PART II

I

_December_

_Littledale_

Almost three weeks have passed since I last wrote a line in this

book,--three weeks crowded with events which have turned the current of

my life into ways of which I never dreamed. I am here, in my old room,

a log fire snapping in the fireplace, the window sills banked with

snow, and the clock on the landing below has rung eleven times. I have

sat before these written pages a full half-hour, tempted to destroy

all,--yielding to the sense of the futility in my life. Has it been

but three weeks since the night I sat and listened to Brinsmade in the

Chapon Fin at Bordeaux? To-day every logical consideration is scattered

to the winds as I realize with an acute pain what sport we are in the

veiled hands of chance. Into my life has come the greatest exaltation

and the greatest emptiness, so inextricably interwoven that I know not

what to name it, pleasure or pain,--this emotion which has imprisoned

all my faculties with the sudden awakening of a great love.

I do not know that I shall ever see her again; I have given my promise

never to seek her out. Why? I do not know. Simply because, for her own

reasons, she implored it of me, and to her slightest wish I would be

as powerless to offer opposition as to consciously give her physical

pain. I have spoken of the mystery of good and evil that is in each

of us. To-day it is a mystery more baffling than ever. As I look back

now, what I marvel at most is that I should have met Bernoline at the

very moment when I had so complacently, in my worldly wisdom, accepted

the easy path held open to me. Two women will ever remain before me as

the embodiment of the twin contending mysteries in my soul: Letty, who

stands as the sinister embodiment of all those fierce, primal instincts

which in civilization we name evil; and Bernoline, who has reached deep

into the hidden needs of which I was ignorant and revealed to me a self

I did not know,--a self against whose imperious idealism I rebel, but

a self which will, to the end of my days, dominate me and determine my

actions. One has vanished into the wilderness of men, and the other

returns, a sinister memory, which is a cross to be borne day by day,

behind a mask that must forever stand between me and my brother.

At Bordeaux I had but explored the mystery of evil; the mystery of good

was still unknown to me.

* * * * *

As I look back now, every word, every object, every outline is clear

to me from the first instant of our meeting. It is as though with the

sudden stirring of my deeper nature every little sense awoke. There

are colors, the oranges in a straw basket, the blue of a porter on the

dock, the gray whirl of her scarf against the blue Breton cape on the

upper deck as we passed out of France, the red luxury of the sunset

that swam over our heads that last day at sea,--all these tints and a

dozen others are associated in the minutest visualization along with

the scent of tarred ropes about us at Bordeaux, the clean brine of the

sea which held us ten unforgettable days, the sound of the forecastle

bell tolling off the hours, and the light, slipping step which I would

know to-day from a thousand others.

It was in the wet dawn of late November that I first saw her, and the

memory starts up before my eyes, even to the most irrelevant details.

I can see again the moist dock, the gray flanks of the ocean liner

shutting out the sky, the masts dissolving in the morning mist and the

white splotches of faces flowering against the rails. The salt, tarred

smell of the sea is still in my nostrils and I am back in the crowd of

leave-takers, saying the last broken farewells; an old couple clinging

to their son, a sailor with his sweetheart. Boatswains are piping,

cabmen swearing, loiterers gazing; a smirched face looms as a little

wharf rat bumps against me, and--I look up and see her again--as I saw

her for the first time.

She stood heavily veiled, her arm about an old servant in a Breton cap,

who was weeping her heart out,--a very old woman, wrinkled and stooped,

whose lips trembled, whose eyes never ceased their staring intentness.

It was not simply grief at parting, often hysterical in servants,

but something inexpressibly deeper; not so much a protest as a final

resignation to a weight of sorrow beyond old age’s power to bear.

At this moment, her young mistress lifted her veil and, as she bent

forward to kiss each shriveled cheek, I saw her face out of the mist

and the blurred crowd--as I see it now--and no second glance could ever

add to that instant conviction. The whistle blew above us. The old

woman cried something hysterically and caught the young hand to her

lips. I heard her murmur a blessing, I saw her try to disengage her

hand, and then as, helplessly, she sought for assistance, her look met

mine. I know that my eyes were dim. She saw and trusted them. I stepped

forward, bare-headed.

“_Permettez--Madame?_”

“_Merci, Monsieur--vous êtes bien bon._”

The veil dropped again. I put my hand under the old woman’s arm and

drew her slowly away. When I returned, her young mistress was already

on the boat.

I do not know that I can describe her, for when I see her face I see

only the eyes, dark, round and big, without guile or artifice, eyes

that were open and luminous, and yet eyes that were stricken with a

suffering too deep to be cast off in tears. It was not what I saw but

what I felt,--the inner quality, the sweet dignity, the gentleness and

the high aristocracy. Women, before, had been to me types. In her,

instantly, I discerned a being set apart, whose choice of action could

never proceed from feminine acceptance of the hour’s fashion in dress,

thought and standards. She was what she was, and would go forward

always along her clear path, undisturbed by the troubling blast of the

popular wind. I knew that for the first time I had looked into eyes

which no ugliness, no meanness, no unworthy thought could ever trouble,

and that I was of the privileged of the world to have seen her. One

look, a look that might pass a thousand times--one look in the mists

of the dawn, in the scrambling, shoddy crowd--and yet, for that one

instant’s fugitive understanding, all that I had been and was became

as nothing, and my destiny--for better or worse, for ill and pain and

sorrow, emptiness and loneliness--was irrevocably determined. Yes,

mystery of the good and evil that is in us! From the pain of evil, we

struggle back to sanity and clean air and memory covers over the scar,

but from the emptiness and the ache that, in the mystery of good, love

may lay upon our lives, what escape or what answer is there?

* * * * *

Last night I left off when the memory was too acute and my eyes could

no longer see to write. To-night, I come back to it, impatiently, with

a longing to reclaim every word, every look, every precious minute, and

fix it indelibly before me. The situation here is hideous. I seem to

be walking over a mine that sooner or later will go off, while I can

do nothing but await the final catastrophe. To write is to return to

her, to hope again that somehow, somewhere, without being false to my

promise, I shall see her again.

II

The gangplank swung out as I stepped on the deck, the air shrilling

with the chirp of whistles and the creak of pulleys. I shouldered

through the motley crowd and joined Mr. Brinsmade on the upper deck.

I remember how solemnly I looked down on the France I knew and loved,

and with what reluctant apprehension of the future I watched the gray

hawser stiffen.

“Strange, to be going?”

“Yes--incredibly strange,” I said slowly. “I can’t quite believe it;

for whole months to be a free agent--no longer a part of a great

orderly machine, without eyes or ears or will. I think I have forgotten

what the other world is like.”

“Do you regret this?”

“Regret it? Yes, it’s hard to leave a thing unfinished when you’ve

gone so far. And, though I’ve hated it and cursed it, well, it is a

different conception of humanity, after all, this doing a thing as

a mass. I’ve accepted it, readjusted myself to it. I think it’s not

the question of liking it or not liking it; it’s the feeling of the

inevitable and the wanting to measure up to other men. I stopped

debating with myself the day I saw a man at my side go to his death.

He was a scullion out of the kitchen of a New York hotel--Carlo

Roger--deserter and rascal. He could have remained, and no one would

have cared. He did his duty, unnoticed. I couldn’t do less.”

I looked up, and then down, and added, “Better hold on tight to me, Mr.

Brinsmade. I feel like making a jump for it.”

Laughing he passed his arm through mine and pretended not to notice the

dimness in my eyes.

“You’ve known humanity at its best, my boy,” he said. “And I, thank

God, have had a glimpse of it. And when you’re like myself, a

weather-worn old lawyer, who walks behind the scenes, that’s something

to be thankful for. Well--if they’re not of our race--they’re the same

human beings: we can share that.”

“I feel that way.”

A group of ambulance drivers descended upon us, with their fragmentary

chatter.

“Boat in had a close shave.”

“Missed a torpedo by twenty feet.”

“Come off! Every one’s seeing submarines!”

“Hope we pick one up.”

“Say, what’s the matter with this boat?”

“Off for the good old U. S. A!”

A great blast of steam shook the air above us, sending its wet vapors

against our cheeks. The gangway swung clear and rolled back on the

dock. Another moment, and the big ship trembled beneath our feet and

slowly and definitely veered out against the straining hawsers.

We left the noisy exuberance of the crowd and went down the deck, in

search of quieter moods.

“Here’s our spot.”

I followed Mr. Brinsmade and slipped between two lifeboats. Then,

abruptly, we stopped. The railing was already tenanted by a young woman.

If she heard our exclamation she did not change from the rigidity of

her pose. We hesitated, moving to one side, and lifted our hats in

a sobered deference and, I knew, through our minds flashed the same

thought: she was French and France was receding from her eyes.

One hawser still held us to the land, like a faint memory stretching

back into the past. Then a sudden hissing contortion whipped over the

widening waters. And so, with the parting of that link, one chapter had

ended for me and another, that in the wildest flight of my imagination

I could never have divined, had begun.

Instinctively I raised my eyes and recognized my chance acquaintance of

the dock.

* * * * *

She had fallen back against the life boat, arms rigidly extended,

holding the railing from her. A gray film hid her features, wound about

her neck and stood out in a long flutter, a ripple of light against the

dark unanimity of her costume. Youth and sorrow are two great emotions

which cannot be disguised. I felt, despite the rigidity of the body

which told of the stricken soul, the young grace and dignity. I hoped

that she would notice me, but she remained in staring oblivion. Yet,

though I had spoken but a half dozen words to her, I can remember how

keen was the sense of her presence at my side and how, on the instant,

I forgot my personal emotions and seemed to be entering into the moods

of the woman whose first glance had brought me a sense of intimacy.

