Before the invaders the Rumanian towns were going down like houses built of blocks. In her attitude to Rumania, Russia was a mystery—a husband who sees his wife fighting for her life and doing hardly anything to help her. The rumors, true or false, that reached us might have been torn from some stupendous, improbable romance—a feeble Czar, a beautiful and traitorous Czarina, a corrupt nobility, an army betrayed, a people seething in dreams and furies and ignorance. Washington, having gone so far as to ask the Allied nations their peace conditions, had received them—restitution, reparation, and future security. Then late in that month of January, 1917, there came to people like me an unexpected shock. Before the Senate President Wilson delivered the speech of which the tag that ran electrically round the world was peace without victory.
I mention these things because they are the only waymarks of a time during which my private life seemed to be drearily and hopelessly at a standstill. The deadlock of the nations reacted on myself. Mentally I was at grips with destiny, but nothing made any progress. I was exactly where I had started, as regards Regina, as regards Cantyre, as regards Annette, as regards the father and mother Barry. Outwardly I was on friendly terms with them all, and on no more than friendly terms with any one.
The Barrys invited me to dinner, and I went. Cantyre made up a theater party—he was fond of this form of recreation—and I went to that. Annette asked me to a Sunday lunch at which Cantyre and Regina were guests. The force of organized life held us together as a cohesive group; the operation of conventional good manners kept us to courtesies. That any one was happy I do not believe; but life threw its mask even on unhappiness.
I got in, of course, an occasional word with Regina, which, nevertheless, didn’t help me. As far as I could observe, she lived and moved in a kind of hypnotic state, from which nothing I knew how to say could wake her. She was always waiting for me to give the word, and I was afraid to give it. If there was hypnotism, it affected us both, since I was as deeply in the trance as she.
Now and then, however, she came out of it with some brief remark which gave me a lead and perhaps made me hope. One such occasion was at the theater. Cantyre had not put me next to her, but there was an entr’acte when I found his place empty and slipped into it.
“And how are events taking their course?” I asked, with a semblance of speaking cheerily.
“I’m waiting to see.”
“Still?”
“Still.”