One afternoon in the summer of 1917 Walter Dreer arrived on leave from Toronto in the uniform of a cadet in the air force. He had transferred from service to service, with the result that he had not yet been sent overseas.
His greeting to Paul was, "Hello, when are you going to join up?"
"I hadn't thought of joining up at all."
Walter, who had hitherto reserved taunts for occasions when Paul was not on hand to parry them, felt emboldened by the presence of his father, who walked proudly beside him.
"Content to let somebody else fight for you?" Walter threw out.
"Not at all," Paul replied. "I always fight my own battles."
Walter could make nothing of this. "It don't look like it," he finally commented.
"Looks are deceiving," said Paul, surveying his old chum's uniform. "Take yourself. Anybody would think you had been fighting—for me, as you put it." He had a desire to punctuate Walter's fraudulent heroics.
"It's lucky there's nobody else around to hear you talking like that."
"Well, now that you're back, Walter, all Hale's Turning will get a report of my words." It was the only time he had referred to Walter's propensity for gossip.
"By Joe, if I hadn't known you as a kid"
"You wouldn't realize how beautifully consistent my attitude has been throughout," Paul finished it.
"Beautifully crazy!" interposed Mr. Dreer, with a snort.
"As you decide," replied Paul.
"It's not a time for fancy phrases," pronounced Mr. Dreer severely.
"Then why do you publicly indulge in them?" Paul inquired. He alluded to meetings in the town hall and at Bridgetown.
"That's my affair, sir. I'm too old to carry a gun."
"Yes, aren't you glad?"
"Damn you—your insolence has gone beyond the limit."
Paul's wrath came to the surface. He had not sought the quarrel. "What do you expect of a crazy man?" he retorted, and strode away, leaving father and son to assure each other of their moral advantage.
He knew he had gone beyond the limit this time—of discretion, if not of insolence. There were bound to be consequences; but he almost welcomed them. Anything would be better than the present negative status. Even the illusion of Phœbe's support was gone.
The sequel to the passage at arms with Mr. Dreer came a few weeks later in the form of a summons to appear before a special board in Halifax and explain alleged statements of a seditious character. Then only did Paul realize how many enemies he had made. Mr. Dreer, with the aid of his son and the Baptist minister, had compiled the evidence. There were records of conversations with men in the shipyard—some of them fairly accurate, literally, but robbed of the context, lacking the ironical stress and the qualifying clauses that had characterized Paul's utterances. Not once had he advanced his views without provocation; not once had he sought to make converts. The charges seemed to him puerile and he listened with an air of aloofness.
It was intimated that "things" would be "made easy" if he were willing to undertake certain missions for which his attainments specially fitted him. He declined the loophole. "It's entirely a matter of principle," he maintained. Hence they did not make it easy for him.
"And serve him right!" said Hale's Turning, with the exception of Miss Todd, Mrs. Kestrell, Mrs. Barker, Becky States, Mr. Silva, old Silas and Phœbe Meddar.
Phœbe, overcome by the shock, wrote a letter in which she diffidently, and between the lines tearfully, attempted to creep back, to reassure him of her continued faith and goodwill and love. On the bottom of the sheet he wrote:
"The faith I'll keep on trust, Phœbe. The goodwill is still more acceptable, for on the cultivation of that article the salvation of the world depends. The love I'm sending back, dear, ever so gently, with your letter. You'll have wiser uses for it."
Of all the messages he received, that from old Dave Ashmill struck him as being the most apt. "You have two big faults, boy," wrote his former employer. "You're too smart and too honest for your own good. Let me know if I can do anything."
Paul smiled cynically. Old Dave's opportunism always prevailed over his generosity. That explained why Andrew Minas had died poor, when he ought to have prospered on just commissions for charters he had obtained for Ashmill. Paul knew that the patriot, Ashmill, would not trouble to put in a word with the authorities for a young man whom the profiteer, Ashmill, slyly admired. Simply because the shrewd profiteer had observed that his secretary had become bored with shipbuilding—as he became bored with everything in life that failed to add cubits to his spiritual stature. And old Dave, like most of the men Paul had encountered, was more ready to pay a deposit on a new order than settle for goods already received.
"Let me know if I can do anything for you." That was what the world all generously said, whenever it was sure that one would be too proud to take it at its word.
