Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME
BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Author of "A Certain Rich Man," etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY TONY SARG
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
II IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"
III IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER "BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR"
IV WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"
V IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS "BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT"
VI WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY
VII WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION
VIII IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"
IX IN WHICH WE RETURN TO "THE LAND OF THE FREE"
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece
And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be
worn at most only two months
"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir"
She often paced the rounds of the deck between us
"Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?"
So we waved back at them so long as they were in sight
"Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame toot sweet about
it!"
Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe
One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout
"Come on! Let's go to the abri!"
So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force
of will and both hands!
He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for
a second at his inconvenience
"Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs.
Chessman--this is practically her hospital"
He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water
Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the lady from Oklahoma
City to me
And he sat cross-legged
As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum
They were standing on the running board all this time with the
train going forty miles an hour
"What part of the States do you Canadians come from?"
He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth
A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform without
looking like a sack of meal
He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coat
of glaring scarlet broadcloth
We thought he might be testing us out as potential spies
And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party
and dropped into a grand ball
"Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord
Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?"
THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
By rights Henry, being the hero of this story, should be introduced
in the first line. But really there isn't so much to say about
Henry--Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas--Henry J. Allen,
editor and owner of the Wichita Beacon. And to make the dramatis
personae complete, we may consider me as the editor of the Emporia
Gazette, and the two of us as short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inland
Americans, from fresh water colleges in our youth and arrived at
New York by way of an often devious, yet altogether happy route,
leading through politics where it was rough going and unprofitable
for years; through business where we still find it easy to sign,
possible to float and hard to pay a ninety-day note, and through
two country towns; one somewhat less than one hundred thousand
population, and Emporia slightly above ten thousand.
We are discovered in the prologue to the play in New York City wearing
our new silk suits to give New York a treat on a hot August day.
Not that we or any one else ever wears silk suits in any Wichita
or Emporia; silk suits are bought by Wichita people and Emporians
all over the earth to paralyse the natives of the various New Yorks.
In our pockets we hold commissions from the American Red Cross.
These commissions are sending us to Europe as inspectors with a
view to publicity later, one to speak for the Red Cross, the other
to write for it in America. We have been told by the Red Cross
authorities in Washington that we shall go immediately to the front
in France and that it will be necessary to have the protective
colouring of some kind of an army uniform. The curtain rises on a
store in 43rd Street in New York--perhaps the "Palace" or the "Hub"
or the "Model" or the "Army and Navy," where a young man is trying
to sell us a khaki coat, and shirt and trousers for $17.48. And
at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be worn
at most only two months. But we compromise by making him throw in
another shirt and a service hat and we take the lot for $17.93 and
go away holding in low esteem the "pride, pomp and circumstance of
glorious war" as exemplified by these military duds. In our hearts
as we go off at R. U. E. will be seen a hatred for uniforms as
such, and particularly for phoney uniforms that mean nothing and
cost $18.00 in particular.
[Illustration with caption: And at that it seems a lot of money to
pay for a rig which can be worn at most only two months]
And then, with a quick curtain, the good ship Espagne, a French
liner, is discovered in New York harbour the next day with Henry
and me aboard her, trying to distinguish as she crawfishes out of
the dock, the faces of our waving friends from the group upon the
pier.
The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and scooting through the
night, with two or three hundred others of the cast of characters
aboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters,
and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity of
evil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act,
splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for three
thousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicas
of Wichita and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and the man
that this story is written, nor of Henry and me, and the war; but
it is the eternal Wichita and Emporia in the American heart that
we shall celebrate hereinafter as we unfold our tale. Of course,
that makes it provincial. And people living in New York or Boston,
or Philadelphia (but not Chicago, for half of the people there have
just come to town and the other half is just ready to leave town)
may not understand this story. For in some respects New York is
larger than Wichita and Emporia; but not so much larger; for mere
numbers of population amount to little. There is always an angle of
the particular from which one can see it as a part of the universal;
and seen properly the finite is always infinite. And that brings
us back naturally to Henry and me, looking out at the scurrying
stars in the ocean as we hurried through the black night on the
good ship Espagne. We had just folded away a fine Sunday dinner, a
French Sunday dinner, beginning with onion soup which was strange;
and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blast
of trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup
was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner that
night ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboard
the boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the value
of food as a two-way commodity--going down and coming up--but
later in the dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one-way
luxury, with small thought as to its other uses. So we leaned against
the rail in the night and thought large thoughts about Wichita and
Emporia.
