Lenore told her conception of the history and the romance of wheat to
Dorn at this critical time when it was necessary to give a trenchant
call to hope and future.
In the beginning man's struggle was for life and the mainstay of life
was food. Perhaps the original discoverer of wheat was a meat-eating
savage who, in roaming the forests and fields, forced by starvation to
eat bark and plant and berry, came upon a stalk of grain that chewed
with strange satisfaction. Perhaps through that accident he became a
sower of wheat.
Who actually were the first sowers of wheat would never be known. They
were older than any history, and must have been among the earliest of
the human race.
The development of grain produced wheat, and wheat was ground into
flour, and flour was baked into bread, and bread had for untold
centuries been the sustenance and the staff of life.
Centuries ago an old Chaldean priest tried to ascertain if wheat had
ever grown wild. That question never was settled. It was universally
believed, however, that wheat had to have the cultivation of man.
Nevertheless, the origin of the plant must have been analogous to that
of other plants. Wheat-growers must necessarily have been people who
stayed long in one place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the
fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races,
and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples.
Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains
of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the
Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. In the days of the
Pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the
soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean of wheat waved and
shone under the hot Egyptian sun. The Arabs, on their weird beasts of
burden, rode from the desert wastes down to the land of waters and of
plenty. Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the
palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden
grain toward the mysterious east. Moses, when he stood in the night,
watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on
the desert wind a scent of wheat. The Bible said, "He maketh peace in
thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat."
Black-bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure
flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner,
dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine;
when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out, "Bread or
blood!"
But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization;
and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of
man. Wheat-fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous
farmers; fruitful toil of happy peoples; the miller and his humming
mill!
When wheat crossed the ocean to America it came to strange and wonderful
fulfilment of its destiny. America, fresh, vast, and free, with its
sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward; with the
advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable
wheat-sowers; with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each
succeeding year; with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested
by machines that were mechanical wonders; with enormous flour-mills,
humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour,
pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and
sweet, the whitest and finest in the world!
America, the new county, became in 1918 the salvation of starving
Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France! Wheat for the
world! Wheat--that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the
armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns! America to
succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful
slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its
vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of
war! It was an exalted destiny for a people. Its truth was a blazing
affront in the face of age-old autocracy. Fields and toil and grains of
wheat, first and last, the salvation of mankind, the freedom and the
food of the world!
* * * * *
Far up the slow-rising bulge of valley slope above the gleaming river
two cars climbed leisurely and rolled on over the height into what
seemed a bare and lonely land of green.
It was a day in June, filled with a rich, thick, amber light, with a
fragrant warm wind blowing out of the west.
At a certain point on this road, where Anderson always felt compelled to
halt, he stopped the car this day and awaited the other that contained
Lenore and Dorn.
Lenore's joy in the ride was reflected in her face. Dorn rested
comfortably beside her, upon an improvised couch. As he lay half propped
up by pillows he could see out across the treeless land that he knew.
His eyes held a look of the returned soldier who had never expected to
see his native land again. Lenore, sensitive to every phase of his
feeling, watched him with her heart mounting high.
Anderson got out of his car, followed by Kathleen, who looked glad and
mischievous and pretty as a wild rose.
"I just never can get by this place," explained the rancher, as he came
and stood so that he could put a hand on Dorn's knee. "Look, son--an'
Lenore, don't you miss this."
"Never fear, dad," replied Lenore, "it was I who first told you to look
here."
"Terrible big and bare, but grand!" exclaimed Kathleen.
Lenore looked first at Dorn's face as he gazed away across the length
and breadth of land. Could that land mean as much to him as it did
before he went to war? Infinitely more, she saw, and rejoiced. Her faith
was coming home to her in verities. Then she thrilled at the wide
prospect before her.
