Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium
where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back
until October. Claude and his mother gave all their attention to
the war despatches. Day after day, through the first two weeks of
August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
into the farming country.
About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the
forts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a
few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,--guns which
evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or
ever could be constructed. Even to these quiet wheat-growing
people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their
safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way
of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which
afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of
unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or
the eruption of volcanoes.
On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at
Namur; again giving warning that an unprecedented power of
destruction had broken loose in the world. A few days later the
story of the wiping out of the ancient and peaceful seat of
learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers
were full of accounts of the destruction of civilian populations.
Something new, and certainly evil, was at work among mankind.
Nobody was ready with a name for it. None of the well-worn words
descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The epithets
grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too
dramatic, too full of old, familiar human passion.
One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in
the kitchen making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car
coming back from Frankfort. In a moment he entered, letting the
screen door slam behind him, and threw a bundle of mail on the
table.
"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of
government to Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold
Paris."
Mrs. Wheeler wiped her pale, perspiring face with the hem of her
apron and sat down in the nearest chair. "You mean that Paris is
not the capital of France any more? Can that be true?"
"That's what it looks like. Though the papers say it's only a
precautionary measure."
She rose. "Let's go up to the map. I don't remember exactly where
Bordeaux is. Mahailey, you won't let my vinegar burn, will you?"
Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung
on the wall above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of
a willow rocking-chair, she began to move her hand about over the
brightly coloured, shiny surface, murmuring, "Yes, there is
Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris."
Claude, behind her, looked over her shoulder. "Do you suppose
they are going to hand their city over to the Germans, like a
Christmas present? I should think they'd burn it first, the way
the Russians did Moscow. They can do better than that now, they
can dynamite it!"
"Don't say such things." Mrs. Wheeler dropped into the deep
willow chair, realizing that she was very tired, now that she had
left the stove and the heat of the kitchen. She began weakly to
wave the palm leaf fan before her face. "It's said to be such a
beautiful city. Perhaps the Germans will spare it, as they did
Brussels. They must be sick of destruction by now. Get the
encyclopaedia and see what it says. I've left my glasses
downstairs."
Claude brought a volume from the bookcase and sat down on the
lounge. He began: "Paris, the capital city of France and the
Department of the Seine,--shall I skip the history?"
"No. Read it all."
He cleared his throat and began again: "At its first appearance
in history, there was nothing to foreshadow the important part
which Paris was to play in Europe and in the world," etc.
Mrs. Wheeler rocked and fanned, forgetting the kitchen and the
cucumbers as if they had never been. Her tired body was resting,
and her mind, which was never tired, was occupied with the
account of early religious foundations under the Merovingian
kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested
upon the sunburned neck and catapult shoulders of her red-headed
son.
Claude read faster and faster until he stopped with a gasp.
"Mother, there are pages of kings! We'll read that some other
time. I want to find out what it's like now, and whether it's
going to have any more history." He ran his finger up and down
the columns. "Here, this looks like business.
"Defences: Paris, in a recent German account of the greatest
fortresses of the world, possesses three distinct rings of
defences"--here he broke off. "Now what do you think of that? A
German account, and this is an English book! The world simply
made a mistake about the Germans all along. It's as if we invited
a neighbour over here and showed him our cattle and barns, and
all the time he was planning how he would come at night and club
us in our beds."
Mrs. Wheeler passed her hand over her brow. "Yet we have had so
many German neighbours, and never one that wasn't kind and
helpful."
"I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany
made me want to go there. And the people that sing all those
beautiful songs about women and children went into Belgian
villages and--"
"Don't, Claude!" his mother put out her hands as if to push his
words back. "Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we
must think about now. I can't but believe there is one fort the
Germans didn't put down in their book, and that it will stand. We
know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many God-fearing
people there, and God has preserved it all these years. You saw
in the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying."
She leaned forward and smiled at him indulgently. "And you
believe those prayers will accomplish nothing, son?"
Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon
certain subjects. "Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans
are praying, too. And I guess they are just naturally more pious
than the French." Taking up the book he began once more: "In the
low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great loop of the
Marne," etc.
Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that
river, and with the idea of its strategic importance, before it
began to stand out in black headlines a few days later.
