that he observed them. He launched at once upon an unrestrained flow of
ship talk. It seemed that he was an Austrian, though of Hungarian blood
on his mother's side. He had gone into the army, was an officer--already
a captain, she gathered--and he had been serving for some months as an
attache of his country's legation in Washington. Now he had been
transferred to the legation at Paris. Muriel noted that he spoke with
many gestures. She tried to dislike these as being un-American, and when
she found it hard to dislike what were, after all, graceful adjuncts to
his conversation and frequent aids to his adequate expression, she was
annoyed and tried to indicate her annoyance.
"I thought you were a soldier?" she said.
With another European bow he produced a silver case engraved with his
arms, drew from it a card, which he handed to Muriel. The card announced
him as Captain Franz Esterhazy von B. von Klausen.
"But yes," he said. "Please."
Muriel slipped the card into her belt.
"You seem to like the diplomatic service better," she said.
Von Klausen shrugged.
"I go where I am sent," said he.
"Would you ever go to war?" she persisted.
"If I had to. Why not?"
"And fight?"
"Dear lady, but yes. I do not like, though, to fight, for war is what
one of your great generals said: it is Hell."
"Yet you went into the army?"
"Because all my family have for generations done thus. I was born for
that, I was brought up for that, and when I came to know"--he extended
his palms--"I had to live," he concluded.
This was scarcely Muriel's ideal of a soldier. She changed the
conversation.
"Of course you know Europe perfectly?" she enquired.
"Not Russia," answered von Klausen; "but Germany, France, Spain, Italy
and England--yes. You will travel much?"
Muriel did not know; very likely they would. They would do whatever Mr.
Stainton--Mr. Stainton was her husband--elected: she always did, always
wanted to do, whatever her husband elected.
The young man bowed at mention of Jim's name, as if he were being
introduced.
"Certainly," he gravely agreed. "Certainly, since he is your
husband.--But you must not miss my country, dear lady, as so many
foolish tourists miss it. It is the Tyrol, my fathers' country: the
Austrian Tyrol. There is scenery--the most beautiful scenery in all the
world: superb, majestic. You love scenery? Please."
Muriel gave a surprised assent.
"Then do not neglect the Tyrol. They call it the Austrian Tyrol, but it
is really the only real Tyrol. Come to Innsbruck by the way of Zurich.
That will bring you along the Waldersee, and so, too, you pass Castle
Lichtenstein and come across the border at just beyond the ruins of
Graephang. You will see genuine mountains then, gigantic, snow-capped,
with forests as dense as--as what you call a hairbrush--black,
impenetrable. To the very tops of some the train climbs; it trembles
over abysses. You look from the window of it down--down--down, a
thousand feet, fifteen hundred, into valleys exquisite, with pink
farmhouses or grey in them, the roofs weighted with large stones, the
sides painted with crucifixes, or ornamented statues of the Blessed
Virgin."
He loved his country and he made it vivid to her. He rambled on and on.
Muriel became a more and more fascinated listener. It was not until two
hours later that she thought, with a guilty start, of Jim.
She excused herself hastily and, leaving the Austrian bowing by the
rail, ran to the close stateroom and her husband.
He was awake, but still sick.
"Don't bother about me," muttered Stainton as she entered--"and _please_
don't bang the door!"
She considered him compassionately. His hair fell in disorder over his
haggard face; his cheeks were faintly green.
"Can't I do something for you?" she asked, stepping forward.
Stainton failed in a smile, but feebly motioned her away.
"I am afraid not," said he--"unless you stop the ship. All I need is a
little rest. You had better go back on deck. Really."
Muriel delayed.
"A man spoke to me on deck," she breathlessly confessed. "An Austrian
diplomat, I think he is. My rug blew, and he rearranged it. Do you
mind?"
"Mind?" asked Stainton. "Certainly not.--How this boat pitches!--Talk to
him, by all means. These things are common on shipboard, I believe."
Muriel was reassured. She returned to the deck, but von Klausen was not
there, and she did not see him again until evening.
Then, though she still dutifully wished that Jim were with her, she
found her appetite better than ever. She ventured upon a lonely
cocktail. She ate some Blue Points. Captain von Klausen sent to her
table, with his card, a pint of champagne, and she ordered potage
Mogador, duckling balls with turnips, cepes Provencals, sacher tart, and
ice cream.
