The City of Comrades

by Basil King

I accepted the diversion—for more reasons than one. Of these the first was the shock to which I have alluded. She saw through me. That is, she saw I didn’t place her first. How she saw it I could no more tell than she could tell how I knew her history of the past two years. But the tables were turned and turned in such a way as to make me feel ridiculous. A man who is careful with regard to a woman is always slightly grotesque.

As my most skilful defense lay in feigning a lack of perception I talked about U-boats and the experience of two days before; but I came away from her with a feeling of discomfort.

I analyzed the feeling of discomfort as due to the repetition of our mutual attitude more than two years previously. Where she came forward I drew back. I had always drawn back. I used to suppose that nothing but one motive could have driven me to this humiliating course, and now I was taking it from another. I was taking it from another, and she knew it. The essence of the humiliation lay in that.

Each time I met her on deck she betrayed a hesitation that I found harder to bear than contempt. Her very effort to preserve a tone of friendliness was a reproach to me. It seemed to say: “You see all I’ve done for you. You accept it and give me nothing in return.”

And yet I was obliged to consider that which, were I to let myself be nothing but myself, might lie before me in the next few weeks and months. I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married. As a man engaged to be married I should be at once enveloped in that silken net of formalities with which women with their consecration to the future of the race have invested all that pertains to the preliminaries of mating. I had seen for myself that in America that silken net is more elaborate than it is elsewhere. In any British community it is spun of tissue, fragile, light, easily swept aside should the need arise. In America it is solidly constructed of gold cord, and is as often as not adorned with gems. In America an engagement leads to something of an anti-climax in that, from the human point of view, it is more important than a marriage. It is sung by a chorus of matrons and maidens and social correspondents of the press in a volume far more resounding than that of the nuptial hymn. That a man should marry after he has become engaged is considered as much a matter of course as that he should fight after he has enlisted; but that he should become engaged is like taking that first oath which denotes his willingness to give himself up, to make the great renunciation for the sake of something else. More than any single or signal act of bravery that comes later, it is the thing that counts. I am not quarreling with American social custom; I am only saying that I had reasons for being afraid of it.

I should arrive in New York as a man engaged to be married, and as a man engaged to be married I should be put through paces as strict and as stately as those of the minuet. There would be no escape from it. I might be promised in advance an escape from it, but the promise would not be kept. I might be promised simplicity, privacy, secrecy, a mere process of handfasting before the least noticeable of legal authorities; but all would go by the board.

Whatever my future wife and I might say—and my future wife would say it only half-heartedly, if as earnestly as that—I should be seized in the soft, tender, irresistible embrace of the feminine in American life, the element that is far more powerful than any other, and I should have no more fight to put up than a new-born infant against a nurse. There would be a whole array of mothers and potential mothers to see that I had not. There would be Mrs. Barry and Annette van Elstine and Hilda Grace and Esther Coningsby and Elsie Coningsby and Mrs. Legrand, not to speak of a vast social army behind them, all supported and urged on by the unanimous power of the press.

No one of them would allow me to slip from their kindly, overwhelming attentions any more than bees would allow a queen. Like a queen bee is any man who is engaged to an American girl—or at least he was in the days, now so extraordinarily long ago, before America went into the war. Since then marriage has become casual, incidental, one of those hasty touches given to human life, which, like the possession of money or the pursuit of happiness or the leisure to earn a living, are pleasant but not vital. But in the America of the end of 1916, the mentally far-away America to which I was going back, matrimony was the most momentous happening in a life history. From the minute a man became engaged to that when he turned away from the altar, he had to give himself up to his condition. He was no longer his own. Dinners, lunches, parties, theaters, publicity, and the approval of women claimed him; and shrinking was of no avail.

To the life after marriage, from this point of view, my mind hardly worked forward. I have spoken of men who were good soldiers and equally good husbands. Undoubtedly there are hundreds of thousands in the class. But I had seen not a little of men who, because they were husbands, would gladly not have been soldiers at all. Theirs was not a divided allegiance, for they had only one. The body was in the fight, and it did wondrously; but the heart and soul and mind and craving were with the wife and little ones; and who could blame them?