CHAPTER XXI
So my celibacy of the will was threatened. I mean by that that I found myself with two main objects of thought instead of one. Having vowed myself to a cause, a woman had supervened with that pervasiveness of presence with which a perfume fills a room. I might still vow myself to the cause, but I shouldn’t serve it as I had meant to, with heart and senses free.
Or should I?
The question fundamentally was that. Could I at a time like this divide my allegiance as I should be obliged to divide it by falling in love and being married? Or ought I, in deference to the work I was to do, suppress this old passion and smother the problems and curiosities it had begun to rouse in me?
If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was, had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances.I couldn’t make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself every minute of the day.
No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer singleness of purpose than I when I came on board theAssiniboia; and now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her.
I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal?
Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might end again in her being disappointed?
I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaningaway of my heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it.
Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure.
But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my labor for my pains.
It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience. On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.”
Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it.
“Human effort after human welfare is never drastic enough,” I read. “It is never sufficiently radical to accomplish the purpose it tries to carry out. Instead of laying its ax at the root of the tree of its ills it is content to hack off a few branches. It never gets beyond pruning-work; and the most one can say of the results it achieves is that they are better than nothing.
“So much, then, one can affirm of the dreams that are now being dreamed, in all probability to vanish with waking. They are better than nothing. Better than nothing are the aims held up before the Allied nations as the citadels they are to capture. The crushing of military despotism is better than nothing; the elimination of war is better than nothing; the establishment of universal democracy, the founding of a league of nations, the formation of a league to enforce peace, the dissemination of a world-wide entente, these are all of them better than nothing, even though they end in being no more productive of permanent blessing than the Hague Conference, which was better than nothing in itself. They are probably as effective as anything that man, with his reason, his wisdom, his science, his degree of self-control, and his pathetic persistence in believing in himself when that belief has so unfailingly been blasted, can ever attain to. But, oh, gentlemen, as the prophet said thirty centuries ago, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city.’ You are pouring out blood; you are pouring out money; you are giving your sons and your daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch; through the fire to Moloch unflinchingly they pass; you are tearing the hearts out of your own bodies, and you are doing it with a heroismthat cannot fail of some reward. But this is not the way, neither is this the city. It is better than nothing, but it is not the best. You could do it all so much more thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”
But with the knowledge that this woman had simply passed and let her shadow fall upon me I had no heart for Sheering’s impassioned words. I got up and followed her.
I found her on deck, far forward, leaning on the rail and watching a fiery, angry sunset that inflamed all the western horizon. As she looked round and saw me advancing along the deck I detected in her telltale eyes the first scared impulse to run away.
But what was she afraid of?
It was the question I asked as soon as I was near enough to speak.
“What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”
“The way you looked. You see, this queer sort of veil doesn’t protect you; it gives you away by throwing all your expression into your eyes. There’s an essence that eludes one till it’s concentrated and distilled.”
“I’m sure I didn’t mean—”
“To look like an animal trying to escape? Well, you did.”
“Oh, as to that, I could easily have walked round the deck-house to the other side of the ship.”
“If the discourtesy wouldn’t have been too obvious—of course!” But I didn’t press the point. There were other admissions to which I had an unchivalrous cravingto bring her if I could; and so I went on, artfully, “It was clever of you to find my state-room on Tuesday—all on the spur of the moment like that.”
She contented herself with murmuring, “Yes, wasn’t it?”
“And your own cabin is on another deck.”
“I’m on this deck.”
“So that you hadn’t even seen me going in and out.”
“I’m a nurse—in a way. Nurses have to know more than other passengers or they’d be no good on board ship.”
“And do you know every one’s cabin?”
“I know every one’s cabin to whom I can be useful.”
“Is that many?”
“No; not many, unfortunately.” She diverted the attack by saying, “What are you asking for?”
“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, carelessly. I added, however, with some slight show of intention, “I’ve called it your cleverness, but I really mean it as your kindness.”
She decided to take the bull by the horns, shifting her position and standing with her back to the rail.
“If you call it kindness that I should have learned the number and location of your cabin before we left Liverpool—”
“Oh, you did it then?”
“Yes, I did it then. But if you call it kindness, of course I can’t prevent you. I can only assure you it isn’t. I knew you couldn’t get about easily—”
“How did you know that?”
