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Rising of the Tide

<div><h2 class='c010'>CHAPTER XI</h2></div> It is only when one loves a town as Richard Ingraham loved Sabinsport that one is conscious of the currents of unrest, of groping, of joy and of grief that fluctuate through it as truly as they fluctuate through the soul of man or woman. Love makes one sensitive—sensitive to fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan, hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its loftiest aims and hopes. Something more in experience must come to Sabinsport, thought Dick; and he sometimes wondered if it would have to be a baptism of blood. She would stick—stick to the end, he felt. Indeed, he did not believe that all the nations of the earth combined could pry Sabinsport now from the task to which she had put her hand. But he wanted more from her in carrying out this task—a fuller sense of the bigness of the thing in which she was engaged. Where was it all to come from? As the spring drive of the Germans pounded back farther and farther the English and French lines, the anxiety in Sabinsport grew, intensified. Out of it Dick saw coming one emotion that greatly rejoiced him. Sabinsport, through all the war, had never any very strong feeling for England. To Belgium and France she had given her heart, a little of it had gone to Serbia, England never had won more than a slightly grudging recognition; but now, when that amazing army stood with its back to the sea, and the world realized that though every man might fall, no man would surrender, something broke in Sabinsport. For the first time she realized something of the fullness and the nobility of the English sacrifice—how with characteristic English quiet, the nation had put everything in and called it a “bit.” To Dick, whose love of English hearts and English ways and whose faith in the unconquerable English soul was second only to his love and faith in America, this belated understanding of England by Sabinsport gave both joy and hope. She was beginning to see things. They were getting down into her soul. As the days went on and the Germans drew nearer and nearer to Paris, as the city was actually shelled, and as rumors came of preparations for a siege, with all the doubts they brought of its being possible for her to long withstand it, something like panic seized Sabinsport—an almost angry panic. Where, where were the Americans? For what had she been making all her great effort? Why, but to stay the invading hordes? Were we too late? Were these hundred thousands of men that we boasted now of having landed in so short a time, to come in only in time to see the destruction of France and the certain invasion and destruction of England, which Sabinsport believed that would mean? Doubt and anger and horror possessed her. And then suddenly the American army did appear. There was Cantigny, and then, in the very nick of time, the last moment, when the wearied and overwhelmed French were actually in retreat, our boys came—Sabinsport’s boys; and, careless of the long journeys which had brought them to the spot—the sleepless hours, they broke over the foe, beat him down, beat him back, followed, defied, laughed at his boasted formations, his impregnable trenches, his deadly nests of guns. It was true, as the most experienced and hardened French cried, Rien les arreste—Nothing stops them! Nothing stops them! When the story of Château-Thierry came back to Sabinsport, men shook one another’s hands, clapped one another on the back, told over and over every item they could gather. Captain Billy walked up and down the street, not ashamed of tears, crying, “I knew they would do it. Just like the boys of ’61.” They treasured every story of reckless exploit, of daredeviltry. “That’s our boys. Just like them!” And they were even prouder of the fact that, reckless and unafraid as they showed themselves, they had known how to take discipline, to play the game according to rules, that the wisest of English and French generals were saying, “They are good soldiers.” Château-Thierry and the weeks of struggle that drove back the Hun from the lovely Marne country, back through Soissons, back to the Aisne—those were great days for Sabinsport; and particularly they were great days for the War Board. The War Board, said Dick to himself, has settled down to enjoy the war. It spent its nightly sessions in recounting tales of heroism. Every list of citations for bravery was gone over item by item, under the leadership of Captain Billy. At first they set out to remember the names, those wonderful names, not only American, but Russian, Greek, Rumanian, Pole, Italian, Serb, Chinese and—yes, German—even German. “By the Jumping Jehoshaphat,” Captain Billy would say, “we’ve got them all—every blamed nation on earth—and every one Americans. They have all got it—good American grit. It don’t make any difference where their names come from, there isn’t one of them but dies with his face to the Hun.” Over and over they recounted the gallant stories—of men going out from shelters into which they had been ordered, to carry in wounded, and sometimes receiving their own death bullet as they laid their man in a place of safety—of their quick strategy in surrounding machine gun nests and their fearless hand to hand fights with the crews. And then those tales of the way they ran in their prisoners. Captain Billy was never tired relating the historic tale of the sergeant from the New York East Side who came back with 159 prisoners and complained to his superior officer that “one had died on him.” And nothing so delighted Captain Billy as the tales that came over of the