But on the way I had another prompting—one that took me into the office
of a tourist company to consult time-tables and buy tickets.
“Lovey,” I said, when I got home, “we must both begin packing for all
we’re worth. We’re leaving for Montreal to-night.”
“Goin’ to see your people, Slim, and stay in that swell hotel?”
“Not just now, Lovey. Later, perhaps. First of all we’re going for a
month into the woods north of the Ottawa.”
His jaw dropped. “Into the woods?”
“Yes, old sport. You’ll like it.”
“Oh no, I won’t, Slim. I never was in no woods in my life—except London
and New York. There’s one thing I never could abide, and that’s trees.”
“You won’t say that when you’ve seen real trees. We’ll shoot and fish and
camp out—”
“Camp out? In a tent, like? Oh, I couldn’t, sonny! I’d ketch me death!”
“Then if you do we’ll come back; only, we’ve got to go now.”
“Why have we? It’s awful nice here in New York; and I don’t pay no
attention to people that says it’s too hot.”
I made the appeal which I knew he would not resist. Laying my hand on his
shoulder, I said: “Because, old man, I’m—I’m in trouble. I want to get
away where—where I sha’n’t see—some one—again—and I need you.”
“It ain’t that girl, Slim? She—she haven’t turned you down?”
The words took me so much by surprise that I hadn’t time to get angry.
All I could feel was a foolish, nervous kind of coolness.
“Lovey, what I want you to know I’ll tell you; and at present I’m telling
you this: I’ve got to get out; I’ve got to get out quick; and I need you
to buck me up. No one can buck me up like you.”
“Oh, if it’s that!” He would have followed me then to places more
dreadful than the Canadian woods. “Will you take all your suits—or only
just them new summer things?”
_CHAPTER XVIII_
Thus it happened that when war broke out I was deep in the wilderness.
For more than a month I had had no contact with the outside world, not a
letter, not a newspaper. I had escaped from New York without leaving an
address, since Cantyre was absent. I had meant to write to him to have my
letters forwarded, but I never had. Could I have guessed that war was to
begin and to last so long I might have acted differently; but the name of
Gavrilo Prinzip was still meaningless.
All sportsmen in my part of Canada know Jack Hiller’s, just as
frequenters of the Adirondacks know Paul Smith’s. From Jack Hiller’s
we struck farther in, to the rude camp where I had spent many a happy
holiday when I was a lad. Two guides, an Indian and a half-breed, did the
heavy work; and some long-forgotten, atavistic sporting strain in Lovey
allowed him, groaningly and discontentedly, to enjoy himself.
But if I expected to find peace I saw I was mistaken. The distance I had
put between myself and the house dominating Long Island Sound was only
geographical. In spirit I was always back on that veranda, living through
again the minutes of the long waiting. So the solitude was no solitude
for me. And then one day the half-breed’s canoe shot over the waters of
the lake, bringing supplies from Jack Hiller’s, with the news that the
world had gone to war.
I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of men and women there are to
whom the war came as a blessed opportunity to get away from uselessness
or heartache. Stranded, purposeless, spiritless, futile, tired, empty,
with something broken in the life or seemingly at an end, they suddenly
found themselves called on to put forth energies they never knew they
had, to meet needs they had never heard of.
“Son of man, can these dry bones live?” one might have been asking
oneself a few years previously; and all at once there were multitudes,
multitudes in the valley of decision, energized into newness of being.
Among them I was only one humble, stupid individual; but the summons was
like that which came to the dust when it was bidden to be Adam and a man.
I have no intention of telling you in detail what happened to me between
that August morning in 1914 and the day I stepped on board the boat at
Liverpool more than two years later. There is no need. You know the
outlines of that tale already. My case hardly differed externally from
any other of the millions of cases you have heard about. The machine of
war does not vary in its working much more than any other machine, except
for the drama played in each man’s soul.
And of that I can say nothing. I don’t know why—but I cannot. Day and
night I think of what I saw and heard and did in those two years, but
some other language must be coined before I can begin to speak of it.
In this I am not singular; it is a rule to which I know few, if any,
exceptions. I have heard returned soldiers on the lecture platform,
telling part of the truth, and nothing but the truth, but never the whole
truth nor the most vital truth. I have talked with some of them when the
lectures were over, and a flare in the eye has said, “This is for public
consumption; but you and I know that the realities are not to be put into
words.”
One little incident I must give you, however, before I revert to what
happened on the boat.
Having in that early August made my way to Ottawa with Lovey, and decided
that I must respond at once to the country’s call, I expected a struggle
with him, or something bitter in the way of protest. But in this I was
mistaken. He, too, had been thinking the matter over, and, hard as it
would be for him to see me do it, that quiet valor which practically no
Englishman is without raised him at once to the level of his part.
