Leaves in the Wind Part 6

For contrary to the common conception of him as a hurrying, bustling, get-on-or-get-out young man, he is leisurely both in speech and action, cool and unworried, equable of mood, little subject to the extremes of emotion, bearing himself with a solid deliberateness that suggests confidence in himself and inspires confidence in him. You feel that he will neither surprise you, nor let you down.

Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his accessibility. The common language, of course, is a great help, and the common traditions also. You are rarely quite at home with a man who thinks in another language than your own. The Tower of Babel was a great misfortune for humanity. But it is not these things which give the American his quality of immediate and easy intercourse. There is no ice to break before you get at him. There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what social footing you are to stand. You are on him at once--or rather he is on you. He comes into the open, without reserves of manner, and talks "right ahead" with the candour and ease of a man who is at home in the world and at home with you. He is free alike from intellectual priggishness and social aloofness. He is just a plain man talking to a plain man on equal terms.

It is the manner of the New World and of a democratic society in which the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private citizen next year. It is ill.u.s.trated by the tribute which Frederick Dougla.s.s, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln. "He treated me as a man," said Dougla.s.s after his visit to the President. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners. He treated Dougla.s.s as a man and an equal because he was a man and an equal, and because the difference in the colour of their skins had no more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the colour of their ties or the shape of their boots.

The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of his traits. It gives the sense of a man who is born free--free from the irritating restraints, embarra.s.sments and artificialities of a society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they still prevail in most European countries. Perhaps Germany is the most flagrant example. It used to be said by Goethe that there were twenty-seven different social castes in Germany, and that none of them would speak to the caste below. And Mr. Gerard's description of the Rat system suggests that the stratification of society has increased rather than diminished since the days of Goethe.

The disease is not so bad in this country; but we cannot pretend that we have the pure milk of democracy. No people which tolerates t.i.tles, and so deliberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, un.o.bstructed intercourse of a real democracy like that of America. It was said long ago by Daniel O'Connell that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth." It is a caricature, of course, but there is truth in it. We are icy because we are uncertain about each other--not about each other as human beings, but about each other's social status. We have got the spirit of feudalism still in our bones, and our public school system, our t.i.tles, and our established Church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up society into social orders which are the negation of democracy.

And as if we had not enough of the abomination, we are imitating the German Rat system with the grotesque O.B.E. We shall get stiffer than ever under this rain of sham jewellery, and shall not be fit to speak to our American friends. But we shall still be able to admire and envy the fine freedom and human friendliness which is the conspicuous gift of these stalwart young fellows who walk our streets in their flat-brimmed hats.

Perhaps when the account of the war is made up we shall find that the biggest credit entry of all is this fact that they did walk our streets as comrades of our own sons. For over a century we two peoples, talking the same language and cherishing the same traditions of liberty, have walked on opposites sides of the way, remembering old grudges, forgetting our common heritage, forgetting even that we gave the world its first and its grandest lead in peace by proclaiming the disarmament of the Canadian-United States frontier. Now the grudges are forgotten, and we have found a reconciliation that will never again be broken, and that will be the corner-stone of the new world-order that is taking shape in the furnace of these days.

'APPY 'EINRICH

The waiter certainly was rather slow, or perhaps it was that we were hungry and impatient. In any case, I apologised to my guest, a young fellow home on leave, and explained that the waiter was ent.i.tled to be a little absent-minded, for he had lost two sons in the war and his only remaining son had been invalided out of the Army, a permanent wreck.

"He tells me," I said, "that the boy never talks about the war or his experiences. He just seems silent and numbed. All that they know is that he killed five Germans, and that he is sorry for one of them. It happened while he was on patrol. There had been a good deal of indignation at that part of the line because there had been cases reported in which 'hands up' had been a trick for ensnaring some of our men, and the order had been given that the signal was to be ignored and those making it shot at sight. It was twilight and a young German soldier was seen running forward with his hands up. The patrol fired and he fell. He was quite unarmed and alone. On his body they found letters from his sweetheart in England--old letters that he had apparently carried with him all through the war. They showed that he had been at work at some place in London and had been engaged to be married when the war broke out."

