CHAPTER XXX
My purpose in telling you all this is to show you why I reacted so slightly to Regina’s charge of the indirect method. Though my curiosity as to what she meant was keen enough, the pressure of other interests allowed it no time to work. This is to say, as soon as I got back into the current of great events personal concerns became relatively unimportant. They had to wait. One developed the capacity to keep them waiting.
But toward the middle of March I met her one day in Fifth Avenue. Even from a distance I could see that her step was vigor and her look animation. The haunting sadness had fled from her eyes, while the generous smile, spontaneous and flashing, had returned to her scarlet lips. It was a new Regina because it was the old one.
To me her first exclamation was: “How well you look! You’re almost as you were before the war.”
Though I was conscious of a pang at seeing her so far from pining away, I endeavored to play up.
“Mayn’t I say the same of you? What’s done it?”
She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. Work, I suppose—and the knowledge that things are marching.”
“I hear you’re very busy.”
“I hear you’re busy, too.”
“People do seem to want to be told things at first hand.”
“I find the same.”
“And so one has to be on the job.”
“There’s nothing like it, is there? It”—she flung me one of her old, quick, daring glances—“it fills all the needs. Nothing else becomes urgent.”
“You mean that one’s personal affairs—”
“Oh, one has no personal affairs. I remember a man who was in the San Francisco earthquake telling me that for forty-eight hours he hardly needed to eat or sleep.”
“I’ve seen that doubled and trebled.”
“Of course you have. It simply means that when we get out of ourselves we can make supermen of the commonest material.”
I ventured to say: “You look happy, Regina. Are you?”
“Are you?”
I weighed this in order to answer her truthfully.
“If I’m not happy I’m—I’m content—content to be doing something—the least little bit—to urge things forward.”
“And I can say the same. If I look well, as you put it, that’s the reason. And so long as that’s the reason other things can—wait.” She added, quickly: “I must go now or I shall be late. I’m speaking to the women at the Mary Chilton Club, and I’m overdue.”
She had actually passed on when I stopped her to say, “What do you mean by the indirect method?”
She called back over her shoulder, “Ask Stephen.”
And I asked him that night. Having heard him come into his room between eight and nine o’clock, I marched in boldly, bearding him without beating about the bush.
“I say, old Stephen, what have you been saying to Regina about me?”
His hat had been thrown on the table; his arms were outstretched in the act of taking off his overcoat.
He repeated my question as if he didn’t understand it.
“What have I been saying to Regina about you? Why, nothing—much.”
“Nothing much; that means something. What the deuce do you mean by the indirect method?”
“I haven’t spoken of an indirect method.”
“No; but she has!”
“Oh, I see.”
“Then if you see, tell me what it is.”
He finished the arrested act of taking off his coat, after which he hung it up in a closet, doing the same with his hat. The minute’s delay allowed time for the storm-clouds to gather on his face, and all the passions of a gloomy-hearted nature to concentrate in a hot, thundery silence.
“Is this a bit of bluff, Frank?”
“Bluff be hanged! I’m ready to speak out frankly.”
The storm-clouds were torn with a flash like a streak of lightning.
“Then why didn’t you come to me like a man instead of sending that sneaking old beast—”
“Hold on, Stephen. What sneaking old beast have I sent?”
“He wouldn’t have come unless you had set him on me. You needn’t tell me that.”
“What the deuce are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. There hasn’t been a day since you came back that I haven’t had a hint.” He was not a man to whom anger came easily; he began to choke, to strangle with the effort to get his indignation out. “I’d have given him the toe of myboot long ago if—if—if—if”—the words positively shivered on his lips—“if—if—if I hadn’t wanted to see how far you’d go; and, by God! I’ve—I’ve had enough of it!”
“Enough of what, Stephen?” I endeavored to ask, quietly.
He knocked his knuckles on the table with a force that almost made them bleed.
“My name is Cantyre—do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. But tell me, what is it you’ve had enough of?”
“I’ve had enough of your damned diplomatic slyness in setting that old reptile on me!”
I am not quick tempered. The tolerance born of a too painful knowledge of my own shortcomings obliges me to be slow to wrath. But when anger does get hold of me it works a change like that of a powerful chemical agent suddenly infused into the blood.
I turned and strode out. A few times in the trenches I had been the victim of this rage to kill—and I had killed. How many I killed at one time or another I now couldn’t tell you. I saw too red to keep the count. All I know is that I have stuck my bayonet into heart after heart, and have dashed out brains with the butt end of my rifle. It is all red before me still—a great splash of blood on the memory.
