So everywhere over the country, that winter of 1916, there were light-hearted boys skylarking—at college, or on the farms; and in the towns the young machinists snowballed one another as they came from the shops; while on this Sunday of the “frat” snow fight probably several hundreds of thousands of youthful bachelors, between the two oceans, went walking, like Ramsey, each with a girl who could forget the weather. Yet boys of nineteen and in the twenties were not light-hearted all the time that winter and that spring and that summer. Most of them knew long, thoughtful moments, as Ramsey did, when they seemed to be thinking not of girls or work or play—nor of anything around them, but of some more vital matter or prospect. And at such times they were grave, but not ungentle.
For the long strain was on the country; underneath all its outward seeming of things going on as usual there shook a deep vibration, like the air trembling to vast organ pipes in diapasons too profound to reach the ear as sound: one felt, not heard, thunder in the ground under one's feet. The succession of diplomatic Notes came to an end after the torpedoing of theSussex; and at last the tricky ruling Germans in Berlin gave their word to murder no more, and people said, “This means peace for America, and all is well for us,” but everybody knew in his heart that nothing was well for us, that there was no peace.
They said “All is well,” while that thunder in the ground never ceased—it grew deeper and heavier till all America shook with it and it became slowly audible as the voice of the old American soil wherein lay those who had defended it aforetime, a soil that bred those who would defend it again, for it was theirs; and the meaning of it—Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—was theirs, and theirs to defend. And they knew they would defend it, and that more than the glory of a Nation was at stake. The Freedom of Man was at stake. So, gradually, the sacred thunder reached the ears of the young men and gave them those deep moments that came to them whether they sat in the classroom or the counting-room, or walked with the plow, or stood to the machine, or behind the ribbon counter. Thus the thunder shook them and tried them and slowly came into their lives and changed everything for them.
Hate of the Germans was not bred; but a contempt for what Germany had shown in lieu of a national heart; a contempt as mighty and profound as the resolve that the German way and the German will should prevail in America, nor in any country of the world that would be free. And when the German Kaiser laid his command upon America, that no American should take his ship upon the free seas, death being the penalty for any who disobeyed, then the German Kaiser got his answer, not only to this new law he had made for us, but to many other thoughts of his. Yet the answer was for some time delayed.
There was a bitter Sunday, and its bitterness went everywhere, to every place in the whole world that held high and generous hearts. Its bitterness came to the special meeting in the “Frat hall,” where there were hearts, indeed, of that right sort, and one of them became vocal in its bitterness. This was the heart of Fred Mitchell, who was now an authority, being president of the Junior Class, chairman of the Prom Committee, and other things pleasant to be and to live for at his age.
“For me, Brothers,” he said, “I'd think I'd a great deal rather have been shot through the head than heard the news from Washington to-day! I tell you, I've spent the meanest afternoon I ever did in my life, and I guess it's been pretty much the same with all of us. The worst of it is, it looks as though there isn't a thing in the world we can do. The country's been betrayed by a few blatherskites and boneheads that had the power to do it, and all we can do we've just got to stand it. But there's some Americans that aren't just standing it, and I want to tell you a lot of 'em are men from the universities, just like us. They'reover thereright now; they haven't said much—they just packed up and went. They're flying for France and for England and for Canada; they're fighting under every flag on the right side of the Western Front; and they're driving ambulances at Verdun and ammunition trucks at the Somme. Well, there's going to be a lot more American boys on all these jobs mighty soon, on account of what those men did in Congress to-day. If they won't give us a chance to do something under our own flag, then we'll have to go and do it under some other flag; and I want to tell you I'm one that's going togo!I'll stick it out in college up to Easter, and then if there's still no chance to go under the Stars and Stripes I'll maybe have to go under the flag my great-great-grandfather fought against in 1776, but, anyhow, I'llgo!”
It was in speaking to Ramsey of this declaration that Dora said Fred was a “dangerous firebrand.” They were taking another February walk, but the February was February, 1917; and the day was dry and sunny. “It's just about a year ago,” she said.
“What is?” Ramsey asked.
“That first time we went walking. Don't you remember?”
“Oh,thatday? Yes, I remember it was snowing.”
“And so cold and blowy!” she added. “It seems a long time ago. I like walking with you, Ramsey. You're so quiet and solid—I've always felt I could talk to you just anyhow I pleased, and you wouldn't mind. I'll miss these walks with you when we're out of college.”
He chuckled. “That's funny!”
“Why?”
“Because we've only taken four besides this: two last year, and another week before last, and another last week. This is only the fifth.”
“Good gracious! Is that all? It seemed to me we'd gone ever so often!” She laughed. “I'm afraid you won't think that seems much as if I'd liked going, but I really have. And, by the way, you've never called on me at all. Perhaps it's because I've forgotten to ask you.”
