CHAPTER VIII
A real and sweet intimacy with Nancy Cowder had been going on in Dick’s heart almost unconsciously to himself. It was natural that this should have been so. Curiosity over the girl had been awakened when Patsy McCullon came back from Europe in 1914 and gave an account of her charm, activity and associations—a picture very different from what Sabinsport had quite unconsciously drawn for him. This curiosity had become sympathetic interest when Reuben Cowder had first unburdened himself about his daughter, and this interest had grown warmer and warmer as week after week he read the letters that Nancy was writing her father from Serbia. The nature which revealed itself so frankly in these letters was, Dick realized, something rarely sweet and strong. He grew as the weeks went on to watch for the coming of the letters with scarcely less eagerness than Reuben Cowder himself, and he dreamed much more over them. The girl was taking possession of him without his knowing it. The thought of her was the most fragrant, penetrating and beautiful that came to him.
When the great tragedy came, and she was driven with the host over the mountains, Dick suffered keenly. Here again his old habit of creating a picture of the physical surroundings tormented him. The pictures of what was happening to the girl in that bleak and distracted land came before his eyes as he went about his daily work, stinging him as an unexpected shot might have done, or wakened him, shivering, from his sleep by their horrible realism. His anxiety became so great in the early part of the year that he had almost persuaded himself to join Reuben Cowder in his distracted search, when the cablegram came that Nancy was found. Dick had a vain hope that they might come home soon, but the first letters destroyed that. It was only by long and careful nursing that the exhausted vitality would be brought back, and the girl probably would never again be able to support long strains. Reuben Cowder was ready and glad, so he wrote, to give up everything else to the care of his precious girl, even to never coming back again to America if that were necessary.
Dick had a great sense of loss—one that he did not attempt to analyze or justify—over these intimations that it might be possible that Nancy would never again see Sabinsport. When Nikola came, however, a different face was put on the matter, for he was all confidence that Miss Nancy would never consent to live away from Sabinsport, that she loved it above all places, and that the thing that was sustaining her now was the thought of coming back with her father. They had many rare talks, these two, and little by little Dick was able to piece together, down to the last and commonest detail, the weeks of danger and hardship that the little party had endured. It was a brave, brave tale, and the more he talked it over with Nikola the prouder he became of Nancy Cowder, and the quicker his heart beat at the thought of her.
Throughout the months when Sabinsport was full of anxiety over Verdun, of sorrow over Mikey’s death, of more or less irritated activity over the Border troubles, Dick was daily going about her streets, sharing in her sorrows and in her perplexities, always deep in his mind and in his heart the thought of this girl over the seas.
And the girl herself—the last thing that Dick dreamed was that she was beginning to establish an intimacy with him. It could hardly have been otherwise. Reuben Cowder had a profound sense of obligation to the young man. For the first time in many years he had had a confidant. Not indeed since his wife died had Reuben Cowder talked freely to any living being. He told this to his daughter. “He is a man,” he said, “that you open your heart to. I don’t know why it is, but I knew that I could go to him and say what I could say to no other man in Sabinsport, however long I had known him. You get something from him—I don’t know what it is. I suppose it’s sympathy and understanding. It is not what he says, but it’s a very real thing, and everybody gets it, everybody in Sabinsport. When he dropped down there among us at the time of the accident at the ‘Emma,’ it was to him that all those poor souls turned, not to us. Jake Mulligan feels just as I do about it, and so does Tom Sabins, and so does Nikola and so does John Starrett, and even the Rev. Mr. Pepper. He’s a man—a man that seems to touch everybody. I suppose he is what you call human—I don’t know, but I do know that Sabinsport is a vastly better place to live in because of Dick Ingraham. Why, Nancy,” he said, “I could never have found you in the world if it had not been for him. I would not have had the courage. My tongue would have been tied in my search. I don’t know but that’s the greatest thing that Dick Ingraham has done for me—he has loosened my tongue. Nobody ever did that before for me but your mother.”
