This crescendo of interest was not lost on Ralph. He knew in his heart
it was sucking him in, had known since the day the news had come of the
attack on Verdun. He knew then that he, like Sabinsport, cared about
the result; but he kept his feeling carefully concealed, hardly
admitting it to himself.
He was still floundering. For some time after his frank repudiation in
August of 1915 of Labor's National Peace Council, he had fidgeted from
question to question in the _Argus_, trying to fix firmly on a campaign
which would advance his program for Sabinsport's regeneration and
either ignore or belittle the war. But nothing he attempted counted. It
was all trivial, temporary, beside the great stakes for which Europe
was struggling. The minds of his readers were there, not in Sabinsport.
It was so even in the mills and factories, where the men and women of a
dozen nationalities watched the contest and not his efforts to fight
what he insisted was their battle. What he did not sense was that these
grave laboring people were slowly realizing that _their_ battle was
being fought overseas. They could not have told you how or why,
perhaps, but feel it they did; and every letter from those of their
number in the war fed the idea. It grew amazingly in the mines after
Nikola came back with his tale of a nation driven into the sea. Such
things should not be. Were not the Allies fighting to put an end to
them, to punish those that dared attempt them? If so, was that not the
common man's battle?
The only discussion Ralph carried on in this period which really
stirred Sabinsport was his defense of the Federal Administration's
dealings with Germany. He was as violent in upholding its policy as his
own party was in abusing it. Not that he was any more willing to yield
the nation's rights under international law than his Progressive
leader, but he believed with all his obstinate, passionate soul that
these rights could be preserved without war. He upheld every successive
note, pointing exultantly to their skill in cornering Germany, in
forcing admissions and submission from her. "And not a gun fired," he
always cried.
Under his eloquent leadership, the town became familiar with every
point and every fact in the long-drawn-out controversy. The interest
was such that full sets of documents were to be found in more than one
unlikely place. Thus Sam Peets, the barber at the Paradise, had all
that mattered in the drawer under his big glass in front of his chair,
his repository for years for whatever interested him in public affairs.
And if anybody questioned or mis-stated either the position of Germany
or the United States, Sam would stop, whatever the condition of his
client's face, and pull out the document which settled the matter.
Captain Billy always carried, stuffed in disorder in his overcoat
pocket, most of the essential papers; and there was more than one man
in the wire mill that had them tucked away in some safe place in his
working clothes or some hidden corner of the great shop.
But the machinery which Ralph applauded, and in which Sabinsport
certainly wanted to trust, did not work smoothly. Again and again the
pledges on which we rested were violated; and then, in the spring of
1916, when the town's heart was still big with anxiety over the fate of
Paris, came the sinking of the _Sussex_, and the cynical declaration of
one of the German leaders in frightfulness that henceforth there should
be "unlimited, unchecked, indiscriminate torpedoing, directed against
every nationality and every kind of ship."
Germany yielded at the prompt threat of the United States to break with
her. She yielded, promised all we asked--reparation, right of search,
faithful attention to the laws of the sea as they had been at the
coming of war. But Dick had felt at the time that Sabinsport, as a
whole, would have been much better satisfied if the victory over
Germany in the matter of the _Sussex_ had been a victory of guns rather
than of notes. Certainly Uncle Billy and Patsy and those who followed
them felt so, and said so--Patsy with such insistence that Ralph who,
throughout the spring had been honestly trying to cultivate control in
her company, broke out hotly one day:
"You ought to be proud of our victory," he declared; "a victory of
civilized methods instead of barbarous ones, but to hear you talk one
wouldn't dream that you had ever heard of it. Why, Patsy, we're the
only nation that has won a victory over Germany since the war began.
We've made her give up the very weapons on which she counted most, and
we've done it without a soldier or a gun."
"A victory!" sniffed Patsy; "you'll see she's given in because the
English were getting ahead of her. She'll come back to it again. She
lies. Wasn't I in Belgium when--"
"Good Lord, Patsy, can't you ever for a moment forget Belgium? You
don't know yet, nor does any one, the real provocation the Germans had."
At which Patsy, white with rage, left the room, but only to talk more
and more vehemently, while Ralph the next day published an editorial in
the _Argus_ which was long remembered. He called it "The Unpopularity
of Civilization."
