Studies in Patriotism

I

AN author of merited fame, for whose masterpieces the present writer entertains a certain wistful admiration, has published, as an item of literary interest, a formidable list of the works that he consulted in the course of writing one of his most successful tales — a novel dealing with bygone ships and the owners of them; men who sought adventure and worthy aggrandizement in far countries and the islands of the sea. The interest of such a revelation was indisputable, yet one had to decide whether the precedent could be tolerated, bearing in mind the well-known facility with which literary men follow one another, like sheep through a gate. The present writer decided it to be a matter of taste, not to be argued about . A matter, moreover, quite out of his own way, since his books deal with things and persons so colloquial and immediate that the conventional author’s study is a strange place to him, and he regards with apprehension a workroom lined with books.

But it gave him an idea. Just as there must inevitably be a fascination in reading the names of books consulted in the building of a work of art, in studying the shores and cradles on which the vessel was raised and which floated away from her as she slid down the ways at her launching, so there must be a certain glamour in the recollection of persons and moods partly responsible for the growth of a tale. I say ‘partly,’ because it has always seemed to me that men do not rightly understand how a story grows. It is assumed here that a story ought to grow piece by piece, the design well thought out and pondered, every section and drawer and sliding panel a smooth, hand-fitted affair, bearing the trade-finish of a craftsman, rather than that it should be hastily fabricated and glued together and flung on the market, with the varnish sticky and the hinges out of alignment. This is what I understand by the old Latin tag, that ‘Art is long.’ It does not mean that the artist has a right to be lazy. It implies that there should be a period between the action and the presentation of it. So, to resume, there are persons and moods only partly responsible for the growth of a tale, because those persons and moods have what one may call a merely catalytic action upon the author’s mind. Here you have the secret which torments the plain people who want so much to know all about the thing ‘as it actually happened.’ No one has ever discovered why these folk read novels at all, since the information they crave is so ably purveyed in the daily press.

There are, of course, authors still alive, who honestly believe they are ‘drawing from life’ in their fictions, unaware that, in so far as they are correct, they diminish the value of their work. They have mistaken their vocation, and should go at once into the photographic business, where such claims are considered, and paid for at the market rate.

Moods and persons, then, whose advent is instrumental in precipitating in the author’s mind those soluble and shadowy elements which are the basis of a work of art: the moods and persons pass, and are possibly forgotten; or they may return and evoke yet other moods and persons, shadows of shadows, in whose communion the artist can see the faint beginnings of another tale. A professional analogist might easily depict the business as a species of transcendental procreation; a sort of manure-bed of dead and decomposing memories, out of which proceeds the fantastic fecundity of the imagination.

Something of this stirred in the mind of the present writer some five years ago, as he sat in the Garden of the White Tower at Saloniki, drinking lemonade and meditating, while a casual companion talked amusingly of his adventures in the Ægean. It was necessary to cultivate one’s own soul in those days, and to seek spiritual support in the contemplation of eternal principles; for, as a nation, or a corporation of nations, at war, we were apparently in a bad way. Our armies seemed to get nowhere. Our navies were, by a process of attrition, disappearing either beneath the waves or into the fogs of censorship. We were, indeed, in danger of being defeated by our own censors, who, for example, proclaimed our own Macedonian front ‘quiet,’ while all the time the shattered battalions were being carried past us to the hospital ships in the harbor. We were getting nowhere; and our enemies, as was evident from their insistent and powerful wireless messages, were feeling extremely fit.

Moreover, we had just witnessed an event which pessimists attributed to our own incompetence against an alert enemy. The city had been destroyed by fire. From where we sat, coils of smoke could be seen rising above the ruins, and the earth shook at intervals, as naval parties fired charges beneath perilous masses of still-standing masonry. We were drinking lemonade, because there was no malt liquor or any means of transporting it. The waiter who loitered near us had already endeavored to negotiate the purchase from us of our old garments, such merchandise having suddenly assumed the value and scarcity of bales of oriental purple. With a glint in his Hellenic eye, he had informed us that all the Jews were burned out and were offering great sums for clothing. He was puzzled at our calm reception of this news, not having lived in England, where such functions are tacitly left in Israelitish hands.

