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Men, Women, and Boats

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MEN, WOMEN, AND BOATS

By Stephen Crane

Edited With an Introduction by Vincent Starrett




NOTE

A Number of the tales and sketches here brought together appear now for
the first time between covers; others for the first time between covers
in this country. All have been gathered from out-of-print volumes and
old magazine files.

"The Open Boat," one of Stephen Crane's finest stories, is used with the
courteous permission of Doubleday, Page & Co., holders of the copyright.
Its companion masterpiece, "The Blue Hotel," because of copyright
complications, has had to be omitted, greatly to the regret of the
editor.

After the death of Stephen Crane, a haphazard and undiscriminating
gathering of his earlier tales and sketches appeared in London under the
misleading title, "Last Words." From this volume, now rarely met with, a
number of characteristic minor works have been selected, and these will
be new to Crane's American admirers; as follows: "The Reluctant
Voyagers," "The End of the Battle," "The Upturned Face," "An Episode of
War," "A Desertion," "Four Men in a Cave," "The Mesmeric Mountain,"
"London Impressions," "The Snake."

Three of our present collection, printed by arrangement, appeared in the
London (1898) edition of "The Open Boat and Other Stories," published by
William Heinemann, but did not occur in the American volume of that
title. They are "An Experiment in Misery," "The Duel that was not
Fought," and "The Pace of Youth."

For the rest, "A Dark Brown Dog," "A Tent in Agony," and "The Scotch
Express," are here printed for the first time in a book.

For the general title of the present collection, the editor alone is
responsible.

V. S.



MEN, WOMEN AND BOATS

CONTENTS

STEPHEN CRANE: _An Estimate_

THE OPEN BOAT

THE RELUCTANT VOYAGERS

THE END OF THE BATTLE

THE UPTURNED FACE

AN EPISODE OF WAR

AN EXPERIMENT IN MISERY

THE DUEL THAT WAS NOT FOUGHT

A DESERTION

THE DARK-BROWN DOG

THE PACE OF YOUTH

SULLIVAN COUNTY SKETCHES

A TENT IN AGONY

FOUR MEN IN A CAVE

THE MESMERIC MOUNTAIN

THE SNAKE

LONDON IMPRESSIONS

THE SCOTCH EXPRESS




STEPHEN CRANE: _AN ESTIMATE_


It hardly profits us to conjecture what Stephen Crane might have written
about the World War had he lived. Certainly, he would have been in it,
in one capacity or another. No man had a greater talent for war and
personal adventure, nor a finer art in describing it. Few writers of
recent times could so well describe the poetry of motion as manifested
in the surge and flow of battle, or so well depict the isolated deed of
heroism in its stark simplicity and terror.

To such an undertaking as Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire," that powerful,
brutal book, Crane would have brought an analytical genius almost
clairvoyant. He possessed an uncanny vision; a descriptive ability
photographic in its clarity and its care for minutiae--yet
unphotographic in that the big central thing often is omitted, to be
felt rather than seen in the occult suggestion of detail. Crane would
have seen and depicted the grisly horror of it all, as did Barbusse, but
also he would have seen the glory and the ecstasy and the wonder of it,
and over that his poetry would have been spread.

While Stephen Crane was an excellent psychologist, he was also a true
poet. Frequently his prose was finer poetry than his deliberate essays
in poesy. His most famous book, "The Red Badge of Courage," is
essentially a psychological study, a delicate clinical dissection of the
soul of a recruit, but it is also a _tour de force_ of the
imagination. When he wrote the book he had never seen a battle: he had
to place himself in the situation of another. Years later, when he came
out of the Greco-Turkish _fracas_, he remarked to a friend: "'The
Red Badge' is all right."

Written by a youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has
been compared with Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Débâcle," and
with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with
Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so.
Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they
apply themselves to a devoted--almost obscene--study of corpses and
carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy
commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his
realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down
where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are accomplished with
studied awkwardness.

Crane was an obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort, he
says, somewhere, "was born of pain--despair, almost." It was a better
piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is far
from flawless. It has been remarked that it bristles with as many
grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am
certain that many of Crane's deviations from the rules of polite
rhetoric were deliberate experiments, looking to effect--effect which,
frequently, he gained.

Stephen Crane "arrived" with this book. There are, of course, many who
never have heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he was
very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following
publication of "The Red Badge of Courage," although even before that he
had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems called
"The Black Riders and Other Lines." He was highly praised, and highly
abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be "made." We have largely
forgotten since. It is a way we have.

Personally, I prefer his short stories to his novels and his poems;
those, for instance, contained in "The Open Boat," in "Wounds in the
Rain," and in "The Monster." The title-story in that first collection is
perhaps his finest piece of work. Yet what is it? A truthful record of
an adventure of his own in the filibustering days that preceded our war
with Spain; the faithful narrative of the voyage of an open boat, manned
by a handful of shipwrecked men. But Captain Bligh's account of
_his_ small boat journey, after he had been sent adrift by the
mutineers of the _Bounty_, seems tame in comparison, although of
the two the English sailor's voyage was the more perilous.

In "The Open Boat" Crane again gains his effects by keeping down the
tone where another writer might have attempted "fine writing" and have
been lost. In it perhaps is most strikingly evident the poetic cadences
of his prose: its rhythmic, monotonous flow is the flow of the gray
water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in
cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and
the tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that
go to make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I
doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better
rendered than in Stephen Crane's curious, distorted, staccato sentences.

"War Stories" is the laconic sub-title of "Wounds in the Rain." It was
not war on a grand scale that Crane saw in the Spanish-American
complication, in which he participated as a war correspondent; no such
war as the recent horror. But the occasions for personal heroism were no
fewer than always, and the opportunities for the exercise of such powers
of trained and appreciative understanding and sympathy as Crane
possessed, were abundant. For the most part, these tales are episodic,
reports of isolated instances--the profanely humorous experiences of
correspondents, the magnificent courage of signalmen under fire, the
forgotten adventure of a converted yacht--but all are instinct with the
red fever of war, and are backgrounded with the choking smoke of battle.
Never again did Crane attempt the large canvas of "The Red Badge of
Courage." Before he had seen war, he imagined its immensity and painted
it with the fury and fidelity of a Verestchagin; when he was its
familiar, he singled out its minor, crimson passages for briefer but no
less careful delineation.

In this book, again, his sense of the poetry of motion is vividly
evident. We see men going into action, wave on wave, or in scattering
charges; we hear the clink of their accoutrements and their breath
whistling through their teeth. They are not men going into action at
all, but men going about their business, which at the moment happens to
be the capture of a trench. They are neither heroes nor cowards. Their
faces reflect no particular emotion save, perhaps, a desire to get
somewhere. They are a line of men running for a train, or following a
fire engine, or charging a trench. It is a relentless picture, ever
changing, ever the same. But it contains poetry, too, in rich, memorable
passages.

In "The Monster and Other Stories," there is a tale called "The Blue
Hotel". A Swede, its central figure, toward the end manages to get
himself murdered. Crane's description of it is just as casual as that.
The story fills a dozen pages of the book; but the social injustice of
the whole world is hinted in that space; the upside-downness of
creation, right prostrate, wrong triumphant,--a mad, crazy world. The
incident of the murdered Swede is just part of the backwash of it all,
but it is an illuminating fragment. The Swede was slain, not by the
gambler whose knife pierced his thick hide: he was the victim of a
condition for which he was no more to blame than the man who stabbed
him. Stephen Crane thus speaks through the lips of one of the
characters:--

"We are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even
a noun. He is a kind of an adverb. Every sin is
the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have
collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually
there are from a dozen to forty women really involved
in every murder, but in this case it seems
to be only five men--you, I, Johnnie, Old Scully,
and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came
merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement,
and gets all the punishment."

And then this typical and arresting piece of irony:--

"The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon,
had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that
dwelt atop of the cash-machine: 'This registers the
amount of your purchase.'"

In "The Monster," the ignorance, prejudice and cruelty of an entire
community are sharply focussed. The realism is painful; one blushes for
mankind. But while this story really belongs in the volume called
"Whilomville Stories," it is properly left out of that series. The
Whilomville stories are pure comedy, and "The Monster" is a hideous
tragedy.

Whilomville is any obscure little village one may happen to think of. To
write of it with such sympathy and understanding, Crane must have done
some remarkable listening in Boyville. The truth is, of course, he was a
boy himself--"a wonderful boy," somebody called him--and was possessed
of the boy mind. These tales are chiefly funny because they are so true
--boy stories written for adults; a child, I suppose, would find them
dull. In none of his tales is his curious understanding of human moods
and emotions better shown.

A stupid critic once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking
effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights
of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls
occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the
quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of
these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He
objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to
"terror-stricken" wagons. The very touches of poetic impressionism that
largely make for Crane's greatness, are cited to prove him an ignoramus.
There is the finest of poetic imagery in the suggestions subtly conveyed
by Crane's tricky adjectives, the use of which was as deliberate with
him as his choice of a subject. But Crane was an imagist before our
modern imagists were known.

This unconventional use of adjectives is marked in the Whilomville
tales. In one of them Crane refers to the "solemn odor of burning
turnips." It is the most nearly perfect characterization of burning
turnips conceivable: can anyone improve upon that "solemn odor"?

Stephen Crane's first venture was "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." It
was, I believe, the first hint of naturalism in American letters. It was
not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit
of slum fiction, ending with the tragic finality of a Greek drama. It
is a skeleton of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful
outline, written about a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper
reporter in New York. It is a singularly fine piece of analysis, or a
bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a
few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes
what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is
"George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a
cumulative effect quite overwhelming.

Crane published two volumes of poetry--"The Black Riders" and "War is
Kind." Their appearance in print was jeeringly hailed; yet Crane was
only pioneering in the free verse that is today, if not definitely
accepted, at least more than tolerated. I like the following love poem
as well as any rhymed and conventionally metrical ballad that I know:--

"Should the wide world roll away,
Leaving black terror,
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential,
If thou and thy white arms were there
And the fall to doom a long way."

"If war be kind," wrote a clever reviewer, when the second volume
appeared, "then Crane's verse may be poetry, Beardsley's black and white
creations may be art, and this may be called a book";--a smart summing
up that is cherished by cataloguers to this day, in describing the
volume for collectors. Beardsley needs no defenders, and it is fairly
certain that the clever reviewer had not read the book, for certainly
Crane had no illusions about the kindness of war. The title-poem of the
volume is an amazingly beautiful satire which answers all criticism.

"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

"Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, and his kingdom--
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

* * * * *

"Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind."

Poor Stephen Crane! Like most geniuses, he had his weaknesses and his
failings; like many, if not most, geniuses, he was ill. He died of
tuberculosis, tragically young. But what a comrade he must have been,
with his extraordinary vision, his keen, sardonic comment, his
fearlessness and his failings!

Just a glimpse of Crane's last days is afforded by a letter written from
England by Robert Barr, his friend--Robert Barr, who collaborated with
Crane in "The 0' Ruddy," a rollicking tale of old Ireland, or, rather,
who completed it at Crane's death, to satisfy his friend's earnest
request. The letter is dated from Hillhead, Woldingham, Surrey, June 8,
1900, and runs as follows:--

"My Dear ----

"I was delighted to hear from you, and was much
interested to see the article on Stephen Crane you
sent me. It seems to me the harsh judgment of an
unappreciative, commonplace person on a man of
genius. Stephen had many qualities which lent
themselves to misapprehension, but at the core he
was the finest of men, generous to a fault, with
something of the old-time recklessness which used
to gather in the ancient literary taverns of London.
I always fancied that Edgar Allan Poe revisited the
earth as Stephen Crane, trying again, succeeding
again, failing again, and dying ten years sooner
than he did on the other occasion of his stay on
earth.

"When your letter came I had just returned from
Dover, where I stayed four days to see Crane off
for the Black Forest. There was a thin thread of
hope that he might recover, but to me he looked like
a man already dead. When he spoke, or, rather,
whispered, there was all the accustomed humor in
his sayings. I said to him that I would go over to
the Schwarzwald in a few weeks, when he was getting
better, and that we would take some convalescent
rambles together. As his wife was listening
he said faintly: 'I'll look forward to that,' but he
smiled at me, and winked slowly, as much as to say:
'You damned humbug, you know I'll take no more
rambles in this world.' Then, as if the train of
thought suggested what was looked on before as the
crisis of his illness, he murmured: 'Robert, when
you come to the hedge--that we must all go over--
it isn't bad. You feel sleepy--and--you don't
care. Just a little dreamy curiosity--which world
you're really in--that's all.'

