“How long did you expect me to wait that afternoon?”
She looked down at the deck, answering with a perceptible infusion of the
bitter in her tone.
“I didn’t fix a time. I wasn’t sitting with my watch in my hand.”
“But I was.”
“Evidently.”
“Why didn’t you come down?”
“I came down as soon as I could.”
“What kept you?”
She raised her eyes for a fleeting glance—lowering them again. At the
same time her voice sank, too, so that in the fury of sound about us she
was no more than audible.
“The thing you told me.”
“And that kept you—in what way?”
“In the way of making everything—different.”
“How much does that mean—different?”
“It means a good deal.”
“Can’t you tell me exactly?”
“I can’t tell you exactly; but it was something like this.” She fixed
her eyes on me steadily. “When they first opened the Subway in New York
I came up out of a station one winter afternoon just as the lights were
lit, and instead of going to the right, as I should have done, I turned
to the left. When I had walked about fifteen minutes I was dazed. Though
I was in a part of New York I knew perfectly well, I couldn’t recognize
anything. It was all a confusion of lights. I couldn’t tell which of the
streets ran north and south, or which were east and west, or what the
buildings were that I’d been used to seeing all my life. In the end some
one took me into a drug-store and made me sit down till I had time to
reorientate myself.”
“But you did it in the end?”
“That time—yes.”
“And this time? The time we’re talking about?”
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
Bang!
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
Bang!
From the port side there came something like a feeble cheer—a chorus of
rough male voices and high female screams, timid and yet glad.
A new swing of our crazed leviathan disclosed the reason for this
wavering, victorious cry. There were two more blobs of smoke on the
horizon, and from different points on the Irish coast three huge birds
were flying like messengers from some god. Moreover, the blob of smoke we
had first seen now had a considerable stretch of the ocean behind her,
and in front a parting of the spray like two white plumes as she tore in
our direction.
“She sure is some little ripper!” came a dry Yankee voice in the group
about life-boat No. 5.
“Thirty-five knots if it’s one.”
“Them ’planes’ll overtake her, though, and be on the spot as soon as she
is.”
“Gosh! I’d like to see Fritzie then!”
“J’ever see a kingfisher sweep down on a gudgeon?”
“Gee-whiz! Look at Fritzie! Goin’ to submerge!”
And sure enough, as we stared, the blue-gray streak began to sink behind
the waves, becoming to the imagination even more a giant deep-sea reptile
after it had gone.
Almost simultaneously our leviathan calmed down, resuming her straight
course. It was done apparently with the wordless, unexplained
inconsequence with which a runaway horse will suddenly fall into a
peaceful trot. There was no stopping to salute the destroyers and ’planes
that were hastening to our help or to exchange confidences with them as
to our common enemy. There was neither hail nor farewell as we forged
again toward the open sea.
Danger being considered past, the groups broke up, intermingling with
sighs of relief. The Consolatrice and her friend came to exchange a few
words with us, and Miss Prynne returned from the boat to which she had
good-naturedly exchanged. While I thanked her for this kindness, as if
it had been done for myself, I saw Miss Barry trying to slip off.
By stepping out of my corner and assuming a limp lamer than my actual
disability warranted I was able to intercept her.
“I wonder,” I made bold to ask, “if you could give me a hand back to the
music-room?”
The yashmak was not so impervious but that I could detect behind it the
scarlet glimmer of her smile.
“Oh, I think you could get there by yourself. Try.”
“I can manage the deck,” I said, in the tones of a boy feigning an
indisposition to stay away from school, “but I’m afraid of the steps of
the companionway.”
“How would you have managed if I hadn’t been here?” she asked, as she
allowed me to lean ever so lightly on her arm.
The steps of the companionway presenting a more real difficulty than I
had expected, I could say nothing till with her aid I had lowered myself
safely down.
Postponing the pleasure of thanking her, I reverted to the topic the last
attack had interrupted.
“I want to hear about your reorientation. You were able to put the
streets in their proper place again, and to see New York as it was; but
in my case—”
She put out her hand with that air which there is no gainsaying.
