The High Heart Part 61

"Oh, they're long on ungraciousness, all right."

"Yes; they're very long on ungraciousness--"

"Even dad feels that. You should hear him cuss after he's been kotowing to some British celebrity--and given him the best of all he's got--and put him up at the good clubs. They bring him letters in shoals, you know--"

"I'm afraid it has to be admitted that the best-mannered among them are often rude from our transatlantic point of view; and yet the very rudeness is one of the defects of their good qualities. You can no more take the ungraciousness out of the English character than you can take the hardness out of granite; but if granite wasn't hard it wouldn't serve its purposes. We Canadians know that, don't you see? We allow for it in advance, just as you allow for the clumsiness of the elephant for the sake of his strength and sagacity. We're not angels ourselves--neither you Americans nor we Canadians; and yet we like to get the credit for such small merits as we possess."

Hugh whipped off the blossom of a roadside flower as he swung his stick.

"All they give us credit for is money."

"Well, they certainly give you a great deal of credit for that!" I laughed. "They make a golden calf of you. They fall down and wors.h.i.+p you, like the children of Israel in the wilderness. When we're as rich as we shall be some day they'll do the same by us."

Within a week my intercourse with Hugh had come to be wholly along international lines. We were no longer merely a man and a woman; we were types; we were points of view. The world-struggle--the time-struggle, as Larry Strangways would have called it--had broken out in us. The interlocking of human destinies had become apparent. As positively as Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, we had our part in the vast drama.

Even Hugh, against all his inclinations to hang back, was obliged to take his share. So lost were we in the theme that, as we tramped along, we had not a thought for the bracing wind, the ruffled seas, the das.h.i.+ng of surf over ledges, or the exquisite, gentle savagery of the rocky flowering uplands, with villas marking the sky-line as they do on the Cte d'Azur.

I was the more willing to discuss the subject since I felt it a kind of mission from Mr. Strangways to carry out the object he had so much at heart. I was to be--so far as so humble a body as I could be it--an interpreter of the one country to the other. I reckoned that if I explained and explained and explained, and didn't let myself grow tired of explaining, some little shade of the distrust which each of the great English-speaking nations has for its fellow might be scrubbed away. I couldn't do much, but the value of all effort is in proportion to the opportunity. So I began with Hugh.

"You see, Hugh, peoples are like people. Each of us has his weak points as well as his strong ones; but we don't necessarily hate each other on that account. You've lived in England, and you know the English rub you up the wrong way. I've lived there, too, and had exactly the same experience. But we go through just that thing with lots of individuals with whom we manage to be very good friends. You and your brother Jack, for instance, don't hit it off so very well; and yet you contrive to be Brokens.h.i.+res together and uphold the honor of the family."

"I'm a Socialist and Jack's a sn.o.b--"

"That's it. Mentally you're the world apart. But, as you've objects in common to work for, you get along fairly well. Now why shouldn't the Englishman and the American do the same? Why should they always see how much they differ instead of how much they are alike? Why should they always underscore each other's faults when by seeing each other's good points they could benefit not only themselves, but the world? If there was an entente, let us say, between the British Empire and the United States--not exactly an alliance, perhaps, if people are afraid of the word--"

He stopped and wheeled round suddenly, suspicion in his small, myosotis-colored eyes.

"Look here, little Alix; isn't this the dope that fresh guy Strangways was handing out the other day?"

I flushed, but I didn't stammer.

"I don't care whether it is or not. Besides, it isn't dope; it's food; it's medicine; it's a remedy for the ills of this poor old civilization.

We've got it in our power, we English-speaking peoples--"

"You haven't," he declared, coolly. "Your country would still be the goat."

"Yes," I agreed, "Canada would still be the goat; but we don't mind that. We're used to it. You'll always have a fling at us on one side and England on the other; but we're like the strong, good-natured boy who doesn't resent kicks and cuffs because he knows he can grow and thrive in spite of them."

He put his hand on my arm and spoke in the kindly tone that reminded me of his father.

