Presently--and still without looking up--she said: "Are you within the draft age?"
"No. I am thirty-two."
"Will you volunteer?"
"No."
"Would you tell me why?"
"Yes, I"ll tell you why. I shall not volunteer because of my habits."
"You mean your temporary infirmity," she said calmly. But her cheeks reddened and she bent lower over her work. A dull colour stained his face, too, but he merely shrugged his comment.
She said in a low voice: "I want you to volunteer with me for overseas service in the Army Intelligence Department.... You and I, together.... To prove what you have surmised concerning the German operations beyond Mount Terrible.... And first I want you to go with me to Dr. Langford"s hospital .... I want you to go this afternoon with me. ... And face the situation. And see it through. And come out cured." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Will you?" And in his altering gaze she saw the flicker of half-senseless anger intensified suddenly to a flare of hatred.
"Don"t ask anything like that of me," he said. She had grown quite white.
"I do ask it.... Will you?"
"If I wanted to I couldn"t, and I don"t want to. I prefer this h.e.l.l to the other."
"Won"t you make a fight for it?"
"No!" he said brutally.
The girl bent her head again over her knitting. But her white fingers remained idle. After a long while, staring at her intently, he saw her lip quiver.
"Don"t do that!" he broke out harshly. "What the devil do you care?"
Then she lifted her tragic white face. And he had his answer.
"My G.o.d!" he faltered, springing to his feet. "What"s the matter with you? Why do you care? You can"t care! What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into h.e.l.l again? Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?... A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all--a burnt-out thing with neither mind nor manhood left--"
She got to her feet, trembling and deathly white.
"I can"t let you go," she whispered.
Exasperation almost strangled him and set afire his unhinged brain.
"For Christ"s sake!" he cried. "What do you care?"
"I--I care," she stammered--"for Christ"s sake ... And yours!"
Things went dark before her eyes.... She opened them after a while on the sofa where he had carried her. He was standing looking down at her. ... After a long while the ghost of a smile touched her lips. In his haunted gaze there was no response. But he said in an altered, unfamiliar voice: "I"ll go if you say so. I"ll do all that"s in me to do. ... Will you be there--for the first day or two?"
"Yes.... All day long.... Every day if you want me. Do you?"
"Yes.... But G.o.d knows what I may do to you.... There"ll be somebody to--watch me--won"t there?... I don"t know what may happen to you or to myself.... I"m in a bad way, Miss Erith... I"m in a very bad way."
"I know," she murmured.
He said with an almost childish directness: "Do men always live through such cures?... I don"t see how I can live through it."
She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength.
"Let us win through," she said, not looking at him. "I think you will suffer more than I shall. A little more.... Because I had rather feel pain than give it--rather suffer than look on suffering....
It will be very hard for us both, I fear."
Her butler announced luncheon.
CHAPTER IV
WRECKAGE
The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December--the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.
Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.
Was THIS, then, their cursed cure?--this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible--conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingrat.i.tude.
But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.
"That meddling woman," he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness.
"Curse her!" he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.
Then a meaningless anger grew with him: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of h.e.l.l is ent.i.tled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself.
But how about that "cure"?
Was THIS it--this terrible blankness--this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving--yes. But what to take its place--what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul?
What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost? And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void to live in--Curse her!
There were no lights showing aboard the transport; all ports remained screened. Arrows, painted on the decks in luminous paint, pointed out the way. Below decks, a blue globe here and there emitted a feeble glimmer, marking corridors which pierced a depthless darkness.
No noise was permitted on board, no smoking, no other lights in cabin or saloon. There was scarcely a sound to be heard on the ship, save the throbbing of her engines, the long, splintering crash of heavy seas, and the dull creak of her steel vertebrae tortured by a million rivets.
As for the accursed ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his stupid acquiescence in convalescence.
He hated the sea. It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour--always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of endless motion.