Books: In Secret

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He was shaking all over now, and presently he sat up in bed and
covered his head with one desperate hand.

"You poor boy!" she whispered.

"Keep away from me," he muttered, "I've told you all I know. I'm no
further use.... Keep clear of me.... I'm sorry--to be--what I am."

"When I leave what are you going to do?" she asked gently.

"Do? I'll dress and go to the nearest bar."

"Do you need it so much already?"

He nodded his bowed head covered by the hand that gripped his hair:
"Yes, I need it--badly."

She rose, loosened his clutch on her slender hand, picked up her
muff:

"I'll be waiting for you downstairs," she said simply.

His face expressed sullen defiance as he passed through the
waiting-room. Yet he seemed a little taken aback as well as relieved
when Miss Erith did not appear among the considerable number of
people waiting there for discharged patients. He walked on,
buttoning his fur coat with shaky fingers, passed the doorway and
stepped out into the falling snow. At the same moment a chauffeur
buried in coon-skins moved forward touching his cap:

"Miss Erith's car is here, sir; Miss Erith expects you."

McKay hesitated, scowling now in his perplexity; passed his
quivering hand slowly across his face, then turned, and looked at
the waiting car drawn up at the gutter. Behind the frosty window
Miss Erith gave him a friendly smile. He walked over to the curb,
the chauffeur opened the door, and McKay took off his hat.

"Don't ask me," he said in a low voice that trembled slightly like a
sick man's.

"I DO ask you."

"You know what's the matter with me, Miss Erith," he insisted in the
same low, unsteady voice.

"Please," she said: and laid one small gloved hand lightly on his
arm.

So he entered the car; the chauffeur drew the robe over them, and
stood awaiting orders.

"Home," said Miss Erith faintly.

If McKay was astonished he did not betray it. Neither said anything
more for a while. The man rested an elbow on the sill, his troubled,
haggard face on his hand; the girl kept her gaze steadily in front
of her with a partly resolute, partly scared expression. The car
went up Park Avenue and then turned westward.

When it stopped the girl said: "You will give me a few moments in my
library with you, won't you?"

The visage he turned to her was one of physical anguish. They sat
confronting each other in silence for an instant; then he rose with
a visible effort and descended, and she followed.

"Be at the garage at two, Wayland," she said, and ascended the snowy
stoop beside McKay.

The butler admitted them. "Luncheon for two," she said, and mounted
the stairs without pausing.

McKay remained in the hall until he had been separated from hat and
coat; then he slowly ascended the stairway. She was waiting on the
landing and she took him directly into the library where a wood fire
was burning.

"Just a moment," she said, "to make myself as--as persuasive as I
can."

"You are perfectly equipped, Miss Erith--"

"Oh, no, I must do better than I have done. This is the great moment
of our careers, Mr. McKay." Her smile, brightly forced, left his
grim features unresponsive. The undertone in her voice warned him of
her determination to have her way.

He took an involuntary step toward the door like a caged thing that
sees a loophole, halted as she barred his way, turned his marred
young visage and glared at her. There was something terrible in his
intent gaze--a pale flare flickering in his eyes like the uncanny
light in the orbs of a cornered beast.

"You'll wait, won't you?" she asked, secretly frightened now.

After a long interval, "Yes," his lips motioned.

"Thank you. Because it is the supreme moment of our lives. It
involves life or death.... Be patient with me. Will you?"

"But you must be brief," he muttered restlessly. "You know what I
need. I am sick, I tell you!"

So she went away--not to arrange her beauty more convincingly, but
to fling coat and hat to her maid and drop down on the chair by her
desk and take up the telephone:

"Dr. Langford's Hospital?"

"Yes."

"Miss Erith wishes to speak to Dr. Langford. ... Is that you,
Doctor?... Oh, yes, I'm perfectly well.... Tell me, how soon can you
cure a man of--of dipsomania?... Of course.... It was a stupid
question. But I'm so worried and unhappy... Yes.... Yes, it's a man
I know.... It wasn't his fault, poor fellow. If I can only get him
to you and persuade him to tell you the history of his case... I
don't know whether he'll go. I'm doing my best. He's here in my
library.... Oh, no, he isn't intoxicated now, but he was yesterday.
And oh, Doctor! He is so shaky and he seems so ill--I mean in mind
and spirit more than in body.... Yes, he says he needs something....
What?... Give him some whisky if he wants it?... Do you mean a
highball?... How many?... Oh... Yes... Yes, I understand ... I'll do
my very best.... Thank you. ... At three o'clock?... Thank you so
much, Doctor Langford. Good-bye!"

