Part 23

“That’s what I’m a-comin’ to. He says: ‘Lovey,’ says He, ‘you’ve put up a good fight, and now ye’re over the worst of it. But I’m with ye all the time,’ says He; ‘only I can’t give ye everythin’ to oncet. All ye can take is what ye’ve made yerself fit to receive,’ says He; ‘because there was a good many years in yer life when ye wasn’t fit to receive nothink. But just you wait, and you’ll see ’ow good I’ll be to you by degrees,’ says He. ‘You go on fightin’ in your way, just as that young fella, Slim, is fightin’ in his way, and I’ll do you both good, and bring you back to each other,’ says He. And, oh, sonny, He’s kep’ His word—all but right up till now, when you’ve been goin’ about that sad-like—and not wantin’ to be ’ome. And now this!”

“But that’s not God, Lovey; that’s me.”

“I don’t see much difference. The most ways I gets a’old o’ God, as you might say, is through the nice things people does for me—and the nice people theirselves—especially men—I don’t ’old with women—and more particular you, Slim—you that was more to me than my own children ever was—than my own life—yes, sonny, than my own life. I ain’t a-goin’ to live very long now—”

“What makes you think so?”

“I ’appen to know,” he replied, briefly. “There’s ways you can tell.”

“What ways?”

“Smellin’, for one thing. Ye can smell death just as easy as ye can smell flowers, or the fryin’ o’ fish, or any other smell; and it’s a sign ye’ll never be mistook in.” His ascetic profile was thrown up, with a long sniff through his delicate, quivering nostrils. “I can smell it now—just like the smell o’ liquor.” The profile came down, and he went on, eagerly: “But what I’m tellin’ you is that if I could die to save you from what ye’re beginnin’ to do this day, Slim, I’d do it cheerful. I knowed you was bent on it before ye knowed it yerself. I’ve been a-watchin’ on ye, and follerin’ you about when ye didn’t see me.”

“How did you know?”

“I can’t tell ye ’ow—not no more than I could tell you I knowed it was God. It don’t matter ’ow you know things as long as you know them, does it?”

“Perhaps not.”

“I’ve just been a-livin’ in yer skin ever since ye come ’ome, sonny. It was as if all yer thoughts passed through my mind, and all yer feelin’s through my ’eart. I ain’t much of a ’and at love—that kind of female love, I mean—not now, I ain’t; but I know that when ye’re young it kind o’ ketches you—”

“Stop, Lovey,” I said, warningly.

“All right, Slim, I’ll stop. I don’t need to go on. All I want to say is that you don’t know—you couldn’t know—the fancy I’ve took to you—and I used to think that you kind o’ ’ad a fancy for me, like.”

“So I have.”

The mild eyes searched me. There was a violent trembling of the lower lip.

“Do you mean that, Slim?” Before I could answer he added, proudly: “I don’t need to ’ave no one sayin’ they’ve got a fancy for me when they ’aven’t.”

“Oh, but it’s true!”

Two shivering hands were stretched out toward me in dramatic appeal.

“Oh, then leave that there drink alone and come ’ome along o’ me.” His eyes fell on the glass. “’Ow many o’ them things ’ave ye ’ad?”

“None yet; this is the first; and I haven’t tasted it.”

He straightened himself up, speaking with what I can only call a kind of exaltation.

“Then God A’mighty has sent me to you in time. It’s Him—and except Him ’tain’t no one nor nothink. Slim, if you puts yer lips to that glass now ye’ll be sinnin’ in His face just as much as if it was Him and not me as was a-pleadin’ with ye.”

“It isn’t a sin to take a cocktail.”

“Not for every one, I don’t suppose. It wouldn’t be for the doctor; and it wouldn’t be for Mr. Coningsby; but ’tis for me, and ’tis for you. There’s take-it-and-leave-it people in the world, and there’s take-it-and-be-damned; and you and me belongs to the last. Oh, Slim, don’t be mad wi’ me! Ain’t ye a silver-star man in the Down and Out? Ain’t I yer next friend—yer real next friend, that is—a great deal more than that young Pyn, with ’is impotent tongue, what stood up with you? Come ’ome along o’ me, and I’ll show you somethin’ good.”

