CHAPTER XX
After having found my cabin and seen to my belongings I hobbled up on deck once more, to verify my vision of the Canadian nurse’s uniform. I discovered the uniform in two or three instances, but in none that corresponded to the figure too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little I had watched receding down the deck.
As for the costume itself, it was not difficult to find myself beside one of the ladies who wore it—a beautiful, grave woman, of the type of Bouguereau’s Consolatrice, who, with hands resting on the deck rail, was looking down at the movement on the dock.
“There seem to be a number of nurses going back,” I observed, after an introductory word or two.
“There are three in our party—myself and the two over there.”
The two over there were two I had already seen, neither of them being my pilot of a half-hour previously.
“I thought I saw another,” I threw off, casually.
“I believe there is one—an American girl from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow.”
As I had just come from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow, and Lady Rideover herself was my sister, I suggested, without mentioning the relationship, that in this speculation there was some mistake.
“She may not have come directly from there,” theConsolatrice admitted; “but I know she was with Lady Rideover six months ago.”
“But six months ago I was with Lady Rideover myself.”
“Well, she was there then.”
“But I should have seen her if she had been.”
She turned slowly round on me, with deep, kind eyes. “Would you? You could see all the time?”
I had forgotten that. There had been two months when I hadn’t seen at all. Any one might have come and gone during that time.
Remarking on the inconvenience of having no list of passengers, I asked my companion if she knew the young lady’s name.
“No; but I can inquire of my friends. They may know.”
Having crossed to speak to the nurses on the other side of the deck, she came back without the information.
“But Miss Prynne,” she added, “that’s the short one, says that the young lady came over about two years ago with Lady Rideover’s sister, Miss Melbury, of Montreal.”
I withdrew to ponder. I had been in continuous if desultory communication with my sisters during all my time abroad, and no mention of Regina Barry had ever escaped either. I had not supposed that they knew one another. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had been under the same roof with her at Taplow and had not been aware of it. And here she was on board the ship on which I was returning home, and able to come to my aid at a minute when I wanted help.
I had often wished that some of my New York correspondents would speak of her, but no one ever had. Except in the case of Cantyre this was hardly strange, for—apartfrom Hilda Grace, who never wrote to me—no one knew that Regina Barry and I had meant anything to each other. If Cantyre had spoken of her, it would have been on his own account; but confidential as he was in private talk, his letters were never more than a few terse lines. So I had rather bitterly imagined her as going on with the testing of other men, as she had tested Jim Hunter, Cantyre, and me—trying them and finding them wanting. In ungenerous moments I went so far as to hope that Nemesis might overtake her in some tremendous passion in which she herself would be tried and tossed aside.
It was, however, the second day out before I actually came face to face with her. Her absence from the deck had been part of the mystery. Having swung into the Mersey, we remained there all Sunday night—it was a Sunday we had gone on board—and much of Monday. Accepting as necessary the secrecy which in war-time enshrouds an Atlantic voyage, the passengers had made themselves as comfortable as the conditions permitted, and taken air and exercise by promenading the decks. There could have been no better opportunity for finding familiar faces, but, apart from one or two distant acquaintances, I saw none. The three nurses’ uniforms I had noted already were continually about; but I never found the fourth.
And then on Tuesday, after we had lost sight of the Irish coast, there was another queer little incident. As I could walk but little, I had been reading in the music-room. Tired of doing that and eager to continue my search for the missing uniform, I had limped to the doorway, screened by a heavy portière, leading out toward the companionway. But while I stood turning up thecollar of my overcoat the portière was suddenly pulled aside, and we were before each other, with a suggestion of a similar occurrence three and a half years before.
The very differences in my appearance—the mustache, the patch over my left eye, the military coat—must have helped to recall the earlier occasion by the indirect means of contrast. As for her, she was what she had seemed to me then—two great flaming eyes. They were tired eyes now, haunted, tragic perhaps, and I saw later that when you caught them off their guard they were pensive, if not mournful. They were, indeed, all I could see of her, for the rest of her features were hidden by the veil over the lower part of the face which women occasionally copy from the Turkish lady’s yashmak. A small black cap, held by a jade-green pin, and a long, shapeless black ulster or coat completed a costume quite unlike the uniform for which I had been looking.
