It had become second nature for Paul to avoid his kind. As a sailor in port he had invariably slipped away from his mates. In the cafés of Europe he had preferred to sit at remote tables. Even in Cairo his real self had never mingled with his throng of acquaintances. Consequently he was in no sense disconcerted by a new esstrangement. However lonely he might feel, he was in a situation with which he knew how to cope.
There were days when he spoke to no one but Mrs. Barker, Mr. Silva, or Becky States, who still came to scrub and iron and chant unearthly melodies in her cracked, growling baritone. He developed reclusive habits that reminded him of Aunt Verona. He had already begun to collect texts—from such books as Norman Angell's The Great Illusion. "When," he sardonically mused, "shall I begin writing my futile history!"
Each new manifestation of the belligerent spirit intensified his disdain. His views were understood in no quarter and tolerated in few. Current patriotism struck him as being a glorification of the spirit in which Skinny Wiggins had been wont, with his bony fist, to prop a victim against a wall and reduce him to submission with the self-righteous query, "Did I? Did I? Say I did and I'll bust you in the eye!" Skinny certainly had; but had his heart been pure, his attitude was insulting and ill-bred—and patriotism was both. "My country, right or wrong!" cried the patriot, and the mob cheered. Well, let the mob not be surprised if he, Paul Minas, found the sentiment singularly fatuous. He listened with new ears to the National Anthem. Even poor, timid, quavering little Miss Todd could, with a holy zeal, sing:
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!"
He drew endless comfort from the picture of his deluded fellow-citizens, packed into the town hall, singing that last line with all their might!
Occasionally he lost his temper, under the stress. Once when Mr. Kingsley implied that his attitude was based on sophistry, Paul broke forth in an impassioned counter-charge. "Christliness," he concluded, "the most civilizing of all attitudes, assumes that men are brothers. The War Office assumes that they are members of opposing camps, all but one of which contain 'bloody foreigners.' I feel no urge to assert the superlative virtues of my particular nation and kill a lot of foreigners to prove the fictitious assertion. Why should I accept the mob's version? I've never accepted its opinion on any other issue. If I did I should have to accept its disapproval of outlandish traits that are a vital part of my own nature, which would be spiritual suicide. Forget 'honour' and 'righteousness,' cut out the hypocrisy, the drooling jingoism and sentimentality, and call on Mars. He's your man—not God. I should imagine by now your God is bloody well fed up with the whole of creation. I know I am. Do what you like with it—you and the people who understand its interests!"
The following winter, with its blizzards, ice and slush, seemed interminable. Paul read, and made music, oppressed by a sense of his dilettantism. It was maddening to be a mere fly on the cake of life—but even worse, he mused, to be a real currant, embedded in its dough. During the long transition weeks, when partial thaws alternated with frosts, when bleak winds and icy rains tore at the trees and fields in a final effort to frustrate the revival of life, Paul's isolation was relieved by conferences with old Dave Ashmill, who, in response to the increasing clamour for ships, had formed a syndicate to take over disused yards and, with lumber from his own mills, build wooden vessels on government contract. Paul had agreed to sell his waterside properties, and accepted the post of secretary of the Hale's Turning yard.
There were many papers to prepare and arrangements to make for the installation of plant and procuring of supplies. Old Ashmill, like his son, cultivated a coarse heartiness which resembled broad-mindedness, and chuckled whenever Paul gave vent to subversive remarks of the sort which had stamped him, in the eyes of Hale's Turning, as an "atheist"—the most damning epithet in its bestowal—or "odd," the epithet that had attached to Miss Windell.
Mrs. Ashmill, who was prepared to receive him coldly, owing to his reputation, he had won over in one stroke by arriving at her house in a dinner jacket and addressing the parlour-maid as though she were a maid rather than a "hired girl." Flora Ashmill, a virgin of forty and quite the most genteel object in the country, was deliciously appalled by his authoritative manner of contradicting her on her best topics: painting, music, horticulture.
Regarding his resistance the two women maintained a pregnant silence, making their knitting needles click with symbolic purport. They were bound to respect his views, for Mr. Ashmill had given out, with a hint of sardonic humour, that "Young Minas" was "indispensable" to him in his government shipbuilding project. Old Dave was universally suspected of a penchant for cheating all forms of orthodoxy on the sly, while conspicuously upholding them.
