So Pierre Thierry told her all he knew. They were preparing despatches he was at once to carry back to the General Staff, and, for the moment, his time was his own. How could he better employ it than in talking of the war with a patriotic and charming French woman?
In consequence Marie acquired a mass of facts, gossip, and guesses. From these she mentally selected such information as, to her employers across the Aisne, would be of vital interest.
And to rid herself of Thierry and on the fourth floor seek Anfossi was now her only wish. But, in attempting this, by the return of the adjutant she was delayed. To Thierry the adjutant gave a sealed envelope.
“Thirty-one, Boulevard des Invalides,” he said. With a smile he turned to Marie. “And you will accompany him!”
“I!” exclaimed Marie. She was sick with sudden terror.
But the tolerant smile of the adjutant reassured her.
“The count, your husband,” he explained, “has learned of your detention here by the enemy, and he has besieged the General Staff to have you convoyed safely to Paris.” The adjutant glanced at a field telegram he held open in his hand. “He asks,” he continued, “that you be permitted to return in the car of his friend, Captain Thierry, and that on arriving you join him at the Grand Hotel.”
Thierry exclaimed with delight.
“But how charming!” he cried. “To-night you must both dine with me at La Rue’s.” He saluted his superior officer. “Some petrol, sir,” he said. “And I am ready.” To Marie he added: “The car will be at the steps in five minutes.” He turned and left them.
The thoughts of Marie, snatching at an excuse for delay, raced madly. The danger of meeting the Count d’Aurillac, her supposed husband, did not alarm her. The Grand Hotel has many exits, and, even before they reached it, for leaving the car she could invent an excuse that the gallant Thierry would not suspect. But what now concerned her was how, before she was whisked away to Paris, she could convey to Anfossi the information she had gathered from Thierry. First, of a woman overcome with delight at being reunited with her husband she gave an excellent imitation; then she exclaimed in distress: “But my aunt, Madame Benet!” she cried. “I cannot leave her!”
“The Sisters of St. Francis,” said the adjutant, “arrive within an hour to nurse the wounded. They will care also for your aunt.”
Marie concealed her chagrin. “Then I will at once prepare to go,” she said.
The adjutant handed her a slip of paper. “Your laissez-passer to Paris,” he said. “You leave in five minutes, madame!”
As temporary hostess of the chateau Marie was free to visit any part of it, and as she passed her door a signal from Madame Benet told her that Anfossi was on the fourth floor, that he was at work, and that the coast was clear. Softly, in the felt slippers she always wore, as she explained, in order not to disturb the wounded, she mounted the staircase. In her hand she carried the housekeeper’s keys, and as an excuse it was her plan to return with an armful of linen for the arriving Sisters. But Marie never reached the top of the stairs. When her eyes rose to the level of the fourth floor she came to a sudden halt. At what she saw terror gripped her, bound her hand and foot, and turned her blood to ice.
At her post for an instant Madame Benet had slept, and an officer of the staff, led by curiosity, chance, or suspicion, had, unobserved and unannounced, mounted to the fourth floor. When Marie saw him he was in front of the room that held the wireless. His back was toward her, but she saw that he was holding the door to the room ajar, that his eye was pressed to the opening, and that through it he had pushed the muzzle of his automatic. What would be the fate of Anfossi Marie knew. Nor did she for an instant consider it. Her thoughts were of her own safety; that she might live.
Not that she might still serve the Wilhelmstrasse, the Kaiser, or the Fatherland; but that she might live. In a moment Anfossi would be denounced, the chateau would ring with the alarm, and, though she knew Anfossi would not betray her, by others she might be accused. To avert suspicion from herself she saw only one way open. She must be the first to denounce Anfossi.
Like a deer, she leaped down the marble stairs and, in a panic she had no need to assume, burst into the presence of the staff.
“Gentlemen!” she gasped, “my servant–the chauffeur–Briand is a spy! There is a German wireless in the chateau. He is using it! I have seen him.” With exclamations, the officers rose to their feet. General Andre alone remained seated. General Andre was a veteran of many Colonial wars: Cochin-China, Algiers, Morocco. The great war, when it came, found him on duty in the Intelligence Department. His aquiline nose, bristling white eyebrows, and flashing, restless eyes gave him his nickname of l’Aigle.
In amazement, the flashing eyes were now turned upon Marie. He glared at her as though he thought she suddenly had flown mad.
“A German wireless!” he protested. “It is impossible!”
“I was on the fourth floor,” panted Marie, “collecting linen for the Sisters. In the room next to the linen-closet I heard a strange buzzing sound. I opened the door softly. I saw Briand with his back to me seated by an instrument. There were receivers clamped to his ears! My God! The disgrace! The disgrace to my husband and to me, who vouched for him to you!” Apparently in an agony of remorse, the fingers of the woman laced and interlaced. “I cannot forgive myself!”
The officers moved toward the door, but General Andre halted them. Still in a tone of incredulity, he demanded: “When did you see this?”
Marie knew the question was coming, knew she must explain how she saw Briand, and yet did not see the staff officer who, with his prisoner, might now at any instant appear. She must make it plain she had discovered the spy and left the upper part of the house before the officer had visited it. When that was she could not know, but the chance was that he had preceded her by only a few minutes.
“When did you see this?” repeated the general.
“But just now,” cried Marie; “not ten minutes since.”
“Why did you not come to me at once?”
“I was afraid,” replied Marie. “If I moved I was afraid he might hear me, and he, knowing I would expose him, would kill me-and so escape you!” There was an eager whisper of approval. For silence, General Andre slapped his hand upon the table.
“Then,” continued Marie, “I understood with the receivers on his ears he could not have heard me open the door, nor could he hear me leave, and I ran to my aunt. The thought that we had harbored such an animal sickened me, and I was weak enough to feel faint. But only for an instant. Then I came here.” She moved swiftly to the door. “Let me show you the room,” she begged; “you can take him in the act.” Her eyes, wild with the excitement of the chase, swept the circle. “Will you come?” she begged.
Unconscious of the crisis he interrupted, the orderly on duty opened the door.
“Captain Thierry’s compliments,” he recited mechanically, “and is he to delay longer for Madame d’Aurillac?”
With a sharp gesture General Andre waved Marie toward the door. Without rising, he inclined his head. “Adieu, madame,” he said. “We act at once upon your information. I thank you!”
As she crossed from the hall to the terrace, the ears of the spy were assaulted by a sudden tumult of voices. They were raised in threats and curses. Looking back, she saw Anfossi descending the stairs. His hands were held above his head; behind him, with his automatic, the staff officer she had surprised on the fourth floor was driving him forward. Above the clinched fists of the soldiers that ran to meet him, the eyes of Anfossi were turned toward her. His face was expressionless. His eyes neither accused nor reproached. And with the joy of one who has looked upon and then escaped the guillotine, Marie ran down the steps to the waiting automobile. With a pretty cry of pleasure she leaped into the seat beside Thierry. Gayly she threw out her arms. “To Paris!” she commanded. The handsome eyes of Thierry, eloquent with admiration, looked back into hers. He stooped, threw in the clutch, and the great gray car, with the machine gun and its crew of privates guarding the rear, plunged through the park.
“To Paris!” echoed Thierry.
In the order in which Marie had last seen them, Anfossi and the staff officer entered the room of General Andre, and upon the soldiers in the hall the door was shut. The face of the staff officer was grave, but his voice could not conceal his elation.
“My general,” he reported, “I found this man in the act of giving information to the enemy. There is a wireless-“
General Andre rose slowly. He looked neither at the officer nor at his prisoner. With frowning eyes he stared down at the maps upon his table.
“I know,” he interrupted. “Some one has already told me.” He paused, and then, as though recalling his manners, but still without raising his eyes, he added: “You have done well, sir.”
In silence the officers of the staff stood motionless. With surprise they noted that, as yet, neither in anger nor curiosity had General Andre glanced at the prisoner. But of the presence of the general the spy was most acutely conscious. He stood erect, his arms still raised, but his body strained forward, and on the averted eyes of the general his own were fixed.
In an agony of supplication they asked a question.
At last, as though against his wish, toward the spy the general turned his head, and their eyes met. And still General Andre was silent. Then the arms of the spy, like those of a runner who has finished his race and breasts the tape exhausted, fell to his sides. In a voice low and vibrant he spoke his question.
“It has been so long, sir,” he pleaded. “May I not come home?”
