Iam writing in the dawn of a May morning in 1917.
Before me lies a sickle of white beach some four or five miles in curve. Beyond that is the Atlantic, a mirror of leaden gray. Woods and fields bank themselves inland; here a dewy pasture, there a stretch of plowed earth recently sown and harrowed; elsewhere a grove of fir or maple or a hazel copse. From a little wooden house on the other side of the crescent of white sand a pillar of pale smoke is going straight up into the windless air. In the woods round me the birds, which have only just arrived from Florida, from the West Indies, from Brazil, are chirruping sleepily. They will doze again presently, to awake with the sunrise into the chorus of full song. Halifax lies some ten or twelve miles to the westward. This house is my uncle's summer residence, which he has lent to my husband and me for the latter's after-cure.
I am used to being up at this hour, or at any hour, owing to my experience in nursing. As a matter of fact, I am restless with the beginning of day, fearing lest my husband may need me. He is in the next room. If he stirs I can hear him. In this room my baby is sleeping in his little bassinet. It is not the bassinet of my dreams, nor is this the white-enameled nursery, nor am I wearing a delicate lace peignoir. It is all much more beautiful than that, because it is as it is. My baby's name is John Howard Brokenshire Strangways, though we shorten it to Broke, which, in the English fashion, we pronounce Brook.
You will see why I wanted to call him by this name; but for that I must hark back to the night when I returned the ring to dear Hugh Brokenshire and fled. It is like a dream to me now, that night; but a dream still vivid enough to recall.
On escaping Hugh and making my way down-stairs I was lucky enough to find Thomas, my rosebud footman knight. Poor lad! The judgment trumpet was sounding for him, as for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek and the rest of us. He went back to England shortly after that and was killed the next year at the Dardanelles. But there he was for the moment, standing with the wraps of the Rossiter party.
"Thomas, call the motor," I said, hurriedly. "Be quick! I'm going home, alone, and you must come with me. I've things for you to do. Mr. Jack Brokenshire will bring Mrs. Rossiter."
On the way I explained my program to him through the window. I had been called suddenly to New York. There was a train from Boston to that city which would stop at Providence at two. I thought there was one from Newport to Providence about twelve-thirty, and it was now a quarter past eleven. If there was such a train I must take it; if there wasn't, the motor must run me up to Providence, for which there was still time. I should delay only long enough to pack a suit-case. For the use I was making of him and the chauffeur, as well as of the vehicle, I should be responsible to my hosts.
Both the men being my tacitly sworn friends, there was no questioning of my authority. I fell back, therefore, into the depths of the limousine with the first sense of relief I had had since the day I accepted my position with Mrs. Rossiter. Something seemed to roll off me. I realized all at once that I had never, during the whole of the two years, been free from that necessity of picking my steps which one must have in walking on a tight-rope. Now it was delicious. I could have wished that the drive along Ochre Point Avenue had been thirty times as long.
For Hugh I had no feeling of compunction. It was so blissful to be free. Cissie Boscobel, I knew, would make up to him for all I had failed to give, and would give more. Let me say at once that when, a few weeks later, the man Lady Janet Boscobel was engaged to had also been killed at the front, and her parents had begged Cissie to go home, Hugh was her escort on the journey. It was the beginning of an end which I think is in sight, of a healing which no one wishes so eagerly as I.
For the last two years Cissie has been mothering Belgian children somewhere in the neighborhood of Poperinghe, and Hugh has been in the American Ambulance Corps before Verdun. That was Cissie's work, made easier, perhaps, by some recollection he retained of me. When he has a few days' leave—so Ethel Rossiter writes me—he spends it at Goldborough Castle or Strath-na-Cloid. I ran across Cissie when for a time I was helping in first-aid work not far behind the lines at Neuve Chapelle.
I had been taking care of her brother Rowan—Lord Ovingdean, he calls himself now, hesitating to follow his brother as Lord Leatherhead, and using one of his father's other secondary titles—and she had come to see him. I hadn't supposed till then that we were such friends. We talked and talked and talked, and still would have gone on talking. I can understand what she sees in Hugh, though I could never feel it for him with her intensity. I hope her devotion will be rewarded soon, and I think it will.
