Part 22

He threw off in a tone that seemed careless: “In that case there’d be just one thing for me to do. I’d leave her everything I possess—I’m doing that as it is—and, well, you can guess the rest. I—I couldn’t go through all that again. The first time—well, I just pulled it off; but the second—”

It was the old story. They all seemed to have the second time on the brain. I, too, was getting it on the brain. It was like a trip-hammer pounding in my head.

I forced myself, however, to make some foolish, semi-jovial speech in which there was no congratulation, begging him, then, for the love of Heaven, to clear out, as I wanted to go to sleep.

_CHAPTER XXV_

No record of the next few weeks exists for me. I suppose I must have done things—little things. I must have gone in and out, and eaten my meals, and fulfilled Lovey’s orders—for, lacking volition of my own, I was entirely at his command. But the recollection of it all has passed from me. I remember reading in some one’s reminiscences of prison life that the weeks of solitary confinement went by; but the released prisoner could not say how. Nothing remained with him, apparently, but a big, black blur; and of these first weeks in New York it was all that stayed with me.

I know that Christmas came and went, and that I spent the festival at Atlantic City. I did this in a wild hope, which I knew was idiotic when I formed it. I told Lovey what I was about to do; I knew he, in the course of his valeting, which he still kept up, would tell Cantyre; I guessed that Cantyre would tell Regina; and I hoped—it never really amounted to hoping, I only dreamed—that Regina might find the moment a favorable one for slipping away and joining me. Then we should actually do the thing so impossible to plan.

But, of course, nothing came of it; and I returned to New York more unsatisfied than I had gone away. The sense of being unsatisfied sent me at last to Sterling Barry’s door.

You will observe that I had not talked with Regina since our last night on board ship. On the morning of landing her quick movements, as compared with my slow, lumbering ones, enabled her to elude me. Since our landing my will had been positively paralyzed. Those words of hers, “Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!” were always in my memory; but the very sense that I could use the power held me back from doing it. I meant to use it; but as each minute came round when I might have taken a step toward that end I seemed to fall backward, like the men who went out with swords and staves to take the Christ.

But two days after my return from Atlantic City I came to the conclusion that I could wait no longer. I could go and call on her at least. For the family it would mean no more than that I had come to offer my congratulations. For her—but I could tell that only by being face to face with her.

The old manservant recognized me on coming to the door. He was sorry that Miss Barry had gone to tea with Miss van Elstine, and was sure his mistress would be sorry, too. Moreover, they had all heard of my prowess in battle, and were proud of me.

So I drove round in my taxi to Annette’s.

The maid would have ushered me straight up to the library, but I preferred to send in my card. As I was being conducted up-stairs a minute later I had the privilege of hearing a few words which I am sure Annette intended for my ear.

“Well, I don’t mind this once, Regina; but I can’t have it going on.... Yes, I know it’s an accident; but it’s an accident that mustn’t continue to happen. The very fact that he’s my cousin obliges me to be the more careful. It wouldn’t be fair to your father and mother if I were to let you come here—”

“But, Annette, this once is all I’m asking for.”

“And all I mean to grant.”

I could tell by Annette’s voice that she was retreating to another room, so that by the time I entered Regina stood there alone. Before I knew what I was doing I held both her hands in mine and was kissing them.

It is an odd fact that on raising my eyes I saw her features for the first time since that summer afternoon at Rosyth. On board ship she had always worn the yashmak; and on the dock she had been too far away to allow of my seeing more than that she was there.

The face I saw now was not like Annette’s, untouched by the passage of time and suffering and world agony. You might have said that in its shadows and lines and intensities the whole history of the epoch was expressed. It was one of those twentieth-century faces—they are women’s faces, as a rule—on which the heroic in our time has stamped itself in lineaments which neither paint nor marble could reproduce. It flashed on me that the transmigrated soul had traveled farther than I had suspected.

I don’t know what we said to each other at first. They were no more than broken things, not to be set down by the pen. When I came to the consciousness of my actual words I was saying, “I’m going to make you, Regina; I’m going to make you.”