General Andre turned to the astonished group surrounding him. His voice was hushed like that of one who speaks across an open grave.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “my children,” he added. “A German spy, a woman, involved in a scandal your brother in arms, Henri Ravignac. His honor, he thought, was concerned, and without honor he refused to live. To prove him guiltless his younger brother Charles asked leave to seek out the woman who had betrayed Henri, and by us was detailed on secret service. He gave up home, family, friends. He lived in exile, in poverty, at all times in danger of a swift and ignoble death. In the War Office we know him as one who has given to his country services she cannot hope to reward. For she cannot return to him the years he has lost. She cannot return to him his brother. But she can and will clear the name of Henri Ravignac, and upon his brother Charles bestow promotion and honors.”
The general turned and embraced the spy. “My children,” he said, “welcome your brother. He has come home.”
Before the car had reached the fortifications, Marie Gessler had arranged her plan of escape. She had departed from the chateau without even a hand-bag, and she would say that before the shops closed she must make purchases.
Le Printemps lay in their way, and she asked that, when they reached it, for a moment she might alight. Captain Thierry readily gave permission.
From the department store it would be most easy to disappear, and in anticipation Marie smiled covertly. Nor was the picture of Captain Thierry impatiently waiting outside unamusing.
But before Le Printemps was approached, the car turned sharply down a narrow street. On one side, along its entire length, ran a high gray wall, grim and forbidding. In it was a green gate studded with iron bolts. Before this the automobile drew suddenly to a halt. The crew of the armored car tumbled off the rear seat, and one of them beat upon the green gate. Marie felt a hand of ice clutch at her throat. But she controlled herself.
“And what is this?” she cried gayly.
At her side Captain Thierry was smiling down at her, but his smile was hateful.
“It is the prison of St. Lazare,” he said. “It is not becoming,” he added sternly, “that the name of the Countess d’Aurillac should be made common as the Paris road!”
Fighting for her life, Marie thrust herself against him; her arm that throughout the journey had rested on the back of the driving-seat caressed his shoulders; her lips and the violet eyes were close to his.
“Why should you care?” she whispered fiercely. “You have me! Let the Count d’Aurillac look after the honor of his wife himself.”
The charming Thierry laughed at her mockingly.
“He means to,” he said. “I am the Count d’Aurillac!”
THE DESERTER
In Salonika, the American consul, the Standard Oil man, and the war correspondents formed the American colony. The correspondents were waiting to go to the front. Incidentally, as we waited, the front was coming rapidly toward us. There was “Uncle” Jim, the veteran of many wars, and of all the correspondents, in experience the oldest and in spirit the youngest, and there was the Kid, and the Artist. The Kid jeered at us, and proudly described himself as the only Boy Reporter who jumped from a City Hall assignment to cover a European War. “I don’t know strategy,” he would boast; “neither does the Man at Home. He wants ‘human interest’ stuff, and I give him what he wants. I write exclusively for the subway guard and the farmers in the wheat belt. When you fellows write about the ‘Situation,’ they don’t understand it. Neither do you. Neither does Venizelos or the King. I don’t understand it myself. So, I write my people heart-to-heart talks about refugees and wounded, and what kind of ploughs the Servian peasants use, and that St. Paul wrote his letters to the Thessalonians from the same hotel where I write mine; and I tell ’em to pronounce Salonika ‘eeka,’ and not put the accent on the ‘on.’ This morning at the refugee camp I found all the little Servians of the Frothingham unit in American Boy Scout uniforms. That’s my meat. That’s ‘home week’ stuff. You fellows write for the editorial page; and nobody reads it. I write for the man that turns first to Mutt and Jeff, and then looks to see where they are running the new Charlie Chaplin release. When that man has to choose between ‘our military correspondent’ and the City Hall Reporter, he chooses me!”
The third man was John, “Our Special Artist.” John could write a news story, too, but it was the cartoons that had made him famous. They were not comic page, but front page cartoons, and before making up their minds what they thought, people waited to see what their Artist thought. So, it was fortunate his thoughts were as brave and clean as they were clever. He was the original Little Brother to the Poor. He was always giving away money. When we caught him, he would prevaricate. He would say the man was a college chum, that he had borrowed the money from him, and that this was the first chance he had had to pay it back. The Kid suggested it was strange that so many of his college chums should at the same moment turn up, dead broke, in Salonika, and that half of them should be women.
John smiled disarmingly. “It was a large college,” he explained, “and coeducational.” There were other Americans; Red Cross doctors and nurses just escaped through the snow from the Bulgars, and hyphenated Americans who said they had taken out their first papers. They thought hyphenated citizens were so popular with us, that we would pay their passage to New York. In Salonika they were transients. They had no local standing. They had no local lying-down place, either, or place to eat, or to wash, although they did not look as though that worried them, or place to change their clothes. Or clothes to change. It was because we had clothes to change, and a hotel bedroom, instead of a bench in a cafe, that we were ranked as residents and from the Greek police held a “permission to sojourn.” Our American colony was a very close corporation. We were only six Americans against 300,000 British, French, Greek, and Servian soldiers, and 120,000 civilian Turks, Spanish Jews, Armenians, Persians, Egyptians, Albanians, and Arabs, and some twenty more other races that are not listed. We had arrived in Salonika before the rush, and at the Hotel Hermes on the water-front had secured a vast room. The edge of the stone quay was not forty feet from us, the only landing steps directly opposite our balcony. Everybody who arrived on the Greek passenger boats from Naples or the Piraeus, or who had shore leave from a man-of-war, transport, or hospital ship, was raked by our cameras. There were four windows–one for each of us and his work table. It was not easy to work. What was the use? The pictures and stories outside the windows fascinated us, but when we sketched them or wrote about them, they only proved us inadequate. All day long the pinnaces, cutters, gigs, steam launches shoved and bumped against the stone steps, marines came ashore for the mail, stewards for fruit and fish, Red Cross nurses to shop, tiny midshipmen to visit the movies, and the sailors and officers of the Russian, French, British, Italian, and Greek war-ships to stretch their legs in the park of the Tour Blanche, or to cramp them under a cafe table. Sometimes the ambulances blocked the quay and the wounded and frost-bitten were lifted into the motor-boats, and sometimes a squad of marines lined the landing stage, and as a coffin under a French or English flag was borne up the stone steps stood at salute. So crowded was the harbor that the oars of the boatmen interlocked.
Close to the stone quay, stretched along the three-mile circle, were the fishing smacks, beyond them, so near that the anchor chains fouled, were the passenger ships with gigantic Greek flags painted on their sides, and beyond them transports from Marseilles, Malta, and Suvla Bay, black colliers, white hospital ships, burning green electric lights, red-bellied tramps and freighters, and, hemming them in, the grim, mouse-colored destroyers, submarines, cruisers, dreadnaughts. At times, like a wall, the cold fog rose between us and the harbor, and again the curtain would suddenly be ripped asunder, and the sun would flash on the brass work of the fleet, on the white wings of the aeroplanes, on the snow-draped shoulders of Mount Olympus. We often speculated as to how in the early days the gods and goddesses, dressed as they were, or as they were not, survived the snows of Mount Olympus. Or was it only their resort for the summer?
It got about that we had a vast room to ourselves, where one might obtain a drink, or a sofa for the night, or even money to cable for money. So, we had many strange visitors, some half starved, half frozen, with terrible tales of the Albanian trail, of the Austrian prisoners fallen by the wayside, of the mountain passes heaped with dead, of the doctors and nurses wading waist-high in snow-drifts and for food killing the ponies. Some of our visitors wanted to get their names in the American papers so that the folks at home would know they were still alive, others wanted us to keep their names out of the papers, hoping the police would think them dead; another, convinced it was of pressing news value, desired us to advertise the fact that he had invented a poisonous gas for use in the trenches. With difficulty we prevented him from casting it adrift in our room. Or, he had for sale a second-hand motor-cycle, or he would accept a position as barkeeper, or for five francs would sell a state secret that, once made public, in a month would end the war. It seemed cheap at the price.
Each of us had his “scouts” to bring him the bazaar rumor, the Turkish bath rumor, the cafe rumor. Some of our scouts journeyed as far afield as Monastir and Doiran, returning to drip snow on the floor, and to tell us tales, one-half of which we refused to believe, and the other half the censor refused to pass. With each other’s visitors it was etiquette not to interfere. It would have been like tapping a private wire. When we found John sketching a giant stranger in a cap and coat of wolf skin we did not seek to know if he were an Albanian brigand, or a Servian prince incognito, and when a dark Levantine sat close to the Kid, whispering, and the Kid banged on his typewriter, we did not listen.
