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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, One of Ours, by Willa Cather
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: One of Ours
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2004  [eBook #2369]
+[Date last updated: April 11, 2006]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE OF OURS***
+
+
+
+
+
+One of Ours
+
+by Willa Cather
+
+
+
+
+Book One: On Lovely Creek
+
+I.
+
+Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and
+vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half
+of the same bed.
+
+"Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why, aren't we going to the circus today?"
+
+"Car's all right. Let me alone." The boy turned over and pulled
+the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was
+beginning to come through the curtainless windows.
+
+Claude rose and dressed,--a simple operation which took very
+little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way
+in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's
+comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom,
+which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had
+washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed
+with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not
+dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to
+the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head
+in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.
+
+Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full
+of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at
+him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were
+alone.
+
+"What air you gittin' up for a-ready, boy? You goin' to the
+circus before breakfast? Don't you make no noise, else you'll
+have 'em all down here before I git my fire a-goin'."
+
+"All right, Mahailey." Claude caught up his cap and ran out of
+doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over
+the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light
+poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly,
+timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a
+sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the
+south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go
+to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort
+of day that must, somehow, turn out well.
+
+Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to
+the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted
+wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men,
+Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock.
+Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude
+wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to
+them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and
+dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a
+grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one
+of the horses.
+
+Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude
+and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man
+Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a
+board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of
+her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the
+cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for
+weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg
+swollen until it looked like an elephant's. She would have to
+stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she
+grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been
+discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a
+credit to him.
+
+Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell.
+After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the
+barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating
+quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot
+lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck
+and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him
+mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her
+upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being
+petted. She let him touch her foot and examine her leg.
+
+When Claude reached the kitchen, his mother was sitting at one
+end of the breakfast table, pouring weak coffee, his brother and
+Dan and Jerry were in their chairs, and Mahailey was baking
+griddle cakes at the stove. A moment later Mr. Wheeler came down
+the enclosed stairway and walked the length of the table to his
+own place. He was a very large man, taller and broader than any
+of his neighbours. He seldom wore a coat in summer, and his
+rumpled shirt bulged out carelessly over the belt of his
+trousers. His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle
+tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for
+good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical
+composure. Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler
+flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak
+with complete seriousness. He kept up his easy-going, jocular
+affability even with his own family.
+
+As soon as he was seated, Mr. Wheeler reached for the two-pint
+sugar bowl and began to pour sugar into his coffee. Ralph asked
+him if he were going to the circus. Mr. Wheeler winked.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if I happened in town sometime before the
+elephants get away." He spoke very deliberately, with a
+State-of-Maine drawl, and his voice was smooth and agreeable.
+"You boys better start in early, though. You can take the wagon
+and the mules, and load in the cowhides. The butcher has agreed
+to take them."
+
+Claude put down his knife. "Can't we have the car? I've washed it
+on purpose."
+
+"And what about Dan and Jerry? They want to see the circus just
+as much as you do, and I want the hides should go in; they're
+bringing a good price now. I don't mind about your washing the
+car; mud preserves the paint, they say, but it'll be all right
+this time, Claude."
+
+The hired men haw-hawed and Ralph giggled. Claude's freckled face
+got very red. The pancake grew stiff and heavy in his mouth and
+was hard to swallow. His father knew he hated to drive the mules
+to town, and knew how he hated to go anywhere with Dan and Jerry.
+As for the hides, they were the skins of four steers that had
+perished in the blizzard last winter through the wanton
+carelessness of these same hired men, and the price they would
+bring would not half pay for the time his father had spent in
+stripping and curing them. They had lain in a shed loft all
+summer, and the wagon had been to town a dozen times. But today,
+when he wanted to go to Frankfort clean and care-free, he must
+take these stinking hides and two coarse-mouthed men, and drive a
+pair of mules that always brayed and balked and behaved
+ridiculously in a crowd. Probably his father had looked out of
+the window and seen him washing the car, and had put this up on
+him while he dressed. It was like his father's idea of a joke.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at Claude sympathetically, feeling that he
+was disappointed. Perhaps she, too, suspected a joke. She had
+learned that humour might wear almost any guise.
+
+When Claude started for the barn after breakfast, she came
+running down the path, calling to him faintly,--hurrying always
+made her short of breath. Overtaking him, she looked up with
+solicitude, shading her eyes with her delicately formed hand. "If
+you want I should do up your linen coat, Claude, I can iron it
+while you're hitching," she said wistfully.
+
+Claude stood kicking at a bunch of mottled feathers that had once
+been a young chicken. His shoulders were drawn high, his mother
+saw, and his figure suggested energy and determined self-control.
+
+"You needn't mind, mother." He spoke rapidly, muttering his
+words. "I'd better wear my old clothes if I have to take the
+hides. They're greasy, and in the sun they'll smell worse than
+fertilizer."
+
+"The men can handle the hides, I should think. Wouldn't you feel
+better in town to be dressed?" She was still blinking up at him.
+
+"Don't bother about it. Put me out a clean coloured shirt, if you
+want to. That's all right."
+
+He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the
+path up to the house. She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear
+mother! He guessed if she could stand having these men about,
+could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!
+
+Half an hour after the wagon left, Nat Wheeler put on an alpaca
+coat and went off in the rattling buckboard in which, though he
+kept two automobiles, he still drove about the country. He said
+nothing to his wife; it was her business to guess whether or not
+he would be home for dinner. She and Mahailey could have a good
+time scrubbing and sweeping all day, with no men around to bother
+them.
+
+
+
+There were few days in the year when Wheeler did not drive off
+somewhere; to an auction sale, or a political convention, or a
+meeting of the Farmers' Telephone directors;--to see how his
+neighbours were getting on with their work, if there was nothing
+else to look after. He preferred his buckboard to a car because
+it was light, went easily over heavy or rough roads, and was so
+rickety that he never felt he must suggest his wife's
+accompanying him. Besides he could see the country better when he
+didn't have to keep his mind on the road. He had come to this
+part of Nebraska when the Indians and the buffalo were still
+about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone, had
+watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
+where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
+settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young
+fellows the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper;
+until he felt a little as if all this were his own enterprise.
+The changes, not only those the years made, but those the seasons
+made, were interesting to him.
+
+People recognized Nat Wheeler and his cart a mile away. He sat
+massive and comfortable, weighing down one end of the slanting
+seat, his driving hand lying on his knee. Even his German
+neighbours, the Yoeders, who hated to stop work for a quarter of
+an hour on any account, were glad to see him coming. The
+merchants in the little towns about the county missed him if he
+didn't drop in once a week or so. He was active in politics;
+never ran for an office himself, but often took up the cause of a
+friend and conducted his campaign for him.
+
+The French saying, "Joy of the street, sorrow of the home," was
+exemplified in Mr. Wheeler, though not at all in the French way.
+His own affairs were of secondary importance to him. In the early
+days he had homesteaded and bought and leased enough land to make
+him rich. Now he had only to rent it out to good farmers who
+liked to work--he didn't, and of that he made no secret. When he
+was at home, he usually sat upstairs in the living room, reading
+newspapers. He subscribed for a dozen or more--the list included
+a weekly devoted to scandal--and he was well informed about what
+was going on in the world. He had magnificent health, and illness
+in himself or in other people struck him as humorous. To be sure,
+he never suffered from anything more perplexing than toothache or
+boils, or an occasional bilious attack.
+
+Wheeler gave liberally to churches and charities, was always
+ready to lend money or machinery to a neighbour who was short of
+anything. He liked to tease and shock diffident people, and had
+an inexhaustible supply of funny stories. Everybody marveled that
+he got on so well with his oldest son, Bayliss Wheeler. Not that
+Bayliss was exactly diffident, but he was a narrow gauge fellow,
+the sort of prudent young man one wouldn't expect Nat Wheeler to
+like.
+
+Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he
+was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial
+success. Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son's business acumen.
+At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a
+week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about
+his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
+came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
+still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
+virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
+everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
+Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
+wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
+together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
+good time were so different.
+
+Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
+stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
+sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
+always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
+buckboard, and Bayliss.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
+High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
+was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
+reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
+There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
+sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
+and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
+them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
+done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
+see the man at once, as if he hadn't hitherto appreciated him.
+
+There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude's father. He
+liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
+immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often
+tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never
+loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,--as
+when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat
+down on the sticky fly-paper,--he was not boisterous. He was a
+jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not
+thin-skinned.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope
+went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.
+Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial
+companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the
+crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr.
+Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head
+above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was
+setting up a shell-game. To avoid his father, Claude turned and
+went in to his brother's store. The two big show windows were
+full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to
+watch the parade. Bayliss was seated in the little glass cage
+where he did his writing and bookkeeping. He nodded at Claude
+from his desk.
+
+"Hello," said Claude, bustling in as if he were in a great hurry.
+"Have you seen Ernest Havel? I thought I might find him in here."
+
+Bayliss swung round in his swivel chair to return a plough
+catalogue to the shelf. "What would he be in here for? Better
+look for him in the saloon." Nobody could put meaner insinuations
+into a slow, dry remark than Bayliss.
+
+Claude's cheeks flamed with anger. As he turned away, he noticed
+something unusual about his brother's face, but he wasn't going
+to give him the satisfaction of asking him how he had got a black
+eye. Ernest Havel was a Bohemian, and he usually drank a glass of
+beer when he came to town; but he was sober and thoughtful beyond
+the wont of young men. From Bayliss' drawl one might have
+supposed that the boy was a drunken loafer.
+
+At that very moment Claude saw his friend on the other side of
+the street, following the wagon of trained dogs that brought up
+the rear of the procession. He ran across, through a crowd of
+shouting youngsters, and caught Ernest by the arm.
+
+"Hello, where are you off to?"
+
+"I'm going to eat my lunch before show-time. I left my wagon out
+by the pumping station, on the creek. What about you?"
+
+"I've got no program. Can I go along?"
+
+Ernest smiled. "I expect. I've got enough lunch for two."
+
+"Yes, I know. You always have. I'll join you later."
+
+Claude would have liked to take Ernest to the hotel for dinner.
+He had more than enough money in his pockets; and his father was
+a rich farmer. In the Wheeler family a new thrasher or a new
+automobile was ordered without a question, but it was considered
+extravagant to go to a hotel for dinner. If his father or Bayliss
+heard that he had been there-and Bayliss heard everything they
+would say he was putting on airs, and would get back at him. He
+tried to excuse his cowardice to himself by saying that he was
+dirty and smelled of the hides; but in his heart he knew that he
+did not ask Ernest to go to the hotel with him because he had
+been so brought up that it would be difficult for him to do this
+simple thing. He made some purchases at the fruit stand and the
+cigar counter, and then hurried out along the dusty road toward
+the pumping station. Ernest's wagon was standing under the shade
+of some willow trees, on a little sandy bottom half enclosed by a
+loop of the creek which curved like a horseshoe. Claude threw
+himself on the sand beside the stream and wiped the dust from his
+hot face. He felt he had now closed the door on his disagreeable
+morning.
+
+Ernest produced his lunch basket.
+
+"I got a couple bottles of beer cooling in the creek," he said.
+"I knew you wouldn't want to go in a saloon."
+
+"Oh, forget it!" Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of
+pickles. He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into
+a saloon, and his friend knew he was afraid.
+
+After lunch, Claude took out a handful of good cigars he had
+bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was
+pleased. He lit one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with
+an air of pride and turning it around between his fingers.
+
+The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching
+their oats. The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a
+cool, persuasive sound. Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their
+coats under their heads, talking very little. Occasionally a
+motor dashed along the road toward town, and a cloud of dust and
+a smell of gasoline blew in over the creek bottom; but for the
+most part the silence of the warm, lazy summer noon was
+undisturbed. Claude could usually forget his own vexations and
+chagrins when he was with Ernest. The Bohemian boy was never
+uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once. He was
+simple and direct. He had a number of impersonal preoccupations;
+was interested in politics and history and in new inventions.
+Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental
+liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain. After he
+had talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go
+right on the farm seemed less important. Claude's mother was
+almost as fond of Ernest as he was himself. When the two boys
+were going to high school, Ernest often came over in the evening
+to study with Claude, and while they worked at the long kitchen
+table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning and sat near them, helping
+them with their Latin and algebra. Even old Mahailey was
+enlightened by their words of wisdom.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived
+from the Old Country. His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to
+Frankfort to meet him, and was to stop on the way home and leave
+some groceries for the Wheelers. The train from the east was
+late; it was ten o'clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in
+the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon rumble across the little bridge
+over Lovely Creek. She opened the outside door, and presently Joe
+came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of
+flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down to the cellar
+for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy,
+short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
+valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had
+fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother
+gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his
+pack. He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light,
+looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.
+What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought.... She
+went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and
+saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her,
+"Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"
+
+Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this
+country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and
+hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of
+them. That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at
+each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good
+friends.
+
+After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy
+frame of mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson,
+the oldest son of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the
+three sat together for the performance. Leonard said he had come
+to town alone in his car; wouldn't Claude ride out with him?
+Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who
+didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.
+
+Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big
+hands and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of
+energy. He and his father and two brothers not only worked their
+own big farm, but rented a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They
+were master farmers. If there was a dry summer and a failure,
+Leonard only laughed and stretched his long arms, and put in a
+bigger crop next year. Claude was always a little reserved with
+Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather contemptuous of
+the hap-hazard way in which things were done on the Wheeler
+place, and thought his going to college a waste of money. Leonard
+had not even gone through the Frankfort High School, and he was
+already a more successful man than Claude was ever likely to be.
+Leonard did think these things, but he was fond of Claude, all
+the same.
+
+At sunset the car was speeding over a fine stretch of smooth road
+across the level country that lay between Frankfort and the
+rougher land along Lovely Creek. Leonard's attention was largely
+given up to admiring the faultless behaviour of his engine.
+Presently he chuckled to himself and turned to Claude.
+
+"I wonder if you'd take it all right if I told you a joke on
+Bayliss?"
+
+"I expect I would." Claude's tone was not at all eager.
+
+"You saw Bayliss today? Notice anything queer about him, one eye
+a little off colour? Did he tell you how he got it?"
+
+"No. I didn't ask him."
+
+"Just as well. A lot of people did ask him, though, and he said
+he was hunting around his place for something in the dark and ran
+into a reaper. Well, I'm the reaper!"
+
+Claude looked interested. "You mean to say Bayliss was in a
+fight?"
+
+Leonard laughed. "Lord, no! Don't you know Bayliss? I went in
+there to pay a bill yesterday, and Susie Gray and another girl
+came in to sell tickets for the firemen's dinner. An advance man
+for this circus was hanging around, and he began talking a little
+smart,--nothing rough, but the way such fellows will. The girls
+handed it back to him, and sold him three tickets and shut him
+up. I couldn't see how Susie thought so quick what to say. The
+minute the girls went out Bayliss started knocking them; said all
+the country girls were getting too fresh and knew more than they
+ought to about managing sporty men and right there I reached out
+and handed him one. I hit harder than I meant to. I meant to slap
+him, not to give him a black eye. But you can't always regulate
+things, and I was hot all over. I waited for him to come back at
+me. I'm bigger than he is, and I wanted to give him satisfaction.
+Well, sir, he never moved a muscle! He stood there getting redder
+and redder, and his eyes watered. I don't say he cried, but his
+eyes watered. 'All right, Bayliss,' said I. 'Slow with your
+fists, if that's your principle; but slow with your tongue,
+too,--especially when the parties mentioned aren't present.'"
+
+"Bayliss will never get over that," was Claude's only comment.
+
+"He don't have to!" Leonard threw up his head. "I'm a good
+customer; he can like it or lump it, till the price of binding
+twine goes down!"
+
+For the next few minutes the driver was occupied with trying to
+get up a long, rough hill on high gear. Sometimes he could
+make that hill, and sometimes he couldn't, and he was not able to
+account for the difference. After he pulled the second lever with
+some disgust and let the car amble on as she would, he noticed
+that his companion was disconcerted.
+
+"I'll tell you what, Leonard," Claude spoke in a strained voice,
+"I think the fair thing for you to do is to get out here by the
+road and give me a chance."
+
+Leonard swung his steering wheel savagely to pass a wagon on the
+down side of the hill. "What the devil are you talking about,
+boy?"
+
+"You think you've got our measure all right, but you ought to
+give me a chance first."
+
+Leonard looked down in amazement at his own big brown hands,
+lying on the wheel. "You mortal fool kid, what would I be telling
+you all this for, if I didn't know you were another breed of
+cats? I never thought you got on too well with Bayliss yourself."
+
+"I don't, but I won't have you thinking you can slap the men in
+my family whenever you feel like it." Claude knew that his
+explanation sounded foolish, and his voice, in spite of all he
+could do, was weak and angry.
+
+Young Leonard Dawson saw he had hurt the boy's feelings. "Lord,
+Claude, I know you're a fighter. Bayliss never was. I went to
+school with him."
+
+The ride ended amicably, but Claude wouldn't let Leonard take him
+home. He jumped out of the car with a curt goodnight, and ran
+across the dusky fields toward the light that shone from the
+house on the hill. At the little bridge over the creek, he
+stopped to get his breath and to be sure that he was outwardly
+composed before he went in to see his mother.
+
+"Ran against a reaper in the dark!" he muttered aloud, clenching
+his fist.
+
+Listening to the deep singing of the frogs, and to the distant
+barking of the dogs up at the house, he grew calmer.
+Nevertheless, he wondered why it was that one had sometimes to
+feel responsible for the behaviour of people whose natures were
+wholly antipathetic to one's own.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was standing
+at his dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade
+darker than his hair and not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and
+long lashes were a pale corn-colour--made his blue eyes seem
+lighter than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness
+and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the
+sort of looking boy he didn't want to be. He especially hated his
+head,--so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and
+uncompromisingly square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name
+was another source of humiliation. Claude: it was a "chump" name,
+like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country
+schools there was always a red-headed, warty-handed, runny-nosed
+little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he took for
+granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a
+farmer boy might be supposed to have. Unfortunately he had none
+of his father's physical repose, and his strength often asserted
+itself inharmoniously. The storms that went on in his mind
+sometimes made him rise, or sit down, or lift something, more
+violently than there was any apparent reason for his doing.
+
+The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not
+get up until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the
+smell of doughnuts frying. This morning Ralph rolled out of bed
+at the last minute and callously put on his clean underwear
+without taking a bath. This cost him not one regret, though he
+took time to polish his new ox-blood shoes tenderly with a pocket
+handkerchief. He reached the table when all the others were half
+through breakfast, and made his peace by genially asking his
+mother if she didn't want him to drive her to church in the car.
+
+"I'd like to go if I can get the work done in time," she said,
+doubtfully glancing at the clock.
+
+"Can't Mahailey tend to things for you this morning?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "Everything but the separator, she can.
+But she can't fit all the parts together. It's a good deal of
+work, you know."
+
+"Now, Mother," said Ralph good-humouredly, as he emptied the
+syrup pitcher over his cakes, "you're prejudiced. Nobody ever
+thinks of skimming milk now-a-days. Every up-to-date farmer uses
+a separator."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler's pale eyes twinkled. "Mahailey and I will never be
+quite up-to-date, Ralph. We're old-fashioned, and I don't know but
+you'd better let us be. I could see the advantage of a separator
+if we milked half-a-dozen cows. It's a very ingenious machine.
+But it's a great deal more work to scald it and fit it together
+than it was to take care of the milk in the old way."
+
+"It won't be when you get used to it," Ralph assured her. He was
+the chief mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm
+implements and the automobiles did not give him enough to do, he
+went to town and bought machines for the house. As soon as
+Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to keep
+up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still
+newer one. The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to
+use, and patent flat-irons and oil-stoves drove her wild.
+
+Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald
+the separator while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working
+at it when his brother came in from the garage to wash his hands.
+
+"You really oughtn't to load mother up with things like this,
+Ralph," he exclaimed fretfully. "Did you ever try washing this
+damned thing yourself?"
+
+"Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think
+mother could."
+
+"Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there's no point in
+trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother."
+
+Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude's bluntness. "See
+here," he said persuasively, "don't you go encouraging her into
+thinking she can't change her ways. Mother's entitled to all the
+labour-saving devices we can get her."
+
+Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he
+was trying to fit together in their proper sequence. "Well, if
+this is labour-saving"
+
+The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He
+never quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful,
+how much Ralph would take from Claude.
+
+After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler
+drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just
+bought a blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes
+down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the
+cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
+the rats couldn't get at her vegetables.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so
+bad. The cats catches one most every day, too."
+
+"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board
+down at the garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool
+and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
+groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
+photographer's apparatus. Claude took his place at the
+carpenter's bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
+objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
+old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
+fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
+mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
+those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
+left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
+when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
+Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
+wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
+Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
+hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
+cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
+day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
+have put a boy through college decently.
+
+While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
+the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
+She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
+herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
+"spring-rocker" with one arm gone, but it wouldn't have been her
+idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
+contentment in them as she followed Claude's motions. She watched
+him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
+her lap.
+
+"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about
+nothin', is he?"
+
+"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
+yesterday. We went to the circus together."
+
+Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two
+boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked
+him first rate. He's a little feller, though. He ain't big like
+you, is he? I guess he ain't as tall as Mr. Ralph, even."
+
+"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though,
+and gets through a lot of work."
+
+"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
+foreigners works hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
+the circus. Maybe they don't have circuses like our'n, over where
+he come from."
+
+Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
+dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
+smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
+too.
+
+Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
+months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
+family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
+pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
+nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
+Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
+one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
+
+Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
+savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
+her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
+an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to
+bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
+often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
+of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
+to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
+sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
+of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
+half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
+their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
+not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
+teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
+forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
+by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
+of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
+packages. "That's a big A." she would murmur, "and that there's a
+little a."
+
+Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
+her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
+the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
+the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
+lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
+difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
+knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
+off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
+her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
+thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
+a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
+Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
+touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
+little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
+thing about the kitchen.
+
+On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
+liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
+he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
+creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
+trailed across the high pastures to a wild-plum thicket at the
+north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
+days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
+to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
+sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
+part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
+over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
+denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
+where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
+
+"Mother," he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
+to her alone, "I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
+the State University."
+
+She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
+
+"But why, Claude?"
+
+"Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
+Temple aren't much good. Most of them are just preachers who
+couldn't make a living at preaching."
+
+The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
+his mother's face. "Son, don't say such things. I can't believe
+but teachers are more interested in their students when they are
+concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
+Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
+University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
+cases."
+
+"Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
+they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
+Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He's
+sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn't
+get them he'd lose his job. I wish he'd never got me. Most of the
+fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did."
+
+"But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
+time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
+larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
+are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I've heard that
+dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
+more money, and you couldn't live as cheaply as you do at the
+Chapins'."
+
+Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
+a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
+at him wistfully. "I'm sure you must be able to study better in a
+quiet, serious atmosphere," she said.
+
+He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
+unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
+enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
+faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
+was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
+fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
+her understand.
+
+His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
+card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such
+things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only
+another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
+education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
+not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
+was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
+The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
+of history.
+
+Nat Wheeler didn't care where his son went to school, but he,
+too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
+cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
+there looked shabbier they were less likely to become too
+knowing, and to be offensively intelligent at home. However, he
+referred the matter to Bayliss one day when he was in town.
+
+"Claude's got some notion he wants to go to the State University
+this winter."
+
+Bayliss at once assumed that wise,
+better-be-prepared-for-the-worst expression which had made him
+seem shrewd and seasoned from boyhood. "I don't see any point in
+changing unless he's got good reasons."
+
+"Well, he thinks that bunch of parsons at the Temple don't make
+first-rate teachers."
+
+"I expect they can teach Claude quite a bit yet. If he gets in
+with that fast football crowd at the State, there'll be no
+holding him." For some reason Bayliss detested football. "This
+athletic business is a good deal over-done. If Claude wants
+exercise, he might put in the fall wheat."
+
+That night Mr. Wheeler brought the subject up at supper,
+questioned Claude, and tried to get at the cause of his
+discontent. His manner was jocular, as usual, and Claude hated
+any public discussion of his personal affairs. He was afraid of
+his father's humour when it got too near him.
+
+Claude might have enjoyed the large and somewhat gross cartoons
+with which Mr. Wheeler enlivened daily life, had they been of any
+other authorship. But he unreasonably wanted his father to be the
+most dignified, as he was certainly the handsomest and most
+intelligent, man in the community. Moreover, Claude couldn't bear
+ridicule very well. He squirmed before he was hit; saw it coming,
+invited it. Mr. Wheeler had observed this trait in him when he
+was a little chap, called it false pride, and often purposely
+outraged his feelings to harden him, as he had hardened Claude's
+mother, who was afraid of everything but schoolbooks and
+prayer-meetings when he first married her. She was still more or
+less bewildered, but she had long ago got over any fear of him
+and any dread of living with him. She accepted everything about
+her husband as part of his rugged masculinity, and of that she
+was proud, in her quiet way.
+
+Claude had never quite forgiven his father for some of his
+practical jokes. One warm spring day, when he was a boisterous
+little boy of five, playing in and out of the house, he heard his
+mother entreating Mr. Wheeler to go down to the orchard and pick
+the cherries from a tree that hung loaded. Claude remembered that
+she persisted rather complainingly, saying that the cherries were
+too high for her to reach, and that even if she had a ladder it
+would hurt her back. Mr. Wheeler was always annoyed if his wife
+referred to any physical weakness, especially if she complained
+about her back. He got up and went out. After a while he
+returned. "All right now, Evangeline," he called cheerily as he
+passed through the kitchen. "Cherries won't give you any trouble.
+You and Claude can run along and pick 'em as easy as can be."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler trustfully put on her sunbonnet, gave Claude a
+little pail and took a big one herself, and they went down the
+pasture hill to the orchard, fenced in on the low land by the
+creek. The ground had been ploughed that spring to make it hold
+moisture, and Claude was running happily along in one of the
+furrows, when he looked up and beheld a sight he could never
+forget. The beautiful, round-topped cherry tree, full of green
+leaves and red fruit,--his father had sawed it through! It lay on
+the ground beside its bleeding stump. With one scream Claude
+became a little demon. He threw away his tin pail, jumped about
+howling and kicking the loose earth with his copper-toed shoes,
+until his mother was much more concerned for him than for the
+tree.
+
+"Son, son," she cried, "it's your father's tree. He has a perfect
+right to cut it down if he wants to. He's often said the trees
+were too thick in here. Maybe it will be better for the others."
+
+"'Tain't so! He's a damn fool, damn fool!" Claude bellowed, still
+hopping and kicking, almost choking with rage and hate.
+
+His mother dropped on her knees beside him. "Claude, stop! I'd
+rather have the whole orchard cut down than hear you say such
+things."
+
+After she got him quieted they picked the cherries and went back
+to the house. Claude had promised her that he would say nothing,
+but his father must have noticed the little boy's angry eyes
+fixed upon him all through dinner, and his expression of scorn.
+Even then his flexible lips were only too well adapted to hold
+the picture of that feeling. For days afterward Claude went down
+to the orchard and watched the tree grow sicker, wilt and wither
+away. God would surely punish a man who could do that, he
+thought.
+
+A violent temper and physical restlessness were the most
+conspicuous things about Claude when he was a little boy. Ralph
+was docile, and had a precocious sagacity for keeping out of
+trouble. Quiet in manner, he was fertile in devising mischief,
+and easily persuaded his older brother, who was always looking
+for something to do, to execute his plans. It was usually Claude
+who was caught red-handed. Sitting mild and contemplative on his
+quilt on the floor, Ralph would whisper to Claude that it might
+be amusing to climb up and take the clock from the shelf, or to
+operate the sewing-machine. When they were older, and played out
+of doors, he had only to insinuate that Claude was afraid, to
+make him try a frosted axe with his tongue, or jump from the shed
+roof.
+
+The usual hardships of country boyhood were not enough for
+Claude; he imposed physical tests and penances upon himself.
+Whenever he burned his finger, he followed Mahailey's advice and
+held his hand close to the stove to "draw out the fire." One year
+he went to school all winter in his jacket, to make himself
+tough. His mother would button him up in his overcoat and put his
+dinner-pail in his hand and start him off. As soon as he got out
+of sight of the house, he pulled off his coat, rolled it under
+his arm, and scudded along the edge of the frozen fields,
+arriving at the frame schoolhouse panting and shivering, but very
+well pleased with himself.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude waited for his elders to change their mind about where he
+should go to school; but no one seemed much concerned, not even
+his mother.
+
+Two years ago, the young man whom Mrs. Wheeler called "Brother
+Weldon" had come out from Lincoln, preaching in little towns and
+country churches, and recruiting students for the institution at
+which he taught in the winter. He had convinced Mrs. Wheeler that
+his college was the safest possible place for a boy who was
+leaving home for the first time.
+
+Claude's mother was not discriminating about preachers. She
+believed them all chosen and sanctified, and was never happier
+than when she had one in the house to cook for and wait upon. She
+made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her
+roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent
+the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at
+mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,
+downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His
+top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was
+parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little
+ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up
+as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who
+liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely
+"what part of the chicken he would prefer," in order to hear him
+murmur, "A little of the white meat, if you please," while he
+drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a
+dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on
+a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a
+red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,
+and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the
+automobile.
+
+Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,
+and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always
+absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the
+visitor, did not notice Claude's scornful silences until
+Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over
+the stove one day: "Mr. Claude, he don't like the preacher. He
+just ain't got no use fur him, but don't you let on."
+
+As a result of Brother Weldon's sojourn at the farm, Claude was
+sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the
+things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to
+shape his destiny.
+
+When the second week of September came round, he threw a few
+clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother
+and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train
+for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
+Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
+car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
+was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
+
+Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
+was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
+lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
+he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
+himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
+with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
+continue to live with the tiresome Chapins? The Chapin household
+consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
+twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,--and he was still going to
+school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
+house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
+done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
+jobs from churches and religious societies; he "supplied" the
+pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
+college and the Young Men's Christian Association. Claude's
+weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
+necessary to their comfort.
+
+Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
+it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
+He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
+track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
+natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
+ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
+Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
+gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
+oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile--it had been
+thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
+in lieu of a foundation--re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
+voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
+
+Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude's classmates. She was not as
+dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
+the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
+silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
+good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
+Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
+while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
+can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
+to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
+house--it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
+do--until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
+the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
+pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
+decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
+their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
+might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
+care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from
+Annabelle's attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences
+of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born
+with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a
+personal attribute.
+
+The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought
+up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When
+he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,
+because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His
+clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high
+and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his
+trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The
+tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn't know what he
+wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he
+needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.
+When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul's church on Sunday
+morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs
+down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old
+men and young, and decided there wasn't another pair of checked
+pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and
+never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them
+wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a
+well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could
+recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into
+the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he
+was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to
+seem indifferent.
+
+Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal
+allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or
+pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard
+with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost
+in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean
+something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is
+not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap
+substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who
+flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring
+a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy
+compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in
+the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home
+for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him
+and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the
+volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at
+his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or
+more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car
+and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of
+little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,
+and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays
+stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive
+made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the
+grey sky.
+
+Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an
+oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a
+frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he
+was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished
+roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could
+have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came
+in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting
+on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on
+the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking
+bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.
+
+"I been lookin' for you every day," said Mrs. Voigt when she
+brought his plate. "I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet
+pertaters, ja."
+
+"Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders."
+
+She giggled. "Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes
+dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons
+in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain't got no boys
+mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?"
+
+She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching
+every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting
+it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking
+what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited
+little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether
+working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He
+didn't believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was
+common only in what he broadly called "the West." He bought a big
+cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh
+air until the passenger whistled in.
+
+After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books
+again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they
+unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the
+great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A
+starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly
+ridges between the furrows.
+
+Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and
+Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and
+slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and
+again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,
+when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his
+father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler
+custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it
+was understood that some member of the family would act in that
+capacity.
+
+Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home
+before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to
+him since he went over this road three months ago.
+
+As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated
+at the State University for special work in European History. The
+year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for
+some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to
+change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The
+course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as
+much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of
+historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for
+full notebooks. Claude's were of the fullest. He worked early and
+late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and
+went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was
+studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do
+with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How
+often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see
+Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his
+independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor
+spoke without notes,--he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing
+his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which
+Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like
+a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,
+and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely
+personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.
+
+Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that
+the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was
+fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His
+reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to
+him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief
+difficulties had always been that he could not make himself
+believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that
+were all, then life was not worth the trouble.
+
+The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got
+to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after
+a football game between the Temple eleven and the State
+University team--merely a practice game for the latter. Claude
+was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the
+first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the
+right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and
+broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.
+He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men
+congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint
+that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place
+for him on the University team.
+
+Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was
+talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the
+grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of
+her own construction, bedecked with the Temple colours and
+blowing a child's horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.
+He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away
+to the dressing shed.... What was the use, if you were always
+with the wrong crowd?
+
+Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him
+aside and said affably: "Come home to supper with me tonight,
+Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the
+Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven't you?"
+
+"They're hardly clothes to go visiting in," Claude replied
+doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, that doesn't matter! We're all boys at home. Mother wouldn't
+mind if you came in your track things."
+
+Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by
+imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the
+history class, and they had several times talked together.
+Hitherto Claude had felt that he "couldn't make Erlich out," but
+this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they
+became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps
+less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at
+finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he
+scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar
+with a broken edge,--wretched economies he had been trained to
+observe.
+
+They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when
+Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,
+terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a
+glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,
+above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,
+seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and
+they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man
+in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were
+alone.
+
+"Five of these are my brothers," said his host, "and the rest are
+friends."
+
+The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk
+about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his
+brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,
+agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but
+they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never
+before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one
+another. To him they were very cordial; the one who was lying
+down came forward to shake hands, keeping the place in his book
+with his finger.
+
+On a table in the middle of the room were pipes and boxes of
+tobacco, cigars in a glass jar, and a big Chinese bowl full of
+cigarettes. This provisionment seemed the more remarkable to
+Claude because at home he had to smoke in the cowshed. The number
+of books astonished him almost as much; the wainscoting all
+around the room was built up in open bookcases, stuffed with
+volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and
+hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night
+before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck
+of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This
+head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention
+more than anything else in the room, and for some reason
+instantly made him wish he lived there.
+
+Julius brought in his mother, and when they went to supper Claude
+was seated beside her at one end of the long table. Mrs. Erlich
+seemed to him very young to be the head of such a family. Her
+hair was still brown, and she wore it drawn over her ears and
+twisted in two little horns, like the ladies in old
+daguerreotypes. Her face, too, suggested a daguerreotype; there
+was something old-fashioned and picturesque about it. Her skin
+had the soft whiteness of white flowers that have been drenched
+by rain. She talked with quick gestures, and her decided little
+nod was quaint and very personal. Her hazel-coloured eyes peered
+expectantly over her nose-glasses, always watching to see things
+turn out wonderfully well; always looking for some good German
+fairy in the cupboard or the cake-box, or in the steaming vapor
+of wash-day.
+
+The boys were discussing an engagement that had just been
+announced, and Mrs. Erlich began to tell Claude a long story
+about how this brilliant young man had come to Lincoln and met
+this beautiful young girl, who was already engaged to a cold and
+academic youth, and how after many heart-burnings the beautiful
+girl had broken with the wrong man and become betrothed to the
+right one, and now they were so happy, and every one, she asked
+Claude to believe, was equally happy! In the middle of her
+narrative Julius reminded her smilingly that since Claude didn't
+know these people, he would hardly be interested in their
+romance, but she merely looked at him over her nose-glasses and
+said, "And is that so, Herr Julius!" One could see that she was a
+match for them.
+
+The conversation went racing from one thing to another. The
+brothers began to argue hotly about a new girl who was visiting
+in town; whether she was pretty, how pretty she was, whether she
+was naive. To Claude this was like talk in a play. He had never
+heard a living person discussed and analysed thus before. He had
+never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much
+zest. Here there was none of the poisonous reticence he had
+always associated with family gatherings, nor the awkwardness of
+people sitting with their hands in their lap, facing each other,
+each one guarding his secret or his suspicion, while he hunted
+for a safe subject to talk about. Their fertility of phrase, too,
+astonished him; how could people find so much to say about one
+girl? To be sure, a good deal of it sounded far-fetched to him,
+but he sadly admitted that in such matters he was no judge. When
+they went back to the living room Julius began to pick out airs
+on his guitar, and the bearded brother sat down to read. Otto,
+the youngest, seeing a group of students passing the house, ran
+out on to the lawn and called them in,--two boys, and a girl
+with red cheeks and a fur stole. Claude had made for a corner,
+and was perfectly content to be an on-looker, but Mrs. Erlich
+soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the
+parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an
+engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go
+and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she
+showed him a portrait of her great-grandfather, who was an
+officer in Napoleon's army. To explain how this came about was a
+long story.
+
+As she talked to Claude, Mrs. Erlich discovered that his eyes
+were not really pale, but only looked so because of his light
+lashes. They could say a great deal when they looked squarely
+into hers, and she liked what they said. She soon found out that
+he was discontented; how he hated the Temple school, and why his
+mother wished him to go there.
+
+When the three who had been called in from the sidewalk took
+their leave, Claude rose also. They were evidently familiars of
+the house, and their careless exit, with a gay "Good-night,
+everybody!" gave him no practical suggestion as to what he ought
+to say or how he was to get out. Julius made things more
+difficult by telling him to sit down, as it wasn't time to go
+yet. But Mrs. Erlich said it was time; he would have a long ride
+out to Temple Place.
+
+It was really very easy. She walked to the door with him and gave
+him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. "You will come often
+to see us. We are going to be friends." Her forehead, with its
+neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude's chin,
+and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression,
+as if--as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly,
+nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
+
+"It's been lovely," he murmured to her, quite without
+embarrassment, and in happy unconsciousness he turned the knob
+and passed out through the glass door.
+
+While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter
+country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude
+went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
+to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
+exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
+first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
+which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
+were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
+poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
+those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
+discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
+machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
+Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
+they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
+so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
+indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.
+
+Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs', not as often
+as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
+University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
+it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
+looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
+was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
+hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
+the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
+deal about music.
+
+Claude didn't wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
+he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
+Erlichs' house, looking at the lighted windows of the
+sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
+went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
+If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
+that helped, of course.
+
+Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tried to think
+things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
+would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
+He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
+dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
+to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
+person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
+this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
+foreign. It wasn't American to explain yourself; you didn't have
+to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't; that
+Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy. You weren't
+supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,--if you
+tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself
+talk. Since you never said anything, you didn't form the habit of
+thinking. If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought
+something new.
+
+But all the people he met at the Erlichs' talked. If they asked
+him about a play or a book and he said it was "no good," they at
+once demanded why. The Erlichs thought him a clam, but Claude
+sometimes thought himself amazing. Could it really be he, who was
+airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself
+using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his
+mind were associated only with the printed page. When he suddenly
+realized that he was using a word for the first time, and
+probably mispronouncing it, he would become as much confused as
+if he were trying to pass a lead dollar, would blush and stammer
+and let some one finish his sentence for him.
+
+Claude couldn't resist occasionally dropping in at the Erlichs'
+in the afternoon; then the boys were away, and he could have Mrs.
+Erlich to himself for half-an-hour. When she talked to him she
+taught him so much about life. He loved to hear her sing
+sentimental German songs as she worked; "Spinn, spinn, du Tochter
+mein." He didn't know why, but he simply adored it! Every time he
+went away from her he felt happy and full of kindness, and
+thought about beech woods and walled towns, or about Carl Schurz
+and the Romantic revolution.
+
+He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the
+holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took
+him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions
+that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and
+seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude
+thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he
+believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old
+friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working
+rhymes and songs. Surely these were fine things to put into
+little cakes! After Claude left her, he did something a Wheeler
+didn't do; he went down to O street and sent her a box of the
+reddest roses he could find. In his pocket was the little note
+she had written to thank him.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+It was beginning to grow dark when Claude reached the farm. While
+Ralph stopped to put away the car, he walked on alone to the
+house. He never came back without emotion,--try as he would to
+pass lightly over these departures and returns which were all in
+the day's work. When he came up the hill like this, toward the
+tall house with its lighted windows, something always clutched at
+his heart. He both loved and hated to come home. He was always
+disappointed, and yet he always felt the rightness of returning
+to his own place. Even when it broke his spirit and humbled his
+pride, he felt it was right that he should be thus humbled. He
+didn't question that the lowest state of mind was the truest, and
+that the less a man thought of himself, the more likely he was to
+be correct in his estimate.
+
+Approaching the door, Claude stopped a moment and peered in at
+the kitchen window. The table was set for supper, and Mahailey
+was at the stove, stirring something in a big iron pot; cornmeal
+mush, probably,--she often made it for herself now that her teeth
+had begun to fail. She stood leaning over, embracing the pot with
+one arm, and with the other she beat the stiff contents, nodding
+her head in time to this rotary movement. Confused emotions
+surged up in Claude. He went in quickly and gave her a bearish
+hug.
+
+Her face wrinkled up in the foolish grin he knew so well. "Lord,
+how you scared me, Mr. Claude! A little more'n I'd 'a' had my
+mush all over the floor. You lookin' fine, you nice boy, you!"
+
+He knew Mahailey was gladder to see him come home than any one
+except his mother. Hearing Mrs. Wheeler's wandering, uncertain
+steps in the enclosed stairway, he opened the door and ran
+halfway up to meet her, putting his arm about her with the almost
+painful tenderness he always felt, but seldom was at liberty to
+show. She reached up both hands and stroked his hair for a
+moment, laughing as one does to a little boy, and telling him she
+believed it was redder every time he came back.
+
+"Have we got all the corn in, Mother?"
+
+"No, Claude, we haven't. You know we're always behindhand. It's
+been fine, open weather for husking, too. But at least we've got
+rid of that miserable Jerry; so there's something to be thankful
+for. He had one of his fits of temper in town one day, when he
+was hitching up to come home, and Leonard Dawson saw him beat one
+of our horses with the neck-yoke. Leonard told your father, and
+spoke his mind, and your father discharged Jerry. If you or Ralph
+had told him, he most likely wouldn't have done anything about
+it. But I guess all fathers are the same." She chuckled
+confidingly, leaning on Claude's arm as they descended the
+stairs.
+
+"I guess so. Did he hurt the horse much? Which one was it?"
+
+"The little black, Pompey. I believe he is rather a mean horse.
+The men said one of the bones over the eye was broken, but he
+would probably come round all right."
+
+"Pompey isn't mean; he's nervous. All the horses hated Jerry, and
+they had good reason to." Claude jerked his shoulders to shake
+off disgusting recollections of this mongrel man which flashed
+back into his mind. He had seen things happen in the barn that
+he positively couldn't tell his father. Mr. Wheeler came into the
+kitchen and stopped on his way upstairs long enough to say,
+"Hello, Claude. You look pretty well."
+
+"Yes, sir. I'm all right, thank you."
+
+"Bayliss tells me you've been playing football a good deal."
+
+"Not more than usual. We played half a dozen games; generally got
+licked. The State has a fine team, though."
+
+"I ex-pect," Mr. Wheeler drawled as he strode upstairs.
+
+Supper went as usual. Dan kept grinning and blinking at Claude,
+trying to discover whether he had already been informed of
+Jerry's fate. Ralph told him the neighbourhood gossip: Gus
+Yoeder, their German neighbour, was bringing suit against a
+farmer who had shot his dog. Leonard Dawson was going to marry
+Susie Grey. She was the girl on whose account Leonard had slapped
+Bayliss, Claude remembered.
+
+After supper Ralph and Mr. Wheeler went off in the car to a
+Christmas entertainment at the country schoolhouse. Claude and
+his mother sat down for a quiet talk by the hard-coal burner in
+the living room upstairs. Claude liked this room, especially when
+his father was not there. The old carpet, the faded chairs, the
+secretary book-case, the spotty engraving with all the scenes
+from Pilgrim's Progress that hung over the sofa,--these things
+made him feel at home. Ralph was always proposing to re-furnish
+the room in Mission oak, but so far Claude and his mother had
+saved it.
+
+Claude drew up his favourite chair and began to tell Mrs. Wheeler
+about the Erlich boys and their mother. She listened, but he
+could see that she was much more interested in hearing about the
+Chapins, and whether Edward's throat had improved, and where he
+had preached this fall. That was one of the disappointing things
+about coming home; he could never interest his mother in new
+things or people unless they in some way had to do with the
+church. He knew, too, she was always hoping to hear that he at
+last felt the need of coming closer to the church. She did not
+harass him about these things, but she had told him once or twice
+that nothing could happen in the world which would give her so
+much pleasure as to see him reconciled to Christ. He realized, as
+he talked to her about the Erlichs, that she was wondering
+whether they weren't very "worldly" people, and was apprehensive
+about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
+and he went to bed early.
+
+Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
+thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
+fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
+not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
+But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
+avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
+did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
+would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
+faculties free. He didn't want to be like the young men who said
+in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
+their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
+
+In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
+funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
+coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
+dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
+escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
+way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
+lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing
+but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
+never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
+yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
+that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
+from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
+would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay.... He could
+not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What
+did it mean, that verse in the Bible, "He shall not suffer His
+holy one to see corruption"?
+
+If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
+fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
+had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
+something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
+about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
+taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
+theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
+faith. "Faith," as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
+Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
+he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
+timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
+they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
+mother.
+
+Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
+Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in
+God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on
+the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at "Blessed are the meek,"
+until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant
+exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+On the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking
+along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.
+Wheeler's timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,
+so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked
+elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops
+seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to
+the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than
+a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that
+wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.
+It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.
+They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had
+brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell
+Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt
+that this was more Ernest's fault than his own; Ernest was such a
+literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they
+forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the
+red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold
+leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it
+honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the
+stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes
+took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the
+creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
+melting ice.
+
+When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude
+again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and
+reasonable mood.
+
+"What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to
+farm all your life?"
+
+"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before
+now. What makes you ask that?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future
+sometime. And you're so practical."
+
+"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big
+word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I'm
+going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a
+nice girl and bring her back."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"
+
+"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever
+settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this rate there
+isn't much in it?"
+
+"In what?"
+
+"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
+Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad
+to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel
+sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a
+holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to
+bed--nothing has happened."
+
+"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
+own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
+see my friends like this, it's enough for me."
+
+"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there
+ought to be something--well, something splendid about life,
+sometimes."
+
+Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
+walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. "You
+Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
+warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
+very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make
+the most of little things."
+
+"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
+Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
+things."
+
+"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
+idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
+sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
+vanity to help them along, too."
+
+Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at
+a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, "The fact
+is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
+and clothes and Sundays off, don't you?"
+
+Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I
+think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
+down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess."
+
+Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about
+over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
+
+The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler
+watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside
+a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving
+along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at
+that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so
+unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was
+on the wrong side.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in
+the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove
+where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art
+students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in
+this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having
+to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked
+him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and
+greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the
+campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between
+boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,
+Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,--different
+from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
+was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
+
+Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what
+might be called a "carriage," and she had altogether more manner
+and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and
+curly,--the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of
+a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
+and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to
+pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if
+they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her
+"the Georgia peach." She was considered very pretty, and the
+University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since
+then her vogue had somewhat declined.
+
+Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town
+with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her
+tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always
+dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked
+to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
+slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and
+be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in
+his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling
+him that he had "a magnificent physique," a compliment which
+covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
+
+Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if
+she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she
+should explain her absences to him,--tell him how often she
+washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
+
+One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the
+campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
+
+"Yes, I'm going out," Claude replied. "I've promised to teach
+Miss Millmore to skate. Won't you come along and help me?"
+
+Julius laughed indulgently. "Oh, no! Some other time. I don't
+want to break in on that."
+
+"Nonsense! You could teach her better than I."
+
+"Oh, I haven't the courage!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"No, I don't. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?"
+
+Julius made a little grimace. "She wrote some awfully slushy
+letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house
+one night."
+
+"Didn't you slap him?" Claude demanded, turning red.
+
+"Well, I would have thought I would," said Julius smiling, "but I
+didn't. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I've been wary
+of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of
+peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand."
+
+"I don't think so," replied Claude haughtily. "She's only
+kind-hearted."
+
+"Perhaps you're right. But I'm terribly afraid of girls who are
+too kindhearted," Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude
+a word of warning for some time.
+
+Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to
+the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning
+he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last
+excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude
+avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She
+was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by
+clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a
+degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale
+cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been
+sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,--though
+when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager
+susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He
+was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of
+trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father
+kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had
+given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost
+Hippolytean pride in candour.
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That
+spring Mrs. Erlich's first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,
+who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as
+soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement
+approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The
+Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so
+the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family
+invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding
+which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.
+There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich
+remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the
+society of her own sex.
+
+One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich
+reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. "For me,"
+she said with decision, "you may put down Claude Wheeler."
+
+This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
+
+"You don't mean it, Mother," the oldest son protested. "Poor old
+Claude wouldn't know what it was all about,--and one stick can
+spoil a dinner party."
+
+Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. "You will
+see; your cousin Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy
+than in any of the others!"
+
+Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might
+still yield her point. "For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn't any
+dinner clothes," he murmured. She nodded to him. "That has been
+attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded
+him, he told me he could easily afford it."
+
+The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed
+they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down
+"Claude Wheeler" with a flourish.
+
+If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing
+to Claude's. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame
+Schroeder-Schatz's recital, and on the evening of the concert,
+when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him
+over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new
+black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see
+what figure her escort cut.
+
+Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, and presented
+himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich's
+eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly
+his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She
+laughed and clapped her hands.
+
+"Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and
+wonder where I got him!"
+
+Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;
+opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into
+her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and
+smelling salts,--there was even a little silver box of peppermint
+drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long
+gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was
+ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about
+her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,
+they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air
+was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
+
+The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,
+Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than
+her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an
+enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great
+contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a
+really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as
+food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son.
+Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched
+attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing
+rhinestones.
+
+After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining
+room, she dropped her cousin's arm and stopped before Claude, who
+stood at attention behind his chair.
+
+"If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk
+together. We have been very far separated," she said.
+
+She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at
+once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green
+scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders;
+but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed
+air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude
+reminded her about the draft.
+
+"Draft?" she said lifting her chin, "there is no draft here."
+
+She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned,
+what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When
+she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she
+seemed to know a good deal about farming and live-stock. She was
+disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to
+other farmers. "If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire
+land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county," she
+declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to
+find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard
+one.
+
+Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented
+to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she
+beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head,
+smiling ruefully.
+
+"I'm sorry I'm so stupid, but I don't know one note from
+another."
+
+She tapped his sleeve. "Well, never mind. I may want the piano
+moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?"
+
+When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich's bedroom,
+powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked,
+"What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry
+to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law."
+
+"Ah, if I only had!" sighed Mrs. Erlich.
+
+"Or," continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on
+her large carriage shoes, "if you were but a few years younger,
+it might not yet be too late. Oh, don't be a fool, Augusta! Such
+things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a
+widow than to be tied to a sick man--like a stone about my neck!
+What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Jas
+ist ein Kreuz ich trage!" She smote her bosom, on the left side.
+
+Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame
+Schroeder-Schatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and
+kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good-night.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+One warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the
+Chapins', copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an
+examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of
+Jeanne d'Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in
+ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash
+of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many
+hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the
+fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would
+not dismiss the case lightly.
+
+Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the
+matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important
+thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the
+Proces, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her
+replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It
+seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of
+whom Jeanne said, "the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it
+speaks in the French tongue." Claude flattered himself that he
+had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a
+cold estimate of the girl's motives and character as indicated by
+the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the
+change wrought in her by imprisonment and by "the fear of the
+fire."
+
+When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat
+contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all
+his conscientious study he really knew very little more about
+the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his
+mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in
+the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of
+her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen
+where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the
+picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting
+it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she
+said,--it must have been very fragmentary,--but from that time on
+he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a
+living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as
+now, and now as miraculous as then.
+
+It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could
+perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a word, a phrase, it could
+renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again
+in the minds of children. At that time he had never seen a map of
+France, and had a very poor opinion of any place farther away
+than Chicago; yet he was perfectly prepared for the legend of
+Joan of Arc, and often thought about her when he was bringing in
+his cobs in the evening, or when he was sent to the windmill for
+water and stood shaking in the cold while the chilled pump
+brought it slowly up. He pictured her then very much as he did
+now; about her figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust,
+with soldiers in it... the banner with lilies... a great
+church... cities with walls.
+
+On this balmy spring afternoon, Claude felt softened and
+reconciled to the world. Like Gibbon, he was sorry to have
+finished his labour,--and he could not see anything else as
+interesting ahead. He must soon be going home now. There would be
+a few examinations to sit through at the Temple, a few more
+evenings with the Erlichs, trips to the Library to carry back the
+books he had been using,--and then he would suddenly find himself
+with nothing to do but take the train for Frankfort.
+
+He rose with a sigh and began to fasten his history papers
+between covers. Glancing out of the window, he decided that he
+would walk into town and carry his thesis, which was due today;
+the weather was too fine to sit bumping in a street car. The
+truth was, he wished to prolong his relations with his manuscript
+as far as possible.
+
+He struck off by the road,--it could scarcely be called a street,
+since it ran across raw prairie land where the buffalo-peas were
+in blossom. Claude walked slower than was his custom, his straw
+hat pushed back on his head and the blaze of the sun full in his
+face. His body felt light in the scented wind, and he listened
+drowsily to the larks, singing on dried weeds and sunflower
+stalks. At this season their song is almost painful to hear, it
+is so sweet. He sometimes thought of this walk long afterward; it
+was memorable to him, though he could not say why.
+
+On reaching the University, he went directly to the Department of
+European History, where he was to leave his thesis on a long
+table, with a pile of others. He rather dreaded this, and was
+glad when, just as he entered, the Professor came out from his
+private office and took the bound manuscript into his own hands,
+nodding cordially.
+
+"Your thesis? Oh yes, Jeanne d'Arc. The Proces. I had forgotten.
+Interesting material, isn't it?" He opened the cover and ran over
+the pages. "I suppose you acquitted her on the evidence?"
+
+Claude blushed. "Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, now you might read what Michelet has to say about her.
+There's an old translation in the Library. Did you enjoy working
+on it?"
+
+"I did, very much." Claude wished to heaven he could think of
+something to say.
+
+"You've got a good deal out of your course, altogether, haven't
+you? I'll be interested to see what you do next year. Your work
+has been very satisfactory to me." The Professor went back into
+his study, and Claude was pleased to see that he carried the
+manuscript with him and did not leave it on the table with the
+others.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Between haying and harvest that summer Ralph and Mr. Wheeler
+drove to Denver in the big car, leaving Claude and Dan to
+cultivate the corn. When they returned Mr. Wheeler announced that
+he had a secret. After several days of reticence, during which he
+shut himself up in the sitting-room writing letters, and passed
+mysterious words and winks with Ralph at table, he disclosed a
+project which swept away all Claude's plans and purposes.
+
+On the return trip from Denver Mr. Wheeler had made a detour down
+into Yucca county, Colorado, to visit an old friend who was in
+difficulties. Tom Wested was a Maine man, from Wheeler's own
+neighbourhood. Several years ago he had lost his wife. Now his
+health had broken down, and the Denver doctors said he must
+retire from business and get into a low altitude. He wanted to go
+back to Maine and live among his own people, but was too much
+discouraged and frightened about his condition even to undertake
+the sale of his ranch and live stock. Mr. Wheeler had been able
+to help his friend, and at the same time did a good stroke of
+business for himself. He owned a farm in Maine, his share of his
+father's estate, which for years he had rented for little more
+than the up-keep. By making over this property, and assuming
+certain mortgages, he got Wested's fine, well-watered ranch in
+exchange. He paid him a good price for his cattle, and promised
+to take the sick man back to Maine and see him comfortably
+settled there. All this Mr. Wheeler explained to his family when
+he called them up to the living room one hot, breathless night
+after supper. Mrs. Wheeler, who seldom concerned herself with her
+husband's business affairs, asked absently why they bought more
+land, when they already had so much they could not farm half of
+it.
+
+"Just like a woman, Evangeline, just like a woman!" Mr. Wheeler
+replied indulgently. He was sitting in the full glare of the
+acetylene lamp, his neckband open, his collar and tie on the
+table beside him, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan. "You
+might as well ask me why I want to make more money, when I
+haven't spent all I've got."
+
+He intended, he said, to put Ralph on the Colorado ranch and
+"give the boy some responsibility." Ralph would have the help of
+Wested's foreman, an old hand in the cattle business, who had
+agreed to stay on under the new management. Mr. Wheeler assured
+his wife that he wasn't taking advantage of poor Wested; the
+timber on the Maine place was really worth a good deal of money;
+but because his father had always been so proud of his great pine
+woods, he had never, he said, just felt like turning a sawmill
+loose in them. Now he was trading a pleasant old farm that didn't
+bring in anything for a grama-grass ranch which ought to turn
+over a profit of ten or twelve thousand dollars in good cattle
+years, and wouldn't lose much in bad ones. He expected to spend
+about half his time out there with Ralph. "When I'm away," he
+remarked genially, "you and Mahailey won't have so much to do.
+You can devote yourselves to embroidery, so to speak."
+
+"If Ralph is to live in Colorado, and you are to be away from
+home half of the time, I don't see what is to become of this
+place," murmured Mrs. Wheeler, still in the dark.
+
+"Not necessary for you to see, Evangeline," her husband replied,
+stretching his big frame until the rocking chair creaked under
+him. "It will be Claude's business to look after that."
+
+"Claude?" Mrs. Wheeler brushed a lock of hair back from her damp
+forehead in vague alarm.
+
+"Of course." He looked with twinkling eyes at his son's straight,
+silent figure in the corner. "You've had about enough theology, I
+presume? No ambition to be a preacher? This winter I mean to turn
+the farm over to you and give you a chance to straighten things
+out. You've been dissatisfied with the way the place is run for
+some time, haven't you? Go ahead and put new blood into it. New
+ideas, if you want to; I've no objection. They're expensive, but
+let it go. You can fire Dan if you want, and get what help you
+need."
+
+Claude felt as if a trap had been sprung on him. He shaded his
+eyes with his hand. "I don't think I'm competent to run the place
+right," he said unsteadily.
+
+"Well, you don't think I am either, Claude, so we're up against
+it. It's always been my notion that the land was made for man,
+just as it's old Dawson's that man was created to work the land.
+I don't mind your siding with the Dawsons in this difference of
+opinion, if you can get their results."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rose and slipped quickly from the room, feeling her
+way down the dark staircase to the kitchen. It was dusky and
+quiet there. Mahailey sat in a corner, hemming dish-towels by the
+light of a smoky old brass lamp which was her own cherished
+luminary. Mrs. Wheeler walked up and down the long room in soft,
+silent agitation, both hands pressed tightly to her breast, where
+there was a physical ache of sympathy for Claude.
+
+She remembered kind Tom Wested. He had stayed over night with
+them several times, and had come to them for consolation after
+his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and
+loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler's fortuitous trip to Denver, the old
+pine-wood farm in Maine; were all things that fitted together and
+made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had
+been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and that for the first
+time he looked forward eagerly to going back to school. He was
+homesick for his friends, the Erlichs, and his mind was all the
+time upon the history course he meant to take.
+
+Yet all this would weigh nothing in the family councils probably
+he would not even speak of it--and he had not one substantial
+objection to offer to his father's wishes. His disappointment
+would be bitter. "Why, it will almost break his heart," she
+murmured aloud. Mahailey was a little deaf and heard nothing. She
+sat holding her work up to the light, driving her needle with a
+big brass thimble, nodding with sleepiness between stitches.
+Though Mrs. Wheeler was scarcely conscious of it, the old woman's
+presence was a comfort to her, as she walked up and down with her
+drifting, uncertain step.
+
+She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might
+get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she
+couldn't bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life
+hard to live; he suffered so much over little things,-and she
+suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments.
+Her husband's careless decisions did not disconcert her. If he
+declared that he would not plant a garden at all this year, she
+made no protest. It was Mahailey who grumbled. If he felt like
+eating roast beef and went out and killed a steer, she did the
+best she could to take care of the meat, and if some of it
+spoiled she tried not to worry. When she was not lost in
+religious meditation, she was likely to be thinking about some
+one of the old books she read over and over. Her personal life
+was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that
+rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude
+was concerned, she lived on another plane, dropped into the lower
+air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind,
+passionate human feelings.
+
+It had always been so. And now, as she grew older, and her flesh
+had almost ceased to be concerned with pain or pleasure, like the
+wasted wax images in old churches, it still vibrated with his
+feelings and became quick again for him. His chagrins shrivelled
+her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something ached in
+her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical
+contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and
+happened to think that he had been happy lately, she would lie
+softly and gratefully in her warm place.
+
+"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit," she sometimes whispered to him in
+her mind, when she wakened thus and thought of him. There was a
+singular light in his eyes when he smiled at her on one of his
+good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner
+kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she
+could always remember it in the dark,--a quick blue flash, tender
+and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright
+uncertainties.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The next few weeks were busy ones on the farm. Before the wheat
+harvest was over, Nat Wheeler packed his leather trunk, put on
+his "store clothes," and set off to take Tom Welted back to
+Maine. During his absence Ralph began to outfit for life in Yucca
+county. Ralph liked being a great man with the Frankfort
+merchants, and he had never before had such an opportunity as
+this. He bought a new shot gun, saddles, bridles, boots, long and
+short storm coats, a set of furniture for his own room, a
+fireless cooker, another music machine, and had them shipped to
+Colorado. His mother, who did not like phonograph music, and
+detested phonograph monologues, begged him to take the machine at
+home, but he assured her that she would be dull without it on
+winter evenings. He wanted one of the latest make, put out under
+the name of a great American inventor.
+
+Some of the ranches near Wested's were owned by New York men who
+brought their families out there in the summer. Ralph had heard
+about the dances they gave, and he way counting on being one of
+the guests. He asked Claude to give him his dress suit, since
+Claude wouldn't be needing it any more.
+
+"You can have it if you want it," said Claude indifferently "But
+it won't fit you."
+
+"I'll take it in to Fritz and have the pants cut off a little and
+the shoulders taken in," his brother replied lightly.
+
+Claude was impassive. "Go ahead. But if that old Dutch man takes
+a whack at it, it will look like the devil."
+
+"I think I'll let him try. Father won't say anything about what
+I've ordered for the house, but he isn't much for glad rags, you
+know." Without more ado he threw Claude's black clothes into the
+back seat of the Ford and ran into town to enlist the services of
+the German tailor.
+
+Mr. Wheeler, when he returned, thought Ralph had been rather free
+in expenditures, but Ralph told him it wouldn't do to take over
+the new place too modestly. "The ranchers out there are all
+high-fliers. If we go to squeezing nickels, they won't think we
+mean business."
+
+The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers'
+doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph's lavishness as
+he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to
+Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table.
+August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly
+whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph.
+Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude
+in town one day and shouted;
+
+"My God, Claude, there's nothing left in the furniture store for
+me and Susie! Ralph's bought everything but the coffins. He must
+be going to live like a prince out there."
+
+"I don't know anything about it," Claude answered coolly. "It's
+not my enterprise."
+
+"No, you've got to stay on the old place and make it pay the
+debts, I understand." Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude
+wouldn't have a chance to reply.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these
+preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair
+to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier.
+Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a
+good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with
+machinery and run errands in his car. She couldn't understand why
+he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money
+was invested.
+
+"Why, Claude," she said dreamily one day, "if your father were an
+older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail.
+Won't we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?"
+
+"Don't say anything, Mother. It's Father's money. He shan't think
+I want any of it."
+
+"I wish I could talk to Bayliss. Has he said anything?"
+
+"Not to me, he hasn't."
+
+Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and
+when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him
+bedding and table linen. He said he wasn't going to live like a
+savage, even in the sand hills. Mahailey was outraged to see the
+linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many
+years packed into boxes. She was out of temper most of the time
+now, and went about muttering to herself.
+
+The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to
+live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork
+quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep,
+washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old
+mother, and given to her for a marriage portion. The patchwork on
+each was done in a different design; one was the popular
+"log-cabin" pattern, another the "laurel-leaf," the third the
+"blazing star." This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and
+she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it "to give Mr.
+Claude when he got married."
+
+She slept on her feather bed in winter, and in summer she put it
+away in the attic. The attic was reached by a ladder which,
+because of her weak back, Mrs. Wheeler very seldom climbed. Up
+there Mahailey had things her own way, and thither she often
+retired to air the bedding stored away there, or to look at the
+pictures in the piles of old magazines. Ralph facetiously called
+the attic "Mahailey's library."
+
+One day, while things were being packed for the western ranch,
+Mrs. Wheeler, going to the foot of the ladder to call Mahailey,
+narrowly escaped being knocked down by a large feather bed which
+came plumping through the trap door. A moment later Mahailey
+herself descended backwards, holding to the rungs with one hand,
+and in the other arm carrying her quilts.
+
+"Why, Mahailey," gasped Mrs. Wheeler. "It's not winter yet;
+whatever are you getting your bed for?"
+
+"I'm just a-goin' to lay on my fedder bed," she broke out, "or
+direc'ly I won't have none. I ain't a-goin' to have Mr. Ralph
+carryin' off my quilts my mudder pieced fur me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler tried to reason with her, but the old woman took up
+her bed in her arms and staggered down the hall with it,
+muttering and tossing her head like a horse in fly-time.
+
+That afternoon Ralph brought a barrel and a bundle of straw into
+the kitchen and told Mahailey to carry up preserves and canned
+fruit, and he would pack them. She went obediently to the cellar,
+and Ralph took off his coat and began to line the barrel with
+straw. He was some time in doing this, but still Mahailey had not
+returned. He went to the head of the stairs and whistled.
+
+"I'm a-comin', Mr. Ralph, I'm a-comin'! Don't hurry me, I don't
+want to break nothin'."
+
+Ralph waited a few minutes. "What are you doing down there,
+Mahailey?" he fumed. "I could have emptied the whole cellar by
+this time. I suppose I'll have to do it myself."
+
+"I'm a-comin'. You'd git yourself all dusty down here." She came
+breathlessly up the stairs, carrying a hamper basket full of
+jars, her hands and face streaked with black.
+
+"Well, I should say it is dusty!" Ralph snorted. "You might clean
+your fruit closet once in awhile, you know, Mahailey. You ought
+to see how Mrs. Dawson keeps hers. Now, let's see." He sorted the
+jars on the table. "Take back the grape jelly. If there's
+anything I hate, it's grape jelly. I know you have lots of it,
+but you can't work it off on me. And when you come up, don't
+forget the pickled peaches. I told you particularly, the pickled
+peaches!"
+
+"We ain't got no pickled peaches." Mahailey stood by the cellar
+door, holding a corner of her apron up to her chin, with a queer,
+animal look of stubbornness in her face.
+
+"No pickled peaches? What nonsense, Mahailey! I saw you making
+them here, only a few weeks ago."
+
+"I know you did, Mr. Ralph, but they ain't none now. I didn't
+have no luck with my peaches this year. I must 'a' let the air
+git at 'em. They all worked on me, an' I had to throw 'em out."
+
+Ralph was thoroughly annoyed. "I never heard of such a thing,
+Mahailey! You get more careless every year. Think of wasting all
+that fruit and sugar! Does mother know?"
+
+Mahailey's low brow clouded. "I reckon she does. I don't wase
+your mudder's sugar. I never did wase nothin'," she muttered. Her
+speech became queerer than ever when she was angry.
+
+Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched
+the fruit closet. Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches.
+When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood
+watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look
+that is in a chained coyote's eyes when a boy is showing him off
+to visitors and saying he wouldn't run away if he could.
+
+"Go on with your work," Ralph snapped. "Don't stand there
+watching me!"
+
+That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by
+the barn, after a hard day's work ploughing for winter wheat. He
+was solacing himself with his pipe. No matter how much she loved
+him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring
+herself to tell him he might smoke in the house. Lights were
+shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open
+windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph. A figure came
+stealing down the path. He knew by her low, padding step that it
+was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head. She came up to
+him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that
+what she had to say was confidential.
+
+"Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph's done packed up a barr'l of your mudder's
+jelly an' pickles to take out there."
+
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Mr. Wested was a widower, and I
+guess there wasn't anything of that sort put up at his place."
+
+She hesitated and bent lower. "He asked me fur them pickled
+peaches I made fur you, but I didn't give him none. I hid 'em all
+in my old cook-stove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph
+bought the new one. I didn't give him your mudder's new
+preserves, nudder. I give him the old last year's stuff we had
+left over, and now you an' your mudder'll have plenty." Claude
+laughed. "Oh, I don't care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the
+place, Mahailey!"
+
+She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, "No, I know you
+don't, Mr. Claude. I know you don't."
+
+"I surely ought not to take it out on her," Claude thought, when
+he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back.
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches,
+anyhow."
+
+She shook her finger at him. "Don't you let on!"
+
+He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path
+up the hill.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August,
+and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship
+a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during
+the winter. This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder. There
+was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek,--just on the
+sky-line when one looked out from the west windows of the house.
+Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in
+September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it
+for fodder. As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up
+the ground, and drill in the wheat when he planted the other
+wheat fields.
+
+This was Claude's first innovation, and it did not meet with
+approval. When Bayliss came out to spend Sunday with his mother,
+he asked her what Claude thought he was doing, anyhow. If he
+wanted to change the crop on that field, why didn't he plant oats
+in the spring, and then get into wheat next fall? Cutting fodder
+and preparing the ground now, would only hold him back in his
+work. When Mr. Wheeler came home for a short visit, he jocosely
+referred to that quarter as "Claude's wheat field."
+
+Claude went ahead with what he had undertaken to do, but all
+through September he was nervous and apprehensive about the
+weather. Heavy rains, if they came, would make him late with his
+wheat-planting, and then there would certainly be criticism. In
+reality, nobody cared much whether the planting was late or not,
+but Claude thought they did, and sometimes in the morning he
+awoke in a state of panic because he wasn't getting ahead faster.
+He had Dan and one of August Yoeder's four sons to help him, and
+he worked early and late. The new field he ploughed and drilled
+himself. He put a great deal of young energy into it, and buried
+a great deal of discontent in its dark furrows. Day after day he
+flung himself upon the land and planted it with what was
+fermenting in him, glad to be so tired at night that he could not
+think.
+
+Ralph came home for Leonard Dawson's wedding, on the first of
+October. All the Wheelers went to the wedding, even Mahailey, and
+there was a great gathering of the country folk and townsmen.
+
+After Ralph left, Claude had the place to himself again, and the
+work went on as usual. The stock did well, and there were no
+vexatious interruptions. The fine weather held, and every morning
+when Claude got up, another gold day stretched before him like a
+glittering carpet, leading...? When the question where the
+days were leading struck him on the edge of his bed, he hurried
+to dress and get down-stairs in time to fetch wood and coal for
+Mahailey. They often reached the kitchen at the same moment, and
+she would shake her finger at him and say, "You come down to help
+me, you nice boy, you!" At least he was of some use to Mahailey.
+His father could hire one of the Yoeder boys to look after the
+place, but Mahailey wouldn't let any one else save her old back.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Mahailey, enjoyed that fall. She slept
+late in the morning, and read and rested in the afternoon. She
+made herself some new house-dresses out of a grey material Claude
+chose. "It's almost like being a bride, keeping house for just
+you, Claude," she sometimes said.
+
+Soon Claude had the satisfaction of seeing a blush of green come
+up over his brown wheat fields, visible first in the dimples and
+little hollows, then flickering over the knobs and levels like a
+fugitive smile. He watched the green blades coming every day,
+when he and Dan went afield with their wagons to gather corn.
+Claude sent Dan to shuck on the north quarter, and he worked on
+the south. He always brought in one more load a day than Dan
+did,--that was to be expected. Dan explained this very
+reasonably, Claude thought, one afternoon when they were hooking
+up their teams.
+
+"It's all right for you to jump at that corn like you was
+a-beating carpets, Claude; it's your corn, or anyways it's your
+Paw's. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a
+hired man's got no property but his back, and he has to save it.
+I figure that I've only got about so many jumps left in me, and I
+ain't a-going to jump too hard at no man's corn."
+
+"What's the matter? I haven't been hinting that you ought to jump
+any harder, have I?"
+
+"No, you ain't, but I just want you to know that there's reason
+in all things." With this Dan got into his wagon and drove off.
+He had probably been meditating upon this declaration for some
+time.
+
+That afternoon Claude suddenly stopped flinging white ears into
+the wagon beside him. It was about five o'clock, the yellowest
+hour of the autumn day. He stood lost in a forest of light, dry,
+rustling corn leaves, quite hidden away from the world. Taking
+off his husking-gloves, he wiped the sweat from his face, climbed
+up to the wagon box, and lay down on the ivory-coloured corn. The
+horses cautiously advanced a step or two, and munched with great
+content at ears they tore from the stalks with their teeth.
+
+Claude lay still, his arms under his head, looking up at the
+hard, polished blue sky, watching the flocks of crows go over
+from the fields where they fed on shattered grain, to their nests
+in the trees along Lovely Creek. He was thinking about what Dan
+had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of
+truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he
+would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among
+strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and
+crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was
+sometimes called a "land hog" by the country people, and he
+himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have
+so much land,--to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they
+chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had
+been going, the question of property had not been better
+adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people
+who didn't have it were slaves to them.
+
+He sprang down into the gold light to finish his load. Warm
+silence nestled over the cornfield. Sometimes a light breeze rose
+for a moment and rattled the stiff, dry leaves, and he himself
+made a great rustling and crackling as he tore the husks from the
+ears.
+
+Greedy crows were still cawing about before they flapped
+homeward. When he drove out to the highway, the sun was going
+down, and from his seat on the load he could see far and near.
+Yonder was Dan's wagon, coming in from the north quarter; over
+there was the roof of Leonard Dawson's new house, and his
+windmill, standing up black in the declining day. Before him were
+the bluffs of the pasture, and the little trees, almost bare,
+huddled in violet shadow along the creek, and the Wheeler
+farm-house on the hill, its windows all aflame with the last red
+fire of the sun.
+
+
+XV
+
+Claude dreaded the inactivity of the winter, to which the farmer
+usually looks forward with pleasure. He made the Thanksgiving
+football game a pretext for going up to Lincoln,--went intending
+to stay three days and stayed ten. The first night, when he
+knocked at the glass door of the Erlichs' sitting-room and took
+them by surprise, he thought he could never go back to the farm.
+Approaching the house on that clear, frosty autumn evening,
+crossing the lawn strewn with crackling dry leaves, he told
+himself that he must not hope to find things the same. But they
+were the same. The boys were lounging and smoking about the
+square table with the lamp on it, and Mrs. Erlich was at the
+piano, playing one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." When
+he knocked, Otto opened the door and called:
+
+"A surprise for you, Mother! Guess who's here."
+
+What a welcome she gave him, and how much she had to tell him!
+While they were all talking at once, Henry, the oldest son, came
+downstairs dressed for a Colonial ball, with satin breeches and
+stockings and a sword. His brothers began to point out the
+inaccuracies of his costume, telling him that he couldn't
+possibly call himself a French emigré unless he wore a powdered
+wig. Henry took a book of memoirs from the shelf to prove to them
+that at the time when the French emigrés were coming to
+Philadelphia, powder was going out of fashion.
+
+During this discussion, Mrs. Erlich drew Claude aside and told
+him in excited whispers that her cousin Wilhelmina, the singer,
+had at last been relieved of the invalid husband whom she had
+supported for so many years, and now was going to marry her
+accompanist, a man much younger than herself.
+
+After the French emigré had gone off to his party, two young
+instructors from the University dropped in, and Mrs. Erlich
+introduced Claude as her "landed proprietor" who managed a big
+ranch out in one of the western counties. The instructors took
+their leave early, but Claude stayed on. What was it that made
+life seem so much more interesting and attractive here than
+elsewhere? There was nothing wonderful about this room; a lot of
+books, a lamp... comfortable, hard-used furniture, some people
+whose lives were in no way remarkable--and yet he had the sense
+of being in a warm and gracious atmosphere, charged with generous
+enthusiasms and ennobled by romantic friendships. He was glad to
+see the same pictures on the wall; to find the Swiss wood-cutter
+on the mantel, still bending under his load of faggots; to handle
+again the heavy brass paper-knife that in its time had cut so
+many interesting pages. He picked it up from the cover of a red
+book lying there,-one of Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi, which
+Julius told him he must read before he was another week older.
+
+The next afternoon Claude took Mrs. Erlich to the football game
+and came home with the family for dinner. He lingered on day
+after day, but after the first few evenings his heart was growing
+a little heavier all the time. The Erlich boys had so many new
+interests he couldn't keep up with them; they had been going on,
+and he had been standing still. He wasn't conceited enough to
+mind that. The thing that hurt was the feeling of being out of
+it, of being lost in another kind of life in which ideas played
+but little part. He was a stranger who walked in and sat down
+here; but he belonged out in the big, lonely country, where
+people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the
+horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say.
+If Mrs. Erlich and her Hungarian woman made lentil soup and
+potato dumplings and Wiener-Schnitzel for him, it only made the
+plain fare on the farm seem the heavier.
+
+When the second Friday came round, he went to bid his friends
+good-bye and explained that he must be going home tomorrow. On
+leaving the house that night, he looked back at the ruddy windows
+and told himself that it was goodbye indeed, and not, as Mrs.
+Erlich had fondly said, auf wiedersehen. Coming here only made
+him more discontented with his lot; his frail claim on this kind
+of life existed no longer. He must settle down into something
+that was his own, take hold of it with both hands, no matter how
+grim it was. The next day, during his journey out through the
+bleak winter country, he felt that he was going deeper and deeper
+into reality.
+
+Claude had not written when he would be home, but on Saturday
+there were always some of the neighbours in town. He rode out
+with one of the Yoeder boys, and from their place walked on the
+rest of the way. He told his mother he was glad to be back again.
+He sometimes felt as if it were disloyal to her for him to be so
+happy with Mrs. Erlich. His mother had been shut away from the
+world on a farm for so many years; and even before that, Vermont
+was no very stimulating place to grow up in, he guessed. She had
+not had a chance, any more than he had, at those things which
+make the mind more supple and keep the feeling young.
+
+The next morning it was snowing outside, and they had a long,
+pleasant Sunday breakfast. Mrs. Wheeler said they wouldn't try to
+go to church, as Claude must be tired. He worked about the place
+until noon, making the stock comfortable and looking after things
+that Dan had neglected in his absence. After dinner he sat down
+at the secretary and wrote a long letter to his friends in
+Lincoln. Whenever he lifted his eyes for a moment, he saw the
+pasture bluffs and the softly falling snow. There was something
+beautiful about the submissive way in which the country met
+winter. It made one contented,--sad, too. He sealed his letter
+and lay down on the couch to read the paper, but was soon asleep.
+
+When he awoke the afternoon was already far gone. The clock on
+the shelf ticked loudly in the still room, the coal stove sent
+out a warm glow. The blooming plants in the south bow-window
+looked brighter and fresher than usual in the soft white light
+that came up from the snow. Mrs. Wheeler was reading by the west
+window, looking away from her book now and then to gaze off at
+the grey sky and the muffled fields. The creek made a winding
+violet chasm down through the pasture, and the trees followed it
+in a black thicket, curiously tufted with snow. Claude lay for
+some time without speaking, watching his mother's profile against
+the glass, and thinking how good this soft, clinging snow-fall
+would be for his wheat fields.
+
+"What are you reading, Mother?" he asked presently.
+
+She turned her head toward him. "Nothing very new. I was just
+beginning 'Paradise Lost' again. I haven't read it for a long
+while."
+
+"Read aloud, won't you? Just wherever you happen to be. I like
+the sound of it."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler always read deliberately, giving each syllable its
+full value. Her voice, naturally soft and rather wistful, trailed
+over the long measures and the threatening Biblical names, all
+familiar to her and full of meaning.
+
+  "A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
+  As one great furnace flamed; yet from the flames
+  No light, but rather darkness visible
+  Served only to discover sights of woe."
+
+Her voice groped as if she were trying to realize something. The
+room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid
+catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and
+pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed,
+and Mrs. Wheeler closed the book.
+
+"That's fine," Claude commented from the couch. "But Milton
+couldn't have got along without the wicked, could he?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up. "Is that a joke?" she asked slyly.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! It just struck me that this part is so much
+more interesting than the books about perfect innocence in Eden."
+
+"And yet I suppose it shouldn't be so," Mrs. Wheeler said slowly,
+as if in doubt.
+
+Her son laughed and sat up, smoothing his rumpled hair. "The fact
+remains that it is, dear Mother. And if you took all the great
+sinners out of the Bible, you'd take out all the interesting
+characters, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Except Christ," she murmured.
+
+"Yes, except Christ. But I suppose the Jews were honest when they
+thought him the most dangerous kind of criminal."
+
+"Are you trying to tangle me up?" his mother inquired, with both
+reproach and amusement in her voice.
+
+Claude went to the window where she was sitting, and looked out
+at the snowy fields, now becoming blue and desolate as the
+shadows deepened. "I only mean that even in the Bible the people
+who were merely free from blame didn't amount to much."
+
+"Ah, I see!" Mrs. Wheeler chuckled softly. "You are trying to get
+me back to Faith and Works. There's where you always balked when
+you were a little fellow. Well, Claude, I don't know as much
+about it as I did then. As I get older, I leave a good deal more
+to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this
+world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I." She rose
+like a gentle shadow and rubbed her cheek against his flannel
+shirt-sleeve, murmuring, "I believe He is sometimes where we
+would least expect to find Him,--even in proud, rebellious
+hearts."
+
+For a moment they clung together in the pale, clear square of the
+west window, as the two natures in one person sometimes meet and
+cling in a fated hour.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Ralph and his father came home to spend the holidays, and on
+Christmas day Bayliss drove out from town for dinner. He arrived
+early, and after greeting his mother in the kitchen, went up to
+the sitting-room, which shone with a holiday neatness, and, for
+once, was warm enough for Bayliss,--having a low circulation, he
+felt the cold acutely. He walked up and down, jingling the keys
+in his pockets and admiring his mother's winter chrysanthemums,
+which were still blooming. Several times he paused before the
+old-fashioned secretary, looking through the glass doors at the
+volumes within. The sight of some of those books awoke
+disagreeable memories. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen,
+it used to make him bitterly jealous to hear his mother coaxing
+Claude to read aloud to her. Bayliss had never been bookish. Even
+before he could read, when his mother told him stories, he at
+once began to prove to her how they could not possibly be true.
+Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than
+"Robinson Crusoe." If he sat down with a book, he wanted to feel
+that he was learning something. His mother and Claude were always
+talking over his head about the people in books and stories.
+
+Though Bayliss had a sentimental feeling about coming home, he
+considered that he had had a lonely boyhood. At the country
+school he had not been happy; he was the boy who always got the
+answers to the test problems when the others didn't, and he kept
+his arithmetic papers buttoned up in the inside pocket of his
+little jacket until he modestly handed them to the teacher, never
+giving a neighbour the benefit of his cleverness. Leonard Dawson
+and other lusty lads of his own age made life as terrifying for
+him as they could. In winter they used to throw him into a
+snow-drift, and then run away and leave him. In summer they made
+him eat live grasshoppers behind the schoolhouse, and put big
+bull-snakes in his dinner pail to surprise him. To this day,
+Bayliss liked to see one of those fellows get into difficulties
+that his big fists couldn't get him out of.
+
+It was because Bayliss was quick at figures and undersized for a
+farmer that his father sent him to town to learn the implement
+business. From the day he went to work, he managed to live on his
+small salary. He kept in his vest pocket a little day-book
+wherein he noted down all his expenditures,--like the
+millionaire about whom the Baptist preachers were never tired of
+talking,-and his offering to the contribution box stood out
+conspicuous in his weekly account.
+
+In Bayliss' voice, even when he used his insinuating drawl and
+said disagreeable things, there was something a little plaintive;
+the expression of a deep-seated sense of injury. He felt that he
+had always been misunderstood and underestimated. Later after he
+went into business for himself, the young men of Frankfort had
+never urged him to take part in their pleasures. He had not been
+asked to join the tennis club or the whist club. He envied Claude
+his fine physique and his unreckoning, impulsive vitality, as if
+they had been given to his brother by unfair means and should
+rightly have been his.
+
+Bayliss and his father were talking together before dinner when
+Claude came in and was so inconsiderate as to put up a window,
+though he knew his brother hated a draft. In a moment Bayliss
+addressed him without looking at him:
+
+"I see your friends, the Erlichs, have bought out the Jenkinson
+company, in Lincoln; at least, they've given their notes."
+
+Claude had promised his mother to keep his temper today, "Yes, I
+saw it in the paper. I hope they'll succeed."
+
+"I doubt it." Bayliss shook his head with his wisest look. "I
+understand they've put a mortgage on their home. That old woman
+will find herself without a roof one of these days."
+
+"I don't think so. The boys have wanted to go into business
+together for a long while. They are all intelligent and
+industrious; why shouldn't they get on?" Claude flattered himself
+that he spoke in an easy, confidential way.
+
+Bayliss screwed up his eyes. "I expect they're too fond of good
+living. They'll pay their interest, and spend whatever's left
+entertaining their friends. I didn't see the young fellow's name
+in the notice of incorporation, Julius, do they call him?"
+
+"Julius is going abroad to study this fall. He intends to be a
+professor."
+
+"What's the matter with him? Does he have poor health?"
+
+At this moment the dinner bell sounded, Ralph ran down from his
+room where he had been dressing, and they all descended to the
+kitchen to greet the turkey. The dinner progressed pleasantly.
+Bayliss and his father talked politics, and Ralph told stories
+about his neighbours in Yucca county. Bayliss was pleased that
+his mother had remembered he liked oyster stuffing, and he
+complimented her upon her mince pies. When he saw her pour a
+second cup of coffee for herself and for Claude at the end of
+dinner, he said, in a gentle, grieved tone, "I'm sorry to see you
+taking two, Mother."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at him over the coffee-pot with a droll,
+guilty smile. "I don't believe coffee hurts me a particle,
+Bayliss."
+
+"Of course it does; it's a stimulant." What worse could it be,
+his tone implied! When you said anything was a "stimulant," you
+had sufficiently condemned it; there was no more noxious word.
+
+Claude was in the upper hall, putting on his coat to go down to
+the barn and smoke a cigar, when Bayliss came out from the
+sitting-room and detained him by an indefinite remark.
+
+"I believe there's to be a musical show in Hastings Saturday
+night."
+
+Claude said he had heard something of the sort.
+
+"I was thinking," Bayliss affected a careless tone, as if he
+thought of such things every day, "that we might make a party and
+take Gladys and Enid. The roads are pretty good."
+
+"It's a hard drive home, so late at night," Claude objected.
+Bayliss meant, of course, that Claude should drive the party up
+and back in Mr. Wheeler's big car. Bayliss never used his
+glistening Cadillac for long, rough drives.
+
+"I guess Mother would put us up overnight, and we needn't take
+the girls home till Sunday morning. I'll get the tickets."
+
+"You'd better arrange it with the girls, then. I'll drive you, of
+course, if you want to go."
+
+Claude escaped and went out, wishing that Bayliss would do his
+own courting and not drag him into it. Bayliss, who didn't know
+one tune from another, certainly didn't want to go to this
+concert, and it was doubtful whether Enid Royce would care much
+about going. Gladys Farmer was the best musician in Frankfort,
+and she would probably like to hear it.
+
+Claude and Gladys were old friends, from their High School days,
+though they hadn't seen much of each other while he was going to
+college. Several times this fall Bayliss had asked Claude to go
+somewhere with him on a Sunday, and then stopped to "pick Gladys
+up," as he said. Claude didn't like it. He was disgusted, anyhow,
+when he saw that Bayliss had made up his mind to marry Gladys.
+She and her mother were so poor that he would probably succeed in
+the end, though so far Gladys didn't seem to give him much
+encouragement. Marrying Bayliss, he thought, would be no joke for
+any woman, but Gladys was the one girl in town whom he
+particularly ought not to marry. She was as extravagant as she
+was poor. Though she taught in the Frankfort High School for
+twelve hundred a year, she had prettier clothes than any of the
+other girls, except Enid Royce, whose father was a rich man. Her
+new hats and suede shoes were discussed and criticized year in
+and year out. People said if she married Bayliss Wheeler, he
+would soon bring her down to hard facts. Some hoped she would,
+and some hoped she wouldn't. As for Claude, he had kept away from
+Mrs. Farmer's cheerful parlour ever since Bayliss had begun to
+drop in there. He was disappointed in Gladys. When he was
+offended, he seldom stopped to reason about his state of feeling.
+He avoided the person and the thought of the person, as if it
+were a sore spot in his mind.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+It had been Mr. Wheeler's intention to stay at home until spring,
+but Ralph wrote that he was having trouble with his foreman, so
+his father went out to the ranch in February. A few days after
+his departure there was a storm which gave people something to
+talk about for a year to come.
+
+The snow began to fall about noon on St. Valentine's day, a soft,
+thick, wet snow that came down in billows and stuck to
+everything. Later in the afternoon the wind rose, and wherever
+there was a shed, a tree, a hedge, or even a clump of tall weeds,
+drifts began to pile up. Mrs. Wheeler, looking anxiously out from
+the sitting-room windows, could see nothing but driving waves of
+soft white, which cut the tall house off from the rest of the
+world.
+
+Claude and Dan, down in the corral, where they were provisioning
+the cattle against bad weather, found the air so thick that they
+could scarcely breathe; their ears and mouths and nostrils were
+full of snow, their faces plastered with it. It melted constantly
+upon their clothing, and yet they were white from their boots to
+their caps as they worked,--there was no shaking it off. The air
+was not cold, only a little below freezing. When they came in for
+supper, the drifts had piled against the house until they covered
+the lower sashes of the kitchen windows, and as they opened the
+door, a frail wall of snow fell in behind them. Mahailey came
+running with her broom and pail to sweep it up.
+
+"Ain't it a turrible storm, Mr. Claude? I reckon poor Mr. Ernest
+won't git over tonight, will he? You never mind, honey; I'll wipe
+up that water. Run along and git dry clothes on you, an' take a
+bath, or you'll ketch cold. Th' ole tank's full of hot water for
+you." Exceptional weather of any kind always delighted Mahailey.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Claude at the head of the stairs. "There's no
+danger of the steers getting snowed under along the creek, is
+there?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, I thought of that. We've driven them all into the little
+corral on the level, and shut the gates. It's over my head down
+in the creek bottom now. I haven't a dry stitch on me. I guess
+I'll follow Mahailey's advice and get in the tub, if you can wait
+supper for me."
+
+"Put your clothes outside the bathroom door, and I'll see to
+drying them for you."
+
+"Yes, please. I'll need them tomorrow. I don't want to spoil my
+new corduroys. And, Mother, see if you can make Dan change. He's
+too wet and steamy to sit at the table with. Tell him if anybody
+has to go out after supper, I'll go."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hurried down stairs. Dan, she knew, would rather sit
+all evening in wet clothes than take the trouble to put on dry
+ones. He tried to sneak past her to his own quarters behind the
+wash-room, and looked aggrieved when he heard her message.
+
+"I ain't got no other outside clothes, except my Sunday ones," he
+objected.
+
+"Well, Claude says he'll go out if anybody has to. I guess you'll
+have to change for once, Dan, or go to bed without your supper."
+She laughed quietly at his dejected expression as he slunk away.
+
+"Mrs. Wheeler," Mahailey whispered, "can't I run down to the
+cellar an' git some of them nice strawberry preserves? Mr.
+Claude, he loves 'em on his hot biscuit. He don't eat the honey
+no more; he's got tired of it."
+
+"Very well. I'll make the coffee good and strong; that will
+please him more than anything."
+
+Claude came down feeling clean and warm and hungry. As he opened
+the stair door he sniffed the coffee and frying ham, and when
+Mahailey bent over the oven the warm smell of browning biscuit
+rushed out with the heat. These combined odours somewhat
+dispersed Dan's gloom when he came back in squeaky Sunday shoes
+and a bunglesome cut-away coat. The latter was not required of
+him, but he wore it for revenge.
+
+During supper Mrs. Wheeler told them once again how, long ago
+when she was first married, there were no roads or fences west of
+Frankfort. One winter night she sat on the roof of their first
+dugout nearly all night, holding up a lantern tied to a pole to
+guide Mr. Wheeler home through a snowstorm like this.
+
+Mahailey, moving about the stove, watched over the group at the
+table. She liked to see the men fill themselves with food-though
+she did not count Dan a man, by any means, and she looked out to
+see that Mrs. Wheeler did not forget to eat altogether, as she
+was apt to do when she fell to remembering things that had
+happened long ago. Mahailey was in a happy frame of mind because
+her weather predictions had come true; only yesterday she had
+told Mrs. Wheeler there would be snow, because she had seen
+snowbirds. She regarded supper as more than usually important
+when Claude put on his "velvet close," as she called his brown
+corduroys.
+
+After supper Claude lay on the couch in the sitting room, while
+his mother read aloud to him from "Bleak House,"--one of the few
+novels she loved. Poor Jo was drawing toward his end when Claude
+suddenly sat up. "Mother, I believe I'm too sleepy. I'll have to
+turn in. Do you suppose it's still snowing?"
+
+He rose and went to look out, but the west windows were so
+plastered with snow that they were opaque. Even from the one on
+the south he could see nothing for a moment; then Mahailey must
+have carried her lamp to the kitchen window beneath, for all at
+once a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down
+it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing
+progression, moving as close as they could without forming a
+solid mass. Claude struck the frozen window-frame with his fist,
+lifted the lower sash, and thrusting out his head tried to look
+abroad into the engulfed night. There was a solemnity about a
+storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The
+myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight
+seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite
+end. A faint purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human
+senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and
+shoulders. His mother, looking under his lifted arm, strained her
+eyes to see out into that swarming movement, and murmured softly
+in her quavering voice:
+
+"Ever thicker, thicker, thicker, Froze the ice on lake and river;
+Ever deeper, deeper, deeper, Fell the snow o'er all the
+landscape."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Claude's bedroom faced the east. The next morning, when he looked
+out of his windows, only the tops of the cedars in the front yard
+were visible. Hurriedly putting on his clothes he ran to the west
+window at the end of the hall; Lovely Creek, and the deep ravine
+in which it flowed, had disappeared as if they had never been.
+The rough pasture was like a smooth field, except for humps and
+mounds like haycocks, where the snow had drifted over a post or a
+bush.
+
+At the kitchen stairs Mahailey met him in gleeful excitement.
+"Lord 'a' mercy, Mr. Claude, I can't git the storm door open.
+We're snowed in fas'." She looked like a tramp woman, in a jacket
+patched with many colours, her head tied up in an old black
+"fascinator," with ravelled yarn hanging down over her face like
+wild locks of hair. She kept this costume for calamitous
+occasions; appeared in it when the water-pipes were frozen and
+burst, or when spring storms flooded the coops and drowned her
+young chickens.
+
+The storm door opened outward. Claude put his shoulder to it and
+pushed it a little way. Then, with Mahailey's fireshovel he
+dislodged enough snow to enable him to force back the door. Dan
+came tramping in his stocking-feet across the kitchen to his
+boots, which were still drying behind the stove. "She's sure a
+bad one, Claude," he remarked, blinking.
+
+"Yes. I guess we won't try to go out till after breakfast. We'll
+have to dig our way to the barn, and I never thought to bring the
+shovels up last night."
+
+"Th' ole snow shovels is in the cellar. I'll git 'em."
+
+"Not now, Mahailey. Give us our breakfast before you do anything
+else."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler came down, pinning on her little shawl, her
+shoulders more bent than usual. "Claude," she said fearfully,
+"the cedars in the front yard are all but covered. Do you suppose
+our cattle could be buried?"
+
+He laughed. "No, Mother. The cattle have been moving around all
+night, I expect."
+
+When the two men started out with the wooden snow shovels, Mrs.
+Wheeler and Mahailey stood in the doorway, watching them. For a
+short distance from the house the path they dug was like a
+tunnel, and the white walls on either side were higher than their
+heads. On the breast of the hill the snow was not so deep, and
+they made better headway. They had to fight through a second
+heavy drift before they reached the barn, where they went in and
+warmed themselves among the horses and cows. Dan was for getting
+next a warm cow and beginning to milk.
+
+"Not yet," said Claude. "I want to have a look at the hogs before
+we do anything here."
+
+The hog-house was built down in a draw behind the barn. When
+Claude reached the edge of the gully, blown almost bare, he could
+look about him. The draw was full of snow, smooth... except in
+the middle, where there was a rumpled depression, resembling a
+great heap of tumbled bed-linen.
+
+Dan gasped. "God a' mighty, Claude, the roof's fell in! Them
+hogs'll be smothered."
+
+"They will if we don't get at them pretty quick. Run to the house
+and tell Mother. Mahailey will have to milk this morning, and get
+back here as fast as you can."
+
+The roof was a flat thatch, and the weight of the snow had been
+too much for it. Claude wondered if he should have put on a new
+thatch that fall; but the old one wasn't leaky, and had seemed
+strong enough.
+
+When Dan got back they took turns, one going ahead and throwing
+out as much snow as he could, the other handling the snow that
+fell back. After an hour or so of this work, Dan leaned on his
+shovel.
+
+"We'll never do it, Claude. Two men couldn't throw all that snow
+out in a week. I'm about all in."
+
+"Well, you can go back to the house and sit by the fire," Claude
+called fiercely. He had taken off his coat and was working in his
+shirt and sweater. The sweat was rolling from his face, his back
+and arms ached, and his hands, which he couldn't keep dry, were
+blistered. There were thirty-seven hogs in the hog-house.
+
+Dan sat down in the hole. "Maybe if I could git a drink of water,
+I could hold on a-ways," he said dejectedly.
+
+It was past noon when they got into the shed; a cloud of steam
+rose, and they heard grunts. They found the pigs all lying in a
+heap at one end, and pulled the top ones off alive and squealing.
+Twelve hogs, at the bottom of the pile, had been suffocated. They
+lay there wet and black in the snow, their bodies warm and
+smoking, but they were dead; there was no mistaking that.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, in her husband's rubber boots and an old overcoat,
+came down with Mahailey to view the scene of disaster.
+
+"You ought to git right at them hawgs an' butcher 'em today,"
+Mahailey called down to the men. She was standing on the edge of
+the draw, in her patched jacket and ravelled hood. Claude, down
+in the hole, brushed the sleeve of his sweater across his
+streaming face. "Butcher them?" he cried indignantly. "I wouldn't
+butcher them if I never saw meat again."
+
+"You ain't a-goin' to let all that good hawg-meat go to wase, air
+you, Mr. Claude?" Mahailey pleaded. "They didn't have no sickness
+nor nuthin'. Only you'll have to git right at 'em, or the meat
+won't be healthy."
+
+"It wouldn't be healthy for me, anyhow. I don't know what I will
+do with them, but I'm mighty sure I won't butcher them."
+
+"Don't bother him, Mahailey," Mrs. Wheeler cautioned her. "He's
+tired, and he has to fix some place for the live hogs."
+
+"I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs
+myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could
+save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs. We ain't had no
+spare-ribs for ever so long."
+
+What with the ache in his back and his chagrin at losing the
+pigs, Claude was feeling desperate. "Mother," he shouted, "if you
+don't take Mahailey into the house, I'll go crazy!"
+
+That evening Mrs. Wheeler asked him how much the twelve hogs
+would have been worth in money. He looked a little startled.
+
+"Oh, I don't know exactly; three hundred dollars, anyway."
+
+"Would it really be as much as that? I don't see how we could
+have prevented it, do you?" Her face looked troubled.
+
+Claude went to bed immediately after supper, but he had no sooner
+stretched his aching body between the sheets than he began to
+feel wakeful. He was humiliated at losing the pigs, because they
+had been left in his charge; but for the loss in money, about
+which even his mother was grieved, he didn't seem to care. He
+wondered whether all that winter he hadn't been working himself
+up into a childish contempt for money-values.
+
+When Ralph was home at Christmas time, he wore on his little
+finger a heavy gold ring, with a diamond as big as a pea,
+surrounded by showy grooves in the metal. He admitted to Claude
+that he had won it in a poker game. Ralph's hands were never free
+from automobile grease--they were the red, stumpy kind that
+couldn't be kept clean. Claude remembered him milking in the barn
+by lantern light, his jewel throwing off jabbing sparkles of
+colour, and his fingers looking very much like the teats of the
+cow. That picture rose before him now, as a symbol of what
+successful farming led to.
+
+The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic
+value; wheat and corn as good as could be grown anywhere in the
+world, hogs and cattle that were the best of their kind. In
+return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy
+furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded,
+clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown. Most of his
+money was paid out for machinery,--and that, too, went to pieces.
+A steam thrasher didn't last long; a horse outlived three
+automobiles.
+
+Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the
+neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more
+individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine
+cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges
+along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being
+cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished
+the land... they made the snow drift... nobody had them any
+more. With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody
+wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The
+orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty
+years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble
+to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to
+raise it.
+
+The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the
+farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now
+they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either
+stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were
+always stirring up trouble. Evidently, it took more intelligence
+to spend money than to make it.
+
+When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the
+Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's
+degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph
+would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make
+anything the world needed.
+
+Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was
+twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no
+ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he
+admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs.
+Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably
+it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth
+the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use
+of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs.
+Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this
+security was what was the matter with everybody; that only
+perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in
+people and develop the mean ones.
+
+Ernest, too, said "it's the best life in the world, Claude."
+
+But if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake
+in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To
+be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep,
+was like being assured of a decent burial. Safety, security; if
+you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would
+never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to
+them.
+
+Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was
+something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his
+discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary
+fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and
+other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was
+that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that
+his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his
+guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The
+neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was
+a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his
+energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in
+resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to
+subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself
+in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he
+would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He
+would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short
+in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an
+intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,--the conviction
+that there was something splendid about life, if he could but
+find it.
+
+IX
+
+The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was
+a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,--then a hard
+freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people
+went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of
+ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler's old double sleigh
+from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on
+top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for
+Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles,
+most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But
+the Wheelers always kept everything.
+
+Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a
+sleigh-ride. Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain
+merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run
+the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and Claude were old
+playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was
+called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to
+see Mr. Royce at his town office.
+
+Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks,
+Pompey and Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long
+before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most
+of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with
+silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy
+feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger;
+that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite
+so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence
+is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical
+lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the
+many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked in the barn.
+
+The mill road, that led off the highway and down to the river,
+had pleasant associations for Claude. When he was a youngster,
+every time his father went to mill, he begged to go along. He
+liked the mill and the miller and the miller's little girl. He
+had never liked the miller's house, however, and he was afraid of
+Enid's mother. Even now, as he tied his horses to the long
+hitch-bar down by the engine room, he resolved that he would not
+be persuaded to enter that formal parlour, full of new-looking,
+expensive furniture, where his energy always deserted him and he
+could never think of anything to talk about. If he moved, his
+shoes squeaked in the silence, and Mrs. Royce sat and blinked her
+sharp little eyes at him, and the longer he stayed, the harder it
+was to go.
+
+Enid herself came to the door.
+
+"Why, it's Claude!" she exclaimed. "Won't you come in?"
+
+"No, I want you to go riding. I've got the old sleigh out. Come
+on, it's a fine night!"
+
+"I thought I heard bells. Won't you come in and see Mother while
+I get my things on?"
+
+Claude said he must stay with his horses, and ran back to the
+hitch-bar. Enid didn't keep him waiting long; she wasn't that
+kind. She came swiftly down the path and through the front gate
+in the Maine seal motor-coat she wore when she drove her coupe in
+cold weather.
+
+"Now, which way?" Claude asked as the horses sprang forward and
+the bells began to jingle.
+
+"Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells,
+Claude. I haven't heard sleighbells since you used to bring me
+and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don't we stop
+for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!" Here Enid laughed.
+"All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they
+can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for
+Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself,
+I believe they'd hold a public meeting."
+
+Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. "Doesn't it
+make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?"
+
+"It would, if she minded. But she's just as serene! They must
+have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer's
+back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the
+furs."
+
+Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a
+few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and
+lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the
+snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were
+turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her
+daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the
+town, where only people of modest means lived. "We must stop to
+see Gladys' mother, if only for a minute," Enid said as they drew
+up before the fence. "She is so fond of company." Claude tied his
+team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch,
+hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.
+
+Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a
+pleasant Kentucky voice. She took Enid's arm affectionately, and
+Claude followed them into the long, low sitting-room, which had
+an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and was scantily
+furnished in rickety mahogany. There, close beside the hard-coal
+burner, sat Bayliss Wheeler. He did not rise when they entered,
+but said, "Hello, folks," in a rather sheepish voice. On a little
+table, beside Mrs. Farmer's workbasket, was the box of candy he
+had lately taken out of his overcoat pocket, still tied up with
+its gold cord. A tall lamp stood beside the piano, where Gladys
+had evidently been practising. Claude wondered whether Bayliss
+actually pretended to an interest in music! At this moment Gladys
+was in the kitchen, Mrs. Farmer explained, looking for her
+mother's glasses, mislaid when she was copying a recipe for a
+cheese soufflé.
+
+"Are you still getting new recipes, Mrs. Farmer?" Enid asked her.
+"I thought you could make every dish in the world already."
+
+"Oh, not quite!" Mrs. Farmer laughed modestly and showed that she
+liked compliments. "Do sit down, Claude," she besought of the
+stiff image by the door. "Daughter will be here directly."
+
+At that moment Gladys Farmer appeared.
+
+"Why, I didn't know you had company, Mother," she said, coming in
+to greet them.
+
+This meant, Claude supposed, that Bayliss was not company. He
+scarcely glanced at Gladys as he took the hand she held out to
+him.
+
+One of Gladys' grandfathers had come from Antwerp, and she had
+the settled composure, the full red lips, brown eyes, and dimpled
+white hands which occur so often in Flemish portraits of young
+women. Some people thought her a trifle heavy, too mature and
+positive to be called pretty, even though they admired her rich,
+tulip-like complexion. Gladys never seemed aware that her looks
+and her poverty and her extravagance were the subject of
+perpetual argument, but went to and from school every day with
+the air of one whose position is assured. Her musicianship gave
+her a kind of authority in Frankfort.
+
+Enid explained the purpose of their call. "Claude has got out his
+old sleigh, and we've come to take you for a ride. Perhaps
+Bayliss will go, too?"
+
+Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was
+nothing he hated so much as being out in the cold. Gladys ran
+upstairs to put on a warm dress, and Enid accompanied her,
+leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable conversation between her
+two incompatible guests.
+
+"Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm,
+Claude. What a pity!" she said sympathetically.
+
+Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn't be at all reticent about
+that incident!
+
+"I suppose there was really no way to save them," Mrs. Farmer
+went on in her polite way; her voice was low and round, like her
+daughter's, different from the high, tight Western voice. "So I
+hope you don't let yourself worry about it."
+
+"No, I don't worry about anything as dead as those hogs were.
+What's the use?" Claude asked boldly.
+
+"That's right," murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her
+chair. "Such things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to
+take them too hard. It isn't as if a person had been hurt, is
+it?"
+
+Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and
+to the shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its
+best to be attractive to her friends. There weren't four steady
+legs on any of the stuffed chairs or little folding tables she
+had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold moulding was
+half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.
+But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after
+the Civil War, and she didn't fret half so much about her back
+taxes as her neighbours did. Claude tried to talk agreeably to
+her, but he was distracted by the sound of stifled laughter
+upstairs. Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss'
+being there. How shameless girls were, anyhow!
+
+People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh
+dashed jingling up and down the village streets. When they left
+town, Bayliss suggested that they drive out past the Trevor
+place. The girls began to talk about the two young New
+Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when
+Frankfort was still a tough little frontier settlement. Every one
+was talking about them now, for a few days ago word had come that
+one of the partners, Amos Brewster, had dropped dead in his law
+office in Hartford. It was thirty years since he and his friend,
+Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort
+county, and had built the house on the round hill east of the
+town, where they wasted a great deal of money very joyously.
+Claude's father always declared that the amount they squandered
+in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in
+commendable industrial endeavour. The country, Mr. Wheeler said,
+had never been the same since those boys left it. He delighted to
+tell about the time when Trevor and Brewster went into sheep.
+They imported a breeding ram from Scotland at a great expense,
+and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him that
+they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his
+crate. Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season;
+came at the beginning of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the
+mothers died from exposure. The gallant Trevor took horse and
+spurred all over the county, from one little settlement to
+another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan
+lambs.
+
+The rich bottom land about the Trevor place had been rented out
+to a truck gardener for years now; the comfortable house with its
+billiard-room annex--a wonder for that part of the country in
+its day--remained closed, its windows boarded up. It sat on the
+top of a round knoll, a fine cottonwood grove behind it. Tonight,
+as Claude drove toward it, the hill with its tall straight trees
+looked like a big fur cap put down on the snow.
+
+"Why hasn't some one bought that house long ago and fixed it up?"
+Enid remarked. "There is no building site around here to compare
+with it. It looks like the place where the leading citizen of the
+town ought to live."
+
+"I'm glad you like it, Enid," said Bayliss in a guarded voice.
+"I've always had a sneaking fancy for the place myself. Those
+fellows back there never wanted to sell it. But now the estate's
+got to be settled up. I bought it yesterday. The deed is on its
+way to Hartford for signature."
+
+Enid turned round in her seat. "Why Bayliss, are you in earnest?
+Think of just buying the Trevor place off-hand, as if it were any
+ordinary piece of real estate! Will you make over the house, and
+live there some day?"
+
+"I don't know about living there. It's too far to walk to my
+business, and the road across this bottom gets pretty muddy for a
+car in the spring."
+
+"But it's not far, less than a mile. If I once owned that spot,
+I'd surely never let anybody else live there. Even Carrie
+remembers it. She often asks in her letters whether any one has
+bought the Trevor place yet."
+
+Carrie Royce, Enid's older sister, was a missionary in China.
+
+"Well," Bayliss admitted, "I didn't buy it for an investment,
+exactly. I paid all it was worth."
+
+Enid turned to Gladys, who was apparently not listening. "You'd
+be the one who could plan a mansion for Trevor Hill, Gladys. You
+always have such original ideas about houses."
+
+"Yes, people who have no houses of their own often seem to have
+ideas about building," said Gladys quietly. "But I like the
+Trevor place as it is. I hate to think that one of them is dead.
+People say they did have such good times up there."
+
+Bayliss grunted. "Call it good times if you like. The kids were
+still grubbing whiskey bottles out of the cellar when I first
+came to town. Of course, if I decide to live there, I'll pull
+down that old trap and put up something modern." He often took
+this gruff tone with Gladys in public.
+
+Enid tried to draw the driver into the conversation. "There seems
+to be a difference of opinion here, Claude."
+
+"Oh," said Gladys carelessly, "it's Bayliss' property, or soon
+will be. He will build what he likes. I've always known somebody
+would get that place away from me, so I'm prepared."
+
+"Get it away from you?" muttered Bayliss, amazed.
+
+"Yes. As long as no one bought it and spoiled it, it was mine as
+much as it was anybody's."
+
+"Claude," said Enid banteringly, "now both your brothers have
+houses. Where are you going to have yours?"
+
+"I don't know that I'll ever have one. I think I'll run about the
+world a little before I draw my plans," he replied sarcastically.
+
+"Take me with you, Claude!" said Gladys in a tone of sudden
+weariness. From that spiritless murmur Enid suspected that
+Bayliss had captured Gladys' hand under the buffalo robe.
+
+Grimness had settled down over the sleighing party. Even Enid,
+who was not highly sensitive to unuttered feelings, saw that
+there was an uncomfortable constraint. A sharp wind had come up.
+Bayliss twice suggested turning back, but his brother answered,
+"Pretty soon," and drove on. He meant that Bayliss should have
+enough of it. Not until Enid whispered reproachfully, "I really
+think you ought to turn; we're all getting cold," did he realize
+that he had made his sleighing party into a punishment! There was
+certainly nothing to punish Enid for; she had done her best, and
+had tried to make his own bad manners less conspicuous. He
+muttered a blundering apology to her when he lifted her from the
+sleigh at the mill house. On his long drive home he had bitter
+thoughts for company.
+
+He was so angry with Gladys that he hadn't been able to bid her
+good-night. Everything she said on the ride had nettled him. If
+she meant to marry Bayliss, then she ought to throw off this
+affectation of freedom and independence. If she did not mean to,
+why did she accept favours from him and let him get into the
+habit of walking into her house and putting his box of candy on
+the table, as all Frankfort fellows did when they were courting?
+Certainly she couldn't make herself believe that she liked his
+society!
+
+When they were classmates at the Frankfort High School, Gladys
+was Claude's aesthetic proxy. It wasn't the proper thing for a
+boy to be too clean, or too careful about his dress and manners.
+But if he selected a girl who was irreproachable in these
+respects, got his Latin and did his laboratory work with her,
+then all her personal attractions redounded to his credit. Gladys
+had seemed to appreciate the honour Claude did her, and it was
+not all on her own account that she wore such beautifully ironed
+muslin dresses when they went on botanical expeditions.
+
+Driving home after that miserable sleigh-ride, Claude told
+himself that in so far as Gladys was concerned he could make up
+his mind to the fact that he had been "stung" all along. He had
+believed in her fine feelings; believed implicitly. Now he knew
+she had none so fine that she couldn't pocket them when there was
+enough to be gained by it. Even while he said these things over
+and over, his old conception of Gladys, down at the bottom of his
+mind, remained persistently unchanged. But that only made his
+state of feeling the more painful. He was deeply hurt,--and for
+some reason, youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself
+betrayed.
+
+
+Book Two: Enid
+
+I
+
+One afternoon that spring Claude was sitting on the long flight
+of granite steps that leads up to the State House in Denver. He
+had been looking at the collection of Cliff Dweller remains in
+the Capitol, and when he came out into the sunlight the faint
+smell of fresh-cut grass struck his nostrils and persuaded him to
+linger. The gardeners were giving the grounds their first light
+mowing. All the lawns on the hill were bright with daffodils and
+hyacinths. A sweet, warm wind blew over the grass, drying the
+waterdrops. There had been showers in the afternoon, and the sky
+was still a tender, rainy blue, where it showed through the
+masses of swiftly moving clouds.
+
+Claude had been away from home for nearly a month. His father had
+sent him out to see Ralph and the new ranch, and from there he
+went on to Colorado Springs and Trinidad. He had enjoyed
+travelling, but now that he was back in Denver he had that
+feeling of loneliness which often overtakes country boys in a
+city; the feeling of being unrelated to anything, of not
+mattering to anybody. He had wandered about Colorado Springs
+wishing he knew some of the people who were going in and out of
+the houses; wishing that he could talk to some of those pretty
+girls he saw driving their own cars about the streets, if only to
+say a few words. One morning when he was walking out in the hills
+a girl passed him, then slowed her car to ask if she could give
+him a lift. Claude would have said that she was just the sort who
+would never stop to pick him up, yet she did, and she talked to
+him pleasantly all the way back to town. It was only twenty
+minutes or so, but it was worth everything else that happened on
+his trip. When she asked him where she should put him down, he
+said at the Antlers, and blushed so furiously that she must have
+known at once he wasn't staying there.
+
+He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat
+here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind
+the mountains. Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to
+be young; but it was a painful thing, too. He didn't believe
+older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden
+light, the mass of mountains was splitting up into four distinct
+ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in
+perspective, one behind the other. It was a lonely splendour that
+only made the ache in his breast the stronger. What was the
+matter with him, he asked himself entreatingly. He must answer
+that question before he went home again.
+
+The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square,
+pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more.
+There was still South America; perhaps he could find something
+below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the
+world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.
+
+Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his
+father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a
+new country. It was a storm that died down at last,--but what a
+pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power--for it was a
+kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against
+the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did
+not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped
+to look at him.
+
+The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man
+standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists
+clenched in an attitude of arrested action,--his sandy hair, his
+tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique
+rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known
+how he seemed to this stranger.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning Claude stepped off the train at Frankfort and
+had his breakfast at the station before the town was awake. His
+family were not expecting him, so he thought he would walk home
+and stop at the mill to see Enid Royce. After all, old friends
+were best.
+
+He left town by the low road that wound along the creek. The
+willows were all out in new yellow leaves, and the sticky
+cotton-wood buds were on the point of bursting. Birds were
+calling everywhere, and now and then, through the studded willow
+wands, flashed the dazzling wing of a cardinal.
+
+All over the dusty, tan-coloured wheatfields there was a tender
+mist of green,--millions of little fingers reaching up and waving
+lightly in the sun. To the north and south Claude could see the
+corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres
+where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in
+clouds of dust to the roadside. When a gust of wind rose, gay
+little twisters came across the open fields, corkscrews of
+powdered earth that whirled through the air and suddenly fell
+again. It seemed as if there were a lark on every fence post,
+singing for everything that was dumb; for the great ploughed
+lands, and the heavy horses in the rows, and the men guiding the
+horses.
+
+Along the roadsides, from under the dead weeds and wisps of dried
+bluestem, the dandelions thrust up their clean, bright faces. If
+Claude happened to step on one, the acrid smell made him think of
+Mahailey, who had probably been out this very morning, gouging
+the sod with her broken butcher knife and stuffing dandelion
+greens into her apron. She always went for greens with an air of
+secrecy, very early, and sneaked along the roadsides stooping
+close to the ground, as if she might be detected and driven away,
+or as if the dandelions were wild things and had to be caught
+sleeping.
+
+Claude was thinking, as he walked, of how he used to like to come
+to mill with his father. The whole process of milling was
+mysterious to him then; and the mill house and the miller's wife
+were mysterious; even Enid was, a little--until he got her down
+in the bright sun among the cat-tails. They used to play in the
+bins of clean wheat, watch the flour coming out of the hopper and
+get themselves covered with white dust.
+
+Best of all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping
+in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in
+through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted
+jewel-weed growing in the shale. The mill was a place of sharp
+contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy,
+dripping silence. He remembered how astonished he was one day,
+when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the
+millstones, and discovered what harmless looking things they
+were. The miller picked away at them with a sharp hammer until
+the sparks flew, and Claude still had on his hand a blue spot
+where a chip of flint went under the skin when he got too near.
+
+Jason Royce must have kept his mill going out of sentiment, for
+there was not much money in it now. But milling had been his
+first business, and he had not found many things in life to be
+sentimental about. Sometimes one still came upon him in dusty
+miller's clothes, giving his man a day off. He had long ago
+ceased to depend on the risings and fallings of Lovely Creek for
+his power, and had put in a gasoline engine. The old dam now lay
+"like a holler tooth," as one of his men said, grown up with
+weeds and willow-brush.
+
+Mr. Royce's family affairs had never gone as well as his
+business. He had not been blessed with a son, and out of five
+daughters he had succeeded in bringing up only two. People
+thought the mill house damp and unwholesome. Until he built a
+tenant's cottage and got a married man to take charge of the
+mill, Mr. Royce was never able to keep his millers long. They
+complained of the gloom of the house, and said they could not get
+enough to eat. Mrs. Royce went every summer to a vegetarian
+sanatorium in Michigan, where she learned to live on nuts and
+toasted cereals. She gave her family nourishment, to be sure, but
+there was never during the day a meal that a man could look
+forward to with pleasure, or sit down to with satisfaction. Mr.
+Royce usually dined at the hotel in town. Nevertheless, his wife
+was distinguished for certain brilliant culinary accomplishments.
+Her bread was faultless. When a church supper was toward, she was
+always called upon for her wonderful mayonnaise dressing, or her
+angel-food cake,--sure to be the lightest and spongiest in any
+assemblage of cakes.
+
+A deep preoccupation about her health made Mrs. Royce like a
+woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming
+regret. It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility. She lived
+differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful
+and reserved. Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care
+of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was understood and
+surrounded by sympathy.
+
+Her distrust had communicated itself to her daughters and in
+countless little ways had coloured their feelings about life.
+They grew up under the shadow of being "different," and formed no
+close friendships. Gladys Farmer was the only Frankfort girl who
+had ever gone much to the mill house. Nobody was surprised when
+Caroline Royce, the older daughter, went out to China to be a
+missionary, or that her mother let her go without a protest. The
+Royce women were strange, anyhow, people said; with Carrie gone,
+they hoped Enid would grow up to be more like other folk. She
+dressed well, came to town often in her car, and was always ready
+to work for the church or the public library.
+
+Besides, in Frankfort, Enid was thought very pretty,--in itself a
+humanizing attribute. She was slender, with a small, well-shaped
+head, a smooth, pale skin, and large, dark, opaque eyes with
+heavy lashes. The long line from the lobe of her ear to the tip
+of her chin gave her face a certain rigidity, but to the old
+ladies, who are the best critics in such matters, this meant
+firmness and dignity. She moved quickly and gracefully, just
+brushing things rather than touching them, so that there was a
+suggestion of flight about her slim figure, of gliding away from
+her surroundings. When the Sunday School gave tableaux vivants,
+Enid was chosen for Nydia, the blind girl of Pompeii, and for the
+martyr in "Christ or Diana." The pallor of her skin, the
+submissive inclination of her forehead, and her dark, unchanging
+eyes, made one think of something "early Christian."
+
+On this May morning when Claude Wheeler came striding up the mill
+road, Enid was in the yard, standing by a trellis for vines built
+near the fence, out from under the heavy shade of the trees. She
+was raking the earth that had been spaded up the day before, and
+making furrows in which to drop seeds. From the turn of the road,
+by the knotty old willows, Claude saw her pink starched dress and
+little white sun-bonnet. He hurried forward.
+
+"Hello, are you farming?" he called as he came up to the fence.
+
+Enid, who was bending over at that moment, rose quickly, but
+without a start. "Why, Claude! I thought you were out West
+somewhere. This is a surprise!" She brushed the earth from her
+hands and gave him her limp white fingers. Her arms, bare below
+the elbow, were thin, and looked cold, as if she had put on a
+summer dress too early.
+
+"I just got back this morning. I'm walking out home. What are you
+planting?"
+
+"Sweet peas."
+
+"You always have the finest ones in the country. When I see a
+bunch of yours at church or anywhere, I always know them."
+
+"Yes, I'm quite successful with my sweet peas," she admitted.
+"The ground is rich down here, and they get plenty of sun."
+
+"It isn't only your sweet peas. Nobody else has such lilacs or
+rambler roses, and I expect you have the only wistaria vine in
+Frankfort county."
+
+"Mother planted that a long while ago, when she first moved here.
+She is very partial to wistaria. I'm afraid we'll lose it, one of
+these hard winters."
+
+"Oh, that would be a shame! Take good care of it. You must put in
+a lot of time looking after these things, anyway." He spoke
+admiringly.
+
+Enid leaned against the fence and pushed back her little bonnet.
+"Perhaps I take more interest in flowers than I do in people. I
+often envy you, Claude; you have so many interests."
+
+He coloured. "I? Good gracious, I don't have many! I'm an awfully
+discontented sort of fellow. I didn't care about going to school
+until I had to stop, and then I was sore because I couldn't go
+back. I guess I've been sulking about it all winter."
+
+She looked at him with quiet astonishment. "I don't see why you
+should be discontented; you're so free."
+
+"Well, aren't you free, too?"
+
+"Not to do what I want to. The only thing I really want to do is
+to go out to China and help Carrie in her work. Mother thinks I'm
+not strong enough. But Carrie was never very strong here. She is
+better in China, and I think I might be."
+
+Claude felt concern. He had not seen Enid since the sleigh-ride,
+when she had been gayer than usual. Now she seemed sunk in
+lassitude. "You must get over such notions, Enid. You don't want
+to go wandering off alone like that. It makes people queer. Isn't
+there plenty of missionary work to be done right here?"
+
+She sighed. "That's what everybody says. But we all of us have a
+chance, if we'll take it. Out there they haven't. It's terrible
+to think of all those millions that live and die in darkness."
+
+Claude glanced up at the sombre mill house, hidden in
+cedars,--then off at the bright, dusty fields. He felt as if he
+were a little to blame for Enid's melancholy. He hadn't been very
+neighbourly this last year. "People can live in darkness here,
+too, unless they fight it. Look at me. I told you I've been
+moping all winter. We all feel friendly enough, but we go
+plodding on and never get together. You and I are old friends,
+and yet we hardly ever see each other. Mother says you've been
+promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her. Why
+don't you come? It would please her."
+
+"Then I will. I've always been fond of your mother." She paused a
+moment, absently twisting the strings of her bonnet, then
+twitched it from her head with a quick movement and looked at him
+squarely in the bright light. "Claude, you haven't really become
+a free-thinker, have you?"
+
+He laughed outright. "Why, what made you think I had?"
+
+"Everybody knows Ernest Havel is, and people say you and he read
+that kind of books together."
+
+"Has that got anything to do with our being friends?"
+
+"Yes, it has. I couldn't feel the same confidence in you. I've
+worried about it a good deal."
+
+"Well, you just cut it out. For one thing, I'm not worth it," he
+said quickly.
+
+"Oh, yes, you are! If worrying would do any good--" she shook her
+head at him reproachfully.
+
+Claude took hold of the fence pickets between them with both
+hands. "It will do good! Didn't I tell you there was missionary
+work to be done right here? Is that why you've been so
+stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I
+was an atheist?"
+
+"I never, you know, liked Ernest Havel," she murmured.
+
+When Claude left the mill and started homeward he felt that he
+had found something which would help him through the summer. How
+fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her
+without interruption,--without once seeing Mrs. Royce's face,
+always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn
+blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she
+used to come into church with her little girls,--a tiny woman in
+tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her
+black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and
+rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.
+
+Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other
+people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own
+thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions--her garden and the great
+kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about
+her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to
+be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The
+more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the
+act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as
+mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to
+him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have
+holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic
+and commonplace, like a man.
+
+
+III
+
+During the next few weeks Claude often ran his car down to the
+mill house on a pleasant evening and coaxed Enid to go into
+Frankfort with him and sit through a moving picture show, or to
+drive to a neighbouring town. The advantage of this form of
+companionship was that it did not put too great a strain upon
+one's conversational powers. Enid could be admirably silent, and
+she was never embarrassed by either silence or speech. She was
+cool and sure of herself under any circumstances, and that was
+one reason why she drove a car so well,--much better than Claude,
+indeed.
+
+One Sunday, when they met after church, she told Claude that she
+wanted to go to Hastings to do some shopping, and they arranged
+that he should take her on Tuesday in his father's big car. The
+town was about seventy miles to the northeast and, from
+Frankfort, it was an inconvenient trip by rail.
+
+On Tuesday morning Claude reached the mill house just as the sun
+was rising over the damp fields. Enid was on the front porch
+waiting for him, wearing a blanket coat over her spring suit. She
+ran down to the gate and slipped into the seat beside him.
+
+"Good morning, Claude. Nobody else is up. It's going to be a
+glorious day, isn't it?"
+
+"Splendid. A little warm for this time of year. You won't need
+that coat long."
+
+For the first hour they found the roads empty. All the fields
+were grey with dew, and the early sunlight burned over everything
+with the transparent brightness of a fire that has just been
+kindled. As the machine noiselessly wound off the miles, the sky
+grew deeper and bluer, and the flowers along the roadside opened
+in the wet grass. There were men and horses abroad on every hill
+now. Soon they began to pass children on the way to school, who
+stopped and waved their bright dinner pails at the two
+travellers. By ten o'clock they were in Hastings.
+
+While Enid was shopping, Claude bought some white shoes and duck
+trousers. He felt more interest than usual in his summer clothes.
+They met at the hotel for lunch, both very hungry and both
+satisfied with their morning's work. Seated in the dining room,
+with Enid opposite him, Claude thought they did not look at all
+like a country boy and girl come to town, but like experienced
+people touring in their car.
+
+"Will you make a call with me after dinner?" she asked while they
+were waiting for their dessert.
+
+"Is it any one I know?"
+
+"Certainly. Brother Weldon is in town. His meetings are over, and
+I was afraid he might be gone, but he is staying on a few days
+with Mrs. Gleason. I brought some of Carrie's letters along for
+him to read."
+
+Claude made a wry face. "He won't be delighted to see me. We
+never got on well at school. He's a regular muff of a teacher, if
+you want to know," he added resolutely.
+
+Enid studied him judicially. "I'm surprised to hear that; he's
+such a good speaker. You'd better come along. It's so foolish to
+have a coolness with your old teachers."
+
+An hour later the Reverend Arthur Weldon received the two young
+people in Mrs. Gleason's half-darkened parlour, where he seemed
+quite as much at home as that lady herself. The hostess, after
+chatting cordially with the visitors for a few moments, excused
+herself to go to a P. E. O. meeting. Every one rose at her
+departure, and Mr. Weldon approached Enid, took her hand, and
+stood looking at her with his head inclined and his oblique
+smile. "This is an unexpected pleasure, to see you again, Miss
+Enid. And you, too, Claude," turning a little toward the latter.
+"You've come up from Frankfort together this beautiful day?" His
+tone seemed to say, "How lovely for you!"
+
+He directed most of his remarks to Enid and, as always, avoided
+looking at Claude except when he definitely addressed him.
+
+"You are farming this year, Claude? I presume that is a great
+satisfaction to your father. And Mrs. Wheeler is quite well?"
+
+Mr. Weldon certainly bore no malice, but he always pronounced
+Claude's name exactly like the word "Clod," which annoyed him. To
+be sure, Enid pronounced his name in the same way, but either
+Claude did not notice this, or did not mind it from her. He sank
+into a deep, dark sofa, and sat with his driving cap on his knee
+while Brother Weldon drew a chair up to the one open window of
+the dusky room and began to read Carrie Royce's letters. Without
+being asked to do so, he read them aloud, and stopped to comment
+from time to time. Claude observed with disappointment that Enid
+drank in all his platitudes just as Mrs. Wheeler did. He had
+never looked at Weldon so long before. The light fell full on the
+young man's pear-shaped head and his thin, rippled hair. What in
+the world could sensible women like his mother and Enid Royce
+find to admire in this purring, white-necktied fellow? Enid's
+dark eyes rested upon him with an expression of profound respect.
+She both looked at him and spoke to him with more feeling than
+she ever showed toward Claude.
+
+"You see, Brother Weldon," she said earnestly, "I am not
+naturally much drawn to people. I find it hard to take the proper
+interest in the church work at home. It seems as if I had always
+been holding myself in reserve for the foreign field,--by not
+making personal ties, I mean. If Gladys Farmer went to China,
+everybody would miss her. She could never be replaced in the High
+School. She has the kind of magnetism that draws people to her.
+But I have always been keeping myself free to do what Carrie is
+doing. There I know I could be of use."
+
+Claude saw it was not easy for Enid to talk like this. Her face
+looked troubled, and her dark eyebrows came together in a sharp
+angle as she tried to tell the young preacher exactly what was
+going on in her mind. He listened with his habitual, smiling
+attention, smoothing the paper of the folded letter pages and
+murmuring, "Yes, I understand. Indeed, Miss Enid?"
+
+When she pressed him for advice, he said it was not always easy
+to know in what field one could be most useful; perhaps this very
+restraint was giving her some spiritual discipline that she
+particularly needed. He was careful not to commit himself, not to
+advise anything unconditionally, except prayer.
+
+"I believe that all things are made clear to us in prayer, Miss
+Enid."
+
+Enid clasped her hands; her perplexity made her features look
+sharper. "But it is when I pray that I feel this call the
+strongest. It seems as if a finger were pointing me over there.
+Sometimes when I ask for guidance in little things, I get none,
+and only get the feeling that my work lies far away, and that for
+it, strength would be given me. Until I take that road, Christ
+withholds himself."
+
+Mr. Weldon answered her in a tone of relief, as if something
+obscure had been made clear. "If that is the case, Miss Enid, I
+think we need have no anxiety. If the call recurs to you in
+prayer, and it is your Saviour's will, then we can be sure that
+the way and the means will be revealed. A passage from one of the
+Prophets occurs to me at this moment; 'And behold a way shall be
+opened up before thy feet; walk thou in it.' We might say that
+this promise was originally meant for Enid Royce! I believe God
+likes us to appropriate passages of His word personally." This
+last remark was made playfully, as if it were a kind of Christian
+Endeavour jest. He rose and handed Enid back the letters.
+Clearly, the interview was over.
+
+As Enid drew on her gloves she told him that it had been a great
+help to talk to him, and that he always seemed to give her what
+she needed. Claude wondered what it was. He hadn't seen Weldon do
+anything but retreat before her eager questions. He, an
+"atheist," could have given her stronger reinforcement.
+
+Claude's car stood under the maple trees in front of Mrs.
+Gleason's house. Before they got into it, he called Enid's
+attention to a mass of thunderheads in the west.
+
+"That looks to me like a storm. It might be a wise thing to stay
+at the hotel tonight."
+
+"Oh, no! I don't want to do that. I haven't come prepared."
+
+He reminded her that it wouldn't be impossible to buy whatever
+she might need for the night.
+
+"I don't like to stay in a strange place without my own things,"
+she said decidedly.
+
+"I'm afraid we'll be going straight into it. We may be in for
+something pretty rough,--but it's as you say." He still
+hesitated, with his hand on the door.
+
+"I think we'd better try it," she said with quiet determination.
+Claude had not yet learned that Enid always opposed the
+unexpected, and could not bear to have her plans changed by
+people or circumstances.
+
+For an hour he drove at his best speed, watching the clouds
+anxiously. The table-land, from horizon to horizon, was glowing
+in sunlight, and the sky itself seemed only the more brilliant
+for the mass of purple vapours rolling in the west, with bright
+edges, like new-cut lead. He had made fifty odd miles when the
+air suddenly grew cold, and in ten minutes the whole shining sky
+was blotted out. He sprang to the ground and began to jack up his
+wheels. As soon as a wheel left the earth, Enid adjusted the
+chain. Claude told her he had never got the chains on so quickly
+before. He covered the packages in the back seat with an oilcloth
+and drove forward to meet the storm.
+
+The rain swept over them in waves, seemed to rise from the sod as
+well as to fall from the clouds. They made another five miles,
+ploughing through puddles and sliding over liquefied roads.
+Suddenly the heavy car, chains and all, bounded up a two-foot
+bank, shot over the sod a dozen yards before the brake caught it,
+then swung a half-circle and stood still. Enid sat calm and
+motionless.
+
+Claude drew a long breath. "If that had happened on a culvert,
+we'd be in the ditch with the car on top of us. I simply can't
+control the thing. The whole top soil is loose, and there's
+nothing to hold to. That's Tommy Rice's place over there. We'd
+better get him to take us in for the night."
+
+"But that would be worse than the hotel," Enid objected. "They
+are not very clean people, and there are a lot of children."
+
+"Better be crowded than dead," he murmured. "From here on, it
+would be a matter of luck. We might land anywhere."
+
+"We are only about ten miles from your place. I can stay with
+your mother tonight."
+
+"It's too dangerous, Enid. I don't like the responsibility. Your
+father would blame me for taking such a chance."
+
+"I know, it's on my account you're nervous." Enid spoke
+reasonably enough. "Do you mind letting me drive for awhile?
+There are only three bad hills left, and I think I can slide down
+them sideways; I've often tried it."
+
+Claude got out and let her slip into his seat, but after she took
+the wheel he put his hand on her arm. "Don't do anything so
+foolish," he pleaded.
+
+Enid smiled and shook her head. She was amiable, but inflexible.
+
+He folded his arms. "Go on."
+
+He was chafed by her stubbornness, but he had to admire her
+resourcefulness in handling the car. At the bottom of one of the
+worst hills was a new cement culvert, overlaid with liquid mud,
+where there was nothing for the chains to grip. The car slid to
+the edge of the culvert and stopped on the very brink. While they
+were ploughing up the other side of the hill, Enid remarked;
+"It's a good thing your starter works well; a little jar would
+have thrown us over."
+
+They pulled up at the Wheeler farm just before dark, and Mrs.
+Wheeler came running out to meet them with a rubber coat over her
+head.
+
+"You poor drowned children!" she cried, taking Enid in her arms.
+"How did you ever get home? I so hoped you had stayed in
+Hastings."
+
+"It was Enid who got us home," Claude told her. "She's a
+dreadfully foolhardy girl, and somebody ought to shake her, but
+she's a fine driver."
+
+Enid laughed as she brushed a wet lock back from her forehead.
+"You were right, of course; the sensible thing would have been to
+turn in at the Rice place; only I didn't want to."
+
+Later in the evening Claude was glad they hadn't. It was pleasant
+to be at home and to see Enid at the supper table, sitting on his
+father's right and wearing one of his mother's new grey
+house-dresses. They would have had a dismal time at the Rices',
+with no beds to sleep in except such as were already occupied by
+Rice children. Enid had never slept in his mother's guest room
+before, and it pleased him to think how comfortable she would be
+there.
+
+At an early hour Mrs. Wheeler took a candle to light her guest to
+bed; Enid passed near Claude's chair as she was leaving the room.
+"Have you forgiven me?" she asked teasingly.
+
+"What made you so pig-headed? Did you want to frighten me? or to
+show me how well you could drive?"
+
+"Neither. I wanted to get home. Good-night."
+
+Claude settled back in his chair and shaded his eyes. She did
+feel that this was home, then. She had not been afraid of his
+father's jokes, or disconcerted by Mahailey's knowing grin. Her
+ease in the household gave him unaccountable pleasure. He picked
+up a book, but did not read. It was lying open on his knee when
+his mother came back half an hour later.
+
+"Move quietly when you go upstairs, Claude. She is so tired that
+she may be asleep already."
+
+He took off his shoes and made his ascent with the utmost
+caution.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Ernest Havel was cultivating his bright, glistening young
+cornfield one summer morning, whistling to himself an old German
+song which was somehow connected with a picture that rose in his
+memory. It was a picture of the earliest ploughing he could
+remember.
+
+He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in
+the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of
+sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests. In the meadows
+at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek,
+with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown
+fields. He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and
+watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that
+had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns. His
+mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father
+walked behind, guiding the plough. His father always looked down.
+His mother's face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields,
+and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring. The
+two would go up and down thus all morning without speaking,
+except to the oxen. Ernest was the last of a long family, and as
+he played by the creek he used to wonder why his parents looked
+so old.
+
+Leonard Dawson drove his car up to the fence and shouted, waking
+Ernest from his revery. He told his team to stand, and ran out to
+the edge of the field.
+
+"Hello, Ernest," Leonard called. "Have you heard Claude Wheeler
+got hurt day before yesterday?"
+
+"You don't say so! It can't be anything bad, or they'd let me
+know."
+
+"Oh, it's nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face
+scratched up in the wire quite a little. It was the queerest
+thing I ever saw. He was out with the team of mules and a heavy
+plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and
+mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than
+usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they
+did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that
+deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to
+the gasoline man to stop, but he didn't hear me. Claude jumped
+for the critters' heads and got 'em by the bits, but by that time
+he was all tangled up in the lines. Those damned mules lifted him
+off his feet and started to run. Down the draw and up the bank
+and across the fields they went, with that big plough-blade
+jumping three or four feet in the air every clip. I was sure it
+would cut one of the mules open, or go clean through Claude. It
+would have got him, too, if he hadn't kept his hold on the bits.
+They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally
+ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up."
+
+"My goodness! Did he get cut bad?"
+
+"No, not very, but yesterday morning he was out cultivating corn,
+all stuck up with court plaster. I knew that was a fool thing to
+do; a wire cut's nasty if you get overheated out in the dust. But
+you can't tell a Wheeler anything. Now they say his face has
+swelled and is hurting him terrible, and he's gone to town to see
+the doctor. You'd better go over there tonight, and see if you
+can make him take care of himself."
+
+Leonard drove on, and Ernest went back to his team. "It's queer
+about that boy," he was thinking. "He's big and strong, and he's
+got an education and all that fine land, but he don't seem to fit
+in right." Sometimes Ernest thought his friend was unlucky. When
+that idea occurred to him, he sighed and shook it off. For Ernest
+believed there was no help for that; it was something rationalism
+did not explain.
+
+The next afternoon Enid Royce's coupe drove up to the Wheeler
+farmyard. Mrs. Wheeler saw Enid get out of her car and came down
+the hill to meet her, breathless and distressed. "Oh, Enid!
+You've heard of Claude's accident? He wouldn't take care of
+himself, and now he's got erysipelas. He's in such pain, poor
+boy!"
+
+Enid took her arm, and they started up the hill toward the house.
+"Can I see Claude, Mrs. Wheeler? I want to give him these
+flowers."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "I don't know if he will let you come in,
+dear. I had hard work persuading him to see Ernest for a few
+moments last night. He seems so low-spirited, and he's sensitive
+about the way he's bandaged up. I'll go to his room and ask him."
+
+"No, just let me go up with you, please. If I walk in with you,
+he won't have time to fret about it. I won't stay if he doesn't
+wish it, but I want to see him."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was alarmed at this suggestion, but Enid ignored her
+uncertainty. They went up to the third floor together, and Enid
+herself tapped at the door.
+
+"It's I, Claude. May I come in for a moment?"
+
+A muffled, reluctant voice answered. "No. They say this is
+catching, Enid. And anyhow, I'd rather you didn't see me like
+this."
+
+Without waiting she pushed open the door. The dark blinds were
+down, and the room was full of a strong, bitter odor. Claude lay
+flat in bed, his head and face so smothered in surgical cotton
+that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible. The
+brown paste with which his features were smeared oozed out at the
+edges of the gauze and made his dressings look untidy. Enid took
+in these details at a glance.
+
+"Does the light hurt your eyes? Let me put up one of the blinds
+for a moment, because I want you to see these flowers. I've
+brought you my first sweet peas."
+
+Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before
+him. She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell
+them through his medicines. In a moment he ceased to feel
+embarrassed. His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged
+the flowers on the little table beside him.
+
+"Now, do you want me to darken the room again?"
+
+"Not yet. Sit down for a minute and talk to me. I can't say much
+because my face is stiff."
+
+"I should think it would be! I met Leonard Dawson on the road
+yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you
+were cut. I would like to scold you hard, Claude."
+
+"Do. It might make me feel better." He took her hand and kept her
+beside him a moment. "Are those the sweet peas you were planting
+that day when I came back from the West?"
+
+"Yes. Haven't they done well to blossom so early?"
+
+"Less than two months. That's strange," he sighed.
+
+"Strange? What?"
+
+"Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few
+weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it's
+not much account."
+
+"That's not the way to look at things," she said reprovingly.
+
+Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her
+flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had
+brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began
+to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas.
+He listened but absently. He would never have believed that Enid,
+with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and
+sit with him like this. He noticed that his mother was quite as
+much astonished as he. She hovered about the visitor for a few
+moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went
+downstairs to her work. Claude wished that Enid would not talk at
+all, but would sit there and let him look at her. The sunshine
+she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence,
+soothed him. Presently he realized that she was asking him
+something.
+
+"What is it, Enid? The medicine they give me makes me stupid. I
+don't catch things."
+
+"I was asking whether you play chess."
+
+"Very badly."
+
+"Father says I play passably well. When you are better you must
+let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.
+They are beautifully carved. And now it's time for me to go."
+
+She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish
+about seeing people. "I didn't know you were so vain. Bandages
+are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the
+dark blind again for you?"
+
+"Yes, please. There won't be anything to look at now."
+
+"Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies' man!"
+
+Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He
+felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went
+downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.
+
+His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him
+while he swallowed it. "Enid Royce is a real sensible girl--" she
+said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not
+conviction but bewilderment.
+
+Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her
+visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that
+happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his
+poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when
+he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt
+unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the
+pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a
+distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog
+fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of
+torture,--everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the
+rack and the wheel.
+
+When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer
+clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but
+he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After
+awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer
+chair and play chess with her.
+
+One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room
+with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that
+he was beaten again.
+
+"It must be dull for you, playing with me," he murmured, brushing
+the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so
+white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were
+the soft, languid hands of a sick man.
+
+"You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind
+on it," Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had
+a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it
+was clear that he would never play well.
+
+"Yes," he sighed, dropping back into his chair, "my wits do
+wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn't
+it lovely? And now I won't be able to harvest it. Sometimes I
+wonder whether I'll ever finish anything I begin."
+
+Enid put the chessmen back into their box. "Now that you are
+better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your
+trouble people are always depressed."
+
+Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the
+chair. "No, it's not that. It's having so much time to think that
+makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that
+gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I
+lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening
+to me or to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much
+connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."
+
+"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to
+start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!" She
+shook her finger at him.
+
+"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them."
+Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock milk; it was his
+first day downstairs.
+
+When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen
+the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would
+always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted
+to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a
+bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that
+some day he must reckon with it again.
+
+Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and
+she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling
+room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody
+but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from
+conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered
+her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day
+exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her
+stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her
+stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent
+gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to
+do thus and to do Right!"
+
+Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had
+been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife--and his
+eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in
+her the promise of "virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to
+use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across the
+aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he
+respected her seriousness.
+
+When they played together she was fair-minded, didn't whine if
+she got hurt, and never claimed a girl's exemption from anything
+unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the
+mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking
+and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little
+drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over,
+"Oh, Claude, Claude!" Incidents like that one now seemed to him
+significant and fateful.
+
+When Claude's strength began to return to him, it came
+overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong while his body
+was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The
+desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was
+unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted.
+When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her
+actual presence restored his equilibrium--almost. This fact did
+not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful
+in the girl's nature,--a quality so lovely and subtle that there
+is no name for it.
+
+During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy
+the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft physical
+pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through,
+it was delightful to lie upon a cloud that floated lazily down
+the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid
+would start up like a sweet, burning pain, and he would drift out
+into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor
+control. So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back
+in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he was overtaken
+by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he
+would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed
+for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was
+feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would
+be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he
+who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her,
+but loved her while she was still and unconscious like a statue.
+He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without
+knowing why.
+
+Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush
+swept across his face and he felt guilty toward her, meek and
+humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he
+was glad when she went away and left him alone to think about
+her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be
+grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the
+one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into
+the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed
+his father, His marriage would be the first natural, dutiful,
+expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of
+usefulness and content; as his mother's oft-repeated Psalm said,
+it would restore his soul. Enid's willingness to listen to him he
+could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was
+probably regarded by her friends as equivalent to an engagement.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude's first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After
+leaving the barber-shop he presented himself, glistening with
+bayrum, at Jason Royce's office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing
+his safe, turned and took the young man by the hand.
+
+"Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can't do
+much to a husky young farmer like you. With old fellows, it's
+another story. I'm just starting off to have a look at my
+alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go along with me."
+
+They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and
+when they were spinning along between fields of ripening grain
+Claude broke the silence. "I expect you know what I want to see
+you about, Mr. Royce?"
+
+The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim
+ever since they started.
+
+"Well," Claude went on modestly, "it oughtn't to surprise you to
+hear that I've set my heart on Enid. I haven't said anything to
+her yet, but if you're not against me, I'm going to try to
+persuade her to marry me."
+
+"Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude," said Mr. Royce. He
+sat slumping in his seat, watching the road ahead of him with
+intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual.
+"Enid is a vegetarian, you know," he remarked unexpectedly.
+
+Claude smiled. "That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr.
+Royce."
+
+The other nodded slightly. "I know. At your age you think it
+doesn't. Such things do make a difference, however." His lips
+closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not
+open them.
+
+"Enid is a good girl," he said at last. "Strictly speaking, she
+has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce had another
+daughter at home, I'd take Enid into my office. She has good
+judgment. I don't know but she'd run a business better than a
+house." Having got this out, Mr. Royce relaxed his frown, took
+his cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back between
+his teeth without relighting it.
+
+Claude was watching him with surprise. "There's no question about
+Enid, Mr. Royce. I didn't come to ask you about her," he
+exclaimed. "I came to ask if you'd be willing to have me for a
+son-in-law. I know, and you know, that Enid could do a great deal
+better than to marry me. I surely haven't made much of a showing,
+so far."
+
+"Here we are," announced Mr. Royce. "I'll leave the car under
+this elm, and we'll go up to the north end of the field and have
+a look."
+
+They crawled under the wire fence and started across the rough
+ground through a field of purple blossoms. Clouds of yellow
+butterflies darted up before them. They walked jerkily, breaking
+through the sun-baked crust into the soft soil beneath. Mr. Royce
+lit a fresh cigar, and as he threw away the match let his hand
+drop on the young man's shoulder. "I always envied your father.
+You took my fancy when you were a little shaver, and I used to
+let you in to see the water-wheel. When I gave up water power and
+put in an engine, I said to myself: 'There's just one fellow in
+the country will be sorry to see the old wheel go, and that's
+Claude Wheeler.'"
+
+"I hope you don't think I'm too young to marry," Claude said as
+they tramped on.
+
+"No, it's right and proper a young man should marry. I don't say
+anything against marriage," Mr. Royce protested doggedly. "You
+may find some opposition in Enid's missionary motives. I don't
+know how she feels about that now. I don't enquire. I'd be
+pleased to see her get rid of such notions. They don't do a woman
+any good."
+
+"I want to help her get rid of them. If it's all right with you,
+I hope I can persuade Enid to marry me this fall."
+
+Jason Royce turned his head quickly toward his companion, studied
+his artless, hopeful countenance for a moment, and then looked
+away with a frown.
+
+The alfalfa field sloped upward at one corner, lay like a bright
+green-and-purple handkerchief thrown down on the hillside. At the
+uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as
+light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that
+hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off
+his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the
+flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and
+the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his
+brown neck. He sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his
+heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the
+field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast
+body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in
+his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak
+struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself
+understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do
+was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his
+young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain
+heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The
+dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the
+young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his
+secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and
+tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first. He did
+not look at Claude, but while he watched the wind plough soft,
+flowery roads in the field, the boy's face was clearly before
+him, with its expression of reticent pride melting into the
+desire to please, and the slight stiffness of his shoulders, set
+in a kind of stubborn loyalty. Claude lay on the sod beside him,
+rather tired after his walk in the sun, a little melancholy,
+though he did not know why.
+
+After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered
+miller's hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar.
+"Well, Claude," he said with determined cheerfulness, "we'll
+always be better friends than is common between father and
+son-in-law. You'll find out that pretty nearly everything you
+believe about life--about marriage, especially--is lies. I don't
+know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they
+do."
+
+
+VI
+
+After his interview with Mr. Royce, Claude drove directly to the
+mill house. As he came up the shady road, he saw with
+disappointment the flash of two white dresses instead of one,
+moving about in the sunny flower garden. The visitor was Gladys
+Farmer. This was her vacation time. She had walked out to the
+mill in the cool of the morning to spend the day with Enid. Now
+they were starting off to gather water-cresses, and had stopped
+in the garden to smell the heliotrope. On this scorching
+afternoon the purple sprays gave out a fragrance that hung over
+the flower-bed and brushed their cheeks like a warm breath. The
+girls looked up at the same moment and recognized Claude. They
+waved to him and hurried down to the gate to congratulate him on
+his recovery. He took their little tin pails and followed them
+around the old dam-head and up a sandy gorge, along a clear
+thread of water that trickled into Lovely Creek just above the
+mill. They came to the gravelly hill where the stream took its
+source from a spring hollowed out under the exposed roots of two
+elm trees. All about the spring, and in the sandy bed of the
+shallow creek, the cresses grew cool and green.
+
+Gladys had strong feelings about places. She looked around her
+with satisfaction. "Of all the places where we used to play,
+Enid, this was my favourite," she declared.
+
+"You girls sit up there on the elm roots," Claude suggested.
+"Wherever you put your foot in this soft gravel, water gathers.
+You'll spoil your white shoes. I'll get the cress for you."
+
+"Stuff my pail as full as you can, then," Gladys called as they
+sat down. "I wonder why the Spanish dagger grows so thick on this
+hill, Enid? These plants were old and tough when we were little.
+I love it here."
+
+She leaned back upon the hot, glistening hill-side. The sun came
+down in red rays through the elm-tops, and all the pebbles and
+bits of quartz glittered dazzlingly. Down in the stream bed the
+water, where it caught the light, twinkled like tarnished gold.
+Claude's sandy head and stooping shoulders were mottled with
+sunshine as they moved about over the green patches, and his duck
+trousers looked much whiter than they were. Gladys was too poor
+to travel, but she had the good fortune to be able to see a great
+deal within a few miles of Frankfort, and a warm imagination
+helped her to find life interesting. She did, as she confided to
+Enid, want to go to Colorado; she was ashamed of never having
+seen a mountain.
+
+Presently Claude came up the bank with two shining, dripping
+pails. "Now may I sit down with you for a few minutes?"
+
+Moving to make room for him beside her, Enid noticed that his
+thin face was heavily beaded with perspiration. His pocket
+handkerchief was wet and sandy, so she gave him her own, with a
+proprietary air. "Why, Claude, you look quite tired! Have you
+been over-doing? Where were you before you came here?"
+
+"I was out in the country with your father, looking at his
+alfalfa."
+
+"And he walked you all over the field in the hot sun, I suppose?"
+
+Claude laughed. "He did."
+
+"Well, I'll scold him tonight. You stay here and rest. I am going
+to drive Gladys home."
+
+Gladys protested, but at last consented that they should both
+drive her home in Claude's car. They lingered awhile, however,
+listening to the soft, amiable bubbling of the spring; a wise,
+unobtrusive voice, murmuring night and day, continually telling
+the truth to people who could not understand it.
+
+When they went back to the house Enid stopped long enough to cut
+a bunch of heliotrope for Mrs. Farmer,--though with the sinking
+of the sun its rich perfume had already vanished. They left
+Gladys and her flowers and cresses at the gate of the white
+cottage, now half hidden by gaudy trumpet vines.
+
+Claude turned his car and went back along the dim, twilight road
+with Enid. "I usually like to see Gladys, but when I found her
+with you this afternoon, I was terribly disappointed for a
+minute. I'd just been talking with your father, and I wanted to
+come straight to you. Do you think you could marry me, Enid?"
+
+"I don't believe it would be for the best, Claude." She spoke
+sadly.
+
+He took her passive hand. "Why not?"
+
+"My mind is full of other plans. Marriage is for most girls, but
+not for all."
+
+Enid had taken off her hat. In the low evening light Claude
+studied her pale face under her brown hair. There was something
+graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something
+that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness. "I've had
+those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don't get
+any further than you. If you could care ever so little for me to
+start on, I'd be willing to risk the rest." She sighed. "You know
+I care for you. I've never made any secret of it. But we're happy
+as we are, aren't we?"
+
+"No, I'm not. I've got to have some life of my own, or I'll go to
+pieces. If you won't have me, I'll try South America,--and I
+won't come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman."
+
+Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.
+
+The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs
+window. Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to
+the ground. She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long
+lashes. In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars,
+and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to
+Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes
+where the old mill-dam used to be. A terrible melancholy clutched
+at the boy's heart. He hadn't thought it would be like this. He
+drove home feeling weak and broken. Was there nothing in the
+world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn
+to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard?
+This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and
+you could no more change that than you could change the story in
+an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the
+world was too rough a place to get about in.
+
+There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that
+night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while,
+watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly
+enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were
+little girls,--and knew all there was to know about her. Claude
+would become one of those dead people that moved about the
+streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish,
+and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for
+fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead
+men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of
+strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all
+things which might make the world beautiful--love and kindness,
+leisure and art--were shut up in prison, and that successful men
+like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would
+let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and
+could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed
+into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss.
+She had not dared, for instance, to go to Omaha that spring for
+the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an
+extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her
+friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have
+decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted
+upon having next year.
+
+There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and
+generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit,
+inefficient--failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery,
+emotional old maid who couldn't tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a
+lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day
+long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug
+clerk, who wrote free verse and "movie" scenarios, and tended the
+sodawater fountain.
+
+Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High
+School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had
+waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be
+more successful than Bayliss AND STILL BE CLAUDE. She would have
+made any sacrifice to help him on. If a strong boy like Claude,
+so well endowed and so fearless, must fail, simply because he had
+that finer strain in his nature,--then life was not worth the
+chagrin it held for a passionate heart like hers.
+
+At last Gladys threw herself upon the bed. If he married Enid,
+that would be the end. He would go about strong and heavy, like
+Mr. Royce; a big machine with the springs broken inside.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Claude was well enough to go into the fields before the harvest
+was over. The middle of July came, and the farmers were still
+cutting grain. The yield of wheat and oats was so heavy that
+there were not machines enough to thrash it within the usual
+time. Men had to await their turn, letting their grain stand in
+shock until a belching black engine lumbered into the field.
+Rains would have been disastrous; but this was one of those "good
+years" which farmers tell about, when everything goes well. At
+the time they needed rain, there was plenty of it; and now the
+days were miracles of dry, glittering heat.
+
+Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew,
+and started a quivering excitement in all living things. In great
+harvest seasons like that one, the heat, the intense light, and
+the important work in hand draw people together and make them
+friendly. Neighbours helped each other to cope with the
+burdensome abundance of man-nourishing grain; women and children
+and old men fell to and did what they could to save and house it.
+Even the horses had a more varied and sociable existence than
+usual, going about from one farm to another to help neighbour
+horses drag wagons and binders and headers. They nosed the colts
+of old friends, ate out of strange mangers, and drank, or refused
+to drink, out of strange water-troughs. Decrepit horses that
+lived on a pension, like the Wheelers' stiff-legged Molly and
+Leonard Dawson's Billy with the heaves--his asthmatic cough could
+be heard for a quarter of a mile--were pressed into service now.
+It was wonderful, too, how well these invalided beasts managed to
+keep up with the strong young mares and geldings; they bent their
+willing heads and pulled as if the chafing of the collar on their
+necks was sweet to them.
+
+The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and
+took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak
+and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left
+behind it a spent and exhausted world. Horses and men and women
+grew thin, seethed all day in their own sweat. After supper they
+dropped over and slept anywhere at all, until the red dawn broke
+clear in the east again, like the fanfare of trumpets, and nerves
+and muscles began to quiver with the solar heat.
+
+For several weeks Claude did not have time to read the
+newspapers; they lay about the house in bundles, unopened, for
+Nat Wheeler was in the field now, working like a giant. Almost
+every evening Claude ran down to the mill to see Enid for a few
+minutes; he did not get out of his car, and she sat on the old
+stile, left over from horse-back days, while she chatted with
+him. She said frankly that she didn't like men who had just come
+out of the harvest field, and Claude did not blame her. He didn't
+like himself very well after his clothes began to dry on him. But
+the hour or two between supper and bed was the only time he had
+to see anybody. He slept like the heroes of old; sank upon his
+bed as the thing he desired most on earth, and for a blissful
+moment felt the sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In
+the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for
+hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he
+had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him
+between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was
+enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for
+instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see Enid as
+usual. While she was coming down the path from the house, he
+discovered that he had no clothes on at all! Then, with wonderful
+agility, he jumped over the picket fence into a clump of castor
+beans, and stood in the dusk, trying to cover himself with the
+leaves, like Adam in the garden, talking commonplaces to Enid
+through chattering teeth, afraid lest at any moment she might
+discover his plight.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey always lost weight in thrashing time,
+just as the horses did; this year Nat Wheeler had six hundred
+acres of winter wheat that would run close upon thirty bushels to
+the acre. Such a harvest was as hard on the women as it was on
+the men. Leonard Dawson's wife, Susie, came over to help Mrs.
+Wheeler, but she was expecting a baby in the fall, and the heat
+proved too much for her. Then one of the Yoeder daughters came;
+but the methodical German girl was so distracted by Mahailey's
+queer ways that Mrs. Wheeler said it was easier to do the work
+herself than to keep explaining Mahailey's psychology. Day after
+day ten ravenous men sat down at the long dinner table in the
+kitchen. Mrs. Wheeler baked pies and cakes and bread loaves as
+fast as the oven would hold them, and from morning till night the
+range was stoked like the fire-box of a locomotive. Mahailey
+wrung the necks of chickens until her wrist swelled up, as she
+said, "like a puff-adder."
+
+By the end of July the excitement quieted down. The extra leaves
+were taken out of the dining table, the Wheeler horses had their
+barn to themselves again, and the reign of terror in the henhouse
+was over.
+
+One evening Mr. Wheeler came down to supper with a bundle of
+newspapers under his arm. "Claude, I see this war scare in Europe
+has hit the market. Wheat's taken a jump. They're paying
+eighty-eight cents in Chicago. We might as well get rid of a few
+hundred bushel before it drops again. We'd better begin hauling
+tomorrow. You and I can make two trips a day over to Vicount, by
+changing teams,--there's no grade to speak of."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, arrested in the act of pouring coffee, sat holding
+the coffee-pot in the air, forgetting she had it. "If this is
+only a newspaper scare, as we think, I don't see why it should
+affect the market," she murmured mildly. "Surely those big
+bankers in New York and Boston have some way of knowing rumour
+from fact."
+
+"Give me some coffee, please," said her husband testily. "I don't
+have to explain the market, I've only got to take advantage of
+it."
+
+"But unless there's some reason, why are we dragging our wheat
+over to Vicount? Do you suppose it's some scheme the grain men
+are hiding under a war rumour? Have the financiers and the press
+ever deceived the public like this before?"
+
+"I don't know a thing in the world about it, Evangeline, and I
+don't suppose. I telephoned the elevator at Vicount an hour ago,
+and they said they'd pay me seventy cents, subject to change in
+the morning quotations. Claude," with a twinkle in his eye,
+"you'd better not go to mill tonight. Turn in early. If we are on
+the road by six tomorrow, we'll be in town before the heat of the
+day."
+
+"All right, sir. I want to look at the papers after supper. I
+haven't read anything but the headlines since before thrashing.
+Ernest was stirred up about the murder of that Grand Duke and
+said the Austrians would make trouble. But I never thought there
+was anything in it."
+
+"There's seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway," said his father,
+reaching for a hot biscuit.
+
+"If there's that much, I'm somehow afraid there will be more,"
+said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully. She had picked up the paper
+fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to
+brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.
+
+"You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers
+say about it," Mr. Wheeler suggested.
+
+Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer
+from the Havels. They had probably gone to a barn dance down in
+the Bohemian township. He went upstairs and sat down before an
+armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable
+out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the
+Omaha World Herald. The German army was entering Luxembourg; he
+didn't know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a
+country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace!
+His mother had gone up to "Mahailey's library," the attic, to
+hunt for a map of Europe,--a thing for which Nebraska farmers had
+never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads,
+the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.
+
+Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother's
+return. He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark. The night
+was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play
+of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon. Mosquitoes had
+got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon
+the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating
+note. He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears
+with the pillow. The disquieting sound became merged, in his
+sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper;
+those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a
+soft, high, sing-song whizz.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Late in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his
+empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat
+country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley. He had made
+two trips to town that day. Though he had kept his heaviest team
+for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged
+off a walk. Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their
+flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every
+step. Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and
+slow. The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot
+to the touch. Claude sat at one end of it, his head bared to
+catch the faint stir of air that sometimes dried his neck and
+chin and saved him the trouble of pulling out a handkerchief. On
+every side the wheat stubble stretched for miles and miles.
+Lonely straw stacks stood up yellow in the sun and cast long
+shadows. Claude peered anxiously along the distant locust hedges
+which told where the road ran. Ernest Havel had promised to meet
+him somewhere on the way home. He had not seen Ernest for a week:
+since then Time had brought prodigies to birth.
+
+At last he recognized the Havels' team along way off, and he
+stopped and waited for Ernest beside a thorny hedge, looking
+thoughtfully about him. The sun was already low. It hung above
+the stubble, all milky and rosy with the heat, like the image of
+a sun reflected in grey water. In the east the full moon had just
+risen, and its thin silver surface was flushed with pink until it
+looked exactly like the setting sun. Except for the place each
+occupied in the heavens, Claude could not have told which was
+which. They rested upon opposite rims of the world, two bright
+shields, and regarded each other, as if they, too, had met by
+appointment.
+
+Claude and Ernest sprang to the ground at the same instant and
+shook hands, feeling that they had not seen each other for a long
+while.
+
+"Well, what do you make of it, Ernest?"
+
+The young man shook his head cautiously, but replied no further.
+He patted his horses and eased the collars on their necks.
+
+"I waited in town for the Hastings paper," Claude went on
+impatiently. "England declared war last night."
+
+"The Germans," said Ernest, "are at Liege. I know where that is.
+I sailed from Antwerp when I came over here."
+
+"Yes, I saw that. Can the Belgians do anything?"
+
+"Nothing." Ernest leaned against the wagon wheel and drawing his
+pipe from his pocket slowly filled it. "Nobody can do anything.
+The German army will go where it pleases."
+
+"If it's as bad as that, why are the Belgians putting up a fight?"
+
+"I don't know. It's fine, but it will come to nothing in the end.
+Let me tell you something about the German army, Claude."
+
+Pacing up and down beside the locust hedge, Ernest rehearsed the
+great argument; preparation, organization, concentration,
+inexhaustible resources, inexhaustible men. While he talked the
+sun disappeared, the moon contracted, solidified, and slowly
+climbed the pale sky. The fields were still glimmering with the
+bland reflection left over from daylight, and the distance grew
+shadowy,--not dark, but seemingly full of sleep.
+
+"If I were at home," Ernest concluded, "I would be in the
+Austrian army this minute. I guess all my cousins and nephews are
+fighting the Russians or the Belgians already. How would you like
+it yourself, to be marched into a peaceful country like this, in
+the middle of harvest, and begin to destroy it?"
+
+"I wouldn't do it, of course. I'd desert and be shot."
+
+"Then your family would be persecuted. Your brothers, maybe even
+your father, would be made orderlies to Austrian officers and be
+kicked in the mouth."
+
+"I wouldn't bother about that. I'd let my male relatives decide
+for themselves how often they would be kicked."
+
+Ernest shrugged his shoulders. "You Americans brag like little
+boys; you would and you wouldn't! I tell you, nobody's will has
+anything to do with this. It is the harvest of all that has been
+planted. I never thought it would come in my life-time, but I
+knew it would come."
+
+The boys lingered a little while, looking up at the soft radiance
+of the sky. There was not a cloud anywhere, and the low glimmer
+in the fields had imperceptibly changed to full, pure moonlight.
+Presently the two wagons began to creep along the white road, and
+on the backless seat of each the driver sat drooping forward,
+lost in thought. When they reached the corner where Ernest turned
+south, they said goodnight without raising their voices. Claude's
+horses went on as if they were walking in their sleep. They did
+not even sneeze at the low cloud of dust beaten up by their heavy
+foot-falls,--the only sounds in the vast quiet of the night.
+
+Why was Ernest so impatient with him, Claude wondered. He could
+not pretend to feel as Ernest did. He had nothing behind him to
+shape his opinions or colour his feelings about what was going on
+in Europe; he could only sense it day by day. He had always been
+taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues
+Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had
+all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. The
+invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as
+he knew it in his friends and neighbours. He still cherished the
+hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid
+people would apologize and right itself with the world.
+
+Mr. Wheeler came down the hill, bareheaded and coatless, as
+Claude drove into the barnyard. "I expect you're tired. I'll put
+your team away. Any news?"
+
+"England has declared war."
+
+Mr. Wheeler stood still a moment and scratched his head. "I guess
+you needn't get up early tomorrow. If this is to be a sure enough
+war, wheat will go higher. I've thought it was a bluff until now.
+You take the papers up to your mother."
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium
+where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back
+until October. Claude and his mother gave all their attention to
+the war despatches. Day after day, through the first two weeks of
+August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
+into the farming country.
+
+About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the
+forts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a
+few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,--guns which
+evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or
+ever could be constructed. Even to these quiet wheat-growing
+people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their
+safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way
+of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which
+afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of
+unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or
+the eruption of volcanoes.
+
+On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at
+Namur; again giving warning that an unprecedented power of
+destruction had broken loose in the world. A few days later the
+story of the wiping out of the ancient and peaceful seat of
+learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
+directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers
+were full of accounts of the destruction of civilian populations.
+Something new, and certainly evil, was at work among mankind.
+Nobody was ready with a name for it. None of the well-worn words
+descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The epithets
+grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too
+dramatic, too full of old, familiar human passion.
+
+One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in
+the kitchen making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car
+coming back from Frankfort. In a moment he entered, letting the
+screen door slam behind him, and threw a bundle of mail on the
+table.
+
+"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of
+government to Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold
+Paris."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler wiped her pale, perspiring face with the hem of her
+apron and sat down in the nearest chair. "You mean that Paris is
+not the capital of France any more? Can that be true?"
+
+"That's what it looks like. Though the papers say it's only a
+precautionary measure."
+
+She rose. "Let's go up to the map. I don't remember exactly where
+Bordeaux is. Mahailey, you won't let my vinegar burn, will you?"
+
+Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung
+on the wall above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of
+a willow rocking-chair, she began to move her hand about over the
+brightly coloured, shiny surface, murmuring, "Yes, there is
+Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris."
+
+Claude, behind her, looked over her shoulder. "Do you suppose
+they are going to hand their city over to the Germans, like a
+Christmas present? I should think they'd burn it first, the way
+the Russians did Moscow. They can do better than that now, they
+can dynamite it!"
+
+"Don't say such things." Mrs. Wheeler dropped into the deep
+willow chair, realizing that she was very tired, now that she had
+left the stove and the heat of the kitchen. She began weakly to
+wave the palm leaf fan before her face. "It's said to be such a
+beautiful city. Perhaps the Germans will spare it, as they did
+Brussels. They must be sick of destruction by now. Get the
+encyclopaedia and see what it says. I've left my glasses
+downstairs."
+
+Claude brought a volume from the bookcase and sat down on the
+lounge. He began: "Paris, the capital city of France and the
+Department of the Seine,--shall I skip the history?"
+
+"No. Read it all."
+
+He cleared his throat and began again: "At its first appearance
+in history, there was nothing to foreshadow the important part
+which Paris was to play in Europe and in the world," etc.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rocked and fanned, forgetting the kitchen and the
+cucumbers as if they had never been. Her tired body was resting,
+and her mind, which was never tired, was occupied with the
+account of early religious foundations under the Merovingian
+kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested
+upon the sunburned neck and catapult shoulders of her red-headed
+son.
+
+Claude read faster and faster until he stopped with a gasp.
+
+"Mother, there are pages of kings! We'll read that some other
+time. I want to find out what it's like now, and whether it's
+going to have any more history." He ran his finger up and down
+the columns. "Here, this looks like business.
+
+"Defences: Paris, in a recent German account of the greatest
+fortresses of the world, possesses three distinct rings of
+defences"--here he broke off. "Now what do you think of that? A
+German account, and this is an English book! The world simply
+made a mistake about the Germans all along. It's as if we invited
+a neighbour over here and showed him our cattle and barns, and
+all the time he was planning how he would come at night and club
+us in our beds."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler passed her hand over her brow. "Yet we have had so
+many German neighbours, and never one that wasn't kind and
+helpful."
+
+"I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany
+made me want to go there. And the people that sing all those
+beautiful songs about women and children went into Belgian
+villages and--"
+
+"Don't, Claude!" his mother put out her hands as if to push his
+words back. "Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we
+must think about now. I can't but believe there is one fort the
+Germans didn't put down in their book, and that it will stand. We
+know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many God-fearing
+people there, and God has preserved it all these years. You saw
+in the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying."
+She leaned forward and smiled at him indulgently. "And you
+believe those prayers will accomplish nothing, son?"
+
+Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon
+certain subjects. "Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans
+are praying, too. And I guess they are just naturally more pious
+than the French." Taking up the book he began once more: "In the
+low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great loop of the
+Marne," etc.
+
+Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that
+river, and with the idea of its strategic importance, before it
+began to stand out in black headlines a few days later.
+
+The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to
+put in six hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the
+other side of the world, they would need bread. He took a third
+team himself and went into the field every morning to help Dan
+and Claude. The neighbours said that nobody but the Kaiser had
+ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.
+
+Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every
+morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile
+away, to get yesterday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the
+carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them
+as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
+wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning,
+indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read
+all the war news through before she stirred, while the
+grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers
+came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she
+saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down
+to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the
+windmill breathless.
+
+"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing
+at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it
+may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army
+went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew himself up. "Well, it will
+decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?"
+
+"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few
+of the English are there, and the French are terribly
+outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers
+upstairs."
+
+"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after
+I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper."
+
+In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father
+and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the
+sitting-room. "There is not much news, except that the battle is
+on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans
+outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in
+artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no
+farther." He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his
+room.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not
+to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a
+window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he
+knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the
+capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were
+responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the
+grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since
+the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with
+amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.
+
+It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four
+days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with
+the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital,
+not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only
+farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. The fact
+that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western "r"
+standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's
+imagination a firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and
+thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of
+French "politeness"--so much more terrifying than German
+bullets--and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's
+manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the
+eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so
+gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose
+and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much
+through all the centuries--but had never meant so much before.
+Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In
+great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the
+little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as
+they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star
+fall.
+
+
+
+X
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and Claude had gone down to the mill
+house, as Enid and her mother had returned from Michigan the day
+before. Mrs. Wheeler, propped back in a rocking chair, was
+reading, and Mr. Wheeler, in his shirt sleeves, his Sunday collar
+unbuttoned, was sitting at his walnut secretary, amusing himself
+with columns of figures. Presently he rose and yawned, stretching
+his arms above his head.
+
+"Claude thinks he wants to begin building right away, up on the
+quarter next the timber claim. I've been figuring on the lumber.
+Building materials are cheap just now, so I suppose I'd better
+let him go ahead."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up absently from the page. "Why, I suppose
+so."
+
+Her husband sat down astride a chair, and leaning his arms on the
+back of it, looked at her. "What do you think of this match,
+anyway? I don't know as I've heard you say."
+
+"Enid is a good, Christian girl..." Mrs. Wheeler began
+resolutely, but her sentence hung in the air like a question.
+
+He moved impatiently. "Yes, I know. But what does a husky boy
+like Claude want to pick out a girl like that for? Why,
+Evangeline, she'll be the old woman over again!"
+
+Apparently these misgivings were not new to Mrs. Wheeler, for she
+put out her hand to stop him and whispered in solemn agitation,
+"Don't say anything! Don't breathe!"
+
+"Oh, I won't interfere! I never do. I'd rather have her for a
+daughter-in-law than a wife, by a long shot. Claude's more of a
+fool than I thought him." He picked up his hat and strolled down
+to the barn, but his wife did not recover her composure so
+easily. She left the chair where she had hopefully settled
+herself for comfort, took up a feather duster and began moving
+distractedly about the room, brushing the surface of the
+furniture. When the war news was bad, or when she felt troubled
+about Claude, she set to cleaning house or overhauling the
+closets, thankful to be able to put some little thing to rights
+in such a disordered world.
+
+As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers
+out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work
+he began digging his cellar. He was building his house on the
+level stretch beside his father's timber claim because, when he
+was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most
+beautiful spot in the world. It was a square of about thirty
+acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a
+thick mulberry hedge on the south side. The trees had been
+neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage
+to trim them and care for them at odd moments.
+
+Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.
+He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and
+he meant that this one should be deep enough. One day Leonard
+Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making. Standing on
+the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating
+below.
+
+"My God, Claude, what do you want of a cellar as deep as that?
+When your wife takes a notion to go to China, you can open a
+trap-door and drop her through!"
+
+Claude flung down his pick and ran up the ladder. "Enid's not
+going to have notions of that sort," he said wrathfully.
+
+"Well, you needn't get mad. I'm glad to hear it. I was sorry when
+the other girl went. It always looked to me like Enid had her face
+set for China, but I haven't seen her for a good while,--not
+since before she went off to Michigan with the old lady."
+
+After Leonard was gone, Claude returned to his work, still out of
+humour. He was not altogether happy in his mind about Enid. When
+he went down to the mill it was usually Mr. Royce, not Enid, who
+sought to detain him, followed him down the path to the gate and
+seemed sorry to see him go. He could not blame Enid with any lack
+of interest in what he was doing. She talked and thought of
+nothing but the new house, and most of her suggestions were good.
+He often wished she would ask for something unreasonable and
+extravagant. But she had no selfish whims, and even insisted that
+the comfortable upstairs sleeping room he had planned with such
+care should be reserved for a guest chamber.
+
+As the house began to take shape, Enid came up often in her car,
+to watch its growth, to show Claude samples of wallpapers and
+draperies, or a design for a window-seat she had cut from some
+magazine. There could be no question of her pride in every
+detail. The disappointing thing was that she seemed more
+interested in the house than in him. These months when they could
+be together as much as they pleased, she treated merely as a
+period of time in which they were building a house.
+
+Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told
+himself. He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as
+his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.
+Marriage reduced all women to a common denominator; changed a
+cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one. It
+was quite right that Enid should be unconscious now of everything
+that she was to be when she was his wife. He told himself he
+wouldn't want it otherwise.
+
+But he was lonely, all the same. He lavished upon the little
+house the solicitude and cherishing care that Enid seemed not to
+need. He stood over the carpenters urging the greatest nicety in
+the finish of closets and cupboards, the convenient placing of
+shelves, the exact joining of sills and casings. Often he stayed
+late in the evening, after the workmen with their noisy boots had
+gone home to supper. He sat down on a rafter or on the skeleton
+of the upper porch and quite lost himself in brooding, in
+anticipation of things that seemed as far away as ever. The dying
+light, the quiet stars coming out, were friendly and sympathetic.
+One night a bird flew in and fluttered wildly about among the
+partitions, shrieking with fright before it darted out into the
+dusk through one of the upper windows and found its way to
+freedom.
+
+When the carpenters were ready to put in the staircase, Claude
+telephoned Enid and asked her to come and show them just what
+height she wanted the steps made. His mother had always had to
+climb stairs that were too steep. Enid stopped her car at the
+Frankfort High School at four o'clock and persuaded Gladys Farmer
+to drive out with her.
+
+When they arrived they found Claude working on the lattice
+enclosure of the back porch. "Claude is like Jonah," Enid
+laughed. "He wants to plant gourd vines here, so they will run
+over the lattice and make shade. I can think of other vines that
+might be more ornamental."
+
+Claude put down his hammer and said coaxingly: "Have you ever
+seen a gourd vine when it had something to climb on, Enid? You
+wouldn't believe how pretty they are; big green leaves, and
+gourds and yellow blossoms hanging all over them at the same
+time. An old German woman who keeps a lunch counter at one of
+those stations on the road to Lincoln has them running up her
+back porch, and I've wanted to plant some ever since I first saw
+hers."
+
+Enid smiled indulgently. "Well, I suppose you'll let me have
+clematis for the front porch, anyway? The men are getting ready
+to leave, so we'd better see about the steps."
+
+After the workmen had gone, Claude took the girls upstairs by the
+ladder. They emerged from a little entry into a large room which
+extended over both the front and back parlours. The carpenters
+called it "the pool hall". There were two long windows, like
+doors, opening upon the porch roof, and in the sloping ceiling
+were two dormer windows, one looking north to the timber claim
+and the other south toward Lovely Creek. Gladys at once felt a
+singular pleasantness about this chamber, empty and unplastered
+as it was. "What a lovely room!" she exclaimed.
+
+Claude took her up eagerly. "Don't you think so? You see it's my
+idea to have the second floor for ourselves, instead of cutting
+it up into little boxes as people usually do. We can come up here
+and forget the farm and the kitchen and all our troubles. I've
+made a big closet for each of us, and got everything just right.
+And now Enid wants to keep this room for preachers!"
+
+Enid laughed. "Not only for preachers, Claude. For Gladys, when
+she comes to visit us--you see she likes it--and for your mother
+when she comes to spend a week and rest. I don't think we ought
+to take the best room for ourselves."
+
+"Why not?" Claude argued hotly. "I'm building the whole house for
+ourselves. Come out on the porch roof, Gladys. Isn't this fine
+for hot nights? I want to put a railing round and make this into
+a balcony, where we can have chairs and a hammock."
+
+Gladys sat down on the low window-sill. "Enid, you'd be foolish
+to keep this for a guest room. Nobody would ever enjoy it as much
+as you would. You can see the whole country from here."
+
+Enid smiled, but showed no sign of relenting. "Let's wait and
+watch the sun go down. Be careful, Claude. It makes me nervous to
+see you lying there."
+
+He was stretched out on the edge of the roof, one leg hanging
+over, and his head pillowed on his arm. The flat fields turned
+red, the distant windmills flashed white, and little rosy clouds
+appeared in the sky above them.
+
+"If I make this into a balcony," Claude murmured, "the peak of
+the roof will always throw a shadow over it in the afternoon, and
+at night the stars will be right overhead. It will be a fine
+place to sleep in harvest time."
+
+"Oh, you could always come up here to sleep on a hot night," Enid
+said quickly.
+
+"It wouldn't be the same."
+
+They sat watching the light die out of the sky, and Enid and
+Gladys drew close together as the coolness of the autumn evening
+came on. The three friends were thinking about the same thing;
+and yet, if by some sorcery each had begun to speak his thoughts
+aloud, amazement and bitterness would have fallen upon all.
+Enid's reflections were the most blameless. The discussion about
+the guest room had reminded her of Brother Weldon. In September,
+on her way to Michigan with Mrs. Royce, she had stopped for a day
+in Lincoln to take counsel with Arthur Weldon as to whether she
+ought to marry one whom she described to him as "an unsaved man."
+Young Mr. Weldon approached this subject with a cautious tread,
+but when he learned that the man in question was Claude Wheeler,
+he became more partisan than was his wont. He seemed to think
+that her marrying Claude was the one way to reclaim him, and did
+not hesitate to say that the most important service devout girls
+could perform for the church was to bring promising young men to
+its support. Enid had been almost certain that Mr. Weldon would
+approve her course before she consulted him, but his concurrence
+always gratified her pride. She told him that when she had a home
+of her own she would expect him to spend a part of his summer
+vacation there, and he blushingly expressed his willingness to do
+so.
+
+Gladys, too, was lost in her own thoughts, sitting with that ease
+which made her seem rather indolent, her head resting against the
+empty window frame, facing the setting sun. The rosy light made
+her brown eyes gleam like old copper, and there was a moody look
+in them, as if in her mind she were defying something. When he
+happened to glance at her, it occurred to Claude that it was a
+hard destiny to be the exceptional person in a community, to be
+more gifted or more intelligent than the rest. For a girl it must
+be doubly hard. He sat up suddenly and broke the long silence.
+
+"I forgot, Enid, I have a secret to tell you. Over in the timber
+claim the other day I started up a flock of quail. They must be
+the only ones left in all this neighbourhood, and I doubt if they
+ever come out of the timber. The bluegrass hasn't been mowed in
+there for years,--not since I first went away to school, and maybe
+they live on the grass seeds. In summer, of course, there are
+mulberries."
+
+Enid wondered whether the birds could have learned enough about
+the world to stay hidden in the timber lot. Claude was sure they
+had.
+
+"Nobody ever goes near the place except Father; he stops there
+sometimes. Maybe he has seen them and never said a word. It would
+be just like him." He told them he had scattered shelled corn in
+the grass, so that the birds would not be tempted to fly over
+into Leonard Dawson's cornfield. "If Leonard saw them, he'd
+likely take a shot at them."
+
+"Why don't you ask him not to?" Enid suggested.
+
+Claude laughed. "That would be asking a good deal. When a bunch
+of quail rise out of a cornfield they're a mighty tempting sight,
+if a man likes hunting. We'll have a picnic for you when you come
+out next summer, Gladys. There are some pretty places over there
+in the timber."
+
+Gladys started up. "Why, it's night already! It's lovely here,
+but you must get me home, Enid."
+
+They found it dark inside. Claude took Enid down the ladder and
+out to her car, and then went back for Gladys. She was sitting on
+the floor at the top of the ladder. Giving her his hand he helped
+her to rise.
+
+"So you like my little house," he said gratefully.
+
+"Yes. Oh, yes!" Her voice was full of feeling, but she did not
+exert herself to say more. Claude descended in front of her to
+keep her from slipping. She hung back while he led her through
+confusing doorways and helped her over the piles of laths that
+littered the floors. At the edge of the gaping cellar entrance
+she stopped and leaned wearily on his arm for a moment. She did
+not speak, but he understood that his new house made her sad;
+that she, too, had come to the place where she must turn out of
+the old path. He longed to whisper to her and beg her not to
+marry his brother. He lingered and hesitated, fumbling in the
+dark. She had his own cursed kind of sensibility; she would
+expect too much from life and be disappointed. He was reluctant
+to lead her out into the chilly evening without some word of
+entreaty. He would willingly have prolonged their passage,--
+through many rooms and corridors. Perhaps, had that been
+possible, the strength in him would have found what it was
+seeking; even in this short interval it had stirred and made
+itself felt, had uttered a confused appeal. Claude was greatly
+surprised at himself.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Enid decided that she would be married in the first week of June.
+Early in May the plasterers and painters began to be busy in the
+new house. The walls began to shine, and Claude went about all
+day, oiling and polishing the hard-pine floors and wainscoting.
+He hated to have anybody step on his floors. He planted gourd
+vines about the back porch, set out clematis and lilac bushes,
+and put in a kitchen garden. He and Enid were going to Denver and
+Colorado Springs for their wedding trip, but Ralph would be at
+home then, and he had promised to come over and water the flowers
+and shrubs if the weather was dry.
+
+Enid often brought her work and sat sewing on the front porch
+while Claude was rubbing the woodwork inside the house, or
+digging and planting outside. This was the best part of his
+courtship. It seemed to him that he had never spent such happy
+days before. If Enid did not come, he kept looking down the road
+and listening, went from one thing to another and made no
+progress. He felt full of energy, so long as she sat there on the
+porch, with lace and ribbons and muslin in her lap. When he
+passed by, going in or out, and stopped to be near her for a
+moment, she seemed glad to have him tarry. She liked him to
+admire her needlework, and did not hesitate to show him the
+featherstitching and embroidery she was putting on her new
+underclothes. He could see, from the glances they exchanged, that
+the painters thought this very bold behaviour in one so soon to
+be a bride. He thought it very charming behaviour himself, though
+he would never have expected it of Enid. His heart beat hard when
+he realized how far she confided in him, how little she was
+afraid of him! She would let him linger there, standing over her
+and looking down at her quick fingers, or sitting on the ground
+at her feet, gazing at the muslin pinned to her knee, until his
+own sense of propriety told him to get about his work and spare
+the feelings of the painters.
+
+"When are you going over to the timber claim with me?" he asked,
+dropping on the ground beside her one warm, windy afternoon. Enid
+was sitting on the porch floor, her back against a pillar, and
+her feet on one of those round mats of pursley that grow over
+hard-beaten earth. "I've found my flock of quail again. They live
+in the deep grass, over by a ditch that holds water most of the
+year. I'm going to plant a few rows of peas in there, so they'll
+have a feeding ground at home. I consider Leonard's cornfield a
+great danger. I don't know whether to take him into my confidence
+or not."
+
+"You've told Ernest Havel, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" Claude replied, trying not to be aware of the little
+note of acrimony in her voice. "He's perfectly safe. That place
+is a paradise for birds. The trees are full of nests. You can
+stand over there in the morning and hear the young robins
+squawking for their breakfast. Come up early tomorrow morning and
+go over with me, won't you? But wear heavy shoes; it's wet in the
+long grass."
+
+While they were talking a sudden whirlwind swept round the corner
+of the house, caught up the little mound of folded lace
+corset-covers and strewed them over the dusty yard. Claude ran
+after them with Enid's flowered workbag and thrust them into it
+as he came upon one after another, fluttering in the weeds. When
+he returned, Enid had folded her needle-case and was putting on
+her hat. "Thank you," she said with a smile. "Did you find
+everything?"
+
+"I think so." He hurried toward the car to hide his guilty face.
+One little lace thing he had not put into the bag, but had thrust
+into his pocket.
+
+The next morning Enid came up early to hear the birds in the
+timber.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+On the night before his wedding Claude went to bed early. He had
+been dashing about with Ralph all day in the car, making final
+preparations, and was worn out. He fell asleep almost at once.
+The women of the household could not so easily forget the great
+event of tomorrow. After the supper dishes were washed, Mahailey
+clambered up to the attic to get the quilt she had so long been
+saving for a wedding present for Claude. She took it out
+of the chest, unfolded it, and counted the stars in the
+pattern--counting was an accomplishment she was proud of--before
+she wrapped it up. It was to go down to the mill house with the
+other presents tomorrow. Mrs. Wheeler went to bed many times that
+night. She kept thinking of things that ought to be looked after;
+getting up and going to make sure that Claude's heavy underwear
+had been put into his trunk, against the chance of cold in the
+mountains; or creeping downstairs to see that the six roasted
+chickens which were to help out at the wedding supper were
+securely covered from the cats. As she went about these tasks,
+she prayed constantly. She had not prayed so long and fervently
+since the battle of the Marne.
+
+Early the next morning Ralph loaded the big car with the presents
+and baskets of food and ran down to the Royces'. Two motors from
+town were already standing in the mill yard; they had brought a
+company of girls who came with all the June roses in Frankfort to
+trim the house for the wedding. When Ralph tooted his horn,
+half-a-dozen of them ran out to greet him, reproaching him
+because he had not brought his brother along. Ralph was
+immediately pressed into service. He carried the step-ladder
+wherever he was told, drove nails, and wound thorny sprays of
+rambler roses around the pillars between the front and back
+parlours, making the arch under which the ceremony was to take
+place.
+
+Gladys Farmer had not been able to leave her classes at the High
+School to help in this friendly work, but at eleven o'clock a
+livery automobile drove up, laden with white and pink peonies
+from her front yard, and bringing a box of hothouse flowers she
+had ordered for Enid from Hastings. The girls admired them, but
+declared that Gladys was extravagant, as usual; the flowers from
+her own yard would really have been enough. The car was driven by
+a lank, ragged boy who worked about the town garage, and who was
+called "Silent Irv," because nobody could ever get a word out of
+him. He had almost no voice at all,--a thin little squeak in the
+top of his throat, like the gasping whisper of a medium in her
+trance state. When he came to the front door, both arms full of
+peonies, he managed to wheeze out:
+
+"These are from Miss Farmer. There are some more down there."
+
+The girls went back to his car with him, and he took out a square
+box, tied up with white ribbons and little silver bells,
+containing the bridal bouquet.
+
+"How did you happen to get these?" Ralph asked the thin boy. "I
+was to go to town for them."
+
+The messenger swallowed. "Miss Farmer told me if there were any
+other flowers at the station marked for here, I should bring them
+along."
+
+"That was nice of her." Ralph thrust his hand into his trousers
+pocket. "How much? I'll settle with you before I forget."
+
+A pink flush swept over the boy's pale face,--a delicate face
+under ragged hair, contracted by a kind of shrinking unhappiness.
+His eyes were always half-closed, as if he did not want to see
+the world around him, or to be seen by it. He went about like
+somebody in a dream. "Miss Farmer," he whispered, "has paid me."
+
+"Well, she thinks of everything!" exclaimed one of the girls.
+"You used to go to school to Gladys, didn't you, Irv?"
+
+"Yes, mam." He got into his car without opening the door,
+slipping like an eel round the steering-rod, and drove off.
+
+The girls followed Ralph up the gravel walk toward the house. One
+whispered to the others: "Do you suppose Gladys will come out
+tonight with Bayliss Wheeler? I always thought she had a pretty
+warm spot in her heart for Claude, myself."
+
+Some one changed the subject. "I can't get over hearing Irv talk
+so much. Gladys must have put a spell on him."
+
+"She was always kind to him in school," said the girl who had
+questioned the silent boy. "She said he was good in his studies,
+but he was so frightened he could never recite. She let him write
+out the answers at his desk."
+
+Ralph stayed for lunch, playing about with the girls until his
+mother telephoned for him. "Now I'll have to go home and look
+after my brother, or he'll turn up tonight in a striped shirt."
+
+"Give him our love," the girls called after him, "and tell him
+not to be late."
+
+As he drove toward the farm, Ralph met Dan, taking Claude's trunk
+into town. He slowed his car. "Any message?" he called.
+
+Dan grinned. "Naw. I left him doin' as well as could be
+expected."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Ralph on the stairs. "He's up in his room. He
+complains his new shoes are too tight. I think it's nervousness.
+Perhaps he'll let you shave him; I'm sure he'll cut himself. And
+I wish the barber hadn't cut his hair so short, Ralph. I hate
+this new fashion of shearing men behind the ears. The back of his
+neck is the ugliest part of a man." She spoke with such
+resentment that Ralph broke into a laugh.
+
+"Why, Mother, I thought all men looked alike to you! Anyhow,
+Claude's no beauty."
+
+"When will you want your bath? I'll have to manage so that
+everybody won't be calling for hot water at once." She turned to
+Mr. Wheeler who sat writing a check at the secretary. "Father,
+could you take your bath now, and be out of the way?"
+
+"Bath?" Mr. Wheeler shouted, "I don't want any bath! I'm not
+going to be married tonight. I guess we don't have to boil the
+whole house for Enid."
+
+Ralph snickered and shot upstairs. He found Claude sitting on the
+bed, with one shoe off and one shoe on. A pile of socks lay
+scattered on the rug. A suitcase stood open on one chair and a
+black travelling bag on another.
+
+"Are you sure they're too small?" Ralph asked.
+
+"About four sizes."
+
+"Well, why didn't you get them big enough?"
