II

"In loving memory of Jim,From his old pal,The artful dodger,'Gone but not forgotten.'"

"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain Crump?"

Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.

"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.

The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the identification disc.

"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary—that black thing—round the cross."

"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.

"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from the body."

"No, he was not a Catholic," whispered May Margaret. She felt as if she must drop on her knees and call on the mute earth to speak, to explain, to tell her who lay beneath.

"There must be a mistake," she said at last, and her own voice rang in her ears like the voice of a stranger. "I must find out. How can I find out?"

Her face was bloodless as she confronted Captain Crump.

"There's some terrible mistake," she said again. "I can't face his people at home till I find out. He may be—" But that awful word of hope died on her lips.

"I'll do my best," said Captain Crump. "It's very odd, certainly; but I shouldn't—er—hope for too much. You see, if he were living, they wouldn't have been likely to overlook it. It's possible that he may be there, or there." He pointed to two graves without a name. "Or again, he may be missing, of course, or a prisoner. His lot are down at Arras now. We'll get into touch with them to-morrow and I'll make inquiries. You want to pass a night in the trenches, don't you? I think it can be arranged for you to go to that section to-morrow night. Then we can kill two birds with one stone."

May Margaret thanked him. Behind them, she heard, with that strange sense of double meanings which the most commonplace accidents of life can awake at certain moments—the voice of one of the correspondents, still arguing with the others. "Here, if you like, is Shakespeare," he said:

"How should I your true love knowFrom another one."

The quotation, lilted inanely as a nursery rime, pierced her heart like a flight of silver arrows.

"You have not a very pleasant business," the correspondent continued, addressing a soldier at work in an open grave.

"I've 'ad two years in the trenches, sir, and I'm glad to get it," he replied.

"Little Christian crosses, planted against the heathen, creeping nearer and nearer to the Rhine," murmured Julian Sinclair, on the other side of May Margaret.

The multiplicity of the ways in which it seemed possible for both soldiers and civilians to regard the war was beginning to rob her of the power to think.

On their way back, through the dusk, they passed a body of men marching to the trenches, with a song that she had heard Brian humming:

"Fat Fritz went out, all camouflaged, like a beautiful bumble-bee,With daffodil stripes and 'airy legs to see what he could see,By the light of the moon, in No Man's Land, he climbed an apple treeAnd he put on his big round spectacles, to look for gay Paree.But I don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and months, and months;But I don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and month, and months;For Archie is only a third class shot,But he brought him down at once,ANDI don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and months, and months."

But I don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and months, and months;But I don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and month, and months;For Archie is only a third class shot,But he brought him down at once,

AND

I don't suppose he'll do it againFor months, and months, and months."

Soon afterwards, with all these themes interchanging in her bewildered mind, May Margaret heard Julian Sinclair calling through the dark from the car ahead: "Take a good look at the next village; it's called Crécy." The stars that watched the ancient bowmen had nothing new to tell her; but a few minutes later, as another body of troops came tramping through the dark to another stanza of their song, there seemed to be an ancient and unconquerable mass of marching harmonies within the lilt of the Cockney ballad; like the mass of the sea behind the breaking wave:

"'E called 'em the Old Contemptibles,But 'e only did it once,And I don't suppose 'e'll do it again,For months, and months, and months."

They dined at the château, and she slipped away early to the house of the curé. Before she slept, she took out Brian's last letter and read it. She sat on the narrow bed, under the little black crucifix with the ivory Christ looking down at her from the bare wall. She was glad that it was there; for it embodied the master-thought of that day's pilgrimage. Never before had she realized how that symbol was dominating this war; how it was repeated and repeated over thousands of acres of young men's graves; and with what a new significance the wayside crosses of France were now stretching out their arms in the night of disaster.

In Brian's letter there was very little about himself. He had always been somewhat impatient of the "lyrical people," as he called them, who were "so eloquently introspective" about the war, and he had carried his prejudice even into his correspondence. She was reading his letter again to-night because she remembered that it expressed something of her own bewilderment at the multiplicity of ways in which people were talking and thinking of the international tragedy. "I have heard," he wrote, "every possible kind of opinion out here, with the exception of one. I have never heard any one suggest any possible end for this war but the defeat of the Hun. But Ihaveheard, over and over again, ridicule of the idea that this war is going to end war, or even make the world better.

"Along with that, I've often heard praise of the very militaristic system that we are trying so hard to abolish altogether. Of course, this is only among certain sets of men. But this war has become a war of ideas; and ideas are not always contained or divided by the lines of trenches. We are fighting things out amongst ourselves, in all the belligerent countries, and the most crying need of the Allies to-day is a leader who can crystallize their own truest thoughts and ideals for them.

"You know what my dream was, always, in the days when I was trying my prentice hand in literature. I wanted to help in the greatest work of modern times—the task of bringing your country and mine together. Our common language (and that implies so much more than people realize) is the greatest political factor in the modern world; and, thank God, it's beyond the reach of the politicians. In England, we exaggerate the importance of the mere politician. We do not realize the supreme glory of our own inheritance; or even the practical aspects of it; the practical value of the fact that every city and town and village over the whole of your continent paid homage to Shakespeare during the tercentenary. Carlyle was right when he compared that part of our inheritance with the Indian Empire. It is in our literature that we can meet and read each other's hearts and minds, and that has been our greatest asset during the war. Think what it will mean when two hundred million people, thirty years hence, in North America, are reading that literature and sharing it. Shelley understood it. You remember what he says in the 'Revolt of Islam.' The Germans understand, that's why they're so anxious to introduce compulsory German into your schools and colleges. But our own reactionaries are afraid to understand it.

