“Well, wipe your slate clean, start afresh. Take the world as it is to-day, try, without prejudice, to get at the things that brought about this convulsion. I have no fear of where you will come out, if you will but give up your idea of trying to reconstruct Sabinsport according to the formula you have laid down. Incantations are useless now, Ralph. You may cry ‘Peace! Peace!’ until you swoon, but you’ll cry it to unhearing ears. You can say your formulæ backward and forward and wave your divining rod as you will, but it won’t work. There is no magic wand that is going to end this thing. Realities are at work, and the greatest of them is the reality of hope—the hope for greater freedom to more people. When you once understand this, Ralph, you will find that you have a religion far greater than that which the Progressive Convention of 1912 gave you.”
“Of course you’re right, Parson. You always are. The war has won. I’ve known it would some day. Don’t expect much of me. It will be like learning to walk, to accept the war.”
Dick thought of the phrase often in the days to come, “to accept the war,” and he felt a profound pity for the ardent idealists of the land that had been dragged from their dreams and their efforts and had been forced by merciless, insistent, continuing facts to admit that war was on the earth. Neither their denials nor their horror turned the Great Invader. He came on as if they were not. They had no weapons of eloquence, of reason, of beauty, that lessened his might, slowed his step. He was Power and Life and things as they are, and they were Denial and Fantasy and that which is not.
But Ralph’s effort to “accept the war” did not engross his mind nearly so much, Dick soon began to feel, as his effort to persuade Patsy to accept him—as a friend, of course! He was too humble now to think of more. Patsy’s wrath at being classed with the uncivilized, as she insisted she had been, had not cooled, and Ralph, so long as he was engrossed with his hope of revival of progressive ideas, had not tried to cool it. He had determined that they could not safely meet, and, as he told Dick, he wasn’t going to enliven everybody’s parties any longer by quarreling with Patsy.
“You certainly will take a good deal of ginger out of Sabinsport’s festivities if you do stop seeing her, but you know you will hurt Patsy.”
“Hurt Patsy! I can’t conceive a girl holding a man who was once her friend in greater contempt than she does me.”
“Nothing of the kind. Patsy suffers over these childish breaks more than you do. She really does, Ralph.”
“But I don’t believe it. And no matter if she did feel it, it’s no use. We’ve tried it out.” And there he let it rest for many weeks, while he set himself at a stiff course of reading of war documents. He had resolved to read, he said, “without prejudice, and decide in cool blood if the case justified war!” Again and again, however, as he was attempting to follow the Prussian from his start, as Dick had advised, he found himself beginning with his own advent in Sabinsport six years before and his first meeting with Patsy McCullon soon after she had taken the position of “Assistant to the Principal” in the high school. He remembered exactly how she looked as she came briskly into Mary Sabins’ handsome living-room—a straight, slender figure, brimming with life and curiosity—dark, clear eyes, dark waving hair, a nose with just a suggestion of a tilt, and a mouth all smiles and good humor. He remembered how full she was of her new work—to the practical exclusion of everybody else’s interests, he recalled—how she had kept them laughing with tales of the terror of her first week; her suspicion that her pupils knew more than she did about algebra and geometry and Latin grammar. He had gone away without getting in more than a word on the Argus and the iniquities of Sabinsport and a discomforted feeling that this young woman had made the most of her “social opportunities” to which High Town referred with such respect.
He recalled, too—recalled it with the German White Book on his knee—how, before the winter was over, his resentment at Patsy’s aplomb had passed. He had learned to match her lively reports of personal adventures in her school with as lively ones of what was going on in Sabinsport’s streets and factories. If she talked school reform, he talked labor reform; if she urged improved laboratories, he urged social insurance. They often accused each other of not understanding the importance of their respective tasks and they as often gibed at each other for taking these tasks over-seriously.
He remembered that he missed her when she went away for the summer and greeted her gladly when she came back. Patsy had been nice to him that second winter. She had guests from the East in the fall—“real swells”—people whose names appeared in the New York society column, and he had said to himself, “She’s certainly a corker,” when he saw with what genuine hospitality and with what entire absence of pretension Patsy had entertained her friends in the ample farm house, giving them all the gay country fall pleasures, quite to the horror of High Town, who would have loved to have opened its really luxurious houses and set out its really lovely china. Patsy had taken Dick and himself as her major-domos in her festivities and had thanked him warmly. “Nobody could have been nicer or more generous than you and Dick were. I knew I could count on you. It isn’t so easy, you know, to keep people whose business in life is largely amusement—though they don’t know it—amused every moment in a simple establishment like ours. But they really were happy, and it was largely due to you.”