“Oh, no,” Ramsey said, and scuffed his shoes on the path, presently explaining rather huskily that he “neverwasmuch of a caller”; and he added, “or anything.”
“Well, you must come if you ever care to,” she said, with a big-sister graciousness. “The Dorm chaperon sits there, of course, but ours is a jolly one and you'd like her. You've probably met her—Mrs. Hustings?—when you've called on other girls at our old shop.”
“No,” said Ramsey. “I never was much of a—” He paused, fearing that he might be repeating himself, and too hastily amended his intention. “I never liked any girl enough to go and call on her.”
“Ramsey Milholland!” she cried. “Why, when we were in school half the room used to be talking about how you and that pretty Milla—”
“No, no!” Ramsey protested, again too hurriedly. “I never called on her. We just went walking.”
A moment later his colour suddenly became fiery. “I don't mean—I mean—” he stammered. “It was walking, of course—I mean we did go out walking but it wasn't walking like—like this.” He concluded with a fit of coughing which seemed to rack him.
Dora threw back her head and laughed delightfully. “Don't you apologize!” she said. “Ididn't when I said it seemed to me that we've gone walking so often, when in reality it's only four or five times altogether. I think I can explain, though: I think it came partly from a feeling I have that I can rely on you—that you're a good, solid, reliable sort of person. I remember from the time we were little children, you always had a sort of worried, honest look in school; and you used to make a dent in your forehead—you meant it for a frown—whenever I caught your eye. You hated me so honestly, and you were so honestly afraid I wouldn't see it!”
“Oh, no—no—”
“Oh, yes—yes!” she laughed, then grew serious. “My feeling about you—that you were a person to be relied on, I mean—I think it began that evening in our freshman year, after theLusitania, when I stopped you on campus and you went with me, and I couldn't help crying, and you were so nice and quiet. I hardly realized then that it was the first time we'd ever really talked together—of courseIdid all the talking!—and yet we'd known each other so many years. I thought of it afterward. But what gave me such a different view of you, I'd always thought you were one of that truculent sort of boys, always just bursting for a fight; but you showed me you'd really never had a fight in your life and hated fighting, and that you sympathized with my feeling about war.” She stopped speaking to draw in her breath with a sharp sigh. “Ah, don't you remember what I've told you all along? How it keeps coming closer and closer—and now it's almost here! Isn't itunthinkable?And what can we do to stop it, we poor few who feel that wemuststop it?”
“Well—” Ramsey began uncomfortably. “Of course I—I—”
“You can't do much,” she said. “I know. None of us can. What can any little group do? There are so few of us among the undergraduates—and only one in the whole faculty. All the rest are for war. But we mustn't give up; we must never feel afterward that we left anything undone; we must fight to the last breath!”
“'Fight'?” he repeated wonderingly, then chuckled.
“Oh, as a figure of speech,” she said, impatiently. “Our language is full of barbaric figures left over from the dark ages. But, oh, Ramsey!”—she touched his sleeve—“I've heard that Fred Mitchell is saying that he's going to Canada after Easter, to try to get into the Canadian aviation corps. If it's true, he's a dangerous firebrand, I think. Is it true?”
“I guess so. He's been talking that way some.”
“But why do youlethim talk that way?” she cried. “He's your roommate; surely you have more influence with him than anybody else has. Couldn't you—”
He shook his head slowly, while upon his face the faintly indicated modellings of a grin hinted of an inner laughter at some surreptitious thought. “Well, you know, Fred says himself sometimes, I don't seem to be much of a talker exactly!”
“I know. But don't you see? That sort of thing is contagious. Others will think they ought to go if he does; he's popular and quite a leader. Can't you do anything with him?”
She waited for him to answer. “Can't you?” she insisted.
The grin had disappeared, and Ramsey grew red again. He seemed to wish to speak, to heave with speech that declined to be spoken and would not rouse up from his inwards. Finally he uttered words.
“I—I—well, I—”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “A man—or a boy!—always hates to be intruding his own convictions upon other men, especially in a case like this, where he might be afraid of some idiot's thinking him unmanlike. But Ramsey—” Suddenly she broke off and looked at him attentively; his discomfort had become so obvious that suspicion struck her. She spoke sharply. “Ramseyyouaren't dreaming of doing such a thing, are you?”
“What such a thing?”
“Fred hasn't influencedyou, has he? You aren't planning to go with him, are you?”
“Where?”
“To join the Canadian aviation.”
“No; I hadn't thought of doing it.”
She sighed again, relieved. “I had a queer feeling about you just then—that youwerethinking of doing some such thing. You looked so odd—and you're always so quiet, anybody might not really know what you do think. But I'm not wrong about you, am I, Ramsey?”