"After all, this war is only a continuation of the Revolutionary war, when the Englishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence fought an army of hired Germans, directed by Germans. Even their military maps were drawn up in German. It's the same war, and the same cause, and I believe that the New World eventually will come into it. Then we shall have a real leadership. The scheming reactionaries in Europe will fail to keep us apart. We shall yet see our flags united. And then despite all the sneers of the little folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall be able to suppress barbarism in Europe and say (as you and I have said):Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder.

"There seems to be an epidemic of verse among the armies. I haven't caught it very badly yet; but these were some of my symptoms in a spare moment last week:

"How few are they that voyage through the night,On that eternal quest,For that strange light beyond our light,That rest beyond our rest.And they who, seeking beauty, once descryHer face, to most unknown;Thenceforth like changelings from the skyMust walk their road alone.So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood;But now, before these eyes,From those foul trenches, black with blood,What radiant legions rise.And loveliness over the wounded earth awakesLike wild-flowers in the Spring.Out of the mortal chrysalis breaksImmortal wing on wing.They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light,Through realms beyond our ken.The loneliest soul is companied to-nightBy hosts of unknown men."

"How few are they that voyage through the night,On that eternal quest,For that strange light beyond our light,That rest beyond our rest.

And they who, seeking beauty, once descryHer face, to most unknown;Thenceforth like changelings from the skyMust walk their road alone.

So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood;But now, before these eyes,From those foul trenches, black with blood,What radiant legions rise.

And loveliness over the wounded earth awakesLike wild-flowers in the Spring.Out of the mortal chrysalis breaksImmortal wing on wing.

They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light,Through realms beyond our ken.The loneliest soul is companied to-nightBy hosts of unknown men."

At ten o'clock the next morning, the two cars were moving at sixty miles an hour along a road that ran parallel with the German trenches. There was a slight screen of canvas to hide the traffic, for the road by Dead-Man's-Corner was not the safest way into Arras at that time. But they reached the city without misadventure, and May Margaret felt nearer now than ever to the secret of the quest.

No dream was ever so strange as this great echoing shell of the deserted city where he, too, had walked so recently. He, too, had passed along these cracked pavements, keeping close to the wall, in order to escape observation from the enemy, whose lines ran through one end of the city at this moment. He had seen these pitiful interiors of shattered houses, where sometimes the whole front had been blown away, leaving the furniture still intact on two floors, and even pictures, a little askew, on the walls. He had seen that little black crucifix over that bed; crossed this grass-grown square; and gone into the shattered railway-station, where the many-colored tickets were strewn like autumn leaves over the glass-littered floor. The Spaniard filled his pockets with them.

They went down a narrow street to the ruins of the cathedral. On one of the deserted houses there was a small placard advertising the Paris edition of a London paper, the only sign of the outside world in all that echoing solitude. The neutrals rejoiced greatly before a deserted insurance office, which still displayed an advertisement of its exceedingly reasonable rates for the lives of peaceful citizens. Their merriment was stopped abruptly by a hollow boom that shook the whole city and rumbled echoing along the deserted streets from end to end.

"That's a Boche shell," said Crump. "It sounds as if they've got the cathedral again."

At noon they lunched under the lee of a hill just outside Arras, that had been drenched with blood a few weeks earlier. The great seas of thunder ebbed and flowed incessantly from sky to sky, as if the hill were the one firm island in the universe and all the rest were breaking up and washing around them. The amazing incongruity of things bewildered May Margaret again. It was more fantastic than any dream. They sat there at ease, eating chicken, munching sandwiches, filling their cups with red wine and white, and ending with black coffee, piping hot from the thermos bottle. Great puffs of brown smoke rose in the distance where our shells were dropping along the German line. It looked as if the trees were walking out from a certain distant wood. Little blue rings of smoke rose from the peaceful cigarettes around her. Bees and butterflies came and went through the sunshine; and, in the stainless blue sky overhead there was a rush and rumor as of invisible trains passing to and fro. The neutrals amused themselves by trying to distinguish between our own and the enemy shells.

At two o'clock Crump rose. "I'll take you along now, Grant, if you are ready," he said. "The rest of you wait here. I shall be back in about ten minutes."

May Margaret stumbled after him down the hill. At the foot, a soldier was waiting; and, hardly conscious of the fact that she had exchanged one guide for another, she found herself plodding silently beside him on her unchanging quest, toward the communication trenches.

"What do they think about things in England, sir?" said her new companion at last, with a curiously suppressed eagerness.

"They are very hopeful," said May Margaret.

"When do they think it will be over?"

"Some of them say in six months."

"Ah, yes. I've been here three years now, and they always say that. At the end of the six months they'll say it again."

It was the first open note of depression that May Margaret had heard. "Do most of the men feel like that?" she said.