In the course of it he said:
"How small a place civilization has in the hearts and understandings of
vociferous America has been most vividly and interestingly demonstrated
in recent weeks. As an exhibit of its unpopularity, the reception the
settlement of our struggle with Germany has met surpasses anything that
I remember in our history. We were and had been for a year in a
critical case. We had undertaken to force a great power to admit that
she was violating international law, and to exact from her a promise to
obey it.
"There were two methods of attempting to secure a reinstatement of the
broken law. One was by arms. It was possible to say, 'Withdraw your
ambassador. We _fight_ for our right.' That way men have been trying
for more than a century to do away with. Civilization means doing away
with it--substituting reason for force, brains for fists, ballots for
bullets. Vociferous America subscribes to this ambition. Indeed she
says that it is for the sake of compelling this substitution--insuring
it--that she wants armies and navies. If this be so--if she does so
love civilization, why then, when she sees the complete success of
civilized machinery, is she so sore?
"Nobody denies that it has been a victory. It is doubtful if we have
ever had a victory of diplomacy that compared with it. England and
France say so. We know in our hearts it is a rousing victory.
"Suppose that instead of forcing an abandonment of the methods which we
contended were contrary to the laws of nations by arbitration as we
have done, we had forced it by the use of guns--is there any doubt that
vociferous America would have exulted--would have been thrilled?
"'It took so long,' they say. Several of the greatest nations in the
civilized world have been trying twice as long to settle a dispute by
war and no end is in sight. 'They may break their compact any day and
we have to fight.' Sure--but compacts settled by war do not always
hold. War means more war. Italy could not be held from the present
horror. She remembered earlier wars. This war settles nothing. When
exhaustion comes and arbitration begins--it will be by its wisdom that
the terms of peace will be measured, not by the sons slaughtered, the
villages in ruins, the debts only piled on future generations.
"'It shames us to be at peace.' Does it? Why? We have fought with our
brains for the rights not only of ourselves but for all nations. We
have won. The rights of all nations of the earth are firmer because of
our victory. But greater still in far-reaching importance is the
demonstration of what arbitration can do. It will make all civilized
methods easier to use in the future. We have set peaceful ways ahead on
the earth and done it at a time when all law, all humanity, all control
between nations was in danger of breaking down.
"Why is there so little pride in the achievement? There seems to be but
one explanation. We are civilized only in our skin--not clear through
that. We don't like civilization. We prefer to fight. We are afraid,
too, of what other peoples that do and are fighting will think of us.
They will think we are cowards. They and we _say_ that 'he who
conquereth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city,' but that's
for the gallery. We do not believe it.
"Civilization is unpopular with vociferous America."
* * * * *
Patsy was very personal about it. "That settles it," she told Dick. "I
shall never see Ralph Gardner again. He might just as well tell me to
my face that I'm uncivilized."
"She is uncivilized," Ralph shouted when Dick reported on his
questioning how personal Patsy was over his article. "Emotionalism has
made her harsh, cruel, unseeing. It is horrifying that any woman should
want war--contrary to their nature. There would be no wars if women
could have their way."
"You read that in a book, Ralph. Patsy is a perfectly normal
woman--that is, she cries to defend those that suffer. She has the
natural feminine anger towards those that caused the hurt, and she
wants to fight them, to hurt them in turn. There are as many women as
men in Sabinsport to-day eager to get into the war. There'll be more
and more of them, and when we do go in they will be as vindictive and
merciless as the men."
But Ralph hooted at the notion. "You are thinking of a cave woman,
Man--not of her of the twentieth century. Women never will support war.
I tell you, Patsy is not normal. Her whole nature is distorted by what
she saw in Belgium. Sometimes I think she is a bit crazy."
"Jealous," said Dick to himself. "Jealous of Belgium! Lord, was there
ever such a courtship!"
There were to be many of them before the war was over. Something
greater in meaning was sweeping through the hearts of men and women
than even their most precious personal desires. They could not have
told from whence it came or what it was--this fierce, overwhelming
necessity to sacrifice themselves; but they could not escape. That way
only was peace and safety and honor. The loves of men and women bent
before the flood. Patsy had been caught in the onrush. She could not
escape--would not, though her heart was breaking over Ralph's contempt
for her great, consuming passion. What she did not realize at all, and
what Dick could not make her see, was that Ralph himself had in these
last years been swept away by a splendid, unselfish ideal akin to her
own, that all his efforts in Sabinsport had been to realize his hopes,
that the war had stripped him of his cause, and that he had not as yet
found his way out of the ruins. It was all meaningless to Patsy. She
could not realize that he could no more abandon his great cause than
she hers, and, as he resented Belgium, she resented his absorption in
interests which had never stirred her soul.
Ralph had one refuge left at this moment. It was that the party, to
which four years before he had given an allegiance that was little
short of a dedication, would at its convention in June again sound the
high note it had struck four years before. He went to Chicago with a
despairing hope that he would there hear some hearty, strong expression
of faith in the things which were his passion, some definite plan for
rescuing them from the maw of the war. If he did not--"Well," he told
himself, "there's no place for me in the world."
"Don't count on there being anything there that you can follow, Ralph,"
Dick had told him. "The backbone of that program is military, all that
is modern in it is a reminiscence of 1912. Don't deceive yourself. Your
party at least is practical enough to admit that there is war on the
face of the earth, and that men everywhere must deal with it, which you
will not."
The convention was a cruel ordeal for Ralph. There he saw go down not
only an idol, but the group behind him, in whom he and so great a body
had had faith. There he saw shattered his hope of speedily building
into party gospel new and kindlier and more just practices between men,
greater protection for women and children, enlarged opportunities for
happy, satisfied living.
Ralph came back from Chicago sore and humble.
"It was a cowardly abandonment of something which had come to be for me
a religion, Dick. I think it was the greatest thing I ever felt--that
thing which happened in 1912. It was to make, what I thought it meant
come true, in Sabinsport that I've worked. It's all over. I've no
leader and no party. I don't know where I am in the world. I'm utterly
lost. What's the matter with me? Tell me square, as you see it. What's
the matter, that I can't get my fingers on this war, that I can't feel
it my affair? I believe I've got to do that, Dick, or give up the
_Argus_--for the war's getting Sabinsport. What ails me?"
It was a very humble Ralph that listened to the quiet voice of the man
whom he knew to be his best friend, the man who at least had never
wavered in affection in these long months when the two had been so
asunder in aim and in thought. Dick had taken their differences for
granted, he had never disputed, never been angry. It was always
possible to talk frankly to Dick without impassioned or angry
rejoinders. If that had only been possible with Patsy!
Now that Ralph had fairly put the question, "What's the matter with
me?" his friend did not spare him.
"Egotism is the matter with you, Ralph. You refuse to recognize that a
time has come when the world has different interests from those which
you think it ought to have. You have been going on the theory that the
one thing that is wrong in the world is the corrupt and stupid relation
between business and politics which has done so much mischief in this
country. So far you have been unwilling to admit that any other form of
evil existed on earth and the only way you were willing to fight this
was your own way. You had selected your enemy, you had laid out your
weapons. You would not consent to see other enemies or other weapons.
You have considered every other interest that occupied men and women as
an usurper, an intruder. The war called attention away from your fight
for righteousness--therefore it must not be tolerated. You refused even
to study the catastrophe. You took the easy, intellectual way of the
pacifist--war is wrong, therefore I won't try to understand this war.
"You've wanted Germany to be right because she had been right in
certain things you had at heart. You picked out those things and would
not see their place in her scheme. You rage at the use some of the
mills and mines make of welfare work; their efforts to turn attention
from a just distribution of profits, free discussion, full
representation, by improving conditions. I tell you, Ralph, that is
Germany's use for all her social and industrial machinery. It carries
with it no honest effort to appraise the value of the man's
contribution and see that he gets it; no determination to give him a
free voice and a free vote; no attempt to arouse him to exercise his
opinion, get from himself whatever he has in him that may contribute to
the whole. It fits him into a scheme; all of whose material profits and
privileges go to a selected few. Your industrial welfare jugglers are a
perfect type of German rule. But you were so obstinate in your
determination to have it as you wanted it that you would not see the
likeness. It has been your opinion, your propaganda, your desires, that
you clung to at a time when the very core of things just and decent in
the world was attacked.
