Voyage Sentimentale

I

THIS morning, December 6, we are approximately one third of the way between New York and the Peace Conference. The exact longitude is not given in the brief report of the day’s run, posted on the bulletin board. The latitude varies considerably. It is widest in the immediate neighborhood of several young women from the vaudeville circuits, who are on their way to entertain the boys at the front. But we must not judge too hastily. If you watch them play at quoits on the promenade deck, you think you know what is meant by the freedom of the seas. But last night the tallest and loudest of them sang the ‘Marseillaise’ in a scarlet gown, and she was France at the Marne. For all of us it is a pity that we are more often detected pitching quoits on the deck of existence than heroically irrigating our native furrows with the impure blood of the invader.

We are on our way to the last act of the biggest show in history. We are one of the last waves which the suck of war has sent lapping from the west against the east. Some of us, one hundred and six I believe, men and women, carry the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. in the red triangle on the right sleeve. They are outbound to do their bit in accordance with the established evangelical tradition. Half a hundred of us have K.C. on the sleeve, and are out to serve the country in the older formulas of Nicæa and Trent. There are two or three with the still older insignia of David. A few of us are stragglers in the army of newspaper correspondents sweeping forward on Versailles and the pensions of the Place de l’Étoile.

One day ahead of us is a shipload of newspaper men. You wonder. Are they boning up on their French conversation, like our own industrious boys of the Y.M.C.A., going at their task in the spirit of Château-Thierry? Il fait beau ce matin, n’est-ce pas? Il fait chaud ce soir, n’est-ce pas? Or are those several hundred newspaper men taking their advanced steps in French: La maison pleine; étroit; trois de même chose; je vous verrai; jusqu’au plafond? They are on their way to chronicle the great reconciliation scene in the fiftytwo months’ drama of blood and tears; and if they were dishonest journalists, they would now be typing their story of the opening of the Peace Conference. Being honest reporters, they probably play poker. It is the way of the world, n’est-ce pas?

A day and a half behind us is the President with his peace commissioners — probably the most momentous trans-Atlantic voyage, as we say in our cautious newspaper style, in the last four hundred and twenty-six years, since the three caravels set out from Palos. It is the latest flux in the rhythm of east to west and west to east, wherein the historians have found the harmonic law of civilization. In this convoy of one converted German liner, one dreadnought, and several destroyers is concentrated the reaction to four hundred and twenty-six years of westward traffic: from Palos, from Plymouth, from Bristol, from Glasgow, from Queenstown, from Hamburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bordeaux, Genoa, Fiume, Patras, Alexandria, and Beirut; from famine, plague, pogroms, churchfires, state gibbets, dragonnades; from the inclosures and fencings and palings and caveats and Verbotens and general boredom of a thousand years, since the Goths got the number of the Roman world. To all of this the voyage of the George Washington is to-day for us the fulfillment and the answer. Time, the major-domo, draws aside the portières of Europe and announces, ‘ If you please, madam, America!’

So that Woodrow Wilson can and must and probably will go further than Pershing, with his ‘Lafayette, nous voilà!’ From the navigation bridge of his ship, these wonderfully mild December nights, quick with the breath of the spray and lit with a blazing hippodrome of constellations, the President may be peering forward into the east, and he will say, ‘ Nous voilà, Lafayette, Steuben, Kosciuszko, Christoforo Colombo, Drake, Bradford, Penn, Anne Hutchinson, La Salle, Carl Schurz; nous voilà, John Smith, Tammas Burns, Pat Casey. Michel Schmidt, Jens Jensen, Jacques Dupont, Vaclav Przebyshevski, Metros Kazandjian, and Cristo Chryselephantidopopulagolous; nous roilà, fugitives and adventurers, pioneers and buccaneers, Angles and Saxons, Picts and Scots, Celts and Iberians, Pollocks and Hunkers and Squareheads and Jews, out of whom we have built our strength and our vision. In this hour, when your strength is agonized and your vision is strained with pain, yet blinded with the radiance of a new hope, in this hour of reappraisal and reconstitution, nous voilà, a member of the family, anxious to help.’