"My dear little girl, you can drop it. It won't go down. Suppose we keep to the sort of thing you can tackle. You see, when you've married me you'll be an American. Then you'll be out of it."

I was hurt. I was furious. The expression, too, was getting on my nerves. I began to wish I was out of it. Since I couldn't be in it, marriage might prove a Lethe bath, in which I should forget I had anything to do with it. Sheer desperation made me cry out:

"Very well, then, Hugh! If we're to be married, can't we be married quickly? Then I shall have it off my mind."

There was not only a woeful decline of spirit in his response, but a full acceptance of the Brokens.h.i.+re yoke.

"We can't be married any quicker than dad says. But I'll talk to him."

He made no objection, however, when, a little later, I received from my uncle a draft for my entire fortune and announced my intention of handing the sum over to Mr. Strangways for investment. Hugh probably looked on the amount as too insignificant to talk about; in addition to which some Brokens.h.i.+re instinct for the profitable may have led him to appreciate a thing so good as to make it folly to say nay to it. The result was that I heard from Larry Strangways, in letters which added nothing to my comfort.

I don't know what I expected him to say; but, whatever it was, he didn't say it. He wasn't curt; his letters were not short. On the contrary, he wrote at length, and brought up subjects that had nothing to do with certificates of stock. But they were all political or international, or related in one way or another to the ideal of his heart--England and America! The British Empire and the United States! The brotherhood of democracies! Why in thunder had the bally world waited so long for the coalition of dominating influences which alone could keep it straight?

Why dream of the impossible when the practical had not as yet been tried? Why talk peace, peace, when there was no peace at The Hague, if a full and controlling sympathy could be effected nearer home--let us say at Ottawa? He was going to Canada to enlist; he would start in a few days' time; but he was doing it not merely to fight for the Cause; he was going to be one man, at least, just a straggling democratic scout--one of a forlorn hope, if you chose to call it so--to offer his life to a union of which the human race had the same sort of need as human beings of wedlock.

And in all this there was no reference to me. He might not have loved me; I might not have loved him. I answered the letters in the vein in which they were written, and once or twice showed my replies to Hugh.

"Forget it!" was his ordinary comment. "The American eagle is too wise an old bird to be caught with salt on its tail."

Perhaps it was because Larry Strangways made no appeal to me that I gave myself to forwarding his work with a more enthusiastic zeal. I had to do it quietly, for fear of offending Hugh; but I got my opportunities--that is, I got my opportunities to talk, though I saw I made no impression.

I was only a girl--the queer Canadian who had been Ethel Rossiter's nursery governess and whom the Brokens.h.i.+re family, for unexplained reasons, had accepted as Hugh's future wife. What could I know about matters at which statesmen had always s.h.i.+ed? It was preposterous that I should speak of them; it was presumptuous. n.o.body told me that; I saw it in people's eyes.

And I should have seen it in their eyes more plainly if they had been interested. No one was. An entente between the United States and the British Empire might have been an alliance between Bolivia and Beluchistan. It wasn't merely fas.h.i.+onable folk who wouldn't think of it; no one would. I knew plenty of people by this time. I knew townspeople of Newport, and summer residents, and that intermediate group of retired admirals and professors who come in between the two. I knew shop people and I knew servants, all with their stake in the country, their stake in the world. Not a soul among them cared a hang.

And then, threatening to put me entirely out of business, we got the American war refugees and the English visitors. I group them together because they belonged together. They belonged together for the reason that there was nothing each one of them didn't know--by hearsay from some one who knew it by hearsay. The American war refugees had all been in contact with people in England whom they characterized as well informed. The English visitors were well informed because they were English visitors. Some of them told prodigious secrets which they had indirectly from Downing Street. Others gave the reasons why General Isleworth had been superseded in his command, and the part Mrs.

Lamingford, that beautiful American, had played in the scandal. From others we learned that Lady Hull, with her baleful charm, was the influence really responsible for the shortage of sh.e.l.ls.

