A world once considered of enduring stability had crashed fearsomely
about the ears of Winona Penniman and Wilbur Cowan. After this no
support was to be trusted, however seemingly stout. Old foundations had
crumbled, old institutions perished, the walls of Time itself lay
wrecked. They stared across the appalling desolation with frightened
eyes. What next? In a world to be ruined at a touch, like a house of
cards, what vaster ruin would ensue?
It did not shock Wilbur Cowan that nations should plunge into another
madness the very day after a certain fair one, mentioned in his
meditations as "My Pearl--My Pearl of great price," and eke--from the
perfume label--"My Heart of Flowers," had revealed herself but a mortal
woman with an eye for the good provider. It occasioned Winona not even
mild surprise that the world should abandon itself to hideous war on the
very day after Lyman Teaford had wed beyond the purple. It was awful,
yet somehow fitting. Anything less than a World War would have appeared
inconsequent, anti-climactic, to these two so closely concerned in the
preliminary catastrophe, and yet so reticent that neither ever knew the
other's wound. Wilbur Cowan may have supposed that the entire Penniman
family, Winona included, would rejoice that no more forever were they to
hear the flute of Lyman Teaford. Certainly Winona never suspected that a
mere boy had been desolated by woman's perfidy and Lyman's mad
abandonment of all that people of the better sort most prize.
Other people, close observers of world events, declared that no real war
would ensue; it would be done in a few days--a few weeks at most. But
Winona and Wilbur knew better. Now anything could happen--and would. Of
all Newbern's wise folk these two alone foresaw the malign dimensions of
the inevitably approaching cataclysm. They would fall grimly silent in
the presence of conventional optimists. They knew the war was to be
unparalleled for blood and tears, but they allowed themselves no more
than sinister, vague prophecies, for they could not tell how they knew.
And they saw themselves active in war. They lost no time in doing that.
The drama of each drew to a splendid climax with the arrival in Newbern
of a French officer--probably a general--bound upon a grave mission.
Wilbur's general came to seek out the wife of Lyman Teaford.
To her he said in choice English: "Madame, I bring you sad news. This
young man died gallantly on the field of battle--the flag of my country
was about to be captured by the enemy when he leaped bravely forward,
where no other would dare the storm of shot and shell, and brought the
precious emblem safely back to our battle line. But even as the cheers
of his comrades rang in his ears an enemy bullet laid him low. I sprang
to his side and raised his head. His voice was already weak, for the
bullet had found rest in his noble heart.
"'Tell her,' he breathed, 'that she sent me to my death so that she
might become only a bird in a gilded cage. But tell her also that I wish
her happiness in her new life.' Madame, he died there, while weeping
soldiers clustered about with hats off and heads bowed--died with your
name on his pale lips---'My Pearl of great price,' he whispered, and all
was over. I bring you this photograph, which to the last he wore above
his heart. Observe the bullet hole and those dark stains that discolour
your proud features."
Whereupon Mrs. Lyman Teaford would fall fainting to the floor and never
again be the same woman, bearing to her grave a look of unutterable
sadness, even amid the splendours of the newly furnished Latimer
residence on North Oak Street.
Winona's drama was less depressing. Possibly Winona at thirty-two had
developed a resilience not yet achieved by Wilbur at twenty. She was not
going to die upon a field of battle for any Lyman Teaford. She would
brave dangers, however. She saw herself in a neat uniform, searching a
battlefield strewn with the dead and wounded. To the latter she
administered reviving cordial from a minute cask suspended at her trim
waist by a cord. Shells burst about her, but to these she paid no heed.
It was thus the French officer--a mere lieutenant, later promoted for
gallantry under fire--first observed her. He called her an angel of
mercy, and his soldiers--rough chaps, but hearty and outspoken--cheered
her as La Belle Americaine.
