Part 17

“What about the cabin-boy?” some one called out.

He shrugged his shoulders, saying, merely, “Doctor attending to the wounded.”

It was strange to be tearing through the seas, with that erratic course of the crazed leviathan, when at any second death might strike us from the air. I had often been under shell-fire, of course; but on land there was generally some dugout, some _abri_, in which one could seek shelter. What impressed me here was the vast exposure of it all. We could only stand with the heaven over us, ready to take to the boats, if need be, or equally ready to be blown into bits like little Sammy Smelt.

Among the people on the deck the quiet waiting which the traditions of the race have made second nature continued. We might have been passengers gathered at the entrance to a railway track. If a scared look haunted some faces, it was not more than might have been occasioned by the extreme lateness of a train.

The shells were still splashing, the ship was still driving onward under every pound of steam, when I looked again at the girl in the yashmak. It must not be understood that I had looked away from her for long. The period of our extreme peril did not in reality cover more than a few minutes. Like the crisis of a fever, it was slow in coming, but it passed quickly, though we needed some time to realize the fact.

But when I looked again at Regina Barry I found her as little disturbed as a woman could possibly have been in that special situation. Not to be hurled again into my arms, she held now to the hand-rail that runs along cabin walls; but she watched me rather than the ocean. I was her charge and the ocean was not. The blue-gray streak that had held her attention for a while was visible only when the turnings of the ship threw it into view; otherwise we had nothing to see on the starboard side except an infinitude of billows with curling white crests.

To resume something like the customary attitude of human beings toward each other I said, as casually as I could manage, “You came over here just after I did, didn’t you?”

Having purposely framed my sentence in just those words, it was some satisfaction to get the result I was playing for. It took all the aplomb—a rather shy aplomb—of which she was mistress to answer in a way that wouldn’t underscore my meaning.

“Possibly; but I don’t remember when you came over.”

Having given the date of my sailing, I added, “And you left with Evelyn a little more than three weeks later?”

“Since you know everything, you naturally know that.” She took on the old air of being at once smiling and defiant as she asked, “And has the fact any special significance?”

“That’s what I want to find out.” Before she could protest that there was no such significance I put the question, “How did you come to know her?”

“Is she so terribly difficult to know?”

“Not in the least; only, you’d never seen her in your life at the time when”—I gathered all my innermost strength together to bring the words out—“at the time when I talked to you last.”

She, too, gathered her innermost strength together, rising to the reference gallantly.

“Oh, well, a good many things have happened since then.”

Before going further I was obliged to pause and reckon how much I dared. Of the many sensitive points in my history, we were touching on the most sensitive. I was fully aware that since the sleeping dog was sleeping it might be better to let him lie. Once he was roused, there might be a new set of perils to deal with, perils we could avoid by softly stepping round them. That Paolo should go one way in space and Francesca another seemed to be decreed by inevitable fate; so why interfere with the process?

I should probably not have interfered with it had the circumstances not raised us above the sphere of our ordinary interests. The roar of the wind, the tumult of the sea, the plunging of the ship, the indescribable whining of shells, the knowledge of danger—were as the orchestra which lifts the duet to emotional planes that dialogue alone could never attain to. Though our words might be commonplace, every syllable was charged with tones and overtones and undertones of meaning to be seized by something more subtle than intelligence. Prudence might have said, “Let everything alone,” but that urging of the being which escapes the leash of prudence drove me on to speak.

“Do you remember when I talked to you last?”

She answered with the detachment of a witness under compulsion to tell the truth. The personal was as far as possible eliminated from her voice.

“Perfectly.”

“We—we seemed to—to break off in the middle of a conversation.”

“Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.”

The statement took my breath away. For some seconds I could only stare at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie direct.

“Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last.

“What do you think?”

“I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.”

“And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—”

I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to say that?”

She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible screened against embarrassment.

She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the barricade of her composure.

“No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.”

“But we could have talked them over.”

“If you’d waited.”

“I should have waited forever if I’d known.”

“Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.”

I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914, I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to recover from the first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt to me.

“It was curious, though,” I went on, “that that name, Gavrilo Prinzip, should have hammered itself in on my brain. I recall it now as about the only thing I could think of. I didn’t know what it meant, and I was far from supposing it the touchstone of human destinies that it afterward proved to be; but in some unreasoning way it held me. It was like the meaningless catch of a tune with which you can’t go on, till all at once you see it finishes in—”

“In a trumpet-call. Yes, I know. You had to follow it. So had I. I don’t think there’s much more than that to be said.”

The blue-gray streak was again on the starboard side, but comfortingly far astern. Though we were still within her range, we were getting the benefit of distance. At the same time some one called our attention to a blotch of black smoke, far down on the eastern horizon. A destroyer was coming to our aid.

I went back to the point we had partially forsaken.

“How long did you expect me to wait that afternoon?”

She looked down at the deck, answering with a perceptible infusion of the bitter in her tone.

“I didn’t fix a time. I wasn’t sitting with my watch in my hand.”

“But I was.”

“Evidently.”

