Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

Providence had acted, as it could only occasionally be relied upon to act, with considerable tact and promptitude.

Perhaps the promptitude was a little overdone; six weeks later, considering the date of the marriage, would have been less startling and no less convenient. But Henry was prepared to overlook this slight lapse of taste on the part of the higher powers in view of the fact that they had carried out his main intention. They had got rid of

Kitty.

Henry was not, however, in the least prepared for Anthony's saying in an off-hand tone:

"Yes, I suppose it was the best possible thing, really," quite as if he were answering Henry's thoughts and not his words. Henry was sorry for Kitty. He had been charmed by her, and he was readily sorry for those who were capable of charming him; but the fact remained that Kitty was not respectable and that all Ardens married respectable women. Now that Kitty was dead, he thought it would have been better taste on Anthony's part not to refer to her disabilities. To admit death as a solution was, Henry felt, a direct slur upon Kitty.

"Let's have something to eat," Anthony unexpectedly suggested. "Peck-. ham, have you got some tea hot for us?"

"Yes, sir," said Peckham, fluttering, but justified. "It 's in the dining-room now, sir, and an egg, if you could face it."

"I'll eat anything you 've got," said Anthony, with conviction. He did not even have to be tempted.

Henry felt a little bitterly how much more devastating grief would have been to him. He had had his lunch two hours earlier, and he did not want tea now, though Kitty had only been his sister-in-law.

"I thought perhaps," he said gravely, "I might be of use to you, my dear fellow. There are certain things-"

"Yes, I know," interrupted Anthony, who was standing to eat his food in a thoroughly uncomfortable, restless way by the door. "There are heaps of things -telegrams, undertakers, the registrar. I'd be awfully obliged if you'd do them for me. Hilton Laurence said he 'd

look in and help later. I want to go out for a walk."

"People will expect to hear from you direct," suggested Henry, who did not think that widowers should go for walks before the funeral.

"Sign my name, do anything you like," said Anthony, hastily. "She had n't any wishes. Will you see Costrelle for me? Don't interrupt his bridge; he plays between five and seventhirty."

"On an occasion like this-" said Henry, severely. He was going to give up his own bridge.

"Yes, yes, I know," said Anthony, hurriedly; "but Costrelle does n't think in occasions; he won't like being interrupted. It's awfully good of you, my dear old chap, to do these things for me. I think I think I must get out."

"There will be questions which you alone can decide," said Henry. "When shall I expect you back?"

Anthony looked for the first time as if he was a little changed. He fumbled perceptibly for an answer.

"I don't know what time it is now," he said jerkily, and without waiting for Henry to tell him he walked out into the hall, shutting the door after him.

The day had grown unexpectedly mild and sunny. Anthony walked listlessly and without any definite direction. He wanted to get to some open space where people would cease to pour past him like part of a great procession. He found himself at last by the river. The light lay faint and thin over its gray waters, gleaming with a pale, transparent silver upon the distant towers of Westminster. The huddled low waterside houses looked full of the stubborn comfort and unconsciousness of England. Westminster brooded high and bright above a flock of little, ugly dwelling-places. There was no background to the ancient river but the smoke from factory chimneys and the low, dim sky.

Anthony was not aware of his grief, but he was aware of a great desire, a compulsion of his inner being, to get away from all pity and arrangements. He wanted to place between himself and Kitty's death a host of less immediate objects.

The towers of Westminster rested him, the rocking motion of the motorbusses, passing like broad-sided ships down the stream of the open thoroughfares, lulled him. The slow pressure of the river upon its unhurrying journey to the sea placed a merciful image between his thoughts and Kitty.

Time stood still. The hours hung on Anthony heavily with the weight of

years.

As he leaned over the bridge and watched the long, slow ripples pass his thoughts unnumbered, he felt eternity. The sun sank into the misty west; there was a faint deepening of color and light along the Embankment. Five white swans rose on massive wings high above Battersea Bridge; they slipped dazzling across a path of light into the darkening sky, taking the day with them.

Twilight slipped gray and blue in long lanes between the shadowy houses; the lights at the street corners had misty haloes round them, like a cloudencircled opal moon.

Anthony became aware of an overwhelming physical fatigue; it was so intense that, despite the chill of the falling night, he sank with relief on to one of the benches. It was empty, for it was too early for the prowlers of the night to seek their rest there, and too late for the belated children playing their last games.

