Part 24

In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in the end, I was sorry to see this waste.

With one exception I placed them as all under thirty. They were good-looking fellows in the main, who would respond amazingly to drill. After that impetus to the inner self, of which the Down and Out had the secret, plenty of work, a regular life, food, water, and sleep would renew them as the earth is renewed by spring. No missionary ever longed to bring a half-dozen promising pagans into the Christian fold more ardently than I to see these five or six poor wastrels transformed into fighting-men.

For the minute there was no official there but little Spender, whose bliss in life was in opening the Down and Out door. Having led me across the empty front sitting-room, he said, as I stood in the gap of the folding-doors:

“Say, brothers! This is Slim. Come in here four or five years ago, just as low down as any of you, and look at him now!”

I did feel enormously tall, in spite of the high studding of the room, as well as enormously big in my ample military overcoat. To the six who sat in that woeful outward idleness, of which I knew the inner secret preoccupation, I must have been an astonishing apparition. Only a very commanding presence could summon these men from the desolate land into which their spirits were wandering; but for once in my life I did it. All eyes were fixed on me; every jaw dropped in a kind of awe.

Knowing the habits and needs of such a stupor, I merely threw off my overcoat, entered, and sat down. Any greeting I made was general and offhand. Apart from that I sat and said nothing.

I sat and said nothing because I knew it was what they liked. They liked the companionship, as babies and dogs like companionship, though their aching minds could not have responded to talk. There was no embarrassment in this silence, no expectation. It was a stupefied pleasure to them to stare at the uniform, to speculate inchoately as to the patch on my eye; and that little was enough.

Nobody read; nobody smoked. I neither smoked nor read; I only sat as in a Quaker meeting, waiting for the first movement of the spirit.

It came when a husky voice, that seemed to travel from across a gulf, said, without any particular reason, “I’m Spud.”

I turned to my right, to see a good-looking, brown-eyed fellow, of perhaps twenty-eight, trying to reach me, as it were, with his pathetic, despairing gaze.

I knew what was behind this self-introduction. The lost identity was trying to find itself; the man who was worthy of something was doing his utmost to get out of the abyss by reaching up his hands to the man who had got out.

“All right, Spud,” I said, heartily. “Put it there! We’re going to be friends.”

Silence for another five minutes was broken when a high voice recited in a sort of litany, “I’m Jimmy McKeever, traveler for Grubbe & Oates, gents’ furnishers.”

Sharp-faced, wiry, catlike, agile, tough as wire, I could see this fellow creeping out into the darkness of No Man’s Land, and creeping back with information of the enemy.

I broke in on the litany to say: “Good for you, Jimmy, old boy! Glad to know you. Let’s shake hands.”

He sprang from his seat on the outskirts of the group, but before he could reach me a great, brawny paw was stretched forward by a blue-eyed young Hercules sitting nearer me, which grasped my fingers as if in a vise. There was then a scramble of handshaking, each of the bunch asserting his claim for recognition, like very small children. The older man alone held aloof, sitting by himself, scowling, hard-faced, cross-legged, kicking out a big foot with a rapid, nervous rhythm.

It was he who, when the handshaking was over, snarled out the question, “What’s the matter with your eye?”

I told them the story of how I lost it.

I told it as simply as I could, while working in a fair share of the strong color which I hoped would arrest their attention.

It did. In all my experience of men coming back into life from the state which is so expressively known as dead drunk it was the first time I ever saw them listen with avidity to any voice but that of the inner man.

What is there about war which speaks with this authority? Where did it get its power to go to the hidden man of the heart, that subliminal self with which modern speculation has been so busy, and shift him from off his age-long base? It is commonly said that, whatever our personal vicissitudes, human nature remains the same; but though that may be true of the past, I doubt if it will be true of the future. War on the scale on which we are waging it has already changed human nature. It has changed it as the years change a baby to a boy and a boy to a man. It has lifted human nature up, drawn out of it what we never supposed to be there, freed it from its slavery to time. It has to a large degree reversed the processes of time as it has reversed the usages of sex. We have seen youth doing the work of maturity, maturity that of youth, women that of men, men that of women. We have seen cowards transformed into heroes, rotters into saints, stupid, idiotic ne’er-do-wells into saviors of mankind.

