Puslapio vaizdai
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and less humane order of affairs, have led to a clash of swords among the major powers. But through the years he had been soothed with the lotus and the poppies of the Hague Conferences, and he, like the rest of us, had felt that all such difficulties would be smoothed out by diplomatic assurances or friendly arbitration. Moreover, he had been thoroughly convinced that the great bankers of the nations, realizing the vast network of credits and loans, would never again consent to a declaration of war. All this he came back to repeat to our confiding and credulous ears. He had no trouble in convincing us that he was right. We, ourselves, had long been lulled by the same false siren tunes that had beguiled him from the bare and palpable truth.

For my own part, I had gone even further. I felt that we had reached a plane of humanity that would in a few years make disarmament quite practical. I had actually believed the optimistic utterances of the Massachusetts Peace Society and the International Conciliation pamphlets.

I mention these errors, my son, to let you see that, while I opposed your enlistment at this time, I opposed it less vigorously than I should have done if confidence in my previous judgments had not been so rudely shattered by the crashing thunders of 1914. If I had been wrong in this analysis of international conditions, might I not also be wrong in this question, which was more difficult because it could not now be impartially analyzed?

Some day, I hope, you will have a son of your own. As you watch him on the day of his birth, as his tiny form lies by his mother's side, a gush of tenderness such as you have never known will come to your aching heart and fill you with a sense of sobering responsibility and obligation. There will come with this a wave of parental love that

will expand your soul and reveal wel of unsuspected emotional depth. Co incident with this will come a great surging ambition. What sacrifices wil you not be willing to make, provided only your vicarious hardships ease the path for your offspring and lead him to places of distinction and honor! No school or college will be too good for him, and already, while he lies breathing out those earliest dormant days you will be busy planning his life and removing in fancy the obstacles that so tragically blocked your own early am bitions and desires.

Then gradually, as he grows up and develops tastes alien to your own, you will begin to question the source of these strange perversities, and wonder where in the wide, uncharted universe he ever picked up the strange whims that so capriciously beguile him from the path which you in your wisdom had laid out with such meticulous care and foresight. Suddenly, too, you will learn that he has outstripped you in certain branches of useful knowledge, and will find yourself turning in his direction for help and guidance in matters where your own experience was too meagre to meet the exacting demands of such triv ial matters as - gasoline or electricity.

You will perhaps discover, too, that all the major plans which you had laid for him conflict most horribly with traits and temperaments which he is developing. You think, of course, that he will want to enter your office and carry on your business. Instead, he will some day bluntly inform you that he has no such intention - he is going to Paris to study art. What does he care for billets and pig iron and the Bessemer process - they can all go to limbo, and he will go to France to follow Whistler's ways. And thus he will leave you to readjust yourself to the new conditions which his independence has imposed.

Oh, of course, it won't turn out just like this! If it did, it could now be no surprise. What actually happens will be nothing which you ever thought about, but it will be something stupefying and absurd - something that will send you back to your private office, force your hand through your fast-thinning hair, and make you wonder at the strange perversity of youth. And you will be overwhelmed with a sense of terrible disappointment. Then you will, for the first time, perhaps, begin to understand your own father's feelings, even though in so many respects the situations are so different. For my plans for you have, as you well know, woefully miscarried. I have not, as many fathers do, expected you to follow in my footsteps. Chance has apparently guided my career, and somehow I felt that it would largely guide yours; but I never felt that it would guide you into the work allotted to me. I wanted you to go to college-preferably, to Harvard. I wanted you to sit in the same class-rooms and gaze at the same jackknife carvings that used to beguile me through some of the sleepy hours in Old Sever. I wanted college to give you a thousand such trivially important things as it gave me, and I should have liked it to fail to give another thousand with which I could so profitably have dispensed.

But now all this, and the fancy-laden sequence of all this, is not to be! Instead, I pick up The Lampoon, and I listen to R. E. Sherwood as he interprets the modern message of John Harvard:

Go forward, my son, for the bugle-calls beckon; The grim god of battles has called you away; Go forward, my son, never halting to reckon The price your Creator may bid you to pay.

Yes, the god of battles has come to interrupt the plans I had made for you. He came somewhat hesitatingly into America, but not hesitatingly enough

to avert the shock that has set all our homes a-tremble. He came with a slow and leisured stride, but he has pinioned our hearts with the might of his pitiless pressure. Everywhere I go, fathers and mothers are telling me about their sons. This one is with Pershing's army, this other one is in the aviation corps in Pensacola, scores are in the cantonments, impatient and restless, longing for the active service into which our transports are so soon to take them. As these parents tell me of these details, a glow of pride is in their eyes; but I know -oh, how much more personally I know it now-that, behind the pride and the calm, hearts are throbbing with anxiety, and the vacant chairs in the dining-room and around the fireplace mutely speak their grim story of loss and poignant yearning. Yes, they tell me the last letters were full of hope and cheer and the boys were all well. But that was three weeks ago, and what is happening right now?

