As Hugh Brokenshire and I were walking along the Ocean Drive a few days
after Larry Strangways had come and gone, the dear lad got some
satisfaction from charging me with inconsistency.
"You're certainly talking about England and Canada to-day very
differently from what you used to."
"Am I? Well, if it seems so it's because you don't understand the
attitude of Canadians toward their mother country. As a country, as a
government, England has been magnificently true to us always. It's only
between Englishmen and Canadians as individuals that irritation arises,
and for that most Canadians don't care. The Englishman snubs and the
Canadian grows bumptious. I don't think the Canadian would grow
bumptious if the Englishman didn't snub. Both snubbing and bumptiousness
are offensive to me; but that, I suppose, is because I'm over-sensitive.
And yet one forgets sensitiveness when it comes to anything really
national. In that we're one, with as perfect a solidarity as that which
binds Oregon to Florida. You'll never find one of us who isn't proud to
serve when England gives the orders."
"To be snubbed by her for serving."
"Certainly; to be snubbed by her for serving! It's all we look for; it's
all we shall ever get. No one need make any mistake about that. In
Canada we're talking of sending fifty thousand troops to the front. We
may send five hundred thousand and we shall still be snubbed. But we're
not such children as to go into a cause in the hope that some one will
give us sweets. We do it for the Cause. We know, too, that it isn't
exactly injustice on the English side; it's only ungraciousness."
"Oh, they're long on ungraciousness, all right."
"Yes; they're very long on ungraciousness--"
"Even dad feels that. You should hear him cuss after he's been kotowing
to some British celebrity--and given him the best of all he's got--and
put him up at the good clubs. They bring him letters in shoals, you
know--"
"I'm afraid it has to be admitted that the best-mannered among them are
often rude from our transatlantic point of view; and yet the very
rudeness is one of the defects of their good qualities. You can no more
take the ungraciousness out of the English character than you can take
the hardness out of granite; but if granite wasn't hard it wouldn't
serve its purposes. We Canadians know that, don't you see? We allow for
it in advance, just as you allow for the clumsiness of the elephant for
the sake of his strength and sagacity. We're not angels
ourselves--neither you Americans nor we Canadians; and yet we like to
get the credit for such small merits as we possess."
Hugh whipped off the blossom of a roadside flower as he swung his stick.
"All they give us credit for is money."
"Well, they certainly give you a great deal of credit for that!" I
laughed. "They make a golden calf of you. They fall down and worship
you, like the children of Israel in the wilderness. When we're as rich
as we shall be some day they'll do the same by us."
Within a week my intercourse with Hugh had come to be wholly along
international lines. We were no longer merely a man and a woman; we were
types; we were points of view. The world-struggle--the time-struggle, as
Larry Strangways would have called it--had broken out in us. The
interlocking of human destinies had become apparent. As positively as
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, we had our part in the vast drama.
Even Hugh, against all his inclinations to hang back, was obliged to
take his share. So lost were we in the theme that, as we tramped along,
we had not a thought for the bracing wind, the ruffled seas, the dashing
of surf over ledges, or the exquisite, gentle savagery of the rocky
flowering uplands, with villas marking the sky-line as they do on the
Cote d'Azur.
I was the more willing to discuss the subject since I felt it a kind of
mission from Mr. Strangways to carry out the object he had so much at
heart. I was to be--so far as so humble a body as I could be it--an
interpreter of the one country to the other. I reckoned that if I
explained and explained and explained, and didn't let myself grow tired
of explaining, some little shade of the distrust which each of the great
English-speaking nations has for its fellow might be scrubbed away. I
couldn't do much, but the value of all effort is in proportion to the
opportunity. So I began with Hugh.
"You see, Hugh, peoples are like people. Each of us has his weak points
as well as his strong ones; but we don't necessarily hate each other on
that account. You've lived in England, and you know the English rub you
up the wrong way. I've lived there, too, and had exactly the same
experience. But we go through just that thing with lots of individuals
with whom we manage to be very good friends. You and your brother Jack,
for instance, don't hit it off so very well; and yet you contrive to be
Brokenshires together and uphold the honor of the family."
"I'm a Socialist and Jack's a snob--"
"That's it. Mentally you're the world apart. But, as you've objects in
common to work for, you get along fairly well. Now why shouldn't the
Englishman and the American do the same? Why should they always see how
much they differ instead of how much they are alike? Why should they
always underscore each other's faults when by seeing each other's good
points they could benefit not only themselves, but the world? If there
was an entente, let us say, between the British Empire and the United
States--not exactly an alliance, perhaps, if people are afraid of the
word--"
He stopped and wheeled round suddenly, suspicion in his small,
myosotis-colored eyes.