doughboy’s directness and common sense in an emergency. “Just like them. Don’t phase them a bit. Just as much at home over there as here. I guess they’re teaching them down-trodden European countries the kind of men a free country makes. Read about the doughboy and his mules? Harness broke—mules ran away—turned them into a tree—smashed one—jumped out, looked at him, saw he was done up, shot him, rigged up and went ahead,—never said a word, never asked anybody anything, just did what was necessary. They say those French poilus haven’t stopped talking about it yet. They would have held an inquest, sent in a report, and probably stopped the work of that train for a week. That’s the difference.” Dick was deeply touched to notice how every now and then in the rejoicings somebody in the War Board would nod up at Lieutenant Mikey, looking down on them from the wall, and say, “What a pity he couldn’t have been in it now; couldn’t have fought with his own men. But he was our first one, we must never forget that.” Nor did they forget their other heroes. Often and often they would nod up to Albert on the wall, and say, “Hold on, old fellow, your time is coming.” Or to Joffre, “Feeling pretty good to-night, ain’t you, Papa Joffre?” Oh, the War Board was certainly enjoying the war—now that it was going their way. While the War Board regaled itself with stories of doughboy exploits at Cantigny and Château-Thierry, the saving of Rheims, the capture of Soissons; while it speculated over the big gun—where it was, how it operated—quarreled over the merits of arms, and exhausted itself in devising methods of destroying Germany—the town outside, the busy, working town, seemed sometimes to Dick almost to be living in France with the boys. Quite wonderfully and naturally they had built up from what came to them in letters and news the life of their boys over there. Of course they were proud of their exploits, but they did not want to dwell too much on them; they meant ghastly wounds or death—what they wanted to know was just how the boys lived, and where, the kind of beds they slept on, the kind of food they ate, whether it was really true that when they fell ill they had the care that they ought to have; and all of this, this eagerness to know where the boys were and how they were getting on in detail, made every letter that came almost a matter of town importance. It was quite amazing how the contents of these letters circulated. The very arrival of one was known, sometimes, in advance of its delivery, for the post office force took notice when a letter from anybody in the A. E. F. arrived, and I have known it more than once to happen that if a letter came in Saturday night—there was no Sunday delivery—one of the postal clerks would run immediately to the telephone and call up, “Hello, Mrs. B., here’s a letter for you from Tom, if you want to come down and get it. None of us can get away much before midnight.” You can imagine how quickly Mrs. B. went or sent. The great interest and excitement of the postmen’s life in those days was delivering the letters from the A. E. F. It was the practice of these functionaries in Sabinsport to put the mail in the box outside, if you had one; to throw it on the steps if you had not; or sometimes, if it rained, to try your door and throw it in the hall; but whenever there was a letter from a soldier none of these things were sufficient. Your bell rang with an eager, insistent cry which said, “There’s a letter from Tom.” And the next morning, the probabilities are that the postman lingered a bit to see if you didn’t come out and tell him personally something of what was in the letter. And you did it. Oh, how you loved to tell what was in the letter! And how it went up and down the town and everybody telephoned and compared it with what was in Frank’s letter, or Will’s letter. After the letters, Sabinsport’s great interest was The Stars and Stripes. There was no paper published on the globe so popular in the town. A half dozen of the boys had been inspired to send it home by the clever appeal of the paper itself. “Do the home folks a good turn by having us send them The Stars and Stripes every week,” the editor said at the head of his page, in an appealing display type. “There are not many things you can do from this side of the water,” he said, “for your folks or your old pal or that girl back home. The Stars and Stripes would come to them like another letter every week or another little present.” The doughboys had not passed it up, as he advised, and the paper came to be to the home folks all that he had prophesied. Intimate, natural, humorous, eloquent, the best bit of editing the war had inspired, The Stars and Stripes brought to Sabinsport such a sense of how the boys were thinking and feeling and acting, the whole town was comforted and helped. One supreme consolation it brought—the certainty that whatever the war might be doing to their boys, it was not changing their tastes. The Stars and Stripes proved that. It was “just like them.” Although it was known that many of their men were with the divisions fighting along the Marne, and although every night when the Argus came, the first thing that the town turned to was the casualty list, they went a long time untouched—so long that Sabinsport came to have a curious kind of jealousy. The City, twenty-five miles away, had lost heavily. She rejoiced, and yet she somehow wanted to pay her price. But when it came—poor little Sabinsport! It came like a stroke of lightning. One evening Dick was called up by Ralph’s successor in the Argus office. “Parson,” he said, in a broken voice, “I wish you would come down. It’s dreadful! The