“I’m rather tired. I think I must go to my cabin and have a rest.” She
added, however, not very coherently: “The way things happen is in general
the best way—if we know how to use it.”
Somewhat desperately, because of her determination to go, I burst out,
“And do you think all this has been the best way?”
“You must see for yourself that it’s been a very good way. We’ve been
able to do—to do the things we’ve both done.” But the admission in the
use of the first personal plural pronoun seemed suddenly to alarm her.
She took refuge again in her need of rest. “I really must be off. If we
don’t meet again before we leave the boat—”
“Oh, but we shall!”
“I’m very often confined to my cabin.”
“Not when you want to be out of it.”
“Very well, then; I very often don’t leave my cabin.”
I was holding the hand she had extended to say good-by, but she slipped
it away and was going.
“Then tell me this—just this,” I begged. “How is it that we’re both on
the same ship? That didn’t happen by accident?”
Whether she refused to answer my question or whether it didn’t reach her
I couldn’t tell. All I got in response was a long, oblique regard—the
fleeing farewell look of Beatrice Cenci—as she carried her secrets and
mysteries away with her.
_CHAPTER XXI_
So my celibacy of the will was threatened. I mean by that that I found
myself with two main objects of thought instead of one. Having vowed
myself to a cause, a woman had supervened with that pervasiveness of
presence with which a perfume fills a room. I might still vow myself to
the cause, but I shouldn’t serve it as I had meant to, with heart and
senses free.
Or should I?
The question fundamentally was that. Could I at a time like this divide
my allegiance as I should be obliged to divide it by falling in love and
being married? Or ought I, in deference to the work I was to do, suppress
this old passion and smother the problems and curiosities it had begun to
rouse in me?
If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good
husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to
remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was,
had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen
for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the
world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and
those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared
to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy
could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one
else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances. I couldn’t
make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends
I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most
pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself
every minute of the day.
No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer
singleness of purpose than I when I came on board the _Assiniboia_; and
now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose
the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and
fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her.
I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I
joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did
she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in
her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my
room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence
unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back
on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared
for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the
minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal?
Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was
she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might
end again in her being disappointed?
I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such
a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate
every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens
like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaning away of my
heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put
his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I
might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it.
Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these
counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If
I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more
intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative
spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the
moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge
of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure.
But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day
for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not
weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something
else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my
labor for my pains.
It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience.
On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no
more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to
allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of
books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a
game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take
a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when
sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in
the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up
from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.”
Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it.
“Human effort after human welfare is never drastic enough,” I read. “It
is never sufficiently radical to accomplish the purpose it tries to carry
out. Instead of laying its ax at the root of the tree of its ills it is
content to hack off a few branches. It never gets beyond pruning-work;
and the most one can say of the results it achieves is that they are
better than nothing.
“So much, then, one can affirm of the dreams that are now being dreamed,
in all probability to vanish with waking. They are better than nothing.
Better than nothing are the aims held up before the Allied nations as
the citadels they are to capture. The crushing of military despotism
is better than nothing; the elimination of war is better than nothing;
the establishment of universal democracy, the founding of a league of
nations, the formation of a league to enforce peace, the dissemination
of a world-wide entente, these are all of them better than nothing, even
though they end in being no more productive of permanent blessing than
the Hague Conference, which was better than nothing in itself. They are
probably as effective as anything that man, with his reason, his wisdom,
his science, his degree of self-control, and his pathetic persistence in
believing in himself when that belief has so unfailingly been blasted,
can ever attain to. But, oh, gentlemen, as the prophet said thirty
centuries ago, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city.’ You are
pouring out blood; you are pouring out money; you are giving your sons
and your daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch; through the fire
to Moloch unflinchingly they pass; you are tearing the hearts out of your
own bodies, and you are doing it with a heroism that cannot fail of some
reward. But this is not the way, neither is this the city. It is better
than nothing, but it is not the best. You could do it all so much more
thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is
no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the
city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which
you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”
But with the knowledge that this woman had simply passed and let her
shadow fall upon me I had no heart for Sheering’s impassioned words. I
got up and followed her.