She hung up the receiver, took a look at herself in the
dressing-glass, and saw reflected there a yellow-haired hazel-eyed
girl who looked a trifle scared. But she forced a smile, made a
hasty toilette and rang for the butler, gave her orders, and then
walked leisurely into the library. McKay lifted his tragic face from
his hands where he stood before the fire, his elbows resting on the
mantel.

"Come," she said in her pretty, resolute way, "you and I are
perfectly human. Let's face this thing together and find out what
really is in it."

She took one armchair, he the other, and she noticed that all his
frame was quivering now--his hands always in restless, groping
movement, as though with palsy. A moment later the butler came with
a decanter, ice, mineral water and a tall glass. There was also a
box of cigars on the silver tray.

"You'll fix your own highball," she said carelessly, nodding
dismissal to the butler. But she looked only once at McKay, then
turned away--pretence of picking up her knitting--so terrible it was
to her to see in his eyes the very glimmer of hell itself as he
poured out what he "needed."

Minute after minute she sat there by the fire knitting tranquilly,
scarcely ever even lifting her calm young eyes to the man. Twice
again he poured out what he "needed" for himself before the agony in
his sickened brain and body became endurable--before the tortured
nerves had been sufficiently drugged once more and the indescribable
torment had subsided. He looked at her once or twice where she sat
knitting and apparently quite oblivious to what he had been about,
but his glance was no longer furtive; he unconsciously squared his
shoulders, and his head straightened up.

Without lifting her eyes she said: "I thought we'd talk over our
plans when you feel better."

He glanced sideways at the decanter: "I am all right," he said.

She had not yet lifted her eyes; she continued to knit while
speaking:

"First of all," she said, "I shall place your testimony and my
report in the hands of my superior, Mr. Vaux. Does that meet with
your approval?"

"Yes."

She knitted in silence a few moments. He kept his eyes on her.
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 hell
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 God!" 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 hell 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 God 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 ingratitude.

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
hell is entitled 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.

He loathed it: he detested the livid skies by day against which
tossing waves showed black: he hated every wave at night and their
ceaseless unseen motion. McKay had been "cured." McKay was very,
very ill.

There came to him, at intervals, a girl who stole through the
obscurity of the pitching corridors guiding him from one faint blue
light to the next--a girl who groped out the way with him at night
to the deck by following the painted arrows under foot. Also
sometimes she sat at his bedside through the unreal flight of time,
her hand clasped over his. He knew that he had been brutal to her
during his "cure."

He was still rough with her at moments of intense mental
pressure--somehow; realised it--made efforts toward
self-command--toward reason again, mental control; sometimes felt
that he was on the way to acquiring mental mastery.

But traces of injury to the mind still remained--sensitive
places--and there were swift seconds of agony--of blind anger, of
crafty, unbalanced watching to do harm. Yet for all that he knew he
was convalescent--that alcohol was no longer a necessity to him;
that whatever he did had now become a choice for him; that he had
the power and the authority and the will, and was capable, once
more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been
taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his
brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the
clamour of unreason.

On one of his worst days when his crippled soul was loneliest the
icy seas became terrific. Cruisers and destroyers of the escort
remained invisible, and none of the convoyed transports were to be
seen. The watery, lowering daylight faded: the unseen sun set: the
brief day ended. And the wind went down with the sun. But through
the thick darkness the turbulent wind appeared to grow luminous with
tossing wraiths; and all the world seemed to dissolve into a
nebulous, hell-driven thing, unreal, dreadful, unendurable!

"Mr. McKay!"

He had already got into his wool dressing-robe and felt shoes, and
he sat now very still on the edge of his berth, listening stealthily
with the cunning of distorted purpose.

Her tiny room was just across the corridor. She seemed to be
eternally sleepless, always on the alert night and day, ready to
interfere with him.

