The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me Part 9

Nitti says the millers were h.o.a.rding flour and caused the delay.

The strike grew general over the city. Workers wandering about the town were threatened with the police if they congregated. They congregated, and some troops from a nearby training camp were called.

The troops were new; they were also friends of the strikers. They refused to fire. Then the strikers built barricades in the streets and in a day or so the regular troops came down from the mountains with machine guns, fired on the barricades and when hundreds were hit the rebellion was quelled. And Signor Nitti says it was all because some profit hog stopped the ordinary flow of flour from the farmer to the consumer of bread! There is, of course, the other side. They told us in Turin that boys in their teens were found dead back of the barricades with thousand lire notes in their pockets, and that German agents came during the first hours of the strike and spread money lavishly to make the riot a rebellion. Probably this is true. The profiteer made the strike possible. It was an opportunity for rebellion, and Germany took the opportunity. Always she is on hand with spies to buy what she cannot honestly win.

Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to France. Yet the journey had been well worth while. We came home with a definite and hopeful impression about Italy. The Turin riot, bad as it was, was not an anti-war riot. It was directed at the bad administration of the food controller. Italy then was not an invaded country, as France was, and had no such enthusiasm for the war, as a nation has when its soil is invaded. Italy has that enthusiasm now for the war. We saw that her man-power was hardly tapped. She has millions to pour into the trenches. She needs and will need until the end of the war, iron and coal. She will have to borrow her guns and her fuel. But she has almost enough food. We found sugar scarce; b.u.t.ter scarce, and bread sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants. We found two meatless days a week besides Friday and found the people, as a rule, observing them. We found the industries of the nation turned solely toward the war. Italy realizes what defeat means.

The pro-Austrian party which was strong at the beginning of the war has vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope has lost his interest in peace!

But all these things are temporary; with the war's pa.s.sing they will pa.s.s. The real thing we found was an awakening people, coming into the new century eager and wise and sure that it held somewhere in its coming years the dawn of a new day. That really is the hope of the war--an industrial hope, not a political hope, not a geographical hope, but a hope for better things for the common man.

It is a hope that Christianity may take Christendom, and that the fellowship among the nations of the world so devoutly hoped for, may be possible because of a fellowship among men inside of nations.

CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION

It is curious how the human heart throws out homeseeking tendrils.

As we crossed the Italian frontier and came back into France, keen longing for the Ritz--even the Ritz with its gloomy grandeur came to me, and Henry confessed that he was glad to get back to a country where a man could get a good refreshing bowl of onion soup! After dinner, our first evening at the Ritz, we were looking over the theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at the hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie," the patrician relative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilian clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating our formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would have caught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed aside the levity of the opening.

"Haven't you heard--haven't you heard?" she asked. And we knew instinctively that something had happened to the Gilded Youth. And when one is in aviation something happening always is serious. It was Henry's kind voice that conveyed our sympathy to her. And she told us of the accident. Two mornings before, while making his first flight alone, from the training camp near Paris, something went wrong with his engine while he was but a thousand feet in the air--and over Neuilly. He had to glide down, and being over a town he could not make a landing. They took him from the wreck of his plane, to the hospital near by--fortunately an American Red Cross Hospital, where the people recognized him and sent for his aunt. All day and all night he had lain unconscious, and at noon had opened his eyes for a minute to find his aunt beside him. "I brought with me," said Auntie, in a tone so significantly casual that it arrested our attention before she added, "that capable young nurse, the first a.s.sistant--" As she spoke she caught Henry's eyes and held him from looking at me.

"You mean the one--" said Henry in a tone quite as casual as Auntie's while giving eye for eye.

"Yes, your pretty mid-western girl. She is with him now." Then Auntie lost Henry's eyes as tears brimmed into her own. "It has been twenty-six hours since we arrived at Neuilly. I shall return in an hour, and--"

"I wish," cried Henry, "I wish there was something we could do!"

Auntie caught our embarra.s.sed desire to be of service yet not to a.s.sume. Her strong fine face lighted with something kind enough for a smile, as she answered: "Couldn't you go out and see him? I think no one else in Paris would be more welcome than you two!"

That puzzled us. She saw us looking our question at each other, and went on: "Life means more to him now than it ever has meant."

