I
The rest is a blur. Clear and definite as is every moment from my
first meeting with Bernoline to the last faint flutter of her white
hand, the rest of the day is confused. There are hours which are lost,
during which I do not know what I did or where I wandered. The great
city roared about me. I walked interminable miles along dark, echoing
side streets and into sudden flaming thoroughfares, where rapid crowds
descended upon me like gusts of wind. I can remember the tap-tap of my
cane along some stony solitude, and again standing at Times Square, in
a wilderness of lights, roared at, amid the clanging and the honking of
traffic; crowded, jostled, buffeted in the polygot stream,--a stranger
in the land of his fathers.
Those crowds--those hostile, unintelligible crowds, so triumphantly
successful--shall I ever forget them! I had known the monastic
multitudes of Paris, slow-moving, reticent, respectful of the
black-garbed mourners, compassionate and grim, hiding neither their
sorrows nor their sympathy. I had known them and felt at home in them.
But this other thing; this strident influx of strange tongues, this
pagan riot, this shrill pursuit of pleasure, when all the world was
hushed and apprehensive! What did they understand? What could they be
made to understand? I stood, bewildered--I who had come for my American
heritage--more alone, more distant than when in the long days of
convalescence the dread feeling of homesickness gripped my heart.
If this were America, it was the America that Peter Magnus saw,
polygot, cosmopolitan, international, an America that might be roaring
on to some greater world-significance, but an America that had left me
behind.
* * * * *
My room was on the eighteenth floor of a great hotel flung above the
electric city. Below me swam the theatric night, the fluid effulgence
of Broadway, the piping thrum of automobiles, the revelry ascending
from flaring restaurants, carried upward into hanging gardens floating
on the night,--nervous, shifting sheets of electric transparencies,
fantastic, ingenious, unescapable, a million splendors to exalt a
corset or a soap! What a vast, illuminated billboard! Everything
oppressed me, the staggering scale of things, the importance of
unimportant things, this capture of the night by the materialism of the
day. I watched it, as one stands before the unleashed torrents of the
sea and sky, overwhelmed with my own shrunk significance.
In the morning my first movement was to my window. The city of the
night was fled. Below me lay a shanty civilization. The fairy splendor,
the figment of the night had dissolved with the dawn. Broadway was but
a huddled group of puny shanties, with skeleton trickeries exposed in
the pitiless light of the day; ugly, visible, naked,--an adventuress
stealing home at dawn, rouged, powdered and wan, and the pretentious
jewels of the night showing themselves to be paste. The whole was stale
as a ballroom when the laughter is fled. The crowded stars were empty
sockets; the flaming palaces, scaffolding.
Homesickness? Yes, even in Picardy, even in the wet weariness of the
trenches, in the gray rain that soaked into my soul, I had never felt
such utter loneliness as here, in the nausea of the revealing dawn.
I came out of the city and set my face sternly to the task of
readjustment. I would not be true to my determination to set down
without disguise or sentimentalization the history of my shifting
moods, actions and reactions, emotions and resolves, if I didn’t write
this down. No sooner had I entered the train, pulled my cap over my
eyes and sunk back in my corner, than I fell into a mood of extreme
weakness. As the instinct to live is stronger in the body, no matter
what the will to die, so I believe that in the thinking man the will to
continue as a free agent is an instinct deeper than our perceptions.
Everything in me rebelled at the sudden subjection which a blind
destiny had forced upon me. Something in me cried out imperiously:
“Forget! You must forget!”
And this is the hideous thing: the words of the other woman, the words
of Letty, were the ones that sounded in my ears:
“Life is a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”
To close the door and never to return! If it were possible!
* * * * *
I said to myself, incredulously, that it was not possible that in ten
days I had come to a final and irrevocable love; that the romance and
the glamor were for much, that the dramatic quality of the lone woman
venturing into the wilderness of men, the mystery which enveloped her,
had caught my sympathy. I did not attempt, it is true, to deceive
myself into the belief that I did not love her, but I tried to convince
myself that I could and must forget her.
Yet, even as rebelling against the cruelty of such destiny, I argued
thus, I found myself comparing the women about me, the women there in
the car, the women in the crowds of New York, the women of the past I
had known, to the Bernoline I loved,--and wondering where again in the
empty world I would meet with another such. Suddenly, ahead of me in
the far end of the car, a silhouette, the turn of the neck, a carriage
of the head, reminded me so vividly of her that I sat bolt upright,
staring, and so acute was the sense of her presence that though I knew
it to be the wildest trick of fancy, I could not rest until I had risen
and reassured myself. I returned and sank back heavily in my corner, no
longer with strength or will to struggle against my fate.
The visible things receded, the unreal present dissolved. I abandoned
myself to the unforgettable past. I lived again the hours since our
meeting. I saw her, I heard her, I talked with her. I was back on the
high forward deck, with the cliffs of New York growing into the night.
I argued against her decision; I pleaded for us both. I said the things
I should have said, as I reconstructed the inexorable past, until,
struck by my own absurdity, I regained some measure of self-control.
After all, what remains? What can remain of this, the purest and
deepest seeking of my life? I have dreamed a beautiful dream! The rest
is a waking to the pain of reality.
Yet is it possible, I wonder, that for this ten days’ dreaming the
years of my life must pay the reckoning?
II
At South Norwalk I descended and took the train for Littledale. Hardly
had I turned up the platform before I was among friends, welcomed
with incredulous shouts: Burke, the conductor, and Lannigan, of the
express, smothering me with rapturous greetings. I rode back in the
baggage car, the center of an admiring group. The old oil lamps still
flickered overhead, undisturbed in their appointed task of gathering
in the cobwebs, and for a while I forgot my loneliness in the warm
pleasure of being back among my own kind. Heaven be thanked, nothing
had changed! The baggage car still dates from 1870, wheezing and
bumping over the narrow-gauge road as the old familiar figures gather
about the stove in the solemnity of country-store conclave.
I had not thought to have such a thrill, yet a lump was in my throat
when at the station old man Carpenter came hobbling up and a group
of youngsters set up a cheer. It was no longer New York: it was my
America, and I belonged to it.
I refused a trap and set out on foot, after cautioning them against
telephoning my arrival. Hardly five years were gone, yet every detail
of the green and white village was so definite in my memory that I
noted with an intolerant resentment the new porch at Hamill’s and the
glass front which had arrived at Sherwood’s corner grocery. All my
boyhood was about me as I hurried on under the vaulted elms: Parson
Miller’s home, where Ben and I had strung a tick-tack; the green
picket fence where the fox terrier came fearfully out when we rattled
our sticks; the side street where I had fought M’Ginnis; the hideous
soldiers’ monument, where the snowball fights raged; the stone bridge
to which I used to steal after supper to meet Jenny. The past lay at
my side,--tranquil, unchanging, and undisturbed by the currents that
whirled and struggled three thousand miles away, and in that moment I,
too, felt a leaping joy in my heart to be in this America which had
stood still in the breathless rush of things.
The lights were in the windows of the great hall as I turned the
postern and came up the deep well of the evergreens, towards the low,
rambling, red house that sat at the feet of the three drooping elms. I
came slowly across the white hoar frost which coated the lawn, and the
stiff gravel crackled as I stood under the _porte-cochère_, undecided,
fearful of what I should find, steeling myself against the shock of
disillusionment, and in my heart the cold repugnance of that one
dreaded confrontation,--Letty, at the side of Ben. Yet, despite doubt
and shrinking, I think that in my heart the deepest sentiment was a
weak gladness to leave all the world behind and come back, as a tired
boy comes back, into that sheltered warmth which is called home.