I can only describe that encounter as the meeting of two transmigrated souls. She had gone as far in her direction as I in mine; but I couldn’t tell at a glance in what direction she had gone. It was what struck me dumb. When Paolo and Francesca met in space they had nothing to say to each other except with the eyes. In some such case as that we found ourselves. The pressure of topics was too great to allow of immediate selection. She seemed to wait for me to utter the first word, and as I was at a loss she dropped the portière behind her, inclined her head, and passed on into the saloon.
Though it was my place to follow her, I couldn’t, for the minute, take so obvious a course. I was not only too mystified by what I had heard of her, but too confused as to our standing toward each other. I couldn’tbegin with a “How do you do?” as if we had parted on the ordinary social terms, while anything more dramatic would have been absurd. Hobbling along the deck, I took refuge in the smoking-room in order to reflect.
Reflection was not easy. Over its calm fields emotion spread like water through a broken dike. For two and a half years the emotional had been so stemmed and banked and dammed in me that I had thought it under control forever. I had had enough to do in giving orders or carrying them out. But, now that the repressed had broken its bounds again, the tide swept everything away with it.
Not that I knew just what I was experiencing; on the contrary, I couldn’t have disentangled the element of anger from that of curiosity, nor that of curiosity from that of joy. All I could say for certain was that never in my life had I been so anxious to keep free; never had I so much needed concentration and single-mindedness. The task to which I had vowed my undivided energy and heart demanded a genuine celibacy of the will; and now of all the women in the world....
I was working on this train of thought when I became aware that people were running along the deck. Glancing about me at the same moment, I saw I was alone in the smoking-room. A whistle blew, piercingly, alarmingly. By the time I had struggled to my feet the ship changed her course so sharply as to throw me against a chair.
I knew what it was, of course. We had been talking of the possibility ever since we left the Mersey. However much we tried to keep the mind away from the subject, it came back to it, as a mischievous boy makes straight for the thing forbidden him.
My first thought was for the girl in the yashmak. I must find her, see she had a life-belt, and take her to her boat. Before I had scrambled to the door, however, it flew open, apparently of its own accord, while a wild nor’wester positively blew the young lady in.
It also blew away anything like Paolo-and-Francesca sentiment.
“Oh, here you are!” she exclaimed, breathlessly. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere. They say we’ve sighted a periscope. Take this and put it on.”
Of the two life-belts she carried she flung one to me, beginning to fasten the other about herself.
“But the one you’ve brought me must belong to some one else,” I objected, as I aided her. “I’ve got one of my own in my cabin. I’ll just run down—”
She brushed this aside. “No; this is yours. I went and got it.”
“You—” I began in astonishment.
“I’m a nurse—or a kind of one,” she said, hastily. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“But you knew where my cabin was?”
“I found out. Oh, hurry—please!”
She helped me as a medieval lady might have helped her lord to buckle on his sword; and presently we were out on deck.
As we had twice already drilled in the unsightly things, we had lost the sense of the grotesque appearance presented by ourselves and our fellow-travelers. Besides, we were too eager to descry the periscope to have any more thought of ourselves than a wild duck of how it looks when skimming away from a sniper. Indeed, it was chiefly of a hunted wild duck that our zigzagging boat reminded me.
It was a sullen day, with that scudding of low, gray clouds which looks as if the heavens were hastening to some Armageddon of their own. The sea had hardly got over the swell left by one gale when it was being lashed into fury by another. TheAssiniboiapitched and rolled and tore through the waters like a monster goaded by innumerable stings. I should have found it next to impossible to struggle along the deck had my protectress not stood by and steadied me.
There was a kind of foolish pretense at the chivalrous in my tone as I said, “I’ll just see you to your boat before going over to mine.”
“We’re in the same boat,” she answered, briefly. “Do come along.”
I thought of my forty-eight hours of unfruitful search for her.
“But I didn’t see you at Number Seven when we drilled yesterday.”