Imprisoned and abandoned, Paul marvelled that anything so intangible as a point of view could bring one to such a pass—such an inevitable point of view, and such a phantastic pass! He disbelieved in martyrdom, yet knew that he would have been ready to make any sacrifice, even that of life itself, for his principle. He could only conclude that the issue had been after all a matter of life and death for him—the life or death of his individuality. He was still obsessed by the idea that he had something to express, in the sense that artists and thinkers "express." Had he yielded to mass reasoning and entered a fight which in no way touched his moral fibre, his message, he felt, would have been irretrievably lost. By sheltering the principles he had long nurtured, he hoped to bring his life to the point of blossoming, if not of fruit-bearing.
As the months crept by, months during which meditation was an antidote to the hideously importunate reality of his surroundings, his past took on new meaning, and the dejection into which he had settled gave place to a sombre ecstasy as, bit by bit, he puzzled out a future of self-realization—made it out tentatively, hopefully, romantically. The watching and recording faculty, the warder of his thoughts and emotions, told him he was going through hell, and an idealizing faculty, their chaplain, persuaded him that this was a necessary stage of his progress, that the fire would strip him of garments he had worn for the sake of convention. With this certitude to support him, the tension relaxed.
Often now, when lost in meditation, he recaptured the experience of "just being." By holding his faculties in poise he could relapse at will into a state of trance through which came a radiant vision. The discordant forces of human nature redistributed themselves, producing a harmony so exquisite and so complex that the mind grew faint in trying to grasp it. The world revealed itself a transcendent instrument on which one's life would be played as a mighty solo, without a false chord.
From one of these trance-like abstractions he emerged to find a keeper staring at him. Paul returned the stare, wonderingly, and the keeper departed. From that moment he was more closely watched. He concluded they suspected him of lunacy.
When the exalted moods passed, he clung to the memory of his visions with the feverish tenacity of a man whose experience has been an alternation of romantic expectations and brusque deceptions. This next adventure, towards which all his instincts, like tendrils, had been reaching forth since the dawn of experience, must not be bungled, lest the future become a descent into nothingness. He sought support in the poetry which had made an impression on his youth, but the odds seemed against success. Poets seldom got farther than passionately envying the happiness of skylarks. The youth whose motto was "Excelsior" mounted high, but in Alpine snows succumbed to his own fanaticism. Paul thought of himself as Wordsworth's youth, "Nature's Priest," lured by the vision of immortality which had attended him as a child. Heaven had lain about him in his infancy; even yet he caught glimpses of an eternal effulgence which gave him courage to defy the life of "sense and outward things." But the poet warned him:
And fade into the light of common day."
A mortal weariness seized on him, and he tore up his lyrical diary.
When the gates swung open he passed through with a mechanical nod of goodwill. He ignored the directions given by the man who closed the gates after him, and walked at haphazard until he came to a familiar grassy slope.
Above him stretched the hill where he had sat and ruminated one autumn afternoon—the afternoon on which he had defied the gym instructor. From the citadel he had gazed towards ships in the roads, free ships that roamed at will in search of exotit havens.
He was sorry for that far-away boy who had longed for freedom, only to learn that it entailed crushing obligations. The boy had shouldered them, earned his title-deeds, and when youth was gone handed the precious legacy to the man. The man in consequence was now free; his claim was beyond a shadow of doubt. And for that very reason the sight of noble ships lying at anchor gave him, now, no sense of exhilaration. He thought not of their incomparable privilege as roamers; but of the dreary fate which buffeted them from harbour to harbour in a quest that was never fulfilled. Poor ships! Poor boy! Yet he envied, as well as pitied the boy—envied him his blazing faith in the treasures that lay beyond the horizon. Poor man! His faith nowadays, at best, merely glowed; often it lay cold and ash-buried. It might once more burst into flame—a flame that should serve as a beacon. But it would need the most delicate fanning.
His eyes wandered over the soot-besmirched city. How sure it was of itself—like all things ugly.
He took a deep breath, shrugged his shoulders, and walked down the hill, making for the office of his solicitor. Mr. Kingsley started up with an air of surprise and offered him an awkward greeting.
"Well?" he finally inquired.
"I'd like you to arrange for the immediate sale of everything I possess," announced Paul.
"Everything?"
"Every square inch of land, every stick, every stock—the whole shooting-match."
"Won't you explain your idea—I don't quite see"
"You needn't. You'll receive the usual commission."
Mr. Kingsley winced, but took down Paul's instructions.
"You plan to go away again?" he inquired, when the business was settled.
"Yes."
"I suppose you'll let us hear from you occasionally."