They had come to the foot of the steps that led up to the entrance of her dormitory, and their walk was at an end. As they stopped and faced each other, she looked at him earnestly; but he did not meet the scrutiny, his eyelids fell.
“I'm not wrong, am I, Ramsey?”
“About what?” he murmured, uncomfortably.
“You are my friend, aren't you?”
“Yes.”
“Then it's all right,” she said. “That relieves me and makes me happier than I was just now, for of course if you're my friend you wouldn't let me make any mistake about you. I believe you, and now, just before I go in and we won't see much of each other for a week—if you still want me to go with you again next Sunday—”
“Yes—won't you, please?”
“Yes, if you like. But I want to tell you now that I count on you in all this, even though you don't 'talk much,' as you say; I count on you more than I do on anybody else, and I trust you when you say you're my friend, and it makes me happy. And I think perhaps you're right about Fred Mitchell. Talk isn't everything, nobody knows that better than I, who talk so much! and I think that, instead of talking to Fred, a steady, quiet influence like yours would do more good than any amount of arguing. So I trust you, you see? And I'm sorry I had that queer doubt of you.” She held out her hand. “Unless I happen to see you on the campus for a minute, in the meantime, it's good-bye until a week from to-day. So—well, so, good-bye until then!”
“Wait,” said Ramsey.
“What is it?”
He made a great struggle. “I'm not influencing Fred not to go,” he said. “I—don't want you to trust me to do anything like that.”
“What?”
“I think it's all right for him to go, if he wants to,” Ramsey said, miserably.
“You do? For him to go tofight?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“Oh!” she cried, turned even redder than he, and ran up the stone steps. But before the storm doors closed upon her she looked down to where he stood, with his eyes still lowered, a lonely-seeming figure, upon the pavement below. Her voice caught upon a sob as she spoke.
“If you feel like that, you might as well go and enlist, yourself,” she said, bitterly. “I can't—I couldn't—speak to you again after this!”
It was easy enough for him to evade Fred Mitchell's rallyings these days; the sprig's mood was truculent, not toward his roommate but toward Congress, which was less in fiery haste than he to be definitely at war with Germany. All through the university the change had come: athletics, in other years spotlighted at the centre of the stage, languished suddenly, threatened with abandonment; students working for senior honours forgot them; everything was forgotten except that growing thunder in the soil. Several weeks elapsed after Dora's bitter dismissal of Ramsey before she was mentioned between the comrades. Then, one evening, Fred asked, as he restlessly paced their study floor:
“Have you seen your pacifist friend lately?”
“No. Not exactly. Why?”
“Well, for my part, I think she ought to be locked up,” Fred said, angrily. “Have you heard what she did this afternoon?”
“No.”
“It's all over college. She got up in the class in jurisprudence and made a speech. It's a big class, you know, over two hundred, under Dean Burney. He's a great lecturer, but he's a pacifist—the only one on the faculty—and a friend of Dora's. They say he encouraged her to make this break and led the subject around so she could do it, and then called on her for an opinion, as the highest-stand student in the class. She got up and claimed there wasn't any such thing as a legitimate cause for war, either legally or morally, and said it was a sign of weakness in a nation for it to believe that it did have cause for war.
“Well, it was too much for that little, spunky Joe Stansbury, and he jumped up and argued with her. He made her admit all the Germans have done to us, the sea murders and the land murders, the blowing up of the factories, the propaganda, the strikes, trying to turn the United States into a German settlement, trying to get Japan and Mexico to make war on us, and all the rest. He even made her admit there was proof they mean to conquer us when they get through with the others, and that they've set out to rule the world for their own benefit, and make whoever else they kindly allow to live, to work for them.
“She said it might be true, but since nothing at all could be a right cause for war, than all this couldn't be a cause of war. Of course she had her regular pacifist 'logic' working; she said that since war is the worst thing there is, why, all other evils were lesser, and a lesser evil can't be a just cause for a greater. She got terribly excited, they say, but kept right on, anyway. She said war was murder and there couldn't be any other way to look at it; and she'd heard there was already talk in the university of students thinking about enlisting, and whoever did such a thing was virtually enlisting to return murder for murder. Then Joe Stansbury asked her if she meant that she'd feel toward any student that enlisted the way she would toward a murderer, and she said, yes, she'd have a horror of any student that enlisted.
“Well, that broke up the class; Joe turned from her to the platform and told old Burney that he was responsible for allowing such talk in his lecture-room, and Joe said so far ashewas concerned, he resigned from Burney's classes right there. That started it, and practically the whole class got up and walked out with Joe. They said Burney streaked off home, and Dora was left alone in there, with her head down on her desk—and I guess she certainly deserves it. A good many have already stopped speaking to her.”