I had a premonition of this as I drove along Ochre Point Avenue that night. It helped me to the joy of liberty, to rightness of heart. As I threw the things into my suit-case I could have sung. Séraphine, who was up, waiting for her mistress, being also my friend, promised to finish my packing after I had gone, so that Mrs. Rossiter would have nothing to do but send my boxes after me. It couldn't have been half an hour after my arrival at the house before I was ready to drive away again.
I was in the down-stairs hall, going out to the motor, when a great black form appeared in the doorway. My knees shook under me; my happiness came down like a shot bird. Mr. Brokenshire advanced and stood under the many-colored Oriental hall lantern. I clung for support to the pilaster that finished the balustrade of the stairway.
There was gentleness in his voice, in spite of its whip-lash abruptness.
"Where are you going?"
I could hardly reply, my heart pounded with such fright.
"To—to New York, sir."
"What for?"
"Be-because," I faltered. "I want to—to get away."
"Why do you want to get away?"
"For—for every reason."
"But suppose I don't want you to go?"
"I should still have to be gone."
He said in a hoarse whisper:
"I want you to stay—and—and marry Hugh."
I clasped my hands.
"Oh, but how can I?"
"He's willing to forget what you've said—what my daughter Ethel has said; and I'm willing to forget it, too."
"Do you mean as to my being in love with some one else? But I am."
"Not more than you were at the beginning of the evening. You were willing to marry him then."
"But he didn't know then what he's had to learn since. I hoped to have kept it from him always. I may have been wrong—I suppose I was; but I had nothing but good motives."
There was a strange drop in his voice as he said, "I know you hadn't."
I couldn't help taking a step nearer him.
"Oh, do you? Then I'm so glad. I thought—"
He turned slightly away from me, toward a huge ugly fish in a glass case, which Mr. Rossiter believed to be a proof of his sportsmanship and an ornament to the hall.
"I've had great trials," he said, after a pause—"great trials!"
"I know," I agreed, softly.
He walked toward the fish and seemed to be studying it.
"They've—they've—broken me down."
"Oh, don't say that, sir!"
"It's true." His finger outlined the fish's skeleton from head to tail. "The things I said to-night—" He seemed hung up there. He traced the fish's skeleton back from tail to head. "Have we been unkind to you?" he demanded, suddenly, wheeling round in my direction.
I thought it best to speak quite truthfully.
"Not unkind, sir—exactly."
"But what did Ethel mean? She said we'd been brutes to you. Is that true?"
"No, sir; not in my sense. I haven't felt it."
He tapped his foot with the old imperiousness. "Then—what?"
We were so near the fundamentals that again I felt I ought to give him nothing but the facts.
"I suppose Mrs. Rossiter meant that sometimes I should have been glad of a little more sympathy, and always of more—courtesy." I added: "From you, sir, I shouldn't have asked for more than courtesy."
Though only his profile was toward me and the hall was dim, I could see that his face was twitching. "And—and didn't you get it?"
"Do you think I did?"
"I never thought anything about it."
"Exactly; but any one in my position does. Even if we could do without courtesy between equals—and I don't think we can—from the higher to the lower—from you to me, for instance—it's indispensable. I don't remember that I ever complained of it, however. Mrs. Rossiter must have seen it for herself."
"I didn't want you to marry Hugh," he began, again, after a long pause; "but I'd given in about it. I shouldn't have minded it so much if—if my wife—"
He broke off with a distressful, choking sound in the throat, and a twisting of the head, as if he couldn't get his breath. That passed and he began once more.
"I've had great trials. . . . My wife! . . . And then the burden of this war. . . . They think—they think I don't care anything about it but—but just to make money. . . . I've always been misjudged. . . . They've put me down as hard and proud, when—"
"I could have liked you, sir," I interrupted, boldly. "I told you so once, and it offended you. But I've never been able to help it. I've always felt that there was something big and fine in you—if you'd only set it free."
His reply to this was to turn away from his contemplation of the fish and say:
"Why don't you come back?"
I was sure it was best to be firm.