+
+"I did. That shark in Hastings worked off another pair on me when
+I wasn't looking. That's all right," snatching away the shoe his
+brother had picked up to examine. "I don't care, so long as I can
+stand in them. You'd better go telephone the depot and ask if
+the train's on time."
+
+"They won't know yet. It's seven hours till it's due."
+
+"Then telephone later. But find out, somehow. I don't want to
+stand around that station, waiting for the train."
+
+Ralph whistled. Clearly, his young man was going to be hard to
+manage. He proposed a bath as a soothing measure. No, Claude had
+had his bath. Had he, then, packed his suitcase?
+
+"How the devil can I pack it when I don't know what I'm going to
+put on?"
+
+"You'll put on one shirt and one pair of socks. I'm going to get
+some of this stuff out of the way for you." Ralph caught up a
+handful of socks and fell to sorting them. Several had bright red
+spots on the toe. He began to laugh.
+
+"I know why your shoe hurts, you've cut your foot!"
+
+Claude sprang up as if a hornet had stung him. "Will you get out
+of here," he shouted, "and let me alone?"
+
+Ralph vanished. He told his mother he would dress at once, as
+they might have to use force with Claude at the last moment. The
+wedding ceremony was to be at eight, supper was to follow, and
+Claude and Enid were to leave Frankfort at 10:25, on the Denver
+express. At six o'clock, when Ralph knocked at his brother's
+door, he found him shaved and brushed, and dressed, except for
+his coat. His tucked shirt was not rumpled, and his tie was
+properly knotted. Whatever pain they concealed, his patent
+leather shoes were smooth and glistening and resolutely pointed.
+
+"Are you packed?" Ralph asked in astonishment.
+
+"Nearly. I wish you'd go over things and make them look a little
+neater, if you can. I'd hate to have a girl see the inside of
+that suitcase, the way it is. Where shall I put my cigars?
+They'll make everything smell, wherever I put them. All my
+clothes seem to smell of cooking, or starch, or something. I
+don't know what Mahailey does to them," he ended bitterly.
+
+Ralph looked outraged. "Well, of all ingratitude! Mahailey's been
+ironing your damned old shirts for a week!"
+
+"Yes, yes, I know. Don't rattle me. I forgot to put any
+handkerchiefs in my trunk, so you'll have to get the whole bunch
+in somewhere."
+
+Mr. Wheeler appeared in the doorway, his Sunday black trousers
+gallowsed up high over a white shirt, wafting a rich odor of
+bayrum from his tumbled hair. He held a thin folded paper
+delicately between his thick fingers.
+
+"Where is your bill-book, son?"
+
+Claude caught up his discarded trousers and extracted a square of
+leather from the pocket. His father took it and placed the bit of
+paper inside with the bank notes. "You may want to pick up some
+trifle your wife fancies," he said. "Have you got your railroad
+tickets in here? Here is your trunk check Dan brought back. Don't
+forget, I've put it in with your tickets and marked it C. W., so
+you'll know which is your check and which is Enid's."
+
+"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
+
+Claude had already drawn from the bank all the money he would
+need. This additional bank check was Mr. Wheeler's admission that
+he was sorry for some sarcastic remarks he had made a few days
+ago, when he discovered that Claude had reserved a stateroom on
+the Denver express. Claude had answered curtly that when Enid and
+her mother went to Michigan they always had a stateroom, and he
+wasn't going to ask her to travel less comfortably with him.
+
+At seven o'clock the Wheeler family set out in the two cars that
+stood waiting by the windmill. Mr. Wheeler drove the big
+Cadillac, and Ralph took Mahailey and Dan in the Ford. When they
+reached the mill house the outer yard was already black with
+motors, and the porch and parlours were full of people talking
+and moving about.
+
+Claude went directly upstairs. Ralph began to seat the guests,
+arranging the folding chairs in such a way as to leave a passage
+from the foot of the stairs to the floral arch he had constructed
+that morning. The preacher had his Bible in his hand and was
+standing under the light, hunting for his chapter. Enid would
+have preferred to have Mr. Weldon come down from Lincoln to marry
+her, but that would have wounded Mr. Snowberry deeply. After all,
+he was her minister, though he was not eloquent and persuasive
+like Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command
+than most human beings, and even those did not come to him
+readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them
+until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell
+upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he
+said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that
+he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a
+drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was a
+simple, courageous man.
+
+Ralph was to be both usher and best man. Gladys Farmer could not
+be one of the bridesmaids because she was to play the wedding
+march. At eight o'clock Enid and Claude came downstairs together,
+conducted by Ralph and followed by four girls dressed in white,
+like the bride. They took their places under the arch before the
+preacher. He began with the chapter from Genesis about the
+creation of man, and Adam's rib, reading in a laboured manner, as
+if he did not quite know why he had selected that passage and was
+looking for something he did not find. His nose-glasses kept
+falling off and dropping upon the open book. Throughout this
+prolonged fumbling Enid stood calm, looking at him respectfully,
+very pretty in her short veil. Claude was so pale that he looked
+unnatural,--nobody had ever seen him like that before. His face,
+between his very black clothes and his smooth, sandy hair, was
+white and severe, and he uttered his responses in a hollow voice.
+Mahailey, at the back of the room, in a black hat with green
+gooseberries on it, was standing, in order to miss nothing. She
+watched Mr. Snowberry as if she hoped to catch some visible sign
+of the miracle he was performing. She always wondered just what
+it was the preacher did to make the wrongest thing in the world
+the rightest thing in the world.
+
+When it was over, Enid went upstairs to put on her travelling
+dress, and Ralph and Gladys began seating the guests for supper.
+Just twenty minutes later Enid came down and took her place
+beside Claude at the head of the long table. The company rose and
+drank the bride's health in grape-juice punch. Mr. Royce,
+however, while the guests were being seated, had taken Mr.
+Wheeler down to the fruit cellar, where the two old friends drank
+off a glass of well-seasoned Kentucky whiskey, and shook hands.
+When they came back to the table, looking younger than when they
+withdrew, the preacher smelled the tang of spirits and felt
+slighted. He looked disconsolately into his ruddy goblet and
+thought about the marriage at Cana. He tried to apply his Bible
+literally to life and, though he didn't dare breathe it aloud in
+these days, he could never see why he was better than his Lord.
+
+Ralph, as master of ceremonies, kept his head and forgot nothing.
+When it was time to start, he tapped Claude on the shoulder,
+cutting his father short in one of his best stories. Contrary to
+custom, the bridal couple were to go to the station
+unaccompanied, and they vanished from the head of the table with
+only a nod and a smile to the guests. Ralph hurried them into the
+light car, where he had already stowed Enid's hand luggage. Only
+wizened little Mrs. Royce slipped out from the kitchen to bid
+them good-bye.
+
+That evening some bad boys had come out from town and strewn the
+road near the mill with dozens of broken glass bottles, after
+which they hid in the wild plum bushes to wait for the fun.
+Ralph's was the first car out, and though his lights glittered on
+this bed of jagged glass, there was no time to stop; the road was
+ditched on either side, so he had to drive straight ahead, and
+got into Frankfort on flat tires. The express whistled just as he
+pulled up at the station. He and Claude caught up the four pieces
+of hand luggage and put them in the stateroom. Leaving Enid there
+with the bags, the two boys went to the rear platform of the
+observation car to talk until the last moment. Ralph checked off
+on his fingers the list of things he had promised Claude to
+attend to. Claude thanked him feelingly. He felt that without
+Ralph he could never have got married at all. They had never been
+such good friends as during the last fortnight.
+
+The wheels began to turn. Ralph gripped Claude's hand, ran to the
+front of the car and stepped off. As Claude passed him, he stood
+waving his handkerchief,--a rather funny figure under the station
+lights, in his black clothes and his stiff straw hat, his short
+legs well apart, wearing his incurably jaunty air.
+
+The train glided quietly out through the summer darkness, along
+the timbered river valley. Claude was alone on the back platform,
+smoking a nervous cigar. As they passed the deep cut where Lovely
+Creek flowed into the river, he saw the lights of the mill house
+flash for a moment in the distance. The night air was still;
+heavy with the smell of sweet clover that grew high along the
+tracks, and of wild grapevines wet with dew. The conductor came
+to ask for the tickets, saying with a wise smile that he had been
+hunting for him, as he didn't like to trouble the lady.
+
+After he was gone, Claude looked at his watch, threw away the end
+of his cigar, and went back through the Pullman cars. The
+passengers had gone to bed; the overhead lights were always
+turned low when the train left Frankfort. He made his way through
+the aisles of swaying green curtains, and tapped at the door of
+his state room. It opened a little way, and Enid stood there in a
+white silk dressing-gown with many ruffles, her hair in two
+smooth braids over her shoulders.
+
+"Claude," she said in a low voice, "would you mind getting a
+berth somewhere out in the car tonight? The porter says they are
+not all taken. I'm not feeling very well. I think the dressing on
+the chicken salad must have been too rich."
+
+He answered mechanically. "Yes, certainly. Can't I get you
+something?"
+
+"No, thank you. Sleep will do me more good than anything else.
+Good-night."
+
+She closed the door, and he heard the lock slip. He stood looking
+at the highly polished wood of the panel for a moment, then
+turned irresolutely and went back along the slightly swaying
+aisle of green curtains. In the observation car he stretched
+himself out upon two wicker chairs and lit another cigar. At
+twelve o'clock the porter came in.
+
+"This car is closed for the night, sah. Is you the gen'leman from
+the stateroom in fourteen? Do you want a lower?"
+
+"No, thank you. Is there a smoking car?"
+
+"They is the day-coach smokah, but it ain't likely very clean at
+this time o' night."
+
+"That's all right. It's forward?" Claude absently handed him a
+coin, and the porter conducted him to a very dirty car where the
+floor was littered with newspapers and cigar stumps, and the
+leather cushions were grey with dust. A few desperate looking men
+lay about with their shoes off and their suspenders hanging down
+their backs. The sight of them reminded Claude that his left foot
+was very sore, and that his shoes must have been hurting him for
+some time. He pulled them off, and thrust his feet, in their silk
+socks, on the opposite seat.
+
+On that long, dirty, uncomfortable ride Claude felt many things,
+but the paramount feeling was homesickness. His hurt was of a
+kind that made him turn with a sort of aching cowardice to the
+old, familiar things that were as sure as the sunrise. If only
+the sagebrush plain, over which the stars were shining, could
+suddenly break up and resolve itself into the windings of Lovely
+Creek, with his father's house on the hill, dark and silent in
+the summer night! When he closed his eyes he could see the light
+in his mother's window; and, lower down, the glow of Mahailey's
+lamp, where she sat nodding and mending his old shirts. Human
+love was a wonderful thing, he told himself, and it was most
+wonderful where it had least to gain.
+
+By morning the storm of anger, disappointment, and humiliation
+that was boiling in him when he first sat down in the observation
+car, had died out. One thing lingered; the peculiarly casual,
+indifferent, uninterested tone of his wife's voice when she sent
+him away. It was the flat tone in which people make commonplace
+remarks about common things.
+
+Day broke with silvery brightness on the summer sage. The sky
+grew pink, the sand grew gold. The dawn-wind brought through the
+windows the acrid smell of the sagebrush: an odour that is
+peculiarly stimulating in the early morning, when it always seems
+to promise freedom... large spaces, new beginnings, better
+days.
+
+The train was due in Denver at eight o'clock. Exactly at seven
+thirty Claude knocked at Enid's door,--this time firmly. She was
+dressed, and greeted him with a fresh, smiling face, holding her
+hat in her hand.
+
+"Are you feeling better?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes! I am perfectly all right this morning. I've put out all
+your things for you, there on the seat."
+
+He glanced at them. "Thank you. But I won't have time to change,
+I'm afraid."
+
+"Oh, won't you? I'm so sorry I forgot to give you your bag last
+night. But you must put on another necktie, at least. You look
+too much like a groom."
+
+"Do I?" he asked, with a scarcely perceptible curl of his lip.
+
+Everything he needed was neatly arranged on the plush seat;
+shirt, collar, tie, brushes, even a handkerchief. Those in his
+pockets were black from dusting off the cinders that blew in all
+night, and he threw them down and took up the clean one. There
+was a damp spot on it, and as he unfolded it he recognized the
+scent of a cologne Enid often used. For some reason this
+attention unmanned him. He felt the smart of tears in his eyes,
+and to hide them bent over the metal basin and began to scrub his
+face. Enid stood behind him, adjusting her hat in the mirror.
+
+"How terribly smoky you are, Claude. I hope you don't smoke
+before breakfast?"
+
+"No. I was in the smoking car awhile. I suppose my clothes got
+full of it."
+
+"You are covered with dust and cinders, too!" She took the
+clothes broom from the rack and began to brush him.
+
+Claude caught her hand. "Don't, please!" he said sharply. "The
+porter can do that for me."
+
+Enid watched him furtively as he closed and strapped his
+suitcase. She had often heard that men were cross before
+breakfast.
+
+"Sure you've forgotten nothing?" he asked before he closed her
+bag.
+
+"Yes. I never lose things on the train,--do you?"
+
+"Sometimes," he replied guardedly, not looking up as he snapped
+the catch.
+
+
+
+
+Book Three; Sunrise on the Prairie
+
+I
+
+Claude was to continue farming with his father, and after he
+returned from his wedding journey, he fell at once to work. The
+harvest was almost as abundant as that of the summer before, and
+he was busy in the fields six days a week.
+
+One afternoon in August he came home with his team, watered and
+fed the horses in a leisurely way, and then entered his house by
+the back door. Enid, he knew, would not be there. She had gone to
+Frankfort to a meeting of the Anti-Saloon League. The Prohibition
+party was bestirring itself in Nebraska that summer, confident of
+voting the State dry the following year, which purpose it
+triumphantly accomplished.
+
+Enid's kitchen, full of the afternoon sun, glittered with new
+paint, spotless linoleum, and blue-and-white cooking vessels. In
+the dining-room the cloth was laid, and the table was neatly set
+for one. Claude opened the icebox, where his supper was arranged
+for him; a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled
+eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of
+ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter. He
+placed these things on the table, cut some bread, and after
+carelessly washing his face and hands, sat down to eat in his
+working shirt. He propped the newspaper against a red glass water
+pitcher and read the war news while he had his supper. He was
+annoyed when he heard heavy footsteps coming around the house.
+Leonard Dawson stuck his head in at the kitchen door, and Claude
+rose quickly and reached for his hat; but Leonard came in,
+uninvited, and sat down. His brown shirt was wet where his
+suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide
+straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with
+dust.
+
+"Go ahead and finish your supper," he cried. "Having a wife with
+a car of her own is next thing to having no wife at all. How they
+do like to roll around! I've been mighty blamed careful to see
+that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how
+soon do you figure you'll be able to let me have the thrasher? My
+wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you
+reckon your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I
+helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Mother wouldn't like it. We never have done
+that, even when we were crowded."
+
+"Well, I think I'll go over and have a talk with your mother. If
+she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her
+it's pretty near a case of your neighbour's ox falling into a pit
+on the Sabbath day."
+
+"That's a good idea. She's always reasonable."
+
+Leonard rose. "What's the news?"
+
+"The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic;
+coming this way, too."
+
+"That's all right," Leonard declared. "Maybe Americans will stay
+at home now, and mind their own business. I don't care how they
+chew each other up over there, not a bit! I'd as soon one got
+wiped off the map as another."
+
+"Your grandparents were English people, weren't they?"
+
+"That's a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and
+little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn't mind if the baby
+turned out to have my grandmother's skin. She had the finest
+complexion I ever saw."
+
+As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens
+with red combs ran squawking toward them. It was the hour at
+which the poultry was usually fed. Leonard stopped to admire
+them. "You've got a fine lot of hens. I always did like white
+leghorns. Where are all your roosters?"
+
+"We've only got one. He's shut up in the coop. The brood hens are
+setting. Enid is going to try raising winter frys."
+
+"Only one rooster? And may I ask what these hens do?"
+
+Claude laughed. "They lay eggs, just the same,--better. It's the
+fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather."
+
+This information seemed to make Leonard angry. "I never heard of
+such damned nonsense," he blustered. "I raise chickens on a
+natural basis, or I don't raise 'em at all." He jumped into his
+car for fear he would say more.
+
+When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat
+near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle. Dirty and sweaty as
+he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and
+smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its
+neck. The little girl was beside herself with delight.
+
+"Go and wash up for supper, Len," Susie called from the stove. He
+put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking
+with his eyes shut.
+
+"Susie, I'm in an awful temper. I can't stand that damned wife of
+Claude's!"
+
+She was spearing roasting ears out of a big iron pot and looked
+up through the steam. "Why, have you seen her? I was listening on
+the telephone this morning and heard her tell Bayliss she would
+be in town until late." "Oh, yes! She went to town all right, and
+he's over there eating a cold supper by himself. That woman's a
+fanatic. She ain't content with practising prohibition on
+humankind; she's begun now on the hens." While he placed the
+chairs and wheeled the baby up to the table, he explained Enid's
+method of raising poultry to his wife. She said she really didn't
+see any harm in it.
+
+"Now be honest, Susie; did you ever know hens would keep on
+laying without a rooster?"
+
+"No, I didn't, but I was brought up the old-fashioned way. Enid
+has poultry books and garden books, and all such things. I don't
+doubt she gets good ideas from them. But anyhow, you be careful.
+She's our nearest neighbour, and I don't want to have trouble
+with her."
+
+"I'll have to keep out of her way, then. If she tries to do any
+missionary work among my chickens, I'll tell her a few home
+truths her husband's too bashful to tell her. It's my opinion
+she's got that boy cowed already."
+
+"Now, Len, you know she won't bother your chickens. You keep
+quiet. But Claude does seem to sort of avoid people," Susie
+admitted, filling her husband's plate again. "Mrs. Joe Havel says
+Ernest don't go to Claude's any more. It seems Enid went over
+there and wanted Ernest to paste some Prohibition posters about
+fifteen million drunkards on their barn, for an example to the
+Bohemians. Ernest wouldn't do it, and told her he was going to
+vote for saloons, and Enid was quite spiteful, Mrs. Havel said.
+It's too bad, when those boys were such chums. I used to like to
+see them together." Susie spoke so kindly that her husband shot
+her a quick glance of shy affection.
+
+"Do you suppose Claude relished having that preacher visiting
+them, when they hadn't been married two months? Sitting on the
+front porch in a white necktie every day, while Claude was out
+cutting wheat?"
+
+"Well, anyhow, I guess Claude had more to eat when Brother Weldon
+was staying there. Preachers won't be fed on calories, or
+whatever it is Enid calls 'em," said Susie, who was given to
+looking on the bright side of things. "Claude's wife keeps a
+wonderful kitchen; but so could I, if I never cooked any more
+than she does."
+
+Leonard gave her a meaning look. "I don't believe you would live
+with the sort of man you could feed out of a tin can."
+
+"No, I don't believe I would." She pushed the buggy toward him.
+"Take her up, Daddy. She wants to play with you."
+
+Leonard set the baby on his shoulder and carried her off to show
+her the pigs. Susie kept laughing to herself as she cleared the
+table and washed the dishes; she was much amused by what her
+husband had told her.
+
+Late that evening, when Leonard was starting for the barn to see
+that all was well before he went to bed, he observed a discreet
+black object rolling along the highroad in the moonlight, a red
+spark winking in the rear. He called Susie to the door.
+
+"See, there she goes; going home to report the success of the
+meeting to Claude. Wouldn't that be a nice way to have your wife
+coming in?"
+
+"Now, Leonard, if Claude likes it--"
+
+"Likes it?" Big Leonard drew himself up. "What can he do, poor
+kid? He's stung!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+After Leonard left him, Claude cleared away the remains of his
+supper and watered the gourd vine before he went to milk. It was
+not really a gourd vine at all, but a summer-squash, of the
+crook-necked, warty, orange-coloured variety, and it was now full
+of ripe squashes, hanging by strong stems among the rough green
+leaves and prickly tendrils. Claude had watched its rapid growth
+and the opening of its splotchy yellow blossoms, feeling grateful
+to a thing that did so lustily what it was put there to do. He
+had the same feeling for his little Jersey cow, which came home
+every night with full udders and gave down her milk willingly,
+keeping her tail out of his face, as only a well disposed cow will
+do.
+
+His milking done, he sat down on the front porch and lit a cigar.
+While he smoked, he did not think about anything but the quiet
+and the slow cooling of the atmosphere, and how good it was to
+sit still. The moon swam up over the bare wheat fields, big and
+magical, like a great flower. Presently he got some bath towels,
+went across the yard to the windmill, took off his clothes, and
+stepped into the tin horse tank. The water had been warmed by the
+sun all afternoon, and was not much cooler than his body. He
+stretched himself out in it, and resting his head on the metal
+rim, lay on his back, looking up at the moon. The sky was a
+midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed
+to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an
+invisible current. One expected to see its great petals open.
+
+For some reason, Claude began to think about the far-off times
+and countries it had shone upon. He never thought of the sun as
+coming from distant lands, or as having taken part in human life
+in other ages. To him, the sun rotated about the wheatfields. But
+the moon, somehow, came out of the historic past, and made him
+think of Egypt and the Pharaohs, Babylon and the hanging gardens.
+She seemed particularly to have looked down upon the follies and
+disappointments of men; into the slaves' quarters of old times,
+into prison windows, and into fortresses where captives
+languished.
+
+Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of
+people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were
+captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death.
+Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the
+windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe
+which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all. Perhaps even in
+people like Mrs. Royce and his brother Bayliss there was
+something of this sort--but that was a shuddery thought. He
+dismissed it with a quick movement of his hand through the water,
+which, disturbed, caught the light and played black and gold,
+like something alive, over his chest. In his own mother the
+imprisoned spirit was almost more present to people than her
+corporeal self. He had so often felt it when he sat with her on
+summer nights like this. Mahailey, too, had one, though the walls
+of her prison were so thick--and Gladys Farmer. Oh, yes, how much
+Gladys must have to tell this perfect confidant! The people whose
+hearts were set high needed such intercourse--whose wish was so
+beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy
+it. And these children of the moon, with their unappeased
+longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children
+of the sun. This conception flooded the boy's heart like a second
+moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay
+deathly still for fear of losing it.
+
+At last the black cubical object which had caught Leonard
+Dawson's wrathful eye, came rolling along the highroad. Claude
+snatched up his clothes and towels, and without waiting to make
+use of either, he ran, a white man across a bare white yard.
+Gaining the shelter of the house, he found his bathrobe, and fled
+to the upper porch, where he lay down in the hammock. Presently
+he heard his name called, pronounced as if it were spelled
+"Clod." His wife came up the stairs and looked out at him. He lay
+motionless, with his eyes closed. She went away. When all was
+quiet again he looked off at the still country, and the moon in
+the dark indigo sky. His revelation still possessed him, making
+his whole body sensitive, like a tightly strung bow. In the
+morning he had forgotten, or was ashamed of what had seemed so
+true and so entirely his own the night before. He agreed, for the
+most part, that it was better not to think about such things, and
+when he could he avoided thinking.
+
+
+
+III
+
+After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often
+persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard,
+to take her as far as Claude's new house. She was glad Enid
+didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors
+and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in
+the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
+sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her
+work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily
+and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing
+machine before he went to work, and by nine o'clock the clothes
+were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before
+in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
+satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working
+shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.
+
+Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two
+thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said
+that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected
+her husband depended upon one's conception of what was his due.
+When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was
+conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
+happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not
+happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed
+him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and
+make the best of what was good in it. If his wife didn't love
+him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
+thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he
+came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.
+Everything about a man's embrace was distasteful to Enid;
+something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,--
+for Eve's transgression, perhaps.
+
+This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of
+any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude
+before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a
+readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in
+exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that
+for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient
+with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not
+understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting
+remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went
+over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in
+the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
+
+Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself,
+"It's the end of everything for me." Other men than he must have
+been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a
+lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy because he was an
+idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
+love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that
+it might be otherwise.
+
+Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright
+summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but
+broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, but even more
+in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid
+could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At
+such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging
+hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.
+
+In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why
+she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace
+and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful
+attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he
+came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
+against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head
+drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity
+which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in
+him? Was it, after all, his fault?
+
+Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one
+else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every
+day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came
+out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid's
+vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the
+Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.
+Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against
+alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the
+pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to take any part in
+the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what
+Bayliss and Enid called "our literature."
+
+In the farming towns the term "literature" was applied only to a
+special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature,
+Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease,
+there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature. This special application of
+the word didn't bother Claude, but his mother, being an
+old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
+
+Enid did not understand her husband's indifference to a burning
+question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest
+Havel. She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her
+committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and
+wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had something
+to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He
+did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the
+lightning had blasted. Further than that he wouldn't have let
+anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.
+
+The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut
+in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried
+and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and
+dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife's
+blood with horror--and some would have melted his mother's heart
+with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless
+blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as
+they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from
+branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with
+life--that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told
+himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into
+the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and
+interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with
+compromises.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+From her upstairs window Mrs. Wheeler could see Claude moving
+back and forth in the west field, drilling wheat. She felt lonely
+for him. He didn't come home as often as he might. She had begun
+to wonder whether he was one of those people who are always
+discontented; but whatever his disappointments were, he kept them
+locked in his own breast. One had to learn the lessons of life.
+Nevertheless, it made her a little sad to see him so settled and
+indifferent at twenty-three.
+
+After watching from the window for a few moments, she turned to
+the telephone and called up Claude's house, asking Enid whether
+she would mind if he came there for dinner. "Mahailey and I get
+lonesome with Mr. Wheeler away so much," she added.
+
+"Why, no, Mother Wheeler, of course not." Enid spoke cheerfully,
+as she always did. "Have you any one there you can send over to
+tell him?"
+
+"I thought I would walk over myself, Enid. It's not far, if I
+take my time."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler left the house a little before noon and stopped at
+the creek to rest before she climbed the long hill. At the edge
+of the field she sat down against a grassy bank and waited until
+the horses came tramping up the long rows. Claude saw her and
+pulled them in.
+
+"Anything wrong, Mother?" he called.
+
+"Oh, no! I'm going to take you home for dinner with me, that's
+all. I telephoned Enid." He unhooked his team, and he and his
+mother started down the hill together, walking behind the horses.
+Though they had not been alone like this for a long while, she
+felt it best to talk about impersonal things.
+
+"Don't let me forget to give you an article about the execution
+of that English nurse."
+
+"Edith Cavell? I've read about it," he answered listlessly. "It's
+nothing to be surprised at. If they could sink the Lusitania,
+they could shoot an English nurse, certainly."
+
+"Someway I feel as if this were different," his mother murmured.
+"It's like the hanging of John Brown. I wonder they could find
+soldiers to execute the sentence."
+
+"Oh, I guess they have plenty of such soldiers!"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up at him. "I don't see how we can stay out
+of it much longer, do you? I suppose our army wouldn't be a drop
+in the bucket, even if we could get it over. They tell us we can
+be more useful in our agriculture and manufactories than we could
+by going into the war. I only hope it isn't campaign talk. I do
+distrust the Democrats."
+
+Claude laughed. "Why, Mother, I guess there's no party politics
+in this."
+
+She shook her head. "I've never yet found a public question in
+which there wasn't party politics. Well, we can only do our duty
+as it comes to us, and have faith. This field finishes your fall
+work?"
+
+"Yes. I'll have time to do some things about the place, now. I'm
+going to make a good ice-house and put up my own ice this
+winter."
+
+"Were you thinking of going up to Lincoln, for a little?"
+
+"I guess not."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back
+on old pleasures and old friends.
+
+"Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in
+Frankfort?"
+
+"I think so, Mother," he answered a little impatiently. "I told
+her she could attend to it when she was in town some day."
+
+"Of course," his mother persevered, "some of the programs are not
+very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of
+what we have."
+
+He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that.
+His horses stopped at the water tank. "Don't wait for me. I'll be
+along in a minute." Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled.
+"Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give
+me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool
+the other."
+
+She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost
+disappeared. "I thought I was smart that time!"
+
+It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to
+get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.
+
+While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a
+page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her
+they were all photographs,--she knew no other way of making a
+picture.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she asked, "how comes it all them Germans is such
+ugly lookin' people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here
+ain't ugly lookin'."
+
+Claude put her off indulgently. "Maybe it's the ugly ones that
+are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our
+neighbours."
+
+"Then why don't they make their soldiers stay home, an' not go
+breakin' other people's things, an' turnin' 'em out of their
+houses," she muttered indignantly. "They say little babies was
+born out in the snow last winter, an' no fires for their mudders
+nor nothin'. 'Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn't like that in our war;
+the soldiers didn't do nothin' to the women an' chillun. Many a
+time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an' they never so
+much as broke a piece of my mudder's chiney."
+
+"You'll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must
+have my dinner and get back to work. If we don't get our wheat
+in, those people over there won't have anything to eat, you
+know."
+
+The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she
+could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over
+photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages,
+things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry
+that used to stop to drink at her mother's cold mountain spring.
+She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding
+feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a
+clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back,
+"as raw as beef where he'd scratched it." Five of her brothers
+were in the Confederate army. When one was wounded in the second
+battle of Bull Run, her mother had borrowed a wagon and horses,
+gone a three days' journey to the field hospital, and brought the
+boy home to the mountain. Mahailey could remember how her older
+sisters took turns pouring cold spring water on his gangrenous
+leg all day and all night. There were no doctors left in the
+neighbourhood, and as nobody could amputate the boy's leg, he
+died by inches. Mahailey was the only person in the Wheeler
+household who had ever seen war with her own eyes, and she felt
+that this fact gave her a definite superiority.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude had been married a year and a half. One December morning
+he got a telephone message from his father-in-law, asking him to
+come in to Frankfort at once. He found Mr. Royce sunk in his
+desk-chair, smoking as usual, with several foreign-looking
+letters on the table before him. As he took these out of their
+envelopes and sorted the pages, Claude noticed how unsteady his
+hands had become.
+
+One letter, from the chief of the medical staff in the mission
+school where Caroline Royce taught, informed Mr. Royce that his
+daughter was seriously ill in the mission hospital. She would
+have to be sent to a more salubrious part of the country for rest
+and treatment, and would not be strong enough to return to her
+duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could
+come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school
+authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a
+fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline
+herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a
+box of cigars toward him and began to talk despondently about
+missionaries.
+
+"I could go to her," he complained, "but what good would that do?
+I'm not in sympathy with her ideas, and it would only fret her.
+You can see she's made her mind up not to come home. I don't
+believe in one people trying to force their ways or their
+religion on another. I'm not that kind of man." He sat looking at
+his cigar. After a long pause he broke out suddenly, "China has
+been drummed into my ears. It seems like a long way to go to
+hunt for trouble, don't it? A man hasn't got much control over
+his own life, Claude. If it ain't poverty or disease that
+torments him, it's a name on the map. I could have made out
+pretty well, if it hadn't been for China, and some other things....
+If Carrie'd had to teach for her clothes and help pay off
+my notes, like old man Harrison's daughters, like enough she'd
+have stayed at home. There's always something. I don't know what
+to say about showing these letters to Enid."
+
+"Oh, she will have to know about it, Mr. Royce. If she feels that
+she ought to go to Carrie, it wouldn't be right for me to
+interfere."
+
+Mr. Royce shook his head. "I don't know. It don't seem fair that
+China should hang over you, too."
+
+When Claude got home he remarked as he handed Enid the letters,
+"Your father has been a good deal upset by this. I never saw him
+look so old as he did today."
+
+Enid studied their contents, sitting at her orderly little desk,
+while Claude pretended to read the paper.
+
+"It seems clear that I am the one to go," she said when she had
+finished.
+
+"You think it's necessary for some one to go? I don't see it."
+
+"It would look very strange if none of us went," Enid replied
+with spirit.
+
+"How, look strange?"
+
+"Why, it would look to her associates as if her family had no
+feeling."
+
+"Oh, if that's all!" Claude smiled perversely and took up his
+paper again. "I wonder how it will look to people here if you go
+off and leave your husband?"
+
+"What a mean thing to say, Claude!" She rose sharply, then
+hesitated, perplexed. "People here know me better than that. It
+isn't as if you couldn't be perfectly comfortable at your
+mother's." As he did not glance up from his paper, she went into
+the kitchen.
+
+Claude sat still, listening to Enid's quick movements as she
+opened up the range to get supper. The light in the room grew
+greyer. Outside the fields melted into one another as evening
+came on. The young trees in the yard bent and whipped about under
+a bitter north wind. He had often thought with pride that winter
+died at his front doorstep; within, no draughty halls, no chilly
+corners. This was their second year here. When he was driving
+home, the thought that he might be free of this house for a long
+while had stirred a pleasant excitement in him; but now, he
+didn't want to leave it. Something grew soft in him. He wondered
+whether they couldn't try again, and make things go better. Enid
+was singing in the kitchen in a subdued, rather lonely voice. He
+rose and went out for his milking coat and pail. As he passed his
+wife by the window, he stopped and put his arm about her
+questioningly.
+
+She looked up. "That's right. You're feeling better about it,
+aren't you? I thought you would. Gracious, what a smelly coat,
+Claude! I must find another for you."
+
+Claude knew that tone. Enid never questioned the rightness of her
+own decisions. When she made up her mind, there was no turning
+her. He went down the path to the barn with his hands stuffed in
+his trousers pockets, his bright pail hanging on his arm. Try
+again--what was there to try? Platitudes, littleness, falseness....
+His life was choking him, and he hadn't the courage to
+break with it. Let her go! Let her go when she would!... What
+a hideous world to be born into! Or was it hideous only for him?
+Everything he touched went wrong under his hand--always had.
+
+When they sat down at the supper table in the back parlour an
+hour later, Enid looked worn, as if this time her decision had
+cost her something. "I should think you might have a restful
+winter at your mother's," she began cheerfully. "You won't have
+nearly so much to look after as you do here. We needn't disturb
+things in this house. I will take the silver down to Mother, and
+we can leave everything else just as it is. Would there be room
+for my car in your father's garage? You might find it a
+convenience."
+
+"Oh, no! I won't need it. I'll put it up at the mill house," he
+answered with an effort at carelessness.
+
+All the familiar objects that stood about them in the lamplight
+seemed stiller and more solemn than usual, as if they were
+holding their breath.
+
+"I suppose you had better take the chickens over to your
+mother's," Enid continued evenly. "But I shouldn't like them to
+get mixed with her Plymouth Rocks; there's not a dark feather
+among them now. Do ask Mother Wheeler to use all the eggs, and
+not to let my hens set in the spring."
+
+"In the spring?" Claude looked up from his plate.
+
+"Of course, Claude. I could hardly get back before next fall, if
+I'm to be of any help to poor Carrie. I might try to be home for
+harvest, if that would make it more convenient for you." She rose
+to bring in the dessert.
+
+"Oh, don't hurry on my account!" he muttered, staring after her
+disappearing figure.
+
+Enid came back with the hot pudding and the after-dinner coffee
+things. "This has come on us so suddenly that we must make our
+plans at once," she explained. "I should think your mother would
+be glad to keep Rose for us; she is such a good cow. And then you
+can have all the cream you want."
+
+He took the little gold-rimmed cup she held out to him. "If you
+are going to be gone until next fall, I shall sell Rose," he
+announced gruffly.
+
+"But why? You might look a long time before you found another
+like her."
+
+"I shall sell her, anyhow. The horses, of course, are Father's;
+he paid for them. If you clear out, he may want to rent this
+place. You may find a tenant in here when you get back from
+China." Claude swallowed his coffee, put down the cup, and went
+into the front parlour, where he lit a cigar. He walked up and
+down, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who still sat at the
+table in the circle of light from the hanging lamp. Her head,
+bent forward a little, showed the neat part of her brown hair.
+When she was perplexed, her face always looked sharper, her chin
+longer.
+
+"If you've no feeling for the place," said Claude from the other
+room, "you can hardly expect me to hang around and take care of
+it. All the time you were campaigning, I played housekeeper
+here."
+
+Enid's eyes narrowed, but she did not flush. Claude had never
+seen a wave of colour come over his wife's pale, smooth cheeks.
+
+"Don't be childish. You know I care for this place; it's our
+home. But no feeling would be right that kept me from doing my
+duty. You are well, and you have your mother's house to go to.
+Carrie is ill and among strangers."
+
+She began to gather up the dishes. Claude stepped quickly out
+into the light and confronted her. "It's not only your going. You
+know what's the matter with me. It's because you want to go. You
+are glad of a chance to get away among all those preachers, with
+their smooth talk and make-believe."
+
+Enid took up the tray. "If I am glad, it's because you are not
+willing to govern our lives by Christian ideals. There is
+something in you that rebels all the time. So many important
+questions have come up since our marriage, and you have been
+indifferent or sarcastic about every one of them. You want to
+lead a purely selfish life."
+
+She walked resolutely out of the room and shut the door behind
+her. Later, when she came back, Claude was not there. His hat and
+coat were gone from the hat rack; he must have let himself out
+quietly by the front door. Enid sat up until eleven and then went
+to bed.
+
+In the morning, on coming out from her bedroom, she found Claude
+asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on. She had a
+moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any
+smell of spirits. She began preparations for breakfast, moving
+quietly.
+
+Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost
+no time. She engaged passage and cabled the mission school. She
+left Frankfort the week before Christmas. Claude and Ralph took
+her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express.
+When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother's, and sold
+his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson. Except when he went to
+see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the
+neighbours. He felt that they were discussing his domestic
+affairs,--as, of course, they were. The Royces and the Wheelers,
+they said, couldn't behave like anybody else, and it was no use
+their trying. If Claude built the best house in the
+neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn't live in it. And if he
+had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!
+
+One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and
+went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and
+bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar.
+Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the
+kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went
+away. He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses
+with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows
+securely. As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and
+listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice. All these things
+that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such
+pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop
+of any second-hand dealer.
+
+How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the
+feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris
+of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and
+decaying things in nature. Rubbish... junk... his mind
+could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the
+dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued
+from day to day. Actions without meaning.... As he looked out
+and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he
+could not help thinking how much better it would be if people
+could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under
+the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats
+forgotten. He wondered how he was to go on through the years
+ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his
+soul.
+
+At last he locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and went
+over to the timber claim to smoke a cigar and say goodbye to the
+place. There he soberly walked about for more than an hour, under
+the crooked trees with empty birds' nests in their forks. Every
+time he came to a break in the hedge, he could see the little
+house, giving itself up so meekly to solitude. He did not believe
+that he would ever live there again. Well, at any rate, the money
+his father had put into the place would not be lost; he could
+always get a better tenant for having a comfortable house there.
+Several of the boys in the neighbourhood were planning to be
+married within the year. The future of the house was safe. And
+he? He stopped short in his walk; his feet had made an uncertain,
+purposeless trail all over the white ground. It vexed him to see
+his own footsteps. What was it--what WAS the matter with him?
+Why, at least, could he not stop feeling things, and hoping? What
+was there to hope for now?
+
+He heard a sound of distress, and looking back, saw the barn cat,
+that had been left behind to pick up her living. She was standing
+inside the hedge, her jet black fur ruffled against the wet
+flakes, one paw lifted, mewing miserably. Claude went over and
+picked her up.
+
+"What's the matter, Blackie? Mice getting scarce in the barn?
+Mahailey will say you are bad luck. Maybe you are, but you can't
+help it, can you?" He slipped her into his overcoat pocket.
+Later, when he was getting into his car, he tried to dislodge her
+and put her in a basket, but she clung to her nest in his pocket
+and dug her claws into the lining. He laughed. "Well, if you are
+bad luck, I guess you are going to stay right with me!"
+
+She looked up at him with startled yellow eyes and did not even
+mew.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was afraid that Claude might not find the old place
+comfortable, after having had a house of his own. She put her
+best rocking chair and a reading lamp in his bedroom. He often
+sat there all evening, shading his eyes with his hand, pretending
+to read. When he stayed downstairs after supper, his mother and
+Mahailey were grateful. Besides collecting war pictures,
+Mahailey now hunted through the old magazines in the attic for
+pictures of China. She had marked on her big kitchen calendar the
+day when Enid would arrive in Hong-Kong.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she would say as she stood at the sink washing the
+supper dishes, "it's broad daylight over where Miss Enid is,
+ain't it? Cause the world's round, an' the old sun, he's
+a-shinin' over there for the yaller people."
+
+From time to time, when they were working together, Mrs. Wheeler
+told Mahailey what she knew about the customs of the Chinese. The
+old woman had never had two impersonal interests at the same time
+before, and she scarcely knew what to do with them. She would
+murmur on, half to Claude and half to herself: "They ain't
+fightin' over there where Miss Enid is, is they? An' she won't
+have to wear their kind of clothes, cause she's a white woman.
+She won't let 'em kill their girl babies nor do such awful things
+like they always have, an' she won't let 'em pray to them stone
+iboles, cause they can't help 'em none. I 'spect Miss Enid'll do
+a heap of good, all the time."
+
+Behind her diplomatic monologues, however, Mahailey had her own
+ideas, and she was greatly scandalized at Enid's departure. She
+was afraid people would say that Claude's wife had "run off an'
+lef' him," and in the Virginia mountains, where her social
+standards had been formed, a husband or wife thus deserted was
+the object of boisterous ridicule. She once stopped Mrs. Wheeler
+in a dark corner of the cellar to whisper, "Mr. Claude's wife
+ain't goin' to stay off there, like her sister, is she?"
+
+If one of the Yoeder boys or Susie Dawson happened to be at the
+Wheelers' for dinner, Mahailey never failed to refer to Enid in a
+loud voice. "Mr. Claude's wife, she cuts her potatoes up raw in
+the pan an' fries 'em. She don't boil 'em first like I do. I know
+she's an awful good cook, I know she is." She felt that easy
+references to the absent wife made things look better.
+
+Ernest Havel came to see Claude now, but not often. They both
+felt it would be indelicate to renew their former intimacy.
+Ernest still felt aggrieved about his beer, as if Enid had
+snatched the tankard from his lips with her own corrective hand.
+Like Leonard, he believed that Claude had made a bad bargain in
+matrimony; but instead of feeling sorry for him, Ernest wanted to
+see him convinced and punished. When he married Enid, Claude had
+been false to liberal principles, and it was only right that he
+should pay for his apostasy. The very first time he came to spend
+an evening at the Wheelers' after Claude came home to live,
+Ernest undertook to explain his objections to Prohibition. Claude
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not drop it? It's a matter that doesn't interest me, one way
+or the other."
+
+Ernest was offended and did not come back for nearly a
+month--not, indeed, until the announcement that Germany would
+resume unrestricted submarine warfare made every one look
+questioningly at his neighbour.
+
+He walked into the Wheelers' kitchen the night after this news
+reached the farming country, and found Claude and his mother
+sitting at the table, reading the papers aloud to each other in
+snatches. Ernest had scarcely taken a seat when the telephone
+bell rang. Claude answered the call.
+
+"It's the telegraph operator at Frankfort," he said, as he hung
+up the receiver. "He repeated a message from Father, sent from
+Wray: 'Will be home day after tomorrow. Read the papers.' What
+does he mean? What does he suppose we are doing?"
+
+"It means he considers our situation very serious. It's not like
+him to telegraph except in case of illness." Mrs. Wheeler rose
+and walked distractedly to the telephone box, as if it might
+further disclose her husband's state of mind.
+
+"But what a queer message! It was addressed to you, too, Mother,
+not to me."
+
+"He would know how I feel about it. Some of your father's people
+were seagoing men, out of Portsmouth. He knows what it means when
+our shipping is told where it can go on the ocean, and where it
+cannot. It isn't possible that Washington can take such an
+affront for us. To think that at this time, of all times, we
+should have a Democratic administration!"
+
+Claude laughed. "Sit down, Mother. Wait a day or two. Give them
+time."
+
+"The war will be over before Washington can do anything, Mrs.
+Wheeler," Ernest declared gloomily, "England will be starved out,
+and France will be beaten to a standstill. The whole German army
+will be on the Western front now. What could this country do? How
+long do you suppose it takes to make an army?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler stopped short in her restless pacing and met his
+moody glance. "I don't know anything, Ernest, but I believe the
+Bible. I believe that in the twinkling of an eye we shall be
+changed!"
+
+Ernest looked at the floor. He respected faith. As he said, you
+must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.
+
+Claude sat leaning his elbows on the table. "It always comes back
+to the same thing, Mother. Even if a raw army could do anything,
+how would we get it over there? Here's one naval authority who
+says the Germans are turning out submarines at the rate of three
+a day. They probably didn't spring this on us until they had
+enough built to keep the ocean clear."
+
+"I don't pretend to say what we could accomplish, son. But we
+must stand somewhere, morally. They have told us all along that
+we could be more helpful to the Allies out of the war than in it,
+because we could send munitions and supplies. If we agree to
+withdraw that aid, where are we? Helping Germany, all the time we
+are pretending to mind our own business! If our only alternative
+is to be at the bottom of the sea, we had better be there!"
+
+"Mother, do sit down! We can't settle it tonight. I never saw you
+so worked up."
+
+"Your father is worked up, too, or he would never have sent that
+telegram." Mrs. Wheeler reluctantly took up her workbasket, and
+the boys talked with their old, easy friendliness.
+
+When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeders' place with
+him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the
+frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them,
+he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with
+the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that
+were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must
+be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet,
+that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A
+question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him,
+over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country,
+as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver,
+when this war was undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.
+
+Claude and his mother had not long to wait. Three days later they
+knew that the German ambassador had been dismissed, and the
+American ambassador recalled from Berlin. To older men these
+events were subjects to think and converse about; but to boys
+like Claude they were life and death, predestination.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+One stormy morning Claude was driving the big wagon to town to
+get a load of lumber. The roads were beginning to thaw out, and
+the country was black and dirty looking. Here and there on the
+dark mud, grey snow crusts lingered, perforated like honeycomb,
+with wet weedstalks sticking up through them. As the wagon
+creaked over the high ground just above Frankfort, Claude noticed
+a brilliant new flag flying from the schoolhouse cupola. He had
+never seen the flag before when it meant anything but the Fourth
+of July, or a political rally. Today it was as if he saw it for
+the first time; no bands, no noise, no orators; a spot of
+restless colour against the sodden March sky.
+
+He turned out of his way in order to pass the High School, drew
+up his team, and waited a few minutes until the noon bell rang.
+The older boys and girls came out first, with a flurry of
+raincoats and umbrellas. Presently he saw Gladys Farmer, in a
+yellow "slicker" and an oilskin hat, and waved to her. She came
+up to the wagon.
+
+"I like your decoration," he said, glancing toward the cupola.
+
+"It's a silk one the Senior boys bought with their athletic
+money. I advised them not to run it up in this rain, but the
+class president told me they bought that flag for storms."
+
+"Get in, and I'll take you home."
+
+She took his extended hand, put her foot on the hub of the wheel,
+and climbed to the seat beside him. He clucked to his team.
+
+"So your High School boys are feeling war-like these days?"
+
+"Very. What do you think?"
+
+"I think they'll have a chance to express their feelings."
+
+"Do you, Claude? It seems awfully unreal."
+
+"Nothing else seems very real, either. I'm going to haul out a
+load of lumber, but I never expect to drive a nail in it. These
+things don't matter now. There is only one thing we ought to do,
+and only one thing that matters; we all know it."
+
+"You feel it's coming nearer every day?"
+
+"Every day."
+
+Gladys made no reply. She only looked at him gravely with her
+calm, generous brown eyes. They stopped before the low house
+where the windows were full of flowers. She took his hand and
+swung herself to the ground, holding it for a moment while she
+said good-bye. Claude drove back to the lumber yard. In a place
+like Frankfort, a boy whose wife was in China could hardly go to
+see Gladys without causing gossip.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+During the bleak month of March Mr. Wheeler went to town in his
+buckboard almost every day. For the first time in his life he had
+a secret anxiety. The one member of his family who had never
+given him the slightest trouble, his son Bayliss, was just now
+under a cloud.
+
+Bayliss was a Pacifist, and kept telling people that if only the
+United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what
+Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the
+capital of the world. There was a kind of logic in Bayliss'
+utterances that shook Nat Wheeler's imperturbable assumption that
+one point of view was as good as another. When Bayliss fought the
+dram and the cigarette, Wheeler only laughed. That a son of his
+should turn out a Prohibitionist, was a joke he could appreciate.
+But Bayliss' attitude in the present crisis disturbed him. Day
+after day he sat about his son's place of business, interrupting
+his arguments with funny stories. Bayliss did not go home at all
+that month. He said to his father, "No, Mother's too violent. I'd
+better not."
+
+Claude and his mother read the papers in the evening, but they
+talked so little about what they read that Mahailey inquired
+anxiously whether they weren't still fighting over yonder. When
+she could get Claude alone for a moment, she pulled out Sunday
+supplement pictures of the devastated countries and asked him to
+tell her what was to become of this family, photographed among
+the ruins of their home; of this old woman, who sat by the
+roadside with her bundles. "Where's she goin' to, anyways? See,
+Mr. Claude, she's got her iron cook-pot, pore old thing, carryin'
+it all the way!"
+
+Pictures of soldiers in gas-masks puzzled her; gas was something
+she hadn't learned about in the Civil War, so she worked it out
+for herself that these masks were worn by the army cooks, to
+protect their eyes when they were cutting up onions! "All them
+onions they have to cut up, it would put their eyes out if they
+didn't wear somethin'," she argued.
+
+On the morning of the eighth of April Claude came downstairs
+early and began to clean his boots, which were caked with dry
+mud. Mahailey was squatting down beside her stove, blowing and
+puffing into it. The fire was always slow to start in heavy
+weather. Claude got an old knife and a brush, and putting his
+foot on a chair over by the west window, began to scrape his
+shoe. He had said good-morning to Mahailey, nothing more. He
+hadn't slept well, and was pale.
+
+"Mr. Claude," Mahailey grumbled, "this stove ain't never drawed
+good like my old one Mr. Ralph took away from me. I can't do
+nothin' with it. Maybe you'll clean it out for me next Sunday."
+
+"I'll clean it today, if you say so. I won't be here next Sunday.
+I'm going away."
+
+Something in his tone made Mahailey get up, her eyes still
+blinking with the smoke, and look at him sharply. "You ain't
+goin' off there where Miss Enid is?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, Mahailey." He had dropped the shoebrush and stood with one
+foot on the chair, his elbow on his knee, looking out of the
+window as if he had forgotten himself. "No, I'm not going to
+China. I'm going over to help fight the Germans."
+
+He was still staring out at the wet fields. Before he could stop
+her, before he knew what she was doing, she had caught and kissed
+his unworthy hand.
+
+"I knowed you would," she sobbed. "I always knowed you would, you
+nice boy, you! Old Mahail' knowed!"
+
+Her upturned face was working all over; her mouth, her eyebrows,
+even the wrinkles on her low forehead were working and twitching.
+Claude felt a tightening in his throat as he tenderly regarded
+that face; behind the pale eyes, under the low brow where there
+was not room for many thoughts, an idea was struggling and
+tormenting her. The same idea that had been tormenting him.
+
+"You're all right, Mahailey," he muttered, patting her back and
+turning away. "Now hurry breakfast."
+
+"You ain't told your mudder yit?" she whispered.
+
+"No, not yet. But she'll be all right, too." He caught up his cap
+and went down to the barn to look after the horses.
+
+When Claude returned, the family were already at the breakfast
+table. He slipped into his seat and watched his mother while she
+drank her first cup of coffee. Then he addressed his father.
+
+"Father, I don't see any use of waiting for the draft. If you can
+spare me, I'd like to get into a training camp somewhere. I
+believe I'd stand a chance of getting a commission."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder." Mr. Wheeler poured maple syrup on his
+pancakes with a liberal hand. "How do you feel about it,
+Evangeline?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had quietly put down her knife and fork. She looked
+at her husband in vague alarm, while her fingers moved restlessly
+about over the tablecloth.
+
+"I thought," Claude went on hastily, "that maybe I would go up to
+Omaha tomorrow and find out where the training camps are to be
+located, and have a talk with the men in charge of the enlistment
+station. Of course," he added lightly, "they may not want me. I
+haven't an idea what the requirements are."
+
+"No, I don't understand much about it either." Mr. Wheeler rolled
+his top pancake and conveyed it to his mouth. After a moment of
+mastication he said, "You figure on going tomorrow?"
+
+"I'd like to. I won't bother with baggage--some shirts and
+underclothes in my suitcase. If the Government wants me, it will
+clothe me."
+
+Mr. Wheeler pushed back his plate. "Well, now I guess you'd
+better come out with me and look at the wheat. I don't know but
+I'd best plough up that south quarter and put it in corn. I don't
+believe it will make anything much."
+
+When Claude and his father went out of the door, Dan sprang up
+with more alacrity than usual and plunged after them. He did not
+want to be left alone with Mrs. Wheeler. She remained sitting at
+the foot of the deserted breakfast table. She was not crying. Her
+eyes were utterly sightless. Her back was so stooped that she
+seemed to be bending under a burden. Mahailey cleared the dishes
+away quietly.
+
+Out in the muddy fields Claude finished his talk with his father.
+He explained that he wanted to slip away without saying good-bye
+to any one. "I have a way, you know," he said, flushing, "of
+beginning things and not getting very far with them. I don't want
+anything said about this until I'm sure. I may be rejected for
+one reason or another."
+
+Mr. Wheeler smiled. "I guess not. However, I'll tell Dan to keep
+his mouth shut. Will you just go over to Leonard Dawson's and get
+that wrench he borrowed? It's about noon, and he'll likely be at
+home." Claude found big Leonard watering his team at the
+windmill. When Leonard asked him what he thought of the
+President's message, he blurted out at once that he was going to
+Omaha to enlist. Leonard reached up and pulled the lever that
+controlled the almost motionless wheel.
+
+"Better wait a few weeks and I'll go with you. I'm going to try
+for the Marines. They take my eye."
+
+Claude, standing on the edge of the tank, almost fell backward.
+"Why, what--what for?"
+
+Leonard looked him over. "Good Lord, Claude, you ain't the only
+fellow around here that wears pants! What for? Well, I'll tell
+you what for," he held up three large red fingers threateningly;
+"Belgium, the Lusitania, Edith Cavell. That dirt's got under my
+skin. I'll get my corn planted, and then Father'll look after
+Susie till I come back."
+
+Claude took a long breath. "Well, Leonard, you fooled me. I
+believed all this chaff you've been giving me about not caring
+who chewed up who."
+
+"And no more do I care," Leonard protested, "not a damn! But
+there's a limit. I've been ready to go since the Lusitania. I
+don't get any satisfaction out of my place any more. Susie feels
+the same way."
+
+Claude looked at his big neighbour. "Well, I'm off tomorrow,
+Leonard. Don't mention it to my folks, but if I can't get into
+the army, I'm going to enlist in the navy. They'll always take an
+able-bodied man. I'm not coming back here." He held out his hand
+and Leonard took it with a smack.
+
+"Good luck, Claude. Maybe we'll meet in foreign parts. Wouldn't
+that be a joke! Give my love to Enid when you write. I always did
+think she was a fine girl, though I disagreed with her on
+Prohibition." Claude crossed the fields mechanically, without
+looking where he went. His power of vision was turned inward upon
+scenes and events wholly imaginary as yet.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One bright June day Mr. Wheeler parked his car in a line of
+motors before the new pressed-brick Court house in Frankfort. The
+Court house stood in an open square, surrounded by a grove of
+cotton-woods. The lawn was freshly cut, and the flower beds were
+blooming. When Mr. Wheeler entered the courtroom upstairs, it was
+already half-full of farmers and townspeople, talking in low
+tones while the summer flies buzzed in and out of the open
+windows. The judge, a one-armed man, with white hair and
+side-whiskers, sat at his desk, writing with his left hand. He
+was an old settler in Frankfort county, but from his frockcoat
+and courtly manners you might have thought he had come from
+Kentucky yesterday instead of thirty years ago. He was to hear
+this morning a charge of disloyalty brought against two German
+farmers. One of the accused was August Yoeder, the Wheelers'
+nearest neighbour, and the other was Troilus Oberlies, a rich
+German from the northern part of the county.
+
+Oberlies owned a beautiful farm and lived in a big white house
+set on a hill, with a fine orchard, rows of beehives, barns,
+granaries, and poultry yards. He raised turkeys and
+tumbler-pigeons, and many geese and ducks swam about on his
+cattleponds. He used to boast that he had six sons, "like our
+German Emperor." His neighbours were proud of his place, and
+pointed it out to strangers. They told how Oberlies had come to
+Frankfort county a poor man, and had made his fortune by his
+industry and intelligence. He had twice crossed the ocean to
+re-visit his fatherland, and when he returned to his home on the
+prairies he brought presents for every one; his lawyer, his
+banker, and the merchants with whom he dealt in Frankfort and
+Vicount. Each of his neighbours had in his parlour some piece of
+woodcarving or weaving, or some ingenious mechanical toy that
+Oberlies had picked up in Germany. He was an older man than
+Yoeder, wore a short beard that was white and curly, like his
+hair, and though he was low in stature, his puffy red face and
+full blue eyes, and a certain swagger about his carriage, gave
+him a look of importance. He was boastful and quick-tempered, but
+until the war broke out in Europe nobody had ever had any trouble
+with him. Since then he had constantly found fault and
+complained,--everything was better in the Old Country.
+
+Mr. Wheeler had come to town prepared to lend Yoeder a hand if he
+needed one. They had worked adjoining fields for thirty years
+now. He was surprised that his neighbour had got into trouble. He
+was not a blusterer, like Oberlies, but a big, quiet man, with a
+serious, large-featured face, and a stern mouth that seldom
+opened. His countenance might have been cut out of red sandstone,
+it was so heavy and fixed. He and Oberlies sat on two wooden
+chairs outside the railing of the judge's desk.
+
+Presently the judge stopped writing and said he would hear the
+charges against Troilus Oberlies. Several neighbours took the
+stand in succession; their complaints were confused and almost
+humorous. Oberlies had said the United States would be licked,
+and that would be a good thing; America was a great country, but
+it was run by fools, and to be governed by Germany was the best
+thing that could happen to it. The witness went on to say that
+since Oberlies had made his money in this country--
+
+Here the judge interrupted him. "Please confine yourself to
+statements which you consider disloyal, made in your presence by
+the defendant." While the witness proceeded, the judge took off
+his glasses and laid them on the desk and began to polish the
+lenses with a silk handkerchief, trying them, and rubbing them
+again, as if he desired to see clearly.
+
+A second witness had heard Oberlies say he hoped the German
+submarines would sink a few troopships; that would frighten the
+Americans and teach them to stay at home and mind their own
+business. A third complained that on Sunday afternoons the old
+man sat on his front porch and played Die Wacht am Rhein on a
+slide-trombone, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. Here
+Nat Wheeler slapped his knee with a loud guffaw, and a titter ran
+through the courtroom. The defendant's puffy red cheeks seemed
+fashioned by his Maker to give voice to that piercing instrument.
+
+When asked if he had anything to say to these charges, the old
+man rose, threw back his shoulders, and cast a defiant glance at
+the courtroom. "You may take my property and imprison me, but I
+explain nothing, and I take back nothing," he declared in a loud
+voice.
+
+The judge regarded his inkwell with a smile. "You mistake the
+nature of this occasion, Mr. Oberlies. You are not asked to
+recant. You are merely asked to desist from further disloyal
+utterances, as much for your own protection and comfort as from
+consideration for the feelings of your neighbours. I will now
+hear the charges against Mr. Yoeder."
+
+Mr. Yoeder, a witness declared, had said he hoped the United
+States would go to Hell, now that it had been bought over by
+England. When the witness had remarked to him that if the Kaiser
+were shot it would end the war, Yoeder replied that charity
+begins at home, and he wished somebody would put a bullet in the
+President.
+
+When he was called upon, Yoeder rose and stood like a rock before
+the judge. "I have nothing to say. The charges are true. I
+thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind."
+
+"Yes, a man can speak his mind, but even here he must take the
+consequences. Sit down, please." The judge leaned back in his
+chair, and looking at the two men in front of him, began with
+deliberation: "Mr. Oberlies, and Mr. Yoeder, you both know, and
+your friends and neighbours know, why you are here. You have not
+recognized the element of appropriateness, which must be regarded
+in nearly all the transactions of life; many of our civil laws
+are founded upon it. You have allowed a sentiment, noble in
+itself, to carry you away and lead you to make extravagant
+statements which I am confident neither of you mean. No man can
+demand that you cease from loving the country of your birth; but
+while you enjoy the benefits of this country, you should not
+defame its government to extol another. You both admit to
+utterances which I can only adjudge disloyal. I shall fine you
+each three hundred dollars; a very light fine under the
+circumstances. If I should have occasion to fix a penalty a
+second time, it will be much more severe."
+
+After the case was concluded, Mr. Wheeler joined his neighbour at
+the door and they went downstairs together.
+
+"Well, what do you hear from Claude?" Mr. Yoeder asked.
+
+"He's still at Fort R--. He expects to get home on leave before
+he sails. Gus, you'll have to lend me one of your boys to
+cultivate my corn. The weeds are getting away from me."
+
+"Yes, you can have any of my boys,--till the draft gets 'em,"
+said Yoeder sourly.
+
+"I wouldn't worry about it. A little military training is good
+for a boy. You fellows know that." Mr. Wheeler winked, and
+Yoeder's grim mouth twitched at one corner.
+
+That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account
+of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude. Mrs.
+Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a
+rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the
+neighbourhood doings. Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material
+for them. Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way
+of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife. But since Claude
+went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the
+boy would be interested. As she laconically said in one of her
+letters:
+
+"Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and
+sometimes I think he is trying to take your place."
+
+
+
+X
+
+On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast
+train from Omaha, going home for a week's leave. The uniform was
+still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917. The first draft was not
+yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in
+training camps far away. Therefore a redheaded young man with
+long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic,
+responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a
+conspicuous figure among the passengers. Little boys and young
+girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the
+aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied
+his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept
+opening and forgetting to read.
+
+The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more
+interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book. He was
+glad to be going through it at harvest,--the season when it is
+most itself. He noted that there was more corn than usual,--much
+of the winter wheat had been weather killed, and the fields were
+ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize. The pastures
+were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again
+after its first cutting. Binders and harvesters were abroad in
+the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain
+into wide, subduing arms. When the train slowed down for a
+trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls
+and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.
+Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. "When I see
+those fellows, I feel as if I'd wakened up in the wrong clothes."
+
+His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. "That the kind of
+uniform you're accustomed to?"
+
+"I surely never wore anything else in the month of July," Claude
+admitted. "When I find myself riding along in a train, in the
+middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the
+world is turned upside down, for a fact!"
+
+The old man pressed a cigar upon him and began to question him.
+Like the hero of the Odyssey upon his homeward journey, Claude
+had often to tell what his country was, and who were the parents
+that begot him. He was constantly interrupted in his perusal of a
+French phrase-book (made up of sentences chosen for their
+usefulness to soldiers,--such as; "Non, jamais je ne regarde les
+femmes") by the questions of curious strangers. Presently he
+gathered up his luggage, shook hands with his neighbour, and put
+on his hat--the same old Stetson, with a gold cord and two hard
+tassels added to its conical severity. "I get off at this station
+and wait for the freight that goes down to Frankfort; the
+cotton-tail, we call it."
+
+The old man wished him a pleasant visit home, and the best of
+luck in days to come. Every one in the car smiled at him as he
+stepped down to the platform with his suitcase in one hand and
+his canvas bag in the other. His old friend, Mrs. Voigt, the
+German woman, stood out in front of her restaurant, ringing her
+bell to announce that dinner was ready for travellers. A crowd of
+young boys stood about her on the sidewalk, laughing and shouting
+in disagreeable, jeering tones. As Claude approached, one of them
+snatched the bell from her hand, ran off across the tracks with
+it, and plunged into a cornfield. The other boys followed, and
+one of them shouted, "Don't go in there to eat, soldier. She's a
+German spy, and she'll put ground glass in your dinner!"
+
+Claude swept into the lunch room and threw his bags on the floor.
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Voigt? Can I do anything for you?"
+
+She was sitting on one of her own stools, crying piteously, her
+false frizzes awry. Looking up, she gave a little screech of
+recognition. "Oh, I tank Gott it was you, and no more trouble
+coming! You know I ain't no spy nor nodding, like what dem boys
+say. Dem young fellers is dreadful rough mit me. I sell dem candy
+since dey was babies, an' now dey turn on me like dis.
+Hindenburg, dey calls me, and Kaiser Bill!" She began to cry
+again, twisting her stumpy little fingers as if she would tear
+them off.
+
+"Give me some dinner, ma'am, and then I'll go and settle with
+that gang. I've been away for a long time, and it seemed like
+getting home when I got off the train and saw your squaw vines
+running over the porch like they used to."
+
+"Ya? You remember dat?" she wiped her eyes. "I got a pot-pie
+today, and green peas, chust a few, out of my own garden."
+
+"Bring them along, please. We don't get anything but canned stuff
+in camp."
+
+Some railroad men came in for lunch. Mrs. Voigt beckoned Claude
+off to the end of the counter, where, after she had served her
+customers, she sat down and talked to him, in whispers.
+
+"My, you look good in dem clothes," she said patting his sleeve.
+"I can remember some wars, too; when we got back dem provinces
+what Napoleon took away from us, Alsace and Lorraine. Dem boys is
+passed de word to come and put tar on me some night, and I am
+skeered to go in my bet. I chust wrap in a quilt and sit in my
+old chair."
+
+"Don't pay any attention to them. You don't have trouble with the
+business people here, do you?"
+
+"No-o, not troubles, exactly." She hesitated, then leaned
+impulsively across the counter and spoke in his ear. "But it
+ain't all so bad in de Old Country like what dey say. De poor
+people ain't slaves, and dey ain't ground down like what dey say
+here. Always de forester let de poor folks come into de wood and
+carry off de limbs dat fall, and de dead trees. Und if de rich
+farmer have maybe a liddle more manure dan he need, he let de
+poor man come and take some for his land. De poor folks don't git
+such wages like here, but dey lives chust as comfortable. Und dem
+wooden shoes, what dey makes such fun of, is cleaner dan what
+leather is, to go round in de mud and manure. Dey don't git so
+wet and dey don't stink so."
+
+Claude could see that her heart was bursting with homesickness,
+full of tender memories of the far-away time and land of her
+youth. She had never talked to him of these things before, but
+now she poured out a flood of confidences about the big dairy
+farm on which she had worked as a girl; how she took care of nine
+cows, and how the cows, though small, were very strong,--drew a
+plough all day and yet gave as much milk at night as if they had
+been browsing in a pasture! The country people never had to spend
+money for doctors, but cured all diseases with roots and herbs,
+and when the old folks had the rheumatism they took "one of dem
+liddle jenny-pigs" to bed with them, and the guinea-pig drew out
+all the pain.
+
+Claude would have liked to listen longer, but he wanted to find
+the old woman's tormentors before his train came in. Leaving his
+bags with her, he crossed the railroad tracks, guided by an
+occasional teasing tinkle of the bell in the cornfield. Presently
+he came upon the gang, a dozen or more, lying in a shallow draw
+that ran from the edge of the field out into an open pasture. He
+stood on the edge of the bank and looked down at them, while he
+slowly cut off the end of a cigar and lit it. The boys grinned at
+him, trying to appear indifferent and at ease.
+
+"Looking for any one, soldier?" asked the one with the bell.
+
+"Yes, I am. I'm looking for that bell. You'll have to take it
+back where it belongs. You every one of you know there's no harm
+in that old woman."
+
+"She's a German, and we're fighting the Germans, ain't we?"
+
+"I don't think you'll ever fight any. You'd last about ten
+minutes in the American army. You're not our kind. There's only
+one army in the world that wants men who'll bully old women. You
+might get a job with them."
+
+The boys giggled. Claude beckoned impatiently. "Come along with
+that bell, kid."
+
+The boy rose slowly and climbed the bank out of the gully. As
+they tramped back through the cornfield, Claude turned to him
+abruptly. "See here, aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that!" the boy replied airily, tossing
+the bell up like a ball and catching it.
+
+"Well, you ought to be. I didn't expect to see anything of this
+kind until I got to the front. I'll be back here in a week, and
+I'll make it hot for anybody that's been bothering her." Claude's
+train was pulling in, and he ran for his baggage. Once seated in
+the "cotton-tail," he began going down into his own country,
+where he knew every farm he passed,--knew the land even when he
+did not know the owner, what sort of crops it yielded, and about
+how much it was worth. He did not recognize these farms with the
+pleasure he had anticipated, because he was so angry about the
+indignities Mrs. Voigt had suffered. He was still burning with
+the first ardour of the enlisted man. He believed that he was
+going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war
+without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry.
+
+Most of his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideas. They had
+come together from farms and shops and mills and mines, boys from
+college and boys from tough joints in big cities; sheepherders,
+street car drivers, plumbers' assistants, billiard markers.
+Claude had seen hundreds of them when they first came in; "show
+men" in cheap, loud sport suits, ranch boys in knitted
+waistcoats, machinists with the grease still on their fingers,
+farm-hands like Dan, in their one Sunday coat. Some of them
+carried paper suitcases tied up with rope, some brought all they
+had in a blue handkerchief. But they all came to give and not to
+ask, and what they offered was just themselves; their big red
+hands, their strong backs, the steady, honest, modest look in
+their eyes. Sometimes, when he had helped the medical examiner,
+Claude had noticed the anxious expression in the faces of the
+long lines of waiting men. They seemed to say, "If I'm good
+enough, take me. I'll stay by." He found them like that to work
+with; serviceable, good-natured, and eager to learn. If they
+talked about the war, or the enemy they were getting ready to
+fight, it was usually in a facetious tone; they were going to
+"can the Kaiser," or to make the Crown Prince work for a living.
+Claude, loved the men he trained with,--wouldn't choose to live
+in any better company.
+
+The freight train swung into the river valley that meant
+home,--the place the mind always came back to, after its farthest
+quest. Rapidly the farms passed; the haystacks, the cornfields,
+the familiar red barns--then the long coal sheds and the water
+tank, and the train stopped.
+
+On the platform he saw Ralph and Mr. Royce, waiting to welcome
+him. Over there, in the automobile, were his father and mother,
+Mr. Wheeler in the driver's seat. A line of motors stood along
+the siding. He was the first soldier who had come home, and some
+of the townspeople had driven down to see him arrive in his
+uniform. From one car Susie Dawson waved to him, and from another
+Gladys Farmer. While he stopped and spoke to them, Ralph took his
+bags.
+
+"Come along, boys," Mr. Wheeler called, tooting his horn, and he
+hurried the soldier away, leaving only a cloud of dust behind.
+
+Mr. Royce went over to old man Dawson's car and said rather
+childishly, "It can't be that Claude's grown taller? I suppose
+it's the way they learn to carry themselves. He always was a
+manly looking boy."
+
+"I expect his mother's a proud woman," said Susie, very much
+excited. "It's too bad Enid can't be here to see him. She would
+never have gone away if she'd known all that was to happen."
+
+Susie did not mean this as a thrust, but it took effect. Mr.
+Royce turned away and lit a cigar with some difficulty. His hands
+had grown very unsteady this last year, though he insisted that
+his general health was as good as ever. As he grew older, he was
+more depressed by the conviction that his women-folk had added
+little to the warmth and comfort of the world. Women ought to do
+that, whatever else they did. He felt apologetic toward the
+Wheelers and toward his old friends. It seemed as if his
+daughters had no heart.
+
+
+
+XI
+Camp habits persisted. On his first morning at home Claude came
+downstairs before even Mahailey was stirring, and went out to
+have a look at the stock. The red sun came up just as he was
+going down the hill toward the cattle corral, and he had the
+pleasant feeling of being at home, on his father's land. Why was
+it so gratifying to be able to say "our hill," and "our creek
+down yonder"? to feel the crunch of this particular dried mud
+under his boots?
+
+When he went into the barn to see the horses, the first creatures
+to meet his eye were the two big mules that had run away with
+him, standing in the stalls next the door. It flashed upon Claude
+that these muscular quadrupeds were the actual authors of his
+fate. If they had not bolted with him and thrown him into the
+wire fence that morning, Enid would not have felt sorry for him
+and come to see him every day, and his life might have turned out
+differently. Perhaps if older people were a little more honest,
+and a boy were not taught to idealize in women the very qualities
+which can make him utterly unhappy--But there, he had got away
+from those regrets. But wasn't it just like him to be dragged
+into matrimony by a pair of mules!
+
+He laughed as he looked at them. "You old devils, you're strong
+enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come.
+You're chock full of meanness!"
+
+One of the animals wagged an ear and cleared his throat
+threateningly. Mules are capable of strong affections, but they
+hate snobs, are the enemies of caste, and this pair had always
+seemed to detect in Claude what his father used to call his
+"false pride." When he was a young lad they had been a source of
+humiliation to him, braying and balking in public places, trying
+to show off at the lumber yard or in front of the post office.
+
+At the end manger Claude found old Molly, the grey mare with the
+stiff leg, who had grown a second hoof on her off forefoot, an
+achievement not many horses could boast of. He was sure she
+recognized him; she nosed his hand and arm and turned back her
+upper lip, showing her worn, yellow teeth.
+
+"Mustn't do that, Molly," he said as he stroked her. "A dog can
+laugh, but it makes a horse look foolish. Seems to me Dan might
+curry you about once a week!" He took a comb from its niche
+behind a joist and gave her old coat a rubbing. Her white hair
+was flecked all over with little rust-coloured dashes, like India
+ink put on with a fine brush, and her mane and tail had turned a
+greenish yellow. She must be eighteen years old, Claude reckoned,
+as he polished off her round, heavy haunches. He and Ralph used
+to ride her over to the Yoeders' when they were barefoot
+youngsters, guiding her with a rope halter, and kicking at the
+leggy colt that was always running alongside.
+
+When he entered the kitchen and asked Mahailey for warm water to
+wash his hands, she sniffed him disapprovingly.
+
+"Why, Mr. Claude, you've been curryin' that old mare, and you've
+got white hairs all over your soldier-clothes. You're jist
+covered!"
+
+If his uniform stirred feeling in people of sober judgment, over
+Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the
+time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in
+detail. Before she got past his puttees, her powers of
+observation were befogged by excitement, and her wits began to
+jump about like monkeys in a cage. She had expected his uniform
+to be blue, like those she remembered, and when he walked into
+the kitchen last night she scarcely knew what to make of him.
+After Mrs. Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn't
+wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown
+clothes didn't show the dust, and that Claude would never look
+like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother's
+spring.
+
+"Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin' you,
+ain't they? I 'spect there's an awful lot of briars over there,
+like them long blackberry vines in the fields in Virginia. Your
+madder says the soldiers git lice now, like they done in our war.
+You jist carry a little bottle of coal-oil in your pocket an' rub
+it on your head at night. It keeps the nits from hatchin'."
+
+Over the flour barrel in the corner Mahailey had tacked a Red
+Cross poster; a charcoal drawing of an old woman poking with a
+stick in a pile of plaster and twisted timbers that had once been
+her home. Claude went over to look at it while he dried his
+hands.
+
+"Where did you get your picture?"
+
+"She's over there where you're goin', Mr. Claude. There she is,
+huntin' for somethin' to cook with; no stove nor no dishes nor
+nothin'--everything all broke up. I reckon she'll be mighty glad
+to see you comin'."
+
+Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Mahailey whispered
+hastily, "Don't forgit about the coal-oil, and don't you be lousy
+if you can help it, honey." She considered lice in the same class
+with smutty jokes,--things to be whispered about.
+
+After breakfast Mr. Wheeler took Claude out to the fields, where
+Ralph was directing the harvesters. They watched the binder for a
+while, then went over to look at the haystacks and alfalfa, and
+walked along the edge of the cornfield, where they examined the
+young ears. Mr. Wheeler explained and exhibited the farm to
+Claude as if he were a stranger; the boy had a curious feeling of
+being now formally introduced to these acres on which he had
+worked every summer since he was big enough to carry water to the
+harvesters. His father told him how much land they owned, and how
+much it was worth, and that it was unencumbered except for a
+trifling mortgage he had given on one quarter when he took over
+the Colorado ranch.
+
+"When you come back," he said, "you and Ralph won't have to hunt
+around to get into business. You'll both be well fixed. Now you'd
+better go home by old man Dawson's and drop in to see Susie.
+Everybody about here was astonished when Leonard went." He walked
+with Claude to the corner where the Dawson land met his own. "By
+the way," he said as he turned back, "don't forget to go in to
+see the Yoeders sometime. Gus is pretty sore since they had him
+up in court. Ask for the old grandmother. You remember she never
+learned any English. And now they've told her it's dangerous to
+talk German, she don't talk at all and hides away from everybody.
+If I go by early in the morning, when she's out weeding the
+garden, she runs and squats down in the gooseberry bushes till
+I'm out of sight."
+
+Claude decided he would go to the Yoeders' today, and to the
+Dawsons' tomorrow. He didn't like to think there might be hard
+feeling toward him in a house where he had had so many good
+times, and where he had often found a refuge when things were
+dull at home. The Yoeder boys had a music-box long before the
+days of Victrolas, and a magic lantern, and the old grandmother
+made wonderful shadow-pictures on a sheet, and told stories about
+them. She used to turn the map of Europe upside down on the
+kitchen table and showed the children how, in this position, it
+looked like a jungfrau; and recited a long German rhyme which
+told how Spain was the maiden's head, the Pyrenees her lace ruff,
+Germany her heart and bosom, England and Italy were two arms, and
+Russia, though it looked so big, was only a hoopskirt. This rhyme
+would probably be condemned as dangerous propaganda now!
+
+As he walked on alone, Claude was thinking how this country that
+had once seemed little and dull to him, now seemed large and rich
+in variety. During the months in camp he had been wholly absorbed
+in new work and new friendships, and now his own neighbourhood
+came to him with the freshness of things that have been forgotten
+for a long while,--came together before his eyes as a harmonious
+whole. He was going away, and he would carry the whole
+countryside in his mind, meaning more to him than it ever had
+before. There was Lovely Creek, gurgling on down there, where he
+and Ernest used to sit and lament that the book of History was
+finished; that the world had come to avaricious old age and noble
+enterprise was dead for ever. But he was going away....
+
+That afternoon Claude spent with his mother. It was the first
+time she had had him to herself. Ralph wanted terribly to stay
+and hear his brother talk, but understanding how his mother felt,
+he went back to the wheat field. There was no detail of Claude's
+life in camp so trivial that Mrs. Wheeler did not want to hear
+about it. She asked about the mess, the cooks, the laundry, as
+well as about his own duties. She made him describe the bayonet
+drill and explain the operation of machine guns and automatic
+rifles.
+
+"I hardly see how we can bear the anxiety when our transports
+begin to sail," she said thoughtfully. "If they can once get you
+all over there, I am not afraid; I believe our boys are as good
+as any in the world. But with submarines reported off our own
+coast, I wonder how the Government can get our men across safely.
+The thought of transports going down with thousands of young men
+on board is something so terrible--" she put her hands quickly
+over her eyes.
+
+Claude, sitting opposite his mother, wondered what it was about
+her hands that made them so different from any others he had ever
+seen. He had always known they were different, but now he must
+look closely and see why. They were slender, and always white,
+even when the nails were stained at preserving time. Her fingers
+arched back at the joints, as if they were shrinking from
+contacts. They were restless, and when she talked often brushed
+her hair or her dress lightly. When she was excited she sometimes
+put her hand to her throat, or felt about the neck of her gown,
+as if she were searching for a forgotten brooch. They were
+sensitive hands, and yet they seemed to have nothing to do with
+sense, to be almost like the groping fingers of a spirit.
+
+"How do you boys feel about it?"
+
+Claude started. "About what, Mother? Oh, the transportation! We
+don't worry about that. It's the Government's job to get us
+across. A soldier mustn't worry about anything except what he's
+directly responsible for. If the Germans should sink a few troop
+ships, it would be unfortunate, certainly, but it wouldn't cut any
+figure in the long run. The British are perfecting an enormous
+dirigible, built to carry passengers. If our transports are sunk,
+it will only mean delay. In another year the Yankees will be
+flying over. They can't stop us."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler bent forward. "That must be boys' talk, Claude.
+Surely you don't believe such a thing could be practicable?"
+
+"Absolutely. The British are depending on their aircraft
+designers to do just that, if everything else fails. Of course,
+nobody knows yet how effective the submarines will be in our
+case."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler again shaded her eyes with her hand. "When I was
+young, back in Vermont, I used to wish that I had lived in the
+old times when the world went ahead by leaps and bounds. And now,
+I feel as if my sight couldn't bear the glory that beats upon it.
+It seems as if we would have to be born with new faculties, to
+comprehend what is going on in the air and under the sea."
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The afternoon sun was pouring in at the back windows of Mrs.
+Farmer's long, uneven parlour, making the dusky room look like a
+cavern with a fire at one end of it. The furniture was all in its
+cool, figured summer cretonnes. The glass flower vases that stood
+about on little tables caught the sunlight and twinkled like tiny
+lamps. Claude had been sitting there for a long while, and he
+knew he ought to go. Through the window at his elbow he could see
+rows of double hollyhocks, the flat leaves of the sprawling
+catalpa, and the spires of the tangled mint bed, all transparent
+in the gold-powdered light. They had talked about everything but
+the thing he had come to say. As he looked out into the garden he
+felt that he would never get it out. There was something in the
+way the mint bed burned and floated that made one a
+fatalist,--afraid to meddle. But after he was far away, he would
+regret; uncertainty would tease him like a splinter in his thumb.
+
+He rose suddenly and said without apology: "Gladys, I wish I
+could feel sure you'd never marry my brother."
+
+She did not reply, but sat in her easy chair, looking up at him
+with a strange kind of calmness.
+
+"I know all the advantages," he went on hastily, "but they
+wouldn't make it up to you. That sort of a--compromise would make
+you awfully unhappy. I know."
+
+"I don't think I shall ever marry Bayliss," Gladys spoke in her
+usual low, round voice, but her quick breathing showed he had
+touched something that hurt. "I suppose I have used him. It gives
+a school-teacher a certain prestige if people think she can marry
+the rich bachelor of the town whenever she wants to. But I am
+afraid I won't marry him,--because you are the member of the
+family I have always admired."
+
+Claude turned away to the window. "A fine lot I've been to
+admire," he muttered.
+
+"Well, it's true, anyway. It was like that when we went to High
+School, and it's kept up. Everything you do always seems exciting
+to me."
+
+Claude felt a cold perspiration on his forehead. He wished now
+that he had never come. "But that's it, Gladys. What HAVE I ever
+done, except make one blunder after another?"
+
+She came over to the window and stood beside him. "I don't know;
+perhaps it's by their blunders that one gets to know people,--by
+what they can't do. If you'd been like all the rest, you could
+have got on in their way. That was the one thing I couldn't have
+stood."
+
+Claude was frowning out into the flaming garden. He had not heard
+a word of her reply. "Why didn't you keep me from making a fool
+of myself?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"I think I tried--once. Anyhow, it's all turning out better than
+I thought. You didn't get stuck here. You've found your place.
+You're sailing away. You've just begun."
+
+"And what about you?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Oh, I shall teach in the High School!"
+
+Claude took her hands and they stood looking searchingly at each
+other in the swimming golden light that made everything
+transparent. He never knew exactly how he found his hat and made
+his way out of the house. He was only sure that Gladys did not
+accompany him to the door. He glanced back once, and saw her head
+against the bright window.
+
+She stood there, exactly where he left her, and watched the
+evening come on, not moving, scarcely breathing. She was thinking
+how often, when she came downstairs, she would see him standing
+here by the window, or moving about in the dusky room, looking at
+last as he ought to look,--like his convictions and the choice he
+had made. She would never let this house be sold for taxes now.
+She would save her salary and pay them off. She could never like
+any other room so well as this. It had always been a refuge from
+Frankfort; and now there would be this vivid, confident figure,
+an image as distinct to her as the portrait of her grandfather
+upon the wall.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Sunday was Claude's last day at home, and he took a long walk
+with Ernest and Ralph. Ernest would have preferred to lose
+Ralph, but when the boy was out of the harvest field he stuck to
+his brother like a burr. There was something about Claude's new
+clothes and new manner that fascinated him, and he went through
+one of those sudden changes of feeling that often occur in
+families. Although they had been better friends ever since
+Claude's wedding, until now Ralph had always felt a little
+ashamed of him. Why, he used to ask himself, wouldn't Claude
+"spruce up and be somebody"? Now, he was struck by the fact that
+he was somebody.
+
+On Monday morning Mrs. Wheeler wakened early, with a faintness in
+her chest. This was the day on which she must acquit herself
+well. Breakfast would be Claude's last meal at home. At eleven
+o'clock his father and Ralph would take him to Frankfort to catch
+the train. She was longer than usual in dressing. When she got
+downstairs Claude and Mahailey were already talking. He was
+shaving in the washroom, and Mahailey stood watching him, a side
+of bacon in her hand.
+
+"You tell 'em over there I'm awful sorry about them old women,
+with their dishes an' their stove all broke up."
+
+"All right. I will." Claude scraped away at his chin.
+
+She lingered. "Maybe you can help 'em mend their things, like you
+do mine fur me," she suggested hopefully.
+
+"Maybe," he murmured absently. Mrs. Wheeler opened the stair
+door, and Mahailey dodged back to the stove.
+
+After breakfast Dan went out to the fields with the harvesters.
+Ralph and Claude and Mr. Wheeler were busy with the car all
+morning.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler kept throwing her apron over her head and going down
+the hill to see what they were doing. Whether there was really
+something the matter with the engine, or whether the men merely
+made it a pretext for being together and keeping away from the
+house, she did not know. She felt that her presence was not much
+desired, and at last she went upstairs and resignedly watched
+them from the sitting-room window. Presently she heard Ralph run
+up to the third storey. When he came down with Claude's bags in
+his hands, he stuck his head in at the door and shouted
+cheerfully to his mother:
+
+"No hurry. I'm just taking them down so they'll be ready."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler ran after him, calling faintly, "Wait, Ralph! Are
+you sure he's got everything in? I didn't hear him packing."
+
+"Everything ready. He says he won't have to go upstairs again.
+He'll be along pretty soon. There's lots of time." Ralph shot
+down through the basement.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sat down in her reading chair. They wanted to keep
+her away, and it was a little selfish of them. Why couldn't they
+spend these last hours quietly in the house, instead of dashing
+in and out to frighten her? Now she could hear the hot water
+running in the kitchen; probably Mr. Wheeler had come in to wash
+his hands. She felt really too weak to get up and go to the west
+window to see if he were still down at the garage. Waiting was
+now a matter of seconds, and her breath came short enough as it
+was.
+
+She recognized a heavy, hob-nailed boot on the stairs, mounting
+quickly. When Claude entered, carrying his hat in his hand, she
+saw by his walk, his shoulders, and the way he held his head,
+that the moment had come, and that he meant to make it short. She
+rose, reaching toward him as he came up to her and caught her in
+his arms. She was smiling her little, curious intimate smile,
+with half-closed eyes.
+
+"Well, is it good-bye?" she murmured. She passed her hands over
+his shoulders, down his strong back and the close-fitting sides
+of his coat, as if she were taking the mould and measure of his
+mortal frame. Her chin came just to his breast pocket, and she
+rubbed it against the heavy cloth. Claude stood looking down at
+her without speaking a word. Suddenly his arms tightened and he
+almost crushed her.
+
+"Mother!" he whispered as he kissed her. He ran downstairs and
+out of the house without looking back.
+
+She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to
+the window; he was vaulting down the hill as fast as he could go.
+He jumped into the car beside his father. Ralph was already at
+the wheel, and Claude had scarcely touched the cushions when they
+were off. They ran down the creek and over the bridge, then up
+the long hill on the other side. As they neared the crest of the
+hill, Claude stood up in the car and looked back at the house,
+waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained her
+sight, but her tears blurred everything. The brown, upright
+figure seemed to float out of the car and across the fields, and
+before he was actually gone, she lost him. She fell back against
+the windowsill, clutching her temples with both hands, and broke
+into choking, passionate speech. "Old eyes," she cried, "why do
+you betray me? Why do you cheat me of my last sight of my
+splendid son!"
+
+
+Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises
+
+I
+
+A long train of crowded cars, the passengers all of the same sex,
+almost of the same age, all dressed and hatted alike, was slowly
+steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer
+afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs,
+shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of
+cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter
+about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and
+tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and
+shout; what is the matter now?
+
+The conductor goes through the cars, saying something about a
+freight wreck on ahead; he has orders to wait here for half an
+hour. Nobody pays any attention to him. A murmur of astonishment
+rises from one side of the train. The boys crowd over to the
+south windows. At last there is something to look at,--though
+what they see is so strangely quiet that their own exclamations
+are not very loud.
+
+Their train is lying beside an arm of the sea that reaches far
+into the green shore. At the edge of the still water stand the
+hulls of four wooden ships, in the process of building. There is
+no town, there are no smoke-stacks--very few workmen. Piles of
+lumber lie about on the grass. A gasoline engine under a
+temporary shelter is operating a long crane that reaches down
+among the piles of boards and beams, lifts a load, silently and
+deliberately swings it over to one of the skeleton vessels, and
+lowers it somewhere into the body of the motionless thing. Along
+the sides of the clean hulls a few riveters are at work; they sit
+on suspended planks, lowering and raising themselves with
+pulleys, like house painters. Only by listening very closely can
+one hear the tap of their hammers. No orders are shouted, no thud
+of heavy machinery or scream of iron drills tears the air. These
+strange boats seem to be building themselves.
+
+Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks,
+asking each other how boats could be built off in the grass like
+this. Lieutenant Claude Wheeler stretched his legs upon the
+opposite seat and sat still at his window, looking down on this
+strange scene. Shipbuilding, he had supposed, meant noise and
+forges and engines and hosts of men. This was like a dream.
+Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze of
+mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls,
+flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their wings--and those
+four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by
+the sea.
+
+Claude knew nothing of ships or shipbuilding, but these craft did
+not seem to be nailed together,--they seemed all of a piece, like
+sculpture. They reminded him of the houses not made with hands;
+they were like simple and great thoughts, like purposes forming
+slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the
+Atlantic. He knew nothing about ships, but he didn't have to; the
+shape of those hulls--their strong, inevitable lines--told their
+story, WAS their story; told the whole adventure of man with the
+sea.
+
+Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a
+country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the
+sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or
+read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden
+bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act,
+they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered
+cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!...
+
+The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old
+turkey-hen calling her brood. The soldier boys came running back
+along the embankment and leaped aboard the train. The conductor
+shouted they would be in Hoboken in time for supper.
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began
+unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of the long dock
+waiting-rooms,--which in other days had been thronged by people
+who came to welcome home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed
+to foreign shores. Claude and some of his men had tried to look
+about them; but there was little to be seen. The bow of a boat,
+painted in distracting patterns of black and white, rose at one
+end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible. Down in
+the cobble-paved street below they watched for awhile the long
+line of drays and motor trucks that bumped all night into a vast
+cavern lit by electricity, where crates and barrels and
+merchandise of all kinds were piled, marked American
+Expeditionary Forces; cases of electrical machinery from some
+factory in Ohio, parts of automobiles, gun-carriages, bath-tubs,
+hospital supplies, bales of cotton, cases of canned food, grey
+metal tanks full of chemical fluids. Claude went back to the
+waiting room, lay down and fell asleep with the glare of an
+arc-light shining full in his face.
+
+He was called at four in the morning and told where to report to
+headquarters. Captain Maxey, stationed at a desk on one of the
+landings, explained to his lieutenants that their company was to
+sail at eight o'clock on the Anchises. It was an English boat, an
+old liner pulled off the Australian trade, that could carry only
+twenty-five hundred men. The crew was English, but part of the
+stores,--the meat and fresh fruit and vegetables,--were furnished
+by the United States Government. The Captain had been over the
+boat during the night, and didn't like it very well. He had
+expected to be scheduled for one of the fine big Hamburg-American
+liners, with dining-rooms finished in rosewood, and ventilation
+plants and cooling plants, and elevators running from top to
+bottom like a New York office building. "However," he said,
+"we'll have to make the best of it. They're using everything
+that's got a bottom now."
+
+The company formed for roll-call at one end of the shed, with
+their packs and rifles. Breakfast was served to them while they
+waited. After an hour's standing on the concrete, they saw
+encouraging signs. Two gangplanks were lowered from the vessel at
+the end of the slip, and up each of them began to stream a close
+brown line of men in smart service caps. They recognized a
+company of Kansas Infantry, and began to grumble because their
+own service caps hadn't yet been given to them; they would have
+to sail in their old Stetsons. Soon they were drawn into one of
+the brown lines that went continuously up the gangways, like
+belting running over machinery. On the deck one steward directed
+the men down to the hold, and another conducted the officers to
+their cabins. Claude was shown to a four-berth state-room. One of
+his cabin mates, Lieutenant Fanning, of his own company, was
+already there, putting his slender luggage in order. The steward
+told them the officers were breakfasting in the dining saloon.
+
+By seven o'clock all the troops were aboard, and the men were
+allowed on deck. For the first time Claude saw the profile of New
+York City, rising thin and gray against an opal-coloured morning
+sky. The day had come on hot and misty. The sun, though it was
+now high, was a red ball, streaked across with purple clouds. The
+tall buildings, of which he had heard so much, looked
+unsubstantial and illusionary,--mere shadows of grey and pink and
+blue that might dissolve with the mist and fade away in it. The
+boys were disappointed. They were Western men, accustomed to the
+hard light of high altitudes, and they wanted to see the city
+clearly; they couldn't make anything of these uneven towers that
+rose dimly through the vapour. Everybody was asking questions.
+Which of those pale giants was the Singer Building? Which the
+Woolworth? What was the gold dome, dully glinting through the
+fog? Nobody knew. They agreed it was a shame they could not have
+had a day in New York before they sailed away from it, and that
+they would feel foolish in Paris when they had to admit they had
+never so much as walked up Broadway. Tugs and ferry boats and
+coal barges were moving up and down the oily river, all novel
+sights to the men. Over in the Canard and French docks they saw
+the first examples of the "camouflage" they had heard so much
+about; big vessels daubed over in crazy patterns that made the
+eyes ache, some in black and white, some in soft rainbow colours.
+
+A tug steamed up alongside and fastened. A few moments later a
+man appeared on the bridge and began to talk to the captain.
+Young Fanning, who had stuck to Claude's side, told him this was
+the pilot, and that his arrival meant they were going to start.
+They could see the shiny instruments of a band assembling in the
+bow.
+
+"Let's get on the other side, near the rail if we can," said
+Fanning. "The fellows are bunching up over here because they want
+to look at the Goddess of Liberty as we go out. They don't even
+know this boat turns around the minute she gets into the river.
+They think she's going over stern first!"
+
+It was not easy to cross the deck; every inch was covered by a
+boot. The whole superstructure was coated with brown uniforms;
+they clung to the boat davits, the winches, the railings and
+ventilators, like bees in a swarm. Just as the vessel was backing
+out, a breeze sprang up and cleared the air. Blue sky broke
+overhead, and the pale silhouette of buildings on the long island
+grew sharp and hard. Windows flashed flame-coloured in their grey
+sides, the gold and bronze tops of towers began to gleam where
+the sunlight struggled through. The transport was sliding down
+toward the point, and to the left the eye caught the silver
+cobweb of bridges, seen confusingly against each other.
+
+"There she is!" "Hello, old girl!" "Good-bye, sweetheart!"
+
+The swarm surged to starboard. They shouted and gesticulated to
+the image they were all looking for,--so much nearer than they
+had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist
+streaming up like smoke behind. For nearly every one of those
+twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude, it was their first
+glimpse of the Bartholdi statue. Though she was such a definite
+image in their minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of
+sea and sky, with the shipping of the world coming and going at
+her feet, and the moving cloud masses behind her. Post-card
+pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large
+gesture, or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish
+elements. "France gave her to us," they kept saying, as they
+saluted her. Before Claude had got over his first thrill, the
+Kansas band in the bow began playing "Over There." Two thousand
+voices took it up, booming out over the water the gay,
+indomitable resolution of that jaunty air.
+
+A Staten Island ferry-boat passed close under the bow of the
+transport. The passengers were office-going people, on their way
+to work, and when they looked up and saw these hundreds of faces,
+all young, all bronzed and grinning, they began to shout and wave
+their handkerchiefs. One of the passengers was an old clergyman,
+a famous speaker in his day, now retired, who went over to the
+City every morning to write editorials for a church paper. He
+closed the book he was reading, stood by the rail, and taking off
+his hat began solemnly to quote from a poet who in his time was
+still popular. "Sail on," he quavered,
+
+  "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State,
+  Humanity, with all its fears,
+  With all its hopes of future years,
+  Is hanging breathless on thy fate."
+
+As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still
+watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms
+and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American
+boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was
+ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a
+sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase... and on their
+departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.
+
+
+
+III
+
+All the first morning Tod Fanning showed Claude over the
+boat,--not that Fanning had ever been on anything bigger than a
+Lake Michigan steamer, but he knew a good deal about machinery,
+and did not hesitate to ask the deck stewards to explain anything
+he didn't know. The stewards, indeed all the crew, struck the
+boys as an unusually good-natured and obliging set of men.
+
+The fourth occupant of number 96, Claude's cabin, had not turned
+up by noon, nor had any of his belongings, so the three who had
+settled their few effects there began to hope they would have the
+place to themselves. It would be crowded enough, at that. The
+third bunk was assigned to an officer from the Kansas regiment,
+Lieutenant Bird, a Virginian, who had been working in his uncle's
+bank in Topeka when he enlisted. He and Claude sat together at
+mess. When they were at lunch, the Virginian said in his very
+gentle voice:
+
+"Lieutenant, I wish you'd explain Lieutenant Fanning to me. He
+seems very immature. He's been telling me about a submarine
+destroyer he's invented, but it looks to me like foolishness."
+
+Claude laughed. "Don't try to understand Fanning. Just let him
+sink in, and you'll come to like him. I used to wonder how he
+ever got a commission. You never can tell what crazy thing he'll
+do."
+
+Fanning had, for instance, brought on board a pair of white
+flannel pants, his first and only tailor-made trousers, because
+he had a premonition that the boat would make a port and that he
+would be asked to a garden party! He had a way of using big words
+in the wrong place, not because he tried to show off, but because
+all words sounded alike to him. In the first days of their
+acquaintance in camp he told Claude that this was a failing he
+couldn't help, and that it was called "anaesthesia." Sometimes
+this failing was confusing; when Fanning sententiously declared
+that he would like to be on hand when the Crown Prince settled
+his little account with Plato, Claude was perplexed until
+subsequent witticisms revealed that the boy meant Pluto.
+
+At three o'clock there was a band concert on deck. Claude fell
+into talk with the bandmaster, and was delighted to find that he
+came from Hillport, Kansas, a town where Claude had once been
+with his father to buy cattle, and that all his fourteen men came
+from Hillport. They were the town band, had enlisted in a body,
+had gone into training together, and had never been separated.
+One was a printer who helped to get out the Hillport Argus every
+week, another clerked in a grocery store, another was the son of
+a German watch repairer, one was still in High School, one worked
+in an automobile livery. After supper Claude found them all
+together, very much interested in their first evening at sea, and
+arguing as to whether the sunset on the water was as fine as
+those they saw every night in Hillport. They hung together in a
+quiet, determined way, and if you began to talk to one, you soon
+found that all the others were there.
+
+When Claude and Fanning and Lieutenant Bird were undressing in
+their narrow quarters that night, the fourth berth was still
+unclaimed. They were in their bunks and almost asleep, when the
+missing man came in and unceremoniously turned on the light. They
+were astonished to see that he wore the uniform of the Royal
+Flying Corps and carried a cane. He seemed very young, but the
+three who peeped out at him felt that he must be a person of
+consequence. He took off his coat with the spread wings on the
+collar, wound his watch, and brushed his teeth with an air of
+special personal importance. Soon after he had turned out the
+light and climbed into the berth over Lieutenant Bird, a heavy
+smell of rum spread in the close air.
+
+Fanning, who slept under Claude, kicked the sagging mattress
+above him and stuck his head out. "Hullo, Wheeler! What have you
+got up there?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing smells pretty good to me. I'll have some with anybody
+that asks me."
+
+No response from any quarter. Bird, the Virginian, murmured,
+"Don't make a row," and they went to sleep.
+
+In the morning, when the bath steward came, he edged his way into
+the narrow cabin and poked his head into the berth over Bird's.
+"I'm sorry, sir, I've made careful search for your luggage, and
+it's not to be found, sir."
+
+"I tell you it must be found," fumed a petulant voice overhead.
+"I brought it over from the St. Regis myself in a taxi. I saw it
+standing on the pier with the officers' luggage,--a black cabin
+trunk with V.M. lettered on both ends. Get after it."
+
+The steward smiled discreetly. He probably knew that the aviator
+had come on board in a state which precluded any very accurate
+observation on his part. "Very well, sir. Is there anything I can
+get you for the present?"
+
+"You can take this shirt out and have it laundered and bring it
+back to me tonight. I've no linen in my bag."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Claude and Fanning got on deck as quickly as possible and found
+scores of their comrades already there, pointing to dark smudges
+of smoke along the clear horizon. They knew that these vessels
+had come from unknown ports, some of them far away, steaming
+thither under orders known only to their commanders. They would
+all arrive within a few hours of each other at a given spot on
+the surface of the ocean. There they would fall into place,
+flanked by their destroyers, and would proceed in orderly
+formation, without changing their relative positions. Their
+escort would not leave them until they were joined by gunboats
+and destroyers off whatever coast they were bound for,--what that
+coast was, not even their own officers knew as yet.
+
+Later in the morning this meeting was actually accomplished.
+There were ten troop ships, some of them very large boats, and
+six destroyers. The men stood about the whole morning, gazing
+spellbound at their sister transports, trying to find out their
+names, guessing at their capacity. Tanned as they already were,
+their lips and noses began to blister under the fiery sunlight.
+After long months of intensive training, the sudden drop into an
+idle, soothing existence was grateful to them. Though their pasts
+were neither long or varied, most of them, like Claude Wheeler,
+felt a sense of relief at being rid of all they had ever been
+before and facing something absolutely new. Said Tod Fanning, as
+he lounged against the rail, "Whoever likes it can run for a
+train every morning, and grind his days out in a Westinghouse
+works; but not for me any more!"
+
+The Virginian joined them. "That Englishman ain't got out of bed
+yet. I reckon he's been liquouring up pretty steady. The place
+smells like a bar. The room steward was just coming out, and he
+winked at me. He was slipping something in his pocket, looked
+like a banknote."
+
+Claude was curious, and went down to the cabin. As he entered,
+the air-man, lying half-dressed in his upper berth, raised
+himself on one elbow and looked down at him. His blue eyes were
+contracted and hard, his curly hair disordered, but his cheeks
+were as pink as a girl's, and the little yellow humming-bird
+moustache on his upper lip was twisted sharp.
+
+"You're missing fine weather," said Claude affably.
+
+"Oh, there'll be a great deal of weather before we get over, and
+damned little of anything else!" He drew a bottle from under his
+pillow. "Have a nip?"
+
+"I don't mind if I do," Claude put out his hand.
+
+The other laughed and sank back on his pillow, drawling lazily,
+"Brave boy! Go ahead; drink to the Kaiser."
+
+"Why to him in particular?"
+
+"It's not particular. Drink to Hindenburg, or the High Command,
+or anything else that got you out of the cornfield. That's where
+they did get you, didn't they?"
+
+"Well, it's a good guess, anyhow. Where did they get you?"
+
+"Crystal Lake, Iowa. I think that was the place." He yawned and
+folded his hands over his stomach.
+
+"Why, we thought you were an Englishman."
+
+"Not quite. I've served in His Majesty's army two years, though."
+
+"Have you been flying in France?"
+
+"Yes. I've been back and forth all the time, England and France.
+Now I've wasted two months at Fort Worth. Instructor. That's not
+my line. I may have been sent over as a reprimand. You can't tell
+about my Colonel, though; may have been his way of getting me out
+of danger."
+
+Claude glanced up at him, shocked at such an idea.
+
+The young man in the berth smiled with listless compassion. "Oh,
+I don't mean Bosch planes! There are dangers and dangers. You'll
+find you got bloody little information about this war, where they
+trained you. They don't communicate any details of importance.
+Going?"
+
+Claude hadn't intended to, but at this suggestion he pulled back
+the door.
+
+"One moment," called the aviator. "Can't you keep that
+long-legged ass who bunks under you quiet?"
+
+"Fanning? He's a good kid. What's the matter with him?"
+
+"His general ignorance and his insufferably familiar tone,"
+snapped the other as he turned over.
+
+Claude found Fanning and the Virginian playing checkers, and told
+them that the mysterious air-man was a fellow countryman. Both
+seemed disappointed.
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Lieutenant Bird.
+
+"He can't put on airs with me, after that," Fanning declared.
+"Crystal Lake! Why it's no town at all!"
+
+All the same, Claude wanted to find out how a youth from Crystal
+Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Already,
+from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as
+men he was determined to know better. Taking them altogether the
+men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the
+sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days
+forgotten. Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown
+uniforms. Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were
+rather noble looking fellows. In so many of the faces there was a
+look of fine candour, an expression of cheerful expectancy and
+confident goodwill.
+
+There was on board a solitary Marine, with the stripes of Border
+service on his coat. He had been sick in the Navy Hospital in
+Brooklyn when his regiment sailed, and was now going over to join
+it. He was a young fellow, rather pale from his recent illness,
+but he was exactly Claude's idea of what a soldier ought to look
+like. His eye followed the Marine about all day.
+
+The young man's name was Albert Usher, and he came from a little
+town up in the Wind River mountains, in Wyoming, where he had
+worked in a logging camp. He told Claude these facts when they
+found themselves standing side by side that evening, watching the
+broad purple sun go down into a violet coloured sea.
+
+It was the hour when the farmers at home drive their teams in
+after the day's work. Claude was thinking how his mother would be
+standing at the west window every evening now, watching the sun
+go down and following him in her mind. When the young Marine came
+up and joined him, he confessed to a pang of homesickness.
+
+"That's a kind of sickness I don't have to wrastle with," said
+Albert Usher. "I was left an orphan on a lonesome ranch, when I
+was nine, and I've looked out for myself ever since."
+
+Claude glanced sidewise at the boy's handsome head, that came up
+from his neck with clean, strong lines, and thought he had done a
+pretty good job for himself. He could not have said exactly what
+it was he liked about young Usher's face, but it seemed to him a
+face that had gone through things,--that had been trained down
+like his body, and had developed a definite character. What
+Claude thought due to a manly, adventurous life, was really due
+to well-shaped bones; Usher's face was more "modelled" than most
+of the healthy countenances about him.
+
+When questioned, the Marine went on to say that though he had no
+home of his own, he had always happened to fall on his feet,
+among kind people. He could go back to any house in Pinedale or
+Du Bois and be welcomed like a son.
+
+"I suppose there are kind women everywhere," he said, "but in
+that respect Wyoming's got the rest of the world beat. I never
+felt the lack of a home. Now the U. S. Marines are my family.
+Wherever they are, I'm at home."
+
+"Were you at Vera Cruz?" Claude asked.
+
+"I guess! We thought that was quite a little party at the time,
+but I suppose it will seem small potatoes when we get over there.
+I'm figuring on seeing some first-rate scrapping. How long have
+you been in the army?"
+
+"Year ago last April. I've had hard luck about getting over. They
+kept me jumping about to train men."
+
+"Then yours is all to come. Are you a college graduate?"
+
+"No. I went away to school, but I didn't finish."
+
+Usher frowned at the gilded path on the water where the sun lay
+half submerged, like a big, watchful eye, closing. "I always
+wanted to go to college, but I never managed it. A man in Laramie
+offered to stake me to a course in the University there, but I
+was too restless. I guess I was ashamed of my handwriting." He
+paused as if he had run against some old regret. A moment later
+he said suddenly, "Can you parlez-vous?"
+
+"No. I know a few words, but I can't put them together."
+
+"Same here. I expect to pick up some. I pinched quite a little
+Spanish down on the Border."
+
+By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the
+yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still
+sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue
+stone,--not a twinkle on its immobile surface. Across its dusky
+smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin's
+egg.
+
+"Do you like the water?" Usher asked, in the tone of a polite
+host. "When I first shipped on a cruiser I was crazy about it. I
+still am. But, you know, I like them old bald mountains back in
+Wyoming, too. There's waterfalls you can see twenty miles off
+from the plains; they look like white sheets or something,
+hanging up there on the cliffs. And down in the pine woods, in
+the cold streams, there's trout as long as my fore-arm."
+
+That evening Claude was on deck, almost alone; there was a
+concert down in the ward room. To the west heavy clouds had come
+up, moving so low that they flapped over the water like a black
+washing hanging on the line.
+
+The music sounded well from below. Four Swedish boys from the
+Scandinavian settlement at Lindsborg, Kansas, were singing "Long,
+Long Ago." Claude listened from a sheltered spot in the stern.
+What were they, and what was he, doing here on the Atlantic? Two
+years ago he had seemed a fellow for whom life was over; driven
+into the ground like a post, or like those Chinese criminals who
+are planted upright in the earth, with only their heads left out
+for birds to peck at and insects to sting. All his comrades had
+been tucked away in prairie towns, with their little jobs and
+their little plans. Yet here they were, attended by unknown ships
+called in from the four quarters of the earth. How had they come
+to be worth the watchfulness and devotion of so many men and
+machines, this extravagant consumption of fuel and energy? Taken
+one by one, they were ordinary fellows like himself. Yet here
+they were. And in this massing and movement of men there was
+nothing mean or common; he was sure of that. It was, from first
+to last, unforeseen, almost incredible. Four years ago, when the
+French were holding the Marne, the wisest men in the world had
+not conceived of this as possible; they had reckoned with every
+fortuity but this. "Out of these stones can my Father raise up
+seed unto Abraham."
+
+Downstairs the men began singing "Annie Laurie." Where were those
+summer evenings when he used to sit dumb by the windmill,
+wondering what to do with his life?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The morning of the third day; Claude and the Virginian and the
+Marine were up very early, standing in the bow, watching the
+Anchises mount the fresh blowing hills of water, her prow, as it
+rose and fell, always a dull triangle against the glitter. Their
+escorts looked like dream ships, soft and iridescent as shell in
+the pearl-coloured tints of the morning. Only the dark smudges of
+smoke told that they were mechanical realities with stokers and
+engines.
+
+While the three stood there, a sergeant brought Claude word that
+two of his men would have to report at sick-call. Corporal
+Tannhauser had had such an attack of nose-bleed during the night
+that the sergeant thought he might die before they got it
+stopped. Tannhauser was up now, and in the breakfast line, but
+the sergeant was sure he ought not to be. This Fritz Tannhauser
+was the tallest man in the company, a German-American boy who,
+when asked his name, usually said that his name was Dennis and
+that he was of Irish descent. Even this morning he tried to joke,
+and pointing to his big red face told Claude he thought he had
+measles. "Only they ain't German measles, Lieutenant," he
+insisted.
+
+Medical inspection took a long while that morning. There seemed
+to be an outbreak of sickness on board. When Claude brought his
+two men up to the Doctor, he told them to go below and get into
+bed. As they left he turned to Claude.
+
+"Give them hot tea, and pile army blankets on them. Make them
+sweat if you can." Claude remarked that the hold wasn't a very
+cheerful place for sick men.
+
+"I know that, Lieutenant, but there are a number of sick men this
+morning, and the only other physician on board is the sickest of
+the lot. There's the ship's doctor, of course, but he's only
+responsible for the crew, and so far he doesn't seem interested.
+I've got to overhaul the hospital and the medical stores this
+morning."
+
+"Is there an epidemic of some sort?"
+
+"Well, I hope not. But I'll have plenty to do today, so I count
+on you to look after those two." The doctor was a New Englander
+who had joined them at Hoboken. He was a brisk, trim man, with
+piercing eyes, clean-cut features, and grey hair just the colour
+of his pale face. Claude felt at once that he knew his business,
+and he went below to carry out instructions as well as he could.
+
+When he came up from the hold, he saw the aviator--whose name, he
+had learned, was Victor Morse--smoking by the rail. This
+cabin-mate still piqued his curiosity.
+
+"First time you've been up, isn't it?"
+
+The aviator was looking at the distant smoke plumes over the
+quivering, bright water. "Time enough. I wish I knew where we are
+heading for. It will be awfully awkward for me if we make a
+French port."
+
+"I thought you said you were to report in France."
+
+"I am. But I want to report in London first." He continued to
+gaze off at the painted ships. Claude noticed that in standing he
+held his chin very high. His eyes, now that he was quite sober,
+were brilliantly young and daring; they seemed scornful of things
+about him. He held himself conspicuously apart, as if he were not
+among his own kind.
+
+Claude had seen a captured crane, tied by its leg to a hencoop,
+behave exactly like that among Mahailey's chickens; hold its
+wings to its sides, and move its head about quickly and glare.
+
+"I suppose you have friends in London?" he asked.
+
+"Rather!" the aviator replied with feeling.
+
+"Do you like it better than Paris?"
+
+"I shouldn't imagine anything was much better than London. I've
+not been in Paris; always went home when I was on leave. They
+work us pretty hard. In the infantry and artillery our men get
+only a fortnight off in twelve months. I understand the Americans
+have leased the Riviera,--recuperate at Nice and Monte Carlo. The
+only Cook's tour we had was Gallipoli," he added grimly.
+
+Victor had gone a good way toward acquiring an English accent,
+the boys thought. At least he said 'necess'ry' and 'dysent'ry'
+and called his suspenders 'braces'. He offered Claude a
+cigarette, remarking that his cigars were in his lost trunk.
+
+"Take one of mine. My brother sent me two boxes just before we
+sailed. I'll put a box in your bunk next time I go down. They're
+good ones."
+
+The young man turned and looked him over with surprise. "I say,
+that's very decent of you! Yes, thank you, I will."
+
+Claude had tried yesterday, when he lent Victor some shirts, to
+make him talk about his aerial adventures, but upon that subject
+he was as close as a clam. He admitted that the long red scar on
+his upper arm had been drilled by a sharpshooter from a German
+Fokker, but added hurriedly that it was of no consequence, as he
+had made a good landing. Now, on the strength of the cigars,
+Claude thought he would probe a little further. He asked whether
+there was anything in the lost trunk that couldn't be replaced,
+anything "valuable."
+
+"There's one thing that's positively invaluable; a Zeiss lens, in
+perfect condition. I've got several good photographic outfits
+from time to time, but the lenses are always cracked by
+heat,--the things usually come down on fire. This one I got out
+of a plane I brought down up at Bar-le-Duc, and there's not a
+scratch on it; simply a miracle."
+
+"You get all the loot when you bring down a machine, do you?"
+Claude asked encouragingly.
+
+"Of course. I've a good collection; altimeters and compasses and
+glasses. This lens I always carry with me, because I'm afraid to
+leave it anywhere."
+
+"I suppose it makes a fellow feel pretty fine to bring down one
+of those German planes."
+
+"Sometimes. I brought down one too many, though; it was very
+unpleasant." Victor paused, frowning. But Claude's open,
+credulous face was too much for his reserve. "I brought down a
+woman once. She was a plucky devil, flew a scouting machine and
+had bothered us a bit, going over our lines. Naturally, we didn't
+know it was a woman until she came down. She was crushed
+underneath things. She lived a few hours and dictated a letter to
+her people. I went out and dropped it inside their lines. It was
+nasty business. I was quite knocked out. I got a fortnight's
+leave in London, though. Wheeler," he broke out suddenly, "I wish
+I knew we were going there now!"
+
+"I'd like it well enough if we were."
+
+Victor shrugged. "I should hope so!" He turned his chin in
+Claude's direction. "See here, if you like, I'll show you London!
+It's a promise. Americans never see it, you know. They sit in a
+Y. hut and write to their Pollyannas, or they go round hunting for
+the Tower. I'll show you a city that's alive; that is, unless
+you've a preference for museums."
+
+His listener laughed. "No, I want to see life, as they say."
+
+"Umph! I'd like to set you down in some places I can think of.
+Very well, I invite you to dine with me at the Savoy, the first
+night we're in London. The curtain will rise on this world for
+you. Nobody admitted who isn't in evening dress. The jewels will
+dazzle you. Actresses, duchesses, all the handsomest women in
+Europe."
+
+"But I thought London was dark and gloomy since the war."
+
+Victor smiled and teased his small straw-coloured moustache with
+his thumb and middle finger. "There are a few bright spots left,
+thank you!" He began to explain to a novice what life at the
+front was really like. Nobody who had seen service talked about
+the war, or thought about it; it was merely a condition under
+which they lived. Men talked about the particular regiment they
+were jealous of, or the favoured division that was put in for all
+the show fighting. Everybody thought about his own game, his
+personal life that he managed to keep going in spite of
+discipline; his next leave, how to get champagne without paying
+for it, dodging the guard, getting into scrapes with women and
+getting out again. "Are you quick with your French?" he asked.
+
+Claude grinned. "Not especially."
+
+"You'd better brush up on it if you want to do anything with
+French girls. I hear your M.P.'s are very strict. You must be
+able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your
+date before the guard gets onto you."
+
+"I suppose French girls haven't any scruples?" Claude remarked
+carelessly.
+
+Victor shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I haven't found that girls
+have many, anywhere. When we Canadians were training in England,
+we all had our week-end wives. I believe the girls in Crystal
+Lake used to be more or less fussy,--but that's long ago and far
+away. You won't have any difficulty."
+
+When Victor was in the middle of a tale of amorous adventure, a
+little different from any Claude had ever heard, Tod Fanning
+joined them. The aviator did not acknowledge the presence of a
+new listener, but when he had finished his story, walked away
+with his special swagger, his eyes fixed upon the distance.
+
+Fanning looked after him with disgust. "Do you believe him? I
+don't think he's any such heart-smasher. I like his nerve,
+calling you `Leftenant'! When he speaks to me he'll have to say
+Lootenant, or I'll spoil his beauty."
+
+That day the men remembered long afterward, for it was the end of
+the fine weather, and of those first long, carefree days at sea.
+In the afternoon Claude and the young Marine, the Virginian and
+Fanning, sat together in the sun watching the water scoop itself
+out in hollows and pile itself up in blue, rolling hills. Usher
+was telling his companions a long story about the landing of the
+Marines at Vera Cruz.
+
+"It's a great old town," he concluded. "One thing there I'll
+never forget. Some of the natives took a few of us out to the old
+prison that stands on a rock in the sea. We put in the whole day
+there, and it wasn't any tourist show, believe me! We went down
+into dungeons underneath the water where they used to keep State
+prisoners, kept them buried alive for years. We saw all the old
+instruments of torture; rusty iron cages where a man couldn't lie
+down or stand up, but had to sit bent over till he grew crooked.
+It made you feel queer when you came up, to think how people had
+been left to rot away down there, when there was so much sun and
+water outside. Seems like something used to be the matter with
+the world." He said no more, but Claude thought from his serious
+look that he believed he and his countrymen who were pouring
+overseas would help to change all that.
+
+
+
+V
+
+That night the Virginian, who berthed under Victor Morse, had an
+alarming attack of nose-bleed, and by morning he was so weak that
+he had to be carried to the hospital. The Doctor said they might
+as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on
+board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type.* Everybody was
+a little frightened. Some of the officers shut themselves up in
+the smoking-room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all
+day, as if they could keep contagion out.
+
+* The actual outbreak of influenza on transports carrying United
+States troops is here anticipated by several months.
+
+
+Lieutenant Bird died late in the afternoon and was buried at
+sunrise the next day, sewed up in a tarpaulin, with an eighteen
+pound shell at his feet. The morning broke brilliantly clear and
+bitter cold. The sea was rolling blue walls of water, and the
+boat was raked by a wind as sharp as ice. Excepting those who
+were sick, the boys turned out to a man. It was the first burial
+at sea they had ever witnessed, and they couldn't help finding it
+interesting. The Chaplain read the burial service while they
+stood with uncovered heads. The Kansas band played a solemn
+march, the Swedish quartette sang a hymn. Many a man turned his
+face away when that brown sack was lowered into the cold, leaping
+indigo ridges that seemed so destitute of anything friendly to
+human kind. In a moment it was done, and they steamed on without
+him.
+
+The glittering walls of water kept rolling in, indigo, purple,
+more brilliant than on the days of mild weather. The blinding
+sunlight did not temper the cold, which cut the face and made the
+lungs ache. Landsmen began to have that miserable sense of being
+where they were never meant to be. The boys lay in heaps on the
+deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close. Everybody
+was seasick. Fanning went to bed with his clothes on, so sick he
+couldn't take off his boots. Claude lay in the crowded stern, too
+cold, too faint to move. The sun poured over them like flame,
+without any comfort in it. The strong, curling, foam-crested
+waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their
+colour was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed
+denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the
+edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man
+should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces.
+
+The whole ocean seemed suddenly to have come to life, the waves
+had a malignant, graceful, muscular energy, were animated by a
+kind of mocking cruelty. Only a few hours ago a gentle boy had
+been thrown into that freezing water and forgotten. Yes, already
+forgotten; every one had his own miseries to think about.
+
+Late in the afternoon the wind fell, and there was a sinister
+sunset. Across the red west a small, ragged black cloud
+hurried,--then another, and another. They came up out of the
+sea,--wild, witchlike shapes that travelled fast and met in the
+west as if summoned for an evil conclave. They hung there against
+the afterglow, distinct black shapes, drawing together, devising
+something. The few men who were left on deck felt that no good
+could come out of a sky like that. They wished they were at home,
+in France, anywhere but here.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Doctor Trueman asked Claude to help him at sick
+call. "I've got a bunch of sergeants taking temperatures, but
+it's too much for one man to oversee. I don't want to ask
+anything of those dude officers who sit in there playing poker
+all the time. Either they've got no conscience, or they're not
+awake to the gravity of the situation."
+
+The Doctor stood on deck in his raincoat, his foot on the rail to
+keep his equilibrium, writing on his knee as the long string of
+men came up to him. There were more than seventy in the line that
+morning, and some of them looked as if they ought to be in a
+drier place. Rain beat down on the sea like lead bullets. The old
+Anchises floundered from one grey ridge to another, quite alone.
+Fog cut off the cheering sight of the sister ships. The doctor
+had to leave his post from time to time, when seasickness got the
+better of his will. Claude, at his elbow, was noting down names
+and temperatures. In the middle of his work he told the sergeants
+to manage without him for a few minutes. Down near the end of the
+line he had seen one of his own men misconducting himself,
+snivelling and crying like a baby,--a fine husky boy of eighteen
+who had never given any trouble. Claude made a dash for him and
+clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"If you can't stop that, Bert Fuller, get where you won't be
+seen. I don't want all these English stewards standing around to
+watch an American soldier cry. I never heard of such a thing!"
+
+"I can't help it, Lieutenant," the boy blubbered. "I've kept it
+back just as long as I can. I can't hold in any longer!"
+
+"What's the matter with you? Come over here and sit down on this
+box and tell me."
+
+Private Fuller willingly let himself be led, and dropped on the
+box. "I'm so sick, Lieutenant!"
+
+"I'll see how sick you are." Claude stuck a thermometer into his
+mouth, and while he waited, sent the deck steward to bring a cup
+of tea. "Just as I thought, Fuller. You've not half a degree of
+fever. You're scared, and that's all. Now drink this tea. I
+expect you didn't eat any breakfast."
+
+"No, sir. I can't eat the awful stuff on this boat."
+
+"It is pretty bad. Where are you from?"
+
+"I'm from P-P-Pleasantville, up on the P-P-Platte," the boy
+gulped, and his tears began to flow afresh.
+
+"Well, now, what would they think of you, back there? I suppose
+they got the band out and made a fuss over you when you went
+away, and thought they were sending off a fine soldier. And I've
+always thought you'd be a first rate soldier. I guess we'll forget
+about this. You feel better already, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, sir. This tastes awful good. I've been so sick to my
+stomach, and last night I got pains in my chest. All my crowd is
+sick, and you took big Tannhauser, I mean Corporal, away to the
+hospital. It looks like we're all going to die out here."
+
+"I know it's a little gloomy. But don't you shame me before these
+English stewards."
+
+"I won't do it again, sir," he promised.
+
+When the medical inspection was over, Claude took the Doctor down
+to see Fanning, who had been coughing and wheezing all night and
+hadn't got out of his berth. The examination was short. The
+Doctor knew what was the matter before he put the stethoscope on
+him. "It's pneumonia, both lungs," he said when they came out
+into the corridor. "I have one case in the hospital that will die
+before morning."
+
+"What can you do for him, Doctor?"
+
+"You see how I'm fixed; close onto two hundred men sick, and one
+doctor. The medical supplies are wholly inadequate. There's not
+castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside. I'm
+using my own drugs, but they won't last through an epidemic like
+this. I can't do much for Lieutenant Fanning. You can, though, if
+you'll give him the time. You can take better care of him right
+here than he could get in the hospital. We haven't an empty bed
+there."
+
+Claude found Victor Morse and told him he had better get a berth
+in one of the other staterooms. When Victor left with his
+belongings, Fanning stared after him. "Is he going?"
+
+"Yes. It's too crowded in here, if you've got to stay in bed."
+
+"Glad of it. His stories are too raw for me. I'm no sissy, but
+that fellow's a regular Don Quixote."
+
+Claude laughed. "You mustn't talk. It makes you cough."
+
+"Where's the Virginian?"
+
+"Who, Bird?" Claude asked in astonishment,--Fanning had stood
+beside him at Bird's funeral. "Oh, he's gone, too. You sleep if
+you can."
+
+After dinner Doctor Trueman came in and showed Claude how to give
+his patient an alcohol bath. "It's simply a question of whether
+you can keep up his strength. Don't try any of this greasy food
+they serve here. Give him a raw egg beaten up in the juice of an
+orange every two hours, night and day. Waken him out of his sleep
+when it's time, don't miss a single two-hour period. I'll write
+an order to your table steward, and you can beat the eggs up here
+in your cabin. Now I must go to the hospital. It's wonderful what
+those band boys are doing there. I begin to take some pride in
+the place. That big German has been asking for you. He's in a
+very bad way."
+
+As there were no nurses on board, the Kansas band had taken over
+the hospital. They had been trained for stretcher and first aid
+work, and when they realized what was happening on the Anchises,
+the bandmaster came to the Doctor and offered the services of his
+men. He chose nurses and orderlies, divided them into night and
+day shifts.
+
+When Claude went to see his Corporal, big Tannhauser did not
+recognize him. He was quite out of his head and was conversing
+with his own family in the language of his early childhood. The
+Kansas boys had singled him out for special attention. The mere
+fact that he kept talking in a tongue forbidden on the surface of
+the seas, made him seem more friendless and alone than the
+others.
+
+From the hospital Claude went down into the hold where
+half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and
+musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of
+innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept
+clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid
+with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were
+working in the stench and dirt, helping the stewards. Claude
+stayed to lend a hand until it was time to give Fanning his
+nourishment. He began to see that the wrist watch, which he had
+hitherto despised as effeminate and had carried in his pocket,
+might be a very useful article. After he had made Fanning swallow
+his egg, he piled all the available blankets on him and opened
+the port to give the cabin an airing. While the fresh wind blew
+in, he sat down on the edge of his berth and tried to collect his
+wits. What had become of those first days of golden weather,
+leisure and good-comradeship? The band concerts, the Lindsborg
+Quartette, the first excitement and novelty of being at sea: all
+that had gone by like a dream.
+
+That night when the Doctor came in to see Fanning, he threw his
+stethoscope on the bed and said wearily, "It's a wonder that
+instrument doesn't take root in my ears and grow there." He sat
+down and sucked his thermometer for a few minutes, then held it
+out for inspection. Claude looked at it and told him he ought to
+go to bed.
+
+"Then who's to be up and around? No bed for me, tonight. But I
+will have a hot bath by and by."
+
+Claude asked why the ship's doctor didn't do anything and added
+that he must be as little as he looked.
+
+"Chessup? No, he's not half bad when you get to know him. He's
+given me a lot of help about preparing medicines, and it's a
+great assistance to talk the cases over with him. He'll do
+anything for me except directly handle the patients. He doesn't
+want to exceed his authority. It seems the English marine is very
+particular about such things. He's a Canadian, and he graduated
+first in his class at Edinburgh. I gather he was frozen out in
+private practice. You see, his appearance is against him. It's an
+awful handicap to look like a kid and be as shy as he is."
+
+The Doctor rose, shored up his shoulders and took his bag.
+"You're looking fine yourself, Lieutenant," he remarked.
+
+"Parents both living? Were they quite young when you were born?
+Well, then their parents were, probably. I'm a crank about that.
+Yes, I'll get my bath pretty soon, and I will lie down for an
+hour or two. With those splendid band boys running the hospital,
+I get a little lee-way."
+
+Claude wondered how the Doctor kept going. He knew he hadn't had
+more than four hours sleep out of the last forty-eight, and he
+was not a man of rugged constitution. His bath steward was, as he
+said, his comfort. Hawkins was an old fellow who had held better
+positions on better boats,--yes, in better times, too. He had
+first gone to sea as a bath steward, and now, through the
+fortunes of war, he had come back where he began,--not a good
+place for an old man. His back was bent meekly, and he shuffled
+along with broken arches. He looked after the comfort of all the
+officers, and attended the doctor like a valet; got out his clean
+linen, persuaded him to lie down and have a hot drink after his
+bath, stood on guard at his door to take messages for him in the
+short hours when he was resting. Hawkins had lost two sons in the
+war and he seemed to find a solemn consolation in being of
+service to soldiers. "Take it a bit easy now, sir. You'll 'ave it
+'ard enough over there," he used to say to one and another.
+
+At eleven o'clock one of the Kansas men came to tell Claude that
+his Corporal was going fast. Big Tannhauser's fever had left him,
+but so had everything else. He lay in a stupor. His congested
+eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish
+whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out
+at one side. From the end of the corridor Claude had heard the
+frightful sounds that came from his throat, sounds like violent
+vomiting, or the choking rattle of a man in strangulation,--and,
+indeed, he was being strangled. One of the band boys brought
+Claude a camp chair, and said kindly, "He doesn't suffer. It's
+mechanical now. He'd go easier if he hadn't so much vitality. The
+Doctor says he may have a few moments of consciousness just at
+the last, if you want to stay."
+
+"I'll go down and give my private patient his egg, and then I'll
+come back." Claude went away and returned, and sat dozing by the
+bed. After three o'clock the noise of struggle ceased; instantly
+the huge figure on the bed became again his good-natured
+corporal. The mouth closed, the glassy jellies were once more
+seeing, intelligent human eyes. The face lost its swollen,
+brutish look and was again the face of a friend. It was almost
+unbelievable that anything so far gone could come back. He looked
+up wistfully at his Lieutenant as if to ask him something. His
+eyes filled with tears, and he turned his head away a little.
+
+"Mein' arme Mutter!" he whispered distinctly.
+
+A few moments later he died in perfect dignity, not struggling
+under torture, but consciously, it seemed to Claude,--like a
+brave boy giving back what was not his to keep.
+
+Claude returned to his cabin, roused Fanning once more, and then
+threw himself upon his tipping bunk. The boat seemed to wallow
+and sprawl in the waves, as he had seen animals do on the farm
+when they gave birth to young. How helpless the old vessel was
+out here in the pounding seas, and how much misery she carried!
+He lay looking up at the rusty water pipes and unpainted
+joinings. This liner was in truth the "Old Anchises"; even the
+carpenters who made her over for the service had not thought her
+worth the trouble, and had done their worst by her. The new
+partitions were hung to the joists by a few nails.
+
+Big Tannhauser had been one of those who were most anxious to
+sail. He used to grin and say, "France is the only climate that's
+healthy for a man with a name like mine." He had waved his
+good-bye to the image in the New York harbour with the rest,
+believed in her like the rest. He only wanted to serve. It seemed
+hard.
+
+When Tannhauser first came to camp he was confused all the time,
+and couldn't remember instructions. Claude had once stepped him
+out in front of the line and reprimanded him for not knowing his
+right side from his left. When he looked into the case, he found
+that the fellow was not eating anything, that he was ill from
+homesickness. He was one of those farmer boys who are afraid of
+town. The giant baby of a long family, he had never slept away
+from home a night in his life before he enlisted.
+
+Corporal Tannhauser, along with four others, was buried at
+sunrise. No band this time; the chaplain was ill, so one of the
+young captains read the service. Claude stood by watching until
+the sailors shot one sack, longer by half a foot than the other
+four, into a lead-coloured chasm in the sea. There was not even a
+splash. After breakfast one of the Kansas orderlies called him
+into a little cabin where they had prepared the dead men for
+burial. The Army regulations minutely defined what was to be done
+with a deceased soldier's effects. His uniform, shoes, blankets,
+arms, personal baggage, were all disposed of according to
+instructions. But in each case there was a residue; the dead
+man's toothbrushes, his razors, and the photographs he carried
+upon his person. There they were in five pathetic little heaps;
+what should be done with them?
+
+Claude took up the photographs that had belonged to his corporal;
+one was a fat, foolish-looking girl in a white dress that was too
+tight for her, and a floppy hat, a little flag pinned on her
+plump bosom. The other was an old woman, seated, her hands
+crossed in her lap. Her thin hair was drawn back tight from a
+hard, angular face--unmistakably an Old-World face--and her eyes
+squinted at the camera. She looked honest and stubborn and
+unconvinced, he thought, as if she did not in the least
+understand.
+
+"I'll take these," he said. "And the others--just pitch them
+over, don't you think?"
+
+
+
+VII
+
+B Company's first officer, Captain Maxey, was so seasick
+throughout the voyage that he was of no help to his men in the
+epidemic. It must have been a frightful blow to his pride, for
+nobody was ever more anxious to do an officer's whole duty.
+
+Claude had known Harris Maxey slightly in Lincoln; had met him at
+the Erlichs' and afterward kept up a campus acquaintance with
+him. He hadn't liked Maxey then, and he didn't like him now, but
+he thought him a good officer. Maxey's family were poor folk from
+Mississippi, who had settled in Nemaha county, and he was very
+ambitious, not only to get on in the world, but, as he said, to
+"be somebody." His life at the University was a feverish pursuit
+of social advantages and useful acquaintances. His feeling for
+the "right people" amounted to veneration. After his graduation,
+Maxey served on the Mexican Border. He was a tireless drill
+master, and threw himself into his duties with all the energy of
+which his frail physique was capable. He was slight and
+fair-skinned; a rigid jaw threw his lower teeth out beyond the
+upper ones and made his face look stiff. His whole manner, tense
+and nervous, was the expression of a passionate desire to excel.
+
+Claude seemed to himself to be leading a double life these days.
+When he was working over Fanning, or was down in the hold helping
+to take care of the sick soldiers, he had no time to think,--did
+mechanically the next thing that came to hand. But when he had an
+hour to himself on deck, the tingling sense of ever-widening
+freedom flashed up in him again. The weather was a continual
+adventure; he had never known any like it before. The fog, and
+rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean
+were like something he had imagined long ago--memories of old sea
+stories read in childhood, perhaps--and they kindled a warm spot
+in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where
+childhood had left off. The ugly hiatus between had closed up.
+Years of his life were blotted out in the fog. This fog which had
+been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving
+through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving
+one a chance to correct one's ideas about life and to plan the
+future. The past was physically shut off; that was his illusion.
+He had already travelled a great many more miles than were told
+off by the ship's log. When Bandmaster Fred Max asked him to play
+chess, he had to stop a moment and think why it was that game had
+such disagreeable associations for him. Enid's pale, deceptive
+face seldom rose before him unless some such accident brought it
+up. If he happened to come upon a group of boys talking about
+their sweethearts and war-brides, he listened a moment and then
+moved away with the happy feeling that he was the least married
+man on the boat.
+
+There was plenty of deck room, now that so many men were ill
+either from seasickness or the epidemic, and sometimes he and
+Albert Usher had the stormy side of the boat almost to
+themselves. The Marine was the best sort of companion for these
+gloomy days; steady, quiet, self-reliant. And he, too, was always
+looking forward. As for Victor Morse, Claude was growing
+positively fond of him. Victor had tea in a special corner of the
+officers' smoking-room every afternoon--he would have perished
+without it--and the steward always produced some special
+garnishes of toast and jam or sweet biscuit for him. Claude
+usually managed to join him at that hour.
+
+On the day of Tannhauser's funeral he went into the smoking-room
+at four. Victor beckoned the steward and told him to bring a
+couple of hot whiskeys with the tea. "You're very wet, you know,
+Wheeler, and you really should. There," he said as he put down
+his glass, "don't you feel better with a drink?"
+
+"Very much. I think I'll have another. It's agreeable to be warm
+inside."
+
+"Two more, steward, and bring me some fresh lemon." The occupants
+of the room were either reading or talking in low tones. One of
+the Swedish boys was playing softly on the old piano. Victor
+began to pour the tea. He had a neat way of doing it, and today
+he was especially solicitous. "This Scotch mist gets into one's
+bones, doesn't it? I thought you were looking rather seedy when I
+passed you on deck."
+
+"I was up with Tannhauser last night. Didn't get more than an
+hour's sleep," Claude murmured, yawning.
+
+"Yes, I heard you lost your big corporal. I'm sorry. I've had bad
+news, too. It's out now that we're to make a French port. That
+dashes all my plans. However, c'est la guerre!" He pushed back
+his cup with a shrug. "Take a turn outside?"
+
+Claude had often wondered why Victor liked him, since he was so
+little Victor's kind. "If it isn't a secret," he said, "I'd like
+to know how you ever got into the British army, anyway."
+
+As they walked up and down in the rain, Victor told his story
+briefly. When he had finished High School, he had gone into his
+father's bank at Crystal Lake as bookkeeper. After banking hours
+he skated, played tennis, or worked in the strawberry-bed,
+according to the season. He bought two pairs of white pants every
+summer and ordered his shirts from Chicago and thought he was a
+swell, he said. He got himself engaged to the preacher's
+daughter. Two years ago, the summer he was twenty, his father
+wanted him to see Niagara Falls; so he wrote a modest check,
+warned his son against saloons--Victor had never been inside
+one--against expensive hotels and women who came up to ask the
+time without an introduction, and sent him off, telling him it
+wasn't necessary to fee porters or waiters. At Niagara Falls,
+Victor fell in with some young Canadian officers who opened his
+eyes to a great many things. He went over to Toronto with them.
+Enlistment was going strong, and he saw an avenue of escape from
+the bank and the strawberry bed. The air force seemed the most
+brilliant and attractive branch of the service. They accepted
+him, and here he was.
+
+"You'll never go home again," Claude said with conviction. "I
+don't see you settling down in any little Iowa town."
+
+"In the air service," said Victor carelessly, "we don't concern
+ourselves about the future. It's not worth while." He took out a
+dull gold cigarette case which Claude had noticed before.
+
+"Let me see that a minute, will you? I've often admired it. A
+present from somebody you like, isn't it?"
+
+A twitch of feeling, something quite genuine, passed over the
+air-man's boyish face, and his rather small red mouth compressed
+sharply. "Yes, a woman I want you to meet. Here," twitching his
+chin over his high collar, "I'll write Maisie's address on my
+card: `Introducing Lieutenant Wheeler, A.E.F.' That's all you'll
+need. If you should get to London before I do, don't hesitate.
+Call on her at once. Present this card, and she'll receive you."
+
+Claude thanked him and put the card in his pocketbook, while
+Victor lit a cigarette. "I haven't forgotten that you're dining
+with us at the Savoy, if we happen in London together. If I'm
+there, you can always find me. Her address is mine. It will
+really be a great thing for you to meet a woman like Maisie.
+She'll be nice to you, because you're my friend." He went on to
+say that she had done everything in the world for him; had left
+her husband and given up her friends on his account. She now had
+a studio flat in Chelsea, where she simply waited his coming and
+dreaded his going. It was an awful life for her. She entertained
+other officers, of course, old acquaintances; but it was all
+camouflage. He was the man.
+
+Victor went so far as to produce her picture, and Claude gazed
+without knowing what to say at a large moon-shaped face with
+heavy-lidded, weary eyes,--the neck clasped by a pearl collar,
+the shoulders bare to the matronly swell of the bosom. There was
+not a line or wrinkle in that smooth expanse of flesh, but from
+the heavy mouth and chin, from the very shape of the face, it was
+easy to see that she was quite old enough to be Victor's mother.
+Across the photograph was written in a large splashy hand, 'A
+mon aigle!' Had Victor been delicate enough to leave him in any
+doubt, Claude would have preferred to believe that his relations
+with this lady were wholly of a filial nature.
+
+"Women like her simply don't exist in your part of the world,"
+the aviator murmured, as he snapped the photograph case. "She's a
+linguist and musician and all that. With her, every-day living is
+a fine art. Life, as she says, is what one makes it. In itself,
+it's nothing. Where you came from it's nothing--a sleeping
+sickness."
+
+Claude laughed. "I don't know that I agree with you, but I like
+to hear you talk."
+
+"Well; in that part of France that's all shot to pieces, you'll
+find more life going on in the cellars than in your home town,
+wherever that is. I'd rather be a stevedore in the London docks
+than a banker-king in one of your prairie States. In London, if
+you're lucky enough to have a shilling, you can get something for
+it."
+
+"Yes, things are pretty tame at home," the other admitted.
+
+"Tame? My God, it's death in life! What's left of men if you take
+all the fire out of them? They're afraid of everything. I know
+them; Sunday-school sneaks, prowling around those little towns
+after dark!" Victor abruptly dismissed the subject. "By the way,
+you're pals with the doctor, aren't you? I'm needing some
+medicine that is somewhere in my lost trunk. Would you mind
+asking him if he can put up this prescription? I don't want to go
+to him myself. All these medicos blab, and he might report me.
+I've been lucky dodging medical inspections. You see, I don't
+want to get held up anywhere. Tell him it's not for you, of
+course."
+
+When Claude presented the piece of blue paper to Doctor Trueman,
+he smiled contemptuously. "I see; this has been filled by a
+London chemist. No, we have nothing of this sort." He handed it
+back. "Those things are only palliatives. If your friend wants
+that, he needs treatment,--and he knows where he can get it."
+
+Claude returned the slip of paper to Victor as they left the
+dining-room after supper, telling him he hadn't been able to get
+any.
+
+"Sorry," said Victor, flushing haughtily. "Thank you so much!"
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Tod Fanning held out better than many of the stronger men; his
+vitality surprised the doctor. The death list was steadily
+growing; and the worst of it was that patients died who were not
+very sick. Vigorous, clean-blooded young fellows of nineteen and
+twenty turned over and died because they had lost their courage,
+because other people were dying,--because death was in the air.
+The corridors of the vessel had the smell of death about them.
+Doctor Trueman said it was always so in an epidemic; patients
+died who, had they been isolated cases, would have recovered.
+
+"Do you know, Wheeler," the doctor remarked one day when they
+came up from the hospital together to get a breath of air, "I
+sometimes wonder whether all these inoculations they've been
+having, against typhoid and smallpox and whatnot, haven't lowered
+their vitality. I'll go off my head if I keep losing men! What
+would you give to be out of it all, and safe back on the farm?"
+Hearing no reply, he turned his head, peered over his raincoat
+collar, and saw a startled, resisting look in the young man's
+blue eyes, followed by a quick flush.
+
+"You don't want to be back on the farm, do you! Not a little bit!
+Well, well; that's what it is to be young!" He shook his head
+with a smile which might have been commiseration, might have been
+envy, and went back to his duties.
+
+Claude stayed where he was, drawing the wet grey air into his
+lungs and feeling vexed and reprimanded. It was quite true, he
+realized; the doctor had caught him. He was enjoying himself all
+the while and didn't want to be safe anywhere. He was sorry about
+Tannhauser and the others, but he was not sorry for himself. The
+discomforts and misfortunes of this voyage had not spoiled it for
+him. He grumbled, of course, because others did. But life had
+never seemed so tempting as it did here and now. He could come up
+from heavy work in the hospital, or from poor Fanning and his
+everlasting eggs, and forget all that in ten minutes. Something
+inside him, as elastic as the grey ridges over which they were
+tipping, kept bounding up and saying: "I am all here. I've left
+everything behind me. I am going over."
+
+Only on that one day, the cold day of the Virginian's funeral,
+when he was seasick, had he been really miserable. He must be
+heartless, certainly, not to be overwhelmed by the sufferings of
+his own men, his own friends--but he wasn't. He had them on his
+mind and did all he could for them, but it seemed to him just now
+that he took a sort of satisfaction in that, too, and was
+somewhat vain of his usefulness to Doctor Trueman. A nice
+attitude! He awoke every morning with that sense of freedom and
+going forward, as if the world were growing bigger each day and
+he were growing with it. Other fellows were sick and dying, and
+that was terrible,--but he and the boat went on, and always on.
+
+Something was released that had been struggling for a long while,
+he told himself. He had been due in France since the first battle
+of the Marne; he had followed false leads and lost precious time
+and seen misery enough, but he was on the right road at last, and
+nothing could stop him. If he hadn't been so green, so bashful,
+so afraid of showing what he felt, and so stupid at finding his
+way about, he would have enlisted in Canada, like Victor, or run
+away to France and joined the Foreign Legion. All that seemed
+perfectly possible now. Why hadn't he?
+
+Well, that was not "the Wheelers' way." The Wheelers were
+terribly afraid of poking themselves in where they weren't
+wanted, of pushing their way into a crowd where they didn't
+belong. And they were even more afraid of doing anything that
+might look affected or "romantic." They couldn't let themselves
+adopt a conspicuous, much less a picturesque course of action,
+unless it was all in the day's work. Well, History had
+condescended to such as he; this whole brilliant adventure had
+become the day's work. He had got into it after all, along with
+Victor and the Marine and other fellows who had more imagination
+and self-confidence in the first place. Three years ago he used
+to sit moping by the windmill because he didn't see how a
+Nebraska farmer boy had any "call," or, indeed, any way, to throw
+himself into the struggle in France. He used enviously to read
+about Alan Seeger and those fortunate American boys who had a
+right to fight for a civilization they knew.
+
+But the miracle had happened; a miracle so wide in its amplitude
+that the Wheelers,--all the Wheelers and the roughnecks and the
+low-brows were caught up in it. Yes, it was the rough-necks' own
+miracle, all this; it was their golden chance. He was in on it,
+and nothing could hinder or discourage him unless he were put
+over the side himself--which was only a way of joking, for that
+was a possibility he never seriously considered. The feeling of
+purpose, of fateful purpose, was strong in his breast.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"Look at this, Doctor!" Claude caught Dr. Trueman on his way from
+breakfast and handed him a written notice, signed D. T. Micks,
+Chief Steward. It stated that no more eggs or oranges could be
+furnished to patients, as the supply was exhausted.
+
+The doctor squinted at the paper. "I'm afraid that's your
+patient's death warrant. You'll never be able to keep him going
+on anything else. Why don't you go and talk it over with Chessup?
+He's a resourceful fellow. I'll join you there in a few minutes."
+
+Claude had often been to Dr. Chessup's cabin since the epidemic
+broke out,-rather liked to wait there when he went for medicines
+or advice. It was a comfortable, personal sort of place with
+cheerful chintz hangings. The walls were lined with books, held
+in place by sliding wooden slats, padlocked at the ends. There
+were a great many scientific works in German and English; the
+rest were French novels in paper covers. This morning he found
+Chessup weighing out white powders at his desk. In the rack over
+his bunk was the book with which he had read himself to sleep
+last night; the title, "Un Crime d'Amour," lettered in black on
+yellow, caught Claude's eye. The doctor put on his coat and
+pointed his visitor to the jointed chair in which patients were
+sometimes examined. Claude explained his predicament.
+
+The ship's doctor was a strange fellow to come from Canada, the
+land of big men and rough. He looked like a schoolboy, with small
+hands and feet and a pink complexion. On his left cheekbone was a
+large brown mole, covered with silky hair, and for some reason
+that seemed to make his face effeminate. It was easy to see why
+he had not been successful in private practice. He was like
+somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so
+cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish
+appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating
+wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly
+suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had
+fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with constant
+exposure to human personalities.
+
+"Have you tried him on malted milk?" he asked, when Claude had
+told him how Farming's nourishment was threatened.
+
+"Dr. Trueman hasn't a bottle left. How long do you figure we'll
+be at sea?"
+
+"Four days; possibly five."
+
+"Then Lieutenant Wheeler will lose his pal," said Dr. Trueman,
+who had just come in.
+
+Chessup stood for a moment frowning and pulling nervously at the
+brass buttons on his coat. He slid the bolt on his door and
+turning to his colleague said resolutely: "I can give you some
+information, if you won't implicate me. You can do as you like,
+but keep my name out of it. For several hours last night cases of
+eggs and boxes of oranges were being carried into the Chief
+Steward's cabin by a flunky of his from the galley. Whatever port
+we make, he can get a shilling each for the fresh eggs, and
+perhaps sixpence for the oranges. They are your property, of
+course, furnished by your government; but this is his customary
+perquisite. I've been on this boat six years, and it's always
+been so. About a week before we make port, the choicest of the
+remaining stores are taken to his cabin, and he disposes of them
+after we dock. I can't say just how he manages it, but he does.
+The skipper may know of this custom, and there may be some reason
+why he permits it. It's not my business to see anything. The
+Chief Steward is a powerful man on an English vessel. If he has
+anything against me, sooner or later he can lose my berth for me.
+There you have the facts."
+
+"Have I your permission to go to the Chief Steward?" Dr. Trueman
+asked.
+
+"Certainly not. But you can go without my knowledge. He's an ugly
+man to cross, and he can make it uncomfortable for you and your
+patients."
+
+"Well, we'll say no more about it. I appreciate your telling me,
+and I will see that you don't get mixed up in this. Will you go
+down with me to look at that new meningitis case?"
+
+Claude waited impatiently in his stateroom for the doctor's
+return. He didn't see why the Chief Steward shouldn't be exposed
+and dealt with like any other grafter. He had hated the man ever
+since he heard him berating the old bath steward one morning.
+Hawkins had made no attempt to defend himself, but stood like a
+dog that has been terribly beaten, trembling all over, saying
+"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," while his chief gave him a cold cursing in
+a low, snarling voice. Claude had never heard a man or even an
+animal addressed with such contempt. The Steward had a cruel
+face,--white as cheese, with limp, moist hair combed back from a
+high forehead,--the peculiarly oily hair that seems to grow only
+on the heads of stewards and waiters. His eyes were exactly the
+shape of almonds, but the lids were so swollen that the dull
+pupil was visible only through a narrow slit. A long, pale
+moustache hung like a fringe over his loose lips.
+
+When Dr. Trueman came back from the hospital, he declared he was
+now ready to call on Mr. Micks. "He's a nasty looking customer,
+but he can't do anything to me."
+
+They went to the Chief Steward's cabin and knocked.
+
+"What's wanted?" called a threatening voice.
+
+The doctor made a grimace to his companion and walked in. The
+Steward was sitting at a big desk, covered with account books. He
+turned in his chair. "I beg your pardon," he said coldly, "I do
+not see any one here. I will be--"
+
+The doctor held up his hand quickly. "That's all right, Steward.
+I'm sorry to intrude, but I've something I must say to you in
+private. I'll not detain you long." If he had hesitated for a
+moment, Claude believed the Steward would have thrown him out,
+but he went on rapidly. "This is Lieutenant Wheeler, Mr. Micks.
+His fellow officer lies very ill with pneumonia in stateroom 96.
+Lieutenant Wheeler has kept him alive by special nursing. He is
+not able to retain anything in his stomach but eggs and orange
+juice. If he has these, we may be able to keep up his strength
+till the fever breaks, and carry him to a hospital in France. If
+we can't get them for him, he will be dead within twenty-four
+hours. That's the situation."
+
+The steward rose and turned out the drop-light on his desk. "Have
+you received notice that there are no more eggs and oranges on
+board? Then I am afraid there is nothing I can do for you. I did
+not provision this ship."
+
+"No. I understand that. I believe the United States Government
+provided the fruit and eggs and meat. And I positively know that
+the articles I need for my patient are not exhausted. Without
+going into the matter further, I warn you that I'm not going to
+let a United States officer die when the means of saving him are
+procurable. I'll go to the skipper, I'll call a meeting of the
+army officers on board. I'll go any length to save this man."
+
+"That is your own affair, but you will not interfere with me in
+the discharge of my duties. Will you leave my cabin?"
+
+"In a moment, Steward. I know that last night a number of cases
+of eggs and oranges were carried into this room. They are here
+now, and they belong to the A.E.F. If you will agree to provision
+my man, what I know won't go any further. But if you refuse, I'll
+get this matter investigated. I won't stop till I do."
+
+The Steward sat down, and took up a pen. His large, soft hand
+looked cheesy, like his face. "What is the number of the cabin?"
+he asked indifferently.
+
+"Ninety-six."
+
+"Exactly what do you require?"
+
+"One dozen eggs and one dozen oranges every twenty-four hours, to
+be delivered at any time convenient to you."
+
+"I will see what I can do."
+
+The Steward did not look up from his writing pad, and his
+visitors left as abruptly as they had come.
+
+At about four o'clock every morning, before even the bath
+stewards were on duty, there was a scratching at Claude's door,
+and a covered basket was left there by a messenger who was
+unwashed, half-naked, with a sacking apron tied round his middle
+and his hairy chest splashed with flour. He never spoke, had only
+one eye and an inflamed socket. Claude learned that he was a
+half-witted brother of the Chief Steward, a potato peeler and
+dish-washer in the galley.
+
+Four day after their interview with Mr. Micks, when they were at
+last nearing the end of the voyage, Doctor Trueman detained
+Claude after medical inspection to tell him that the Chief
+Steward had come down with the epidemic. "He sent for me last
+night and asked me to take his case,--won't have anything to do
+with Chessup. I had to get Chessup's permission. He seemed very
+glad to hand the case over to me."
+
+"Is he very bad?"
+
+"He hasn't a look-in, and he knows it. Complications; chronic
+Bright's disease. It seems he has nine children. I'll try to get
+him into a hospital when we make port, but he'll only live a few
+days at most. I wonder who'll get the shillings for all the eggs
+and oranges he hoarded away. Claude, my boy," the doctor spoke
+with sudden energy, "if I ever set foot on land again, I'm going
+to forget this voyage like a bad dream. When I'm in normal
+health, I'm a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the
+wicked get worse than they deserve."
+
+A day came at last when Claude was wakened from sleep by a sense
+of stillness. He sprang up with a dazed fear that some one had
+died; but Fanning lay in his berth, breathing quietly.
+
+Something caught his eye through the porthole,--a great grey
+shoulder of land standing up in the pink light of dawn, powerful
+and strangely still after the distressing instability of the sea.
+Pale trees and long, low fortifications... close grey
+buildings with red roofs... little sailboats bounding seaward...
+up on the cliff a gloomy fortress.
+
+He had always thought of his destination as a country shattered
+and desolated,--"bleeding France"; but he had never seen anything
+that looked so strong, so self-sufficient, so fixed from the
+first foundation, as the coast that rose before him. It was like
+a pillar of eternity. The ocean lay submissive at its feet, and
+over it was the great meekness of early morning.
+
+This grey wall, unshaken, mighty, was the end of the long
+preparation, as it was the end of the sea. It was the reason for
+everything that had happened in his life for the last fifteen
+months. It was the reason why Tannhauser and the gentle
+Virginian, and so many others who had set out with him, were
+never to have any life at all, or even a soldier's death. They
+were merely waste in a great enterprise, thrown overboard like
+rotten ropes. For them this kind release,--trees and a still
+shore and quiet water,--was never, never to be. How long would
+their bodies toss, he wondered, in that inhuman kingdom of
+darkness and unrest?
+
+He was startled by a weak voice from behind.
+
+"Claude, are we over?"
+
+"Yes, Fanning. We're over."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On"
+
+I
+
+At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little
+shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about.
+Truck drivers and boys on bell less bicycles shouted at him
+indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane
+tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him.
+His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help
+of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken
+Fanning to the base hospital, and seen him into the arms of a big
+orderly from Texas. He came away from the hospital with no idea
+where he was going--except that he wanted to get to the heart of
+the city. It seemed, however, to have no heart; only long, stony
+arteries, full of heat and noise. He was still standing there,
+under his plane tree, when a group of uncertain, lost-looking
+brown figures, headed by Sergeant Hicks, came weaving up the
+street; nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each
+with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with
+joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their
+way! He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.
+
+Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the
+town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless
+food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store
+up the street, where there seemed to be everything else. He had
+tried to make the old woman understand by signs.
+
+"Don't these French people eat cheese, anyhow? What's their word
+for it, Lieutenant? I'm damned if I know, and I've lost my phrase
+book. Suppose you could make her understand?"
+
+"Well, I'll try. Come along, boys."
+
+Crowding close together, the ten men entered the shop. The
+proprietress ran forward with an exclamation of despair.
+Evidently she had thought she was done with them, and was not
+pleased to see them coming back. When she paused to take breath,
+Claude took off his hat respectfully, and performed the bravest
+act of his life; uttered the first phrase-book sentence he had
+ever spoken to a French person. His men were at his back; he had
+to say something or run, there was no other course. Looking the
+old woman in the eye, he steadily articulated:
+
+"Avez-vous du fromage, Madame?" It was almost inspiration to add
+the last word, he thought; and when it worked, he was as much
+startled as if his revolver had gone off in his belt.
+
+"Du fromage?" the shop woman screamed. Calling something to her
+daughter, who was at the desk, she caught Claude by the sleeve,
+pulled him out of the shop, and ran down the street with him. She
+dragged him into a doorway darkened by a long curtain, greeted
+the proprietress, and then pushed the men after their officer, as
+if they were stubborn burros.
+
+They stood blinking in the gloom, inhaling a sour, damp, buttery,
+smear-kase smell, until their eyes penetrated the shadows and
+they saw that there was nothing but cheese and butter in the
+place. The shopkeeper was a fat woman, with black eyebrows that
+met above her nose; her sleeves were rolled up, her cotton dress
+was open over her white throat and bosom. She began at once to
+tell them that there was a restriction on milk products; every
+one must have cards; she could not sell them so much. But soon
+there was nothing left to dispute about. The boys fell upon her
+stock like wolves. The little white cheeses that lay on green
+leaves disappeared into big mouths. Before she could save it,
+Hicks had split a big round cheese through the middle and was
+carving it up like a melon. She told them they were dirty pigs
+and worse than the Boches, but she could not stop them.
+
+"What's the matter with Mother, Lieutenant? What's she fussing
+about? Ain't she here to sell goods?"
+
+Claude tried to look wiser than he was. "From what I can make
+out, there's some sort of restriction; you aren't allowed to buy
+all you want. We ought to have thought about that; this is a war
+country. I guess we've about cleaned her out."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Hicks wiping his clasp-knife. "We'll
+bring her some sugar tomorrow. One of the fellows who helped us
+unload at the docks told me you can always quiet 'em if you give
+'em sugar."
+
+They surrounded her and held out their money for her to take her
+pay. "Come on, ma'm, don't be bashful. What's the matter, ain't
+this good money?"
+
+She was distracted by the noise they made, by their bronzed faces
+with white teeth and pale eyes, crowding so close to her. Ten
+large, well-shaped hands with straight fingers, the open palms
+full of crumpled notes.... Holding the men off under the
+pretence of looking for a pencil, she made rapid calculations.
+The money that lay in their palms had no relation to these big,
+coaxing, boisterous fellows; it was a joke to them; they didn't
+know what it meant in the world. Behind them were shiploads of
+money, and behind the ships....
+
+The situation was unfair. Whether she took much or little out of
+their hands, couldn't possibly matter to the Americans, couldn't
+even dash their good humour. But there was a strain on the
+cheesewoman, and the standards of a lifetime were in jeopardy.
+Her mind mechanically fixed upon two-and-a-half; she would charge
+them two-and-a-half times the market price of the cheese. With
+this moral plank to cling to, she made change with conscientious
+accuracy and did not keep a penny too much from anybody. Telling
+them what big stupids they were, and that it was necessary to
+learn to count in this world, she urged them out of her shop. She
+liked them well enough, but she did not like to do business with
+them. If she didn't take their money, the next one would. All the
+same, fictitious values were distasteful to her, and made
+everything seem flimsy and unsafe.
+
+Standing in her doorway, she watched the brown band go ambling
+down the street; as they passed in front of the old church of St.
+Jacques, the two foremost stumbled on a sunken step that was
+scarcely above the level of the pavement. She laughed aloud. They
+looked back and waved to her. She replied with a smile that was
+both friendly and angry. She liked them, but not the legend of
+waste and prodigality that ran before them--and followed after.
+It was superfluous and disintegrating in a world of hard facts.
+An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more
+every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week!
+Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of
+France. Down below Arles, where her husband's sister had married,
+on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were
+piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had
+ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams;
+everything the world was famished for. They brought shiploads of
+useless things, too. And useless people. Shiploads of women who
+were not nurses; some said they came to dance with the officers,
+so they would not be ennuyés.
+
+All this was not war,--any more than having money thrust at you
+by grown men who could not count, was business. It was an
+invasion, like the other. The first destroyed material
+possessions, and this threatened everybody's integrity. Distaste
+of such methods, deep, recoiling distrust of them, clouded the
+cheesewoman's brow as she threw her money into the drawer and
+turned the key on it.
+
+As for the doughboys, having once stubbed their toes on the
+sunken step, they examined it with interest, and went in to
+explore the church. It was in their minds that they must not let
+a church escape, any more than they would let a Boche escape.
+Within they came upon a bunch of their shipmates, including the
+Kansas band, to whom they boasted that their Lieutenant could
+"speak French like a native."
+
+The Lieutenant himself thought he was getting on pretty well, but
+a few hours later his pride was humbled. He was sitting alone in
+a little triangular park beside another church, admiring the
+cropped locust trees and watching some old women who were doing
+their mending in the shade. A little boy in a black apron, with a
+close-shaved, bare head, came along, skipping rope. He hopped
+lightly up to Claude and said in a most persuasive and confiding
+voice,
+
+"Voulez-vous me dire l'heure, s'il vous plaît, M'sieu' l'
+soldat?"
+
+Claude looked down into his admiring eyes with a feeling of
+panic. He wouldn't mind being dumb to a man, or even to a pretty
+girl, but this was terrible. His tongue went dry, and his face
+grew scarlet. The child's expectant gaze changed to a look of
+doubt, and then of fear. He had spoken before to Americans who
+didn't understand, but they had not turned red and looked angry
+like this one; this soldier must be ill, or wrong in his head.
+The boy turned and ran away.
+
+Many a serious mishap had distressed Claude less. He was
+disappointed, too. There was something friendly in the boy's face
+that he wanted... that he needed. As he rose he ground his
+heel into the gravel. "Unless I can learn to talk to the CHILDREN
+of this country," he muttered, "I'll go home!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude set off to find the Grand Hotel, where he had promised to
+dine with Victor Morse. The porter there spoke English. He called
+a red-headed boy in a dirty uniform and told him to take the
+American to vingt-quatre. The boy also spoke English. "Plenty
+money in New York, I guess! In France, no money." He made their
+way, through musty corridors and up slippery staircases, as long
+as possible, shrewdly eyeing the visitor and rubbing his thumb
+nervously against his fingers all the while.
+
+"Vingt-quatre, twen'y-four," he announced, rapping at a door with
+one hand and suggestively opening the other. Claude put something
+into it--anything to be rid of him.
+
+Victor was standing before the fireplace. "Hello, Wheeler, come
+in. Our dinner will be served up here. It's big enough, isn't it?
+I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a
+day."
+
+The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds,
+and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that
+had certainly not been washed since before the war. The heavy red
+cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust,
+the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches.
+Razor blades and "Khaki Comfort" boxes lay about on the dresser,
+and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the
+table. Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers
+arrived,--and the room remained the same, like a wood in which
+travellers camp for the night. The valet de chambre carried away
+only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes.
+It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.
+
+When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and
+put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses. Victor and his guest
+sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around
+which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly. They did not
+buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there
+in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting
+system. The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude;
+he felt as if he were being watched.
+
+"By the way," said Victor while the soup plates were being
+removed, "what do you think of this wine? It cost me thirty
+francs the bottle."
+
+"It tastes very good to me," Claude replied. "But then, it's the
+first champagne I've ever drunk."
+
+"Really?" Victor drank off another glass and sighed. "I envy you.
+I wish I had it all to do over. Life's too short, you know."
+
+"I should say you had made a good beginning. We're a long way
+from Crystal Lake."
+
+"Not far enough." His host reached across the table and filled
+Claude's empty glass. "I sometimes waken up with the feeling I'm
+back there. Or I have bad dreams, and find myself sitting on that
+damned stool in the glass cage and can't make my books balance; I
+hear the old man coughing in his private room, the way he coughs
+when he's going to refuse a loan to some poor devil who needs it.
+I've had a narrow escape, Wheeler; 'as a brand from the burning'.
+That's all the Scripture I remember."
+
+The bright red spots on Victor's cheeks, his pale forehead and
+brilliant eyes and saucy little moustaches seemed to give his
+quotation a peculiar vividness. Claude envied him. It must be
+great fun to take up a part and play it to a finish; to believe
+you were making yourself over, and to admire the kind of fellow
+you made. He, too, in a way, admired Victor,--though he couldn't
+altogether believe in him.
+
+"You'll never go back," he said, "I wouldn't worry about that."
+
+"Take it from me, there are thousands who will never go back! I'm
+not speaking of the casualties. Some of you Americans are likely
+to discover the world this trip... and it'll make the hell of
+a lot of difference! You boys never had a fair chance. There's a
+conspiracy of Church and State to keep you down. I'm going off to
+play with some girls tonight, will you come along?"
+
+Claude laughed. "I guess not."
+
+"Why not? You won't be caught, I guarantee."
+
+"I guess not." Claude spoke apologetically. "I'm going out to see
+Fanning after dinner."
+
+Victor shrugged. "That ass!" He beckoned the waiter to open
+another bottle and bring the coffee. "Well, it's your last chance
+to go nutting with me." He looked intently at Claude and lifted
+his glass. "To the future, and our next meeting!" When he put
+down his empty goblet he remarked, "I got a wire through today;
+I'm leaving tomorrow."
+
+"For London?"
+
+"For Verdun."
+
+Claude took a quick breath. Verdun... the very sound of the
+name was grim, like the hollow roll of drums. Victor was going
+there tomorrow. Here one could take a train for Verdun, or
+thereabouts, as at home one took a train for Omaha. He felt more
+"over" than he had done before, and a little crackle of
+excitement went all through him. He tried to be careless:
+
+"Then you won't get to London soon?"
+
+"God knows," Victor answered gloomily. He looked up at the
+ceiling and began to whistle softly an engaging air. "Do you know
+that? It's something Maisie often plays; 'Roses of Picardy.' You
+won't know what a woman can be till you meet her, Wheeler."
+
+"I hope I'll have that pleasure. I was wondering if you'd
+forgotten her for the moment. She doesn't object to these
+diversions?"
+
+Victor lifted his eyebrows in the old haughty way. "Women don't
+require that sort of fidelity of the air service. Our engagements
+are too uncertain."
+
+Half an hour later Victor had gone in quest of amorous adventure,
+and Claude was wandering alone in a brightly lighted street full
+of soldiers and sailors of all nations. There were black
+Senegalese, and Highlanders in kilts, and little lorry-drivers
+from Siam,--all moving slowly along between rows of cabarets and
+cinema theatres. The wide-spreading branches of the plane trees
+met overhead, shutting out the sky and roofing in the orange
+glare. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and little tables,
+at which marines and soldiers sat drinking schnapps and cognac and
+coffee. From every doorway music-machines poured out jazz tunes
+and strident Sousa marches. The noise was stupefying. Out in the
+middle of the street a band of bareheaded girls, hardy and tough
+looking; were following a string of awkward Americans, running
+into them, elbowing them, asking for treats, crying, "You dance
+me Fausse-trot, Sammie?"
+
+Claude stationed himself before a movie theatre, where the sign
+in electric lights read, "Amour, quand tu nous tiens!" and stood
+watching the people. In the stream that passed him, his eye lit
+upon two walking arm-in-arm, their hands clasped, talking eagerly
+and unconscious of the crowd,--different, he saw at once, from
+all the other strolling, affectionate couples.
+
+The man wore the American uniform; his left arm had been
+amputated at the elbow, and he carried his head awry, as if he
+had a stiff neck. His dark, lean face wore an expression of
+intense anxiety, his eyebrows twitched as if he were in constant
+pain. The girl, too, looked troubled. As they passed him, under
+the red light of the Amour sign, Claude could see that her eyes
+were full of tears. They were wide, blue eyes, innocent looking,
+and she had the prettiest face he had seen since he landed. From
+her silk shawl, and little bonnet with blue strings and a white
+frill, he thought she must be a country girl. As she listened to
+the soldier, with her mouth half-open, he saw a space between her
+two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just
+come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently
+at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she
+evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to
+emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did not
+know where to turn.
+
+Without realizing what he did, Claude followed them out of the
+crowd into a quiet street, and on into another, even more
+deserted, where the houses looked as if they had been asleep a
+long while. Here there were no street lamps, not even a light in
+the windows, but natural darkness; with the moon high overhead
+throwing sharp shadows across the white cobble paving. The narrow
+street made a bend, and he came out upon the church he and his
+comrades had entered that afternoon. It looked larger by night,
+and but for the sunken step, he might not have been sure it was
+the same. The dark neighbouring houses seemed to lean toward it,
+the moonlight shone silver-grey upon its battered front.
+
+The two walking before him ascended the steps and withdrew into
+the deep doorway, where they clung together in an embrace so long
+and still that it was like death. At last they drew shuddering
+apart. The girl sat down on the stone bench beside the door. The
+soldier threw himself upon the pavement at her feet, and rested
+his head on her knee, his one arm lying across her lap.
+
+In the shadow of the houses opposite, Claude kept watch like a
+sentinel, ready to take their part if any alarm should startle
+them. The girl bent over her soldier, stroking his head so softly
+that she might have been putting him to sleep; took his one hand
+and held it against her bosom as if to stop the pain there. Just
+behind her, on the sculptured portal, some old bishop, with a
+pointed cap and a broken crozier, stood, holding up two fingers.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The next morning when Claude arrived at the hospital to see
+Fanning, he found every one too busy to take account of him. The
+courtyard was full of ambulances, and a long line of camions
+waited outside the gate. A train-load of wounded Americans had
+come in, sent back from evacuation hospitals to await
+transportation home.
+
+As the men were carried past him, he thought they looked as if
+they had been sick a long while--looked, indeed, as if they could
+never get well. The boys who died on board the Anchises had never
+seemed as sick as these did. Their skin was yellow or purple,
+their eyes were sunken, their lips sore. Everything that belonged
+to health had left them, every attribute of youth was gone. One
+poor fellow, whose face and trunk were wrapped in cotton, never
+stopped moaning, and as he was carried up the corridor he smelled
+horribly. The Texas orderly remarked to Claude, "In the beginning
+that one only had a finger blown off; would you believe it?"
+
+These were the first wounded men Claude had seen. To shed bright
+blood, to wear the red badge of courage,--that was one thing; but
+to be reduced to this was quite another. Surely, the sooner
+these boys died, the better.
+
+The Texan, passing with his next load, asked Claude why he didn't
+go into the office and wait until the rush was over. Looking in
+through the glass door, Claude noticed a young man writing at a
+desk enclosed by a railing. Something about his figure, about the
+way he held his head, was familiar. When he lifted his left arm
+to prop open the page of his ledger, it was a stump below the
+elbow. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; the pale, sharp
+face, the beak nose, the frowning, uneasy brow. Presently, as if
+he felt a curious eye upon him, the young man paused in his rapid
+writing, wriggled his shoulders, put an iron paperweight on the
+page of his book, took a case from his pocket and shook a
+cigarette out on the table. Going up to the railing, Claude
+offered him a cigar. "No, thank you. I don't use them any more.
+They seem too heavy for me." He struck a match, moved his
+shoulders again as if they were cramped, and sat down on the edge
+of his desk.
+
+"Where do these wounded men come from?" Claude asked. "I just got
+in on the Anchises yesterday."
+
+"They come from various evacuation hospitals. I believe most of
+them are the Belleau Wood lot."
+
+"Where did you lose your arm?"
+
+"Cantigny. I was in the First Division. I'd been over since last
+September, waiting for something to happen, and then got fixed in
+my first engagement."
+
+"Can't you go home?"
+
+"Yes, I could. But I don't want to. I've got used to things over
+here. I was attached to Headquarters in Paris for awhile."
+
+Claude leaned across the rail. "We read about Cantigny at home,
+of course. We were a good deal excited; I suppose you were?"
+
+"Yes, we were nervous. We hadn't been under fire, and we'd been
+fed up on all that stuff about it's taking fifty years to build a
+fighting machine. The Hun had a strong position; we looked up
+that long hill and wondered how we were going to behave." As he
+talked the boy's eyes seemed to be moving all the time, probably
+because he could not move his head at all. After blowing out deep
+clouds of smoke until his cigarette was gone, he sat down to his
+ledger and frowned at the page in a way which said he was too
+busy to talk.
+
+Claude saw Dr. Trueman standing in the doorway, waiting for him.
+They made their morning call on Fanning, and left the hospital
+together. The Doctor turned to him as if he had something on his
+mind.
+
+"I saw you talking to that wry-necked boy. How did he seem, all
+right?"
+
+"Not exactly. That is, he seems very nervous. Do you know
+anything about him?"
+
+"Oh, yes! He's a star patient here, a psychopathic case. I had
+just been talking to one of the doctors about him, when I came
+out and saw you with him. He was shot in the neck at Cantigny,
+where he lost his arm. The wound healed, but his memory is
+affected; some nerve cut, I suppose, that connects with that part
+of his brain. This psychopath, Phillips, takes a great interest
+in him and keeps him here to observe him. He's writing a book
+about him. He says the fellow has forgotten almost everything
+about his life before he came to France. The queer thing is, it's
+his recollection of women that is most affected. He can remember
+his father, but not his mother; doesn't know if he has sisters or
+not,--can remember seeing girls about the house, but thinks they
+may have been cousins. His photographs and belongings were lost
+when he was hurt, all except a bunch of letters he had in his
+pocket. They are from a girl he's engaged to, and he declares he
+can't remember her at all; doesn't know what she looks like or
+anything about her, and can't remember getting engaged. The
+doctor has the letters. They seem to be from a nice girl in his
+own town who is very ambitious for him to make the most of
+himself. He deserted soon after he was sent to this hospital, ran
+away. He was found on a farm out in the country here, where the
+sons had been killed and the people had sort of adopted him. He'd
+quit his uniform and was wearing the clothes of one of the dead
+sons. He'd probably have got away with it, if he hadn't had that
+wry neck. Some one saw him in the fields and recognized him and
+reported him. I guess nobody cared much but this psychopathic
+doctor; he wanted to get his pet patient back. They call him 'the
+lost American' here."
+
+"He seems to be doing some sort of clerical work," Claude
+observed discreetly.
+
+"Yes, they say he's very well educated. He remembers the books he
+has read better than his own life. He can't recall what his home
+town looks like, or his home. And the women are clear wiped out,
+even the girl he was going to marry."
+
+Claude smiled. "Maybe he's fortunate in that."
+
+The Doctor turned to him affectionately, "Now Claude, don't begin
+to talk like that the minute you land in this country."
+
+Claude walked on past the church of St. Jacques. Last night
+already seemed like a dream, but it haunted him. He wished he
+could do something to help that boy; help him get away from the
+doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted
+him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether
+in what he had been lucky enough to find. All day, as Claude came
+and went, he looked among the crowds for that young face, so
+compassionate and tender.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Deeper and deeper into flowery France! That was the sentence
+Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels, as
+the long troop train went southward, on the second day after he
+and his company had left the port of debarkation. Fields of
+wheat, fields of oats, fields of rye; all the low hills and
+rolling uplands clad with harvest. And everywhere, in the grass,
+in the yellowing grain, along the road-bed, the poppies spilling
+and streaming. On the second day the boys were still calling to
+each other about the poppies; nothing else had so entirely
+surpassed their expectations. They had supposed that poppies grew
+only on battle fields, or in the brains of war correspondents.
+Nobody knew what the cornflowers were, except Willy Katz, an
+Austrian boy from the Omaha packing-houses, and he knew only an
+objectionable name for them, so he offered no information. For a
+long time they thought the red clover blossoms were wild
+flowers,--they were as big as wild roses. When they passed the
+first alfalfa field, the whole train rang with laughter; alfalfa
+was one thing, they believed, that had never been heard of
+outside their own prairie states.
+
+All the way down, Company B had been finding the old things
+instead of the new,--or, to their way of thinking, the new things
+instead of the old. The thatched roofs they had so counted upon
+seeing were few and far between. But American binders, of
+well-known makes, stood where the fields were beginning to
+ripen,--and they were being oiled and put in order, not by
+"peasants," but by wise-looking old farmers who seemed to know
+their business. Pear trees, trained like vines against the wall,
+did not astonish them half so much as the sight of the familiar
+cottonwood, growing everywhere. Claude thought he had never
+before realized how beautiful this tree could be. In verdant
+little valleys, along the clear rivers, the cottonwoods waved and
+rustled; and on the little islands, of which there were so many
+in these rivers, they stood in pointed masses, seemed to grip
+deep into the soil and to rest easy, as if they had been there
+for ever and would be there for ever more. At home, all about
+Frankfort, the farmers were cutting down their cottonwoods
+because they were "common," planting maples and ash trees to
+struggle along in their stead. Never mind; the cottonwoods were
+good enough for France, and they were good enough for him! He
+felt they were a real bond between him and this people.
+
+When B Company had first got their orders to go into a training
+camp in north central France, all the men were disappointed.
+Troops much rawer than they were being rushed to the front, so
+why fool around any longer? But now they were reconciled to the
+delay. There seemed to be a good deal of France that wasn't the
+war, and they wouldn't mind travelling about a little in a
+country like this. Was the harvest always a month later than at
+home, as it seemed to be this year? Why did the farmers have rows
+of trees growing along the edges of every field--didn't they take
+the strength out of the soil? What did the farmers mean by
+raising patches of mustard right along beside other crops? Didn't
+they know that mustard got into wheat fields and strangled the
+grain?
+
+The second night the boys were to spend in Rouen, and they would
+have the following day to look about. Everybody knew what had
+happened at Rouen--if any one didn't, his neighbours were only too
+eager to inform him! It had happened in the market-place, and the
+market-place was what they were going to find.
+
+Tomorrow, when it came, proved to be black and cold, a day of
+pouring rain. As they filed through the narrow, crowded streets,
+that harsh Norman city presented no very cheering aspect. They
+were glad, at last, to find the waterside, to go out on the
+bridge and breathe the air in the great open space over the
+river, away from the clatter of cart-wheels and the hard voices
+and crafty faces of these townspeople, who seemed rough and
+unfriendly. From the bridge they looked up at the white chalk
+hills, the tops a blur of intense green under the low,
+lead-coloured sky. They watched the fleets of broad, deep-set
+river barges, coming and going under their feet, with tilted
+smokestacks. Only a little way up that river was Paris, the place
+where every doughboy meant to go; and as they leaned on the rail
+and looked down at the slow-flowing water, each one had in his
+mind a confused picture of what it would be like. The Seine, they
+felt sure, must be very much wider there, and it was spanned by
+many bridges, all longer than the bridge over the Missouri at
+Omaha. There would be spires and golden domes past counting, all
+the buildings higher than anything in Chicago, and
+brilliant--dazzlingly brilliant, nothing grey and shabby about it
+like this old Rouen. They attributed to the city of their desire
+incalculable immensity, bewildering vastness, Babylonian hugeness
+and heaviness--the only attributes they had been taught to admire.
+
+Late in the morning Claude found himself alone before the Church
+of St. Ouen. He was hunting for the Cathedral, and this looked as
+if it might be the right place. He shook the water from his
+raincoat and entered, removing his hat at the door. The day, so
+dark without, was darker still within;... far away, a few
+scattered candles, still little points of light... just before
+him, in the grey twilight, slender white columns in long rows,
+like the stems of silver poplars.
+
+The entrance to the nave was closed by a cord, so he walked up
+the aisle on the right, treading softly, passing chapels where
+solitary women knelt in the light of a few tapers. Except for
+them, the church was empty... empty. His own breathing was
+audible in this silence. He moved with caution lest he should
+wake an echo.
+
+When he reached the choir he turned, and saw, far behind him, the
+rose window, with its purple heart. As he stood staring, hat in
+hand, as still as the stone figures in the chapels, a great bell,
+up aloft, began to strike the hour in its deep, melodious throat;
+eleven beats, measured and far apart, as rich as the colours in
+the window, then silence... only in his memory the throbbing
+of an undreamed-of quality of sound. The revelations of the glass
+and the bell had come almost simultaneously, as if one produced
+the other; and both were superlatives toward which his mind had
+always been groping,--or so it seemed to him then.
+
+In front of the choir the nave was open, with no rope to shut it
+off. Several straw chairs were huddled on a flag of the stone
+floor. After some hesitation he took one, turned it round, and
+sat down facing the window. If some one should come up to him and
+say anything, anything at all, he would rise and say, "Pardon,
+Monsieur; je ne sais pas c'est defendu." He repeated this to
+himself to be quite sure he had it ready.
+
+On the train, coming down, he had talked to the boys about the
+bad reputation Americans had acquired for slouching all over the
+place and butting in on things, and had urged them to tread
+lightly, "But Lieutenant," the kid from Pleasantville had piped
+up, "isn't this whole Expedition a butt-in? After all, it ain't
+our war." Claude laughed, but he told him he meant to make an
+example of the fellow who went to rough-housing.
+
+He was well satisfied that he hadn't his restless companions on
+his mind now. He could sit here quietly until noon, and hear the
+bell strike again. In the meantime, he must try to think: This
+was, of course, Gothic architecture; he had read more or less
+about that, and ought to be able to remember something. Gothic...
+that was a mere word; to him it suggested something very
+peaked and pointed,--sharp arches, steep roofs. It had nothing to
+do with these slim white columns that rose so straight and
+far,--or with the window, burning up there in its vault of
+gloom....
+
+While he was vainly trying to think about architecture, some
+recollection of old astronomy lessons brushed across his
+brain,--something about stars whose light travels through space
+for hundreds of years before it reaches the earth and the human
+eye. The purple and crimson and peacock-green of this window had
+been shining quite as long as that before it got to him....
+He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still...
+as if his mother were looking over his shoulder. He sat
+solemnly through the hour until twelve, his elbows on his knees,
+his conical hat swinging between them in his hand, looking up
+through the twilight with candid, thoughtful eyes.
+
+When Claude joined his company at the station, they had the laugh
+on him. They had found the Cathedral,--and a statue of Richard
+the Lion-hearted, over the spot where the lion-heart itself was
+buried; "the identical organ," fat Sergeant Hicks assured him.
+But they were all glad to leave Rouen.
+
+
+
+V
+
+B Company reached the training camp at S-- thirty-six men short:
+twenty-five they had buried on the voyage over, and eleven sick
+were left at the base hospital. The company was to be attached
+to a battalion which had already seen service, commanded by
+Lieutenant Colonel Scott. Arriving early in the morning, the
+officers reported at once to Headquarters. Captain Maxey must
+have suffered a shock when the Colonel rose from his desk to
+acknowledge his salute, then shook hands with them all around
+and asked them about their journey. The Colonel was not a very
+martial figure; short, fat, with slouching shoulders, and a
+lumpy back like a sack of potatoes. Though he wasn't much over
+forty, he was bald, and his collar would easily slip over his
+head without being unbuttoned. His little twinkling eyes and
+good-humoured face were without a particle of arrogance or
+official dignity.
+
+Years ago, when General Pershing, then a handsome young
+Lieutenant with a slender waist and yellow moustaches, was
+stationed as Commandant at the University of Nebraska, Walter
+Scott was an officer in a company of cadets the Lieutenant took
+about to military tournaments. The Pershing Rifles, they were
+called, and they won prizes wherever they went. After his
+graduation, Scott settled down to running a hardware business in
+a thriving Nebraska town, and sold gas ranges and garden hose for
+twenty years. About the time Pershing was sent to the Mexican
+border, Scott began to think there might eventually be something
+in the wind, and that he would better get into training. He went
+down to Texas with the National Guard. He had come to France with
+the First Division, and had won his promotions by solid,
+soldierly qualities.
+
+"I see you're an officer short, Captain Maxey," the Colonel
+remarked at their conference. "I think I've got a man here to
+take his place. Lieutenant Gerhardt is a New York man, came over
+in the band and got transferred to infantry. He has lately been
+given a commission for good service. He's had some experience and
+is a capable fellow." The Colonel sent his orderly out to bring
+in a young man whom he introduced to the officers as Lieutenant
+David Gerhardt.
+
+Claude had been ashamed of Tod Fanning, who was always showing
+himself a sap-head, and who would never have got a commission if
+his uncle hadn't been a Congressman. But the moment he met
+Lieutenant Gerhardt's eye, something like jealousy flamed up in
+him. He felt in a flash that he suffered by comparison with the
+new officer; that he must be on his guard and must not let
+himself be patronized.
+
+As they were leaving the Colonel's office together, Gerhardt
+asked him whether he had got his billet. Claude replied that
+after the men were in their quarters, he would look out for
+something for himself.
+
+The young man smiled. "I'm afraid you may have difficulty. The
+people about here have been overworked, keeping soldiers, and
+they are not willing as they once were. I'm with a nice old
+couple over in the village. I'm almost sure I can get you in
+there. If you'll come along, we'll speak to them, before some one
+else is put off on them."
+
+Claude didn't want to go, didn't want to accept
+favours,--nevertheless he went. They walked together along a
+dusty road that ran between half-ripe wheat fields, bordered with
+poplar trees. The wild morning-glories and Queen Anne's lace that
+grew by the road-side were still shining with dew. A fresh breeze
+stirred the bearded grain, parting it in furrows and fanning out
+streaks of crimson poppies. The new officer was not intrusive,
+certainly. He walked along, whistling softly to himself, seeming
+quite lost in the freshness of the morning, or in his own
+thoughts. There had been nothing patronizing in his manner so
+far, and Claude began to wonder why he felt ill at ease with him.
+Perhaps it was because he did not look like the rest of them.
+Though he was young, he did not look boyish. He seemed
+experienced; a finished product, rather than something on the
+way. He was handsome, and his face, like his manner and his walk,
+had something distinguished about it. A broad white forehead
+under reddish brown hair, hazel eyes with no uncertainty in their
+look, an aquiline nose, finely cut,--a sensitive, scornful mouth,
+which somehow did not detract from the kindly, though slightly
+reserved, expression of his face.
+
+Lieutenant Gerhardt must have been in this neighbourhood for some
+time; he seemed to know the people. On the road they passed
+several villagers; a rough looking girl taking a cow out to graze,
+an old man with a basket on his arm, the postman on his bicycle;
+they all spoke to Claude's companion as if they knew him well.
+
+"What are these blue flowers that grow about everywhere?" Claude
+asked suddenly, pointing to a clump with his foot.
+
+"Cornflowers," said the other. "The Germans call them
+Kaiser-blumen."
+
+They were approaching the village, which lay on the edge of a
+wood,--a wood so large one could not see the end of it; it met
+the horizon with a ridge of pines. The village was but a single
+street. On either side ran clay-coloured walls, with painted
+wooden doors here and there, and green shutters. Claude's guide
+opened one of these gates, and they walked into a little sanded
+garden; the house was built round it on three sides. Under a
+cherry tree sat a woman in a black dress, sewing, a work table
+beside her.
+
+She was fifty, perhaps, but though her hair was grey she had a
+look of youthfulness; thin cheeks, delicately flushed with pink,
+and quiet, smiling, intelligent eyes. Claude thought she looked
+like a New England woman,--like the photographs of his mother's
+cousins and schoolmates. Lieutenant Gerhardt introduced him to
+Madame Joubert. He was quite disheartened by the colloquy that
+followed. Clearly his new fellow officer spoke Madame Joubert's
+perplexing language as readily as she herself did, and he felt
+irritated and grudging as he listened. He had been hoping that,
+wherever he stayed, he could learn to talk to the people a
+little; but with this accomplished young man about, he would
+never have the courage to try. He could see that Mme. Joubert
+liked Gerhardt, liked him very much; and all this, for some
+reason, discouraged him.
+
+Gerhardt turned to Claude, speaking in a way which included
+Madame Joubert in the conversation, though she could not
+understand it: "Madame Joubert will let you come, although she
+has done her part and really doesn't have to take any one else
+in. But you will be so well off here that I'm glad she consents.
+You will have to share my room, but there are two beds. She will
+show you."
+
+Gerhardt went out of the gate and left him alone with his
+hostess. Her mind seemed to read his thoughts. When he uttered a
+word, or any sound that resembled one, she quickly and smoothly
+made a sentence of it, as if she were quite accustomed to talking
+in this way and expected only monosyllables from strangers. She
+was kind, even a little playful with him; but he felt it was all
+good manners, and that underneath she was not thinking of him at
+all. When he was alone in the tile-floored sleeping room
+upstairs, unrolling his blankets and arranging his shaving
+things, he looked out of the window and watched her where she sat
+sewing under the cherry tree. She had a very sad face, he
+thought; it wasn't grief, nothing sharp and definite like sorrow.
+It was an old, quiet, impersonal sadness,--sweet in its
+expression, like the sadness of music.
+
+As he came out of the house to start back to the barracks, he
+bowed to her and tried to say, "Au revoir, Madame. Jusq' au ce
+soir." He stopped near the kitchen door to look at a
+many-branched rose vine that ran all over the wall, full of
+cream-coloured, pink-tipped roses, just a shade stronger in
+colour than the clay wall behind them. Madame Joubert came over
+and stood beside him, looking at him and at the rosier, "Oui,
+c'est joli, n'est-ce pas?" She took the scissors that hung by a
+ribbon from her belt, cut one of the flowers and stuck it in his
+buttonhole. "Voilà." She made a little flourish with her thin
+hand.
+
+Stepping into the street, he turned to shut the wooden door after
+him, and heard a soft stir in the dark tool-house at his elbow.
+From among the rakes and spades a child's frightened face was
+staring out at him. She was sitting on the ground with her lap
+full of baby kittens. He caught but a glimpse of her dull, pale
+face.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Claude awoke with such a sense of physical
+well-being as he had not had for a long time. The sun was
+shining brightly on the white plaster walls and on the red tiles
+of the floor. Green jalousies, half-drawn, shaded the upper part
+of the two windows. Through their slats, he could see the forking
+branches of an old locust tree that grew by the gate. A flock of
+pigeons flew over it, dipping and mounting with a sharp twinkle
+of silver wings. It was good to lie again in a house that was
+cared for by women. He must have felt that even in his sleep,
+for when he opened his eyes he was thinking about Mahailey and
+breakfast and summer mornings on the farm. The early stillness
+was sweet, and the feeling of dry, clean linen against his body.
+There was a smell of lavender about his warm pillow. He lay
+still for fear of waking Lieutenant Gerhardt. This was the sort
+of peace one wanted to enjoy alone. When he rose cautiously on
+his elbow and looked at the other bed, it was empty. His
+companion must have dressed and slipped out when day first broke.
+Somebody else who liked to enjoy things alone; that looked
+hopeful. But now that he had the place to himself, he decided to
+get up. While he was dressing he could see old M. Joubert down in
+the garden, watering the plants and vines, raking the sand fresh
+and smooth, clipping off dead leaves and withered flowers and
+throwing them into a wheelbarrow. These people had lost both
+their sons in the war, he had been told, and now they were taking
+care of the property for their grandchildren,--two daughters of
+the elder son. Claude saw Gerhardt come into the garden, and sit
+down at the table under the trees, where they had their dinner
+last night. He hurried down to join him. Gerhardt made room for
+him on the bench.
+
+"Do you always sleep like that? It's an accomplishment. I made
+enough noise when I dressed,--kept dropping things, but it never
+reached you."
+
+Madame Joubert came out of the kitchen in a purple flowered
+morning gown, her hair in curl-papers under a lace cap. She
+brought the coffee herself, and they sat down at the unpainted
+table without a cloth, and drank it out of big crockery bowls.
+They had fresh milk with it,--the first Claude had tasted in a
+long while, and sugar which Gerhardt produced from his pocket.
+The old cook had her coffee sitting in the kitchen door, and on
+the step, at her feet, sat the strange, pale little girl.
+
+Madame Joubert amiably addressed herself to Claude; she knew that
+Americans were accustomed to a different sort of morning repast,
+and if he wished to bring bacon from the camp, she would gladly
+cook it for him. She had even made pancakes for officers who
+stayed there before. She seemed pleased, however, to learn that
+Claude had had enough of these things for awhile. She called
+David by his first name, pronouncing it the French way, and when
+Claude said he hoped she would do as much for him, she said, Oh,
+yes, that his was a very good French name, "mais un peu, un peu...
+romanesque," at which he blushed, not quite knowing whether
+she were making fun of him or not.
+
+"It is rather so in English, isn't it?" David asked.
+
+"Well, it's a sissy name, if you mean that."