As befitted the leading family of Hale's Turning, the Ashmills patronized education. Mrs. Ashmill awarded an annual scholarship, and her daughter gave an annual "strawberry social" at which objects were sold for the purpose of raising funds to buy plaster models of "The Winged Victory" and lithographs of the Colosseum for the schoolhouse. The teachers were also invited once a year to dinner, and it was this rite that brought Paul into contact with Phœbe Meddar. So far he had only exchanged casual phrases with her at the post office where the villagers repaired every evening, ostensibly to collect letters, inostensibly to gossip. The ladylikeness which had vexed him on his first glimpse of Phœbe he now put down to constraint. It was most marked in the presence of Flora Ashmill, whose method of establishing her own superiority was to place everybody else at a disadvantage.
"How do you ever manage to keep it up year in and year out, Miss Meddar?" Flora murmured, referring to Phœbe's position in the village school.
"Oh, really, Miss Ashmill, it isn't so bad," Phœbe explained, hesitating between natural shyness and a desire to be hearty. "I actually enjoy it."
Paul leapt to the rescue. "Of course she does. You ladies who've been sheltered like beautiful greenhouse roses"—he paused a second to let Flora revel in it—"often miss one of life's best thrills: the thrill of fulfilling a responsibility."
Flora, who was plain and unloved, let her soul linger over the word he had so deftly tossed to her—"beautiful," and Phœbe sent across the table a glance acknowledging his protection. Her cheeks were like petals. "I wonder if you're really as remarkable as the addle-pated girls of Hale's Turning make out," her nice blue eyes seemed to say.
After dinner Mrs. Ashmill proposed music. Would Mr. Minas care to play? Paul welcomed the suggestion. In this hideous plush drawing-room, many years ago, he had played for guests of Miss Ashmill driven indoors by a shower which had blasted the booths at her strawberry social.
"And you were so small," Flora archly reminded him, "that you couldn't reach the pedals."
For the first time since his return Phœbe favoured him with a directly personal allusion. "Oh," she laughed, "he was the sort of child who would simply imagine he was pedalling and somehow produce the same effect."
Paul shot her a look of delighted surprise. It was shrewd. And, for Hale's Turning, original. But for the stiff presence of the Ashmill ladies and the silly stare of Myrtle Wilcove he would have been tempted to reply, "Exactly, and if you only knew it, Phœbe, he was the sort of child who while practising in a bare playroom used to imagine that you were listening to his strains, and he played all the better for the breathless interest his image of you took in them!" In the circumstances all he dared say was a bantering:
"How well you understand small boys! Does that come from experience as a teacher, or is it a natural gift?"
Phœbe's ladylikeness had vanished. "Oh, I'm sure the ability to understand you implies something more than either, something approximating genius!" The sarcasm was veiled by the gentleness of her voice, her frank smile, the suggestion of pale gilding that marked the contours of her smooth hair, her compact little figure, her simple black satin frock.
The retort pleased him, yet as he turned to the keyboard he shrugged his shoulders with a trace of the humiliation he had always felt as being treated as a superior being, instead of a quite ordinary boy.
At half-past nine he escorted Phœbe from the house, past the historic rose-beds. Wrapped in cloaks and equipped with overshoes and a lantern, they plodded through acres of slush which Phœbe likened to pineapple sherbet. For an unnaturally long period Paul had eschewed feminine society. The cosiness of the girl whose arm he was holding roused susceptibilities that had been lying torpid. Phœbe chatted easily, but never aimlessly. Her remarks were inclined to be edged. Her reserve piqued him. It was as though there were a lump in it which all his personal arts failed to dissolve. He decided, on the spot, to challenge her.
"Tell me, Phœbe"—it was the first time he had used her name—"why do you dislike me?"
She looked up at him, her face a patchwork of curved shadows cast by the lantern. Her lips were closed and there was a half timid glint in her eyes.
"Do I?" she fenced.
"Yes, a little. It's not so much dislike as distrust. Why?"
She considered it. "Why don't you answer the question for yourself, since you seem to know so much about my feelings—more than I do, I assure you."
With a grunt he recalled the far distant occasion when she had been unable to state the colour of his eyes. "Do you mean you don't know that you distrust me?" he insisted.
She went off on a strange tack. "I would have imagined," she said thoughtfully, "that seafaring would have dulled your sensitiveness. You must have had some bad times."
He was touched. "It's good to hear you say that."
"For mercy's sake, why?"
He came back to a flippant tone to conceal his concession to sentimentality. "Because," he laughed, "it's another neat sign of your comprehension of small boys—or rather a small boy. It proves you, according to your own rating, approximately a genius. Besides, now that you've said it, I'm sure the verdict is only 'distrust.' It was not the sort of remark one makes of a person one dislikes."
"Aren't you conceited!" she commented.