Ramsey fidgeted with a pen on the table by which he sat. “Well, I don't know,” he said, slowly; “I don't know if they ought to do that exactly.”
“Why oughtn't they?” Fred demanded, sharply.
“Well, it looks to me as if she was only fightin' for her principles. She believes in 'em. The more it costs a person to stick to their principles, why, the more I believe the person must have something pretty fine about 'em likely.”
“Yes!” said the hot-headed Fred. “That may be in ordinary times, but not when a person's principles are liable to betray their country! We won't stand that kind of principles, I tell you, and we oughtn't to. Dora Yocum's finding that out, all right. She had the biggest position of any girl in this place, or any boy either, up to the last few weeks, and there wasn't any student or hardly even a member of the faculty that had the influence or was more admired and looked up to. She had the whole show! But now, since she's just the same as called any student a murderer if he enlists to fight for his country and his flag—well, now she hasn't got anything at all, and if she keeps on she'll have even less!”
He paused in his walking to and fro and came to a halt behind his friend's chair, looking down compassionately upon the back of Ramsey's motionless head. His tone changed. “I guess it isn't just the ticket—me to be talking this way to you, is it?” he said, with a trace of huskiness.
“Oh—it's all right,” Ramsey murmured, not altering his position.
“I can't help blowing up,” Fred went on. “I want to say, though, I know I'm not very considerate to blow up about her to you this way. I've been playing horse with you about her ever since freshman year, but—well, you must have understood, Ram, I never meant anything that would really bother you much, and I thought—well, Ireallythought it was a good thing, you—your—well, I mean about her, you know. I'm on, all right. I know it's pretty serious with you.” He paused.
Ramsey did not move, except that his right hand still fidgeted with the pen upon the table.
“Oh—well—” he said.
“It's—it's kind of tough luck!” his friend contrived to say; and he began to pace the floor again.
“Oh—well—”
“See here, ole stick-in-the-mud,” Fred broke out abruptly. “After her saying what she did— Well, it's none o' my business, but—but—”
“Well, what?” Ramsey murmured. “I don't care what you say, if you want to say anything.”
“Well, Igotto say it,” Fred half groaned and half blurted. “After she saidthat—and she meant it—why, if I were in your place I'd be darned if I'd be seen out walking with her again.”
“I'm not going to be,” Ramsey said, quietly.
“By George!” And now Fred halted in front of him, both being huskily solemn. “I think I understand a little of what that means to you, old Ramsey; I think I do. I think I know something of what it costs you to make that resolution for your country's sake.” Impulsively he extended his hand. “It's a pretty big thing for you to do. Will you shake hands?”
But Ramsey shook his head. “I didn't do it. I wouldn't ever have done anything just on account of her talkin' that way. She shut the door on me—it was a good while ago.”
“She did! What for?”
“Well, I'm not much of a talker, you know, Fred,” said Ramsey, staring at the pen he played with. “I'm not much of anything, for that matter, prob'ly, but I—well—I—”
“You what?”
“Well, I had to tell her I didn't feel about things the way she did. She'd thought I had, all along, I guess. Anyway, it made her hate me or something, I guess; and she called it all off. I expect there wasn't much to call off, so far as she was concerned, anyhow.” He laughed feebly. “She told me I better go and enlist.”
“Pleasant of her!” Fred muttered. “Especially as we know what she thinks enlisting means.” He raised his voice cheerfully. “Well, that's settled; and, thank God, old Mr. Bernstorff's on his way to his sweet little vine-clad cottage home! They're getting guns on the ships, and the big show's liable to commence any day. We can hold up our heads now, and we're going to see some great times, old Ramsey boy! It's hard on the home folks—Gosh! I don't like to think of that! And I guess it's going to be hard on a lot of boys that haven't understood what it's all about, and hard on some that their family affairs, and business, and so on, have got 'em tied up so it's hard to go—and of course there's plenty that just can't, and some that aren't husky enough—but the rest of us are going to have the big time in our lives. We got an awful lot to learn; it scares me to think of what I don't know about being any sort of a rear-rank private. Why, it's a regularprofession, like practising law, or selling for a drug house on the road. Golly! Do you remember how we talked about that, 'way back in freshman year, what we were going to do when we got out of college? You were going to be practising law, for instance, and I—well, f'r instance, remember Colburn; he was going to be a doctor, and he did go to some medical school for one year. Now he's in the Red Cross, somewhere inPersia. Golly!”