So, when I came in one afternoon and found a strange American youth writing at John’s table, and no one introduced us, I took it for granted he had sold the Artist an “exclusive” story, and asked no questions. But I could not help hearing what they said. Even though I tried to drown their voices by beating on the Kid’s typewriter. I was taking my third lesson, and I had printed, “I Amm 5w writjng This, 5wjth my own lilly w?ite handS,” when I heard the Kid saying:
“You can beat the game this way. Let John buy you a ticket to the Piraeus. If you go from one Greek port to another you don’t need a vise. But, if you book from here to Italy, you must get a permit from the Italian consul, and our consul, and the police. The plot is to get out of the war zone, isn’t it? Well, then, my dope is to get out quick, and map the rest of your trip when you’re safe in Athens.”
It was no business of mine, but I had to look up. The stranger was now pacing the floor. I noticed that while his face was almost black with tan, his upper lip was quite white. I noticed also that he had his hands in the pockets of one of John’s blue serge suits, and that the pink silk shirt he wore was one that once had belonged to the Kid. Except for the pink shirt, in the appearance of the young man there was nothing unusual. He was of a familiar type. He looked like a young business man from our Middle West, matter-of-fact and unimaginative, but capable and self-reliant. If he had had a fountain pen in his upper waistcoat pocket, I would have guessed he was an insurance agent, or the publicity man for a new automobile. John picked up his hat, and said, “That’s good advice. Give me your steamer ticket, Fred, and I’ll have them change it.” He went out; but he did not ask Fred to go with him.
Uncle Jim rose, and murmured something about the Cafe Roma, and tea. But neither did he invite Fred to go with him. Instead, he told him to make himself at home, and if he wanted anything the waiter would bring it from the cafe downstairs. Then the Kid, as though he also was uncomfortable at being left alone with us, hurried to the door. “Going to get you a suit-case,” he explained. “Back in five minutes.”
The stranger made no answer. Probably he did not hear him. Not a hundred feet from our windows three Greek steamers were huddled together, and the eyes of the American were fixed on them. The one for which John had gone to buy him a new ticket lay nearest. She was to sail in two hours. Impatiently, in short quick steps, the stranger paced the length of the room, but when he turned and so could see the harbor, he walked slowly, devouring it with his eyes. For some time, in silence, he repeated this manoeuvre; and then the complaints of the typewriter disturbed him. He halted and observed my struggles. Under his scornful eye, in my embarrassment I frequently hit the right letter. “You a newspaper man, too?” he asked. I boasted I was, but begged not to be judged by my typewriting.
“I got some great stories to write when I get back to God’s country,” he announced. “I was a reporter for two years in Kansas City before the war, and now I’m going back to lecture and write. I got enough material to keep me at work for five years. All kinds of stuff– specials, fiction, stories, personal experiences, maybe a novel.”
I regarded him with envy. For the correspondents in the greatest of all wars the pickings had been meagre. “You are to be congratulated,” I said. He brushed aside my congratulations. “For what?” he demanded. “I didn’t go after the stories; they came to me. The things I saw I had to see. Couldn’t get away from them. I’ve been with the British, serving in the R. A. M. C. Been hospital steward, stretcher bearer, ambulance driver. I’ve been sixteen months at the front, and all the time on the firing-line. I was in the retreat from Mons, with French on the Marne, at Ypres, all through the winter fighting along the Canal, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and, just lately, in Servia. I’ve seen more of this war than any soldier. Because, sometimes, they give the soldier a rest; they never give the medical corps a rest. The only rest I got was when I was wounded.”
He seemed no worse for his wounds, so again I tendered congratulations. This time he accepted them. The recollection of the things he had seen, things incredible, terrible, unique in human experience, had stirred him. He talked on, not boastfully, but in a tone, rather, of awe and disbelief, as though assuring himself that it was really he to whom such things had happened.
“I don’t believe there’s any kind of fighting I haven’t seen,” he declared; “hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets, grenades, gun butts. I’ve seen ’em on their knees in the mud choking each other, beating each other with their bare fists. I’ve seen every kind of airship, bomb, shell, poison gas, every kind of wound. Seen whole villages turned into a brickyard in twenty minutes; in Servia seen bodies of women frozen to death, bodies of babies starved to death, seen men in Belgium swinging from trees; along the Yzer for three months I saw the bodies of men I’d known sticking out of the mud, or hung up on the barb wire, with the crows picking them.
“I’ve seen some of the nerviest stunts that ever were pulled off in history. I’ve seen real heroes. Time and time again I’ve seen a man throw away his life for his officer, or for a chap he didn’t know, just as though it was a cigarette butt. I’ve seen the women nurses of our corps steer a car into a village and yank out a wounded man while shells were breaking under the wheels and the houses were pitching into the streets.” He stopped and laughed consciously.
“Understand,” he warned me, “I’m not talking about myself, only of things I’ve seen. The things I’m going to put in my book. It ought to be a pretty good book-what?”
My envy had been washed clean in admiration.
“It will make a wonderful book,” I agreed. “Are you going to syndicate it first?”
Young Mr. Hamlin frowned importantly.
“I was thinking,” he said, “of asking John for letters to the magazine editors. So, they’ll know I’m not faking, that I’ve really been through it all. Letters from John would help a lot.” Then he asked anxiously: “They would, wouldn’t they?”
I reassured him. Remembering the Kid’s gibes at John and his numerous dependents, I said: “You another college chum of John’s?” The young man answered my question quite seriously. “No,” he said; “John graduated before I entered; but we belong to the same fraternity. It was the luckiest chance in the world my finding him here. There was a month-old copy of the Balkan News blowing around camp, and his name was in the list of arrivals. The moment I found he was in Salonika, I asked for twelve hours leave, and came down in an ambulance. I made straight for John; gave him the grip, and put it up to him to help me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you were sailing on the Adriaticus?”
The young man was again pacing the floor. He halted and faced the harbor.
“You bet I’m sailing on the Adriaticus,” he said. He looked out at that vessel, at the Blue Peter flying from her foremast, and grinned. “In just two hours!”
It was stupid of me, but I still was unenlightened. “But your twelve hours’ leave?” I asked.
The young man laughed. “They can take my twelve hours’ leave,” he said deliberately, “and feed it to the chickens. I’m beating it.”
“What d’you mean, you’re beating it?”
“What do you suppose I mean?” he demanded. “What do you suppose I’m doing out of uniform, what do you suppose I’m lying low in the room for? So’s I won’t catch cold?”
“If you’re leaving the army without a discharge, and without permission,” I said, “I suppose you know it’s desertion.”
Mr. Hamlin laughed easily. “It’s not my army,” he said. “I’m an American.”
“It’s your desertion,” I suggested.
The door opened and closed noiselessly, and Billy, entering, placed a new travelling bag on the floor. He must have heard my last words, for he looked inquiringly at each of us. But he did not speak and, walking to the window, stood with his hands in his pockets, staring out at the harbor. His presence seemed to encourage the young man. “Who knows I’m deserting?” he demanded. “No one’s ever seen me in Salonika before, and in these ‘cits’ I can get on board all right. And then they can’t touch me. What do the folks at home care how I left the British army? They’ll be so darned glad to get me back alive that they won’t ask if I walked out or was kicked out. I should worry!”
“It’s none of my business,” I began, but I was interrupted. In his restless pacings the young man turned quickly.
“As you say,” he remarked icily, “it is none of your business. It’s none of your business whether I get shot as a deserter, or go home, or–“
“You can go to the devil for all I care,” I assured him. “I wasn’t considering you at all. I was only sorry that I’ll never be able to read your book.”
For a moment Mr. Hamlin remained silent, then he burst forth with a jeer.
“No British firing squad,” he boasted, “will ever stand me up.”
“Maybe not,” I agreed, “but you will never write that book.”
Again there was silence, and this time it was broken by the Kid. He turned from the window and looked toward Hamlin. “That’s right!” he said.
He sat down on the edge of the table, and at the deserter pointed his forefinger.
“Son,” he said, “this war is some war. It’s the biggest war in history, and folks will be talking about nothing else for the next ninety years; folks that never were nearer it than Bay City, Mich. But you won’t talk about it. And you’ve been all through it. You’ve been to hell and back again. Compared with what you know about hell, Dante is in the same class with Dr. Cook. But you won’t be able to talk about this war, or lecture, or write a book about it.”
“I won’t?” demanded Hamlin. “And why won’t I?”
