I
The Czar had been deposed in the opening weeks of March. Sturmer, Golitsyn and Protopopov had been arrested. The Imperial Russian family were under tragic detention in Tsarkoë-Selo Palace. On March 15 came the coalition cabinet of the revolutionists. As April began, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates were declaring it necessary for them to control the course of the provisional government. Events were moving in seven-league boots in the land of the luckless Romanoffs. But where they were moving or what would be the state of affairs when the moving was ended, no one dared to predict.
Nathan sailed from San Francisco on the first day of April. Queer emotions played through him as the big Japanese liner, Tenyo Maru, turned its prow about, started its engines, gathered speed away from the line of handkerchiefs, cheers and tears along the dock, down the harbor, past the Presidio, followed by swarms of crying gulls out through the Golden Gate, off into the mystic West which strangely becomes the East again. Much might happen before he next saw the clock on the Market Street ferry-house tower.
As the land dropped lower behind the ship and the flocks of gulls thinned out and the arms of the Pacific opened wider and wider, a sense of vast freedom came to Nathan. Those broad ocean reaches stirred deep reactions within him. They beckoned him away from petty things. Hour after hour he walked the Tenyo’s decks or sank down in his steamer chair and dozed there, sending dream-cargoes off across the miles. Every day carried him farther from the handicap, sordidness, mediocrity, trial, pose, struggle, which had been the sum and substance of his life and environment to date. Something big and vital must transpire out in this world whence he was going. He would look for it. It was all in the epilogue of Going On.
Entering the dining saloon for lunch on April 6, he found beside his plate a copy of the little daily news sheet filled with items received by wireless.
America had declared war.
Tourist trade to the Orient had dropped to zero. Passengers aboard were people of importance, outward bound on serious business. Nathan shared his cabin with an International Y. M. C. A. official going to Siberia to open cantonment work among the Russian troops.
With his easy ability to “get along” with those of his own sex, he had become intimate with the Y. man before two days had passed. By the end of the week he knew most of the men on board and had talked textiles to a group of South Americans in the smoking room one night so intelligently that one of them had approached him next day declaring his government needed a man of Nathan’s experience and ability, and would Nathan consider a position in Bolivia when his present mission was over.
Nathan laughed, shrugging his shoulders.
He could not help feeling as he “held his own” among those of his own sex, that they minded little the talon aspect of his gnarled hands or his mutilated ear. That for Bernie! It was what a man was in his head and his heart which counted most. He began to get a perspective on himself.
Yet he hungered. He hardly spoke to a woman throughout the voyage. But this was true: for the first time in his life Nathan had day after day to dream,—to do absolutely nothing but think.
He tried to assay his mental equipment in those long, lazy days of meditation, to determine what he was best fitted to do, how to make up for lost years, whether he should go on as a salesman and make textiles his business after his return and now that he was free,—or specialize in some profession or art. His poetry? He had long ago seen enough of life to realize it would be a dreary day before he could hope to secure a living from poetry. Well enough as a hobby, perhaps. But life meant more than compilation of romantic rhymes. He felt it too late now to go to college. But it was never too late to educate himself for some profession or art. Just what should that education be? To what purpose? What did he enjoy doing best, aside from composing rhymes? Of what could he make a success because his heart would be in his work?
One night, as the great liner swung down the northern border of tropical seas, he leaned over the railing and watched the soft, warm stars. One star in particular was very luminous and close. A snatch of an old poem came to him——
“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,
When the stars hang soft and low,
I slip away from the clash and care
To the Hills of Long Ago.
Across those hills in the whisp’ring dark,
With the night-breeze sighing through,
I see those castles we’d planned to build
When our dreams had all come true!”
The lines brought the tropic skies close. Nat’s heart sang in rhythm with the swash of the water and beat of the screw. Who was the one with whom he had built castles—Bernie? Carol? Mildred? Who?
“Your face glows plain in an evening star,
Ere the moon rides high and cold,
And memories tune with the summer night
On a chord that’s rare and old——”
A face in a star! Whose face? He thought for a time he could almost discern. Fancy led him to invent a face which should approximate his ideal. What was his ideal woman’s face? If he were a great painter and would put on canvas the features of his Dream Girl, what manner and type of face would he paint?
The boat swayed on in the starlit dark. Above it, lights of God looked down their mighty passwords over the waters. Stygian smoke furled from great funnels and dropped a billowy screen across their phosphorescent wake. A happy laugh floated out a sharply defined door from the ladies lounging room up forward.
A face in a star! Whose face?
Nathan thought of a woman he had seen in Springfield one night—the night of the Harvard-Pennsylvania boat race—before he had gone to his hotel to get that awful wire about little Mary’s going away—a girl sitting across a snowy-white table from a man in dinner clothes,—a girl raised just above him—with features he had never quite forgotten, they were so fine and tender and cameo-rare.
If he were a painter, he believed he would try to sketch that woman’s face as something very like his Dream Girl. He wondered who she had been—her name? The fellow’s wife probably. Strange how things stick in the back of a man’s mind at times.
A face in a star, indeed!
Happily, new scenes and clean, free horizons were taking pressure from head and brain. The world with which he had battled was drawing off in increasingly better perspective. He was humbly thankful.
He awoke one morning to find the engine’s heart-throb stopped and the vessel strangely quiet. Glancing out his stateroom porthole in the hush of dawn, he beheld a mountain sky line weirdly close. They had approached Hawaii and Honolulu during the night. Dense, tropical vapor clouded the mauve mountain summits. The city was almost hidden in foliage. A molten sun came up while he was breakfasting. About ten o’clock he went ashore.
The narrow, low-roofed streets with queer souvenir shops; the native, comic-opera policemen at intersections of traffic; picturesque brown men with hatbands and collars wreathed with flowers; quaint Japanese women with brilliant sun-shades,—among them Nathan felt like a schoolboy off on his first vacation.