Part 18

I accepted the diversion—for more reasons than one. Of these the first was the shock to which I have alluded. She saw through me. That is, she saw I didn’t place her first. How she saw it I could no more tell than she could tell how I knew her history of the past two years. But the tables were turned and turned in such a way as to make me feel ridiculous. A man who is careful with regard to a woman is always slightly grotesque.

As my most skilful defense lay in feigning a lack of perception I talked about U-boats and the experience of two days before; but I came away from her with a feeling of discomfort.

I analyzed the feeling of discomfort as due to the repetition of our mutual attitude more than two years previously. Where she came forward I drew back. I had always drawn back. I used to suppose that nothing but one motive could have driven me to this humiliating course, and now I was taking it from another. I was taking it from another, and she knew it. The essence of the humiliation lay in that.

Each time I met her on deck she betrayed a hesitation that I found harder to bear than contempt. Her very effort to preserve a tone of friendliness was a reproach to me. It seemed to say: “You see all I’ve done for you. You accept it and give me nothing in return.”

And yet I was obliged to consider that which, were I to let myself be nothing but myself, might lie before me in the next few weeks and months. I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married. As a man engaged to be married I should be at once enveloped in that silken net of formalities with which women with their consecration to the future of the race have invested all that pertains to the preliminaries of mating. I had seen for myself that in America that silken net is more elaborate than it is elsewhere. In any British community it is spun of tissue, fragile, light, easily swept aside should the need arise. In America it is solidly constructed of gold cord, and is as often as not adorned with gems. In America an engagement leads to something of an anti-climax in that, from the human point of view, it is more important than a marriage. It is sung by a chorus of matrons and maidens and social correspondents of the press in a volume far more resounding than that of the nuptial hymn. That a man should marry after he has become engaged is considered as much a matter of course as that he should fight after he has enlisted; but that he should become engaged is like taking that first oath which denotes his willingness to give himself up, to make the great renunciation for the sake of something else. More than any single or signal act of bravery that comes later, it is the thing that counts. I am not quarreling with American social custom; I am only saying that I had reasons for being afraid of it.

I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married, and as a man engaged to be married I should be put through paces as strict and as stately as those of the minuet. There would be no escape from it. I might be promised in advance an escape from it, but the promise would not be kept. I might be promised simplicity, privacy, secrecy, a mere process of handfasting before the least noticeable of legal authorities; but all would go by the board.

Whatever my future wife and I might say—and my future wife would say it only half-heartedly, if as earnestly as that—I should be seized in the soft, tender, irresistible embrace of the feminine in American life, the element that is far more powerful than any other, and I should have no more fight to put up than a new-born infant against a nurse. There would be a whole array of mothers and potential mothers to see that I had not. There would be Mrs. Barry and Annette van Elstine and Hilda Grace and Esther Coningsby and Elsie Coningsby and Mrs. Legrand, not to speak of a vast social army behind them, all supported and urged on by the unanimous power of the press.

No one of them would allow me to slip from their kindly, overwhelming attentions any more than bees would allow a queen. Like a queen bee is any man who is engaged to an American girl—or at least he was in the days, now so extraordinarily long ago, before America went into the war. Since then marriage has become casual, incidental, one of those hasty touches given to human life, which, like the possession of money or the pursuit of happiness or the leisure to earn a living, are pleasant but not vital. But in the America of the end of 1916, the mentally far-away America to which I was going back, matrimony was the most momentous happening in a life history. From the minute a man became engaged to that when he turned away from the altar, he had to give himself up to his condition. He was no longer his own. Dinners, lunches, parties, theaters, publicity, and the approval of women claimed him; and shrinking was of no avail.

To the life after marriage, from this point of view, my mind hardly worked forward. I have spoken of men who were good soldiers and equally good husbands. Undoubtedly there are hundreds of thousands in the class. But I had seen not a little of men who, because they were husbands, would gladly not have been soldiers at all. Theirs was not a divided allegiance, for they had only one. The body was in the fight, and it did wondrously; but the heart and soul and mind and craving were with the wife and little ones; and who could blame them?

But all my personal desire was not to be of their number. Had I been married before the war I should have been as they; but since I was free to espouse the cause which had become mistress of everything I was I wanted to espouse it.

