Читать книгу The Rising of the Tide - Ida M. Tarbell - Страница 5

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A ripple of interest ran over a few quarters of Sabinsport when it read of the sudden departure of three Serbian miners. At the banks, and in the offices of the mills and factories, men sniffed or swore, “Doesn’t a man know when he is well off? I don’t understand how a steady fellow like Nikola Petrovitch can do such a crazy thing. Who is going to take care of his family?” This was the usual business view.

A few members of the Ladies’ Aid of Dick’s church grumbled to him. “We will have that family on our hands again. Couldn’t you stop him?”

It was momentary interest only. Austria’s declaration of war had not entered their minds. Dick felt that if he had asked some of the members of his congregation who had declared war, they might have said, “Serbia.” The repeated shocks of the news of the next few days battered down indifference. Each night and each morning there fell into the community facts—terrible, unbelievable—stunning and horrifying it. Germany had invaded Belgium. She was battering down Liège. Why, what did it mean? England had declared war on Germany. She was calling out an army, but what for? And we—we were to be neutral, of course. We had nothing to do with it.

The town discussed the news of that dreadful week in troubled voices, reading the paper line by line, curious, awed—but quite detached. The first sense of connection came when the Argus announced that Patsy McCullon was lost. The last her family had heard of her she was in Belgium. They had cabled—could get no word. Now Patsy was Sabinsport’s pride.

She was an example, so High Town said, of what a girl could make of herself, though as a matter of fact better backing than Patsy had for her achievement it would be hard to find. Her father and mother were of the reliable Scotch stock which had come a hundred years before to the country near Sabinsport. Here Patsy’s grandfather had settled and prospered. Here her father had been born and here he still carried on the original McCullon farm. He had married a “native” like himself, and like himself well-to-do. They had worked hard and they had to show for their efforts as comfortable and attractive a place as the district boasted—not a “show farm,” like Ralph Cowder’s, but clean, generous acres—many of them—substantial buildings always shining with fresh paint, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, gardens, vines, orchards.

The McCullons had one child, Patsy. You’d go far to find anything firmer on its feet than Patsy McCullon, anything that knew better its own mind or went more promptly and directly after the thing it wanted. Patsy was twenty-four. Since the hour she was born, she had been her own mistress. When she was ten she had elected to go into town to school. When she was sixteen she had graduated, and the next year she had gone to college. Her father and mother had put in a feeble protest. They needed her. She was an only child. They had “enough.” Why not settle down? But Patsy said firmly, No. She was going to “prepare to do something.” When they asked her what, she said quite frankly she didn’t know. She’d see. She knew the first thing was education and she meant to have it. She’d teach and pay back if they said so, but Father McCullon hastened to say that it “wasn’t necessary.” He guessed she could have what she wanted. And so Patsy had gone East to college. She had graduated with honor two years before the war and had come back to Sabinsport to take a position in the high school.

If Patsy had been able to analyze the motives back of her career to date she would have found the dominating one to have been a determination to make Sabinsport—select, rich, satisfied Sabinsport—take her in. She had been, as a little girl, conscious that these handsome, well-dressed, citified people, whose origin was in no case better and often not so good as her own—Father McCullon took care that Patsy knew the worst of the forebears of those in town who held their heads so high—regarded her as a little country girl, something intangibly different and inferior to themselves. When they stopped at the farm, as they so often did in pleasant weather to eat strawberries in summer and apples in the fall, to drink buttermilk and gather “country posies,” as they called them, she had been vaguely offended by their ways.

When she insisted at ten upon going into town to school, it was with an unconscious resolve to find out what made them “different”—what secret had they for making her father and mother so proud of their visits, and why didn’t her father and mother drop in as they did? She suggested it once when they were in town, and had been told, “No, you can’t do that. We’ve not been asked.”

“But they come to visit you without being asked.”

“But that’s different. We are country people. Visitors are always welcome in the country. City people don’t expect you to come without invitation.”

This offended her. She would find out about it. But it continued to baffle her.

She stood high in school. She quickly learned how to dress and do her hair as well as the best of them. She read books, she shone in every school exhibition, but she continued a girl from the country. Evidently she must do more than come to them; she must bring them something. She’d see what college would do.

College did wonders for Patsy. She came to it full of health and zest, excellently prepared; good, oh very good, to look at; sufficiently supplied with money, and, greatest of all, determined to get everything going. “Nothing gets away from Patsy McCullon,” the envious sometimes said. It didn’t, nothing tried to: she was too useful, too agreeable, too resourceful. It didn’t matter whether it was a Greek or a tennis score, Patsy went after it, and oftener than not carried it away. Probably if there had been annual voting for the most popular girl in her class, there would never have been a year she wouldn’t have won. She had friends galore. All her short vacations she went on visits—the homes of distinguished people, it would have been noted, if anybody had been keeping tab on her. And Sabinsport always knew it.

“Miss Patsy McCullon, the daughter of Donald McCullon, is spending her Easter holiday in New York, with the daughter of Senator Blank,” the Argus reported. A thing like that didn’t get by the exclusive of Sabinsport. There weren’t many of them who would not have been willing to have given fat slices of their generous incomes for introduction into that fashionable household.

And when college was done with and High Town was prepared to welcome Patsy into its innermost, idlest set, she had taken its breath away and distressed her father and mother by asking for and getting a position in the high school.

Her reasons for this surprising action were many. She could not and would not ask more from her parents. They had been generous, too generous, and she’d taken freely. It wasn’t fair, unless she went back to the farm and she wouldn’t do that. She could be near them if not with them, and still be where she could conquer High Town.