I found her on deck, far forward, leaning on the rail and watching a
fiery, angry sunset that inflamed all the western horizon. As she looked
round and saw me advancing along the deck I detected in her telltale eyes
the first scared impulse to run away.
But what was she afraid of?
It was the question I asked as soon as I was near enough to speak.
“What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”
“The way you looked. You see, this queer sort of veil doesn’t protect
you; it gives you away by throwing all your expression into your eyes.
There’s an essence that eludes one till it’s concentrated and distilled.”
“I’m sure I didn’t mean—”
“To look like an animal trying to escape? Well, you did.”
“Oh, as to that, I could easily have walked round the deck-house to the
other side of the ship.”
“If the discourtesy wouldn’t have been too obvious—of course!” But I
didn’t press the point. There were other admissions to which I had
an unchivalrous craving to bring her if I could; and so I went on,
artfully, “It was clever of you to find my state-room on Tuesday—all on
the spur of the moment like that.”
She contented herself with murmuring, “Yes, wasn’t it?”
“And your own cabin is on another deck.”
“I’m on this deck.”
“So that you hadn’t even seen me going in and out.”
“I’m a nurse—in a way. Nurses have to know more than other passengers or
they’d be no good on board ship.”
“And do you know every one’s cabin?”
“I know every one’s cabin to whom I can be useful.”
“Is that many?”
“No; not many, unfortunately.” She diverted the attack by saying, “What
are you asking for?”
“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, carelessly. I added, however, with some
slight show of intention, “I’ve called it your cleverness, but I really
mean it as your kindness.”
She decided to take the bull by the horns, shifting her position and
standing with her back to the rail.
“If you call it kindness that I should have learned the number and
location of your cabin before we left Liverpool—”
“Oh, you did it then?”
“Yes, I did it then. But if you call it kindness, of course I can’t
prevent you. I can only assure you it isn’t. I knew you couldn’t get
about easily—”
“How did you know that?”
“I saw you come on board. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Then let me go farther back and ask how you happened to see me come on
board. Wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that you should have been
there, right at the head of the gangway?”
“Well, life is full of extraordinary coincidences, isn’t it? And when a
woman who can do so little sees a wounded man—”
There were other wounded men scattered about the deck. I glanced at them
as I said, “And have you done that for all the wounded men on board?”
“I’ve done it for all I know.”
“And how many do you know?”
She averted her profile, with an air of having had enough of the subject.
“I wanted you to tell me a minute ago why you were asking me these
questions, and you said for nothing.” I could see her smile behind the
chiffon of the yashmak as she went on, “Since that’s your only reason,
perhaps you won’t mind if I don’t answer you.”
“But if I had a reason for asking, would you tell me then?”
“Wouldn’t it have to depend on the reason?”
“You’re very careful.”
She shot a daring, smiling glance at me as she riposted, “Well, aren’t
you?” Before I had time to recover from the slight shock that these words
dealt me she pointed to the horizon. “See, there’s smoke over there. I do
hope it’s not another U-boat.”
I accepted the diversion—for more reasons than one. Of these the first
was the shock to which I have alluded. She saw through me. That is,
she saw I didn’t place her first. How she saw it I could no more tell
than she could tell how I knew her history of the past two years. But
the tables were turned and turned in such a way as to make me feel
ridiculous. A man who is careful with regard to a woman is always
slightly grotesque.
As my most skilful defense lay in feigning a lack of perception I talked
about U-boats and the experience of two days before; but I came away from
her with a feeling of discomfort.
I analyzed the feeling of discomfort as due to the repetition of our
mutual attitude more than two years previously. Where she came forward I
drew back. I had always drawn back. I used to suppose that nothing but
one motive could have driven me to this humiliating course, and now I was
taking it from another. I was taking it from another, and she knew it.
The essence of the humiliation lay in that.