As I debated, with a sudden scurry and barking defiance, the dogs
came tumbling over each other,--and the next moment old Dan was in
my arms, while the two younger dogs, accepting me on faith, set up a
furious chatter. Then, a rush of feet across the hall, the door flung
open, and something soft and fluttering leaped to my neck;--home was
a reality and Molly was crying my name! It was no longer the laughing
tomboy of the bobbed hair and short skirts, but a woman whose eyes
were on a level with mine. I took her by the shoulders and held her
from me fiercely, and then caught her to me once more with a great
thankfulness, for the eyes were straight and clear and the heart was
the heart of my little sister.
My mother ran out, and it gave me a great thrill to see her face, for
we had always stood in awe of her,--of her austerity, her brilliance
and her measured mentality. To us she had always been one on whose
public services we children should never intrude. I think she must have
pictured me as stricken or mutilated, for I shall never forget the
first incredulous look on her face as she saw me, and then--the burst
of tears. In all my life, in stress and disaster, I never remember to
have seen her show such emotion.
“Be careful, with the Governor,” Molly whispered. “Don’t seem
surprised. He’s in there.”
He was in the dusky library, sunk in a great leather chair, a
drop-light at his side, and I noticed at once how thin and loose was
the hand that lay on the magazine.
“Hello, Governor,” I said. “Dropped in to see you.”
He put out his hand and felt of me. He was gray, and the red blood
had run from his face and left feeble veins under the drawn skin. The
watery eyes came unsteadily up to mine and passed on to the faces of my
mother and Molly, in a silent, terrifying interrogation. I guessed what
was in his mind, even before he said,--
“Then, it’s closer than I thought.”
The mater stood it without flinching, but Molly swayed and went
suddenly out of the room.
“Not much, Governor,” I said, in bluff cheerfulness. “We’re a tough
lot. They tried hard to get me, but they couldn’t. Don’t get any such
nonsense in your head. I came home because the doctors insisted upon my
being fattened up before they’d let me back. Two months’ furlough.”
His fingers had closed over my wrist and, still holding it, he motioned
me to be seated.
“Glad you’re here, Davy.”
“And lots to tell you, Governor. I’ve good news for you.”
“Alan?”
Now, the Governor had never been as quick as that, and I ascribe it to
the uncanny prescience which comes to the very sick.
“Yes--Alan.” I drew out the cross from my pocket and laid it before
him.
“Governor, you don’t need to be ashamed of Alan. He sent that to you,
and told me to tell you how he’d won it.”
He looked up quickly at the mater, and his lip trembled so that we
hurriedly changed the subject. I left him presently, with a promise to
return, and went out into the hall, where Molly’s hand slid into mine.
“Aunt Janie?”
“Upstairs.”
“You expected me?”
“Mr. Brinsmade telephoned.”
“Who’s here?” I said suddenly. “Ben?”
“No. They’re coming at the end of the week.”
This news took a sudden dread from my heart. For that night, the night
of my home-coming, I would not have to face that!
* * * * *
The very old change little. Aunt Janie was the same fairy godmother
that I remember as a mischievous youngster: tall, thin, a little
stooped, soft-voiced, gentle, living in a more measured age, aloof
from the momentum of the present. Strange, silent, devoted soul:
she had come into the home, asking of life only the opportunity of
serving others! She had brought us up, run the house, planted the
trees which had grown to stature and let the rest of the world pass
her by, faithful to the one and only love of her life, the memory of
the Captain of the --th Massachusetts who had died at Antietam. His
sword hangs above the fireplace and his portrait is in the locket at
her throat. Each night, after the rest of the house has retired, she
descends and closes the doors, examines the windows, ushers the dogs
into the back hall, and extinguishes the lights. Nothing has ever been
able to dissuade her from this last responsibility. We argued with
her, we implored her, and, finally, we came to accept with a feeling
of restful gratitude the sound of her slippered step up the stairs,
ushering in the night.
I am always to her about twelve years old and, I think, her favorite.
“I have prayed for you every night, Davy,” she said, when I put my arm
around her. “_You’ve_ come back.”
Possibly she had been dreaming by the fire of the other, who had not
returned. I sat there, trying to answer her questions and finding it
difficult. It is not easy to talk about the war. The point of view is
so different. All that I have lived has been so inevitable, so part of
the instincts of the man who fights, that I find it hard to comprehend
the curiosity of those who look on it from the outside. To me still it
is this other life that is incomprehensible and chaotic, and profoundly
disturbing. When men must fight, it is better to forget.--With all the
home memories thronging about me, sitting there with Aunt Janie’s hand
in mine, I was thinking but one thing.
“In two months I shall return to it--the grim gamble--where those who
stake their lives must lose in the end inevitably,--as all gamblers do.”
III
The next night Molly and I drove over to the Brinsmades’. Anne had
been insistently in my thoughts all day. All my revolt from the dead
weight of emptiness in life was instinctively towards her. Yet I can
hardly explain to myself now the strangeness of my conduct, once in her
presence, nor the motive that prompted me deliberately to wound her,
as though I were seeking once for all to reject her from my life. Was
it some savage instinct of honesty towards her, or a strange unhuman
bitterness that entered my soul,--a resentment for the thing offered
against the thing denied? I do not know. I cannot yet see clearly.
Yet I do know that I came there eagerly, with a great need of the
affection of my old playmate. For what Bernoline had waked in me, the
discovery of the harmonious companionship of a true woman, had left
me with a new feeling of dependence. Perhaps, also, in the years of
absence, I had idealized my very human little friend.
* * * * *
I do not know if such contradictory impulses are true to others or
only to me. I imagine that few persons would understand me. Yet it is
true that in the desolate loneliness against which I was struggling, I
longed to find in some one, some one known and kind, some measure of
that deep womanhood of the Bernoline who had gone.
* * * * *
When we arrived the dance was in full swing. I stood staring, unable
to adjust myself to the carnival note. For months I had not looked on
such a scene. For months I had forgotten the existence of this world,
where color fired the imagination and music awoke disturbing needs of
pleasure. Anne hurried forward, we shook hands, and--a sudden shyness
came between us. Others crowded up, an old friend or two, chance
acquaintances; an indiscriminate, curious crowd that, to my annoyance,
insisted on treating me as a hero. I resented it all. The men offended
me. I forgot I had once been like them. How unrelated to actualities
they were, these men, mostly of my generation, of the generation
of wasted opportunities, well-set-up, pleasing, clean-cut, but so
untested, so devoid of the stamp of leadership. What could they know of
the realities that were gathering on the horizon? The sobered France
of Bernoline lay outside. Light and shadow, I thought. Half the world
dancing, while the other half staggers through the night!
Then I thought of the leaping call to duty which, in the coming day,
would startle them in the midst of their playtime. And, knowing what I
know, the irony of it all stood out. How little they could divine the
future or what the immutable, slow-moving course of little things could
mean to each.