+
+"Yes, it is, a little," David admitted candidly. The day's work
+on the parade ground was hard, and Captain Maxey's men were soft,
+felt the heat,--didn't size up well with the Kansas boys who had
+been hardened by service. The Colonel wasn't pleased with B
+Company and detailed them to build new barracks and extend the
+sanitation system. Claude got out and worked with the men.
+Gerhardt followed his example, but it was easy to see that he
+had never handled lumber or tin-roofing before. A kind of rivalry
+seemed to have sprung up between him and Claude, neither of them
+knew why.
+
+Claude could see that the sergeants and corporals were a little
+uncertain about Gerhardt. His laconic speech, never embroidered
+by the picturesque slang they relished, his gravity, and his
+rare, incredulous smile, alike puzzled them. Was the new officer
+a dude? Sergeant Hicks asked of his chum, Dell Able. No, he
+wasn't a dude. Was he a swellhead? No, not at all; but he wasn't
+a good mixer. He was "an Easterner"; what more he was would
+develop later. Claude sensed something unusual about him. He
+suspected that Gerhardt knew a good many things as well as he
+knew French, and that he tried to conceal it, as people sometimes
+do when they feel they are not among their equals; this idea
+nettled him. It was Claude who seized the opportunity to be
+patronizing, when Gerhardt betrayed that he was utterly unable to
+select lumber by given measurements.
+
+The next afternoon, work on the new barracks was called off
+because of rain. Sergeant Hicks set about getting up a boxing
+match, but when he went to invite the lieutenants, they had both
+disappeared. Claude was tramping toward the village, determined
+to get into the big wood that had tempted him ever since his
+arrival.
+
+The highroad became the village street, and then, at the edge of
+the wood, became a country road again. A little farther on, where
+the shade grew denser, it split up into three wagon trails, two
+of them faint and little used. One of these Claude followed. The
+rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing
+up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in
+spongy, mossy earth. The light about him, the very air, was
+green. The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green
+moss, like mould. He was wondering whether this forest was not
+always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through
+and shattered the whole wood with gold. He had never seen
+anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green
+of the dripping beech tops. Everything woke up; rabbits ran across
+the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were
+full of whirring insects.
+
+The winding path turned again, and came out abruptly on a
+hillside, above an open glade piled with grey boulders. On the
+opposite rise of ground stood a grove of pines, with bare, red
+stems. The light, around and under them, was red like a rosy
+sunset. Nearly all the stems divided about half-way up into two
+great arms, which came together again at the top, like the
+pictures of old Grecian lyres.
+
+Down in the grassy glade, among the piles of flint boulders,
+little white birches shook out their shining leaves in the
+lightly moving air. All about the rocks were patches of purple
+heath; it ran up into the crevices between them like fire. On one
+of these bald rocks sat Lieutenant Gerhardt, hatless, in an
+attitude of fatigue or of deep dejection, his hands clasped about
+his knees, his bronze hair ruddy in the sun. After watching him
+for a few minutes, Claude descended the slope, swishing the tall
+ferns.
+
+"Will I be in the way?" he asked as he stopped at the foot of the
+rocks.
+
+"Oh, no!" said the other, moving a little and unclasping his
+hand.
+
+Claude sat down on a boulder. "Is this heather?" he asked. "I
+thought I recognized it, from 'Kidnapped.' This part of the world
+is not as new to you as it is to me."
+
+"No. I lived in Paris for several years when I was a student."
+
+"What were you studying?"
+
+"The violin."
+
+"You are a musician?" Claude looked at him wonderingly.
+
+"I was," replied the other with a disdainful smile, languidly
+stretching out his legs in the heather.
+
+"That seems too bad," Claude remarked gravely.
+
+"What does?"
+
+"Why, to take fellows with a special talent. There are enough of
+us who haven't any."
+
+Gerhardt rolled over on his back and put his hands under his
+head. "Oh, this affair is too big for exceptions; it's universal.
+If you happened to be born twenty-six years ago, you couldn't
+escape. If this war didn't kill you in one way, it would in
+another." He told Claude he had trained at Camp Dix, and had come
+over eight months ago in a regimental band, but he hated the work
+he had to do and got transferred to the infantry.
+
+When they retraced their steps, the wood was full of green
+twilight. Their relations had changed somewhat during the last
+half hour, and they strolled in confidential silence up the
+home-like street to the door of their own garden.
+
+Since the rain was over, Madame Joubert had laid the cloth on the
+plank table under the cherry tree, as on the previous evenings.
+Monsieur was bringing the chairs, and the little girl was
+carrying out a pile of heavy plates. She rested them against her
+stomach and leaned back as she walked, to balance them. She wore
+shoes, but no stockings, and her faded cotton dress switched
+about her brown legs. She was a little Belgian refugee who had
+been sent there with her mother. The mother was dead now, and the
+child would not even go to visit her grave. She could not be
+coaxed from the court-yard into the quiet street. If the
+neighbour children came into the garden on an errand, she hid
+herself. She would have no playmates but the cat; and now she had
+the kittens in the tool house.
+
+Dinner was very cheerful that evening. M. Joubert was pleased
+that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat. The
+garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook
+down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The
+mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert's sewing
+chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to snap up earthworms that
+wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the house fell over the
+dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight, and
+the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured
+roses. Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy
+smell.
+
+M. Joubert must have been ten years older than his wife. There
+was a great contentment in his manner and a pleasant sparkle in
+his eye. He liked the young officers. Gerhardt had been there
+more than two weeks, and somewhat relieved the stillness that
+had settled over the house since the second son died in hospital.
+The Jouberts had dropped out of things. They had done all they
+could do, given all they had, and now they had nothing to look
+forward to,--except the event to which all France looked forward.
+The father was talking to Gerhardt about the great sea-port the
+Americans were making of Bordeaux; he said he meant to go there
+after the war, to see it all for himself.
+
+Madame Joubert was pleased to hear that they had been walking in
+the wood. And was the heather in bloom? She wished they had
+brought her some. Next time they went, perhaps. She used to walk
+there often. Her eyes seemed to come nearer to them, Claude
+thought, when she spoke of it, and she evidently cared a great
+deal more about what was blooming in the wood than about what the
+Americans were doing on the Garonne. He wished he could talk to
+her as Gerhardt did. He admired the way she roused herself and
+tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such
+spirit and precision. It was a language that couldn't be mumbled;
+that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.
+Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken
+spirit, he thought.
+
+The little maid who served them moved about noiselessly. Her dull
+eyes never seemed to look; yet she saw when it was time to bring
+the heavy soup tureen, and when it was time to take it away.
+Madame Joubert had found that Claude liked his potatoes with his
+meat--when there was meat--and not in a course by themselves. She
+had each time to tell the little girl to go and fetch them. This
+the child did with manifest reluctance,--sullenly, as if she were
+being forced to do something wrong. She was a very strange little
+creature, altogether. As the two soldiers left the table and
+started for the camp, Claude reached down into the tool house and
+took up one of the kittens, holding it out in the light to see it
+blink its eyes. The little girl, just coming out of the kitchen,
+uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted
+down, covering her face with her hands. Madame Joubert came out
+to chide her.
+
+"What is the matter with that child?" Claude asked as they
+hurried out of the gate. "Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused
+in some way?"
+
+"Terrorized. She often screams like that at night. Haven't you
+heard her? They have to go and wake her, to stop it. She doesn't
+speak any French; only Walloon. And she can't or won't learn, so
+they can't tell what goes on in her poor little head."
+
+In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude
+marvelled at Gerhardt's spirit and endurance. The muscular strain
+of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any
+of the other officers. He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed
+only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly
+bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned
+that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a
+soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp
+entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his
+occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have
+wriggled out and didn't.
+
+
+VII
+
+On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel
+Scott's battalion was streaming along one of the dusty,
+well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind
+them. The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods,
+little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people
+came out to watch the soldiers go by.
+
+The Americans went through every village in march step, colours
+flying, the band playing, "to show that the morale was high," as
+the officers said. Claude trudged on the outside of the
+column,--now at the front of his company, now at the
+rear,--wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his
+satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.
+
+They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were
+reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and
+torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half
+concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth,
+bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the
+road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty
+barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,--with
+no purpose at all.
+
+"Begins to look like we're getting in, Lieutenant," said Sergeant
+Hicks, smiling behind his salute.
+
+Claude nodded and passed forward.
+
+"Well, we can't arrive any too soon for us, boys?" The Sergeant
+looked over his shoulder, and they grinned, their teeth flashing
+white in their red, perspiring faces. Claude didn't wonder that
+everybody along the route, even the babies, came out to see them;
+he thought they were the finest sight in the world. This was the
+first day they had worn their tin hats; Gerhardt had shown them
+how to stuff grass and leaves inside to keep their heads cool.
+When they fell into fours, and the band struck up as they
+approached a town, Bert Fuller, the boy from Pleasantville on the
+Platte, who had blubbered on the voyage over, was guide right,
+and whenever Claude passed him his face seemed to say, "You won't
+get anything on me in a hurry, Lieutenant!"
+
+They made camp early in the afternoon, on a hill covered with
+half-burned pines. Claude took Bert and Dell Able and Oscar the
+Swede, and set off to make a survey and report the terrain.
+
+Behind the hill, under the burned edge of the wood, they found an
+abandoned farmhouse and what seemed to be a clean well.
+
+It had a solid stone curb about it, and a wooden bucket hanging
+by a rusty wire. When the boys splashed the bucket about, the
+water sent up a pure, cool breath. But they were wise boys, and
+knew where dead Prussians most loved to hide. Even the straw in
+the stable they regarded with suspicion, and thought it would be
+just as well not to bed anybody there.
+
+Swinging on to the right to make their circuit, they got into
+mud; a low field where the drain ditches had been neglected and
+had overflowed. There they came upon a pitiful group of humanity,
+bemired. A woman, ill and wretched looking, sat on a fallen log
+at the end of the marsh, a baby in her lap and three children
+hanging about her. She was far gone in consumption; one had only
+to listen to her breathing and to look at her white, perspiring
+face to feel how weak she was. Draggled, mud to the knees, she
+was trying to nurse her baby, half hidden under an old black
+shawl. She didn't look like a tramp woman, but like one who had
+once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was still
+young. The children were tired and discouraged. One little boy
+wore a clumsy blue jacket, made from a French army coat. The
+other wore a battered American Stetson that came down over his
+ears. He carried, in his two arms, a pink celluloid clock. They
+all looked up and waited for the soldiers to do something.
+
+Claude approached the woman, and touching the rim of his helmet,
+began: "Bonjour, Madame. Qu'est que c'est?"
+
+She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only
+able to gasp, "'Toinette, 'Toinette!"
+
+'Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and
+seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face
+with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy,
+crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced
+than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at
+making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign
+soldiers,--spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.
+
+She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty
+farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night.
+How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been
+staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying
+to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick,
+presque morte and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard
+people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their
+own cellar,--and so could they if they once got there. The point
+was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die
+chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French
+soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans
+were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to
+be toujours gentils.
+
+While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to
+howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl
+shrugged. "Il est toujours en colère," she muttered. The woman
+turned it around with difficulty--it seemed a big, heavy baby,
+but white and sickly--and gave it the other breast. It began
+sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were
+famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this
+exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men
+away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her
+after them.
+
+"Il faut que votre mère--se reposer," he told her, with the grave
+caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French
+sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue
+surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed
+in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English,
+Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind,
+and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.
+
+Had they anything to eat? "Vous avez quelque chose à manger?"
+
+"Rien. Rien du tout."
+
+Wasn't her mother "trop malade à marcher?"
+
+She shrugged; Monsieur could see for himself.
+
+And her father?
+
+He was dead; "mort à la Marne, en quatorze."
+
+"At the Marne?" Claude repeated, glancing in perplexity at the
+nursing baby. Her sharp eyes followed his, and she instantly
+divined his doubt. "The baby?" she said quickly. "Oh, the baby is
+not my brother, he is a Boche."
+
+For a moment Claude did not understand. She repeated her
+explanation impatiently, something disdainful and sinister in her
+metallic little voice. A slow blush mounted to his forehead.
+
+He pushed her toward her mother, "Attendez là."
+
+"I guess we'll have to get them over to that farmhouse," he told
+the men. He repeated what he had got of the child's story. When
+he came to her laconic statement about the baby, they looked at
+each other. Bert Fuller was afraid he might cry again, so he kept
+muttering, "By God, if we'd a-got here sooner, by God if we had!"
+as they ran back along the ditch.
+
+Dell and Oscar made a chair of their crossed hands and carried
+the woman, she was no great weight. Bert picked up the little boy
+with the pink clock; "Come along, little frog, your legs ain't
+long enough."
+
+Claude walked behind, holding the screaming baby stiffly in his
+arms. How was it possible for a baby to have such definite
+personality, he asked himself, and how was it possible to dislike
+a baby so much? He hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and
+bloodless ears, and carried it with loathing... no wonder it
+cried! When it got nothing by screaming and stiffening, however,
+it suddenly grew quiet; regarded him with pale blue eyes, and
+tried to make itself comfortable against his khaki coat. It put
+out a grimy little fist and took hold of one of his buttons.
+"Kamerad, eh?" he muttered, glaring at the infant. "Cut it out!"
+
+Before they had their own supper that night, the boys carried hot
+food and blankets down to their family.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Four o'clock... a summer dawn... his first morning in the
+trenches.
+
+Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams
+were in position. This hour, when the light was changing, was a
+favourite time for attack. He had come in late last night, and
+had everything to learn. Mounting the firestep, he peeped over
+the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist.
+Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with
+birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they
+did on the wire fences at home. Clear and flute-like they sounded
+in the heavy air,--and they were the only sounds. A little breeze
+came up, slowly clearing the mist away. Streaks of green showed
+through the moving banks of vapour. The birds became more
+agitated. That dull stretch of grey and green was No Man's Land.
+Those low, zigzag mounds, like giant molehills protected by wire
+hurdles, were the Hun trenches; five or six lines of them. He
+could easily follow the communication trenches without a glass.
+At one point their front line could not be more than eighty yards
+away, at another it must be all of three hundred. Here and there
+thin columns of smoke began to rise; the Hun was getting
+breakfast; everything was comfortable and natural. Behind the
+enemy's position the country rose gradually for several miles,
+with ravines and little woods, where, according to his map, they
+had masked artillery. Back on the hills were ruined farmhouses
+and broken trees, but nowhere a living creature in sight. It was
+a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection. Yet
+everywhere the ground was full of men. Their own trenches, from
+the other side, must look quite as dead. Life was a secret, these
+days.
+
+It was amazing how simply things could be done. His battalion had
+marched in quietly at midnight, and the line they came to relieve
+had set out as silently for the rear. It all took place in utter
+darkness. Just as B Company slid down an incline into the shallow
+rear trenches, the country was lit for a moment by two star
+shells, there was a rattling of machine guns, German Maxims,--a
+sporadic crackle that was not followed up. Filing along the
+communication trenches, they listened anxiously; artillery fire
+would have made it bad for the other men who were marching to the
+rear. But nothing happened. They had a quiet night, and this
+morning, here they were!
+
+The sky flamed up saffron and silver. Claude looked at his watch,
+but he could not bear to go just yet. How long it took a Wheeler
+to get round to anything! Four years on the way; now that he was
+here, he would enjoy the scenery a bit, he guessed. He wished his
+mother could know how he felt this morning. But perhaps she did
+know. At any rate, she would not have him anywhere else. Five
+years ago, when he was sitting on the steps of the Denver State
+House and knew that nothing unexpected could ever happen to him...
+suppose he could have seen, in a flash, where he would be
+today? He cast a long look at the reddening, lengthening
+landscape, and dropped down on the duckboard.
+
+Claude made his way back to the dugout into which he and Gerhardt
+had thrown their effects last night. The former occupants had
+left it clean. There were two bunks nailed against the side
+walls,--wooden frames with wire netting over them, covered with
+dry sandbags. Between the two bunks was a soap-box table, with a
+candle stuck in a green bottle, an alcohol stove, a bainmarie,
+and two tin cups. On the wall were coloured pictures from Jugend,
+taken out of some Hun trench.
+
+He found Gerhardt still asleep on his bed, and shook him until he
+sat up.
+
+"How long have you been out, Claude? Didn't you sleep?"
+
+"A little. I wasn't very tired. I suppose we could heat shaving
+water on this stove; they've left us half a bottle of alcohol.
+It's quite a comfortable little hole, isn't it?"
+
+"It will doubtless serve its purpose," David remarked dryly. "So
+sensitive to any criticism of this war! Why, it's not your
+affair; you've only just arrived."
+
+"I know," Claude replied meekly, as he began to fold his
+blankets. "But it's likely the only one I'll ever be in, so I may
+as well take an interest."
+
+The next afternoon four young men, all more or less naked, were
+busy about a shell-hole full of opaque brown water. Sergeant Hicks
+and his chum, Dell Able, had hunted through half the blazing hot
+morning to find a hole not too scummy, conveniently, and even
+picturesquely situated, and had reported it to the Lieutenants.
+Captain Maxey, Hicks said, could send his own orderly to find his
+own shell-hole, and could take his bath in private. "He'd never
+wash himself with anybody else," the Sergeant added. "Afraid of
+exposing his dignity!"
+
+Bruger and Hammond, the two second Lieutenants, were already out
+of their bath, and reclined on what might almost be termed a
+grassy slope, examining various portions of their body with
+interest. They hadn't had all their clothes off for some time,
+and four days of marching in hot weather made a man anxious to
+look at himself.
+
+"You wait till winter," Gerhardt told them. He was still
+splashing in the hole, up to his armpits in muddy water. "You
+won't get a wash once in three months then. Some of the Tommies
+told me that when they got their first bath after Vimy, their
+skins peeled off like a snake's. What are you doing with my
+trousers, Bruger?"
+
+"Hunting for your knife. I dropped mine yesterday, when that
+shell exploded in the cut-off. I darned near dropped my old nut!"
+
+"Shucks, that wasn't anything. Don't keep blowing about it--shows
+you're a greenhorn."
+
+Claude stripped off his shirt and slid into the pool beside
+Gerhardt. "Gee, I hit something sharp down there! Why didn't you
+fellows pull out the splinters?"
+
+He shut his eyes, disappeared for a moment, and came up
+sputtering, throwing on the ground a round metal object, coated
+with rust and full of slime. "German helmet, isn't it? Phew!" He
+wiped his face and looked about suspiciously.
+
+"Phew is right!" Bruger turned the object over with a stick. "Why
+in hell didn't you bring up the rest of him? You've spoiled my
+bath. I hope you enjoy it."
+
+Gerhardt scrambled up the side. "Get out, Wheeler! Look at that,"
+he pointed to big sleepy bubbles, bursting up through the thick
+water. "You've stirred up trouble, all right! Something's going
+very bad down there."
+
+Claude got out after him, looking back at the activity in the
+water. "I don't see how pulling out one helmet could stir the
+bottom up so. I should think the water would keep the smell
+down."
+
+"Ever study chemistry?" Bruger asked scornfully. "You just opened
+up a graveyard, and now we get the exhaust. If you swallowed any
+of that German cologne--Oh, you should worry!"
+
+Lieutenant Hammond, still barelegged, with his shirt tied over
+his shoulders, was scratching in his notebook. Before they left
+he put up a placard on a split stick.
+
+No Public Bathing!! Private Beach
+
+C. Wheeler, Co. B. 2-th Inf'ty.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+The first letters from home! The supply wagons brought them up,
+and every man in the Company got something except Ed Drier, a
+farm-hand from the Nebraska sand hills, and Willy Katz, the
+tow-headed Austrian boy from the South Omaha packing-houses.
+Their comrades were sorry for them. Ed didn't have any "folks" of
+his own, but he had expected letters all the same. Willy was sure
+his mother must have written. When the last ragged envelope was
+given out and he turned away empty-handed, he murmured, "She's
+Bohunk, and she don't write so good. I guess the address wasn't
+plain, and some fellow in another comp'ny has got my letter."
+
+No second class matter was sent up,--the boys had hoped for
+newspapers from home to give them a little war news, since they
+never got any here. Dell Able's sister, however, had enclosed a
+clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the
+British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the
+hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies,
+mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a
+group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where
+they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story
+of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where
+the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,--a desolate
+spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very
+religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together,
+opened his mouth and said scornfully,
+
+"That's a lie!"
+
+Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you
+know it is?"
+
+"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the
+Garden, and there ain't no man going to find it. It ain't
+intended they should. The Bible says so."
+
+Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years
+ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?"
+
+"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim?
+Nothin'!"
+
+The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.
+
+Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead?
+Solid ivory!"
+
+Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off
+with his washing.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front
+line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The
+Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the
+place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One
+night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the
+gun teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes,
+smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases. Gerhardt was
+working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean
+copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning,
+showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could
+sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.
+
+There was one officer who could talk all the others down,
+wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the
+Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet
+four, and very broad,--a dynamo of energy. Before the war he was
+building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in
+his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius
+Caesar's fortified camps. This had been too much for his
+easily-inflamed imagination. He photographed and measured and
+brooded upon these ancient remains. He was an engineer by day and
+an archaeologist by night. He had crates of books sent down from
+Paris,--everything that had been written on Caesar, in French and
+German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to him
+in the evening. The priest believed the American was mad.
+
+When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest
+in classical studies, but now it was as if he were giving birth
+to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam.
+It also drove other ideas into his exclusively engineering
+brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his
+countrymen.. He travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly
+what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he had
+a chance to enlist.
+
+In the Battalion, Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men
+never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general's
+operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from
+one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him;
+centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens
+found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he
+was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black
+cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French
+characteristics, coaching and preparing them. It was his legs
+that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on
+two short stumps.
+
+"Now you fellows don't want to forget that the night-life of
+Paris is not a typical thing at all; that's a show got up for
+foreigners.... The French peasant, he's a thrifty fellow....
+This red wine's all right if you don't abuse it; take it
+two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery.... You don't
+have to be rough with them, simply firm. Whenever one of them
+accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her
+twenty-five francs; then I look her in the eye and say, 'My girl,
+I've got three children, three boys.' She gets the point at once;
+never fails. She goes away ashamed of herself."
+
+"But that's so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,"
+said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
+
+Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the
+Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such
+concentration, when snatches of the Captain's lecture kept
+breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of
+the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive
+glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was
+something out of the ordinary about him.
+
+The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed
+out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude
+saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He
+listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then
+frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his
+momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had
+particular associations with the air,--melancholy, but beautiful,
+Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record
+himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the
+light, read the inscription:
+
+"Meditation from Thais--Violin solo--David Gerhardt."
+
+When they were going back along the communication trench in the
+rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly.
+"That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin
+solo, wasn't it?"
+
+"Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost
+here."
+
+"Are there many of your records?"
+
+"Quite a number. Why do you ask?"
+
+"I'd like to write my mother. She's fond of good music. She'll
+get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing
+closer to her, don't you see?"
+
+"All right, Claude," said David good-naturedly. "She will find
+them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I
+had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets
+a little income from them. Here we are, at home." As he struck a
+match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared
+behind the blankets. "Plenty of them around, these wet nights.
+Get one? Don't squash him in there. Here's the sack."
+
+Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust
+the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously
+trampled whatever fell to the bottom. "Where do you suppose the
+other is?" "He'll join us later. I don't mind the rats half so
+much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his
+clothes off! Turn in; I'll go the rounds." Gerhardt splashed out
+along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and
+cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get
+David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked
+like on a concert platform, playing his violin.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The following night, Claude was sent back to Division
+Head-quarters at Q-- with information the Colonel did not care to
+commit to paper. He set off at ten o'clock, with Sergeant Hicks
+for escort. There had been two days of rain, and the
+communication trenches were almost knee-deep in water. About half
+a mile back of the front line, the two men crawled out of the
+ditch and went on above ground. There was very little shelling
+along the front that night. When a flare went up, they dropped
+and lay on their faces, trying, at the same time, to get a squint
+at what was ahead of them.
+
+The ground was rough, and the darkness thick; it was past
+midnight when they reached the east-and-west road--usually full
+of traffic, and not entirely deserted even on a night like this.
+Trains of horses were splashing through the mud, with shells on
+their backs, empty supply wagons were coming back from the front.
+Claude and Hicks paused by the ditch, hoping to get a ride. The
+rain began to fall with such violence that they looked about for
+shelter. Stumbling this way and that, they ran into a big
+artillery piece, the wheels sunk over the hubs in a mud-hole.
+
+"Who's there?" called a quick voice, unmistakably British.
+
+"American infantrymen, two of us. Can we get onto one of your
+trucks till this lets up?"
+
+"Oh, certainly! We can make room for you in here, if you're not
+too big. Speak quietly, or you'll waken the Major." Giggles and
+smothered laughter; a flashlight winked for a moment and showed a
+line of five trucks, the front and rear ones covered with
+tarpaulin tents. The voices came from the shelter next the gun.
+The men inside drew up their legs and made room for the
+strangers; said they were sorry they hadn't anything dry to offer
+them except a little rum. The intruders accepted this gratefully.
+
+The Britishers were a giggly lot, and Claude thought, from their
+voices, they must all be very young. They joked about their Major
+as if he were their schoolmaster. There wasn't room enough on the
+truck for anybody to lie down, so they sat with their knees under
+their chins and exchanged gossip. The gun team belonged to an
+independent battery that was sent about over the country,
+"wherever needed." The rest of the battery had got through, gone
+on to the east, but this big gun was always getting into trouble;
+now something had gone wrong with her tractor and they couldn't
+pull her out. They called her "Jenny," and said she was taken
+with fainting fits now and then, and had to be humoured. It was
+like going about with your grandmother, one of the invisible
+Tommies said, "she is such a pompous old thing!" The Major was
+asleep on the rear truck; he was going to get the V.C. for
+sleeping. More giggles.
+
+No, they hadn't any idea where they were going; of course, the
+officers knew, but artillery officers never told anything. What
+was this country like, anyhow? They were new to this part, had
+just come down from Verdure.
+
+Claude said he had a friend in the air service up there; did they
+happen to know anything about Victor Morse?
+
+Morse, the American ace? Hadn't he heard? Why, that got into the
+London papers. Morse was shot down inside the Hun line three
+weeks ago. It was a brilliant affair. He was chased by eight
+Boche planes, brought down three of them, put the rest to flight,
+and was making for base, when they turned and got him. His
+machine came down in flames and he jumped, fell a thousand feet
+or more.
+
+"Then I suppose he never got his leave?" Claude asked.
+
+They didn't know. He got a fine citation.
+
+The men settled down to wait for the weather to improve or the
+night to pass. Some of them fell into a doze, but Claude felt
+wide awake. He was wondering about the flat in Chelsea; whether
+the heavy-eyed beauty had been very sorry, or whether she was
+playing "Roses of Picardy" for other young officers. He thought
+mournfully that he would never go to London now. He had quite
+counted on meeting Victor there some day, after the Kaiser had
+been properly disposed of. He had really liked Victor. There was
+something about that fellow... a sort of debauched baby, he
+was, who went seeking his enemy in the clouds. What other age
+could have produced such a figure? That was one of the things
+about this war; it took a little fellow from a little town, gave
+him an air and a swagger, a life like a movie-film,--and then a
+death like the rebel angels.
+
+A man like Gerhardt, for instance, had always lived in a more or
+less rose-colored world; he belonged over here, really. How could
+he know what hard moulds and crusts the big guns had broken open
+on the other side of the sea? Who could ever make him understand
+how far it was from the strawberry bed and the glass cage in the
+bank, to the sky-roads over Verdure?
+
+By three o'clock the rain had stopped. Claude and Hicks set off
+again, accompanied by one of the gun team who was going back to
+get help for their tractor. As it began to grow light, the two
+Americans wondered more and more at the extremely youthful
+appearance of their companion. When they stopped at a shell-hole
+and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his
+helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance
+of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples,
+yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes.
+
+"You haven't been over very long, have you?" Claude asked in a
+fatherly tone, as they took the road again.
+
+"I came out in 'sixteen. I was formerly in the infantry."
+
+The Americans liked to hear him talk; he spoke very quickly, in a
+high, piping voice.
+
+"How did you come to change?"
+
+"Oh, I belonged to one of the Pal Battalions, and we got cut to
+pieces. When I came out of hospital, I thought I'd try another
+branch of the service, seeing my pals were gone."
+
+"Now, just what is a Pal Battalion?" drawled Hicks. He hated all
+English words he didn't understand, though he didn't mind French
+ones in the least.
+
+"Fellows who signed up together from school," the lad piped.
+
+Hicks glanced at Claude. They both thought this boy ought to be
+in school for some time yet, and wondered what he looked like
+when he first came over.
+
+"And you got cut up, you say?" he asked sympathetically.
+
+"Yes, on the Somme. We had rotten luck. We were sent over to take
+a trench and couldn't. We didn't even get to the wire. The Hun
+was so well prepared that time, we couldn't manage it. We went
+over a thousand, and we came back seventeen."
+
+"A hundred and seventeen?"
+
+"No, seventeen."
+
+Hicks whistled and again exchanged looks with Claude. They could
+neither of them doubt him. There was something very unpleasant
+about the idea of a thousand fresh-faced schoolboys being sent
+out against the guns. "It must have been a fool order," he
+commented. "Suppose there was some mistake at Headquarters?"
+
+"Oh, no, Headquarters knew what it was about! We'd have taken it,
+if we'd had any sort of luck. But the Hun happened to be full of
+fight. His machine guns did for us."
+
+"You were hit yourself?" Claude asked him.
+
+"In the leg. He was popping away at me all the while, but I
+wriggled back on my tummy. When I came out of the hospital my leg
+wasn't strong, and there's less marching in the artillery.
+
+"I should think you'd have had about enough."
+
+"Oh, a fellow can't stay out after all his chums have been
+killed! He'd think about it all the time, you know," the boy
+replied in his clear treble.
+
+Claude and Hicks got into Headquarters just as the cooks were
+turning out to build their fires. One of the Corporals took them
+to the officers' bath,--a shed with big tin tubs, and carried away
+their uniforms to dry them in the kitchen. It would be an hour
+before the officers would be about, he said, and in the meantime
+he would manage to get clean shirts and socks for them.
+
+"Say, Lieutenant," Hicks brought out as he was rubbing himself
+down with a real bath towel, "I don't want to hear any more about
+those Pal Battalions, do you? It gets my goat. So long as we were
+going to get into this, we might have been a little more
+previous. I hate to feel small." "Guess we'll have to take our
+medicine," Claude said dryly, "There wasn't anywhere to duck, was
+there? I felt like it. Nice little kid. I don't believe American
+boys ever seem as young as that."
+
+"Why, if you met him anywhere else, you'd be afraid of using bad
+words before him, he's so pretty! What's the use of sending an
+orphan asylum out to be slaughtered? I can't see it," grumbled
+the fat sergeant. "Well, it's their business. I'm not going to
+let it spoil my breakfast. Suppose we'll draw ham and eggs,
+Lieutenant?"
+
+
+
+X
+
+After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with
+one of the staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until
+tomorrow to see Colonel James, who had been called to Paris for a
+general conference. He had left in his car at four that morning,
+in response to a telephone message.
+
+"There's not much to do here, by way of amusement," said the
+Major. "A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want
+at the estaminet,--the one on the square, opposite the English
+tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the
+Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden.
+They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on
+good terms with them. We get their supplies through with our own,
+and the quartermaster has orders to help them when they run
+short. You might go up and call on them. They speak English
+perfectly."
+
+Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of
+introduction.
+
+"Oh, yes, they're used to us! I'll give you a card to Mlle.
+Olive, though. She's a particular friend of mine. There you are:
+'Mlle. Olive de Courcy, introducing, etc.' And, you understand,"
+here he glanced up and looked Claude over from head to foot,
+"she's a perfect lady."
+
+Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about
+presenting himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn't like
+Americans; he was always afraid of meeting French people who
+didn't. It was the same way with most of the fellows in his
+battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being
+disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they
+hastened to behave as badly as possible, in order to deserve it;
+then they didn't feel that they had been taken in--the worst
+feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
+
+Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a
+little. It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914,
+after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until
+about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the
+Chasseurs d'Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive
+the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not
+one building remained standing.
+
+Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as
+he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster.
+There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war
+pictures one saw at home. A cyclone or a fire might have done
+just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an
+exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American
+towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned
+brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered
+beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy
+water. An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a
+few nights before, and been drowned.
+
+This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now
+the civilian population was about four hundred. There were people
+there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation;
+others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out,
+came back from wherever they had found shelter. They were living
+in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers
+and American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read
+familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the
+sides of these frail shelters: "From Emery Bird, Thayer Co.
+Kansas City, Mo." "Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo." These
+inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going
+up and calling on the French ladies.
+
+The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant
+pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank,
+heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of
+rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
+and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
+came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the
+Germans did to it.
+
+Claude paused before a little shanty built against a
+half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with
+a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the
+garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had
+washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops
+and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his
+helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red
+Cross.
+
+She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous
+savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"
+
+(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way
+or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the
+site of the old town hall.)
+
+A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told
+her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie
+put her hand in Claude's and led him off along one of the paths
+that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show
+him a church,--evidently one of the ruins of which they were
+proudest,--where the blue sky was shining through the white
+arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a
+little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus
+had been shot away.
+
+"Le bébé est cassé, mais il a protégé sa mère," Marie explained
+with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had
+a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il
+est gai, mon soldat," but he sometimes drank too much alcohol,
+and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since his comrade had
+stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
+had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do
+better. Marie was evidently a well brought up child. Her father,
+she said, had been a schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent
+hill, she turned to go home. Claude called her back and awkwardly
+tried to give her some money, but she thrust her hands behind her
+and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
+then ran away down the path.
+
+As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the
+ground had been cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, the bricks
+and hewn stones had been piled in neat heaps, the broken hedges
+had been trimmed and the dead parts cut away. Emerging at last
+into the garden, he stood still for wonder; even though it was in
+ruins, it seemed so beautiful after the disorder of the world
+below.
+
+The gravel walks were clean and shining. A wall of very old
+boxwoods stood green against a row of dead Lombardy poplars.
+Along the shattered side of the main building, a pear tree,
+trained on wires like a vine, still flourished,--full of little
+red pears. Around the stone well was a shaven grass plot, and
+everywhere there were little trees and shrubs, which had been too
+low for the shells to hit,--or for the fire, which had seared the
+poplars, to catch. The hill must have been wrapped in flames at
+one time, and all the tall trees had been burned.
+
+The barrack was built against the walls of the cloister,--three
+arches of which remained, like a stone wing to the shed of
+planks. On a ladder stood a one-armed young man, driving nails
+very skillfully with his single hand. He seemed to be making a
+frame projection from the sloping roof, to support an awning. He
+carried his nails in his mouth. When he wanted one, he hung his
+hammer to the belt of his trousers, took a nail from between his
+teeth, stuck it into the wood, and then deftly rapped it on the
+head. Claude watched him for a moment, then went to the foot of
+the ladder and held out his two hands. "Laissez-moi," he
+exclaimed.
+
+The one aloft spat his nails out into his palm, looked down, and
+laughed. He was about Claude's age, with very yellow hair and
+moustache and blue eyes. A charming looking fellow.
+
+"Willingly," he said. "This is no great affair, but I do it to
+amuse myself, and it will be pleasant for the ladies." He
+descended and gave his hammer to the visitor. Claude set to work
+on the frame, while the other went under the stone arches and
+brought back a roll of canvas,--part of an old tent, by the look
+of it.
+
+"Un héritage des Boches," he explained unrolling it upon the
+grass. "I found it among their filth in the cellar, and had the
+idea to make a pavilion for the ladies, as our trees are
+destroyed." He stood up suddenly. "Perhaps you have come to see
+the ladies?"
+
+"Plus tard."
+
+Very well, the boy said, they would get the pavilion done for a
+surprise for Mlle. Olive when she returned. She was down in the
+town now, visiting the sick people. He bent over his canvas
+again, measuring and cutting with a pair of garden shears, moving
+round the green plot on his knees, and all the time singing.
+Claude wished he could understand the words of his song.
+
+While they were working together, tying the cloth up to the
+frame, Claude, from his elevation, saw a tall girl coming slowly
+up the path by which he had ascended. She paused at the top, by
+the boxwood hedge, as if she were very tired, and stood looking
+at them. Presently she approached the ladder and said in slow,
+careful English, "Good morning. Louis has found help, I see."
+
+Claude came down from his perch.
+
+"Are you Mlle. de Courcy? I am Claude Wheeler. I have a note of
+introduction to you, if I can find it."
+
+She took the card, but did not look at it. "That is not
+necessary. Your uniform is enough. Why have you come?"
+
+He looked at her in some confusion. "Well, really, I don't know!
+I am just in from the front to see Colonel James, and he is in
+Paris, so I must wait over a day. One of the staff suggested my
+coming up here--I suppose because it is so nice!" he finished
+ingenuously.
+
+"Then you are a guest from the front, and you will have lunch
+with Louis and me. Madame Barre is also gone for the day. Will you
+see our house?" She led him through the low door into a living
+room, unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy. There were coloured
+war posters on the clean board walls, brass shell cases full of
+wild flowers and garden flowers, canvas camp-chairs, a shelf of
+books, a table covered by a white silk shawl embroidered with big
+butterflies. The sunlight on the floor, the bunches of fresh
+flowers, the white window curtains stirring in the breeze,
+reminded Claude of something, but he could not remember what.
+
+"We have no guest room," said Mlle. de Courcy. "But you will come
+to mine, and Louis will bring you hot water to wash."
+
+In a wooden chamber at the end of the passage, Claude took off
+his coat, and set to work to make himself as tidy as possible.
+Hot water and scented soap were in themselves pleasant things.
+The dresser was an old goods box, stood on end and covered with
+white lawn. On it there was a row of ivory toilet things, with
+combs and brushes, powder and cologne, and a pile of white
+handkerchiefs fresh from the iron. He felt that he ought not to
+look about him much, but the odor of cleanness, and the
+indefinable air of personality, tempted him. In one corner, a
+curtain on a rod made a clothes-closet; in another was a low iron
+bed, like a soldier's, with a pale blue coverlid and white
+pillows. He moved carefully and splashed discreetly. There was
+nothing he could have damaged or broken, not even a rug on the
+plank floor, and the pitcher and hand-basin were of iron; yet he
+felt as if he were imperiling something fragile.
+
+When he came out, the table in the living room was set for three.
+The stout old dame who was placing the plates paid no attention
+to him,--seemed, from her expression, to scorn him and all his
+kind. He withdrew as far as possible out of her path and picked
+up a book from the table, a volume of Heine's Reisebilder in
+German.
+
+Before lunch Mlle. de Courcy showed him the store room in the
+rear, where the shelves were stocked with rows of coffee tins,
+condensed milk, canned vegetables and meat, all with American
+trade names he knew so well; names which seemed doubly familiar
+and "reliable" here, so far from home. She told him the people in
+the town could not have got through the winter without these
+things. She had to deal them out sparingly, where the need was
+greatest, but they made the difference between life and death.
+Now that it was summer, the people lived by their gardens; but
+old women still came to beg for a few ounces of coffee, and
+mothers to get a can of milk for the babies.
+
+Claude's face glowed with pleasure. Yes, his country had a long
+arm. People forgot that; but here, he felt, was some one who did
+not forget. When they sat down to lunch he learned that Mlle. de
+Courcy and Madame Barre had been here almost a year now; they
+came soon after the town was retaken, when the old inhabitants
+began to drift back. The people brought with them only what they
+could carry in their arms.
+
+"They must love their country so much, don't you think, when they
+endure such poverty to come back to it?" she said. "Even the old
+ones do not often complain about their dear things--their linen,
+and their china, and their beds. If they have the ground, and
+hope, all that they can make again. This war has taught us all
+how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters."
+
+Exactly so; hadn't he been trying to say this ever since he was
+born? Hadn't he always known it, and hadn't it made life both
+bitter and sweet for him? What a beautiful voice she had, this
+Mlle. Olive, and how nobly it dealt with the English tongue. He
+would like to say something, but out of so much... what? He
+remained silent, therefore, sat nervously breaking up the black
+war bread that lay beside his plate.
+
+He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded
+it with favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the
+table.
+
+"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have
+seen our poor trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part
+of France. Our people are more sorry for them than to lose their
+cattle and horses."
+
+Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility,
+Claude thought, as he watched her. She seemed far from strong.
+Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired, with white transparent skin and a
+too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks,--like the flame of a
+feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as if she were
+always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads
+of grey in her hair,--brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the
+back of her head.
+
+After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and
+Louis took Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and
+trimming and planting were his own work, and he had done it all
+with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish much more, for he
+was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
+single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they
+distressed Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four
+old locusts; the tops were naked forks, burned coal-black, but
+the lower branches had put out thick tufts of yellow-green
+foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must still be
+sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong
+American boys to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs
+and trim the tops flat over the thick boles. How much it must
+mean to a man to love his country like this, Claude thought; to
+love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
+tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come
+back self-sown or from old roots, Claude found a group of tall,
+straggly plants with reddish stems and tiny white blossoms,--one
+of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that grew along the
+clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
+pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it
+was one of those nameless prairie flowers that grew on the
+prairie and nowhere else.
+
+When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in
+one of the canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.
+
+"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after him.
+
+"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on
+leave he always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one
+of the family. The shell that killed my brother tore off his arm.
+My mother and I went to visit him in the hospital, and he seemed
+ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother was dead. He put
+his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
+il était toujours plus chic que moi!'"
+
+Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did
+so only by keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences
+she uttered were foreign to her nature; her face and eyes ran
+ahead of her tongue and made one wait eagerly for what was
+coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently twisting
+a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.
+
+"You have found a flower?" She looked up.
+
+"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."
+
+She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about
+your country! I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to
+understand. Yes, tell me about that!"
+
+Nebraska--What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it
+look like? As he tried to describe it, she listened with
+half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers. I think
+it must be like Russia. But your father's farm; describe that to
+me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."
+
+Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to
+begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big
+pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the
+wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and
+corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow
+sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust
+trees. He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger
+about it in such detail. It was partly due to his listener, no
+doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual
+mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew
+of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed
+faster from her effort to see and understand everything. He told
+her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was
+like there in summer and winter and autumn--what it had been like
+in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward
+Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
+the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the
+news at night, and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their
+breath.
+
+Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair. Claude looked up and
+saw tears sparkling in her brilliant eyes. "And I myself," she
+murmured, "did not know of the Marne until days afterward, though
+my father and brother were both there! I was far off in Brittany,
+and the trains did not run. That is what is wonderful, that you
+are here, telling me this! We, we were taught from childhood that
+some day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat.
+But you were so safe, with all your wheat and corn. Nothing could
+touch you, nothing!"
+
+Claude dropped his eyes. "Yes," he muttered, blushing, "shame
+could. It pretty nearly did. We are pretty late." He rose from
+his chair as if he were going to fetch something.... But
+where was he to get it from? He shook his head. "I am afraid," he
+said mournfully, "there is nothing I can say to make you
+understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary. It
+didn't only seem miles away, it seemed centuries away."
+
+"But you do come,--so many, and from so far! It is the last
+miracle of this war. I was in Paris on the fourth day of July,
+when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your
+national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, 'That is a
+new man!' Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.
+Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to
+them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look...
+eyes straight before. They passed like men of destiny." She threw
+out her hands with a swift movement and dropped them in her lap.
+The emotion of that day came back in her face. As Claude looked
+at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the
+strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost
+like a gift of prophecy.
+
+A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to
+meet her and took her into the house. Claude sat down again,
+almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely
+understood, of being no longer a stranger. In the far distance
+the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden Louis
+was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis' songs.
+The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very
+cheerfully. There was something open and warm about the boy's
+voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too. It was
+distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and
+waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new
+kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the
+shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of
+beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life,
+he saw.
+
+When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the
+creeping sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls
+like you," he said simply, as she sat down.
+
+She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left.
+There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came,
+and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or
+sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with
+soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different
+with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father
+had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since
+the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war
+of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men
+would be left to see the day of victory.
+
+She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay.
+Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave;
+but an hour more or less wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly
+give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.
+
+"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get
+through this war?" he asked as he rose.
+
+He wrote it down in his notebook.
+
+"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.
+
+There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the
+edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he
+stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the
+sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the
+glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
+which he would never find again.
+
+The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front.
+They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their
+route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and
+then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter
+half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through
+the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.
+
+When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting
+in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing
+the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their
+nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn't
+happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious.
+This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant
+with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees.
+More because he admired the looks of the man than because he
+needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed
+a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt nodded.
+
+"About how far back would you say it was?"
+
+"I wouldn't say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,"
+he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a
+washtub.
+
+"Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?"
+
+"That I couldn't say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour."
+
+"I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can't be?"
+Hicks asked jovially.
+
+"That I couldn't say. You've been four years gettin' this far, I
+know verra well."
+
+Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. "Oh, if that's the way you
+talk--"
+
+"That's the way I do," said the other sourly.
+
+Claude put out a warning hand. "Come on, Hicks. You'll get
+nothing by it." They went up the road very much disconcerted.
+Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was
+angry, the Sergeant's forehead puffed up and became dark red,
+like a young baby's. "What did you call me off for?" he
+sputtered.
+
+"I don't see where you'd have come out in an argument, and you
+certainly couldn't have licked him."
+
+They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went
+down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through
+the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French
+graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves,
+with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The
+Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the
+soldier's photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some
+comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.
+
+The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to
+sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down
+between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped.
+Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary
+stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie.
+They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a
+cross at their feet the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu,
+Mort pour La France.
+
+A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who
+fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too
+young. They died and took their secret with them,--what they were
+and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France.
+How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a
+shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the
+Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one's mind, where
+one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never
+blush.
+
+Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the
+silence. "Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.'
+It has a coffinish sound. And over there they're all 'tod,' and
+it's all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here,
+black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who
+put 'em here, and what's the good of it?"
+
+"Search me," the other murmured absently.
+
+Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face
+wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. "Well,"
+he brought out at last, "we'd better hike. This afterglow will
+hang on for an hour,--always does, over here."
+
+"I suppose we had." They rose to go. The white crosses were now
+violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow.
+Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still
+burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep
+thunder. "Somebody's getting peppered up there. Do owls always
+hoot in graveyards?"
+
+"Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It's a peaceful spot,
+otherwise. Good-night, boys," said Hicks kindly, as they left the
+graves behind them.
+
+They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping
+trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting
+back to their chums and their own little group. Hicks broke out
+and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business
+together when they got home; were going to open a garage and
+automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both,
+that lonely spot lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort
+pour La France.
+
+
+XI
+
+After four days' rest in the rear, the Battalion went to the
+front again in new country, about ten kilometers east of the
+trench they had relieved before. One morning Colonel Scott sent
+for Claude and Gerhardt and spread his maps out on the table.
+
+"We are going to clean them out there in F 6 tonight, and
+straighten our line. The thing that bothers us is that little
+village stuck up on the hill, where the enemy machine guns have a
+strong position. I want to get them out of there before the
+Battalion goes over. We can't spare too many men, and I don't
+like to send out more officers than I can help; it won't do to
+reduce the Battalion for the major operation. Do you think you
+two boys could manage it with a hundred men? The point is, you
+will have to be out and back before our artillery begins at three
+o'clock."
+
+Under the hill where the village stood, ran a deep ravine, and
+from this ravine a twisting water course wound up the hillside.
+By climbing this gully, the raiders should be able to fall on the
+machine gunners from the rear and surprise them. But first they
+must get across the open stretch, nearly one and a half
+kilometers wide, between the American line and the ravine,
+without attracting attention. It was raining now, and they could
+safely count on a dark night.
+
+The night came on black enough. The Company crossed the open
+stretch without provoking fire, and slipped into the ravine to
+wait for the hour of attack, A young doctor, a Pennsylvanian,
+lately attached to the staff, had volunteered to come with them,
+and he arranged a dressing station at the bottom of the ravine,
+where the stretchers were left. They were to pick up their
+wounded on the way back. Anything left in that area would be
+exposed to the artillery fire later on.
+
+At ten o'clock the men began to ascend the water-course, creeping
+through pools and little waterfalls, making a continuous spludgy
+sound, like pigs rubbing against the sty. Claude, with the head
+of the column, was just pulling out of the gully on the hillside
+above the village, when a flare went up, and a volley of fire
+broke from the brush on the up-hill side of the water-course;
+machine guns, opening on the exposed line crawling below. The Hun
+had been warned that the Americans were crossing the plain and
+had anticipated their way of approach. The men in the gully were
+trapped; they could not retaliate with effect, and the bullets
+from the Maxims bounded on the rocks about them like hail.
+Gerhardt ran along the edge of the line, urging the men not to
+fall back and double on themselves, but to break out of the gully
+on the downhill side and scatter.
+
+Claude, with his group, started back. "Go into the brush and get
+'em! Our fellows have got no chance down there. Grenades while
+they last, then bayonets. Pull your plugs and don't hold on too
+long."
+
+They were already on the run, charging the brush. The Hun gunners
+knew the hill like a book, and when the bombs began bursting
+among them, they took to trails and burrows. "Don't follow them
+off into the rocks," Claude kept calling. "Straight ahead! Clear
+everything to the ravine."
+
+As the German gunners made for cover, the firing into the gully
+stopped, and the arrested column poured up the steep defile after
+Gerhardt.
+
+Claude and his party found themselves back at the foot of the
+hill, at the edge of the ravine from which they had started.
+Heavy firing on the hill above told them the rest of the men had
+got through. The quickest way back to the scene of action was by
+the same water-course they had climbed before. They dropped into
+it and started up. Claude, at the rear, felt the ground rise
+under him, and he was swept with a mountain of earth and rock
+down into the ravine.
+
+He never knew whether he lost consciousness or not. It seemed to
+him that he went on having continuous sensations. The first, was
+that of being blown to pieces; of swelling to an enormous size
+under intolerable pressure, and then bursting. Next he felt
+himself shrink and tingle, like a frost-bitten body thawing out.
+Then he swelled again, and burst. This was repeated, he didn't
+know how often. He soon realized that he was lying under a great
+weight of earth; his body, not his head. He felt rain falling on
+his face. His left hand was free, and still attached to his arm.
+He moved it cautiously to his face. He seemed to be bleeding from
+the nose and ears. Now he began to wonder where he was hurt; he
+felt as if he were full of shell splinters. Everything was buried
+but his head and left shoulder. A voice was calling from
+somewhere below.
+
+"Are any of you fellows alive?"
+
+Claude closed his eyes against the rain beating in his face. The
+same voice came again, with a note of patient despair.
+
+"If there's anybody left alive in this hole, won't he speak up?
+I'm badly hurt myself."
+
+That must be the new doctor; wasn't his dressing station
+somewhere down here? Hurt, he said. Claude tried to move his legs
+a little. Perhaps, if he could get out from under the dirt, he
+might hold together long enough to reach the doctor. He began to
+wriggle and pull. The wet earth sucked at him; it was painful
+business. He braced himself with his elbows, but kept slipping
+back.
+
+"I'm the only one left, then?" said the mournful voice below.
+
+At last Claude worked himself out of his burrow, but he was
+unable to stand. Every time he tried to stand, he got faint and
+seemed to burst again. Something was the matter with his right
+ankle, too--he couldn't bear his weight on it. Perhaps he had
+been too near the shell to be hit; he had heard the boys tell of
+such cases. It had exploded under his feet and swept him down
+into the ravine, but hadn't left any metal in his body. If it had
+put anything into him, it would have put so much that he wouldn't
+be sitting here speculating. He began to crawl down the slope on
+all fours. "Is that the Doctor? Where are you?"
+
+"Here, on a stretcher. They shelled us. Who are you? Our fellows
+got up, didn't they?"
+
+"I guess most of them did. What happened back here?"
+
+"I'm afraid it's my fault," the voice said sadly. "I used my
+flash light, and that must have given them the range. They put
+three or four shells right on top of us. The fellows that got
+hurt in the gully kept stringing back here, and I couldn't do
+anything in the dark. I had to have a light to do anything. I
+just finished putting on a Johnson splint when the first shell
+came. I guess they're all done for now."
+
+"How many were there?"
+
+"Fourteen, I think. Some of them weren't much hurt. They'd all be
+alive, if I hadn't come out with you."
+
+"Who were they? But you don't know our names yet, do you? You didn't
+see Lieutenant Gerhardt among them?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Nor Sergeant Hicks, the fat fellow?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Where are you hurt?"
+
+"Abdominal. I can't tell anything without a light. I lost my
+flash light. It never occurred to me that it could make trouble;
+it's one I use at home, when the babies are sick," the doctor
+murmured.
+
+Claude tried to strike a match, with no success. "Wait a minute,
+where's your helmet?" He took off his metal hat, held it over the
+doctor, and managed to strike a light underneath it. The wounded
+man had already loosened his trousers, and now he pulled up his
+bloody shirt. His groin and abdomen were torn on the left side.
+The wound, and the stretcher on which he lay, supported a mass of
+dark, coagulated blood that looked like a great cow's liver.
+
+"I guess I've got mine," the Doctor murmured as the match went
+out.
+
+Claude struck another. "Oh, that can't be! Our fellows will be
+back pretty soon, and we can do something for you."
+
+"No use, Lieutenant. Do you suppose you could strip a coat off
+one of those poor fellows? I feel the cold terribly in my
+intestines. I had a bottle of French brandy, but I suppose it's
+buried."
+
+Claude stripped off his own coat, which was warm on the inside,
+and began feeling about in the mud for the brandy. He wondered
+why the poor man wasn't screaming with pain. The firing on the
+hill had ceased, except for the occasional click of a Maxim, off
+in the rocks somewhere. His watch said 12:10; could anything have
+miscarried up there?
+
+Suddenly, voices above, a clatter of boots on the shale. He began
+shouting to them.
+
+"Coming, coming!" He knew the voice. Gerhardt and his rifles ran
+down into the ravine with a bunch of prisoners. Claude called to
+them to be careful. "Don't strike a light! They've been shelling
+down here."
+
+"All right are you, Wheeler? Where are the wounded?"
+
+"There aren't any but the Doctor and me. Get us out of here
+quick. I'm all right, but I can't walk."
+
+They put Claude on a stretcher and sent him ahead. Four big
+Germans carried him, and they were prodded to a lope by Hicks and
+Dell Able. Four of their own men took up the doctor, and Gerhardt
+walked beside him. In spite of their care, the motion started the
+blood again and tore away the clots that had formed over his
+wounds. He began to vomit blood and to strangle. The men put the
+stretcher down. Gerhardt lifted the Doctor's head. "It's over,"
+he said presently. "Better make the best time you can."
+
+They picked up their load again. "Them that are carrying him now
+won't jolt him," said Oscar, the pious Swede.
+
+B Company lost nineteen men in the raid. Two days later the
+Company went off on a ten-day leave. Claude's sprained ankle was
+twice its natural size, but to avoid being sent to the hospital
+he had to march to the railhead. Sergeant Hicks got him a giant
+shoe he found stuck on the barbed wire entanglement. Claude and
+Gerhardt were going off on their leave together.
+
+XII
+
+A rainy autumn night; Papa Joubert sat reading his paper. He
+heard a heavy pounding on his garden gate. Kicking off his
+slippers, he put on the wooden sabots he kept for mud, shuffled
+across the dripping garden, and opened the door into the dark
+street. Two tall figures with rifles and kits confronted him. In
+a moment he began embracing them, calling to his wife:
+
+"Nom de diable, Maman, c'est David, David et Claude, tous les
+deux!"
+
+Sorry-looking soldiers they appeared when they stood in the
+candlelight, plastered with clay, their metal hats shining like
+copper bowls, their clothes dripping pools of water upon the
+flags of the kitchen floor. Mme. Joubert kissed their wet cheeks,
+and Monsieur, now that he could see them, embraced them again.
+Whence had they come, and how had it fared with them, up there?
+Very well, as anybody could see. What did they want
+first,--supper, perhaps? Their room was always ready for them; and
+the clothes they had left were in the big chest.
+
+David explained that their shirts had not once been dry for four
+days; and what they most desired was to be dry and to be clean.
+Old Martha, already in bed, was routed out to heat water. M.
+Joubert carried the big washtub upstairs. Tomorrow for
+conversation, he said; tonight for repose. The boys followed him
+and began to peel off their wet uniforms, leaving them in two
+sodden piles on the floor. There was one bath for both, and they
+threw up a coin to decide which should get into the warm water
+first. M. Joubert, seeing Claude's fat ankle strapped up in
+adhesive bandages, began to chuckle. "Oh, I see the Boche made
+you dance up there!"
+
+When they were clad in clean pyjamas out of the chest, Papa
+Joubert carried their shirts and socks down for Martha to wash.
+He returned with the big meat platter, on which was an omelette
+made of twelve eggs and stuffed with bacon and fried potatoes.
+Mme. Joubert brought the three-story earthen coffee-pot to the
+door and called, "Bon appetit!" The host poured the coffee and
+cut up the loaf with his clasp knife. He sat down to watch them
+eat. How had they found things up there, anyway? The Boches
+polite and agreeable as usual? Finally, when there was not a
+crumb of anything left, he poured for each a little glass of
+brandy, "pour cider la digestion," and wished them good-night. He
+took the candle with him.
+
+Perfect bliss, Claude reflected, as the chill of the sheets grew
+warm around his body, and he sniffed in the pillow the old smell
+of lavender. To be so warm, so dry, so clean, so beloved! The
+journey down, reviewed from here, seemed beautiful. As soon as
+they had got out of the region of martyred trees, they found the
+land of France turning gold. All along the river valleys the
+poplars and cottonwoods had changed from green to yellow,--evenly
+coloured, looking like candle flames in the mist and rain. Across
+the fields, along the horizon they ran, like torches passed from
+hand to hand, and all the willows by the little streams had
+become silver. The vineyards were green still, thickly spotted
+with curly, blood-red branches. It all flashed back beside his
+pillow in the dark: this beautiful land, this beautiful people,
+this beautiful omelette; gold poplars, blue-green vineyards, wet,
+scarlet vine leaves, rain dripping into the court, fragrant
+darkness... sleep, stronger than all.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The woodland path was deep in leaves. Claude and David were lying
+on the dry, springy heather among the flint boulders. Gerhardt,
+with his Stetson over his eyes, was presumably asleep. They were
+having fine weather for their holiday. The forest rose about this
+open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of
+horse chestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown,
+as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry
+leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible
+in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes.
+Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes
+glittered.
+
+It was the Wheeler way to dread false happiness, to feel cowardly
+about being fooled. Since he had come back, Claude had more than
+once wondered whether he took too much for granted and felt more
+at home here than he had any right to feel. The Americans were
+prone, he had observed, to make themselves very much at home, to
+mistake good manners for good-will. He had no right to doubt the
+affection of the Jouberts, however; that was genuine and
+personal,--not a smooth surface under which almost any shade of
+scorn might lie and laugh... was not, in short, the
+treacherous "French politeness" by which one must not let oneself
+be taken in. Merely having seen the season change in a country
+gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. And,
+anyway, he wasn't a tourist. He was here on legitimate business.
+
+Claude's sprained ankle was still badly swollen. Madame Joubert
+was sure he ought not to move about on it at all, begged him to
+sit in the garden all day and nurse it. But the surgeon at the
+front had told him that if he once stopped walking, he would have
+to go to the hospital. So, with the help of his host's best
+holly-wood cane, he limped out into the forest every day. This
+afternoon he was tempted to go still farther. Madame Joubert had
+told him about some caves at the other end of the wood,
+underground chambers where the country people had gone to live in
+times of great misery, long ago, in the English wars. The English
+wars; he could not remember just how far back they were,--but
+long enough to make one feel comfortable. As for him, perhaps he
+would never go home at all. Perhaps, when this great affair was
+over, he would buy a little farm and stay here for the rest of
+his life. That was a project he liked to play with. There was no
+chance for the kind of life he wanted at home, where people were
+always buying and selling, building and pulling down. He had
+begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow
+emotions. That was the way Gerhardt had put it once; and if it
+was true, there was no cure for it. Life was so short that it
+meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by
+something that endured; unless the shadows of individual
+existence came and went against a background that held together.
+While he was absorbed in his day dream of farming in France, his
+companion stirred and rolled over on his elbow.
+
+"You know we are to join the Battalion at A--. They'll be living
+like kings there. Hicks will get so fat he'll drop over on the
+march. Headquarters must have something particularly nasty in
+mind; the infantry is always fed up before a slaughter. But I've
+been thinking; I have some old friends at A--. Suppose we go on
+there a day early, and get them to take us in? It's a fine old
+place, and I ought to go to see them. The son was a fellow
+student of mine at the Conservatoire. He was killed the second
+winter of the war. I used to go up there for the holidays with
+him; I would like to see his mother and sister again. You've no
+objection?"
+
+Claude did not answer at once. He lay squinting off at the beech
+trees, without moving. "You always avoid that subject with me,
+don't you?" he said presently.
+
+"What subject?"
+
+"Oh, anything to do with the Conservatoire, or your profession."
+
+"I haven't any profession at present. I'll never go back to the
+violin."
+
+"You mean you couldn't make up for the time you'll lose?"
+
+Gerhardt settled his back against a rock and got out his pipe.
+"That would be difficult; but other things would be harder. I've
+lost much more than time."
+
+"Couldn't you have got exemption, one way or another?"
+
+"I might have. My friends wanted to take it up and make a test
+case of me. But I couldn't stand for it. I didn't feel I was a
+good enough violinist to admit that I wasn't a man. I often wish
+I had been in Paris that summer when the war broke out; then I
+would have gone into the French army on the first impulse, with
+the other students, and it would have been better."
+
+David paused and sat puffing at his pipe. Just then a soft
+movement stirred the brakes on the hillside. A little barefoot
+girl stood there, looking about. She had heard voices, but at
+first did not see the uniforms that blended with the yellow and
+brown of the wood. Then she saw the sun shining on two heads; one
+square, and amber in colour,--the other reddish bronze, long and
+narrow. She took their friendliness for granted and came down the
+hill, stopping now and again to pick up shiny horse chestnuts and
+pop them into a sack she was dragging. David called to her and
+asked her whether the nuts were good to eat.
+
+"Oh, non!" she exclaimed, her face expressing the liveliest
+terror, "pour les cochons!" These inexperienced Americans might
+eat almost anything. The boys laughed and gave her some pennies,
+"pour les cochons aussi." She stole about the edge of the wood,
+stirring among the leaves for nuts, and watching the two
+soldiers.
+
+Gerhardt knocked out his pipe and began to fill it again. "I went
+home to see my mother in May, of 1914. I wasn't here when the war
+broke out. The Conservatoire closed at once, so I arranged a
+concert tour in the States that winter, and did very well. That
+was before all the little Russians went over, and the field
+wasn't so crowded. I had a second season, and that went well. But
+I was getting more nervous all the time; I was only half there."
+He smoked thoughtfully, sitting with folded arms, as if he were
+going over a succession of events or states of feeling. "When my
+number was drawn, I reported to see what I could do about getting
+out; I took a look at the other fellows who were trying to
+squirm, and chucked it. I've never been sorry. Not long
+afterward, my violin was smashed, and my career seemed to go
+along with it."
+
+Claude asked him what he meant.
+
+"While I was at Camp Dix, I had to play at one of the
+entertainments. My violin, a Stradivarius, was in a vault in New
+York. I didn't need it for that concert, any more than I need it
+at this minute; yet I went to town and brought it out. I was
+taking it up from the station in a military car, and a drunken
+taxi driver ran into us. I wasn't hurt, but the violin, lying
+across my knees, was smashed into a thousand pieces. I didn't
+know what it meant then; but since, I've seen so many beautiful
+old things smashed... I've become a fatalist."
+
+Claude watched his brooding head against the grey flint rock.
+
+"You ought to have kept out of the whole thing. Any army man
+would say so."
+
+David's head went back against the boulder, and he threw one of
+the, chestnuts lightly into the air. "Oh, one violinist more or
+less doesn't matter! But who is ever going back to anything?
+That's what I want to know!"
+
+Claude felt guilty; as if David must have guessed what apostasy
+had been going on in his own mind this afternoon. "You don't
+believe we are going to get out of this war what we went in for,
+do you?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Absolutely not," the other replied with cool indifference.
+
+"Then I certainly don't see what you're here for!"
+
+"Because in 1917 I was twenty-four years old, and able to bear
+arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what
+for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the
+world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I
+was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that
+nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes,
+though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, but
+something unforeseen." He paused and shut his eyes. "You remember
+in the old mythology tales how, when the sons of the gods were
+born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele
+I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the
+young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the
+world... something Olympian. I'd like to know. I think I shall
+know. Since I've been over here this time, I've come to believe
+in immortality. Do you?"
+
+Claude was confused by this quiet question. "I hardly know. I've
+never been able to make up my mind."
+
+"Oh, don't bother about it! If it comes to you, it comes. You
+don't have to go after it. I arrived at it in quite the same way
+I used to get things in art,--knowing them and living on them
+before I understood them. Such ideas used to seem childish to
+me." Gerhardt sprang up. "Now, have I told you what you want to
+know about my case?" He looked down at Claude with a curious
+glimmer of amusement and affection. "I'm going to stretch my
+legs. It's four o'clock."
+
+He disappeared among the red pine stems, where the sunlight made
+a rose-colored lake, as it used to do in the summer... as it
+would do in all the years to come, when they were not there to
+see it, Claude was thinking. He pulled his hat over his eyes and
+went to sleep.
+
+The little girl on the edge of the beech wood left her sack and
+stole quietly down the hill. Sitting in the heather and drawing
+her feet up under her, she stayed still for a long time, and
+regarded with curiosity the relaxed, deep breathing body of the
+American soldier.
+
+The next day was Claude's twenty-fifth birthday, and in honour of
+that event Papa Joubert produced a bottle of old Burgundy from
+his cellar, one of a few dozens he had laid in for great
+occasions when he was a young man.
+
+During that week of idleness at Madame Joubert's, Claude often
+thought that the period of happy "youth," about which his old
+friend Mrs. Erlich used to talk, and which he had never
+experienced, was being made up to him now. He was having his
+youth in France. He knew that nothing like this would ever come
+again; the fields and woods would never again be laced over with
+this hazy enchantment. As he came up the village street in the
+purple evening, the smell of wood-smoke from the chimneys went to
+his head like a narcotic, opened the pores of his skin, and
+sometimes made the tears come to his eyes. Life had after all
+turned out well for him, and everything had a noble significance.
+The nervous tension in which he had lived for years now seemed
+incredible to him... absurd and childish, when he thought of
+it at all. He did not torture himself with recollections. He was
+beginning over again.
+
+One night he dreamed that he was at home; out in the ploughed
+fields, where he could see nothing but the furrowed brown earth,
+stretching from horizon to horizon. Up and down it moved a boy,
+with a plough and two horses. At first he thought it was his
+brother Ralph; but on coming nearer, he saw it was himself,--and
+he was full of fear for this boy. Poor Claude, he would never,
+never get away; he was going to miss everything! While he was
+struggling to speak to Claude, and warn him, he awoke.
+
+In the years when he went to school in Lincoln, he was always
+hunting for some one whom he could admire without reservations;
+some one he could envy, emulate, wish to be. Now he believed that
+even then he must have had some faint image of a man like
+Gerhardt in his mind. It was only in war times that their paths
+would have been likely to cross; or that they would have had
+anything to do together... any of the common interests that
+make men friends.
+
+ XIV
+
+Gerhardt and Claude Wheeler alighted from a taxi before the open
+gates of a square-roofed, solid-looking house, where all the
+shutters on the front were closed, and the tops of many trees
+showed above the garden wall. They crossed a paved court and
+rang at the door. An old valet admitted the young men, and took
+them through a wide hall to the salon, which opened on the
+garden. Madame and Mademoiselle would be down very soon. David
+went to one of the long windows and looked out. "They have kept
+it up, in spite of everything. It was always lovely here."
+
+The garden was spacious,--like a little park. On one side was a
+tennis court, on the other a fountain, with a pool and
+water-lilies. The north wall was hidden by ancient yews; on the
+south two rows of plane trees, cut square, made a long arbour. At
+the back of the garden there were fine old lindens. The gravel
+walks wound about beds of gorgeous autumn flowers; in the rose
+garden, small white roses were still blooming, though the leaves
+were already red.
+
+Two ladies entered the drawing-room. The mother was short, plump,
+and rosy, with strong, rather masculine features and yellowish
+white hair. The tears flashed into her eyes as David bent to kiss
+her hand, and she embraced him and touched both his cheeks with
+her lips.
+
+"Et vous, vous aussi!" she murmured, touching the coat of his
+uniform with her fingers. There was but a moment of softness. She
+gathered herself up like an old general, Claude thought, as he
+stood watching the group from the window, drew her daughter
+forward, and asked David whether he recognized the little girl
+with whom he used to play. Mademoiselle Claire was not at all
+like her mother; slender, dark, dressed in a white costume de
+tennis and an apple green hat with black ribbons, she looked very
+modern and casual and unconcerned. She was already telling David
+she was glad he had arrived early, as now they would be able to
+have a game of tennis before tea. Maman would bring her knitting
+to the garden and watch them. This last suggestion relieved
+Claude's apprehension that he might be left alone with his
+hostess. When David called him and presented him to the ladies,
+Mlle. Claire gave him a quick handshake, and said she would be
+very glad to try him out on the court as soon as she had beaten
+David. They would find tennis shoes in their room,--a collection
+of shoes, for the feet of all nations; her brother's, some that
+his Russian friend had forgotten when he hurried off to be
+mobilized, and a pair lately left by an English officer who was
+quartered on them. She and her mother would wait in the garden.
+She rang for the old valet.
+
+The Americans found themselves in a large room upstairs, where
+two modern iron beds stood out conspicuous among heavy mahogany
+bureaus and desks and dressing-tables, stuffed chairs and velvet
+carpets and dull red brocade window hangings. David went at once
+into the little dressing-room and began to array himself for the
+tennis court. Two suits of flannels and a row of soft shirts hung
+there on the wall.
+
+"Aren't you going to change?" he asked, noticing that Claude
+stood stiff and unbending by the window, looking down into the
+garden. "Why should I?" said Claude scornfully. "I don't play
+tennis. I never had a racket in my hand."
+
+"Too bad. She used to play very well, though she was only a
+youngster then." Gerhardt was regarding his legs in trousers two
+inches too short for him. "How everything has changed, and yet
+how everything is still the same! It's like coming back to places
+in dreams."
+
+"They don't give you much time to dream, I should say!" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"Fortunately!"
+
+"Explain to the girl that I don't play, will you? I'll be down
+later."
+
+"As you like."
+
+Claude stood in the window, watching Gerhardt's bare head and
+Mlle. Claire's green hat and long brown arm go bounding about
+over the court.
+
+When Gerhardt came to change before tea, he found his fellow
+officer standing before his bag, which was open, but not
+unpacked.
+
+"What's the matter? Feeling shellshock again?"
+
+"Not exactly." Claude bit his lip. "The fact is, Dave, I don't
+feel just comfortable here. Oh, the people are all right. But
+I'm out of place. I'm going to pull out and get a billet
+somewhere else, and let you visit your friends in peace. Why
+should I be here? These people don't keep a hotel."
+
+"They very nearly do, from what they've been telling me. They've
+had a string of Scotch and English quartered on them. They like
+it, too,-or have the good manners to pretend they do. Of course,
+you'll do as you like, but you'll hurt their feelings and put me
+in an awkward position. To be frank, I don't see how you can go
+away without being distinctly rude."
+
+Claude stood looking down at the contents of his bag in an
+irresolute attitude. Catching a glimpse of his face in one of the
+big mirrors, Gerhardt saw that he looked perplexed and miserable.
+His flash of temper died, and he put his hand lightly on his
+friend's shoulder.
+
+"Come on, Claude! This is too absurd. You don't even have to
+dress, thanks to your uniform,--and you don't have to talk, since
+you're not supposed to know the language. I thought you'd like
+coming here. These people have had an awfully rough time; can't
+you admire their pluck?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do! It's awkward for me, though." Claude pulled off
+his coat and began to brush his hair vigorously. "I guess I've
+always been more afraid of the French than of the Germans. It
+takes courage to stay, you understand. I want to run."
+
+"But why? What makes you want to?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! Something in the house, in the atmosphere."
+
+"Something disagreeable?"
+
+"No. Something agreeable."
+
+David laughed. "Oh, you'll get over that!"
+
+They had tea in the garden, English fashion--English tea, too,
+Mlle. Claire informed them, left by the English officers.
+
+At dinner a third member of the family was introduced, a little
+boy with a cropped head and big black eyes. He sat on Claude's
+left, quiet and shy in his velvet jacket, though he followed the
+conversation eagerly, especially when it touched upon his brother
+Rene, killed at Verdun in the second winter of the war. The
+mother and sister talked about him as if he were living, about
+his letters and his plans, and his friends at the Conservatoire
+and in the Army. Mlle. Claire told Gerhardt news of all the girl
+students he had known in Paris: how this one was singing for the
+soldiers; another, when she was nursing in a hospital which was
+bombed in an air raid, had carried twenty wounded men out of the
+burning building, one after another, on her back, like sacks of
+flour. Alice, the dancer, had gone into the English Red Cross and
+learned English. Odette had married a New Zealander, an officer
+who was said to be a cannibal; it was well known that his tribe
+had eaten two Auvergnat missionaries. There was a great deal more
+that Claude could not understand, but he got enough to see that
+for these women the war was France, the war was life, and
+everything that went into it. To be alive, to be conscious and
+have one's faculties, was to be in the war.
+
+After dinner, when they went into the salon, Madame Fleury asked
+David whether he would like to see Rene's violin again, and
+nodded to the little boy. He slipped away and returned carrying
+the case, which he placed on the table. He opened it carefully
+and took off the velvet cloth, as if this was his peculiar
+office, then handed the instrument to Gerhardt.
+
+David turned it over under the candles, telling Madame Fleury
+that he would have known it anywhere, Rene's wonderful Amati,
+almost too exquisite in tone for the concert hall, like a woman
+who is too beautiful for the stage. The family stood round and
+listened to his praise with evident satisfaction. Madame Fleury
+told him that Lucien was très sérieux with his music, that his
+master was well pleased with him, and when his hand was a little
+larger he would be allowed to play upon Rene's violin. Claude
+watched the little boy as he stood looking at the instrument in
+David's hands; in each of his big black eyes a candle flame was
+reflected, as if some steady fire were actually burning there.
+
+"What is it, Lucien?" his mother asked.
+
+"If Monsieur David would be so good as to play before I must go
+to bed--" he murmured entreatingly.
+
+"But, Lucien, I am a soldier now. I have not worked at all for
+two years. The Amati would think it had fallen into the hands of
+a Boche."
+
+Lucien smiled. "Oh, no! It is too intelligent for that. A little,
+please," and he sat down on a footstool before the sofa in
+confident anticipation.
+
+Mlle. Claire went to the piano. David frowned and began to tune
+the violin. Madame Fleury called the old servant and told him to
+light the sticks that lay in the fireplace. She took the
+arm-chair at the right of the hearth and motioned Claude to a
+seat on the left. The little boy kept his stool at the other end
+of the room. Mlle. Claire began the orchestral introduction to
+the Saint-Saens concerto.
+
+"Oh, not that!" David lifted his chin and looked at her in
+perplexity.
+
+She made no reply, but played on, her shoulders bent forward.
+Lucien drew his knees up under his chin and shivered. When the
+time came, the violin made its entrance. David had put it back
+under his chin mechanically, and the instrument broke into that
+suppressed, bitter melody.
+
+They played for a long while. At last David stopped and wiped his
+forehead. "I'm afraid I can't do anything with the third
+movement, really."
+
+"Nor can I. But that was the last thing Rene played on it, the
+night before he went away, after his last leave." She began
+again, and David followed. Madame Fleury sat with half-closed
+eyes, looking into the fire. Claude, his lips compressed, his
+hands on his knees, was watching his friend's back. The music was
+a part of his own confused emotions. He was torn between generous
+admiration, and bitter, bitter envy. What would it mean to be
+able to do anything as well as that, to have a hand capable of
+delicacy and precision and power? If he had been taught to do
+anything at all, he would not be sitting here tonight a wooden
+thing amongst living people. He felt that a man might have been
+made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it;
+tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied. If one were born into this
+world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and
+upset things, break and destroy, all one's life.
+
+Gerhardt wrapped the violin up in its cloth. The little boy
+thanked him and carried it away. Madame Fleury and her daughter
+wished their guests goodnight.
+
+David said he was warm, and suggested going into the garden to
+smoke before they went to bed. He opened one of the long windows
+and they stepped out on the terrace. Dry leaves were rustling
+down on the walks; the yew trees made a solid wall, blacker than
+the darkness. The fountain must have caught the starlight; it was
+the only shining thing,--a little clear column of twinkling
+silver. The boys strolled in silence to the end of the walk.
+
+"I guess you'll go back to your profession, all right," Claude
+remarked, in the unnatural tone in which people sometimes speak
+of things they know nothing about.
+
+"Not I. Of course, I had to play for them. Music has always been
+like a religion in this house. Listen," he put up his hand; far
+away the regular pulsation of the big guns sounded through the
+still night. "That's all that matters now. It has killed
+everything else."
+
+"I don't believe it." Claude stopped for a moment by the edge of
+the fountain, trying to collect his thoughts. "I don't believe it
+has killed anything. It has only scattered things." He glanced
+about hurriedly at the sleeping house, the sleeping garden, the
+clear, starry sky not very far overhead. "It's men like you that
+get the worst of it," he broke out. "But as for me, I never knew
+there was anything worth living for, till this war came on.
+Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition."
+
+"You'll admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the
+young," said David drily.
+
+"Maybe so; all the same..."
+
+Claude pursued the argument to himself long after they were in
+their luxurious beds and David was asleep. No battlefield or
+shattered country he had seen was as ugly as this world would be
+if men like his brother Bayliss controlled it altogether. Until
+the war broke out, he had supposed they did control it; his
+boyhood had been clouded and enervated by that belief. The
+Prussians had believed it, too, apparently. But the event had
+shown that there were a great many people left who cared about
+something else.
+
+The intervals of the distant artillery fire grew shorter, as if
+the big guns were tuning up, choking to get something out. Claude
+sat up in his bed and listened. The sound of the guns had from
+the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of
+confidence and safety; tonight he knew why. What they said was,
+that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had
+made to keep their dreams. He knew the future of the world was
+safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a
+strait-jacket,--cunning and prudence would never have it to
+themselves. Why, that little boy downstairs, with the candlelight
+in his eyes, when it came to the last cry, as they said, could
+"carry on" for ever! Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful
+and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As
+long as that was true, and now he knew it was true--he had come
+all this way to find out--he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did
+he envy David. He would give his own adventure for no man's. On
+the edge of sleep it seemed to glimmer, like the clear column of
+the fountain, like the new moon,--alluring, half-averted, the
+bright face of danger.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+When Claude and David rejoined their Battalion on the 20th of
+September, the end of the war looked as far away as ever. The
+collapse of Bulgaria was unknown to the American army, and their
+acquaintance with European affairs was so slight that this would
+have meant very little to them had they heard of it. The German
+army still held the north and east of France, and no one could
+say how much vitality was left in that sprawling body.
+
+The Battalion entrained at Arras. Lieutenant Colonel Scott had
+orders to proceed to the railhead, and then advance on foot into
+the Argonne.
+
+The cars were crowded, and the railway journey was long and
+fatiguing. They detrained at night, in the rain, at what the men
+said seemed to be the jumping off place. There was no town, and
+the railway station had been bombed the day before, by an air
+fleet out to explode artillery ammunition. A mound of brick, and
+holes full of water told where it had been. The Colonel sent
+Claude out with a patrol to find some place for the men to sleep.
+The patrol came upon a field of straw stacks, and at the end of it
+found a black farmhouse.
+
+Claude went up and hammered on the door. Silence. He kept
+hammering and calling, "The Americans are here!" A shutter
+opened. The farmer stuck his head out and demanded gruffly what
+was wanted; "What now?"
+
+Claude explained in his best French that an American battalion
+had just come in; might they sleep in his field if they did not
+destroy his stacks?
+
+"Sure," replied the farmer, and shut the window.
+
+That one word, coming out of the dark in such an unpromising
+place, had a cheering effect upon the patrol, and upon the men,
+when it was repeated to them. "Sure, eh?" They kept laughing over
+it as they beat about the field and dug into the straw. Those who
+couldn't burrow into a stack lay down in the muddy stubble. They
+were asleep before they could feel sorry for themselves.
+
+The farmer came out to offer his stable to the officers, and to
+beg them not on any account to make a light. They had never been
+bothered here by air raids until yesterday, and it must be
+because the Americans were coming and were sending in ammunition.
+
+Gerhardt, who was called to talk to him, told the farmer the
+Colonel must study his map, and for that the man took them down
+into the cellar, where the children were asleep. Before he lay
+down on the straw bed his orderly had made for him, the Colonel
+kept telling names and kilometers off on his fingers. For
+officers like Colonel Scott the names of places constituted one
+of the real hardships of the war. His mind worked slowly, but it
+was always on his job, and he could go without sleep for more
+hours together than any of his officers. Tonight he had scarcely
+lain down, when a sentinel brought in a runner with a message.
+The Colonel had to go into the cellar again to read it. He was to
+meet Colonel Harvey at Prince Joachim farm, as early as possible
+tomorrow morning. The runner would act as guide.
+
+The Colonel sat with his eye on his watch, and interrogated the
+messenger about the road and the time it would take to get over
+the ground. "What's Fritz's temper up here, generally speaking?"
+
+"That's as it happens, sir. Sometimes we nab a night patrol of a
+dozen or fifteen and send them to the rear under a one-man guard.
+Then, again, a little bunch of Heinies will fight like the devil.
+They say it depends on what part of Germany they come from; the
+Bavarians and Saxons are the bravest."
+
+Colonel Scott waited for an hour, and then went about, shaking
+his sleeping officers.
+
+"Yes, sir." Captain Maxey sprang to his feet as if he had been
+caught in a disgraceful act. He called his sergeants, and they
+began to beat the men up out of the strawstacks and puddles. In
+half an hour they were on the road.
+
+This was the Battalion's first march over really bad roads, where
+walking was a question of pulling and balancing. They were soon
+warm, at any rate; it kept them sweating. The weight of their
+equipment was continually thrown in the wrong place. Their wet
+clothing dragged them back, their packs got twisted and cut into
+their shoulders. Claude and Hicks began wondering to each other
+what it must have been like in the real mud, up about Ypres and
+Passchendaele, two years ago. Hicks had been training at Arras
+last week, where a lot of Tommies were "resting" in the same way,
+and he had tales to tell.
+
+The Battalion got to Joachim farm at nine o'clock. Colonel Harvey
+had not yet come up, but old Julius Caesar was there with his
+engineers, and he had a hot breakfast ready for them. At six
+o'clock in the evening they took the road again, marching until
+daybreak, with short rests. During the night they captured two
+Hun patrols, a bunch of thirty men. At the halt for breakfast,
+the prisoners wanted to make themselves useful, but the cook said
+they were so filthy the smell of them would make a stew go bad.
+They were herded off by themselves, a good distance from the grub
+line.
+
+It was Gerhardt, of course, who had to go over and question them.
+Claude felt sorry for the prisoners; they were so willing to tell
+all they knew, and so anxious to make themselves agreeable; began
+talking about their relatives in America, and said brightly that
+they themselves were going over at once, after the war--seemed to
+have no doubt that everybody would be glad to see them!
+
+They begged Gerhardt to be allowed to do something. Couldn't they
+carry the officers' equipment on the march? No, they were too
+buggy; they might relieve the sanitary squad. Oh, that they would
+gladly do, Herr Offizier!
+
+The plan was to get to Rupprecht trench and take it before
+nightfall. It was easy taking--empty of everything but vermin and
+human discards; a dozen crippled and sick, left for the enemy to
+dispose of, and several half-witted youths who ought to have been
+locked up in some institution. Fritz had known what it meant when
+his patrols did not come back. He had evacuated, leaving behind
+his hopelessly diseased, and as much filth as possible. The
+dugouts were fairly dry, but so crawling with vermin that the
+Americans preferred to sleep in the mud, in the open.
+
+After supper the men fell on their packs and began to lighten
+them, throwing away all that was not necessary, and much that
+was. Many of them abandoned the new overcoats that had been
+served out at the railhead; others cut off the skirts and made
+the coats into ragged jackets. Captain Maxey was horrified at
+these depredations, but the Colonel advised him to shut his eyes.
+"They've got hard going before them; let them travel light. If
+they'd rather stand the cold, they've got a right to choose."
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+The Battalion had twenty-four hours' rest at Rupprecht trench,
+and then pushed on for four days and nights, stealing trenches,
+capturing patrols, with only a few hours' sleep,--snatched by the
+roadside while their food was being prepared. They pushed hard
+after a retiring foe, and almost outran themselves. They did
+outrun their provisions; on the fourth night, when they fell
+upon a farm that had been a German Headquarters, the supplies
+that were to meet them there had not come up, and they went to
+bed supperless.
+
+This farmhouse, for some reason called by the prisoners Frau
+Hulda farm, was a nest of telephone wires; hundreds of them ran
+out through the walls, in all directions. The Colonel cut those
+he could find, and then put a guard over the old peasant who had
+been left in charge of the house, suspecting that he was in the
+pay of the enemy.
+
+At last Colonel Scott got into the Headquarters bed, large and
+lumpy,--the first one he had seen since he left Arras. He had not
+been asleep more than two hours, when a runner arrived with
+orders from the Regimental Colonel. Claude was in a bed in the
+loft, between Gerhardt and Bruger. He felt somebody shaking him,
+but resolved that he wouldn't be disturbed and went on placidly
+sleeping. Then somebody pulled his hair,--so hard that he sat up.
+Captain Maxey was standing over the bed.
+
+"Come along, boys. Orders from Regimental Headquarters. The
+Battalion is to split here. Our Company is to go on four
+kilometers tonight, and take the town of Beaufort."
+
+Claude rose. "The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey,
+and they had no supper."
+
+"That can't be helped. Tell them we are to be in Beaufort for
+breakfast."
+
+Claude and Gerhardt went out to the barn and roused Hicks and his
+pal, Dell Able. The men were asleep in dry straw, for the first
+time in ten days. They were completely worn out, lost to time and
+place. Many of them were already four thousand miles away,
+scattered among little towns and farms on the prairie. They were
+a miserable looking lot as they got together, stumbling about in
+the dark.
+
+After the Colonel had gone over the map with Captain Maxey, he
+came out and saw the Company assembled. He wasn't going with
+them, he told them, but he expected them to give a good account
+of themselves. Once in Beaufort, they would have a week's rest;
+sleep under cover, and live among people for awhile.
+
+The men took the road, some with their eyes shut, trying to make
+believe they were still asleep, trying to have their agreeable
+dreams over again, as they marched. They did not really waken up
+until the advance challenged a Hun patrol, and sent it back to
+the Colonel under a one-man guard. When they had advanced two
+kilometers, they found the bridge blown up. Claude and Hicks went
+in one direction to look for a ford, Bruger and Dell Able in the
+other, and the men lay down by the roadside and slept heavily.
+Just at dawn they reached the outskirts of the village, silent
+and still.
+
+Captain Maxey had no information as to how many Germans might be
+left in the town. They had occupied it ever since the beginning
+of the war, and had used it as a rest camp. There had never been
+any fighting there.
+
+At the first house on the road, the Captain stopped and pounded.
+No answer.
+
+"We are Americans, and must see the people of the house. If you
+don't open, we must break the door."
+
+A woman's voice called; "There is nobody here. Go away, please,
+and take your men away. I am sick."
+
+The Captain called Gerhardt, who began to explain and reassure
+through the door. It opened a little way, and an old woman in a
+nightcap peeped out. An old man hovered behind her. She gazed in
+astonishment at the officers, not understanding. These were the
+first soldiers of the Allies she had ever seen. She had heard the
+Germans talk about Americans, but thought it was one of their
+lies, she said. Once convinced, she let the officers come in and
+replied to their questions.
+
+No, there were no Boches left in her house. They had got orders
+to leave day before yesterday, and had blown up the bridge. They
+were concentrating somewhere to the east. She didn't know how
+many were still in the village, nor where they were, but she
+could tell the Captain where they had been. Triumphantly she
+brought out a map of the town--lost, she said with a meaning
+smile, by a German officer--on which the billets were marked.
+
+With this to guide them, Captain Maxey and his men went on up the
+street. They took eight prisoners in one cellar, seventeen in
+another. When the villagers saw the prisoners bunched together in
+the square, they came out of their houses and gave information.
+This cleaning up, Bert Fuller remarked, was like taking fish
+from the Platte River when the water was low, simply pailing them
+out! There was no sport in it.
+
+At nine o'clock the officers were standing together in the square
+before the church, checking off on the map the houses that had
+been searched. The men were drinking coffee, and eating fresh
+bread from a baker's shop. The square was full of people who had
+come out to see for themselves. Some believed that deliverance
+had come, and others shook their heads and held back, suspecting
+another trick. A crowd of children were running about, making
+friends with the soldiers. One little girl with yellow curls and
+a clean white dress had attached herself to Hicks, and was eating
+chocolate out of his pocket. Gerhardt was bargaining with the
+baker for another baking of bread. The sun was shining, for a
+change,--everything was looking cheerful. This village seemed to
+be swarming with girls; some of them were pretty, and all were
+friendly. The men who had looked so haggard and forlorn when dawn
+overtook them at the edge of the town, began squaring their
+shoulders and throwing out their chests. They were dirty and
+mud-plastered, but as Claude remarked to the Captain, they
+actually looked like fresh men.
+
+Suddenly a shot rang out above the chatter, and an old woman in a
+white cap screamed and tumbled over on the pavement,--rolled
+about, kicking indecorously with both hands and feet. A second
+crack,--the little girl who stood beside Hicks, eating chocolate,
+threw out her hands, ran a few steps, and fell, blood and brains
+oozing out in her yellow hair. The people began screaming and
+running. The Americans looked this way and that; ready to dash,
+but not knowing where to go. Another shot, and Captain Maxey fell
+on one knee, blushed furiously and sprang up, only to fall
+again,--ashy white, with the leg of his trousers going red.
+
+"There it is, to the left!" Hicks shouted, pointing. They saw
+now. From a closed house, some distance down a street off the
+square, smoke was coming. It hung before one of the upstairs
+windows. The Captain's orderly dragged him into a wineshop.
+Claude and David, followed by the men, ran down the street and
+broke in the door. The two officers went through the rooms on the
+first floor, while Hicks and his lot made straight for an
+enclosed stairway at the back of the house. As they reached the
+foot of the stairs, they were met by a volley of rifle shots, and
+two of the men tumbled over. Four Germans were stationed at the
+head of the steps.
+
+The Americans scarcely knew whether their bullets or their
+bayonets got to the Huns first; they were not conscious of going
+up, till they were there. When Claude and David reached the
+landing, the squad were wiping their bayonets, and four grey
+bodies were piled in the corner.
+
+Bert Fuller and Dell Able ran down the narrow hallway and threw
+open the door into the room on the street. Two shots, and Dell
+came back with his jaw shattered and the blood spouting from the
+left side of his neck. Gerhardt caught him, and tried to close
+the artery with his fingers.
+
+"How many are in there, Bert?" Claude called.
+
+"I couldn't see. Look out, sir! You can't get through that door
+more than two at a time!"
+
+The door still stood open, at the end of the corridor. Claude
+went down the steps until he could sight along the floor of the
+passage, into the front room. The shutters were closed in there,
+and the sunlight came through the slats. In the middle of the
+floor, between the door and the windows, stood a tall chest of
+drawers, with a mirror attached to the top. In the narrow space
+between the bottom of this piece of furniture and the floor, he
+could see a pair of boots. It was possible there was but one man
+in the room, shooting from behind his movable fort,--though there
+might be others hidden in the corners.
+
+"There's only one fellow in there, I guess. He's shooting from
+behind a big dresser in the middle of the room. Come on, one of
+you, we'll have to go in and get him."
+
+Willy Katz, the Austrian boy from the Omaha packing house,
+stepped up and stood beside him.
+
+"Now, Willy, we'll both go in at once; you jump to the right, and
+I to the left,--and one of us will jab him. He can't shoot both
+ways at once. Are you ready? All right--Now!"
+
+Claude thought he was taking the more dangerous position himself,
+but the German probably reasoned that the important man would be
+on the right. As the two Americans dashed through the door, he
+fired. Claude caught him in the back with his bayonet, under the
+shoulder blade, but Willy Katz had got the bullet in his brain,
+through one of his blue eyes. He fell, and never stirred. The
+German officer fired his revolver again as he went down, shouting
+in English, English with no foreign accent,
+
+"You swine, go back to Chicago!" Then he began choking with
+blood.
+
+Sergeant Hicks ran in and shot the dying man through the temples.
+Nobody stopped him.
+
+The officer was a tall man, covered with medals and orders; must
+have been very handsome. His linen and his hands were as white as
+if he were going to a ball. On the dresser were the files and
+paste and buffers with which he had kept his nails so pink and
+smooth. A ring with a ruby, beautifully cut, was on his little
+finger. Bert Fuller screwed it off and offered it to Claude. He
+shook his head. That English sentence had unnerved him. Bert held
+the ring out to Hicks, but the Sergeant threw down his revolver
+and broke out:
+
+"Think I'd touch anything of his? That beautiful little girl, and
+my buddy--He's worse than dead, Dell is, worse!" He turned his
+back on his comrades so that they wouldn't see him cry.
+
+"Can I keep it myself, sir?" Bert asked.
+
+Claude nodded. David had come in, and was opening the shutters.
+This officer, Claude was thinking, was a very different sort of
+being from the poor prisoners they had been scooping up like
+tadpoles from the cellars. One of the men picked up a gorgeous
+silk dressing gown from the bed, another pointed to a
+dressing-case full of hammered silver. Gerhardt said it was
+Russian silver; this man must have come from the Eastern front.
+Bert Fuller and Nifty Jones were going through the officer's
+pockets. Claude watched them, and thought they did about right.
+They didn't touch his medals; but his gold cigarette case, and
+the platinum watch still ticking on his wrist,--he wouldn't have
+further need for them. Around his neck, hung by a delicate chain,
+was a miniature case, and in it was a painting,--not, as Bert
+romantically hoped when he opened it, of a beautiful woman, but
+of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes.
+
+Claude studied it, wondering. "It looks like a poet, or
+something. Probably a kid brother, killed at the beginning of the
+war."
+
+Gerhardt took it and glanced at it with a disdainful expression.
+"Probably. There, let him keep it, Bert." He touched Claude on
+the shoulder to call his attention to the inlay work on the
+handle of the officer's revolver.
+
+Claude noticed that David looked at him as if he were very much
+pleased with him,--looked, indeed, as if something pleasant had
+happened in this room; where, God knew, nothing had; where, when
+they turned round, a swarm of black flies was quivering with
+greed and delight over the smears Willy Katz' body had left on
+the floor. Claude had often observed that when David had an
+interesting idea, or a strong twinge of recollection, it made
+him, for the moment, rather heartless. Just now he felt that
+Gerhardt's flash of high spirits was in some way connected with
+him. Was it because he had gone in with Willy? Had David doubted
+his nerve?
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+When the survivors of Company B are old men, and are telling over
+their good days, they will say to each other, "Oh, that week we
+spent at Beaufort!" They will close their eyes and see a little
+village on a low ridge, lost in the forest, overgrown with oak
+and chestnut and black walnut... buried in autumn colour, the
+streets drifted deep in autumn leaves, great branches interlacing
+over the roofs of the houses, wells of cool water that tastes of
+moss and tree roots. Up and down those streets they will see
+figures passing; themselves, young and brown and clean-limbed;
+and comrades, long dead, but still alive in that far-away
+village. How they will wish they could tramp again, nights on
+days in the mud and rain, to drag sore feet into their old
+billets at Beaufort! To sink into those wide feather beds and
+sleep the round of the clock while the old women washed and dried
+their clothes for them; to eat rabbit stew and pommes frites in
+the garden,--rabbit stew made with red wine and chestnuts. Oh,
+the days that are no more!
+
+As soon as Captain Maxey and the wounded men had been started on
+their long journey to the rear, carried by the prisoners, the
+whole company turned in and slept for twelve hours--all but
+Sergeant Hicks, who sat in the house off the square, beside the
+body of his chum.
+
+The next day the Americans came to life as if they were new men,
+just created in a new world. And the people of the town came to
+life... excitement, change, something to look forward to at
+last! A new flag, le drapeau étoilé, floated along with the
+tricolour in the square. At sunset the soldiers stood in
+formation behind it and sang "The Star Spangled Banner" with
+uncovered heads. The old people watched them from the doorways.
+The Americans were the first to bring "Madelon" to Beaufort. The
+fact that the village had never heard this song, that the
+children stood round begging for it, "Chantez-vous la Madelon!"
+made the soldiers realize how far and how long out of the world
+these villagers had been. The German occupation was like a
+deafness which nothing pierced but their own arrogant martial
+airs.
+
+Before Claude was out of bed after his first long sleep, a runner
+arrived from Colonel Scott, notifying him that he was in charge
+of the Company until further orders. The German prisoners had
+buried their own dead and dug graves for the Americans before
+they were sent off to the rear. Claude and David were billeted at
+the edge of the town, with the woman who had given Captain Maxey
+his first information, when they marched in yesterday morning.
+Their hostess told them, at their mid-day breakfast, that the old
+dame who was shot in the square, and the little girl, were to be
+buried this afternoon. Claude decided that the Americans might as
+well have their funeral at the same time. He thought he would ask
+the priest to say a prayer at the graves, and he and David set
+off through the brilliant, rustling autumn sunshine to find the
+Cure's house. It was next the church, with a high-walled garden
+behind it. Over the bell-pull in the outer wall was a card on
+which was written, "Tirez fort."
+
+The priest himself came out to them, an old man who seemed weak
+like his doorbell. He stood in his black cap, holding his hands
+against his breast to keep them from shaking, and looked very old
+indeed,--broken, hopeless, as if he were sick of this world and
+done with it. Nowhere in France had Claude seen a face so sad as
+his. Yes, he would say a prayer. It was better to have Christian
+burial, and they were far from home, poor fellows! David asked
+him whether the German rule had been very oppressive, but the old
+man did not answer clearly, and his hands began to shake so
+uncontrollably over his cassock that they went away to spare him
+embarrassment.
+
+"He seems a little gone in the head, don't you think?" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"I suppose the war has used him up. How can he celebrate mass
+when his hands quiver so?" As they crossed the church steps,
+David touched Claude's arm and pointed into the square. "Look,
+every doughboy has a girl already! Some of them have trotted out
+fatigue caps! I supposed they'd thrown them all away!"
+
+Those who had no caps stood with their helmets under their arms,
+in attitudes of exaggerated gallantry, talking to the women,--who
+seemed all to have errands abroad. Some of them let the boys
+carry their baskets. One soldier was giving a delighted little
+girl a ride on his back.
+
+After the funeral every man in the Company found some sympathetic
+woman to talk to about his fallen comrades. All the garden
+flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put
+on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the
+bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz,
+for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.
+
+The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the
+"Pas Seul" and the "Fausse Trot." They had found an old violin in
+the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it. They danced
+every evening. Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he
+lectured his men at parade. But he realized that he might as well
+scold at the sparrows. Here was a village with several hundred
+women, and only the grandmothers had husbands. All the men were
+in the army; hadn't even been home on leave since the Germans
+first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years
+with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must
+constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable--and
+prolonged. The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam
+in the garden.
+
+"Did you know, sir," said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook
+Claude in the street after parade, "that these lovely girls had
+to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty
+pigs to eat? Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German
+sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like
+convicts! It's sure up to us to give them a good time now."
+
+One couldn't walk out of an evening without meeting loitering
+couples in the dusky streets and lanes. The boys had lost all
+their bashfulness about trying to speak French. They declared
+they could get along in France with three verbs, and all,
+happily, in the first conjugation: manger, aimer, payer,--quite
+enough! They called Beaufort "our town," and they were called
+"our Americans." They were going to come back after the war, and
+marry the girls, and put in waterworks!
+
+"Chez-moi, sir!" Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a
+bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his
+billet. "Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!"
+
+"You know, Wheeler," David remarked one morning as they were
+shaving, "I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he
+knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms."
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Aren't you going to put a stop to them?"
+
+"Not I!" Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly.
+"If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I'll
+interfere. Not otherwise. I've thought the matter over."
+
+"Oh, the girls--" David laughed softly. "Well, it's something to
+acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don't get them at home, do
+they?"
+
+When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there
+was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the
+officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the
+square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was
+dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor
+fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church
+to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.
+
+There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that
+stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves
+and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they
+stayed had told them the story of this grave.
+
+The Cure's niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in
+Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German
+officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian,
+quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and
+she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit
+up half the night in the garden with his head in his
+hands--homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise;
+never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the
+ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated
+Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the
+front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the
+slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a
+story got about that some woman met him at night in the German
+graveyard. The Germans had taken the land behind the church for
+their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Cure's garden. When
+the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie
+Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in
+the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her
+with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the
+Cure. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she
+snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She
+was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.
+
+"And the Bavarian?" Claude asked David later. The story had
+become so complicated he could not follow it.
+
+"He justified her, and promptly. He took the same pistol and shot
+himself through the temples. His orderly, stationed at the edge
+of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward
+them. He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it
+on himself. But the Kommandant couldn't believe that one of his
+officers had so much feeling. He held an enquête, dragged the
+girl's mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that
+they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German
+officer. The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and
+where they began to meet. Though he wasn't very delicate about
+the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw
+Lieutenant Muller shoot himself with his own hand, and the
+Kommandant failed to prove his case. The old Cure had known
+nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military
+court. Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child,
+and was like his daughter. He had a stroke or something, and has
+been like this ever since. The girl's friends forgave her, and
+when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take
+flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an affiche on the
+hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave. Apparently,
+nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than
+poor Marie Louise."
+
+It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely
+little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it.
+There, at the foot of the Cure's garden, was the German cemetery,
+with heavy cement crosses,--some of them with long inscriptions;
+lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant
+Muller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story
+stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he
+hadn't happened to think of before; but the same thing must have
+occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would
+never forget the Cure's hands, his dim, suffering eyes.
+
+Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the
+church, and went back to meet him.
+
+"Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be
+out here." David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.
+
+"So did I. I came out to look for him."
+
+"Oh, I expect he's found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize,
+Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven't got
+engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It's a
+good thing we're pulling out, or we'd have banns and a bunch of
+christenings to look after." "All the same," murmured Claude, "I
+like the women of this country, as far as I've seen them." While
+they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet
+scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his
+first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending
+over her sick soldier.
+
+When they walked back across the square, over the crackling
+leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing "Home, Sweet
+Home," for the last waltz.
+
+"Le dernier baiser," said David. "Well, tomorrow we'll be gone,
+and the chances are we won't come back this way."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+"With us it's always a feast or a famine," the men groaned, when
+they sat down by the road to munch dry biscuit at noon. They had
+covered eighteen miles that morning, and had still seven more to
+go. They were ordered to do the twenty-five miles in eight hours.
+Nobody had fallen out yet, but some of the boys looked pretty
+well wilted. Nifty Jones said he was done for. Sergeant Hicks was
+expostulating with the faint-hearted. He knew that if one man
+fell out, a dozen would.
+
+"If I can do it, you can. It's worse on a fat man like me. This
+is no march to make a fuss about. Why, at Arras I talked with a
+little Tommy from one of those Pal Battalions that got
+slaughtered on the Somme. His battalion marched twenty-five miles
+in six hours, in the heat of July, into certain death. They were
+all kids out of school, not a man of them over five-foot-three,
+called them the 'Bantams.' You've got to hand it to them,
+fellows."
+
+"I'll hand anything to anybody, but I can't go no farther on
+these," Jones muttered, nursing his sore feet.
+
+"Oh, you! We're going to heave you onto the only horse in the
+Company. The officers, they can walk!"
+
+When they got into Battalion lines there was food ready for them,
+but very few wanted it. They drank and lay down in the bushes.
+Claude went at once to Headquarters and found Barclay Owens, of
+the Engineers, with the Colonel, who was smoking and studying his
+maps as usual.
+
+"Glad to see you, Wheeler. Your men ought to be in good shape,
+after a week's rest. Let them sleep now. We've got to move out of
+here before midnight, to relieve two Texas battalions at Moltke
+trench. They've taken the trench with heavy casualties and are
+beat out; couldn't hold it in case of counter-attack. As it's an
+important point, the enemy will try to recover it. I want to get
+into position before daylight, so he won't know fresh troops are
+coming in. As ranking officer, you are in charge of the Company."
+
+"Very well, sir. I'll do my best."
+
+"I'm sure you will. Two machine gun teams are going up with us,
+and some time tomorrow a Missouri battalion comes up to support.
+I'd have had you over here before, but I only got my orders to
+relieve yesterday. We may have to advance under shell fire. The
+enemy has been putting a lot of big stuff over; he wants to cut
+off that trench."
+
+Claude and David got into a fresh shell hole, under the
+half-burned scrub, and fell asleep. They were awakened at dusk by
+heavy artillery fire from the north.
+
+At ten o'clock the Battalion, after a hot meal, began to advance
+through almost impassable country. The guns must have been
+pounding away at the same range for a long while; the ground was
+worked and kneaded until it was soft as dough, though no rain had
+fallen for a week. Barclay Owens and his engineers were throwing
+down a plank road to get food and the ammunition wagons across.
+Big shells were coming over at intervals of twelve minutes. The
+intervals were so regular that it was quite possible to get
+forward without damage. While B Company was pulling through the
+shell area, Colonel Scott overtook them, on foot, his orderly
+leading his horse.
+
+"Know anything about that light over there, Wheeler?" he asked.
+"Well, it oughtn't to be there. Come along and see."
+
+The light was a mere match-head down in the ground, Claude hadn't
+noticed it before. He followed the Colonel, and when they reached
+the spark they found three officers of A Company crouching in a
+shell crater, covered with a piece of sheet-iron.
+
+"Put out that light," called the Colonel sharply. "What's the
+matter, Captain Brace?"
+
+A young man rose quickly. "I'm waiting for the water, sir. It's
+coming up on mules, in petrol cases, and I don't want to get
+separated from it. The ground's so bad here the drivers are
+likely to get lost."
+
+"Don't wait more than twenty minutes. You must get up and take
+your position on time, that's the important thing, water or no
+water."
+
+As the Colonel and Claude hurried back to overtake the Company,
+five big shells screamed over them in rapid succession. "Run,
+sir," the orderly called. "They're getting on to us; they've
+shortened the range."
+
+"That light back there was just enough to give them an idea," the
+Colonel muttered.
+
+The bad ground continued for about a mile, and then the advance
+reached Headquarters, behind the eighth trench of the great
+system of trenches. It was an old farmhouse which the Germans had
+made over with reinforced concrete, lining it within and without,
+until the walls were six feet thick and almost shell-proof, like
+a pill-box. The Colonel sent his orderly to enquire about A
+Company. A young Lieutenant came to the door of the farmhouse.
+
+"A Company is ready to go into position, sir. I brought them
+up."
+
+"Where is Captain Brace, Lieutenant?"
+
+"He and both our first lieutenants were killed, Colonel. Back in
+that hole. A shell fell on them not five minutes after you were
+talking to them."
+
+"That's bad. Any other damage?"
+
+"Yes, sir. There was a cook wagon struck at the same time; the
+first one coming along Julius Caesar's new road. The driver was
+killed, and we had to shoot the horses. Captain Owens, he near
+got scalded with the stew."
+
+The Colonel called in the officers one after another and
+discussed their positions with them.
+
+"Wheeler," he said when Claude's turn came, "you know your map?
+You've noticed that sharp loop in the front trench, in H 2; the
+Boar's Head, I believe they call it. It's a sort of spear point
+that reaches out toward the enemy, and it will be a hot place to
+hold. If I put your company in there, do you think you can do the
+Battalion credit in case of a counter attack?"
+
+Claude said he thought so.
+
+"It's the nastiest bit of the line to hold, and you can tell your
+men I pay them a compliment when I put them there."
+
+"All right, sir. They'll appreciate it."
+
+The Colonel bit off the end of a fresh cigar. "They'd better, by
+thunder! If they give way and let the Hun bombers in, it will let
+down the whole line. I'll give you two teams of Georgia machine
+guns to put in that point they call the Boar's Snout. When the
+Missourians come up tomorrow, they'll go in to support you, but
+until then you'll have to take care of the loop yourselves. I've
+got an awful lot of trench to hold, and I can't spare you any
+more men."
+
+The Texas men whom the Battalion came up to relieve had been
+living for sixty hours on their iron rations, and on what they
+could pick off the dead Huns. Their supplies had been shelled on
+the way, and nothing had got through to them. When the Colonel
+took Claude and Gerhardt forward to inspect the loop that B
+Company was to hold, they found a wallow, more like a dump heap
+than a trench. The men who had taken the position were almost too
+weak to stand. All their officers had been killed, and a sergeant
+was in command. He apologized for the condition of the loop.
+
+"Sorry to leave such a mess for you to clean up, sir, but we got
+it bad in here. He's been shelling us every night since we drove
+him out. I couldn't ask the men to do anything but hold on."
+
+"That's all right. You beat it, with your boys, quick! My men
+will hand you out some grub as you go back."
+
+The battered defenders of the Boar's Head stumbled past them
+through the darkness into the communication. When the last man
+had filed out, the Colonel sent for Barclay Owens. Claude and
+David tried to feel their way about and get some idea of the
+condition the place was in. The stench was the worst they had yet
+encountered, but it was less disgusting than the flies; when they
+inadvertently touched a dead body, clouds of wet, buzzing flies
+flew up into their faces, into their eyes and nostrils. Under
+their feet the earth worked and moved as if boa constrictors were
+wriggling down there soft bodies, lightly covered. When they had
+found their way up to the Snout they came upon a pile of corpses,
+a dozen or more, thrown one on top of another like sacks of
+flour, faintly discernible in the darkness. While the two
+officers stood there, rumbling, squirting sounds began to come
+from this heap, first from one body, then from another--gases,
+swelling in the liquefying entrails of the dead men. They seemed
+to be complaining to one another; glup, glup, glup.
+
+The boys went back to the Colonel, who was standing at the mouth
+of the communication, and told him there was nothing much to
+report, except that the burying squad was needed badly.
+
+"I expect!" The Colonel shook his head. When Barclay Owens
+arrived, he asked him what could be done here before daybreak.
+The doughty engineer felt his way about as Claude and Gerhardt
+had done; they heard him coughing, and beating off the flies. But
+when he came back he seemed rather cheered than discouraged.
+
+"Give me a gang to get the casualties out, and with plenty of
+quick-lime and concrete I can make this loop all right in four
+hours, sir," he declared.
+
+"I've brought plenty of lime, but where'll you get your
+concrete?"
+
+"The Hun left about fifty sacks of it in the cellar, under your
+Headquarters. I can do better, of course, if I have a few hours
+more for my concrete to dry."
+
+"Go ahead, Captain." The Colonel told Claude and David to bring
+their men up to the communication before light, and hold them
+ready. "Give Owens' cement a chance, but don't let the enemy put
+over any surprise on you."
+
+The shelling began again at daybreak; it was hardest on the rear
+trenches and the three-mile area behind. Evidently the enemy felt
+sure of what he had in Moltke trench; he wanted to cut off
+supplies and possible reinforcements. The Missouri battalion did
+not come up that day, but before noon a runner arrived from their
+Colonel, with information that they were hiding in the wood. Five
+Boche planes had been circling over the wood since dawn,
+signalling to the enemy Headquarters back on Dauphin Ridge; the
+Missourians were sure they had avoided detection by lying close
+in the under-brush. They would come up in the night. Their
+linemen were following the runner, and Colonel Scott would be in
+telephone communication with them in half an hour.
+
+When B Company moved into the Boar's Head at one o'clock in the
+afternoon, they could truthfully say that the prevailing smell
+was now that of quick-lime. The parapet was evenly built up, the
+firing step had been partly restored, and in the Snout there were
+good emplacements for the machine guns. Certain unpleasant
+reminders were still to be found if one looked for them. In the
+Snout a large fat boot stuck stiffly from the side of the trench.
+Captain Ovens explained that the ground sounded hollow in there,
+and the boot probably led back into a dugout where a lot of Hun
+bodies were entombed together. As he was pressed for time, he had
+thought best not to look for trouble. In one of the curves of the
+loop, just at the top of the earth wall, under the sand bags, a
+dark hand reached out; the five fingers, well apart, looked like
+the swollen roots of some noxious weed. Hicks declared that this
+object was disgusting, and during the afternoon he made Nifty
+Jones and Oscar scrape down some earth and make a hump over the
+paw. But there was shelling in the night, and the earth fell
+away.
+
+"Look," said Jones when he wakened his Sergeant. "The first thing
+I seen when daylight come was his old fingers, wigglin' in the
+breeze. He wants air, Heinie does; he won't stay covered."
+
+Hicks got up and re-buried the hand himself, but when he came
+around with Claude on inspection, before breakfast, there were
+the same five fingers sticking out again. The Sergeant's forehead
+puffed up and got red, and he swore that if he found the man who
+played dirty jokes, he'd make him eat this one.
+
+The Colonel sent for Claude and Gerhardt to come to breakfast
+with him. He had been talking by telephone with the Missouri
+officers and had agreed that they should stay back in the bush
+for the present. The continual circling of planes over the wood
+seemed to indicate that the enemy was concerned about the actual
+strength of Moltke trench. It was possible their air scouts had
+seen the Texas men going back,--otherwise, why were they holding
+off?
+
+While the Colonel and the officers were at breakfast, a corporal
+brought in two pigeons he had shot at dawn. One of them carried a
+message under its wing. The Colonel unrolled a strip of paper and
+handed it to Gerhardt.
+
+"Yes, sir, it's in German, but it's code stuff. It's a German
+nursery rhyme. Those reconnoitering planes must have dropped
+scouts on our rear, and they are sending in reports. Of course,
+they can get more on us than the air men can. Here, do you want
+these birds, Dick?"
+
+The boy grinned. "You bet I do, sir! I may get a chance to fry
+'em, later on."
+
+After breakfast the Colonel went to inspect B Company in the
+Boar's Head. He was especially pleased with the advantageous
+placing of the machine guns in the Snout. "I expect you'll have a
+quiet day," he said to the men, "but I wouldn't like to promise
+you a quiet night. You'll have to be very steady in here; if
+Fritz takes this loop, he's got us, you understand."
+
+They had, indeed, a quiet day. Some of the men played cards, and
+Oscar read his Bible. The night, too, began well. But at four
+fifteen everybody was roused by the gas alarm. Gas shells came
+over for exactly half an hour. Then the shrapnel broke loose;
+not the long, whizzing scream of solitary shells, but drum-fire,
+continuous and deafening. A hundred electrical storms seemed
+raging at once, in the air and on the ground. Balls of fire were
+rolling all over the place. The range was a little long for the
+Boar's Head, they were not getting the worst of it; but thirty
+yards back everything was torn to pieces. Claude didn't see how
+anybody could be left alive back there. A single twister had
+killed six of his men at the rear of the loop, where they were
+shovelling to keep the communication clear. Captain Owns' neat
+earthworks were being badly pounded.
+
+Claude and Gerhardt were consulting together when the smoke and
+darkness began to take on the livid colour that announced the
+coming of daybreak. A messenger ran in from the Colonel; the
+Missourians had not yet come up, and his telephone communication
+with them was cut off. He was afraid they had got lost in the
+bombardment. "The Colonel says you are to send two men back to
+bring them up; two men who can take charge if they're stampeded."
+
+When the messenger shouted this order, Gerhardt and Hicks looked
+at each other quickly, and volunteered to go.
+
+Claude hesitated. Hicks and David waited for no further consent;
+they ran down the communication and disappeared.
+
+Claude stood in the smoke that was slowly growing greyer, and
+looked after them with the deepest stab of despair he had ever
+known. Only a man who was bewildered and unfit to be in command
+of other men would have let his best friend and his best officer
+take such a risk. He was standing there under shelter, and his
+two friends were going back through that curtain of flying steel,
+toward the square from which the lost battalion had last
+reported. If he knew them, they would not lose time following the
+maze of trenches; they were probably even now out on the open,
+running straight through the enemy barrage, vaulting trench tops.
+
+Claude turned and went back into the loop. Well, whatever
+happened, he had worked with brave men. It was worth having lived
+in this world to have known such men. Soldiers, when they were in
+a tight place, often made secret propositions to God; and now he
+found himself offering terms: If They would see to it that David
+came back, They could take the price out of him. He would pay.
+Did They understand?
+
+An hour dragged by. Hard on the nerves, waiting. Up the
+communication came a train with ammunition and coffee for the
+loop. The men thought Headquarters did pretty well to get hot
+food to them through that barrage. A message came up in the
+Colonel's hand:
+
+"Be ready when the barrage stops."
+
+Claude took this up and showed it to the machine gunners in the
+Snout. Turning back, he ran into Hicks, stripped to his shirt and
+trousers, as wet as if he had come out of the river, and splashed
+with blood. His hand was wrapped up in a rag. He put his mouth to
+Claude's ear and shouted: "We found them. They were lost. They're
+coming. Send word to the Colonel."
+
+"Where's Gerhardt?"
+
+"He's coming; bringing them up. God, it's stopped!"
+
+The bombardment ceased with a suddenness that was stupefying. The
+men in the loop gasped and crouched as if they were falling from
+a height. The air, rolling black with smoke and stifling with the
+smell of gases and burning powder, was still as death. The
+silence was like a heavy anaesthetic.
+
+Claude ran back to the Snout to see that the gun teams were
+ready. "Wake up, boys! You know why we're here!"
+
+Bert Fuller, who was up in the look-out, dropped back into the
+trench beside him. "They're coming, sir."
+
+Claude gave the signal to the machine guns. Fire opened all along
+the loop. In a moment a breeze sprang up, and the heavy smoke
+clouds drifted to the rear. Mounting to the firestep, he peered
+over. The enemy was coming on eight deep, on the left of the
+Boar's Head, in long, waving lines that reached out toward the
+main trench. Suddenly the advance was checked. The files of
+running men dropped behind a wrinkle in the earth fifty yards
+forward and did not instantly re-appear. It struck Claude that
+they were waiting for something; he ought to be clever enough to
+know for what, but he was not. The Colonel's line man came up to
+him.
+
+"Headquarters has a runner from the Missourians. They'll be up in
+twenty minutes. The Colonel will put them in here at once. Till
+then you must manage to hold."
+
+"We'll hold. Fritz is behaving queerly. I don't understand his
+tactics..."
+
+While he was speaking, everything was explained. The Boar's Snout
+spread apart with an explosion that split the earth, and went up
+in a volcano of smoke and flame. Claude and the Colonel's
+messenger were thrown on their faces. When they got to their
+feet, the Snout was a smoking crater full of dead and dying men.
+The Georgia gun teams were gone.
+
+It was for this that the Hun advance had been waiting behind the
+ridge. The mine under the Snout had been made long ago, probably,
+on a venture, when the Hun held Moltke trench for months without
+molestation. During the last twenty-four hours they had been
+getting their explosives in, reasoning that the strongest
+garrison would be placed there.
+
+Here they were, coming on the run. It was up to the rifles. The
+men who had been knocked down by the shock were all on their feet
+again. They looked at their officer questioningly, as if the
+whole situation had changed. Claude felt they were going soft
+under his eyes. In a moment the Hun bombers would be in on them,
+and they would break. He ran along the trench, pointing over the
+sand bags and shouting, "It's up to you, it's up to you!"
+
+The rifles recovered themselves and began firing, but Claude felt
+they were spongy and uncertain, that their minds were already on
+the way to the rear. If they did anything, it must be quick, and
+their gun-work must be accurate. Nothing but a withering fire
+could check.... He sprang to the firestep and then out on the
+parapet. Something instantaneous happened; he had his men in
+hand.
+
+"Steady, steady!" He called the range to the rifle teams behind
+him, and he could see the fire take effect. All along the Hun
+lines men were stumbling and falling. They swerved a little to
+the left; he called the rifles to follow, directing them with his
+voice and with his hands. It was not only that from here he could
+correct the range and direct the fire; the men behind him had
+become like rock. That line of faces below; Hicks, Jones, Fuller,
+Anderson, Oscar.... Their eyes never left him. With these men
+he could do anything.
+
+The right of the Hun line swerved out, not more than twenty yards
+from the battered Snout, trying to run to shelter under that pile
+of debris and human bodies. A quick concentration of rifle fire
+depressed it, and the swell came out again toward the left.
+Claude's appearance on the parapet had attracted no attention
+from the enemy at first, but now the bullets began popping about
+him; two rattled on his tin hat, one caught him in the shoulder.
+The blood dripped down his coat, but he felt no weakness. He felt
+only one thing; that he commanded wonderful men. When David came
+up with the supports he might find them dead, but he would find
+them all there. They were there to stay until they were carried
+out to be buried. They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.
+
+The Colonel's twenty minutes must be almost up, he thought. He
+couldn't take his eyes from the front line long enough to look at
+his wrist watch.... The men behind him saw Claude sway as if
+he had lost his balance and were trying to recover it. Then he
+plunged, face down, outside the parapet. Hicks caught his foot
+and pulled him back. At the same moment the Missourians ran
+yelling up the communication. They threw their machine guns up on
+the sand bags and went into action without an unnecessary motion.
+
+Hicks and Bert Fuller and Oscar carried Claude forward toward the
+Snout, out of the way of the supports that were pouring in. He
+was not bleeding very much. He smiled at them as if he were going
+to speak, but there was a weak blankness in his eyes. Bert tore
+his shirt open; three clean bullet holes. By the time they looked
+at him again, the smile had gone... the look that was Claude
+had faded. Hicks wiped the sweat and smoke from his officer's
+face. "Thank God I never told him," he said. "Thank God for
+that!"
+
+Bert and Oscar knew what Hicks meant. Gerhardt had been blown to
+pieces at his side when they dashed back through the enemy
+barrage to find the Missourians. They were running together
+across the open, not able to see much for smoke. They bumped into
+a section of wire entanglement, left above an old trench. David
+cut round to the right, waving Hicks to follow him. The two were
+not ten yards apart when the shell struck. Then Sergeant Hicks
+ran on alone.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The sun is sinking low, a transport is steaming slowly up the
+narrows with the tide. The decks are covered with brown men. They
+cluster over the superstructure like bees in swarming time. Their
+attitudes are relaxed and lounging. Some look thoughtful, some
+well contented, some are melancholy, and many are indifferent, as
+they watch the shore approaching. They are not the same men who
+went away.
+
+Sergeant Hicks was standing in the stern, smoking, reflecting,
+watching the twinkle of the red sunset upon the cloudy water. It
+is more than a year since he sailed for France. The world has
+changed in that time, and so has he.
+
+Bert Fuller elbowed his way up to the Sergeant. "The doctor says
+Colonel Maxey is dying, He won't live to get off the boat, much
+less to ride in the parade in New York tomorrow."
+
+Hicks shrugged, as if Maxey's pneumonia were no affair of his.
+"Well, we should worry! We've left better officers than him over
+there."
+
+"I'm not saying we haven't. But it seems too bad, when he's so
+strong for fuss and feathers. He's been sending cables about that
+parade for weeks."
+
+"Huh!" Hicks elevated his eyebrows and glanced sidewise in
+disdain. Presently he sputtered, squinting down at the glittering
+water, "Colonel Maxey, anyhow! Colonel for what Claude and
+Gerhardt did, I guess!" Hicks and Bert Fuller have been helping
+to keep the noble fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. They have always
+hung together and are usually quarrelling and grumbling at each
+other when they are off duty. Still, they hang together. They are
+the last of their group. Nifty Jones and Oscar, God only knows
+why, have gone on to the Black Sea.
+
+During the year they were in the Rhine valley, Bert and Hicks
+were separated only once, and that was when Hicks got a two
+weeks' leave and, by dint of persevering and fatiguing travel,
+went to Venice. He had no proper passport, and the consuls and
+officials to whom he had appealed in his difficulties begged him
+to content himself with something nearer. But he said he was
+going to Venice because he had always heard about it. Bert Fuller
+was glad to welcome him back to Coblentz, and gave a "wine party"
+to celebrate his return. They expect to keep an eye on each
+other. Though Bert lives on the Platte and Hicks on the Big Blue,
+the automobile roads between those two rivers are excellent.
+
+Bert is the same sweet-tempered boy he was when he left his
+mother's kitchen; his gravest troubles have been frequent
+betrothals. But Hicks' round, chubby face has taken on a slightly
+cynical expression,--a look quite out of place there. The chances
+of war have hurt his feelings... not that he ever wanted
+anything for himself. The way in which glittering honours bump
+down upon the wrong heads in the army, and palms and crosses
+blossom on the wrong breasts, has, as he says, thrown his compass
+off a few points.
+
+What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and
+repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all
+that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with
+"Hicks and Able" over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves
+and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for
+the rest of his life.
+
+As the transport enters the North River, sirens and steam
+whistles all along the water front begin to blow their shrill
+salute to the returning soldiers. The men square their shoulders
+and smile knowingly at one another; some of them look a little
+bored. Hicks slowly lights a cigarette and regards the end of it
+with an expression which will puzzle his friends when he gets
+home.
+
+By the banks of Lovely Creek, where it began, Claude Wheeler's
+story still goes on. To the two old women who work together in
+the farmhouse, the thought of him is always there, beyond
+everything else, at the farthest edge of consciousness, like the
+evening sun on the horizon.
+
+ Mrs. Wheeler got the word of his death one afternoon in the
+sitting-room, the room in which he had bade her good-bye. She was
+reading when the telephone rang.
+
+"Is this the Wheeler farm? This is the telegraph office at
+Frankfort. We have a message from the War Department,--" the
+voice hesitated. "Isn't Mr. Wheeler there?"
+
+"No, but you can read the message to me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said, "Thank you," and hung up the receiver. She
+felt her way softly to her chair. She had an hour alone, when
+there was nothing but him in the room,--but him and the map
+there, which was the end of his road. Somewhere among those
+perplexing names, he had found his place.
+
+Claude's letters kept coming for weeks afterward; then came the
+letters from his comrades and his Colonel to tell her all.
+
+In the dark months that followed, when human nature looked to her
+uglier than it had ever done before, those letters were Mrs.
+Wheeler's comfort. As she read the newspapers, she used to think
+about the passage of the Red Sea, in the Bible; it seemed as if
+the flood of meanness and greed had been held back just long
+enough for the boys to go over, and then swept down and engulfed
+everything that was left at home. When she can see nothing that
+has come of it all but evil, she reads Claude's letters over
+again and reassures herself; for him the call was clear, the
+cause was glorious. Never a doubt stained his bright faith. She
+divines so much that he did not write. She knows what to read
+into those short flashes of enthusiasm; how fully he must have
+found his life before he could let himself go so far--he, who was
+so afraid of being fooled! He died believing his own country
+better than it is, and France better than any country can ever
+be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with. Perhaps it was
+as well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would
+have dreaded the awakening,--she sometimes even doubts whether he
+could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment. One
+by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership,
+leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose
+deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood
+of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers,--one by
+one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure
+lodging houses, some in their office, where they seemed to be
+carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a
+vessel's side and disappear into the sea. When Claude's mother
+hears of these things, she shudders and presses her hands tight
+over her breast, as if she had him there. She feels as if God had
+saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible end. For as
+she reads, she thinks those slayers of themselves were all so
+like him; they were the ones who had hoped extravagantly,--who in
+order to do what they did had to hope extravagantly, and to
+believe passionately. And they found they had hoped and believed
+too much. But one she knew, who could ill bear disillusion...
+safe, safe.
+
+Mahailey, when they are alone, sometimes addresses Mrs. Wheeler
+as "Mudder"; "Now, Mudder, you go upstairs an' lay down an' rest
+yourself." Mrs. Wheeler knows that then she is thinking of
+Claude, is speaking for Claude. As they are working at the table
+or bending over the oven, something reminds them of him, and they
+think of him together, like one person: Mahailey will pat her
+back and say, "Never you mind, Mudder; you'll see your boy up
+yonder." Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near,--but
+Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces,
+and for her He is nearer still,--directly overhead, not so very
+far above the kitchen stove.
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE OF OURS***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, One of Ours, by Willa Cather
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: One of Ours
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2004  [eBook #2369]
+[Date last updated: April 11, 2006]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE OF OURS***
+
+
+
+
+
+One of Ours
+
+by Willa Cather
+
+
+
+
+Book One: On Lovely Creek
+
+I.
+
+Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and
+vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half
+of the same bed.
+
+"Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why, aren't we going to the circus today?"
+
+"Car's all right. Let me alone." The boy turned over and pulled
+the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was
+beginning to come through the curtainless windows.
+
+Claude rose and dressed,--a simple operation which took very
+little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way
+in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's
+comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom,
+which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had
+washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed
+with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not
+dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to
+the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head
+in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.
+
+Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full
+of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at
+him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were
+alone.
+
+"What air you gittin' up for a-ready, boy? You goin' to the
+circus before breakfast? Don't you make no noise, else you'll
+have 'em all down here before I git my fire a-goin'."
+
+"All right, Mahailey." Claude caught up his cap and ran out of
+doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over
+the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light
+poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly,
+timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a
+sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the
+south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go
+to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort
+of day that must, somehow, turn out well.
+
+Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to
+the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted
+wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men,
+Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock.
+Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude
+wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to
+them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and
+dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a
+grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one
+of the horses.
+
+Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude
+and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man
+Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a
+board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of
+her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the
+cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for
+weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg
+swollen until it looked like an elephant's. She would have to
+stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she
+grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been
+discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a
+credit to him.
+
+Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell.
+After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the
+barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating
+quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot
+lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck
+and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him
+mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her
+upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being
+petted. She let him touch her foot and examine her leg.
+
+When Claude reached the kitchen, his mother was sitting at one
+end of the breakfast table, pouring weak coffee, his brother and
+Dan and Jerry were in their chairs, and Mahailey was baking
+griddle cakes at the stove. A moment later Mr. Wheeler came down
+the enclosed stairway and walked the length of the table to his
+own place. He was a very large man, taller and broader than any
+of his neighbours. He seldom wore a coat in summer, and his
+rumpled shirt bulged out carelessly over the belt of his
+trousers. His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle
+tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for
+good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical
+composure. Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler
+flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak
+with complete seriousness. He kept up his easy-going, jocular
+affability even with his own family.
+
+As soon as he was seated, Mr. Wheeler reached for the two-pint
+sugar bowl and began to pour sugar into his coffee. Ralph asked
+him if he were going to the circus. Mr. Wheeler winked.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if I happened in town sometime before the
+elephants get away." He spoke very deliberately, with a
+State-of-Maine drawl, and his voice was smooth and agreeable.
+"You boys better start in early, though. You can take the wagon
+and the mules, and load in the cowhides. The butcher has agreed
+to take them."
+
+Claude put down his knife. "Can't we have the car? I've washed it
+on purpose."
+
+"And what about Dan and Jerry? They want to see the circus just
+as much as you do, and I want the hides should go in; they're
+bringing a good price now. I don't mind about your washing the
+car; mud preserves the paint, they say, but it'll be all right
+this time, Claude."
+
+The hired men haw-hawed and Ralph giggled. Claude's freckled face
+got very red. The pancake grew stiff and heavy in his mouth and
+was hard to swallow. His father knew he hated to drive the mules
+to town, and knew how he hated to go anywhere with Dan and Jerry.
+As for the hides, they were the skins of four steers that had
+perished in the blizzard last winter through the wanton
+carelessness of these same hired men, and the price they would
+bring would not half pay for the time his father had spent in
+stripping and curing them. They had lain in a shed loft all
+summer, and the wagon had been to town a dozen times. But today,
+when he wanted to go to Frankfort clean and care-free, he must
+take these stinking hides and two coarse-mouthed men, and drive a
+pair of mules that always brayed and balked and behaved
+ridiculously in a crowd. Probably his father had looked out of
+the window and seen him washing the car, and had put this up on
+him while he dressed. It was like his father's idea of a joke.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at Claude sympathetically, feeling that he
+was disappointed. Perhaps she, too, suspected a joke. She had
+learned that humour might wear almost any guise.
+
+When Claude started for the barn after breakfast, she came
+running down the path, calling to him faintly,--hurrying always
+made her short of breath. Overtaking him, she looked up with
+solicitude, shading her eyes with her delicately formed hand. "If
+you want I should do up your linen coat, Claude, I can iron it
+while you're hitching," she said wistfully.
+
+Claude stood kicking at a bunch of mottled feathers that had once
+been a young chicken. His shoulders were drawn high, his mother
+saw, and his figure suggested energy and determined self-control.
+
+"You needn't mind, mother." He spoke rapidly, muttering his
+words. "I'd better wear my old clothes if I have to take the
+hides. They're greasy, and in the sun they'll smell worse than
+fertilizer."
+
+"The men can handle the hides, I should think. Wouldn't you feel
+better in town to be dressed?" She was still blinking up at him.
+
+"Don't bother about it. Put me out a clean coloured shirt, if you
+want to. That's all right."
+
+He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the
+path up to the house. She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear
+mother! He guessed if she could stand having these men about,
+could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!
+
+Half an hour after the wagon left, Nat Wheeler put on an alpaca
+coat and went off in the rattling buckboard in which, though he
+kept two automobiles, he still drove about the country. He said
+nothing to his wife; it was her business to guess whether or not
+he would be home for dinner. She and Mahailey could have a good
+time scrubbing and sweeping all day, with no men around to bother
+them.
+
+
+
+There were few days in the year when Wheeler did not drive off
+somewhere; to an auction sale, or a political convention, or a
+meeting of the Farmers' Telephone directors;--to see how his
+neighbours were getting on with their work, if there was nothing
+else to look after. He preferred his buckboard to a car because
+it was light, went easily over heavy or rough roads, and was so
+rickety that he never felt he must suggest his wife's
+accompanying him. Besides he could see the country better when he
+didn't have to keep his mind on the road. He had come to this
+part of Nebraska when the Indians and the buffalo were still
+about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone, had
+watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
+where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
+settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young
+fellows the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper;
+until he felt a little as if all this were his own enterprise.
+The changes, not only those the years made, but those the seasons
+made, were interesting to him.
+
+People recognized Nat Wheeler and his cart a mile away. He sat
+massive and comfortable, weighing down one end of the slanting
+seat, his driving hand lying on his knee. Even his German
+neighbours, the Yoeders, who hated to stop work for a quarter of
+an hour on any account, were glad to see him coming. The
+merchants in the little towns about the county missed him if he
+didn't drop in once a week or so. He was active in politics;
+never ran for an office himself, but often took up the cause of a
+friend and conducted his campaign for him.
+
+The French saying, "Joy of the street, sorrow of the home," was
+exemplified in Mr. Wheeler, though not at all in the French way.
+His own affairs were of secondary importance to him. In the early
+days he had homesteaded and bought and leased enough land to make
+him rich. Now he had only to rent it out to good farmers who
+liked to work--he didn't, and of that he made no secret. When he
+was at home, he usually sat upstairs in the living room, reading
+newspapers. He subscribed for a dozen or more--the list included
+a weekly devoted to scandal--and he was well informed about what
+was going on in the world. He had magnificent health, and illness
+in himself or in other people struck him as humorous. To be sure,
+he never suffered from anything more perplexing than toothache or
+boils, or an occasional bilious attack.
+
+Wheeler gave liberally to churches and charities, was always
+ready to lend money or machinery to a neighbour who was short of
+anything. He liked to tease and shock diffident people, and had
+an inexhaustible supply of funny stories. Everybody marveled that
+he got on so well with his oldest son, Bayliss Wheeler. Not that
+Bayliss was exactly diffident, but he was a narrow gauge fellow,
+the sort of prudent young man one wouldn't expect Nat Wheeler to
+like.
+
+Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he
+was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial
+success. Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son's business acumen.
+At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a
+week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about
+his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
+came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
+still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
+virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
+everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
+Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
+wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
+together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
+good time were so different.
+
+Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
+stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
+sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
+always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
+buckboard, and Bayliss.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
+High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
+was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
+reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
+There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
+sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
+and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
+them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
+done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
+see the man at once, as if he hadn't hitherto appreciated him.
+
+There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude's father. He
+liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
+immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often
+tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never
+loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,--as
+when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat
+down on the sticky fly-paper,--he was not boisterous. He was a
+jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not
+thin-skinned.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope
+went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.
+Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial
+companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the
+crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr.
+Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head
+above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was
+setting up a shell-game. To avoid his father, Claude turned and
+went in to his brother's store. The two big show windows were
+full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to
+watch the parade. Bayliss was seated in the little glass cage
+where he did his writing and bookkeeping. He nodded at Claude
+from his desk.
+
+"Hello," said Claude, bustling in as if he were in a great hurry.
+"Have you seen Ernest Havel? I thought I might find him in here."
+
+Bayliss swung round in his swivel chair to return a plough
+catalogue to the shelf. "What would he be in here for? Better
+look for him in the saloon." Nobody could put meaner insinuations
+into a slow, dry remark than Bayliss.
+
+Claude's cheeks flamed with anger. As he turned away, he noticed
+something unusual about his brother's face, but he wasn't going
+to give him the satisfaction of asking him how he had got a black
+eye. Ernest Havel was a Bohemian, and he usually drank a glass of
+beer when he came to town; but he was sober and thoughtful beyond
+the wont of young men. From Bayliss' drawl one might have
+supposed that the boy was a drunken loafer.
+
+At that very moment Claude saw his friend on the other side of
+the street, following the wagon of trained dogs that brought up
+the rear of the procession. He ran across, through a crowd of
+shouting youngsters, and caught Ernest by the arm.
+
+"Hello, where are you off to?"
+
+"I'm going to eat my lunch before show-time. I left my wagon out
+by the pumping station, on the creek. What about you?"
+
+"I've got no program. Can I go along?"
+
+Ernest smiled. "I expect. I've got enough lunch for two."
+
+"Yes, I know. You always have. I'll join you later."
+
+Claude would have liked to take Ernest to the hotel for dinner.
+He had more than enough money in his pockets; and his father was
+a rich farmer. In the Wheeler family a new thrasher or a new
+automobile was ordered without a question, but it was considered
+extravagant to go to a hotel for dinner. If his father or Bayliss
+heard that he had been there-and Bayliss heard everything they
+would say he was putting on airs, and would get back at him. He
+tried to excuse his cowardice to himself by saying that he was
+dirty and smelled of the hides; but in his heart he knew that he
+did not ask Ernest to go to the hotel with him because he had
+been so brought up that it would be difficult for him to do this
+simple thing. He made some purchases at the fruit stand and the
+cigar counter, and then hurried out along the dusty road toward
+the pumping station. Ernest's wagon was standing under the shade
+of some willow trees, on a little sandy bottom half enclosed by a
+loop of the creek which curved like a horseshoe. Claude threw
+himself on the sand beside the stream and wiped the dust from his
+hot face. He felt he had now closed the door on his disagreeable
+morning.
+
+Ernest produced his lunch basket.
+
+"I got a couple bottles of beer cooling in the creek," he said.
+"I knew you wouldn't want to go in a saloon."
+
+"Oh, forget it!" Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of
+pickles. He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into
+a saloon, and his friend knew he was afraid.
+
+After lunch, Claude took out a handful of good cigars he had
+bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was
+pleased. He lit one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with
+an air of pride and turning it around between his fingers.
+
+The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching
+their oats. The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a
+cool, persuasive sound. Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their
+coats under their heads, talking very little. Occasionally a
+motor dashed along the road toward town, and a cloud of dust and
+a smell of gasoline blew in over the creek bottom; but for the
+most part the silence of the warm, lazy summer noon was
+undisturbed. Claude could usually forget his own vexations and
+chagrins when he was with Ernest. The Bohemian boy was never
+uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once. He was
+simple and direct. He had a number of impersonal preoccupations;
+was interested in politics and history and in new inventions.
+Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental
+liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain. After he
+had talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go
+right on the farm seemed less important. Claude's mother was
+almost as fond of Ernest as he was himself. When the two boys
+were going to high school, Ernest often came over in the evening
+to study with Claude, and while they worked at the long kitchen
+table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning and sat near them, helping
+them with their Latin and algebra. Even old Mahailey was
+enlightened by their words of wisdom.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived
+from the Old Country. His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to
+Frankfort to meet him, and was to stop on the way home and leave
+some groceries for the Wheelers. The train from the east was
+late; it was ten o'clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in
+the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon rumble across the little bridge
+over Lovely Creek. She opened the outside door, and presently Joe
+came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of
+flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down to the cellar
+for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy,
+short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
+valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had
+fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother
+gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his
+pack. He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light,
+looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.
+What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought.... She
+went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and
+saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her,
+"Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"
+
+Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this
+country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and
+hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of
+them. That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at
+each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good
+friends.
+
+After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy
+frame of mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson,
+the oldest son of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the
+three sat together for the performance. Leonard said he had come
+to town alone in his car; wouldn't Claude ride out with him?
+Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who
+didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.
+
+Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big
+hands and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of
+energy. He and his father and two brothers not only worked their
+own big farm, but rented a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They
+were master farmers. If there was a dry summer and a failure,
+Leonard only laughed and stretched his long arms, and put in a
+bigger crop next year. Claude was always a little reserved with
+Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather contemptuous of
+the hap-hazard way in which things were done on the Wheeler
+place, and thought his going to college a waste of money. Leonard
+had not even gone through the Frankfort High School, and he was
+already a more successful man than Claude was ever likely to be.
+Leonard did think these things, but he was fond of Claude, all
+the same.
+
+At sunset the car was speeding over a fine stretch of smooth road
+across the level country that lay between Frankfort and the
+rougher land along Lovely Creek. Leonard's attention was largely
+given up to admiring the faultless behaviour of his engine.
+Presently he chuckled to himself and turned to Claude.
+
+"I wonder if you'd take it all right if I told you a joke on
+Bayliss?"
+
+"I expect I would." Claude's tone was not at all eager.
+
+"You saw Bayliss today? Notice anything queer about him, one eye
+a little off colour? Did he tell you how he got it?"
+
+"No. I didn't ask him."
+
+"Just as well. A lot of people did ask him, though, and he said
+he was hunting around his place for something in the dark and ran
+into a reaper. Well, I'm the reaper!"
+
+Claude looked interested. "You mean to say Bayliss was in a
+fight?"
+
+Leonard laughed. "Lord, no! Don't you know Bayliss? I went in
+there to pay a bill yesterday, and Susie Gray and another girl
+came in to sell tickets for the firemen's dinner. An advance man
+for this circus was hanging around, and he began talking a little
+smart,--nothing rough, but the way such fellows will. The girls
+handed it back to him, and sold him three tickets and shut him
+up. I couldn't see how Susie thought so quick what to say. The
+minute the girls went out Bayliss started knocking them; said all
+the country girls were getting too fresh and knew more than they
+ought to about managing sporty men and right there I reached out
+and handed him one. I hit harder than I meant to. I meant to slap
+him, not to give him a black eye. But you can't always regulate
+things, and I was hot all over. I waited for him to come back at
+me. I'm bigger than he is, and I wanted to give him satisfaction.
+Well, sir, he never moved a muscle! He stood there getting redder
+and redder, and his eyes watered. I don't say he cried, but his
+eyes watered. 'All right, Bayliss,' said I. 'Slow with your
+fists, if that's your principle; but slow with your tongue,
+too,--especially when the parties mentioned aren't present.'"
+
+"Bayliss will never get over that," was Claude's only comment.
+
+"He don't have to!" Leonard threw up his head. "I'm a good
+customer; he can like it or lump it, till the price of binding
+twine goes down!"
+
+For the next few minutes the driver was occupied with trying to
+get up a long, rough hill on high gear. Sometimes he could
+make that hill, and sometimes he couldn't, and he was not able to
+account for the difference. After he pulled the second lever with
+some disgust and let the car amble on as she would, he noticed
+that his companion was disconcerted.
+
+"I'll tell you what, Leonard," Claude spoke in a strained voice,
+"I think the fair thing for you to do is to get out here by the
+road and give me a chance."
+
+Leonard swung his steering wheel savagely to pass a wagon on the
+down side of the hill. "What the devil are you talking about,
+boy?"
+
+"You think you've got our measure all right, but you ought to
+give me a chance first."
+
+Leonard looked down in amazement at his own big brown hands,
+lying on the wheel. "You mortal fool kid, what would I be telling
+you all this for, if I didn't know you were another breed of
+cats? I never thought you got on too well with Bayliss yourself."
+
+"I don't, but I won't have you thinking you can slap the men in
+my family whenever you feel like it." Claude knew that his
+explanation sounded foolish, and his voice, in spite of all he
+could do, was weak and angry.
+
+Young Leonard Dawson saw he had hurt the boy's feelings. "Lord,
+Claude, I know you're a fighter. Bayliss never was. I went to
+school with him."
+
+The ride ended amicably, but Claude wouldn't let Leonard take him
+home. He jumped out of the car with a curt goodnight, and ran
+across the dusky fields toward the light that shone from the
+house on the hill. At the little bridge over the creek, he
+stopped to get his breath and to be sure that he was outwardly
+composed before he went in to see his mother.
+
+"Ran against a reaper in the dark!" he muttered aloud, clenching
+his fist.
+
+Listening to the deep singing of the frogs, and to the distant
+barking of the dogs up at the house, he grew calmer.
+Nevertheless, he wondered why it was that one had sometimes to
+feel responsible for the behaviour of people whose natures were
+wholly antipathetic to one's own.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was standing
+at his dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade
+darker than his hair and not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and
+long lashes were a pale corn-colour--made his blue eyes seem
+lighter than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness
+and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the
+sort of looking boy he didn't want to be. He especially hated his
+head,--so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and
+uncompromisingly square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name
+was another source of humiliation. Claude: it was a "chump" name,
+like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country
+schools there was always a red-headed, warty-handed, runny-nosed
+little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he took for
+granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a
+farmer boy might be supposed to have. Unfortunately he had none
+of his father's physical repose, and his strength often asserted
+itself inharmoniously. The storms that went on in his mind
+sometimes made him rise, or sit down, or lift something, more
+violently than there was any apparent reason for his doing.
+
+The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not
+get up until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the
+smell of doughnuts frying. This morning Ralph rolled out of bed
+at the last minute and callously put on his clean underwear
+without taking a bath. This cost him not one regret, though he
+took time to polish his new ox-blood shoes tenderly with a pocket
+handkerchief. He reached the table when all the others were half
+through breakfast, and made his peace by genially asking his
+mother if she didn't want him to drive her to church in the car.
+
+"I'd like to go if I can get the work done in time," she said,
+doubtfully glancing at the clock.
+
+"Can't Mahailey tend to things for you this morning?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "Everything but the separator, she can.
+But she can't fit all the parts together. It's a good deal of
+work, you know."
+
+"Now, Mother," said Ralph good-humouredly, as he emptied the
+syrup pitcher over his cakes, "you're prejudiced. Nobody ever
+thinks of skimming milk now-a-days. Every up-to-date farmer uses
+a separator."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler's pale eyes twinkled. "Mahailey and I will never be
+quite up-to-date, Ralph. We're old-fashioned, and I don't know but
+you'd better let us be. I could see the advantage of a separator
+if we milked half-a-dozen cows. It's a very ingenious machine.
+But it's a great deal more work to scald it and fit it together
+than it was to take care of the milk in the old way."
+
+"It won't be when you get used to it," Ralph assured her. He was
+the chief mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm
+implements and the automobiles did not give him enough to do, he
+went to town and bought machines for the house. As soon as
+Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to keep
+up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still
+newer one. The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to
+use, and patent flat-irons and oil-stoves drove her wild.
+
+Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald
+the separator while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working
+at it when his brother came in from the garage to wash his hands.
+
+"You really oughtn't to load mother up with things like this,
+Ralph," he exclaimed fretfully. "Did you ever try washing this
+damned thing yourself?"
+
+"Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think
+mother could."
+
+"Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there's no point in
+trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother."
+
+Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude's bluntness. "See
+here," he said persuasively, "don't you go encouraging her into
+thinking she can't change her ways. Mother's entitled to all the
+labour-saving devices we can get her."
+
+Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he
+was trying to fit together in their proper sequence. "Well, if
+this is labour-saving"
+
+The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He
+never quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful,
+how much Ralph would take from Claude.
+
+After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler
+drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just
+bought a blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes
+down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the
+cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
+the rats couldn't get at her vegetables.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so
+bad. The cats catches one most every day, too."
+
+"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board
+down at the garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool
+and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
+groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
+photographer's apparatus. Claude took his place at the
+carpenter's bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
+objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
+old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
+fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
+mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
+those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
+left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
+when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
+Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
+wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
+Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
+hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
+cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
+day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
+have put a boy through college decently.
+
+While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
+the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
+She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
+herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
+"spring-rocker" with one arm gone, but it wouldn't have been her
+idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
+contentment in them as she followed Claude's motions. She watched
+him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
+her lap.
+
+"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about
+nothin', is he?"
+
+"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
+yesterday. We went to the circus together."
+
+Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two
+boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked
+him first rate. He's a little feller, though. He ain't big like
+you, is he? I guess he ain't as tall as Mr. Ralph, even."
+
+"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though,
+and gets through a lot of work."
+
+"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
+foreigners works hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
+the circus. Maybe they don't have circuses like our'n, over where
+he come from."
+
+Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
+dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
+smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
+too.
+
+Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
+months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
+family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
+pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
+nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
+Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
+one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
+
+Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
+savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
+her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
+an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to
+bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
+often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
+of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
+to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
+sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
+of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
+half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
+their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
+not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
+teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
+forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
+by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
+of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
+packages. "That's a big A." she would murmur, "and that there's a
+little a."
+
+Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
+her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
+the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
+the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
+lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
+difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
+knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
+off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
+her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
+thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
+a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
+Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
+touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
+little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
+thing about the kitchen.
+
+On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
+liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
+he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
+creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
+trailed across the high pastures to a wild-plum thicket at the
+north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
+days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
+to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
+sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
+part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
+over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
+denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
+where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
+
+"Mother," he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
+to her alone, "I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
+the State University."
+
+She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
+
+"But why, Claude?"
+
+"Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
+Temple aren't much good. Most of them are just preachers who
+couldn't make a living at preaching."
+
+The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
+his mother's face. "Son, don't say such things. I can't believe
+but teachers are more interested in their students when they are
+concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
+Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
+University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
+cases."
+
+"Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
+they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
+Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He's
+sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn't
+get them he'd lose his job. I wish he'd never got me. Most of the
+fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did."
+
+"But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
+time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
+larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
+are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I've heard that
+dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
+more money, and you couldn't live as cheaply as you do at the
+Chapins'."
+
+Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
+a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
+at him wistfully. "I'm sure you must be able to study better in a
+quiet, serious atmosphere," she said.
+
+He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
+unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
+enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
+faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
+was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
+fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
+her understand.
+
+His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
+card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such
+things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only
+another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
+education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
+not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
+was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
+The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
+of history.
+
+Nat Wheeler didn't care where his son went to school, but he,
+too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
+cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
+there looked shabbier they were less likely to become too
+knowing, and to be offensively intelligent at home. However, he
+referred the matter to Bayliss one day when he was in town.
+
+"Claude's got some notion he wants to go to the State University
+this winter."
+
+Bayliss at once assumed that wise,
+better-be-prepared-for-the-worst expression which had made him
+seem shrewd and seasoned from boyhood. "I don't see any point in
+changing unless he's got good reasons."
+
+"Well, he thinks that bunch of parsons at the Temple don't make
+first-rate teachers."
+
+"I expect they can teach Claude quite a bit yet. If he gets in
+with that fast football crowd at the State, there'll be no
+holding him." For some reason Bayliss detested football. "This
+athletic business is a good deal over-done. If Claude wants
+exercise, he might put in the fall wheat."
+
+That night Mr. Wheeler brought the subject up at supper,
+questioned Claude, and tried to get at the cause of his
+discontent. His manner was jocular, as usual, and Claude hated
+any public discussion of his personal affairs. He was afraid of
+his father's humour when it got too near him.
+
+Claude might have enjoyed the large and somewhat gross cartoons
+with which Mr. Wheeler enlivened daily life, had they been of any
+other authorship. But he unreasonably wanted his father to be the
+most dignified, as he was certainly the handsomest and most
+intelligent, man in the community. Moreover, Claude couldn't bear
+ridicule very well. He squirmed before he was hit; saw it coming,
+invited it. Mr. Wheeler had observed this trait in him when he
+was a little chap, called it false pride, and often purposely
+outraged his feelings to harden him, as he had hardened Claude's
+mother, who was afraid of everything but schoolbooks and
+prayer-meetings when he first married her. She was still more or
+less bewildered, but she had long ago got over any fear of him
+and any dread of living with him. She accepted everything about
+her husband as part of his rugged masculinity, and of that she
+was proud, in her quiet way.
+
+Claude had never quite forgiven his father for some of his
+practical jokes. One warm spring day, when he was a boisterous
+little boy of five, playing in and out of the house, he heard his
+mother entreating Mr. Wheeler to go down to the orchard and pick
+the cherries from a tree that hung loaded. Claude remembered that
+she persisted rather complainingly, saying that the cherries were
+too high for her to reach, and that even if she had a ladder it
+would hurt her back. Mr. Wheeler was always annoyed if his wife
+referred to any physical weakness, especially if she complained
+about her back. He got up and went out. After a while he
+returned. "All right now, Evangeline," he called cheerily as he
+passed through the kitchen. "Cherries won't give you any trouble.
+You and Claude can run along and pick 'em as easy as can be."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler trustfully put on her sunbonnet, gave Claude a
+little pail and took a big one herself, and they went down the
+pasture hill to the orchard, fenced in on the low land by the
+creek. The ground had been ploughed that spring to make it hold
+moisture, and Claude was running happily along in one of the
+furrows, when he looked up and beheld a sight he could never
+forget. The beautiful, round-topped cherry tree, full of green
+leaves and red fruit,--his father had sawed it through! It lay on
+the ground beside its bleeding stump. With one scream Claude
+became a little demon. He threw away his tin pail, jumped about
+howling and kicking the loose earth with his copper-toed shoes,
+until his mother was much more concerned for him than for the
+tree.
+
+"Son, son," she cried, "it's your father's tree. He has a perfect
+right to cut it down if he wants to. He's often said the trees
+were too thick in here. Maybe it will be better for the others."
+
+"'Tain't so! He's a damn fool, damn fool!" Claude bellowed, still
+hopping and kicking, almost choking with rage and hate.
+
+His mother dropped on her knees beside him. "Claude, stop! I'd
+rather have the whole orchard cut down than hear you say such
+things."
+
+After she got him quieted they picked the cherries and went back
+to the house. Claude had promised her that he would say nothing,
+but his father must have noticed the little boy's angry eyes
+fixed upon him all through dinner, and his expression of scorn.
+Even then his flexible lips were only too well adapted to hold
+the picture of that feeling. For days afterward Claude went down
+to the orchard and watched the tree grow sicker, wilt and wither
+away. God would surely punish a man who could do that, he
+thought.
+
+A violent temper and physical restlessness were the most
+conspicuous things about Claude when he was a little boy. Ralph
+was docile, and had a precocious sagacity for keeping out of
+trouble. Quiet in manner, he was fertile in devising mischief,
+and easily persuaded his older brother, who was always looking
+for something to do, to execute his plans. It was usually Claude
+who was caught red-handed. Sitting mild and contemplative on his
+quilt on the floor, Ralph would whisper to Claude that it might
+be amusing to climb up and take the clock from the shelf, or to
+operate the sewing-machine. When they were older, and played out
+of doors, he had only to insinuate that Claude was afraid, to
+make him try a frosted axe with his tongue, or jump from the shed
+roof.
+
+The usual hardships of country boyhood were not enough for
+Claude; he imposed physical tests and penances upon himself.
+Whenever he burned his finger, he followed Mahailey's advice and
+held his hand close to the stove to "draw out the fire." One year
+he went to school all winter in his jacket, to make himself
+tough. His mother would button him up in his overcoat and put his
+dinner-pail in his hand and start him off. As soon as he got out
+of sight of the house, he pulled off his coat, rolled it under
+his arm, and scudded along the edge of the frozen fields,
+arriving at the frame schoolhouse panting and shivering, but very
+well pleased with himself.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude waited for his elders to change their mind about where he
+should go to school; but no one seemed much concerned, not even
+his mother.
+
+Two years ago, the young man whom Mrs. Wheeler called "Brother
+Weldon" had come out from Lincoln, preaching in little towns and
+country churches, and recruiting students for the institution at
+which he taught in the winter. He had convinced Mrs. Wheeler that
+his college was the safest possible place for a boy who was
+leaving home for the first time.
+
+Claude's mother was not discriminating about preachers. She
+believed them all chosen and sanctified, and was never happier
+than when she had one in the house to cook for and wait upon. She
+made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her
+roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent
+the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at
+mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,
+downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His
+top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was
+parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little
+ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up
+as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who
+liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely
+"what part of the chicken he would prefer," in order to hear him
+murmur, "A little of the white meat, if you please," while he
+drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a
+dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on
+a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a
+red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,
+and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the
+automobile.
+
+Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,
+and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always
+absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the
+visitor, did not notice Claude's scornful silences until
+Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over
+the stove one day: "Mr. Claude, he don't like the preacher. He
+just ain't got no use fur him, but don't you let on."
+
+As a result of Brother Weldon's sojourn at the farm, Claude was
+sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the
+things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to
+shape his destiny.
+
+When the second week of September came round, he threw a few
+clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother
+and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train
+for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
+Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
+car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
+was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
+
+Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
+was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
+lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
+he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
+himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
+with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
+continue to live with the tiresome Chapins? The Chapin household
+consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
+twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,--and he was still going to
+school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
+house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
+done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
+jobs from churches and religious societies; he "supplied" the
+pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
+college and the Young Men's Christian Association. Claude's
+weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
+necessary to their comfort.
+
+Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
+it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
+He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
+track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
+natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
+ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
+Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
+gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
+oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile--it had been
+thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
+in lieu of a foundation--re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
+voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
+
+Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude's classmates. She was not as
+dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
+the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
+silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
+good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
+Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
+while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
+can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
+to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
+house--it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
+do--until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
+the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
+pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
+decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
+their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
+might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
+care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from
+Annabelle's attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences
+of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born
+with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a
+personal attribute.
+
+The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought
+up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When
+he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,
+because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His
+clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high
+and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his
+trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The
+tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn't know what he
+wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he
+needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.
+When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul's church on Sunday
+morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs
+down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old
+men and young, and decided there wasn't another pair of checked
+pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and
+never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them
+wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a
+well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could
+recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into
+the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he
+was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to
+seem indifferent.
+
+Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal
+allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or
+pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard
+with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost
+in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean
+something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is
+not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap
+substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who
+flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring
+a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy
+compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in
+the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home
+for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him
+and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the
+volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at
+his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or
+more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car
+and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of
+little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,
+and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays
+stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive
+made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the
+grey sky.
+
+Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an
+oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a
+frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he
+was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished
+roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could
+have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came
+in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting
+on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on
+the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking
+bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.
+
+"I been lookin' for you every day," said Mrs. Voigt when she
+brought his plate. "I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet
+pertaters, ja."
+
+"Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders."
+
+She giggled. "Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes
+dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons
+in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain't got no boys
+mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?"
+
+She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching
+every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting
+it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking
+what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited
+little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether
+working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He
+didn't believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was
+common only in what he broadly called "the West." He bought a big
+cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh
+air until the passenger whistled in.
+
+After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books
+again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they
+unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the
+great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A
+starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly
+ridges between the furrows.
+
+Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and
+Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and
+slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and
+again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,
+when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his
+father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler
+custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it
+was understood that some member of the family would act in that
+capacity.
+
+Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home
+before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to
+him since he went over this road three months ago.
+
+As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated
+at the State University for special work in European History. The
+year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for
+some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to
+change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The
+course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as
+much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of
+historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for
+full notebooks. Claude's were of the fullest. He worked early and
+late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and
+went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was
+studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do
+with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How
+often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see
+Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his
+independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor
+spoke without notes,--he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing
+his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which
+Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like
+a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,
+and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely
+personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.
+
+Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that
+the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was
+fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His
+reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to
+him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief
+difficulties had always been that he could not make himself
+believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that
+were all, then life was not worth the trouble.
+
+The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got
+to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after
+a football game between the Temple eleven and the State
+University team--merely a practice game for the latter. Claude
+was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the
+first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the
+right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and
+broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.
+He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men
+congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint
+that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place
+for him on the University team.
+
+Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was
+talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the
+grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of
+her own construction, bedecked with the Temple colours and
+blowing a child's horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.
+He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away
+to the dressing shed.... What was the use, if you were always
+with the wrong crowd?
+
+Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him
+aside and said affably: "Come home to supper with me tonight,
+Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the
+Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven't you?"
+
+"They're hardly clothes to go visiting in," Claude replied
+doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, that doesn't matter! We're all boys at home. Mother wouldn't
+mind if you came in your track things."
+
+Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by
+imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the
+history class, and they had several times talked together.
+Hitherto Claude had felt that he "couldn't make Erlich out," but
+this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they
+became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps
+less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at
+finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he
+scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar
+with a broken edge,--wretched economies he had been trained to
+observe.
+
+They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when
+Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,
+terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a
+glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,
+above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,
+seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and
+they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man
+in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were
+alone.
+
+"Five of these are my brothers," said his host, "and the rest are
+friends."
+
+The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk
+about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his
+brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,
+agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but
+they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never
+before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one
+another. To him they were very cordial; the one who was lying
+down came forward to shake hands, keeping the place in his book
+with his finger.
+
+On a table in the middle of the room were pipes and boxes of
+tobacco, cigars in a glass jar, and a big Chinese bowl full of
+cigarettes. This provisionment seemed the more remarkable to
+Claude because at home he had to smoke in the cowshed. The number
+of books astonished him almost as much; the wainscoting all
+around the room was built up in open bookcases, stuffed with
+volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and
+hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night
+before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck
+of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This
+head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention
+more than anything else in the room, and for some reason
+instantly made him wish he lived there.
+
+Julius brought in his mother, and when they went to supper Claude
+was seated beside her at one end of the long table. Mrs. Erlich
+seemed to him very young to be the head of such a family. Her
+hair was still brown, and she wore it drawn over her ears and
+twisted in two little horns, like the ladies in old
+daguerreotypes. Her face, too, suggested a daguerreotype; there
+was something old-fashioned and picturesque about it. Her skin
+had the soft whiteness of white flowers that have been drenched
+by rain. She talked with quick gestures, and her decided little
+nod was quaint and very personal. Her hazel-coloured eyes peered
+expectantly over her nose-glasses, always watching to see things
+turn out wonderfully well; always looking for some good German
+fairy in the cupboard or the cake-box, or in the steaming vapor
+of wash-day.
+
+The boys were discussing an engagement that had just been
+announced, and Mrs. Erlich began to tell Claude a long story
+about how this brilliant young man had come to Lincoln and met
+this beautiful young girl, who was already engaged to a cold and
+academic youth, and how after many heart-burnings the beautiful
+girl had broken with the wrong man and become betrothed to the
+right one, and now they were so happy, and every one, she asked
+Claude to believe, was equally happy! In the middle of her
+narrative Julius reminded her smilingly that since Claude didn't
+know these people, he would hardly be interested in their
+romance, but she merely looked at him over her nose-glasses and
+said, "And is that so, Herr Julius!" One could see that she was a
+match for them.
+
+The conversation went racing from one thing to another. The
+brothers began to argue hotly about a new girl who was visiting
+in town; whether she was pretty, how pretty she was, whether she
+was naive. To Claude this was like talk in a play. He had never
+heard a living person discussed and analysed thus before. He had
+never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much
+zest. Here there was none of the poisonous reticence he had
+always associated with family gatherings, nor the awkwardness of
+people sitting with their hands in their lap, facing each other,
+each one guarding his secret or his suspicion, while he hunted
+for a safe subject to talk about. Their fertility of phrase, too,
+astonished him; how could people find so much to say about one
+girl? To be sure, a good deal of it sounded far-fetched to him,
+but he sadly admitted that in such matters he was no judge. When
+they went back to the living room Julius began to pick out airs
+on his guitar, and the bearded brother sat down to read. Otto,
+the youngest, seeing a group of students passing the house, ran
+out on to the lawn and called them in,--two boys, and a girl
+with red cheeks and a fur stole. Claude had made for a corner,
+and was perfectly content to be an on-looker, but Mrs. Erlich
+soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the
+parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an
+engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go
+and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she
+showed him a portrait of her great-grandfather, who was an
+officer in Napoleon's army. To explain how this came about was a
+long story.
+
+As she talked to Claude, Mrs. Erlich discovered that his eyes
+were not really pale, but only looked so because of his light
+lashes. They could say a great deal when they looked squarely
+into hers, and she liked what they said. She soon found out that
+he was discontented; how he hated the Temple school, and why his
+mother wished him to go there.
+
+When the three who had been called in from the sidewalk took
+their leave, Claude rose also. They were evidently familiars of
+the house, and their careless exit, with a gay "Good-night,
+everybody!" gave him no practical suggestion as to what he ought
+to say or how he was to get out. Julius made things more
+difficult by telling him to sit down, as it wasn't time to go
+yet. But Mrs. Erlich said it was time; he would have a long ride
+out to Temple Place.
+
+It was really very easy. She walked to the door with him and gave
+him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. "You will come often
+to see us. We are going to be friends." Her forehead, with its
+neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude's chin,
+and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression,
+as if--as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly,
+nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
+
+"It's been lovely," he murmured to her, quite without
+embarrassment, and in happy unconsciousness he turned the knob
+and passed out through the glass door.
+
+While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter
+country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude
+went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
+to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
+exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
+first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
+which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
+were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
+poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
+those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
+discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
+machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
+Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
+they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
+so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
+indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.
+
+Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs', not as often
+as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
+University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
+it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
+looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
+was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
+hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
+the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
+deal about music.
+
+Claude didn't wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
+he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
+Erlichs' house, looking at the lighted windows of the
+sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
+went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
+If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
+that helped, of course.
+
+Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tried to think
+things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
+would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
+He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
+dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
+to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
+person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
+this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
+foreign. It wasn't American to explain yourself; you didn't have
+to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't; that
+Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy. You weren't
+supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,--if you
+tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself
+talk. Since you never said anything, you didn't form the habit of
+thinking. If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought
+something new.
+
+But all the people he met at the Erlichs' talked. If they asked
+him about a play or a book and he said it was "no good," they at
+once demanded why. The Erlichs thought him a clam, but Claude
+sometimes thought himself amazing. Could it really be he, who was
+airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself
+using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his
+mind were associated only with the printed page. When he suddenly
+realized that he was using a word for the first time, and
+probably mispronouncing it, he would become as much confused as
+if he were trying to pass a lead dollar, would blush and stammer
+and let some one finish his sentence for him.
+
+Claude couldn't resist occasionally dropping in at the Erlichs'
+in the afternoon; then the boys were away, and he could have Mrs.
+Erlich to himself for half-an-hour. When she talked to him she
+taught him so much about life. He loved to hear her sing
+sentimental German songs as she worked; "Spinn, spinn, du Tochter
+mein." He didn't know why, but he simply adored it! Every time he
+went away from her he felt happy and full of kindness, and
+thought about beech woods and walled towns, or about Carl Schurz
+and the Romantic revolution.
+
+He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the
+holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took
+him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions
+that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and
+seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude
+thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he
+believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old
+friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working
+rhymes and songs. Surely these were fine things to put into
+little cakes! After Claude left her, he did something a Wheeler
+didn't do; he went down to O street and sent her a box of the
+reddest roses he could find. In his pocket was the little note
+she had written to thank him.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+It was beginning to grow dark when Claude reached the farm. While
+Ralph stopped to put away the car, he walked on alone to the
+house. He never came back without emotion,--try as he would to
+pass lightly over these departures and returns which were all in
+the day's work. When he came up the hill like this, toward the
+tall house with its lighted windows, something always clutched at
+his heart. He both loved and hated to come home. He was always
+disappointed, and yet he always felt the rightness of returning
+to his own place. Even when it broke his spirit and humbled his
+pride, he felt it was right that he should be thus humbled. He
+didn't question that the lowest state of mind was the truest, and
+that the less a man thought of himself, the more likely he was to
+be correct in his estimate.
+
+Approaching the door, Claude stopped a moment and peered in at
+the kitchen window. The table was set for supper, and Mahailey
+was at the stove, stirring something in a big iron pot; cornmeal
+mush, probably,--she often made it for herself now that her teeth
+had begun to fail. She stood leaning over, embracing the pot with
+one arm, and with the other she beat the stiff contents, nodding
+her head in time to this rotary movement. Confused emotions
+surged up in Claude. He went in quickly and gave her a bearish
+hug.
+
+Her face wrinkled up in the foolish grin he knew so well. "Lord,
+how you scared me, Mr. Claude! A little more'n I'd 'a' had my
+mush all over the floor. You lookin' fine, you nice boy, you!"
+
+He knew Mahailey was gladder to see him come home than any one
+except his mother. Hearing Mrs. Wheeler's wandering, uncertain
+steps in the enclosed stairway, he opened the door and ran
+halfway up to meet her, putting his arm about her with the almost
+painful tenderness he always felt, but seldom was at liberty to
+show. She reached up both hands and stroked his hair for a
+moment, laughing as one does to a little boy, and telling him she
+believed it was redder every time he came back.
+
+"Have we got all the corn in, Mother?"
+
+"No, Claude, we haven't. You know we're always behindhand. It's
+been fine, open weather for husking, too. But at least we've got
+rid of that miserable Jerry; so there's something to be thankful
+for. He had one of his fits of temper in town one day, when he
+was hitching up to come home, and Leonard Dawson saw him beat one
+of our horses with the neck-yoke. Leonard told your father, and
+spoke his mind, and your father discharged Jerry. If you or Ralph
+had told him, he most likely wouldn't have done anything about
+it. But I guess all fathers are the same." She chuckled
+confidingly, leaning on Claude's arm as they descended the
+stairs.
+
+"I guess so. Did he hurt the horse much? Which one was it?"
+
+"The little black, Pompey. I believe he is rather a mean horse.
+The men said one of the bones over the eye was broken, but he
+would probably come round all right."
+
+"Pompey isn't mean; he's nervous. All the horses hated Jerry, and
+they had good reason to." Claude jerked his shoulders to shake
+off disgusting recollections of this mongrel man which flashed
+back into his mind. He had seen things happen in the barn that
+he positively couldn't tell his father. Mr. Wheeler came into the
+kitchen and stopped on his way upstairs long enough to say,
+"Hello, Claude. You look pretty well."
+
+"Yes, sir. I'm all right, thank you."
+
+"Bayliss tells me you've been playing football a good deal."
+
+"Not more than usual. We played half a dozen games; generally got
+licked. The State has a fine team, though."
+
+"I ex-pect," Mr. Wheeler drawled as he strode upstairs.
+
+Supper went as usual. Dan kept grinning and blinking at Claude,
+trying to discover whether he had already been informed of
+Jerry's fate. Ralph told him the neighbourhood gossip: Gus
+Yoeder, their German neighbour, was bringing suit against a
+farmer who had shot his dog. Leonard Dawson was going to marry
+Susie Grey. She was the girl on whose account Leonard had slapped
+Bayliss, Claude remembered.
+
+After supper Ralph and Mr. Wheeler went off in the car to a
+Christmas entertainment at the country schoolhouse. Claude and
+his mother sat down for a quiet talk by the hard-coal burner in
+the living room upstairs. Claude liked this room, especially when
+his father was not there. The old carpet, the faded chairs, the
+secretary book-case, the spotty engraving with all the scenes
+from Pilgrim's Progress that hung over the sofa,--these things
+made him feel at home. Ralph was always proposing to re-furnish
+the room in Mission oak, but so far Claude and his mother had
+saved it.
+
+Claude drew up his favourite chair and began to tell Mrs. Wheeler
+about the Erlich boys and their mother. She listened, but he
+could see that she was much more interested in hearing about the
+Chapins, and whether Edward's throat had improved, and where he
+had preached this fall. That was one of the disappointing things
+about coming home; he could never interest his mother in new
+things or people unless they in some way had to do with the
+church. He knew, too, she was always hoping to hear that he at
+last felt the need of coming closer to the church. She did not
+harass him about these things, but she had told him once or twice
+that nothing could happen in the world which would give her so
+much pleasure as to see him reconciled to Christ. He realized, as
+he talked to her about the Erlichs, that she was wondering
+whether they weren't very "worldly" people, and was apprehensive
+about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
+and he went to bed early.
+
+Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
+thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
+fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
+not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
+But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
+avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
+did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
+would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
+faculties free. He didn't want to be like the young men who said
+in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
+their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
+
+In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
+funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
+coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
+dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
+escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
+way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
+lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing
+but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
+never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
+yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
+that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
+from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
+would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay.... He could
+not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What
+did it mean, that verse in the Bible, "He shall not suffer His
+holy one to see corruption"?
+
+If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
+fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
+had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
+something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
+about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
+taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
+theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
+faith. "Faith," as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
+Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
+he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
+timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
+they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
+mother.
+
+Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
+Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in
+God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on
+the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at "Blessed are the meek,"
+until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant
+exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+On the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking
+along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.
+Wheeler's timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,
+so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked
+elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops
+seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to
+the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than
+a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that
+wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.
+It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.
+They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had
+brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell
+Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt
+that this was more Ernest's fault than his own; Ernest was such a
+literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they
+forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the
+red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold
+leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it
+honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the
+stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes
+took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the
+creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
+melting ice.
+
+When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude
+again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and
+reasonable mood.
+
+"What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to
+farm all your life?"
+
+"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before
+now. What makes you ask that?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future
+sometime. And you're so practical."
+
+"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big
+word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I'm
+going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a
+nice girl and bring her back."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"
+
+"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever
+settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this rate there
+isn't much in it?"
+
+"In what?"
+
+"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
+Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad
+to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel
+sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a
+holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to
+bed--nothing has happened."
+
+"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
+own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
+see my friends like this, it's enough for me."
+
+"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there
+ought to be something--well, something splendid about life,
+sometimes."
+
+Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
+walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. "You
+Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
+warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
+very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make
+the most of little things."
+
+"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
+Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
+things."
+
+"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
+idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
+sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
+vanity to help them along, too."
+
+Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at
+a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, "The fact
+is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
+and clothes and Sundays off, don't you?"
+
+Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I
+think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
+down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess."
+
+Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about
+over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
+
+The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler
+watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside
+a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving
+along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at
+that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so
+unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was
+on the wrong side.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in
+the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove
+where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art
+students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in
+this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having
+to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked
+him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and
+greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the
+campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between
+boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,
+Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,--different
+from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
+was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
+
+Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what
+might be called a "carriage," and she had altogether more manner
+and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and
+curly,--the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of
+a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
+and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to
+pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if
+they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her
+"the Georgia peach." She was considered very pretty, and the
+University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since
+then her vogue had somewhat declined.
+
+Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town
+with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her
+tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always
+dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked
+to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
+slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and
+be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in
+his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling
+him that he had "a magnificent physique," a compliment which
+covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
+
+Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if
+she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she
+should explain her absences to him,--tell him how often she
+washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
+
+One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the
+campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
+
+"Yes, I'm going out," Claude replied. "I've promised to teach
+Miss Millmore to skate. Won't you come along and help me?"
+
+Julius laughed indulgently. "Oh, no! Some other time. I don't
+want to break in on that."
+
+"Nonsense! You could teach her better than I."
+
+"Oh, I haven't the courage!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"No, I don't. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?"
+
+Julius made a little grimace. "She wrote some awfully slushy
+letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house
+one night."
+
+"Didn't you slap him?" Claude demanded, turning red.
+
+"Well, I would have thought I would," said Julius smiling, "but I
+didn't. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I've been wary
+of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of
+peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand."
+
+"I don't think so," replied Claude haughtily. "She's only
+kind-hearted."
+
+"Perhaps you're right. But I'm terribly afraid of girls who are
+too kindhearted," Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude
+a word of warning for some time.
+
+Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to
+the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning
+he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last
+excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude
+avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She
+was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by
+clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a
+degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale
+cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been
+sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,--though
+when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager
+susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He
+was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of
+trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father
+kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had
+given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost
+Hippolytean pride in candour.
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That
+spring Mrs. Erlich's first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,
+who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as
+soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement
+approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The
+Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so
+the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family
+invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding
+which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.
+There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich
+remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the
+society of her own sex.
+
+One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich
+reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. "For me,"
+she said with decision, "you may put down Claude Wheeler."
+
+This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
+
+"You don't mean it, Mother," the oldest son protested. "Poor old
+Claude wouldn't know what it was all about,--and one stick can
+spoil a dinner party."
+
+Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. "You will
+see; your cousin Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy
+than in any of the others!"
+
+Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might
+still yield her point. "For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn't any
+dinner clothes," he murmured. She nodded to him. "That has been
+attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded
+him, he told me he could easily afford it."
+
+The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed
+they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down
+"Claude Wheeler" with a flourish.
+
+If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing
+to Claude's. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame
+Schroeder-Schatz's recital, and on the evening of the concert,
+when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him
+over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new
+black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see
+what figure her escort cut.
+
+Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, and presented
+himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich's
+eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly
+his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She
+laughed and clapped her hands.
+
+"Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and
+wonder where I got him!"
+
+Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;
+opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into
+her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and
+smelling salts,--there was even a little silver box of peppermint
+drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long
+gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was
+ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about
+her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,
+they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air
+was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
+
+The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,
+Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than
+her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an
+enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great
+contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a
+really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as
+food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son.
+Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched
+attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing
+rhinestones.
+
+After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining
+room, she dropped her cousin's arm and stopped before Claude, who
+stood at attention behind his chair.
+
+"If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk
+together. We have been very far separated," she said.
+
+She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at
+once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green
+scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders;
+but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed
+air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude
+reminded her about the draft.
+
+"Draft?" she said lifting her chin, "there is no draft here."
+
+She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned,
+what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When
+she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she
+seemed to know a good deal about farming and live-stock. She was
+disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to
+other farmers. "If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire
+land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county," she
+declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to
+find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard
+one.
+
+Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented
+to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she
+beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head,
+smiling ruefully.
+
+"I'm sorry I'm so stupid, but I don't know one note from
+another."
+
+She tapped his sleeve. "Well, never mind. I may want the piano
+moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?"
+
+When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich's bedroom,
+powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked,
+"What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry
+to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law."
+
+"Ah, if I only had!" sighed Mrs. Erlich.
+
+"Or," continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on
+her large carriage shoes, "if you were but a few years younger,
+it might not yet be too late. Oh, don't be a fool, Augusta! Such
+things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a
+widow than to be tied to a sick man--like a stone about my neck!
+What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Jas
+ist ein Kreuz ich trage!" She smote her bosom, on the left side.
+
+Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame
+Schroeder-Schatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and
+kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good-night.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+One warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the
+Chapins', copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an
+examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of
+Jeanne d'Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in
+ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash
+of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many
+hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the
+fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would
+not dismiss the case lightly.
+
+Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the
+matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important
+thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the
+Proces, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her
+replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It
+seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of
+whom Jeanne said, "the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it
+speaks in the French tongue." Claude flattered himself that he
+had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a
+cold estimate of the girl's motives and character as indicated by
+the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the
+change wrought in her by imprisonment and by "the fear of the
+fire."
+
+When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat
+contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all
+his conscientious study he really knew very little more about
+the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his
+mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in
+the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of
+her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen
+where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the
+picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting
+it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she
+said,--it must have been very fragmentary,--but from that time on
+he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a
+living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as
+now, and now as miraculous as then.
+
+It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could
+perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a word, a phrase, it could
+renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again
+in the minds of children. At that time he had never seen a map of
+France, and had a very poor opinion of any place farther away
+than Chicago; yet he was perfectly prepared for the legend of
+Joan of Arc, and often thought about her when he was bringing in
+his cobs in the evening, or when he was sent to the windmill for
+water and stood shaking in the cold while the chilled pump
+brought it slowly up. He pictured her then very much as he did
+now; about her figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust,
+with soldiers in it... the banner with lilies... a great
+church... cities with walls.
+
+On this balmy spring afternoon, Claude felt softened and
+reconciled to the world. Like Gibbon, he was sorry to have
+finished his labour,--and he could not see anything else as
+interesting ahead. He must soon be going home now. There would be
+a few examinations to sit through at the Temple, a few more
+evenings with the Erlichs, trips to the Library to carry back the
+books he had been using,--and then he would suddenly find himself
+with nothing to do but take the train for Frankfort.
+
+He rose with a sigh and began to fasten his history papers
+between covers. Glancing out of the window, he decided that he
+would walk into town and carry his thesis, which was due today;
+the weather was too fine to sit bumping in a street car. The
+truth was, he wished to prolong his relations with his manuscript
+as far as possible.
+
+He struck off by the road,--it could scarcely be called a street,
+since it ran across raw prairie land where the buffalo-peas were
+in blossom. Claude walked slower than was his custom, his straw
+hat pushed back on his head and the blaze of the sun full in his
+face. His body felt light in the scented wind, and he listened
+drowsily to the larks, singing on dried weeds and sunflower
+stalks. At this season their song is almost painful to hear, it
+is so sweet. He sometimes thought of this walk long afterward; it
+was memorable to him, though he could not say why.
+
+On reaching the University, he went directly to the Department of
+European History, where he was to leave his thesis on a long
+table, with a pile of others. He rather dreaded this, and was
+glad when, just as he entered, the Professor came out from his
+private office and took the bound manuscript into his own hands,
+nodding cordially.
+
+"Your thesis? Oh yes, Jeanne d'Arc. The Proces. I had forgotten.
+Interesting material, isn't it?" He opened the cover and ran over
+the pages. "I suppose you acquitted her on the evidence?"
+
+Claude blushed. "Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, now you might read what Michelet has to say about her.
+There's an old translation in the Library. Did you enjoy working
+on it?"
+
+"I did, very much." Claude wished to heaven he could think of
+something to say.
+
+"You've got a good deal out of your course, altogether, haven't
+you? I'll be interested to see what you do next year. Your work
+has been very satisfactory to me." The Professor went back into
+his study, and Claude was pleased to see that he carried the
+manuscript with him and did not leave it on the table with the
+others.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Between haying and harvest that summer Ralph and Mr. Wheeler
+drove to Denver in the big car, leaving Claude and Dan to
+cultivate the corn. When they returned Mr. Wheeler announced that
+he had a secret. After several days of reticence, during which he
+shut himself up in the sitting-room writing letters, and passed
+mysterious words and winks with Ralph at table, he disclosed a
+project which swept away all Claude's plans and purposes.
+
+On the return trip from Denver Mr. Wheeler had made a detour down
+into Yucca county, Colorado, to visit an old friend who was in
+difficulties. Tom Wested was a Maine man, from Wheeler's own
+neighbourhood. Several years ago he had lost his wife. Now his
+health had broken down, and the Denver doctors said he must
+retire from business and get into a low altitude. He wanted to go
+back to Maine and live among his own people, but was too much
+discouraged and frightened about his condition even to undertake
+the sale of his ranch and live stock. Mr. Wheeler had been able
+to help his friend, and at the same time did a good stroke of
+business for himself. He owned a farm in Maine, his share of his
+father's estate, which for years he had rented for little more
+than the up-keep. By making over this property, and assuming
+certain mortgages, he got Wested's fine, well-watered ranch in
+exchange. He paid him a good price for his cattle, and promised
+to take the sick man back to Maine and see him comfortably
+settled there. All this Mr. Wheeler explained to his family when
+he called them up to the living room one hot, breathless night
+after supper. Mrs. Wheeler, who seldom concerned herself with her
+husband's business affairs, asked absently why they bought more
+land, when they already had so much they could not farm half of
+it.
+
+"Just like a woman, Evangeline, just like a woman!" Mr. Wheeler
+replied indulgently. He was sitting in the full glare of the
+acetylene lamp, his neckband open, his collar and tie on the
+table beside him, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan. "You
+might as well ask me why I want to make more money, when I
+haven't spent all I've got."
+
+He intended, he said, to put Ralph on the Colorado ranch and
+"give the boy some responsibility." Ralph would have the help of
+Wested's foreman, an old hand in the cattle business, who had
+agreed to stay on under the new management. Mr. Wheeler assured
+his wife that he wasn't taking advantage of poor Wested; the
+timber on the Maine place was really worth a good deal of money;
+but because his father had always been so proud of his great pine
+woods, he had never, he said, just felt like turning a sawmill
+loose in them. Now he was trading a pleasant old farm that didn't
+bring in anything for a grama-grass ranch which ought to turn
+over a profit of ten or twelve thousand dollars in good cattle
+years, and wouldn't lose much in bad ones. He expected to spend
+about half his time out there with Ralph. "When I'm away," he
+remarked genially, "you and Mahailey won't have so much to do.
+You can devote yourselves to embroidery, so to speak."
+
+"If Ralph is to live in Colorado, and you are to be away from
+home half of the time, I don't see what is to become of this
+place," murmured Mrs. Wheeler, still in the dark.
+
+"Not necessary for you to see, Evangeline," her husband replied,
+stretching his big frame until the rocking chair creaked under
+him. "It will be Claude's business to look after that."
+
+"Claude?" Mrs. Wheeler brushed a lock of hair back from her damp
+forehead in vague alarm.
+
+"Of course." He looked with twinkling eyes at his son's straight,
+silent figure in the corner. "You've had about enough theology, I
+presume? No ambition to be a preacher? This winter I mean to turn
+the farm over to you and give you a chance to straighten things
+out. You've been dissatisfied with the way the place is run for
+some time, haven't you? Go ahead and put new blood into it. New
+ideas, if you want to; I've no objection. They're expensive, but
+let it go. You can fire Dan if you want, and get what help you
+need."
+
+Claude felt as if a trap had been sprung on him. He shaded his
+eyes with his hand. "I don't think I'm competent to run the place
+right," he said unsteadily.
+
+"Well, you don't think I am either, Claude, so we're up against
+it. It's always been my notion that the land was made for man,
+just as it's old Dawson's that man was created to work the land.
+I don't mind your siding with the Dawsons in this difference of
+opinion, if you can get their results."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rose and slipped quickly from the room, feeling her
+way down the dark staircase to the kitchen. It was dusky and
+quiet there. Mahailey sat in a corner, hemming dish-towels by the
+light of a smoky old brass lamp which was her own cherished
+luminary. Mrs. Wheeler walked up and down the long room in soft,
+silent agitation, both hands pressed tightly to her breast, where
+there was a physical ache of sympathy for Claude.
+
+She remembered kind Tom Wested. He had stayed over night with
+them several times, and had come to them for consolation after
+his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and
+loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler's fortuitous trip to Denver, the old
+pine-wood farm in Maine; were all things that fitted together and
+made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had
+been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and that for the first
+time he looked forward eagerly to going back to school. He was
+homesick for his friends, the Erlichs, and his mind was all the
+time upon the history course he meant to take.
+
+Yet all this would weigh nothing in the family councils probably
+he would not even speak of it--and he had not one substantial
+objection to offer to his father's wishes. His disappointment
+would be bitter. "Why, it will almost break his heart," she
+murmured aloud. Mahailey was a little deaf and heard nothing. She
+sat holding her work up to the light, driving her needle with a
+big brass thimble, nodding with sleepiness between stitches.
+Though Mrs. Wheeler was scarcely conscious of it, the old woman's
+presence was a comfort to her, as she walked up and down with her
+drifting, uncertain step.
+
+She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might
+get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she
+couldn't bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life
+hard to live; he suffered so much over little things,-and she
+suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments.
+Her husband's careless decisions did not disconcert her. If he
+declared that he would not plant a garden at all this year, she
+made no protest. It was Mahailey who grumbled. If he felt like
+eating roast beef and went out and killed a steer, she did the
+best she could to take care of the meat, and if some of it
+spoiled she tried not to worry. When she was not lost in
+religious meditation, she was likely to be thinking about some
+one of the old books she read over and over. Her personal life
+was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that
+rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude
+was concerned, she lived on another plane, dropped into the lower
+air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind,
+passionate human feelings.
+
+It had always been so. And now, as she grew older, and her flesh
+had almost ceased to be concerned with pain or pleasure, like the
+wasted wax images in old churches, it still vibrated with his
+feelings and became quick again for him. His chagrins shrivelled
+her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something ached in
+her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical
+contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and
+happened to think that he had been happy lately, she would lie
+softly and gratefully in her warm place.
+
+"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit," she sometimes whispered to him in
+her mind, when she wakened thus and thought of him. There was a
+singular light in his eyes when he smiled at her on one of his
+good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner
+kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she
+could always remember it in the dark,--a quick blue flash, tender
+and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright
+uncertainties.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The next few weeks were busy ones on the farm. Before the wheat
+harvest was over, Nat Wheeler packed his leather trunk, put on
+his "store clothes," and set off to take Tom Welted back to
+Maine. During his absence Ralph began to outfit for life in Yucca
+county. Ralph liked being a great man with the Frankfort
+merchants, and he had never before had such an opportunity as
+this. He bought a new shot gun, saddles, bridles, boots, long and
+short storm coats, a set of furniture for his own room, a
+fireless cooker, another music machine, and had them shipped to
+Colorado. His mother, who did not like phonograph music, and
+detested phonograph monologues, begged him to take the machine at
+home, but he assured her that she would be dull without it on
+winter evenings. He wanted one of the latest make, put out under
+the name of a great American inventor.
+
+Some of the ranches near Wested's were owned by New York men who
+brought their families out there in the summer. Ralph had heard
+about the dances they gave, and he way counting on being one of
+the guests. He asked Claude to give him his dress suit, since
+Claude wouldn't be needing it any more.
+
+"You can have it if you want it," said Claude indifferently "But
+it won't fit you."
+
+"I'll take it in to Fritz and have the pants cut off a little and
+the shoulders taken in," his brother replied lightly.
+
+Claude was impassive. "Go ahead. But if that old Dutch man takes
+a whack at it, it will look like the devil."
+
+"I think I'll let him try. Father won't say anything about what
+I've ordered for the house, but he isn't much for glad rags, you
+know." Without more ado he threw Claude's black clothes into the
+back seat of the Ford and ran into town to enlist the services of
+the German tailor.
+
+Mr. Wheeler, when he returned, thought Ralph had been rather free
+in expenditures, but Ralph told him it wouldn't do to take over
+the new place too modestly. "The ranchers out there are all
+high-fliers. If we go to squeezing nickels, they won't think we
+mean business."
+
+The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers'
+doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph's lavishness as
+he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to
+Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table.
+August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly
+whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph.
+Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude
+in town one day and shouted;
+
+"My God, Claude, there's nothing left in the furniture store for
+me and Susie! Ralph's bought everything but the coffins. He must
+be going to live like a prince out there."
+
+"I don't know anything about it," Claude answered coolly. "It's
+not my enterprise."
+
+"No, you've got to stay on the old place and make it pay the
+debts, I understand." Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude
+wouldn't have a chance to reply.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these
+preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair
+to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier.
+Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a
+good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with
+machinery and run errands in his car. She couldn't understand why
+he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money
+was invested.
+
+"Why, Claude," she said dreamily one day, "if your father were an
+older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail.
+Won't we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?"
+
+"Don't say anything, Mother. It's Father's money. He shan't think
+I want any of it."
+
+"I wish I could talk to Bayliss. Has he said anything?"
+
+"Not to me, he hasn't."
+
+Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and
+when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him
+bedding and table linen. He said he wasn't going to live like a
+savage, even in the sand hills. Mahailey was outraged to see the
+linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many
+years packed into boxes. She was out of temper most of the time
+now, and went about muttering to herself.
+
+The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to
+live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork
+quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep,
+washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old
+mother, and given to her for a marriage portion. The patchwork on
+each was done in a different design; one was the popular
+"log-cabin" pattern, another the "laurel-leaf," the third the
+"blazing star." This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and
+she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it "to give Mr.
+Claude when he got married."
+
+She slept on her feather bed in winter, and in summer she put it
+away in the attic. The attic was reached by a ladder which,
+because of her weak back, Mrs. Wheeler very seldom climbed. Up
+there Mahailey had things her own way, and thither she often
+retired to air the bedding stored away there, or to look at the
+pictures in the piles of old magazines. Ralph facetiously called
+the attic "Mahailey's library."
+
+One day, while things were being packed for the western ranch,
+Mrs. Wheeler, going to the foot of the ladder to call Mahailey,
+narrowly escaped being knocked down by a large feather bed which
+came plumping through the trap door. A moment later Mahailey
+herself descended backwards, holding to the rungs with one hand,
+and in the other arm carrying her quilts.