"They don't say so, sir, but they all want it to be over." Then he added, with the doggedness of his kind, "Not till we get what we're fighting for, of course. You're a correspondent, sir, aren't you? Well, I never seen the real fax put in the papers yet. There was one of these soldier writers the other day. I saw his book in the Y. M. C. A. hut. He said that the only time he nearly broke his heart was when there was a rumor that Germany was asking for peace before he was able to get into it hisself. That's what I call bloody selfish, sir. All this poytry! (he spat into a shell-hole) making pictures out of it and talking about their own souls. Mind you I'm all for finishing it properly; but it ain't right, the way they look at it. It's like saying they're glad the Belgians had their throats cut because it's taught their own bloody selves the beauty of sacrifice. If what they say is true, why in the hell do they want the war ever to stop at all? P'raps if it went on for ever, we should all of us learn the bloody beauty of it, and keep on learning it till there wasn't any one left. There was a member of Parliament out here the other day. He saw three poor chaps trying to wash in a mine-crater full of muddy water. Covered with lice they was. The paper described it afterwards. The right honorable gentleman laughed 'artily, it said, same as they say about royalty. Always laughing 'artily. P'raps he didn't laugh. I dunno about that. But if he did, I'd like him to 'ave a taste of the fun hisself."

They were entering the long tunnel of the communication-trench now. The soldier went ahead, and May Margaret followed, through smells of earth, and the reek of stale uniforms, for a mile or more, till they came to the alert eyes along the fire-step of the front-line trench.

"Here's Major Hilton, sir." A lean young man with a thin aquiline nose and a face of Indian red approached them, stepping like a cat along the trench.

"Mr. Grant," he said.

May Margaret nodded, and they were about to shake hands, when one side of the trench seemed to rise up and smash against their faces, with a roar that stunned them. May Margaret picked herself up at once, wiping the bits of grit out of her eyes. The bombardment appeared to be growing in intensity.

"That was pretty near," said Major Hilton. "You'd better come into my dugout till this blows over."

He led the way into his gloomy little cavern. It was not much of a shelter from a direct hit; but it would protect them from flying splinters at least.

"Mr. Davidson was my friend," said May Margaret at once. "I know his people. I think there must be some mistake about ... about the grave."

"You're not a relative of his, are you?" said Major Hilton. "Had you known him for long?"

"No. Less than a year."

"Well, I don't mind tellingyouthat therewasa mistake. We discovered it a few hours after it was made; but we thought it better not to upset his people by giving them further details."

"He was killed, then," May Margaret whispered; and, if the darkness of the dugout had not veiled her face, Major Hilton would not have continued.

"Yes. It was a trench raid. The Boches took a section of our trenches. When we recovered it, we found him. You'd better not tell his people, but I don't mind tellingyou. It was a pretty bad case."

"What do you mean?"

"One of those filthy Boche tricks. They'd nailed him up against the lining of the trench with bayonets. He was still alive when we found him. But they'll get it all back. We're going to give 'em hell to-night."

May Margaret was silent for so long that Major Hilton peered at her more closely. Her white face looked like a bruised thing in the darkness.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you. They have done so much of that kind of thing, I suppose we've got used to it. Well, you've been tramping about all day, and if I were you, as you're going to spend the night here, I should settle down for a bit in the dugout. The bombardment seems to be easing off a little, and you'll want to be awake all night. There'll be some sights coming on of the picturesque kind—fireworks and things, which is what you want, I suppose, for the blessed old public."

Far away, in another section of the trenches, there was a burst of cheering. Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete darkness thick with dust and sand.

"Are you all right?" said Hilton, in a moment or two. "They've blown the parapet over us. Our chaps will soon get us out."

They sat down and waited. The sound of their rescuers' shovels was followed almost immediately by the pulling away of a sandbag, and the dusty daylight filtered in again, bringing with it another roar of cheering, nearer now, and rolling along the trenches like an Atlantic breaker.

"What the hell are they shouting about?" Hilton grunted, as he scrambled through the opening. May Margaret was about to follow him, when the abrupt answer struck her motionless.

"America has declared war, sir."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It looks as if they mean business."

May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her knees by an old packing-case in the corner.

"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears came, and her whole body shook.

A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my country, you see."

"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm an Englishman, but—if a democracy can discipline itself—I'm not sure that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"

It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the trenches.

She lay there, dazed as from shell-shock by the account of Brian's death; and the declaration of war from her own country had burst upon her with an equal violence, leaving her stunned in a kind of "No Man's Land," a desolate hell, somewhere between despair and triumph. Her world had broken up. Her mind was no longer her own. Her thoughts were helpless things between enormous conflicting forces; and, as if to escape from their rending clutches, as if to cling to the present reality, she whispered to herself the words of the wounded soldier at Charing Cross station: "If you meet him, give him hell forme! Give him hell forme." It seemed as if it were Brian himself speaking. Once, with a swift sense of horror, catching herself upon the verge of insanity, she found that her imagination was furtively beginning to picture his last agony, and she stopped it, screwing her face up, like a child pulling faces at a nightmare, and making inarticulate sounds to drive it away.

Of one thing she was quite certain now. She did not wish to live any longer in a world where these things were done. She meant, by hook or by crook, to get to the dangerous bit of the trench, where our men were only separated by six yards from the enemy, and to stay there until she was killed. Even if she couldn't throw bombs herself, she supposed that she could hand them up to others. And any thought that conflicted with this idea she suppressed, automatically, with her monotonous echo of the wounded soldier, "Give them hell forme."

But she was spared any further trouble about the execution of her plans; and she knew, at once, that she had come to the end of her quest, when she heard the quick sharp cries of warning outside.