The immediate disaster, however, was only a sample of the broad general fact that we were not getting along. We were not rising to the occasion, to use a phrase whose meaning has been obscured by incessant abuse. What preoccupied the present writer, in spite of his companion’s amusing remarks, was the grayness of the future. The war was going on, but it seemed more a matter of momentum than of vitality. An observant eye noted that the steampressure was dropping, as if the fire had gone out. Patriotism, as it was understood and felt in 1914, seemed to have shot its bolt. Here we were, English, French, Italian, Greeks, Serbs, and Russians, scarcely civil to each other at the Cercle Militaire, living our own lives apart, suspicious, critical, and illtempered. In our hasty construction of this huge and complicated war-machine, we had forgotten to put any oil on the countless working parts, and the heat of friction was absorbing all the power. And this was evocative of a still wider sweep of thought. Looking ahead a few years, ignoring whether we won or lost, — since, at the rate we were going, nobody would care at the last, — the question loomed up, what would be our inspiration in those coming days? In other words, what should we write about?

The man of affairs may conceivably smile at the naïveté of a person who sat looking at a burning city, as Nero fiddled at Rome, in the midst of so huge a conflict, and thought it important what sort of novels would be written in ten years’ time. But the man of affairs is reminded that literature is an integer of nationality. It is the gauge that registers for us the form and pressure of the time. One can imagine, for example, that, if that early Continental Congress had been provided, by some miraculous dispensation, with advance copies of Mr. Tarkington’s Turmoil, E. W. Howe’s Story of a Country Town, and Hamlin Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Cooly, there would have fallen a silence, while judgments were adjusted and short-sighted eyes brought into focus.

At the time, however, when the present writer sat listening to the dull thump of the dynamite charges, and watching the white clouds of brick-dust rising and spreading over the ruins, his interest centred in this question of Patriotism. The scene was a garden behind a collection of buildings devoted to pleasure. Seated about us were officers in all the uniforms of the Allies. Most of them bore on their breasts various ribbons. It was a regular joke in each army to disparage the decorations of the foreigner. The Britisher’s amusement at the Croix de Guerre was only surpassed by the Frenchman’s dry wit at the expense of the Military Cross. The medals of such folk as Russians and Greeks were too funny for words. The beautiful and romantic names of the Latin-Slavonic orders were the butt of wine-bibbers and sensualists.

This derision was a symptom of the formidable paralysis of soul creeping over us at that now-distant time. We no longer believed in each other’s patriotism. And it was while thinking this over, that the present writer suddenly began to pay some sort of attention to his companion. This gentleman had been in action three hundred times,— in the Ægean, with enemy submarines and so forth, — and his activity had culminated in his ship being sent to the bottom by a mine. He was talking about a very mysterious case of a ship losing the rest of a convoy in one of those fogs that beset the mariner in among the Cyclades, or, as we used to call them in the old days, the Grecian Arches. She was a small ship, loaded with stores, owned by a local firm, but requisitioned by the Allies. And her master and mate were Englishmen. No, he did not know them personally. The mystery lay in the fact that this ship had been captured since by our forces in the Black Sea. She was taken into Custenje by a Rumanian gunboat, he had heard. And the skipper, one of those Englishmen, instead of asking to be returned to his own crowd, had bolted from Custenje and made his way back to Constantinople, where, my informant added, they had news that he was living with a woman. Now, what did I think about that?