He paused to digest this impossibility, then chattered briskly on. “Well, there'sonegood old boy was with our class for a while, back in freshman year; I bet we won't see him in any good old army! Old rough-neck Linski that you put the knob on his nose for. Tommie Hopper says he saw him last summer in Chicago soapboxin', yellin' his head off cussin' every government under the sun, but mostly ours and the Allies', you bet, and going to run the earth by revolution and representatives of unskilled labour immigrants, nobody that can read or write allowed to vote, except Linski. Tommie Hopper says he knows all about Linski; he never did a day's work in his life—too busy trying to get the workingmen stirred up against the people that exploit 'em! Tommie says he had a big crowd to hear him, though, and took up quite a little money for a 'cause' or something. Well, let him holler! I guess we can attend to him when we get back from over yonder. By George, old Ram, I'm gettin' kind of floppy in the gills!” He administered a resounding slap to his comrade's shoulder. “It certainly looks as if our big days were walking toward us!”
He was right. The portentous days came on apace, and each one brought a new and greater portent. The faces of men lost a driven look besetting them in the days of badgered waiting, and instead of that heavy apprehension one saw the look men's faces must have worn in 1776 and 1861, and the history of the old days grew clearer in the new. The President went to the Congress, and the true indictment he made there reached scoffing Potsdam with an unspoken prophecy somewhat chilling even to Potsdam, one guesses—and then through an April night went almost quietly the steady work: we were at war with Germany.
The bugles sounded across the continent; drums and fifes played up and down the city streets and in town and village squares and through the countrysides. Faintly in all ears there was multitudinous noise like distant, hoarse cheering... and a sound like that was what Dora Yocum heard, one night, as she sat lonely in her room. The bugles and fifes and drums had been heard about the streets of the college town, that day, and she thought she must die of them, they hurt her so, and now to be haunted by this imaginary cheering—
She started. Was it imaginary?
She went downstairs and stood upon the steps of the dormitory in the open air. No; the cheering was real and loud. It came from the direction of the railway station, and the night air surged and beat with it.
Below her stood the aged janitor of the building, listening. “What's the cheering for?” she asked, remembering grimly that the janitor was one of her acquaintances who had not yet stopped “speaking” to her. “What's the matter?”
“It's a good matter,” the old man answered. “I guess there must be a big crowd of 'em down there. One of our students enlisted to-day, and they're givin' him a send-off. Listen to 'em, how theydocheer. He's the first one to go.”
She went back to her room, shivering, and spent the next day in bed with an aching head. She rose in the evening, however—a handbill had been slid under her door at five o'clock, calling a “Mass Meeting” of the university at eight, and she felt it her duty to go; but when she got to the great hall she found a seat in the dimmest corner, farthest from the rostrum.
The president of the university addressed the tumultuous many hundreds before him, for tumultuous they were until he quieted them. He talked to them soberly of patriotism, and called upon them for “deliberation and a little patience.” There was danger of a stampede, he said, and he and the rest of the faculty were in a measure responsible to their fathers and mothers for them.
“You must keep your heads,” he said. “God knows, I do not seek to judge your duty in this gravest moment of your lives, nor assume to tell you what you must or must not do. But by hurrying into service now, without careful thought or consideration, you may impair the extent of your possible usefulness to the very cause you are so anxious to serve. Hundreds of you are taking technical courses which should be completed—at least to the end of the term in June. Instructors from the United States Army are already on the way here, and military training will be begun at once for all who are physically eligible and of acceptable age. A special course will be given in preparation for flying, and those who wish to become aviators may enroll themselves for the course at once.
“I speak to you in a crisis of the university's life, as well as that of the nation, and the warning I utter has been made necessary by what took place yesterday and to-day. Yesterday morning, a student in the junior class enlisted as a private in the United States Regular Army. Far be it from me to deplore his course in so doing; he spoke to me about it, and in such a way that I felt I had no right to dissuade him. I told him that it would be preferable for college men to wait until they could go as officers, and, aside from the fact of a greater prestige, I urged that men of education could perhaps be more useful in that capacity. He replied that if he were useful enough as a private a commission might in time come his way, and, as I say, I did not feel at liberty to attempt dissuasion. He left to join a regiment to which he had been assigned, and many of you were at the station to bid him farewell.
“But enthusiasm may be too contagious; even a great and inspiring motive may work for harm, and the university must not become a desert. In the twenty-four hours since that young man went to join the army last night, one hundred and eleven of our young men students have left our walls; eighty-four of them went off together at three o'clock to catch an east-bound train at the junction and enlist for the Navy at Newport. We are, I say, in danger of a stampede.”
He spoke on, but Dora was not listening; she had become obsessed by the idea which seemed to be carrying her to the border of tragedy. When the crowd poured forth from the building she went with it mechanically, and paused in the dark outside. She spoke to a girl whom she did not know.
