The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me | Page 8

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 to the war. We were gathered in the dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south--a mere speck on the horizon's edge. Signals began to twinkle from her and we felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at full speed. The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, but we sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for, though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have been a U-boat lure. Often the