The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me | Page 7

the kilowat power of the eyes. He was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score on the Emporia Country Club links--anyway something of broad, universal human interest. But those things seemed to pall on her. So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women at home--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These things left her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered, slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she was at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. She managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansas partner suggested that life would be broader and better for women after the war, because they would have so much more important a part to do than before in the useful work of the world. "Ah, yes," she said, "perhaps so. But with the men all gone what shall we do when we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllables of petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you know women were made to be pet-ted." There was a bewildered second under the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered seriously her theory. He had never cherished such a theory before. But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the pleasant new things in it--this theory of the woman requiring to be pet-ted!
Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said: "Oh, yes--come on, Col-o-nel"--making three unaccented syllables of the word--"and we shall have une femme sandweech." She gave the Colonel her arm. The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy with the Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia Country Club, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes to the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyous incandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchman but gazing sweetly at the American, "Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?" They must have weighed six or eight ounces! And she shifted them to the Col-o-nel as though they weighed a ton!
So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking room to find his mate. They two then and there discussed the woman proposition in detail and drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporia type, the American type that carries its own books and burdens and does not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry and does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may die for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing that they should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others. But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry and me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the Armenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerage and ail day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the drill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army and avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling, they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It was queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. It was written on a barbarie scale with savage cadences and broken time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had the charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.
"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy in khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano. "That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that's the 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax 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