“My generation is the tragic generation,” De Saint Omer had often
said to me. Would this, too, be our tragic generation,--a generation
brought up only to play, to enjoy life gluttonously, to pursue pleasure
riotously--abruptly halted in the full of the revelry and summoned to
face the recurring test of the ages?
* * * * *
I dare say the mood was morbid and my own mental condition was
accountable for much in it. Yet there was cause for irritation. My
ears were filled with the chatter of silliness. I was paraded for the
curiosity of empty-headed girls, outrageously décolleté and bejeweled.
Had I been afraid? Wouldn’t I please tell them about the atrocities?
Had I really killed a man? What did it feel like? What sort of uniform
did I wear? Was it attractive?
One disappointed young lady exclaimed:
“Oh, dear! Then you’re not an aviator. I’m just crazy to have one of
those dinky little caps!”
* * * * *
Molly, who divined my irritation, saved the situation by drawing me
away into the library, where I shook hands with Mr. Brinsmade, and
presently, ashamed of my too evident ill-humor, I returned to the
ballroom.
I was a little hurt, too, that Anne had not made more of my coming. I
remembered her diffidence, her quick yielding to others who pressed
around her, and I asked myself moodily the reason for this attitude.
Was it the memory of old days, of certain things half expressed in her
letters? Had her father spoken to her as he had to me? Did she expect
that I would assume any rights over her? This last thought increased my
irritation. I stood at the door of the conservatory, watching her as
she danced.
It was not the Anne that I remembered. There was a finished charm about
all she did, a grace of conscious assurance, a sure sense of her own
value, that for some reason offended me. She was no longer an impulsive
girl, but a brilliant and confident woman. From the tumult of her
golden hair to the decolleté of her black jet gown, that revealed too
boldly the lithe and graceful lines of her body; in the ready smile of
attention, to the eyes which had the fevered sense of pleasure, she was
one of them,--of a vapid, inconsequential society which, that night,
offended every instinct in me.
“And the worst is, she feeds upon it,” I said to myself gloomily.
* * * * *
When the dance ended, she came directly to me, smiling and confident.
I was quite at a loss to account for the sudden antagonism which came
over me.
“I’ve saved this dance: it’s yours, Davy. If you’ll ask me?”
“I’ve forgotten how,” I said shortly, and with very bad grace.
“Besides, after all this while, we might have something to say to each
other.”
Now, this was not only ill-humored, but unjustified. She looked at
me quickly and then, with a glance down the conservatory: “There’s a
corner. Let’s sit it out, then?”
A little remorseful, I gave her my arm, saying:
“First I want to thank you for your letters. They meant a lot.”
She did not answer, suddenly serious, wondering, perhaps, at my mood.
When we had come to our corner she turned and faced me.
“You have changed, Davy.”
“And I don’t think I should have known you.” She looked at me so
quickly that I added, “You see--I am dazzled.”
“You do not approve?”
The truth is that I did not quite approve, and her question threw me
off my guard. She must have read in my eyes, for such a hurt look came
to the corners of her lips that I repeated hastily:
“My dear Anne, I am dazzled. Just think; I have come out of a gray
world, and I am still blinking with astonishment. I can’t quite get
used to it. You women are different from the women over there--more
feminine, perhaps--but you represent something I had forgotten. Don’t
pay any attention to me. I’m an old bear who comes to you, grumbling,
out of the wet and the mud.”
“I see,” she said, and then, “but I do pay attention to what you say,
so please be frank, as you always were, Davy.”
“I don’t think you would understand,” I began and then, struck by
the absurdity of it, I broke into a laugh. “After all, it isn’t the
slightest business of mine.”
“Am I any different from the rest?”
I looked into the dancing crowd.
“No, of course not.”
“Well--then?”
“Anne, you will not understand in the least; you probably will be
offended, but, since you ask, I will tell you.”
But there I stopped.
“So, you’re not going to tell me?”
“No. Besides, it is a question of a point of view.”
“I wonder what you really think of me, Davy?” she said, puzzled. “Is it
such a very bad opinion?”
“It is not your fault. It is the whole system,” I blurted out, led
on by my growing irritation; the feeling, perhaps, of the quality of
girlhood that should be there and was now gone; the eyes that had seen
too much, the ears that had heard too much, the woman who knew too well
her worth in the eyes of men. Perhaps it was because I needed to see
her differently that I felt so strongly. “It’s you who are defrauded.
There are bigger things in our women than just the pursuit of pleasure.
However,” I broke off, with a sudden laugh, “I am just as absurd to be
talking to you like this!”
“I wanted to go over there and nurse,” she said, looking down.
“Heavens, don’t you think I’m tired of this sort of life!”
“I wonder just how sincere that is,” I said, watching her with
amusement. “Service, or--adventure?”
She sat up, suddenly frowning.
“You will go back?”
“Of course.”
Suddenly a recollection smote me.
“My dear Anne, don’t mind me to-night. I dare say I’m unjust, but
I’m living in another world, and this shocks me--the incomprehension
of it all! Are these really men and women, and do they think war is
a vaudeville show? Yes, I am out of temper; but if you’d heard the
questions I’ve been asked! I beg your pardon. You were very good to
write me all the time: it meant a lot, too.”
She looked up, so happily, that I began to reproach myself for my
boorishness.
“What is it you don’t like in me?”
“I should like to see you--you and Molly--in the blue and white of the
Red Cross, with big square hob-nailed boots, splashing around in the
mud and rain, with smirches on your dainty noses!”
I had hurt her, despite my assumed levity, and I knew it. Some one
came up to claim a dance, and she rose quickly, both of us glad of
the interruption. The rest of the evening I spent with Mr. Brinsmade,
discussing politics. Now that I write it, I am sorry that I acted as I
did. Yet I am at a loss to know why.
IV
I have seen Letty. I had steeled myself against the meeting, with a
cold, panicky dread. Yet, when the actual test came, I was amazed at
my self-possession. The inevitable thing is, after all, the easiest
thing to do. It was so, I remember, with my first test in battle, the
question of courage, which had so tortured my imagination, clarified
itself with the first command. I answered it, as others did, because, I
think, there was no choice.
So, the moment that the crisis arose, I knew it would have to be gone
through,--that I would have to meet her eyes and his without a false
movement. It had to be done, and I did it, as calmly and as naturally
as though I had lied all my life. And yet, there was one awful moment
for me,--and for her, too.
They had motored over for luncheon and I knew that they would arrive
about one o’clock. I debated and made a dozen decisions, changing them
immediately. I would wait until all the company was assembled and meet
them in the confusion of the crowd. I even contemplated a morning
canter, timing my ride so as to meet them on my return, and obtain some
clue of the exact situation in the advantage of the hasty informality.
For I felt a cold dread of the test. What had she told him? Was I to
act as a chance acquaintance, or as an old friend? If I pretended
ignorance, my attitude might rouse his suspicions immediately. Yet if I
called her by her first name and showed the knowledge of an intimate, I
might precipitate a dangerous situation. I must take my cue from her,
holding myself alertly on my guard.
At the last moment, at the sound of their entering the driveway, I did
the thing I had not even considered. I went out on the porch and stood
forth openly to greet them, curiously calm and ready for any turn, now
that it was a question of danger. Yet I loathed the dissimulation I
could not escape. The next instants seemed leaden. The car drove up.
I looked at Ben, steadily, controlling my glance. Fortunately, he was
nearest to me.
