The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

Dick found that not only the women were working but that the war spirit among them was hot, even fierce. He dropped in one afternoon to the Woman’s Club to hear the story that an Eastern journalist, lately returned from a trip along the front, had to tell. As he watched the audience, a large proportion of whom were knitting—for Sabinsport’s Woman’s Club had come to the point where it was stipulated, when bringing on a lecturer, that he should not object to knitting—he recalled the discussion he had had a couple of years before with Ralph.

Ralph had insisted loudly that it was nonsense to talk in America about war, that the women would not stand for it, that they would riot first. Dick had answered, “Ralph, that is something you read in a book. If you knew women and knew history, you would know that when the test comes, they not only will ‘stand for’ war, but they will be violent supporters of war.” Ralph had accused him of being out of touch with the modern world, of not knowing anything of the “New Woman.” This conversation ran through his mind now as the speaker told the story of the first gas attack by the Germans, of the deadly effect it had had on the unprepared English, and then remarked that the English now had a more deadly gas invention than anything that had come out of Germany. He was almost startled by the applause which rang through the room. Practically every woman took part in it; the knitters dropping their work to clap.

The speaker went on with stories of how our troops made their first attack. “Nineteen dead Germans,” he said, “to six dead Americans.” Again the room rang with long clapping and cries of, “Good boys! Good boys!” Not a tear, not a bowed head; but pride—fierce pride, and vengeance.

“I was right,” thought Dick. “Ralph read it in a book, not out of life.”

Again and again Dick noted profound changes in individuals in the three months in which he had been gone. None of them moved him so deeply or gave him so much joy as that in Mary Sabins, who was now regularly installed as a nurse’s aide in the hospital at camp. Her face wore the look of one who had struggled to a high mountain and from the top was looking into a new and glorious world.

Mary had been a very unhappy woman in the months since Young Tom had left her for France. It was not only the shock of his going, but it was the still greater shock that her husband had refused to use his authority at her request and forbid the boy’s going away. For the first time in their married life of some twenty-five years, a strain had come between them. Tom Sabins could not understand why Mary did not feel his pride in the boy’s courageous and adventurous spirit. She should not understand why he did not resent the invasion of their snug and comfortable world.

When the war came she was still further bewildered by the change that came over Tom. Every business and social occupation that had engrossed him, the pleasures to which he had been so devoted, he threw them aside as completely as the boy had thrown over college and home. It was Tom Sabins that had been asked to head the draft board of the community, and Mary had never seen him so engrossed or so interested in anything. “Why, why should he give his days to men of whom she had never heard? Why should he be so eager, so enthusiastic, so indefatigable, in this work?” Mary watched him with resentful eyes.

Dick had talked frequently with Nancy about their friend, and the two had tried their best to interest her in some form of camp work; but she had refused peremptorily to be enlisted. And here she was now, going regularly day by day to the hospitals.

“Tell me about Mary Sabins,” he asked Nancy, the first Monday afternoon after his return that he was able to go to the farm.

“You know, of course,” Nancy said, “that just after you left Young Tom was invalided home. He went into the Foreign Legion when our forces took over the ambulance service, and got a nasty wound in the cheek and shoulder almost at once. It was nothing dangerous, however, but it was very hard for Tom to make Mary believe this, and she raved at her inability to go to him. He got on famously and soon was allowed to come back. You never saw any one so exultant as Mary was when Tom first came. It seemed to her, I think, that her old world, at least part of it, was restored; but it was pitiful to see how soon she discovered that Young Tom’s notions of life were utterly changed, that the interests which had absorbed them in the old days had no meaning now; that his one thought was of the war, and his one hope was to return to it.