That was all. I should have felt a certain relief that nothing was
irrevocably settled had there not been in the envelope another page. On
it were written the words: “Are you trying the indirect method? If so, I
think you will find it unwise.”
If I read this once I must have read it twenty times, trying to fathom
its meaning.
I could only think that she was gently charging me with my apathy. The
indirect method was the inactive method. I had let weeks go by not only
without saying the word which she had told me she would obey, but without
making any attempt to get speech with her.
And yet it seemed to me that any other woman in the world might have
resented this but Regina. It was a kind of resentment unlike her. She
was too proud, too intense. Even in the hypnotic state induced by the
knowledge, after years of doubt, that we cared for each other, she had
kept her power of resistance. She would come with me if I made her, but
she hoped I wouldn’t make her. That hope made it difficult for me to
impose myself on any one at once so willing and so reluctant. Of what,
from different angles, each of us owed to Cantyre—not to mention any one
else—she was as sensitively aware as I was.
I could hardly believe, therefore, that she was reproaching me; and yet
what else did she mean?
I tried to learn that on the following day, but found access to her
difficult. Since she was hostess to the speaker of the afternoon as well
as to some sixty or eighty guests, mostly ladies, this was scarcely
strange. I was limited, therefore, to the two or three seconds during
which I was placing in her hands a cup of tea. Even then there was a
subject as to which I more pressingly desired information.
“I see Stephen isn’t here.”
She couldn’t keep out of her eyes what I read as a kind of crossfire,
expressive of contradictory emotions.
“He wouldn’t come.”
“Why not?”
“He didn’t like the subject.”
“Because it was medicine?”
“Because it was war.”
“But if this country goes in?”
“He doesn’t believe it will. He thinks the breaking off of our relations
with Germany will do all for which we can be called on. We’ll never
fight, he says. Even if we declare war he’s sure it will only be in name.”
I was not so much interested in Cantyre’s opinions as in the way in which
she would take them.
“And you?”
“Oh, I think he’s only kicking against the pricks. He can’t think like
that.”
I gave her a look which I tried to make significant. “You mean that he’s
taking the indirect method?”
She gazed off to the other side of the room. “Oh, that isn’t the indirect
method.”
“What does the indirect method involve?”
But here Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott butted in—I have no other term for
it—with a question, which she asked as if her life depended on the
answer, “Regina, didn’t you think the action of that English nurse in
going over the mountains with the band of little Serbian boys the most
heroic thing you ever heard of?”
So I came away without having learned what it was I was doing, but not
less determined to find out.
I resolved to try Cantyre. My meetings with him had become not exactly
rare, but certainly infrequent. I had hardly noticed the decline of our
intimacy while it was going on; I only came to a sudden realization of it
when I said to myself I would look in on him that night.
It occurred to me in the first place that I had not looked in on him
of my own accord since I had come home. I had gone round the elbow of
the corridor once or twice when he had invited me, but never of my own
initiative. Then it struck me that it was some time since he himself had
come knocking at my door.
“Lovey, when was the doctor last in here?”
He was in the “kitchingette” and came to the threshold slowly. When he
did so there was that scared look on his face I had seen on the previous
afternoon.
“I don’t rightly know, Slim.”
“Isn’t it more than a week ago?”
He considered. “It might be.”
“Do you know any reason why he doesn’t come?”
He seemed to be defending himself against an accusation.
“Why, Slim! ’Ow sh’d I know?”
“Well, you see him every day—in and out of his room with his boots and
things.”
“He don’t ’ardly ever speak to me.”
“And don’t you ever speak to him?”
He fidgeted nervously. “Oh, I passes the time o’ day, like, and tells him
if his pants need pressin’ and little things like that.”
“Does he ever say anything about me?”
“Not lately he don’t.”
“Have you any idea why not?”
“I might ’ave a hidea, Slim; but what’s servants’ gossip, after all?”
As he had me there I dropped the subject, stealing round to Cantyre’s
quarters about eleven that night.
To my knock, which was timid and self-conscious, he responded with a low
“Come in” that lacked the heartiness to which he had accustomed me. As
usual at this hour, he was in an elaborate dressing-gown, and also as
usual the room was heavy with the scent of flowers. He was not lounging
in an arm-chair, but sitting at his desk with his back to me, writing
checks.
