The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

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.