More! Not only these poor people need me, but--you do, Stefan."

She had brought it into the open at last, the one thing which they had never yet discussed in their discussions of everything under the sun; that eternal human question of Thou-and-I. She was a little frightened, dreading yet eager for the answer.

It was long in coming. Nikolai understood the crisis they had reached.

He knew that it was his to put out his hand and hold her, to keep forever in his life this one gift of the G.o.ds he craved, the fulfilled hope which had been his beacon through many a lonely year. Once before because of a mistake in judgment he had lost her, to her own unhappiness. There must be no more mistakes in judgment.

But the habit of truth in thought and word was too great for him.

"No," he said at last, "I do not need you."

He saw her wince.

"I do not need you," he repeated steadily, "and you do not need me, Joan. People like us get on quite well alone. Better, perhaps. It is not good for us to be too happy--Besides, what we already have of each other cannot be affected by time or s.p.a.ce. You know that? The rest--is extraneous. Tell me this: Have you ever in any important moment of your life forgotten me, have you ever failed to be conscious of my presence, no matter what the distance between us?"

She looked deep into the luminous eyes fixed upon hers.

"Never, Stefan. Even in my unthinking school-days, even in that strange time after I lost my babies and could not write to you, I have counted upon you always. Everything that has come to me, good or bad, big or little, I have shared with you in my thoughts. Only--I did not realize it."

"That," he said quietly, "is marriage. Your mother realized it. She knew when you were only a child of the tie between us--But she and I thought that I must keep away from you until the accident of time corrected itself. You see we have been sent into this incarnation rather far apart."

"You kept away too long, Stefan!"

"I know. But what does it matter?" He spoke half to himself, with his little shrug. "This manifestation or the next--we shall not be apart always."

"No, no!" she cried, catching at his hand. "That is too ethereal, too mystic for me--I can't bear it, Stefan! I want the people I love with me _now_, in this 'manifestation,' as you call it, where I can talk with them, and touch them, and hold on to them--I am not all spirit. I thought I was, but--I'm not. Oh, my dear, aren't you human _at all_?"

He did not reply; and Joan, looking at him through swimming tears, saw that it was because he could not.

She dropped his hand. "Forgive me!" she whispered. "I will try to climb up to you--since you will not come down to me.... But you must help me."

"I will help," said Nikolai.

They spoke a little later of Archie, who had been all the while at the back of their thoughts. Both knew it was to him she was returning, rather than to her step-mother.

"You expect too much of him, Joan--you always expect too much of people.

Try to take them as you find them. He is one of the many who think better with their hearts than with their heads."

She commented with a faint smile, "My step-mother once told me that there was nothing in the world so dangerous as what she called 'bone-headedness.'"

"Exactly!--especially to the bone-headed--Your Archie is no fool, however. There are perhaps fewer convolutions in his gray matter than in ours, that is all. He has made mistakes with his head, and will again.

But with his heart--never."

"You are not condoning," she asked slowly, "what Archie has done?"

He answered after a little pause, "To me there seems nothing unforgivable, nothing utterly vicious, except selfishness. There is no self in Archie Blair. Not enough self."

Joan told him then reluctantly of something she had never before mentioned: her final incredible scene with her husband. She was curiously ashamed of that scene, as though it were she who had betrayed herself, instead of Archie. "Should you not call that a mistake of the heart?"

But Nikolai did not appear to be particularly shocked by it. "I had no idea," he commented, "that Blair was so good an actor."

"An actor!--You think that scene was not genuine?"

"I think, in fact I know, that your husband would hesitate to sacrifice nothing to what he believed your happiness; even your respect--I love that man," he said simply. "And so do you, Joan. Otherwise he would have been powerless to hurt you."

Her eyes widened. She asked, as so many before her have asked, "Is it possible to love--two people at once?"

"Two? A dozen--a hundred! Does a mother love two children at once?--Surely that depends upon the stage of the soul's development."

"But always one best," she said quite fiercely.

