“Oh, I know. If you came into my room you didn’t make a sound. You
arranged that with Mabel. But haven’t you heard that the blind develop an
extra sense?”
“Not as quickly as that—or with that precision.” She brightened with a
new thought. “If your extra sense told you I was there, why didn’t you
speak to me?”
“Suppose I said that I respected your incognita? If you didn’t want to
speak to me it must have been for a reason. I couldn’t ignore that.”
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
A shell from the submarine struck the water somewhere near us, though all
we saw was a column of white spume on the port side of the ship, while we
were on the starboard.
She ignored even this. Standing erect, with her hands in the pockets of
her ulster, with no feature to betray her but her eyes, she surmised,
calmly, “Some of the other nurses or one of the patients must have given
you a hint.”
“None of them ever pronounced your name in my hearing.”
“Then I give up guessing!” she said, with a touch of impatience.
“Which is what I can’t do.”
“But what have you to guess at?”
“At what you’ve done it—at what you’re doing it—for.”
She may have smiled behind the yashmak as she said, “What difference does
it make to you?”
“I dare say it doesn’t make any—except that I seem to be the person
benefited.”
“In time of war the soldier—the man who does the thing—is the person
benefited.”
“Oh no; there’s the cause.”
“But surely, if we’ve learned anything during the past two years, it’s
that what the soldier does for the cause can’t compare with what the
cause does for the soldier.”
I saw my opportunity and was quick to use it. “So that out of what you’ve
been doing for me even you have got something.”
She turned this neatly. “I’ve got a great deal—out of what I’ve been
doing for every one. Not that it’s been much. I merely mean that,
whatever it’s been, it’s brought me in far more than I’ve ever given out.”
The swing of the boat was so abrupt as almost to make her heel over. Up
and down the deck such passengers as were clinging to nothing were flung
this way and that, with some laughing and a few involuntary cries. Miss
Barry having braced me in a corner of the alcove because of my game leg,
I kept my footing steadily, but the girl herself was thrown square into
my arms.
Not more than a second later another Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! warned us that
another shell was on the way; but before we had time to be afraid a soft
P-ff! told us that this, too, had struck the water. The waterspout, this
time on the starboard side, not only spattered us with spray, but made
it clear that only the sharp shifting of the course had saved us from a
hole in our bow. That within the next few minutes our enemy would get us
somewhere was a little more than probable.
Then from every cluster of heads came the cry, “Oh, look!”
There she was—a blue-gray streak, only a little darker than the blue-gray
waters. The change in our course revealed her as she lay on the surface
to shell us, since she was too far away to send us a torpedo. We forgot
everything—Regina Barry and I forgot each other—to gaze. My arms relaxed
their hold on the girl because there was no longer a mind to direct them;
the girl took command of herself because it was only thus that she could
observe the most baleful and fascinating monster in the world.
For it was as a monster, baleful and fascinating, that we regarded her.
She was not a thing planned by men’s brains and built in a shipyard.
She was an abnormal, unscrupulous, venomous water beast, with a special
enmity toward man. She had about her the horror of the trackless, the
deep, the solitary, the lonesome, the devilish. Few of us had ever got
a glimpse of her before. It was like Saint George’s first sight of the
dragon that wasted men and cities, and called forth his hatred and his
sword.
I think that sheer hatred was the cause of our banging away at her with
our two guns. We could hardly expect to hit her. She must have been out
of our range, and our only hope was in getting out of hers.
As far as we could judge she was lying still and shelling us at her ease.
Splash! Splash! Splash! The screeching things went all round us; but by
some miracle they were only spectacular.
Viewed as a spectacle, there was a terrific beauty in it all. Nature and
man were raging together, ferociously, magnificently, without conscience,
without quarter, without remorse. Hell had unsealed its springs even in
us who stood watchful and inactive. There was a sense of abhorrent glory
in the knowledge that there were no limits to which we would not go.
That there were no limits to which our enemy would not go with us was
stimulating, quickening, like the flicker of the whip to the racer. About
and above us were all the elements of which man is most accustomed to be
afraid, but which, now that we were among them, inspired an appalling
glee.
It was amazing how quickly we got used to it, just as, I am told, a man
after a night or two gets used to being in the death-house. To be shelled
on a stormy, lonely ocean came within a few minutes to being a matter
of course. Had we had time to reflect and look backward, it would have
seemed strange to think that we had made voyages across the Atlantic in
which we had not been shelled.
Then all of a sudden there was a noise like that in a house when it is
struck by lightning. It was as if all creation had burst into sound,
as if there were nothing anywhere that was not a concomitant of an
ear-splitting, soul-splitting crash. It was over us; it was round us;
it was everywhere; it might have been within us. In our own persons we
seemed to be rent by it.
From the port side a blast of smoke rose and poisoned the dark air. A few
shrieks, half suppressed by the shriekers, ran the length of the deck,
and a few male exclamations of astonishment and awe. For the most part,
however, we stood still and soundless, as I believe we should have held
ourselves had it proved to be the Judgment Day.
Our immediate impression was that all the aft of the ship had been
carried away. Had she begun to settle stern foremost on the instant we
should not have been surprised. We could hardly believe that the long,
narrow perspective of the deck, with its groups dotting the length of it,
could remain unshattered and afloat. We were sure the decks below must
have been blown into air and water.
For the hundredth part of a second the _Assiniboia_ appeared to stop
still in her course, like a creature with its death-wound. She seemed
stricken, stunned. But she gave another lurch, another swing to her huge
person; and when the second shell came on, taking the range of that which
had struck her, it plowed the waves astern. All seemed to be over in the
space of between two breaths. By the time we could get our wits together
sufficiently to ask what had happened she was once more driving onward.