When she reached the promenade-deck, von Klausen was already there. He
had dined in evening clothes, but these were now hidden by the light
rain-coat that swathed his lithe young figure from neck to heels. Muriel
observed that its shoulders fitted to the shoulders of the wearer and
had none of the deceptiveness of the padded shoulders to which she was
once familiar in American coats.
"Have you seen the phosphorus?" he asked, as she met him at the rail.
His lifted cap showed his wind-tossed blond hair, and his ruddy face
gleamed with salt spray.
Muriel admitted her ignorance of phosphorus.
"But," said von Klausen, "that is one of the sights of the voyage, and I
have not often on the Atlantic seen it finer than it is to-night."
He took her forward, by the starboard rail, under the bridge. Behind
them were the closely curtained windows of the writing-room, forward
was, only ten feet below them, the now emptied deck reserved for the
third-class passengers, and beyond that, higher, rose and fell,
rhythmically, the keen, dark prow. They were quite alone.
"Look there!" said von Klausen.
He pointed over the rail to where the inky surface of the sea was broken
by the speed of the _Friedrich Barbarossa's_ passage, bursting into
boiling, hissing, angry patches of bright whiteness.
Timidly Muriel extended her head.
"Do you see it?" asked von Klausen. He stood close beside her.
"I see the waves," said Muriel, "and the white foam."
"But the phosphorus--you do not see that? There--and there!"
She shook her head.
"Look though," said he. "You do not look in just the correct direction.
Please. Ahead, to the left. No; away a little from the ship--a little;
not too much--where we have hit the water and the water recedes from us.
It is beautiful--beautiful! See!"
The great boat rose on a sudden wave. Von Klausen gripped the rail with
one slim hand; the other, its arm around her waist, he placed about her
farther arm.
"Now!" he said, and, letting go of the rail, pointed.
Her eyes followed his finger, and there, shining green and yellow, now
clear, now opalescent, from burning cores to nebulous edges, she saw
what seemed to be live stars smouldering and flaming in the hearts of
the waves.
"I see," she said. "It is beautiful--beautiful!"
She was, she suddenly realised, but repeating his own phrase. Why should
she not? The phrase was commonplace enough; besides, the phosphorus
_was_ beautiful.
Then she became conscious of his arm about her, became conscious that
this arm about her had not been unpleasant; was indignant with him,
silently, and indignant with herself; made certain, in her own mind,
that he had put his arm around her waist only that he might protect
her--and thus soon left him and went to bed without waking Jim.
She opened her eyes after an unquiet night, to find that Stainton was
somewhat improved, though too mindful of his experience of the preceding
day to trust himself on deck.
"I'll wait," he decided, "till to-morrow or this evening. Yes, I think I
shall manage it this evening. I'm really in good shape, but I must have
eaten something that didn't agree with me. You go up, Muriel. If you see
that Austrian fellow, don't forget to give him my compliments and tell
him I'll probably have the pleasure of meeting him this evening. What
did you say he was?"
"His name," said Muriel, "is von Klausen." She hated herself for her
unreasonable disinclination to mention the Captain.
"H'm--a diplomat, did you say?"
"Something of the sort."
"As old as most diplomats then, I suppose?"
"No," said Muriel; "he's--he's rather young."
The ship began to descend a lofty wave, and Stainton lay back in his
berth. His face, with its full day's growth of beard, looked grey.
"All right," he said. "Run along, dear--and look in about noon."
Muriel obeyed him. Their chairs were well forward, and when she reached
them she saw von Klausen again seated in that which bore Stainton's
card.
He rose at sight of her. No motion of the boat seemed ever to affect him
to awkwardness.
"Your husband," he asked, bareheaded and erect while she seated herself;
"he is, I trust, better?"
"He hasn't really been sick," she asseverated with what she knew, as she
said it, to be wholly unnecessary emphasis.
The young Austrian performed one of his ceremonious obeisances.
"Then I shall be so pleased, so honoured, this evening to be presented
to him, and I so deeply regret his having been ill. It is not good, this
ocean, for the elderly."
Muriel's cheeks warmed.
"Why do you call him that?" she demanded. "I told you yesterday that he
was--that he was almost young. Why do you call him elderly?"