"Because I can't, sir. The episode is—is over. I'm sorry, and yet I'm glad. What I'm doing is right. I suppose everything has been right—even what happened between me and Hugh. I don't think it will do him any harm—Cissie Boscobel is there—and it's done me good. It's been a wonderful experience; but it's over. It would be a mistake for me to go back now—a mistake for all of us. Please let me go, sir; and just remember of me that I'm—I'm—grateful."
He regarded me quietly and—if I may say so—curiously. There was something in his look, something broken, something defeated, something, at long last, kind, that made me want to cry.
I was crying inwardly when he turned about, without another word, and walked toward the door.
It must have been the impulse to say a silent good-by to him that sent me slowly down the hall, though I was scarcely aware of moving. He had gone out into the dark and I was under the Oriental lamp, when he suddenly reappeared, coming in my direction rapidly. I would have leaped back if I hadn't refused to show fear. As it was, I stood still. I was only conscious of an overwhelming pity, terror, and amazement as he seized me and kissed me hotly on the brow. Then he was gone.
But it was that kiss which made all the difference in my afterthought of him. It was a confession on his part, too, and a bit of self-revelation. Behind it lay a nature of vast, splendid qualities—strong, noble, dominating, meant to be used for good—all ruined by self-love. Of the Brokenshire family, of whom I am so fond and to whom I owe so much, he was the one toward whom, by some blind, spontaneous, subconscious sympathy of my own, I have been most urgently attracted. If his soul was twisted by passions as his face became twisted by them, too—well, who is there among us of whom something of the sort may not be said; and yet God has patience with us all.
Howard Brokenshire and I were foes, and we fought; but we fought as so many thousands, so many millions, have fought in the short time since that day; we fought as those who, when the veils are suddenly stripped away, when they are helpless on the battle-field after the battle, or on hospital cots lined side by side, recognize one another as men and brethren. And so, when my baby was born I called him after him. I wanted the name as a symbol—not only to myself, but to the Brokenshire family—that there was no bitterness in my heart.
At present let me say that, though pained, I was scarcely surprised to read in the New York papers on the following afternoon that Mr. J. Howard Brokenshire, the eminent financier, had, on the previous evening, been taken with a paralytic seizure while in his motor on the way from his daughter's house to his own. He was conscious when carried indoors, but he had lost the power of speech. The doctors indicated overwork in connection with foreign affairs as the predisposing cause.
From Mrs. Rossiter I heard as each successive shock overtook him. Very pitifully the giant was laid low. Very tenderly—so Ethel has written me—Mrs. Brokenshire has watched over him—and yet, I suppose, with a terrible tragic expectation in her heart, which no one but myself, and perhaps Stacy Grainger, can have shared with her. Howard Brokenshire died on that early morning when his country went to war.
I stayed in New York just long enough to receive my boxes from Newport. On getting out of the train at Halifax Larry Strangways received me in his arms.
And this time I saw no little dining-room, with myself seating the guests; I saw no bassinet and no baby. I saw nothing but him. I knew nothing but him. He was all to me. It was the difference.
And not the least of my surprises, when I came to find out, was the fact that it was Jim Rossiter who had sent him there—Jim Rossiter, whom I had rather despised as a selfish, cat-like person, with not much thought beyond "ridin' and racin'," and pills and medicinal waters. That was true of him; and yet he took the trouble to get into touch with Stacy Grainger—as a Brokenshire only by affinity, he could do it—to use his influence at Washington and Ottawa to get Larry Strangways a week's leave from Princess Patricia's regiment—to watch over my movements in New York and know the train I should take—and wire to Larry Strangways the hour of my arrival. When I think of it I grow maudlin at the thought of the good there is in every one.
We were married within the week at the old church which was once a center for Loyalist refugees from New England, beneath which some of them lie buried, and where I was baptized. When my husband returned to Valcartier I went—to be near him—to Quebec. After he sailed for England I, too, sailed, and met him there. I kept near him in England, taking such nursing training as I could while he trained in other ways. I was not many miles away from him when, in the spring of the next year, he was badly cut up at Bois Grenier, near Neuve Chapelle.