It was splendid. It was sublime. It thrilled one with pride in pluck and
seamanship. One could have hugged the brave old leviathan by the neck.
A British seaman, running down the deck on some errand, cried, as he
passed us: “Got the old bucket aft, just above the water-line. But, Lor’!
she don’t mind it! Didn’t do no ’arm. On’y killed Sammy Smelt, a steerage
cabin-boy.”
But it was a beginning. Nothing could save us now but speed and the
captain’s skill. The young officer who had helped to strip the covering
off No. 5 strolled by us, smoking a cigarette.
“We’re showing her a pretty clean pair of heels,” he said, coolly, by way
of dealing out encouragement. “Ship’s carpenter’s begun plugging up the
hole. That won’t hurt us so long as we don’t get another.”
“What about the cabin-boy?” some one called out.
He shrugged his shoulders, saying, merely, “Doctor attending to the
wounded.”
It was strange to be tearing through the seas, with that erratic course
of the crazed leviathan, when at any second death might strike us from
the air. I had often been under shell-fire, of course; but on land there
was generally some dugout, some _abri_, in which one could seek shelter.
What impressed me here was the vast exposure of it all. We could only
stand with the heaven over us, ready to take to the boats, if need be, or
equally ready to be blown into bits like little Sammy Smelt.
Among the people on the deck the quiet waiting which the traditions of
the race have made second nature continued. We might have been passengers
gathered at the entrance to a railway track. If a scared look haunted
some faces, it was not more than might have been occasioned by the
extreme lateness of a train.
The shells were still splashing, the ship was still driving onward under
every pound of steam, when I looked again at the girl in the yashmak.
It must not be understood that I had looked away from her for long. The
period of our extreme peril did not in reality cover more than a few
minutes. Like the crisis of a fever, it was slow in coming, but it passed
quickly, though we needed some time to realize the fact.
But when I looked again at Regina Barry I found her as little disturbed
as a woman could possibly have been in that special situation. Not to be
hurled again into my arms, she held now to the hand-rail that runs along
cabin walls; but she watched me rather than the ocean. I was her charge
and the ocean was not. The blue-gray streak that had held her attention
for a while was visible only when the turnings of the ship threw it into
view; otherwise we had nothing to see on the starboard side except an
infinitude of billows with curling white crests.
To resume something like the customary attitude of human beings toward
each other I said, as casually as I could manage, “You came over here
just after I did, didn’t you?”
Having purposely framed my sentence in just those words, it was some
satisfaction to get the result I was playing for. It took all the
aplomb—a rather shy aplomb—of which she was mistress to answer in a way
that wouldn’t underscore my meaning.
“Possibly; but I don’t remember when you came over.”
Having given the date of my sailing, I added, “And you left with Evelyn a
little more than three weeks later?”
“Since you know everything, you naturally know that.” She took on the old
air of being at once smiling and defiant as she asked, “And has the fact
any special significance?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” Before she could protest that there was
no such significance I put the question, “How did you come to know her?”
“Is she so terribly difficult to know?”
“Not in the least; only, you’d never seen her in your life at the time
when”—I gathered all my innermost strength together to bring the words
out—“at the time when I talked to you last.”
She, too, gathered her innermost strength together, rising to the
reference gallantly.
“Oh, well, a good many things have happened since then.”
Before going further I was obliged to pause and reckon how much I dared.
Of the many sensitive points in my history, we were touching on the most
sensitive. I was fully aware that since the sleeping dog was sleeping
it might be better to let him lie. Once he was roused, there might be a
new set of perils to deal with, perils we could avoid by softly stepping
round them. That Paolo should go one way in space and Francesca another
seemed to be decreed by inevitable fate; so why interfere with the
process?
I should probably not have interfered with it had the circumstances not
raised us above the sphere of our ordinary interests. The roar of the
wind, the tumult of the sea, the plunging of the ship, the indescribable
whining of shells, the knowledge of danger—were as the orchestra which
lifts the duet to emotional planes that dialogue alone could never attain
to. Though our words might be commonplace, every syllable was charged
with tones and overtones and undertones of meaning to be seized by
something more subtle than intelligence. Prudence might have said, “Let
everything alone,” but that urging of the being which escapes the leash
of prudence drove me on to speak.
“Do you remember when I talked to you last?”
She answered with the detachment of a witness under compulsion to tell
the truth. The personal was as far as possible eliminated from her voice.
“Perfectly.”
“We—we seemed to—to break off in the middle of a conversation.”
“Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.”
The statement took my breath away. For some seconds I could only stare
at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie
direct.
“Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last.
“What do you think?”
“I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.”
“And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—”
I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I
might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to
say that?”
She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the
clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before
going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult
situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible
screened against embarrassment.
She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her
eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the
barricade of her composure.
“No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would
have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.”
“But we could have talked them over.”
“If you’d waited.”
“I should have waited forever if I’d known.”
“Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared
next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I
could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.”
I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914,
I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to
recover from the first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt
to me.
“It was curious, though,” I went on, “that that name, Gavrilo Prinzip,
should have hammered itself in on my brain. I recall it now as about the
only thing I could think of. I didn’t know what it meant, and I was far
from supposing it the touchstone of human destinies that it afterward
proved to be; but in some unreasoning way it held me. It was like the
meaningless catch of a tune with which you can’t go on, till all at once
you see it finishes in—”
“In a trumpet-call. Yes, I know. You had to follow it. So had I. I don’t
think there’s much more than that to be said.”
The blue-gray streak was again on the starboard side, but comfortingly
far astern. Though we were still within her range, we were getting the
benefit of distance. At the same time some one called our attention to a
blotch of black smoke, far down on the eastern horizon. A destroyer was
coming to our aid.