"Probably not."
Mr. Kingsley looked offended, then, with a sympathy which Paul dismissed as belated, left his desk and crossed the room to stand beside his client. "Look here, Minas, you mustn't take this thing so hard. I knew your father and mother, and I hate to see you let yourself grow bitter."
"Oh—you think I'm mad, I suppose," Paul said, as though the possibility of the other man's objecting to his scheme had just occurred to him.
"Well, since you mention it, I do."
"Then, don't waste your advice. Madmen must do mad things."
"Madmen" Mr. Kingsley stopped short.
"You were going to retort that madmen are usually locked up." With a gleam of amusement he watched the elder man's countenance which suggested embarrassment, anxiety and frustrated affection. "But you see," Paul went on relentlessly, "that it doesn't do us a particle of good. We only grow madder. It's much wiser of you all to let us go unmolestedly to the dogs."
"Why 'us all?' You don't suppose I had anything to do with bringing about the wretched trial! On the contrary I did my best to defend you."
"I'm not ungrateful for your aid—even though you did maintain that my statements misrepresented my real sentiments. You didn't realize, perhaps, that you were making me out a liar."
"Oh, look here now, Minas"
"Well, it doesn't in the least matter. It's over. Get on with the sale. If my property isn't disposed of within a month I'll give it to the poor, like the young man in the Bible." And Paul went out and slammed the door.
A few hours later he drove into Hale's Turning in a hired car. Without useless preliminaries he set to work on the task he had allotted himself. With the aid of the chauffeur, he brought down his trunks and bags from the attic, then went from room to room making a rapid selection of objects to be packed, setting aside others for destruction, and taking an inventory of the remainder for the convenience of his solicitor.
Most of Aunt Verona's possessions he burnt. They were not for the profane. He preserved only her music. Into his bags also went trifling objects which should remind him of boyish faiths and illusions—among them the lacquer box with its dead flowers. Phœbe, after all, had not come to see the bouquet. She must remain in ignorance of that episode, as Leila had remained in ignorance of the "secrets" he had planned to reveal to her. His life was a succession of fanciful projects which never got beyond a dress-rehearsal.
The inventory was completed before dawn, and Paul lay down for the last time in the little room from whose walls Queen Victoria and Sir John Macdonald looked so forbiddingly forth. His life in Hale's Turning, where he had come to anchor, was ended—but what of the friends who remained? He would have preferred not to see them again. Whatever friendliness he had enjoyed had been offered to the image his friends had made of him, an image in their own likeness. His real self they had involuntarily shunned, or sought to edit. True, some, including Phœbe, had overcome the first shock and made timid advances. But he could never forget their shrinking. He could forgive—Lord yes, had forgiven freely, just as he hoped to be forgiven for having at times, in the groping past, been a sheep among sheep. The long hours of reflection had at least purged his soul of rancour. But after all he was a new man, and as such must be free of confusing associations. On his new pilgrimage, towards the very heart of life, his spirit's meat, as the poet said, must be freedom, his staff must be wrought of strength—carefully conserved strength—and his cloak woven of thought. If there were to be friends—and he felt he was getting beyond the age for making intimate friendships—they could only be people who would accept him for what he was, not for what circumstances had made him appear. Now that all veils had been discarded and his essential nature stood revealed, he would never again hide it from the world. Let the world react as it saw fit. Enemies and revilers there might be a-plenty, but he had plumbed the depths of any suffering they could inflict. They had sought to make him like themselves by locking him up, but had merely succeeded in confirming his incompatibility with themselves.
For decency's sake, and in order to reassure those who had been kind to him, he planned, in the morning, to make a round of farewell calls. Phœbe he would leave till the last, for she would be the most difficult—especially if she adopted an absolving attitude now that he had settled his account with society. That would be an intolerable weakness on her part, against which he must guard by an impersonal approach. He could find it in his heart to envy Wilfrid his insipidity. As a child Wilfrid had Gritty Kestrell to protect him. In his maturity, he would have Phœbe. And Wilfrid was of a mental and moral stature that Phœbe could manage, with energy to spare for the "improvement of her mind." One couldn't help feeling a little sarcastic toward Phœbe—in strict privacy. Gritty had said, "At least she's the only girl in that God-forsaken hole with a nickel's worth of brains." That wasn't the final word to be said for Phœbe, but it was wickedly near the mark.