It was the dark hint again.

“What are you driving at, Lovey? What is there at home?”

His reply might have been paraphrased from a writing he had never heard of.

“There’s things ahead of you, Slim, different from what you’re expectin’ of. Wait.”

I confess to being startled. You must see me as in an overwrought condition, reacting from the tremendous strain, first of fighting, then of blindness, and thirdly of emotional stress. I do not pretend that more than any other man who comes back from the jaws of the infernal brazier in Flanders I was my normal self. I was easily up and easily down, easily excited and easily impressed. The mere cast of Lovey’s two brief sentences impressed me.

“What things?” I asked, with that mixture of credulity and rejection with which one puts questions to a trance medium.

“I’ll not tell ye; I’ll show ye; only ye must come ’ome.” As if in illustration of his words, he added, “Ye must begin to wait right now.”

“But why wait?”

“Because God A’mighty can’t give us everything to oncet. Didn’t I say He told me that Hisself? We ain’t fit to receive more’n a little at a time, just like babies. That’s another tip as Beady give me. And Mr. Christian he p’inted out to me oncet that wait is one of the frequentest words in the Bible. See here! Beady writ this for me.” Fumbling in an inside pocket, he drew forth a carefully folded bit of paper, saying, as he did so: “It was one of the times when I was awful low in my mind because you was away. I don’t ’old with them low fellas at the Down and Out—not as a reg’lar thing, I don’t—but now and then when I just couldn’t seem to get along without you I’d go down to one of the meetin’s. Then oncet Beady sits beside me and begins a-kiddin’ o’ me, callin’ me old son and everything like that. But by ’n’ by he sees I wasn’t in no such humor, and we starts in to talk serious-like. And then—well, I don’t ’ardly know ’ow I come to let it out—but Beady he sees just ’ow it was with me, and he bucks me up and writes me this. He ain’t as bad as you’d think he’d be, that Beady. It’s good words out of the Bible, and there’s a reg’lar tip in ’em.”

The shaky hands unfolded the bit of foolscap on which was scrawled in a laborious script:

“Wait on the Lord; wait, I say, on the Lord.”

Beneath this counsel from one psalm were the verses from another:

“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”

I suppose you will call my impulse by some modern psychological name, and for aught I know you may be right. But the words were not without their effect on me. They came to me with the mystery of a message emanating from the days before Time, and from spheres which have no need of the sun to rise or of the moon to give brightness or of the light of any candle. That it was carried to me by this tottering old man whom I had known in such different conditions only added to the awe.

I struggled to feet that were as shaky as Lovey’s hands, carried my little white ticket to the bookkeeper, paid for my drink, which I had left untouched, and flinging an “All right, Lovey; I’m your man!” to him, hobbled out into the lobby of the hotel.

My immediate sensation was that which you have known when the black cloud of troubles that enveloped you on waking has been instantly dispelled on your getting out of bed. The troubles may still be there; but you know your competence to live and work and deal with them.

What I felt chiefly, I think, was that the old temptation would never master me again. I had been face to face with it, and hadn’t submitted to its spell. Something had been healed in me; something had been outgrown. A simple old man with no eloquence but that of his affection had led me as another might be led by a child.

With this sense of release came a sense of energy. I was given back to my mission; my mission was given back to me. That which for lack of a more humble term I can only call the spirit of consecration took hold of me again and made me its own. The aims for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.

And as for love—well, after all, there was the moratorium of love. My lot in this respect—if it was to be my lot—would be no harder than that of millions of other men the wide world over. Love was no longer the first of a man’s considerations, not any more than the earning of a living could be the first. It might be a higher thing for her—a higher thing for me—to give it up.

Turning these things over in my mind and wondering vaguely what might be awaiting me at the apartment, I said nothing to Lovey as we trundled homeward in a taxicab; nor did Lovey say anything to me.