"Ah, now I understand the grounds for distrust."
"I dare say you understand heaps of things. Here's the gate. Will you come in?"
He declined the formal invitation, and stood, throwing the lantern's rays along the pathway. Within the last half hour Phœbe had revived his romantic hopes for her. She seemed to have it in her to rise to occasions.
He splashed his way homeward with a refreshed courage. It was as though his inner egos were happily smiling, after long days and nights of unacknowledged chagrin.
As he entered his house he hummed a snatch from an opera he had heard in some far corner of the globe: "Io son barbiere, di qualita—di qualita."
Why, he asked himself, should that particular ditty come to his lips? What on earth was the association between The Barber of Seville and the mood of the evening? For a few moments he indulged in the fascinating exercise of thinking backward, in search of a clue to the mysterious workings of sub-consciousness. At last he had it: qualita, quality. "Quality" was the word for which his mind had groped at the dinner table, when trying to define the flavour of the Ashmill ladies. They considered themselves persons "of quality"—that was it.
Quality, Quality Street—Phœbe Throstle! Everything led back to Phœbe!
He shivered as he passed the open door of the ghostly playroom, and hurried upstairs to bed.
Inordinate bustle troubled the slumbers of Hale's Turning with the advent of spring, reminding the aged of days when ship "lanchings" were of frequent occurrence. From the riverside issued an incessant din of trip-hammers, and as summer wore on, the hulls of three stocky steamers loomed up. On Sunday afternoons the pastime of the godly was to walk along the bluff, survey these evidences of Dave Ashmill's ingenuity, and make comment on the progress since the previous Sabbath.
Paul's abilities had been discovered by old Dave and put to the best advantage. Chief among them was a knack he had acquired at sea of handling men. Ashmill's success had been due in good measure to his gift for suborning brains, and Paul knew, from Aunt Verona, that his own father had swelled the Ashmill fortunes by enlarging the foreign market.
Paul noted that the people who had liked him seized on his new occupation with relief, as though to assure him that by contributing his knowledge of ships towards the success of the allies he was in a measure redeeming himself. He declined the shift.
"I'm doing it not because it's my 'bit,'" he said truculently one day to the Baptist minister, "but because building ships is always a worth-while task."
"And sinking them?"
"Is, of course, insane."
"Ah, my young friend, how true! I fear Germany's insanity is of the incurable kind. That comes of denying her God."
"Don't talk rot, man," said Paul, who still harboured a grudge against the sect that had tried to Shanghai him into the fold, "It's insane to fire off twelve-inch guns. All phases of warfare are insane. We're no more exempt than the enemy."
The minister was stung by the trace of contempt in Paul's tone. "Do you realize?" he asked, "that your remarks might be interpreted as seditious?"
"Fully. The truth is always seditious—as Socrates and Christ knew to their cost. You men of God don't preach Christ these days. You preach Jehovah, and choose the bloodiest texts in the Old Testament. Why not be consistent—be patriarchal, practise polygamy, and the whole bag of tricks!"
The minister bowed and walked away. Paul had no remorse, for he was settling an old score. He was not impious. Faith had been bred in him through occasional flashes of insight. He passionately envied adepts who had penetrated into the inner temples. But his religion was an intensely personal relationship with the infinite—an infinite which men, in the feebleness of their imagination, had had to personify as an old gentleman with a beard. He heartily endorsed the proverb which says: "Il vaut mieux avoir affaire à Dieu qu' à ses saints." Of course he had made an enemy of the minister, but he preferred enemies to friends who edited his conduct to bring it into conformity with their mechanical orthodoxy.
Even Phœbe, his new friend, persisted in hushing up his heterodoxies, though he had striven to train her into understanding, if not sharing, his own contempt of criticism. His views had shocked her, as they shocked all the others. But Phœbe possessed a mind that invited ideas. Unlike the girls with whom she had studied at Normal School, she had not considered her education at an end when she received a diploma. Paul had patiently waited for her to overcome her first distrust, to conquer the pride which made her hold out against the personality that had flurried less fastidious women. But in the end it was inevitable they should be together, for he alone could give her glimpses of a civilization broader and richer than that of which she, as assistant principal of the local school, was the accredited representative.
Paul guessed that other girls twitted Phœbe for her interest in him, and in order to spare her had checked his first advances. He guessed, too, that his advent was responsible for a certain coolness between Phœbe and Wilfrid Fraser, who had paid attention to her for years. He had known Phœbe subtly defiant with the girls who were loudest in their war zeal, and he had observed, with sweetly painful concern, her distrust of him change gradually to trust, her edged retorts give way to earnest and intimate confidences. He knew that Phœbe's invalid mother disapproved of his iconoclasm. He knew that Bob Meddar, whom he liked, had warned Phœbe against accepting at their face value the ideas of a confessed visionary—and, worst of all, he knew that Bob's warning was fearfully well-founded. Yet he was drawn.