“I’m there now,” she said, with the same brevity. Feeling, apparently, that some explanation was needed, she went on: “I’ve—I mean they—they’ve changed me. Miss Prynne has let me have—or rather she’s taken— That is,” she finished, in confusion, “we’re all nurses together—and we’ve—we’ve exchanged.”
In spite of some inward observations, I spared her any other comment than to say, “How jolly!” as if the exchange had been the most matter-of-course thing in the world.
I spoke just now of riding tempests and zephyrs, and something like that it was to plow along at every ounce of steam, with cross seas, head seas, seas abeam, and seas abaft, as each new zigzag caught them. On the roaring of the wind and the plunge and thunder of thewaves one rose into regions of tumultuous play where life and death were the stakes. I saw no signs of fear, and still less of panic; nor, so far as the eye could read, anything more than a sporting excitement. One would have said that our peril was accepted as being all in the game, part of the day’s work. By the end of 1916 Atlantic travelers had come to take the submarine for granted, just as the statesmen of Plantagenet and Tudor times took the headsman’s block as one of the natural risks of going into politics.
But we looked instinctively for a periscope. It is not an easy thing for any one to see, and for me it was more difficult than for most. I saw none; or I saw a hundred. With the imperfect vision of my one eye the crests of the billows bristled with moving four-inch pipes; and then suddenly all would disappear and I saw nothing but the waves curling upward into coronets of foam with veils of trailing lace.
Not that I was worse off in this respect than my fellow-travelers. As they ran for their boats they would pause, take a hurried look at the seas, exclaiming, “There it is!” and then, more doubtfully, “No, no!” all in one breath. The “No, no!” was generally uttered in a tone of disappointment, since to cross the ocean and sight no submarine would have been like journeying through Egypt and missing the pyramids.
And yet our danger was apparent. Only a fortnight before theKamouraska, sister ship to theAssiniboia, had been sent to the bottom in these very waters, with great loss of life. Of the tragedy the papers had given us realistic pictures that were fresh in all our minds. There was a preliminary scene on board not unlike the one we were enacting. We saw later a shell bursting on thedeck, somewhere amidships. We saw the passengers and crew taking to the boats with shells kicking up geysers among them as they tried to get away. We saw the great ship sticking as straight up out of the water as a Cleopatra’s Needle, before going slowly down. We saw the U-boat herself lying on the water like a crocodile, some four thousand yards away; we saw Queenstown as a morgue. All this was as vividly in our minds as a rehearsal to the actors of a play; and yet we were probably no more nervous than the company on a first night when the curtain is going up.
The word went round that it was the fate of theKamouraska, with the futility of her surrender as a means of saving the passengers’ lives, that prompted our captain to flight and fight. Our wireless calls were undoubtedly going up and down the Irish coast and out into the ocean. Within an hour or two, if we could hold out so long, destroyers would be rushing to our rescue. We had nothing to be terribly afraid of with more than an imaginative fear.
That imaginative fear was quickened by the seemingly maddened action of our ship. I can best describe her as a leviathan gone insane. If insanity were to overtake a whale it would probably splash the deep in some such frenzy as this—so many angles out of the course one way—then a violent heeling over—so many angles out of the course another way—anyway, anywhere, anything—to get out of that straight, staid line from port to port which makes an ocean-going ship a liner. I admit that in this wild, erratic dashing there was something that alarmed us, and something, too, that made us laugh. It was the comic side of madness, in which you can hardly see the terrible because of the grotesque.
By the time we reached life-boat No. 7 there were many signs that neither officers nor passengers were going to take more chances than they were obliged to. At No. 5 on one side of us a young officer was on top, peeling off the tarpaulin covering. At No. 9 on the other side some of the crew were already mounted, examining supplies and oars. At our own boat, cranks were being fitted to the davits to swing the boat outward. All along the line similar preparations were in progress, while men and women—luckily we had no children on board—carrying such wraps and hand-bags as they might reasonably take, stood in groups, waiting for what was to happen next.
Our view of the sea was largely cut off here by the bulk of the life-boats, though wherever there was a chink there was also a cluster of heads. So many saw periscopes—and so many didn’t see them—that it became a mild joke. In general we surmised that if a U-boat was cruising round us at all she had only been porpoising—sticking up her periscope for a second or two to get a look round, and withdrawing it before it could be seen by any eye not on that very spot.
