THE NEW STOICS
Mr. Brougham stood waiting in the wings. Never before had he made a speech; never had he been upon a stage, except to sit safely with a delegation, in a row, behind the ice-water pitcher. He had a small dry patch in his throat which constant swallowing failed to improve, and the tips of his fingers kept getting cold and very distant. He was about to make a Liberty Loan speech, and he was suffering more than he had expected; but, as he kept murmuring to himself, "Dulce et decorum est."
At twenty-eight he had volunteered among the first in the Spanish War, and it had been no fault of his that he had never got any nearer the front than Chattanooga. At forty-eight he could still speak for his country—at least he hoped he could. How absurd to be nervous! This was no time to be thinking of one's own feelings. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. "Well, Mr. Brougham," said the loud bold voice of the local chairman, "shall we go on?" What was one victim more or less to him in his insatiable campaign for speakers?
"By all means," answered Brougham in a tone which even in his own ears sounded like that of a total stranger.
His only conscious thought was grateful remembrance that his wife was kept at the canteen that evening, and couldn't be in the audience, which he found himself regarding as a hostile body waiting to devour him. He sat trying to relax the muscles of his face during the chairman's short address; and then the fatal sentence began: " ... the great pleasure ... introduce ... so well known ... Mr. Walter Brougham, who will say a few rousing words to you on this great subject."
What a silly adjective "rousing" was, Brougham thought as he came forward. He had no intention whatever of being rousing. He wondered if he had the intention of being anything except absolutely silent. He lifted the lid and looked into his mind as into an unexplored box. Was there anything in it? Why, yes; rather to his surprise he found there was.
"My friends," he began, "this is no time for oratory." Hearty, and to Brougham totally unexpected, applause greeted this sentiment. "This is a time for cool, steady, clear-eyed vision." That was a mistake; of course vision was clear-eyed. "This is a time to ask ourselves this question: How is it that we hesitate to give our money, and yet stand ready—every one of us—to give our lives and—harder still—our sons' lives?"
"Hear, hear!" cried a voice from the audience, fresh, young and familiar. Brougham looked down; yes, there they were—his own two boys, David, not eighteen, and Lawrence, hardly fifteen. Their blond, well-brushed heads towered above the rest of the row and were easily recognizable. He could see the expressions of their faces—cool, serene, friendly approval. They're too damned philosophical, he said to himself; and as he went on speaking, with all that was mortal in him concentrated on his words, in some entirely different part of his being a veil was suddenly lifted and he saw something that he had been trying not to see for months—namely, that he was dissatisfied with his elder son's attitude toward the war—it was cool; cool like his approval of the speech. Not that Mr. Brougham wanted his son to volunteer at his age—quite the contrary; he sincerely believed it was every man's duty to wait until he had reached the age designated by his country; but he did want the boy to want to volunteer. He wanted to be able to say at the club as other fathers were saying: "What gets into these young fellows? I've had to forbid my boy—" Perhaps if his self-vision had been perfect he would have admitted that he had sometimes said it.
And then it occurred to him that this was the moment to stir their hearts—to make one of those speeches which might not touch the audience but which would inflame the patriotism of youth. Forgetting his recent pledge he plunged into oratory—the inherited oratory of the Fourth of July, he snatched up any adjectives as long as they came in threes, called patriotism by name, and spoke of the flag as Old Glory. Hurried on by his own warmth he reached his climax too soon, ended his speech before the audience expected and began asking for subscriptions before anyone was ready.
There was an awkward silence. Then a young voice spoke up: "One one-hundred-dollar bond." Yes, it was David. Mr. Brougham's heart leaped with hope; had the boy been moved? Was this the first fruit of repentance? He looked down, hoping to meet the upward glance of a devotee, but David was whispering something to his younger brother which made the latter giggle foolishly.
The ball once set rolling went fast. Subscriptions poured in; it was a successful evening—almost as successful as the evening made famous by a great screen artist. Mr. Brougham was warmly congratulated by the local chairman.
"We shall call on you again, Brougham," he said gayly.
Mr. Brougham nodded, but his thought was: Is nothing enough for these fellows?
His two boys were waiting for him at the stage door. "You're good, sir, you're good!" they cried, patting him on the back.
"I never thought he'd let them have it so mild," said Lawrence.
Mr. Brougham did not mind being laughed at—at least he always said he didn't—but he couldn't bear to have patriotism in any form held up to ridicule. He thought to himself:
"They don't know what it costs a man of my age to go on a stage and make a speech. I don't enjoy making myself conspicuous."
"We'll stop and get your mother at the canteen," he said sternly.
"Oh, yes, this is mother's night for saving the country, isn't it?" said Lawrence.
"Did you know," said David to his brother, across his father's head, for they were both taller than he, "did you know that a gob tipped mother the other evening? So pleased with his coffee that he flicked her a dime for herself."
"Oh, you sailor-boys!" said Lawrence in a high falsetto.
This was really more than Mr. Brougham could bear in his exalted state. "I don't like that, boys," he said.
"No, father," answered David; "but you know we never tipped mother; in fact, it's always been quite the other way."
"I mean I don't like your tone of ridicule, of—of—of—" He couldn't think of the word he wanted, and felt conscious that David had it on the tip of his tongue but was too tactful to interrupt. "You boys don't seem to appreciate the sacrifice, the physical strain for a woman of your mother's age—standing all evening handing out sandwiches—not accustomed to hard work either."
Both boys looked gravely ahead of them, and Mr. Brougham had a sickening conviction they were both trying to think of something to say that would calm him.
The canteen was just closing, and the two boys made themselves useful in putting things away. "Just as if it were a school picnic," their father thought.
As soon as they were on their way home Mrs. Brougham asked about the speech. Had it gone well?
"Oh, father was great, mother," David answered. "He took it from them in wads, and presented Lawrence and me to his country with every bond."
"A lady behind us was awfully affected," said Lawrence. "She kept whispering that she understood the speaker had two lovely boys of his own."
"I could hardly keep Lawrence from telling her that she had not been misinformed."
Mr. Brougham sighed. This was not the tone of young men suddenly roused to a new vision of patriotism. He said aloud: "I was glad you felt financially able to take a bond yourself, David."
"Oh, yes," answered his son. "I sold my boat yesterday."
Mr. Brougham was not so Spartan a parent that he did not feel a pang to think of the boy without his favorite pastime on this perhaps his last summer.
"Quite right," he said. "This is no year for pleasure boats."
"You get a good price for boats this year," said David.
There it was again—that note Mr. Brougham didn't like. Even if David's motives had been financial and not patriotic he might have allowed Lawrence to see an example of self-sacrifice. Instead Lawrence was getting just like his brother.
Brougham was not a man who habitually eased his burdens by casting them on his wife, but that night when they went upstairs he took her into his confidence.
"Are you satisfied with David's attitude toward the war?" he began.
She was a silent, deep woman whose actions always astonished those who had no intuitive knowledge of the great general trends of her nature. She and David usually understood each other fairly well.
Now she shook her head. "No," she said.
"Good Lord!" said poor Mr. Brougham. "I don't want the boy shot in a trench. I think it's his duty to wait a year or two; but I can't see that he has any enthusiasm, any eagerness, hardly any interest. He seized the paper last evening, and I supposed that he wanted to read about the offensive. Not at all! After a glance at the headlines he turned to the baseball news. Do you understand him?"
"No," said his mother.
"At his age I should have been in this war, with or without my parents' consent. Mind you, I don't want him in it—not for a year or two. But why doesn't he want to get in? He's not a coward."
"No," said his mother, and then she added: "I've thought a great deal about it, and I think it's because he's so young—so immature."
"Immature!" cried Mr. Brougham. "Why, he's always using words I don't know the meaning of!"
"Perhaps he doesn't either," said his wife. "That's immature, isn't it? But I meant the immaturity of not seeing responsibilities—not taking them up, at least. You see, my dear, he's very young—only a year out of school. It's natural enough."
"It's not natural at all," answered Mr. Brougham. "Just out of school—school is the very place to learn patriotism—drilling and all that—and I'm sure Granby is one of the most patriotic men I ever knew. He inspires most of his boys. No, I don't understand. I shall speak to David about his attitude."
"Oh, don't! You'll have him enlisting to-morrow."
"No; for I shall explain to him that he must wait."
She smiled. "You're going to stir him up to want to do something which you won't allow him to do. Is that sensible, dear?"
It wasn't sensible, but—more important—it was inevitable. Mr. Brougham, feeling as he did, could not be silent. He had always been proud of his boys, had always assumed they were stuff to be proud of. They had done decently in their lessons, well in their athletics. What could a father ask more? Now for the first time he found himself questioning his right to be proud, and the doubt was like poison in his system. He must speak to his son.
The difficulty of "speaking to" people is that we either take too portentous a tone, and thus ruffle the minds we mean to impress, or else that we speak so casually as to make no impression at all. Mr. Brougham's leanings were all to the former manner, and recognizing this weakness he made one more effort at the indirect attack. Hearing that his nephew, a lieutenant of infantry, was about to sail, he sent for him to come and dine. In his greeting of the young man he tried to express his respect for the uniform, even when decorated by nothing more than a gold bar.
"I envy you, my boy," he said. "I remember how I felt when I first put on those clothes in 1898—not that we can compare that war with this, but the emotion is the same—the emotion is always the same. We all envy you in this house."
David looked rather impish. "Envy him!" he said. "And him such a bad sailor!"
At this Brougham's brows contracted, but the lieutenant smiled.
"Yes," he said; "won't I wish I had stayed at home!"
This sentiment would have shocked Mr. Brougham except that he believed he recognized in it the decent Anglo-Saxon cloak of a profound feeling—very different from David's cold inaction.
As soon as dinner was over he left the boys alone and took a chair on the piazza, from which he could watch the expressions of their faces. They fell at once into a conversation of the deepest interest; so interesting that they began to move their hands about in unaccustomed gestures. Once David lifted his and brought it down with a sidewise swoop.
"That's it!" a voice rang out. "It's great!"
Mr. Brougham felt justified in moving a little nearer. He then found that the subject of discussion was jazz-band records for the phonograph.
The next morning, looking out of his window early, he saw David in his bathing suit trying, with a seriousness that might have drilled a company, to teach a new handspring to Lawrence. And this made it impossible for Mr. Brougham to be silent any longer.
When David came back to the house, dressed, but with his hair still dark and wet from his swim, his father stopped him.
"Sit down a minute," he said. "I want to speak to you. I want you to explain your attitude toward this war."
This opening sentence, which he had thought of while the handsprings were going on, would have been excellent if he could have given his son time to answer it, but he couldn't; his emotions swept him on, and at the end of five minutes he was still talking:
"The Civil War was fought by boys your age or younger. I don't say it was best, but it's the fact. And here you are—you've had every advantage—of education, of luxury, of protection. Don't you care for the traditions of your country? You're not a child any more. You're old enough to understand that a hideous catastrophe has come upon the world, and before long you must take your part in remedying it. What's your attitude to the war?"
"I think we're going to win it, sir, in the end."
"Other people are going to win it?"
"Would you approve of my enlisting at once? I understood—"
"No, I would not approve of it, as I've told you," answered his father, feeling that somehow he was being unjustly cornered. "But because a man's too young to make a soldier, that doesn't mean he shouldn't have any patriotism in his make-up—should be absolutely indifferent, with his head full of handsprings and jazz bands."
"I'm not indifferent," said David; "and as for jazz bands, even the men at the Front like them."
"But you're not at the Front—if you get my point."
"I don't believe I do," said David.
Civil as David's tone was there was of course a trace of hostility in the words themselves, and in his distress Mr. Brougham decided to go and consult Granby, the head of the school where David had been for five years and where Lawrence still was.
Brougham only went to Granby in desperate straits, for he was a little afraid of his son's schoolmaster. Granby was a tall bald man of fifty, with an expression at once stern and humble—stern with the habit of innumerable decisions, humble with the consciousness that half of them had been wrong. Brougham admired him, but could not be his friend, owing to the fact that he always became in Granby's presence an essential parent and nothing else. Mrs. Brougham, with the protection of her long silences, managed better to retain her individuality in his presence.
"I've come to consult you about David," he began.
Granby visibly shrank. "Don't tell me he's gone too!"
"No—he hasn't; that's it."
Brougham managed to tell his story very satisfactorily, for Granby had the power, rarer than is supposed, of extracting an idea from spoken words.
"He has no enthusiasm—no emotion. I can't understand him. At his age, I venture to say, I would— Well, I've come to you. You've had thirty years' experience of boys."
"Yes," said Granby with his reserved, pedagogic manner. "I've been at it thirty years." He stared at the floor and then, looking up, added: "But I've only had four years of boys as they are now."
This was a new idea to Brougham.
"You mean boys are different?"
"Of course, they're different!" said Granby. "Even we are different, and they— Boys I was giving demerits to and scolding about Latin prose last winter are fighting the war for us to-day. Roberts—I used to make Roberts' life a burden to him about the dative of reference—he was killed last month rescuing his machine gun; and here I am doing the same safe task— Well, I never felt like that about my work before. Different? Of course they're different! They are not boys any more. They are men; and we are old men."
There was, naturally enough, a pause, for this was by no means a conception of life which Mr. Brougham could accept offhand; and in the silence the door opened and David himself strode in—and stopped with every appearance of disappointment on seeing his father.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I'm interrupting you. I'll come back."
"What did you want?" said Mr. Granby.
David paused, looking less like a man and more like a boy in his indecision. Then his jaw set as he took his determination.
"I wanted you to tell my father something, but as long as he's here I'd better tell him myself. I took the examinations last month for an aviation camp, and I've just heard that I'm accepted."
Relief and horror struggling in Mr. Brougham like opposing waves resulted in calm.
"But, my son," he said, "why have you concealed it? You did not think I'd oppose you?"
David moved restlessly.
"Oh, no," he answered. "It wasn't that." He looked at Mr. Granby and smiled. "Father's awfully tyrannical about this war," he said. "He wants everyone to feel just as he does."
"But don't you feel as I do?" asked his father. "Why, you've just proved that you do!"
"Not a bit!" said David, and he spoke with a force neither of the men had ever heard from him before. "I don't feel a bit as you do, sir, and what's more, I don't want to!" He stopped. "But we needn't go into that," he added, and seemed about to leave the room.
Granby looked at Brougham. "It must be right here if we could get at it," he said. "Tell us, David, what is it in your father's attitude that you don't sympathize with?"
"And my mother's too."
"And mine?" asked Granby.
David hesitated an instant.
"You don't seem to care so much about having us all feel the way you do if what we do is right. But my father and mother don't care what I do unless I get excited about it."
"A healthy emotion is not excitement," said Mr. Brougham. "But you have been cold, absolutely cold to the horror of the world's bleeding to death, to all this unnatural disaster that has come upon us."
"It doesn't seem exactly unnatural to me," answered the boy slowly. "At least I've got used to it. You see, sir, ever since I knew anything—ever since I was Lawrence's age—war has been about the most natural thing going. I suppose it's very different for all of you. Coming at the end of a perfectly peaceful life, it must seem like a sort of dirty accident; but even so, it's awfully queer to me the way you and mother have to lash yourselves up to doing anything—"
"Lash ourselves up?" exclaimed Mr. Brougham.
"Yes, with the idea of patriotism and self-sacrifice, when it's so perfectly clear what we all have to do. Why, father, I feel just as if I were a policeman, or, no, a fireman—I feel as if I were a fireman and you expected me to get off something about patriotism and self-sacrifice every time I went to put out a fire. A fireman goes, all right—it's his job; but I dare say he often wishes he could stay in bed. No one says his heart is cold, and no more it is, to my mind. It must be fun to go off in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm. I know, for I've often felt like that about football. But this is different. This isn't a sport—it's a long disagreeable job. And I must say, father, it makes me pretty tired to have you think me a slacker because I don't get, and don't want to get, excited about it."
"You misunderstand me," said his father. "I don't think any man a slacker who waits to think it over before he makes the supreme sacrifice and offers"—Mr. Brougham's voice took a deeper note—"his life."
David turned sharply to Granby.
"There," he said, "that's what I hate! I hate that attitude toward death—as if it were something you couldn't speak of in the drawing-room. Death isn't so bad," he added, as if saying what he could for an absent friend.
With this Mr. Brougham couldn't even pretend to agree; death seemed to him very bad indeed—about the worst possible, though not to be evaded by brave men on that account.
"Ah," he said to Granby, "that's the beauty of youth—it doesn't think about death at all."
"Nonsense," said David. "I beg your pardon, sir, but isn't it nonsense? Of course, we think of it—a lot more than you do. The chances are about one in twenty that I'll be killed. When you were my age you were planning your career, and college, and you thought you'd be married sometime, and you were getting your name put up at clubs you couldn't get into for years. But fellows of my age aren't making any plans—it would be pretty foolish if we did. We haven't got any future, as you had it. I don't know if you call that thinking about death. I do—thinking about it as a fact, not a horror. We've been up against it for the last four years, and we've got used to it. That's what none of you older people seem to be able to get into your heads. We don't particularly mind the idea of dying. And now I think I'll run home and tell my mother."
Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes after he had gone. Mr. Brougham was shocked. He had just caught himself back from telling David that he ought to be afraid of dying—which of course was not at all what he meant. He himself had always feared death—most of the men he knew feared it—only hadn't allowed that fear to influence their actions. He had always regarded this fear as a great universal limitation. He felt as if a great gulf had suddenly opened between him and his son. More than that, he felt that to live free from the terror was too great an emancipation for one so young.
"If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found himself thinking.
He himself in his youth had never thought about dying—except sometimes in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he remembered, he did for the first time consider the possibility of his, Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her—as if she could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't afraid.
Good heavens, what would they do—this new generation, young and healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long trousers?
Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and reverently to all our betters?"
Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time for puzzling him.
"Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is that what you meant?"
"No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."
Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home. He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet they were thinking very different thoughts.
Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her husband.
David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical knowledge of aëroplanes.