And so, day after day, as they sat on their terrace overlooking the blue Mediterranean, the man would talk of Sabinsport and of Dick Ingraham, and his daughter realized that he was seeing the world through new eyes—his town, his business, his future; and her heart grew big with thankfulness to the man that had helped work this transformation, and more and more eagerly did she look forward to the time when she should see him, when she should know him and could thank him.
It was not until late in the fall that definite assurance of a quick return came to Dick. An exultant letter from Reuben Cowder told him they were leaving their nook on the sea for London, and that as soon as it could be arranged they would sail for home. The certainty that Nancy was coming, that he should meet her, after all these long months of intimacy with her, filled him with an unreasoning kind of dread. Might it not be that he would discover that he must give up this lovely thing that he had been treasuring in his heart? It was as if he had been growing in some shady, secret corner of his garden a delicate and rare plant, and that the time had come when he must take it into the full sun, and he feared what the change might do—feared lest it was something that could not endure the wide, roaring out of doors. There was a real dread in his heart when, without warning, one night early in December, he listened to a cheerful voice which he scarcely recognized, calling to him over the telephone, “Hello, Ingraham!—this is Cowder—how are you?” and as he accepted the hearty invitation to “come out with me to-morrow afternoon and meet my girl.”
Dick found his friend much changed. Reuben Cowder had been what Sabinsport called a “sour” man, a “hard” man. He had never talked except when it was necessary, and then so straight to the point, so bluntly and finally, that those familiar with him feared his silence less than his words. He had a smile which was so rare, so joyless, that one would rather he frowned, for the smile made one sorry for him and uneasy lest one’s judgment of him as cruel, greedy and unfeeling might, after all, need qualification. He had a way of walking with his eyes on the ground. Ralph said it was so nothing would distract his attention from his eternal scheming to “do” Sabinsport. This stoop in his walk, his grizzled hair, his stern face, made him look old—a “hard old man” he was frequently called.
No one would have described him now as old, and this in spite of the fact that his hair was perfectly white—one of the results of his weeks of torture over Nancy’s fate. Nothing was more noticeable about him now than that he walked erect with head well back and eyes that shone. If he talked but little more, he smiled freely and indiscriminately at all the world. The change in him was a nine days’ wonder to the town. To Dick, dining at his side out at the farm, it was a miracle. “It’s a resurrection of things all but dead in him,” he thought to himself, “a marvel that only love and joy could work.”
“I’ve told Nancy,” said Reuben Cowder, “that you are the best friend I ever had, that if it hadn’t been for you I don’t believe I ever would have found her—wouldn’t have had the courage and faith. So, you see, she is very anxious to see you, and I want you to like her. She’s going to stay here now, she says, with me, and I don’t want her to be lonesome.”
“She’ll never be lonesome here,” was Dick’s first thought at the sight of her flying across the lawn to meet the car, a half dozen dogs at her heels. And his second thought, as they stopped and she stood beside them, was her father’s description of the months before—“so slight and fine and free-moving.”
She was all that—and beautiful, too—a girl of twenty-four, dark hair and eyes, a high-bred face of delicate features, its fine coloring heightened by her romp with the dogs and set off by a sweater and tam as nearly the shade of her cheeks as wool could imitate. She gave a warm, firm hand to Dick, and looking him frankly in the eye, said: “Father has told me about you. I am glad you have come to see us.”
There was no question of being at home with her. She had so simply and sweetly taken him in that it was as if he had always known her. It seemed entirely natural to be walking up to the house with her, to stop on the veranda and look over the valley, lying now brown and gray with the broad river glittering through it; to go in to tea before the great open fire; to talk of all sorts of things, the latest war news, Reuben Cowder’s day in town, the dogs, the telephone talks she had with Patsy, who was coming out Sunday afternoon with her father and mother, her meeting with Patsy in London two and a half years ago, the Boys’ Club, Nikola, whom she had run out to see in the morning—“her first morning, too,” thought Dick, with a glow of something like pride.
In the hour, which Dick was always to remember in its every detail, there was but one alarm. It was when Nancy suddenly asked:
“But how about Otto, Father. Did you see him? Isn’t he here? I thought surely he would telephone me.”