I looked, and then I looked away, with a guilty consciousness of

trespassing on her grief. Yet, though my glance was averted, I was

looking back with her eyes. My companion spoke to me: I did not hear.

I was thinking of the wrench of old affections for her--the venture

into the uncharted new--the fading of the homeland that was in her

heart by a thousand memories.

Below, the swift currents of the Garonne ran from us, swift as the

currents of time. Faces of blue-shirted dock hands grew blurred.

Flashes of red trousers, gray-blue uniforms, brown and black of women’s

dresses merged into a momentary tapestry. The ungainly, lumbering

motor-boat, with a hulking colossus balanced at the tiller, dropped

behind. Blue-tiled roofs slipped away. Cathedral spires came out

against the horizon, like the spoutings of huge sea monsters. The

grassy shores flowed back with the current. Wharves, factories, lean

shipyards with naked iron arms extended, tilted ships discharging

cargoes, brown vineyards combing the aged slopes, tramp steamers

in dusty garments, Swedish and Greek, under the imperial banner of

Britain, the Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes; tubs, derelicts, old men

of the sea, reclaimed and pressed into service,--all the multiple,

incongruous aspects of war crowded about our passing, and always that

revelation of the human note, the swarming sea adventurers, undaunted,

incredulous of the odds, contemptuous of man’s malignant genius for

slaying man.

I hazarded another glance at my companion and, perceiving her still

oblivious to our presence, my glance remained, my sympathies quickened

by a hundred remembered scenes of parting. I could not see her eyes for

the veil that hid them but, instinctively, I divined the yearning of

their backward look.

Heavens, how I knew that last look! How many times, in crowded depot

or passing train, I had seen on the faces of women, dry-eyed and

staring, that look of the soul’s rebellion, the last renunciation, the

last groping for a final memory to bear down the lonely years. France,

land of her childhood and girlish dreams; France, of precious sorrows

and what affections: France, of her long race and living prayers, was

receding before the weakening vision that rebelled.

“I say, Davy.”

I came to myself at the touch of Mr. Brinsmade’s hand.

“I don’t think we’ve a right here, do you?”

Then, and then only, I realized how profound had been my absorption.

“No, no, guess you’re right.”

As we started to withdraw, a couple of sailors, preparing to swing

the lifeboats for the night’s perilous dash into haunted seas, came

shuffling up.

“_Pardon, Messieurs._”

“All right--moving out.”

“_Pardon, Mamzelle._”

The sailor hesitated, shuffled and touching his cap, repeated his

request, unnoticed. As he stood there awkwardly, undecided, I stepped

to her side, raising my hat.

“_Pardon, Mademoiselle. Les matelots._”

She turned, and I felt her staring blankly at us, as though in the long

blur of faces she were unable to separate friends, acquaintances and

enemies. But, immediately perceiving the situation, she thanked me with

a little nod and turning, said:

“_Je vous dérange--mil pardons._”

There was a tired note in the modulated voice that I remember to this

day,--the weariness of too much struggling.

From the sailors a chorus went up.

“_Pas de quoi, Mamzelle!_”

“_Ne vous donnez pas la peine._”

They made way for her deferentially, fingers to their caps,

simple-hearted men, quick to feel and sure to recognize the finer metal.

“_Merci, Messieurs._”

A slight inclination of her head, and she had passed down the deck to

the further rail.

“I didn’t realize I was staring,” I blurted out.

“Yes--a little too openly.”

“Perhaps. It rather got me--took me back to the mobilization, and the

depots--the look on the faces of the women; when you’ve seen it you

can’t forget it.”

We moved to the rear and talked of desultory things, as we hung on the

rail and watched the steerage. Below, a returning _permissionaire_,

perched on a capstan, was playing on a harmonica the defiant strains

of “Sambre et Meuse,” a group of cattlemen from a torpedoed ship,

stretched about him, basking in the sun. The martial air quickened the

blood in my veins. I saw a regiment growing out of the mists of the

morning, gaunt, grim and proud, bandaged and limping, returning with

their memories from the trenches. I have seen many a dress parade after

battle and been thrilled; but I still can remember that first knowledge

of the living returning from the dead to the rolling drums of the

“Sambre et Meuse.”

“I want to love my country like that,” I said suddenly. “I want to get

the same thrill when the regiment swings up the street--” I broke off.

“I don’t know just how I’ll fit in. I’m afraid they won’t understand my

way of looking at things. I’m rather dreading the test.”

“You’ll get that thrill.”

“I wonder. We all seem to be pulling for ourselves: liberty,

individualism, yes; but real nationalism--the thing that’s a

religion--the thing you get over here--that makes it worth while to

die.”

“Wait until we understand.”

Some one in the khaki of a volunteer ambulance hailed me.

“David Littledale, ’08. Remember me? Joe Hungerford. Heard you were on

board. What luck!”

I turned to shake hands. It was the same Joe Hungerford of school and

college days, lively and irrepressible, a pink and white complexion,

a mischief-loving eye, a quick smile and a clear visage, incapable of

wrong, deceit, subtleties, or an unnecessary mental operation,--a boy,

as his nation was young.

“Who’d thought to run in on you, Big Dale? Glad to meet you, Mr.

Brinsmade. You know my father--Sam Hungerford, of the Illinois Central?

Quite a crowd on board. Say, do you think there is any chance of our

sighting a submarine?”

“Same old Joe,” I said, laughing. “You wouldn’t feel anything if you

were being led out to be shot.”

“The devil I wouldn’t.” But, in the midst of a retort, perceiving a

familiar face below, he was off, with an exclamation: “Hello! If there

isn’t Frangipani! See you later!”

“There’s your young America.”

“Yes,” I assented. “And a pretty good sort, too. It does everything but

think. That sounds rather hard; but that was what I was, three years

ago.”

“I suppose it was the feeling of the game, the bigger game, that got

you in it?”

“Frankly, yes; more or less. And that’s true of most of us. Not all,

though. But once in, we got a touch of the other thing.”

“Don’t be too quick to judge when you get over there,” he said,

divining my thoughts. “Public opinion is complex, but there is one

thing that decides America in the end, always,--idealism. It’s a

quality that is our weakness and our salvation. It makes us the prey to

quacks and demagogues, until we learn to see through them. But it is

the air we breathe and no one can lead us long away from it.”

“I say, Mr. Brinsmade,” I broke in, “don’t put me down for the sort of

expatriate who goes round damning his country--”

“My dear David,” he said, laying his hand on my arm, “don’t worry. I

feel even more strongly than you do. And it’s a big test that’s coming;

make no mistake. It’s our kind that’s failing, not America. Somehow,

the class that ought to lead, doesn’t.”

We separated on that, and I went down to arrange my cabin, a little

uncomfortable at what I had said, and wondering if my listener had not

been all the while smiling tolerantly at my youthful pessimism,--for

though I am obstinate in my opinions, I do not express them easily in

conversation.

When I returned the early twilight was sifting in. I went to the upper

deck, with a vague feeling of uneasiness which to this day I cannot

explain. Invisible nets descended between us and the fading world; the

ship itself, its masts and its traveling rails, was dissolving in the

flowing in of the dusk. I went directly to the rear, and twenty feet

away I saw her as I had expected, a blot against the rail. She did not

turn at my approach, though we were alone on the creaking deck. Twice

I came to the railing at her side, hesitated and turned away. She was

there, like a statue of bereavement, oblivious of all but the France

that was now but the faint iterated flashing of distant lights.

I do not know how long I continued there, pacing off the deck under the

swinging spaces of the night. All my instincts urged me to her side,

and all my education warned me against the intrusion. I felt so keenly

her utter loneliness, the mysterious sense of some overwhelming sorrow,

the exhaustion of an unending struggle, that twice, with some hasty

phrase on my lips, I stopped, determined to speak to her. But each time

I turned away. Yet, each time, I remember the angry rebellion that came

into my heart at the tyranny of convention which interposed between us.

Had she been a woman of the people,--how easy it would have been! But

she was not. She was of my own kind, and convention dictated that I

should pass on and leave her there in the melancholy of the damp night,

eating out her heart.

What was it came to me at that moment? What inexplicable intuition

of danger? I had left her with a feeling of my utter helplessness,

when, with my hand on the door, I stopped, looking out into the dark

void, where sea and sky had disappeared and but a single step led into

Infinity.

But a single step and such an easy step! Suddenly I turned, went to her

directly, and said:

“_Mademoiselle--pardon, Mademoiselle_; you must not--_vous ne pouvez

rester ici_.”

The emotion in my voice startled her. Her head turned hastily; she

swayed and leaned heavily on the rail. I felt the stiffening of her

body against the impertinence of my intrusion, and all my assurance

fled.

“Monsieur, I do not think I understood you.”

She answered me slowly, in excellent English, with only the slightest

accent.

“I beg your pardon, humbly. Please don’t think I mean to be

impertinent,” I stammered back, “but I don’t think it is good for you

to stay up here--all alone.”

I felt how ridiculous this must have sounded, and broke off lamely.

“By what right?”

“No right, Mademoiselle; just a human impulse, that’s all--just the

feeling that you are in great sorrow and that you shouldn’t be left

alone,--not here, at least. I feel it very strongly, Mademoiselle.”

