Part 20

There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted, and I had to give her time to regain her self-control.

“You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you had about you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished, something faithful and good.”

“Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no counterpart in the nature.”

“Well, whatever it was I saw it—and all that year those two types had been before my mind. Then when I was told that there were not two—that there was only one—it was like asking me to understand that the earth had only one pole, and that the North and the South Poles were identical.” She surprised me with the question, “Did you ever read _La Dame aux Camélias_?”

I said I had, wondering at the connection.

“Don’t you remember how it begins with the exhumation of the body of that poor woman six months after she was buried?”

I recalled the fact.

“So that all through the rest of the book, when Marguerite Gautier is at the height of her triumphs, if you call them triumphs, you see her as she was first shown to you. Well— Oh, don’t you understand? That’s the way I had to see—I had to see you!”

I hung my head. “I understand perfectly, Regina—now.”

“There’s so much we’re only beginning to understand now, both on your side and on mine.”

“When it’s almost too late—if it isn’t quite.”

Her manner, her voice, both of which had been a little piteous, took on a sudden energy.

“Oh, as to that, I’ve been thinking it over—I’ve had to think over so much—and I don’t believe the word applies.”

“Doesn’t apply?” I asked, in astonishment. “Why not—when it’s as late as it is? It’s just as if Fate had been making us a plaything.”

“I don’t believe that. Life can’t be the sport of disorganized chance. If Romeo takes poison ten minutes before Juliet wakes it’s because the years behind them led up to the mistake.”

“You mean that we reap only what we sow?”

“And that life is as much a matter of development in a logical sequence as the growth of certain plants from certain seeds. It isn’t—it can’t be—a mere frenzy of haphazards. Things happen to us in a certain way because what we’ve done leaves them no other way.”

“And was there no other way in which this could happen to you and me?”

“Think! Isn’t it the very outcome that might have been expected from what we’ve been in the past?”

I stared at her without comprehension.

“Because of your past life,” she went on, “there was something you couldn’t tell me; and because I didn’t know it I’ve taken a step which my past life doesn’t allow me to retrace. Could anything be neater?”

“And yet you’re fond of saying that the way things happen is the best way.”

“It’s the best way if it’s the only way, isn’t it? I should go mad if I thought that my life hung on nothing but caprice—whether of luck or fate or anything you call God. I can stand my deserts, however hard, if I know they’re my deserts.”

“You can stand this?”

“This is not a question of standing; it’s one of working out. Life isn’t static; it’s dynamic—those are the right words, aren’t they? It’s always unfolding. One thing leads to the next thing; and then there must be times when a lot of things that seemed separate are gathered up in one immense result. Don’t you think it must be that way?”

I said, stupidly, that I didn’t know.

“Of course you don’t know if you don’t think; but try to think!”

“What good will thinking do when we see how things are?”

“It’ll show us how to make the best of them, won’t it?”

“Is there any best to be made of your marrying anybody else than me? The way things happen isn’t necessarily the best way.”

After her hesitating syncopated sentences in dealing with what was more directly personal to her life and mine she talked now not so much calmly as surely, as of subjects she had long thought out.

“I don’t say the best way absolutely; but the best in view of what we’ve made for ourselves. For ourselves you and I have made things hard. There’s no question about that. But isn’t it for both of us now to live this minute so that the next won’t be any harder?”

There was no argument in this; there was only appeal.

“What,” I asked, “do you mean by that?”

“I suppose I mean that the best way to live this minute is to accept what it contains—till it develops into something else—as it will. This isn’t final. It’s only a step on the way to—”

“It’s a step on the way to your marrying a man you’re not in love with, and my not marrying at all.”

“And as the world is at present, aren’t there worse tragedies than that?”

Irony of which she must have been unaware pricked my dreams of celibate consecration to a cause as a pin pricks a bubble.

“So that if I stand still and let you go on—”

She threw me a quick glance. “And aren’t you going to?”

The answer to that question was what in the back of my mind I had been trying to work out.

“Wouldn’t it depend,” I said, picking the right words, “on which of the three it is? There’s one I couldn’t interfere with—not without disregarding gratitude and honor.”

“Do you want me to tell you which?”

But I didn’t—not then. Too much hung on what the knowledge would bring me. There were decisions to which I couldn’t force myself at once. In saying this I added, “But though I can’t interfere with him without disregarding gratitude and honor, I don’t say that I sha’n’t disregard them.”

In the clear starlight her eyes had a veiled metallic brightness.

“No?”

“And if I don’t,” I persisted, “what shall you do?”

“What would you expect me to do?”

“I should expect you to back me up.”

“So that we should both be disregarding gratitude and honor?”

“We’ve a right to our happiness.”

“That’s a very old argument, isn’t it?”

