THE big ship issued from the Mersey into ugly waters--into the weather that at all seasons haunts and curses the coasts of Northern Europe.From Saturday until Wednesday Susan and Madame Deliere had true Atlantic seas and skies; and the ship leaped and shivered and crashed along like a brave cavalryman in the rear of a rout--fighting and flying, flying and fighting.Four days of hours whose every waking second lagged to record itself in a distinct pang of physical wretchedness;four days in which all emotions not physical were suspended, in which even the will to live, most tenacious of primal instincts in a sane human being, yielded somewhat to the general lassitude and disgust.Yet for Susan Lenox four most fortunate days; for in them she underwent a mental change that enabled her to emerge delivered of the strain that threatened at every moment to cause a snap.
On the fifth day her mind, crutched by her resuming body, took up again its normal routine.She began to dress herself, to eat, to exercise--the mechanical things first, as always--then to think.The grief that had numbed her seemed to have been left behind in England where it had suddenly struck her down--England far away and vague across those immense and infuriated waters, like the gulf of death between two incarnations.No doubt that grief was awaiting her at the other shores; no doubt there she would feel that Brent was gone.But she would be better able to bear the discovery.
The body can be accustomed to the deadliest poisons, so that they become harmless--even useful--even a necessary aid to life.In the same way the mind can grow accustomed to the cruelest calamities, tolerate them, use them to attain a strength and power the hot-housed soul never gets.
When a human being is abruptly plunged into an unnatural unconsciousness by mental or physical catastrophes, the greatest care is taken that the awakening to normal life again be slow, gradual, without shock.Otherwise the return would mean death or insanity or lifelong affliction with radical weakness.It may be that this sea voyage with its four days of agitations that lowered Susan's physical life to a harmony of wretchedness with her mental plight, and the succeeding days of gradual calming and restoration, acted upon her to save her from disaster.There will be those readers of her story who, judging her, perhaps, by themselves--as revealed in their judgments, rather than in their professions--will think it was quite unnecessary to awaken her gradually; they will declare her a hard-hearted person, caring deeply about no one but herself, or one of those curiosities of human nature that are interested only in things, not at all in persons, even in themselves.There may also be those who will see in her a soft and gentle heart for which her intelligence finally taught her to construct a shield--more or less effective--against buffetings which would have destroyed or, worse still, maimed her.These will feel that the sea voyage, the sea change, suspending the normal human life, the life on land, tided her over a crisis that otherwise must have been disastrous.
However this may be--and who dares claim the definite knowledge of the mazes of human character and motive to be positive about the matter?--however it may be, on Thursday afternoon they steamed along a tranquil and glistening sea into the splendor and majesty of New York Harbor.And Susan was again her calm, sweet self, as the violet-gray eyes gazing pensively from the small, strongly-featured face plainly showed.Herself again, with the wound--deepest if not cruelest of her many wounds--covered and with its poison under control.She was ready again to begin to live--ready to fulfill our only certain mission on this earth, for we are not here to succumb and to die, but to adapt ourselves and live.
And those who laud the succumbers and the diers--yea, even the blessed martyrs of sundry and divers fleeting issues usually delusions--may be paying ill-deserved tribute to vanity, obstinacy, lack of useful common sense, passion for futile and untimely agitation--or sheer cowardice.Truth--and what is truth but right living?--truth needs no martyrs; and the world needs not martyrs, not corpses rotting in unmarked or monumented graves, but intelligent men and women, healthy in body and mind, capable of leading the human race as fast as it is able to go in the direction of the best truth to which it is able at that time to aspire.
As the ship cleared Quarantine Susan stood on the main deck well forward, with Madame Clelie beside her.And up within her, defying all rebuke, surged the hope that cannot die in strong souls living in healthy bodies.
She had a momentary sense of shame, born of the feeling that it is basest, most heartless selfishness to live, to respond to the caress of keen air upon healthy skin, of glorious light upon healthy eyes, when there are others shut out and shut away from these joys forever.Then she said to herself, "But no one need apologize for being alive and for hoping.I must try to justify him for all he did for me."A few miles of beautiful water highway between circling shores of green, and afar off through the mist Madame Clelie's fascinated eyes beheld a city of enchantment.It appeared and disappeared, reappeared only to disappear again, as its veil of azure mist was blown into thick or thin folds by the light breeze.One moment the Frenchwoman would think there was nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in the summer sunlight.The next moment she would see again that city--or was it a mirage of a city?--towers, mighty walls, domes rising mass above mass, summit above summit, into the very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of green.Surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man out of earth and upon earth rear in such enchantment of line and color those enormous masses, those peak-like piercings of the sky?
"Is that--_it?_" she asked in an awed undertone.