“Because of what you’re doing now,” said Billy. “Because you’re queering yourself. Now, you’ve got everything.” The Kid was very much in earnest. His tone was intimate, kind, and friendly. “You’ve seen everything, done everything. We’d give our eye-teeth to see what you’ve seen, and to write the things you can write. You’ve got a record now that’ll last you until you’re dead, and your grandchildren are dead-and then some. When you talk the table will have to sit up and listen. You can say ‘I was there.’ ‘I was in it.’ ‘I saw.’ ‘I know.’ When this war is over you’ll have everything out of it that’s worth getting-all the experiences, all the inside knowledge, all the ‘nosebag’ news; you’ll have wounds, honors, medals, money, reputation. And you’re throwing all that away!”
Mr. Hamlin interrupted savagely.
“To hell with their medals,” he said. “They can take their medals and hang ’em on Christmas trees. I don’t owe the British army anything. It owes me. I’ve done my bit. I’ve earned what I’ve got, and there’s no one can take it away from me.”
“You can,” said the Kid. Before Hamlin could reply the door opened and John came in, followed by Uncle Jim. The older man was looking very grave, and John very unhappy. Hamlin turned quickly to John.
“I thought these men were friends of yours,” he began, “and Americans. They’re fine Americans. They’re as full of human kindness and red blood as a kippered herring!”
John looked inquiringly at the Kid.
“He wants to hang himself,” explained Billy, “and because we tried to cut him down, he’s sore.”
“They talked to me,” protested Hamlin, “as though I was a yellow dog. As though I was a quitter. I’m no quitter! But, if I’m ready to quit, who’s got a better right? I’m not an Englishman, but there are several million Englishmen haven’t done as much for England in this was as I have. What do you fellows know about it? You write about it, about the ‘brave lads in the trenches’; but what do you know about the trenches? What you’ve seen from automobiles. That’s all. That’s where you get off! I’ve lived in the trenches for fifteen months, froze in ’em, starved in ’em, risked my life in ’em, and I’ve saved other lives, too, by hauling men out of the trenches. And that’s no airy persiflage, either!”
He ran to the wardrobe where John’s clothes hung, and from the bottom of it dragged a khaki uniform. It was still so caked with mud and snow that when he flung it on the floor it splashed like a wet bathing suit. “How would you like to wear one of those?” he Demanded. “Stinking with lice and sweat and blood; the blood of other men, the men you’ve helped off the field, and your own blood.”
As though committing hara-kiri, he slashed his hand across his stomach, and then drew it up from his waist to his chin. “I’m scraped with shrapnel from there to there,” said Mr. Hamlin. “And another time I got a ball in the shoulder. That would have been a ‘blighty’ for a fighting man–they’re always giving them leave–but all I got was six weeks at Havre in hospital. Then it was the Dardanelles, and sunstroke and sand; sleeping in sand, eating sand, sand in your boots, sand in your teeth; hiding in holes in the sand like a dirty prairie dog. And then, ‘Off to Servia!’ And the next act opens in the snow and the mud! Cold? God, how cold it was! And most of us in sun helmets.”
As though the cold still gnawed at his bones, he shivered.
“It isn’t the danger,” he protested. “It isn’t that I’m getting away from. To hell with the danger! It’s just the plain discomfort of it! It’s the never being your own master, never being clean, never being warm.” Again he shivered and rubbed one hand against the other. “There were no bridges over the streams,” he went on, “and we had to break the ice and wade in, and then sleep in the open with the khaki frozen to us. There was no firewood; not enough to warm a pot of tea. There were no wounded; all our casualties were frost bite and Pneumonia. When we take them out of the blankets their toes fall off. We’ve been in camp for a month now near Doiran, and it’s worse there than on the march. It’s a frozen swamp. You can’t sleep for the cold; can’t eat; the only ration we get is bully beef, and our insides are frozen so damn tight we can’t digest it. The cold gets into your blood, gets into your brains. It won’t let you think; or else, you think crazy things. It makes you afraid.” He shook himself like a man coming out of a bad dream.
So, I’m through,” he said. In turn he scowled at each of us, as though defying us to contradict him. “That’s why I’m quitting,” he added. “Because I’ve done my bit. Because I’m damn well fed up on it.” He kicked viciously at the water-logged uniform on the floor. “Any one who wants my job can have it!” He walked to the window, turned his back on us, and fixed his eyes hungrily on the Adriaticus. There was a long pause. For guidance we looked at John, but he was staring down at the desk blotter, scratching on it marks that he did not see.
Finally, where angels feared to tread, the Kid rushed in. “That’s certainly a hard luck story,” he said; “but,” he added cheerfully, “it’s nothing to the hard luck you’ll strike when you can’t tell why you left the army.” Hamlin turned with an exclamation, but Billy held up his hand. “Now wait,” he begged, “we haven’t time to get mussy. At six o’clock your leave is up, and the troop train starts back to camp, and–“
Mr. Hamlin interrupted sharply. “And the Adriaticus starts at five.”
Billy did not heed him. “You’ve got two hours to change your mind,” he said. “That’s better than being sorry you didn’t the rest of your life.”
Mr. Hamlin threw back his head and laughed. It was a most unpleasant laugh. “You’re a fine body of men,” he jeered. “America must be proud of you!”
“If we weren’t Americans,” explained Billy patiently, “we wouldn’t give a damn whether you deserted or not. You’re drowning and you don’t know it, and we’re throwing you a rope. Try to see it that way. We’ll cut out the fact that you took an oath, and that you’re breaking it. That’s up to you. We’ll get down to results. When you reach home, if you can’t tell why you left the army, the folks will darned soon guess. And that will queer everything you’ve done. When you come to sell your stuff, it will queer you with the editors, queer you with the publishers. If they know you broke your word to the British army, how can they know you’re keeping faith with them? How can they believe anything you tell them? Every ‘story’ you write, every statement of yours will make a noise like a fake. You won’t come into court with clean hands. You’ll be licked before you start.
“Of course, you’re for the Allies. Well, all the Germans at home will fear that; and when you want to lecture on your ‘Fifteen Months at the British Front,’ they’ll look up your record; and what will they do to you? This is what they’ll do to you. When you’ve shown ’em your moving pictures and say, ‘Does any gentleman in the audience want to ask a question?’ a German agent will get up and say, ‘Yes, I want to ask a question. Is it true that you deserted from the British army, and that if you return to it, they will shoot you?'”
I was scared. I expected the lean and muscular Mr. Hamlin to fall on Billy, and fling him where he had flung the soggy uniform. But instead he remained motionless, his arms pressed across his chest. His eyes, filled with anger and distress, returned to the Adriaticus.
“I’m sorry,” muttered the Kid.
John rose and motioned to the door, and guiltily and only too gladly we escaped. John followed us into the hall. “Let me talk to him,” he whispered. “The boat sails in an hour. Please don’t come back until she’s gone.”
We went to the moving picture palace next door, but I doubt if the thoughts of any of us were on the pictures. For after an hour, when from across the quay there came the long-drawn warning of a steamer’s whistle, we nudged each other and rose and went out.
Not a hundred yards from us the propeller blades of the Adriaticus were slowly churning, and the rowboats were falling away from her sides.
“Good-bye, Mr. Hamlin,” called Billy. “You had everything and you chucked it away. I can spell your finish. It’s ‘check’ for yours.”
But when we entered our room, in the centre of it, under the bunch of electric lights, stood the deserter. He wore the water-logged uniform. The sun helmet was on his head.
“Good man!” shouted Billy.
He advanced, eagerly holding out his hand.
Mr. Hamlin brushed past him. At the door he turned and glared at us, even at John. He was not a good loser. “I hope you’re satisfied,” he snarled. He pointed at the four beds in a row. I felt guiltily conscious of them. At the moment they appeared so unnecessarily clean and warm and soft. The silk coverlets at the foot of each struck me as being disgracefully effeminate. They made me ashamed.
“I hope,” said Mr. Hamlin, speaking slowly and picking his words, “when you turn into those beds to-night you’ll think of me in the mud. I hope when you’re having your five-course dinner and your champagne you’ll remember my bully beef. I hope when a shell or Mr. Pneumonia gets me, you’ll write a nice little sob story about the ‘brave lads in the trenches.’ “
He looked at us, standing like schoolboys, sheepish, embarrassed, and silent, and then threw open the door. “I hope,” he added, “you all choke!”
With an unconvincing imitation of the college chum manner, John cleared his throat and said: “Don’t forget, Fred, if there’s anything I can do–“
Hamlin stood in the doorway smiling at us.
“There’s something you can all do,” he said.
“Yes?” asked John heartily.
“You can all go to hell!” said Mr. Hamlin.
We heard the door slam, and his hobnailed boots pounding down the stairs. No one spoke. Instead, in unhappy silence, we stood staring at the floor. Where the uniform had lain was a pool of mud and melted snow and the darker stains of stale blood.
