Books: In Secret

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"Now," she said, "we can understand each other at last--our minds
are rational; and whether in accord or conflict they are at least in
contact; and mine isn't clashing with something disordered and
foreign which it can't interpret, can't approach."

He said, not turning toward her: "You are kind to put it that
way.... I think self-control has returned--will-power--all that....
I won't-betray you--Miss Erith."

"YOU never would, Mr. McKay. But I--I've been in terror of what has
been masquerading as you."

"I know.... But whatever you think of such a--a man--I'll do my
bit, now. I'll carry on--until the end."

"I will too! I promise you."

He turned his head at that and a mirthless laugh touched his wet
eyes and drawn visage:

"As though you had to promise anybody that you'd stick! You! You
beautiful, magnificent young thing--you superb kid--"

Her surprise and the swift blaze of colour in her face silenced him.

After a moment, the painful red still staining his face, he muttered
something about dressing.

He watched her turn and enter her room; saw that she had closed her
door-something she had not dared do heretofore; then he went into
his own room and threw himself down on the bunk, shaking in every
nerve.

For a long while, preoccupied with the obsession for
self-destruction, he lay there face downward, exhausted, trying to
fight off the swimming sense of horror that was creeping over him
again..... Little by little it mounted like a tide from hell.... He
struggled to his feet with the unuttered cry of a dreamer tearing
his throat. An odd sense of fear seized him and he dressed and
adjusted his clumsy life-suit. For the ship was in the danger zone,
now, and orders had been given, and dawn was not far off. Perhaps it
was already day! he could not tell in his dim cabin.

And after he was completely accoutred for the hazard of the
Hun-cursed seas he turned and looked down at his bunk with the odd
idea that his body still lay there--that it was a thing apart from
himself--something inert, unyielding, corpse-like, sprawling there
in a stupor--something visible, tangible, taking actual proportion
and shape there under his very eyes.

He turned his back with a shudder and went on deck. To his surprise
the blue lights were extinguished, and corridor and saloon were all
rosy with early sunlight.

Blue sky, blue sea, silver spindrift flying and clouds of silvery
gulls--a glimmer of Heaven from the depths of the pit--a glimpse of
life through a crack in the casket--and land close on the starboard
bow! Sheer cliffs, with the bonny green grass atop all furrowed by
the wind--and the yellow-flowered broom and the shimmering whinns
blowing.

"Why, it's Scotland," he said aloud, "it's Glenark Cliffs and the
Head of Strathlone--my people's fine place in the Old World--where
we took root--and--O my God! Yankee that I am, it looks like home!"

The cape of a white fleece cloak fluttered in his face, and he
turned and saw Miss Erith at his elbow.

Yellow-haired, a slender, charming thing in her white wind-blown
coat, she stood leaning on the spray-wet rail close to his shoulder.

And with him it was suddenly as though he had known her for
years--as though he had always been aware of her beauty and her
loveliness--as though his eyes had always framed her--his heart had
always wished for her, and she had always been the sole and
exquisite tenant of his mind.

"I had no idea that we were off Scotland," he said--"off Strathlone
Head--and so close in. Why, I can see the cliff-flowers!"

She laid one hand lightly on his arm, listening; high and heavenly
sweet above the rushing noises of the sea they heard the singing of
shoreward sky-larks above the grey cliff of Glenark.

He began to tremble. "That nightmare through which I've struggled,"
he began, but she interrupted:

"It is quite ended, Kay. You are awake. It is day and the world's
before you." At that he caught her slim hand in both of his:

"Eve! Eve! You've brought me through death's shadow! You gave me
back my mind!"

She let her hand rest between his. At first he could not make out
what her slightly moving lips uttered, and bending nearer he heard
her murmur: "Beside the still waters." The sea had become as calm as
a pond.

And now the transport was losing headway, scarcely moving at all.
Forward and aft the gun-crews, no longer alert, lounged lazily in
the sunshine watching a boat being loaded and swung outward from the
davits.

"Is somebody going ashore?" asked McKay.

"We are," said the girl.

"Just you and I, Eve?"

"Just you and I."

Then he saw their luggage piled in the lifeboat.'

"This is wonderful," he said. "I have a house a few miles inland
from Strathlone Head."

"Will you take me there, Kay?"

Such a sense of delight possessed him that he could not speak.

"That's where we must go to make our plans," she said. "I didn't
tell you in those dark hours we have lived together, because our
minds were so far apart--and I was fighting so hard to hold you."

"Have you forgiven me--you wonderful girl?"

His voice shook so that he could scarcely control it. Miss Erith
laughed.

"You adorable boy!" she said. "Stand still while I unlace your
life-belt. You can't travel in this."