Here we were, two middle-aged men, nearing fifty years, going out
to a ruthless war without our wives. We had packed our own valises
at the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. We realized
that probably we were leaving half our things in closets and
drawers and were taking the wrong things with us, and checking the
right things in our trunks at our hotels in New York. We had some
discussion about our evening clothes, and on a toss-up had decided
to take our tails and leave our dinner coats in the trunks. But
we didn't know why we had abandoned our dinner coats. We had no
accurate social knowledge of those things. Henry boasted that his
wife had taught him a formula that would work in the matter of white
or black ties with evening clothes. But it was all complicated with
white vests and black vests and sounded like a corn remedy; yet it
was the only sartorial foundation we had. And there we were with
land out of sight, without a light visible on the boat, standing
in the black of night leaning over the rail, looking at the stars
in the water, and wondering silently whether we had packed our best
cuff buttons, "with which to harry our foes," or whether we might
have to win the war in our $17.93 uniforms, and we both thought
and admitted our shame, that our wives would think we had "been
extravagant in putting so much money into those uniforms. The admirable
French dinner which we had just enveloped, seemed a thousand miles
away. It was a sad moment and our thoughts turned naturally to
home.
"Fried chicken, don't you suppose?" sighed Henry.
"And mashed potatoes, and lots of thick cream gravy!" came from
the gloom beside him.
"And maybe lima beans," he speculated.
"And a lettuce salad with thousand island dressing, I presume!"
came out of the darkness.
"And apple dumpling--green apple dumpling with hard sauce," welled
up from Henry's heavy heart. It was a critical moment. If it had
kept on that way we would have got off the boat, and trudged back
home through a sloppy ocean, and let the war take care of itself.
Then Henry's genius rose. Henry is the world's greatest kidder.
Give him six days' immunity in Germany, and let him speak in Berlin,
Munich, Dresden, Leipsic and Cologne and he would kid the divine
right of kings out of Germany and the kaiser on to the Chautauqua
circuit, reciting his wrongs and his reminiscences!
Henry, you may remember, delivered the Roosevelt valedictory at the
Chicago Republican convention in 1912, when he kidded the standpat
crowd out of every Republican state in the union but two at the
election. Possibly you don't like that word kid. But it's in the
dictionary, and there's no other word to describe Henry's talent.
He is always jamming the allegro into the adagio. And that night
in the encircling gloom on the boat as we started on our martial
adventures he began kidding the ocean. His idea was that he would
get Wichita to vote bonds for one that would bring tide water to
Main Street. He didn't want a big ocean--just a kind of an oceanette
with a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea,
and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps that
rose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken and
mashed potatoes of our dream, had vanished.
And so we fell to talking about our towns. It seems that we had
each had the same experience. Henry declared that, from the day it
was known he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the town had
set him apart; he was somewhat like the doomed man in a hanging and
people were always treating him with distinguished consideration.
He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the town boomer, had the memorial
services all worked out--who would sing "How Sleep the Brave,"
who would play Chopin's funeral march on the pipe organ, who would
deliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would send
around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocks
to print the eulogy in full and on the first page! Henry employs
an alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whether
he had decided to use "Wichita Weeps," or "State Stands Sorrowing."
If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that would
require a deck head. We could not decide, so we began talking of
serious things.
How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn days
when the man who went to France was a hero in his town's eyes.
Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passed
down America's main streets, all headed for France. And what proud
pageants they were! Walking at the head of the line were the little
limping handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came the
middle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so
boyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--the
volunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half
accoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly
young. There had been banquets the week before, and speeches and
flag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tears
and good-byes across the land. And all this in a few weeks; indeed
it began during the long days in which we two sailed through the
gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such
a bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town upon
an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred
leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger in
some way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers
often multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and me
on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and
ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers. No particular advantage
would come to the German arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne,
carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on merciful
errands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon,
we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an interned
leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had been told of how cunningly the
Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric
wires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source,
how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship,
how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts and
rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they had
scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make
steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a
floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize
she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those
handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country
as they went to their training camps. Even to consider these things
gave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat
in the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had
come before. And then our first real martial adventure happened,
thus:
As we leaned over the rail that first night talking of many things,
in the blackness, without a glimmer from any porthole, with the
decks as dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots an
hour. In peace times it would be regarded as a crazy man's deed,
to go whizzing along at full speed without lights. Henry had taken
two long puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind us came
a hand that tapped his shoulder, and then a voice spoke:
"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A submarine could see that
five miles on a night like this!"