Sleep came at last, while his soul, like a kite, tugged pleasantly at his leaden body. His mind had gone beyond the farewells and he drowsily pictured himself in a train, speeding, speeding, towards infinity. Night drawing in, wheels grinding, the carriage swaying, the world rushing by: the globe, the stars, trees, men. Something infinitely precious, but dead, left behind. Life, a series of partial deaths, or of new creations; merely two ways of stating it. And at the heart of it all was a blessed stability; harmony, forgetfulness, peace. Three days later Paul arrived in New York and put up at the old Brevoort Hotel on the edge of "Greenwich Village." Its suggested bohemianism and the mellow beauty of lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square, red, blue, white, and gold in the glittering sunshine of autumn, soothed nerves fatigued by the insistent exhibits of a city which struck him as a permanent "world's fair."
He engaged a passage on a ship sailing for Havre the following week, then booked a seat for a performance of Take it or Leave It, the revue in which Gritty Kestrell was appearing. Gritty's name stretched across hoardings in red letters and winked at Times Square in electric lights. Her face, with its odd grimaces, its snub nose, blue eyes and hair of counterfeit gold, graced the cover of a smart periodical. She endorsed new beauty creams and published her advice to stage-struck girls. She was proprietress of a dancing establishment frequented by the fashionably fast. Joe Krauss had died and left her a fortune and there were hints that she was on excellent terms with the partner who had stepped into Joe's shoes.
Paul eagerly awaited Gritty's first entrance. There were echoes of a vulgar brawl between father and daughter on a landing, then Gritty appeared, made up as a "slavey," her hair screwed into a knot, her sleeves rolled up, her long, twisted boots toeing in, her apron splashed, her skirt down at the back, bucket and mop in hand, staring aggressively off-stage. She set down the bucket, heaved a sigh, and ran out her tongue at the invisible enemy. Paul chuckled. It was so like the tomboy of twenty years ago.
Then she put her foot in the bucket and came tumbling down the stairs, head over heels, fetching up with a skilfully faked thump and an air of chagrin.
The secret of Gritty's success was patent. On the stage she projected endearingly human qualities, adding a touch of the pert and the incongruous, her whole instinctive object being to make people like her. He had noticed that other women in the cast, more beautiful but less successful, walked on assuming that the audience must be overcome by their charm. Gritty took nothing for granted. She "worked" every minute, as he could see from the gestures and tone-shadings with which she drove home her first song. This ditty descanted upon the woes and hardships of an "honest hired girl":
And your pa(r)
Blows your wages in a bar,
You better throw yourself into the lake.
For you can't keep your honour,
Your virtue is a gonner,
If your pa(r) bags all your savings
And you try to live on shavings
And there's nothing in your stomach but a ache."
It was followed by a dolorous dance in which Gritty made capital of her big boots and the long wet mop. She galumphed about the stage with an infectious sense of rhythm, while the gallery softly whistled the tune, then at the approach of the last bars she neared the wings, always neatly cavorting, and repeated the catch line. The "a' ache"—the elision of the consonant—was the real Gritty, and the audience seemed to know it.
In the interval he sent around his card and received a prompt reply:
"You dear old darling. Talk about bolts from the blue. Come back after the show. Ask for Louis who'll bring you to my dressing-room. You're to have supper with me. Oh Paul three cheers."
For a week Gritty gave him all her available time, which in view of matinées, fittings, and visits to the cinema studios, was limited. He found himself playing with her as a heavy-hearted man might play with a kitten. They were brother and sister again and took tranquil drives into the country in Gritty's limousine, lunching at remote road-houses in Long Island or beside the Hudson.
The five intervening years had brought rich experience to both, Although Gritty had gone far up the ladder, her success had been purchased at the price of hard work, nervous strain, and fierce intrigue. A new maturity underlay her playfulness, Paul found it strangely easy to talk to her. For all her prattling she was transparently sincere, and protectively affectionate. She knew men intuitively and through long observation. And he was more grateful for her approval of him than he would have been for the approval of a less expert woman, however chaste. Gritty was the only human being with whom he had been able to talk without reserve. She combined two qualities rare in women: frankness and discretion. She said exactly what she meant when her hearer was reliable; and was careful to say nothing that an unreliable hearer might repeat with damaging effect.
The only reproach he made to Gritty was her promiscuity. "Nobody expects you to go straight, Gritty," he said, on the day before he was to sail. They were having tea at her flat in Central Park West. "But do be an artist in your affairs. I hated your association with Krauss, and I don't think much of his successor."