"Look here, little Alix; isn't this the dope that fresh guy Strangways
was handing out the other day?"
I flushed, but I didn't stammer.
"I don't care whether it is or not. Besides, it isn't dope; it's food;
it's medicine; it's a remedy for the ills of this poor old civilization.
We've got it in our power, we English-speaking peoples--"
"You haven't," he declared, coolly. "Your country would still be the
goat."
"Yes," I agreed, "Canada would still be the goat; but we don't mind
that. We're used to it. You'll always have a fling at us on one side and
England on the other; but we're like the strong, good-natured boy who
doesn't resent kicks and cuffs because he knows he can grow and thrive
in spite of them."
He put his hand on my arm and spoke in the kindly tone that reminded me
of his father.
"My dear little girl, you can drop it. It won't go down. Suppose we keep
to the sort of thing you can tackle. You see, when you've married me
you'll be an American. Then you'll be out of it."
I was hurt. I was furious. The expression, too, was getting on my
nerves. I began to wish I was out of it. Since I couldn't be in it,
marriage might prove a Lethe bath, in which I should forget I had
anything to do with it. Sheer desperation made me cry out:
"Very well, then, Hugh! If we're to be married, can't we be married
quickly? Then I shall have it off my mind."
There was not only a woeful decline of spirit in his response, but a
full acceptance of the Brokenshire yoke.
"We can't be married any quicker than dad says. But I'll talk to him."
He made no objection, however, when, a little later, I received from my
uncle a draft for my entire fortune and announced my intention of
handing the sum over to Mr. Strangways for investment. Hugh probably
looked on the amount as too insignificant to talk about; in addition to
which some Brokenshire instinct for the profitable may have led him to
appreciate a thing so good as to make it folly to say nay to it. The
result was that I heard from Larry Strangways, in letters which added
nothing to my comfort.
I don't know what I expected him to say; but, whatever it was, he didn't
say it. He wasn't curt; his letters were not short. On the contrary, he
wrote at length, and brought up subjects that had nothing to do with
certificates of stock. But they were all political or international, or
related in one way or another to the ideal of his heart--England and
America! The British Empire and the United States! The brotherhood of
democracies! Why in thunder had the bally world waited so long for the
coalition of dominating influences which alone could keep it straight?
Why dream of the impossible when the practical had not as yet been
tried? Why talk peace, peace, when there was no peace at The Hague, if a
full and controlling sympathy could be effected nearer home--let us say
at Ottawa? He was going to Canada to enlist; he would start in a few
days' time; but he was doing it not merely to fight for the Cause; he
was going to be one man, at least, just a straggling democratic
scout--one of a forlorn hope, if you chose to call it so--to offer his
life to a union of which the human race had the same sort of need as
human beings of wedlock.
And in all this there was no reference to me. He might not have loved
me; I might not have loved him. I answered the letters in the vein in
which they were written, and once or twice showed my replies to Hugh.
"Forget it!" was his ordinary comment. "The American eagle is too wise
an old bird to be caught with salt on its tail."
Perhaps it was because Larry Strangways made no appeal to me that I gave
myself to forwarding his work with a more enthusiastic zeal. I had to do
it quietly, for fear of offending Hugh; but I got my opportunities--that
is, I got my opportunities to talk, though I saw I made no impression.
I was only a girl--the queer Canadian who had been Ethel Rossiter's
nursery governess and whom the Brokenshire family, for unexplained
reasons, had accepted as Hugh's future wife. What could I know about
matters at which statesmen had always shied? It was preposterous that I
should speak of them; it was presumptuous. Nobody told me that; I saw it
in people's eyes.
And I should have seen it in their eyes more plainly if they had been
interested. No one was. An entente between the United States and the
British Empire might have been an alliance between Bolivia and
Beluchistan. It wasn't merely fashionable folk who wouldn't think of it;
no one would. I knew plenty of people by this time. I knew townspeople
of Newport, and summer residents, and that intermediate group of retired
admirals and professors who come in between the two. I knew shop people
and I knew servants, all with their stake in the country, their stake in
the world. Not a soul among them cared a hang.
And then, threatening to put me entirely out of business, we got the
American war refugees and the English visitors. I group them together
because they belonged together. They belonged together for the reason
that there was nothing each one of them didn't know--by hearsay from
some one who knew it by hearsay. The American war refugees had all been
in contact with people in England whom they characterized as well
informed. The English visitors were well informed because they were
English visitors. Some of them told prodigious secrets which they had
indirectly from Downing Street. Others gave the reasons why General
Isleworth had been superseded in his command, and the part Mrs.