So Henry doused his light, and the war came right home to us.
The next day was uniform day on the boat, and the war came a bit
nearer to us than ever. Scores of good people who had come on the
boat in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day;
mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. or American ambulance or Field Service
uniforms. We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed that
we should at least have a dress rehearsal. The only regular uniforms
on board were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, straggling
home from a French political mission to America, and these French
soldiers were the only passengers on the boat who had errands
to France connected with the destructive side of the war. So not
until the uniforms blazed out gorgeously did we realize what an
elaborate and important business had sprung up in the reconstructive
side of war. Here we saw a whole ship's company--hundreds of busy
and successful men and women, one of scores and scores of ship's
companies like it, that had been hurrying across the ocean every
few days for three years, devoted not to trading upon the war, not
to exploiting the war, not even to expediting the business of "the
gentle art of murdering," but devoted to saving the waste of war!
As the days passed, and "we sailed and we sailed," a sort of
denatured pirate craft armed to the teeth with healing lotions to
massage the wrinkled front of war, Henry kept picking at the ocean.
It was his first transatlantic voyage; for like most American men,
he kept his European experiences in his wife's name. So the ocean
bothered him. He understood a desert or a drouth, but here was a
tremendous amount of unnecessary and unaccountable water. It was
a calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at it for a long
time one day, Henry remarked wearily: "The town boosters who secured
this ocean for this part of the country rather overdid the job!"
One evening, looking back at the level floor of the ocean stretching
illimitably into the golden sunset, he mused: "They have a fine
country here. You kind of like the lay of it, and there is plenty
of nice sightly real estate about--it's a gently rolling country,
uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there's
got to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that at
a glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his proposition!"
[Illustration with caption: "You'll have to put out that cigar,
sir."]
A time always comes in a voyage, when men and women begin to step
out as individuals from the mass. With us it was the Red Cross
stenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased being
ladyships and lordships and took their proper places in the cosmos.
They were a gay lot--and young. And human nature is human nature.
So the decks began to clutter up with boys and girls intensely
interested in exploring each other's lives. It is after all the
most wonderful game in the world. And while the chaperon fluttered
about more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks at
night, and while public opinion on the boat made eminently proper
rules against young women in the smoking room, still young blood did
have its way, which really is a good way; better than we think,
perhaps, who look back in cold blood and old blood. And by the token
of our years it was brought to us that war is the game of youth.
We were two middle-aged old coots--though still in our forties and
not altogether blind to a pretty face--and yet the oldest people
on the boat. Even the altruistic side of war is the game of youth.
Perhaps it is the other way around, and maybe youth is the only game
in the world worth playing and that the gains of youth, service and
success and follies and failures, are only the chips and counters.
