And always, everywhere, that hell-born Crimson Tide seemed to be rising. All newspapers were full of it, sounding the universal alarm. And Civilisation merely stared at the scarlet flood––gawked stupidly and unstirring––while the far clamour of massacre throughout Russia grew suddenly to a crashing discord in Berlin, shaking the whole world with brazen dissonance.
Like the first ominous puff before the tempest, the deadly breath of the Black Death––called “influenza,” but known of old among the verminous myriads of the East––swept over the earth from East to West. Millions died; millions were yet to perish of it; yet the dazed world, still half blind with blood and smoke, sat helpless and unstirring, barring no gates to this pestilence that stalked the stricken earth at noon-day.
New York, partly paralysed by sacrifice and the blood-sucking antics of half-crazed congressmen, gorged by six years feeding after decades of starvation, welcomed the incoming soldiers in a bewildered sort of way, making either an idiot’s din of dissonance or gaping in stupid silence as the huge troop-ships swept up the bay.
The battle fleet arrived––the home squadron and the “6th battle squadron”––and lay towering along the Hudson, while officers and jackies swarmed the streets––streets now thronged by wounded, too––pallid cripples in olive drab, limping along slowly beneath lowering skies, with their citations and crosses and 296 ribbons and wound chevrons in glinting gold under the relighted lustres of the metropolis.
So the false mockery of Christmas came to the city––a forced festival, unutterably sad, for all that the end of the war was subject of thanks in every church and synagogue. And so the mystic feast ended, scarcely heeded amid the slow, half-crippled groping for financial readjustment in the teeth of a snarling and vindictive Congress, mean in its envy, meaner in revenge––a domestic brand of sectional Bolsheviki as dirty and degenerate as any anarchist in all Russia.
The President had sailed away––(Slava! Slava! Nechevo!)––and the newspapers were preparing to tell their disillusioned public all about it, if permitted.
And so dawned the New Year over the spreading crimson flood, flecking the mounting tide with brighter scarlet as it crept ever westward, ever wider, across a wounded world.
Palla had not seen Jim for a very long time now. Christmas passed, bringing neither gift nor message, although she had sent him a little remembrance––The Divine Pantheon, by an unfrocked Anglican clergyman, one Loxon Fettars, recently under detention pending investigation concerning an alleged multiplicity of wives.
The New Year brought no greeting from him, either; nobody she knew had seen him, and her pride had revolted at writing him after she had telephoned and left a message at his club––her usual concession after a stormy parting.