Which was precisely what the present writer was unable to say. This question of patriotism had resolved itself so often into a mere case of desire for adventure, that he was weary of making a hasty decision. He had heard an exasperated shipmate say that he would take a master’s job from the Germans to-morrow, if they offered him one, he was so sick of waiting for promotion. He had heard a seaman bawl at a naval officer that he, the seaman, had been better treated in a German jail than in a British transport. We had more condottieri than we imagined. He recalled a certain figure who had bulked largely in his early life — a man who had defaulted, and ruined half the prominent citizens of the town, and then had run away to Constantinople, and become a Bey, or some such person. No, he would not do. He was earmarked for another tale anyhow, and he was too old for an adventure like this. For the tale would begin, of course, before that little ship quitted the convoy in the fog. Men don’t bolt away into horrifying mine-fields on the off chance of meeting a foreign woman, to live with her. It was suspected that the woman was a secondary factor in the affair. And yet, admitting the breakdown of morale, the gradual wearing away of patriotism, it was a risky thing to assume that an Englishman would take so long a chance merely for money. But, in certain moods, seamen of any race will take prodigious chances for no particular motive at all; and it was this possibility, together with the mistiness of the outline of the tale, that made it a fascinating problem.

There was another angle. My companion, with his three hundred actions, revealed no feelings of indignation toward this possible traitor. In fact, the picture of romantic experiences evoked by the description of this silent, inarticulate renegade fleeing back to Constantinople, ‘to live with a woman,’ seemed to rouse in him a certain degree of envy. To him, surfeited with obscure actions, silken dalliance behind green jalousies in Pera or Stamboul appealed strongly. ‘Lucky blighter!’ were the words he let fall, smiling.

Lucky, and plucky, too, we agreed, since it was obvious that some fortitude and enterprise were implied in the whole adventure. Much loyalty was born of prudence, it had been observed. The more one looked into this question of patriotism, the more complex the fabric of it was seen to be. For instance, how many such, actual or potential, could one find, if a census were taken? Or, given the opportunity, how many of us could stand the strain and nobly reject the subtle lure?

II

So one of us took away with him the germ of a tale, a study in patriotism born of a mood which sought to investigate the roots of a virtue. After the manner of germs, however, it remained invisible, propagating in darkness while time rolled on. The next scene lay off Gibraltar, where a sporting character in a submarine got himself entangled in the very middle of our convoy, and launched his last torpedo at us, and, fortunately for this narrative, missed by a good ten feet.

That, however, was a day’s work for a day’s pay. The interest concentrated upon Fritzie, one of our own company, a young gentleman of extensive scientific attainments, who had abandoned his post in the engine-room at an inopportune moment. Fritzie, which was the name wished on him by unscientific naval ratings because of his knowledge of German, was the product of advanced university culture, and represented for many of us a new and revised version of patriotism. He it, was who translated for us each day the gnarled and cacophonous German wireless — translated it with unconcealed pleasure; for it transpired in conversation that he sincerely held the Germans to be our superiors, and he regarded their triumph as inevitable and desirable. This was an interesting variant of the popular view of the war, and it was extraordinary how tolerant most of us were, and how respectful in the face of a degree from a Northern University. Even the obvious fact that he had scuttled away to sea to avoid conscription was condoned. It was assumed that even a votary of Science would reveal at the appointed time that elusive yet indispensable character which is all most of us have, to confirm our faith in the soul of man. We had freaks of all kinds in the forces, and our clumsy English charity covered them all so long as they stood the test at the critical moment. This the bachelor of science failed to do. At the signal for more revolutions, and at the sound of gun-fire, he abandoned everything and climbed into the neighborhood of the boats. It will thus be seen that a training in natural science may prove a safeguard against sentimental folly at the most unexpected times. He, too, it may be surmised, had looked ahead into the future, when popular opinion would be against war, and racial animosities so blurred that no one could make them out. A mere temporary embarrassment, caused by the contempt of men who knew nothing of science, was a cheap price to pay for a share in the good time coming. So he passed out of our view, and is probably forgotten by all save the present writer, who found in him yet another reagent to test the radio-active principle of patriotism.

For, in the meantime, the story had grown, had got itself a name; but for lack of a clear perception of that high note upon which we believe a piece of literature should end, it had lain more or less inert. You must get that, or your labor will be drudgery, and all your skill of no avail. This must not be confounded with what is called a ‘happy ending,’ though the happy ending is a shrill attempt at the high note. What was needed was a view of the main character as the episode closes. One had to take into account the changes in England as well as the changes in the men beyond the seas. To leave him behind those green jalousies in Pera or Stamboul was an attractive but improbable suggestion. He was not the sort of man whom the author of Désenchantée describes. To bring him home to England was just as embarrassing; for what kind of England would it be? To end him in a fight would be simply a cheap evasion. So the inventor of a tale dealing with patriotism left the thing in abeyance, while he went on with another tale, for he had learned the folly of proceeding too fast in a fog, so to speak.

And in the meantime the war got itself to a conclusion on what may be called a high note. How high that note was, we seem to have forgotten for the moment ! And, coincidently with that event, the present writer appeared once more in London, one of an orderly swarm of men seeking demobilization. Though they did not know it, they were getting something else besides demobilization. They were getting a glimpse into a new and perplexing England. They had been away, in Egypt and Syria and Macedonia, in Persia and India and East Africa, and the England whose image they had treasured in their hearts through those hot and dusty years was gone. Old fidelities, old bonds, old social orders had disappeared; a new generation, who had been at school when the war began, was in the streets now, and in the offices and factories, and they moved among their elders as easily as among cattle. This was the only England they had known; and the present writer was conscious of a vague desire among a few stranded derelicts like himself, to leave the young people undisturbed in their enjoyment.

He found this feeling less vague, one day, in a gentleman who came running across a ploughed field in Berkshire, to beg a ride into Basingstoke. He was in naval uniform of warrant rank, with the solidly built body and austere expression of feature, as if he were holding himself in with an effort, that seems to mark most warrant officers. He was welcomed, of course, and the hired car, in which the journey to a vast and lonely hospital had been made, proceeded toward the town.

The present writer has found that the shortest way to obtain information from a stranger is to talk about one’s self. What one says about one’s self is often fanciful and sometimes fictitious; but the trick works none the less easily for that. The stranger, on the other hand, has no object save in pouring forth the truth in all sincerity. With most of us it is a master-passion to be right, and to have the approbation of men. As you may discover in the smoking-room at sea, or in the smoking-car ashore.

In this particular instance, however, as we bumped and swung along that bleak and wind-swept road into Basingstoke, very little trickery was required. He saw a uniform he knew, and he was beholden to the present writer for a convenient lift into town. It poured out of him. He was in the grip of a concentrated emotion, yet he had not lost his wits. His wits were all about him: in his indignant eyes, in the depressed corners of his scornful mouth, in the turned-out, thumbs of his hairy and capable hands, in the set of his alert and bulging haunches. And when we had reached the station, and entrained for London, whither it seemed he was bound, and when, in the privacy of an otherwise empty compartment, he poured out his tale, one could not be surprised.

For he had experienced what some might call the Ultimate Disillusion. After three years on active service, during which time he had sent his savings home to his wife, he arrived in England to find her gone. Gone away with a stranger, to America, as far as he was able to make out. She had sold the furniture and told the neighbors she was going to join her husband in London, and settle there. What did I think of that? No letters for six months, and him getting anxious, of course; but he’d been moving about so much, between Dar-es-Salaam, Suez, Constantinople, and Bizerta, that nobody on his ship had had any mail for ever so long. And that was that. He’d just been down to see his old mother; but she was n’t so old for that matter, and here she was married again. There you were again. He’d been down to say good-bye. Because, if I thought he was going to stay in England — Go after her? What for? No! If I wanted to know, he had a very good thing in view. A friend of his had spoken to him about it the other day in London, and he’d put it off because he wanted to stay a bit in the old country. Now he wanted to get out of the old country as soon as he could. And never set eyes on it again. He breathed heavily and looked out at the quiet English fields with dull anger. Now, well, he would take that billet. He had his bonus and a couple of months’ pay, and a bit o’ prize money. Say four hundred pound. Enough and to spare. There were no expenses out where he was going. A friend of his was going harbor-master in a little place in the West Indies, and he had been asked to bring out a man to look after the oiltanks. It was the very thing. A couple of hundred dollars a month, free quarters, and three months’ leave after two years. And no white women for miles. He was finished, fed up, through. He’d take it!

