With nerves that contracted at every untoward sound, he had gone out at dark, and gradually the peacefulness of the night had soothed and calmed him as the dew of dusk cools the earth after the heat of a summer's day. The familiar strains of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' came to his mind, and as he walked he idly traced the different movements of the music in the moods of the evening's witchery.

His steps, like his thoughts, pursued a tangled course, and led him into the prosaic brick-and-mortar monotony of Bayswater, but the moon was lavish in her generosity, and strewed his path with glinting strands of light. He paused in a quiet square to get his bearings. There was the heavy smell of fallen leaves from the gardens on the other side of the railing.

His mind was still playing the slow minor theme of the sonata's opening movement.

Suddenly the air was shattered with the noise of warning guns. As if released by a single switch, a dozen searchlights sprang into the sky, crossing and blending in a swerving glare. There was the piercing warning of bugles and the heavy booming of maroons.

Dazed by the swiftness of it all, Selwyn leaned against the low iron fence. A Boy Scout whirled past on a bicycle, his bugle hoarse and discordant; an old woman went whimpering by, hatless, with a protesting child in her arms; an ambulance, clanging its gong, rounded the corner with reckless speed; a mightier searchlight than any of the rest swept the sky in great circles.

It seemed only a matter of seconds, though in reality much longer, when the American heard a faint crunching sound in the distance, followed by a deep, sullen thud. In rapid succession came three more, and the defence guns of London burst into action, changing the night into Bedlam.

Still motionless, he listened, awe-struck, to the din of the weird battle with an unseen foe, when the cough of exploding shells in the air grew appreciably louder. Raising a whirlwind of dust, a motor-car swerved dangerously into the square, and with a roar sped up the road, carrying to their aerodrome three British airmen. As if driven by a gale, the battle of the clouds drew nearer and nearer, the whine and barking of the shells like a pack of dogs trying to repel some monster of the jungle.

There was a deafening crash.

Selwyn was thrown against the fence, and almost buried beneath a shower of bricks and earth. With the roar of a rushing waterfall in his ears, and blood streaming from a wound in his forehead, he sank to his knees and for a moment lost consciousness; but mastering his weakness, he staggered to his feet and looked wildly about. On the other side of the street, where there had been a house, there was a smoking chaos. A little crowd had appeared seemingly from the bowels of the earth, and a woman was shrieking horribly.

Selwyn wiped his forehead with his hand and gazed stupidly at the blood which covered it. The roar of the guns was louder than it had yet been, and from a few streets away came the crunch of another bomb, shaking the earth with the explosion which followed. Selwyn leaned impotently against a post, and a quivering uncanny laugh broke from his lips. It was all so grotesque, so absurd. Human beings didn't do such things. It was a joke—a mad jest. He held his sides and laughed with uncontrollable mirth.

Then his whole form became rigid in a moment. A man had shouted something. There had been a wail from the crowd. Was it true? Some one buried alive—a little girl?

With a blasphemous curse Selwyn staggered across the road, and roughly elbowing his way through the crowd, found a solitary policeman, hindered by willing undirected hands, digging in the wreckage as best he could, while a couple of women sobbed hysterically and wrung their hands.

Those who watched hardly knew what had happened, but they saw a hatless, bleeding figure appear, and, with the incision of snapping hawsers, question the policeman and the weeping women. They heard his quick commands to the men, and saw him jump into the centre of the debris. With the instantaneous recognition of leadership his helpers threw themselves to the work with a frenzy of determination. Lifting, digging, pulling with torn hands and arms that ached with strain, they struggled furiously towards the spot where it was known the girl was buried. They were like starving wolves tearing at the carcass of an animal. They yelled encouragement and fought through the chaos—and still the stranger whipped them into madness with his cries.

There in the smoke and the choking dust Austin Selwyn shook in the grip of the greatest emotion he had ever known. A girl was buried—a fraction of a minute might mean her life. With hot breath and pulses on fire, he led his unknown men through the choking ruins to where one small, insignificant life was imprisoned.

An ambulance sounded its gong, and drew up by the crowd; the storm of the guns continued to rage, but no one thought of anything but the fight of those men for one little unknown life.

At last. They had uncovered a great iron beam which had struck on a stone foundation and left a zone of safety beneath. Eager hands gripped it, dragging it aside, and there was hardly a sound as the stranger lowered himself into the chasm. A minute later he reappeared, and a shout broke from the on-lookers. He was carrying a little form in his arms.

But when they saw his face a hush fell on every one. She was dead.

Wild-eyed, with the ghastliness of his pallor showing through the coating of grime and blood, Austin Selwyn stood in the ruins of the house, and the brown tresses of the child fell over his arm.

Kind hands were stretched out to him, but he shook them off angrily. He was talking to the thing in his arms—muttering, crooning something.

Slowly he raised his face to the skies. In the glare of the searchlights a gleaming, silvery, oblong-shaped form was turning and twisting like an animal at bay. They heard him catch his breath; then their blood was frozen by a choking, heart-rending cry of agony and rage.

It was the cry of the crystal-gazer who has had his crystal dashed from his eyes, to find himself in the presence of murder.

The crowd remained mute, helpless and frightened at the spectacle, when they saw a young woman approach him, a woman dressed in the khaki uniform of an ambulance-driver.

'Austin,' they heard her say, 'please give me the little girl.'

With a stupid smile he handed the child to her, and she laid it on a stretcher. When it had been taken away, she took Selwyn's hand in hers and led him, unresisting, to the ambulance.



CHAPTER XVIII.

ELISE.

I.

Early next morning, in a large military ward of a London hospital, Austin Selwyn woke from a sleep that had been charged with black dreams, and tried to recall the events leading to his present whereabouts.

By slow, tortuous process he reconstructed the previous evening as far as the moment when he had heard the warning guns. After that the incidents grew dim, and faded into incoherency. He seemed to remember rushing somewhere in a motor-vehicle. He distinctly recalled seeing a policeman in Trafalgar Square. Yes, that was very clear—quite the most vivid impression of the whole night, indeed. He would hang on to that policeman.

With the care of an Arctic explorer establishing his base before going farther into terra incognita, he attached the threads of his wandering mind to that limb of the law, and groped in all the directions of his memory's compass. But it was of no avail. Tired out with the futile efforts he had made, his bandaged head sank back in the pillows, and the vivid policeman in Trafalgar Square was reluctantly surrendered as a negligible means of solution.

When he next awoke, it was to the sound of many voices. There were two that were very close—one on either side of him, in fact. Affecting sleep, Selwyn listened carefully.

'Wot's that you say, Jock?' said a Cockney voice to his left.

'I was obsairvin',' said the other, 'that Number Twenty-sax is occupied this mornin'.'

'Ow yus, so it is. I was 'oping as 'ow me pal the Duke of Mudturtle would buy the plice next to mine. But he don't look a bad cove, wot you can see under 'is farncy 'ead-dress.'

'I dinna think he can be o' the airmy. His skin's as pale as a lassie in love.'

'In the army, Jock? Don't hinsult 'im. 'E's one of the 'eroes of the 'ome front—hindispensibles, they calls 'em.'

'Weel, weel, noo,' expostulated the Scot, 'dinna tak' ower muckle for granted. We canna a' gang tae the war, or wha wud bide at hame an' mak the whusky?'

'By Gar!' said a third patient opposite, sitting up suddenly and speaking in the disjointed but strangely musical dialect of the French-Canadian, 'she is a wise feller, dis Scoachie.'

'Bonn swoir, Frenchy,' said the Cockney graciously. ''Ow alley you mantenongs?'

'Verra good, Tommee. How is de godam bow bells?'

'Well, the last toime I sees me old side-kick the Lord Mayor, 'e says as 'ow they was took by a Canadian for a soovenir.'

'Na,' said the Scotsman reprovingly; 'I'm thinkin' yon's exaggerated.'

'By Gar!' said the French-Canadian. 'See, the orderly come now with water for shav'. Back in de bush or on de long portage I shav' once, twice, perhaps tree time a month. Always before I meet my leetle girl I shav'. But when I say good-bye and go to war—by gollies! de army make me for do it every day. My officier, he say, "What for you no shav' dis morning?" "Sair," I say, "I no kees de Boche—I keel him." He say noding to dat excep', "Look at you. I shav' every day. Do you preten' I doan' fight?" "Well," I say, "if de cap feets you, smoke it." And for no reason he give me tree time extra for carry de godam ration.'

At this stage the arrival of wash-basins interrupted further anecdote and philosophy, and the entire ward became animated with soldiers performing their ablutions, some sitting up in bed, others on the edge of their beds, and a few so weak that they could just turn painfully on their side and wait for other hands to help.

A burst of hearty greetings told Selwyn that some one must have entered the ward, and a few minutes later he felt the presence of a nurse beside him.

'Good-morning,' she said, gently touching him on the shoulder. 'How is your head feeling?'

He opened his eyes and looked into the face bending over his. 'I think it's all right,' he said weakly. 'But, nurse, won't you tell me how I got here?'

She dipped a cloth into a basin and bathed his hands and face.

'You were hit by a piece of shrapnel in last night's air-raid. I wasn't on duty when you came in, but the night-sister said you were quite delirious—though you seem ever so much better this morning, don't you? I'll take your temperature, and after you've had some breakfast I'll put a new dressing on your wound.'

She was just going to insert the thermometer between his lips, when he stopped her with his hand. 'Nurse,' he said, 'why was I brought here—among soldiers?'

'Because every hospital is filled to overflowing. The casualties are so heavy just now.' Her voice was still kind, but there was a look of resentment in her eyes at his question.

'Please don't misunderstand me,' said Selwyn wearily. 'It is only the feeling that I have no right here. This cot should be for a soldier, and I'm a civilian. I'm an American, and—and if you only knew'——

'Just a minute, now, until we get this temperature, and then you can tell me all about it.'