Lamingford, that beautiful American, had played in the scandal. From
others we learned that Lady Hull, with her baleful charm, was the
influence really responsible for the shortage of shells.
War was shown to us by our English visitors not as a mighty, pitiless
contest, but as a series of social, sexual, and political intrigues, in
which women pulled the strings. I know it was talk; but talk it was. For
weeks, for months, we had it with the greater number of our meals.
Wherever there were English guests--women of title they often were, or
eccentric public men--we had an orgy of tales in which the very entrails
of English reputations were torn out. No one was spared---not even the
Highest in the Land. All the American could do was to listen
open-mouthed; and open-mouthed he listened.
I will say for the English that they have no disloyalty but that of
chatter; but the plain American could not be expected to know that. To
him the chatter was gospel truth. He has none of that facility for
discounting gossip on the great which the Englishman learns with his
mother tongue. The American heard it greedily; he was avid for more. He
retailed it at dinners and teas, and in that Reading-room which is
really a club. Naturally enough! From what our English visitors told us
about themselves, their statesmen, their generals, their admirals were
footlers at the best, and could, moreover, be described by a vigorous
compound Anglo-Saxon word in the Book of Revelations.
And the English papers were no better. All the important ones, weeklies
as well as dailies, were sent to Mr. Brokenshire, and copies lay about
at Mr. Rossiter's. They sickened me. I stopped reading them. There was
good in them, doubtless; but what I chiefly found was a wild tempest of
abuse of this party or that party, of this leading man or that leading
man, with the effect on the imagination of a ship going down amid the
curses and confusion of officers and passengers alike. It may have
sounded well in England; very likely it did; but in America it was
horrible. I mention it here only because, in this babel of voices, my
own faint pipe on behalf of a league of democracies could no more be
heard than the tinkle of a sacring bell amid the shrieking and bursting
of shells.
I was often tempted to say no more about it and let the world go to pot.
Then I thought of Larry Strangways, offering his life for an ideal as to
which I was unwilling to speak a word. So I would begin my litany of
Bolivia and Beluchistan over again, crooning it into the ears of people,
both gentle and simple, who, in the matter of response, might never have
heard the names of the two countries I mentioned together.
A few lines from one of Larry Strangways's letters, written from
Valcartier, prompted me to persevere in this course:
People are no more interested here than they are on our side of
the border; but it's got to come, for all that. What we need is
a public opinion; and a public opinion can only be created by
writing and talk. Thank the Lord, you and I can talk if we are
not very strong on writing! and talk we must! Bigger streams
have risen from smaller springs. The mustard seed is the least
of all seeds; but it grows to be the greatest of herbs.
It might have been easier to call forth a responsive spark had we
realized that there was a war. But we hadn't--not in the way that the
fact came to us afterward. In spite of the taking of Namur, Liege,
Maubeuge, the advance on Paris, and the rolling back on the Marne, we
had seen no more than chariots and horses of fire in the clouds. It was
not only distant, it was phantom-like. We read the papers; we heard of
horrors; American war refugees and English visitors alike piled up the
agonies, to which we listened eagerly; we saw the moneyed magnates come
and go in counsel with Mr. Brokenshire; we knitted and sewed and
subscribed to funds; but, so far as vital participation went, Hugh was
right in saying we were out of it.
And then a shot fell into our midst, smiting us with awe.
Cissie Boscobel, Hugh, another young man, and I had been playing tennis
one September morning on Mrs. Rossiter's courts. The other young man
having left for Bailey's Beach, the remaining three of us were
sauntering back toward the house when a lad, whom Cissie recognized as
belonging to the Burkes' establishment, came running up with a telegram.
As it was for Cissie she stood still to read it, while Hugh and I
strolled on. Once or twice I glanced back toward her; but she still held
the brief lines up before her as if she couldn't make out their meaning.
When she rejoined us, as she presently did, I noticed that her color had
died out, though there was otherwise no change in her unless it was in
stillness. The question was as to whether we should go to Bailey's or
not. I didn't want to go and Hugh declared he wouldn't go without me.
"We'll put it up to Cissie," he said, as we reached the house. "If she
goes we'll all go."
"I think I won't go," she answered, quietly; adding, without much change
of tone, "Leatherhead's been killed in action."
So there really was a war! Hugh's deep "Oh!" was in Itself like the
distant rumble of guns.