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, 1rbnh11.txt VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 1rbnh10a.txt
This etext was prepared by Joseph S. Miller, Pensacola, FL and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Library, Prescott, AZ.
copyright notice is included. Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement. preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment and editing by those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes in the first week of the next month. Since our ftp program has a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a new copy has at least one byte more or less.
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2 million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+ If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers, which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly from Michael Hart’s salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we We need your donations more than ever!
Mellon University).
For these and other matters, please mail to:
Champaign, IL 61825
When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director: Michael S. Hart
hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
We would prefer to send you this information by email.
******
author and by title, and includes information about how is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com, for a more complete list of our various sites.
To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any at http://promo.net/pg).
Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
Example FTP session:
ftp sunsite.unc.edu
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
cd etext90 through etext99
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files] GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year’s listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99] GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
***
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START*** Why is this “Small Print!” statement here? You know: lawyers. They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from someone other than us, and even if what’s wrong is not our fault. So, among other things, this “Small Print!” statement disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept this “Small Print!” statement. If you do not, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG- tm etexts, is a “public domain” work distributed by Professor things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext under the Project’s “PROJECT GUTENBERG” trademark.
To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain works. Despite these efforts, the Project’s etexts and any medium they may be on may contain “Defects”. Among other things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES But for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described below, [1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that time to the person you received it from. If you received it on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement copy. If you received it electronically, such person may choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to receive it electronically.
THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU “AS-IS”. NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors, officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER “PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm” You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the etext or this “small print!” statement. You may however, if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, including any form resulting from conversion by word pro- cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as *EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and does *not* contain characters other than those intended by the author of the work, although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may be used to convey punctuation intended by the author, and additional characters may be used to indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the program that displays the etext (as is the case, for instance, with most word processors); OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this “Small Print!” statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you don’t derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO? The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
THE LOST ROAD
THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
Contains:
THE LOST ROAD
THE MIRACLE OF LAS PALMAS
EVIL TO HIM WHO EVIL THINKS
THE MEN OF ZANZIBAR
THE LONG ARM
THE GOD OF COINCIDENCE
THE BURIED TREASURE OF COBRE
THE BOY SCOUT
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
THE DESERTER
TO
MY WIFE
AN INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN T. McCUTCHEON
WITH DAVIS IN VERA CRUZ, BRUSSELS, AND SALONIKA
In common with many others who have been with Richard Harding Davis as correspondents, I find it difficult to realize that he has covered his last story and that he will not be seen again with the men who follow the war game, rushing to distant places upon which the spotlight of news interest suddenly centres.
It seems a sort of bitter irony that he who had covered so many big events of world importance in the past twenty years should be abruptly torn away in the midst of the greatest event of them all, while the story is still unfinished and its outcome undetermined. If there is a compensating thought, it lies in the reflection that he had a life of almost unparalleled fulness, crowded to the brim, up to the last moment, with those experiences and achievements which he particularly aspired to have. He left while the tide was at its flood, and while he still held supreme his place as the best reporter in his country. He escaped the bitterness of seeing the ebb set in, when the youth to which he clung had slipped away, and when he would have to sit impatient in the audience, while younger men were in the thick of great, world-stirring dramas on the stage.
This would have been a real tragedy in “Dick” Davis’s case, for, while his body would have aged, it is doubtful if his spirit ever would have lost its youthful freshness or boyish enthusiasm.
It was my privilege to see a good deal of Davis in the last two years.
He arrived in Vera Cruz among the first of the sixty or seventy correspondents who flocked to that news centre when the situation was so full of sensational possibilities. It was a time when the American newspaper-reading public was eager for thrills, and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the correspondents in Vera Cruz were tried to the uttermost to supply the demand.
In the face of the fiercest competition it fell to Davis’s lot to land the biggest story of those days of marking time.
The story “broke” when it became known that Davis, Medill McCormick, and Frederick Palmer had gone through the Mexican lines in an effort to reach Mexico City. Davis and McCormick, with letters to the Brazilian and British ministers, got through and reached the capital on the strength of those letters, but Palmer, having only an American passport, was turned back.
After an ominous silence which furnished American newspapers with a lively period of suspense, the two men returned safely with wonderful stories of their experiences while under arrest in the hands of the Mexican authorities. McCormick, in recently speaking of Davis at that time, said that, “as a correspondent in difficult and dangerous situations, he was incomparable–cheerful, ingenious, and undiscouraged. When the time came to choose between safety and leaving his companion he stuck by his fellow captive even though, as they both said, a firing-squad and a blank wall were by no means a remote possibility.”
This Mexico City adventure was a spectacular achievement which gave Davis and McCormick a distinction which no other correspondents of all the ambitious and able corps had managed to attain.
Davis usually “hunted” alone. He depended entirely upon his own ingenuity and wonderful instinct for news situations. He had the energy and enthusiasm of a beginner, with the experience and training of a veteran. His interest in things remained as keen as though he had not been years at a game which often leaves a man jaded and blase. His acquaintanceship in the American army and navy was wide, and for this reason, as well as for the prestige which his fame and position as a national character gave him, he found it easy to establish valuable connections in the channels from which news emanates. And yet, in spite of the fact that he was “on his own” instead of having a working partnership with other men, he was generous in helping at times when he was able to do so.
Davis was a conspicuous figure in Vera Cruz, as he inevitably had been in all such situations. Wherever he went, he was pointed out. His distinction of appearance, together with a distinction in dress, which, whether from habit or policy, was a valuable asset in his work, made him a marked man. He dressed and looked the “war correspondent,” such a one as he would describe in one of his stories. He fulfilled the popular ideal of what a member of that fascinating profession should look like. His code of life and habits was as fixed as that of the Briton who takes his habits and customs and games and tea wherever he goes, no matter how benighted or remote the spot may be.
He was just as loyal to his code as is the Briton. He carried his bath-tub, his immaculate linen, his evening clothes, his war equipment–in which he had the pride of a connoisseur–wherever he went, and, what is more, he had the courage to use the evening clothes at times when their use was conspicuous. He was the only man who wore a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his particular table in the crowded “Portales,” at the Hotel Diligencia, he was to be seen, as fresh and clean as though he were in a New York or London restaurant.
Each day he was up early to take the train out to the “gap,” across which came arrivals from Mexico City. Sometimes a good “story” would come down, as when the long-heralded and long- expected arrival of Consul Silliman gave a first-page “feature” to all the American papers.
In the afternoon he would play water polo over at the navy aviation camp, and always at a certain time of the day his “striker” would bring him his horse and for an hour or more he would ride out along the beach roads within the American lines. After the first few days it was difficult to extract real thrills from the Vera Cruz situation, but we used to ride out to El Tejar with the cavalry patrol and imagine that we might be fired on at some point in the long ride through unoccupied territory; or else go out to the “front,” at Legarto, where a little American force occupied a sun-baked row of freight-cars, surrounded by malarial swamps. From the top of the railroad water-tank, we could look across to the Mexican outposts a mile or so away. It was not very exciting, and what thrills we got lay chiefly in our imagination.
Before my acquaintanceship with Davis at Vera Cruz I had not known him well. Our trails didn’t cross while I was in Japan in the Japanese-Russian War, and in the Transvaal I missed him by a few days, but in Vera Cruz I had many enjoyable opportunities of becoming well acquainted with him.
The privilege was a pleasant one, for it served to dispel a preconceived and not an entirely favorable impression of his character. For years I had heard stories about Richard Harding Davis–stories which emphasized an egotism and self-assertiveness which, if they ever existed, had happily ceased to be obtrusive by the time I got to know him.
He was a different Davis from the Davis whom I had expected to find; and I can imagine no more charming and delightful companion than he was in Vera Cruz. There was no evidence of those qualities which I feared to find, and his attitude was one of unfailing kindness, considerateness, and generosity.
In the many talks I had with him, I was always struck by his evident devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings he was the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes were young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters, war correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did the noble thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the favored types which his imagination had created for his stories. In a certain sense he was living a life of make-believe, wherein he was the hero of the story, and in which he was bound by his ideals always to act as he would have the hero of his story act. It was a quality which only one could have who had preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in spite of the hardening processes of maturity.
His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not only had the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a situation, but also had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to describe them vividly. I don’t know how many of those men at Verz Cruz tried to describe the kaleidoscopic life of the city during the American occupation, but I know that Davis’s story was far and away the most faithful and satisfying picture. The story was photographic, even to the sounds and smells.