So much for the war. But the French officer--a general now, perhaps with
one arm off--came to Newbern to claim his bride. He had been one of the
impetuous sort that simply would not take no for an answer. The wedding
was in the Methodist church, and was a glittering public function. The
groom was not only splendidly handsome in a French way, but wore a
shining uniform, and upon his breast sparkled a profusion of medals. A
vast crowd outside the church waited to cheer the happy couple, and
slinking at the rear of this was a drab Lyman Teaford--without medals,
without uniform, dull, prosaic, enduring at this moment pangs of the
keenest remorse for his hasty act of a year before. He, too, would never
be the same man again.
In truth, the beginning Teaford ménage lay under the most unfavourable
portents. Things looked dark for it.
Yet despite the forebodings of Wilbur and Winona, it began to be
suspected, even by them, that the war would wear itself out, as old
Doctor Purdy said, by first intention. And in spite of affecting
individual dramas they began to feel that it must wear itself out with
no help from them. It seemed to have settled into a quarrel among
foreign nations with which we could rightfully have no concern. Winona
learned, too, that her picture of the nurse on a battlefield
administering cordial to wounded combatants from the small keg at her
waist was based upon an ancient and doubtless always fanciful print.
Wilbur, too, gathered from the newspapers that, though he might die upon
a battlefield, there was little chance that a French general would be
commissioned to repeat his last words to Mrs. Lyman Teaford of Newbern
Center. He almost decided that he would not become a soldier. Some years
before, it is true, he had been drawn to the life by a government
poster, designed by one who must himself have been a capable dramatist.
"Join the Army and See the World," urged the large-lettered legend above
the picture.
The latter revealed an entrancing tropical scene with graceful palms
adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the
background two officers consulted with a private above an
important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at
attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking
old colonel seemed to be entreating a couple of spruce young privates to
drop round for tea that afternoon and meet the ladies.
Had Wilbur happened upon this poster in conjunction with the resolve of
Miss Pearl King to be sensible, it is possible his history might have
been different. But its promise had faded from his memory ere his life
was wrecked. He felt now merely that he ought to settle down to
something. Even Sharon Whipple plainly told him so. He said it was all
right to knock about from one thing to another while you were still in
the gristle. Up to twenty a boy's years were kind of yeasty and
uncertain, and if he was any way self-headed he ought to be left to run.
But after twenty he lost his pinfeathers and should begin to think about
things.
So Wilbur began to think about things. He continued to do everything
that old Porter Howgill was asked to do, to repair cars for the Mansion
garage, and to be a shield and buckler to Sam Pickering in time of need.
The _Advance_ office became freshly attractive at this time, because Sam
had installed a wonderful new power press to print the paper daily; for
the _Advance_, as Sam put it, could be found ever in the van of
progress.
The new press had innermost secrets of structure that were presently
best known to Wilbur Cowan. No smeared small boy was required to ink its
forms and no surmounting bronze eagle was reported to scream for beer
when the last paper was run off. Even Dave Cowan, drifting in from out
of the nowhere--in shoes properly describable as only memories of
shoes--said she was a snappy little machine, and applauded his son's
easy mastery of it.
So the days of Wilbur were busy days, even if he had not settled far
enough down to suit either Sam Pickering, Porter Howgill--who did
everything, if asked--or the First-Class Garage. And the blight put upon
him by a creature as false as she was beautiful proved not to be
enduring. He was able, indeed, to behold her without a tremor, save of
sympathy for one compelled to endure the daily proximity of Lyman
Teaford.
But the war prolonged itself as only he and Winona had felt it would,
and presently it began to be hinted that a great nation, apparently
unconcerned with its beginning, might eventually be compelled to a
livelier interest in it. Herman Vielhaber was a publicly exposed
barometer of this sentiment. At the beginning he beamed upon the world
and predicted the Fatherland's speedy triumph over all the treacherous
foes. When the triumph was unaccountably delayed he appeared mysterious,
but not less confident. The Prussian system might involve delay, but
Prussian might was none the less invincible. Herman would explain the
Prussian system freely to all who cared to listen--and many did
attentively--from high diplomacy to actual fighting. He left many of his
hearers with a grateful relief that neutrality had been officially
enjoined upon them.
