The Thread of Flame

Chapter 3

It occurred to me that I could escape some of my embarrassment by asking Drinkwater to stop his friend the doctor from looking in on me; but before I had time to formulate this plan, and while I was sitting up crosslegged in my berth, eating from the tray which Jean-Marie had laid on my knees, there was a sharp rap on the door. As I could do nothing but say, "Come in," the doctor was before me.

"Good!" he said, quietly, without greeting or self-introduction. "Best thing you could be doing."

The lack of formality nettled me. I objected to his assumption of a right to force himself in uninvited.

I said, frigidly: "I shall be out on deck presently. If you want to see me, perhaps it would be easier there."

"Oh, this is all right." He made himself comfortable in a corner of the couch, propping his body against the rolling of the ship with a fortification of bags. "Glad you're able to get up and dress. I'm Doctor Averill."

To give him to understand that I was not communicative I took this information in silence. My coldness apparently did not impress him, and, sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to mine, he watched me eat.

He was one of those men in whom personality disappears in the scientific observer. His features, manners, clothing, were mere accidents.

He struck you as being wise, though with a measure of sympathy in his wisdom. Small in build, the dome of his forehead would have covered a man of twice his stature. A small, dark mustache was no more consciously a point of personal adornment than a patch of stonecrop to a rock. When he took off his cap his baldness, though more extensive than you would have expected in a man who couldn't have been older than forty-five, was the finishing-touch of the staid.

"You've been having a long sleep."

"Yes."

"Making up for lost time?"

"Exactly."

"Been at the front?"

It was the kind of a question I was afraid of. I knew that if I said, "Yes," I should have to give details, and so I said, "No."

"Look as if you had been."

"Do I?"

"Often leaves some sort of hang-over"

"It couldn't do that in my case, because I wasn't there."

He tried another avenue of approach. "Drinkwater told me you were a Frenchman."

"That seems to have been a mistake of our steward."

"But you speak the language."

"Yes, I speak it."

"You must speak it very well."

"Probably."

"Have you lived much in France?"

"Oh, on and off."

"Had a position over there?"

It seemed to be my turn to ask a question. I shot him a quick glance. "What sort of position do you mean?"

"Oh, I didn't know but what you might have been in a shop or an office"

So I looked like that! It was a surprise to me. I had thought he might mention the Embassy. My sense of superior standing was so strong that I expected another man of superior standing to see it at a glance. Contenting myself with a shake of the heads I felt his eyes on me with a graver stare.

"Must have found it useful to speak French so well, especially at a time like this."

I allowed that to pass without challenge.

"If we should ever go into the war a fellow like you could make himself handy in a lot of ways."

We were therefore not in the war. I was glad to add that to my list of facts. "I should try," I assented, feeling that the words committed me to nothing.

"Wonder you weren't tempted to pitch in as it was. A lot of our young Americans didchaps who found themselves over there."

"I wasn't one of them."

"Poor Drinkwater, nowhe went over with me as my stenographer in the spring of that year; and when the thing broke out"

"He went?"

"Yes, he went."

"And didn't get much good from it."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Dependsdoesn't it?on what we mean by good. You fellows"

I shot him another glance, but I don't think he noticed that I objected to being classed with Drinkwater.

"You fellows" he began again.

I never knew how he meant to continue, for a shuffling and pawing outside the door warned us that Drinkwater, having finished his breakfast, was feeling his way in.

The doctor spoke as the boy pushed the door open and stumbled across the threshold.

"Morning, Harry! Your friend here seems to have waked up in pretty good condition. Look at the breakfast he's been making away with." He rose to leave, since the cabin had not room enough for two men on foot at the same time. "See you on deck by and by," he added, with a nod to me; "then we can have a more satisfactory talk."

I waited till he was out of earshot. "Who is he, anyhow?"

In giving me a summary of Averill's history Drinkwater couldn't help weaving in a partial one of his own. It was in fact most of his own, except that it included no reference to his birth and parentage.

Drinkwater had worked his way through one of the great universities, when laboratory research threw him in contact with Boyd Averill. The latter was not a practising physician, but a student of biology. He was the more at liberty to follow one of the less lucrative lines of scientific work because of being a man of large means. Sketching the origin of this fortune, my companion informed me that from his patron's democratic ways no one would ever suppose him the only son, and except for a sister the only heir, of the biggest banker in the state of New Jersey. By one of those odd freaks of heredity which neither Sir Francis Galton nor the great Plockendorff had been able to explain, Boyd Averill had shown a distaste for banking from his cradle, and yet with an interest equally difficult to account for in bacteria.

On the subject of Averill's more personal life all my friend could tell me was that he had married Miss Lulu Winfield, once well known on the concert stage.