Anthony could no longer see the river, but he was aware of it moving quietly beside him in the dark. It seemed to help his mind to turn slowly and without pain back to the thought of Kitty. He thought what a wonderful and easy chance his life would afford a cynic for laughter. Only a few years ago his career had been so shapely and definite a fact. He knew what he meant to do, and he had the means and the ability with which to do it. He was as sure of his surgical powers and his unshakable nerve as of the continuity of bread upon his table. He had no bad habits, no overmastering temptations. His life was a clear and steadfast plan, and in due time, with substantial success behind him and ripened ambition for the future, he meant to seek and find a fitting mate.

He laughed out suddenly into the

dark. He was not that sane man now, with his iron-like securities. He had lost the rapier-like decision of the unbroken. His mind saw many issues, his will flickered at a choice of opportunities; a long day's work unstrung him like a delicate girl. His memory was uncertain, his clean slate was written across with undecipherable, lost activities. He was not sure of anything at all.

And his love, that reserved and whole-hearted quality on which Anthony meant to found a home, had been called out and wasted on a light woman, happily dead. Destiny had applauded him for his equipment and destroyed it.

And yet he was aware, sitting there in the dark and cold, with his weaknesses and his great grief, that he would not for anything in the world be the old Anthony, secure and hidebound, moving with blind assurance among infinite things. The old Anthony had been a master of material facts; he had not been a servant of reality. Broken and twisted and sore, unsure of his aims, diffident of his remaining powers, Anthony knew that there was nothing in him that reserved itself for its own purposes.

He could meet all that came with his naked new possession. The old Anthony had given his faculties only to his work; he himself remained aloof, fastidious, and unused. He had been imprisoned in a fortress of privilege.

An unseen hand had plucked him out of it, and plunged him into a fettered, dreadful intimacy with miserable human beings, so that he should learn the reality of pain. Pain had taught Anthony his own insignificance and broken a little of his isolation away from him. Anthony had given more of himself that he knew to his fellowprisoners, but he had not given all. His sympathies were touched and widened, but his heart remained intact. He could still blame men for their weaknesses.

He thought of his return to England, and how its beauty and serenity had rebuilt him. But he was not the same again; there was more that was accessible in him, or he would never have known Kitty.

She would have been to him either what she intended to be, a few weeks' amusement, or perhaps merely a fresh peg upon which to hang his measured morality. It would have been so easy for the old Anthony to have dispensed with Kitty. But his new responsiveness to pain had saved him from this ignoble security. Her need had called to him, and his whole being had rushed out to answer it.

Kitty had taken from him one by one his old immunities. She had shaken him with a passion so vivid that he saw his code as a little thing, and she had roused in him a tenderness that was stronger than any self-control. She had not done these things of a set purpose; she had no purposes. She was

one of the instruments of life.

She could not give him the completeness of love because love's completeness had been defaced in her, but out of the shattered gifts and, images of their hours together she had left him one changeless memory: Kitty had never blamed or judged a human soul.

From her father to the vicar's wife she absolved them all. All women were her natural enemies before their faces, but behind their backs she was their indignant advocate. She could even stand up for the self-righteous with a whimsical admiration. Anthony re

membered with a pang of shame how easily and quickly she had let him off his own rigidities.

He had felt his rigidity was his strength. Even now he was aware of the loss of it, with a certain sense of formidable exposure; but he was no longer afraid of the exposure.

He did not want to get out of anything until he had taken with him the comradeship of what was in it.

Kitty's little, narrow life was like the foam of a wave. It had been lived for pleasure; and, miscarried by the wind, had broken itself against the iron rocks of life.

Anthony's wider being was like the force and purpose of the waters beneath; but for a moment the powerless foam had lit it onward and enlightened its purposes.

Kitty had not changed the direction of Anthony's life, but she had changed the angle of his vision. She had told him that she was only an atom of dust dancing in a sunbeam, and that when the light went, there would be nothing left of her but dust. It seemed to Anthony that it was the dust that had gone, and left him with the memory of light.

A cold, wet wind rose from the river, cutting against his weariness. He rose, and set his face toward home. THE END

Recognition

By REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

Have I not loved you? I had lived
So many years before you came
That, waiting, watching, dreaming so,

I knew your soul before your name.

Each night your heart against my own
Beat like the runner's in the race;
Each day I said, "If we should meet!"
I knew your soul, but not your face.

And then we did meet, and at once

My soul cried out that it was you:
My soul leapt up into my eyes;

Your soul was in your eyes. I knew!