I thought I had espoused it. I had considered myself bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. During my months of fighting it had been a satisfaction to think of myself as at liberty to make any sacrifice of limb or life, and leave no heart to bewail me, no eye to shed a tear, and no care to spring up behind me. My family would be content to say, “Poor old Frank, he did his duty!” Further than that, I should bring no regret to any heart but Lovey’s; and of him I was persuaded that if I went he wouldn’t wait long after me. Moreover, I had guarded against any too great misfortune overtaking him by providing for him in my will.

I must own, furthermore, to another misgiving: I was not too sure of myself from the point of view of the old failing.

Things had happened in the trenches—they had dosed me with brandy, whisky, rum, any restorative that came handy, on a number of occasions—and there had been something within me as ready to be waked as a tiger to the taste of blood. I can say truthfully enough that I had never yielded to the desire of my own deliberate act; but I must also say truthfully that I was by no means sure that one day I might not do so. We had talked often enough, as men with men, of what we called a moral moratorium—and the talk haunted me with all manner of suggestions. The ban on what is commonly called sin was to be lifted for the period of the war; and we who had to deny ourselves so much were not to deny ourselves anything that came easily within our grasp. It seemed an alluring condition, and one which, without waiting for the license of supreme war councils or the permission of the Church, each of us was tempted to inaugurate for himself. In a situation in which that which is born of the flesh is flauntingly before one’s eyes, and millions of men are thrown together as flesh and little more, appetite has its mouth wide open. That man was strong indeed who could ignore this yearning of the body; and that man was not I.

So again the consciousness of freedom was like a reserve fund to a corporation. It was something on which to fall back if everything else was swept away. I didn’t want to go to the devil; but if I went no one would suffer but myself, as no one would suffer but myself if a German sniper were to blow the top off my head. Mind you, I am not saying that I came back morally weakened from the war; I only came back with a sense that one man’s life or death—one man’s ruin or salvation—was of no more account than the fate of a roadside bit of jewel-weed amid the infinite seed-time and harvest of the year. I was inured to loss of all kinds on a stupendous scale. I had seen thousands blown to pieces beside me, and my mind had not turned aside to regret them; thousands would see me blown to pieces with the same indifference as to whether I lived or died. Callousness as to the life and death of others induces callousness as to one’s own; and compared to life and death, what is the control of a mere appetite? No; I was not morally weakened; but I was morally benumbed. There was a kind of moral moratorium in my consciousness. I repeat that I wasn’t practically making use of it; but I was in a period of suspense in which I admitted to myself that it might depend on circumstances whether I made use of it or not.

And if I did, and if I was married....

From the sheer possibility my mind turned in dismay. To the celibacy made urgent by a purpose I added the celibacy necessitated by a curse. As the one counseled me not to involve myself with anybody else, so the other warned me not to involve anybody else with me. Through warning and counsel I had kept myself in something like a state of serenity till now.

It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well, I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate, devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once been Miss Smedley’s.

And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one in which I saw myself moving amid compliments and flowers and polite conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net. Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the answer valiantly.

The difficulty in my case sprang of choice. “I’ve got to” wasn’t imperative enough. Or if imperative, it was imperative on both sides equally.

_CHAPTER XXII_

And then a word was said which, though solving no problems, opened up a new line of suggestion.

I have spoken of Regina Barry as another transmigrated soul. I have said that I could not tell at a glance in what direction her spirit had traveled; nor could I after some days of intercourse. As much as she had been frank and open in the other period of our acquaintance, she had now become mystery to me—elusive, tantalizing, sealed. By the end of a few days I began to perceive that she came near me only, as I might say, officially. If there was danger or storm or darkness—we sailed without lights—she was within reach of me. She was within reach of me many a time if I wanted no more than a book that had fallen or a rug that had been left elsewhere on the deck. It was strange how hovering and protective her presence could be for the moment of need, and how far withdrawn the minute I could get along alone.

And far withdrawn the transmigrated spirit seemed to me at all times. Do what I would to traverse the distance, I found her as remote as ever. Do what I would to break down her defenses or transcend them, they still rose between us, impalpable, impregnable, and all but indiscernible. She had traveled away from me as I had traveled away from her; and yet now that we met in space there was some indefinable bond between us.

It was in right of that bond that I asked her one day why she was going home.

“Oh, for all sorts of reasons.” She added, “One of them is on account of father.”

