December
Littledale

Almost three weeks have passed since I last wrote a line in this book,—three weeks crowded with events which have turned the current of my life into ways of which I never dreamed. I am here, in my old room, a log fire snapping in the fireplace, the window sills banked with snow, and the clock on the landing below has rung eleven times. I have sat before these written pages a full half-hour, tempted to destroy all,—yielding to the sense of the futility in my life. Has it been but three weeks since the night I sat and listened to Brinsmade in the Chapon Fin at Bordeaux? To-day every logical consideration is scattered to the winds as I realize with an acute pain what sport we are in the veiled hands of chance. Into my life has come the greatest exaltation and the greatest emptiness, so inextricably interwoven that I know not what to name it, pleasure or pain,—this emotion which has imprisoned all my faculties with the sudden awakening of a great love.

I do not know that I shall ever see her again; I have given my promise never to seek her out. Why? I do not know. Simply because, for her own reasons, she implored it of me, and to her slightest wish I would be as powerless to offer opposition as to consciously give her physical pain. I have spoken of the mystery of good and evil that is in each of us. To-day it is a mystery more baffling than ever. As I look back now, what I marvel at most is that I should have met Bernoline at the very moment when I had so complacently, in my worldly wisdom, accepted the easy path held open to me. Two women will ever remain before me as the embodiment of the twin contending mysteries in my soul: Letty, who stands as the sinister embodiment of all those fierce, primal instincts which in civilization we name evil; and Bernoline, who has reached deep into the hidden needs of which I was ignorant and revealed to me a self I did not know,—a self against whose imperious idealism I rebel, but a self which will, to the end of my days, dominate me and determine my actions. One has vanished into the wilderness of men, and the other returns, a sinister memory, which is a cross to be borne day by day, behind a mask that must forever stand between me and my brother.

At Bordeaux I had but explored the mystery of evil; the mystery of good was still unknown to me.

As I look back now, every word, every object, every outline is clear to me from the first instant of our meeting. It is as though with the sudden stirring of my deeper nature every little sense awoke. There are colors, the oranges in a straw basket, the blue of a porter on the dock, the gray whirl of her scarf against the blue Breton cape on the upper deck as we passed out of France, the red luxury of the sunset that swam over our heads that last day at sea,—all these tints and a dozen others are associated in the minutest visualization along with the scent of tarred ropes about us at Bordeaux, the clean brine of the sea which held us ten unforgettable days, the sound of the forecastle bell tolling off the hours, and the light, slipping step which I would know to-day from a thousand others.

It was in the wet dawn of late November that I first saw her, and the memory starts up before my eyes, even to the most irrelevant details. I can see again the moist dock, the gray flanks of the ocean liner shutting out the sky, the masts dissolving in the morning mist and the white splotches of faces flowering against the rails. The salt, tarred smell of the sea is still in my nostrils and I am back in the crowd of leave-takers, saying the last broken farewells; an old couple clinging to their son, a sailor with his sweetheart. Boatswains are piping, cabmen swearing, loiterers gazing; a smirched face looms as a little wharf rat bumps against me, and—I look up and see her again—as I saw her for the first time.

She stood heavily veiled, her arm about an old servant in a Breton cap, who was weeping her heart out,—a very old woman, wrinkled and stooped, whose lips trembled, whose eyes never ceased their staring intentness. It was not simply grief at parting, often hysterical in servants, but something inexpressibly deeper; not so much a protest as a final resignation to a weight of sorrow beyond old age’s power to bear.

At this moment, her young mistress lifted her veil and, as she bent forward to kiss each shriveled cheek, I saw her face out of the mist and the blurred crowd—as I see it now—and no second glance could ever add to that instant conviction. The whistle blew above us. The old woman cried something hysterically and caught the young hand to her lips. I heard her murmur a blessing, I saw her try to disengage her hand, and then as, helplessly, she sought for assistance, her look met mine. I know that my eyes were dim. She saw and trusted them. I stepped forward, bare-headed.

“Permettez—Madame?”

“Merci, Monsieur—vous Êtes bien bon.”

The veil dropped again. I put my hand under the old woman’s arm and drew her slowly away. When I returned, her young mistress was already on the boat.

I do not know that I can describe her, for when I see her face I see only the eyes, dark, round and big, without guile or artifice, eyes that were open and luminous, and yet eyes that were stricken with a suffering too deep to be cast off in tears. It was not what I saw but what I felt,—the inner quality, the sweet dignity, the gentleness and the high aristocracy. Women, before, had been to me types. In her, instantly, I discerned a being set apart, whose choice of action could never proceed from feminine acceptance of the hour’s fashion in dress, thought and standards. She was what she was, and would go forward always along her clear path, undisturbed by the troubling blast of the popular wind. I knew that for the first time I had looked into eyes which no ugliness, no meanness, no unworthy thought could ever trouble, and that I was of the privileged of the world to have seen her. One look, a look that might pass a thousand times—one look in the mists of the dawn, in the scrambling, shoddy crowd—and yet, for that one instant’s fugitive understanding, all that I had been and was became as nothing, and my destiny—for better or worse, for ill and pain and sorrow, emptiness and loneliness—was irrevocably determined. Yes, mystery of the good and evil that is in us! From the pain of evil, we struggle back to sanity and clean air and memory covers over the scar, but from the emptiness and the ache that, in the mystery of good, love may lay upon our lives, what escape or what answer is there?

Last night I left off when the memory was too acute and my eyes could no longer see to write. To-night, I come back to it, impatiently, with a longing to reclaim every word, every look, every precious minute, and fix it indelibly before me. The situation here is hideous. I seem to be walking over a mine that sooner or later will go off, while I can do nothing but await the final catastrophe. To write is to return to her, to hope again that somehow, somewhere, without being false to my promise, I shall see her again.

The gangplank swung out as I stepped on the deck, the air shrilling with the chirp of whistles and the creak of pulleys. I shouldered through the motley crowd and joined Mr. Brinsmade on the upper deck. I remember how solemnly I looked down on the France I knew and loved, and with what reluctant apprehension of the future I watched the gray hawser stiffen.

“Strange, to be going?”

“Yes—incredibly strange,” I said slowly. “I can’t quite believe it; for whole months to be a free agent—no longer a part of a great orderly machine, without eyes or ears or will. I think I have forgotten what the other world is like.”

“Do you regret this?”

“Regret it? Yes, it’s hard to leave a thing unfinished when you’ve gone so far. And, though I’ve hated it and cursed it, well, it is a different conception of humanity, after all, this doing a thing as a mass. I’ve accepted it, readjusted myself to it. I think it’s not the question of liking it or not liking it; it’s the feeling of the inevitable and the wanting to measure up to other men. I stopped debating with myself the day I saw a man at my side go to his death. He was a scullion out of the kitchen of a New York hotel—Carlo Roger—deserter and rascal. He could have remained, and no one would have cared. He did his duty, unnoticed. I couldn’t do less.”

I looked up, and then down, and added, “Better hold on tight to me, Mr. Brinsmade. I feel like making a jump for it.”

Laughing he passed his arm through mine and pretended not to notice the dimness in my eyes.

“You’ve known humanity at its best, my boy,” he said. “And I, thank God, have had a glimpse of it. And when you’re like myself, a weather-worn old lawyer, who walks behind the scenes, that’s something to be thankful for. Well—if they’re not of our race—they’re the same human beings: we can share that.”

“I feel that way.”

A group of ambulance drivers descended upon us, with their fragmentary chatter.

“Boat in had a close shave.”

“Missed a torpedo by twenty feet.”

“Come off! Every one’s seeing submarines!”

“Hope we pick one up.”

“Say, what’s the matter with this boat?”

“Off for the good old U.S.A!”

A great blast of steam shook the air above us, sending its wet vapors against our cheeks. The gangway swung clear and rolled back on the dock. Another moment, and the big ship trembled beneath our feet and slowly and definitely veered out against the straining hawsers.

We left the noisy exuberance of the crowd and went down the deck, in search of quieter moods.

“Here’s our spot.”

I followed Mr. Brinsmade and slipped between two lifeboats. Then, abruptly, we stopped. The railing was already tenanted by a young woman.

If she heard our exclamation she did not change from the rigidity of her pose. We hesitated, moving to one side, and lifted our hats in a sobered deference and, I knew, through our minds flashed the same thought: she was French and France was receding from her eyes.

One hawser still held us to the land, like a faint memory stretching back into the past. Then a sudden hissing contortion whipped over the widening waters. And so, with the parting of that link, one chapter had ended for me and another, that in the wildest flight of my imagination I could never have divined, had begun.

Instinctively I raised my eyes and recognized my chance acquaintance of the dock.

She had fallen back against the life boat, arms rigidly extended, holding the railing from her. A gray film hid her features, wound about her neck and stood out in a long flutter, a ripple of light against the dark unanimity of her costume. Youth and sorrow are two great emotions which cannot be disguised. I felt, despite the rigidity of the body which told of the stricken soul, the young grace and dignity. I hoped that she would notice me, but she remained in staring oblivion. Yet, though I had spoken but a half dozen words to her, I can remember how keen was the sense of her presence at my side and how, on the instant, I forgot my personal emotions and seemed to be entering into the moods of the woman whose first glance had brought me a sense of intimacy.

I looked, and then I looked away, with a guilty consciousness of trespassing on her grief. Yet, though my glance was averted, I was looking back with her eyes. My companion spoke to me: I did not hear.

I was thinking of the wrench of old affections for her—the venture into the uncharted new—the fading of the homeland that was in her heart by a thousand memories.

Below, the swift currents of the Garonne ran from us, swift as the currents of time. Faces of blue-shirted dock hands grew blurred. Flashes of red trousers, gray-blue uniforms, brown and black of women’s dresses merged into a momentary tapestry. The ungainly, lumbering motor-boat, with a hulking colossus balanced at the tiller, dropped behind. Blue-tiled roofs slipped away. Cathedral spires came out against the horizon, like the spoutings of huge sea monsters. The grassy shores flowed back with the current. Wharves, factories, lean shipyards with naked iron arms extended, tilted ships discharging cargoes, brown vineyards combing the aged slopes, tramp steamers in dusty garments, Swedish and Greek, under the imperial banner of Britain, the Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes; tubs, derelicts, old men of the sea, reclaimed and pressed into service,—all the multiple, incongruous aspects of war crowded about our passing, and always that revelation of the human note, the swarming sea adventurers, undaunted, incredulous of the odds, contemptuous of man’s malignant genius for slaying man.

I hazarded another glance at my companion and, perceiving her still oblivious to our presence, my glance remained, my sympathies quickened by a hundred remembered scenes of parting. I could not see her eyes for the veil that hid them but, instinctively, I divined the yearning of their backward look.

Heavens, how I knew that last look! How many times, in crowded depot or passing train, I had seen on the faces of women, dry-eyed and staring, that look of the soul’s rebellion, the last renunciation, the last groping for a final memory to bear down the lonely years. France, land of her childhood and girlish dreams; France, of precious sorrows and what affections: France, of her long race and living prayers, was receding before the weakening vision that rebelled.

“I say, Davy.”

I came to myself at the touch of Mr. Brinsmade’s hand.

“I don’t think we’ve a right here, do you?”

Then, and then only, I realized how profound had been my absorption.

“No, no, guess you’re right.”

As we started to withdraw, a couple of sailors, preparing to swing the lifeboats for the night’s perilous dash into haunted seas, came shuffling up.

“Pardon, Messieurs.”

“All right—moving out.”

“Pardon, Mamzelle.”

The sailor hesitated, shuffled and touching his cap, repeated his request, unnoticed. As he stood there awkwardly, undecided, I stepped to her side, raising my hat.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle. Les matelots.”

She turned, and I felt her staring blankly at us, as though in the long blur of faces she were unable to separate friends, acquaintances and enemies. But, immediately perceiving the situation, she thanked me with a little nod and turning, said:

“Je vous dÉrange—mil pardons.”

There was a tired note in the modulated voice that I remember to this day,—the weariness of too much struggling.

From the sailors a chorus went up.

“Pas de quoi, Mamzelle!”

“Ne vous donnez pas la peine.”

They made way for her deferentially, fingers to their caps, simple-hearted men, quick to feel and sure to recognize the finer metal.

“Merci, Messieurs.”

A slight inclination of her head, and she had passed down the deck to the further rail.

“I didn’t realize I was staring,” I blurted out.

“Yes—a little too openly.”

“Perhaps. It rather got me—took me back to the mobilization, and the depots—the look on the faces of the women; when you’ve seen it you can’t forget it.”

We moved to the rear and talked of desultory things, as we hung on the rail and watched the steerage. Below, a returning permissionaire, perched on a capstan, was playing on a harmonica the defiant strains of “Sambre et Meuse,” a group of cattlemen from a torpedoed ship, stretched about him, basking in the sun. The martial air quickened the blood in my veins. I saw a regiment growing out of the mists of the morning, gaunt, grim and proud, bandaged and limping, returning with their memories from the trenches. I have seen many a dress parade after battle and been thrilled; but I still can remember that first knowledge of the living returning from the dead to the rolling drums of the “Sambre et Meuse.”

“I want to love my country like that,” I said suddenly. “I want to get the same thrill when the regiment swings up the street—” I broke off. “I don’t know just how I’ll fit in. I’m afraid they won’t understand my way of looking at things. I’m rather dreading the test.”

“You’ll get that thrill.”

“I wonder. We all seem to be pulling for ourselves: liberty, individualism, yes; but real nationalism—the thing that’s a religion—the thing you get over here—that makes it worth while to die.”

“Wait until we understand.”

Some one in the khaki of a volunteer ambulance hailed me.

“David Littledale, ’08. Remember me? Joe Hungerford. Heard you were on board. What luck!”

I turned to shake hands. It was the same Joe Hungerford of school and college days, lively and irrepressible, a pink and white complexion, a mischief-loving eye, a quick smile and a clear visage, incapable of wrong, deceit, subtleties, or an unnecessary mental operation,—a boy, as his nation was young.

“Who’d thought to run in on you, Big Dale? Glad to meet you, Mr. Brinsmade. You know my father—Sam Hungerford, of the Illinois Central? Quite a crowd on board. Say, do you think there is any chance of our sighting a submarine?”

“Same old Joe,” I said, laughing. “You wouldn’t feel anything if you were being led out to be shot.”

“The devil I wouldn’t.” But, in the midst of a retort, perceiving a familiar face below, he was off, with an exclamation: “Hello! If there isn’t Frangipani! See you later!”

“There’s your young America.”

“Yes,” I assented. “And a pretty good sort, too. It does everything but think. That sounds rather hard; but that was what I was, three years ago.”

“I suppose it was the feeling of the game, the bigger game, that got you in it?”

“Frankly, yes; more or less. And that’s true of most of us. Not all, though. But once in, we got a touch of the other thing.”

“Don’t be too quick to judge when you get over there,” he said, divining my thoughts. “Public opinion is complex, but there is one thing that decides America in the end, always,—idealism. It’s a quality that is our weakness and our salvation. It makes us the prey to quacks and demagogues, until we learn to see through them. But it is the air we breathe and no one can lead us long away from it.”

“I say, Mr. Brinsmade,” I broke in, “don’t put me down for the sort of expatriate who goes round damning his country—”

“My dear David,” he said, laying his hand on my arm, “don’t worry. I feel even more strongly than you do. And it’s a big test that’s coming; make no mistake. It’s our kind that’s failing, not America. Somehow, the class that ought to lead, doesn’t.”

We separated on that, and I went down to arrange my cabin, a little uncomfortable at what I had said, and wondering if my listener had not been all the while smiling tolerantly at my youthful pessimism,—for though I am obstinate in my opinions, I do not express them easily in conversation.