Phœbe wept helplessly when Bob went overseas. A few months later she saw Wilfrid off to Ottawa, where he had obtained a war post that exempted him from action for which he was physically disqualified. Paul met Phœbe a few days later at the post office, and their interview was a little strained.
He had found a note from Mark Laval, written just before embarking. It was short, but glowed with enthusiasm, as Mark's eyes had glowed in the days when he declaimed romantic verse under the cherry tree. "One of them there dumdums will probably get me," Mark concluded, "but it will be better than a tree falling on me."
As they walked through the fields Paul read the letter to Phœbe.
"Mark will be a good soldier," she commented.
"Yes—for men like him the war means emancipation. For men like Wilfrid Fraser it would mean torture, slavery, and death. Sensibilities are a luxury society dispenses with in wartime. The arrangement would be more successful if the sensitive men could dispense with their own sensibilities at a given signal. But butterflies don't revert into caterpillars."
"Just the same," said Phœbe, with a hint of hostility, "Wilfrid is doing his bit."
"That's such a glib word, Phœbe—'bit.' You who are so meticulous, why don't you avoid it?" He spoke more testily than the trifle warranted, his nerves showing the strain of increasingly intensive propaganda
He knew her feelings were hurt, for she half turned from him. With a tinge of pride and a tinge of appeal in his tones he apologized. Some maternal instinct stirred in her, and she took his arm.
"I'm trying to understand you, Paul," she said. "But you're so different from everybody I know!"
He was moved, "At any rate you don't despise me—that's something to hold to."
"Oh Paul—despise!" There were tears in her voice.
They had reached a deserted grove of alders behind the Meddar cottage. Suddenly he took Phœbe in his arms and kissed her—gently. For some time her face lay against his shoulder. When she finally looked up she gave him an anxious smile. Her eyes were like wet violets.
He held her close, as if to assure himself by sheer contact that he had not made a mistake.
Gradually it became apparent to Paul that Phœbe staggered under the weight of his anomalous status. The isolation natural to him was for her a new and trying experience. She continued to knit and make bandages, but worked in private, recoiling from the chatter about slackers and heroes. Unwittingly she antagonized shallow girls and noticed that Myrtle Wilcove, who had been a competitor for her position at the school, made the most of her advantage with public opinion.
When coercive measures began to be seriously discussed Phœbe was dismayed. It had been hard enough to be torn daily between the duty of teaching her pupils prescribed lessons in patriotism and that of defending an unpatriotic lover, but it was harrowing to guess the consequences of his attitude should conscription come into effect.
"What will you do then, dear?" she inquired timidly.
He was hurt by the implication that he might adapt his principles to the exigencies of society and made a truculent reply.
Phœbe was quiet for a while and they sat staring into the open door of the Klondike stove in her mother's sitting-room—a room embellished with shells and painted ostrich eggs.
"But Paul—they will—don't they?"
"Send one to prison, you mean? Don't be afraid to speak plainly, Phœbe. Now's a time for honest people to do so, now that highfalutin lies are being hoisted banner-like for folk to rally under. . . . No doubt I'll be sent to prison if the worst comes to the worst."
Her lips were quivering.
"They won't shoot me," he added bitterly. "Which proves that society, after all, has an embryonic conscience."
Then he relented and took her in his arms.
"I'm so selfish," she sobbed, as he petted her, "to make you supply courage for two, when I ought to be a source of strength to you."
"You are, dear—you are," he replied abstractedly. But to himself he had to avow that Phœbe was in his boat—his privateer—only as supercargo. He was haunted by the problem of her fate; it weighed on him more heavily than his own.
Some weeks later he found her with red eyes, shrinking. Her manner drove from his mind a momentous development in his own affairs which he had come to announce. He talked of trivial matters, waiting for a clue. They came around to the inevitable topic, and suddenly, with a little rush of words, Phœbe suggested that he should make some compromise before it was too late.
"You might do something that would keep you from the actual fighting. Couldn't you"
Paul rose from his chair and paced the room. "Is that all you've been able to make of my abstention?" he cried. "Compromise? Now? I'm less ready to compromise than I've ever been."