"Forgive." Von Klausen's wide gesture expressed his regret for this
error. "I had forgotten entirely. It is too bad of me to forget
entirely."
"Oh," laughed Muriel, for she was already condemning her annoyance as
childishness, "it doesn't matter, because it is so absurd. Only, what
gave you such an impression?"
"Please?"
"The impression that he was elderly: what gave you that?"
Von Klausen manifestly hesitated.
"I do not know," he said. "I thought that--I thought that, before we
sailed, on the deck here I had seen him with you. You and two American
gentlemen I thought I saw: one young and stout. I thought the gentleman
young and stout went ashore. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other that
went ashore. Perhaps that was your father."
There was a moment's silence. Muriel looked intently at the ragged
horizon.
"The stout man was Mr. Holt," she said at last. "He is a friend of
mine--of ours."
"Ah?" said von Klausen, disinterestedly polite.
"My husband," said Muriel, "is _not_ elderly."
"I ask his pardon," said von Klausen. He produced his bow again. He
remained quite at his ease, but his manner implied a courteous wonder at
any person's shame of his years. "He is then----"
"He is not so much over forty," lied Muriel, without the remotest idea
why she should be thus untruthfully communicative.
Von Klausen ever so slightly turned his head away. She was immediately
sure that he did it to conceal a smile.
"That is not old," she hotly contended. She made up her mind now that
she did not like this graceful young foreigner. "And Jim is not so old
as his age," she continued--"not nearly. He has lived half his life in
our Great West, and he is as strong as a lion--and as brave."
She felt the folly of her remark as she made it, but von Klausen gave no
sign of sharing that feeling. He settled himself comfortably in Jim's
chair. She saw that his face was wholly innocent, his eyes only politely
eager.
"Tell me of him, please," he said. "I have heard of your brave
Westerners, as you call them, in your United States. I met, once in
Washington, a Senator from Texas, but he did not seem to me
quite--quite----Pray tell me of your husband, dear lady."
She was amazed to find that, offhand, she could not do this. She started
twice and twice stopped, wondering what, after all, there was to say.
Then, with a vigorous concentration, she laid hold of all that her aunt
and uncle had told her of her husband, all that Holt was authority for,
all that the Sunday supplement of the newspapers had printed. She
narrated how he had rescued the innocent runaway from the lynching
party at Grand Joining, how he had saved the lives of his camp mates
during the spotted fever epidemic at Sunnyside; she told of the shooting
in Alaska, the filibustering expedition, of Jim's slaying with a knife
the grizzly bear that was about to strip Holt's flesh from his bones;
she gave in detail the story of Jim's descent into the shaft of the
"Better Days" mine, and what she had not learned she supplied to the
history of the train robbers on the Rio Grande. It was all deliberate
boasting, and when she ended, she felt a little ashamed.
Von Klausen, however, was visibly affected.
"He is a man to admire, your husband," said the Austrian. "Strength and
bravery, bravery and strength: these, dear lady, are the two things that
men envy and women love, all the world over. I wish"--his young smile
grew crooked--"I wish I had them."
Muriel's red lips parted in surprise:
"But you are a soldier?"
"What of that?" shrugged von Klausen.
"Oh, but you are brave!" She was sure of it.
"How do you know?" he asked--"how do I?"
"And you--you _look_ strong," she continued. Her black eyes passed
involuntarily over his slim, well-proportioned figure. "Anybody can see
that you must be strong."
"If I correctly recall my sight of your good husband," said the
captain, "he could break me in two pieces across his knee."
She inwardly acknowledged this possibility, but she did not like to bear
her new friend belittle himself.
"That's only because Jim is _very_ strong," she explained.
"Perhaps," said von Klausen, "yet that was not the only kind of strength
I bore in my mind, dear lady. I thought of the strength--of moral
strength, strength of purpose--whether the purpose is for the good or
the bad--which is two-thirds of bravery."
"And haven't you that?"
It might have been because he was altogether so new to her that the
question came readily. There seemed then nothing strange in the
discussion of these intimate topics.
"Who knows?" said von Klausen, quietly. "I have not yet been tried.