She responded like a child who recognizes power, but has no questionings as to right and wrong.

“Are you, Frank? How?”

“In any way that suggests itself.” I added, helplessly, “I don’t know how.”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me,” she said, simply and submissively.

“Then will you just walk away with me some afternoon—and be married—without saying anything to any one?”

“If you say so.”

“When shall we do it?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Next week?”

“If that suits you.”

“Would it suit you?”

She bent her head and was silent. I repeated the question with more insistence.

“Would it suit you, Regina?”

“There’s no question of suiting me. I’ve got myself where I can’t be”—she smiled, a twitching, nervous smile—“where I can’t be suited.”

“Do you mean that you’d come with me—when you wouldn’t want to?”

“Something like that.”

“Why should you?”

“I’ve told you that. I’ve—I’ve let you see it—in what I’ve been doing for the past two years.”

“So that I’m absolutely master?”

“That’s it.”

I turned away from her, walking to the other end of the long room. When I came back she was standing as I had left her, humbly, with eyes downcast, like a slave-girl put up for sale.

I paused in front of her.

“Do you know that your abandonment of will puts us both in an extraordinary position?”

“Yes.” She went on presently, “But I know, too, that where you’re concerned my will-power has left me.”

“But that isn’t like you.”

She shook her head.

“No, it isn’t. Generally my will is rather strong. But in this case— You see—I’d—I’d waited so long—and I’d never believed that you—that you cared anything—and now that I know you do—well, it’s simply made me helpless. I’ve—I’ve no will at all.”

“So that I must have enough for two?”

“I suppose so.”

“And if I—if I carry you off—and make every one unhappy—and put you in a position where you’d be—where you’d be done for—that’s what Annette calls it—the responsibility would be all mine?”

“I should never reproach you.”

“In words.”

“Nor in thought—if I could help it.”

“But you mightn’t be able to help it.”

To this there was no reply. I took another turn to the end of the room. My freedom of action was terrifying. Since I could do with her what I liked, I was afraid to do anything. I came back and said so.

The old Regina woke as she murmured, “If you’re afraid to do anything—do nothing.”

“And what would you do?”

“I should let things take their course.”

“Let things take their course—and marry him?”

“If things took their course that way.”

“Do you mean that they mightn’t take their course that way?”

“I’m not married to him yet. There are—there are difficulties.”

I caught her by the arm. “Of what kind?”

“Of opinion chiefly—but of very vital opinion.”

“Do you mean about the war?”

She said with a force like that of a suppressed cry: “He wants me not to have anything more to do with it! And I—I can’t stop—not while it’s going on. I—I must be doing something. It’s one of the reasons why I could marry him—that he’s a doctor—and I could take him over there—where they need him so much.”

“And he won’t go?”

“He doesn’t say that exactly; but he doesn’t want to. He thinks it’s all wrong—that when it comes to brutality, one side is as bad as the other.”

“Oh, he’ll get over that—if you insist; and then you’ll marry him.”

“Perhaps so—if I haven’t already married you.”

“What makes you think you may have married me?”

“You said you’d make me.”

And in the end, when Annette came back, we left it at that, with everything up in the air.

_CHAPTER XXVI_

More weeks followed, of which my record is chiefly in the drama of public events.

Vast as these were at the time, they seem even vaster in the retrospect. As my memory goes back to them they are like prodigious portents in the sky, awful to look at and still more awful to think about. A time will come when we shall find it amazing merely to have lived through such happenings.

Before the invaders the Rumanian towns were going down like houses built of blocks. In her attitude to Rumania, Russia was a mystery—a husband who sees his wife fighting for her life and doing hardly anything to help her. The rumors, true or false, that reached us might have been torn from some stupendous, improbable romance—a feeble Czar, a beautiful and traitorous Czarina, a corrupt nobility, an army betrayed, a people seething in dreams and furies and ignorance. Washington, having gone so far as to ask the Allied nations their peace conditions, had received them—restitution, reparation, and future security. Then late in that month of January, 1917, there came to people like me an unexpected shock. Before the Senate President Wilson delivered the speech of which the tag that ran electrically round the world was peace without victory.