How shall I speak of the temptations that you are sure to meet, my son? Don't think that I am going to preach to you. My little homilies have been spread pretty thickly over the brief years of your past life, and if they have not been woven into the fabric of your unphrased philosophy, they cannot now be abruptly gathered into the pattern. But we who are older and a bit scar-worn would so gladly enlist in a sort of moral signal-service that would warn you of the presence of lurking enemies. I need not specify them you know we have talked them all over. You in your own way are the only one who can conquer them. I have faith in your strength. Are you not strong enough to give your soul its orders and see to it that each separate command is implicitly obeyed? It is only thus that strong and enduring character is developed. It is only through this experience and triumph that you can return

to your home, your mother, and your friends, and carry in your soul the sweet satisfaction of knowing yourself to have been valiant, pure, and reliant.

I learn from your mother's letter that your single blue service star now hangs in the window of our lonely home. Another, amid many more, hangs in the vestry of the church. In fancy I shall select the one I call yours; and I shall have faith that, in the midst of the red, which symbolizes carnage, and the white, which symbolizes purity, your period of enlistment will but deepen the blue, which symbolizes loyalty.

THE LETTER R

A was an apple-do you remember? And B was the fat-legged little glutton who bit it, and C, all in pert frills, cut it; and can you turn the remembered pages and go on? Perhaps modern efficiency caught you and handed you a primer of Modern Philology, and you never fingered that blessed Alphabet. Perhaps you gabbled A B C in a Chinese chorus and never really knew your letters. Really to know them takes a lifetime, of course, but you can glimpse their personalities in your early years. And there is such necessity for studying their stubborn little egos, if you ever hope to stay on the right side of them! Punctuation is treacherous enough, but I know nothing inanimate that can equal letters, for that sheer impish power of revenge. I suppose they have to be prickly to keep their personalities intact in all the stupid situations they are thrust into. But like all prickly characters, from the great Stickly Prickly down, they repay watching. I love to see them on their best behavior-marshaled in orderly marshaled in orderly and docile little rows, each piping his own little note, tractable as an earnest little choir. And quite as well I like to see them under the hand of an insensi

tive stylist-messing his music i bedlam, just because he neglected: learn his letters.

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R is my particular delight, I thiri I am fond of his appearance, he is s manifestly an energetic letter, -a his own feet, with none of B's i comfort or of S's sinuous repose abog him. There are many standing letter -A, sturdily astraddle, hands i pocket, and F, meditative on one leg and K flinging hilarious legs on the wind. But R is of another mind tha these: just look at him, erect and haited, and tapping the floor impatiently with one foot. R is the restless lette. the Irishman of letters, the essentia younger son. R is of the temperamen: of Reuben; and 'I will arise and get 'ence,' says R. G is a moving letter. too, but G is a pilgrim. R is a vaga bond with the trekking soul.

I found R in the dictionary oncethat can be a pleasant bypath if you don't go looking for information. Verbs are especially revealing about the te perament of a letter. All R's verbs an the verbs of purposeful movement verbs of restless youth and change. R ranges far afield. He is the roamer and the rover. His gait is variable - he can rush and run and race, or lapse into a ramble. For the spice of travel he can ride or even roll. R's is the windy breath of the foot-loose. He blows it in the face of the restless and whispers, 'Rise.' Reveille is the bugle-call of R

R is at heart a primitive traveler. His is the road. He has adopted the railroad and the roadster, in this me chanical age. But he has never really taken to the sea, or to any water-way. And the only scion of the house of R that is concerned with ships is Kenneth Grahame's Spanish Sea-Rat. He has his beasts; his totem protects all those fleet things that run for their living: the rabbit and the rat and the roe. He has his birds. Do you know that sudden

uail-call -the hwe-heeeeew-hew that makes the knee-muscles tighten and he head lift? What is it but human vireless- the dot-dash-dot that is R? R is untidy and unprosperous, and quiltless of the moss that is the reward of the stay-at-home. He is a frank Ragged Robin. But rags have their ses. They clothe R in romance. One s a little tenderer with R than with other letters. There is something inangible about him-perhaps the fratrance of the country of Romany, that weeter land than Arcady the placid. When I call up most clearly the inouciant figure of R, he is in gay red; ust that red that the gypsiest leaves get before they throw themselves off he tree, and the most western string of cloud is on the eve of a windy night. And the first real coals of a wanderer's cooking-fire. You know. And others know. There is that New England gypsy-heart who draws the little vagabond winds that say 'Rise' most wooingly, and she colors them red. There is that gypsy-foot in Old England who chants before the gods of the trail as the Red Gods. Dunsany the Irishman, though, has made the real deity of R, and set him idol-wise for all the lovers of R forever. And do you think that the troubling God Roon, out of Time and the Gods, by any other name would smell as strange? I don't. But then, I am a lover of R.

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the Great Renunciation, and the Great Attainment a whole nebula of capital letters. And they are just two ordinary Tommies all the time. But what is there that's ordinary in the world?

As we sat overlooking Lens and Vimy the other day, the captain and I, there came up to us an ugly little Canadian Tommy, astray from the camp below. Without the least regard to decencies, disciplines, 'circles, spheres, lines, ranks, everything,' he came up to us as bold as brass and entered quite cheerfully into conversation.

The captain was staggered, and tried to strike a mien between acquiescence and a due repressiveness. For it was such preposterous impudence or it would have been, if the lad had had the slightest idea that it was impudence at all, or what august proprieties he was violating. But it was immediately clear that he was perfectly innocent and naïf: it was like a little new boy cheerily engaging the captain of the eleven in chat, without the slightest notion of the enormity he was committing. Of course, had this not been so, and, of course, had he been English, he would not have been allowed to go on another minute. As it was, we tried cold, short answers, unresponsive without being positively crushing. It was not the least use: he babbled on at us, quite unchilled. We then tried flight, but he pursued us; we scattered across the face of the moorland, but he would not be detached. Finally, we gave up and collapsed under a grassy trench-ridge, in front of the view. And he came with us, and sat down gayly at our side, and prattled along undaunted.

And then, at last, I began to understand the hectic fever of his speech, and his hungry, undefeatable cordiality. That poor little soul was face to face with the extremity of mortal terror. This was his very first day up at the front, it appeared; he did not know

a single soul, had not a single friend or even an acquaintance to talk to everything was utterly strange to him, filled with the void of fear. For there before him was Vimy Ridge, on which his only brother had been killed a few months earlier, and now lay namelessly buried; and down in front of him was Lens, a smashed-up skeleton of anguish and death: and all that fearful landscape empty of everything but waste and murder and martyrdom. It was out into that that he himself was to go, at any moment. He was frantic to hold on to the light and warmth of life a little longer while it lasted.

He knew, and we knew ourselves, that in a few days he would almost certainly be dead. We were human beings like himself, and he did not care who or what: he merely craved the warm-bloodedness of our presence, and the sound of human speech going on continually to drown his own thoughts.

It is a dreadful thing, that high extremity of suffering which feverishly hides behind a curtain of prattle. One hears the silence inside, and the deadly cold. Yet what can one do? Uttermost loneliness is the place where we all live, when the big things come along.

We bore with him, in a dull, useless ache, realizing impotently the clutching agony of his need to stay linked on; in face of which, one could only be inarticulate at the best. And at last he got up with a wrench, and said that 'a man down there' (the only person, it seemed, he had spoken to out here yet, and he had no notion more of him, or who he was) had said that he ought to be back in camp at such a time.

It was a relief at last to have something we could say. We all wished him good luck, as he went. 'Good luck, you fellows,' he answered breezily; and vanished over the brow of the hill, dark against the glare of the west.

We, ourselves, went down soon after.

THE ASTRONOMY OF FICTION

I STOOD in the gathering dusk v my back to a lamp-post and gaze Venus, a little above the western A policeman passed and observed casually. Before long he was back th way and I was still there. This t he eyed me with more interest, u I thought, a shade professionally. reassure him I said:

'Good evening. Are you familiarwi the points of interest around here?"

'Well, pretty much,' he answer. amiably, plainly relieved to find that seemed to be neither in need of the post's support nor bent on burglary.

'Can you tell me what that light. over there?' I asked him.

He looked at the glorious plane just ready to dip from sight, and the at me. "That ain't no light; that's: star,' he said in a voice a trifle nettle as if he suspected that I was trying joke. Which I was feeling just that time a sort of doggish waggishnes

'Is it?' I returned. 'What is th name of it?"

Now he was clearly disgusted. "A I got too much to do to keep track the names of the stars,' he answere and he started on, swinging his cl and doing nothing else all through th gorgeous night.

And I wondered, if I should hav asked the question of the first hundre citizens who passed me, how man would have given me a truer answer.

Astronomy, I believe, is called the most exact of the sciences. And it is one at least of the most fascinating even to a smatterer- and I am n more than that. Its fundamentals are simplicity itself; they are more open t us than those of any other science they are before us continually. Bu the average intelligent person appears to be far more indifferent to them than to the dirt under his feet.

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