"Always one best," he repeated....

The parting had come. Staring at him desperately, she saw in his eyes a depth of pain and loneliness that made her own for the moment insignificant. So much of his life was done; so much of hers, after all, only beginning.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she cried in a sort of bewilderment. "What is it all about? Is there a purpose somewhere in this muddle of things? Why do you say it is not good for people like us to be happy, when others go to the end of their days in calm security? I do not want any--wicked things, Stefan! I only want to be with you always. To take care of you if you are sick, to mend your clothes, and make you comfortable, and--love you. I want us to grow old together, not alone. Oh, my dear, all your life you have been alone; and I can't bear it!--What is the good of this thing that has waked in me at last, if I am not to use it?"

"You are," he said steadily. "Emotion to be safe must, _must_ translate itself into action."

"But how, how? By doing for others, you are going to say--but it's such a thankless task, Stefan! A red-blooded woman like me to take to altruism, as some take to drugs!--Why must some of us live so intensely, so consciously, only to be denied again and again the fulfilment that we crave? Sinking our lives into those of lesser people, always of lesser people!"

He answered gently, "'_Car je suis le Cobzar._'--It is time you understood.... You know what a Cobzar is?"

She shook her head; and he told her.

"In the more remote Magyar villages, news of the world comes to the people by means of a sort of minstrel who is called the Cobzar. He is to them not only newsbringer, but historian and poet and philosopher as well. He is treated with respect, they reward his singing with food and wine and a place beside the fire, for it is an honor to be born a Cobzar. But not always a happy honor, Joan. People do not listen to singing that comes out of an empty heart. It is the Cobzar's duty to tell them the story of themselves, and that is only the story of himself, wrought into many forms. Their fears and joys, their failures and their suffering and their hopes--he must be part of it all, and yet apart, that he may not only understand but watch, remembering always his mission to bring life to the knowledge of those who live."

He quoted for her then some lines which Joan never forgot:

"Aime-moi, parce que j'ai besoin de ton amour pour mes chansons, Va t'en, parce que j'ai besoin de pleurer pour mes chansons, Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons, Car je suis le Cobzar."

The water widened between them....

CHAPTER LVI

All during her homeward journey Joan had the feeling that she was waking slowly from a long dream; such a dream as ether gives, more vivid than reality itself but impossible of recapture. As he came literally nearer, Archie grew to be the dominant figure in her thoughts rather than Nikolai, though Nikolai was always there; Archie under the new light her friend's parting words had shed upon him. It mortified her to realize that another, almost a stranger to him, should have read her husband better than she did. It occurred to her, too, that with Nikolai she had not left behind her all Romance. A man who was capable of such a sacrifice as Archie Blair's could not be entirely commonplace. Her eyes had been suddenly opened.

Perhaps this was part of the help Nikolai had promised.

Indeed, her sentiments toward her husband became rather puzzling, being composed so far as she could decipher them of a desire to comfort him for the loss of herself, combined with a desire to be comforted by him for the loss of Stefan....

Her fellow-travelers eyed Joan with more than the usual interest she invariably excited among strangers; but to no avail. It was a time when what few barriers exist on shipboard at best went down in the sharing of a common peril, the menace of the submarine. Not so with Joan, however.

She seemed unaware of friendly advances or invidious criticism: wrapped in a curious aloofness, from danger and from her fellowman alike. Nor was it an aloofness that would pa.s.s.

She had her great renunciation to make, and faced it; a renunciation which took the most difficult form, of dedication. Loneliness was upon her, not loneliness as she had known it before, a groping restlessness, a dissatisfaction. There was nothing left to grope for. She knew quite well now what she wanted, had always wanted, and might never have; but she knew, too, that on this solitary road of life, the warm human clasp of hands is something, the warm human touch of lips.... Thinking of Archie as Nikolai thought of him, her heart seemed to be stretching, literally expanding, with growing-pains; so that there might be room in it for two--or for a dozen, a hundred, as he had promised.