He felt her soft fingers at his throat and turned his face upward.
All the blue air seemed glittering with the sun-tipped wings of
gulls. The skylark's song, piercingly sweet, seemed to penetrate his
soul. And, as his life-suit fell about him, so seemed to fall the
heavy weight of dread like a shroud, dropping at his feet. And he
stepped clear--took his first free step toward her--as though
between them there were no questions, no barriers, nothing but this
living, magic light--which bathed them both.

There seemed to be no need of speech, either, only the sense of
heavenly contact as though the girl were melting into him,
dissolving in his arms.

"Kay!"

Her voice sounded as from an infinite distance. There came a
smothered thudding like the soft sound of guns at sea; and then her
voice again, and a greyness as if a swift cloud had passed across
the sun.

"Kay!"

A sharp, cold wind began to blow through the strange and sudden
darkness. He heard her voice calling his name--felt his numbed body
shaken, lifted his head from his arms and sat upright on his bunk in
the dim chill of his cabin.

Miss Erith stood beside his bed, wearing her life-suit.

"Kay! Are you awake?'

"Yes."

"Then put on your life-suit. Our destroyers are firing at something.
Quick, please, I'll help you!"

Dazed, shaken, still mazed by the magic of his dream, not yet clear
of its beauty and its passion, he stumbled to his feet in the
obscurity. And he felt her chilled hand aiding him.

"Eve--I--thought--"

"What?"

"I thought your name--was Eve--" he stammered. "I've
been--dreaming."

Then was a silence as he fumbled stupidly with his clothing and
life-suit. The sounds of the guns, rapid, distinct, echoed through
the unsteady obscurity.

She helped him as a nurse helps a convalescent, her swift, cold
little fingers moving lightly and unerringly. And at last he was
equipped, and his mind had cleared darkly of the golden vision of
love and spring.

Icy seas, monstrous and menacing, went smashing past the sealed and
blinded port; but there was no wind and the thudding of the guns
came distinctly to their ears.

A shape in uniform loomed at the cabin door for an instant and a
calm, unhurried voice summoned them.

Corridors were full of dark figures. The main saloon was thronged as
they climbed the companion-way. There appeared to be no panic, no
haste, no confusion. Voices were moderately low, the tone casually
conversational.

Miss Erith's arm remained linked in McKay's where they stood
together amid the crowd.

"U-boats, I fancy," she said.

"Probably."

After a moment: "What were you dreaming about, Mr. McKay?" she asked
lightly. In the dull bluish dusk of the saloon his boyish face grew
hot.

"What was it you called me?" she insisted. "Was it Eve?"

At that his cheeks burnt crimson.

"What do you mean?" he muttered.

"Didn't you call me Eve?"

"I--when a man is dreaming--asleep--"

"My name is Evelyn, you know. Nobody ever called me Eve....
Yet--it's odd, isn't it, Mr. McKay? I've always wished that somebody
would call me Eve.... But perhaps you were not dreaming of me?"

"I--was."

"Really. How interesting!" He remained silent.

"And did you call me Eve--in that dream?... That is curious, isn't
it, after what I've just told you?... So I've had my wish--in a
dream." She laughed a little. "In a dream--YOUR dream," she
repeated. "We must have been good friends in your dream--that you
called me Eve."

But the faint thrill of the dream was in him again, and it troubled
him and made him shy, and he found no word to utter--no defence to
her low-voiced banter.

Then, not far away on the port quarter, a deck-gun spoke with a
sharper explosion, and intense stillness reigned in the saloon.

"If there's any necessity," he whispered, "you recollect your boat,
don't you?"

"Yes.... I don't want to go--without you." He said, in a pleasant
firm voice which was new to her: "I know what you mean. But you are
not to worry. I am absolutely well."

The girl turned toward him, the echoes of the guns filling her ears,
and strove to read his face in the ghastly, dreary light.

"I'm really cured, Miss Erith," he said. "If there's any emergency
I'll fight to live. Do you believe me?"

"If you tell me so."

"I tell you so."

The girl drew a deep, unsteady breath, and her arm tightened a
trifle within his.

"I am--so glad," she said in a voice that sounded suddenly tired.

There came an ear-splitting detonation from the after-deck,
silencing every murmur.

"Something is shelling us," whispered McKay. "When orders come, go
instantly to your boat and your station."

"I don't want to go alone."

"The nurses of the unit to which you--"

The crash of a shell drowned his voice. Then came a deathly silence,
then the sound of the deck-guns in action once more.

Miss Erith was leaning rather heavily on his arm. He bent it,
drawing her closer.

"I don't want to leave you," she said again.