Each time I met her on deck she betrayed a hesitation that I found harder
to bear than contempt. Her very effort to preserve a tone of friendliness
was a reproach to me. It seemed to say: “You see all I’ve done for you.
You accept it and give me nothing in return.”
And yet I was obliged to consider that which, were I to let myself be
nothing but myself, might lie before me in the next few weeks and months.
I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married. As a man
engaged to be married I should be at once enveloped in that silken net
of formalities with which women with their consecration to the future
of the race have invested all that pertains to the preliminaries of
mating. I had seen for myself that in America that silken net is more
elaborate than it is elsewhere. In any British community it is spun of
tissue, fragile, light, easily swept aside should the need arise. In
America it is solidly constructed of gold cord, and is as often as not
adorned with gems. In America an engagement leads to something of an
anti-climax in that, from the human point of view, it is more important
than a marriage. It is sung by a chorus of matrons and maidens and social
correspondents of the press in a volume far more resounding than that
of the nuptial hymn. That a man should marry after he has become engaged
is considered as much a matter of course as that he should fight after
he has enlisted; but that he should become engaged is like taking that
first oath which denotes his willingness to give himself up, to make the
great renunciation for the sake of something else. More than any single
or signal act of bravery that comes later, it is the thing that counts.
I am not quarreling with American social custom; I am only saying that I
had reasons for being afraid of it.
I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married, and as a man
engaged to be married I should be put through paces as strict and as
stately as those of the minuet. There would be no escape from it. I might
be promised in advance an escape from it, but the promise would not be
kept. I might be promised simplicity, privacy, secrecy, a mere process
of handfasting before the least noticeable of legal authorities; but all
would go by the board.
Whatever my future wife and I might say—and my future wife would say it
only half-heartedly, if as earnestly as that—I should be seized in the
soft, tender, irresistible embrace of the feminine in American life, the
element that is far more powerful than any other, and I should have no
more fight to put up than a new-born infant against a nurse. There would
be a whole array of mothers and potential mothers to see that I had not.
There would be Mrs. Barry and Annette van Elstine and Hilda Grace and
Esther Coningsby and Elsie Coningsby and Mrs. Legrand, not to speak of a
vast social army behind them, all supported and urged on by the unanimous
power of the press.
No one of them would allow me to slip from their kindly, overwhelming
attentions any more than bees would allow a queen. Like a queen bee is
any man who is engaged to an American girl—or at least he was in the
days, now so extraordinarily long ago, before America went into the war.
Since then marriage has become casual, incidental, one of those hasty
touches given to human life, which, like the possession of money or the
pursuit of happiness or the leisure to earn a living, are pleasant but
not vital. But in the America of the end of 1916, the mentally far-away
America to which I was going back, matrimony was the most momentous
happening in a life history. From the minute a man became engaged to that
when he turned away from the altar, he had to give himself up to his
condition. He was no longer his own. Dinners, lunches, parties, theaters,
publicity, and the approval of women claimed him; and shrinking was of no
avail.
To the life after marriage, from this point of view, my mind hardly
worked forward. I have spoken of men who were good soldiers and equally
good husbands. Undoubtedly there are hundreds of thousands in the class.
But I had seen not a little of men who, because they were husbands,
would gladly not have been soldiers at all. Theirs was not a divided
allegiance, for they had only one. The body was in the fight, and it did
wondrously; but the heart and soul and mind and craving were with the
wife and little ones; and who could blame them?
But all my personal desire was not to be of their number. Had I been
married before the war I should have been as they; but since I was free
to espouse the cause which had become mistress of everything I was I
wanted to espouse it.
I thought I had espoused it. I had considered myself bone of its bone
and flesh of its flesh. During my months of fighting it had been a
satisfaction to think of myself as at liberty to make any sacrifice of
limb or life, and leave no heart to bewail me, no eye to shed a tear, and
no care to spring up behind me. My family would be content to say, “Poor
old Frank, he did his duty!” Further than that, I should bring no regret
to any heart but Lovey’s; and of him I was persuaded that if I went he
wouldn’t wait long after me. Moreover, I had guarded against any too
great misfortune overtaking him by providing for him in my will.