"And, say," he went on, enthusiastically, "she's about the prettiest. You'll see for yourself when you come up on deck. She'll speak to you. Oh yes, she will," he hastened to assure me, when I began to demur. "She won't mind. She's not a bit aristocratic, and Miss Blair says the same."

To make conversation I asked him who was Miss Blair, learning that she was the young lady whom Miss Averill had brought over to Europe to act as stenographer to her brother when Drinkwater had gone to the war.

"You see," he continued to explain, "Averill's been white with me from the start. When I left him in the lurchafter he'd paid my expenses over to Europe and all thatbecause the war broke out, he didn't kick any more than a straw dummy. When I told him I felt mean, but that this war couldn't be going on and me not in it, he said that at my age he'd have felt the same. One of these days I've got to pay him back that fare. I'll do that when I've got to work in New York and saved a bit of dough."

I asked him what he meant to work at.

"Oh, there'll be things. There always are. Miss Blair wants me to learn the touch system and go in for big stenography. Says she'll teach me. Say, she's some girl. I want you to know her." He reverted to the principal theme. "Big money in piano-tuning, too, though what I'm really out for is biology. But after all what's biology but the science of life?and you can pick that up anywhere. Oh, I'm all right. I've had the darnedest good luck, when I've seen my pals" He left this sentence unfinished, going on to say: "That was the way when I got mine at Bois Robert. Shell came downand, gee whizz! Nothing left of a bunch of six or eight of us but meand I only got this."

A toss of his hand was meant to indicate his eyes, after which he went on to tell how marvelously he had been taken care of, with the additional good luck of running across Boyd Averill in hospital. Best luck of all was, now that he was able to go home, the Averills were coming, too, and had been willing to have him sail by their boat and keep an eye on him. He spoke as if they were his intimate friends, while I had only to appear on deck to have them become mine.

"In the jewelry business?" he asked me, suddenly.

I stared in an amazement of which he must have recognized the tones in my voice. "What made you ask me that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Speak like it. Thought you might have been in thator gents' furnishings."

After he had gone on deck, and Jean-Marie had taken away the tray, I got up and dressed. I did it slowly, with a hatred to my clothes that grew as I put them on. How I had dressed in the previous portion of my life I couldn't, of course, tell; but now I was something between a country barber and a cheap Latin Quarter Bohemian. In conjunction with my patently Anglo-Saxon face nothing could have been more grotesque.

I thought of trunks. I must have some in the hold. Ringing for Jean-Marie, I asked if it would be possible to have one or two of them brought up. If so, I could go back to bed again till I found something more presentable. The steward, with comic compassion stealing into his eye as he studied me, said that of course it was possible to have monsieur's trunks brought up if monsieur would give him the checks or receipts, which would doubtless be in monsieur's pockets. But a search revealed nothing. The bags and my purse revealed nothing. My dismay at the fact that I had come on board without other belongings than those on the couch almost betrayed me to the little man watching me so wistfully. I was obliged to invent a story of hurried war-time traveling in order to get him out.

My predicament was growing more absurd. I sat down on the couch and considered it. It would have been easy to become excited, frantic, frenzied, with my ridiculous inability. Putting my hands to my head, I could have torn it asunder to wrest from my atrophied brain the secret it guarded so maliciously. "None of that!" I warned myself; and my hands came down. Whatever I did I must do coolly. So not long after the eight bells of noon I dragged myself to the deck.

All at once I began to find something like consolation. The wild beauty of sky and water beat in on me like love. I must have traveled often enough before, so that it was not new to me; but it was all the more comforting for that. I had come back to an old, old friendshipthe friendship of wind and color and scudding clouds and glinting horizons and the mad squadrons of the horses of Neptune shaking their foamy manes. Amid the raging tempests of cloud there were tranquil islands of a blue such as was never unfolded by a flower. In the long, sweeping hollows of the waves one's eye could catch all the hues in pigeons' necks. Before a billow broke it climbed to a tip of that sea-water green more ineffable than any of the greens of grass, jades, or emeralds. From every crest, and in widening lines from the ship's sides as we plowed along, the foam trailed into shreds that seemed to have been torn from the looms of a race more deft and exquisite than ours.

Not many men and women love beauty for its own sake. Not many see it. To most of us it is only an adjunct to comfort or pride. It springs from the purse, or at best from the intellect; but the hidden man of the heart doesn't care for it. The hidden man of the heart has no capacity to value the cloud or the bit of jewel-weed. These things meet no need in him; they inspire no ecstasy. The cloud dissolves and the bit of jewel-weed goes back to earth; and the chances are that no human eye has noted the fact that each has externalized God in one of the myriad forms of His appeal to us. Only here and there, at long intervals, is there one to whom line and color and invisible forces like the wind are significant and sacred, and as essential as food and drink. It came to me now that, somewhere in my past, beauty had been the dominating energythat beauty was the thread of flame which, if I kept steadily hold of it, would lead me back whence I came.