CHAPTER XXIII
So we came to that last evening on board, of which I must now tell you. It had taken me the intervening time to get used to the new outlook. The habit of seeing myself surrounded by a whole stockade of prohibitions was too strong to overcome in a flash. I had to let my mind emerge into freedom gently, telling myself each day that with a wife like this I could serve the cause more devotedly than ever, since she would be serving it too.
Of that dedication to a cause I was possibly too much aware. My uniform made me aware of it. My game leg and my sightless eye made me aware of it. The need of whole peoples, like the French and British and Italian, of every man who could fire a gun or ram home a bayonet or speak a rousing word—that more than anything else seemed to put a consecration upon me of which I was as foolishly and yet as loftily conscious as a modern king, accustomed to a bowler hat, when he rides through the streets with his crown on.
And on the last evening there was enough of the ecstatic in the air to justify this sense of a mission.
The voyage, which had not been without the exciting stimulus of danger, was successfully over. The west was actually reached, and the things done left behind us. The things to be done were making our pulses beat faster and our energies yearn forward. To-morrow with itssummons to activity was more keenly in our consciousness than to-day. Doctors, nurses, returning soldiers, the sparse handful of business men—we were already in heart ashore, walking in streets, riding in tram-cars, eating in dining-rooms, sleeping in beds, taking part in hard work, and deeming these things a privilege. Voices and laughter in the clear, still night, and the clicking of heels on the deck, were part of the relief and joyousness.
Late in the afternoon we had picked up the Nantucket light-ship, which rested like a star on the water. Now the horizon was being strung with beads of light, one, two, three, or little clusters at a time, behind which we knew that advancing night was lighting myriads of lamps all the way to the Pacific. On the Atlantic coast it was already dark, with cities and towns ablaze, and villages and farm-houses lit by kindly, shimmering windows. In the Middle West it was twilight, with electrics spangling the office-buildings here and there, and pale-gold flowers strewn over the prairie floors. Beyond the Mississippi it would still be day, but day dissolving gorgeously, softly, into sunset and moonrise and the everlasting magic of the stars.
As she and I hung over the deck rail side by side we felt ourselves on the edge of wonders. The Old World was in need of us, and we were in need of the New. To us who were New World born, and who were coming back to generous, easy-going welcome after the unspeakable things we had seen, the craving for New World brotherhood and vigor was like that of hunger or thirst. This much we admitted in so many words—even she.
She was still elusive; she was still mysterious. Though during the past few days she had not resisted a certain habit as to the place and hour at which we should findourselves together and had been willing to talk freely on any theme connected with the cause, she took flight from a hint of the personal, like a bird at an approaching footstep.
Nevertheless, she was so far responsive as to say in answer to some question of mine, “My immediate plans—”
I broke in abruptly, “Let me tell you about your immediate plans.”
As the deck was faintly illuminated, since we were again sailing with lights, I saw that change in her eyes which comes when a fire on a hearth bursts into a conflagration.
Probably my tone and the change in my manner had startled her.
“You? What?” she began, confusedly.
“I’ll tell you what your plans are; but before that let me tell you something else.”
She put up her hand. “Wait! Don’t—”
But it was too late to stop me. I couldn’t have stopped myself. I was carried on by the impetus that came from my having been so many years held back. I was no longer the consecrated servant of a cause. As for having been a drunkard and a thief, no shadow of remembrance stayed with me. I was simply a man head over heels in love with a woman, and in all sorts of stupid, stumbling phrases saying so.
She listened because she couldn’t do anything else without walking away; but she listened with a kind of aloofness. With her clasped hands resting on the rail and her little, black silhouette held quietly erect, she gazed off toward a great white star, which I suppose must have been Capella, and heard my tale because she couldn’t stop it.
“Listen,” I went on, leaning on an arm extended along the rail. “I’ll tell you your story. I’ve pieced it together and I know what it is. I didn’t know it when I came on board. It puzzled me.”
Her lips moved, but there was no turn of her head or stir of her person.
“Please don’t. I’m—I’m not sure that I could bear it.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You’ve done certain things. Let me give you their interpretation.”
“If I do—” she began, weakly.
I couldn’t allow her to continue.