The last I saw of him in Vera Cruz was when, on the Utah, he steamed past the flagship Wyoming, upon which I was quartered, and started for New York. The Battenberg cup race had just been rowed, and the Utah and Florida crews had tied. As the Utah was sailing immediately after the race, there was no time in which to row off the tie. So it was decided that the names of both ships should be engraved on the cup, and that the Florida crew should defend the title against a challenging crew from the British Admiral Craddock’s flagship.
By the end of June, the public interest in Vera Cruz had waned, and the corps of correspondents dwindled until there were only a few left.
Frederick Palmer and I went up to join Carranza and Villa, and on the 26th of July we were in Monterey waiting to start with the triumphal march of Carranza’s army toward Mexico City. There was no sign of serious trouble abroad. That night ominous telegrams came, and at ten o’clock on the following morning we were on a train headed for the States.
Palmer and Davis caught the Lusitania, sailing August 4 from New York, and I followed on the Saint Paul, leaving three days later. On the 17th of August I reached Brussels, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to find Davis already there. He was at the Palace Hotel, where a number of American and English correspondents were quartered.
Things moved quickly. On the 19th Irvin Cobb, Will Irwin, Arno Dosch, and I were caught between the Belgian and German lines in Louvain; our retreat to Brussels was cut, and for three days, while the vast German army moved through the city, we were detained. Then, the army having passed, we were allowed to go back to the capital.
In the meantime Davis was in Brussels. The Germans reached the outskirts of the city on the morning of the 20th, and the correspondents who had remained in Brussels were feverishly writing despatches describing the imminent fall of the city. One of them, Harry Hansen, of the Chicago Daily News, tells the following story, which I give in his words:
“While we were writing,” says Hansen, “Richard Harding Davis walked into the writing-room of the Palace Hotel with a bunch of manuscript in his hand. With an amused expression he surveyed the three correspondents filling white paper.
“‘I say, men,’ said Davis, ‘do you know when the next train leaves?’
“‘There is one at three o’clock,’ said a correspondent, looking up.
“‘That looks like our only chance to get a story out,’ said Davis. ‘Well, we’ll trust to that.’
“The story was the German invasion of Brussels, and the train mentioned was considered the forlorn hope of the correspondents to connect with the outside world–that is, every correspondent thought it to be the other man’s hope. Secretly each had prepared to outwit the other, and secretly Davis had already sent his story to Ostend. He meant to emulate Archibald Forbes, who despatched a courier with his real manuscript, and next day publicly dropped a bulky package in the mail-bag.
“Davis had sensed the news in the occupation of Brussels long before it happened. With dawn he went out to the Louvain road, where the German army stood, prepared to smash the capital if negotiations failed. His observant eye took in all the details. Before noon he had written a comprehensive sketch of the occupation, and when word was received that it was under way, he trusted his copy to an old Flemish woman, who spoke not a word of English, and saw her safely on board the train that pulled out under Belgian auspices for Ostend.”
With passes which the German commandant in Brussels gave us the correspondents immediately started out to see how far those passes would carry us. A number of us left on the afternoon of August 23 for Waterloo, where it was expected that the great clash between the German and the Anglo-French forces would occur. We had planned to be back the same evening, and went prepared only for an afternoon’s drive in a couple of hired street carriages. It was seven weeks before we again saw Brussels.
On the following day (August 24) Davis started for Mons. He wore the khaki uniform which he had worn in many campaigns. Across his breast was a narrow bar of silk ribbon indicating the campaigns in which he had served as a correspondent. He so much resembled a British officer that he was arrested as a British derelict and was informed that he would be shot at once.
He escaped only by offering to walk to Brand Whitlock, in Brussels, reporting to each officer he met on the way. His plan was approved, and as a hostage on parole he appeared before the American minister, who quickly established his identity as an American of good standing, to the satisfaction of the Germans.
In the following few months our trails were widely separated. I read of his arrest by German officers on the road to Mons; later I read the story of his departure from Brussels by train to Holland–a trip which carried him through Louvain while the town still was burning; and still later I read that he was with the few lucky men who were in Rheims during one of the early bombardments that damaged the cathedral. By amazing luck, combined with a natural news sense which drew him instinctively to critical places at the psychological moment, he had been a witness of the two most widely featured stories of the early weeks of the war.
Arrested by the Germans in Belgium, and later by the French in France, he was convinced that the restrictions on correspondents were too great to permit of good work.
So he left the European war zone with the widely quoted remark: “The day of the war correspondent is over.”
And yet I was not surprised when, one evening, late in November of last year, he suddenly walked into the room in Salonika where William G. Shepherd, of the United Press, “Jimmy Hare,” the veteran war photographer, and I had established ourselves several weeks before.
The hotel was jammed, and the city, with a normal capacity of about one hundred and seventy-five thousand, was struggling to accommodate at least a hundred thousand more. There was not a room to be had in any of the better hotels, and for several days we lodged Davis in our room, a vast chamber which formerly had been the main dining-room of the establishment, and which now was converted into a bedroom. There was room for a dozen men, if necessary, and whenever stranded Americans arrived and could find no hotel accommodations we simply rigged up emergency cots for their temporary use.
The weather in Salonika at this time, late November, was penetratingly cold. In the mornings the steam coils struggled feebly to dispel the chill in the room.
Early in the morning after Davis had arrived, we were aroused by the sound of violent splashing, accompanied by shuddering gasps, and we looked out from the snug warmth of our beds to see Davis standing in his portable bath-tub and drenching himself with ice-cold water. As an exhibition of courageous devotion to an established custom of life it was admirable, but I’m not sure that it was prudent.
For some reason, perhaps a defective circulation or a weakened heart, his system failed to react from these cold-water baths. All through the days he complained of feeling chilled. He never seemed to get thoroughly warmed, and of us all he was the one who suffered most keenly from the cold. It was all the more surprising, for his appearance was always that of a man in the pink of athletic fitness–ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, and full of tireless energy.
On one occasion we returned from the French front in Serbia to Salonika in a box car lighted only by candles, bitterly cold, and frightfully exhausting. We were seven hours in travelling fifty-five miles, and we arrived at our destination at three o’clock in the morning. Several of the men contracted desperate colds, which clung to them for weeks. Davis was chilled through, and said that of all the cold he had ever experienced that which swept across the Macedonian plain from the Balkan highlands was the most penetrating. Even his heavy clothing could not afford him adequate protection.
When he was settled in his own room in our hotel he installed an oil-stove which burned beside him as he sat at his desk and wrote his stories. The room was like an oven, but even then he still complained of the cold.
When he left he gave us the stove, and when we left, some time later, it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a British hospital, where I’m sure it is doing its best to thaw the Balkan chill out of sick and wounded soldiers.
Davis was always up early, and his energy and interest were as keen as a boy’s. We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and rather smart Bastasini’s, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd, Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most enjoyable daily events of our lives.
Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by British, French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian, and Bulgarian civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English, and Scotch nurses and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge, high-ceilinged room that the waiters could barely pick their way among the tables, we hung for hours over our dinners, and left only when the landlord and his Austrian wife counted the day’s receipts and paid the waiters at the end of the evening.
One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion than Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he could not make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of standing up at a banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table with a few friends who were only too eager to listen rather than to talk, his stories, covering personal experiences in all parts of the world, were intensely vivid, with that remarkable “holding” quality of description which characterizes his writings.
He brought his own bread–a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred to the better white bread–and with it he ate great quantities of butter. As we sat down at the table his first demand was for “Mastika,” a peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and his second demand invariably was “Du beurre!” with the “r’s” as silent as the stars; and if it failed to come at once the waiter was made to feel the enormity of his tardiness.
The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in Philadelphia, and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central America, to his early Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged through an endless variety of personal experiences which very nearly covered the whole course of American history in the past twenty years.
Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures, but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them, told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of humorous comment that made them gems of narrative.
At times, in our work, we all tried our hands at describing the Salonika of those early days of the Allied occupation, for it was really what one widely travelled British officer called it–“the most amazingly interesting situation I’ve ever seen”—but Davis’s description was far and away the best, just as his description of Vera Cruz was the best, and his wonderful story of the entry of the German army into Brussels was matchless as one of the great pieces of reporting in the present war.
In thinking of Davis, I shall always remember him for the delightful qualities which he showed in Salonika. He was unfailingly considerate and thoughtful. Through his narratives one could see the pride which he took in the width and breadth of his personal relation to the great events of the past twenty years. His vast scope of experiences and equally wide acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were amazing, and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and interesting history could tell his stories in such a simple way that the personal element was never obtrusive.
