It was one of Dumas' characters, I believe, who said: "I do not
apologize--I explain." The purpose of this brief preface is to explain
the many imperfections which of necessity appear in this volume.
It was at a dance after Armistice, given by American officers in the
Palace Hotel, London, that I met a young lady who had landed from New
York two days previously.
"My goodness!" she said, "they don't have any furnaces in their houses
here; and I've been trying all day to buy some rubbers, and no one knew
what I meant. My goodness! but they're backward over here."
I looked at her face and recognized the joyful mania of the explorer.
She was "discovering" England.
Before the war, England was "discovered" fairly often--but during the
war it became the passion of hundreds of thousands, Americans,
Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, South
Africans--we all brought our particular national viewpoint and centered
it on the "tight little Island," nor were we backward about telling the
English of their faults. Each one of us stated (or implied) that his
own country was the special acreage of God, and that the Kaiser ought
to be made to live in foggy London as a punishment.
And for more than four years the Old Country listened patiently as the
throngs of adventurers poured in from the world's outskirts. The
stately homes of England were opened in their stately, hospitable way;
English taxicab drivers insulted and robbed us just as cheerfully as
they did their own countrymen; English girls proved the best of
comrades; and the Englishman proper continued to be the world's
greatest enigma.
So, in claiming admittance to that vast throng that has already
discovered England, I do so with a certain humility but a hope that,
when my words are sifted, some little ore of truth may be discovered at
the bottom.
In three of the five stories of this collection, I have usurped the
power of the Wizard of Oz, and have looked through three pairs of
glasses. In "The Blower of Bubbles" an Englishman subjects his own
country to analysis; in "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist," the
glasses used are American and the medium is a New Yorker; in "The Airy
Prince" (the last and favorite child) a girl of sixteen from Picardy is
transplanted by aeroplane for one full day in wartime London.
In the remaining two stories I have endeavored to paint something of
city life in Canada in the one, and in the other to do some little
justice to that least understood type--the French Canadian.
During an interesting but undistinguished career of nearly four years
with the Canadian Forces, I realized that, although the army gives one
plenty of food for thought, it sometimes fails to supply facilities for
assimilation. _Par exemple_: "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist,"
was started in hospital at Abbéville, France, where my fellow-patients
assumed me to be a lovelorn swain, writing a love-letter that never
left off. Later, "Mr. Craighouse" developed a couple of thousand words
in a charming home of Scotland. The last part of the story was finished
at a table in the Turkish baths of the Royal Automobile Club, London,
where the attendants were good enough to consider me eccentric, but
apparently not violent.
Under the robust companionship of several normal and talkative
subalterns, "The Blower of Bubbles" was written in a hut at Seaford
Camp during the month of November, 1918. As my stove was a consistent
performer, nearly every evening a few choice souls gathered for cocoa
and refreshments from home; and if their host persisted in writing at
his improvised table it did not disturb their good-fellowship in the
least, providing the author did not threaten to read his "stuff" aloud.
It was in that hut in the mud of Seaford that, one November morning, a
little before eleven o'clock, we heard the sound of ships' sirens in
Newhaven Harbor some miles away; then a distant shouting, that grew in
a great crescendo, as it rode across the downs on the throats of
thousands of soldiers, and passed us in one great prolonged roar, "The
Germans have signed!"
We missed Armistice Day in London, but I like to think of the thirty
Canadian officers, most of them veterans of many battles, gathered in
the mess of that bleakest of camps, while one chap at the piano played
the national anthems of the nations who had fought ... and in voices
that were not too steady we echoed the toast: "To the Allies and
America."