casualty list has just come in—there are twelve of our men dead, Parson—twelve of Sabinsport’s boys. Ralph’s name is among them. How are we going to get it to the people? There is no notice to any family yet, as I know, and I cannot call them up. Won’t you come down and help me?” It was not long before Dick was bending over the list; and the two men were asking themselves who would better go here, who there, who’s the friend of this family, who the friend of that? They called up the priest for the three of his own boys; the Rev. Mr. Pepper, who, in spite of his pacifism, still had kept a gentle heart, for one of his flock. They called up Jake Mulligan, and between them the sad duty was performed. The news flew. All Sabinsport wept that night. The next morning there was laid at every door in town—subscribers or not—a little extra sheet of the Argus—Sabinsport’s Honor Roll. And first in the list was the name of Lieut. Michael Sullivan, killed at Delville Wood, July 15, 1916. It fell to Dick to go to Patsy. It was nearly midnight when he called up Father McCullon and told him. “Wait until morning,” the old man said, “and come yourself, Dick. Mother and I could never do it.” Patsy had been back in Sabinsport since the beginning of the year. After her marriage she lived near Ralph’s camp until he had sailed in January. By a fortune which seemed to both of them miraculous, he had been promoted until he was a lieutenant in the Rainbow Division. He had sailed, believing that he would soon be in the trenches. To Patsy, as to him, this had been a matter of glad rejoicing. She had come back so proudly to Sabinsport that Mary Sabins had been shocked. “To think anybody,” she had said to Patsy, “could rejoice when her husband was in danger of his life. I cannot understand it, Patsy, and you in your condition, too,”—for Patsy was scarcely less proud or less open about the fact that Ralph was in France in the trenches than that she soon would be a mother—the mother of a little Ralph, she proudly announced, for she seemed to have no doubt in the world that she would bear a son. “Ralph wanted a son.” The boy had come in the spring. Never in her capable, vivid life had Patsy been so proud and so joyous. And Ralph was dead, and Dick was on his way to the farm-house to tell her. It was early when he came up the walk—and Patsy, radiant and beautiful—oh, far more beautiful than she had ever been—met him at the door, for she had seen him coming. She needed no telling. With that divination of womankind whose loved ones are at the front, Patsy sensed that Dick brought her sorrowful news of Ralph. She did not even lose her color, but, taking him by the hand, led him into the cheerful sitting room where, before the fire, little Ralph was cooing in his crib. She took the baby up, and standing straight and proud, said, “Tell me, Dick.” “Ralph’s name is on the casualty list, Patsy—among the dead. But do not lose hope,” he pled, “it may be a mistake.” “It is not a mistake, Dick. He knew it. I knew it. We fought it out together. I promised to live to raise our son. Take him, Dick—take him,” and she held out the child, crumpling to the floor as Dick sprang to her side. Stricken as she was—so stricken that in the coming days life itself seemed to ooze from her veins and she lay for hours in long white swoons, the spirit of her remained undaunted. She had made her sacrifice when she said good-by to her husband. As Ralph had had to fight like every man of passionate heart and living imagination to conquer his natural fear of death in battle, so Patsy had fought to conquer her fear of his loss. Both had won, for when the test came both were victorious. Ralph, so they learned one day, had lost his life in the full tide of battle. His company had been ordered to secure a foothold on the high northern bank of a river to which the army had fought its way. They had been led with extraordinary skill and courage, but in crossing one after another of the officers had been killed until Ralph was left alone in command. He took his men through the last cruel shelling to the desired objective, but in the final push he was fatally wounded. Even then he had refused to give up and for hours continued to direct his men as they literally clawed their way into the side of the bluff. “He would not die,” wrote home one grieving young soldier, “until he knew we were safe.” And Patsy made her fight as bravely. She held her head high. Had she not little Ralph, who, so they had both agreed, was one day to carry on his father’s work for justice and peace among men? If there were times when it seemed as if her brave heart must break with pain, no one ever saw her shed a tear or say other than, “I would not have held him back, no, not even to have him here to-day.” It was to the honor and the sanctification of Sabinsport that the bereaved took their sorrow as they did. It was more. Out of their loss there seemed to come to the town a mysterious illumination, the enlarged sense of what it was all about, which Dick had so desired for her, which he had felt so keenly she should have, to sustain her. Wounded and hurt as she was, the town had to find a reason, a great reason, to justify it all. Defending laws on sea or land that had grown out of past struggles between nations was not enough; vengeance was not enough, not even avenging wrongs as great as Belgium and the Lusitania. Sabinsport needed to feel that out of this sacrifice there should come some new conception of life, some greater guarantee of more joy and freedom to more people, some pledge that in future times there was hope of less sorrow, less hunger, less pain everywhere on the earth. This, she finally