As yet I had noticed him only as the returned traveler notices the
faithful old dog that greets him by lifting his eyes adoringly and
wagging his tail. I saw now that the intervening two and a half years had
aged him. He had grown white and waxy; his thin gray hair was thinner.
A trembling, like that of a delicately poised leaf on a day when there
is little wind, shook his hands, and the left corner of his lower lip
had the pathetic quiver of a child’s when it is about to sag in a great
weeping.
As I had paid him so little attention on the dock, I picked up the hand
resting on his knee and pressed it.
He responded with a long, harsh breath which, starting as a sigh of
comfort, became something inarticulately emotional.
“Oh, Slim! I’ve got ye back, ’aven’t I?”
“Seems like it, Lovey.” I laughed without feeling mirthful.
“Ye look awful, don’t ye?”
“I suppose I do.”
“But it don’t make no difference to me, it don’t. I’d rather ’ave ye all
chawed up like this than not ’ave ye at all.”
“Thank you, Lovey.”
“Them wars is awful things. Why don’t they stop ’em?” He continued,
without waiting for an explanation: “It’s all along o’ them blamed
Germans. The cheek o’ them—to go and fight Englishmen! There was a German
in the ’at-shop in the Edgware Road used to ’ang round me somethin’
fierce; and now I believe he wasn’t nothink but a-spyin’ on me. Don’t you
think he was, Slim?”
“I think very likely.”
“Makes my blood run cold, it does, the times I’ve took ’im into a little
tea-shop in Great Hatfield Street—and me a-treatin’ on ’im, like. If I
’adn’t ’ad luck I might be lookin’ like you by this time. Ain’t it awful
to be one-eyed, sonny?”
“Oh, I’m getting used to it.”
“Used to it till you looks in the glass, I expect. Get a fright when ye
do that, don’t you? But it’s all right, Slim. It wouldn’t matter to me
if you was a worse looker than y’are. I wouldn’t turn ye down, neither,
not if it was for all the doctors in the world. Not but what he’s been
very attentive to me while you was away. I don’t make no complaint about
that. Bit finicky about socks and ’andkerchiefs always the same color—and
ye couldn’t see ’is socks most o’ the time—only when he pulled up his
trouser leg a-purpose—but a good spender and not pokin’ ’is nose into
my affairs. I’ll say all that for ’im; but if he was to ask my ’and in
marriage, like, and I could get you, Slim—all bunged up as y’are now and
everything!—well, I know what I’d say.”
Too miserable to reject this bit of sympathy, I said, merely,
“Unfortunately, Lovey, every one may not be of your opinion.”
“I d’n’ know about that,” he protested. “Seems to me everybody would be
if you could make ’em understand, like.”
There was nothing offensive in this, coming as it did from a deep
affection, but, as it had gone far enough, I turned my attention to the
streets.
There was a quality in them not to be apprehended by the sense of sight.
It defied at first my limited powers of analysis. Something to which I
was accustomed was not there; and something was there to which I was not
accustomed.
That to which I was not accustomed struck me soon as shimmering, shining,
radiant. That it was not an outward radiance goes without saying. New
York on that November day was as dreary and bleak a port as one could
easily land at. A leaden sky cloaked the streets in a leaden, lifeless
atmosphere. The tops of steeples and the roofs of the tall buildings
were wreathed in a leaden mist. Patches of befouled snow on the ground,
with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is
so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through
which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is
no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked,
ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a
noise like that of the shell that had struck the _Assiniboia_, while our
taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a
speed he has long outlived. On the pavements a strange, strange motley
of men and women—Hebrew, Slavic, Mongolian, negro, negroid—carried
on trades as outlandish as themselves. Here and there an outlandish
child shivered its way to an outlandish school. Only now and then one
saw a Caucasian face, either clean, alert, superior, or brutalized and
repulsive beyond anything to be seen among the yearning, industrious
aliens.
And yet to me all was lit by an inner light of which I couldn’t at
first see the lamp. I caught the rays without detecting the source that
emitted them. In and through and above this squalid New York, with its
tumult, its filth, its seeming indifference to the individual, there was
a celestial property born of the kingdom of heaven. It shone in the sky;
it quivered in the air; it lay restfully on the hoary graveyards nestling
at the feet of prodigious cubes, like eld at the base of Time. All faces
glowed with it; all tasks translated it; all the clamor of feet and
wheels and whistles sang it like a song.