When I returned the early twilight was sifting in. I went to the upper deck, with a vague feeling of uneasiness which to this day I cannot explain. Invisible nets descended between us and the fading world; the ship itself, its masts and its traveling rails, was dissolving in the flowing in of the dusk. I went directly to the rear, and twenty feet away I saw her as I had expected, a blot against the rail. She did not turn at my approach, though we were alone on the creaking deck. Twice I came to the railing at her side, hesitated and turned away. She was there, like a statue of bereavement, oblivious of all but the France that was now but the faint iterated flashing of distant lights.

I do not know how long I continued there, pacing off the deck under the swinging spaces of the night. All my instincts urged me to her side, and all my education warned me against the intrusion. I felt so keenly her utter loneliness, the mysterious sense of some overwhelming sorrow, the exhaustion of an unending struggle, that twice, with some hasty phrase on my lips, I stopped, determined to speak to her. But each time I turned away. Yet, each time, I remember the angry rebellion that came into my heart at the tyranny of convention which interposed between us. Had she been a woman of the people,—how easy it would have been! But she was not. She was of my own kind, and convention dictated that I should pass on and leave her there in the melancholy of the damp night, eating out her heart.

What was it came to me at that moment? What inexplicable intuition of danger? I had left her with a feeling of my utter helplessness, when, with my hand on the door, I stopped, looking out into the dark void, where sea and sky had disappeared and but a single step led into Infinity.

But a single step and such an easy step! Suddenly I turned, went to her directly, and said:

“Mademoiselle—pardon, Mademoiselle; you must not—vous ne pouvez rester ici.”

The emotion in my voice startled her. Her head turned hastily; she swayed and leaned heavily on the rail. I felt the stiffening of her body against the impertinence of my intrusion, and all my assurance fled.

“Monsieur, I do not think I understood you.”

She answered me slowly, in excellent English, with only the slightest accent.

“I beg your pardon, humbly. Please don’t think I mean to be impertinent,” I stammered back, “but I don’t think it is good for you to stay up here—all alone.”

I felt how ridiculous this must have sounded, and broke off lamely.

“By what right?”

“No right, Mademoiselle; just a human impulse, that’s all—just the feeling that you are in great sorrow and that you shouldn’t be left alone,—not here, at least. I feel it very strongly, Mademoiselle.”

“Monsieur, there are some sorrows that are sacred.”

The words, the accent, the suffering implied went to my heart. I felt then as I have ever felt since the indefinable superiority of her gentle nature over mine.

“Mademoiselle, I know that this may seem incomprehensible to you; I have been walking here half an hour, before I dared to speak to you, but—but I cannot go away and leave you here alone.”

Saying which, I bowed and moved away a little distance and took my station resolutely. Presently she said:

“Monsieur—you will not leave me?”

“I cannot, Mademoiselle.”

“Oh, please go away; please leave me alone!”

Her voice broke and, as I hurried to her side, she put her head suddenly down on her arms. A film of her veil whipped by the wind caught my arm, and by this slender bond I held her in my protection.

“Mademoiselle, I, too, am a soldier of France; I have fought with your people: must I turn from one of my own kind who, I know, is in distress, just because of conventionality! You are in distress, and I know it. Please let me judge for you at this moment. You must not stay up here alone. I mean it.”

“But I want to be alone.”

It was the weak voice of a child that now fought against me.

“I know I am right,” I said with difficulty, for then, as ever, all my impulse was to do her bidding. But it was the thought of the void without and that unseen step that gave me courage to resist her. “I know how impertinent this must seem to you. It is not meant that way. Do believe that. You must go down on the lower deck. You really must.”

She straightened up and there, cloaked by the night, facing each other, our wills clashed. A moment—a long moment—then, yielding, she turned and I followed by her side. Halfway down the deck she stopped.

“Just a second.”

She leaned back against the lifeboat, her hand to her throat.

“Now.”

I piloted her below and found her a chair near mine. She suffered me to wrap her up without further objection.

“There are no lights to-night and all passengers are ordered to spend the night on deck. You will be quite alone here. Good-night and thank you.”

If she answered me I did not hear her. I left her purposely and went aimlessly through the ship, with something new and strange stirring in my brain.

I know now that I loved her from the first meeting of our eyes. I did not realize it then nor for many days after. The impulse that drew me to her was so imperious that I yielded completely to it, without power of pausing to put questions to myself.

That night I was possessed of many conflicting emotions. I was an American again after years of exile, making contact with my own kind, accustoming my ear to old accents, familiar phrases, forgotten bits of slang, my heart warming with their exuberance, their youthful spirits. Even the drummer by my side at the table, nasal, rough and loquacious, was a type so comprehensible that I found myself beaming with grateful pleasure as he talked of “God’s country,” stretched for the hors d’oeuvres, and addressed his neighbor as “Sonny.”

Supper was a hasty, scrambling meal, with the portholes sealed. The crowd was oddly mixed, like a herd of refugees arrived from an inundation; a score of young ambulance men returning, the gray-blue of a few French officers, sailors and officers from torpedoed boats, crews of cattle boats, commercial travelers, and those endless rovers of the sea, dressmakers and journalists. The conversation, freed by the sense of the abnormal, rose about me without restriction.

“What are we stoppin’ down here for?”

“Moon’s coming up: waiting for it to cloud over.”

“Why that?”

“Clear moon’s what submarines like, lady. They can see us, and we can’t see them.”

“That’s how they got us, second night out of Genoa, just a ripple blowing, and full moon.”

“What were you in?”

“Three-master, carrying lumber—that we’d landed—return voyage. Well, I ain’t got no kick coming. We pulled off ten round trips, and the balance is on the right side.”

“Torpedoed?”

“Yep—and sunk in ten minutes.”

“Spry work getting into boats?”

“Sure was.”

“All off?”

“Most of us.”

“Where was your section?”

“We were up in the Vosges.”

“Know Harrity?”

“He was down in Verdun with us.”

“That was rather hot, wasn’t it?”

“Quite hot enough.”

“Shucks! I don’t believe there’s any danger,” said a voice.

“If they sank us, it would mean war, sure.”

“That is, if it could be proved: and what chance would there be of proving it, a night like this?”

“Guess that’s sense, too; besides, there’s always a chance at a mine.”

Joe Hungerford joined me as I left the table.

“Going to spend the night on deck?”

“It’s orders.”

A little moonlight had come filtering in between the decks, as the heavy moon rolled up over the horizon. A faint streak ran along the railing and touched the stanchions with the luster of fallen snow. In the shadows we could distinguish shapes stretched out on steamer chairs, while others arrived, trailing life preservers and rugs, with an occasional handbag.

“Quite a picnic.”

“Don’t like the children being around, Hungerford.”

“No, that’s not pleasant. If it weren’t for that, wouldn’t mind having a run in with a submarine. Hello—sounds like the anchor coming up.”

We mounted to the upper deck, under the open sky, with its opalescent tints and shifting clouds to the west. Red lights and green lights on ghostlike shadows dotted the stretch of foggy water. Ahead, from the last sentinel of the world underfoot, a shaft of light came whirling in broken iteration,—like a can of fire that a small boy whirls in the night. A group of sailors shuffled by. The shrill of a whistle, the thrum of engines, and ahead the whirling beacon crept around the bow and, returning, slid down amidships. The door shot out its feeble ray of light. A group from the smoking room crowded out to witness the running of the channel. Then, a sudden rise of voices.

“Well, bring on your submarines!”

“If they get us, I take my chances on deck.”

“You young fellows are mighty chipper; wait till you get shaken up once.”

“Well, you got away, didn’t you?”

“Gosh, with that light playing on us, anything ought to hit us.”

“Back to the good old U.S.A., boys!”

“Well, enough scenery! Let’s start up a game!”

There was a laugh, and the crowd shuffled back to the card room.

“Going to sit in, Littledale? It’s a good crowd.”

“Perhaps, later.”

I went below, bundled up my great-coat, fished out a couple of life preservers, and groped my way to my chair. She was there as I had placed her, but in the black of the deck I could not tell whether she was awake or asleep. I hesitated a moment and then, slipping in, made myself comfortable for the night.

Brinsmade at my right was struggling with a tinder which refused to light.

“Have a briquet,” said a voice.

“Thanks.”

The next moment the steel struck sparks and an odor of burning tobacco filled the air. Slight as had been the light it provoked remonstrances and down the deck the plaint of a woman was heard.

“I don’t see why they allow such a thing as that!”

“No lights!”

“Put it out!”

“Good many persons seem unduly excited about submarines,” said the voice of our neighbor, high-pitched, pleasing, if not resonant.

“Well—there’s always a risk.”

“Hardly. Germany doesn’t want us in the war.”

“Germany? Think so? From what I’ve seen of her, she doesn’t care what we think or any one else—except what she wants at the time.”

Our new acquaintance was silent a moment, as though unwilling to venture too rapidly forward.

“Well, thank God, we’re out of it!” he said, at last. “The election settled that. If it had gone the other way, there might be a little more excitement.”

“Pacifist?”

“Absolutely.”

There was a long silence, broken at last by a question.

“Been over long?”

“Three months.”

“In France?”

“Yes.”

“So—and you still come back with those ideas?” said Brinsmade’s bass voice, studiously polite but with a note of criticism.

“Does that mean you’d have us in the war?” said the other, in a tone which showed that he recognized the criticism and resented it. “To pull the chestnuts out of the fire for France and England?”

“Over on business?”

“No, I don’t desire peace to keep on making money,” answered the other, with a suavity which suggested a smile. “I am a journalist. Suppose I’d better warn you—a socialist; worse, still—the editor of The Protest.”

“The Protest? Yes, I read it,” said the other. “Then you are Peter Magnus?”

“Now you know the worst.”

“Glad to know you. Well, I’m rather on the other side. Stephen B. Brinsmade,—one of the unconvicted rich, I suppose you’d call us.”

“Really? And you read The Protest?” said Magnus in surprise. “May I ask why?”

“Why I read it? Certainly; to know what the other side thinks.” He laughed, and continued with the good humor men of politics use as a cloak but which in his case was the complacency of success. “Honestly, I’m glad to meet you, Magnus, and I look forward to talking things over with you. That’s rather odd, for I suppose we’ll get to hating each other cordially. However, I’ll promise to keep my temper.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well—that’s my experience. Men can meet in physical combat and, the struggling over, sit down over a friendly chop. They may fight each other with their wits; as lawyers, blackguard each other in public for the benefit of the unsuspecting jury, and retain a friendly liking; but when it comes to a combat of ideas, we seem to acquire a secret antipathy for the man who disagrees with us.”

“That’s because the conflict of ideas is the most fundamental and irrepressible of all conflicts,” said Magnus thoughtfully.

“Quite right.” Brinsmade drew on his pipe until the ashes reddened, outlining the fingers which screened it. Then he began to whistle, softly, to himself, drawing in his breath.

Outside, the lighthouse was sinking into the sea, while the whirling beams continued to blazon the sky like flashes of heat lightning. To the south a star swam out from the horizon, swelled and glittered, as a new lighthouse took up its warning. A rift of clouds spread over the risen moon, obscuring the crested ripples that had been following us. A patrol of sailors went heavily overhead, to the sound of a dragging rope, the creak of a pulley,—and through the hiss of cleft waters and the whistle of the wind the thud of powerful engines shook the decks.

“Feels like ‘Full Speed,’ Davy,” said Brinsmade. “Guess we’re clear.”

“Suppose we’re convoyed. Well, anyhow, it’s clouded over, and that’s a good thing. Hardly think there’s any danger,” said Magnus.

“Neither did our friends on the Lusitania.” Brinsmade changed the subject to one which had evidently been in his mind. “So you’ve been over here in this hallowed land three months, and you come back with the same ideas you started with?”

“Only more so.”

“No offence. Most men I know have had their pre-conceived ideas pretty badly shaken up. That’s my own experience. Well—time enough to discuss all that. Only—I’ll say this. Whatever you may think of war, and I was a good deal of a pacifist, myself, to have been over here, to see what this old world is capable of in a crisis, gives me a better liking for my fellow man. I haven’t always had a very affectionate regard for him. But, by Jove, what I’ve seen of this people over here makes me respect myself a little more just as a plain human being!”

“You’re plumb right there, Mister, whoever you may be!” said a voice back of us, a voice with the nasal Yankee twang.

“It is glorious, I grant you,” said Magnus quietly.

“But useless?”

“Quite useless, because it accomplishes nothing toward a final solution; but, of course, where we differ, and, I suppose, in all arguments will come back to it, is that I don’t admit the necessity of nationality.”

“That’s frank, and glad you mentioned it,” said Brinsmade, with a certain joy. “For that is the one big thing that has come out of the war, and it’s bigger than creed or politics, Magnus. See what happened to your German Socialists! It’s the rock on which you’ve split!”

“For the present, quite true,” said Magnus, “but it’s the backbone of Socialism and, if we are not internationalists, we are not Socialists.”

“Why?”

“Well—put it this way. You’ll agree that war is savagery, and contrary to the spirit of civilization; in other words, that what we are all seeking is a final and enduring peace?”

“Two years ago I’d have agreed. Now, I’m not quite so sure I do believe that is possible in our vision. However, for the sake of argument, go on.”

“What is war? Competition. Competition of what? Of rival nationalities. Seeking what? Commercial aggrandizement—subjecting the many to benefit the few. America, Germany, England, France have been at war with each other commercially one hundred years. War is only a commercial ultimatum, when a commercial tariff is too slow. The trouble is, men are guided by their sentiments to think nationally, instead of by their logic to conceive of themselves as a world race.”

“You are a Jew, of course, Magnus?”

“I am.”

“And proud of the history of your race?”

“I am exceedingly proud.”

“And rightfully. It is a wonderful race. But if it had been guided by such theories as you now profess, it would have disappeared centuries ago, like a drop of ink in a barrel of water. Racial solidarity has been the immortality of you Jews, and sometimes—no offence, Magnus—I’m inclined to believe that the instinct that moves many of your brilliant race into Socialism is a contempt of mere national definitions which in your own world-solidarity have no meaning to you.”

“The Jewish race is not socialistic,” said Magnus, with a note of impatience.

“It is increasingly so, and most of its intellectuals are.”

“It was not a Jew, but William Lloyd Garrison, who said ‘Our Country is the world.’”

“A fair rejoinder in a debate, but we are not appealing to the applause of an audience, but, I take it, as two men holding diametrically opposite opinions, honestly seeking to find out what each believes.”

“All right,” said Magnus, evidently favorably influenced by the other’s good nature, for he answered more frankly. “It is possibly true that the Jewish race is most ready to embrace the principle of internationalism on account of its past history. I will grant that. But that does not affect the general proposition. Pacifism, which is good Christianity, is the first step to internationalism, and don’t forget that the most determined opponents of militarism are of a Christian sect,—your Quakers.”

“Two years ago,” said Brinsmade, carefully, “when I called myself a pacifist, I might have denied that. By pacifism then I meant opposition to war,—the belief in the possibility of universal disarmament and settlement of all difficulties by arbitration. But I never associated that with internationalism.”

“Am I not logical when I say that pacifism must be considered the first step to internationalism?” said Magnus. There was in his voice the persuasive gentleness of the born debater, who is confident of leading his opponent to the conclusion he seeks. “If you wish nations to renounce warring on each other by arms, isn’t it because we are coming to the point of view that we are all human beings on the same globe, artificially divided by national lines? And if it is abhorrent to you that one nation should murder another with gunpowder, isn’t it just as wrong to seek by commercial warfare to impoverish and reduce an inferior to a state of commercial slavery, a portion of the same human race?”

I sat up, listening with strong attention. Thoughts which had struggled for clarification in my own deliberate mind started up. Once or twice I had come near breaking in with a question, so close to my own problems had the debate come. Here were two men discussing theories that might apply in a thousand years, when the immediate problem was this present thing: what should a nation—my nation—do in this world crisis, for its greater good?

“Well, now, Magnus—there’s logic in what you say, and I’m the more ready to admit it in that I haven’t the slightest patience with what I used to believe.”

