An ocean steamer is a great university of the world. Infinity of sea and sky bring an incredulity of the defined land, where strange human beings move under precise conventions to the tyranny of what is or is not done. For me the comprehensible world was but this speck of wood, swinging between water and sky. The salt democracy of the sea and the common sense of danger run quickened our senses and let down the barriers of our Anglo-Saxon restraint.
Yet of all those who crowded the decks the one woman who interested me most defied all my attempts at friendship. Beyond the unconventionality of our first meetings on the dock and by the upper rail I had been unable to progress. Indeed, all her attitude indicated a studied resolve to retreat from the memory of that accidental intimacy. Her greeting each morning was gracious. She allowed me to arrange her pillows and wrap her solicitously in her steamer rugs.
“Monsieur, I thank you; you are very kind.”
She said it gravely, with a slight acknowledgment of her head, but her tone remained impersonal and she conveyed to me, without possibility of misunderstanding, that her privacy was to be respected, and it was not until I had gone off for a tramp of the decks or had turned into the constant discussion which ran on between Magnus and Brinsmade that she drew her veil and picked up her book. The book was but a pretext. For hours she held it before her without the turning of a page.
At times, I pretended to go off into long siestas, studying her furtively in short examinations. For despite every precaution, if my glance remained on her too long, shebecame aware of it and, if I persisted, she retired behind her veil.
This very reserve stirred my curiosity. My imagination was drawn to the mystery I divined of some inner conflict beneath the precise formality of her outer manner. Her slightest action became to me the important record of my day. I studied her and wondered. There were hollows in her cheek that should not have gone with her years. Often in the warm, impulsive lips I detected the set droop of long fatigue, while about the eyes, which remained long moments lost in the healing distance, I felt the still quivering lines of remembered pain. She seemed so out of place that, with the memory of my own exile, I felt intuitively the struggle of a soul brutally torn from its protecting affections and forced by the tragic hazards of war to struggle for readjustment and the right to go on living. I felt this and yet I could not intrude. About her, in everything she did, in every word she uttered, was an authority I could not but respect.
Her day was measured in an unvarying routine. She came from breakfast, walked alone for an hour, took to her chair and read, with long periods of abstracted contemplation, until a glance at her watch apprised her of the time for another turn of the deck.
When she walked, it was without movement of the hips or shoulders, her elbows to her sides, with a curious erect and measured grace, as our grandmothers used to walk,—when our grandmothers were straight and slender. Her step was light and leisurely, without purpose. She paused often, leaning against the rail, to gaze into the western distances, before resuming her pensive strolling. In the afternoon, particularly at the stealing in of the dusk, I saw her turn to her prayer-book. Then she became so absorbed that she forgot my presence completely, lifted into regions where I could not follow.
The method, the dryness, the precision of this routine would have convinced me were it not for a memory,—the cry of the woman in her loneliness on the upper deck. With that memory in mind, I felt from the first the struggle and the conflict,—two natures contending within her; or rather that, with some determined resolve before her, as a novice about to renounce the world, she was striving to impose upon herself a discipline, mental and moral, which was not in the ardent and impulsive rebellion of her temperament.
The short word of greeting, the punctilious farewell at night, in a manner grave, restrained, and without a smile, were all so carefully adjusted to the most obvious civilities that I despaired of ever penetrating her reserve. Yet when the opportunity came it came as naturally as it was unexpected.
*****
Among the few children was a boy of five or six who enjoyed great popularity among the passengers. The child, attracted to Mademoiselle Duvernoy by childhood’s instinct to those who have borne pain, passed and repassed a dozen times a day before her chair, seeking by every artifice to catch her eye.
The fourth morning out, when we were stretched languidly in our steamer chairs, Master Jack, enveloped in leggings, sweater and muffler, wabbled down like a rolling ball of cotton and, after the usual preliminary skirmishes, rallying his courage, stopped directly between our chairs and said timidly:
“How do?”
The piping voice startled her from her mechanical contemplation. She dropped her book and her body seemed to shrink back.
“I talk to you a little while—yes?”
The smile of the young suppliant would have won overa jury, yet to my surprise she did not unbend and the greeting was forced and perfunctory.
“Good-morning.”
Determined, the youngster sidled up and stood gazing in adoration.
“Why you wear that ugly veil all the time?”