When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from the British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked his passage on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only obtainable accommodation was a lounge in the dining saloon. We gave him a farewell dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all the other Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the dinner we rowed out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably installed for his voyage.
He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away. That was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.
JOHN T. MCCUTCHEON.
THE LOST ROAD
During the war with Spain, Colton Lee came into the service as a volunteer. For a young man, he always had taken life almost too seriously, and when, after the campaign in Cuba, he elected to make soldiering his profession, the seriousness with which he attacked his new work surprised no one. Finding they had lost him forever, his former intimates were bored, but his colonel was enthusiastic, and the men of his troop not only loved, but respected him.
From the start he determined in his new life women should have no part–a determination that puzzled no one so much as the women, for to Lee no woman, old or young, had found cause to be unfriendly. But he had read that the army is a jealous mistress who brooks no rival, that “red lips tarnish the scabbard steel,” that “he travels the fastest who travels alone.”
So, when white hands beckoned and pretty eyes signalled, he did not look. For five years, until just before he sailed for his three years of duty in the Philippines, he succeeded not only in not looking, but in building up for himself such a fine reputation as a woman-hater that all women were crazy about him. Had he not been ordered to Agawamsett that fact would not have affected him. But at the Officers’ School he had indulged in hard study rather than in hard riding, had overworked, had brought back his Cuban fever, and was in poor shape to face the tropics. So, for two months before the transport was to sail, they ordered him to Cape Cod to fill his lungs with the bracing air of a New England autumn.
He selected Agawamsett, because, when at Harvard, it was there he had spent his summer vacations, and he knew he would find sailboats and tennis and, through the pine woods back of the little whaling village, many miles of untravelled roads. He promised himself that over these he would gallop an imaginary troop in route marches, would manoeuvre it against possible ambush, and, in combat patrols, ground scouts, and cossack outposts, charge with it “as foragers.” But he did none of these things. For at Agawamsett he met Frances Gardner, and his experience with her was so disastrous that, in his determination to avoid all women, he was convinced he was right.
When later he reached Manila he vowed no other woman would ever again find a place in his thoughts. No other woman did. Not because he had the strength to keep his vow, but because he so continually thought of Frances Gardner that no other woman had a chance.
Miss Gardner was a remarkable girl. Her charm appealed to all kinds of men, and, unfortunately for Lee, several kinds of men appealed to her. Her fortune and her relations were bound up in the person of a rich aunt with whom she lived, and who, it was understood, some day would leave her all the money in the world. But, in spite of her charm, certainly in spite of the rich aunt, Lee, true to his determination, might not have noticed the girl had not she ridden so extremely well.
It was to the captain of cavalry she first appealed. But even a cavalry captain, whose duty in life is to instruct sixty men in the art of taking the life of as many other men as possible, may turn his head in the direction of a good-looking girl. And when for weeks a man rides at the side of one through pine forests as dim and mysterious as the aisles of a great cathedral, when he guides her across the wet marshes when the sun is setting crimson in the pools and the wind blows salt from the sea, when he loses them both by moonlight in wood-roads where the hoofs of the horses sink silently into dusty pine needles, he thinks more frequently of the girl at his side than of the faithful troopers waiting for him in San Francisco. The girl at his side thought frequently of him.
With the “surface indications” of a young man about to ask her to marry him she was painfully familiar; but this time the possibility was the reverse of painful. What she meant to do about it she did not know, but she did know that she was strangely happy. Between living on as the dependent of a somewhat exacting relative and becoming the full partner of this young stranger, who with men had proved himself so masterful, and who with her was so gentle, there seemed but little choice. But she did not as yet wish to make the choice. She preferred to believe she was not certain. She assured him that before his leave of absence was over she would tell him whether she would remain on duty with the querulous aunt, who had befriended her, or as his wife accompany him to the Philippines.
It was not the answer he wanted; but in her happiness, which was evident to every one, he could not help but take hope. And in the questions she put to him of life in the tropics, of the life of the “officers’ ladies,” he saw that what was in her mind was a possible life with him, and he was content.
She became to him a wonderful, glorious person, and each day she grew in loveliness. It had been five years of soldiering in Cuba, China, and on the Mexican border since he had talked to a woman with interest, and now in all she said, in all her thoughts and words and delights, he found fresher and stronger reasons for discarding his determination to remain wedded only to the United States Army. He did not need reasons. He was far too much in love to see in any word or act of hers anything that was not fine and beautiful.
In their rides they had one day stumbled upon a long-lost and long-forgotten road through the woods, which she had claimed as their own by right of discovery, and, no matter to what point they set forth each day, they always returned by it. Their way through the woods stretched for miles. It was concealed in a forest of stunted oaks and black pines, with no sign of human habitation, save here and there a clearing now long neglected and alive only with goldenrod. Trunks of trees, moss-grown and crumbling beneath the touch of the ponies’ hoofs, lay in their path, and above it the branches of a younger generation had clasped hands. At their approach squirrels raced for shelter, woodcock and partridge shot deeper into the network of vines and saplings, and the click of the steel as the ponies tossed their bits, and their own whispers, alone disturbed the silence.
“It is an enchanted road,” said the girl; “or maybe we are enchanted.”
“Not I,” cried the young man loyally. “I was never so sane, never so sure, never so happy in knowing just what I wanted! If only you could be as sure!”
One day she came to him in high excitement with a book of verse. “He has written a poem,” she cried, “about our own woods, about our lost road! Listen” she commanded, and she read to him:
“‘They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ringdove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
“‘Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate
(They fear not men in the woods
Because they see so few),
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods. . . . But there is no road through the woods.'”
“I don’t like that at all,” cried the soldierman. “It’s too–too sad–it doesn’t give you any encouragement. The way it ends, I mean: ‘But there is no road through the woods.’ Of course there’s a road! For us there always will be. I’m going to make sure. I’m going to buy those woods, and keep the lost road where we can always find it.”
“I don’t think,” said the girl, “that he means a real road.”
“I know what he means,” cried the lover, “and he’s wrong! There is a road, and you and I have found it, and we are going to follow it for always.”
The girl shook her head, but her eyes were smiling happily.
The “season” at Agawamsett closed with the tennis tournament, and it was generally conceded fit and proper, from every point of view, that in mixed doubles Lee and Miss Gardner should be partners. Young Stedman, the Boston artist, was the only one who made objection. Up in the sail-loft that he had turned into a studio he was painting a portrait of the lovely Miss Gardner, and he protested that the three days’ tournament would sadly interrupt his work. And Frances, who was very much interested in the portrait, was inclined to agree.
But Lee beat down her objections. He was not at all interested in the portrait. He disapproved of it entirely. For the sittings robbed him of Frances during the better part of each morning, and he urged that when he must so soon leave her, between the man who wanted her portrait and the man who wanted her, it would be kind to give her time to the latter.
“But I had no idea,” protested Frances, “he would take so long. He told me he’d finish it in three sittings. But he’s so critical of his own work that he goes over it again and again. He says that I am a most difficult subject, but that I inspire him. And he says, if I will only give him time, he believes this will be the best thing he has done.”
“That’s an awful thought,” said the cavalry officer.
“You don’t like him,” reproved Miss Gardner. “He is always very polite to you.”
“He’s polite to everybody,” said Lee; “that’s why I don’t like him. He’s not a real artist. He’s a courtier. God gave him a talent, and he makes a mean use of it. Uses it to flatter people. He’s like these long-haired violinists who play anything you ask them to in the lobster palaces.”
Miss Gardner looked away from him. Her color was high and her eyes very bright.
“I think,” she said steadily, “that Mr. Stedman is a great artist, and some day all the world will think so, too!”
Lee made no answer. Not because he disagreed with her estimate of Mr. Stedman’s genius-he made no pretense of being an art critic–but because her vehement admiration had filled him with sudden panic. He was not jealous. For that he was far too humble. Indeed, he thought himself so utterly unworthy of Frances Gardner that the fact that to him she might prefer some one else was in no way a surprise. He only knew that if she should prefer some one else not all his troop horses nor all his men could put Humpty Dumpty back again.
But if, in regard to Mr. Stedman, Miss Gardner had for a moment been at odds with the man who loved her, she made up for it the day following on the tennis court. There she was in accord with him in heart, soul, and body, and her sharp “Well played, partner!” thrilled him like one of his own bugle calls. For two days against visiting and local teams they fought their way through the tournament, and the struggle with her at his side filled Lee with a great happiness. Not that the championship of Agawamsett counted greatly to one exiled for three years to live among the Moros. He wanted to win because she wanted to win. But his happiness came in doing something in common with her, in helping her and in having her help him, in being, if only in play, if only for three days, her “partner.”