We shall never go back again to the helpless conviction that youth must grow slowly into age, only to have age decay into ugliness and senility. This kind of foolish, useless progress may still go on for an indefinite time to come, but we shall work against it as against something contrary to the highest possibilities of nature. Since we have thrown off our mental shackles in great moments, we shall see that we can do the same in small, and, having emerged on a higher plane, we shall stay there. Staying there, we shall doubtless go on in time to a higher plane still—a plane on which the mighty works that are now wrought in war will become feasible in peace. We are not on that plane yet; but if the advance of the human race means anything we shall get there. It may take a thousand years; it may take more; it may take less; but in the mean time we must seize our blessings as we may.

So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men in their condition they were astonishing.

That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?”

As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out there was always an inclination.

I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield, Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?”

He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal. My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of America was being shaken out of its materialism, its provincialism, and its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that we ought to be in it was expressed.

“We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors. We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.”

I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of purposes.

But he spoke so calmly!

“We shall go into this thing the more thoroughly when our people as a whole are convinced of its necessity. And for a hundred millions of people to be convinced is a matter that takes time. But even there you can see how a great purpose is changing them almost against their own will. It isn’t many months ago that they elected a President on the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ Had it not been for that slogan it’s doubtful whether or not he would have been elected. All politics apart, we can say that, had he not been elected, it’s doubtful whether any other candidate could carry with him a united Congress when we come to the moment of decision. Were the President not to have a united Congress, behind him, there would be no united people. As it is we’re all forging forward together, President, Congress, and people, as surely as winter forges forward into spring; and when the minute arrives—”

He broke off with a smile I can only call exalted. With a hasty pressure of my hand he was off to some other fellow with some other needful word.

_CHAPTER XXX_

My purpose in telling you all this is to show you why I reacted so slightly to Regina’s charge of the indirect method. Though my curiosity as to what she meant was keen enough, the pressure of other interests allowed it no time to work. This is to say, as soon as I got back into the current of great events personal concerns became relatively unimportant. They had to wait. One developed the capacity to keep them waiting.

But toward the middle of March I met her one day in Fifth Avenue. Even from a distance I could see that her step was vigor and her look animation. The haunting sadness had fled from her eyes, while the generous smile, spontaneous and flashing, had returned to her scarlet lips. It was a new Regina because it was the old one.

To me her first exclamation was: “How well you look! You’re almost as you were before the war.”

Though I was conscious of a pang at seeing her so far from pining away, I endeavored to play up.

“Mayn’t I say the same of you? What’s done it?”

She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. Work, I suppose—and the knowledge that things are marching.”

“I hear you’re very busy.”

“I hear you’re busy, too.”

“People do seem to want to be told things at first hand.”

“I find the same.”

“And so one has to be on the job.”

“There’s nothing like it, is there? It”—she flung me one of her old, quick, daring glances—“it fills all the needs. Nothing else becomes urgent.”

“You mean that one’s personal affairs—”

“Oh, one has no personal affairs. I remember a man who was in the San Francisco earthquake telling me that for forty-eight hours he hardly needed to eat or sleep.”

“I’ve seen that doubled and trebled.”

“Of course you have. It simply means that when we get out of ourselves we can make supermen of the commonest material.”

I ventured to say: “You look happy, Regina. Are you?”

“Are you?”

I weighed this in order to answer her truthfully.

“If I’m not happy I’m—I’m content—content to be doing something—the least little bit—to urge things forward.”

“And I can say the same. If I look well, as you put it, that’s the reason. And so long as that’s the reason other things can—wait.” She added, quickly: “I must go now or I shall be late. I’m speaking to the women at the Mary Chilton Club, and I’m overdue.”

She had actually passed on when I stopped her to say, “What do you mean by the indirect method?”

She called back over her shoulder, “Ask Stephen.”