As he asked the question, the childish fingers fastened and turned about her wrist, while the young eyes grew big with sympathy. I saw her arm draw hastily back from the contact. Then, after a moment, as though obeying a superior determination, it came forward slowly and reluctantly.
“The veil is not ugly.”
The tone, the action, the undefined look with which she stared at him, impressed the child. A serious expression came over his face,—a look of trying to understand something beyond his ken.
“Is it because you are so very sad?” he said softly.
I felt her panic before the child’s innocent directness and that in her helplessness she turned to me.
“Come here, Jack the Giant Killer,” I said, catching him up and swinging him through the air to plant him firmly on my lap. “How old are you? Where are you going? What makes the steam white, the water wet, and why does the wind sing? Do you know all that?”
“Why is the water wet?” said the youngster.
“You don’t know? Goodness—neither do I!”
The child, with his eyes still on Mademoiselle Duvernoy, extended a pudgy forefinger.
“Is she your sister?”
“No, young man: and Mademoiselle Duvernoy is not my daughter, nor my cousin, aunt or wife,” I said hastily, with a fear of coming questions. “And if you will promise, solemnly promise, not to ask another question, I’ll tell you the story of ‘Puss-in-Boots’.”
“I know ‘Puss-in-Boots’!”
“Well, ‘Cinderella and the Glass Slipper’.”
“I know ‘Cinderella’.”
“Well, what don’t you know?”
“I like the story of the Bears,” said the youngster decidedly.
“Humph! Now, that is funny,” I said, to gain time, for my memory was not of the clearest. To save the situation, I decided to improvise. “That is funny, because,—do you know, that reminds me of myself and my brothers. What do you think they called us? ‘Big Dale, Little Dale, Weeny Dale, and No Dale at All’!”
“You look like a bear,” said the youngster gravely.
“So they say. Well, once upon a time there was a little girl,—a very little girl, with the most wonderful golden hair in the world. She was called—”
“Snow-White!”
“Not at all. Golden-Locks. Well, one day, Golden-Locks went out walking in the woods, and she saw the most wonderful butterfly in the world, with diamonds glittering on its wings. She went on and on, following the diamond butterfly, until all at once she came to a little river that was flowing milk; but that wasn’t the strangest thing—”
“No?” said Master Jack, with round eyes.
“No. On the opposite side was a house,—all made of gingerbread; but that wasn’t the strangest thing.”
“No?”
“No. She went inside, and there, on the table, were five white plates.”
But here Master Jack sat up in protest.
“How could there be five plates, when there is only three Bears?”
“Three? Who said there were only three Bears? There were five Bears in the story.”
“Three!”
“Five. The story of the Five Bears. Don’t I know?”
“Wasn’t there only three Bears?” said Master Jack, who had caught the now amused glance of Mademoiselle Duvernoy.
“Three—yes.”
“There—you see!” exclaimed the youngster. “And—and wasn’t she called Snow-White?”
“She was.”
“There!”
“Then they’re not the same Bears,” said I, in pretended wrath. “My Bears are American Bears. There was Father Growler and Mother Gruff—that makes two—and Grumble Bear and Guzzle Bear—and that makes four—and then there was Tinkle Bear—”
“That makes five!”
“I resign,” I said, with tremendous dignity. “Tell it your own way.”
But instead of protests and capitulation, the critic stood to his colors.
“You don’t tell it at all the right way,” said the prejudiced public in the person of Master Jack. “You put in things that don’t belong. You tell it?” he said, suddenly turning to Mademoiselle Duvernoy, who had been smiling at my perplexity.
“Oh, but Mr. Littledale tells it very well.”
“You tell it yourself, and I’ll correct you,” I said, laughing.
The issue was settled by Master Jack who, with a sudden wriggle, transferred himself to the other chair. I rose to reclaim the truant, who had snuggled up to her shoulder, but she shook her head.
“No, no, he can stay.”
Her arms closed about the fluffy rascal, and she began.
“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Snow-White, who lived with her father, a wood-chopper, in the woods—”
The youngster nodded, satisfied, glancing at me from time to time with malicious triumph as the narration ran along classic lines. Her voice was low, warmed with tenderness, and with the serio-comic pantomime of the story there came into her face a new light, all gentleness. I bent forward, listening to the melody of the voice without attention to the narrative, my eyes fixed on the mobile, fugitive expressions of her face. Why had she resisted the child at first,—shrinking from his touch? And, why this sudden melting?