The girl in the yashmak and I arrived so late on the scene that there were no places left by the rail, and we were obliged to content ourselves with second-hand information as to what was taking place. Our excitement had, therefore, a lack of point, like that of the small boy behind the line of grown-up people watching a procession. We fell back in the end into a kind of alcove, where, being partially protected from wind and tumult, we could speak to each other without shouting.
I took the opportunity to thank her for her kindness to me when I came on board on Sunday; but with my openingwords the air of Francesca meeting Paolo in space came over her again. I understood her to say that her help on Sunday was a little thing, that she would have given it to any one.
“Of course,” I agreed, “you would have given it to any one; but in this case you gave it to me. You must allow me to thank you before anything happens that might—that might make gratitude too late.”
As I think of her now I can see that she was mistress of herself in the way that a letter-perfect actress is mistress of herself, repeating words that have been learned to fit a certain situation. She had foreseen that I would say something of the kind; she had foreseen that when I did she might be a prey to troublesome emotions; and so had fortified herself in advance by a studied set of phrases.
“I’m so little of a nurse that I should be ashamed not to do for a soldier the few small things in my power.”
If she had never made me suffer anything, and if the moment had not been one that might conceivably end our relations forever, I should probably not have uttered the words that came to me next.
“Was it only because I’m a soldier—?”
She interrupted skilfully. “Only because you’re a soldier? Isn’t a soldier the most splendid man in the world—especially at a time like this?”
Bang!
It was one of our two guns. As a merchantman, not built to withstand the concussion of cannon, theAssiniboiashuddered.
With an involuntary start my companion caught me by the sleeve. The impulse to seize her hand and draw it gently within my arm was irresistible. Had I reflected,I might not have done this, since my dominant desire was to keep stripped and unencumbered for the race.
She allowed me to retain her hand just long enough to show that she was not mortally offended, after which she gently disengaged herself. To cover the constraint that both of us felt I went on to wonder if our shot had taken effect. A young man who had gone to find out came back with the news that the lookout, having spied the pin furrow of the periscope, the shot had been fired at a venture. As far as could be observed it had done nothing but send up a waterspout.
On receiving this information I went on with our interrupted personalities.
“Ever since Sunday I’ve wondered what had become of you; but then I’ve been looking for the uniform.”
“I always intended taking that off when I got on board. You see, I never was a nurse in any but an amateur sense, and so—”
It was my opportunity to spring the surprise I had been holding in reserve ever since my talk with the Consolatrice in the dock at Liverpool.
“When did you last see Mabel?”
She spoke with a sharp, sudden mezzo cry that might have been caused by pain.
“Who told you that?”
“Who told me what?”
Bang!
It was our second gun, and though the girl in the yashmak started again, she did not seize my arm. To hold the drama at its instant of suspense, I pretended to be more interested in the effect of the shot than in anything else in the world, as in other circumstances I should have been. I turned to this one and that one, inviting theirguesses, noting all the while that over Regina Barry’s eyes there spread the surface fire that a flaming sunset casts on troubled water.
She harked back to the subject as soon as it was clear that we had missed our aim again.
“Lady Rideover promised me she’d never tell you.”
Her tone having become accusatory, I broke in on it with studied nonchalance.
“And she never did. To the best of my recollection she never mentioned your name to me. But is there anything wrong in my knowing that you and she are friends?”
Color mounted to her brows where the yashmak couldn’t conceal it, though she ignored the question.
“And I’m sure it wasn’t your sister Evelyn.”
“Why shouldn’t it have been?”
“Because she promised me, too. I should be frightfully hurt if I thought she—”
“Then I’ll relieve your mind by assuring you that she didn’t. But to me the curious thing is that you shouldn’t have wanted me to know.”
She ignored this, too, a furrow of perplexity deepening between her brows.
“It isn’t possible that Lady Rideover or Evelyn, without telling you in words, should have allowed you to suspect—”
“Not any more than they allowed me to suspect that I was being nursed by a houri out of paradise.”
She hastened to make a correction. “Oh, I never acted as nurse to you! It was that Miss Farley.”