“I see now the explanation of so many things that bewildered me at first—that made me suffer. That day at Rosyth, for instance, when you went in and left me, you didn’t despise or hate me. You may have been disillusioned—”
“It isn’t the word,” she murmured, still motionless, and looking off at the big white star. “I’d been thinking of you as the kind of man I’d—I’d been looking for so long.”
“And you saw I was less so than any of the others.”
“I’m not saying that. But if you think it was easy to tear up all one’s conceptions by the roots and plant in new ones—however kindly—all at once—”
“Oh no, I don’t! not now. But at that time I didn’t know you. It’s only been since coming on board and finding out what you’ve done—”
Curiosity prompted her to glance round at me.
“Then it was only since coming on board?”
“Oh, it was simple enough. It’s silly to keep up the secret. I was talking, while we were still in the dock at Liverpool, with that handsome Canadian nurse.”
“Miss Ogden. She was matron of the hospital at—”
“She knew who you were. She couldn’t tell me your name, but she said—or Miss Prynne said—that you’d come over with Evelyn—that you’d been at Taplow with Mabel—”
“I know; the sort of thing that goes round among nurses.”
“And so I put two and two together and formed a theory.”
“You needn’t tell me what it is. Please don’t.”
“But I want to.” I hurried on before she could protest further. “When you saw that you’d—you’d hurt me—that day at Rosyth—and that I had disappeared—and gone into the army—and away to England—you got into touch with Evelyn—”
“I wanted to do something,” she declared, in a tone of self-defense. “I couldn’t help it when I knew the need was going to be so great. We didn’t see that all at once, because we thought the war was going to be over in a very little while. But when we began to realize it wasn’t—”
“Oh, I don’t say you did it all on my account.”
Though this was meant to provoke either admission or denial, she glided over it.
“It wasn’t easy to do anything in New York, because we hadn’t got that far as yet; and so I naturally went to Canada. When I did so Annette gave me a line of introduction to Evelyn.”
“And you told her about me.”
She fell into my trap so far as to say: “I didn’t tell her. I simply let her guess.”
“Guess what?”
“All I ever said to her in words was to ask her never to mention my name to you.”
“But why?”
“I did the same with Lady Rideover when she took me on at Taplow.”
“Why—again?”
“For the reason that—that if you ever came to find out what I was doing you’d misunderstand it; just as I see you—you do.”
“But I don’t. I don’t misunderstand it when I say that in going to my sisters you wanted to be—you mustn’t be offended!—you wanted to be near me—to watch over me as much as possible.”
“You were the only man I knew at that time who’d taken the actual step of going to the war. If there’d been any others—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been a hundred. I don’t misunderstand it when I say that as soon as you knew I was going home by this boat you arranged—”
“To go home by it too,” she forestalled, quickly, “so that you should have somebody near you who could get about in the normal way in case there was danger. I admit that. It’s perfectly true.” She turned round on me with fire in her manner as well as in her eyes. “But what do you think I’m going home for?”
I repeated what she had said a few days before:
“You’re going home on account of your father—and to interest him and other Americans in American duty as to the war.”
“That’s a reason; it’s the reason I find it easiest to give. But I mustn’t hide it from you now that—that I’ve—I’ve another.”
“You’re going home to marry me.”“How can I be going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that you—that you cared anything about me?”
“You’re going home to marry me.”
“How can I be going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that you—that you cared anything about me?”
I made one of my long mental leaps. I made it as a man might take the one chance of life in leaping a crevasse, knowing that there are more chances that he will be dashed to pieces in the chasm.
“You’re going home to be married.”
There was a kind of awe in the way she drew off from me.
“You’re extraordinary,” she breathed, faintly. “Miss Ogden didn’t tell you that.”
I had not cleared the crevasse. I was struggling desperately on the edge of it, while beneath me was the abyss.
“You’re going home to marry me.”
I think she gave a little bitter laugh. At any rate, there was the echo of it in her tone, as she said, with sardonic promptness: “How can I be going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that you—that you cared anything about me?”
I, too, must have laughed, the statement struck me as so absurd.
“What? You never knew—?”
She shook her head with an emphasis almost violent.