“Monsieur, there are some sorrows that are sacred.”

The words, the accent, the suffering implied went to my heart. I felt

then as I have ever felt since the indefinable superiority of her

gentle nature over mine.

“Mademoiselle, I know that this may seem incomprehensible to you; I

have been walking here half an hour, before I dared to speak to you,

but--but I cannot go away and leave you here alone.”

Saying which, I bowed and moved away a little distance and took my

station resolutely. Presently she said:

“Monsieur--you will not leave me?”

“I cannot, Mademoiselle.”

“Oh, please go away; please leave me alone!”

Her voice broke and, as I hurried to her side, she put her head

suddenly down on her arms. A film of her veil whipped by the wind

caught my arm, and by this slender bond I held her in my protection.

“Mademoiselle, I, too, am a soldier of France; I have fought with

your people: must I turn from one of my own kind who, I know, is in

distress, just because of conventionality! You are in distress, and I

know it. Please let me judge for you at this moment. You must not stay

up here alone. I mean it.”

“But I want to be alone.”

It was the weak voice of a child that now fought against me.

“I know I am right,” I said with difficulty, for then, as ever, all

my impulse was to do her bidding. But it was the thought of the void

without and that unseen step that gave me courage to resist her. “I

know how impertinent this must seem to you. It is not meant that way.

Do believe that. You must go down on the lower deck. You really must.”

She straightened up and there, cloaked by the night, facing each other,

our wills clashed. A moment--a long moment--then, yielding, she turned

and I followed by her side. Halfway down the deck she stopped.

“Just a second.”

She leaned back against the lifeboat, her hand to her throat.

“Now.”

I piloted her below and found her a chair near mine. She suffered me to

wrap her up without further objection.

“There are no lights to-night and all passengers are ordered to spend

the night on deck. You will be quite alone here. Good-night and thank

you.”

If she answered me I did not hear her. I left her purposely and went

aimlessly through the ship, with something new and strange stirring in

my brain.

III

I know now that I loved her from the first meeting of our eyes. I did

not realize it then nor for many days after. The impulse that drew me

to her was so imperious that I yielded completely to it, without power

of pausing to put questions to myself.

* * * * *

That night I was possessed of many conflicting emotions. I was an

American again after years of exile, making contact with my own kind,

accustoming my ear to old accents, familiar phrases, forgotten bits of

slang, my heart warming with their exuberance, their youthful spirits.

Even the drummer by my side at the table, nasal, rough and loquacious,

was a type so comprehensible that I found myself beaming with grateful

pleasure as he talked of “God’s country,” stretched for the hors

d’oeuvres, and addressed his neighbor as “Sonny.”

Supper was a hasty, scrambling meal, with the portholes sealed.

The crowd was oddly mixed, like a herd of refugees arrived from an

inundation; a score of young ambulance men returning, the gray-blue of

a few French officers, sailors and officers from torpedoed boats, crews

of cattle boats, commercial travelers, and those endless rovers of the

sea, dressmakers and journalists. The conversation, freed by the sense

of the abnormal, rose about me without restriction.

“What are we stoppin’ down here for?”

“Moon’s coming up: waiting for it to cloud over.”

“Why that?”

“Clear moon’s what submarines like, lady. They can see us, and we can’t

see them.”

“That’s how they got us, second night out of Genoa, just a ripple

blowing, and full moon.”

“What were you in?”

“Three-master, carrying lumber--that we’d landed--return voyage. Well,

I ain’t got no kick coming. We pulled off ten round trips, and the

balance is on the right side.”

“Torpedoed?”

“Yep--and sunk in ten minutes.”

“Spry work getting into boats?”

“Sure was.”

“All off?”

“Most of us.”

“Where was your section?”

“We were up in the Vosges.”

“Know Harrity?”

“He was down in Verdun with us.”

“That was rather hot, wasn’t it?”

“Quite hot enough.”

“Shucks! I don’t believe there’s any danger,” said a voice.

“If they sank us, it would mean war, sure.”

“That is, if it could be proved: and what chance would there be of

proving it, a night like this?”

“Guess that’s sense, too; besides, there’s always a chance at a mine.”

Joe Hungerford joined me as I left the table.

“Going to spend the night on deck?”

“It’s orders.”

A little moonlight had come filtering in between the decks, as the

heavy moon rolled up over the horizon. A faint streak ran along the

railing and touched the stanchions with the luster of fallen snow.

In the shadows we could distinguish shapes stretched out on steamer

chairs, while others arrived, trailing life preservers and rugs, with

an occasional handbag.

“Quite a picnic.”

“Don’t like the children being around, Hungerford.”

“No, that’s not pleasant. If it weren’t for that, wouldn’t mind having

a run in with a submarine. Hello--sounds like the anchor coming up.”

We mounted to the upper deck, under the open sky, with its opalescent

tints and shifting clouds to the west. Red lights and green lights on

ghostlike shadows dotted the stretch of foggy water. Ahead, from the

last sentinel of the world underfoot, a shaft of light came whirling

in broken iteration,--like a can of fire that a small boy whirls in

the night. A group of sailors shuffled by. The shrill of a whistle,

the thrum of engines, and ahead the whirling beacon crept around the

bow and, returning, slid down amidships. The door shot out its feeble

ray of light. A group from the smoking room crowded out to witness the

running of the channel. Then, a sudden rise of voices.

“Well, bring on your submarines!”

“If they get us, I take my chances on deck.”

“You young fellows are mighty chipper; wait till you get shaken up

once.”

“Well, you got away, didn’t you?”

“Gosh, with that light playing on us, anything ought to hit us.”

“Back to the good old U. S. A., boys!”

“Well, enough scenery! Let’s start up a game!”

There was a laugh, and the crowd shuffled back to the card room.

“Going to sit in, Littledale? It’s a good crowd.”

“Perhaps, later.”

I went below, bundled up my great-coat, fished out a couple of life

preservers, and groped my way to my chair. She was there as I had

placed her, but in the black of the deck I could not tell whether she

was awake or asleep. I hesitated a moment and then, slipping in, made

myself comfortable for the night.

Brinsmade at my right was struggling with a tinder which refused to

light.

“Have a _briquet_,” said a voice.

“Thanks.”

The next moment the steel struck sparks and an odor of burning tobacco

filled the air. Slight as had been the light it provoked remonstrances

and down the deck the plaint of a woman was heard.

“I don’t see why they allow such a thing as that!”

“No lights!”

“Put it out!”

“Good many persons seem unduly excited about submarines,” said the

voice of our neighbor, high-pitched, pleasing, if not resonant.

“Well--there’s always a risk.”

“Hardly. Germany doesn’t want us in the war.”

“Germany? Think so? From what I’ve seen of her, she doesn’t care what

we think or any one else--except what she wants at the time.”

Our new acquaintance was silent a moment, as though unwilling to

venture too rapidly forward.

“Well, thank God, we’re out of it!” he said, at last. “The election

settled that. If it had gone the other way, there might be a little

more excitement.”

“Pacifist?”

“Absolutely.”

There was a long silence, broken at last by a question.

“Been over long?”

“Three months.”

“In France?”

“Yes.”

“So--and you still come back with those ideas?” said Brinsmade’s bass

voice, studiously polite but with a note of criticism.

“Does that mean you’d have us in the war?” said the other, in a tone

which showed that he recognized the criticism and resented it. “To pull

the chestnuts out of the fire for France and England?”

“Over on business?”

“No, I don’t desire peace to keep on making money,” answered the other,

with a suavity which suggested a smile. “I am a journalist. Suppose

I’d better warn you--a socialist; worse, still--the editor of _The

Protest_.”

“_The Protest?_ Yes, I read it,” said the other. “Then you are Peter

Magnus?”

“Now you know the worst.”

“Glad to know you. Well, I’m rather on the other side. Stephen B.

Brinsmade,--one of the unconvicted rich, I suppose you’d call us.”

“Really? And you read _The Protest_?” said Magnus in surprise. “May I

ask why?”

“Why I read it? Certainly; to know what the other side thinks.” He

laughed, and continued with the good humor men of politics use as a

cloak but which in his case was the complacency of success. “Honestly,

I’m glad to meet you, Magnus, and I look forward to talking things

over with you. That’s rather odd, for I suppose we’ll get to hating

each other cordially. However, I’ll promise to keep my temper.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well--that’s my experience. Men can meet in physical combat and, the

struggling over, sit down over a friendly chop. They may fight each

other with their wits; as lawyers, blackguard each other in public for

the benefit of the unsuspecting jury, and retain a friendly liking;

but when it comes to a combat of ideas, we seem to acquire a secret

antipathy for the man who disagrees with us.”

“That’s because the conflict of ideas is the most fundamental and

irrepressible of all conflicts,” said Magnus thoughtfully.

“Quite right.” Brinsmade drew on his pipe until the ashes reddened,

outlining the fingers which screened it. Then he began to whistle,

softly, to himself, drawing in his breath.

Outside, the lighthouse was sinking into the sea, while the whirling

beams continued to blazon the sky like flashes of heat lightning. To

the south a star swam out from the horizon, swelled and glittered, as

a new lighthouse took up its warning. A rift of clouds spread over the

risen moon, obscuring the crested ripples that had been following us.

A patrol of sailors went heavily overhead, to the sound of a dragging

rope, the creak of a pulley,--and through the hiss of cleft waters and

the whistle of the wind the thud of powerful engines shook the decks.