It was a trench-raid, brief, and unimportant from a military point of view. The newspapers told London, on the next day, that nothing of importance had happened. Half a dozen revolvers cracked. There were curses and groans, a sound of soft thudding blows and grunting, gasping men, followed by a loud pig-like squeal. Then May Margaret saw three faces peering cautiously into the dugout, faces of that strange brutality, heavy-boned, pig-eyed, evil-skulled, which has impressed itself upon the whole world as a distinct reversion from all civilized types of humanity. She knew them, as one recognizes the smell of carrion; and her whole soul exulted as she seized her supreme chance of striking at the evil thing. She had picked up a revolver almost unconsciously, and without pausing to think she fired three times with a steady hand. Two of them she knew that she had killed. The third had been too quick for her, and in another second she was down on her back, with a blood-greased boot on her throat, and a throng of evil-smelling cattle around her. Unhappily, they did not kill her at once; and so the discovery was made, amidst a storm of guttural exclamations.

When the trench was retaken, half an hour later, a further discovery was made by Major Hilton. A locket containing a photograph of Brian Davidson was buried in what remained of her left breast, as if it had been trying to hide in her heart. It was almost the only thing about her that was unhurt.

Major Hilton made no explanations; but when the body was removed, he gave strict orders for it to be buried by the side of Lieutenant Davidson.

A week later, Mr. Harvey, of theChicago Bulletin, was informed that his correspondent, Mr. Martin Grant, had died of pneumonia. The authorities left the responsibility of informing others, who might be interested, to his capable hands.

He went to see Julian Sinclair about it; but he could not discover whether that sincerely regretful young diplomat with the dazzling smile and the delightful manners knew anything more. It may have been a coincidence that, shortly afterwards, Mr. Harvey was recalled to the shores of Lake Michigan, and replaced by another manager.

Rachel Hepburn believed that her first lover had been drawn to her—when she was twenty-two years old—by the way in which she played the violin. She played it remarkably well; and she was also exceedingly pretty, in a frank open-air fashion. Until she was seventeen, she had lived on the mountainous coast of Cumberland, where she rode astride, and swam half a mile every morning before breakfast. Her family nicknamed her "the Shetland Pony"; and that was her picture to the life, as she used to come in from her swim, with her face glowing and her dark eyes like mountain pools, and the thick mane of hair blowing about her broad forehead. Her sturdy build helped the picture at the time; but she had shot up in height since then, and the phrase was no longer applicable. At twenty-four, she became beautiful, and her music began to show traces of genius. Unfortunately, she had the additional attraction of ten thousand pounds a year in her own right; and, when the marriage settlement was discussed, she proposed to share the money with her three younger sisters.

The young man behaved very badly. She told him—very quietly—that this was the result of her own folly; for, in her family, hitherto, marriages had always been "arranged." He replied—for he was an intellectual young man, who understood women, and read the most advanced novelists—that she was one of those who were ruining England with their feudal ideas. Then they parted, the young man cursing under his breath, and Rachel lilting the ballad to which she had hitherto attributed her good fortune.

"Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew,And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true,Gi'ed me her promise true, which ne'er forgot shall be,And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me doon and dee."

He had quoted it so often in his letters that she was justified, perhaps, in thinking that it had influenced her fate. "You know, darling, that those words were supposed to tell the love of a soldier, who died in Flanders, fighting for England, more than a hundred years ago, and when you sing them, I feel that I, too ..." So it was the obvious thing to toss at him as she went through the door, holding her head up almost as gallantly as a soldier. But he didn't seem to mind, and the parting was final.

Rachel, apparently, minded very much indeed; but she kept it to herself and her violin, till on a certain day, she decided that she must escape from all her old surroundings and forget.

Her guardian was the only person she consulted, and he made no criticism of her scheme of travel so far as she divulged it. She had been brought up to complete freedom, while her parents were alive, and in the six years since their death, she had proved that she was capable of taking care of herself. He was wise or unwise enough not to let her know that he understood her trouble. But he tried to express a certain sympathy in his gruff parting words, "London is a grimy cavern."

"Yes, and the people are grimy, too," she replied, waving her hand to him, as she went out into the fog. She looked brighter than she had looked for months past. His last impression of her was that she looked as roses would look if they could wear furs and carry stars in their eyes.

She had been studying the sailings of the ocean-steamers for some time, but it was not her intention to follow the traveled routes more than was necessary. Her brain was busy with a new music, the music of the names in a hundred tales that she had read. The Golden Gate and Rio Grande called to her like chords in a Beethoven symphony. Yokohama and Singapore stirred her like Rossini. But it was the folk-song of travel that she wanted, something wilder and sweeter even than Tahiti, some fortunate Eden island in the South Seas.

Egypt and Ceylon were only incidents on her way. They only set the fever burning a little more restlessly in her veins; and her first moment of content was when the yacht of thirty tons, which she chartered in San Diego, carried her out to the long heave of the Pacific, and turned southward on the endless trail to the Happy Islands.

This was a part of her scheme about which she had not consulted any one at home, or she might have received some good advice about the choice of her ship. It was a sturdy little craft, with small but excellent cabins for herself and her maid. The captain and his wife were apparently created for her special benefit, being very capable people, with the quality of effacing themselves. The crew, of half a dozen Kanakas in white shirts and red pareos, was picturesque and remote enough from all the associations of cities to satisfy her desire for isolation.