I mention these things because they are the only waymarks of a time during which my private life seemed to be drearily and hopelessly at a standstill. The deadlock of the nations reacted on myself. Mentally I was at grips with destiny, but nothing made any progress. I was exactly where I had started, as regards Regina, as regards Cantyre, as regards Annette, as regards the father and mother Barry. Outwardly I was on friendly terms with them all, and on no more than friendly terms with any one.

The Barrys invited me to dinner, and I went. Cantyre made up a theater party—he was fond of this form of recreation—and I went to that. Annette asked me to a Sunday lunch at which Cantyre and Regina were guests. The force of organized life held us together as a cohesive group; the operation of conventional good manners kept us to courtesies. That any one was happy I do not believe; but life threw its mask even on unhappiness.

I got in, of course, an occasional word with Regina, which, nevertheless, didn’t help me. As far as I could observe, she lived and moved in a kind of hypnotic state, from which nothing I knew how to say could wake her. She was always waiting for me to give the word, and I was afraid to give it. If there was hypnotism, it affected us both, since I was as deeply in the trance as she.

Now and then, however, she came out of it with some brief remark which gave me a lead and perhaps made me hope. One such occasion was at the theater. Cantyre had not put me next to her, but there was an entr’acte when I found his place empty and slipped into it.

“And how are events taking their course?” I asked, with a semblance of speaking cheerily.

“I’m waiting to see.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“And how long is that to go on?”

“Till events have shaped their course in a way that will tell me what to do.”

“How shall you know that?”

“How does the twig know when the current takes it from the spot where it has been caught and carries it down-stream?”

“Oh, but you’ve got intelligence.”

“Any intelligence I’ve got implores me to keep on waiting.”

“So that you’re not going to be married right away?”

“I shall not be married till I see it’s the obvious thing to do.”

“Not even to me?”

“That’s different. I’ve already told you—”

“That if I give the word— But don’t you see I can’t give it?”

“Exactly. You’re waiting for the sign as much as I am.”

“What sign?”

“We shall recognize it when the time comes.”

“Where will it come from?”

“Right up out of life; I don’t know where, nor how.”

“Who’ll give it to us?”

She had only time, as Cantyre returned to his seat, to send me a long, slantwise look, with the underscored words, “You know!”

Another time was in the regrouping of guests, after Annette’s luncheon. Finding myself beside her at a window, I asked the plain question, “Are you engaged to Cantyre?”

“I’m just where I was when I told you about it on board ship. He hasn’t asked me to be more definite.”

“Is he just where he was?”

“I think he is, in that—in that he expects me to marry him.”

“And you leave him under that impression?”

“I don’t know what else to do—till I get the sign.”

“You’re still looking for that?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Oh, but you are, whether you’re aware of it or not.”

“And suppose he urges you before the sign comes?”

“I shall still wait.”

“And suppose I urged you?”

“I’d take that as the sign.”

And after the guests went I stayed behind and told the whole story to Annette. So long as there were no clandestine meetings under her roof, she was as detached and sympathetic and non-committal as a chorus in a Greek play.

“Why don’t you give her the sign, if it’s not a rude question?” she asked, while a marvelous succession of ripples circled over her duskiness.

“Because I’m afraid to. Think what it would mean to Cantyre, who’s been so white with me all these years.”

“As well as to every one concerned, including herself and you. I’m glad you’ve enough common sense to feel that. See here, Frank,” she went on, kindly, “you’ve got to pull yourself out of this state of mind. It’s doing you no good. When you ought to be at work for your country, which needs you desperately, you’re sulking over a love-affair. Buck up! Be a sport! Be a man! There are lots of nice girls in New York. I’ll find you some one.”

But at that I ran away.

_CHAPTER XXVII_

Within a few days I saw the correctness of Annette’s summing up.