Finally he ventured to rise and move cautiously to his door, and he
made not the slightest sound in opening it, but her door opened
instantly, and she stood there confronting him, an ulster buttoned
over her nightdress.

"What is the matter?" she said gently.

"Nothing."

"Are you having a bad night?"

"I'm all right. I wish you wouldn't constitute yourself my nurse,
servant, mentor, guardian, keeper, and personal factotum!" Sudden
rage left him inarticulate, and he shot an ugly look at her. "Can't
you let me alone?" he snarled.

"You poor boy," she said under her breath.

"Don't talk like that! Damnation! I--I can't stand much more--I
can't stand it, I tell you!"

"Yes, you can, and you will. And I don't mind what you say to me."
His malignant expression altered.

"Do you know," he said, in a cool and evil voice, "that I may stop
SAYING things and take to DOING them?"

"Would you hurt me physically? Are you really as sick as that?"

"Not yet.... How do I know?" Suddenly he felt tired and leaned
against the doorway, covering his dulling eyes with his right
forearm. But his hand was now clenched convulsively.

"Could you lie down? I'll talk to you," she whispered. "I'll see you
through."

"I can't--endure--this tension," he muttered. "For God's sake let me
go!"

"Where?"

"You know."

"Yes.... But it won't do. We must carry on, you and I."

"If you--knew--"

"I do know! When these crises come try to fix your mind on what you
have become."

"Yes.... A hell of a soldier. Do you really believe that my country
needs a thing like me?" She stood looking at him in silence--knowing
that he was in a torment of some terrible sort. His eyes were still
covered by his arm. On his boyish brow the blonde-brown hair had
become damp.

She went across and passed her arm through his. His hand rested,
fell to his side, but he suffered her to guide him through the
corridors toward a far bluish spark that seemed as distant as Venus,
the star.

They walked very slowly for a while on deck, encountering now and
then the shadowy forms of officers and crew. The personnel of the
several hospital units in transit were long ago in bed below.

Once he said: "You know, Miss Erith, it is not _I_ who behaves like
a scoundrel to you."

"I know," she said with a dauntless smile.

"Because," he went on, searching painfully for thought as well as
words, "I'm not really a brute--was not always a blackguard--"

"Do you suppose for one moment that I blame a man who has been
irresponsible through no fault of his, and who has made the fight
and has won back to sanity?"

"I--am not yet--well!"

"I understand."

They paused beside the port rail for a few moments.

"I suppose you know," he muttered, "that I have thought--at
times--of ending things--down there. ... You seem to know most
things. Did you suspect that?"

"Yes."

"Don't you ever sleep?"

"I wake easily."

"I know you do. I can't stir in bed but I hear you move, too.... I
should think you'd hate and loathe me--for all I've done--for all
I've cost you."

"Nurses don't loathe their patients," she said lightly.

"I should think they'd want to kill them."

"Oh, Mr. McKay! On the contrary they--they grow to like
them--exceedingly."

"You dare not say that about yourself and me."

Miss Erith shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I don't have to say
anything, do I?"

He made no reply. After a long silence she said casually: "The sea
is calmer, I think. There's something resembling faint moonlight up
among those flying clouds."

He lifted his tragic face and gazed up at the storm-wrack speeding
overhead. And there through the hurrying vapours behind flying rags
of cloud, a pallid lustre betrayed the smothered moon.

There was just enough light, now, to reveal the forward gun under
its jacket, and the shadowy gun-crew around it where the ship's bow
like a vast black, plough ripped the sea asunder in two deep,
foaming furrows.

"I wish I knew where we are at this moment," mused the girl. She
counted the days on her fingertips: "We may be off Bordeaux.... It's
been a long time, hasn't it?"

To him it had been a century of dread endured through half-awakened
consciousness of the latest inferno within him.

"It's been very long," he said, sighing.

A few minutes later they caught a glimpse of a strangled moon
overhead--a livid corpse of a moon, tarnished and battered almost
out of recognition.

"Clearing weather," she said cheerfully, adding: "To-morrow we may
be in the danger zone.... Did you ever see a submarine?"

"Yes. Did you?"

"There were some up the Hudson. I saw them last summer while
motoring along Riverside Drive."

The spectral form of an officer appeared at her elbow, said
something in a low voice, and walked aft.