It was only when we got out of the lift and he had turned the key in our own door that he said, with sudden energy: “Slim, I’ll be yer servant right down to the very ground.”

“Oh no, you won’t be, Lovey,” I returned, deprecatingly. “We’re fellas together. We’re buddies. We’ll be buddies as long as we live.”

He slapped his leg with a cackle that was, as nearly as his old lungs could make it, a heartfelt, mirthful laugh.

“There! Didn’t I tell you? That’s what I’ve been a-waitin’ for; and the Lord has give it to me at last. He can’t do much more for me now—not till He takes me ’ome, like.” He raised his sharp profile and sniffed. “I smell it, Slim—a kind o’ stuffy smell it is now—but I ain’t mistook in it. And now, Slim,” he went on, triumphantly, as he threw the door open and entered before me to turn on the lights—“and now, Slim, what you’re a-waitin’ for is—is waitin’ ’ere for you.”

I knew it couldn’t be Regina that Lovey was caging in these overheated rooms, since she wouldn’t be sitting in the dark.

_CHAPTER XXVIII_

It was not Regina Barry who was waiting for me, but it was the next best thing.

Lovey stood off and pointed to it as it lay, white and oblong, on the sitting-room table.

“Give it to me with ’er own ’and,” he said, mysteriously. “Druv up to the door and asked the janitor to call me down. Told me to tell you that it wouldn’t be at ’alf past four, as she says in the note, but at five, and ’oped you wouldn’t keep ’er waitin’.”

I held it in my hand, turning it over. I felt sure of what was in it, but I didn’t know whether I was sorry or glad. Of course I should be glad from one point of view; but the points of view were so many. It would be all over now with the mission, for which my enthusiasm had so suddenly revived. When we had done this thing we should be discredited and ostracized by the people we knew best, and for some time to come.

I stood fingering the thing, feeling as I had felt now and then when we had given up a trench or a vantage-point we had been holding against odds. Wise as it might be to yield, it was, nevertheless, a pity, and only left ground that would have to be regained. There was moral strength, too, in the mere fact of holding. Not to hold any longer was a sign of weakness, however good the reason.

I broke the seal slowly, saying, as I did so, “Did she say where?”

“No, Slim; she didn’t say nowhere.”

“Only that I was not to keep her waiting.”

He thought again. “Punctual was ’er word.”

She needn’t, however, have said that. Of course I should be punctual. All might depend on my being on the spot at the moment when the clock struck. I still hesitated at drawing out the sheet. As a matter of fact I was wondering if she had received the sign she had talked about, and if so, what it was.

After all, it was an unimportant note.

DEAR FRANK,—Mother has allowed me to ask Doctor Feltring—a lady—who retreated with the Serbian Army into Albania, to speak at our house at half-past four to-morrow afternoon. Will you come? We shall all be glad to see you.

Yours,

REGINA.

That was all. I should have felt a certain relief that nothing was irrevocably settled had there not been in the envelope another page. On it were written the words: “Are you trying the indirect method? If so, I think you will find it unwise.”

If I read this once I must have read it twenty times, trying to fathom its meaning.

I could only think that she was gently charging me with my apathy. The indirect method was the inactive method. I had let weeks go by not only without saying the word which she had told me she would obey, but without making any attempt to get speech with her.

And yet it seemed to me that any other woman in the world might have resented this but Regina. It was a kind of resentment unlike her. She was too proud, too intense. Even in the hypnotic state induced by the knowledge, after years of doubt, that we cared for each other, she had kept her power of resistance. She would come with me if I made her, but she hoped I wouldn’t make her. That hope made it difficult for me to impose myself on any one at once so willing and so reluctant. Of what, from different angles, each of us owed to Cantyre—not to mention any one else—she was as sensitively aware as I was.

I could hardly believe, therefore, that she was reproaching me; and yet what else did she mean?