After they won they walked home together, each swinging a fat, heavy loving-cup. On each was engraved:
“Mixed doubles, Agawamsett, 1910.”
Lee held his up so that the setting sun flashed on the silver.
“I am going to keep that,” he said, “as long as I live. It means you were once my ‘partner.’ It’s a sign that once we two worked together for something and won.” In the words the man showed such feeling that the girl said soberly:
“Mine means that to me, too. I will never part with mine, either.”
Lee turned to her and smiled, appealing wistfully.
“It seems a pity to separate them,” he said. “They’d look well together over an open fireplace.”
The girl frowned unhappily. “I don’t know,” she protested. “I don’t know.”
The next day Lee received from the War Department a telegram directing him to “proceed without delay” to San Francisco, and there to embark for the Philippines.
That night he put the question to her directly, but again she shook her head unhappily; again she said: “I don’t know!”
So he sailed without her, and each evening at sunset, as the great transport heaved her way across the swell of the Pacific, he stood at the rail and looked back. With the aid of the first officer he calculated the difference in time between a whaling village situated at forty-four degrees north and an army transport dropping rapidly toward the equator, and so, each day, kept in step with the girl he loved.
“Now,” he would tell himself, “she is in her cart in front of the post-office, and while they sort the morning mail she gossips with the fisher folks, the summer folks, the grooms, and chauffeurs. Now she is sitting for her portrait to Stedman” (he did not dwell long on that part of her day), “and now she is at tennis, or, as she promised, riding alone at sunset down our lost road through the woods.”
But that part of her day from which Lee hurried was that part over which the girl herself lingered. As he turned his eyes from his canvas to meet hers, Stedman, the charming, the deferential, the adroit, who never allowed his painting to interrupt his talk, told her of what he was pleased to call his dreams and ambitions, of the great and beautiful ladies who had sat before his easel, and of the only one of them who had given him inspiration. Especially of the only one who had given him inspiration. With her always to uplift him, he could become one of the world’s most famous artists, and she would go down into history as the beautiful woman who had helped him, as the wife of Rembrandt had inspired Rembrandt, as “Mona Lisa” had made Leonardo.
Gilbert wrote: “It is not the lover who comes to woo, but the lover’s way of wooing!” His successful lover was the one who threw the girl across his saddle and rode away with her. But one kind of woman does not like to have her lover approach shouting: “At the gallop! Charge!”
She prefers a man not because he is masterful, but because he is not. She likes to believe the man needs her more than she needs him, that she, and only she, can steady him, cheer him, keep him true to the work he is in the world to perform. It is called the “mothering” instinct.
Frances felt this mothering instinct toward the sensitive, imaginative, charming Stedman. She believed he had but two thoughts, his art and herself. She was content to place his art first. She could not guess that to one so unworldly, to one so wrapped up in his art, the fortune of a rich aunt might prove alluring.
When the transport finally picked up the landfalls of Cavite Harbor, Lee, with the instinct of a soldier, did not exclaim: “This is where Dewey ran the forts and sank the Spanish fleet!” On the contrary, he was saying: “When she comes to join me, it will be here I will first see her steamer. I will be waiting with a field-glass on the end of that wharf. No, I will be out here in a shore-boat waving my hat. And of all those along the rail, my heart will tell me which is she!”
Then a barefooted Filipino boy handed him an unsigned cablegram. It read: “If I wrote a thousand words I could not make it easier for either of us. I am to marry Arthur Stedman in December.”
Lee was grateful for the fact that he was not permitted to linger in Manila. Instead, he was at once ordered up-country, where at a one-troop post he administered the affairs of a somewhat hectic province, and under the guidance of the local constabulary chased will-o’-the-wisp brigands. On a shelf in his quarters he placed the silver loving-cup, and at night, when the village slept, he would sit facing it, filling one pipe after another, and through the smoke staring at the evidence to the fact that once Frances Gardner and he had been partners.
In these post-mortems he saw nothing morbid. With his present activities they in no way interfered, and in thinking of the days when they had been together, in thinking of what he had lost, he found deep content. Another man, having lost the woman he loved, would have tried to forget her and all she meant to him. But Lee was far too honest with himself to substitute other thoughts for those that were glorious, that still thrilled him. The girl could take herself from him, but she could not take his love for her from him. And for that he was grateful. He never had considered himself worthy, and so could not believe he had been ill used. In his thoughts of her there was no bitterness: for that also he was grateful. And, as he knew he would not care for any other woman in the way he cared for her, he preferred to care in that way, even for one who was lost, than in a lesser way for a possible she who some day might greatly care for him. So she still remained in his thoughts, and was so constantly with him that he led a dual existence, in which by day he directed the affairs of an alien and hostile people and by night again lived through the wonderful moments when she had thought she loved him, when he first had learned to love her. At times she seemed actually at his side, and he could not tell whether he was pretending that this were so or whether the force of his love had projected her image half around the world.
Often, when in single file he led the men through the forest, he seemed again to be back on Cape Cod picking his way over their own lost road through the wood, and he heard “the beat of a horse’s feet and the swish of a skirt in the dew.” And then a carbine would rattle, or a horse would stumble and a trooper swear, and he was again in the sweating jungle, where men, intent upon his life, crouched in ambush.
She spared him the mockery of wedding-cards; but the announcement of the wedding came to him in a three-months-old newspaper. Hoping they would speak of her in their letters, he kept up a somewhat one-sided correspondence with friends of Mrs. Stedman’s in Boston, where she now lived. But for a year in none of their letters did her name appear. When a mutual friend did write of her Lee understood the silence.
From the first, the mutual friend wrote, the life of Mrs. Stedman and her husband was thoroughly miserable. Stedman blamed her because she came to him penniless. The rich aunt, who had heartily disapproved of the artist, had spoken of him so frankly that Frances had quarrelled with her, and from her no longer would accept money. In his anger at this Stedman showed himself to Frances as he was. And only two months after their marriage she was further enlightened.
An irate husband made him the central figure in a scandal that filled the friends of Frances with disgust, and that for her was an awakening cruel and humiliating. Men no longer permitted their womenfolk to sit to Stedman for a portrait, and the need of money grew imperative. He the more blamed Frances for having quarrelled with her aunt, told her it was for her money he had married her, that she had ruined his career, and that she was to blame for his ostracism–a condition that his own misconduct had brought upon him. Finally, after twelve months of this, one morning he left a note saying he no longer would allow her to be a drag upon him, and sailed for Europe.
They learned that, in Paris, he had returned to that life which before his marriage, even in that easy-going city, had made him notorious. “And Frances,” continued Lee’s correspondent, “has left Boston, and now lives in New York. She wouldn’t let any of us help her, nor even know where she is. The last we heard of her she was in charge of the complaint department of a millinery shop, for which work she was receiving about the same wages I give my cook.”
Lee did not stop to wonder why the same woman, who to one man was a “drag,” was to another, even though separated from her by half the world, a joy and a blessing. Instead, he promptly wrote his lawyers to find Mrs. Stedman, and, in such a way as to keep her ignorant of their good offices, see that she obtained a position more congenial than her present one, and one that would pay her as much as, without arousing her suspicions, they found it possible to give.
Three months had passed, and this letter had not been answered, when in Manila, where he had been ordered to make a report, he heard of her again. One evening, when the band played on the Luneta, he met a newly married couple who had known him in Agawamsett. They now were on a ninety-day cruise around the world. Close friends of Frances Gardner, they remembered him as one of her many devotees and at once spoke of her.
“That blackguard she married,” the bridegroom told him, “was killed three months ago racing with another car from Versailles back to Paris after a dinner at which, it seems, all present drank ‘burgundy out of the fingerbowls.’ Coming down that steep hill into Saint Cloud, the cars collided, and Stedman and a woman, whose husband thought she was somewhere else, were killed. He couldn’t even die without making a scandal of it.”
“But the worst,” added the bride, “is that, in spite of the way the little beast treated her, I believe Frances still cares for him, and always will. That’s the worst of it, isn’t it?” she demanded.
In words, Lee did not answer, but in his heart he agreed that was much the worst of it. The fact that Frances was free filled him with hope; but that she still cared for the man she had married, and would continue to think only of him, made him ill with despair.
He cabled his lawyers for her address. He determined that, at once, on learning it, he would tell her that with him nothing was changed. He had forgotten nothing, and had learned much. He had learned that his love for her was a splendid and inspiring passion, that even without her it had lifted him up, helped and cheered him, made the whole world kind and beautiful. With her he