It is obvious, however, these last three days, that the President could not whisper his will and hopes and apprehensions into the ear of ocean without prudently holding on to a stanchion or pillar or taffrail or belaying-pin or mizzen-topmast, or whatever may be the appropriate and absurdly obscure nautical term for the nearest available piece of maritime furniture. There must be quite a bit of seasickness on the ship of peace, if we may judge by our own boat. Since the first twenty-four hours out, one side of the Atlantic has been a good deal higher than the other. The sea has been rubbing its iron-gray head with a thin shampoo of foam, the wind breathes mightily through the wiring of the ship, and the rail swings up and down, up and down, across fifteen degrees of sky and fifteen degrees of sea. But the wind, when it strikes the face, is warm as well as moist and loud, and it requires no hardihood to walk the deck without an overcoat. The whole bluster of the sea is very like the gray-haired Englishman in the smokeroom, with two of someone else’s British babies on his lap. For them he tousles his hair and rends his monocle with gnashing fangs, and barks; and even so the ocean.

We have French lessons on board, administered by one of the Welfare men who knows the lingo much better than he can teach it. Being serious men and women of good standing in the churches of their faith, the students may learn to say Il fait beau ce matin with the aid of Divine interposition; but nothing less than Providence will overcome the peculiar method employed by the instructor. He divides his class in two, and makes them chant— port, ‘Il fait beau temps ce matin’; starboard, ‘Il fait mauvais temps ce matin’; port, ‘beau’; starboard, ‘ mauvais.' And what is the use of it all? Like the minds of Mr. Wilson and the late German government, the minds of our shipload and the minds of the old text bookmakers do not meet. Voulez-vous la parapluie de votre belle-sœur? Not on your life, monsieur; greater things draw us. Je veux un billet pour le Conférence de Paix, and there is nothing about conferences de paix in the textbook.

The girls stand the trip much better than the men. Even when the Atlantic has been unkind to them, they go out bravely on deck, and from under their rugs are never quite too wan to smile back. Whereas the men are inclined to sit about the smoke-room with their heads against the wall. It is also to be not iced that the expert on personnel, who picked out the Y.W.C.A. women for our trip, did not confine himself to a series of tests in biblical history and exegesis. It cannot be mere accident that in the dark-green tailor-mades, with military shirt and cravat, they make a pleasant eyefull, as the writer for one of our enormously circulated magazines remarks, between comments on the weather and the outlook for railroad securities. This may be hard on our boys at the front, who would have nothing interfere with efficiency in their canteen workers. But duty is duty, for a personnel inspector, n’est-ce pas?

The ‘Y’ men read a good deal of war-book stuff and light fiction. The girls read The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and eagerly discuss it with such newspaper men as are available, under the pathetic illusion that our business is connected in some mysterious way with literature. Our professional wag asserts that he was in a quandary when one of the girls asked who were the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. He said he easily recalled Shem, Ham, and Japhet, but could not for the life of him think of the fourth.

In what mood are these ‘Y’ men and women going forth to their work? Very much as all armies and auxiliary services not driven by the lash have approached their tasks since wholesale fighting began in the world. There is a spirit of adventure giving glow to the fundamental fidelity to one’s job. It is the predominant matter-of-factness that at first surprises — and hurts. But that is partly because there has been time, during the half-year they have been training or waiting, for the first eager anticipations to abate — the adventure of the sea, of Europe, of service for the country, of opportunities for personal self-education outside of the legitimate hours in canteens or headquarters.