I tried to learn that on the following day, but found access to her difficult. Since she was hostess to the speaker of the afternoon as well as to some sixty or eighty guests, mostly ladies, this was scarcely strange. I was limited, therefore, to the two or three seconds during which I was placing in her hands a cup of tea. Even then there was a subject as to which I more pressingly desired information.

“I see Stephen isn’t here.”

She couldn’t keep out of her eyes what I read as a kind of crossfire, expressive of contradictory emotions.

“He wouldn’t come.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t like the subject.”

“Because it was medicine?”

“Because it was war.”

“But if this country goes in?”

“He doesn’t believe it will. He thinks the breaking off of our relations with Germany will do all for which we can be called on. We’ll never fight, he says. Even if we declare war he’s sure it will only be in name.”

I was not so much interested in Cantyre’s opinions as in the way in which she would take them.

“And you?”

“Oh, I think he’s only kicking against the pricks. He can’t think like that.”

I gave her a look which I tried to make significant. “You mean that he’s taking the indirect method?”

She gazed off to the other side of the room. “Oh, that isn’t the indirect method.”

“What does the indirect method involve?”

But here Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott butted in—I have no other term for it—with a question, which she asked as if her life depended on the answer, “Regina, didn’t you think the action of that English nurse in going over the mountains with the band of little Serbian boys the most heroic thing you ever heard of?”

So I came away without having learned what it was I was doing, but not less determined to find out.

I resolved to try Cantyre. My meetings with him had become not exactly rare, but certainly infrequent. I had hardly noticed the decline of our intimacy while it was going on; I only came to a sudden realization of it when I said to myself I would look in on him that night.

It occurred to me in the first place that I had not looked in on him of my own accord since I had come home. I had gone round the elbow of the corridor once or twice when he had invited me, but never of my own initiative. Then it struck me that it was some time since he himself had come knocking at my door.

“Lovey, when was the doctor last in here?”

He was in the “kitchingette” and came to the threshold slowly. When he did so there was that scared look on his face I had seen on the previous afternoon.

“I don’t rightly know, Slim.”

“Isn’t it more than a week ago?”

He considered. “It might be.”

“Do you know any reason why he doesn’t come?”

He seemed to be defending himself against an accusation.

“Why, Slim! ’Ow sh’d I know?”

“Well, you see him every day—in and out of his room with his boots and things.”

“He don’t ’ardly ever speak to me.”

“And don’t you ever speak to him?”

He fidgeted nervously. “Oh, I passes the time o’ day, like, and tells him if his pants need pressin’ and little things like that.”

“Does he ever say anything about me?”

“Not lately he don’t.”

“Have you any idea why not?”

“I might ’ave a hidea, Slim; but what’s servants’ gossip, after all?”

As he had me there I dropped the subject, stealing round to Cantyre’s quarters about eleven that night.

To my knock, which was timid and self-conscious, he responded with a low “Come in” that lacked the heartiness to which he had accustomed me. As usual at this hour, he was in an elaborate dressing-gown, and also as usual the room was heavy with the scent of flowers. He was not lounging in an arm-chair, but sitting at his desk with his back to me, writing checks.

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, without turning his head.

“Thought I’d drop in on you.”

He went on writing. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Not if you’re busy.”

“Got some bills to pay.”

“Oh, then I’ll come another time.”

Having gone in for one bit of information, I went out with another. Cantyre knew.

I was not only sorry for his knowing, I was surprised at it. During the two months we had been in New York both Regina and I had been notably discreet. We had been discreet for the reasons that all the strings were in our own hands, and it depended solely on ourselves as to which we pulled. We alone were the responsible parties. That poor Cantyre shouldn’t have to suffer before we knew whether we meant to make him suffer or not had been a matter of concern to us both.

If he knew, it was, therefore, not from me; and neither was it from Regina. There remained Annette, but she was as safe as ourselves. Further than Annette I couldn’t think of any one.