And I asked him that night. Having heard him come into his room between eight and nine o’clock, I marched in boldly, bearding him without beating about the bush.

“I say, old Stephen, what have you been saying to Regina about me?”

His hat had been thrown on the table; his arms were outstretched in the act of taking off his overcoat.

He repeated my question as if he didn’t understand it.

“What have I been saying to Regina about you? Why, nothing—much.”

“Nothing much; that means something. What the deuce do you mean by the indirect method?”

“I haven’t spoken of an indirect method.”

“No; but she has!”

“Oh, I see.”

“Then if you see, tell me what it is.”

He finished the arrested act of taking off his coat, after which he hung it up in a closet, doing the same with his hat. The minute’s delay allowed time for the storm-clouds to gather on his face, and all the passions of a gloomy-hearted nature to concentrate in a hot, thundery silence.

“Is this a bit of bluff, Frank?”

“Bluff be hanged! I’m ready to speak out frankly.”

The storm-clouds were torn with a flash like a streak of lightning.

“Then why didn’t you come to me like a man instead of sending that sneaking old beast—”

“Hold on, Stephen. What sneaking old beast have I sent?”

“He wouldn’t have come unless you had set him on me. You needn’t tell me that.”

“What the deuce are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. There hasn’t been a day since you came back that I haven’t had a hint.” He was not a man to whom anger came easily; he began to choke, to strangle with the effort to get his indignation out. “I’d have given him the toe of my boot long ago if—if—if—if”—the words positively shivered on his lips—“if—if—if I hadn’t wanted to see how far you’d go; and, by God! I’ve—I’ve had enough of it!”

“Enough of what, Stephen?” I endeavored to ask, quietly.

He knocked his knuckles on the table with a force that almost made them bleed.

“My name is Cantyre—do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand. But tell me, what is it you’ve had enough of?”

“I’ve had enough of your damned diplomatic slyness in setting that old reptile on me!”

I am not quick tempered. The tolerance born of a too painful knowledge of my own shortcomings obliges me to be slow to wrath. But when anger does get hold of me it works a change like that of a powerful chemical agent suddenly infused into the blood.

I turned and strode out. A few times in the trenches I had been the victim of this rage to kill—and I had killed. How many I killed at one time or another I now couldn’t tell you. I saw too red to keep the count. All I know is that I have stuck my bayonet into heart after heart, and have dashed out brains with the butt end of my rifle. It is all red before me still—a great splash of blood on the memory.

But I had got the habit. In a rage like this to kill some one had become an instinct. I could not have believed that the impulse would have pursued me into civil life; but there it was.

Having flung open the door of my apartment, I marched straight for the “kitchingette.” Lovey was seated on a stool beside the tiny gas-range, polishing one of my boots. The boot was like a boxing-glove on his left hand, while he held the brush suspended in his right, looking up at me with the piteous appeal of a rabbit pleading for its life.

His weakness held me back from striking him, but it didn’t stem my words.

“Who the devil, you old snake, gave you the right to interfere in my affairs?”

He simply looked up at me, the boot on one hand, the brush suspended in the other. His lower lip trembled—his arms began to tremble—but he made no attempt to defend himself.

“What have you been saying?” I demanded. “Speak, can’t you?”

But he couldn’t. I caught him by the collar and dragged him to his feet.

He had just the strength to stand on them, though his limp hands continued to hold the boot and the brush.

“Now are you going to speak? Or shall I kick you out?”

“You’d kick me out, Slim?”

The mildness of his voice maddened me.

“By God, I would!”

The brush and the boot fell with a dull clatter to the floor.

“Then I’d better go.”

He looked about him helplessly till his eyes fell on the old felt hat hanging on a peg. I watched him as he took it down and crammed it on his head. There was another helpless searching as if he didn’t know what he was looking for before he spied an old gnarled stick in a corner. Taking that in his hand, he fumbled his way into the living-room.

