Basil King

“ If ever a human being had been dwelling in love he had been dwelling in it for a year and more; and there were the words, distilled out of the consciousness of the ages, and written for all time, “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” Was it God that this poor, purblind old fellow had all unconsciously been bringing me, shedding round us, keeping us straight, making us strong, making us prosperous, helping us to fight our way upward? ”

“ Then there was a young fellow running at the head of his platoon, a slim young fellow with flaxen hair and a face like a bright angel’s, who had been a crack sprinter at McGill. He was long after my time, of course; but I had known his family, and since being in the neighborhood of Ypres I had seen him from time to time. He was not made for a soldier, but a brave young soldier he had become, surmounting fear, repulsion, and all that was hideous to a sensitive soul like his, and establishing those relations with his men that are dearer in many ways than ties of blood. ”

“ I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no period when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me in pity and amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch me still. In their light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw myself as a boy again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of lumber carried me back to our old summer home on the banks of the Ottawa, where I had had my dreams of what I should do when I was big. ”

“ To me the real Ville Lumière is New York. It scatters lights with the prodigal richness with which the heaven scatters stars. It strings them in long lines; it banks them in towering façades; it flings them in handfuls up into the darkness; it writes them on the sky. Twilight offers you a special beauty because, wherever you are in the city, it brings out for you in one window or another that first wan, primrose-colored beacon—in some ways more beautiful than the evening star. Behind the star you don’t know what there is, while behind the light there is a palpitating history. ”

“ The apartment differed from Cantyre’s in that its simplicity would have been bare had it not produced an impression of containing just enough. The walls of the drawing-room were of a pale-gold ocher against which every spot of color told for its full value. On this background the green of chairs, the rose of lamp-shades, the mahogany of tables, and the satinwood of cabinets pleased and rested the eye. There were no pictures in the room but a portrait of Mrs. Coningsby, which one of the great artists of the day had painted for her as a gift. ”

“ That night the speaker to the blue-star men was that club benefactor and favorite, Beady Lamont. He was a huge mass of muscle, turning the scale at three hundred and more. Strength was in every movement when he walked and every pose when he stood still. To my architect’s eye he planted his legs as though they were ancient Egyptian monoliths. Comparatively small round the abdomen, his chest was like a great drum. His arms—but why give a description? Hercules must have been like him, and Goliath of Gath, and Charlemagne, and the Giants that were in Those Days. ”

“ During another brief silence I surmised that Regina Barry had seated herself before the dressing-table and was probably doing something to her hair. I wish I could say here that in my eavesdropping I experienced a sense of shame; but I can’t. Whatever creates a sense of shame had been warped in me. The moral transitions that had turned me into a burglar had been gradual but sure. With the gold-mesh purse in my pocket a burglar I had become, and I felt no more repugnance to the business than I did to that of the architect. ”

“ I suppose it is instinct that tells women how to avoid comparisons with each other by creating contrasts. Knowing that in competition with her hostess she would have everything to lose, Miss Barry used Mrs. Coningsby as a foil. In other words, she had divined the fact that her friend would be in black with a spangling of blue-green sequins, and so had enhanced her own vividness by dressing in a bright rose-red. What she lacked in beauty, therefore, she made up in a brilliancy that stood out against the pale-gold ocher background with the force of a flaming flower. ”

“ In this I got encouragement from the fact that one day in Fifth Avenue I met my uncle Van Elstine. He didn’t know me. He wouldn’t have cut me for anything in the world; he was too good-natured and kind; but he let his wandering gaze rest on me as on any passing stranger, and went on his way. I argued then that time, vicissitude, a hard life, and a mustache had worked an effective disguise. If my own uncle, who had known me all my life, could go by like that, how much more one to whom I could be nothing but a sinister shadow seen for three or four minutes in a rose-colored gloom. ”

“ And in that reconstruction we Americans have the chance to take the lead because we’re doing it of our own accord. Every other country has some ax to grind; but we have none. We’ve none except just to be in the big movement of all mankind upward and forward. But the difference between us and every other country—unless it’s the British Empire—is that we do it man by man, each stepping out of the ranks in his turn as if he was the only one and everything depended on his act. It’s up to you, Beady; it’s up to me; it’s up to each American singly. ”

“ But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. ”

“ Patches of befouled snow on the ground, with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked, ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a noise like that of the shell that had struck the Assiniboia, while our taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a speed he has long outlived. ”

“ Two days later a little company of us stood by his grave while Rufus Legrand read the ever-stirring words of the earth to earth. It was the old comradeship which Lovey himself would have liked—the fellowship of men who had fought the same fight as he, and were hoping to be faithful unto death like him—Christian, Straight, little Spender, Beady, Pyn, the wee bye Daisy, and one or two others. Cantyre alone had none of the dark memories—and yet the bright and blessed memories—that held the rest of us together ”