“Oh, it’s you!” he said, without turning his head.
“Thought I’d drop in on you.”
He went on writing. “Do you want to sit down?”
“Not if you’re busy.”
“Got some bills to pay.”
“Oh, then I’ll come another time.”
Having gone in for one bit of information, I went out with another.
Cantyre knew.
I was not only sorry for his knowing, I was surprised at it. During the
two months we had been in New York both Regina and I had been notably
discreet. We had been discreet for the reasons that all the strings
were in our own hands, and it depended solely on ourselves as to which
we pulled. We alone were the responsible parties. That poor Cantyre
shouldn’t have to suffer before we knew whether we meant to make him
suffer or not had been a matter of concern to us both.
If he knew, it was, therefore, not from me; and neither was it from
Regina. There remained Annette, but she was as safe as ourselves. Further
than Annette I couldn’t think of any one.
I should have been more absorbed by this question had I not waked to
new elements in the world drama, as one wakes to a sudden change in
the weather. My surprise came not from any knowledge of new facts, but
from the revival of my own faculty for putting two and two together.
There had been a month in which depression had produced a kind of mental
hibernation. When at the end of February I emerged from it the New World
in particular had moved immeasurably far forward.
Now that I came to notice it, I saw a change as perceptible as that in
the wind in the whole American national position. As silently as the wind
shifts to a new point of the compass a hundred millions of people had
shifted their point of view. They were moving it onward day by day, with
a rapidity of which they themselves were unconscious.
The titanic facts were to the undercurrent of events but as the volcano
to the fire at the heart of the earth. The heart of all human life being
now ablaze, there was here and there a stupendous outburst which was but
a symptom of the raging flame beneath. There was the U-boat blockade of
Great Britain, endangering all the maritime nations of the world. There
was the American diplomatic break with Germany. There was the guarding
of the German ships interned in American ports. There was the torpedoing
of an American steamer off the Scilly Isles. There was Mr. Wilson’s
invitation to the neutral nations to join him in the breach with the
German Emperor. And then on the 26th the President went in person before
Congress to ask authority to use armed force to protect American rights.
These, I say, were but volcanic incidents. The impressive thing to me was
the transformation of a people by a process as subtle as enchantment.
Two months earlier they had been neutral, and sitting tight on their
neutrality. The war was three thousand miles away. It had been brewed in
the cursed vendettas of nations of some of which the every-day American
hardly knew the names. It was tragic for those peoples; but they whose
lives were poisoned by no hereditary venom were not called on to take
part. Zebulun and Naphtali from sheer geographical position might be
obliged to hazard their lives to the death; but Asher could abide in his
ports, and Gilead beyond Jordan. That had been the kind of reasoning I
heard as late as the time of my arrival.
On my return to New York in November, I found a nation holding its
judgments and energies in suspense. What by the end of February
interested me most was the spectacle of this same people urging forward,
surging upward, striving, straining toward a goal which every one knew it
would take strength and sacrifice to reach.
Between this approach to war and that of any of the other great powers
there was this difference: They had taken the inevitable step while in
the grip of a great stress. They sprang to their arms overnight. They had
no more choice than a man whose house is on fire as to whether or not he
will extinguish it. Out of the bed of their luxurious existence they were
called as if by conflagration. Whether they would lose their lives or
escape with them was a question they had no time to consider. They went
up to the top notch of the heroic in an instant, not knowing the danger
they were facing or the courage they displayed.
Here, on the other hand, was a people who saw everything from a long
way off. For nearly three years their souls had been sickened with the
tale of blood. Gilead might abide beyond Jordan and Asher in his ports,
but no atrocious detail had been spared them. They knew, therefore,
just what they were doing, exactly what was before them. I can hardly
say that they made their choice; they grew toward it. They grew toward
it calmly, deliberately, clear-sightedly; and for this very reason with
an incomparable bravery. If I were an American citizen instead of the
American citizen’s blood-brother, I might not say this; I might not have
been aware of it. In any family the outsider can see that which escapes
the observation of the daughter or the son. I heard no born American
comment on this splendid, tranquil, leisurely readjustment of the spirit
to a new, herculean task; perhaps no born American noticed it; but to
me as an onlooker, interested and yet detached, it was one of the most
grandiose movements of an epoch in which the repetition of the grandiose
bewilders the sense of proportion, as on the first days in the Selkirks
or the Alps.