Dick thought she looked a little hurt, and he knew Reuben Cowder evaded when he answered, with a quick and warning look at him, “He’s in New York probably. I didn’t ask about him, I was so busy. I will telephone if you wish,” but Nancy said, “No, he must be away or he would have been out.”
It was quite as natural as everything else about it, but it raised a cloud. “She did not know, then, that Reuben Cowder had quarreled with Otto. She did not know there was a question in Sabinsport’s mind about his loyalty. And could it be that she cared for him? What more probable?” If the Reverend Richard Ingraham went home, marveling at the sweet and wonderful companionship so fully and naturally opened to him, there was a decided uneasiness running through his exaltation. Did Nancy Cowder care for Otto Littman? Would she understand the feeling about him? Would she know, indeed, anything of the stratagem and plots that the Germans had spun over the country, with what Dick felt was for the most part decidedly amateurish and bungling skill? Would she dismiss the suspicions which connected Otto Littman’s name with the intrigues as unfounded and unworthy? Did she care enough to defend him, womanlike, even if it was finally proved that there was a serious, nationwide, Germany-inspired conspiracy abroad and that he was connected with the mischief-making?
It was many months before he was to have satisfactory answers to these questions. And for the most part they lay at the bottom of his mind, only working their way for brief, if troubling, moments to the top. Life was too full, too insistent, too weighty, to give time for questions that did not require immediate handling.
He saw much of Reuben Cowder and his daughter. The unquestioning, affectionate acceptance of him as part of their life that had so rejoiced and overwhelmed him that first day, continued. It was made the more delightful by the entire naturalness of the Cowders’ relations with Sabinsport. Ralph and Dick discussed it again and again. The town took them in, and they accepted the town as if there had been no long black years when Sabinsport had openly scorned the man and his daughter, while it secretly feared him and envied her; or when Reuben Cowder hated them all with a Scotch hate because they so utterly misjudged his beautiful girl.
All of this seemed forgotten now—something childish, not worth recall, belonging to a day when men and women occupied themselves with lesser things. The town’s suspicions had been washed completely away by the story of Nancy Cowder’s noble sacrifice and brave endurance. They plumed themselves no little on the fact that she belonged to them. The change in Reuben Cowder, who, if he owned as much as ever of everything and ran it with as high hand as ever, did it smilingly and generously, wiped out fear and old enmities. And as for Nancy and her father, after you’ve been where they had been, resentment for neglect and misjudgment have no part in your soul.
And so the town came together in a way quite new to it. High Town and the “Emma,” Cowder’s Point, Jo’s Mills, the South Side and the War Board began to connect up as they never had before. It was one of the strange ways in which the Great War reached Sabinsport—stretching her mind to take in facts never before known to her, softening her heart to understand and sympathize where she had been ignorant and hard.
It was time that Sabinsport grew together, for the day was close at hand when she was to be called upon to become more than a spectator in the great tragedy. She watched with somber face but steady eye as day after day the proofs piled up that she could no longer do business with Germany. Dick, watching her with the eyes and the heart of a lover, said to himself that when the day came, she could be counted on.
He was right. The day that theArgusreported that Germany had again torn up a pledge, that she had announced her return to the practices she had so solemnly sworn to respect, he heard but one thing as he stopped in the groceries, the barber shop, the lobby of the Paradise, and that was, “Of course this means war.”
Sabinsport took the breaking of diplomatic relations, four days later, almost in silence, but with a growing hardness of eyes and a setting of lips which meant to Dick that she could be relied upon for whatever she might be called upon to do.
It was Ralph who at this moment stirred the town. For weeks now he had shut himself away from his friends, even from Dick and Patsy. TheArgushad been dull reading. Even those who highly disapproved of Ralph’s belligerent attacks on the established order missed his outspoken talk. They had not before appreciated how much zest he had given to life.
Ralph had been giving nights and days to the hardest studying and thinking he had ever done. He had been saturating himself with the history of Europe, the philosophies of the contending nations, their ambitions and their procedures. He had succeeded in divesting himself from all personal prejudices and feelings about the war. He had achieved one of the most difficult of human tasks—a completely impersonal, non-partisan attitude toward events which thrilled with human emotion and which involved all of the deepest of human wants and human dreams. He meant to see the thing right, and whatever labor or pain was necessary to see it right he was giving. Gradually it unrolled itself before his mind—the most terrific of human dramas.
Like Sabinsport, Ralph had come to hinge his final decision of what the United States should do on whether or no Germany had still enough sense of decency and righteousness in her to keep her given word, and, when she proved she had not, his case was complete.
The day after the news came of her insolent announcement that she would resume her submarine warfare, a full column of theArguswas given to a double-leaded, signed article. It was an article of vast importance in Sabinsport, for it put into words the feelings that were within her. It became her statement of the necessity that she should at last take part in the Great War. And it gave her, too, some sense of an issue far greater than the defense of rights.
The article was headed “A Confession and a Good-by,” and it began with a characteristically blunt statement: “As this is the last piece that the editor will write for theArgusfor a long time, he is going to drop the third person and use the first. That third person always was a cramping for him as a dress suit.” The piece followed.
“I have always tried to say to you as nearly as I could what I thought about any matter which it seemed to me I should discuss in this newspaper. I have often failed to say what was in my mind—sometimes because I attempted to write of things of which I did not know enough, sometimes because I was determined to force your attention to things in which you were not interested, and again because I was more interested in converting you to my ideas than in attending to my business, which was the expression of those ideas. But, whether I have failed or succeeded in saying what I undertook to say, I have tried to be frank, especially since the war began.
“I don’t think there is anybody who reads theArguswho does not know how the war has affected me. I have tried to believe, and to persuade others to believe, that Sabinsport need not concern herself with the war. I tried to talk and act as if we could go on with our daily lives here as if it were not loose on the earth. I thought that was our duty—at least, I wanted to think that was our duty. My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid out for myself for this town.
“I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making what he thought would be a perfect world; I had a plan for making a perfect Sabinsport. And I have been in my way as narrow and as unreasonable as he.
“You have been both tolerant and kind in your dealings with me. If this war had not come, I believe that gradually some of my ideas might have been adopted in Sabinsport; but the war came and, in spite of my fierce gestures and loud shouting, it swept over us. It threw me high and dry out of the current of human activities. As long as I refused, as I did, to go with my kind and take part in its agonies, it had no place for me. It took me two full years to discover this, to understand that my wishes and my ways were too puny for the times.
“I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind and strength to helping all men and women in this town to understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader; but we all realize that it has been his wisdom and patience and suffering that has opened our eyes. There has been nobody in Sabinsport so humble, so ignorant, or, like myself, so selfish that he was not his friend and counselor. When I finally realized the hopelessness of my opposition, it was this man who showed me the vanity and the inhumanity of my position, and who urged me to use my little training and scholarship in trying to understand how this human tragedy came about and why there was to-day no finer or nobler thing than to take a man’s part in it. For six months I have been following his advice.
“I know now that this war came on the world because Germany willed it. It was necessary to her plans. It is no great trick to show from her own records why she wanted the war, why she believed she would win. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that while she has herself been telling us for forty years why she must have a war, we have not heeded. The few in France and in England that believed her were cried down as disturbers of the peace. As for us Americans, our stupidity has been beyond belief. There is scarcely a college or university in this country that has not its quota of men and women, educated in Germany, whose chief ambition has been to demonstrate the superiority of her scholarship and of her social system. It was her social machinery that captivated my imagination. Without ever having seen it in operation, without having any sense of its relation to her war machine, which she never hesitated to tell us was her main objective, I, like thousands of others in this country, accepted and lauded her. I swallowed her whole, because she insured her sick, her old, and her unemployed. All I knew about that I gathered from statistics and from observers who had seen in Germany only what they wanted to see.
“It has taken me all these months to realize what Germany’s invasion of Belgium meant, the abysmal depravity of it. It has taken me all this time to understand that her attacks on treaties and laws were attacks on personal freedom.