But Patsy soon learned—indeed she was pretty sure of it before she put her ambition to test—that the thing she had set out to win so long ago wasn’t the thing she wanted. She found herself free to come and go wherever she would in Sabinsport, but it was no longer an interest. College had done something to Patsy—set her on a chase after what she called the “real.” She didn’t know what it was, but she did know it was something to be worked for—which is perhaps more than most of the seekers of reality ever discover.

She was going to achieve the “real” and she was never going to be a snob. She wasn’t ever going to make anybody feel as those people in Sabinsport, with their suburban, metropolitan airs, had made her feel. She was going to treat everybody fair, for, as she sagely told herself, “You can never tell what anybody may do—look at me!” Which of course proves that Patsy was not free from calculation. Indeed, she steered her course solely by calculation, but it was calculation without malice, incapable of a meanness, a lie or a real unkindness.

“She’s out after what she wants,” a brother of one of her college friends had said once, “but you can be darn sure she’ll never double cross you in getting it: she’s white all through.” She was, but she was also hard; a kind, clean, just sort of hardness—of which she was entirely unconscious.

Patsy’s two years in the high school had won her the town solidly. And when in June, 1914, she went abroad everybody had been interested. It was her first trip and she had prepared for it thoroughly, drawing particularly on Dick’s stores of experience.

Ralph, who was feeling very wroth at her that spring because of her indifference to his reform plans, sniffed at this. “I don’t see why you give Patsy so much time over this trip of hers. It will only make her more unendurable, more cocksure, more blind to things about her. I like a woman that sees.”

“Sees what?” asked Dick.

“The condition of those about her—the future. Patsy McCullon doesn’t know there is a suffering woman or child in Sabinsport. She has never crossed the threshold of a factory or entered a mine.”

“She’s no exception,” said Dick. “There are not a half dozen of the women in Sabinsport, even those whose entire income comes from factory and mine, that know anything of the life of the men and women who do the work. You can’t blame Patsy for what is true of nearly all American well-to-do women. Of course it is shocking. But Patsy at least has the excuse that she gets no dividends from these institutions and so has no direct responsibility.”

“I’ll give her credit for knowing what she wants,” said Ralph, dryly.

“And playing a clean game, Ralph.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but I hate a calculating woman.” Dick eyed him sharply. He had a suspicion sometimes that Ralph’s irritation over Patsy was partly growing fondness and partly self-protection. He feared her closing in on him, and feared he would be helpless if she did.

“She’ll have to work harder than she ever did before, but if I don’t mistake, she’s beginning. I don’t believe she knows it, though,” Dick said to himself.

Patsy sailed in June. He and Ralph had had several joyous notes from her, and the day after the declaration of war on Serbia a long letter announcing a sudden change of the itinerary she and Dick had arranged with such pains.

“I have run into a college mate here who with her husband and brother are just starting for a leisurely motor trip, half pleasure, half business. Mr. Laurence and his brother have connections over here, and it is to look into them that they go the route they do. Of course, Dick, it shatters all those wonderful Baedeker constellations we worked out for this part of the world, but I shall see the true French country and the little towns and I’ll learn how the people live and I’ll have no end of knowledge about ‘conditions’ to give Ralph when I get back.”

“Much she’ll see there if she can’t see anything here,” growled Ralph. “Who is this Laurence anyway?”

“We leave Paris around the 20th for Dijon. Mr. Laurence’s firm makes all sorts of things for farmers. They have offices in Paris and Brussels and Berlin—all the big cities, and agents in many of the larger towns. I suppose he takes these trips to see what the country people need and how well the agents are persuading them they need it. Martha says it’s no end of fun to go with him. We’ll spend a day in Dijon—time enough to see the old houses and the pastels in the museum. We’re going from there to a place called Beaune—never heard of it before, but Henry—Mr. Laurence’s brother—he knows everything about this country—says it has the most perfect fifteenth century hospital in Europe. Then along the Meuse into Belgium. We ought to be in Brussels by the first of August.”

And so on and on—a gurgling, happy, altogether care-free letter, calculated above all to make a young man who still was unconscious that he was in danger, read it and re-read it and say to himself that a girl who could write like that at twenty-four must be a very giddy person, and then to wake up in the night with an entirely irrelevant thought—“She didn’t say whether Henry is married. Confound him.”

If Patsy had calculated her effect—which she had not, for she herself was unconscious of why she wrote these bubbling letters so unlike her usual ones, she could not have done better.

“I wonder where Patsy is to-day,” said Dick to himself. “I hope they turned back,” but he said nothing to Ralph of his disquiet. It took that young man forty-eight hours longer to realize that Patsy might be caught in some unpleasant trap. He called up Dick. “The papers say there’s a panic among our tourists, Dick. Do you suppose that hits Patsy? Don’t you think we better drive out and see if the old folks have heard from her?”

It was Sunday afternoon of August 2nd that they went out. Mr. and Mrs. McCullon were quite serene. “Here’s a letter from Patsy,” they said. “Last we’ve heard.” It was from Paris, the 20th, two days later than theirs, the night before they started. “She ought to be in Brussels to-day. They say they’re worried over there about getting home. I guess Patsy can take care of herself all right. Glad she’s with some real live American business men—these Laurences seem to have pretty big foreign interests. Patsy’s all right with them.”

“Of course she is,” agreed Ralph. “Besides, Belgium’s a good place to be now. Belgium has a treaty with all her neighbors to keep off her soil. France and Germany keep a strip specially for fighting purposes. Couldn’t be a better place for Patsy.” And Ralph quite honestly believed it.

But it was a different thing to Dick. He was oppressed, bewildered, alarmed. He couldn’t have told just what he feared. The world seemed suddenly black and all roads closed. But at least he would keep his depression to himself. He knew how entirely unreasonable it would seem to all Sabinsport.