He was one of the two or three Canadians to hold a listening post half-way between the hostile lines, where they could hear the slightest movement of the enemy and signal back. A Maxim swept the dugout at intervals, and now and then a shell burst near them. My husband was wounded in a leg and his right arm was shattered.
When I was permitted to see him at Amiens the arm had been taken off and the doctors were doing what they could to save the leg. Fortunately, they have succeeded; and now he walks with no more than a noticeable limp. He is a captain in Princess Patricia's regiment and a D. S. O.
Later he was taken to the American Women's Hospital, at Paignton, in Devonshire, and there again I had the joy of being near him. I couldn't take care of him—I had not the skill, and perhaps my nerve would have failed me—but I worked in the kitchen and was sometimes allowed to take him his food and feed him. I think the hope, the expectation, of my doing this was what brought him out of the profound silence into which he was plunged when he arrived.
That was the only sign of mental suffering I ever saw in him. For the physical suffering he never seemed to care. But something deep and far off, and beyond the beyond of self-consciousness, seemed to have been reached by what he had seen and heard and done. It was said of Lazarus, after his recall to life by Christ, that he never spoke of what he had experienced in those four days; and I can say as much of my husband.
When his mind reverts to the months in France and Flanders he grows dumb. He grows dumb and his spirit moves away from me. It moves away from me and from everything that is of this world. It is among scenes past speech, past understanding, past imagining. He is Lazarus back in the world, but with secrets in his keeping which no one may learn but those who have learned them where he did.
When he came to Paignton he was far removed from us; but little by little he reapproached. I helped to restore him; and then, when the baby was born, the return to earth was quickened.
To have my baby I went over to Torquay, where I had six quiet contented weeks in a room overlooking the peacock-blue waters of Tor Bay, with the kindly roof that sheltered my husband in the distance. When I had recovered I went to a cottage at Paignton, where, when he left the hospital, he joined me. As the healing of the leg has been so slow, we have been in the lovely Devon country ever since, till, a few weeks ago, the British Government allowed us to cross on the ship that brought the British Commissioners to Washington.
I have just been in to look at him. He is sound asleep, lying on his left side, the coverlet sagging slightly at the shoulder where the right arm is gone. He is getting accustomed to using his left hand, but not rapidly. Meantime he is my other baby; and, in a way, I love to have it so. I can be more to him. In proportion as he needs me the bond is closer.
He is a grave man now. The smile that used to flash like a sword between us is never there any more. When he smiles it is with a long, slow smile that comes from far away—perhaps from life as it was before the war. It is a sweet smile, a brave one, one infinitely touching; and it pierces me to the heart.
He didn't have to forfeit his American citizenship in becoming one of the glorious Princess Pats. They were glad to have him on any terms. He is an American and I am one. I thought I became one without feeling any difference. It seemed to me I had been born one, just as I had been born a subject of the dear old queen. But on the night of our landing in Halifax, a military band came and played the "Star-spangled Banner" before my uncle's door, and I burst into the first tears I had shed since my marriage.
Through everything else I had been upheld; but at the strains of that anthem, and all it implied, I broke down helplessly. When we went to the door and my husband stood to listen to the cheering of my friends, in his khaki with the empty sleeve, and the fine, stirring, noble air was played again, his eyes, as well as mine, were wet.
It recalled to me what he said once when I was allowed to relieve the night nurse and sit beside him at Paignton. He woke in the small hours and smiled at me—his distant, dreamy smile. His only words—words he seemed to bring with him out of the lands of sleep, in which perhaps he lived again what now was past for him—his only words were:
"You know the Stars and Stripes were at Bois Grenier."
"How?" I asked, to humor him, thinking him delirious.
He laughed—the first thing that could be called a laugh since they had brought him there.
"Sewn or my undershirt—over my heart! It will be there again," he added, "floating openly!"
And almost immediately he fell asleep once more.
And, after all, it is to be there again—floating openly. The time-struggle has taken it and will carry it aloft. It has taken other flags, too—flags of Asia; flags of South America; flags of the islands of the seas. As my husband predicted long ago, mankind is divided into just two camps. So be it! God knows I don't want war. I have been too near it, and too closely touched by it, ever to wish again to hear a cannon-shot or see a sword. But I suppose it is all a part of the great War in Heaven.