“ Business and profession are stamped all over them. They are in their clothes, their faces, the tones of their voices. You’d know Ralph Coningsby was an architect, and Stephen Cantyre a doctor, and Rufus Legrand a clergyman, the minute you heard them speak. Now you wouldn’t know what you were. You might be anything—anything a gentleman can be, that is. I’ve heard some one say that Oxford is a town in a university, and Cambridge a university in a town. In just the same way my father, for instance, is a man in an architect. You’re an architect in a man. With you the man is the bigger. ”

“ You could do it all so much more thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”
But with the knowledge that this woman had simply passed and let her shadow fall upon me I had no heart for Sheering’s impassioned words. I got up and followed her.
I found her on deck, far forward, leaning on the rail and watching a fiery, angry sunset that inflamed all the western horizon. ”

“ My retreat being cut off, I looked wildly about for a place in which to hide myself. In the instants at my disposal I could discover nothing more remote than the bay window, screened by its loose rose-colored hangings. By the time the young ladies were on the threshold I was established there, with the silk sections pulled together and held tightly in my hand.
The first words I heard were: “But it will seem so like a habit. Men will be afraid of you.”
This voice was light, silvery, and staccato. That which replied had a deep mezzo quality, without being quite contralto. ”

“ A time will come when we shall find it amazing merely to have lived through such happenings.
Before the invaders the Rumanian towns were going down like houses built of blocks. In her attitude to Rumania, Russia was a mystery—a husband who sees his wife fighting for her life and doing hardly anything to help her. The rumors, true or false, that reached us might have been torn from some stupendous, improbable romance—a feeble Czar, a beautiful and traitorous Czarina, a corrupt nobility, an army betrayed, a people seething in dreams and furies and ignorance. ”

“ I wanted to marry the woman I loved, and settle down quietly, industriously, to spend my days in an office and my nights at home, like the countless human ants that were running to and fro. My celibacy of the will was gone. My consecration was gone. Where these austerities had been there was now only that yearning of whatever it is that draws a man toward a woman, and I asked nothing but the freedom to enjoy. I was determined to enjoy. The resolve came over me with this first glimpse of New York. ”

“ Having bathed and shaved, I was not an ill-looking fellow till it came to putting on my shirt again. Any man who has worn a shirt for forty-eight hours in a city or on a train knows what a horror it becomes in the exposed spots on the chest and about the wrists. I had had but one shirt for a week and more—and but the one soft collar. You can see already, then, that in spite of some success in smartening up my damp and threadbare suit I left the bath-room looking abject.
I was not, however, so abject as Lovey when I found him again in the front sitting-room down-stairs. ”

“ There is always in him a strain of the voyageur. The true Canadian never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild shores.
It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed me as the river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of paddle-wheels, followed by a bellow like the call of some sea monster to its mate. [41] Right below me and close to the slip I heard the measured dip of oars. Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or from deck to dock, had a weird, watchful sound, as though the darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen. ”

“ All my struggling, all my wandering, all my up-hill work, all my days and nights in the trenches, all my suffering, all my love—everything had combined together to land me just here, where, so to speak, I had begun. It was the old story of dragging up the cliff, only to fall over the precipice. It seemed to be my fate. There was no escaping it.
I might not take more than that one drink during that afternoon; but I knew it would be a beginning. I should come back again; and I should come back again after that. Another type of man would do nothing of the kind ”

“ I chuckled in advance over the mystification of Miss Regina Barry, who would find on returning to her room that her rings, her necklet, and her gold-mesh purse had melted into the atmosphere.
In sheer recklessness I was now guilty of a bit of deviltry before which I would have hesitated had I had time to give it a second thought. On the desk there was a scrap of blank paper and a pen. Stooping, I printed in the neat block letters I had once been accustomed to inscribe below a plan:
There are men different from those you have seen hitherto. ”

“ Wind and water were fraught with the nameless peaceful intimations of the New World after the turmoil of the Old one. It is difficult to say how one seizes them, but they come with the Gulf Stream. I have always noticed that half-way over there is a change in the aura, the atmosphere. It throws a breath of balsam on the wind, and flashes on the waves that gleam which Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and the Pilgrims saw when they sighted land. ”

“ As she and I hung over the deck rail side by side we felt ourselves on the edge of wonders. The Old World was in need of us, and we were in need of the New. To us who were New World born, and who were coming back to generous, easy-going welcome after the unspeakable things we had seen, the craving for New World brotherhood and vigor was like that of hunger or thirst. ”