saw, was what it was all about; and in groping toward this realization there came to Sabinsport something that was akin to a new faith, and with this she was for the first time fully and unalterably reconciled to the Great War. It was no longer grim determination, no longer hatred of an enemy that she despised, that held her to the undertaking. It was a large and luminous faith that out of it all a long step had been taken toward realizing that new world to which, since the beginning of time, men have lifted their eyes. It was amazing how the town softened under the touch of its sorrow, how many old feuds sank out of sight, how much warmer grew everybody’s heart. “It’s doing something to us, Dick,” Reuben Cowder said to him one day. “Why, I even heard Captain Billy speak approvingly of Wilson to-day.” It did something to Dick. It made easier his renunciation of Nancy which he still believed was his duty. That was his part, his sacrifice, he told himself. He must give himself now to keeping alive, feeding this new sense that had come to the town; and he threw himself with enthusiasm into the work of explaining to Sabinsport the national aspirations and hopes that began to take form in the unfamiliar countries of Europe. At the camp, at the Boys’ Club, in his church, and at the War Board, Dick made himself the advocate of Serbian and Bohemian, Czecho-Slav and Pole. For the first time in all Sabinsport’s life, she began really to sense that these strange men who filled her mines and her factories carried in their hearts loves for their lands like hers for America; that they, too, had dreams—some of them coming down from hundreds of years of struggle—of freedom and equal opportunity in their own nations. And her chivalry, her sense of protection, her determination to help them see it through, grew with her knowledge. It was perhaps quite natural that, as the days went on, Dick should come to feel that Sabinsport had had a change of heart so profound that it had softened even her bitterness against Germany, itself. It was this feeling that he might even talk mercifulness to Sabinsport now that led him into what afterwards was known as “the Parson’s Big Break.” It was not until October that Dick was able to bring himself to believe that at last the Allies had the upper hand. From the start he had seen the war as long—long—long. It was that that made him suffer so. Cantigny, Château-Thierry, the falling back to the Vesle—none of these things had really convinced him. But when the Americans captured St. Mihiel, following on the break in the North, he suddenly realized the splendid scheme on which the great French general was working. “She’s beaten,” he said, “she’s beaten. It will take time, but we’ve got her.” No longer was it, as the French had said it in that unquenchable faith of theirs—On les aura; it was no On les a. And as the days went on and he became more and more certain, his imagination flew ahead to the time when the Allies would reach the borders of enemy territory. He had his theory about this: Germany would unconditionally surrender before she would allow the Allies to fight on her territory. But he could not give up the idea that the Allies should enter Berlin—not as destroyers but as world peacemakers. He meditated much on this, and at last one October Sunday morning preached a sermon on the text: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty. And he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” At the head of his notes he had put a title, “The Great Revenge.” As he talked his imagination kindled, and almost before he knew it he fell into a rhapsody: “In thinking of that great day—the day when victory is near and certain,” he said, “I have dreamed a dream, and in this dream I have seen the Allied statesmen and their military leaders gathered for a final conference which they believed will be the last before the end of this greatest of human tragedies. “With the terms for the world settlement outlined and accepted, with a full knowledge of the military situation before them, with a sober certainty that victory is in their hands, though it may be delayed, the conference is ready to disband. And it is then that an American general, whom first the Allied military forces and later the Allied diplomats had come to listen to with respect, if not eagerness, not only for the knowledge and fine judgment that he brought to their councils but because of a quality of spiritual insight which many of them believed to amount to genius—it was then that this American general asked a hearing. “‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I am in the fullest agreement with every conclusion of this conference. I believe that the military situation of the Allied armies has been rightly presented, that nothing has been concealed of either weakness or strength, that the conclusion that the enemy must soon yield is inevitable from the facts that have been laid before us. What I ask the privilege of saying to this conference will add nothing to what you already know, it will add nothing to the plan of world reorganization which has been suggested. It is not a matter on which action is required. It may be called a dream or a vision, as you please. I only beg that you will listen, and not deride, for what I have to say comes from an inner conviction so deep that to withhold it would be for me little better than treason to the great end of all this suffering, this labor of spirit and of mind through which we have gone in these many hard years. “‘The enemy will soon yield. I am one of those that believe that he will yield at or before his last line of defense. I believe this, not because