CHAPTER XVII
I came back as Major Melbury, of one of the Canadian regiments.
It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.
There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible, but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind.
The day of my sailing from Liverpool was exactly two years four months and three weeks from that on which I had last seen Regina Barry; and because it was so I must tell you at once of an incident that occurred at the minute when I stepped on board.
Having come up the long gangway easily enough, I found that at the top, where passengers and their friends congregate, my difficulties began.
When my left eye had been shot out the right had suffered in sympathy, and also from shock to the retina. For a while I had been blind. Rest and care in the hospital my sister, Mabel Rideover, maintained at Taplowhad, however, restored the sight of my right eye; and now my trouble was only with perspective. People and things crowded on one another as they do in the vision of a baby. I would dodge that which was far away, and allow myself to bump into objects quite near me.
As I stepped on deck I had a minute or two of bewilderment. There were so many men more helpless than I that whatever care there was to give was naturally bestowed on them. Moreover, most of those who thronged the top of the gangway had too many anxieties of their own to notice that a man who at worst was only half blind didn’t know which way to turn.
But I did turn—at a venture. The venture took me straight into a woman holding a baby in her arms, whom I crushed against the nearest cabin wall. The woman protested; the baby screamed. I was about, in the rebound, to crash into some other victim when I felt from behind me a hand take me by the arm. An almost invisible guide began to pilot me through the crowd. All I caught sight of was a Canadian nurse’s uniform.
It is one of the results of the war that men, who are often reduced to the mere shreds of human nature, grow accustomed to being taken care of by women, who remain the able-bodied ones.
“Thanks,” I laughed, as the light touch pushed me along, slightly in advance. “You caught me right in the nick of time. I can see pretty well with my good eye, only I can’t measure distances. They tell me that will come by degrees.”
Even though occupied with other thoughts, I was surprised that my rescuer didn’t respond to my civility, for another result of the war is the ease with which the men and women who have been engaged in it get on terms ofnatural acquaintanceship. When artificial barriers are removed, it is extraordinary how quickly we go back to primitive human simplicity. Social and sex considerations have thus been minimized to a degree which, it seems to me, will make it difficult ever to re-establish them in their old first place. They say it was an advance in civilization when we ceased to see each other as primarily males and females and knew we were men and women. Possibly the war will lead us a step farther still and reveal us as children of one family.
That a nurse shouldn’t have a friendly word for a partly incapacitated man struck me, therefore, as odd, though my mind would not have dwelt on the circumstance if she hadn’t released my arm as abruptly as she had taken it. Having helped me to reach a comparatively empty quarter of the deck, she had counted, apparently, on the slowness and awkwardness of my movements to slip away before I could turn round.
When I managed this feat she was already some yards down the length of the deck, hurrying back toward the crowd from which we had emerged. I saw then that she was too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little. Moreover, she carried herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, and walking with that care which people display when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight. Reaching one of the entrances, she went in, exactly as I had seen a woman pass through a doorway two years four months and three weeks before.
I was sure it was she—and yet I told myself it couldn’t be. I told myself it couldn’t be, for the reason that I had been deceived so frequently before that I had grown distrustful of my senses. All through the intervening time I had been getting glimpses of a slight figure here,of an alert movement there, of the poise of a head, of the wave of a hand—that for an instant would make my heart stop beating; but in the end it had meant nothing but the stirring of old memories. In this case I could have been convinced if the coincidence had not put too great a strain on all the probabilities.
I was to learn later that there was no coincidence; but I must tell my story in its right order.
The right order takes me back to my return to New York, after my week-end at Mrs. Grace’s, on the morning of June 29, 1914.
During the two or three hours of jogging down the length of Long Island in the train I tried to keep out of my mind all thoughts but one; having deposited my bags at my rooms, I should go to Stinson’s.
With regard to this intention I was clearly aware of a threefold blend of reaction.
First, there was the pity of it. I could take a detached view of this downfall, just as if I had heard of it in connection with Beady Lamont or old Colonel Straight. Though I should be only a man dropped in the ranks, while they would have been leaders, the grief of my comrades over my collapse would be no less sincere.
But by tearing my mind away from that aspect of the case I reverted to the satisfaction at being in the gutter, of which the memories had never ceased to haunt me. I cannot expect to make you, who have always lived on the upper levels, understand this temptation; I can only tell you that for men who have once been outside the moral law there is a recurrent tugging at the senses to get there again. I once knew an Englishman who had lived in the interior of Australia and had “gone black.” On his return to make his home in England he was seizedwith so consuming a nostalgia for his black wives and black children that in the end he went back to them. Something like this was the call I was always hearing—the call of Circe to go down.
But I knew, too, that there was method in this madness. I was deliberately starting out to earn the wages of sin; and the wages of sin would be death. I must repeat that going to Stinson’s would be no more than a slow, convenient process of committing suicide. It would be committing suicide in a way for which Regina Barry would not have to feel herself responsible, as she would were I to use the revolver. Having brought so much on her, I was unwilling to bring more, even though my heart was hot against her.
My heart was hot against her—and yet I had to admit that she had been within her rights. When all was said that could be said in my favor, I had deceived her. I had let her go on for the best part of a year believing me to be what I was not, when during much of the time I could see that such a belief was growing perilous to her happiness. I had been a coward. I should have said from the first moment—the moment when she took me for my brother Jack—“I am a crook.” Then all would have been open and aboveboard between us; but as it was there was only one way out. Any other way—any way that would have allowed me to go on living longer than the time it would take drink to kill me—would have been unbearable.