With his lips silenced, but his doubts by no means so, he watched her move down the ward in commencement of the countless duties of her day. She was a woman of thirty-three or thirty-four years, still young, and possessed of a womanliness that softened her whole appearance with a tranquil restfulness. But beneath her eyes and in the texture of the skin faint wrinkles were showing, thinly pencilled protests against overwork, that no treatment could ever eradicate. On the red collar of her uniform was a badge which told that she had gone to France with the first little army of Regulars in 1914.

Noting her calloused hands and the too rapid approach of life's midsummer, Selwyn watched her, and wondered what recompense could be offered for those things. In ordinary life, given the privileges and the opportunities which she deserved, she would have been another of those glorious English women whose beauty is nearest the rose. She would have been a wife to grace any home, and as a mother her charm would have been twofold. But for more than two years incessant toil and endless suffering had been the companions of her days, and the not over-strong body was giving to the ordeal.

But as his heavy thoughts drifted slowly through this channel, he saw grinning patients who were well enough get out of bed to help her. As if she carried some magic gem of happiness, her soft voice and deft touch brought smiles to eyes that had been scorched in the flames of hell. Men looked up, and seeing her, believed once more in life; and hope crept into their hearts. Men in the great shadowy valley murmured like a child in its sleep when a ray of morning sunshine, stealing through the curtains, plays upon its face.

And of the many things which Selwyn learned that day, one was that those ministering angels, those women of limitless spirit and sympathy, have memories of mute, unspoken gratitude, beside which the proudest triumphs of the greatest beauties are but the tawdry, tinsel glory of a pantomime queen.

II.

After the nurse had taken the thermometer from Selwyn and marked his temperature on a chart which she placed beside him, breakfast was brought in, and he was propped up with pillows.

'Guid-mornin',' said the Highlander. 'I hope ye're nane the waur o' your expeerience.'

'Not 'im,' broke in the Cockney, eating his porridge with great relish. 'It done 'im good.'

'I am very well,' said Selwyn haltingly. 'I hope my arrival did not disturb any of you last night.'

At the sound of his carefully nuanced Bostonian accent there was a violent dumb-play of smoothing the hair and arranging the coats of pyjamas, while one Tommy placed a penny in his eye in lieu of a monocle.

'I was 'oping,' said the Cockney, with a solemn wink to the gathering, 'as 'ow Number 26 would be took by a toff, and, blime, if it ain't! It were gettin' blinkin' lonesome for me with only Jock 'ere and Frenchy opposite, who ain't bad blokes in their wy, but orful crude for my likin'.'

'Where did it hit ye?' asked the Scot encouragingly.

'On the head,' said Selwyn, pointing to his bandage.

'Mon, mon, that's apt to be dangerous.'

'Nah then!' cried the Cockney, reaching for his temperature-chart, 'we'll open the mornink proper with the 'Ymn of 'Ate. In cise you don't know the piece, m'lud, you can read it off your temperacher-ticket. Steady now—everybody got a full breath? Gow!'

With great zest all the patients who were able to sit up broke into a discordant jumble of scales as they followed the course of their temperatures up and down the chart. Gradually, one by one, they fell out and resumed their breakfast, until the Scotsman was the only one singing.

'Ye ken,' he said, pausing temporarily and looking at Selwyn, 'yon should be rendered wi' proper deegnity.' With which explanatory comment he finished the last six notes, and solemnly replaced the chart on the ledge behind him, as if it were a copy of Handel's Messiah.

The last note had hardly died away when a violent controversy broke out between a pair of Australian soldiers on one side and almost the entire ward on the other. The thing had started by one of the Anzacs venturing the modest opinion that if Britain had had a million Australian troops, they, the present gathering, would be 'hoch, hoching' in Berlin (apparently a delightful prospect) instead of being cooped up in a London hospital.

The little Cockney was just going to utter a crushing sarcasm, the French-Canadian had taken in a perfectly stupendous breath, the Highlander was calmly tasting the flavour of his own reply, when the impending torrent was broken by the entrance of the chaplain, who wished every one a somewhat sanctimonious 'Good-day.'

'I shall read,' he said, putting on a pair of glasses, 'the latest communique from the front. We have done very well. The news is quite good—quite good. "This morning, on a front of three miles, after an intense artillery preparation, the Australians"'——

''OORAY!' roared the Cockney.

The glasses popped off the chaplain's startled nose, and he just managed by a brilliant bit of juggling to rescue them before they reached the floor.

'I—I,' he ventured, smiling blandly, 'am delighted at your enthusiasm, but you did not let me finish. "This morning"—um, um, ah—"three miles"—um, um, yes—"three miles, after an intense artillery preparation, the Australians"'——

''OORAY!' It was a deafening roar from the whole crowd.

'"The Australians"'——

'OORAY!'

'"The"'——

'Oo'——

Really, men, you must control yourselves. We are all glad and sustained by any victory, however slight, but you must not give way to unmeaning boisterousness. "This morning, on a front of three miles, after an intense artillery preparation, the Australians"'——

There was a medley of submerged, prolonged snores. The chaplain looked up indignantly. With the exception of Selwyn and the two Australians, every one had followed the lead of the Cockney and disappeared underneath the bed-clothes.

'This,' said the good man—'this frivolity at such a harrowing moment in our country's destiny is neither seemly nor respectful. Cheerfulness is admirable, until it descends to horseplay.'

With which parting salvo the worthy chaplain, who had never been to France, and who was doing the best he could according to his clerical upbringing, left his unruly flock, taking the communique with him.

A little later the doctor made his rounds, pronouncing Selwyn's wound as not dangerous, but assuring him he was lucky to be alive. Another inch either way and—— Passing on to the Scotsman, he stayed a considerable length of time; but as the screen was set for the examination, the American had no way of knowing its nature.

And so, with constant badinage, seldom brilliant, but never unkind, the morning wore on. It was nearly noon when Selwyn saw a wheeled stretcher brought into the ward and the Highlander lifted on to it.

'Jock,' said the little Cockney, 'I 'opes as 'ow everythink will come out orlright.'

'By Gar, Scoachie!' cried the French-Canadian, 'I am sorree. You are one dam fine feller, Scoachie.'

'Dinna worry yersel's,' said the man from the North. 'I'm rare an' lucky that it's to be ma richt leg an' no the left, for that richt shank o' mine was aye a wee thing crookit at the knee, and didna dae credit tae the airchitecture o' tither ane.'

Thus, amid the rough encouragement of his fellows, and by no means unconscious of the dignity of his position, the Highland soldier was taken away to the operating-room.

The French-Canadian made a remark to Selwyn, but it was not until the second repetition that he heard him.

III.

About three o'clock that afternoon a little stream of visitors began to arrive, and Thomas Atkins, with his extraordinary adaptability, gravely, if somewhat inaccurately, answered the catechism of well-meaning old ladies, and flirted heartily and openly with giggling 'flappers.'

To the visitors, however, Austin Selwyn paid no heed. He was enduring the lassitude which follows a fever. He knew that the crisis had come, the hour when he must face fairly the crash and ruin of his work; but he put it off as something to which his brain was unequal. Like slow drifting wisps of cloud, different phrases and incidents floated across his mind, shadows of things that had left a clear imprint upon his senses. With the odd vagrancy of an undirected mind, he found himself recalling a few of Hamlet's lines, and smiled wanly to think how, after all those years, the immortal Shakespeare could still give words to his own thoughts: 'This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, . . . this brave overhanging firmament—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.'

The wings of memory bore him back to Harvard, where once in a scene from Hamlet he had mouthed those very words, little dreaming that in a few short years he would lose the sense of euphony in the cruel realisation of their meaning.

Then, before he saw her or heard her step, he knew that SHE had come. His heart quickened, and his breathing was tremulous with mingled emotions.

'Well,' she said, coming to his bedside and offering her hand, 'how is the invalid?'

'Elise,' he said, 'it is wonderful of you to come.' He looked at her khaki uniform, at the driver's cap which imprisoned her hair. 'Now,' he went on dreamily, 'it all comes back to me. It was you who brought me here.'

'Had you forgotten that already?' she said, bringing a chair to the bedside.

'I couldn't remember,' he answered weakly. 'All I know is that I was walking alone—and there came a blank. When I woke up I was here with a head that didn't feel quite like my own. But I knew, somehow, that you had been with me.'

'What does the doctor say about your wound?'

'It is not serious.'

'You have heard since what happened?'

'Yes.'

'It was absolutely topping the way you fought for that child's life.'

He made a deprecatory gesture, and for a moment conversation ceased. He was wondering at her voice. A subtle change had come over it. Her words were just as uncomfortably rapid as in the first days of their friendship, but there was a hidden quality caught by his ear which he could not analyse. Looking at her with eyes that had waited so long for her coming, he felt once more the affinity she held with things of nature. Her presence obliterated everything else. They were alone—the two of them. The hospital, London, the world, were dimmed to a distant background.

'After such a night,' he said, 'it is very kind of you to make this effort.'

'Not at all. We're cousins, you know.'

'I—I don't'——

'The Americans and the English, I mean. Relatives always go to each others' funerals, so I thought I might stretch a point and take in the hospital.'

'Oh! That was all?'

'Goodness, no! You automatically became a protege of mine when I picked you up last night. Isn't that a horrid expression?—but frightfully fashionable these unmoral days.'

'You must excuse me,' he said slowly, 'but I was foolish enough to think you came here because—well, because you wanted to.'

'So I did. An air-raid casualty is ever so much more romantic than a wounded soldier. If he lives through it, he always proposes the very next day either to the nurse or to the ambulance-driver, whereas a Tommy, after his third wound, becomes so blase.'

'You shouldn't torture me,' he said, wincing noticeably under the incision of her words.

Just for a fleeting instant her eyes were softened with a tender look of self-reproach. His heart warmed at the sight, but before he could convince himself that it was not a creation of his own fancy, it had passed, and once more she was holding him at bay with her impersonal abruptness.

'Will you tell me about yourself?' he urged. 'Please.'

'What do you want to know?'

'Everything—everything!' he blurted out, impetuously leaning forward. 'My heavens! Don't you know how I've longed and waited for this moment ever since that night at your flat? I want to hear all about you—what you've done, where you've been, and—and in what mysterious way you've changed.'