It was the invasion of Belgium—the thing that could not be, the resistance of the Belgians, the attack upon Liége, the realization that the Germans intended to fight their way to Paris—that they must pass through Brussels where Patsy was supposed to be, that gave Sabinsport its first sense that the war might concern them. The anxiety of Farmer and Mrs. McCullon, which grew with the reading of the papers, stirred the town mightily. The poor old people, so confident at first, had become more and more disturbed as they failed by cablegram to get any news. They spent part of every day in town, going back at night, white with weariness and forebodings. The only thing that buoyed them up was the series of postals they received in these early August days. Patsy had been at Dijon and eaten of its wonderful pastry. She had been at Beaune and seen the fireplace big enough to roast an ox in—they were starting for a run through the fortified towns—Belfort, Verdun, Metz, Maubeuge—and then to Brussels via Dinant and Namur. Dreadful days of silence followed.

It was not until the 14th of August that Mr. McCullon received word that Patsy had arrived that day in Brussels, was well and was posting a letter. The next morning a wire from Washington said that the Embassy reported her in Brussels, and when the New York papers came late in the afternoon, there was her name in the State Department’s list of “Americans Found.”

It was wonderful how the news ran up and down the town. Willie Butler rushed into the house crying at the full of his lungs, “Miss Patsy’s found. Miss Patsy’s found.” Willie had been a year in the high school, and his admiration for his teacher, always considerable, had been heated white-hot by the excitement of her adventures. They talked about it in the barber shop and at the grocery and at the hardware store where Farmer McCullon traded and where he had been seen so often in the last terrible days, seeking from those whom long acquaintance had made familiar the support that familiarity and friendliness carry.

It was a topic for half the tea tables in Sabinsport that night, and many people whom Mr. and Mrs. McCullon scarcely knew called them up to tell them how glad they were Patsy was safe and sometimes to confide their dark suspicion that the reason there had been no news of her was that she was a prisoner of war!

In the long twelve days the McCullons and Sabinsport waited for Patsy’s letter, regular cablegrams notified them of her safety. Then the letter came. Simple as it was, it took on something of the character of a historical document in the town. It made the things they had read and shivered over every morning actual and in a vague way connected them with the events. There was no little pride, too, among Patsy’s friends in town that they should know an eye-witness of what they had begun to realize was the beginning of no ordinary war.

Patsy’s letter was headed

“Dinant, Belgium, Friday, July 31, 1918.”

“Only three weeks ago,” Dick said to himself, shuddering, when the letter came to him, “and what is going on in Dinant to-day?” for, knowing the land foot by foot, he realized how inevitable it was that the town must be engulfed in the Namur-Charleroi battle, the result of which in the light of the three weeks since Patsy had written her heading, he had no doubt.

“My dear Folks:—It is just ten days since I mailed you a letter. That was in Paris. We were starting out. It was all so gay then. The world has changed. It is all so anxious now. It is not for any tangible reason—nothing I could tell you. I suppose what has happened to me is that I have caught what is in the air. It is like an infection—this stern, tense expectancy that pervades France. To-day we reached Dinant, this lovely little playboy of a town, its feet in the Meuse, its head wearing an old old citadel on a cliff grown up with trees and ferns. You would love it so, Mother McCullon. And here it is the same watchful, dangerous quiet. There have been rumors of war for many days, you know. The French papers, which I’ve read diligently, were full of forecastings and queer political calculations which I didn’t understand and which Mr. Laurence said were not to be taken seriously. It didn’t seem credible to me that because a crazy fellow in a little under-sized country like Serbia had killed even a Grand Duke that a great country like Austria should declare war on her, particularly when she’s eaten as much humble pie as Serbia has. And even if she did, I cannot see for the life of me what Russia has to do with it or why France should be alarmed.

“I only know that it seems as if the very air held its breath, as if every living thing was about to spring and kill—I can’t escape it. Perhaps it would not have caught me as it has if I had not been so close to the frontier. When I wrote you ten days ago—it seems a year—I told you that we were to follow the frontier from Belfort through Toul and Verdun with a side trip to Metz, then on to Maubeuge and into Belgium. The men have a passion for forts, and they were obliged to go to Metz for business.

“On the evening of the 28th, just as we reached Verdun, the news came that Austria had at last declared war. We got into town all right and they took us into the hotel, but I thought we’d never get out. The air suddenly seemed to rain soldiers—and suspicion—the street swarmed with people and nobody talked or smiled.

“Verdun is so lovely. You look for miles over the country from the high terraces—the houses are so clean and trim. They look so stable—everything seems so settled to me here as if it had been living years upon years and had learned how to be happy and grow in one place. I wonder if that is the difference between the American and French towns. These places look as if nothing could disturb them. I’m sure if when I’m old and gray and come back to Verdun, it will all be the same and I’ll sit on the terrace looking out on the Meuse and drink my coffee just as I did last Thursday night!—Only—only if the Germans should get near here—they can throw their hideous shells so far, the men say—I could fancy them popping a big one down right into the middle of our garden, scattering us right and left.

“Up to the time we reached Verdun we had sailed through. The most secret places were opened for us. But the fact that Austria had declared war on Serbia certainly slowed up our wheels. It looked on Wednesday as if we wouldn’t be able to leave Verdun. Henry’s friend—he always knows a man everywhere—wasn’t there—he’d been suddenly called, transferred. Nobody knew us and everybody suspected us, but Mr. Laurence was determined to get into Belgium at once. We’d be free there, he said, and could play around until things settled down. He had to use all his influence to get out. It was only when he enlisted our officer friends at Toul by telephone that he was allowed to go. We had just such a time at Maubeuge yesterday and certainly it looked like war there.