"Yes," said my companion, as the waiter came up with the fish. "Yes, when the enemy turns from an abstraction to an individual you generally find there's something that makes you hate this killing business. I don't know that I have felt more sorry for any man's death in this war than for that of a German.

"You've been to F----, haven't you? You know that bit of line north of the M---- road that you reach by the communication trench that is always up to your knees in mud no matter how dry the weather is. You remember how close the lines are to each other at that point--not forty yards apart? I was there in a dull season."

"You were lucky," I said. "It isn't often dull there."

"No, but it was then. The Boche would drop over an occasional whiz-bang as a reminder, and he'd have his usual afternoon c.o.c.k-shy over our heads at the last pinnacle standing on the ruins of the cathedral in the town behind us. But really there was nothing doing, and we got rather chummy with the fellows over the way. We'd put up a target for them, and they'd do the same for us. They'd got some decent singers among them, and we'd shout for the 'Hate' song or 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Tannenbaum' or something of that sort and they always obliged, and we gave them the best we had back.

"Yes, we got quite friendly, and one morning one of their men got up on the parapet over the way, bowed very low, and shouted 'Goot morning.'

Our men answered, 'Morgen, Fritz. How goes it?' and so on. He was a big fat fellow, with gla.s.ses, and a good-humoured face, and to our great joy he began to sing a song in broken English. And after he had finished we called for more. He had a real gift for comedy; seemed one of those fellows who are sent into the world with their happiness ready made. He laughed a great gurgling laugh that made you laugh to hear it. Our chaps gave him no end of applause, and called for his name.

He beamed and bowed, said 'Thank you, genteelmen,' and said that his name was Heinrich something or other.

"So we called him 'Appy 'Einrich,' and whenever our men were bored and things had gone to sleep someone would sing out 'We want 'Einrich.

Send us 'Appy 'Einrich to give us a song.' And up would come Heinrich on to the parapet, red and smiling and bowing like a _prima donna_.

And off he would start with his programme. He always seemed willing and evidently greatly enjoyed his popularity with our fellows.

"This went on for some time, and then one day we got the news that we were to be relieved at once. We were to clear out that night and our place was to be taken by a Scotch regiment. You need not be told that we were glad. Life in the trenches when there is nothing doing is about as deadly a weariness as man has invented. We got our kit together and when night fell and our relief had come we marched back under the stars through F---- towards B----.

"We had been too much occupied with the prospect of release to give a thought to the fellows over the road or to Heinrich. I remembered him afterwards and hoped that someone had told the new men that Heinrich was a good sort and would always give them a bit of fun, if he was asked, or even if he wasn't asked.

"Some weeks afterwards at B---- I ran across a man in the Scotch regiment which had followed us in the trenches on the M---- road, and we talked about things there. 'And how did you get on with Heinrich?'

I asked. 'Heinrich?' he said, 'Who is he?' 'Why, surely,' said I, 'you know Heinrich, the fat fellow across the way, who gets up on the parapet and says "Goot morning," and sings comic songs?' 'Never heard of him,' he said. 'Ah,' I said, 'he would have heard we were relieved and didn't find you so responsive a crowd as we were.' 'Never heard of him,' he repeated--then, after a pause, he added, 'There was an incident the morning after we took over the line. Some of our fellows saw a bulky Boche climbing on to the parapet just across the way and had a little target practice, and he went down in a heap.' 'That was him,' I said, 'that was 'Appy 'Einrich. What a beastly business war is, and what ungrateful beggars we were to forget him!'

"Yes, a beastly business, killing men," he added. "I don't wonder the waiter's son doesn't want to talk about it. We shall all be glad to forget when we come out of h.e.l.l."

