The High Heart

by Basil King

  CHAPTER XXIII

  As Hugh Brokenshire and I were walking along the Ocean Drive a few daysafter Larry Strangways had come and gone, the dear lad got somesatisfaction from charging me with inconsistency.

  "You're certainly talking about England and Canada to-day verydifferently from what you used to."

  "Am I? Well, if it seems so it's because you don't understand theattitude of Canadians toward their mother country. As a country, as agovernment, England has been magnificently true to us always. It's onlybetween Englishmen and Canadians as individuals that irritation arises,and for that most Canadians don't care. The Englishman snubs and theCanadian grows bumptious. I don't think the Canadian would growbumptious if the Englishman didn't snub. Both snubbing and bumptiousnessare offensive to me; but that, I suppose, is because I'm over-sensitive.And yet one forgets sensitiveness when it comes to anything reallynational. In that we're one, with as perfect a solidarity as that whichbinds Oregon to Florida. You'll never find one of us who isn't proud toserve when England gives the orders."

  "To be snubbed by her for serving."

  "Certainly; to be snubbed by her for serving! It's all we look for; it'sall we shall ever get. No one need make any mistake about that. InCanada we're talking of sending fifty thousand troops to the front. Wemay send five hundred thousand and we shall still be snubbed. But we'renot such children as to go into a cause in the hope that some one willgive us sweets. We do it for the Cause. We know, too, that it isn'texactly injustice on the English side; it's only ungraciousness."

  "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 kotowingto some British celebrity--and given him the best of all he's got--andput him up at the good clubs. They bring him letters in shoals, youknow--"

  "I'm afraid it has to be admitted that the best-mannered among them areoften rude from our transatlantic point of view; and yet the veryrudeness is one of the defects of their good qualities. You can no moretake the ungraciousness out of the English character than you can takethe hardness out of granite; but if granite wasn't hard it wouldn'tserve its purposes. We Canadians know that, don't you see? We allow forit in advance, just as you allow for the clumsiness of the elephant forthe sake of his strength and sagacity. We're not angelsourselves--neither you Americans nor we Canadians; and yet we like toget 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!" Ilaughed. "They make a golden calf of you. They fall down and worshipyou, like the children of Israel in the wilderness. When we're as richas we shall be some day they'll do the same by us."

  Within a week my intercourse with Hugh had come to be wholly alonginternational lines. We were no longer merely a man and a woman; we weretypes; we were points of view. The world-struggle--the time-struggle, asLarry Strangways would have called it--had broken out in us. Theinterlocking of human destinies had become apparent. As positively asFranz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, we had our part in the vast drama.Even Hugh, against all his inclinations to hang back, was obliged totake 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 dashingof surf over ledges, or the exquisite, gentle savagery of the rockyflowering uplands, with villas marking the sky-line as they do on theCote d'Azur.

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

  "You see, Hugh, peoples are like people. Each of us has his weak pointsas well as his strong ones; but we don't necessarily hate each other onthat account. You've lived in England, and you know the English rub youup the wrong way. I've lived there, too, and had exactly the sameexperience. But we go through just that thing with lots of individualswith 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 beBrokenshires together and uphold the honor of the family."

  "I'm a Socialist and Jack's a snob--"

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

  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 Strangwayswas 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 thegoat."

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

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

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

  I was hurt. I was furious. The expression, too, was getting on mynerves. 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 hadanything to do with it. Sheer desperation made me cry out:

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

  There was not only a woeful decline of spirit in his response, but afull acceptance of the Brokenshire 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 myuncle a draft for my entire fortune and announced my intention ofhanding the sum over to Mr. Strangways for investment. Hugh probablylooked on the amount as too insignificant to talk about; in addition towhich some Brokenshire instinct for the profitable may have led him toappreciate a thing so good as to make it folly to say nay to it. Theresult was that I heard from Larry Strangways, in letters which addednothing to my comfort.

  I don't know what I expected him to say; but, whatever it was, he didn'tsay it. He wasn't curt; his letters were not short. On the contrary, hewrote at length, and brought up subjects that had nothing to do withcertificates of stock. But they were all political or international, orrelated in one way or another to the ideal of his heart--England andAmerica! The British Empire and the United States! The brotherhood ofdemocracies! Why in thunder had the bally world waited so long for thecoalition of dominating influences which alone could keep it straight?Why dream of the impossible when the practical had not as yet beentried? Why talk peace, peace, when there was no peace at The Hague, if afull and controlling sympathy could be effected nearer home--let us sayat Ottawa? He was going to Canada to e
nlist; he would start in a fewdays' time; but he was doing it not merely to fight for the Cause; hewas going to be one man, at least, just a straggling democraticscout--one of a forlorn hope, if you chose to call it so--to offer hislife to a union of which the human race had the same sort of need ashuman beings of wedlock.