“They were beginning to cut down the trees—to open up the country and to put up barbed-wire fences—to hold up people—I couldn’t help wondering if the wire came from Sabinsport. I never heard of such a thing. Henry says that his officer friend told him that the Germans on the other side of the frontier began clearing out trees and preparing wire entanglements five days ago and that was before Austria declared war. What does it mean?

“But here we are in Belgium—nice, neutral Belgium!

“Saturday, Aug. 1.

“I certainly can’t make head or tail of European politics. We run as fast as they will let us from a country that hasn’t declared war and that nobody has challenged, as I can see, but which merely thinks it may be attacked, to get into a country that everybody has signed a compact to let alone and live. This morning when I came down into the garden of this darling hotel to drink my coffee, I hear bells and commotion and I am told an order has come to mobilize. But what for? When Mr. Laurence and Henry came they said it was merely to protect neutrality. I don’t see much in a neutrality that calls all the men out. It is harsh business for the people. I’ve been out in the streets and walking in the country for hours and I’m broken-hearted. It seems that the bell the police go up and down ringing means that they must go at once. There are posters all over the walls to the Armée de Terre and Armée de mer, telling them to lose no time. Why, this morning the man who was serving us left in the middle of our meal, just saying ‘Pardon, c’est la mobilization,’ and in three minutes Madame was fluttering around apologizing for a delay and telling us it wouldn’t happen again, that she would serve us. Poor thing! she’ll have to, for every man about her place, her only son included, followed that horrid bell. There’s many a woman worse off than our landlady. There are the farmers’ wives, left quite alone with cows, pigs, horses and the crops ready to harvest—some of them with not a soul to help them. They never complain, only say, ‘C’est la guerre,’ but it isn’t la guerre—at least, not in Belgium. How can it be, with her treaties!

“Dinant, Tuesday, August 3.

“I did not send this letter as I expected to. Mr. Laurence advised us to mail no letters until after the mobilization is well under way—says the tax on transportation is so heavy that the mails are held up. There is great difficulty even in getting Brussels by telephone or telegraph, and we’ve had no papers for three days.

“You see, I am still at Dinant, though we will leave in a few hours—if nothing happens! We were held by an incident of mobilization. Sunday afternoon while we were in a shop buying some fruit, a man came in hurriedly, leading a little boy and girl. He wanted the woman to take them while he was gone. Their mother was dead, he said. He had no one. The woman cried. She couldn’t, she said; she had her own—her husband must go. She must keep the shop. How could she do it—how could she—and she appealed to me. The poor fellow looked so wretched and the children so pretty that Henry, who has the kindest heart in the world, said, ‘See here, let me have the kids. I’ll find somebody to keep them.’ ‘But I have no money,’ the man said. ‘Well, never mind—I’ll see to that,’ and, would you believe it? that man marched off leaving Henry Laurence with two solemn little Belgians. Well, we had to stay in Dinant forty-eight hours longer than we’d expected while Henry found a place for them. We had such fun! He found a dear old lady in a nice little house, and everybody said she’d be kind to them, and Henry arranged at the bank for weekly payments as long as the father has to be away. He could do that without trouble because his firm has a branch in Brussels, and a man here handles their goods. We’re going this evening to say good-by and then north to Namur, which is only fifteen miles away. We follow the Meuse—it will be a lovely ride.

“Namur, August 5.

“An awful, a wicked thing has happened. I can’t believe it is true. Last night when we reached our hotel here, the first thing we heard was that Germany had crossed the Belgian frontier. Mr. Laurence and Henry grew quite angry with the proprietor—whom they know very well, as the firm has offices here—for repeating such a rumor, but he insisted he was right. Germany couldn’t do such a thing, Henry insisted. The man only shrugged and said what everybody says here: ‘Guillaume est la cause.’ (‘William did it.’) You hear the peasants in the fields say the same thing. They don’t say the kaiser, or the emperor, or William II; just William—as one might speak about a rich and powerful relative that he didn’t like or approve of but had to obey.

“Well, it is true. They crossed on Tuesday at the very time we were having such fun placing our two little Dinantais—and to-day, oh, Mother dear, I can’t write it—they have attacked Liége. Nobody seems to know just what has happened. It is sure that the Belgians were told by Germany that they would not be disturbed. Henry came in this afternoon with a copy of a Brussels paper in which only two days ago the German Minister to Brussels said in an interview that Belgium need have no fear from Germany.

“‘Your neighbor’s house may burn but yours will be safe’—his very words. Think of that!—and at the very time he uttered them their armies were there ready to cross. The King must be a perfect brick. The Germans sent him a message, telling him what they proposed to do. He called the parliament instanter and read them the document. It was in the Brussels papers. It began by saying that the French intended to march down the Meuse by Givet—a town on the border only a little distance from Dinant—and then on to Namur into Germany!

“There never was such a lie. Why, we have just come from there. There wasn’t a sign of such a thing. The French army didn’t begin to mobilize until Sunday, and it will take days and days, and here Germany is in Belgium. She says that she won’t hurt the Belgians if they will let her march through so as to attack France—and she gives them twelve hours to decide—think of that. Doesn’t it make you want to fight yourself? The cowards! It is like a knife in the back. But I am proud of little Belgium. They say the king and parliament sat up all night going over things and in the morning they sent back word ‘No, the Germans could not pass with Belgium’s consent and if they tried to she’d fight,’ and she’s doing it!