“Feels like ‘Full Speed,’ Davy,” said Brinsmade. “Guess we’re clear.”

“Suppose we’re convoyed. Well, anyhow, it’s clouded over, and that’s a

good thing. Hardly think there’s any danger,” said Magnus.

“Neither did our friends on the _Lusitania_.” Brinsmade changed the

subject to one which had evidently been in his mind. “So you’ve been

over here in this hallowed land three months, and you come back with

the same ideas you started with?”

“Only more so.”

“No offence. Most men I know have had their pre-conceived ideas pretty

badly shaken up. That’s my own experience. Well--time enough to discuss

all that. Only--I’ll say this. Whatever you may think of war, and I was

a good deal of a pacifist, myself, to have been over here, to see what

this old world is capable of in a crisis, gives me a better liking for

my fellow man. I haven’t always had a very affectionate regard for him.

But, by Jove, what I’ve seen of this people over here makes me respect

myself a little more just as a plain human being!”

“You’re plumb right there, Mister, whoever you may be!” said a voice

back of us, a voice with the nasal Yankee twang.

“It is glorious, I grant you,” said Magnus quietly.

“But useless?”

“Quite useless, because it accomplishes nothing toward a final

solution; but, of course, where we differ, and, I suppose, in all

arguments will come back to it, is that I don’t admit the necessity of

nationality.”

“That’s frank, and glad you mentioned it,” said Brinsmade, with a

certain joy. “For that is the one big thing that has come out of the

war, and it’s bigger than creed or politics, Magnus. See what happened

to your German Socialists! It’s the rock on which you’ve split!”

“For the present, quite true,” said Magnus, “but it’s the backbone of

Socialism and, if we are not internationalists, we are not Socialists.”

“Why?”

“Well--put it this way. You’ll agree that war is savagery, and contrary

to the spirit of civilization; in other words, that what we are all

seeking is a final and enduring peace?”

“Two years ago I’d have agreed. Now, I’m not quite so sure I do believe

that is possible in our vision. However, for the sake of argument, go

on.”

“What is war? Competition. Competition of what? Of rival nationalities.

Seeking what? Commercial aggrandizement--subjecting the many to benefit

the few. America, Germany, England, France have been at war with

each other commercially one hundred years. War is only a commercial

ultimatum, when a commercial tariff is too slow. The trouble is, men

are guided by their sentiments to think nationally, instead of by their

logic to conceive of themselves as a world race.”

“You are a Jew, of course, Magnus?”

“I am.”

“And proud of the history of your race?”

“I am exceedingly proud.”

“And rightfully. It is a wonderful race. But if it had been guided by

such theories as you now profess, it would have disappeared centuries

ago, like a drop of ink in a barrel of water. Racial solidarity

has been the immortality of you Jews, and sometimes--no offence,

Magnus--I’m inclined to believe that the instinct that moves many of

your brilliant race into Socialism is a contempt of mere national

definitions which in your own world-solidarity have no meaning to you.”

“The Jewish race is not socialistic,” said Magnus, with a note of

impatience.

“It is increasingly so, and most of its intellectuals are.”

“It was not a Jew, but William Lloyd Garrison, who said ‘Our Country is

the world.’”

“A fair rejoinder in a debate, but we are not appealing to the

applause of an audience, but, I take it, as two men holding

diametrically opposite opinions, honestly seeking to find out what each

believes.”

“All right,” said Magnus, evidently favorably influenced by the

other’s good nature, for he answered more frankly. “It is possibly

true that the Jewish race is most ready to embrace the principle of

internationalism on account of its past history. I will grant that. But

that does not affect the general proposition. Pacifism, which is good

Christianity, is the first step to internationalism, and don’t forget

that the most determined opponents of militarism are of a Christian

sect,--your Quakers.”

“Two years ago,” said Brinsmade, carefully, “when I called myself a

pacifist, I might have denied that. By pacifism then I meant opposition

to war,--the belief in the possibility of universal disarmament and

settlement of all difficulties by arbitration. But I never associated

that with internationalism.”

“Am I not logical when I say that pacifism must be considered the

first step to internationalism?” said Magnus. There was in his voice

the persuasive gentleness of the born debater, who is confident of

leading his opponent to the conclusion he seeks. “If you wish nations

to renounce warring on each other by arms, isn’t it because we are

coming to the point of view that we are all human beings on the same

globe, artificially divided by national lines? And if it is abhorrent

to you that one nation should murder another with gunpowder, isn’t it

just as wrong to seek by commercial warfare to impoverish and reduce an

inferior to a state of commercial slavery, a portion of the same human

race?”

I sat up, listening with strong attention. Thoughts which had struggled

for clarification in my own deliberate mind started up. Once or twice I

had come near breaking in with a question, so close to my own problems

had the debate come. Here were two men discussing theories that might

apply in a thousand years, when the immediate problem was this present

thing: what should a nation--my nation--do in this world crisis, for

its greater good?

“Well, now, Magnus--there’s logic in what you say, and I’m the more

ready to admit it in that I haven’t the slightest patience with what I

used to believe.”

“What’s changed you?”

“France. Keeping my eyes open and seeing things as they are in

this world, and not as I want them to be. Your internationalism is

a political millennium, which will come just about as soon as the

other millennium. I used to think that we were all pretty much alike,

English, American, German, and French. I’ve found out we’re not. We’re

not pursuing the same ideas. The English world has settled down to an

easy-going existence, each man sufficient unto himself, occupied in his

own private affairs, getting farther and farther away from his national

ideal, looking on government as a convenient policeman, a central

telephone, and all that. And then, there’s Germany--and the explanation

of Germany is national solidarity--every man fitting into the national

scheme, and every man working for the national aggrandizement.

‘_Deutschland uber alles!_’ We used to laugh at that. I don’t. It

impresses me now. And it terrifies me.”

“Do you want to live under such a system?”

“I’ll come back to that. No, I don’t want to be subjected to that.

That’s why I’m done with pacifism. Because the world’s up against not

simply German armies but the German idea. And we may as well admit that

it is the German idea that’s got to be destroyed or adopted: no two

ways.”

“What does the man in the fields, or the man in the street, care about

all that?” said Magnus softly.

“If the French peasant and the French workman can understand that, I

guess we can,” said Brinsmade. “I said France has changed me over to

a belief in a strong national feeling. It has. I don’t want German

militarism, but I want the sort of military education you see in the

French army,--preparation, with absolute democracy.”

“Compulsory service?”

“Of course. And I want it because I want my sons to be educated into

democracy, and I know no better way than sending them out for a year

or two to rough it with the fellow who comes up out of the mines and

fields, out of the city slums and the wharves. I want them to eat

together, tramp together, sleep together, to learn how to talk to each

other. I want them to respect a man, wherever found, and I want them

to make themselves respected as men. Moreover, I want them to have a

vision of what America is and can be. Why? Because the wealth I leave

them is going to make them leaders and instead of artificial leadership

I want intelligent leadership.”

“You’ll never get compulsory training in America,” said Magnus shortly.

“That’s one thing I’m not worrying about.”

“If we need it for nothing else, we need it to digest our foreign

classes,” said Brinsmade, warming up; “German, Italian, Russian, Greek,

Swedish; we need it for self-education, to form our own race,--a

clear-cut, united American type. But of course,” he said, stopping

suddenly, “that doesn’t enter into your philosophy.”

“No,” said Magnus directly. “To me the greatness of America is that

it is not American. It has the whole world in it and, as long as

these world elements remain distinctly defined in their inherited

traditions, just so long America remains the natural Parliament of Man.”

“The little Sassenach,” said a voice out of the night. “Damned if I

don’t hope a submarine gets us.”

Brinsmade laughed.

“Thanks, friend,” he said. “I feel almost that way, myself.”

“Whether you like it or not, it is so to-day,” said Magnus, “and the

reason that internationalism will come as an American doctrine is

just that. We are international, and not in a hundred years can we be

anything else. This to you may seem abhorrent, but to me it is the

greatest destiny that could come to us. You would wipe out our links to

other nations. I say, keep them; do nothing to weaken them, and make

them great bonds of political thought, that America may lead the world.”

“What gets me--and by George, it does get me--” Brinsmade blurted out,

“is your assumption to speak for my country. Good heavens; my family

fought in three wars, and you have been here twenty years and tell me

what America is, and--damn it--the worst is, I believe you do know!”

“Yes, Mr. Brinsmade, I do,” said Magnus quietly. “What do you know of

the great East Side of New York? What do you know of how multitudes

think and act,--the great labor organizations, the I. W. W? What do you

know of what you call the foreign press? Do you know that there are

over four hundred newspapers published in a foreign tongue--German,

French, Italian, Swedish, Jewish and Hungarian--and that they represent

a circulation of millions? The foreign element that was born abroad,

or whose parents were born abroad, represents twenty millions;

you represent a dwindling minority. You represent--we are talking

frankly--an insular element, and the strange thing is that you still

persist in seeing America in that spirit of nationalism which existed

in Revolutionary days. America has passed beyond such limitations, and

you don’t realize it.”

“And this from a man who came to my country twenty-five years ago!”

“But who has, perhaps, a greater vision of your country’s mission in

world affairs than you have,” retorted Magnus.

“You are probably right,” said Brinsmade. “You place crudely things

that are coming into my mind and the minds of others like me.

Probably we are not awake. Have we, the old American strain, lost our

inheritance?” He added, as if to himself, “And if so, is it our fault?”