“What’s changed you?”

“France. Keeping my eyes open and seeing things as they are in this world, and not as I want them to be. Your internationalism is a political millennium, which will come just about as soon as the other millennium. I used to think that we were all pretty much alike, English, American, German, and French. I’ve found out we’re not. We’re not pursuing the same ideas. The English world has settled down to an easy-going existence, each man sufficient unto himself, occupied in his own private affairs, getting farther and farther away from his national ideal, looking on government as a convenient policeman, a central telephone, and all that. And then, there’s Germany—and the explanation of Germany is national solidarity—every man fitting into the national scheme, and every man working for the national aggrandizement. ‘Deutschland uber alles!’ We used to laugh at that. I don’t. It impresses me now. And it terrifies me.”

“Do you want to live under such a system?”

“I’ll come back to that. No, I don’t want to be subjected to that. That’s why I’m done with pacifism. Because the world’s up against not simply German armies but the German idea. And we may as well admit that it is the German idea that’s got to be destroyed or adopted: no two ways.”

“What does the man in the fields, or the man in the street, care about all that?” said Magnus softly.

“If the French peasant and the French workman can understand that, I guess we can,” said Brinsmade. “I said France has changed me over to a belief in a strong national feeling. It has. I don’t want German militarism, but I want the sort of military education you see in the French army,—preparation, with absolute democracy.”

“Compulsory service?”

“Of course. And I want it because I want my sons to be educated into democracy, and I know no better way than sending them out for a year or two to rough it with the fellow who comes up out of the mines and fields, out of the city slums and the wharves. I want them to eat together, tramp together, sleep together, to learn how to talk to each other. I want them to respect a man, wherever found, and I want them to make themselves respected as men. Moreover, I want them to have a vision of what America is and can be. Why? Because the wealth I leave them is going to make them leaders and instead of artificial leadership I want intelligent leadership.”

“You’ll never get compulsory training in America,” said Magnus shortly. “That’s one thing I’m not worrying about.”

“If we need it for nothing else, we need it to digest our foreign classes,” said Brinsmade, warming up; “German, Italian, Russian, Greek, Swedish; we need it for self-education, to form our own race,—a clear-cut, united American type. But of course,” he said, stopping suddenly, “that doesn’t enter into your philosophy.”

“No,” said Magnus directly. “To me the greatness of America is that it is not American. It has the whole world in it and, as long as these world elements remain distinctly defined in their inherited traditions, just so long America remains the natural Parliament of Man.”

“The little Sassenach,” said a voice out of the night. “Damned if I don’t hope a submarine gets us.”

Brinsmade laughed.

“Thanks, friend,” he said. “I feel almost that way, myself.”

“Whether you like it or not, it is so to-day,” said Magnus, “and the reason that internationalism will come as an American doctrine is just that. We are international, and not in a hundred years can we be anything else. This to you may seem abhorrent, but to me it is the greatest destiny that could come to us. You would wipe out our links to other nations. I say, keep them; do nothing to weaken them, and make them great bonds of political thought, that America may lead the world.”

“What gets me—and by George, it does get me—” Brinsmade blurted out, “is your assumption to speak for my country. Good heavens; my family fought in three wars, and you have been here twenty years and tell me what America is, and—damn it—the worst is, I believe you do know!”

“Yes, Mr. Brinsmade, I do,” said Magnus quietly. “What do you know of the great East Side of New York? What do you know of how multitudes think and act,—the great labor organizations, the I.W.W? What do you know of what you call the foreign press? Do you know that there are over four hundred newspapers published in a foreign tongue—German, French, Italian, Swedish, Jewish and Hungarian—and that they represent a circulation of millions? The foreign element that was born abroad, or whose parents were born abroad, represents twenty millions; you represent a dwindling minority. You represent—we are talking frankly—an insular element, and the strange thing is that you still persist in seeing America in that spirit of nationalism which existed in Revolutionary days. America has passed beyond such limitations, and you don’t realize it.”

“And this from a man who came to my country twenty-five years ago!”

“But who has, perhaps, a greater vision of your country’s mission in world affairs than you have,” retorted Magnus.

“You are probably right,” said Brinsmade. “You place crudely things that are coming into my mind and the minds of others like me. Probably we are not awake. Have we, the old American strain, lost our inheritance?” He added, as if to himself, “And if so, is it our fault?”

Up the deck a spear of light shot across the night from an open door. A group of young men, emerging from the card room for a breath of air, came shuffling down the deck, singing as they came.

“Hello there—Littledale!”

I cursed them mentally and returned an uninviting grunt.

“Hello.”

“Counting the submarines?”

Four figures loomed at the foot of my chair.

“Some games running up there! Four tables. Better take a hand.”

Farther up the line of chairs, a child, awakened by their coming, began to cry.

“Not to-night. And say, if you want to make a night of it, you fellows, tramp the upper deck. People want to sleep down here.”

“Yes, Captain,” said a laughing voice; but another said, “Shut up, Limpy. The women are round here. Come on: clear out.”

The sound of their heavy tramp died out in the distance. A woman behind me sat up, rearranged her pillow, and settled back. The child whimpered sleepily and then grew quiet. In the distance some one began to snore. The ship had begun a slight roll, as it fled, ghostlike in a ghostly night, followed by noises of unseen things; the hiss of hidden waves, a sudden leap of spray, the creak of pulleys, a stifled whistle, and the rumble of the invisible force that thrust it forward.

Magnus laughed.

“Your American inheritance; there it is!”

“Damned if I can listen to any more of that!”

I rose abruptly, kicking the rugs from my legs, and went down the deck. I am, I suppose, too young not to resent unwelcome arguments with a hot intolerance. Socialism had meant to me little more than a name, which I rejected on faith as something akin to anarchy. The voice of the immigrant, speaking for my America, roused in me a blind rebellion. The more so that, while he had cut across every traditional instinct, I was at a loss in the poverty of my mental experience to answer the coldly stated propositions which, despite my will, convinced me of some measure of their truth. Yet what had he done but state in his own words thoughts which had been in my own mind; yes, even those opinions which had been surging uppermost,—that, in the coming test of a changed democracy, my generation had let slip the leadership that was its by inherited responsibility. I could say this to myself, yet I could not brook it from another. Why? Perhaps Mr. Brinsmade was right, and in the conflicts of man to man there is no antagonism so deep-rooted, so unreasoning, so obedient to inherited repulsions, as that antagonism which in the field of ideas has led men to persecute, to torture and to stamp out one another with the fury of unreasoning beasts.

Of this reflection I was not then conscious. I felt only the resentment of the man of action for the man of thought. It was not the ideas, but the ideas in the mouth of Peter Magnus which aroused my fury. I remember standing a long time forward, sheltering myself behind a bulging canvas which slapped against its chains with windy explosions, trying to shake off my ill-humor, until the cold cut of the spray which hissed over the decks brought back some equanimity.

I went inside. The sofas in the ladies’ saloon had been turned into beds. Most of the women had already put on their life preservers and were surrounded by impossible mounds of baggage. An old man was methodically deploying a pack of cards at a table. A woman, with a child on her shoulder, was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Outside on the landing two returning sailors and a nursemaid were whispering with sudden outbursts of mirth,—Americans all, Yankee, Westerner, Scandinavian, Latin and Asiatic.

I went upstairs and into the foul thickness of the smoking room, where the shock of my entrance set the layers of gray fumes to twisting and coiling about the dim lamps. Groups had already formed at the corner tables; Hungerford and the younger men, a solemn audience about a chess match; another group near me—officers of two torpedoed freighters—were swapping yarns as they played.

“Got ours out of Genoa, just after dawn.”

“Trouble getting away?”

“Shelled us right up to the last minute.”

A little woman, wife of the speaker, broke into a light laugh.

“Kept on shellin’, too, when we got the boats clear. Dan here, he says to me, ‘Sarah, you stand right up and let ’em see there’s a woman in the boat.’ So I stood up, and crack, they let go with a shot that jumped the bonnet from my head. Polite, aren’t they?”

“Don’t tell that at home: they’ll say you ex—aggerate!” said a large, swarthy man, who was shuffling the cards. “Civilized folks don’t do such things; that’s what they’ll say!”

“Well, Sarah and I ain’t got no kick coming,” said the skipper philosophically. “We got away with six trips and landed the last cargo, too. Risky—but big money, and I guess we’re on easy street for a while.”

“Say, if this war goes on another year, boy, we’ll have all the money in the world.”

A short, stockily built young fellow, keen as a vulture, derby pushed back, removed a fat cigar and nodded to his neighbor, a type of world peddler, Armenian or Levantine, who was chewing a toothpick in a drowsy interest.

“All the money in the world! And after? Say—I’ve been over cleaning up some contracts, believe me; but that’s nothin’ to what’s comin’—nothin’! Say—when this little war’s over, any fellow who’s got somethin’ to sell is goin’ to cash in so fast a crooked gamblin’ wheel won’t be in it.”

“Oh, got a pretty good line, myself.”

“You have, eh? What?”

“Antiques.”

“Pretty soft bargains, eh?”

The Levantine smiled contentedly. And the two, suddenly attracted, moved into a corner, absorbed by their own bright conceptions of the future.

“Hello, there, Big Dale. Ship ahoy!”

I sauntered over curiously to where Hungerford was ensconced in the midst of congenial spirits.

“Have a hand?”

“No, thanks.”

“Have a drink?”

“Not now.”

I had sat through just such all-night sessions in the days when such feats were regarded as title to man’s estate, but to-night the mood was foreign to my own.

“Shake hands with my old friend, ‘Gyp, the Blood,’ alias Frangipani,” said Hungerford, whose good humor was proof against hunger, drowsiness, the cold gray dawn and stale tobacco. “Mr. Frangipani was not a professor of English at Columbia.”

“How be you, friend? Seen you on the deck,” said a stocky, square fellow in ambulance uniform, who gave me a drowsy squint from around a knobby nose and put out a squatty hand which was minus a finger. “Not drinkin’?”

“Thanks, no. The atmosphere is strong enough,” I answered, wondering in what strange by-ways of civilization—tramp steamer, traveler of the underworld, or ranger of the Western prairies—the man had gone his careless journey.

“Mr. Tooker, of Tookerville, Mississippi, sah. Mr. Tooker is a close student of our great national game.”

“Very glad to know you, Mr. Littledale,” said a brisk little fellow, sober, well-groomed, soft-voiced, alert and smiling. “Heard a good deal about you.”

“Mr. Galligan, of Walla Walla. Mr. Galligan is returning from his period of rest at the front to get a little excitement in the Coeur d’Alene district,” said Hungerford, who was in good spirits.

A powerful, big-framed youth, with bullet head, blue eyes and thin lips, who had been making desperate attempts at keeping his eyes open, yawned, and said thickly:

“’Scuse me. Had a —— of a night in Bordeaux. Glad to know you.”

“And Professor Ralph Waldo William Butler Swinburne Southwick, of Harvard, and Beacon Street, and the American Ambulance.”

Southwick, in his precipitation to shake hands, dropped his glasses, which slid from his long, delving nose and dangled back and forth on their short string, overturned a pile of chips, and started to take up the discards, under a storm of protests.

“Other members of the original Inter-Allied Poker Club have succumbed to poison gas, auto-intoxication, and the need of a recumbent position,” continued Hungerford, with a wave of his hand toward two figures on the couches, who had passed beyond the stage of introductions. He paused and indicated a large, bulbous figure under a sombrero, snoring peacefully in a sitting position at his side. “The late Mr. Honus Scroff, of Tittle Valley, Arizona. Mr. Scroff is especially delighted to meet you,” he added, lifting the hat from the red, cropped hair and freckled ears.

“Honus hasn’t been to bed since we started down,” said Galligan, gathering in the cards.

“Quite right. Mr. Scroff’s like an eight-day clock; he only has to sleep every Saturday night from 12 to 8.”

“Play ball!” said Frangipani loudly, throwing in an ante.

Scroff woke, blinked, and said thickly, “My deal?”

“Not yet, old top!”

“All right.”

And he went off to sleep again.

“I’m in,” said the professor colloquially. “Shove around the pasteboards.”

began Frangipani, in a long, doglike wail, which drew curses from the four corners of the room. The cards were dealt and the bets began.

I stood watching them quite a while, amused at their patter. They were real, as I had learned to value men in the rough-and-tumble of life. It was Young America relaxing,—the need of a young nation to return to its play, to blow off steam after months of driven dynamic energy. Quite barbaric at bottom, perhaps,—but so understandable, to me! I liked the democracy of the group and its unconscious camaraderie. Yet, I could not help thinking how unrelated we were to one another,—to the present or to the future. And, as I stood there studying them—in my mind the menace that Magnus had voiced—I wondered how long we could stem the moving forces below that had the solidarity and the energy of determined rebels.

To-night, as I recall this first conversation with Magnus, my irritation dies away. I am not sure but what he has but stated in his own antagonistic way things which have been growing over me.

Democracy was a revolt against the leadership of a class when that leadership had grown weak and was no longer natural and genuine. But, if democracy cannot produce its own real leadership—if it can do no more than set in motion a mob—the leadership of that mob will be the leadership that surges out of the accidents of a stampede.

Four bells rang from the forecastle when I returned to my chair on the lower deck. Brinsmade and Magnus were breathing heavily. I enclosed my legs in the rug, burrowed my nose in my great coat, and sought sleep. Disturbed by the bustle of my arrival, the young woman at my side stirred in her sleep and moaned. The dream passed into a nightmare for, struggling suddenly against some grim horror of unreality, she burst into a cry:

“Ma mÈre! Ma mÈre,—oh non, pas Ça!”

The scream awoke a score of passengers. Out of the darkness voices cried excitedly:

“What’s happened?”

“Submarine?”

“Oh, my God!”

People began to rise and grope towards the cabins. I heard Brinsmade and Magnus struggling to their feet. Another moment, and a panic would have swept over us. I called out cheerily:

“Nothing wrong! Somebody’s got a bad dream; nothing else!”

Then I leaned over and caught the arm of the dreamer. She groaned, shivered, and sat up.

“A nightmare, Mademoiselle,” I said, loud enough to be heard down the deck. “All right now. Nothing wrong.”

She was sitting bolt upright, straining against the horror of the passing phantom.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle, for having taken your arm—it seemed best—you were evidently—” I stopped lamely, a prey to the diffidence I had felt in her presence from the first approach.

She had not moved.

“I hope I did not offend you—”

“No, no,” she said suddenly. “It was a dream—a terrible dream!”

Her voice was not yet under control. I waited, but having said this, she drew back into her silence. Presently, I heard her settling back into her chair. Quiet had returned to the deck. I sat there, keenly awake. The memory of her cry haunted me and, though the utter blackness prevented my seeing her, I had the feeling that she, too, was tremulously, nervously awake at my side.

Often have I wondered what makes us so blind to our own selves, and sometimes I think it is our insistence in seeing our lives as a logical development. We seek in all phases of life a working formula (formulas which are not knowledge but the substitute for knowledge) and we early adopt a formula about our own selves. We never see ourselves whole because, perhaps, we never complete our own image.

I know that I, too, am a slave to my own formula. I say to myself that I am an average man,—that, given a problem of action, I will do under given circumstances just what the average man will do; that, if I am better or worse, it is all in the quality of opportunity. I am influenced largely by the judgment my neighbors would pass on me—by a desire to maintain my own self-respect, or to return to it—and yet I am conscious of but a distant and imperfect acquaintance with this self which is my court of last judgment. And, when I have said all this, I am conscious that I have explained nothing,—that there is always at the bottom of myself some unpremeditated, rebellious impulse that in the moments of most determined progress towards a given point suddenly sends me blindly in another direction. What is that invisible, intangible sense? I obey by instinct something that I do not comprehend. I follow myself through changing phases and wonder at the instinct that brings me back to the level of common sense—as a ship in a storm struggles to right itself. I am here as I am to-day by some agency that mystifies me,—invisible forces from without, or some instinct from within. Yet as I look back I see no logical relation in the process.