"I told you--"

"It isn't that.... Don't you understand that I have become--your
friend?"

"Such a brute as I am?"

"I like you."

In the silence he could hear his heart drumming between the
detonations of the deck-guns. He said: "It's because you are you. No
other woman on earth but would have loathed me... beastly rotter
that I was--"

"Oh-h, don't," she breathed.... "I don't know--we may be very close
to death.... I want to live. I'd like to. But I don't really mind
death. ... But I can't bear to have things end for you just as
you've begun to live again--"

Crash! Something was badly smashed on deck that time, for the brazen
jar of falling wreckage seemed continuous.

Through the metallic echo she heard her voice:

"Kay! I'm afraid--a little."

"I think it's all right so far. Listen, there go our guns again.
It's quite all right, Eve dear."

"I didn't know I was so cowardly. But of course I'll never show it
when the time comes."

"Of course you won't. Don't worry. Shells make a lot of noise when
they explode on deck. All that tinpan effect we heard was probably a
ventilator collapsing--perhaps a smokestack."

After a silence punctured by the flat bang of the deck-guns:

"You ARE cured, aren't you, Kay?"

"Yes."

She repeated in a curiously exultant voice: "You ARE cured. All of a
sudden--after that black crisis, too, you wake up, well!"

"You woke me."

"Of course, I did--with those guns frightening me!"

"You woke me, Eve," he repeated coolly, "and my dream had already
cured me. I am perfectly well. We'll get out of this mess shortly,
you and I. And--and then--"He paused so long that she looked up at
him in the bluish dusk:

"And what then?" she asked.

He did not answer. She said: "Tell me, Kay."

But as his lips unclosed to speak a terrific shock shook the
saloon--a shock that seemed to come from the depths of the ship,
tilt up the cabin floor, and send everybody reeling about.

Through the momentary confusion in the bluish obscurity the cool
voice of an officer sounded unalarmed, giving orders. There was no
panic. The hospital units formed and started for the deck. A young
officer passing near exchanged a calm word with McKay, and passed on
speaking pleasantly to the women who were now moving forward.

McKay said to Miss Erith: "It seems that we've been torpedoed. We'll
go on deck together. You know your boat and station?"

"Yes."

"I'll see you safely there. You're not afraid any more, are you?"

"No."

He gave a short dry laugh. "What a rotten deal," he said. "My dream
was--different.... There is your boat--THAT one!... I'll say good
luck. I'm assigned to a station on the port side. ... Good luck....
And thank you, Eve."

"Don't go--"

"Yes, I must.. We'll find each other--ashore--or somewhere."

"Kay! The port boats can't be launched--"

"Take your place! you're next, Eve."... Her hand, which had clung to
his, he suddenly twisted up, and touched the convulsively tightening
fingers with his lips.

"Good luck, dear," he said gaily. And watched her go and take her
place. Then he lifted his cap, as she turned and looked for him, and
sauntered off to where his boat and station should have been had not
the U-boat shells annihilated boat and rail and deck.

"What a devil of a mess!" he said to a petty officer near him. A
young doctor smoking a cigarette surveyed his own life-suit and the
clumsy apparel of his neighbours with unfeigned curiosity!

"How long do these things keep one afloat?" he inquired.

"Long enough to freeze solid," replied an ambulance driver.

"Did we get the Hun?" asked McKay of the petty officer.

"Naw," he replied in disgust, "but the destroyers ought to nail him.
Look out, sir--you'll go sliding down that slippery toboggan!"

"How long'll she float?" asked the young ambulance driver.

"This ship? SHE'S all right," remarked the petty officer absently.

She went down, nose first. Those in the starboard boats saw her
stand on end for full five minutes, screws spinning, before a
muffled detonation blew the bowels out of her and sucked her down
like a plunging arrow.

Destroyers and launches from some of the cruisers were busy amid the
wreckage where here, on a spar, some stunned form clung like a
limpet, and there, a-bob in the curling seas, a swimmer in his
life-suit tossed under the wintry sky.

There were men on rafts, too, and several clinging to hatches; there
was not much loss of life, considering.

Toward midday a sea-plane which had been releasing depth-bombs and
hovering eagerly above the wide iridescent and spreading stain,
sheered shoreward and shot along the coast.

There was a dead man afloat in a cave, rocking there rather
peacefully in his life-suit--or at least they supposed him to be
dead.

But on a chance they signalled the discovery to a distant trawler,
then soared upward for a general coup de l'oeil, turned there aloft
like a seahawk for a while, sheering in widening spirals, and
finally, high in the grey sky, set a steady course for parts
unknown.