They prepare cheerily enough for the job. They meet every morning for prayer and secular song, and in the process appears the national genius for organization which might somewhat puzzle a foreigner as he gives ear from the corner of the adjacent smoke-room. After the hymns and the prayer come regularly the choraled reminders to keep on smiling and pack your troubles into the kit-bag. The programme unrolls without a lost motion, and the foreigner, in the face of such efficiency and good cheer and jesting, quite like a college rally, might wonder how close to the hearts of t hese men and women is the sense and call of their work. Do they realize this wrecked and torn and vindicated Europe that awaits them? Do they feel awe in presence of the tumult of race and class which they are about to witness from the frontier of Germany and the late Hapsburg lands? Are they aware of themselves as part of that great American wave-motion of which I have spoken, flooding back heavily against the shores of Europe?

Well, they realize in the restrained fashion of our national psychology, and they organize in the smooth, capable American fashion; but they certainly do not brood over world-drama as Tavarish Dostoievsky would, under similar circumstances, or analyze rabbits out of a silk hat like Mr. Wells. They pass easily enough from the ‘ Rock of Ages’ and the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ to Il fait chaud ce matin, or ce soir, as the case may be. The girls double-quick the promenade deck again and again, in pairs, or on the arm of an overcoated ‘Y’ man, and venture boldly into the bow of the ship, whence they are ejected ignominiously by orders from the bridge. To-morrow they will be chased back again. There are any number of young men on board who seem willing, nay anxious, to affiliate with the Y.W.C.A. They are specially useful in beating up against the wind when the sea breaks out into Corinthian shells of white spume, with green on the inner concave, a green as fresh, seemingly, as the first, day of the world.

This last assertion is obviously sentimental, but it has its measure of excuse in the face of an ocean that is a thousand times as sentimental as any body of water has a right to be when it lies between two such reticent races as the modern American and the Ulster Irish. The first twenty-four hours out from Sandy Hook the sea was like the Hudson under the ice-gray clouds of late November, only much more so: stillgray, rippling, completely filling up the inverted bowl of the sky, and just at the farthest rim a gleam of silver.

Late the second day the Atlantic began to dress for dinner, only not in the conventional black. It went in for delicate mant illas of spumed lace-work. It revealed a middle-aged passion for giddy colors — turquoise, purple, lavender, bottle-green. It spluttered all over the place, like a fat man making ready in a tiled bathroom, and whistled in the rigging quite like a fat man shaving. Musically it went the limit — the storm-music from the Valkyrie, Wilhelm Tell, the whining sob of ‘Ridi, Pagliaccio.’ Nobody can be as sentimental as a fat man when he once gets going, and nothing could be more absurdly romantic than several square thousand miles of sea-water showing off before a boat-load of ‘ Y’ girls.

II

Thus, only a matter-of-fact American editor would have the heart to run his blue pencil through such bits of the preceding tale as might seem to border dangerously on idyllic prose — or a North Irish editor. As granite a personality as we have on the ship is our table-neighbor from Belfast, who speaks of ‘Jawn Morrley,’ and has a nose pushed forward into the ether as implacable as the rock held in trust by the British Empire for the Prudential Insurance Company. And the most sentimental people on board ship are the English; the longer they have been in the Royal Air Force, or in the Imperial Picric Acid Service at Bethlehem, Pa., the closer this sentimentality lies to the surface. We have Englishmen on board who are constantly doing the Kipling chanties and ‘Mandalay’ and ‘Danny Deever.’ My own countrymen watch a ton of green water come over the side of the ship and say, ‘Some wave!’ But always I am under the apprehension that some tall, slim Englishman in a cap will turn to me and say, ‘This morning the ocean just climbed over the rail and spat at me, quite.’ Pure Kipling, you see. Whereupon it would be for me to soar to the same level, and I could probably think of nothing but the ‘Courtship of Miles Stand ish.’

But if by a masterly mental coup d’état, I should manage to scale the height of the poetic argument and remark that there was about the sea in motion an awe and a passion, my British friend would say, ‘Rather!’ In the British language ‘Rather’ is a super superlative, but it sounds like a snub. When they mean superb, they say ‘ Rather’; when they mean ‘You amaze me,’ they say, ‘ Really ? ’ and when they speak of a pet animal they wax lyrical; and of such is the United Kingdom.