She really smiled as she quoted: "'It means intensely and it means good!'" Auntie's tired eyes gathered us in again. "When you left Landrecourt last month he told me much about the voyage over here on the Espagne." The tired eyes left us to follow the crippled elevator boy who went pegging down the corridor as she continued: "about his days in Paris before he went back to his ambulance unit; about his meeting you that night near Douaumont,--at the first aid post and--and I know," she paused a second, pulled herself together and continued gently. "We must face things as they are. The boy's hours in this earth are short. He has other friends here, of course--old friends, but you--" again she stopped. "You will appreciate why when you see him."

So we gave up the poor travesty upon life that we should have seen behind the footlights for a glimpse into one of life's real dramas.

It was nearly midnight before we came to Neuilly and stood awkwardly beside the white cot in the little white room where the Gilded Youth was lying. How the gilding had fallen off! All white and broken he lay, a crushed wreck of a man, with the cluttering contrivances of science swathing him, binding him, encasing him, holding him miserably together while the tide of life ran out. But when he wakened he could smile. There was real gilding in that smile, the gilding of youth, but he only flashed his eyes upon us for a fleeting second in turning his smile to her--to the Eager Soul, to her who had brought some new incandescence into his life. Then we knew why his aunt had said that we should see him. He would have us who had witnessed the planting of the seed, know how it had flowered. His smile told us that also. He could lift no hand to us, and could speak but faintly. Yet his greeting held something princely in it--fine and sweet and brave. Then he did a curious thing. He began whistling very softly under his breath and between his teeth a queer little tune, that reminded one oddly of the theme of Tschaicovski's Symphony Pathetique--the first movement. As he whistled he turned from Henry and me and looked at the Eager Soul, who smiled back intelligently, and when she smiled he stopped. We could not understand their signals. But whatever it was so far as it pretended to a show of courage, we knew that it was a gorgeous bluff. In the fleeting glance that he gave us, he told us the truth; and we knew that he was pretending to the others that he did not know. We made some cheerful nothings in our talk, and would have gone but he held us.

The Eager Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medicine, which we took to be a heart stimulant; for he revived under it, and said to me:

"Remember--that night at Douaumont?"

"Where you whistled the 'Meditation from Thais,' in the moonlight?"

"Yes," he murmured, "and we--watched--the trucks--come out of the mist--full of life--and go into the mist,--toward death."

"Wonderful--wasn't it!" sighed one of us.

"Symbolic," he whispered. And our eyes followed his to the vivid face of the Eager Soul, in the halo of her nurse's cap. She was exceedingly glorious, and animate and beautiful. And he was pa.s.sing into the mist, out toward death. He saw that he had got the figure to me, and smiled. Then suddenly something came into his face from afar, and he seemed to know that his frail craft had mounted the out-going tide. Slowly, very slowly life began to fade from his face. Further and further from sh.o.r.e the tide was bearing him. We seemed to be on the pier. The Eager Soul even leaned forward and put out a pretty hand, and waved at him. He signalled back with a twitch of his lips that was meant for a smile. And then we at the pier lost the last gleam of life and saw only the broken bark, wearily riding the racing tide.

And then we turned from the pier and went our several ways back into the midst of life. We were going home, and getting ready to go home is a joyous proceeding. And there was another significance to our packing to leave Paris. It meant something more than a homeward journey; it meant that for the first time since we left Wichita and Emporia in midsummer we were turning our backs on war.

It took a tug to make the turn. From all over the earth the war draws men to it like an insatiable whirlpool. And as we came nearer and nearer to war we had felt it swallow men into its vortex--men, customs, inst.i.tutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos--into nothing, to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out there on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealed nothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the hungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth, for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a race, for the creed of an era. And we left them still ravening, mad and unsated. And we were going away as dazed as we were when we came. But as we packed our things in Paris, the thrall of it still gripped us and the consciousness that we were leaving the war was as strong in our hearts as the joy we felt at turning homeward. But we got aboard the train and rode during the long lovely morning down the wide rich valley of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy with its steep hills which seem reflected in the sharp peaked roofs of its chateaux, and through musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hard to realize that modern industry was hiving. The hum of industry seemed badly out of key in a town with a cathedral whose architectural roots are a thousand years old, and whose streets have not yet been veined with sewers, and whose walls are gay with the facades of the fifteenth century. The whole face of the landscape, town and country side, seemed to us like the back drop of the first act in a comic opera, and we were forever listening for "The Chimes of Normandy!" Instead we heard the noon whistle. It was tremendously incongruous. How American humour cracks into sardonic ribaldry at the spectacle. The French are the least bit unhappy about this American humour. They don't entirely see it. Once outside of a poor French village near the war zone, that had been bombed from the German lines, bombed from the German airships and ravaged by fire and sword, some American soldiers, looking at the desolation and the ruin of the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, so hopeless in its pitiful finality, painted on a large white board, and nailed on a sign post just at the edge of the town this slogan:

"Watch Commercy Grow! Boost for the Old Town!"