“Hello, there, old fellow!”
“Hello, Ben,” I said, in my heart a great thankfulness.
“_Bon jour, Monsieur_, my brother-in-law; you have not forgotten me?”
I looked. I had to look. Letty’s shadowy eyes--calm, even a trifle
amused--were on me, and no more trace of emotion than was in her voice.
“The idea! But I did not expect to meet you again like this,” I heard
myself saying, with all the banality of an accomplished society fop.
Had there been a look of fear or distress in her eyes I might have
faltered, but the self-possession roused my anger and that carried me
through. I took the gloved hand (thank heaven it was gloved) and forced
some sort of a smile to my face. Fortunately the others ran out, and
the first test was over.
Luncheon ended, after coffee in the conservatory, Ben said:
“Davy, let’s take a tramp around the duck pond. There are some things I
want to talk over with you.”
I rose and I know that my heart leaped. I saw Letty’s little fingers
work slowly up the arms of her chair and her shoulders stiffen. That
was all; but I, who knew Letty, knew what terror was beneath.
We bundled up and went out over the hard ground, and, as we turned the
conservatory, I saw that Letty had taken up a position by the window. I
did not dare look at her, for my own heart within me stood still, while
I waited his first words. Everything required me to make some reference
to his wife, and yet I could not do it. My tongue refused to move.
“The mater does not like my marriage, Davy,” he said finally, after he
had waited for me to begin the conversation. “Oh, it’s nothing open;
she’s too loyal for that, you know; but of course, their worlds are
absolutely different. Still, I feel it, and I know that Letty feels it.”
“Yes, I suppose that would be so,” I said, forced to answer.
Again, he seemed to wait for something I should say and when I remained
silent, he dropped into a silence, too. Presently, he began to whistle
to himself, and so we came to the duck pond. The cabin we had built as
children still stood, sagging and covered with moss.
“I can’t get Rossie out of my mind,” I said suddenly. “Remember the day
he stepped into the hornet’s nest and had to dive into the pond?”
We stood on the rustic bridge, leaning over the rail, the white, solemn
ducks waddling below us.
“Davy, will you answer me a direct question?”
I felt the moment approaching.
“Fire away.”
“Did you ever write back anything against Letty to the family?”
“What!”
He repeated the question, while for me the tension relaxed. Still, this
might be only a preliminary.
“Ben, I have never written a word home mentioning your wife one way or
the other.”
“You knew her well in Paris, didn’t you?”
“We were in the same crowd, yes.”
“Weren’t you a little bit in love with her at one time?”
“Frankly, yes; we all were.”
I had given my answers readily, for each question I had foreseen.
“Do you know, Davy,” he said, looking me in the face, “that I am
beginning to think that you, too, do not approve.”
“That’s a hard question to answer, but since you’ve put it,--here goes.
There’s been something closer between us, Ben, than other brothers.
I think I would make any sacrifice for you and your happiness. I’m
not thinking of Letty; I’m thinking of you. I know her world and I
know yours. Her world is a world that takes everything lightly and is
not bruised by disillusionments. You are different. If you should be
unhappy, it would break you.”
“You don’t know her as I know her,” he broke in.
“No--of course not.” For a moment the hideous irony of it escaped me.
Had it been any other man, I would have been willing to convince myself
that Letty, like a thousand other women of her class, was capable, once
her love awakened, of absolute loyalty and devotion. But did she really
love him, beyond a caprice of the emotions? That was what I did not
know.
“Ben, you know that I am always loyal, no matter what happens. If it
were a question of your good, old fellow, I would give my right arm.”
I held out my hand, and waited. If he could not bring himself to take
it--but he did--though after some hesitation! The first test, thank
God, was over. He could not have suspected and done that!
* * * * *
What had we said to each other? What could I have said differently?
I was caught in the iron grip of circumstance, and every word was
dictated to me. I knew my brother, and I was afraid,--coldly, mortally
afraid. Such men are capable of murder.
Then I told him of Bernoline. Some instinct warned me to do so, and
the way his face cleared and the old affection returned confirmed
my suspicions. Beneath all he had said (or not said) was something
brooding. Only, in that case, the situation was more than ever fraught
with danger.
We went back over the old days, when we four were the Littledale
boys,--Big Dale, Little Dale, Tiny Dale, and Rossie, who was no Dale
at all. With the clearing vista of years, I saw my brother as he was,
and I was astonished to find in my new estimate a sense of personal
superiority. He felt it, too, for once or twice he said something which
showed me that he had a feeling of having stood still.
I told him of having seen Alan.
“I never liked him,” he said, without compromise, “and there’s no use
pretending; but I’m glad he made good.” He turned to me, laying his
hand on my arm for the first time. “Davy, there’s not been much luck in
the family, has there? We’re out of existence--shot to pieces. And the
other time doesn’t seem so very far ago,--the time when we romped and
played like good, wholesome puppies. Rossie gone--Alan drifting about
the world--you crawling back by the skin of your teeth--I suppose
there’s no use arguing with you about your going back?”
“None.”
“Well, if we don’t wake up and get into it, I’m going, myself,” he
blurted out. “The mater, of course, is all for pacifism, but as for the
Governor, I believe he’s just hanging on until we declare war.”
“I believe so, too.”
“Must seem strange to you, here.”
“Yes--strange.”
We each wished the interview over, I felt. With all our attempts at
restoring the old intimacy, there was a constraint on us we couldn’t
shake off.
* * * * *
The first thing I saw, as we went back, was Letty’s face at the window
of the conservatory. It was only a look, for she rose immediately and
shifted her seat, but that look I shall never efface from my memory.
She was no coward. Indeed, I have never known any woman with more of
the reckless, devil-may-care attitude towards danger, but that vital
hour, when she sat there and wondered, must have tried her soul.
When we entered she was consummately at ease. She did not appear to
notice our coming, but once I caught her glancing furtively in the
mirror, watching Ben.
I went on upstairs and there, in the old playroom, the tension I had
been under snapped and my nerves went bad and, as I was doubled up,
shivering and shaking, Molly found me. It must have frightened her out
of her wits, to come upon me without warning, for by the time the spell
was over, she was in my arms, weeping her heart out.
“Oh, Davy, you aren’t going back, like that!”
“Nonsense! It’s almost over--only, once in a while--when something
excites me.”
“You’ve been talking to Ben,” she said, straightening up. “Davy, I
don’t _like_ her! And, what’s more, Ben isn’t happy!”
What could I say? I couldn’t look into my dear little sister’s clean
eyes and counsel her to accept Letty with an open heart.
* * * * *
I went back presently and joined the company. I knew that in public
I must pay my brother’s wife some attention. To avoid her would be
confession. She had quite recovered by this time and was her own
malicious self again.
“Do you know, David, that you have neglected me shamefully?” she said
aloud. “You were more gallant in Paris.”
I made some lame excuse. I do not remember what I muttered and,
avoiding any intimacy, turned the conversation to common acquaintances.
I cannot remember a more hideously disagreeable hour in all my life.
Not that there was left any flicker of the old infatuation. The image
of Bernoline had cleansed the old fever. I looked at Letty and, looking
at her, wondered that I could meet her eyes without a tremor. She felt
this, I know, and did not like the sensation for, despite the danger
of the situation, her voice at times took on the old caressing tone
and her eyes sparkled with the desire to entice. Our conversation was
necessarily banal in the presence of others. It was not until they
started to go that I found myself alone with her on the porch.