I think that line less strong than it has been represented, less strong than the enemy himself has boasted it to be—it may be the most nearly impregnable line of defense that has been constructed in all the history of the world—I believe he will yield because I believe that yielding at this point is the inevitable result of his own lifelong military teachings. “‘Germany has held that those people she wished to subdue could be frightened into submission. Her people have been schooled for years to believe that by inventing new and unheard of ways of destruction, by attacking the defenseless, by stealthily striking where the laws of war had forbidden men to strike, they could so terrorize the world that it would submit to her supremacy without long resistance. She has learned that neither the French nor the English, the Italian nor the American people can be terrorized. She has learned that free people have no fear of human devices, however hideous and destructive. “‘But what is the logical result of this story of teaching on the minds of the people who teach it? This doctrine of frightfulness will—already has—acted as a boomerang. There is not a military man in this room who has not, from the beginning of his experience with the enemy, found that when their own methods were turned back they were the quickest to say “Enough.” When we turned their own infernal gas inventions against them they appealed to the laws of war. When, after months and months of endurance of their bombardment of peaceful towns and countrysides, England, in despair and rage, retaliated, they again appealed to the laws of war. The natural reaction of their own gospel is to make them and their peoples fear the things which they taught other nations would fear. “‘Germany has given to the world the most awful exhibits of destructiveness that mortal man has ever conceived. We, who have marched through the torn and battered villages and homes of France and Belgium and Serbia, have been made old and gray by the things that we have seen. She believed that this destruction would take the heart out of us. She did not know the peoples she attacked. And now her turn has come. My conviction is that those who have taught this frightfulness, and the people to whom they have taught it, will never have the moral or physical courage to run the risk of having applied to them what they have applied to us. The day we reach this last invincible line and make our first break in it—as we know we shall—that day the sword of the enemy will be laid down! They will not be able to face the horrors of fighting on their own land, of seeing their own villages, their own homes, undergoing the awful punishment which they have so wantonly given the villages and homes of other countries. They will yield. They will yield on the border. Gentlemen, we shall not be obliged to fight our way to Berlin. And I am one of those who will be glad when the time comes that we are not to take another life, not to devastate another mile of the earth’s fair face; that we are not to batter down another cottage, or destroy another beautiful work of man’s hands. “‘But that does not mean that I believe that the Allied armies should not go to Berlin. What I have at this moment to propose to this conference is that when the day comes—as it surely will—that the German and the Austrian emperors and their high commands say to us, “We yield,”—the Allied armies shall say to them: “Gentlemen, you will yield in Berlin. We go to Berlin. But we go to your capital not as destroyers; we go as saviors of freedom. “‘“We shall make no claim upon you in crossing your land. We shall lead our armies—French, English, Italian, American—through your fertile fields, your pleasant villages, into your beautiful capital, without cost or pain or destruction to you. We shall take with us our food, we shall ask no lodging for which we do not give fair return, and we shall pledge our honor that no woman suffer, even by word or look, from those hundreds of thousands of marching men.” “‘Gentlemen, our armies will do this if we ask it of them. To do it will give this people who have held as a religion the destructive notion of progress and power which has encircled the earth with woe, an exhibit of what free men really are. It will show them as no other act could do that in our interpretation of progress and power, there is no element of compulsion of others or of injury to others. If we can take these hundreds of thousands of men of ours into Berlin and leave no trace of destruction, no story of injustice behind us, we will give the world the greatest exhibit of the control that free men can exercise over themselves that it has ever seen or conceived. We shall prove the Biblical saying that “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he who taketh a city.” “‘I ask, then, that when Germany yields—as she soon will—we say, “We receive your sword in Berlin.” And that we march our armies there for that great ceremony. You will say that this is too much to ask of armies. Gentlemen, I am willing to pledge the American army to that great act of self-control.’ “The General sat down. For a long time there was silence at the table, and then the oldest, the least smiling, the longest in arms of the English staff, arose and said: ‘I pledge the English Tommies to march to Berlin without injury to man or woman or child.’ A white haired Italian sprang to his feet: ‘You may count on us,’ he cried. Then slowly the great French general, to whose genius the campaign soon to finish was due, arose. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you all realize what it would mean to the French poilus who have seen their country so obliterated that many of them cannot even trace the lines of the little farms on which they were born, who know that when they go back to the villages in which they and their families once lived, they will not be able to find the spot where their homes stood, you must know what it would mean to these men to march into Germany as conquerors, to see her fields still peaceful and fertile, her villages still untouched, and with this bitter contrast before their eyes, neither by look or act to show hate or insult. Yet, if this conception of our American friend ever becomes possible, I pledge the French poilu to that majestic undertaking.’ “There was but one to hear from—a king—a king who knew that scores of his fairest towns and cities, with all their treasured work of centuries of labor and skill and love, were in hopeless, blood-stained ruins—who knew that thousands of his brave and honest countrymen and countrywomen had been dragged from the remnants of homes left them, to do the bidding of the enemy in his own land; who knew that, scattered in foreign lands were little children of his realm who never would know even the names to which they had been born. “And the conference was still, and the hearts of all were big with pity, looking on this king who sat with bowed head. Long minutes passed before, rising proudly, he lifted to them a face which bore the look of one who comes fresh from a great struggle and a great victory, and in the quiet voice they had learned to know, the king said: ‘Gentlemen, I pledge you that the Belgian army will march to Berlin and leave behind it no shattered wall, no mutilated old man, no outraged woman, no orphaned child.’” <hr class='c014' /> The rhapsody was over. Dick stopped, a little breathless. Never before in all his experience as a speaker had he so lost himself. He blinked a little, then suddenly was conscious of a curious change in his audience—disapproval—almost hostility. What was the matter? It threw him off his balance a bit, and he finished his sermon haltingly. They went out stiff, disapproving backbones. What in the world had he done? He went into the vestry room, saying to himself, “What is the matter?” It was very common for the vestrymen to come around and say, “That was fine, Ingraham. Just what ought to be said,” but to-day the only person that waited on him at the door as he came out was Miss Sarah Kenton, a lady of sixty or so, whom he and Ralph were accustomed to call, “Our Intellectual.” Miss Sarah had had a literary experience, she had written books. There was no subject which ever came up on which she did not have a pronounced opinion. It must be confessed that she held most of Sabinsport in awe. With Dick, she had always been as nearly humble as was possible for her, for Dick was a man who had seen most of the world which Miss Sarah had not. Besides, his reading and thinking, even she admitted, was much broader and mellower than hers. Almost invariably Miss Sarah approved of Dick, but this morning when he came out she was waiting for him very rigid and very stern, and what she said was to the point. “You have made a great mistake, Mr. Ingraham, in your sermon this morning. You have outraged us and you have injured yourself. No matter what we would do if we were given the direct alternative of sparing Germany or injuring her—an alternative which can only be hypothetical, and therefore should not be discussed now even as a ‘mere dream’—no matter, I say, what we would do if face to face with such an alternative, we don’t want people to talk to us now about sparing the smiling fields and cheerful little happy homes of Germany! It isn’t that we are bloodthirsty, but we are nauseated, Richard Ingraham, at talking about the blessed state of Germany compared with the desolation she has made in other countries. We don’t want to hear about it.” And Miss Sarah turned on her heel and walked down the street, indignation and disgust in every tap of her shoe on the pavement. What Miss Sarah had so pointedly put straight to Dick himself, his retiring congregation was saying in more or less abbreviated and moderated form to one another. “I can’t see it,” said one; “it’s looking too far ahead to talk like that. Besides, it sounds like peace propaganda to me, and I won’t stand for that, even from the Domine, much as I have always believed in him.” “It’s pacifist talk,” said another. “Makes me feel as if we’d been harboring a serpent in our bosom through all these years. It might be all very well to talk about a peaceful walk to Berlin if the Germans were not Germans, but they are Germans, the people who have stood for all these atrocities, who have been militarized out of all semblance to human beings, they must have their lesson. It’s a church for a church, a cottage for a cottage, I think.” “He’s all wrong,” said another. “Get them with their backs to the wall and they would fight like hell, for they’ve got it into their heads that our men would do every fearful thing to their women and children that they have done to ours.” The air was thick with disapproval that day in Sabinsport of the Rev. Richard Ingraham; and suspicion gathered and gathered as the day went on. Could it be that they had been mistaken, that he really was at heart a pacifist? The day was to come—and it was not far distant—when all these indignant patriots were to do their best to make amends for their resentment. Under the great burst of joyous relief which the news of the signing of the armistice caused in Sabinsport, her anger at Dick began to soften. As the days went on and they actually saw at least the spirit of his dream coming true—their own boys crossing into the