“But you were at Taplow when I was there, and in and out of my room.”
The peculiar light in her eyes, partly of amazement, partly of incredulity, reminded me of a poor trappedlady I had once seen in the prisoner’s dock while a witness recounted the secrets of her life with remarkable exactness of detail.
“But you couldn’t see me!” she began, helplessly.
“No, but I could hear.”
“And you didn’t hear me. If I went into your room, which I didn’t often do—”
I launched a theory that was purely inspiration.
“Oh, I know. If you came into my room you didn’t make a sound. You arranged that with Mabel. But haven’t you heard that the blind develop an extra sense?”
“Not as quickly as that—or with that precision.” She brightened with a new thought. “If your extra sense told you I was there, why didn’t you speak to me?”
“Suppose I said that I respected your incognita? If you didn’t want to speak to me it must have been for a reason. I couldn’t ignore that.”
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
A shell from the submarine struck the water somewhere near us, though all we saw was a column of white spume on the port side of the ship, while we were on the starboard.
She ignored even this. Standing erect, with her hands in the pockets of her ulster, with no feature to betray her but her eyes, she surmised, calmly, “Some of the other nurses or one of the patients must have given you a hint.”
“None of them ever pronounced your name in my hearing.”
“Then I give up guessing!” she said, with a touch of impatience.
“Which is what I can’t do.”
“But what have you to guess at?”
“At what you’ve done it—at what you’re doing it—for.”
She may have smiled behind the yashmak as she said, “What difference does it make to you?”
“I dare say it doesn’t make any—except that I seem to be the person benefited.”
“In time of war the soldier—the man who does the thing—is the person benefited.”
“Oh no; there’s the cause.”
“But surely, if we’ve learned anything during the past two years, it’s that what the soldier does for the cause can’t compare with what the cause does for the soldier.”
I saw my opportunity and was quick to use it. “So that out of what you’ve been doing for me even you have got something.”
She turned this neatly. “I’ve got a great deal—out of what I’ve been doing for every one. Not that it’s been much. I merely mean that, whatever it’s been, it’s brought me in far more than I’ve ever given out.”
The swing of the boat was so abrupt as almost to make her heel over. Up and down the deck such passengers as were clinging to nothing were flung this way and that, with some laughing and a few involuntary cries. Miss Barry having braced me in a corner of the alcove because of my game leg, I kept my footing steadily, but the girl herself was thrown square into my arms.
Not more than a second later another Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! warned us that another shell was on the way; but before we had time to be afraid a soft P-ff! told us that this, too, had struck the water. The waterspout, this time on the starboard side, not only spattered us with spray, but made it clear that only the sharp shifting of the coursehad saved us from a hole in our bow. That within the next few minutes our enemy would get us somewhere was a little more than probable.
Then from every cluster of heads came the cry, “Oh, look!”
There she was—a blue-gray streak, only a little darker than the blue-gray waters. The change in our course revealed her as she lay on the surface to shell us, since she was too far away to send us a torpedo. We forgot everything—Regina Barry and I forgot each other—to gaze. My arms relaxed their hold on the girl because there was no longer a mind to direct them; the girl took command of herself because it was only thus that she could observe the most baleful and fascinating monster in the world.
For it was as a monster, baleful and fascinating, that we regarded her. She was not a thing planned by men’s brains and built in a shipyard. She was an abnormal, unscrupulous, venomous water beast, with a special enmity toward man. She had about her the horror of the trackless, the deep, the solitary, the lonesome, the devilish. Few of us had ever got a glimpse of her before. It was like Saint George’s first sight of the dragon that wasted men and cities, and called forth his hatred and his sword.
I think that sheer hatred was the cause of our banging away at her with our two guns. We could hardly expect to hit her. She must have been out of our range, and our only hope was in getting out of hers.
As far as we could judge she was lying still and shelling us at her ease. Splash! Splash! Splash! The screeching things went all round us; but by some miracle they were only spectacular.
