The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me | Page 8

and he went away
whistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with their idea
on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music, the
Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins from
Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their striking
differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across the world to help
in the great fight for democracy which, in its essence, is only the right
to live in the world, each man, each cult, each race, each blood and
each nation after its own kind. And about all the war involves is the
right to live, and to love one's own kind of women, one's own kind of

music, one's own kind of humour, one's own kind of philosophy;
knowing that they are not perfect and understanding their limitations;
trusting to time and circumstance to bring out the fast colours of life in
the eternal wash. Thinking thoughts like these that night, Henry's
bunk-mate could not sleep. So he slipped on a grey overcoat over his
pajamas and put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, and went
out on deck into the hot night that falls in the gulf stream in summer. It
was the murky hour before dawn and around and around the deck he
paced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt spectre in the night. The
deck chairs were filled with sleepers from the berths below decks. At
last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped to gaze over the rail at
the water and the stars when he heard this from a deck chair behind him,
"Wake up, Net--for God's sake wake up!" whispered a frightened
woman's voice. "There's that awful thing again that scared me so
awhile ago!"
[Illustration with caption: "Col-o-nel, will you please carry my
books?"]
Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean interested us. An ocean
always seems so unreasonable to inlanders. And that morning when
there was "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking,"
Henry came alongside and looked at the seascape, all twisting and
writhing and tossing and billowing, up and down and sideways. He also
looked at his partner who was gradually growing pale and wan and
weary. And Henry heard this: "She's on a bender; she's riz about ten
feet during the night. I guess there's been rain somewhere up near the
headwaters or else the fellow took his finger out of the hole in the dyke.
Anyway, she'll be out of her banks before breakfast. I don't want any
breakfast; I'm going to bed for the day." And he went.
During the day Henry brought the cheerful information that the Doctor
was down and that the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearing
out the deck. Henry also added that her slapping was scheduled for that
night.
"Has her hair slopped over yet?" This from me.

"No," answered Henry, "but it's getting crinklier and crinklier and she
looks pinker and pinker, and prettier and prettier, and you ought to see
her in her new purple sweater. She sprang that on the boat this
afternoon! It's laying 'em out in swaths!" Henry's affinity was afraid to
turn off his back. But he turned a pale face toward his side-kick and
whispered: "Henry, you tell her," he gulped before going on, "that if
she can't find anyone else to slap, there's a man down here who can't
fight back!"
A sense of security comes to one who churns along seven days on a
calm sea on an eventless voyage. And the French, by easy-going ways,
stimulate that sense of security; we had heard weird stories of
boat-drills at daybreak, of midnight alarms and of passengers sleeping
on deck in their life preservers, and we were prepared for the thrills
which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have. They never came.
One afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had notice at noon that we
would try on our life preservers that afternoon. The life preservers were
thrown on our beds by the stewards and at three o'clock each passenger
appeared beside the life-boat assigned to him, donned his life-belt
which gave him a ridiculously stuffed appearance, answered to a
roll-call, guyed those about him after the manner of old friends, and
waited for something else. It never came. The ship's officers gradually
faded from the decks and the passengers, after standing around
foolishly for a time, disappeared one by one into their cabins and
bloomed out again with their life-belts moulted! That was the last we
heard of the boat-drill or the life-belts. The French are just that casual.
But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grisly
incident that brought us close up