The maid was the only mistake, she thought, and she did not discover this until they had been a fortnight at sea. Her own maid had fallen ill at an early stage of her travels, and had been sent home from Cairo. Rachel had engaged this new one in San Diego, chiefly because she thought it necessary to take somebody with her. When Marie Mendoza had come to do Rachel's hair at San Diego, she had a somewhat pathetic story to tell about a husband who had deserted her and forced her to work for her living. Rachel thought there might be two sides to the story when she discovered that the captain was playing the part of Samson to this Delilah. It was a vivid moonlight picture that she saw in the bows one night, when she had come up on deck unexpectedly for a breath of air. Captain Ryan was an ardent wooer, and he did not see her. Marie Mendoza looked rather like a rainbow in the arms of a black-bearded gorilla, and Rachel retired discreetly, hoping that it was merely a temporary aberration.

She would have been more disturbed, probably, if she had heard a little of the conversation of this precious pair.

"I tell you, it's a cinch, Mickey. I never seen pearls like 'em. They're worth fifty thousand dollars in Tiffany's, if they're worth a cent. She keeps 'em locked up in her steamer-trunk, but I seen her take 'em out several times."

"Well, I've been hunting pearls up and down the South Seas for twenty years, and never had a chance of making good like this."

But Rachel did not hear the conversation, or she might have been able to change the course of events considerably. She might even have taken an opportunity of explaining to Marie that the real pearls were in the bank at home, and that the necklace in her trunk was a clever imitation, useful when she wished to adorn herself without too much responsibility, and worth about thirty-five pounds in London, or perhaps a little more than one hundred and fifty dollars in New York.

But Rachel knew nothing of all this; and so, on a certain morning, when theSeamewdropped anchor off the coral island of her dreams, she went ashore without any misgivings. It was an island paradise, not recognized by any map that she had seen, though Captain Ryan seemed to know all about it. Rachel had particularly wanted to hear the real music of the islanders, and Captain Ryan had assured her that she would find it at its best among the inhabitants of this island, who had been unspoiled by travelers, and yet were among the most gentle of the natives of the South Seas. Marie Mendoza pleaded a headache, and remained on board; but the Captain and his wife accompanied Rachel up the white beach, leaving the boat in charge of the Kanakas. A throng of brown-skinned, flower-wreathed islanders watched them timidly from under the first fringe of palm trees; but the Captain knew how to ingratiate himself; and, after certain gifts had been proffered to the bolder natives, the rest came forward with their own gifts of flowers and long stems of yellow fruit. Two young goddesses seized Rachel by the hands, and examined her clothes, while the rest danced round her like the figures from the Hymn to Pan in "Endymion."

Before the morning was over, Rachel had made firm friends of these two maidens, who rejoiced in the names of Tinovao and Amaru; and, when she signified to them that she wanted to swim in the lagoon, they danced off with her in an ecstasy of mirth at the European bathing dress which she carried over her arm, to their own favorite bathing beach, which was hidden from the landing-place by a palm-tufted promontory.

It was more than an hour later when she returned, radiant, with her radiant companions. She was a superb swimmer, and she had lost all her troubles for the time in that rainbow-colored revel. She thought of telling the Captain that they would stay here for some days. She wanted to drink in the beauty of the island, and make it her own; to swim in the lagoon, and bask in the healing sun; to walk through the palms at dusk, and listen to the songs of the islanders. But where was the Captain? Surely, this was the landing-place. There were the foot-prints and the mark of the boat on the beach. Then she saw—with a quick contraction of the heart—not only that the boat was missing, but that there was no sign of the yacht. She stared at the vacant circle of the sea, and could find no trace of it. There was no speck on that blazing sapphire.

Her last doubt as to whether she had been deliberately marooned was removed by Tinovao, who pointed to a heap of her belongings that had been dumped on the beach, all in accordance with the best sea-traditions, though it was due in this case to a sentimental spasm on the part of Marie Mendoza, who remembered the kindness of Rachel at San Diego.

The heap was a small one. But Rachel was glad to see that it included her violin-case.

She knew that her stay was like to be a long one. They had been looking for islands out of the way of ships; and she knew that it might even be some years before another sail appeared on that stainless horizon. The thieves would disappear, and they were not likely to talk. Her own movements had been so erratic that she doubted whether her friends could trace her. But she took it all very pluckily; so that the round-eyed Amaru and Tinovao were unable to guess the full meaning of her plight. They came to the conclusion, and Rachel thought it best to encourage them in it, that she was voluntarily planning to live amongst them for a little while, and that the yacht would of course return for her. They had heard of white people doing these strange things, and they were delighted at the prospect.

In a very short time, they had lodged Rachel in a hut of palm leaves, with all the fruits of the island at her door. They carried up the small heap of her possessions, and she gave them each a little mirror from her dressing bag, which lifted them into the seventh heaven. Thenceforward, they were her devoted slaves. Rachel discovered, moreover, while they were turning over her possessions and examining her clothes, that her ignorance of their language was but a slight barrier to understanding. They communicated, it seemed, by a kind of wireless telegraphy, through that universal atmosphere of their sex. They helped her to do her hair; and, as it fell over her shoulders, they held it up to one another, admiring its weight and beauty. When it was dark, there came a sound of singing from the beach; and they crowned her with fresh frangipanni blossoms, and led her out like a bride, to hear the songs of the islanders.

