CHAPTER XIX
All these interests had seemed far away from me during the two and a half years over there; but in proportion as I drew near Liverpool that morning they reformed themselves in the mists of the near future, as old memories come back with certain scents and scenes. Not till the damp, smoky haze of the great port was closing in round me did I realize that my more active part in the vast cosmic episode was at an end, and that I had come to the hour I had so often longed for—and was going home.
I was going home; and yet, for the minute, at any rate, I was not glad. There is always something painful in the taking up again of forsaken ties, however much we once loved them. It was like a repetition of the effort with which I had renewed my relations with my people. The actual has a way of seizing us in its tentacles and making us feel that it is the only life we ever truly led. There was a time when I seemed to forget that I had ever been anywhere but in the trenches. During the month or two that I was blind I got so used to the condition as to find it strange that I had ever seen. And always, in face of the fierce intensity of the present, the life in New York was remote, shadowy, and dim, as they say the life in prison becomes from its very monotony to those who look back on it after their release.
What it really amounted to was that during those twoyears I seemed to have grown in the size of my mental conceptions. Having been hurled into an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other ways of living had grown pale and small. If you can imagine yourself swirling through space, riding both zephyrs and tempests equally as a matter of course, you can understand how tame it would seem to be tied down to earth again, to go at nothing more stimulating than a walking pace. Otherwise typified, a lion that has been in a cage, and after two and a half years of free roving in the jungle finds itself returned to the cage again, would probably have the same sinking of the heart as I when I saw the hulk of theAssiniboialoom up before me in the dock.
And then came that odd little incident of the nurse to connect me with the past by a new form of excitement. I have to confess that it was excitement largely compounded of wonder and distress. A dull ache told me that sensation was returning to a deadened nerve, and that where I had supposed there was paralysis at least there was going to be reaction and perhaps a pang.
For by this time I had passed through that process which is commonly known as “getting over it.” That is, a new self was living a new life on a new plane of existence. All that belonged to the period before I went to enlist at Ottawa was on the other side of a flood. I had not precisely forgotten; I had only died and become a transmigrated soul. Whatever was past was past. I might suffer from it; I might feel its consequences; but I couldn’t live it again. On the other hand, I was living vividly in the present. Not so much consciously or by word as because I couldn’t help it, I had merged everythingI was into one dominating purpose with which, as far as I was aware, Regina Barry had nothing to do. The aims for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.
So mentally I was pressing forward. Though I could do no more fighting, I had been told that there was still work by which I could contribute to the object beside which no other object could be taken into consideration. I was being sent back for that reason. Not much had been told me as yet about what I was to do, but I understood that it was to be in connection with American public opinion. It will be remembered that at the end of 1916 the United States was not only not in the war, but it was still doubtful as to whether or not she ever would be. The hand of a cautious listener being on the pulse of a patient people, it was on the beat of that pulse that the issue turned.
I understood that, with my acquaintance ranging among high and low, I was to do what I could to make the pulse a little quicker. I might not be able to do much, but we had all learned the value of small individual contributions. It was argued that in proportion as the American people began to see on which side the balance of righteousness dipped, my game leg and my black patch, and the haggardness and gauntness and batteredness of my whole appearance, would have some appeal. The appeal would be the stronger for the fact that I was not an Englishman, but a Canadian—blood-brother to the man of his own continent, blood-brother to the Briton,blood-brother to the Frenchman, blood-son of the great ideals fathered by the Anglo-Saxon race, and in which all free peoples in the course of two hundred years had been made participants—and quick to spring to their defense. I was to be, therefore, a kind of unobtrusive, unaccredited ambassador to the man in the office and the street, with instructions to be inoffensive but persuasive.
And on this mission all my conscious thought was set. No hermit in the desert was ever more entirely self-dedicated to the saving of his soul than I to the quiet preaching of this new crusade among men like Ralph Coningsby and Stephen Cantyre and Beady Lamont and Headlights and Daisy and Momma and Mouse, and any others with whom I should come in contact. In fulfilling this task I wanted no one to disturb or distract me; and here at the very outset was some one who might do both.