That night, half-awake, half-adream, four figures passed before me, conjured up from the cauldron of my imagination, as the mystic sequence which greeted Macbeth.

The First: A boy, with the eyes of faith, believing in the good of the world, a scrubby, tousled little urchin, in and out of mischief, just beginning to penetrate beyond the borders of fairyland, passionately curious; a rich little mind exploring vast continents of treasured knowledge; a youngster who had already dared climb the magic walls of childhood and hesitated before the jump into the strange real world. What was I then? All of creation was within my imagination; society was expressed in three laws,—the rising bell, soap, and the Sunday prohibitions. The first two I comprehended (in my male’s instinct for order); the last I never did. What had happened to the world that periodically, at the end of each week, a sudden hush should fall in the household, that romping must cease and playthings be hidden away, and the body encased in starched shirts and shining black suits, and the young romping spirits should be led in leash to hard benches and the pointing finger. Father and mother were majestic, Olympian figures, never quite understood; authority was absolute, and the world black or white. My first love, a young lady of twenty years, was an angel stepping down out of the parted heavens, whose voice thrilled to the secret caverns of my heart. She stopped but a week at our home and I have never seen her since, yet in those short days I fell so desperately in love with her—greatest and most radiant of fairy princesses—that to this day I can feel my little heart stop as over the bed-covers I saw her come to my bedside, all fragrance and loveliness, to touch my eyelids with her lips. And then, they told me that she was to be married; that she had gone and I would see her no more. I remembered the child quivering under his first touch of sorrow, poignant and overwhelming. That first knowledge of sorrow, the utter loneliness, the incomprehension that such things could exist in the simplicity of the world! There was no refuge but in dreams and for months I lived for my dream,—for that moment when the candle wick glowed and dropped into the darkness and the shimmering stars came through the open window, and my dreams would begin anew, as out of the peopled dark, ogres and kings’ sons, Napoleons and presidents, Hercules and Ulysses, fairy godmothers and elves, and—always—the loveliest princess in the world came forth to fetch me into the fantasy of the future.

Sometimes now, thinking on that future, I wonder, should I have sons, if any of them will be as real to me as that boy. I think not. In the man, the first-born and the closest to his heart must ever be the boy that was. I see now that it was that first imagined sorrow which led me beyond the magic garden of childhood into the questioning of youth. There were nights, moonlit nights and starry nights, when I crept to my window and strove to pierce the riddle of the strange things above; when I stood and wondered and shivered, a little mind striving to penetrate the sky, pitting itself against Infinity. And, as I watched this young self there in the still of the covered night, I wondered. Now, I seldom dream or question: I have retreated behind my formulas. But what became of all the brave little thoughts, the fancy, the rich curiosity and the eagerness for first knowledge? Which is the true, abiding self,—this, or the pebble fashioned by the grinding, restless forces of Society?

Second Figure: A young man of twenty, outwardly disciplined, walking, talking, dressing like ten thousand other well-groomed, mechanical products of the educational factories; inwardly, a turbulent appetite for life, a mind which had stopped functioning, an imagination buried, but with every impulse and curiosity vibrantly awake. Never have I been surer of myself, and never was I more worked upon by forces which I did not understand; I, a high-strung young animal suddenly released into the pastures of youth. Everything appealed to me; every broad way and byway in the vast forest of life sent me galloping down it in exploration. Each impulse, good or evil, was genuine and irresistible. I adored one woman as a saint, blushed and stumbled in her presence, trembled at the contact of her fingers and, in the full flush of this puppy-love, could feel my blood surge at a brazen glance. I drank too much, gambled outrageously: yet it was not from any desire for ugliness, but from the sheer joy of wrestling with invisible outer forces, in a strange belief that I, a privileged being, could affront the gods of chance and bind them to my way. I dissipated a month’s allowance in a day; fell into deep periods of religious speculation; rebelled at dogma and constituted authority; rejected all that was old and followed everything that was new. All this I did as hungrily as I sat down at table, without knowing in the slightest why I did it. Yet this is not quite true. Already, I had begun to be conscious of a dual self, a self that acted and a self that watched. Often, I went madly towards an infatuation which would have meant the end of all things, knowing all the time the fatality of it, powerless to resist and saved only by some trick of circumstance. The truth was that my blood ran too rapidly in my veins, the delight in every sense was too imperious, the joy of being alive too intoxicating.

Still, in this period when everything was fermenting, fructifying, bubbling to the surface in me, my outlook was of the simplest. Black was still black, and white, white. Women were good or bad,—and both drew me to them. I broke the laws of society, but I believed in them, fully determined at some calmer, wiser period of my life to maintain and defend them. So, when I was most inconsistent, I had faith in inconsistency. I repented with the same ardor with which I transgressed.

I walked down the avenue, and my imagination took fire at the brilliant women in their speeding luxury. What did I feel? The need of exerting the supremacy of my youth over their shallow, sparkling little souls. I sat in a great Opera House and, before that insistent, imperious parade of society, dreamed of some future date when I who was now lost in the crowd would impose myself. Everything in me was force, faith, and desire, and all these young impulses tugged at my soul for the opportunity to express themselves. How confident, how wise, how convinced I was, and—I knew nothing. For, mentally, it was a period of arrested development, when I mistook hunger for strength, vanity for power, longing for capacity.

We are all, I suppose, more or less cases of arrested development. When a man ceases to inquire, to explore, and to wonder, when he is convinced of his knowledge, when he reaches the point where all his free and flexible opinions have settled into hardened convictions, at that moment his development is stopped, even as a little child whose mind cannot move beyond the A.B.C.

This was what I was in the days when all within me was but an appetite for life. What shook my equanimity and violently freed me of my self-complacency? The first contact with evil, the knowledge and the mysterious reaction.

Third Figure: A man approaching thirty, perhaps too near to be seen distinctly, and yet in such violent contrast that before its note of worldly knowledge boyhood and youth fled from the contact. I saw a man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned, he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity: steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that rises to the surface and that in the old pot-au-feu below are the vital nourishments of the race. I had come eagerly into the brilliant cosmopolitan society of Europe with enough money and proper credentials, and I had come as how many young men of imagination and fire before me, believing in pleasure as the goal of life, pleasure, which I had seen in my ardent nature as in youth one sees and believes in the painted beauties and the paste jewels behind footlights. I recoiled, I grew accustomed to what I at first resented. I shrugged my shoulders, and, in the end, I did as those I lived with did. In the unconscious progression is the whole story. I became a flÂneur of society. I knew the comedies and tragedies of a ballroom as an old collector on the quais recognizes and smiles over the titles whose stories he knows. I lived a life of crowded inconsequences. The days and nights were consumed in doing—what to-day is a blank of years. But how my world had narrowed! The limitless horizons and starry spaces of childhood, even the mysterious depths of youth, had contracted into confines so narrow that my daily run of life was more provincial than that of a buried village. Why did I not go on in the paths of worldly wisdom, with a cynical weighing of actual values? Why did I not continue steadfast, as my logic showed me? The truth lay, perhaps, in the heart of a child that we men can never quite kill. The first impulse is the abiding impulse; if you would know the man, know the child.

It was in vain I told myself that only the living was vital, and that in a world of sceptics and pagans only the fools cling to compunctions. I repeated to myself that the sum of all moralities is in the instinct of the man to believe what he wants to believe. It brought me no calm. I did wrong, saying to myself that it was not wrong, and yet all the time I knew in my restlessness that it was wrong. Madame de Tinquerville instilled into my veins this mental corruption and yet, at the end, when I believed that I had accepted everything, a nausea seized me and I flung this self violently aside. Then the mobilization, and a new self.

Fourth Figure: I, myself,—if not the self of to-morrow, the self of to-day: an exile. For I had been that all these long embittered months,—an exile from all that life had been to me, a man grown suddenly taciturn, who smoked his pipe, lying in a mud hole behind a flap, and gazed up at the thin blue avenue of the trenches overhead; smoked, obeyed, questioned not, and was content to have found a meaning. Atavism, perhaps, the content to be just man again, following man’s instinct to survive among the fittest. I knew life as though I had been born to it again. Three times a day I thrilled with the delight of eating; I knew the ecstasy of sleep after fatigue; I wept at the loss of a comrade, and my whole heart rejoiced when in the exhaustion after battle with my closing vision I felt the rough hands of a convict drawing his coat over me with the tenderness of a woman. The world had no perplexities for me. The mask was discarded. I felt myself brute, Crusader, sinner, pagan and saint, and each mood was genuine. I saw men in the frenzy of combat swept into moments of unbelievable ferocity. I myself knew moments when there was nothing human in me, when courage was but the panic for existence. And out of the abnormal slaying self I would grope back into the man that reasoned over his actions and shivered at the animal that had run wild. I knew the pagan hour that comes so easily to those who have felt the breath of passing destruction continuously at their side. In the whirlpool and the whipping trenches I have seen my comrade at arms struck and strewn into unrecognizable matter and have felt but one instinctive thought:

“I live—I still live!”

Yet, later, in a more reasoning mood, deliberately and calmly, I have gone back as others went, into the certainty of destruction, to rescue a wounded stranger. I have returned with the living, singing, greedy of life,—a bed of hay paradise and a can of Pinard the ecstasy of forgetfulness. I have rebelled, hesitated, been caught with the cold nausea of fear, thrilled at a word from a peasant boy kneeling and crossing himself, and awakened to the call of leadership which was mine by noblesse oblige, become suddenly and disdainfully impersonal when responsibility had fallen to me and I could do no less than the least. Other moments there were, when I walked, a lone sentry in the night, among the sleeping and the dead, when a feeling of reverence and awe possessed my soul at the slow revolving stars, and I wondered at the futility of victors and vanquished under the things that change not. I knew moments of intense intellectual clarity when my mind seemed to take wing and lift me above the soiled reality of conflict into a mystic sense of my own loneliness in the scheme of things. At such moments, when only the questioning remained, I had a disdain of danger and of the death which went unseen and whining in the night,—a disdain that was absolute. Yet in the morning, cramped in a dugout, I heard above me the great shells shatter and felt the cold sweat rise in my back. After this can the other life be real? I wonder. Or will all this pass into a dim incredible memory?

And so, through the long night, there on the hidden deck among those who waited and feared, next to the woman at my side, awake, too, with her memories, I saw my strange selves pass and wondered. Which was the nearest kin to the David of that hour? What new figure would come out of the future that was as impenetrable as the dark that wrapped me about?

I think I must have gone off into a half-sleep, for all at once my eyes opened to gray and wavering shapes. The skeleton outline of the creaking ship grew out of the fluid dawn, figures of sleeping passengers rose out of the obscurity and across the rail glimmered the white curl of the clearing sea. My first instinctive impulse was to the woman at my side.

The veil had been thrown back; the long lashes lay on the brown cheek across which clung a spray of dark hair. The front of the rough Breton hood half concealed the clear rise of the forehead and soaring eyebrows, the fine delicacy of the high-bridged nose, the full and sensitive lips. One hand lay at her throat, a rosary entwined in her fingers and the silver flash of a crucifix. I thought then that I had never looked upon anything so gentle, so fragile, so pure. She was so far removed from the things of this heavy world that in her semi-recumbent position, I thought of some sculptured saint, asleep in an olden monastery.

Her eyes opened, rested in mine a full moment, read my thoughts, and dropped away. Instantly, she drew her veil, sat up, and averted her head. Within me everything grew troubled and confused. I rose hastily and went down the deck.

I can remember to this day the sudden timidity that overcame me always in her presence, the eagerness to speak to her, and the hesitancy whenever I found an excuse. In her, too, I see now, two impulses fought, for at times, in her instinct to repel me, she was brusque almost to the point of rudeness and her manner so determinedly antagonistic that I grew diffident as a boy. What had become of the man of the world? I, who prided myself on my knowledge of women, was as awkward in her presence, as helpless and at loss as the veriest schoolboy. I can remember that I had but one thought on awakening,—to do her some service. Yet when I had returned from below-decks with a thermos bottle of hot coffee I was utterly nonplussed for some pretext to approach her.

I came hesitantly down the strewn deck. The sky was graying rapidly now, as the dawn crept in chill and sickly. Astern, the low-huddled funnels of our escort,—guardian of our night. Brinsmade and Magnus had wakened and gone below. The lady with the child was sitting up, rearranging her veil. A sudden inspiration came to me. I stopped and made my offer.

“A drop of hot coffee, Madame?”

She took it, smiling and grateful, refusing a second cup. I breathed more freely, for I felt I had removed all personal emphasis. I passed on.

“Won’t you also, Mademoiselle, have a bit of coffee? It’s a long way to breakfast.”

Yet, as I said this, I had a sudden weak feeling of intruding, and I looked away from her for fear she would read beneath the studied impersonality of my tone. Behind the veil, I felt a moment of hesitation.

“If you will hold the bottle, I will get some clean glasses.”

When I returned, I brought a box of crackers, taking the precaution to offer them along the way. This action evidently disarmed her prejudices, for she had drawn her veil when I came to her chair. I poured a full glass.

“But you, Monsieur?”

“Oh, I’ve had my cup, below. Take it—you need it. I’m afraid you had a bad night.”

She took the glass but made no answer. When I referred to the night, her gray-eyed glance rose to my face, rested a furtive moment in thoughtful inquiry, and retreated; but the moment was not one of embarrassment or hesitation, but rather of a settled attitude of aloofness.

“There is just a little more.”

“Some one else, then.”

I poured out what remained and handed it to her, pressing her acceptance.

“Thank you—no more.”

She drew on her glove, lowered her veil, and sank back once more.

Feeling a certain irritation that in this first clash of authority she should have resisted, I sat down.

“To-morrow morning I’ll be better provided.”

“To-morrow? We spend another night on deck?” she said, in surprise.

“That’s orders. But you don’t obey orders,” I said, glancing at the deck. “Orders are to bring your life belt, and you’ve not done it.”

“No—I didn’t think of it.”

“You are not afraid?”

“Afraid? Of that?” she said slowly. She shook her head and I wondered at the look behind her veil.

The tone in which it was said, coupled with the memory of that meeting on the upper deck, thrilled me. I sought to make her talk, to establish a natural acquaintance, through no forward curiosity but out of a genuine sympathy. Yet I was so keenly aware of the bar which her traditions interposed that I waited a long moment before I had courage to say:

“Mademoiselle, I hope you will forgive my presumption of last night.”

“Presumption?”

“Yes, it was that. I hope you did not misunderstand my action.”

She turned.

“I did not misunderstand that, no,” she said reluctantly, for I was forcing her into a conversation against her will, “and yet, why should you have done it?”

“Mademoiselle,” I said, surprised at the quickening of my pulses, “I have done what little I could to help, because I love your people. I have lived among sorrow and terror. Am I not allowed to understand, and try to help, just—because it is one of my own kind?”

She did not reply at once. I felt that her eyes were on me.

“You Americans have kind hearts, Monsieur, and I thank you again.”

To this day I can remember the thrill of pleasure that came to me with the first softening of her voice, that first note which told me that in her eyes I was no longer just one of the passing crowd.

“I know how a young girl is brought up in France,” I began hurriedly—

“We are no young girls now, Monsieur. There are only women in France.”

The voice was back into the measured, impersonal tone.

I looked at her, amazed, started to speak and stopped. I understood that I should gain nothing by forcing a conversation, and though every instinct urged me to remain near her, I rose to withdraw.

“May I present myself, Mademoiselle, since we are to be companions for a while? I am Mr. David Littledale.”

She bowed in acknowledgment but made no answer, and I went down the deck with a stirring uneasiness at the awkwardness which it seemed to me I had displayed in every word and action. Later in the day I found a card on her chair. The name was like herself, a veil thrown up against my curiosity.