“I beg your pardon—”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask: Do you know who was the student Doctor Corvis spoke of? I mean the one that was the first to enlist, and that they were cheering last night when he went away to be a private in the United States Army. Did you happen to hear his name?”
“Yes, he was a junior.”
“Who was it?”
“Ramsey Milholland.”
Fred Mitchell, crossing the campus one morning, ten days later, saw Dora standing near the entrance of her dormitory, where he would pass her unless he altered his course; and as he drew nearer her and the details of her face grew into distinctness, he was indignant with himself for feeling less and less indignation toward her in proportion to the closeness of his approach. The pity that came over him was mingled with an unruly admiration, causing him to wonder what unpatriotic stuff he could be made of. She was marked, but not whipped; she still held herself straight under all the hammering and cutting which, to his knowledge, she had been getting.
She stopped him, “for only a moment,” she said, adding with a wan profoundness: “That is, if you're not one of those who feel that I shouldn't be 'spoken to'?”
“No,” said Fred, stiffly. “I may share their point of view, perhaps, but I don't feel called upon to obtrude it on you in that manner.”
“I see,” she said, nodding. “I've wanted to speak with you about Ramsey.”
“All right.”
She bit her lip, then asked, abruptly: “What made him do it?”
“Enlist as a private with the regulars?”
“No. What made him enlist at all?”
“Only because he's that sort,” Fred returned briskly. “He may be inexplicable to people who believe that his going out to fight for his country is the same thing as going out to commit a mur—”
She lifted her hand. “Couldn't you—”
“I beg your pardon,” Fred said at once. “I'm sorry, but I don't know just how to explain him to you.”
“Why?”
He laughed, apologetically. “Well, you see, as I understand it, you don't think it's possible for a person to have something within him that makes him care so much about his country that he—”
“Wait!” she cried. “Don't you think I'm willing to suffer a little rather than to see my country in the wrong? Don't you think I'm doing it?”
“Well, I don't want to be rude; but, of course, it seems to me that you're suffering because you think you know more about what's right and wrong than anybody else does.”
“Oh, no. But I—”
“We wouldn't get anywhere, probably, by arguing it,” Fred said. “You asked me.”
“I asked you to tell my why he enlisted.”
“The trouble is, I don't think Icantell that to anybody who needs an answer. He just went, of course. There isn't any question about it. I always thought he'd be the first to go.”
“Oh, no!” she said.
“Yes, I always thought so.”
“I think you were mistaken,” she said, decidedly. “It was a special reason—to make him act so cruelly.”
“Cruelly!” Fred cried.
“Itwas!”
“Cruel to whom?”
“Oh, to his mother—to his family. To have him go off that way, without a word—”
“Oh, no' he'd been home,” Fred corrected her. “He went home the Saturday before he enlisted, and settled it with them. They're all broken up, of course; but when they saw he'd made up his mind, they quit opposing him, and I think they're proud of him about it, maybe, in spite of feeling anxious. You see, his father was an artilleryman in the war with Spain, and his grandfather was a Colonel at the end of the War of the Rebellion, though he went into it as a private, like Ramsey. He died when Ramsey was about twelve; but Ramsey remembers him; he was talking of him a little the night before he enlisted.”
Dora made a gesture of despairing protest. “You don't understand!”
“What is it I don't understand?”
“Ramsey!Iknow why he went—and it's just killing me!”
Fred looked at her gravely. “I don't think you need worry about it,” he said. “There's nothing about his going that you are responsible for.”
She repeated her despairing gesture. “You don't understand. But it's no use. It doesn't help any to try to talk of it, though I thought maybe it would, somehow.” She went a little nearer the dormitory entrance, leaving him where he was, then turned. “I suppose you won't see him?”
“I don't know. Most probably not till we meet-if we should—in France. I don't know where he's stationed; and I'm going with the aviation—if it's ever ready! And he's with the regulars; he'll probably be among the first to go over.”
“I see.” She turned sharply away, calling back over her shoulder in a choked voice. “Thank you. Good-bye!”
But Fred's heart had melted; gazing after her, he saw that her proud young head had lowered now, and that her shoulders were moving convulsively; he ran after her and caught her as she began slowly to ascend the dormitory steps.
“See here,” he cried. “Don't—”
She lifted a wet face. “No, no! He went in bitterness because I told him to, in my own bitterness! I've killed him! Long ago, when he wasn't much more than a child, I heard he'd said that some day he'd 'show' me, and now he's done it!”
Fred whistled low and long when she had disappeared. “Girls!” he murmured to himself. “Some girls, anyhow—they will be girls! You can't tell 'em what's what, and you can't change 'em, either!”