enemy’s country in orderly fashion, going about the enemy’s streets in self-control, even holding the enemy’s children on their knees and joining in their Christmas trees and Christmas carols—a kind of wonder seized them. It was a prophecy they had listened to. Even Miss Sarah Kenton was one day to come to Dick and express her appreciation of his sermon, as frankly as she had just expressed her disapproval. But all that was for a later day. There is no question at all but that, at the moment, Richard Ingraham had deeply outraged Sabinsport spirit of righteous indignation against the Germans which he had done more than any other man to awaken. He went back to his study in the rectory after his interview with Miss Sarah and sat for a long time, considering what he had done. “Good Lord!” he said, “I certainly have put my foot in it. They really think I am a pacifist,” and he threw back his head and laughed aloud. But it was a rueful laugh. Disapproval was a new experience for the young man. He had had nothing but affectionate approval from the day that Sabinsport first made his acquaintance. He could not remember a time in all these years of speaking to them that his sermons had not met with kindly appreciation, and now? Why, they had walked out of that church as if they thought him a German spy. And yet, underneath his chagrin, there was a certain exaltation. “She has a mind of her own, Sabinsport, and she is not afraid to show it. You can trust her to take care of her own, even against her own. But what a climb I will have to get back!” And then quickly the thought came, “I wonder if Nancy will feel as they do?” That gave him a cold heart, almost a physical sickness. He could bear everything but to have Nancy look at him as the people had when he first came out of his rhapsody and realized their faces. He put it through bravely. At the evening service there was the smallest number of people that he ever remembered to have seen, but he talked exactly as he had planned. Monday had always been for him a play day. Usually he started off in the morning for a long tramp, and since he had established his friendly, homelike relations with Nancy, oftener than not he made it a point to walk into her living room at half-past four or five for a cup of tea. Reuben Cowder usually made it a point, too, to get home by five on Mondays, knowing Dick would be there, for Reuben Cowder had grown fonder as the months went by of the young parson, and sometimes he said to himself, “I wish it were Dick and not Otto that she cared for. What a son he would make.” This habit of Dick’s was known to Patsy. Patsy had been stirred to wrath by the echoes that had reached her before night of Sunday and all through Monday morning of Dick’s pro-Germanism. What utter stupidity, she had said. Of course it’s nothing but a reaction from the uplift they have been wallowing in. Angry as she was at the thought of any criticism of Dick, she was willing to slur even the spirit which had taken possession of the town and in which she as much as Dick had rejoiced. And to Patsy as to Dick, the only real alarm in the outbreak was that it would reach Nancy and that she might be influenced. For Patsy you see had come to believe that the two were in love. “I think, Little Ralph,” she said, talking aloud to the baby, “it’s time for your mother to take a decisive hand. He was the best friend your father ever had. If it had not been for him you would not have been here, little boy. If Nancy Cowder doesn’t love him, she ought to. At least she is not going to be turned against him now by this senseless gossip.” And so Patsy, whose anguished heart was becoming braver and braver day by day in service to others, arrived at the McCullon farm just about the time that Nancy came in from camp. “I have come to lunch, Nancy,” Patsy announced. “I want to know if you have heard what Sabinsport is doing to Dick.” “Doing to Dick?” Nancy cried, turning white. “Why, what do you mean?” “She does care!” Patsy said to herself. “They are doing a cruel thing; they are accusing him of treason—he—he who has led us all into the light, who showed Ralph the way, who gave me Ralph. They are badgering him, heckling him, Nancy. And all out of their stupid, stupid, wicked, revengeful spirits.” “But what—what do you mean?” Nancy cried, still white and trembling. And Patsy, having made her impression, put aside her eloquence, and told her what she knew of the sermon that had aroused resentment in the town. As she went on, relief, tenderness, amusement chased one another across Nancy’s unconscious face. “Oh, I understand, Patsy. You needn’t defend Richard Ingraham to me. He ought to have known better, though. He ought to have known the town better. Why, Sabinsport really at heart was never so bitter against Germany as she is to-day. It was foolish, foolish of him; but it’s wicked, wicked of them to doubt him. He has led us all. Why, my father, Patsy. See what he has done for my father, and for me! Why, he brought me back. Never would father have found me if it had not been for him.” It was a very satisfied Patsy that sat down at the lunch table, but it was also a very curious one. There was one point that needed clearing up, and that was Otto Littman. And so, with a calculated unconsciousness that Nancy didn’t catch at all, Patsy said, “I wish I knew, just for my own guidance, what there is in all the suspicion against Otto Littman. They are saying that he has done something fine, that has made up for all his early defense of Germany; but nobody seems to know what it is.” And Nancy, quite unguarded, told her as much as she dared of what Otto himself had told her in confession, of