“It’s not the less true for being old.”

“Oh no; if it’s true it’s true—anyhow.”

“And it is true. Don’t you know it is?”

She surprised me by saying, as if quite casually, “I don’t suppose that in the end it’s the truth or the untruth of the argument that would weigh with me.”

My heart gave a thump.

“Then what would weigh with you?”

She was standing with her back to the rail, the great white star behind her. As if to emphasize the minute of suspense the engines gradually stopped, while the ship rocked gently on the tide. The lights on shore were more complex now, lights above lights, lights back of lights, with the profusion of seaboard towns even in November. The murmur of voices and the click of heels grew expectant as well as joyous.

When she spoke at last it was with breast heaving and eyes downcast. Her words came out staccatowise, as if each made its separate effort to keep itself back.

“What would weigh with me? I—I don’t know.”

“Does that mean,” I demanded, sharply, “that you might back me up?”

I could barely catch her words.

“It means first of all that—that I’m awfully weak.”

“It isn’t weak, Regina, to—to love.”

“It’s weak for a soldier to make love an excuse for not fighting.”

“But you’re not a soldier.”

“Oh yes, I am; and so are you. We’re all soldiers now—every one in the world. We keep telling ourselves—we keep telling one another—that we’re fighting for right. It’s our great justification. But what’s the use of fighting for public right if we go and do wrong privately?”

“But it isn’t right for you to throw yourself away on a man you don’t care for.”

“It’s right for me to stand by my word—what is practically my word—till something relieves me from the necessity.”

“And do you think anything ever will?”

“That’s not what I have to consider. If I do what I know I ought to do I’ve only to wait—and let the next thing come.”

“And what you know you ought to do—are you going to do it?”

She looked up at me pleadingly, quiveringly, with clasped hands.

“I don’t want to do—to do anything else. Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!”

It was not this unexpected collapse that made me tremble; it was not this confession; it was the knowledge that I had her in my power. She had seemed so far above me—ever since I knew her; she had seemed so far beyond me, so strong, so aloof, so ice pure, so inflexibly and inaccessibly right! And now she was ready to come to me if I insisted on taking her.

But the hungry beast in me was not yet satisfied with her avowals.

“Could I, Regina—could I—make you?”

I once saw in the eyes of a spaniel that knew it was going to be shot the beseeching, submissive, helpless look I saw here.

“You know what I’ve been doing, Frank—the last two years—just to be where I—where I could—hear about you—occasionally—and see you perhaps—when you couldn’t see me.”

I bent down toward her, close, closer, till I almost enveloped her.

“Yes, I know that—now—and—and I’m—I’m going to make you.”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t withdraw. Perhaps she crept nearer me. Certainly she shivered.

The look in her eyes was still helpless, submissive, beseeching; but because it grew mortally frightened as well I repeated what I had said as softly but as firmly as I could make the words:

“I’m—I’m going to make you.”

There was nothing but the strip of black veiling between her lips and mine when a sudden flash that might have come out of heaven threw me back with a start.

It was there above us—the great beacon—landlike—homelike—the New World—the new work—the new problems to be solved—the new duties toward mankind to be hammered home—while thankful voices were murmuring round us:

“Sandy Hook!”

_CHAPTER XXIV_

I never knew the compulsion exercised by organized life till I found it settling round me, with an even distribution like that of the weight of the atmosphere on the body, paralyzing my will and making it impotent. No more than I could throw off the atmosphere could I be free from this force for a second.

It began with my arrival on the dock, where Sterling Barry had come to meet his daughter. I had seen him often enough before, though I had never known him otherwise than in the way called touch-and-go. A ruddy, portly, handsome fellow of sixty-odd, with eyes that had passed on their torch to his daughter’s, he must in early life have been retiring and diffident, for his general approach now had that forced jovial note that verges on the boisterous.

“Hello! Hello!” he cried, as he lilted up to where I stood with Lovey in the Custom House Section M. “Alive and kicking, what? Couldn’t kill you. Tried, didn’t they?” he went on, looking me over. “Not but what it might have been worse, of course. Billy Townsend’s son’ll never come back at all, poor chap. Fine young fellow, with a bee in his bonnet about aviation. Would go—and now you see! Well, we’ve got you back and we’re going to keep you. What do you know about that?”

I replied that as things were I was afraid I had no choice but to stay.

“And if you want a job come to me. Some big things doing. Country never so prosperous. Lots of business for every one—even for poor old nuts like us. Well, so long! Come and see us. Mrs. Barry will want to hear you talk. Awfully keen on the war, she is, and that sort of thing. Bit down in the mouth now over this Rumania business. Sad slump that, very.”

I said that it only left the more for us to do.