Up the deck a spear of light shot across the night from an open door.

A group of young men, emerging from the card room for a breath of air,

came shuffling down the deck, singing as they came.

I was drunk last night, dear mother;

I was drunk the night before,

And if I live till to-morrow,

I’ll be--

“Hello there--Littledale!”

I cursed them mentally and returned an uninviting grunt.

“Hello.”

“Counting the submarines?”

Four figures loomed at the foot of my chair.

“Some games running up there! Four tables. Better take a hand.”

Farther up the line of chairs, a child, awakened by their coming, began

to cry.

“Not to-night. And say, if you want to make a night of it, you fellows,

tramp the upper deck. People want to sleep down here.”

“Yes, Captain,” said a laughing voice; but another said, “Shut up,

Limpy. The women are round here. Come on: clear out.”

The sound of their heavy tramp died out in the distance. A woman behind

me sat up, rearranged her pillow, and settled back. The child whimpered

sleepily and then grew quiet. In the distance some one began to snore.

The ship had begun a slight roll, as it fled, ghostlike in a ghostly

night, followed by noises of unseen things; the hiss of hidden waves, a

sudden leap of spray, the creak of pulleys, a stifled whistle, and the

rumble of the invisible force that thrust it forward.

Magnus laughed.

“Your American inheritance; there it is!”

“Damned if I can listen to any more of that!”

I rose abruptly, kicking the rugs from my legs, and went down the deck.

I am, I suppose, too young not to resent unwelcome arguments with a

hot intolerance. Socialism had meant to me little more than a name,

which I rejected on faith as something akin to anarchy. The voice of

the immigrant, speaking for my America, roused in me a blind rebellion.

The more so that, while he had cut across every traditional instinct,

I was at a loss in the poverty of my mental experience to answer the

coldly stated propositions which, despite my will, convinced me of some

measure of their truth. Yet what had he done but state in his own words

thoughts which had been in my own mind; yes, even those opinions which

had been surging uppermost,--that, in the coming test of a changed

democracy, my generation had let slip the leadership that was its by

inherited responsibility. I could say this to myself, yet I could not

brook it from another. Why? Perhaps Mr. Brinsmade was right, and in

the conflicts of man to man there is no antagonism so deep-rooted, so

unreasoning, so obedient to inherited repulsions, as that antagonism

which in the field of ideas has led men to persecute, to torture and to

stamp out one another with the fury of unreasoning beasts.

Of this reflection I was not then conscious. I felt only the resentment

of the man of action for the man of thought. It was not the ideas,

but the ideas in the mouth of Peter Magnus which aroused my fury. I

remember standing a long time forward, sheltering myself behind a

bulging canvas which slapped against its chains with windy explosions,

trying to shake off my ill-humor, until the cold cut of the spray which

hissed over the decks brought back some equanimity.

IV

I went inside. The sofas in the ladies’ saloon had been turned into

beds. Most of the women had already put on their life preservers

and were surrounded by impossible mounds of baggage. An old man was

methodically deploying a pack of cards at a table. A woman, with a

child on her shoulder, was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Outside

on the landing two returning sailors and a nursemaid were whispering

with sudden outbursts of mirth,--Americans all, Yankee, Westerner,

Scandinavian, Latin and Asiatic.

I went upstairs and into the foul thickness of the smoking room, where

the shock of my entrance set the layers of gray fumes to twisting

and coiling about the dim lamps. Groups had already formed at the

corner tables; Hungerford and the younger men, a solemn audience

about a chess match; another group near me--officers of two torpedoed

freighters--were swapping yarns as they played.

“Got ours out of Genoa, just after dawn.”

“Trouble getting away?”

“Shelled us right up to the last minute.”

A little woman, wife of the speaker, broke into a light laugh.

“Kept on shellin’, too, when we got the boats clear. Dan here, he says

to me, ‘Sarah, you stand right up and let ’em see there’s a woman in

the boat.’ So I stood up, and crack, they let go with a shot that

jumped the bonnet from my head. Polite, aren’t they?”

“Don’t tell that at home: they’ll say you ex--aggerate!” said a large,

swarthy man, who was shuffling the cards. “Civilized folks don’t do

such things; that’s what they’ll say!”

“Well, Sarah and I ain’t got no kick coming,” said the skipper

philosophically. “We got away with six trips and landed the last cargo,

too. Risky--but big money, and I guess we’re on easy street for a

while.”

“Say, if this war goes on another year, boy, we’ll have all the money

in the world.”

A short, stockily built young fellow, keen as a vulture, derby pushed

back, removed a fat cigar and nodded to his neighbor, a type of world

peddler, Armenian or Levantine, who was chewing a toothpick in a drowsy

interest.

“All the money in the world! And after? Say--I’ve been over cleaning

up _some_ contracts, believe me; but that’s nothin’ to what’s

comin’--nothin’! Say--when this little war’s over, any fellow who’s got

somethin’ to sell is goin’ to cash in so fast a crooked gamblin’ wheel

won’t be in it.”

“Oh, got a pretty good line, myself.”

“You have, eh? What?”

“Antiques.”

“Pretty soft bargains, eh?”

The Levantine smiled contentedly. And the two, suddenly attracted,

moved into a corner, absorbed by their own bright conceptions of the

future.

“Hello, there, Big Dale. Ship ahoy!”

I sauntered over curiously to where Hungerford was ensconced in the

midst of congenial spirits.

“Have a hand?”

“No, thanks.”

“Have a drink?”

“Not now.”

I had sat through just such all-night sessions in the days when such

feats were regarded as title to man’s estate, but to-night the mood was

foreign to my own.

“Shake hands with my old friend, ‘Gyp, the Blood,’ alias Frangipani,”

said Hungerford, whose good humor was proof against hunger, drowsiness,

the cold gray dawn and stale tobacco. “Mr. Frangipani was _not_ a

professor of English at Columbia.”

“How be you, friend? Seen you on the deck,” said a stocky, square

fellow in ambulance uniform, who gave me a drowsy squint from around a

knobby nose and put out a squatty hand which was minus a finger. “Not

drinkin’?”

“Thanks, no. The atmosphere is strong enough,” I answered, wondering in

what strange by-ways of civilization--tramp steamer, traveler of the

underworld, or ranger of the Western prairies--the man had gone his

careless journey.

“Mr. Tooker, of Tookerville, Mississippi, sah. Mr. Tooker is a close

student of our great national game.”

“Very glad to know you, Mr. Littledale,” said a brisk little fellow,

sober, well-groomed, soft-voiced, alert and smiling. “Heard a good deal

about you.”

“Mr. Galligan, of Walla Walla. Mr. Galligan is returning from his

period of rest at the front to get a little excitement in the Coeur

d’Alene district,” said Hungerford, who was in good spirits.

A powerful, big-framed youth, with bullet head, blue eyes and thin

lips, who had been making desperate attempts at keeping his eyes open,

yawned, and said thickly:

“’Scuse me. Had a ---- of a night in Bordeaux. Glad to know you.”

“_And_ Professor Ralph Waldo William Butler Swinburne Southwick, of

Harvard, and Beacon Street, and the American Ambulance.”

Southwick, in his precipitation to shake hands, dropped his glasses,

which slid from his long, delving nose and dangled back and forth on

their short string, overturned a pile of chips, and started to take up

the discards, under a storm of protests.

“Other members of the original Inter-Allied Poker Club have succumbed

to poison gas, auto-intoxication, and the need of a recumbent

position,” continued Hungerford, with a wave of his hand toward

two figures on the couches, who had passed beyond the stage of

introductions. He paused and indicated a large, bulbous figure under

a sombrero, snoring peacefully in a sitting position at his side.

“The late Mr. Honus Scroff, of Tittle Valley, Arizona. Mr. Scroff is

especially delighted to meet you,” he added, lifting the hat from the

red, cropped hair and freckled ears.

“Honus hasn’t been to bed since we started down,” said Galligan,

gathering in the cards.

“Quite right. Mr. Scroff’s like an eight-day clock; he only has to

sleep every Saturday night from 12 to 8.”

“Play ball!” said Frangipani loudly, throwing in an ante.

Scroff woke, blinked, and said thickly, “My deal?”

“Not yet, old top!”

“All right.”

And he went off to sleep again.

“I’m in,” said the professor colloquially. “Shove around the

pasteboards.”

She did

And she didn’t;

She would

And she wouldn’t;

O-o-o-o-o! BUT--!

began Frangipani, in a long, doglike wail, which drew curses from the

four corners of the room. The cards were dealt and the bets began.

I stood watching them quite a while, amused at their patter. They were

real, as I had learned to value men in the rough-and-tumble of life.

It was Young America relaxing,--the need of a young nation to return

to its play, to blow off steam after months of driven dynamic energy.

Quite barbaric at bottom, perhaps,--but so understandable, to me! I

liked the democracy of the group and its unconscious camaraderie. Yet,

I could not help thinking how unrelated we were to one another,--to the

present or to the future. And, as I stood there studying them--in my

mind the menace that Magnus had voiced--I wondered how long we could

stem the moving forces below that had the solidarity and the energy of

determined rebels.

* * * * *

To-night, as I recall this first conversation with Magnus, my

irritation dies away. I am not sure but what he has but stated in his

own antagonistic way things which have been growing over me.

Democracy was a revolt against the leadership of a class when that

leadership had grown weak and was no longer natural and genuine. But,

if democracy cannot produce its own real leadership--if it can do no

more than set in motion a mob--the leadership of that mob will be the

leadership that surges out of the accidents of a stampede.