'Have I changed?'

'Of course you have. You're trying to appear just as you were when we first met, but you can't do it. Even if I hadn't noticed the difference in you, I should have known that no one could live through these times and remain the same.'

'Why not? Haven't you?'

He laughed grimly, and his head sank back on the pillows. 'I want to know all about you, Elise,' he repeated dully.

'Very well.' She smoothed her skirt with her hands, and folded them Quakeress-fashion.

'As you know, I once had a flat in Park Walk—which I shared with various and variegated female patriots, also engaged in guiding the destinies of motor-cars. Edna was the first one to follow Marian, after she and I quarrelled; but Edna couldn't break herself of the habit of wandering into the Ritz for luncheon every second day with only a shilling in her pocket.'

'But I don't see how'——

'You poor innocent! Some one always paid—don't worry. So we parted company on that issue, and I asked Mabel to take Edna's place. Mabel was frightfully nice, but took to opium cigarettes, and then to heroin. She disappeared one night, and never came back. Poor girl! Her going made room for Lily, who read the very nicest modern novels, and always cried through the love scenes. I wish you could have seen her sitting up in bed reading a book, eating chocolates, and sobbing like a crocodile. Lily had only one weakness—marrying Flying Corps officers. It was really the army's fault giving two of her husbands leave at the same time.'

Selwyn frowned, 'What a dreadful experience!' he said.

'Oh, I don't know.' She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, but the spirit of badinage had vanished both from her face and from her voice. 'It didn't take long to lose most of one's illusions. It is one thing to meet people as Lord Durwent's daughter, and quite another as a free-lance ambulance-driver. I've seen what people really are since I've been on my own, and I'm sick of the whole thing.'

'You don't mean that, Elise?'

'I do. Men are rotten, and women are cats.'

He smiled quizzically, but she kept her eyes averted from his. It almost appeared as if she were determined to retain her pose of callousness at any effort, but his sense of psychology told him that his first conjecture was correct. The girl who had endured was trying to hide herself behind the personality of her old self.

'My dear girl,' he said slowly, 'it is an old trick of women to talk for the purpose of convincing themselves. I don't care what you have seen—you could not have passed through the ordeal of these long months and believe in your innermost soul that either men or women are rotten. In many ways I feel as if what little knowledge I possess dates from last night; and I have learned things about men right here in this ward to-day that have made me humble. These chaps that we call ignorant, the lower classes—why, they are superb, wonderful. I tell you they have greatness in them. I wish you could have seen them'——

'Haven't I seen them,' she cried, with a little catch in her throat, 'hundreds and hundreds of times? Almost every day, and at all hours of the night, I've gone to meet the Red Cross trains. I have seen men die while being lifted out of the ambulance—men who would try to smile their thanks to us just before the end came. I have'—— She caught her hands in a tight grip, and her eyes welled with tears. 'But they're just jingoes, I suppose,' she said, blending a scornfulness with her repressed grief.

'I have deserved this,' said Selwyn, his face drawn. 'Nothing that you can say is half so bitter as my thoughts.'

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' she said.

'If ever a man was sincere, I was, Elise. Since I left you at Roselawn I have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead. Now I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.'

'No, it wasn't,' she replied vehemently. 'I hated you for thinking English women would not aid their men to fight, and I wanted never to see you again. But do you remember when I said that the glory of war was in women's blood? There was a certain amount of truth in it at the beginning; for when I first saw the wounded arrive I was madly excited. I wanted to shout and cheer. But as the months have gone on, and I have seen our soldiers maimed and bleeding and suffering, while thousands of their women at home have simply broken loose and lost all sense of decency or self-respect—oh, what's the use?'

'But you mustn't forget the women who have done such great things for the country.'

'I know—but what's it all for? Since this battle of the Somme our casualties have been frightful, and every day means so many of our real men killed, and so many more shirkers and rotters in proportion to carry on the life of England. We've had our women's revolution all right. There are not many of the old barriers left; but what a mess we have made of our freedom! When I think of all that, and then recall what you said about war, I know that you were right, and we were wrong.'

'You are wonderfully brave,' said Selwyn, 'not only for having done so much, but in telling me that.'

'No,' she said, lowering her eyes to the gloves which she held in her hand; 'I have lost all my courage. Every night I feel as if another day of meeting the wounded will kill me. . . . If it could only end! Anything would be better than these awful casualty lists.'

'Elise'—he raised himself on his elbow and leaned towards her—'you prove yourself a woman when you say that; but you're wrong. I can't give my reasons yet, but since last night I have been seeing clearer and clearer that Britain not only must not lose, but must win. I know other men have said it ten thousand times, but only to-day have I begun to see that, in its own strange, unidealistic manner, this Empire is fighting for civilisation.'

'Then'—her eyes were lit with sudden, glistening radiancy—'then you don't think our men have died uselessly?'

'I could not believe in God,' he answered, wondering at the calm certainty of his voice uttering things which would have infuriated him a few hours before, 'if I thought that this war's dead had fallen for nothing.' His hand, which had been raised in gesture, fell limply on the bed. 'Up to yesterday,' he went on slowly, 'I reasoned truth; to-day—I feel truth. I wonder if it is not always so, that higher knowledge begins with the end of reasoning.'

For a couple of minutes neither spoke, and his head was throbbing with anvil-beats. Twice she started to speak, but stopped each time as though distrustful of her own words.

'I am going back to America, Elise.' His dreamy eyes were gazing beyond her into the distance, or he might have noted that the colour in her cheeks fluctuated suddenly and the fingers on her gloves tightened.

'Why?' There was nothing in her voice to indicate anything but casual interest.

'I must go back,' he said, leaning towards her—'back to my own country. You don't understand. . . . There comes a moment when every fibre of a man's being craves for his own people, for the very air that he breathed as a boy. All these wasted months and last night's climax of damnable murder have left me dazed. I am floundering hopelessly—but at home I shall be able to clear my mind of its mists and see this whole thing as it really is.'

A wall of pain pressed against his head, and his face went gray with agony. In an instant she was standing over him arranging his pillows, and soothing his temples with the gentle pressure of her hands.

For the first time in many months he knew the help and compassion of a woman—and the woman was Elise. He was weak from loss of blood, weary from the long travail of the mind, and her presence, with its indefinable fragrance of clover and morning flowers, was as exquisite music to his senses.

'If you only knew,' he murmured, 'how I have longed for this moment. It has been very lonely for me—and I have wanted you so much, Elise. God! I've wanted you until I had to struggle to keep from crying out your name in the very streets. Forgive me talking like this.' He groped for her hand and held it tightly in his. 'I never had any right to tell you what you meant to me—and less now than before—but when I come back'——

'You will never come back.' She laughed with a strange tremulousness, but in her eyes there was something of the scorn she had shown towards him at Roselawn.

'You are wrong,' he said; 'I must'——

'You are an American,' she answered quickly, 'and that comes first with you. Your country has nothing to do with this war, and you are going back to it. You will stay there. I know you will.'

With his old decisive mannerism he sat up, and his eyes flashed with vigour.

'I will come back,' he said firmly. 'Life has separated us—it has not been your fault or mine—but some day, Elise, when I get my grip on things again, I shall come to you, and you will have to listen. We need each other, and nothing on the earth can alter that'——

'Except America!' She laughed again, and withdrew her hand from his.

'Elise!' he cried, reaching towards her, 'listen to me'——

The Cockney patient leaned over with a bag in his hand. ''Ave a gripe?' he said genially.

'No, th'—— began Selwyn.

'Thanks so much,' said Elise, taking the bag and picking a small cluster for the American, afterwards handing the bag back to the Tommy.

''Ave a few yourself, won't yer?' said the warrior.

'May I?'

''Ere,' said the Cockney, with mock brusqueness. 'Tike a bunch.'

Perhaps from the very intensity of their previous talk, the threads snapped, and her quickly uttered sentences, with the accompanying sparkle in her eyes, showed him that he could hope for little more than badinage for the rest of her visit. Almost as if she desired to eradicate the memory of her emotional admission, she gave her vivacity full play. For a few minutes he tried to bring back the close intimacy of their souls, but she fenced him off, and met his heart-hungry glances with the gayest of smiles.

Roselawn, she told him, had been transformed into a convalescent home, and Lord and Lady Durwent were living in one of the wings. Practically all the servants had enlisted or gone into war-work; and even Mathews, the groom, after perjuring himself before a whole regiment of army doctors, had been accepted (with grave official doubts) for military service.

Interspersed with these details she recounted incidents of her London life as an ambulance-driver, and it was all her listener could do to follow the swift irrelevance of her course. Only once did she pause when, in answer to his question, she told him she had heard nothing of Dick.

IV.

A few minutes later she rose to go.

'I have stayed much too long,' she said. 'I do hope you'll get better quickly.'

He took her hand in his, but made no attempt to translate the meaning of the moment into language. He had worked against her country; while she plied her rounds of mercy, he had written on the debasement and the fallacy of it all. Lying in the wreck of his idealism, in the grip of physical pain, dreading the torture of his own thoughts, could he express what her coming had meant? He wanted to tell her of his heart-hunger, of his loneliness, his gratitude, understanding, reverence, and, above all, of his love. There was so much that it made him silent.

'Good-bye, Elise,' he said.

'Good-bye,' she answered.

That was the end. Of such paltry substance are words.

'By Gar!' said the French-Canadian, looking after her as she disappeared down the ward, 'she mak me tink of my leetle girl Marie; only Marie, mebbe, is only so high, comme ca, and got de black hair, so! I am homeseek. Yes. It mak me verra homeseek. Godam!'

V.

She did not come again. Every morning his heart quickened with hope, and each afternoon grew heavy with discouragement as the hours passed by without the step he listened for. The arrival of the mail was an instant of mad expectancy and mute resignation. But every day carried its cargo of renewed hope, and he grudged the very hours of sleep that separated him from it.

