It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and
wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.
There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so
many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed
themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming
back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible,
but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a
new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that
new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind.
The day of my sailing from Liverpool was exactly two years four months
and three weeks from that on which I had last seen Regina Barry; and
because it was so I must tell you at once of an incident that occurred at
the minute when I stepped on board.
Having come up the long gangway easily enough, I found that at the top,
where passengers and their friends congregate, my difficulties began.
When my left eye had been shot out the right had suffered in sympathy,
and also from shock to the retina. For a while I had been blind. Rest and
care in the hospital my sister, Mabel Rideover, maintained at Taplow
had, however, restored the sight of my right eye; and now my trouble was
only with perspective. People and things crowded on one another as they
do in the vision of a baby. I would dodge that which was far away, and
allow myself to bump into objects quite near me.
As I stepped on deck I had a minute or two of bewilderment. There were so
many men more helpless than I that whatever care there was to give was
naturally bestowed on them. Moreover, most of those who thronged the top
of the gangway had too many anxieties of their own to notice that a man
who at worst was only half blind didn’t know which way to turn.
But I did turn—at a venture. The venture took me straight into a woman
holding a baby in her arms, whom I crushed against the nearest cabin
wall. The woman protested; the baby screamed. I was about, in the
rebound, to crash into some other victim when I felt from behind me a
hand take me by the arm. An almost invisible guide began to pilot me
through the crowd. All I caught sight of was a Canadian nurse’s uniform.
It is one of the results of the war that men, who are often reduced to
the mere shreds of human nature, grow accustomed to being taken care of
by women, who remain the able-bodied ones.
“Thanks,” I laughed, as the light touch pushed me along, slightly in
advance. “You caught me right in the nick of time. I can see pretty well
with my good eye, only I can’t measure distances. They tell me that will
come by degrees.”
Even though occupied with other thoughts, I was surprised that my rescuer
didn’t respond to my civility, for another result of the war is the ease
with which the men and women who have been engaged in it get on terms
of natural acquaintanceship. When artificial barriers are removed, it
is extraordinary how quickly we go back to primitive human simplicity.
Social and sex considerations have thus been minimized to a degree which,
it seems to me, will make it difficult ever to re-establish them in their
old first place. They say it was an advance in civilization when we
ceased to see each other as primarily males and females and knew we were
men and women. Possibly the war will lead us a step farther still and
reveal us as children of one family.
That a nurse shouldn’t have a friendly word for a partly incapacitated
man struck me, therefore, as odd, though my mind would not have dwelt on
the circumstance if she hadn’t released my arm as abruptly as she had
taken it. Having helped me to reach a comparatively empty quarter of the
deck, she had counted, apparently, on the slowness and awkwardness of my
movements to slip away before I could turn round.
When I managed this feat she was already some yards down the length of
the deck, hurrying back toward the crowd from which we had emerged. I saw
then that she was too little to be tall and too tall to be considered
little. Moreover, she carried herself proudly, placing her dainty feet
daintily, and walking with that care which people display when they
are not certain of their ability to walk straight. Reaching one of the
entrances, she went in, exactly as I had seen a woman pass through a
doorway two years four months and three weeks before.
I was sure it was she—and yet I told myself it couldn’t be. I told myself
it couldn’t be, for the reason that I had been deceived so frequently
before that I had grown distrustful of my senses. All through the
intervening time I had been getting glimpses of a slight figure here,
of an alert movement there, of the poise of a head, of the wave of a
hand—that for an instant would make my heart stop beating; but in the
end it had meant nothing but the stirring of old memories. In this case
I could have been convinced if the coincidence had not put too great a
strain on all the probabilities.
I was to learn later that there was no coincidence; but I must tell my
story in its right order.
The right order takes me back to my return to New York, after my week-end
at Mrs. Grace’s, on the morning of June 29, 1914.
During the two or three hours of jogging down the length of Long Island
in the train I tried to keep out of my mind all thoughts but one; having
deposited my bags at my rooms, I should go to Stinson’s.
With regard to this intention I was clearly aware of a threefold blend of
reaction.
First, there was the pity of it. I could take a detached view of this
downfall, just as if I had heard of it in connection with Beady Lamont or
old Colonel Straight. Though I should be only a man dropped in the ranks,
while they would have been leaders, the grief of my comrades over my
collapse would be no less sincere.
But by tearing my mind away from that aspect of the case I reverted to
the satisfaction at being in the gutter, of which the memories had never
ceased to haunt me. I cannot expect to make you, who have always lived on
the upper levels, understand this temptation; I can only tell you that
for men who have once been outside the moral law there is a recurrent
tugging at the senses to get there again. I once knew an Englishman who
had lived in the interior of Australia and had “gone black.” On his
return to make his home in England he was seized with so consuming a
nostalgia for his black wives and black children that in the end he went
back to them. Something like this was the call I was always hearing—the
call of Circe to go down.