Viewed as a spectacle, there was a terrific beauty in itall. Nature and man were raging together, ferociously, magnificently, without conscience, without quarter, without remorse. Hell had unsealed its springs even in us who stood watchful and inactive. There was a sense of abhorrent glory in the knowledge that there were no limits to which we would not go. That there were no limits to which our enemy would not go with us was stimulating, quickening, like the flicker of the whip to the racer. About and above us were all the elements of which man is most accustomed to be afraid, but which, now that we were among them, inspired an appalling glee.
It was amazing how quickly we got used to it, just as, I am told, a man after a night or two gets used to being in the death-house. To be shelled on a stormy, lonely ocean came within a few minutes to being a matter of course. Had we had time to reflect and look backward, it would have seemed strange to think that we had made voyages across the Atlantic in which we had not been shelled.
Then all of a sudden there was a noise like that in a house when it is struck by lightning. It was as if all creation had burst into sound, as if there were nothing anywhere that was not a concomitant of an ear-splitting, soul-splitting crash. It was over us; it was round us; it was everywhere; it might have been within us. In our own persons we seemed to be rent by it.
From the port side a blast of smoke rose and poisoned the dark air. A few shrieks, half suppressed by the shriekers, ran the length of the deck, and a few male exclamations of astonishment and awe. For the most part, however, we stood still and soundless, as I believe we should have held ourselves had it proved to be the Judgment Day.
Our immediate impression was that all the aft of theship had been carried away. Had she begun to settle stern foremost on the instant we should not have been surprised. We could hardly believe that the long, narrow perspective of the deck, with its groups dotting the length of it, could remain unshattered and afloat. We were sure the decks below must have been blown into air and water.
For the hundredth part of a second theAssiniboiaappeared to stop still in her course, like a creature with its death-wound. She seemed stricken, stunned. But she gave another lurch, another swing to her huge person; and when the second shell came on, taking the range of that which had struck her, it plowed the waves astern. All seemed to be over in the space of between two breaths. By the time we could get our wits together sufficiently to ask what had happened she was once more driving onward.
It was splendid. It was sublime. It thrilled one with pride in pluck and seamanship. One could have hugged the brave old leviathan by the neck.
A British seaman, running down the deck on some errand, cried, as he passed us: “Got the old bucket aft, just above the water-line. But, Lor’! she don’t mind it! Didn’t do no ’arm. On’y killed Sammy Smelt, a steerage cabin-boy.”
But it was a beginning. Nothing could save us now but speed and the captain’s skill. The young officer who had helped to strip the covering off No. 5 strolled by us, smoking a cigarette.
“We’re showing her a pretty clean pair of heels,” he said, coolly, by way of dealing out encouragement. “Ship’s carpenter’s begun plugging up the hole. That won’t hurt us so long as we don’t get another.”
“What about the cabin-boy?” some one called out.
He shrugged his shoulders, saying, merely, “Doctor attending to the wounded.”
It was strange to be tearing through the seas, with that erratic course of the crazed leviathan, when at any second death might strike us from the air. I had often been under shell-fire, of course; but on land there was generally some dugout, someabri, in which one could seek shelter. What impressed me here was the vast exposure of it all. We could only stand with the heaven over us, ready to take to the boats, if need be, or equally ready to be blown into bits like little Sammy Smelt.
Among the people on the deck the quiet waiting which the traditions of the race have made second nature continued. We might have been passengers gathered at the entrance to a railway track. If a scared look haunted some faces, it was not more than might have been occasioned by the extreme lateness of a train.
The shells were still splashing, the ship was still driving onward under every pound of steam, when I looked again at the girl in the yashmak. It must not be understood that I had looked away from her for long. The period of our extreme peril did not in reality cover more than a few minutes. Like the crisis of a fever, it was slow in coming, but it passed quickly, though we needed some time to realize the fact.
But when I looked again at Regina Barry I found her as little disturbed as a woman could possibly have been in that special situation. Not to be hurled again into my arms, she held now to the hand-rail that runs along cabin walls; but she watched me rather than the ocean. I was her charge and the ocean was not. The blue-gray streak that had held her attention for a while was visibleonly when the turnings of the ship threw it into view; otherwise we had nothing to see on the starboard side except an infinitude of billows with curling white crests.
To resume something like the customary attitude of human beings toward each other I said, as casually as I could manage, “You came over here just after I did, didn’t you?”