“Mademoiselle RenÉe Duvernoy.”

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, she became 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 over a 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, the poilu always 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.

Her behavior with Hungerford puzzled me. There was not a trace of the calculated reserve which dominated all our meetings and to which, if for a moment she forgot herself, she inevitably returned. A little jealousy sprang up in me, for I was quite blind then to the real reason. I felt that in me there was some lack of spontaneous appeal to a woman. Before the irresistible good spirits of the younger man I felt a heaviness of experience and wondered why in all my attempts at friendship I should be so constantly saying the things that sent her into the shell of her reserve, when she would listen with her grave smile to Joe’s amusing patter. I was blind, indeed, and though I took pains to hide it, I was weakly hurt at this unconscious camaraderie with another.

She consented to our accompanying her in her walks when Joe assumed it as a matter of course, though she did refuse, and I remember it with a secret delight, to permit him the privilege alone. Here again her personality dominated us. When Hungerford, with the free and easy catch-as-catch-can manner of the younger generation, started to assume possession of her arm, she disengaged herself quietly, and said:

“Messieurs, if you will offer me your arms.”

Any one but Hungerford would have been discountenanced. As it was, though he was a bit flustered, he gave her an exaggerated sweep of his hat.

“Style Louis XIV, Marquise!”

And, with her hands resting lightly on our arms, we adapted our impulsive strides to the leisurely grace of her choosing. Whatever her reason for assuming the name and position she did (I had never believed in it from the first), it was by such little things as this that she betrayed the quality of her breeding. Brinsmade and Peter Magnus were drawn to her instinctively, and often in the long afternoons we formed a circle of animated discussion. The opportunities to talk to her alone were rare and always she avoided them. When I did find a moment’s intimacy it was always to be made aware of the ever present sadness back of her eyes and the weight of some oppressing memory.

The afternoon after her first introduction to Hungerford, a curious incident happened, which, to this day, remains inexplicable to me. For neither of us ever after referred to it.

We were walking the upper deck, under the open sky, the crisp tingling air setting our cheeks to glowing. Despite herself, she was smiling at Hungerford’s whimsical instructions on American society, while I, feeling a little out of it, walked silently at her side, wondering at the ease with which Joe had plunged into her acquaintance.

“And remember, in America, a young lady of fashion, who is properly brought up, never marries until she has had a dozen proposals.”

“Never?”

“Never. It isn’t done. Oh, American girls are brought up to take care of themselves! When she is bored, do you think she waits for the men to come round? Not at all: she goes to the ’phone and says: ‘Jack, come up and take me out to dinner and a show; I want to be amused’.”

“And she pays the bill?” said Mademoiselle Duvernoy innocently.

“The what?”

“The bill.”

“Mademoiselle—I am living in hopes—”

At this moment a gust of wind caught a large woman and bore her down the deck, screaming for help. Hungerford dashed ahead, while we, sheltering ourselves in the lee of a lifeboat, stood laughing at the difficulties of the rescue. A sailor passed us and then a boy, carrying a pot of grease, slipped, and, to save himself, caught at my arm. When I had righted him, I saw such an expression of astonishment on his face as he gazed at Mademoiselle Duvernoy that I said, still laughing:

“I say, this young fellow seems to know you.”

“Eh, Bonne Dame; que c’est notre Mamzelle!”

She turned, and her face went blank: then, recovering herself, she said something rapidly in the Breton dialect which I could not understand. The effect was instantaneous. The boy drew up straight, snatched off his cap, and with marks of great respect backed away.

“Take my arm,” I said, going to her instantly.

She made no resistance and once as we started she swayed against my side. We crossed the deck and I found her a seat where she was sheltered from sight. There was no mistaking the effect on her. The lips were twitching, and the lines under her staring eyes were quivering with a haunting pain.

“Don’t try to speak. Don’t worry. No one saw you—not even I. Do you understand?”

“Monsieur—” She tried to speak and then put her hand to her throat.

“Don’t try to explain. Believe me, it isn’t necessary.”

She looked up at me, weak and shaken, and for the first time that I remembered her eyes held mine in a long, searching, mute appeal.

“But you will think—”

“Let me be your friend that far, Mademoiselle,” I said impulsively. “Trust me. I have forgotten.”

Hungerford swung around the deck and stopped short.

“Hello. What’s wrong?”

“Too much motion, you unfeeling brute, or perhaps the sight of your gyrations.”

I sent him for a chair and rugs, which gave her time to regain her self-control. Then I tucked her away in a sheltered corner, without opposition. She was stunned and did not seem to notice my presence for the long hour during which I religiously kept my eyes from her face, turning my back and staring over the driven waves. Later she called to me in a voice still weak and I helped her to the lower deck. The incident remained in my memory, obsessing it, deepening the film of mystery which had been about her from the first.

I think the thing that impelled me irresistibly to Mademoiselle Duvernoy was the directness and order of her character. I knew that as she was, she had always been, and that no future temptation could ever alter for a moment her clear perception of her own high ideals. In fact, I could not conceive of any such thing as temptation even entering her life. To me, in my own consciousness of my turbulent, shifting existence and my distrust of to-morrow, it brought me a sense of cathedral calm to be privileged to sit at her side and listen. I had not the slightest thought what was awakening in me, so simple, so natural and so unpremeditated was my impulse towards her. Gradually, a sense of well-being and light-heartedness came to me, for now, while I was still aware of her struggling against me, I was also aware of her yielding. With each morning’s greeting I felt the night’s determination to relegate me into the safe distance of the crowd. Yet I had but to conquer the disappointment of her first manner and possess my soul in patience, to have her turn to me in a new friendliness. At first I talked, and she listened, gravely and attentively. I spoke of impersonal things, of memories of trenches and hospital, of my intellectual unrest and philosophic speculations. She answered me shortly, or by a question led me to find my own solution, but it was not until we were three days from port that she revealed her own thoughts and Peter Magnus was the occasion. I had been speaking of my reluctance to return home and my fear of the indifference to war I should find.

“You are never very tolerant, are you?” she said pensively.

“No, I suppose not,” I said, rather surprised at her reading my character. “And yet you who are French surely must understand the longing I have to love my own country.”

“My country has been centuries in the making. Our memories are long. In every family some one has died that France might remain France. We are an old race. We have lived together, been proud together, suffered together, a long while. That does not come in a day.”

“No, of course not.”

I must have shown in my sudden abstraction something of the indecision in my mind for, to my surprise, a note of friendly sympathy came into her voice.

“Mr. Littledale, I am afraid you are going to be unhappy, just at first. You hope for too much. Don’t be impatient. How can your people know what we know? You will learn, as we learned, to stand together—by suffering.”

At this moment, the voice of Peter Magnus broke in on our new mood.

“Then, you are glorifying war; you’ve come to that. Admit it.”

Brinsmade rose from his rugs and stood before us with an expression of utter helplessness.

“Here is a man who has been three months in France and brings back nothing but war is horrible. What am I to do with him?”

Peter Magnus ensconced himself in Brinsmade’s chair, so that we formed a group. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, which was like a mane.

“When you speak of the glory of war,” he said, addressing Mademoiselle Duvernoy directly, “I see only the women in black, the cripples, the men who will grope in blindness, the station filled with the agony of parting, the homes swept by sorrow. Glory! Where is the glory in it, if you do not wear a crown? No, no, war is horrible, unthinkable!”

“Yet war is as inevitable a condition to a nation as death is to a human being,” she said quietly. “And is death so horrible?”

We three, of differing degrees of agnosticism, looked at her, struck with the boldness of the thought. It was Magnus who broke out:

“Yes, horrible! Death is horrible!”

“That, Monsieur, is because you have not seen how men die: you are frightened by the mystery of the thing you do not know. And—perhaps, in a man like you, you see only your own death—do you not?”

Magnus stared at her. From the first he had been strongly attracted to her and never failed in deference.

“What can you know of such a thing?” he asked incredulously.

“Men have died by the hundreds about me.”

“You?”

She nodded.

“You have nursed in the Red Cross?”

“Yes. I do not like to speak of myself. I only mention it because we are discussing things seriously. Yes, I have seen men die by the hundreds. Monsieur Magnus, I have listened to many things you have said, and I wish to tell you where you are wrong, and where all your doctrines will fall down. All you think of is to avoid suffering.”

“Yes, not only the suffering that comes from needless sacrifice, but the unending suffering that comes from those who must go on living. You know one thing. I know the great mass; the suffering of those who starve and suffocate.”

“You speak of the individual. I speak of the bigger thing,—the race.” A little color came into her face as she grew animated with her theme. “If a million men die to-day or to-morrow, what difference does that make to the nation, any more than the death of a single sparrow?”

“I can hardly believe it is you that says such a thing!” he said, astounded.

“Perhaps you don’t understand me. It is not how a million men die but how they live that is important.”

“You are arguing with an individualist,” said Brinsmade.

“The right to live your life as you wish is to me a far more important thing than whether half the world shall speak English or German,” said Magnus warmly. “I am looking from the bottom up. I know what they think who are striving,—not how best to enjoy life, but how to live. I know what the workers feel about such things.”

“If that is true in America,” she said, seeking to moderate the antagonism which his views aroused in her, “it is because the peasants and the workers who have emigrated are—how do you say?—dÉracinÉs; they have been uprooted; they have not yet fastened to your land; they do not love it more than they do themselves. What you say is not true of our French people. If you had seen our mobilization, you would have understood what it is,—the love of country.”

“I saw it in the city,” I said, breaking in, “and it is a memory I shall never forget.”

“But you should have seen it in the country! The quietness and the stillness of it all—only the tocsin ringing in the church towers, ringing all the afternoon. I saw it. I saw the women running to join the men in the fields; to be together, the first thought. And I can see the men leaving their reaping, sending back the women to make ready their uniforms while they went, silently—always silently—to register at the mairies. And when they went off, that night, each woman brought down something from the store of the stockings,—a hundred, two hundred francs. Not a woman rebelled. They put out flower pots on the window sills and garlands of flowers on the great locomotives; and I myself saw a little child writing in chalk on the cars, ‘J’aime la France!’ There have been other moments—moments of doubt and weakness—but it is good to have seen that!” She stopped, a little embarrassed at having been carried away by her own enthusiasm. Then, she said more quietly: “That is how the people of France, the people you speak of, felt.”

Magnus was silent a moment.

“It is hard to answer you, Mademoiselle,” he said, gently. “I grant you that it is beautiful, but I maintain that the tragic thing is that it is all so unnecessary.”

“No, no, it is not unnecessary. I say that France is finer, nobler now than it was before. Sacrifice is the essence of life. Suffering is the test of the finest in us. Why won’t you admit that? Is it because you don’t believe in anything else?”

“No,” he said. “I cannot believe.”

“Yes, that is at the bottom of much of your Socialism and your internationalism and your individualism. It is the selfish conception of mankind. There, Mr. Magnus, there, we disagree. We are not afraid of death.”

“The Socialists and Freethinkers fought bravely, Mademoiselle,” he said quietly, flushing under the antagonism he felt in her voice.

“True,” she said, checked for a moment, “but one is not truly agnostic when one’s mother has had faith. It is not a question of bravery, though. That is not quite fair,” she admitted. “Yet, I am sure I am right. If there is no religious belief, you cannot have faith also for your nation, can you, Mr. Brinsmade?”

“I had not thought of it in your way,” he said slowly. “I am inclined to believe you are right.”

“I am. A Frenchman may have ceased to believe, but he can’t get away from what has been taught him back through his generations of ancestors. For we have taught him duty, not as something he rebels against, but as an ideal, something so beautiful that he is willing to sacrifice himself to that. Also, that is why we are a great nation; because our young men are brought up to think of France as something outside of themselves, that must go on, that must live,—an ideal that is not selfish. That is what we all feel, Messieurs, from top to bottom. What difference what happens to us, if France remains? Oh, I express myself badly,” she broke off. “I wish I could make you feel what we feel!”

“I understand your point of view, and I do respect it: yet, Mademoiselle, there is something that I believe is more important, and that is to see the truth. Don’t condemn too hastily. You have the gift of faith: it is a wonderful thing. We are unhappier, I grant you; but we cannot change our independence. Pardon me if I am not convinced.”

“In what way?”

“I still maintain that when the people’s eyes are open, they will see that they are the ones who are sacrificed. The nationality you speak of is a beautiful thing,—a dramatically beautiful thing. I can understand how honor, glory, duty—those Middle Ages words—thrill your class. But the others,—the peasant, the workman; no, no, he fights without understanding, blindly, and he is the one who bears the burden. For is it not true that it is the great mass, the men in the fields and in the streets, that bears the burden and receives nothing?”

She started to answer and checked herself, but immediately, impelled by an impulse too strong to be mastered, she said:

“Monsieur Magnus, it is my right to answer that. At New Year’s, 1914, in my family, we sat down to table, fifteen of us: my mother, my father, my five brothers, uncles and cousins—fifteen. Five are left to-day: myself, a brother and two cousins at the front, and a brother who in another year will go to do his duty as a volunteer; and, if for any reason he should seek to avoid it, we would disown him though he were the last of our name.”

She said it quietly without change of voice. We looked at her, incapable of reply. Tears started to the eyes of Peter Magnus. He took off his hat and said solemnly:

“If all the world were like you, Mademoiselle Duvernoy, there would be no rebels like me.”

And, for that, I shall always maintain a respect for Peter Magnus.

Later in the afternoon I came out of the smoking room on the upper deck for a breath of fresh air. To my surprise I had hardly started for a turn among the rafts and lifeboats when I perceived the slender figure of Mademoiselle Duvernoy standing by the rail. I went to her. One glance, and I knew that her mood had been melancholy.

“If you are going to indulge in the mopes—you know what the mopes are—the blues—I refuse to leave you alone.”

“But, Monsieur Littledale, I don’t see—” she began, drawing herself up.

“What business it is of mine?” I said, smiling. “No, no, you can intimidate me at other times—you do that, you know—but not now, when I feel that you are sad, and—please don’t go away,” I said hurriedly, as she began to draw her cape about her. “I want to talk to you.”

“But in France we don’t talk alone with young men,” she protested, yet I noticed that she lingered.

“You are not in France, now, and we are not alone,” I said, indicating a group of children who were playing on the opposite deck.

She glanced in the direction of my gesture.

“Please, I do want to talk to you.”

Her look came to my eyes, the first time that her glance had met mine openly, and in the look was gravity, friendliness, and a shade of uncertainty. Then she looked away, hesitating.

“It is a new country and a new life you are going to, Mademoiselle,” I said quickly, “and if our ways seem freer, you will find at the bottom that you can always count on one thing,—the friendship and protection of our men.”

“You have been very kind to me, Mr. Littledale,” she said solemnly.

“I did not mean that.”

She did not turn her glance from the horizon, but her head nodded twice, and a rare smile touched the corners of her lips.

For the last days the air had been growing clearer, vibrant with the vitality of younger skies: skies that had not been drenched in the suffering of many multitudes. In the west, the sun was falling below the green-blue horizon that wavered in sharp outline; a magnificent sweep of golden reds was spreading across the cloud-strewn skies; colors of hope and exaltation, colors of action. I, who had walked in doubts, felt the boundless youth and opportunity which came streaming towards me from the world of the future.

“It has been a privilege to meet you,” I said warmly. “I wish I could talk over—so many things with you.”

“Yes, I feel what is in your mind: you are torn between two ideas—”

“Two? Twenty! I listen to every one; to Magnus, who sometimes convinces me; to Brinsmade, whom I want to believe; to twenty different points of view I pick up in the smoking room. I want to see my way clear as an American, to something that stands out and thrills me as the one word ‘France’ thrills you. I want to have some beautiful ideal of my country to live for, and I can’t yet see what we stand for. I’ve lost all the smug, complacent ideas I had, and I don’t see anything else clearly.”