“All right, Slim. It’s yer dooty to go, and mine to give ye up. We won’t
say no more about that.”
“Thanks, Lovey, for making it so easy for me. I’ll never forget it as
long as I live. Now there’s only one thing—”
“If it’s about me goin’ straight, sonny, while ye’re away, I’ll swear to
God not to look so much as on the same side o’ the street as a drop o’
liquor till He brings ye back to me.”
“Then I believe He will bring me back, old fellow.”
“Sure He’ll bring ye back. Ye’ll be ’ome before Christmas; and, Slim, if
it isn’t goin’ to cost ye too much money, won’t ye ’old on to them rooms
so as I can keep our little place together, like, and ’ave it all clean
and nice for you—?”
Having consented to this, I was able to make further provision for the
old man when Cantyre joined me for a day or two in Montreal to bid me
good-by. Lovey’s heroism was the sort of thing to draw out Cantyre’s
sentimental vein of approval.
“I’ll take him and look after him, Frank. He’ll valet me till you come
back. I’ve always wanted a man to do that sort of thing, and only haven’t
had one because I thought it would look like putting on side. But now
that he drops down to me out of heaven, as you might say, I’ll take him
as a souvenir of you.”
_CHAPTER XIX_
All these interests had seemed far away from me during the two and a half
years over there; but in proportion as I drew near Liverpool that morning
they reformed themselves in the mists of the near future, as old memories
come back with certain scents and scenes. Not till the damp, smoky haze
of the great port was closing in round me did I realize that my more
active part in the vast cosmic episode was at an end, and that I had come
to the hour I had so often longed for—and was going home.
I was going home; and yet, for the minute, at any rate, I was not glad.
There is always something painful in the taking up again of forsaken
ties, however much we once loved them. It was like a repetition of the
effort with which I had renewed my relations with my people. The actual
has a way of seizing us in its tentacles and making us feel that it is
the only life we ever truly led. There was a time when I seemed to forget
that I had ever been anywhere but in the trenches. During the month or
two that I was blind I got so used to the condition as to find it strange
that I had ever seen. And always, in face of the fierce intensity of the
present, the life in New York was remote, shadowy, and dim, as they say
the life in prison becomes from its very monotony to those who look back
on it after their release.
What it really amounted to was that during those two years I seemed to
have grown in the size of my mental conceptions. Having been hurled into
an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either
the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other
ways of living had grown pale and small. If you can imagine yourself
swirling through space, riding both zephyrs and tempests equally as a
matter of course, you can understand how tame it would seem to be tied
down to earth again, to go at nothing more stimulating than a walking
pace. Otherwise typified, a lion that has been in a cage, and after two
and a half years of free roving in the jungle finds itself returned to
the cage again, would probably have the same sinking of the heart as I
when I saw the hulk of the _Assiniboia_ loom up before me in the dock.
And then came that odd little incident of the nurse to connect me with
the past by a new form of excitement. I have to confess that it was
excitement largely compounded of wonder and distress. A dull ache told me
that sensation was returning to a deadened nerve, and that where I had
supposed there was paralysis at least there was going to be reaction and
perhaps a pang.
For by this time I had passed through that process which is commonly
known as “getting over it.” That is, a new self was living a new life on
a new plane of existence. All that belonged to the period before I went
to enlist at Ottawa was on the other side of a flood. I had not precisely
forgotten; I had only died and become a transmigrated soul. Whatever was
past was past. I might suffer from it; I might feel its consequences;
but I couldn’t live it again. On the other hand, I was living vividly in
the present. Not so much consciously or by word as because I couldn’t
help it, I had merged everything I was into one dominating purpose with
which, as far as I was aware, Regina Barry had nothing to do. The aims
for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When
these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It
would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be
lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.
So mentally I was pressing forward. Though I could do no more fighting,
I had been told that there was still work by which I could contribute
to the object beside which no other object could be taken into
consideration. I was being sent back for that reason. Not much had been
told me as yet about what I was to do, but I understood that it was to be
in connection with American public opinion. It will be remembered that
at the end of 1916 the United States was not only not in the war, but it
was still doubtful as to whether or not she ever would be. The hand of a
cautious listener being on the pulse of a patient people, it was on the
beat of that pulse that the issue turned.