"You're mixing up my affairs with my business, honey. There's a sharp difference."
"Well, don't lose sight of the distinction, then, at any rate."
Gritty was suddenly cast down. "You're so clear-headed," she sighed. "I wisht I could have you handy to scold me often. But you're going away to God knows where. Oh, Paul, there is one little streak in me that's worth all the rest, and you make me remember it. There's something in me that could almost be a nun, if it got the chanst. But you can't give up being a successful artiste to be a bum nun! If I could only be like you and have a thing called a destiny instead of a Broadway career—Gee!"
"You can have a destiny, Gritty. The highest aim anyone can have is to share the destiny of the race. If you go on being generous and playing fair you will be keeping your candle burning and adding to the piteously inadequate enlightenment of this naughty world. The tragedy of it is, there are gigantic waterfalls of intelligence which might be used to generate enlightenment, but the world prefers its dark corners. . . . Oh, Gritty, life is so boundlessly potential. We could be gods and goddesses, if we knew what to do with our energies. Instead of which we snarl and haggle and lie and cheat and show off. We go round in circles instead of going straight forward, and then have the ignorance and cheek to claim intelligence! As an old carpenter on my first ship used to say, 'men are more stoopid as animals.'"
Gritty's eyes dwelt on him trustingly, compassionately. He read some sort of vague inquiry in her glance, and it made him doubt himself.
"One feels lost at times," he said, with bowed shoulders, "and futile—like some dotty grandsire mumbling in a corner."
"Why don't you be a writer?" Gritty asked.
The question startled him. He thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, I can't do it that way."
"Do what?"
"I mean I can't deliver my message by writing. I shouldn't know how to drive it home with a pen. I've got to do it by impressing people with whom I come in contact."
"Oh, but that's so vague—and inglorious."
"Who's talking about glory, you poor little footlight moth! . . . Besides it's not as vague as you think. The greatest messages the world has ever received have been spread by word of mouth."
Paul's vision suddenly cleared. "One thing is sure, and that is that I'll never be good for anything but spreading the ideas that have come to possess me. Like the Ancient Mariner I'm doomed to go wandering forth, stopping 'one of three' . . . Do you remember the days, Gritty, when we had to spout that poem?"
"Do I! I was a rotten reciter—and here I am now, reciting every night of my life! Oh, Paul, darling, doesn't it make you feel chokey to think of those days and that odious little class-room with its smell of wet slate-pencils that squeaked, squeaked, squeaked, and geraniums at the window and coloured water and Miss Hornby's bottle of cod liver oil?"
"And your pigtails!"
"And gingham pinnies that I always came home torn in. And the spit-balls we used to shoot at each other with a elastic."
"And Wilfrid Fraser who always put his head under the desk when he blew his nose."
"And the time John Ashmill held it under when Miss Hornby asked Wilfie a question. . . . And now—whoever would a dreamt all that's happened! Oh. Paul, it is a dream—no kidding. But I do wisht I could have a aim like you, honest I do!"
"Saves disappointment not to, dear."
Gritty stroked his hand. "You so often look sad, honey—why?"
"I feel sad—diffusely, almost paternally. I'm sad for the world, rather. As far as I'm concerned nothing matters. I'm too old."
Gritty gave a ringing laugh. "Baby boy! Why, you're younger'n me, and I'm only thirty!"
"But I've lived harder—mentally. As a boy I was a sort of prodigy. And prodigies have a way of petering out."
Gritty snuggled closer to him on the settee.
"There are people," he went on, "whose lives are concentrated in the span of a single generation. Sometimes I think I'm one of them."
She placed soft white fingers over his mouth. "Hush! Why, in a year or two when you've got used to your new ideas you'll be all over your blues. Won't you? Say yes."
A maid entered the room carrying a big pasteboard box.
"Hats! Hats!" squealed Gritty, undoing the cord with eager fingers.
She tried them on and forgot everything but the bright portraits she was making of herself before a mirror. Paul found them pretty, but his mind travelled back to a summer morning when he had seen Gritty trying on a leghorn hat trimmed with heliotrope ribbon, whilst Phœbe Meddar stooped to pick up a bouquet of tea-roses.
He departed with a nameless sense of desolation. Gritty was the only friend left—the last on his list of farewells. And for all her amiability she was scarcely more than a makeshift: a misguided, vicious, pleasant, warm-hearted, promiscuous, vain, tender little makeshift.
"Poor kitten," he sighed, as he stepped into the street.