It was a night of music. In the moonlight, on the moon-white sands, a few of the younger islanders, garlanded like the sunburnt lovers of Theocritus, danced from time to time; but, for the most part, they were in a restful mood, attuned to the calm breathing of the sea. Their plaintive songs and choruses rose and fell as quietly as the night-wind among the palms; and Rachel thought she had never heard or seen anything more exquisite. The beauty of the night was deepened a thousand-fold by her new loneliness. The music plucked at her heart-strings. Beautiful shapes passed her, that made her think of Keats:

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain."

She murmured the lines to herself; and while her lips yet moved, a young islander stood before her who might have posed as the model for Endymion. He was hardly darker than herself, and, to her surprise, he spoke to her in quaint broken English.

"Make us the music of your own country," was what she understood him to say, and Tinovao confirmed it by darting off to the hut and returning with the violin. Rachel took it, and without any conscious choice of a melody, began to play and sing the air which had been pulsing just below the level of her consciousness ever since she had left England:

"Like dew on the gowan lying is the fa' of her fairy feet,And like winds in simmer sighing, her voice is low and sweet,Her voice is low and sweet, and she's a' the world to me,And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me doon and dee."

The islanders listened, as if spellbound; but she could not tell whether the music went home to any of them, except the boy who lay at her feet with his eyes fixed on her face. When the last notes died away, the crowd broke into applause, with cries of "Malo! Malo!" But the boy lay still, looking at her, as a dog looks at his mistress. Then the moonlight glistened in his eyes, and she thought that she saw tears. She bent forward a little to make sure. He rose with a smile, and lifted her hand to his face, so that she might feel that his eyes were wet.

"Tears," he said, "and I only listen. But you—you make the music, and no tears are in your eyes." He looked into her face.

"No," she said, "there are no tears in my eyes." Then she continued hurriedly, as if speaking to herself (and perhaps only a musician would have felt that the catch in her voice went a little deeper than tears): "That's one of the things you lose when you go in for music. It used to be so with me, too."

"I like your music," the boy went on. "My father—English sailor. My mother—learn speak English—from him. She teach me. My father only stay here little time. I never see English people before this."

Rachel looked at him with a quick realization of what his words meant. The boy was at least eighteen years old.

"You remember no ship coming to this island?" she said.

"No. I never see my father. He only stay here little time. My mother think for long time he will come again. That is how she die, only a little time ago. Too much waiting. Make some more music. You have made my ears hungry."

But Rachel was facing the truth now, and she played and sang no more that night.

For a week or two, Rachel spent much time alone, thinking hard, thinking things out as she had never done before. She did not quite understand her isolation till the first shock of the full discovery had passed. Then, one morning, sitting alone, and gazing out over the spotless blue, she found herself accepting the plain fact, that this might indeed be for ever. She found herself weighing all the chances, all that she had lost, and all that yet remained to her. It dawned upon her, for the first time, that youth does not lightly surrender the fulness of its life, at the first disillusionment. She knew now that she would have recovered from that first disastrous love-affair. She knew now that she had always known it, and that her search had been only for some healing dittany, some herb of grace that would heal her wound more quickly. She faced it all—the loss of her birthright as a woman, the loss of the unknown lover. She saw herself growing old in this loneliness.

She weighed everything that was left to her, the freedom from all the complications of life, the beauty of her prison, the years of youth and strength that might yet rejoice in the sun and the sea, and even find some companionship among these children of nature that rejoiced in them also. She compared them with the diseased monstrosities, the hideous bodies and brutal faces that swarmed in the gray cities of Europe. She saw nothing to alter her former opinion here. She was condemned at any rate to live among a folk that had walked out of an ode by Keats. But always, at the end, she pictured herself growing old, with her own life unfulfilled.

Then, one day, a change came over her. She had lost all count of time in that island of lasting summer; but she must have been marooned for many months when it happened.

One afternoon, when she had been swimming with Tinovao and Amaru, the two girls had run up into the woods to get some fruit, leaving Rachel to bask on the beach alone. The sunlight of the last few months had tinted her skin with a smooth rosy brown that would have made it difficult to distinguish her from a native, except for the contours of her face and the deep violet of her eyes, as she lay on that milk-white sand. Before she followed her friends, she thought she would take one more ride through the surf. She made her way out, through the gap in the reef, till she had reached the right distance. Then she rested, treading water, while she waited for the big comber that was to carry her back again.

It was her civilized intelligence, perhaps, that betrayed her now, for she turned her back to the sea for a moment, while she drank in the beauty of the feathery green palms and delicate tresses of the ironwood that waved along the shore. She was roused from her dreams by the familiar muffled roar of the approaching breaker, and she turned her head a few seconds too late to take the rush of it as it ought to have been taken. It was a giant and, for almost the first time in her life, she knew the sensation of fear in the sea, as the green crest crumbled into white high over her. In that instant, too, she caught a glimpse of a figure on the reef watching her. It was the figure of Rua, the boy who spoke English; and, as the breaker crashed down with all its tons of water over her head, she carried with her the impression that he was about to dive to her rescue. She was whirled helplessly, heels over head, downward and downward, then swept forward with the rushing whirlpools in the blackness below, like a reed in a subterranean river. She knew that if she could hold her breath long enough, she would rise to the surface; but she had reckoned without the perils of the gap in the reef. Twice she was whirled and caught against a jagged piece of coral, which would probably have killed her if it had struck her head. She took the warning, and held her arms in the best way she could to ward off any head-blow. A lacerated body would not matter so much as the momentary stunning that might prevent her from keeping afloat when she rose. At last, when it seemed that she could hold her breath no longer, she shot with a wild gasp to the surface again.