The name of it came to me with a cry of joy and a pang of grief
simultaneously. It was peace. I was in a country that was not at war.
I had forgotten the experience. I had forgotten the sensation it
produces. I had forgotten that there was a world in which men and women
were free to go and come without let or hindrance. And here were people
doing it. The day’s work claimed them, and nothing beyond the day’s work.
To earn a living was an end in itself. The living earned, a man could
enjoy it. The money he made he could spend; the house he built he could
occupy; the motor he bought he could ride in; the wife he married he
could abide with; the children he begot he could bring up. He could go
on in this routine till he sickened and died and was buried in it. There
was no terrific overruling motive to which all other motives had become
subsidiary, and into which they merged.
In the countries I had been living in war was the sky overhead and the
ground beneath the feet. One dreamed it at night, and one woke to it in
the morning. It made everything its adjunct, every one its slave. Duty,
wealth, love, devotion, had no other object on which to pour themselves
out. It commanded, absorbed, monopolized. There was no home it didn’t
visit, no pocket it didn’t rifle, no face it didn’t haunt, no heart it
didn’t search and sift and strengthen and wrench upward—the process was
always a hard, dragging, compulsive one—till the most wilful had become
submissive and the most selfish had given all. Prayer was war; worship
was war; art, science, philosophy, sport were war. Nothing else walked in
the streets or labored in the fields or bought and sold in the shops. It
was the next Universal after God.
And here, after God, a man was his own Universal. With no standard to
which everything had to be referred he seemed unutterably care-free.
Care-free was not a term I should have used of New York, of America, in
the old days; but it was now the only one that applied. The people I saw
going by on the sidewalks had nothing but themselves and their families
to think of. Their only struggle was the struggle for food and shelter.
Safe people, happy people, dwelling in an Eden out of the reach of cannon
and gas and bomb!
“I came not to bring peace, but a sword!”
Sacrilegiously, perhaps, I was applying those words to myself as we
jolted homeward. But I was applying them with a query. I was asking if
it could possibly be worth while. All at once my mission became unreal,
fantastic.
To begin with, it was beyond my powers. Among these hundreds of thousands
of strangers I knew but a handful. Even on that handful I should make no
impression. I could see at a glance, from the few words I had exchanged
with people on the dock, that each man’s cup was full. You couldn’t pour
another drop into it. I had subconsciously taken it for granted that my
friends would be, as it were, waiting for me; and already it was evident
that in their minds there would not be a vacant spot. I had not the
will-power to force myself in on so much hurry and preoccupation.
Then I wasn’t interested in it any more. I had pretentiously thought of
myself as dedicated to a cause, and now the cause had dissolved into
nothing on this leaden, overcharged air. It would be ridiculous to wean
these people away from their work, even if I could play like the Pied
Piper and have them follow me. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to marry
the woman I loved, and settle down quietly, industriously, to spend
my days in an office and my nights at home, like the countless human
ants that were running to and fro. My celibacy of the will was gone. My
consecration was gone. Where these austerities had been there was now
only that yearning of whatever it is that draws a man toward a woman, and
I asked nothing but the freedom to enjoy. I was determined to enjoy. The
resolve came over me with this first glimpse of New York. It came over me
in a tide of desire which was all the fiercer for its long repression. It
may have been the demand of the flesh for compensation. That which had
not merely been denied, but brutalized and broken, rose with the appetite
of a starving beast.
So, thirdly, I was not fit for any high undertaking. It was not my real
self that had made these vows; it was a phantasm self evoked by the vast
emotions of a strife in which the passions raged on a scale that lifted
the human temporarily out of itself. But now that the strife had been
left behind, the human fell back into the same old rut.
In the same old rut I found myself. I had reverted to what I had been
before there was a war at all. My carnal instincts were as strong as
ever; as strong as ever was my longing for Regina Barry as my wife. It
was stronger than ever, since I meant to get her by hook or by crook, if
I couldn’t do it by the methods which colloquially we call straight.