He wrote to her three times—pleaded with her to come again. He begged forgiveness for omitted or committed things which might have hurt her, but no reply came. He thought of writing to Roselawn, fancying she might have gone there, but he was certain that before the letter could reach her she would have come again, and they would only laugh at the idea of any misunderstanding.

He blamed himself for a hundred imaginary crimes. He had not asked her if she would return. Perhaps he had carelessly uttered words that wounded her. He knew her pride; knew that after their parting at the flat it must have been hard for her to make the first move towards reconciliation—and she might have mistaken his joy for petty personal triumph.

Or—had he been an utter fool? Was this her punishment of him? With the consummate artistry of her sex, had she simulated sympathy and forbearance to make his torture all the more exquisite? He dismissed the suggestion as something vile, but, feeding on his doubts and longings, it grew stronger and more insistent with every hour's passing. A hundred times a day he closed his eyes and lived the sweet memory of her visit; but with the gathering arraignments of his doubts, he wondered if it had all been the studied act of the English girl's reprisal on the American who had dared to challenge her nation.

Weary, weary hours—the inactivity of the body lending fuel to the flames of his mind. He determined to dismiss her from his thoughts, and with his power of mental discipline he reduced his mood to one of mute resignation.

Then the thought of America came to him, and he was seized with an impetuous craving for his own country, his own land, where men's natures were broad and mountainous, like America itself. He pictured New York towering into the skies, the charming homes of Boston, where so many happy hours had been spent in genial, cultured controversy. He smelt the ozone of the West, where sandy plains melted into the horizon; where men lived in the open, and a man was your friend for no better reason than that he was following the same trail as yourself.

America. . . . He was impatient now of every day that kept him in England. He felt that his emotions, his brain, his convictions would all be rudderless until he breathed once more the air of the New World, with its vassal oceans bringing tribute to both Eastern and Western coasts.

He would not call himself a failure or a success until he looked on his handiwork in the light of the great Republic. As his ancestors leaving the shores of Holland and Ireland, as millions of men and women had done with the Old World dwindling away in the distance, he looked towards America for the answer to existence.

Ten days after his admission he was allowed to leave the hospital for his rooms in St. James's Square.

He took his leave of the little group who had been his companions for the time—the little Cockney with his incessant exuberance; the French-Canadian, picturesque of language and imagination; the one remaining Australian, vigorous of thought and forceful of temperament; the nurse, carrying Florence Nightingale's lamp through the blackness of war. He tried to say a little of what was bursting for utterance, but they only laughed and fenced it off. They wished him 'Cheerio—good-bye—good luck;' and he wondered if the whole realm of lived or written drama held any farewell more sublimely expressive of a great people enduring to the uttermost.

His servant had a taxi-cab waiting for him. Driving first to a florist's, he purchased roses for the nurse; then, stopping at a tobacconist's, he left a generous order for all the occupants of the ward. After that he went directly to the American Consul's office and made arrangements for his return to New York.

VI.

It was late in December when, driving to Waterloo to catch the boat-train to Southampton, Selwyn was held up in the Strand by the crush of people welcoming the arrival of Red Cross trains from the front.

Leaning out of the window, he watched the motor-cars and ambulances coming out from the station courtyard, while London's people, as they had done from the beginning, welcomed the unknown wounded with waving handkerchiefs and flowers, with hearts that wept and faces that bravely smiled.

With a suppressed cry, Selwyn opened the door and leaped into the crowd. He had seen her driving one of the ambulances, and he fought his way furiously through the human mass to the open roadway. But it was useless. The ambulance had disappeared.

Struggling back to the taxi, he re-entered it, and turning round, made for Waterloo Bridge by way of the Embankment.



CHAPTER XIX.

EN VOYAGE.

From a sheltered position on the hurricane-deck, Austin Selwyn watched the curtain of night descending on England's coast. Portsmouth, with its thousand naval activities, was already lost to view off the ship's stern; and the Isle of Wight was but a dark margin on the water's edge.

Not a light was to be seen on shore. Like an uninhabited island, England lay in the mingled menace and protection of the sea, while unseen eyes kept their endless vigil.

The vibration from the ship's engines told him she was gathering speed. Impatient of the six days that must elapse before harbour could be reached, he walked to the front of the deck and watched the officers on the bridge peering into the darkness ahead.

When he retraced his steps he could no longer distinguish land. Two searchlights playing on the surface of the water revealed a cruiser steaming silently out to sea.

A feeble star appeared in the sky.

* * * * * *

Mid-ocean.

A clear winter sunlight touching the green, swirling water with strands of yellow gold; a wind sweeping the ship's decks, blowing boisterously down companion-ways and along the corridors; a few shimmering snowflakes from an almost cloudless sky; everywhere the vastness of ocean. And the ship buffeting its way towards the New World.

Mid-ocean.

* * * * * *

The City of New York.

Anchored down the bay just after sunset, Selwyn watched the great metropolis as her form was vitalised with a million lights. From the ship's side, it seemed to the eyes watching the birth of New York's night that the buildings had come to the very water's edge to gaze into its depths, and see their own reflection.

Here and there in the outline of great buildings a mammoth structure raised its head above all others, losing itself in the foam of light that floated mist-like over the city's towering majesty.

For more than two hours Selwyn remained motionless in the thrill of patriotism. The burst of light challenging the reign of darkness was a symbol to him. The Old World was crouching in darkness, fingering and fearing the assassin's knife. . . . But America was the Spirit of Light.

How many times, he thought, emigrants must have looked on just as he was doing! How many times that sight must have brought hope to weary, discouraged souls that never thought to hope again!

To the idealist returning to his own country, New York was not a citadel guarding the entrance to a Nation, but a gateway opening to the Continent of Opportunity.



CHAPTER XX.

THE GREAT NEUTRAL.

I.

One afternoon a tall, heavily built young man entered his house on 128th Street, New York, and after divesting himself of his coat and hat, rubbed his hands in genial appreciation of his own hearth and the exclusion of the raw outside air. He was dressed in a gray lounge suit, a clerical collar alone denoting his vocation.

'There's a gentleman in your room, Mr. Forbes,' said his housekeeper, appearing from the kitchen. 'He said he was an old friend, and would wait.'

'What's his name?'

'Mr. Selwyn, sir.'

'Austin Selwyn? By George!' Taking the stairs three at a time, the energetic clergyman burst into the library and advanced with both hands outstretched. 'For the love of Pete!' he ejaculated most unclerically. 'How are you, my boy? Let me have a look at you. Still the same old Sel, eh? A little thinner, I think, and not quite so much hair—humph! Sit down; have that easy-chair; tell me all about yourself. Well, well! this is an unexpected treat.'

The Rev. Edgerton Forbes, who had been looking Selwyn over after the custom of tailors about to offer sartorial advice, ceased his inspection, and shook hands all over again.

'Edge,' said Selwyn, speaking for the first time, 'you can't imagine what your welcome means to me.'

'My dear boy, you never doubted its warmth?'

'Yes I did, old man—after what I've been writing.'

The athletic clergyman laughed uproariously. 'I suppose you're a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman now, and want your cup of tea. Well, I'll join you.—Mrs. Perkins.' Going to the door, he gave the necessary orders, and returned rubbing his hands, and venting his surplus energy in a variety of hearty noises expressive of pleasure at seeing his old friend.

'Now, start at the beginning,' he said, 'and give me everything. The semaphore's up, and there's a clear track ahead.'

'But I want to know about things here first.'

'After you, my son. Put it over now. By the way, that's a nasty scar on your head. How did you get it?'

In a few words Selwyn traced the course of events which had led to his crusade against Ignorance, a crusade which had in an inexplicable way turned particularly against England. He spoke of Doug Watson's letter with its description of the slaughtered German boy, and he told of the air-raid in the moonlight, the climax to his long orgy of idealism. He touched lightly and humorously on his hospital experience, but not once did he mention the inner secret of his heart. To the whole recital Forbes listened with a genuineness and a bigness of sympathy which seemed to belong to his body as well as his mind.

'That is pretty well everything,' said Selwyn. 'I have come back here, humble and perplexed, to try to get my bearings. There have been two men financing my stuff, and they must account to me for the uses to which they have put it. Edge, I was sincere. Not one word was written but I put my very life-blood into it.'

The arrival of tea put a temporary stop to the author's self-revelation, and his host busied himself with his hospitable duties.

Selwyn passed his hand querulously over his face. The clergyman looked at him with a feeling of pervading compassion.

'I was going to ask about Gerard Van Derwater,' said Selwyn, 'How is he?'

'Van's very well. He is in the Intelligence Division right here in New York.'

'I heard he was engaged to Marjory Shoreham.'

'Yes—he was. They broke it off a few weeks ago; or, rather, she did.'

'I am sorry to hear that,' said Selwyn earnestly. 'I always liked her immensely, and I was glad that poor old Van had been the lucky suitor. You remember how I used to say that he always carried a certain atmosphere of impending tragedy, although he was never gloomy or moody about it.'

'Well, Austin, I think the tragedy has come.'

'I must see him,' said Selwyn. 'In coming back here, you and he were the two I wanted most to meet. I knew that neither of you would withdraw your friendship without good reason; but also I knew you would tell me bluntly where I stood. Why did Marjory break off with Van?'

The clergyman told what he knew, and at the conclusion of the story Selwyn rose to his feet.

'I must see Van at once,' he said. 'There's more in this than appears on the surface. If you will give me his number, I'll find out when we can get together.'

Receiving the necessary information, Selwyn went downstairs to the telephone, returning in a couple of minutes to the den.

'I just caught him,' he said to his host, 'and I am going to his rooms at nine tonight.'

'Good work. Now sit down and tell me about the English. You'll find me the most attentive audience you ever had.'

II.

It was theatre-time when Selwyn left his hotel and walked over to Broadway. That diagonal, much-advertised avenue of Gotham was ablaze with light. From shop windows, from illuminated signs, from office buildings, street-cars, and motors, the carnival of theatre-hour was lit with glaring brilliancy. Women, in all the semi-barbaric costliness with which their sex loves to adorn itself of a night, stepped from limousines with their tiny silvery feet twinkling beneath the load of gorgeous furs and vivid opera-cloaks; while well-groomed men, in the smart insignificance of their evening clothes, guided the perilous passage of their fair consorts from the motor's step to the pavement.