“Everything has gone to pieces, mail—news—even money. The men can’t get any, and we’re down to about five francs apiece. You ought to see the high and mighty Laurences without a dollar in their pockets—I wouldn’t have missed it for a fortune. They are like two helpless kids. They’ve always had it and depended on it to get them everything they wanted and to make everybody else do everything they wanted done. Now they can’t get it and they wouldn’t be more helpless if their legs had been unhooked. The trouble is we can’t get to Brussels without money—for they’ve taken the car! Doesn’t it sound like a comic opera, Mother dear? I forgot you never saw one, but it’s just such crazy things they do. We’ve credit, at least, for the firm has an agent here—a big one; but the office is closed, for the agent and bookkeepers are mobilized. Suddenly we, Mr. Laurence and Henry and their proud corporation, are nobody. It won’t last. It’s inconvenient, but it’s good for them. They somehow were so sure of things—of Germany, of the power of the firm, of themselves—when they had their pockets full and now—why, now we’re beggars! But we’re American beggars and I tell you it does brace one up to remember that.

“Namur, Friday, August 7.

“We are still here at Namur, dearest one, and when the wind is right we can hear the guns firing. It is the Germans at Liége. So far the Belgians are holding them. Isn’t it glorious? The people are crazy with pride and joy. Of course we would not be here if it were not for the trouble about money and the delay in getting back our car. Mr. Laurence would not have waited for that, but Martha is really ill and he was afraid that the journey to Brussels in the over-crowded trains and with the delays and discomforts might be serious for her. We couldn’t be in a safer place, I suppose, if we must stand a siege. The people say Namur has the strongest fortifications in Belgium. There are nine great forts around the town—not close—three or four miles off. There is a wonderful old fortification on the hill above the river, and from there you can see over the country for miles—a much better place for a fort it seems to me than off out in the country, but I suppose that’s my ignorance.

“You would never believe the place was preparing for a siege. It is more like a fête. There are flags everywhere—the French and English with the Belgian. There are no end of soldiers. They are building barricades in the streets, but people go on so naturally. The old men and women are harvesting. Here and there on the river bank you see a fisherman holding his pole as placidly as if there was not a German in a thousand miles. The fussy little steamers and boats with lovely red square sails go up and down the rivers just as usual. And yet this moment if I listen I can hear a distant roar that they tell me is the guns at Liége,

“Thursday—Later.

“We are going in the morning—if they will let us. The car has been turned back. News has just come that yesterday the Germans were seen in Dinant—looking for the French that they made their excuse for invading Belgium, I suppose. It has frightened Mr. Laurence and Henry and they want to get to Brussels. The news from Liége is very queer. We can’t tell how true it is, but the attack seems to be heavier and to-day there flew over this town a great German airplane! spying on us, of course. It was white, with a big blue spot on each wing, and looked for all the world like a great scarab, and such a racket as it made!

“I watched it from the street floating over the town so insolent and calm, and I wanted to kill it. I wasn’t the only one. I saw a Belgian workman do the funniest thing. He shook his fist at it, screaming threats and then—spit at it!

“Brussels, August 10.

“We are here at last, dearest, and they tell me I can get off a letter—maybe. We were all day yesterday getting here—about sixty miles—think of that for a car of the Laurences. It is all funny now, but there were moments when it was anything but that. The entire Belgian population between Namur and Brussels seems to be on guard. They are spy mad. We were not out of sight of one set of guards before another had us. We had all sorts of passports, but they took their own time making sure and sometimes it was long, for I don’t believe they could always read. There were soldiers and civil guards all holding us up, and when they were not on the road it was the peasants themselves. Why, in one little town a regiment of armed peasants stopped us. Mr. Laurence said they must have raided the firearms’ department of a historical museum to get the weapons they carried; rusty old antiques that probably wouldn’t work if they did try to fire. They arrested us and took us to the Burgomaster, and it took two hours to convince him we weren’t spies. I’m sure he couldn’t read our passports. Finally the curé came in and he understood at once. He scolded them like children—told them they would offend their noble English ally if they stopped Americans. So they let us off and even cheered us as we went.

“We reached Brussels finally and found that Mr. Laurence’s people had arranged everything. You feel so safe here as if you could breathe. I suppose it’s because of our embassy and the office, though the office has been turned into a hospital. Hundreds of wounded are coming in. The Red Cross is at work raising money, and somebody jingles a cup under your nose every time you go out. The town is full of boy scouts, too—they say they’ve taken over all the messenger service.

“Mr. Laurence had just come in and says letters will go. He tells me, too, that you’ve been worried—that his cablegram from Namur didn’t get through—that there are inquiries here at the embassy for me. He says you think I’m lost. Oh, my dear, I never thought of that. But you’ll surely get your wire from Washington to-day, he says. His New York office will wire every day. I couldn’t sleep if I thought of you worried. Will see you are regularly posted. Will leave for London as soon as Martha is stronger, and I will sail for America as soon as I can get a ship.

“Your loving Patsy.”

It was on August 22nd that the McCullons received this letter. That afternoon came a message saying that Patsy had reached London. It was many days before they were to know of the experiences of the ten days between letter and message, experiences which were to kindle in the girl that anger and that pity from which her first great passion for other people than her own was to spring.

It was not necessary for Sabinsport to receive Patsy’s letter in order to make up its mind about the invasion of Belgium. There were many things involved in the Great War that Sabinsport was to learn only after long months of slow and cumbersome meditation, months upon months of wearing, puzzled watching. They were things hard for her to learn, for they contradicted all her little teaching in world relations and bade her enter where the traditions of her land as she had learned them had forbidden her to go; they forced her, a landsman, to whom the seas and their laws and meanings were remote and unreal, to come to a realization of what the seas meant to her, the things she made and the children she bore; they forced her to understand that the flag and laws which protected her homes must protect ships on the water, for as her home was her castle so were ships the sailor’s castle; they forced her to lay aside old prejudices against England; they forced her to a passion of pity and pride and protective love for France; they forced her to an understanding of the utter contradiction between her beliefs and ideals and the beliefs and ideals of the Power that had brought the war on the world. Poor little Sabinsport! Born only to know and to desire her own corner of the earth, wishing only that her people should be free to work out their lives in peace—she had a long road to travel before her mind could grasp the mighty problems the Great War had put up to the peoples of the earth, before her heart could feel as her own the passions and aspirations that burned and drove onward the scores of big and little peoples that fate had brought into the struggle.