It was, however, the difficulties of hook and crook that oppressed me.
The straight line was in this case that of least resistance. I grew more
convinced of it as the day advanced.
There was everything to make my return to the old quarters a moment of
depression. The quarters themselves, which had seemed palatial after the
Down and Out, were modest to the point of being squalid. As Cantyre had
said, Lovey had kept them as clean as an operating-room, but cleanliness
couldn’t relieve their dingy shabbiness or make up for the absence of
daylight.
Moreover, Cantyre’s own proximity was trying to me. There was only the
elbow of a corridor between his rooms and mine. He would resume the old
chumming habits of running in and out, while I was sharpening a knife to
stab him in the back.
And in the processes of unpacking Lovey got on my nerves. He got on my
nerves as a sweet, old, fussy mother gets on those of a wayward son
during the hours he is compelled to stay at home. Dogging me about from
one room to another, his affection was like a draught of milk held out
to a man whose lips are parched for brandy.
It was a relief, therefore, when the telephone rang and Annette van
Elstine asked me to come and have tea with her. I knew that Annette was
not craving to see me merely as her cousin; and as my cousin I could have
waited patiently for the pleasure of seeing her; but with her scent for
drama and her insatiable curiosity she would raise the issues of which I
wanted to talk even if I got no good from it.
I found her as little changed as if Time had not passed nor War dropped
his bomb on the world.
Annette’s smartness, as I have already told you, was difficult to define.
It was not in looks or dress or manner of living or gifts of intellect.
If I could ascribe it to a cause I should put it down as authority of
position combined with the possession of a great many personal secrets.
She knew your intimate history for the reason that she asked you intimate
questions. Authority of position enabled her to do this—or at least she
acted as if it did—with the right of a cross-examiner to probe the truth
in court. She could convey the impression that her interest in your
affairs was an honor—as if a queen were to put her royal finger in your
family pie—so that quite artlessly you unlocked your heart to her. Other
people’s unlocked hearts were her kingdom, since, as far as I could see,
she had nothing in her own.
Also, as far as I could see, she wore the same tea-gown I had always seen
her in; she sat in the same chair in front of the same fire; she had
before her the same tea equipage; she might have been pouring the same
tea.
The transition from the necessary questions as to my personal experiences
and wounds to that of the exact relations between Mrs. Hartlepool and
Gen. Lord Birkenhead was an easy one. Disappointed that I had spent
two years at the front and had heard nothing of the delicate situation
between these distinguished persons, of which an amazing mass of
contradictory detail had reached certain circles in New York, she turned
the conversation on what was really the matter in hand.
“So you came over on the same boat as Regina?”
Unable to deny this statement, I admitted its truth. The dusky ripples
played over Annette’s round features, giving them a somber vivacity.
“Did she tell you anything?”
“Yes; a good many things.”
“Anything special, I mean?”
“Everything she said was special, as far as I can remember.”
She tried another avenue.
“You’ve gone back to your old quarters, haven’t you?”
“Yes; I kept them all the time I was away. Stupid, I suppose; but when I
left New York I didn’t expect to be gone for more than a few weeks.”
“Stephen Cantyre is in that house, isn’t he?”
“On the same floor with me.”
“You’ll see a great deal of him, won’t you?”
“I did when I was there before.”
“Was he on the dock to meet Regina?”
“He was on the dock, either to meet her or to meet me. As a matter of
fact, he met us both.”
“Did he say anything about her?”
“Yes; he said he had to go and speak to her.”
“Only to speak to her?”
“What more could he do—right there on the dock?”
“Oh, then you do know?”
“Know what?”
“What do you suppose? Can’t you guess?”
“I didn’t know you wanted me to guess. I thought you meant to tell me.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know myself—officially.”
“Do you know it in any other way?”
“I know it by signs and tokens.”
“One can infer a lot from them.”
“That’s just what I’ve done. It wasn’t till I heard that you’d come over
in the same boat with her—”
The rest of the sentence was conveyed by a look which invited me to go on.
“You thought I might be able to corroborate the signs and tokens?”
“Or contradict them—if it’s not a rude thing to say.”