CHAPTER XXIII
So we came to that last evening on board, of which I must now tell you. It had taken me the intervening time to get used to the new outlook. The habit of seeing myself surrounded by a whole stockade of prohibitions was too strong to overcome in a flash. I had to let my mind emerge into freedom gently, telling myself each day that with a wife like this I could serve the cause more devotedly than ever, since she would be serving it too.
Of that dedication to a cause I was possibly too much aware. My uniform made me aware of it. My game leg and my sightless eye made me aware of it. The need of whole peoples, like the French and British and Italian, of every man who could fire a gun or ram home a bayonet or speak a rousing word—that more than anything else seemed to put a consecration upon me of which I was as foolishly and yet as loftily conscious as a modern king, accustomed to a bowler hat, when he rides through the streets with his crown on.
And on the last evening there was enough of the ecstatic in the air to justify this sense of a mission.
The voyage, which had not been without the exciting stimulus of danger, was successfully over. The west was actually reached, and the things done left behind us. The things to be done were making our pulses beat faster and our energies yearn forward. To-morrow with its summons to activity was more keenly in our consciousness than to-day. Doctors, nurses, returning soldiers, the sparse handful of business men—we were already in heart ashore, walking in streets, riding in tram-cars, eating in dining-rooms, sleeping in beds, taking part in hard work, and deeming these things a privilege. Voices and laughter in the clear, still night, and the clicking of heels on the deck, were part of the relief and joyousness.
Late in the afternoon we had picked up the Nantucket light-ship, which rested like a star on the water. Now the horizon was being strung with beads of light, one, two, three, or little clusters at a time, behind which we knew that advancing night was lighting myriads of lamps all the way to the Pacific. On the Atlantic coast it was already dark, with cities and towns ablaze, and villages and farm-houses lit by kindly, shimmering windows. In the Middle West it was twilight, with electrics spangling the office-buildings here and there, and pale-gold flowers strewn over the prairie floors. Beyond the Mississippi it would still be day, but day dissolving gorgeously, softly, into sunset and moonrise and the everlasting magic of the stars.
As she and I hung over the deck rail side by side we felt ourselves on the edge of wonders. The Old World was in need of us, and we were in need of the New. To us who were New World born, and who were coming back to generous, easy-going welcome after the unspeakable things we had seen, the craving for New World brotherhood and vigor was like that of hunger or thirst. This much we admitted in so many words—even she.
She was still elusive; she was still mysterious. Though during the past few days she had not resisted a certain habit as to the place and hour at which we should find ourselves together and had been willing to talk freely on any theme connected with the cause, she took flight from a hint of the personal, like a bird at an approaching footstep.