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 dramatic 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
I
2--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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 an-
And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig
which can be worn at most only two months
(blank page follows)
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--5
other 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.
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
6--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--7
--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
nightand 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
8--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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 Ger-
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--9
many, 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
10--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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 enlogy 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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--11
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
12--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--13
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
14--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir"
(blank page follows)
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--17
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!"
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
18--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--19
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
20--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
She often paced the rounds of the deck between us
(blank page follows)
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--23
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 inFrance 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
tête-à-tête 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!"
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
24--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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 hus-
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--25
bands; 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
26--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
women; and national prohibition. These things left her with no
temperature. She was cold; she even shivered, slightly, but
gracefully 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 pet-ted in her ingénue 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!
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--27
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 women 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
28--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
bizarré
"Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?"
(blank page follows)
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--31
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
32--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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!"
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.
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--33
"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
34--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--35
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
36--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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
We Begin Our Sentimental Journey--37
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
38--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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 Begin Our Sentimental Journey--39
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 w as 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
40--Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
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!
So we waved back at them so long as they were in
sight
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