War was shown to us by our English visitors not as a mighty, pitiless contest, but as a series of social, s.e.xual, and political intrigues, in which women pulled the strings. I know it was talk; but talk it was. For weeks, for months, we had it with the greater number of our meals.

Wherever there were English guests--women of t.i.tle they often were, or eccentric public men--we had an orgy of tales in which the very entrails of English reputations were torn out. No one was spared---not even the Highest in the Land. All the American could do was to listen open-mouthed; and open-mouthed he listened.

I will say for the English that they have no disloyalty but that of chatter; but the plain American could not be expected to know that. To him the chatter was gospel truth. He has none of that facility for discounting gossip on the great which the Englishman learns with his mother tongue. The American heard it greedily; he was avid for more. He retailed it at dinners and teas, and in that Reading-room which is really a club. Naturally enough! From what our English visitors told us about themselves, their statesmen, their generals, their admirals were footlers at the best, and could, moreover, be described by a vigorous compound Anglo-Saxon word in the Book of Revelations.

And the English papers were no better. All the important ones, weeklies as well as dailies, were sent to Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re, and copies lay about at Mr. Rossiter's. They sickened me. I stopped reading them. There was good in them, doubtless; but what I chiefly found was a wild tempest of abuse of this party or that party, of this leading man or that leading man, with the effect on the imagination of a s.h.i.+p going down amid the curses and confusion of officers and pa.s.sengers alike. It may have sounded well in England; very likely it did; but in America it was horrible. I mention it here only because, in this babel of voices, my own faint pipe on behalf of a league of democracies could no more be heard than the tinkle of a sacring bell amid the shrieking and bursting of sh.e.l.ls.

I was often tempted to say no more about it and let the world go to pot.

Then I thought of Larry Strangways, offering his life for an ideal as to which I was unwilling to speak a word. So I would begin my litany of Bolivia and Beluchistan over again, crooning it into the ears of people, both gentle and simple, who, in the matter of response, might never have heard the names of the two countries I mentioned together.

A few lines from one of Larry Strangways's letters, written from Valcartier, prompted me to persevere in this course:

People are no more interested here than they are on our side of the border; but it's got to come, for all that. What we need is a public opinion; and a public opinion can only be created by writing and talk. Thank the Lord, you and I can talk if we are not very strong on writing! and talk we must! Bigger streams have risen from smaller springs. The mustard seed is the least of all seeds; but it grows to be the greatest of herbs.

It might have been easier to call forth a responsive spark had we realized that there was a war. But we hadn't--not in the way that the fact came to us afterward. In spite of the taking of Namur, Lige, Maubeuge, the advance on Paris, and the rolling back on the Marne, we had seen no more than chariots and horses of fire in the clouds. It was not only distant, it was phantom-like. We read the papers; we heard of horrors; American war refugees and English visitors alike piled up the agonies, to which we listened eagerly; we saw the moneyed magnates come and go in counsel with Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re; we knitted and sewed and subscribed to funds; but, so far as vital partic.i.p.ation went, Hugh was right in saying we were out of it.

And then a shot fell into our midst, smiting us with awe.

Cissie Boscobel, Hugh, another young man, and I had been playing tennis one September morning on Mrs. Rossiter's courts. The other young man having left for Bailey's Beach, the remaining three of us were sauntering back toward the house when a lad, whom Cissie recognized as belonging to the Burkes' establishment, came running up with a telegram.

As it was for Cissie she stood still to read it, while Hugh and I strolled on. Once or twice I glanced back toward her; but she still held the brief lines up before her as if she couldn't make out their meaning.

When she rejoined us, as she presently did, I noticed that her color had died out, though there was otherwise no change in her unless it was in stillness. The question was as to whether we should go to Bailey's or not. I didn't want to go and Hugh declared he wouldn't go without me.

"We'll put it up to Cissie," he said, as we reached the house. "If she goes we'll all go."

"I think I won't go," she answered, quietly; adding, without much change of tone, "Leatherhead's been killed in action."

So there really was a war! Hugh's deep "Oh!" was in Itself like the distant rumble of guns.