The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to
put in six hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the
other side of the world, they would need bread. He took a third
team himself and went into the field every morning to help Dan
and Claude. The neighbours said that nobody but the Kaiser had
ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.
Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every
morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile
away, to get yesterday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the
carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them
as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning,
indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read
all the war news through before she stirred, while the
grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers
came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she
saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down
to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the
windmill breathless.
"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing
at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it
may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army
went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew himself up. "Well, it will
decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?"
"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few
of the English are there, and the French are terribly
outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers
upstairs."
"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after
I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper."
In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father
and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the
sitting-room. "There is not much news, except that the battle is
on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans
outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in
artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no
farther." He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his
room.
Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not
to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a
window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he
knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the
capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were
responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the
grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since
the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with
amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.
It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four
days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with
the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital,
not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only
farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. The fact
that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western "r"
standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's
imagination a firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and
thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of
French "politeness"--so much more terrifying than German
bullets--and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's
manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the
eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so
gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose
and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much
through all the centuries--but had never meant so much before.
Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In
great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the
little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as
they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star
fall.
X
It was Sunday afternoon and Claude had gone down to the mill
house, as Enid and her mother had returned from Michigan the day
before. Mrs. Wheeler, propped back in a rocking chair, was
reading, and Mr. Wheeler, in his shirt sleeves, his Sunday collar
unbuttoned, was sitting at his walnut secretary, amusing himself
with columns of figures. Presently he rose and yawned, stretching
his arms above his head.
"Claude thinks he wants to begin building right away, up on the
quarter next the timber claim. I've been figuring on the lumber.
Building materials are cheap just now, so I suppose I'd better
let him go ahead."
Mrs. Wheeler looked up absently from the page. "Why, I suppose
so."
Her husband sat down astride a chair, and leaning his arms on the
back of it, looked at her. "What do you think of this match,
anyway? I don't know as I've heard you say."
"Enid is a good, Christian girl..." Mrs. Wheeler began
resolutely, but her sentence hung in the air like a question.
He moved impatiently. "Yes, I know. But what does a husky boy
like Claude want to pick out a girl like that for? Why,
Evangeline, she'll be the old woman over again!"
Apparently these misgivings were not new to Mrs. Wheeler, for she
put out her hand to stop him and whispered in solemn agitation,
"Don't say anything! Don't breathe!"
"Oh, I won't interfere! I never do. I'd rather have her for a
daughter-in-law than a wife, by a long shot. Claude's more of a
fool than I thought him." He picked up his hat and strolled down
to the barn, but his wife did not recover her composure so
easily. She left the chair where she had hopefully settled
herself for comfort, took up a feather duster and began moving
distractedly about the room, brushing the surface of the
furniture. When the war news was bad, or when she felt troubled
about Claude, she set to cleaning house or overhauling the
closets, thankful to be able to put some little thing to rights
in such a disordered world.
As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers
out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work
he began digging his cellar. He was building his house on the
level stretch beside his father's timber claim because, when he
was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most
beautiful spot in the world. It was a square of about thirty
acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a
thick mulberry hedge on the south side. The trees had been
neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage
to trim them and care for them at odd moments.
Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.
He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and
he meant that this one should be deep enough. One day Leonard
Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making. Standing on
the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating
below.
"My God, Claude, what do you want of a cellar as deep as that?
When your wife takes a notion to go to China, you can open a
trap-door and drop her through!"
Claude flung down his pick and ran up the ladder. "Enid's not
going to have notions of that sort," he said wrathfully.
"Well, you needn't get mad. I'm glad to hear it. I was sorry when
the other girl went. It always looked to me like Enid had her face
set for China, but I haven't seen her for a good while,--not
since before she went off to Michigan with the old lady."
After Leonard was gone, Claude returned to his work, still out of
humour. He was not altogether happy in his mind about Enid. When
he went down to the mill it was usually Mr. Royce, not Enid, who
sought to detain him, followed him down the path to the gate and
seemed sorry to see him go. He could not blame Enid with any lack
of interest in what he was doing. She talked and thought of
nothing but the new house, and most of her suggestions were good.