She found that she was only half-way through the gap, not in mid-stream where she would have been comparatively safe, but in an eddy of boiling water, close to the reef and among sharp fangs of coral that made it impossible to swim. All that she could do, at the moment, was to hold on to the coral and prevent herself from being lacerated against it. The sharp edges of the little shells, with which it was covered here, cut her hands, as the water swirled her to and fro; but she held on, and looked round for help.

Then she saw that she was not fated to receive help, but to give it; and, like lightning in a tropic night, the moment changed her world. She had no time to think it out now; for she saw the face of Rua, swirling up towards her through the green water, and it looked like the face of a drowned man. His head and arms emerged, and sank again, twice, before she caught him by the hand and drew him, with the strength of a woman fighting for life, to her side.

She was not sure whether he was alive or dead; but she saw that, in his hasty plunge to help her, a dive that no native would have taken at that place in ordinary circumstances, he had struck one of the coral jags. Blood was flowing from his head and, as she held him floating there helplessly for a minute, the clear water went away over the white coral tinted with little clouds of crimson. She waited for the next big wave, thinking that it would save or destroy them both. Happily, it had not broken when it reached them; and, as they rose on the smooth back of it, she held her companion by the hand, and struck out fiercely for a higher shelf of the reef. It had been out of her reach before; but the wave carried them both up to its level, and left them stranded there.

From this point, the reef rose by easy stages; and, with the aid of two more waves, she was able to lug Rua to a point where there was no risk of their being washed away, though the clear water still swirled up about them, and went away clouded with red. She lay there for a moment exhausted; but, as her strength came back to her, the strange sensation that flashed through her when she had first come to the surface returned with greater force. Much has been said and sung about the dawn of wonder on the primitive mind. This was an even stranger dawn, the dawn of wonder on a daughter of the twentieth century. It seemed to her that she was looking at the world for the first time, while she lay there panting and gazing out to sea, with those red stains on the white coral, and her hands gripping the slender brown hands of the half-drowned islander. It seemed that she had returned to her childhood, and that she was looking at a primal world that she had forgotten. She saw now that Rua was breathing, and she knew instinctively that he would recover. The wave of joy that went through her had something primitive and fierce in it, like the joy of the wild creatures. She felt like an islander herself, and when the sea-birds hovered overhead, she called to them, in the island tongue, and felt as if she had somehow drawn nearer to them. She looked at the sea with new eyes, as if it were a fierce old play-mate of her own, an old tiger that had forgotten to sheath its claws when it buffeted its cubs. There was a glory in the savor of life, like the taste of freedom to a caged bird. Only it was Europe now, and the world of houses, that seemed the cage. The sea had never been so blue. The brine on her lips was like the sacramental wine of her new kinship with the world....

Then, looking at Rua's face, as the life came back to it, a wave of compassion went through her. Every contour of that face told her that this boy also was a victim of her own kindred. He, too, was marooned, and more hopelessly than herself, for there must be a soul within him that could never even know what it had lost or what it hungered for, unless, ... unless, perhaps, she could help him out of the treasures of her own memory, and give him glimpses of that imperial palace whence he came.

It was growing dark when they slipped into the water of the lagoon and swam slowly towards the beach. There, she helped him to limp as far as his hut, neither of them speaking. He dropped on his knees, as she turned to go, and laid his face at her feet. She stayed for a moment, looking at him, and half stooped to raise him; but she checked the impulse, and left him abruptly.

At the edge of the wood, she turned to look again, and he was there still, in the same attitude. There was a dumb pathos in it that reminded her curiously of certain pictures of her lost world, the peasants in the Angelus of Millet, though this was a picture unmarred by the curse of Adam, the picture of a dumb brown youthful god, perfect in physical beauty, praying in Paradise garden to the star that trembled above the palms.

Many women (and most men) in their unguarded moments, impute their own good and evil to others; read their own thoughts in the eyes around them; pity their own tears, or the tears of Vergil, in the eyes of "Geist." But Rua was praying to the best he knew.

The prayer was a long one. It lasted, in various forms, for more than a year. At dawn, she would wake, and find offerings of fruit and flowers left at her door by her faithful worshiper; and often she would talk with him on the beach, telling him of her own country, about which he daily thirsted to hear more; for the more he learned, the more he seemed to share her own exile. Music, too, they shared, that universal language whose very spirituality is its chief peril; for it is emotion unattached to facts, and it may mean different things to different people; so that you may accompany the sacking of cities by the thunders of Wagner, or dream that you see angels in an empty shrine. Sometimes, in the evening, Rua would steal like a shadow from the shadows around her hut, where he had been waiting to see her pass, and would beg her to play the music of her own country. Then she would sing, and he would stand in the doorway listening, with every pulse of his body beating time, and one brown foot tapping in the dust.

One night, she had been wandering with Tinovao and Amaru by the lagoon, in which the reflected stars burned so brightly that one might easily believe the island hung in mid-heaven. She looked at them for a long time; then, with her arms round the two girls, who understood her words only vaguely, she murmured to herself: "What does it matter? What does anything matter when one looks up there? And life is going ... life and youth."

