Not altogether by the ways that would have seemed most direct, not solely through the principals concerned, did Napier come by his most intimate knowledge of what happened on that voyage, which was for many to be the last. From his long familiarity with the way Julian "took things"; from familiarity, not long, but lit by the lamp of passion, with the natural turns and reactions of Nan Ellis, Napier filled in the outlines of the widely published and privately rehearsed story, until to him, the lover on shore, the experiences of that voyage wore an actuality denied to many of those who in their own persons lived out the awful hours. As it accumulated, this knowledge of Napier's came to be of that completer type that some of us cherish concerning matters in which our sharing has been of the kind invisible. We were not "there" in any ordinary sense. Yet indubitably we are more intensely there, in that we are not blinded by panic or numbed by the mental or the bodily blow. We, aloof in the conning-towers of love, are spared no sight, no pang. We look down with every natural sense sharpened; with some perceptions, called as yet supernatural, giving voices to the silence and to the darkness vision. But apart from these less generally recognized avenues of information, there were the great outstanding facts which filled the papers of two hemispheres.
The first six days of the Leyden's voyage were, from the steamship company's point of view, wholly uneventful. Mr. Julian Grant had come on board obviously far from well. The reporters who interviewed him just before he sailed remarked upon the fact. Hallett Newcomb, a middle-aged Englishman of letters, returning home upon conclusion of an extended lecture tour, who had some pre-war acquaintance with Mr. Grant and yet more with Gavan Napier, had been struck at once by the change. Julian Grant's litheness had become fragility, almost emaciation. He walked with the old briskness, but as under a load. Those little lines slanting away from each side of the mustache should have taken the antique pencil another ten years to grave. Grant hadn't yet given his life in the Great War, but of a surety he had given his youth. It was gone forever. In those bright Indian-summer days that followed he would lie bundled up in his deck-chair while hour after hour, in that low, comforting voice, the girl who was his traveling companion read to him. The passengers commented on a supposed likeness between the two, though there was little in it beyond a common delicacy of feature and identity of coloring. People on the Leyden, according to Newcomb, took the pair at first for brother and sister. Anyway, she treated him like a brother, a younger brother who was to be soothed and cared for.
The matter in those books and papers that Mr. Grant seemed never to have enough of was not such stuff as would have soothed the British censor. However, it stirred to enthusiasm the frequent visitor to that sheltered nook on the deck—Miss Genevieve Sherman, as the forged passport gave out Miss Ellis's fascinating black-haired friend. To the fact that Miss Ellis didn't seem to know the lady was her friend, Mr. Hallett Newcomb was an unwilling witness. He had chanced to see the younger woman making her escape from the other on deck, only to be trapped in the cul-de-sac corridor at the bottom of which was Newcomb's cabin. Behind the half-hooked-back door he was looking through his papers for a registered cable address. The tête-à-tête outside began so quietly that he had for those first moments no sense of hearing anything private.
"So you didn't expect to see me," said Miss Genevieve Sherman whom the girl called Greta.
"How in the world could I expect such a thing?"
"Why not?"
"Why not! For the reason that sends my heart into my mouth when I realize only a little of"—the girl's voice hesitated—"of what you must know far more. The risk, Greta, the awful risk!"
"It's dear of you"—the heavier voice was caressing—"dear of you to keep thinking of that. And you're a clever child to have spotted me at once."
"Clever? I've seen you as so many people by now, I think I've got down at last to the things you can't change." The weight of sadness in the words brought out one of the woman's challenging laughs.
"I gather that what you think the essential me doesn't make you very gay, dear child."