He often wished she would ask for something unreasonable and
extravagant. But she had no selfish whims, and even insisted that
the comfortable upstairs sleeping room he had planned with such
care should be reserved for a guest chamber.
As the house began to take shape, Enid came up often in her car,
to watch its growth, to show Claude samples of wallpapers and
draperies, or a design for a window-seat she had cut from some
magazine. There could be no question of her pride in every
detail. The disappointing thing was that she seemed more
interested in the house than in him. These months when they could
be together as much as they pleased, she treated merely as a
period of time in which they were building a house.
Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told
himself. He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as
his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.
Marriage reduced all women to a common denominator; changed a
cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one. It
was quite right that Enid should be unconscious now of everything
that she was to be when she was his wife. He told himself he
wouldn't want it otherwise.
But he was lonely, all the same. He lavished upon the little
house the solicitude and cherishing care that Enid seemed not to
need. He stood over the carpenters urging the greatest nicety in
the finish of closets and cupboards, the convenient placing of
shelves, the exact joining of sills and casings. Often he stayed
late in the evening, after the workmen with their noisy boots had
gone home to supper. He sat down on a rafter or on the skeleton
of the upper porch and quite lost himself in brooding, in
anticipation of things that seemed as far away as ever. The dying
light, the quiet stars coming out, were friendly and sympathetic.
One night a bird flew in and fluttered wildly about among the
partitions, shrieking with fright before it darted out into the
dusk through one of the upper windows and found its way to
freedom.
When the carpenters were ready to put in the staircase, Claude
telephoned Enid and asked her to come and show them just what
height she wanted the steps made. His mother had always had to
climb stairs that were too steep. Enid stopped her car at the
Frankfort High School at four o'clock and persuaded Gladys Farmer
to drive out with her.
When they arrived they found Claude working on the lattice
enclosure of the back porch. "Claude is like Jonah," Enid
laughed. "He wants to plant gourd vines here, so they will run
over the lattice and make shade. I can think of other vines that
might be more ornamental."
Claude put down his hammer and said coaxingly: "Have you ever
seen a gourd vine when it had something to climb on, Enid? You
wouldn't believe how pretty they are; big green leaves, and
gourds and yellow blossoms hanging all over them at the same
time. An old German woman who keeps a lunch counter at one of
those stations on the road to Lincoln has them running up her
back porch, and I've wanted to plant some ever since I first saw
hers."
Enid smiled indulgently. "Well, I suppose you'll let me have
clematis for the front porch, anyway? The men are getting ready
to leave, so we'd better see about the steps."
After the workmen had gone, Claude took the girls upstairs by the
ladder. They emerged from a little entry into a large room which
extended over both the front and back parlours. The carpenters
called it "the pool hall". There were two long windows, like
doors, opening upon the porch roof, and in the sloping ceiling
were two dormer windows, one looking north to the timber claim
and the other south toward Lovely Creek. Gladys at once felt a
singular pleasantness about this chamber, empty and unplastered
as it was. "What a lovely room!" she exclaimed.
Claude took her up eagerly. "Don't you think so? You see it's my
idea to have the second floor for ourselves, instead of cutting
it up into little boxes as people usually do. We can come up here
and forget the farm and the kitchen and all our troubles. I've
made a big closet for each of us, and got everything just right.
And now Enid wants to keep this room for preachers!"
Enid laughed. "Not only for preachers, Claude. For Gladys, when
she comes to visit us--you see she likes it--and for your mother
when she comes to spend a week and rest. I don't think we ought
to take the best room for ourselves."
"Why not?" Claude argued hotly. "I'm building the whole house for
ourselves. Come out on the porch roof, Gladys. Isn't this fine
for hot nights? I want to put a railing round and make this into
a balcony, where we can have chairs and a hammock."
Gladys sat down on the low window-sill. "Enid, you'd be foolish
to keep this for a guest room. Nobody would ever enjoy it as much
as you would. You can see the whole country from here."
Enid smiled, but showed no sign of relenting. "Let's wait and
watch the sun go down. Be careful, Claude. It makes me nervous to
see you lying there."
He was stretched out on the edge of the roof, one leg hanging
over, and his head pillowed on his arm. The flat fields turned
red, the distant windmills flashed white, and little rosy clouds
appeared in the sky above them.