She said good-night to her friends, and laughingly plucked the red hibiscus flower from behind the shell-like ear of Tinovao as they parted. When she neared her door, a shadow stole out of the woods, and stood before her on the threshold. His eyes were shining like dark stars, the eyes of a fawn. "Music," he pleaded, "the music of your country."

Then he saw the red flower that she wore behind her ear, exactly as Tinovao had worn it. He stared at her, as Endymion must have stared at Diana among the poppies of Latmos, half frightened, half amazed. He dropped to his knees, as on that night when she had saved him. He pressed his face against her bare feet. They were cold and salt from the sea. But she stooped now, and raised him.

"In my country, in our country," she said, "love crowns a man. Happy is the love that does not bring the woman to the dust."

There followed a time when she was happy, or thought herself happy. It must have lasted for nearly seven years, the lifetime of that dancing ray of sunlight, the small son, whom she buried with her own hands under a palm-tree. Then Rua deserted her, almost as a child forsakes its mother. He was so much younger than herself, and he took a younger wife from among the islanders. When she first discovered his intention, Rachel laughed mockingly at herself, and said—also to herself, for she knew that she had somehow lost the power to make Rua understand her,—"Have you, too, become an advanced thinker, Rua?"

But Rua understood that it was some kind of mockery; and, as her mockery was keeping him away from his new fancy, and he was an undisciplined child, he leapt at her in fury, seized her by the throat, and beat her face against the ground. When she rose to her feet, with the blood running from her mouth, he saw that he had broken out two of her teeth. This effectively wrecked her beauty, and convinced him, as clearly as if he had indeed been an advanced thinker, that love must be free to develop its own life, and that, in the interests of his own soul, he must get away as quickly as possible. Thereafter, he avoided her carefully, and she led a life of complete solitude, spending all her days by the little grave under the palm-tree.

She lost all count of time. She only knew that the colors were fading from things, and that while she used to be able to watch the waves breaking into distinct spray on the reef, she could only see now a blur of white, from her place by the grave. She was growing old, she supposed, and it was very much like going to sleep, after all. The slow pulse of the sea, the voice of the eternal, was lulling her to rest.

When the schoonerPearl, with its party of irresponsible European globe-trotters, dropped anchor off the island, it was the first ship that had been seen there since the arrival of theSeamew, the first that had ever been seen there by many of the young islanders.

The visitors came ashore, shouting and singing, the men in white duck suits, with red and blue pareos fastened round their waists; the women in long flowing lava-lavas of yellow and rose and green, which they had bought in Tahiti, for they were going to do the thing properly. The lady in yellow had already loosened her hair and crowned herself with frangipanni blossoms. The islanders flocked around them, examining everything they wore, and decorating them with garlands of flowers, just as they had done with Rachel's party. The new arrivals feasted on the white beach of the lagoon, in what they believed to be island fashion; and when the stars came out, and the banjos were tired, they called on the islanders for the songs and dances of the South Seas. The lady in yellow tittered apprehensively, and remarked to her neighbor in green, that she had heard dreadful things about some of those dances. But she was disappointed on this occasion. The plaintive airs rose and fell around them, like the very voice of the wind in the palm trees; and the dancers moved as gracefully as the waves broke on the shore.

When the islanders had ended their entertainment, amidst resounding applause, one of the young native women called out a name that seemed to amuse her companions. They instantly echoed it, and one of them snatched a banjo from the hands of a white man. Then they all flew, like chattering birds, towards a hut, which had kept its door closed throughout the day.

They clamored round it, gleefully nudging each other, as if in expectation of a huge joke. At last, the door opened, and a gray, bent old woman appeared. She was of larger build than most of the islanders, and there was something in her aspect that silenced the chatterers, even though they still nudged each other slyly. The native with the banjo offered it to her almost timidly, and said something, to which the old woman shook her head.

"They say she is a witch," said the Captain of thePearl, who had been listening to the conversation of the group nearest to him. "They want her to give us some of her music. She used to sing songs, apparently, before her man drove her out of his house, in the old days, but she has not sung them since. They think she might oblige our party, for some strange reason. Evidently, they've got some little joke they want to play on us. You know these Kanakas have a pretty keen sense of humor."

The visitors gathered round curiously. An island witch was certainly something to record in their diaries. The old woman looked at them for a moment, with eyes like burning coals through her shaggy elf-locks. They seemed to remind her of something unpleasant. A savage sneer bared her broken teeth. Then she took the banjo in her shaking hands. They were queerly distorted by age or some disease and they looked like the claws of a land-crab. She sat down on her own threshold, and touched the strings absently with her misshapen fingers. The faint sound of it seemed to rouse her, seemed to kindle some sleeping fire within her, and she struck it twice, vigorously.

The banjo is not a subtle instrument, but the sound of those two chords drew the crowd to attention, as a master holds his audience breathless when he tests his violin before playing.

"Holy smoke!" muttered the owner of the banjo, "where did the old witch learn to do that?"

Then the miracle began. The decrepit fingers drew half a dozen chords that went like fire through the unexpectant veins of the Europeans, went through them as a national march shivers through the soul of a people when its armies return from war. The haggard burning eyes, between the tattered elf-locks, moistened and softened like the eyes of a Madonna, and the withered mouth, with its broken teeth, began to sing, very softly and quaveringly, at first, but, gathering strength, note by note, the words that told of the love of a soldier who fought in Flanders more than a hundred years ago:

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