But I had got the habit. In a rage like this to kill some one had become an instinct. I could not have believed that the impulse would have pursued me into civil life; but there it was.
Having flung open the door of my apartment, I marched straight for the “kitchingette.” Lovey was seated on a stool beside the tiny gas-range, polishing one of my boots. The boot was like a boxing-glove on his left hand, whilehe held the brush suspended in his right, looking up at me with the piteous appeal of a rabbit pleading for its life.
His weakness held me back from striking him, but it didn’t stem my words.
“Who the devil, you old snake, gave you the right to interfere in my affairs?”
He simply looked up at me, the boot on one hand, the brush suspended in the other. His lower lip trembled—his arms began to tremble—but he made no attempt to defend himself.
“What have you been saying?” I demanded. “Speak, can’t you?”
But he couldn’t. I caught him by the collar and dragged him to his feet.
He had just the strength to stand on them, though his limp hands continued to hold the boot and the brush.
“Now are you going to speak? Or shall I kick you out?”
“You’d kick me out, Slim?”
The mildness of his voice maddened me.
“By God, I would!”
The brush and the boot fell with a dull clatter to the floor.
“Then I’d better go.”
He looked about him helplessly till his eyes fell on the old felt hat hanging on a peg. I watched him as he took it down and crammed it on his head. There was another helpless searching as if he didn’t know what he was looking for before he spied an old gnarled stick in a corner. Taking that in his hand, he fumbled his way into the living-room.
By the time I had followed him I was beginning to relent.I had not really meant to have him go, but I was not ready as yet to call him back. What Cantyre must have thought of me, what Regina must have thought of me, in egging so poor a creature on to say what I wouldn’t say myself, roused me as to a more intense degree I used to be roused on hearing of Belgian women treated with the last indignities, and Canadian soldiers crucified. Had I stopped to consider I would have seen that Regina didn’t believe it, and that Cantyre believed it only as far as it gave an outlet to his complicated inward sufferings; but I didn’t stop to consider. Perhaps I, too, was seeking an outlet for something repressed. At any rate, I let the poor old fellow go.
“What about your things?” I asked, before he had reached the door.
He turned with a certain dignity. “I sha’n’t want no things.” He added, however, “Ye do mean me to get out, Slim?”
I didn’t—but I didn’t want to tell him so. Fury had cooled down without leaving me ready to retract what I had said. I meant to go after him—when he had got as far as the lift—but I meant, too, that he should take those few bleeding steps of anguish.
He took them—not to the lift, but out into the vestibule. Then I heard a faint moan; then a sound as if something broke; and then a soft tumbling to the floor.
When I got out he was lying all in a little huddled, senseless heap, with a cut on his forehead where he had struck the key or the door-knob as he fell.
It was more than an hour before Cantyre got him back to consciousness; but it was early morning before he spoke. We had stayed with him through the night, ashe had shown all the signs of passing out. His recovery of speech somewhere about dawn came as a surprise to us.
To Cantyre I had given but the slightest explanation of the accident, being sure, however, that he guessed at what I didn’t say.
“Told him to get to the dickens out of this, and he was taking me at my word. Never meant to let him get farther than the lift. Just wanted to scare him. Sorry now.”
But Lovey’s account was different.
About seven in the morning there came a streak of wan light down the shaft into which the window of his room looked out. Cantyre murmured something about going back to his own place for a bath.
“All right,” I agreed, “and you’d better get your breakfast. When you come back I can do the same. You will come back, won’t you?”
“Oh, of course! I sha’n’t be gone more than an hour. When he wakes again give him another teaspoonful of this; but don’t worry him unless he wakes.”
And just then Lovey woke. He woke with a dim smile, as a young child wakes. He smiled at Cantyre first, and then, rolling his soft blue eyes to the other side of the bed, he smiled at me.
“What’s up, Slim?” he asked, feebly. “I ain’t sick, am I?”
“No, Lovey, old son, you’re not sick; you’ve only had a bit of a fall.”
And then it came back to him.
“Oh yes. I know. Served me right, didn’t it?” Rolling his eyes now toward Cantyre, he continued: “I was just a-frightenin’ of Slim, like. Kind o’ foolish, Iwas. Said I was goin’ to leave him. Didn’t mean to go no farther nor the lift.”
“I didn’t mean to let you go, Lovey,” I groaned, humbly.