“I have felt that,” she said, in her simple way, unconscious of the intimacy into which we were drifting. “Yes, I have felt that often as I watched your face when you were listening to Mr. Magnus and Mr. Brinsmade.”

“They debate what’s going to happen to America in a hundred years! What interests me is what’s going to happen now.”

“Do you believe you will get into the war?”

“I hope so, from the bottom of my heart.”

“It will be a great awakening. We in France needed the war, too. You see only what is glorious in us now. You don’t know what went before. The heart of the people was pure in the great, beautiful fields of France, and that saved us. But we had begun to lose faith; we even said that we were decadent, that our day had passed. We were led by false leaders who talked to the people of their ‘rights,’ not of their duties. And these ‘rights,’—what were they? To do as they pleased, to seek to make life easier. They were breaking down the faith of the people, the faith in the family, with their right to live each for himself; the faith in France, with their internationalism; and their faith in God, which is at the bottom of it all.”

“Yes, so you said.”

“You do not believe?” she said, turning to me.

“I hope,” I said, after a moment’s pause.

“That may be enough for you, for you have traditions, traditions founded in faith. But is that enough for the people?”

“Magnus says it is just what keeps them from progressing.”

“How does he say that?”

“He says that the Church is a superstition worked in the interests of property. When the Church tells them that the reward will come in another life, it blinds them to what they can accomplish in this if they would organize and act.”

“Mr. Magnus is honest and logical, because he does not believe,” she said, to my surprise. “Those who are not honest with themselves are those who try to stand halfway.”

“But how would you answer him?” I said, troubled.

“By his own argument. If there is no future life, and therefore no faith, why should we not do anything we please—steal, murder; why should we abide by any law?”

“But he would supplant that by devotion to the Common State,” I said, rather awkwardly.

“Isn’t that just what the Prussians are doing, with all their pretensions of calling on God? Isn’t that why we hate the Prussian idea and resent it, because it has no faith, either in the sacredness of one’s word or in the feelings of humanity? Isn’t it founded on the idea of force, and isn’t that what would result from any State formed on agnosticism? Force, and only force, would prevail.”

“But would it?”

“Hasn’t it? Take our own Revolution: what happened? Didn’t it produce worse tyrants, men of force,—Marat, Robespierre? And what killed the Revolution? The attempt to destroy faith, in the abolishing of religion. You see, you are questioning yourself as though faith were only a spiritual speculation. It is much more than that, Mr. Littledale: it is the beginning and end of all political organization. Don’t you see?”

“When you speak, it is easy to be convinced,” I said, yielding to the honesty in her eyes and the impassioned ring of her voice.

The discussion had carried her out of herself. The stiff preciseness had gone. Her words, warm and glowing, thrilled me. It was not that she convinced me of what she said but that she convinced me of herself. I felt the woman in her, swept by generous impulses, glowing with a beautiful ideal,—a great nature, with so much need to give. She checked herself.

“Pardon. I am perhaps speaking too frankly.”

“No, no, you could never do that.”

I waited her pleasure, wishing to speak but finding no words, afraid of the interruption which might come.

“I wonder what you were like before? I cannot see you in your home. But I feel you have changed.”

She said it without looking at me, hardly aware that she had spoken her thoughts aloud.

“Yes, great changes—so great that it is hard to look back and understand myself. The first night there on the deck—you remember—I could not sleep, and I kept going back over what I had been. You, too; I felt you were awake, feverishly awake. Was I right?” She nodded, but without looking at me. “I rebelled at going back! Oh, that’s what war does for you. Whether you hate it or love it, it ends by creating about you a new life and the other becomes something incredible, something you wish to forget, something you don’t wish to interfere with your liberty of action. For, Mademoiselle, the thing that’s hard at first is to build up for yourself a new life that will satisfy, a new philosophy; a new code of morals,—something to die with, not to live by. All that is so different from the other thing that I have seen men at my side who loved their homes shrink from opening a letter. For when you have prepared yourself to die it is hard to remember how you have lived. That was what I was rebelling against,—the thought of going back, taking up life again, only to have to go through all the mental pain of readjustment.”

“You are going back?” she said, turning to me in surprise.

“I am on a furlough only.”

“I didn’t know—I did not realize.”

“You ask if there have not been great changes in my life? Many, so that I wonder what is coming. Up to the present, my life has been without meaning, and I have only just realized it. It’s the change—the contrast: the coming back has opened my eyes. It’s been drifting—just drifting—nothing else. I don’t suppose I had an idea that was really my own or that I had thought out. Was it my fault, or the education they gave me? I don’t know. I went through school and college, with a nice collection of hand-picked acquaintances, wafted gently from one exclusive club to another. In the course of things I would have married in my own set a charming, irreproachable girl—a spoiled child, with entirely too much money—and settled down to the weary task of warding off boredom. Why I didn’t do it, I don’t know. A curious, rebellious pride, perhaps. I went abroad, to Paris, two years. Well, I came through that! I do not see them clearly yet or their relation to my life. They may have been necessary: time only will tell. I only know that the mobilization was like an escape into pure air. The rest? Just an acceptance of a thing that can’t be changed,—a happiness in finding some purpose.”

“Monsieur, all this has made you what you are,” she said, directly. “I did feel much of this. I felt this restlessness in you. And I think I know what you are going to do. You have qualities of the heart that will make you see clearly in the end; the qualities of the heart are sounder, truer than the qualities of the mind; make no mistake. Will you tell me about her? The young girl?”

“May I?” We had drawn a little together and stood looking over the rail at the tumbling swirl below. “After all, why not?” I added, hesitating.

“Monsieur, sometimes it is easier to speak of the deep things in our hearts to some one we meet just for a moment and never see again, when each is true of heart and understands.” She turned and a smile touched her lips,—a smile of dignity and friendliness. “I should not ask it if I did not think, if I did not feel very strongly, that I might help you to see a little clearer. She loves you, does she not?”

I did not realize then how strange the conversation was, nor the sudden intimacy that drew us together.

“It is easy to tell you anything, Mademoiselle,” I said, smiling back into her eyes. “But the situation is not just what you think. Do you believe in marriage without love?”

“I believe—we are taught to believe—that love should follow marriage,” she said, hesitating. “And if both are loyal—”

“That is your tradition; it is not ours. And you—is it always possible for you to control your hearts?”

“We are taught that such love can only mean tragedy and unhappiness,” she answered, staring away from me.

“Mademoiselle, it is Mr. Brinsmade’s daughter.” She looked up at this, startled. “We have grown up together. She is charming. I admire and respect her. Once, I thought it was a little more than that. But—but I do not love her. Let me tell you all. It would mean everything to me—power, opportunity, a big life—and Mr. Brinsmade would like it.” Then I told her of our conversation, as best I could remember. “And now, to be honest, I think—I believe that she cares for me and—yet I do not love her.”

“Your pride is very strong,” she said solemnly.

“I suppose it is.”

She considered a long moment before she began to speak.

“Monsieur, I feel, no matter what you may think to-day, your happiness lies there. The question of money is what makes it difficult to you, but it is a question that should not come into it at all. Mr. Brinsmade is right. Money is opportunity, to be utilized or to be thrown away. He is a man with big ideas, a man who goes forward, and you will go forward with him. I do feel I understand your nature more than you do yourself, perhaps. You need stability in life, a home, and a woman who loves you. A woman who is true, loyal and loves you, you will love in the end, believe me.”

“Mademoiselle, do you believe that you can make yourself love?”

“There are many kinds of love, Monsieur Littledale: loves that destroy us and wreck our lives; loves that pass; loves that we must fight down to be true to ourselves; but there is another love which is calm and security, which comes from mutual respect, the love that comes with sharing life together loyally; and that love will come later to you, for you have the qualities of the heart that count.”

“To some, to some brought up in different traditions, perhaps,” I said rebelliously. “But with myself—no.”

“Wait, the young girl is a woman, a charming woman now, and all the advantages are in her hands.”

“It is of course what I should do,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. Then, all at once, the incongruity of it struck me, and I broke into a laugh. “After all, there is one thing we forget.”

“What is that?”

“That all such things are quite unimportant: in a few months’ time I go back. It is not a time to be making such decisions.”

“You will come through safely, Monsieur Littledale,” she said, in a tone of deep conviction. “I know it. I feel it. I have strange intuitions sometimes. I see storm and trouble ahead but I see the end in happiness for you.” She could not have realized the gentleness which came into her voice. I knew that the secret of her change of manner was the introduction of a third. Was I altogether honest in permitting a serious discussion, for no thought of such a marriage was then in my mind. I watched her face eagerly, wondering at the gentle womanliness that came out of its hidden cell,—all unconsciousness and simplicity.

“And your mother—what is she like?” she said.

“Mother? Why, I don’t know how to describe her,” I said, in some perplexity. “I don’t know whether you’d understand. Mother goes in for public things—very strong on woman suffrage, charities, uplift, and pacifism. She’s a terrific worker. She has terrific convictions—terrific! The Governor’s a trump; a sort of country gentleman. He’s written quite a bit; he has convictions, too: other convictions. There’s six of us; all with convictions—separate convictions. Oh, we’d amuse you. A typical American family.”

She shook her head.

“That seems so strange; but don’t your families stand together?”

“Well, there’s one thing unites us,” I said, with a laugh. “We agree on our right to disagree.”

She frowned in some perplexity.

“I don’t think I understand a home like that.”

“It isn’t like your French idea of home. We are all tremendously devoted to each other but the thing you mean—the family tradition—the standing for one definite idea—that doesn’t exist.”

“Are you a happy race, I wonder?”

The question surprised me.

“I had never thought of that. I should say we are—yes—and yet—I don’t know: perhaps we are not. We are a nation of individualists, full of driving energy and ambition. We all want something we haven’t got. I’m afraid it’s rather a material ambition, usually. I’d like to believe it makes for the greatness of the country,—this restlessness, this discontent, this wanting to push up: but perhaps we do sacrifice a good deal to it. I haven’t thought over that much.”

“I think that what makes my nation truly great is that we are the happiest people in the world.”

“I don’t think I quite understand you.”

“Everything is so well ordered with us,” she said, and her voice softened as she spoke of loved things. “Just as our beautiful land is so well ordered: the fields so well laid out, the trees so well disciplined, the little, red-topped villages so clean and so prosperous, so in harmony. Just so in our family life: it is so well ordered. We have real grandmothers and real grandchildren, and our fathers are real heads of the family. I don’t think a Frenchwoman would want to have a husband who didn’t have authority, to whom she didn’t look up. And our mothers—you can never know the affection, the deference, the respect that surrounds them.”

“Yes, I know that: it’s a rare and beautiful thing.”

“We have such pride in what the family has stood for. We live as one, we surround the family life with so many quaint little customs. There is much beauty and simplicity in it, for we are willing to be happy as our grandfathers have been happy; and that happiness is not selfish; it means many, many sacrifices often, but that makes it true happiness because we cannot be happy unless we keep our pride in our ideals.” She stopped. “I don’t know if you understand me, but I think we study how to live more than you do. And, because we French are so happy together, we can give everything to keep that happiness undefiled and pass it down to our children.”

“Tell me of yourself—of your life,” I said, strangely moved.

She drew back, as though she had been unaware of a listener. The change was so instantaneous that it startled me.

“But—Monsieur—certain things I cannot discuss—”

“Yet you asked me the same questions, didn’t you?”

“I? But I—”

She was thrown into confusion—at loss for an answer—and, all at once, her face went red.

“I only want you to understand, Mademoiselle,” I said, with kindness, “that it seemed a natural thing. It was not an impertinence. I could never be impertinent to you.”

“You make me feel—” She hesitated again. “I am sorry—I didn’t realize. But you made me talk. It were better I should not; I knew I should not.”

“For heaven’s sake, why not?”

“I do not want to hurt you, Monsieur Littledale. You have been so kind, so generous; but you make me do things I don’t want to do,—things that are against my traditions, for I am traveling alone, unprotected—”

“Mademoiselle Duvernoy, I shall consider it a great privilege to be your friend now and hereafter.”

“That cannot be; it is not possible; it is not right. We go different ways in the world.”

“I don’t believe that—”

“We go different ways,” she repeated firmly. “If you will be generous, you will not ask any more—please.”

She ended so low that it came to me in a whisper.

“I can be generous, but not to that point,” I said obstinately. “I want another answer.”

“Monsieur Littledale, we are just chance acquaintances,” she said, bringing her hands together in impulsive entreaty. “There is no reason—”

“I do not believe we are what you say. It was something more than that which brought me to your side that first night here.”

“What do you mean?”

She turned to me, with startled eyes.

“The feeling that made me know you were in—in danger.”

“In danger!”

“In danger, Mademoiselle. I felt it so strongly that it sent me to you, and I did not dare leave you alone.”

I had no sooner said it than I realized how profoundly and fatally I had erred. The woman who faced me I had never seen before.

“Monsieur, you do not know me. I am not of a race of cowards. I do not take a coward’s way out of life.”

I looked at her, without power to answer,—amazed and baffled by the swift succession of emotions which had culminated in this erect and scornful pride. My eyes dropped before the look.

“Mademoiselle,” I said, at last. “I have offended you, I have offended you, when my only thought, from the moment I met you, has been to offer you all my friendship and deference. I am profoundly and miserably sorry.”

I left her and went down the deck to the farther rail. There was no resentment towards her,—only a weak, sinking misery that I should have wounded her. My ears were filled with the sound of her gentleness. I remembered only the hurt pride in her eyes. I saw her face in the mists of the twilight, her deep eyes looking gravely out at me.

“Good God! How could she think I would say or do word or deed to hurt her!” I said to myself, again and again.

“Monsieur Littledale?”

Unperceived, she had come to me. She was there, waiting at my side.

“Monsieur Littledale, I am sorry, too.”

Her hands were clasped before her, and the eyes that looked to me in compassion and forgiveness were blurred. I put out my hands blindly, but she had fled. I stood there, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, my heart pounding within me.

It was then I knew that I loved her.

She was not down to dinner when I came eagerly into the crowded salon. She was not on the deck when I hurried up, nor did she appear again that night. I slept badly and was out with the dawn, making endless rounds through the sailors, who were swabbing down the decks.

I knew that I was beginning to love her, nor was I so dull as not to feel that to her, too, I was more than just a chance acquaintance. I did not attempt to analyze my feelings or to penetrate the future. The present hour was too imperious. My mood was not of exultation but of fear of her shy and persistent avoidance of me. If only a week were before us! But the day was the last, and the morrow would bring America, and—separation. I think I did not realize the full force of the emotion that had swept over me; nor all the complexities, the hazards, and the tragic destiny that it had, in the twinkling of an eye, laid upon my life. My only thought was to see her again to know from her first look that I still retained what had come to us in the dusk before. I knew that everything was horribly against me. I was certain, for some reason I could not fathom, that she would resist me, had resisted me from the first. I was sure of nothing. But though it meant finally but emptiness and the struggle to forget, I was powerless to draw back now.

Breakfast passed, and the morning drew out, and she did not come. I went to my chair and threw myself down, bodily and mentally tired. A vast feeling of depression possessed me. Magnus came and talked to me. I was conscious of seeming to listen; I caught phrases, heard myself making responses. I knew nothing. My heart sank within me and such a feeling of physical weakness possessed me, in this new, utter sense of loneliness, that I could do no more than lie there, stretched inertly, saying again and again to myself:

“She will not come. I have frightened her away.”

Yet she had not passed the door before I was instantly aware of it. A wave of happiness and well-being went through me, as though my lungs had filled with the first life-giving breath of air. She was coming, head down and walking fast. I sprang up and hurried to relieve her of the rug she was carrying. I knew she saw me, for she wavered and turned aside to speak to a little French-woman who was traveling with her baby.

“Good morning, Mademoiselle.”