“And the enchanted Prince came out and married Snow-White, and they lived happily, ever and ever after!”
But only half of the audience heard her. Master Jack was fast asleep.
“I thought I made up a very good story,” I said hurriedly, fearing the opportunity would pass.
“You see, fairy stories are better each time they are told over—and that’s why they must always be kept the same.”
We lowered our voices.
“I thought for a moment you—” I caught myself. “I beg your pardon; I was going to ask you a personal question, and I know you don’t like that.”
“You thought I disliked children, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Why, yes—”
“It was not that. Memories—” She checked herself, frowning.
“Of course. I understand,” I said hurriedly, as I saw the old expression of sadness cloud her face. “I am sorry. Don’t you want me to take the youngster? He is rather heavy.”
“No, no, please.”
I felt opportunity slipping from me.
“Mademoiselle Duvernoy, it must seem strange to you, a French girl, brought up as you were, to realize this freedom of the sea?”
She turned to me in astonishment.
“What do you know about the way I have been brought up, Monsieur?” The tone was a return to the old formality. Yet her eyes, in the brief second they met mine, had a certain fugitive alarm.
“I have lived in France. I know the ways of your people, and I have been privileged to know many of your old families. I am certain we have acquaintances in common, of the Faubourg St. Germain; and I know how rigidly the daughters are brought up.”
She frowned and shook her head decisively.
“You are quite mistaken about me. I have come to America to earn my own living.”
The tone in which she said it was imperative, set and admitting no debate.
“If you are a Frenchwoman, coming to my country, in whatever way, I hope I may be honored by your friendship.”
“But, Monsieur,” she retorted, in a gentler tone, “I don’t see how you and I can touch at any point; our ways are entirely different; and my traditions do not permit me to make chance acquaintanceships. Pardon me for saying this frankly to you, but it is a question of pride.”
I felt the door had been firmly closed in my face. Why such a rebuff, when every instinct in me had been but of kindness? I was hurt, and my manner showed it. I turned stiffly, and, sinking back in my chair, returned to my book. Master Jack woke up and departed in search of a tray of cookies.
“Mr. Littledale,—please?”
I looked up so hastily that the book slipped from my hands and tumbled to the deck.
“I did not mean anything to offend you. You won’t be offended, will you?”
“Why, just for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure—” Such a clear feeling of joy rose in me, after the blank discouragement of a moment before, that I cried out:
“Good heavens, no; of course, I won’t!”
She looked at me a little shyly and then away, hesitating, and I feared I had frightened her away again with my tactless impulsiveness. However, after a moment, she turned to me.
“You were in the Legion, Monsieur?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle.”
“Long?”
“I went in with the mobilization.”
“May I ask why you, an American, did that?”
“I could not help myself. It was so much bigger than anything else that had come into my life.”
She thought this over a moment and then nodded as though pleased.
“Ah, yes—the mobilization. It made us very proud of our old French race.”
“It made me proud of my fellow beings!”
“You—an American—felt that?”
“Particularly because I was an American,” I found myself saying, with great warmth. “Oh, I do not sentimentalize war. I have lived it.”
“You do not see it as only brutalizing, as that book ‘Gaspard,’ of which we are so much ashamed?”
“No, if that were the only side, France would not be living to-day.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” she said, in sudden friendliness.
“The truth is in neither point of view. We cannot say that war ennobles or brutalizes mankind. I have thought about this much, and this is what I think: the man who is fundamentally a brute is made more brutal; the man who has in him a spark of nobility, even unsuspected, is lifted up. What war does is to search our souls and discover the ultimate truth. You see, in times of peace, we all more or less wear a mask for our neighbors. Well, when you’ve once gone into the trenches, that all disappears: you find out what you believe. When all may be over at any moment, you do what you want to do. And the strange thing is that each respects the other’s point of view.”
“I think there is one thing you have left out,” she said, after a moment’s thought.
“What is that?”
“The question of leadership. When he who leads is simple and high of heart, thepoilualways responds.”
“Yes, that is true, absolutely true.”
“War is a time when the leader is everything, isn’t it?” She thought a moment, and added, with a little weariness in her voice: “That is why I think, no matter what the hideous suffering that comes, it does set us right and turn us from false leaders.”
At this moment Hungerford came up and, much to my chagrin, I was forced to present him, cutting short our first conversation.