The Crimson Tide

Before he was announced by the maid, however, she had understood one problem in the scheme of things--realised it as she rose from the lounge and held out her slender hand.

He took it and kept it. The maid retired.

"Well, Palla," he said.

"Well," she said, rather breathlessly, "--I know now."

His voice and face seemed amiable and lifeless; his eyes, too, remained dull and incurious; but he said: "I don't think I understand.

What is it you know?"

"Shall I tell you?"

"If you wish."

His pleasant, listless manner chilled her; she hesitated, then turned away, withdrawing her hand.

When she had seated herself on the sofa he dropped down beside her in his old place. She lighted a cigarette for him.

"Tell me about poor old Jack," he said in a low voice.

Their dinner was a pleasant but subdued affair. Afterward she played for him--interrupted once by a telephone call from Ilse, who said that John's temperature had risen a degree and the only thing to do was to watch him every second. But she refused Palla's offer to join her at the hospital, saying that she and the night nurse were sufficient; and the girl went slowly back to the piano.

But, somehow, even that seemed too far away from her lover--or the man who once had been her avowed lover. And after idling-with the keys for a few minutes she came back to the lounge where he was seated.

He looked up from his revery: "This is most comfortable, Palla," he said with a slight smile.

"Do you like it?"

"Of course."

"You need not go away at all--if it pleases you." Her voice was so indistinct that for a moment he did not comprehend what she had said.

Then he turned and looked at her. Both were pale enough now.

"That is what--what I was going to tell you," she said. "Is it too late?"

"Too late!"

"To say that I am--in love with you."

He flushed heavily and looked at her in a dazed way.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean--if you want me--I am--am not afraid any more----"

They had both risen instinctively, as though to face something vital.

She said:

"Don't ask me to submit to any degrading ceremony.... I love you enough."

He said slowly: "Do you realise what you say? You are crazy! You and your socialist friends pretend to be fighting anarchy. You preach against Bolshevism! You warn the world that the Crimson Tide

"Like the hun, you come to impose your will on a world already content with its own G.o.d and its own belief! And that is autocracy; and autocracy is what you say you oppose!

"I tell you and your friends that it was not wolves that were pupped in the sand of the s.h.a.ggy Prussian forests when the first Hohenzollern was dropped. It was swine! Swine were farrowed;--not even _sanglier_, but decadent domestic swine;--when Wilhelm and his degenerate litter came out to root up Europe! And _they_ were the first real Bolsheviki!"

He turned and began to stride to and fro; his pale, sunken face deeply shadowed, his hands clenching and unclenching.

"What in G.o.d's name," he said fiercely, "are women like you doing to us! What do you suppose happens to such a man as I when the girl he loves tells him she cares only to be his mistress! What hope is there left in him?--what sense, what understanding, what faith?

"You don't have to tell me that the Crimson Tide is rising. I saw it in the Argonne. I wish to G.o.d I were back there and the hun was still resisting. I wish I had never lived to come back here and see what demoralisation is threatening my own country from that cursed germ of wilful degeneracy born in the Prussian twilight, fed in Russian desolation, infecting the whole world----"

His voice died in his throat; he walked swiftly past her, turned at the threshold:

"I've known three of you," he said, "--you and Ilse and Marya. I've seen a lot of your a.s.sociates and acquaintances who profess your views. And I've seen enough."

He hesitated; then when he could control his voice again:

"It's bad enough when a woman refuses marriage to a man she does not love. That man is going to be unhappy. But have you any idea what happens to him when the girl he loves, and who says she cares for him, refuses marriage?

"It was terrible even when you cared for me only a little. But--but now--do you know what I think of your creed? I hate it as you hated the beasts who slew your friend! d.a.m.n your creed! To h.e.l.l with it!"

She covered her face with both hands: there was a noise like thunder in her brain.

She heard the door close sharply in the hall below.

This was the end.

CHAPTER XXII

She felt a trifle weak. In her ears there lingered a dull, confused sensation, like the echo of things still falling. Something had gone very wrong with the scheme of nature. Even beneath her feet, now, the floor seemed unsteady, unreliable.

A half-darkness dimmed her eyes; she laid one slim hand on the sofa-back and seated herself, fighting instinctively for consciousness.

She sat there for a long while. The swimming faintness pa.s.sed away. An intense stillness seemed to invade her, and the room, and the street outside. And for vast distances beyond. Half hours and hours rang clearly through the silence from the mantel-clock. So still was the place that a sheaf of petals falling from a fading rose on the piano seemed to fill the room with ghostly rustling.

This, then, was the finish. Love had ended. Youth itself was ending, too, here in the dead silence of this lamplit room.

There remained nothing more. Except that ever darkening horizon where, at the earth's ends, those grave shapes of cloud closed out the vista of remote skies.

There seemed to be no shelter anywhere in the vast nakedness of the scheme of things--no shadow under which to crouch--no refuge.