The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me Part 10

"Go to it, sister, and luck to you," cried her pa.s.senger as he rose from his bench. The car was nearing the fourth floor.

"We shall," she answered; "no fear of that." She stopped the car, and they smiled as friends as she let him out of the door. "Well--good morning," she said as he turned down the corridor. The "sir" had left entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the women of Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtains in Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping the servile "sir" and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as human beings.

It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman question as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is forming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the European woman of the war is almost American in her liberty.

"European women," said a former American grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with me at an emba.s.sy in the dim lit gorgeousness of a mediaeval room, "are of two kinds: Those who are being crucified by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which war has brought them!"

"Liberties?" asked her colloquitor; not Henry. He had no patience with these theoretical excursions into speculative realms. "Liberties rather than privileges?"

"Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary," purred the lady at the emba.s.sy. "They come and go, but the whole trouble with this new situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of the crucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never again can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American level."

"And the continental mistress system," prodded her American interviewer, ironically, "will it, too, disappear with the departed superiority of continental womanhood?"

"Yes, the mistress system too--if you want to call it a system--and I suppose it is an inst.i.tution--it too will become degraded and Americanized."

"Americanized?" the middle western eyebrows went up, and possibly the middle western voice flinched a little. But the wise dowager from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Central bonds, continued bitterly: "Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. The continental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that you middle cla.s.s Americans think it is. Of course there are European men who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few months or a few years and forget her. Such men are impossible."

She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe with a contemptuous hand.

"But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-product of a leisure cla.s.s. Men and women marry for business reasons. The women have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, and clings to her for a lifetime. He cannot afford to marry her--even if he could be divorced; for he would have to work to support her, and be decla.s.sed. But he can support her on his wife's money and a beautiful life-long friendship is thus cherished. It will disappear when men have to work, and when women may go into the world to work without losing their social positions. And this new order, this making the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will rob civilization of its most perfect flower--the cultivated woman who has developed under the shelter of our economic system. I might as well shock your bourgeois morals now as later. So listen to this.

Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering. I talked to a French mother this morning. Her income is gone--part of it taxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in Northern France. Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. In this chaos she can find no suitable wife for him. One who is rich today, tomorrow may be poor, so the dear fellow may not marry. And he is looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up a fool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant's salary. And the weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her son should have no mistress as to have a fool! For a man's mistress does make such a difference in his life! My friend is almost willing to let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work! The world never will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring in this war!"

Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe which Henry gave when he heard it. He was trying to tell a d.u.c.h.ess about prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas or prohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard of both. But Henry's other ear was open to what the emba.s.sy ornament was saying to me. On the other side of this record of the swan song of the lady of the emba.s.sy is this record. It is a man's voice. The man has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a place where as manager of the London factory of an American concern, he works several hundred employees.

"Say, let me tell you something--never again! Never again for mine do the men come back into our shop. We may let a dozen or so of 'em back to handle the big machines. But the next size, which we thought that only men could handle--never again. And when they come back these men will have to work under women foremen. We thought when the war took our men bosses away that we should have to close the shop. But say--never again, I tell you. And let me give you a pointer. You wouldn't know them girls. When the war broke out they were getting ten shillings--about $2.50 a week, the best of 'em, and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, and every once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls had a great joke about her--you know. And they would soak the shop whenever they got a chance! The boss had to keep right after 'em, or they'd soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight the product, and they'd lie--why, man, the whole works would stand up and lie for each other against the shop. It took five men to boss them where we have one woman doing it now. And say, it ain't the woman boss that's done it. We pay 'em more. Them same girls is getting ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now--Lawsee, man--you ought to see 'em! Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!

G.o.ddlemighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that same measly bunch of grouches we had three years ago. And they work for the shop now, and not against it. They're different girls. I wouldn't-a believed ten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it's sure done it."

"Perhaps," suggested his acquaintance, "the girls are cheerful and competent because they aren't afraid of poverty. Maybe they are motived by hope of getting on in the world and not motived by the terror of slipping down. Does that not make them stand by the shop instead of working against it? Isn't it a developed middle cla.s.s feeling that accepts the shop as 'their kind of people' now?"

"Search me, Cap--I give it up. I just only know what I know and see what I see. And never again--you hear me, man--never again does our shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made a hit with me! Have a cigarette?"

The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course, a gain in fellowship.

But after all fellowship will be futile if it does not bear fruit.

And the first fruit of the fellowship between men and women in Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon the destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knows woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward a just and lasting peace.

Often while we were in London, during the last days of our stay, when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds we talked of these things. There are two Henrys--one, the owner of a ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To me this was his greatest charm--this infinite variety of Henrys that was forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beacon building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my theories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellowship with men in the new democratization of the world. He refused to see the democratization of the world in the war. To him the war meant adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments of political and commercial influence on the map of the world. But to the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many times setting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing away his political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man would toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something more than its military expression.