“Got your hands full, what? They do seem to put it over on you, don’t they? Ah, well, we won’t see you licked. We’ll keep out of the war as war; but you’ve got our sympathy. Watchful waiting—that’s the new ticket, you know. Can do a lot with that.”

With his light, dancing step he was waltzing away again when he suddenly returned.

“Mrs. Barry’ll have something to tell you,” he said, with a gleam in his eye curiously like that in Regina’s. “Perhaps you know it already. Regina may have given you the tip, what? People get confidential on board ship. Nothing else to do. No fuss and feathers about it. They don’t want that. War-time spirit, you know. Just telling a few of our friends. Don’t mind saying that Mrs. Barry and I are mighty delighted. Been like our own son for years. Sorry when it came to nothing last time; but look at ’em now!” He pointed to Section B, where Cantyre was bending over Regina as I had bent over her last night. “Can see from here what it means. Get your congratulations by and by.”

Of all this the point is that I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell him there on the dock that I didn’t mean to let it go any farther, nor did he suspect for a second that I had more than an outsider’s interest in the romance. I felt awkward and cowardly at remaining dumb, but neither time nor place admitted of a protest.

So, too, when a few minutes later Cantyre came over to give me his welcome. It was the welcome of old, with a shocked pity in it.

“Didn’t expect to see you so badly mauled,” was his sorrowful comment after the first demonstrations. “I knew you were wounded, of course, and that you had been blind. Regina wrote me that from Taplow. But I didn’t look for your being so—”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I interposed, in the effort to shut off his sympathy.

Having asked me a few professional questions in reference to the ways in which I had been wounded, he said: “Well, now that we’ve got hold of you again we mean to feed you up and take care of you. You’re going to be my patient, Frank. For the present, at any rate, we’ll be living in the same old house, and I shall be able to keep a daily eye on you. Lovey here has your apartment as clean as an operating-room. See you there later. Just now I’ve got to go back to—to Regina. And by the way”—his habitually mournful expression brightened as a lowering day lights up when the sun bursts through the masses of drifting cloud—“by the way, I shall have something to tell you by and by. The most wonderful thing has happened, Frank—something you and I used to talk about before you went abroad.”

He wrung my hand with that way he had of pulling it downward and pulling it hard, which betrayed all sorts of raptures breaking in on a spirit that had never known common, every-day happiness. His whole face asked me to rejoice with him, and, though I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do the other thing.

It was on my lips to say, “You can’t have her because I’m going to take her away from you.” But the words died before they were formed. The very thought died in my mind. Whatever I did, I shouldn’t be able to do it that way; and so I let him go.

“Do you know what he meant, Slim—when he said them things—the doctor?”

This was Lovey’s question as he sat beside me in the taxicab and we drove up-town.

As I made no answer, he mumbled, mysteriously: “I do. I ’aven’t valeted ’im for nothink.”

I still made no answer, and the mumble ceased.

As yet I had noticed him only as the returned traveler notices the faithful old dog that greets him by lifting his eyes adoringly and wagging his tail. I saw now that the intervening two and a half years had aged him. He had grown white and waxy; his thin gray hair was thinner. A trembling, like that of a delicately poised leaf on a day when there is little wind, shook his hands, and the left corner of his lower lip had the pathetic quiver of a child’s when it is about to sag in a great weeping.

As I had paid him so little attention on the dock, I picked up the hand resting on his knee and pressed it.

He responded with a long, harsh breath which, starting as a sigh of comfort, became something inarticulately emotional.

“Oh, Slim! I’ve got ye back, ’aven’t I?”

“Seems like it, Lovey.” I laughed without feeling mirthful.

“Ye look awful, don’t ye?”

“I suppose I do.”

“But it don’t make no difference to me, it don’t. I’d rather ’ave ye all chawed up like this than not ’ave ye at all.”

“Thank you, Lovey.”

“Them wars is awful things. Why don’t they stop ’em?” He continued, without waiting for an explanation: “It’s all along o’ them blamed Germans. The cheek o’ them—to go and fight Englishmen! There was a German in the ’at-shop in the Edgware Road used to ’ang round me somethin’ fierce; and now I believe he wasn’t nothink but a-spyin’ on me. Don’t you think he was, Slim?”

“I think very likely.”

“Makes my blood run cold, it does, the times I’ve took ’im into a little tea-shop in Great Hatfield Street—and me a-treatin’ on ’im, like. If I ’adn’t ’ad luck I might be lookin’ like you by this time. Ain’t it awful to be one-eyed, sonny?”

“Oh, I’m getting used to it.”