“You may have known,” she said, in that voice which, after all, could not be called bitter, for the reason that it was reproachful, “but I’d come to the conclusion that”—she tried to carry the situation off with a second laugh, a laugh that ended as something like a sob—“that you didn’t.”
I leaned down toward her, speaking the words right into her face.
“Didn’t care?”
She nodded silently.
“For God’s sake, what made you think that?”
“Oh—everything!”
“Everything? When? How?”
She was doing her best to convey the impression that it didn’t matter.
“Everything—always—in New York—at Atlantic City—there especially! And lately—”
“Yes? Lately?”
“Lately—at Taplow.”
“But at Taplow—how? In Heaven’s name—how?”
“Oh, I was in and out of your room.”
“So I understand; but what of that?”
“Nothing; nothing; only—only what I saw.”
“Well, what did you see?”
Instead of answering this question at once she shifted her ground.
“If you cared—as you say—why didn’t you tell some one?”
“Tell some one? Who could I tell?”
“Oh, any one. Lady Rideover, for one. She’d made a promise not to mention me; but you hadn’t.”
“But why should I have mentioned you when I never supposed she had any notion—”
“But you see that’s it. If you’d cared—so much—you’d have done it—to one of your sisters or the other. But you didn’t—not to either; and so they got the idea—”
“Yes? What idea did they get? Go on. Tell me.”
I noticed that she was twisting and untwisting her fingers, and that she had begun throwing me quick, nervous glances through the half-light.
“It’s no use telling you, because it doesn’t matter. That is, it doesn’t matter now. Everything’s—arranged.”
“We’ll talk about that later. I want to know what idea Mabel and Evelyn got.”
“They didn’t get it exactly. They were only beginning to get it when I made them understand that I was goingback to be—Oh, why do you make me talk about it? Why do you bring it all up now, when it can’t do any good?”
To get at the facts I was obliged to speak with the severity one uses toward a difficult child.
“I want you to tell me what idea Mabel and Evelyn got.”
“Isn’t it perfectly evident what idea they’d get? Any one would get it when you—when you never said a word—not the least, little, confidential word—and you so ill!—and blind!—and to your own sisters!—and that Miss Farley there!”
I passed over the reference to Miss Farley because I couldn’t see what it meant. I had enough to do in seizing the new suggestion that had come to me.
“They didn’t think—they couldn’t have thought—that there was nothing on my side.”
“And everything on mine. That’s precisely the inference they drew. Girls do go about, you know, giving people to understand that men—”
“But not girls like you.”
“Yes, girls like me; or sufficiently like me. And so I had—in sheer self-respect—to let Lady Rideover see that there was nothing in it of the kind of thing she thought, and that I was actually going home to be—”
“But didn’t she see? Didn’t she know? Didn’t everybody see? Didn’t everybody know?”
In the two brief sentences that came out with something like a groan she threw tremendous emphasis on the first word.
“Nobody knew! Nobody saw!”
There was a similar emphasis on the penultimate word in my response.
“Did you ask them?”
She flashed back at me: “I did—almost. At times like that—if it’s so—some one generally knows it from—from the person who’s expecting to be brimming over with his secret.” She laughed again, lightly, nervously. “But in this instance nobody did.”
“You asked them?”
“Practically. I forgot everything I used to consider pride and—and I sounded them.”
“You sounded whom?”
“Oh, the people who knew you best—and who knew me—Annette, Esther Coningsby, Ralph—any one to whom I thought you might have betrayed yourself by a word. But it was just as with Evelyn and Lady Rideover. You had practically not mentioned my name. Hilda Grace told me she tried to sound you—that Sunday at Rosyth.”
“Well?”
“I’m only quoting her, mind you. She said she didn’t get”—there was a repetition of that nervous laugh—“she said she didn’t get—any satisfaction. And so—”
I tried to take a reasonable tone. “But how could I tell you or anybody else before I’d confessed to you who I was and where you’d first seen me?”
“Exactly. I quite understand that—now that you’ve said what you’ve said to-night. It’s where the past makes us pay—”
“For what I used to be.”
“Oh, you’re not the only one,” she declared, in a curious, offhand tone. “It’s for what I used to be, too.”
I found it difficult to follow her. “What you used to be? I don’t understand you.”
“You know about me—how I’ve been engaged to one man after another—and broken the engagements.”