+
+"Why, Mahailey," gasped Mrs. Wheeler. "It's not winter yet;
+whatever are you getting your bed for?"
+
+"I'm just a-goin' to lay on my fedder bed," she broke out, "or
+direc'ly I won't have none. I ain't a-goin' to have Mr. Ralph
+carryin' off my quilts my mudder pieced fur me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler tried to reason with her, but the old woman took up
+her bed in her arms and staggered down the hall with it,
+muttering and tossing her head like a horse in fly-time.
+
+That afternoon Ralph brought a barrel and a bundle of straw into
+the kitchen and told Mahailey to carry up preserves and canned
+fruit, and he would pack them. She went obediently to the cellar,
+and Ralph took off his coat and began to line the barrel with
+straw. He was some time in doing this, but still Mahailey had not
+returned. He went to the head of the stairs and whistled.
+
+"I'm a-comin', Mr. Ralph, I'm a-comin'! Don't hurry me, I don't
+want to break nothin'."
+
+Ralph waited a few minutes. "What are you doing down there,
+Mahailey?" he fumed. "I could have emptied the whole cellar by
+this time. I suppose I'll have to do it myself."
+
+"I'm a-comin'. You'd git yourself all dusty down here." She came
+breathlessly up the stairs, carrying a hamper basket full of
+jars, her hands and face streaked with black.
+
+"Well, I should say it is dusty!" Ralph snorted. "You might clean
+your fruit closet once in awhile, you know, Mahailey. You ought
+to see how Mrs. Dawson keeps hers. Now, let's see." He sorted the
+jars on the table. "Take back the grape jelly. If there's
+anything I hate, it's grape jelly. I know you have lots of it,
+but you can't work it off on me. And when you come up, don't
+forget the pickled peaches. I told you particularly, the pickled
+peaches!"
+
+"We ain't got no pickled peaches." Mahailey stood by the cellar
+door, holding a corner of her apron up to her chin, with a queer,
+animal look of stubbornness in her face.
+
+"No pickled peaches? What nonsense, Mahailey! I saw you making
+them here, only a few weeks ago."
+
+"I know you did, Mr. Ralph, but they ain't none now. I didn't
+have no luck with my peaches this year. I must 'a' let the air
+git at 'em. They all worked on me, an' I had to throw 'em out."
+
+Ralph was thoroughly annoyed. "I never heard of such a thing,
+Mahailey! You get more careless every year. Think of wasting all
+that fruit and sugar! Does mother know?"
+
+Mahailey's low brow clouded. "I reckon she does. I don't wase
+your mudder's sugar. I never did wase nothin'," she muttered. Her
+speech became queerer than ever when she was angry.
+
+Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched
+the fruit closet. Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches.
+When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood
+watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look
+that is in a chained coyote's eyes when a boy is showing him off
+to visitors and saying he wouldn't run away if he could.
+
+"Go on with your work," Ralph snapped. "Don't stand there
+watching me!"
+
+That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by
+the barn, after a hard day's work ploughing for winter wheat. He
+was solacing himself with his pipe. No matter how much she loved
+him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring
+herself to tell him he might smoke in the house. Lights were
+shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open
+windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph. A figure came
+stealing down the path. He knew by her low, padding step that it
+was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head. She came up to
+him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that
+what she had to say was confidential.
+
+"Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph's done packed up a barr'l of your mudder's
+jelly an' pickles to take out there."
+
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Mr. Wested was a widower, and I
+guess there wasn't anything of that sort put up at his place."
+
+She hesitated and bent lower. "He asked me fur them pickled
+peaches I made fur you, but I didn't give him none. I hid 'em all
+in my old cook-stove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph
+bought the new one. I didn't give him your mudder's new
+preserves, nudder. I give him the old last year's stuff we had
+left over, and now you an' your mudder'll have plenty." Claude
+laughed. "Oh, I don't care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the
+place, Mahailey!"
+
+She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, "No, I know you
+don't, Mr. Claude. I know you don't."
+
+"I surely ought not to take it out on her," Claude thought, when
+he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back.
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches,
+anyhow."
+
+She shook her finger at him. "Don't you let on!"
+
+He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path
+up the hill.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August,
+and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship
+a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during
+the winter. This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder. There
+was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek,--just on the
+sky-line when one looked out from the west windows of the house.
+Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in
+September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it
+for fodder. As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up
+the ground, and drill in the wheat when he planted the other
+wheat fields.
+
+This was Claude's first innovation, and it did not meet with
+approval. When Bayliss came out to spend Sunday with his mother,
+he asked her what Claude thought he was doing, anyhow. If he
+wanted to change the crop on that field, why didn't he plant oats
+in the spring, and then get into wheat next fall? Cutting fodder
+and preparing the ground now, would only hold him back in his
+work. When Mr. Wheeler came home for a short visit, he jocosely
+referred to that quarter as "Claude's wheat field."
+
+Claude went ahead with what he had undertaken to do, but all
+through September he was nervous and apprehensive about the
+weather. Heavy rains, if they came, would make him late with his
+wheat-planting, and then there would certainly be criticism. In
+reality, nobody cared much whether the planting was late or not,
+but Claude thought they did, and sometimes in the morning he
+awoke in a state of panic because he wasn't getting ahead faster.
+He had Dan and one of August Yoeder's four sons to help him, and
+he worked early and late. The new field he ploughed and drilled
+himself. He put a great deal of young energy into it, and buried
+a great deal of discontent in its dark furrows. Day after day he
+flung himself upon the land and planted it with what was
+fermenting in him, glad to be so tired at night that he could not
+think.
+
+Ralph came home for Leonard Dawson's wedding, on the first of
+October. All the Wheelers went to the wedding, even Mahailey, and
+there was a great gathering of the country folk and townsmen.
+
+After Ralph left, Claude had the place to himself again, and the
+work went on as usual. The stock did well, and there were no
+vexatious interruptions. The fine weather held, and every morning
+when Claude got up, another gold day stretched before him like a
+glittering carpet, leading...? When the question where the
+days were leading struck him on the edge of his bed, he hurried
+to dress and get down-stairs in time to fetch wood and coal for
+Mahailey. They often reached the kitchen at the same moment, and
+she would shake her finger at him and say, "You come down to help
+me, you nice boy, you!" At least he was of some use to Mahailey.
+His father could hire one of the Yoeder boys to look after the
+place, but Mahailey wouldn't let any one else save her old back.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Mahailey, enjoyed that fall. She slept
+late in the morning, and read and rested in the afternoon. She
+made herself some new house-dresses out of a grey material Claude
+chose. "It's almost like being a bride, keeping house for just
+you, Claude," she sometimes said.
+
+Soon Claude had the satisfaction of seeing a blush of green come
+up over his brown wheat fields, visible first in the dimples and
+little hollows, then flickering over the knobs and levels like a
+fugitive smile. He watched the green blades coming every day,
+when he and Dan went afield with their wagons to gather corn.
+Claude sent Dan to shuck on the north quarter, and he worked on
+the south. He always brought in one more load a day than Dan
+did,--that was to be expected. Dan explained this very
+reasonably, Claude thought, one afternoon when they were hooking
+up their teams.
+
+"It's all right for you to jump at that corn like you was
+a-beating carpets, Claude; it's your corn, or anyways it's your
+Paw's. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a
+hired man's got no property but his back, and he has to save it.
+I figure that I've only got about so many jumps left in me, and I
+ain't a-going to jump too hard at no man's corn."
+
+"What's the matter? I haven't been hinting that you ought to jump
+any harder, have I?"
+
+"No, you ain't, but I just want you to know that there's reason
+in all things." With this Dan got into his wagon and drove off.
+He had probably been meditating upon this declaration for some
+time.
+
+That afternoon Claude suddenly stopped flinging white ears into
+the wagon beside him. It was about five o'clock, the yellowest
+hour of the autumn day. He stood lost in a forest of light, dry,
+rustling corn leaves, quite hidden away from the world. Taking
+off his husking-gloves, he wiped the sweat from his face, climbed
+up to the wagon box, and lay down on the ivory-coloured corn. The
+horses cautiously advanced a step or two, and munched with great
+content at ears they tore from the stalks with their teeth.
+
+Claude lay still, his arms under his head, looking up at the
+hard, polished blue sky, watching the flocks of crows go over
+from the fields where they fed on shattered grain, to their nests
+in the trees along Lovely Creek. He was thinking about what Dan
+had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of
+truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he
+would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among
+strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and
+crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was
+sometimes called a "land hog" by the country people, and he
+himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have
+so much land,--to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they
+chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had
+been going, the question of property had not been better
+adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people
+who didn't have it were slaves to them.
+
+He sprang down into the gold light to finish his load. Warm
+silence nestled over the cornfield. Sometimes a light breeze rose
+for a moment and rattled the stiff, dry leaves, and he himself
+made a great rustling and crackling as he tore the husks from the
+ears.
+
+Greedy crows were still cawing about before they flapped
+homeward. When he drove out to the highway, the sun was going
+down, and from his seat on the load he could see far and near.
+Yonder was Dan's wagon, coming in from the north quarter; over
+there was the roof of Leonard Dawson's new house, and his
+windmill, standing up black in the declining day. Before him were
+the bluffs of the pasture, and the little trees, almost bare,
+huddled in violet shadow along the creek, and the Wheeler
+farm-house on the hill, its windows all aflame with the last red
+fire of the sun.
+
+
+XV
+
+Claude dreaded the inactivity of the winter, to which the farmer
+usually looks forward with pleasure. He made the Thanksgiving
+football game a pretext for going up to Lincoln,--went intending
+to stay three days and stayed ten. The first night, when he
+knocked at the glass door of the Erlichs' sitting-room and took
+them by surprise, he thought he could never go back to the farm.
+Approaching the house on that clear, frosty autumn evening,
+crossing the lawn strewn with crackling dry leaves, he told
+himself that he must not hope to find things the same. But they
+were the same. The boys were lounging and smoking about the
+square table with the lamp on it, and Mrs. Erlich was at the
+piano, playing one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." When
+he knocked, Otto opened the door and called:
+
+"A surprise for you, Mother! Guess who's here."
+
+What a welcome she gave him, and how much she had to tell him!
+While they were all talking at once, Henry, the oldest son, came
+downstairs dressed for a Colonial ball, with satin breeches and
+stockings and a sword. His brothers began to point out the
+inaccuracies of his costume, telling him that he couldn't
+possibly call himself a French emigre unless he wore a powdered
+wig. Henry took a book of memoirs from the shelf to prove to them
+that at the time when the French emigres were coming to
+Philadelphia, powder was going out of fashion.
+
+During this discussion, Mrs. Erlich drew Claude aside and told
+him in excited whispers that her cousin Wilhelmina, the singer,
+had at last been relieved of the invalid husband whom she had
+supported for so many years, and now was going to marry her
+accompanist, a man much younger than herself.
+
+After the French emigre had gone off to his party, two young
+instructors from the University dropped in, and Mrs. Erlich
+introduced Claude as her "landed proprietor" who managed a big
+ranch out in one of the western counties. The instructors took
+their leave early, but Claude stayed on. What was it that made
+life seem so much more interesting and attractive here than
+elsewhere? There was nothing wonderful about this room; a lot of
+books, a lamp... comfortable, hard-used furniture, some people
+whose lives were in no way remarkable--and yet he had the sense
+of being in a warm and gracious atmosphere, charged with generous
+enthusiasms and ennobled by romantic friendships. He was glad to
+see the same pictures on the wall; to find the Swiss wood-cutter
+on the mantel, still bending under his load of faggots; to handle
+again the heavy brass paper-knife that in its time had cut so
+many interesting pages. He picked it up from the cover of a red
+book lying there,-one of Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi, which
+Julius told him he must read before he was another week older.
+
+The next afternoon Claude took Mrs. Erlich to the football game
+and came home with the family for dinner. He lingered on day
+after day, but after the first few evenings his heart was growing
+a little heavier all the time. The Erlich boys had so many new
+interests he couldn't keep up with them; they had been going on,
+and he had been standing still. He wasn't conceited enough to
+mind that. The thing that hurt was the feeling of being out of
+it, of being lost in another kind of life in which ideas played
+but little part. He was a stranger who walked in and sat down
+here; but he belonged out in the big, lonely country, where
+people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the
+horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say.
+If Mrs. Erlich and her Hungarian woman made lentil soup and
+potato dumplings and Wiener-Schnitzel for him, it only made the
+plain fare on the farm seem the heavier.
+
+When the second Friday came round, he went to bid his friends
+good-bye and explained that he must be going home tomorrow. On
+leaving the house that night, he looked back at the ruddy windows
+and told himself that it was goodbye indeed, and not, as Mrs.
+Erlich had fondly said, auf wiedersehen. Coming here only made
+him more discontented with his lot; his frail claim on this kind
+of life existed no longer. He must settle down into something
+that was his own, take hold of it with both hands, no matter how
+grim it was. The next day, during his journey out through the
+bleak winter country, he felt that he was going deeper and deeper
+into reality.
+
+Claude had not written when he would be home, but on Saturday
+there were always some of the neighbours in town. He rode out
+with one of the Yoeder boys, and from their place walked on the
+rest of the way. He told his mother he was glad to be back again.
+He sometimes felt as if it were disloyal to her for him to be so
+happy with Mrs. Erlich. His mother had been shut away from the
+world on a farm for so many years; and even before that, Vermont
+was no very stimulating place to grow up in, he guessed. She had
+not had a chance, any more than he had, at those things which
+make the mind more supple and keep the feeling young.
+
+The next morning it was snowing outside, and they had a long,
+pleasant Sunday breakfast. Mrs. Wheeler said they wouldn't try to
+go to church, as Claude must be tired. He worked about the place
+until noon, making the stock comfortable and looking after things
+that Dan had neglected in his absence. After dinner he sat down
+at the secretary and wrote a long letter to his friends in
+Lincoln. Whenever he lifted his eyes for a moment, he saw the
+pasture bluffs and the softly falling snow. There was something
+beautiful about the submissive way in which the country met
+winter. It made one contented,--sad, too. He sealed his letter
+and lay down on the couch to read the paper, but was soon asleep.
+
+When he awoke the afternoon was already far gone. The clock on
+the shelf ticked loudly in the still room, the coal stove sent
+out a warm glow. The blooming plants in the south bow-window
+looked brighter and fresher than usual in the soft white light
+that came up from the snow. Mrs. Wheeler was reading by the west
+window, looking away from her book now and then to gaze off at
+the grey sky and the muffled fields. The creek made a winding
+violet chasm down through the pasture, and the trees followed it
+in a black thicket, curiously tufted with snow. Claude lay for
+some time without speaking, watching his mother's profile against
+the glass, and thinking how good this soft, clinging snow-fall
+would be for his wheat fields.
+
+"What are you reading, Mother?" he asked presently.
+
+She turned her head toward him. "Nothing very new. I was just
+beginning 'Paradise Lost' again. I haven't read it for a long
+while."
+
+"Read aloud, won't you? Just wherever you happen to be. I like
+the sound of it."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler always read deliberately, giving each syllable its
+full value. Her voice, naturally soft and rather wistful, trailed
+over the long measures and the threatening Biblical names, all
+familiar to her and full of meaning.
+
+  "A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
+  As one great furnace flamed; yet from the flames
+  No light, but rather darkness visible
+  Served only to discover sights of woe."
+
+Her voice groped as if she were trying to realize something. The
+room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid
+catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and
+pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed,
+and Mrs. Wheeler closed the book.
+
+"That's fine," Claude commented from the couch. "But Milton
+couldn't have got along without the wicked, could he?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up. "Is that a joke?" she asked slyly.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! It just struck me that this part is so much
+more interesting than the books about perfect innocence in Eden."
+
+"And yet I suppose it shouldn't be so," Mrs. Wheeler said slowly,
+as if in doubt.
+
+Her son laughed and sat up, smoothing his rumpled hair. "The fact
+remains that it is, dear Mother. And if you took all the great
+sinners out of the Bible, you'd take out all the interesting
+characters, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Except Christ," she murmured.
+
+"Yes, except Christ. But I suppose the Jews were honest when they
+thought him the most dangerous kind of criminal."
+
+"Are you trying to tangle me up?" his mother inquired, with both
+reproach and amusement in her voice.
+
+Claude went to the window where she was sitting, and looked out
+at the snowy fields, now becoming blue and desolate as the
+shadows deepened. "I only mean that even in the Bible the people
+who were merely free from blame didn't amount to much."
+
+"Ah, I see!" Mrs. Wheeler chuckled softly. "You are trying to get
+me back to Faith and Works. There's where you always balked when
+you were a little fellow. Well, Claude, I don't know as much
+about it as I did then. As I get older, I leave a good deal more
+to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this
+world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I." She rose
+like a gentle shadow and rubbed her cheek against his flannel
+shirt-sleeve, murmuring, "I believe He is sometimes where we
+would least expect to find Him,--even in proud, rebellious
+hearts."
+
+For a moment they clung together in the pale, clear square of the
+west window, as the two natures in one person sometimes meet and
+cling in a fated hour.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Ralph and his father came home to spend the holidays, and on
+Christmas day Bayliss drove out from town for dinner. He arrived
+early, and after greeting his mother in the kitchen, went up to
+the sitting-room, which shone with a holiday neatness, and, for
+once, was warm enough for Bayliss,--having a low circulation, he
+felt the cold acutely. He walked up and down, jingling the keys
+in his pockets and admiring his mother's winter chrysanthemums,
+which were still blooming. Several times he paused before the
+old-fashioned secretary, looking through the glass doors at the
+volumes within. The sight of some of those books awoke
+disagreeable memories. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen,
+it used to make him bitterly jealous to hear his mother coaxing
+Claude to read aloud to her. Bayliss had never been bookish. Even
+before he could read, when his mother told him stories, he at
+once began to prove to her how they could not possibly be true.
+Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than
+"Robinson Crusoe." If he sat down with a book, he wanted to feel
+that he was learning something. His mother and Claude were always
+talking over his head about the people in books and stories.
+
+Though Bayliss had a sentimental feeling about coming home, he
+considered that he had had a lonely boyhood. At the country
+school he had not been happy; he was the boy who always got the
+answers to the test problems when the others didn't, and he kept
+his arithmetic papers buttoned up in the inside pocket of his
+little jacket until he modestly handed them to the teacher, never
+giving a neighbour the benefit of his cleverness. Leonard Dawson
+and other lusty lads of his own age made life as terrifying for
+him as they could. In winter they used to throw him into a
+snow-drift, and then run away and leave him. In summer they made
+him eat live grasshoppers behind the schoolhouse, and put big
+bull-snakes in his dinner pail to surprise him. To this day,
+Bayliss liked to see one of those fellows get into difficulties
+that his big fists couldn't get him out of.
+
+It was because Bayliss was quick at figures and undersized for a
+farmer that his father sent him to town to learn the implement
+business. From the day he went to work, he managed to live on his
+small salary. He kept in his vest pocket a little day-book
+wherein he noted down all his expenditures,--like the
+millionaire about whom the Baptist preachers were never tired of
+talking,-and his offering to the contribution box stood out
+conspicuous in his weekly account.
+
+In Bayliss' voice, even when he used his insinuating drawl and
+said disagreeable things, there was something a little plaintive;
+the expression of a deep-seated sense of injury. He felt that he
+had always been misunderstood and underestimated. Later after he
+went into business for himself, the young men of Frankfort had
+never urged him to take part in their pleasures. He had not been
+asked to join the tennis club or the whist club. He envied Claude
+his fine physique and his unreckoning, impulsive vitality, as if
+they had been given to his brother by unfair means and should
+rightly have been his.
+
+Bayliss and his father were talking together before dinner when
+Claude came in and was so inconsiderate as to put up a window,
+though he knew his brother hated a draft. In a moment Bayliss
+addressed him without looking at him:
+
+"I see your friends, the Erlichs, have bought out the Jenkinson
+company, in Lincoln; at least, they've given their notes."
+
+Claude had promised his mother to keep his temper today, "Yes, I
+saw it in the paper. I hope they'll succeed."
+
+"I doubt it." Bayliss shook his head with his wisest look. "I
+understand they've put a mortgage on their home. That old woman
+will find herself without a roof one of these days."
+
+"I don't think so. The boys have wanted to go into business
+together for a long while. They are all intelligent and
+industrious; why shouldn't they get on?" Claude flattered himself
+that he spoke in an easy, confidential way.
+
+Bayliss screwed up his eyes. "I expect they're too fond of good
+living. They'll pay their interest, and spend whatever's left
+entertaining their friends. I didn't see the young fellow's name
+in the notice of incorporation, Julius, do they call him?"
+
+"Julius is going abroad to study this fall. He intends to be a
+professor."
+
+"What's the matter with him? Does he have poor health?"
+
+At this moment the dinner bell sounded, Ralph ran down from his
+room where he had been dressing, and they all descended to the
+kitchen to greet the turkey. The dinner progressed pleasantly.
+Bayliss and his father talked politics, and Ralph told stories
+about his neighbours in Yucca county. Bayliss was pleased that
+his mother had remembered he liked oyster stuffing, and he
+complimented her upon her mince pies. When he saw her pour a
+second cup of coffee for herself and for Claude at the end of
+dinner, he said, in a gentle, grieved tone, "I'm sorry to see you
+taking two, Mother."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at him over the coffee-pot with a droll,
+guilty smile. "I don't believe coffee hurts me a particle,
+Bayliss."
+
+"Of course it does; it's a stimulant." What worse could it be,
+his tone implied! When you said anything was a "stimulant," you
+had sufficiently condemned it; there was no more noxious word.
+
+Claude was in the upper hall, putting on his coat to go down to
+the barn and smoke a cigar, when Bayliss came out from the
+sitting-room and detained him by an indefinite remark.
+
+"I believe there's to be a musical show in Hastings Saturday
+night."
+
+Claude said he had heard something of the sort.
+
+"I was thinking," Bayliss affected a careless tone, as if he
+thought of such things every day, "that we might make a party and
+take Gladys and Enid. The roads are pretty good."
+
+"It's a hard drive home, so late at night," Claude objected.
+Bayliss meant, of course, that Claude should drive the party up
+and back in Mr. Wheeler's big car. Bayliss never used his
+glistening Cadillac for long, rough drives.
+
+"I guess Mother would put us up overnight, and we needn't take
+the girls home till Sunday morning. I'll get the tickets."
+
+"You'd better arrange it with the girls, then. I'll drive you, of
+course, if you want to go."
+
+Claude escaped and went out, wishing that Bayliss would do his
+own courting and not drag him into it. Bayliss, who didn't know
+one tune from another, certainly didn't want to go to this
+concert, and it was doubtful whether Enid Royce would care much
+about going. Gladys Farmer was the best musician in Frankfort,
+and she would probably like to hear it.
+
+Claude and Gladys were old friends, from their High School days,
+though they hadn't seen much of each other while he was going to
+college. Several times this fall Bayliss had asked Claude to go
+somewhere with him on a Sunday, and then stopped to "pick Gladys
+up," as he said. Claude didn't like it. He was disgusted, anyhow,
+when he saw that Bayliss had made up his mind to marry Gladys.
+She and her mother were so poor that he would probably succeed in
+the end, though so far Gladys didn't seem to give him much
+encouragement. Marrying Bayliss, he thought, would be no joke for
+any woman, but Gladys was the one girl in town whom he
+particularly ought not to marry. She was as extravagant as she
+was poor. Though she taught in the Frankfort High School for
+twelve hundred a year, she had prettier clothes than any of the
+other girls, except Enid Royce, whose father was a rich man. Her
+new hats and suede shoes were discussed and criticized year in
+and year out. People said if she married Bayliss Wheeler, he
+would soon bring her down to hard facts. Some hoped she would,
+and some hoped she wouldn't. As for Claude, he had kept away from
+Mrs. Farmer's cheerful parlour ever since Bayliss had begun to
+drop in there. He was disappointed in Gladys. When he was
+offended, he seldom stopped to reason about his state of feeling.
+He avoided the person and the thought of the person, as if it
+were a sore spot in his mind.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+It had been Mr. Wheeler's intention to stay at home until spring,
+but Ralph wrote that he was having trouble with his foreman, so
+his father went out to the ranch in February. A few days after
+his departure there was a storm which gave people something to
+talk about for a year to come.
+
+The snow began to fall about noon on St. Valentine's day, a soft,
+thick, wet snow that came down in billows and stuck to
+everything. Later in the afternoon the wind rose, and wherever
+there was a shed, a tree, a hedge, or even a clump of tall weeds,
+drifts began to pile up. Mrs. Wheeler, looking anxiously out from
+the sitting-room windows, could see nothing but driving waves of
+soft white, which cut the tall house off from the rest of the
+world.
+
+Claude and Dan, down in the corral, where they were provisioning
+the cattle against bad weather, found the air so thick that they
+could scarcely breathe; their ears and mouths and nostrils were
+full of snow, their faces plastered with it. It melted constantly
+upon their clothing, and yet they were white from their boots to
+their caps as they worked,--there was no shaking it off. The air
+was not cold, only a little below freezing. When they came in for
+supper, the drifts had piled against the house until they covered
+the lower sashes of the kitchen windows, and as they opened the
+door, a frail wall of snow fell in behind them. Mahailey came
+running with her broom and pail to sweep it up.
+
+"Ain't it a turrible storm, Mr. Claude? I reckon poor Mr. Ernest
+won't git over tonight, will he? You never mind, honey; I'll wipe
+up that water. Run along and git dry clothes on you, an' take a
+bath, or you'll ketch cold. Th' ole tank's full of hot water for
+you." Exceptional weather of any kind always delighted Mahailey.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Claude at the head of the stairs. "There's no
+danger of the steers getting snowed under along the creek, is
+there?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, I thought of that. We've driven them all into the little
+corral on the level, and shut the gates. It's over my head down
+in the creek bottom now. I haven't a dry stitch on me. I guess
+I'll follow Mahailey's advice and get in the tub, if you can wait
+supper for me."
+
+"Put your clothes outside the bathroom door, and I'll see to
+drying them for you."
+
+"Yes, please. I'll need them tomorrow. I don't want to spoil my
+new corduroys. And, Mother, see if you can make Dan change. He's
+too wet and steamy to sit at the table with. Tell him if anybody
+has to go out after supper, I'll go."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hurried down stairs. Dan, she knew, would rather sit
+all evening in wet clothes than take the trouble to put on dry
+ones. He tried to sneak past her to his own quarters behind the
+wash-room, and looked aggrieved when he heard her message.
+
+"I ain't got no other outside clothes, except my Sunday ones," he
+objected.
+
+"Well, Claude says he'll go out if anybody has to. I guess you'll
+have to change for once, Dan, or go to bed without your supper."
+She laughed quietly at his dejected expression as he slunk away.
+
+"Mrs. Wheeler," Mahailey whispered, "can't I run down to the
+cellar an' git some of them nice strawberry preserves? Mr.
+Claude, he loves 'em on his hot biscuit. He don't eat the honey
+no more; he's got tired of it."
+
+"Very well. I'll make the coffee good and strong; that will
+please him more than anything."
+
+Claude came down feeling clean and warm and hungry. As he opened
+the stair door he sniffed the coffee and frying ham, and when
+Mahailey bent over the oven the warm smell of browning biscuit
+rushed out with the heat. These combined odours somewhat
+dispersed Dan's gloom when he came back in squeaky Sunday shoes
+and a bunglesome cut-away coat. The latter was not required of
+him, but he wore it for revenge.
+
+During supper Mrs. Wheeler told them once again how, long ago
+when she was first married, there were no roads or fences west of
+Frankfort. One winter night she sat on the roof of their first
+dugout nearly all night, holding up a lantern tied to a pole to
+guide Mr. Wheeler home through a snowstorm like this.
+
+Mahailey, moving about the stove, watched over the group at the
+table. She liked to see the men fill themselves with food-though
+she did not count Dan a man, by any means, and she looked out to
+see that Mrs. Wheeler did not forget to eat altogether, as she
+was apt to do when she fell to remembering things that had
+happened long ago. Mahailey was in a happy frame of mind because
+her weather predictions had come true; only yesterday she had
+told Mrs. Wheeler there would be snow, because she had seen
+snowbirds. She regarded supper as more than usually important
+when Claude put on his "velvet close," as she called his brown
+corduroys.
+
+After supper Claude lay on the couch in the sitting room, while
+his mother read aloud to him from "Bleak House,"--one of the few
+novels she loved. Poor Jo was drawing toward his end when Claude
+suddenly sat up. "Mother, I believe I'm too sleepy. I'll have to
+turn in. Do you suppose it's still snowing?"
+
+He rose and went to look out, but the west windows were so
+plastered with snow that they were opaque. Even from the one on
+the south he could see nothing for a moment; then Mahailey must
+have carried her lamp to the kitchen window beneath, for all at
+once a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down
+it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing
+progression, moving as close as they could without forming a
+solid mass. Claude struck the frozen window-frame with his fist,
+lifted the lower sash, and thrusting out his head tried to look
+abroad into the engulfed night. There was a solemnity about a
+storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The
+myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight
+seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite
+end. A faint purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human
+senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and
+shoulders. His mother, looking under his lifted arm, strained her
+eyes to see out into that swarming movement, and murmured softly
+in her quavering voice:
+
+"Ever thicker, thicker, thicker, Froze the ice on lake and river;
+Ever deeper, deeper, deeper, Fell the snow o'er all the
+landscape."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Claude's bedroom faced the east. The next morning, when he looked
+out of his windows, only the tops of the cedars in the front yard
+were visible. Hurriedly putting on his clothes he ran to the west
+window at the end of the hall; Lovely Creek, and the deep ravine
+in which it flowed, had disappeared as if they had never been.
+The rough pasture was like a smooth field, except for humps and
+mounds like haycocks, where the snow had drifted over a post or a
+bush.
+
+At the kitchen stairs Mahailey met him in gleeful excitement.
+"Lord 'a' mercy, Mr. Claude, I can't git the storm door open.
+We're snowed in fas'." She looked like a tramp woman, in a jacket
+patched with many colours, her head tied up in an old black
+"fascinator," with ravelled yarn hanging down over her face like
+wild locks of hair. She kept this costume for calamitous
+occasions; appeared in it when the water-pipes were frozen and
+burst, or when spring storms flooded the coops and drowned her
+young chickens.
+
+The storm door opened outward. Claude put his shoulder to it and
+pushed it a little way. Then, with Mahailey's fireshovel he
+dislodged enough snow to enable him to force back the door. Dan
+came tramping in his stocking-feet across the kitchen to his
+boots, which were still drying behind the stove. "She's sure a
+bad one, Claude," he remarked, blinking.
+
+"Yes. I guess we won't try to go out till after breakfast. We'll
+have to dig our way to the barn, and I never thought to bring the
+shovels up last night."
+
+"Th' ole snow shovels is in the cellar. I'll git 'em."
+
+"Not now, Mahailey. Give us our breakfast before you do anything
+else."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler came down, pinning on her little shawl, her
+shoulders more bent than usual. "Claude," she said fearfully,
+"the cedars in the front yard are all but covered. Do you suppose
+our cattle could be buried?"
+
+He laughed. "No, Mother. The cattle have been moving around all
+night, I expect."
+
+When the two men started out with the wooden snow shovels, Mrs.
+Wheeler and Mahailey stood in the doorway, watching them. For a
+short distance from the house the path they dug was like a
+tunnel, and the white walls on either side were higher than their
+heads. On the breast of the hill the snow was not so deep, and
+they made better headway. They had to fight through a second
+heavy drift before they reached the barn, where they went in and
+warmed themselves among the horses and cows. Dan was for getting
+next a warm cow and beginning to milk.
+
+"Not yet," said Claude. "I want to have a look at the hogs before
+we do anything here."
+
+The hog-house was built down in a draw behind the barn. When
+Claude reached the edge of the gully, blown almost bare, he could
+look about him. The draw was full of snow, smooth... except in
+the middle, where there was a rumpled depression, resembling a
+great heap of tumbled bed-linen.
+
+Dan gasped. "God a' mighty, Claude, the roof's fell in! Them
+hogs'll be smothered."
+
+"They will if we don't get at them pretty quick. Run to the house
+and tell Mother. Mahailey will have to milk this morning, and get
+back here as fast as you can."
+
+The roof was a flat thatch, and the weight of the snow had been
+too much for it. Claude wondered if he should have put on a new
+thatch that fall; but the old one wasn't leaky, and had seemed
+strong enough.
+
+When Dan got back they took turns, one going ahead and throwing
+out as much snow as he could, the other handling the snow that
+fell back. After an hour or so of this work, Dan leaned on his
+shovel.
+
+"We'll never do it, Claude. Two men couldn't throw all that snow
+out in a week. I'm about all in."
+
+"Well, you can go back to the house and sit by the fire," Claude
+called fiercely. He had taken off his coat and was working in his
+shirt and sweater. The sweat was rolling from his face, his back
+and arms ached, and his hands, which he couldn't keep dry, were
+blistered. There were thirty-seven hogs in the hog-house.
+
+Dan sat down in the hole. "Maybe if I could git a drink of water,
+I could hold on a-ways," he said dejectedly.
+
+It was past noon when they got into the shed; a cloud of steam
+rose, and they heard grunts. They found the pigs all lying in a
+heap at one end, and pulled the top ones off alive and squealing.
+Twelve hogs, at the bottom of the pile, had been suffocated. They
+lay there wet and black in the snow, their bodies warm and
+smoking, but they were dead; there was no mistaking that.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, in her husband's rubber boots and an old overcoat,
+came down with Mahailey to view the scene of disaster.
+
+"You ought to git right at them hawgs an' butcher 'em today,"
+Mahailey called down to the men. She was standing on the edge of
+the draw, in her patched jacket and ravelled hood. Claude, down
+in the hole, brushed the sleeve of his sweater across his
+streaming face. "Butcher them?" he cried indignantly. "I wouldn't
+butcher them if I never saw meat again."
+
+"You ain't a-goin' to let all that good hawg-meat go to wase, air
+you, Mr. Claude?" Mahailey pleaded. "They didn't have no sickness
+nor nuthin'. Only you'll have to git right at 'em, or the meat
+won't be healthy."
+
+"It wouldn't be healthy for me, anyhow. I don't know what I will
+do with them, but I'm mighty sure I won't butcher them."
+
+"Don't bother him, Mahailey," Mrs. Wheeler cautioned her. "He's
+tired, and he has to fix some place for the live hogs."
+
+"I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs
+myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could
+save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs. We ain't had no
+spare-ribs for ever so long."
+
+What with the ache in his back and his chagrin at losing the
+pigs, Claude was feeling desperate. "Mother," he shouted, "if you
+don't take Mahailey into the house, I'll go crazy!"
+
+That evening Mrs. Wheeler asked him how much the twelve hogs
+would have been worth in money. He looked a little startled.
+
+"Oh, I don't know exactly; three hundred dollars, anyway."
+
+"Would it really be as much as that? I don't see how we could
+have prevented it, do you?" Her face looked troubled.
+
+Claude went to bed immediately after supper, but he had no sooner
+stretched his aching body between the sheets than he began to
+feel wakeful. He was humiliated at losing the pigs, because they
+had been left in his charge; but for the loss in money, about
+which even his mother was grieved, he didn't seem to care. He
+wondered whether all that winter he hadn't been working himself
+up into a childish contempt for money-values.
+
+When Ralph was home at Christmas time, he wore on his little
+finger a heavy gold ring, with a diamond as big as a pea,
+surrounded by showy grooves in the metal. He admitted to Claude
+that he had won it in a poker game. Ralph's hands were never free
+from automobile grease--they were the red, stumpy kind that
+couldn't be kept clean. Claude remembered him milking in the barn
+by lantern light, his jewel throwing off jabbing sparkles of
+colour, and his fingers looking very much like the teats of the
+cow. That picture rose before him now, as a symbol of what
+successful farming led to.
+
+The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic
+value; wheat and corn as good as could be grown anywhere in the
+world, hogs and cattle that were the best of their kind. In
+return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy
+furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded,
+clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown. Most of his
+money was paid out for machinery,--and that, too, went to pieces.
+A steam thrasher didn't last long; a horse outlived three
+automobiles.
+
+Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the
+neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more
+individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine
+cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges
+along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being
+cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished
+the land... they made the snow drift... nobody had them any
+more. With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody
+wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The
+orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty
+years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble
+to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to
+raise it.
+
+The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the
+farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now
+they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either
+stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were
+always stirring up trouble. Evidently, it took more intelligence
+to spend money than to make it.
+
+When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the
+Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's
+degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph
+would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make
+anything the world needed.
+
+Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was
+twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no
+ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he
+admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs.
+Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably
+it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth
+the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use
+of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs.
+Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this
+security was what was the matter with everybody; that only
+perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in
+people and develop the mean ones.
+
+Ernest, too, said "it's the best life in the world, Claude."
+
+But if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake
+in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To
+be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep,
+was like being assured of a decent burial. Safety, security; if
+you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would
+never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to
+them.
+
+Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was
+something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his
+discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary
+fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and
+other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was
+that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that
+his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his
+guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The
+neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was
+a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his
+energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in
+resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to
+subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself
+in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he
+would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He
+would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short
+in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an
+intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,--the conviction
+that there was something splendid about life, if he could but
+find it.
+
+IX
+
+The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was
+a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,--then a hard
+freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people
+went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of
+ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler's old double sleigh
+from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on
+top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for
+Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles,
+most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But
+the Wheelers always kept everything.
+
+Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a
+sleigh-ride. Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain
+merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run
+the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and Claude were old
+playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was
+called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to
+see Mr. Royce at his town office.
+
+Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks,
+Pompey and Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long
+before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most
+of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with
+silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy
+feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger;
+that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite
+so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence
+is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical
+lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the
+many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked in the barn.
+
+The mill road, that led off the highway and down to the river,
+had pleasant associations for Claude. When he was a youngster,
+every time his father went to mill, he begged to go along. He
+liked the mill and the miller and the miller's little girl. He
+had never liked the miller's house, however, and he was afraid of
+Enid's mother. Even now, as he tied his horses to the long
+hitch-bar down by the engine room, he resolved that he would not
+be persuaded to enter that formal parlour, full of new-looking,
+expensive furniture, where his energy always deserted him and he
+could never think of anything to talk about. If he moved, his
+shoes squeaked in the silence, and Mrs. Royce sat and blinked her
+sharp little eyes at him, and the longer he stayed, the harder it
+was to go.
+
+Enid herself came to the door.
+
+"Why, it's Claude!" she exclaimed. "Won't you come in?"
+
+"No, I want you to go riding. I've got the old sleigh out. Come
+on, it's a fine night!"
+
+"I thought I heard bells. Won't you come in and see Mother while
+I get my things on?"
+
+Claude said he must stay with his horses, and ran back to the
+hitch-bar. Enid didn't keep him waiting long; she wasn't that
+kind. She came swiftly down the path and through the front gate
+in the Maine seal motor-coat she wore when she drove her coupe in
+cold weather.
+
+"Now, which way?" Claude asked as the horses sprang forward and
+the bells began to jingle.
+
+"Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells,
+Claude. I haven't heard sleighbells since you used to bring me
+and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don't we stop
+for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!" Here Enid laughed.
+"All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they
+can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for
+Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself,
+I believe they'd hold a public meeting."
+
+Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. "Doesn't it
+make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?"
+
+"It would, if she minded. But she's just as serene! They must
+have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer's
+back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the
+furs."
+
+Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a
+few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and
+lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the
+snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were
+turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her
+daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the
+town, where only people of modest means lived. "We must stop to
+see Gladys' mother, if only for a minute," Enid said as they drew
+up before the fence. "She is so fond of company." Claude tied his
+team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch,
+hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.
+
+Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a
+pleasant Kentucky voice. She took Enid's arm affectionately, and
+Claude followed them into the long, low sitting-room, which had
+an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and was scantily
+furnished in rickety mahogany. There, close beside the hard-coal
+burner, sat Bayliss Wheeler. He did not rise when they entered,
+but said, "Hello, folks," in a rather sheepish voice. On a little
+table, beside Mrs. Farmer's workbasket, was the box of candy he
+had lately taken out of his overcoat pocket, still tied up with
+its gold cord. A tall lamp stood beside the piano, where Gladys
+had evidently been practising. Claude wondered whether Bayliss
+actually pretended to an interest in music! At this moment Gladys
+was in the kitchen, Mrs. Farmer explained, looking for her
+mother's glasses, mislaid when she was copying a recipe for a
+cheese souffle.
+
+"Are you still getting new recipes, Mrs. Farmer?" Enid asked her.
+"I thought you could make every dish in the world already."
+
+"Oh, not quite!" Mrs. Farmer laughed modestly and showed that she
+liked compliments. "Do sit down, Claude," she besought of the
+stiff image by the door. "Daughter will be here directly."
+
+At that moment Gladys Farmer appeared.
+
+"Why, I didn't know you had company, Mother," she said, coming in
+to greet them.
+
+This meant, Claude supposed, that Bayliss was not company. He
+scarcely glanced at Gladys as he took the hand she held out to
+him.
+
+One of Gladys' grandfathers had come from Antwerp, and she had
+the settled composure, the full red lips, brown eyes, and dimpled
+white hands which occur so often in Flemish portraits of young
+women. Some people thought her a trifle heavy, too mature and
+positive to be called pretty, even though they admired her rich,
+tulip-like complexion. Gladys never seemed aware that her looks
+and her poverty and her extravagance were the subject of
+perpetual argument, but went to and from school every day with
+the air of one whose position is assured. Her musicianship gave
+her a kind of authority in Frankfort.
+
+Enid explained the purpose of their call. "Claude has got out his
+old sleigh, and we've come to take you for a ride. Perhaps
+Bayliss will go, too?"
+
+Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was
+nothing he hated so much as being out in the cold. Gladys ran
+upstairs to put on a warm dress, and Enid accompanied her,
+leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable conversation between her
+two incompatible guests.
+
+"Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm,
+Claude. What a pity!" she said sympathetically.
+
+Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn't be at all reticent about
+that incident!
+
+"I suppose there was really no way to save them," Mrs. Farmer
+went on in her polite way; her voice was low and round, like her
+daughter's, different from the high, tight Western voice. "So I
+hope you don't let yourself worry about it."
+
+"No, I don't worry about anything as dead as those hogs were.
+What's the use?" Claude asked boldly.
+
+"That's right," murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her
+chair. "Such things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to
+take them too hard. It isn't as if a person had been hurt, is
+it?"
+
+Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and
+to the shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its
+best to be attractive to her friends. There weren't four steady
+legs on any of the stuffed chairs or little folding tables she
+had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold moulding was
+half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.
+But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after
+the Civil War, and she didn't fret half so much about her back
+taxes as her neighbours did. Claude tried to talk agreeably to
+her, but he was distracted by the sound of stifled laughter
+upstairs. Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss'
+being there. How shameless girls were, anyhow!
+
+People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh
+dashed jingling up and down the village streets. When they left
+town, Bayliss suggested that they drive out past the Trevor
+place. The girls began to talk about the two young New
+Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when
+Frankfort was still a tough little frontier settlement. Every one
+was talking about them now, for a few days ago word had come that
+one of the partners, Amos Brewster, had dropped dead in his law
+office in Hartford. It was thirty years since he and his friend,
+Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort
+county, and had built the house on the round hill east of the
+town, where they wasted a great deal of money very joyously.
+Claude's father always declared that the amount they squandered
+in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in
+commendable industrial endeavour. The country, Mr. Wheeler said,
+had never been the same since those boys left it. He delighted to
+tell about the time when Trevor and Brewster went into sheep.
+They imported a breeding ram from Scotland at a great expense,
+and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him that
+they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his
+crate. Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season;
+came at the beginning of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the
+mothers died from exposure. The gallant Trevor took horse and
+spurred all over the county, from one little settlement to
+another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan
+lambs.
+
+The rich bottom land about the Trevor place had been rented out
+to a truck gardener for years now; the comfortable house with its
+billiard-room annex--a wonder for that part of the country in
+its day--remained closed, its windows boarded up. It sat on the
+top of a round knoll, a fine cottonwood grove behind it. Tonight,
+as Claude drove toward it, the hill with its tall straight trees
+looked like a big fur cap put down on the snow.
+
+"Why hasn't some one bought that house long ago and fixed it up?"
+Enid remarked. "There is no building site around here to compare
+with it. It looks like the place where the leading citizen of the
+town ought to live."
+
+"I'm glad you like it, Enid," said Bayliss in a guarded voice.
+"I've always had a sneaking fancy for the place myself. Those
+fellows back there never wanted to sell it. But now the estate's
+got to be settled up. I bought it yesterday. The deed is on its
+way to Hartford for signature."
+
+Enid turned round in her seat. "Why Bayliss, are you in earnest?
+Think of just buying the Trevor place off-hand, as if it were any
+ordinary piece of real estate! Will you make over the house, and
+live there some day?"
+
+"I don't know about living there. It's too far to walk to my
+business, and the road across this bottom gets pretty muddy for a
+car in the spring."
+
+"But it's not far, less than a mile. If I once owned that spot,
+I'd surely never let anybody else live there. Even Carrie
+remembers it. She often asks in her letters whether any one has
+bought the Trevor place yet."
+
+Carrie Royce, Enid's older sister, was a missionary in China.
+
+"Well," Bayliss admitted, "I didn't buy it for an investment,
+exactly. I paid all it was worth."
+
+Enid turned to Gladys, who was apparently not listening. "You'd
+be the one who could plan a mansion for Trevor Hill, Gladys. You
+always have such original ideas about houses."
+
+"Yes, people who have no houses of their own often seem to have
+ideas about building," said Gladys quietly. "But I like the
+Trevor place as it is. I hate to think that one of them is dead.
+People say they did have such good times up there."
+
+Bayliss grunted. "Call it good times if you like. The kids were
+still grubbing whiskey bottles out of the cellar when I first
+came to town. Of course, if I decide to live there, I'll pull
+down that old trap and put up something modern." He often took
+this gruff tone with Gladys in public.
+
+Enid tried to draw the driver into the conversation. "There seems
+to be a difference of opinion here, Claude."
+
+"Oh," said Gladys carelessly, "it's Bayliss' property, or soon
+will be. He will build what he likes. I've always known somebody
+would get that place away from me, so I'm prepared."
+
+"Get it away from you?" muttered Bayliss, amazed.
+
+"Yes. As long as no one bought it and spoiled it, it was mine as
+much as it was anybody's."
+
+"Claude," said Enid banteringly, "now both your brothers have
+houses. Where are you going to have yours?"
+
+"I don't know that I'll ever have one. I think I'll run about the
+world a little before I draw my plans," he replied sarcastically.
+
+"Take me with you, Claude!" said Gladys in a tone of sudden
+weariness. From that spiritless murmur Enid suspected that
+Bayliss had captured Gladys' hand under the buffalo robe.
+
+Grimness had settled down over the sleighing party. Even Enid,
+who was not highly sensitive to unuttered feelings, saw that
+there was an uncomfortable constraint. A sharp wind had come up.
+Bayliss twice suggested turning back, but his brother answered,
+"Pretty soon," and drove on. He meant that Bayliss should have
+enough of it. Not until Enid whispered reproachfully, "I really
+think you ought to turn; we're all getting cold," did he realize
+that he had made his sleighing party into a punishment! There was
+certainly nothing to punish Enid for; she had done her best, and
+had tried to make his own bad manners less conspicuous. He
+muttered a blundering apology to her when he lifted her from the
+sleigh at the mill house. On his long drive home he had bitter
+thoughts for company.
+
+He was so angry with Gladys that he hadn't been able to bid her
+good-night. Everything she said on the ride had nettled him. If
+she meant to marry Bayliss, then she ought to throw off this
+affectation of freedom and independence. If she did not mean to,
+why did she accept favours from him and let him get into the
+habit of walking into her house and putting his box of candy on
+the table, as all Frankfort fellows did when they were courting?
+Certainly she couldn't make herself believe that she liked his
+society!
+
+When they were classmates at the Frankfort High School, Gladys
+was Claude's aesthetic proxy. It wasn't the proper thing for a
+boy to be too clean, or too careful about his dress and manners.
+But if he selected a girl who was irreproachable in these
+respects, got his Latin and did his laboratory work with her,
+then all her personal attractions redounded to his credit. Gladys
+had seemed to appreciate the honour Claude did her, and it was
+not all on her own account that she wore such beautifully ironed
+muslin dresses when they went on botanical expeditions.
+
+Driving home after that miserable sleigh-ride, Claude told
+himself that in so far as Gladys was concerned he could make up
+his mind to the fact that he had been "stung" all along. He had
+believed in her fine feelings; believed implicitly. Now he knew
+she had none so fine that she couldn't pocket them when there was
+enough to be gained by it. Even while he said these things over
+and over, his old conception of Gladys, down at the bottom of his
+mind, remained persistently unchanged. But that only made his
+state of feeling the more painful. He was deeply hurt,--and for
+some reason, youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself
+betrayed.
+
+
+Book Two: Enid
+
+I
+
+One afternoon that spring Claude was sitting on the long flight
+of granite steps that leads up to the State House in Denver. He
+had been looking at the collection of Cliff Dweller remains in
+the Capitol, and when he came out into the sunlight the faint
+smell of fresh-cut grass struck his nostrils and persuaded him to
+linger. The gardeners were giving the grounds their first light
+mowing. All the lawns on the hill were bright with daffodils and
+hyacinths. A sweet, warm wind blew over the grass, drying the
+waterdrops. There had been showers in the afternoon, and the sky
+was still a tender, rainy blue, where it showed through the
+masses of swiftly moving clouds.
+
+Claude had been away from home for nearly a month. His father had
+sent him out to see Ralph and the new ranch, and from there he
+went on to Colorado Springs and Trinidad. He had enjoyed
+travelling, but now that he was back in Denver he had that
+feeling of loneliness which often overtakes country boys in a
+city; the feeling of being unrelated to anything, of not
+mattering to anybody. He had wandered about Colorado Springs
+wishing he knew some of the people who were going in and out of
+the houses; wishing that he could talk to some of those pretty
+girls he saw driving their own cars about the streets, if only to
+say a few words. One morning when he was walking out in the hills
+a girl passed him, then slowed her car to ask if she could give
+him a lift. Claude would have said that she was just the sort who
+would never stop to pick him up, yet she did, and she talked to
+him pleasantly all the way back to town. It was only twenty
+minutes or so, but it was worth everything else that happened on
+his trip. When she asked him where she should put him down, he
+said at the Antlers, and blushed so furiously that she must have
+known at once he wasn't staying there.
+
+He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat
+here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind
+the mountains. Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to
+be young; but it was a painful thing, too. He didn't believe
+older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden
+light, the mass of mountains was splitting up into four distinct
+ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in
+perspective, one behind the other. It was a lonely splendour that
+only made the ache in his breast the stronger. What was the
+matter with him, he asked himself entreatingly. He must answer
+that question before he went home again.
+
+The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square,
+pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more.
+There was still South America; perhaps he could find something
+below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the
+world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.
+
+Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his
+father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a
+new country. It was a storm that died down at last,--but what a
+pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power--for it was a
+kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against
+the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did
+not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped
+to look at him.
+
+The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man
+standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists
+clenched in an attitude of arrested action,--his sandy hair, his
+tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique
+rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known
+how he seemed to this stranger.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning Claude stepped off the train at Frankfort and
+had his breakfast at the station before the town was awake. His
+family were not expecting him, so he thought he would walk home
+and stop at the mill to see Enid Royce. After all, old friends
+were best.
+
+He left town by the low road that wound along the creek. The
+willows were all out in new yellow leaves, and the sticky
+cotton-wood buds were on the point of bursting. Birds were
+calling everywhere, and now and then, through the studded willow
+wands, flashed the dazzling wing of a cardinal.
+
+All over the dusty, tan-coloured wheatfields there was a tender
+mist of green,--millions of little fingers reaching up and waving
+lightly in the sun. To the north and south Claude could see the
+corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres
+where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in
+clouds of dust to the roadside. When a gust of wind rose, gay
+little twisters came across the open fields, corkscrews of
+powdered earth that whirled through the air and suddenly fell
+again. It seemed as if there were a lark on every fence post,
+singing for everything that was dumb; for the great ploughed
+lands, and the heavy horses in the rows, and the men guiding the
+horses.
+
+Along the roadsides, from under the dead weeds and wisps of dried
+bluestem, the dandelions thrust up their clean, bright faces. If
+Claude happened to step on one, the acrid smell made him think of
+Mahailey, who had probably been out this very morning, gouging
+the sod with her broken butcher knife and stuffing dandelion
+greens into her apron. She always went for greens with an air of
+secrecy, very early, and sneaked along the roadsides stooping
+close to the ground, as if she might be detected and driven away,
+or as if the dandelions were wild things and had to be caught
+sleeping.
+
+Claude was thinking, as he walked, of how he used to like to come
+to mill with his father. The whole process of milling was
+mysterious to him then; and the mill house and the miller's wife
+were mysterious; even Enid was, a little--until he got her down
+in the bright sun among the cat-tails. They used to play in the
+bins of clean wheat, watch the flour coming out of the hopper and
+get themselves covered with white dust.
+
+Best of all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping
+in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in
+through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted
+jewel-weed growing in the shale. The mill was a place of sharp
+contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy,
+dripping silence. He remembered how astonished he was one day,
+when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the
+millstones, and discovered what harmless looking things they
+were. The miller picked away at them with a sharp hammer until
+the sparks flew, and Claude still had on his hand a blue spot
+where a chip of flint went under the skin when he got too near.
+
+Jason Royce must have kept his mill going out of sentiment, for
+there was not much money in it now. But milling had been his
+first business, and he had not found many things in life to be
+sentimental about. Sometimes one still came upon him in dusty
+miller's clothes, giving his man a day off. He had long ago
+ceased to depend on the risings and fallings of Lovely Creek for
+his power, and had put in a gasoline engine. The old dam now lay
+"like a holler tooth," as one of his men said, grown up with
+weeds and willow-brush.
+
+Mr. Royce's family affairs had never gone as well as his
+business. He had not been blessed with a son, and out of five
+daughters he had succeeded in bringing up only two. People
+thought the mill house damp and unwholesome. Until he built a
+tenant's cottage and got a married man to take charge of the
+mill, Mr. Royce was never able to keep his millers long. They
+complained of the gloom of the house, and said they could not get
+enough to eat. Mrs. Royce went every summer to a vegetarian
+sanatorium in Michigan, where she learned to live on nuts and
+toasted cereals. She gave her family nourishment, to be sure, but
+there was never during the day a meal that a man could look
+forward to with pleasure, or sit down to with satisfaction. Mr.
+Royce usually dined at the hotel in town. Nevertheless, his wife
+was distinguished for certain brilliant culinary accomplishments.
+Her bread was faultless. When a church supper was toward, she was
+always called upon for her wonderful mayonnaise dressing, or her
+angel-food cake,--sure to be the lightest and spongiest in any
+assemblage of cakes.
+
+A deep preoccupation about her health made Mrs. Royce like a
+woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming
+regret. It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility. She lived
+differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful
+and reserved. Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care
+of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was understood and
+surrounded by sympathy.
+
+Her distrust had communicated itself to her daughters and in
+countless little ways had coloured their feelings about life.
+They grew up under the shadow of being "different," and formed no
+close friendships. Gladys Farmer was the only Frankfort girl who
+had ever gone much to the mill house. Nobody was surprised when
+Caroline Royce, the older daughter, went out to China to be a
+missionary, or that her mother let her go without a protest. The
+Royce women were strange, anyhow, people said; with Carrie gone,
+they hoped Enid would grow up to be more like other folk. She
+dressed well, came to town often in her car, and was always ready
+to work for the church or the public library.
+
+Besides, in Frankfort, Enid was thought very pretty,--in itself a
+humanizing attribute. She was slender, with a small, well-shaped
+head, a smooth, pale skin, and large, dark, opaque eyes with
+heavy lashes. The long line from the lobe of her ear to the tip
+of her chin gave her face a certain rigidity, but to the old
+ladies, who are the best critics in such matters, this meant
+firmness and dignity. She moved quickly and gracefully, just
+brushing things rather than touching them, so that there was a
+suggestion of flight about her slim figure, of gliding away from
+her surroundings. When the Sunday School gave tableaux vivants,
+Enid was chosen for Nydia, the blind girl of Pompeii, and for the
+martyr in "Christ or Diana." The pallor of her skin, the
+submissive inclination of her forehead, and her dark, unchanging
+eyes, made one think of something "early Christian."
+
+On this May morning when Claude Wheeler came striding up the mill
+road, Enid was in the yard, standing by a trellis for vines built
+near the fence, out from under the heavy shade of the trees. She
+was raking the earth that had been spaded up the day before, and
+making furrows in which to drop seeds. From the turn of the road,
+by the knotty old willows, Claude saw her pink starched dress and
+little white sun-bonnet. He hurried forward.
+
+"Hello, are you farming?" he called as he came up to the fence.
+
+Enid, who was bending over at that moment, rose quickly, but
+without a start. "Why, Claude! I thought you were out West
+somewhere. This is a surprise!" She brushed the earth from her
+hands and gave him her limp white fingers. Her arms, bare below
+the elbow, were thin, and looked cold, as if she had put on a
+summer dress too early.
+
+"I just got back this morning. I'm walking out home. What are you
+planting?"
+
+"Sweet peas."
+
+"You always have the finest ones in the country. When I see a
+bunch of yours at church or anywhere, I always know them."
+
+"Yes, I'm quite successful with my sweet peas," she admitted.
+"The ground is rich down here, and they get plenty of sun."
+
+"It isn't only your sweet peas. Nobody else has such lilacs or
+rambler roses, and I expect you have the only wistaria vine in
+Frankfort county."
+
+"Mother planted that a long while ago, when she first moved here.
+She is very partial to wistaria. I'm afraid we'll lose it, one of
+these hard winters."
+
+"Oh, that would be a shame! Take good care of it. You must put in
+a lot of time looking after these things, anyway." He spoke
+admiringly.
+
+Enid leaned against the fence and pushed back her little bonnet.
+"Perhaps I take more interest in flowers than I do in people. I
+often envy you, Claude; you have so many interests."
+
+He coloured. "I? Good gracious, I don't have many! I'm an awfully
+discontented sort of fellow. I didn't care about going to school
+until I had to stop, and then I was sore because I couldn't go
+back. I guess I've been sulking about it all winter."
+
+She looked at him with quiet astonishment. "I don't see why you
+should be discontented; you're so free."
+
+"Well, aren't you free, too?"
+
+"Not to do what I want to. The only thing I really want to do is
+to go out to China and help Carrie in her work. Mother thinks I'm
+not strong enough. But Carrie was never very strong here. She is
+better in China, and I think I might be."
+
+Claude felt concern. He had not seen Enid since the sleigh-ride,
+when she had been gayer than usual. Now she seemed sunk in
+lassitude. "You must get over such notions, Enid. You don't want
+to go wandering off alone like that. It makes people queer. Isn't
+there plenty of missionary work to be done right here?"
+
+She sighed. "That's what everybody says. But we all of us have a
+chance, if we'll take it. Out there they haven't. It's terrible
+to think of all those millions that live and die in darkness."
+
+Claude glanced up at the sombre mill house, hidden in
+cedars,--then off at the bright, dusty fields. He felt as if he
+were a little to blame for Enid's melancholy. He hadn't been very
+neighbourly this last year. "People can live in darkness here,
+too, unless they fight it. Look at me. I told you I've been
+moping all winter. We all feel friendly enough, but we go
+plodding on and never get together. You and I are old friends,
+and yet we hardly ever see each other. Mother says you've been
+promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her. Why
+don't you come? It would please her."
+
+"Then I will. I've always been fond of your mother." She paused a
+moment, absently twisting the strings of her bonnet, then
+twitched it from her head with a quick movement and looked at him
+squarely in the bright light. "Claude, you haven't really become
+a free-thinker, have you?"
+
+He laughed outright. "Why, what made you think I had?"
+
+"Everybody knows Ernest Havel is, and people say you and he read
+that kind of books together."
+
+"Has that got anything to do with our being friends?"
+
+"Yes, it has. I couldn't feel the same confidence in you. I've
+worried about it a good deal."
+
+"Well, you just cut it out. For one thing, I'm not worth it," he
+said quickly.
+
+"Oh, yes, you are! If worrying would do any good--" she shook her
+head at him reproachfully.
+
+Claude took hold of the fence pickets between them with both
+hands. "It will do good! Didn't I tell you there was missionary
+work to be done right here? Is that why you've been so
+stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I
+was an atheist?"
+
+"I never, you know, liked Ernest Havel," she murmured.
+
+When Claude left the mill and started homeward he felt that he
+had found something which would help him through the summer. How
+fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her
+without interruption,--without once seeing Mrs. Royce's face,
+always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn
+blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she
+used to come into church with her little girls,--a tiny woman in
+tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her
+black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and
+rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.
+
+Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other
+people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own
+thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions--her garden and the great
+kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about
+her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to
+be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The
+more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the
+act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as
+mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to
+him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have
+holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic
+and commonplace, like a man.
+
+
+III
+
+During the next few weeks Claude often ran his car down to the
+mill house on a pleasant evening and coaxed Enid to go into
+Frankfort with him and sit through a moving picture show, or to
+drive to a neighbouring town. The advantage of this form of
+companionship was that it did not put too great a strain upon
+one's conversational powers. Enid could be admirably silent, and
+she was never embarrassed by either silence or speech. She was
+cool and sure of herself under any circumstances, and that was
+one reason why she drove a car so well,--much better than Claude,
+indeed.
+
+One Sunday, when they met after church, she told Claude that she
+wanted to go to Hastings to do some shopping, and they arranged
+that he should take her on Tuesday in his father's big car. The
+town was about seventy miles to the northeast and, from
+Frankfort, it was an inconvenient trip by rail.
+
+On Tuesday morning Claude reached the mill house just as the sun
+was rising over the damp fields. Enid was on the front porch
+waiting for him, wearing a blanket coat over her spring suit. She
+ran down to the gate and slipped into the seat beside him.
+
+"Good morning, Claude. Nobody else is up. It's going to be a
+glorious day, isn't it?"
+
+"Splendid. A little warm for this time of year. You won't need
+that coat long."
+
+For the first hour they found the roads empty. All the fields
+were grey with dew, and the early sunlight burned over everything
+with the transparent brightness of a fire that has just been
+kindled. As the machine noiselessly wound off the miles, the sky
+grew deeper and bluer, and the flowers along the roadside opened
+in the wet grass. There were men and horses abroad on every hill
+now. Soon they began to pass children on the way to school, who
+stopped and waved their bright dinner pails at the two
+travellers. By ten o'clock they were in Hastings.
+
+While Enid was shopping, Claude bought some white shoes and duck
+trousers. He felt more interest than usual in his summer clothes.
+They met at the hotel for lunch, both very hungry and both
+satisfied with their morning's work. Seated in the dining room,
+with Enid opposite him, Claude thought they did not look at all
+like a country boy and girl come to town, but like experienced
+people touring in their car.
+
+"Will you make a call with me after dinner?" she asked while they
+were waiting for their dessert.
+
+"Is it any one I know?"
+
+"Certainly. Brother Weldon is in town. His meetings are over, and
+I was afraid he might be gone, but he is staying on a few days
+with Mrs. Gleason. I brought some of Carrie's letters along for
+him to read."
+
+Claude made a wry face. "He won't be delighted to see me. We
+never got on well at school. He's a regular muff of a teacher, if
+you want to know," he added resolutely.
+
+Enid studied him judicially. "I'm surprised to hear that; he's
+such a good speaker. You'd better come along. It's so foolish to
+have a coolness with your old teachers."
+
+An hour later the Reverend Arthur Weldon received the two young
+people in Mrs. Gleason's half-darkened parlour, where he seemed
+quite as much at home as that lady herself. The hostess, after
+chatting cordially with the visitors for a few moments, excused
+herself to go to a P. E. O. meeting. Every one rose at her
+departure, and Mr. Weldon approached Enid, took her hand, and
+stood looking at her with his head inclined and his oblique
+smile. "This is an unexpected pleasure, to see you again, Miss
+Enid. And you, too, Claude," turning a little toward the latter.
+"You've come up from Frankfort together this beautiful day?" His
+tone seemed to say, "How lovely for you!"
+
+He directed most of his remarks to Enid and, as always, avoided
+looking at Claude except when he definitely addressed him.
+
+"You are farming this year, Claude? I presume that is a great
+satisfaction to your father. And Mrs. Wheeler is quite well?"
+
+Mr. Weldon certainly bore no malice, but he always pronounced
+Claude's name exactly like the word "Clod," which annoyed him. To
+be sure, Enid pronounced his name in the same way, but either
+Claude did not notice this, or did not mind it from her. He sank
+into a deep, dark sofa, and sat with his driving cap on his knee
+while Brother Weldon drew a chair up to the one open window of
+the dusky room and began to read Carrie Royce's letters. Without
+being asked to do so, he read them aloud, and stopped to comment
+from time to time. Claude observed with disappointment that Enid
+drank in all his platitudes just as Mrs. Wheeler did. He had
+never looked at Weldon so long before. The light fell full on the
+young man's pear-shaped head and his thin, rippled hair. What in
+the world could sensible women like his mother and Enid Royce
+find to admire in this purring, white-necktied fellow? Enid's
+dark eyes rested upon him with an expression of profound respect.
+She both looked at him and spoke to him with more feeling than
+she ever showed toward Claude.
+
+"You see, Brother Weldon," she said earnestly, "I am not
+naturally much drawn to people. I find it hard to take the proper
+interest in the church work at home. It seems as if I had always
+been holding myself in reserve for the foreign field,--by not
+making personal ties, I mean. If Gladys Farmer went to China,
+everybody would miss her. She could never be replaced in the High
+School. She has the kind of magnetism that draws people to her.
+But I have always been keeping myself free to do what Carrie is
+doing. There I know I could be of use."
+
+Claude saw it was not easy for Enid to talk like this. Her face
+looked troubled, and her dark eyebrows came together in a sharp
+angle as she tried to tell the young preacher exactly what was
+going on in her mind. He listened with his habitual, smiling
+attention, smoothing the paper of the folded letter pages and
+murmuring, "Yes, I understand. Indeed, Miss Enid?"
+
+When she pressed him for advice, he said it was not always easy
+to know in what field one could be most useful; perhaps this very
+restraint was giving her some spiritual discipline that she
+particularly needed. He was careful not to commit himself, not to
+advise anything unconditionally, except prayer.
+
+"I believe that all things are made clear to us in prayer, Miss
+Enid."
+
+Enid clasped her hands; her perplexity made her features look
+sharper. "But it is when I pray that I feel this call the
+strongest. It seems as if a finger were pointing me over there.
+Sometimes when I ask for guidance in little things, I get none,
+and only get the feeling that my work lies far away, and that for
+it, strength would be given me. Until I take that road, Christ
+withholds himself."
+
+Mr. Weldon answered her in a tone of relief, as if something
+obscure had been made clear. "If that is the case, Miss Enid, I
+think we need have no anxiety. If the call recurs to you in
+prayer, and it is your Saviour's will, then we can be sure that
+the way and the means will be revealed. A passage from one of the
+Prophets occurs to me at this moment; 'And behold a way shall be
+opened up before thy feet; walk thou in it.' We might say that
+this promise was originally meant for Enid Royce! I believe God
+likes us to appropriate passages of His word personally." This
+last remark was made playfully, as if it were a kind of Christian
+Endeavour jest. He rose and handed Enid back the letters.
+Clearly, the interview was over.
+
+As Enid drew on her gloves she told him that it had been a great
+help to talk to him, and that he always seemed to give her what
+she needed. Claude wondered what it was. He hadn't seen Weldon do
+anything but retreat before her eager questions. He, an
+"atheist," could have given her stronger reinforcement.
+
+Claude's car stood under the maple trees in front of Mrs.
+Gleason's house. Before they got into it, he called Enid's
+attention to a mass of thunderheads in the west.
+
+"That looks to me like a storm. It might be a wise thing to stay
+at the hotel tonight."
+
+"Oh, no! I don't want to do that. I haven't come prepared."
+
+He reminded her that it wouldn't be impossible to buy whatever
+she might need for the night.
+
+"I don't like to stay in a strange place without my own things,"
+she said decidedly.
+
+"I'm afraid we'll be going straight into it. We may be in for
+something pretty rough,--but it's as you say." He still
+hesitated, with his hand on the door.
+
+"I think we'd better try it," she said with quiet determination.
+Claude had not yet learned that Enid always opposed the
+unexpected, and could not bear to have her plans changed by
+people or circumstances.
+
+For an hour he drove at his best speed, watching the clouds
+anxiously. The table-land, from horizon to horizon, was glowing
+in sunlight, and the sky itself seemed only the more brilliant
+for the mass of purple vapours rolling in the west, with bright
+edges, like new-cut lead. He had made fifty odd miles when the
+air suddenly grew cold, and in ten minutes the whole shining sky
+was blotted out. He sprang to the ground and began to jack up his
+wheels. As soon as a wheel left the earth, Enid adjusted the
+chain. Claude told her he had never got the chains on so quickly
+before. He covered the packages in the back seat with an oilcloth
+and drove forward to meet the storm.
+
+The rain swept over them in waves, seemed to rise from the sod as
+well as to fall from the clouds. They made another five miles,
+ploughing through puddles and sliding over liquefied roads.
+Suddenly the heavy car, chains and all, bounded up a two-foot
+bank, shot over the sod a dozen yards before the brake caught it,
+then swung a half-circle and stood still. Enid sat calm and
+motionless.
+
+Claude drew a long breath. "If that had happened on a culvert,
+we'd be in the ditch with the car on top of us. I simply can't
+control the thing. The whole top soil is loose, and there's
+nothing to hold to. That's Tommy Rice's place over there. We'd
+better get him to take us in for the night."
+
+"But that would be worse than the hotel," Enid objected. "They
+are not very clean people, and there are a lot of children."
+
+"Better be crowded than dead," he murmured. "From here on, it
+would be a matter of luck. We might land anywhere."
+
+"We are only about ten miles from your place. I can stay with
+your mother tonight."
+
+"It's too dangerous, Enid. I don't like the responsibility. Your
+father would blame me for taking such a chance."
+
+"I know, it's on my account you're nervous." Enid spoke
+reasonably enough. "Do you mind letting me drive for awhile?
+There are only three bad hills left, and I think I can slide down
+them sideways; I've often tried it."
+
+Claude got out and let her slip into his seat, but after she took
+the wheel he put his hand on her arm. "Don't do anything so
+foolish," he pleaded.
+
+Enid smiled and shook her head. She was amiable, but inflexible.
+
+He folded his arms. "Go on."
+
+He was chafed by her stubbornness, but he had to admire her
+resourcefulness in handling the car. At the bottom of one of the
+worst hills was a new cement culvert, overlaid with liquid mud,
+where there was nothing for the chains to grip. The car slid to
+the edge of the culvert and stopped on the very brink. While they
+were ploughing up the other side of the hill, Enid remarked;
+"It's a good thing your starter works well; a little jar would
+have thrown us over."
+
+They pulled up at the Wheeler farm just before dark, and Mrs.
+Wheeler came running out to meet them with a rubber coat over her
+head.
+
+"You poor drowned children!" she cried, taking Enid in her arms.
+"How did you ever get home? I so hoped you had stayed in
+Hastings."
+
+"It was Enid who got us home," Claude told her. "She's a
+dreadfully foolhardy girl, and somebody ought to shake her, but
+she's a fine driver."
+
+Enid laughed as she brushed a wet lock back from her forehead.
+"You were right, of course; the sensible thing would have been to
+turn in at the Rice place; only I didn't want to."
+
+Later in the evening Claude was glad they hadn't. It was pleasant
+to be at home and to see Enid at the supper table, sitting on his
+father's right and wearing one of his mother's new grey
+house-dresses. They would have had a dismal time at the Rices',
+with no beds to sleep in except such as were already occupied by
+Rice children. Enid had never slept in his mother's guest room
+before, and it pleased him to think how comfortable she would be
+there.
+
+At an early hour Mrs. Wheeler took a candle to light her guest to
+bed; Enid passed near Claude's chair as she was leaving the room.
+"Have you forgiven me?" she asked teasingly.
+
+"What made you so pig-headed? Did you want to frighten me? or to
+show me how well you could drive?"
+
+"Neither. I wanted to get home. Good-night."
+
+Claude settled back in his chair and shaded his eyes. She did
+feel that this was home, then. She had not been afraid of his
+father's jokes, or disconcerted by Mahailey's knowing grin. Her
+ease in the household gave him unaccountable pleasure. He picked
+up a book, but did not read. It was lying open on his knee when
+his mother came back half an hour later.
+
+"Move quietly when you go upstairs, Claude. She is so tired that
+she may be asleep already."
+
+He took off his shoes and made his ascent with the utmost
+caution.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Ernest Havel was cultivating his bright, glistening young
+cornfield one summer morning, whistling to himself an old German
+song which was somehow connected with a picture that rose in his
+memory. It was a picture of the earliest ploughing he could
+remember.
+
+He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in
+the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of
+sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests. In the meadows
+at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek,
+with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown
+fields. He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and
+watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that
+had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns. His
+mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father
+walked behind, guiding the plough. His father always looked down.
+His mother's face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields,
+and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring. The
+two would go up and down thus all morning without speaking,
+except to the oxen. Ernest was the last of a long family, and as
+he played by the creek he used to wonder why his parents looked
+so old.
+
+Leonard Dawson drove his car up to the fence and shouted, waking
+Ernest from his revery. He told his team to stand, and ran out to
+the edge of the field.
+
+"Hello, Ernest," Leonard called. "Have you heard Claude Wheeler
+got hurt day before yesterday?"
+
+"You don't say so! It can't be anything bad, or they'd let me
+know."
+
+"Oh, it's nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face
+scratched up in the wire quite a little. It was the queerest
+thing I ever saw. He was out with the team of mules and a heavy
+plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and
+mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than
+usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they
+did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that
+deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to
+the gasoline man to stop, but he didn't hear me. Claude jumped
+for the critters' heads and got 'em by the bits, but by that time
+he was all tangled up in the lines. Those damned mules lifted him
+off his feet and started to run. Down the draw and up the bank
+and across the fields they went, with that big plough-blade
+jumping three or four feet in the air every clip. I was sure it
+would cut one of the mules open, or go clean through Claude. It
+would have got him, too, if he hadn't kept his hold on the bits.
+They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally
+ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up."
+
+"My goodness! Did he get cut bad?"
+
+"No, not very, but yesterday morning he was out cultivating corn,
+all stuck up with court plaster. I knew that was a fool thing to
+do; a wire cut's nasty if you get overheated out in the dust. But
+you can't tell a Wheeler anything. Now they say his face has
+swelled and is hurting him terrible, and he's gone to town to see
+the doctor. You'd better go over there tonight, and see if you
+can make him take care of himself."
+
+Leonard drove on, and Ernest went back to his team. "It's queer
+about that boy," he was thinking. "He's big and strong, and he's
+got an education and all that fine land, but he don't seem to fit
+in right." Sometimes Ernest thought his friend was unlucky. When
+that idea occurred to him, he sighed and shook it off. For Ernest
+believed there was no help for that; it was something rationalism
+did not explain.
+
+The next afternoon Enid Royce's coupe drove up to the Wheeler
+farmyard. Mrs. Wheeler saw Enid get out of her car and came down
+the hill to meet her, breathless and distressed. "Oh, Enid!
+You've heard of Claude's accident? He wouldn't take care of
+himself, and now he's got erysipelas. He's in such pain, poor
+boy!"
+
+Enid took her arm, and they started up the hill toward the house.
+"Can I see Claude, Mrs. Wheeler? I want to give him these
+flowers."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "I don't know if he will let you come in,
+dear. I had hard work persuading him to see Ernest for a few
+moments last night. He seems so low-spirited, and he's sensitive
+about the way he's bandaged up. I'll go to his room and ask him."
+
+"No, just let me go up with you, please. If I walk in with you,
+he won't have time to fret about it. I won't stay if he doesn't
+wish it, but I want to see him."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was alarmed at this suggestion, but Enid ignored her
+uncertainty. They went up to the third floor together, and Enid
+herself tapped at the door.
+
+"It's I, Claude. May I come in for a moment?"
+
+A muffled, reluctant voice answered. "No. They say this is
+catching, Enid. And anyhow, I'd rather you didn't see me like
+this."
+
+Without waiting she pushed open the door. The dark blinds were
+down, and the room was full of a strong, bitter odor. Claude lay
+flat in bed, his head and face so smothered in surgical cotton
+that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible. The
+brown paste with which his features were smeared oozed out at the
+edges of the gauze and made his dressings look untidy. Enid took
+in these details at a glance.
+
+"Does the light hurt your eyes? Let me put up one of the blinds
+for a moment, because I want you to see these flowers. I've
+brought you my first sweet peas."
+
+Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before
+him. She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell
+them through his medicines. In a moment he ceased to feel
+embarrassed. His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged
+the flowers on the little table beside him.
+
+"Now, do you want me to darken the room again?"
+
+"Not yet. Sit down for a minute and talk to me. I can't say much
+because my face is stiff."
+
+"I should think it would be! I met Leonard Dawson on the road
+yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you
+were cut. I would like to scold you hard, Claude."
+
+"Do. It might make me feel better." He took her hand and kept her
+beside him a moment. "Are those the sweet peas you were planting
+that day when I came back from the West?"
+
+"Yes. Haven't they done well to blossom so early?"
+
+"Less than two months. That's strange," he sighed.
+
+"Strange? What?"
+
+"Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few
+weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it's
+not much account."
+
+"That's not the way to look at things," she said reprovingly.
+
+Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her
+flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had
+brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began
+to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas.
+He listened but absently. He would never have believed that Enid,
+with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and
+sit with him like this. He noticed that his mother was quite as
+much astonished as he. She hovered about the visitor for a few
+moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went
+downstairs to her work. Claude wished that Enid would not talk at
+all, but would sit there and let him look at her. The sunshine
+she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence,
+soothed him. Presently he realized that she was asking him
+something.
+
+"What is it, Enid? The medicine they give me makes me stupid. I
+don't catch things."
+
+"I was asking whether you play chess."
+
+"Very badly."
+
+"Father says I play passably well. When you are better you must
+let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.
+They are beautifully carved. And now it's time for me to go."
+
+She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish
+about seeing people. "I didn't know you were so vain. Bandages
+are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the
+dark blind again for you?"
+
+"Yes, please. There won't be anything to look at now."
+
+"Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies' man!"
+
+Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He
+felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went
+downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.
+
+His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him
+while he swallowed it. "Enid Royce is a real sensible girl--" she
+said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not
+conviction but bewilderment.
+
+Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her
+visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that
+happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his
+poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when
+he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt
+unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the
+pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a
+distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog
+fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of
+torture,--everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the
+rack and the wheel.
+
+When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer
+clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but
+he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After
+awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer
+chair and play chess with her.
+
+One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room
+with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that
+he was beaten again.
+
+"It must be dull for you, playing with me," he murmured, brushing
+the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so
+white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were
+the soft, languid hands of a sick man.
+
+"You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind
+on it," Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had
+a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it
+was clear that he would never play well.
+
+"Yes," he sighed, dropping back into his chair, "my wits do
+wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn't
+it lovely? And now I won't be able to harvest it. Sometimes I
+wonder whether I'll ever finish anything I begin."
+
+Enid put the chessmen back into their box. "Now that you are
+better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your
+trouble people are always depressed."
+
+Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the
+chair. "No, it's not that. It's having so much time to think that
+makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that
+gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I
+lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening
+to me or to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much
+connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."
+
+"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to
+start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!" She
+shook her finger at him.
+
+"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them."
+Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock milk; it was his
+first day downstairs.
+
+When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen
+the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would
+always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted
+to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a
+bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that
+some day he must reckon with it again.
+
+Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and
+she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling
+room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody
+but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from
+conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered
+her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day
+exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her
+stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her
+stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent
+gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to
+do thus and to do Right!"
+
+Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had
+been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife--and his
+eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in
+her the promise of "virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to
+use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across the
+aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he
+respected her seriousness.
+
+When they played together she was fair-minded, didn't whine if
+she got hurt, and never claimed a girl's exemption from anything
+unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the
+mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking
+and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little
+drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over,
+"Oh, Claude, Claude!" Incidents like that one now seemed to him
+significant and fateful.
+
+When Claude's strength began to return to him, it came
+overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong while his body
+was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The
+desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was
+unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted.
+When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her
+actual presence restored his equilibrium--almost. This fact did
+not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful
+in the girl's nature,--a quality so lovely and subtle that there
+is no name for it.
+
+During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy
+the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft physical
+pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through,
+it was delightful to lie upon a cloud that floated lazily down
+the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid
+would start up like a sweet, burning pain, and he would drift out
+into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor
+control. So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back
+in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he was overtaken
+by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he
+would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed
+for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was
+feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would
+be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he
+who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her,
+but loved her while she was still and unconscious like a statue.
+He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without
+knowing why.
+
+Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush
+swept across his face and he felt guilty toward her, meek and
+humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he
+was glad when she went away and left him alone to think about
+her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be
+grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the
+one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into
+the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed
+his father, His marriage would be the first natural, dutiful,
+expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of
+usefulness and content; as his mother's oft-repeated Psalm said,
+it would restore his soul. Enid's willingness to listen to him he
+could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was
+probably regarded by her friends as equivalent to an engagement.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude's first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After
+leaving the barber-shop he presented himself, glistening with
+bayrum, at Jason Royce's office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing
+his safe, turned and took the young man by the hand.
+
+"Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can't do
+much to a husky young farmer like you. With old fellows, it's
+another story. I'm just starting off to have a look at my
+alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go along with me."
+
+They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and
+when they were spinning along between fields of ripening grain
+Claude broke the silence. "I expect you know what I want to see
+you about, Mr. Royce?"
+
+The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim
+ever since they started.
+
+"Well," Claude went on modestly, "it oughtn't to surprise you to
+hear that I've set my heart on Enid. I haven't said anything to
+her yet, but if you're not against me, I'm going to try to
+persuade her to marry me."
+
+"Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude," said Mr. Royce. He
+sat slumping in his seat, watching the road ahead of him with
+intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual.
+"Enid is a vegetarian, you know," he remarked unexpectedly.
+
+Claude smiled. "That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr.
+Royce."
+
+The other nodded slightly. "I know. At your age you think it
+doesn't. Such things do make a difference, however." His lips
+closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not
+open them.
+
+"Enid is a good girl," he said at last. "Strictly speaking, she
+has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce had another
+daughter at home, I'd take Enid into my office. She has good
+judgment. I don't know but she'd run a business better than a
+house." Having got this out, Mr. Royce relaxed his frown, took
+his cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back between
+his teeth without relighting it.
+
+Claude was watching him with surprise. "There's no question about
+Enid, Mr. Royce. I didn't come to ask you about her," he
+exclaimed. "I came to ask if you'd be willing to have me for a
+son-in-law. I know, and you know, that Enid could do a great deal
+better than to marry me. I surely haven't made much of a showing,
+so far."
+
+"Here we are," announced Mr. Royce. "I'll leave the car under
+this elm, and we'll go up to the north end of the field and have
+a look."
+
+They crawled under the wire fence and started across the rough
+ground through a field of purple blossoms. Clouds of yellow
+butterflies darted up before them. They walked jerkily, breaking
+through the sun-baked crust into the soft soil beneath. Mr. Royce
+lit a fresh cigar, and as he threw away the match let his hand
+drop on the young man's shoulder. "I always envied your father.
+You took my fancy when you were a little shaver, and I used to
+let you in to see the water-wheel. When I gave up water power and
+put in an engine, I said to myself: 'There's just one fellow in
+the country will be sorry to see the old wheel go, and that's
+Claude Wheeler.'"
+
+"I hope you don't think I'm too young to marry," Claude said as
+they tramped on.
+
+"No, it's right and proper a young man should marry. I don't say
+anything against marriage," Mr. Royce protested doggedly. "You
+may find some opposition in Enid's missionary motives. I don't
+know how she feels about that now. I don't enquire. I'd be
+pleased to see her get rid of such notions. They don't do a woman
+any good."
+
+"I want to help her get rid of them. If it's all right with you,
+I hope I can persuade Enid to marry me this fall."
+
+Jason Royce turned his head quickly toward his companion, studied
+his artless, hopeful countenance for a moment, and then looked
+away with a frown.
+
+The alfalfa field sloped upward at one corner, lay like a bright
+green-and-purple handkerchief thrown down on the hillside. At the
+uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as
+light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that
+hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off
+his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the
+flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and
+the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his
+brown neck. He sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his
+heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the
+field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast
+body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in
+his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak
+struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself
+understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do
+was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his
+young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain
+heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The
+dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the
+young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his
+secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and
+tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first. He did
+not look at Claude, but while he watched the wind plough soft,
+flowery roads in the field, the boy's face was clearly before
+him, with its expression of reticent pride melting into the
+desire to please, and the slight stiffness of his shoulders, set
+in a kind of stubborn loyalty. Claude lay on the sod beside him,
+rather tired after his walk in the sun, a little melancholy,
+though he did not know why.
+
+After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered
+miller's hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar.
+"Well, Claude," he said with determined cheerfulness, "we'll
+always be better friends than is common between father and
+son-in-law. You'll find out that pretty nearly everything you
+believe about life--about marriage, especially--is lies. I don't
+know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they
+do."
+
+
+VI
+
+After his interview with Mr. Royce, Claude drove directly to the
+mill house. As he came up the shady road, he saw with
+disappointment the flash of two white dresses instead of one,
+moving about in the sunny flower garden. The visitor was Gladys
+Farmer. This was her vacation time. She had walked out to the
+mill in the cool of the morning to spend the day with Enid. Now
+they were starting off to gather water-cresses, and had stopped
+in the garden to smell the heliotrope. On this scorching
+afternoon the purple sprays gave out a fragrance that hung over
+the flower-bed and brushed their cheeks like a warm breath. The
+girls looked up at the same moment and recognized Claude. They
+waved to him and hurried down to the gate to congratulate him on
+his recovery. He took their little tin pails and followed them
+around the old dam-head and up a sandy gorge, along a clear
+thread of water that trickled into Lovely Creek just above the
+mill. They came to the gravelly hill where the stream took its
+source from a spring hollowed out under the exposed roots of two
+elm trees. All about the spring, and in the sandy bed of the
+shallow creek, the cresses grew cool and green.
+
+Gladys had strong feelings about places. She looked around her
+with satisfaction. "Of all the places where we used to play,
+Enid, this was my favourite," she declared.
+
+"You girls sit up there on the elm roots," Claude suggested.
+"Wherever you put your foot in this soft gravel, water gathers.
+You'll spoil your white shoes. I'll get the cress for you."
+
+"Stuff my pail as full as you can, then," Gladys called as they
+sat down. "I wonder why the Spanish dagger grows so thick on this
+hill, Enid? These plants were old and tough when we were little.
+I love it here."
+
+She leaned back upon the hot, glistening hill-side. The sun came
+down in red rays through the elm-tops, and all the pebbles and
+bits of quartz glittered dazzlingly. Down in the stream bed the
+water, where it caught the light, twinkled like tarnished gold.
+Claude's sandy head and stooping shoulders were mottled with
+sunshine as they moved about over the green patches, and his duck
+trousers looked much whiter than they were. Gladys was too poor
+to travel, but she had the good fortune to be able to see a great
+deal within a few miles of Frankfort, and a warm imagination
+helped her to find life interesting. She did, as she confided to
+Enid, want to go to Colorado; she was ashamed of never having
+seen a mountain.
+
+Presently Claude came up the bank with two shining, dripping
+pails. "Now may I sit down with you for a few minutes?"
+
+Moving to make room for him beside her, Enid noticed that his
+thin face was heavily beaded with perspiration. His pocket
+handkerchief was wet and sandy, so she gave him her own, with a
+proprietary air. "Why, Claude, you look quite tired! Have you
+been over-doing? Where were you before you came here?"
+
+"I was out in the country with your father, looking at his
+alfalfa."
+
+"And he walked you all over the field in the hot sun, I suppose?"
+
+Claude laughed. "He did."
+
+"Well, I'll scold him tonight. You stay here and rest. I am going
+to drive Gladys home."
+
+Gladys protested, but at last consented that they should both
+drive her home in Claude's car. They lingered awhile, however,
+listening to the soft, amiable bubbling of the spring; a wise,
+unobtrusive voice, murmuring night and day, continually telling
+the truth to people who could not understand it.
+
+When they went back to the house Enid stopped long enough to cut
+a bunch of heliotrope for Mrs. Farmer,--though with the sinking
+of the sun its rich perfume had already vanished. They left
+Gladys and her flowers and cresses at the gate of the white
+cottage, now half hidden by gaudy trumpet vines.
+
+Claude turned his car and went back along the dim, twilight road
+with Enid. "I usually like to see Gladys, but when I found her
+with you this afternoon, I was terribly disappointed for a
+minute. I'd just been talking with your father, and I wanted to
+come straight to you. Do you think you could marry me, Enid?"
+
+"I don't believe it would be for the best, Claude." She spoke
+sadly.
+
+He took her passive hand. "Why not?"
+
+"My mind is full of other plans. Marriage is for most girls, but
+not for all."
+
+Enid had taken off her hat. In the low evening light Claude
+studied her pale face under her brown hair. There was something
+graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something
+that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness. "I've had
+those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don't get
+any further than you. If you could care ever so little for me to
+start on, I'd be willing to risk the rest." She sighed. "You know
+I care for you. I've never made any secret of it. But we're happy
+as we are, aren't we?"
+
+"No, I'm not. I've got to have some life of my own, or I'll go to
+pieces. If you won't have me, I'll try South America,--and I
+won't come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman."
+
+Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.
+
+The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs
+window. Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to
+the ground. She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long
+lashes. In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars,
+and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to
+Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes
+where the old mill-dam used to be. A terrible melancholy clutched
+at the boy's heart. He hadn't thought it would be like this. He
+drove home feeling weak and broken. Was there nothing in the
+world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn
+to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard?
+This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and
+you could no more change that than you could change the story in
+an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the
+world was too rough a place to get about in.
+
+There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that
+night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while,
+watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly
+enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were
+little girls,--and knew all there was to know about her. Claude
+would become one of those dead people that moved about the
+streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish,
+and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for
+fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead
+men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of
+strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all
+things which might make the world beautiful--love and kindness,
+leisure and art--were shut up in prison, and that successful men
+like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would
+let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and
+could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed
+into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss.
+She had not dared, for instance, to go to Omaha that spring for
+the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an
+extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her
+friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have
+decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted
+upon having next year.
+
+There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and
+generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit,
+inefficient--failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery,
+emotional old maid who couldn't tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a
+lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day
+long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug
+clerk, who wrote free verse and "movie" scenarios, and tended the
+sodawater fountain.
+
+Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High
+School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had
+waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be
+more successful than Bayliss AND STILL BE CLAUDE. She would have
+made any sacrifice to help him on. If a strong boy like Claude,
+so well endowed and so fearless, must fail, simply because he had
+that finer strain in his nature,--then life was not worth the
+chagrin it held for a passionate heart like hers.
+
+At last Gladys threw herself upon the bed. If he married Enid,
+that would be the end. He would go about strong and heavy, like
+Mr. Royce; a big machine with the springs broken inside.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Claude was well enough to go into the fields before the harvest
+was over. The middle of July came, and the farmers were still
+cutting grain. The yield of wheat and oats was so heavy that
+there were not machines enough to thrash it within the usual
+time. Men had to await their turn, letting their grain stand in
+shock until a belching black engine lumbered into the field.
+Rains would have been disastrous; but this was one of those "good
+years" which farmers tell about, when everything goes well. At
+the time they needed rain, there was plenty of it; and now the
+days were miracles of dry, glittering heat.
+
+Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew,
+and started a quivering excitement in all living things. In great
+harvest seasons like that one, the heat, the intense light, and
+the important work in hand draw people together and make them
+friendly. Neighbours helped each other to cope with the
+burdensome abundance of man-nourishing grain; women and children
+and old men fell to and did what they could to save and house it.
+Even the horses had a more varied and sociable existence than
+usual, going about from one farm to another to help neighbour
+horses drag wagons and binders and headers. They nosed the colts
+of old friends, ate out of strange mangers, and drank, or refused
+to drink, out of strange water-troughs. Decrepit horses that
+lived on a pension, like the Wheelers' stiff-legged Molly and
+Leonard Dawson's Billy with the heaves--his asthmatic cough could
+be heard for a quarter of a mile--were pressed into service now.
+It was wonderful, too, how well these invalided beasts managed to
+keep up with the strong young mares and geldings; they bent their
+willing heads and pulled as if the chafing of the collar on their
+necks was sweet to them.
+
+The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and
+took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak
+and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left
+behind it a spent and exhausted world. Horses and men and women
+grew thin, seethed all day in their own sweat. After supper they
+dropped over and slept anywhere at all, until the red dawn broke
+clear in the east again, like the fanfare of trumpets, and nerves
+and muscles began to quiver with the solar heat.
+
+For several weeks Claude did not have time to read the
+newspapers; they lay about the house in bundles, unopened, for
+Nat Wheeler was in the field now, working like a giant. Almost
+every evening Claude ran down to the mill to see Enid for a few
+minutes; he did not get out of his car, and she sat on the old
+stile, left over from horse-back days, while she chatted with
+him. She said frankly that she didn't like men who had just come
+out of the harvest field, and Claude did not blame her. He didn't
+like himself very well after his clothes began to dry on him. But
+the hour or two between supper and bed was the only time he had
+to see anybody. He slept like the heroes of old; sank upon his
+bed as the thing he desired most on earth, and for a blissful
+moment felt the sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In
+the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for
+hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he
+had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him
+between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was
+enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for
+instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see Enid as
+usual. While she was coming down the path from the house, he
+discovered that he had no clothes on at all! Then, with wonderful
+agility, he jumped over the picket fence into a clump of castor
+beans, and stood in the dusk, trying to cover himself with the
+leaves, like Adam in the garden, talking commonplaces to Enid
+through chattering teeth, afraid lest at any moment she might
+discover his plight.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey always lost weight in thrashing time,
+just as the horses did; this year Nat Wheeler had six hundred
+acres of winter wheat that would run close upon thirty bushels to
+the acre. Such a harvest was as hard on the women as it was on
+the men. Leonard Dawson's wife, Susie, came over to help Mrs.
+Wheeler, but she was expecting a baby in the fall, and the heat
+proved too much for her. Then one of the Yoeder daughters came;
+but the methodical German girl was so distracted by Mahailey's
+queer ways that Mrs. Wheeler said it was easier to do the work
+herself than to keep explaining Mahailey's psychology. Day after
+day ten ravenous men sat down at the long dinner table in the
+kitchen. Mrs. Wheeler baked pies and cakes and bread loaves as
+fast as the oven would hold them, and from morning till night the
+range was stoked like the fire-box of a locomotive. Mahailey
+wrung the necks of chickens until her wrist swelled up, as she
+said, "like a puff-adder."
+
+By the end of July the excitement quieted down. The extra leaves
+were taken out of the dining table, the Wheeler horses had their
+barn to themselves again, and the reign of terror in the henhouse
+was over.
+
+One evening Mr. Wheeler came down to supper with a bundle of
+newspapers under his arm. "Claude, I see this war scare in Europe
+has hit the market. Wheat's taken a jump. They're paying
+eighty-eight cents in Chicago. We might as well get rid of a few
+hundred bushel before it drops again. We'd better begin hauling
+tomorrow. You and I can make two trips a day over to Vicount, by
+changing teams,--there's no grade to speak of."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, arrested in the act of pouring coffee, sat holding
+the coffee-pot in the air, forgetting she had it. "If this is
+only a newspaper scare, as we think, I don't see why it should
+affect the market," she murmured mildly. "Surely those big
+bankers in New York and Boston have some way of knowing rumour
+from fact."
+
+"Give me some coffee, please," said her husband testily. "I don't
+have to explain the market, I've only got to take advantage of
+it."
+
+"But unless there's some reason, why are we dragging our wheat
+over to Vicount? Do you suppose it's some scheme the grain men
+are hiding under a war rumour? Have the financiers and the press
+ever deceived the public like this before?"
+
+"I don't know a thing in the world about it, Evangeline, and I
+don't suppose. I telephoned the elevator at Vicount an hour ago,
+and they said they'd pay me seventy cents, subject to change in
+the morning quotations. Claude," with a twinkle in his eye,
+"you'd better not go to mill tonight. Turn in early. If we are on
+the road by six tomorrow, we'll be in town before the heat of the
+day."
+
+"All right, sir. I want to look at the papers after supper. I
+haven't read anything but the headlines since before thrashing.
+Ernest was stirred up about the murder of that Grand Duke and
+said the Austrians would make trouble. But I never thought there
+was anything in it."
+
+"There's seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway," said his father,
+reaching for a hot biscuit.
+
+"If there's that much, I'm somehow afraid there will be more,"
+said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully. She had picked up the paper
+fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to
+brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.
+
+"You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers
+say about it," Mr. Wheeler suggested.
+
+Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer
+from the Havels. They had probably gone to a barn dance down in
+the Bohemian township. He went upstairs and sat down before an
+armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable
+out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the
+Omaha World Herald. The German army was entering Luxembourg; he
+didn't know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a
+country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace!
+His mother had gone up to "Mahailey's library," the attic, to
+hunt for a map of Europe,--a thing for which Nebraska farmers had
+never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads,
+the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.
+
+Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother's
+return. He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark. The night
+was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play
+of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon. Mosquitoes had
+got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon
+the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating
+note. He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears
+with the pillow. The disquieting sound became merged, in his
+sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper;
+those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a
+soft, high, sing-song whizz.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Late in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his
+empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat
+country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley. He had made
+two trips to town that day. Though he had kept his heaviest team
+for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged
+off a walk. Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their
+flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every
+step. Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and
+slow. The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot
+to the touch. Claude sat at one end of it, his head bared to
+catch the faint stir of air that sometimes dried his neck and
+chin and saved him the trouble of pulling out a handkerchief. On
+every side the wheat stubble stretched for miles and miles.
+Lonely straw stacks stood up yellow in the sun and cast long
+shadows. Claude peered anxiously along the distant locust hedges
+which told where the road ran. Ernest Havel had promised to meet
+him somewhere on the way home. He had not seen Ernest for a week:
+since then Time had brought prodigies to birth.
+
+At last he recognized the Havels' team along way off, and he
+stopped and waited for Ernest beside a thorny hedge, looking
+thoughtfully about him. The sun was already low. It hung above
+the stubble, all milky and rosy with the heat, like the image of
+a sun reflected in grey water. In the east the full moon had just
+risen, and its thin silver surface was flushed with pink until it
+looked exactly like the setting sun. Except for the place each
+occupied in the heavens, Claude could not have told which was
+which. They rested upon opposite rims of the world, two bright
+shields, and regarded each other, as if they, too, had met by
+appointment.
+
+Claude and Ernest sprang to the ground at the same instant and
+shook hands, feeling that they had not seen each other for a long
+while.
+
+"Well, what do you make of it, Ernest?"
+
+The young man shook his head cautiously, but replied no further.
+He patted his horses and eased the collars on their necks.
+
+"I waited in town for the Hastings paper," Claude went on
+impatiently. "England declared war last night."
+
+"The Germans," said Ernest, "are at Liege. I know where that is.
+I sailed from Antwerp when I came over here."
+
+"Yes, I saw that. Can the Belgians do anything?"
+
+"Nothing." Ernest leaned against the wagon wheel and drawing his
+pipe from his pocket slowly filled it. "Nobody can do anything.
+The German army will go where it pleases."
+
+"If it's as bad as that, why are the Belgians putting up a fight?"
+
+"I don't know. It's fine, but it will come to nothing in the end.
+Let me tell you something about the German army, Claude."
+
+Pacing up and down beside the locust hedge, Ernest rehearsed the
+great argument; preparation, organization, concentration,
+inexhaustible resources, inexhaustible men. While he talked the
+sun disappeared, the moon contracted, solidified, and slowly
+climbed the pale sky. The fields were still glimmering with the
+bland reflection left over from daylight, and the distance grew
+shadowy,--not dark, but seemingly full of sleep.
+
+"If I were at home," Ernest concluded, "I would be in the
+Austrian army this minute. I guess all my cousins and nephews are
+fighting the Russians or the Belgians already. How would you like
+it yourself, to be marched into a peaceful country like this, in
+the middle of harvest, and begin to destroy it?"
+
+"I wouldn't do it, of course. I'd desert and be shot."
+
+"Then your family would be persecuted. Your brothers, maybe even
+your father, would be made orderlies to Austrian officers and be
+kicked in the mouth."
+
+"I wouldn't bother about that. I'd let my male relatives decide
+for themselves how often they would be kicked."
+
+Ernest shrugged his shoulders. "You Americans brag like little
+boys; you would and you wouldn't! I tell you, nobody's will has
+anything to do with this. It is the harvest of all that has been
+planted. I never thought it would come in my life-time, but I
+knew it would come."
+
+The boys lingered a little while, looking up at the soft radiance
+of the sky. There was not a cloud anywhere, and the low glimmer
+in the fields had imperceptibly changed to full, pure moonlight.
+Presently the two wagons began to creep along the white road, and
+on the backless seat of each the driver sat drooping forward,
+lost in thought. When they reached the corner where Ernest turned
+south, they said goodnight without raising their voices. Claude's
+horses went on as if they were walking in their sleep. They did
+not even sneeze at the low cloud of dust beaten up by their heavy
+foot-falls,--the only sounds in the vast quiet of the night.
+
+Why was Ernest so impatient with him, Claude wondered. He could
+not pretend to feel as Ernest did. He had nothing behind him to
+shape his opinions or colour his feelings about what was going on
+in Europe; he could only sense it day by day. He had always been
+taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues
+Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had
+all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. The
+invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as
+he knew it in his friends and neighbours. He still cherished the
+hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid
+people would apologize and right itself with the world.
+
+Mr. Wheeler came down the hill, bareheaded and coatless, as
+Claude drove into the barnyard. "I expect you're tired. I'll put
+your team away. Any news?"
+
+"England has declared war."
+
+Mr. Wheeler stood still a moment and scratched his head. "I guess
+you needn't get up early tomorrow. If this is to be a sure enough
+war, wheat will go higher. I've thought it was a bluff until now.
+You take the papers up to your mother."
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium
+where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back
+until October. Claude and his mother gave all their attention to
+the war despatches. Day after day, through the first two weeks of
+August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
+into the farming country.
+
+About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the
+forts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a
+few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,--guns which
+evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or
+ever could be constructed. Even to these quiet wheat-growing
+people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their
+safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way
+of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which
+afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of
+unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or
+the eruption of volcanoes.
+
+On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at
+Namur; again giving warning that an unprecedented power of
+destruction had broken loose in the world. A few days later the
+story of the wiping out of the ancient and peaceful seat of
+learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
+directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers
+were full of accounts of the destruction of civilian populations.
+Something new, and certainly evil, was at work among mankind.
+Nobody was ready with a name for it. None of the well-worn words
+descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The epithets
+grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too
+dramatic, too full of old, familiar human passion.
+
+One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in
+the kitchen making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car
+coming back from Frankfort. In a moment he entered, letting the
+screen door slam behind him, and threw a bundle of mail on the
+table.
+
+"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of
+government to Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold
+Paris."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler wiped her pale, perspiring face with the hem of her
+apron and sat down in the nearest chair. "You mean that Paris is
+not the capital of France any more? Can that be true?"
+
+"That's what it looks like. Though the papers say it's only a
+precautionary measure."
+
+She rose. "Let's go up to the map. I don't remember exactly where
+Bordeaux is. Mahailey, you won't let my vinegar burn, will you?"
+
+Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung
+on the wall above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of
+a willow rocking-chair, she began to move her hand about over the
+brightly coloured, shiny surface, murmuring, "Yes, there is
+Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris."
+
+Claude, behind her, looked over her shoulder. "Do you suppose
+they are going to hand their city over to the Germans, like a
+Christmas present? I should think they'd burn it first, the way
+the Russians did Moscow. They can do better than that now, they
+can dynamite it!"
+
+"Don't say such things." Mrs. Wheeler dropped into the deep
+willow chair, realizing that she was very tired, now that she had
+left the stove and the heat of the kitchen. She began weakly to
+wave the palm leaf fan before her face. "It's said to be such a
+beautiful city. Perhaps the Germans will spare it, as they did
+Brussels. They must be sick of destruction by now. Get the
+encyclopaedia and see what it says. I've left my glasses
+downstairs."
+
+Claude brought a volume from the bookcase and sat down on the
+lounge. He began: "Paris, the capital city of France and the
+Department of the Seine,--shall I skip the history?"
+
+"No. Read it all."
+
+He cleared his throat and began again: "At its first appearance
+in history, there was nothing to foreshadow the important part
+which Paris was to play in Europe and in the world," etc.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rocked and fanned, forgetting the kitchen and the
+cucumbers as if they had never been. Her tired body was resting,
+and her mind, which was never tired, was occupied with the
+account of early religious foundations under the Merovingian
+kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested
+upon the sunburned neck and catapult shoulders of her red-headed
+son.
+
+Claude read faster and faster until he stopped with a gasp.
+
+"Mother, there are pages of kings! We'll read that some other
+time. I want to find out what it's like now, and whether it's
+going to have any more history." He ran his finger up and down
+the columns. "Here, this looks like business.
+
+"Defences: Paris, in a recent German account of the greatest
+fortresses of the world, possesses three distinct rings of
+defences"--here he broke off. "Now what do you think of that? A
+German account, and this is an English book! The world simply
+made a mistake about the Germans all along. It's as if we invited
+a neighbour over here and showed him our cattle and barns, and
+all the time he was planning how he would come at night and club
+us in our beds."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler passed her hand over her brow. "Yet we have had so
+many German neighbours, and never one that wasn't kind and
+helpful."
+
+"I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany
+made me want to go there. And the people that sing all those
+beautiful songs about women and children went into Belgian
+villages and--"
+
+"Don't, Claude!" his mother put out her hands as if to push his
+words back. "Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we
+must think about now. I can't but believe there is one fort the
+Germans didn't put down in their book, and that it will stand. We
+know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many God-fearing
+people there, and God has preserved it all these years. You saw
+in the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying."
+She leaned forward and smiled at him indulgently. "And you
+believe those prayers will accomplish nothing, son?"
+
+Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon
+certain subjects. "Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans
+are praying, too. And I guess they are just naturally more pious
+than the French." Taking up the book he began once more: "In the
+low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great loop of the
+Marne," etc.
+
+Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that
+river, and with the idea of its strategic importance, before it
+began to stand out in black headlines a few days later.
+
+The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to
+put in six hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the
+other side of the world, they would need bread. He took a third
+team himself and went into the field every morning to help Dan
+and Claude. The neighbours said that nobody but the Kaiser had
+ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.
+
+Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every
+morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile
+away, to get yesterday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the
+carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them
+as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
+wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning,
+indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read
+all the war news through before she stirred, while the
+grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers
+came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she
+saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down
+to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the
+windmill breathless.
+
+"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing
+at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it
+may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army
+went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew himself up. "Well, it will
+decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?"
+
+"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few
+of the English are there, and the French are terribly
+outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers
+upstairs."
+
+"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after
+I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper."
+
+In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father
+and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the
+sitting-room. "There is not much news, except that the battle is
+on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans
+outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in
+artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no
+farther." He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his
+room.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not
+to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a
+window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he
+knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the
+capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were
+responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the
+grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since
+the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with
+amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.
+
+It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four
+days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with
+the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital,
+not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only
+farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. The fact
+that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western "r"
+standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's
+imagination a firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and
+thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of
+French "politeness"--so much more terrifying than German
+bullets--and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's
+manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the
+eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so
+gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose
+and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much
+through all the centuries--but had never meant so much before.
+Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In
+great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the
+little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as
+they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star
+fall.
+
+
+
+X
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and Claude had gone down to the mill
+house, as Enid and her mother had returned from Michigan the day
+before. Mrs. Wheeler, propped back in a rocking chair, was
+reading, and Mr. Wheeler, in his shirt sleeves, his Sunday collar
+unbuttoned, was sitting at his walnut secretary, amusing himself
+with columns of figures. Presently he rose and yawned, stretching
+his arms above his head.
+
+"Claude thinks he wants to begin building right away, up on the
+quarter next the timber claim. I've been figuring on the lumber.
+Building materials are cheap just now, so I suppose I'd better
+let him go ahead."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up absently from the page. "Why, I suppose
+so."
+
+Her husband sat down astride a chair, and leaning his arms on the
+back of it, looked at her. "What do you think of this match,
+anyway? I don't know as I've heard you say."
+
+"Enid is a good, Christian girl..." Mrs. Wheeler began
+resolutely, but her sentence hung in the air like a question.
+
+He moved impatiently. "Yes, I know. But what does a husky boy
+like Claude want to pick out a girl like that for? Why,
+Evangeline, she'll be the old woman over again!"
+
+Apparently these misgivings were not new to Mrs. Wheeler, for she
+put out her hand to stop him and whispered in solemn agitation,
+"Don't say anything! Don't breathe!"
+
+"Oh, I won't interfere! I never do. I'd rather have her for a
+daughter-in-law than a wife, by a long shot. Claude's more of a
+fool than I thought him." He picked up his hat and strolled down
+to the barn, but his wife did not recover her composure so
+easily. She left the chair where she had hopefully settled
+herself for comfort, took up a feather duster and began moving
+distractedly about the room, brushing the surface of the
+furniture. When the war news was bad, or when she felt troubled
+about Claude, she set to cleaning house or overhauling the
+closets, thankful to be able to put some little thing to rights
+in such a disordered world.
+
+As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers
+out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work
+he began digging his cellar. He was building his house on the
+level stretch beside his father's timber claim because, when he
+was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most
+beautiful spot in the world. It was a square of about thirty
+acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a
+thick mulberry hedge on the south side. The trees had been
+neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage
+to trim them and care for them at odd moments.
+
+Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.
+He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and
+he meant that this one should be deep enough. One day Leonard
+Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making. Standing on
+the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating
+below.
+
+"My God, Claude, what do you want of a cellar as deep as that?
+When your wife takes a notion to go to China, you can open a
+trap-door and drop her through!"
+
+Claude flung down his pick and ran up the ladder. "Enid's not
+going to have notions of that sort," he said wrathfully.
+
+"Well, you needn't get mad. I'm glad to hear it. I was sorry when
+the other girl went. It always looked to me like Enid had her face
+set for China, but I haven't seen her for a good while,--not
+since before she went off to Michigan with the old lady."
+
+After Leonard was gone, Claude returned to his work, still out of
+humour. He was not altogether happy in his mind about Enid. When
+he went down to the mill it was usually Mr. Royce, not Enid, who
+sought to detain him, followed him down the path to the gate and
+seemed sorry to see him go. He could not blame Enid with any lack
+of interest in what he was doing. She talked and thought of
+nothing but the new house, and most of her suggestions were good.
+He often wished she would ask for something unreasonable and
+extravagant. But she had no selfish whims, and even insisted that
+the comfortable upstairs sleeping room he had planned with such
+care should be reserved for a guest chamber.
+
+As the house began to take shape, Enid came up often in her car,
+to watch its growth, to show Claude samples of wallpapers and
+draperies, or a design for a window-seat she had cut from some
+magazine. There could be no question of her pride in every
+detail. The disappointing thing was that she seemed more
+interested in the house than in him. These months when they could
+be together as much as they pleased, she treated merely as a
+period of time in which they were building a house.
+
+Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told
+himself. He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as
+his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.
+Marriage reduced all women to a common denominator; changed a
+cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one. It
+was quite right that Enid should be unconscious now of everything
+that she was to be when she was his wife. He told himself he
+wouldn't want it otherwise.
+
+But he was lonely, all the same. He lavished upon the little
+house the solicitude and cherishing care that Enid seemed not to
+need. He stood over the carpenters urging the greatest nicety in
+the finish of closets and cupboards, the convenient placing of
+shelves, the exact joining of sills and casings. Often he stayed
+late in the evening, after the workmen with their noisy boots had
+gone home to supper. He sat down on a rafter or on the skeleton
+of the upper porch and quite lost himself in brooding, in
+anticipation of things that seemed as far away as ever. The dying
+light, the quiet stars coming out, were friendly and sympathetic.
+One night a bird flew in and fluttered wildly about among the
+partitions, shrieking with fright before it darted out into the
+dusk through one of the upper windows and found its way to
+freedom.
+
+When the carpenters were ready to put in the staircase, Claude
+telephoned Enid and asked her to come and show them just what
+height she wanted the steps made. His mother had always had to
+climb stairs that were too steep. Enid stopped her car at the
+Frankfort High School at four o'clock and persuaded Gladys Farmer
+to drive out with her.
+
+When they arrived they found Claude working on the lattice
+enclosure of the back porch. "Claude is like Jonah," Enid
+laughed. "He wants to plant gourd vines here, so they will run
+over the lattice and make shade. I can think of other vines that
+might be more ornamental."
+
+Claude put down his hammer and said coaxingly: "Have you ever
+seen a gourd vine when it had something to climb on, Enid? You
+wouldn't believe how pretty they are; big green leaves, and
+gourds and yellow blossoms hanging all over them at the same
+time. An old German woman who keeps a lunch counter at one of
+those stations on the road to Lincoln has them running up her
+back porch, and I've wanted to plant some ever since I first saw
+hers."
+
+Enid smiled indulgently. "Well, I suppose you'll let me have
+clematis for the front porch, anyway? The men are getting ready
+to leave, so we'd better see about the steps."
+
+After the workmen had gone, Claude took the girls upstairs by the
+ladder. They emerged from a little entry into a large room which
+extended over both the front and back parlours. The carpenters
+called it "the pool hall". There were two long windows, like
+doors, opening upon the porch roof, and in the sloping ceiling
+were two dormer windows, one looking north to the timber claim
+and the other south toward Lovely Creek. Gladys at once felt a
+singular pleasantness about this chamber, empty and unplastered
+as it was. "What a lovely room!" she exclaimed.
+
+Claude took her up eagerly. "Don't you think so? You see it's my
+idea to have the second floor for ourselves, instead of cutting
+it up into little boxes as people usually do. We can come up here
+and forget the farm and the kitchen and all our troubles. I've
+made a big closet for each of us, and got everything just right.
+And now Enid wants to keep this room for preachers!"
+
+Enid laughed. "Not only for preachers, Claude. For Gladys, when
+she comes to visit us--you see she likes it--and for your mother
+when she comes to spend a week and rest. I don't think we ought
+to take the best room for ourselves."
+
+"Why not?" Claude argued hotly. "I'm building the whole house for
+ourselves. Come out on the porch roof, Gladys. Isn't this fine
+for hot nights? I want to put a railing round and make this into
+a balcony, where we can have chairs and a hammock."
+
+Gladys sat down on the low window-sill. "Enid, you'd be foolish
+to keep this for a guest room. Nobody would ever enjoy it as much
+as you would. You can see the whole country from here."
+
+Enid smiled, but showed no sign of relenting. "Let's wait and
+watch the sun go down. Be careful, Claude. It makes me nervous to
+see you lying there."
+
+He was stretched out on the edge of the roof, one leg hanging
+over, and his head pillowed on his arm. The flat fields turned
+red, the distant windmills flashed white, and little rosy clouds
+appeared in the sky above them.
+
+"If I make this into a balcony," Claude murmured, "the peak of
+the roof will always throw a shadow over it in the afternoon, and
+at night the stars will be right overhead. It will be a fine
+place to sleep in harvest time."
+
+"Oh, you could always come up here to sleep on a hot night," Enid
+said quickly.
+
+"It wouldn't be the same."
+
+They sat watching the light die out of the sky, and Enid and
+Gladys drew close together as the coolness of the autumn evening
+came on. The three friends were thinking about the same thing;
+and yet, if by some sorcery each had begun to speak his thoughts
+aloud, amazement and bitterness would have fallen upon all.
+Enid's reflections were the most blameless. The discussion about
+the guest room had reminded her of Brother Weldon. In September,
+on her way to Michigan with Mrs. Royce, she had stopped for a day
+in Lincoln to take counsel with Arthur Weldon as to whether she
+ought to marry one whom she described to him as "an unsaved man."
+Young Mr. Weldon approached this subject with a cautious tread,
+but when he learned that the man in question was Claude Wheeler,
+he became more partisan than was his wont. He seemed to think
+that her marrying Claude was the one way to reclaim him, and did
+not hesitate to say that the most important service devout girls
+could perform for the church was to bring promising young men to
+its support. Enid had been almost certain that Mr. Weldon would
+approve her course before she consulted him, but his concurrence
+always gratified her pride. She told him that when she had a home
+of her own she would expect him to spend a part of his summer
+vacation there, and he blushingly expressed his willingness to do
+so.
+
+Gladys, too, was lost in her own thoughts, sitting with that ease
+which made her seem rather indolent, her head resting against the
+empty window frame, facing the setting sun. The rosy light made
+her brown eyes gleam like old copper, and there was a moody look
+in them, as if in her mind she were defying something. When he
+happened to glance at her, it occurred to Claude that it was a
+hard destiny to be the exceptional person in a community, to be
+more gifted or more intelligent than the rest. For a girl it must
+be doubly hard. He sat up suddenly and broke the long silence.
+
+"I forgot, Enid, I have a secret to tell you. Over in the timber
+claim the other day I started up a flock of quail. They must be
+the only ones left in all this neighbourhood, and I doubt if they
+ever come out of the timber. The bluegrass hasn't been mowed in
+there for years,--not since I first went away to school, and maybe
+they live on the grass seeds. In summer, of course, there are
+mulberries."
+
+Enid wondered whether the birds could have learned enough about
+the world to stay hidden in the timber lot. Claude was sure they
+had.
+
+"Nobody ever goes near the place except Father; he stops there
+sometimes. Maybe he has seen them and never said a word. It would
+be just like him." He told them he had scattered shelled corn in
+the grass, so that the birds would not be tempted to fly over
+into Leonard Dawson's cornfield. "If Leonard saw them, he'd
+likely take a shot at them."
+
+"Why don't you ask him not to?" Enid suggested.
+
+Claude laughed. "That would be asking a good deal. When a bunch
+of quail rise out of a cornfield they're a mighty tempting sight,
+if a man likes hunting. We'll have a picnic for you when you come
+out next summer, Gladys. There are some pretty places over there
+in the timber."
+
+Gladys started up. "Why, it's night already! It's lovely here,
+but you must get me home, Enid."
+
+They found it dark inside. Claude took Enid down the ladder and
+out to her car, and then went back for Gladys. She was sitting on
+the floor at the top of the ladder. Giving her his hand he helped
+her to rise.
+
+"So you like my little house," he said gratefully.
+
+"Yes. Oh, yes!" Her voice was full of feeling, but she did not
+exert herself to say more. Claude descended in front of her to
+keep her from slipping. She hung back while he led her through
+confusing doorways and helped her over the piles of laths that
+littered the floors. At the edge of the gaping cellar entrance
+she stopped and leaned wearily on his arm for a moment. She did
+not speak, but he understood that his new house made her sad;
+that she, too, had come to the place where she must turn out of
+the old path. He longed to whisper to her and beg her not to
+marry his brother. He lingered and hesitated, fumbling in the
+dark. She had his own cursed kind of sensibility; she would
+expect too much from life and be disappointed. He was reluctant
+to lead her out into the chilly evening without some word of
+entreaty. He would willingly have prolonged their passage,--
+through many rooms and corridors. Perhaps, had that been
+possible, the strength in him would have found what it was
+seeking; even in this short interval it had stirred and made
+itself felt, had uttered a confused appeal. Claude was greatly
+surprised at himself.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Enid decided that she would be married in the first week of June.
+Early in May the plasterers and painters began to be busy in the
+new house. The walls began to shine, and Claude went about all
+day, oiling and polishing the hard-pine floors and wainscoting.
+He hated to have anybody step on his floors. He planted gourd
+vines about the back porch, set out clematis and lilac bushes,
+and put in a kitchen garden. He and Enid were going to Denver and
+Colorado Springs for their wedding trip, but Ralph would be at
+home then, and he had promised to come over and water the flowers
+and shrubs if the weather was dry.
+
+Enid often brought her work and sat sewing on the front porch
+while Claude was rubbing the woodwork inside the house, or
+digging and planting outside. This was the best part of his
+courtship. It seemed to him that he had never spent such happy
+days before. If Enid did not come, he kept looking down the road
+and listening, went from one thing to another and made no
+progress. He felt full of energy, so long as she sat there on the
+porch, with lace and ribbons and muslin in her lap. When he
+passed by, going in or out, and stopped to be near her for a
+moment, she seemed glad to have him tarry. She liked him to
+admire her needlework, and did not hesitate to show him the
+featherstitching and embroidery she was putting on her new
+underclothes. He could see, from the glances they exchanged, that
+the painters thought this very bold behaviour in one so soon to
+be a bride. He thought it very charming behaviour himself, though
+he would never have expected it of Enid. His heart beat hard when
+he realized how far she confided in him, how little she was
+afraid of him! She would let him linger there, standing over her
+and looking down at her quick fingers, or sitting on the ground
+at her feet, gazing at the muslin pinned to her knee, until his
+own sense of propriety told him to get about his work and spare
+the feelings of the painters.
+
+"When are you going over to the timber claim with me?" he asked,
+dropping on the ground beside her one warm, windy afternoon. Enid
+was sitting on the porch floor, her back against a pillar, and
+her feet on one of those round mats of pursley that grow over
+hard-beaten earth. "I've found my flock of quail again. They live
+in the deep grass, over by a ditch that holds water most of the
+year. I'm going to plant a few rows of peas in there, so they'll
+have a feeding ground at home. I consider Leonard's cornfield a
+great danger. I don't know whether to take him into my confidence
+or not."
+
+"You've told Ernest Havel, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" Claude replied, trying not to be aware of the little
+note of acrimony in her voice. "He's perfectly safe. That place
+is a paradise for birds. The trees are full of nests. You can
+stand over there in the morning and hear the young robins
+squawking for their breakfast. Come up early tomorrow morning and
+go over with me, won't you? But wear heavy shoes; it's wet in the
+long grass."
+
+While they were talking a sudden whirlwind swept round the corner
+of the house, caught up the little mound of folded lace
+corset-covers and strewed them over the dusty yard. Claude ran
+after them with Enid's flowered workbag and thrust them into it
+as he came upon one after another, fluttering in the weeds. When
+he returned, Enid had folded her needle-case and was putting on
+her hat. "Thank you," she said with a smile. "Did you find
+everything?"
+
+"I think so." He hurried toward the car to hide his guilty face.
+One little lace thing he had not put into the bag, but had thrust
+into his pocket.
+
+The next morning Enid came up early to hear the birds in the
+timber.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+On the night before his wedding Claude went to bed early. He had
+been dashing about with Ralph all day in the car, making final
+preparations, and was worn out. He fell asleep almost at once.
+The women of the household could not so easily forget the great
+event of tomorrow. After the supper dishes were washed, Mahailey
+clambered up to the attic to get the quilt she had so long been
+saving for a wedding present for Claude. She took it out
+of the chest, unfolded it, and counted the stars in the
+pattern--counting was an accomplishment she was proud of--before
+she wrapped it up. It was to go down to the mill house with the
+other presents tomorrow. Mrs. Wheeler went to bed many times that
+night. She kept thinking of things that ought to be looked after;
+getting up and going to make sure that Claude's heavy underwear
+had been put into his trunk, against the chance of cold in the
+mountains; or creeping downstairs to see that the six roasted
+chickens which were to help out at the wedding supper were
+securely covered from the cats. As she went about these tasks,
+she prayed constantly. She had not prayed so long and fervently
+since the battle of the Marne.
+
+Early the next morning Ralph loaded the big car with the presents
+and baskets of food and ran down to the Royces'. Two motors from
+town were already standing in the mill yard; they had brought a
+company of girls who came with all the June roses in Frankfort to
+trim the house for the wedding. When Ralph tooted his horn,
+half-a-dozen of them ran out to greet him, reproaching him
+because he had not brought his brother along. Ralph was
+immediately pressed into service. He carried the step-ladder
+wherever he was told, drove nails, and wound thorny sprays of
+rambler roses around the pillars between the front and back
+parlours, making the arch under which the ceremony was to take
+place.
+
+Gladys Farmer had not been able to leave her classes at the High
+School to help in this friendly work, but at eleven o'clock a
+livery automobile drove up, laden with white and pink peonies
+from her front yard, and bringing a box of hothouse flowers she
+had ordered for Enid from Hastings. The girls admired them, but
+declared that Gladys was extravagant, as usual; the flowers from
+her own yard would really have been enough. The car was driven by
+a lank, ragged boy who worked about the town garage, and who was
+called "Silent Irv," because nobody could ever get a word out of
+him. He had almost no voice at all,--a thin little squeak in the
+top of his throat, like the gasping whisper of a medium in her
+trance state. When he came to the front door, both arms full of
+peonies, he managed to wheeze out:
+
+"These are from Miss Farmer. There are some more down there."
+
+The girls went back to his car with him, and he took out a square
+box, tied up with white ribbons and little silver bells,
+containing the bridal bouquet.
+
+"How did you happen to get these?" Ralph asked the thin boy. "I
+was to go to town for them."
+
+The messenger swallowed. "Miss Farmer told me if there were any
+other flowers at the station marked for here, I should bring them
+along."
+
+"That was nice of her." Ralph thrust his hand into his trousers
+pocket. "How much? I'll settle with you before I forget."
+
+A pink flush swept over the boy's pale face,--a delicate face
+under ragged hair, contracted by a kind of shrinking unhappiness.
+His eyes were always half-closed, as if he did not want to see
+the world around him, or to be seen by it. He went about like
+somebody in a dream. "Miss Farmer," he whispered, "has paid me."
+
+"Well, she thinks of everything!" exclaimed one of the girls.
+"You used to go to school to Gladys, didn't you, Irv?"
+
+"Yes, mam." He got into his car without opening the door,
+slipping like an eel round the steering-rod, and drove off.
+
+The girls followed Ralph up the gravel walk toward the house. One
+whispered to the others: "Do you suppose Gladys will come out
+tonight with Bayliss Wheeler? I always thought she had a pretty
+warm spot in her heart for Claude, myself."
+
+Some one changed the subject. "I can't get over hearing Irv talk
+so much. Gladys must have put a spell on him."
+
+"She was always kind to him in school," said the girl who had
+questioned the silent boy. "She said he was good in his studies,
+but he was so frightened he could never recite. She let him write
+out the answers at his desk."
+
+Ralph stayed for lunch, playing about with the girls until his
+mother telephoned for him. "Now I'll have to go home and look
+after my brother, or he'll turn up tonight in a striped shirt."
+
+"Give him our love," the girls called after him, "and tell him
+not to be late."
+
+As he drove toward the farm, Ralph met Dan, taking Claude's trunk
+into town. He slowed his car. "Any message?" he called.
+
+Dan grinned. "Naw. I left him doin' as well as could be
+expected."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Ralph on the stairs. "He's up in his room. He
+complains his new shoes are too tight. I think it's nervousness.
+Perhaps he'll let you shave him; I'm sure he'll cut himself. And
+I wish the barber hadn't cut his hair so short, Ralph. I hate
+this new fashion of shearing men behind the ears. The back of his
+neck is the ugliest part of a man." She spoke with such
+resentment that Ralph broke into a laugh.
+
+"Why, Mother, I thought all men looked alike to you! Anyhow,
+Claude's no beauty."
+
+"When will you want your bath? I'll have to manage so that
+everybody won't be calling for hot water at once." She turned to
+Mr. Wheeler who sat writing a check at the secretary. "Father,
+could you take your bath now, and be out of the way?"
+
+"Bath?" Mr. Wheeler shouted, "I don't want any bath! I'm not
+going to be married tonight. I guess we don't have to boil the
+whole house for Enid."
+
+Ralph snickered and shot upstairs. He found Claude sitting on the
+bed, with one shoe off and one shoe on. A pile of socks lay
+scattered on the rug. A suitcase stood open on one chair and a
+black travelling bag on another.
+
+"Are you sure they're too small?" Ralph asked.
+
+"About four sizes."
+
+"Well, why didn't you get them big enough?"
+
+"I did. That shark in Hastings worked off another pair on me when
+I wasn't looking. That's all right," snatching away the shoe his
+brother had picked up to examine. "I don't care, so long as I can
+stand in them. You'd better go telephone the depot and ask if
+the train's on time."
+
+"They won't know yet. It's seven hours till it's due."
+
+"Then telephone later. But find out, somehow. I don't want to
+stand around that station, waiting for the train."
+
+Ralph whistled. Clearly, his young man was going to be hard to
+manage. He proposed a bath as a soothing measure. No, Claude had
+had his bath. Had he, then, packed his suitcase?
+
+"How the devil can I pack it when I don't know what I'm going to
+put on?"
+
+"You'll put on one shirt and one pair of socks. I'm going to get
+some of this stuff out of the way for you." Ralph caught up a
+handful of socks and fell to sorting them. Several had bright red
+spots on the toe. He began to laugh.
+
+"I know why your shoe hurts, you've cut your foot!"
+
+Claude sprang up as if a hornet had stung him. "Will you get out
+of here," he shouted, "and let me alone?"
+
+Ralph vanished. He told his mother he would dress at once, as
+they might have to use force with Claude at the last moment. The
+wedding ceremony was to be at eight, supper was to follow, and
+Claude and Enid were to leave Frankfort at 10:25, on the Denver
+express. At six o'clock, when Ralph knocked at his brother's
+door, he found him shaved and brushed, and dressed, except for
+his coat. His tucked shirt was not rumpled, and his tie was
+properly knotted. Whatever pain they concealed, his patent
+leather shoes were smooth and glistening and resolutely pointed.
+
+"Are you packed?" Ralph asked in astonishment.
+
+"Nearly. I wish you'd go over things and make them look a little
+neater, if you can. I'd hate to have a girl see the inside of
+that suitcase, the way it is. Where shall I put my cigars?
+They'll make everything smell, wherever I put them. All my
+clothes seem to smell of cooking, or starch, or something. I
+don't know what Mahailey does to them," he ended bitterly.
+
+Ralph looked outraged. "Well, of all ingratitude! Mahailey's been
+ironing your damned old shirts for a week!"
+
+"Yes, yes, I know. Don't rattle me. I forgot to put any
+handkerchiefs in my trunk, so you'll have to get the whole bunch
+in somewhere."
+
+Mr. Wheeler appeared in the doorway, his Sunday black trousers
+gallowsed up high over a white shirt, wafting a rich odor of
+bayrum from his tumbled hair. He held a thin folded paper
+delicately between his thick fingers.
+
+"Where is your bill-book, son?"
+
+Claude caught up his discarded trousers and extracted a square of
+leather from the pocket. His father took it and placed the bit of
+paper inside with the bank notes. "You may want to pick up some
+trifle your wife fancies," he said. "Have you got your railroad
+tickets in here? Here is your trunk check Dan brought back. Don't
+forget, I've put it in with your tickets and marked it C. W., so
+you'll know which is your check and which is Enid's."
+
+"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
+
+Claude had already drawn from the bank all the money he would
+need. This additional bank check was Mr. Wheeler's admission that
+he was sorry for some sarcastic remarks he had made a few days
+ago, when he discovered that Claude had reserved a stateroom on
+the Denver express. Claude had answered curtly that when Enid and
+her mother went to Michigan they always had a stateroom, and he
+wasn't going to ask her to travel less comfortably with him.
+
+At seven o'clock the Wheeler family set out in the two cars that
+stood waiting by the windmill. Mr. Wheeler drove the big
+Cadillac, and Ralph took Mahailey and Dan in the Ford. When they
+reached the mill house the outer yard was already black with
+motors, and the porch and parlours were full of people talking
+and moving about.
+
+Claude went directly upstairs. Ralph began to seat the guests,
+arranging the folding chairs in such a way as to leave a passage
+from the foot of the stairs to the floral arch he had constructed
+that morning. The preacher had his Bible in his hand and was
+standing under the light, hunting for his chapter. Enid would
+have preferred to have Mr. Weldon come down from Lincoln to marry
+her, but that would have wounded Mr. Snowberry deeply. After all,
+he was her minister, though he was not eloquent and persuasive
+like Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command
+than most human beings, and even those did not come to him
+readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them
+until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell
+upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he
+said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that
+he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a
+drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was a
+simple, courageous man.
+
+Ralph was to be both usher and best man. Gladys Farmer could not
+be one of the bridesmaids because she was to play the wedding
+march. At eight o'clock Enid and Claude came downstairs together,
+conducted by Ralph and followed by four girls dressed in white,
+like the bride. They took their places under the arch before the
+preacher. He began with the chapter from Genesis about the
+creation of man, and Adam's rib, reading in a laboured manner, as
+if he did not quite know why he had selected that passage and was
+looking for something he did not find. His nose-glasses kept
+falling off and dropping upon the open book. Throughout this
+prolonged fumbling Enid stood calm, looking at him respectfully,
+very pretty in her short veil. Claude was so pale that he looked
+unnatural,--nobody had ever seen him like that before. His face,
+between his very black clothes and his smooth, sandy hair, was
+white and severe, and he uttered his responses in a hollow voice.
+Mahailey, at the back of the room, in a black hat with green
+gooseberries on it, was standing, in order to miss nothing. She
+watched Mr. Snowberry as if she hoped to catch some visible sign
+of the miracle he was performing. She always wondered just what
+it was the preacher did to make the wrongest thing in the world
+the rightest thing in the world.
+
+When it was over, Enid went upstairs to put on her travelling
+dress, and Ralph and Gladys began seating the guests for supper.
+Just twenty minutes later Enid came down and took her place
+beside Claude at the head of the long table. The company rose and
+drank the bride's health in grape-juice punch. Mr. Royce,
+however, while the guests were being seated, had taken Mr.
+Wheeler down to the fruit cellar, where the two old friends drank
+off a glass of well-seasoned Kentucky whiskey, and shook hands.
+When they came back to the table, looking younger than when they
+withdrew, the preacher smelled the tang of spirits and felt
+slighted. He looked disconsolately into his ruddy goblet and
+thought about the marriage at Cana. He tried to apply his Bible
+literally to life and, though he didn't dare breathe it aloud in
+these days, he could never see why he was better than his Lord.
+
+Ralph, as master of ceremonies, kept his head and forgot nothing.
+When it was time to start, he tapped Claude on the shoulder,
+cutting his father short in one of his best stories. Contrary to
+custom, the bridal couple were to go to the station
+unaccompanied, and they vanished from the head of the table with
+only a nod and a smile to the guests. Ralph hurried them into the
+light car, where he had already stowed Enid's hand luggage. Only
+wizened little Mrs. Royce slipped out from the kitchen to bid
+them good-bye.
+
+That evening some bad boys had come out from town and strewn the
+road near the mill with dozens of broken glass bottles, after
+which they hid in the wild plum bushes to wait for the fun.
+Ralph's was the first car out, and though his lights glittered on
+this bed of jagged glass, there was no time to stop; the road was
+ditched on either side, so he had to drive straight ahead, and
+got into Frankfort on flat tires. The express whistled just as he
+pulled up at the station. He and Claude caught up the four pieces
+of hand luggage and put them in the stateroom. Leaving Enid there
+with the bags, the two boys went to the rear platform of the
+observation car to talk until the last moment. Ralph checked off
+on his fingers the list of things he had promised Claude to
+attend to. Claude thanked him feelingly. He felt that without
+Ralph he could never have got married at all. They had never been
+such good friends as during the last fortnight.
+
+The wheels began to turn. Ralph gripped Claude's hand, ran to the
+front of the car and stepped off. As Claude passed him, he stood
+waving his handkerchief,--a rather funny figure under the station
+lights, in his black clothes and his stiff straw hat, his short
+legs well apart, wearing his incurably jaunty air.
+
+The train glided quietly out through the summer darkness, along
+the timbered river valley. Claude was alone on the back platform,
+smoking a nervous cigar. As they passed the deep cut where Lovely
+Creek flowed into the river, he saw the lights of the mill house
+flash for a moment in the distance. The night air was still;
+heavy with the smell of sweet clover that grew high along the
+tracks, and of wild grapevines wet with dew. The conductor came
+to ask for the tickets, saying with a wise smile that he had been
+hunting for him, as he didn't like to trouble the lady.
+
+After he was gone, Claude looked at his watch, threw away the end
+of his cigar, and went back through the Pullman cars. The
+passengers had gone to bed; the overhead lights were always
+turned low when the train left Frankfort. He made his way through
+the aisles of swaying green curtains, and tapped at the door of
+his state room. It opened a little way, and Enid stood there in a
+white silk dressing-gown with many ruffles, her hair in two
+smooth braids over her shoulders.
+
+"Claude," she said in a low voice, "would you mind getting a
+berth somewhere out in the car tonight? The porter says they are
+not all taken. I'm not feeling very well. I think the dressing on
+the chicken salad must have been too rich."
+
+He answered mechanically. "Yes, certainly. Can't I get you
+something?"
+
+"No, thank you. Sleep will do me more good than anything else.
+Good-night."
+
+She closed the door, and he heard the lock slip. He stood looking
+at the highly polished wood of the panel for a moment, then
+turned irresolutely and went back along the slightly swaying
+aisle of green curtains. In the observation car he stretched
+himself out upon two wicker chairs and lit another cigar. At
+twelve o'clock the porter came in.
+
+"This car is closed for the night, sah. Is you the gen'leman from
+the stateroom in fourteen? Do you want a lower?"
+
+"No, thank you. Is there a smoking car?"
+
+"They is the day-coach smokah, but it ain't likely very clean at
+this time o' night."
+
+"That's all right. It's forward?" Claude absently handed him a
+coin, and the porter conducted him to a very dirty car where the
+floor was littered with newspapers and cigar stumps, and the
+leather cushions were grey with dust. A few desperate looking men
+lay about with their shoes off and their suspenders hanging down
+their backs. The sight of them reminded Claude that his left foot
+was very sore, and that his shoes must have been hurting him for
+some time. He pulled them off, and thrust his feet, in their silk
+socks, on the opposite seat.
+
+On that long, dirty, uncomfortable ride Claude felt many things,
+but the paramount feeling was homesickness. His hurt was of a
+kind that made him turn with a sort of aching cowardice to the
+old, familiar things that were as sure as the sunrise. If only
+the sagebrush plain, over which the stars were shining, could
+suddenly break up and resolve itself into the windings of Lovely
+Creek, with his father's house on the hill, dark and silent in
+the summer night! When he closed his eyes he could see the light
+in his mother's window; and, lower down, the glow of Mahailey's
+lamp, where she sat nodding and mending his old shirts. Human
+love was a wonderful thing, he told himself, and it was most
+wonderful where it had least to gain.
+
+By morning the storm of anger, disappointment, and humiliation
+that was boiling in him when he first sat down in the observation
+car, had died out. One thing lingered; the peculiarly casual,
+indifferent, uninterested tone of his wife's voice when she sent
+him away. It was the flat tone in which people make commonplace
+remarks about common things.
+
+Day broke with silvery brightness on the summer sage. The sky
+grew pink, the sand grew gold. The dawn-wind brought through the
+windows the acrid smell of the sagebrush: an odour that is
+peculiarly stimulating in the early morning, when it always seems
+to promise freedom... large spaces, new beginnings, better
+days.
+
+The train was due in Denver at eight o'clock. Exactly at seven
+thirty Claude knocked at Enid's door,--this time firmly. She was
+dressed, and greeted him with a fresh, smiling face, holding her
+hat in her hand.
+
+"Are you feeling better?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes! I am perfectly all right this morning. I've put out all
+your things for you, there on the seat."
+
+He glanced at them. "Thank you. But I won't have time to change,
+I'm afraid."
+
+"Oh, won't you? I'm so sorry I forgot to give you your bag last
+night. But you must put on another necktie, at least. You look
+too much like a groom."
+
+"Do I?" he asked, with a scarcely perceptible curl of his lip.
+
+Everything he needed was neatly arranged on the plush seat;
+shirt, collar, tie, brushes, even a handkerchief. Those in his
+pockets were black from dusting off the cinders that blew in all
+night, and he threw them down and took up the clean one. There
+was a damp spot on it, and as he unfolded it he recognized the
+scent of a cologne Enid often used. For some reason this
+attention unmanned him. He felt the smart of tears in his eyes,
+and to hide them bent over the metal basin and began to scrub his
+face. Enid stood behind him, adjusting her hat in the mirror.
+
+"How terribly smoky you are, Claude. I hope you don't smoke
+before breakfast?"
+
+"No. I was in the smoking car awhile. I suppose my clothes got
+full of it."
+
+"You are covered with dust and cinders, too!" She took the
+clothes broom from the rack and began to brush him.
+
+Claude caught her hand. "Don't, please!" he said sharply. "The
+porter can do that for me."
+
+Enid watched him furtively as he closed and strapped his
+suitcase. She had often heard that men were cross before
+breakfast.
+
+"Sure you've forgotten nothing?" he asked before he closed her
+bag.
+
+"Yes. I never lose things on the train,--do you?"
+
+"Sometimes," he replied guardedly, not looking up as he snapped
+the catch.
+
+
+
+
+Book Three; Sunrise on the Prairie
+
+I
+
+Claude was to continue farming with his father, and after he
+returned from his wedding journey, he fell at once to work. The
+harvest was almost as abundant as that of the summer before, and
+he was busy in the fields six days a week.
+
+One afternoon in August he came home with his team, watered and
+fed the horses in a leisurely way, and then entered his house by
+the back door. Enid, he knew, would not be there. She had gone to
+Frankfort to a meeting of the Anti-Saloon League. The Prohibition
+party was bestirring itself in Nebraska that summer, confident of
+voting the State dry the following year, which purpose it
+triumphantly accomplished.
+
+Enid's kitchen, full of the afternoon sun, glittered with new
+paint, spotless linoleum, and blue-and-white cooking vessels. In
+the dining-room the cloth was laid, and the table was neatly set
+for one. Claude opened the icebox, where his supper was arranged
+for him; a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled
+eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of
+ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter. He
+placed these things on the table, cut some bread, and after
+carelessly washing his face and hands, sat down to eat in his
+working shirt. He propped the newspaper against a red glass water
+pitcher and read the war news while he had his supper. He was
+annoyed when he heard heavy footsteps coming around the house.
+Leonard Dawson stuck his head in at the kitchen door, and Claude
+rose quickly and reached for his hat; but Leonard came in,
+uninvited, and sat down. His brown shirt was wet where his
+suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide
+straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with
+dust.
+
+"Go ahead and finish your supper," he cried. "Having a wife with
+a car of her own is next thing to having no wife at all. How they
+do like to roll around! I've been mighty blamed careful to see
+that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how
+soon do you figure you'll be able to let me have the thrasher? My
+wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you
+reckon your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I
+helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Mother wouldn't like it. We never have done
+that, even when we were crowded."
+
+"Well, I think I'll go over and have a talk with your mother. If
+she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her
+it's pretty near a case of your neighbour's ox falling into a pit
+on the Sabbath day."
+
+"That's a good idea. She's always reasonable."
+
+Leonard rose. "What's the news?"
+
+"The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic;
+coming this way, too."
+
+"That's all right," Leonard declared. "Maybe Americans will stay
+at home now, and mind their own business. I don't care how they
+chew each other up over there, not a bit! I'd as soon one got
+wiped off the map as another."
+
+"Your grandparents were English people, weren't they?"
+
+"That's a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and
+little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn't mind if the baby
+turned out to have my grandmother's skin. She had the finest
+complexion I ever saw."
+
+As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens
+with red combs ran squawking toward them. It was the hour at
+which the poultry was usually fed. Leonard stopped to admire
+them. "You've got a fine lot of hens. I always did like white
+leghorns. Where are all your roosters?"
+
+"We've only got one. He's shut up in the coop. The brood hens are
+setting. Enid is going to try raising winter frys."
+
+"Only one rooster? And may I ask what these hens do?"
+
+Claude laughed. "They lay eggs, just the same,--better. It's the
+fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather."
+
+This information seemed to make Leonard angry. "I never heard of
+such damned nonsense," he blustered. "I raise chickens on a
+natural basis, or I don't raise 'em at all." He jumped into his
+car for fear he would say more.
+
+When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat
+near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle. Dirty and sweaty as
+he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and
+smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its
+neck. The little girl was beside herself with delight.
+
+"Go and wash up for supper, Len," Susie called from the stove. He
+put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking
+with his eyes shut.
+
+"Susie, I'm in an awful temper. I can't stand that damned wife of
+Claude's!"
+
+She was spearing roasting ears out of a big iron pot and looked
+up through the steam. "Why, have you seen her? I was listening on
+the telephone this morning and heard her tell Bayliss she would
+be in town until late." "Oh, yes! She went to town all right, and
+he's over there eating a cold supper by himself. That woman's a
+fanatic. She ain't content with practising prohibition on
+humankind; she's begun now on the hens." While he placed the
+chairs and wheeled the baby up to the table, he explained Enid's
+method of raising poultry to his wife. She said she really didn't
+see any harm in it.
+
+"Now be honest, Susie; did you ever know hens would keep on
+laying without a rooster?"
+
+"No, I didn't, but I was brought up the old-fashioned way. Enid
+has poultry books and garden books, and all such things. I don't
+doubt she gets good ideas from them. But anyhow, you be careful.
+She's our nearest neighbour, and I don't want to have trouble
+with her."
+
+"I'll have to keep out of her way, then. If she tries to do any
+missionary work among my chickens, I'll tell her a few home
+truths her husband's too bashful to tell her. It's my opinion
+she's got that boy cowed already."
+
+"Now, Len, you know she won't bother your chickens. You keep
+quiet. But Claude does seem to sort of avoid people," Susie
+admitted, filling her husband's plate again. "Mrs. Joe Havel says
+Ernest don't go to Claude's any more. It seems Enid went over
+there and wanted Ernest to paste some Prohibition posters about
+fifteen million drunkards on their barn, for an example to the
+Bohemians. Ernest wouldn't do it, and told her he was going to
+vote for saloons, and Enid was quite spiteful, Mrs. Havel said.
+It's too bad, when those boys were such chums. I used to like to
+see them together." Susie spoke so kindly that her husband shot
+her a quick glance of shy affection.
+
+"Do you suppose Claude relished having that preacher visiting
+them, when they hadn't been married two months? Sitting on the
+front porch in a white necktie every day, while Claude was out
+cutting wheat?"
+
+"Well, anyhow, I guess Claude had more to eat when Brother Weldon
+was staying there. Preachers won't be fed on calories, or
+whatever it is Enid calls 'em," said Susie, who was given to
+looking on the bright side of things. "Claude's wife keeps a
+wonderful kitchen; but so could I, if I never cooked any more
+than she does."
+
+Leonard gave her a meaning look. "I don't believe you would live
+with the sort of man you could feed out of a tin can."
+
+"No, I don't believe I would." She pushed the buggy toward him.
+"Take her up, Daddy. She wants to play with you."
+
+Leonard set the baby on his shoulder and carried her off to show
+her the pigs. Susie kept laughing to herself as she cleared the
+table and washed the dishes; she was much amused by what her
+husband had told her.
+
+Late that evening, when Leonard was starting for the barn to see
+that all was well before he went to bed, he observed a discreet
+black object rolling along the highroad in the moonlight, a red
+spark winking in the rear. He called Susie to the door.
+
+"See, there she goes; going home to report the success of the
+meeting to Claude. Wouldn't that be a nice way to have your wife
+coming in?"
+
+"Now, Leonard, if Claude likes it--"
+
+"Likes it?" Big Leonard drew himself up. "What can he do, poor
+kid? He's stung!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+After Leonard left him, Claude cleared away the remains of his
+supper and watered the gourd vine before he went to milk. It was
+not really a gourd vine at all, but a summer-squash, of the
+crook-necked, warty, orange-coloured variety, and it was now full
+of ripe squashes, hanging by strong stems among the rough green
+leaves and prickly tendrils. Claude had watched its rapid growth
+and the opening of its splotchy yellow blossoms, feeling grateful
+to a thing that did so lustily what it was put there to do. He
+had the same feeling for his little Jersey cow, which came home
+every night with full udders and gave down her milk willingly,
+keeping her tail out of his face, as only a well disposed cow will
+do.
+
+His milking done, he sat down on the front porch and lit a cigar.
+While he smoked, he did not think about anything but the quiet
+and the slow cooling of the atmosphere, and how good it was to
+sit still. The moon swam up over the bare wheat fields, big and
+magical, like a great flower. Presently he got some bath towels,
+went across the yard to the windmill, took off his clothes, and
+stepped into the tin horse tank. The water had been warmed by the
+sun all afternoon, and was not much cooler than his body. He
+stretched himself out in it, and resting his head on the metal
+rim, lay on his back, looking up at the moon. The sky was a
+midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed
+to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an
+invisible current. One expected to see its great petals open.
+
+For some reason, Claude began to think about the far-off times
+and countries it had shone upon. He never thought of the sun as
+coming from distant lands, or as having taken part in human life
+in other ages. To him, the sun rotated about the wheatfields. But
+the moon, somehow, came out of the historic past, and made him
+think of Egypt and the Pharaohs, Babylon and the hanging gardens.
+She seemed particularly to have looked down upon the follies and
+disappointments of men; into the slaves' quarters of old times,
+into prison windows, and into fortresses where captives
+languished.
+
+Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of
+people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were
+captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death.
+Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the
+windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe
+which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all. Perhaps even in
+people like Mrs. Royce and his brother Bayliss there was
+something of this sort--but that was a shuddery thought. He
+dismissed it with a quick movement of his hand through the water,
+which, disturbed, caught the light and played black and gold,
+like something alive, over his chest. In his own mother the
+imprisoned spirit was almost more present to people than her
+corporeal self. He had so often felt it when he sat with her on
+summer nights like this. Mahailey, too, had one, though the walls
+of her prison were so thick--and Gladys Farmer. Oh, yes, how much
+Gladys must have to tell this perfect confidant! The people whose
+hearts were set high needed such intercourse--whose wish was so
+beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy
+it. And these children of the moon, with their unappeased
+longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children
+of the sun. This conception flooded the boy's heart like a second
+moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay
+deathly still for fear of losing it.
+
+At last the black cubical object which had caught Leonard
+Dawson's wrathful eye, came rolling along the highroad. Claude
+snatched up his clothes and towels, and without waiting to make
+use of either, he ran, a white man across a bare white yard.
+Gaining the shelter of the house, he found his bathrobe, and fled
+to the upper porch, where he lay down in the hammock. Presently
+he heard his name called, pronounced as if it were spelled
+"Clod." His wife came up the stairs and looked out at him. He lay
+motionless, with his eyes closed. She went away. When all was
+quiet again he looked off at the still country, and the moon in
+the dark indigo sky. His revelation still possessed him, making
+his whole body sensitive, like a tightly strung bow. In the
+morning he had forgotten, or was ashamed of what had seemed so
+true and so entirely his own the night before. He agreed, for the
+most part, that it was better not to think about such things, and
+when he could he avoided thinking.
+
+
+
+III
+
+After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often
+persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard,
+to take her as far as Claude's new house. She was glad Enid
+didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors
+and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in
+the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
+sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her
+work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily
+and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing
+machine before he went to work, and by nine o'clock the clothes
+were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before
+in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
+satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working
+shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.
+
+Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two
+thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said
+that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected
+her husband depended upon one's conception of what was his due.
+When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was
+conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
+happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not
+happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed
+him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and
+make the best of what was good in it. If his wife didn't love
+him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
+thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he
+came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.
+Everything about a man's embrace was distasteful to Enid;
+something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,--
+for Eve's transgression, perhaps.
+
+This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of
+any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude
+before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a
+readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in
+exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that
+for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient
+with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not
+understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting
+remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went
+over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in
+the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
+
+Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself,
+"It's the end of everything for me." Other men than he must have
+been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a
+lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy because he was an
+idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
+love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that
+it might be otherwise.
+
+Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright
+summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but
+broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, but even more
+in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid
+could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At
+such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging
+hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.
+
+In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why
+she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace
+and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful
+attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he
+came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
+against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head
+drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity
+which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in
+him? Was it, after all, his fault?
+
+Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one
+else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every
+day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came
+out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid's
+vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the
+Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.
+Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against
+alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the
+pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to take any part in
+the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what
+Bayliss and Enid called "our literature."
+
+In the farming towns the term "literature" was applied only to a
+special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature,
+Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease,
+there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature. This special application of
+the word didn't bother Claude, but his mother, being an
+old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
+
+Enid did not understand her husband's indifference to a burning
+question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest
+Havel. She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her
+committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and
+wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had something
+to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He
+did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the
+lightning had blasted. Further than that he wouldn't have let
+anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.
+
+The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut
+in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried
+and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and
+dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife's
+blood with horror--and some would have melted his mother's heart
+with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless
+blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as
+they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from
+branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with
+life--that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told
+himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into
+the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and
+interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with
+compromises.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+From her upstairs window Mrs. Wheeler could see Claude moving
+back and forth in the west field, drilling wheat. She felt lonely
+for him. He didn't come home as often as he might. She had begun
+to wonder whether he was one of those people who are always
+discontented; but whatever his disappointments were, he kept them
+locked in his own breast. One had to learn the lessons of life.
+Nevertheless, it made her a little sad to see him so settled and
+indifferent at twenty-three.
+
+After watching from the window for a few moments, she turned to
+the telephone and called up Claude's house, asking Enid whether
+she would mind if he came there for dinner. "Mahailey and I get
+lonesome with Mr. Wheeler away so much," she added.
+
+"Why, no, Mother Wheeler, of course not." Enid spoke cheerfully,
+as she always did. "Have you any one there you can send over to
+tell him?"
+
+"I thought I would walk over myself, Enid. It's not far, if I
+take my time."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler left the house a little before noon and stopped at
+the creek to rest before she climbed the long hill. At the edge
+of the field she sat down against a grassy bank and waited until
+the horses came tramping up the long rows. Claude saw her and
+pulled them in.
+
+"Anything wrong, Mother?" he called.
+
+"Oh, no! I'm going to take you home for dinner with me, that's
+all. I telephoned Enid." He unhooked his team, and he and his
+mother started down the hill together, walking behind the horses.
+Though they had not been alone like this for a long while, she
+felt it best to talk about impersonal things.
+
+"Don't let me forget to give you an article about the execution
+of that English nurse."
+
+"Edith Cavell? I've read about it," he answered listlessly. "It's
+nothing to be surprised at. If they could sink the Lusitania,
+they could shoot an English nurse, certainly."
+
+"Someway I feel as if this were different," his mother murmured.
+"It's like the hanging of John Brown. I wonder they could find
+soldiers to execute the sentence."
+
+"Oh, I guess they have plenty of such soldiers!"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up at him. "I don't see how we can stay out
+of it much longer, do you? I suppose our army wouldn't be a drop
+in the bucket, even if we could get it over. They tell us we can
+be more useful in our agriculture and manufactories than we could
+by going into the war. I only hope it isn't campaign talk. I do
+distrust the Democrats."
+
+Claude laughed. "Why, Mother, I guess there's no party politics
+in this."
+
+She shook her head. "I've never yet found a public question in
+which there wasn't party politics. Well, we can only do our duty
+as it comes to us, and have faith. This field finishes your fall
+work?"
+
+"Yes. I'll have time to do some things about the place, now. I'm
+going to make a good ice-house and put up my own ice this
+winter."
+
+"Were you thinking of going up to Lincoln, for a little?"
+
+"I guess not."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back
+on old pleasures and old friends.
+
+"Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in
+Frankfort?"
+
+"I think so, Mother," he answered a little impatiently. "I told
+her she could attend to it when she was in town some day."
+
+"Of course," his mother persevered, "some of the programs are not
+very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of
+what we have."
+
+He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that.
+His horses stopped at the water tank. "Don't wait for me. I'll be
+along in a minute." Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled.
+"Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give
+me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool
+the other."
+
+She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost
+disappeared. "I thought I was smart that time!"
+
+It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to
+get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.
+
+While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a
+page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her
+they were all photographs,--she knew no other way of making a
+picture.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she asked, "how comes it all them Germans is such
+ugly lookin' people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here
+ain't ugly lookin'."
+
+Claude put her off indulgently. "Maybe it's the ugly ones that
+are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our
+neighbours."
+
+"Then why don't they make their soldiers stay home, an' not go
+breakin' other people's things, an' turnin' 'em out of their
+houses," she muttered indignantly. "They say little babies was
+born out in the snow last winter, an' no fires for their mudders
+nor nothin'. 'Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn't like that in our war;
+the soldiers didn't do nothin' to the women an' chillun. Many a
+time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an' they never so
+much as broke a piece of my mudder's chiney."
+
+"You'll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must
+have my dinner and get back to work. If we don't get our wheat
+in, those people over there won't have anything to eat, you
+know."
+
+The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she
+could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over
+photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages,
+things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry
+that used to stop to drink at her mother's cold mountain spring.
+She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding
+feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a
+clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back,
+"as raw as beef where he'd scratched it." Five of her brothers
+were in the Confederate army. When one was wounded in the second
+battle of Bull Run, her mother had borrowed a wagon and horses,
+gone a three days' journey to the field hospital, and brought the
+boy home to the mountain. Mahailey could remember how her older
+sisters took turns pouring cold spring water on his gangrenous
+leg all day and all night. There were no doctors left in the
+neighbourhood, and as nobody could amputate the boy's leg, he
+died by inches. Mahailey was the only person in the Wheeler
+household who had ever seen war with her own eyes, and she felt
+that this fact gave her a definite superiority.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude had been married a year and a half. One December morning
+he got a telephone message from his father-in-law, asking him to
+come in to Frankfort at once. He found Mr. Royce sunk in his
+desk-chair, smoking as usual, with several foreign-looking
+letters on the table before him. As he took these out of their
+envelopes and sorted the pages, Claude noticed how unsteady his
+hands had become.
+
+One letter, from the chief of the medical staff in the mission
+school where Caroline Royce taught, informed Mr. Royce that his
+daughter was seriously ill in the mission hospital. She would
+have to be sent to a more salubrious part of the country for rest
+and treatment, and would not be strong enough to return to her
+duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could
+come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school
+authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a
+fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline
+herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a
+box of cigars toward him and began to talk despondently about
+missionaries.
+
+"I could go to her," he complained, "but what good would that do?
+I'm not in sympathy with her ideas, and it would only fret her.
+You can see she's made her mind up not to come home. I don't
+believe in one people trying to force their ways or their
+religion on another. I'm not that kind of man." He sat looking at
+his cigar. After a long pause he broke out suddenly, "China has
+been drummed into my ears. It seems like a long way to go to
+hunt for trouble, don't it? A man hasn't got much control over
+his own life, Claude. If it ain't poverty or disease that
+torments him, it's a name on the map. I could have made out
+pretty well, if it hadn't been for China, and some other things....
+If Carrie'd had to teach for her clothes and help pay off
+my notes, like old man Harrison's daughters, like enough she'd
+have stayed at home. There's always something. I don't know what
+to say about showing these letters to Enid."
+
+"Oh, she will have to know about it, Mr. Royce. If she feels that
+she ought to go to Carrie, it wouldn't be right for me to
+interfere."
+
+Mr. Royce shook his head. "I don't know. It don't seem fair that
+China should hang over you, too."
+
+When Claude got home he remarked as he handed Enid the letters,
+"Your father has been a good deal upset by this. I never saw him
+look so old as he did today."
+
+Enid studied their contents, sitting at her orderly little desk,
+while Claude pretended to read the paper.
+
+"It seems clear that I am the one to go," she said when she had
+finished.
+
+"You think it's necessary for some one to go? I don't see it."
+
+"It would look very strange if none of us went," Enid replied
+with spirit.
+
+"How, look strange?"
+
+"Why, it would look to her associates as if her family had no
+feeling."
+
+"Oh, if that's all!" Claude smiled perversely and took up his
+paper again. "I wonder how it will look to people here if you go
+off and leave your husband?"
+
+"What a mean thing to say, Claude!" She rose sharply, then
+hesitated, perplexed. "People here know me better than that. It
+isn't as if you couldn't be perfectly comfortable at your
+mother's." As he did not glance up from his paper, she went into
+the kitchen.
+
+Claude sat still, listening to Enid's quick movements as she
+opened up the range to get supper. The light in the room grew
+greyer. Outside the fields melted into one another as evening
+came on. The young trees in the yard bent and whipped about under
+a bitter north wind. He had often thought with pride that winter
+died at his front doorstep; within, no draughty halls, no chilly
+corners. This was their second year here. When he was driving
+home, the thought that he might be free of this house for a long
+while had stirred a pleasant excitement in him; but now, he
+didn't want to leave it. Something grew soft in him. He wondered
+whether they couldn't try again, and make things go better. Enid
+was singing in the kitchen in a subdued, rather lonely voice. He
+rose and went out for his milking coat and pail. As he passed his
+wife by the window, he stopped and put his arm about her
+questioningly.
+
+She looked up. "That's right. You're feeling better about it,
+aren't you? I thought you would. Gracious, what a smelly coat,
+Claude! I must find another for you."
+
+Claude knew that tone. Enid never questioned the rightness of her
+own decisions. When she made up her mind, there was no turning
+her. He went down the path to the barn with his hands stuffed in
+his trousers pockets, his bright pail hanging on his arm. Try
+again--what was there to try? Platitudes, littleness, falseness....
+His life was choking him, and he hadn't the courage to
+break with it. Let her go! Let her go when she would!... What
+a hideous world to be born into! Or was it hideous only for him?
+Everything he touched went wrong under his hand--always had.
+
+When they sat down at the supper table in the back parlour an
+hour later, Enid looked worn, as if this time her decision had
+cost her something. "I should think you might have a restful
+winter at your mother's," she began cheerfully. "You won't have
+nearly so much to look after as you do here. We needn't disturb
+things in this house. I will take the silver down to Mother, and
+we can leave everything else just as it is. Would there be room
+for my car in your father's garage? You might find it a
+convenience."
+
+"Oh, no! I won't need it. I'll put it up at the mill house," he
+answered with an effort at carelessness.
+
+All the familiar objects that stood about them in the lamplight
+seemed stiller and more solemn than usual, as if they were
+holding their breath.
+
+"I suppose you had better take the chickens over to your
+mother's," Enid continued evenly. "But I shouldn't like them to
+get mixed with her Plymouth Rocks; there's not a dark feather
+among them now. Do ask Mother Wheeler to use all the eggs, and
+not to let my hens set in the spring."
+
+"In the spring?" Claude looked up from his plate.
+
+"Of course, Claude. I could hardly get back before next fall, if
+I'm to be of any help to poor Carrie. I might try to be home for
+harvest, if that would make it more convenient for you." She rose
+to bring in the dessert.
+
+"Oh, don't hurry on my account!" he muttered, staring after her
+disappearing figure.
+
+Enid came back with the hot pudding and the after-dinner coffee
+things. "This has come on us so suddenly that we must make our
+plans at once," she explained. "I should think your mother would
+be glad to keep Rose for us; she is such a good cow. And then you
+can have all the cream you want."
+
+He took the little gold-rimmed cup she held out to him. "If you
+are going to be gone until next fall, I shall sell Rose," he
+announced gruffly.
+
+"But why? You might look a long time before you found another
+like her."
+
+"I shall sell her, anyhow. The horses, of course, are Father's;
+he paid for them. If you clear out, he may want to rent this
+place. You may find a tenant in here when you get back from
+China." Claude swallowed his coffee, put down the cup, and went
+into the front parlour, where he lit a cigar. He walked up and
+down, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who still sat at the
+table in the circle of light from the hanging lamp. Her head,
+bent forward a little, showed the neat part of her brown hair.
+When she was perplexed, her face always looked sharper, her chin
+longer.
+
+"If you've no feeling for the place," said Claude from the other
+room, "you can hardly expect me to hang around and take care of
+it. All the time you were campaigning, I played housekeeper
+here."
+
+Enid's eyes narrowed, but she did not flush. Claude had never
+seen a wave of colour come over his wife's pale, smooth cheeks.
+
+"Don't be childish. You know I care for this place; it's our
+home. But no feeling would be right that kept me from doing my
+duty. You are well, and you have your mother's house to go to.
+Carrie is ill and among strangers."
+
+She began to gather up the dishes. Claude stepped quickly out
+into the light and confronted her. "It's not only your going. You
+know what's the matter with me. It's because you want to go. You
+are glad of a chance to get away among all those preachers, with
+their smooth talk and make-believe."
+
+Enid took up the tray. "If I am glad, it's because you are not
+willing to govern our lives by Christian ideals. There is
+something in you that rebels all the time. So many important
+questions have come up since our marriage, and you have been
+indifferent or sarcastic about every one of them. You want to
+lead a purely selfish life."
+
+She walked resolutely out of the room and shut the door behind
+her. Later, when she came back, Claude was not there. His hat and
+coat were gone from the hat rack; he must have let himself out
+quietly by the front door. Enid sat up until eleven and then went
+to bed.
+
+In the morning, on coming out from her bedroom, she found Claude
+asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on. She had a
+moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any
+smell of spirits. She began preparations for breakfast, moving
+quietly.
+
+Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost
+no time. She engaged passage and cabled the mission school. She
+left Frankfort the week before Christmas. Claude and Ralph took
+her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express.
+When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother's, and sold
+his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson. Except when he went to
+see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the
+neighbours. He felt that they were discussing his domestic
+affairs,--as, of course, they were. The Royces and the Wheelers,
+they said, couldn't behave like anybody else, and it was no use
+their trying. If Claude built the best house in the
+neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn't live in it. And if he
+had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!
+
+One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and
+went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and
+bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar.
+Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the
+kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went
+away. He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses
+with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows
+securely. As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and
+listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice. All these things
+that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such
+pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop
+of any second-hand dealer.
+
+How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the
+feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris
+of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and
+decaying things in nature. Rubbish... junk... his mind
+could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the
+dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued
+from day to day. Actions without meaning.... As he looked out
+and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he
+could not help thinking how much better it would be if people
+could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under
+the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats
+forgotten. He wondered how he was to go on through the years
+ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his
+soul.
+
+At last he locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and went
+over to the timber claim to smoke a cigar and say goodbye to the
+place. There he soberly walked about for more than an hour, under
+the crooked trees with empty birds' nests in their forks. Every
+time he came to a break in the hedge, he could see the little
+house, giving itself up so meekly to solitude. He did not believe
+that he would ever live there again. Well, at any rate, the money
+his father had put into the place would not be lost; he could
+always get a better tenant for having a comfortable house there.
+Several of the boys in the neighbourhood were planning to be
+married within the year. The future of the house was safe. And
+he? He stopped short in his walk; his feet had made an uncertain,
+purposeless trail all over the white ground. It vexed him to see
+his own footsteps. What was it--what WAS the matter with him?
+Why, at least, could he not stop feeling things, and hoping? What
+was there to hope for now?
+
+He heard a sound of distress, and looking back, saw the barn cat,
+that had been left behind to pick up her living. She was standing
+inside the hedge, her jet black fur ruffled against the wet
+flakes, one paw lifted, mewing miserably. Claude went over and
+picked her up.
+
+"What's the matter, Blackie? Mice getting scarce in the barn?
+Mahailey will say you are bad luck. Maybe you are, but you can't
+help it, can you?" He slipped her into his overcoat pocket.
+Later, when he was getting into his car, he tried to dislodge her
+and put her in a basket, but she clung to her nest in his pocket
+and dug her claws into the lining. He laughed. "Well, if you are
+bad luck, I guess you are going to stay right with me!"
+
+She looked up at him with startled yellow eyes and did not even
+mew.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was afraid that Claude might not find the old place
+comfortable, after having had a house of his own. She put her
+best rocking chair and a reading lamp in his bedroom. He often
+sat there all evening, shading his eyes with his hand, pretending
+to read. When he stayed downstairs after supper, his mother and
+Mahailey were grateful. Besides collecting war pictures,
+Mahailey now hunted through the old magazines in the attic for
+pictures of China. She had marked on her big kitchen calendar the
+day when Enid would arrive in Hong-Kong.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she would say as she stood at the sink washing the
+supper dishes, "it's broad daylight over where Miss Enid is,
+ain't it? Cause the world's round, an' the old sun, he's
+a-shinin' over there for the yaller people."
+
+From time to time, when they were working together, Mrs. Wheeler
+told Mahailey what she knew about the customs of the Chinese. The
+old woman had never had two impersonal interests at the same time
+before, and she scarcely knew what to do with them. She would
+murmur on, half to Claude and half to herself: "They ain't
+fightin' over there where Miss Enid is, is they? An' she won't
+have to wear their kind of clothes, cause she's a white woman.
+She won't let 'em kill their girl babies nor do such awful things
+like they always have, an' she won't let 'em pray to them stone
+iboles, cause they can't help 'em none. I 'spect Miss Enid'll do
+a heap of good, all the time."
+
+Behind her diplomatic monologues, however, Mahailey had her own
+ideas, and she was greatly scandalized at Enid's departure. She
+was afraid people would say that Claude's wife had "run off an'
+lef' him," and in the Virginia mountains, where her social
+standards had been formed, a husband or wife thus deserted was
+the object of boisterous ridicule. She once stopped Mrs. Wheeler
+in a dark corner of the cellar to whisper, "Mr. Claude's wife
+ain't goin' to stay off there, like her sister, is she?"
+
+If one of the Yoeder boys or Susie Dawson happened to be at the
+Wheelers' for dinner, Mahailey never failed to refer to Enid in a
+loud voice. "Mr. Claude's wife, she cuts her potatoes up raw in
+the pan an' fries 'em. She don't boil 'em first like I do. I know
+she's an awful good cook, I know she is." She felt that easy
+references to the absent wife made things look better.
+
+Ernest Havel came to see Claude now, but not often. They both
+felt it would be indelicate to renew their former intimacy.
+Ernest still felt aggrieved about his beer, as if Enid had
+snatched the tankard from his lips with her own corrective hand.
+Like Leonard, he believed that Claude had made a bad bargain in
+matrimony; but instead of feeling sorry for him, Ernest wanted to
+see him convinced and punished. When he married Enid, Claude had
+been false to liberal principles, and it was only right that he
+should pay for his apostasy. The very first time he came to spend
+an evening at the Wheelers' after Claude came home to live,
+Ernest undertook to explain his objections to Prohibition. Claude
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not drop it? It's a matter that doesn't interest me, one way
+or the other."
+
+Ernest was offended and did not come back for nearly a
+month--not, indeed, until the announcement that Germany would
+resume unrestricted submarine warfare made every one look
+questioningly at his neighbour.
+
+He walked into the Wheelers' kitchen the night after this news
+reached the farming country, and found Claude and his mother
+sitting at the table, reading the papers aloud to each other in
+snatches. Ernest had scarcely taken a seat when the telephone
+bell rang. Claude answered the call.
+
+"It's the telegraph operator at Frankfort," he said, as he hung
+up the receiver. "He repeated a message from Father, sent from
+Wray: 'Will be home day after tomorrow. Read the papers.' What
+does he mean? What does he suppose we are doing?"
+
+"It means he considers our situation very serious. It's not like
+him to telegraph except in case of illness." Mrs. Wheeler rose
+and walked distractedly to the telephone box, as if it might
+further disclose her husband's state of mind.
+
+"But what a queer message! It was addressed to you, too, Mother,
+not to me."
+
+"He would know how I feel about it. Some of your father's people
+were seagoing men, out of Portsmouth. He knows what it means when
+our shipping is told where it can go on the ocean, and where it
+cannot. It isn't possible that Washington can take such an
+affront for us. To think that at this time, of all times, we
+should have a Democratic administration!"
+
+Claude laughed. "Sit down, Mother. Wait a day or two. Give them
+time."
+
+"The war will be over before Washington can do anything, Mrs.
+Wheeler," Ernest declared gloomily, "England will be starved out,
+and France will be beaten to a standstill. The whole German army
+will be on the Western front now. What could this country do? How
+long do you suppose it takes to make an army?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler stopped short in her restless pacing and met his
+moody glance. "I don't know anything, Ernest, but I believe the
+Bible. I believe that in the twinkling of an eye we shall be
+changed!"
+
+Ernest looked at the floor. He respected faith. As he said, you
+must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.
+
+Claude sat leaning his elbows on the table. "It always comes back
+to the same thing, Mother. Even if a raw army could do anything,
+how would we get it over there? Here's one naval authority who
+says the Germans are turning out submarines at the rate of three
+a day. They probably didn't spring this on us until they had
+enough built to keep the ocean clear."
+
+"I don't pretend to say what we could accomplish, son. But we
+must stand somewhere, morally. They have told us all along that
+we could be more helpful to the Allies out of the war than in it,
+because we could send munitions and supplies. If we agree to
+withdraw that aid, where are we? Helping Germany, all the time we
+are pretending to mind our own business! If our only alternative
+is to be at the bottom of the sea, we had better be there!"
+
+"Mother, do sit down! We can't settle it tonight. I never saw you
+so worked up."
+
+"Your father is worked up, too, or he would never have sent that
+telegram." Mrs. Wheeler reluctantly took up her workbasket, and
+the boys talked with their old, easy friendliness.
+
+When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeders' place with
+him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the
+frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them,
+he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with
+the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that
+were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must
+be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet,
+that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A
+question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him,
+over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country,
+as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver,
+when this war was undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.
+
+Claude and his mother had not long to wait. Three days later they
+knew that the German ambassador had been dismissed, and the
+American ambassador recalled from Berlin. To older men these
+events were subjects to think and converse about; but to boys
+like Claude they were life and death, predestination.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+One stormy morning Claude was driving the big wagon to town to
+get a load of lumber. The roads were beginning to thaw out, and
+the country was black and dirty looking. Here and there on the
+dark mud, grey snow crusts lingered, perforated like honeycomb,
+with wet weedstalks sticking up through them. As the wagon
+creaked over the high ground just above Frankfort, Claude noticed
+a brilliant new flag flying from the schoolhouse cupola. He had
+never seen the flag before when it meant anything but the Fourth
+of July, or a political rally. Today it was as if he saw it for
+the first time; no bands, no noise, no orators; a spot of
+restless colour against the sodden March sky.
+
+He turned out of his way in order to pass the High School, drew
+up his team, and waited a few minutes until the noon bell rang.
+The older boys and girls came out first, with a flurry of
+raincoats and umbrellas. Presently he saw Gladys Farmer, in a
+yellow "slicker" and an oilskin hat, and waved to her. She came
+up to the wagon.
+
+"I like your decoration," he said, glancing toward the cupola.
+
+"It's a silk one the Senior boys bought with their athletic
+money. I advised them not to run it up in this rain, but the
+class president told me they bought that flag for storms."
+
+"Get in, and I'll take you home."
+
+She took his extended hand, put her foot on the hub of the wheel,
+and climbed to the seat beside him. He clucked to his team.
+
+"So your High School boys are feeling war-like these days?"
+
+"Very. What do you think?"
+
+"I think they'll have a chance to express their feelings."
+
+"Do you, Claude? It seems awfully unreal."
+
+"Nothing else seems very real, either. I'm going to haul out a
+load of lumber, but I never expect to drive a nail in it. These
+things don't matter now. There is only one thing we ought to do,
+and only one thing that matters; we all know it."
+
+"You feel it's coming nearer every day?"
+
+"Every day."
+
+Gladys made no reply. She only looked at him gravely with her
+calm, generous brown eyes. They stopped before the low house
+where the windows were full of flowers. She took his hand and
+swung herself to the ground, holding it for a moment while she
+said good-bye. Claude drove back to the lumber yard. In a place
+like Frankfort, a boy whose wife was in China could hardly go to
+see Gladys without causing gossip.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+During the bleak month of March Mr. Wheeler went to town in his
+buckboard almost every day. For the first time in his life he had
+a secret anxiety. The one member of his family who had never
+given him the slightest trouble, his son Bayliss, was just now
+under a cloud.
+
+Bayliss was a Pacifist, and kept telling people that if only the
+United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what
+Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the
+capital of the world. There was a kind of logic in Bayliss'
+utterances that shook Nat Wheeler's imperturbable assumption that
+one point of view was as good as another. When Bayliss fought the
+dram and the cigarette, Wheeler only laughed. That a son of his
+should turn out a Prohibitionist, was a joke he could appreciate.
+But Bayliss' attitude in the present crisis disturbed him. Day
+after day he sat about his son's place of business, interrupting
+his arguments with funny stories. Bayliss did not go home at all
+that month. He said to his father, "No, Mother's too violent. I'd
+better not."
+
+Claude and his mother read the papers in the evening, but they
+talked so little about what they read that Mahailey inquired
+anxiously whether they weren't still fighting over yonder. When
+she could get Claude alone for a moment, she pulled out Sunday
+supplement pictures of the devastated countries and asked him to
+tell her what was to become of this family, photographed among
+the ruins of their home; of this old woman, who sat by the
+roadside with her bundles. "Where's she goin' to, anyways? See,
+Mr. Claude, she's got her iron cook-pot, pore old thing, carryin'
+it all the way!"
+
+Pictures of soldiers in gas-masks puzzled her; gas was something
+she hadn't learned about in the Civil War, so she worked it out
+for herself that these masks were worn by the army cooks, to
+protect their eyes when they were cutting up onions! "All them
+onions they have to cut up, it would put their eyes out if they
+didn't wear somethin'," she argued.
+
+On the morning of the eighth of April Claude came downstairs
+early and began to clean his boots, which were caked with dry
+mud. Mahailey was squatting down beside her stove, blowing and
+puffing into it. The fire was always slow to start in heavy
+weather. Claude got an old knife and a brush, and putting his
+foot on a chair over by the west window, began to scrape his
+shoe. He had said good-morning to Mahailey, nothing more. He
+hadn't slept well, and was pale.
+
+"Mr. Claude," Mahailey grumbled, "this stove ain't never drawed
+good like my old one Mr. Ralph took away from me. I can't do
+nothin' with it. Maybe you'll clean it out for me next Sunday."
+
+"I'll clean it today, if you say so. I won't be here next Sunday.
+I'm going away."
+
+Something in his tone made Mahailey get up, her eyes still
+blinking with the smoke, and look at him sharply. "You ain't
+goin' off there where Miss Enid is?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, Mahailey." He had dropped the shoebrush and stood with one
+foot on the chair, his elbow on his knee, looking out of the
+window as if he had forgotten himself. "No, I'm not going to
+China. I'm going over to help fight the Germans."
+
+He was still staring out at the wet fields. Before he could stop
+her, before he knew what she was doing, she had caught and kissed
+his unworthy hand.
+
+"I knowed you would," she sobbed. "I always knowed you would, you
+nice boy, you! Old Mahail' knowed!"
+
+Her upturned face was working all over; her mouth, her eyebrows,
+even the wrinkles on her low forehead were working and twitching.
+Claude felt a tightening in his throat as he tenderly regarded
+that face; behind the pale eyes, under the low brow where there
+was not room for many thoughts, an idea was struggling and
+tormenting her. The same idea that had been tormenting him.
+
+"You're all right, Mahailey," he muttered, patting her back and
+turning away. "Now hurry breakfast."
+
+"You ain't told your mudder yit?" she whispered.
+
+"No, not yet. But she'll be all right, too." He caught up his cap
+and went down to the barn to look after the horses.
+
+When Claude returned, the family were already at the breakfast
+table. He slipped into his seat and watched his mother while she
+drank her first cup of coffee. Then he addressed his father.
+
+"Father, I don't see any use of waiting for the draft. If you can
+spare me, I'd like to get into a training camp somewhere. I
+believe I'd stand a chance of getting a commission."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder." Mr. Wheeler poured maple syrup on his
+pancakes with a liberal hand. "How do you feel about it,
+Evangeline?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had quietly put down her knife and fork. She looked
+at her husband in vague alarm, while her fingers moved restlessly
+about over the tablecloth.
+
+"I thought," Claude went on hastily, "that maybe I would go up to
+Omaha tomorrow and find out where the training camps are to be
+located, and have a talk with the men in charge of the enlistment
+station. Of course," he added lightly, "they may not want me. I
+haven't an idea what the requirements are."
+
+"No, I don't understand much about it either." Mr. Wheeler rolled
+his top pancake and conveyed it to his mouth. After a moment of
+mastication he said, "You figure on going tomorrow?"
+
+"I'd like to. I won't bother with baggage--some shirts and
+underclothes in my suitcase. If the Government wants me, it will
+clothe me."
+
+Mr. Wheeler pushed back his plate. "Well, now I guess you'd
+better come out with me and look at the wheat. I don't know but
+I'd best plough up that south quarter and put it in corn. I don't
+believe it will make anything much."
+
+When Claude and his father went out of the door, Dan sprang up
+with more alacrity than usual and plunged after them. He did not
+want to be left alone with Mrs. Wheeler. She remained sitting at
+the foot of the deserted breakfast table. She was not crying. Her
+eyes were utterly sightless. Her back was so stooped that she
+seemed to be bending under a burden. Mahailey cleared the dishes
+away quietly.
+
+Out in the muddy fields Claude finished his talk with his father.
+He explained that he wanted to slip away without saying good-bye
+to any one. "I have a way, you know," he said, flushing, "of
+beginning things and not getting very far with them. I don't want
+anything said about this until I'm sure. I may be rejected for
+one reason or another."
+
+Mr. Wheeler smiled. "I guess not. However, I'll tell Dan to keep
+his mouth shut. Will you just go over to Leonard Dawson's and get
+that wrench he borrowed? It's about noon, and he'll likely be at
+home." Claude found big Leonard watering his team at the
+windmill. When Leonard asked him what he thought of the
+President's message, he blurted out at once that he was going to
+Omaha to enlist. Leonard reached up and pulled the lever that
+controlled the almost motionless wheel.
+
+"Better wait a few weeks and I'll go with you. I'm going to try
+for the Marines. They take my eye."
+
+Claude, standing on the edge of the tank, almost fell backward.
+"Why, what--what for?"
+
+Leonard looked him over. "Good Lord, Claude, you ain't the only
+fellow around here that wears pants! What for? Well, I'll tell
+you what for," he held up three large red fingers threateningly;
+"Belgium, the Lusitania, Edith Cavell. That dirt's got under my
+skin. I'll get my corn planted, and then Father'll look after
+Susie till I come back."
+
+Claude took a long breath. "Well, Leonard, you fooled me. I
+believed all this chaff you've been giving me about not caring
+who chewed up who."
+
+"And no more do I care," Leonard protested, "not a damn! But
+there's a limit. I've been ready to go since the Lusitania. I
+don't get any satisfaction out of my place any more. Susie feels
+the same way."
+
+Claude looked at his big neighbour. "Well, I'm off tomorrow,
+Leonard. Don't mention it to my folks, but if I can't get into
+the army, I'm going to enlist in the navy. They'll always take an
+able-bodied man. I'm not coming back here." He held out his hand
+and Leonard took it with a smack.
+
+"Good luck, Claude. Maybe we'll meet in foreign parts. Wouldn't
+that be a joke! Give my love to Enid when you write. I always did
+think she was a fine girl, though I disagreed with her on
+Prohibition." Claude crossed the fields mechanically, without
+looking where he went. His power of vision was turned inward upon
+scenes and events wholly imaginary as yet.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One bright June day Mr. Wheeler parked his car in a line of
+motors before the new pressed-brick Court house in Frankfort. The
+Court house stood in an open square, surrounded by a grove of
+cotton-woods. The lawn was freshly cut, and the flower beds were
+blooming. When Mr. Wheeler entered the courtroom upstairs, it was
+already half-full of farmers and townspeople, talking in low
+tones while the summer flies buzzed in and out of the open
+windows. The judge, a one-armed man, with white hair and
+side-whiskers, sat at his desk, writing with his left hand. He
+was an old settler in Frankfort county, but from his frockcoat
+and courtly manners you might have thought he had come from
+Kentucky yesterday instead of thirty years ago. He was to hear
+this morning a charge of disloyalty brought against two German
+farmers. One of the accused was August Yoeder, the Wheelers'
+nearest neighbour, and the other was Troilus Oberlies, a rich
+German from the northern part of the county.
+
+Oberlies owned a beautiful farm and lived in a big white house
+set on a hill, with a fine orchard, rows of beehives, barns,
+granaries, and poultry yards. He raised turkeys and
+tumbler-pigeons, and many geese and ducks swam about on his
+cattleponds. He used to boast that he had six sons, "like our
+German Emperor." His neighbours were proud of his place, and
+pointed it out to strangers. They told how Oberlies had come to
+Frankfort county a poor man, and had made his fortune by his
+industry and intelligence. He had twice crossed the ocean to
+re-visit his fatherland, and when he returned to his home on the
+prairies he brought presents for every one; his lawyer, his
+banker, and the merchants with whom he dealt in Frankfort and
+Vicount. Each of his neighbours had in his parlour some piece of
+woodcarving or weaving, or some ingenious mechanical toy that
+Oberlies had picked up in Germany. He was an older man than
+Yoeder, wore a short beard that was white and curly, like his
+hair, and though he was low in stature, his puffy red face and
+full blue eyes, and a certain swagger about his carriage, gave
+him a look of importance. He was boastful and quick-tempered, but
+until the war broke out in Europe nobody had ever had any trouble
+with him. Since then he had constantly found fault and
+complained,--everything was better in the Old Country.
+
+Mr. Wheeler had come to town prepared to lend Yoeder a hand if he
+needed one. They had worked adjoining fields for thirty years
+now. He was surprised that his neighbour had got into trouble. He
+was not a blusterer, like Oberlies, but a big, quiet man, with a
+serious, large-featured face, and a stern mouth that seldom
+opened. His countenance might have been cut out of red sandstone,
+it was so heavy and fixed. He and Oberlies sat on two wooden
+chairs outside the railing of the judge's desk.
+
+Presently the judge stopped writing and said he would hear the
+charges against Troilus Oberlies. Several neighbours took the
+stand in succession; their complaints were confused and almost
+humorous. Oberlies had said the United States would be licked,
+and that would be a good thing; America was a great country, but
+it was run by fools, and to be governed by Germany was the best
+thing that could happen to it. The witness went on to say that
+since Oberlies had made his money in this country--
+
+Here the judge interrupted him. "Please confine yourself to
+statements which you consider disloyal, made in your presence by
+the defendant." While the witness proceeded, the judge took off
+his glasses and laid them on the desk and began to polish the
+lenses with a silk handkerchief, trying them, and rubbing them
+again, as if he desired to see clearly.
+
+A second witness had heard Oberlies say he hoped the German
+submarines would sink a few troopships; that would frighten the
+Americans and teach them to stay at home and mind their own
+business. A third complained that on Sunday afternoons the old
+man sat on his front porch and played Die Wacht am Rhein on a
+slide-trombone, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. Here
+Nat Wheeler slapped his knee with a loud guffaw, and a titter ran
+through the courtroom. The defendant's puffy red cheeks seemed
+fashioned by his Maker to give voice to that piercing instrument.
+
+When asked if he had anything to say to these charges, the old
+man rose, threw back his shoulders, and cast a defiant glance at
+the courtroom. "You may take my property and imprison me, but I
+explain nothing, and I take back nothing," he declared in a loud
+voice.
+
+The judge regarded his inkwell with a smile. "You mistake the
+nature of this occasion, Mr. Oberlies. You are not asked to
+recant. You are merely asked to desist from further disloyal
+utterances, as much for your own protection and comfort as from
+consideration for the feelings of your neighbours. I will now
+hear the charges against Mr. Yoeder."
+
+Mr. Yoeder, a witness declared, had said he hoped the United
+States would go to Hell, now that it had been bought over by
+England. When the witness had remarked to him that if the Kaiser
+were shot it would end the war, Yoeder replied that charity
+begins at home, and he wished somebody would put a bullet in the
+President.
+
+When he was called upon, Yoeder rose and stood like a rock before
+the judge. "I have nothing to say. The charges are true. I
+thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind."
+
+"Yes, a man can speak his mind, but even here he must take the
+consequences. Sit down, please." The judge leaned back in his
+chair, and looking at the two men in front of him, began with
+deliberation: "Mr. Oberlies, and Mr. Yoeder, you both know, and
+your friends and neighbours know, why you are here. You have not
+recognized the element of appropriateness, which must be regarded
+in nearly all the transactions of life; many of our civil laws
+are founded upon it. You have allowed a sentiment, noble in
+itself, to carry you away and lead you to make extravagant
+statements which I am confident neither of you mean. No man can
+demand that you cease from loving the country of your birth; but
+while you enjoy the benefits of this country, you should not
+defame its government to extol another. You both admit to
+utterances which I can only adjudge disloyal. I shall fine you
+each three hundred dollars; a very light fine under the
+circumstances. If I should have occasion to fix a penalty a
+second time, it will be much more severe."
+
+After the case was concluded, Mr. Wheeler joined his neighbour at
+the door and they went downstairs together.
+
+"Well, what do you hear from Claude?" Mr. Yoeder asked.
+
+"He's still at Fort R--. He expects to get home on leave before
+he sails. Gus, you'll have to lend me one of your boys to
+cultivate my corn. The weeds are getting away from me."
+
+"Yes, you can have any of my boys,--till the draft gets 'em,"
+said Yoeder sourly.
+
+"I wouldn't worry about it. A little military training is good
+for a boy. You fellows know that." Mr. Wheeler winked, and
+Yoeder's grim mouth twitched at one corner.
+
+That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account
+of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude. Mrs.
+Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a
+rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the
+neighbourhood doings. Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material
+for them. Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way
+of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife. But since Claude
+went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the
+boy would be interested. As she laconically said in one of her
+letters:
+
+"Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and
+sometimes I think he is trying to take your place."
+
+
+
+X
+
+On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast
+train from Omaha, going home for a week's leave. The uniform was
+still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917. The first draft was not
+yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in
+training camps far away. Therefore a redheaded young man with
+long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic,
+responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a
+conspicuous figure among the passengers. Little boys and young
+girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the
+aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied
+his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept
+opening and forgetting to read.
+
+The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more
+interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book. He was
+glad to be going through it at harvest,--the season when it is
+most itself. He noted that there was more corn than usual,--much
+of the winter wheat had been weather killed, and the fields were
+ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize. The pastures
+were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again
+after its first cutting. Binders and harvesters were abroad in
+the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain
+into wide, subduing arms. When the train slowed down for a
+trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls
+and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.
+Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. "When I see
+those fellows, I feel as if I'd wakened up in the wrong clothes."
+
+His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. "That the kind of
+uniform you're accustomed to?"
+
+"I surely never wore anything else in the month of July," Claude
+admitted. "When I find myself riding along in a train, in the
+middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the
+world is turned upside down, for a fact!"
+
+The old man pressed a cigar upon him and began to question him.
+Like the hero of the Odyssey upon his homeward journey, Claude
+had often to tell what his country was, and who were the parents
+that begot him. He was constantly interrupted in his perusal of a
+French phrase-book (made up of sentences chosen for their
+usefulness to soldiers,--such as; "Non, jamais je ne regarde les
+femmes") by the questions of curious strangers. Presently he
+gathered up his luggage, shook hands with his neighbour, and put
+on his hat--the same old Stetson, with a gold cord and two hard
+tassels added to its conical severity. "I get off at this station
+and wait for the freight that goes down to Frankfort; the
+cotton-tail, we call it."
+
+The old man wished him a pleasant visit home, and the best of
+luck in days to come. Every one in the car smiled at him as he
+stepped down to the platform with his suitcase in one hand and
+his canvas bag in the other. His old friend, Mrs. Voigt, the
+German woman, stood out in front of her restaurant, ringing her
+bell to announce that dinner was ready for travellers. A crowd of
+young boys stood about her on the sidewalk, laughing and shouting
+in disagreeable, jeering tones. As Claude approached, one of them
+snatched the bell from her hand, ran off across the tracks with
+it, and plunged into a cornfield. The other boys followed, and
+one of them shouted, "Don't go in there to eat, soldier. She's a
+German spy, and she'll put ground glass in your dinner!"
+
+Claude swept into the lunch room and threw his bags on the floor.
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Voigt? Can I do anything for you?"
+
+She was sitting on one of her own stools, crying piteously, her
+false frizzes awry. Looking up, she gave a little screech of
+recognition. "Oh, I tank Gott it was you, and no more trouble
+coming! You know I ain't no spy nor nodding, like what dem boys
+say. Dem young fellers is dreadful rough mit me. I sell dem candy
+since dey was babies, an' now dey turn on me like dis.
+Hindenburg, dey calls me, and Kaiser Bill!" She began to cry
+again, twisting her stumpy little fingers as if she would tear
+them off.
+
+"Give me some dinner, ma'am, and then I'll go and settle with
+that gang. I've been away for a long time, and it seemed like
+getting home when I got off the train and saw your squaw vines
+running over the porch like they used to."
+
+"Ya? You remember dat?" she wiped her eyes. "I got a pot-pie
+today, and green peas, chust a few, out of my own garden."
+
+"Bring them along, please. We don't get anything but canned stuff
+in camp."