But I knew, too, that there was method in this madness. I was
deliberately starting out to earn the wages of sin; and the wages of
sin would be death. I must repeat that going to Stinson’s would be no
more than a slow, convenient process of committing suicide. It would be
committing suicide in a way for which Regina Barry would not have to feel
herself responsible, as she would were I to use the revolver. Having
brought so much on her, I was unwilling to bring more, even though my
heart was hot against her.
My heart was hot against her—and yet I had to admit that she had been
within her rights. When all was said that could be said in my favor,
I had deceived her. I had let her go on for the best part of a year
believing me to be what I was not, when during much of the time I could
see that such a belief was growing perilous to her happiness. I had been
a coward. I should have said from the first moment—the moment when she
took me for my brother Jack—“I am a crook.” Then all would have been open
and aboveboard between us; but as it was there was only one way out. Any
other way—any way that would have allowed me to go on living longer than
the time it would take drink to kill me—would have been unbearable.
The checkmate to these musings came when my eyes fell upon Lovey. He was
at the door of the apartment, not only to welcome me, but to give me
ocular demonstration that he had kept the faith while I had been away.
It was the first time since the beginning of our association that I had
left him for forty-eight hours; and that he was on his honor during those
two days was no secret between us. The radiant triumph of his greeting
struck into me like a stab.
For Lovey now was almost as completely reconstructed as I. I use the
qualifying “almost” only because the longer standing of his habits and
the harder conditions of his life had burnt the past more indelibly into
him. Of either of us one could say, as the Florentines are reported to
have said of Dante, “There goes a man who has been in hell”; but the
marks of the experience had been laid more brutally on my companion than
on me.
Otherwise he showed cheering signs of resuscitation. Neat, even at the
worst of times, he was now habitually scrubbed and shaved, and as elegant
as Colonel Straight’s establishment could turn him out. He had, in fact,
for the hours he had free from washing windows, metamorphosed himself
into the typical, self-respecting English valet, with a pride in his work
sprung chiefly of devotion.
And for me he made a home. I mean by that that he was always
there—something living to greet me, to move about in the dingy little
apartment. As I am too gregarious, I may say too affectionate, to live
contentedly alone, it meant much to me to have some one else within the
walls I called mine, even if actual companionship was limited.
But whatever it was, I was about to destroy it. I could scarcely look him
in the eyes; I could hardly say a word to him.
While unpacking my suit-case he said, timorously, “Y’ain’t sick, Slim?”
I began to change the suit I had been wearing for one that would attract
less attention at Stinson’s.
“No, Lovey; I’m all right. I’m just—I’m just going out.”
And I went out. I went out without bidding the poor old fellow good-by,
though I knew it was the last the anxious pale-blue eyes would see of
me in that phase of comradeship. When next we met I should probably be
drunk, and he would have come to get drunk in my company. It would then
be a question as to which of us would hold out the longer.
And that was the thought that after an hour or two turned me back. I
could throw my own life away, but I couldn’t throw away his. However
reckless I might be on my own account, I couldn’t be so when I held
another man’s fate in my hand.
Even so, I didn’t go back at once. Half-way to Stinson’s—I was on foot—I
came to a sudden halt. It was as if the sense of responsibility toward
Lovey wouldn’t allow me to go any farther. I said to myself that I
must think the matter out—that I must find and would find additional
justification for my course before going on.
To do that I turned into a chance hotel.
I like the wide hospitality of American hotels, where any tired or
lonesome wayfarer can enter and sit down. I have never been a clubman.
Clubs are too elective and selective for my affinities; they are too
threshed and winnowed and refined. I have never in spirit had any desire
to belong to a chosen few, since not only in heart, but in tastes and
temperament, I belong to the unchosen many. I enjoy, therefore, the
freedom and promiscuity of the lobby, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry
has the same right as I.
Annoyed by the fact that a halt had been called in my errand of
self-destruction, I began to ask myself why. The only answer that came to
me was that this old man, this old reprobate, if one chose to call him
so, cared for me. He had been giving me an affection that prompted him to
the most vital sacrifice, to the most difficult kind of self-control.
Then suddenly that truth came back to me which Andrew Christian had
pointed out a few months earlier, and which in the mean time had grown
dim, that any true love is of God.
I was startled. I was awed. In saying these things I am trying only to
tell you what happened in my inner self; and possibly when a man’s inner
self has plumbed the depths like mine it means more to him to get a bit
of insight than it does to you who have always been on the level. In any
case this question rose within me: Was it possible that out of this old
man, this drunkard, this murderer, cast off by his children, cast out
by men, some feeble stream was welling up toward me from that pure and
holy fountain that is God? Was it possible that this strayed creature
had, through what he was giving me—me!—been finding his way back to the
universal heart? If ever a human being had been dwelling in love he
had been dwelling in it for a year and more; and there were the words,
distilled out of the consciousness of the ages, and written for all time,
“He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” Was it God that this poor,
purblind old fellow had all unconsciously been bringing me, shedding
round us, keeping us straight, making us strong, making us prosperous,
helping us to fight our way upward?