“Because you were trying to find the right one.”
“It wasn’t only that. I thought of myself; I didn’t think of them. I let them offer me everything they had to give—and pretended to accept it—just to experiment—to play with—and now—now I’m—I’m caught!”
“Caught—in what way?”
She tossed her hands outward in a little, exasperated gesture.
“I can’t do the same thing again. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be sane.”
“The same thing? Do tell me what you mean.”
“It’s—it’s one of the same men. I’m—I’m caught. It’s what mother—and Elsie Coningsby—and other people who could talk to me plainly—told me would happen some day. I’m—I’m punished. And I can’t do the same thing the second time.”
It was still to escape from the yawning hell into which I felt myself going down that I said, stupidly, “Why can’t you?”
“Because I can’t. It’s what I said just now. It wouldn’t be sane. I’ve made a kind of history for myself. If I were to do the same thing again it wouldn’t merely seem cruel, it would seem crazy.”
“But if you don’t care for him?”
“I do—in a way. He’s been so good and kind and patient and everything! And even if I didn’t care for him at all it would be just the same—after what I’ve let him think—the second time.”
I could see her reasoning, if reasoning it was, though it was not the uppermost thought in my mind. As a matter of fact, I was repeating her statement as to “oneof the same men.” Which one of them was it? There had been three—the one she didn’t trust—the one she couldn’t have lived with—and the one who was only very nice. It would make such a difference which one it proved to be that I was afraid to ask her.
I burst out, desperately: “Oh, but why did you—let him think it—the second time?”
“I don’t know. It happened by degrees—by writing—in letters—and I didn’t see how far I was going. It was a kind of reaction.”
“Reaction from what?”
She looked at me wildly. “From you, I think. As far as I remember it became definite at Taplow.”
“When you were actually seeing me every day?”
“That was the reason. It was seeing you so cheerful and full of jokes—and not missing—not missing any one—nor ever mentioning them—not to a soul. It just convinced me of what I’d been sure of before—ever since the time at Atlantic City—that you didn’t—that you never had.... And so when he suggested it in one of his letters—I don’t know what made me!—but I didn’t say it was impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, who knows?—or something like that. And then he cabled—but I didn’t cable back—I only wrote—trying to say no—but not saying it decidedly enough.... And so it’s gone on—he writing and cabling both—and I only writing, but letting him think—just little by little—and not seeing how far I was being swept along.”
I wanted to be clear as to the facts.
“Then do I understand that you’re engaged to him?”
“I told him I wouldn’t be engaged again—that engagements for me had come to be grotesque. I said that ifwe did it we’d—we’d just go somewhere and be married.”
“If you did it? Then it’s possible—”
“No; because he’s expecting it. I’ve allowed him to expect it—just little by little, you understand—and not seeing how far I was letting myself in.... And now he’s told some people who used to know about it when I was engaged to him before—and that binds me because it will get about—so that if I were to break it off with him the second time I should be a laughing-stock—and quite rightly.”
“Oh, Regina, how could you?”
Taking no note of the fact that for the first time in my life I had called her Regina, she answered, simply: “I tell you I don’t know. If I do know it was because I was so lonely—and I’m over twenty-six—and feel older still—and nobody seemed to care about me but him—and I couldn’t bear the idea of going on and never marrying any one at all—which is what Elsie Coningsby said would happen to me—and what I’d been half wishing for myself—and yet half afraid of.... And you—”
“Yes? What about me?”
“There was a nurse at Taplow, that Miss Farley—”
“Miss Farley! Oh, good God!”
“Well, how did I know? She was very pretty.”
“Could I see whether she was pretty or not?”
“And you were always joking with her and thanking her.”
“Of course I thanked her. What else could I do?”
“You needn’t have kissed her hand. I caught you doing that one day when I was tidying up in your room.”
“Did you? Very likely. When a man is as helpless as I was his gratitude often becomes maudlin.”
“I don’t know that you need call it that. He simply falls in love with the pretty nurse who takes care of him. It was happening all the time in the hospitals. But for me—right there in your room—and shut out from everything—”
“But that wasn’t my fault. If I’d known you were there—”
“It was your fault at Atlantic City—and afterward—when I’d let you see—far more than a girl should ever let any man see.”
