If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was, had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances. I couldn’t make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself every minute of the day.
No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer singleness of purpose than I when I came on board the Assiniboia; and now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her.
I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal?
Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might end again in her being disappointed?
I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaning away of my heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it.
Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure.
But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my labor for my pains.
It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience. On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.”
Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it.