“I hope to God you did it because you love him,” I said, without
premeditation.
“And if there was any other reason, Davy?” she said softly.
“He is quite capable of killing you. I give you a solemn warning.”
Her fur slipped to the ground and, as I recovered it, she said aloud:
“Thank you, my brother-in-law--and you will be sociable, and run over?”
Ben had come up as we were speaking, but her quick ear had detected his
approach.
* * * * *
The interview has left me quite in the dark. Why had she done it? Is
she in love with Ben? Is there any change in the inner woman? Can
she be held wholly and loyally by a man with whom she cannot trifle,
before whom she is genuinely afraid? Was it the dramatic revenge that
tempted her? Or was it just the instinct of social self-preservation,
the fetich of that great god, Respectability, which dominates all
such women? For, protest as they may, no matter how they rage
against conventionalities, flout them openly or secretly, in the
heart of each lawless woman, whether her situation be sheltered or
ruthlessly exposed, is the slumbering veneration of the thing called
respectability. Once passed the thirties, it becomes an obsession.
Perhaps, after all, it was the safe haven of respectability that
Letty sought, at the end of a few adventurous years. Perhaps, it
was a combination of all these motives. But, of one thing I am
certain,--Letty is afraid of her husband.
V
_December_
My first Sunday has come and gone. All day I have been looking at
myself and at my home with a new revelation of values. Strangely
enough, I never before perceived its significance. France and another
civilization have suddenly thrown it into a clearer relief, and all the
while the words of Bernoline return to my memory. What a contrast!
At eleven o’clock we departed to Sunday worship: Ben and my mother
to the Unitarian Church; Aunt Janie to the Congregational, with
father; and Molly and myself to a Presbyterian service, accompanied
by the servants. No scene is more typical of what we are: a group of
individualists bound together by mutual tolerance. Are we a home, I
wonder, or simply a shelter over a group of lodgers for this night
or for many nights? Of course, it is not fair to take us as typical
of America. Yet we are typical of one thing,--a developed type of
traditional New England. This morning, as I sat in the old pew, with
Molly by my side, I thought with a little tightening of my heart that
even in the coming days of suspense when I go back to the front my
family will not be even united in its sorrow.
* * * * *
The whole contrast between our two civilizations, French and American,
is here,--in the family. Thinking on this to-night, I understand
Bernoline better. The sense of duty that dominates her life and makes
sacrifice so easily possible is the sense of family solidarity. Love of
the mother, respect for the authority of the father, companionship with
the children,--it is a France in miniature, and that greater love of
country is but a tradition of family pride.
I do not think we have this strongly disciplined sense of duty nor
this unquestioning acceptance of sacrifice. How often children are but
accidents and sometimes strangers under the same roof. In my own case,
what is my father to me? Do I know him as well as I know the boy I
roomed with at school, I wonder? There is hardly an opinion we share
or an outlook on life which we could understand together. He has never
really discussed anything with me, as though instinctively he divined I
would take an opposite view.
I don’t say what should be. Yet to-night, perhaps because the sense of
loss of a dear and necessary presence accents my own loneliness, I can
visualize another type of home--the home of Bernoline--and wonder....
After all, there is something that touches the heart strings in the
thought of the generations succeeding each other, standing for the same
ideal of conduct, the same loyalty to a conception of state and faith,
passing down the same standard from father and son and guarding it in
reverence! Governments change as I change my hat; waves of paganism,
materialism and doubt come and pass; but so long as the family faith is
untouched, France will be found equal to its past. Order, stability,
discipline,--the sunken cornerstone of the national consciousness are
all in this conception, and I think to understand this is to understand
why there was no miracle in France’s answer in the month of August,
1914.
* * * * *
Yet, I have no doubt now of America’s answer when the call is clear:
only we will respond from different motives. If the sense of duty
is not developed here by old traditions, there is a man’s pride in
doing what free men should do. It will be a great voluntary impulse,
something that has come down to us from our strong, free, battling
ancestors of Jutland, of those who sang of heroic deaths and defied
the tempest and the perils of the forest, who never bowed to king or
conqueror,--the fierce dissenting strain of Saxon manhood. I am not
afraid of this heritage when stirred by the test of war;--but in peace?
What is the basic impulse, then, that moves through our Anglo-Saxon
civilization? It is the relation between man and woman, and this
conception of love as heroic is of the origins of our race.
Christianity did not exalt women with us. In the days of the Berserkers
and the sea-rovers, man and woman clove together in single partnership
and kept their faith. So, to-day, the children in the house are but
waiting the touch of destiny, free agents, held by no family tradition,
impatient for life to open to them. Under all the sentimentalism of our
literature and art there is this abiding instinct, the need of love
that shall come as a directing purpose. Each child, in the imagination
of boy or girl, holds it as his right to give his heart where it
pleases him, no matter what the wrench or what the sacrifice, as the
beginning and the meaning of life. In this instinct to determine our
own existence as children in our father’s house, we remain fierce and
rebellious, as our Saxon heroes who served, but feared neither their
gods nor their masters. We do not inherit our homes: we create them.
* * * * *
My little sister, who hangs on my arm and comes to me with her
confidences, knows deep in her heart that this is not her home.
To-morrow she will look in the eyes of some stranger and, despite all
our entreaties, pleadings, warnings, put her hand in his and follow
him into the outer world. No wonder that we have colonized the earth,
when each of us has in him the soul of the pioneer! And now that I
have written this, I think I understand why I cannot do what would be
so easy for a Latin to do. Marriage to us is not a formula, but a need
of our hidden spiritual self, the meaning of our existence. No, I can
never turn to Anne with a divided memory, not even in the instinct of
self-preservation!
Everything separates me from Bernoline. In our basic conceptions
of life, she in her clear outlook of faith, and I in my driven
questionings; she in her unquestioned acceptance of duty; I in my
rebellion against aught which means the immolation of self on the altar
of convention. We are as distant as though she stood at the threshold
of a hundred years and I at the close. A civilization and an age
intervene between us. Yet why, knowing this, despite instinct and will,
have we been powerless to turn away? Is it, I wonder, because the thing
is so utterly hopeless, forbidden, destructive, that the instinct of
Eden draws us irresistibly to our destiny?
* * * * *
Yesterday I read in Maeterlinck’s “Life of The Bee” that strange and
terrible chapter of the Nuptial Flight, which in its fearful mystery of
love and death reveals to us the mysterious origin in nature’s purpose
of our human seeking. How little we foresee in the first quickening
ecstasy of our beings the destiny of tragedy towards which we move! How
little, in that one clear, untroubled afternoon, when all the beating
frenzy in me grew still and peaceful with the knowledge that I was
loved, did I divine that the rapture which held me was but the prelude
to life denied and the ache of happiness remembered. Mystery of good
and evil! How often this thought returns across the vista of my life!
The thing I cannot struggle against is silence,--this blank wall of
silence that I cannot seize and yet which fastens about me and shuts
out all hope. If I could but see her, talk to her, write to her! But
between that and nothingness is my promise. Yesterday, in my loneliness
and rebellion, I wrote her,--a wild, incoherent letter, imploring her
to release me of a promise beyond my strength to keep. I sealed it and
addressed it, refusing to listen to anything but the fever and the
revolt that burned through every fiber of my being. I rushed out of
the house and down to the village, with only one thought,--to end the
suspense, to be done with my conscience by an irrevocable act. And then
I came back, slowly, with lagging steps, beaten, the letter destroyed.