"To-morrow, Saturday, the 9th, I go again to
Dover to meet his body. He will rest for a little
while in England, a country that was always good
to him, then to America, and his journey will be
ended.

"I've got the unfinished manuscript of his last
novel here beside me, a rollicking Irish tale, different
from anything he ever wrote before. Stephen
thought I was the only person who could finish it,
and he was too ill for me to refuse. I don't know
what to do about the matter, for I never could work
up another man's ideas. Even your vivid imagination
could hardly conjecture anything more ghastly
than the dying man, lying by an open window overlooking
the English channel, relating in a sepulchral
whisper the comic situations of his humorous hero
so that I might take up the thread of his story.

"From the window beside which I write this I
can see down in the valley Ravensbrook House,
where Crane used to live and where Harold Frederic,
he and I spent many a merry night together. When
the Romans occupied Britain, some of their legions,
parched with thirst, were wandering about these dry
hills with the chance of finding water or perishing.
They watched the ravens, and so came to the stream
which rises under my place and flows past Stephen's
former home; hence the name, Ravensbrook.

"It seems a strange coincidence that the greatest
modern writer on war should set himself down
where the greatest ancient warrior, Caesar, probably
stopped to quench his thirst.

"Stephen died at three in the morning, the same
sinister hour which carried away our friend Frederic
nineteen months before. At midnight, in Crane's
fourteenth-century house in Sussex, we two tried
to lure back the ghost of Frederic into that house of
ghosts, and to our company, thinking that if reappearing
were ever possible so strenuous a man as
Harold would somehow shoulder his way past the
guards, but he made no sign. I wonder if the less
insistent Stephen will suggest some ingenious method
by which the two can pass the barrier. I can imagine
Harold cursing on the other side, and welcoming
the more subtle assistance of his finely fibred
friend.

"I feel like the last of the Three Musketeers, the
other two gone down in their duel with Death. I
am wondering if, within the next two years, I also
shall get the challenge. If so, I shall go to the competing
ground the more cheerfully that two such
good fellows await the outcome on the other side.

"Ever your friend,

"ROBERT BARR."

The last of the Three Musketeers is gone, now, although he outlived his
friends by some years. Robert Barr died in 1912. Perhaps they are still
debating a joint return.

There could be, perhaps, no better close for a paper on Stephen Crane
than the subjoined paragraph from a letter written by him to a Rochester
editor:--

"The one thing that deeply pleases me is the
fact that men of sense invariably believe me to be
sincere. I know that my work does not amount to
a string of dried beans--I always calmly admit it--but
I also know that I do the best that is in me
without regard to praise or blame. When I was
the mark for every humorist in the country, I went
ahead; and now when I am the mark for only fifty
per cent of the humorists of the country, I go
ahead; for I understand that a man is born into the
world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all
responsible for his vision--he is merely responsible
for his quality of personal honesty. To keep
close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition."

VINCENT STARRETT.




THE OPEN BOAT

A Tale intended to be after the fact. Being the experience of four men
from the sunk steamer "Commodore"


I

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and
were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of
the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and
all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and
widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with
waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man ought to
have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These
waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each
froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.

The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six
inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were
rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest
dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That was
a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the
broken sea.

The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes
raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the
stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and
wondered why he was there.

The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that
profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least,
to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails,
the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel
is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he commanded for a day or a
decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in
the greys of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast
with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low
and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his
voice. Although steady, it was, deep with mourning, and of a quality
beyond oration or tears.

"Keep 'er a little more south, Billie," said he.

"'A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.

A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and by
the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and
reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for
it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The
manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and,
moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white
water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a
new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a
crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and
arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after
successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another
behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do
something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dingey
one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves
that is not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in
a dingey. As each slatey wall of water approached, it shut all else from
the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine
that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last
effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the
waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.

In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been grey. Their eyes
must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed
from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly
picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they
had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds. The sun
swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the
color of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with
amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the
breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect
upon the color of the waves that rolled toward them.

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