The checkmate to these musings came when my eyes fell upon Lovey. He was at the door of the apartment, not only to welcome me, but to give me ocular demonstration that he had kept the faith while I had been away. It was the first time since the beginning of our associationthat I had left him for forty-eight hours; and that he was on his honor during those two days was no secret between us. The radiant triumph of his greeting struck into me like a stab.
For Lovey now was almost as completely reconstructed as I. I use the qualifying “almost” only because the longer standing of his habits and the harder conditions of his life had burnt the past more indelibly into him. Of either of us one could say, as the Florentines are reported to have said of Dante, “There goes a man who has been in hell”; but the marks of the experience had been laid more brutally on my companion than on me.
Otherwise he showed cheering signs of resuscitation. Neat, even at the worst of times, he was now habitually scrubbed and shaved, and as elegant as Colonel Straight’s establishment could turn him out. He had, in fact, for the hours he had free from washing windows, metamorphosed himself into the typical, self-respecting English valet, with a pride in his work sprung chiefly of devotion.
And for me he made a home. I mean by that that he was always there—something living to greet me, to move about in the dingy little apartment. As I am too gregarious, I may say too affectionate, to live contentedly alone, it meant much to me to have some one else within the walls I called mine, even if actual companionship was limited.
But whatever it was, I was about to destroy it. I could scarcely look him in the eyes; I could hardly say a word to him.
While unpacking my suit-case he said, timorously, “Y’ain’t sick, Slim?”
I began to change the suit I had been wearing for one that would attract less attention at Stinson’s.
“No, Lovey; I’m all right. I’m just—I’m just going out.”
And I went out. I went out without bidding the poor old fellow good-by, though I knew it was the last the anxious pale-blue eyes would see of me in that phase of comradeship. When next we met I should probably be drunk, and he would have come to get drunk in my company. It would then be a question as to which of us would hold out the longer.
And that was the thought that after an hour or two turned me back. I could throw my own life away, but I couldn’t throw away his. However reckless I might be on my own account, I couldn’t be so when I held another man’s fate in my hand.
Even so, I didn’t go back at once. Half-way to Stinson’s—I was on foot—I came to a sudden halt. It was as if the sense of responsibility toward Lovey wouldn’t allow me to go any farther. I said to myself that I must think the matter out—that I must find and would find additional justification for my course before going on.
To do that I turned into a chance hotel.
I like the wide hospitality of American hotels, where any tired or lonesome wayfarer can enter and sit down. I have never been a clubman. Clubs are too elective and selective for my affinities; they are too threshed and winnowed and refined. I have never in spirit had any desire to belong to a chosen few, since not only in heart, but in tastes and temperament, I belong to the unchosen many. I enjoy, therefore, the freedom and promiscuity of the lobby, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry has the same right as I.
Annoyed by the fact that a halt had been called in myerrand of self-destruction, I began to ask myself why. The only answer that came to me was that this old man, this old reprobate, if one chose to call him so, cared for me. He had been giving me an affection that prompted him to the most vital sacrifice, to the most difficult kind of self-control.
Then suddenly that truth came back to me which Andrew Christian had pointed out a few months earlier, and which in the mean time had grown dim, that any true love is of God.
I was startled. I was awed. In saying these things I am trying only to tell you what happened in my inner self; and possibly when a man’s inner self has plumbed the depths like mine it means more to him to get a bit of insight than it does to you who have always been on the level. In any case this question rose within me: Was it possible that out of this old man, this drunkard, this murderer, cast off by his children, cast out by men, some feeble stream was welling up toward me from that pure and holy fountain that is God? Was it possible that this strayed creature had, through what he was giving me—me!—been finding his way back to the universal heart? If ever a human being had been dwelling in love he had been dwelling in it for a year and more; and there were the words, distilled out of the consciousness of the ages, and written for all time, “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” Was it God that this poor, purblind old fellow had all unconsciously been bringing me, shedding round us, keeping us straight, making us strong, making us prosperous, helping us to fight our way upward?
I went back.
But on the way I had another prompting—one thattook me into the office of a tourist company to consult time-tables and buy tickets.
“Lovey,” I said, when I got home, “we must both begin packing for all we’re worth. We’re leaving for Montreal to-night.”
“Goin’ to see your people, Slim, and stay in that swell hotel?”
“Not just now, Lovey. Later, perhaps. First of all we’re going for a month into the woods north of the Ottawa.”
His jaw dropped. “Into the woods?”
“Yes, old sport. You’ll like it.”
“Oh no, I won’t, Slim. I never was in no woods in my life—except London and New York. There’s one thing I never could abide, and that’s trees.”
“You won’t say that when you’ve seen real trees. We’ll shoot and fish and camp out—”
“Camp out? In a tent, like? Oh, I couldn’t, sonny! I’d ketch me death!”
“Then if you do we’ll come back; only, we’ve got to go now.”
“Why have we? It’s awful nice here in New York; and I don’t pay no attention to people that says it’s too hot.”
I made the appeal which I knew he would not resist. Laying my hand on his shoulder, I said: “Because, old man, I’m—I’m in trouble. I want to get away where—where I sha’n’t see—some one—again—and I need you.”
“It ain’t that girl, Slim? She—she haven’t turned you down?”
The words took me so much by surprise that I hadn’t time to get angry. All I could feel was a foolish, nervous kind of coolness.
“Lovey, what I want you to know I’ll tell you; and at present I’m telling you this: I’ve got to get out; I’ve got to get out quick; and I need you to buck me up. No one can buck me up like you.”
“Oh, if it’s that!” He would have followed me then to places more dreadful than the Canadian woods. “Will you take all your suits—or only just them new summer things?”