Why? Because, in all the checkered path of my life, there is one memory
inviolate. No matter what I have done, and bitterly regretted; no
matter what I may come to in some middle-aged sophistry,--I once have
reached an ideal of myself. This ideal that she, Bernoline, created of
me can never be lowered. Whatever in its tyranny this memory demands of
me, I shall in the end obey.
VI
I remember an incident in my boyhood. A little Airedale called Frazzles
had become so wild that a conference of the powers had decided on
sending her away to a veterinary. The sentence was duly carried out,
and Frazzles was deported in the last days of autumn, while we children
howled our grief in the nursery. The next we heard of her, she had
escaped and taken to the woods some twenty miles away, where she was
living like a wild animal. The winter passed and then the spring, and
one day Frazzles came, scratching at the door, weary, savage, and
caked with mud. The door opened, she flew to her old post under the
blue sofa by the fireplace. Six months had passed,--outcast from home
and humanity, yet, at the hour when the tea-cakes were brought in, she
crept out of her hiding; place and lay at the feet of Aunt Janie, just
as though it were yesterday.
At times I feel strangely akin to that little bedraggled outcast. I
have fallen back so easily into the familiar routine that all the
other life seems incredible. Have I ever really lived in the wet and
slime of the trenches, pillowed on a foul blanket; and is it possible
that in a few short weeks the moving finger of fate will return and
touch me over again? It is so far off, so obscure, fainter than a dying
echo; only the memory of Bernoline is vivid and acute with the power to
pain.
Against this memory I struggle day and night. There are times when I
combat it fiercely in the instinct of self-preservation, when I try
to reach down into my heart and tear out the thing that aches. At
others, I yield to a fool’s paradise and delude myself with impossible
solutions that deceive me but for an hour.
* * * * *
Yesterday, in my desperation, I went over to the Brinsmades’. I went,
deliberately, to see Anne. Why, I do not know. For Anne, I think, loves
me, and, despite all my reason, all my will to escape from my destiny,
I do not, I cannot love her as she deserves to be loved. Perhaps, if I
had not met Bernoline--
I went, hesitating and undecided. I came away convinced. Whatever
comes, I care this much for my boy-hood’s companion; I shall never come
to her with a memory between us.
* * * * *
It was a morning when Bernoline’s presence had been so acutely near me
that there was no escape from the blank impossibility of the future.
Did I go to seek some strange, healing comfort in the knowledge of
another’s suffering,--even as I suffered without possibility of hope?
The instinct of love is, I suppose, so fiercely primitive in us that
under its tyranny we are subjected to some moral atavism. All the
primitive passions that have swayed us from the dawn of time are
suddenly let loose and, with the leaping impulse towards possession,
comes the instinct to hate violently or to desire fiercely the joy
that comes from the feeling of being able to cause pain, to turn
against another all that we suffer from the one we love. Girl or
courtesan, I have seen women pour out treasures of sacrifice to one
man and at the same time show themselves savagely, incomprehensibly
pitiless to an unwelcome lover.
* * * * *
Not that all this was in my thought. Far from it. I went, brooding and
restless, without impulse but to escape from myself. I drove over after
luncheon, after telephoning my coming.
She came down immediately and at my first look I felt a guilty feeling,
yet one of some compensating happiness.
“There’s a house party, but I got rid of them,” she said, giving me
both her hands. “Do you know, Davy, you have waited a long, long time
to come.”
“I have wanted to, many times.”
“Really, and honestly?” she said, looking me in the eyes.
“Of course.”
My heart smote me as I met her glance. One word from me had brought
back the comrade of other days. From her hair to the stout walking
boots, all artifice had been so evidently offered up on the altar of my
criticism that I could not help saying:
“Now I remember an old friend.”
She laughed at this and her eyes sparkled, but there was a retort on
her tongue.
“It’s quite hopeless to try and please you,--and I who fondly believed
I was going to make such an impression on you with my grand manner!”
“Now, Miss Flattery, you don’t take me in like that. There were others
present, and--you didn’t know I was coming.”
“Father told me,” she said abruptly. “Let’s get out of this hothouse
atmosphere. How about a ramble into the glen? There’s not enough snow
to bother us. Shall we?”
“Agreed.”
Well bundled up, we struck out over the frozen swamps for the solitudes
of the hills, and as we went a curious diffidence fell between us.
“David, it’s you who are the stranger,” she said suddenly. “You are
changed, much changed.”
“In what way?”
“Your eyes are terribly critical of things you don’t like. You--you
rather intimidate me. Please be a little kind in your judgments.”
“I am not aware--”
“Yes, you have changed. Before, I often wondered how you would turn
out--you might have gone so many ways. You have been tested and you
have found yourself. Only, Davy, in finding yourself, I think you have
forgotten a little the way you have gone and are apt to be without much
indulgence towards others.”
Now, the directness of this analysis and its point quite startled me.
“Do you think I am like that?” I said, wondering.
She nodded decisively, twice.
“And dreadfully direct. You can’t conceal what you feel.”
A memory returned, and, also, a possible explanation.
“What I said that first night hurt you?”
“Terribly.”
“You attach too much importance to a chance remark.”
“Don’t.”
I stopped short in my lumbering explanation.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, looking at me with a little
frown above her eyes. “Davy, in the old days there was nothing but
absolute honesty between us--no nonsense. I have known many men since
you went; naturally, some who attracted me,--one or two, very much--”
“Naturally,” I said, but, to my surprise, with a certain instinctive
resentment.
“But no one else to whom I could talk, frankly and openly, as I always
did with you. Don’t change that, because”--she hesitated--“because,
Davy, you can help me to see clearer in many ways, and--and I shall
always be to you the one person to whom you can tell anything. Davy,
memories, the real memories, I think, are the things to hold on to in
this world.”
Her words went through me like a knife, so near were they to my own
fate. It was all that I could do to fight back the telltale moodiness I
felt rising in my face, for I knew her eyes were on me.
“I really need to talk to you, Davy,” she said, when I did not answer,
and there was such a plaintive note in her voice that, to cover my
unease, I held out my hand and said with an appearance of bluffness:
“All right: the old alliance is renewed.”
“Absolute honesty?”
“So help me.”
“Then--you were disappointed when you saw me again?”
“Yes.”
“You thought I had become superficial, vacillating?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am,” she said, to my surprise. “I didn’t know it. You gave me
a shock, but you made me realize it. You still think so?”
“My dear Anne,” I said carefully. “How can you be otherwise? Everything
is against you. What in life is real to you, except pleasure? You’ve
been shown nothing else in life--granted it isn’t your fault. You have
been cheated out of something bigger. Other women will never notice it;
thank heaven, you do. Now, to explain what I felt on coming back out of
the other world. Before, I don’t suppose it ever would have occurred to
me. I took the American man’s point of view--from the best of motives,
I grant you--our attitude of chivalry towards you. But, over there,
something else has come to us, a bigger conception of you, an ideal of
service. That is the difference in point of view.”
“But what am I to do?” she said, shrinking under the directness of the
opinion she had invited.
