The war had brought to no one in Sabinsport so far as great humiliation and wretchedness as to this dabbler in world politics. No small part of his misery was due to his fear that the suspicion abroad in Sabinsport would find its way overseas to the one girl in the world for whom he had ever really cared. Would the intangible thing which followed him in the street find Nancy Cowder in Serbia and poison her loyal and honest mind against him? He had many reasons for knowing how candidly she weighed things. Would she be misled by gossip and the letters he’d been sending her, so full of his own importance in the great work of making America understand Germany? Would Nancy say, like Ralph, “All this does make me understand Germany better, Otto”? He had an awful fear of it. The only consolation was his certainty that she had no other Sabinsport correspondent but her father, and it was unthinkable that her father would write of their quarrel over the munitions contract.
CHAPTER V
Otto Littman was quite right in thinking that Reuben Cowder would not write his daughter about their quarrel. People might say what they would of Reuben Cowder’s business methods, but he never hit below the belt. Moreover, he was too wise to attempt to influence the likes or dislikes of his spirited daughter. He had too great faith in the soundness of her instincts. However deeply she might be interested in Otto—and he feared it was deep indeed—he was confident that she would instinctively know whether he was loyal; and, of course, while she was in Serbia, there was no danger. He was quite right. Nancy was reading between the lines of Otto Littman’s letters, and sensing far better than any one in Sabinsport the motives which had involved him in the German intriguing. Besides, she was wholly occupied with her work.
Dick realized, better even than Reuben Cowder, how the sorrows that she had undertaken to relieve absorbed her. He was getting better and better acquainted with the young woman in these days, for it came to be Reuben Cowder’s habit, since his first talk with Dick, to bring him regularly her letters. Sometimes he dropped into Dick’s study at night, sometimes he picked him up as he drove by in his car or stopped him as he met him on the street; and always Dick found that his reason was the need he had of talking about his girl. Evidently he talked to no one else, for nobody in Sabinsport knew any of the details of the terrible experiences these months had brought Nancy Cowder or anything of the hell of torment her father had gone through. Dick himself never mentioned her name, sensing that, at the first hint the hard old man had that he had talked, his confidence would be silenced. Reuben Cowder had a terrible resentment against Sabinsport society because it misjudged his daughter. Sabinsport should never know of her from him, should not have the stupid satisfaction of rolling over her splendid service with idle tongue, and Sabinsport did not know more than that the girl had been in Serbia throughout the bitter months after the second invasion and repulse.
Dick knew the tragic story in spots, and, by his knowledge of the country and his careful reading of every scrap of news the leading journals of the world gave him, had pieced it into a whole. He saved every item he read to talk over with Cowder, and every day that he built up the story he unconsciously became more deeply involved. “The courage of the creature,” he said to himself; “the gentleness, the gayety, the pity—why, she’s a wonder woman. Who could have guessed it from the gossip of this benighted town?”
And as a truth, Nancy Cowder deserved all Dick was attributing to her. She was showing the qualities of a great, pitying, resourceful soul, naturally and quietly giving its life to ease the boundless misery of a brave and neglected little people.
She had first entered the country in 1914, stirred to the undertaking by the reports of the plight of the sick and wounded after the Austro-Hungarian invasions. Things in Serbia, indeed, were in a frightful way. Exhausted by two recent wars, her hospitals, never many, stripped of supplies, her few physicians and nurses worn out by the long strain through which they had been going, the country could scarce have been in a worse condition to stand a new shock. She, to be sure, repulsed her enemy, but the repulse cost a frightful price of dead and mutilated. Who shall ever have the courage to tell of the savage cruelties that attended the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian army from Serbia in the fall of 1914? Those who followed after found men hanging in orchards, dead; women huddled in heaps where they’d been felled, the hideous first step in that decision to exterminate the Serbian people, which the Central Empires had taken.
It was a heart-breaking story that reached Nancy Cowder from an English official summoned home by the war. Her decision was immediate: “I’ll go, there is need there. All the world will care for Belgium,” and for a month she worked with her English friend, Betty Barstow, to get together a unit of a half-dozen women. The result was two physicians, two nurses, one chauffeur and one “general utility man,” as Nancy called herself. They moved heaven and earth to raise money, collect supplies and secure such recognition from the English and French governments as would give their unofficial and volunteer caravan a standing before the Serbian authorities. They had little need of passports. A woman with surgical dressings in one hand and food in the other was welcomed as an angel from heaven by Serbians in those stricken days.
Nancy’s party had gone into the country by Salonika, a city overflowing with the excited travelers of half the world. From there they had made their way to Valievo, a little town north of the center of Serbia, the terminus of a narrow gauge railroad which runs eastward connecting with the main line between Salonika and Belgrade. It was over this single track, with its dwarf engine and cars, that the soldiery of all Central Serbia was traveling—with their supplies, their wounded and their sick. Since the terrific fighting along the Save and the Dwina, wounded Serbs and Austrians had been pouring into Valievo. Refugees had followed them. The little narrow-gauge railroad could not cope with this mass of misery. It had carried away what it could but numbers had been left behind.
Late in 1914 these six young and intrepid Samaritans arrived with bags, boxes of bandages, cordials and medicines—and more to follow. They had planned to find a little house on one of the green hillsides, to make it a home, and from there to go day by day among the people; and thus they started.