“Why didn’t you come down?”

“I came down as soon as I could.”

“What kept you?”

She raised her eyes for a fleeting glance—lowering them again. At the same time her voice sank, too, so that in the fury of sound about us she was no more than audible.

“The thing you told me.”

“And that kept you—in what way?”

“In the way of making everything—different.”

“How much does that mean—different?”

“It means a good deal.”

“Can’t you tell me exactly?”

“I can’t tell you exactly; but it was something like this.” She fixed her eyes on me steadily. “When they first opened the Subway in New York I came up out of a station one winter afternoon just as the lights were lit, and instead of going to the right, as I should have done, I turned to the left. When I had walked about fifteen minutes I was dazed. Though I was in a part of New York I knew perfectly well, I couldn’t recognize anything. It was all a confusion of lights. I couldn’t tell which of the streets ran north and south, or which were east and west, or what the buildings were that I’d been used to seeing all my life. In the end some one took me into a drug-store and made me sit down till I had time to reorientate myself.”

“But you did it in the end?”

“That time—yes.”

“And this time? The time we’re talking about?”

Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!

Bang!

Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!

Bang!

From the port side there came something like a feeble cheer—a chorus of rough male voices and high female screams, timid and yet glad.

A new swing of our crazed leviathan disclosed the reason for this wavering, victorious cry. There were two more blobs of smoke on the horizon, and from different points on the Irish coast three huge birds were flying like messengers from some god. Moreover, the blob of smoke we had first seen now had a considerable stretch of the ocean behind her, and in front a parting of the spray like two white plumes as she tore in our direction.

“She sure is some little ripper!” came a dry Yankee voice in the group about life-boat No. 5.

“Thirty-five knots if it’s one.”

“Them ’planes’ll overtake her, though, and be on the spot as soon as she is.”

“Gosh! I’d like to see Fritzie then!”

“J’ever see a kingfisher sweep down on a gudgeon?”

“Gee-whiz! Look at Fritzie! Goin’ to submerge!”

And sure enough, as we stared, the blue-gray streak began to sink behind the waves, becoming to the imagination even more a giant deep-sea reptile after it had gone.

Almost simultaneously our leviathan calmed down, resuming her straight course. It was done apparently with the wordless, unexplained inconsequence with which a runaway horse will suddenly fall into a peaceful trot. There was no stopping to salute the destroyers and ’planes that were hastening to our help or to exchange confidences with them as to our common enemy. There was neither hail nor farewell as we forged again toward the open sea.

Danger being considered past, the groups broke up, intermingling with sighs of relief. The Consolatrice and her friend came to exchange a few words with us, and Miss Prynne returned from the boat to which she had good-naturedly exchanged. While I thanked her for this kindness, as if it had been done for myself, I saw Miss Barry trying to slip off.

By stepping out of my corner and assuming a limp lamer than my actual disability warranted I was able to intercept her.

“I wonder,” I made bold to ask, “if you could give me a hand back to the music-room?”

The yashmak was not so impervious but that I could detect behind it the scarlet glimmer of her smile.

“Oh, I think you could get there by yourself. Try.”

“I can manage the deck,” I said, in the tones of a boy feigning an indisposition to stay away from school, “but I’m afraid of the steps of the companionway.”

“How would you have managed if I hadn’t been here?” she asked, as she allowed me to lean ever so lightly on her arm.

The steps of the companionway presenting a more real difficulty than I had expected, I could say nothing till with her aid I had lowered myself safely down.

Postponing the pleasure of thanking her, I reverted to the topic the last attack had interrupted.

“I want to hear about your reorientation. You were able to put the streets in their proper place again, and to see New York as it was; but in my case—”

She put out her hand with that air which there is no gainsaying.

“I’m rather tired. I think I must go to my cabin and have a rest.” She added, however, not very coherently: “The way things happen is in general the best way—if we know how to use it.”

Somewhat desperately, because of her determination to go, I burst out, “And do you think all this has been the best way?”

“You must see for yourself that it’s been a very good way. We’ve been able to do—to do the things we’ve both done.” But the admission in the use of the first personal plural pronoun seemed suddenly to alarm her. She took refuge again in her need of rest. “I really must be off. If we don’t meet again before we leave the boat—”

“Oh, but we shall!”

“I’m very often confined to my cabin.”

“Not when you want to be out of it.”

“Very well, then; I very often don’t leave my cabin.”

I was holding the hand she had extended to say good-by, but she slipped it away and was going.

“Then tell me this—just this,” I begged. “How is it that we’re both on the same ship? That didn’t happen by accident?”

Whether she refused to answer my question or whether it didn’t reach her I couldn’t tell. All I got in response was a long, oblique regard—the fleeing farewell look of Beatrice Cenci—as she carried her secrets and mysteries away with her.

_CHAPTER XXI_

So my celibacy of the will was threatened. I mean by that that I found myself with two main objects of thought instead of one. Having vowed myself to a cause, a woman had supervened with that pervasiveness of presence with which a perfume fills a room. I might still vow myself to the cause, but I shouldn’t serve it as I had meant to, with heart and senses free.