“I saw you come on board. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Then let me go farther back and ask how you happened to see me come on board. Wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that you should have been there, right at the head of the gangway?”
“Well, life is full of extraordinary coincidences, isn’t it? And when a woman who can do so little sees a wounded man—”
There were other wounded men scattered about the deck. I glanced at them as I said, “And have you done that for all the wounded men on board?”
“I’ve done it for all I know.”
“And how many do you know?”
She averted her profile, with an air of having had enough of the subject.
“I wanted you to tell me a minute ago why you were asking me these questions, and you said for nothing.” I could see her smile behind the chiffon of the yashmak as she went on, “Since that’s your only reason, perhaps you won’t mind if I don’t answer you.”
“But if I had a reason for asking, would you tell me then?”
“Wouldn’t it have to depend on the reason?”
“You’re very careful.”
She shot a daring, smiling glance at me as she riposted, “Well, aren’t you?” Before I had time to recover from the slight shock that these words dealt me she pointed to the horizon. “See, there’s smoke over there. I do hope it’s not another U-boat.”
I accepted the diversion—for more reasons than one. Of these the first was the shock to which I have alluded. She saw through me. That is, she saw I didn’t place her first. How she saw it I could no more tell than she could tell how I knew her history of the past two years. But the tables were turned and turned in such a way as to make me feel ridiculous. A man who is careful with regard to a woman is always slightly grotesque.
As my most skilful defense lay in feigning a lack of perceptionI talked about U-boats and the experience of two days before; but I came away from her with a feeling of discomfort.
I analyzed the feeling of discomfort as due to the repetition of our mutual attitude more than two years previously. Where she came forward I drew back. I had always drawn back. I used to suppose that nothing but one motive could have driven me to this humiliating course, and now I was taking it from another. I was taking it from another, and she knew it. The essence of the humiliation lay in that.
Each time I met her on deck she betrayed a hesitation that I found harder to bear than contempt. Her very effort to preserve a tone of friendliness was a reproach to me. It seemed to say: “You see all I’ve done for you. You accept it and give me nothing in return.”
And yet I was obliged to consider that which, were I to let myself be nothing but myself, might lie before me in the next few weeks and months. I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married. As a man engaged to be married I should be at once enveloped in that silken net of formalities with which women with their consecration to the future of the race have invested all that pertains to the preliminaries of mating. I had seen for myself that in America that silken net is more elaborate than it is elsewhere. In any British community it is spun of tissue, fragile, light, easily swept aside should the need arise. In America it is solidly constructed of gold cord, and is as often as not adorned with gems. In America an engagement leads to something of an anti-climax in that, from the human point of view, it is more important than a marriage. It is sung by a chorus of matrons and maidens and social correspondents of the press in avolume far more resounding than that of the nuptial hymn. That a man should marry after he has become engaged is considered as much a matter of course as that he should fight after he has enlisted; but that he should become engaged is like taking that first oath which denotes his willingness to give himself up, to make the great renunciation for the sake of something else. More than any single or signal act of bravery that comes later, it is the thing that counts. I am not quarreling with American social custom; I am only saying that I had reasons for being afraid of it.
I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married, and as a man engaged to be married I should be put through paces as strict and as stately as those of the minuet. There would be no escape from it. I might be promised in advance an escape from it, but the promise would not be kept. I might be promised simplicity, privacy, secrecy, a mere process of handfasting before the least noticeable of legal authorities; but all would go by the board.
Whatever my future wife and I might say—and my future wife would say it only half-heartedly, if as earnestly as that—I should be seized in the soft, tender, irresistible embrace of the feminine in American life, the element that is far more powerful than any other, and I should have no more fight to put up than a new-born infant against a nurse. There would be a whole array of mothers and potential mothers to see that I had not. There would be Mrs. Barry and Annette van Elstine and Hilda Grace and Esther Coningsby and Elsie Coningsby and Mrs. Legrand, not to speak of a vast social army behind them, all supported and urged on by the unanimous power of the press.