Having purposely framed my sentence in just those words, it was some satisfaction to get the result I was playing for. It took all the aplomb—a rather shy aplomb—of which she was mistress to answer in a way that wouldn’t underscore my meaning.
“Possibly; but I don’t remember when you came over.”
Having given the date of my sailing, I added, “And you left with Evelyn a little more than three weeks later?”
“Since you know everything, you naturally know that.” She took on the old air of being at once smiling and defiant as she asked, “And has the fact any special significance?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” Before she could protest that there was no such significance I put the question, “How did you come to know her?”
“Is she so terribly difficult to know?”
“Not in the least; only, you’d never seen her in your life at the time when”—I gathered all my innermost strength together to bring the words out—“at the time when I talked to you last.”
She, too, gathered her innermost strength together, rising to the reference gallantly.
“Oh, well, a good many things have happened since then.”
Before going further I was obliged to pause and reckon how much I dared. Of the many sensitive points in my history, we were touching on the most sensitive. I was fully aware that since the sleeping dog was sleeping it might be better to let him lie. Once he was roused, there might be a new set of perils to deal with, perils we could avoid by softly stepping round them. That Paolo should go one way in space and Francesca another seemed to be decreed by inevitable fate; so why interfere with the process?
I should probably not have interfered with it had the circumstances not raised us above the sphere of our ordinary interests. The roar of the wind, the tumult of the sea, the plunging of the ship, the indescribable whining of shells, the knowledge of danger—were as the orchestra which lifts the duet to emotional planes that dialogue alone could never attain to. Though our words might be commonplace, every syllable was charged with tones and overtones and undertones of meaning to be seized by something more subtle than intelligence. Prudence might have said, “Let everything alone,” but that urging of the being which escapes the leash of prudence drove me on to speak.
“Do you remember when I talked to you last?”
She answered with the detachment of a witness under compulsion to tell the truth. The personal was as far as possible eliminated from her voice.
“Perfectly.”
“We—we seemed to—to break off in the middle of a conversation.”
“Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.”
The statement took my breath away. For some secondsI could only stare at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie direct.
“Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last.
“What do you think?”
“I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.”
“And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—”
I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to say that?”
She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible screened against embarrassment.
She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the barricade of her composure.
“No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.”
“But we could have talked them over.”
“If you’d waited.”
“I should have waited forever if I’d known.”
“Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.”
I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914, I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to recover fromthe first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt to me.
“It was curious, though,” I went on, “that that name, Gavrilo Prinzip, should have hammered itself in on my brain. I recall it now as about the only thing I could think of. I didn’t know what it meant, and I was far from supposing it the touchstone of human destinies that it afterward proved to be; but in some unreasoning way it held me. It was like the meaningless catch of a tune with which you can’t go on, till all at once you see it finishes in—”
“In a trumpet-call. Yes, I know. You had to follow it. So had I. I don’t think there’s much more than that to be said.”
The blue-gray streak was again on the starboard side, but comfortingly far astern. Though we were still within her range, we were getting the benefit of distance. At the same time some one called our attention to a blotch of black smoke, far down on the eastern horizon. A destroyer was coming to our aid.
I went back to the point we had partially forsaken.
“How long did you expect me to wait that afternoon?”
She looked down at the deck, answering with a perceptible infusion of the bitter in her tone.
“I didn’t fix a time. I wasn’t sitting with my watch in my hand.”
“But I was.”
“Evidently.”
“Why didn’t you come down?”
“I came down as soon as I could.”
“What kept you?”
She raised her eyes for a fleeting glance—lowering them again. At the same time her voice sank, too,so that in the fury of sound about us she was no more than audible.
“The thing you told me.”
“And that kept you—in what way?”
“In the way of making everything—different.”
“How much does that mean—different?”
“It means a good deal.”
“Can’t you tell me exactly?”