+
+Some railroad men came in for lunch. Mrs. Voigt beckoned Claude
+off to the end of the counter, where, after she had served her
+customers, she sat down and talked to him, in whispers.
+
+"My, you look good in dem clothes," she said patting his sleeve.
+"I can remember some wars, too; when we got back dem provinces
+what Napoleon took away from us, Alsace and Lorraine. Dem boys is
+passed de word to come and put tar on me some night, and I am
+skeered to go in my bet. I chust wrap in a quilt and sit in my
+old chair."
+
+"Don't pay any attention to them. You don't have trouble with the
+business people here, do you?"
+
+"No-o, not troubles, exactly." She hesitated, then leaned
+impulsively across the counter and spoke in his ear. "But it
+ain't all so bad in de Old Country like what dey say. De poor
+people ain't slaves, and dey ain't ground down like what dey say
+here. Always de forester let de poor folks come into de wood and
+carry off de limbs dat fall, and de dead trees. Und if de rich
+farmer have maybe a liddle more manure dan he need, he let de
+poor man come and take some for his land. De poor folks don't git
+such wages like here, but dey lives chust as comfortable. Und dem
+wooden shoes, what dey makes such fun of, is cleaner dan what
+leather is, to go round in de mud and manure. Dey don't git so
+wet and dey don't stink so."
+
+Claude could see that her heart was bursting with homesickness,
+full of tender memories of the far-away time and land of her
+youth. She had never talked to him of these things before, but
+now she poured out a flood of confidences about the big dairy
+farm on which she had worked as a girl; how she took care of nine
+cows, and how the cows, though small, were very strong,--drew a
+plough all day and yet gave as much milk at night as if they had
+been browsing in a pasture! The country people never had to spend
+money for doctors, but cured all diseases with roots and herbs,
+and when the old folks had the rheumatism they took "one of dem
+liddle jenny-pigs" to bed with them, and the guinea-pig drew out
+all the pain.
+
+Claude would have liked to listen longer, but he wanted to find
+the old woman's tormentors before his train came in. Leaving his
+bags with her, he crossed the railroad tracks, guided by an
+occasional teasing tinkle of the bell in the cornfield. Presently
+he came upon the gang, a dozen or more, lying in a shallow draw
+that ran from the edge of the field out into an open pasture. He
+stood on the edge of the bank and looked down at them, while he
+slowly cut off the end of a cigar and lit it. The boys grinned at
+him, trying to appear indifferent and at ease.
+
+"Looking for any one, soldier?" asked the one with the bell.
+
+"Yes, I am. I'm looking for that bell. You'll have to take it
+back where it belongs. You every one of you know there's no harm
+in that old woman."
+
+"She's a German, and we're fighting the Germans, ain't we?"
+
+"I don't think you'll ever fight any. You'd last about ten
+minutes in the American army. You're not our kind. There's only
+one army in the world that wants men who'll bully old women. You
+might get a job with them."
+
+The boys giggled. Claude beckoned impatiently. "Come along with
+that bell, kid."
+
+The boy rose slowly and climbed the bank out of the gully. As
+they tramped back through the cornfield, Claude turned to him
+abruptly. "See here, aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that!" the boy replied airily, tossing
+the bell up like a ball and catching it.
+
+"Well, you ought to be. I didn't expect to see anything of this
+kind until I got to the front. I'll be back here in a week, and
+I'll make it hot for anybody that's been bothering her." Claude's
+train was pulling in, and he ran for his baggage. Once seated in
+the "cotton-tail," he began going down into his own country,
+where he knew every farm he passed,--knew the land even when he
+did not know the owner, what sort of crops it yielded, and about
+how much it was worth. He did not recognize these farms with the
+pleasure he had anticipated, because he was so angry about the
+indignities Mrs. Voigt had suffered. He was still burning with
+the first ardour of the enlisted man. He believed that he was
+going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war
+without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry.
+
+Most of his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideas. They had
+come together from farms and shops and mills and mines, boys from
+college and boys from tough joints in big cities; sheepherders,
+street car drivers, plumbers' assistants, billiard markers.
+Claude had seen hundreds of them when they first came in; "show
+men" in cheap, loud sport suits, ranch boys in knitted
+waistcoats, machinists with the grease still on their fingers,
+farm-hands like Dan, in their one Sunday coat. Some of them
+carried paper suitcases tied up with rope, some brought all they
+had in a blue handkerchief. But they all came to give and not to
+ask, and what they offered was just themselves; their big red
+hands, their strong backs, the steady, honest, modest look in
+their eyes. Sometimes, when he had helped the medical examiner,
+Claude had noticed the anxious expression in the faces of the
+long lines of waiting men. They seemed to say, "If I'm good
+enough, take me. I'll stay by." He found them like that to work
+with; serviceable, good-natured, and eager to learn. If they
+talked about the war, or the enemy they were getting ready to
+fight, it was usually in a facetious tone; they were going to
+"can the Kaiser," or to make the Crown Prince work for a living.
+Claude, loved the men he trained with,--wouldn't choose to live
+in any better company.
+
+The freight train swung into the river valley that meant
+home,--the place the mind always came back to, after its farthest
+quest. Rapidly the farms passed; the haystacks, the cornfields,
+the familiar red barns--then the long coal sheds and the water
+tank, and the train stopped.
+
+On the platform he saw Ralph and Mr. Royce, waiting to welcome
+him. Over there, in the automobile, were his father and mother,
+Mr. Wheeler in the driver's seat. A line of motors stood along
+the siding. He was the first soldier who had come home, and some
+of the townspeople had driven down to see him arrive in his
+uniform. From one car Susie Dawson waved to him, and from another
+Gladys Farmer. While he stopped and spoke to them, Ralph took his
+bags.
+
+"Come along, boys," Mr. Wheeler called, tooting his horn, and he
+hurried the soldier away, leaving only a cloud of dust behind.
+
+Mr. Royce went over to old man Dawson's car and said rather
+childishly, "It can't be that Claude's grown taller? I suppose
+it's the way they learn to carry themselves. He always was a
+manly looking boy."
+
+"I expect his mother's a proud woman," said Susie, very much
+excited. "It's too bad Enid can't be here to see him. She would
+never have gone away if she'd known all that was to happen."
+
+Susie did not mean this as a thrust, but it took effect. Mr.
+Royce turned away and lit a cigar with some difficulty. His hands
+had grown very unsteady this last year, though he insisted that
+his general health was as good as ever. As he grew older, he was
+more depressed by the conviction that his women-folk had added
+little to the warmth and comfort of the world. Women ought to do
+that, whatever else they did. He felt apologetic toward the
+Wheelers and toward his old friends. It seemed as if his
+daughters had no heart.
+
+
+
+XI
+Camp habits persisted. On his first morning at home Claude came
+downstairs before even Mahailey was stirring, and went out to
+have a look at the stock. The red sun came up just as he was
+going down the hill toward the cattle corral, and he had the
+pleasant feeling of being at home, on his father's land. Why was
+it so gratifying to be able to say "our hill," and "our creek
+down yonder"? to feel the crunch of this particular dried mud
+under his boots?
+
+When he went into the barn to see the horses, the first creatures
+to meet his eye were the two big mules that had run away with
+him, standing in the stalls next the door. It flashed upon Claude
+that these muscular quadrupeds were the actual authors of his
+fate. If they had not bolted with him and thrown him into the
+wire fence that morning, Enid would not have felt sorry for him
+and come to see him every day, and his life might have turned out
+differently. Perhaps if older people were a little more honest,
+and a boy were not taught to idealize in women the very qualities
+which can make him utterly unhappy--But there, he had got away
+from those regrets. But wasn't it just like him to be dragged
+into matrimony by a pair of mules!
+
+He laughed as he looked at them. "You old devils, you're strong
+enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come.
+You're chock full of meanness!"
+
+One of the animals wagged an ear and cleared his throat
+threateningly. Mules are capable of strong affections, but they
+hate snobs, are the enemies of caste, and this pair had always
+seemed to detect in Claude what his father used to call his
+"false pride." When he was a young lad they had been a source of
+humiliation to him, braying and balking in public places, trying
+to show off at the lumber yard or in front of the post office.
+
+At the end manger Claude found old Molly, the grey mare with the
+stiff leg, who had grown a second hoof on her off forefoot, an
+achievement not many horses could boast of. He was sure she
+recognized him; she nosed his hand and arm and turned back her
+upper lip, showing her worn, yellow teeth.
+
+"Mustn't do that, Molly," he said as he stroked her. "A dog can
+laugh, but it makes a horse look foolish. Seems to me Dan might
+curry you about once a week!" He took a comb from its niche
+behind a joist and gave her old coat a rubbing. Her white hair
+was flecked all over with little rust-coloured dashes, like India
+ink put on with a fine brush, and her mane and tail had turned a
+greenish yellow. She must be eighteen years old, Claude reckoned,
+as he polished off her round, heavy haunches. He and Ralph used
+to ride her over to the Yoeders' when they were barefoot
+youngsters, guiding her with a rope halter, and kicking at the
+leggy colt that was always running alongside.
+
+When he entered the kitchen and asked Mahailey for warm water to
+wash his hands, she sniffed him disapprovingly.
+
+"Why, Mr. Claude, you've been curryin' that old mare, and you've
+got white hairs all over your soldier-clothes. You're jist
+covered!"
+
+If his uniform stirred feeling in people of sober judgment, over
+Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the
+time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in
+detail. Before she got past his puttees, her powers of
+observation were befogged by excitement, and her wits began to
+jump about like monkeys in a cage. She had expected his uniform
+to be blue, like those she remembered, and when he walked into
+the kitchen last night she scarcely knew what to make of him.
+After Mrs. Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn't
+wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown
+clothes didn't show the dust, and that Claude would never look
+like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother's
+spring.
+
+"Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin' you,
+ain't they? I 'spect there's an awful lot of briars over there,
+like them long blackberry vines in the fields in Virginia. Your
+madder says the soldiers git lice now, like they done in our war.
+You jist carry a little bottle of coal-oil in your pocket an' rub
+it on your head at night. It keeps the nits from hatchin'."
+
+Over the flour barrel in the corner Mahailey had tacked a Red
+Cross poster; a charcoal drawing of an old woman poking with a
+stick in a pile of plaster and twisted timbers that had once been
+her home. Claude went over to look at it while he dried his
+hands.
+
+"Where did you get your picture?"
+
+"She's over there where you're goin', Mr. Claude. There she is,
+huntin' for somethin' to cook with; no stove nor no dishes nor
+nothin'--everything all broke up. I reckon she'll be mighty glad
+to see you comin'."
+
+Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Mahailey whispered
+hastily, "Don't forgit about the coal-oil, and don't you be lousy
+if you can help it, honey." She considered lice in the same class
+with smutty jokes,--things to be whispered about.
+
+After breakfast Mr. Wheeler took Claude out to the fields, where
+Ralph was directing the harvesters. They watched the binder for a
+while, then went over to look at the haystacks and alfalfa, and
+walked along the edge of the cornfield, where they examined the
+young ears. Mr. Wheeler explained and exhibited the farm to
+Claude as if he were a stranger; the boy had a curious feeling of
+being now formally introduced to these acres on which he had
+worked every summer since he was big enough to carry water to the
+harvesters. His father told him how much land they owned, and how
+much it was worth, and that it was unencumbered except for a
+trifling mortgage he had given on one quarter when he took over
+the Colorado ranch.
+
+"When you come back," he said, "you and Ralph won't have to hunt
+around to get into business. You'll both be well fixed. Now you'd
+better go home by old man Dawson's and drop in to see Susie.
+Everybody about here was astonished when Leonard went." He walked
+with Claude to the corner where the Dawson land met his own. "By
+the way," he said as he turned back, "don't forget to go in to
+see the Yoeders sometime. Gus is pretty sore since they had him
+up in court. Ask for the old grandmother. You remember she never
+learned any English. And now they've told her it's dangerous to
+talk German, she don't talk at all and hides away from everybody.
+If I go by early in the morning, when she's out weeding the
+garden, she runs and squats down in the gooseberry bushes till
+I'm out of sight."
+
+Claude decided he would go to the Yoeders' today, and to the
+Dawsons' tomorrow. He didn't like to think there might be hard
+feeling toward him in a house where he had had so many good
+times, and where he had often found a refuge when things were
+dull at home. The Yoeder boys had a music-box long before the
+days of Victrolas, and a magic lantern, and the old grandmother
+made wonderful shadow-pictures on a sheet, and told stories about
+them. She used to turn the map of Europe upside down on the
+kitchen table and showed the children how, in this position, it
+looked like a jungfrau; and recited a long German rhyme which
+told how Spain was the maiden's head, the Pyrenees her lace ruff,
+Germany her heart and bosom, England and Italy were two arms, and
+Russia, though it looked so big, was only a hoopskirt. This rhyme
+would probably be condemned as dangerous propaganda now!
+
+As he walked on alone, Claude was thinking how this country that
+had once seemed little and dull to him, now seemed large and rich
+in variety. During the months in camp he had been wholly absorbed
+in new work and new friendships, and now his own neighbourhood
+came to him with the freshness of things that have been forgotten
+for a long while,--came together before his eyes as a harmonious
+whole. He was going away, and he would carry the whole
+countryside in his mind, meaning more to him than it ever had
+before. There was Lovely Creek, gurgling on down there, where he
+and Ernest used to sit and lament that the book of History was
+finished; that the world had come to avaricious old age and noble
+enterprise was dead for ever. But he was going away....
+
+That afternoon Claude spent with his mother. It was the first
+time she had had him to herself. Ralph wanted terribly to stay
+and hear his brother talk, but understanding how his mother felt,
+he went back to the wheat field. There was no detail of Claude's
+life in camp so trivial that Mrs. Wheeler did not want to hear
+about it. She asked about the mess, the cooks, the laundry, as
+well as about his own duties. She made him describe the bayonet
+drill and explain the operation of machine guns and automatic
+rifles.
+
+"I hardly see how we can bear the anxiety when our transports
+begin to sail," she said thoughtfully. "If they can once get you
+all over there, I am not afraid; I believe our boys are as good
+as any in the world. But with submarines reported off our own
+coast, I wonder how the Government can get our men across safely.
+The thought of transports going down with thousands of young men
+on board is something so terrible--" she put her hands quickly
+over her eyes.
+
+Claude, sitting opposite his mother, wondered what it was about
+her hands that made them so different from any others he had ever
+seen. He had always known they were different, but now he must
+look closely and see why. They were slender, and always white,
+even when the nails were stained at preserving time. Her fingers
+arched back at the joints, as if they were shrinking from
+contacts. They were restless, and when she talked often brushed
+her hair or her dress lightly. When she was excited she sometimes
+put her hand to her throat, or felt about the neck of her gown,
+as if she were searching for a forgotten brooch. They were
+sensitive hands, and yet they seemed to have nothing to do with
+sense, to be almost like the groping fingers of a spirit.
+
+"How do you boys feel about it?"
+
+Claude started. "About what, Mother? Oh, the transportation! We
+don't worry about that. It's the Government's job to get us
+across. A soldier mustn't worry about anything except what he's
+directly responsible for. If the Germans should sink a few troop
+ships, it would be unfortunate, certainly, but it wouldn't cut any
+figure in the long run. The British are perfecting an enormous
+dirigible, built to carry passengers. If our transports are sunk,
+it will only mean delay. In another year the Yankees will be
+flying over. They can't stop us."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler bent forward. "That must be boys' talk, Claude.
+Surely you don't believe such a thing could be practicable?"
+
+"Absolutely. The British are depending on their aircraft
+designers to do just that, if everything else fails. Of course,
+nobody knows yet how effective the submarines will be in our
+case."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler again shaded her eyes with her hand. "When I was
+young, back in Vermont, I used to wish that I had lived in the
+old times when the world went ahead by leaps and bounds. And now,
+I feel as if my sight couldn't bear the glory that beats upon it.
+It seems as if we would have to be born with new faculties, to
+comprehend what is going on in the air and under the sea."
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The afternoon sun was pouring in at the back windows of Mrs.
+Farmer's long, uneven parlour, making the dusky room look like a
+cavern with a fire at one end of it. The furniture was all in its
+cool, figured summer cretonnes. The glass flower vases that stood
+about on little tables caught the sunlight and twinkled like tiny
+lamps. Claude had been sitting there for a long while, and he
+knew he ought to go. Through the window at his elbow he could see
+rows of double hollyhocks, the flat leaves of the sprawling
+catalpa, and the spires of the tangled mint bed, all transparent
+in the gold-powdered light. They had talked about everything but
+the thing he had come to say. As he looked out into the garden he
+felt that he would never get it out. There was something in the
+way the mint bed burned and floated that made one a
+fatalist,--afraid to meddle. But after he was far away, he would
+regret; uncertainty would tease him like a splinter in his thumb.
+
+He rose suddenly and said without apology: "Gladys, I wish I
+could feel sure you'd never marry my brother."
+
+She did not reply, but sat in her easy chair, looking up at him
+with a strange kind of calmness.
+
+"I know all the advantages," he went on hastily, "but they
+wouldn't make it up to you. That sort of a--compromise would make
+you awfully unhappy. I know."
+
+"I don't think I shall ever marry Bayliss," Gladys spoke in her
+usual low, round voice, but her quick breathing showed he had
+touched something that hurt. "I suppose I have used him. It gives
+a school-teacher a certain prestige if people think she can marry
+the rich bachelor of the town whenever she wants to. But I am
+afraid I won't marry him,--because you are the member of the
+family I have always admired."
+
+Claude turned away to the window. "A fine lot I've been to
+admire," he muttered.
+
+"Well, it's true, anyway. It was like that when we went to High
+School, and it's kept up. Everything you do always seems exciting
+to me."
+
+Claude felt a cold perspiration on his forehead. He wished now
+that he had never come. "But that's it, Gladys. What HAVE I ever
+done, except make one blunder after another?"
+
+She came over to the window and stood beside him. "I don't know;
+perhaps it's by their blunders that one gets to know people,--by
+what they can't do. If you'd been like all the rest, you could
+have got on in their way. That was the one thing I couldn't have
+stood."
+
+Claude was frowning out into the flaming garden. He had not heard
+a word of her reply. "Why didn't you keep me from making a fool
+of myself?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"I think I tried--once. Anyhow, it's all turning out better than
+I thought. You didn't get stuck here. You've found your place.
+You're sailing away. You've just begun."
+
+"And what about you?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Oh, I shall teach in the High School!"
+
+Claude took her hands and they stood looking searchingly at each
+other in the swimming golden light that made everything
+transparent. He never knew exactly how he found his hat and made
+his way out of the house. He was only sure that Gladys did not
+accompany him to the door. He glanced back once, and saw her head
+against the bright window.
+
+She stood there, exactly where he left her, and watched the
+evening come on, not moving, scarcely breathing. She was thinking
+how often, when she came downstairs, she would see him standing
+here by the window, or moving about in the dusky room, looking at
+last as he ought to look,--like his convictions and the choice he
+had made. She would never let this house be sold for taxes now.
+She would save her salary and pay them off. She could never like
+any other room so well as this. It had always been a refuge from
+Frankfort; and now there would be this vivid, confident figure,
+an image as distinct to her as the portrait of her grandfather
+upon the wall.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Sunday was Claude's last day at home, and he took a long walk
+with Ernest and Ralph. Ernest would have preferred to lose
+Ralph, but when the boy was out of the harvest field he stuck to
+his brother like a burr. There was something about Claude's new
+clothes and new manner that fascinated him, and he went through
+one of those sudden changes of feeling that often occur in
+families. Although they had been better friends ever since
+Claude's wedding, until now Ralph had always felt a little
+ashamed of him. Why, he used to ask himself, wouldn't Claude
+"spruce up and be somebody"? Now, he was struck by the fact that
+he was somebody.
+
+On Monday morning Mrs. Wheeler wakened early, with a faintness in
+her chest. This was the day on which she must acquit herself
+well. Breakfast would be Claude's last meal at home. At eleven
+o'clock his father and Ralph would take him to Frankfort to catch
+the train. She was longer than usual in dressing. When she got
+downstairs Claude and Mahailey were already talking. He was
+shaving in the washroom, and Mahailey stood watching him, a side
+of bacon in her hand.
+
+"You tell 'em over there I'm awful sorry about them old women,
+with their dishes an' their stove all broke up."
+
+"All right. I will." Claude scraped away at his chin.
+
+She lingered. "Maybe you can help 'em mend their things, like you
+do mine fur me," she suggested hopefully.
+
+"Maybe," he murmured absently. Mrs. Wheeler opened the stair
+door, and Mahailey dodged back to the stove.
+
+After breakfast Dan went out to the fields with the harvesters.
+Ralph and Claude and Mr. Wheeler were busy with the car all
+morning.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler kept throwing her apron over her head and going down
+the hill to see what they were doing. Whether there was really
+something the matter with the engine, or whether the men merely
+made it a pretext for being together and keeping away from the
+house, she did not know. She felt that her presence was not much
+desired, and at last she went upstairs and resignedly watched
+them from the sitting-room window. Presently she heard Ralph run
+up to the third storey. When he came down with Claude's bags in
+his hands, he stuck his head in at the door and shouted
+cheerfully to his mother:
+
+"No hurry. I'm just taking them down so they'll be ready."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler ran after him, calling faintly, "Wait, Ralph! Are
+you sure he's got everything in? I didn't hear him packing."
+
+"Everything ready. He says he won't have to go upstairs again.
+He'll be along pretty soon. There's lots of time." Ralph shot
+down through the basement.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sat down in her reading chair. They wanted to keep
+her away, and it was a little selfish of them. Why couldn't they
+spend these last hours quietly in the house, instead of dashing
+in and out to frighten her? Now she could hear the hot water
+running in the kitchen; probably Mr. Wheeler had come in to wash
+his hands. She felt really too weak to get up and go to the west
+window to see if he were still down at the garage. Waiting was
+now a matter of seconds, and her breath came short enough as it
+was.
+
+She recognized a heavy, hob-nailed boot on the stairs, mounting
+quickly. When Claude entered, carrying his hat in his hand, she
+saw by his walk, his shoulders, and the way he held his head,
+that the moment had come, and that he meant to make it short. She
+rose, reaching toward him as he came up to her and caught her in
+his arms. She was smiling her little, curious intimate smile,
+with half-closed eyes.
+
+"Well, is it good-bye?" she murmured. She passed her hands over
+his shoulders, down his strong back and the close-fitting sides
+of his coat, as if she were taking the mould and measure of his
+mortal frame. Her chin came just to his breast pocket, and she
+rubbed it against the heavy cloth. Claude stood looking down at
+her without speaking a word. Suddenly his arms tightened and he
+almost crushed her.
+
+"Mother!" he whispered as he kissed her. He ran downstairs and
+out of the house without looking back.
+
+She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to
+the window; he was vaulting down the hill as fast as he could go.
+He jumped into the car beside his father. Ralph was already at
+the wheel, and Claude had scarcely touched the cushions when they
+were off. They ran down the creek and over the bridge, then up
+the long hill on the other side. As they neared the crest of the
+hill, Claude stood up in the car and looked back at the house,
+waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained her
+sight, but her tears blurred everything. The brown, upright
+figure seemed to float out of the car and across the fields, and
+before he was actually gone, she lost him. She fell back against
+the windowsill, clutching her temples with both hands, and broke
+into choking, passionate speech. "Old eyes," she cried, "why do
+you betray me? Why do you cheat me of my last sight of my
+splendid son!"
+
+
+Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises
+
+I
+
+A long train of crowded cars, the passengers all of the same sex,
+almost of the same age, all dressed and hatted alike, was slowly
+steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer
+afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs,
+shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of
+cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter
+about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and
+tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and
+shout; what is the matter now?
+
+The conductor goes through the cars, saying something about a
+freight wreck on ahead; he has orders to wait here for half an
+hour. Nobody pays any attention to him. A murmur of astonishment
+rises from one side of the train. The boys crowd over to the
+south windows. At last there is something to look at,--though
+what they see is so strangely quiet that their own exclamations
+are not very loud.
+
+Their train is lying beside an arm of the sea that reaches far
+into the green shore. At the edge of the still water stand the
+hulls of four wooden ships, in the process of building. There is
+no town, there are no smoke-stacks--very few workmen. Piles of
+lumber lie about on the grass. A gasoline engine under a
+temporary shelter is operating a long crane that reaches down
+among the piles of boards and beams, lifts a load, silently and
+deliberately swings it over to one of the skeleton vessels, and
+lowers it somewhere into the body of the motionless thing. Along
+the sides of the clean hulls a few riveters are at work; they sit
+on suspended planks, lowering and raising themselves with
+pulleys, like house painters. Only by listening very closely can
+one hear the tap of their hammers. No orders are shouted, no thud
+of heavy machinery or scream of iron drills tears the air. These
+strange boats seem to be building themselves.
+
+Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks,
+asking each other how boats could be built off in the grass like
+this. Lieutenant Claude Wheeler stretched his legs upon the
+opposite seat and sat still at his window, looking down on this
+strange scene. Shipbuilding, he had supposed, meant noise and
+forges and engines and hosts of men. This was like a dream.
+Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze of
+mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls,
+flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their wings--and those
+four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by
+the sea.
+
+Claude knew nothing of ships or shipbuilding, but these craft did
+not seem to be nailed together,--they seemed all of a piece, like
+sculpture. They reminded him of the houses not made with hands;
+they were like simple and great thoughts, like purposes forming
+slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the
+Atlantic. He knew nothing about ships, but he didn't have to; the
+shape of those hulls--their strong, inevitable lines--told their
+story, WAS their story; told the whole adventure of man with the
+sea.
+
+Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a
+country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the
+sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or
+read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden
+bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act,
+they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered
+cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!...
+
+The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old
+turkey-hen calling her brood. The soldier boys came running back
+along the embankment and leaped aboard the train. The conductor
+shouted they would be in Hoboken in time for supper.
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began
+unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of the long dock
+waiting-rooms,--which in other days had been thronged by people
+who came to welcome home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed
+to foreign shores. Claude and some of his men had tried to look
+about them; but there was little to be seen. The bow of a boat,
+painted in distracting patterns of black and white, rose at one
+end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible. Down in
+the cobble-paved street below they watched for awhile the long
+line of drays and motor trucks that bumped all night into a vast
+cavern lit by electricity, where crates and barrels and
+merchandise of all kinds were piled, marked American
+Expeditionary Forces; cases of electrical machinery from some
+factory in Ohio, parts of automobiles, gun-carriages, bath-tubs,
+hospital supplies, bales of cotton, cases of canned food, grey
+metal tanks full of chemical fluids. Claude went back to the
+waiting room, lay down and fell asleep with the glare of an
+arc-light shining full in his face.
+
+He was called at four in the morning and told where to report to
+headquarters. Captain Maxey, stationed at a desk on one of the
+landings, explained to his lieutenants that their company was to
+sail at eight o'clock on the Anchises. It was an English boat, an
+old liner pulled off the Australian trade, that could carry only
+twenty-five hundred men. The crew was English, but part of the
+stores,--the meat and fresh fruit and vegetables,--were furnished
+by the United States Government. The Captain had been over the
+boat during the night, and didn't like it very well. He had
+expected to be scheduled for one of the fine big Hamburg-American
+liners, with dining-rooms finished in rosewood, and ventilation
+plants and cooling plants, and elevators running from top to
+bottom like a New York office building. "However," he said,
+"we'll have to make the best of it. They're using everything
+that's got a bottom now."
+
+The company formed for roll-call at one end of the shed, with
+their packs and rifles. Breakfast was served to them while they
+waited. After an hour's standing on the concrete, they saw
+encouraging signs. Two gangplanks were lowered from the vessel at
+the end of the slip, and up each of them began to stream a close
+brown line of men in smart service caps. They recognized a
+company of Kansas Infantry, and began to grumble because their
+own service caps hadn't yet been given to them; they would have
+to sail in their old Stetsons. Soon they were drawn into one of
+the brown lines that went continuously up the gangways, like
+belting running over machinery. On the deck one steward directed
+the men down to the hold, and another conducted the officers to
+their cabins. Claude was shown to a four-berth state-room. One of
+his cabin mates, Lieutenant Fanning, of his own company, was
+already there, putting his slender luggage in order. The steward
+told them the officers were breakfasting in the dining saloon.
+
+By seven o'clock all the troops were aboard, and the men were
+allowed on deck. For the first time Claude saw the profile of New
+York City, rising thin and gray against an opal-coloured morning
+sky. The day had come on hot and misty. The sun, though it was
+now high, was a red ball, streaked across with purple clouds. The
+tall buildings, of which he had heard so much, looked
+unsubstantial and illusionary,--mere shadows of grey and pink and
+blue that might dissolve with the mist and fade away in it. The
+boys were disappointed. They were Western men, accustomed to the
+hard light of high altitudes, and they wanted to see the city
+clearly; they couldn't make anything of these uneven towers that
+rose dimly through the vapour. Everybody was asking questions.
+Which of those pale giants was the Singer Building? Which the
+Woolworth? What was the gold dome, dully glinting through the
+fog? Nobody knew. They agreed it was a shame they could not have
+had a day in New York before they sailed away from it, and that
+they would feel foolish in Paris when they had to admit they had
+never so much as walked up Broadway. Tugs and ferry boats and
+coal barges were moving up and down the oily river, all novel
+sights to the men. Over in the Canard and French docks they saw
+the first examples of the "camouflage" they had heard so much
+about; big vessels daubed over in crazy patterns that made the
+eyes ache, some in black and white, some in soft rainbow colours.
+
+A tug steamed up alongside and fastened. A few moments later a
+man appeared on the bridge and began to talk to the captain.
+Young Fanning, who had stuck to Claude's side, told him this was
+the pilot, and that his arrival meant they were going to start.
+They could see the shiny instruments of a band assembling in the
+bow.
+
+"Let's get on the other side, near the rail if we can," said
+Fanning. "The fellows are bunching up over here because they want
+to look at the Goddess of Liberty as we go out. They don't even
+know this boat turns around the minute she gets into the river.
+They think she's going over stern first!"
+
+It was not easy to cross the deck; every inch was covered by a
+boot. The whole superstructure was coated with brown uniforms;
+they clung to the boat davits, the winches, the railings and
+ventilators, like bees in a swarm. Just as the vessel was backing
+out, a breeze sprang up and cleared the air. Blue sky broke
+overhead, and the pale silhouette of buildings on the long island
+grew sharp and hard. Windows flashed flame-coloured in their grey
+sides, the gold and bronze tops of towers began to gleam where
+the sunlight struggled through. The transport was sliding down
+toward the point, and to the left the eye caught the silver
+cobweb of bridges, seen confusingly against each other.
+
+"There she is!" "Hello, old girl!" "Good-bye, sweetheart!"
+
+The swarm surged to starboard. They shouted and gesticulated to
+the image they were all looking for,--so much nearer than they
+had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist
+streaming up like smoke behind. For nearly every one of those
+twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude, it was their first
+glimpse of the Bartholdi statue. Though she was such a definite
+image in their minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of
+sea and sky, with the shipping of the world coming and going at
+her feet, and the moving cloud masses behind her. Post-card
+pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large
+gesture, or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish
+elements. "France gave her to us," they kept saying, as they
+saluted her. Before Claude had got over his first thrill, the
+Kansas band in the bow began playing "Over There." Two thousand
+voices took it up, booming out over the water the gay,
+indomitable resolution of that jaunty air.
+
+A Staten Island ferry-boat passed close under the bow of the
+transport. The passengers were office-going people, on their way
+to work, and when they looked up and saw these hundreds of faces,
+all young, all bronzed and grinning, they began to shout and wave
+their handkerchiefs. One of the passengers was an old clergyman,
+a famous speaker in his day, now retired, who went over to the
+City every morning to write editorials for a church paper. He
+closed the book he was reading, stood by the rail, and taking off
+his hat began solemnly to quote from a poet who in his time was
+still popular. "Sail on," he quavered,
+
+  "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State,
+  Humanity, with all its fears,
+  With all its hopes of future years,
+  Is hanging breathless on thy fate."
+
+As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still
+watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms
+and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American
+boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was
+ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a
+sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase... and on their
+departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.
+
+
+
+III
+
+All the first morning Tod Fanning showed Claude over the
+boat,--not that Fanning had ever been on anything bigger than a
+Lake Michigan steamer, but he knew a good deal about machinery,
+and did not hesitate to ask the deck stewards to explain anything
+he didn't know. The stewards, indeed all the crew, struck the
+boys as an unusually good-natured and obliging set of men.
+
+The fourth occupant of number 96, Claude's cabin, had not turned
+up by noon, nor had any of his belongings, so the three who had
+settled their few effects there began to hope they would have the
+place to themselves. It would be crowded enough, at that. The
+third bunk was assigned to an officer from the Kansas regiment,
+Lieutenant Bird, a Virginian, who had been working in his uncle's
+bank in Topeka when he enlisted. He and Claude sat together at
+mess. When they were at lunch, the Virginian said in his very
+gentle voice:
+
+"Lieutenant, I wish you'd explain Lieutenant Fanning to me. He
+seems very immature. He's been telling me about a submarine
+destroyer he's invented, but it looks to me like foolishness."
+
+Claude laughed. "Don't try to understand Fanning. Just let him
+sink in, and you'll come to like him. I used to wonder how he
+ever got a commission. You never can tell what crazy thing he'll
+do."
+
+Fanning had, for instance, brought on board a pair of white
+flannel pants, his first and only tailor-made trousers, because
+he had a premonition that the boat would make a port and that he
+would be asked to a garden party! He had a way of using big words
+in the wrong place, not because he tried to show off, but because
+all words sounded alike to him. In the first days of their
+acquaintance in camp he told Claude that this was a failing he
+couldn't help, and that it was called "anaesthesia." Sometimes
+this failing was confusing; when Fanning sententiously declared
+that he would like to be on hand when the Crown Prince settled
+his little account with Plato, Claude was perplexed until
+subsequent witticisms revealed that the boy meant Pluto.
+
+At three o'clock there was a band concert on deck. Claude fell
+into talk with the bandmaster, and was delighted to find that he
+came from Hillport, Kansas, a town where Claude had once been
+with his father to buy cattle, and that all his fourteen men came
+from Hillport. They were the town band, had enlisted in a body,
+had gone into training together, and had never been separated.
+One was a printer who helped to get out the Hillport Argus every
+week, another clerked in a grocery store, another was the son of
+a German watch repairer, one was still in High School, one worked
+in an automobile livery. After supper Claude found them all
+together, very much interested in their first evening at sea, and
+arguing as to whether the sunset on the water was as fine as
+those they saw every night in Hillport. They hung together in a
+quiet, determined way, and if you began to talk to one, you soon
+found that all the others were there.
+
+When Claude and Fanning and Lieutenant Bird were undressing in
+their narrow quarters that night, the fourth berth was still
+unclaimed. They were in their bunks and almost asleep, when the
+missing man came in and unceremoniously turned on the light. They
+were astonished to see that he wore the uniform of the Royal
+Flying Corps and carried a cane. He seemed very young, but the
+three who peeped out at him felt that he must be a person of
+consequence. He took off his coat with the spread wings on the
+collar, wound his watch, and brushed his teeth with an air of
+special personal importance. Soon after he had turned out the
+light and climbed into the berth over Lieutenant Bird, a heavy
+smell of rum spread in the close air.
+
+Fanning, who slept under Claude, kicked the sagging mattress
+above him and stuck his head out. "Hullo, Wheeler! What have you
+got up there?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing smells pretty good to me. I'll have some with anybody
+that asks me."
+
+No response from any quarter. Bird, the Virginian, murmured,
+"Don't make a row," and they went to sleep.
+
+In the morning, when the bath steward came, he edged his way into
+the narrow cabin and poked his head into the berth over Bird's.
+"I'm sorry, sir, I've made careful search for your luggage, and
+it's not to be found, sir."
+
+"I tell you it must be found," fumed a petulant voice overhead.
+"I brought it over from the St. Regis myself in a taxi. I saw it
+standing on the pier with the officers' luggage,--a black cabin
+trunk with V.M. lettered on both ends. Get after it."
+
+The steward smiled discreetly. He probably knew that the aviator
+had come on board in a state which precluded any very accurate
+observation on his part. "Very well, sir. Is there anything I can
+get you for the present?"
+
+"You can take this shirt out and have it laundered and bring it
+back to me tonight. I've no linen in my bag."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Claude and Fanning got on deck as quickly as possible and found
+scores of their comrades already there, pointing to dark smudges
+of smoke along the clear horizon. They knew that these vessels
+had come from unknown ports, some of them far away, steaming
+thither under orders known only to their commanders. They would
+all arrive within a few hours of each other at a given spot on
+the surface of the ocean. There they would fall into place,
+flanked by their destroyers, and would proceed in orderly
+formation, without changing their relative positions. Their
+escort would not leave them until they were joined by gunboats
+and destroyers off whatever coast they were bound for,--what that
+coast was, not even their own officers knew as yet.
+
+Later in the morning this meeting was actually accomplished.
+There were ten troop ships, some of them very large boats, and
+six destroyers. The men stood about the whole morning, gazing
+spellbound at their sister transports, trying to find out their
+names, guessing at their capacity. Tanned as they already were,
+their lips and noses began to blister under the fiery sunlight.
+After long months of intensive training, the sudden drop into an
+idle, soothing existence was grateful to them. Though their pasts
+were neither long or varied, most of them, like Claude Wheeler,
+felt a sense of relief at being rid of all they had ever been
+before and facing something absolutely new. Said Tod Fanning, as
+he lounged against the rail, "Whoever likes it can run for a
+train every morning, and grind his days out in a Westinghouse
+works; but not for me any more!"
+
+The Virginian joined them. "That Englishman ain't got out of bed
+yet. I reckon he's been liquouring up pretty steady. The place
+smells like a bar. The room steward was just coming out, and he
+winked at me. He was slipping something in his pocket, looked
+like a banknote."
+
+Claude was curious, and went down to the cabin. As he entered,
+the air-man, lying half-dressed in his upper berth, raised
+himself on one elbow and looked down at him. His blue eyes were
+contracted and hard, his curly hair disordered, but his cheeks
+were as pink as a girl's, and the little yellow humming-bird
+moustache on his upper lip was twisted sharp.
+
+"You're missing fine weather," said Claude affably.
+
+"Oh, there'll be a great deal of weather before we get over, and
+damned little of anything else!" He drew a bottle from under his
+pillow. "Have a nip?"
+
+"I don't mind if I do," Claude put out his hand.
+
+The other laughed and sank back on his pillow, drawling lazily,
+"Brave boy! Go ahead; drink to the Kaiser."
+
+"Why to him in particular?"
+
+"It's not particular. Drink to Hindenburg, or the High Command,
+or anything else that got you out of the cornfield. That's where
+they did get you, didn't they?"
+
+"Well, it's a good guess, anyhow. Where did they get you?"
+
+"Crystal Lake, Iowa. I think that was the place." He yawned and
+folded his hands over his stomach.
+
+"Why, we thought you were an Englishman."
+
+"Not quite. I've served in His Majesty's army two years, though."
+
+"Have you been flying in France?"
+
+"Yes. I've been back and forth all the time, England and France.
+Now I've wasted two months at Fort Worth. Instructor. That's not
+my line. I may have been sent over as a reprimand. You can't tell
+about my Colonel, though; may have been his way of getting me out
+of danger."
+
+Claude glanced up at him, shocked at such an idea.
+
+The young man in the berth smiled with listless compassion. "Oh,
+I don't mean Bosch planes! There are dangers and dangers. You'll
+find you got bloody little information about this war, where they
+trained you. They don't communicate any details of importance.
+Going?"
+
+Claude hadn't intended to, but at this suggestion he pulled back
+the door.
+
+"One moment," called the aviator. "Can't you keep that
+long-legged ass who bunks under you quiet?"
+
+"Fanning? He's a good kid. What's the matter with him?"
+
+"His general ignorance and his insufferably familiar tone,"
+snapped the other as he turned over.
+
+Claude found Fanning and the Virginian playing checkers, and told
+them that the mysterious air-man was a fellow countryman. Both
+seemed disappointed.
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Lieutenant Bird.
+
+"He can't put on airs with me, after that," Fanning declared.
+"Crystal Lake! Why it's no town at all!"
+
+All the same, Claude wanted to find out how a youth from Crystal
+Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Already,
+from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as
+men he was determined to know better. Taking them altogether the
+men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the
+sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days
+forgotten. Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown
+uniforms. Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were
+rather noble looking fellows. In so many of the faces there was a
+look of fine candour, an expression of cheerful expectancy and
+confident goodwill.
+
+There was on board a solitary Marine, with the stripes of Border
+service on his coat. He had been sick in the Navy Hospital in
+Brooklyn when his regiment sailed, and was now going over to join
+it. He was a young fellow, rather pale from his recent illness,
+but he was exactly Claude's idea of what a soldier ought to look
+like. His eye followed the Marine about all day.
+
+The young man's name was Albert Usher, and he came from a little
+town up in the Wind River mountains, in Wyoming, where he had
+worked in a logging camp. He told Claude these facts when they
+found themselves standing side by side that evening, watching the
+broad purple sun go down into a violet coloured sea.
+
+It was the hour when the farmers at home drive their teams in
+after the day's work. Claude was thinking how his mother would be
+standing at the west window every evening now, watching the sun
+go down and following him in her mind. When the young Marine came
+up and joined him, he confessed to a pang of homesickness.
+
+"That's a kind of sickness I don't have to wrastle with," said
+Albert Usher. "I was left an orphan on a lonesome ranch, when I
+was nine, and I've looked out for myself ever since."
+
+Claude glanced sidewise at the boy's handsome head, that came up
+from his neck with clean, strong lines, and thought he had done a
+pretty good job for himself. He could not have said exactly what
+it was he liked about young Usher's face, but it seemed to him a
+face that had gone through things,--that had been trained down
+like his body, and had developed a definite character. What
+Claude thought due to a manly, adventurous life, was really due
+to well-shaped bones; Usher's face was more "modelled" than most
+of the healthy countenances about him.
+
+When questioned, the Marine went on to say that though he had no
+home of his own, he had always happened to fall on his feet,
+among kind people. He could go back to any house in Pinedale or
+Du Bois and be welcomed like a son.
+
+"I suppose there are kind women everywhere," he said, "but in
+that respect Wyoming's got the rest of the world beat. I never
+felt the lack of a home. Now the U. S. Marines are my family.
+Wherever they are, I'm at home."
+
+"Were you at Vera Cruz?" Claude asked.
+
+"I guess! We thought that was quite a little party at the time,
+but I suppose it will seem small potatoes when we get over there.
+I'm figuring on seeing some first-rate scrapping. How long have
+you been in the army?"
+
+"Year ago last April. I've had hard luck about getting over. They
+kept me jumping about to train men."
+
+"Then yours is all to come. Are you a college graduate?"
+
+"No. I went away to school, but I didn't finish."
+
+Usher frowned at the gilded path on the water where the sun lay
+half submerged, like a big, watchful eye, closing. "I always
+wanted to go to college, but I never managed it. A man in Laramie
+offered to stake me to a course in the University there, but I
+was too restless. I guess I was ashamed of my handwriting." He
+paused as if he had run against some old regret. A moment later
+he said suddenly, "Can you parlez-vous?"
+
+"No. I know a few words, but I can't put them together."
+
+"Same here. I expect to pick up some. I pinched quite a little
+Spanish down on the Border."
+
+By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the
+yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still
+sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue
+stone,--not a twinkle on its immobile surface. Across its dusky
+smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin's
+egg.
+
+"Do you like the water?" Usher asked, in the tone of a polite
+host. "When I first shipped on a cruiser I was crazy about it. I
+still am. But, you know, I like them old bald mountains back in
+Wyoming, too. There's waterfalls you can see twenty miles off
+from the plains; they look like white sheets or something,
+hanging up there on the cliffs. And down in the pine woods, in
+the cold streams, there's trout as long as my fore-arm."
+
+That evening Claude was on deck, almost alone; there was a
+concert down in the ward room. To the west heavy clouds had come
+up, moving so low that they flapped over the water like a black
+washing hanging on the line.
+
+The music sounded well from below. Four Swedish boys from the
+Scandinavian settlement at Lindsborg, Kansas, were singing "Long,
+Long Ago." Claude listened from a sheltered spot in the stern.
+What were they, and what was he, doing here on the Atlantic? Two
+years ago he had seemed a fellow for whom life was over; driven
+into the ground like a post, or like those Chinese criminals who
+are planted upright in the earth, with only their heads left out
+for birds to peck at and insects to sting. All his comrades had
+been tucked away in prairie towns, with their little jobs and
+their little plans. Yet here they were, attended by unknown ships
+called in from the four quarters of the earth. How had they come
+to be worth the watchfulness and devotion of so many men and
+machines, this extravagant consumption of fuel and energy? Taken
+one by one, they were ordinary fellows like himself. Yet here
+they were. And in this massing and movement of men there was
+nothing mean or common; he was sure of that. It was, from first
+to last, unforeseen, almost incredible. Four years ago, when the
+French were holding the Marne, the wisest men in the world had
+not conceived of this as possible; they had reckoned with every
+fortuity but this. "Out of these stones can my Father raise up
+seed unto Abraham."
+
+Downstairs the men began singing "Annie Laurie." Where were those
+summer evenings when he used to sit dumb by the windmill,
+wondering what to do with his life?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The morning of the third day; Claude and the Virginian and the
+Marine were up very early, standing in the bow, watching the
+Anchises mount the fresh blowing hills of water, her prow, as it
+rose and fell, always a dull triangle against the glitter. Their
+escorts looked like dream ships, soft and iridescent as shell in
+the pearl-coloured tints of the morning. Only the dark smudges of
+smoke told that they were mechanical realities with stokers and
+engines.
+
+While the three stood there, a sergeant brought Claude word that
+two of his men would have to report at sick-call. Corporal
+Tannhauser had had such an attack of nose-bleed during the night
+that the sergeant thought he might die before they got it
+stopped. Tannhauser was up now, and in the breakfast line, but
+the sergeant was sure he ought not to be. This Fritz Tannhauser
+was the tallest man in the company, a German-American boy who,
+when asked his name, usually said that his name was Dennis and
+that he was of Irish descent. Even this morning he tried to joke,
+and pointing to his big red face told Claude he thought he had
+measles. "Only they ain't German measles, Lieutenant," he
+insisted.
+
+Medical inspection took a long while that morning. There seemed
+to be an outbreak of sickness on board. When Claude brought his
+two men up to the Doctor, he told them to go below and get into
+bed. As they left he turned to Claude.
+
+"Give them hot tea, and pile army blankets on them. Make them
+sweat if you can." Claude remarked that the hold wasn't a very
+cheerful place for sick men.
+
+"I know that, Lieutenant, but there are a number of sick men this
+morning, and the only other physician on board is the sickest of
+the lot. There's the ship's doctor, of course, but he's only
+responsible for the crew, and so far he doesn't seem interested.
+I've got to overhaul the hospital and the medical stores this
+morning."
+
+"Is there an epidemic of some sort?"
+
+"Well, I hope not. But I'll have plenty to do today, so I count
+on you to look after those two." The doctor was a New Englander
+who had joined them at Hoboken. He was a brisk, trim man, with
+piercing eyes, clean-cut features, and grey hair just the colour
+of his pale face. Claude felt at once that he knew his business,
+and he went below to carry out instructions as well as he could.
+
+When he came up from the hold, he saw the aviator--whose name, he
+had learned, was Victor Morse--smoking by the rail. This
+cabin-mate still piqued his curiosity.
+
+"First time you've been up, isn't it?"
+
+The aviator was looking at the distant smoke plumes over the
+quivering, bright water. "Time enough. I wish I knew where we are
+heading for. It will be awfully awkward for me if we make a
+French port."
+
+"I thought you said you were to report in France."
+
+"I am. But I want to report in London first." He continued to
+gaze off at the painted ships. Claude noticed that in standing he
+held his chin very high. His eyes, now that he was quite sober,
+were brilliantly young and daring; they seemed scornful of things
+about him. He held himself conspicuously apart, as if he were not
+among his own kind.
+
+Claude had seen a captured crane, tied by its leg to a hencoop,
+behave exactly like that among Mahailey's chickens; hold its
+wings to its sides, and move its head about quickly and glare.
+
+"I suppose you have friends in London?" he asked.
+
+"Rather!" the aviator replied with feeling.
+
+"Do you like it better than Paris?"
+
+"I shouldn't imagine anything was much better than London. I've
+not been in Paris; always went home when I was on leave. They
+work us pretty hard. In the infantry and artillery our men get
+only a fortnight off in twelve months. I understand the Americans
+have leased the Riviera,--recuperate at Nice and Monte Carlo. The
+only Cook's tour we had was Gallipoli," he added grimly.
+
+Victor had gone a good way toward acquiring an English accent,
+the boys thought. At least he said 'necess'ry' and 'dysent'ry'
+and called his suspenders 'braces'. He offered Claude a
+cigarette, remarking that his cigars were in his lost trunk.
+
+"Take one of mine. My brother sent me two boxes just before we
+sailed. I'll put a box in your bunk next time I go down. They're
+good ones."
+
+The young man turned and looked him over with surprise. "I say,
+that's very decent of you! Yes, thank you, I will."
+
+Claude had tried yesterday, when he lent Victor some shirts, to
+make him talk about his aerial adventures, but upon that subject
+he was as close as a clam. He admitted that the long red scar on
+his upper arm had been drilled by a sharpshooter from a German
+Fokker, but added hurriedly that it was of no consequence, as he
+had made a good landing. Now, on the strength of the cigars,
+Claude thought he would probe a little further. He asked whether
+there was anything in the lost trunk that couldn't be replaced,
+anything "valuable."
+
+"There's one thing that's positively invaluable; a Zeiss lens, in
+perfect condition. I've got several good photographic outfits
+from time to time, but the lenses are always cracked by
+heat,--the things usually come down on fire. This one I got out
+of a plane I brought down up at Bar-le-Duc, and there's not a
+scratch on it; simply a miracle."
+
+"You get all the loot when you bring down a machine, do you?"
+Claude asked encouragingly.
+
+"Of course. I've a good collection; altimeters and compasses and
+glasses. This lens I always carry with me, because I'm afraid to
+leave it anywhere."
+
+"I suppose it makes a fellow feel pretty fine to bring down one
+of those German planes."
+
+"Sometimes. I brought down one too many, though; it was very
+unpleasant." Victor paused, frowning. But Claude's open,
+credulous face was too much for his reserve. "I brought down a
+woman once. She was a plucky devil, flew a scouting machine and
+had bothered us a bit, going over our lines. Naturally, we didn't
+know it was a woman until she came down. She was crushed
+underneath things. She lived a few hours and dictated a letter to
+her people. I went out and dropped it inside their lines. It was
+nasty business. I was quite knocked out. I got a fortnight's
+leave in London, though. Wheeler," he broke out suddenly, "I wish
+I knew we were going there now!"
+
+"I'd like it well enough if we were."
+
+Victor shrugged. "I should hope so!" He turned his chin in
+Claude's direction. "See here, if you like, I'll show you London!
+It's a promise. Americans never see it, you know. They sit in a
+Y. hut and write to their Pollyannas, or they go round hunting for
+the Tower. I'll show you a city that's alive; that is, unless
+you've a preference for museums."
+
+His listener laughed. "No, I want to see life, as they say."
+
+"Umph! I'd like to set you down in some places I can think of.
+Very well, I invite you to dine with me at the Savoy, the first
+night we're in London. The curtain will rise on this world for
+you. Nobody admitted who isn't in evening dress. The jewels will
+dazzle you. Actresses, duchesses, all the handsomest women in
+Europe."
+
+"But I thought London was dark and gloomy since the war."
+
+Victor smiled and teased his small straw-coloured moustache with
+his thumb and middle finger. "There are a few bright spots left,
+thank you!" He began to explain to a novice what life at the
+front was really like. Nobody who had seen service talked about
+the war, or thought about it; it was merely a condition under
+which they lived. Men talked about the particular regiment they
+were jealous of, or the favoured division that was put in for all
+the show fighting. Everybody thought about his own game, his
+personal life that he managed to keep going in spite of
+discipline; his next leave, how to get champagne without paying
+for it, dodging the guard, getting into scrapes with women and
+getting out again. "Are you quick with your French?" he asked.
+
+Claude grinned. "Not especially."
+
+"You'd better brush up on it if you want to do anything with
+French girls. I hear your M.P.'s are very strict. You must be
+able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your
+date before the guard gets onto you."
+
+"I suppose French girls haven't any scruples?" Claude remarked
+carelessly.
+
+Victor shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I haven't found that girls
+have many, anywhere. When we Canadians were training in England,
+we all had our week-end wives. I believe the girls in Crystal
+Lake used to be more or less fussy,--but that's long ago and far
+away. You won't have any difficulty."
+
+When Victor was in the middle of a tale of amorous adventure, a
+little different from any Claude had ever heard, Tod Fanning
+joined them. The aviator did not acknowledge the presence of a
+new listener, but when he had finished his story, walked away
+with his special swagger, his eyes fixed upon the distance.
+
+Fanning looked after him with disgust. "Do you believe him? I
+don't think he's any such heart-smasher. I like his nerve,
+calling you `Leftenant'! When he speaks to me he'll have to say
+Lootenant, or I'll spoil his beauty."
+
+That day the men remembered long afterward, for it was the end of
+the fine weather, and of those first long, carefree days at sea.
+In the afternoon Claude and the young Marine, the Virginian and
+Fanning, sat together in the sun watching the water scoop itself
+out in hollows and pile itself up in blue, rolling hills. Usher
+was telling his companions a long story about the landing of the
+Marines at Vera Cruz.
+
+"It's a great old town," he concluded. "One thing there I'll
+never forget. Some of the natives took a few of us out to the old
+prison that stands on a rock in the sea. We put in the whole day
+there, and it wasn't any tourist show, believe me! We went down
+into dungeons underneath the water where they used to keep State
+prisoners, kept them buried alive for years. We saw all the old
+instruments of torture; rusty iron cages where a man couldn't lie
+down or stand up, but had to sit bent over till he grew crooked.
+It made you feel queer when you came up, to think how people had
+been left to rot away down there, when there was so much sun and
+water outside. Seems like something used to be the matter with
+the world." He said no more, but Claude thought from his serious
+look that he believed he and his countrymen who were pouring
+overseas would help to change all that.
+
+
+
+V
+
+That night the Virginian, who berthed under Victor Morse, had an
+alarming attack of nose-bleed, and by morning he was so weak that
+he had to be carried to the hospital. The Doctor said they might
+as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on
+board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type.* Everybody was
+a little frightened. Some of the officers shut themselves up in
+the smoking-room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all
+day, as if they could keep contagion out.
+
+* The actual outbreak of influenza on transports carrying United
+States troops is here anticipated by several months.
+
+
+Lieutenant Bird died late in the afternoon and was buried at
+sunrise the next day, sewed up in a tarpaulin, with an eighteen
+pound shell at his feet. The morning broke brilliantly clear and
+bitter cold. The sea was rolling blue walls of water, and the
+boat was raked by a wind as sharp as ice. Excepting those who
+were sick, the boys turned out to a man. It was the first burial
+at sea they had ever witnessed, and they couldn't help finding it
+interesting. The Chaplain read the burial service while they
+stood with uncovered heads. The Kansas band played a solemn
+march, the Swedish quartette sang a hymn. Many a man turned his
+face away when that brown sack was lowered into the cold, leaping
+indigo ridges that seemed so destitute of anything friendly to
+human kind. In a moment it was done, and they steamed on without
+him.
+
+The glittering walls of water kept rolling in, indigo, purple,
+more brilliant than on the days of mild weather. The blinding
+sunlight did not temper the cold, which cut the face and made the
+lungs ache. Landsmen began to have that miserable sense of being
+where they were never meant to be. The boys lay in heaps on the
+deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close. Everybody
+was seasick. Fanning went to bed with his clothes on, so sick he
+couldn't take off his boots. Claude lay in the crowded stern, too
+cold, too faint to move. The sun poured over them like flame,
+without any comfort in it. The strong, curling, foam-crested
+waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their
+colour was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed
+denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the
+edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man
+should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces.
+
+The whole ocean seemed suddenly to have come to life, the waves
+had a malignant, graceful, muscular energy, were animated by a
+kind of mocking cruelty. Only a few hours ago a gentle boy had
+been thrown into that freezing water and forgotten. Yes, already
+forgotten; every one had his own miseries to think about.
+
+Late in the afternoon the wind fell, and there was a sinister
+sunset. Across the red west a small, ragged black cloud
+hurried,--then another, and another. They came up out of the
+sea,--wild, witchlike shapes that travelled fast and met in the
+west as if summoned for an evil conclave. They hung there against
+the afterglow, distinct black shapes, drawing together, devising
+something. The few men who were left on deck felt that no good
+could come out of a sky like that. They wished they were at home,
+in France, anywhere but here.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Doctor Trueman asked Claude to help him at sick
+call. "I've got a bunch of sergeants taking temperatures, but
+it's too much for one man to oversee. I don't want to ask
+anything of those dude officers who sit in there playing poker
+all the time. Either they've got no conscience, or they're not
+awake to the gravity of the situation."
+
+The Doctor stood on deck in his raincoat, his foot on the rail to
+keep his equilibrium, writing on his knee as the long string of
+men came up to him. There were more than seventy in the line that
+morning, and some of them looked as if they ought to be in a
+drier place. Rain beat down on the sea like lead bullets. The old
+Anchises floundered from one grey ridge to another, quite alone.
+Fog cut off the cheering sight of the sister ships. The doctor
+had to leave his post from time to time, when seasickness got the
+better of his will. Claude, at his elbow, was noting down names
+and temperatures. In the middle of his work he told the sergeants
+to manage without him for a few minutes. Down near the end of the
+line he had seen one of his own men misconducting himself,
+snivelling and crying like a baby,--a fine husky boy of eighteen
+who had never given any trouble. Claude made a dash for him and
+clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"If you can't stop that, Bert Fuller, get where you won't be
+seen. I don't want all these English stewards standing around to
+watch an American soldier cry. I never heard of such a thing!"
+
+"I can't help it, Lieutenant," the boy blubbered. "I've kept it
+back just as long as I can. I can't hold in any longer!"
+
+"What's the matter with you? Come over here and sit down on this
+box and tell me."
+
+Private Fuller willingly let himself be led, and dropped on the
+box. "I'm so sick, Lieutenant!"
+
+"I'll see how sick you are." Claude stuck a thermometer into his
+mouth, and while he waited, sent the deck steward to bring a cup
+of tea. "Just as I thought, Fuller. You've not half a degree of
+fever. You're scared, and that's all. Now drink this tea. I
+expect you didn't eat any breakfast."
+
+"No, sir. I can't eat the awful stuff on this boat."
+
+"It is pretty bad. Where are you from?"
+
+"I'm from P-P-Pleasantville, up on the P-P-Platte," the boy
+gulped, and his tears began to flow afresh.
+
+"Well, now, what would they think of you, back there? I suppose
+they got the band out and made a fuss over you when you went
+away, and thought they were sending off a fine soldier. And I've
+always thought you'd be a first rate soldier. I guess we'll forget
+about this. You feel better already, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, sir. This tastes awful good. I've been so sick to my
+stomach, and last night I got pains in my chest. All my crowd is
+sick, and you took big Tannhauser, I mean Corporal, away to the
+hospital. It looks like we're all going to die out here."
+
+"I know it's a little gloomy. But don't you shame me before these
+English stewards."
+
+"I won't do it again, sir," he promised.
+
+When the medical inspection was over, Claude took the Doctor down
+to see Fanning, who had been coughing and wheezing all night and
+hadn't got out of his berth. The examination was short. The
+Doctor knew what was the matter before he put the stethoscope on
+him. "It's pneumonia, both lungs," he said when they came out
+into the corridor. "I have one case in the hospital that will die
+before morning."
+
+"What can you do for him, Doctor?"
+
+"You see how I'm fixed; close onto two hundred men sick, and one
+doctor. The medical supplies are wholly inadequate. There's not
+castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside. I'm
+using my own drugs, but they won't last through an epidemic like
+this. I can't do much for Lieutenant Fanning. You can, though, if
+you'll give him the time. You can take better care of him right
+here than he could get in the hospital. We haven't an empty bed
+there."
+
+Claude found Victor Morse and told him he had better get a berth
+in one of the other staterooms. When Victor left with his
+belongings, Fanning stared after him. "Is he going?"
+
+"Yes. It's too crowded in here, if you've got to stay in bed."
+
+"Glad of it. His stories are too raw for me. I'm no sissy, but
+that fellow's a regular Don Quixote."
+
+Claude laughed. "You mustn't talk. It makes you cough."
+
+"Where's the Virginian?"
+
+"Who, Bird?" Claude asked in astonishment,--Fanning had stood
+beside him at Bird's funeral. "Oh, he's gone, too. You sleep if
+you can."
+
+After dinner Doctor Trueman came in and showed Claude how to give
+his patient an alcohol bath. "It's simply a question of whether
+you can keep up his strength. Don't try any of this greasy food
+they serve here. Give him a raw egg beaten up in the juice of an
+orange every two hours, night and day. Waken him out of his sleep
+when it's time, don't miss a single two-hour period. I'll write
+an order to your table steward, and you can beat the eggs up here
+in your cabin. Now I must go to the hospital. It's wonderful what
+those band boys are doing there. I begin to take some pride in
+the place. That big German has been asking for you. He's in a
+very bad way."
+
+As there were no nurses on board, the Kansas band had taken over
+the hospital. They had been trained for stretcher and first aid
+work, and when they realized what was happening on the Anchises,
+the bandmaster came to the Doctor and offered the services of his
+men. He chose nurses and orderlies, divided them into night and
+day shifts.
+
+When Claude went to see his Corporal, big Tannhauser did not
+recognize him. He was quite out of his head and was conversing
+with his own family in the language of his early childhood. The
+Kansas boys had singled him out for special attention. The mere
+fact that he kept talking in a tongue forbidden on the surface of
+the seas, made him seem more friendless and alone than the
+others.
+
+From the hospital Claude went down into the hold where
+half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and
+musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of
+innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept
+clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid
+with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were
+working in the stench and dirt, helping the stewards. Claude
+stayed to lend a hand until it was time to give Fanning his
+nourishment. He began to see that the wrist watch, which he had
+hitherto despised as effeminate and had carried in his pocket,
+might be a very useful article. After he had made Fanning swallow
+his egg, he piled all the available blankets on him and opened
+the port to give the cabin an airing. While the fresh wind blew
+in, he sat down on the edge of his berth and tried to collect his
+wits. What had become of those first days of golden weather,
+leisure and good-comradeship? The band concerts, the Lindsborg
+Quartette, the first excitement and novelty of being at sea: all
+that had gone by like a dream.
+
+That night when the Doctor came in to see Fanning, he threw his
+stethoscope on the bed and said wearily, "It's a wonder that
+instrument doesn't take root in my ears and grow there." He sat
+down and sucked his thermometer for a few minutes, then held it
+out for inspection. Claude looked at it and told him he ought to
+go to bed.
+
+"Then who's to be up and around? No bed for me, tonight. But I
+will have a hot bath by and by."
+
+Claude asked why the ship's doctor didn't do anything and added
+that he must be as little as he looked.
+
+"Chessup? No, he's not half bad when you get to know him. He's
+given me a lot of help about preparing medicines, and it's a
+great assistance to talk the cases over with him. He'll do
+anything for me except directly handle the patients. He doesn't
+want to exceed his authority. It seems the English marine is very
+particular about such things. He's a Canadian, and he graduated
+first in his class at Edinburgh. I gather he was frozen out in
+private practice. You see, his appearance is against him. It's an
+awful handicap to look like a kid and be as shy as he is."
+
+The Doctor rose, shored up his shoulders and took his bag.
+"You're looking fine yourself, Lieutenant," he remarked.
+
+"Parents both living? Were they quite young when you were born?
+Well, then their parents were, probably. I'm a crank about that.
+Yes, I'll get my bath pretty soon, and I will lie down for an
+hour or two. With those splendid band boys running the hospital,
+I get a little lee-way."
+
+Claude wondered how the Doctor kept going. He knew he hadn't had
+more than four hours sleep out of the last forty-eight, and he
+was not a man of rugged constitution. His bath steward was, as he
+said, his comfort. Hawkins was an old fellow who had held better
+positions on better boats,--yes, in better times, too. He had
+first gone to sea as a bath steward, and now, through the
+fortunes of war, he had come back where he began,--not a good
+place for an old man. His back was bent meekly, and he shuffled
+along with broken arches. He looked after the comfort of all the
+officers, and attended the doctor like a valet; got out his clean
+linen, persuaded him to lie down and have a hot drink after his
+bath, stood on guard at his door to take messages for him in the
+short hours when he was resting. Hawkins had lost two sons in the
+war and he seemed to find a solemn consolation in being of
+service to soldiers. "Take it a bit easy now, sir. You'll 'ave it
+'ard enough over there," he used to say to one and another.
+
+At eleven o'clock one of the Kansas men came to tell Claude that
+his Corporal was going fast. Big Tannhauser's fever had left him,
+but so had everything else. He lay in a stupor. His congested
+eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish
+whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out
+at one side. From the end of the corridor Claude had heard the
+frightful sounds that came from his throat, sounds like violent
+vomiting, or the choking rattle of a man in strangulation,--and,
+indeed, he was being strangled. One of the band boys brought
+Claude a camp chair, and said kindly, "He doesn't suffer. It's
+mechanical now. He'd go easier if he hadn't so much vitality. The
+Doctor says he may have a few moments of consciousness just at
+the last, if you want to stay."
+
+"I'll go down and give my private patient his egg, and then I'll
+come back." Claude went away and returned, and sat dozing by the
+bed. After three o'clock the noise of struggle ceased; instantly
+the huge figure on the bed became again his good-natured
+corporal. The mouth closed, the glassy jellies were once more
+seeing, intelligent human eyes. The face lost its swollen,
+brutish look and was again the face of a friend. It was almost
+unbelievable that anything so far gone could come back. He looked
+up wistfully at his Lieutenant as if to ask him something. His
+eyes filled with tears, and he turned his head away a little.
+
+"Mein' arme Mutter!" he whispered distinctly.
+
+A few moments later he died in perfect dignity, not struggling
+under torture, but consciously, it seemed to Claude,--like a
+brave boy giving back what was not his to keep.
+
+Claude returned to his cabin, roused Fanning once more, and then
+threw himself upon his tipping bunk. The boat seemed to wallow
+and sprawl in the waves, as he had seen animals do on the farm
+when they gave birth to young. How helpless the old vessel was
+out here in the pounding seas, and how much misery she carried!
+He lay looking up at the rusty water pipes and unpainted
+joinings. This liner was in truth the "Old Anchises"; even the
+carpenters who made her over for the service had not thought her
+worth the trouble, and had done their worst by her. The new
+partitions were hung to the joists by a few nails.
+
+Big Tannhauser had been one of those who were most anxious to
+sail. He used to grin and say, "France is the only climate that's
+healthy for a man with a name like mine." He had waved his
+good-bye to the image in the New York harbour with the rest,
+believed in her like the rest. He only wanted to serve. It seemed
+hard.
+
+When Tannhauser first came to camp he was confused all the time,
+and couldn't remember instructions. Claude had once stepped him
+out in front of the line and reprimanded him for not knowing his
+right side from his left. When he looked into the case, he found
+that the fellow was not eating anything, that he was ill from
+homesickness. He was one of those farmer boys who are afraid of
+town. The giant baby of a long family, he had never slept away
+from home a night in his life before he enlisted.
+
+Corporal Tannhauser, along with four others, was buried at
+sunrise. No band this time; the chaplain was ill, so one of the
+young captains read the service. Claude stood by watching until
+the sailors shot one sack, longer by half a foot than the other
+four, into a lead-coloured chasm in the sea. There was not even a
+splash. After breakfast one of the Kansas orderlies called him
+into a little cabin where they had prepared the dead men for
+burial. The Army regulations minutely defined what was to be done
+with a deceased soldier's effects. His uniform, shoes, blankets,
+arms, personal baggage, were all disposed of according to
+instructions. But in each case there was a residue; the dead
+man's toothbrushes, his razors, and the photographs he carried
+upon his person. There they were in five pathetic little heaps;
+what should be done with them?
+
+Claude took up the photographs that had belonged to his corporal;
+one was a fat, foolish-looking girl in a white dress that was too
+tight for her, and a floppy hat, a little flag pinned on her
+plump bosom. The other was an old woman, seated, her hands
+crossed in her lap. Her thin hair was drawn back tight from a
+hard, angular face--unmistakably an Old-World face--and her eyes
+squinted at the camera. She looked honest and stubborn and
+unconvinced, he thought, as if she did not in the least
+understand.
+
+"I'll take these," he said. "And the others--just pitch them
+over, don't you think?"
+
+
+
+VII
+
+B Company's first officer, Captain Maxey, was so seasick
+throughout the voyage that he was of no help to his men in the
+epidemic. It must have been a frightful blow to his pride, for
+nobody was ever more anxious to do an officer's whole duty.
+
+Claude had known Harris Maxey slightly in Lincoln; had met him at
+the Erlichs' and afterward kept up a campus acquaintance with
+him. He hadn't liked Maxey then, and he didn't like him now, but
+he thought him a good officer. Maxey's family were poor folk from
+Mississippi, who had settled in Nemaha county, and he was very
+ambitious, not only to get on in the world, but, as he said, to
+"be somebody." His life at the University was a feverish pursuit
+of social advantages and useful acquaintances. His feeling for
+the "right people" amounted to veneration. After his graduation,
+Maxey served on the Mexican Border. He was a tireless drill
+master, and threw himself into his duties with all the energy of
+which his frail physique was capable. He was slight and
+fair-skinned; a rigid jaw threw his lower teeth out beyond the
+upper ones and made his face look stiff. His whole manner, tense
+and nervous, was the expression of a passionate desire to excel.
+
+Claude seemed to himself to be leading a double life these days.
+When he was working over Fanning, or was down in the hold helping
+to take care of the sick soldiers, he had no time to think,--did
+mechanically the next thing that came to hand. But when he had an
+hour to himself on deck, the tingling sense of ever-widening
+freedom flashed up in him again. The weather was a continual
+adventure; he had never known any like it before. The fog, and
+rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean
+were like something he had imagined long ago--memories of old sea
+stories read in childhood, perhaps--and they kindled a warm spot
+in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where
+childhood had left off. The ugly hiatus between had closed up.
+Years of his life were blotted out in the fog. This fog which had
+been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving
+through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving
+one a chance to correct one's ideas about life and to plan the
+future. The past was physically shut off; that was his illusion.
+He had already travelled a great many more miles than were told
+off by the ship's log. When Bandmaster Fred Max asked him to play
+chess, he had to stop a moment and think why it was that game had
+such disagreeable associations for him. Enid's pale, deceptive
+face seldom rose before him unless some such accident brought it
+up. If he happened to come upon a group of boys talking about
+their sweethearts and war-brides, he listened a moment and then
+moved away with the happy feeling that he was the least married
+man on the boat.
+
+There was plenty of deck room, now that so many men were ill
+either from seasickness or the epidemic, and sometimes he and
+Albert Usher had the stormy side of the boat almost to
+themselves. The Marine was the best sort of companion for these
+gloomy days; steady, quiet, self-reliant. And he, too, was always
+looking forward. As for Victor Morse, Claude was growing
+positively fond of him. Victor had tea in a special corner of the
+officers' smoking-room every afternoon--he would have perished
+without it--and the steward always produced some special
+garnishes of toast and jam or sweet biscuit for him. Claude
+usually managed to join him at that hour.
+
+On the day of Tannhauser's funeral he went into the smoking-room
+at four. Victor beckoned the steward and told him to bring a
+couple of hot whiskeys with the tea. "You're very wet, you know,
+Wheeler, and you really should. There," he said as he put down
+his glass, "don't you feel better with a drink?"
+
+"Very much. I think I'll have another. It's agreeable to be warm
+inside."
+
+"Two more, steward, and bring me some fresh lemon." The occupants
+of the room were either reading or talking in low tones. One of
+the Swedish boys was playing softly on the old piano. Victor
+began to pour the tea. He had a neat way of doing it, and today
+he was especially solicitous. "This Scotch mist gets into one's
+bones, doesn't it? I thought you were looking rather seedy when I
+passed you on deck."
+
+"I was up with Tannhauser last night. Didn't get more than an
+hour's sleep," Claude murmured, yawning.
+
+"Yes, I heard you lost your big corporal. I'm sorry. I've had bad
+news, too. It's out now that we're to make a French port. That
+dashes all my plans. However, c'est la guerre!" He pushed back
+his cup with a shrug. "Take a turn outside?"
+
+Claude had often wondered why Victor liked him, since he was so
+little Victor's kind. "If it isn't a secret," he said, "I'd like
+to know how you ever got into the British army, anyway."
+
+As they walked up and down in the rain, Victor told his story
+briefly. When he had finished High School, he had gone into his
+father's bank at Crystal Lake as bookkeeper. After banking hours
+he skated, played tennis, or worked in the strawberry-bed,
+according to the season. He bought two pairs of white pants every
+summer and ordered his shirts from Chicago and thought he was a
+swell, he said. He got himself engaged to the preacher's
+daughter. Two years ago, the summer he was twenty, his father
+wanted him to see Niagara Falls; so he wrote a modest check,
+warned his son against saloons--Victor had never been inside
+one--against expensive hotels and women who came up to ask the
+time without an introduction, and sent him off, telling him it
+wasn't necessary to fee porters or waiters. At Niagara Falls,
+Victor fell in with some young Canadian officers who opened his
+eyes to a great many things. He went over to Toronto with them.
+Enlistment was going strong, and he saw an avenue of escape from
+the bank and the strawberry bed. The air force seemed the most
+brilliant and attractive branch of the service. They accepted
+him, and here he was.
+
+"You'll never go home again," Claude said with conviction. "I
+don't see you settling down in any little Iowa town."
+
+"In the air service," said Victor carelessly, "we don't concern
+ourselves about the future. It's not worth while." He took out a
+dull gold cigarette case which Claude had noticed before.
+
+"Let me see that a minute, will you? I've often admired it. A
+present from somebody you like, isn't it?"
+
+A twitch of feeling, something quite genuine, passed over the
+air-man's boyish face, and his rather small red mouth compressed
+sharply. "Yes, a woman I want you to meet. Here," twitching his
+chin over his high collar, "I'll write Maisie's address on my
+card: `Introducing Lieutenant Wheeler, A.E.F.' That's all you'll
+need. If you should get to London before I do, don't hesitate.
+Call on her at once. Present this card, and she'll receive you."
+
+Claude thanked him and put the card in his pocketbook, while
+Victor lit a cigarette. "I haven't forgotten that you're dining
+with us at the Savoy, if we happen in London together. If I'm
+there, you can always find me. Her address is mine. It will
+really be a great thing for you to meet a woman like Maisie.
+She'll be nice to you, because you're my friend." He went on to
+say that she had done everything in the world for him; had left
+her husband and given up her friends on his account. She now had
+a studio flat in Chelsea, where she simply waited his coming and
+dreaded his going. It was an awful life for her. She entertained
+other officers, of course, old acquaintances; but it was all
+camouflage. He was the man.
+
+Victor went so far as to produce her picture, and Claude gazed
+without knowing what to say at a large moon-shaped face with
+heavy-lidded, weary eyes,--the neck clasped by a pearl collar,
+the shoulders bare to the matronly swell of the bosom. There was
+not a line or wrinkle in that smooth expanse of flesh, but from
+the heavy mouth and chin, from the very shape of the face, it was
+easy to see that she was quite old enough to be Victor's mother.
+Across the photograph was written in a large splashy hand, 'A
+mon aigle!' Had Victor been delicate enough to leave him in any
+doubt, Claude would have preferred to believe that his relations
+with this lady were wholly of a filial nature.
+
+"Women like her simply don't exist in your part of the world,"
+the aviator murmured, as he snapped the photograph case. "She's a
+linguist and musician and all that. With her, every-day living is
+a fine art. Life, as she says, is what one makes it. In itself,
+it's nothing. Where you came from it's nothing--a sleeping
+sickness."
+
+Claude laughed. "I don't know that I agree with you, but I like
+to hear you talk."
+
+"Well; in that part of France that's all shot to pieces, you'll
+find more life going on in the cellars than in your home town,
+wherever that is. I'd rather be a stevedore in the London docks
+than a banker-king in one of your prairie States. In London, if
+you're lucky enough to have a shilling, you can get something for
+it."
+
+"Yes, things are pretty tame at home," the other admitted.
+
+"Tame? My God, it's death in life! What's left of men if you take
+all the fire out of them? They're afraid of everything. I know
+them; Sunday-school sneaks, prowling around those little towns
+after dark!" Victor abruptly dismissed the subject. "By the way,
+you're pals with the doctor, aren't you? I'm needing some
+medicine that is somewhere in my lost trunk. Would you mind
+asking him if he can put up this prescription? I don't want to go
+to him myself. All these medicos blab, and he might report me.
+I've been lucky dodging medical inspections. You see, I don't
+want to get held up anywhere. Tell him it's not for you, of
+course."
+
+When Claude presented the piece of blue paper to Doctor Trueman,
+he smiled contemptuously. "I see; this has been filled by a
+London chemist. No, we have nothing of this sort." He handed it
+back. "Those things are only palliatives. If your friend wants
+that, he needs treatment,--and he knows where he can get it."
+
+Claude returned the slip of paper to Victor as they left the
+dining-room after supper, telling him he hadn't been able to get
+any.
+
+"Sorry," said Victor, flushing haughtily. "Thank you so much!"
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Tod Fanning held out better than many of the stronger men; his
+vitality surprised the doctor. The death list was steadily
+growing; and the worst of it was that patients died who were not
+very sick. Vigorous, clean-blooded young fellows of nineteen and
+twenty turned over and died because they had lost their courage,
+because other people were dying,--because death was in the air.
+The corridors of the vessel had the smell of death about them.
+Doctor Trueman said it was always so in an epidemic; patients
+died who, had they been isolated cases, would have recovered.
+
+"Do you know, Wheeler," the doctor remarked one day when they
+came up from the hospital together to get a breath of air, "I
+sometimes wonder whether all these inoculations they've been
+having, against typhoid and smallpox and whatnot, haven't lowered
+their vitality. I'll go off my head if I keep losing men! What
+would you give to be out of it all, and safe back on the farm?"
+Hearing no reply, he turned his head, peered over his raincoat
+collar, and saw a startled, resisting look in the young man's
+blue eyes, followed by a quick flush.
+
+"You don't want to be back on the farm, do you! Not a little bit!
+Well, well; that's what it is to be young!" He shook his head
+with a smile which might have been commiseration, might have been
+envy, and went back to his duties.
+
+Claude stayed where he was, drawing the wet grey air into his
+lungs and feeling vexed and reprimanded. It was quite true, he
+realized; the doctor had caught him. He was enjoying himself all
+the while and didn't want to be safe anywhere. He was sorry about
+Tannhauser and the others, but he was not sorry for himself. The
+discomforts and misfortunes of this voyage had not spoiled it for
+him. He grumbled, of course, because others did. But life had
+never seemed so tempting as it did here and now. He could come up
+from heavy work in the hospital, or from poor Fanning and his
+everlasting eggs, and forget all that in ten minutes. Something
+inside him, as elastic as the grey ridges over which they were
+tipping, kept bounding up and saying: "I am all here. I've left
+everything behind me. I am going over."
+
+Only on that one day, the cold day of the Virginian's funeral,
+when he was seasick, had he been really miserable. He must be
+heartless, certainly, not to be overwhelmed by the sufferings of
+his own men, his own friends--but he wasn't. He had them on his
+mind and did all he could for them, but it seemed to him just now
+that he took a sort of satisfaction in that, too, and was
+somewhat vain of his usefulness to Doctor Trueman. A nice
+attitude! He awoke every morning with that sense of freedom and
+going forward, as if the world were growing bigger each day and
+he were growing with it. Other fellows were sick and dying, and
+that was terrible,--but he and the boat went on, and always on.
+
+Something was released that had been struggling for a long while,
+he told himself. He had been due in France since the first battle
+of the Marne; he had followed false leads and lost precious time
+and seen misery enough, but he was on the right road at last, and
+nothing could stop him. If he hadn't been so green, so bashful,
+so afraid of showing what he felt, and so stupid at finding his
+way about, he would have enlisted in Canada, like Victor, or run
+away to France and joined the Foreign Legion. All that seemed
+perfectly possible now. Why hadn't he?
+
+Well, that was not "the Wheelers' way." The Wheelers were
+terribly afraid of poking themselves in where they weren't
+wanted, of pushing their way into a crowd where they didn't
+belong. And they were even more afraid of doing anything that
+might look affected or "romantic." They couldn't let themselves
+adopt a conspicuous, much less a picturesque course of action,
+unless it was all in the day's work. Well, History had
+condescended to such as he; this whole brilliant adventure had
+become the day's work. He had got into it after all, along with
+Victor and the Marine and other fellows who had more imagination
+and self-confidence in the first place. Three years ago he used
+to sit moping by the windmill because he didn't see how a
+Nebraska farmer boy had any "call," or, indeed, any way, to throw
+himself into the struggle in France. He used enviously to read
+about Alan Seeger and those fortunate American boys who had a
+right to fight for a civilization they knew.
+
+But the miracle had happened; a miracle so wide in its amplitude
+that the Wheelers,--all the Wheelers and the roughnecks and the
+low-brows were caught up in it. Yes, it was the rough-necks' own
+miracle, all this; it was their golden chance. He was in on it,
+and nothing could hinder or discourage him unless he were put
+over the side himself--which was only a way of joking, for that
+was a possibility he never seriously considered. The feeling of
+purpose, of fateful purpose, was strong in his breast.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"Look at this, Doctor!" Claude caught Dr. Trueman on his way from
+breakfast and handed him a written notice, signed D. T. Micks,
+Chief Steward. It stated that no more eggs or oranges could be
+furnished to patients, as the supply was exhausted.
+
+The doctor squinted at the paper. "I'm afraid that's your
+patient's death warrant. You'll never be able to keep him going
+on anything else. Why don't you go and talk it over with Chessup?
+He's a resourceful fellow. I'll join you there in a few minutes."
+
+Claude had often been to Dr. Chessup's cabin since the epidemic
+broke out,-rather liked to wait there when he went for medicines
+or advice. It was a comfortable, personal sort of place with
+cheerful chintz hangings. The walls were lined with books, held
+in place by sliding wooden slats, padlocked at the ends. There
+were a great many scientific works in German and English; the
+rest were French novels in paper covers. This morning he found
+Chessup weighing out white powders at his desk. In the rack over
+his bunk was the book with which he had read himself to sleep
+last night; the title, "Un Crime d'Amour," lettered in black on
+yellow, caught Claude's eye. The doctor put on his coat and
+pointed his visitor to the jointed chair in which patients were
+sometimes examined. Claude explained his predicament.
+
+The ship's doctor was a strange fellow to come from Canada, the
+land of big men and rough. He looked like a schoolboy, with small
+hands and feet and a pink complexion. On his left cheekbone was a
+large brown mole, covered with silky hair, and for some reason
+that seemed to make his face effeminate. It was easy to see why
+he had not been successful in private practice. He was like
+somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so
+cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish
+appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating
+wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly
+suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had
+fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with constant
+exposure to human personalities.
+
+"Have you tried him on malted milk?" he asked, when Claude had
+told him how Farming's nourishment was threatened.
+
+"Dr. Trueman hasn't a bottle left. How long do you figure we'll
+be at sea?"
+
+"Four days; possibly five."
+
+"Then Lieutenant Wheeler will lose his pal," said Dr. Trueman,
+who had just come in.
+
+Chessup stood for a moment frowning and pulling nervously at the
+brass buttons on his coat. He slid the bolt on his door and
+turning to his colleague said resolutely: "I can give you some
+information, if you won't implicate me. You can do as you like,
+but keep my name out of it. For several hours last night cases of
+eggs and boxes of oranges were being carried into the Chief
+Steward's cabin by a flunky of his from the galley. Whatever port
+we make, he can get a shilling each for the fresh eggs, and
+perhaps sixpence for the oranges. They are your property, of
+course, furnished by your government; but this is his customary
+perquisite. I've been on this boat six years, and it's always
+been so. About a week before we make port, the choicest of the
+remaining stores are taken to his cabin, and he disposes of them
+after we dock. I can't say just how he manages it, but he does.
+The skipper may know of this custom, and there may be some reason
+why he permits it. It's not my business to see anything. The
+Chief Steward is a powerful man on an English vessel. If he has
+anything against me, sooner or later he can lose my berth for me.
+There you have the facts."
+
+"Have I your permission to go to the Chief Steward?" Dr. Trueman
+asked.
+
+"Certainly not. But you can go without my knowledge. He's an ugly
+man to cross, and he can make it uncomfortable for you and your
+patients."
+
+"Well, we'll say no more about it. I appreciate your telling me,
+and I will see that you don't get mixed up in this. Will you go
+down with me to look at that new meningitis case?"
+
+Claude waited impatiently in his stateroom for the doctor's
+return. He didn't see why the Chief Steward shouldn't be exposed
+and dealt with like any other grafter. He had hated the man ever
+since he heard him berating the old bath steward one morning.
+Hawkins had made no attempt to defend himself, but stood like a
+dog that has been terribly beaten, trembling all over, saying
+"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," while his chief gave him a cold cursing in
+a low, snarling voice. Claude had never heard a man or even an
+animal addressed with such contempt. The Steward had a cruel
+face,--white as cheese, with limp, moist hair combed back from a
+high forehead,--the peculiarly oily hair that seems to grow only
+on the heads of stewards and waiters. His eyes were exactly the
+shape of almonds, but the lids were so swollen that the dull
+pupil was visible only through a narrow slit. A long, pale
+moustache hung like a fringe over his loose lips.
+
+When Dr. Trueman came back from the hospital, he declared he was
+now ready to call on Mr. Micks. "He's a nasty looking customer,
+but he can't do anything to me."
+
+They went to the Chief Steward's cabin and knocked.
+
+"What's wanted?" called a threatening voice.
+
+The doctor made a grimace to his companion and walked in. The
+Steward was sitting at a big desk, covered with account books. He
+turned in his chair. "I beg your pardon," he said coldly, "I do
+not see any one here. I will be--"
+
+The doctor held up his hand quickly. "That's all right, Steward.
+I'm sorry to intrude, but I've something I must say to you in
+private. I'll not detain you long." If he had hesitated for a
+moment, Claude believed the Steward would have thrown him out,
+but he went on rapidly. "This is Lieutenant Wheeler, Mr. Micks.
+His fellow officer lies very ill with pneumonia in stateroom 96.
+Lieutenant Wheeler has kept him alive by special nursing. He is
+not able to retain anything in his stomach but eggs and orange
+juice. If he has these, we may be able to keep up his strength
+till the fever breaks, and carry him to a hospital in France. If
+we can't get them for him, he will be dead within twenty-four
+hours. That's the situation."
+
+The steward rose and turned out the drop-light on his desk. "Have
+you received notice that there are no more eggs and oranges on
+board? Then I am afraid there is nothing I can do for you. I did
+not provision this ship."
+
+"No. I understand that. I believe the United States Government
+provided the fruit and eggs and meat. And I positively know that
+the articles I need for my patient are not exhausted. Without
+going into the matter further, I warn you that I'm not going to
+let a United States officer die when the means of saving him are
+procurable. I'll go to the skipper, I'll call a meeting of the
+army officers on board. I'll go any length to save this man."
+
+"That is your own affair, but you will not interfere with me in
+the discharge of my duties. Will you leave my cabin?"
+
+"In a moment, Steward. I know that last night a number of cases
+of eggs and oranges were carried into this room. They are here
+now, and they belong to the A.E.F. If you will agree to provision
+my man, what I know won't go any further. But if you refuse, I'll
+get this matter investigated. I won't stop till I do."
+
+The Steward sat down, and took up a pen. His large, soft hand
+looked cheesy, like his face. "What is the number of the cabin?"
+he asked indifferently.
+
+"Ninety-six."
+
+"Exactly what do you require?"
+
+"One dozen eggs and one dozen oranges every twenty-four hours, to
+be delivered at any time convenient to you."
+
+"I will see what I can do."
+
+The Steward did not look up from his writing pad, and his
+visitors left as abruptly as they had come.
+
+At about four o'clock every morning, before even the bath
+stewards were on duty, there was a scratching at Claude's door,
+and a covered basket was left there by a messenger who was
+unwashed, half-naked, with a sacking apron tied round his middle
+and his hairy chest splashed with flour. He never spoke, had only
+one eye and an inflamed socket. Claude learned that he was a
+half-witted brother of the Chief Steward, a potato peeler and
+dish-washer in the galley.
+
+Four day after their interview with Mr. Micks, when they were at
+last nearing the end of the voyage, Doctor Trueman detained
+Claude after medical inspection to tell him that the Chief
+Steward had come down with the epidemic. "He sent for me last
+night and asked me to take his case,--won't have anything to do
+with Chessup. I had to get Chessup's permission. He seemed very
+glad to hand the case over to me."
+
+"Is he very bad?"
+
+"He hasn't a look-in, and he knows it. Complications; chronic
+Bright's disease. It seems he has nine children. I'll try to get
+him into a hospital when we make port, but he'll only live a few
+days at most. I wonder who'll get the shillings for all the eggs
+and oranges he hoarded away. Claude, my boy," the doctor spoke
+with sudden energy, "if I ever set foot on land again, I'm going
+to forget this voyage like a bad dream. When I'm in normal
+health, I'm a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the
+wicked get worse than they deserve."
+
+A day came at last when Claude was wakened from sleep by a sense
+of stillness. He sprang up with a dazed fear that some one had
+died; but Fanning lay in his berth, breathing quietly.
+
+Something caught his eye through the porthole,--a great grey
+shoulder of land standing up in the pink light of dawn, powerful
+and strangely still after the distressing instability of the sea.
+Pale trees and long, low fortifications... close grey
+buildings with red roofs... little sailboats bounding seaward...
+up on the cliff a gloomy fortress.
+
+He had always thought of his destination as a country shattered
+and desolated,--"bleeding France"; but he had never seen anything
+that looked so strong, so self-sufficient, so fixed from the
+first foundation, as the coast that rose before him. It was like
+a pillar of eternity. The ocean lay submissive at its feet, and
+over it was the great meekness of early morning.
+
+This grey wall, unshaken, mighty, was the end of the long
+preparation, as it was the end of the sea. It was the reason for
+everything that had happened in his life for the last fifteen
+months. It was the reason why Tannhauser and the gentle
+Virginian, and so many others who had set out with him, were
+never to have any life at all, or even a soldier's death. They
+were merely waste in a great enterprise, thrown overboard like
+rotten ropes. For them this kind release,--trees and a still
+shore and quiet water,--was never, never to be. How long would
+their bodies toss, he wondered, in that inhuman kingdom of
+darkness and unrest?
+
+He was startled by a weak voice from behind.
+
+"Claude, are we over?"
+
+"Yes, Fanning. We're over."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On"
+
+I
+
+At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little
+shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about.
+Truck drivers and boys on bell less bicycles shouted at him
+indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane
+tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him.
+His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help
+of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken
+Fanning to the base hospital, and seen him into the arms of a big
+orderly from Texas. He came away from the hospital with no idea
+where he was going--except that he wanted to get to the heart of
+the city. It seemed, however, to have no heart; only long, stony
+arteries, full of heat and noise. He was still standing there,
+under his plane tree, when a group of uncertain, lost-looking
+brown figures, headed by Sergeant Hicks, came weaving up the
+street; nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each
+with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with
+joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their
+way! He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.
+
+Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the
+town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless
+food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store
+up the street, where there seemed to be everything else. He had
+tried to make the old woman understand by signs.
+
+"Don't these French people eat cheese, anyhow? What's their word
+for it, Lieutenant? I'm damned if I know, and I've lost my phrase
+book. Suppose you could make her understand?"
+
+"Well, I'll try. Come along, boys."
+
+Crowding close together, the ten men entered the shop. The
+proprietress ran forward with an exclamation of despair.
+Evidently she had thought she was done with them, and was not
+pleased to see them coming back. When she paused to take breath,
+Claude took off his hat respectfully, and performed the bravest
+act of his life; uttered the first phrase-book sentence he had
+ever spoken to a French person. His men were at his back; he had
+to say something or run, there was no other course. Looking the
+old woman in the eye, he steadily articulated:
+
+"Avez-vous du fromage, Madame?" It was almost inspiration to add
+the last word, he thought; and when it worked, he was as much
+startled as if his revolver had gone off in his belt.
+
+"Du fromage?" the shop woman screamed. Calling something to her
+daughter, who was at the desk, she caught Claude by the sleeve,
+pulled him out of the shop, and ran down the street with him. She
+dragged him into a doorway darkened by a long curtain, greeted
+the proprietress, and then pushed the men after their officer, as
+if they were stubborn burros.
+
+They stood blinking in the gloom, inhaling a sour, damp, buttery,
+smear-kase smell, until their eyes penetrated the shadows and
+they saw that there was nothing but cheese and butter in the
+place. The shopkeeper was a fat woman, with black eyebrows that
+met above her nose; her sleeves were rolled up, her cotton dress
+was open over her white throat and bosom. She began at once to
+tell them that there was a restriction on milk products; every
+one must have cards; she could not sell them so much. But soon
+there was nothing left to dispute about. The boys fell upon her
+stock like wolves. The little white cheeses that lay on green
+leaves disappeared into big mouths. Before she could save it,
+Hicks had split a big round cheese through the middle and was
+carving it up like a melon. She told them they were dirty pigs
+and worse than the Boches, but she could not stop them.
+
+"What's the matter with Mother, Lieutenant? What's she fussing
+about? Ain't she here to sell goods?"
+
+Claude tried to look wiser than he was. "From what I can make
+out, there's some sort of restriction; you aren't allowed to buy
+all you want. We ought to have thought about that; this is a war
+country. I guess we've about cleaned her out."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Hicks wiping his clasp-knife. "We'll
+bring her some sugar tomorrow. One of the fellows who helped us
+unload at the docks told me you can always quiet 'em if you give
+'em sugar."
+
+They surrounded her and held out their money for her to take her
+pay. "Come on, ma'm, don't be bashful. What's the matter, ain't
+this good money?"
+
+She was distracted by the noise they made, by their bronzed faces
+with white teeth and pale eyes, crowding so close to her. Ten
+large, well-shaped hands with straight fingers, the open palms
+full of crumpled notes.... Holding the men off under the
+pretence of looking for a pencil, she made rapid calculations.
+The money that lay in their palms had no relation to these big,
+coaxing, boisterous fellows; it was a joke to them; they didn't
+know what it meant in the world. Behind them were shiploads of
+money, and behind the ships....
+
+The situation was unfair. Whether she took much or little out of
+their hands, couldn't possibly matter to the Americans, couldn't
+even dash their good humour. But there was a strain on the
+cheesewoman, and the standards of a lifetime were in jeopardy.
+Her mind mechanically fixed upon two-and-a-half; she would charge
+them two-and-a-half times the market price of the cheese. With
+this moral plank to cling to, she made change with conscientious
+accuracy and did not keep a penny too much from anybody. Telling
+them what big stupids they were, and that it was necessary to
+learn to count in this world, she urged them out of her shop. She
+liked them well enough, but she did not like to do business with
+them. If she didn't take their money, the next one would. All the
+same, fictitious values were distasteful to her, and made
+everything seem flimsy and unsafe.
+
+Standing in her doorway, she watched the brown band go ambling
+down the street; as they passed in front of the old church of St.
+Jacques, the two foremost stumbled on a sunken step that was
+scarcely above the level of the pavement. She laughed aloud. They
+looked back and waved to her. She replied with a smile that was
+both friendly and angry. She liked them, but not the legend of
+waste and prodigality that ran before them--and followed after.
+It was superfluous and disintegrating in a world of hard facts.
+An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more
+every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week!
+Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of
+France. Down below Arles, where her husband's sister had married,
+on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were
+piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had
+ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams;
+everything the world was famished for. They brought shiploads of
+useless things, too. And useless people. Shiploads of women who
+were not nurses; some said they came to dance with the officers,
+so they would not be ennuyes.
+
+All this was not war,--any more than having money thrust at you
+by grown men who could not count, was business. It was an
+invasion, like the other. The first destroyed material
+possessions, and this threatened everybody's integrity. Distaste
+of such methods, deep, recoiling distrust of them, clouded the
+cheesewoman's brow as she threw her money into the drawer and
+turned the key on it.
+
+As for the doughboys, having once stubbed their toes on the
+sunken step, they examined it with interest, and went in to
+explore the church. It was in their minds that they must not let
+a church escape, any more than they would let a Boche escape.
+Within they came upon a bunch of their shipmates, including the
+Kansas band, to whom they boasted that their Lieutenant could
+"speak French like a native."
+
+The Lieutenant himself thought he was getting on pretty well, but
+a few hours later his pride was humbled. He was sitting alone in
+a little triangular park beside another church, admiring the
+cropped locust trees and watching some old women who were doing
+their mending in the shade. A little boy in a black apron, with a
+close-shaved, bare head, came along, skipping rope. He hopped
+lightly up to Claude and said in a most persuasive and confiding
+voice,
+
+"Voulez-vous me dire l'heure, s'il vous plait, M'sieu' l'
+soldat?"
+
+Claude looked down into his admiring eyes with a feeling of
+panic. He wouldn't mind being dumb to a man, or even to a pretty
+girl, but this was terrible. His tongue went dry, and his face
+grew scarlet. The child's expectant gaze changed to a look of
+doubt, and then of fear. He had spoken before to Americans who
+didn't understand, but they had not turned red and looked angry
+like this one; this soldier must be ill, or wrong in his head.
+The boy turned and ran away.
+
+Many a serious mishap had distressed Claude less. He was
+disappointed, too. There was something friendly in the boy's face
+that he wanted... that he needed. As he rose he ground his
+heel into the gravel. "Unless I can learn to talk to the CHILDREN
+of this country," he muttered, "I'll go home!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude set off to find the Grand Hotel, where he had promised to
+dine with Victor Morse. The porter there spoke English. He called
+a red-headed boy in a dirty uniform and told him to take the
+American to vingt-quatre. The boy also spoke English. "Plenty
+money in New York, I guess! In France, no money." He made their
+way, through musty corridors and up slippery staircases, as long
+as possible, shrewdly eyeing the visitor and rubbing his thumb
+nervously against his fingers all the while.
+
+"Vingt-quatre, twen'y-four," he announced, rapping at a door with
+one hand and suggestively opening the other. Claude put something
+into it--anything to be rid of him.
+
+Victor was standing before the fireplace. "Hello, Wheeler, come
+in. Our dinner will be served up here. It's big enough, isn't it?
+I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a
+day."
+
+The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds,
+and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that
+had certainly not been washed since before the war. The heavy red
+cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust,
+the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches.
+Razor blades and "Khaki Comfort" boxes lay about on the dresser,
+and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the
+table. Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers
+arrived,--and the room remained the same, like a wood in which
+travellers camp for the night. The valet de chambre carried away
+only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes.
+It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.
+
+When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and
+put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses. Victor and his guest
+sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around
+which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly. They did not
+buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there
+in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting
+system. The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude;
+he felt as if he were being watched.
+
+"By the way," said Victor while the soup plates were being
+removed, "what do you think of this wine? It cost me thirty
+francs the bottle."
+
+"It tastes very good to me," Claude replied. "But then, it's the
+first champagne I've ever drunk."
+
+"Really?" Victor drank off another glass and sighed. "I envy you.
+I wish I had it all to do over. Life's too short, you know."
+
+"I should say you had made a good beginning. We're a long way
+from Crystal Lake."
+
+"Not far enough." His host reached across the table and filled
+Claude's empty glass. "I sometimes waken up with the feeling I'm
+back there. Or I have bad dreams, and find myself sitting on that
+damned stool in the glass cage and can't make my books balance; I
+hear the old man coughing in his private room, the way he coughs
+when he's going to refuse a loan to some poor devil who needs it.
+I've had a narrow escape, Wheeler; 'as a brand from the burning'.
+That's all the Scripture I remember."
+
+The bright red spots on Victor's cheeks, his pale forehead and
+brilliant eyes and saucy little moustaches seemed to give his
+quotation a peculiar vividness. Claude envied him. It must be
+great fun to take up a part and play it to a finish; to believe
+you were making yourself over, and to admire the kind of fellow
+you made. He, too, in a way, admired Victor,--though he couldn't
+altogether believe in him.
+
+"You'll never go back," he said, "I wouldn't worry about that."
+
+"Take it from me, there are thousands who will never go back! I'm
+not speaking of the casualties. Some of you Americans are likely
+to discover the world this trip... and it'll make the hell of
+a lot of difference! You boys never had a fair chance. There's a
+conspiracy of Church and State to keep you down. I'm going off to
+play with some girls tonight, will you come along?"
+
+Claude laughed. "I guess not."
+
+"Why not? You won't be caught, I guarantee."
+
+"I guess not." Claude spoke apologetically. "I'm going out to see
+Fanning after dinner."
+
+Victor shrugged. "That ass!" He beckoned the waiter to open
+another bottle and bring the coffee. "Well, it's your last chance
+to go nutting with me." He looked intently at Claude and lifted
+his glass. "To the future, and our next meeting!" When he put
+down his empty goblet he remarked, "I got a wire through today;
+I'm leaving tomorrow."
+
+"For London?"
+
+"For Verdun."
+
+Claude took a quick breath. Verdun... the very sound of the
+name was grim, like the hollow roll of drums. Victor was going
+there tomorrow. Here one could take a train for Verdun, or
+thereabouts, as at home one took a train for Omaha. He felt more
+"over" than he had done before, and a little crackle of
+excitement went all through him. He tried to be careless:
+
+"Then you won't get to London soon?"
+
+"God knows," Victor answered gloomily. He looked up at the
+ceiling and began to whistle softly an engaging air. "Do you know
+that? It's something Maisie often plays; 'Roses of Picardy.' You
+won't know what a woman can be till you meet her, Wheeler."
+
+"I hope I'll have that pleasure. I was wondering if you'd
+forgotten her for the moment. She doesn't object to these
+diversions?"
+
+Victor lifted his eyebrows in the old haughty way. "Women don't
+require that sort of fidelity of the air service. Our engagements
+are too uncertain."
+
+Half an hour later Victor had gone in quest of amorous adventure,
+and Claude was wandering alone in a brightly lighted street full
+of soldiers and sailors of all nations. There were black
+Senegalese, and Highlanders in kilts, and little lorry-drivers
+from Siam,--all moving slowly along between rows of cabarets and
+cinema theatres. The wide-spreading branches of the plane trees
+met overhead, shutting out the sky and roofing in the orange
+glare. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and little tables,
+at which marines and soldiers sat drinking schnapps and cognac and
+coffee. From every doorway music-machines poured out jazz tunes
+and strident Sousa marches. The noise was stupefying. Out in the
+middle of the street a band of bareheaded girls, hardy and tough
+looking; were following a string of awkward Americans, running
+into them, elbowing them, asking for treats, crying, "You dance
+me Fausse-trot, Sammie?"
+
+Claude stationed himself before a movie theatre, where the sign
+in electric lights read, "Amour, quand tu nous tiens!" and stood
+watching the people. In the stream that passed him, his eye lit
+upon two walking arm-in-arm, their hands clasped, talking eagerly
+and unconscious of the crowd,--different, he saw at once, from
+all the other strolling, affectionate couples.
+
+The man wore the American uniform; his left arm had been
+amputated at the elbow, and he carried his head awry, as if he
+had a stiff neck. His dark, lean face wore an expression of
+intense anxiety, his eyebrows twitched as if he were in constant
+pain. The girl, too, looked troubled. As they passed him, under
+the red light of the Amour sign, Claude could see that her eyes
+were full of tears. They were wide, blue eyes, innocent looking,
+and she had the prettiest face he had seen since he landed. From
+her silk shawl, and little bonnet with blue strings and a white
+frill, he thought she must be a country girl. As she listened to
+the soldier, with her mouth half-open, he saw a space between her
+two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just
+come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently
+at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she
+evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to
+emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did not
+know where to turn.
+
+Without realizing what he did, Claude followed them out of the
+crowd into a quiet street, and on into another, even more
+deserted, where the houses looked as if they had been asleep a
+long while. Here there were no street lamps, not even a light in
+the windows, but natural darkness; with the moon high overhead
+throwing sharp shadows across the white cobble paving. The narrow
+street made a bend, and he came out upon the church he and his
+comrades had entered that afternoon. It looked larger by night,
+and but for the sunken step, he might not have been sure it was
+the same. The dark neighbouring houses seemed to lean toward it,
+the moonlight shone silver-grey upon its battered front.
+
+The two walking before him ascended the steps and withdrew into
+the deep doorway, where they clung together in an embrace so long
+and still that it was like death. At last they drew shuddering
+apart. The girl sat down on the stone bench beside the door. The
+soldier threw himself upon the pavement at her feet, and rested
+his head on her knee, his one arm lying across her lap.
+
+In the shadow of the houses opposite, Claude kept watch like a
+sentinel, ready to take their part if any alarm should startle
+them. The girl bent over her soldier, stroking his head so softly
+that she might have been putting him to sleep; took his one hand
+and held it against her bosom as if to stop the pain there. Just
+behind her, on the sculptured portal, some old bishop, with a
+pointed cap and a broken crozier, stood, holding up two fingers.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The next morning when Claude arrived at the hospital to see
+Fanning, he found every one too busy to take account of him. The
+courtyard was full of ambulances, and a long line of camions
+waited outside the gate. A train-load of wounded Americans had
+come in, sent back from evacuation hospitals to await
+transportation home.
+
+As the men were carried past him, he thought they looked as if
+they had been sick a long while--looked, indeed, as if they could
+never get well. The boys who died on board the Anchises had never
+seemed as sick as these did. Their skin was yellow or purple,
+their eyes were sunken, their lips sore. Everything that belonged
+to health had left them, every attribute of youth was gone. One
+poor fellow, whose face and trunk were wrapped in cotton, never
+stopped moaning, and as he was carried up the corridor he smelled
+horribly. The Texas orderly remarked to Claude, "In the beginning
+that one only had a finger blown off; would you believe it?"
+
+These were the first wounded men Claude had seen. To shed bright
+blood, to wear the red badge of courage,--that was one thing; but
+to be reduced to this was quite another. Surely, the sooner
+these boys died, the better.
+
+The Texan, passing with his next load, asked Claude why he didn't
+go into the office and wait until the rush was over. Looking in
+through the glass door, Claude noticed a young man writing at a
+desk enclosed by a railing. Something about his figure, about the
+way he held his head, was familiar. When he lifted his left arm
+to prop open the page of his ledger, it was a stump below the
+elbow. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; the pale, sharp
+face, the beak nose, the frowning, uneasy brow. Presently, as if
+he felt a curious eye upon him, the young man paused in his rapid
+writing, wriggled his shoulders, put an iron paperweight on the
+page of his book, took a case from his pocket and shook a
+cigarette out on the table. Going up to the railing, Claude
+offered him a cigar. "No, thank you. I don't use them any more.
+They seem too heavy for me." He struck a match, moved his
+shoulders again as if they were cramped, and sat down on the edge
+of his desk.
+
+"Where do these wounded men come from?" Claude asked. "I just got
+in on the Anchises yesterday."
+
+"They come from various evacuation hospitals. I believe most of
+them are the Belleau Wood lot."
+
+"Where did you lose your arm?"
+
+"Cantigny. I was in the First Division. I'd been over since last
+September, waiting for something to happen, and then got fixed in
+my first engagement."
+
+"Can't you go home?"
+
+"Yes, I could. But I don't want to. I've got used to things over
+here. I was attached to Headquarters in Paris for awhile."
+
+Claude leaned across the rail. "We read about Cantigny at home,
+of course. We were a good deal excited; I suppose you were?"
+
+"Yes, we were nervous. We hadn't been under fire, and we'd been
+fed up on all that stuff about it's taking fifty years to build a
+fighting machine. The Hun had a strong position; we looked up
+that long hill and wondered how we were going to behave." As he
+talked the boy's eyes seemed to be moving all the time, probably
+because he could not move his head at all. After blowing out deep
+clouds of smoke until his cigarette was gone, he sat down to his
+ledger and frowned at the page in a way which said he was too
+busy to talk.
+
+Claude saw Dr. Trueman standing in the doorway, waiting for him.
+They made their morning call on Fanning, and left the hospital
+together. The Doctor turned to him as if he had something on his
+mind.
+
+"I saw you talking to that wry-necked boy. How did he seem, all
+right?"
+
+"Not exactly. That is, he seems very nervous. Do you know
+anything about him?"
+
+"Oh, yes! He's a star patient here, a psychopathic case. I had
+just been talking to one of the doctors about him, when I came
+out and saw you with him. He was shot in the neck at Cantigny,
+where he lost his arm. The wound healed, but his memory is
+affected; some nerve cut, I suppose, that connects with that part
+of his brain. This psychopath, Phillips, takes a great interest
+in him and keeps him here to observe him. He's writing a book
+about him. He says the fellow has forgotten almost everything
+about his life before he came to France. The queer thing is, it's
+his recollection of women that is most affected. He can remember
+his father, but not his mother; doesn't know if he has sisters or
+not,--can remember seeing girls about the house, but thinks they
+may have been cousins. His photographs and belongings were lost
+when he was hurt, all except a bunch of letters he had in his
+pocket. They are from a girl he's engaged to, and he declares he
+can't remember her at all; doesn't know what she looks like or
+anything about her, and can't remember getting engaged. The
+doctor has the letters. They seem to be from a nice girl in his
+own town who is very ambitious for him to make the most of
+himself. He deserted soon after he was sent to this hospital, ran
+away. He was found on a farm out in the country here, where the
+sons had been killed and the people had sort of adopted him. He'd
+quit his uniform and was wearing the clothes of one of the dead
+sons. He'd probably have got away with it, if he hadn't had that
+wry neck. Some one saw him in the fields and recognized him and
+reported him. I guess nobody cared much but this psychopathic
+doctor; he wanted to get his pet patient back. They call him 'the
+lost American' here."
+
+"He seems to be doing some sort of clerical work," Claude
+observed discreetly.
+
+"Yes, they say he's very well educated. He remembers the books he
+has read better than his own life. He can't recall what his home
+town looks like, or his home. And the women are clear wiped out,
+even the girl he was going to marry."
+
+Claude smiled. "Maybe he's fortunate in that."
+
+The Doctor turned to him affectionately, "Now Claude, don't begin
+to talk like that the minute you land in this country."
+
+Claude walked on past the church of St. Jacques. Last night
+already seemed like a dream, but it haunted him. He wished he
+could do something to help that boy; help him get away from the
+doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted
+him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether
+in what he had been lucky enough to find. All day, as Claude came
+and went, he looked among the crowds for that young face, so
+compassionate and tender.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Deeper and deeper into flowery France! That was the sentence
+Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels, as
+the long troop train went southward, on the second day after he
+and his company had left the port of debarkation. Fields of
+wheat, fields of oats, fields of rye; all the low hills and
+rolling uplands clad with harvest. And everywhere, in the grass,
+in the yellowing grain, along the road-bed, the poppies spilling
+and streaming. On the second day the boys were still calling to
+each other about the poppies; nothing else had so entirely
+surpassed their expectations. They had supposed that poppies grew
+only on battle fields, or in the brains of war correspondents.
+Nobody knew what the cornflowers were, except Willy Katz, an
+Austrian boy from the Omaha packing-houses, and he knew only an
+objectionable name for them, so he offered no information. For a
+long time they thought the red clover blossoms were wild
+flowers,--they were as big as wild roses. When they passed the
+first alfalfa field, the whole train rang with laughter; alfalfa
+was one thing, they believed, that had never been heard of
+outside their own prairie states.
+
+All the way down, Company B had been finding the old things
+instead of the new,--or, to their way of thinking, the new things
+instead of the old. The thatched roofs they had so counted upon
+seeing were few and far between. But American binders, of
+well-known makes, stood where the fields were beginning to
+ripen,--and they were being oiled and put in order, not by
+"peasants," but by wise-looking old farmers who seemed to know
+their business. Pear trees, trained like vines against the wall,
+did not astonish them half so much as the sight of the familiar
+cottonwood, growing everywhere. Claude thought he had never
+before realized how beautiful this tree could be. In verdant
+little valleys, along the clear rivers, the cottonwoods waved and
+rustled; and on the little islands, of which there were so many
+in these rivers, they stood in pointed masses, seemed to grip
+deep into the soil and to rest easy, as if they had been there
+for ever and would be there for ever more. At home, all about
+Frankfort, the farmers were cutting down their cottonwoods
+because they were "common," planting maples and ash trees to
+struggle along in their stead. Never mind; the cottonwoods were
+good enough for France, and they were good enough for him! He
+felt they were a real bond between him and this people.
+
+When B Company had first got their orders to go into a training
+camp in north central France, all the men were disappointed.
+Troops much rawer than they were being rushed to the front, so
+why fool around any longer? But now they were reconciled to the
+delay. There seemed to be a good deal of France that wasn't the
+war, and they wouldn't mind travelling about a little in a
+country like this. Was the harvest always a month later than at
+home, as it seemed to be this year? Why did the farmers have rows
+of trees growing along the edges of every field--didn't they take
+the strength out of the soil? What did the farmers mean by
+raising patches of mustard right along beside other crops? Didn't
+they know that mustard got into wheat fields and strangled the
+grain?
+
+The second night the boys were to spend in Rouen, and they would
+have the following day to look about. Everybody knew what had
+happened at Rouen--if any one didn't, his neighbours were only too
+eager to inform him! It had happened in the market-place, and the
+market-place was what they were going to find.
+
+Tomorrow, when it came, proved to be black and cold, a day of
+pouring rain. As they filed through the narrow, crowded streets,
+that harsh Norman city presented no very cheering aspect. They
+were glad, at last, to find the waterside, to go out on the
+bridge and breathe the air in the great open space over the
+river, away from the clatter of cart-wheels and the hard voices
+and crafty faces of these townspeople, who seemed rough and
+unfriendly. From the bridge they looked up at the white chalk
+hills, the tops a blur of intense green under the low,
+lead-coloured sky. They watched the fleets of broad, deep-set
+river barges, coming and going under their feet, with tilted
+smokestacks. Only a little way up that river was Paris, the place
+where every doughboy meant to go; and as they leaned on the rail
+and looked down at the slow-flowing water, each one had in his
+mind a confused picture of what it would be like. The Seine, they
+felt sure, must be very much wider there, and it was spanned by
+many bridges, all longer than the bridge over the Missouri at
+Omaha. There would be spires and golden domes past counting, all
+the buildings higher than anything in Chicago, and
+brilliant--dazzlingly brilliant, nothing grey and shabby about it
+like this old Rouen. They attributed to the city of their desire
+incalculable immensity, bewildering vastness, Babylonian hugeness
+and heaviness--the only attributes they had been taught to admire.
+
+Late in the morning Claude found himself alone before the Church
+of St. Ouen. He was hunting for the Cathedral, and this looked as
+if it might be the right place. He shook the water from his
+raincoat and entered, removing his hat at the door. The day, so
+dark without, was darker still within;... far away, a few
+scattered candles, still little points of light... just before
+him, in the grey twilight, slender white columns in long rows,
+like the stems of silver poplars.
+
+The entrance to the nave was closed by a cord, so he walked up
+the aisle on the right, treading softly, passing chapels where
+solitary women knelt in the light of a few tapers. Except for
+them, the church was empty... empty. His own breathing was
+audible in this silence. He moved with caution lest he should
+wake an echo.
+
+When he reached the choir he turned, and saw, far behind him, the
+rose window, with its purple heart. As he stood staring, hat in
+hand, as still as the stone figures in the chapels, a great bell,
+up aloft, began to strike the hour in its deep, melodious throat;
+eleven beats, measured and far apart, as rich as the colours in
+the window, then silence... only in his memory the throbbing
+of an undreamed-of quality of sound. The revelations of the glass
+and the bell had come almost simultaneously, as if one produced
+the other; and both were superlatives toward which his mind had
+always been groping,--or so it seemed to him then.
+
+In front of the choir the nave was open, with no rope to shut it
+off. Several straw chairs were huddled on a flag of the stone
+floor. After some hesitation he took one, turned it round, and
+sat down facing the window. If some one should come up to him and
+say anything, anything at all, he would rise and say, "Pardon,
+Monsieur; je ne sais pas c'est defendu." He repeated this to
+himself to be quite sure he had it ready.
+
+On the train, coming down, he had talked to the boys about the
+bad reputation Americans had acquired for slouching all over the
+place and butting in on things, and had urged them to tread
+lightly, "But Lieutenant," the kid from Pleasantville had piped
+up, "isn't this whole Expedition a butt-in? After all, it ain't
+our war." Claude laughed, but he told him he meant to make an
+example of the fellow who went to rough-housing.
+
+He was well satisfied that he hadn't his restless companions on
+his mind now. He could sit here quietly until noon, and hear the
+bell strike again. In the meantime, he must try to think: This
+was, of course, Gothic architecture; he had read more or less
+about that, and ought to be able to remember something. Gothic...
+that was a mere word; to him it suggested something very
+peaked and pointed,--sharp arches, steep roofs. It had nothing to
+do with these slim white columns that rose so straight and
+far,--or with the window, burning up there in its vault of
+gloom....
+
+While he was vainly trying to think about architecture, some
+recollection of old astronomy lessons brushed across his
+brain,--something about stars whose light travels through space
+for hundreds of years before it reaches the earth and the human
+eye. The purple and crimson and peacock-green of this window had
+been shining quite as long as that before it got to him....
+He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still...
+as if his mother were looking over his shoulder. He sat
+solemnly through the hour until twelve, his elbows on his knees,
+his conical hat swinging between them in his hand, looking up
+through the twilight with candid, thoughtful eyes.
+
+When Claude joined his company at the station, they had the laugh
+on him. They had found the Cathedral,--and a statue of Richard
+the Lion-hearted, over the spot where the lion-heart itself was
+buried; "the identical organ," fat Sergeant Hicks assured him.
+But they were all glad to leave Rouen.
+
+
+
+V
+
+B Company reached the training camp at S-- thirty-six men short:
+twenty-five they had buried on the voyage over, and eleven sick
+were left at the base hospital. The company was to be attached
+to a battalion which had already seen service, commanded by
+Lieutenant Colonel Scott. Arriving early in the morning, the
+officers reported at once to Headquarters. Captain Maxey must
+have suffered a shock when the Colonel rose from his desk to
+acknowledge his salute, then shook hands with them all around
+and asked them about their journey. The Colonel was not a very
+martial figure; short, fat, with slouching shoulders, and a
+lumpy back like a sack of potatoes. Though he wasn't much over
+forty, he was bald, and his collar would easily slip over his
+head without being unbuttoned. His little twinkling eyes and
+good-humoured face were without a particle of arrogance or
+official dignity.
+
+Years ago, when General Pershing, then a handsome young
+Lieutenant with a slender waist and yellow moustaches, was
+stationed as Commandant at the University of Nebraska, Walter
+Scott was an officer in a company of cadets the Lieutenant took
+about to military tournaments. The Pershing Rifles, they were
+called, and they won prizes wherever they went. After his
+graduation, Scott settled down to running a hardware business in
+a thriving Nebraska town, and sold gas ranges and garden hose for
+twenty years. About the time Pershing was sent to the Mexican
+border, Scott began to think there might eventually be something
+in the wind, and that he would better get into training. He went
+down to Texas with the National Guard. He had come to France with
+the First Division, and had won his promotions by solid,
+soldierly qualities.
+
+"I see you're an officer short, Captain Maxey," the Colonel
+remarked at their conference. "I think I've got a man here to
+take his place. Lieutenant Gerhardt is a New York man, came over
+in the band and got transferred to infantry. He has lately been
+given a commission for good service. He's had some experience and
+is a capable fellow." The Colonel sent his orderly out to bring
+in a young man whom he introduced to the officers as Lieutenant
+David Gerhardt.
+
+Claude had been ashamed of Tod Fanning, who was always showing
+himself a sap-head, and who would never have got a commission if
+his uncle hadn't been a Congressman. But the moment he met
+Lieutenant Gerhardt's eye, something like jealousy flamed up in
+him. He felt in a flash that he suffered by comparison with the
+new officer; that he must be on his guard and must not let
+himself be patronized.
+
+As they were leaving the Colonel's office together, Gerhardt
+asked him whether he had got his billet. Claude replied that
+after the men were in their quarters, he would look out for
+something for himself.
+
+The young man smiled. "I'm afraid you may have difficulty. The
+people about here have been overworked, keeping soldiers, and
+they are not willing as they once were. I'm with a nice old
+couple over in the village. I'm almost sure I can get you in
+there. If you'll come along, we'll speak to them, before some one
+else is put off on them."
+
+Claude didn't want to go, didn't want to accept
+favours,--nevertheless he went. They walked together along a
+dusty road that ran between half-ripe wheat fields, bordered with
+poplar trees. The wild morning-glories and Queen Anne's lace that
+grew by the road-side were still shining with dew. A fresh breeze
+stirred the bearded grain, parting it in furrows and fanning out
+streaks of crimson poppies. The new officer was not intrusive,
+certainly. He walked along, whistling softly to himself, seeming
+quite lost in the freshness of the morning, or in his own
+thoughts. There had been nothing patronizing in his manner so
+far, and Claude began to wonder why he felt ill at ease with him.
+Perhaps it was because he did not look like the rest of them.
+Though he was young, he did not look boyish. He seemed
+experienced; a finished product, rather than something on the
+way. He was handsome, and his face, like his manner and his walk,
+had something distinguished about it. A broad white forehead
+under reddish brown hair, hazel eyes with no uncertainty in their
+look, an aquiline nose, finely cut,--a sensitive, scornful mouth,
+which somehow did not detract from the kindly, though slightly
+reserved, expression of his face.
+
+Lieutenant Gerhardt must have been in this neighbourhood for some
+time; he seemed to know the people. On the road they passed
+several villagers; a rough looking girl taking a cow out to graze,
+an old man with a basket on his arm, the postman on his bicycle;
+they all spoke to Claude's companion as if they knew him well.
+
+"What are these blue flowers that grow about everywhere?" Claude
+asked suddenly, pointing to a clump with his foot.
+
+"Cornflowers," said the other. "The Germans call them
+Kaiser-blumen."
+
+They were approaching the village, which lay on the edge of a
+wood,--a wood so large one could not see the end of it; it met
+the horizon with a ridge of pines. The village was but a single
+street. On either side ran clay-coloured walls, with painted
+wooden doors here and there, and green shutters. Claude's guide
+opened one of these gates, and they walked into a little sanded
+garden; the house was built round it on three sides. Under a
+cherry tree sat a woman in a black dress, sewing, a work table
+beside her.
+
+She was fifty, perhaps, but though her hair was grey she had a
+look of youthfulness; thin cheeks, delicately flushed with pink,
+and quiet, smiling, intelligent eyes. Claude thought she looked
+like a New England woman,--like the photographs of his mother's
+cousins and schoolmates. Lieutenant Gerhardt introduced him to
+Madame Joubert. He was quite disheartened by the colloquy that
+followed. Clearly his new fellow officer spoke Madame Joubert's
+perplexing language as readily as she herself did, and he felt
+irritated and grudging as he listened. He had been hoping that,
+wherever he stayed, he could learn to talk to the people a
+little; but with this accomplished young man about, he would
+never have the courage to try. He could see that Mme. Joubert
+liked Gerhardt, liked him very much; and all this, for some
+reason, discouraged him.
+
+Gerhardt turned to Claude, speaking in a way which included
+Madame Joubert in the conversation, though she could not
+understand it: "Madame Joubert will let you come, although she
+has done her part and really doesn't have to take any one else
+in. But you will be so well off here that I'm glad she consents.
+You will have to share my room, but there are two beds. She will
+show you."
+
+Gerhardt went out of the gate and left him alone with his
+hostess. Her mind seemed to read his thoughts. When he uttered a
+word, or any sound that resembled one, she quickly and smoothly
+made a sentence of it, as if she were quite accustomed to talking
+in this way and expected only monosyllables from strangers. She
+was kind, even a little playful with him; but he felt it was all
+good manners, and that underneath she was not thinking of him at
+all. When he was alone in the tile-floored sleeping room
+upstairs, unrolling his blankets and arranging his shaving
+things, he looked out of the window and watched her where she sat
+sewing under the cherry tree. She had a very sad face, he
+thought; it wasn't grief, nothing sharp and definite like sorrow.
+It was an old, quiet, impersonal sadness,--sweet in its
+expression, like the sadness of music.
+
+As he came out of the house to start back to the barracks, he
+bowed to her and tried to say, "Au revoir, Madame. Jusq' au ce
+soir." He stopped near the kitchen door to look at a
+many-branched rose vine that ran all over the wall, full of
+cream-coloured, pink-tipped roses, just a shade stronger in
+colour than the clay wall behind them. Madame Joubert came over
+and stood beside him, looking at him and at the rosier, "Oui,
+c'est joli, n'est-ce pas?" She took the scissors that hung by a
+ribbon from her belt, cut one of the flowers and stuck it in his
+buttonhole. "Voila." She made a little flourish with her thin
+hand.
+
+Stepping into the street, he turned to shut the wooden door after
+him, and heard a soft stir in the dark tool-house at his elbow.
+From among the rakes and spades a child's frightened face was
+staring out at him. She was sitting on the ground with her lap
+full of baby kittens. He caught but a glimpse of her dull, pale
+face.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Claude awoke with such a sense of physical
+well-being as he had not had for a long time. The sun was
+shining brightly on the white plaster walls and on the red tiles
+of the floor. Green jalousies, half-drawn, shaded the upper part
+of the two windows. Through their slats, he could see the forking
+branches of an old locust tree that grew by the gate. A flock of
+pigeons flew over it, dipping and mounting with a sharp twinkle
+of silver wings. It was good to lie again in a house that was
+cared for by women. He must have felt that even in his sleep,
+for when he opened his eyes he was thinking about Mahailey and
+breakfast and summer mornings on the farm. The early stillness
+was sweet, and the feeling of dry, clean linen against his body.
+There was a smell of lavender about his warm pillow. He lay
+still for fear of waking Lieutenant Gerhardt. This was the sort
+of peace one wanted to enjoy alone. When he rose cautiously on
+his elbow and looked at the other bed, it was empty. His
+companion must have dressed and slipped out when day first broke.
+Somebody else who liked to enjoy things alone; that looked
+hopeful. But now that he had the place to himself, he decided to
+get up. While he was dressing he could see old M. Joubert down in
+the garden, watering the plants and vines, raking the sand fresh
+and smooth, clipping off dead leaves and withered flowers and
+throwing them into a wheelbarrow. These people had lost both
+their sons in the war, he had been told, and now they were taking
+care of the property for their grandchildren,--two daughters of
+the elder son. Claude saw Gerhardt come into the garden, and sit
+down at the table under the trees, where they had their dinner
+last night. He hurried down to join him. Gerhardt made room for
+him on the bench.
+
+"Do you always sleep like that? It's an accomplishment. I made
+enough noise when I dressed,--kept dropping things, but it never
+reached you."
+
+Madame Joubert came out of the kitchen in a purple flowered
+morning gown, her hair in curl-papers under a lace cap. She
+brought the coffee herself, and they sat down at the unpainted
+table without a cloth, and drank it out of big crockery bowls.
+They had fresh milk with it,--the first Claude had tasted in a
+long while, and sugar which Gerhardt produced from his pocket.
+The old cook had her coffee sitting in the kitchen door, and on
+the step, at her feet, sat the strange, pale little girl.
+
+Madame Joubert amiably addressed herself to Claude; she knew that
+Americans were accustomed to a different sort of morning repast,
+and if he wished to bring bacon from the camp, she would gladly
+cook it for him. She had even made pancakes for officers who
+stayed there before. She seemed pleased, however, to learn that
+Claude had had enough of these things for awhile. She called
+David by his first name, pronouncing it the French way, and when
+Claude said he hoped she would do as much for him, she said, Oh,
+yes, that his was a very good French name, "mais un peu, un peu...
+romanesque," at which he blushed, not quite knowing whether
+she were making fun of him or not.
+
+"It is rather so in English, isn't it?" David asked.
+
+"Well, it's a sissy name, if you mean that."
+
+"Yes, it is, a little," David admitted candidly. The day's work
+on the parade ground was hard, and Captain Maxey's men were soft,
+felt the heat,--didn't size up well with the Kansas boys who had
+been hardened by service. The Colonel wasn't pleased with B
+Company and detailed them to build new barracks and extend the
+sanitation system. Claude got out and worked with the men.
+Gerhardt followed his example, but it was easy to see that he
+had never handled lumber or tin-roofing before. A kind of rivalry
+seemed to have sprung up between him and Claude, neither of them
+knew why.
+
+Claude could see that the sergeants and corporals were a little
+uncertain about Gerhardt. His laconic speech, never embroidered
+by the picturesque slang they relished, his gravity, and his
+rare, incredulous smile, alike puzzled them. Was the new officer
+a dude? Sergeant Hicks asked of his chum, Dell Able. No, he
+wasn't a dude. Was he a swellhead? No, not at all; but he wasn't
+a good mixer. He was "an Easterner"; what more he was would
+develop later. Claude sensed something unusual about him. He
+suspected that Gerhardt knew a good many things as well as he
+knew French, and that he tried to conceal it, as people sometimes
+do when they feel they are not among their equals; this idea
+nettled him. It was Claude who seized the opportunity to be
+patronizing, when Gerhardt betrayed that he was utterly unable to
+select lumber by given measurements.
+
+The next afternoon, work on the new barracks was called off
+because of rain. Sergeant Hicks set about getting up a boxing
+match, but when he went to invite the lieutenants, they had both
+disappeared. Claude was tramping toward the village, determined
+to get into the big wood that had tempted him ever since his
+arrival.
+
+The highroad became the village street, and then, at the edge of
+the wood, became a country road again. A little farther on, where
+the shade grew denser, it split up into three wagon trails, two
+of them faint and little used. One of these Claude followed. The
+rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing
+up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in
+spongy, mossy earth. The light about him, the very air, was
+green. The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green
+moss, like mould. He was wondering whether this forest was not
+always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through
+and shattered the whole wood with gold. He had never seen
+anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green
+of the dripping beech tops. Everything woke up; rabbits ran across
+the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were
+full of whirring insects.
+
+The winding path turned again, and came out abruptly on a
+hillside, above an open glade piled with grey boulders. On the
+opposite rise of ground stood a grove of pines, with bare, red
+stems. The light, around and under them, was red like a rosy
+sunset. Nearly all the stems divided about half-way up into two
+great arms, which came together again at the top, like the
+pictures of old Grecian lyres.
+
+Down in the grassy glade, among the piles of flint boulders,
+little white birches shook out their shining leaves in the
+lightly moving air. All about the rocks were patches of purple
+heath; it ran up into the crevices between them like fire. On one
+of these bald rocks sat Lieutenant Gerhardt, hatless, in an
+attitude of fatigue or of deep dejection, his hands clasped about
+his knees, his bronze hair ruddy in the sun. After watching him
+for a few minutes, Claude descended the slope, swishing the tall
+ferns.
+
+"Will I be in the way?" he asked as he stopped at the foot of the
+rocks.
+
+"Oh, no!" said the other, moving a little and unclasping his
+hand.
+
+Claude sat down on a boulder. "Is this heather?" he asked. "I
+thought I recognized it, from 'Kidnapped.' This part of the world
+is not as new to you as it is to me."
+
+"No. I lived in Paris for several years when I was a student."
+
+"What were you studying?"
+
+"The violin."
+
+"You are a musician?" Claude looked at him wonderingly.
+
+"I was," replied the other with a disdainful smile, languidly
+stretching out his legs in the heather.
+
+"That seems too bad," Claude remarked gravely.
+
+"What does?"
+
+"Why, to take fellows with a special talent. There are enough of
+us who haven't any."
+
+Gerhardt rolled over on his back and put his hands under his
+head. "Oh, this affair is too big for exceptions; it's universal.
+If you happened to be born twenty-six years ago, you couldn't
+escape. If this war didn't kill you in one way, it would in
+another." He told Claude he had trained at Camp Dix, and had come
+over eight months ago in a regimental band, but he hated the work
+he had to do and got transferred to the infantry.
+
+When they retraced their steps, the wood was full of green
+twilight. Their relations had changed somewhat during the last
+half hour, and they strolled in confidential silence up the
+home-like street to the door of their own garden.
+
+Since the rain was over, Madame Joubert had laid the cloth on the
+plank table under the cherry tree, as on the previous evenings.
+Monsieur was bringing the chairs, and the little girl was
+carrying out a pile of heavy plates. She rested them against her
+stomach and leaned back as she walked, to balance them. She wore
+shoes, but no stockings, and her faded cotton dress switched
+about her brown legs. She was a little Belgian refugee who had
+been sent there with her mother. The mother was dead now, and the
+child would not even go to visit her grave. She could not be
+coaxed from the court-yard into the quiet street. If the
+neighbour children came into the garden on an errand, she hid
+herself. She would have no playmates but the cat; and now she had
+the kittens in the tool house.
+
+Dinner was very cheerful that evening. M. Joubert was pleased
+that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat. The
+garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook
+down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The
+mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert's sewing
+chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to snap up earthworms that
+wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the house fell over the
+dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight, and
+the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured
+roses. Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy
+smell.
+
+M. Joubert must have been ten years older than his wife. There
+was a great contentment in his manner and a pleasant sparkle in
+his eye. He liked the young officers. Gerhardt had been there
+more than two weeks, and somewhat relieved the stillness that
+had settled over the house since the second son died in hospital.
+The Jouberts had dropped out of things. They had done all they
+could do, given all they had, and now they had nothing to look
+forward to,--except the event to which all France looked forward.
+The father was talking to Gerhardt about the great sea-port the
+Americans were making of Bordeaux; he said he meant to go there
+after the war, to see it all for himself.
+
+Madame Joubert was pleased to hear that they had been walking in
+the wood. And was the heather in bloom? She wished they had
+brought her some. Next time they went, perhaps. She used to walk
+there often. Her eyes seemed to come nearer to them, Claude
+thought, when she spoke of it, and she evidently cared a great
+deal more about what was blooming in the wood than about what the
+Americans were doing on the Garonne. He wished he could talk to
+her as Gerhardt did. He admired the way she roused herself and
+tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such
+spirit and precision. It was a language that couldn't be mumbled;
+that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.
+Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken
+spirit, he thought.
+
+The little maid who served them moved about noiselessly. Her dull
+eyes never seemed to look; yet she saw when it was time to bring
+the heavy soup tureen, and when it was time to take it away.
+Madame Joubert had found that Claude liked his potatoes with his
+meat--when there was meat--and not in a course by themselves. She
+had each time to tell the little girl to go and fetch them. This
+the child did with manifest reluctance,--sullenly, as if she were
+being forced to do something wrong. She was a very strange little
+creature, altogether. As the two soldiers left the table and
+started for the camp, Claude reached down into the tool house and
+took up one of the kittens, holding it out in the light to see it
+blink its eyes. The little girl, just coming out of the kitchen,
+uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted
+down, covering her face with her hands. Madame Joubert came out
+to chide her.
+
+"What is the matter with that child?" Claude asked as they
+hurried out of the gate. "Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused
+in some way?"
+
+"Terrorized. She often screams like that at night. Haven't you
+heard her? They have to go and wake her, to stop it. She doesn't
+speak any French; only Walloon. And she can't or won't learn, so
+they can't tell what goes on in her poor little head."
+
+In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude
+marvelled at Gerhardt's spirit and endurance. The muscular strain
+of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any
+of the other officers. He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed
+only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly
+bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned
+that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a
+soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp
+entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his
+occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have
+wriggled out and didn't.
+
+
+VII
+
+On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel
+Scott's battalion was streaming along one of the dusty,
+well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind
+them. The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods,
+little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people
+came out to watch the soldiers go by.
+
+The Americans went through every village in march step, colours
+flying, the band playing, "to show that the morale was high," as
+the officers said. Claude trudged on the outside of the
+column,--now at the front of his company, now at the
+rear,--wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his
+satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.
+
+They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were
+reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and
+torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half
+concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth,
+bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the
+road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty
+barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,--with
+no purpose at all.
+
+"Begins to look like we're getting in, Lieutenant," said Sergeant
+Hicks, smiling behind his salute.
+
+Claude nodded and passed forward.
+
+"Well, we can't arrive any too soon for us, boys?" The Sergeant
+looked over his shoulder, and they grinned, their teeth flashing
+white in their red, perspiring faces. Claude didn't wonder that
+everybody along the route, even the babies, came out to see them;
+he thought they were the finest sight in the world. This was the
+first day they had worn their tin hats; Gerhardt had shown them
+how to stuff grass and leaves inside to keep their heads cool.
+When they fell into fours, and the band struck up as they
+approached a town, Bert Fuller, the boy from Pleasantville on the
+Platte, who had blubbered on the voyage over, was guide right,
+and whenever Claude passed him his face seemed to say, "You won't
+get anything on me in a hurry, Lieutenant!"
+
+They made camp early in the afternoon, on a hill covered with
+half-burned pines. Claude took Bert and Dell Able and Oscar the
+Swede, and set off to make a survey and report the terrain.
+
+Behind the hill, under the burned edge of the wood, they found an
+abandoned farmhouse and what seemed to be a clean well.
+
+It had a solid stone curb about it, and a wooden bucket hanging
+by a rusty wire. When the boys splashed the bucket about, the
+water sent up a pure, cool breath. But they were wise boys, and
+knew where dead Prussians most loved to hide. Even the straw in
+the stable they regarded with suspicion, and thought it would be
+just as well not to bed anybody there.
+
+Swinging on to the right to make their circuit, they got into
+mud; a low field where the drain ditches had been neglected and
+had overflowed. There they came upon a pitiful group of humanity,
+bemired. A woman, ill and wretched looking, sat on a fallen log
+at the end of the marsh, a baby in her lap and three children
+hanging about her. She was far gone in consumption; one had only
+to listen to her breathing and to look at her white, perspiring
+face to feel how weak she was. Draggled, mud to the knees, she
+was trying to nurse her baby, half hidden under an old black
+shawl. She didn't look like a tramp woman, but like one who had
+once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was still
+young. The children were tired and discouraged. One little boy
+wore a clumsy blue jacket, made from a French army coat. The
+other wore a battered American Stetson that came down over his
+ears. He carried, in his two arms, a pink celluloid clock. They
+all looked up and waited for the soldiers to do something.
+
+Claude approached the woman, and touching the rim of his helmet,
+began: "Bonjour, Madame. Qu'est que c'est?"
+
+She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only
+able to gasp, "'Toinette, 'Toinette!"
+
+'Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and
+seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face
+with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy,
+crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced
+than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at
+making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign
+soldiers,--spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.
+
+She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty
+farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night.
+How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been
+staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying
+to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick,
+presque morte and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard
+people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their
+own cellar,--and so could they if they once got there. The point
+was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die
+chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French
+soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans
+were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to
+be toujours gentils.
+
+While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to
+howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl
+shrugged. "Il est toujours en colere," she muttered. The woman
+turned it around with difficulty--it seemed a big, heavy baby,
+but white and sickly--and gave it the other breast. It began
+sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were
+famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this
+exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men
+away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her
+after them.
+
+"Il faut que votre mere--se reposer," he told her, with the grave
+caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French
+sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue
+surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed
+in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English,
+Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind,
+and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.
+
+Had they anything to eat? "Vous avez quelque chose a manger?"
+
+"Rien. Rien du tout."
+
+Wasn't her mother "trop malade a marcher?"
+
+She shrugged; Monsieur could see for himself.
+
+And her father?
+
+He was dead; "mort a la Marne, en quatorze."
+
+"At the Marne?" Claude repeated, glancing in perplexity at the
+nursing baby. Her sharp eyes followed his, and she instantly
+divined his doubt. "The baby?" she said quickly. "Oh, the baby is
+not my brother, he is a Boche."
+
+For a moment Claude did not understand. She repeated her
+explanation impatiently, something disdainful and sinister in her
+metallic little voice. A slow blush mounted to his forehead.
+
+He pushed her toward her mother, "Attendez la."
+
+"I guess we'll have to get them over to that farmhouse," he told
+the men. He repeated what he had got of the child's story. When
+he came to her laconic statement about the baby, they looked at
+each other. Bert Fuller was afraid he might cry again, so he kept
+muttering, "By God, if we'd a-got here sooner, by God if we had!"
+as they ran back along the ditch.
+
+Dell and Oscar made a chair of their crossed hands and carried
+the woman, she was no great weight. Bert picked up the little boy
+with the pink clock; "Come along, little frog, your legs ain't
+long enough."
+
+Claude walked behind, holding the screaming baby stiffly in his
+arms. How was it possible for a baby to have such definite
+personality, he asked himself, and how was it possible to dislike
+a baby so much? He hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and
+bloodless ears, and carried it with loathing... no wonder it
+cried! When it got nothing by screaming and stiffening, however,
+it suddenly grew quiet; regarded him with pale blue eyes, and
+tried to make itself comfortable against his khaki coat. It put
+out a grimy little fist and took hold of one of his buttons.
+"Kamerad, eh?" he muttered, glaring at the infant. "Cut it out!"
+
+Before they had their own supper that night, the boys carried hot
+food and blankets down to their family.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Four o'clock... a summer dawn... his first morning in the
+trenches.
+
+Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams
+were in position. This hour, when the light was changing, was a
+favourite time for attack. He had come in late last night, and
+had everything to learn. Mounting the firestep, he peeped over
+the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist.
+Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with
+birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they
+did on the wire fences at home. Clear and flute-like they sounded
+in the heavy air,--and they were the only sounds. A little breeze
+came up, slowly clearing the mist away. Streaks of green showed
+through the moving banks of vapour. The birds became more
+agitated. That dull stretch of grey and green was No Man's Land.
+Those low, zigzag mounds, like giant molehills protected by wire
+hurdles, were the Hun trenches; five or six lines of them. He
+could easily follow the communication trenches without a glass.
+At one point their front line could not be more than eighty yards
+away, at another it must be all of three hundred. Here and there
+thin columns of smoke began to rise; the Hun was getting
+breakfast; everything was comfortable and natural. Behind the
+enemy's position the country rose gradually for several miles,
+with ravines and little woods, where, according to his map, they
+had masked artillery. Back on the hills were ruined farmhouses
+and broken trees, but nowhere a living creature in sight. It was
+a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection. Yet
+everywhere the ground was full of men. Their own trenches, from
+the other side, must look quite as dead. Life was a secret, these
+days.
+
+It was amazing how simply things could be done. His battalion had
+marched in quietly at midnight, and the line they came to relieve
+had set out as silently for the rear. It all took place in utter
+darkness. Just as B Company slid down an incline into the shallow
+rear trenches, the country was lit for a moment by two star
+shells, there was a rattling of machine guns, German Maxims,--a
+sporadic crackle that was not followed up. Filing along the
+communication trenches, they listened anxiously; artillery fire
+would have made it bad for the other men who were marching to the
+rear. But nothing happened. They had a quiet night, and this
+morning, here they were!
+
+The sky flamed up saffron and silver. Claude looked at his watch,
+but he could not bear to go just yet. How long it took a Wheeler
+to get round to anything! Four years on the way; now that he was
+here, he would enjoy the scenery a bit, he guessed. He wished his
+mother could know how he felt this morning. But perhaps she did
+know. At any rate, she would not have him anywhere else. Five
+years ago, when he was sitting on the steps of the Denver State
+House and knew that nothing unexpected could ever happen to him...
+suppose he could have seen, in a flash, where he would be
+today? He cast a long look at the reddening, lengthening
+landscape, and dropped down on the duckboard.
+
+Claude made his way back to the dugout into which he and Gerhardt
+had thrown their effects last night. The former occupants had
+left it clean. There were two bunks nailed against the side
+walls,--wooden frames with wire netting over them, covered with
+dry sandbags. Between the two bunks was a soap-box table, with a
+candle stuck in a green bottle, an alcohol stove, a bainmarie,
+and two tin cups. On the wall were coloured pictures from Jugend,
+taken out of some Hun trench.
+
+He found Gerhardt still asleep on his bed, and shook him until he
+sat up.
+
+"How long have you been out, Claude? Didn't you sleep?"
+
+"A little. I wasn't very tired. I suppose we could heat shaving
+water on this stove; they've left us half a bottle of alcohol.
+It's quite a comfortable little hole, isn't it?"
+
+"It will doubtless serve its purpose," David remarked dryly. "So
+sensitive to any criticism of this war! Why, it's not your
+affair; you've only just arrived."
+
+"I know," Claude replied meekly, as he began to fold his
+blankets. "But it's likely the only one I'll ever be in, so I may
+as well take an interest."
+
+The next afternoon four young men, all more or less naked, were
+busy about a shell-hole full of opaque brown water. Sergeant Hicks
+and his chum, Dell Able, had hunted through half the blazing hot
+morning to find a hole not too scummy, conveniently, and even
+picturesquely situated, and had reported it to the Lieutenants.
+Captain Maxey, Hicks said, could send his own orderly to find his
+own shell-hole, and could take his bath in private. "He'd never
+wash himself with anybody else," the Sergeant added. "Afraid of
+exposing his dignity!"
+
+Bruger and Hammond, the two second Lieutenants, were already out
+of their bath, and reclined on what might almost be termed a
+grassy slope, examining various portions of their body with
+interest. They hadn't had all their clothes off for some time,
+and four days of marching in hot weather made a man anxious to
+look at himself.
+
+"You wait till winter," Gerhardt told them. He was still
+splashing in the hole, up to his armpits in muddy water. "You
+won't get a wash once in three months then. Some of the Tommies
+told me that when they got their first bath after Vimy, their
+skins peeled off like a snake's. What are you doing with my
+trousers, Bruger?"
+
+"Hunting for your knife. I dropped mine yesterday, when that
+shell exploded in the cut-off. I darned near dropped my old nut!"
+
+"Shucks, that wasn't anything. Don't keep blowing about it--shows
+you're a greenhorn."
+
+Claude stripped off his shirt and slid into the pool beside
+Gerhardt. "Gee, I hit something sharp down there! Why didn't you
+fellows pull out the splinters?"
+
+He shut his eyes, disappeared for a moment, and came up
+sputtering, throwing on the ground a round metal object, coated
+with rust and full of slime. "German helmet, isn't it? Phew!" He
+wiped his face and looked about suspiciously.
+
+"Phew is right!" Bruger turned the object over with a stick. "Why
+in hell didn't you bring up the rest of him? You've spoiled my
+bath. I hope you enjoy it."
+
+Gerhardt scrambled up the side. "Get out, Wheeler! Look at that,"
+he pointed to big sleepy bubbles, bursting up through the thick
+water. "You've stirred up trouble, all right! Something's going
+very bad down there."
+
+Claude got out after him, looking back at the activity in the
+water. "I don't see how pulling out one helmet could stir the
+bottom up so. I should think the water would keep the smell
+down."
+
+"Ever study chemistry?" Bruger asked scornfully. "You just opened
+up a graveyard, and now we get the exhaust. If you swallowed any
+of that German cologne--Oh, you should worry!"
+
+Lieutenant Hammond, still barelegged, with his shirt tied over
+his shoulders, was scratching in his notebook. Before they left
+he put up a placard on a split stick.
+
+No Public Bathing!! Private Beach
+
+C. Wheeler, Co. B. 2-th Inf'ty.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+The first letters from home! The supply wagons brought them up,
+and every man in the Company got something except Ed Drier, a
+farm-hand from the Nebraska sand hills, and Willy Katz, the
+tow-headed Austrian boy from the South Omaha packing-houses.
+Their comrades were sorry for them. Ed didn't have any "folks" of
+his own, but he had expected letters all the same. Willy was sure
+his mother must have written. When the last ragged envelope was
+given out and he turned away empty-handed, he murmured, "She's
+Bohunk, and she don't write so good. I guess the address wasn't
+plain, and some fellow in another comp'ny has got my letter."
+
+No second class matter was sent up,--the boys had hoped for
+newspapers from home to give them a little war news, since they
+never got any here. Dell Able's sister, however, had enclosed a
+clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the
+British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the
+hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies,
+mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a
+group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where
+they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story
+of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where
+the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,--a desolate
+spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very
+religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together,
+opened his mouth and said scornfully,
+
+"That's a lie!"
+
+Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you
+know it is?"
+
+"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the
+Garden, and there ain't no man going to find it. It ain't
+intended they should. The Bible says so."
+
+Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years
+ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?"
+
+"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim?
+Nothin'!"
+
+The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.
+
+Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead?
+Solid ivory!"
+
+Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off
+with his washing.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front
+line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The
+Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the
+place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One
+night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the
+gun teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes,
+smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases. Gerhardt was
+working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean
+copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning,
+showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could
+sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.
+
+There was one officer who could talk all the others down,
+wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the
+Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet
+four, and very broad,--a dynamo of energy. Before the war he was
+building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in
+his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius
+Caesar's fortified camps. This had been too much for his
+easily-inflamed imagination. He photographed and measured and
+brooded upon these ancient remains. He was an engineer by day and
+an archaeologist by night. He had crates of books sent down from
+Paris,--everything that had been written on Caesar, in French and
+German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to him
+in the evening. The priest believed the American was mad.
+
+When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest
+in classical studies, but now it was as if he were giving birth
+to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam.
+It also drove other ideas into his exclusively engineering
+brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his
+countrymen.. He travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly
+what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he had
+a chance to enlist.
+
+In the Battalion, Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men
+never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general's
+operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from
+one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him;
+centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens
+found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he
+was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black
+cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French
+characteristics, coaching and preparing them. It was his legs
+that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on
+two short stumps.
+
+"Now you fellows don't want to forget that the night-life of
+Paris is not a typical thing at all; that's a show got up for
+foreigners.... The French peasant, he's a thrifty fellow....
+This red wine's all right if you don't abuse it; take it
+two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery.... You don't
+have to be rough with them, simply firm. Whenever one of them
+accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her
+twenty-five francs; then I look her in the eye and say, 'My girl,
+I've got three children, three boys.' She gets the point at once;
+never fails. She goes away ashamed of herself."
+
+"But that's so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,"
+said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
+
+Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the
+Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such
+concentration, when snatches of the Captain's lecture kept
+breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of
+the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive
+glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was
+something out of the ordinary about him.
+
+The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed
+out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude
+saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He
+listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then
+frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his
+momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had
+particular associations with the air,--melancholy, but beautiful,
+Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record
+himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the
+light, read the inscription:
+
+"Meditation from Thais--Violin solo--David Gerhardt."
+
+When they were going back along the communication trench in the
+rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly.
+"That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin
+solo, wasn't it?"
+
+"Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost
+here."
+
+"Are there many of your records?"
+
+"Quite a number. Why do you ask?"
+
+"I'd like to write my mother. She's fond of good music. She'll
+get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing
+closer to her, don't you see?"
+
+"All right, Claude," said David good-naturedly. "She will find
+them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I
+had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets
+a little income from them. Here we are, at home." As he struck a
+match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared
+behind the blankets. "Plenty of them around, these wet nights.
+Get one? Don't squash him in there. Here's the sack."
+
+Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust
+the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously
+trampled whatever fell to the bottom. "Where do you suppose the
+other is?" "He'll join us later. I don't mind the rats half so
+much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his
+clothes off! Turn in; I'll go the rounds." Gerhardt splashed out
+along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and
+cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get
+David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked
+like on a concert platform, playing his violin.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The following night, Claude was sent back to Division
+Head-quarters at Q-- with information the Colonel did not care to
+commit to paper. He set off at ten o'clock, with Sergeant Hicks
+for escort. There had been two days of rain, and the
+communication trenches were almost knee-deep in water. About half
+a mile back of the front line, the two men crawled out of the
+ditch and went on above ground. There was very little shelling
+along the front that night. When a flare went up, they dropped
+and lay on their faces, trying, at the same time, to get a squint
+at what was ahead of them.
+
+The ground was rough, and the darkness thick; it was past
+midnight when they reached the east-and-west road--usually full
+of traffic, and not entirely deserted even on a night like this.
+Trains of horses were splashing through the mud, with shells on
+their backs, empty supply wagons were coming back from the front.
+Claude and Hicks paused by the ditch, hoping to get a ride. The
+rain began to fall with such violence that they looked about for
+shelter. Stumbling this way and that, they ran into a big
+artillery piece, the wheels sunk over the hubs in a mud-hole.
+
+"Who's there?" called a quick voice, unmistakably British.
+
+"American infantrymen, two of us. Can we get onto one of your
+trucks till this lets up?"
+
+"Oh, certainly! We can make room for you in here, if you're not
+too big. Speak quietly, or you'll waken the Major." Giggles and
+smothered laughter; a flashlight winked for a moment and showed a
+line of five trucks, the front and rear ones covered with
+tarpaulin tents. The voices came from the shelter next the gun.
+The men inside drew up their legs and made room for the
+strangers; said they were sorry they hadn't anything dry to offer
+them except a little rum. The intruders accepted this gratefully.
+
+The Britishers were a giggly lot, and Claude thought, from their
+voices, they must all be very young. They joked about their Major
+as if he were their schoolmaster. There wasn't room enough on the
+truck for anybody to lie down, so they sat with their knees under
+their chins and exchanged gossip. The gun team belonged to an
+independent battery that was sent about over the country,
+"wherever needed." The rest of the battery had got through, gone
+on to the east, but this big gun was always getting into trouble;
+now something had gone wrong with her tractor and they couldn't
+pull her out. They called her "Jenny," and said she was taken
+with fainting fits now and then, and had to be humoured. It was
+like going about with your grandmother, one of the invisible
+Tommies said, "she is such a pompous old thing!" The Major was
+asleep on the rear truck; he was going to get the V.C. for
+sleeping. More giggles.
+
+No, they hadn't any idea where they were going; of course, the
+officers knew, but artillery officers never told anything. What
+was this country like, anyhow? They were new to this part, had
+just come down from Verdure.
+
+Claude said he had a friend in the air service up there; did they
+happen to know anything about Victor Morse?
+
+Morse, the American ace? Hadn't he heard? Why, that got into the
+London papers. Morse was shot down inside the Hun line three
+weeks ago. It was a brilliant affair. He was chased by eight
+Boche planes, brought down three of them, put the rest to flight,
+and was making for base, when they turned and got him. His
+machine came down in flames and he jumped, fell a thousand feet
+or more.
+
+"Then I suppose he never got his leave?" Claude asked.
+
+They didn't know. He got a fine citation.
+
+The men settled down to wait for the weather to improve or the
+night to pass. Some of them fell into a doze, but Claude felt
+wide awake. He was wondering about the flat in Chelsea; whether
+the heavy-eyed beauty had been very sorry, or whether she was
+playing "Roses of Picardy" for other young officers. He thought
+mournfully that he would never go to London now. He had quite
+counted on meeting Victor there some day, after the Kaiser had
+been properly disposed of. He had really liked Victor. There was
+something about that fellow... a sort of debauched baby, he
+was, who went seeking his enemy in the clouds. What other age
+could have produced such a figure? That was one of the things
+about this war; it took a little fellow from a little town, gave
+him an air and a swagger, a life like a movie-film,--and then a
+death like the rebel angels.
+
+A man like Gerhardt, for instance, had always lived in a more or
+less rose-colored world; he belonged over here, really. How could
+he know what hard moulds and crusts the big guns had broken open
+on the other side of the sea? Who could ever make him understand
+how far it was from the strawberry bed and the glass cage in the
+bank, to the sky-roads over Verdure?
+
+By three o'clock the rain had stopped. Claude and Hicks set off
+again, accompanied by one of the gun team who was going back to
+get help for their tractor. As it began to grow light, the two
+Americans wondered more and more at the extremely youthful
+appearance of their companion. When they stopped at a shell-hole
+and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his
+helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance
+of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples,
+yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes.
+
+"You haven't been over very long, have you?" Claude asked in a
+fatherly tone, as they took the road again.
+
+"I came out in 'sixteen. I was formerly in the infantry."
+
+The Americans liked to hear him talk; he spoke very quickly, in a
+high, piping voice.
+
+"How did you come to change?"
+
+"Oh, I belonged to one of the Pal Battalions, and we got cut to
+pieces. When I came out of hospital, I thought I'd try another
+branch of the service, seeing my pals were gone."
+
+"Now, just what is a Pal Battalion?" drawled Hicks. He hated all
+English words he didn't understand, though he didn't mind French
+ones in the least.
+
+"Fellows who signed up together from school," the lad piped.
+
+Hicks glanced at Claude. They both thought this boy ought to be
+in school for some time yet, and wondered what he looked like
+when he first came over.
+
+"And you got cut up, you say?" he asked sympathetically.
+
+"Yes, on the Somme. We had rotten luck. We were sent over to take
+a trench and couldn't. We didn't even get to the wire. The Hun
+was so well prepared that time, we couldn't manage it. We went
+over a thousand, and we came back seventeen."
+
+"A hundred and seventeen?"
+
+"No, seventeen."
+
+Hicks whistled and again exchanged looks with Claude. They could
+neither of them doubt him. There was something very unpleasant
+about the idea of a thousand fresh-faced schoolboys being sent
+out against the guns. "It must have been a fool order," he
+commented. "Suppose there was some mistake at Headquarters?"
+
+"Oh, no, Headquarters knew what it was about! We'd have taken it,
+if we'd had any sort of luck. But the Hun happened to be full of
+fight. His machine guns did for us."
+
+"You were hit yourself?" Claude asked him.
+
+"In the leg. He was popping away at me all the while, but I
+wriggled back on my tummy. When I came out of the hospital my leg
+wasn't strong, and there's less marching in the artillery.
+
+"I should think you'd have had about enough."
+
+"Oh, a fellow can't stay out after all his chums have been
+killed! He'd think about it all the time, you know," the boy
+replied in his clear treble.
+
+Claude and Hicks got into Headquarters just as the cooks were
+turning out to build their fires. One of the Corporals took them
+to the officers' bath,--a shed with big tin tubs, and carried away
+their uniforms to dry them in the kitchen. It would be an hour
+before the officers would be about, he said, and in the meantime
+he would manage to get clean shirts and socks for them.
+
+"Say, Lieutenant," Hicks brought out as he was rubbing himself
+down with a real bath towel, "I don't want to hear any more about
+those Pal Battalions, do you? It gets my goat. So long as we were
+going to get into this, we might have been a little more
+previous. I hate to feel small." "Guess we'll have to take our
+medicine," Claude said dryly, "There wasn't anywhere to duck, was
+there? I felt like it. Nice little kid. I don't believe American
+boys ever seem as young as that."
+
+"Why, if you met him anywhere else, you'd be afraid of using bad
+words before him, he's so pretty! What's the use of sending an
+orphan asylum out to be slaughtered? I can't see it," grumbled
+the fat sergeant. "Well, it's their business. I'm not going to
+let it spoil my breakfast. Suppose we'll draw ham and eggs,
+Lieutenant?"
+
+
+
+X
+
+After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with
+one of the staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until
+tomorrow to see Colonel James, who had been called to Paris for a
+general conference. He had left in his car at four that morning,
+in response to a telephone message.
+
+"There's not much to do here, by way of amusement," said the
+Major. "A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want
+at the estaminet,--the one on the square, opposite the English
+tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the
+Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden.
+They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on
+good terms with them. We get their supplies through with our own,
+and the quartermaster has orders to help them when they run
+short. You might go up and call on them. They speak English
+perfectly."
+
+Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of
+introduction.
+
+"Oh, yes, they're used to us! I'll give you a card to Mlle.
+Olive, though. She's a particular friend of mine. There you are:
+'Mlle. Olive de Courcy, introducing, etc.' And, you understand,"
+here he glanced up and looked Claude over from head to foot,
+"she's a perfect lady."
+
+Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about
+presenting himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn't like
+Americans; he was always afraid of meeting French people who
+didn't. It was the same way with most of the fellows in his
+battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being
+disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they
+hastened to behave as badly as possible, in order to deserve it;
+then they didn't feel that they had been taken in--the worst
+feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
+
+Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a
+little. It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914,
+after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until
+about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the
+Chasseurs d'Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive
+the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not
+one building remained standing.
+
+Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as
+he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster.
+There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war
+pictures one saw at home. A cyclone or a fire might have done
+just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an
+exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American
+towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned
+brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered
+beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy
+water. An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a
+few nights before, and been drowned.
+
+This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now
+the civilian population was about four hundred. There were people
+there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation;
+others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out,
+came back from wherever they had found shelter. They were living
+in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers
+and American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read
+familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the
+sides of these frail shelters: "From Emery Bird, Thayer Co.
+Kansas City, Mo." "Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo." These
+inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going
+up and calling on the French ladies.
+
+The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant
+pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank,
+heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of
+rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
+and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
+came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the
+Germans did to it.
+
+Claude paused before a little shanty built against a
+half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with
+a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the
+garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had
+washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops
+and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his
+helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red
+Cross.
+
+She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous
+savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"
+
+(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way
+or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the
+site of the old town hall.)
+
+A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told
+her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie
+put her hand in Claude's and led him off along one of the paths
+that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show
+him a church,--evidently one of the ruins of which they were
+proudest,--where the blue sky was shining through the white
+arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a
+little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus
+had been shot away.
+
+"Le bebe est casse, mais il a protege sa mere," Marie explained
+with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had
+a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il
+est gai, mon soldat," but he sometimes drank too much alcohol,
+and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since his comrade had
+stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
+had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do
+better. Marie was evidently a well brought up child. Her father,
+she said, had been a schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent
+hill, she turned to go home. Claude called her back and awkwardly
+tried to give her some money, but she thrust her hands behind her
+and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
+then ran away down the path.
+
+As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the
+ground had been cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, the bricks
+and hewn stones had been piled in neat heaps, the broken hedges
+had been trimmed and the dead parts cut away. Emerging at last
+into the garden, he stood still for wonder; even though it was in
+ruins, it seemed so beautiful after the disorder of the world
+below.
+
+The gravel walks were clean and shining. A wall of very old
+boxwoods stood green against a row of dead Lombardy poplars.
+Along the shattered side of the main building, a pear tree,
+trained on wires like a vine, still flourished,--full of little
+red pears. Around the stone well was a shaven grass plot, and
+everywhere there were little trees and shrubs, which had been too
+low for the shells to hit,--or for the fire, which had seared the
+poplars, to catch. The hill must have been wrapped in flames at
+one time, and all the tall trees had been burned.
+
+The barrack was built against the walls of the cloister,--three
+arches of which remained, like a stone wing to the shed of
+planks. On a ladder stood a one-armed young man, driving nails
+very skillfully with his single hand. He seemed to be making a
+frame projection from the sloping roof, to support an awning. He
+carried his nails in his mouth. When he wanted one, he hung his
+hammer to the belt of his trousers, took a nail from between his
+teeth, stuck it into the wood, and then deftly rapped it on the
+head. Claude watched him for a moment, then went to the foot of
+the ladder and held out his two hands. "Laissez-moi," he
+exclaimed.
+
+The one aloft spat his nails out into his palm, looked down, and
+laughed. He was about Claude's age, with very yellow hair and
+moustache and blue eyes. A charming looking fellow.
+
+"Willingly," he said. "This is no great affair, but I do it to
+amuse myself, and it will be pleasant for the ladies." He
+descended and gave his hammer to the visitor. Claude set to work
+on the frame, while the other went under the stone arches and
+brought back a roll of canvas,--part of an old tent, by the look
+of it.
+
+"Un heritage des Boches," he explained unrolling it upon the
+grass. "I found it among their filth in the cellar, and had the
+idea to make a pavilion for the ladies, as our trees are
+destroyed." He stood up suddenly. "Perhaps you have come to see
+the ladies?"
+
+"Plus tard."
+
+Very well, the boy said, they would get the pavilion done for a
+surprise for Mlle. Olive when she returned. She was down in the
+town now, visiting the sick people. He bent over his canvas
+again, measuring and cutting with a pair of garden shears, moving
+round the green plot on his knees, and all the time singing.
+Claude wished he could understand the words of his song.
+
+While they were working together, tying the cloth up to the
+frame, Claude, from his elevation, saw a tall girl coming slowly
+up the path by which he had ascended. She paused at the top, by
+the boxwood hedge, as if she were very tired, and stood looking
+at them. Presently she approached the ladder and said in slow,
+careful English, "Good morning. Louis has found help, I see."
+
+Claude came down from his perch.
+
+"Are you Mlle. de Courcy? I am Claude Wheeler. I have a note of
+introduction to you, if I can find it."
+
+She took the card, but did not look at it. "That is not
+necessary. Your uniform is enough. Why have you come?"
+
+He looked at her in some confusion. "Well, really, I don't know!
+I am just in from the front to see Colonel James, and he is in
+Paris, so I must wait over a day. One of the staff suggested my
+coming up here--I suppose because it is so nice!" he finished
+ingenuously.
+
+"Then you are a guest from the front, and you will have lunch
+with Louis and me. Madame Barre is also gone for the day. Will you
+see our house?" She led him through the low door into a living
+room, unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy. There were coloured
+war posters on the clean board walls, brass shell cases full of
+wild flowers and garden flowers, canvas camp-chairs, a shelf of
+books, a table covered by a white silk shawl embroidered with big
+butterflies. The sunlight on the floor, the bunches of fresh
+flowers, the white window curtains stirring in the breeze,
+reminded Claude of something, but he could not remember what.
+
+"We have no guest room," said Mlle. de Courcy. "But you will come
+to mine, and Louis will bring you hot water to wash."
+
+In a wooden chamber at the end of the passage, Claude took off
+his coat, and set to work to make himself as tidy as possible.
+Hot water and scented soap were in themselves pleasant things.
+The dresser was an old goods box, stood on end and covered with
+white lawn. On it there was a row of ivory toilet things, with
+combs and brushes, powder and cologne, and a pile of white
+handkerchiefs fresh from the iron. He felt that he ought not to
+look about him much, but the odor of cleanness, and the
+indefinable air of personality, tempted him. In one corner, a
+curtain on a rod made a clothes-closet; in another was a low iron
+bed, like a soldier's, with a pale blue coverlid and white
+pillows. He moved carefully and splashed discreetly. There was
+nothing he could have damaged or broken, not even a rug on the
+plank floor, and the pitcher and hand-basin were of iron; yet he
+felt as if he were imperiling something fragile.
+
+When he came out, the table in the living room was set for three.
+The stout old dame who was placing the plates paid no attention
+to him,--seemed, from her expression, to scorn him and all his
+kind. He withdrew as far as possible out of her path and picked
+up a book from the table, a volume of Heine's Reisebilder in
+German.
+
+Before lunch Mlle. de Courcy showed him the store room in the
+rear, where the shelves were stocked with rows of coffee tins,
+condensed milk, canned vegetables and meat, all with American
+trade names he knew so well; names which seemed doubly familiar
+and "reliable" here, so far from home. She told him the people in
+the town could not have got through the winter without these
+things. She had to deal them out sparingly, where the need was
+greatest, but they made the difference between life and death.
+Now that it was summer, the people lived by their gardens; but
+old women still came to beg for a few ounces of coffee, and
+mothers to get a can of milk for the babies.
+
+Claude's face glowed with pleasure. Yes, his country had a long
+arm. People forgot that; but here, he felt, was some one who did
+not forget. When they sat down to lunch he learned that Mlle. de
+Courcy and Madame Barre had been here almost a year now; they
+came soon after the town was retaken, when the old inhabitants
+began to drift back. The people brought with them only what they
+could carry in their arms.
+
+"They must love their country so much, don't you think, when they
+endure such poverty to come back to it?" she said. "Even the old
+ones do not often complain about their dear things--their linen,
+and their china, and their beds. If they have the ground, and
+hope, all that they can make again. This war has taught us all
+how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters."
+
+Exactly so; hadn't he been trying to say this ever since he was
+born? Hadn't he always known it, and hadn't it made life both
+bitter and sweet for him? What a beautiful voice she had, this
+Mlle. Olive, and how nobly it dealt with the English tongue. He
+would like to say something, but out of so much... what? He
+remained silent, therefore, sat nervously breaking up the black
+war bread that lay beside his plate.
+
+He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded
+it with favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the
+table.
+
+"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have
+seen our poor trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part
+of France. Our people are more sorry for them than to lose their
+cattle and horses."
+
+Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility,
+Claude thought, as he watched her. She seemed far from strong.
+Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired, with white transparent skin and a
+too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks,--like the flame of a
+feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as if she were
+always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads
+of grey in her hair,--brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the
+back of her head.
+
+After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and
+Louis took Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and
+trimming and planting were his own work, and he had done it all
+with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish much more, for he
+was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
+single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they
+distressed Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four
+old locusts; the tops were naked forks, burned coal-black, but
+the lower branches had put out thick tufts of yellow-green
+foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must still be
+sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong
+American boys to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs
+and trim the tops flat over the thick boles. How much it must
+mean to a man to love his country like this, Claude thought; to
+love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
+tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come
+back self-sown or from old roots, Claude found a group of tall,
+straggly plants with reddish stems and tiny white blossoms,--one
+of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that grew along the
+clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
+pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it
+was one of those nameless prairie flowers that grew on the
+prairie and nowhere else.
+
+When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in
+one of the canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.
+
+"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after him.
+
+"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on
+leave he always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one
+of the family. The shell that killed my brother tore off his arm.
+My mother and I went to visit him in the hospital, and he seemed
+ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother was dead. He put
+his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
+il etait toujours plus chic que moi!'"
+
+Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did
+so only by keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences
+she uttered were foreign to her nature; her face and eyes ran
+ahead of her tongue and made one wait eagerly for what was
+coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently twisting
+a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.
+
+"You have found a flower?" She looked up.
+
+"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."
+
+She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about
+your country! I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to
+understand. Yes, tell me about that!"
+
+Nebraska--What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it
+look like? As he tried to describe it, she listened with
+half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers. I think
+it must be like Russia. But your father's farm; describe that to
+me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."
+
+Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to
+begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big
+pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the
+wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and
+corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow
+sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust
+trees. He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger
+about it in such detail. It was partly due to his listener, no
+doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual
+mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew
+of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed
+faster from her effort to see and understand everything. He told
+her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was
+like there in summer and winter and autumn--what it had been like
+in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward
+Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
+the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the
+news at night, and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their
+breath.
+
+Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair. Claude looked up and
+saw tears sparkling in her brilliant eyes. "And I myself," she
+murmured, "did not know of the Marne until days afterward, though
+my father and brother were both there! I was far off in Brittany,
+and the trains did not run. That is what is wonderful, that you
+are here, telling me this! We, we were taught from childhood that
+some day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat.
+But you were so safe, with all your wheat and corn. Nothing could
+touch you, nothing!"
+
+Claude dropped his eyes. "Yes," he muttered, blushing, "shame
+could. It pretty nearly did. We are pretty late." He rose from
+his chair as if he were going to fetch something.... But
+where was he to get it from? He shook his head. "I am afraid," he
+said mournfully, "there is nothing I can say to make you
+understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary. It
+didn't only seem miles away, it seemed centuries away."
+
+"But you do come,--so many, and from so far! It is the last
+miracle of this war. I was in Paris on the fourth day of July,
+when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your
+national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, 'That is a
+new man!' Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.
+Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to
+them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look...
+eyes straight before. They passed like men of destiny." She threw
+out her hands with a swift movement and dropped them in her lap.
+The emotion of that day came back in her face. As Claude looked
+at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the
+strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost
+like a gift of prophecy.
+
+A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to
+meet her and took her into the house. Claude sat down again,
+almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely
+understood, of being no longer a stranger. In the far distance
+the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden Louis
+was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis' songs.
+The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very
+cheerfully. There was something open and warm about the boy's
+voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too. It was
+distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and
+waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new
+kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the
+shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of
+beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life,
+he saw.
+
+When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the
+creeping sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls
+like you," he said simply, as she sat down.
+
+She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left.
+There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came,
+and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or
+sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with
+soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different
+with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father
+had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since
+the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war
+of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men
+would be left to see the day of victory.
+
+She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay.
+Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave;
+but an hour more or less wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly
+give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.
+
+"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get
+through this war?" he asked as he rose.
+
+He wrote it down in his notebook.
+
+"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.
+
+There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the
+edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he
+stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the
+sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the
+glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
+which he would never find again.
+
+The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front.
+They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their
+route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and
+then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter
+half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through
+the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.
+
+When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting
+in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing
+the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their
+nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn't
+happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious.
+This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant
+with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees.
+More because he admired the looks of the man than because he
+needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed
+a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt nodded.
+
+"About how far back would you say it was?"
+
+"I wouldn't say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,"
+he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a
+washtub.
+
+"Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?"
+
+"That I couldn't say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour."
+
+"I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can't be?"
+Hicks asked jovially.
+
+"That I couldn't say. You've been four years gettin' this far, I
+know verra well."
+
+Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. "Oh, if that's the way you
+talk--"
+
+"That's the way I do," said the other sourly.
+
+Claude put out a warning hand. "Come on, Hicks. You'll get
+nothing by it." They went up the road very much disconcerted.
+Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was
+angry, the Sergeant's forehead puffed up and became dark red,
+like a young baby's. "What did you call me off for?" he
+sputtered.
+
+"I don't see where you'd have come out in an argument, and you
+certainly couldn't have licked him."
+
+They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went
+down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through
+the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French
+graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves,
+with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The
+Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the
+soldier's photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some
+comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.
+
+The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to
+sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down
+between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped.
+Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary
+stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie.
+They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a
+cross at their feet the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu,
+Mort pour La France.
+
+A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who
+fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too
+young. They died and took their secret with them,--what they were
+and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France.
+How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a
+shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the
+Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one's mind, where
+one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never
+blush.
+
+Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the
+silence. "Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.'
+It has a coffinish sound. And over there they're all 'tod,' and
+it's all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here,
+black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who
+put 'em here, and what's the good of it?"
+
+"Search me," the other murmured absently.
+
+Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face
+wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. "Well,"
+he brought out at last, "we'd better hike. This afterglow will
+hang on for an hour,--always does, over here."
+
+"I suppose we had." They rose to go. The white crosses were now
+violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow.
+Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still
+burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep
+thunder. "Somebody's getting peppered up there. Do owls always
+hoot in graveyards?"
+
+"Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It's a peaceful spot,
+otherwise. Good-night, boys," said Hicks kindly, as they left the
+graves behind them.
+
+They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping
+trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting
+back to their chums and their own little group. Hicks broke out
+and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business
+together when they got home; were going to open a garage and
+automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both,
+that lonely spot lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort
+pour La France.
+
+
+XI
+
+After four days' rest in the rear, the Battalion went to the
+front again in new country, about ten kilometers east of the
+trench they had relieved before. One morning Colonel Scott sent
+for Claude and Gerhardt and spread his maps out on the table.
+
+"We are going to clean them out there in F 6 tonight, and
+straighten our line. The thing that bothers us is that little
+village stuck up on the hill, where the enemy machine guns have a
+strong position. I want to get them out of there before the
+Battalion goes over. We can't spare too many men, and I don't
+like to send out more officers than I can help; it won't do to
+reduce the Battalion for the major operation. Do you think you
+two boys could manage it with a hundred men? The point is, you
+will have to be out and back before our artillery begins at three
+o'clock."
+
+Under the hill where the village stood, ran a deep ravine, and
+from this ravine a twisting water course wound up the hillside.
+By climbing this gully, the raiders should be able to fall on the
+machine gunners from the rear and surprise them. But first they
+must get across the open stretch, nearly one and a half
+kilometers wide, between the American line and the ravine,
+without attracting attention. It was raining now, and they could
+safely count on a dark night.
+
+The night came on black enough. The Company crossed the open
+stretch without provoking fire, and slipped into the ravine to
+wait for the hour of attack, A young doctor, a Pennsylvanian,
+lately attached to the staff, had volunteered to come with them,
+and he arranged a dressing station at the bottom of the ravine,
+where the stretchers were left. They were to pick up their
+wounded on the way back. Anything left in that area would be
+exposed to the artillery fire later on.
+
+At ten o'clock the men began to ascend the water-course, creeping
+through pools and little waterfalls, making a continuous spludgy
+sound, like pigs rubbing against the sty. Claude, with the head
+of the column, was just pulling out of the gully on the hillside
+above the village, when a flare went up, and a volley of fire
+broke from the brush on the up-hill side of the water-course;
+machine guns, opening on the exposed line crawling below. The Hun
+had been warned that the Americans were crossing the plain and
+had anticipated their way of approach. The men in the gully were
+trapped; they could not retaliate with effect, and the bullets
+from the Maxims bounded on the rocks about them like hail.
+Gerhardt ran along the edge of the line, urging the men not to
+fall back and double on themselves, but to break out of the gully
+on the downhill side and scatter.
+
+Claude, with his group, started back. "Go into the brush and get
+'em! Our fellows have got no chance down there. Grenades while
+they last, then bayonets. Pull your plugs and don't hold on too
+long."
+
+They were already on the run, charging the brush. The Hun gunners
+knew the hill like a book, and when the bombs began bursting
+among them, they took to trails and burrows. "Don't follow them
+off into the rocks," Claude kept calling. "Straight ahead! Clear
+everything to the ravine."
+
+As the German gunners made for cover, the firing into the gully
+stopped, and the arrested column poured up the steep defile after
+Gerhardt.
+
+Claude and his party found themselves back at the foot of the
+hill, at the edge of the ravine from which they had started.
+Heavy firing on the hill above told them the rest of the men had
+got through. The quickest way back to the scene of action was by
+the same water-course they had climbed before. They dropped into
+it and started up. Claude, at the rear, felt the ground rise
+under him, and he was swept with a mountain of earth and rock
+down into the ravine.
+
+He never knew whether he lost consciousness or not. It seemed to
+him that he went on having continuous sensations. The first, was
+that of being blown to pieces; of swelling to an enormous size
+under intolerable pressure, and then bursting. Next he felt
+himself shrink and tingle, like a frost-bitten body thawing out.
+Then he swelled again, and burst. This was repeated, he didn't
+know how often. He soon realized that he was lying under a great
+weight of earth; his body, not his head. He felt rain falling on
+his face. His left hand was free, and still attached to his arm.
+He moved it cautiously to his face. He seemed to be bleeding from
+the nose and ears. Now he began to wonder where he was hurt; he
+felt as if he were full of shell splinters. Everything was buried
+but his head and left shoulder. A voice was calling from
+somewhere below.
+
+"Are any of you fellows alive?"
+
+Claude closed his eyes against the rain beating in his face. The
+same voice came again, with a note of patient despair.
+
+"If there's anybody left alive in this hole, won't he speak up?
+I'm badly hurt myself."
+
+That must be the new doctor; wasn't his dressing station
+somewhere down here? Hurt, he said. Claude tried to move his legs
+a little. Perhaps, if he could get out from under the dirt, he
+might hold together long enough to reach the doctor. He began to
+wriggle and pull. The wet earth sucked at him; it was painful
+business. He braced himself with his elbows, but kept slipping
+back.
+
+"I'm the only one left, then?" said the mournful voice below.
+
+At last Claude worked himself out of his burrow, but he was
+unable to stand. Every time he tried to stand, he got faint and
+seemed to burst again. Something was the matter with his right
+ankle, too--he couldn't bear his weight on it. Perhaps he had
+been too near the shell to be hit; he had heard the boys tell of
+such cases. It had exploded under his feet and swept him down
+into the ravine, but hadn't left any metal in his body. If it had
+put anything into him, it would have put so much that he wouldn't
+be sitting here speculating. He began to crawl down the slope on
+all fours. "Is that the Doctor? Where are you?"
+
+"Here, on a stretcher. They shelled us. Who are you? Our fellows
+got up, didn't they?"
+
+"I guess most of them did. What happened back here?"
+
+"I'm afraid it's my fault," the voice said sadly. "I used my
+flash light, and that must have given them the range. They put
+three or four shells right on top of us. The fellows that got
+hurt in the gully kept stringing back here, and I couldn't do
+anything in the dark. I had to have a light to do anything. I
+just finished putting on a Johnson splint when the first shell
+came. I guess they're all done for now."
+
+"How many were there?"
+
+"Fourteen, I think. Some of them weren't much hurt. They'd all be
+alive, if I hadn't come out with you."
+
+"Who were they? But you don't know our names yet, do you? You didn't
+see Lieutenant Gerhardt among them?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Nor Sergeant Hicks, the fat fellow?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Where are you hurt?"
+
+"Abdominal. I can't tell anything without a light. I lost my
+flash light. It never occurred to me that it could make trouble;
+it's one I use at home, when the babies are sick," the doctor
+murmured.
+
+Claude tried to strike a match, with no success. "Wait a minute,
+where's your helmet?" He took off his metal hat, held it over the
+doctor, and managed to strike a light underneath it. The wounded
+man had already loosened his trousers, and now he pulled up his
+bloody shirt. His groin and abdomen were torn on the left side.
+The wound, and the stretcher on which he lay, supported a mass of
+dark, coagulated blood that looked like a great cow's liver.
+
+"I guess I've got mine," the Doctor murmured as the match went
+out.
+
+Claude struck another. "Oh, that can't be! Our fellows will be
+back pretty soon, and we can do something for you."
+
+"No use, Lieutenant. Do you suppose you could strip a coat off
+one of those poor fellows? I feel the cold terribly in my
+intestines. I had a bottle of French brandy, but I suppose it's
+buried."
+
+Claude stripped off his own coat, which was warm on the inside,
+and began feeling about in the mud for the brandy. He wondered
+why the poor man wasn't screaming with pain. The firing on the
+hill had ceased, except for the occasional click of a Maxim, off
+in the rocks somewhere. His watch said 12:10; could anything have
+miscarried up there?
+
+Suddenly, voices above, a clatter of boots on the shale. He began
+shouting to them.
+
+"Coming, coming!" He knew the voice. Gerhardt and his rifles ran
+down into the ravine with a bunch of prisoners. Claude called to
+them to be careful. "Don't strike a light! They've been shelling
+down here."
+
+"All right are you, Wheeler? Where are the wounded?"
+
+"There aren't any but the Doctor and me. Get us out of here
+quick. I'm all right, but I can't walk."
+
+They put Claude on a stretcher and sent him ahead. Four big
+Germans carried him, and they were prodded to a lope by Hicks and
+Dell Able. Four of their own men took up the doctor, and Gerhardt
+walked beside him. In spite of their care, the motion started the
+blood again and tore away the clots that had formed over his
+wounds. He began to vomit blood and to strangle. The men put the
+stretcher down. Gerhardt lifted the Doctor's head. "It's over,"
+he said presently. "Better make the best time you can."
+
+They picked up their load again. "Them that are carrying him now
+won't jolt him," said Oscar, the pious Swede.
+
+B Company lost nineteen men in the raid. Two days later the
+Company went off on a ten-day leave. Claude's sprained ankle was
+twice its natural size, but to avoid being sent to the hospital
+he had to march to the railhead. Sergeant Hicks got him a giant
+shoe he found stuck on the barbed wire entanglement. Claude and
+Gerhardt were going off on their leave together.
+
+XII
+
+A rainy autumn night; Papa Joubert sat reading his paper. He
+heard a heavy pounding on his garden gate. Kicking off his
+slippers, he put on the wooden sabots he kept for mud, shuffled
+across the dripping garden, and opened the door into the dark
+street. Two tall figures with rifles and kits confronted him. In
+a moment he began embracing them, calling to his wife:
+
+"Nom de diable, Maman, c'est David, David et Claude, tous les
+deux!"
+
+Sorry-looking soldiers they appeared when they stood in the
+candlelight, plastered with clay, their metal hats shining like
+copper bowls, their clothes dripping pools of water upon the
+flags of the kitchen floor. Mme. Joubert kissed their wet cheeks,
+and Monsieur, now that he could see them, embraced them again.
+Whence had they come, and how had it fared with them, up there?
+Very well, as anybody could see. What did they want
+first,--supper, perhaps? Their room was always ready for them; and
+the clothes they had left were in the big chest.
+
+David explained that their shirts had not once been dry for four
+days; and what they most desired was to be dry and to be clean.
+Old Martha, already in bed, was routed out to heat water. M.
+Joubert carried the big washtub upstairs. Tomorrow for
+conversation, he said; tonight for repose. The boys followed him
+and began to peel off their wet uniforms, leaving them in two
+sodden piles on the floor. There was one bath for both, and they
+threw up a coin to decide which should get into the warm water
+first. M. Joubert, seeing Claude's fat ankle strapped up in
+adhesive bandages, began to chuckle. "Oh, I see the Boche made
+you dance up there!"
+
+When they were clad in clean pyjamas out of the chest, Papa
+Joubert carried their shirts and socks down for Martha to wash.
+He returned with the big meat platter, on which was an omelette
+made of twelve eggs and stuffed with bacon and fried potatoes.
+Mme. Joubert brought the three-story earthen coffee-pot to the
+door and called, "Bon appetit!" The host poured the coffee and
+cut up the loaf with his clasp knife. He sat down to watch them
+eat. How had they found things up there, anyway? The Boches
+polite and agreeable as usual? Finally, when there was not a
+crumb of anything left, he poured for each a little glass of
+brandy, "pour cider la digestion," and wished them good-night. He
+took the candle with him.
+
+Perfect bliss, Claude reflected, as the chill of the sheets grew
+warm around his body, and he sniffed in the pillow the old smell
+of lavender. To be so warm, so dry, so clean, so beloved! The
+journey down, reviewed from here, seemed beautiful. As soon as
+they had got out of the region of martyred trees, they found the
+land of France turning gold. All along the river valleys the
+poplars and cottonwoods had changed from green to yellow,--evenly
+coloured, looking like candle flames in the mist and rain. Across
+the fields, along the horizon they ran, like torches passed from
+hand to hand, and all the willows by the little streams had
+become silver. The vineyards were green still, thickly spotted
+with curly, blood-red branches. It all flashed back beside his
+pillow in the dark: this beautiful land, this beautiful people,
+this beautiful omelette; gold poplars, blue-green vineyards, wet,
+scarlet vine leaves, rain dripping into the court, fragrant
+darkness... sleep, stronger than all.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The woodland path was deep in leaves. Claude and David were lying
+on the dry, springy heather among the flint boulders. Gerhardt,
+with his Stetson over his eyes, was presumably asleep. They were
+having fine weather for their holiday. The forest rose about this
+open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of
+horse chestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown,
+as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry
+leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible
+in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes.
+Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes
+glittered.
+
+It was the Wheeler way to dread false happiness, to feel cowardly
+about being fooled. Since he had come back, Claude had more than
+once wondered whether he took too much for granted and felt more
+at home here than he had any right to feel. The Americans were
+prone, he had observed, to make themselves very much at home, to
+mistake good manners for good-will. He had no right to doubt the
+affection of the Jouberts, however; that was genuine and
+personal,--not a smooth surface under which almost any shade of
+scorn might lie and laugh... was not, in short, the
+treacherous "French politeness" by which one must not let oneself
+be taken in. Merely having seen the season change in a country
+gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. And,
+anyway, he wasn't a tourist. He was here on legitimate business.
+
+Claude's sprained ankle was still badly swollen. Madame Joubert
+was sure he ought not to move about on it at all, begged him to
+sit in the garden all day and nurse it. But the surgeon at the
+front had told him that if he once stopped walking, he would have
+to go to the hospital. So, with the help of his host's best
+holly-wood cane, he limped out into the forest every day. This
+afternoon he was tempted to go still farther. Madame Joubert had
+told him about some caves at the other end of the wood,
+underground chambers where the country people had gone to live in
+times of great misery, long ago, in the English wars. The English
+wars; he could not remember just how far back they were,--but
+long enough to make one feel comfortable. As for him, perhaps he
+would never go home at all. Perhaps, when this great affair was
+over, he would buy a little farm and stay here for the rest of
+his life. That was a project he liked to play with. There was no
+chance for the kind of life he wanted at home, where people were
+always buying and selling, building and pulling down. He had
+begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow
+emotions. That was the way Gerhardt had put it once; and if it
+was true, there was no cure for it. Life was so short that it
+meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by
+something that endured; unless the shadows of individual
+existence came and went against a background that held together.
+While he was absorbed in his day dream of farming in France, his
+companion stirred and rolled over on his elbow.
+
+"You know we are to join the Battalion at A--. They'll be living
+like kings there. Hicks will get so fat he'll drop over on the
+march. Headquarters must have something particularly nasty in
+mind; the infantry is always fed up before a slaughter. But I've
+been thinking; I have some old friends at A--. Suppose we go on
+there a day early, and get them to take us in? It's a fine old
+place, and I ought to go to see them. The son was a fellow
+student of mine at the Conservatoire. He was killed the second
+winter of the war. I used to go up there for the holidays with
+him; I would like to see his mother and sister again. You've no
+objection?"
+
+Claude did not answer at once. He lay squinting off at the beech
+trees, without moving. "You always avoid that subject with me,
+don't you?" he said presently.
+
+"What subject?"
+
+"Oh, anything to do with the Conservatoire, or your profession."
+
+"I haven't any profession at present. I'll never go back to the
+violin."
+
+"You mean you couldn't make up for the time you'll lose?"
+
+Gerhardt settled his back against a rock and got out his pipe.
+"That would be difficult; but other things would be harder. I've
+lost much more than time."
+
+"Couldn't you have got exemption, one way or another?"
+
+"I might have. My friends wanted to take it up and make a test
+case of me. But I couldn't stand for it. I didn't feel I was a
+good enough violinist to admit that I wasn't a man. I often wish
+I had been in Paris that summer when the war broke out; then I
+would have gone into the French army on the first impulse, with
+the other students, and it would have been better."
+
+David paused and sat puffing at his pipe. Just then a soft
+movement stirred the brakes on the hillside. A little barefoot
+girl stood there, looking about. She had heard voices, but at
+first did not see the uniforms that blended with the yellow and
+brown of the wood. Then she saw the sun shining on two heads; one
+square, and amber in colour,--the other reddish bronze, long and
+narrow. She took their friendliness for granted and came down the
+hill, stopping now and again to pick up shiny horse chestnuts and
+pop them into a sack she was dragging. David called to her and
+asked her whether the nuts were good to eat.
+
+"Oh, non!" she exclaimed, her face expressing the liveliest
+terror, "pour les cochons!" These inexperienced Americans might
+eat almost anything. The boys laughed and gave her some pennies,
+"pour les cochons aussi." She stole about the edge of the wood,
+stirring among the leaves for nuts, and watching the two
+soldiers.
+
+Gerhardt knocked out his pipe and began to fill it again. "I went
+home to see my mother in May, of 1914. I wasn't here when the war
+broke out. The Conservatoire closed at once, so I arranged a
+concert tour in the States that winter, and did very well. That
+was before all the little Russians went over, and the field
+wasn't so crowded. I had a second season, and that went well. But
+I was getting more nervous all the time; I was only half there."
+He smoked thoughtfully, sitting with folded arms, as if he were
+going over a succession of events or states of feeling. "When my
+number was drawn, I reported to see what I could do about getting
+out; I took a look at the other fellows who were trying to
+squirm, and chucked it. I've never been sorry. Not long
+afterward, my violin was smashed, and my career seemed to go
+along with it."
+
+Claude asked him what he meant.
+
+"While I was at Camp Dix, I had to play at one of the
+entertainments. My violin, a Stradivarius, was in a vault in New
+York. I didn't need it for that concert, any more than I need it
+at this minute; yet I went to town and brought it out. I was
+taking it up from the station in a military car, and a drunken
+taxi driver ran into us. I wasn't hurt, but the violin, lying
+across my knees, was smashed into a thousand pieces. I didn't
+know what it meant then; but since, I've seen so many beautiful
+old things smashed... I've become a fatalist."
+
+Claude watched his brooding head against the grey flint rock.
+
+"You ought to have kept out of the whole thing. Any army man
+would say so."
+
+David's head went back against the boulder, and he threw one of
+the, chestnuts lightly into the air. "Oh, one violinist more or
+less doesn't matter! But who is ever going back to anything?
+That's what I want to know!"
+
+Claude felt guilty; as if David must have guessed what apostasy
+had been going on in his own mind this afternoon. "You don't
+believe we are going to get out of this war what we went in for,
+do you?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Absolutely not," the other replied with cool indifference.
+
+"Then I certainly don't see what you're here for!"
+
+"Because in 1917 I was twenty-four years old, and able to bear
+arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what
+for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the
+world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I
+was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that
+nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes,
+though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, but
+something unforeseen." He paused and shut his eyes. "You remember
+in the old mythology tales how, when the sons of the gods were
+born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele
+I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the
+young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the
+world... something Olympian. I'd like to know. I think I shall
+know. Since I've been over here this time, I've come to believe
+in immortality. Do you?"
+
+Claude was confused by this quiet question. "I hardly know. I've
+never been able to make up my mind."
+
+"Oh, don't bother about it! If it comes to you, it comes. You
+don't have to go after it. I arrived at it in quite the same way
+I used to get things in art,--knowing them and living on them
+before I understood them. Such ideas used to seem childish to
+me." Gerhardt sprang up. "Now, have I told you what you want to
+know about my case?" He looked down at Claude with a curious
+glimmer of amusement and affection. "I'm going to stretch my
+legs. It's four o'clock."
