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