ON FEAR

I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who fight their battles at the base. He is invented because these nave people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a hero. But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being brave if you had no fear. The real victory of the hero is not over outward circ.u.mstance, but over himself. One of the bravest men of our time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. By sheer will he beat down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man who knew no fear. But the very essence of his heroism was that he had fought fear and won.

It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything discreditable in knowing fear. You might as well say that there is something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood. The virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to lie and yet telling the truth. And the more you are tempted the more splendid is the resistance. Without temptation you may make a plaster saint, but not a human hero. That is why the familiar story of Nelson when a boy--"Fear! grandmother. I never saw fear. What is it?"--is so essentially false. Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by man. They were brave to the brink of recklessness. The whole episode of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the dictates of prudence. On the facts one would be compelled to admit that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals his astonishing command of himself and of circ.u.mstance. When the issue was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster, he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ash.o.r.e.

It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call camouflage. When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he ordered a candle to be brought from the c.o.c.kpit and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. "This," said he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal." With such triumphant self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in view. But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in Southey's "Life of Nelson."

That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well. At the age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpa.s.sed."

He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.

"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing, and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory to the young ear, and said, 'n.o.body ever thought you were a coward, my boy.' I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I tried? 'But you won't do it again?' she said. I replied, 'Of course not--where would be the fun?'"

It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came.

Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.

Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind. I was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the country the other day. It had been empty since the beginning of the war. Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade.

On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried, "We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined." Then he went out and shot himself. Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any other.

In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that grows by brooding. There is a story of Maupa.s.sant's, which ill.u.s.trates how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling upon fear. He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who had stared insolently at a lady who was with him. His action led to a challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning.

When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold a.s.surance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors as a marksman. As the night advanced he pa.s.sed through all the stages from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn he found a corpse. Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape the terrors of his mind.

It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear. Give them only a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circ.u.mference of disastrous consequences. It is not a bad thing in this world to be born a little dull and unimaginative. You will have a much more comfortable time. And if you have not taken that precaution, you will do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies.

Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom. In the romantic theatre of his mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to p.r.i.c.k the bubbles of his master with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.

ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON

Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its contents, but by its address. My name (for the purposes of this article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson.

Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p." When I see it wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance altogether disproportioned to the fact. I know that taken in the lump the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons. There is not a pin to choose between us. In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson and that man called himself Thompson. Why he should have spatchc.o.c.ked a "p" into his name I don't know. I daresay it was pride on his part, just as it is my pride not to have a "p."

Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist.

He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist was asked to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell." That is probably the case of the Thompsons. They don't know how to spell.

But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. We feel an outrage on our names as if it were an outrage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led to one of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some American publisher had pirated one of his books. But it was not the theft that angered him so much as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book advertised as the work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled. It is so easy to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is full length on the t.i.tle-page of your booty. But no, d.a.m.n him, not he!

He calls me Stephenson." I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson.

Thompson, indeed!

I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that sn.o.b, Sir Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford. He was addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers (whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "Do I look like a person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and pa.s.sed on. And as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like a person of the name of Thompson? Now do I?" And yet I suppose one may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I should like to try the experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. I should like to address him as Sir Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.

It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our ident.i.ty that annoys us when people play tricks with our names. We want to be ourselves and not somebody else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and the fathers that begat us. We may not know much about our ancestors, and may not care much about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the position of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," he said, "were looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I only got as far back as my great-grandfather, _who disappeared somewhere about the time of the a.s.sizes_." If we go far enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the a.s.sizes, or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those fellows, the Thompsons.

And there is another reason for the annoyance. To misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer him the subtlest of all insults--especially if he is a Scotsman. The old prides and hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by calling him Mr. M'Donald or _vice versa_. Indeed, I recall the case of a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as Thompson makes me boil.

Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. I like a man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house of the Duke of Northumberland. He even put the Percy arms on his monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to G.o.driche.

I am afraid Bishop Percy was a sn.o.b.

There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family a.s.sociation and so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually "something rotten about him," as Johnson would say. He stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste."