A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers is a heart-wrenching and adventurous tale. The 1939 film adaptation is well done, but in truth it falls short of the novel’s portrayal of events. Mason’s characters seem to be made of more flesh and blood than those of the film, with more depth and more feeling to their personalities.
The film never actually addresses young Harry Feversham’s reluctance to go to war. He feared that he would be a coward. Always that fear haunted him, that one day his mettle would be tested and found wanting. And so, when he had one the heart of the girl he loved, he resigned his commission. This in itself might never have been thought cowardly, had a telegram not arrived the night before Feversham announced his resignation, informing him that his regiment was shipping off to Egypt.
In the film, Harry Feversham’s father, General Feversham, passed away. Feversham used his death as an explanation, saying that his duty to his father was now over. In actuality, Feversham uses his engagement to Ethne Eustace as the reason for his resignation, as his father is still alive.
After going to Ramelton to be with Ethne, Feversham is told that a packaged was forwarded to him from his old address. The package contains three white feathers, a symbol of cowardice from three men of his old regiment: Trench, Castleton and Willoughby. Feversham’s best friend, Durrance, knows nothing of these events. He does not discover the truth until much later.
In the film, Durrance is one of the three who send Feversham a feather, and Feversham’s disgrace is his motivation to follow his old regiment to Egypt and find opportunities to express his bravery and make his accusers retract their feathers. However, it is Ethne who is Feversham’s guiding star. Having added her own feather to the three originals, Ethne shows Feversham that she believes him a coward. And Feversham, devastated by the pain he has caused her, makes a decision to return the feathers through acts of bravery. No hope that she will wait for him gleams in his soul, but he retains some belief that they will meet “afterwards.”
In the film, Feversham poses as a mute Arab and helps Durrance after he becomes blind, guiding him back to safety. He then gets himself sent to prison in order to help rescue Willoughby and Trench, in the process inciting a prison rebellion that tips the scales in a key British battle. The whole process is very quick, very exciting and very gratifying.
But Feversham’s tale is not so glorious, nor so brief. Three years spent in the desert, posing as a Greek, picking up the language, and waiting for any opportunity in which he might redeem his honor. His first opportunity comes from retrieving a packet of letters in a heavily guarded city and giving them to Willoughby, who retracts its feather and returns home a year later to deliver it to Ethne.
His second opportunity, some months later, is revealed upon discovering that Captain Trench is in prison. Feversham makes careful plans in order to first get into prison and then to arrange an escape for both of them. His plan might have succeeded if Captain Trench had not come down with fever three days before their planned escape. But Feversham’s man comes through, and he is able to get himself and his second accuser out. Captain Trench then accepts his own feather, and follows Willoughby home to give it to Ethne.
Feversham’s third opportunity never came, because Castleton was killed early in the war. He returns to Ramelton to see Ethne, who is engaged to his friend Durrance, gone blind by sunstroke some time after Willoughby retracts his feather. Durrance, meanwhile, has pieced together the entire story and is determined that, although he loves Ethne, she does not love him and so should marry Feversham.
It is a rather bittersweet tale, much less exciting than the film portrayed it to be, but just as satisfying and perhaps rather more fulfilling. A lesson hides beneath the surface of Mason’s story. It was not Feversham’s fear that sent him spiraling into disgrace, but rather his fear that he would be afraid, which is a much different thing altogether.
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