V

Four bells rang from the forecastle when I returned to my chair on the

lower deck. Brinsmade and Magnus were breathing heavily. I enclosed my

legs in the rug, burrowed my nose in my great coat, and sought sleep.

Disturbed by the bustle of my arrival, the young woman at my side

stirred in her sleep and moaned. The dream passed into a nightmare for,

struggling suddenly against some grim horror of unreality, she burst

into a cry:

“_Ma mère! Ma mère,--oh non, pas ça!_”

The scream awoke a score of passengers. Out of the darkness voices

cried excitedly:

“What’s happened?”

“Submarine?”

“Oh, my God!”

People began to rise and grope towards the cabins. I heard Brinsmade

and Magnus struggling to their feet. Another moment, and a panic would

have swept over us. I called out cheerily:

“Nothing wrong! Somebody’s got a bad dream; nothing else!”

Then I leaned over and caught the arm of the dreamer. She groaned,

shivered, and sat up.

“A nightmare, Mademoiselle,” I said, loud enough to be heard down the

deck. “All right now. Nothing wrong.”

She was sitting bolt upright, straining against the horror of the

passing phantom.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle, for having taken your arm--it seemed best--you

were evidently--” I stopped lamely, a prey to the diffidence I had felt

in her presence from the first approach.

She had not moved.

“I hope I did not offend you--”

“No, no,” she said suddenly. “It was a dream--a terrible dream!”

Her voice was not yet under control. I waited, but having said this,

she drew back into her silence. Presently, I heard her settling

back into her chair. Quiet had returned to the deck. I sat there,

keenly awake. The memory of her cry haunted me and, though the utter

blackness prevented my seeing her, I had the feeling that she, too, was

tremulously, nervously awake at my side.

* * * * *

Often have I wondered what makes us so blind to our own selves, and

sometimes I think it is our insistence in seeing our lives as a logical

development. We seek in all phases of life a working formula (formulas

which are not knowledge but the substitute for knowledge) and we early

adopt a formula about our own selves. We never see ourselves whole

because, perhaps, we never complete our own image.

* * * * *

I know that I, too, am a slave to my own formula. I say to myself

that I am an average man,--that, given a problem of action, I will do

under given circumstances just what the average man will do; that, if

I am better or worse, it is all in the quality of opportunity. I am

influenced largely by the judgment my neighbors would pass on me--by

a desire to maintain my own self-respect, or to return to it--and

yet I am conscious of but a distant and imperfect acquaintance with

this self which is my court of last judgment. And, when I have said

all this, I am conscious that I have explained nothing,--that there

is always at the bottom of myself some unpremeditated, rebellious

impulse that in the moments of most determined progress towards a given

point suddenly sends me blindly in another direction. What is that

invisible, intangible sense? I obey by instinct something that I do

not comprehend. I follow myself through changing phases and wonder at

the instinct that brings me back to the level of common sense--as a

ship in a storm struggles to right itself. I am here as I am to-day by

some agency that mystifies me,--invisible forces from without, or some

instinct from within. Yet as I look back I see no logical relation in

the process.

* * * * *

That night, half-awake, half-adream, four figures passed before me,

conjured up from the cauldron of my imagination, as the mystic sequence

which greeted Macbeth.

The First: A boy, with the eyes of faith, believing in the good of the

world, a scrubby, tousled little urchin, in and out of mischief, just

beginning to penetrate beyond the borders of fairyland, passionately

curious; a rich little mind exploring vast continents of treasured

knowledge; a youngster who had already dared climb the magic walls of

childhood and hesitated before the jump into the strange real world.

What was I then? All of creation was within my imagination; society

was expressed in three laws,--the rising bell, soap, and the Sunday

prohibitions. The first two I comprehended (in my male’s instinct for

order); the last I never did. What had happened to the world that

periodically, at the end of each week, a sudden hush should fall in

the household, that romping must cease and playthings be hidden away,

and the body encased in starched shirts and shining black suits, and

the young romping spirits should be led in leash to hard benches

and the pointing finger. Father and mother were majestic, Olympian

figures, never quite understood; authority was absolute, and the

world black or white. My first love, a young lady of twenty years,

was an angel stepping down out of the parted heavens, whose voice

thrilled to the secret caverns of my heart. She stopped but a week

at our home and I have never seen her since, yet in those short days

I fell so desperately in love with her--greatest and most radiant of

fairy princesses--that to this day I can feel my little heart stop as

over the bed-covers I saw her come to my bedside, all fragrance and

loveliness, to touch my eyelids with her lips. And then, they told me

that she was to be married; that she had gone and I would see her no

more. I remembered the child quivering under his first touch of sorrow,

poignant and overwhelming. That first knowledge of sorrow, the utter

loneliness, the incomprehension that such things could exist in the

simplicity of the world! There was no refuge but in dreams and for

months I lived for my dream,--for that moment when the candle wick

glowed and dropped into the darkness and the shimmering stars came

through the open window, and my dreams would begin anew, as out of the

peopled dark, ogres and kings’ sons, Napoleons and presidents, Hercules

and Ulysses, fairy godmothers and elves, and--always--the loveliest

princess in the world came forth to fetch me into the fantasy of the

future.

Sometimes now, thinking on that future, I wonder, should I have sons,

if any of them will be as real to me as that boy. I think not. In the

man, the first-born and the closest to his heart must ever be the boy

that was. I see now that it was that first imagined sorrow which led

me beyond the magic garden of childhood into the questioning of youth.

There were nights, moonlit nights and starry nights, when I crept to my

window and strove to pierce the riddle of the strange things above;

when I stood and wondered and shivered, a little mind striving to

penetrate the sky, pitting itself against Infinity. And, as I watched

this young self there in the still of the covered night, I wondered.

Now, I seldom dream or question: I have retreated behind my formulas.

But what became of all the brave little thoughts, the fancy, the rich

curiosity and the eagerness for first knowledge? Which is the true,

abiding self,--this, or the pebble fashioned by the grinding, restless

forces of Society?

* * * * *

Second Figure: A young man of twenty, outwardly disciplined, walking,

talking, dressing like ten thousand other well-groomed, mechanical

products of the educational factories; inwardly, a turbulent appetite

for life, a mind which had stopped functioning, an imagination buried,

but with every impulse and curiosity vibrantly awake. Never have I

been surer of myself, and never was I more worked upon by forces which

I did not understand; I, a high-strung young animal suddenly released

into the pastures of youth. Everything appealed to me; every broad

way and byway in the vast forest of life sent me galloping down it in

exploration. Each impulse, good or evil, was genuine and irresistible.

I adored one woman as a saint, blushed and stumbled in her presence,

trembled at the contact of her fingers and, in the full flush of this

puppy-love, could feel my blood surge at a brazen glance. I drank

too much, gambled outrageously: yet it was not from any desire for

ugliness, but from the sheer joy of wrestling with invisible outer

forces, in a strange belief that I, a privileged being, could affront

the gods of chance and bind them to my way. I dissipated a month’s

allowance in a day; fell into deep periods of religious speculation;

rebelled at dogma and constituted authority; rejected all that was old

and followed everything that was new. All this I did as hungrily as I

sat down at table, without knowing in the slightest why I did it. Yet

this is not quite true. Already, I had begun to be conscious of a dual

self, a self that acted and a self that watched. Often, I went madly

towards an infatuation which would have meant the end of all things,

knowing all the time the fatality of it, powerless to resist and saved

only by some trick of circumstance. The truth was that my blood ran too

rapidly in my veins, the delight in every sense was too imperious, the

joy of being alive too intoxicating.

* * * * *

Still, in this period when everything was fermenting, fructifying,

bubbling to the surface in me, my outlook was of the simplest. Black

was still black, and white, white. Women were good or bad,--and both

drew me to them. I broke the laws of society, but I believed in them,

fully determined at some calmer, wiser period of my life to maintain

and defend them. So, when I was most inconsistent, I had faith in

inconsistency. I repented with the same ardor with which I transgressed.

I walked down the avenue, and my imagination took fire at the brilliant

women in their speeding luxury. What did I feel? The need of exerting

the supremacy of my youth over their shallow, sparkling little souls.

I sat in a great Opera House and, before that insistent, imperious

parade of society, dreamed of some future date when I who was now

lost in the crowd would impose myself. Everything in me was force,

faith, and desire, and all these young impulses tugged at my soul for

the opportunity to express themselves. How confident, how wise, how

convinced I was, and--I knew nothing. For, mentally, it was a period of

arrested development, when I mistook hunger for strength, vanity for

power, longing for capacity.

We are all, I suppose, more or less cases of arrested development.

When a man ceases to inquire, to explore, and to wonder, when he is

convinced of his knowledge, when he reaches the point where all his

free and flexible opinions have settled into hardened convictions, at

that moment his development is stopped, even as a little child whose

mind cannot move beyond the A. B. C.

* * * * *

This was what I was in the days when all within me was but an appetite

for life. What shook my equanimity and violently freed me of my

self-complacency? The first contact with evil, the knowledge and the

mysterious reaction.