Meanwhile a boat from the trawler fished out McKay, wrapped him in
red-hot blankets, pried open his blue lips, and tried to fill him
full of boiling rum. Then he came to life. But those honest
fishermen knew he had gone stark mad because he struck at the
pannikin of steaming rum and cursed them vigorously for their
kindness. And only a madman could so conduct himself toward a
pannikin of steaming rum. They understood that perfectly. And,
understanding it, they piled more hot blankets upon the struggling
form of Kay McKay and roped him to his bunk.

Toward evening, becoming not only coherent but frightfully emphatic,
they released McKay.

"What's this damn place?" he shouted.

"Strathlone Firth," they said.

"That's my country!" he raged. "I want to go ashore!"

They were quite ready to be rid of the cracked Yankee, and told him
so.

"And the boats? How about them?" he demanded.

"All in the Firth, sir."

"Any women lost?"

"None, sir."

At that, struggling into his clothes, he began to shed gold
sovereigns from his ripped money-belt all over the cabin.
Weatherbeaten fingers groped to restore the money to him. But it was
quite evident that the young man was mad. He wouldn't take it. And
in his crazy way he seemed very happy, telling them what fine lads
they were and that not only Scotland but the world ought to be proud
of them, and that he was about to begin to live the most wonderful
life that any man had ever lived as soon as he got ashore.

"Because," he explained, as he swung off and dropped into the small
boat alongside, "I've taken a look into hell and I've had a glimpse
of heaven, but the earth has got them both stung to death, and I
like it and I'm going to settle down on it and live awhile. You
don't get me, do you?" They did not.

"It doesn't matter. You're a fine lot of lads. Good luck!"

And so they were rid of their Yankee lunatic.

On the Firth Quay and along the docks all the inhabitants of Glenark
and Strathlone were gathered to watch the boats come in with living,
with dead, or merely the news of the seafight off the grey head of
Strathlone.

At the foot of the slippery waterstairs, green with slime, McKay,
grasping the worn rail, lifted his head and looked up into the faces
of the waiting crowd. And saw the face of her he was looking for
among them.

He went up slowly. She pushed through the throng, descended the
steps, and placed one arm around him.

"Thanks, Eve," he said cheerfully. "Are you all right?"

"All right, Kay. Are you hurt?"

"No.... I know this place. There's an inn ... if you'll give me your
arm--it's just across the street."

They went very leisurely, her arm under his--and his face, suddenly
colourless, half-resting against her shoulder.

CHAPTER V

ISLA WATER

Earlier in the evening there had been a young moon on Isla Water.
Under it spectres of the mist floated in the pale lustre; a painted
moorhen steered through ghostly pools leaving fan-shaped wakes of
crinkled silver behind her; heavy fish splashed, swirling again to
drown the ephemera.

But there was no moonlight now; not a star; only fog on Isla Water,
smothering ripples and long still reaches, bank and upland, wall and
house.

The last light had gone out in the stable; the windows of Isla were
darkened; there was a faint scent of heather in the night; a fainter
taint of peat smoke. The world had grown very still by Isla Water.

Toward midnight a dog-otter, swimming leisurely by the Bridge of
Isla, suddenly dived and sped away under water; and a stoat,
prowling in the garden, also took fright and scurried through the
wicket. Then in the dead of night the iron bell hanging inside the
court began to clang. McKay heard it first in his restless sleep.
Finally the clangour broke his sombre dream and he awoke and sat up
in bed, listening.

Neither of the two servants answered the alarm. He swung out of bed
and into slippers and dressing-gown and picked up a service pistol.
As he entered the stone corridor he heard Miss Erith's door creak on
its ancient hinges.

"Did the bell wake you?" he asked in a low voice.

"Yes. What is it?"

"I haven't any idea."

She opened her door a little wider. Her yellow hair covered her
shoulders like a mantilla. "Who could it be at this hour?" she
repeated uneasily.

McKay peered at the phosphorescent dial of his wrist-watch:

"I don't know," he repeated. "I can't imagine who would come here at
this hour."

"Don't strike a light!" she whispered.

"No, I think I won't." He continued on down the stone stairs, and
Miss Erith ran to the rail and looked over.

"Are you armed?" she called through the darkness.

"Yes."

He went on toward the rear of the silent house and through the
servants' hall, then around by the kitchen garden, then felt his way
along a hedge to a hutchlike lodge where a fixed iron bell hung
quivering under the slow blows of the clapper.

"What the devil's the matter?" demanded McKay in a calm voice.

The bell still hummed with the melancholy vibrations, but the
clapper now hung motionless. Through the brooding rumour of metallic
sound came a voice out of the mist:

"The hours of life are numbered. Is it true?"