She said: "Well, then, I think we'd better dress. ... Do you feel
better?"

He said that he did, but his sombre gaze into darkness belied him.
So again she slipped her arm through his and he suffered himself to
be led away along the path of shinning arrows under foot.

At his door she said cheerfully: "No more undressing for bed, you
know. No more luxury of night-clothes. You heard the orders about
lifebelts?"

"Yes," he replied listlessly.

"Very well. I'll be waiting for you."

She lingered a moment more watching him in his brooding revery where
he stood leaning against the doorway. And after a while he raised
his haunted eyes to hers.

"I can't keep on," he breathed.

"Yes you can!"

"No.... The world is slipping away--under foot. It's going on
without me--in spite of me."

"It's you that are slipping, if anything is. Be fair to the world at
least--even if you mean to betray it--and me."

"I don't want to betray anybody--anything." He had begun to tremble
when he stood leaning against his door. "I--don't know--what to do."

"Stand by the world. Stand by me. And, through me, stand by your own
self."

The young fellow's forehead was wet with the vague horror of
something. He made an effort to speak, to straighten up; gave her a
dreadful look of appeal which turned into a snarl.

He whispered between writhing lips: "Can't you let me alone? Can't I
end it if I can't stand it--without your blocking me every
time--every time I stir a finger--"

"McKay! Wait! Don't touch me!--don't do that!"

But he had her in a sudden grip now--was looking right and left for
a place to hurl her out of the way.

"I've stood enough, by God!" he muttered between his teeth. "Now I'm
through--"

"Please listen. You're out of your mind," she said breathlessly, not
struggling to free herself, but striving to twist both her arms
around one of his.

"You hurt me," she whimpered. "Don't be brutal to me!"

"I've got to get you out of my way." He tried to fling her across
the corridor into her own cabin, but she had fastened herself to
him.

"Don't!" she panted. "Don't do anything to yourself--"

"Let go of me! Unclasp your arms!"

But she clung the more desperately and wound her limbs around his,
almost tripping him.

"I WON'T give you up!" she gasped.

"What do you care?" he retorted hoarsely, striving to tear himself
loose. "I want to get some rest--somewhere!"

"You're hurting! You're breaking my arm! Kay! Kay! what are you
doing to me?" she wailed.

Something--perhaps the sound of his own name falling from her lips
for the first time--checked his mounting frenzy. She could feel
every muscle in his body become rigidly inert.

"Kay!" she whispered, fastening herself to him convulsively. For a
full minute she sustained his half-insane stare, then it altered,
and her own eyes slowly closed, though her head remained upright on
the rigid marble of her neck.

The crisis had been reached: the tide of frenzy was turning, had
turned, was already ebbing. She felt it, was conscious that he also
had become aware of it. Then his grasp slackened, grew lax,
loosened, and almost spent. She ventured to unwind her limbs from
his, to relax her stiffened fingers, unclasp her arms.

It was over. She could scarcely stand, felt blindly for support,
rested so, and slowly unclosed her eyes.

"I've had to fight very hard for you," she whispered. "But I think
I've won."

He answered with difficulty.

"Yes--if you want the dog you fought for."

"It isn't what _I_ want, Kay."

"All right, I guess I can face it through--after this.... But I
don't know why you did it."

"I do."

"Do you? Don't you know I'm not a man, but a beast? And there are
half a hundred million real men to replace me--to do what you and
the country expect of real men."

"What may be expected of them I expect of you. Kay, I've made a good
fight for you, haven't I?"

He turned his quenched eyes on her. "From gutter to hospital, from
hospital to sanitarium, from sanitarium to ship," he said in a
colourless voice. "Yes, it was--a--good--fight."

"What a Calvary!" she murmured, looking at him out of clear,
sorrowful eyes. "And on your knees, poor boy!"

"You ought to know. You have made every station with me--on your
tender bleeding knees of a girl!" He choked, turned his head
swiftly; and she caught his hand. The break had come.

"Oh, Kay! Kay!" she said, quivering all over, "I have done my bit
and you are cured! You know it, don't you? Look at me, turn your
head." She laid her slim hand flat against his tense cheek but could
not turn his face. But she did not care; the palm of her hand was
wet. The break had come. She drew a deep, uneven breath, let go his
hand.

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