Then, as more urgent matters again occupied his attention, he went on at an ardent and lively gait to attend his class in map-making.
That thunder in the soil, at first too deep within it to be audible, had come to the surface now and gradually became heard as the thunder of a million feet upon the training grounds. The bugles rang sharper; the drums and fifes of town and village and countryside were the drums and fifes of a war that came closer and closer to every hearth between the two oceans.
All the old symbols became symbols bright and new, as if no one had ever seen them before. “America” was like a new word, and the song “America” was like a new song. All the dusty blatancies of orating candidates, seeking to rouse bored auditors with “the old flag”; all the mechanical patriotics of school and church and club; all these time-worn flaccid things leaped suddenly into living colour. The flag became brilliant and strange to see—strange with a meaning that seemed new, a meaning long known, yet never known till now.
And so hearts that thought they knew themselves came upon ambushes of emotion and hidden indwellings of spirit not guessed before. Dora Yocum, listening to the “Star Spangled Banner,” sung by children of immigrants to an out-of-tune old piano in a mission clubroom, in Chicago, found herself crying with a soul-shaking heartiness in a way different from other ways that she had cried. Among the many things she thought of then was this: That the banner the children were singing about was in danger. The great country, almost a continent, had always seemed so untouchable, so safe and sure; she had never been able to conceive of a hostile power mighty enough to shake or even jar it. And since so great and fundamental a thing could not be injured, a war for its defence had appeared to be, in her eyes, not only wicked but ridiculous. At last, less and less vaguely, she had come to comprehend something of the colossal German threat, and the shadow that touched this bright banner of which the immigrants' children piped so briskly in the mission club-room.
She had begun to understand, though she could not have told just why, or how, or at what moment understanding reached her. She began to understand that her country, threatened to the life, had flung its line those thousands of miles across the sea to stand and hold Hindenburg and Ludendorff and all their Kaisers, Kings, Dukes, and Crown Princes, their Krupp and Skoda monstrous engines, and their monstrous other engines of men made into armies. Through the long haze of misted sea-miles and the smoke of land-miles she perceived that brown line of ours, and knew it stood there that Freedom, and the Nation itself, might not perish from the earth.
And so, a week later, she went home, and came nervously to Ramsey's mother and found how to direct the letter she wanted to write. He was in France.
As the old phrase went, she poured out her heart. It seems to apply to her letter.
She wrote:
Don't misunderstand me. I felt that my bitter speech to you had driven you to take the step you did. I felt that I had sent you to be killed, and that I ought to be killed for doing it, but I knew that you had other motives, too. I knew, of course, that you thought of the country more than you did of me, or of any mad thing I would say—but I thought that what I said might have been the prompting thing, the word that threw you into it so hastily and before you were ready, perhaps. I dreaded to bear that terrible responsibility. I hope you understand.
My great mistake has been—I thought I sas so “logical”—it's been in my starting everything with a thought I'd never proven; that war is the worst thing, and all other evils were lesser. I was wrong. I was wrong, because war isn't the worst evil. Slavery is the worse evil, and now I want to tell you I have come to see that you are making war on those that make slavery. Yes, you are fighting those that make both war and slavery, and you are right, and I humbly reverence and honour all of you who are in this right war. I have come home to work in the Red Cross here; I work there all day, and all day I keep saying to myself—but I really mean toyou—it's what I pray, and oh, how I pray it: “God be with you and grant you the victory!” For you must win and you will win.
Forgive me, oh, please—and if you will, could you write to me? I know you have things to do more important than “girls”—but oh, couldn't you, please?
This letter, which she had taken care not to dampen, as she wrote, went in slow course to the “American Expeditionary Forces in France,” and finally found him whom it patiently sought. He delayed not long to answer, and in time she held in a shaking hand the pencilled missive he had sent her.
You forget all that comic talk about me enlisting because of your telling me to. I'd written my father I was going at the first chance a month and a half before that day when you said it. My mind was made up at the first time there was any talk of war, and you had about as much responsibility for my going as some little sparrow or something. Of course I don't mean I didn't pay any attention to the different things you said, because I always did, and I used to worry over it because I was afraid some day it would get you in trouble, and I'm mighty glad you've cut it out. That's right; you be a regular girl now. You always were one, and I knew it all right. I'm not as scared to write to you as I was to talk to you, so I guess you know I was mighty tickled to get your letter. It sounded blue, but I was glad to get it. YoubetI'll write to you! I don't suppose you could have any idea how glad I was to get your letter. I could sit here and write to you all day if they'd let me, but I'm a corporal now. When you answer this, I wish you'd say how the old town looks and if the grass in the front yards is as green as it usually is, and everything. And tell me some more about everything you think of when you are working down at the Red Cross like you said. I guess I've read your letter five million times, and that part ten million. I mean where you underlined that “you” and what you said to yourself at the Red Cross. Oh, murder, but I was glad to read that! Don't forget about writing anything else you think of like that.