+
+He disappeared among the red pine stems, where the sunlight made
+a rose-colored lake, as it used to do in the summer... as it
+would do in all the years to come, when they were not there to
+see it, Claude was thinking. He pulled his hat over his eyes and
+went to sleep.
+
+The little girl on the edge of the beech wood left her sack and
+stole quietly down the hill. Sitting in the heather and drawing
+her feet up under her, she stayed still for a long time, and
+regarded with curiosity the relaxed, deep breathing body of the
+American soldier.
+
+The next day was Claude's twenty-fifth birthday, and in honour of
+that event Papa Joubert produced a bottle of old Burgundy from
+his cellar, one of a few dozens he had laid in for great
+occasions when he was a young man.
+
+During that week of idleness at Madame Joubert's, Claude often
+thought that the period of happy "youth," about which his old
+friend Mrs. Erlich used to talk, and which he had never
+experienced, was being made up to him now. He was having his
+youth in France. He knew that nothing like this would ever come
+again; the fields and woods would never again be laced over with
+this hazy enchantment. As he came up the village street in the
+purple evening, the smell of wood-smoke from the chimneys went to
+his head like a narcotic, opened the pores of his skin, and
+sometimes made the tears come to his eyes. Life had after all
+turned out well for him, and everything had a noble significance.
+The nervous tension in which he had lived for years now seemed
+incredible to him... absurd and childish, when he thought of
+it at all. He did not torture himself with recollections. He was
+beginning over again.
+
+One night he dreamed that he was at home; out in the ploughed
+fields, where he could see nothing but the furrowed brown earth,
+stretching from horizon to horizon. Up and down it moved a boy,
+with a plough and two horses. At first he thought it was his
+brother Ralph; but on coming nearer, he saw it was himself,--and
+he was full of fear for this boy. Poor Claude, he would never,
+never get away; he was going to miss everything! While he was
+struggling to speak to Claude, and warn him, he awoke.
+
+In the years when he went to school in Lincoln, he was always
+hunting for some one whom he could admire without reservations;
+some one he could envy, emulate, wish to be. Now he believed that
+even then he must have had some faint image of a man like
+Gerhardt in his mind. It was only in war times that their paths
+would have been likely to cross; or that they would have had
+anything to do together... any of the common interests that
+make men friends.
+
+ XIV
+
+Gerhardt and Claude Wheeler alighted from a taxi before the open
+gates of a square-roofed, solid-looking house, where all the
+shutters on the front were closed, and the tops of many trees
+showed above the garden wall. They crossed a paved court and
+rang at the door. An old valet admitted the young men, and took
+them through a wide hall to the salon, which opened on the
+garden. Madame and Mademoiselle would be down very soon. David
+went to one of the long windows and looked out. "They have kept
+it up, in spite of everything. It was always lovely here."
+
+The garden was spacious,--like a little park. On one side was a
+tennis court, on the other a fountain, with a pool and
+water-lilies. The north wall was hidden by ancient yews; on the
+south two rows of plane trees, cut square, made a long arbour. At
+the back of the garden there were fine old lindens. The gravel
+walks wound about beds of gorgeous autumn flowers; in the rose
+garden, small white roses were still blooming, though the leaves
+were already red.
+
+Two ladies entered the drawing-room. The mother was short, plump,
+and rosy, with strong, rather masculine features and yellowish
+white hair. The tears flashed into her eyes as David bent to kiss
+her hand, and she embraced him and touched both his cheeks with
+her lips.
+
+"Et vous, vous aussi!" she murmured, touching the coat of his
+uniform with her fingers. There was but a moment of softness. She
+gathered herself up like an old general, Claude thought, as he
+stood watching the group from the window, drew her daughter
+forward, and asked David whether he recognized the little girl
+with whom he used to play. Mademoiselle Claire was not at all
+like her mother; slender, dark, dressed in a white costume de
+tennis and an apple green hat with black ribbons, she looked very
+modern and casual and unconcerned. She was already telling David
+she was glad he had arrived early, as now they would be able to
+have a game of tennis before tea. Maman would bring her knitting
+to the garden and watch them. This last suggestion relieved
+Claude's apprehension that he might be left alone with his
+hostess. When David called him and presented him to the ladies,
+Mlle. Claire gave him a quick handshake, and said she would be
+very glad to try him out on the court as soon as she had beaten
+David. They would find tennis shoes in their room,--a collection
+of shoes, for the feet of all nations; her brother's, some that
+his Russian friend had forgotten when he hurried off to be
+mobilized, and a pair lately left by an English officer who was
+quartered on them. She and her mother would wait in the garden.
+She rang for the old valet.
+
+The Americans found themselves in a large room upstairs, where
+two modern iron beds stood out conspicuous among heavy mahogany
+bureaus and desks and dressing-tables, stuffed chairs and velvet
+carpets and dull red brocade window hangings. David went at once
+into the little dressing-room and began to array himself for the
+tennis court. Two suits of flannels and a row of soft shirts hung
+there on the wall.
+
+"Aren't you going to change?" he asked, noticing that Claude
+stood stiff and unbending by the window, looking down into the
+garden. "Why should I?" said Claude scornfully. "I don't play
+tennis. I never had a racket in my hand."
+
+"Too bad. She used to play very well, though she was only a
+youngster then." Gerhardt was regarding his legs in trousers two
+inches too short for him. "How everything has changed, and yet
+how everything is still the same! It's like coming back to places
+in dreams."
+
+"They don't give you much time to dream, I should say!" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"Fortunately!"
+
+"Explain to the girl that I don't play, will you? I'll be down
+later."
+
+"As you like."
+
+Claude stood in the window, watching Gerhardt's bare head and
+Mlle. Claire's green hat and long brown arm go bounding about
+over the court.
+
+When Gerhardt came to change before tea, he found his fellow
+officer standing before his bag, which was open, but not
+unpacked.
+
+"What's the matter? Feeling shellshock again?"
+
+"Not exactly." Claude bit his lip. "The fact is, Dave, I don't
+feel just comfortable here. Oh, the people are all right. But
+I'm out of place. I'm going to pull out and get a billet
+somewhere else, and let you visit your friends in peace. Why
+should I be here? These people don't keep a hotel."
+
+"They very nearly do, from what they've been telling me. They've
+had a string of Scotch and English quartered on them. They like
+it, too,-or have the good manners to pretend they do. Of course,
+you'll do as you like, but you'll hurt their feelings and put me
+in an awkward position. To be frank, I don't see how you can go
+away without being distinctly rude."
+
+Claude stood looking down at the contents of his bag in an
+irresolute attitude. Catching a glimpse of his face in one of the
+big mirrors, Gerhardt saw that he looked perplexed and miserable.
+His flash of temper died, and he put his hand lightly on his
+friend's shoulder.
+
+"Come on, Claude! This is too absurd. You don't even have to
+dress, thanks to your uniform,--and you don't have to talk, since
+you're not supposed to know the language. I thought you'd like
+coming here. These people have had an awfully rough time; can't
+you admire their pluck?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do! It's awkward for me, though." Claude pulled off
+his coat and began to brush his hair vigorously. "I guess I've
+always been more afraid of the French than of the Germans. It
+takes courage to stay, you understand. I want to run."
+
+"But why? What makes you want to?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! Something in the house, in the atmosphere."
+
+"Something disagreeable?"
+
+"No. Something agreeable."
+
+David laughed. "Oh, you'll get over that!"
+
+They had tea in the garden, English fashion--English tea, too,
+Mlle. Claire informed them, left by the English officers.
+
+At dinner a third member of the family was introduced, a little
+boy with a cropped head and big black eyes. He sat on Claude's
+left, quiet and shy in his velvet jacket, though he followed the
+conversation eagerly, especially when it touched upon his brother
+Rene, killed at Verdun in the second winter of the war. The
+mother and sister talked about him as if he were living, about
+his letters and his plans, and his friends at the Conservatoire
+and in the Army. Mlle. Claire told Gerhardt news of all the girl
+students he had known in Paris: how this one was singing for the
+soldiers; another, when she was nursing in a hospital which was
+bombed in an air raid, had carried twenty wounded men out of the
+burning building, one after another, on her back, like sacks of
+flour. Alice, the dancer, had gone into the English Red Cross and
+learned English. Odette had married a New Zealander, an officer
+who was said to be a cannibal; it was well known that his tribe
+had eaten two Auvergnat missionaries. There was a great deal more
+that Claude could not understand, but he got enough to see that
+for these women the war was France, the war was life, and
+everything that went into it. To be alive, to be conscious and
+have one's faculties, was to be in the war.
+
+After dinner, when they went into the salon, Madame Fleury asked
+David whether he would like to see Rene's violin again, and
+nodded to the little boy. He slipped away and returned carrying
+the case, which he placed on the table. He opened it carefully
+and took off the velvet cloth, as if this was his peculiar
+office, then handed the instrument to Gerhardt.
+
+David turned it over under the candles, telling Madame Fleury
+that he would have known it anywhere, Rene's wonderful Amati,
+almost too exquisite in tone for the concert hall, like a woman
+who is too beautiful for the stage. The family stood round and
+listened to his praise with evident satisfaction. Madame Fleury
+told him that Lucien was tres serieux with his music, that his
+master was well pleased with him, and when his hand was a little
+larger he would be allowed to play upon Rene's violin. Claude
+watched the little boy as he stood looking at the instrument in
+David's hands; in each of his big black eyes a candle flame was
+reflected, as if some steady fire were actually burning there.
+
+"What is it, Lucien?" his mother asked.
+
+"If Monsieur David would be so good as to play before I must go
+to bed--" he murmured entreatingly.
+
+"But, Lucien, I am a soldier now. I have not worked at all for
+two years. The Amati would think it had fallen into the hands of
+a Boche."
+
+Lucien smiled. "Oh, no! It is too intelligent for that. A little,
+please," and he sat down on a footstool before the sofa in
+confident anticipation.
+
+Mlle. Claire went to the piano. David frowned and began to tune
+the violin. Madame Fleury called the old servant and told him to
+light the sticks that lay in the fireplace. She took the
+arm-chair at the right of the hearth and motioned Claude to a
+seat on the left. The little boy kept his stool at the other end
+of the room. Mlle. Claire began the orchestral introduction to
+the Saint-Saens concerto.
+
+"Oh, not that!" David lifted his chin and looked at her in
+perplexity.
+
+She made no reply, but played on, her shoulders bent forward.
+Lucien drew his knees up under his chin and shivered. When the
+time came, the violin made its entrance. David had put it back
+under his chin mechanically, and the instrument broke into that
+suppressed, bitter melody.
+
+They played for a long while. At last David stopped and wiped his
+forehead. "I'm afraid I can't do anything with the third
+movement, really."
+
+"Nor can I. But that was the last thing Rene played on it, the
+night before he went away, after his last leave." She began
+again, and David followed. Madame Fleury sat with half-closed
+eyes, looking into the fire. Claude, his lips compressed, his
+hands on his knees, was watching his friend's back. The music was
+a part of his own confused emotions. He was torn between generous
+admiration, and bitter, bitter envy. What would it mean to be
+able to do anything as well as that, to have a hand capable of
+delicacy and precision and power? If he had been taught to do
+anything at all, he would not be sitting here tonight a wooden
+thing amongst living people. He felt that a man might have been
+made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it;
+tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied. If one were born into this
+world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and
+upset things, break and destroy, all one's life.
+
+Gerhardt wrapped the violin up in its cloth. The little boy
+thanked him and carried it away. Madame Fleury and her daughter
+wished their guests goodnight.
+
+David said he was warm, and suggested going into the garden to
+smoke before they went to bed. He opened one of the long windows
+and they stepped out on the terrace. Dry leaves were rustling
+down on the walks; the yew trees made a solid wall, blacker than
+the darkness. The fountain must have caught the starlight; it was
+the only shining thing,--a little clear column of twinkling
+silver. The boys strolled in silence to the end of the walk.
+
+"I guess you'll go back to your profession, all right," Claude
+remarked, in the unnatural tone in which people sometimes speak
+of things they know nothing about.
+
+"Not I. Of course, I had to play for them. Music has always been
+like a religion in this house. Listen," he put up his hand; far
+away the regular pulsation of the big guns sounded through the
+still night. "That's all that matters now. It has killed
+everything else."
+
+"I don't believe it." Claude stopped for a moment by the edge of
+the fountain, trying to collect his thoughts. "I don't believe it
+has killed anything. It has only scattered things." He glanced
+about hurriedly at the sleeping house, the sleeping garden, the
+clear, starry sky not very far overhead. "It's men like you that
+get the worst of it," he broke out. "But as for me, I never knew
+there was anything worth living for, till this war came on.
+Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition."
+
+"You'll admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the
+young," said David drily.
+
+"Maybe so; all the same..."
+
+Claude pursued the argument to himself long after they were in
+their luxurious beds and David was asleep. No battlefield or
+shattered country he had seen was as ugly as this world would be
+if men like his brother Bayliss controlled it altogether. Until
+the war broke out, he had supposed they did control it; his
+boyhood had been clouded and enervated by that belief. The
+Prussians had believed it, too, apparently. But the event had
+shown that there were a great many people left who cared about
+something else.
+
+The intervals of the distant artillery fire grew shorter, as if
+the big guns were tuning up, choking to get something out. Claude
+sat up in his bed and listened. The sound of the guns had from
+the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of
+confidence and safety; tonight he knew why. What they said was,
+that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had
+made to keep their dreams. He knew the future of the world was
+safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a
+strait-jacket,--cunning and prudence would never have it to
+themselves. Why, that little boy downstairs, with the candlelight
+in his eyes, when it came to the last cry, as they said, could
+"carry on" for ever! Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful
+and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As
+long as that was true, and now he knew it was true--he had come
+all this way to find out--he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did
+he envy David. He would give his own adventure for no man's. On
+the edge of sleep it seemed to glimmer, like the clear column of
+the fountain, like the new moon,--alluring, half-averted, the
+bright face of danger.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+When Claude and David rejoined their Battalion on the 20th of
+September, the end of the war looked as far away as ever. The
+collapse of Bulgaria was unknown to the American army, and their
+acquaintance with European affairs was so slight that this would
+have meant very little to them had they heard of it. The German
+army still held the north and east of France, and no one could
+say how much vitality was left in that sprawling body.
+
+The Battalion entrained at Arras. Lieutenant Colonel Scott had
+orders to proceed to the railhead, and then advance on foot into
+the Argonne.
+
+The cars were crowded, and the railway journey was long and
+fatiguing. They detrained at night, in the rain, at what the men
+said seemed to be the jumping off place. There was no town, and
+the railway station had been bombed the day before, by an air
+fleet out to explode artillery ammunition. A mound of brick, and
+holes full of water told where it had been. The Colonel sent
+Claude out with a patrol to find some place for the men to sleep.
+The patrol came upon a field of straw stacks, and at the end of it
+found a black farmhouse.
+
+Claude went up and hammered on the door. Silence. He kept
+hammering and calling, "The Americans are here!" A shutter
+opened. The farmer stuck his head out and demanded gruffly what
+was wanted; "What now?"
+
+Claude explained in his best French that an American battalion
+had just come in; might they sleep in his field if they did not
+destroy his stacks?
+
+"Sure," replied the farmer, and shut the window.
+
+That one word, coming out of the dark in such an unpromising
+place, had a cheering effect upon the patrol, and upon the men,
+when it was repeated to them. "Sure, eh?" They kept laughing over
+it as they beat about the field and dug into the straw. Those who
+couldn't burrow into a stack lay down in the muddy stubble. They
+were asleep before they could feel sorry for themselves.
+
+The farmer came out to offer his stable to the officers, and to
+beg them not on any account to make a light. They had never been
+bothered here by air raids until yesterday, and it must be
+because the Americans were coming and were sending in ammunition.
+
+Gerhardt, who was called to talk to him, told the farmer the
+Colonel must study his map, and for that the man took them down
+into the cellar, where the children were asleep. Before he lay
+down on the straw bed his orderly had made for him, the Colonel
+kept telling names and kilometers off on his fingers. For
+officers like Colonel Scott the names of places constituted one
+of the real hardships of the war. His mind worked slowly, but it
+was always on his job, and he could go without sleep for more
+hours together than any of his officers. Tonight he had scarcely
+lain down, when a sentinel brought in a runner with a message.
+The Colonel had to go into the cellar again to read it. He was to
+meet Colonel Harvey at Prince Joachim farm, as early as possible
+tomorrow morning. The runner would act as guide.
+
+The Colonel sat with his eye on his watch, and interrogated the
+messenger about the road and the time it would take to get over
+the ground. "What's Fritz's temper up here, generally speaking?"
+
+"That's as it happens, sir. Sometimes we nab a night patrol of a
+dozen or fifteen and send them to the rear under a one-man guard.
+Then, again, a little bunch of Heinies will fight like the devil.
+They say it depends on what part of Germany they come from; the
+Bavarians and Saxons are the bravest."
+
+Colonel Scott waited for an hour, and then went about, shaking
+his sleeping officers.
+
+"Yes, sir." Captain Maxey sprang to his feet as if he had been
+caught in a disgraceful act. He called his sergeants, and they
+began to beat the men up out of the strawstacks and puddles. In
+half an hour they were on the road.
+
+This was the Battalion's first march over really bad roads, where
+walking was a question of pulling and balancing. They were soon
+warm, at any rate; it kept them sweating. The weight of their
+equipment was continually thrown in the wrong place. Their wet
+clothing dragged them back, their packs got twisted and cut into
+their shoulders. Claude and Hicks began wondering to each other
+what it must have been like in the real mud, up about Ypres and
+Passchendaele, two years ago. Hicks had been training at Arras
+last week, where a lot of Tommies were "resting" in the same way,
+and he had tales to tell.
+
+The Battalion got to Joachim farm at nine o'clock. Colonel Harvey
+had not yet come up, but old Julius Caesar was there with his
+engineers, and he had a hot breakfast ready for them. At six
+o'clock in the evening they took the road again, marching until
+daybreak, with short rests. During the night they captured two
+Hun patrols, a bunch of thirty men. At the halt for breakfast,
+the prisoners wanted to make themselves useful, but the cook said
+they were so filthy the smell of them would make a stew go bad.
+They were herded off by themselves, a good distance from the grub
+line.
+
+It was Gerhardt, of course, who had to go over and question them.
+Claude felt sorry for the prisoners; they were so willing to tell
+all they knew, and so anxious to make themselves agreeable; began
+talking about their relatives in America, and said brightly that
+they themselves were going over at once, after the war--seemed to
+have no doubt that everybody would be glad to see them!
+
+They begged Gerhardt to be allowed to do something. Couldn't they
+carry the officers' equipment on the march? No, they were too
+buggy; they might relieve the sanitary squad. Oh, that they would
+gladly do, Herr Offizier!
+
+The plan was to get to Rupprecht trench and take it before
+nightfall. It was easy taking--empty of everything but vermin and
+human discards; a dozen crippled and sick, left for the enemy to
+dispose of, and several half-witted youths who ought to have been
+locked up in some institution. Fritz had known what it meant when
+his patrols did not come back. He had evacuated, leaving behind
+his hopelessly diseased, and as much filth as possible. The
+dugouts were fairly dry, but so crawling with vermin that the
+Americans preferred to sleep in the mud, in the open.
+
+After supper the men fell on their packs and began to lighten
+them, throwing away all that was not necessary, and much that
+was. Many of them abandoned the new overcoats that had been
+served out at the railhead; others cut off the skirts and made
+the coats into ragged jackets. Captain Maxey was horrified at
+these depredations, but the Colonel advised him to shut his eyes.
+"They've got hard going before them; let them travel light. If
+they'd rather stand the cold, they've got a right to choose."
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+The Battalion had twenty-four hours' rest at Rupprecht trench,
+and then pushed on for four days and nights, stealing trenches,
+capturing patrols, with only a few hours' sleep,--snatched by the
+roadside while their food was being prepared. They pushed hard
+after a retiring foe, and almost outran themselves. They did
+outrun their provisions; on the fourth night, when they fell
+upon a farm that had been a German Headquarters, the supplies
+that were to meet them there had not come up, and they went to
+bed supperless.
+
+This farmhouse, for some reason called by the prisoners Frau
+Hulda farm, was a nest of telephone wires; hundreds of them ran
+out through the walls, in all directions. The Colonel cut those
+he could find, and then put a guard over the old peasant who had
+been left in charge of the house, suspecting that he was in the
+pay of the enemy.
+
+At last Colonel Scott got into the Headquarters bed, large and
+lumpy,--the first one he had seen since he left Arras. He had not
+been asleep more than two hours, when a runner arrived with
+orders from the Regimental Colonel. Claude was in a bed in the
+loft, between Gerhardt and Bruger. He felt somebody shaking him,
+but resolved that he wouldn't be disturbed and went on placidly
+sleeping. Then somebody pulled his hair,--so hard that he sat up.
+Captain Maxey was standing over the bed.
+
+"Come along, boys. Orders from Regimental Headquarters. The
+Battalion is to split here. Our Company is to go on four
+kilometers tonight, and take the town of Beaufort."
+
+Claude rose. "The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey,
+and they had no supper."
+
+"That can't be helped. Tell them we are to be in Beaufort for
+breakfast."
+
+Claude and Gerhardt went out to the barn and roused Hicks and his
+pal, Dell Able. The men were asleep in dry straw, for the first
+time in ten days. They were completely worn out, lost to time and
+place. Many of them were already four thousand miles away,
+scattered among little towns and farms on the prairie. They were
+a miserable looking lot as they got together, stumbling about in
+the dark.
+
+After the Colonel had gone over the map with Captain Maxey, he
+came out and saw the Company assembled. He wasn't going with
+them, he told them, but he expected them to give a good account
+of themselves. Once in Beaufort, they would have a week's rest;
+sleep under cover, and live among people for awhile.
+
+The men took the road, some with their eyes shut, trying to make
+believe they were still asleep, trying to have their agreeable
+dreams over again, as they marched. They did not really waken up
+until the advance challenged a Hun patrol, and sent it back to
+the Colonel under a one-man guard. When they had advanced two
+kilometers, they found the bridge blown up. Claude and Hicks went
+in one direction to look for a ford, Bruger and Dell Able in the
+other, and the men lay down by the roadside and slept heavily.
+Just at dawn they reached the outskirts of the village, silent
+and still.
+
+Captain Maxey had no information as to how many Germans might be
+left in the town. They had occupied it ever since the beginning
+of the war, and had used it as a rest camp. There had never been
+any fighting there.
+
+At the first house on the road, the Captain stopped and pounded.
+No answer.
+
+"We are Americans, and must see the people of the house. If you
+don't open, we must break the door."
+
+A woman's voice called; "There is nobody here. Go away, please,
+and take your men away. I am sick."
+
+The Captain called Gerhardt, who began to explain and reassure
+through the door. It opened a little way, and an old woman in a
+nightcap peeped out. An old man hovered behind her. She gazed in
+astonishment at the officers, not understanding. These were the
+first soldiers of the Allies she had ever seen. She had heard the
+Germans talk about Americans, but thought it was one of their
+lies, she said. Once convinced, she let the officers come in and
+replied to their questions.
+
+No, there were no Boches left in her house. They had got orders
+to leave day before yesterday, and had blown up the bridge. They
+were concentrating somewhere to the east. She didn't know how
+many were still in the village, nor where they were, but she
+could tell the Captain where they had been. Triumphantly she
+brought out a map of the town--lost, she said with a meaning
+smile, by a German officer--on which the billets were marked.
+
+With this to guide them, Captain Maxey and his men went on up the
+street. They took eight prisoners in one cellar, seventeen in
+another. When the villagers saw the prisoners bunched together in
+the square, they came out of their houses and gave information.
+This cleaning up, Bert Fuller remarked, was like taking fish
+from the Platte River when the water was low, simply pailing them
+out! There was no sport in it.
+
+At nine o'clock the officers were standing together in the square
+before the church, checking off on the map the houses that had
+been searched. The men were drinking coffee, and eating fresh
+bread from a baker's shop. The square was full of people who had
+come out to see for themselves. Some believed that deliverance
+had come, and others shook their heads and held back, suspecting
+another trick. A crowd of children were running about, making
+friends with the soldiers. One little girl with yellow curls and
+a clean white dress had attached herself to Hicks, and was eating
+chocolate out of his pocket. Gerhardt was bargaining with the
+baker for another baking of bread. The sun was shining, for a
+change,--everything was looking cheerful. This village seemed to
+be swarming with girls; some of them were pretty, and all were
+friendly. The men who had looked so haggard and forlorn when dawn
+overtook them at the edge of the town, began squaring their
+shoulders and throwing out their chests. They were dirty and
+mud-plastered, but as Claude remarked to the Captain, they
+actually looked like fresh men.
+
+Suddenly a shot rang out above the chatter, and an old woman in a
+white cap screamed and tumbled over on the pavement,--rolled
+about, kicking indecorously with both hands and feet. A second
+crack,--the little girl who stood beside Hicks, eating chocolate,
+threw out her hands, ran a few steps, and fell, blood and brains
+oozing out in her yellow hair. The people began screaming and
+running. The Americans looked this way and that; ready to dash,
+but not knowing where to go. Another shot, and Captain Maxey fell
+on one knee, blushed furiously and sprang up, only to fall
+again,--ashy white, with the leg of his trousers going red.
+
+"There it is, to the left!" Hicks shouted, pointing. They saw
+now. From a closed house, some distance down a street off the
+square, smoke was coming. It hung before one of the upstairs
+windows. The Captain's orderly dragged him into a wineshop.
+Claude and David, followed by the men, ran down the street and
+broke in the door. The two officers went through the rooms on the
+first floor, while Hicks and his lot made straight for an
+enclosed stairway at the back of the house. As they reached the
+foot of the stairs, they were met by a volley of rifle shots, and
+two of the men tumbled over. Four Germans were stationed at the
+head of the steps.
+
+The Americans scarcely knew whether their bullets or their
+bayonets got to the Huns first; they were not conscious of going
+up, till they were there. When Claude and David reached the
+landing, the squad were wiping their bayonets, and four grey
+bodies were piled in the corner.
+
+Bert Fuller and Dell Able ran down the narrow hallway and threw
+open the door into the room on the street. Two shots, and Dell
+came back with his jaw shattered and the blood spouting from the
+left side of his neck. Gerhardt caught him, and tried to close
+the artery with his fingers.
+
+"How many are in there, Bert?" Claude called.
+
+"I couldn't see. Look out, sir! You can't get through that door
+more than two at a time!"
+
+The door still stood open, at the end of the corridor. Claude
+went down the steps until he could sight along the floor of the
+passage, into the front room. The shutters were closed in there,
+and the sunlight came through the slats. In the middle of the
+floor, between the door and the windows, stood a tall chest of
+drawers, with a mirror attached to the top. In the narrow space
+between the bottom of this piece of furniture and the floor, he
+could see a pair of boots. It was possible there was but one man
+in the room, shooting from behind his movable fort,--though there
+might be others hidden in the corners.
+
+"There's only one fellow in there, I guess. He's shooting from
+behind a big dresser in the middle of the room. Come on, one of
+you, we'll have to go in and get him."
+
+Willy Katz, the Austrian boy from the Omaha packing house,
+stepped up and stood beside him.
+
+"Now, Willy, we'll both go in at once; you jump to the right, and
+I to the left,--and one of us will jab him. He can't shoot both
+ways at once. Are you ready? All right--Now!"
+
+Claude thought he was taking the more dangerous position himself,
+but the German probably reasoned that the important man would be
+on the right. As the two Americans dashed through the door, he
+fired. Claude caught him in the back with his bayonet, under the
+shoulder blade, but Willy Katz had got the bullet in his brain,
+through one of his blue eyes. He fell, and never stirred. The
+German officer fired his revolver again as he went down, shouting
+in English, English with no foreign accent,
+
+"You swine, go back to Chicago!" Then he began choking with
+blood.
+
+Sergeant Hicks ran in and shot the dying man through the temples.
+Nobody stopped him.
+
+The officer was a tall man, covered with medals and orders; must
+have been very handsome. His linen and his hands were as white as
+if he were going to a ball. On the dresser were the files and
+paste and buffers with which he had kept his nails so pink and
+smooth. A ring with a ruby, beautifully cut, was on his little
+finger. Bert Fuller screwed it off and offered it to Claude. He
+shook his head. That English sentence had unnerved him. Bert held
+the ring out to Hicks, but the Sergeant threw down his revolver
+and broke out:
+
+"Think I'd touch anything of his? That beautiful little girl, and
+my buddy--He's worse than dead, Dell is, worse!" He turned his
+back on his comrades so that they wouldn't see him cry.
+
+"Can I keep it myself, sir?" Bert asked.
+
+Claude nodded. David had come in, and was opening the shutters.
+This officer, Claude was thinking, was a very different sort of
+being from the poor prisoners they had been scooping up like
+tadpoles from the cellars. One of the men picked up a gorgeous
+silk dressing gown from the bed, another pointed to a
+dressing-case full of hammered silver. Gerhardt said it was
+Russian silver; this man must have come from the Eastern front.
+Bert Fuller and Nifty Jones were going through the officer's
+pockets. Claude watched them, and thought they did about right.
+They didn't touch his medals; but his gold cigarette case, and
+the platinum watch still ticking on his wrist,--he wouldn't have
+further need for them. Around his neck, hung by a delicate chain,
+was a miniature case, and in it was a painting,--not, as Bert
+romantically hoped when he opened it, of a beautiful woman, but
+of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes.
+
+Claude studied it, wondering. "It looks like a poet, or
+something. Probably a kid brother, killed at the beginning of the
+war."
+
+Gerhardt took it and glanced at it with a disdainful expression.
+"Probably. There, let him keep it, Bert." He touched Claude on
+the shoulder to call his attention to the inlay work on the
+handle of the officer's revolver.
+
+Claude noticed that David looked at him as if he were very much
+pleased with him,--looked, indeed, as if something pleasant had
+happened in this room; where, God knew, nothing had; where, when
+they turned round, a swarm of black flies was quivering with
+greed and delight over the smears Willy Katz' body had left on
+the floor. Claude had often observed that when David had an
+interesting idea, or a strong twinge of recollection, it made
+him, for the moment, rather heartless. Just now he felt that
+Gerhardt's flash of high spirits was in some way connected with
+him. Was it because he had gone in with Willy? Had David doubted
+his nerve?
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+When the survivors of Company B are old men, and are telling over
+their good days, they will say to each other, "Oh, that week we
+spent at Beaufort!" They will close their eyes and see a little
+village on a low ridge, lost in the forest, overgrown with oak
+and chestnut and black walnut... buried in autumn colour, the
+streets drifted deep in autumn leaves, great branches interlacing
+over the roofs of the houses, wells of cool water that tastes of
+moss and tree roots. Up and down those streets they will see
+figures passing; themselves, young and brown and clean-limbed;
+and comrades, long dead, but still alive in that far-away
+village. How they will wish they could tramp again, nights on
+days in the mud and rain, to drag sore feet into their old
+billets at Beaufort! To sink into those wide feather beds and
+sleep the round of the clock while the old women washed and dried
+their clothes for them; to eat rabbit stew and pommes frites in
+the garden,--rabbit stew made with red wine and chestnuts. Oh,
+the days that are no more!
+
+As soon as Captain Maxey and the wounded men had been started on
+their long journey to the rear, carried by the prisoners, the
+whole company turned in and slept for twelve hours--all but
+Sergeant Hicks, who sat in the house off the square, beside the
+body of his chum.
+
+The next day the Americans came to life as if they were new men,
+just created in a new world. And the people of the town came to
+life... excitement, change, something to look forward to at
+last! A new flag, le drapeau etoile, floated along with the
+tricolour in the square. At sunset the soldiers stood in
+formation behind it and sang "The Star Spangled Banner" with
+uncovered heads. The old people watched them from the doorways.
+The Americans were the first to bring "Madelon" to Beaufort. The
+fact that the village had never heard this song, that the
+children stood round begging for it, "Chantez-vous la Madelon!"
+made the soldiers realize how far and how long out of the world
+these villagers had been. The German occupation was like a
+deafness which nothing pierced but their own arrogant martial
+airs.
+
+Before Claude was out of bed after his first long sleep, a runner
+arrived from Colonel Scott, notifying him that he was in charge
+of the Company until further orders. The German prisoners had
+buried their own dead and dug graves for the Americans before
+they were sent off to the rear. Claude and David were billeted at
+the edge of the town, with the woman who had given Captain Maxey
+his first information, when they marched in yesterday morning.
+Their hostess told them, at their mid-day breakfast, that the old
+dame who was shot in the square, and the little girl, were to be
+buried this afternoon. Claude decided that the Americans might as
+well have their funeral at the same time. He thought he would ask
+the priest to say a prayer at the graves, and he and David set
+off through the brilliant, rustling autumn sunshine to find the
+Cure's house. It was next the church, with a high-walled garden
+behind it. Over the bell-pull in the outer wall was a card on
+which was written, "Tirez fort."
+
+The priest himself came out to them, an old man who seemed weak
+like his doorbell. He stood in his black cap, holding his hands
+against his breast to keep them from shaking, and looked very old
+indeed,--broken, hopeless, as if he were sick of this world and
+done with it. Nowhere in France had Claude seen a face so sad as
+his. Yes, he would say a prayer. It was better to have Christian
+burial, and they were far from home, poor fellows! David asked
+him whether the German rule had been very oppressive, but the old
+man did not answer clearly, and his hands began to shake so
+uncontrollably over his cassock that they went away to spare him
+embarrassment.
+
+"He seems a little gone in the head, don't you think?" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"I suppose the war has used him up. How can he celebrate mass
+when his hands quiver so?" As they crossed the church steps,
+David touched Claude's arm and pointed into the square. "Look,
+every doughboy has a girl already! Some of them have trotted out
+fatigue caps! I supposed they'd thrown them all away!"
+
+Those who had no caps stood with their helmets under their arms,
+in attitudes of exaggerated gallantry, talking to the women,--who
+seemed all to have errands abroad. Some of them let the boys
+carry their baskets. One soldier was giving a delighted little
+girl a ride on his back.
+
+After the funeral every man in the Company found some sympathetic
+woman to talk to about his fallen comrades. All the garden
+flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put
+on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the
+bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz,
+for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.
+
+The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the
+"Pas Seul" and the "Fausse Trot." They had found an old violin in
+the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it. They danced
+every evening. Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he
+lectured his men at parade. But he realized that he might as well
+scold at the sparrows. Here was a village with several hundred
+women, and only the grandmothers had husbands. All the men were
+in the army; hadn't even been home on leave since the Germans
+first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years
+with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must
+constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable--and
+prolonged. The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam
+in the garden.
+
+"Did you know, sir," said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook
+Claude in the street after parade, "that these lovely girls had
+to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty
+pigs to eat? Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German
+sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like
+convicts! It's sure up to us to give them a good time now."
+
+One couldn't walk out of an evening without meeting loitering
+couples in the dusky streets and lanes. The boys had lost all
+their bashfulness about trying to speak French. They declared
+they could get along in France with three verbs, and all,
+happily, in the first conjugation: manger, aimer, payer,--quite
+enough! They called Beaufort "our town," and they were called
+"our Americans." They were going to come back after the war, and
+marry the girls, and put in waterworks!
+
+"Chez-moi, sir!" Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a
+bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his
+billet. "Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!"
+
+"You know, Wheeler," David remarked one morning as they were
+shaving, "I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he
+knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms."
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Aren't you going to put a stop to them?"
+
+"Not I!" Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly.
+"If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I'll
+interfere. Not otherwise. I've thought the matter over."
+
+"Oh, the girls--" David laughed softly. "Well, it's something to
+acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don't get them at home, do
+they?"
+
+When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there
+was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the
+officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the
+square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was
+dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor
+fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church
+to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.
+
+There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that
+stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves
+and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they
+stayed had told them the story of this grave.
+
+The Cure's niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in
+Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German
+officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian,
+quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and
+she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit
+up half the night in the garden with his head in his
+hands--homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise;
+never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the
+ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated
+Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the
+front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the
+slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a
+story got about that some woman met him at night in the German
+graveyard. The Germans had taken the land behind the church for
+their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Cure's garden. When
+the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie
+Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in
+the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her
+with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the
+Cure. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she
+snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She
+was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.
+
+"And the Bavarian?" Claude asked David later. The story had
+become so complicated he could not follow it.
+
+"He justified her, and promptly. He took the same pistol and shot
+himself through the temples. His orderly, stationed at the edge
+of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward
+them. He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it
+on himself. But the Kommandant couldn't believe that one of his
+officers had so much feeling. He held an enquete, dragged the
+girl's mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that
+they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German
+officer. The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and
+where they began to meet. Though he wasn't very delicate about
+the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw
+Lieutenant Muller shoot himself with his own hand, and the
+Kommandant failed to prove his case. The old Cure had known
+nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military
+court. Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child,
+and was like his daughter. He had a stroke or something, and has
+been like this ever since. The girl's friends forgave her, and
+when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take
+flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an affiche on the
+hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave. Apparently,
+nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than
+poor Marie Louise."
+
+It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely
+little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it.
+There, at the foot of the Cure's garden, was the German cemetery,
+with heavy cement crosses,--some of them with long inscriptions;
+lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant
+Muller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story
+stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he
+hadn't happened to think of before; but the same thing must have
+occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would
+never forget the Cure's hands, his dim, suffering eyes.
+
+Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the
+church, and went back to meet him.
+
+"Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be
+out here." David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.
+
+"So did I. I came out to look for him."
+
+"Oh, I expect he's found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize,
+Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven't got
+engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It's a
+good thing we're pulling out, or we'd have banns and a bunch of
+christenings to look after." "All the same," murmured Claude, "I
+like the women of this country, as far as I've seen them." While
+they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet
+scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his
+first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending
+over her sick soldier.
+
+When they walked back across the square, over the crackling
+leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing "Home, Sweet
+Home," for the last waltz.
+
+"Le dernier baiser," said David. "Well, tomorrow we'll be gone,
+and the chances are we won't come back this way."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+"With us it's always a feast or a famine," the men groaned, when
+they sat down by the road to munch dry biscuit at noon. They had
+covered eighteen miles that morning, and had still seven more to
+go. They were ordered to do the twenty-five miles in eight hours.
+Nobody had fallen out yet, but some of the boys looked pretty
+well wilted. Nifty Jones said he was done for. Sergeant Hicks was
+expostulating with the faint-hearted. He knew that if one man
+fell out, a dozen would.
+
+"If I can do it, you can. It's worse on a fat man like me. This
+is no march to make a fuss about. Why, at Arras I talked with a
+little Tommy from one of those Pal Battalions that got
+slaughtered on the Somme. His battalion marched twenty-five miles
+in six hours, in the heat of July, into certain death. They were
+all kids out of school, not a man of them over five-foot-three,
+called them the 'Bantams.' You've got to hand it to them,
+fellows."
+
+"I'll hand anything to anybody, but I can't go no farther on
+these," Jones muttered, nursing his sore feet.
+
+"Oh, you! We're going to heave you onto the only horse in the
+Company. The officers, they can walk!"
+
+When they got into Battalion lines there was food ready for them,
+but very few wanted it. They drank and lay down in the bushes.
+Claude went at once to Headquarters and found Barclay Owens, of
+the Engineers, with the Colonel, who was smoking and studying his
+maps as usual.
+
+"Glad to see you, Wheeler. Your men ought to be in good shape,
+after a week's rest. Let them sleep now. We've got to move out of
+here before midnight, to relieve two Texas battalions at Moltke
+trench. They've taken the trench with heavy casualties and are
+beat out; couldn't hold it in case of counter-attack. As it's an
+important point, the enemy will try to recover it. I want to get
+into position before daylight, so he won't know fresh troops are
+coming in. As ranking officer, you are in charge of the Company."
+
+"Very well, sir. I'll do my best."
+
+"I'm sure you will. Two machine gun teams are going up with us,
+and some time tomorrow a Missouri battalion comes up to support.
+I'd have had you over here before, but I only got my orders to
+relieve yesterday. We may have to advance under shell fire. The
+enemy has been putting a lot of big stuff over; he wants to cut
+off that trench."
+
+Claude and David got into a fresh shell hole, under the
+half-burned scrub, and fell asleep. They were awakened at dusk by
+heavy artillery fire from the north.
+
+At ten o'clock the Battalion, after a hot meal, began to advance
+through almost impassable country. The guns must have been
+pounding away at the same range for a long while; the ground was
+worked and kneaded until it was soft as dough, though no rain had
+fallen for a week. Barclay Owens and his engineers were throwing
+down a plank road to get food and the ammunition wagons across.
+Big shells were coming over at intervals of twelve minutes. The
+intervals were so regular that it was quite possible to get
+forward without damage. While B Company was pulling through the
+shell area, Colonel Scott overtook them, on foot, his orderly
+leading his horse.
+
+"Know anything about that light over there, Wheeler?" he asked.
+"Well, it oughtn't to be there. Come along and see."
+
+The light was a mere match-head down in the ground, Claude hadn't
+noticed it before. He followed the Colonel, and when they reached
+the spark they found three officers of A Company crouching in a
+shell crater, covered with a piece of sheet-iron.
+
+"Put out that light," called the Colonel sharply. "What's the
+matter, Captain Brace?"
+
+A young man rose quickly. "I'm waiting for the water, sir. It's
+coming up on mules, in petrol cases, and I don't want to get
+separated from it. The ground's so bad here the drivers are
+likely to get lost."
+
+"Don't wait more than twenty minutes. You must get up and take
+your position on time, that's the important thing, water or no
+water."
+
+As the Colonel and Claude hurried back to overtake the Company,
+five big shells screamed over them in rapid succession. "Run,
+sir," the orderly called. "They're getting on to us; they've
+shortened the range."
+
+"That light back there was just enough to give them an idea," the
+Colonel muttered.
+
+The bad ground continued for about a mile, and then the advance
+reached Headquarters, behind the eighth trench of the great
+system of trenches. It was an old farmhouse which the Germans had
+made over with reinforced concrete, lining it within and without,
+until the walls were six feet thick and almost shell-proof, like
+a pill-box. The Colonel sent his orderly to enquire about A
+Company. A young Lieutenant came to the door of the farmhouse.
+
+"A Company is ready to go into position, sir. I brought them
+up."
+
+"Where is Captain Brace, Lieutenant?"
+
+"He and both our first lieutenants were killed, Colonel. Back in
+that hole. A shell fell on them not five minutes after you were
+talking to them."
+
+"That's bad. Any other damage?"
+
+"Yes, sir. There was a cook wagon struck at the same time; the
+first one coming along Julius Caesar's new road. The driver was
+killed, and we had to shoot the horses. Captain Owens, he near
+got scalded with the stew."
+
+The Colonel called in the officers one after another and
+discussed their positions with them.
+
+"Wheeler," he said when Claude's turn came, "you know your map?
+You've noticed that sharp loop in the front trench, in H 2; the
+Boar's Head, I believe they call it. It's a sort of spear point
+that reaches out toward the enemy, and it will be a hot place to
+hold. If I put your company in there, do you think you can do the
+Battalion credit in case of a counter attack?"
+
+Claude said he thought so.
+
+"It's the nastiest bit of the line to hold, and you can tell your
+men I pay them a compliment when I put them there."
+
+"All right, sir. They'll appreciate it."
+
+The Colonel bit off the end of a fresh cigar. "They'd better, by
+thunder! If they give way and let the Hun bombers in, it will let
+down the whole line. I'll give you two teams of Georgia machine
+guns to put in that point they call the Boar's Snout. When the
+Missourians come up tomorrow, they'll go in to support you, but
+until then you'll have to take care of the loop yourselves. I've
+got an awful lot of trench to hold, and I can't spare you any
+more men."
+
+The Texas men whom the Battalion came up to relieve had been
+living for sixty hours on their iron rations, and on what they
+could pick off the dead Huns. Their supplies had been shelled on
+the way, and nothing had got through to them. When the Colonel
+took Claude and Gerhardt forward to inspect the loop that B
+Company was to hold, they found a wallow, more like a dump heap
+than a trench. The men who had taken the position were almost too
+weak to stand. All their officers had been killed, and a sergeant
+was in command. He apologized for the condition of the loop.
+
+"Sorry to leave such a mess for you to clean up, sir, but we got
+it bad in here. He's been shelling us every night since we drove
+him out. I couldn't ask the men to do anything but hold on."
+
+"That's all right. You beat it, with your boys, quick! My men
+will hand you out some grub as you go back."
+
+The battered defenders of the Boar's Head stumbled past them
+through the darkness into the communication. When the last man
+had filed out, the Colonel sent for Barclay Owens. Claude and
+David tried to feel their way about and get some idea of the
+condition the place was in. The stench was the worst they had yet
+encountered, but it was less disgusting than the flies; when they
+inadvertently touched a dead body, clouds of wet, buzzing flies
+flew up into their faces, into their eyes and nostrils. Under
+their feet the earth worked and moved as if boa constrictors were
+wriggling down there soft bodies, lightly covered. When they had
+found their way up to the Snout they came upon a pile of corpses,
+a dozen or more, thrown one on top of another like sacks of
+flour, faintly discernible in the darkness. While the two
+officers stood there, rumbling, squirting sounds began to come
+from this heap, first from one body, then from another--gases,
+swelling in the liquefying entrails of the dead men. They seemed
+to be complaining to one another; glup, glup, glup.
+
+The boys went back to the Colonel, who was standing at the mouth
+of the communication, and told him there was nothing much to
+report, except that the burying squad was needed badly.
+
+"I expect!" The Colonel shook his head. When Barclay Owens
+arrived, he asked him what could be done here before daybreak.
+The doughty engineer felt his way about as Claude and Gerhardt
+had done; they heard him coughing, and beating off the flies. But
+when he came back he seemed rather cheered than discouraged.
+
+"Give me a gang to get the casualties out, and with plenty of
+quick-lime and concrete I can make this loop all right in four
+hours, sir," he declared.
+
+"I've brought plenty of lime, but where'll you get your
+concrete?"
+
+"The Hun left about fifty sacks of it in the cellar, under your
+Headquarters. I can do better, of course, if I have a few hours
+more for my concrete to dry."
+
+"Go ahead, Captain." The Colonel told Claude and David to bring
+their men up to the communication before light, and hold them
+ready. "Give Owens' cement a chance, but don't let the enemy put
+over any surprise on you."
+
+The shelling began again at daybreak; it was hardest on the rear
+trenches and the three-mile area behind. Evidently the enemy felt
+sure of what he had in Moltke trench; he wanted to cut off
+supplies and possible reinforcements. The Missouri battalion did
+not come up that day, but before noon a runner arrived from their
+Colonel, with information that they were hiding in the wood. Five
+Boche planes had been circling over the wood since dawn,
+signalling to the enemy Headquarters back on Dauphin Ridge; the
+Missourians were sure they had avoided detection by lying close
+in the under-brush. They would come up in the night. Their
+linemen were following the runner, and Colonel Scott would be in
+telephone communication with them in half an hour.
+
+When B Company moved into the Boar's Head at one o'clock in the
+afternoon, they could truthfully say that the prevailing smell
+was now that of quick-lime. The parapet was evenly built up, the
+firing step had been partly restored, and in the Snout there were
+good emplacements for the machine guns. Certain unpleasant
+reminders were still to be found if one looked for them. In the
+Snout a large fat boot stuck stiffly from the side of the trench.
+Captain Ovens explained that the ground sounded hollow in there,
+and the boot probably led back into a dugout where a lot of Hun
+bodies were entombed together. As he was pressed for time, he had
+thought best not to look for trouble. In one of the curves of the
+loop, just at the top of the earth wall, under the sand bags, a
+dark hand reached out; the five fingers, well apart, looked like
+the swollen roots of some noxious weed. Hicks declared that this
+object was disgusting, and during the afternoon he made Nifty
+Jones and Oscar scrape down some earth and make a hump over the
+paw. But there was shelling in the night, and the earth fell
+away.
+
+"Look," said Jones when he wakened his Sergeant. "The first thing
+I seen when daylight come was his old fingers, wigglin' in the
+breeze. He wants air, Heinie does; he won't stay covered."
+
+Hicks got up and re-buried the hand himself, but when he came
+around with Claude on inspection, before breakfast, there were
+the same five fingers sticking out again. The Sergeant's forehead
+puffed up and got red, and he swore that if he found the man who
+played dirty jokes, he'd make him eat this one.
+
+The Colonel sent for Claude and Gerhardt to come to breakfast
+with him. He had been talking by telephone with the Missouri
+officers and had agreed that they should stay back in the bush
+for the present. The continual circling of planes over the wood
+seemed to indicate that the enemy was concerned about the actual
+strength of Moltke trench. It was possible their air scouts had
+seen the Texas men going back,--otherwise, why were they holding
+off?
+
+While the Colonel and the officers were at breakfast, a corporal
+brought in two pigeons he had shot at dawn. One of them carried a
+message under its wing. The Colonel unrolled a strip of paper and
+handed it to Gerhardt.
+
+"Yes, sir, it's in German, but it's code stuff. It's a German
+nursery rhyme. Those reconnoitering planes must have dropped
+scouts on our rear, and they are sending in reports. Of course,
+they can get more on us than the air men can. Here, do you want
+these birds, Dick?"
+
+The boy grinned. "You bet I do, sir! I may get a chance to fry
+'em, later on."
+
+After breakfast the Colonel went to inspect B Company in the
+Boar's Head. He was especially pleased with the advantageous
+placing of the machine guns in the Snout. "I expect you'll have a
+quiet day," he said to the men, "but I wouldn't like to promise
+you a quiet night. You'll have to be very steady in here; if
+Fritz takes this loop, he's got us, you understand."
+
+They had, indeed, a quiet day. Some of the men played cards, and
+Oscar read his Bible. The night, too, began well. But at four
+fifteen everybody was roused by the gas alarm. Gas shells came
+over for exactly half an hour. Then the shrapnel broke loose;
+not the long, whizzing scream of solitary shells, but drum-fire,
+continuous and deafening. A hundred electrical storms seemed
+raging at once, in the air and on the ground. Balls of fire were
+rolling all over the place. The range was a little long for the
+Boar's Head, they were not getting the worst of it; but thirty
+yards back everything was torn to pieces. Claude didn't see how
+anybody could be left alive back there. A single twister had
+killed six of his men at the rear of the loop, where they were
+shovelling to keep the communication clear. Captain Owns' neat
+earthworks were being badly pounded.
+
+Claude and Gerhardt were consulting together when the smoke and
+darkness began to take on the livid colour that announced the
+coming of daybreak. A messenger ran in from the Colonel; the
+Missourians had not yet come up, and his telephone communication
+with them was cut off. He was afraid they had got lost in the
+bombardment. "The Colonel says you are to send two men back to
+bring them up; two men who can take charge if they're stampeded."
+
+When the messenger shouted this order, Gerhardt and Hicks looked
+at each other quickly, and volunteered to go.
+
+Claude hesitated. Hicks and David waited for no further consent;
+they ran down the communication and disappeared.
+
+Claude stood in the smoke that was slowly growing greyer, and
+looked after them with the deepest stab of despair he had ever
+known. Only a man who was bewildered and unfit to be in command
+of other men would have let his best friend and his best officer
+take such a risk. He was standing there under shelter, and his
+two friends were going back through that curtain of flying steel,
+toward the square from which the lost battalion had last
+reported. If he knew them, they would not lose time following the
+maze of trenches; they were probably even now out on the open,
+running straight through the enemy barrage, vaulting trench tops.
+
+Claude turned and went back into the loop. Well, whatever
+happened, he had worked with brave men. It was worth having lived
+in this world to have known such men. Soldiers, when they were in
+a tight place, often made secret propositions to God; and now he
+found himself offering terms: If They would see to it that David
+came back, They could take the price out of him. He would pay.
+Did They understand?
+
+An hour dragged by. Hard on the nerves, waiting. Up the
+communication came a train with ammunition and coffee for the
+loop. The men thought Headquarters did pretty well to get hot
+food to them through that barrage. A message came up in the
+Colonel's hand:
+
+"Be ready when the barrage stops."
+
+Claude took this up and showed it to the machine gunners in the
+Snout. Turning back, he ran into Hicks, stripped to his shirt and
+trousers, as wet as if he had come out of the river, and splashed
+with blood. His hand was wrapped up in a rag. He put his mouth to
+Claude's ear and shouted: "We found them. They were lost. They're
+coming. Send word to the Colonel."
+
+"Where's Gerhardt?"
+
+"He's coming; bringing them up. God, it's stopped!"
+
+The bombardment ceased with a suddenness that was stupefying. The
+men in the loop gasped and crouched as if they were falling from
+a height. The air, rolling black with smoke and stifling with the
+smell of gases and burning powder, was still as death. The
+silence was like a heavy anaesthetic.
+
+Claude ran back to the Snout to see that the gun teams were
+ready. "Wake up, boys! You know why we're here!"
+
+Bert Fuller, who was up in the look-out, dropped back into the
+trench beside him. "They're coming, sir."
+
+Claude gave the signal to the machine guns. Fire opened all along
+the loop. In a moment a breeze sprang up, and the heavy smoke
+clouds drifted to the rear. Mounting to the firestep, he peered
+over. The enemy was coming on eight deep, on the left of the
+Boar's Head, in long, waving lines that reached out toward the
+main trench. Suddenly the advance was checked. The files of
+running men dropped behind a wrinkle in the earth fifty yards
+forward and did not instantly re-appear. It struck Claude that
+they were waiting for something; he ought to be clever enough to
+know for what, but he was not. The Colonel's line man came up to
+him.
+
+"Headquarters has a runner from the Missourians. They'll be up in
+twenty minutes. The Colonel will put them in here at once. Till
+then you must manage to hold."
+
+"We'll hold. Fritz is behaving queerly. I don't understand his
+tactics..."
+
+While he was speaking, everything was explained. The Boar's Snout
+spread apart with an explosion that split the earth, and went up
+in a volcano of smoke and flame. Claude and the Colonel's
+messenger were thrown on their faces. When they got to their
+feet, the Snout was a smoking crater full of dead and dying men.
+The Georgia gun teams were gone.
+
+It was for this that the Hun advance had been waiting behind the
+ridge. The mine under the Snout had been made long ago, probably,
+on a venture, when the Hun held Moltke trench for months without
+molestation. During the last twenty-four hours they had been
+getting their explosives in, reasoning that the strongest
+garrison would be placed there.
+
+Here they were, coming on the run. It was up to the rifles. The
+men who had been knocked down by the shock were all on their feet
+again. They looked at their officer questioningly, as if the
+whole situation had changed. Claude felt they were going soft
+under his eyes. In a moment the Hun bombers would be in on them,
+and they would break. He ran along the trench, pointing over the
+sand bags and shouting, "It's up to you, it's up to you!"
+
+The rifles recovered themselves and began firing, but Claude felt
+they were spongy and uncertain, that their minds were already on
+the way to the rear. If they did anything, it must be quick, and
+their gun-work must be accurate. Nothing but a withering fire
+could check.... He sprang to the firestep and then out on the
+parapet. Something instantaneous happened; he had his men in
+hand.
+
+"Steady, steady!" He called the range to the rifle teams behind
+him, and he could see the fire take effect. All along the Hun
+lines men were stumbling and falling. They swerved a little to
+the left; he called the rifles to follow, directing them with his
+voice and with his hands. It was not only that from here he could
+correct the range and direct the fire; the men behind him had
+become like rock. That line of faces below; Hicks, Jones, Fuller,
+Anderson, Oscar.... Their eyes never left him. With these men
+he could do anything.
+
+The right of the Hun line swerved out, not more than twenty yards
+from the battered Snout, trying to run to shelter under that pile
+of debris and human bodies. A quick concentration of rifle fire
+depressed it, and the swell came out again toward the left.
+Claude's appearance on the parapet had attracted no attention
+from the enemy at first, but now the bullets began popping about
+him; two rattled on his tin hat, one caught him in the shoulder.
+The blood dripped down his coat, but he felt no weakness. He felt
+only one thing; that he commanded wonderful men. When David came
+up with the supports he might find them dead, but he would find
+them all there. They were there to stay until they were carried
+out to be buried. They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.
+
+The Colonel's twenty minutes must be almost up, he thought. He
+couldn't take his eyes from the front line long enough to look at
+his wrist watch.... The men behind him saw Claude sway as if
+he had lost his balance and were trying to recover it. Then he
+plunged, face down, outside the parapet. Hicks caught his foot
+and pulled him back. At the same moment the Missourians ran
+yelling up the communication. They threw their machine guns up on
+the sand bags and went into action without an unnecessary motion.
+
+Hicks and Bert Fuller and Oscar carried Claude forward toward the
+Snout, out of the way of the supports that were pouring in. He
+was not bleeding very much. He smiled at them as if he were going
+to speak, but there was a weak blankness in his eyes. Bert tore
+his shirt open; three clean bullet holes. By the time they looked
+at him again, the smile had gone... the look that was Claude
+had faded. Hicks wiped the sweat and smoke from his officer's
+face. "Thank God I never told him," he said. "Thank God for
+that!"
+
+Bert and Oscar knew what Hicks meant. Gerhardt had been blown to
+pieces at his side when they dashed back through the enemy
+barrage to find the Missourians. They were running together
+across the open, not able to see much for smoke. They bumped into
+a section of wire entanglement, left above an old trench. David
+cut round to the right, waving Hicks to follow him. The two were
+not ten yards apart when the shell struck. Then Sergeant Hicks
+ran on alone.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The sun is sinking low, a transport is steaming slowly up the
+narrows with the tide. The decks are covered with brown men. They
+cluster over the superstructure like bees in swarming time. Their
+attitudes are relaxed and lounging. Some look thoughtful, some
+well contented, some are melancholy, and many are indifferent, as
+they watch the shore approaching. They are not the same men who
+went away.
+
+Sergeant Hicks was standing in the stern, smoking, reflecting,
+watching the twinkle of the red sunset upon the cloudy water. It
+is more than a year since he sailed for France. The world has
+changed in that time, and so has he.
+
+Bert Fuller elbowed his way up to the Sergeant. "The doctor says
+Colonel Maxey is dying, He won't live to get off the boat, much
+less to ride in the parade in New York tomorrow."
+
+Hicks shrugged, as if Maxey's pneumonia were no affair of his.
+"Well, we should worry! We've left better officers than him over
+there."
+
+"I'm not saying we haven't. But it seems too bad, when he's so
+strong for fuss and feathers. He's been sending cables about that
+parade for weeks."
+
+"Huh!" Hicks elevated his eyebrows and glanced sidewise in
+disdain. Presently he sputtered, squinting down at the glittering
+water, "Colonel Maxey, anyhow! Colonel for what Claude and
+Gerhardt did, I guess!" Hicks and Bert Fuller have been helping
+to keep the noble fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. They have always
+hung together and are usually quarrelling and grumbling at each
+other when they are off duty. Still, they hang together. They are
+the last of their group. Nifty Jones and Oscar, God only knows
+why, have gone on to the Black Sea.
+
+During the year they were in the Rhine valley, Bert and Hicks
+were separated only once, and that was when Hicks got a two
+weeks' leave and, by dint of persevering and fatiguing travel,
+went to Venice. He had no proper passport, and the consuls and
+officials to whom he had appealed in his difficulties begged him
+to content himself with something nearer. But he said he was
+going to Venice because he had always heard about it. Bert Fuller
+was glad to welcome him back to Coblentz, and gave a "wine party"
+to celebrate his return. They expect to keep an eye on each
+other. Though Bert lives on the Platte and Hicks on the Big Blue,
+the automobile roads between those two rivers are excellent.
+
+Bert is the same sweet-tempered boy he was when he left his
+mother's kitchen; his gravest troubles have been frequent
+betrothals. But Hicks' round, chubby face has taken on a slightly
+cynical expression,--a look quite out of place there. The chances
+of war have hurt his feelings... not that he ever wanted
+anything for himself. The way in which glittering honours bump
+down upon the wrong heads in the army, and palms and crosses
+blossom on the wrong breasts, has, as he says, thrown his compass
+off a few points.
+
+What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and
+repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all
+that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with
+"Hicks and Able" over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves
+and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for
+the rest of his life.
+
+As the transport enters the North River, sirens and steam
+whistles all along the water front begin to blow their shrill
+salute to the returning soldiers. The men square their shoulders
+and smile knowingly at one another; some of them look a little
+bored. Hicks slowly lights a cigarette and regards the end of it
+with an expression which will puzzle his friends when he gets
+home.
+
+By the banks of Lovely Creek, where it began, Claude Wheeler's
+story still goes on. To the two old women who work together in
+the farmhouse, the thought of him is always there, beyond
+everything else, at the farthest edge of consciousness, like the
+evening sun on the horizon.
+
+ Mrs. Wheeler got the word of his death one afternoon in the
+sitting-room, the room in which he had bade her good-bye. She was
+reading when the telephone rang.
+
+"Is this the Wheeler farm? This is the telegraph office at
+Frankfort. We have a message from the War Department,--" the
+voice hesitated. "Isn't Mr. Wheeler there?"
+
+"No, but you can read the message to me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said, "Thank you," and hung up the receiver. She
+felt her way softly to her chair. She had an hour alone, when
+there was nothing but him in the room,--but him and the map
+there, which was the end of his road. Somewhere among those
+perplexing names, he had found his place.
+
+Claude's letters kept coming for weeks afterward; then came the
+letters from his comrades and his Colonel to tell her all.
+
+In the dark months that followed, when human nature looked to her
+uglier than it had ever done before, those letters were Mrs.
+Wheeler's comfort. As she read the newspapers, she used to think
+about the passage of the Red Sea, in the Bible; it seemed as if
+the flood of meanness and greed had been held back just long
+enough for the boys to go over, and then swept down and engulfed
+everything that was left at home. When she can see nothing that
+has come of it all but evil, she reads Claude's letters over
+again and reassures herself; for him the call was clear, the
+cause was glorious. Never a doubt stained his bright faith. She
+divines so much that he did not write. She knows what to read
+into those short flashes of enthusiasm; how fully he must have
+found his life before he could let himself go so far--he, who was
+so afraid of being fooled! He died believing his own country
+better than it is, and France better than any country can ever
+be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with. Perhaps it was
+as well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would
+have dreaded the awakening,--she sometimes even doubts whether he
+could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment. One
+by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership,
+leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose
+deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood
+of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers,--one by
+one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure
+lodging houses, some in their office, where they seemed to be
+carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a
+vessel's side and disappear into the sea. When Claude's mother
+hears of these things, she shudders and presses her hands tight
+over her breast, as if she had him there. She feels as if God had
+saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible end. For as
+she reads, she thinks those slayers of themselves were all so
+like him; they were the ones who had hoped extravagantly,--who in
+order to do what they did had to hope extravagantly, and to
+believe passionately. And they found they had hoped and believed
+too much. But one she knew, who could ill bear disillusion...
+safe, safe.
+
+Mahailey, when they are alone, sometimes addresses Mrs. Wheeler
+as "Mudder"; "Now, Mudder, you go upstairs an' lay down an' rest
+yourself." Mrs. Wheeler knows that then she is thinking of
+Claude, is speaking for Claude. As they are working at the table
+or bending over the oven, something reminds them of him, and they
+think of him together, like one person: Mahailey will pat her
+back and say, "Never you mind, Mudder; you'll see your boy up
+yonder." Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near,--but
+Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces,
+and for her He is nearer still,--directly overhead, not so very
+far above the kitchen stove.
+
+
+
+
+
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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Ours, by Willa Cather**
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+
+
+
+
+One of Ours
+
+by Willa Cather
+
+
+
+
+Book One: On Lovely Creek
+
+I.
+
+Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and
+vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half
+of the same bed.
+
+"Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why, aren't we going to the circus today?"
+
+"Car's all right. Let me alone." The boy turned over and pulled
+the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was
+beginning to come through the curtainless windows.
+
+Claude rose and dressed,--a simple operation which took very
+little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way
+in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's
+comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom,
+which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had
+washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed
+with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not
+dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to
+the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head
+in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.
+
+Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full
+of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at
+him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were
+alone.
+
+"What air you gittin' up for a-ready, boy? You goin' to the
+circus before breakfast? Don't you make no noise, else you'll
+have 'em all down here before I git my fire a-goin'."
+
+"All right, Mahailey." Claude caught up his cap and ran out of
+doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over
+the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light
+poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly,
+timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a
+sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the
+south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go
+to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort
+of day that must, somehow, turn out well.
+
+Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to
+the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted
+wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men,
+Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock.
+Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude
+wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to
+them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and
+dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a
+grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one
+of the horses.
+
+Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude
+and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man
+Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a
+board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of
+her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the
+cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for
+weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg
+swollen until it looked like an elephant's. She would have to
+stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she
+grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been
+discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a
+credit to him.
+
+Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell.
+After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the
+barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating
+quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot
+lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck
+and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him
+mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her
+upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being
+petted. She let him touch her foot and examine her leg.
+
+When Claude reached the kitchen, his mother was sitting at one
+end of the breakfast table, pouring weak coffee, his brother and
+Dan and Jerry were in their chairs, and Mahailey was baking
+griddle cakes at the stove. A moment later Mr. Wheeler came down
+the enclosed stairway and walked the length of the table to his
+own place. He was a very large man, taller and broader than any
+of his neighbours. He seldom wore a coat in summer, and his
+rumpled shirt bulged out carelessly over the belt of his
+trousers. His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle
+tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for
+good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical
+composure. Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler
+flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak
+with complete seriousness. He kept up his easy-going, jocular
+affability even with his own family.
+
+As soon as he was seated, Mr. Wheeler reached for the two-pint
+sugar bowl and began to pour sugar into his coffee. Ralph asked
+him if he were going to the circus. Mr. Wheeler winked.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if I happened in town sometime before the
+elephants get away." He spoke very deliberately, with a
+State-of-Maine drawl, and his voice was smooth and agreeable.
+"You boys better start in early, though. You can take the wagon
+and the mules, and load in the cowhides. The butcher has agreed
+to take them."
+
+Claude put down his knife. "Can't we have the car? I've washed it
+on purpose."
+
+"And what about Dan and Jerry? They want to see the circus just
+as much as you do, and I want the hides should go in; they're
+bringing a good price now. I don't mind about your washing the
+car; mud preserves the paint, they say, but it'll be all right
+this time, Claude."
+
+The hired men haw-hawed and Ralph giggled. Claude's freckled face
+got very red. The pancake grew stiff and heavy in his mouth and
+was hard to swallow. His father knew he hated to drive the mules
+to town, and knew how he hated to go anywhere with Dan and Jerry.
+As for the hides, they were the skins of four steers that had
+perished in the blizzard last winter through the wanton
+carelessness of these same hired men, and the price they would
+bring would not half pay for the time his father had spent in
+stripping and curing them. They had lain in a shed loft all
+summer, and the wagon had been to town a dozen times. But today,
+when he wanted to go to Frankfort clean and care-free, he must
+take these stinking hides and two coarse-mouthed men, and drive a
+pair of mules that always brayed and balked and behaved
+ridiculously in a crowd. Probably his father had looked out of
+the window and seen him washing the car, and had put this up on
+him while he dressed. It was like his father's idea of a joke.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at Claude sympathetically, feeling that he
+was disappointed. Perhaps she, too, suspected a joke. She had
+learned that humour might wear almost any guise.
+
+When Claude started for the barn after breakfast, she came
+running down the path, calling to him faintly,--hurrying always
+made her short of breath. Overtaking him, she looked up with
+solicitude, shading her eyes with her delicately formed hand. "If
+you want I should do up your linen coat, Claude, I can iron it
+while you're hitching," she said wistfully.
+
+Claude stood kicking at a bunch of mottled feathers that had once
+been a young chicken. His shoulders were drawn high, his mother
+saw, and his figure suggested energy and determined self-control.
+
+"You needn't mind, mother." He spoke rapidly, muttering his
+words. "I'd better wear my old clothes if I have to take the
+hides. They're greasy, and in the sun they'll smell worse than
+fertilizer."
+
+"The men can handle the hides, I should think. Wouldn't you feel
+better in town to be dressed?" She was still blinking up at him.
+
+"Don't bother about it. Put me out a clean coloured shirt, if you
+want to. That's all right."
+
+He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the
+path up to the house. She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear
+mother! He guessed if she could stand having these men about,
+could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!
+
+Half an hour after the wagon left, Nat Wheeler put on an alpaca
+coat and went off in the rattling buckboard in which, though he
+kept two automobiles, he still drove about the country. He said
+nothing to his wife; it was her business to guess whether or not
+he would be home for dinner. She and Mahailey could have a good
+time scrubbing and sweeping all day, with no men around to bother
+them.
+
+
+
+There were few days in the year when Wheeler did not drive off
+somewhere; to an auction sale, or a political convention, or a
+meeting of the Farmers' Telephone directors;--to see how his
+neighbours were getting on with their work, if there was nothing
+else to look after. He preferred his buckboard to a car because
+it was light, went easily over heavy or rough roads, and was so
+rickety that he never felt he must suggest his wife's
+accompanying him. Besides he could see the country better when he
+didn't have to keep his mind on the road. He had come to this
+part of Nebraska when the Indians and the buffalo were still
+about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone, had
+watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
+where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
+settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young
+fellows the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper;
+until he felt a little as if all this were his own enterprise.
+The changes, not only those the years made, but those the seasons
+made, were interesting to him.
+
+People recognized Nat Wheeler and his cart a mile away. He sat
+massive and comfortable, weighing down one end of the slanting
+seat, his driving hand lying on his knee. Even his German
+neighbours, the Yoeders, who hated to stop work for a quarter of
+an hour on any account, were glad to see him coming. The
+merchants in the little towns about the county missed him if he
+didn't drop in once a week or so. He was active in politics;
+never ran for an office himself, but often took up the cause of a
+friend and conducted his campaign for him.
+
+The French saying, "Joy of the street, sorrow of the home," was
+exemplified in Mr. Wheeler, though not at all in the French way.
+His own affairs were of secondary importance to him. In the early
+days he had homesteaded and bought and leased enough land to make
+him rich. Now he had only to rent it out to good farmers who
+liked to work--he didn't, and of that he made no secret. When he
+was at home, he usually sat upstairs in the living room, reading
+newspapers. He subscribed for a dozen or more--the list included
+a weekly devoted to scandal--and he was well informed about what
+was going on in the world. He had magnificent health, and illness
+in himself or in other people struck him as humorous. To be sure,
+he never suffered from anything more perplexing than toothache or
+boils, or an occasional bilious attack.
+
+Wheeler gave liberally to churches and charities, was always
+ready to lend money or machinery to a neighbour who was short of
+anything. He liked to tease and shock diffident people, and had
+an inexhaustible supply of funny stories. Everybody marveled that
+he got on so well with his oldest son, Bayliss Wheeler. Not that
+Bayliss was exactly diffident, but he was a narrow gauge fellow,
+the sort of prudent young man one wouldn't expect Nat Wheeler to
+like.
+
+Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he
+was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial
+success. Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son's business acumen.
+At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a
+week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about
+his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
+came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
+still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
+virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
+everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
+Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
+wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
+together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
+good time were so different.
+
+Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
+stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
+sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
+always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
+buckboard, and Bayliss.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
+High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
+was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
+reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
+There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
+sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
+and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
+them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
+done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
+see the man at once, as if he hadn't hitherto appreciated him.
+
+There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude's father. He
+liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
+immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often
+tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never
+loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,--as
+when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat
+down on the sticky fly-paper,--he was not boisterous. He was a
+jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not
+thin-skinned.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope
+went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.
+Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial
+companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the
+crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr.
+Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head
+above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was
+setting up a shell-game. To avoid his father, Claude turned and
+went in to his brother's store. The two big show windows were
+full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to
+watch the parade. Bayliss was seated in the little glass cage
+where he did his writing and bookkeeping. He nodded at Claude
+from his desk.
+
+"Hello," said Claude, bustling in as if he were in a great hurry.
+"Have you seen Ernest Havel? I thought I might find him in here."
+
+Bayliss swung round in his swivel chair to return a plough
+catalogue to the shelf. "What would he be in here for? Better
+look for him in the saloon." Nobody could put meaner insinuations
+into a slow, dry remark than Bayliss.
+
+Claude's cheeks flamed with anger. As he turned away, he noticed
+something unusual about his brother's face, but he wasn't going
+to give him the satisfaction of asking him how he had got a black
+eye. Ernest Havel was a Bohemian, and he usually drank a glass of
+beer when he came to town; but he was sober and thoughtful beyond
+the wont of young men. From Bayliss' drawl one might have
+supposed that the boy was a drunken loafer.
+
+At that very moment Claude saw his friend on the other side of
+the street, following the wagon of trained dogs that brought up
+the rear of the procession. He ran across, through a crowd of
+shouting youngsters, and caught Ernest by the arm.
+
+"Hello, where are you off to?"
+
+"I'm going to eat my lunch before show-time. I left my wagon out
+by the pumping station, on the creek. What about you?"
+
+"I've got no program. Can I go along?"
+
+Ernest smiled. "I expect. I've got enough lunch for two."
+
+"Yes, I know. You always have. I'll join you later."
+
+Claude would have liked to take Ernest to the hotel for dinner.
+He had more than enough money in his pockets; and his father was
+a rich farmer. In the Wheeler family a new thrasher or a new
+automobile was ordered without a question, but it was considered
+extravagant to go to a hotel for dinner. If his father or Bayliss
+heard that he had been there-and Bayliss heard everything they
+would say he was putting on airs, and would get back at him. He
+tried to excuse his cowardice to himself by saying that he was
+dirty and smelled of the hides; but in his heart he knew that he
+did not ask Ernest to go to the hotel with him because he had
+been so brought up that it would be difficult for him to do this
+simple thing. He made some purchases at the fruit stand and the
+cigar counter, and then hurried out along the dusty road toward
+the pumping station. Ernest's wagon was standing under the shade
+of some willow trees, on a little sandy bottom half enclosed by a
+loop of the creek which curved like a horseshoe. Claude threw
+himself on the sand beside the stream and wiped the dust from his
+hot face. He felt he had now closed the door on his disagreeable
+morning.
+
+Ernest produced his lunch basket.
+
+"I got a couple bottles of beer cooling in the creek," he said.
+"I knew you wouldn't want to go in a saloon."
+
+"Oh, forget it!" Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of
+pickles. He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into
+a saloon, and his friend knew he was afraid.
+
+After lunch, Claude tools out a handful of good cigars he had
+bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was
+pleased. He lit one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with
+an air of pride and turning it around between his fingers.
+
+The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching
+their oats. The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a
+cool, persuasive sound. Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their
+coats under their heads, talking very little. Occasionally a
+motor dashed along the road toward town, and a cloud of dust and
+a smell of gasoline blew in over the creek bottom; but for the
+most part the silence of the warm, lazy summer noon was
+undisturbed. Claude could usually forget his own vexations and
+chagrins when he was with Ernest. The Bohemian boy was never
+uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once. He was
+simple and direct. He had a number of impersonal preoccupations;
+was interested in politics and history and in new inventions.
+Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental
+liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain. After he
+had talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go
+right on the farm seemed less important. Claude's mother was
+almost as fond of Ernest as he was himself. When the two boys
+were going to high school, Ernest often came over in the evening
+to study with Claude, and while they worked at the long kitchen
+table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning and sat near them, helping
+them with their Latin and algebra. Even old Mahailey was
+enlightened by their words of wisdom.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived
+from the Old Country. His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to
+Frankfort to meet him, and was to stop on the way home and leave
+some groceries for the Wheelers. The train from the east was
+late; it was ten o'clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in
+the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon rumble across the little bridge
+over Lovely Creek. She opened the outside door, and presently Joe
+came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of
+flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down to the cellar
+for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy,
+short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
+valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had
+fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother
+gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his
+pack. He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light,
+looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.
+What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought . . . . She
+went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and
+saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her,
+"Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"
+
+Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this
+country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and
+hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of
+them. That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at
+each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good
+friends.
+
+After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy
+frame of mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson,
+the oldest son of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the
+three sat together for the performance. Leonard said he had come
+to town alone in his car; wouldn't Claude ride out with him?
+Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who
+didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.
+
+Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big
+hands and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of
+energy. He and his father and two brothers not only worked their
+own big farm, but rented a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They
+were master farmers. If there was a dry summer and a failure,
+Leonard only laughed and stretched his long arms, and put in a
+bigger crop next year. Claude was always a little reserved with
+Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather contemptuous of
+the hap-hazard way in which things were done on the Wheeler
+place, and thought his going to college a waste of money. Leonard
+had not even gone through the Frankfort High School, and he was
+already a more successful man than Claude was ever likely to be.
+Leonard did think these things, but he was fond of Claude, all
+the same.
+
+At sunset the car was speeding over a fine stretch of smooth road
+across the level country that lay between Frankfort and the
+rougher land along Lovely Creek. Leonard's attention was largely
+given up to admiring the faultless behaviour of his engine.
+Presently he chuckled to himself and turned to Claude.
+
+"I wonder if you'd take it all right if I told you a joke on
+Bayliss?"
+
+"I expect I would." Claude's tone was not at all eager.
+
+"You saw Bayliss today? Notice anything queer about him, one eye
+a little off colour? Did he tell you how he got it?"
+
+"No. I didn't ask him."
+
+"Just as well. A lot of people did ask him, though, and he said
+he was hunting around his place for something in the dark and ran
+into a reaper. Well, I'm the reaper!"
+
+Claude looked interested. "You mean to say Bayliss was in a
+fight?"
+
+Leonard laughed. "Lord, no! Don't you know Bayliss? I went in
+there to pay a bill yesterday, and Susie Gray and another girl
+came in to sell tickets for the firemen's dinner. An advance man
+for this circus was hanging around, and he began talking a little
+smart,- nothing rough, but the way such fellows will. The girls
+handed it back to him, and sold him three tickets and shut him
+up. I couldn't see how Susie thought so quick what to say. The
+minute the girls went out Bayliss started knocking them; said all
+the country girls were getting too fresh and knew more than they
+ought to about managing sporty men and right there I reached out
+and handed him one. I hit harder than I meant to. I meant to slap
+him, not to give him a black eye. But you can't always regulate
+things, and I was hot all over. I waited for him to come back at
+me. I'm bigger than he is, and I wanted to give him satisfaction.
+Well, sir, he never moved a muscle! He stood there getting redder
+and redder, and his eyes watered. I don't say he cried, but his
+eyes watered. 'All right, Bayliss,' said I. 'Slow with your
+fists, if that's your principle; but slow with your tongue,
+too,--especially when the parties mentioned aren't present.' "
+
+"Bayliss will never get over that," was Claude's only comment.
+
+"He don't have to!" Leonard threw up his head. "I'm a good
+customer; he can like it or lump it, till the price of binding
+twine goes down!"
+
+For the next few minutes the driver was occupied with trying to
+get up a long, rough hill on high gear. Sometimes he could 
+make
 that hill, and sometimes he couldn't, and he was not able to
+account for the difference. After he pulled the second lever with
+some disgust and let the car amble on as she would, he noticed
+that his companion was disconcerted.
+
+"I'll tell you what, Leonard," Claude spoke in a strained voice,
+"I think the fair thing for you to do is to get out here by the
+road and give me a chance."
+
+Leonard swung his steering wheel savagely to pass a wagon on the
+down side of the hill. "What the devil are you talking about,
+boy?"
+
+"You think you've got our measure all right, but you ought to
+give me a chance first."
+
+Leonard looked down in amazement at his own big brown hands,
+lying on the wheel. "You mortal fool kid, what would I be telling
+you all this for, if I didn't know you were another breed of
+cats? I never thought you got on too well with Bayliss yourself."
+
+"I don't, but I won't have you thinking you can slap the men in
+my family whenever you feel like it." Claude knew that his
+explanation sounded foolish, and his voice, in spite of all he
+could do, was weak and angry.
+
+Young Leonard Dawson saw he had hurt the boy's feelings. "Lord,
+Claude, I know you're a fighter. Bayliss never was. I went to
+school with him."
+
+The ride ended amicably, but Claude wouldn't let Leonard take him
+home. He jumped out of the car with a curt goodnight, and ran
+across the dusky fields toward the light that shore from the
+house on the hill. At the little bridge over the creek, he
+stopped to get his breath and to be sure that he was outwardly
+composed before he went in to see his mother.
+
+"Ran against a reaper in the dark!" he muttered aloud, clenching
+his fist.
+
+Listening to the deep singing of the frogs, and to the distant
+barking of the dogs up at the house, he grew calmer.
+Nevertheless, he wondered why it was that one had sometimes to
+feel responsible for the behaviour of people whose natures were
+wholly antipathetic to one's own.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was standing
+at his dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade
+darker than his hair and not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and
+long lashes were a pale corn-colour--made his blue eyes seem
+lighter than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness
+and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the
+sort of looking boy he didn't want to be. He especially hated his
+head,--so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and
+uncompromisingly square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name
+was another source of humiliation. Claude: it was a "chump" name,
+like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country
+schools there was always a red-headed, warty-handed, runny-nosed
+little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he took for
+granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a
+farmer boy might be supposed to have. Unfortunately he had none
+of his father's physical repose, and his strength often asserted
+itself inharmoniously. The storms that went on in his mind
+sometimes made him rise, or sit down, or lift something, more
+violently than there was any apparent reason for his doing.
+
+The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not
+get up until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the
+smell of doughnuts frying. This morning Ralph rolled out of bed
+at the last minute and callously put on his clean underwear
+without taking a bath. This cost him not one regret, though he
+took time to polish his new ox-blood shoes tenderly with a pocket
+handkerchief. He reached the table when all the others were half
+through breakfast, and made his peace by genially asking his
+mother if she didn't want him to drive her to church in the car.
+
+"I'd like to go if I can get the work done in time," she said,
+doubtfully glancing at the clock.
+
+"Can't Mahailey tend to things for you this morning?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "Everything but the separator, she can.
+But she can't fit all the parts together. It's a good deal of
+work, you know."
+
+"Now, Mother," said Ralph good-humouredly, as he emptied the
+syrup pitcher over his cakes, "you're prejudiced. Nobody ever
+thinks of skimming milk now-a-days. Every up-to-date farmer uses
+a separator."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler's pale eyes twinkled. "Mahailey and I will never be
+quite up-todate, Ralph. We're old-fashioned, and I don't know but
+you'd better let us be. I could see the advantage of a separator
+if we milked half-a-dozen cows. It's a very ingenious machine.
+But it's a great deal more work to scald it and fit it together
+than it was to take care of the milk in the old way."
+
+"It won't be when you get used to it," Ralph assured her. He was
+the chief mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm
+implements and the automobiles did not give him enough to do, he
+went to town and bought machines for the house. As soon as
+Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to keep
+up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still
+newer one. The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to
+use, and patent flat-irons and oil-stoves drove her wild.
+
+Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald
+the separator while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working
+at it when his brother came in from the garage to wash his hands.
+
+"You really oughtn't to load mother up with things like this,
+Ralph," he exclaimed fretfully. "Did you ever try washing this
+damned thing yourself ?"
+
+"Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think
+mother could."
+
+"Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there's no point in
+trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother."
+
+Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude's bluntness. "See
+here," he said persuasively, "don't you go encouraging her into
+thinking she can't change her ways. Mother's entitled to all the
+labour-saving devices we can get her."
+
+Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he
+was trying to fit together in their proper sequence. "Well, if
+this is labour-saving "
+
+The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He
+never quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful,
+how much Ralph would take from Claude.
+
+After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler
+drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just
+bought a blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes
+down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the
+cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
+the rats couldn't get at her vegetables.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so
+bad. The cats catches one most every day, too."
+
+"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board
+down at the garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool
+and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
+groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
+photographer's apparatus. Claude took his place at the
+carpenter's bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
+objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
+old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
+fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
+mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
+those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
+left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
+when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
+Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
+wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
+Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
+hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
+cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
+day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
+have put a boy through college decently.
+
+While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
+the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
+She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
+herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
+"spring-rocker" with one arm gone, but it wouldn't have been her
+idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
+contentment in them as she followed Claude's motions. She watched
+him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
+her lap.
+
+"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about
+nothin', is he?"
+
+"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
+yesterday. We went to the circus together."
+
+Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two
+boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked
+him first rate. He's a little feller, though. He ain't big like
+you, is he? I guess he ain't as tall as Mr. Ralph, even."
+
+"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though,
+and gets through a lot of work."
+
+"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
+foreigners works hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
+the circus. Maybe they don't have circuses like our'n, over where
+he come from."
+
+Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
+dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
+smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
+too.
+
+Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
+months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
+family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
+pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
+nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
+Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
+one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
+
+Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
+savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
+her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
+an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to
+bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
+often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
+of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
+to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
+sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
+of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
+half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
+their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
+not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
+teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
+forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
+by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
+of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
+packages. "That's a big A." she would murmur, "and that there's a
+little a."
+
+Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
+her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
+the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
+the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
+lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
+difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
+knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
+off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
+her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
+thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
+a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
+Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
+touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
+little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
+thing about the kitchen.
+
+On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
+liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
+he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
+creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
+trailed across the high pastures to a wildplum thicket at the
+north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
+days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
+to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
+sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
+part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
+over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
+denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
+where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
+
+"Mother," he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
+to her alone, "I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
+the State University."
+
+She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
+
+"But why, Claude?"
+
+"Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
+Temple aren't much good. Most of them are just preachers who
+couldn't make a living at preaching."
+
+The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
+his mother's face. "Son, don't say such things. I can't believe
+but teachers are more interested in their students when they are
+concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
+Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
+University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
+cases."
+
+"Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
+they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
+Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He's
+sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn't
+get them he'd lose his job. I wish he'd never got me. Most of the
+fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did."
+
+"But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
+time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
+larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
+are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I've heard that
+dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
+more money, and you couldn't live as cheaply as you do at the
+Chapins'."
+
+Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
+a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
+at him wistfully. "I'm sure you must be able to study better in a
+quiet, serious atmosphere," she said.
+
+He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
+unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
+enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
+faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
+was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
+fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
+her understand.
+
+His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
+card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such
+things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only
+another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
+education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
+not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
+was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
+The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
+of history.
+
+Nat Wheeler didn't care where his son went to school, but he,
+too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
+cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
+there looked shabbier they were less likely to become too
+knowing, and to be offensively intelligent at home. However, he
+referred the matter to Bayliss one day when he was in town.
+
+"Claude's got some notion he wants to go to the State University
+this winter."
+
+Bayliss at once assumed that wise,
+better-be-prepared-for-the-worst expression which had made him
+seem shrewd and seasoned from boyhood. "I don't see any point in
+changing unless he's got good reasons."
+
+"Well, he thinks that bunch of parsons at the Temple don't make
+first-rate teachers."
+
+"I expect they can teach Claude quite a bit yet. If he gets in
+with that fast football crowd at the State, there'll be no
+holding him." For some reason Bayliss detested football. "This
+athletic business is a good deal over-done. If Claude wants
+exercise, he might put in the fall wheat."
+
+That night Mr. Wheeler brought the subject up at supper,
+questioned Claude, and tried to get at the cause of his
+discontent. His manner was jocular, as usual, and Claude hated
+any public discussion of his personal affairs. He was afraid of
+his father's humour when it got too near him.
+
+Claude might have enjoyed the large and somewhat gross cartoons
+with which Mr. Wheeler enlivened daily life, had they been of any
+other authorship. But he unreasonably wanted his father to be the
+most dignified, as he was certainly the handsomest and most
+intelligent, man in the community. Moreover, Claude couldn't bear
+ridicule very well. He squirmed before he was hit; saw it coming,
+invited it. Mr. Wheeler had observed this trait in him when he
+was a little chap, called it false pride, and often purposely
+outraged his feelings to harden him, as he had hardened Claude's
+mother, who was afraid of everything but schoolbooks and
+prayer-meetings when he first married her. She was still more or
+less bewildered, but she had long ago got over any fear of him
+and any dread of living with him. She accepted everything about
+her husband as part of his rugged masculinity, and of that she
+was proud, in her quiet way.
+
+Claude had never quite forgiven his father for some of his
+practical jokes. One warm spring day, when he was a boisterous
+little boy of five, playing in and out of the house, he heard his
+mother entreating Mr. Wheeler to go down to the orchard and pick
+the cherries from a tree that hung loaded. Claude remembered that
+she persisted rather complainingly, saying that the cherries were
+too high for her to reach, and that even if she had a ladder it
+would hurt her back. Mr. Wheeler was always annoyed if his wife
+referred to any physical weakness, especially if she complained
+about her back. He got up and went out. After a while he
+returned. "All right now, Evangeline," he called cheerily as he
+passed through the kitchen. "Cherries won't give you any trouble.
+You and Claude can run along and pick 'em as easy as can be."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler trustfully put on her sunbonnet, gave Claude a
+little pail and took a big one herself, and they went down the
+pasture hill to the orchard, fenced in on the low land by the
+creek. The ground had been ploughed that spring to make it hold
+moisture, and Claude was running happily along in one of the
+furrows, when he looked up and beheld a sight he could never
+forget. The beautiful, round-topped cherry tree, full of green
+leaves and red fruit,--his father had sawed it through! It lay on
+the ground beside its bleeding stump. With one scream Claude
+became a little demon. He threw away his tin pail, jumped about
+howling and kicking the loose earth with his copper-toed shoes,
+until his mother was much more concerned for him than for the
+tree.
+
+"Son, son," she cried, "it's your father's tree. He has a perfect
+right to cut it down if he wants to. He's often said the trees
+were too thick in here. Maybe it will be better for the others." 
+
+"'Tain't so! He's a damn fool, damn fool!" Claude bellowed, still
+hopping and kicking, almost choking with rage and hate.
+
+His mother dropped on her knees beside him. "Claude, stop! I'd
+rather have the whole orchard cut down than hear you say such
+things."
+
+After she got him quieted they picked the cherries and went back
+to the house. Claude had promised her that he would say nothing,
+but his father must have noticed the little boy's angry eyes
+fixed upon him all through dinner, and his expression of scorn.
+Even then his flexible lips were only too well adapted to hold
+the picture of that feeling. For days afterward Claude went down
+to the orchard and watched the tree grow sicker, wilt and wither
+away. God would surely punish a man who could do that, he
+thought.
+
+A violent temper and physical restlessness were the most
+conspicuous things about Claude when he was a little boy. Ralph
+was docile, and had a precocious sagacity for keeping out of
+trouble. Quiet in manner, he was fertile in devising mischief,
+and easily persuaded his older brother, who was always looking
+for something to do, to execute his plans. It was usually Claude
+who was caught red-handed. Sitting mild and contemplative on his
+quilt on the floor, Ralph would whisper to Claude that it might
+be amusing to climb up and take the clock from the shelf, or to
+operate the sewing-machine. When they were older, and played out
+of doors, he had only to insinuate that Claude was afraid, to
+make him try a frosted axe with his tongue, or jump from the shed
+roof.
+
+The usual hardships of country boyhood were not enough for
+Claude; he imposed physical tests and penances upon himself.
+Whenever he burned his finger, he followed Mahailey's advice and
+held his hand close to the stove to "draw out the fire." One year
+he went to school all winter in his jacket, to make himself
+tough. His mother would button him up in his overcoat and put his
+dinner-pail in his hand and start him off. As soon as he got out
+of sight of the house, he pulled off his coat, rolled it under
+his arm, and scudded along the edge of the frozen fields,
+arriving at the frame schoolhouse panting and shivering, but very
+well pleased with himself.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude waited for his elders to change their mind about where he
+should go to school; but no one seemed much concerned, not even
+his mother.
+
+Two years ago, the young man whom Mrs. Wheeler called "Brother
+Weldon" had come out from Lincoln, preaching in little towns and
+country churches, and recruiting students for the institution at
+which he taught in the winter. He had convinced Mrs. Wheeler that
+his college was the safest possible place for a boy who was
+leaving home for the first time.
+
+Claude's mother was not discriminating about preachers. She
+believed them all chosen and sanctified, and was never happier
+than when she had one in the house to cook for and wait upon. She
+made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her
+roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent
+the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at
+mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,
+downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His
+top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was
+parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little
+ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up
+as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who
+liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely
+"what part of the chicken he would prefer," in order to hear him
+murmur, "A little of the white meat, if you please," while he
+drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a
+dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on
+a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a
+red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,
+and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the
+automobile.
+
+Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,
+and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always
+absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the
+visitor, did not notice Claude's scornful silences until
+Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over
+the stove one day: "Mr. Claude, he don't like the preacher. He
+just ain't got no use fur him, but don't you let on."
+
+As a result of Brother Weldon's sojourn at the farm, Claude was
+sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the
+things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to
+shape his destiny.
+
+When the second week of September came round, he threw a few
+clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother
+and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train
+for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
+Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
+car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
+was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
+
+Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
+was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
+lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
+he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
+himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
+with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
+continue to live with the tiresome Chapins ? The Chapin household
+consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
+twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,--and he was still going to
+school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
+house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
+done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
+jobs from churches and religious societies; he "supplied" the
+pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
+college and the Young Men's Christian Association. Claude's
+weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
+necessary to their comfort.
+
+Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
+it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
+He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
+track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
+natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
+ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
+Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
+gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
+oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile--it had been
+thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
+in lieu of a foundation-- re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
+voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
+
+Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude's classmates. She was not as
+dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
+the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
+silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
+good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
+Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
+while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
+can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
+to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
+house--it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
+do--until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
+the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
+pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
+decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
+their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
+might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
+care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from
+Annabelle's attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences
+of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born
+with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a
+personal attribute.
+
+The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought
+up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When
+he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,
+because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His
+clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high
+and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his
+trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The
+tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn't know what he
+wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he
+needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.
+When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul's church on Sunday
+morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs
+down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old
+men and young, and decided there wasn't another pair of checked
+pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and
+never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them
+wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a
+well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could
+recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into
+the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he
+was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to
+seem indifferent.
+
+Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal
+allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or
+pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard
+with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost
+in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean
+something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is
+not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap
+substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who
+flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring
+a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy
+compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in
+the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home
+for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him
+and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the
+volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at
+his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or
+more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car
+and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of
+little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,
+and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays
+stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive
+made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the
+grey sky.
+
+Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an
+oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a
+frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he
+was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished
+roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could
+have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came
+in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting
+on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on
+the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking
+bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.
+
+"I been lookin' for you every day," said Mrs. Voigt when she
+brought his plate. "I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet
+pertaters, ja." "Thank you. You must be popular with your
+boarders."
+
+She giggled. "Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes
+dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons
+in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain't got no boys
+mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?"
+
+She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching
+every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting
+it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking
+what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited
+little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether
+working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He
+didn't believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was
+common only in what he broadly called "the West." He bought a big
+cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh
+air until the passenger whistled in.
+
+After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books
+again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they
+unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the
+great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A
+starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly
+ridges between the furrows.
+
+Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and
+Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and
+slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and
+again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,
+when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his
+father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler
+custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it
+was understood that some member of the family would act in that
+capacity.
+
+Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home
+before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to
+him since he went over this road three months ago.
+
+As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated
+at the State University for special work in European History. The
+year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for
+some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to
+change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The
+course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as
+much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of
+historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for
+full notebooks. Claude's were of the fullest. He worked early and
+late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and
+went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was
+studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do
+with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How
+often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see
+Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his
+independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor
+spoke without notes,--he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing
+his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which
+Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like
+a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,
+and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely
+personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.
+
+Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that
+the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was
+fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His
+reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to
+him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief
+difficulties had always been that he could not make himself
+believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that
+were all, then life was not worth the trouble.
+
+The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got
+to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after
+a football game between the Temple eleven and the State
+University team--merely a practice game for the latter. Claude
+was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the
+first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the
+right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and
+broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.
+He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men
+congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint
+that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place
+for him on the University team.
+
+Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was
+talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the
+grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of
+her own construction, bedecked with the Temple colours and
+blowing a child's horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.
+He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away
+to the dressing shed . . . . What was the use, if you were always
+with the wrong crowd?
+
+Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him
+aside and said affably: "Come home to supper with me tonight,
+Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the
+Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven't you?"
+
+"They're hardly clothes to go visiting in," Claude replied
+doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, that doesn't matter! We're all boys at home. Mother wouldn't
+mind if you came in your track things."
+
+Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by
+imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the
+history class, and they had several times talked together.
+Hitherto Claude had felt that he "couldn't make Erlich out," but
+this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they
+became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps
+less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at
+finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he
+scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar
+with a broken edge,--wretched economies he had been trained to
+observe.
+
+They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when
+Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,
+terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a
+glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,
+above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,
+seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and
+they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man
+in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were
+alone.
+
+"Five of these are my brothers," said his host, "and the rest are
+friends."
+
+The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk
+about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his
+brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,
+agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but
+they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never
+before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one
+another. To him they were very cordial; the one who was lying
+down came forward to shake hands, keeping the place in his book
+with his finger.
+
+On a table in the middle of the room were pipes and boxes of
+tobacco, cigars in a glass jar, and a big Chinese bowl full of
+cigarettes. This provisionment seemed the more remarkable to
+Claude because at home he had to smoke in the cowshed. The number
+of books astonished him almost as much; the wainscoting all
+around the room was built up in open bookcases, stuffed with
+volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and
+hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night
+before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck
+of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This
+head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention
+more than anything else in the room, and for some reason
+instantly made him wish he lived there.
+
+Julius brought in his mother, and when they went to supper Claude
+was seated beside her at one end of the long table. Mrs. Erlich
+seemed to him very young to be the head of such a family. Her
+hair was still brown, and she wore it drawn over her ears and
+twisted in two little horns, like the ladies in old
+daguerreotypes. Her face, too, suggested a daguerreotype; there
+was something old-fashioned and picturesque about it. Her skin
+had the soft whiteness of white flowers that have been drenched
+by rain. She talked with quick gestures, and her decided little
+nod was quaint and very personal. Her hazel-coloured eyes peered
+expectantly over her nose-glasses, always watching to see things
+turn out wonderfully well; always looking for some good German
+fairy in the cupboard or the cake-box, or in the steaming vapor
+of wash-day.
+
+The boys were discussing an engagement that had just been
+announced, and Mrs. Erlich began to tell Claude a long story
+about how this brilliant young man had come to Lincoln and met
+this beautiful young girl, who was already engaged to a cold and
+academic youth, and how after many heart-burnings the beautiful
+girl had broken with the wrong man and become betrothed to the
+right one, and now they were so happy, and every one, she asked
+Claude to believe, was equally happy! In the middle of her
+narrative Julius reminded her smilingly that since Claude didn't
+know these people, he would hardly be interested in their
+romance, but she merely looked at him over her nose-glasses and
+said, "And is that so, Herr Julius!" One could see that she was a
+match for them.
+
+The conversation went racing from one thing to another. The
+brothers began to argue hotly about a new girl who was visiting
+in town; whether she was pretty, how pretty she was, whether she
+was naive. To Claude this was like talk in a play. He had never
+heard a living person discussed and analysed thus before. He had
+never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much
+zest. Here there was none of the poisonous reticence he had
+always associated with family gatherings, nor the awkwardness of
+people sitting with their hands in their lap, facing each other,
+each one guarding his secret or his suspicion, while he hunted
+for a safe subject to talk about. Their fertility of phrase, too,
+astonished him; how could people find so much to say about one
+girl? To be sure, a good deal of it sounded far-fetched to him,
+but he sadly admitted that in such matters he was no judge. When
+they went back to the living room Julius began to pick out airs
+on his guitar, and the bearded brother sat down to read. Otto,
+the youngest, seeing a group of students passing the house, ran
+out on to the lawn and called them in,-- two boys, and a girl
+with red cheeks and a fur stole. Claude had made for a corner,
+and was perfectly content to be an on-looker, but Mrs. Erlich
+soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the
+parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an
+engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go
+and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she
+showed him a portrait of her great-grandfather, who was an
+officer in Napoleon's army. To explain how this came about was a
+long story.
+
+As she talked to Claude, Mrs. Erlich discovered that his eyes
+were not really pale, but only looked so because of his light
+lashes. They could say a great deal when they looked squarely
+into hers, and she liked what they said. She soon found out that
+he was discontented; how he hated the Temple school, and why his
+mother wished him to go there.
+
+When the three who had been called in from the sidewalk took
+their leave, Claude rose also. They were evidently familiars of
+the house, and their careless exit, with a gay "Good-night,
+everybody!" gave him no practical suggestion as to what he ought
+to say or how he was to get out. Julius made things more
+difficult by telling him to sit down, as it wasn't time to go
+yet. But Mrs. Erlich said it was time; he would have a long ride
+out to Temple Place.
+
+It was really very easy. She walked to the door with him and gave
+him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. "You will come often
+to see us. We are going to be friends." Her forehead, with its
+neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude's chin,
+and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression,
+as if--as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly,
+nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
+
+"It's been lovely," he murmured to her, quite without
+embarrassment, and in happy unconsciousness he turned the knob
+and passed out through the glass door.
+
+While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter
+country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude
+went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
+to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
+exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
+first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
+which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
+were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
+poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
+those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
+discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
+machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
+Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
+they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
+so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
+indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.
+
+Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs', not as often
+as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
+University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
+it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
+looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
+was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
+hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
+the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
+deal about music.
+
+Claude didn't wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
+he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
+Erlichs' house, looking at the lighted windows of the
+sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
+went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
+If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
+that helped, of course.
+
+Almost without realizing what be was doing, he tried to think
+things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
+would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
+He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
+dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
+to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
+person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
+this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
+foreign. It wasn't American to explain yourself; you didn't have
+to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't; that
+Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy. You weren't
+supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,- if you
+tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself
+talk. Since you never said anything, you didn't form the habit of
+thinking. If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought
+something new.
+
+But all the people he met at the Erlichs' talked. If they asked
+him about a play or a book and he said it was "no good," they at
+once demanded why. The Erlichs thought him a clam, but Claude
+sometimes thought himself amazing. Could it really be he, who was
+airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself
+using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his
+mind were associated only with the printed page. When he suddenly
+realized that he was using a word for the first time, and
+probably mispronouncing it, he would become as much confused as 
+i
f he were trying to pass a lead dollar, would blush and stammer
+and let some one finish his sentence for him.
+
+Claude couldn't resist occasionally dropping in at the Erlichs'
+in the afternoon; then the boys were away, and he could have Mrs.
+Erlich to himself for half-anhour. When she talked to him she
+taught him so much about life. He loved to hear her sing
+sentimental German sons as she worked; "Spinn, spinn, du Tochter
+mein." He didn't know why, but he simply adored it! Every time he
+went away from her lie felt happy and full of kindness, and
+thought about beech woods and walled towns, or about Carl Schurz
+and the Romantic revolution.
+
+He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the
+holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took
+him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions
+that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and
+seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude
+thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he
+believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old
+friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working
+rhymes and songs. Surely these were fine things to put into
+little cakes! After Claude left her, he did something a Wheeler
+didn't do; he went down to O street and sent her a box of the
+reddest roses he could find. In his pocket was the little note
+she had written to thank him.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+It was beginning to grow dark when Claude reached the farm. While
+Ralph stopped to put away the car, he walked on alone to the
+house. He never came back without emotion,--try as he would to
+pass lightly over these departures and returns which were all in
+the day's work. When he came up the hill like this, toward the
+tall house with its lighted windows, something always clutched at
+his heart. He both loved and hated to come home. He was always
+disappointed, and yet he always felt the rightness of returning
+to his own place. Even when it broke his spirit and humbled his
+pride, he felt it was right that he should be thus humbled. He
+didn't question that the lowest state of mind was the truest, and
+that the less a man thought of himself, the more likely he was to
+be correct in his estimate.
+
+Approaching the door, Claude stopped a moment and peered in at
+the kitchen window. The table was set for supper, and Mahailey
+was at the stove, stirring something in a big iron pot; cornmeal
+mush, probably,--she often made it for herself now that her teeth
+had begun to fail. She stood leaning over, embracing the pot with
+one arm, and with the other she beat the stiff contents, nodding
+her head in time to this rotary movement. Confused emotions
+surged up in Claude. He went in quickly and gave her a bearish
+hug.
+
+Her face wrinkled up in the foolish grin he knew so well. "Lord,
+how you scared me, Mr. Claude! A little more'n I'd 'a' had my
+mush all over the floor. You lookin' fine, you nice boy, you!"
+
+He knew Mahailey was gladder to see him come home than any one
+except his mother. Hearing Mrs. Wheeler's wandering, uncertain
+steps in the enclosed stairway, he opened the door and ran
+halfway up to meet her, putting his arm about her with the almost
+painful tenderness he always felt, but seldom was at liberty to
+show. She reached up both hands and stroked his hair for a
+moment, laughing as one does to a little boy, and telling him she
+believed it was redder every time he came back.
+
+"Have we got all the corn in, Mother?"
+
+"No, Claude, we haven't. You know we're always behindhand. It's
+been fine, open weather for husking, too. But at least we've got
+rid of that miserable Jerry; so there's something to be thankful
+for. He had one of his fits of temper in town one day, when he
+was hitching up to come home, and Leonard Dawson saw him beat one
+of our horses with the neck-yoke. Leonard told your father, and
+spoke his mind, and your father discharged Jerry. If you or Ralph
+had told him, he most likely wouldn't have done anything about
+it. But I guess all fathers are the same." She chuckled
+confidingly, leaning on Claude's arm as they descended the
+stairs.
+
+"I guess so. Did he hurt the horse much? Which one was it?"
+
+"The little black, Pompey. I believe he is rather a mean horse.
+The men said one of the bones over the eye was broken, but he
+would probably come round all right."
+
+"Pompey isn't mean; he's nervous. All the horses hated Jerry, and
+they had good reason to." Claude jerked his shoulders to shake
+off disgusting recollections of this mongrel man which flashed
+back into his mind. He had seen things happen. in the barn that
+he positively couldn't tell his father. Mr. Wheeler came into the
+kitchen and stopped on his way upstairs long enough to say,
+"Hello, Claude. You look pretty well."
+
+"Yes, sir. I'm all right, thank you."
+
+"Bayliss tells me you've been playing football a good deal."
+
+"Not more than usual. We played half a dozen games; generally got
+licked. The State has a fine team, though."
+
+"I ex-pect," Mr. Wheeler drawled as he strode upstairs.
+
+Supper went as usual. Dan kept grinning and blinking at Claude,
+trying to discover whether he had already been informed of
+Jerry's fate. Ralph told him the neighbourhood gossip: Gus
+Yoeder, their German neighbour, was bringing suit against a
+farmer who had shot his dog. Leonard Dawson was going to marry
+Susie Grey. She was the girl on whose account Leonard had slapped
+Bayliss, Claude remembered.
+
+After supper Ralph and Mr. Wheeler went off in the car to a
+Christmas entertainment at the country schoolhouse. Claude and
+his mother sat down for a quiet talk by the hard-coal burner in
+the living room upstairs. Claude liked this room, especially when
+his father was not there. The old carpet, the faded chairs, the
+secretary book-case, the spotty engraving with all the scenes
+from Pilgrim's Progress that hung over the sofa,--these things
+made him feel at home. Ralph was always proposing to re-furnish
+the room in Mission oak, but so far Claude and his mother had
+saved it.
+
+Claude drew up his favourite chair and began to tell Mrs. Wheeler
+about the Erlich boys and their mother. She listened, but he
+could see that she was much more interested in hearing about the
+Chapins, and whether Edward's throat had improved, and where he
+had preached this fall. That was one of the disappointing things
+about coming home; he could never interest his mother in new
+things or people unless they in some way had to do with the
+church. He knew, too, she was always hoping to hear that he at
+last felt the need of coming closer to the church. She did not
+harass him about these things, but she had told him once or twice
+that nothing could happen in the world which would give her so
+much pleasure as to see him reconciled to Christ. He realized, as
+he talked to her about the Erlichs, that she was wondering
+whether they weren't very "worldly" people, and was apprehensive
+about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
+and he went to bed early.
+
+Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
+thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
+fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
+not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
+But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
+avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
+did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
+would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
+faculties free. He didn't want to be like the young men who said
+in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
+their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
+
+In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
+funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
+coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
+dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
+escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
+way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
+lonely creatures rotting away under ground. life seemed nothing
+but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
+never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
+yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
+that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
+from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
+would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay . . . . He could
+not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! "What
+did it mean, that verse in the Bible, "He shall not suffer His
+holy one to see corruption"?
+
+If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
+fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
+had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
+something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
+about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
+taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
+theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
+faith. "Faith," as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
+Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
+he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
+timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
+they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
+mother.
+
+Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
+Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in
+God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on
+the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at "Blessed are the meek,"
+until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant
+exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+0n the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking
+along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.
+Wheeler's timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,
+so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked
+elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops
+seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to
+the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than
+a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that
+wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.
+It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.
+They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had
+brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell
+Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt
+that this was more Ernest's fault than his own; Ernest was such a
+literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they
+forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the
+red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold
+leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it
+honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the
+stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes
+took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the
+creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
+melting ice.
+
+When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude
+again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and
+reasonable mood.
+
+"What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to
+farm all your life?"
+
+"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before
+now. What makes you ask that?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future
+sometime. And you're so practical."
+
+"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big
+word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I'm
+going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a
+nice girl and bring her back."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"
+
+"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever
+settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this rate there
+isn't much in it?"
+
+"In what?"
+
+"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
+Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad
+to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel
+sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a
+holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed
+-
-nothing has happened."
+
+"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
+own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
+see my friends like this, it's enough for me."
+
+"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there
+ought to be something--well, something splendid about life,
+sometimes."
+
+Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
+walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. "You
+Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
+warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
+very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make
+the most of little things."
+
+"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
+Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
+things."
+
+"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
+idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
+sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
+vanity to help them along, too."'
+
+Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at
+a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, "The fact
+is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
+and clothes and Sundays off, don't you ?"
+
+Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I
+think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
+down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess."
+
+Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about
+over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
+
+The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler
+watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside
+a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving
+along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at
+that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so
+unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was
+on the wrong side.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in
+the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove
+where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art
+students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in
+this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having
+to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked
+him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and
+greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the
+campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between
+boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,
+Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,--different
+from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
+was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
+
+Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what
+might be called a "carriage," and she had altogether more manner
+and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and
+curly,--the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of
+a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
+and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to
+pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if
+they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her
+"the Georgia peach." She was considered very pretty, and the
+University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since
+then her vogue had somewhat declined.
+
+Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town
+with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her
+tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always
+dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked
+to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
+slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and
+be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in
+his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling
+him that he had "a magnificent physique," a compliment which
+covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
+
+Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if
+she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she
+should explain her absences to him,--tell him how often she
+washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
+
+One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the
+campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
+
+"Yes, I'm going out," Claude replied. "I've promised to teach
+Miss Millmore to skate. Won't you come along and help me?"
+
+Julius laughed indulgently. "Oh, no! Some other time. I don't
+want to break in on that."
+
+"Nonsense! You could teach her better than I"
+
+"Oh, I haven't the courage!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"No, I don't. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?"
+
+Julius made a little grimace. "She wrote some awfully slushy
+letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house
+one night." "Didn't you slap him?" Claude demanded, turning red.
+
+"Well, I would have thought I would," said Julius smiling, "but I
+didn't. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I've been wary
+of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of
+peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand."
+
+"I don't think so," replied Claude haughtily. "She's only
+kind-hearted."
+
+"Perhaps you're right. But I'm terribly afraid of girls who are
+too kindhearted," Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude
+a word of warning for some time.
+
+Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to
+the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning
+he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last
+excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude
+avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She
+was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by
+clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a
+degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale
+cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been
+sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,--though
+when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager
+susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He
+was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of
+trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father
+kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had
+given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost
+Hippolytean pride in candour.
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That
+spring Mrs. Erlich's first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,
+who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as
+soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement
+approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The
+Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so
+the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family
+invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding
+which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.
+There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich
+remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the
+society of her own sex.
+
+One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich
+reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. "For me,"
+she said with decision, "you may put down Claude Wheeler."
+
+This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
+
+"You don't mean it, Mother," the oldest son protested. "Poor old
+Claude wouldn't know what it was all about,--and one stick can
+spoil a dinner party."
+
+Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. "You will
+see; your cousin Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy
+than in any of the others!"
+
+Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might
+still yield her point. "For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn't any
+dinner clothes," he murmured. She nodded to him. "That has been
+attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded
+him, he told me he could easily afford it."
+
+The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed
+they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down
+"Claude Wheeler" with a flourish.
+
+If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing
+to Claude's. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame
+Schroeder-Schatz's recital, and on the evening of the concert,
+when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him
+over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new
+black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see
+what figure her escort cut.
+
+Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, arid presented
+himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich's
+eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly
+his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She
+laughed and clapped her hands.
+
+"Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and
+wonder where I got him!"
+
+Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;
+opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into
+her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and
+smelling salts,--there was even a little silver box of peppermint
+drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long
+gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was
+ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about
+her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,
+they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air
+was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
+
+The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,
+Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than
+her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an
+enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great
+contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a
+really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as
+food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son.
+Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched
+attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing
+rhinestones.
+
+After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining
+room, she dropped her cousin's arm and stopped before Claude, who
+stood at attention behind his chair.
+
+"If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk
+together. We have been very far separated," she said.
+
+She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at
+once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green
+scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders;
+but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed
+air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude
+reminded her about the draft.
+
+"Draft?" she said lifting her chin, "there is no draft here."
+
+She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned,
+what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When
+she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she
+seemed to know a good deal about farming and live-stock. She was
+disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to
+other farmers. "If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire
+land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county," she
+declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to
+find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard
+one.
+
+Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented
+to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she
+beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head,
+smiling ruefully.
+
+"I'm sorry I'm so stupid, but I don't know one note from
+another."
+
+She tapped his sleeve. "Well, never mind. I may want the piano
+moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?"
+
+When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich's bedroom,
+powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked,
+"What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry
+to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law."
+
+"Ah, if I only had!" sighed Mrs. Erlich.
+
+"Or," continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on
+her large carriage shoes, "if you were but a few years younger,
+it might not yet be too late. Oh, don't be a fool, Augusta! Such
+things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a
+widow than to be tied to a sick man--like a stone about my neck!
+What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Jas
+ist ein Kreuz ich trage!" She smote her bosom, on the left side.
+
+Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame
+SchroederSchatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and
+kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good-night.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+0ne warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the
+Chapins', copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an
+examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of
+Jeanne d'Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in
+ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash
+of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many
+hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the
+fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would
+not dismiss the case lightly.
+
+Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the
+matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important
+thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the
+Proces, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her
+replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It
+seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of
+whom Jeanne said, "the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it
+speaks in the French tongue." Claude flattered himself that he
+had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a
+cold estimate of the girl's motives and character as indicated by
+the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the
+change wrought in her by imprisonment and by "the fear of the
+fire."
+
+When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat
+contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all
+his conscientious study he really knew very little more about
+the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his
+mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in
+the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of
+her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen
+where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the
+picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting
+it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she
+said,--it must have been very fragmentary,--but from that time on
+he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a
+living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as
+now, and now as miraculous as then.
+
+It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could
+perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a word, a phrase, it could
+renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again
+in the minds of children. At that time he had never seen a map of
+France, and had a very poor opinion of any place farther away
+than Chicago; yet he was perfectly prepared for the legend of
+Joan of Arc, and often thought about her when he was bringing in
+his cobs in the evening, or when he was sent to the windmill for
+water and stood shaking in the cold while the chilled pump
+brought it slowly up. He pictured her then very much as he did
+now; about her figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust,
+with soldiers in it . . . the banner with lilies . . . a great
+church . . . cities with walls.
+
+On this balmy spring afternoon, Claude felt softened and
+reconciled to the world. Like Gibbon, he was sorry to have
+finished his labour,--and he could not see anything else as
+interesting ahead. He must soon be going home now. There would be
+a few examinations to sit through at the Temple, a few more
+evenings with the Erlichs, trips to the Library to carry back the
+books he had been using,--and then he would suddenly find himself
+with nothing to do but take the train for Frankfort.
+
+He rose with a sigh and began to fasten his history papers
+between covers. Glancing out of the window, he decided that he
+would walk into town and carry his thesis, which was due today;
+the weather was too fine to sit bumping in a street car. The
+truth was, he wished to prolong his relations with his manuscript
+as far as possible.
+
+He struck off by the road,--it could scarcely be called a street,
+since it ran across raw prairie land where the buffalo-peas were
+in blossom. Claude walked slower than was his custom, his straw
+hat pushed back on his head and the blaze of the sun full in his
+face. His body felt light in the scented wind, and he listened
+drowsily to the larks, singing on dried weeds and sunflower
+stalks. At this season their song is almost painful to hear, it
+is so sweet. He sometimes thought of this walk long afterward; it
+was memorable to him, though he could not say why.
+
+On reaching the University, he went directly to the Department of
+European History, where he was to leave his thesis on a long
+table, with a pile of others. He rather dreaded this, and was
+glad when, just as he entered, the Professor came out from his
+private office and took the bound manuscript into his own hands,
+nodding cordially.
+
+"Your thesis? Oh yes, Jeanne d'Arc. The Proces. I had forgotten.
+Interesting material, isn't it?" He opened the cover and ran over
+the pages. "I suppose you acquitted her on the evidence?"
+
+Claude blushed. "Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, now you might read what Michelet has to say about her.
+There's an old translation in the Library. Did you enjoy working
+on it?"
+
+"I did, very much." Claude wished to heaven he could think of
+something to say.
+
+"You've got a good deal out of your course, altogether, haven't
+you? I'll be interested to see what you do next year. Your work
+has been very satisfactory to me." The Professor went back into
+his study, and Claude was pleased to see that he carried the
+manuscript with him and did not leave it on the table with the
+others.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Between haying and harvest that summer Ralph and Mr. Wheeler
+drove to Denver in the big car, leaving Claude and Dan to
+cultivate the corn. When they returned Mr. Wheeler announced that
+he had a secret. After several days of reticence, during which he
+shut himself up in the sitting-room writing letters, and passed
+mysterious words and winks with Ralph at table, he disclosed a
+project which swept away all Claude's plans and purposes.
+
+On the return trip from Denver Mr. Wheeler had made a detour down
+into Yucca county, Colorado, to visit an old friend who was in
+difficulties. Tom Wested was a Maine man, from Wheeler's own
+neighbourhood. Several years ago he had lost his wife. Now his
+health had broken down, and the Denver doctors said he must
+retire from business and get into a low altitude. He wanted to go
+back to Maine and live among his own people, but was too much
+discouraged and frightened about his condition even to undertake
+the sale of his ranch and live stock. Mr. Wheeler had been able
+to help his friend, and at the same time did a good stroke of
+business for himself. He owned a farm in Maine, his share of his
+father's estate, which for years he had rented for little more
+than the up-keep. By making over this property, and assuming
+certain mortgages, he got Wested's fine, well-watered ranch in
+exchange. He paid him a good price for his cattle, and promised
+to take the sick man back to Maine and see him comfortably
+settled there. All this Mr. Wheeler explained to his family when
+he called them up to the living room one hot, breathless night
+after supper. Mrs. Wheeler, who seldom concerned herself with her
+husband's business affairs, asked absently why they bought more
+land, when they already had so much they could not farm half of
+it.
+
+"Just like a woman, Evangeline, just like a woman!" Mr. Wheeler
+replied indulgently. He was sitting in the full glare of the
+acetylene lamp, his neckband open, his collar and tie on the
+table beside him, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan. "You
+might as well ask me why I want to make more money, when I
+haven't spent all I've got."
+
+He intended, he said, to put Ralph on the Colorado ranch and
+"give the boy some responsibility." Ralph would have the help of
+Wested's foreman, an old hand in the cattle business, who had
+agreed to stay on under the new management. Mr. Wheeler assured
+his wife that he wasn't taking advantage of poor Wested; the
+timber on the Maine place was really worth a good deal of money;
+but because his father had always been so proud of his great pine
+woods, he had never, he said, just felt like turning a sawmill
+loose in them. Now he was trading a pleasant old farm that didn't
+bring in anything for a grama-grass ranch which ought to turn
+over a profit of ten or twelve thousand dollars in good cattle
+years, and wouldn't lose much in bad ones. He expected to spend
+about half his time out there with Ralph. "When I'm away," he
+remarked genially, "you and Mahailey won't have so much to do.
+You can devote yourselves to embroidery, so to speak."
+
+"If Ralph is to live in Colorado, and you are to be away from
+home half of the time, I don't see what is to become of this
+place," murmured Mrs. Wheeler, still in the dark.
+
+"Not necessary for you to see, Evangeline," her husband replied,
+stretching his big frame until the rocking chair creaked under
+him. "It will be Claude's business to look after that."
+
+"Claude?" Mrs. Wheeler brushed a lock of hair back from her damp
+forehead in vague alarm.
+
+"Of course." He looked with twinkling eyes at his son's straight,
+silent figure in the corner. "You've had about enough theology, I
+presume? No ambition to be a preacher? This winter I mean to turn
+the farm over to you and give you a chance to straighten things
+out. You've been dissatisfied with the way the place is run for
+some time, haven't you? Go ahead and put new blood into it. New
+ideas, if you want to; I've no objection. They're expensive, but
+let it go. You can fire Dan if you want, and get what help you
+need."
+
+Claude felt as if a trap had been sprung on him. He shaded his
+eyes with his hand. "I don't think I'm competent to run the place
+right," he said unsteadily.
+
+"Well, you don't think I am either, Claude, so we're up against
+it. It's always been my notion that the land was made for man,
+just as it's old Dawson's that man was created to work the land.
+I don't mind your siding with the Dawsons in this difference of
+opinion, if you can get their results."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rose and slipped quickly from the room, feeling her
+way down the dark staircase to the kitchen. It was dusky and
+quiet there. Mahailey sat in a corner, hemming dish-towels by the
+light of a smoky old brass lamp which was her own cherished
+luminary. Mrs. Wheeler walked up and down the long room in soft,
+silent agitation, both hands pressed tightly to her breast, where
+there was a physical ache of sympathy for Claude.
+
+She remembered kind Tom Wested. He had stayed over night with
+them several times, and had come to them for consolation after
+his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and
+loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler's fortuitous trip to Denver, the old
+pine-wood farm in Maine; were all things that fitted together and
+made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had
+been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and that for the first
+time he looked forward eagerly to going back to school. He was
+homesick for his friends, the Erlichs, and his mind was all the
+time upon the history course he meant to take.
+
+Yet all this would weigh nothing in the family councils probably
+he would not even speak of it--and he had not one substantial
+objection to offer to his father's wishes. His disappointment
+would be bitter. "Why, it will almost break his heart," she
+murmured aloud. Mahailey was a little deaf and heard nothing. She
+sat holding her work up to the light, driving her needle with a
+big brass thimble, nodding with sleepiness between stitches.
+Though Mrs. Wheeler was scarcely conscious of it, the old woman's
+presence was a comfort to her, as she walked up and down with her
+drifting, uncertain step.
+
+She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might
+get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she
+couldn't bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life
+hard to live; he suffered so much over little things,-and she
+suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments.
+Her husband's careless decisions did not disconcert her. If he
+declared that he would not plant a garden at all this year, she
+made no protest. It was Mahailey who grumbled. If he felt like
+eating roast beef and went out and killed a steer, she did the
+best she could to take care of the meat, and if some of it
+spoiled she tried not to worry. When she was not lost in
+religious meditation, she was likely to be thinking about some
+one of the old books she read over and over. Her personal life
+was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that
+rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude
+was concerned, she lived on another plane, dropped into the lower
+air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind,
+passionate human feelings.
+
+It had always been so. And now, as she grew older, and her flesh
+had almost ceased to be concerned with pain or pleasure, like the
+wasted wax images in old churches, it still vibrated with his
+feelings and became quick again for him. His chagrins shrivelled
+her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something ached in
+her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical
+contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and
+happened to think that he had been happy lately, she would lie
+softly and gratefully in her warm place.
+
+"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit," she sometimes whispered to him in
+her mind, when she wakened thus and thought of him. There was a
+singular light in his eyes when he smiled at her on one of his
+good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner
+kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she
+could always remember it in the dark,--a quick blue flash, tender
+and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright
+uncertainties.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The next few weeks were busy ones on the farm. Before the wheat
+harvest was over, Nat Wheeler packed his leather trunk, put on
+his "store clothes," and set off to take Tom Welted back to
+Maine. During his absence Ralph began to outfit for life in Yucca
+county. Ralph liked being a great man with the Frankfort
+merchants, and he had never before had such an opportunity as
+this. He bought a new shot gun, saddles, bridles, boots, long and
+short storm coats, a set of furniture for his own room, a
+fireless cooker, another music machine, and had them shipped to
+Colorado. His mother, who did not like phonograph music, and
+detested phonograph monologues, begged him to take the machine at
+home, but he assured her that she would be dull without it on
+winter evenings. He wanted one of the latest make, put out under
+the name of a great American inventor.
+
+Some of the ranches near Wested's were owned by New York men who
+brought their families out there in the summer Ralph had heard
+about the dances they gave, and he way counting on being one of
+the guests. He asked Claude to give him his dress suit, since
+Claude wouldn't be needing it any more.
+
+"You can have it if you want it," said Claude indifferently "But
+it won't fit you."
+
+"I'll take it in to Fritz and have the pants cut off a little and
+the shoulders taken in," his brother replied lightly.
+
+Claude was impassive. "Go ahead. But if that old Dutch man takes
+a whack at it, it will look like the devil."
+
+"I think I'll let him try. Father won't say anything about what
+I've ordered for the house, but he isn't much for glad rags, you
+know." Without more ado he threw Claude's black clothes into the
+back seat of the Ford and ran into town to enlist the services of
+the German tailor.
+
+Mr. Wheeler, when he returned, thought Ralph had been rather free
+in expenditures, but Ralph told him it wouldn't do to take over
+the new place too modestly. "The ranchers out there are all
+high-fliers. If we go to squeezing nickels, they won't think we
+mean business."
+
+The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers'
+doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph's lavishness as
+he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to
+Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table.
+August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly
+whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph.
+Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude
+in town one day and shouted;
+
+"My God, Claude, there's nothing left in the furniture store for
+me and Susie! Ralph's bought everything but the coffins. He must
+be going to live like a prince out there."
+
+"I don't know anything about it," Claude answered coolly. "It's
+not my enterprise."
+
+"No, you've got to stay on the old place and make it pay the
+debts, I understand." Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude
+wouldn't have a chance to reply.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these
+preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair
+to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier.
+Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a
+good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with
+machinery and run errands in his car. She couldn't understand why
+he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money
+was invested.
+
+"Why, Claude," she said dreamily one day, "if your father were an
+older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail.
+Won't we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?"
+
+"Don't say anything, Mother. It's Father's money. He shan't think
+I want any of it."
+
+"I wish I could talk to Bayliss. Has he said anything?"
+
+"Not to me, he hasn't."
+
+Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and
+when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him
+bedding and table linen. He said he wasn't going to live like a
+savage, even in the sand hills. Mahailey was outraged to see the
+linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many
+years packed into boxes. She was out of temper most of the time
+now, and went about muttering to herself.
+
+The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to
+live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork
+quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep,
+washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old
+mother, and given to her for a marriage portion. The patchwork on
+each was done in a different design; one was the popular
+"logcabin" pattern, another the "laurel-leaf," the third the
+"blazing star." This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and
+she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it "to give Mr.
+Claude when he got married."
+
+She slept on her feather bed in winter, and in summer she put it
+away in the attic. The attic was reached by a ladder. which,
+because of her weak back, Mrs. Wheeler very seldom climbed. Up
+there Mahailey had things her own way, and thither she often
+retired to air the bedding stored away there, or to look at the
+pictures in the piles of old magazines. Ralph facetiously called
+the attic "Mahailey's library."
+
+One day, while things were being packed for the western ranch,
+Mrs. Wheeler, going to the foot of the ladder to call Mahailey,
+narrowly escaped being knocked down by a large feather bed which
+came plumping through the trap door. A moment later Mahailey
+herself descended backwards, holding to the rungs with one hand,
+and in the other arm carrying her quilts.
+
+"Why, Mahailey," gasped Mrs. Wheeler. "It's not winter yet;
+whatever are you getting your bed for?"
+
+"I'm just a-goin' to lay on my fedder bed," she broke out, "or
+direc'ly I won't have none. I ain't a-goin' to have Mr. Ralph
+carryin' off my quilts my mudder pieced fur me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler tried to reason with her, but the old woman took up
+her bed in her arms and staggered down the hall with it,
+muttering and tossing her head like a horse in fly-time.
+
+That afternoon Ralph brought a barrel and a bundle of straw into
+the kitchen and told Mahailey to carry up preserves and canned
+fruit, and he would pack them. She went obediently to the cellar,
+and Ralph took off his coat and began to line the barrel with
+straw. He was some time in doing this, but still Mahailey had not
+returned. He went to the head of the stairs and whistled.
+
+"I'm a-comin', Mr. Ralph, I'm a-comin' ! Don't hurry me, I don't
+want to break nothin'."
+
+Ralph waited a few minutes. "What are you doing down there,
+Mahailey?" he fumed. "I could have emptied the whole cellar by
+this time. I suppose I'll have to do it myself."
+
+"I'm a-comin'. You'd git yourself all dusty down here." She came
+breathlessly up the stairs, carrying a hamper basket full of
+jars, her hands and face streaked with black.
+
+"Well, I should say it is dusty!" Ralph snorted. "You might clean
+your fruit closet once in awhile, you know, Mahailey. You ought
+to see how Mrs. Dawson keeps hers. Now, let's see." He sorted the
+jars on the table. "Take back the grape jelly. If there's
+anything I hate, it's grape jelly. I know you have lots of it,
+but you can't work it off on me. And when you come up, don't
+forget the pickled peaches. I told you particularly, the pickled
+peaches!"
+
+"We ain't got no pickled peaches." Mahailey stood by the cellar
+door, holding a corner of her apron up to her chin, with a queer,
+animal look of stubbornness in her face.
+
+"No pickled peaches? What nonsense, Mahailey ! I saw you making
+them here, only a few weeks ago."
+
+"I know you did, Mr. Ralph, but they ain't none now. I didn't
+have no luck with my peaches this year. I must 'a' let the air
+git at 'em. They all worked on me, an' I had to throw 'em out."
+
+Ralph was thoroughly annoyed. "I never heard of such a thing,
+Mahailey ! You get more careless every year. Think of wasting all
+that fruit and sugar! Does mother know?"
+
+Mahailey's low brow clouded. "I reckon she does. I don't wase
+your mudder's sugar. I never did wase nothin'," she muttered. Her
+speech became queerer than ever when she was angry.
+
+Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched
+the fruit closet. Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches.
+When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood
+watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look
+that is in a chained coyote's eyes when a boy is showing him off
+to visitors and saying he wouldn't run away if he could.
+
+"Go on with your work," Ralph snapped. "Don't stand there
+watching me!"
+
+That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by
+the barn, after a hard day's work ploughing for winter wheat. He
+was solacing himself with his pipe. No matter how much she loved
+him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring
+herself to tell him he might smoke in the house. Lights were
+shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open
+windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph. A figure came
+stealing down the path. He knew by her low, padding step that it
+was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head. She came up to
+him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that
+what she had to say was confidential.
+
+"Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph's done packed up a barr'l of your mudder's
+jelly an' pickles to take out there."
+
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Mr. Wested was a widower, and I
+guess there wasn't anything of that sort put up at his place."
+
+She hesitated and bent lower. "He asked me fur them pickled
+peaches I made fur you, but I didn't give him none. I hid 'em all
+in my old cook-stove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph
+bought the new one. I didn't give him your mudder's new
+preserves, nudder. I give him the old last year's stuff we had
+left over, and now you an' your mudder'll have plenty." Claude
+laughed. "Oh, I don't care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the
+place, Mahailey!"
+
+She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, "No, I know you
+don't, Mr. Claude. I know you don't."
+
+"I surely ought not to take it out on her," Claude thought, when
+he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back.
+"That's all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches,
+anyhow."
+
+She shook her finger at him. "Don't you let on!"
+
+He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path
+up the hill.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August,
+and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship
+a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during
+the winter. This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder. There
+was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek,--just on the
+sky-line when one looked out from the west windows of the house.
+Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in
+September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it
+for fodder. As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up
+the ground, and drill in the wheat when he planted the other
+wheat fields.
+
+This was Claude's first innovation, and it did not meet with
+approval. When Bayliss came out to spend Sunday with his mother,
+he asked her what Claude thought he was doing, anyhow. If he
+wanted to change the crop on that field, why didn't he plant oats
+in the spring, and then get into wheat next fall? Cutting fodder
+and preparing the ground now, would only hold him back in his
+work. When Mr. Wheeler came home for a short visit, he jocosely
+referred to that quarter as "Claude's wheat field."
+
+Claude went ahead with what he had undertaken to do, but all
+through September he was nervous and apprehensive about the
+weather. Heavy rains, if they came, would make him late with his
+wheat-planting, and then there would certainly be criticism. In
+reality, nobody cared much whether the planting was late or not,
+but Claude thought they did, and sometimes in the morning he
+awoke in a state of panic because he wasn't getting ahead faster.
+He had Dan and one of August Yoeder's four sons to help him, and
+he worked early and late. The new field he ploughed and drilled
+himself. He put a great deal of young energy into it, and buried
+a great deal of discontent in its dark furrows. Day after day he
+flung himself upon the land and planted it with what was
+fermenting in him, glad to be so tired at night that he could not
+think.
+
+Ralph came home for Leonard Dawson's wedding, on the first of
+October. All the Wheelers went to the wedding, even Mahailey, and
+there was a great gathering of the country folk and townsmen.
+
+After Ralph left, Claude had the place to himself again, and the
+work went on as usual. The stock did well, and there were no
+vexatious interruptions. The fine weather held, and every morning
+when Claude got up, another gold day stretched before him like a
+glittering carpet, leading. . . ? When the question where the
+days were leading struck him on the edge of his bed, he hurried
+to dress and get down-stairs in time to fetch wood and coal for
+Mahailey. They often reached the kitchen at the same moment, and
+she would shake her finger at him and say, "You come down to help
+me, you nice boy, you!" At least he was of some use to Mahailey.
+His father could hire one of the Yoeder boys to look after the
+place, but Mahailey wouldn't let any one else save her old back.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Mahailey, enjoyed that fall. She slept
+late in the morning, and read and rested in the afternoon. She
+made herself some new house-dresses out of a grey material Claude
+chose. "It's almost like being a bride, keeping house for just
+you, Claude," she sometimes said.
+
+Soon Claude had the satisfaction of seeing a blush of green come
+up over his brown wheat fields, visible first in the dimples and
+little hollows, then flickering over the knobs and levels like a
+fugitive smile. He watched the green blades coming every day,
+when he and Dan went afield with their wagons to gather corn.
+Claude sent Dan to shuck on the north quarter, and he worked on
+the south. He always brought in one more load a day than Dan
+did,--that was to be expected. Dan explained this very
+reasonably, Claude thought, one afternoon when they were hooking
+up their teams.
+
+"It's all right for you to jump at that corn like you was
+a-beating carpets, Claude; it's your corn, or anyways it's your
+Paw's. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a
+hired man's got no property but his back, and he has to save it.
+I figure that I've only got about so many jumps left in me, and I
+ain't a-going to jump too hard at no man's corn."
+
+"What's the matter? I haven't been hinting that you ought to jump
+any harder, have I ?"
+
+"No, you ain't, but I just want you to know that there's reason
+in all things." With this Dan got into his wagon and drove off.
+He had probably been meditating upon this declaration for some
+time.
+
+That afternoon Claude suddenly stopped flinging white ears into
+the wagon beside him. It was about five o'clock, the yellowest
+hour of the autumn day. He stood lost in a forest of light, dry,
+rustling corn leaves, quite hidden away from the world. Taking
+off his husking-gloves, he wiped the sweat from his face, climbed
+up to the wagon box, and lay down on the ivory-coloured corn. The
+horses cautiously advanced a step or two, and munched with great
+content at ears they tore from the stalks with their teeth.
+
+Claude lay still, his arms under his head, looking up at the
+hard, polished blue sky, watching the flocks of crows go over
+from the fields where they fed on shattered grain, to their nests
+in the trees along Lovely Creek. He was thinking about what Dan
+had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of
+truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he
+would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among
+strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and
+crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was
+sometimes called a "land hog" by the country people, and he
+himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have
+so much land,--to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they
+chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had
+been going, the question of property had not been better
+adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people
+who didn't have it were slaves to them.
+
+He sprang down into the gold light to finish his load. Warm
+silence nestled over the cornfield. Sometimes a light breeze rose
+for a moment and rattled the stiff, dry leaves, and he himself
+made a great rustling and crackling as he tore the husks from the
+ears.
+
+Greedy crows were still cawing about before they flapped
+homeward. When he drove out to the highway, the sun was going
+down, and from his seat on the load he could see far and near.
+Yonder was Dan's wagon, coming in from the north quarter; over
+there was the roof of Leonard Dawson's new house, and his
+windmill, standing up black in the declining day. Before him were
+the bluffs of the pasture, and the little trees, almost bare,
+huddled in violet shadow along the creek, and the Wheeler
+farm-house on the hill, its windows all aflame with the last red
+fire of the sun.
+
+
+XV
+
+Claude dreaded the inactivity of the winter, to which the farmer
+usually looks forward with pleasure. He made the Thanksgiving
+football game a pretext for going up to Lincoln,--went intending
+to stay three days and stayed ten. The first night, when he
+knocked at the glass door of the Erlichs' sitting-room and took
+them by surprise, he thought he could never go back to the farm.
+Approaching the house on that clear, frosty autumn evening,
+crossing the lawn strewn with crackling dry leaves, he told
+himself that he must not hope to find things the same. But they
+were the same. The boys were lounging and smoking about the
+square table with the lamp on it, and Mrs. Erlich was at the
+piano, playing one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." When
+he knocked, Otto opened the door and called:
+
+"A surprise for you, Mother! Guess who's here."
+
+What a welcome she gave him, and how much she had to tell him!
+While they were all talking at once, Henry, the oldest son, came
+downstairs dressed for a Colonial ball, with satin breeches and
+stockings and a sword. His brothers began to point out the
+inaccuracies of his costume, telling him that he couldn't
+possibly call himself a French emigre unless he wore a powdered
+wig. Henry took a book of memoirs from the shelf to prove to them
+that at the time when the French emigres were coming to
+Philadelphia, powder was going out of fashion.
+
+During this discussion, Mrs. Erlich drew Claude aside and told
+him in excited whispers that her cousin Wilhelmina, the singer,
+had at last been relieved of the invalid husband whom she had
+supported for so many years, and now was going to marry her
+accompanist, a man much younger than herself.
+
+After the French emigre had gone off to his party, two young
+instructors from the University dropped in, and Mrs. Erlich
+introduced Claude as her "landed proprietor" who managed a big
+ranch out in one of the western counties. The instructors took
+their leave early, but Claude stayed on. What was it that made
+life seem so much more interesting and attractive here than
+elsewhere? There was nothing wonderful about this room; a lot of
+books, a lamp . . . comfortable, hard-used furniture, some people
+whose lives were in no way remarkable--and yet he had the sense
+of being in a warm and gracious atmosphere, charged with generous
+enthusiasms and ennobled by romantic friendships. He was glad to
+see the same pictures on the wall; to find the Swiss wood-cutter
+on the mantel, still bending under his load of faggots; to handle
+again the heavy brass paper-knife that in its time had cut so
+many interesting pages. He picked it up from the cover of a red
+book lying there,-one of Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi, which
+Julius told him he must read before he was another week older.
+
+The next afternoon Claude took Mrs. Erlich to the football game
+and came home with the family for dinner. He lingered on day
+after day, but after the first few evenings his heart was growing
+a little heavier all the time. The Erlich boys had so many new
+interests he couldn't keep up with them; they had been going on,
+and he had been standing still. He wasn't conceited enough to
+mind that. The thing that hurt was the feeling of being out of
+it, of being lost in another kind of life in which ideas played
+but little part. He was a stranger who walked in and sat down
+here; but he belonged out in the big, lonely country, where
+people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the
+horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say.
+If Mrs. Erlich and her Hungarian woman made lentil soup and
+potato dumplings and WienerSchnitzel for him, it only made the
+plain fare on the farm seem the heavier.
+
+When the second Friday came round, he went to bid his friends
+good-bye and explained that he must be going home tomorrow. On
+leaving the house that night, he looked back at the ruddy windows
+and told himself that it was goodbye indeed, and not, as Mrs.
+Erlich had fondly said, auf wiedersehen. Coming here only made
+him more discontented with his lot; his frail claim on this kind
+of life existed no longer. He must settle down into something
+that was his own, take hold of it with both hands, no matter how
+grim it was. The next day, during his journey out through the
+bleak winter country, he felt that he was going deeper and deeper
+into reality.
+
+Claude had not written when he would be home, but on Saturday
+there were always some of the neighbours in town. He rode out
+with one of the Yoeder boys, and from their place walked on the
+rest of the way. He told his mother he was glad to be back again.
+He sometimes felt as if it were disloyal to her for him to be so
+happy with Mrs. Erlich. His mother had been shut away from the
+world on a farm for so many years; and even before that, Vermont
+was no very stimulating place to grow up in, he guessed. She had
+not had a chance, any more than he had, at those things which
+make the mind more supple and keep the feeling young.
+
+The next morning it was snowing outside, and they had a long,
+pleasant Sunday breakfast. Mrs. Wheeler said they wouldn't try to
+go to church, as Claude must be tired. He worked about the place
+until noon, making the stock comfortable and looking after things
+that Dan had neglected in his absence. After dinner he sat down
+at the secretary and wrote a long letter to his friends in
+Lincoln. Whenever he lifted his eyes for a moment, he saw the
+pasture bluffs and the softly falling snow. There was something
+beautiful about the submissive way in which the country met
+winter. It made one contented,--sad, too. He sealed his letter
+and lay down on the couch to read the paper, but was soon asleep.
+
+When he awoke the afternoon was already far gone. The clock on
+the shelf ticked loudly in the still room, the coal stove sent
+out a warm glow. The blooming plants in the south bow-window
+looked brighter and fresher than usual in the soft white light
+that came up from the snow. Mrs. Wheeler was reading by the west
+window, looking away from her book now and then to gaze off at
+the grey sky and the muffled fields. The creek made a winding
+violet chasm down through the pasture, and the trees followed it
+in a black thicket, curiously tufted with snow. Claude lay for
+some time without speaking, watching his mother's profile against
+the glass, and thinking how good this soft, clinging snow-fall
+would be for his wheat fields.
+
+"What are you reading, Mother?" he asked presently.
+
+She turned her head toward him. "Nothing very new. I was just
+Beginning 'Paradise Lost' again. I haven't read it for a long
+while."
+
+"Read aloud, won't you? Just wherever you happen to be. I like
+the sound of it."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler always read deliberately, giving each syllable its
+full value. Her voice, naturally soft and rather wistful, trailed
+over the long measures and the threatening Biblical names, all
+familiar to her and full of meaning.
+
+"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great furnace
+flamed; yet from the flames No light, but rather darkness visible
+Served only to discover sights of woe."
+
+Her voice groped as if she were trying to realize something. The
+room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid
+catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and
+pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed,
+and Mrs. Wheeler closed the book.
+
+"That's fine," Claude commented from the couch. "But Milton
+couldn't have got along without the wicked, could he?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up. "Is that a joke?" she asked slyly.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! It just struck me that this part is so much
+more interesting than the books about perfect innocence in Eden."
+
+"And yet I suppose it shouldn't be so," Mrs. Wheeler said slowly,
+as if in doubt.
+
+Her son laughed and sat up, smoothing his rumpled hair. "The fact
+remains that it is, dear Mother. And if you took all the great
+sinners out of the Bible, you'd take out all the interesting
+characters, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Except Christ," she murmured.
+
+"Yes, except Christ. But I suppose the Jews were honest when they
+thought him the most dangerous kind of criminal."
+
+"Are you trying to tangle me up?" his mother inquired, with both
+reproach and amusement in her voice.
+
+Claude went to the window where she was sitting, and looked out
+at the snowy fields, now becoming blue and desolate as the
+shadows deepened. "I only mean that even in the Bible the people
+who were merely free from blame didn't amount to much."
+
+"Ah, I see!" Mrs. Wheeler chuckled softly. "You are trying to get
+me back to Faith and Works. There's where you always balked when
+you were a little fellow. Well, Claude, I don't know as much
+about it as I did then. As I get older, I leave a good deal more
+to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this
+world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I." She rose
+like a gentle shadow and rubbed her cheek against his flannel
+shirt-sleeve, murmuring, "I believe He is sometimes where we
+would least expect to find Him,--even in proud, rebellious
+hearts."
+
+For a moment they clung together in the pale, clear square of the
+west window, as the two natures in one person sometimes meet and
+cling in a fated hour.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Ralph and his father came home to spend the holidays, and on
+Christmas day Bayliss drove out from town for dinner. He arrived
+early, and after greeting his mother in the kitchen, went up to
+the sitting-room, which shone with a holiday neatness, and, for
+once, was warm enough for Bayliss,--having a low circulation, he
+felt the cold acutely. He walked up and down, jingling the keys
+in his pockets and admiring his mother's winter chrysanthemums,
+which were still blooming. Several times he paused before the
+old-fashioned secretary, looking through the glass doors at the
+volumes within. The sight of some of those books awoke
+disagreeable memories. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen,
+it used to make him bitterly jealous to hear his mother coaxing
+Claude to read aloud to her. Bayliss had never been bookish. Even
+before he could read, when his mother told him stories, he at
+once began to prove to her how they could not possibly be true.
+Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than
+"Robinson Crusoe." If he sat down with a book, he wanted to feel
+that he was learning something. His mother and Claude were always
+talking over his head about the people in books and stories.
+
+Though Bayliss had a sentimental feeling about coming home, he
+considered that he had had a lonely boyhood. At the country
+school he had not been happy; he was the boy who always got the
+answers to the test problems when the others didn't, and he kept
+his arithmetic papers buttoned up in the inside pocket of his
+little jacket until he modestly handed them to the teacher, never
+giving a neighbour the benefit of his cleverness. Leonard Dawson
+and other lusty lads of his own age made life as terrifying for
+him as they could. In winter they used to throw him into a
+snow-drift, and then run away and leave him. In summer they made
+him eat live grasshoppers behind the schoolhouse, and put big
+bull-snakes in his dinner pail to surprise him. To this day,
+Bayliss liked to see one of those fellows get into difficulties
+that his big fists couldn't get him out of.
+
+It was because Bayliss was quick at figures and undersized for a
+farmer that his father sent him to town to learn the implement
+business. From the day he went to work, he managed to live on his
+small salary. He kept in his vest pocket a little day-book
+wherein he noted down all his expenditures,-- like the
+millionaire about whom the Baptist preachers were never tired of
+talking,-and his offering to the contribution box stood out
+conspicuous in his weekly account.
+
+In Bayliss' voice, even when he used his insinuating drawl and
+said disagreeable things, there was something a little plaintive;
+the expression of a deep-seated sense of injury. He felt that he
+had always been misunderstood and underestimated. Later after he
+went into business for himself, the young men of Frankfort had
+never urged him to take part in their pleasures. He had not been
+asked to join the tennis club or the whist club. He envied Claude
+his fine physique and his unreckoning, impulsive vitality, as if
+they had been given to his brother by unfair means and should
+rightly have been his.
+
+Bayliss and his father were talking together before dinner when
+Claude came in and was so inconsiderate as to put up a window,
+though he knew his brother hated a draft. In a moment Bayliss
+addressed him without looking at him:
+
+"I see your friends, the Erlichs, have bought out the Jenkinson
+company, in Lincoln; at least, they've given their notes."
+
+Claude had promised his mother to keep his temper today, "Yes, I
+saw it in the paper. I hope they'll succeed."
+
+"I doubt it." Bayliss shook his head with his wisest look. "I
+understand they've put a mortgage on their home. That old woman
+will find herself without a roof one of these days."
+
+"I don't think so. The boys have wanted to go into business
+together for a long while. They are all intelligent and
+industrious; why shouldn't they get on?" Claude flattered himself
+that he spoke in an easy, confidential way.
+
+Bayliss screwed up his eyes. "I expect they're too fond of good
+living. They'll pay their interest, and spend whatever's left
+entertaining their friends. I didn't see the young fellow's name
+in the notice of incorporation, Julius, do they call him?"
+
+"Julius is going abroad to study this fall. He intends to be a
+professor."
+
+"What's the matter with him? Does he have poor health?"
+
+At this moment the dinner bell sounded, Ralph ran down from his
+room where he had been dressing, and they all descended to the
+kitchen to greet the turkey. The dinner progressed pleasantly.
+Bayliss and his father talked politics, and Ralph told stories
+about his neighbours in Yucca county. Bayliss was pleased that
+his mother had remembered he liked oyster stuffing, and he
+complimented her upon her mince pies. When he saw her pour a
+second cup of coffee for herself and for Claude at the end of
+dinner, he said, in a gentle, grieved tone, "I'm sorry to see you
+taking two, Mother."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at him over the coffee-pot with a droll,
+guilty smile. "I don't believe coffee hurts me a particle,
+Bayliss."
+
+"Of course it does; it's a stimulant." What worse could it be,
+his tone implied! When you said anything was a "stimulant," you
+had sufficiently condemned it; there was no more noxious word.
+
+Claude was in the upper hall, putting on his coat to go down to
+the barn and smoke a cigar, when Bayliss came out from the
+sitting-room and detained him by an indefinite remark.
+
+"I believe there's to be a musical show in Hastings Saturday
+night."
+
+Claude said he had heard something of the sort.
+
+"I was thinking," Bayliss affected a careless tone, as if he
+thought of such things every day, "that we might make a party and
+take Gladys and Enid. The roads are pretty good."
+
+"It's a hard drive home, so late at night," Claude objected.
+Bayliss meant, of course, that Claude should drive the party up
+and back in Mr. Wheeler's big car. Bayliss never used his
+glistening Cadillac for long, rough drives.
+
+"I guess Mother would put us up overnight, and we needn't take
+the girls home till Sunday morning. I'll get the tickets."
+
+"You'd better arrange it with the girls, then. I'll drive you, of
+course, if you want to go."
+
+Claude escaped and went out, wishing that Bayliss would do his
+own courting and not drag him into it. Bayliss, who didn't know
+one tune from another, certainly didn't want to go to this
+concert, and it was doubtful whether Enid Royce would care much
+about going. Gladys Farmer was the best musician in Frankfort,
+and she would probably like to hear it.
+
+Claude and Gladys were old friends, from their High School days,
+though they hadn't seen much of each other while he was going to
+college. Several times this fall Bayliss had asked Claude to go
+somewhere with him on a Sunday, and then stopped to "pick Gladys
+up," as he said. Claude didn't like it. He was disgusted, anyhow,
+when he saw that Bayliss had made up his mind to marry Gladys.
+She and her mother were so poor that he would probably succeed in
+the end, though so far Gladys didn't seem to give him much
+encouragement. Marrying Bayliss, he thought, would be no joke for
+any woman, but Gladys was the one girl in town whom he
+particularly ought not to marry. She was as extravagant as she
+was poor. Though she taught in the Frankfort High School for
+twelve hundred a year, she had prettier clothes than any of the
+other girls, except Enid Royce, whose father was a rich man. Her
+new hats and suede shoes were discussed and criticized year in
+and year out. People said if she married Bayliss Wheeler, he
+would soon bring her down to hard facts. Some hoped she would,
+and some hoped she wouldn't. As for Claude, he had kept away from
+Mrs. Farmer's cheerful parlour ever since Bayliss had begun to
+drop in there. He was disappointed in Gladys. When he was
+offended, he seldom stopped to reason about his state of feeling.
+He avoided the person and the thought of the person, as if it
+were a sore spot in his mind.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+It had been Mr. Wheeler's intention to stay at home until spring,
+but Ralph wrote that he was having trouble with his foreman, so
+his father went out to the ranch in February. A few days after
+his departure there was a storm which gave people something to
+talk about for a year to come.
+
+The snow began to fall about noon on St. Valentine's day, a soft,
+thick, wet snow that came down in billows and stuck to
+everything. Later in the afternoon the wind rose, and wherever
+there was a shed, a tree, a hedge, or even a clump of tall weeds,
+drifts began to pile up. Mrs. Wheeler, looking anxiously out from
+the sitting-room windows, could see nothing but driving waves of
+soft white, which cut the tall house off from the rest of the
+world.
+
+Claude and Dan, down in the corral, where they were provisioning
+the cattle against bad weather, found the air so thick that they
+could scarcely breathe; their ears and mouths and nostrils were
+full of snow, their faces plastered with it. It melted constantly
+upon their clothing, and yet they were white from their boots to
+their caps as they worked,- there was no shaking it off. The air
+was not cold, only a little below freezing. When they came in for
+supper, the drifts had piled against the house until they covered
+the lower sashes of the kitchen windows, and as they opened the
+door, a frail wall of snow fell in behind them. Mahailey came
+running with her broom and pail to sweep it up.
+
+"Ain't it a turrible storm, Mr. Claude? I reckon poor Mr. Ernest
+won't git over tonight, will he? You never mind, honey; I'll wipe
+up that water. Run along and git dry clothes on you, an' take a
+bath, or you'll ketch cold. Th' ole tank's full of hot water for
+you." Exceptional weather of any kind always delighted Mahailey.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Claude at the head of the stairs. "There's no
+danger of the steers getting snowed under along the creek, is
+there?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, I thought of that. We've driven them all into the little
+corral on the level, and shut the gates. It's over my head down
+in the creek bottom now. I haven't a dry stitch on me. I guess
+I'll follow Mahailey's advice and get in the tub, if you can wait
+supper for me."
+
+"Put your clothes outside the bathroom door, and I'll see to
+drying them for you."
+
+"Yes, please. I'll need them tomorrow. I don't want to spoil my
+new corduroys. And, Mother, see if you can make Dan change. He's
+too wet and steamy to sit at the table with. Tell him if anybody
+has to go out after supper, I'll go."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hurried down stairs. Dan, she knew, would rather sit
+all evening in wet clothes than take the trouble to put on dry
+ones. He tried to sneak past her to his own quarters behind the
+wash-room, and looked aggrieved when he heard her message.
+
+"I ain't got no other outside clothes, except my Sunday ones," he
+objected.
+
+"Well, Claude says he'll go out if anybody has to. I guess you'll
+have to change for once, Dan, or go to bed without your supper."
+She laughed quietly at his dejected expression as he slunk away.
+
+"Mrs. Wheeler," Mahailey whispered, "can't I run down to the
+cellar an' git some of them nice strawberry preserves? Mr.
+Claude, he loves 'em on his hot biscuit. He don't eat the honey
+no more; he's got tired of it."
+
+"Very well. I'll make the coffee good and strong; that will
+please him more than anything."
+
+Claude came down feeling clean and warm and hungry. As he opened
+the stair door he sniffed the coffee and frying ham, and when
+Mahailey bent over the oven the warm smell of browning biscuit
+rushed out with the heat. These combined odours somewhat
+dispersed Dan's gloom when he came back in squeaky Sunday shoes
+and a bunglesome cut-away coat. The latter was not required of
+him, but he wore it for revenge.
+
+During supper Mrs. Wheeler told them once again how, long ago
+when she was first married, there were no roads or fences west of
+Frankfort. One winter night she sat on the roof of their first
+dugout nearly all night, holding up a lantern tied to a pole to
+guide Mr. Wheeler home through a snowstorm like this.
+
+Mahailey, moving about the stove, watched over the group at the
+table. She liked to see the men fill themselves with food-though
+she did not count Dan a man, by any means, and she looked out to
+see that Mrs. Wheeler did not forget to eat altogether, as she
+was apt to do when she fell to remembering things that had
+happened long ago. Mahailey was in a happy frame of mind because
+her weather predictions had come true; only yesterday she had
+told Mrs. Wheeler there would be snow, because she had seen
+snowbirds. She regarded supper as more than usually important
+when Claude put on his "velvet close," as she called his brown
+corduroys.
+
+After supper Claude lay on the couch in the sitting room, while
+his mother read aloud to him from "Bleak House,"--one of the few
+novels she loved. Poor Jo was drawing toward his end when Claude
+suddenly sat up. "Mother, I believe I'm too sleepy. I'll have to
+turn in. Do you suppose it's still snowing?"
+
+He rose and went to look out, but the west windows were so
+plastered with snow that they were opaque. Even from the one on
+the south he could see nothing for a moment; then Mahailey must
+have carried her lamp to the kitchen window beneath, for all at
+once a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down
+it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing
+progression, moving as close as they could without forming a
+solid mass. Claude struck the frozen window-frame with his fist,
+lifted the lower sash, and thrusting out his head tried to look
+abroad into the engulfed night. There was a solemnity about a
+storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The
+myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight
+seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite
+end. A faint purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human
+senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and
+shoulders. His mother, looking under his lifted arm, strained her
+eyes to see out into that swarming movement, and murmured softly
+in her quavering voice:
+
+"Ever thicker, thicker, thicker, Froze the ice on lake and river;
+Ever deeper, deeper, deeper, Fell the snow o'er all the
+landscape."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Claude's bedroom faced the east. The next morning, when he looked
+out of his windows, only the tops of the cedars in the front yard
+were visible. Hurriedly putting on his clothes he ran to the west
+window at the end of the hall; Lovely Creek, and the deep ravine
+in which it flowed, had disappeared as if they had never been.
+The rough pasture was like a smooth field, except for humps and
+mounds like haycocks, where the snow had drifted over a post or a
+bush.
+
+At the kitchen stairs Mahailey met him in gleeful excitement.
+"Lord 'a' mercy, Mr. Claude, I can't git the storm door open.
+We're snowed in fas'." She looked like a tramp woman, in a jacket
+patched with many colours, her head tied up in an old black
+"fascinator," with ravelled yarn hanging down over her face like
+wild locks of hair. She kept this costume for calamitous
+occasions; appeared in it when the water-pipes were frozen and
+burst, or when spring storms flooded the coops and drowned her
+young chickens.
+
+The storm door opened outward. Claude put his shoulder to it and
+pushed it a little way. Then, with Mahailey's fireshovel he
+dislodged enough snow to enable him to force back the door. Dan
+came tramping in his stocking-feet across the kitchen to his
+boots, which were still drying behind the stove. "She's sure a
+bad one, Claude," he remarked, blinking.
+
+"Yes. I guess we won't try to go out till after breakfast. We'll
+have to dig our way to the barn, and I never thought to bring the
+shovels up last night."
+
+"Th' ole snow shovels is in the cellar.
+I'll git 'em."
+
+"Not now, Mahailey. Give us our breakfast before you do anything
+else."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler came down, pinning on her little shawl, her
+shoulders more bent than usual. "Claude," she said fearfully,
+"the cedars in the front yard are all but covered. Do you suppose
+our cattle could be buried?"
+
+He laughed. "No, Mother. The cattle have been moving around all
+night, I expect."
+
+When the two men started out with the wooden snow shovels, Mrs.
+Wheeler and Mahailey stood in the doorway, watching them. For a
+short distance from the house the path they dug was like a
+tunnel, and the white walls on either side were higher than their
+heads. On the breast of the hill the snow was not so deep, and
+they made better headway. They had to fight through a second
+heavy drift before they reached the barn, where they went in and
+warmed themselves among the horses and cows. Dan was for getting
+next a warm cow and beginning to milk.
+
+"Not yet," said Claude. "I want to have a look at the hogs before
+we do anything here."
+
+The hog-house was built down in a draw behind the barn. When
+Claude reached the edge of the gully, blown almost bare, he could
+look about him. The draw was full of snow, smooth . . . except in
+the middle, where there was a rumpled depression, resembling a
+great heap of tumbled bed-linen.
+
+Dan gasped. "God a' mighty, Claude, the roof's fell in! Them
+hogs'll be smothered."
+
+"They will if we don't get at them pretty quick. Run to the house
+and tell Mother Mahailey will have to milk this morning, and get
+back here as fast as you can."
+
+The roof was a flat thatch, and the weight of the snow had been
+too much for it. Claude wondered if he should have put on a new
+thatch that fall; but the old one wasn't leaky, and had seemed
+strong enough.
+
+When Dan got back they took turns, one going ahead and throwing
+out as much snow as he could, the other handling the snow that
+fell back. After an hour or so of this work, Dan leaned on his
+shovel.
+
+"We'll never do it, Claude. Two men couldn't throw all that snow
+out in a week. I'm about all in."
+
+"Well, you can go back to the house and sit by the fire," Claude
+called fiercely. He had taken off his coat and was working in his
+shirt and sweater. The sweat was rolling from his face, his back
+and arms ached, and his hands, which he couldn't keep dry, were
+blistered. There were thirty-seven hogs in the hoghouse.
+
+Dan sat down in the hole. "Maybe if I could git a drink of water,
+I could hold on a-ways," he said dejectedly.
+
+It was past noon when they got into the shed; a cloud of steam
+rose, and they heard grunts. They found the pigs all lying in a
+heap at one end, and pulled the top ones off alive and squealing.
+Twelve hogs, at the bottom of the pile, had been suffocated. They
+lay there wet and black in the snow, their bodies warm and
+smoking, but they were dead; there was no mistaking that.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, in her husband's rubber boots and an old overcoat,
+came down with Mahailey to view the scene of disaster.
+
+"You ought to git right at them hawgs an' butcher 'em today,"
+Mahailey called down to the men. She was standing on the edge of
+the draw, in her patched jacket and ravelled hood. Claude, down
+in the hole, brushed the sleeve of his sweater across his
+streaming face. "Butcher them?" he cried indignantly. "I wouldn't
+butcher them if I never saw meat again."
+
+"You ain't a-goin' to let all that good hawg-meat go to wase, air
+you, Mr. Claude?" Mahailey pleaded. "They didn't have no sickness
+nor nuthin'. Only you'll have to git right at 'em, or the meat
+won't be healthy."
+
+"It wouldn't be healthy for me, anyhow. I don't know what I will
+do with them, but I'm mighty sure I won't butcher them."
+
+"Don't bother him, Mahailey," Mrs. Wheeler cautioned her. "He's
+tired, and he has to fix some place for the live hogs."
+
+"I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs
+myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could
+save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs. We ain't had no
+spare-ribs for ever so long."
+
+What with the ache in his back and his chagrin at losing the
+pigs, Claude was feeling desperate. "Mother," he shouted, "if you
+don't take Mahailey into the house, I'll go crazy!"
+
+That evening Mrs. Wheeler asked him how much the twelve hogs
+would have been worth in money. He looked a little startled.
+
+"Oh, I don't know exactly; three hundred dollars, anyway."
+
+"Would it really be as much as that? I don't see how we could
+have prevented it, do you?" Her face looked troubled.
+
+Claude went to bed immediately after supper, but he had no sooner
+stretched his aching body between the sheets than he began to
+feel wakeful. He was humiliated at losing the pigs, because they
+had been left in his charge; but for the loss in money, about
+which even his mother was grieved, he didn't seem to care. He
+wondered whether all that winter he hadn't been working himself
+up into a childish contempt for money-values.
+
+When Ralph was home at Christmas time, he wore on his little
+finger a heavy gold ring, with a diamond as big as a pea,
+surrounded by showy grooves in the metal. He admitted to Claude
+that he had won it in a poker game. Ralph's hands were never free
+from automobile grease--they were the red, stumpy kind that
+couldn't be kept clean. Claude remembered him milking in the barn
+by lantern light, his jewel throwing off jabbing sparkles of
+colour, and his fingers looking very much like the teats of the
+cow. That picture rose before him now, as a symbol of what
+successful farming led to.
+
+The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic
+value; wheat and corn as good as could be grown anywhere in the
+world, hogs and cattle that were the best of their kind. In
+return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy
+furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded,
+clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown. Most of his
+money was paid out for machinery,--and that, too, went to pieces.
+A steam thrasher didn't last long; a horse outlived three
+automobiles.
+
+Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the
+neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more
+individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine
+cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges
+along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being
+cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished
+the land . . . they made the snow drift . . . nobody had them any
+more. With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody
+wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The
+orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty
+years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble
+to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to
+raise it.
+
+The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the
+farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now
+they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either
+stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were
+always stirring up trouble. Evidently, it took more intelligence
+to spend money than to make it.
+
+When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the
+Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's
+degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph
+would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make
+anything the world needed.
+
+Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was
+twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no
+ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he
+admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs.
+Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably
+it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth
+the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use
+of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs.
+Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this
+security was what was the matter with everybody; that only
+perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in
+people and develop the mean ones.
+
+Ernest, too, said "it's the best life in the world, Claude."
+
+But if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake
+in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To
+be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep,
+was like being assured of a decent burial. Safety, security; if
+you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would
+never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to
+them.
+
+Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was
+something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his
+discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary
+fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and
+other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was
+that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that
+his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his
+guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The
+neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was
+a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his
+energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in
+resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to
+subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself
+in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he
+would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He
+would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short
+in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an
+intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,- the conviction
+that there was something splendid about life, if he could but
+find it 
+
+IX
+
+The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was
+a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,--then a hard
+freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people
+went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of
+ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler's old double sleigh
+from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on
+top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for
+Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles,
+most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But
+the Wheelers always kept everything.
+
+Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a
+sleigh-ride. Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain
+merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run
+the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and Claude were old
+playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was
+called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to
+see Mr. Royce at his town office.
+
+Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks,
+Pompey and Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long
+before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most
+of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with
+silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy
+feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger;
+that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite
+so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence
+is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical
+lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the
+many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked in the barn.
+
+The mill road, that led off the highway and down to the river,
+had pleasant associations for Claude. When he was a youngster,
+every time his father went to mill, he begged to go along. He
+liked the mill and the miller and the miller's little girl. He
+had never liked the miller's house, however, and he was afraid of
+Enid's mother. Even now, as he tied his horses to the long
+hitch-bar down by the engine room, he resolved that he would not
+be persuaded to enter that formal parlour, full of new-looking,
+expensive furniture, where his energy always deserted him and he
+could never think of anything to talk about. If he moved, his
+shoes squeaked in the silence, and Mrs. Royce sat and blinked her
+sharp little eyes at him, and the longer he stayed, the harder it
+was to go.
+
+Enid herself came to the door.
+
+"Why, it's Claude!" she exclaimed. "Won't you come in?"
+
+"No, I want you to go riding. I've got the old sleigh out. Come
+on, it's a fine night!"
+
+"I thought I heard bells. Won't you come in and see Mother while
+I get my things on?"
+
+Claude said he must stay with his horses, and ran back to the
+hitch-bar. Enid didn't keep him waiting long; she wasn't that
+kind. She came swiftly down the path and through the front gate
+in the Maine seal motor-coat she wore when she drove her coupe in
+cold weather.
+
+"Now, which way?" Claude asked as the horses sprang forward and
+the bells began to jingle.
+
+"Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells,
+Claude. I haven't heard sleighbells since you used to bring me
+and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don't we stop
+for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!" Here Enid laughed.
+"All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they
+can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for
+Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself,
+I believe they'd hold a public meeting."
+
+Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. "Doesn't it
+make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?"
+
+"It would, if she minded. But she's just as serene! They must
+have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer's
+back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the
+furs."
+
+Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a
+few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and
+lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the
+snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were
+turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her
+daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the
+town, where only people of modest means lived. "We must stop to
+see Gladys' mother, if only for a minute," Enid said as they drew
+up before the fence. "She is so fond of company." Claude tied his
+team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch,
+hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.
+
+Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a
+pleasant Kentucky voice. She took Enid's arm affectionately, and
+Claude followed them into the long, low sitting-room, which had
+an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and was scantily
+furnished in rickety mahogany. There, close beside the hard-coal
+burner, sat Bayliss Wheeler. He did not rise when they entered,
+but said, "Hello, folks," in a rather sheepish voice. On a little
+table, beside Mrs. Farmer's workbasket, was the box of candy he
+had lately taken out of his overcoat pocket, still tied up with
+its gold cord. A tall lamp stood beside the piano, where Gladys
+had evidently been practising. Claude wondered whether Bayliss
+actually pretended to an interest in music! At this moment Gladys
+was in the kitchen, Mrs. Farmer explained, looking for her
+mother's glasses, mislaid when she was copying a recipe for a
+cheese souffle.
+
+"Are you still getting new recipes, Mrs. Farmer?" Enid asked her.
+"I thought you could make every dish in the world already."
+
+"Oh, not quite!" Mrs. Farmer laughed modestly and showed that she
+liked compliments. "Do sit down, Claude," she besought of the
+stiff image by the door. "Daughter will be here directly."
+
+At that moment Gladys Farmer appeared.
+
+"Why, I didn't know you had company, Mother," she said, coming in
+to greet them.
+
+This meant, Claude supposed, that Bayliss was not company. He
+scarcely glanced at Gladys as he took the hand she held out to
+him.
+
+One of Gladys' grandfathers had come from Antwerp, and she had
+the settled composure, the full red lips, brown eyes, and dimpled
+white hands which occur so often in Flemish portraits of young
+women. Some people thought her a trifle heavy, too mature and
+positive to be called pretty, even though they admired her rich,
+tulip-like complexion. Gladys never seemed aware that her looks
+and her poverty and her extravagance were the subject of
+perpetual argument, but went to and from school every day with
+the air of one whose position is assured. Her musicianship gave
+her a kind of authority in Frankfort.
+
+Enid explained the purpose of their call. "Claude has got out his
+old sleigh, and we've come to take you for a ride. Perhaps
+Bayliss will go, too?"
+
+Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was
+nothing he hated so much as being out in the cold. Gladys ran
+upstairs to put on a warm dress, and Enid accompanied her,
+leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable conversation between her
+two incompatible guests.
+
+"Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm,
+Claude. What a pity!" she said sympathetically.
+
+Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn't be at all reticent about
+that incident!
+
+"I suppose there was really no way to save them," Mrs. Farmer
+went on in her polite way; her voice was low and round, like her
+daughter's, different from the high, tight Western voice. "So I
+hope you don't let yourself worry about it."
+
+"No, I don't worry about anything as dead as those hogs were.
+What's the use?" Claude asked boldly.
+
+"That's right," murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her
+chair. "Such things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to
+take them too hard. It isn't as if a person had been hurt, is
+it?"
+
+Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and
+to the shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its
+best to be attractive to her friends. There weren't four steady
+legs on any of the stuffed chairs or little folding tables she
+had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold moulding was
+half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.
+But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after
+the Civil War, and she didn't fret half so much about her back
+taxes as her neighbours did. Claude tried to talk agreeably to
+her, but he was distracted by the sound of stifled laughter
+upstairs. Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss'
+being there. How shameless girls were, anyhow!
+
+People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh
+dashed jingling up and down the village streets. When they left
+town, Bayliss suggested that they drive out past the Trevor
+place. The girls began to talk about the two young New
+Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when
+Frankfort was still a tough little frontier settlement. Every one
+was talking about them now, for a few days ago word had come that
+one of the partners, Amos Brewster, had dropped dead in his law
+office in Hartford. It was thirty years since he and his friend,
+Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort
+county, and had built the house on the round hill east of the
+town, where they wasted a great deal of money very joyously.
+Claude's father always declared that the amount they squandered
+in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in
+commendable industrial endeavour. The country, Mr. Wheeler said,
+had never been the same since those boys left it. He delighted to
+tell about the time when Trevor and Brewster went into sheep.
+They imported a breeding ram from Scotland at a great expense,
+and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him that
+they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his
+crate. Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season;
+came at the beginning of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the
+mothers died from exposure. The gallant Trevor took horse and
+spurred all over the county, from one little settlement to
+another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan
+lambs.
+
+The rich bottom land about the Trevor place had been rented out
+to a truck gardener for years now; the comfortable house with its
+billiard-room annex-- a wonder for that part of the country in
+its day--remained closed, its windows boarded up. It sat on the
+top of a round knoll, a fine cottonwood grove behind it. Tonight,
+as Claude drove toward it, the hill with its tall straight trees
+looked like a big fur cap put down on the snow.
+
+"Why hasn't some one bought that house long ago and fixed it up?"
+Enid remarked. "There is no building site around here to compare
+with it. It looks like the place where the leading citizen of the
+town ought to live."
+
+"I'm glad you like it, Enid," said Bayliss in a guarded voice.
+"I've always had a sneaking fancy for the place myself. Those
+fellows back there never wanted to sell it. But now the estate's
+got to be settled up. I bought it yesterday. The deed is on its
+way to Hartford for signature."
+
+Enid turned round in her seat. "Why Bayliss, are you in earnest?
+Think of just buying the Trevor place off-hand, as if it were any
+ordinary piece of real estate! Will you make over the house, and
+live there some day?"
+
+"I don't know about living there. It's too far to walk to my
+business, and the road across this bottom gets pretty muddy for a
+car in the spring."
+
+"But it's not far, less than a mile. If I once owned that spot,
+I'd surely never let anybody else live there. Even Carrie
+remembers it. She often asks in her letters whether any one has
+bought the Trevor place yet."
+
+Carrie Royce, Enid's older sister, was a missionary in China.
+
+"Well," Bayliss admitted, "I didn't buy it for an investment,
+exactly. I paid all it was worth."
+
+Enid turned to Gladys, who was apparently not listening. "You'd
+be the one who could plan a mansion for Trevor Hill, Gladys. You
+always have such original ideas about houses."
+
+"Yes, people who have no houses of their own often seem to have
+ideas about building," said Gladys quietly. "But I like the
+Trevor place as it is. I hate to think that one of them is dead.
+People say they did have such good times up there."
+
+Bayliss grunted. "Call it good times if you like. The kids were
+still grubbing whiskey bottles out of the cellar when I first
+came to town. Of course, if I decide to live there, I'll pull
+down that old trap and put up something modern." He often took
+this gruff tone with Gladys in public.
+
+Enid tried to draw the driver into the conversation. "There seems
+to be a difference of opinion here, Claude."
+
+"Oh," said Gladys carelessly, "it's Bayliss' property, or soon
+will be. He will build what he likes. I've always known somebody
+would get that place away from me, so I'm prepared."
+
+"Get it away from you?" muttered Bayliss, amazed.
+
+"Yes. As long as no one bought it and spoiled it, it was mine as
+much as it was anybody's."
+
+"Claude," said Enid banteringly, "now both your brothers have
+houses. Where are you going to have yours?"
+
+"I don't know that I'll ever have one. I think I'll run about the
+world a little before I draw my plans," he replied sarcastically.
+
+"Take me with you, Claude!" said Gladys in a tone of sudden
+weariness. From that spiritless murmur Enid suspected that
+Bayliss had captured Gladys' hand under the buffalo robe.
+
+Grimness had settled down over the sleighing party. Even Enid,
+who was not highly sensitive to unuttered feelings, saw that
+there was an uncomfortable constraint. A sharp wind had come up.
+Bayliss twice suggested turning back, but his brother answered,
+"Pretty soon," and drove on. He meant that Bayliss should have
+enough of it. Not until Enid whispered reproachfully, "I really
+think you ought to turn; we're all getting cold," did he realize
+that he had made his sleighing party into a punishment! There was
+certainly nothing to punish Enid for; she had done her best, and
+had tried to make his own bad manners less conspicuous. He
+muttered a blundering apology to her when he lifted her from the
+sleigh at the mill house. On his long drive home he had bitter
+thoughts for company.
+
+He was so angry with Gladys that he hadn't been able to bid her
+good-night. Everything she said on the ride had nettled him. If
+she meant to marry Bayliss, then she ought to throw off this
+affectation of freedom and independence. If she did not mean to,
+why did she accept favours from him and let him get into the
+habit of walking into her house and putting his box of candy on
+the table, as all Frankfort fellows did when they were courting?
+Certainly she couldn't make herself believe that she liked his
+society!
+
+When they were classmates at the Frankfort High School, Gladys
+was Claude's aesthetic proxy. It wasn't the proper thing for a
+boy to be too clean, or too careful about his dress and manners.
+But if he selected a girl who was irreproachable in these
+respects, got his Latin and did his laboratory work with her,
+then all her personal attractions redounded to his credit. Gladys
+had seemed to appreciate the honour Claude did her, and it was
+not all on her own account that she wore such beautifully ironed
+muslin dresses when they went on botanical expeditions.
+
+Driving home after that miserable sleigh-ride, Claude told
+himself that in so far as Gladys was concerned he could make up
+his mind to the fact that he had been "stung" all along. He had
+believed in her fine feelings; believed implicitly. Now he knew
+she had none so fine that she couldn't pocket them when there was
+enough to be gained by it. Even while he said these things over
+and over, his old conception of Gladys, down at the bottom of his
+mind, remained persistently unchanged. But that only made his
+state of feeling the more painful. He was deeply hurt,--and for
+some reason, youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself
+betrayed. 
+
+
+Book Two: Enid 
+
+I
+
+0ne afternoon that spring Claude was sitting on the long flight
+of granite steps that leads up to the State House in Denver. He
+had been looking at the collection of Cliff Dweller remains in
+the Capitol, and when he came out into the sunlight the faint
+smell of fresh-cut grass struck his nostrils and persuaded him to
+linger. The gardeners were giving the grounds their first light
+mowing. All the lawns on the hill were bright with daffodils and
+hyacinths. A sweet, warm wind blew over the grass, drying the
+waterdrops. There had been showers in the afternoon, and the sky
+was still a tender, rainy blue, where it showed through the
+masses of swiftly moving clouds.
+
+Claude had been away from home for nearly a month. His father had
+sent him out to see Ralph and the new ranch, and from there he
+went on to Colorado Springs and Trinidad. He had enjoyed
+travelling, but now that he was back in Denver he had that
+feeling of loneliness which often overtakes country boys in a
+city; the feeling of being unrelated to anything, of not
+mattering to anybody. He had wandered about Colorado Springs
+wishing he knew some of the people who were going in and out of
+the houses; wishing that he could talk to some of those pretty
+girls he saw driving their own cars about the streets, if only to
+say a few words. One morning when he was walking out in the hills
+a girl passed him, then slowed her car to ask if she could give
+him a lift. Claude would have said that she was just the sort who
+would never stop to pick him up, yet she did, and she talked to
+him pleasantly all the way back to town. It was only twenty
+minutes or so, but it was worth everything else that happened on
+his trip. When she asked him where she should put him down, he
+said at the Antlers, and blushed so furiously that she must have
+known at once he wasn't staying there.
+
+He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat
+here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind
+the mountains. Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to
+be young; but it was a painful thing, too. He didn't believe
+older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden
+light, the mass of mountains was splitting up into four distinct
+ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in
+perspective, one behind the other. It was a lonely splendour that
+only made the ache in his breast the stronger. What was the
+matter with him, he asked himself entreatingly. He must answer
+that question before he went home again.
+
+The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square,
+pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more.
+There was still South America; perhaps he could find something
+below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the
+world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.
+
+Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his
+father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a
+new country. It was a storm that died down at last,--but what a
+pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power--for it was a
+kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against
+the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did
+not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped
+to look at him.
+
+The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man
+standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists
+clenched in an attitude of arrested action,--his sandy hair, his
+tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique
+rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known
+how he seemed to this stranger.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning Claude stepped off the train at Frankfort and
+had his breakfast at the station before the town was awake. His
+family were not expecting him, so he thought he would walk home
+and stop at the mill to see Enid Royce. After all, old friends
+were best.
+
+He left town by the low road that wound along the creek. The
+willows were all out in new yellow leaves, and the sticky
+cotton-wood buds were on the point of bursting. Birds were
+calling everywhere, and now and then, through the studded willow
+wands, flashed the dazzling wing of a cardinal.
+
+All over the dusty, tan-coloured wheatfields there was a tender
+mist of green,--millions of little fingers reaching up and waving
+lightly in the sun. To the north and south Claude could see the
+corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres
+where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in
+clouds of dust to the roadside. When a gust of wind rose, gay
+little twisters came across the open fields, corkscrews of
+powdered earth that whirled through the air and suddenly fell
+again. It seemed as if there were a lark on every fence post,
+singing for everything that was dumb; for the great ploughed
+lands, and the heavy horses in the rows, and the men guiding the
+horses.
+
+Along the roadsides, from under the dead weeds and wisps of dried
+bluestem, the dandelions thrust up their clean, bright faces. If
+Claude happened to step on one, the acrid smell made him think of
+Mahailey, who had probably been out this very morning, gouging
+the sod with her broken butcher knife and stuffing dandelion
+greens into her apron. She always went for greens with an air of
+secrecy, very early, and sneaked along the roadsides stooping
+close to the ground, as if she might be detected and driven away,
+or as if the dandelions were wild things and had to be caught
+sleeping.
+
+Claude was thinking, as he walked, of how he used to like to come
+to mill with his father. The whole process of milling was
+mysterious to him then; and the mill house and the miller's wife
+were mysterious; even Enid was, a little--until he got her down
+in the bright sun among the cat-tails. They used to play in the
+bins of clean wheat, watch the flour coming out of the hopper and
+get themselves covered with white dust.
+
+Best of all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping
+in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in
+through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted
+jewel-weed growing in the shale. The mill was a place of sharp
+contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy,
+dripping silence. He remembered how astonished he was one day,
+when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the
+millstones, and discovered what harmless looking things they
+were. The miller picked away at them with a sharp hammer until
+the sparks flew, and Claude still had on his hand a blue spot
+where a chip of flint went under the skin when he got too near.
+
+Jason Royce must have kept his mill going out of sentiment, for
+there was not much money in it now. But milling had been his
+first business, and he had not found many things in life to be
+sentimental about. Sometimes one still came upon him in dusty
+miller's clothes, giving his man a day off. He had long ago
+ceased to depend on the risings and fallings of Lovely Creek for
+his power, and had put in a gasoline engine. The old dam now lay
+"like a holler tooth," as one of his men said, grown up with
+weeds and willow-brush.
+
+Mr. Royce's family affairs had never gone as well as his
+business. He had not been blessed with a son, and out of five
+daughters he had succeeded in bringing up only two. People
+thought the mill house damp and unwholesome. Until he built a
+tenant's cottage and got a married man to take charge of the
+mill, Mr. Royce was never able to keep his millers long. They
+complained of the gloom of the house, and said they could not get
+enough to eat. Mrs. Royce went every summer to a vegetarian
+sanatorium in Michigan, where she learned to live on nuts and
+toasted cereals. She gave her family nourishment, to be sure, but
+there was never during the day a meal that a man could look
+forward to with pleasure, or sit down to with satisfaction. Mr.
+Royce usually dined at the hotel in town. Nevertheless, his wife
+was distinguished for certain brilliant culinary accomplishments.
+Her bread was faultless. When a church supper was toward, she was
+always called upon for her wonderful mayonnaise dressing, or her
+angel-food cake,--sure to be the lightest and spongiest in any
+assemblage of cakes.
+
+A deep preoccupation about her health made Mrs. Royce like a
+woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming
+regret. It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility. She lived
+differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful
+and reserved. Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care
+of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was understood and
+surrounded by sympathy.
+
+Her distrust had communicated itself to her daughters and in
+countless little ways had coloured their feelings about life.
+They grew up under the shadow of being "different," and formed no
+close friendships. Gladys Farmer was the only Frankfort girl who
+had ever gone much to the mill house. Nobody was surprised when
+Caroline Royce, the older daughter, went out to China to be a
+missionary, or that her mother let her go without a protest. The
+Royce women were strange, anyhow, people said; with Carrie gone,
+they hoped Enid would grow up to be more like other folk. She
+dressed well, came to town often in her car, and was always ready
+to work for the church or the public library.
+
+Besides, in Frankfort, Enid was thought very pretty,--in itself a
+humanizing attribute. She was slender, with a small, well-shaped
+head, a smooth, pale skin, and large, dark, opaque eyes with
+heavy lashes. The long line from the lobe of her ear to the tip
+of her chin gave her face a certain rigidity, but to the old
+ladies, who are the best critics in such matters, this meant
+firmness and dignity. She moved quickly and gracefully, just
+brushing things rather than touching them, so that there was a
+suggestion of flight about her slim figure, of gliding away from
+her surroundings. When the Sunday School gave tableaux vivants,
+Enid was chosen for Nydia, the blind girl of Pompeii, and for the
+martyr in "Christ or Diana." The pallor of her skin, the
+submissive inclination of her forehead, and her dark, unchanging
+eyes, made one think of something "early Christian."
+
+On this May morning when Claude Wheeler came striding up the mill
+road, Enid was in the yard, standing by a trellis for vines built
+near the fence, out from under the heavy shade of the trees. She
+was raking the earth that had been spaded up the day before, and
+making furrows in which to drop seeds. From the turn of the road,
+by the knotty old willows, Claude saw her pink starched dress and
+little white sun-bonnet. He hurried forward.
+
+"Hello, are you farming?" he called as he came up to the fence.
+
+Enid, who was bending over at that moment, rose quickly, but
+without a start. "Why, Claude! I thought you were out West
+somewhere. This is a surprise!" She brushed the earth from her
+hands and gave him her limp white fingers. Her arms, bare below
+the elbow, were thin, and looked cold, as if she had put on a
+summer dress too early.
+
+"I just got back this morning. I'm walking out home. What are you
+planting?"
+
+"Sweet peas."
+
+"You always have the finest ones in the country. When I see a
+bunch of yours at church or anywhere, I always know them."
+
+"Yes, I'm quite successful with my sweet peas," she admitted.
+"The ground is rich down here, and they get plenty of sun."
+
+"It isn't only your sweet peas. Nobody else has such lilacs or
+rambler roses, and I expect you have the only wistaria vine in
+Frankfort county."
+
+"Mother planted that a long while ago, when she first moved here.
+She is very partial to wistaria. I'm afraid we'll lose it, one of
+these hard winters."
+
+"Oh, that would be a shame! Take good care of it. You must put in
+a lot of time looking after these things, anyway." He spoke
+admiringly.
+
+Enid leaned against the fence and pushed back her little bonnet.
+"Perhaps I take more interest in flowers than I do in people. I
+often envy you, Claude; you have so many interests."
+
+He coloured. "I? Good gracious, I don't have many! I'm an awfully
+discontented sort of fellow. I didn't care about going to school
+until I had to stop, and then I was sore because I couldn't go
+back. I guess I've been sulking about it all winter."
+
+She looked at him with quiet astonishment. "I don't see why you
+should be discontented; you're so free."
+
+"Well, aren't you free, too?"
+
+"Not to do what I want to. The only thing I really want to do is
+to go out to China and help Carrie in her work. Mother thinks I'm
+not strong enough. But Carrie was never very strong here. She is
+better in China, and I think I might be."
+
+Claude felt concern. He had not seen Enid since the sleighride,
+when she had been gayer than usual. Now she seemed sunk in
+lassitude. "You must get over such notions, Enid. You don't want
+to go wandering off alone like that. It makes people queer. Isn't
+there plenty of missionary work to be done right here?"
+
+She sighed. "That's what everybody says. But we all of us have a
+chance, if we'll take it. Out there they haven't. It's terrible
+to think of all those millions that live and die in darkness."
+
+Claude glanced up at the sombre mill house, hidden in
+cedars,--then off at the bright, dusty fields. He felt as if he
+were a little to blame for Enid's melancholy. He hadn't been very
+neighbourly this last year. "People can live in darkness here,
+too, unless they fight it. Look at me. I told you I've been
+moping all winter. We all feel friendly enough, but we go
+plodding on and never get together. You and I are old friends,
+and yet we hardly ever see each other. Mother says you've been
+promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her. Why
+don't you come? It would please her."
+
+"Then I will. I've always been fond of your mother." She paused a
+moment, absently twisting the strings of her bonnet, then
+twitched it from her head with a quick movement and looked at him
+squarely in the bright light. "Claude, you haven't really become
+a free-thinker, have you?"
+
+He laughed outright. "Why, what made you think I had?"
+
+"Everybody knows Ernest Havel is, and people say you and he read
+that kind of books together."
+
+"Has that got anything to do with our being friends?"
+
+"Yes, it has. I couldn't feel the same confidence in you. I've
+worried about it a good deal."
+
+"Well, you just cut it out. For one thing, I'm not worth it," be
+said quickly.
+
+"Oh, yes, you are! If worrying would do any good--" she shook her
+head at him reproachfully.
+
+Claude took hold of the fence pickets between them with both
+hands. "It will do good! Didn't I tell you there was missionary
+work to be done right here? Is that why you've been so
+stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I
+was an atheist?"
+
+"I never, you know, liked Ernest Havel," she murmured.
+
+When Claude left the mill and started homeward he felt that he
+had found something which would help him through the summer. How
+fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her
+without interruption,--without once seeing Mrs. Royce's face,
+always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn
+blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she
+used to come into church with her little girls,--a tiny woman in
+tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her
+black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and
+rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.
+
+Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other
+people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own
+thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions--her garden and the great
+kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about
+her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to
+be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The
+more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the
+act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as
+mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to
+him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have
+holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic
+and commonplace, like a man.
+
+
+III
+
+During the next few weeks Claude often ran his car down to the
+mill house on a pleasant evening and coaxed Enid to go into
+Frankfort with him and sit through a moving picture show, or to
+drive to a neighbouring town. The advantage of this form of
+companionship was that it did not put too great a strain upon
+one's conversational powers. Enid could be admirably silent, and
+she was never embarrassed by either silence or speech. She was
+cool and sure of herself under any circumstances, and that was
+one reason why she drove a car so well,--much better than Claude,
+indeed.
+
+One Sunday, when they met after church, she told Claude that she
+wanted to go to Hastings to do some shopping, and they arranged
+that he should take her on Tuesday in his father's big car. The
+town was about seventy miles to the northeast and, from
+Frankfort, it was an inconvenient trip by rail.
+
+On Tuesday morning Claude reached the mill house just as the sun
+was rising over the damp fields. Enid was on the front porch
+waiting for him, wearing a blanket coat over her spring suit. She
+ran down to the gate and slipped into the seat beside him.
+
+"Good morning, Claude. Nobody else is up. It's going to be a
+glorious day, isn't it?"
+
+"Splendid. A little warm for this time of year. You won't need
+that coat long."
+
+For the first hour they found the roads empty. All the fields
+were grey with dew, and the early sunlight burned over everything
+with the transparent brightness of a fire that has just been
+kindled. As the machine noiselessly wound off the miles, the sky
+grew deeper and bluer, and the flowers along the roadside opened
+in the wet grass. There were men and horses abroad on every hill
+now. Soon they began to pass children on the way to school, who
+stopped and waved their bright dinner pails at the two
+travellers. By ten o'clock they were in Hastings.
+
+While Enid was shopping, Claude bought some white shoes and duck
+trousers. He felt more interest than usual in his summer clothes.
+They met at the hotel for lunch, both very hungry and both
+satisfied with their morning's work. Seated in the dining room,
+with Enid opposite him, Claude thought they did not look at all
+like a country boy and girl come to town, but like experienced
+people touring in their car.
+
+"Will you make a call with me after dinner?" she asked while they
+were waiting for their dessert.
+
+"Is it any one I know?"
+
+"Certainly. Brother Weldon is in town. His meetings are over, and
+I was afraid he might be gone, but he is staying on a few days
+with Mrs. Gleason. I brought some of Carrie's letters along for
+him to read."
+
+Claude made a wry face. "He won't be delighted to see me. We
+never got on well at school. He's a regular muff of a teacher, if
+you want to know," he added resolutely.
+
+Enid studied him judicially. "I'm surprised to hear that; he's
+such a good speaker. You'd better come along. It's so foolish to
+have a coolness with your old teachers."
+
+An hour later the Reverend Arthur Weldon received the two young
+people in Mrs. Gleason's half-darkened parlour, where he seemed
+quite as much at home as that lady herself. The hostess, after
+chatting cordially with the visitors for a few moments, excused
+herself to go to a P. E. O. meeting. Every one rose at her
+departure, and Mr. Weldon approached Enid, took her hand, and
+stood looking at her with his head inclined and his oblique
+smile. "This is an unexpected pleasure, to see you again, Miss
+Enid. And you, too, Claude," turning a little toward the latter.
+"You've come up from Frankfort together this beautiful day?" His
+tone seemed to say, "How lovely for you!"
+
+He directed most of his remarks to Enid and, as always, avoided
+looking at Claude except when he definitely addressed him.
+
+"You are farming this year, Claude? I presume that is a great
+satisfaction to your father. And Mrs. Wheeler is quite well?"
+
+Mr. Weldon certainly bore no malice, but he always pronounced
+Claude's name exactly like the word "Clod," which annoyed him. To
+be sure, Enid pronounced his name in the same way, but either
+Claude did not notice this, or did not mind it from her. He sank
+into a deep, dark sofa, and sat with his driving cap on his knee
+while Brother Weldon drew a chair up to the one open window of
+the dusky room and began to read Carrie Royce's letters. Without
+being asked to do so, he read them aloud, and stopped to comment
+from time to time. Claude observed with disappointment that Enid
+drank in all his platitudes just as Mrs. Wheeler did. He had
+never looked at Weldon so long before. The light fell full on the
+young man's pear-shaped head and his thin, rippled hair. What in
+the world could sensible women like his mother and Enid Royce
+find to admire in this purring, white-necktied fellow? Enid's
+dark eyes rested upon him with an expression of profound respect.
+She both looked at him and spoke to him with more feeling than
+she ever showed toward Claude.
+
+"You see, Brother Weldon," she said earnestly, "I am not
+naturally much drawn to people. I find it hard to take the proper
+interest in the church work at home. It seems as if I had always
+been holding myself in reserve for the foreign field,- by not
+making personal ties, I mean. If Gladys Farmer went to China,
+everybody would miss her. She could never be replaced in the High
+School. She has the kind of magnetism that draws people to her.
+But I have always been keeping myself free to do what Carrie is
+doing. There I know I could be of use."
+
+Claude saw it was not easy for Enid to talk like this. Her face
+looked troubled, and her dark eyebrows came together in a sharp
+angle as she tried to tell the young preacher exactly what was
+going on in her mind. He listened with his habitual, smiling
+attention, smoothing the paper of the folded letter pages and
+murmuring, "Yes, I understand. Indeed, Miss Enid?"
+
+When she pressed him for advice, he said it was not always easy
+to know in what field one could be most useful; perhaps this very
+restraint was giving her some spiritual discipline that she
+particularly needed. He was careful not to commit himself, not to
+advise anything unconditionally, except prayer.
+
+"I believe that all things are made clear to us in prayer, Miss
+Enid."
+
+Enid clasped her hands; her perplexity made her features look
+sharper. "But it is when I pray that I feel this call the
+strongest. It seems as if a finger were pointing me over there.
+Sometimes when I ask for guidance in little things, I get none,
+and only get the feeling that my work lies far away, and that for
+it, strength would be given me. Until I take that road, Christ
+withholds himself."
+
+Mr. Weldon answered her in a tone of relief, as if something
+obscure had been made clear. "If that is the case, Miss Enid, I
+think we need have no anxiety. If the call recurs to you in
+prayer, and it is your Saviour's will, then we can be sure that
+the way and the means will be revealed. A passage from one of the
+Prophets occurs to me at this moment; 'And behold a way shall be
+opened up before thy feet; walk thou in it.' We might say that
+this promise was originally meant for Enid Royce! I believe God
+likes us to appropriate passages of His word personally." This
+last remark was made playfully, as if it were a kind of Christian
+Endeavour jest. He rose and handed Enid back the letters.
+Clearly, the interview was over.
+
+As Enid drew on her gloves she told him that it had been a great
+help to talk to him, and that he always seemed to give her what
+she needed. Claude wondered what it was. He hadn't seen Weldon do
+anything but retreat before her eager questions. He, an
+"atheist," could have given her stronger reinforcement.
+
+Claude's car stood under the maple trees in front of Mrs.
+Gleason's house. Before they got into it, he called Enid's
+attention to a mass of thunderheads in the west.
+
+"That looks to me like a storm. It might be a wise thing to stay
+at the hotel tonight."
+
+"Oh, no! I don't want to do that. I haven't come prepared."
+
+He reminded her that it wouldn't be impossible to buy whatever
+she might need for the night.
+
+"I don't like to stay in a strange place without my own things,"
+she said decidedly.
+
+"I'm afraid we'll be going straight into it. We may be in for
+something pretty rough,--but it's as you say." He still
+hesitated, with his hand on the door.
+
+"I think we'd better try it," she said with quiet determination.
+Claude had not yet learned that Enid always opposed the
+unexpected, and could not bear to have her plans changed by
+people or circumstances.
+
+For an hour he drove at his best speed, watching the clouds
+anxiously. The table-land, from horizon to horizon, was glowing
+in sunlight, and the sky itself seemed only the more brilliant
+for the mass of purple vapours rolling in the west, with bright
+edges, like new-cut lead. He had made fifty odd miles when the
+air suddenly grew cold, and in ten minutes the whole shining sky
+was blotted out. He sprang to the ground and began to jack up his
+wheels. As soon as a wheel left the earth, Enid adjusted the
+chain. Claude told her he had never got the chains on so quickly
+before. He covered the packages in the back seat with an oilcloth
+and drove forward to meet the storm.
+
+The rain swept over them in waves, seemed to rise from the sod as
+well as to fall from the clouds. They made another five miles,
+ploughing through puddles and sliding over liquefied roads.
+Suddenly the heavy car, chains and all, bounded up a two-foot
+bank, shot over the sod a dozen yards before the brake caught it,
+then swung a half-circle and stood still. Enid sat calm and
+motionless.
+
+Claude drew a long breath. "If that had happened on a culvert,
+we'd be in the ditch with the car on top of us. I simply can't
+control the thing. The whole top soil is loose, and there's
+nothing to hold to. That's Tommy Rice's place over there. We'd
+better get him to take us in for the night."
+
+"But that would be worse than the hotel," Enid objected. "They
+are not very clean people, and there are a lot of children."
+
+"Better be crowded than dead," he murmured. "From here on, it
+would be a matter of luck. We might land anywhere."
+
+"We are only about ten miles from your place. I can stay with
+your mother tonight."
+
+"It's too dangerous, Enid. I don't like the responsibility. Your
+father would blame me for taking such a chance."
+
+"I know, it's on my account you're nervous." Enid spoke
+reasonably enough. "Do you mind letting me drive for awhile?
+There are only three bad hills left, and I think I can slide down
+them sideways; I've often tried it."
+
+Claude got out and let her slip into his seat, but after she took
+the wheel he put his hand on her arm. "Don't do anything so
+foolish," he pleaded.
+
+Enid smiled and shook her head. She was amiable, but inflexible.
+
+He folded his arms. "Go on."
+
+He was chafed by her stubbornness, but he had to admire her
+resourcefulness in handling the car. At the bottom of one of the
+worst hills was a new cement culvert, overlaid with liquid mud,
+where there was nothing for the chains to grip. The car slid to
+the edge of the culvert and stopped on the very brink. While they
+were ploughing up the other side of the hill, Enid remarked;
+"It's a good thing your starter works well; a little jar would
+have thrown us over."
+
+They pulled up at the Wheeler farm just before dark, and Mrs.
+Wheeler came running out to meet them with a rubber coat over her
+head.
+
+"You poor drowned children!" she cried, taking Enid in her arms.
+"How did you ever get home? I so hoped you had stayed in
+Hastings."
+
+"It was Enid who got us home," Claude told her. "She's a
+dreadfully foolhardy girl, and somebody ought to shake her, but
+she's a fine driver."
+
+Enid laughed as she brushed a wet lock back from her forehead.
+"You were right, of course; the sensible thing would have been to
+turn in at the Rice place; only I didn't want to."
+
+Later in the evening Claude was glad they hadn't. It was pleasant
+to be at home and to see Enid at the supper table, sitting on his
+father's right and wearing one of his mother's new grey
+house-dresses. They would have had a dismal time at the Rices',
+with no beds to sleep in except such as were already occupied by
+Rice children. Enid had never slept in his mother's guest room
+before, and it pleased him to think how comfortable she would be
+there.
+
+At an early hour Mrs. Wheeler took a candle to light her guest to
+bed; Enid passed near Claude's chair as she was leaving the room.
+"Have you forgiven me?" she asked teasingly.
+
+"What made you so pig-headed? Did you want to frighten me? or to
+show me how well you could drive?"
+
+"Neither. I wanted to get home. Good-night."
+
+Claude settled back in his chair and shaded his eyes. She did
+feel that this was home, then. She had not been afraid of his
+father's jokes, or disconcerted by Mahailey's knowing grin. Her
+ease in the household gave him unaccountable pleasure. He picked
+up a book, but did not read. It was lying open on his knee when
+his mother came back half an hour later.
+
+"Move quietly when you go upstairs, Claude. She is so tired that
+she may be asleep already."
+
+He took off his shoes and made his ascent with the utmost
+caution.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Ernest Havel was cultivating his bright, glistening young
+cornfield one summer morning, whistling to himself an old German
+song which was somehow connected with a picture that rose in his
+memory. It was a picture of the earliest ploughing he could
+remember.
+
+He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in
+the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of
+sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests. In the meadows
+at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek,
+with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown
+fields. He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and
+watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that
+had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns. His
+mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father
+walked behind, guiding the plough. His father always looked down.
+His mother's face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields,
+and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring. The
+two would go up and down thus all morning without speaking,
+except to the oxen. Ernest was the last of a long family, and as
+he played by the creek he used to wonder why his parents looked
+so old.
+
+Leonard Dawson drove his car up to the fence and shouted, waking
+Ernest from his revery. He told his team to stand, and ran out to
+the edge of the field.
+
+"Hello, Ernest," Leonard called. "Have you heard Claude Wheeler
+got hurt day before yesterday?"
+
+"You don't say so! It can't be anything bad, or they'd let me
+know."
+
+"Oh, it's nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face
+scratched up in the wire quite a little. It was the queerest
+thing I ever saw. He was out with the team of mules and a heavy
+plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and
+mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than
+usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they
+did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that
+deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to
+the gasoline man to stop, but he didn't hear me. Claude jumped
+for the critters' heads and got 'em by the bits, but by that time
+he was all tangled up in the lines. Those damned mules lifted him
+off his feet and started to run. Down the draw and up the bank
+and across the fields they went, with that big plough-blade
+jumping three or four feet in the air every clip. I was sure it
+would cut one of the mules open, or go clean through Claude. It
+would have got him, too, if he hadn't kept his hold on the bits.
+They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally
+ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up."
+
+"My goodness! Did he get cut bad?"
+
+"No, not very, but yesterday morning he was out cultivating corn,
+all stuck up with court plaster. I knew that was a fool thing to
+do; a wire cut's nasty if you get overheated out in the dust. But
+you can't tell a Wheeler anything. Now they say his face has
+swelled and is hurting him terrible, and he's gone to town to see
+the doctor. You'd better go over there tonight, and see if you
+can make him take care of himself."
+
+Leonard drove on, and Ernest went back to his team. "It's queer
+about that boy," he was thinking. "He's big and strong, and he's
+got an education and all that fine land, but he don't seem to fit
+in right." Sometimes Ernest thought his friend was unlucky. When
+that idea occurred to him, he sighed and shook it off. For Ernest
+believed there was no help for that; it was something rationalism
+did not explain.
+
+The next afternoon Enid Royce's coupe drove up to the Wheeler
+farmyard. Mrs. Wheeler saw Enid get out of her car and came down
+the hill to meet her, breathless and distressed. "Oh, Enid!
+You've heard of Claude's accident? He wouldn't take care of
+himself, and now he's got erysipelas. He's in such pain, poor
+boy!"
+
+Enid took her arm, and they started up the hill toward the house.
+"Can I see Claude, Mrs. Wheeler? I want to give him these
+flowers."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "I don't know if he will let you come in,
+dear. I had hard work persuading him to see Ernest for a few
+moments last night. He seems so low-spirited, and he's sensitive
+about the way he's bandaged up. I'll go to his room and ask him."
+
+"No, just let me go up with you, please. If I walk in with you,
+he won't have time to fret about it. I won't stay if he doesn't
+wish it, but I want to see him."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was alarmed at this suggestion, but Enid ignored her
+uncertainty. They went up to the third floor together, and Enid
+herself tapped at the door.
+
+"It's I, Claude. May I come in for a moment?"
+
+A muffled, reluctant voice answered. "No. They say this is
+catching, Enid. And anyhow, I'd rather you didn't see me like
+this."
+
+Without waiting she pushed open the door. The dark blinds were
+down, and the room was full of a strong, bitter odor. Claude lay
+flat in bed, his head and face so smothered in surgical cotton
+that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible. The
+brown paste with which his features were smeared oozed out at the
+edges of the gauze and made his dressings look untidy. Enid took
+in these details at a glance.
+
+"Does the light hurt your eyes? Let me put up one of the blinds
+for a moment, because I want you to see these flowers. I've
+brought you my first sweet peas."
+
+Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before
+him. She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell
+them through his medicines. In a moment he ceased to feel
+embarrassed. His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged
+the flowers on the little table beside him.
+
+"Now, do you want me to darken the room again?"
+
+"Not yet. Sit down for a minute and talk to me. I can't say much
+because my face is stiff."
+
+"I should think it would be! I met Leonard Dawson on the road
+yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you
+were cut. I would like to scold you hard, Claude."
+
+"Do. It might make me feel better." He took her hand and kept her
+beside him a moment. "Are those the sweet peas you were planting
+that day when I came back from the West?"
+
+"Yes. Haven't they done well to blossom so early?"
+
+"Less than two months. That's strange," he sighed.
+
+"Strange? What?"
+
+"Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few
+weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it's
+not much account."
+
+"That's not the way to look at things," she said reprovingly.
+
+Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her
+flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had
+brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began
+to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas.
+He listened but absently. He would never have believed that Enid,
+with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and
+sit with him like this. He noticed that his mother was quite as
+much astonished as he. She hovered about the visitor for a few
+moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went
+downstairs to her work. Claude wished that Enid would not talk at
+all, but would sit there and let him look at her. The sunshine
+she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence,
+soothed him. Presently he realized that she was asking him
+something.
+
+"What is it, Enid? The medicine they give me makes me stupid. I
+don't catch things."
+
+"I was asking whether you play chess."
+
+"Very badly."
+
+"Father says I play passably well. When you are better you must
+let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.
+They are beautifully carved. And now it's time for me to go."
+
+She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish
+about seeing people. "I didn't know you were so vain. Bandages
+are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the
+dark blind again for you?"
+
+"Yes, please. There won't be anything to look at now."
+
+"Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies' man!"
+
+Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He
+felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went
+downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.
+
+His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him
+while he swallowed it. "Enid Royce is a real sensible girl--" she
+said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not
+conviction but bewilderment.
+
+Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her
+visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that
+happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his
+poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when
+he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt
+unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the
+pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a
+distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog
+fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of
+torture,--everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the
+rack and the wheel.
+
+When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer
+clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but
+he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After
+awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer
+chair and play chess with her.
+
+One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room
+with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that
+he was beaten again.
+
+"It must be dull for you, playing with me," he murmured, brushing
+the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so
+white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were
+the soft, languid hands of a sick man.
+
+"You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind
+on it," Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had
+a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it
+was clear that he would never play well.
+
+"Yes," he sighed, dropping back into his chair, "my wits do
+wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn't
+it lovely? And now I won't be able to harvest it. Sometimes I
+wonder whether I'll ever finish anything I begin."
+
+Enid put the chessmen back into their box. "Now that you are
+better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your
+trouble people are always depressed."
+
+Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the
+chair. "No, it's not that. It's having so much time to think that
+makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that
+gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I
+lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening
+to me or to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much
+connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."
+
+"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to
+start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!" She
+shook her finger at him.
+
+"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them."
+Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock milk; it was his
+first day downstairs.
+
+When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen
+the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would
+always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted
+to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a
+bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that
+some day he must reckon with it again.
+
+Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and
+she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling
+room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody
+but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from
+conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered
+her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day
+exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her
+stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her
+stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent
+gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to
+do thus and to do Right!"
+
+Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had
+been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife--and his
+eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in
+her the promise of "virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to
+use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across the
+aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he
+respected her seriousness.
+
+When they played together she was fair-minded, didn't whine if
+she got hurt, and never claimed a girl's exemption from anything
+unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the
+mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking
+and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little
+drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over,
+"Oh, Claude, Claude!" Incidents like that one now seemed to him
+significant and fateful.
+
+When Claude's strength began to return to him, it came
+overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong while his body
+was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The
+desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was
+unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted.
+When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her
+actual presence restored his equilibrium--almost. This fact did
+not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful
+in the girl's nature,--a quality so lovely and subtle that there
+is no name for it.
+
+During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy
+the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft physical
+pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through,
+it was delightful to lie upon a cloud that floated lazily down
+the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid
+would start up like a sweet, burning pain, and he would drift out
+into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor
+control. So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back
+in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he was overtaken
+by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he
+would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed
+for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was
+feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would
+be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he
+who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her,
+but loved her while she was still and unconscious like a statue.
+He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without
+knowing why.
+
+Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush
+swept across his face and he felt guilty toward her, meek and
+humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he
+was glad when she went away and left him alone to think about
+her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be
+grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the
+one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into
+the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed
+his father, His marriage would be the first natural, dutiful,
+expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of
+usefulness and content; as his mother's oft-repeated Psalm said,
+it would restore his soul. Enid's willingness to listen to him he
+could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was
+probably regarded by her friends as equivalent to an engagement.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude's first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After
+leaving the barber-shop he presented himself, glistening with
+bayrum, at Jason Royce's office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing
+his safe, turned and took the young man by the hand.
+
+"Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can't do
+much to a husky young farmer like you. With old fellows, it's
+another story. I'm just starting off to have a look at my
+alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go along with me."
+
+They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and
+when they were spinning along between fields of ripening grain
+Claude broke the silence. "I expect you know what I want to see
+you about, Mr. Royce?"
+
+The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim
+ever since they started.
+
+"Well," Claude went on modestly, "it oughtn't to surprise you to
+hear that I've set my heart on Enid. I haven't said anything to
+her yet, but if you're not against me, I'm going to try to
+persuade her to marry me."
+
+"Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude," said Mr. Royce. He
+sat slumping in his seat, watching the road ahead of him with
+intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual.
+"Enid is a vegetarian, you know," he remarked unexpectedly.
+
+Claude smiled. "That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr.
+Royce."
+
+The other nodded slightly. "I know. At your age you think it
+doesn't. Such things do make a difference, however." His lips
+closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not
+open them.
+
+"Enid is a good girl," he said at last. "Strictly speaking, she
+has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce had another
+daughter at home, I'd take Enid into my office. She has good
+judgment. I don't know but she'd run a business better than a
+house."' Having got this out, Mr. Royce relaxed his frown, took
+his cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back between
+his teeth without relighting it.
+
+Claude was watching him with surprise. "There's no question about
+Enid, Mr. Royce. I didn't come to ask you about her," he
+exclaimed. "I came to ask if you'd be willing to have me for a
+son-in-law. I know, and you know, that Enid could do a great deal
+better than to marry me. I surely haven't made much of a showing,
+so far."
+
+"Here we are," announced Mr. Royce. "I'll leave the car under
+this elm, and we'll go up to the north end of the field and have
+a look."
+
+They crawled under the wire fence and started across the rough
+ground through a field of purple blossoms. Clouds of yellow
+butterflies darted up before them. They walked jerkily, breaking
+through the sun-baked crust into the soft soil beneath. Mr. Royce
+lit a fresh cigar, and as he threw away the match let his hand
+drop on the young man's shoulder. "I always envied your father.
+You took my fancy when you were a little shaver, and I used to
+let you in to see the water-wheel, When I gave up water power and
+put in an engine, I said to myself: 'There's just one fellow in
+the country will be sorry to see the old wheel go, and that's
+Claude Wheeler.'" 
+
+"I hope you don't think I'm too young to marry," Claude said as
+they tramped on.
+
+"No, it's right and proper a young man should marry. I don't say
+anything against marriage," Mr. Royce protested doggedly. "You
+may find some opposition in Enid's missionary motives. I don't
+know how she feels about that now. I don't enquire. I'd be
+pleased to see her get rid of such notions. They don't do a woman
+any good."
+
+"I want to help her get rid of them. If it's all right with you,
+I hope I can persuade Enid to marry me this fall."
+
+Jason Royce turned his head quickly toward his companion, studied
+his artless, hopeful countenance for a moment, and then looked
+away with a frown.
+
+The alfalfa field sloped upward at one corner, lay like a bright
+green-and-purple handkerchief thrown down on the hillside. At the
+uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as
+light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that
+hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off
+his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the
+flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and
+the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his
+brown neck. He sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his
+heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the
+field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast
+body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in
+his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak
+struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself
+understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do
+was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his
+young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain
+heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The
+dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the
+young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his
+secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and
+tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first. He did
+not look at Claude, but while he watched the wind plough soft,
+flowery roads in the field, the boy's face was clearly before
+him, with its expression of reticent pride melting into the
+desire to please, and the slight stiffness of his shoulders, set
+in a kind of stubborn loyalty. Claude lay on the sod beside him,
+rather tired after his walk in the sun, a little melancholy,
+though he did not know why.
+
+After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered
+miller's hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar.
+"Well, Claude," he said with determined cheerfulness, "we'll
+always be better friends than is common between father and
+son-in-law. You'll find out that pretty nearly everything you
+believe about life--about marriage, especially--is lies. I don't
+know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they
+do."
+
+
+VI
+
+After his interview with Mr. Royce, Claude drove directly to the
+mill house. As he came up the shady road, he saw with
+disappointment the flash of two white dresses instead of one,
+moving about in the sunny flower garden. The visitor was Gladys
+Farmer. This was her vacation time. She had walked out to the
+mill in the cool of the morning to spend the day with Enid. Now
+they were starting off to gather water-cresses, and had stopped
+in the garden to smell the heliotrope. On this scorching
+afternoon the purple sprays gave out a fragrance that hung over
+the flower-bed and brushed their cheeks like a warm breath. The
+girls looked up at the same moment and recognized Claude. They
+waved to him and hurried down to the gate to congratulate him on
+his recovery. He took their little tin pails and followed them
+around the old dam-head and up a sandy gorge, along a clear
+thread of water that trickled into Lovely Creek just above the
+mill. They came to the gravelly hill where the stream took its
+source from a spring hollowed out under the exposed roots of two
+elm trees. All about the spring, and in the sandy bed of the
+shallow creek, the cresses grew cool and green.
+
+Gladys had strong feelings about places. She looked around her
+with satisfaction. "Of all the places where we used to play,
+Enid, this was my favourite," she declared.
+
+"You girls sit up there on the elm roots," Claude suggested.
+"Wherever you put your foot in this soft gravel, water gathers.
+You'll spoil your white shoes. I'll get the cress for you."
+
+"Stuff my pail as full as you can, then," Gladys called as they
+sat down. "I wonder why the Spanish dagger grows so thick on this
+hill, Enid? These plants were old and tough when we were little.
+I love it here."
+
+She leaned back upon the hot, glistening hill-side. The sun came
+down in red rays through the elm-tops, and all the pebbles and
+bits of quartz glittered dazzlingly. Down in the stream bed the
+water, where it caught the light, twinkled like tarnished gold.
+Claude's sandy head and stooping shoulders were mottled with
+sunshine as they moved about over the green patches, and his duck
+trousers looked much whiter than they were. Gladys was too poor
+to travel, but she had the good fortune to be able to see a great
+deal within a few miles of Frankfort, and a warm imagination
+helped her to find life interesting. She did, as she confided to
+Enid, want to go to Colorado; she was ashamed of never having
+seen a mountain.
+
+Presently Claude came up the bank with two shining, dripping
+pails. "Now may I sit down with you for a few minutes?"
+
+Moving to make room for him beside her, Enid noticed that his
+thin face was heavily beaded with perspiration. His pocket
+handkerchief was wet and sandy, so she gave him her own, with a
+proprietary air. "Why, Claude, you look quite tired! Have you
+been over-doing? Where were you before you came here?"
+
+"I was out in the country with your father, looking at his
+alfalfa."
+
+"And he walked you all over the field in the hot sun, I suppose?"
+
+Claude laughed. "He did."
+
+"Well, I'll scold him tonight. You stay here and rest. I am going
+to drive Gladys home."
+
+Gladys protested, but at last consented that they should both
+drive her home in Claude's car. They lingered awhile, however,
+listening to the soft, amiable bubbling of the spring; a wise,
+unobtrusive voice, murmuring night and day, continually telling
+the truth to people who could not understand it.
+
+When they went back to the house Enid stopped long enough to cut
+a bunch of heliotrope for Mrs. Farmer,--though with the sinking
+of the sun its rich perfume had already vanished. They left
+Gladys and her flowers and cresses at the gate of the white
+cottage, now half hidden by gaudy trumpet vines.
+
+Claude turned his car and went back along the dim, twilight road
+with Enid. "I usually like to see Gladys, but when I found her
+with you this afternoon, I was terribly disappointed for a
+minute. I'd just been talking with your father, and I wanted to
+come straight to you. Do you think you could marry me, Enid?"
+
+"I don't believe it would be for the best, Claude." She spoke
+sadly.
+
+He took her passive hand. "Why not?"
+
+"My mind is full of other plans. Marriage is for most girls, but
+not for all."
+
+Enid had taken off her hat. In the low evening light Claude
+studied her pale face under her brown hair. There was something
+graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something
+that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness. "I've had
+those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don't get
+any further than you. If you could care ever so little for me to
+start on, I'd be willing to risk the rest." She sighed. "You know
+I care for you. I've never made any secret of it. But we're happy
+as we are, aren't we?"
+
+"No, I'm not. I've got to have some life of my own, or I'll go to
+pieces. If you won't have me, I'll try South America,--and I
+won't come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman."
+
+Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.
+
+The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs
+window. Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to
+the ground. She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long
+lashes. In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars,
+and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to
+Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes
+where the old mill-dam used to be. A terrible melancholy clutched
+at the boy's heart. He hadn't thought it would be like this. He
+drove home feeling weak and broken. Was there nothing in the
+world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn
+to be fresh disappointment? Why was life so mysteriously hard?
+This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and
+you could no more change that than you could change the story in
+an unhappy human face. He wished to God he were sick again; the
+world was too rough a place to get about in.
+
+There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that
+night. Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while,
+watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly
+enough that afternoon. She had liked Enid ever since they were
+little girls,--and knew all there was to know about her. Claude
+would become one of those dead people that moved about the
+streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish,
+and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for
+fifty years. Gladys had taught the children of many such dead
+men. She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of
+strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all
+things which might make the world beautiful--love and kindness,
+leisure and art--were shut up in prison, and that successful men
+like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would
+let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and
+could not break the bars. Even her own little life was squeezed
+into an unnatural shape by the domination of people like Bayliss.
+She had not dared, for instance, to go to Ornaha that spring for
+the three performances of the Chicago Opera Company. Such an
+extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her
+friends, and in the schoolboard as well; they would probably have
+decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted
+upon having next year.
+
+There were people, even in Frankfort, who had imagination and
+generous impulses, but they were all, she had to admit,
+inefficient--failures. There was Miss Livingstone, the fiery,
+emotional old maid who couldn't tell the truth; old Mr. Smith, a
+lawyer without clients, who read Shakespeare and Dryden all day
+long in his dusty office; Bobbie Jones, the effeminate drug
+clerk, who wrote free verse and "movie" scenarios, and tended the
+sodawater fountain.
+
+Claude was her one hope. Ever since they graduated from High
+School, all through the four years she had been teaching, she had
+waited to see him emerge and prove himself. She wanted him to be
+more successful than Bayliss AND STILL BE CLAUDE. She would have
+made any sacrifice to help him on. If a strong boy like Claude,
+so well endowed and so fearless, must fail, simply because he had
+that finer strain in his nature,--then life was not worth the
+chagrin it held for a passionate heart like hers.
+
+At last Gladys threw herself upon the bed. If he married Enid,
+that would be the end. He would go about strong and heavy, like
+Mr. Royce; a big machine with the springs broken inside.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Claude was well enough to go into the fields before the harvest
+was over. The middle of July came, and the farmers were still
+cutting grain. The yield of wheat and oats was so heavy that
+there were not machines enough to thrash it within the usual
+time. Men had to await their turn, letting their grain stand in
+shock until a belching black engine lumbered into the field.
+Rains would have been disastrous; but this was one of those "good
+years" which farmers tell about, when everything goes well. At
+the time they needed rain, there was plenty of it; and now the
+days were miracles of dry, glittering heat.
+
+Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew,
+and started a quivering excitement in all living things. In great
+harvest seasons like that one, the heat, the intense light. and
+the important work in hand draw people together and make them
+friendly. Neighbours helped each other to cope with the
+burdensome abundance of man-nourishing grain; women and children
+and old men fell to and did what they could to save and house it.
+Even the horses had a more varied and sociable existence than
+usual, going about from one farm to another to help neighbour
+horses drag wagons and binders and headers. They nosed the colts
+of old friends, ate out of strange mangers, and drank, or refused
+to drink, out of strange water-troughs. Decrepit horses that
+lived on a pension, like the Wheelers' stiff-legged Molly and
+Leonard Dawson's Billy with the heaves--his asthmatic cough could
+be heard for a quarter of a mile--were pressed into service now.
+It was wonderful, too, how well these invalided beasts managed to
+keep up with the strong young mares and geldings; they bent their
+willing heads and pulled as if the chafing of the collar on their
+necks was sweet to them.
+
+The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and
+took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak
+and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left
+behind it a spent and exhausted world. Horses and men and women
+grew thin, seethed all day in their own sweat. After supper they
+dropped over and slept anywhere at all, until the red dawn broke
+clear in the east again, like the fanfare of trumpets, and nerves
+and muscles began to quiver with the solar heat.
+
+For several weeks Claude did not have time to read the
+newspapers; they lay about the house in bundles, unopened, for
+Nat Wheeler was in the field now, working like a giant. Almost
+every evening Claude ran down to the mill to see Enid for a few
+minutes; he did not get out of his car, and she sat on the old
+stile, left over from horse-back days, while she chatted with
+him. She said frankly that she didn't like men who had just come
+out of the harvest field, and Claude did not blame her. He didn't
+like himself very well after his clothes began to dry on him. But
+the hour or two between supper and bed was the only time he had
+to see anybody. He slept like the heroes of old; sank upon his
+bed as the thing he desired most on earth, and for a blissful
+moment felt the sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In
+the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for
+hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he
+had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him
+between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was
+enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for
+instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see Enid as
+usual. While she was coming down the path from the house, he
+discovered that he had no clothes on at all! Then, with wonderful
+agility, he jumped over the picket fence into a clump of castor
+beans, and stood in the dusk, trying to cover himself with the
+leaves, like Adam in the garden, talking commonplaces to Enid
+through chattering teeth, afraid lest at any moment she might
+discover his plight.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey always lost weight in thrashing time,
+just as the horses did; this year Nat Wheeler had six hundred
+acres of winter wheat that would run close upon thirty bushels to
+the acre. Such a harvest was as hard on the women as it was on
+the men. Leonard Dawson's wife, Susie, came over to help Mrs.
+Wheeler, but she was expecting a baby in the fall, and the heat
+proved too much for her. Then one of the Yoeder daughters came;
+but the methodical German girl was so distracted by Mahailey's
+queer ways that Mrs. Wheeler said it was easier to do the work
+herself than to keep explaining Mahailey's psychology. Day after
+day ten ravenous men sat down at the long dinner table in the
+kitchen. Mrs. Wheeler baked pies and cakes and bread loaves as
+fast as the oven would hold them, and from morning till night the
+range was stoked like the fire-box of a locomotive. Mahailey
+wrung the necks of chickens until her wrist swelled up, as she
+said, "like a puff-adder."
+
+By the end of July the excitement quieted down. The extra leaves
+were taken out of the dining table, the Wheeler horses had their
+barn to themselves again, and the reign of terror in the henhouse
+was over.
+
+One evening Mr. Wheeler came down to supper with a bundle of
+newspapers under his arm. "Claude, I see this war scare in Europe
+has hit the market. Wheat's taken a jump. They're paying
+eighty-eight cents in Chicago. We might as well get rid of a few
+hundred bushel before it drops again. We'd better begin hauling
+tomorrow. You and I can make two trips a day over to Vicount, by
+changing teams,--there's no grade to speak of."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, arrested in the act of pouring coffee, sat holding
+the coffee-pot in the air, forgetting she had it. "If this is
+only a newspaper scare, as we think, I don't see why it should
+affect the market," she murmured mildly. "Surely those big
+bankers in New York and Boston have some way of knowing rumour
+from fact."
+
+"Give me some coffee, please," said her husband testily. "I don't
+have to explain the market, I've only got to take advantage of
+it."
+
+"But unless there's some reason, why are we dragging our wheat
+over to Vicount? Do you suppose it's some scheme the grain men
+are hiding under a war rumour? Have the financiers and the press
+ever deceived the public like this before?"
+
+"I don't know a thing in the world about it, Evangeline, and I
+don't suppose. I telephoned the elevator at Vicount an hour ago,
+and they said they'd pay me seventy cents, subject to change in
+the morning quotations. Claude," with a twinkle in his eye,
+"you'd better not go to mill tonight. Turn in early. If we are on
+the road by six tomorrow, we'll be in town before the heat of the
+day."
+
+"All right, sir. I want to look at the papers after supper. I
+haven't read anything but the headlines since before thrashing.
+Ernest was stirred up about the murder of that Grand Duke and
+said the Austrians would make trouble. But I never thought there
+was anything in it."
+
+"There's seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway," said his father,
+reaching for a hot biscuit.
+
+"If there's that much, I'm somehow afraid there will be more,"
+said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully. She had picked up the paper
+fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to
+brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.
+
+"You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers
+say about it," Mr. Wheeler suggested.
+
+Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer
+from the Havels. They had probably gone to a barn dance down in
+the Bohemian township. He event upstairs and sat down before an
+armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable
+out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the
+Omaha World Herald. The German army was entering Luxembourg; he
+didn't know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a
+country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace!
+His mother had gone up to "Mahailey's library," the attic, to
+hunt for a map of Europe,--a thing for which Nebraska farmers had
+never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads,
+the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.
+
+Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother's
+return. He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark. The night
+was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play
+of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon. Mosquitoes had
+got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon
+the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating
+note. He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears
+with the pillow. The disquieting sound became merged, in his
+sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper;
+those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a
+soft, high, sing-song whizz.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Late in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his
+empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat
+country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley. He had made
+two trips to town that day. Though he had kept his heaviest team
+for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged
+off a walk. Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their
+flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every
+step. Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and
+slow. The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot
+to the touch. Claude sat at one end of it, his head bared to
+catch the faint stir of air that sometimes dried his neck and
+chin and saved him the trouble of pulling out a handkerchief. On
+every side the wheat stubble stretched for miles and miles.
+Lonely straw stacks stood up yellow in the sun and cast long
+shadows. Claude peered anxiously along the distant locust hedges
+which told where the road ran. Ernest Havel had promised to meet
+him somewhere on the way home. He had not seen Ernest for a week:
+since then Time had brought prodigies to birth.
+
+At last he recognized the Havels' team along way off, and he
+stopped and waited for Ernest beside a thorny hedge, looking
+thoughtfully about him. The sun was already low. It hung above
+the stubble, all milky and rosy with the heat, like the image of
+a sun reflected in grey water. In the east the full moon had just
+risen, and its thin silver surface was flushed with pink until it
+looked exactly like the setting sun. Except for the place each
+occupied in the heavens, Claude could not have told which was
+which. They rested upon opposite rims of the world, two bright
+shields, and regarded each other, as if they, too, had met by
+appointment.
+
+Claude and Ernest sprang to the ground at the same instant and
+shook hands, feeling that they had not seen each other for a long
+while.
+
+"Well, what do you make of it, Ernest?"
+
+The young man shook his head cautiously, but replied no further.
+He patted his horses and eased the collars on their necks.
+
+"I waited in town for the Hastings paper," Claude went on
+impatiently. "England declared war last night."
+
+"The Germans," said Ernest, "are at Liege. I know where that is.
+I sailed from Antwerp when I came over here."
+
+"Yes, I saw that. Can the Belgians do anything?"
+
+"Nothing." Ernest leaned against the wagon wheel and drawing his
+pipe from his pocket slowly filled it. "Nobody can do anything.
+The German army will go where it pleases."
+
+"If it's as bad as that, why are the Belgians putting up a fight
?"
+
+"I don't know. It's fine, but it will come to nothing in the end.
+Let me tell you something about the German army, Claude."
+
+Pacing up and down beside the locust hedge, Ernest rehearsed the
+great argument; preparation, organization, concentration,
+inexhaustible resources, inexhaustible men. While he talked the
+sun disappeared, the moon contracted, solidified, and slowly
+climbed the pale sky. The fields were still glimmering with the
+bland reflection left over from daylight, and the distance grew
+shadowy,--not dark, but seemingly full of sleep.
+
+"If I were at home," Ernest concluded, "I would be in the
+Austrian army this minute. I guess all my cousins and nephews are
+fighting the Russians or the Belgians already. How would you like
+it yourself, to be marched into a peaceful country like this, in
+the middle of harvest, and begin to destroy it?"
+
+"I wouldn't do it, of course. I'd desert and be shot."
+
+"Then your family would be persecuted. Your brothers, maybe even
+your father, would be made orderlies to Austrian officers and be
+kicked in the mouth."
+
+"I wouldn't bother about that. I'd let my male relatives decide
+for themselves how often they would be kicked."
+
+Ernest shrugged his shoulders. "You Americans brag like little
+boys; you would and you wouldn't! I tell you, nobody's will has
+anything to do with this. It is the harvest of all that has been
+planted. I never thought it would come in my life-time, but I
+knew it would come."
+
+The boys lingered a little while, looking up at the soft radiance
+of the sky. There was not a cloud anywhere, and the low glimmer
+in the fields had imperceptibly changed to full, pure moonlight.
+Presently the two wagons began to creep along the white road, and
+on the backless seat of each the driver sat drooping forward,
+lost in thought. When they reached the corner where Ernest turned
+south, they said goodnight without raising their voices. Claude's
+horses went on as if they were walking in their sleep. They did
+not even sneeze at the low cloud of dust beaten up by their heavy
+foot-falls,--the only sounds in the vast quiet of the night.
+
+Why was Ernest so impatient with him, Claude wondered. He could
+not pretend to feel as Ernest did. He had nothing behind him to
+shape his opinions or colour his feelings about what was going on
+in Europe; he could only sense it day by day. He had always been
+taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues
+Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had
+all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. The
+invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as
+he knew it in his friends and neighbours. He still cherished the
+hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid
+people would apologize and right itself with the world.
+
+Mr. Wheeler came down the hill, bareheaded and coatless, as
+Claude drove into the barnyard. "I expect you're tired. I'll put
+your team away. Any news?"
+
+"England has declared war."
+
+Mr. Wheeler stood still a moment and scratched his head. "I guess
+you needn't get up early tomorrow. If this is to be a sure enough
+war, wheat will go higher. I've thought it was a bluff until now.
+You take the papers up to your mother."
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium
+where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back
+until October. Claude and his mother gave all their attention to
+the war despatches. Day after day, through the first two weeks of
+August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
+into the farming country.
+
+About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the 
+f
orts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a
 
+few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,--guns which
+evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or
+ever could be constructed. Even to these quiet wheat-growing
+people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their
+safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way
+of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which
+afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of
+unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or
+the eruption of volcanoes.
+
+On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at
+Namur; again giving warning that an unprecedented power of
+destruction had broken loose in the world. A few days later the
+story of the wiping out of the ancient and peaceful seat of
+learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
+directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers
+were full of accounts of the destruction of civilian populations.
+Something new, and certainly evil, was at work among mankind.
+Nobody was ready with a name for it. None of the well-worn words
+descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The epithets
+grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too
+dramatic, too full of old, familiar human passion.
+
+One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in
+the kitchen making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car
+coming back from Frankfort. In a moment he entered, letting the
+screen door slam behind him, and threw a bundle of mail on the
+table.
+
+"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of
+government to Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold
+Paris."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler wiped her pale, perspiring face with the hem of her
+apron and sat down in the nearest chair. "You mean that Paris is
+not the capital of France any more? Can that be true?"
+
+"That's what it looks like. Though the papers say it's only a
+precautionary measure."
+
+She rose. "Let's go up to the map. I don't remember exactly where
+Bordeaux is. Mahailey, you won't let my vinegar burn, will you?"
+
+Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung
+on the wall above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of
+a willow rocking-chair, she began to move her hand about over the
+brightly coloured, shiny surface, murmuring, "Yes, there is
+Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris."
+
+Claude, behind her, looked over her shoulder. "Do you suppose
+they are going to hand their city over to the Germans, like a
+Christmas present? I should think they'd burn it first, the way
+the Russians did Moscow. They can do better than that now, they
+can dynamite it!"
+
+"Don't say such things." Mrs. Wheeler dropped into the deep
+willow chair, realizing that she was very tired, now that she had
+left the stove and the heat of the kitchen. She began weakly to
+wave the palm leaf fan before her face. "It's said to be such a
+beautiful city. Perhaps the Germans will spare it, as they did
+Brussels. They must be sick of destruction by now. Get the
+encyclopaedia and see what it says. I've left my glasses
+downstairs."
+
+Claude brought a volume from the bookcase and sat down on the
+lounge. He began: "Paris, the capital city o f France and the
+Department of the Seine,--shall I skip the history?"
+
+"No. Read it all."
+
+He cleared his throat and began again: "At its first appearance
+in history, there was nothing to foreshadow the important part
+which Paris was to play in Europe and in the world," etc.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler rocked and fanned, forgetting the kitchen and the
+cucumbers as if they had never been. Her tired body was resting,
+and her mind, which was never tired, was occupied with the
+account of early religious foundations under the Merovingian
+kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested
+upon the sunburned neck and catapult shoulders of her red-headed
+son.
+
+Claude read faster and faster until he stopped with a gasp.
+
+"Mother, there are pages of kings! We'll read that some other
+time. I want to find out what it's like now, and whether it's
+going to have any more history." He ran his finger up and down
+the columns. "Here, this looks like business.
+
+Defences: Paris, in a recent German account of the greatest
+fortresses of the world, possesses three distinct rings of
+defences"--here he broke off. "Now what do you think of that? A
+German account, and this is an English book! The world simply
+made a mistake about the Germans all along. It's as if we invited
+a neighbour over here and showed him our cattle and barns, and
+all the time he was planning how he would come at night and club
+us in our beds."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler passed her hand over her brow. "Yet we have had so
+many German neighbours, and never one that wasn't kind and
+helpful."
+
+"I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany
+made me want to go there. And the people that sing all those
+beautiful songs about women and children went into Belgian
+villages and--"
+
+"Don't, Claude!" his mother put out her lands as if to push his
+words back. "Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we
+must think about now. I can't but believe there is one fort the
+Germans didn't put down in their book, and that it will stand. We
+know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many God-fearing
+people there, and God has preserved it all these years. You saw
+in the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying."
+She leaned forward and smiled at him indulgently. "And you
+believe those prayers will accomplish nothing, son?"
+
+Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon
+certain subjects. "Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans
+are praying, too. And I guess they are just naturally more pious
+than the French." Taking up the book he began once more: "In the
+low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great loop of the
+Marne," etc.
+
+Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that
+river, and with the idea of its strategic importance, before it
+began to stand out in black headlines a few days later.
+
+The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to
+put in six hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the
+other side of the world, they would need bread. He took a third
+team himself and went into the field every morning to help Dan
+and Claude. The neighbours said that nobody but the Kaiser had
+ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.
+
+Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every
+morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile
+away, to get yesterday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the
+carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them
+as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
+wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning,
+indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read
+all the war news through before she stirred, while the
+grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers
+came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she
+saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down
+to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the
+windmill breathless.
+
+"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing
+at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it
+may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army
+went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew himself up. "Well, it will
+decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?"
+
+"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few
+of the English are there, and the French are terribly
+outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers
+upstairs."
+
+"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after
+I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper."
+
+In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father
+and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the
+sitting-room. "There is not much news, except that the battle is
+on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans
+outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in
+artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no
+farther." He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his
+room.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not
+to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a
+window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he
+knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the
+capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were
+responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the
+grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since
+the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with
+amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.
+
+It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four
+days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with
+the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital,
+not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only
+farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. The fact
+that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western "r"
+standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's
+imagination a firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and
+thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of
+French "politeness"--so much more terrifying than German
+bullets--and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's
+manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the
+eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so
+gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose
+and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much
+through all the centuries--but had never meant so much before.
+Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In
+great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the
+little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as
+they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star
+fall.
+
+
+
+X
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and Claude had gone down to the mill
+house, as Enid and her mother had returned from Michigan the day
+before. Mrs. Wheeler, propped back in a rocking chair, was
+reading, and Mr. Wheeler, in his shirt sleeves, his Sunday collar
+unbuttoned, was sitting at his walnut secretary, amusing himself
+with columns of figures. Presently he rose and yawned, stretching
+his arms above his head.
+
+"Claude thinks he wants to begin building right away, up on the
+quarter next the timber claim. I've been figuring on the lumber.
+Building materials are cheap just now, so I suppose I'd better
+let him go ahead."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up absently from the page. "Why, I suppose
+so."
+
+Her husband sat down astride a chair, and leaning his arms on the
+back of it, looked at her. "What do you think of this match,
+anyway? I don't know as I've heard you say."
+
+"Enid is a good, Christian girl. . ." Mrs. Wheeler began
+resolutely, but her sentence hung in the air like a question.
+
+He moved impatiently. "Yes, I know. But what does a husky boy
+like Claude want to pick out a girl like that for? Why,
+Evangeline, she'll be the old woman over again!"
+
+Apparently these misgivings were not new to Mrs. Wheeler,* for she
+put out her hand to stop him and whispered in solemn agitation,
+"Don't say anything! Don't breathe!"
+
+"Oh, I won't interfere! I never do. I'd rather have her for a
+daughter-in-law than a wife, by a long shot. Claude's more of a
+fool than I thought him." He picked up his hat and strolled down
+to the barn, but his wife did not recover her composure so
+easily. She left the chair where she had hopefully settled
+herself for comfort, took up a feather duster and began moving
+distractedly about the room, brushing the surface of the
+furniture. When the war news was bad, or when she felt troubled
+about Claude, she set to cleaning house or overhauling the
+closets, thankful to be able to put some little thing to rights
+in such a disordered world.
+
+As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers
+out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work
+he began digging his cellar. He was building his house on the
+level stretch beside his father's timber claim because, when he
+was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most
+beautiful spot in the world. It was a square of about thirty
+acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a
+thick mulberry hedge on the south side. The trees had been
+neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage
+to trim them and care for them at odd moments.
+
+Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.
+He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and
+he meant that this one should be deep enough. One day Leonard
+Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making. Standing on
+the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating
+below.
+
+"My God, Claude, what do you want of a cellar as deep as that?
+When your wife takes a notion to go to China, you can open a
+trap-door and drop her through!"
+
+Claude flung down his pick and ran up the ladder. "Enid's not
+going to have notions of that sort," he said wrathfully. 
+
+"Well, you needn't get mad. I'm glad to hear it. I was sorry when 
+the
 other girl went. It always looked to me like Enid had her face
+set for China, but I haven't seen her for a good while,--not
+since before she went off to Michigan with the old lady."
+
+After Leonard was gone, Claude returned to his work, still out of
+humour. He was not altogether happy in his mind about Enid. When
+he went down to the mill it was usually Mr. Royce, not Enid, who
+sought to detain him, followed him down the path to the gate and
+seemed sorry to see him go. He could not blame Enid with any lack
+of interest in what he was doing. She talked and thought of
+nothing but the new house, and most of her suggestions were good.
+He often wished she would ask for something unreasonable and
+extravagant. But she had no selfish whims, and even insisted that
+the comfortable upstairs sleeping room he had planned with such
+care should be reserved for a guest chamber.
+
+As the house began to take shape, Enid came up often in her car,
+to watch its growth, to show Claude samples of wallpapers and
+draperies, or a design for a window-seat she had cut from some
+magazine. There could be no question of her pride in every
+detail. The disappointing thing was that she seemed more
+interested in the house than in him. These months when they could
+be together as much as they pleased, she treated merely as a
+period of time in which they were building a house.
+
+Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told
+himself. He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as
+his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.
+Marriage reduced all women to a common
 denominator ; changed a cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving
+and generous one. It was quite right that Enid should be
+unconscious now of everything that she was to be when she was his
+wife. He told himself he wouldn't want it otherwise.
+
+But he was lonely, all the same. He lavished upon the little
+house the solicitude and cherishing care that Enid seemed not to
+need. He stood over the carpenters urging the greatest nicety in
+the finish of closets and cupboards, the convenient placing of
+shelves, the exact joining of sills and casings. Often he stayed
+late in the evening, after the workmen with their noisy boots had
+gone home to supper. He sat down on a rafter or on the skeleton
+of the upper porch and quite lost himself in brooding, in
+anticipation of things that seemed as far away as ever. The dying
+light, the quiet stars coming out, were friendly and sympathetic.
+One night a bird flew in and fluttered wildly about among the
+partitions, shrieking with fright before it darted out into the
+dusk through one of the upper windows and found its way to
+freedom.
+
+When the carpenters were ready to put in the staircase, Claude
+telephoned Enid and asked her to come and show them just what
+height she wanted the steps made. His mother had always had to
+climb stairs that were too steep. Enid stopped her car at the
+Frankfort High School at four o'clock and persuaded Gladys Farmer
+to drive out with her.
+
+When they arrived they found Claude working on the lattice
+enclosure of the back porch. "Claude is like Jonah," Enid
+laughed. "He wants to plant gourd vines here, so they will run
+over the lattice and make shade. I can think of other vines that
+might be more ornamental."
+
+Claude put down his hammer and said coaxingly: "Have you ever
+seen a gourd vine when it had something to climb on, Enid? You
+wouldn't believe how pretty they are; big green leaves, and
+gourds and yellow blossoms hanging all over them at the same
+time. An old German woman who keeps a lunch counter at one of
+those stations on the road to Lincoln has them running up her
+back porch, and I've wanted to plant some ever since I first saw
+hers."
+
+Enid smiled indulgently. "Well, I suppose you'll let me have
+clematis for the front porch, anyway? The men are getting ready
+to leave, so we'd better see about the steps."
+
+After the workmen had gone, Claude took the girls upstairs by the
+ladder. They emerged from a little entry into a large room which
+extended over both the front and back parlours. The carpenters
+called it "the pool hall". There were two long windows, like
+doors, opening upon the porch roof, and in the sloping ceiling
+were two dormer windows, one looking north to the timber claim
+and the other south toward Lovely Creek. Gladys at once felt a
+singular pleasantness about this chamber, empty and unplastered
+as it was. "What a lovely room!" she exclaimed.
+
+Claude took her up eagerly. "Don't you think so? You see it's my
+idea to have the second floor for ourselves, instead of cutting
+it up into little boxes as people usually do. We can come up here
+and forget the farm and the kitchen and all our troubles. I've
+made a big closet for each of us, and got everything just right.
+And now Enid wants to keep this room for preachers!"
+
+Enid laughed. "Not only for preachers, Claude. For Gladys, when
+she comes to visit us--you see she likes it--and for your mother
+when she comes to spend a week and rest. I don't think we ought
+to take the best room for ourselves."
+
+"Why not?" Claude argued hotly. "I'm building the whole house for
+ourselves. Come out on the porch roof, Gladys. Isn't this fine
+for hot nights? I want to put a railing round and make this into
+a balcony, where we can have chairs and a hammock."
+
+Gladys sat down on the low window-sill. "Enid, you'd be foolish
+to keep this for a guest room. Nobody would ever enjoy it as much
+as you would. You can see the whole country from here."
+
+Enid smiled, but showed no sign of relenting. "Let's wait and
+watch the sun go down. Be careful, Claude. It makes me nervous to
+see you lying there."
+
+He was stretched out on the edge of the roof, one leg hanging
+over, and his head pillowed on his arm. The flat fields turned
+red, the distant windmills flashed white, and little rosy clouds
+appeared in the sky above them.
+
+"If I make this into a balcony," Claude murmured, "the peak of
+the roof will always throw a shadow over it in the afternoon, and
+at night the stars will be right overhead. It will be a fine
+place to sleep in harvest time."
+
+"Oh, you could always come up here to sleep on a hot night," Enid
+said quickly.
+
+"It wouldn't be the same."
+
+They sat watching the light die out of the sky, and Enid and
+Gladys drew close together as the coolness of the autumn evening
+came on. The three friends were thinking about the same thing;
+and yet, if by some sorcery each had begun to speak his thoughts
+aloud, amazement and bitterness would have fallen upon all.
+Enid's reflections were the most blameless. The discussion about
+the guest room had reminded her of Brother Weldon. In September,
+on her way to Michigan with Mrs. Royce, she had stopped for a day
+in Lincoln to take counsel with Arthur Weldon as to whether she
+ought to marry one whom she described to him as "an unsaved man."
+Young Mr. Weldon approached this subject with a cautious tread,
+but when he learned that the man in question was Claude Wheeler,
+he became more partisan than was his wont. He seemed to think
+that her marrying Claude was the one way to reclaim him, and did
+not hesitate to say that the most important service devout girls
+could perform for the church was to bring promising young men to
+its support. Enid had been almost certain that Mr. Weldon would
+approve her course before she consulted him, but his concurrence
+always gratified her pride. She told him that when she had a home
+of her own she would expect him to spend a part of his summer
+vacation there, and he blushingly expressed his willingness to do
+so.
+
+Gladys, too, was lost in her own thoughts, sitting with that ease
+which made her seem rather indolent, her head resting against the
+empty window frame, facing the setting sun. The rosy light made
+her brown eyes gleam like old copper, and there was a moody look
+in them, as if in her mind she were defying something. When he
+happened to glance at her, it occurred to Claude that it was a
+hard destiny to be the exceptional person. in a community, to be
+more gifted or more intelligent than the rest. For a girl it must
+be doubly hard. He sat up suddenly and broke the long silence.
+
+"I forgot, Enid, I have a secret to tell you. Over in the timber
+claim the other day I started up a flock of quail. They must be
+the only ones left in all this neighbourhood, and I doubt if they
+ever come out of the timber. The bluegrass hasn't been mowed in
+there for years,--not since I first went away to school, and maybe
+they live on the grass seeds. In summer, of course, there are
+mulberries."
+
+Enid wondered whether the birds could have learned enough about
+the world to stay hidden in the timber lot. Claude was sure they
+had.
+
+"Nobody ever goes near the place except Father; he stops there
+sometimes. Maybe he has seen them and never said a word. It would
+be just like him." He told them he had scattered shelled corn in
+the grass, so that the birds would not be tempted to fly over
+into Leonard Dawson's cornfield. "If Leonard saw them, he'd
+likely take a shot at them."
+
+"Why don't you ask him not to?" Enid suggested.
+
+Claude laughed. "That would be asking a good deal. When a bunch
+of quail rise out of a cornfield they're a mighty tempting sight,
+if a man likes hunting. We'll have a picnic for you when you come
+out next summer, Gladys. There are some pretty places over there
+in the timber."
+
+Gladys started up. "Why, it's night already! It's lovely here,
+but you must get me home, Enid."
+
+They found it dark inside. Claude took Enid down the ladder and
+out to her car, and then went back for Gladys. She was sitting on
+the floor at the top of the ladder. Giving her his hand he helped
+her to rise.
+
+"So you like my little house," he said gratefully.
+
+"Yes. Oh, yes!" Her voice was full of feeling, but she did not
+exert herself to say more. Claude descended in front of her to
+keep her from slipping. She hung back while he led her through
+confusing doorways and helped her over the piles of laths that
+littered the floors. At the edge of the gaping cellar entrance
+she stopped and leaned wearily on his arm for a moment. She did
+not speak, but he understood that his new house made her sad;
+that she, too, had come to the place where she must turn out of
+the old path. He longed to whisper to her and beg her not to
+marry his brother. He lingered and hesitated, fumbling in the
+dark. She had his own cursed kind of sensibility; she would
+expect too much from life and be disappointed. He was reluctant
+to lead her out into the chilly evening without some word of
+entreaty. He would willingly have prolonged their passage,--
+through many rooms and corridors. Perhaps, had that been
+possible, the strength in him would have found what it was
+seeking; even in this short interval it had stirred and made
+itself felt, had uttered a confused appeal. Claude was greatly
+surprised at himself.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Enid decided that she would be married in the first week of June.
+Early in May the plasterers and painters began to be busy in the
+new house. The walls began to shine, and Claude went about all
+day, oiling and polishing the hard-pine floors and wainscoting.
+He hated to have anybody step on his floors. He planted gourd
+vines about the back porch, set out clematis and lilac bushes,
+and put in a kitchen garden. He and Enid were going to Denver and
+Colorado Springs for their wedding trip, but Ralph would be at
+home then, and he had promised to come over and water the flowers
+and shrubs if the weather was dry.
+
+Enid often brought her work and sat sewing on the front porch
+while Claude was rubbing the woodwork inside the house, or
+digging and planting outside. This was the best part of his
+courtship. It seemed to him that he had never spent such happy
+days before. If Enid did not come, he kept looking down the road
+and listening, went from one thing to another and made no
+progress. He felt full of energy, so long as she sat there on the
+porch, with lace and ribbons and muslin in her lap. When he
+passed by, going in or out, and stopped to be near her for a
+moment, she seemed glad to have him tarry. She liked him to
+admire her needlework, and did not hesitate to show him the
+featherstitching and embroidery she was putting on her new
+underclothes. He could see, from the glances they exchanged, that
+the painters thought this very bold behaviour in one so soon to
+be a bride. He thought it very charming behaviour himself, though
+he would never have expected it of Enid. His heart beat hard when
+he realized how far she confided in him, how little she was
+afraid of him! She would let him linger there, standing over her
+and looking down at her quick fingers, or sitting on the ground
+at her feet, gazing at the muslin pinned to her knee, until his
+own sense of propriety told him to get about his work and spare
+the feelings of the painters.
+
+"When are you going over to the timber claim with me?" he asked,
+dropping on the ground beside her one warm, windy afternoon. Enid
+was sitting on the porch floor, her back against a pillar, and
+her feet on one of those round mats of pursley that grow over
+hard-beaten earth. "I've found my flock of quail again. They live
+in the deep grass, over by a ditch that holds water most of the
+year. I'm going to plant a few rows of peas in there, so they'll
+have a feeding ground at home. I consider Leonard's cornfield a
+great danger. I don't know whether to take him into my confidence
+or not."
+
+"You've told Ernest Havel, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" Claude replied, trying not to be aware of the little
+note of acrimony in her voice. "He's perfectly safe. That place
+is a paradise for birds. The trees are full of nests. You can
+stand over there in the morning and hear the young robins
+squawking for their breakfast. Come up early tomorrow morning and
+go over with me, won't you? But wear heavy shoes; it's wet in the
+long grass."
+
+While they were talking a sudden whirlwind swept round the corner
+of the house, caught up the little mound of folded lace
+corset-covers and strewed them over the dusty yard. Claude ran
+after them with Enid's flowered workbag and thrust them into it
+as he came upon one after another, fluttering in the weeds. When
+he returned, Enid had folded her needle-case and was putting on
+her hat. "Thank you," she said with a smile. "Did you find
+everything?"
+
+"I think so." He hurried toward the car to hide his guilty face.
+One little lace thing he had not put into the bag, but had thrust
+into his pocket.
+
+The next morning Enid came up early to hear the birds in the
+timber.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+0n the night before his wedding Claude went to bed early. He had
+been dashing about with Ralph all day in the car, making final
+preparations, and was worn out. He fell asleep almost at once.
+The women of the household could not so easily forget the great
+event of tomorrow. After the supper dishes were washed, Mahailey
+clambered up to the attic to get the quilt she had so long been
+saving for a wedding present for Claude. She took it out of the
+chest, unfolded it, and counted the stars in the
+pattern--counting was an accomplishment she was proud of--before
+she wrapped it up. It was to go down to the mill house with the
+other presents tomorrow. Mrs. Wheeler went to bed many times that
+night. She kept thinking of things that ought to be looked after;
+getting up and going to make sure that Claude's heavy underwear
+had been put into his trunk, against the chance of cold in the
+mountains; or creeping downstairs to see that the six roasted
+chickens which were to help out at the wedding supper were
+securely covered from the cats. As she went about these tasks,
+she prayed constantly. She had not prayed so long and fervently
+since the battle of the Marne.
+
+Early the next morning Ralph loaded the big car with the presents
+and baskets of food and ran down to the Royces'. Two motors from
+town were already standing in the mill yard; they had brought a
+company of girls who came with all the June roses in Frankfort to
+trim the house for the wedding. When Ralph tooted his horn,
+half-a-dozen of them ran out to greet him, reproaching him
+because he had not brought his brother along. Ralph was
+immediately pressed into service. He carried the step-ladder
+wherever he was told, drove nails, and wound thorny sprays of
+rambler roses around the pillars between the front and back
+parlours, making the arch under which the ceremony was to take
+place.
+
+Gladys Farmer had not been able to leave her classes at the High
+School to help in this friendly work, but at eleven o'clock a
+livery automobile drove up, laden with white and pink peonies
+from her front yard, and bringing a box of hothouse flowers she
+had ordered for Enid from Hastings. The girls admired them, but
+declared that Gladys was extravagant, as usual; the flowers from
+her own yard would really have been enough. The car was driven by
+a lank, ragged boy who worked about the town garage, and who was
+called "Silent Irv," because nobody could ever get a word out of
+him. He had almost no voice at all,--a thin little squeak in the
+top of his throat, like the gasping whisper of a medium in her
+trance state. When he came to the front door, both arms full of
+peonies, he managed to wheeze out:
+
+"These are from Miss Farmer. There are some more down there."
+
+The girls went back to his car with him, and he took out a square
+box, tied up with white ribbons and little silver bells,
+containing the bridal bouquet.
+
+"How did you happen to get these?" Ralph asked the thin boy. "I
+was to go to town for them."
+
+The messenger swallowed. "Miss Farmer told me if there were any
+other flowers at the station marked for here, I should bring them
+along."
+
+"That was nice of her." Ralph thrust his hand into his trousers
+pocket. "How much? I'll settle with you before I forget."
+
+A pink flush swept over the boy's pale face,--a delicate face
+under ragged hair, contracted by a kind of shrinking unhappiness.
+His eyes were always half-closed, as if he did not want to see
+the world around him, or to be seen by it. He went about like
+somebody in a dream. "Miss Farmer," he whispered, "has paid me."
+
+"Well, she thinks of everything!" exclaimed one of the girls.
+"You used to go to school to Gladys, didn't you, Irv?"
+
+"Yes, mam." He got into his car without opening the door,
+slipping like an eel round the steering-rod, and drove off.
+
+The girls followed Ralph up the gravel walk toward the house. One
+whispered to the others: "Do you suppose Gladys will come out
+tonight with Bayliss Wheeler? I always thought she had a pretty
+warm spot in her heart for Claude, myself."
+
+Some one changed the subject. "I can't get over hearing Irv talk
+so much. Gladys must have put a spell on him."
+
+"She was always kind to him in school," said the girl who had
+questioned the silent boy. "She said he was good in his studies,
+but he was so frightened he could never recite. She let him write
+out the answers at his desk."
+
+Ralph stayed for lunch, playing about with the girls until his
+mother telephoned for him. "Now I'll have to go home and look
+after my brother, or he'll turn up tonight in a striped shirt."
+
+"Give him our love," the girls called after him, "and tell him
+not to be late."
+
+As he drove toward the farm, Ralph met Dan, taking Claude's trunk
+into town. He slowed his car. "Any message?" he called.
+
+Dan grinned. "Naw. I left him doin' as well as could be
+expected."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler met Ralph on the stairs. "He's up in his room. He
+complains his new shoes are too tight. I think it's nervousness.
+Perhaps he'll let you shave him; I'm sure he'll cut himself. And
+I wish the barber hadn't cut his hair so short, Ralph. I hate
+this new fashion of shearing men behind the ears. The back of his
+neck is the ugliest part of a man." She spoke with such
+resentment that Ralph broke into a laugh.
+
+"Why, Mother, I thought all men looked alike to you! Anyhow,
+Claude's no beauty."
+
+"When will you want your bath? I'll have to manage so that
+everybody won't be calling for hot water at once." She turned to
+Mr. Wheeler who sat writing a check at the secretary. "Father,
+could you take your bath now, and be out of the way?"
+
+"Bath?" Mr. Wheeler shouted, "I don't want any bath! I'm not
+going to be married tonight. I guess we don't have to boil the
+whole house for Enid."
+
+Ralph snickered and shot upstairs. He found Claude sitting on the
+bed, with one shoe off and one shoe on. A pile of socks lay
+scattered on the rug. A suitcase stood open on one chair and a
+black travelling bag on another.
+
+"Are you sure they're too small?" Ralph asked.
+
+"About four sizes."
+
+"Well, why didn't you get them big enough?"
+
+"I did. That shark in Hastings worked off another pair on me when
+I wasn't looking. That's all right," snatching away the shoe his
+brother had picked up to examine. "I don't care, so long as I can
+stand in them. .You'd better go telephone the depot and ask if
+the train's on time."
+
+"They won't know yet. It's seven hours till it's due."
+
+"Then telephone later. But find out, somehow. I don't want to
+stand around that station, waiting for the train."
+
+Ralph whistled. Clearly, his young man was going to be hard to
+manage. He proposed a bath as a soothing measure. No, Claude had
+had his bath. Had he, then, packed his suitcase?
+
+"How the devil can I pack it when I don't know what I'm going to
+put on?"
+
+"You'll put on one shirt and one pair of socks. I'm going to get
+some of this stuff out of the way for you." Ralph caught up a
+handful of socks and fell to sorting them. Several had bright red
+spots on the toe. He began to laugh.
+
+"I know why your shoe hurts, you've cut your foot!"
+
+Claude sprang up as if a hornet had stung him. "Will you get out
+of here," he shouted, "and let me alone?"
+
+Ralph vanished. He told his mother he would dress at once, as
+they might have to use force with Claude at the last moment. The
+wedding ceremony was to be at eight, supper was to follow, and
+Claude and Enid were to leave Frankfort at 10:25, on the Denver
+express. At six o'clock, when Ralph knocked at his brother's
+door, he found him shaved and brushed, and dressed, except for
+his coat. His tucked shirt was not rumpled, and his tie was
+properly knotted. Whatever pain they concealed, his patent
+leather shoes were smooth and glistening and resolutely pointed.
+
+"Are you packed?" Ralph asked in astonishment.
+
+"Nearly. I wish you'd go over things and make them look a little
+neater, if you can. I'd hate to have a girl see the inside of
+that suitcase, the way it is. Where shall I put my cigars?
+They'll make everything smell, wherever I put them. All my
+clothes seem to smell of cooking, or starch, or something. I
+don't know what Mahailey does to them," he ended bitterly.
+
+Ralph looked outraged. "Well, of all ingratitude! Mahailey's been
+ironing your damned old shirts for a week!"
+
+"Yes, yes, I know. Don't rattle me. I forgot to put any
+handkerchiefs in my trunk, so you'll have to get the whole bunch
+in somewhere."
+
+Mr. Wheeler appeared in the doorway, his Sunday black trousers
+gallowsed up high over a white shirt, wafting a rich odor of
+bayrum from his tumbled hair. He held a thin folded paper
+delicately between his thick fingers.
+
+"Where is your bill-book, son?"
+
+Claude caught up his discarded trousers and extracted a square of
+leather from the pocket. His father took it and placed the bit of
+paper inside with the bank notes. "You may want to pick up some
+trifle your wife fancies," he said. "Have you got your railroad
+tickets in here? Here is your trunk check Dan brought back. Don't
+forget, I've put it in with your tickets and marked it C. W., so
+you'll know which is your check and which is Enid's."
+
+"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
+
+Claude had already drawn from the bank all the money he would
+need. This additional bank check was Mr. Wheeler's admission that
+he was sorry for some sarcastic remarks he had made a few days
+ago, when he discovered that Claude had reserved a stateroom on
+the Denver express. Claude had answered curtly that when Enid and
+her mother went to Michigan they always had a stateroom, and he
+wasn't going to ask her to travel less comfortably with him.
+
+At seven o'clock the Wheeler family set out in the two cars that
+stood waiting by the windmill. Mr. Wheeler drove the big
+Cadillac, and Ralph took Mahailey and Dan in the Ford. When they
+reached the mill house the outer yard was already black with
+motors, and the porch and parlours were full of people talking
+and moving about.
+
+Claude went directly upstairs. Ralph began to seat the guests,
+arranging the folding chairs in such a way as to leave a passage
+from the foot of the stairs to the floral arch he had constructed
+that morning. The preacher had his Bible in his hand and was
+standing under the light, hunting for his chapter. Enid would
+have preferred to have Mr. Weldon come down from Lincoln to marry
+her, but that would have wounded Mr. Snowberry deeply. After all,
+he was her minister, though he was not eloquent and persuasive
+like Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command
+than most human beings, and even those did not come to him
+readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them
+until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell
+upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he
+said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that
+he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a
+drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was a
+simple, courageous man.
+
+Ralph was to be both usher and best man. Gladys Farmer could not
+be one of the bridesmaids because she was to play the wedding
+march. At eight o'clock Enid and Claude came downstairs together,
+conducted by Ralph and followed by four girls dressed in white,
+like the bride. They took their places under the arch before the
+preacher. He began with the chapter from Genesis about the
+creation of man, and Adam's rib, reading in a laboured manner, as
+if he did not quite know why he had selected that passage and was
+looking for something he did not find. His nose-glasses kept
+falling off and dropping upon the open book. Throughout this
+prolonged fumbling Enid stood calm, looking at him respectfully,
+very pretty in her short veil. Claude was so pale that he looked
+unnatural,--nobody had ever seen him like that before. His face,
+between his very black clothes and his smooth, sandy hair, was
+white and severe, and he uttered his responses in a hollow voice.
+Mahailey, at the back of the room, in a black hat with green
+gooseberries on it, was standing, in order to miss nothing. She
+watched Mr. Snowberry as if she hoped to catch some visible sign
+of the miracle he was performing. She always wondered just what
+it was the preacher did to make the wrongest thing in the world
+the rightest thing in the world.
+
+When it was over, Enid went upstairs to put on her travelling
+dress, and Ralph and Gladys began seating the guests for supper.
+Just twenty minutes later Enid came down and took her place
+beside Claude at the head of the long table. The company rose and
+drank the bride's health in grape-juice punch. Mr. Royce,
+however, while the guests were being seated, had taken Mr.
+Wheeler down to the fruit cellar, where the two old friends drank
+off a glass of well-seasoned Kentucky whiskey, and shook hands.
+When they came back to the table, looking younger than when they
+withdrew, the preacher smelled the tang of spirits and felt
+slighted. He looked disconsolately into his ruddy goblet and
+thought about the marriage at Cana. He tried to apply his Bible
+literally to life and, though he didn't dare breathe it aloud in
+these days, he could never see why he was better than his Lord.
+
+Ralph, as master of ceremonies, kept his head and forgot nothing.
+When it was time to start, he tapped Claude on the shoulder,
+cutting his father short in one of his best stories. Contrary to
+custom, the bridal couple were to go to the station
+unaccompanied, and they vanished from the head of the table with
+only a nod and a smile to the guests. Ralph hurried them into the
+light car, where he had already stowed Enid's hand luggage. Only
+wizened little Mrs. Royce slipped out from the kitchen to bid
+them good-bye.
+
+That evening some bad boys had come out from town and strewn the
+road near the mill with dozens of broken glass bottles, after
+which they hid in the wild plum bushes to wait for the fun.
+Ralph's was the first car out, and though his lights glittered on
+this bed of jagged glass, there was no time to stop; the road was
+ditched on either side, so he had to drive straight ahead, and
+got into Frankfort on flat tires. The express whistled just as he
+pulled up at the station. He and Claude caught up the four pieces
+of hand luggage and put them in the stateroom. Leaving Enid there
+with the bags, the two boys went to the rear platform of the
+observation car to talk until the last moment. Ralph checked off
+on his fingers the list of things he had promised Claude to
+attend to. Claude thanked him feelingly. He felt that without
+Ralph he could never have got married at all. They had never been
+such good friends as during the last fortnight.
+
+The wheels began to turn. Ralph gripped Claude's hand, ran to the
+front of the car and stepped off. As Claude passed him, he stood
+waving his handkerchief,--a rather funny figure under the station
+lights, in his black clothes and his stiff straw hat, his short
+legs well apart, wearing his incurably jaunty air.
+
+The train glided quietly out through the summer darkness, along
+the timbered river valley. Claude was alone on the back platform,
+smoking a nervous cigar. As they passed the deep cut where Lovely
+Creek flowed into the river, he saw the lights of the mill house
+flash for a moment in the distance. The night air was still;
+heavy with the smell of sweet clover that grew high along the
+tracks, and of wild grapevines wet with dew. The conductor came
+to ask for the tickets, saying with a wise smile that he had been
+hunting for him, as he didn't like to trouble the lady.
+
+After he was gone, Claude looked at his watch, threw away the end
+of his cigar, and went back through the Pullman cars. The
+passengers had gone to bed; the overhead lights were always
+turned low when the train left Frankfort. He made his way through
+the aisles of swaying green curtains, and tapped at the door of
+his state room. It opened a little way, and Enid stood there in a
+white silk dressing-gown with many ruffles, her hair in two
+smooth braids over her shoulders.
+
+"Claude," she said in a low voice, "would you mind getting a
+berth somewhere out in the car tonight? The porter says they are
+not all taken. I'm not feeling very well. I think the dressing on
+the chicken salad must have been too rich."
+
+He answered mechanically. "Yes, certainly. Can't I get you
+something?"
+
+"No, thank you. Sleep will do me more good than anything else.
+Good-night."
+
+She closed the door, and he heard the lock slip. He stood looking
+at the highly polished wood of the panel for a moment, then
+turned irresolutely and went back along the slightly swaying
+aisle of green curtains. In the observation car he stretched
+himself out upon two wicker chairs and lit another cigar. At
+twelve o'clock the porter came in.
+
+"This car is closed for the night, sah. Is you the gen'leman from
+the stateroom in fourteen? Do you want a lower?"
+
+"No, thank you. Is there a smoking car?"
+
+"They is the day-coach smokah, but it ain't likely very clean at
+this time o' night."
+
+"That's all right. It's forward?" Claude absently handed him a
+coin, and the porter conducted him to a very dirty car where the
+floor was littered with newspapers and cigar stumps, and the
+leather cushions were grey with dust. A few desperate looking men
+lay about with their shoes off and their suspenders hanging down
+their backs. The sight of them reminded Claude that his left foot
+was very sore, and that his shoes must have been hurting him for
+some time. He pulled them off, and thrust his feet, in their silk
+socks, on the opposite seat.
+
+On that long, dirty, uncomfortable ride Claude felt many things,
+but the paramount feeling was homesickness. His hurt was of a
+kind that made him turn with a sort of aching cowardice to the
+old, familiar things that were as sure as the sunrise. If only
+the sagebrush plain, over which the stars were shining, could
+suddenly break up and resolve itself into the windings of Lovely
+Creek, with his father's house on the hill, dark and silent in
+the summer night! When he closed his eyes he could see the light
+in his mother's window; and, lower down, the glow of Mahailey's
+lamp, where she sat nodding and mending his old shirts. Human
+love was a wonderful thing, he told himself, and it was most
+wonderful where it had least to gain.
+
+By morning the storm of anger, disappointment, and humiliation
+that was boiling in him when he first sat down in the observation
+car, had died out. One thing lingered; the peculiarly casual,
+indifferent, uninterested tone of his wife's voice when she sent
+him away. It was the flat tone in which people make commonplace
+remarks about common things.
+
+Day broke with silvery brightness on the summer sage. The sky
+grew pink, the sand grew gold. The dawn-wind brought through the
+windows the acrid smell of the sagebrush: an odour that is
+peculiarly stimulating in the early morning, when it always seems
+to promise freedom . . . large spaces. new beginnings, better
+days.
+
+The train was due in Denver at eight o'clock. Exactly at seven
+thirty Claude knocked at Enid's door,--this time firmly. She was
+dressed, and greeted him with a fresh, smiling face, holding her
+hat in her hand.
+
+"Are you feeling better?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes! I am perfectly all right this morning. I've put out all
+your things for you, there on the seat."
+
+He glanced at them. "Thank you. But I won't have time to change,
+I'm afraid."
+
+"Oh, won't you? I'm so sorry I forgot to give you your bag last
+night. But you must put on another necktie, at least. You look
+too much like a groom."
+
+"Do I?" he asked, with a scarcely perceptible curl of his lip.
+
+Everything he needed was neatly arranged on the plush seat;
+shirt, collar, tie, brushes, even a handkerchief. Those in his
+pockets were black from dusting off the cinders that blew in all
+night, and he threw them down and took up the clean one. There
+was a damp spot on it, and as he unfolded it he recognized the
+scent of a cologne Enid often used. For some reason this
+attention unmanned him. He felt the smart of tears in his eyes,
+and to hide them bent over the metal basin and began to scrub his
+face. Enid stood behind him, adjusting her hat in the mirror.
+
+"How terribly smoky you are, Claude. I hope you don't smoke
+before breakfast?"
+
+"No. I was in the smoking car awhile. I suppose my clothes got
+full of it."
+
+"You are covered with dust and cinders, too!" She took the
+clothes broom from the rack and began to brush him.
+
+Claude caught her hand. "Don't, please!" he said sharply. "The
+porter can do that for me."
+
+Enid watched him furtively as he closed and strapped his
+suitcase. She had often heard that men were cross before
+breakfast.
+
+"Sure you've forgotten nothing?" he asked before he closed her
+bag.
+
+"Yes. I never lose things on the train,--do you?"
+
+"Sometimes," he replied guardedly, not looking up as he snapped
+the catch.
+
+
+
+
Book Three; Sunrise on the Prairie
+
+I
+
+Claude was to continue farming with his father, and after he
+returned from his wedding journey, he fell at once to work. The
+harvest was almost as abundant as that of the summer before, and
+he was busy in the fields six days a week.
+
+One afternoon in August he came home with his team, watered and
+fed the horses in a leisurely way, and then entered his house by
+the back door. Enid, he knew, would not be there. She had gone to
+Frankfort to a meeting of the AntiSaloon League. The Prohibition
+party was bestirring itself in Nebraska that summer, confident of
+voting the State dry the following year, which purpose it
+triumphantly accomplished.
+
+Enid's kitchen, full of the afternoon sun, glittered with new
+paint, spotless linoleum, and blue-and-white cooking vessels. In
+the dining-room the cloth was laid, and the table was neatly set
+for one. Claude opened the icebox, where his supper was arranged
+for him; a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled
+eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of
+ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter. He
+placed these things on the table, cut some bread, and after
+carelessly washing his face and hands, sat down to eat in his
+working shirt. He propped the newspaper against a red glass water
+pitcher and read the war news while he had his supper. He was
+annoyed when he heard heavy footsteps coming around the house.
+Leonard Dawson stuck his head in at the kitchen door, and Claude
+rose quickly and reached for his hat; but Leonard came in,
+uninvited, and sat down. His brown shirt was wet where his
+suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide
+straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with
+dust.
+
+"Go ahead and finish your supper," he cried. "Having a wife with
+a car of her own is next thing to having no wife at all. How they
+do like to roll around! I've been mighty blamed careful to see
+that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how
+soon do you figure you'll be able to let me have the thrasher? My
+wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you
+reckon your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I
+helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Mother wouldn't like it. We never have done
+that, even when we were crowded."
+
+"Well, I think I'll go over and have a talk with your mother. If
+she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her
+it's pretty near a case of your neighbour's ox falling into a pit
+on the Sabbath day."
+
+"That's a good idea. She's always reasonable."
+
+Leonard rose. "What's the news?"
+
+"The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic;
+coming this way, too."
+
+"That's all right," Leonard declared. "Maybe Americans will stay
+at home now, and mind their own business. I don't care how they
+chew each other up over there, not a bit! I'd as soon one got
+wiped off the map as another."
+
+"Your grandparents were English people, weren't they?"
+
+"That's a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and
+little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn't mind if the baby
+turned out to have my grandmother's skin. She had the finest
+complexion I ever saw."
+
+As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens
+with red combs ran squawking toward them. It was the hour at
+which the poultry was usually fed. Leonard stopped to admire
+them. "You've got a fine lot of hens. I always did like white
+leghorns. Where are all your roosters?"
+
+"We've only got one. He's shut up in the coop. The brood hens are
+setting. Enid is going to try raising winter frys."
+
+"Only one rooster? And may I ask what these hens do?"
+
+Claude laughed. "They lay eggs, just the same,--better. it's the
+fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather."
+
+This information seemed to make Leonard angry. "I never heard of
+such damned nonsense," he blustered. "I raise chickens on a
+natural basis, or I don't raise 'em at all." He jumped into his
+car for fear he would say more.
+
+When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat
+near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle. Dirty and sweaty as
+he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and
+smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its
+neck. The little girl was beside herself with delight.
+
+"Go and wash up for supper, Len," Susie called from the stove. He
+put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking
+with his eyes shut.
+
+"Susie, I'm in an awful temper. I can't stand that damned wife of
+Claude's !"
+
+She was spearing roasting ears out of a big iron pot and looked
+up through the steam. "Why, have you seen her? I was listening on
+the telephone this morning and heard her tell Bayliss she would
+be in town until late." "Oh, yes! She went to town all right, and
+he's over there eating a cold supper by himself. That woman's a
+fanatic. She ain't content with practising prohibition on
+humankind; she's begun now on the hens." While he placed the
+chairs and wheeled the baby up to the table, he explained Enid's
+method of raising poultry to his wife. She said she really didn't
+see any harm in it.
+
+"Now be honest, Susie; did you ever know hens would keep on
+laying without a rooster?"
+
+"No, I didn't, but I was brought up the old-fashioned way. Enid
+has poultry books and garden books, and all such things. I don't
+doubt she gets good ideas from them. But anyhow, you be careful.
+She's our nearest neighbour, and I don't want to have trouble
+with her."
+
+"I'll have to keep out of her way, then. If she tries to do any
+missionary work among my chickens, I'll tell her a few home
+truths her husband's too bashful to tell her. It's my opinion
+she's got that boy cowed already."
+
+"Now, Len, you know she won't bother your chickens. You keep
+quiet. But Claude does seem to sort of avoid people," Susie
+admitted, filling her husband's plate again. "Mrs. Joe Havel says
+Ernest don't go to Claude's any more. It seems Enid went over
+there and wanted Ernest to paste some Prohibition posters about
+fifteen million drunkards on their barn, for an example to the
+Bohemians. Ernest wouldn't do it, and told her he was going to
+vote for saloons, and Enid was quite spiteful, Mrs. Havel said.
+It's too bad, when those boys were such chums. I used to like to
+see them together." Susie spoke so kindly that her husband shot
+her a quick glance of shy affection.
+
+"Do you suppose Claude relished having that preacher visiting
+them, when they hadn't been married two months? Sitting on the
+front porch in a white necktie every day, while Claude was out
+cutting wheat?"
+
+"Well, anyhow, I guess Claude had more to eat when Brother Weldon
+was staying there. Preachers won't be fed on calories, or
+whatever it is Enid calls 'em," said Susie, who was given to
+looking on the bright side of things. "Claude's wife keeps a
+wonderful kitchen; but so could I, if I never cooked any more
+than she does."
+
+Leonard gave her a meaning look. "I don't believe you would live
+with the sort of man you could feed out of a tin can."
+
+"No, I don't believe I would." She pushed the buggy toward him.
+"Take her up, Daddy. She wants to play with you."
+
+Leonard set the baby on his shoulder and carried her off to show
+her the pigs. Susie kept laughing to herself as she cleared the
+table and washed the dishes; she was much amused by what her
+husband had told her.
+
+Late that evening, when Leonard was starting for the barn to see
+that all was well before he went to bed, he observed a discreet
+black object rolling along the highroad in the moonlight, a red
+spark winking in the rear. He called Susie to the door.
+
+"See, there she goes; going home to report the success of the
+meeting to Claude. Wouldn't that be a nice way to have your wife
+coming in?"
+
+"Now, Leonard, if Claude likes it--"
+
+"Likes it?" Big Leonard drew himself up. "What can he do, poor
+kid? He's stung!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+After Leonard left him, Claude cleared away the remains of his
+supper and watered the gourd vine before he went to milk. It was
+not really a gourd vine at all, but a summer-squash, of the
+crook-necked, warty, orange-coloured variety, and it was now full
+of ripe squashes, hanging by strong stems among the rough green
+leaves and prickly tendrils. Claude had watched its rapid growth
+and the opening of its splotchy yellow blossoms, feeling grateful
+to a thing that did so lustily what it was put there to do. He
+had the same feeling for his little Jersey cow, which came home
+every night with full udders and gave down her milk willingly,
+keeping her tail out of his face, as only a well disposed cow will
+do.
+
+His milking done, he sat down on the front porch and lit a cigar.
+While he smoked, he did not think about anything but the quiet
+and the slow cooling of the atmosphere, and how good it was to
+sit still. The moon swam up over the bare wheat fields, big and
+magical, like a great flower. Presently he got some bath towels,
+went across the yard to the windmill, took off his clothes, and
+stepped into the tin horse tank. The water had been warmed by the
+sun all afternoon, and was not much cooler than his body. He
+stretched himself out in it, and resting his head on the metal
+rim, lay on his back, looking up at the moon. The sky was a
+midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed
+to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an
+invisible current. One expected to see its great petals open. 
+
+For some reason, Claude began to think about the far-off times
+and countries it had shone upon. He never thought of the sun as
+coming from distant lands, or as having taken part in human life
+in other ages. To him, the sun rotated about the wheatfields. But
+the moon, somehow, came out of the historic past, and made him
+think of Egypt and the Pharaohs, Babylon and the hanging gardens.
+She seemed particularly to have looked down upon the follies and
+disappointments of men; into the slaves' quarters of old times,
+into prison windows, and into fortresses where captives
+languished.
+
+Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of
+people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were
+captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death.
+Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the
+windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe
+which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all. Perhaps even in
+people like Mrs. Royce and his brother Bayliss there was
+something of this sort--but that was a shuddery thought. He
+dismissed it with a quick movement of his hand through the water,
+which, disturbed, caught the light and played black and gold,
+like something alive, over his chest. In his own mother the
+imprisoned spirit was almost more present to people than her
+corporeal self. He had so often felt it when he sat with her on
+summer nights like this. Mahailey, too, had one, though the walls
+of her prison were so thick--and Gladys Farmer. Oh, yes, how much
+Gladys must have to tell this perfect confidant! The people whose
+hearts were set high needed such intercourse--whose wish was so
+beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy
+it. And these children of the moon, with their unappeased
+longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children
+of the sun. This conception flooded the boy's heart like a second
+moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay
+deathly still for fear of losing it.
+
+At last the black cubical object which had caught Leonard
+Dawson's wrathful eye, came rolling along the highroad. Claude
+snatched up his clothes and towels, and without waiting to make
+use of either, he ran, a white man across a bare white yard.
+Gaining the shelter of the house, he found his bathrobe, and fled
+to the upper porch, where he lay down in the hammock. Presently
+he heard his name called, pronounced as if it were spelled
+"Clod." His wife came up the stairs and looked out at him. He lay
+motionless, with his eyes closed. She went away. When all was
+quiet again he looked off at the still country, and the moon in
+the dark indigo sky. His revelation still possessed him, making
+his whole body sensitive, like a tightly strung bow. In the
+morning he had forgotten, or was ashamed of what had seemed so
+true and so entirely his own the night before. He agreed, for the
+most part, that it was better not to think about such things, and
+when he could he avoided thinking.
+
+
+
+III
+
+After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often
+persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard,
+to take her as far as Claude's new house. She was glad Enid
+didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors
+and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in
+the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
+sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her
+work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily
+and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing
+machine before he went to work, and by nine o'clock the clothes
+were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before
+in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
+satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working
+shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.
+
+Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two
+thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said
+that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected
+her husband depended upon one's conception of what was his due.
+When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was
+conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
+happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not
+happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed
+him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and
+make the best of what was good in it. If his wife didn't love
+him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
+thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he
+came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.
+Everything about a man's embrace was distasteful to Enid;
+something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,--
+for Eve's transgression, perhaps.
+
+This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of
+any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude
+before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a
+readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in
+exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that
+for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient
+with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not
+understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting
+remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went
+over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in
+the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
+
+Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself,
+"It's the end of everything for me." Other men than he must have
+been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a
+lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy because he was an
+idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
+love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that
+it might be otherwise.
+
+Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright
+summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but
+broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, but even more
+in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid
+could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At
+such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging
+hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.
+
+In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why
+she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace
+and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful
+attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he
+came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
+against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head
+drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity
+which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in
+him? Was it, after all, his fault?
+
+Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one
+else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every
+day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came
+out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid's
+vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the
+Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.
+Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against
+alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the
+pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to take any part in
+the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what
+Bayliss and Enid called "our literature."
+
+In the farming towns the term "literature" was applied only to a
+special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature,
+Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease,
+there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature. This special application of
+the word didn't bother Claude, but his mother, being an
+old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
+
+Enid did not understand her husband's indifference to a burning
+question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest
+Havel. She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her
+committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and
+wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had something
+to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He
+did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the
+lightning had blasted. Further than that he wouldn't have let
+anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.
+
+The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut
+in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried
+and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and
+dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife's
+blood with horror--and some would have melted his mother's heart
+with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless
+blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as
+they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from
+branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with
+life--that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told
+himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into
+the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and
+interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with
+compromises.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+>From her upstairs window Mrs. Wheeler could see Claude moving
+back and forth in the west field, drilling wheat. She felt lonely
+for him. He didn't come home as often as he might. She had begun
+to wonder whether he was one of those people who are always
+discontented; but whatever his disappointments were, he kept them
+locked in his own breast. One had to learn the lessons of life.
+Nevertheless, it made her a little sad to see him so settled and
+indifferent at twenty-three.
+
+After watching from the window for a few moments, she turned to
+the telephone and called up Claude's house, asking Enid whether
+she would mind if he came there for dinner. "Mahailey and I get
+lonesome with Mr. Wheeler away so much," she added.
+
+"Why, no, Mother Wheeler, of course not." Enid spoke cheerfully,
+as she always did. "Have you any one there you can send over to
+tell him?"
+
+"I thought I would walk over myself, Enid. It's not far, if I
+take my time."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler left the house a little before noon and stopped at
+the creek to rest before she climbed the long hill. At the edge
+of the field she sat down against a grassy bank and waited until
+the horses came tramping up the long rows. Claude saw her and
+pulled them in.
+
+"Anything wrong, Mother?" he called.
+
+"Oh, no! I'm going to take you home for dinner with me, that's
+all. I telephoned Enid." He unhooked his team, and he and his
+mother started down the hill together, walking behind the horses.
+Though they had not been alone like this for a long while, she
+felt it best to talk about impersonal things.
+
+"Don't let me forget to give you an article about the execution
+of that English nurse."
+
+"Edith Cavell? I've read about it," he answered listlessly. "It's
+nothing to be surprised at. If they could sink the Lusitania,
+they could shoot an English nurse, certainly."
+
+"Someway I feel as if this were different," his mother murmured.
+"It's like the hanging of John Brown. I wonder they could find
+soldiers to execute the sentence."
+
+"Oh, I guess they have plenty of such soldiers!"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked up at him. "I don't see how we can stay out
+of it much longer, do you? I suppose our army wouldn't be a drop
+in the bucket, even if we could get it over. They tell us we can
+be more useful in our agriculture and manufactories than we could
+by going into the war. I only hope it isn't campaign talk. I do
+distrust the Democrats."
+
+Claude laughed. "Why, Mother, I guess there's no party politics
+in this."
+
+She shook her head. "I've never yet found a public question in
+which there wasn't party politics. Well, we can only do our duty
+as it comes to us, and have faith. This field finishes your fall
+work?"
+
+"Yes. I'll have time to do some things about the place, now. I'm
+going to make a good ice-house and put up my own ice this
+winter."
+
+"Were you thinking of going up to Lincoln, for a little?"
+
+"I guess not."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back
+on old pleasures and old friends.
+
+"Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in
+Frankfort?"
+
+"I think so, Mother," he answered a little impatiently. "I told
+her she could attend to it when she was in town some day."
+
+"Of course," his mother persevered, "some of the programs are not
+very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of
+what we have."
+
+He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that.
+His horses stopped at the water tank. "Don't wait for me. I'll be
+along in a minute." Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled.
+"Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give
+me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool
+the other."
+
+She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost
+disappeared. "I thought I was smart that time!"
+
+It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to
+get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.
+
+While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a
+page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her
+they were all photographs,--she knew no other way of making a
+picture.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she asked, "how comes it all them Germans is such
+ugly lookin' people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here
+ain't ugly lookin'."
+
+Claude put her off indulgently. "Maybe it's the ugly ones that
+are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our
+neighbours."
+
+"Then why don't they make their soldiers stay home, an' not go
+breakin' other people's things, an' turnin' 'em out of their
+houses," she muttered indignantly. "They say little babies was
+born out in the snow last winter, an' no fires for their mudders
+nor nothin'. 'Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn't like that in our war;
+the soldiers didn't do nothin' to the women an' chillun. Many a
+time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an' they never so
+much as broke a piece of my mudder's chiney."
+
+"You'll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must
+have my dinner and get back to work. If we don't get our wheat
+in, those people over there won't have anything to eat, you
+know."
+
+The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she
+could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over
+photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages,
+things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry
+that used to stop to drink at her mother's cold mountain spring.
+She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding
+feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a
+clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back,
+"as raw as beef where he'd scratched it." Five of her brothers
+were in the Confederate army. When one was wounded in the second
+battle of Bull Run, her mother had borrowed a wagon and horses,
+gone a three days' journey to the field hospital, and brought the
+boy home to the mountain. Mahailey could remember how her older
+sisters took turns pouring cold spring water on his gangrenous
+leg all day and all night. There were no doctors left in the
+neighbourhood, and as nobody could amputate the boy's leg, he
+died by inches. Mahailey was the only person in the Wheeler
+household who had ever seen war with her own eyes, and she felt
+that this fact gave her a definite superiority.
+
+
+
+V
+
+Claude had been married a year and a half. One December morning
+he got a telephone message from his father-in-law, asking him to
+come in to Frankfort at once. He found Mr. Royce sunk in his
+desk-chair, smoking as usual, with several foreign-looking
+letters on the table before him. As he took these out of their
+envelopes and sorted the pages, Claude noticed how unsteady his
+hands had become.
+
+One letter, from the chief of the medical staff in the mission
+school where Caroline Royce taught, informed Mr. Royce that his
+daughter was seriously ill in the mission hospital. She would
+have to be sent to a more salubrious part of the country for rest
+and treatment, and would not be strong enough to return to her
+duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could
+come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school
+authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a
+fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline
+herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a
+box of cigars toward him and began to talk despondently about
+missionaries.
+
+"I could go to her," he complained, "but what good would that do?
+I'm not in sympathy with her ideas, and it would only fret her.
+You can see she's made her mind up not to come home. I don't
+believe in one people trying to force their ways or their
+religion on another. I'm not that kind of man." He sat looking at
+his cigar. After a long pause he broke out suddenly, "China has
+been drummed into my ears . It seems like a long way to go to
+hunt for trouble, don't it? A man hasn't got much control over
+his own life, Claude. If it ain't poverty or disease that
+torments him, it's a name on the map. I could have made out
+pretty well, if it hadn't been for China, and some other things .
+. . . If Carrie'd had to teach for her clothes and help pay off
+my notes, like old man Harrison's daughters, like enough she'd
+have stayed at home. There's always something. I don't know what
+to say about showing these letters to Enid."
+
+"Oh, she will have to know about it, Mr. Royce. If she feels that
+she ought to go to Carrie, it wouldn't be right for me to
+interfere."
+
+Mr. Royce shook his head. "I don't know. It don't seem fair that
+China should hang over you, too."
+
+When Claude got home he remarked as he handed Enid the letters,
+"Your father has been a good deal upset by this. I never saw him
+look so old as he did today."
+
+Enid studied their contents, sitting at her orderly little desk,
+while Claude pretended to read the paper.
+
+"It seems clear that I am the one to go," she said when she had
+finished.
+
+"You think it's necessary for some one to go? I don't see it."
+
+"It would look very strange if none of us went," Enid replied
+with spirit.
+
+"How, look strange?"
+
+"Why, it would look to her associates as if her family had no
+feeling."
+
+"Oh, if that's all!" Claude smiled perversely and took up his
+paper again. "I wonder how it will look to people here if you go
+off and leave your husband?"
+
+"What a mean thing to say, Claude!" She rose sharply, then
+hesitated, perplexed. "People here know me better than that. It
+isn't as if you couldn't be perfectly comfortable at your
+mother's." As he did not glance up from his paper, she went into
+the kitchen.
+
+Claude sat still, listening to Enid's quick movements as she
+opened up the range to get supper. The light in the room grew
+greyer. Outside the fields melted into one another as evening
+came on. The young trees in the yard bent and whipped about under
+a bitter north wind. He had often thought with pride that winter
+died at his front doorstep; within, no draughty halls, no chilly
+corners. This was their second year here. When he was driving
+home, the thought that he might be free of this house for a long
+while had stirred a pleasant excitement in him; but now, he
+didn't want to leave it. Something grew soft in him. He wondered
+whether they couldn't try again, and make things go better. Enid
+was singing in the kitchen in a subdued, rather lonely voice. He
+rose and went out for his milking coat and pail. As he passed his
+wife by the window, he stopped and put his arm about her
+questioningly.
+
+She looked up. "That's right. You're feeling better about it,
+aren't you? I thought you would. Gracious, what a smelly coat,
+Claude! I must find another for you."
+
+Claude knew that tone. Enid never questioned the rightness of her
+own decisions. When she made up her mind, there was no turning
+her. He went down the path to the barn with his hands stuffed in
+his trousers pockets, his bright pail hanging on his arm. Try
+again--what was there to try? Platitudes, littleness, falseness .
+. . . His life was choking him, and he hadn't the courage to
+break with it. Let her go! Let her go when she would! . . . What
+a hideous world to be born into! Or was it hideous only for him?
+Everything he touched went wrong under his hand--always had.
+
+When they sat down at the supper table in the back parlour an
+hour later, Enid looked worn, as if this time her decision had
+cost her something. "I should think you might have a restful
+winter at your mother's," she began cheerfully. "You won't have
+nearly so much to look after as you do here. We needn't disturb
+things in this house. I will take the silver down to Mother, and
+we can leave everything else just as it is. Would there be room
+for my car in your father's garage? You might find it a
+convenience."
+
+"Oh, no! I won't need it. I'll put it up at the mill house," he
+answered with an effort at carelessness.
+
+All the familiar objects that stood about them in the lamplight
+seemed stiller and more solemn than usual, as if they were
+holding their breath.
+
+"I suppose you had better take the chickens over to your
+mother's," Enid continued evenly. "But I shouldn't like them to
+get mixed with her Plymouth Rocks; there's not a dark feather
+among them now. Do ask Mother Wheeler to use all the eggs, and
+not to let my hens set in the spring."
+
+"In the spring?" Claude looked up from his plate.
+
+"Of course, Claude. I could hardly get back before next fall, if
+I'm to be of any help to poor Carrie. I might try to be home for
+harvest, if that would make it more convenient for you." She rose
+to bring in the dessert.
+
+"Oh, don't hurry on my account!" he muttered, staring after her
+disappearing figure.
+
+Enid came back with the hot pudding and the after-dinner coffee
+things. "This has come on us so suddenly that we must make our
+plans at once," she explained. "I should think your mother would
+be glad to keep Rose for us; she is such a good cow. And then you
+can have all the cream you want."
+
+He took the little gold-rimmed cup she held out to him. "If you
+are going to be gone until next fall, I shall sell Rose," he
+announced gruffly.
+
+"But why? You might look a long time before you found another
+like her."
+
+"I shall sell her, anyhow. The horses, of course, are Father's;
+he paid for them. If you clear out, he may want to rent this
+place. You may find a tenant in here when you get back from
+China." Claude swallowed his coffee, put down the cup, and went
+into the front parlour, where he lit a cigar. He walked up and
+down, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who still sat at the
+table in the circle of light from the hanging lamp. Her head,
+bent forward a little, showed the neat part of her brown hair.
+When she was perplexed, her face always looked sharper, her chin
+longer.
+
+"If you've no feeling for the place," said Claude from the other
+room, "you can hardly expect me to hang around and take care of
+it. All the time you were campaigning, I played housekeeper
+here."
+
+Enid's eyes narrowed, but she did not flush. Claude had never
+seen a wave of colour come over his wife's pale, smooth cheeks.
+
+"Don't be childish. You know I care for this place; it's our
+home. But no feeling would be right that kept me from doing my
+duty. You are well, and you have your mother's house to go to.
+Carrie is ill and among strangers."
+
+She began to gather up the dishes. Claude stepped quickly out
+into the light and confronted her. "It's not only your going. You
+know what's the matter with me. It's because you want to go. You
+are glad of a chance to get away among all those preachers, with
+their smooth talk and make-believe."
+
+Enid took up the tray. "If I am glad, it's because you are not
+willing to govern our lives by Christian ideals. There is
+something in you that rebels all the time. So many important
+questions have come up since our marriage, and you have been
+indifferent or sarcastic about every one of them. You want to
+lead a purely selfish life."
+
+She walked resolutely out of the room and shut the door behind
+her. Later, when she came back, Claude was not there. His hat and
+coat were gone from the hat rack; he must have let himself out
+quietly by the front door. Enid sat up until eleven and then went
+to bed.
+
+In the morning, on coming out from her bedroom, she found Claude
+asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on. She had a
+moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any
+smell of spirits. She began preparations for breakfast, moving
+quietly.
+
+Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost
+no time. She engaged passage and cabled the mission school. She
+left Frankfort the week before Christmas. Claude and Ralph took
+her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express.
+When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother's, and sold
+his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson. Except when he went to
+see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the
+neighbours. He felt that they were discussing his domestic
+affairs,--as, of course, they were. The Royces and the Wheelers,
+they said, couldn't behave like anybody else, and it was no use
+their trying. If Claude built the best house in the
+neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn't live in it. And if he
+had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!
+
+One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and
+went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and
+bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar.
+Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the
+kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went
+away. He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses
+with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows
+securely. As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and
+listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice. All these things
+that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such
+pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop
+of any second-hand dealer.
+
+How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the
+feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris
+of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and
+decaying things in nature. Rubbish . . . junk . . . his mind
+could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the
+dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued
+from day to day. Actions without meaning . . . . As he looked out
+and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he
+could not help thinking how much better it would be if people
+could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under
+the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats
+forgotten. He wondered how he was to go on through the years
+ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his
+soul.
+
+At last he locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and went
+over to the timber claim to smoke a cigar and say goodbye to the
+place. There he soberly walked about for more than an hour, under
+the crooked trees with empty birds' nests in their forks. Every
+time he came to a break in the hedge, he could see the little
+house, giving itself up so meekly to solitude. He did not believe
+that he would ever live there again. Well, at any rate, the money
+his father had put into the place would not be lost; he could
+always get a better tenant for having a comfortable house there.
+Several of the boys in the neighbourhood were planning to be
+married within the year. The future of the house was safe. And
+he? He stopped short in his walk; his feet had made an uncertain,
+purposeless trail all over the white ground. It vexed him to see
+his own footsteps. What was it--what WAS the matter with him?
+Why, at least, could he not stop feeling things, and hoping? What
+was there to hope for now?
+
+He heard a sound of distress, and looking back, saw the barn cat,
+that had been left behind to pick up her living. She was standing
+inside the hedge, her jet black fur ruffled against the wet
+flakes, one paw lifted, mewing miserably. Claude went over and
+picked her up.
+
+"What's the matter, Blackie? Mice getting scarce in the barn?
+Mahailey will say you are bad luck. Maybe you are, but you can't
+help it, can you?" He slipped her into his overcoat pocket.
+Later, when he was getting into his car, he tried to dislodge her
+and put her in a basket, but she clung to her nest in his pocket
+and dug her claws into the lining. He laughed. "Well, if you are
+bad luck, I guess you are going to stay right with me!"
+
+She looked up at him with startled yellow eyes and did not even
+mew.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Mrs. Wheeler was afraid that Claude might not find the old place 
+comfortable, after having had a house of his own. She put her
+best rocking chair and a reading lamp in his bedroom. He often
+sat there all evening, shading his eyes with his hand, pretending
+to read. When he stayed downstairs after supper, his mother and
+Mahailey were grateful. Besides collecting war pictures,
+Mahailey now hunted through the old magazines in the attic for
+pictures of China. She had marked on her big kitchen calendar the
+day when Enid would arrive in Hong-Kong.
+
+"Mr. Claude," she would say as she stood at the sink washing the
+supper dishes, "it's broad daylight over where Miss Enid is,
+ain't it? Cause the world's round, an' the old sun, he's
+a-shinin' over there for the yaller people."
+
+>From time to time, when they were working together, Mrs. Wheeler
+told Mahailey what she knew about the customs of the Chinese. The
+old woman had never had two impersonal interests at the same time
+before, and she scarcely knew what to do with them. She would
+murmur on, half to Claude and half to herself: "They ain't
+fightin' over there where Miss Enid is, is they? An' she won't
+have to wear their kind of clothes, cause she's a white woman.
+She won't let 'em kill their girl babies nor do such awful things
+like they always have, an' she won't let 'em pray to them stone
+iboles, cause they can't help 'em none. I 'spect Miss Enid'll do
+a heap of good, all the time."
+
+Behind her diplomatic monologues, however, Mahailey had her own
+ideas, and she was greatly scandalized at Enid's departure. She
+was afraid people would say that Claude's wife had "run off an'
+lef' him," and in the Virginia mountains, where her social
+standards had been formed, a husband or wife thus deserted was
+the object of boisterous ridicule. She once stopped Mrs. Wheeler
+in a dark corner of the cellar to whisper, "Mr. Claude's wife
+ain't goin' to stay off there, like her sister, is she?"
+
+If one of the Yoeder boys or Susie Dawson happened to be at the
+Wheelers' for dinner, Mahailey never failed to refer to Enid in a
+loud voice. "Mr. Claude's wife, she cuts her potatoes up raw in
+the pan an' fries 'em. She don't boil 'em first like I do. I know
+she's an awful good cook, I know she is." She felt that easy
+references to the absent wife made things look better.
+
+Ernest Havel came to see Claude now, but not often. They both
+felt it would be indelicate to renew their former intimacy.
+Ernest still felt aggrieved about his beer, as if Enid had
+snatched the tankard from his lips with her own corrective hand.
+Like Leonard, he believed that Claude had made a bad bargain in
+matrimony; but instead of feeling sorry for him, Ernest wanted to
+see him convinced and punished. When he married Enid, Claude had
+been false to liberal principles, and it was only right that he
+should pay for his apostasy. The very first time he came to spend
+an evening at the Wheelers' after Claude came home to live,
+Ernest undertook to explain his objections to Prohibition. Claude
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why not drop it? It's a matter that doesn't interest me, one way
+or the other."
+
+Ernest was offended and did not come back for nearly a
+month--not, indeed, until the announcement that Germany would
+resume unrestricted submarine warfare made every one look
+questioningly at his neighbour.
+
+He walked into the Wheelers' kitchen the night after this news
+reached the farming country, and found Claude and his mother
+sitting at the table, reading the papers aloud to each other in
+snatches. Ernest had scarcely taken a seat when the telephone
+bell rang. Claude answered the call.
+
+"It's the telegraph operator at Frankfort," he said, as he hung
+up the receiver. "He repeated a message from Father, sent from
+Wray: 'Will be home day after tomorrow. Read the papers.' What
+does he mean? What does he suppose we are doing?"
+
+"It means he considers our situation very serious. It's not like
+him to telegraph except in case of illness." Mrs. Wheeler rose
+and walked distractedly to the telephone box, as if it might
+further disclose her husband's state of mind.
+
+"But what a queer message! It was addressed to you, too, Mother,
+not to me."
+
+"He would know how I feel about it. Some of your father's people
+were seagoing men, out of Portsmouth. He knows what it means when
+our shipping is told where it can go on the ocean, and where it
+cannot. It isn't possible that Washington can take such an
+affront for us. To think that at this time, of all times, we
+should have a Democratic administration!"
+
+Claude laughed. "Sit down, Mother. Wait a day or two. Give them
+time."
+
+"The war will be over before Washington can do anything, Mrs.
+Wheeler," Ernest declared gloomily, "England will be starved out,
+and France will be beaten to a standstill. The whole German army
+will be on the Western front now. What could this country do? How
+long do you suppose it takes to make an army?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler stopped short in her restless pacing and met his
+moody glance. "I don't know anything, Ernest, but I believe the
+Bible. I believe that in the twinkling of an eye we shall be
+changed!"
+
+Ernest looked at the floor. He respected faith. As he said, you
+must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.
+
+Claude sat leaning his elbows on the table. "It always comes back
+to the same thing, Mother. Even if a raw army could do anything,
+how would we get it over there? Here's one naval authority who
+says the Germans are turning out submarines at the rate of three
+a day. They probably didn't spring this on us until they had
+enough built to keep the ocean clear."
+
+"I don't pretend to say what we could accomplish, son. But we
+must stand somewhere, morally. They have told us all along that
+we could be more helpful to the Allies out of the war than in it,
+because we could send munitions and supplies. If we agree to
+withdraw that aid, where are we? Helping Germany, all the time we
+are pretending to mind our own business! If our only alternative
+is to be at the bottom of the sea, we had better be there!"
+
+"Mother, do sit down! We can't settle it tonight. I never saw you
+so worked up."
+
+"Your father is worked up, too, or he would never have sent that
+telegram." Mrs. Wheeler reluctantly took up her workbasket, and
+the boys talked with their old, easy friendliness.
+
+When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeders' place with
+him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the
+frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them,
+he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with
+the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that
+were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must
+be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet,
+that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A
+question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him,
+over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country,
+as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver,
+when this war was undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.
+
+Claude and his mother had not long to wait. Three days later they
+knew that the German ambassador had been dismissed, and the
+American ambassador recalled from Berlin. To older men these
+events were subjects to think and converse about; but to boys
+like Claude they were life and death, predestination.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+One stormy morning Claude was driving the big wagon to town to
+get a load of lumber. The roads were beginning to thaw out, and
+the country was black and dirty looking. Here and there on the
+dark mud, grey snow crusts lingered, perforated like honeycomb,
+with wet weedstalks sticking up through them. As the wagon
+creaked over the high ground just above Frankfort, Claude noticed
+a brilliant new flag flying from the schoolhouse cupola. He had
+never seen the flag before when it meant anything but the Fourth
+of July, or a political rally. Today it was as if he saw it for
+the first time; no bands, no noise, no orators; a spot of
+restless colour against the sodden March sky.
+
+He turned out of his way in order to pass the High School, drew
+up his team, and waited a few minutes until the noon bell rang.
+The older boys and girls came out first, with a flurry of
+raincoats and umbrellas. Presently he saw Gladys Farmer, in a
+yellow "slicker" and an oilskin hat, and waved to her. She came
+up to the wagon.
+
+"I like your decoration," he said, glancing toward the cupola.
+
+"It's a silk one the Senior boys bought with their athletic
+money. I advised them not to run it up in this rain, but the
+class president told me they bought that flag for storms."
+
+"Get in, and I'll take you home."
+
+She took his extended hand, put her foot on the hub of the wheel,
+and climbed to the seat beside him. He clucked to his team.
+
+"So your High School boys are feeling war-like these days?"
+
+"Very. What do you think?"
+
+"I think they'll have a chance to express their feelings."
+
+"Do you, Claude? It seems awfully unreal."
+
+"Nothing else seems very real, either. I'm going to haul out a
+load of lumber, but I never expect to drive a nail in it. These
+things don't matter now. There is only one thing we ought to do,
+and only one thing that matters; we all know it."
+
+"You feel it's coming nearer every day?"
+
+"Every day."
+
+Gladys made no reply. She only looked at him gravely with her
+calm, generous brown eyes. They stopped before the low house
+where the windows were full of flowers. She took his hand and
+swung herself to the ground, holding it for a moment while she
+said good-bye. Claude drove back to the lumber yard. In a place
+like Frankfort, a boy whose wife was in China could hardly go to
+see Gladys without causing gossip.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+During the bleak month of March Mr. Wheeler went to town in his
+buckboard almost every day. For the first time in his life he had
+a secret anxiety. The one member of his family who had never
+given him the slightest trouble, his son Bayliss, was just now
+under a cloud.
+
+Bayliss was a Pacifist, and kept telling people that if only the
+United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what
+Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the
+capital of the world. There was a kind of logic in Bayliss'
+utterances that shook Nat Wheeler's imperturbable assumption that
+one point of view was as good as another. When Bayliss fought the
+dram and the cigarette, Wheeler only laughed. That a son of his
+should turn out a Prohibitionist, was a joke he could appreciate.
+But Bayliss' attitude in the present crisis disturbed him. Day
+after day he sat about his son's place of business, interrupting
+his arguments with funny stories. Bayliss did not go home at all
+that month. He said to his father, "No, Mother's too violent. I'd
+better not."
+
+Claude and his mother read the papers in the evening, but they
+talked so little about what they read that Mahailey inquired
+anxiously whether they weren't still fighting over yonder. When
+she could get Claude alone for a moment, she pulled out Sunday
+supplement pictures of the devastated countries and asked him to
+tell her what was to become of this family, photographed among
+the ruins of their home; of this old woman, who sat by the
+roadside with her bundles. "Where's she goin' to, anyways? See,
+Mr. Claude, she's got her iron cook-pot, pore old thing, carryin'
+it all the way!"
+
+Pictures of soldiers in gas-masks puzzled her; gas was something
+she hadn't learned about in the Civil War, so she worked it out
+for herself that these masks were worn by the army cooks, to
+protect their eyes when they were cutting up onions! "All them
+onions they have to cut up, it would put their eyes out if they
+didn't wear somethin'," she argued.
+
+On the morning of the eighth of April Claude came downstairs
+early and began to clean his boots, which were caked with dry
+mud. Mahailey was squatting down beside her stove, blowing and
+puffing into it. The fire was always slow to start in heavy
+weather. Claude got an old knife and a brush, and putting his
+foot on a chair over by the west window, began to scrape his
+shoe. He had said good-morning to Mahailey, nothing more. He
+hadn't slept well, and was pale.
+
+"Mr. Claude," Mahailey grumbled, "this stove ain't never drawed
+good like my old one Mr. Ralph took away from me. I can't do
+nothin' with it. Maybe you'll clean it out for me next Sunday."
+
+"I'll clean it today, if you say so. I won't be here next Sunday.
+I'm going away."
+
+Something in his tone made Mahailey get up, her eyes still
+blinking with the smoke, and look at him sharply. "You ain't
+goin' off there where Miss Enid is?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, Mahailey." He had dropped the shoebrush and stood with one
+foot on the chair, his elbow on his knee, looking out of the
+window as if he had forgotten himself. "No, I'm not going to
+China. I'm going over to help fight the Germans."
+
+He was still staring out at the wet fields. Before he could stop
+her, before he knew what she was doing, she had caught and kissed
+his unworthy hand.
+
+"I knowed you would," she sobbed. "I always knowed you would, you
+nice boy, you! Old Mahail' knowed!"
+
+Her upturned face was working all over; her mouth, her eyebrows,
+even the wrinkles on her low forehead were working and twitching.
+Claude felt a tightening in his throat as he tenderly regarded
+that face; behind the pale eyes, under the low brow where there
+was not room for many thoughts, an idea was struggling and
+tormenting her. The same idea that had been tormenting him.
+
+"You're all right, Mahailey," he muttered, patting her back and
+turning away. "Now hurry breakfast."
+
+"You ain't told your mudder yit?" she whispered.
+
+"No, not yet. But she'll be all right, too." He caught up his cap
+and went down to the barn to look after the horses.
+
+When Claude returned, the family were already at the breakfast
+table. He slipped into his seat and watched his mother while she
+drank her first cup of coffee. Then he addressed his father.
+
+"Father, I don't see any use of waiting for the draft. If you can
+spare me, I'd like to get into a training camp somewhere. I
+believe I'd stand a chance of getting a commission."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder." Mr. Wheeler poured maple syrup on his
+pancakes with a liberal hand. "How do you feel about it,
+Evangeline?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler had quietly put down her knife and fork. She looked
+at her husband in vague alarm, while her fingers moved restlessly
+about over the tablecloth.
+
+"I thought," Claude went on hastily, "that maybe I would go up to
+Omaha tomorrow and find out where the training camps are to be
+located, and have a talk with the men in charge of the enlistment
+station. Of course," he added lightly, "they may not want me. I
+haven't an idea what the requirements are."
+
+"No, I don't understand much about it either." Mr. Wheeler rolled
+his top pancake and conveyed it to his mouth. After a moment of
+mastication he said, "You figure on going tomorrow?"
+
+"I'd like to. I won't bother with baggage--some shirts and
+underclothes in my suitcase. If the Government wants me, it will
+clothe me."
+
+Mr. Wheeler pushed back his plate. "Well, now I guess you'd
+better come out with me and look at the wheat. I don't know but
+I'd best plough up that south quarter and put it in corn. I don't
+believe it will make anything much."
+
+When Claude and his father went out of the door, Dan sprang up
+with more alacrity than usual and plunged after them. He did not
+want to be left alone with Mrs. Wheeler. She remained sitting at
+the foot of the deserted breakfast table. She was not crying. Her
+eyes were utterly sightless. Her back was so stooped that she
+seemed to be bending under a burden. Mahailey cleared the dishes
+away quietly.
+
+Out in the muddy fields Claude finished his talk with his father.
+He explained that he wanted to slip away without saying good-bye
+to any one. "I have a way, you know," he said, flushing, "of
+beginning things and not getting very far with them. I don't want
+anything said about this until I'm sure. I may be rejected for
+one reason or another."
+
+Mr. Wheeler smiled. "I guess not. However, I'll tell Dan to keep
+his mouth shut. Will you just go over to Leonard Dawson's and get
+that wrench he borrowed? It's about noon, and he'll likely be at
+home." Claude found big Leonard watering his team at the
+windmill. When Leonard asked him what he thought of the
+President's message, he blurted out at once that he was going to
+Omaha to enlist. Leonard reached up and pulled the lever that
+controlled the almost motionless wheel.
+
+"Better wait a few weeks and I'll go with you. I'm going to try
+for the Marines. They take my eye."
+
+Claude, standing on the edge of the tank, almost fell backward.
+"Why, what--what for?"
+
+Leonard looked him over. "Good Lord, Claude, you ain't the only
+fellow around here that wears pants! What for? Well, I'll tell
+you what for," he held up three large red fingers threateningly;
+"Belgium., the Lusitania, Edith Cavell. That dirt's got under my
+skin. I'll get my corn planted, and then Father'll look after
+Susie till I come back."
+
+Claude took a long breath. "Well, Leonard, you fooled me. I
+believed all this chaff you've been giving me about not caring
+who chewed up who."
+
+"And no more do I care," Leonard protested, "not a damn! But
+there's a limit. I've been ready to go since the Lusitania. I
+don't get any satisfaction out of my place any more. Susie feels
+the same way."
+
+Claude looked at his big neighbour. "Well, I'm off tomorrow,
+Leonard. Don't mention it to my folks, but if I can't get into
+the army, I'm going to enlist in the navy. They'll always take an
+able-bodied man. I'm not coming back here." He held out his hand
+and Leonard took it with a smack.
+
+"Good luck, Claude. Maybe we'll meet in foreign parts. Wouldn't
+that be a joke! Give my love to Enid when you write. I always did
+think she was a fine girl, though I disagreed with her on
+Prohibition." Claude crossed the fields mechanically, without
+looking where he went. His power of vision was turned inward upon
+scenes and events wholly imaginary as yet.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One bright June day Mr. Wheeler parked his car in a line of
+motors before the new pressed-brick Court house in Frankfort. The
+Court house stood in an open square, surrounded by a grove of
+cotton-woods. The lawn was freshly cut, and the flower beds were
+blooming. When Mr. Wheeler entered the courtroom upstairs, it was
+already half-full of farmers and townspeople, talking in low
+tones while the summer flies buzzed in and out of the open
+windows. The judge, a one-armed man, with white hair and
+side-whiskers, sat at his desk, writing with his left hand. He
+was an old settler in Frankfort county, but from his frockcoat
+and courtly manners you might have thought he had come from
+Kentucky yesterday instead of thirty years ago. He was to hear
+this morning a charge of disloyalty brought against two German
+farmers. One of the accused was August Yoeder, the Wheelers'
+nearest neighbour, and the other was Troilus Oberlies, a rich
+German from the northern part of the county.
+
+Oberlies owned a beautiful farm and lived in a big white house
+set on a hill, with a fine orchard, rows of beehives, barns,
+granaries, and poultry yards. He raised turkeys and
+tumbler-pigeons, and many geese and ducks swam about on his
+cattleponds. He used to boast that he had six sons, "like our
+German Emperor." His neighbours were proud of his place, and
+pointed it out to strangers. They told how Oberlies had come to
+Frankfort county a poor man, and had made his fortune by his
+industry and intelligence. He had twice crossed the ocean to
+re-visit his fatherland, and when he returned to his home on the
+prairies he brought presents for every one; his lawyer, his
+banker, and the merchants with whom he dealt in Frankfort and
+Vicount. Each of his neighbours had in his parlour some piece of
+woodcarving or weaving, or some ingenious mechanical toy that
+Oberlies had picked up in Germany. He was an older man than
+Yoeder, wore a short beard that was white and curly, like his
+hair, and though he was low in stature, his puffy red face and
+full blue eyes, and a certain swagger about his carriage, gave
+him a look of importance. He was boastful and quick-tempered, but
+until the war broke out in Europe nobody had ever had any trouble
+with him. Since then he had constantly found fault and
+complained,--everything was better in the Old Country.
+
+Mr. Wheeler had come to town prepared to lend Yoeder a hand if he
+needed one. They had worked adjoining fields for thirty years
+now. He was surprised that his neighbour had got into trouble. He
+was not a blusterer, like Oberlies, but a big, quiet man, with a
+serious, large-featured face, and a stern mouth that seldom
+opened. His countenance might have been cut out of red sandstone,
+it was so heavy and fixed. He and Oberlies sat on two wooden
+chairs outside the railing of the judge's desk.
+
+Presently the judge stopped writing and said he would hear the
+charges against Troilus Oberlies. Several neighbours took the
+stand in succession; their complaints were confused and almost
+humorous. Oberlies had said the United States would be licked,
+and that would be a good thing; America was a great country, but
+it was run by fools, and to be governed by Germany was the best
+thing that could happen to it. The witness went on to say that
+since Oberlies had made his money in this country--
+
+Here the judge interrupted him. "Please confine yourself to
+statements which you consider disloyal, made in your presence by
+the defendant." While the witness proceeded, the judge took off
+his glasses and laid them on the desk and began to polish the
+lenses with a silk handkerchief, trying them, and rubbing them
+again, as if he desired to see clearly.
+
+A second witness had heard Oberlies say he hoped the German
+submarines would sink a few troopships; that would frighten the
+Americans and teach them to stay at home and mind their own
+business. A third complained that on Sunday afternoons the old
+man sat on his front porch and played Die Wacht am Rhein on a
+slide-trombone, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. Here
+Nat Wheeler slapped his knee with a loud guffaw, and a titter ran
+through the courtroom. The defendant's puffy red cheeks seemed
+fashioned by his Maker to give voice to that piercing instrument.
+
+When asked if he had anything to say to these charges, the old
+man rose, threw back his shoulders, and cast a defiant glance at
+the courtroom. "You may take my property and imprison me, but I
+explain nothing, and I take back nothing," he declared in a loud
+voice.
+
+The judge regarded his inkwell with a smile. "You mistake the
+nature of this occasion, Mr. Oberlies. You are not asked to
+recant. You are merely asked to desist from further disloyal
+utterances, as much for your own protection and comfort as from
+consideration for the feelings of your neighbours. I will now
+hear the charges against Mr. Yoeder."
+
+Mr. Yoeder, a witness declared, had said he hoped the United
+States would go to Hell, now that it had been bought over by
+England. When the witness had remarked to him that if the Kaiser
+were shot it would end the war, Yoeder replied that charity
+begins at home, and he wished somebody would put a bullet in the
+President.
+
+When he was called upon, Yoeder rose and stood like a rock before
+the judge. "I have nothing to say. The charges are true. I
+thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind."
+
+"Yes, a man can speak his mind, but even here he must take the
+consequences. Sit down, please." The judge leaned back in his
+chair, and looking at the two men in front of him, began with
+deliberation: "Mr. Oberlies, and Mr. Yoeder, you both know, and
+your friends and neighbours know, why you are here. You have not
+recognized the element of appropriateness, which must be regarded
+in nearly all the transactions of life; many of our civil laws
+are founded upon it. You have allowed a sentiment, noble in
+itself, to carry you away and lead you to make extravagant
+statements which I am confident neither of you mean. No man can
+demand that you cease from loving the country of your birth; but
+while you enjoy the benefits of this country, you should not
+defame its government to extol another. You both admit to
+utterances which I can only adjudge disloyal. I shall fine you
+each three hundred dollars; a very light fine under the
+circumstances. If I should have occasion to fix a penalty a
+second time, it will be much more severe."
+
+After the case was concluded, Mr. Wheeler joined his neighbour at
+the door and they went downstairs together.
+
+"Well, what do you hear from Claude"' Mr. Yoeder asked.
+
+"He's still at Fort R--. He expects to get home on leave before
+he sails. Gus, you'll have to lend me one of your boys to
+cultivate my corn. The weeds are getting away from me."
+
+"Yes, you can have any of my boys,-- till the draft gets 'em,"
+said Yoeder sourly.
+
+"I wouldn't worry about it. A little military training is good
+for a boy. You fellows know that." Mr. Wheeler winked, and
+Yoeder's grim mouth twitched at one corner.
+
+That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account
+of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude. Mrs.
+Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a
+rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the
+neighbourhood doings. Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material
+for them. Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way
+of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife. But since Claude
+went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the
+boy would be interested. As she laconically said in one of her
+letters:
+
+"Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and
+sometimes I think he is trying to take your place."
+
+
+
+X
+
+On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast
+train from Omaha, going home for a week's leave. The uniform was
+still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917. The first draft was not
+yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in
+training camps far away. Therefore a redheaded young man with
+long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic,
+responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a
+conspicuous figure among the passengers. Little boys and young
+girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the
+aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied
+his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept
+opening and forgetting to read.
+
+The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more
+interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book. He was
+glad to be going through it at harvest,--the season when it is
+most itself. He noted that there was more corn than usual,--much
+of the winter wheat had been weather killed, and the fields were
+ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize. The pastures
+were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again
+after its first cutting. Binders and harvesters were abroad in
+the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain
+into wide, subduing arms. When the train slowed down for a
+trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls
+and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.
+Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. "When I see
+those fellows, I feel as if I'd wakened up in the wrong clothes."
+
+His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. "That the kind of
+uniform you're accustomed to?"
+
+"I surely never wore anything else in the month of July," Claude
+admitted. "When I find myself riding along in a train, in the
+middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the
+world is turned upside down, for a fact!"
+
+The old man pressed a cigar upon him and began to question him.
+Like the hero of the Odyssey upon his homeward journey, Claude
+had often to tell what his country was, and who were the parents
+that begot him. He was constantly interrupted in his perusal of a
+French phrase-book (made up of sentences chosen for their
+usefulness to soldiers,--such as; "Non, jamais je ne regarde les
+femmes") by the questions of curious strangers. Presently he
+gathered up his luggage, shook hands with his neighbour, and put
+on his hat-the same old Stetson, with a gold cord and two hard
+tassels added to its conical severity. "I get off at this station
+and wait for the freight that goes down to Frankfort; the
+cotton-tail, we call it."
+
+The old man wished him a pleasant visit home, and the best of
+luck in days to come. Every one in the car smiled at him as he
+stepped down to the platform with his suitcase in one hand and
+his canvas bag in the other. His old friend, Mrs. Voigt, the
+German woman, stood out in front of her restaurant, ringing her
+bell to announce that dinner was ready for travellers. A crowd of
+young boys stood about her on the sidewalk, laughing and shouting
+in disagreeable, jeering tones. As Claude approached, one of them
+snatched the bell from her hand, ran off across the tracks with
+it, and plunged into a cornfield. The other boys followed, and
+one of them shouted, "Don't go in there to eat, soldier. She's a
+German spy, and she'll put ground glass in your dinner!"
+
+Claude swept into the lunch room and threw his bags on the floor.
+"What's the matter, Mrs. Voigt? Can I do anything for you?"
+
+She was sitting on one of her own stools, crying piteously, her
+false frizzes awry. Looking up, she gave a little screech of
+recognition. "Oh, I tank Gott it was you, and no more trouble
+coming! You know I ain't no spy nor nodding, like what dem boys
+say. Dem young fellers is dreadful rough mit me. I sell dem candy
+since dey was babies, an' now dey turn on me like dis.
+Hindenburg, dey calls me, and Kaiser Bill!" She began to cry
+again, twisting her stumpy little fingers as if she would tear
+them off.
+
+"Give me some dinner, ma'am, and then I'll go and settle with
+that gang. I've been away for a long time, and it seemed like
+getting home when I got off the train and saw your squaw vines
+running over the porch like they used to."
+
+"Ya? You remember dat?" she wiped her eyes. "I got a pot-pie
+today, and green peas, chust a few, out of my own garden."
+
+"Bring them along, please. We don't get anything but canned stuff
+in camp."
+
+Some railroad men came in for lunch. Mrs. Voigt beckoned Claude
+off to the end of the counter, where, after she had served her
+customers, she sat down and talked to him, in whispers.
+
+"My, you look good in dem clothes," she said patting his sleeve.
+"I can remember some wars, too; when we got back dem provinces
+what Napoleon took away from us, Alsace and Lorraine. Dem boys is
+passed de word to come and put tar on me some night, and I am
+skeered to go in my bet. I chust wrap in a quilt and sit in my
+old chair."
+
+"Don't pay any attention to them. You don't have trouble with the
+business people here, do you?"
+
+"No-o, not troubles, exactly." She hesitated, then leaned
+impulsively across the counter and spoke in his ear. "But it
+ain't all so bad in de Old Country like what dey say. De poor
+people ain't slaves, and dey ain't ground down like what dey say
+here. Always de forester let de poor folks come into de wood and
+carry off de limbs dat fall, and de dead trees. Und if de rich
+farmer have maybe a liddle more manure dan he need, he let de
+poor man come and take some for his land. De poor folks don't git
+such wages like here, but dey lives chust as comfortable. Und dem
+wooden shoes, what dey makes such fun of, is cleaner dan what
+leather is, to go round in de mud and manure. Dey don't git so
+wet and dey don't stink so."
+
+Claude could see that her heart was bursting with homesickness,
+full of tender memories of the far-away time and land of her
+youth. She had never talked to him of these things before, but
+now she poured out a flood of confidences about the big dairy
+farm on which she had worked as a girl; how she took care of nine
+cows, and how the cows, though small, were very strong,--drew a
+plough all day and yet gave as much milk at night as if they had
+been browsing in a pasture! The country people never had to spend
+money for doctors, but cured all diseases with roots and herbs,
+and when the old folks had the rheumatism they took "one of dem
+liddle jenny-pigs" to bed with them, and the guinea-pig drew out
+all the pain.
+
+Claude would have liked to listen longer, but he wanted to find
+the old woman's tormentors before his train came in. Leaving his
+bags with her, he crossed the railroad tracks, guided by an
+occasional teasing tinkle of the bell in the cornfield. Presently
+he came upon the gang, a dozen or more, lying in a shallow draw
+that ran from the edge of the field out into an open pasture. He
+stood on the edge of the bank and looked down at them, while he
+slowly cut off the end of a cigar and lit it. The boys grinned at
+him, trying to appear indifferent and at ease.
+
+"Looking for any one, soldier?" asked the one with the bell.
+
+"Yes, I am. I'm looking for that bell. You'll have to take it
+back where it belongs. You every one of you know there's no harm
+in that old woman."
+
+"She's a German, and we're fighting the Germans, ain't we?"
+
+"I don't think you'll ever fight any. You'd last about ten
+minutes in the American army. You're not our kind. There's only
+one army in the world that wants men who'll bully old women. You
+might get a job with them."
+
+The boys giggled. Claude beckoned impatiently. "Come along with
+that bell, kid."
+
+The boy rose slowly and climbed the bank out of the gully. As
+they tramped back through the cornfield, Claude turned to him
+abruptly. "See here, aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that!" the boy replied airily, tossing
+the bell up like a ball and catching it.
+
+"Well, you ought to be. I didn't expect to see anything of this
+kind until I got to the front. I'll be back here in a week, and
+I'll make it hot for anybody that's been bothering her." Claude's
+train was pulling in, and he ran for his baggage. Once seated in
+the "cotton-tail," he began going down into his own country,
+where he knew every farm he passed,--knew the land even when he
+did not know the owner, what sort of crops it yielded, and about
+how much it was worth. He did not recognize these farms with the
+pleasure he had anticipated, because he was so angry about the
+indignities Mrs. Voigt had suffered. He was still burning with
+the first ardour of the enlisted man. He believed that he was
+going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war
+without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry.
+
+Most of his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideas. They had
+come together from farms and shops and mills and mines, boys from
+college and boys from tough joints in big cities; sheepherders,
+street car drivers, plumbers' assistants, billiard markers.
+Claude had seen hundreds of them when they first came in; "show
+men" in cheap, loud sport suits, ranch boys in knitted
+waistcoats, machinists with the grease still on their fingers,
+farm-hands like Dan, in their one Sunday coat. Some of them
+carried paper suitcases tied up with rope, some brought all they
+had in a blue handkerchief. But they all came to give and not to
+ask, and what they offered was just themselves; their big red
+hands, their strong backs, the steady, honest, modest look in
+their eyes. Sometimes, when he had helped the medical examiner,
+Claude had noticed the anxious expression in the faces of the
+long lines of waiting men. They seemed to say, "If I'm good
+enough, take me. I'll stay by." He found them like that to work
+with; serviceable, good-natured, and eager to learn. If they
+talked about the war, or the enemy they were getting ready to
+fight, it was usually in a facetious tone; they were going to
+"can the Kaiser," or to make the Crown Prince work for a living.
+Claude, loved the men he trained with,--wouldn't choose to live
+in any better company.
+
+The freight train swung into the river valley that meant
+home,--the place the mind always came back to, after its farthest
+quest. Rapidly the farms passed; the haystacks, the cornfields,
+the familiar red barns--then the long coal sheds and the water
+tank, and the train stopped.
+
+On the platform he saw Ralph and Mr. Royce, waiting to welcome
+him. Over there, in the automobile, were his father and mother,
+Mr. Wheeler in the driver's seat. A line of motors stood along
+the siding. He was the first soldier who had come home, and some
+of the townspeople had driven down to see him arrive in his
+uniform. From one car Susie Dawson waved to him, and from another
+Gladys Farmer. While he stopped and spoke to them, Ralph took his
+bags.
+
+"Come along, boys," Mr. Wheeler called, tooting his horn, and he
+hurried the soldier away, leaving only a cloud of dust behind.
+
+Mr. Royce went over to old man Dawson's car and said rather
+childishly, "It can't be that Claude's grown taller? I suppose
+it's the way they learn to carry themselves. He always was a
+manly looking boy."
+
+"I expect his mother's a proud woman," said Susie, very much
+excited. "It's too bad Enid can't be here to see him. She would
+never have gone away if she'd known all that was to happen."
+
+Susie did not mean this as a thrust, but it took effect. Mr.
+Royce turned away and lit a cigar with some difficulty. His hands
+had grown very unsteady this last year, though he insisted that
+his general health was as good as ever. As he grew older, he was
+more depressed by the conviction that his women-folk had added
+little to the warmth and comfort of the world. Women ought to do
+that, whatever else they did. He felt apologetic toward the
+Wheelers and toward his old friends. It seemed as if his
+daughters had no heart.
+
+
+
+XI

+
+Camp habits persisted. On his first morning at home Claude came
+downstairs before even Mahailey was stirring, and went out to
+have a look at the stock. The red sun came up just as he was
+going down the hill toward the cattle corral, and he had the
+pleasant feeling of being at home, on his father's land. Why was
+it so gratifying to be able to say "our hill," and "our creek
+down yonder"? to feel the crunch of this particular dried mud
+under his boots?
+
+When he went into the barn to see the horses, the first creatures
+to meet his eye were the two big mules that had run away with
+him, standing in the stalls next the door. It flashed upon Claude
+that these muscular quadrupeds were the actual authors of his
+fate. If they had not bolted with him and thrown him into the
+wire fence that morning, Enid would not have felt sorry for him
+and come to see him every day, and his life might have turned out
+differently. Perhaps if older people were a little more honest,
+and a boy were not taught to idealize in women the very qualities
+which can make him utterly unhappy--But there, he had got away
+from those regrets. But wasn't it just like him to be dragged
+into matrimony by a pair of mules!
+
+He laughed as he looked at them. "You old devils, you're strong
+enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come.
+You're chock full of meanness!"
+
+One of the animals wagged an ear and cleared his throat
+threateningly. Mules are capable of strong affections, but they
+hate snobs, are the enemies of caste, and this pair had always
+seemed to detect in Claude what his father used to call his
+"false pride." When he was a young lad they had been a source of
+humiliation to him, braying and balking in public places, trying
+to show off at the lumber yard or in front of the post office.
+
+At the end manger Claude found old Molly, the grey mare with the
+stiff leg, who had grown a second hoof on her off forefoot, an
+achievement not many horses could boast of. He was sure she
+recognized him; she nosed his hand and arm and turned back her
+upper lip, showing her worn, yellow teeth.
+
+"Mustn't do that, Molly," he said as he stroked her. "A dog can
+laugh, but it makes a horse look foolish. Seems to me Dan might
+curry you about once a week!" He took a comb from its niche
+behind a joist and gave her old coat a rubbing. Her white hair
+was flecked all over with little rust-coloured dashes, like India
+ink put on with a fine brush, and her mane and tail had turned a
+greenish yellow. She must be eighteen years old, Claude reckoned,
+as he polished off her round, heavy haunches. He and Ralph used
+to ride her over to the Yoeders' when they were barefoot
+youngsters, guiding her with a rope halter, and kicking at the
+leggy colt that was always running alongside.
+
+When he entered the kitchen and asked Mahailey for warm water to
+wash his hands, she sniffed him disapprovingly.
+
+"Why, Mr. Claude, you've been curryin' that old mare, and you've
+got white hairs all over your soldier-clothes. You're jist
+covered!"
+
+If his uniform stirred feeling in people of sober judgment, over
+Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the
+time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in
+detail. Before she got past his puttees, her powers of
+observation were befogged by excitement, and her wits began to
+jump about like monkeys in a cage. She had expected his uniform
+to be blue, like those she remembered, and when he walked into
+the kitchen last night she scarcely knew what to make of him.
+After Mrs. Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn't
+wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown
+clothes didn't show the dust, and that Claude would never look
+like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother's
+spring.
+
+"Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin' you,
+ain't they? I 'spect there's an awful lot of briars over there,
+like them long blackberry vines in the fields in Virginia. Your
+madder says the soldiers git lice now, like they done in our war.
+You jist carry a little bottle of coal-oil in your pocket an' rub
+it on your head at night. It keeps the nits from hatchin'."
+
+Over the flour barrel in the corner Mahailey had tacked a Red
+Cross poster; a charcoal drawing of an old woman poking with a
+stick in a pile of plaster and twisted timbers that had once been
+her home. Claude went over to look at it while he dried his
+hands.
+
+"Where did you get your picture?"
+
+"She's over there where you're goin', Mr. Claude. There she is,
+huntin' for somethin' to cook with; no stove nor no dishes nor
+nothin'--everything all broke up. I reckon she'll be mighty glad
+to see you comin'."
+
+Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Mahailey whispered
+hastily, "Don't forgit about the coal-oil, and don't you be lousy
+if you can help it, honey." She considered lice in the same class
+with smutty jokes,--things to be whispered about.
+
+After breakfast Mr. Wheeler took Claude out to the fields, where
+Ralph was directing the harvesters. They watched the binder for a
+while, then went over to look at the haystacks and alfalfa, and
+walked along the edge of the cornfield, where they examined the
+young ears. Mr. Wheeler explained and exhibited the farm to
+Claude as if he were a stranger; the boy had a curious feeling of
+being now formally introduced to these acres on which he had
+worked every summer since he was big enough to carry water to the
+harvesters. His father told him how much land they owned, and how
+much it was worth, and that it was unencumbered except for a
+trifling mortgage he had given on one quarter when he took over
+the Colorado ranch.
+
+"When you come back," he said, "you and Ralph won't have to hunt
+around to get into business. You'll both be well fixed. Now you'd
+better go home by old man Dawson's and drop in to see Susie.
+Everybody about here was astonished when Leonard went." He walked
+with Claude to the corner where the Dawson land met his own. "By
+the way," he said as he turned back, "don't forget to go in to
+see the Yoeders sometime. Gus is pretty sore since they had him
+up in court. Ask for the old grandmother. You remember she never
+learned any English. And now they've told her it's dangerous to
+talk German, she don't talk at all and hides away from everybody.
+If I go by early in the morning, when she's out weeding the
+garden, she runs and squats down in the gooseberry bushes till
+I'm out of sight."
+
+Claude decided he would go to the Yoeders' today, and to the
+Dawsons' tomorrow. He didn't like to think there might be hard
+feeling toward him in a house where he had had so many good
+times, and where he had often found a refuge when things were
+dull at home. The Yoeder boys had a music-box long before the
+days of Victrolas, and a magic lantern, and the old grandmother
+made wonderful shadow-pictures on a sheet, and told stories about
+them. She used to turn the map of Europe upside down on the
+kitchen table and showed the children how, in this position, it
+looked like a jungfrau; and recited a long German rhyme which
+told how Spain was the maiden's head, the Pyrenees her lace ruff,
+Germany her heart and bosom, England and Italy were two arms, and
+Russia, though it looked so big, was only a hoopskirt. This rhyme
+would probably be condemned as dangerous propaganda now!
+
+As he walked on alone, Claude was thinking how this country that
+had once seemed little and dull to him, now seemed large and rich
+in variety. During the months in camp he had been wholly absorbed
+in new work and new friendships, and now his own neighbourhood
+came to him with the freshness of things that have been forgotten
+for a long while,--came together before his eyes as a harmonious
+whole. He was going away, and he would carry the whole
+countryside in his mind, meaning more to him than it ever had
+before. There was Lovely Creek, gurgling on down there, where he
+and Ernest used to sit and lament that the book of History was
+finished; that the world had come to avaricious old age and noble
+enterprise was dead for ever. But he was going away . . . .
+
+That afternoon Claude spent with his mother. It was the first
+time she had had him to herself. Ralph wanted terribly to stay
+and hear his brother talk, but understanding how his mother felt,
+he went back to the wheat field. There was no detail of Claude's
+life in camp so trivial that Mrs. Wheeler did not want to hear
+about it. She asked about the mess, the cooks, the laundry, as
+well as about his own duties. She made him describe the bayonet
+drill and explain the operation of machine guns and automatic
+rifles.
+
+"I hardly see how we can bear the anxiety when our transports
+begin to sail," she said thoughtfully. "If they can once get you
+all over there, I am not afraid; I believe our boys are as good
+as any in the world. But with submarines reported off our own
+coast, I wonder how the Government can get our men across safely.
+The thought of transports going down with thousands of young men
+on board is something so terrible--" she put her hands quickly
+over her eyes.
+
+Claude, sitting opposite his mother, wondered what it was about
+her hands that made them so different from any others he had ever
+seen. He had always known they were different, but now he must
+look closely and see why. They were slender, and always white,
+even when the nails were stained at preserving time. Her fingers
+arched back at the joints, as if they were shrinking from
+contacts. They were restless, and when she talked often brushed
+her hair or her dress lightly. When she was excited she sometimes
+put her hand to her throat, or felt about the neck of her gown,
+as if she were searching for a forgotten brooch. They were
+sensitive hands, and yet they seemed to have nothing to do with
+sense, to be almost like the groping fingers of a spirit.
+
+"How do you boys feel about it?"
+
+Claude started. "About what, Mother? Oh, the transportation! We
+don't worry about that. It's the Government's job to get us
+across. A soldier mustn't worry about anything except what he's
+directly responsible for. If the Germans should sink a few troop
+ships, it would be unfortunate, certainly, but it wouldn't cut any
+figure in the long run. The British are perfecting an enormous
+dirigible, built to carry passengers. If our transports are sunk,
+it will only mean delay. In another year the Yankees will be
+flying over. They can't stop us."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler bent forward. "That must be boys' talk, Claude.
+Surely you don't believe such a thing could be practicable?"
+
+"Absolutely. The British are depending on their aircraft
+designers to do just that, if everything else fails. Of course,
+nobody knows yet how effective the submarines will be in our
+case."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler again shaded her eyes with her hand. "When I was
+young, back in Vermont, I used to wish that I had lived in the
+old times when the world went ahead by leaps and bounds. And now,
+I feel as if my sight couldn't bear the glory that beats upon it.
+It seems as if we would have to be born with new faculties, to
+comprehend what is going on in the air and under the sea."
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The afternoon sun was pouring in at the back windows of Mrs.
+Farmer's long, uneven parlour, making the dusky room look like a
+cavern with a fire at one end of it. The furniture was all in its
+cool, figured summer cretonnes. The glass flower vases that stood
+about on little tables caught the sunlight and twinkled like tiny
+lamps. Claude had been sitting there for a long while, and he
+knew he ought to go. Through the window at his elbow he could see
+rows of double hollyhocks, the flat leaves of the sprawling
+catalpa, and the spires of the tangled mint bed, all transparent
+in the gold-powdered light. They had talked about everything but
+the thing he had come to say. As he looked out into the garden he
+felt that he would never get it out. There was something in the
+way the mint bed burned and floated that made one a
+fatalist,--afraid to meddle. But after he was far away, he would
+regret; uncertainty would tease him like a splinter in his thumb.
+
+He rose suddenly and said without apology: "Gladys, I wish I
+could feel sure you'd never marry my brother."
+
+She did not reply, but sat in her easy chair, looking up at him
+with a strange kind of calmness.
+
+"I know all the advantages," he went on hastily, "but they
+wouldn't make it up to you. That sort of a--compromise would make
+you awfully unhappy. I know."
+
+"I don't think I shall ever marry Bayliss," Gladys spoke in her
+usual low, round voice, but her quick breathing showed he had
+touched something that hurt. "I suppose I have used him. It gives
+a school-teacher a certain prestige if people think she can marry
+the rich bachelor of the town whenever she wants to. But I am
+afraid I won't marry him,--because you are the member of the
+family I have always admired."
+
+Claude turned away to the window. "A fine lot I've been to
+admire," he muttered.
+
+"Well, it's true, anyway. It was like that when we went to High
+School, and it's kept up. Everything you do always seems exciting
+to me."
+
+Claude felt a cold perspiration on his forehead. He wished now
+that he had never come. "But that's it, Gladys. What HAVE I ever
+done, except make one blunder after another?"
+
+She came over to the window and stood beside him. "I don't know;
+perhaps it's by their blunders that one gets to know people,--by
+what they can't do. If you'd been like all the rest, you could
+have got on in their way. That was the one thing I couldn't have
+stood."
+
+Claude was frowning out into the flaming garden. He had not heard
+a word of her reply. "Why didn't you keep me from making a fool
+of myself?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"I think I tried--once. Anyhow, it's all turning out better than
+I thought. You didn't get stuck here. You've found your place.
+You're sailing away. You've just begun."
+
+"And what about you?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Oh, I shall teach in the High School!"
+
+Claude took her hands and they stood looking searchingly at each
+other in the swimming golden light that made everything
+transparent. He never knew exactly how he found his hat and made
+his way out of the house. He was only sure that Gladys did not
+accompany him to the door. He glanced back once, and saw her head
+against the bright window.
+
+She stood there, exactly where he left her, and watched the
+evening come on, not moving, scarcely breathing. She was thinking
+how often, when she came downstairs, she would see him standing
+here by the window, or moving about in the dusky room, looking at
+last as he ought to look,--like his convictions and the choice he
+had made. She would never let this house be sold for taxes now.
+She would save her salary and pay them off. She could never like
+any other room so well as this. It had always been a refuge from
+Frankfort; and now there would be this vivid, confident figure,
+an image as distinct to her as the portrait of her grandfather
+upon the wall.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Sunday was Claude's last day at home, and he took a long walk
+with Ernest and Ralph. Ernest would have preferred to lose
+Ralph, but when the boy was out of the harvest field he stuck to
+his brother like a burr. There was something about Claude's new
+clothes and new manner that fascinated him, and he went through
+one of those sudden changes of feeling that often occur in
+families. Although they had been better friends ever since
+Claude's wedding, until now Ralph had always felt a little
+ashamed of him. Why, he used to ask himself, wouldn't Claude
+"spruce up and be somebody"? Now, he was struck by the fact that
+he was somebody.
+
+On Monday morning Mrs. Wheeler wakened early, with a faintness in
+her chest. This was the day on which she must acquit herself
+well. Breakfast would be Claude's last meal at home. At eleven
+o'clock his father and Ralph would take him to Frankfort to catch
+the train. She was longer than usual in dressing. When she got
+downstairs Claude and Mahailey were already talking. He was
+shaving in the washroom, and Mahailey stood watching him, a side
+of bacon in her hand.
+
+"You tell 'em over there I'm awful sorry about them old women,
+with their dishes an' their stove all broke up."
+
+"All right. I will." Claude scraped away at his chin.
+
+She lingered. "Maybe you can help 'em mend their things, like you
+do mine fur me," she suggested hopefully.
+
+"Maybe," he murmured absently. Mrs. Wheeler opened the stair
+door, and Mahailey dodged back to the stove.
+
+After breakfast Dan went out to the fields with the harvesters.
+Ralph and Claude and Mr. Wheeler were busy with the car all
+morning.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler kept throwing her apron over her head and going down
+the hill to see what they were doing. Whether there was really
+something the matter with the engine, or whether the men merely
+made it a pretext for being together and keeping away from the
+house, she did not know. She felt that her presence was not much
+desired, and at last she went upstairs and resignedly watched
+them from the sitting-room window. Presently she heard Ralph run
+up to the third storey. When he came down with Claude's bags in
+his hands, he stuck his head in at the door and shouted
+cheerfully to his mother:
+
+"No hurry. I'm just taking them down so they'll be ready."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler ran after him, calling faintly, "Wait, Ralph! Are
+you sure he's got everything in? I didn't hear him packing."
+
+"Everything ready. He says he won't have to go upstairs again.
+He'll be along pretty soon. There's lots of time." Ralph shot
+down through the basement.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler sat down in her reading chair. They wanted to keep
+her away, and it was a little selfish of them. Why couldn't they
+spend these last hours quietly in the house, instead of dashing
+in and out to frighten her? Now she could hear the hot water
+running in the kitchen; probably Mr. Wheeler had come in to wash
+his hands. She felt really too weak to get up and go to the west
+window to see if he were still down at the garage. Waiting was
+now a matter of seconds, and her breath came short enough as it
+was.
+
+She recognized a heavy, hob-nailed boot on the stairs, mounting
+quickly. When Claude entered, carrying his hat in his hand, she
+saw by his walk, his shoulders, and the way he held his head,
+that the moment had come, and that he meant to make it short. She
+rose, reaching toward him as he came up to her and caught her in
+his arms. She was smiling her little, curious intimate smile,
+with half-closed eyes.
+
+"Well, is it good-bye?" she murmured. She passed her hands over
+his shoulders, down his strong back and the close-fitting sides
+of his coat, as if she were taking the mould and measure of his
+mortal frame. Her chin came just to his breast pocket, and she
+rubbed it against the heavy cloth. Claude stood looking down at
+her without speaking a word. Suddenly his arms tightened and he
+almost crushed her.
+
+"Mother!" he whispered as he kissed her. He ran downstairs and
+out of the house without looking back.
+
+She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to
+the window; he was vaulting down the hill as fast as he could go.
+He jumped into the car beside his father. Ralph was already at
+the wheel, and Claude had scarcely touched the cushions when they
+were off. They ran down the creek and over the bridge, then up
+the long hill on the other side. As they neared the crest of the
+hill, Claude stood up in the car and looked back at the house,
+waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained her
+sight, but her tears blurred everything. The brown, upright
+figure seemed to float out of the car and across the fields, and
+before he was actually gone, she lost him. She fell back against
+the windowsill, clutching her temples with both hands, and broke
+into choking, passionate speech. "Old eyes," she cried, "why do
+you betray me? Why do you cheat me of my last sight of my
+splendid son!" 
+
+
Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises
+
+I
+
+A long train of crowded cars, the passengers all of the same sex,
+almost of the same age, all dressed and hatted alike, was slowly
+steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer
+afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs,
+shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of
+cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter
+about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and
+tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and
+shout; what is the matter now?
+
+The conductor goes through the cars, saying something about a
+freight wreck on ahead; he has orders to wait here for half an
+hour. Nobody pays any attention to him. A murmur of astonishment
+rises from one side of the train. The boys crowd over to the
+south windows. At last there is something to look at,--though
+what they see is so strangely quiet that their own exclamations
+are not very loud.
+
+Their train is lying beside an arm of the sea that reaches far
+into the green shore. At the edge of the still water stand the
+hulls of four wooden ships, in the process of building. There is
+no town, there are no smoke-stacks--very few workmen. Piles of
+lumber lie about on the grass. A gasoline engine under a
+temporary shelter is operating a long crane that reaches down
+among the piles of boards and beams, lifts a load, silently and
+deliberately swings it over to one of the skeleton vessels, and
+lowers it somewhere into the body of the motionless thing. Along
+the sides of the clean hulls a few riveters are at work; they sit
+on suspended planks, lowering and raising themselves with
+pulleys, like house painters. Only by listening very closely can
+one hear the tap of their hammers. No orders are shouted, no thud
+of heavy machinery or scream of iron drills tears the air. These
+strange boats seem to be building themselves.
+
+Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks,
+asking each other how boats could be built off in the grass like
+this. Lieutenant Claude Wheeler stretched his legs upon the
+opposite seat and sat still at his window, looking down on this
+strange scene. Shipbuilding, he had supposed, meant noise and
+forges and engines and hosts of men. This was like a dream.
+Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze of
+mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls,
+flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their wings--and those
+four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by
+the sea.
+
+Claude knew nothing of ships or shipbuilding, but these craft did
+not seem to be nailed together,--they seemed all of a piece, like
+sculpture. They reminded him of the houses not made with hands;
+they were like simple and great thoughts, like purposes forming
+slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the
+Atlantic. He knew nothing about ships, but he didn't have to; the
+shape of those hulls--their strong, inevitable lines--told their
+story, WAS their story; told the whole adventure of man with the
+sea.
+
+Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a
+country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the
+sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or
+read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden
+bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act,
+they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered
+cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow! . . .
+
+The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old
+turkey-hen calling her brood. The soldier boys came running back
+along the embankment and leaped aboard the train. The conductor
+shouted they would be in Hoboken in time for supper.
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began
+unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of the long dock
+waiting-rooms,--which in other days had been thronged by people
+who came to welcome home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed
+to foreign shores. Claude and some of his men had tried to look
+about them; but there was little to be seen. The bow of a boat,
+painted in distracting patterns of black and white, rose at one
+end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible. Down in
+the cobble-paved street below they watched for awhile the long
+line of drays and motor trucks that bumped all night into a vast
+cavern lit by electricity, where crates and barrels and
+merchandise of all kinds were piled, marked American
+Expeditionary Forces; cases of electrical machinery from some
+factory in Ohio, parts of automobiles, gun-carriages, bath-tubs,
+hospital supplies, bales of cotton, cases of canned food, grey
+metal tanks full of chemical fluids. Claude went back to the
+waiting room, lay down and fell asleep with the glare of an
+arc-light shining full in his face.
+
+He was called at four in the morning and told where to report to
+headquarters. Captain Maxey, stationed at a desk on one of the
+landings, explained to his lieutenants that their company was to
+sail at eight o'clock on the Anchises. It was an English boat, an
+old liner pulled off the Australian trade, that could carry only
+twenty-five hundred men. The crew was English, but part of the
+stores,--the meat and fresh fruit and vegetables,--were furnished
+by the United States Government. The Captain had been over the
+boat during the night, and didn't like it very well. He had
+expected to be scheduled for one of the fine big Hamburg-American
+liners, with dining-rooms finished in rosewood, and ventilation
+plants and cooling plants, and elevators running from top to
+bottom like a New York office building. "However," he said,
+"we'll have to make the best of it. They're using everything
+that's got a bottom now."
+
+The company formed for roll-call at one end of the shed, with
+their packs and rifles. Breakfast was served to them while they
+waited. After an hour's standing on the concrete, they saw
+encouraging signs. Two gangplanks were lowered from the vessel at
+the end of the slip, and up each of them began to stream a close
+brown line of men in smart service caps. They recognized a
+company of Kansas Infantry, and began to grumble because their
+own service caps hadn't yet been given to them; they would have
+to sail in their old Stetsons. Soon they were drawn into one of
+the brown lines that went continuously up the gangways, like
+belting running over machinery. On the deck one steward directed
+the men down to the hold, and another conducted the officers to
+their cabins. Claude was shown to a four-berth state-room. One of
+his cabin mates, Lieutenant Fanning, of his own company, was
+already there, putting his slender luggage in order. The steward
+told them the officers were breakfasting in the dining saloon.
+
+By seven o'clock all the troops were aboard, and the men were
+allowed on deck. For the first time Claude saw the profile of New
+York City, rising thin and gray against an opal-coloured morning
+sky. The day had come on hot and misty. The sun, though it was
+now high, was a red ball, streaked across with purple clouds. The
+tall buildings, of which he had heard so much, looked
+unsubstantial and illusionary,--mere shadows of grey and pink and
+blue that might dissolve with the mist and fade away in it. The
+boys were disappointed. They were Western men, accustomed to the
+hard light of high altitudes, and they wanted to see the city
+clearly; they couldn't make anything of these uneven towers that
+rose dimly through the vapour. Everybody was asking questions.
+Which of those pale giants was the Singer Building? Which the
+Woolworth? What was the gold dome, dully glinting through the
+fog? Nobody knew. They agreed it was a shame they could not have
+had a day in New York before they sailed away from it, and that
+they would feel foolish in Paris when they had to admit they had
+never so much as walked up Broadway. Tugs and ferry boats and
+coal barges were moving up and down the oily river, all novel
+sights to the men. Over in the Canard and French docks they saw
+the first examples of the "camouflage" they had heard so much
+about; big vessels daubed over in crazy patterns that made the
+eyes ache, some in black and white, some in soft rainbow colours.
+
+A tug steamed up alongside and fastened. A few moments later a
+man appeared on the bridge and began to talk to the captain.
+Young Fanning, who had stuck to Claude's side, told him this was
+the pilot, and that his arrival meant they were going to start.
+They could see the shiny instruments of a band assembling in the
+bow.
+
+"Let's get on the other side, near the rail if we can," said
+Fanning. "The fellows are bunching up over here because they want
+to look at the Goddess of Liberty as we go out. They don't even
+know this boat turns around the minute she gets into the river.
+They think she's going over stern first!"
+
+It was not easy to cross the deck; every inch was covered by a
+boot. The whole superstructure was coated with brown uniforms;
+they clung to the boat davits, the winches, the railings and
+ventilators, like bees in a swarm. Just as the vessel was backing
+out, a breeze sprang up and cleared the air. Blue sky broke
+overhead, and the pale silhouette of buildings on the long island
+grew sharp and hard. Windows flashed flame-coloured in their grey
+sides, the gold and bronze tops of towers began to gleam where
+the sunlight struggled through. The transport was sliding down
+toward the point, and to the left the eye caught the silver
+cobweb of bridges, seen confusingly against each other.
+
+"There she is!" "Hello, old girl!" "Good-bye, sweetheart!"
+
+The swarm surged to starboard. They shouted and gesticulated to
+the image they were all looking for,--so much nearer than they
+had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist
+streaming up like smoke behind. For nearly every one of those
+twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude, it was their first
+glimpse of the Bartholdi statue. Though she was such a definite
+image in their minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of
+sea and sky, with the shipping of the world coming and going at
+her feet, and the moving cloud masses behind her. Post-card
+pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large
+gesture, or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish
+elements. "France gave her to us," they kept saying, as they
+saluted her. Before Claude had got over his first thrill, the
+Kansas band in the bow began playing "Over There." Two thousand
+voices took it up, booming out over the water the gay,
+indomitable resolution of that jaunty air.
+
+A Staten Island ferry-boat passed close under the bow of the
+transport. The passengers were office-going people, on their way
+to work, and when they looked up and saw these hundreds of faces,
+all young, all bronzed and grinning, they began to shout and wave
+their handkerchiefs. One of the passengers was an old clergyman,
+a famous speaker in his day, now retired, who went over to the
+City every morning to write editorials for a church paper. He
+closed the book he was reading, stood by the rail, and taking off
+his hat began solemnly to quote from a poet who in his time was
+still popular. "Sail on," he quavered,
+
+"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State, Humanity, with all its
+fears, With all its hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless
+on thy fate."
+
+As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still
+watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms
+and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American
+boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was
+ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a
+sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase . . . and on their
+departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.
+
+
+
+III
+
+All the first morning Tod Fanning showed Claude over the
+boat,--not that Fanning had ever been on anything bigger than a
+Lake Michigan steamer, but he knew a good deal about machinery,
+and did not hesitate to ask the deck stewards to explain anything
+he didn't know. The stewards, indeed all the crew, struck the
+boys as an unusually good-natured and obliging set of men.
+
+The fourth occupant of number 96, Claude's cabin, had not turned
+up by noon, nor had any of his belongings, so the three who had
+settled their few effects there began to hope they would have the
+place to themselves. It would be crowded enough, at that. The
+third bunk was assigned to an officer from the Kansas regiment,
+Lieutenant Bird, a Virginian, who had been working in his uncle's
+bank in Topeka when he enlisted. He and Claude sat together at
+mess. When they were at lunch, the Virginian said in his very
+gentle voice:
+
+"Lieutenant, I wish you'd explain Lieutenant Fanning to me. He
+seems very immature. He's been telling me about a submarine
+destroyer he's invented, but it looks to me like foolishness."
+
+Claude laughed. "Don't try to understand Fanning. Just let him
+sink in, and you'll come to like him. I used to wonder how he
+ever got a commission. You never can tell what crazy thing he'll
+do."
+
+Fanning had, for instance, brought on board a pair of white
+flannel pants, his first and only tailor-made trousers, because
+he had a premonition that the boat would make a port and that he
+would be asked to a garden party! He had a way of using big words
+in the wrong place, not because he tried to show off, but because
+all words sounded alike to him. In the first days of their
+acquaintance in camp he told Claude that this was a failing he
+couldn't help, and that it was called "anaesthesia." Sometimes
+this failing was confusing; when Fanning sententiously declared
+that he would like to be on hand when the Crown Prince settled
+his little account with Plato, Claude was perplexed until
+subsequent witticisms revealed that the boy meant Pluto.
+
+At three o'clock there was a band concert on deck. Claude fell
+into talk with the bandmaster, and was delighted to find that he
+came from Hillport, Kansas, a town where Claude had once been
+with his father to buy cattle, and that all his fourteen men came
+from Hillport. They were the town band, had enlisted in a body,
+had gone into training together, and had never been separated.
+One was a printer who helped to get out the Hillport Argus every
+week, another clerked in a grocery store, another was the son of
+a German watch repairer, one was still in High School, one worked
+in an automobile livery. After supper Claude found them all
+together, very much interested in their first evening at sea, and
+arguing as to whether the sunset on the water was as fine as
+those they saw every night in Hillport. They hung together in a
+quiet, determined way, and if you began to talk to one, you soon
+found that all the others were there.
+
+When Claude and Fanning and Lieutenant Bird were undressing in
+their narrow quarters that night, the fourth berth was still
+unclaimed. They were in their bunks and almost asleep, when the
+missing man came in and unceremoniously turned on the light. They
+were astonished to see that he wore the uniform of the Royal
+Flying Corps and carried a cane. He seemed very young, but the
+three who peeped out at him felt that he must be a person of
+consequence. He took off his coat with the spread wings on the
+collar, wound his watch, and brushed his teeth with an air of
+special personal importance. Soon after he had turned out the
+light and climbed into the berth over Lieutenant Bird, a heavy
+smell of rum spread in the close air.
+
+Fanning, who slept under Claude, kicked the sagging mattress
+above him and stuck his head out. "Hullo, Wheeler! What have you
+got up there?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing smells pretty good to me. I'll have some with anybody
+that asks me."
+
+No response from any quarter. Bird, the Virginian, murmured,
+"Don't make a row," and they went to sleep.
+
+In the morning, when the bath steward came, he edged his way into
+the narrow cabin and poked his head into the berth over Bird's.
+"I'm sorry, sir, I've made careful search for your luggage, and
+it's not to be found, sir."
+
+"I tell you it must be found," fumed a petulant voice overhead.
+"I brought it over from the St. Regis myself in a taxi. I saw it
+standing on the pier with the officers' luggage,--a black cabin
+trunk with V.M. lettered on both ends. Get after it."
+
+The steward smiled discreetly. He probably knew that the aviator
+had come on board in a state which precluded any very accurate
+observation on his part. "Very well, sir. Is there anything I can
+get you for the present?"
+
+"You can take this shirt out and have it laundered and bring it
+back to me tonight. I've no linen in my bag."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Claude and Fanning got on deck as quickly as possible and found
+scores of their comrades already there, pointing to dark smudges
+of smoke along the clear horizon. They knew that these vessels
+had come from unknown ports, some of then: far away, steaming
+thither under orders known only to their commanders. They would
+all arrive within a few hours of each other at a given spot on
+the surface of the ocean. There they would fall into place,
+flanked by their destroyers, and would proceed in orderly
+formation, without changing their relative positions. Their
+escort would not leave them until they were joined by gunboats
+and destroyers off whatever coast they were bound for,--what that
+coast was, not even their own officers knew as yet.
+
+Later in the morning this meeting was actually accomplished.
+There were ten troop ships, some of them very large boats, and
+six destroyers. The men stood about the whole morning, gazing
+spellbound at their sister transports, trying to find out their
+names, guessing at their capacity. Tanned as they already were,
+their lips and noses began to blister under the fiery sunlight.
+After long months of intensive training, the sudden drop into an
+idle, soothing existence was grateful to them. Though their pasts
+were neither long or varied, most of them, like Claude Wheeler,
+felt a sense of relief at being rid of all they had ever been
+before and facing something absolutely new. Said Tod Fanning, as
+he lounged against the rail, "Whoever likes it can run for a
+train every morning, and grind his days out in a Westinghouse
+works; but not for me any more!"
+
+The Virginian joined them. "That Englishman ain't got out of bed
+yet. I reckon he's been liquouring up pretty steady. The place
+smells like a bar. The room steward was just coming out, and he
+winked at me. He was slipping something in his pocket, looked
+like a banknote."
+
+Claude was curious, and went down to the cabin. As he entered,
+the air-man, lying half-dressed in his upper berth, raised
+himself on one elbow and looked down at him. His blue eyes were
+contracted and hard, his curly hair disordered, but his cheeks
+were as pink as a girl's, and the little yellow humming-bird
+moustache on his upper lip was twisted sharp.
+
+"You're missing fine weather," said Claude affably.
+
+"Oh, there'll be a great deal of weather before we get over, and
+damned little of anything else!" He drew a bottle from under his
+pillow. "Have a nip?"
+
+"I don't mind if I do," Claude put out his hand.
+
+The other laughed and sank back on his pillow, drawling lazily,
+"Brave boy! Go ahead; drink to the Kaiser."
+
+"Why to him in particular?"
+
+"It's not particular. Drink to Hindenburg, or the High Command,
+or anything else that got you out of the cornfield. That's where
+they did get you, didn't they?"
+
+"Well, it's a good guess, anyhow. Where did they get you?"
+
+"Crystal Lake, Iowa. I think that was the place." He yawned and
+folded his hands over his stomach.
+
+"Why, we thought you were an Englishman."
+
+"Not quite. I've served in His Majesty's army two years, though."
+
+"Have you been flying in France?"
+
+"Yes. I've been back and forth all the time, England and France.
+Now I've wasted two months at Fort Worth. Instructor. That's not
+my line. I may have been sent over as a reprimand. You can't tell
+about my Colonel, though; may have been his way of getting me out
+of danger."
+
+Claude glanced up at him, shocked at such an idea.
+
+The young man in the berth smiled with listless compassion. "Oh,
+I don't mean Bosch planes! There are dangers and dangers. You'll
+find you got bloody little information about this war, where they
+trained you. They don't communicate any details of importance.
+Going?"
+
+Claude hadn't intended to, but at this suggestion he pulled back
+the door.
+
+"One moment," called the aviator. "Can't you keep that
+long-legged ass who bunks under you quiet?"
+
+"Fanning? He's a good kid. What's the matter with him?"
+
+"His general ignorance and his insufferably familiar tone,"
+snapped the other as he turned over.
+
+Claude found Fanning and the Virginian playing checkers, and told
+them that the mysterious air-man was a fellow countryman. Both
+seemed disappointed.
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Lieutenant Bird.
+
+"He can't put on airs with me, after that," Fanning declared.
+"Crystal Lake! Why it's no town at all!"
+
+All the same, Claude wanted to find out how a youth from Crystal
+Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Already,
+from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as
+men he was determined to know better. Taking them altogether the
+men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the
+sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days
+forgotten. Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown
+uniforms. Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were
+rather noble looking fellows. In so many of the faces there was a
+look of fine candour, an expression of cheerful expectancy and
+confident goodwill.
+
+There was on board a solitary Marine, with the stripes of Border
+service on his coat. He had been sick in the Navy Hospital in
+Brooklyn when his regiment sailed, and was now going over to join
+it. He was a young fellow, rather pale from his recent illness,
+but he was exactly Claude's idea of what a soldier ought to look
+like. His eye followed the Marine about all day.
+
+The young man's name was Albert Usher, and he came from a little
+town up in the Wind River mountains, in Wyoming, where he had
+worked in a logging camp. He told Claude these facts when they
+found themselves standing side by side that evening, watching the
+broad purple sun go down into a violet coloured sea.
+
+It was the hour when the farmers at home drive their teams in
+after the day's work. Claude was thinking how his mother would be
+standing at the west window every evening now, watching the sun
+go down and following him in her mind. When the young Marine came
+up and joined him, he confessed to a pang of homesickness.
+
+"That's a kind of sickness I don't have to wrastle with," said
+Albert Usher. "I was left an orphan on a lonesome ranch,, when I
+was nine, and I've looked out for myself ever since."
+
+Claude glanced sidewise at the boy's handsome head, that came up
+from his neck with clean, strong lines, and thought he had done a
+pretty good job for himself. He could not have said exactly what
+it was he liked about young Usher's face, but it seemed to him a
+face that had gone through things,--that had been trained down
+like his body, and had developed a definite character. What
+Claude thought due to a manly, adventurous life, was really due
+to well-shaped bones; Usher's face was more "modelled" than most
+of the healthy countenances about him.
+
+When questioned, the Marine went on to say that though he had no
+home of his own, he had always happened to fall on his feet,
+among kind people. He could go back to any house in Pinedale or
+Du Bois and be welcomed like a son.
+
+"I suppose there are kind women everywhere," he said, "but in
+that respect Wyoming's got the rest of the world beat. I never
+felt the lack of a home. Now the U. S. Marines are my family.
+Wherever they are, I'm at home."
+
+"Were you at Vera Cruz?" Claude asked.
+
+"I guess! We thought that was quite a little party at the time,
+but I suppose it will seem small potatoes when we get over there.
+I'm figuring on seeing some first-rate scrapping. How long have
+you been in the army?"
+
+"Year ago last April. I've had hard luck about getting over. They
+kept me jumping about to train men."
+
+"Then yours is all to come. Are you a college graduate?"
+
+"No. I went away to school, but I didn't finish."
+
+Usher frowned at the gilded path on the water where the sun lay
+half submerged, like a big, watchful eye, closing. "I always
+wanted to go to college, but I never managed it. A man in Laramie
+offered to stake me to a course in the University there, but I
+was too restless. I guess I was ashamed of my handwriting." He
+paused as if he had run against some old regret. A moment later
+he said suddenly, "Can you parlez-vous?"
+
+"No. I know a few words, but I can't put them together."
+
+"Same here. I expect to pick up some. I pinched quite a little
+Spanish down on the Border."
+
+By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the
+yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still
+sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue
+stone,--not a twinkle on its immobile surface. Across its dusky
+smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin's
+egg.
+
+"Do you like the water?" Usher asked, in the tone of a polite
+host. "When I first shipped on a cruiser I was crazy about it. I
+still am. But, you know, I like them old bald mountains back in
+Wyoming, too. There's waterfalls you can see twenty miles off
+from the plains; they look like white sheets or something,
+hanging up there on the cliffs. And down in the pine woods, in
+the cold streams, there's trout as long as my fore-arm."
+
+That evening Claude was on deck, almost alone; there was a
+concert down in the ward room. To the west heavy clouds had come
+up, moving so low that they flapped over the water like a black
+washing hanging on the line.
+
+The music sounded well from below. Four Swedish boys from the
+Scandinavian settlement at Lindsborg, Kansas, were singing "Long,
+Long Ago." Claude listened from a sheltered spot in the stern.
+What were they, and what was he, doing here on the Atlantic? Two
+years ago he had seemed a fellow for whom life was over; driven
+into the ground like a post, or like those Chinese criminals who
+are planted upright in the earth, with only their heads left out
+for birds to peck at and insects to sting. All his comrades had
+been tucked away in prairie towns, with their little jobs and
+their little plans. Yet here they were, attended by unknown ships
+called in from the four quarters of the earth. How had they come
+to be worth the watchfulness and devotion of so many men and
+machines, this extravagant consumption of fuel and energy? Taken
+one by one, they were ordinary fellows like himself. Yet here
+they were. And in this massing and movement of men there was
+nothing mean or common; he was sure of that. It was, from first
+to last, unforeseen, almost incredible. Four years ago, when the
+French were holding the Marne, the wisest men in the world had
+not conceived of this as possible; they had reckoned with every
+fortuity but this. "Out of these stones can my Father raise up
+seed unto Abraham."
+
+Downstairs the men began singing "Annie Laurie." Where were those
+summer evenings when he used to sit dumb by the windmill,
+wondering what to do with his life?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The morning of the third day; Claude and the Virginian and the
+Marine were up very early, standing in the bow, watching the
+Anchises mount the fresh blowing hills of water, her prow, as it
+rose and fell, always a dull triangle against the glitter. Their
+escorts looked like dream ships, soft and iridescent as shell in
+the pearl-coloured tints of the morning. Only the dark smudges of
+smoke told that they were mechanical realities with stokers and
+engines.
+
+While the three stood there, a sergeant brought Claude word that
+two of his men would have to report at sick-call. Corporal
+Tannhauser had had such an attack of nose-bleed during the night
+that the sergeant thought he might die before they got it
+stopped. Tannhauser was up now, and in the breakfast line, but
+the sergeant was sure he ought not to be. This Fritz Tannhauser
+was the tallest man in the company, a German-American boy who,
+when asked his name, usually said that his name was Dennis and
+that he was of Irish descent. Even this morning he tried to joke,
+and pointing to his big red face told Claude he thought he had
+measles. "Only they ain't German measles, Lieutenant," he
+insisted.
+
+Medical inspection took a long while that morning. There seemed
+to be an outbreak of sickness on board. When Claude brought his
+two men up to the Doctor, he told them to go below and get into
+bed. As they left he turned to Claude.
+
+"Give them hot tea, and pile army blankets on them. Make them
+sweat if you can." Claude remarked that the hold wasn't a very
+cheerful place for sick men.
+
+"I know that, Lieutenant, but there are a number of sick men this
+morning, and the only other physician on board is the sickest of
+the lot. There's the ship's doctor, of course, but he's only
+responsible for the crew, and so far he doesn't seem interested.
+I've got to overhaul the hospital and the medical stores this
+morning."
+
+"Is there an epidemic of some sort?"
+
+"Well, I hope not. But I'll have plenty to do today, so I count
+on you to look after those two." The doctor was a New Englander
+who had joined them at Hoboken. He was a brisk, trim man, with
+piercing eyes, clean-cut features, and grey hair just the colour
+of his pale face. Claude felt at once that he knew his business,
+and he went below to carry out instructions as well as he could.
+
+When he came up from the hold, he saw the aviator--whose name, he
+had learned, was Victor Morse--smoking by the rail. This
+cabin-mate still piqued his curiosity.
+
+"First time you've been up, isn't it?"
+
+The aviator was looking at the distant smoke plumes over the
+quivering, bright water. "Time enough. I wish I knew where we are
+heading for. It will be awfully awkward for me if we make a
+French port."
+
+"I thought you said you were to report in France."
+
+"I am. But I want to report in London first." He continued to
+gaze off at the painted ships. Claude noticed that in standing he
+held his chin very high. His eyes, now that he was quite sober,
+were brilliantly young and daring; they seemed scornful of things
+about him. He held himself conspicuously apart, as if he were not
+among his own kind.
+
+Claude had seen a captured crane, tied by its leg to a hencoop,
+behave exactly like that among Mahailey's chickens; hold its
+wings to its sides, and move its head about quickly and glare.
+
+"I suppose you have friends in London?" he asked.
+
+"Rather!" the aviator replied with feeling.
+
+"Do you like it better than Paris?"
+
+"I shouldn't imagine anything was much better than London. I've
+not been in Paris; always went home when I was on leave. They
+work us pretty hard. In the infantry and artillery our men get
+only a fortnight off in twelve months. I understand the Americans
+have leased the Riviera,--recuperate at Nice and Monte Carlo. The
+only Cook's tour we had was Gallipoli," he added grimly.
+
+Victor had gone a good way toward acquiring an English accent,
+the boys thought. At least he said 'necess'ry' and 'dysent'ry'
+and called his suspenders 'braces'. He offered Claude a
+cigarette, remarking that his cigars were in his lost trunk.
+
+"Take one of mine. My brother sent me two boxes just before we
+sailed. I'll put a box in your bunk next time I go down. They're
+good ones."
+
+The young man turned and looked him over with surprise. "I say,
+that's very decent of you! Yes, thank you, I will."
+
+Claude had tried yesterday, when he lent Victor some shirts, to
+make him talk about his aerial adventures, but upon that subject
+he was as close as a clam. He admitted that the long red scar on
+his upper arm had been drilled by a sharpshooter from a German
+Fokker, but added hurriedly that it was of no consequence, as he
+had made a good landing. Now, on the strength of the cigars,
+Claude thought he would probe a little further. He asked whether
+there was anything in the lost trunk that couldn't be replaced,
+anything "valuable."
+
+"There's one thing that's positively invaluable; a Zeiss lens, in
+perfect condition. I've got several good photographic outfits
+from time to time, but the lenses are always cracked by
+heat,--the things usually come down on fire. This one I got out
+of a plane I brought down up at Bar-le-Duc, and there's not a
+scratch on it; simply a miracle."
+
+"You get all the loot when you bring down a machine, do you?"
+Claude asked encouragingly.
+
+"Of course. I've a good collection; alimeters and compasses and
+glasses. This lens I always carry with me, because I'm afraid to
+leave it anywhere."
+
+"I suppose it makes a fellow feel pretty fine to bring down one
+of those German planes."
+
+"Sometimes. I brought down one too many, though; it was very
+unpleasant." Victor paused, frowning. But Claude's open,
+credulous face was too much for his reserve. "I brought down a
+woman once. She was a plucky devil, flew a scouting machine and
+had bothered us a bit, going over our lines. Naturally, we didn't
+know it was a woman until she came down. She was crushed
+underneath things. She lived a few hours and dictated a letter to
+her people. I went out and dropped it inside their lines. It was
+nasty business. I was quite knocked out. I got a fortnight's
+leave in London, though. Wheeler," he broke out suddenly, "I wish
+I knew we were going there now!"
+
+"I'd like it well enough if we were."
+
+Victor shrugged. "I should hope so!" He turned his chin in
+Claude's direction. "See here, if you like, I'll show you London!
+It's a promise. Americans never see it, you know. They sit in a Y
.
+hut and write to their Pollyannas, or they go round hunting for
+the Tower. I'll show you a city that's alive; that is, unless
+you've a preference for museums."
+
+His listener laughed. "No, I want to see life, as they say."
+
+"Umph ! I'd like to set you down in some places I can think of.
+Very well, I invite you to dine with me at the Savoy, the first
+night we're in London. The curtain will rise on this world for
+you. Nobody admitted who isn't in evening dress. The jewels will
+dazzle you. Actresses, duchesses, all the handsomest women in
+Europe."
+
+"But I thought London was dark and gloomy since the war."
+
+Victor smiled and teased his small straw-coloured moustache with
+his thumb and middle finger. "There are a few bright spots left,
+thank you!" He began to explain to a novice what life at the
+front was really like. Nobody who had seen service talked about
+the war, or thought about it; it was merely a condition under
+which they lived. Men talked about the particular regiment they
+were jealous of, or the favoured division that was put in for all
+the show fighting. Everybody thought about his own game, his
+personal life that he managed to keep going in spite of
+discipline; his next leave, how to get champagne without paying
+for it, dodging the guard, getting into scrapes with women and
+getting out again. "Are you quick with your French?" he asked.
+
+Claude grinned. "Not especially."
+
+"You'd better brush up on it if you want to do anything with
+French girls. I hear your M.P.'s are very strict. You must be
+able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your
+date before the guard gets onto you."
+
+"I suppose French girls haven't any scruples?" Claude remarked
+carelessly.
+
+Victor shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I haven't found that girls
+have many, anywhere. When we Canadians were training in England,
+we all had our week-end wives. I believe the girls in Crystal
+Lake used to be more or less fussy,--but that's long ago and far
+away. You won't have any difficulty."
+
+When Victor was in the middle of a tale of amorous adventure, a
+little different from any Claude had ever heard, Tod Fanning
+joined them. The aviator did not acknowledge the presence of a
+new listener, but when he had finished his story, walked away
+with his special swagger, his eyes fixed upon the distance.
+
+Fanning looked after him with disgust. "Do you believe him? I
+don't think he's any such heart-smasher. I like his nerve,
+calling you `Leftenant' ! When he speaks to me he'll have to say
+Lootenant, or I'll spoil his beauty."
+
+That day the men remembered long afterward, for it was the end of
+the fine weather, and of those first long, carefree days at sea.
+In the afternoon Claude and the young Marine, the Virginian and
+Fanning, sat together in the sun watching the water scoop itself
+out in hollows and pile itself up in blue, rolling hills. Usher
+was telling his companions a long story about the landing of the
+Marines at Vera Cruz.
+
+"It's a great old town," he concluded. "One thing there I'll
+never forget. Some of the natives took a few of us out to the old
+prison that stands on a rock in the sea. We put in the whole day
+there, and it wasn't any tourist show, believe me! We went down
+into dungeons underneath the water. where they used to keep State
+prisoners, kept them buried alive for years. We saw all the old
+instruments of torture; rusty iron cages where a man couldn't lie
+down or stand up, but had to sit bent over till he grew crooked.
+It made you feel queer when you came up, to think how people had
+been left to rot away down there, when there was so much sun and
+water outside. Seems like something used to be the matter with
+the world." He said no more, but Claude thought from his serious
+look that he believed he and his countrymen who were pouring
+overseas would help to change all that.
+
+
+
+V
+
+That night the Virginian, who berthed under Victor Morse, had an
+alarming attack of nose-bleed, and by morning he was so weak that
+he had to be carried to the hospital. The Doctor said they might
+as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on
+board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type.* Everybody was
+a little frightened. Some of the officers shut themselves up in
+the smoking-room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all
+day, as if they could keep contagion out.
+
+* The actual outbreak of influenza on transports carrying United
+States troops is here anticipated by several months.
+
+
+Lieutenant Bird died late in the afternoon and was buried at
+sunrise the next day, sewed up in a tarpaulin, with an eighteen
+pound shell at his feet. The morning broke brilliantly clear and
+bitter cold. The sea was rolling blue walls of water, and the
+boat was raked by a wind as sharp as ice. Excepting those who
+were sick, the boys turned out to a man. It was the first burial
+at sea they had ever witnessed, and they couldn't help finding it
+interesting. The Chaplain read the burial service while they
+stood with uncovered heads. The Kansas band played a solemn
+march, the Swedish quartette sang a hymn. Many a man turned his
+face away when that brown sack was lowered into the cold, leaping
+indigo ridges that seemed so destitute of anything friendly to
+human kind. In a moment it was done, and they steamed on without
+him.
+
+The glittering walls of water kept rolling in, indigo, purple,
+more brilliant than on the days of mild weather. The blinding
+sunlight did not temper the cold, which cut the face and made the
+lungs ache. Landsmen began to have that miserable sense of being
+where they were never meant to be. The boys lay in heaps on the
+deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close. Everybody
+was seasick. Fanning went to bed with his clothes on, so sick he
+couldn't take off his boots. Claude lay in the crowded stern, too
+cold, too faint to move. The sun poured over them like flame,
+without any comfort in it. The strong, curling, foam-crested
+waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their
+colour was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed
+denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the
+edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man
+should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces.
+
+The whole ocean seemed suddenly to have come to life, the waves
+had a malignant, graceful, muscular energy, were animated by a
+kind of mocking cruelty. Only a few hours ago a gentle boy had
+been thrown into that freezing water and forgotten. Yes, already
+forgotten; every one had his own miseries to think about.
+
+Late in the afternoon the wind fell, and there was a sinister
+sunset. Across the red west a small, ragged black cloud
+hurried,--then another, and another. They came up out of the
+sea,--wild, witchlike shapes that travelled fast and met in the
+west as if summoned for an evil conclave. They hung there against
+the afterglow, distinct black shapes, drawing together, devising
+something. The few men who were left on deck felt that no good
+could come out of a sky like that. They wished they were at home,
+in France, anywhere but here.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Doctor Trueman asked Claude to help him at sick
+call. "I've got a bunch of sergeants taking temperatures, but
+it's too much for one man to oversee. I don't want to ask
+anything of those dude officers who sit in there playing poker
+all the time. Either they've got no conscience, or they're not
+awake to the gravity of the situation."
+
+The Doctor stood on deck in his raincoat, his foot on the rail to
+keep his equilibrium, writing on his knee as the long string of
+men came up to him. There were more than seventy in the line that
+morning, and some of them looked as if they ought to be in a
+drier place. Rain beat down on the sea like lead bullets. The old
+Anchises floundered from one grey ridge to another, quite alone.
+Fog cut off the cheering sight of the sister ships. The doctor
+had to leave his post from time to time, when seasickness got the
+better of his will. Claude, at his elbow, was noting down names
+and temperatures. In the middle of his work he told the sergeants
+to manage without him for a few minutes. Down near the end of the
+line he had seen one of his own men misconducting himself,
+snivelling and crying like a baby,--a fine husky boy of eighteen
+who had never given any trouble. Claude made a dash for him and
+clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"If you can't stop that, Bert Fuller, get where you won't be
+seen. I don't want all these English stewards standing around to
+watch an American soldier cry. I never heard of such a thing!"
+
+"I can't help it, Lieutenant," the boy blubbered. "I've kept it
+back just as long as I can. I can't hold in any longer!"
+
+"What's the matter with you? Come over here and sit down on this
+box and tell me."
+
+Private Fuller willingly let himself be led, and dropped on the
+box. "I'm so sick, Lieutenant!"
+
+"I'll see how sick you are." Claude stuck a thermometer into his
+mouth, and while he waited, sent the deck steward to bring a cup
+of tea. "Just as I thought, Fuller. You've not half a degree of
+fever. You're scared, and that's all. Now drink this tea. I
+expect you didn't eat any breakfast."
+
+"No, sir. I can't eat the awful stuff on this boat."
+
+"It is pretty bad. Where are you from?"
+
+"I'm from P-P-Pleasantville, up on the P-P-Platte," the boy
+gulped, and his tears began to flow afresh.
+
+"Well, now, what would they think of you, back there? I suppose
+they got the band out and made a fuss over you when you went
+away, and thought they were sending off a fine soldier. And I've
+always thought you'd be a first rate soldier. I guess we'll forget
+about this. You feel better already, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, sir. This tastes awful good. I've been so sick to my
+stomach, and last night I got pains in my chest. All my crowd is
+sick, and you took big Tannhauser, I mean Corporal, away to the
+hospital. It looks like we're all going to die out here."
+
+"I know it's a little gloomy. But don't you shame me before these
+English stewards."
+
+"I won't do it again, sir," he promised.
+
+When the medical inspection was over, Claude took the Doctor down
+to see Fanning, who had been coughing and wheezing all night and
+hadn't got out of his berth. The examination was short. The
+Doctor knew what was the matter before he put the stethoscope on
+him. "It's pneumonia, both lungs," he said when they came out
+into the corridor. "I have one case in the hospital that will die
+before morning."
+
+"What can you do for him, Doctor?"
+
+"You see how I'm fixed; close onto two hundred men sick, and one
+doctor. The medical supplies are wholly inadequate. There's not
+castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside. I'm
+using my own drugs, but they won't last through an epidemic like
+this. I can't do much for Lieutenant Fanning. You can, though, if
+you'll give him the time. You can take better care of him right
+here than he could get in the hospital. We haven't an empty bed
+there."
+
+Claude found Victor Morse and told him he had better get a berth
+in one of the other staterooms. When Victor left with his
+belongings, Fanning stared after him. "Is he going?"
+
+"Yes. It's too crowded in here, if you've got to stay in bed."
+
+"Glad of it. His stories are too raw for me. I'm no sissy, but
+that fellow's a regular Don Quixote."
+
+Claude laughed. "You mustn't talk. It makes you cough."
+
+"Where's the Virginian?"
+
+"Who, Bird?" Claude asked in astonishment,--Fanning had stood
+beside him at Bird's funeral. "Oh, he's gone, too. You sleep if
+you can."
+
+After dinner Doctor Trueman came in and showed Claude how to give
+his patient an alcohol bath. "It's simply a question of whether
+you can keep up his strength. Don't try any of this greasy food
+they serve here. Give him a raw egg beaten up in the juice of an
+orange every two hours, night and day. Waken him out of his sleep
+when it's time, don't miss a single two-hour period. I'll write
+an order to your table steward, and you can beat the eggs up here
+in your cabin. Now I must go to the hospital. It's wonderful what
+those band boys are doing there. I begin to take some pride in
+the place. That big German has been asking for you. He's in a
+very bad way."
+
+As there were no nurses on board, the Kansas band had taken over
+the hospital. They had been trained for stretcher and first aid
+work, and when they realized what was happening on the Anchises,
+the bandmaster came to the Doctor and offered the services of his
+men. He chose nurses and orderlies, divided them into night and
+day shifts.
+
+When Claude went to see his Corporal, big Tannhauser did not
+recognize him. He was quite out of his head and was conversing
+with his own family in the language of his early childhood. The
+Kansas boys had singled him out for special attention. The mere
+fact that he kept talking in a tongue forbidden on the surface of
+the seas, made him seem more friendless and alone than the
+others.
+
+>From the hospital Claude went down into the hold where
+half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and
+musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of
+innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept
+clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid
+with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were
+working in the stench and dirt, helping the stewards. Claude
+stayed to lend a hand until it was time to give Fanning his
+nourishment. He began to see that the wrist watch, which he had
+hitherto despised as effeminate and had carried in his pocket,
+might be a very useful article. After he had made Fanning swallow
+his egg, he piled all the available blankets on him and opened
+the port to give the cabin an airing. While the fresh wind blew
+in, he sat down on the edge of his berth and tried to collect his
+wits. What had become of those first days of golden weather,
+leisure and good-comradeship? The band concerts, the Lindsborg
+Quartette, the first excitement and novelty of being at sea: all
+that had gone by like a dream.
+
+That night when the Doctor came in to see Fanning, he threw his
+stethoscope on the bed and said wearily, "It's a wonder that
+instrument doesn't take root in my ears and grow there." He sat
+down and sucked his thermometer for a few minutes, then held it
+out for inspection. Claude looked at it and told him he ought to
+go to bed.
+
+"Then who's to be up and around? No bed for me, tonight. But I
+will have a hot bath by and by."
+
+Claude asked why the ship's doctor didn't do anything and added
+that he must be as little as he looked.
+
+"Chessup? No, he's not half bad when you get to know him. He's
+given me a lot of help about preparing medicines, and it's a
+great assistance to talk the cases over with him. He'll do
+anything for me except directly handle the patients. He doesn't
+want to exceed his authority. It seems the English marine is very
+particular about such things. He's a Canadian, and he graduated
+first in his class at Edinburgh. I gather he was frozen out in
+private practice. You see, his appearance is against him. It's an
+awful handicap to look like a kid and be as shy as he is."
+
+The Doctor rose, shored up his shoulders and took his bag.
+"You're looking fine yourself, Lieutenant," he remarked.
+
+"Parents both living? Were they quite young when you were born?
+Well, then their parents were, probably. I'm a crank about that.
+Yes, I'll get my bath pretty soon, and I will lie down for an
+hour or two. With those splendid band boys running the hospital,
+I get a little lee-way."
