Running Sands Part 29

X

"UNWILLING WAR"

Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell, and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of the voyage.

Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circ.u.mstances, tell Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this man's hand and held it while we were pa.s.sing through a brief curtain of fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was herself afraid in the fog or that she wished to touch von Klausen's hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a breach of confidence.

Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant, even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing exceptions.

Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It came to her in the morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep, rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him of this belief.

But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over her in her berth and kissed her.

"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."

"Sure not?"

"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."

She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one of those futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it un.o.bserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not possibly so soon be seen.

Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appet.i.te that had directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking arm-in-arm.

The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large and st.u.r.dy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched with every roll of the ship.

Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the a.s.sumption that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally, she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his stupid mistake.

Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon installed in a chair beside Stainton's.

"But do I not trespa.s.s?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping inclination.

"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure.

You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."

Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:

"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"

"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."

Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.

As the voyage progressed, Stainton and von Klausen became more and more friendly, and Muriel more and more restless, she could not tell why. Her husband had pa.s.sed his entire manhood among men and had acquired, though he did not know it, the taste for the discussion of what, because of the inferior grade of education that we grant to women, we magnificently call manly topics. These he had not enjoyed since his wedding-day, and now he was hungry for them. He did not neglect Muriel, and von Klausen often made efforts to bring her into their conversations, but her mind had never been trained to these subjects and was, moreover, now filled with a more intimate concern. For an hour she would sit beside Jim and listen to him with some admiration, but less comprehension of his technical terms, and then for fifteen minutes she would leave the pair and walk the deck alone.

"To me it seems," von Klausen was one day saying, "that the great danger in your country is the disintegration of the unit of society, the break-up of the home."

"Oh," said Stainton, "you're referring to our divorce laws?"

The captain nodded.

"Well, how are they in your country?" asked Jim.

"In Austria the code of 1811 is still in force, and under it there are divorces allowed for violence, cruelty, desertion, incompatibility, and adultery. Adultery is a crime and is punishable by five years'

imprisonment."

"That sounds as if your code is pretty broad, too," remarked Stainton.

"Ah, but it is applicable only to persons that are not Catholics, and Austria is a Catholic country."

"I see. And what do the Catholics do?"

"They remain married."

"Always?"

"The law allows them the remedy of judicial separation."

Stainton was smoking a cigar. He puffed at it thoughtfully.

"Judicial separation," he finally said, "has always struck me as begging the question. It denies liberty and yet winks at license. A good marriage ought to be guarded and a bad one broken."

"That," replied von Klausen, "is the American view."

"Not at all. We have all sorts of views--and there is one great trouble.

You can get a divorce for nothing in Nevada, and you can't get it for anything in South Carolina. The South Carolina result is that they have had to pa.s.s a law there removing illegitimacy as a bar to succession."

"Nevertheless," said von Klausen, "except for j.a.pan, there are more divorces in the United States than in any other country in the world. I was told, while I was in Washington, that the American statistics were--they showed seventy-nine divorces to every hundred thousand of your population. Your divorces increase more rapidly than your population; they increase more rapidly than your marriage-rate."

"I don't know about that," said Stainton; "although I believe that I have seen some such figures given somewhere, but I am clear on one point: the man that treats his wife badly ought not to be allowed the chance to have a wife any longer." He looked at Muriel, seated at his side; he smiled and patted her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair.

"Don't you think so, dear?" he asked.

Muriel smiled in answer.

"Of course I do," said she. "Don't you, Captain von Klausen?"

The Austrian's face remained serious.

"I am of the religion of my country," he said.

"Eh?" said Stainton. "Oh, I beg your pardon."