"Why, why should as sensible a fellow as you settle back on your
particular interest in life as something permanent and essential,
something to be done before anything else, and rather than anything
else? How, in heaven's name, can you suppose your conclusions are the
final and supreme ones? How can you expect the world to give you right
of way? Why, boy, if you read your books, you must know that since the
beginning, men setting out to do one thing have had to do another. No
man has any assurance that the thing to which he has laid his hand,
however noble, however beneficent, may not be whisked out of the way
like a toy. What is your way or mine to the sweating world? It turns up
now one side and now another in its endless war for righteousness--it
asks for this method now, and now for that; to-day for war by words,
and to-morrow for war with fists. You can't choose either where you'll
fight for righteousness or how, Ralph; you can only say you will fight
for it--that much is in your power--but where? Insist on your place,
and before you know it you are alone without helper or enemy--the fight
has changed its field, its colors, its terms, its immediate object.
Insist on your method! You might as well insist the day shall be fair.
You fight in this world, Ralph, in the way the gods select for that
particular day. You say you won't countenance war, but what have you
waged but war? When you did your levelest to stir the wire mill to
strike two years ago, what was that but war--gaining a point by force?
What but war are those campaigns of yours in the _Argus_? There's many
a man would prefer to face a machine gun to facing you when you've
loaded the _Argus_.
"It's a hateful, barbarous thing--all war by violence is. To drive men
by hurting them is war, Ralph. Hunger, contempt, ostracism, do the work
as well as Mausers and Zeppelins and submarines. Don't be a fool any
longer--and by being a fool I mean insisting on things you know aren't
so, and on methods you know the world has temporarily flung on the
shelf. That's been your trouble--clinging to things left temporarily
behind. You say they're defeated--lost--that all the betterments you
and your friends had dreamed are ripped from the world. Nonsense!
What's going on in England and France? The recognition of the necessity
of accepting as government practices many a thing you've been turning
Sabinsport upside down to get. This war is righteous in aim, and all
righteousness will be shoved ahead as it goes on. That's what's
happening, Ralph. Governments and parties are admitting, without
contention, the need and the justice of measures they've fought for
years. After the war you'll find this problem of yours half solved, and
you will be forced to devise new ways of finishing the work, for
believe me, Ralph, you'll never fight again in Sabinsport in the old
way--you won't need to--Sabinsport is seeing new lights, dimly, but
seeing them."
"And what am I to do? I'm not the kind that climbs easily on a new band
wagon, you know."
"Ralph, I wish you'd try to forget the things you've been interested
in; forget the Progressive Party, for instance."
"Lord," said Ralph, "I don't have to do that--it's gone--dead."
"Well, wipe your slate clean, start afresh. Take the world as it is
to-day, try, without prejudice, to get at the things that brought about
this convulsion. I have no fear of where you will come out, if you will
but give up your idea of trying to reconstruct Sabinsport according to
the formula you have laid down. Incantations are useless now, Ralph.
You may cry 'Peace! Peace!' until you swoon, but you'll cry it to
unhearing ears. You can say your formulæ backward and forward and wave
your divining rod as you will, but it won't work. There is no magic
wand that is going to end this thing. Realities are at work, and the
greatest of them is the reality of hope--the hope for greater freedom
to more people. When you once understand this, Ralph, you will find
that you have a religion far greater than that which the Progressive
Convention of 1912 gave you."
"Of course you're right, Parson. You always are. The war has won. I've
known it would some day. Don't expect much of me. It will be like
learning to walk, to accept the war."
Dick thought of the phrase often in the days to come, "to accept the
war," and he felt a profound pity for the ardent idealists of the land
that had been dragged from their dreams and their efforts and had been
forced by merciless, insistent, continuing facts to admit that war was
on the earth. Neither their denials nor their horror turned the Great
Invader. He came on as if they were not. They had no weapons of
eloquence, of reason, of beauty, that lessened his might, slowed his
step. He was Power and Life and things as they are, and they were
Denial and Fantasy and that which is not.
But Ralph's effort to "accept the war" did not engross his mind nearly
so much, Dick soon began to feel, as his effort to persuade Patsy to
accept him--as a friend, of course! He was too humble now to think of
more. Patsy's wrath at being classed with the uncivilized, as she
insisted she had been, had not cooled, and Ralph, so long as he was
engrossed with his hope of revival of progressive ideas, had not tried
to cool it. He had determined that they could not safely meet, and, as
he told Dick, he wasn't going to enliven everybody's parties any longer
by quarreling with Patsy.
"You certainly will take a good deal of ginger out of Sabinsport's
festivities if you do stop seeing her, but you know you will hurt
Patsy."
"Hurt Patsy! I can't conceive a girl holding a man who was once her
friend in greater contempt than she does me."