+
+Claude wondered how the Doctor kept going. He knew he hadn't had
+more than four hours sleep out of the last forty-eight, and he
+was not a man of rugged constitution. His bath steward was, as he
+said, his comfort. Hawkins was an old fellow who had held better
+positions on better boats,--yes, in better times, too. He had
+first gone to sea as a bath steward, and now, through the
+fortunes of war, he had come hack where he began,--not a good
+place for an old man. His back was bent meekly, and he shuffled
+along with broken arches. He looked after the comfort of all the
+officers, and attended the doctor like a valet; got out his clean
+linen, persuaded him to lie down and have a hot drink after his
+bath, stood on guard at his door to take messages for him in the
+short hours when he was resting. Hawkins had lost two sons in the
+war and he seemed to find a solemn consolation in being of
+service to soldiers. "Take it a bit easy now, sir. You'll 'ave it
+'ard enough over there," he used to say to one and another.
+
+At eleven o'clock one of the Kansas men came to tell Claude that
+his Corporal was going fast. Big Tannhauser's fever had left him,
+but so had everything else. He lay in a stupor. His congested
+eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish
+whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out
+at one side. From the end of the corridor Claude had heard the
+frightful sounds that came from his throat, sounds like violent
+vomiting, or the choking rattle of a man in strangulation,--and,
+indeed, he was being strangled. One of the band boys brought
+Claude a camp chair, and said kindly, "He doesn't suffer. It's
+mechanical now. He'd go easier if he hadn't so much vitality. The
+Doctor says he may have a few moments of consciousness just at
+the last, if you want to stay."
+
+"I'll go down and give my private patient his egg, and then I'll
+come back." Claude went away and returned, and sat dozing by the
+bed. After three o'clock the noise of struggle ceased; instantly
+the huge figure on the bed became again his good-natured
+corporal. The mouth closed, the glassy jellies were once more
+seeing, intelligent human eyes. The face lost its swollen,
+brutish look and was again the face of a friend. It was almost
+unbelievable that anything so far gone could come back. He looked
+up wistfully at his Lieutenant as if to ask him something. His
+eyes filled with tears, and he turned his head away a little.
+
+"Mein' arme Mutter!" he whispered distinctly.
+
+A few moments later he died in perfect dignity, not struggling
+under torture, but consciously, it seemed to Claude,- like a
+brave boy giving back what was not his to keep.
+
+Claude returned to his cabin, roused Fanning once more, and then
+threw himself upon his tipping bunk. The boat seemed to wallow
+and sprawl in the waves, as he had seen animals do on the farm
+when they gave birth to young. How helpless the old vessel was
+out here in the pounding seas, and how much misery she carried!
+He lay looking up at the rusty water pipes and unpainted
+joinings. This liner was in truth the "Old Anchises"; even the
+carpenters who made her over for the service had not thought her
+worth the trouble, and had done their worst by her. The new
+partitions were hung to the joists by a few nails.
+
+Big Tannhauser had been one of those who were most anxious to
+sail. He used to grin and say, "France is the only climate that's
+healthy for a man with a name like mine." He had waved his
+good-bye to the image in the New York harbour with the rest,
+believed in her like the rest. He only wanted to serve. It seemed
+hard.
+
+When Tannhauser first came to camp he was confused all the time,
+and couldn't remember instructions. Claude had once stepped him
+out in front of the line and reprimanded him for not knowing his
+right side from his left. When he looked into the case, he found
+that the fellow was not eating anything, that he was ill from
+homesickness. He was one of those farmer boys who are afraid of
+town. The giant baby of a long family, he had never slept away
+from home a night in his life before he enlisted.
+
+Corporal Tannhauser, along with four others, was buried at
+sunrise. No band this time; the chaplain was ill, so one of the
+young captains read the service. Claude stood by watching until
+the sailors shot one sack, longer by half a foot than the other
+four, into a lead-coloured chasm in the sea. There was not even a
+splash. After breakfast one of the Kansas orderlies called him
+into a little cabin where they had prepared the dead men for
+burial. The Army regulations minutely defined what was to be done
+with a deceased soldier's effects. His uniform, shoes, blankets,
+arms, personal baggage, were all disposed of according to
+instructions. But in each case there was a residue; the dead
+man's toothbrushes, his razors, and the photographs he carried
+upon his person. There they were in five pathetic little heaps;
+what should be done with them?
+
+Claude took up the photographs that had belonged to his corporal;
+one was a fat, foolish-looking girl in a white dress that was too
+tight for her, and a floppy hat, a little flag pinned on her
+plump bosom. The other was an old woman, seated, her hands
+crossed in her lap. Her thin hair was drawn back tight from a
+hard, angular face--unmistakably an Old-World face--and her eyes
+squinted at the camera. She looked honest and stubborn and
+unconvinced, he thought, as if she did not in the least
+understand.
+
+"I'll take these," he said. "And the others--just pitch them
+over, don't you think?"
+
+
+
+VII
+
+B Company's first officer, Captain Maxey, was so seasick
+throughout the voyage that he was of no help to his men in the
+epidemic. It must have been a frightful blow to his pride, for
+nobody was ever more anxious to do an officer's whole duty.
+
+Claude had known Harris Maxey slightly in Lincoln; had met him at
+the Erlichs' and afterward kept up a campus acquaintance with
+him. He hadn't liked Maxey then, and he didn't like him now, but
+he thought him a good officer. Maxey's family were poor folk from
+Mississippi, who had settled in Nemaha county, and he was very
+ambitious, not only to get on in the world, but, as he said, to
+"be somebody." His life at the University was a feverish pursuit
+of social advantages and useful acquaintances. His feeling for
+the "right people" amounted to veneration. After his graduation,
+Maxey served on the Mexican Border. He was a tireless drill
+master, and threw himself into his duties with all the energy of
+which his frail physique was capable. He was slight and
+fair-skinned; a rigid jaw threw his lower teeth out beyond the
+upper ones and made his face look stiff. His whole manner, tense
+and nervous, was the expression of a passionate desire to excel.
+
+Claude seemed to himself to be leading a double life these days.
+When he was working over Fanning, or was down in the hold helping
+to take care of the sick soldiers, he had no time to think,--did
+mechanically the next thing that came to hand. But when he had an
+hour to himself on deck, the tingling sense of ever-widening
+freedom flashed up in him again. The weather was a continual
+adventure; he had never known any like it before. The fog, and
+rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean
+were like something he had imagined long ago--memories of old sea
+stories read in childhood, perhaps--and they kindled a warm spot
+in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where
+childhood had left off. The ugly hiatus between had closed up.
+Years of his life were blotted out in the fog. This fog which had
+been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving
+through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving
+one a chance to correct one's ideas about life and to plan the
+future. The past was physically shut off; that was his illusion.
+He had already travelled a great many more miles than were told
+off by the ship's log. When Bandmaster Fred Max asked him to play
+chess, he had to stop a moment and think why it was that game had
+such disagreeable associations for him. Enid's pale, deceptive
+face seldom rose before him unless some such accident brought it
+up. If he happened to come upon a group of boys talking about
+their sweethearts and war-brides, he listened a moment and then
+moved away with the happy feeling that he was the least married
+man on the boat.
+
+There was plenty of deck room, now that so many men were ill
+either from seasickness or the epidemic, and sometimes he and
+Albert Usher had the stormy side of the boat almost to
+themselves. The Marine was the best sort of companion for these
+gloomy days; steady, quiet, self-reliant. And he, too, was always
+looking forward. As for Victor Morse, Claude was growing
+positively fond of him. Victor had tea in a special corner of the
+officers' smoking-room every afternoon--he would have perished
+without it--and the steward always produced some special
+garnishes of toast and jam or sweet biscuit for him. Claude
+usually managed to join him at that hour.
+
+On the day of Tannhauser's funeral he went into the smoking-room
+at four. Victor beckoned the steward and told him to bring a
+couple of hot whiskeys with the tea. "You're very wet, you know,
+Wheeler, and you really should. There," he said as he put down
+his glass, "don't you feel better with a drink?"
+
+"Very much. I think I'll have another. It's agreeable to be warm
+inside."
+
+"Two more, steward, and bring me some fresh lemon." The occupants
+of the room were either reading or talking in low tones. One of
+the Swedish boys was playing softly on the old piano. Victor
+began to pour the tea. He had a neat way of doing it, and today
+he was especially solicitous. "This Scotch mist gets into one's
+bones, doesn't it? I thought you were looking rather seedy when I
+passed you on deck."
+
+"I was up with Tannhauser last night. Didn't get more than an
+hour's sleep," Claude murmured, yawning.
+
+"Yes, I heard you lost your big corporal. I'm sorry. I've had bad
+news, too. It's out now that we're to make a French port. That
+dashes all my plans. However, c'est la guerre!" He pushed back
+his cup with a shrug. "Take a turn outside?"
+
+Claude had often wondered why Victor liked him, since he was so
+little Victor's kind. "If it isn't a secret," he said, "I'd like
+to know how you ever got into the British army, anyway."
+
+As they walked up and down in the rain, Victor told his story
+briefly. When he had finished High School, he had gone into his
+father's bank at Crystal Lake as bookkeeper. After banking hours
+he skated, played tennis, or worked in the strawberry-bed,
+according to the season. He bought two pairs of white pants every
+summer and ordered his shirts from Chicago and thought he was a
+swell, he said. He got himself engaged to the preacher's
+daughter. Two years ado, the summer he was twenty, his father
+wanted him to see Niagara Falls; so he wrote a modest check,
+warned his son against saloons--Victor had never been inside
+one--against expensive hotels and women who came up to ask the
+time without an introduction, and sent him off, telling him it
+wasn't necessary to fee porters or waiters. At Niagara Falls,
+Victor fell in with some young Canadian officers who opened his
+eyes to a great many things. He went over to Toronto with them.
+Enlistment was going strong, and he saw an avenue of escape from
+the bank and the strawberry bed. The air force seemed the most
+brilliant and attractive branch of the service. They accepted
+him, and here he was.
+
+"You'll never go home again," Claude said with conviction. "I
+don't see you settling down in any little Iowa town."
+
+"In the air service," said Victor carelessly, "we don't concern
+ourselves about the future. It's not worth while." He took out a
+dull gold cigarette case which Claude had noticed before.
+
+"Let me see that a minute, will you? I've often admired it. A
+present from somebody you like, isn't it?"
+
+A twitch of feeling, something quite genuine, passed over the
+air-man's boyish face, and his rather small red mouth compressed
+sharply. "Yes, a woman I want you to meet. Here," twitching his
+chin over his high collar, "I'll write Maisie's address on my
+card: `Introducing Lieutenant Wheeler, A.E.F.' That's all you'll
+need. If you should get to London before I do, don't hesitate.
+Call on her at once. Present this card, and she'll receive you."
+
+Claude thanked him and put the card in his pocketbook, while
+Victor lit a cigarette. "I haven't forgotten that you're dining
+with us at the Savoy, if we happen in London together. If I'm
+there, you can always find me. Her address is mine. It will
+really be a great thing for you to meet a woman like Maisie.
+She'll be nice to you, because you're my friend." He went on to
+say that she had done everything in the world for him; had left
+her husband and given up her friends on his account. She now had
+a studio flat in Chelsea, where she simply waited his coming and
+dreaded his going. It was an awful life for her. She entertained
+other officers, of course, old acquaintances; but it was all
+camouflage. He was the man.
+
+Victor went so far as to produce her picture, and Claude gazed
+without knowing what to say at a large moon-shaped face with
+heavy-lidded, weary eyes,--the neck clasped by a pearl collar,
+the shoulders bare to the matronly swell of the bosom. There was
+not a line or wrinkle in that smooth expanse of flesh, but from
+the heavy mouth and chin, from the very shape of the face, it was
+easy to see that she was quite old enough to be Victor's mother.
+Across the photograph was written in a large splashy hand, 'A
+mon aigle!' Had Victor been delicate enough to leave him in any
+doubt, Claude would have preferred to believe that his relations
+with this lady were wholly of a filial nature.
+
+"Women like her simply don't exist in your part of the world,"
+the aviator murmured, as he snapped the photograph case. "She's a
+linguist and musician and all that. With her. every-day living is
+a fine art. Life, as she says, is what one makes it. In itself,
+it's nothing. Where you came from it's nothing--a sleeping
+sickness."
+
+Claude laughed. "I don't know that I agree with you, but I like
+to hear you talk."
+
+"Well; in that part of France that's all shot to pieces, you'll
+find more life going on in the cellars than in your home town,
+wherever that is. I'd rather be a stevedore in the London docks
+than a banker-king in one of your prairie States. In London, if
+you're lucky enough to have a shilling, you can get something for
+it."
+
+"Yes, things are pretty tame at home," the other admitted.
+
+"Tame? My God, it's death in life! What's left of men if you take
+all the fire out of them? They're afraid of everything. I know
+them; Sunday-school sneaks, prowling around those little towns
+after dark!" Victor abruptly dismissed the subject. "By the way,
+you're pals with the doctor, aren't you? I'm needing some
+medicine that is somewhere in my lost trunk. Would you mind
+asking him if he can put up this prescription? I don't want to go
+to him myself. All these medicos blab, and he might report me.
+I've been lucky dodging medical inspections. You see, I don't
+want to get held up anywhere. Tell him it's not for you, of
+course."
+
+When Claude presented the piece of blue paper to Doctor Trueman,
+he smiled contemptuously. "I see; this has been filled by a
+London chemist. No, we have nothing of this sort." He handed it
+back. "Those things are only palliatives. If your friend wants
+that, he needs treatment,--and he knows where he can get it."
+
+Claude returned the slip of paper to Victor as they left the
+dining-room after supper, telling him he hadn't been able to get
+any.
+
+"Sorry," said Victor, flushing haughtily. "Thank you so much!" 
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Tod Fanning held out better than many of the stronger men; his
+vitality surprised the doctor. The death list was steadily
+growing; and the worst of it was that patients died who were not
+very sick. Vigorous, clean-blooded young fellows of nineteen and
+twenty turned over and died because they had lost their courage,
+because other people were dying,--because death was in the air.
+The corridors of the vessel had the smell of death about them.
+Doctor Trueman said it was always so in an epidemic; patients
+died who, had they been isolated cases, would have recovered.
+
+"Do you know, Wheeler," the doctor remarked one day when they
+came up from the hospital together to get a breath of air, "I
+sometimes wonder whether all these inoculations they've been
+having, against typhoid and smallpox and whatnot, haven't lowered
+their vitality. I'll go off my head if I keep losing men! What
+would you give to be out of it all, and safe back on the farm?"
+Hearing no reply, he turned his head, peered over his raincoat
+collar, and saw a startled, resisting look in the young man's
+blue eyes, followed by a quick flush.
+
+"You don't want to be back on the farm, do you! Not a little bit!
+Well, well; that's what it is to be young!" He shook his head
+with a smile which might have been commiseration, might have been
+envy, and went back to his duties.
+
+Claude stayed where he was, drawing the wet grey air into his
+lungs and feeling vexed and reprimanded. It was quite true, he
+realized; the doctor had caught him. He was enjoying himself all
+the while and didn't want to be safe anywhere. He was sorry about
+Tannhauser and the others, but he was not sorry for himself. The
+discomforts and misfortunes of this voyage had not spoiled it for
+him. He grumbled, of course, because others did. But life had
+never seemed so tempting as it did here and now. He could come up
+from heavy work in the hospital, or from poor Fanning and his
+everlasting eggs, and forget all that in ten minutes. Something
+inside him, as elastic as the grey ridges over which they were
+tipping, kept bounding up and saying: "I am all here. I've left
+everything behind me. I am going over."
+
+Only on that one day, the cold day of the Virginian's funeral,
+when he was seasick, had he been really miserable. He must be
+heartless, certainly, not to be overwhelmed by the sufferings of
+his own men, his own friends--but he wasn't. He had them on his
+mind and did all he could for them, but it seemed to him just now
+that he took a sort of satisfaction in that, too, and was
+somewhat vain of his usefulness to Doctor Trueman. A nice
+attitude! He awoke every morning with that sense of freedom and
+going forward, as if the world were growing bigger each day and
+he were growing with it. Other fellows were sick and dying, and
+that was terrible,--but he and the boat went on, and always on.
+
+Something was released that had been struggling for a long while,
+he told himself. He had been due in France since the first battle
+of the Marne; he had followed false leads and lost precious time
+and seen misery enough, but he was on the right road at last, and
+nothing could stop him. If he hadn't been so green, so bashful,
+so afraid of showing what he felt, and so stupid at finding his
+way about, he would have enlisted in Canada, like Victor, or run
+away to France and joined the Foreign Legion. All that seemed
+perfectly possible now. Why hadn't he?
+
+Well, that was not "the Wheelers' way." The Wheelers were
+terribly afraid of poking themselves in where they weren't
+wanted, of pushing their way into a crowd where they didn't
+belong. And they were even more afraid of doing anything that
+might look affected or "romantic." They couldn't let themselves
+adopt a conspicuous, much less a picturesque course of action,
+unless it was all in the day's work. Well, History had
+condescended to such as he; this whole brilliant adventure had
+become the day's work. He had got into it after all, along with
+Victor and the Marine and other fellows who had more imagination
+and self-confidence in the first place. Three years ago he used
+to sit moping by the windmill because he didn't see how a
+Nebraska farmer boy had any "call," or, indeed, any way, to throw
+himself into the struggle in France. He used enviously to read
+about Alan Seeger and those fortunate American boys who had a
+right to fight for a civilization they knew.
+
+But the miracle had happened; a miracle so wide in its amplitude
+that the Wheelers,--all the Wheelers and the roughnecks and the
+low-brows were caught up in it. Yes, it was the rough-necks' own
+miracle, all this; it was their golden chance. He was in on it,
+and nothing could hinder or discourage him unless he were put
+over the side himself--which was only a way of joking, for that
+was a possibility he never seriously considered. The feeling of
+purpose, of fateful purpose, was strong in his breast.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"Look at this, Doctor!" Claude caught Dr. Trueman on his way from
+breakfast and handed him a written notice, signed D. T. Micks,
+Chief Steward. It stated that no more eggs or oranges could be
+furnished to patients, as the supply was exhausted.
+
+The doctor squinted at the paper. "I'm afraid that's your
+patient's death warrant. You'll never be able to keep him going
+on anything else. Why don't you go and talk it over with Chessup?
+He's a resourceful fellow. I'll join you there in a few minutes."
+
+Claude had often been to Dr. Chessup's cabin since the epidemic
+broke out,-rather liked to wait there when he went for medicines
+or advice. It was a comfortable, personal sort of place with
+cheerful chintz hangings. The walls were lined with books, held
+in place by sliding wooden slats, padlocked at the ends. There
+were a great many scientific works in German and English; the
+rest were French novels in paper covers. This morning he found
+Chessup weighing out white powders at his desk. In the rack over
+his bunk was the book with which he had read himself to sleep
+last night; the title, "Un Crime d'Amour," lettered in black on
+yellow, caught Claude's eye. The doctor put on his coat and
+pointed his visitor to the jointed chair in which patients were
+sometimes examined. Claude explained his predicament.
+
+The ship's doctor was a strange fellow to come from Canada, the
+land of big men and rough. He looked like a schoolboy, with small
+hands and feet and a pink complexion. On his left cheekbone was a
+large brown mole, covered with silky hair, and for some reason
+that seemed to make his face effeminate. It was easy to see why
+he had not been successful in private practice. He was like
+somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so
+cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish
+appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating
+wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly
+suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had
+fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with constant
+exposure to human personalities.
+
+"Have you tried him on malted milk?" he asked, when Claude had
+told him how Farming's nourishment was threatened.
+
+"Dr. Trueman hasn't a bottle left. How long do you figure we'll
+be at sea?"
+
+"Four days; possibly five."
+
+"Then Lieutenant Wheeler will lose his pal," said Dr. Trueman,
+who had just come in.
+
+Chessup stood for a moment frowning and pulling nervously at the
+brass buttons on his coat. He slid the bolt on his door and
+turning to his colleague said resolutely: "I can give you some
+information, if you won't implicate me. You can do as you like,
+but keep my name out of it. For several hours last night cases of
+eggs and boxes of oranges were being carried into the Chief
+Steward's cabin by a flunky of his from the galley. Whatever port
+we make, he can get a shilling each for the fresh eggs, and
+perhaps sixpence for the oranges. They are your property, of
+course, furnished by your government; but this is his customary
+perquisite. I've been on this boat six years, and it's always
+been so. About a week before we make port, the choicest of the
+remaining stores are taken to his cabin, and he disposes of them
+after we dock. I can't say just how he manages it, but he does.
+The skipper may know of this custom, and there may be some reason
+why he permits it. It's not my business to see anything. The
+Chief Steward is a powerful man on an English vessel. If he has
+anything against me, sooner or later he can lose my berth for me.
+There you have the facts."
+
+"Have I your permission to go to the Chief Steward?" Dr. Trueman
+asked.
+
+"Certainly not. But you can go without my knowledge. He's an ugly
+man to cross, and he can make it uncomfortable for you and your
+patients."
+
+"Well, we'll say no more about it. I appreciate your telling me,
+and I will see that you don't get mixed up in this. Will you go
+down with me to look at that new meningitis case?"
+
+Claude waited impatiently in his stateroom for the doctor's
+return. He didn't see why the Chief Steward shouldn't be exposed
+and dealt with like any other grafter. He had hated the man ever
+since he heard him berating the old bath steward one morning.
+Hawkins had made no attempt to defend himself, but stood like a
+dog that has been terribly beaten, trembling all over, saying
+"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," while his chief gave him a cold cursing in
+a low, snarling voice. Claude had never heard a man or even an
+animal addressed with such contempt. The Steward had a cruel
+face,--white as cheese, with limp, moist hair combed back from a
+high forehead,--the peculiarly oily hair that seems to grow only
+on the heads of stewards and waiters. His eyes were exactly the
+shape of almonds, but the lids were so swollen that the dull
+pupil was visible only through a narrow slit. A long, pale
+moustache hung like a fringe over his loose lips.
+
+When Dr. Trueman came back from the hospital, he declared he was
+now ready to call on Mr. Micks. "He's a nasty looking customer,
+but he can't do anything to me."
+
+They went to the Chief Steward's cabin and knocked.
+
+"What's wanted?" called a threatening voice.
+
+The doctor made a grimace to his companion and walked in. The
+Steward was sitting at a big desk, covered with account books. He
+turned in his chair. "I beg your pardon," he said coldly, "I do
+not see any one here. I will be--"
+
+The doctor held up his hand quickly. "That's all right, Steward.
+I'm sorry to intrude, but I've something I must say to you in
+private. I'll not detain you long." If he had hesitated for a
+moment, Claude believed the Steward would have thrown him out,
+but he went on rapidly. "This is Lieutenant Wheeler, Mr. Micks.
+His fellow officer lies very ill with pneumonia in stateroom 96.
+Lieutenant Wheeler has kept him alive by special nursing. He is
+not able to retain anything in his stomach but eggs and orange
+juice. If he has these, we may be able to keep up his strength
+till the fever breaks, and carry him to a hospital in France. If
+we can't get them for him, he will be dead within twenty-four
+hours. That's the situation."
+
+The steward rose and turned out the drop-light on his desk. "Have
+you received notice that there are no more eggs and oranges on
+board? Then I am afraid there is nothing I can do for you. I did
+not provision this ship."
+
+"No. I understand that. I believe the United States Government
+provided the fruit and eggs and meat. And I positively know that
+the articles I need for my patient are not exhausted. Without
+going into the matter further, I warn you that I'm not going to
+let a United States officer die when the means of saving him are
+procurable. I'll go to the skipper, I'll call a meeting of the
+army officers on board. I'll go any length to save this man."
+
+"That is your own affair, but you will not interfere with me in
+the discharge of my duties. Will you leave my cabin?"
+
+"In a moment, Steward. I know that last night a number of cases
+of eggs and oranges were carried into this room. They are here
+now, and they belong to the A.E.F. If you will agree to provision
+my man, what I know won't go any further. But if you refuse, I'll
+get this matter investigated. I won't stop till I do."
+
+The Steward sat down, and took up a pen. His large, soft hand
+looked cheesy, like his face. "What is the number of the cabin?"
+he asked indifferently.
+
+"Ninety-six."
+
+"Exactly what do you require?"
+
+"One dozen eggs and one dozen oranges every twenty-four hours, to
+be delivered at any time convenient to you."
+
+"I will see what I can do."
+
+The Steward did not look up from his writing pad, and his
+visitors left as abruptly as they had come.
+
+At about four o'clock every morning, before even the bath
+stewards were on duty, there was a scratching at Claude's door,
+and a covered basket was left there by a messenger who was
+unwashed, half-naked, with a sacking apron tied round his middle
+and his hairy chest splashed with flour. He never spoke, had only
+one eye and an inflamed socket. Claude learned that he was a
+half-witted brother of the Chief Steward, a potato peeler and
+dish-washer in the galley.
+
+Four day after their interview with Mr. Micks, when they were at
+last nearing the end of the voyage, Doctor Trueman detained
+Claude after medical inspection to tell him that the Chief
+Steward had come down with the epidemic. "He sent for me last
+night and asked me to take his case,--won't have anything to do
+with Chessup. I had to get Chessup's permission. He seemed very
+glad to hand the case over to me."
+
+"Is he very bad?"
+
+"He hasn't a look-in, and he knows it. Complications; chronic
+Bright's disease. It seems he has nine children. I'll try to get
+him into a hospital when we make port, but he'll only live a few
+days at most. I wonder who'll get the shillings for all the eggs
+and oranges he hoarded away. Claude, my boy," the doctor spoke
+with sudden energy, "if I ever set foot on land again, I'm going
+to forget this voyage like a bad dream. When I'm in normal
+health, I'm a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the
+wicked get worse than they deserve."
+
+A day came at last when Claude was wakened from sleep by a sense
+of stillness. He sprang up with a dazed fear that some one had
+died; but Fanning lay in his berth, breathing quietly.
+
+Something caught his eye through the porthole,--a great grey
+shoulder of land standing up in the pink light of dawn, powerful
+and strangely still after the distressing instability of the sea.
+Pale trees and long, low fortifications . . . close grey
+buildings with red roofs . . . little sailboats bounding seaward
+. . . up on the cliff a gloomy fortress.
+
+He had always thought of his destination as a country shattered
+and desolated,--"bleeding France"; but he had never seen anything
+that looked so strong, so self-sufficient, so fixed from the
+first foundation, as the coast that rose before him. It was like
+a pillar of eternity. The ocean lay submissive at its feet, and
+over it was the great meekness of early morning.
+
+This grey wall, unshaken, mighty, was the end of the long
+preparation, as it was the end of the sea. It was the reason for
+everything that had happened in his life for the last fifteen
+months. It was the reason why Tannhauser and the gentle
+Virginian, and so many others who had set out with him, were
+never to have any life at all, or even a soldier's death. They
+were merely waste in a great enterprise, thrown overboard like
+rotten ropes. For them this kind release,- trees and a still
+shore and quiet water,- was never, never to be. How long would
+their bodies toss, he wondered, in that inhuman kingdom of
+darkness and unrest?
+
+He was startled by a weak voice from behind.
+
+"Claude, are we over?"
+
+"Yes, Fanning. We're over." 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On"
+
+I
+
+At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little
+shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about.
+Truck drivers and boys on bell less bicycles shouted at him
+indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane
+tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him.
+His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help
+of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken
+Fanning to the base hospital, and seen him into the arms of a big
+orderly from Texas. He came away from the hospital with no idea
+where he was going--except that he wanted to get to the heart of
+the city. It seemed, however, to have no heart; only long, stony
+arteries, full of heat and noise. He was still standing there,
+under his plane tree, when a group of uncertain, lost-looking
+brown figures, headed by Sergeant Hicks, came weaving up the
+street; nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each
+with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with
+joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their
+way! He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.
+
+Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the
+town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless
+food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store
+up the street, where there seemed to be everything else. He had
+tried to make the old woman understand by signs.
+
+"Don't these French people eat cheese, anyhow? What's their word
+for it, Lieutenant? I'm damned if I know, and I've lost my phrase
+book. Suppose you could make her understand?"
+
+"Well, I'll try. Come along, boys."
+
+Crowding close together, the ten men entered the shop. The
+proprietress ran forward with an exclamation of despair.
+Evidently she had thought she was done with them, and was not
+pleased to see them coming back. When she paused to take breath,
+Claude took off his hat respectfully, and performed the bravest
+act of his life; uttered the first phrase-book sentence he had
+ever spoken to a French person. His men were at his back; he had
+to say something or run, there was no other course. Looking the
+old woman in the eye, he steadily articulated:
+
+"Avez-vous du fromage, Madame?" It was almost inspiration to add
+the last word, he thought; and when it worked, he was as much
+startled as if his revolver had gone off in his belt.
+
+"Du fromage?" the shop woman screamed. Calling something to her
+daughter, who was at the desk, she caught Claude by the sleeve,
+pulled him out of the shop, and ran down the street with him. She
+dragged him into a doorway darkened by a long curtain, greeted
+the proprietress, and then pushed the men after their officer, as
+if they were stubborn burros.
+
+They stood blinking in the gloom, inhaling a sour, damp, buttery,
+smear-kase smell, until their eyes penetrated the shadows and
+they saw that there was nothing but cheese and butter in the
+place. The shopkeeper was a fat woman, with black eyebrows that
+met above her nose; her sleeves were rolled up, her cotton dress
+was open over her white throat and bosom. She began at once to
+tell them that there was a restriction on milk products; every
+one must have cards; she could not sell them so much. But soon
+there was nothing left to dispute about. The boys fell upon her
+stock like wolves. The little white cheeses that lay on green
+leaves disappeared into big mouths. Before she could save it,
+Hicks had split a big round cheese through the middle and was
+carving it up like a melon. She told them they were dirty pigs
+and worse than the Boches, but she could not stop them.
+
+"What's the matter with Mother, Lieutenant? What's she fussing
+about? Ain't she here to sell goods?"
+
+Claude tried to look wiser than he was. "From what I can make
+out, there's some sort of restriction; you aren't allowed to buy
+all you want. We ought to have thought about that; this is a war
+country. I guess we've about cleaned her out."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Hicks wiping his clasp-knife. "We'll
+bring her some sugar tomorrow. One of the fellows who helped us
+unload at the docks told me you can always quiet 'em if you give
+'em sugar."
+
+They surrounded her and held out their money for her to take her
+pay. "Come on, ma'm, don't be bashful. What's the matter, ain't
+this good money?"
+
+She was distracted by the noise they made, by their bronzed faces
+with white teeth and pale eyes, crowding so close to her. Ten
+large, well-shaped hands with straight fingers, the open palms
+full of crumpled notes . . . . Holding the men off under the
+pretence of looking for a pencil, she made rapid calculations.
+The money that lay in their palms had no relation to these big,
+coaxing, boisterous fellows; it was a joke to them; they didn't
+know what it meant in the world. Behind them were shiploads of
+money, and behind the ships . . . .
+
+The situation was unfair. Whether she took much or little out of
+their hands, couldn't possibly matter to the Americans, couldn't
+even dash their good humour. But there was a strain on the
+cheesewoman, and the standards of a lifetime were in jeopardy.
+Her mind mechanically fixed upon two-and-a-half ; she would charge
+them two-and-a-half times the market price of the cheese. With
+this moral plank to cling to, she made change with conscientious
+accuracy and did not keep a penny too much from anybody. Telling
+them what big stupids they were, and that it was necessary to
+learn to count in this world, she urged them out of her shop. She
+liked them well enough, but she did not like to do business with
+them. If she didn't take their money, the next one would. All the
+same, fictitious values were distasteful to her, and made
+everything seem flimsy and unsafe.
+
+Standing in her doorway, she watched the brown band go ambling
+down the street; as they passed in front of the old church of St.
+Jacques, the two foremost stumbled on a sunken step that was
+scarcely above the level of the pavement. She laughed aloud. They
+looked back and waved to her. She replied with a smile that was
+both friendly and angry. She liked them, but not the legend of
+waste and prodigality that ran before them--and followed after.
+It was superfluous and disintegrating in a world of hard facts.
+An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more
+every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week!
+Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of
+France. Down below Arles, where her husband's sister had married,
+on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were
+piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had
+ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams;
+everything the world was famished for. They brought shiploads of
+useless things, too. And useless people. Shiploads of women who
+were not nurses; some said they came to dance with the officers,
+so they would not be ennuyes.
+
+All this was not war,--any more than having money thrust at you
+by grown men who could not count, was business. It was an
+invasion, like the other. The first destroyed material
+possessions, and this threatened everybody's integrity. Distaste
+of such methods, deep, recoiling distrust of them, clouded the
+cheesewoman's brow as she threw her money into the drawer and
+turned the key on it.
+
+As for the doughboys, having once stubbed their toes on the
+sunken step, they examined it with interest, and went in to
+explore the church. It was in their minds that they must not let
+a church escape, any more than they would let a Boche escape.
+Within they came upon a bunch of their shipmates, including the
+Kansas band, to whom they boasted that their Lieutenant could
+"speak French like a native."
+
+The Lieutenant himself thought he was getting on pretty well, but
+a few hours later his pride was humbled. He was sitting alone in
+a little triangular park beside another church,, admiring the
+cropped locust trees and watching some old women who were doing
+their mending in the shade. A little boy in a black apron, with a
+close-shaved, bare head, came along, skipping rope. He hopped
+lightly up to Claude and said in a most persuasive and confiding
+voice
+
+"Voulez-vous me dire l'heure, s'il vous plaît, M'sieu' l'
+soldat?"
+
+Claude looked down into his admiring eyes with a feeling of
+panic. He wouldn't mind being dumb to a man, or even to a pretty
+girl, but this was terrible. His tongue went dry, and his face
+grew scarlet. The child's expectant gaze changed to a look of
+doubt, and then of fear. He had spoken before to Americans who
+didn't understand, but they had not turned red and looked angry
+like this one; this soldier must be ill, or wrong in his head.
+The boy turned and ran away.
+
+Many a serious mishap had distressed Claude less. He was
+disappointed, too. There was something friendly in the boy's face
+that he wanted . . . that he needed. As he rose he ground his
+heel into the gravel. "Unless I can learn to talk to the CHILDREN
+of this country," he muttered, "I'll go home!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+Claude set off to find the Grand Hotel, where he had promised to
+dine with Victor Morse. The porter there spoke English. He called
+a red-headed boy in a dirty uniform and told him to take the
+American to vingt-quatre. The boy also spoke English. "Plenty
+money in New York, I guess! In France, no money." He made their
+way, through musty corridors and up slippery staircases, as long
+as possible, shrewdly eyeing the visitor and rubbing his thumb
+nervously against his fingers all the while.
+
+"Vingt-quatre, twen'y-four," he announced, rapping at a door with
+one hand and suggestively opening the other. Claude put something
+into it--anything to be rid of him.
+
+Victor was standing before the fireplace. "Hello, Wheeler, come
+in. Our dinner will be served up here. It's big enough, isn't it?
+I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a
+day."
+
+The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds,
+and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that
+had certainly not been washed since before the war. The heavy red
+cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust,
+the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches.
+Razor blades and "Khaki Comfort" boxes lay about on the dresser,
+and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the
+table. Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers
+arrived,--and the room remained the same, like a wood in which
+travellers camp for the night. The valet de chambre carried away
+only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes.
+It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.
+
+When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and
+put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses. Victor and his guest
+sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around
+which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly. They did not
+buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there
+in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting
+system. The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude;
+he felt as if he were being watched.
+
+"By the way," said Victor while the soup plates were being
+removed, "what do you think of this wine? It cost me thirty
+francs the bottle."
+
+"It tastes very good to me," Claude replied. "But then, it's the
+first champagne I've ever drunk."
+
+"Really?" Victor drank off another glass and sighed. "I envy you.
+I wish I had it all to do over. Life's too short, you know."
+
+"I should say you had made a good beginning. We're a long way
+from Crystal Lake."
+
+"Not far enough." His host reached across the table and filled
+Claude's empty glass. "I sometimes waken up with the feeling I'm
+back there. Or I have bad dreams, and find myself sitting on that
+damned stool in the glass cage and can't make my books balance; I
+hear the old man coughing in his private room, the way he coughs
+when he's going to refuse a loan to some poor devil who needs it.
+I've had a narrow escape, Wheeler; 'as a brand from the burning'.
+That's all the Scripture I remember."
+
+The bright red spots on Victor's cheeks, his pale forehead and
+brilliant eyes and saucy little moustaches seemed to give his
+quotation a peculiar vividness. Claude envied him. It must be
+great fun to take up a part and play it to a finish; to believe
+you were making yourself over, and to admire the kind of fellow
+you made. He, too, in a way, admired Victor,--though he couldn't
+altogether believe in him.
+
+"You'll never go back," he said, "I wouldn't worry about that."
+
+"Take it from me, there are thousands who will never go back! I'm
+not speaking of the casualties. Some of you Americans are likely
+to discover the world this trip . . . and it'll make the hell of
+a lot of difference! You boys never had a fair chance. There's a
+conspiracy of Church and State to keep you down. I'm going off to
+play with some girls tonight, will you come along?"
+
+Claude laughed. "I guess not."
+
+"Why not? You won't be caught, I guarantee."
+
+"I guess not." Claude spoke apologetically. "I'm going out to see
+Fanning after dinner."
+
+Victor shrugged. "That ass!" He beckoned the waiter to open
+another bottle and bring the coffee. "Well, it's your last chance
+to go nutting with me." He looked intently at Claude and lifted
+his glass. "To the future, and our next meeting!" When he put
+down his empty goblet he remarked, "I got a wire through today;
+I'm leaving tomorrow."
+
+"For London?"
+
+"For Verdun."
+
+Claude took a quick breath. Verdun . . . the very sound of the
+name was grim, like the hollow roll of drums. Victor was going
+there tomorrow. Here one could take a train for Verdun, or
+thereabouts, as at home one took a train for Omaha. He felt more
+"over" than he had done before, and a little crackle of
+excitement went all through him. He tried to be careless:
+
+"Then you won't get to London soon?"
+
+"God knows," Victor answered gloomily. He looked up at the
+ceiling and began to whistle softly an engaging air. "Do you know
+that? It's something Maisie often plays; 'Roses of Picardy.' You
+won't know what a woman can be till you meet her, Wheeler."
+
+"I hope I'll have that pleasure. I was wondering if you'd
+forgotten her for the moment. She doesn't object to these
+diversions?"
+
+Victor lifted his eyebrows in the old haughty way. "Women don't
+require that sort of fidelity of the air service. Our engagements
+are too uncertain."
+
+Half an hour later Victor had gone in quest of amorous adventure,
+and Claude was wandering alone in a brightly lighted street full
+of soldiers and sailors of all nations. There were black
+Senegalese, and Highlanders in kilts, and little lorry-drivers
+from Siam,--all moving slowly along between rows of cabarets and
+cinema theatres. The wide-spreading branches of the plane trees
+met overhead, shutting out the sky and roofing in the orange
+glare. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and little tables,
+at which marines and soldiers sat drinking shops and cognac and
+coffee. From every doorway music-machines poured out jazz tunes
+and strident Sousa marches. The noise was stupefying. Out in the
+middle of the street a band of bareheaded girls, hardy and tough
+looking; were following a string of awkward Americans, running
+into them, elbowing them, asking for treats, crying, "You dance
+me Fausse-trot, Sammie?"
+
+Claude stationed himself before a movie theatre, where the sign
+in electric lights read, "Amour, quand tu nous tiens!" and stood
+watching the people. In the stream that passed him, his eye lit
+upon two walking arm-in-arm, their hands clasped, talking eagerly
+and unconscious of the crowd,--different, he saw at once, from
+all the other strolling, affectionate couples.
+
+The man wore the American uniform; his left arm had been
+amputated at the elbow, and he carried his head awry, as if he
+had a stiff neck. His dark, lean face wore an expression of
+intense anxiety, his eyebrows twitched as if he were in constant
+pain. The girl, too, looked troubled. As they passed him, under
+the red light of the Amour sign, Claude could see that her eyes
+were full of tears. They were wide, blue eyes, innocent looking,
+and she had the prettiest face he had seen since he landed. From
+her silk shawl, and little bonnet with blue strings and a white
+frill, he thought she must be a country girl. As she listened to
+the soldier, with her mouth half-open, he saw a space between her
+two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just
+come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently
+at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she
+evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to
+emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did not
+know where to turn.
+
+Without realizing what he did, Claude followed them out of the
+crowd into a quiet street, and on into another, even more
+deserted, where the louses looked as if they had been asleep a
+long while. Here there were no street lamps, not even a light in
+the windows, but natural darkness; with the moon high overhead
+throwing sharp shadows across the white cobble paving. The narrow
+street made a bend, and he came out upon the church he and his
+comrades had entered that afternoon. It looked larger by night,
+and but for the sunken step, he might not have been sure it was
+the same. The dark neighbouring houses seemed to lean toward it,
+the moonlight shone silver-grey upon its battered front.
+
+The two walking before him ascended the steps and withdrew into
+the deep doorway, where they clung together in an embrace so long
+and still that it was like death. At last they drew shuddering
+apart. The girl sat down on the stone bench beside the door. The
+soldier threw himself upon the pavement at her feet, and rested
+his head on her knee, his one arm lying across her lap.
+
+In the shadow of the houses opposite, Claude kept watch like a
+sentinel, ready to take their part if any alarm should startle
+them. The girl bent over her soldier, stroking his head so softly
+that she might have been putting him to sleep; took his one hand
+and held it against her bosom as if to stop the pain there. Just
+behind her, on the sculptured portal, some old bishop, with a
+pointed cap and a broken crozier, stood, holding up two fingers.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The next morning when Claude arrived at the hospital to see
+Fanning, he found every one too busy to take account of him. The
+courtyard was full of ambulances, and a long line of camions
+waited outside the gate. A train-load of wounded Americans had
+come in, sent back from evacuation hospitals to await
+transportation home.
+
+As the men were carried past him, he thought they looked as if
+they had been sick a long while--looked, indeed, as if they could
+never get well. The boys who died on board the Anchises had never
+seemed as sick as these did. Their skin was yellow or purple,
+their eyes were sunken, their lips sore. Everything that belonged
+to health had left them, every attribute of youth was gone. One
+poor fellow, whose face and trunk were wrapped in cotton, never
+stopped moaning, and as he was carried up the corridor he smelled
+horribly. The Texas orderly remarked to Claude, "In the beginning
+that one only had a finger blown off; would you believe it?"
+
+These were the first wounded men Claude had seen. To shed bright
+blood, to wear the red badge of courage,--that was one thing; but
+to be reduced to this was quite another,. Surely, the sooner
+these boys died, the better.
+
+The Texan, passing with his next load, asked Claude why he didn't
+go into the office and wait until the rush was over. Looking in
+through the glass door, Claude noticed a young man writing at a
+desk enclosed by a railing. Something about his figure, about the
+way he held his head, was familiar. When he lifted his left arm
+to prop open the page of his ledger, it was a stump below the
+elbow. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; the pale, sharp
+face, the beak nose, the frowning, uneasy brow. Presently, as if
+he felt a curious eye upon him, the young man paused in his rapid
+writing, wriggled his shoulders, put an iron paperweight on the
+page of his book, took a case from his pocket and shook a
+cigarette out on the table. Going up to the railing, Claude
+offered him a cigar. "No, thank you. I don't use them any more.
+They seem too heavy for me." He struck a match, moved his
+shoulders again as if they were cramped, and sat down on the edge
+of his desk.
+
+"Where do these wounded men come from?" Claude asked. "I just got
+in on the Anchises yesterday."
+
+"They come from various evacuation hospitals. I believe most of
+them are the Belleau Wood lot."
+
+"Where did you lose your arm?"
+
+"Cantigny. I was in the First Division. I'd been over since last
+September, waiting for something to happen, and then got fixed in
+my first engagement."
+
+"Can't you go home?"
+
+"Yes, I could. But I don't want to. I've got used to things over
+here. I was attached to Headquarters in Paris for awhile."
+
+Claude leaned across the rail. "We read about Cantigny at home,
+of course. We were a good deal excited; I suppose you were?"
+
+"Yes, we were nervous. We hadn't been under fire, and we'd been
+fed up on all that stuff about it's taking fifty years to build a
+fighting machine. The Hun had a strong position; we looked up
+that long hill and wondered how we were going to behave." As he
+talked the boy's eyes seemed to be moving all the time, probably
+because he could not move his head at all. After blowing out deep
+clouds of smoke until his cigarette was gone, he sat down to his
+ledger and frowned at the page in a way which said he was too
+busy to talk.
+
+Claude saw Dr. Trueman standing in the doorway, waiting for him.
+They made their morning call on Fanning, and left the hospital
+together. The Doctor turned to him as if he had something on his
+mind.
+
+"I saw you talking to that wry-necked boy. How did he seem, all
+right?"
+
+"Not exactly. That is, he seems very nervous. Do you know
+anything about him?"
+
+"Oh, yes! He's a star patient here, a psychopathic case. I had
+just been talking to one of the doctors about him, when I came
+out and saw you with him. He was shot in the neck at Cantigny,
+where he lost his arm. The wound healed, but his memory is
+affected; some nerve cut, I suppose, that connects with that part
+of his brain. This psychopath, Phillips, takes a great interest
+in him and keeps him here to observe him. He's writing a book
+about him. He says the fellow has forgotten almost everything
+about his life before he came to France. The queer thing is, it's
+his recollection of women that is most affected. He can remember
+his father, but not his mother; doesn't know if he has sisters or
+not,--can remember seeing girls about the house, but thinks they
+may have been cousins. His photographs and belongings were lost
+when he was hurt, all except a bunch of letters he had in his
+pocket. They are from a girl he's engaged to, and he declares he
+can't remember her at all; doesn't know what she looks like or
+anything about her, and can't remember getting engaged. The
+doctor has the letters. They seem to be from a nice girl in his
+own town who is very ambitious for him to make the most of
+himself. He deserted soon after he was sent to this hospital, ran
+away. He was found on a farm out in the country here, where the
+sons had been killed and the people had sort of adopted him. He'd
+quit his uniform and was wearing the clothes of one of the dead
+sons. He'd probably have got away with it, if he hadn't had that
+wry neck. Some one saw him in the fields and recognized him and
+reported him. I guess nobody cared much but this psychopathic
+doctor; he wanted to get his pet patient back. They call him 'the
+lost American' here."
+
+"He seems to be doing some sort of clerical work," Claude
+observed discreetly.
+
+"Yes, they say he's very well educated. He remembers the books he
+has read better than his own life. He can't recall what his home
+town looks like, or his home. And the women are clear wiped out,
+even the girl he was going to marry."
+
+Claude smiled. "Maybe he's fortunate in that."
+
+The Doctor turned to him affectionately, "Now Claude, don't begin
+to talk like that the minute you land in this country."
+
+Claude walked on past the church of St. Jacques. Last night
+already seemed like a dream, but it haunted him. He wished he
+could do something to help that boy; help him get away from the
+doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted
+him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether
+in what he had been lucky enough to find. All day, as Claude came
+and went, he looked among the crowds for that young face, so
+compassionate and tender.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Deeper and deeper into flowery France! That was the sentence
+Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels, as
+the long troop train went southward, on the second day after he
+and his company had left the port of debarkation. Fields of
+wheat, fields of oats, fields of rye; all the low hills and
+rolling uplands clad with harvest. And everywhere, in the grass,
+in the yellowing grain, along the road-bed, the poppies spilling
+and streaming. On the second day the boys were still calling to
+each other about the poppies; nothing else had so entirely
+surpassed their expectations. They had supposed that poppies grew
+only on battle fields, or in the brains of war correspondents.
+Nobody knew what the cornflowers were, except Willy Katz, an
+Austrian boy from the Omaha packing-houses, and he knew only an
+objectionable name for them, so he offered no information. For a
+long time they thought the red clover blossoms were wild
+flowers,--they were as big as wild roses. When they passed the
+first alfalfa field, the whole train rang with laughter; alfalfa
+was one thing, they believed, that had never been heard of
+outside their own prairie states.
+
+All the way down, Company B had been finding the old things
+instead of the new,--or, to their way of thinking, the new things
+instead of the old. The thatched roofs they had so counted upon
+seeing were few and far between. But American binders, of
+well-known makes, stood where the fields were beginning to
+ripen,--and they were being oiled and put in order, not by
+"peasants," but by wise-looking old farmers who seemed to know
+their business. Pear trees, trained like vines against the wall,
+did not astonish them half so much as the sight of the familiar
+cottonwood, growing everywhere. Claude thought he had never
+before realized how beautiful this tree could be. In verdant
+little valleys, along the clear rivers, the cottonwoods waved and
+rustled; and on the little islands, of which there were so many
+in these rivers, they stood in pointed masses, seemed to grip
+deep into the soil and to rest easy, as if they had been there
+for ever and would be there for ever more. At home, all about
+Frankfort, the farmers were cutting down their cottonwoods
+because they were "common," planting maples and ash trees to
+struggle along in their stead. Never mind; the cottonwoods were
+good enough for France, and they were good enough for him! He
+felt they were a real bond between him and this people.
+
+When B Company had first got their orders to go into a training
+camp in north central France, all the men were disappointed.
+Troops much rawer than they were being rushed to the front, so
+why fool around any longer? But now they were reconciled to the
+delay. There seemed to be a good deal of France that wasn't the
+war, and they wouldn't mind travelling about a little in a
+country like this. Was the harvest always a month later than at
+home, as it seemed to be this year? Why did the farmers have rows
+of trees growing along the edges of every field--didn't they take
+the strength out of the soil? What did the farmers mean by
+raising patches of mustard right along beside other crops? Didn't
+they know that mustard got into wheat fields and strangled the
+grain?
+
+The second night the boys were to spend in Rouen, and they would
+have the following day to look about. Everybody knew what had
+happened at Rouen--if any one didn't, his neighbours were only too
+eager to inform him! It had happened in the market-place, and the
+market-place was what they were going to find.
+
+Tomorrow, when it came, proved to be black and cold, a day of
+pouring rain. As they filed through the narrow, crowded streets,
+that harsh Norman city presented no very cheering aspect. They
+were glad, at last, to find the waterside, to go out on the
+bridge and breathe the air in the great open space over the
+river, away from the clatter of cart-wheels and the hard voices
+and crafty faces of these townspeople, who seemed rough and
+unfriendly. From the bridge they looked up at the white chalk
+hills, the tops a blur of intense green under the low,
+lead-coloured sky. They watched the fleets of broad, deep-set
+river barges, coming and going under their feet, with tilted
+smokestacks. Only a little way up that river was Paris, the place
+where every doughboy meant to go; and as they leaned on the rail
+and looked down at the slow-flowing water, each one had in his
+mind a confused picture of what it would be like. The Seine, they
+felt sure, must be very much wider there, and it was spanned by
+many bridges, all longer than the bridge over the Missouri at
+Omaha. There would be spires and golden domes past counting, all
+the buildings higher than anything in Chicago, and
+brilliant--dazzlingly brilliant, nothing grey and shabby about it
+like this old Rouen. They attributed to the city of their desire
+incalculable immensity, bewildering vastness, Babylonian hugeness
+and heaviness--the only attributes they had been taught to admire.
+
+Late in the morning Claude found himself alone before the Church
+of St. Ouen. He was hunting for the Cathedral, and this looked as
+if it might be the right place. He shook the water from his
+raincoat and entered, removing his hat at the door. The day, so
+dark without, was darker still within; . . . far away, a few
+scattered candles, still little points of light . . . just before
+him, in the grey twilight, slender white columns in long rows,
+like the stems of silver poplars.
+
+The entrance to the nave was closed by a cord, so he walked up
+the aisle on the right, treading softly, passing chapels where
+solitary women knelt in the light of a few tapers. Except for
+them, the church was empty . . . empty. His own breathing was
+audible in this silence. He moved with caution lest he should
+wake an echo.
+
+When he reached the choir he turned, and saw, far behind him, the
+rose window, with its purple heart. As he stood staring, hat in
+hand, as still as the stone figures in the chapels, a great bell,
+up aloft, began to strike the hour in its deep, melodious throat;
+eleven beats, measured and far apart, as rich as the colours in
+the window, then silence . . . only in his memory the throbbing
+of an undreamed-of quality of sound. The revelations of the glass
+and the bell had come almost simultaneously, as if one produced
+the other; and both were superlatives toward which his mind had
+always been groping,--or so it seemed to him then.
+
+In front of the choir the nave was open, with no rope to shut it
+off. Several .straw chairs were huddled on a flag of the stone
+floor. After some hesitation he took one, turned it round, and
+sat down facing the window. If some one should come up to him and
+say anything, anything at all, he would rise and say, "Pardon,
+Monsieur; je ne sais pas c'est defendu." He repeated this to
+himself to be quite sure he had it ready.
+
+On the train, coming down, he had talked to the boys about the
+bad reputation Americans had acquired for slouching all over the
+place and butting in on things, and had urged them to tread
+lightly, "But Lieutenant," the kid from Pleasantville had piped
+up, "isn't this whole Expedition a butt-in? After all, it ain't
+our war." Claude laughed, but he told him he meant to make an
+example of the fellow who went to rough-housing.
+
+He was well satisfied that he hadn't his restless companions on
+his mind now. He could sit here quietly until noon, and hear the
+bell strike again. In the meantime, he must try to think: This
+was, of course, Gothic architecture; he had read more or less
+about that, and ought to be able to remember something. Gothic .
+. . that was a mere word; to him it suggested something very
+peaked and pointed,--sharp arches, steep roofs. It had nothing to
+do with these slim white columns that rose so straight and
+far,--or with the window, burning up there in its vault of gloom
+. . . .
+
+While he was vainly trying to think about architecture, some
+recollection of old astronomy lessons brushed across his
+brain,--something about stars whose light travels through space
+for hundreds of years before it reaches the earth and the human
+eye. The purple and crimson and peacock-green of this window had
+been shining quite as long as that before it got to him . . . .
+He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still . .
+. as if his mother were looking over his shoulder. He sat
+solemnly through the hour until twelve, his elbows on his knees,
+his conical hat swinging between them in his hand, looking up
+through the twilight with candid, thoughtful eyes.
+
+When Claude joined his company at the station, they had the laugh
+on him. They had found the Cathedral,--and a statue of Richard
+the Lion-hearted, over the spot where the lion-heart itself was
+buried; "the identical organ," fat Sergeant Hicks assured him.
+But they were all glad to leave Rouen. 
+
+
+
+V
+
+B Company reached the training camp at S-- thirty-six men short:
+twenty-five they had buried on the voyage over, and eleven sick
+were left at the base hospital. The company was to be attached
+to a battalion which had already seen service, commanded by
+Lieutenant Colonel Scott. Arriving early in the morning, the
+officers reported at once to Headquarters. Captain Maxey must 
+have suffered a shock when the Colonel rose from his desk to
+acknowledge his salute, then shook hands with them all around
+and asked them about their journey. The Colonel was not a very
+martial figure; short, fat, with slouching shoulders, and a
+lumpy back like a sack of potatoes. Though he wasn't much over
+forty, he was bald, and his collar would easily slip over his 
+head without being unbuttoned. His little twinkling eyes and
+good-humoured face were without a particle of arrogance or
+official dignity.
+
+Years ago, when General Pershing, then a handsome young
+Lieutenant with a slender waist and yellow moustaches, was
+stationed as Commandant at the University of Nebraska, Walter
+Scott was an officer in a company of cadets the Lieutenant tools
+about to military tournaments. The Pershing Rifles, they were
+called, and they won prizes wherever they went. After his
+graduation, Scott settled down to running a hardware business in
+a thriving Nebraska town, and sold gas ranges and garden hose for
+twenty years. About the time Pershing was sent to the Mexican
+border, Scott began to think there might eventually be something
+in the wind, and that he would better get into training. He went
+down to Texas with the National Guard. He had come to France with
+the First Division, and had won his promotions by solid,
+soldierly qualities.
+
+"I see you're an officer short, Captain _Maxey," the Colonel
+remarked at their conference. "I think I've got a man here to
+take his place. Lieutenant Gerhardt is a New York man, came over
+in the band and got transferred to infantry. He has lately been
+given a commission for good service. He's had some experience and
+is a capable fellow." The Colonel sent his orderly out to bring
+in a young man whom he introduced to the officers as Lieutenant
+David Gerhardt.
+
+Claude had been ashamed of Tod Fanning, who was always showing
+himself a sap-head, and who would never have got a commission if
+his uncle hadn't been a Congressman. But the moment he met
+Lieutenant Gerhardt's eye, something like jealousy flamed up in
+him. He felt in a flash that he suffered by comparison with the
+new officer; that he must be on his guard and must not let
+himself be patronized.
+
+As they were leaving the Colonel's office together, Gerhardt
+asked him whether he had got his billet. Claude replied that
+after the men were in their quarters, he would look out for
+something for himself.
+
+The young man smiled. "I'm afraid you may have difficulty. The
+people about here have been overworked, keeping soldiers, and
+they are not willing as they once were. I'm with a nice old
+couple over in the village. I'm almost sure I can get you in
+there. If you'll come along, we'll speak to them, before some one
+else is put off on them."
+
+Claude didn't want to go, didn't want to accept
+favours,--nevertheless he went. They walked together along a
+dusty road that ran between half-ripe wheat fields, bordered with
+poplar trees. The wild morning-glories and Queen Anne's lace that
+grew by the road-side were still shining with dew. A fresh breeze
+stirred the bearded grain, parting it in furrows and fanning out
+streaks of crimson poppies. The new officer was not intrusive,
+certainly. He walked along, whistling softly to himself, seeming
+quite lost in the freshness of the morning, or in his own
+thoughts. There had been nothing patronizing in his manner so
+far, and Claude began to wonder why he felt ill at ease with him.
+Perhaps it was because he did not look like the rest of them.
+Though he was young, he did not look boyish. He seemed
+experienced; a finished product, rather than something on the
+way. He was handsome, and his face, like his manner and his walk,
+had something distinguished about it. A broad white forehead
+under reddish brown hair, hazel eyes with no uncertainty in their
+look, an aquiline nose, finely cut,--a sensitive, scornful mouth,
+which somehow did not detract from the kindly, though slightly
+reserved, expression of his face.
+
+Lieutenant Gerhardt must have been in this neighbourhood for some
+time; he seemed to know the people. On the road they passed
+several villagers; a rough looking girl taking a cow out to graze,
+an old man with a basket on his arm, the postman on his bicycle;
+they all spoke to Claude's companion as if they knew him well.
+
+"What are these blue flowers that grow about everywhere?" Claude
+asked suddenly, pointing to a clump with his foot.
+
+"Cornflowers," said the other. "The Germans call them
+Kaiser-blumen."
+
+They were approaching the village, which lay on the edge of a
+wood,--a wood so large one could not see the end of it; it met
+the horizon with a ridge of pines. The village was but a single
+street. On either side ran clay-coloured walls, with painted
+wooden doors here and there, and green shutters. Claude's guide
+opened one of these gates, and they walked into a little sanded
+garden; the house was built round it on three sides. Under a
+cherry tree sat a woman in a black dress, sewing, a work table
+beside her.
+
+She was fifty, perhaps, but though her hair was grey she had a
+look of youthfulness; thin cheeks, delicately flushed with pink,
+and quiet, smiling, intelligent eyes. Claude thought she looked
+like a New England woman,--like the photographs of his mother's
+cousins and schoolmates. Lieutenant Gerhardt introduced him to
+Madame Joubert. He was quite disheartened by the colloquy that
+followed. Clearly his new fellow officer spoke Madame Joubert's
+perplexing language as readily as she herself did, and he felt
+irritated and grudging as he listened. He had been hoping that,
+wherever he stayed, he could learn to talk to the people a
+little; but with this accomplished young man about, he would
+never have the courage to try. He could see that Mme. Joubert
+liked Gerhardt, liked him very much; and all this, for some
+reason, discouraged him.
+
+Gerhardt turned to Claude, speaking in a way which included
+Madame Joubert in the conversation, though she could not
+understand it: "Madame Joubert will let you come, although she
+has done her part and really doesn't have to take any one else
+in. But you will be so well off here that I'm glad she consents.
+You will have to share my room, but there are two beds. She will
+show you."
+
+Gerhardt went out of the gate and left him alone with his
+hostess. Her mind seemed to read his thoughts. When he uttered a
+word, or any sound that resembled one, she quickly and smoothly
+made a sentence of it, as if she were quite accustomed to talking
+in this way and expected only monosyllables from strangers. She
+was kind, even a little playful with him; but he felt it was all
+good manners, and that underneath she was not thinking of him at
+all. When he was alone in the tile-floored sleeping room
+upstairs, unrolling his blankets and arranging his shaving
+things, he looked out of the window and watched her where she sat
+sewing under the cherry tree. She had a very sad face, he
+thought; it wasn't grief, nothing sharp and definite like sorrow.
+It was an old, quiet, impersonal sadness,--sweet in its
+expression, like the sadness of music.
+
+As he came out of the house to start back to the barracks, he
+bowed to her and tried to say, "Au revoir, Madame. Jusq' au ce
+soir." He stopped near the kitchen door to look at a
+many-branched rose vine that ran all over the wall, full of
+cream-coloured, pink-tipped roses, just a shade stronger in
+colour than the clay wall behind them. Madame Joubert came over
+and stood beside him, looking at him and at the rosier, "Oui,
+c'est joli, n'est-ce pas?" She took the scissors that hung by a
+ribbon from her belt, cut one of the flowers and stuck it in his
+buttonhole. "Voila." She made a little flourish with her thin
+hand.
+
+Stepping into the street, he turned to shut the wooden door after
+him, and heard a soft stir in the dark tool-house at his elbow.
+>From among the rakes and spades a child's frightened face was
+staring out at him. She was sitting on the ground with her lap
+full of baby kittens. He caught but a glimpse of her dull, pale
+face.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The next morning Claude awoke with such a sense of physical
+well-being as he had not had for a long time. The sun was
+shining brightly on the white plaster walls and on the red tiles
+of the floor. Green jalousies, half-drawn, shaded the upper part
+of the two windows. Through their slats, he could see the forking 
+branches of an old locust tree that grew by the gate. A flock of
+pigeons flew over it, dipping and mounting with a sharp twinkle
+of silver wings. It was good to lie again in a house that was
+cared for by women. He must have felt that even in his sleep,
+for when he opened his eyes he was thinking about Mahailey and
+breakfast and summer mornings on the farm. The early stillness
+was sweet, and the feeling of dry, clean linen against his body.
+There was a smell of lavender about his warm pillow. He lay
+still for fear of waking Lieutenant Gerhardt. This was the sort
+of peace one wanted to enjoy alone. When he rose cautiously on
+his elbow and looked at the other bed, it was empty. His 
+companion must have dressed and slipped out when day first broke. 
+Somebody else who liked to enjoy things alone; that looked
+hopeful. But now that he had the place to himself, he decided to
+get up. While he was dressing he could see old M. Joubert down in
+the garden, watering the plants and vines, raking the sand fresh
+and smooth, clipping off dead leaves and withered flowers and
+throwing them into a wheelbarrow. These people had lost both
+their sons in the war, he had been told, and now they were taking
+care of the property for their grandchildren,--two daughters of
+the elder son. Claude saw Gerhardt come into the garden, and sit
+down at the table under the trees, where they had their dinner
+last night. He hurried down to join him. Gerhardt made room for
+him on the bench.
+
+"Do you always sleep like that? It's an accomplishment. I made
+enough noise when I dressed,--kept dropping things, but it never
+reached you."
+
+Madame Joubert came out of the kitchen in a purple flowered
+morning gown, her hair in curl-papers under a lace cap. She
+brought the coffee herself, and they sat down at the unpainted
+table without a cloth, and drank it out of big crockery bowls.
+They had fresh milk with it,--the first Claude had tasted in a
+long while, and sugar which Gerhardt produced from his pocket.
+The old cook had her coffee sitting in the kitchen door, and on
+the step, at her feet, sat the strange, pale little girl.
+
+Madame Joubert amiably addressed herself to Claude; she knew that
+Americans were accustomed to a different sort of morning repast,
+and if he wished to bring bacon from the camp, she would gladly
+cook it for him. She had even made pancakes for officers who
+stayed there before. She seemed pleased, however, to learn that
+Claude had had enough of these things for awhile. She called
+David by his first name, pronouncing it the French way, and when
+Claude said he hoped she would do as much for him, she said, Oh,
+yes, that his was a very good French name, "mais un peu, un peu.
+. .romanesque," at which he blushed, not quite knowing whether
+she were making fun of him or not.
+
+"It is rather so in English, isn't it?" David asked.
+
+"Well, it's a sissy name, if you mean that."
+
+"Yes, it is, a little," David admitted candidly. The day's work
+on the parade ground was hard, and Captain Maxey's men were soft,
+felt the heat,--didn't size up well with the Kansas boys who had
+been hardened by service. The Colonel wasn't pleased with B
+Company and detailed them to build new barracks and extend the
+sanitation system. Claude got out and worked with the men.
+Gerhardt followed his example, but it was easy to see that he
+had never handled lumber or tin-roofing before. A kind of rivalry
+seemed to have sprung up between him and Claude, neither of them
+knew why.
+
+Claude could see that the sergeants and corporals were a little
+uncertain about Gerhardt. His laconic speech, never embroidered
+by the picturesque slang they relished, his gravity, and his
+rare, incredulous smile, alike puzzled them. Was the new officer
+a dude? Sergeant Hicks asked of his chum, Dell Able. No, he
+wasn't a dude. Was he a swellhead? No, not at all; but he wasn't
+a good mixer. He was "an Easterner"; what more he was would
+develop later. Claude sensed something unusual about him. He
+suspected that Gerhardt knew a good many things as well as he
+knew French, and that he tried to conceal it, as people sometimes
+do when they feel they are not among their equals; this idea
+nettled him. It was Claude who seized the opportunity to be
+patronizing, when Gerhardt betrayed that he was utterly unable to
+select lumber by given measurements.
+
+The next afternoon, work on the new barracks was called off
+because of rain. Sergeant Hicks set about getting up a boxing
+match, but when he went to invite the lieutenants, they had both
+disappeared. Claude was tramping toward the village, determined
+to get into the big wood that had tempted him ever since his
+arrival.
+
+The highroad became the village street, and then, at the edge of
+the wood, became a country road again. A little farther on, where
+the shade grew denser, it split up into three wagon trails, two
+of them faint and little used. One of these Claude followed. The
+rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing
+up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in
+spongy, mossy earth. The light about him, the very air, was
+green. The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green
+moss, like mould. He was wondering whether this forest was not
+always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through
+and shattered the whole wood with gold. He had never seen
+anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green
+of the dripping beech tops. Everything woke up; rabbits ran across
+the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were
+full of whirring insects.
+
+The winding path turned again, and came out abruptly on a
+hillside, above an open glade piled with grey boulders. On the
+opposite rise of ground stood a grove of pines, with bare, red
+stems. The light, around and under them, was red like a rosy
+sunset. Nearly all the stems divided about half-way up into two
+great arms, which came together again at the top, like the
+pictures of old Grecian lyres.
+
+Down in the grassy glade, among the piles of flint boulders,
+little white birches shook out their shining leaves in the
+lightly moving air. All about the rocks were patches of purple
+heath; it ran up into the crevices between them like fire. On one
+of these bald rocks sat Lieutenant Gerhardt, hatless, in an
+attitude of fatigue or of deep dejection, his hands clasped about
+his knees, his bronze hair ruddy in the sun. After watching him
+for a few minutes, Claude descended the slope, swishing the tall
+ferns.
+
+"Will I be in the way?" he asked as he stopped at the foot of the
+rocks.
+
+"Oh, no!" said the other, moving a little and unclasping his
+hand.
+
+Claude sat down on a boulder. "Is this heather?" he asked. "I
+thought I recognized it, from 'Kidnapped.' This part of the world
+is not as new to you as it is to me."
+
+"No. I lived in Paris for several years when I was a student."
+
+"What were you studying?"
+
+"The violin."
+
+"You are a musician?" Claude looked at him wonderingly.
+
+"I was," replied the other with a disdainful smile, languidly
+stretching out his legs in the heather.
+
+"That seems too bad," Claude remarked gravely.
+
+"What does?"
+
+"Why, to take fellows with a special talent. There are enough of
+us who haven't any."
+
+Gerhardt rolled over on his back and put his hands under his
+head. "Oh, this affair is too big for exceptions; it's universal.
+If you happened to be born twenty-six years ago, you couldn't
+escape. If this war didn't kill you in one way, it would in
+another." He told Claude he had trained at Camp Dix, and had come
+over eight months ago in a regimental band, but he hated the work
+he had to do and got transferred to the infantry.
+
+When they retraced their steps, the wood was full of green
+twilight. Their relations had changed somewhat during the last
+half hour, and they strolled in confidential silence up the
+home-like street to the door of their own garden.
+
+Since the rain was over, Madame Joubert had laid the cloth on the
+plank table under the cherry tree, as on the previous evenings.
+Monsieur was bringing the chairs, and the little girl was
+carrying out a pile of heavy plates. She rested them against her
+stomach and leaned back as she walked, to balance them. She wore
+shoes, but no stockings, and her faded cotton dress switched
+about her brown legs. She was a little Belgian refugee who had
+been sent there with her mother. The mother was dead now, and the
+child would not even go to visit her grave. She could not be
+coaxed from the court-yard into the quiet street. If the
+neighbour children came into the garden on an errand, she hid
+herself. She would have no playmates but the cat; and now she had
+the kittens in the tool house.
+
+Dinner was very cheerful that evening. M. Joubert was pleased
+that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat. The
+garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook
+down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The
+mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert's sewing
+chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to snap up earthworms that
+wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the house fell over the
+dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight, and
+the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured
+roses. Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy
+smell.
+
+M. Joubert must have been ten years older than his wife. There
+was a great contentment in his manner and a pleasant sparkle in
+his eye. He liked the young officers. Gerhardt had been there
+more than two weeks, and somewhat relieved the stillness that
+had settled over the house since the second son died in hospital.
+The Jouberts had dropped out of things. They had done all they
+could do, given all they had, and now they had nothing to look
+forward to,--except the event to which all France looked forward.
+The father was talking to Gerhardt about the great sea-port the
+Americans were making of Bordeaux; he said he meant to go there
+after the war, to see it all for himself.
+
+Madame Joubert was pleased to hear that they had been walking in
+the wood. And was the heather in bloom? She wished they had
+brought her some. Next time they went, perhaps. She used to walk
+there often. Her eyes seemed to come nearer to them, Claude
+thought, when she spoke of it, and she evidently cared a great
+deal more about what was blooming in the wood than about what the
+Americans were doing on the Garonne. He wished he could talk to
+her as Gerhardt did. He admired the way she roused herself and
+tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such
+spirit and precision. It was a language that couldn't be mumbled;
+that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.
+Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken
+spirit, he thought.
+
+The little maid who served them moved about noiselessly. Her dull
+eyes never seemed to look; yet she saw when it was time to bring
+the heavy soup tureen, and when it was time to take it away.
+Madame Joubert lad found that Claude liked his potatoes with his
+meat--when there was meat--and not in a course by themselves. She
+had each time to tell the little girl to go and fetch them. This
+the child did with manifest reluctance,--sullenly, as if she were
+being forced to do something wrong. She was a very strange little
+creature, altogether. As the two soldiers left the table and
+started for the camp, Claude reached down into the tool house and
+took up one of the kittens, holding it out in the light to see it
+blink its eyes. The little girl, just coming out of the kitchen,
+uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted
+down, covering her face with her hands. Madame Joubert came out
+to chide her.
+
+"What is the matter with that child?" Claude asked as they
+hurried out of the gate. "Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused
+in some way?"
+
+"Terrorized. She often screams like that at night. Haven't you
+heard her? They have to go and wake her, to stop it. She doesn't
+speak any French; only Walloon. And she can't or won't learn, so
+they can't tell what goes on in her poor little head."
+
+In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude
+marvelled at Gerhardt's spirit and endurance. The muscular strain
+of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any
+of the other officers. He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed
+only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly
+bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned
+that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a
+soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp
+entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his
+occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have
+wriggled out and didn't.
+
+
+VII
+
+On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel
+Scott's battalion was streaming along one of the dusty,
+well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind
+them. The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods,
+little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people
+came out to watch the soldiers go by.
+
+The Americans went through every village m march step, colours
+flying, the band playing, "to show that the morale was high," as
+the officers said. Claude trudged on the outside of the
+column,--now at the front of his company, now at the
+rear,--wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his
+satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.
+
+They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were
+reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and
+torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half
+concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth,
+bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the
+road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty
+barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,--with
+no purpose at all.
+
+"Begins to look like we're getting in, Lieutenant," said Sergeant
+Hicks, smiling behind his salute.
+
+Claude nodded and passed forward.
+
+"Well, we can't arrive any too soon for us, boys?" The Sergeant
+looked over his shoulder, and they grinned, their teeth flashing
+white in their red, perspiring faces. Claude didn't wonder that
+everybody along the route, even the babies, came out to see them;
+he thought they were the finest sight in the world. This was the
+first day they had worn their tin hats; Gerhardt had shown them
+how to stuff grass and leaves inside to keep their heads cool.
+When they fell into fours, and the band struck up as they
+approached a town, Bert Fuller, the boy from Pleasantville on the
+Platte, who had blubbered on the voyage over, was guide right,
+and whenever Claude passed him his face seemed to say, "You won't
+get anything on me in a hurry, Lieutenant!"
+
+They made camp early in the afternoon, on a hill covered with
+half-burned pines. Claude took Bert and Dell Able and Oscar the
+Swede, and set off to make a survey and report the terrain.
+
+Behind the hill, under the burned edge of the wood, they found an
+abandoned farmhouse and what seemed to be a clean well.
+
+It had a solid stone curb about it, and a wooden bucket hanging
+by a rusty wire. When the boys splashed the bucket about, the
+water sent up a pure, cool breath. But they were wise boys, and
+knew where dead Prussians most loved to hide. Even the straw in
+the stable they regarded with suspicion, and thought it would be
+just as well not to bed anybody there.
+
+Swinging on to the right to make their circuit, they got into
+mud; a low field where the drain ditches had been neglected and
+had overflowed. There they came upon a pitiful group of humanity,
+bemired. A woman, ill and wretched looking, sat on a fallen log
+at the end of the marsh, a baby in her lap and three children
+hanging about her. She was far gone in consumption; one had only
+to listen to her breathing and to look at her white, perspiring
+face to feel how weak she was. Draggled, mud to the knees, she
+was trying to nurse her baby, half hidden under an old black
+shawl. She didn't look like a tramp woman, but like one who had
+once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was still
+young. The children were tired and discouraged. One little boy
+wore a clumsy blue jacket, made from a French army coat. The
+other wore a battered American Stetson that came down over his
+ears. He carried, in his two arms, a pink celluloid clock. They
+all looked up and waited for the soldiers to do something.
+
+Claude approached the woman, and touching the rim of his helmet,
+began: "Bonjour, Madame. Qu'est que c'est?"
+
+She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only
+able to gasp, "'Toinette, 'Toinette!"
+
+'Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and
+seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face
+with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy,
+crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced
+than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at
+making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign
+soldiers,--spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.
+
+She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty
+farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night.
+How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been
+staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying
+to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick,
+presque morte and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard
+people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their
+own cellar,--and so could they if they once got there. The point
+was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die
+chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French
+soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans
+were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to
+be toujours gentils.
+
+While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to
+howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl
+shrugged. ''Il est toujours en colere," she muttered. The woman
+turned it around with difficulty--it seemed a big, heavy baby,
+but white and sickly--and gave it the other breast. It began
+sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were
+famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this
+exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men
+away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her
+after them.
+
+"Il faut que votre mere--se reposer," he told her, with the grave
+caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French
+sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue
+surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed
+in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English,
+Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind,
+and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.
+
+Had they anything to eat? "Vous avez quelque chose a manger?
"
+
+"Rien. Rien du tout."
+
+Wasn't her mother "trop malade a marcher?
"
+
+She shrugged; Monsieur could see for himself.
+
+And her father?
+
+He was dead; "mort à la Marne, en quatorze".
+
+"At the Marne?" Claude repeated, glancing in perplexity at the
+nursing baby. Her sharp eyes followed his, and she instantly
+divined his doubt. "The baby?" she said quickly. "Oh, the baby is
+not my brother, he is a Boche."
+
+For a moment Claude did not understand. She repeated her
+explanation impatiently, something disdainful and sinister in her
+metallic little voice. A slow blush mounted to his forehead.
+
+He pushed her toward her mother, "Attendez la."
+
+"I guess we'll have to get them over to that farmhouse," he told
+the men. He repeated what he had got of the child's story. When
+he came to her laconic statement about the baby, they looked at
+each other. Bert Fuller was afraid he might cry again, so he kept
+muttering, "By God, if we'd a-got here sooner, by God if we had!"
+as they ran back along the ditch.
+
+Dell and Oscar made a chair of their crossed hands and carried
+the woman, she was no great weight. Bert picked up the little boy
+with the pink clock; "Come along, little frog, your legs ain't
+long enough."
+
+Claude walked behind, holding the screaming baby stiffly in his
+arms. How was it possible for a baby to have such definite
+personality, he asked himself, and how was it possible to dislike
+a baby so much? He hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and
+bloodless ears, and carried it with loathing . . . no wonder it
+cried! When it got nothing by screaming and stiffening, however,
+it suddenly grew quiet; regarded him with pale blue eyes, and
+tried to make itself comfortable against his khaki coat. It put
+out a grimy little fist and took hold of one of his buttons.
+"Kamerad, eh?" he muttered, glaring at the infant. "Cut it out!"
+
+Before they had their own supper that night, the boys carried hot
+food and blankets down to their family.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Four o'clock . . . a summer dawn . . . his first morning in the
+trenches.
+
+Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams
+were in position. This hour, when the light was changing, was a
+favourite time for attack. He had come in late last night, and
+had everything to learn. Mounting the firestep, he peeped over
+the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist.
+Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with
+birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they
+did on the wire fences at home. Clear and flute-like they sounded
+in the heavy air,--and they were the only sounds. A little breeze
+came up, slowly clearing the mist away. Streaks of green showed
+through the moving banks of vapour. The birds became more
+agitated. That dull stretch of grey and green was No Man's Land.
+Those low, zigzag mounds, like giant molehills protected by wire
+hurdles, were the Hun trenches; five or six lines of them. He
+could easily follow the communication trenches without a glass.
+At one point their front line could not be more than eighty yards
+away, at another it must be all of three hundred. Here and there
+thin columns of smoke began to rise; the Hun was getting
+breakfast; everything was comfortable and natural. Behind the
+enemy's position the country rose gradually for several miles,
+with ravines and little woods, where, according to his map, they
+had masked artillery. Back on the hills were ruined farmhouses
+and broken trees, but nowhere a living creature in sight. It was
+a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection. Yet
+everywhere the ground was full of men. Their own trenches, from
+the other side, must look quite as dead. Life was a secret, these
+days.
+
+It was amazing how simply things could be done. His battalion had
+marched in quietly at midnight, and the line they came to relieve
+had set out as silently for the rear. It all took place in utter
+darkness. Just as B Company slid down an incline into the shallow
+rear trenches, the country was lit for a moment by two star
+shells, there was a rattling of machine guns, German Maxims,--a
+sporadic crackle that was not followed up. Filing along the
+communication trenches, they listened anxiously; artillery fire
+would have made it bad for the other men who were marching to the
+rear. But nothing happened. They had a quiet night, and this
+morning, here they were!
+
+The sky flamed up saffron and silver. Claude looked at his watch,
+but he could not bear to go just yet. How long it took a Wheeler
+to get round to anything! Four years on the way; now that he was
+here, he would enjoy the scenery a bit, he guessed. He wished his
+mother could know how he felt this morning. But perhaps she did
+know. At any rate, she would not have him anywhere else. Five
+years ago, when he was sitting on the steps of the Denver State
+House and knew that nothing unexpected could ever happen to him .
+ . suppose he could have seen, in a flash, where he would be
+today? He cast a long look at the reddening, lengthening
+landscape, and dropped down on the duckboard.
+
+Claude made his way back to the dugout into which he and Gerhardt
+had thrown their effects last night. The former occupants had
+left it clean. There were two bunks nailed against the side
+walls,--wooden frames with wire netting over them, covered with
+dry sandbags. Between the two bunks was a soap-box table, with a
+candle stuck in a green bottle, an alcohol stove, a bainmarie,
+and two tin cups. On the wall were coloured pictures from Jugend,
+taken out of some Hun trench.
+
+He found Gerhardt still asleep on his bed, and shook him until he
+sat up.
+
+"How long have you been out, Claude? Didn't you sleep?"
+
+"A little. I wasn't very tired. I suppose we could heat shaving
+water on this stove; they've left us half a bottle of alcohol.
+It's quite a comfortable little hole, isn't it?"
+
+"It will doubtless serve its purpose," David remarked dryly. "So
+sensitive to any criticism of this war! Why, it's not your
+affair; you've only just arrived."
+
+"I know," Claude replied meekly, as he began to fold his
+blankets. "But it's likely the only one I'll ever be in, so I may
+as well take an interest."
+
+The next afternoon four young men, all more or less naked, were
+busy about a shellhole full of opaque brown water. Sergeant Hicks
+and his chum, Dell Able, had hunted through half the blazing hot
+morning to find a hole not too scummy, conveniently, and even
+picturesquely situated, and had reported it to the Lieutenants.
+Captain Maxey, Hicks said, could send his own orderly to find his
+own shellhole, and could take his bath in private. "He'd never
+wash himself with anybody else," the Sergeant added. "Afraid of
+exposing his dignity!"
+
+Bruger and Hammond, the two second Lieutenants, were already out
+of their bath, and reclined on what might almost be termed a
+grassy slope, examining various portions of their body with
+interest. They hadn't had all their clothes off for some time,
+and four days of marching in hot weather made a man anxious to
+look at himself.
+
+"You wait till winter," Gerhardt told them. He was still
+splashing in the hole, up to his armpits in muddy water. "You
+won't get a wash once in three months then. Some of the Tommies
+told me that when they got their first bath after Vimy, their
+skins peeled off like a snake's. What are you doing with my
+trousers, Bruger?"
+
+"Hunting for your knife. I dropped mine yesterday, when that
+shell exploded in the cut-off. I darned near dropped my old nut!"
+
+"Shucks, that wasn't anything. Don't keep blowing about it--shows
+you're a greenhorn."
+
+Claude stripped off his shirt and slid into the pool beside
+Gerhardt. "Gee, I hit something sharp down there! Why didn't you
+fellows pull out the splinters?"
+
+He shut his eyes, disappeared for a moment, and came up
+sputtering, throwing on the ground a round metal object, coated
+with rust and full of slime. "German helmet, isn't it? Phew!" He
+wiped his face and looked about suspiciously.
+
+"Phew is right!" Bruger turned the object over with a stick. "Why
+in hell didn't you bring up the rest of him? You've spoiled my
+bath. I hope you enjoy it."
+
+Gerhardt scrambled up the side. "Get out, Wheeler! Look at that,"
+he pointed to big sleepy bubbles, bursting up through the thick
+water. "You've stirred up trouble, all right! Something's going
+very bad down there."
+
+Claude got out after him, looking back at the activity in the
+water. "I don't see how pulling out one helmet could stir the
+bottom up so. I should think the water would keep the smell
+down."
+
+"Ever study chemistry?" Bruger asked scornfully. "You just opened
+up a graveyard, and now we get the exhaust. If you swallowed any
+of that German cologne--Oh, you should worry!"
+
+Lieutenant Hammond, still barelegged, with his shirt tied over
+his shoulders, was scratching in his notebook. Before they left
+he put up a placard on a split stick.
+
+No Public Bathing! ! Private Beach
+
+C. Wheeler, Co. B. 2-th Inf'ty.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+The first letters from home! The supply wagons brought them up,
+and every man in the Company got something except Ed Drier, a
+farm-hand from the Nebraska sand hills, and Willy Katz, the
+tow-headed Austrian boy from the South Omaha packing-houses.
+Their comrades were sorry for them. Ed didn't have any "folks" of
+his own, but he had expected letters all the same. Willy was sure
+his mother must have written. When the last ragged envelope was
+given out and he turned away empty-handed, he murmured, "She's
+Bohunk, and she don't write so good. I guess the address wasn't
+plain, and some fellow in another comp'ny has got my letter."
+
+No second class matter was sent up,--the boys had hoped for
+newspapers from home to give them a little war news, since they
+never got any here. Dell Able's sister, however, had enclosed a
+clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the
+British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the
+hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies,
+mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a
+group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where
+they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story
+of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where
+the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,--a desolate
+spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very
+religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together,
+opened his mouth and said scornfully,
+
+"That's a lie!"
+
+Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you
+know it is?"
+
+"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the
+Garden, and there ain't no man going to find it. It ain't
+intended they should. The Bible says so."
+
+Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years
+ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?"
+
+"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim?
+Nothin'!"
+
+The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.
+
+Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead?
+Solid ivory!"
+
+Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off
+with his washing.
+
+.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front
+line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The
+Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the
+place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One
+night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the
+gun teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes,
+smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases. Gerhardt was
+working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean
+copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning,
+showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could
+sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.
+
+There was one officer who could talk all the others down,
+wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the
+Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet
+four, and very broad,--a dynamo of energy. Before the war he was
+building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in
+his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius
+Caesar's fortified camps. This had been too much for his
+easily-inflamed imagination. He photographed and measured and
+brooded upon these ancient remains. He was an engineer by day and
+an archaeologist by night. He had crates of books sent down from
+Paris,--everything that had been written on Caesar, in French and
+German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to him
+in the evening. The priest believed the American was mad.
+
+When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest
+in classical studies, but now it was as if he were giving birth
+to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam.
+It also drove other ideas into his exclusively engineering
+brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his
+countrymen.. He travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly
+what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he had
+a chance to enlist.
+
+In the Battalion, Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men
+never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general's
+operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from
+one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him;
+centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens
+found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he
+was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black
+cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French
+characteristics, coaching and preparing them. It was his legs
+that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on
+two short stumps.
+
+"Now you fellows don't want to forget that the night-life of
+Paris is not a typical thing at all; that's a show got up for
+foreigners . . . . The French peasant, he's a thrifty fellow . .
+. . This red wine's all right if you don't abuse it; take it
+two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery . . . . You don't
+have to be rough with them, simply firm. Whenever one of them
+accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her
+twenty-five francs; then I look her in the eye and say, 'My girl,
+I've got three children, three boys.' She gets the point at once;
+never fails. She goes away ashamed of herself."
+
+"But that's so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,"
+said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
+
+Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the
+Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such
+concentration, when snatches of the Captain's lecture kept
+breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of
+the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive
+glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was
+something out of the ordinary about him.
+
+The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed
+out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude
+saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He
+listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then
+frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his
+momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had
+particular associations with the air,--melancholy, but beautiful,
+Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record
+himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the
+light, read the inscription
+
+"Meditation from Thais--Violin solo--David Gerhardt."
+
+When they were going back along the communication trench in the
+rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly.
+"That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin
+solo, wasn't it?"
+
+"Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost
+here."
+
+"Are there many of your records?"
+
+"Quite a number. Why do you ask?"
+
+"I'd like to write my mother. She's fond of good music. She'll
+get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing
+closer to her, don't you see?"
+
+"All right, Claude," said David good-naturedly. "She will find
+them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I
+had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets
+a little income from them. Here we are, at home." As he struck a
+match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared
+behind the blankets. "Plenty of them around, these wet nights.
+Get one? Don't squash him in there. Here's the sack."
+
+Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust
+the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously
+trampled whatever fell to the bottom. "Where do you suppose the
+other is?" "He'll join us later. I don't mind the rats half so
+much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his
+clothes off! Turn in; I'll go the rounds." Gerhardt splashed out
+along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and
+cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get
+David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked
+like on a concert platform, playing his violin.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The following night, Claude was sent back to Division
+Head-quarters at Q-- with information the Colonel did not care to
+commit to paper. He set off at ten o'clock, with Sergeant Hicks
+for escort. There had been two days of rain, and the
+communication trenches were almost knee-deep in water. About half
+a mile back of the front line, the two men crawled out of the
+ditch and went on above ground. There was very little shelling
+along the front that night. When a flare went up, they dropped
+and lay on their faces, trying, at the same time, to get a squint
+at what was ahead of them.
+
+The ground was rough, and the darkness thick; it was past
+midnight when they reached the east-and-west road--usually full
+of traffic, and not entirely deserted even on a night like this.
+Trains of horses were splashing through the mud, with shells on
+their backs, empty supply wagons were coming back from the front.
+Claude and Hicks paused by the ditch, hoping to get a ride. The
+rain began to fall with such violence that they looked about for
+shelter. Stumbling this way and that, they ran into a big
+artillery piece, the wheels sunk over the hubs in a mud-hole.
+
+"Who's there?" called a quick voice, unmistakably British.
+
+"American infantrymen, two of us. Can we get onto one of your
+trucks till this lets up?"
+
+"Oh, certainly! We can make room for you in here, if you're not
+too big. Speak quietly, or you'll waken the Major." Giggles and
+smothered laughter; a flashlight winked for a moment and showed a
+line of five trucks, the front and rear ones covered with
+tarpaulin tents. The voices came from the shelter next the gun.
+The men inside drew up their legs and made room for the
+strangers; said they were sorry they hadn't anything dry to offer
+them except a little rum. The intruders accepted this gratefully.
+
+The Britishers were a giggly lot, and Claude thought, from their
+voices, they must all be very young. They joked about their Major
+as if he were their schoolmaster. There wasn't room enough on the
+truck for anybody to lie down, so they sat with their knees under
+their chins and exchanged gossip. The gun team belonged to an
+independent battery that was sent about over the country,
+"wherever needed." The rest of the battery had got through, gone
+on to the east, but this big gun was always getting into trouble;
+now something had gone wrong with her tractor and they couldn't
+pull her out. They called her "Jenny," and said she was taken
+with fainting fits now and then, and had to be humoured. It was
+like going about with your grandmother, one of the invisible
+Tommies said, "she is such a pompous old thing!" The Major was
+asleep on the rear truck; he was going to get the V.C. for
+sleeping. More giggles.
+
+No, they hadn't any idea where they were going; of course, the
+officers knew, but artillery officers never told anything. What
+was this country like, anyhow? They were new to this part, had
+just come down from Verdure.
+
+Claude said he had a friend in the air service up there; did they
+happen to know anything about Victor Morse?
+
+Morse, the American ace? Hadn't he heard? Why, that got into the
+London papers. Morse was shot down inside the Hun line three
+weeks ago. It was a brilliant affair. He was chased by eight
+Boche planes, brought down three of them, put the rest to flight,
+and was making for base, when they turned and got him. His
+machine came down in flames and he jumped, fell a thousand feet
+or more.
+
+"Then I suppose he never got his leave?" Claude asked.
+
+They didn't know. He got a fine citation.
+
+The men settled down to wait for the weather to improve or the
+night to pass. Some of them fell into a doze, but Claude felt
+wide awake. He was wondering about the flat in Chelsea; whether
+the heavy-eyed beauty had been very sorry, or whether she was
+playing "Roses of Picardy" for other young officers. He thought
+mournfully that he would never go to London now. He had quite
+counted on meeting Victor there some day, after the Kaiser had
+been properly disposed of. He had really liked Victor. There was
+something about that fellow . . . a sort of debauched baby, he
+was, who went seeking his enemy in the clouds. What other age
+could have produced such a figure? That was one of the things
+about this war; it took a little fellow from a little town, gave
+him an air and a swagger, a life like a movie-film,--and then a
+death like the rebel angels.
+
+A man like Gerhardt, for instance, had always lived in a more or
+less rose-colored world; he belonged over here, really. How could
+he know what hard moulds and crusts the big guns had broken open
+on the other side of the sea? Who could ever make him understand
+how far it was from the strawberry bed and the glass cage in the
+bank, to the sky-roads over Verdure?
+
+By three o'clock the rain had stopped. Claude and Hicks set off
+again, accompanied by one of the gun team who was going back to
+get help for their tractor. As it began to grow light, the two
+Americans wondered more and more at the extremely youthful
+appearance of their companion. When they stopped at a shellhole
+and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his
+helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance
+of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples,
+yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes.
+
+"You haven't been over very long, have you?" Claude asked in a
+fatherly tone, as they took the road again.
+
+"I came out in 'sixteen. I was formerly in the infantry."
+
+The Americans liked to hear him talk; he spoke very quickly, in a
+high, piping voice.
+
+"How did you come to change?"
+
+"Oh, I belonged to one of the Pal Battalions, and we got cut to
+pieces. When I came out of hospital, I thought I'd try another
+branch of the service, seeing my pals were gone."
+
+"Now, just what is a Pal Battalion?" drawled Hicks. He hated all
+English words he didn't understand, though he didn't mind French
+ones in the least.
+
+"Fellows who signed up together from school," the lad piped,
+
+Hicks glanced at Claude. They both thought this boy ought to be
+in school for some time yet, and wondered what he looked like
+when he first came over.
+
+"And you got cut up, you say?" he asked sympathetically.
+
+"Yes, on the Somme. We had rotten luck. We were sent over to take
+a trench and couldn't. We didn't even get to the wire. The Hun
+was so well prepared that time, we couldn't manage it. We went
+over a thousand, and we came back seventeen."
+
+"A hundred and seventeen?"
+
+"No, seventeen."
+
+Hicks whistled and again exchanged looks with Claude. They could
+neither of them doubt him. There was something very unpleasant
+about the idea of a thousand fresh-faced schoolboys being sent
+out against the guns. "It must have been a fool order," he
+commented. "Suppose there was some mistake at Headquarters?"
+
+"Oh, no, Headquarters knew what it was about! We'd have taken it,
+if we'd had any sort of luck. But the Hun happened to be full of
+fight. His machine guns did for us."
+
+"You were hit yourself?" Claude asked him.
+
+"In the leg. He was popping away at me all the while, but I
+wriggled back on my tummy. When I came out of the hospital my leg
+wasn't strong, and there's less marching in the artillery.
+
+"I should think you'd have had about enough."
+
+"Oh, a fellow can't stay out after all his chums have been
+killed! He'd think about it all the time, you know," the boy
+replied in his clear treble.
+
+Claude and Hicks got into Headquarters just as the cooks were
+turning out to build their fires. One of the Corporals took them
+to the officers' bath,--a shed with big tin tubs, and carried away
+their uniforms to dry them in the kitchen. It would be an hour
+before the officers would be about, he said, and in the meantime
+he would manage to get clean shirts and socks for them.
+
+"Say, Lieutenant," Hicks brought out as he was rubbing himself
+down with a real bath towel, "I don't want to hear any more about
+those Pal Battalions, do you? It gets my goat. So long as we were
+going to get into this, we might have been a little more
+previous. I hate to feel small." "Guess we'll have to take our
+medicine," Claude said dryly, "There wasn't anywhere to duck, was
+there? I felt like it. Nice little kid. I don't believe American
+boys ever seem as young as that."
+
+"Why, if you met him anywhere else, you'd be afraid of using bad
+words before him, he's so pretty! What's the use of sending an
+orphan asylum out to be slaughtered? I can't see it," grumbled
+the fat sergeant. "Well, it's their business. I'm not going to
+let it spoil my breakfast. Suppose we'll draw ham and eggs,
+Lieutenant?"
+
+
+
+X
+
+After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with
+one of the staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until
+tomorrow to see Colonel James, who had been called to Paris for a
+general conference. He had left in his car at four that morning,
+in response to a telephone message.
+
+"There's not much to do here, by way of amusement," said the
+Major. "A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want
+at the estaminet,--the one on the square, opposite the English
+tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the
+Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden.
+They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on
+good terms with them. We get their supplies through with our own,
+and the quartermaster has orders to help them when they run
+short. You might go up and call on them. They speak English
+perfectly."
+
+Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of
+introduction.
+
+"Oh, yes, they're used to us! I'll give you a card to Mlle.
+Olive, though. She's a particular friend of mine. There you are:
+'Mlle. Olive de Courcy, introducing, etc.' And, you understand,"
+here he glanced up and looked Claude over from head to foot,
+"she's a perfect lady."
+
+Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about
+presenting himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn't like
+Americans; he was always afraid of meeting French people who
+didn't. It was the same way with most of the fellows in his
+battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being
+disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they
+hastened to behave as badly as possible, in order to deserve it;
+then they didn't feel that they had been taken in--the worst
+feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
+
+Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a
+little. It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914,
+after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until
+about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the
+Chasseurs d'Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive
+the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not
+one building remained standing.
+
+Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as
+he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster.
+There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war
+pictures one saw at home. A cyclone or a fire might have done
+just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an
+exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American
+towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned
+brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered
+beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy
+water. An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a
+few nights before, and been drowned.
+
+This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now
+the civilian population was about four hundred. There were people
+there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation;
+others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out,
+came back from wherever they had found shelter. They were living
+in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers
+and American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read
+familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the
+sides of these frail shelters: "From Emery Bird, Thayer Co.
+Kansas City, Mo." "Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo." These
+inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going
+up and calling on the French ladies.
+
+The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant
+pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank,
+heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of
+rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
+and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
+came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the
+Germans did to it.
+
+Claude paused before a little shanty built against a
+half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with
+a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the
+garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had
+washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops
+and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his
+helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red
+Cross.
+
+She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous
+savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"
+
+(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way
+or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the
+site of the old town hall.)
+
+A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told
+her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie
+put her hand in Claude's and led him off along one of the paths
+that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show
+him a church,--evidently one of the ruins of which they were
+proudest,--where the blue sky was shining through the white
+arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a
+little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus
+had been shot away.
+
+"Le bebe est casse, mais il a protege sa mere," Marie explained
+with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had
+a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il
+est gai, mon soldat," but he sometimes drank too much alcohol,
+and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since his comrade had
+stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
+had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do
+better. Marie was evidently a well brought up child. Her father,
+she said, had been a schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent
+hill, she turned to go home. Claude called her back and awkwardly
+tried to give her some money, but she thrust her hands behind her
+and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
+then ran away down the path.
+
+As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the
+ground had been cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, the bricks
+and hewn stones had been piled in neat heaps, the broken hedges
+had been trimmed and the dead parts cut away. Emerging at last
+into the garden, he stood still for wonder; even though it was in
+ruins, it seemed so beautiful after the disorder of the world
+below.
+
+The gravel walks were clean and shining. A wall of very old
+boxwoods stood green against a row of dead Lombardy poplars.
+Along the shattered side of the main building, a pear tree,
+trained on wires like a vine, still flourished,--full of little
+red pears. Around the stone well was a shaven grass plot, and
+everywhere there were little trees and shrubs, which had been too
+low for the shells to hit,--or for the fire, which had seared the
+poplars, to catch. The hill must have been wrapped in flames at
+one time, and all the tall trees had been burned.
+
+The barrack was built against the walls of the cloister,--three
+arches of which remained, like a stone wing to the shed of
+planks. On a ladder stood a one-armed young man, driving nails
+very skillfully with his single hand. He seemed to be making a
+frame projection from the sloping roof, to support an awning. He
+carried his nails in his mouth. When he wanted one, he hung his
+hammer to the belt of his trousers, took a nail from between his
+teeth, stuck it into the wood, and then deftly rapped it on the
+head. Claude watched him for a moment, then went to the foot of
+the ladder and held out his two hands. "Laissez-moi," he
+exclaimed.
+
+The one aloft spat his nails out into his palm, looked down, and
+laughed. He was about Claude's age, with very yellow hair and
+moustache and blue eyes. A charming looking fellow.
+
+"Willingly," he said. "This is no great affair, but I do it to
+amuse myself, and it will be pleasant for the ladies." He
+descended and gave his hammer to the visitor. Claude set to work
+on the frame, while the other went under the stone arches and
+brought back a roll of canvas,--part of an old tent, by the look
+of it.
+
+"Un heritage des Boches," he explained unrolling it upon the
+grass. "I found it among their filth in the cellar, and had the
+idea to make a pavilion for the ladies, as our trees are
+destroyed." He stood up suddenly. "Perhaps you have come to see
+the ladies?"
+
+"Plus tard."
+
+Very well, the boy said, they would get the pavilion done for a
+surprise for Mlle. Olive when she returned. She was down in the
+town now, visiting the sick people. He bent over his canvas
+again, measuring and cutting with a pair of garden shears, moving
+round the green plot on his knees, and all the time singing.
+Claude wished he could understand the words of his song.
+
+While they were working together, tying the cloth up to the
+frame, Claude, from his elevation, saw a tall girl coming slowly
+up the path by which he had ascended. She paused at the top, by
+the boxwood hedge, as if she were very tired, and stood looking
+at them. Presently she approached the ladder and said in slow,
+careful English, "Good morning. Louis has found help, I see."
+
+Claude came down from his perch.
+
+"Are you Mlle. de Courcy? I am Claude Wheeler. I have a note of
+introduction to you, if I can find it."
+
+She took the card, but did not look at it. "That is not
+necessary. Your uniform is enough. Why have you come?"
+
+He looked at her in some confusion. "Well, really, I don't know!
+I am just in from the front to see Colonel James, and he is in
+Paris, so I must wait over a day. One of the staff suggested my
+coming up here--I suppose because it is so nice!" he finished
+ingenuously.
+
+"Then you are a guest from the front, and you will have lunch
+with Louis and me. Madame Barre is also gone for the day. Will you
+see our house?" She led him through the low door into a living
+room, unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy. There were coloured
+war posters on the clean board walls, brass shell cases full of
+wild flowers and garden flowers, canvas camp-chairs, a shelf of
+books, a table covered by a white silk shawl embroidered with big
+butterflies. The sunlight on the floor, the bunches of fresh
+flowers, the white window curtains stirring in the breeze,
+reminded Claude of something, but he could not remember what.
+
+"We have no guest room," said Mlle. de Courcy. "But you will come
+to mine, and Louis will bring you hot water to wash."
+
+In a wooden chamber at the end of the passage, Claude took off
+his coat, and set to work to make himself as tidy as possible.
+Hot water and scented soap were in themselves pleasant things.
+The dresser was an old goods box, stood on end and covered with
+white lawn. On it there was a row of ivory toilet things, with
+combs and brushes, powder and cologne, and a pile of white
+handkerchiefs fresh from the iron. He felt that he ought not to
+look about him much, but the odor of cleanness, and the
+indefinable air of personality, tempted him. In one corner, a
+curtain on a rod made a clothes-closet; in another was a low iron
+bed, like a soldier's, with a pale blue coverlid and white
+pillows. He moved carefully and splashed discreetly. There was
+nothing he could have damaged or broken, not even a rug on the
+plank floor, and the pitcher and hand-basin were of iron; yet he
+felt as if he were imperiling something fragile.
+
+When he came out, the table in the living room was set for three.
+The stout old dame who was placing the plates paid no attention
+to him,--seemed, from her expression, to scorn him and all his
+kind. He withdrew as far as possible out of her path and picked
+up a book from the table, a volume of Heine's Reisebilder in
+German.
+
+Before lunch Mlle. de Courcy showed him the store room in the
+rear, where the shelves were stocked with rows of coffee tins,
+condensed milk, canned vegetables and meat, all with American
+trade names he knew so well; names which seemed doubly familiar
+and "reliable" here, so far from home. She told him the people in
+the town could not have got through the winter without these
+things. She had to deal them out sparingly, where the need was
+greatest, but they made the difference between life and death.
+Now that it was summer, the people lived by their gardens; but
+old women still came to beg for a few ounces of coffee, and
+mothers to get a can of milk for the babies.
+
+Claude's face glowed with pleasure. Yes, his country had a long
+arm. People forgot that; but here, he felt, was some one who did
+not forget. When they sat down to lunch he learned that Mlle. de
+Courcy and Madame Barre had been here almost a year now; they
+came soon after the town was retaken, when the old inhabitants
+began to drift back. The people brought with them only what they
+could carry in their arms.
+
+"They must love their country so much, don't you think, when they
+endure such poverty to come back to it?" she said. "Even the old
+ones do not often complain about their dear things--their linen,
+and their china, and their beds. If they have the ground, and
+hope, all that they can make again. This war has taught us all
+how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters."
+
+Exactly so; hadn't he been trying to say this ever since he was
+born? Hadn't he always known it, and hadn't it made life both
+bitter and sweet for him? What a beautiful voice she had, this
+Mlle. Olive, and how nobly it dealt with the English tongue. He
+would like to say something, but out of so much . . . what? He
+remained silent, therefore, sat nervously breaking up the black
+war bread that lay beside his plate.
+
+He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded
+it with favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the
+table.
+
+"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have
+seen our poor trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part
+of France. Our people are more sorry for them than to lose their
+cattle and horses."
+
+Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility,
+Claude thought, as he watched her. She seemed far from strong.
+Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired, with white transparent skin and a
+too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks,--like the flame of a
+feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as if she were
+always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads
+of grey in her hair,--brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the
+back of her head.
+
+After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and
+Louis took Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and
+trimming and planting were his own work, and he had done it all
+with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish much more, for he
+was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
+single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they
+distressed Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four
+old locusts; the tops were naked forks, burned coal-black, but
+the lower branches had put out thick tufts of yellow-green
+foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must still be
+sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong
+American boys to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs
+and trim the tops flat over the thick boles. How much it must
+mean to a man to love his country like this, Claude thought; to
+love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
+tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come
+back self-sown or from old roots, Claude found a group of tall,
+straggly plants with reddish stems and tiny white blossoms,-- one
+of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that grew along the
+clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
+pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it
+was one of those nameless prairie flowers that grew on the
+prairie and nowhere else.
+
+When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in
+one of the canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.
+
+"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after him.
+
+"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on
+leave he always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one
+of the family. The shell that killed my brother tore off his arm.
+My mother and I went to visit him in the hospital, and he seemed
+ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother was dead. He put
+his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
+il etait toujours plus chic que moi!'"
+
+Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did
+so only by keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences
+she uttered were foreign to her nature; her face and eyes ran
+ahead of her tongue and made one wait eagerly for what was
+coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently twisting
+a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.
+
+"You have found a flower?" She looked up.
+
+"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."
+
+She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about
+your country! I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to
+understand. Yes, tell me about that!"
+
+Nebraska--What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it
+look like? As he tried to describe it, she listened with
+half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers. I think
+it must be like Russia. But your father's farm; describe that to
+me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."
+
+Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to
+begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big
+pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the
+wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and
+corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow
+sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust
+trees. He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger
+about it in such detail. It was partly due to his listener, no
+doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual
+mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew
+of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed
+faster from her effort to see and understand everything. He told
+her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was
+like there in summer and winter and autumn--what it had been like
+in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward
+Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
+the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the
+news at night, and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their
+breath.
+
+Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair. Claude looked up and
+saw tears sparkling in her brilliant eyes. "And I myself," she
+murmured, "did not know of the Marne until days afterward, though
+my father and brother were both there! I was far off in Brittany,
+and the trains did not run. That is what is wonderful, that you
+are here, telling me this! We, we were taught from childhood that
+some day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat.
+But you were so safe, with all your wheat and corn. Nothing could
+touch you, nothing!"
+
+Claude dropped his eyes. "Yes," he muttered, blushing, "shame
+could. It pretty nearly did. We are pretty late." He rose from
+his chair as if he were going to fetch something . . . . But
+where was he to get it from? He shook his head. "I am afraid," he
+said mournfully, "there is nothing I can say to make you
+understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary. It
+didn't only seem miles away, it seemed centuries away."
+
+"But you do come,--so many, and from so far! It is the last
+miracle of this war. I was in Paris on the fourth day of July,
+when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your
+national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, 'That is a
+new man!' Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.
+Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to
+them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look . . .
+eyes straight before. They passed like men of destiny." She threw
+out her hands with a swift movement and dropped them in her lap.
+The emotion of that day came back in her face. As Claude looked
+at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the
+strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost
+like a gift of prophecy.
+
+A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to
+meet her and took her into the house. Clause sat down again,
+almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely
+understood, of being no longer a stranger. In the far distance
+the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden Louis
+was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis' songs.
+The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very
+cheerfully. There was something open and warm about the boy's
+voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too. It was
+distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and
+waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new
+kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the
+shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of
+beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life,
+he saw.
+
+When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the
+creeping sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls
+like you," he said simply, as she sat down.
+
+She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left.
+There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came,
+and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or
+sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with
+soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different
+with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father
+had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since
+the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war
+of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men
+would be left to see the day of victory.
+
+She looked so tired that Clause knew he had no right to stay.
+Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave;
+but an hour more or less wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly
+give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.
+
+"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get
+through this war?" he asked as he rose.
+
+He wrote it down in his notebook.
+
+"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.
+
+There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the
+edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he
+stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the
+sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the
+glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
+which he would never find again.
+
+The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front.
+They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their
+route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and
+then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter
+half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through
+the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.
+
+When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting
+in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing
+the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their
+nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn't
+happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious.
+This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant
+with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees.
+More because he admired the looks of the man than because he
+needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed
+a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt nodded.
+
+"About how far back would you say it was?"
+
+"I wouldn't say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,"
+he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a
+washtub.
+
+"Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?"
+
+"That I couldn't say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour."
+
+"I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can't be?"
+Hicks asked jovially.
+
+"That I couldn't say. You've been four years gettin' this far, I
+know verra well."
+
+Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. "Oh, if that's the way you
+talk--"'
+
+"That's the way I do," said the other sourly.
+
+Claude put out a warning hand. "Come on, Hicks. You'll get
+nothing by it." They went up the road very much disconcerted.
+Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was
+angry, the Sergeant's forehead puffed up and became dark red,
+like a young baby's. "What did you call me off for?" he
+sputtered.
+
+"I don't see where you'd have come out in an argument, and you
+certainly couldn't have licked him."
+
+They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went
+down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through
+the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French
+graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves,
+with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The
+Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the
+soldier's photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some
+comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.
+
+The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to
+sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down
+between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped.
+Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary
+stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie.
+They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a
+cross at their feet the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu,
+Mort pour La France.
+
+A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who
+fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too
+young. They died and took their secret with them,--what they were
+and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France.
+How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a
+shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the
+Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one's mind, where
+one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never
+blush.
+
+Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the
+silence. "Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.'
+It has a coffinish sound. And over there they're all 'tod,' and
+it's all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here,
+black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who
+put 'em here, and what's the good of it?"
+
+"Search me," the other murmured absently.
+
+Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face
+wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. "Well,"
+he brought out at last, "we'd better hike. This afterglow will
+hang on for an hour,--always does, over here."
+
+"I suppose we had." They rose to go. The white crosses were now
+violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow.
+Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still
+burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep
+thunder. "Somebody's getting peppered up there. Do owls always
+hoot in graveyards?"
+
+"Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It's a peaceful spot,
+otherwise. Good-night, boys," said Hicks kindly, as they left the
+graves behind them.
+
+They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping
+trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting
+back to their chums and their own little group. Hicks broke out
+and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business
+together when they got home; were going to open a garage and
+automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both,
+that lonely spot lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort
+pour La France.
+
+
+XI
+
+After four days' rest in the rear, the Battalion went to the
+front again in new country, about ten kilometers east of the
+trench they had relieved before. One morning Colonel Scott sent
+for Claude and Gerhardt and spread his maps out on the table.
+
+"We are going to clean them out there in F 6 tonight, and
+straighten our line. The thing that bothers us is that little
+village stuck up on the hill, where the enemy machine guns have a
+strong position. I want to get them out of there before the
+Battalion goes over. We can't spare too many men, and I don't
+like to send out more officers than I can help; it won't do to
+reduce the Battalion for the major operation. Do you think you
+two boys could manage it with a hundred men? The point is, you
+will have to be out and back before our artillery begins at three
+o'clock."
+
+Under the hill where the village stood, ran a deep ravine, and
+from this ravine a twisting water course wound up the hillside.
+By climbing this gully, the raiders should be able to fall on the
+machine gunners from the rear and surprise them. But first they
+must get across the open stretch, nearly one and a half
+kilometers wide, between the American line and the ravine,
+without attracting attention. It was raining now, and they could
+safely count on a dark night.
+
+The night came on black enough. The Company crossed the open
+stretch without provoking fire, and slipped into the ravine to
+wait for the hour of attack, A young doctor, a Pennsylvanian,
+lately attached to the staff, had volunteered to come with them,
+and he arranged a dressing station at the bottom of the ravine,
+where the stretchers were left. They were to pick up their
+wounded on the way back. Anything left in that area would be
+exposed to the artillery fire later on.
+
+At ten o'clock the men began to ascend the water-course, creeping
+through pools and little waterfalls, making a continuous spludgy
+sound, like pigs rubbing against the sty. Claude, with the head
+of the column, was just pulling out of the gully on the hillside
+above the village, when a flare went up, and a volley of fire
+broke from the brush on the up-hill side of the water-course;
+machine guns, opening on the exposed line crawling below. The Hun
+had been warned that the Americans were crossing the plain and
+had anticipated their way of approach. The men in the gully were
+trapped; they could not retaliate with effect, and the bullets
+from the Maxims bounded on the rocks about them like hail.
+Gerhardt ran along the edge of the line, urging the men not to
+fall back and double on themselves, but to break out of the gully
+on the downhill side and scatter.
+
+Claude, with his group, started back. "Go into the brush and get
+'em! Our fellows have got no chance down there. Grenades while
+they last, then bayonets. Pull your plugs and don't hold on too
+long."
+
+They were already on the run, charging the brush. The Hun gunners
+knew the hill like a book, and when the bombs began bursting
+among them, they took to trails and burrows. "Don't follow them
+off into the rocks," Claude kept calling. "Straight ahead! Clear
+everything to the ravine."
+
+As the German gunners made for cover, the firing into the gully
+stopped, and the arrested column poured up the steep defile after
+Gerhardt.
+
+Claude and his party found themselves back at the foot of the
+hill, at the edge of the ravine from which they had started.
+Heavy firing on the hill above told them the rest of the men had
+got through. The quickest way back to the scene of action was by
+the same water-course they had climbed before. They dropped into
+it and started up. Claude, at the rear, felt the ground rise
+under him, and he was swept with a mountain of earth and rock
+down into the ravine.
+
+He never knew whether he lost consciousness or not. It seemed to
+him that he went on having continuous sensations. The first, was
+that of being blown to pieces; of swelling to an enormous size
+under intolerable pressure, and then bursting. Next he felt
+himself shrink and tingle, like a frost-bitten body thawing out.
+Then he swelled again, and burst. This was repeated, he didn't
+know how often. He soon realized that he was lying under a great
+weight of earth; his body, not his head. He felt rain falling on
+his face. His left hand was free, and still attached to his arm.
+He moved it cautiously to his face. He seemed to be bleeding from
+the nose and ears. Now he began to wonder where he was hurt; he
+felt as if he were full of shell splinters. Everything was buried
+but his head and left shoulder. A voice was calling from
+somewhere below.
+
+"Are any of you fellows alive?"
+
+Claude closed his eyes against the rain beating in his face. The
+same voice came again, with a note of patient despair.
+
+"If there's anybody left alive in this hole, won't he speak up?
+I'm badly hurt myself."
+
+That must be the new doctor; wasn't his dressing station
+somewhere down here? Hurt, he said. Claude tried to move his legs
+a little. Perhaps, if he could get out from under the dirt, he
+might hold together long enough to reach the doctor. He began to
+wriggle and pull. The wet earth sucked at him; it was painful
+business. He braced himself with his elbows, but kept slipping
+back.
+
+"I'm the only one left, then?" said the mournful voice below.
+
+At last Claude worked himself out of his burrow, but he was
+unable to stand. Every time he tried to stand, he got faint and
+seemed to burst again. Something was the matter with his right
+ankle, too--he couldn't bear his weight on it. Perhaps he had
+been too near the shell to be hit; he had heard the boys tell of
+such cases. It had exploded under his feet and swept him down
+into the ravine, but hadn't left any metal in his body. If it had
+put anything into him, it would have put so much that he wouldn't
+be sitting here speculating. He began to crawl down the slope on
+all fours. "Is that the Doctor? Where are you?"
+
+"Here, on a stretcher. They shelled us. Who are you? Our fellows
+got up, didn't they?"
+
+"I guess most of them did. What happened back here?"
+
+"I'm afraid it's my fault," the voice said sadly. "I used my
+flash light, and that must have given them the range. They put
+three or four shells right on top of us. The fellows that got
+hurt in the gully kept stringing back here, and I couldn't do
+anything in the dark. I had to have a light to do anything. I
+just finished putting on a Johnson splint when the first shell
+came. I guess they're all done for now."
+
+"How many were there?"
+
+"Fourteen, I think. Some of them weren't much hurt. They'd all be
+alive, if I hadn't come out with you." "Who were they? But you
+don't know our names yet, do you? You didn't see Lieutenant
+Gerhardt among them?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Nor Sergeant Hicks, the fat fellow?"
+
+"Don't think so."
+
+"Where are you hurt?"
+
+"Abdominal. I can't tell anything without a light. I lost my
+flash light. It never occurred to me that it could make trouble;
+it's one I use at home, when the babies are sick," the doctor
+murmured.
+
+Claude tried to strike a match, with no success. "Wait a minute,
+where's your helmet?" He took off his metal hat, held it over the
+doctor, and managed to strike a light underneath it. The wounded
+man had already loosened his trousers, and now he pulled up his
+bloody shirt. His groin and abdomen were torn on the left side.
+The wound, and the stretcher on which he lay, supported a mass of
+dark, coagulated blood that looked like a great cow's liver.
+
+"I guess I've got mine," the Doctor murmured as the match went
+out.
+
+Claude struck another. "Oh, that can't be! Our fellows will be
+back pretty soon, and we can do something for you."
+
+"No use, Lieutenant. Do you suppose you could strip a coat off
+one of those poor fellows? I feel the cold terribly in my
+intestines. I had a bottle of French brandy, but I suppose it's
+buried."
+
+Claude stripped off his own coat, which was warm on the inside,
+and began feeling about in the mud for the brandy. He wondered
+why the poor man wasn't screaming with pain. The firing on the
+hill had ceased, except for the occasional click of a Maxim, off
+in the rocks somewhere. His watch said 12:10; could anything have
+miscarried up there?
+
+Suddenly, voices above, a clatter of boots on the shale. He began
+shouting to them.
+
+"Coming, coming!" He knew the voice. Gerhardt and his rifles ran
+down into the ravine with a bunch of prisoners. Claude called to
+them to be careful. "Don't strike a light! They've been shelling
+down here."
+
+"All right are you, Wheeler? Where are the wounded?"
+
+"There aren't any but the Doctor and me. Get us out of here
+quick. I'm all right, but I can't walk."
+
+They put Claude on a stretcher and sent him ahead. Four big
+Germans carried him, and they were prodded to a lope by Hicks and
+Dell Able. Four of their own men took up the doctor, and Gerhardt
+walked beside him. In spite of their care, the motion started the
+blood again and tore away the clots that had formed over his
+wounds. He began to vomit blood and to strangle. The men put the
+stretcher down. Gerhardt lifted the Doctor's head. "It's over,"
+he said presently. "Better make the best time you can."
+
+They picked up their load again. "Them that are carrying him now
+won't jolt him," said Oscar, the pious Swede.
+
+B Company lost nineteen men in the raid. Two days later the
+Company went off on a ten-day leave. Claude's sprained ankle was
+twice its natural size, but to avoid being sent to the hospital
+he had to march to the railhead. Sergeant Hicks got him a giant
+shoe he found stuck on the barbed wire entanglement. Claude and
+Gerhardt were going off on their leave together. 
+
+XII
+
+A rainy autumn night; Papa Joubert sat reading his paper. He
+heard a heavy pounding on his garden gate. Kicking off his
+slippers, he put on the wooden sabots he kept for mud, shuffled
+across the dripping garden, and opened the door into the dark
+street. Two tall figures with rifles and kits confronted him. In
+a moment he began embracing them, calling to his wife:
+
+"Nom de diable, Maman, c'est David, David et Claude, tous les
+deux!"
+
+Sorry-looking soldiers they appeared when they stood in the
+candlelight, plastered with clay, their metal hats shining like
+copper bowls, their clothes dripping pools of water upon the
+flags of the kitchen floor. Mme. Joubert kissed their wet cheeks,
+and Monsieur, now that he could see them, embraced them again.
+Whence had they come, and how had it fared with them, up there?
+Very well, as anybody could see. What did they want
+first,--supper, perhaps? Their room was always ready for them; and
+the clothes they had left were in the big chest.
+
+David explained that their shirts had not once been dry for four
+days; and what they most desired was to be dry and to be clean.
+Old Martha, already in bed, was routed out to heat water. M.
+Joubert carried the big washtub upstairs. Tomorrow for
+conversation, he said; tonight for repose. The boys followed him
+and began to peel off their wet uniforms, leaving them in two
+sodden piles on the floor. There was one bath for both, and they
+threw up a coin to decide which should get into the warm water
+first. M. Joubert, seeing Claude's fat ankle strapped up in
+adhesive bandages, began to chuckle. "Oh, I see the Boche made
+you dance up there!"
+
+When they were clad in clean pyjamas out of the chest, Papa
+Joubert carried their shirts and socks down for Martha to wash.
+He returned with the big meat platter, on which was an omelette
+made of twelve eggs and stuffed with bacon and fried potatoes.
+Mme. Joubert brought the three-story earthen coffee-pot to the
+door and called, "Bon appetit!" The host poured the coffee and
+cut up the loaf with his clasp knife. He sat down to watch them
+eat. How had they found things up there, anyway? The Boches
+polite and agreeable as usual? Finally, when there was not a
+crumb of anything left, he poured for each a little glass of
+brandy, "pour cider la digestion," and wished them good-night. He
+took the candle with him.
+
+Perfect bliss, Claude reflected, as the chill of the sheets grew
+warm around his body, and he sniffed in the pillow the old smell
+of lavender. To be so warm, so dry, so clean, so beloved! The
+journey down, reviewed from here, seemed beautiful. As soon as
+they had got out of the region of martyred trees, they found the
+land of France turning gold. All along the river valleys the
+poplars and cottonwoods had changed from green to yellow,--evenly
+coloured, looking like candle flames in the mist and rain. Across
+the fields, along the horizon they ran, like torches passed from
+hand to hand, and all the willows by the little streams had
+become silver. The vineyards were green still, thickly spotted
+with curly, blood-red branches. It all flashed back beside his
+pillow in the dark: this beautiful land, this beautiful people,
+this beautiful omelette; gold poplars, blue-green vineyards, wet,
+scarlet vine leaves, rain dripping into the court, fragrant
+darkness . . . sleep, stronger than all. 
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The woodland path was deep in leaves. Claude and David were lying
+on the dry, springy heather among the flint boulders. Gerhardt,
+with his Stetson over his eyes, was presumably asleep. They were
+having fine weather for their holiday. The forest rose about this
+open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of
+horse chestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown,
+as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry
+leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible
+in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes.
+Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes
+glittered.
+
+It was the Wheeler way to dread false happiness, to feel cowardly
+about being fooled. Since he had come back, Claude had more than
+once wondered whether he took too much for granted and felt more
+at home here than he had any right to feel. The Americans were
+prone, he had observed, to make themselves very much at home, to
+mistake good manners for good-will. He had no right to doubt the
+affection of the Jouberts, however; that was genuine and
+personal,--not a smooth surface under which almost any shade of
+scorn might lie and laugh . . . was not, in short, the
+treacherous "French politeness" by which one must not let oneself
+be taken in. Merely having seen the season change in a country
+gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. And,
+anyway, he wasn't a tourist. He was here on legitimate business.
+
+Claude's sprained ankle was still badly swollen. Madame Joubert
+was sure he ought not to move about on it at all, begged him to
+sit in the garden all day and nurse it. But the surgeon at the
+front had told him that if he once stopped walking, he would have
+to go to the hospital. So, with the help of his host's best
+holly-wood cane, he limped out into the forest every day. This
+afternoon he was tempted to go still farther. Madame Joubert had
+told him about some caves at the other end of the wood,
+underground chambers where the country people had gone to live in
+times of great misery, long ago, in the English wars. The English
+wars; he could not remember just how far back they were,--but
+long enough to make one feel comfortable. As for him, perhaps he
+would never go home at all. Perhaps, when this great affair was
+over, he would buy a little farm and stay here for the rest of
+his life. That was a project he liked to play with. There was no
+chance for the kind of life he wanted at home, where people were
+always buying and selling, building and pulling down. He had
+begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow
+emotions. That was the way Gerhardt had put it once; and if it
+was true, there was no cure for it. Life was so short that it
+meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by
+something that endured; unless the shadows of individual
+existence came and went against a background that held together.
+While he was absorbed in his day dream of farming in France, his
+companion stirred and rolled over on his elbow.
+
+"You know we are to join the Battalion at A--. They'll be living
+like kings there. Hicks will get so fat he'll drop over on the
+march. Headquarters must have something particularly nasty in
+mind; the infantry is always fed up before a slaughter. But I've
+been thinking; I have some old friends at A--. Suppose we go on
+there a day early, and get them to take us in? It's a fine old
+place, and I ought to go to see them. The son was a fellow
+student of mine at the Conservatoire. He was killed the second
+winter of the war. I used to go up there for the holidays with
+him; I would like to see his mother and sister again. You've no
+objection?"
+
+Claude did not answer at once. He lay squinting off at the beech
+trees, without moving. "You always avoid that subject with me,
+don't you?" he said presently.
+
+"What subject?"
+
+"Oh, anything to do with the Conservatoire, or your profession."
+
+"I haven't any profession at present. I'll never go back to the
+violin."
+
+"You mean you couldn't make up for the time you'll lose?"
+
+Gerhardt settled his back against a rock and got out his pipe.
+"That would be difficult; but other things would be harder. I've
+lost much more than time."
+
+"Couldn't you have got exemption, one way or another?"
+
+"I might have. My friends wanted to take it up and make a test
+case of me. But I couldn't stand for it. I didn't feel I was a
+good enough violinist to admit that I wasn't a man. I often wish
+I had been in Paris that summer when the war broke out; then I
+would have gone into the French army on the first impulse, with
+the other students, and it would have been better."
+
+David paused and sat puffing at his pipe. Just then a soft
+movement stirred the brakes on the hillside. A little barefoot
+girl stood there, looking about. She had heard voices, but at
+first did not see the uniforms that blended with the yellow and
+brown of the wood. Then she saw the sun shining on two heads; one
+square, and amber in colour,--the other reddish bronze, long and
+narrow. She took their friendliness for granted and came down the
+hill, stopping now and again to pick up shiny horse chestnuts and
+pop them into a sack she was dragging. David called to her and
+asked her whether the nuts were good to eat.
+
+"Oh, non!" she exclaimed, her face expressing the liveliest
+terror, "pour les cochons!" These inexperienced Americans might
+eat almost anything. The boys laughed and gave her some pennies,
+"pour les cochons aussi." She stole about the edge of the wood,
+stirring among the leaves for nuts, and watching the two
+soldiers.
+
+Gerhardt knocked out his pipe and began to fill it again. "I went
+home to see my mother in May, of 1914. I wasn't here when the war
+broke out. The Conservatoire closed at once, so I arranged a
+concert tour in the States that winter, and did very well. That
+was before all the little Russians went over, and the field
+wasn't so crowded. I had a second season, and that went well. But
+I was getting more nervous all the time; I was only half there."
+He smoked thoughtfully, sitting with folded arms, as if he were
+going over a succession of events or states of feeling. "When my
+number was drawn, I reported to see what I could do about getting
+out; I took a look at the other fellows who were trying to
+squirm, and chucked it. I've never been sorry. Not long
+afterward, my violin was smashed, and my career seemed to go
+along with it."
+
+Claude asked him what he meant.
+
+"While I was at Camp Dix, I had to play at one of the
+entertainments. My violin, a Stradivarius, was in a vault in New
+York. I didn't need it for that concert, any more than I need it
+at this minute; yet I went to town and brought it out. I was
+taking it up from the station in a military car, and a drunken
+taxi driver ran into us. I wasn't hurt, but the violin, lying
+across my knees, was smashed into a thousand pieces. I didn't
+know what it meant then; but since, I've seen so many beautiful
+old things smashed . . . I've become a fatalist."
+
+Claude watched his brooding head against the grey flint rock.
+
+"You ought to have kept out of the whole thing. Any army man
+would say so."
+
+David's head went back against the boulder, and he threw one of
+the, chestnuts lightly into the air. "Oh, one violinist more or
+less doesn't matter! But who is ever going back to anything?
+That's what I want to know!"
+
+Claude felt guilty; as if David must have guessed what apostasy
+had been going on in his own mind this afternoon. "You don't
+believe we are going to get out of this war what we went in for,
+do you?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Absolutely not," the other replied with cool indifference.
+
+"Then I certainly don't see what you're here for!"
+
+"Because in 1917 I was twenty-four years old, and able to bear
+arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what
+for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the
+world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I
+was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that
+nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes,
+though, I think something must . . . . Nothing we expect, but
+something unforeseen." He paused and shut his eyes. "You remember
+in the old mythology tales how, when the sons of the gods were
+born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele
+I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the
+young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the
+world . . . something Olympian. I'd like to know. I think I shall
+know. Since I've been over here this time, I've come to believe
+in immortality. Do you?"
+
+Claude was confused by this quiet question. "I hardly know. I've
+never been able to make up my mind."
+
+"Oh, don't bother about it! If it comes to you, it comes. You
+don't have to go after it. I arrived at it in quite the same way
+I used to get things in art,--knowing them and living on them
+before I understood them. Such ideas used to seem childish to
+me." Gerhardt sprang up. "Now, have I told you what you want to
+know about my case?" He looked down at Claude with a curious
+glimmer of amusement and affection. "I'm going to stretch my
+legs. It's four o'clock."
+
+He disappeared among the red pine stems, where the sunlight made
+a rose-colored lake, as it used to do in the summer . . . as it
+would do in all the years to come, when they were not there to
+see it, Claude was thinking. He pulled his hat over his eyes and
+went to sleep.
+
+The little girl on the edge of the beech wood left her sack and
+stole quietly down the hill. Sitting in the heather and drawing
+her feet up under her, she stayed still for a long time, and
+regarded with curiosity the relaxed, deep breathing body of the
+American soldier.
+
+The next day was Claude's twenty-fifth birthday, and in honour of
+that event Papa Joubert produced a bottle of old Burgundy from
+his cellar, one of a few dozens he had laid in for great
+occasions when he was a young man.
+
+During that week of idleness at Madame Joubert's, Claude often
+thought that the period of happy "youth," about which his old
+friend Mrs. Erlich used to talk, and which he had never
+experienced, was being made up to him now. He was having his
+youth in France. He knew that nothing like this would ever come
+again; the fields and woods would never again be laced over with
+this hazy enchantment. As he came up the village street in the
+purple evening, the smell of wood-smoke from the chimneys went to
+his head like a narcotic, opened the pores of his skin, and
+sometimes made the tears come to his eyes. Life had after all
+turned out well for him, and everything had a noble significance.
+The nervous tension in which he had lived for years now seemed
+incredible to him . . . absurd and childish, when he thought of
+it at all. He did not torture himself with recollections. He was
+beginning over again.
+
+One night he dreamed that he was at home; out in the ploughed
+fields, where he could see nothing but the furrowed brown earth,
+stretching from horizon to horizon. Up and down it moved a boy,
+with a plough and two horses. At first he thought it was his
+brother Ralph; but on coming nearer, he saw it was himself,--and
+he was full of fear for this boy. Poor Claude, he would never,
+never get away; he was going to miss everything! While he was
+struggling to speak to Claude, and warn him, he awoke.
+
+In the years when he went to school in Lincoln, he was always
+hunting for some one whom he could admire without reservations;
+some one he could envy, emulate, wish to be. Now he believed that
+even then he must have had some faint image of a man like
+Gerhardt in his mind. It was only in war times that their paths
+would have been likely to cross; or that they would have had
+anything to do together . . . any of the common interests that
+make men friends.
+
+ XIV
+
+Gerhardt and Claude Wheeler alighted from a taxi before the open
+gates of a square-roofed, solid-looking house, where all the
+shutters on the front were closed, and the tops of many trees
+showed above the garden wall. They crossed a paved court and
+rang at the door. An old valet admitted the young men, and took
+them through a wide hall to the salon, which opened on the
+garden. Madame and Mademoiselle would be down very soon. David
+went to one of the long windows and looked out. "They have kept
+it up, in spite of everything. It was always lovely here."
+
+The garden was spacious,--like a little park. On one side was a
+tennis court, on the other a fountain, with a pool and
+water-lilies. The north wall was hidden by ancient yews; on the
+south two rows of plane trees, cut square, made a long arbour. At
+the back of the garden there were fine old lindens. The gravel
+walks wound about beds of gorgeous autumn flowers; in the rose
+garden, small white roses were still blooming, though the leaves
+were already red.
+
+Two ladies entered the drawing-room. The mother was short, plump,
+and rosy, with strong, rather masculine features and yellowish
+white hair. The tears flashed into her eyes as David bent to kiss
+her hand, and she embraced him and touched both his cheeks with
+her lips.
+
+"Et vous, vous aussi!" she murmured, touching the coat of his
+uniform with her fingers. There was but a moment of softness. She
+gathered herself up like an old general, Claude thought, as he
+stood watching the group from the window, drew her daughter
+forward, and asked David whether he recognized the little girl
+with whom he used to play. Mademoiselle Claire was not at all
+like her mother; slender, dark, dressed in a white costume de
+tennis and an apple green hat with black ribbons, she looked very
+modern and casual and unconcerned. She was already telling David
+she was glad he had arrived early, as now they would be able to
+have a game of tennis before tea. Maman would bring her knitting
+to the garden and watch them. This last suggestion relieved
+Claude's apprehension that he might be left alone with his
+hostess. When David called him and presented him to the ladies,
+Mlle. Claire gave him a quick handshake, and said she would be
+very glad to try him out on the court as soon as she had beaten
+David. They would find tennis shoes in their room,--a collection
+of shoes, for the feet of all nations; her brother's, some that
+his Russian friend had forgotten when he hurried off to be
+mobilized, and a pair lately left by an English officer who was
+quartered on them. She and her mother would wait in the garden.
+She rang for the old valet.
+
+The Americans found themselves in a large room upstairs, where
+two modern iron beds stood out conspicuous among heavy mahogany
+bureaus and desks and dressing-tables, stuffed chairs and velvet
+carpets and dull red brocade window hangings. David went at once
+into the little dressing-room and began to array himself for the
+tennis court. Two suits of flannels and a row of soft shirts hung
+there on the wall.
+
+"Aren't you going to change?" he asked, noticing that Claude
+stood stiff and unbending by the window, looking down into the
+garden. "Why should I?" said Claude scornfully. "I don't play
+tennis. I never had a racket in my hand."
+
+"Too bad. She used to play very well, though she was only a
+youngster then." Gerhardt was regarding his legs in trousers two
+inches too short for him. "How everything has changed, and yet
+how everything is still the same! It's like coming back to places
+in dreams."
+
+"They don't give you much time to dream, I should say!" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"Fortunately!"
+
+"Explain to the girl that I don't play, will you? I'll be down
+later."
+
+"As you like."
+
+Claude stood in the window, watching Gerhardt's bare head and
+Mlle. Claire's green hat and long brown arm go bounding about
+over the court.
+
+When Gerhardt came to change before tea, he found his fellow
+officer standing before his bag, which was open, but not
+unpacked.
+
+"What's the matter? Feeling shellshock again?"
+
+"Not exactly." Claude bit his lip. "The fact is, Dave, I don't
+feel just comfortable here. Oh, the people are all right But
+I'm out of place. I'm going to pull out and get a billet
+somewhere else, and let you visit your friends in peace. Why
+should I be here? These people don't keep a hotel."
+
+"They very nearly do, from what they've been telling me. They've
+had a string of Scotch and English quartered on them. They like
+it, too,-or have the good manners to pretend they do. Of course,
+you'll do as you like, but you'll hurt their feelings and put me
+in an awkward position. To be frank, I don't see how you can go
+away without being distinctly rude."
+
+Claude stood looking down at the contents of his bag in an
+irresolute attitude. Catching a glimpse of his face in one of the
+big mirrors, Gerhardt saw that he looked perplexed and miserable.
+His flash of temper died, and he put his hand lightly on his
+friend's shoulder.
+
+"Come on, Claude! This is too absurd. You don't even have to
+dress, thanks to your uniform,--and you don't have to talk, since
+you're not supposed to know the language. I thought you'd like
+coming here. These people have had an awfully rough time; can't
+you admire their pluck?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do! It's awkward for me, though." Claude pulled off
+his coat and began to brush his hair vigorously. "I guess I've
+always been more afraid of the French than of the Germans. It
+takes courage to stay, you understand. I want to run."
+
+"But why? What makes you want to?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! Something in the house, in the atmosphere."
+
+"Something disagreeable?"
+
+"No. Something agreeable."
+
+David laughed. "Oh, you'll get over that!"
+
+They had tea in the garden, English fashion--English tea, too,
+Mlle. Claire informed them, left by the English officers.
+
+At dinner a third member of the family was introduced, a little
+boy with a cropped head and big black eyes. He sat on Claude's
+left, quiet and shy in his velvet jacket, though he followed the
+conversation eagerly, especially when it touched upon his brother
+Rene, killed at Verdun in the second winter of the war. The
+mother and sister talked about him as if he were living, about
+his letters and his plans, and his friends at the Conservatoire
+and in the Army. Mlle. Claire told Gerhardt news of all the girl
+students he had known in Paris: how this one was singing for the
+soldiers; another, when she was nursing in a hospital which was
+bombed in an air raid, had carried twenty wounded men out of the
+burning building, one after another, on her back, like sacks of
+flour. Alice, the dancer, had gone into the English Red Cross and
+learned English. Odette had married a New Zealander, an officer
+who was said to be a cannibal; it was well known that his tribe
+had eaten two Auvergnat missionaries. There was a great deal more
+that Claude could not understand, but he got enough to see that
+for these women the war was France, the war was life, and
+everything that went into it. To be alive, to be conscious and
+have one's faculties, was to be in the war.
+
+After dinner, when they went into the salon, Madame Fleury asked
+David whether he would like to see Rene's violin again, and
+nodded to the little boy. He slipped away and returned carrying
+the case, which he placed on the table. He opened it carefully
+and took off the velvet cloth, as if this was his peculiar
+office, then handed the instrument to Gerhardt.
+
+David turned it over under the candles, telling Madame Fleury
+that he would have known it anywhere, Rene's wonderful Amati,
+almost too exquisite in tone for the concert hall, like a woman
+who is too beautiful for the stage. The family stood round and
+listened to his praise with evident satisfaction. Madame Fleury
+told him that Lucien was tres serieux with his music, that his
+master was well pleased with him, and when his hand was a little
+larger he would be allowed to play upon Rene's violin. Claude
+watched the little boy as he stood looking at the instrument in
+David's hands; in each of his big black eyes a candle flame was
+reflected, as if some steady fire were actually burning there.
+
+"What is it, Lucien?" his mother asked.
+
+"If Monsieur David would be so good as to play before I must go
+to bed--" he murmured entreatingly.
+
+"But, Lucien, I am a soldier now. I have not worked at all for
+two years. The Amati would think it had fallen into the hands of
+a Boche."
+
+Lucien smiled. "Oh, no! It is too intelligent for that. A little,
+please," and he sat down on a footstool before the sofa in
+confident anticipation.
+
+Mlle. Claire went to the piano. David frowned and began to tune
+the violin. Madame Fleury called the old servant and told him to
+light the sticks that lay in the fireplace. She took the
+arm-chair at the right of the hearth and motioned Claude to a
+seat on the left. The little boy kept his stool at the other end
+of the room. Mlle. Claire began the orchestral introduction to
+the Saint-Saens concerto.
+
+"Oh, not that!" David lifted his chin and looked at her in
+perplexity.
+
+She made no reply, but played on, her shoulders bent forward.
+Lucien drew his knees up under his chin and shivered. When the
+time came, the violin made its entrance. David had put it back
+under his chin mechanically, and the instrument broke into that
+suppressed, bitter melody.
+
+They played for a long while. At last David stopped and wiped his
+forehead. "I'm afraid I can't do anything with the third
+movement, really."
+
+"Nor can I. But that was the last thing Rene played on it, the
+night before he went away, after his last leave." She began
+again, and David followed. Madame Fleury sat with half-closed
+eyes, looking into the fire. Claude, his lips compressed, his
+hands on his knees, was watching his friend's back. The music was
+a part of his own confused emotions. He was torn between generous
+admiration, and bitter, bitter envy. What would it mean to be
+able to do anything as well as that, to have a hand capable of
+delicacy and precision and power? If he had been taught to do
+anything at all, he would not be sitting here tonight a wooden
+thing amongst living people. He felt that a man might have been
+made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it;
+tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied. If one were born into this
+world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and
+upset things, break and destroy, all one's life.
+
+Gerhardt wrapped the violin up in its cloth. The little boy
+thanked him and carried it away. Madame Fleury and her daughter
+wished their guests goodnight.
+
+David said he was warm, and suggested going into the garden to
+smoke before they went to bed. He opened one of the long windows
+and they stepped out on the terrace. Dry leaves were rustling
+down on the walks; the yew trees made a solid wall, blacker than
+the darkness. The fountain must have caught the starlight; it was
+the only shining thing,--a little clear column of twinkling
+silver. The boys strolled in silence to the end of the walk.
+
+"I guess you'll go back to your profession, all right," Claude
+remarked, in the unnatural tone in which people sometimes speak
+of things they know nothing about.
+
+"Not I. Of course, I had to play for them. Music has always been
+like a religion in this house. Listen," he put up his hand; far
+away the regular pulsation of the big guns sounded through the
+still night. "That's all that matters now. It has killed
+everything else."
+
+"I don't believe it." Claude stopped for a moment by the edge of
+the fountain, trying to collect his thoughts. "I don't believe it
+has killed anything. It has only scattered things." He glanced
+about hurriedly at the sleeping house, the sleeping garden, the
+clear, starry sky not very far overhead. "It's men like you that
+get the worst of it," he broke out. "But as for me, I never knew
+there was anything worth living for, till this war came on.
+Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition."
+
+"You'll admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the
+young," said David drily.
+
+"Maybe so; all the same . . ."
+
+Claude pursued the argument to himself long after they were in
+their luxurious beds and David was asleep. No battlefield or
+shattered country he had seen was as ugly as this world would be
+if men like his brother Bayliss controlled it altogether. Until
+the war broke out, he had supposed they did control it; his
+boyhood had been clouded and enervated by that belief. The
+Prussians had believed it, too, apparently. But the event had
+shown that there were a great many people left who cared about
+something else.
+
+The intervals of the distant artillery fire grew shorter, as if
+the big guns were tuning up, choking to get something out. Claude
+sat up in his bed and listened. The sound of the guns had from
+the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of
+confidence and safety; tonight he knew why. What they said was,
+that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had
+made to keep their dreams. He knew the future of the world was
+safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a
+strait-jacket,--cunning and prudence would never have it to
+themselves. Why, that little boy downstairs, with the candlelight
+in his eyes, when it came to the last cry, as they said, could
+"carry on" for ever! Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful
+and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As
+long as that was true, and now he knew it was true--he had come
+all this way to find out--he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did
+he envy David. He would give his own adventure for no man's. On
+the edge of sleep it seemed to glimmer, like the clear column of
+the fountain, like the new moon,--alluring, half-averted, the
+bright face of danger.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+When Claude and David rejoined their Battalion on the 20th of
+September, the end of the war looked as far away as ever. The
+collapse of Bulgaria was unknown to the American army, and their
+acquaintance with European affairs was so slight that this would
+have meant very little to them had they heard of it. The German
+army still held the north and east of France, and no one could
+say how much vitality was left in that sprawling body.
+
+The Battalion entrained at Arras. Lieutenant Colonel Scott had
+orders to proceed to the railhead, and then advance on foot into
+the Argonne.
+
+The cars were crowded, and the railway journey was long and
+fatiguing. They detrained at night, in the rain, at what the men
+said seemed to be the jumping off place. There was no town, and
+the railway station had been bombed the day before, by an air
+fleet out to explode artillery ammunition. A mound of brick, and
+holes full of water told where it had been. The Colonel sent
+Claude out with a patrol to find some place for the men to sleep.
+The patrol came upon a field of straw stacks, and at the end of it
+found a black farmhouse.
+
+Claude went up and hammered on the door. Silence. He kept
+hammering and calling, "The Americans are here!" A shutter
+opened. The farmer stuck his head out and demanded gruffly what
+was wanted; "What now?"
+
+Claude explained in his best French that an American battalion
+had just come in; might they sleep in his field if they did not
+destroy his stacks?
+
+"Sure," replied the farmer, and shut the window.
+
+That one word, coming out of the dark in such an unpromising
+place, had a cheering effect upon the patrol, and upon the men,
+when it was repeated to them. "Sure, eh?" They kept laughing over
+it as they beat about the field and dug into the straw. Those who
+couldn't burrow into a stack lay down in the muddy stubble. They
+were asleep before they could feel sorry for themselves.
+
+The farmer came out to offer his stable to the officers, and to
+beg them not on any account to make a light. They had never been
+bothered here by air raids until yesterday, and it must be
+because the Americans were coming and were sending in ammunition.
+
+Gerhardt, who was called to talk to him, told the farmer the
+Colonel must study his map, and for that the man took them down
+into the cellar, where the children were asleep. Before he lay
+down on the straw bed his orderly had made for him, the Colonel
+kept telling names and kilometers off on his fingers. For
+officers like Colonel Scott the names of places constituted one
+of the real hardships of the war. His mind worked slowly, but it
+was always on his job, and he could go without sleep for more
+hours together than any of his officers. Tonight he had scarcely
+lain down, when a sentinel brought in a runner with a message.
+The Colonel had to go into the cellar again to read it. He was to
+meet Colonel Harvey at Prince Joachim farm, as early as possible
+tomorrow morning. The runner would act as guide.
+
+The Colonel sat with his eye on his watch, and interrogated the
+messenger about the road and the time it would take to get over
+the ground. "What's Fritz's temper up here, generally speaking?"
+
+"That's as it happens, sir. Sometimes we nab a night patrol of a
+dozen or fifteen and send them to the rear under a one-man guard.
+Then, again, a little bunch of Heinies will fight like the devil.
+They say it depends on what part of Germany they come from; the
+Bavarians and Saxons are the bravest."
+
+Colonel Scott waited for an hour, and then went about, shaking
+his sleeping officers.
+
+"Yes, sir." Captain Maxey sprang to his feet as if he had been
+caught in a disgraceful act. He called his sergeants, and they
+began to beat the men up out of the strawstacks and puddles. In
+half an hour they were on the road.
+
+This was the Battalion's first march over really bad roads, where
+walking was a question of pulling and balancing. They were soon
+warm, at any rate; it kept them sweating. The weight of their
+equipment was continually thrown in the wrong place. Their wet
+clothing dragged them back, their packs got twisted and cut into
+their shoulders Claude and Hicks began wondering to each other
+what it must have been like in the real mud, up about Ypres and
+Passchendaele, two years ago. Hicks had been training at Arras
+last week, where a lot of Tommies were "resting" in the same way,
+and he had tales to tell.
+
+The Battalion got to Joachim farm at nine o'clock. Colonel Harvey
+had not yet come up, but old Julius Caesar was there with his
+engineers, and he had a hot breakfast ready for them. At six
+o'clock in the evening they took the road again, marching until
+daybreak, with short rests. During the night they captured two
+Hun patrols, a bunch of thirty men. At the halt for breakfast,
+the prisoners wanted to make themselves useful, but the cook said
+they were so filthy the smell of them would make a stew go bad.
+They were herded off by themselves, a good distance from the grub
+line.
+
+It was Gerhardt, of course, who had to go over and question them.
+Claude felt sorry for the prisoners; they were so willing to tell
+all they knew, and so anxious to make themselves agreeable; began
+talking about their relatives in America, and said brightly that
+they themselves were going over at once, after the war--seemed to
+have no doubt that everybody would be glad to see them!
+
+They begged Gerhardt to be allowed to do something. Couldn't they
+carry the officers' equipment on the march? No, they were too
+buggy; they might relieve the sanitary squad. Oh, that they would
+gladly do, Herr Offiizier!
+
+The plan was to get to Rupprecht trench and take it before
+nightfall. It was easy taking--empty of everything but vermin and
+human discards; a dozen crippled and sick, left for the enemy to
+dispose of, and several half-witted youths who ought to have been
+locked up in some institution. Fritz had known what it meant when
+his patrols did not come back. He had evacuated, leaving behind
+his hopelessly diseased, and as much filth as possible. The
+dugouts were fairly dry, but so crawling with vermin that the
+Americans preferred to sleep in the mud, in the open.
+
+After supper the men fell on their packs and began to lighten
+them, throwing away all that was not necessary, and much that
+was. Many of them abandoned the new overcoats that had been
+served out at the railhead; others cut off the skirts and made
+the coats into ragged jackets. Captain Maxey was horrified at
+these depredations, but the Colonel advised him to shut his eyes.
+"They've got hard going before them; let them travel light. If
+they'd rather stand the cold, they've got a right to choose."
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+The Battalion had twenty-four hours' rest at Rupprecht trench,
+and then pushed on for four days and nights, stealing trenches,
+capturing patrols, with only a few hours' sleep,--snatched by the
+roadside while their food was being prepared. They pushed hard
+after a retiring foe, and almost outran themselves. They did
+outrun their provisions; on the fourth night, when they fell
+upon a farm that had been a German Headquarters, the supplies
+that were to meet them there had not come up, and they went to
+bed supperless.
+
+This farmhouse, for some reason called by the prisoners Frau
+Hulda farm, was a nest of telephone wires; hundreds of them ran
+out through the walls, in all directions. The Colonel cut those
+he could find, and then put a guard over the old peasant who had
+been left in charge of the house, suspecting that he was in the
+pay of the enemy.
+
+At last Colonel Scott got into the Headquarters bed, large and
+lumpy,--the first one he had seen since he left Arras. He had not
+been asleep more than two hours, when a runner arrived with
+orders from the Regimental Colonel. Claude was in a bed in the
+loft, between Gerhardt and Bruger. He felt somebody shaking him,
+but resolved that he wouldn't be disturbed and went on placidly
+sleeping. Then somebody pulled his hair,--so hard that he sat up.
+Captain Maxey was standing over the bed.
+
+"Come along, boys. Orders from Regimental Headquarters. The
+Battalion is to split here. Our Company is to go on four
+kilometers tonight, and take the town of Beaufort."
+
+Claude rose. "The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey,
+and they had no supper."
+
+"That can't be helped. Tell them we are to be in Beaufort for
+breakfast."
+
+Claude and Gerhardt went out to the barn and roused Hicks and his
+pal, Dell Able. The men were asleep in dry straw, for the first
+time in ten days. They were completely worn out, lost to time and
+place. Many of them were already four thousand miles away,
+scattered among little towns and farms on the prairie. They were
+a miserable looking lot as they got together, stumbling about in
+the dark.
+
+After the Colonel had gone over the map with Captain Maxey, he
+came out and saw the Company assembled. He wasn't going with
+them, he told them, but he expected them to give a good account
+of themselves. Once in Beaufort, they would have a week's rest;
+sleep under cover, and live among people for awhile.
+
+The men took the road, some with their eyes shut, trying to make
+believe they were still asleep, trying to have their agreeable
+dreams over again, as they marched. They did not really waken up
+until the advance challenged a Hun patrol, and sent it back to
+the Colonel under a one-man guard. When they had advanced two
+kilometers, they found the bridge blown up. Claude and Hicks went
+in one direction to look for a ford, Bruger and Dell Able in the
+other, and the men lay down by the roadside and slept heavily.
+Just at dawn they reached the outskirts of the village, silent
+and still.
+
+Captain Maxey had no information as to how many Germans might be
+left in the town. They had occupied it ever since the beginning
+of the war, and had used it as a rest camp. There had never been
+any fighting there.
+
+At the first house on the road, the Captain stopped and pounded.
+No answer.
+
+"We are Americans, and must see the people of the house. If you
+don't open, we must break the door."
+
+A woman's voice called; "There is nobody here. Go away, please,
+and take your men away. I am sick."
+
+The Captain called Gerhardt, who began to explain and reassure
+through the door. It opened a little way, and an old woman in a
+nightcap peeped out. An old man hovered behind her. She gazed in
+astonishment at the officers, not understanding. These were the
+first soldiers of the Allies she had ever seen. She had heard the
+Germans talk about Americans, but thought it was one of their
+lies, she said. Once convinced, she let the officers come in and
+replied to their questions.
+
+No, there were no Boches left in her house. They had got orders
+to leave day before yesterday, and had blown up the bridge. They
+were concentrating somewhere to the east. She didn't know how
+many were still in the village, nor where they were, but she
+could tell the Captain where they had been. Triumphantly she
+brought out a map of the town--lost, she said with a meaning
+smile, by a German officer--on which the billets were marked.
+
+With this to guide them, Captain Maxey and his men went on up the
+street. They took eight prisoners in one cellar, seventeen in
+another. When the villagers saw the prisoners bunched together in
+the square, they came out of their houses and gave information.
+This cleaning up, Bert Fuller remarked, was like taking fish
+from the Platte River when the water was low, simply pailing them
+out! There was no sport in it.
+
+At nine o'clock the officers were standing together in the square
+before the church, checking off on the map the houses that had
+been searched. The men were drinking coffee, and eating fresh
+bread from a baker's shop. The square was full of people who had
+come out to see for themselves. Some believed that deliverance
+had come, and others shook their heads and held back, suspecting
+another trick. A crowd of children were running about, making
+friends with the soldiers. One little girl with yellow curls and
+a clean white dress had attached herself to Hicks, and was eating
+chocolate out of his pocket. Gerhardt was bargaining with the
+baker for another baking of bread. The sun was shining, for a
+change,--everything was looking cheerful. This village seemed to
+be swarming with girls; some of them were pretty, and all were
+friendly. The men who had looked so haggard and forlorn when dawn
+overtook them at the edge of the town, began squaring their
+shoulders and throwing out their chests. They were dirty and
+mud-plastered, but as Claude remarked to the Captain, they
+actually looked like fresh men.
+
+Suddenly a shot rang out above the chatter, and an old woman in a
+white cap screamed and tumbled over on the pavement,--rolled
+about, kicking indecorously with both hands and feet. A second
+crack,--the little girl who stood beside Hicks, eating chocolate,
+threw out her hands, ran a few steps, and fell, blood and brains
+oozing out in her yellow hair. The people began screaming and
+running. The Americans looked this way and that; ready to dash,
+but not knowing where to go. Another shot, and Captain Maxey fell
+on one knee, blushed furiously and sprang up, only to fall
+again,--ashy white, with the leg of his trousers going red.
+
+"There it is, to the left!" Hicks shouted, pointing. They saw
+now. From a closed house, some distance down a street off the
+square, smoke was coming. It hung before one of the upstairs
+windows. The Captain's orderly dragged him into a wineshop.
+Claude and David, followed by the men, ran down the street and
+broke in the door. The two officers went through the rooms on the
+first floor, while Hicks and his lot made straight for an
+enclosed stairway at the back of the house. As they reached the
+foot of the stairs, they were met by a volley of rifle shots, and
+two of the men tumbled over. Four Germans were stationed at the
+head of the steps.
+
+The Americans scarcely knew whether their bullets or their
+bayonets got to the Huns first; they were not conscious of going
+up, till they were there. When Claude and David reached the
+landing, the squad were wiping their bayonets, and four grey
+bodies were piled in the corner.
+
+Bert Fuller and Dell Able ran down the narrow hallway and threw
+open the door into the room on the street. Two shots, and Dell
+came back with his jaw shattered and the blood spouting from the
+left side of his neck. Gerhardt caught him, and tried to close
+the artery with his fingers.
+
+"How many are in there, Bert?" Claude called.
+
+"I couldn't see. Look out, sir! You can't get through that door
+more than two at a time!"
+
+The door still stood open, at the end of the corridor. Claude
+went down the steps until he could sight along the floor of the
+passage, into the front room. The shutters were closed in there,
+and the sunlight came through the slats. In the middle of the
+floor, between the door and the windows, stood a tall chest of
+drawers, with a mirror attached to the top. In the narrow space
+between the bottom of this piece of furniture and the floor, he
+could see a pair of boots. It was possible there was but one man
+in the room, shooting from behind his movable fort,--though there
+might be others hidden in the corners.
+
+"There's only one fellow in there, I guess. He's shooting from
+behind a big dresser in the middle of the room. Come on, one of
+you, we'll have to go in and get him."
+
+Willy Katz, the Austrian boy from the Omaha packing house,
+stepped up and stood beside him.
+
+"Now, Willy, we'll both go in at once; you jump to the right, and
+I to the left,--and one of us will jab him. He can't shoot both
+ways at once. Are you ready? All right--Now!"
+
+Claude thought he was taking the more dangerous position himself,
+but the German probably reasoned that the important man would be
+on the right. As the two Americans dashed through the door, he
+fired. Claude caught him in the back with his bayonet, under the
+shoulder blade, but Willy Katz had got the bullet in his brain,
+through one of his blue eyes. He fell, and never stirred. The
+German officer fired his revolver again as he went down, shouting
+in English, English with no foreign accent,
+
+"You swine, go back to Chicago!" Then he began choking with
+blood.
+
+Sergeant Hicks ran in and shot the dying man through the temples.
+Nobody stopped him.
+
+The officer was a tall man, covered with medals and orders; must
+have been very handsome. His linen and his hands were as white as
+if he were going to a ball. On the dresser were the files and
+paste and buffers with which he had kept his nails so pink and
+smooth. A ring with a ruby, beautifully cut, was on his little
+finger. Bert Fuller screwed it off and offered it to Claude. He
+shook his head. That English sentence had unnerved him. Bert held
+the ring out to Hicks, but the Sergeant threw down his revolver
+and broke out:
+
+"Think I'd touch anything of his? That beautiful little girl, and
+my buddy--He's worse than dead, Dell is, worse!" He turned his
+back on his comrades so that they wouldn't see him cry.
+
+"Can I keep it myself, sir?" Bert asked.
+
+Claude nodded. David had come in, and was opening the shutters.
+This officer, Claude was thinking, was a very different sort of
+being from the poor prisoners they had been scooping up like
+tadpoles from the cellars. One of the men picked up a gorgeous
+silk dressing gown from the bed, another pointed to a
+dressing-case full of hammered silver. Gerhardt said it was
+Russian silver; this man must have come from the Eastern front.
+Bert Fuller and Nifty Jones were going through the officer's
+pockets. Claude watched them, and thought they did about right.
+They didn't touch his medals; but his gold cigarette case, and
+the platinum watch still ticking on his wrist,--he wouldn't have
+further need for them. Around his neck, hung by a delicate chain,
+was a miniature case, and in it was a painting,--not, as Bert
+romantically hoped when he opened it, of a beautiful woman, but
+of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes.
+
+Claude studied it, wondering. "It looks like a poet, or
+something. Probably a kid brother, killed at the beginning of the
+war."
+
+Gerhardt took it and glanced at it with a disdainful expression.
+"Probably. There, let him keep it, Bert." He touched Claude on
+the shoulder to call his attention to the inlay work on the
+handle of the officer's revolver.
+
+Claude noticed that David looked at him as if he were very much
+pleased with him,--looked, indeed, as if something pleasant had
+happened in this room; where, God knew, nothing had; where, when
+they turned round, a swarm of black flies was quivering with
+greed and delight over the smears Willy Katz' body had left on
+the floor. Claude had often observed that when David had an
+interesting idea, or a strong twinge of recollection, it made
+him, for the moment, rather heartless. Just now he felt that
+Gerhardt's flash of high spirits was in some way connected with
+him. Was it because he had gone in with Willy? Had David doubted
+his nerve?
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+When the survivors of Company B are old men, and are telling over
+their good days, they will say to each other, "Oh, that week we
+spent at Beaufort!" They will close their eyes and see a little
+village on a low ridge, lost in the forest, overgrown with oak
+and chestnut and black walnut . . . buried in autumn colour, the
+streets drifted deep in autumn leaves, great branches interlacing
+over the roofs of the houses, wells of cool water that tastes of
+moss and tree roots. Up and down those streets they will see
+figures passing; themselves, young and brown and clean-limbed;
+and comrades, long dead, but still alive in that far-away
+village. How they will wish they could tramp again, nights on
+days in the mud and rain, to drag sore feet into their old
+billets at Beaufort! To sink into those wide feather beds and
+sleep the round of the clock while the old women washed and dried
+their clothes for them; to eat rabbit stew and pommes frites in
+the garden,--rabbit stew made with red wine and chestnuts. Oh,
+the days that are no more!
+
+As soon as Captain Maxey and the wounded men had been started on
+their long journey to the rear, carried by the prisoners, the
+whole company turned in and slept for twelve hours--all but
+Sergeant Hicks, who sat in the house off the square, beside the
+body of his chum.
+
+The next day the Americans came to life as if they were new men,
+just created in a new world. And the people of the town came to
+life . . . excitement, change, something to look forward to at
+last! A new flag, le drapeau etoile, floated along with the
+tricolour in the square. At sunset the soldiers stood in
+formation behind it and sang "The Star Spangled Banner" with
+uncovered heads. The old people watched them from the doorways.
+The Americans were the first to bring "Madelon" to Beaufort. The
+fact that the village had never heard this song, that the
+children stood round begging for it, "Chantez-vous la Madelon!"
+made the soldiers realize how far and how long out of the world
+these villagers had been. The German occupation was like a
+deafness which nothing pierced but their own arrogant martial
+airs.
+
+Before Claude was out of bed after his first long sleep, a runner
+arrived from Colonel Scott, notifying him that he was in charge
+of the Company until further orders. The German prisoners had
+buried their own dead and dug graves for the Americans before
+they were sent off to the rear. Claude and David were billeted at
+the edge of the town, with the woman who had given Captain Maxey
+his first information, when they marched in yesterday morning.
+Their hostess told them, at their mid-day breakfast, that the old
+dame who was shot in the square, and the little girl, were to be
+buried this afternoon. Claude decided that the Americans might as
+well have their funeral at the same time. He thought he would ask
+the priest to say a prayer at the graves, and he and David set
+off through the brilliant, rustling autumn sunshine to find the
+Cure's house. It was next the church, with a high-walled garden
+behind it. Over the bell-pull in the outer wall was a card on
+which was written, "Tirez fort."
+
+The priest himself came out to them, an old man who seemed weak
+like his doorbell. He stood in his black cap, holding his hands
+against his breast to keep them from shaking, and looked very old
+indeed,--broken, hopeless, as if he were sick of this world and
+done with it. Nowhere in France had Claude seen a face so sad as
+his. Yes, he would say a prayer. It was better to have Christian
+burial, and they were far from home, poor fellows! David asked
+him whether the German rule had been very oppressive, but the old
+man did not answer clearly, and his hands began to shake so
+uncontrollably over his cassock that they went away to spare him
+embarrassment.
+
+"He seems a little gone in the head, don't you think?" Claude
+remarked.
+
+"I suppose the war has used him up. How can he celebrate mass
+when his hands quiver so?" As they crossed the church steps,
+David touched Claude's arm and pointed into the square. "Look,
+every doughboy has a girl already! Some of them have trotted out
+fatigue caps! I supposed they'd thrown them all away!"
+
+Those who had no caps stood with their helmets under their arms,
+in attitudes of exaggerated gallantry, talking to the women,--who
+seemed all to have errands abroad. Some of them let the boys
+carry their baskets. One soldier was giving a delighted little
+girl a ride on his back.
+
+After the funeral every man in the Company found some sympathetic
+woman to talk to about his fallen comrades. All the garden
+flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put
+on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the
+bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz,
+for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.
+
+The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the
+"Pas Seul" and the "Fausse Trot." They had found an old violin in
+the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it. They danced
+every evening. Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he
+lectured his men at parade. But he realized that he might as well
+scold at the sparrows. Here was a village with several hundred
+women, and only the grandmothers had husbands. All the men were
+in the army; hadn't even been home on leave since the Germans
+first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years
+with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must
+constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable--and
+prolonged. The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam
+in the garden.
+
+"Did you know, sir," said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook
+Claude in the street after parade, "that these lovely girls had
+to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty
+pigs to eat? Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German
+sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like
+convicts! It's sure up to us to give them a good time now."
+
+One couldn't walk out of an evening without meeting loitering
+couples in the dusky streets and lanes. The boys had lost all
+their bashfulness about trying to speak French. They declared
+they could get along in France with three verbs, and all,
+happily, in the first conjugation: manger, aimer, payer,--quite
+enough! They called Beaufort "our town," and they were called
+"our Americans." They were going to come back after the war, and
+marry the girls, and put in waterworks!
+
+"Chez-moi, sir!" Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a
+bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his
+billet. "Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!"
+
+"You know, Wheeler," David remarked one morning as they were
+shaving, "I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he
+knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms."
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Aren't you going to put a stop to them?"
+
+"Not I!" Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly.
+"If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I'll
+interfere. Not otherwise. I've thought the matter over."
+
+"Oh, the girls--" David laughed softly. "Well, it's something to
+acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don't get them at home, do
+they?"
+
+When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there
+was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the
+officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the
+square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was
+dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor
+fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church
+to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.
+
+There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that
+stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves
+and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they
+stayed had told them the story of this grave.
+
+The Cure's niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in
+Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German
+officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian,
+quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and
+she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit
+up half the night in the garden with his head in his
+hands--homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise;
+never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the
+ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated
+Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the
+front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the
+slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a
+story got about that some woman met him at night in the German
+graveyard. The Germans had taken the land behind the church for
+their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Cure's garden. When
+the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie
+Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in
+the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her
+with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the
+Cure. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she
+snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She
+was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.
+
+"And the Bavarian?" Claude asked David later. The story had
+become so complicated he could not follow it.
+
+"He justified her, and promptly. He took the same pistol and shot
+himself through the temples. His orderly, stationed at the edge
+of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward
+them. He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it
+on himself. But the Kommandant couldn't believe that one of his
+officers had so much feeling. He held an enquete, dragged the
+girl's mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that
+they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German
+officer. The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and
+where they began to meet. Though he wasn't very delicate about
+the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw
+Lieutenant Muller shoot himself with his own hand, and the
+Kommandant failed to prove his case. The old Cure had known
+nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military
+court. Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child,
+and was like his daughter. He had a stroke or something, and has
+been like this ever since. The girl's friends forgave her, and
+when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take
+flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an affiche on the
+hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave. Apparently,
+nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than
+poor Marie Louise."
+
+It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely
+little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it.
+There, at the foot of the Cure's garden, was the German cemetery,
+with heavy cement crosses,--some of them with long inscriptions;
+lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant
+Muller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story
+stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he
+hadn't happened to think of before; but the same thing must have
+occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would
+never forget the Cure's hands, his dim, suffering eyes.
+
+Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the
+church, and went back to meet him.
+
+"Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be
+out here." David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.
+
+"So did I. I came out to look for him."
+
+"Oh, I expect he's found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize,
+Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven't got
+engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It's a
+good thing we're pulling out, or we'd have banns and a bunch of
+christenings to look after." "All the same," murmured Claude, "I
+like the women of this country, as far as I've seen them." While
+they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet
+scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his
+first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending
+over her sick soldier.
+
+When they walked back across the square, over the crackling
+leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing "Home, Sweet
+Home," for the last waltz.
+
+"Le dernier baiser," said David. "Well, tomorrow we'll be gone,
+and the chances are we won't come back this way."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+"With us it's always a feast or a famine," the men groaned, when
+they sat down by the road to munch dry biscuit at noon. They had
+covered eighteen miles that morning, and had still seven more to
+go. They were ordered to do the twenty-five miles in eight hours.
+Nobody had fallen out yet, but some of the boys looked pretty
+well wilted. Nifty Jones said he was done for. Sergeant Hicks was
+expostulating with the faint-hearted. He knew that if one man
+fell out, a dozen would.
+
+"If I can do it, you can. It's worse on a fat man like me. This
+is no march to make a fuss about. Why, at Arras I talked with a
+little Tommy from one of those Pal Battalions that got
+slaughtered on the Somme. His battalion marched twenty-five miles
+in six hours, in the heat of July, into certain death. They were
+all kids out of school, not a man of them over five-foot-three,
+called them the 'Bantams.' You've got to hand it to them,
+fellows."
+
+"I'll hand anything to anybody, but I can't go no farther on
+these," Jones muttered, nursing his sore feet.
+
+"Oh, you! We're going to heave you onto the only horse in the
+Company. The officers, they can walk!"
+
+When they got into Battalion lines there was food ready for them,
+but very few wanted it. They drank and lay down in the bushes.
+Claude went at once to Headquarters and found Barclay Owens, of
+the Engineers, with the Colonel, who was smoking and studying his
+maps as usual.
+
+"Glad to see you, Wheeler. Your men ought to be in good shape,
+after a week's rest. Let them sleep now. We've got to move out of
+here before midnight, to relieve two Texas battalions at Moltke
+trench. They've taken the trench with heavy casualties and are
+beat out; couldn't hold it in case of counter-attack. As it's an
+important point, the enemy will try to recover it. I want to get
+into position before daylight, so he won't know fresh troops are
+coming in. As ranking officer, you are in charge of the Company."
+
+"Very well, sir. I'll do my best."
+
+"I'm sure you will. Two machine gun teams are going up with us,
+and some time tomorrow a Missouri battalion comes up to support.
+I'd have had you over here before, but I only got my orders to
+relieve yesterday. We may have to advance under shell fire. The
+enemy has been putting a lot of big stuff over; he wants to cut
+off that trench."
+
+Claude and David got into a fresh shell hole, under the
+half-burned scrub, and fell asleep. They were awakened at dusk by
+heavy artillery fire from the north.
+
+At ten o'clock the Battalion, after a hot meal, began to advance
+through almost impassable country. The guns must have been
+pounding away at the same range for a long while; the ground was
+worked and kneaded until it was soft as dough, though no rain had
+fallen for a week. Barclay Owens and his engineers were throwing
+down a plank road to get food and the ammunition wagons across.
+Big shells were coming over at intervals of twelve minutes. The
+intervals were so regular that it was quite possible to get
+forward without damage. While B Company was pulling through the
+shell area, Colonel Scott overtook them, on foot, his orderly
+leading his horse.
+
+"Know anything about that light over there, Wheeler?" he asked.
+"Well, it oughtn't to be there. Come along and see."
+
+The light was a mere match-head down in the ground, Claude hadn't
+noticed it before. He followed the Colonel, and when they reached
+the spark they found three officers of A Company crouching in a
+shell crater, covered with a piece of sheet-iron.
+
+"Put out that light," called the Colonel sharply. "What's the
+matter, Captain Brace?"
+
+A young man rose quickly. "I'm waiting for the water, sir. It's
+coming up on mules, in petrol cases, and I don't want to get
+separated from it. The ground's so bad here the drivers are
+likely to get lost."
+
+"Don't wait more than twenty minutes. You must get up and take
+your position on time, that's the important thing, water or no
+water."
+
+As the Colonel and Claude hurried back to overtake the Company,
+five big shells screamed over them in rapid succession. "Run,
+sir," the orderly called. "They're getting on to us; they've
+shortened the range."
+
+"That light back there was just enough to give them an idea," the
+Colonel muttered.
+
+The bad ground continued for about a mile, and then the advance
+reached Headquarters, behind the eighth trench of the great
+system of trenches. It was an old farmhouse which the Germans had
+made over with reinforced concrete, lining it within and without,
+until the walls were six feet thick and almost shell-proof, like
+a pill-box. The Colonel sent his orderly to enquire about A
+Company. A young Lieutenant came to the door of the farmhouse.
+
+"A Company is ready to go into position, sir. I brought them
+up." "Where is Captain Brace, Lieutenant?"
+
+"He and both our first lieutenants were killed, Colonel. Back in
+that hole. A shell fell on them not five minutes after you were
+talking to them."
+
+"That's bad. Any other damage?"
+
+"Yes, sir. There was a cook wagon struck at the same time; the
+first one coming along Julius Caesar's new road. The driver was
+killed, and we had to shoot the horses. Captain Owens, he near
+got scalded with the stew."
+
+The Colonel called in the officers one after another and
+discussed their positions with them.
+
+"Wheeler," he said when Claude's turn came, "you know your map?
+You've noticed that sharp loop in the front trench, in H 2; the
+Boar's Head, I believe they call it. It's a sort of spear point
+that reaches out toward the enemy, and it will be a hot place to
+hold. If I put your company in there, do you think you can do the
+Battalion credit in case of a counter attack?"
+
+Claude said he thought so.
+
+"It's the nastiest bit of the line to hold, and you can tell your
+men I pay them a compliment when I put them there."
+
+"All right, sir. They'll appreciate it."
+
+The Colonel bit off the end of a fresh cigar. "They'd better, by
+thunder! If they give way and let the Hun bombers in, it will let
+down the whole line. I'll give you two teams of Georgia machine
+guns to put in that point they call the Boar's Snout. When the
+Missourians come up tomorrow, they'll go in to support you, but
+until then you'll have to take care of the loop yourselves. I've
+got an awful lot of trench to hold, and I can't spare you any
+more men."
+
+The Texas men whom the Battalion came up to relieve had been
+living for sixty hours on their iron rations, and on what they
+could pick off the dead Huns. Their supplies had been shelled on
+the way, and nothing had got through to them. When the Colonel
+took Claude and Gerhardt forward to inspect the loop that B
+Company was to hold, they found a wallow, more like a dump heap
+than a trench. The men who had taken the position were almost too
+weak to stand. All their officers had been killed, and a sergeant
+was in command. He apologized for the condition of the loop.
+
+"Sorry to leave such a mess for you to clean up, sir, but we got
+it bad in here. He's been shelling us every night since we drove
+him out. I couldn't ask the men to do anything but hold on."
+
+"That's all right. You beat it, with your boys, quick! My men
+will hand you out some grub as you go back."
+
+The battered defenders of the Boar's Head stumbled past them
+through the darkness into the communication. When the last man
+had filed out, the Colonel sent for Barclay Owens. Claude and
+David tried to feel their way about and get some idea of the
+condition the place was in. The stench was the worst they had yet
+encountered, but it was less disgusting than the flies; when they
+inadvertently touched a dead body, clouds of wet, buzzing flies
+flew up into their faces, into their eyes and nostrils. Under
+their feet the earth worked and moved as if boa constrictors were
+wriggling down there soft bodies, lightly covered. When they had
+found their way up to the Snout they came upon a pile of corpses,
+a dozen or more, thrown one on top of another like sacks of
+flour, faintly discernible in the darkness. While the two
+officers stood there, rumbling, squirting sounds began to come
+from this heap, first from one body, then from another--gases,
+swelling in the liquefying entrails of the dead men. They seemed
+to be complaining to one another; glup, glup, glup.
+
+The boys went back to the Colonel, who was standing at the mouth
+of the communication, and told him there was nothing much to
+report, except that the burying squad was needed badly.
+
+"I expect!" The Colonel shook his head. When Barclay Owens
+arrived, he asked him what could be done here before daybreak.
+The doughty engineer felt his way about as Claude and Gerhardt
+had done; they heard him coughing, and beating off the flies. But
+when he came back he seemed rather cheered than discouraged.
+
+"Give me a gang to get the casualties out, and with plenty of
+quick-lime and concrete I can make this loop all right in four
+hours, sir," he declared.
+
+"I've brought plenty of lime, but where'll you get your
+concrete?"
+
+"The Hun left about fifty sacks of it in the cellar, under your
+Headquarters. I can do better, of course, if I have a few hours
+more for my concrete to dry."
+
+"Go ahead, Captain." The Colonel told Claude and David to bring
+their men up to the communication before light, and hold them
+ready. "Give Owens' cement a chance, but don't let the enemy put
+over any surprise on you."
+
+The shelling began again at daybreak; it was hardest on the rear
+trenches and the three-mile area behind. Evidently the enemy felt
+sure of what he had in Moltke trench; he wanted to cut off
+supplies and possible reinforcements. The Missouri battalion did
+not come up that day, but before noon a runner arrived from their
+Colonel, with information that they were hiding in the wood. Five
+Boche planes had been circling over the wood since dawn,
+signalling to the enemy Headquarters back on Dauphin Ridge; the
+Missourians were sure they had avoided detection by lying close
+in the under-brush. They would come up in the night. Their
+linemen were following the runner, and Colonel Scott would be in
+telephone communication with them in half an hour.
+
+When B Company moved into the Boar's Head at one o'clock in the
+afternoon, they could truthfully say that the prevailing smell
+was now that of quick-lime. The parapet was evenly built up, the
+firing step had been partly restored, and in the Snout there were
+good emplacements for the machine guns. Certain unpleasant
+reminders were still to be found if one looked for them. In the
+Snout a large fat boot stuck stiffly from the side of the trench.
+Captain Ovens explained that the ground sounded hollow in there,
+and the boot probably led back into a dugout where a lot of Hun
+bodies were entombed together. As he was pressed for time, he had
+thought best not to look for trouble. In one of the curves of the
+loop, just at the top of the earth wall, under the sand bags, a
+dark hand reached out; the five fingers, well apart, looked like
+the swollen roots of some noxious weed. Hicks declared that this
+object was disgusting, and during the afternoon he made Nifty
+Jones and Oscar scrape down some earth and make a hump over the
+paw. But there was shelling in the night, and the earth fell
+away.
+
+"Look," said Jones when he wakened his Sergeant. "The first thing
+I seen when daylight come was his old fingers, wigglin' in the
+breeze. He wants air, Heinie does; he won't stay covered."
+
+Hicks got up and re-buried the hand himself, but when he came
+around with Claude on inspection, before breakfast, there were
+the same five fingers sticking out again. The Sergeant's forehead
+puffed up and got red, and he swore that if he found the man who
+played dirty jokes, he'd make him eat this one.
+
+The Colonel sent for Claude and Gerhardt to come to breakfast
+with him. He had been talking by telephone with the Missouri
+officers and had agreed that they should stay back in the bush
+for the present. The continual circling of planes over the wood
+seemed to indicate that the enemy was concerned about the actual
+strength of Moltke trench. It was possible their air scouts had
+seen the Texas men going back,--otherwise, why were they holding
+off?
+
+While the Colonel and the officers were at breakfast, a corporal
+brought in two pigeons he had shot at dawn. One of them carried a
+message under its wing. The Colonel unrolled a strip of paper and
+handed it to Gerhardt.
+
+"Yes, sir, it's in German, but it's code stuff. It's a German
+nursery rhyme. Those reconnoitering planes must have dropped
+scouts on our rear, and they are sending in reports. Of course,
+they can get more on us than the air men can. Here, do you want
+these birds, Dick?"
+
+The boy grinned. "You bet I do, sir! I may get a chance to fry
+'em, later on."
+
+After breakfast the Colonel went to inspect B Company in the
+Boar's Head. He was especially pleased with the advantageous
+placing of the machine guns in the Snout. "I expect you'll have a
+quiet day," he said to the men, "but I wouldn't like to promise
+you a quiet night. You'll have to be very steady in here; if
+Fritz takes this loop, he's got us, you understand."
+
+They had, indeed, a quiet day. Some of the men played cards, and
+Oscar read his Bible. The night, too, began well. But at four
+fifteen everybody was roused by the gas alarm. Gas shells came
+over for exactly half an hour. Then the shrapnel broke loose;
+not the long, whizzing scream of solitary shells, but drum-fire,
+continuous and deafening. A hundred electrical storms seemed
+raging at once, in the air and on the ground. Balls of fire were
+rolling all over the place. The range was a little long for the
+Boar's Head, they were not getting the worst of it; but thirty
+yards back everything was torn to pieces. Claude didn't see how
+anybody could be left alive back there. A single twister had
+killed six of his men at the rear of the loop, where they were
+shovelling to keep the communication clear. Captain Owns' neat
+earthworks were being badly pounded.
+
+Claude and Gerhardt were consulting together when the smoke and
+darkness began to take on the livid colour that announced the
+coming of daybreak. A messenger ran in from the Colonel; the
+Missourians had not yet come up, and his telephone communication
+with them was cut off. He was afraid they had got lost in the
+bombardment. "The Colonel says you are to send two men back to
+bring them up; two men who can take charge if they're stampeded."
+
+When the messenger shouted this order, Gerhardt and Hicks looked
+at each other quickly, and volunteered to go.
+
+Claude hesitated. Hicks and David waited for no further consent;
+they ran down the communication and disappeared.
+
+Claude stood in the smoke that was slowly growing greyer, and
+looked after them with the deepest stab of despair he had ever
+known. Only a man who was bewildered and unfit to be in command
+of other men would have let his best friend and his best officer
+take such a risk. He was standing there under shelter, and his
+two friends were going back through that curtain of flying steel,
+toward the square from which the lost battalion had last
+reported. If he knew them, they would not lose time following the
+maze of trenches; they were probably even now out on the open,
+running straight through the enemy barrage, vaulting trench tops.
+
+Claude turned and went back into the loop. Well, whatever
+happened, he had worked with brave men. It was worth having lived
+in this world to have known such men. Soldiers, when they were in
+a tight place, often made secret propositions to God; and now he
+found himself offering terms: If They would see to it that David
+came back, They could take the price out of him. He. would pay.
+Did They understand?
+
+An hour dragged by. Hard on the nerves, waiting. Up the
+communication came a train with ammunition and coffee for the
+loop. The men thought Headquarters did pretty well to get hot
+food to them through that barrage. A message came up in the
+Colonel's hand:
+
+"Be ready when the barrage stops."
+
+Claude took this up and showed it to the machine gunners in the
+Snout. Turning back, he ran into Hicks, stripped to his shirt and
+trousers, as wet as if he had come out of the river, and splashed
+with blood. His hand was wrapped up in a rag. He put his mouth to
+Claude's ear and shouted: "We found them. They were lost. They're
+coming. Send word to the Colonel."
+
+"Where's Gerhardt?"
+
+"He's coming; bringing them up. God, it's stopped!"
+
+The bombardment ceased with a suddenness that was stupefying. The
+men in the loop gasped and crouched as if they were falling from
+a height. The air, rolling black with smoke and stifling with the
+smell of gases and burning powder, was still as death. The
+silence was like a heavy anaesthetic.
+
+Claude ran back to the Snout to see that the gun teams were
+ready. "Wake up, boys! You know why we're here!"
+
+Bert Fuller, who was up in the look-out, dropped back into the
+trench beside him. "They're coming, sir."
+
+Claude gave the signal to the machine guns. Fire opened all along
+the loop. In a moment a breeze sprang up, and the heavy smoke
+clouds drifted to the rear. Mounting to the firestep, he peered
+over. The enemy was coming on eight deep, on the left of the
+Boar's Head, in long, waving lines that reached out toward the
+main trench. Suddenly the advance was checked. The files of
+running men dropped behind a wrinkle in the earth fifty yards
+forward and did not instantly re-appear. It struck Claude that
+they were waiting for something; he ought to be clever enough to
+know for what, but he was not. The Colonel's line man came up to
+him.
+
+"Headquarters has a runner from the Missourians. They'll be up in
+twenty minutes. The Colonel will put them in here at once. Till
+then you must manage to hold."
+
+"We'll hold. Fritz is behaving queerly. I don't understand his
+tactics . . . "
+
+While he was speaking, everything was explained. The Boar's Snout
+spread apart with an explosion that split the earth, and went up
+in a volcano of smoke and flame. Claude and the Colonel's
+messenger were thrown on their faces. When they got to their
+feet, the Snout was a smoking crater full of dead and dying men.
+The Georgia gun teams were gone.
+
+It was for this that the Hun advance had been waiting behind the
+ridge. The mine under the Snout had been made long ago, probably,
+on a venture, when the Hun held Moltke trench for months without
+molestation. During the last twenty-four hours they had been
+getting their explosives in, reasoning that the strongest
+garrison would be placed there.
+
+Here they were, coming on the run. It was up to the rifles. The
+men who had been knocked down by the shock were all on their feet
+again. They looked at their officer questioningly, as if the
+whole situation had changed. Claude felt they were going soft
+under his eyes. In a moment the Hun bombers would be in on them,
+and they would break. He ran along the trench, pointing over the
+sand bags and shouting, "It's up to you, it's up to you!"
+
+The rifles recovered themselves and began firing, but Claude felt
+they were spongy and uncertain, that their minds were already on
+the way to the rear. If they did anything, it must be quick, and
+their gun-work must be accurate. Nothing but a withering fire
+could check . . . . He sprang to the firestep and then out on the
+parapet. Something instantaneous happened; he had his men in
+hand.
+
+"Steady, steady!" He called the range to the rifle teams behind
+him, and he could see the fire take effect. All along the Hun
+lines men were stumbling and falling. They swerved a little to
+the left; he called the rifles to follow, directing them with his
+voice and with his hands. It was not only that from here he could
+correct the range and direct the fire; the men behind him had
+become like rock. That line of faces below; Hicks, Jones, Fuller,
+Anderson, Oscar . . . . Their eyes never left him. With these men
+he could do anything.
+
+The right of the Hun line swerved out, not more than twenty yards
+from the battered Snout, trying to run to shelter under that pile
+of debris and human bodies. A quick concentration of rifle fire
+depressed it, and the swell came out again toward the left.
+Claude's appearance on the parapet had attracted no attention
+from the enemy at first, but now the bullets began popping about
+him; two rattled on his tin hat, one caught him in the shoulder.
+The blood dripped down his coat, but he felt no weakness. He felt
+only one thing; that he commanded wonderful men. When David came
+up with the supports he might find them dead, but he would find
+them all there. They were there to stay until they were carried
+out to be buried. They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.
+
+The Colonel's twenty minutes must be almost up, he thought. He
+couldn't take his eyes from the front line long enough to look at
+his wrist watch . . . . The men behind him saw Claude sway as if
+he had lost his balance and were trying to recover it. Then he
+plunged, face down, outside the parapet. Hicks caught his foot
+and pulled him back. At the same moment the Missourians ran
+yelling up the communication. They threw their machine guns up on
+the sand bags and went into action without an unnecessary motion.
+
+Hicks and Bert Fuller and Oscar carried Claude forward toward the
+Snout, out of the way of the supports that were pouring in. He
+was not bleeding very much. He smiled at them as if he were going
+to speak, but there was a weak blankness in his eyes. Bert tore
+his shirt open; three clean bullet holes. By the time they looked
+at him again, the smile had gone . . . the look that was Claude
+had faded. Hicks wiped the sweat and smoke from his officer's
+face. "Thank God I never told him," he said. "Thank God for
+that!"
+
+Bert and Oscar knew what Hicks meant. Gerhardt had been blown to
+pieces at his side when they dashed back through the enemy
+barrage to find the Missourians. They were running together
+across the open, not able to see much for smoke. They bumped into
+a section of wire entanglement, left above an old trench. David
+cut round to the right, waving Hicks to follow him. The two were
+not ten yards apart when the shell struck. Then Sergeant Hicks
+ran on alone.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The sun is sinking low, a transport is steaming slowly up the
+narrows with the tide. The decks are covered with brown men. They
+cluster over the superstructure like bees in swarming time. Their
+attitudes are relaxed and lounging. Some look thoughtful, some
+well contented, some are melancholy, and many are indifferent, as
+they watch the shore approaching. They are not the same men who
+went away.
+
+Sergeant Hicks was standing in the stern, smoking, reflecting,
+watching the twinkle of the red sunset upon the cloudy water. It
+is more than a year since he sailed for France. The world has
+changed in that time, and so has he.
+
+Bert Fuller elbowed his way up to the Sergeant. "The doctor says
+Colonel Maxey is dying, He won't live to get off the boat, much
+less to ride in the parade in New York tomorrow."
+
+Hicks shrugged, as if Maxey's pneumonia were no affair of his.
+"Well, we should worry! We've left better officers than him over
+there."
+
+"I'm not saying we haven't. But it seems too bad, when he's so
+strong for fuss and feathers. He's been sending cables about that
+parade for weeks."
+
+"Huh!" Hicks elevated his eyebrows and glanced sidewise in
+disdain. Presently he sputtered, squinting down at the glittering
+water, "Colonel Maxey, anyhow! Colonel for what Claude and
+Gerhardt did, I guess!". Hicks and Bert Fuller have been helping
+to keep the noble fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. They have always
+hung together and are usually quarrelling and grumbling at each
+other when they are off duty. Still, they hang together. They are
+the last of their group. Nifty Jones and Oscar, God only knows
+why, have gone on to the Black Sea.
+
+During the year they were in the Rhine valley, Bert and Hicks
+were separated only once, and that was when Hicks got a two
+weeks' leave and, by dint of persevering and fatiguing travel,
+went to Venice. He had no proper passport, and the consuls and
+officials to whom he had appealed in his difficulties begged him
+to content himself with something nearer. But he said he was
+going to Venice because he had always heard about it. Bert Fuller
+was glad to welcome him back to Coblentz, and gave a "wine party"
+to celebrate his return. They expect to keep an eye on each
+other. Though Bert lives on the Platte and Hicks on the Big Blue,
+the automobile roads between those two rivers are excellent.
+
+Bert is the same sweet-tempered boy he was when he left his
+mother's kitchen; his gravest troubles have been frequent
+betrothals. But Hicks' round, chubby face has taken on a slightly
+cynical expression,--a look quite out of place there. The chances
+of war have hurt his feelings . . . not that he ever wanted
+anything for himself. The way in which glittering honours bump
+down upon the wrong heads in the army, and palms and crosses
+blossom on the wrong breasts, has, as he says, thrown his compass
+off a few points.
+
+What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and
+repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all
+that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with
+"Hicks and Able" over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves
+and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for
+the rest of his life.
+
+As the transport enters the North River, sirens and steam
+whistles all along the water front begin to blow their shrill
+salute to the returning soldiers. The men square their shoulders
+and smile knowingly at one another; some of them look a little
+bored. Hicks slowly lights a cigarette and regards the end of it
+with an expression which will puzzle his friends when he gets
+home.
+
+By the banks of Lovely Creek, where it began, Claude Wheeler's
+story still goes on. To the two old women who work together in
+the farmhouse, the thought of him is always there, beyond
+everything else, at the farthest edge of consciousness, like the
+evening sun on the horizon.
+
+ Mrs. Wheeler got the word of his death one afternoon in the
+sitting-room, the room in which he had bade her good-bye. She was
+reading when the telephone rang.
+
+"Is this the Wheeler farm? This is the telegraph office at
+Frankfort. We have a message from the War Department,--" the
+voice hesitated. "Isn't Mr. Wheeler there?"
+
+"No, but you can read the message to me."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler said, "Thank you," and hung up the receiver. She
+felt her way softly to her chair. She had an hour alone, when
+there was nothing but him in the room,--but him and the map
+there, which was the end of his road. Somewhere among those
+perplexing names, he had found his place.
+
+Claude's letters kept coming for weeks afterward; then came the
+letters from his comrades and his Colonel to tell her all.
+
+In the dark months that followed, when human nature looked to her
+uglier than it had ever done before, those letters were Mrs.
+Wheeler's comfort. As she read the newspapers, she used to think
+about the passage of the Red Sea, in the Bible; it seemed as if
+the flood of meanness and greed had been held back just long
+enough for the boys to go over, and then swept down and engulfed
+everything that was left at home. When she can see nothing that
+has come of it all but evil, she reads Claude's letters over
+again and reassures herself; for him the call was clear, the
+cause was glorious. Never a doubt stained his bright faith. She
+divines so much that he did not write. She knows what to read
+into those short flashes of enthusiasm; how fully he must have
+found his life before he could let himself go so far--he, who was
+so afraid of being fooled! He died believing his own country
+better than it is, and France better than any country can ever
+be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with. Perhaps it was
+as well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would
+have dreaded the awakening,--she sometimes even doubts whether he
+could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment. One
+by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership,
+leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose
+deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood
+of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers,--one by
+one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure
+lodging houses, some in their office, where they seemed to be
+carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a
+vessel's side and disappear into the sea. When Claude's mother
+hears of these things, she shudders and presses her hands tight
+over her breast, as if she had him there. She feels as if God had
+saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible end. For as
+she reads, she thinks those slayers of themselves were all so
+like him; they were the ones who had hoped extravagantly,--who in
+order to do what they did had to hope extravagantly, and to
+believe passionately. And they found they had hoped and believed
+too much. But one she knew, who could ill bear disillusion . . .
+safe, safe.
+
+Mahailey, when they are alone, sometimes addresses Mrs. Wheeler
+as "Mudder" ; "Now, Mudder, you go upstairs an' lay down an' rest
+yourself." Mrs. Wheeler knows that then she is thinking of
+Claude, is speaking for Claude. As they are working at the table
+or bending over the oven, something reminds them of him, and they
+think of him together, like one person: Mahailey will pat her
+back and say, "Never you mind, Mudder; you'll see your boy up
+yonder." Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near,--but
+Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces,
+and for her He is nearer still,--directly overhead, not so very
+far above the kitchen stove.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of One of Ours, by Willa Cather
+
+
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