And one night as we sat in our room waiting for dinner a letter came up from the Eager Soul, with some trinkets she had sent over to us by messenger to take to her mother in Denver. After telling us the news of the hospital, and of Auntie and of the wound in the Young Doctor's hand, she wrote:

"O how I hate war--hate it--hate it! And this war of all wars, I hate it worst. It is so ruthless, so inexorably cruel; so utterly meaningless, viewed at close range. Yesterday they brought me into Northern France, and I spent the twilight last night looking over the ruins of the local church. It is the most important small church in Northern France and contains one of the earliest ribbed vaults in France, they say. It was built about 1100, and now the thing is smashed. It is what our artillerymen call a one-shot church. O the waste of it--churches, men, homes, creeds! How many one-shot creeds have perished in this h.e.l.l-fire! Still out of the old I suppose the new will come. But I have talked to women, to peasant women in their homes, to n.o.ble women in hospitals; to women in their shops and women on the farms, and I know that if the new world brings them as its heritage, only the enlarged comradeship they are taking with men in this time of suffering, then one thing is sure: We women will strike an awful blow at future wars! The womanhood of the past, someway, is like these sad, broken churches of France. It is shattered and gone, and in its ruins we see its exquisite beauty, its ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faith that once sufficed. But it will not be restored. We shall build new temples; we shall know new women. The old had to go, that the new might come. And our new women and our new temples shall be dedicated, not merely to faith, not merely to beauty, not merely to adoration but to service, to service and comradeship in the world."

As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Its emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: "Well, Bill, I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her worth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to the public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it is settled."

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"

Finally our talk left the war and its meaning, and we fell to wondering how the Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and we thought of the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love and death and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden among the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier or doctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped to the floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly they had dropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul. He opened one and remarked:

"Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here on the margin, 'Verses by our Doctor friend. I thought you'd like to see them. See other sheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he tried to whistle that night. He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor's words.'"

Then Henry unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, was the air, evidently copied by the girl from the melody written by the Gilded Youth. And clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovski melody from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, that dominated the air.[Footnote: For the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote to the Young Doctor's verses the reader should see appendix "A."] The fine thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that air back to her, and to play the game of courage to us! Henry read the verses; they were headed "A Soldier's Song." They were very much such rhymes as we wrote when we were young. They ran:

Love, though these hands, that rest in thine so dear, Back into dust may crumble with the year; Love, though these lips, that meet thy lips so true, Soon may be gra.s.s that stores the morning dew-- O Love, know well, that this fond heart of mine, It shall be always, always--thine!

Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but this; Love, though our faith shall be our rarest bliss; Love, though the years may bring their death and chill, Love, though our blood shall lose its pa.s.sion, still-- Still, Love, know well that this heart is divine, It shall be always--always, thine!

Henry sat holding the sheet and looking through the wall of the room in Buckland's hotel across twenty years, down an elm-shaded path in the little town of Baldwin, Kansas--thousands of miles and seemingly thousands of years away!

"Well," he sighed. "In the note here she's got her he's badly mixed.

But we know what she means. And I don't blame them; any boy in his twenties ought to go singing, with one voice or another, after such a girl!"

And then we knew what the Young Doctor was doing there in the garden among the adoring flowers. He was writing those verses. And, we in our forties, after such things have pa.s.sed, were sitting in a commonplace room in a comfortable hotel, five hundred miles from the battle and twenty years from the primrose path, trying to imagine it all. And like Stephen Blackpool in d.i.c.kens' "Hard Times" about all we could make of it was that it was a mess! They were both so remote, the love affair that had followed us over Europe, and the war which we had followed so wearily. The love affair was of course a look backward, for us, to days "when lutes were touched and songs were sung"; but the war and all its significance stretched ahead.

It portended change. For change always follows war.

Yet life, in spite of the current of war twisting so many things askew, does proceed in England calmly, and in something like order.

As we looked back upon our London experience it seemed to Henry and me that we were hurrying from luncheons to teas and teas to dinners and from dinners to the second act of good shows all the time. For in London we had no Red Cross duties. We were on our way home, and people were kind to us, and best of all we could speak the language--after a fashion--and understand in a general way what was going on. We had dined at two American emba.s.sies on the continent and had worn our tail coats. Of course Red Cross uniforms were proper evening regalia at any social function. But someway a flannel shirt and a four-in-hand tie--even a khaki coloured tie, did not seem to Henry and me de rigueur. We weren't raised that way and we couldn't come to it. So we wore our tails. We noticed in France and Italy that other men wore dinner coats, and we bemoaned our stupidity in bringing our tails and leaving our dinner coats in New York. We fancied in our blindness that on the continent no one noticed the difference. But in England, there doubt disappeared.

Whenever we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some English ladyship through a lorgnette or a spygla.s.s of some kind gave us the once-over with the rough blade of her social disapproval and we felt like prize b.o.o.bs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball. But we couldn't help it. How should we have known, without our wives to pack our trunks for us in New York, that tails had atrophied in European society and that uniforms and dinner coats had taken their place.