It is well that our peace commissioners should master this idiomatic use of ‘Rather’ and ‘Really, lest we think the British are asking us for a billion dollars when in fact they are offering us half of the German colonies. Especially should ‘Really’ be rehearsed by the class on board the George Washington. My left-hand neighbor at table is a fair-haired British matron, with a smile of easy good-nature, as I see it now. But when I first touched lightly on the number of hundred feet in the Metropolitan Tower at home she looked at me and said ‘Really?’ in a voice that went over my head like the wind in the palm fronds, and caused me to lose much of my interest in the appletart. Now I know better. When a British subject says ‘ Really ? ’ it sounds like, ‘What the devil do you mean by intruding on the privacy of my digestion?’ but what he means is, ‘Really?’

In exchange for my data on the height of the Metropolitan Tower and the number of people living east of the Mississippi, my kindly neighbor has put at my disposal any amount of interesting side-lights on the secret history of the war, chiefly relating to the activities of German spies and what General Byng said to General Plumer on a certain gray morning in December when, by all officials accounts, Byng was in Picardy and Plumer on the Piave; this makes the revelat ions all the more sinister. Much more valuable, on the whole, are the authentic tales my neighbor has of the last winter in England; and a bitter winter it must have been, with oranges twenty cents apiece and apples seventy cents a pound. As for marmalade, it was but a memory; and perhaps that is what Haig had in mind when he said to his men, ‘We have our backs against the wall.’

One thing at the present moment is peculiarly disconcerting. The consensus of British opinion around our end of the table is that, when we get to London, we shall be homeless. It had seemed scarcely necessary to cable for hotel accommodation from New York, when the British metropolis, according to Mr. Baedeker, has ever so many hostelries, each with regiments of rooms and battalions of bathrooms. But now I learn that the one big hotel on the Embankment that I had decided upon has been taken over by the War Office. Hotel number 2 is in the hands of the Censor. Hotels 3 to 6, with nine hundred bathrooms, have been absorbed by the Food Administration, others by the Horse Guards, and most of the remainder by the Munitions Department, the Usher of the Black Rod, the Warden of the Cinque Ports, and the master of the Chiltern Hundreds. Why the British government should have given up housekeeping on so extensive a scale and gone in for hotel life can be explained on no other basis than the temptation of open plumbing in the bathrooms. We know how ruthless has been the demand made by the war for the most modern improvements.

At any rate, the choice for us would seem to be at present between a corner in the British Museum and applying for the next vacant arch under Waterloo Bridge. It was suggested that one might hire a cab at Euston Station and drive around town till one found a hotel which was destitute of bathrooms and so had escaped the cupidity of the British government. But, in the first place, we hear that there are no cabs in London, and if we managed to pick one up, it would only be to drive around all night without success. And would it be fun to spend the night navigating London, from Hampstead to Sydenham, with a steamer trunk, a suitcase, a shawl-roll and a typewriter? Well, rather!

Of course, there is just the possibility that our kindly allies are spoofing us. In that case we need a League of Nations worse than ever.

Il fait mauvais temps on the wellknown ocean, as our French instructor so well reminds us. A southern gale howls through wires and ropes and tackle and sends us listing heavily against the white surge of the sea. Even the George Washington’s double our own bulk cannot make her immune to such insistent pressure. Fate speed the George Washington and her freight! She carries with the President a good share of the hope of the world.

It is not chauvinism that makes me come back to t his League of Nations, this Union, this Reconciliation, as the one recompense above all others for four years of woe. To the French, the Belgians, the Serbs, reparation by all means, and in full measure, for their wounds and their heartaches. To the British, gratitude by all means for their magnificent act of world-salvage on the seas. To the Russians, a speedy way out of the labyrinth; escape from the cavern of a millennial despotism into the light of day. To all the victims of the great agony, to all the sufferers by land and on the seas and from the air, alleviation and a merciful forgetfulness of what it is necessary that we shall forget.