But in that flash of humour the tragedy of Commercy stood revealed clearer than in a flood of tears!

We came at the end of the morning "to a port in France." From there we were to take the boat for England. And it seemed to us that the whole place was bent on the same errand. English soldiers going home on leave jammed the streets. They filled the hotels; they crowded into the shops. And the whole town was made over for them. "French Spoken Here" was the facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcard shop near the grey old church on the main thoroughfare. It is curious how the English put their trade mark upon the places they occupy. These French ports filled with British soldiers look more English than England. The English demand their own cooking, their own merchandise, their own tobacco, their own beer--which is stale, flat and unprofitable enough these days--and they demand their native speech. When he gets in sight of his native land the British Tommy quits saying "Donny mo-i, de tabac! Ma'mselle!" But bellows forth both loud and long, "I say, Lizz, gimme some makin's! and look alive, please!" So when we went to bed in our boat in a French port, and slept through a submarine zone, and waked up in an English port, there was no vast difference in the places. Today Southampton and Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for there the English do most congregate. But back of the French ports it is all France, and back of the English ports is England, and worlds lie between them. England, as one rides through it who lives beyond the seas, and uses the English tongue, always must seem like the unfolding of an old, old dream. England gives her step-children the impression that they have seen it all before! And they have; in Mother Goose, in d.i.c.kens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, in the songs of British poets, in the landscapes of British artists! At every turn of the road, in every face at the window, in every hedgerow and rural village is the everlasting reminder that we who speak the English tongue are bound with indissoluble links of our foster memories from the books and the arts, to ways of thinking and living and growing in grace that we call English. It is more than a blood or breed, more even than a civilization, is this spiritual inheritance that comes from this English soil; it is the realization in life of a philosophy, the dramatization of a human creed.

It may be understood, but not defined, yet it is as palpable and substantial in this earth as any material fact. Germany knows what this English philosophy means; and for half a century Germany has been preparing to combat it. Napoleon knew it, and believed in it, when he declared three-fourths of every fact is its spiritual value. France has it, new Russia is struggling for it. American life has it as an ancient inheritance, and as we Americans rode through the green meadows of England up from the coast to London, for ever reviewing familiar scenes and faces and aspects of life that we had never seen before, we realized how much closer than blood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed.

So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary when we were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishman about something a speaker had said in parliament the day before.

We may love the French, like the ladies, G.o.d bless 'em! But we quarrel only with the English.

When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through the grey old streets, surface differences between London and the other capitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts.

These differences marked the different reactions of personal loss upon the different nations. France expresses her loss in mourning; she relieves her emotions in visible grief. Italy does this also; but her losses have been smaller than the French losses and Italy's sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France. But England's master pa.s.sion in this war is pride. "In proud and loving memory"

is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituary notices of those who have died for England. Amba.s.sador Page tells this: He was asking a British matron about her family, severally, and when he inquired about the son, she replied, "Haven't you heard of the new honour that has come to us through him?" And to her friend's negative she returned: "He has been called upon to die for England!" Now that seems rather French in its dramatics than British. Yet it reflects exactly the British att.i.tude. The women wear no mourning. They do not go about in bright colours by any means.

Bright colours in the war distinguish the men. But the women do wear dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutral tints of various hues. The shop windows of London are bright. There is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, "Business as usual." The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs, and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of London, prove that London still is a great city--the greatest city in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it is, cannot overcome London, entirely. Something of the fact that she is the world's metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhat apart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the London consciousness, however remotely.

One must not imagine that London is unchanged. It is greatly changed, for the men are gone. One sees fewer men in London out of uniform than in Paris. And the Londoners one does see, all appear to be hurrying about war work. But it is the women constantly in evidence who have changed the face of London. Women keep the shops, conduct the busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats of the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweep the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggage at the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters, superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens before forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and gra.s.s on farms, herd sheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of the world's work that man has ever done. Now, of course, women are doing these things elsewhere in the world. But London and England are man's domain. It seems natural to see the French women, and even the Italian women at work. Man is more or less the leisure cla.s.s on the continent. But London is a man's town if on earth there is one, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and baffling sight.

