Glad as he was for his friends, their marriage and Ralph’s enlistment threw Dick back again into a black and hopeless mood. If he could ease the pain of his longing for Nancy by getting into the war! If he could ease his despair from the sentence to inaction by possessing Nancy! He felt that he was one condemned to eternal loneliness and eternal rust. More powerfully than ever, as in the distant day when he had sought Annie and found her dead—or when in August of 1914 he had sought to make his way into the British Army and had been thrust back, he was flooded with the conviction that he was doomed never to know the great realities of life. Not a little of his ache came from the stir that Ralph’s almost primitive attitude toward the war had given him. Ralph, once convinced that the future of the world was at stake, that it was at bottom a struggle between men’s freedom and slavery, that the event could only be settled by war, had undergone a startling change in feeling. He was seized with a passion for the struggle. He wanted to fight—fight with weapons—with his hands—get at the very throat of this enemy of men who had so long masqueraded in his mind as their friend.
It was his thirst for battle that had made him enlist in the ranks. When Dick had first heard of this decision he had questioned its wisdom. “Why, Ralph,” he said, “you ought to go into an officers’ camp. You’ll be needed there.”
“No,” answered Ralph, “I want the trenches. I’m after the real thing. I don’t want to order—I want to obey. I want the essence of battle, and I don’t believe anybody but the man in the line ever gets it. Then, too, I’ve hung back all these months, stupid ass that I was. I want to begin at the bottom. All right if I can work up, but I want to work up by doing the thing.”
Dick understood. Thus he had felt in those first days before the hope of a part in the war had been destroyed. He recalled how there had been hours when he felt that nothing but the sight of his own red blood flowing would still the passion within him. Ralph was to have a chance to grapple with death and laugh in her face—the highest thing that came to men, he somehow felt; and he would never know it.
That he had any more chance of winning Nancy than of being admitted into the army, he did not believe. She was bound somehow to Otto, of that he was sure. In the few months she had been at home he had seen scores of little things that made him think it. He always remembered with a pang the disappointment he thought he detected at their first meeting when she had asked for Otto, and her father had told her he was not in town. He recalled, too, how a few days later, when he was alone with her, she had told him of seeing Otto the day he returned; how he seemed depressed, how sorry she was, for he was her oldest, indeed almost her only, friend in Sabinsport. Dick felt as if she were sounding him. He gave no sign, only remarking that the war was sad business for those who had lived in Germany as Otto had and who had many friends there.
She had never pursued it, but she spoke freely of his visits. He never felt sure that she sensed that hers was practically the only house in Sabinsport into which Otto now went. What could make her so interested but—caring? What could make Reuben Cowder look so grim when Otto was present or when his name was mentioned but his belief that she did care? Of one thing he was sure, he must give no sign and he gave none, though as the spring days went on and the question of our going into the war was settled and Sabinsport began to prepare to take up her part, the two were thrown more and more together. It would have been harder if there had not been so much to do, and if the town had not taken it so much for granted that whatever the question, it was Dick who must explain and counsel.
CHAPTER IX
It was this having so much to do that not only saved Dick, but it had saved Sabinsport, for Sabinsport had gone into the war without enthusiasm. She had accepted it fully as a thing she was obliged in honor to carry through, but Dick felt more and more that neither her heart was touched nor her spirit fired. He could not get over the chill that her reception of the news that war had been declared had given him—not a bell rang, not a whistle blew, not a man stopped work. “Well, we are in it,” they said as they met him on the street. “It’s all right.”—“Nothing else to do.”—“I’m for it.” That would be all, and the speaker would walk away with bent head.
How, Dick asked himself, a great wave of doubt coming over him, could a town so unmoved, even if so determined, ever carry out the prodigious piece of work which the Government asked of it, at the time the declaration was made? They were to put everything in—their sons, their money, their industries, were to be conscripted. They were to be asked to change all their ways of living, and to do it at once. How could it be that a town, seemingly so unstirred, would so completely strip itself as Sabinsport was asked to do? Could this determination, which he believed was in her, carry her through the period of sacrifice and effort? Was she to have none of the help of pride, the consciousness of a great cause? How far would Sabinsport go?
The first test came when the Government announced that we were to have an army of two million men, chosen on the principle of universal liability to service. “Never,” declared the Rev. Mr. Pepper, “would Sabinsport stand for that.” And there were not a few in mills and mines, not a few representatives of various peace parties, that gathered about him. They loudly declared in the Pro Bono Publico column of the Argus that we had been plunged into war against our will, that it was still possible to negotiate, that the American people wanted to negotiate, that the President was playing a hypocrite’s part, that he was a puppet of Wall Street, whose only interest was to protect foreign loans and to carry on munition making. The Rev. Mr. Pepper, encouraged by the swift gathering of pacifists around him, engaged the Opera House and called for a great mass meeting of protest. Sabinsport should have a right to vote on our going into the war, if it had been denied to the rest of the country.