Later Herman beamed less brightly as he recounted tales of German
prowess. He came to exhibit a sort of indignant pity for the Fatherland,
into whose way so many obstacles were being inopportunely thrown. He
compared Germany to a wounded deer that ravenous dogs were seeking to
bring down, but his predictions of her ultimate victory were not less
confident. Minna Vielhaber wept back of the bar at Herman's affecting
picture of the stricken deer with the arrow in her flank, and would be
comforted only when he brought the war to a proper close.
It was at this time that Winona wrote in her journal: "General Sherman
said that war is the bad place. He knew."
It was also at this time that a certain phrase from a high source
briefly engaged the notice of Sharon Whipple.
"Guinea pigs," said he, "are also too proud to fight, but they ain't
ever won the public respect on that account. They get treated
accordingly."
It was after this that Sharon was heard ominously to wish that he were
thirty or forty years younger. And it was after this that Winona became
active as a promoter of bazaars for ravaged Belgium and a pacifist whose
watchword was "Resist not evil!" She wrote again in her journal: "If
only someone would reason calmly with them!" She presently became
radiant with hope, for a whole boatload of earnest souls went over to
reason calmly with the combatants.
But the light she had seen proved deceiving. The earnest souls went
forward, but for some cause, never fully revealed to Winona, they had
been unable to reason calmly with those whose mad behaviour they had
meant to correct. It was said that they had been unable to reason calmly
even among themselves. It was merely a mark of Winona's earnestness that
she felt things might have gone differently had the personnel of this
valiant embassy been enlarged to include herself. Meantime, war was
becoming more and more the bad place, just as General Sherman had said.
She had little thought now for silk stockings or other abominations of
the frivolous, for her own country seemed on the very verge of
committing a frightful error.
Some time had elapsed since Wilbur Cowan definitely knew that he would
never go to war because of the mother of Lyman Teaford's infant son. He
began to believe, however, that he would relish a bit of fighting for
its own sake. Winona reasoned with him as she would have reasoned with
certain high personages on the other side of the water, and perhaps with
as little success. He replied cryptically that he was an out-and-out
phagocyte, and getting more so every time he read a newspaper. Winona
winced at the term--it seemed to carry sinister implications. Where did
the boy hear such words?
This one he had heard on a late Sunday afternoon when he sat, contrary
to a municipal ordinance of Newbern, in the back room of Herman
Vielhaber, with certain officials sworn to uphold that ordinance, who
drank beer and talked largely about what we should do; for it had then
become shockingly apparent that the phrase about our being too proud to
fight had been, in its essential meaning, misleading. Dave Cowan,
citizen of the world and student of its structure, physical and social,
had proved that war, however regrettable, was perhaps never to be
avoided; that in any event one of the best means to avoid it was to be
known for your fighting ways. Anyway, war was but an incident in human
progress.
Dave's hair had thinned in the years of his wandering to see a man at
Seattle or New Orleans, and he now wore spectacles, without which he
could no longer have enlarged his comprehension of cosmic values, for
his latest Library of Universal Knowledge was printed in very small
type. Dave said that since the chemicals had got together to form life
everything had lived on something else, and the best livers had always
been the best killers. He did not pretend to justify the plan, but there
it was; and it worked the same whether it was one microscopic organism
preying on another or a bird devouring a beetle or Germany trying to
swallow the world. Rapp, Senior, said that was all very well, but these
pacifists would keep us out of war yet. Doctor Purdy, with whom he had
finished a game of pinochle--Herman Vielhaber had lately been unable to
keep his mind on the game--set down his beer stein in an authoritative
manner, having exploded with rage even while he swallowed some of the
last decent beer to come to Newbern Center. He wiped froth from his
waistcoat.