I understood that, with my acquaintance ranging among high and low, I
was to do what I could to make the pulse a little quicker. I might not
be able to do much, but we had all learned the value of small individual
contributions. It was argued that in proportion as the American people
began to see on which side the balance of righteousness dipped, my
game leg and my black patch, and the haggardness and gauntness and
batteredness of my whole appearance, would have some appeal. The appeal
would be the stronger for the fact that I was not an Englishman, but a
Canadian—blood-brother to the man of his own continent, blood-brother
to the Briton, blood-brother to the Frenchman, blood-son of the great
ideals fathered by the Anglo-Saxon race, and in which all free peoples in
the course of two hundred years had been made participants—and quick to
spring to their defense. I was to be, therefore, a kind of unobtrusive,
unaccredited ambassador to the man in the office and the street, with
instructions to be inoffensive but persuasive.
And on this mission all my conscious thought was set. No hermit in the
desert was ever more entirely self-dedicated to the saving of his soul
than I to the quiet preaching of this new crusade among men like Ralph
Coningsby and Stephen Cantyre and Beady Lamont and Headlights and Daisy
and Momma and Mouse, and any others with whom I should come in contact.
In fulfilling this task I wanted no one to disturb or distract me; and
here at the very outset was some one who might do both.
_CHAPTER XX_
After having found my cabin and seen to my belongings I hobbled up on
deck once more, to verify my vision of the Canadian nurse’s uniform.
I discovered the uniform in two or three instances, but in none that
corresponded to the figure too little to be tall and too tall to be
considered little I had watched receding down the deck.
As for the costume itself, it was not difficult to find myself beside
one of the ladies who wore it—a beautiful, grave woman, of the type of
Bouguereau’s Consolatrice, who, with hands resting on the deck rail, was
looking down at the movement on the dock.
“There seem to be a number of nurses going back,” I observed, after an
introductory word or two.
“There are three in our party—myself and the two over there.”
The two over there were two I had already seen, neither of them being my
pilot of a half-hour previously.
“I thought I saw another,” I threw off, casually.
“I believe there is one—an American girl from Lady Rideover’s hospital at
Taplow.”
As I had just come from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow, and Lady
Rideover herself was my sister, I suggested, without mentioning the
relationship, that in this speculation there was some mistake.
“She may not have come directly from there,” the Consolatrice admitted;
“but I know she was with Lady Rideover six months ago.”
“But six months ago I was with Lady Rideover myself.”
“Well, she was there then.”
“But I should have seen her if she had been.”
She turned slowly round on me, with deep, kind eyes. “Would you? You
could see all the time?”
I had forgotten that. There had been two months when I hadn’t seen at
all. Any one might have come and gone during that time.
Remarking on the inconvenience of having no list of passengers, I asked
my companion if she knew the young lady’s name.
“No; but I can inquire of my friends. They may know.”
Having crossed to speak to the nurses on the other side of the deck, she
came back without the information.
“But Miss Prynne,” she added, “that’s the short one, says that the young
lady came over about two years ago with Lady Rideover’s sister, Miss
Melbury, of Montreal.”
I withdrew to ponder. I had been in continuous if desultory communication
with my sisters during all my time abroad, and no mention of Regina Barry
had ever escaped either. I had not supposed that they knew one another. I
couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had been under the same roof with
her at Taplow and had not been aware of it. And here she was on board
the ship on which I was returning home, and able to come to my aid at a
minute when I wanted help.
I had often wished that some of my New York correspondents would speak of
her, but no one ever had. Except in the case of Cantyre this was hardly
strange, for—apart from Hilda Grace, who never wrote to me—no one knew
that Regina Barry and I had meant anything to each other. If Cantyre had
spoken of her, it would have been on his own account; but confidential
as he was in private talk, his letters were never more than a few terse
lines. So I had rather bitterly imagined her as going on with the testing
of other men, as she had tested Jim Hunter, Cantyre, and me—trying them
and finding them wanting. In ungenerous moments I went so far as to hope
that Nemesis might overtake her in some tremendous passion in which she
herself would be tried and tossed aside.
It was, however, the second day out before I actually came face to face
with her. Her absence from the deck had been part of the mystery. Having
swung into the Mersey, we remained there all Sunday night—it was a Sunday
we had gone on board—and much of Monday. Accepting as necessary the
secrecy which in war-time enshrouds an Atlantic voyage, the passengers
had made themselves as comfortable as the conditions permitted, and taken
air and exercise by promenading the decks. There could have been no
better opportunity for finding familiar faces, but, apart from one or two
distant acquaintances, I saw none. The three nurses’ uniforms I had noted
already were continually about; but I never found the fourth.
And then on Tuesday, after we had lost sight of the Irish coast, there
was another queer little incident. As I could walk but little, I had been
reading in the music-room. Tired of doing that and eager to continue my
search for the missing uniform, I had limped to the doorway, screened by
a heavy portière, leading out toward the companionway. But while I stood
turning up the collar of my overcoat the portière was suddenly pulled
aside, and we were before each other, with a suggestion of a similar
occurrence three and a half years before.