“I have only to look around in Sabinsport among our own people to see this. There is Nikola Petrovitch—a sober, honest, industrious man, who twenty years ago was forced, in order to earn bread for his wife and children, to leave a country that he loved as well as any man in Sabinsport loves America. Why should he have been forced to do this? For no other reason than that Germany and her kind wanted this land which belonged to Nikola. He loved it so well that two and a half years ago he went back, and we know what he has been through since. He and his people were literally swept into the sea by those who wanted Serbia, wanted her wealth—the things that belonged to Nikola and Marta and Stana.
“And there are many men and women in Sabinsport from many different lands, who have been forced to leave these lands. Now it is time that this kind of thing stopped, and the only way to stop it is for us to take a hand, and to take a hand at once. All the documents are in. It is for the President of the United States to declare war to-day.
“The case is closed for me. This is the last article that I shall write for theArgusuntil Germany is conquered. This afternoon I enlisted in the United States Army, and I hope soon to be doing my part toward staying the evil which I have so long denied to be loose on the earth.”
It is safe to say that there was nobody in Sabinsport who took theArgusthat did not read that article from start to finish. It is also safe to say that the one person to whom it meant a thousandfold more than to anybody else was Patsy McCullon. She read it with exultant heart and wet eyes, and laid it down only to call the editorial rooms of theArgus. It was Ralph who answered the telephone.
“Ralph,” she began, “I—” and her voice broke in sobs.
“Why, Patsy,” he said, “what’s the matter?”
And then he had a great light, and for the first time in eight months, the old dominant voice of Ralph Gardner rang out:
“Patsy, I’m coming right out. Will you see me?”
And Patsy uttered a faint and broken, “Ye—s.”
Ralph flung himself into his car, and started toward the McCullon farm at a pace which made those who saw him racing by say: “Something must have happened. Wonder if there’s been an accident.” His lips were set, his eyes flaming, his color high, the great hour of his life was at hand. He could go to Patsy with a clear, clean purpose—the one to which she herself was pledged. However long he had been in darkness, he had reached the light. He need not hang his head before her. Was it too late? The hot heart chilled at the thought, and the firm hand on the wheel trembled so that the car swerved almost into the ditch.
It took twenty minutes to make the run for which they all counted thirty short. It was nearly supper time when he sprang up the steps. Patsy herself opened the door; cool, serene, her guards all up. Who would have thought the cheerful, welcoming voice was the same that so lately had vibrated and broken over the ’phone? Her pose was lost on Ralph. It was not this but the voice of twenty minutes ago that rang in his ears. She might fence if she would. He must know—she should not put him away. He noticed she took him into the more private parlor of the house, not the family room where at this time Father and Mother McCullon were almost sure to be. She sensed something then, in spite of that infernal calm.
Ralph closed the door and disdaining the chair Patsy offered him in front of the fire, roughly seized her arm.
“Patsy, don’t pretend. You know why I’m here. I love you. I want you to marry me, marry me now. I’ve enlisted. I leave next week. I want you, Patsy; want you before I go. Tell me, tell me, quick, Sweet—I must know, I must know now.”
And Patsy, her armor broken and fallen at his first sentence, listened with thirsty heart. She drank the words like one whose lips are parched from long desert dryness, and answered by putting her head on his shoulder and breaking into happy sobs.
A half hour later a tea bell which had sounded twice before was rung close to the door and Mother McCullon’s voice called, “Patsy, your father’s getting impatient.”
Patsy put aside Ralph’s arms. “We must go, Ralph, and tell them.”
“But you haven’t said yes, Patsy.”
“Why, Ralph Gardner, what do you mean?”
“But I asked you to marry me now—before I go—next week—will you?”
And Patsy sighing happily said, “Yes, Ralph; I don’t think I could bear it unless I were your wife.”
They went out arm in arm to break the great news, and were not a little amazed to see how much as a matter of course the elder people took it.
“It’s time you two sillies settled it, I think,” said Mother McCullon, tears and smiles disputing for her eyes.
“I suppose,” said Father McCullon, mischievously, “we may call this the first victory of the war, Ralph. You would never have got her if you hadn’t changed your tune.”
But Patsy and Ralph, looking at each other wisely, knew better. The war—why, what had the war to do with their love? Already the world-old conviction of true lovers submerged all history. Since time began they were destined for one another, and neither war nor pestilence could have kept them apart.
As Ralph demanded, so it was. Four days later there was a wedding at the farm—a wedding so simple that Mother McCullon was shocked. Both Ralph and Patsy would have it so. “We have no time for fussing, Mother,” the autocratic young man had declared, and Patsy was as little concerned. She was going with him. She would find a home as near his camp as practical. She would stay there as long as practical. To make this possible without too great inconvenience to those with whom she worked in school and town, seemed vastly more important than a wedding. Were not these war times?
But a sweeter wedding never was, so Dick and Nancy and Mary and Tom Sabins and the half dozen other friends invited said. Everybody was so happy, everybody so proud, everybody so sure.
“It isn’t often that I marry two people,” so Dick said to Nancy as they drove back from the station where they said good-by to the pair, “without some inward doubts. I haven’t a shadow about Patsy and Ralph. They will work it out.”
And Nancy said confidently, “I am sure of it.”
Glad as he was for his friends, their marriage and Ralph’s enlistment threw Dick back again into a black and hopeless mood. If he could ease the pain of his longing for Nancy by getting into the war! If he could ease his despair from the sentence to inaction by possessing Nancy! He felt that he was one condemned to eternal loneliness and eternal rust. More powerfully than ever, as in the distant day when he had sought Annie and found her dead—or when in August of 1914 he had sought to make his way into the British Army and had been thrust back, he was flooded with the conviction that he was doomed never to know the great realities of life. Not a little of his ache came from the stir that Ralph’s almost primitive attitude toward the war had given him. Ralph, once convinced that the future of the world was at stake, that it was at bottom a struggle between men’s freedom and slavery, that the event could only be settled by war, had undergone a startling change in feeling. He was seized with a passion for the struggle. He wanted to fight—fight with weapons—with his hands—get at the very throat of this enemy of men who had so long masqueraded in his mind as their friend.
It was his thirst for battle that had made him enlist in the ranks. When Dick had first heard of this decision he had questioned its wisdom. “Why, Ralph,” he said, “you ought to go into an officers’ camp. You’ll be needed there.”
“No,” answered Ralph, “I want the trenches. I’m after the real thing. I don’t want to order—I want to obey. I want the essence of battle, and I don’t believe anybody but the man in the line ever gets it. Then, too, I’ve hung back all these months, stupid ass that I was. I want to begin at the bottom. All right if I can work up, but I want to work up by doing the thing.”
Dick understood. Thus he had felt in those first days before the hope of a part in the war had been destroyed. He recalled how there had been hours when he felt that nothing but the sight of his own red blood flowing would still the passion within him. Ralph was to have a chance to grapple with death and laugh in her face—the highest thing that came to men, he somehow felt; and he would never know it.
That he had any more chance of winning Nancy than of being admitted into the army, he did not believe. She was bound somehow to Otto, of that he was sure. In the few months she had been at home he had seen scores of little things that made him think it. He always remembered with a pang the disappointment he thought he detected at their first meeting when she had asked for Otto, and her father had told her he was not in town. He recalled, too, how a few days later, when he was alone with her, she had told him of seeing Otto the day he returned; how he seemed depressed, how sorry she was, for he was her oldest, indeed almost her only, friend in Sabinsport. Dick felt as if she were sounding him. He gave no sign, only remarking that the war was sad business for those who had lived in Germany as Otto had and who had many friends there.
She had never pursued it, but she spoke freely of his visits. He never felt sure that she sensed that hers was practically the only house in Sabinsport into which Otto now went. What could make her so interested but—caring? What could make Reuben Cowder look so grim when Otto was present or when his name was mentioned but his belief that she did care? Of one thing he was sure, he must give no sign and he gave none, though as the spring days went on and the question of our going into the war was settled and Sabinsport began to prepare to take up her part, the two were thrown more and more together. It would have been harder if there had not been so much to do, and if the town had not taken it so much for granted that whatever the question, it was Dick who must explain and counsel.