A medieval legend tells of an angel being sent to Satan with the message that God meant to take from the devil all the temptations with which he had seduced mankind. To this Satan resigned himself because he couldn’t help it, begging of the angel that he should be left with just one—and that the least important. “Which?” asked the angel. “Depression,” said Satan. The angel considered the request, found that depression cut but slight figure as a sin, and went back to heaven, leaving it behind him. “Good!” laughed Satan, as the celestial vision faded out. “In this one gift I’ve secured the whole bag of tricks.”

And that is what I was to find.

I was depressed on leaving Europe. I grew more depressed because of the experience on board ship. In New York I was still more depressed. There was a month in which all things worked together for evil; and then I came to the place at which Satan had desired to have me.

I have not said that during all this time I made no attempt to look up my old friends at the Down and Out or, beyond an occasional argument with Cantyre, to fulfil the mission with which I had been intrusted. Ralph Coningsby had come and offered me work, and I had refused it. Even the march of public events, with the introduction of lawless submarine warfare and the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States, hadn’t roused me. I marked the slow rise of the impulse toward war in the breasts of the American people, as passionless and as irresistible as an incoming tide, but it seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was out of it, flung aside by a fate that had made sport of me.

I was so far from the current of whatever could be called life that I grew apathetic. Though I hadn’t seen Regina for weeks, I sat down under the impalpable obstacles between us, making no effort to overcome them. I ate and drank and slept and brooded on the futility of living, and let the doing so fill my time. Lovey was worried, and dogged me round till there were minutes when I could have sprung on him and choked him.

Then came the afternoon when I decided that Satan must have his way.

There is a hotel in New York of which I had many recollections because I had frequented its barroom in the days before I went altogether down. It is a somewhat expensive-looking barroom, with heavy mahogany, gilded cornices, and frescoes of hunting-scenes on the wall. Hanging over the bar at any time during the day or night can be seen all the types that are commonly known as sporting, from the dashing to the cheap.

They might have been the same as on that day when I turned my back upon the place five years previously. They hung in the same attitudes; they called for the same drinks; they used the same profanities, though with some novelty in the slang. With my limp, my black patch, and my general haggardness, I felt like a ghost returning among them.

Timidly I approached a barman at leisure and asked for a cocktail of a brand for which I used to have a liking. I carried it off to a table placed inconspicuously behind the door leading to and from the hotel. Putting it on the table, I stared at its amber reflections.

I had come back to the same old place at last. It was curious; but there I was. All my struggling, all my wandering, all my up-hill work, all my days and nights in the trenches, all my suffering, all my love—everything had combined together to land me just here, where, so to speak, I had begun. It was the old story of dragging up the cliff, only to fall over the precipice. It seemed to be my fate. There was no escaping it.

I might not take more than that one drink during that afternoon; but I knew it would be a beginning. I should come back again; and I should come back again after that. Another type of man would do nothing of the kind; but I was my own type.

Very deliberately I said good-by to the world I had known for the past three years and more. I said good-by to work, to ambition, to salvation, to country, to love. Back, far back in my mind I was saying the same deliberate good-by to God. I shouldn’t rest now till everything was gone.

The glass was still untasted on the table. I was taking my time. The farewells on which I was engaged couldn’t be hurried. The fate in store for me would wait.

Then the door behind which I sat began to open. It opened slowly, timidly, stealthily, as if the person entering was afraid to come in. The action stirred the curiosity, and I watched.

Before I saw a face I saw a hand. Rather, I saw four fingers from the knuckles to the nails, as if some one was steadying himself by the sheer force of holding on. They were old, thin, twisted fingers, and I knew at a glance I had seen them before.

The door continued to open, stealthily, timidly, slowly; and then, looking like a spirit rather than a man—a neat, respectable spirit wearing a silver star in his buttonhole, with trembling hands and a woeful quiver to the corner of his lower lip—Lovey stood in the barroom.

He stood as if he had never been in any such place before. He was like a visitant from some other sphere—dazed, diaphanous, unearthly.

He didn’t look at the table behind the door. His gaze was far off. I could see it scanning the backs of the hangers across the bar. Then it went over the tables one by one, traveling nearer and nearer.

