II

One night we entered the danger zone.  There had been an entertainment in the little salon which, packed with passengers, had gradually achieved the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath.  For the ports had been closed as tight as gaskets could make them, the electric fans, as usual, obstinately “refused to march.”  After the amateur speechmaking and concert pieces an Italian violinist, who had thrown over a lucrative contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely; and one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck with the mincing steps of the cloister sang; somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria.  Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled into the open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocably yet determinedly upon an era whose life and convictions the music of the composer so beautifully expressed.  And the sister’s sweet withered face was reminiscent of a missal, one bright with colour, and still shining faintly.  A missal in a library of modern books!

On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerating the sinister blackness of the night.  We were, apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modern undersea monsters were lurking.

There were on board other elements which in the normal times gone by would have seemed disquieting enough.  The evening after we had left New York, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw on the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts.  Armenians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two by a German officer.  Twilight was gathering as I joined the group, the sea was silvered by the light of an August moon floating serenely between swaying stays.  The orator’s passionate words and gestures evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful asylum of the west.  This smiling, happy folk, which I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, were now transformed, atavistic—­all save one, a student, who stared wistfully through his spectacles across the waters.  Later, when twilight deepened, when the moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave place to a singer.  He had been a bootblack in America.  Now he had become a bard.  His plaintive minor chant evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of that age-long history of oppression and wrong these were now determined to avenge.  Their conventional costumes were proof that we had harboured them—­almost, indeed, assimilated them.  And suddenly they had reverted.  They were going to slaughter the Turks.