Michael and his angels are fighting, and the dragon is fighting and his angels. By that I do not mean that all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other. God forbid! There is good and evil on both sides. On both sides doubtless evil is being purged away and the new, true man is coming to his own.
If I think most of the spiritualization of France, and the consecration of the British Empire, and the coming of a new manhood to the United States, it is because these are the countries I know best. I should be sorry, I should be hopeless, were I not to believe that, above bloodshed, and cruelty, and hatred, and lust, and suffering, and all that is abominable, the Holy Ghost is breathing on every nation of mankind.
When it is all over, and we have begun to live again, there will be a great Renaissance. It will be what the word implies—a veritable New Birth. The sword shall be beaten to a plowshare and the spear to a pruning-hook. "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
So, in this gray light, growing so silvery that as day advances it becomes positively golden, I turn to my Bible. It is extraordinary how comforting the Bible has become in these days when hearts have been lifted up into long-unexplored regions of terror and courage. Men and women who had given up reading it, men and women who have never read it at all, turn its pages with trembling hands and find the wisdom of the ages. And so I read what for the moment have become to me its most strengthening words:
In your patience possess ye your souls. . . . There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. . . . And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
In your patience possess ye your souls. . . . There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. . . . And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
That is what I believe—that through this travail of the New Birth for all mankind redemption is on the way.
It is coming like the sunrise I now see over the ocean. In it are the glories that never were on land or sea. It paints the things which have never entered into the heart of man, but which God has prepared for them that love him. It is the future; it is Heaven. Not a future that no man will live to see; not a Heaven beyond death and the blue sky. It is a future so nigh as to be at the doors; it is the Kingdom of Heaven within us.
Meantime there is saffron pulsating into emerald, and emerald into rose, and rose into lilac, and lilac into pearl, and pearl into the great gray canopy that has hardly as yet been touched with light.
And the great gray ocean is responding a fleck of color here, a hint of glory there; and now, stealing westward, from wavelet to wavelet, stealing and ever stealing, nearer and still more near, a wide, golden pathway, as if some Mighty One were coming straight to me. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."
Even so I look up, and lift up my head. Even so I possess my soul in patience.
Even so, too, I think of Mildred Brokenshire's words:
"Life is not a blind impulse, working blindly. It is a beneficent, rectifying power."
FOOTNOTES:[1]This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my knowledge of my country—the British Empire—I permit myself to doubt it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall, however, be glad if I am proved wrong.—Alexandra Adare.
[1]This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my knowledge of my country—the British Empire—I permit myself to doubt it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall, however, be glad if I am proved wrong.—Alexandra Adare.
[1]This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my knowledge of my country—the British Empire—I permit myself to doubt it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall, however, be glad if I am proved wrong.—Alexandra Adare.
Transcriber's Notes:
original hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the original
Page 8, "won't he Miss" changed to "won't be Miss"
Page 32, "was to indignant" changed to "was too indignant"
Page 43, "what is is" changed to "what it is"
Page 72, "shoulder. "No" changed to "shoulder, "No"
Page 84, "Glady's" changed to "Gladys's"
Page 85, "Glady's" changed to "Gladys's"
Page 93, "presisted" changed to "persisted"
Page 129, "waistcoat. a slate-colored" changed to "waistcoat, a slate-colored"
Page 150, "come an and" changed to "come and"
Page 178, "stammer the words" changed to "stammer the words—"
Page 211, "well received His" changed to "well received. His"
Page 230, "your hand but" changed to "your hand, but"
Page 235, "put in it my" changed to "put it in my"
Page 235, "'I could be" changed to '"I could be'
Page 268, "at last "but" changed to "at last, "but"
Page 293, "'So much that" changed to '"So much that'
Page 297, "The darlings!'" changed to 'The darlings!"'
Page 312, "ligthning" changed to "lightning"
Page 333, "must be true" changed to "must be true."
Page 334, "broke in, quietly" changed to "broke in, quietly."
Page 398, "dumfounded" changed to "dumbfounded"
Page 409, "want you so stay" changed to "want you to stay"