No one of them would allow me to slip from their kindly, overwhelming attentions any more than bees would allow a queen. Like a queen bee is any man who is engaged to an American girl—or at least he was in the days, now so extraordinarily long ago, before America went into the war. Since then marriage has become casual, incidental, one of those hasty touches given to human life, which, like the possession of money or the pursuit of happiness or the leisure to earn a living, are pleasant but not vital. But in the America of the end of 1916, the mentally far-away America to which I was going back, matrimony was the most momentous happening in a life history. From the minute a man became engaged to that when he turned away from the altar, he had to give himself up to his condition. He was no longer his own. Dinners, lunches, parties, theaters, publicity, and the approval of women claimed him; and shrinking was of no avail.
To the life after marriage, from this point of view, my mind hardly worked forward. I have spoken of men who were good soldiers and equally good husbands. Undoubtedly there are hundreds of thousands in the class. But I had seen not a little of men who, because they were husbands, would gladly not have been soldiers at all. Theirs was not a divided allegiance, for they had only one. The body was in the fight, and it did wondrously; but the heart and soul and mind and craving were with the wife and little ones; and who could blame them?
But all my personal desire was not to be of their number. Had I been married before the war I should have been as they; but since I was free to espouse the cause which had become mistress of everything I was I wanted to espouse it.
I thought I had espoused it. I had considered myself bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. During my months of fighting it had been a satisfaction to think of myself as at liberty to make any sacrifice of limb or life, and leave no heart to bewail me, no eye to shed a tear, and no care to spring up behind me. My family would be content to say, “Poor old Frank, he did his duty!” Further than that, I should bring no regret to any heart but Lovey’s; and of him I was persuaded that if I went he wouldn’t wait long after me. Moreover, I had guarded against any too great misfortune overtaking him by providing for him in my will.
I must own, furthermore, to another misgiving: I was not too sure of myself from the point of view of the old failing.
Things had happened in the trenches—they had dosed me with brandy, whisky, rum, any restorative that came handy, on a number of occasions—and there had been something within me as ready to be waked as a tiger to the taste of blood. I can say truthfully enough that I had never yielded to the desire of my own deliberate act; but I must also say truthfully that I was by no means sure that one day I might not do so. We had talked often enough, as men with men, of what we called a moral moratorium—and the talk haunted me with all manner of suggestions. The ban on what is commonly called sin was to be lifted for the period of the war; and we who had to deny ourselves so much were not to deny ourselves anything that came easily within our grasp. It seemed an alluring condition, and one which, without waiting for the license of supreme war councils or the permission of the Church, each of us was tempted to inaugurate for himself. In a situation in which that which is born of the flesh isflauntingly before one’s eyes, and millions of men are thrown together as flesh and little more, appetite has its mouth wide open. That man was strong indeed who could ignore this yearning of the body; and that man was not I.
So again the consciousness of freedom was like a reserve fund to a corporation. It was something on which to fall back if everything else was swept away. I didn’t want to go to the devil; but if I went no one would suffer but myself, as no one would suffer but myself if a German sniper were to blow the top off my head. Mind you, I am not saying that I came back morally weakened from the war; I only came back with a sense that one man’s life or death—one man’s ruin or salvation—was of no more account than the fate of a roadside bit of jewel-weed amid the infinite seed-time and harvest of the year. I was inured to loss of all kinds on a stupendous scale. I had seen thousands blown to pieces beside me, and my mind had not turned aside to regret them; thousands would see me blown to pieces with the same indifference as to whether I lived or died. Callousness as to the life and death of others induces callousness as to one’s own; and compared to life and death, what is the control of a mere appetite? No; I was not morally weakened; but I was morally benumbed. There was a kind of moral moratorium in my consciousness. I repeat that I wasn’t practically making use of it; but I was in a period of suspense in which I admitted to myself that it might depend on circumstances whether I made use of it or not.
And if I did, and if I was married....
From the sheer possibility my mind turned in dismay. To the celibacy made urgent by a purpose I added the celibacy necessitated by a curse. As the one counseledme not to involve myself with anybody else, so the other warned me not to involve anybody else with me. Through warning and counsel I had kept myself in something like a state of serenity till now.
It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well, I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate, devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once been Miss Smedley’s.
And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one in which I saw myself moving amid complimentsand flowers and polite conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net. Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the answer valiantly.
The difficulty in my case sprang of choice. “I’ve got to” wasn’t imperative enough. Or if imperative, it was imperative on both sides equally.