But there was no problem in Belgium’s case. Germany had sworn to respect her neutrality and she had broken her oath. She had followed this breach of faith with unheard of violence, destruction, wantonness, pillage, cruelty, lust.

This was true.

Now Sabinsport was simple-minded. She was not very good—that is, not without her own cynicism, hard-headedness, hypocrisies. She didn’t pretend to any great virtue, but she would not stand for broken contracts. “You couldn’t do business that way,” was the common feeling in Sabinsport. She was harsh with people who broke bargains and saw to it always they were punished. If the sinner was able by influence in bribery or cleverness to escape the law, Sabinsport punished him in her own way. She never forgot and she built up a cloud of suspicion about the man so that he knew she had not forgotten. Men had left Sabinsport because of her intangible, persistent disapproval of violated agreements, repudiated debts. The invasion of Belgium, then, was classed in the town’s mind with the things she wouldn’t stand for.

Moreover, the deed had been done with cruelty, and Sabinsport could not stand for that. She might—and did—overlook a great deal of the normal cruelty of daily life—cruelties of neglect and snobbery and bad conditions, but the out-and-out thing she wouldn’t stand. A boy caught tying a tin can to a dog’s tail in Sabinsport would be threatened by the police, held up to scorn in school and thrashed at home. A man who beat his wife or child went to jail, and one of Sabinsport’s reasons for mistrusting the motley group of foreigners in its mines and mills was the stories of their harsh treatment of their women.

The steady flow of news of repeated, continued violence in Belgium stirred Sabinsport to deeper and deeper indignation. The Sunday before Patsy’s letter arrived a group of leading men and women asked Dick to start a relief fund; the Sunday after, almost everybody doubled his subscription, for the letter clinched their personal judgment of the case. “She’s been there; she says it as we thought.”

There was another element in Belgium’s case that took a mighty grip on Sabinsport, particularly the men and boys. It was the little nation’s courage. Many a man came to Dick with a subscription because it was so “damned plucky.” Belgium’s courage had no deeper admirers than Mulligan and Cowder. Jake swore long and loud and gave generously. Cowder said little, but the largest sum the fund received in these first days was slipped into Dick’s hand by Reuben Cowder with a simple, “Got guts—that country has.”

It is not to be supposed that there were no dissenting voices, no doubts, no qualifications in the matter on which the town formed its final judgment on Belgium. There were people who intimated that Germany simply had beaten France and England to it. Sabinsport knit her brow and pondered. Possibly England had arranged with Belgium to let her through in case of attack—possibly France would have broken her word in case of need. However that might be, the fact was that it was Germany that had abused her oath and not France or England, and she did it at the moment when neither of the others was thinking of such a maneuver and was unprepared for it. Belgium might be surrounded by rogue nations, but still there is a choice in rogues. Only one so far had proved itself a rogue. Sabinsport dismissed the doubt from her mind. The facts were against it.

There were people, too, a few, who protested against Belgium’s resistance to Germany. Dick was not surprised to hear that a certain important pillar on the financial side of his own flock had decried the sacrifice as “impractical.” “All very well to be brave,” he said, “but one should distinguish in important matters in this life between the practical and impractical. I call this foolish resistance—couldn’t possibly hold that army, and if they had let it pass they would have been paid well. Foolish waste of life and property I call it.” But the gentleman ceased his talk after listening a few times to the strongly expressed contempt of those of his colleagues who did not fear him for his gospel of honor when practical.

Whatever the dissent, the protest, the argument, Dick had a feeling that it was weighed and that it tipped the scale of opinion not the hundredth part of an ounce more than it was worth. It seemed to him sometimes that he was looking at a mixture of chemicals watching for a crystallization—would it come true to the laws in which he had faith? And it did; whatever the fact and fancy, the logic and nonsense, poured into Sabinsport’s head, a sound sensible view came out. His satisfaction in the popular opinion of the town, as he caught it in his running up and down, was the deepest of his troubled days. And the Reverend Richard Ingraham’s days were full of trouble.

There was Ralph Gardner—his dearest friend. They were not getting on at all. The war had broken in on Ralph’s schemes for regenerating Sabinsport at a moment when her open indifference to her own salvation was making him furious and obstinate. It had cut off all possible chance for a campaign. It filled the air with new sympathies and feelings. It thrust rudely out of field matters to which men had been giving their lives. It demanded attention to facts, relations, situations, ideas that until now were unheard of. Insist as Ralph did in the Argus and out that the war was the affair of another hemisphere, it continued to force his hand, challenge his attention, change the current of the activities which he held so dear. As the days went on it grew in importance, engulfed more and more people, began to threaten ominously the very existence of the town itself.

Ralph struggled hopelessly against the flood, refusing to accept the collected opinion, the popular conclusions. Particularly did he refuse to join the condemnation of Germany. Let us understand Germany, was his constant plea. He was seeking to bolster the long-held faith that in the social developments of Germany lay the real hope of civilization. Their relation to German Kultur, he did not even dimly see. They were Kultur for him and all there was of it. Because Germany had worked out fine and practical systems of social insurance and industrial safety, and housing and employment, he could not believe her capable of other than humane and fair dealing with all the world. He was ready, for the sake of this faith, to explain away a great and growing mass of facts which to people of no such intellectual engagement were unanswerable. He found himself more and more at disagreement not only with Dick, his best friend, and the town, but with certain imperative, inner doubts that would not be quiet, and in this struggle he was getting little help from Dick.