“Heavens, you’re making me talk like a confounded, self-righteous
prig,” I exclaimed, with a sudden realization, “and God knows I’m far
from that.”
“No, no! Say what you mean. You, you do not quite trust my sincerity,
do you?”
“Not quite.”
“Why?”
“Because, well, because I think you are inclined to dramatize your
moods,” I said lightly. “I think you are colored by the wish to please
whomever you happen to be with. We all are. But I wonder if to-night,
when the guests, the dreadful guests who bore you so, return, you will
find time so heavy on your hands?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t _laugh_ at me!” she cried, flaring up with
more show of feeling than I had seen.
“Forgive me. I won’t do that again,” I said contritely. “Do you really
care what I think?”
“You know I do.”
Her answer left me awkwardly floundering, until suddenly she burst out:
“All you say is true: I do change, I do drift; what I feel is true one
moment will be different the next. But, Davy, I realize it! Do you
think I want to go on this way? I do what I do because I am restless,
just--just to do something. You think I am superficial: I am, horribly
so. You think I crave pleasure--excitement: I do. You think I like to
play with emotions: I do. All that’s true, and I know it.”
“I wonder if you know what harm you do?” I said, not quite convinced.
“What do you mean?”
“Anne, I sometimes think good women do more harm in this world than
bad. They, poor devils, do so little harm: they are so obvious. A
moment’s madness, and we throw ourselves violently back from them. To
leave them is to forget them. But you--you others--the pain you inflict
is given unconsciously.”
“It doesn’t last,” she said.
“How do you know? Tell me one thing, Anne, because it has always
interested me. You didn’t need to tell me there had been many men in
your life: have you ever felt any responsibility toward them? I mean
this: have you ever stopped to question your right to attract them, to
awaken their love, even when you knew there was no interest on your
part?”
“Why, no, of course not.”
“Probably not; such things are unconscious--an instinct. And of a dozen
men who come to love you, eight or ten forget quickly. But some don’t,
do they?”
“No, that’s true.”
“That’s what I mean by the harm good women do, unconsciously. You would
not give pain willingly, I am sure, and yet I doubt if even you realize
the sorrow that has come from you. You may say it’s all in the game.
It is: but I go back to what I said--that often a girl like yourself,
like Molly, with everything to charm and attract, leaves wounds behind
that it takes years to heal. That’s the strange thing about it; a
friendship that is precious in the life of both, inevitably, by some
hidden spark of impulse, a sudden need of the soul, is transformed into
love on the part of one. Then, what happens? Not only is the friendship
taken out of the lives of both, but to one that first joy of human
contact becomes emptiness and bitterness. It is not only of you I am
thinking, but of my own sister. When I saw Molly again, so radiant, so
lovely in her unconscious youth, so eager for life to begin, I could
not help thinking that wherever she went, so lightly and so joyfully,
she would leave behind her many bruises and aches. Then, a few real men
will come to love her profoundly, and without hope, and know the daily,
hourly slavery to a hopeless longing.”
“It is of yourself you are talking now, Davy?”
I stopped, thunderstruck. In my earnestness I had quite forgotten how
much my own personal feelings must have given warmth to my statement.
“Of course, I did not expect that in all this time you wouldn’t have
fallen in love,” she said. She stood, looking down. “It’s a queer
world.” The next moment she had started up the ravine, swinging from
rock to rock, with a challenge to me to follow. I hurried after her,
vexed at my own indiscreet revelations and seriously alarmed at her
reckless flight.
“Be careful. You’ll slip and turn your ankle. Anne, you’re crazy!”
“Nonsense, never slip!”
She darted up, heedless of my cautions, and when finally I reached the
top, quite out of breath, she was watching me with a malicious smile
from her seat in the little observatory.
“Come up here and take a peep at the view. A fine soldier, to be
out-distanced by a woman!”
“That’s hardly fair,” I said, laughing and relieved to pass from the
dangerous seriousness of a moment ago. “Give me a few more weeks.”
Instantly she was contrite.
“How thoughtless of me. Forgive me!”
“Very little to forgive. By George, that’s fine.” The valley lay
below us, blanketed with a sheen of snow that in great spaces lifted
occasionally for a glimpse of green; black-blue shadows in the far
hills, and faint, transparent reds in the bared branches against the
sky; the whole tremulously still, a winter cameo cut in frozen silences.
“Do you want to go back?” she said at last.
“I shall answer you as I answered your father; honestly, no.”
“But then, why? Surely, after what you’ve been through, in your
condition, and it would be so easy to arrange--”
“Exactly; but you, as my friend--would you want me to stay?”
She did not answer.
“Would you?”
“It is not your war.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“It _is_ the point,” she said, in sudden rebellion. “No, I don’t want
you to go back. It’s absurd, unnecessary, quixotic!”
Poor Anne. She little knew what harm she had done by that one little
outburst. I remembered Bernoline, and, when next I looked at Anne, I
saw only a child.
“And when we get into it? What then, young lady?” I said, laughing.
“Are you going to arrange everything to suit yourself?”
“Davy, if you knew how you hurt me when you take that tone,” she said,
shrinking back. “I am not a child.”
“Then, Anne, you must face life as it comes to you. We can’t make it
as we want it, but our kind, of all the world, should never dodge a
responsibility.”
“I always show you my worst side,” she said, shaking her head, and
presently, leading the way down the ravine again, but this time more
deliberately, she began to chatter lightly of old memories without an
approach to intimacy, until the moment came for my departure.
“David, have you still such a bad opinion of me?” she said, seeking the
answer in my eyes.
“I never have had.”
“Funny: I am not at all myself with you. It’s because I’m so used to
looking up to you, I suppose.”
“Because I am such an old bear, you mean.”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. I’m very much of a woman now--more
than you can ever imagine--and quite capable of determining my life for
myself. And I know what I want. And, David--don’t make one mistake.”
“What?”
“I’m not in love with you.”
Before I could recover myself, she had skipped up the steps. And so
ended this strange interview. Not being myself in love with her, I
could estimate more deliberately the value of her last words, and yet,
knowing in my own experience all the wound to her pride that the fear
of my divining her true motives would bring, I think her last defiance
brought me into closer sympathy with my old playmate.
* * * * *
When I reached home, Ben and Letty were there,--come for the Christmas
holidays.
“David!”
As I was hurrying through the hall, she called me to her, where she was
warming herself by the fireplace.
“You here?” I said, feigning surprise.
“B’rrr! You are cordial as an open door. They said you were at the
Brinsmades’.”
“Yes.”
“_Monsieur fait des conquêtes?_”
I shrugged my shoulders and disdained a reply, which always irritated
her.
“So you are in love--again, David?” she said, with her provoking smile.
“Does this amuse you?”
“You forget that I remember the signs.”
At this I stared at her in such futile anger that she laughed to
herself, well content.
“But I quite approve! An excellent match for you!”
Then she deliberately dropped her muff, and as I stooped to pick it up,
she leaned over and pinched my ear.
“Have you forgotten that, _mon ami_?”
The muff was scented with the perfume I knew. I came up angry and
baffled.
“My dear Davy, if you are not going to pay me some attention, you
may as well go right to your brother and tell all. The situation is
evident.”