Well, I was interrupted then and this is the next day. Of course, I can't tell you where we are, because that darned censor will read this letter, but I guess he will let this much by. Who do you think I ran across in a village yesterday? Two boys from the old school days, and we certainly did shake hands a few times! It was the old foolish Dutch Krusemeyer and Albert Paxton, both of them lieutenants. I heard Fred Mitchell is still training in the States and about crazy because they won't send him over yet.
If you had any idea how glad I was to get your letter, you wouldn't lose any time answering this one. Anyhow, I'm going to write to you again every few days if I get the chance, because maybe you'll answer more than one of 'em.
But see here, cut out that “sent you to be killed” stuff. You've got the wrong idea altogether. We've got the big job of our lives, we know that, but we're going to do it. There'll be mistakes and bad times, but we won't fall down. Now you'll excuse me for saying it this way, Dora, but I don't know just how to express myself except saying of course we know everybody isn't going to get back home—but listen, we didn't come over here to get killed particularly, we came over here to give these Dutchmen h—l!
Perhaps you can excuse language if I write it with a blank like that, but before we get back we're going to do what we came for. They may not all of them be as bad as some of them—it's a good thing you don't know what we do, because some of it would make you sick. As I say, there may be quite a lot of good ones among them; but we know what they've done to this country, and we know what they mean to do to ours. So we're going to attend to them. Of course that's why I'm here. It wasn't you.
Don't forget to write pretty soon, Dora. You say in your letter—I certainly was glad to get that letter—well, you say I have things to do more important than “girls.” Dora, I think you probably know without my saying so that of course while I have got important things to do, just as every man over here has, and everybody at home, for that matter, well, the thing that is most important in the world to me, next to helping win this war, it's reading the next letter from you.
Don't forget how glad I'll be to get it, and don't forget you didn't have anything to do with my being over here. That was—it was something else. And you bet, whatever happens I'm glad I came! Don't ever forgetthat!
Dora knew it was “something else.” Her memory went back to her first recollection of him in school: from that time on he had been just an ordinary, everyday boy, floundering somehow through his lessons in school and through his sweethearting with Milla, as the millions of other boys floundered along with their own lessons and their own Millas. She saw him swinging his books and romping homeward from the schoolhouse, or going whistling by her father's front yard, rattling a stick on the fence as he went, care-free and masterful, but shy as a deer if strangers looked at him, and always “not much of a talker.”
She had always felt so superior to him, she shuddered as she thought of it. His quiet had been so much better than her talk. His intelligence was proven now, when it came to the great test, to be of a stronger sort than hers. He was wise and good and gentle—and a fighting man! “We know what they've done to this country and what they mean to do to ours. So we're going to attend to them.” She read this over, and she knew that Ramsey, wise and gentle and good, would fight like an unchained devil, and that he and his comrades would indeed and indeed do what they “came for.”
“It wasn't you,” he said. She nodded gently, agreeing, and knew what it was that sent him. Yet Ramsey had his own secret there, and did not tell it. Sometimes there rose, faint in his memory, a whimsical picture, yet one that had always meant much to him. He would see an old man sitting with a little boy upon a rustic bench under a walnut tree to watch the “Decoration Day Parade” go by—and Ramsey would see a shoot of sunshine that had somehow got through the walnut tree and made a bedazzlement of glinting fine lines over a spot about the size of a saucer, upon the old man's thick white hair. And in Ramsey's memory, the little boy, sitting beside the veteran, would half close his eyes, drowsily, playing that this sunshine spot was a white bird's-nest, until he had a momentary dream of a glittering little bird that dwelt there and wore a blue soldier cap on its head. And Ramsey would bring out of his memory thoughts that the old man had got into the child's head that day. “We knew that armies fighting for the Freedom of Manhadto win, in the long run.... We were on the side of God's Plan.... Long ago we began to see hints of His Plan.... Man has to win his freedom from himself—men in the light have to fight against men in the dark.... That light is the answer.... We had the light that made us never doubt.”
A long while Dora sat with the letter in her hand before she answered it and took it upon her heart to wear. That was the place for it, since it was already within her heart, where he would find it when he came home again. And she beheld the revelation sent to her. This ordinary life of Ramsey's was but the outward glinting of a high and splendid spirit, as high and splendid as earth can show. And yet it was only the life of an everyday American boy. The streets of the town were full, now, of boys like Ramsey.
At first they were just boys in uniform; then one saw that they were boys no more.
They were soldiers.