“I can’t tell you exactly; but it was something like this.” She fixed her eyes on me steadily. “When they first opened the Subway in New York I came up out of a station one winter afternoon just as the lights were lit, and instead of going to the right, as I should have done, I turned to the left. When I had walked about fifteen minutes I was dazed. Though I was in a part of New York I knew perfectly well, I couldn’t recognize anything. It was all a confusion of lights. I couldn’t tell which of the streets ran north and south, or which were east and west, or what the buildings were that I’d been used to seeing all my life. In the end some one took me into a drug-store and made me sit down till I had time to reorientate myself.”
“But you did it in the end?”
“That time—yes.”
“And this time? The time we’re talking about?”
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
Bang!
Whir-r-r! Z-z-z! P-ff!
Bang!
From the port side there came something like a feeble cheer—a chorus of rough male voices and high female screams, timid and yet glad.
A new swing of our crazed leviathan disclosed the reasonfor this wavering, victorious cry. There were two more blobs of smoke on the horizon, and from different points on the Irish coast three huge birds were flying like messengers from some god. Moreover, the blob of smoke we had first seen now had a considerable stretch of the ocean behind her, and in front a parting of the spray like two white plumes as she tore in our direction.
“She sure is some little ripper!” came a dry Yankee voice in the group about life-boat No. 5.
“Thirty-five knots if it’s one.”
“Them ’planes’ll overtake her, though, and be on the spot as soon as she is.”
“Gosh! I’d like to see Fritzie then!”
“J’ever see a kingfisher sweep down on a gudgeon?”
“Gee-whiz! Look at Fritzie! Goin’ to submerge!”
And sure enough, as we stared, the blue-gray streak began to sink behind the waves, becoming to the imagination even more a giant deep-sea reptile after it had gone.
Almost simultaneously our leviathan calmed down, resuming her straight course. It was done apparently with the wordless, unexplained inconsequence with which a runaway horse will suddenly fall into a peaceful trot. There was no stopping to salute the destroyers and ’planes that were hastening to our help or to exchange confidences with them as to our common enemy. There was neither hail nor farewell as we forged again toward the open sea.
Danger being considered past, the groups broke up, intermingling with sighs of relief. The Consolatrice and her friend came to exchange a few words with us, and Miss Prynne returned from the boat to which she had good-naturedly exchanged. While I thanked her forthis kindness, as if it had been done for myself, I saw Miss Barry trying to slip off.
By stepping out of my corner and assuming a limp lamer than my actual disability warranted I was able to intercept her.
“I wonder,” I made bold to ask, “if you could give me a hand back to the music-room?”
The yashmak was not so impervious but that I could detect behind it the scarlet glimmer of her smile.
“Oh, I think you could get there by yourself. Try.”
“I can manage the deck,” I said, in the tones of a boy feigning an indisposition to stay away from school, “but I’m afraid of the steps of the companionway.”
“How would you have managed if I hadn’t been here?” she asked, as she allowed me to lean ever so lightly on her arm.
The steps of the companionway presenting a more real difficulty than I had expected, I could say nothing till with her aid I had lowered myself safely down.
Postponing the pleasure of thanking her, I reverted to the topic the last attack had interrupted.
“I want to hear about your reorientation. You were able to put the streets in their proper place again, and to see New York as it was; but in my case—”
She put out her hand with that air which there is no gainsaying.
“I’m rather tired. I think I must go to my cabin and have a rest.” She added, however, not very coherently: “The way things happen is in general the best way—if we know how to use it.”
Somewhat desperately, because of her determination to go, I burst out, “And do you think all this has been the best way?”
“You must see for yourself that it’s been a very good way. We’ve been able to do—to do the things we’ve both done.” But the admission in the use of the first personal plural pronoun seemed suddenly to alarm her. She took refuge again in her need of rest. “I really must be off. If we don’t meet again before we leave the boat—”
“Oh, but we shall!”
“I’m very often confined to my cabin.”
“Not when you want to be out of it.”
“Very well, then; I very often don’t leave my cabin.”
I was holding the hand she had extended to say good-by, but she slipped it away and was going.
“Then tell me this—just this,” I begged. “How is it that we’re both on the same ship? That didn’t happen by accident?”
Whether she refused to answer my question or whether it didn’t reach her I couldn’t tell. All I got in response was a long, oblique regard—the fleeing farewell look of Beatrice Cenci—as she carried her secrets and mysteries away with her.