But to-day and to us, in the heart of the gray waters, so limitless and so final, all local reparations, all readjustments, all the prestige of race and frontier, fade away into the gray mist, and only one light shines out — the vision of a world united and fortified against another such Calvary as we have lived through. It cannot be alone for territories and trade agreements that eight million men have died and twenty millions now carry the wounds of battle in their flesh, their nerves, and their souls; that nations have risen from the slime of servitude and thrones have crashed into the dust; that armies have sailed ten thousand miles across the seas to water strange lands with their blood; that the Sahara and the Alpine deserts have reëchoed with the tumult; that motor-lorries have ploughed their way through the Garden of Eden; that biplanes have drummed over Bethlehem and Nazareth. If not a leagued world, then it is a world of madness.

We sing a great deal on our way to war-racked Europe. We keep on smiling twice a day; we pack up our troubles in the old kit-bag, and we follow the long, long trail. And every night, of course, toward the end of the concert, the three Associated hymns, beginning with the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ ending with ‘God Save the King,’ — and the ‘Marseillaise’ between.

‘ Perhaps it was worth while after all,’ says the professional wag at my elbow.

‘What was worth while?’

‘It took four and a half years of a world war to teach us the first stanza of “Oh, say, can you see?” Perhaps it could not have been done in less.’

‘But they have learned it,’ I said querulously.

‘Pretty well; only I hope no school of politics will arise to demand that the nations learn every verse of their national hymns: the world could not stand it.’

In the heart of the spray clouds, and on the great heave of the sea, we strain a bit more fervently than usual to see the flag streaming through the dawn’s early light; we invoke the Divine Protection for Our King a little more tremulously. But let it be confessed that Americans and Britishers let themselves go most when the first violin sounds the opening snarl of the ‘Marseillaise.’ Then we throw up our heads like the war-steeds, we suck the air like four hundred horsemen of the Apocalypse, and leave no doubt as to the sincerity of our demand for the impure blood of the invader. Very likely we are least ashamed to let ourselves go in a foreign tongue. At any rate, by our Allons and our Marchons the Europeans will know we are coming when we are still a good bit off the Munster coast. The sound travels downstairs to the cellar of the ship, upstairs to the top story, the chimneys, and the clothes lines.

I use these domestic terms advisedly. We have suffered altogether too much from the poetic obscurity that hovers over the good old nautical verbiage. There is in the upper lounge — I prefer to call it the upstairs parlor — a sign which says ‘No smoking abaft this pillar,’ and one of us, who cannot for the life of him recall whether abaft means in front or behind, has been reduced to the expedient of walking all round the pillar to make safe. We have thus smoked abaft and athwart that pillar, and to the port and starboard of it, and the whole business is nonsense. Josephus Daniels made a brave stroke for progress when he put Right and Left on our warships. Something of the color of life will go no doubt with these abafts and lees and taffrails. But then a great deal of color is going to accompany a great many old things out of life in the very near future. Baronial lawns will go, and ancient oaks, and the classics that train three per cent of us for culture and leadership, and the mantle of chivalry which woman is so recklessly throwing away in her eagerness to vote. Let them go, the good old abafts, and ivied towers, and chivalry, and much of the paraphernalia and abracadabra of an epoch that began dying on August 1, 1914. To be sure, it hurts when one thinks of Oxford, Cluny — But no, I am modern — Satan, get thee abaft me, or athwart, as the case may be.

In this seemingly mixed and inadequate mood we approach Europe and the Peace — frivolous, and yet a little frightened, gay but not outside of the echo of a sense of tears. Europe looms up ahead of us, the laboratory in which is to be fashioned a new world. ‘And this new world, madame, is it that it is the parlor of the furniture of walnut of our grandmothers?’ ‘But no, no, monsieur, it shall be the free garden of our grandchildren.’

N’est-ce pas?