A Traveller in War-Time | Page 3

bourgeoisie monopolizing the alcove tables and
joking with the fat steward. Here in this 'fumoir', lawyers, doctors,
business men of all descriptions, newspaper correspondents, movie
photographers, and millionaires who had never crossed save in a
'cabine de luxe', rubbed elbows and exchanged views and played bridge
together. There were Y. M. C. A. people on their way to the various
camps, reconstruction workers intending to build temporary homes for
the homeless French, and youngsters in the uniform of the American
Field Service, going over to drive camions and ambulances; many of

whom, without undue regret, had left college after a freshman year.
They invaded the 'fumoir', undaunted, to practise atrocious French on
the phlegmatic steward; they took possession of a protesting piano in
the banal little salon and sang: "We'll not come back till it's over over
there." And in the evening, on the darkened decks, we listened and
thrilled to the refrain:
"There's a long, long trail a-winding Into the land of my dreams."
We were Argonauts--even the Red Cross ladies on their way to
establish rest camps behind the lines and brave the mud and rains of a
winter in eastern France. None, indeed, were more imbued with the
forthfaring spirit than these women, who were leaving, without regret,
sheltered, comfortable lives to face hardships and brave dangers
without a question. And no sharper proof of the failure of the old social
order to provide for human instincts and needs could be found than the
conviction they gave of new and vitalizing forces released in them. The
timidities with which their sex is supposedly encumbered had
disappeared, and even the possibility of a disaster at sea held no terrors
for them. When the sun fell down into the warm waters of the Gulf
Stream and the cabins below were sealed--and thus become
insupportable--they settled themselves for the night in their
steamer-chairs and smiled at the remark of M. le Commissaire that it
was a good "season" for submarines. The moonlight filtered through
the chinks in the burlap shrouding the deck. About 3 a.m. the
khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee became communicative, the Red
Cross ladies produced chocolate. It was the genial hour before the final
nap, from which one awoke abruptly at the sound of squeegees and
brooms to find the deck a river of sea water, on whose banks a wild
scramble for slippers and biscuit-boxes invariably ensued. No
experience could have been more socializing.
"Well, it's a relief," one of the ladies exclaimed, "not to be travelling
with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box! Oh, yes, I realize what I'm
doing. I'm going to live in one of those flimsy portable houses with
twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but
it's better than thrashing around looking for something to do and never

finding it, never getting anything real to spend one's energy-on. I've
closed my country house, I've sublet my apartment, I've done with teas
and bridge, and I'm happier than I've been in my life even if I don't get
enough sleep."
Another lady, who looked still young, had two sons in the army. "There
was nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and I want
to be useful. My husband has to stay at home; he can't leave his
business." Be useful! There she struck the new and aggressive note of
emancipation from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, of wider
service for the unnamed and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider
self- realization of which service is but a by-product. I recall
particularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in
clear grey eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope
renewed. Had she lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been
doomed to slow desiccation. There are thousands of such women in
France today, and to them the great war has brought salvation.
From what country other than America could so many thousands of
pilgrims --even before our nation had entered the war--have hurried
across a wide ocean to take their part? No matter what religion we
profess, whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists,
pragmatists, empiricists for ever. Our faces are set toward strange
worlds presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour and
substance--worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values.
And on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce's splendid
summary of the American philosophy--of the American religion as set
forth by William James:
"The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or the home- builder
transferred to the metaphysical or to the religious realm. There is a
far-off home, our long lost spiritual fortune. Experience alone can
guide us