We were brought to these conclusions more or less by a young person,
a certain Miss Ingersoll, or perhaps her name only sounded like
that; for we called her the Eager Soul. And she was a pretty girl,
too--American pretty: Red hair--lots of blowy, crinkly red hair
that was always threatening to souse her face and ears; blue eyes
of the serious kind and a colour that gave us the impression that
she did exercises and could jab a punching bag. Indeed before we
met her, we began betting on the number of hours it would take her
to tell us that she took a cold plunge every morning. Henry expected
the statement on the second day; as a matter of fact it came late
on the first day! She was that kind. But there was no foolishness
about her. She was a nurse--a Red Cross nurse, and she made it
clear that she had no illusions about men; we suspected that she
had seen them cut up and knew their innermost secrets! Nevertheless
she was tremendously interesting, and because she, too, was from
the middle west, and possibly because she realized that we accepted
her for what she was, she often paced the rounds of the deck between
us. We teased her more or less about a young doctor of the Johns
Hopkins unit who sometimes hovered over her deck chair and a certain
Gilded Youth--every boat-load has its Gilded Youth--whose father
was president of so many industrial concerns, and the vice-president
of so many banks and trust companies that it was hard to look at
the boy without blinking at his gilding. Henry was betting on the
Gilded Youth; so the young doctor fell to me. For the first three
or four days during which we kept fairly close tab on their time,
the Doctor had the Gilded Youth beaten two hours to one. Henry
bought enough lemonade for me and smoking room swill of one sort
and another to start his little old Wichita ocean But it was plain
that the Gilded Youth interested her. And in a confidential moment
filled with laughter and chaff and chatter she told us why: "He's
patronizing me. I mean he doesn't know it, and he thinks I don't
know it; but that's what he's doing. I interest him as a social
specimen. I mean--I'm a bug and he likes to take me up and examine
me. I think I'm the first 'Co-ed' he ever has seen; the first
girl who voted and didn't let her skirts sag and still loved good
candy! I mean that when he found in one half hour that I knew he wore
nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearly
expired; he was that puzzled! I'm not quite the type of working
girl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but--I mean I think he is
wondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind! When he
decides," she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking
away her overflowing red hair, "I may have to slap him--I mean
don't you know--"
And we did know. And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizing
me with odds on the Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautiful
boy--tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming. He
played Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano in
the women's lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud poker
with the San Francisco boys in the smoking room. And it was clear
that he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat
higher than his mother's social secretary--but of the same class.
He was returning from a furlough, to drive his ambulance in France,
and the Doctor was going out to join his unit somewhere in France
down near the Joan of Arc country. He told us shyly one day, as we
watched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationed
at an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, "I serve
because I am served!" When he did not repeat the motto we knew that
it had caught him. He had been at home working on a germ problem
connected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence of
Mrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficulties
with the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the two
at their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge and
gasped, "My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a jumped off the
boat!"
[Illustration with caption: She often paced the rounds of the deck
between us]
As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar faces
and figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair of
eyes--a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. Speaking broadly
and allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes were
no treat to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes. Henry
said if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captain
should make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. We
were not always sure she was a Princess. At times she seemed more
like a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes. We never
had seen such clothes! And millinery! We were used to Broadway;
Michigan Avenue did not make us shy, and Henry had been in the South.
But these clothes and the hats and the eyes--all full dress--were
too many for us. And we fell to speculating upon exactly what would
happen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporia
if the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's place
at table was where he got the full voltage of the eyes every time
the Princess switched them on. And whenever he reached for the
water and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behind
his ordinary resisting power. And he drank enough to float a ship!
As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonely
hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes and
we concluded that they were Latin--Latin chiefly engaged in the
business of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wives
and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and
had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their
husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast,
and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of
their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these
female eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decided
to investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid off
from our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Our
closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably
was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her
when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing
her eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for
ever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have been
the hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deck
with the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes. He
was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of
the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score
on the Emporia Country Club links--anyway something of broad,
universal human interest. But those things seemed to pall on her.
So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women at
home--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and
the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These things
left her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered,
slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on
her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim
lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she was
at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. She
managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan
the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansas
partner suggested that life would be broader and better for women
after the war, because they would have so much more important a
part to do than before in the useful work of the world. "Ah, yes,"
she said, "perhaps so. But with the men all gone what shall we do
when we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllables
of petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you know
women were made to be pet-ted." There was a bewildered second under
the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered
seriously her theory. He had never cherished such a theory before.
But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the
pleasant new things in it--this theory of the woman requiring to
be pet-ted!
Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said: "Oh, yes--come
on, Col-o-nel"--making three unaccented syllables of the word--"and
we shall have une femme sandweech." She gave the Colonel her arm.
The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy with
the Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia Country
Club, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes
to the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyous
incandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchman
but gazing sweetly at the American, "Col-o-nel, will you please
carry my books?" They must have weighed six or eight ounces! And
she shifted them to the Col-o-nel as though they weighed a ton!
So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking room to find his mate.
They two then and there discussed the woman proposition in detail
and drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporia
type, the American type that carries its own books and burdens and
does not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry and
does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may die
for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing that
they should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others.
But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry
and me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the
Armenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerage
and all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the
drill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army
and avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling,
they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It was
queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. It
was written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and broken
time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had the
charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the
strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.
"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy in
khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano.
"That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that's
the 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax and he went away
whistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with their
idea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music,
the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins
from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their
striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across
the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its
essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each
cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind.