Perhaps, should I love something or somebody, I should acquire these
things." His tone lacked offence because it perfectly achieved the
impersonal note. "They would come to me then, for I should love that
cause or person better than my own life or my own welfare. I do not
know. I have not been tried. I know only that, without the cause or the
person, I have not real strength; I have not real courage. I have fought
my duel; I have faced death--but I know there are forms of it that I
fear. I am at least brave enough to admit that I am sometimes afraid.
For the rest, I am not the type of man that women love: I need to be
cared for, to be thought about, to be helped in the hundred foolish
little ways--and women love men who do not take these things, but who
give them."
His low voice, his simplicity, and most of all his childish manner,
touched her.
"I think," she said, "that you are not fair to women."
Von Klausen pointed out across the rail.
"Look there!" said he.
A two-masted fishing boat, storm driven from the Banks to sea, swung
within three or four hundred yards of them. She could see its dripping
gunwale contending with the waves, the oil-skinned sailors tottering
upon its deck.
"Now look there!" said von Klausen.
This time be pointed ahead, and ahead she saw, just beyond the charging
prow of the imperious _Friedrich_, what seemed to be a thick grey
curtain. It reached to the heavens and, as the liner approached it,
opened like three walls: one before the prow, the other two on either
side. It had all the palpability of heavy cloth.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Fog," said von Klausen, and in a moment, with the great siren of the
boat shaking their very hearts, it had descended upon them.
The walls fastened. The curtains enveloped them. The thick, tangible,
breath-tightening stuff wrapped them in a kind of cocoon. All the clouds
of the sky seemed to have fallen. Muriel could scarcely distinguish the
features of the young fellow beside her. And always, reverberating and
portentous, the siren howled overhead.
"The boat!" she called into von Klausen's ear. "Isn't it odd? Only a
minute ago it was there. Then I saw only its masts. Now I can't see it
at all."
He called his answer.
"Once in the Bosphorus--like this--fog. I was on the prow--an express
boat. We brought up a little, low ship--crowded with pilgrims. Fog--shut
out--the crash--I could look down and see--faces upturned, calling. I
could _see_ them calling--could not hear. I am afraid--I am terribly
afraid--of fogs."
She heard his voice break. She caught a glimpse of his face--the face of
a frightened child. She felt him trembling as their shoulders touched:
this soldier who had fought his duel and would not, she knew, fear the
trial of battle. She was not afraid. Instinctively, she reached out
toward him, to help, to comfort.
When the fog lifted as suddenly as it had fallen, the little fisherman
was riding the waves safely and almost gaily far astern. The _Friedrich_
sped unconcernedly on.
"There was no real danger, I am sure," von Klausen was saying; "these
Germans I do not like, but they are good sailors--too good to hurt a
smaller boat."
Then Muriel discovered that she had been holding his hand.
"I think," she said, "that I had better go and look after Mr.
Stainton."
X
"UNWILLING WAR"
Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could
long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell,
and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four
hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of
the voyage.
Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von
Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken
the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been
unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen
understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for
but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circumstances, tell
Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that
hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple
virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the
conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this
man's hand and held it while we were passing through a brief curtain of
fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was
herself afraid in the fog or that she wished to touch von Klausen's
hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these
suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true
value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told
her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a
breach of confidence.
Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this
satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the
succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night
when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must
always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant,
even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has
said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral
system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is
complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the
ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings
can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby
doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative
and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who
accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which
their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing
exceptions.
Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It came to her in the
morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep,
rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her
mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw
through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his
clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too
preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him
of this belief.
But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on
the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over
her in her berth and kissed her.
"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."
"Sure not?"
"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."
She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe
door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the
morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked
with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim
avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a
recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one
of those futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching
catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it
unobserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not
possibly so soon be seen.
Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That
accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and
breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had
directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this
morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that
made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the
promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking
arm-in-arm.
The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an
experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other
floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the
zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large
and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his
sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched
with every roll of the ship.
Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that
it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness
for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The
next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had
not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion
that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she
felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption
that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally,
she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that
her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a
man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush
what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian
had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that
he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would
have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his
stupid mistake.
Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and
Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude
for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon
installed in a chair beside Stainton's.
"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping
inclination.
"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure.
You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."
Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:
"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"
"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent
annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."
Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the
band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about
their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the
differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of
money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and
standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not
understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.