In all this, Dick was going from depth to depth of discouragement. Inveterate believer that he was in this town, which he had come so to love, in the country in whose institutions he so believed, doubt and despair of the outcome of the great undertaking grew upon him. We were not going to be able to handle even the physical side of it. It was not alone what he saw at home; it was what he heard from his friends in Washington. Their letters, once hopeful, became despairing. “It looks to me to-day,” one of them wrote him along in the middle of January, “as if the whole war machine had broken down. I have believed and believed, but the fact is we are not getting men over. It’s all nonsense about our having 400,000 on the other side; there are not over 100,000. It’s all nonsense about our building ships—the whole business is simply tangled up. It’s an awful, humiliating failure, I am afraid, Dick. The men at the top are camouflaging the whole situation. I cannot endure it that we men back here should fail the fine fellows who gave themselves so utterly, so fearlessly.”
This letter was the last straw to Dick’s despair. He was overwhelmed with the futility of all the gigantic effort, sickened by the inability of Sabinsport properly to even take care of its own in a stress of weather, sickened by what he saw in the camp. Sabinsport was failing, the camp was failing, the country was failing. And why should he expect anything else? What was the human race, after all, but a set of selfish, limited bunglers?
And so, night after night, he tossed and groaned, and slept fitfully. Things grinned at him. He wakened feverish and worn. In the day things said, “What’s the use? Why talk about democracy? Why talk about ideals?” And he? Why, he was an utter failure. To get into it, to have a turn in the trenches, to be soaked with filth, to be broken with fatigue, to struggle to his feet, to feel a blessed death wound—that, that was the only thing that would count.
He worked, of course; wore every day his mask of courage and good cheer; but day by day it was growing harder to keep it on. Day by day his strength was failing, for Dick, for the first time in his life, was recklessly disobeying the boundaries which had been set for his physical existence. The over-fatigue which he had always conscientiously avoided he not only sought but coveted; the strains which he had been told might at any time be fatal to him, he took almost gladly. Finally his friends among the physicians at the camp warned him, “You will break down, Ingraham, as sure as the world if you don’t take things easier.” His friends grew worried. Nancy came to him and begged him to stop, to go away for a while; but he laughed at them all. In the bitterness of his soul he had come to feel that here was his way out; he could give himself here.
The break came suddenly in the hospital at the camp; one day he collapsed utterly and was taken home unconscious. An almost superhuman effort of doctors and nurses brought him around, and a month later, very white and humble, he was taken from Sabinsport to the South by Reuben Cowder himself.
His desire to die had left him. He was his normal self, save for his physical weakness. He meant to get well and come back to Sabinsport—Sabinsport, whose grief and anxiety over his illness had touched him to the heart? And he did his part. Three months later he came back—a little thinner, a little quieter, but quite himself again and capable of steady effort.
CHAPTER X
Dick’s impression, as he made his first rounds of Sabinsport after his return, was, Why, here is a new town! What had come over her? He had never pictured any such realization of the war as he sensed at every turn. It seemed to him that it was the one occupation, the one interest of everybody; and it was an orderly, systematized interest. The town seemed not only to have mobilized, but to have trained herself. She was doing her work with a vim and a freshness that he had not thought possible. The women, for instance, the women who had held off, said the City is taking care of the camp; who, as a whole, had never gone beyond the knitting stage, had been marshaled into organized groups and were working with the steadiness of so many factory hands. Since his departure a Red Cross house had gone up, and there, from eight to five every day, regular detachments served under a direction which he found was almost military in its severity. And it was a democratic house. Thursday afternoon was the afternoon “out” of cooks and maids in Sabinsport, and many a one gave her three or four hours at the tables on an equal footing with the greatest ladies of High Town.
Nancy’s canteen, which had met so poor a response when suggested, could be counted on now, night or day. It was no unusual thing for 2000 tired boys to be served at four A. M. with coffee and food at the headquarters by the track.
It was amazing the women that could be called on for this severe duty. There was a little manicurist at the Paradise—a saucy, competent, flirtatious person, that went into the canteen organization for night work. Three nights a week, from nine at night until six in the morning, she was ready for call, and again and again she would serve her full time, and, after two hours’ sleep, go back to her table, a little pale perhaps, but never any less skillful, any less flirtatious. And there were the greatest ladies of High Town that enlisted like the little manicurist for night work and did it as faithfully.