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

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

  Perhaps it was because Larry Strangways made no appeal to me that I gavemyself to forwarding his work with a more enthusiastic zeal. I had to doit quietly, for fear of offending Hugh; but I got my opportunities--thatis, 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'snursery governess and whom the Brokenshire family, for unexplainedreasons, had accepted as Hugh's future wife. What could I know aboutmatters at which statesmen had always shied? It was preposterous that Ishould speak of them; it was presumptuous. Nobody told me that; I saw itin people's eyes.

  And I should have seen it in their eyes more plainly if they had beeninterested. No one was. An entente between the United States and theBritish Empire might have been an alliance between Bolivia andBeluchistan. It wasn't merely fashionable folk who wouldn't think of it;no one would. I knew plenty of people by this time. I knew townspeopleof Newport, and summer residents, and that intermediate group of retiredadmirals and professors who come in between the two. I knew shop peopleand I knew servants, all with their stake in the country, their stake inthe world. Not a soul among them cared a hang.

  And then, threatening to put me entirely out of business, we got theAmerican war refugees and the English visitors. I group them togetherbecause they belonged together. They belonged together for the reasonthat there was nothing each one of them didn't know--by hearsay fromsome one who knew it by hearsay. The American war refugees had all beenin contact with people in England whom they characterized as wellinformed. The English visitors were well informed because they wereEnglish visitors. Some of them told prodigious secrets which they hadindirectly from Downing Street. Others gave the reasons why GeneralIsleworth had been superseded in his command, and the part Mrs.Lamingford, that beautiful American, had played in the scandal. Fromothers we learned that Lady Hull, with her baleful charm, was theinfluence really responsible for the shortage of shells.

  War was shown to us by our English visitors not as a mighty, pitilesscontest, but as a series of social, sexual, and political intrigues, inwhich women pulled the strings. I know it was talk; but talk it was. Forweeks, for months, we had it with the greater number of our meals.Wherever there were English guests--women of title they often were, oreccentric public men--we had an orgy of tales in which the very entrailsof English reputations were torn out. No one was spared---not even theHighest in the Land. All the American could do was to listenopen-mouthed; and open-mouthed he listened.

  I will say for the English that they have no disloyalty but that ofchatter; but the plain American could not be expected to know that. Tohim the chatter was gospel truth. He has none of that facility fordiscounting gossip on the great which the Englishman learns with hismother tongue. The American heard it greedily; he was avid for more. Heretailed it at dinners and teas, and in that Reading-room which isreally a club. Naturally enough! From what our English visitors told usabout themselves, their statesmen, their generals, their admirals werefootlers at the best, and could, moreover, be described by a vigorouscompound Anglo-Saxon word in the Book of Revelations.

  And the English papers were no better. All the important ones, weekliesas well as dailies, were sent to Mr. Brokenshire, and copies lay aboutat Mr. Rossiter's. They sickened me. I stopped reading them. There wasgood in them, doubtless; but what I chiefly found was a wild tempest ofabuse of this party or that party, of this leading man or that leadingman, with the effect on the imagination of a ship going down amid thecurses and confusion of officers and passengers alike. It may havesounded well in England; very likely it did; but in America it washorrible. I mention it here only because, in this babel of voices, myown faint pipe on behalf of a league of democracies could no more beheard than the tinkle of a sacring bell amid the shrieking and burstingof shells.

  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 towhich I was unwilling to speak a word. So I would begin my litany ofBolivia and Beluchistan over again, crooning it into the ears of people,both gentle and simple, who, in the matter of response, might never haveheard the names of the two countries I mentioned together.

  A few lines from one of Larry Strangways's letters, written fromValcartier, 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 werealized that there was a war. But we hadn't--not in the way that thefact came to us afterward. In spite of the taking of Namur, Liege,Maubeuge, the advance on Paris, and the rolling back on the Marne, wehad seen no more than chariots and horses of fire in the clouds. It wasnot only distant, it was phantom-like. We read the papers; we heard ofhorrors; American war refugees and English visitors alike piled up theagonies, to which we listened eagerly; we saw the moneyed magnates comeand go in counsel with Mr. Brokenshire; we knitted and sewed andsubscribed to funds; but, so far as vital participation went, Hugh wasright 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 tennisone September morning on Mrs. Rossiter's courts. The other young manhaving left for Bailey's Beach, the remaining three of us weresauntering back toward the house when a lad, whom Cissie recognized asbelonging to the Burkes' establishment, came running up with a telegram.As it was for Cissie she stood still to read it, while Hugh and Istrolled on. Once or twice I glanced back toward her; but she still heldthe 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 haddied out, though there was otherwise no change in her unless it was instillness. The question was as to whether we should go to Bailey's ornot. 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 shegoes we'll all go."

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

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