"Pacifists!" he stormed. "Why don't they ever look into their own
bodies? They couldn't live a day on non-resistance to evil. Every one of
their bodies is thronged with fighting soldiers. Every pacifist is a
living lie. Phagocytes, that's what they are--white corpuscles--and it's
all they're there for. They believe in preparedness hard enough. See 'em
march up to fight when there's an invasion! And how they do fight! These
pacifists belie their own construction. They're built on a fight from
the cradle and before that.
"I wish more of their own phagocytes would begin to preach
non-resistance and try to teach great moral lessons to invading germs.
We wouldn't have to listen to so many of 'em. But phagocytes don't act
that way. They keep in training. They don't say, like that poor old
maunderer I read this morning, that there's no use preparing--that a
million phagocytes will spring to arms overnight if their country's
invaded. They keep in trim. They fight quick. If they didn't we wouldn't
be here."
"These phagocytes--is infantry, yes?" demanded Herman Vielhaber. "I
never hear 'em named before like that."
"Infantry, and all the other branches, in a healthy body--and our own
body is healthy. Watch our phagocytes come forward now, just as those
tiny white corpuscles rush through the blood to an invaded spot. You'll
see 'em come quick. Herman, your country has licked Belgium and
Serbia--you can rightly claim that much. But she'll never get another
decision. Too many phagocytes."
Dave Cowan, who always listened attentively to Doctor Purdy for new
words, was thus enabled to enlighten Winona about her own and other
people's phagocytes; and Winona, overwhelmed by his mass of detail--for
Dave had supplemented Purdy's lecture with fuller information from his
encyclopedia--had sighed and said: "Oh, dear! We seem to be living over
a volcano!"
This had caused Dave to become more volubly instructive.
"Of course! Didn't you know that? How thick do you suppose the crust of
the earth is, anyway? All we humans are--we're plants that have grown
out of the cooled crust of a floating volcano; plants that can walk and
talk, but plants just the same. We float round the sun, which is only
another big volcano that hasn't cooled yet--good thing for us it
hasn't--and the sun and us are floating round some other volcano that no
one has discovered yet because the circle is too big, and that one is
probably circling round another one--and there you are. That's plain,
isn't it?"
"Not very," said Winona.
"Well, I admit there's a catch in it I haven't figured out yet, but the
facts are right, as far as I've gone. Anyway, here we are, and we got
here by fighting, and we'll have to keep on fighting, one way or
another, if we're to get any place else."
"I don't know anything about all that," said Winona; "but sometimes I
almost think the Germans deserve a good beating."
This was extreme for Winona, the arch pacifist.
"You almost think so, eh? Well, that's a good specimen of almost
thinking. Because the Germans don't deserve any such thing unless
someone can give it to them. If the bird can swallow the worm the bird
deserves the worm. The most of us merely almost think."
It was much later--an age later, it seemed to Winona--for her country,
as she wrote in her journal, had crossed the Rubicon--that she went to
attend a meeting of protest in a larger city than Newbern; a meeting of
mothers and potential mothers who were persuaded that war was never
excusable.
She had listened to much impassioned oratory, with a sickening surprise
that it should leave her half-hearted in the cause of peace at any
price; and she had gone to take her train for home, troubled with a
monstrous indecision. Never before had she suffered an instant's
bewilderment in detecting right from wrong.
As she waited she had observed on a siding a long, dingy train, from the
windows of which looked the faces of boys. She was smitten with a quick
curiosity. There were tall boys and short boys; and a few of them were
plump, but mostly they were lean, with thin, browned faces, and they
were all ominously uniformed. Their keen young faces crowded the open
windows of the cars, and they thronged upon the platforms to make noisy
purchases from younger boys who offered them pitiful confections from
baskets and trays.