* * * * *

Third Figure: A man approaching thirty, perhaps too near to be seen

distinctly, and yet in such violent contrast that before its note of

worldly knowledge boyhood and youth fled from the contact. I saw a

man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned,

he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused

at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant

society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity:

steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong

nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that

rises to the surface and that in the old _pot-au-feu_ below are

the vital nourishments of the race. I had come eagerly into the

brilliant cosmopolitan society of Europe with enough money and proper

credentials, and I had come as how many young men of imagination and

fire before me, believing in pleasure as the goal of life, pleasure,

which I had seen in my ardent nature as in youth one sees and believes

in the painted beauties and the paste jewels behind footlights. I

recoiled, I grew accustomed to what I at first resented. I shrugged

my shoulders, and, in the end, I did as those I lived with did. In

the unconscious progression is the whole story. I became a _flâneur_

of society. I knew the comedies and tragedies of a ballroom as an old

collector on the _quais_ recognizes and smiles over the titles whose

stories he knows. I lived a life of crowded inconsequences. The days

and nights were consumed in doing--what to-day is a blank of years. But

how my world had narrowed! The limitless horizons and starry spaces

of childhood, even the mysterious depths of youth, had contracted

into confines so narrow that my daily run of life was more provincial

than that of a buried village. Why did I not go on in the paths of

worldly wisdom, with a cynical weighing of actual values? Why did I

not continue steadfast, as my logic showed me? The truth lay, perhaps,

in the heart of a child that we men can never quite kill. The first

impulse is the abiding impulse; if you would know the man, know the

child.

It was in vain I told myself that only the living was vital, and that

in a world of sceptics and pagans only the fools cling to compunctions.

I repeated to myself that the sum of all moralities is in the instinct

of the man to believe what he wants to believe. It brought me no

calm. I did wrong, saying to myself that it was not wrong, and yet

all the time I knew in my restlessness that it was wrong. Madame de

Tinquerville instilled into my veins this mental corruption and yet,

at the end, when I believed that I had accepted everything, a nausea

seized me and I flung this self violently aside. Then the mobilization,

and a new self.

* * * * *

Fourth Figure: I, myself,--if not the self of to-morrow, the self

of to-day: an exile. For I had been that all these long embittered

months,--an exile from all that life had been to me, a man grown

suddenly taciturn, who smoked his pipe, lying in a mud hole behind a

flap, and gazed up at the thin blue avenue of the trenches overhead;

smoked, obeyed, questioned not, and was content to have found a

meaning. Atavism, perhaps, the content to be just man again, following

man’s instinct to survive among the fittest. I knew life as though

I had been born to it again. Three times a day I thrilled with the

delight of eating; I knew the ecstasy of sleep after fatigue; I wept

at the loss of a comrade, and my whole heart rejoiced when in the

exhaustion after battle with my closing vision I felt the rough hands

of a convict drawing his coat over me with the tenderness of a woman.

The world had no perplexities for me. The mask was discarded. I felt

myself brute, Crusader, sinner, pagan and saint, and each mood was

genuine. I saw men in the frenzy of combat swept into moments of

unbelievable ferocity. I myself knew moments when there was nothing

human in me, when courage was but the panic for existence. And out of

the abnormal slaying self I would grope back into the man that reasoned

over his actions and shivered at the animal that had run wild. I knew

the pagan hour that comes so easily to those who have felt the breath

of passing destruction continuously at their side. In the whirlpool and

the whipping trenches I have seen my comrade at arms struck and strewn

into unrecognizable matter and have felt but one instinctive thought:

“I live--I still live!”

Yet, later, in a more reasoning mood, deliberately and calmly, I have

gone back as others went, into the certainty of destruction, to rescue

a wounded stranger. I have returned with the living, singing, greedy

of life,--a bed of hay paradise and a can of _Pinard_ the ecstasy of

forgetfulness. I have rebelled, hesitated, been caught with the cold

nausea of fear, thrilled at a word from a peasant boy kneeling and

crossing himself, and awakened to the call of leadership which was

mine by _noblesse oblige_, become suddenly and disdainfully impersonal

when responsibility had fallen to me and I could do no less than the

least. Other moments there were, when I walked, a lone sentry in the

night, among the sleeping and the dead, when a feeling of reverence

and awe possessed my soul at the slow revolving stars, and I wondered

at the futility of victors and vanquished under the things that change

not. I knew moments of intense intellectual clarity when my mind seemed

to take wing and lift me above the soiled reality of conflict into a

mystic sense of my own loneliness in the scheme of things. At such

moments, when only the questioning remained, I had a disdain of danger

and of the death which went unseen and whining in the night,--a disdain

that was absolute. Yet in the morning, cramped in a dugout, I heard

above me the great shells shatter and felt the cold sweat rise in my

back. After this can the other life be real? I wonder. Or will all this

pass into a dim incredible memory?

* * * * *

And so, through the long night, there on the hidden deck among those

who waited and feared, next to the woman at my side, awake, too, with

her memories, I saw my strange selves pass and wondered. Which was the

nearest kin to the David of that hour? What new figure would come out

of the future that was as impenetrable as the dark that wrapped me

about?

VI

I think I must have gone off into a half-sleep, for all at once my

eyes opened to gray and wavering shapes. The skeleton outline of

the creaking ship grew out of the fluid dawn, figures of sleeping

passengers rose out of the obscurity and across the rail glimmered the

white curl of the clearing sea. My first instinctive impulse was to the

woman at my side.

The veil had been thrown back; the long lashes lay on the brown cheek

across which clung a spray of dark hair. The front of the rough

Breton hood half concealed the clear rise of the forehead and soaring

eyebrows, the fine delicacy of the high-bridged nose, the full and

sensitive lips. One hand lay at her throat, a rosary entwined in her

fingers and the silver flash of a crucifix. I thought then that I

had never looked upon anything so gentle, so fragile, so pure. She

was so far removed from the things of this heavy world that in her

semi-recumbent position, I thought of some sculptured saint, asleep in

an olden monastery.

Her eyes opened, rested in mine a full moment, read my thoughts, and

dropped away. Instantly, she drew her veil, sat up, and averted her

head. Within me everything grew troubled and confused. I rose hastily

and went down the deck.

I can remember to this day the sudden timidity that overcame me always

in her presence, the eagerness to speak to her, and the hesitancy

whenever I found an excuse. In her, too, I see now, two impulses

fought, for at times, in her instinct to repel me, she was brusque

almost to the point of rudeness and her manner so determinedly

antagonistic that I grew diffident as a boy. What had become of the

man of the world? I, who prided myself on my knowledge of women, was

as awkward in her presence, as helpless and at loss as the veriest

schoolboy. I can remember that I had but one thought on awakening,--to

do her some service. Yet when I had returned from below-decks with a

thermos bottle of hot coffee I was utterly nonplussed for some pretext

to approach her.

I came hesitantly down the strewn deck. The sky was graying rapidly

now, as the dawn crept in chill and sickly. Astern, the low-huddled

funnels of our escort,--guardian of our night. Brinsmade and Magnus

had wakened and gone below. The lady with the child was sitting up,

rearranging her veil. A sudden inspiration came to me. I stopped and

made my offer.

“A drop of hot coffee, Madame?”

She took it, smiling and grateful, refusing a second cup. I breathed

more freely, for I felt I had removed all personal emphasis. I passed

on.

“Won’t you also, Mademoiselle, have a bit of coffee? It’s a long way to

breakfast.”

Yet, as I said this, I had a sudden weak feeling of intruding, and

I looked away from her for fear she would read beneath the studied

impersonality of my tone. Behind the veil, I felt a moment of

hesitation.

“If you will hold the bottle, I will get some clean glasses.”

When I returned, I brought a box of crackers, taking the precaution

to offer them along the way. This action evidently disarmed her

prejudices, for she had drawn her veil when I came to her chair. I

poured a full glass.

“But you, Monsieur?”

“Oh, I’ve had my cup, below. Take it--you need it. I’m afraid you had a

bad night.”

She took the glass but made no answer. When I referred to the night,

her gray-eyed glance rose to my face, rested a furtive moment in

thoughtful inquiry, and retreated; but the moment was not one of

embarrassment or hesitation, but rather of a settled attitude of

aloofness.

“There is just a little more.”

“Some one else, then.”

I poured out what remained and handed it to her, pressing her

acceptance.

“Thank you--no more.”

She drew on her glove, lowered her veil, and sank back once more.

Feeling a certain irritation that in this first clash of authority she

should have resisted, I sat down.

“To-morrow morning I’ll be better provided.”

“To-morrow? We spend another night on deck?” she said, in surprise.

“That’s orders. But you don’t obey orders,” I said, glancing at the

deck. “Orders are to bring your life belt, and you’ve not done it.”

“No--I didn’t think of it.”

“You are not afraid?”

“Afraid? Of that?” she said slowly. She shook her head and I wondered

at the look behind her veil.

The tone in which it was said, coupled with the memory of that meeting

on the upper deck, thrilled me. I sought to make her talk, to establish

a natural acquaintance, through no forward curiosity but out of a

genuine sympathy. Yet I was so keenly aware of the bar which her

traditions interposed that I waited a long moment before I had courage

to say:

“Mademoiselle, I hope you will forgive my presumption of last night.”

“Presumption?”

“Yes, it was that. I hope you did not misunderstand my action.”

She turned.

“I did not misunderstand that, no,” she said reluctantly, for I was

forcing her into a conversation against her will, “and yet, why should

you have done it?”

“Mademoiselle,” I said, surprised at the quickening of my pulses, “I

have done what little I could to help, because I love your people. I

have lived among sorrow and terror. Am I not allowed to understand, and

try to help, just--because it is one of my own kind?”