“But you know how impossible it was for me then—till I’d told you who I was.”
“I know it now. I didn’t know it before half an hour ago. And the time when you told me that—that thing—at Rosyth—I had no idea whether or not you meant.... And when you blame me for not coming down-stairs quicker than I did—”
“I haven’t blamed you, Regina.”
“You can’t imagine what it was to be all at sea not merely as to what you felt, but actually as to what you were—and had been. When you pulled the pearls out of your pocket—and said you were that man—”
There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted, and I had to give her time to regain her self-control.
“You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you hadabout you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished, something faithful and good.”
“Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no counterpart in the nature.”
“Well, whatever it was I saw it—and all that year those two types had been before my mind. Then when I was told that there were not two—that there was only one—it was like asking me to understand that the earth had only one pole, and that the North and the South Poles were identical.” She surprised me with the question, “Did you ever readLa Dame aux Camélias?”
I said I had, wondering at the connection.
“Don’t you remember how it begins with the exhumation of the body of that poor woman six months after she was buried?”
I recalled the fact.
“So that all through the rest of the book, when Marguerite Gautier is at the height of her triumphs, if you call them triumphs, you see her as she was first shown to you. Well— Oh, don’t you understand? That’s the way I had to see—I had to see you!”
I hung my head. “I understand perfectly, Regina—now.”
“There’s so much we’re only beginning to understand now, both on your side and on mine.”
“When it’s almost too late—if it isn’t quite.”
Her manner, her voice, both of which had been a little piteous, took on a sudden energy.
“Oh, as to that, I’ve been thinking it over—I’ve had to think over so much—and I don’t believe the word applies.”
“Doesn’t apply?” I asked, in astonishment. “Whynot—when it’s as late as it is? It’s just as if Fate had been making us a plaything.”
“I don’t believe that. Life can’t be the sport of disorganized chance. If Romeo takes poison ten minutes before Juliet wakes it’s because the years behind them led up to the mistake.”
“You mean that we reap only what we sow?”
“And that life is as much a matter of development in a logical sequence as the growth of certain plants from certain seeds. It isn’t—it can’t be—a mere frenzy of haphazards. Things happen to us in a certain way because what we’ve done leaves them no other way.”
“And was there no other way in which this could happen to you and me?”
“Think! Isn’t it the very outcome that might have been expected from what we’ve been in the past?”
I stared at her without comprehension.
“Because of your past life,” she went on, “there was something you couldn’t tell me; and because I didn’t know it I’ve taken a step which my past life doesn’t allow me to retrace. Could anything be neater?”
“And yet you’re fond of saying that the way things happen is the best way.”
“It’s the best way if it’s the only way, isn’t it? I should go mad if I thought that my life hung on nothing but caprice—whether of luck or fate or anything you call God. I can stand my deserts, however hard, if I know they’re my deserts.”
“You can stand this?”
“This is not a question of standing; it’s one of working out. Life isn’t static; it’s dynamic—those are the right words, aren’t they? It’s always unfolding. One thing leads to the next thing; and then there must be timeswhen a lot of things that seemed separate are gathered up in one immense result. Don’t you think it must be that way?”
I said, stupidly, that I didn’t know.
“Of course you don’t know if you don’t think; but try to think!”
“What good will thinking do when we see how things are?”
“It’ll show us how to make the best of them, won’t it?”
“Is there any best to be made of your marrying anybody else than me? The way things happen isn’t necessarily the best way.”
After her hesitating syncopated sentences in dealing with what was more directly personal to her life and mine she talked now not so much calmly as surely, as of subjects she had long thought out.
“I don’t say the best way absolutely; but the best in view of what we’ve made for ourselves. For ourselves you and I have made things hard. There’s no question about that. But isn’t it for both of us now to live this minute so that the next won’t be any harder?”
There was no argument in this; there was only appeal.
“What,” I asked, “do you mean by that?”
“I suppose I mean that the best way to live this minute is to accept what it contains—till it develops into something else—as it will. This isn’t final. It’s only a step on the way to—”
“It’s a step on the way to your marrying a man you’re not in love with, and my not marrying at all.”
“And as the world is at present, aren’t there worse tragedies than that?”