“Of course you didn’t! ’Ow ’uld ye get along without me, I’d like to know? Didn’t I keep ye straight all them weeks at the Down and Out?”
“You did, Lovey.”
“And ’aven’t I saved ye lots o’ times since?”
“You have, old man.”
“I wouldn’t leave ye, not for nothink, Slim. We’re buddies as long as we live, ain’t we? Didn’t ye say that to me yerself?”
“I did, and I’ll say it again.”
“Well then, what’s the use o’ talkin’? You mustn’t mind me, sonny. I may get into a bad temper and speak ’arsh to you; but I don’t mean nothink by it. I wouldn’t leave ye, not for—”
The voice trailed away, and presently he was asleep or unconscious again, I couldn’t be sure which.
Neither could I be sure whether he believed this version of the tale or whether he concocted it to comfort me. At any rate, it served its purpose in that it eased the situation outwardly, enabling Cantyre and me to face each other without too much self-consciousness.
As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do. The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to realities. We wereback on the old terms; we called each other Stephen and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual between us.
That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling. Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things; and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the small.
And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place, some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took his bath.
Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the scale of the big.
There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the soles of the huge bootson which he would never walk again. Coming nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see if he was still alive he said, almost roughly:
“Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”
I left him alone because there was nothing I could do for him, but when I went to Jephson he was lying on his back, his knees drawn up, and his face twisted into the strangest, most agonized, most heavenly and ecstatic smile you can imagine on a human face.
Then there was a young fellow running at the head of his platoon, a slim young fellow with flaxen hair and a face like a bright angel’s, who had been a crack sprinter at McGill. He was long after my time, of course; but I had known his family, and since being in the neighborhood of Ypres I had seen him from time to time. He was not made for a soldier, but a brave young soldier he had become, surmounting fear, repulsion, and all that was hideous to a sensitive soul like his, and establishing those relations with his men that are dearer in many ways than ties of blood. The picture I retain, and which came back to me now, is of his running while his men followed him. It was so common a sight that I would hardly have watched it if it had been any one but him. And then, for no reason evident to me, just as if it was part of the order of the day, he threw up his arms, tottered on a few steps, and went tumbling in the mud, face downward.
With the rapidity of a cinema the scene changed to something else I had witnessed. It was the day I got my dose of shrapnel in the foot. Lying near me was a colonel named Blenkins. Farther off there lay a sergeantin his regiment named Day. Day had for Blenkins the kind of admiration that often exists between man and officer for which there is no other name than worship. Slowly, painfully, dying, the non-com. dragged himself over the scarred ground and laid his head on the dying colonel’s heart. Painfully, slowly, the dying colonel’s hand stole across the dying non-com.’s breast; and in this embrace they slept.
Other memories of the same sort came back to me, disconnected, having no reference to Lovey, or Cantyre, or Regina, or the present, beyond the fact that they came out of the great life of which comradeship was a token and the watchwords rang with generosity.
It was the world of the moment. Such things as I had been recalling had happened that very night; they had happened that very morning; they would happen through that day, and through the next day and the next—till their purpose was accomplished. What that purpose was to be—But that I was to learn a little later.
That is to say, a little later I got a light on the outlook which has been sufficient for me to walk by; but of it I will tell you when the time comes.
For in the mean time the tide was rising. As Lovey lay smiling himself into heaven the national spirit was mounting and mounting, quietly, tensely, with excitement held in leash till the day of the Lord was very near at hand.
All through March events had developed rapidly. On the first day of that month the government had revealed Germany’s attempt to stir up Mexico and Japan against the United States. A few days later Germany herself had admitted the instigation. A few days later stillAustria had given her approval to unlimited submarine warfare. A few days later still Nicholas was deposed in Petrograd. The country was marching; the world was marching; the heart was marching. It was difficult for the mind to keep up with the immensity of such happenings or to appraise them at their value. I do not assert that I so appraised them; I only beg you to understand that what I wanted and Cantyre wanted and Regina wanted, each of us for himself and herself, became curiously insignificant.
Not that we were working with the same ends in view. By no means! Cantyre was still opposed to war as war, and bitterly opposed to war if it involved the United States. That he was kicking against the pricks, as Regina asserted, I couldn’t see; but that he was feeling the whole situation intensely was quite evident.
The result, however, was the same when it came to balancing personal interests against the public weal. The public weal might mean one thing to him and another thing to me, but to us both it overrode private resentment. There was a moratorium of resentment. We might revive it again; but for the moment it vanished out of sight.