She did not reply at once. I felt that her eyes were on me.

“You Americans have kind hearts, Monsieur, and I thank you again.”

To this day I can remember the thrill of pleasure that came to me with

the first softening of her voice, that first note which told me that in

her eyes I was no longer just one of the passing crowd.

“I know how a young girl is brought up in France,” I began hurriedly--

“We are no young girls now, Monsieur. There are only women in France.”

The voice was back into the measured, impersonal tone.

I looked at her, amazed, started to speak and stopped. I understood

that I should gain nothing by forcing a conversation, and though every

instinct urged me to remain near her, I rose to withdraw.

“May I present myself, Mademoiselle, since we are to be companions for

a while? I am Mr. David Littledale.”

She bowed in acknowledgment but made no answer, and I went down the

deck with a stirring uneasiness at the awkwardness which it seemed to

me I had displayed in every word and action. Later in the day I found a

card on her chair. The name was like herself, a veil thrown up against

my curiosity.

“Mademoiselle Renée Duvernoy.”

VII

An ocean steamer is a great university of the world. Infinity of sea

and sky bring an incredulity of the defined land, where strange human

beings move under precise conventions to the tyranny of what is or is

not done. For me the comprehensible world was but this speck of wood,

swinging between water and sky. The salt democracy of the sea and

the common sense of danger run quickened our senses and let down the

barriers of our Anglo-Saxon restraint.

Yet of all those who crowded the decks the one woman who interested me

most defied all my attempts at friendship. Beyond the unconventionality

of our first meetings on the dock and by the upper rail I had been

unable to progress. Indeed, all her attitude indicated a studied

resolve to retreat from the memory of that accidental intimacy. Her

greeting each morning was gracious. She allowed me to arrange her

pillows and wrap her solicitously in her steamer rugs.

“Monsieur, I thank you; you are very kind.”

She said it gravely, with a slight acknowledgment of her head, but her

tone remained impersonal and she conveyed to me, without possibility of

misunderstanding, that her privacy was to be respected, and it was not

until I had gone off for a tramp of the decks or had turned into the

constant discussion which ran on between Magnus and Brinsmade that she

drew her veil and picked up her book. The book was but a pretext. For

hours she held it before her without the turning of a page.

At times, I pretended to go off into long siestas, studying her

furtively in short examinations. For despite every precaution, if my

glance remained on her too long, she became aware of it and, if I

persisted, she retired behind her veil.

This very reserve stirred my curiosity. My imagination was drawn to the

mystery I divined of some inner conflict beneath the precise formality

of her outer manner. Her slightest action became to me the important

record of my day. I studied her and wondered. There were hollows in

her cheek that should not have gone with her years. Often in the warm,

impulsive lips I detected the set droop of long fatigue, while about

the eyes, which remained long moments lost in the healing distance, I

felt the still quivering lines of remembered pain. She seemed so out

of place that, with the memory of my own exile, I felt intuitively the

struggle of a soul brutally torn from its protecting affections and

forced by the tragic hazards of war to struggle for readjustment and

the right to go on living. I felt this and yet I could not intrude.

About her, in everything she did, in every word she uttered, was an

authority I could not but respect.

Her day was measured in an unvarying routine. She came from breakfast,

walked alone for an hour, took to her chair and read, with long periods

of abstracted contemplation, until a glance at her watch apprised her

of the time for another turn of the deck.

When she walked, it was without movement of the hips or shoulders, her

elbows to her sides, with a curious erect and measured grace, as our

grandmothers used to walk,--when our grandmothers were straight and

slender. Her step was light and leisurely, without purpose. She paused

often, leaning against the rail, to gaze into the western distances,

before resuming her pensive strolling. In the afternoon, particularly

at the stealing in of the dusk, I saw her turn to her prayer-book. Then

she became so absorbed that she forgot my presence completely, lifted

into regions where I could not follow.

The method, the dryness, the precision of this routine would have

convinced me were it not for a memory,--the cry of the woman in her

loneliness on the upper deck. With that memory in mind, I felt from the

first the struggle and the conflict,--two natures contending within

her; or rather that, with some determined resolve before her, as a

novice about to renounce the world, she was striving to impose upon

herself a discipline, mental and moral, which was not in the ardent and

impulsive rebellion of her temperament.

The short word of greeting, the punctilious farewell at night, in a

manner grave, restrained, and without a smile, were all so carefully

adjusted to the most obvious civilities that I despaired of ever

penetrating her reserve. Yet when the opportunity came it came as

naturally as it was unexpected.

* * * * *

Among the few children was a boy of five or six who enjoyed great

popularity among the passengers. The child, attracted to Mademoiselle

Duvernoy by childhood’s instinct to those who have borne pain, passed

and repassed a dozen times a day before her chair, seeking by every

artifice to catch her eye.

The fourth morning out, when we were stretched languidly in our steamer

chairs, Master Jack, enveloped in leggings, sweater and muffler,

wabbled down like a rolling ball of cotton and, after the usual

preliminary skirmishes, rallying his courage, stopped directly between

our chairs and said timidly:

“How do?”

The piping voice startled her from her mechanical contemplation. She

dropped her book and her body seemed to shrink back.

“I talk to you a little while--yes?”

The smile of the young suppliant would have won over a jury, yet to my

surprise she did not unbend and the greeting was forced and perfunctory.

“Good-morning.”

Determined, the youngster sidled up and stood gazing in adoration.

“Why you wear that ugly veil all the time?”

As he asked the question, the childish fingers fastened and turned

about her wrist, while the young eyes grew big with sympathy. I saw

her arm draw hastily back from the contact. Then, after a moment, as

though obeying a superior determination, it came forward slowly and

reluctantly.

“The veil is not ugly.”

The tone, the action, the undefined look with which she stared at him,

impressed the child. A serious expression came over his face,--a look

of trying to understand something beyond his ken.

“Is it because you are so very sad?” he said softly.

I felt her panic before the child’s innocent directness and that in her

helplessness she turned to me.

“Come here, Jack the Giant Killer,” I said, catching him up and

swinging him through the air to plant him firmly on my lap. “How old

are you? Where are you going? What makes the steam white, the water

wet, and why does the wind sing? Do you know all that?”

“Why is the water wet?” said the youngster.

“You don’t know? Goodness--neither do I!”

The child, with his eyes still on Mademoiselle Duvernoy, extended a

pudgy forefinger.

“Is she your sister?”

“No, young man: and Mademoiselle Duvernoy is not my daughter, nor my

cousin, aunt or wife,” I said hastily, with a fear of coming questions.

“And if you will promise, solemnly promise, not to ask another

question, I’ll tell you the story of ‘Puss-in-Boots’.”

“I know ‘Puss-in-Boots’!”

“Well, ‘Cinderella and the Glass Slipper’.”

“I know ‘Cinderella’.”

“Well, what don’t you know?”

“I like the story of the Bears,” said the youngster decidedly.

“Humph! Now, that is funny,” I said, to gain time, for my memory was

not of the clearest. To save the situation, I decided to improvise.

“That is funny, because,--do you know, that reminds me of myself and

my brothers. What do you think they called us? ‘Big Dale, Little Dale,

Weeny Dale, and No Dale at All’!”

“You look like a bear,” said the youngster gravely.

“So they say. Well, once upon a time there was a little girl,--a very

little girl, with the most wonderful golden hair in the world. She was

called--”

“Snow-White!”

“Not at all. Golden-Locks. Well, one day, Golden-Locks went out walking

in the woods, and she saw the most wonderful butterfly in the world,

with diamonds glittering on its wings. She went on and on, following

the diamond butterfly, until all at once she came to a little river

that was flowing milk; but that wasn’t the strangest thing--”

“No?” said Master Jack, with round eyes.

“No. On the opposite side was a house,--all made of gingerbread; but

that wasn’t the strangest thing.”

“No?”

“No. She went inside, and there, on the table, were five white plates.”

But here Master Jack sat up in protest.

“How could there be five plates, when there is only three Bears?”

“Three? Who said there were only three Bears? There were five Bears in

the story.”

“Three!”

“Five. The story of the Five Bears. Don’t I know?”

“Wasn’t there only three Bears?” said Master Jack, who had caught the

now amused glance of Mademoiselle Duvernoy.

“Three--yes.”

“There--you see!” exclaimed the youngster. “And--and wasn’t she called

Snow-White?”

“She was.”

“There!”

“Then they’re not the same Bears,” said I, in pretended wrath.

“My Bears are American Bears. There was Father Growler and Mother

Gruff--that makes two--and Grumble Bear and Guzzle Bear--and that makes

four--and then there was Tinkle Bear--”

“That makes five!”

“I resign,” I said, with tremendous dignity. “Tell it your own way.”

But instead of protests and capitulation, the critic stood to his

colors.

“You don’t tell it at all the right way,” said the prejudiced public in

the person of Master Jack. “You put in things that don’t belong. You

tell it?” he said, suddenly turning to Mademoiselle Duvernoy, who had

been smiling at my perplexity.

“Oh, but Mr. Littledale tells it very well.”

“You tell it yourself, and I’ll correct you,” I said, laughing.

The issue was settled by Master Jack who, with a sudden wriggle,

transferred himself to the other chair. I rose to reclaim the truant,

who had snuggled up to her shoulder, but she shook her head.

“No, no, he can stay.”

Her arms closed about the fluffy rascal, and she began.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Snow-White, who lived

with her father, a wood-chopper, in the woods--”