"Nothing of the kind. Patsy suffers over these childish breaks more
than you do. She really does, Ralph."
"But I don't believe it. And no matter if she did feel it, it's no use.
We've tried it out." And there he let it rest for many weeks, while he
set himself at a stiff course of reading of war documents. He had
resolved to read, he said, "without prejudice, and decide in cool blood
if the case justified war!" Again and again, however, as he was
attempting to follow the Prussian from his start, as Dick had advised,
he found himself beginning with his own advent in Sabinsport six years
before and his first meeting with Patsy McCullon soon after she had
taken the position of "Assistant to the Principal" in the high school.
He remembered exactly how she looked as she came briskly into Mary
Sabins' handsome living-room--a straight, slender figure, brimming with
life and curiosity--dark, clear eyes, dark waving hair, a nose with
just a suggestion of a tilt, and a mouth all smiles and good humor. He
remembered how full she was of her new work--to the practical exclusion
of everybody else's interests, he recalled--how she had kept them
laughing with tales of the terror of her first week; her suspicion that
her pupils knew more than she did about algebra and geometry and Latin
grammar. He had gone away without getting in more than a word on the
_Argus_ and the iniquities of Sabinsport and a discomforted feeling
that this young woman had made the most of her "social opportunities"
to which High Town referred with such respect.
He recalled, too--recalled it with the German White Book on his
knee--how, before the winter was over, his resentment at Patsy's aplomb
had passed. He had learned to match her lively reports of personal
adventures in her school with as lively ones of what was going on in
Sabinsport's streets and factories. If she talked school reform, he
talked labor reform; if she urged improved laboratories, he urged
social insurance. They often accused each other of not understanding
the importance of their respective tasks and they as often gibed at
each other for taking these tasks over-seriously.
He remembered that he missed her when she went away for the summer and
greeted her gladly when she came back. Patsy had been nice to him that
second winter. She had guests from the East in the fall--"real
swells"--people whose names appeared in the New York society column,
and he had said to himself, "She's certainly a corker," when he saw
with what genuine hospitality and with what entire absence of
pretension Patsy had entertained her friends in the ample farm house,
giving them all the gay country fall pleasures, quite to the horror of
High Town, who would have loved to have opened its really luxurious
houses and set out its really lovely china. Patsy had taken Dick and
himself as her major-domos in her festivities and had thanked him
warmly. "Nobody could have been nicer or more generous than you and
Dick were. I knew I could count on you. It isn't so easy, you know, to
keep people whose business in life is largely amusement--though they
don't know it--amused every moment in a simple establishment like ours.
But they really were happy, and it was largely due to you."
It had set him up wonderfully. But, after all, he hadn't seen much of
Patsy that second winter. There was the _Argus_ and the growing
printing business which he was determined should be strong enough to
support any fight he would make, no matter how costly in advertising
and circulation; there had been the perplexity about how and where to
attack next the duo of rascals, as he believed them, Mulligan and
Cowder, whom he had beaten once, but whom he feared it was not going to
be so easy to beat again. Patsy had not understood his zeal. She had
been frankly disapproving.
"Why set the town by the ears again, Ralph? It makes everybody unhappy,
and I don't see how your old reform victory has improved things. Of
course the franchises ought to be in the hands of the town, but you
must confess we get good service and not so costly. Wait awhile."
He had been very sore over that. He had made up his mind she was merely
an attractive, friendly, calculating young woman. That was the way he
felt about her when she went abroad in June of 1914, he told himself,
as he idly fingered Cramb's little volume, which he really should have
been seriously reading, if he was to understand Germany.
And now, after these two years of quarreling, how changed Patsy was
from the Patsy of Mary Sabins' dinner! What a transformation from the
calculating, self-sufficient Patsy he had known--this passionate,
self-forgetful champion of a sorrowing people! It had only needed
contact with sorrow to break down every hard strain in her, to drive
from her mind every thought of pleasure and profit. It was the weak and
broken men and women of that over-run land that filled her heart. And
how lovely she had grown under pity and labor for others. He had
stepped into a church one night, the first winter of the war, where she
was telling the story of Belgium. He had done it in spite of himself,
he recalled. And he could see her now, her face flushed, her eyes big
and dark with pity, her hands suddenly and unconsciously pressed to her
bosom as she rehearsed the story of a lost child--one she had found
wandering in the streets of Brussels--a refugee child of whom no one
knew the name--too little to know it himself, but not too little to
cry, "Mamma! Mamma!"