“Good morning, Monsieur.”

“May I take your rug?”

She glanced at her arm as though she had just perceived its burden.

“Thank you, Monsieur.”

I went to her chair and prepared it for her coming. All the depression had left me at the first glance into her gray eyes. She, too, had felt the tumult and the turmoil; it was written there in weariness and strain. A violent joy, a sense of living and of hope, surged up in me, as I awaited her first words. When I turned she had taken the arm of her companion and was silently pacing off the deck.

An intuition, the instinct born of the struggle which is inseparable from love, came to me. I, too, would avoid her and, in my absence, in the longing denied, she would suffer, too, and by that suffering come closer to me. Cruel? Yes, as in such moments the impulse is to beat down all obstacles, to contend without quarter for the happiness that lies beyond the agony of doubt and disbelief! I rose and went into the smoking room, steeling myself to patience, resolved not to leave it until luncheon. I sat there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. At the end of a half-hour I could bear it no longer. I went out hurriedly and, all my resolutions forgot, straight to where she waited in her chair.

“Mademoiselle, you have not forgiven me,” I said, without preliminaries.

“Why?”

She turned, startled, and the new conflict I saw in the haunted weariness of her glance brought me a sense of coming victory.

“Because you avoid me.”

“I?”

She could not meet the direct challenge of my look and turned away. Still I pursued, without compassion.

“Yes. You avoid me. Would you rather that I did not remain here?” I asked suddenly, sure of her answer. “For nothing in the world would I do anything that would be distasteful to you. Tell me only what you wish. Shall I go?”

She hesitated and, before the trouble I felt in her, my resolve almost gave way. Yet, because I was fighting for both of us, I held firm.

“Only tell me what you wish.”

Once or twice she seemed to make up her mind to speak, but each time she checked herself.

“Do you realize that by this time to-morrow we shall be steaming up New York harbor?”

“This time to-morrow!”

“This time to-morrow.”

She put down the book she held in her hands with a show of purpose, and looked out gravely.

“A strange world to both of us,” I said.

To my annoyance, the sound of the gong began to rumble through the ship.

“What—already?” she said, to my delight, looking incredulously at her watch.

“Take your luncheon up here; it’s a perfect day.”

“What a good idea! Yes, I think I shall.”

I hesitated, all my assurance melting away.

“I suppose the terrible gods of French etiquette would rock on their thrones if I stayed, too—”

“I should feel very conspicuous.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I knew you would feel that way.”

My tone fell, in such unconcealed chagrin that she could not help noticing it. She sat up and glanced down the deck. Other groups, yielding to the sunlight which poured over the dancing ocean and flung rainbows in the spray, were preparing to picnic above.

“It is the last day,” I repeated.

“Please—I should like if you will stay,” she said, all at once, and then blushed and looked away.

I affected not to notice her confusion and busied myself with a serious contemplation of the menu.

“There, it’ll be just like a meal at the front! Not quite so good cooking as at one of your little country inns. Do you know, what you said the other day’s been in my mind?”

“What was that?”

“About seeing death at first hand. I didn’t feel the way you did. I was all broken up the first time; couldn’t sleep for a week. And yet, you Frenchwomen go through all that and can still smile. Why is it? Have we weaker nerves?”

“Don’t you think there is something changed in our smiles?” she said, looking up.

“Yes, yes, I feel that. But you have so much faith in the good of the world, you seem so uplifted by your experience, there is something so serene in your eyes—”

I stopped, realizing how personal my analysis was growing.

“Ah, but when you are not just a spectator, when you are helping, it is different. What is uplifting in service is that your own self becomes of such little importance.”

“Yes, but I should think your memories—” I broke off. “When you told that fairy tale to Master Jack, the first day, you could even laugh.”

“It’s because what I remember is not pain and ugliness but only the beauty of sacrifice and the nobility of men who at other times may have been very sordid,” she said warmly. “Do you know what our memories are?” She half closed her eyes, and a tender look touched her lips. “I think of one Christmas Eve—a great barn where I was nursing—a barn that had been improvised into a hospital, with beds in the straw, just like the birthplace of the little Saviour. I don’t like to speak of myself, but I will tell you this. We stayed—my mother and I—in a little village on the frontier—our village—when the Germans came through; and that village, our little village, changed hands six times.”

“And you stayed—you and your mother?”

“We stayed, not to abandon our people and to take care of our poor wounded.”

“And they let you do that?”

“They needed some one to take care of their own,” she said, with a frown, “and we agreed—my mother and I—to do that if we could be permitted to nurse our own men. Six times the village changed hands, but on that night—Christmas Night—it was ours. So we made ready to celebrate. We organized a concert. Oh, it was a strange concert! There were over a hundred wounded in that great barn, and only a dozen could stand on their legs, but they were all so gay, for that is something our brave little poilus never lose,—their gaiety. And there was to be a tree, and all sorts of funny presents. And the concert! There was a quartet, and there was a waiter from the CafÉ de Paris who was lying in a stall—with his feet carried off—who was to sing comic songs, and a real tenor from the Conservatoire, who would sing magnificent arias from the opera, and then there was to be a comic recitation, and a classic recitation. Every one quite forgot their troubles in the excitement. But Christmas morning a dozen wounded were brought in, and one, a sergeant of chasseurs, in such a dreadful state that we did not think he would live through the day. So of course, we prepared to give up the celebration: and what do you think? He heard the men talking, and he sent for me.

“‘Mademoiselle, is it true you are giving up the concert on my account?’

“‘You are in a bad way, mon petit!’ I told him.

“‘Bad way! Allons! I am going to die,’ he broke out. ‘Eh, bien! I choose to die gaily, instead of in a corner, like a dog. It is my wish that the concert go on. And tell the comrades to sing out good and strong!’

“It was done, as he wished.”

“And he died?”

“Not that day, but the next,” she said, “without a complaint. Do you think that when I can remember there are men like that in France, I have a right to be sad?”

The deck steward came and went, and we began our luncheon. A hundred questions were on my tongue, but I gave voice to none.

“They were so patient and so simple in their courage,” she continued gravely, “always trying to help me. Many times, I’ve had a soldier who was suffering say to me:

“‘Allons, Mam’zelle, get your sleep to-night. If this arm of mine won’t keep quiet, I can be of some use. I’ll make the rounds.’”

“And the brave fellows who fretted because they couldn’t return soon enough to the lines! They were so gay. I remember a little Breton who had both legs gone, posing for his photograph, with stockings pinned to his trousers, and saying:

“‘When I get up to Paris, I’ll get a pair of legs that’ll make me two inches taller than this old Auvergnat over here!’”

“Those are the things that are good to remember. Poor boys! There were so many that died unnecessarily! We were so few, and we could do so little!”

“But you had doctors?”

She shook her head.

“I am speaking of the first months. Only from time to time a doctor, and, when the Germans had the village, never. But I think that was better.”

“I could not have done that,” I said, shaking my head. “I think I could meet what I had to meet but—day in and day out—to have seen others suffer, others die like that—”

“I only remember the look of gratitude in their eyes,” she said, simply. “And then, I had my part. I had to keep up their morale, you know, and send them back to the front with courage. It would never have done for me to weaken.” She turned with a smile and saw the profound gravity on my face. “Believe me, what I say is true,” she said solemnly. “It had its hardships, but they were days of beauty, and I never think on them without a thrill of pride in the France I have been privileged to know. Please don’t look so grave. I’m afraid I’ve been too serious.”

I was staring at her, looking into the past which she had conjured up, divining things she had passed lightly over.

“Why are you staring so?” she said, a little embarrassed.

“I was trying to imagine you in your white and blue costume,—the most beautiful robe that has ever been given to woman,” I said solemnly. “You have no photograph?”

She shook her head.

“I only meant I should have liked to see it.”

“I love the uniform, too,” she said, and a note of sadness was in her voice.

“But you will go back?” I said, before I could catch myself.

“I shall never go back. Will you take the tray?”

I hastened to obey. When I returned, I saw at once a stiffening of her whole nature against me.

“Confess that you are thinking of the sacred gods of French etiquette,” I said, hoping to make her smile.

She acknowledged the hit, with a little confusion.

“Then please blame me, and not your conscience, for I made you talk.”

“That is so. You make me talk against my will.”

“And now you are wondering how you can run away.”

“How do you know me so well?” she said, forced at last into a smile.

“Oh, I do. There is a very stern, uncompromising Mademoiselle Duvernoy, and there is a very gay, happy Mademoiselle Duvernoy.”

“Once, there was a very frivolous one,” she said, nodding.

“I didn’t say that—”

“But it is so; oh, very frivolous—very mondaine, before the war—who loved good things, as a child loves sugar plums!”

“What terrible sins you must have had on your conscience!” I said, laughing.

“Oh, but I loved pleasure, very much, and the things of this world. I did, very much.”

I smiled.

“I smile, as the Father who heard your confession must have smiled.”

She shook her head.

“I was a very superficial little person; not at all tolerant, very satisfied with myself, and very dissatisfied with others.”

“Good heavens; I don’t think you have ever been anything but the spirit of gentleness!” I broke out.

She drew back instantly, and I hastened to repair the blunder my impulsiveness had made.

“You women of France all have that quality of gentleness,” I said hastily, in a more guarded tone. “That is what I notice about all of you.”

She relaxed, though not quite convinced.

“You idealize me, Monsieur. We have done our duty, that is all, and we have found in it a great happiness.”

“I wish my sister—I used to think of her as my little sister; good heavens, she must be twenty now!—I wish my sister Molly could know you. Of all the family, she is closest to me. I hate to think of her going through four or five years of useless life, dancing herself to death, learning to get bored with every pleasure: she’s such a little trump, now.” I took out my pocketbook and brought out a photograph of a youngster in pigtail, tanned and straight, looking out with innocent laughter at the most beautiful of worlds.

She took it, and glanced from the photograph to me.

“Yes, I understand. There is something very noble, very pure, very brave. She is your favorite?”

I began to laugh.

“What is it?”

“Do you know, that’s only the second time I think you’ve really looked me in the eyes.”

She blushed—as she did easily—and tried to laugh.

“We are told never to look a man in the eyes. It is very old-fashioned to you?”

“But why?”

“Because,” she hesitated a little and then went on, looking away from me, “because, when you look in a man’s eyes, they say, you are seeking a different meaning to his words.” She blushed furiously. “It’s not that exactly but—how shall I say?—we are taught that it is too forward—too provocative. But you are laughing at me,” she said, covered with confusion.

“I am not laughing, Mademoiselle,” I said seriously, “and I like that in you.”

The conversation became difficult and a certain diffidence overcame us. A moment before, she had been talking to me freely and impulsively, though a little shy and hesitant, as a young girl. I saw her mood change and a certain womanly dignity come to her.

“Monsieur, I have been thinking much of the confidence you entrusted to me. Have you—have you no photograph of Miss Brinsmade?”

My pocketbook was still in my hand. I drew out a little snapshot and handed it to her. She held it a long time, studying it intently.

“She is very beautiful,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“This is how long ago?”

“Three—four years; when she was just out of school.”

She nodded, still studying it.

“Monsieur, there is a great deal that is waiting there—a great deal of love—a great deal of nobility. A woman like that will be what you want her to be; only, don’t make her wait too long.”

I took the photograph, looked at it wondering if she had said all her thought, and slowly replaced it in my pocket.

“Mademoiselle, I, too, have been thinking over our conversation and I feel I may have given you a wrong impression—”

“How so?”

“I was only discussing something that was a remote possibility, nothing that I have really considered. I reproach myself a little; I had not the right—on her account.”

“Why?”

“Because I know now that it is quite impossible.”

Heavens, how much I wished to say to her, and how little I dared. I waited, wondering if she would understand. She did not answer, but I saw her hands clasp and unclasp in her lap.

“What you have said of marriage is natural to your traditions. Some other man might do as you suggest and find happiness. I know—I know I could not, and keep my self-respect. I shall never marry, Mademoiselle, unless my whole heart goes with it.” I hesitated and, despite myself, knowing the danger of it, I added, very low, “I know that now.”

She did not hesitate but answered me, instantly and lightly.

“Perhaps, Monsieur, the future will settle that. Will you permit me to hope that it may be so?”

She rose, with a formal nod and made a pretext to descend to her cabin. I saw her to the door and returned, my brain in a whirl. At one moment she had seemed to come to me with such impulsiveness; at the next, to be a thousand miles away. I dropped back into my chair, uneasy and tortured by regrets. A flash of gold on the gray scarf she had left behind her caught my eye and, leaning over, I picked up a little brooch I had always seen at her throat. It was in the form of a locket, heart-shaped, such as children wear. I turned it over in my hands and saw an inscription on the back, a date and a name written in a free hand:

BERNOLINE

The next moment I realized that unwittingly I had trespassed on the mystery of her identity. I put the pin hastily in my pocket and rose, with an idea to restore it to her immediately. I went into the Ladies’ Cabin, hoping to find her there, and then into the writing room. I could not take it, myself, to her stateroom and I did not wish to entrust it to a steward. In the end, I kept it and waited for her reappearance.

It was well into the heart of the afternoon when I discovered her, at her old post on the upper deck.

“Mademoiselle, please do not think that I mean to intrude,” I said diffidently, when I had come to her side.

“You are not intruding, and I had hoped that you would come,” she said, without evasion. “For, Monsieur, I feel that I ought to say something to you very seriously.”

Her manner, in its decision and thoughtfulness, alarmed me.

“I have things, too, which I wish to talk over with you, in the uttermost seriousness. I am a little afraid of that conversation,” I said, looking down, “because we are going to disagree. My mind is made up to certain things, Mademoiselle, and I do not think you can change it.” I added, looking up into the sadness of her eyes, “Will you grant me a favor—a last favor. There is so little time that is left us. Wait until to-morrow.”

She shook her head.

“My conscience reproaches me for putting it off as I have done. Do not make it any harder.”

“If it is to be only a memory,” I said, “let the memory be complete. It is something even to have had a memory of you. Please grant my request.”

I doubt whether she would have yielded even then, though I saw her breast rise and her eyes close at my voice, had I not brought forward the locket, saying:

“Mademoiselle, I came to bring you this. I found it on your chair.”

Her hand went to her dress spasmodically, and the color left her face with the violence of her emotion.

“I must tell you. I did not realize what I was doing, but I saw the name on the back.”

“You did not open the locket?” she said, in terror.

“Mademoiselle, I am sorry that you asked that question.”

“Forgive me—I—forgive me.” She put her hand to her eyes, and stood trembling from head to foot. God knows it was hard not to take her in my arms. But I stood there, gritting my teeth, waiting until she grew quiet once more.

“Bernoline—so that is your name?” I said softly.

“Yes, that is my name.”

“I have known, from the first. Bernoline—I am glad I saw it, for the other name I could not associate with you.”

“Monsieur.” She turned, and this time her eyes looked me through and through. “You are a man of honor? Give me your word of honor never to mention that name to a human being. Oh, I do not mean to hurt you—I do trust you. But—I must have your word!”

“You have hurt me,” I said. “It was not necessary, but—you have my word.”

Her agitation was so extreme that she hardly noticed my reply.

“Mademoiselle—no one who has had the privilege of knowing you—of listening to you—can ever believe that you were brought up to be a governess. And if you had been,” I added hastily, “that would not make the slightest difference. You are you, and that is sufficient. I think, Mademoiselle, I never wanted anything more in the world than to be your friend.”

She shook her head again at this, but the agitation passed and her voice was soft with pleading as she answered me:

“Monsieur Littledale, you will forgive me? From the heart? I did not know what I was saying. I should always trust you—in everything—without a doubt.”

“Thank you,” I said, all choked up.

“Your friendship? Yes. But, friends? No. To-morrow, it is to be good-by,” she said, more gently than I had heard her. “Is it not better to say now what we must say to each other?”

“No, no—to-morrow.”