It was at this time I heard that Regina was addressing meetings. They
were women’s club meetings, and I learned from Annette that she was
speaking with success.
“She seems to have come out of a sort of trance,” Annette observed of
her, using the word I had used myself. “Ever since she came home she’s
been like a girl walking in her sleep. Now she’s waked and is like her
old self.”
Since Annette knew my story, or part of it, I thought it no harm to ask,
“To what do you attribute it?”
But Annette refused to lend herself to my game.
“I attribute it to her getting over the long strain. It’s natural that
you people who’ve been over there should be dazed or jumpy or something.
She’s been dazed.”
“And what do you think I’ve been?”
“Oh, you’ve been the same,” she laughed; “but then, you’re always queer.”
_CHAPTER XXIX_
The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus.
In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If
she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading
the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but
dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier
than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back
sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once
belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise
myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human
material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in
the end, I was sorry to see this waste.
With one exception I placed them as all under thirty. They were
good-looking fellows in the main, who would respond amazingly to drill.
After that impetus to the inner self, of which the Down and Out had the
secret, plenty of work, a regular life, food, water, and sleep would
renew them as the earth is renewed by spring. No missionary ever longed
to bring a half-dozen promising pagans into the Christian fold more
ardently than I to see these five or six poor wastrels transformed into
fighting-men.
For the minute there was no official there but little Spender, whose
bliss in life was in opening the Down and Out door. Having led me across
the empty front sitting-room, he said, as I stood in the gap of the
folding-doors:
“Say, brothers! This is Slim. Come in here four or five years ago, just
as low down as any of you, and look at him now!”
I did feel enormously tall, in spite of the high studding of the room,
as well as enormously big in my ample military overcoat. To the six who
sat in that woeful outward idleness, of which I knew the inner secret
preoccupation, I must have been an astonishing apparition. Only a very
commanding presence could summon these men from the desolate land into
which their spirits were wandering; but for once in my life I did it. All
eyes were fixed on me; every jaw dropped in a kind of awe.
Knowing the habits and needs of such a stupor, I merely threw off my
overcoat, entered, and sat down. Any greeting I made was general and
offhand. Apart from that I sat and said nothing.
I sat and said nothing because I knew it was what they liked. They liked
the companionship, as babies and dogs like companionship, though their
aching minds could not have responded to talk. There was no embarrassment
in this silence, no expectation. It was a stupefied pleasure to them to
stare at the uniform, to speculate inchoately as to the patch on my eye;
and that little was enough.
Nobody read; nobody smoked. I neither smoked nor read; I only sat as in a
Quaker meeting, waiting for the first movement of the spirit.
It came when a husky voice, that seemed to travel from across a gulf,
said, without any particular reason, “I’m Spud.”
I turned to my right, to see a good-looking, brown-eyed fellow, of
perhaps twenty-eight, trying to reach me, as it were, with his pathetic,
despairing gaze.
I knew what was behind this self-introduction. The lost identity was
trying to find itself; the man who was worthy of something was doing his
utmost to get out of the abyss by reaching up his hands to the man who
had got out.
“All right, Spud,” I said, heartily. “Put it there! We’re going to be
friends.”
Silence for another five minutes was broken when a high voice recited
in a sort of litany, “I’m Jimmy McKeever, traveler for Grubbe & Oates,
gents’ furnishers.”
Sharp-faced, wiry, catlike, agile, tough as wire, I could see this fellow
creeping out into the darkness of No Man’s Land, and creeping back with
information of the enemy.
I broke in on the litany to say: “Good for you, Jimmy, old boy! Glad to
know you. Let’s shake hands.”
He sprang from his seat on the outskirts of the group, but before he
could reach me a great, brawny paw was stretched forward by a blue-eyed
young Hercules sitting nearer me, which grasped my fingers as if in
a vise. There was then a scramble of handshaking, each of the bunch
asserting his claim for recognition, like very small children. The
older man alone held aloof, sitting by himself, scowling, hard-faced,
cross-legged, kicking out a big foot with a rapid, nervous rhythm.
It was he who, when the handshaking was over, snarled out the question,
“What’s the matter with your eye?”