Or should I?

The question fundamentally was that. Could I at a time like this divide my allegiance as I should be obliged to divide it by falling in love and being married? Or ought I, in deference to the work I was to do, suppress this old passion and smother the problems and curiosities it had begun to rouse in me?

If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was, had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances. I couldn’t make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself every minute of the day.

No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer singleness of purpose than I when I came on board the _Assiniboia_; and now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her.

I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal?

Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might end again in her being disappointed?

I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaning away of my heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it.

Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure.

But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my labor for my pains.

It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience. On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.”

Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it.

“Human effort after human welfare is never drastic enough,” I read. “It is never sufficiently radical to accomplish the purpose it tries to carry out. Instead of laying its ax at the root of the tree of its ills it is content to hack off a few branches. It never gets beyond pruning-work; and the most one can say of the results it achieves is that they are better than nothing.

“So much, then, one can affirm of the dreams that are now being dreamed, in all probability to vanish with waking. They are better than nothing. Better than nothing are the aims held up before the Allied nations as the citadels they are to capture. The crushing of military despotism is better than nothing; the elimination of war is better than nothing; the establishment of universal democracy, the founding of a league of nations, the formation of a league to enforce peace, the dissemination of a world-wide entente, these are all of them better than nothing, even though they end in being no more productive of permanent blessing than the Hague Conference, which was better than nothing in itself. They are probably as effective as anything that man, with his reason, his wisdom, his science, his degree of self-control, and his pathetic persistence in believing in himself when that belief has so unfailingly been blasted, can ever attain to. But, oh, gentlemen, as the prophet said thirty centuries ago, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city.’ You are pouring out blood; you are pouring out money; you are giving your sons and your daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch; through the fire to Moloch unflinchingly they pass; you are tearing the hearts out of your own bodies, and you are doing it with a heroism that cannot fail of some reward. But this is not the way, neither is this the city. It is better than nothing, but it is not the best. You could do it all so much more thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”

But with the knowledge that this woman had simply passed and let her shadow fall upon me I had no heart for Sheering’s impassioned words. I got up and followed her.

I found her on deck, far forward, leaning on the rail and watching a fiery, angry sunset that inflamed all the western horizon. As she looked round and saw me advancing along the deck I detected in her telltale eyes the first scared impulse to run away.

But what was she afraid of?

It was the question I asked as soon as I was near enough to speak.

“What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”

“The way you looked. You see, this queer sort of veil doesn’t protect you; it gives you away by throwing all your expression into your eyes. There’s an essence that eludes one till it’s concentrated and distilled.”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—”

“To look like an animal trying to escape? Well, you did.”

“Oh, as to that, I could easily have walked round the deck-house to the other side of the ship.”

“If the discourtesy wouldn’t have been too obvious—of course!” But I didn’t press the point. There were other admissions to which I had an unchivalrous craving to bring her if I could; and so I went on, artfully, “It was clever of you to find my state-room on Tuesday—all on the spur of the moment like that.”

She contented herself with murmuring, “Yes, wasn’t it?”

“And your own cabin is on another deck.”

“I’m on this deck.”

“So that you hadn’t even seen me going in and out.”

“I’m a nurse—in a way. Nurses have to know more than other passengers or they’d be no good on board ship.”

“And do you know every one’s cabin?”

“I know every one’s cabin to whom I can be useful.”

“Is that many?”

“No; not many, unfortunately.” She diverted the attack by saying, “What are you asking for?”

“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, carelessly. I added, however, with some slight show of intention, “I’ve called it your cleverness, but I really mean it as your kindness.”

She decided to take the bull by the horns, shifting her position and standing with her back to the rail.

“If you call it kindness that I should have learned the number and location of your cabin before we left Liverpool—”

“Oh, you did it then?”

“Yes, I did it then. But if you call it kindness, of course I can’t prevent you. I can only assure you it isn’t. I knew you couldn’t get about easily—”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw you come on board. Wasn’t that enough?”

“Then let me go farther back and ask how you happened to see me come on board. Wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that you should have been there, right at the head of the gangway?”

“Well, life is full of extraordinary coincidences, isn’t it? And when a woman who can do so little sees a wounded man—”

There were other wounded men scattered about the deck. I glanced at them as I said, “And have you done that for all the wounded men on board?”

“I’ve done it for all I know.”

“And how many do you know?”

She averted her profile, with an air of having had enough of the subject.

“I wanted you to tell me a minute ago why you were asking me these questions, and you said for nothing.” I could see her smile behind the chiffon of the yashmak as she went on, “Since that’s your only reason, perhaps you won’t mind if I don’t answer you.”

“But if I had a reason for asking, would you tell me then?”

“Wouldn’t it have to depend on the reason?”

“You’re very careful.”

She shot a daring, smiling glance at me as she riposted, “Well, aren’t you?” Before I had time to recover from the slight shock that these words dealt me she pointed to the horizon. “See, there’s smoke over there. I do hope it’s not another U-boat.”