Of course the men are not all dead--"they're just away." And they come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal, and there is an ever-urging desire of life to a.s.sume its normal function. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moral break-down among the women of England. In England we were asked about the dreadful things that were happening in France. The things that were happening in France were not essentially evil things. One could imagine that if G.o.d thinks war is necessary for the solution of the world's terrible problems, He will have no trouble forgiving these lapses that follow in the wake of war in France. And in England, similarly we found that the moral break-down was not a moral break-down at all. The abnormal relation of the s.e.xes arising out of war produced somewhat the same results that one found in France, but in different ways. In France too many strange men are billeted in the houses of the people. In England, too many homes are without men at all. And sheer social lonesomeness produces in humanity about the same conditions that arise when people are thrown in too close contact. There is a sort of social balance of nature, wherein normally desirable results are found. The girl working in the munition factories, working at top speed eight hours a day, filled with a big emotional desire to do her full duty to her country every second of the day, finds it easy in her eight hours of rest to fall in love with a soldier who is going out to offer his life for the country for which she is giving her strength so gladly. She is not a light woman. She is moved by deep and beautiful emotions. And if a marriage before he goes out to fight is inconvenient or impossible--the war made it so, and G.o.d will understand. Of course the idle woman, the vain woman, the foolish woman in these times in England finds ample excuse for her folly and vast opportunity to indulge her folly in the social turmoil of the war. And she is going the pace. Her men are gone, who restrain her, and she has nothing in her head or her heart to hold, and she is in evidence. Her type always exaggerates its importance, and fools people into thinking that her name is Legion, and that Mr.

Legion is an extensive polygamist, with a raft of daughters and sisters and cousins and aunts. But she is small in numbers and she is not important. She is merely conspicuous, and the moral break-down in England, that one hears of in the baited breath of the continent, is an illusion.

The elevator girl at Bucklands Hotel in London was a bright, black-eyed, good looking woman in her late twenties. She wore a green uniform with a crimson voile boudoir cap and as the American stepped inside the slow-going car, she answered his "good morning"

with a respectful, "good morning, sir." Being a good traveller, it seemed to me wise to prepare to while away the tedium of the long easy journey to the fourth floor with a friendly chat.

"Any of your relatives in the war?" This from me by way of an ice-breaker.

"Yes, sir, my husband, sir," she replied as she grasped the cable.

She gave it a pull, and added "--or he was, sir. He's home now, sir!"

"On leave?"

"O no, sir, he's wounded, sir--he lost his left arm at the shoulder, sir, and he's going down to Roehampton today, sir, to see if they can teach him some kind of a trade there, sir," answered the woman.

The wonders of Roehampton where they re-educate the cripples of war and turn them out equipped with such trades as their maimed bodies may acquire had been displayed for Henry and me the day before.

"Tell him to try typewriting and stenography, one armed men are doing wonders with that down at Roehampton. Any children?"

"Two, sir," she answered as the elevator approached the mezzanine floor, "three and five, sir!"

"Three and five--well, well, isn't that fine! Aren't you lucky!

Tell him to try that stenography; that will put him in an office and he'll have a fine chance to rise there. You must give them an education--a good one; send them to College. If they're going to get on in this new world they will need every ounce of education you can stuff into them. But it will be a splendid thing for both of you working for that. Is education expensive in England?"

"Very, sir. I hardly see how we can do it, sir!"

"That's too bad--now in our country education, from the primer to the university, is absolutely free. The state does the whole business and in my state they print the school books, and more than that they give a man a professional education, too, without tuition fees--if he wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or a chemist or a school teacher!"

"Is that so, sir," the cable was running through her hands as she spoke. Then she added as the elevator pa.s.sed the second floor, "If we could only have that here, sir. If we only could, sir!"

"Well, it will come. That's the next revolution you want to start when you women get the ballot. Abolish these cla.s.s schools like Eton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. All the kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section of the country go to the common schools. Children should start life as equals. There is no sn.o.bbery so cruel as the sn.o.bbery that marks off childhood into cla.s.ses! When you women vote here, the first thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime keep the kids in school."

"We've talked that all over," she answered. "And we're certainly going to try. He'll have his pension, and I'll have this job and he'll learn a trade and I think we can manage, sir!" The "sir" came belated.