Momentarily reduced to the democracy of pedestrianism, they would lose themselves in the surging mob of passers-by—shop-girls on their way to a cinema; rural visitors shocked and thrilled with everything; keen-faced, black-haired Jews speculating on life's profits; sallow-faced, lustrous-eyed girls hungry for romance, imagining every begowned woman to be an adventuress, and every man a Prince Charming; here and there an Irish policeman, proving that his people can control any country but their own. Of such threads is woven the pattern of New York's theatre-hour on Broadway.

From sheer inability to stem the traffic, Selwyn stepped into a doorway. On the opposite side of the street a theatrical sign announced that 'Lulu' was 'the biggest, most stupendous, comedy of the season.' He wondered what constituted largeness in a comedy. Surely not the author's wit! Before he could formulate a solution of the mystery, a great overhead sign suddenly ignited with the searching question—

DO YOU CHEW SWORDSAFE'S GUM?

Hastily detaching his mind from the biggest, most stupendous, comedy of the season, he stared at the interrogation of the gum company. It suddenly disappeared, however, and then he saw that, like the goblins who chased the small boy who was lost, the business interests of New York had assumed a violent interest in his personal habits. What underwear did he buy? Did he know that Hot-door's shaving-soap was used by 76 per cent. of the entire manhood of America? There was only one place humanly conceivable where lingerie could be purchased; to prove it, the illuminated signboard promptly showed a lady in a costume usually confined to boudoirs. To equalise the immodesty of the sexes, a near male neighbour, at a height of two hundred odd feet, did an electrified turn by putting on and taking off a pair of trousers-suspenders.

DO YOU CHEW SWORDSAFE'S GUM?

That was the question. What importance could a mere war have in comparison with that? Blinking in the glare, Selwyn left the doorway and made for Madison Avenue, where Van Derwater's rooms were.

The clocks were just striking nine when he reached the number he wanted, and a negro servant led him upstairs. As Selwyn entered Van Derwater rose from his chair and greeted him with a restrained courtliness that was gentlemanly to a degree, but had an instantly chilling effect on the visitor. It was the room the owner used for lounging or reading, and the only light was the shaded one on the table.

Van Derwater had just passed thirty, but the premature thinness of his hair in front, the listless droop of his heavy shoulders, and the bluish pallor about his firm jaw contrived to make him appear older than he was. There was a kindliness in the wrinkles about his eyes, and his mouth, though solid, was not lacking in indications of intuitive understanding. It was perhaps the formality of his bearing, the stiffness of his body from the hips, that gave him the air of one who belonged by right to a past and more ceremonious age.

Although Van Derwater encouraged his guest, after the exchange of greetings, to talk of his voyage and its attendant experiences, Selwyn was aware that he was placing a cold impersonal wall between them. His old friend was interested, courteous, intellectually even cordial, but Selwyn knew he was being kept at a distance. He forced the talk to old intimacies—recalled the game when, together, they had crossed Yale's line in the closing moments of the great Rugby match—brought back a host of joint experiences, trivial in themselves, but hallowed by time.

Van Derwater remembered them all. For each one he had the slight smile of his mouth and the quizzical weariness of his eyes; but when the conversation would droop after each outburst of reminiscence, he would not make the least attempt to lift it up again. Finally, being convinced that nothing could come of so bloodless a meeting, Selwyn dropped the impersonal mask.

'I was mighty sorry,' he said, 'to hear that you and Marjory have broken off your engagement.'

'It was her wish: not mine.' Van Derwater's voice was deep and rich, but almost monotonous in its lack of inflection.

'I was talking to Forbes to-day,' went on Selwyn tenaciously. 'He had been to see Marjory.'

'Yes?'

'Marjory told him that you didn't care enough for her to go overseas. I should think she would realise that such a matter concerns you only.'

'Not a bit of it.' For the first time the other's manner showed signs of vitality. 'It means everything to her. She wants to feel that the man she marries is big enough to go and help France. I admire her for it. I wish there were more women with her character.'

Selwyn shifted his chair uneasily. 'But—I don't understand,' he stammered. 'You told her you wouldn't go.'

'Well, what of it?'

'Look here, Van,' said Selwyn vehemently; 'we have been friends for many years. I came to you to-night because my whole career is at a standstill. I want to tell you everything—I must do it—but I can't as long as you withhold your confidence. It isn't curiosity on my part—you know that. I want to bring back the old sense of understanding we once had.'

'You haven't changed,' said Van Derwater, an inscrutable smile playing about his mouth. 'You always had a habit of piercing people's moods, no matter what defence they put up. But if you want candour, I'll tell you frankly I am sorry you came here this evening. I knew that it would be difficult to keep from hurting you, and for old-times' sake I didn't want to do that. As you know, I have never made friends. You and Forbes were the nearest thing to it, and I suppose you two meant more than I would ever care to admit. You might ring the bell over your head. The fire needs more coal.'

As the negro obeyed his master's instructions and stoked the fire into vigour, the two friends sat without speaking. Selwyn was mute with apprehension of what he was to hear; the older man was dreading the words he had to utter. To certain strong natures it is more painful to inflict than to receive a wound.

'If you want my story,' resumed the host, after the servant had left the room, 'and as you are concerned you have a right to hear it, this is how it goes. I went into the diplomatic service. Then I met Marjory. I needn't say what that meant to me. For the first time, I think, I knew what living was. Shortly after came the war. At first I thought that if America remained neutral as a country, it was not up to individuals to quarrel with that attitude. Then came the Lusitania. I wanted to go over at once, but hated to suggest it to Marjory. One night, though, to my delight, the plucky little girl mentioned it herself. I hurried back to Washington and offered my resignation, but the chief urged me to remain three months longer, saying that I was absolutely necessary in the reorganisation of a certain branch of the Intelligence Division in New York. To cut the story short, months and months went on, and they refused to release me. As a matter of fact I was directing an investigation into German foreign diplomacy that was of so delicate a nature I dared not mention it to Marjory. At its conclusion I went to Washington and demanded that they let me go—I gave my exact reason. The chief said he would give me a reply in a week; but I told him that, no matter what he wrote, I would go at the expiration of that time. It was while I was waiting for the answer that Marjory said it rested with me whether or not the engagement was to be broken. I told her that I should be able to state my position in a couple of days. Well, the letter came. Perhaps you had better see it. You can read it to yourself.'

He went to his desk, and searching among the papers, produced a correspondence-form bearing an official stamp. He handed it to Selwyn.

'WASHINGTON, November 2, 1916.

'Personal and Confidential.

'MY DEAR VAN DERWATER,—As a boyhood friend of your father's I have been most anxious to accede to your request for release from your present duties. I may say that in my desire to do the fairest thing by you, I went so far as to place the facts of the matter before the President himself. He agreed with me that your services entitled you to every possible consideration; but he also pointed out that the intimate knowledge of our secret diplomacy which you have gained marks you as too valuable a man to let go lightly. I finally secured his consent, but an hour later he sent for me again. It was to talk over a new enemy that has arisen in this fight of the present administration to weld the conflicting elements of our nation into a single-thinking whole. I refer to the ultra-pacifist section which has grown so large recently.

'You told me once that you knew this fellow, Austin Selwyn. I am sorry to set friend against friend, but his influence over the cultured and pacifist elements has to be met sternly and at once. We cannot take personal action against him, because he is within his rights as a citizen of a neutral country; but nevertheless his writings are proving a strong disrupting force—stronger, in fact, than many of the clumsier methods employed by subjects of belligerent nations.

'Word has reached us that in all probability this nation will be faced shortly with the most momentous decision of the war. Therefore I must insist that you take charge of the anti-disruptionist propaganda. I shall be in New York next Wednesday, and will discuss with you the methods by which we can stem the tide of disloyal pacificism as exemplified by this man Selwyn.

'We have no hold over you, my boy; but in the name of this great Republic which is struggling against such odds for unification of her national life, I bid you remain at your post. I know that the son of my old friend Colonel Van Derwater will not question an order.—Yours faithfully,

A. WALTER GALLEY.'

As Selwyn finished the letter, a flush swept into his cheeks and his jaw stiffened with his old fighting mannerism.

'This is infamous!' he cried hotly. 'Do you accuse me of disloyalty to my own country?'

'I do,' said Van Derwater calmly.

Selwyn's fists clenched with fury. 'Van,' he said, his voice quivering with suppressed passion, 'I may have been blind—I can see where I have injured you and many others—but when you or Galley say that I have been trying to disrupt America, you lie. There is no one more passionately devoted to his country than I.'

'Which is your country?' said Van Derwater.

Through the dim light of the room the eyes of the two men met. Selwyn's were blazing like hot coals; Van Derwater's were cold and steely.

'What have I done,' said Selwyn, twice checking himself before he could trust his voice, 'but tried to show that war is wrong—that men without quarrel are killing each other now—that every nation has contributed to this terrible thing by its ignorance? What is there in that which merits the name of traitor?'

Van Derwater shrugged his shoulders, and taking a book from the table, idly studied its cover. 'Since the war began,' he said, his tones calm and low, 'the United States has been trying to speak with one voice, the voice of a united people. It was the plain duty of every American to aid the Administration in that. Instead, what have we found? Pro-Germans plotting outrage, and pro-Britishers casting slurs; conspiracy, political blackmailing, financial pressure—everywhere she has looked, this country has found within her borders the factors of disruption. We have fought them all. We have refused to be bullied or cajoled into choosing a false national destiny. At the moment that we seem to have accomplished something—with Europe looking to us for the final decision that must come—you, and others of your kind, contrive to poison the great educated, decent-thinking class that we always thought secure. Your cry of "Peace—peace—at any price let us have peace," has done its work. Consciously or unconsciously, Austin, you have been a traitor.'