how he had been carried away by the German dream of world empire, of how his vanity had led him in the first years of the war to aid the plotters in America, of how he had come to his senses when he saw that violence against life and property, as well as the spreading of German ideas (which he had considered legitimate), was intended, of his break with Max, of his determination to win back the confidence of Sabinsport, and of his plea that Nancy, whom he had always loved, the one woman whom he had ever thought to make his wife, should help him. “I could not do it, Patsy,” she said, with tears; “but it has almost broken my heart not to stand by him as a friend in his hard, uphill fight. I understand perfectly how Otto was deluded. I know his vanity; and he has done a noble thing and the day will come when Sabinsport will understand, after the war is over. But it hurts me, oh, you don’t know how it hurts me, not to be able to help. But what can I do? I do not love him. I shall never love him.” And Patsy, the case quite clear in her mind, went back to Young Ralph, satisfied that she had done a good afternoon’s work. It was a couple of hours later that Dick walked in on Nancy. Possibly, he said to himself, she had not heard of the sermon of the day before, for she came running down the steps to greet him, saying, “You are late. I hoped you would come.” It even seemed to him she was warmer in her greetings than usual. They were hardly in before Reuben Cowder’s car drew up, and he came into the drawing room. His greeting to Dick was curt and stern. He neither delayed nor hesitated about expressing his disapproval. “What is this I hear about that sermon of yours yesterday, Ingraham? They tell me you talked some kind of twaddle about a peaceful entrance into Berlin, that you don’t want the Huns punished, that you don’t want any disturbance of their lands, that you propose to leave these brigands and murderers untouched, their spoils in their hands, to let them get away with their infamous atrocities. If that’s the way you feel, I don’t want you in my house.” There was a sudden little stir on one side of the room. Dick thought of it afterwards as something exactly like a bird fluttering out of its nest, and flying to his side. And there was Nancy, standing straight and looking into her father’s eye—Cowder look for Cowder look. “Stop that, Father,” she said. “I know what Dick said. I know exactly what he meant. No revenge could be so great as what he planned.” Her hand was laid protectingly on Dick’s arm. She stood, his defender, blazing with understanding and sympathy. She had said “Dick”—it was the first time in all their acquaintance. And Reuben Cowder had a great light. For a “hard business man,” it was quite extraordinary that he could divine that this was possibly the great hour in the lives of these two young people, that possibly it was not Otto, after all; and, with a gruff, “I beg your pardon, Ingraham,” he left the room. The girl did not stir from where she stood. She did not take her hand from his arm. She only turned a very white face straight up to him. “You said ‘Dick,’” he said slowly. “You meant it, Nancy?” “I meant it—Dick.” Then the Rev. Richard Ingraham did the most sensible thing he ever did in his life, he put his hand over the cold one on his arm, and said, “I love you, Nancy Cowder.” And the reply came swiftly, unhesitatingly, “I love you, Dick.” An hour later the two came out to the veranda, the look of glory still on their faces. In a very few minutes—so few that he might have been accused of waiting around the corner for their appearance,—Reuben Cowder joined them. Dick went straight to the point: “I have asked Nancy to marry me, Mr. Cowder. She has said, Yes. What do you say?” “Well,” said Reuben Cowder, “I say I would rather have you for a son than any man I ever knew.” The three sat long on the veranda in the warm, deepening, October twilight, looking out over the great valley in its glorious autumn coloring, down to a segment of that curve of the great river above which Sabinsport lay. It was not of the past that they talked, it was not of Sabinsport’s struggles and sorrows, it was not of the war news of the day; it was of the future. To all three of them, Reuben Cowder as well as Dick and Nancy, the last hour had opened the new world for which the war had been fought. “It will soon be over,” Reuben said. “We’ve got them, sure thing. We must think now of the future, Dick. There are a lot of changes coming to Sabinsport. There will be things doing here when the boys get back. I will need you both. I am old. I have the old ways; but I have learned something since you and Ralph Gardner came to this town, and I’m not so old that I can’t learn more. I must do it, for we must reckon with those stacks there.” He nodded his head to the opening he had cut long ago in the noble trees which ran down the long slope of the great lawn, an opening that he always carefully preserved for it brought into the landscape from the veranda the tall smoke stacks of the wire mills. Dick’s mind flew back to the day a dozen years before when he had walked over the hills and caught his first view of the town. There were but four stacks that day, there were twelve now, and from every one of the twelve black smoke rose, straight into the clear air, and they said as clear and loudly to him now as they had so long ago, “We are the strong things here, we are the things to be reckoned with.” Yes, they had great struggles for great things coming, he and Reuben Cowder, and Nancy Cowder—his wife. THE END <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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