And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love
one's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind
of humour, one's own kind of philosophy; knowing that they are not
perfect and understanding their limitations; trusting to time and
circumstance to bring out the fast colours of life in the eternal
wash. Thinking thoughts like these that night, Henry's bunk-mate
could not sleep. So he slipped on a grey overcoat over his pajamas
and put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, and went out on
deck into the hot night that falls in the gulf stream in summer.
It was the murky hour before dawn and around and around the deck he
paced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt spectre in the night.
The deck chairs were filled with sleepers from the berths below
decks. At last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped to gaze
over the rail at the water and the stars when he heard this from
a deck chair behind him, "Wake up, Net--for God's sake wake up!"
whispered a frightened woman's voice. "There's that awful thing
again that scared me so awhile ago!"
[Illustration with caption: "Col-o-nel, will you please carry my
books?"]
Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean interested us. An
ocean always seems so unreasonable to inlanders. And that morning
when there was "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn
breaking," Henry came alongside and looked at the seascape, all
twisting and writhing and tossing and billowing, up and down and
sideways. He also looked at his partner who was gradually growing
pale and wan and weary. And Henry heard this: "She's on a bender;
she's riz about ten feet during the night. I guess there's been
rain somewhere up near the headwaters or else the fellow took his
finger out of the hole in the dyke. Anyway, she'll be out of her
banks before breakfast. I don't want any breakfast; I'm going to
bed for the day." And he went.
During the day Henry brought the cheerful information that the Doctor
was down and that the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearing
out the deck. Henry also added that her slapping was scheduled for
that night.
"Has her hair slopped over yet?" This from me.
"No," answered Henry, "but it's getting crinklier and crinklier
and she looks pinker and pinker, and prettier and prettier, and
you ought to see her in her new purple sweater. She sprang that on
the boat this afternoon! It's laying 'em out in swaths!" Henry's
affinity was afraid to turn off his back. But he turned a pale
face toward his side-kick and whispered: "Henry, you tell her,"
he gulped before going on, "that if she can't find anyone else to
slap, there's a man down here who can't fight back!"
A sense of security comes to one who churns along seven days on
a calm sea on an eventless voyage. And the French, by easy-going
ways, stimulate that sense of security; we had heard weird stories
of boat-drills at daybreak, of midnight alarms and of passengers
sleeping on deck in their life preservers, and we were prepared
for the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have. They
never came. One afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had notice
at noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon.
The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and at
three o'clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned
to him, donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffed
appearance, answered to a roll-call, guyed those about him after
the manner of old friends, and waited for something else. It never
came. The ship's officers gradually faded from the decks and the
passengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared
one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their
life-belts moulted! That was the last we heard of the boat-drill
or the life-belts. The French are just that casual.
But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grisly
incident that brought us close up to the war. We were gathered in
the dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south--a mere
speck on the horizon's edge. Signals began to twinkle from her and
we felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at full
speed. The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, but
we sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for,
though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have been
a U-boat lure. Often the Germans have used the lure of distress
signals on a sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the U-boat
has sent to death the Good Samaritan of the sea! It is awful. But
the German has put mercy off the sea!
Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for his
moral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke
out with this: "I've been thinking about this U-boat business;
how it would be if we had the German's job. I have been trying to
think if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run a
U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I've been trying to
imagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or down
at the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captain
of a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinking
ship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to figure
out how the fellows sitting around him would take it. They'd get
up and leave. He would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag or
bluff or blare of victory would gloss over his act. We simply don't
think the German way. We have a loyalty to humanity deeper than
our patriotism. There are certain things self-respecting men can't
do and live in Wichita. But there seem to be no restrictions in
Germany. The U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lure
probably holds about such a place in his home town as Charley Carey,
our banker, or Walter Innes, our dry goods man. He is doubtless
a leading citizen of some German town; doubtless a kind father, a
good husband and maybe a pillar of the church. And I suppose town
and home and church will applaud him when he goes back to Germany
to brag about his treachery. In Wichita, town and home and church
would be ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if they came back
to brag about killing men who were lured to death by responding to
the call of distress."