And there was very little animus against the woman, either. His quarrel was with the whole business whereby he had been made an outcast in the new England. He made fragmentary remarks concerning the working-classes, who, he said, had ‘been making big money’ during the time of the war, and who were now behaving like cantankerous children.

Two young women entered the train and began to smoke; and he stared up at a photograph of Windsor Castle, which was fastened under the baggagerack, as if his emotions were rending him beyond endurance. Well, it would n’t be for long. Not for long.

That night, as we walked down Sloan Street toward the river, and turned westward along Cheyne Walk, he afforded yet deeper glimpses into his disturbed mentality. He drew, in short, broad strokes, the place as he figured it, in that West Indian station. And no allusion to the loneliness or the heat, to the exacerbating proximity to a debased population under an alien flag, could diminish his dream of what one could reasonably call a better world. He had faith in something, though he had lost his faith in the principles of his life. As we moved along under the long line of golden globes, and saw the broad stream in flood under the dark barriers of the bridges, and as we came abreast of patrician windows, where the old order moved on as if we in the street had never existed, he who had been preserving that old order with his body looked up, and his bold unflinching eye defied them to defeat him.

He had no suspicion, walking thus with a casual acquaintance toward his lodging off the King’s Road, of his extraordinary value as a character in a novel. He knew nothing of novels, be said, and merely remembered a man who lost his memory by reading too many. So he could never realize how much of a caricature he himself was, and how he would have to be diluted and modified and strained before he could appear with propriety in a novel. He became monstrous in the intensity of his preoccupation with his own destiny. He saw himself — out there. He saw the sun setting behind long lines of purple mountains; the mist swathing the gray-green immensities of the eastern ranges; the jetty reflected in the motionless water; the light flashing from the point in an amber haze; himself walking in the gloom beneath the green domes of the Indian laurels; the gaunt lines of the great oil-tanks on the hillside above the roofs; the glow of his cigar, as he sat in the screened porch and listened to the coon getting the supper; the incandescent eyes of great beetles crawling across the path; the divine peace of the tropic night, as he lay in his hammock and thought of the beneficent years in store. He saw all this. It was implied in an eloquent gesture toward the patrician windows. At Oakley Street he shaded his eyes with his hand and looked toward the glow of a brass cupola over in Battersea, as if he already stood on his verandah and saw the sullen radiance of a cane-fire in the distant valley.

So he, too, passed, having served his purpose in the scheme of art. It was, if he had only known, his apotheosis. Never again will he be so much alive, never again reach so near to authentic reality, as when he stood in the gathering twilight, between the bridges, looking southwesterly, and then turning with his eloquent gesture toward the world he had abandoned. Out there, behind the long roll of white surf, behind the green bluffs where the native fisherman paddles mysteriously in the shadow of the overhanging trees, where there are neither cash-registers nor social registers, he will achieve a certain mystical completeness. But even as he achieves, he will fade. He will become no more than a shadow reaching a little way across the world. And soon that, too, will fade, as fade the shadows of the trees at sunset. He will discover, as time goes on, an unexpected penalty. He will have no adequate proof of his own existence. He will doubt that distant time when he strove with life. And he will not even know that he lives on, in another form, not so glorious perhaps, but more credible; a character showing up sharp and clear some of the perplexing variations of the bygone idiosyncrasy — patriotism.