CHAPTER XXVI
More weeks followed, of which my record is chiefly in the drama of public events.
Vast as these were at the time, they seem even vaster in the retrospect. As my memory goes back to them they are like prodigious portents in the sky, awful to look at and still more awful to think about. A time will come when we shall find it amazing merely to have lived through such happenings.
Before the invaders the Rumanian towns were going down like houses built of blocks. In her attitude to Rumania, Russia was a mystery—a husband who sees his wife fighting for her life and doing hardly anything to help her. The rumors, true or false, that reached us might have been torn from some stupendous, improbable romance—a feeble Czar, a beautiful and traitorous Czarina, a corrupt nobility, an army betrayed, a people seething in dreams and furies and ignorance. Washington, having gone so far as to ask the Allied nations their peace conditions, had received them—restitution, reparation, and future security. Then late in that month of January, 1917, there came to people like me an unexpected shock. Before the Senate President Wilson delivered the speech of which the tag that ran electrically round the world was peace without victory.
I mention these things because they are the only waymarks of a time during which my private life seemedto be drearily and hopelessly at a standstill. The deadlock of the nations reacted on myself. Mentally I was at grips with destiny, but nothing made any progress. I was exactly where I had started, as regards Regina, as regards Cantyre, as regards Annette, as regards the father and mother Barry. Outwardly I was on friendly terms with them all, and on no more than friendly terms with any one.
The Barrys invited me to dinner, and I went. Cantyre made up a theater party—he was fond of this form of recreation—and I went to that. Annette asked me to a Sunday lunch at which Cantyre and Regina were guests. The force of organized life held us together as a cohesive group; the operation of conventional good manners kept us to courtesies. That any one was happy I do not believe; but life threw its mask even on unhappiness.
I got in, of course, an occasional word with Regina, which, nevertheless, didn’t help me. As far as I could observe, she lived and moved in a kind of hypnotic state, from which nothing I knew how to say could wake her. She was always waiting for me to give the word, and I was afraid to give it. If there was hypnotism, it affected us both, since I was as deeply in the trance as she.
Now and then, however, she came out of it with some brief remark which gave me a lead and perhaps made me hope. One such occasion was at the theater. Cantyre had not put me next to her, but there was an entr’acte when I found his place empty and slipped into it.
“And how are events taking their course?” I asked, with a semblance of speaking cheerily.
“I’m waiting to see.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
“And how long is that to go on?”
“Till events have shaped their course in a way that will tell me what to do.”
“How shall you know that?”
“How does the twig know when the current takes it from the spot where it has been caught and carries it down-stream?”
“Oh, but you’ve got intelligence.”
“Any intelligence I’ve got implores me to keep on waiting.”
“So that you’re not going to be married right away?”
“I shall not be married till I see it’s the obvious thing to do.”
“Not even to me?”
“That’s different. I’ve already told you—”
“That if I give the word— But don’t you see I can’t give it?”
“Exactly. You’re waiting for the sign as much as I am.”
“What sign?”
“We shall recognize it when the time comes.”
“Where will it come from?”
“Right up out of life; I don’t know where, nor how.”
“Who’ll give it to us?”
She had only time, as Cantyre returned to his seat, to send me a long, slantwise look, with the underscored words, “You know!”
Another time was in the regrouping of guests, after Annette’s luncheon. Finding myself beside her at a window, I asked the plain question, “Are you engaged to Cantyre?”
“I’m just where I was when I told you about it on board ship. He hasn’t asked me to be more definite.”
“Is he just where he was?”
“I think he is, in that—in that he expects me to marry him.”
“And you leave him under that impression?”
“I don’t know what else to do—till I get the sign.”
“You’re still looking for that?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Oh, but you are, whether you’re aware of it or not.”
“And suppose he urges you before the sign comes?”
“I shall still wait.”
“And suppose I urged you?”
“I’d take that as the sign.”
And after the guests went I stayed behind and told the whole story to Annette. So long as there were no clandestine meetings under her roof, she was as detached and sympathetic and non-committal as a chorus in a Greek play.
“Why don’t you give her the sign, if it’s not a rude question?” she asked, while a marvelous succession of ripples circled over her duskiness.
“Because I’m afraid to. Think what it would mean to Cantyre, who’s been so white with me all these years.”
“As well as to every one concerned, including herself and you. I’m glad you’ve enough common sense to feel that. See here, Frank,” she went on, kindly, “you’ve got to pull yourself out of this state of mind. It’s doing you no good. When you ought to be at work for your country, which needs you desperately, you’re sulking over a love-affair. Buck up! Be a sport! Be a man! There are lots of nice girls in New York. I’ll find you some one.”
But at that I ran away.