“To-morrow, then. Since you asked it and because I did hurt you,” she answered. “Only, make no mistake. You have seen me, Monsieur, in moments of weakness. Why I have been so I do not know: I am not like that. I can do what has to be done.” The locket was in her hands; she held it before her. “It is the last thing that remains of all my past life. I had no right to keep it; I have been wrong. Monsieur Littledale, I think you will understand now how immovable my resolution is, when I know what must be done!”

She opened her hand, and the locket, a tiny streak of gold, vanished into the sea.

“It was my baby pin, and the name was in the handwriting of my father.”

It was done without a tremor and the chill of the waters, into which the locket had passed, possessed me.

Instinctively we avoided the danger of personal references. For the rest of the afternoon we sat there together, talking eagerly, unconscious as two children of the shortening day. I do not remember ever to have known such an exquisite and eager pleasure as in this impulsive searching of our minds. It was the delight in meeting in intimate conversation some one who woke in me all my dormant imagination and led me along suddenly opening galleries, into unsuspected worlds. As we rambled on, touching lightly or profoundly twenty changing ideas, a deep tranquillity came to my restless spirit, not simply from the contemplation of the serenity that lay on her open forehead and deep in her clear, untroubled eyes, nor the charm of listening to the melody of her voice, but in the calm certitude of coming happiness. I was happy; yes, for that one all too brief afternoon. I was happy as I never realized happiness could come to me. For I saw such happiness in her face that at times she seemed no more than a girl of sixteen, artlessly spreading before me her imagination and her treasured thoughts. She was happy. I knew what that meant. I was content to go no further, sure that on the morrow, when we came to serious discussion, I could turn all her objections, based, as I believed them to be, on a sentiment of too scrupulous pride.

We were in the midst of a gay debate on the upbringing of the young girl in France, when the sound of the dinner gong broke in on our illusions.

“What, so soon!”

“It is not possible!”

The two cries came simultaneously. We stood up, suddenly sobered. I saw her face change.

“And, to-morrow afternoon—here,” I said confidently.

“It were better to say good-by now,” she said wearily.

“It will not be good-by, Mademoiselle.”

She shook her head and gave me her hand, and I remember now how heavily it lay for that short second in mine.

“Monsieur, I repeat, you make me do things I do not mean to do, that I have no right to do.”

“Wait until to-morrow,” I said, so completely happy that I tried to laugh her out of her mood and refused to perceive the solemnity and sadness that settled over her face.

I am glad now, as I look back, for that one hour of absolute faith in the future. Life was a certainty; I was filled with an eagerness to begin and in the knowledge of the rare and beautiful realization of happiness, I had not the slightest fear of the test of the morrow.

I spent the hours after supper in the smoking room, puffing at my pipe, with a new tolerant understanding of the young America before me; of these young spirits, with their exaggerated bursts of humor, their overflowing belief in themselves, their boyish eagerness to return to “God’s Country.”

“I wonder if they would ever agree on anything,” I thought, as I watched the nervous, combustible American need of reaction breaking out in sudden fits of gaiety. “So many minds; so many ideas!”

Some had served from curiosity, more from the love of adventure, and a few, thrilled by the comprehension of noble ideals. I saw them returning, scattering north, south, and west; into village, farm and city; mechanics, students, idlers; taking up again the easy, careless run of American lives; moving on obedient to the accidents which determined their paths; good-natured, generous, emotional, keen, ambitious, seeking that success that is counted in terms of dollars. And then I wondered. I wondered if the sudden, transforming call on the air would ever come to them.

“What does it matter whether a million men die to-day or next year?”

Bernoline’s words, words that had startled me at first, came back to me then. “All that matters is how they live!”

“For, if the test come,” I thought, “it is our generation that’ll have to make good. Make good! Yes, that’s one thing we can do: I have no fear of that—and yet, how unprepared we are for the test!”

The next morning I was up and out on deck with the sun. Already there was the note of change. The dream life of the last days, suspended between sea and sky, between one civilization and another in a happy incredulity, was come to an end. Ahead was reality; life to be taken up again, the fixed path to be followed!

Forward, the hatches were off and the donkey engines were diving into the holds. The passengers who came out were unrecognizable in their shore clothes, stiff and formal, retreating into the shells of themselves. The smoke of an ugly freighter smirched the sky. A swarm of sea gulls, noisy as the approaching multitudes of the city, vexed the air. Across the lapping of shallower waters a dozen sails stood out to sea. At noon Fire Island rose out of the waves, passed and sank. A group on the deck below set up a cheer. The thin, white sand of Long Island slipped over the horizon and grew towards us. America—my America—was there! I felt like snatching off my hat and waving it madly, hysterically, as Frangipani and the others were doing.

I had not thought to be so stirred. I had thought to return with foreboding in my eyes and questions on my lips, and instead there came this involuntary gripping of the heart. Out of the whole world, this, this bit of land was mine!

“Good to see your own again, after all, isn’t it?” said Brinsmade, who had come to my side.

I acknowledged it, with a laugh.

“Had no idea it would affect me so.”

“It’s an instinct that’s down pretty deep, David.”

We watched the derricks swinging up their cargo. A crowd of young fellows, led by Frangipani’s ear-splitting tenor, were singing:

“We’re all like that,” said Brinsmade. “Must blow off steam occasionally. Would you believe it—I feel like jumping down there and doing the same thing!”

“I believe you.”

I glanced at my watch for the twentieth time, and went up to the upper deck and waited, scanning the horizon that was perplexed with the drift of the great city; scows, tugboats, coast liners and pilot boats,—a busy officious rabble. Then Bernoline came.

She was gloved and bonneted, an umbrella in her hand, veiled, as she had been on the day of departure. My heart sank. I was quite unprepared for this. In my rapt imagination I had expected the Bernoline of yesterday, impulsive and generous, a woman turning back into the eager unconsciousness of girlhood. This was more than a mask. She had retreated behind a barrier of impersonality,—an impersonality as stiff and starched and forbidding as the outward form.

“Monsieur Littledale, will you walk with me a moment?”

The voice was calm, self-possessed and resolved. I was so overcome, I had already such a sensation of futility and defeat, that I do not know that I even acknowledged her greeting as I turned and followed at her side.

“A little farther—there—here we can be alone.”

We crossed and found a sheltered nook. I stood, staring down. All below me was ugliness, and I remember now how suddenly depressed it made me to be brought face to face with this sordid realism,—this muddy water, streaked with oil, the waste, refuse and litter of the city. The siren blew, once, twice, in shattering blasts. We moved onward, towards the river head.

“Monsieur, I have to thank you, and I do thank you deeply for your perfect courtesy towards me.” Her voice sank lower. “You have been loyal and considerate. It is a memory I shall always retain of an American gentleman. Now, I am going to appeal to that chivalry and to that loyalty.”

“You are going to ask me never to see you again.”

She hesitated before the shock of pronouncing the decision which must have been in her thoughts for days. Then, recovering herself, she said, calmly:

“That is exactly what I must ask of you.”

“I do not understand—must?”

“Must.”

All that I had thought out, every argument which I had built up victoriously to combat her resolution, all power of reasoning, left me. Intuition, which never fails at such times, told me that before this Bernoline nothing that I could say or do would avail. The woman who spoke was a soul in retreat, and the veil which barred the meeting of our eyes was the veil of renunciation. I blurted out:

“Why? Why do you ask such a thing, such an unnatural thing of me? What reason can there be?”

“Monsieur, I must remind you,” she said instantly, “that there is no reason why I should give explanations.”

“Wait. I can’t talk to you like this,” I broke in. “Yesterday—good heavens, where is yesterday?—yesterday I knew you. Only yesterday, we were happy as two children, exploring the world, hand in hand: to-day you come to me and face me as though I were an enemy! You speak to me behind this mask of a veil! You ask me something utterly incomprehensible and, at my first dazed question, you—but what have I done—why, why should you take this way with me?”

She raised her arms instantly and drew back her veil.

“You are not an enemy, Monsieur Littledale.”

When I looked at her I was so shocked by the pallor of her face and the dark stricken eyes that I cried involuntarily:

“I have made you suffer like that!”

“It is right that I should suffer,” she said bravely, though her lips trembled a bit, “for I have done wrong in even permitting you to speak to me.”

“Why? What wrong?” I said desperately. “What wrong is there in our friendship? I have never said a word to you, Mademoiselle, that could not be said before a third person. I never shall. Leave it as it is. Keep me in your life—as a friend, only.”

She shook her head, and her eyes never wavered from mine.

“You make it very hard for me. Yet, because I feel that what has happened is my fault, I must say things that it is very hard for a woman to say. Mon ami, I shall not disguise from you that, had I the right, your devotion would mean to me the greatest happiness in the world. Let us not play with a situation that is too serious for half-truths. What might be cannot be. I tell you this, and after what I have told you, my friend, without concealment, I ask you to believe without further question.”

“Good God! And what do you think I feel!”

“Try to forgive me—if not now, a little later. I accuse myself bitterly. Don’t—don’t show me how I have hurt you.”

“Bernoline! Bernoline! Don’t say such things.”

I looked away, at the world that grew blurred, and at the sky and water, which ran together before my eyes. Everything was against me—the minutes even, dwindling away as we moved inexorably towards the final parting. At one moment I rebelled against the needless insensate pain of it all. Something in me called out: “She is a woman—a woman that suffers as you do. Clasp her in your arms—beat down all opposition—still all her doubts and fears with the thing that is above reasoning. Be cruel. It is the only way. Be cruel now, to be happy always.”

But at the next moment, at the thought of all it must have cost her to have said what she had said; at the struggle I had seen in her eyes, just to spare her this one added touch of pain, I was ready to accept everything she asked as she asked it. So, I stood, struggling with many impulses. At the end, I raised my head, and said:

“Bernoline, you are right: it can be no question of friendship between us. You have done a very brave thing. I wish I could do as big a thing. I cannot. There is no earthly reason which I can conceive of that can come between us. Do you think, now, after what you have shown me, I could go away without an explanation and not be haunted by the thought of what might have been!”

“Monsieur Littledale, you do not realize the difference between our positions. I am come here to this world to earn my living, as governess, nurse, companion, in whatever way God will show me.”

“Good heavens, what difference does that make to me?”

“It does, to me: it is a question of pride. I have chosen my way, and I must do as others do. Are you going to make it harder?”

“Bernoline, that is not the real reason,” I said sternly.

“Mon ami, there is the difference in religion—”

“Bernoline, that is not the real reason!”

“Monsieur Littledale,” she said, wavering from the look in my eyes, “I repeat, I alone have the right to decide, and I do not admit—”

“And I tell you now I will never let you go out of my life, no matter what you may ask of me!”

There was a long moment before she again raised her head.

“You make it very difficult for me, mon ami; if you knew how difficult, I think you would be more generous.”

The rebellious combat in me died away before the break in her voice. I looked, and saw her eyes closed with sudden tears.

“Oh, don’t,” I said brokenly. “Anything—anything but that, Bernoline!”

“My friend, I will not lie to you,” she said, after a moment. “If I could—if it were right—I should prize beyond all things your friendship.”

“Friendship!”

“It cannot be. I have been wrong, very, very wrong to have even talked to you as I have—but at moments it was beyond my strength. I reproach myself, bitterly! David, mon ami,” she said suddenly, and her hand came out bravely and lay on mine. “I have more than I can bear, now. If you insist, I will tell you, but—it will break my heart to do so. I am going to ask you, once more. If you have the great heart I believe you have, my friend, my good loyal friend, if you do not want me to suffer more than I can bear to suffer, if I am to hold to my own respect, give me your promise never to see me again. Ask me no questions; trust me. Go your own way and let me go mine.”

Her hands had come together in supplication; her eyes had in them a terror of returning pain and their look hung in mortal distress on my decision. Her agitation communicated itself to me; confusion was in my eyes, and in my heart was a chill.

“Good God! What can I do, when you ask me like that?” I said helplessly. “I promise. It shall be as you wish. I—it—I promise.”

“Merci, oh, mon Dieu!”

I heard her cry like something far off; all the world had dropped away from me. She came close to me; perhaps my very helplessness disarmed her.

“David, I never meant to hurt you so. Believe me, what I do is for you—for you, first. Keep me as a memory of something beautiful in your life. Day and night I shall have you in my prayers—you and your happiness. That will come, David. You will forget what I was too weak to prevent.”

I bowed my head, incapable of speech.

“There is only one thing I ask, now,” I said at last. “Oh, it’s only a little thing, otherwise it would be too cruel: I ask only to be allowed to see you through the landing—just the last courtesies.”

“Yes, mon ami.”

I held out my hand abruptly, and she gave me both of hers. She was so close to me that for a moment we swayed against each other, parting and longing in our eyes so poignant that all the world seemed like a whirlpool drawing us down together.

“Your promise, David, your promise!”

I released her hands instantly and my eyes closed not to see her so near and so weak. When I knew what I was doing again, I was alone. How long I had been there, I do not know. A great mass was before me, thrusting a torch into the skies and the kindling stars. I went down the deck like a drunken man and ran into Hungerford, who came up gayly.

“Hello, there, seen a paper?” He checked himself, staring at my face. “Here—Big Dale—what’s wrong?”

“Wrong—nothing’s wrong!”

I felt his arm under mine and was glad for this touch of another human being in my blank loneliness. I heard him rambling on, nodded my head, and knew not a word he was saying. This for long minutes, while gradually I fought back to myself.

To this day I can feel the overwhelming insolence of the stone weight of New York rising out of the waters, crushing me down in my utter loneliness. An invisible hand was lighting up the city; glass squadrons suddenly relieved, floated in carnival pomp across the night. Across the vanishing space of bridges, feverish traveling flames shot out,—one, two, and then another. A furnace belched against the sky. Electric signs swarmed out of the dusk. Below me, over the swift, oily, painted waters, were green lights, red lights, ferryboats afire, tugs coming and going, shrieking, puffing, roaring,—and always we moved on, irrevocably on, past the Battery, past the oozing, slimy hulks of the city wharves, rotting below the fiery splendor of the city’s rise; stagnant as poverty beneath the soaring pride of wealth, in the miraculous city of tragic contrasts! How vast it was, how unhuman! Every note a thousand times multiplied,—every sensation of multitude! Multitude on multitude—armies of order and disorder—a collective tyranny that roared over me on the threshold of America, as the resistless downward plunge of Niagara beats endlessly. Torrent of forty nations and twenty creeds, conflict of tongues and churning of races—not my America, but the world-vision of Peter Magnus—multitudes moving like glaciers towards destinies no one might confidently predict!

And, against this howling contention, this churning, grinding background, I saw but one figure,—the shadow of a woman, the woman I loved, exiled and alone.

At six o’clock it was all over. I stood at her carriage door, bareheaded, bending over her hand. The bustle of the landing, the examination of the baggage, the damp, noisy, strident wharf, the pushing and the strife were behind us,—too soon gone. Only this remained.

“You can give him your address,” I said, stepping back.

“It is St. Rosa’s Convent.”

“Thank you.” Even at that moment, her trust in me brought a little comfort.

“Do not worry. I shall be well taken care of.”

“St. Rosa’s Convent,” I said loudly to the driver.

The moment had come. I had not realized what it would cost me. Before the finality of it, I stood, clutching the door, incapable of a word.

“God be with you,” she said, bending forward.

“Bernoline—Bernoline, if ever—”

She leaned forward and, suddenly remembering, drew her veil. Our eyes met without wavering, unconscious of the crowd that jostled and shouted behind us. She raised her hand and touched my forehead.

“Thank you, from my heart. I shall keep you in my prayers, day and night—always, David.”

She sank back, and I saw her face no more. A policeman shouted an angry order. The carriage moved away. At the window her hand fluttered in a last weak gesture. Then, even the window grew blank. I was alone, standing with head uncovered, in the midst of a group of urchins, who were mocking my long face.

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