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

XXI. SOWING THE WIND-THE SERBIAN can ambassador to Turkey: "The Ger

U

NOTE

NTIL the German Government shall open its private archives, it is impossible to trace the details of events between June 29 and July 23, 1914. But there seems to be absolutely reliable evidence that early in July a great state council was held at which it was determined to precipitate war just as soon as possible, or else to inflict upon Russia such a diplomatic humiliation as would shake her whole prestige and position as a great power, and as a result establish the Teutonic empires as the resistless dominators of the Balkans. Shortly after the outbreak of actual hostilities, Baron Wangenheim, the German ambassador at Constantinople, in an outburst of enthusiasm over the early successes of his country, made a statement to his colleague, Mr. Morgenthau, the Ameri

man ambassador informed me [Morgenthau] that a conference had been held in the early part of July [1914] at which the date of the war was fixed. This conference was presided over by the kaiser; Baron Wangenheim was present to report on conditions in Turkey. Moltke, the chief of staff, was there, and so was Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. With them were the leaders of German finance, the directors of the railroads, and the captains of industry.

. . Each was asked if he were ready for the war. All replied in the affirmative, except the financiers, who insisted that they must have two weeks in which to sell foreign securities and arrange their loans."

His Excellency the baron appears to have told the same story also to his colleague, the Italian ambassador to Constantinople. There is not the least reason to doubt that this tale is substantially true in every detail.

AT six o'clock on the balmy summer evening of July 23, 1914, when the cafés of Belgrade were full of peaceful citizens busy over their sugar-water and syrupy Turkish coffee, when the band was playing in the beautiful gardens overlooking the Danube, his Excellency, Freiherr von Giesl, the minister of Austria, presented himself at the office of M. Patchou, the Serbian minister of finance. He did not go to the Serbian foreign ministry, because M. Pashitch, the premier, who also managed foreign matters, was absent from the little capital. Freiherr von Giesl presented an official document, and added verbally that he was under orders that "if the note was not accepted integrally within forty-eight hours, he was to leave Belgrade with the staff of the legation."

M. Patchou was so agitated when he read the document that he at once telegraphed for all his colleagues to come back to Belgrade, and also got in touch with the Russian chargé d'affaires. He informed the latter "that he solicited the help of Russia, for no Serbian Government could accept the demands of Austria." The next morning the wires not merely from Belgrade, but from Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome were overladen with the messages of excited diplomats, and M. Sazonof, the czar's minister for foreign affairs, was issuing a frantic appeal for moderating counsels whereby "to prevent consequences incalculable and equally fatal for all the powers." Obviously the good Giesl had had the honor of delivering a somewhat momentous document. The Serbian Note had been thrust upon the world.

The document was instantly recognized as charged with dynamite. It recited the sins of the Serbian Government in failing to check the unfriendly and obnoxious Pan-Serbist agitation, called on it to make formal repudiation of the same in its official journal, then added ten categorical demands whereof the substance was that King Peter's ministers forthwith promise to suppress every paper "inciting to hatred and contempt" of Austria, to dissolve the Pan-Serbist society, the Narodna Odbrana, and all similar societies, to dismiss from the Serbian public service

all military and civil officers "guilty of propaganda against Austria whose names and deeds the Austrian Government reserved to itself the right of communicating,"-that is, without letting Serbia satisfy itself of their guilt,"to accept the collaboration in Serbia of representatives of the Austrian Government" to help put down the antiAustrian propaganda, to prosecute the accessories in Serbia to the plot against the archduke, in the investigation of which delegates of the Austrian Government would take part, to arrest two Serbian officials who had been implicated by the trial at Serajevo, and to put a stop to the smuggling of arms from Serbia into Bosnia.

But the most deadly sting of this scorpion was in the tail. "The Austrian Government expects the reply of the Royal [Serbian] Government at the latest by 6 o'clock on Saturday evening, the 25th of July."

Any person with a smattering of international law knew that Serbia could not assent to the demands that Austrian officials should enter the country to sit in judgment on Serbian subjects, whose guilt seemed assumed in advance, without withdrawing King Peter's kingdom automatically from the list of selfrespecting and independent countries. From the outset the diplomats who read this note knew one or two things to be true: either the Vienna foreign office assumed the Serbians to be veritable rabbits ready to barter soul and honor for safety, or Vienna wished for nothing but war. And only forty-eight hours were left to Serbia to decide either to sign away her national independence or engage in a deadly struggle against hopeless odds-unless Russia stirred. Then the South Slav cried to the North Slav, and he did not cry in vain.

During the terrible twelve days that were to follow a large number of diplomats were to sign despatches that will live long in history, but of course certain figures played the greater parts. In St. Petersburg it was M. Sazonof, the reasonable and moderate foreign minister, one of the really capable men whom Nicholas II, with all his faults, contrived to enroll in his service.

In

« AnkstesnisTęsti »