I must own, furthermore, to another misgiving: I was not too sure of
myself from the point of view of the old failing.
Things had happened in the trenches—they had dosed me with brandy,
whisky, rum, any restorative that came handy, on a number of
occasions—and there had been something within me as ready to be waked as
a tiger to the taste of blood. I can say truthfully enough that I had
never yielded to the desire of my own deliberate act; but I must also say
truthfully that I was by no means sure that one day I might not do so.
We had talked often enough, as men with men, of what we called a moral
moratorium—and the talk haunted me with all manner of suggestions. The
ban on what is commonly called sin was to be lifted for the period of the
war; and we who had to deny ourselves so much were not to deny ourselves
anything that came easily within our grasp. It seemed an alluring
condition, and one which, without waiting for the license of supreme
war councils or the permission of the Church, each of us was tempted to
inaugurate for himself. In a situation in which that which is born of the
flesh is flauntingly before one’s eyes, and millions of men are thrown
together as flesh and little more, appetite has its mouth wide open. That
man was strong indeed who could ignore this yearning of the body; and
that man was not I.
So again the consciousness of freedom was like a reserve fund to a
corporation. It was something on which to fall back if everything else
was swept away. I didn’t want to go to the devil; but if I went no one
would suffer but myself, as no one would suffer but myself if a German
sniper were to blow the top off my head. Mind you, I am not saying that
I came back morally weakened from the war; I only came back with a sense
that one man’s life or death—one man’s ruin or salvation—was of no more
account than the fate of a roadside bit of jewel-weed amid the infinite
seed-time and harvest of the year. I was inured to loss of all kinds
on a stupendous scale. I had seen thousands blown to pieces beside me,
and my mind had not turned aside to regret them; thousands would see me
blown to pieces with the same indifference as to whether I lived or died.
Callousness as to the life and death of others induces callousness as to
one’s own; and compared to life and death, what is the control of a mere
appetite? No; I was not morally weakened; but I was morally benumbed.
There was a kind of moral moratorium in my consciousness. I repeat that I
wasn’t practically making use of it; but I was in a period of suspense in
which I admitted to myself that it might depend on circumstances whether
I made use of it or not.
And if I did, and if I was married....
From the sheer possibility my mind turned in dismay. To the celibacy
made urgent by a purpose I added the celibacy necessitated by a curse.
As the one counseled me not to involve myself with anybody else, so the
other warned me not to involve anybody else with me. Through warning and
counsel I had kept myself in something like a state of serenity till now.
It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back
among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I
had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in
Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that
phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a
new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me
that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility
that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the
creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant
fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry
fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor
Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted
man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I
was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped
to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight,
when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street.
As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well,
I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing
their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate,
devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once
been Miss Smedley’s.
And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one
in which I saw myself moving amid compliments and flowers and polite
conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net.
Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside
the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the
ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium
of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the
reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either
under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the
answer valiantly.
The difficulty in my case sprang of choice. “I’ve got to” wasn’t
imperative enough. Or if imperative, it was imperative on both sides
equally.
_CHAPTER XXII_
And then a word was said which, though solving no problems, opened up a
new line of suggestion.
I have spoken of Regina Barry as another transmigrated soul. I have
said that I could not tell at a glance in what direction her spirit had
traveled; nor could I after some days of intercourse. As much as she had
been frank and open in the other period of our acquaintance, she had now
become mystery to me—elusive, tantalizing, sealed. By the end of a few
days I began to perceive that she came near me only, as I might say,
officially. If there was danger or storm or darkness—we sailed without
lights—she was within reach of me. She was within reach of me many a time
if I wanted no more than a book that had fallen or a rug that had been
left elsewhere on the deck. It was strange how hovering and protective
her presence could be for the moment of need, and how far withdrawn the
minute I could get along alone.