"If I make this into a balcony," Claude murmured, "the peak of
the roof will always throw a shadow over it in the afternoon, and
at night the stars will be right overhead. It will be a fine
place to sleep in harvest time."
"Oh, you could always come up here to sleep on a hot night," Enid
said quickly.
"It wouldn't be the same."
They sat watching the light die out of the sky, and Enid and
Gladys drew close together as the coolness of the autumn evening
came on. The three friends were thinking about the same thing;
and yet, if by some sorcery each had begun to speak his thoughts
aloud, amazement and bitterness would have fallen upon all.
Enid's reflections were the most blameless. The discussion about
the guest room had reminded her of Brother Weldon. In September,
on her way to Michigan with Mrs. Royce, she had stopped for a day
in Lincoln to take counsel with Arthur Weldon as to whether she
ought to marry one whom she described to him as "an unsaved man."
Young Mr. Weldon approached this subject with a cautious tread,
but when he learned that the man in question was Claude Wheeler,
he became more partisan than was his wont. He seemed to think
that her marrying Claude was the one way to reclaim him, and did
not hesitate to say that the most important service devout girls
could perform for the church was to bring promising young men to
its support. Enid had been almost certain that Mr. Weldon would
approve her course before she consulted him, but his concurrence
always gratified her pride. She told him that when she had a home
of her own she would expect him to spend a part of his summer
vacation there, and he blushingly expressed his willingness to do
so.
Gladys, too, was lost in her own thoughts, sitting with that ease
which made her seem rather indolent, her head resting against the
empty window frame, facing the setting sun. The rosy light made
her brown eyes gleam like old copper, and there was a moody look
in them, as if in her mind she were defying something. When he
happened to glance at her, it occurred to Claude that it was a
hard destiny to be the exceptional person in a community, to be
more gifted or more intelligent than the rest. For a girl it must
be doubly hard. He sat up suddenly and broke the long silence.
"I forgot, Enid, I have a secret to tell you. Over in the timber
claim the other day I started up a flock of quail. They must be
the only ones left in all this neighbourhood, and I doubt if they
ever come out of the timber. The bluegrass hasn't been mowed in
there for years,--not since I first went away to school, and maybe
they live on the grass seeds. In summer, of course, there are
mulberries."
Enid wondered whether the birds could have learned enough about
the world to stay hidden in the timber lot. Claude was sure they
had.
"Nobody ever goes near the place except Father; he stops there
sometimes. Maybe he has seen them and never said a word. It would
be just like him." He told them he had scattered shelled corn in
the grass, so that the birds would not be tempted to fly over
into Leonard Dawson's cornfield. "If Leonard saw them, he'd
likely take a shot at them."
"Why don't you ask him not to?" Enid suggested.
Claude laughed. "That would be asking a good deal. When a bunch
of quail rise out of a cornfield they're a mighty tempting sight,
if a man likes hunting. We'll have a picnic for you when you come
out next summer, Gladys. There are some pretty places over there
in the timber."
Gladys started up. "Why, it's night already! It's lovely here,
but you must get me home, Enid."
They found it dark inside. Claude took Enid down the ladder and
out to her car, and then went back for Gladys. She was sitting on
the floor at the top of the ladder. Giving her his hand he helped
her to rise.
"So you like my little house," he said gratefully.
"Yes. Oh, yes!" Her voice was full of feeling, but she did not
exert herself to say more. Claude descended in front of her to
keep her from slipping. She hung back while he led her through
confusing doorways and helped her over the piles of laths that
littered the floors. At the edge of the gaping cellar entrance
she stopped and leaned wearily on his arm for a moment. She did
not speak, but he understood that his new house made her sad;
that she, too, had come to the place where she must turn out of
the old path. He longed to whisper to her and beg her not to
marry his brother. He lingered and hesitated, fumbling in the
dark. She had his own cursed kind of sensibility; she would
expect too much from life and be disappointed. He was reluctant
to lead her out into the chilly evening without some word of
entreaty. He would willingly have prolonged their passage,--
through many rooms and corridors. Perhaps, had that been
possible, the strength in him would have found what it was
seeking; even in this short interval it had stirred and made
itself felt, had uttered a confused appeal. Claude was greatly
surprised at himself.