The very differences in my appearance—the mustache, the patch over my
left eye, the military coat—must have helped to recall the earlier
occasion by the indirect means of contrast. As for her, she was what she
had seemed to me then—two great flaming eyes. They were tired eyes now,
haunted, tragic perhaps, and I saw later that when you caught them off
their guard they were pensive, if not mournful. They were, indeed, all I
could see of her, for the rest of her features were hidden by the veil
over the lower part of the face which women occasionally copy from the
Turkish lady’s yashmak. A small black cap, held by a jade-green pin, and
a long, shapeless black ulster or coat completed a costume quite unlike
the uniform for which I had been looking.
I can only describe that encounter as the meeting of two transmigrated
souls. She had gone as far in her direction as I in mine; but I couldn’t
tell at a glance in what direction she had gone. It was what struck me
dumb. When Paolo and Francesca met in space they had nothing to say to
each other except with the eyes. In some such case as that we found
ourselves. The pressure of topics was too great to allow of immediate
selection. She seemed to wait for me to utter the first word, and as I
was at a loss she dropped the portière behind her, inclined her head, and
passed on into the saloon.
Though it was my place to follow her, I couldn’t, for the minute, take
so obvious a course. I was not only too mystified by what I had heard of
her, but too confused as to our standing toward each other. I couldn’t
begin with a “How do you do?” as if we had parted on the ordinary social
terms, while anything more dramatic would have been absurd. Hobbling
along the deck, I took refuge in the smoking-room in order to reflect.
Reflection was not easy. Over its calm fields emotion spread like water
through a broken dike. For two and a half years the emotional had been so
stemmed and banked and dammed in me that I had thought it under control
forever. I had had enough to do in giving orders or carrying them out.
But, now that the repressed had broken its bounds again, the tide swept
everything away with it.
Not that I knew just what I was experiencing; on the contrary, I couldn’t
have disentangled the element of anger from that of curiosity, nor that
of curiosity from that of joy. All I could say for certain was that never
in my life had I been so anxious to keep free; never had I so much needed
concentration and single-mindedness. The task to which I had vowed my
undivided energy and heart demanded a genuine celibacy of the will; and
now of all the women in the world....
I was working on this train of thought when I became aware that people
were running along the deck. Glancing about me at the same moment, I saw
I was alone in the smoking-room. A whistle blew, piercingly, alarmingly.
By the time I had struggled to my feet the ship changed her course so
sharply as to throw me against a chair.
I knew what it was, of course. We had been talking of the possibility
ever since we left the Mersey. However much we tried to keep the mind
away from the subject, it came back to it, as a mischievous boy makes
straight for the thing forbidden him.
My first thought was for the girl in the yashmak. I must find her, see
she had a life-belt, and take her to her boat. Before I had scrambled to
the door, however, it flew open, apparently of its own accord, while a
wild nor’wester positively blew the young lady in.
It also blew away anything like Paolo-and-Francesca sentiment.
“Oh, here you are!” she exclaimed, breathlessly. “I’ve been hunting for
you everywhere. They say we’ve sighted a periscope. Take this and put it
on.”
Of the two life-belts she carried she flung one to me, beginning to
fasten the other about herself.
“But the one you’ve brought me must belong to some one else,” I objected,
as I aided her. “I’ve got one of my own in my cabin. I’ll just run down—”
She brushed this aside. “No; this is yours. I went and got it.”
“You—” I began in astonishment.
“I’m a nurse—or a kind of one,” she said, hastily. “That’s what I’m here
for.”
“But you knew where my cabin was?”
“I found out. Oh, hurry—please!”
She helped me as a medieval lady might have helped her lord to buckle on
his sword; and presently we were out on deck.
As we had twice already drilled in the unsightly things, we had lost
the sense of the grotesque appearance presented by ourselves and our
fellow-travelers. Besides, we were too eager to descry the periscope to
have any more thought of ourselves than a wild duck of how it looks when
skimming away from a sniper. Indeed, it was chiefly of a hunted wild duck
that our zigzagging boat reminded me.
It was a sullen day, with that scudding of low, gray clouds which looks
as if the heavens were hastening to some Armageddon of their own. The
sea had hardly got over the swell left by one gale when it was being
lashed into fury by another. The _Assiniboia_ pitched and rolled and
tore through the waters like a monster goaded by innumerable stings. I
should have found it next to impossible to struggle along the deck had my
protectress not stood by and steadied me.
There was a kind of foolish pretense at the chivalrous in my tone as I
said, “I’ll just see you to your boat before going over to mine.”
“We’re in the same boat,” she answered, briefly. “Do come along.”