And so, having disposed of the psychology of the enemy, we turned
in for the night. We were entering the danger zone and the night was
hot. A few passengers slept on deck; but most of the ship's company
went to their cabins. We didn't seem to be afraid. We presumed
that our convoy would appear in the morning. But when it failed
to appear we assumed that there was no danger. No large French
passenger boat had been sunk by the Germans; this fact we heard a
dozen times that day. It soothed us. The day passed without bringing
our convoy. Again we went to bed, realizing rather clearly that
the French do take things casually; and believing firmly that the
convoys would come with the dawn. But dawn came and brought no
convoy. We seemed to be nearing land. The horizon was rarely without
a boat. The day grew bright. We were almost through the danger zone.
We went to lunch a gay lot, all of us; but we hurried back to the
deck; not uneasily, not in fear, understand, but just to be on
deck, looking landward. And then at two o'clock it appeared. Far
off in the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. It looked
like a seabird; but it grew. In ten minutes the whole deck was
excited. Every glass was focused on the growing black spot. And
then it loomed up the size of a baseball; it showed colour, a dull
yellow in the distance and then it swelled and took form and glowed
brighter and came rushing toward us, as large as a moon, as large
as a barrel, and then we saw its outlines, and it came swooping
over us, a great beautiful golden thing and the whole deck burst
into cheers. It was our convoy, a dirigible balloon--vivid golden
yellow, trimmed with blue! How fair it seemed. How graceful and how
surely and how powerfully it circled about the ship like a great
hovering bird, and how safe we felt; and as we cheered and cheered
the swirling, glowing, beautiful thing, we knew how badly frightened
we really had been. With danger gone, the tension lifted and we
read the fear in our hearts. A torpedo boat destroyer came lumbering
across the sky line. It also was to convoy us, but it had a most
undramatic entrance; and besides we had sighted land. The deck cheered
easily, so we cheered the land. And everyone ran about exclaiming
to everyone else about the wonder and splendour of the balloon,
and everyone took pictures of everyone else and promised to send
prints, and the land waxed fat and loomed large and hospitable
while Henry paced the deck with his hands clasped reflectively
behind him. He was deeply moved and language didn't satisfy him
much. Finally he took his fellow Kansan by the arm and pointed to
the magnificence of the hovering spectre in yellow and blue that
circled about the ship:
"Bill," he said, solemnly, "isn't she a peach!" He paused, then
from his heart he burst out: "'How beautiful upon the mountain are
the feet of them that bring glad tidings!' I wish the fellows in
Wichita could get this thing for the wheat show!"
And thus we came to the shores of sunny France, a land that was to
remind us over and over again of our own sunny land of Kansas.
We landed after dark. Every one was going about vowing deathless
friendship to every one else, and so far as the stenographers and
the ambulance boys were concerned, it came to Henry and me that we
meant it; for they were a fine lot, just joyous, honest, brave young
Americans going out to do their little part in a big enterprise.
While we were bidding good-bye to our boys and girls, we kept
a weather eye on the Eager Soul. She had hooked the Gilded Youth
fairly deeply. He saw that her trunk came up from the hold, but we
noticed that while he was gone, the Doctor showed up and went with
her to sort out her hand-baggage from the pile on the deck. The
gang plank was let down under a pair of smoky torches. And the
Gilded Youth had paid a fine tip some place to be permitted to be
the first passenger off the boat that he might get one of the two
taxis in sight for the Eager Soul. She followed him, but she made
him let the Doctor come along. And so the drinks--lemon squash and
buttermilk--were equally on Henry and me. We hurried down the gang
plank after the happy trio. They were young--so infinitely and
ineffably young, it seemed to us. And the girl's face was flushed
and joyous, and her hair--why it didn't shake out and drown her we
never knew; certainly it surged out from under her hat like ripples
of youth incarnate. We saw them stacking their valises in the taxi
and over the taxi and around the taxi and the last we saw of her
was when she bent out of the cab window and waved and smiled at us,
two sedate old parties alone there in the crowd, with the French
language rising to our ears as we teetered unsteadily into it.
What an adventure they were going into--what a new adventure, the
new and beautiful adventure of youth, the old and inexplicable
adventure of life! So we waved back at them so long as they were
in sight, and the white handkerchief of the Eager Soul fluttered
back from the disappearing cab. When it was gone, Henry turned to
a sad-looking cabman with a sway-backed carriage and explained with
much eloquence that we wanted him to haul us a la hotel France--toot
sweet!
[Illustration with caption: So we waved back at them so long as
they were in sight]