I
The Czar had been deposed in the opening weeks of March. Sturmer, Golitsyn and Protopopov had been arrested. The Imperial Russian family were under tragic detention in Tsarkoë-Selo Palace. On March 15 came the coalition cabinet of the revolutionists. As April began, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates were declaring it necessary for them to control the course of the provisional government. Events were moving in seven-league boots in the land of the luckless Romanoffs. But where they were moving or what would be the state of affairs when the moving was ended, no one dared to predict.
Nathan sailed from San Francisco on the first day of April. Queer emotions played through him as the big Japanese liner, Tenyo Maru, turned its prow about, started its engines, gathered speed away from the line of handkerchiefs, cheers and tears along the dock, down the harbor, past the Presidio, followed by swarms of crying gulls out through the Golden Gate, off into the mystic West which strangely becomes the East again. Much might happen before he next saw the clock on the Market Street ferry-house tower.
As the land dropped lower behind the ship and the flocks of gulls thinned out and the arms of the Pacific opened wider and wider, a sense of vast freedom came to Nathan. Those broad ocean reaches stirred deep reactions within him. They beckoned him away from petty things. Hour after hour he walked the Tenyo’s decks or sank down in his steamer chair and dozed there, sending dream-cargoes off across the miles. Every day carried him farther from the handicap, sordidness, mediocrity, trial, pose, struggle, which had been the sum and substance of his life and environment to date. Something big and vital must transpire out in this world whence he was going. He would look for it. It was all in the epilogue of Going On.
Entering the dining saloon for lunch on April 6, he found beside his plate a copy of the little daily news sheet filled with items received by wireless.
America had declared war.
Tourist trade to the Orient had dropped to zero. Passengers aboard were people of importance, outward bound on serious business. Nathan shared his cabin with an International Y. M. C. A. official going to Siberia to open cantonment work among the Russian troops.
With his easy ability to “get along” with those of his own sex, he had become intimate with the Y. man before two days had passed. By the end of the week he knew most of the men on board and had talked textiles to a group of South Americans in the smoking room one night so intelligently that one of them had approached him next day declaring his government needed a man of Nathan’s experience and ability, and would Nathan consider a position in Bolivia when his present mission was over.
Nathan laughed, shrugging his shoulders.
He could not help feeling as he “held his own” among those of his own sex, that they minded little the talon aspect of his gnarled hands or his mutilated ear. That for Bernie! It was what a man was in his head and his heart which counted most. He began to get a perspective on himself.