The next day when Dick paid his usual late afternoon visit to the Argus office, he went over the talk he had had with Cowder, giving in detail the report of the quarrel with Otto and his own version. To his surprise, Ralph said nothing in defense of Otto.
“He isn’t neutral. He is for Germany, just as Patsy and you are for the Allies. Nobody in Sabinsport is really neutral as far as I can make out. This town is almost solidly against Germany, and you know it. The opposition is to our having anything to do with the infernal business. Sabinsport doesn’t believe in war or doesn’t believe in this war for us, and that’s where I am—now. I’m for the people. We’re trying to keep neutral and trying to see both sides. But I’m sick of it—beastly business—think of Cowder and Littman quarreling. Another war casualty,” he said, bitterly, “suspicion, broken friendships—a world thrown back and all its hopes of making it a place fit for men to live in destroyed. Everything we’ve been trying to do the last twenty years gone to pot. There won’t be a law protecting labor left in the country if this goes on. Who’s going to think about hours and wages and safety and social insurance with that thing going on over there? Who cares any more in Sabinsport whether it’s right or wrong to let two men gobble up the franchises? Who asks, now that we are beginning to make money and have good prospects of continuing as long as there’s a war, whether it’s right to turn a town into a mill for destruction? I’m sick of it, Dick. It’s ruining things for us all. I’m so sore I can’t bear to go anywhere any more, and if I do I always have a row with somebody. Went to Tom Sabins’ last night and Patsy was there. We both tried to patch it up, but somebody said something about the freedom of the seas and I said I couldn’t see why a German embargo was any more reprehensible than an English one, and Patsy went up like a rocket and said I wasn’t human—had no sympathy—that if I’d seen Belgium as she did—she’s just Belgium mad. Of course, like a fool, I said that there was always plenty of a suffering near at hand, and people of real human sympathy, not mere emotionalism, could see it. I was a brute. I know Patsy is right. She left the room, and I didn’t see her again, and Tom said she cried.
“And you, Dick—the war’s got you. You needn’t think I don’t realize how it’s hurting you to have to stay here. I know you’d give your life to go. Nothing makes me so sore as to see you standing up so gamely to your sentence, and all the time I can’t see how you feel like you do. I can’t get it as a thing for me, Dick. It isn’t that I am all obstinate—won’t see it—as you think. I can’t see why it’s up to us to go crazy because a good part of the world is crazy, but, honest to God, Dick, I’m beginning to wish I could. I can’t follow Otto—nor Patsy, nor the Socialists at the mill—I don’t seem to agree with anybody—and what I want is to be with you—”
“And Patsy,” smiled Dick.
“I wonder,” said Ralph inadvertently, “if Patsy has heard from that Henry Laurence she wrote so much about?”
“She hears from Mrs. Laurence, but not at all from Henry, I think, Ralph. Why?—”
“Oh, nothing,” he said, suddenly cheerful, then added, sagely, “Such an experience as they went through together would naturally draw two young people together.”
CHAPTER IV
Dick was coming in from a five days’ walking trip. He had fled from town on Monday, seeking what the road and the sweet early May air and greenery would do for his jumping nerves and tormented mind. “Forget the war,” counseled Ralph, when he telephoned he was off. He had done it fairly well. Spring is a lovely thing in the highlands around Sabinsport. It covers the earth with delicate blossoms, turns the brown tracery of the trees to soft yellows and reds and greens, peoples the air with songsters. It was early this year, and had opened the doors of the farmhouses—started gardens, set men to plowing fields, women to sewing on the porches, children to wandering in the woods. Dick walked without other compass than his own experienced sense of direction and distance, shunning highways, following lanes and little-used roads, stopping only when the day grew dusky and sleeping by preference in friendly farmhouses.
It was Saturday morning, warm, brilliant, fragrant. He would be in Sabinsport by noon, he calculated. How changed he was! How rested! How bright things seemed again! It would be good to get back. He believed he could preach to-morrow. It should be of the healing of the air and the sun.