"It is," said McKay coolly; "and the hairs of our head are numbered
too!"

"So teach us to number our days," rejoined the voice from the fog,
"that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

"The days of our years are three-score years and ten," said McKay.
"Have you a name?"

"A number."

"And what number will that be?"

"Sixty-seven. And yours?"

"You should know that, too."

"It's the reverse; seventy-six."

"It is that," said McKay. "Come in."

He made his way to the foggy gate, drew bolt and chain from the left
wicket. A young man stepped through.

"Losh, mon," he remarked with a Yankee accent, "it's a fearful nicht
to be abroad."

"Come on in," said McKay, re-locking the wicket. "This way; follow
me."

They went by the kitchen garden and servants' hall, and so through
to the staircase hall, where McKay struck a match and Sixty-seven
instantly blew it out.

"Better not," he said. "There are vermin about."

McKay stood silent, probably surprised. Then he called softly in the
darkness:

"Seventy-seven!"

"Je suis la!" came her voice from the stairs.

"It's all right," he said, "it's one of our men. No use sittin' up
if you're sleepy." He listened but did not hear Miss Erith stir.

"Better return to bed," he said again, and guided Sixty-seven into
the room on the left.

For a few moments he prowled around; a glass tinkled against a
decanter. When he returned to the shadow-shape seated motionless by
the casement window he carried only one glass.

"Don't you?" inquired Sixty-seven. "And you a Scot!"

"I'm a Yankee; and I'm through."

"With the stuff?"

"Absolutely."

"Oh, very well. But a Yankee laird--tiens c'est assez drole!" He
smacked his lips over the smoky draught, set the half-empty glass on
the deep sill. Then he began breezily:

"Well, Seventy-six, what's all this I hear about your misfortunes?"

"What do you hear?" inquired McKay guilelessly.

The other man laughed.

"I hear that you and Seventy-seven have entered the Service; that
you are detailed to Switzerland and for a certain object unknown to
myself; that your transport was torpedoed a week ago off the Head of
Strathlone, that you wired London from this house of yours called
Isla, and that you and Seventy-seven went to London last week to
replenish the wardrobe you had lost."

"Is that all you heard?"

"It is."

"Well, what more do you wish to hear?"

"I want to know whether anything has happened to worry you. And I'll
tell you why. There was a Hun caught near Banff! Can you beat it?
The beggar wore kilts!--and the McKay tartan--and, by jinks, if his
gillie wasn't rigged in shepherd's plaid!--and him with his Yankee
passport and his gillie with a bag of ready-made rods. Yellow trout,
is it? Sea-trout, is it! Ho, me bucko, says I when I lamped what he
did with his first trout o' the burn this side the park--by Godfrey!
thinks I to myself, you're no white man at all!--you're Boche. And
it was so, McKay."

"Seventy-six," corrected McKay gently.

"That's better. It should become a habit."

"Excuse me, Seventy-six; I'm Scotch-Irish way back. You're straight
Scotch--somewhere back. We Yankees don't use rods and flies and net
and gaff as these Scotch people use 'em. But we're white,
Seventy-six, and we use 'em RIGHT in our own fashion." He moistened
his throat, shoved aside the glass:

"But this kilted Boche! Oh, la-la! What he did with his rod and
flies and his fish and himself! AND his gillie! Sure YOU'RE not
white at all, thinks I. And at that I go after them."

"You got them?"

"Certainly--at the inn--gobbling a trout, blaue gesotten--having
gone into the kitchen to show a decent Scotch lassie how to concoct
the Hunnish dish. I nailed them then and there--took the chance that
the swine weren't right. And won out."

"Good! But what has it to do with me?" asked McKay.

"Well, I'll be telling you. I took the Boche to London and I've come
all the way back to tell you this, Seventy-six; the Huns are on to
you and what you're up to. That Boche laird called himself Stanley
Brown, but his name is--or was--Schwartz. His gillie proved to be a
Swede."

"Have they been executed?"

"You bet. Tower style! We got another chum of theirs, too, who set
up a holler like he saw a pan of hogwash. We're holding him. And
what we've learned is this: The Huns made a special set at your
transport in order to get YOU and Seventy-seven!

"Now they know you are here and their orders are to get you before
you reach France. The hog that hollered put us next. He's a
Milwaukee Boche; name Zimmerman. He's so scared that he tells all he
knows and a lot that he doesn't. That's the trouble with a Milwaukee
Boche. Anyway, London sent me back to find you and warn you. Keep
your eye skinned. And when you're ready for France wire Edinburgh.
You know where. There'll be a car and an escort for you and
Seventy-seven."

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