Irony of which she must have been unaware prickedmy dreams of celibate consecration to a cause as a pin pricks a bubble.
“So that if I stand still and let you go on—”
She threw me a quick glance. “And aren’t you going to?”
The answer to that question was what in the back of my mind I had been trying to work out.
“Wouldn’t it depend,” I said, picking the right words, “on which of the three it is? There’s one I couldn’t interfere with—not without disregarding gratitude and honor.”
“Do you want me to tell you which?”
But I didn’t—not then. Too much hung on what the knowledge would bring me. There were decisions to which I couldn’t force myself at once. In saying this I added, “But though I can’t interfere with him without disregarding gratitude and honor, I don’t say that I sha’n’t disregard them.”
In the clear starlight her eyes had a veiled metallic brightness.
“No?”
“And if I don’t,” I persisted, “what shall you do?”
“What would you expect me to do?”
“I should expect you to back me up.”
“So that we should both be disregarding gratitude and honor?”
“We’ve a right to our happiness.”
“That’s a very old argument, isn’t it?”
“It’s not the less true for being old.”
“Oh no; if it’s true it’s true—anyhow.”
“And it is true. Don’t you know it is?”
She surprised me by saying, as if quite casually, “I don’t suppose that in the end it’s the truth or the untruth of the argument that would weigh with me.”
My heart gave a thump.
“Then what would weigh with you?”
She was standing with her back to the rail, the great white star behind her. As if to emphasize the minute of suspense the engines gradually stopped, while the ship rocked gently on the tide. The lights on shore were more complex now, lights above lights, lights back of lights, with the profusion of seaboard towns even in November. The murmur of voices and the click of heels grew expectant as well as joyous.
When she spoke at last it was with breast heaving and eyes downcast. Her words came out staccatowise, as if each made its separate effort to keep itself back.
“What would weigh with me? I—I don’t know.”
“Does that mean,” I demanded, sharply, “that you might back me up?”
I could barely catch her words.
“It means first of all that—that I’m awfully weak.”
“It isn’t weak, Regina, to—to love.”
“It’s weak for a soldier to make love an excuse for not fighting.”
“But you’re not a soldier.”
“Oh yes, I am; and so are you. We’re all soldiers now—every one in the world. We keep telling ourselves—we keep telling one another—that we’re fighting for right. It’s our great justification. But what’s the use of fighting for public right if we go and do wrong privately?”
“But it isn’t right for you to throw yourself away on a man you don’t care for.”
“It’s right for me to stand by my word—what is practically my word—till something relieves me from the necessity.”
“And do you think anything ever will?”
“That’s not what I have to consider. If I do what I know I ought to do I’ve only to wait—and let the next thing come.”
“And what you know you ought to do—are you going to do it?”
She looked up at me pleadingly, quiveringly, with clasped hands.
“I don’t want to do—to do anything else. Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!”
It was not this unexpected collapse that made me tremble; it was not this confession; it was the knowledge that I had her in my power. She had seemed so far above me—ever since I knew her; she had seemed so far beyond me, so strong, so aloof, so ice pure, so inflexibly and inaccessibly right! And now she was ready to come to me if I insisted on taking her.
But the hungry beast in me was not yet satisfied with her avowals.
“Could I, Regina—could I—make you?”
I once saw in the eyes of a spaniel that knew it was going to be shot the beseeching, submissive, helpless look I saw here.
“You know what I’ve been doing, Frank—the last two years—just to be where I—where I could—hear about you—occasionally—and see you perhaps—when you couldn’t see me.”
I bent down toward her, close, closer, till I almost enveloped her.
“Yes, I know that—now—and—and I’m—I’m going to make you.”
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t withdraw. Perhaps she crept nearer me. Certainly she shivered.
The look in her eyes was still helpless, submissive, beseeching; but because it grew mortally frightened as well I repeated what I had said as softly but as firmly as I could make the words:
“I’m—I’m going to make you.”
There was nothing but the strip of black veiling between her lips and mine when a sudden flash that might have come out of heaven threw me back with a start.
It was there above us—the great beacon—landlike—homelike—the New World—the new work—the new problems to be solved—the new duties toward mankind to be hammered home—while thankful voices were murmuring round us:
“Sandy Hook!”