And far withdrawn the transmigrated spirit seemed to me at all times. Do
what I would to traverse the distance, I found her as remote as ever. Do
what I would to break down her defenses or transcend them, they still
rose between us, impalpable, impregnable, and all but indiscernible. She
had traveled away from me as I had traveled away from her; and yet now
that we met in space there was some indefinable bond between us.
It was in right of that bond that I asked her one day why she was going
home.
“Oh, for all sorts of reasons.” She added, “One of them is on account of
father.”
“Isn’t he well?”
“Yes, he’s well enough. That isn’t it.”
As she did not explain, I refrained from asking further, not because I
didn’t want to know, but because I knew she would tell me.
It was our usual trysting-place, the deck rail, though not now that
which ran along the side of the ship, but the one across the portion of
the upper deck toward the bow, allowing us to look down on the pit in
which the few steerage passengers took the air. They were standing about
in helpless, idle groups, some ten or twelve oddly clad, oddly hatted
men, with three or four of their women, and a white staring baby, whose
fingers, as it hung over its mother’s shoulder, dangled like bits of
string.
We were in the Gulf Stream, so that the day was comparatively mild. A
north wind not too violent blew away the possibility of fog and sent an
occasional shaft of sunshine through the rifts in the great gray clouds.
The swell left over from the gale of the past few days tossed the ship’s
nose into the air with a long, slow, rhythmic heave, slightly to port,
and gave to good sailors like ourselves that pleasant sensation of
swinging which a bird must get on a tree.
Wind and water were fraught with the nameless peaceful intimations of
the New World after the turmoil of the Old one. It is difficult to say
how one seizes them, but they come with the Gulf Stream. I have always
noticed that half-way over there is a change in the aura, the atmosphere.
It throws a breath of balsam on the wind, and flashes on the waves that
gleam which Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and the Pilgrims saw when they
sighted land.
It is that wonderful sense of going westward which, I suppose, is primal
to the instinct. Going eastward, one is going back to beginnings, to
things lived, to things over and done with. Going westward, all is hope.
It is the onward reach, the upward grasp, the endless striving. It is
the lifting of the hands, the straining of the power to achieve, the
yearning of the inner man. The thing that is finished is left behind, and
the thing to be wrestled with and done is in front of one. The very sun
goes before one with a splendid gesture of beckoning—on to work, on to
self-denial, on to triumph and success—and when it sets it sets with a
promise of a morrow.
We had already begun to feel that; and on my part in a spirit of
compunction. I was going, as far as lay within my small powers, to turn
the west back upon the east again, to reverse nature by making the stream
flow toward its source. I was far from insensible to the pity of it, for
I had seen the effect on my own country.
I had seen my own country—that baby giant, whose very existence
as a country antedated but little the year when I was born—I
had seen it pause in its work, in its play, in its task of
self-development—listen—shiver—thrill—throw down the ax, the spade, the
hammer, the pick—go up from the field, the factory, and the mine—and
offer itself willingly. It was to me as if that was fulfilled which was
spoken by the prophet:
“I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will
go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.”
I had seen that first flotilla of thirty-one ships sail down the St.
Lawrence, out into the ocean, and over to the shores of England, as the
first great gift of men which the New World had ever made to the Old,
as some return for all the Old had poured out upon the New. I had seen
it, for I was on it. We went gaily, as hop-pickers go to a bean-feast.
We knew it was war, but the word had no meaning for us. What it meant
we found out at Ypres, at Vimy, at Lens. But when I think of my country
now I think of her no longer as a baby giant. She has become a girl
widow—valiant, dry-eyed, high-souled, ready to go on with the interrupted
work and do bigger work—but a widow all the same.
And the sword that had pierced one heart I was bringing to pierce
another. I was sorry; but sorrow didn’t keep me, couldn’t keep me from
being terribly in earnest.
And in on these thoughts Regina Barry broke as if she had been following
them.
“Look at the waves where the sun catches them. Aren’t they like flashing
steel? It’s just as if all the drowned hands at the bottom of the sea
were holding up swords to the people of America, begging them to go and
fight.”