Just before the dim eyes reached me I said: “Hello, Lovey! Come and sit down. What’ll you have to drink?”

There seemed to be an interval between hearing my voice and actually seeing me—an interval during which a frosty, unnatural color, as if snow were suddenly to take fire, flared in his waxlike cheek. But he came to the table and dropped into a round-backed chair.

“Oh, Slim!”

Leaning on the table, he covered his face with his hand.

I tried putting up a bluff. “What’s the matter, Lovey? Haven’t got a headache, have you?”

He raised those pitiful, dead blue eyes. “No, but I’ve got a ’eartache, Slim—a ’eartache I won’t never get over.”

“Why, why—” I began to rally him.

“It’s just what I was afeared of—for days and days I’ve been afeared of it. Been a-watchin’ of you, I ’ave.”

Here was another transmigrated soul that had traveled farther than I knew. It was in pure curiosity as to the changes wrought in him that I said: “I should think you would have been glad, Lovey. When I was here before you used to want to have us both go back.”

The extinct eyes were raised on me.

“These times ain’t them times. Everything different. I ’aven’t stayed where I was in them days, not any more nor you. Oh, to think, to think!”

“To think what?”

“That you should ’ave come back to this—and me believin’ the war ’ad done ye good—lifted you up, like. Not but what you was the best man ever lived before the war—”

“Oh no, Lovey. No one knows what I was better than yourself.”

“You was good even then, sonny—even in them awful old days. Goodness ain’t just in doin’ certain things; it’s in being certain things. I don’t ’ardly know what it is; but I can tell it when I see it. And I seen it in you, Slim—right from the first. Me and God A’mighty seen it together. That’s why He pulled you up out o’ what you was—and made you rich—and dressed you in swell clo’es—and sent you to the war—and made you a ’ero—and stuck you all over with medals—and brought you ’ome again to me. And if you’d only waited—”

“Well, if I’d only waited—what?”

“You’d ’a’ got somethink better still. You’d ’a’ got it pretty soon.”

“What should I have got?”

“I ain’t a-goin’ to tell ye. If you’d come ’ome with me you’d see.” Before I could follow up this dark hint he continued: “God A’mighty don’t play no tricks on His children. Look at me! All He’s give me. Kep’ me well while you was away—and ’elped me to knock off the booze when it was mortal ’ard to do it—and pervided me with a good ’ome, thanks to you, Slim!—and work—and wages—and a very nice man to work for, all except bein’ a bit stuck on ’isself—and let me off washin’ windows, which was never a trade for an eddicated man like me—and brought you back to me, which was the best thing of all—and just because I waited.”

“What do you mean by waiting?”

“I mean waitin’ for Him. That’s somethink I’ve found out since you went away, sonny. It’s a tip as Beady Lamont give me. You’ve got to wait patient-like for Him; and if you do He’ll come to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t. That’s why I’m a-tellin’ of you. It was like this: When you went away it was somethink fierce for me—nothink but that empty flat—and everythin’ speakin’ to me o’ you, like—yer clo’es and yer boots and yer books and yer pipes, and the chairs you used to sit on, and the bed you used to sleep in—and everythink like that—till I thought I was goin’ crazy. Many’s the time I wanted to come and do just what you’re a-doin’ of now—but I’d think o’ the promise I give you before ye went—and I’d ’ang on a bit more. And then God A’mighty Hisself come and spoke to me, just as He did to Beady Lamont that time he told us about when we was in the blue stars.”

“And what did God Almighty say?”

“He come in the middle o’ the night, and woke me up out of a sound sleep—”

“How did you know it was He?”

“Oh, I knowed. Ye couldn’t ’elp knowin’.”

“Did you hear His voice?”

“Ye didn’t ’ave to ’ear. It just went all over ye, like. I sits up in bed, and everything was dark and light at the same time, and something awful comfortin’ like sweepin’ through and through me. Ye couldn’t ’ardly say it was ’earin’ or seein’ or feelin’ or nothink. It was just understandin’, like—but you knowed it was there.”

“But you haven’t told me what He said.”