The war had quickly opened itself to Dick as something prodigious, murderous—all-inclusive. He saw the earth encircled by it—felt the inevitableness finally of the entrance of the United States. From the start it had been clear to him, as it could not have been to one who had not known the thought and passion of the German ruling class, that this must become the most desperate struggle the earth had yet seen between those who felt themselves fit and appointed to plan and rule in orderly fashion the lives of men and the blundering, groping mass fumbling at expression but forever indomitable in its determination to rule itself.

Dick felt that he must get into it, the very thick of it, nothing but the limit—the direct, utter giving of himself—his body, his blood, would satisfy the passion that seized him. He would go to Canada and enlist. And with the determination there came a tormenting uncertainty. Would they accept him? All his life he had lived under a restraint—his guardian—physicians in almost every great center of the world had impressed it repeatedly upon him: “No great exertion, no great excitements. Nothing to fear with normal, steady living, everything from strain.”

His guardian had put it to him early: “This is a sporting proposition, Dick; you were born with this physical handicap. You can live a long, full, useful life without danger if you are willing to live within certain physical and mental limitations. Moderation, calm cheerfulness, courage; that will carry you through. It’s a man’s code, Dick. Make up your mind now and never forget the limits.”

Dick had done it easily—at the start. Restraint had become the habit of his life. Only now and then he felt a pang. Sports of the severe sort were closed to him. He went through Europe for years with the imperative call of the snow mountain in his soul and never answered it.

And now? He determined before the close of August that, come what would, he would enlist. He could slip past some way, and so with only an evasive explanation to Ralph he went to Montreal. It was a ghastly and heart-breaking experience. He tried again and again, and no examiner would pass him. He went to the greatest of Canadian specialists—a wise and understanding man. “Give up the idea, boy,” he said gently. “You might live six months. The chances are you would not one. You have no right to insist for the good of the service. And let me tell you something. You are not the only man to-day who feels that to be denied the chance to fling himself into this mighty thing is the greatest calamity life could offer. We men who are too old feel it. Many a man with burdens of political, social, professional, industrial responsibility in him so imperative that he must remain here, feels it. You are one of a great host to whom is denied the very final essence of human experience, giving their blood—for the finest vision the earth has yet seen. Don’t let it down you. Go home to the States and help them to learn what this thing means. They can’t know. It is different with us. Where England leads, Canada follows. The States will go in only as the result of an inner conviction that this struggle is between the kind of things they stand for and the kind of things which led them to their original break with England, their original vision and plan of government. That is what it is, but your people will be slow to see it. They are not attacked. England and France are. It is not fear of attack that will finally take you in. You yourself have said that. It is the consciousness that the right of self-government by peoples on this earth is threatened. Go back and help your land see it.”

Dick scarcely heard the counsel. He was conscious only of his sentence and he refused to accept that. He went in turn to the leading specialists in the States, men whom he had consulted in the past, and from each heard the same verdict. He knew they were right. That was the dreadful truth. He knew that forcing himself into service, as he might very well do in England under the circumstances of the moment there, would mean training a man who could not hold out instead of one who could.

Dick went back to Sabinsport a beaten, miserable man. Ralph was quick to sense that some overwhelming rebuff had come to Dick. He suspected what it was. If Dick had not been too crushed at the moment to realize that his dear but limited and obstinate friend was making awkward efforts to show his sympathy, it is quite possible that they might have come together sufficiently to discuss the war without rancor. But Dick was blind to everything but his own misery. He failed Ralph utterly.

He said to himself daily, “I am of no use on the earth; thirty-five—a fortune I did not earn, an education, relations, experiences prepared for me; a profession adopted as a refuge in a time of need; a citizen of a country in which I have not taken root; an accident in the only spot on earth where I’ve ever done an honest day’s work; the very companions of my student days throwing themselves into a noble struggle in which I would gladly die and from which I’m hopelessly debarred. A useless bit of drifting wreckage, why live?”

It was the victory of the Marne which, coming as it did at the moment of his deepest despair, pulled Dick back into something like normal courage and cheer. The probability that Paris would fall into German hands had filled him with horror. When he read the first headlines of the turn of the battle, he had bowed his head and sobbed aloud, “Thank God, thank God.”

All over the land that September morning hundreds of Americans who knew and loved their France like Dick, sobbed broken thanks to the Almighty. If for the millions it was simply an amazing turn in the war, an unexpected proof that Germany was not as invulnerable as she had made them believe, for these hundreds it was a relief from a pain that had become intolerable.

Dick was not the only one in Sabinsport, however, that the victory of the Marne stirred to the depths. John A. Papalogos hung out a French flag over his fruit and startled the children by giving them handfuls of his wares, the grown-ups by his reckless measures and everybody by an abandon of enthusiasm which not a few regarded as suspicious. “Must have been drinking,” Mary Sabins told Tom when he came home for lunch.

At the mines the effect was serious. The Slavs fell on the Austrians and beat them unmercifully. It was the only way they knew to answer the arrogance that the German advance had brought out. It was worth noting that in the general mêlée the Italian miners sided with the Slavs.

The barrier between Dick and Ralph was still up when Patsy arrived. They all knew by this time something of what the girl had seen between her letter of August 10th mailed in Brussels and her arrival in London the twenty-first. Held by the unwillingness of Mr. Laurence to allow his wife to travel until she was stronger and by his inability to believe that the invasion of Belgium could be the monstrous thing it proved and by his complacent faith that nothing anyway could harm an American business man, it was not until the 19th he obeyed the imperative order of the embassy to go while he could. In those days of waiting, Patsy had come into daily contact with the horrors and miseries of war. She had seen Brussels filling up with wounded, had spent lavishly of her strength and of Laurence money in helping improvise hospitals and in feeding, nursing and comforting refugees. She had lived years in days.