I should have been more absorbed by this question had I not waked to new elements in the world drama, as one wakes to a sudden change in the weather. My surprise came not from any knowledge of new facts, but from the revival of my own faculty for putting two and two together. There had been a month in which depression had produced a kind of mental hibernation. When at the end of February I emerged from it the New World in particular had moved immeasurably far forward.

Now that I came to notice it, I saw a change as perceptible as that in the wind in the whole American national position. As silently as the wind shifts to a new point of the compass a hundred millions of people had shifted their point of view. They were moving it onward day by day, with a rapidity of which they themselves were unconscious.

The titanic facts were to the undercurrent of events but as the volcano to the fire at the heart of the earth. The heart of all human life being now ablaze, there was here and there a stupendous outburst which was but a symptom of the raging flame beneath. There was the U-boat blockade of Great Britain, endangering all the maritime nations of the world. There was the American diplomatic break with Germany. There was the guarding of the German ships interned in American ports. There was the torpedoing of an American steamer off the Scilly Isles. There was Mr. Wilson’s invitation to the neutral nations to join him in the breach with the German Emperor. And then on the 26th the President went in person before Congress to ask authority to use armed force to protect American rights.

These, I say, were but volcanic incidents. The impressive thing to me was the transformation of a people by a process as subtle as enchantment.

Two months earlier they had been neutral, and sitting tight on their neutrality. The war was three thousand miles away. It had been brewed in the cursed vendettas of nations of some of which the every-day American hardly knew the names. It was tragic for those peoples; but they whose lives were poisoned by no hereditary venom were not called on to take part. Zebulun and Naphtali from sheer geographical position might be obliged to hazard their lives to the death; but Asher could abide in his ports, and Gilead beyond Jordan. That had been the kind of reasoning I heard as late as the time of my arrival.

On my return to New York in November, I found a nation holding its judgments and energies in suspense. What by the end of February interested me most was the spectacle of this same people urging forward, surging upward, striving, straining toward a goal which every one knew it would take strength and sacrifice to reach.

Between this approach to war and that of any of the other great powers there was this difference: They had taken the inevitable step while in the grip of a great stress. They sprang to their arms overnight. They had no more choice than a man whose house is on fire as to whether or not he will extinguish it. Out of the bed of their luxurious existence they were called as if by conflagration. Whether they would lose their lives or escape with them was a question they had no time to consider. They went up to the top notch of the heroic in an instant, not knowing the danger they were facing or the courage they displayed.

Here, on the other hand, was a people who saw everything from a long way off. For nearly three years their souls had been sickened with the tale of blood. Gilead might abide beyond Jordan and Asher in his ports, but no atrocious detail had been spared them. They knew, therefore, just what they were doing, exactly what was before them. I can hardly say that they made their choice; they grew toward it. They grew toward it calmly, deliberately, clear-sightedly; and for this very reason with an incomparable bravery. If I were an American citizen instead of the American citizen’s blood-brother, I might not say this; I might not have been aware of it. In any family the outsider can see that which escapes the observation of the daughter or the son. I heard no born American comment on this splendid, tranquil, leisurely readjustment of the spirit to a new, herculean task; perhaps no born American noticed it; but to me as an onlooker, interested and yet detached, it was one of the most grandiose movements of an epoch in which the repetition of the grandiose bewilders the sense of proportion, as on the first days in the Selkirks or the Alps.

It was at this time I heard that Regina was addressing meetings. They were women’s club meetings, and I learned from Annette that she was speaking with success.

“She seems to have come out of a sort of trance,” Annette observed of her, using the word I had used myself. “Ever since she came home she’s been like a girl walking in her sleep. Now she’s waked and is like her old self.”

Since Annette knew my story, or part of it, I thought it no harm to ask, “To what do you attribute it?”

But Annette refused to lend herself to my game.

“I attribute it to her getting over the long strain. It’s natural that you people who’ve been over there should be dazed or jumpy or something. She’s been dazed.”

“And what do you think I’ve been?”

“Oh, you’ve been the same,” she laughed; “but then, you’re always queer.”

_CHAPTER XXIX_

The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus.