“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.