It was a scene that she knew could not be duplicated in the world. Low,
slow-sloping, billowy green hills, bare and smooth with square brown
patches, stretched away to what seemed infinite distance. Valleys and
hills, with less fallow ground than ever before, significant and
striking: lost the meager details of clumps of trees and dots of houses
in a green immensity. A million shadows out of the west came waving over
the wheat. They were ripples of an ocean of grain. No dust-clouds, no
bleached roads, no yellow hills to-day! June, and the desert found its
analogy only in the sweep and reach! A thousand hills billowing away
toward that blue haze of mountain range where rolled the Oregon. Acreage
and mileage seemed insignificant. All was green--green, the fresh and
hopeful color, strangely serene and sweet and endless under the azure
sky. Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive
with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long
lines of roads running everywhither, overwhelmingly pregnant with
meaning--wheat--wheat--wheat--nothing but wheat, a staggering visual
manifestation of vital need, of noble promise.
"That--that!" rolled out Anderson, waving his big hand, as if words were
useless. "Only a corner of the great old U.S.!... What would the Germans
say if they could look out over this?... What do _you_ say, Lenore?"
"Beautiful!" she replied, softly. "Like the rainbow in the sky--God's
promise of life!"
"An', Kathie, what do _you_ say?" went on Anderson.
"Some wheat-fields!" replied Kathleen, with an air of woman's wisdom.
"Fetch on your young wheat-sowers, dad, and I'll pick out a husband."
"An' _you_, son?" finished Anderson, as if wistfully, yet heartily
playing his last card. He was remembering Jim--the wild but beloved
son--the dead soldier. He was fearful for the crowning hope of his
years.
"As ye sow--so shall ye reap!" was Dorn's reply, strong and thrilling.
And Lenore felt her father's strange, heart-satisfying content.
* * * * *
Twilight crept down around the old home on the hill.
Dorn was alone, leaning at the window. He had just strength to lean
there, with uplifted head. Lenore had left him alone, divining his wish.
As she left him there came a sudden familiar happening in his brain,
like a snap-back, and the contending tide of gray forms--the
Huns--rushed upon him. He leaned there at the window, but just the same
he awaited the shock on the ramparts of the trench. A ferocious and
terrible storm of brain, that used to have its reaction in outward
violence, now worked inside him, like a hot wind that drove his blood.
During the spell he fought out his great fight--again for the thousandth
time he rekilled his foes. That storm passed through him without an
outward quiver.
His Huns--charged again--bayoneted again--and he felt acute pain in the
left arm that was gone. He felt the closing of the hand which was not
there. His Huns lay in the shadow, stark and shapeless, with white faces
upward--a line of dead foes, remorseless and abhorrent to him, forever
damned by his ruthless spirit. He saw the boy slide off his bayonet,
beyond recall, murdered by some evil of which Dorn had been the motion.
Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn's brain.
"Lenore will never know--how my Huns come back to me," he whispered.
Night with its trains of stars! Softly the darkness unfolded down over
the dim hills, lonely, tranquil, sweet. A night-bird caroled. The song
of insects, very faint and low, came to him like a still, sad music of
humanity, from over the hills, far away, in the strife-ridden world. The
world of men was there and life was incessant, monstrous, and
inconceivable. This old home of his--the old house seemed full of
well-remembered sounds of mouse and cricket and leaf against the roof
and soft night wind at the eaves--sounds that brought his boyhood back,
his bare feet on the stairs, his father's aloofness, his mother's love.
* * * * *
Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat.
Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body,
higher than the gloom. That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and
manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. It was a growing
rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured. It seemed to
change and grow in volume, in meaning. The night wind bore it, but
life--bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a
driving and a mighty spirit. Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its
life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite
and universal. Suddenly Dorn saw that something as the breath and the
blood and the spirit of wheat--and of man. Dust and to dust returned
they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable
moment on earth, springing up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that
ever-increasing purpose which ran through the ages.
A soft footfall sounded on the stairs. Lenore came. She leaned over him
and the starlight fell upon her face, sweet, luminous, beautiful. In the
sense of her compelling presence, in the tender touch of her hands, in
the whisper of woman's love, Dorn felt uplifted high above the dark pale
of the present with its war and pain and clouded mind to wheat--to the
fertile fields of a golden age to come.