The statement echoed in his ears like some death knell of reasonableness. Life was a matter of winds and currents, and one's views must be swung about like the yards of a ship if one hoped to avoid reefs. In his most lucid moments he perceived that he was stubborn, as Aunt Verona had been. Yet fatalistically he pitted his obduracy against what he regarded as the massed stubbornness of the world. He preferred shipwreck on the shores of his own Utopia to arrival in the promised land of the commonalty.
Phœbe was weeping, and he guessed that something unusual had happened. He approached to pat her shoulder and saw the tears come more freely. Then, her face buried in her hands, she explained that her brother had been killed.
For a long while Paul held her in his arms, consoling her as best he could. In the end she became quiet, and Paul, chastened, let her talk.
"Oh, how could they—how could they?" she cried, with a return to incoherence. "Poor old Bobby—Oh, why can't I go out and avenge him!"
He had never heard her so emphatic. Although she was unstrung by grief, he could not refrain from presenting the corrective aspect of the case. "But don't you see, Phœbe dear, that's the spirit that has brought all this horror about? The more one avenges, the more there is to avenge. It reduces civilization to an arena, and peace merely means 'half time'—a pause during which you rest and repair yourself for new frays."
Phœbe was listening fitfully. "They must be wrong though, Paul—Oh, don't you ever feel that you could wipe such people off the face of the earth? But of course you don't—forgive me, dear."
Through a haze he saw Phœbe retreating. Mechanically he replied:
"All I feel is that some girl like you in Munich is saying exactly those words to some man like me, provided they have any who are still out of the net."
"They haven't—you may depend on it." She said it in a tone which her nervousness rendered somewhat aggressive, then halted in a panic.
He looked at her steadily. "You were going to add, 'And we shouldn't have any, either.'"
Phœbe rose and walked to the window. "Oh, it's hideous. I just can't make it out."
He had an irresistible impulse to test her.
"Would it make matters more comprehensible to you if I were to give in after all?"
She wheeled about. In her glance he read what he had dreaded to find: a hope that he would be unfaithful to the principles which she knew he venerated but which she could only partially understand. He was something Phœbe had "taken up" as she had taken up chemistry and mathematics, and the study was a little beyond her.
He turned away with a heavy sigh. "Unfortunately, I don't think much of deathbed conversions," he said. Her distress now failed to move him; he was too exhausted to feel.
She took his hands imploringly.
"Oh, Paul, I'm stupid. But I do wish to understand for I—" She hesitated again, at his unresponsiveness, and he patted her hands, then replaced them at her sides.
"No not even that," he said, flinching from the truth, yet forcing his way toward it. "You thought you loved me, and in a sort of way you do. But it's not quite the way, and it's not your fault. I should never have inflicted myself on you. I ought to know better than to invite people to subscribe to me. I fail them, and they fail me. But one can't always be wise and farsighted. One so dreads to be eternally thrust back on oneself. . . . A vagrant has no right to claim love and understanding; he sacrifices that for his independence. Besides, a vagrant has nothing to offer in exchange—save picturesque tales of his selfish vagrancy!"
As he talked he heard the words falling dead at Phœbe's feet, as all his weighted words must. She could understand him only when his speech soared on wings of passion. Even yet he might sweep her doubts aside in a single gesture, but all passion had subsided. He saw her fingers twisting and intertwining, and looked away.
"In other circumstances," he went on, "we might have found in each other enough love to sustain us. The war has divided the world into camps of thought, with orthodox folk joined together in temporary fraternity in one, and in the other an assortment of outcasts with an assortment of loyalties. You're not in my camp, dear. It wouldn't even be wise that you should be."
Phœbe winced, but the hard cogent tone helped to steady her. "Who are your colleagues?" she demanded.
"God only knows. They must exist. I haven't lost faith in rationality even yet."
"But how can you choose isolation?"
He smiled grimly, remembering for the first time the tidings he had come to impart. "My social isolation became one degree more acute to-day," he announced, "and not from choice. I've been asked to resign from the shipyard."
Phœbe's face exhibited consternation. "Oh, but Paul! I thought Mr. Ashmill declared you were indispensable to him!"
"His good repute is even more so. He has political enemies, and couldn't afford to have them go on badgering him about his able-bodied young secretary. As the little song says, 'I for one don't blame him.'"
"But how terrible! My dear, what will you do?"
The exclamation and the question bored him. "Oh, Phœbe," he said, and his voice broke, "does it dreadfully matter?"
He left her, unable to promise that he would return. The prospect of further scenes, further misunderstandings, futile tears, was more than he could face. Phœbe had pronounced her doom and his when she reminded him that he had to supply courage for both. He hadn't enough.