“Isn’t he well?”

“Yes, he’s well enough. That isn’t it.”

As she did not explain, I refrained from asking further, not because I didn’t want to know, but because I knew she would tell me.

It was our usual trysting-place, the deck rail, though not now that which ran along the side of the ship, but the one across the portion of the upper deck toward the bow, allowing us to look down on the pit in which the few steerage passengers took the air. They were standing about in helpless, idle groups, some ten or twelve oddly clad, oddly hatted men, with three or four of their women, and a white staring baby, whose fingers, as it hung over its mother’s shoulder, dangled like bits of string.

We were in the Gulf Stream, so that the day was comparatively mild. A north wind not too violent blew away the possibility of fog and sent an occasional shaft of sunshine through the rifts in the great gray clouds. The swell left over from the gale of the past few days tossed the ship’s nose into the air with a long, slow, rhythmic heave, slightly to port, and gave to good sailors like ourselves that pleasant sensation of swinging which a bird must get on a tree.

Wind and water were fraught with the nameless peaceful intimations of the New World after the turmoil of the Old one. It is difficult to say how one seizes them, but they come with the Gulf Stream. I have always noticed that half-way over there is a change in the aura, the atmosphere. It throws a breath of balsam on the wind, and flashes on the waves that gleam which Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and the Pilgrims saw when they sighted land.

It is that wonderful sense of going westward which, I suppose, is primal to the instinct. Going eastward, one is going back to beginnings, to things lived, to things over and done with. Going westward, all is hope. It is the onward reach, the upward grasp, the endless striving. It is the lifting of the hands, the straining of the power to achieve, the yearning of the inner man. The thing that is finished is left behind, and the thing to be wrestled with and done is in front of one. The very sun goes before one with a splendid gesture of beckoning—on to work, on to self-denial, on to triumph and success—and when it sets it sets with a promise of a morrow.

We had already begun to feel that; and on my part in a spirit of compunction. I was going, as far as lay within my small powers, to turn the west back upon the east again, to reverse nature by making the stream flow toward its source. I was far from insensible to the pity of it, for I had seen the effect on my own country.

I had seen my own country—that baby giant, whose very existence as a country antedated but little the year when I was born—I had seen it pause in its work, in its play, in its task of self-development—listen—shiver—thrill—throw down the ax, the spade, the hammer, the pick—go up from the field, the factory, and the mine—and offer itself willingly. It was to me as if that was fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet:

“I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.”

I had seen that first flotilla of thirty-one ships sail down the St. Lawrence, out into the ocean, and over to the shores of England, as the first great gift of men which the New World had ever made to the Old, as some return for all the Old had poured out upon the New. I had seen it, for I was on it. We went gaily, as hop-pickers go to a bean-feast. We knew it was war, but the word had no meaning for us. What it meant we found out at Ypres, at Vimy, at Lens. But when I think of my country now I think of her no longer as a baby giant. She has become a girl widow—valiant, dry-eyed, high-souled, ready to go on with the interrupted work and do bigger work—but a widow all the same.

And the sword that had pierced one heart I was bringing to pierce another. I was sorry; but sorrow didn’t keep me, couldn’t keep me from being terribly in earnest.

And in on these thoughts Regina Barry broke as if she had been following them.

“Look at the waves where the sun catches them. Aren’t they like flashing steel? It’s just as if all the drowned hands at the bottom of the sea were holding up swords to the people of America, begging them to go and fight.”

I looked at her, startled. “You feel that way?”

She looked at me, indignant. “Certainly. How else could I feel?”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Americans feel so many different ways.”

“Because they don’t know. I’m going back”—she gave a light, deprecating laugh—“I’m going back to tell them.”

I was still more startled. “Tell whom?”

“Any one I know. Every one knows some one. I don’t mean to say that I’m a Joan of Arc; but I shall do what I can.”

“And how shall you begin?”

“I’ll begin with father and with—”

She stopped at the second name, though to me the fact did not become significant till afterward.

“That’s what I meant,” she resumed, “when I said I was going back on his account.”

“You mean?”

“He doesn’t see why we should be in it. He’s like so many Americans; he hasn’t emerged from the eighteen-hundreds. He still thinks of the New World as if it was a new creation that had nothing to do with the Old. He doesn’t see that there’s only one world and one race of men, wherever they are and whatever they do. To him Americans are like souls that get over to paradise. They’re safe and can afford to dwell safely. They’re no longer concerned with the sorrows and struggles of the people left on earth.”