He remembered how it had gripped him and how he had resented his
emotion--how his pity had turned to rage that she should be giving her
strength to these distant orphans when, as he told himself in jealous
exaggeration, "America's full of them." Oh, he had been a fool.
It was as Dick said, he had no feeling for any orphans but those which
were included in his scheme, no sense of any wrongs but those which he
had set out to right. What a drop was all the misery in America to the
bottomless well of misery in Europe! And what a difference in trying to
do away with misery in a land of peace and in one of war! What was all
that he had been interested in beside the ghastly wrongs that Patsy
agonized over! Was he never to see her again? Did she mean her last
heated declaration? Could he make it up?
When a young man of Ralph Gardner's sure and lordly spirit eats his
rare humble pie, he usually leaves no crumbs. He humiliates himself to
the ground. Ralph was ready to do this now. He would write a letter,
exposing his egotism, his self-centered narrowness. He would tell her
why he was so unreasonable, so boorish. He wanted his own way in the
world and resented a war that blocked it. He wouldn't see a noble
reason for the war because the war interfered with his noble
reason--Ralph Gardner's scheme of social regeneration. He wouldn't
spare himself, he would outdo Dick's arraignment. He would lay all his
jealousy and resentment at her feet, and then ask if she could be his
friend again.
But his scheme of self-abasement--elaborated in the silence of his
restless nights--never found its way to paper, for Dick had determined
that the time had come for him to take a hand in the affairs of the
two. "They must find out that they are in love," he said quite
decidedly to himself, "and who's to help them to it but me? They'll
never discover it as long as this war lasts"--in which Dick was wrong,
not really being versed by experience in love-making.
He decided to give a party. Now, since the _Argus_ editorial on the
"Unpopularity of Civilization," Patsy had resolutely refused all
invitations where she thought Ralph might be, and as he was doing the
same, the two had had no meetings. That must be stopped. Dick called
Patsy up. "I'm giving a party at the Rectory, Patsy. I want you. Ralph
will be here and that's the chief reason I want you. He is very
unhappy. He has had a great blow--"
"What? What?--" stuttered Patsy. "Please tell me."
"You wouldn't understand, I'm afraid. It's a long story, and I don't
believe I have a right to tell you. Just believe me, Patsy, and help me
brace up a hard-hit man."
"But, Dick, you must tell me. I can't bear to have Ralph unhappy. Is
anybody dead?"
"No--no--Patsy--not that. I can't tell you--" and this amateur plotter,
to whom it had never occurred until that moment that arousing a woman's
curiosity and possibly suspicion over the sorrows of a man in whom she
was interested, was an effective means of kindling her passion, seized
the opening and put a world of mystery and meaning into his tone as he
repeated, "I cannot tell you."
"But I cannot meet him. You know how Ralph despises me?"
"But, Patsy, I know he does not. He comes close to adoring you."
"What nonsense! From you, too! What assurance can I have that he won't
fly into a rage and berate me for knitting--for I shall bring my
knitting?"
"Do--do--and I'll be responsible for Ralph. You'll come?"
"Ye-e-es."
"I wonder," said this intriguing parson, "if I'm interfering with the
work of the gods, and shall make the usual mess of it."
But he stuck to his plan, and that afternoon when he dropped into the
_Argus_ office casually suggested that he was giving a party and that
Ralph was to come. "And Patsy is to be there, and you are not to
quarrel with her."
"Does Patsy know I'm coming?" Ralph asked anxiously.
"She does, and she consents."
"I wonder why," reflected Ralph.
"How should I know the vagaries of Patsy's mind?" the parson replied.
It was funny, Dick told himself after it was over, the formal good
behavior of the two, the conscious restraint that said louder than
words throughout dinner, "I shall not be the one to offend." Patsy
skated away from the war in haste whenever there was even a possibility
of its getting into the conversation. She invented an interest in the
condition of the girls at the munition plant, and she was gentleness
itself in her questions and answers to Ralph. The girl was really
touched by the change in the looks and the manner of the young man. He
was paler than she had ever seen him. It was not unbecoming to the big
fellow, but it was a little pathetic--to Patsy. He was quieter, less
talkative, not at all assertive. "Something has gone out of him," Patsy
told herself. What was it? And it was not strange at all that she
should have said to herself, "There's been a girl somewhere, and he's
lost her." She wondered if it could be that the girl had like herself
believed in Belgium and France. Perhaps she was a nurse and had
insisted on going, and Ralph had broken with her. He'd do that, she
thought to herself, with a stiffening spine which she immediately
limbered, when she caught his eyes on her.
