“Yes, I know that—now—and—and I’m—I’m going to make you.”
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t withdraw. Perhaps she crept nearer me.
Certainly she shivered.
The look in her eyes was still helpless, submissive, beseeching; but
because it grew mortally frightened as well I repeated what I had said as
softly but as firmly as I could make the words:
“I’m—I’m going to make you.”
There was nothing but the strip of black veiling between her lips and
mine when a sudden flash that might have come out of heaven threw me back
with a start.
It was there above us—the great beacon—landlike—homelike—the New
World—the new work—the new problems to be solved—the new duties toward
mankind to be hammered home—while thankful voices were murmuring round us:
“Sandy Hook!”
_CHAPTER XXIV_
I never knew the compulsion exercised by organized life till I found it
settling round me, with an even distribution like that of the weight of
the atmosphere on the body, paralyzing my will and making it impotent.
No more than I could throw off the atmosphere could I be free from this
force for a second.
It began with my arrival on the dock, where Sterling Barry had come to
meet his daughter. I had seen him often enough before, though I had never
known him otherwise than in the way called touch-and-go. A ruddy, portly,
handsome fellow of sixty-odd, with eyes that had passed on their torch to
his daughter’s, he must in early life have been retiring and diffident,
for his general approach now had that forced jovial note that verges on
the boisterous.
“Hello! Hello!” he cried, as he lilted up to where I stood with Lovey
in the Custom House Section M. “Alive and kicking, what? Couldn’t kill
you. Tried, didn’t they?” he went on, looking me over. “Not but what it
might have been worse, of course. Billy Townsend’s son’ll never come back
at all, poor chap. Fine young fellow, with a bee in his bonnet about
aviation. Would go—and now you see! Well, we’ve got you back and we’re
going to keep you. What do you know about that?”