It was to get light on my own way that I asked, “And what are you going to say to convince him?”

“I don’t know yet. I shall say what the moment suggests.”

“And you’re sure it will suggest something?”

Her great eyes burned like coals as she turned them on me in protest at the question.

“Suggest something? You might as well ask if the air suggests something. It suggests that I breathe it; but I don’t have to think of it beforehand, when the whole world is full of it.”

“Full of what?”

She considered the question, finding in it all I meant to put there.

“I don’t know,” she answered at last. “That is, I don’t know in any sense that would go into a few words. There’s so much of it. The minute you try to express it from any one point of view you find you’re inadequate.”

I was still seeking light.

“But when you try to do it from several points of view—correlating them?”

“Even then—” She paused, reflecting, shaking her head as she went on again, as if to shake away a consciousness of the impossible. “I don’t try. There’s no use in trying. It’s so immense—so far beyond me. It’s grown so, too. When it first began I could more or less compass it—or, I thought I could. Now it’s become like nature—or God—or any of the colossal infinite conceptions—it means different things to different minds.”

“That is, we can only take of it what we take of the ocean—each a few drops—no one able to take all?”

“Something like that. And we can only give a few drops—just what we’ve got the measure to take up—some a little more, some a little less—but no one more than a little as compared to the whole. That’s why I’m not going to try to explain.”

“Then how are you going to make them understand?”

“I’ll tell them—I’ll do what I can to show them—that the greatest movement of all time is going on—and America is taking no national part in it. I’ll try to make them see that it isn’t just to avenge the few American lives lost through the U-boats, or to free Belgium, or to put down autocracy, or to do any one or two or three of the things that have been set before us. It isn’t even the whole of them, just taken as so many human motives.”

“But you’ll have to tell them what it is, won’t you? It won’t do just to put before them what it isn’t.”

“But how can I? How can any one? It would be like trying to tell them what nature is. It’s a universal composite, made up of everything; but you couldn’t go about the country explaining it in lectures. The nearest I could come to it would be in saying that it’s the great dramatic conflict between good and evil to which human nature has been working up ever since it committed its first sin; but the words in which to do that have been so hard worked and are so terribly worn that they’ve become a kind of ditty. It seems to me best just to talk to them simply—and let them construct the monster out of the bones I lay before them. They’ll do it. The public is not very quick, but when it gets going it’s pretty instinctive.”

“Oh, then you’re going to tackle the public?”

“I’m going to tackle any one to whom I can get access.”

“You spoke just now of lectures.”

“I’ll speak of anything that will help me to get the message across. That’s why I mention father and—” Again she hesitated at a name, going on with an elision:—“first of all. They are simply the first I shall be able to talk to. As a matter of fact, not many as yet have been over there and come back to America—so that there’s a good deal of curiosity still unsatisfied—and so one will get a chance. You must have noticed already how dearly Americans, especially the women, like to be talked to. We’re talked to so much by experts on all subjects that we should burst with knowledge if our minds weren’t like those swimming-tanks with fresh water running in and out of them all the time.”

“So you’re really going to make it a kind of business?”

She spread her hands apart, palms outward.

“What else can I do? I assure you it isn’t any desire for publicity or that sort of thing. I’m just—I’m just driven on. It’s like what some one says in the Bible—I’ve taken to reading the Bible lately—it seems the only thing big enough in spirit to go with the big times—but some one says there: ‘Woe unto me, if I preach not the gospel!’ Well, it’s the same way with me. Woe unto me if I don’t do this thing! It’s taken possession of me; I can’t do anything else; and so I’m going back—”

I was expressing but one of the host of thoughts that crowded on me as I said: “You’ve got the tremendous advantage of being an American. You can say what you like. If I were—”

She stood off and surveyed me. “You don’t need to say anything. You speak for yourself. One has only to look at you.”

I smiled ruefully. “I know I’m pretty well battered up.”

“Oh, it isn’t that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just—it’s just everything. You’re a type. I’m not speaking of you personally, but of a lot—hundreds—thousands—I’ve seen—young fellows who make me think of some other words in the Bible.”

“What are they?”