As for Ralph, he had come prepared to be very, very polite to Patsy. He
would not force her attention, he would talk only about the things he
knew she was interested in and he would agree with her if it choked
him. But somehow he found himself talking quite freely of things he was
interested in and which Patsy herself had led him to. He talked well
and reasonably of the munition plants, and he didn't take a single
fling at "welfare work." He was amazed how all these things seemed to
have fallen into relation to other things, or, rather, how there seemed
to be other things as well.
And Patsy's eyes--he softened and trembled under them. They were so
gentle and half-pitying. What in the world could it mean? He knew well
enough that back in that active little brain something was
revolving--something about him. But never in his life would he have
figured out that Patsy, as she sat quietly discussing Sabinsport
factories, was building a romance of which he was the broken-hearted
villain and a fair-haired nurse in France the broken-hearted heroine.
After dinner, when they had gathered in the parson's big library for a
talk, Patsy had another surprise, for now Ralph was almost ostentatious
in the interest he showed in Dick's war library--a collection which
would have been remarkable anywhere, but which was particularly
noticeable here, five hundred miles from the sea. It included files of
_Vorwaerts_, of _Le Temps_, _Le Matin_, London _Times_, of political
weeklies of many countries, besides scores and scores of pamphlets and
books. Again and again in the past two years, Dick had urged his friend
to use his library. "You have no right as a citizen of a country which
is getting deeper and deeper into this thing not to follow the
literature of the war," he stormed, but Ralph had hardened his
judgment--he "didn't believe in war."
Now, however, committed to an acceptance which carried with it the
obligation to know and to judge, he had turned resolutely to reading.
Patsy could scarcely credit her eyes and ears when she saw him pick up
book after book--criticize, ask Dick's opinion, borrow, say, "I've
finished this"--"I want to read that." Where was the pugnacious,
intolerant, scoffing Ralph she had fought with for two years? There
could be no fighting with this man. He was too meek a seeker after
knowledge, too hesitant, and apologetic in expressing opinions.
Certainly something had happened to him.
Two equally puzzled young people went home that night to dream and
wonder. For many weeks they continued to dream and wonder. Ralph's
reserve, tolerance, meekness, studiousness continued. He hadn't found
himself. He was so made that as long as his faith in himself wavered,
as he had no fighting objective, he could not press his interest in
Patsy. She seemed as inaccessible as a new faith. And Patsy, still
romancing over the girl he had cruelly driven from him because of her
noble devotion to the sufferers overseas, watched his changed attitude
with anxiety and hope.
And always, as the weeks went on, each was more gentle to the other.
Often their eyes met questioning and fell doubting, afraid; more
eagerly did they meet, more reluctantly part. Even Mary Sabins, who
before the war had harbored an idea that Patsy and Ralph were
"interested," but who, since Young Tom had gone, rarely noticed
anybody's relations--even Mary Sabins said to Tom:
"Do you know, I believe Patsy and Ralph are falling in love, and the
sillies don't know it."
Dick was satisfied with his interference. He watched them with almost a
paternal feeling. It was only now and then that a jealous pang seized
him, and he said, "Why, why is there no one for me? If Annie had lived."
But Annie, after all, was a dream, more and more shadowy. The Reverend
Richard Ingraham was not in love with a dream. He did not know it--he
who had so often commented privately on the stupidity of his friend
Ralph--but he was following Ralph's course, only he, less reasonable,
was falling in love with a woman he had never seen. It would not have
been so, I am convinced, if there had been in Sabinsport a single girl
known to Dick that had the mingling of charm and spirit that was needed
to win him. Surely he would have followed her as the needle the pole;
but she was not there. The girl that did draw him was a girl overseas,
a girl at whose name Sabinsport raised its eyebrows, a girl whose
father had described her as "slight and fine and free moving," and
whose life, as he had been learning it from her father since their
first talk, showed her brave and sweet and unselfish. If I know
anything of the ways of the heart, the Reverend Richard Ingraham was
falling in love with Nancy Cowder--the horse-racing daughter of
Sabinsport's chief pirate.