The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me. William Allen White
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 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 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 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!"
[Illustration with caption: "You'll have to put out that cigar, sir."]
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 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 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 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 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 in France 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 tete-a-tete 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!"
[Illustration with caption: She often paced the rounds of the deck between us]
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 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