Winona stared at them with a sickened wonder. They were all so alive, so
alert, so smiling, so eager to be on with the great adventure. In one of
the cars a band of them roared a stirring chorus. It stirred Winona
beyond the calm that should mark people of the better sort. She forgot
that a gentleman should make no noise and that a lady is serene; forgot
utterly. She waved a hand--timidly at first--to a cluster of young heads
at a car window, and was a little dismayed when they waved heartily in
return. She recovered and waved at another group--less timidly this
time. Again the response was instant, and a malign power against which
she strove in vain carried Winona to the train's side. Heads were thrust
forth and greetings followed, some shy and low-toned, some with feigned
man-of-the-world jauntiness.
Winona was no longer Winona. A freckled young vender with a basket
halted beside her. Winona searched for her purse and emptied its hoard
into one gloved hand. Coins spilled from this and ran about the
platform. Hands sprang from the window above her to point out their
resting places, and half a dozen of the creatures issued from the car to
recover them for her. Flustered, eager, pleasantly shocked at her own
daring, Winona distributed gifts from the basket, seeing only the hands
that came forth to receive them.
Chewing gum, candy, popcorn, figs--even cigarettes--and Winona the first
vice-president and recording secretary of Newbern's anti-tobacco
league! War was assuredly what Sherman had so pithily described it, for
she now sent the vender back to replenish his stock of cigarettes, and
bought and bestowed them upon immature boys so long as her coin lasted.
Their laughter was noisy, their banter of one another and of Winona was
continuous, and Winona laughed, even bantered. That she should banter
strangers in a public place! She felt rowdy, but liked it.
There was a call from the front of the train, and the group about her
sprang to the platform as the cars began to move, waving her gracious,
almost condescending adieus, as happy people who go upon a wondrous
journey will wave to poor stay-at-homes. Winona waved wildly now, being
lost to all decorum; waved to the crowded platform and then to the cloud
of heads at the window above her.
From this window a hand reached down to her--a lean, hard, brown
hand--and the shy, smiling eyes of the boy who reached it sought hers in
something like appeal. Winona clutched the hand and gripped it as she
had never gripped a human hand before.
"Good-bye, sister!" said the boy, and Winona went a dozen steps with the
train, still grasping the hand.
"Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye--all of you!" she called, and was holding
the hand with both her own when the train gathered speed and took it
from her grasp.
She stood then watching other windows thronged with young heads as the
train bore them on; she still waved and was waved at. Faint strains of
the resumed chorus drifted back to her. Her face was hurting with a set
smile.
She stumbled back across the platform, avoiding other groups who had
cheered the passing train, and found sanctuary by a baggage truck loaded
with crates of live chickens. Here she wept unnoticed, and wondered why
she was weeping. Later, in her own train, she looked down and observed
the white-ribboned badge which she had valiantly pinned above her heart
that very morning. She had forgotten the badge--and those boys must have
seen it. Savagely she tore it from its mooring, to the detriment of a
new georgette waist, and dropped it from the open window.
That night she turned back in her journal to an early entry: "If only
someone would reason calmly with them. Resist not evil!" She stared at
this a long time, then she dipped a new pen in red ink and full across
it she wrote "What rotten piffle!" That is, she nearly wrote those
words. What she actually put down was "What r-tt-n piffle!"
To Wilbur Cowan, in recounting her fall from the serene heights of
pacifism, she brazenly said: "Do you know--when that poor boy reached
down to shake hands with me, if I could have got at him I just know I
should have kissed him."
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur in amazed tribute.
"I don't care!" persisted Winona. "That's the way I felt--he was such a
nice boy. He looked like you, as if he'd come from a good home and had
good habits, and I did want to kiss him, and I would have if I could
have reached him--and I'm not going to tell a falsehood about it for any
one, and I'm--I'm hostile."
"Well, I guess pretty soon I'll be going," said Wilbur.
Winona gazed at him with strangely shining eyes.
"You wouldn't be any good if you didn't!" she said, suddenly.
It was perhaps the least ornate sentence she had ever spoken.
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur again. "You've changed!"
"Something came over me," said Winona.