Selwyn rose furiously to his feet. 'This is the end of our friendship,' he said, with his voice almost choking, and his shoulders chafing under the passion which possessed him. 'Your chief has chosen to name me as a reason for keeping you in America, and so it is I who have come between you and Marjory. For that I am sorry. But when you question my loyalty to America—that is the finish.'

Van Derwater had also risen to his feet and with the utmost courtesy listened to Selwyn's outburst. More than ever there was a mystic atmosphere of the Past in his bearing. He might have been a diplomat of the sixteenth century bidding adieu to a thwarted enemy plenipotentiary.

'Austin,' he said, with the merest inclination of his head, and his arms hanging wearily by his sides, 'we live in difficult times.'

With an angry gesture, Selwyn left the room, and taking his coat and hat from the negro, went again into the street.

Closing his study door, Van Derwater moved slowly to his chair, and lifting his book, opened it. For a long time he gazed at the open page without reading a line. 'Difficult times,' he murmured.

III.

Still in the grip of uncontrollable fury, Selwyn stamped his way through the streets. Colliding heavily with a passer-by, he turned and cursed him for his clumsiness. He cherished a mad desire to return to Van Derwater's rooms and force an apology by violence. He had expected criticism, reproach, even abuse; but that any man should brand him treasonous! . . .

He spat into the gutter, and a sound that was almost a snarl escaped from his throat. He stopped, irresolute, and the wound in his head burst into a violent pain. He leaned against a post until the agony had passed, and once more he made for Broadway. At the sight of his face glowing-red with passion, girls tittered and men drew aside.

Crossing the road, he stood to let a street-car pass, its covered wheels giving an odd resemblance to an armoured car, when an extra burst of light made him look up.

It was the gum advertisement again.



CHAPTER XXI.

A NIGHT IN JANUARY.

I.

Next morning, when Selwyn left his hotel, a few desultory snowflakes were falling through the air, and moistly expiring on the asphalt pavements. It lacked a few minutes of nine, and the thousands who man the machinery of New York's business were hurrying to their appointed places. People who had to catch trains were hurrying to stations; and people who had nowhere to go were hurrying still faster. Taxi-cabs were rushing people across the city; and other taxi-cabs were rushing them back again. The overhead railway was rattling and roaring its noisy way; the surface cars were clattering and clanging through the traffic; and every half-minute the subways were belching up cargoes of toilers into the open air.

New York was in a hurry.

All night the great engine of a million parts had lain idle, but morning was the signal that every wheel must leap into action again, driven by the inexhaustible army of human souls. Hurry, noise, clamour, greed, fever, progress. . . . Another day had dawned!

Crossing Broadway to reach Fourth Avenue, Selwyn could not repress a smile at the stricken glory of the great Midway. The illuminated signs that had searched the secret crevices of the mind, and had aided the iridescent foam seen from the harbour, looked tawdry and vulgar, like a circus on a rainy morning. Even the theatres, with their sign-borne superlatives, were garish and illusion-shattering. There was almost an apologetic air about the bill-boards proclaiming their nightly offering to be the 'biggest ever.'

Selwyn began to resent that word 'biggest.' One of the sad things about America is that she started out to make language her slave—only to find that it is becoming her master.

Entering a great office-building, he consulted the directory-board, and was swooped up to the twenty-fourth floor in a non-stop elevator. Finding the room of his literary agent, he went in, but a young lady told him Mr. Lyons was in Chicago.

'It doesn't matter,' said Selwyn. 'I shall see him when he returns. But I want a couple of addresses. Have you the file of letters to me? Austin Selwyn is my name.'

The young lady was gratifyingly flustered at the announcement, and by her haste to produce the required letters indicated the esteem in which her employer held the author.

'It was early last September,' said he. 'Mr. Lyons mentioned two names: a Mr. Schneider, who purchased the foreign rights of my stuff; and some one who wanted me to lecture—yes, that is the letter. Could you give me the addresses of these gentlemen?'

She wrote them on a card and gave it to him. 'Mr. J. V. Schneider,' she said, 'is in the Standard Exchange Building, just one block below here; and Mr. C. B. Benjamin is on 28th Street, in the United Manufacturing Corporation.'

Thanking her for her courtesy, Selwyn left the office, and going directly to Mr. Schneider's place of business, sent in his card. He was ushered through a large room where a dozen typewriters were clicking noisily, and reaching the private office of Mr. Schneider, found himself in the presence of a small, crafty-faced man, whose oily smile and air of deference did not harmonise with his eyes, which were as shifty and gleaming as those of a rat. He shook hands with his visitor, and then clawed at the papers on his desk with moist fingers that were abnormally long.

'Vell, Mister Selvyn,' said Mr. Schneider gutturally, 'to vot do I attribute dis honour? Have a cigar—sit down.'

'May I break the rule of your office?' said the author, indicating a sign on the wall which read: 'NIX ON THE WAR.' 'If you will be so kind, I want to speak of matters not far removed from that subject.'

Mr. Schneider shifted his cigar to the corner of his mouth, and laughed immoderately.

'Ha, ha, ha!' he roared, leaning forward, and thrusting a long, dirty finger into Selwyn's chest. 'That is vot I call mine adjustable creed. For most peoples vot gom' here—Nix. But for fine fellers like you'——

With a greasy chuckle, he mounted his chair and turned the sign about. On the reverse side there was a coat-of-arms, and the words: 'DEUTSCHLAND UeBER ALLES.'

'Vot you tink?' grinned Mr. Schneider, speaking from the altitude of the chair. 'Goot, ugh?' He turned the thing about and stepped down again, wringing his hands in huge enjoyment of the whole thing. 'You can spik blainly, Mister Selvyn,' he went on amiably. 'Ve unnerstan' each odder, hein? Von't you smoke one of dem cigars?'

'No,' said Selwyn. He looked at the little man for about ten seconds, then, crossing to the wall, wrenched the sign away, nail and all.

'Here, here,' protested Mr. Schneider, backing warily to the door, 'vot for you do dis? Vot you mean, you great big fourflusher?'

The young man eyed the sign and then the German's head, apparently with the idea of bringing them together. Mr. Schneider further developed his plan of retreat by taking a grasp of the door-handle.

'That's for people who say "Nix on the War,"' said Selwyn, breaking the sign in his hands as if it were made of matchwood. 'And this is for your damned Deutschland!'

He broke the remainder over his knee, and threw the pieces on the flat desk, upsetting an ink-bottle, the contents of which dripped juicily to the floor.

'But ain't you,' said Mr. Schneider, in a voice that was almost a squeal—'don't you got no resbect for Chermany? Only yesterday der ambassador, he tole me that after the var, for all you wrote to help der Faderland, der Kaiser, himself, vill on you bestow'——

Before the speaker could acquaint the author with the exact nature of the honour in store for him, Selwyn had seized him by the coat-lapels, and was shaking him so violently that Mr. Schneider's natural talent for double-facedness was developed to a pitch where an observant looker-on might have counted at least five of him vibrating at once.

'You dirty little hound,' said Selwyn, without relaxing in the least the shaking process, 'if you ever use my name again, or send out anything written, or supposed to be written, by me, I'll'——

For once words failed him, and lifting the little man almost off the floor, he deposited him violently on his own desk, in the midst of the pool formed by the ink.

'Nix on the war!' snorted Selwyn defiantly, putting on his hat. He was going to add a few more crushing remarks, but, altering his mind, went out, slamming the door so violently that all the typewriters engaged in sending out German propaganda were startled into an instant of silence.

As for Mr. Schneider, he sat still amidst the wreck of his desk, pondering over a famous definition of war given by an American general named Sherman.

II.

Without waiting to catch the driver's eye, the impetuous idealist overtook an empty taxi-cab, and jumped into it.

'United Manufacturing, 28th Street,' he called. 'Make it fast.'

On arrival at his destination he found that Mr. C. B. Benjamin was the president of the United Manufacturing Corporation, which—so a large calendar stated—was the biggest business of its kind in the universe. It had more branches, more output, more character, more push than any other three enterprises in America.

Mr. Benjamin was in, but could be seen only by appointment, so said a sleek-haired young man of immaculate dress.

'Give him that card, and tell him I want to see him at once,' said Selwyn, with a forcefulness that caused a look of pain to cross the young man's countenance.

'Please sit down,' he said, 'and I'll see what I can do.'

As a result of his efforts, Selwyn received a summons to go right in—which he did, going past a number of people who had various big propositions to put before the big man when they could gain his ear.

'Good-morning, Mr. Selwyn,' said the president, a smartly dressed Jew, with a shrewd face and an unquestionable dignity of manner. 'You have returned to America, I see.'

'Yes, Mr. Benjamin. Do you mind if I come right down to business?'

'Mind? How else could I have built up the United Manufacturing Corporation? Have a cigar?'

'No, thanks. Mr. Benjamin, you wrote my agent that you wanted me to lecture on the fallacy of war.'

'Sure,' said the president.

'May I ask why?'

Mr. Benjamin removed his spectacles and wiped them carefully. Putting them on, he surveyed his visitor through them. After that he took them off again, and winked confidentially. 'Mr. Selwyn,' he chuckled, 'you ain't a child, and I see that I can't put over any sob stuff with you. I told your agent I would pay him real money for you to lecture. Well, take it from me, when the president of the United Manufacturing Corporation pays out any of his greenbacks he don't expect nothing for something, eh?'

'I don't understand you—yet,' said Selwyn quietly.

Mr. Benjamin leaned back in his swivel-chair and cut the end of a cigar with a little silver knife. 'Business,' he said, 'is business, eh?'

'Agreed,' was the terse response. 'I am still waiting to know why you offered your money to me.'

Mr. Benjamin leaned forward, and taking up his glasses, waved them hypnotically at the young man. 'Simply business,' he said. 'Same with you—same with me. You write all this dope against war—why? Because you know there's big money in it. I pay you to lecture because you can help to keep America out of the war. In 1913 I was worth two hundred thousand dollars. To-day I have ten million. We are wise men, Mr. Selwyn, both of us. While all the rest of the peoples fight, you and I make money.'