“Used to it till you looks in the glass, I expect. Get a fright when ye do that, don’t you? But it’s all right, Slim. It wouldn’t matter to me if you was a worse looker than y’are. I wouldn’t turn ye down, neither, not if it was for all the doctors in the world. Not but what he’s been very attentive to me while you was away. I don’t make no complaint about that. Bit finicky about socks and ’andkerchiefs always the same color—and ye couldn’t see ’is socks most o’ the time—only when he pulled up his trouser leg a-purpose—but a good spender and not pokin’ ’is nose into my affairs. I’ll say all that for ’im; but if he was to ask my ’and in marriage, like, and I could get you, Slim—all bunged up as y’are now and everything!—well, I know what I’d say.”

Too miserable to reject this bit of sympathy, I said, merely, “Unfortunately, Lovey, every one may not be of your opinion.”

“I d’n’ know about that,” he protested. “Seems to me everybody would be if you could make ’em understand, like.”

There was nothing offensive in this, coming as it did from a deep affection, but, as it had gone far enough, I turned my attention to the streets.

There was a quality in them not to be apprehended by the sense of sight. It defied at first my limited powers of analysis. Something to which I was accustomed was not there; and something was there to which I was not accustomed.

That to which I was not accustomed struck me soon as shimmering, shining, radiant. That it was not an outward radiance goes without saying. New York on that November day was as dreary and bleak a port as one could easily land at. A leaden sky cloaked the streets in a leaden, lifeless atmosphere. The tops of steeples and the roofs of the tall buildings were wreathed in a leaden mist. Patches of befouled snow on the ground, with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked, ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a noise like that of the shell that had struck the _Assiniboia_, while our taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a speed he has long outlived. On the pavements a strange, strange motley of men and women—Hebrew, Slavic, Mongolian, negro, negroid—carried on trades as outlandish as themselves. Here and there an outlandish child shivered its way to an outlandish school. Only now and then one saw a Caucasian face, either clean, alert, superior, or brutalized and repulsive beyond anything to be seen among the yearning, industrious aliens.

And yet to me all was lit by an inner light of which I couldn’t at first see the lamp. I caught the rays without detecting the source that emitted them. In and through and above this squalid New York, with its tumult, its filth, its seeming indifference to the individual, there was a celestial property born of the kingdom of heaven. It shone in the sky; it quivered in the air; it lay restfully on the hoary graveyards nestling at the feet of prodigious cubes, like eld at the base of Time. All faces glowed with it; all tasks translated it; all the clamor of feet and wheels and whistles sang it like a song.

The name of it came to me with a cry of joy and a pang of grief simultaneously. It was peace. I was in a country that was not at war.

I had forgotten the experience. I had forgotten the sensation it produces. I had forgotten that there was a world in which men and women were free to go and come without let or hindrance. And here were people doing it. The day’s work claimed them, and nothing beyond the day’s work. To earn a living was an end in itself. The living earned, a man could enjoy it. The money he made he could spend; the house he built he could occupy; the motor he bought he could ride in; the wife he married he could abide with; the children he begot he could bring up. He could go on in this routine till he sickened and died and was buried in it. There was no terrific overruling motive to which all other motives had become subsidiary, and into which they merged.

In the countries I had been living in war was the sky overhead and the ground beneath the feet. One dreamed it at night, and one woke to it in the morning. It made everything its adjunct, every one its slave. Duty, wealth, love, devotion, had no other object on which to pour themselves out. It commanded, absorbed, monopolized. There was no home it didn’t visit, no pocket it didn’t rifle, no face it didn’t haunt, no heart it didn’t search and sift and strengthen and wrench upward—the process was always a hard, dragging, compulsive one—till the most wilful had become submissive and the most selfish had given all. Prayer was war; worship was war; art, science, philosophy, sport were war. Nothing else walked in the streets or labored in the fields or bought and sold in the shops. It was the next Universal after God.

And here, after God, a man was his own Universal. With no standard to which everything had to be referred he seemed unutterably care-free. Care-free was not a term I should have used of New York, of America, in the old days; but it was now the only one that applied. The people I saw going by on the sidewalks had nothing but themselves and their families to think of. Their only struggle was the struggle for food and shelter. Safe people, happy people, dwelling in an Eden out of the reach of cannon and gas and bomb!

“I came not to bring peace, but a sword!”

Sacrilegiously, perhaps, I was applying those words to myself as we jolted homeward. But I was applying them with a query. I was asking if it could possibly be worth while. All at once my mission became unreal, fantastic.

To begin with, it was beyond my powers. Among these hundreds of thousands of strangers I knew but a handful. Even on that handful I should make no impression. I could see at a glance, from the few words I had exchanged with people on the dock, that each man’s cup was full. You couldn’t pour another drop into it. I had subconsciously taken it for granted that my friends would be, as it were, waiting for me; and already it was evident that in their minds there would not be a vacant spot. I had not the will-power to force myself in on so much hurry and preoccupation.