But other things have disappeared from Great Britain since war began, and Henry was doomed to walk the island vainly looking for the famed foods of old England. All through Italy and France, where onion soup and various pastes were served to us, Henry ate them, but in a fond hope that when we got to England he would have some of the "superior comestibles" which a true lover of d.i.c.kens had a right to expect. The French were given to ragouts and Latin translations of Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered in onions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy green groceries, and these messed dishes irritated Henry. He is the kind of an old-fashioned man who likes to take his food straight. If he eats onions, he demands that they shall be called onions, or if they serve him carrots, he must know specifically that he is eating carrots, and he wants his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and no nonsense about it. Similarly he wants his veal served by itself, and when they bring him a smoking brown ca.s.serole of browned vegetables, browned gravy and browned meat, he pokes his fork into it, sniffs, "another cat mess," pushes it aside and asks for eatable food! So all over the continent he was bragging about what he was going to do to "the roast beef of old England," and was getting ready for Yorkshire pudding with it. It was sweet to hear Henry's honest bark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep-mouthed welcome to Sam Weller's "'am and weal pie," and even Pickwick's "chops and tomato sauce," and David Copperfield's toasted m.u.f.fins, as we drew near the chalk cliffs of England. Also he was going to find what an "eel pie" was, and he had a dozen d.i.c.kensonian dishes that he proposed to explore, dishes whose very names would make a wooden Indian's mouth water. But when he got there the cupboard was bare. England was going on rations. Fats were scarce, sugars were rare, starches were controlled by the food board. And who could make a currant tart without these? He dropped two bullet-sized brown biscuits with a hazelnut of b.u.t.ter under his vest the first three minutes of our first breakfast and asked for another round, after he had taken mine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: And we felt like prize b.o.o.bs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball]

"That's your allowance, sir," said the waitress, and money would buy no more.

He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; that was his allowance of sugar. We went out to lunch. Henry ordered the roast beef of old England at the best club in London and got a pink shaving, escorted in by two boiled potatoes and a hunk of green cabbage, boiled without salt or pork. And for dessert we had a sugarless, lardless whole-wheat-flour tart! It puckered his mouth like a persimmon. It fell to me to explain to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon, that Henry had just come from the continent, where he had scorned the food, and one could see from the twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes that he was going to put Henry in a book. And he certainly was a hero during those London days--the hero of a great disillusion.

Of course the British cooking was good. The English are splendid cooks, and they were doing their best; but Henry's picture of the great boar's head triumphantly borne into the hall on the shoulders of four stout butlers, and his notion of the blazing plum pudding as large as a ha.s.sock, and his preconceived idea of England as d.i.c.kens's fat boy forever stuffing and going to sleep again, had to be entirely revised. For if the English are proud of the way they conceal the bitterness of their sorrow in this war, also they have a vast pride in the way they are sacrificing their creature comforts for it. In Latin countries there is more or less special privilege.

But in England, the law is the law and men glory in its rigours by obeying it in proud self-sacrifice. If our dinners sometimes were Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, refreshing and filling. We, however, had some trouble with our "Who's Who." One evening they sat me opposite a handsome military man who talked of airships and things most wonderfully and it took me three days to learn that he was the authority on air fighting in Europe! He was a Lord of somewhere, and Earl of something and a Duke of somewhat--all rolled into one. Henry hooted at me for two days. But finally he gave me some comfort. "At least," he said, "you are as well-known in London as your Duke's mixture is in Emporia, and London is a bigger town!" Then it came Henry's turn. At our very grandest dinner they sat Henry between Lord Bryce and one of the most distinguished men of contemporary English letters. Henry shone that night as he never shone before and when Henry turns on his talk he is a wizard.

Meredith Nicholson, who has heard Henry talk at a dinner, in a recent number of Scribner's magazine, said of him: "He's the best talker I've ever heard. It was delightful to listen to discourse so free, so graphic in its characterization, so coloured and flavoured with the very soil," and that night at the English dinner, all of Henry's cylinders were hitting and he took every grade without changing gears. But my ears were eager for the man on Henry's right.

He told some stories; my neck craned toward them. Henry returned the Scotch stories with Kansas stories and held the table.

Then going home in the taxi Henry, recalling his dinner companion, said: "Bill, who was that little man on my left, that man they called Barrie!"

It seemed impossible. Yet those were Henry's very words.

"Henry, Henry, have you never heard of 'Peter Pan,' nor 'The Little Minister,' nor 'Sentimental'--" his friend's answer got no further.

Henry's snort of shame almost stopped the taxi.

"No, Bill--no--not that. Well, for Heaven's sake! and I sat by him all evening braying like a jack. Bill--Bill, you won't ever tell this in Wichita, will you?"

So it must remain forever a secret!

That was a joyful hour for me, but the next day, Henry had his laugh. We came in from tea and found a card on the table in the snug little room near the elevator, which pa.s.ses for a hotel office in London. The card was from Lord Bryce inviting us to tea the next afternoon. It fell to Henry's lot to go out for the day in the country, and to me to lunch with Granville Barker. So half-past four saw me rushing into the hotel from a taxi, which stood waiting outside, and throbbing up a two-pence every minute. Then this dialogue occurred.