As if his bones were aching with fatigue, Austin Selwyn rose wearily to his feet, and, without comment, walked slowly out of the office. But the clerks noticed that his face was ashy-pale, like that of a prisoner who has received the maximum sentence of the law.

III.

The days that followed were the bitterest Austin Selwyn had ever known.

It is not in the plan of the Great Dramatist that men shall look on life and not play a part. It is true that there are a few who escape the call-boy's summons, and gaze on human existence much as a passing pageant, but even for them is the knowledge that there is a moment called Death when every man must take the stage.

For years Austin Selwyn had stood apart, mingling with those who were enduring the sword-thrusts of fate, as an author chats with the players on the stage between the acts. Even the great tragedy of war had served only to enrich the processes of his mind. It is true he had known compassion, sorrow, and anger through it, but they were only counterfeit emotions, born of the grip of war on his imagination.

But at last life had reached out its talons and grasped him. Every human experience he had avoided, he was now to know, multiplied. Stripped of his last hope of justifying his idealism, he saw remorse, discouragement, a sense of utter futility, the scorn of friends, the applause of traitors—he saw them all as shadows closing into blackness ahead of him.

He tried to return to England, but passport difficulties were made insurmountable. He went to Boston, only to find that those he valued turned against him, and those he detested welcomed him as comrade. He returned to New York, but every avenue of activity was closed to him, save the one he had chosen for himself—that of world-pacificism.

He had always been a man of strong, underlying passions, and in his veins there was the hot undissipated blood of youth; but his brain had been the controlling force in every action of his life. Hitherto he had never questioned its complete mastery; but as he pondered over his fall he knew that it was his brain that had ridden him to it. He no longer trusted its workings. It had proved rebel and brought him to disaster.

And with that inner challenge came the supreme ordeal of his life.

As rivers, held imprisoned by winter, will burst their confines in the spring and overrun the land, all the passions which had been cooled and tempered by his intellectual discipline swarmed through his arteries in revolt. No longer was the brain dominating the body; instead, he was on fire with a hundred mad flames of desire, springing from sources he knew nothing of. They clung to him by day and haunted him at night. They sang to him that vice had its own heaven, as well as hell—that licentiousness held forgetfulness. He heard whispers in the air that there were drugs which opened perfumed caves of delight, and secret places where sin was made beautiful with mystic music and incense of flowers.

When conscience—or whatever it is in us that combats desire—urged him to close his ears to the voices, he cursed it for a meddlesome thing. Since Life had thrown down the gauntlet, he would take it up! If he had to travel the chambers of disgrace and discouragement, he would go on to the halls of sensual abandonment. Life had torn aside the curtain—it was for him to search the recesses of experience.

IV.

One night towards the end of January Selwyn had tried to sleep, but the furies of desire called to him in the dark. He got up and dressed. He did not know where he was going, but he knew that his steps would be guided to adventure, to oblivion.

There was a drizzling rain falling, and, with his coat buttoned close about his throat, he walked from street to street, his breath quickening with the ecstasy of sensual surrender which had at last come to him. Men spoke to him from dark corners; women called at him as he passed; he caught faint glimmers down murky alleys, where opium was opening the gates to bliss and perdition; but, with a step that was agile and graceful, he went on, his arteries tingling in anticipation of the senses' gratification. Once a mongrel slunk out of a lane, and he called to it. It crawled up to him, and he stooped down to stroke its head, when, with a yelp of terror, it leaped out of his reach and ran back into the lane. As if it was the best of jests, he laughed aloud, and picking up a stone, sent it hurtling after the cur. Then he was suddenly afraid. The loneliness of the spot—the horrors lurking in the dark—the dog's howl and his own meaningless laughter. He felt a fear of night—of himself. He hurried on, but it was not until he reached a lighted street of shops that his courage returned, and with the courage his fever of desire, greater than before.

An extra burst of rain warned him to seek shelter, and hurrying down the street, he paused under the canopy of a shabby theatre. There was one other person there—a woman. She came over to speak to him; but when she saw the mad gleam of his eyes she drew back, and, with a frightened exclamation, pressed her hand against her breast.

He made an ironic bow, then, with a smile, looked up at her, and she heard him utter an ejaculation of amazement.

For a moment he had fancied that it might be true. The likeness was uncanny! The burnished-copper hair, the silk-fringed eyes, the poise of her head, the tapering fingers—even in the scarlet of her rouged cheeks, there was a similarity to the high colouring of the English girl. What a jest of the Fates—that they should cast this poor creature of New York's streets in the same mould with her who was the very spirit of chastity!

'What a mockery!' he muttered aloud. 'What a hideous mockery!'

He was touched with sudden pity. Perhaps this woman had been born with the same spirit of rebellion as Elise. Perhaps her poor mind had never been developed, and so she had succumbed to the current of circumstance. She might have been the plaything of environment. The wound in his head was hurting again, and he covered the scar with his moist hand. Horrible as it seemed, this creature had brought Elise to him once more—Elise, and everything she meant. He wanted to cry out her name. His hands were stretched forward as if they could bridge the sea between them.

Like a man emerging from a trance, he looked dreamily about him—at the street running with streams of water—at the silent theatre—at the woman. A weakness came over him, and his pulses were fluttering and unsteady.

A peddler of umbrellas passed, and Selwyn purchased one for a dollar.

'Won't you take this?' he asked, stepping over to the woman, who cringed nervously. 'It is raining hard, and you will need it.'

She took the thing, and looked up at him wonderingly, like a child that has received a caress where it expected a blow.

'Say,' she said, in a queer nasal whine, 'I thought you was a devil when I seen you a minute ago. Honest—you frightened me.'

He said nothing.

'Why'—there was a weak quaver in her whine, and she caught his wrist with her hand—'why, you're kind—and I thought you was a devil. Gee! ain't it funny?'

With a shrill laugh that set his teeth on edge, she put up the umbrella and walked out into the rain. And only a passing policeman saw, by the light of a lamp, that her eyes were glistening.

Selwyn remained where he was, blinking stupidly into the rain-soaked night, as one who has been walking in his sleep and has waked at the edge of an abyss.



CHAPTER XXII.

THE CHALLENGE.

I.

It was nearly noon next day before Selwyn woke from a heavy, dreamless sleep. Both in mind and in body there was the listlessness which follows the passing of a crisis, but for the first time in many days he felt the impulse to face life again, to accept its bludgeonings, unflinching.

He was almost fully dressed, when a messenger arrived with a letter. It was from Edgerton Forbes.

'MY DEAR AUSTIN,—I have been trying to get hold of you for the past week, but you are as elusive as a hundred-dollar bill. Douglas Watson has returned from the front, minus an arm, and he has asked as many ex-Harvard men as possible to meet him at the University Club. We are having dinner there to-night in one of the smaller rooms, and I want you to come with me. I'll pick you up at your hotel at seven, and we can walk over. If it is all right, send word by the messenger.—As ever, FORBES.'

Selwyn's first instinct was to refuse. He had no desire to meet Watson again just yet, nor did he want to face men with whom he had lived at Harvard. But the thought of another lonely night arose—night, with its germs of madness.

'Tell Mr. Forbes,' he said, 'that I shall expect him at seven.'

A few minutes before the time arranged the clergyman called, and they started for the club. The air was raw and chilling, and people were hurrying through the streets, taking no heed of the illuminated shop windows, tempting the eye of woman and the purse of man. In almost every towering building the lights of offices were gleaming, as tired, routine-chained staffs worked on into the night tabulating and recording the ever-increasing prosperity of the times.

The times!

Ordinary forms of greeting had changed to mutual congratulations on affluence. Anecdotes of business men were no longer of struggle and privation, but of record outputs and maximum prices. Theatres, cafes, cinema palaces, churches, hotels—they had never seen such times. Success was in the very dampness of the air as thousands of people looked at it from the cosy interior of limousines, people who had never aspired higher than an occasional taxi-cab. The times! Dollars multiplied and begat great families of dollars—and Broadway glittered as never before.

It is difficult to state what trend of thought made conversation between the friends difficult, but after two or three desultory attempts they walked on without speaking. As they were entering the majestic portals of the club, Selwyn was reminded of a question he had intended all day to ask.

'Edge,' he said, 'have you heard anything of Marjory Shoreham?'

'She sailed two weeks ago for France,' answered the clergyman.

They were directed to an upper floor, where they found a hundred or so guests who claimed Harvard as their alma mater. Although most of his old acquaintances were quite cordial, Selwyn felt oddly self-conscious. He caught sight of Gerard Van Derwater with his impassive courtliness dominating a group of active but less impressive men; and behind them he saw Douglas Watson of Cambridge surrounded by a dozen guests; but he pleaded a headache to Forbes, and sought a secluded corner, where he remained until dinner was announced.

Like all affairs where men are alone and the charming artifices of femininity are missing, there was a severity and a formality which did not disappear until the ministrations of wine and food had engendered a glow which did away with shyness. The table was arranged in the form of the letter U, with Watson beside the chairman at the head.

Towards the end of the dinner conversation and hilarity were growing apace. Men were forgetting the scramble of existence in the recollection of old college days, when their blood was like wine and the world a thing of adventure. Mellowed by retrospect, they laughed over incidents that had caused heart-burnings at the time; and as they laughed more than one felt a swelling of the throat. It was, perhaps, just an odd streak of sentiment (and the man who is without such is a sorry spectacle); or it may have been the memory of ideals, aspirations, dreams—left behind the college gates.

'Gentlemen.' The chairman had risen to his feet. Cigars were lit; and he was greeted with the usual applause. 'Gentlemen, we have gathered here at short notice to welcome an old boy of Harvard—Douglas Watson. He has a message which he wants to deliver to us, and not only because he is one with us in tradition would we listen, but his empty sleeve is a mute testimony that he has fought in a cause which—though not our own—is one which I know has the sympathy of every man in this room. I shall not detain you, gentlemen, but ask your most attentive hearing for Mr. Watson.'