By the time I had followed him I was beginning to relent. I had not really meant to have him go, but I was not ready as yet to call him back. What Cantyre must have thought of me, what Regina must have thought of me, in egging so poor a creature on to say what I wouldn’t say myself, roused me as to a more intense degree I used to be roused on hearing of Belgian women treated with the last indignities, and Canadian soldiers crucified. Had I stopped to consider I would have seen that Regina didn’t believe it, and that Cantyre believed it only as far as it gave an outlet to his complicated inward sufferings; but I didn’t stop to consider. Perhaps I, too, was seeking an outlet for something repressed. At any rate, I let the poor old fellow go.

“What about your things?” I asked, before he had reached the door.

He turned with a certain dignity. “I sha’n’t want no things.” He added, however, “Ye do mean me to get out, Slim?”

I didn’t—but I didn’t want to tell him so. Fury had cooled down without leaving me ready to retract what I had said. I meant to go after him—when he had got as far as the lift—but I meant, too, that he should take those few bleeding steps of anguish.

He took them—not to the lift, but out into the vestibule. Then I heard a faint moan; then a sound as if something broke; and then a soft tumbling to the floor.

When I got out he was lying all in a little huddled, senseless heap, with a cut on his forehead where he had struck the key or the door-knob as he fell.

It was more than an hour before Cantyre got him back to consciousness; but it was early morning before he spoke. We had stayed with him through the night, as he had shown all the signs of passing out. His recovery of speech somewhere about dawn came as a surprise to us.

To Cantyre I had given but the slightest explanation of the accident, being sure, however, that he guessed at what I didn’t say.

“Told him to get to the dickens out of this, and he was taking me at my word. Never meant to let him get farther than the lift. Just wanted to scare him. Sorry now.”

But Lovey’s account was different.

About seven in the morning there came a streak of wan light down the shaft into which the window of his room looked out. Cantyre murmured something about going back to his own place for a bath.

“All right,” I agreed, “and you’d better get your breakfast. When you come back I can do the same. You will come back, won’t you?”

“Oh, of course! I sha’n’t be gone more than an hour. When he wakes again give him another teaspoonful of this; but don’t worry him unless he wakes.”

And just then Lovey woke. He woke with a dim smile, as a young child wakes. He smiled at Cantyre first, and then, rolling his soft blue eyes to the other side of the bed, he smiled at me.

“What’s up, Slim?” he asked, feebly. “I ain’t sick, am I?”

“No, Lovey, old son, you’re not sick; you’ve only had a bit of a fall.”

And then it came back to him.

“Oh yes. I know. Served me right, didn’t it?” Rolling his eyes now toward Cantyre, he continued: “I was just a-frightenin’ of Slim, like. Kind o’ foolish, I was. Said I was goin’ to leave him. Didn’t mean to go no farther nor the lift.”

“I didn’t mean to let you go, Lovey,” I groaned, humbly.

“Of course you didn’t! ’Ow ’uld ye get along without me, I’d like to know? Didn’t I keep ye straight all them weeks at the Down and Out?”

“You did, Lovey.”

“And ’aven’t I saved ye lots o’ times since?”

“You have, old man.”

“I wouldn’t leave ye, not for nothink, Slim. We’re buddies as long as we live, ain’t we? Didn’t ye say that to me yerself?”

“I did, and I’ll say it again.”

“Well then, what’s the use o’ talkin’? You mustn’t mind me, sonny. I may get into a bad temper and speak ’arsh to you; but I don’t mean nothink by it. I wouldn’t leave ye, not for—”

The voice trailed away, and presently he was asleep or unconscious again, I couldn’t be sure which.

Neither could I be sure whether he believed this version of the tale or whether he concocted it to comfort me. At any rate, it served its purpose in that it eased the situation outwardly, enabling Cantyre and me to face each other without too much self-consciousness.

As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do. The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to realities. We were back on the old terms; we called each other Stephen and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual between us.

That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling. Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things; and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the small.

And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place, some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took his bath.

Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the scale of the big.

There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the soles of the huge boots on which he would never walk again. Coming nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see if he was still alive he said, almost roughly:

“Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”