I left her in a vindictive, smoldering rage,--in one of those moods
of violence into which she had thrown me a hundred times, out of
her malicious pleasure. Does she love me or hate me? Which is the
explanation? As for myself, the anger she awakened frightened me, for
before I was confident of my utter indifference. Is it possible that
by some baneful trick of habit there can remain a vestige of the old
tyranny over my senses? It is unthinkable! If only I could go to Ben!
But no, that is impossible! And for a week, while we three are under
the same roof, this hideous comedy must go on!
* * * * *
As I go back over my interview with Anne, I am somewhat puzzled. Why
was I so brutally direct? I should like to feel that it was an honest
effort to repel her: yet I wonder if I am as honest as all that and if
underneath is not the intuitive knowledge that just such an attitude is
what would draw her closer to me? How difficult it is to know our real
motives!
* * * * *
This morning, in my mail, a note.
David:
Don’t take what I say too literally. Of course, I would never do
anything to keep you from going back,--don’t think I am that weak,
sentimental type of woman. But I might rebel at your going,--and
that is very different, so long as you keep it to yourself,--which
I didn’t. If you don’t think me quite hopeless, come in to-night
for dinner.
ANNE
I went, if for nothing but to escape from the situation here. Mr.
Brinsmade was there, and we had a long talk on our prospects of getting
into the war, which he feels is certain. Anne sat by, listening, but
studiously avoided any opportunity for a tête-à-tête.
I am less sure of my attitude towards her. Last night, with the mental
eagerness which Brinsmade always wakes in me, there, by the great
fireplace, watching her camped by her father’s knee--young, ardent,
desirable--a doubt came into my mind, I again saw my life as it might
be and, frankly, I was tempted. Fortunately, Mr. Brinsmade had the tact
not to broach the subject again. After all, decisions are futile now.
In a few short weeks I shall be returning to France and there, perhaps,
will be the decision to all my perplexities. To-night, when I suddenly
stop at that realization, I am inclined to break out into laughter. The
irony of my plaguing myself with questions now!
And yet it is torture: this memory of a few days’ utter happiness,
of one afternoon’s clear belief in the future! I try to escape from
it, but there is no escape, least of all in the direction of Anne.
That is not fair to her or what might come. I sit long hours in Aunt
Janie’s parlor, pulling at my pipe before the fire and staring into the
coals. Of all the family she understands me best, and I talk or remain
silent, according to my mood. Yet when I look at her, and realize the
shadow of a life to which she has been dedicated--everything denied,
repressed, throttled--I spring up in revolt and go tramping over the
countryside;--that life is beyond my strength!
VII
Christmas and the holidays have passed and certain incidents stand out
vividly. My own personal perplexities have somehow receded into the
healing background. Our sorrows destroy us or themselves, some one has
said. There is a protecting instinct, perhaps, in the soul as well
as in the body. The healing fluids of the eye isolate the intruding
cinder, the membranes of the body wrap around the splinter which
penetrates the flesh; so, insensibly, memory drops its curtains over
our grief, until the pain is lessened, and in fainter perception, we
can bear to look upon it. To the first poignant wrench of my longing
for Bernoline has come a sort of healing incredulity. Is it a mood or
an achieved attitude? Have I definitely risen to a new philosophy of
acceptance, or will the old malaria of loneliness and emptiness return
when I am most sure of equanimity? These are things I do not know.
I know only this: that of late I have been able to get out of myself,
to return to an objective point of view towards life: that the old
desire to play my part is new again; that I am not aloof but vibrantly
a part of my day and my nation, thrilled with the sudden rising anger
at temporizing that is sweeping the country,--a great, mounting,
climactic storm of wrath. The hour is coming, I know, when America will
show to the world and to itself the majesty of its indignant pride.
* * * * *
Christmas night has always been open cheer with us and, with me home,
the house was crowded with friends from the countryside and the
village. They came in sleighs and cutters, with jingling bells, wrapped
in voluminous scarfs, stamping in the great hallway, eager for the
good cheer of a gathering which took them back to the rollicking days
of Merrie England. Threescore, at least, and for every man, woman and
child some present on the old tree. For we at Littledale have a custom
that I don’t remember seeing elsewhere.
In the back of the house, between the two wings, is a stone-flagged
court, and in the midst of it a splendid cedar. It was Rossie’s idea as
a child to convert it into the Christmas symbol. So, promptly at ten,
being well-fed from the buffet of roast pig, fatted ducks, great crisp
turkeys, mountainous dishes of vegetables, pies and cakes to stagger
the imaginations of the youngest eyes, every one bustles into coats and
wraps and crowds out into the court. There, the green tree is ablaze
with lanterns and tinsel wreaths, with a magnificent Santa Claus to
distribute the presents, with appropriate hits at the idiosyncrasies
of each recipient. The fiddles strike up from the dining room. We join
hands and go circling round the tree, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good
Fellow,” until every one is exhausted from laughter and panting for
breath, while the dogs go barking, in and out, frantic with the spirit
of good cheer.
This year, on account of my father’s health, we were in some doubt. But
the Governor, like the fine old trump that he is, insisted that nothing
be changed and watched the celebration from an upper window. The rest
of the night was given up to square dances with old man Carpenter
calling out the figures from the midst of the village fiddles.
I wondered, watching the Governor, if he would see another such
Christmas, or, for that matter, how many would dance so light-heartedly
again. The accent of the evening was absolute democracy,--every one
privileged to dance with every one else,--without introductions, and
much scrambling under the mistletoe.
Jenny, my first flame, was there,--a buxom matron, with three ravenous
youngsters. And once the hazards of a quadrille brought us all
together, Jenny, Ben, Letty, Anne, and myself. In one figure, Ben and
I being opposite each other, Letty was at my side and Jenny at his. I
looked up at him and wondered if he remembered the day, twelve years
ago, when he saved me from utterly throwing away my life. And the
irony of it all,--that I should have been away and powerless, when I
should have stood in his stead. Letty’s behavior throughout the evening
was outrageous, and Ben’s face grew blacker and blacker. She flirted
openly with several young friends of Molly’s and deliberately with
me, whenever she could bring it before the notice of Anne. Of course,
knowing her of old, I realized that we were but the pretexts; that her
real object was to torture Ben himself. And this alarmed me, for I saw
already the progression towards tragedy.
“Letty, let me warn you again,” I said to her, as we were dancing. She
had come to me herself, out of pure malice, and to refuse would have
been an open affront.
“Go on, Davy _mio_,” she said, under her breath.
“When Ben’s hands close about your little throat--they won’t let go,”
I said savagely, “and I don’t know that they ought to.”
“David, I am bored--so bored!”
“I am not joking.”
“Anything for excitement,” she said, with her slow smile. “La petite
Anne is _éprise_. Be quite attentive, Davy. You’ll land her. Now you
are angry, but it seems so natural to have you angry at me!”
“Since when have you danced in public?” I said, unwilling to show her
my disgust and my rage. “And why now?”
“It isn’t fair to the man, do you think?” she said softly.
I stopped abruptly. What devil had made her say this I don’t know: but
she was right. I have danced with hundreds of women, and never been
conscious of what I held in my arms,--until that dance with Letty.
“Thank you; I must see to something,” I said, leaving her abruptly, and
making a pretext of examining the tree, I went out into the cold air,
past the lanterned courtyard, and down the crunching way to the old
wooden bridge by the duck pond.
* * * * *