As the guest of the evening rose to speak he was greeted with prolonged applause, which broke into 'For he's a jolly good fellow,' and ended in a college football yell. During it Selwyn sat motionless, his alert mind trying to decipher the difference between Watson's face and the others. It was not only that they were, almost without exception, clean-shaven, and that Watson wore a small military moustache; the dissimilarity went beyond that. Although he was obviously nervous, Watson's eyes looked steadily ahead as those of a man who has faced death and looked on things that never were intended for human vision. It had left him aged—not aged as with years, but by an experience which made all the keen-faced men about him seem clever precocities whose mentalities had outstripped the growth of their souls.

And studying this phenomenon, Selwyn became conscious of the American business face.

Although differing in colouring and shape, practically every face showed lips thin and straight, eyes narrowing and restlessly on the qui vive, the nervous, muscular tension from the battle for supremacy in feverish competition, the dull, leaden complexion of those who disregard the sunshine—these combined in a clear impression of extraordinary abilities and capacities with which to meet the affairs of the day. What one missed in all their faces was a sense of the centuries.

No—not in all. At the table opposite to Selwyn was Gerard Van Derwater, whose self-composure and air of formal courtliness made him, as always, a man of distinctive, almost lonely, personality.

'Thank you very much,' said Watson, as the applause and singing died away. His fingers pressed nervously on the table, and his first words were uneven and jerky. 'I needn't tell you I am not a speaker. I have a great message for you chaps, but I may not be able to express it. That was my reason for asking to speak to ex-Harvard men. I did it because I knew I should have men who thought as I did—men who looked on things in the same way as myself. I knew you would be patient with me, and I was certain you would give an answer to the question which I bring from France.'

He paused momentarily, and shifted his position, but his face had gained in determination. A few of his listeners encouraged him audibly, but the remainder waited to see what lay behind the intensity of his manner.

'I don't want pity for my wound,' he resumed. 'The soldier who comes out of this war with only the loss of an arm is lucky. Put that aside. I want you to listen to me as an American who loves his country just as you do, and who once was proud to be an American.'

He raised his head defiantly, and when he spoke again, the indecision and the faltering had vanished.

'Gentlemen, the question I bring is from France to America. It is more than a question; it is a challenge. It is not sent from one Government to another Government, but from the heart of France to the conscience of America. They don't understand. Month after month the women there are seeing their sons and husbands killed, their homes destroyed, and no end in sight. And every day they are asking, "Will America never come?" My God! I've seen that question on a thousand faces of women who have lost everything but their hope in this country. I used to tell them to wait—it would come. I said it had to come. When the Hun sank the Lusitania I was glad, for at last, I told them, America would act. Do you know what the British Tommies were saying about you as we took our turn in the line and read in the papers how Wilson was conversing with Germany about that outrage? I could have killed some of them for what they said, for I was still proud of my nationality; but time went on and the French people asked "When?" and the British Tommy laughed.

'If I'm hurting any of you chaps, think of what I felt. One night behind the lines a soldiers' concert-party gave a show. Two of the comedians were gagging, and one asked the other if he knew what the French flag stood for, and he said, "Yes—liberty." His companion then asked him if he knew what the British flag stood for, and he replied, "Yes—freedom." "Then," said the first comedian, "what does the American flag stand for?" "I can't just say," said the other one, "but I know that it has stood a hell of a lot for two years." The crowd roared—officers and men alike. I wanted to get up and fight the whole outfit; but what could I have said in defence of this nation? America—our country here—has become a vulgar joke in men's mouths.'

He stopped abruptly, and poured himself out a glass of water. No one made a sound. There was hot resentment on nearly every face, but they would hear him out without interruption.

'The educated classes of England,' he went on, 'are different in their methods, but they mean the same thing. They say it is America's business to decide for herself, but the Englishman conveys what he means in his voice, not in his words. When I was hit, I swore I would come back here and find out what had changed the nation I knew in the old days into a thing too yellow to hit hack. Mr. Chairman, you said I had fought in a cause that is not yours. I beg to differ. There are hundreds of Americans fighting to-night in France. They're with the Canadians—they're with the French—they're with the British. Ask them if this cause isn't ours. I lay beside a Princeton grad. in hospital. He had been hit, serving with the Durhams. "I'm never going back to America," he said. "I couldn't stand it." As a matter of fact, he died—but I don't think you like that picture any more than I do.'

Bringing his fist down on the table with a crash, Watson leaned forward, and with flashing eyes poured out a stream of words in which reproach, taunts, accusations, and pleading were weirdly mixed. He told them they should remove the statue of Liberty and substitute one of Pontius Pilate. In a voice choking with emotion, he asked what they had done with the soul left them by the Fathers of the Republic. He pictured the British troops holding on with nothing but their indomitable cheeriness, and dying as if it were the greatest of jokes. In one sentence he visualised Arras with refugees fleeing from it, and New York glittering with prosperity. With no relevancy other than that born of his tempestuous sincerity, he thrust his words at them with a ring and an incision as though he were in the midst of an engagement.

'That is all,' he said when he had spoken for twenty minutes. 'In the name of those Americans who have died with the Allies, in the name of the Lusitania's murdered, in the name of civilisation, I ask, What have you done with America's soul?'

He sat down amidst a strained silence. Everywhere men's faces were twitching with repressed fury. Some were livid, and others bit their lips to keep back the hot words that clamoured for utterance. The chairman made no attempt to rise, but by a subconscious unanimity of thought every eye was turned to the one man whose appearance had undergone no change. As if he had been listening to the legal presentation of an impersonal case, Gerard Van Derwater leaned back in his chair with the same courtly detachment he had shown from the beginning of the affair.

II.

'Mr. Van Derwater,' said the chairman hoarsely; and a murmur indicated that he had voiced the wish of the gathering.

Slowly, almost ponderously, the diplomat rose, bowing to the chairman and then to Watson, who was looking straight ahead, his face flushed crimson.

'Mr. Chairman—Mr. Watson—Gentlemen,' said Van Derwater. He stroked his chin meditatively, and looked calmly about as though leisurely recalling a titbit of anecdote or quotation. 'Our friend from overseas has not erred on the side of subterfuge. He has been frank—excellently frank. He has told us that this Republic has become a jest, and that we are responsible. I assume from several of your faces that you are not pleased with the truth. Surely you did not need Mr. Watson to tell you what they are saying in England and France. That has been obvious—unpleasantly obvious—and, I suppose, obviously unpleasant.'

He smiled with a little touch of irony, and leaning forward, flicked the ash from his cigar on to a plate.

'Mr. Watson,' he resumed, 'has asked what we have done with America's soul. That is a telling phrase, and I should like to meet it with an equally telling one; but this is not a matter of phraseology, but of the deepest thought. Gentlemen, if you will, look back with me over the brief history of this Republic. There are great truths hidden in the Past.

'In 1778 Monsieur Turgot wrote that America was the hope of the human race—that the earth could see consolation in the thought of the asylum at last open to the down-trodden of all nations. Three years later the Abbe Taynals, writing of the American Revolution, said: "At the sound of the snapping chains our own fetters seem to grow lighter, and we imagine for a moment that the air we breathe grows purer at the news that the universe counts some tyrants the less." Ten years after that the editor Prudhomme declared: "Philosophy and America have brought about the French Revolution."

'I will not weary you, gentlemen, with further extracts, but I ask you to note—and this is something which many of our public men have forgotten to-day—that at the very commencement of our career we were inextricably involved with European affairs. Entangling alliances—no! But segregation—impossible!'

For an instant his cold, academic manner was galvanised into emphasis. His listeners, who were still smarting under Watson's words, and had been restless at the unimpassioned tone of Van Derwater's reply, began to feel the grip of his slowly developing logic.

'Thus,' the speaker went on, 'at the commencement, our national destiny became a thing dominated by the philosophy of humanitarianism. When we had shed our swaddling-clothes and taken form as a people, the issue of the North and the South began to rise. Because of his realisation of the part America had to play in human affairs, Lincoln, the great-hearted Lincoln, said we must have war. Against the counsel of his Cabinet, loathing everything that had to do with bloodshed, this man of the people declared that there could be no North or South, but only America. And to secure that he plunged this country into a four years' war—four years of untold suffering and terrible bravery. When, during the struggle, Lincoln was informed that peace could be had by dropping the question of the slaves' emancipation, his answer was the proclamation that all men were free. With his great heart bleeding, he said, "The war must go on." Philosophy and America brought on the French Revolution. Philosophy and humanitarianism brought on the war of North and South.

'The psychology of America, which had been hidden beneath the physical side of our rebellion, took definite form as a result. The gates of the country were open to the entire world. The down-trodden, the persecuted, the discouraged, the helpless, no matter of what creed or nationality, saw the rainbow of hope. By hundreds of thousands they poured into this country. Slav and Teuton, Galician, Italian, Belgian, Jew, in an endless stream they came to America, and, true to Washington and Lincoln, she received them with the words, "Welcome—free men." And so we shouldered the burdens of the Past, and men who had been slaves—white as well as black—drank of freedom.'

There was no applause, but men were leaning forward, afraid they might miss a single word. Van Derwater's depth of human understanding, his lack of passion, his solitariness that had been likened to an air of impending tragedy, held his listeners with a magic no one could have explained. He might have come as a spirit of times that had passed, so charged with the ages was his strange, powerful personality.

'From an open sky,' he continued, 'came the present war. The older nations, knit by tradition and startled by its imminence, flew to arms at a word from their leaders. France, who had been our friend, looked to us; but what was our position? In fifty tongues our citizens cried out that it was to escape war that they had come to America. Could we tell the Jew that Russia, which had persecuted him to the point of madness, was on the side of mercy? Could we convince the Teuton that his Fatherland had become suddenly peopled with savages? Could we say to the Irishman, bitterly antagonistic to England, that Britain was fighting for the liberation of small nations? Could we ask the Greek, the Pole, the Galician, to go back to the continent from which they had come, and give their blood that the old order of things might go on?