The letters they had received before she arrived were broken cries of amazed pity. “I cannot write of what I see,” she had said. “Refugees fill the streets, coming from every direction, on foot, beside dog carts, on farm wagons piled high with all sorts of stuff. They are all so white and tired and bewildered—and they are so like the folks around home. It’s the old people that break my heart. Somehow it seems more terrible for them than even the children, though they take it so quietly. We picked up an old woman of eighty to-day. She might have been old Mother Peters out at Cowder’s Corners—never before in a great city—her son killed at Louvain—her daughter-in-law lost—nobody she knew—no money—a poor, wandering, helpless old soul. Of course we’ve found her a place and left money, but what is that?—she’s alone and we’re going and there are so many of them and the Germans are coming—what will they all do—what will they all do?”...

On August 18th she wrote:

“We’re going, rushing away almost as the poor souls we’ve been helping rushed here. We’re leaving them—I feel like a coward, but we’re only in the way, after all. Nothing you can do counts.”

On August 22nd she had written from London after a flight of hardship and horrors:

“We’re here at last. I cannot believe that there is a place where people are safe, where they do not fly and starve. England after Belgium! It is so sweet, but it does not seem right. I cannot consent to be calm when just over there those dreadful things are happening. But every one here is working to care for the refugees that are coming in by the hundreds. You must not be surprised if I come home with an armful of Belgian orphans.”

A paragraph in a last letter aroused keen interest in Sabinsport when it was noised around.

“At one of the stations for Belgian refugees I found Nancy Cowder. It was she who recognized me. I was giving my address, promising to raise money in America, when a girl standing near said, ‘Did you say Sabinsport? It is your home? You are returning?’

“‘Yes,’ I said.

“‘It is my home, too. I am Nancy Cowder. Will you tell my father you saw me, that I am well, and that he is not to be anxious?’

“I was never so surprised. Why, Mother, she looks the very great lady. I know all of that hateful gossip about her is not true. It can’t be. I’ve found out a lot about her here.”

“Trust Patsy for that,” growled Ralph, when he and Dick read the letter.

“She has heaps of friends and is staying with Lady Betty Barstow. She’s been working day and night since the war began. At the Embassy an attaché told me she was about the most level-headed and really useful American woman he’d seen—‘And beautiful and interesting and generous,’ he added. This is another case where Sabinsport has been wrong.”

Dick and Ralph were curious about Patsy’s encounter, for they long ago had discovered that Nancy Cowder was one of Sabinsport’s standing subjects of gossip, that the town considered her highly improper. There seemed to be two reasons: one was the general disapproval of anything that belonged to Reuben Cowder, and then the notion that “a girl who raised dogs and horses and took them east, even to England, could not be ‘nice.’”

Dick was much amused when he learned that the Sabinsport skeleton, as Ralph had always called Nancy Cowder, was visiting the Barstows. “She must be all right,” he mused, “or she would not be in that house.” You see, Dick had known Lady Barstow’s brother at Oxford and more than once had passed a week-end with him at his sister’s place.

But Nancy Cowder was quickly forgotten in Patsy’s return. She came a new Patsy, thin and pale, with the energy and the spirit of a Crusader in her blazing eyes. Belgium and her wrongs had been burnt into Patsy’s soul. It was her first great unselfish passion. It had made her tender beyond belief with her father and mother. The two restrained, inexpressive old people were almost embarrassed by the tears and the kisses she showered on them. This was not their business-like, assertive girl, absorbed in her own plans and insisting on her own ways. It was a girl who watched them with almost annoying persistence, who wanted to save them steps, guard them from imaginary danger, give them pleasures they had never even coveted. What they did not realize was that, as Patsy looked into their faces, visions of distracted, homeless Belgian women, of broken, wounded Belgian men, floated before her eyes, that she found relief in doing for them even unnecessary services since she could do nothing for those others.

Patsy’s passion made her hard on the town. She demanded that it champion Belgium’s cause as she had, with all its soul and all its resources; that it think of nothing else. But this it could not do. Sabinsport, ignorant and distant as it was, had developed something of a perspective and was sensing daily something of the complexity of the elements in the war. It could not think singly of Belgium.

Ralph, bitter in spirit at finding Patsy so changed, so absorbed in her conception of her own and her friends’ duty, took her to task for emotionalism. He forced arguments on her: that Germany was the only bulwark between civilization and the Russian peril; that she had been hampered by an envious England; that if Germany had not violated Belgium, France would. If Ralph had not been stung to jealousy by Patsy’s interest in something outside himself he would never have been as stupid and as unreasonable as he proved. He knew he was wrong. He knew that he admired her for the unselfish passion she showed. He knew he hurt her, but he wanted to hurt her!

Patsy—bewildered, shocked, wounded to the heart by Ralph’s talk—promptly forbade him ever to speak to her again and went home and for the first time in her life cried herself to sleep. She had not known how completely she was counting on Ralph’s sympathy. She had said to herself: “Now I know something of what he feels about people who suffer; he’ll know I understand; we can work together.” And here was her dream dissolved. Patsy was learning that war is not the only destroyer of human happiness and hopes.

Ralph charged their quarrel to the war, as he did everything not to his liking. Every day he pounded more emphatically on the wrong of all wars and particularly this war. Every day he preached neutrality, though it must be confessed that he did it all with decreasing faith. It was a hard rôle. He was a man without a text in which he believed to the full. Then suddenly in October he found what he was searching. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was to convert a factory made idle by the war and build largely. Ralph was himself again. No self-respecting community should permit money to be made within its limits from war supplies. It was blood money.