Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
Our country’s only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the benign powers may forever protect us.
VII
It was a year ago that I met my old friend Smith, irritable, depressed, anxious, in the German capital. This morning we tramped five miles, here among the Vermont hills where he has established himself. Sound in wind and limb is my old neighbor, and his outlook on life is sane and reasonable. I have even heard him referring, with something of his old emotion, to that dark winter at Valley Forge, but with a new hopefulness, a wider vision. He does not think the American Republic will perish, even as Nineveh and Tyre, any more than I do. He has come to a realization of his own errors and he is interested in the contemplation of his own responsibilities. And it is not the German specialist he has to thank for curing his weariness half so much as Fanny.
Fanny! Fanny is the wisest, the most capable, the healthiest-minded girl in the world. Fanny is adorable! As we trudged along the road, Smith suddenly paused and lifted his eyes to a rough pasture slightly above and beyond us. I knew from the sudden light in his face that Fanny was in the landscape. She leaped upon a wall and waved to us. A cool breeze rose from the valley and swept round her. As she poised for a moment before running down to join us in the road, there was about her something of the grace and vigor of the Winged Victory as it challenges the eye at the head of the staircase in the Louvre. She lifted her hand to brush back her hair,—that golden crown so loved by light! And as she ran we knew she would neither stumble nor fall on that rock-strewn pasture. When she reached the brook she took it at a bound, and burst upon us radiant.
It had been Fanny’s idea to come here, and poor, tired, broken, disconsolate Smith, driven desperate by the restrictions imposed upon him by the German doctors, and only harassed by his wife’s fears, had yielded to Fanny’s importunities. I had been so drawn into their affairs that I knew all the steps by which Fanny had effected his redemption. She had broken through the lines of the Philistines and brought him a cup of water from that unquenchable well by the gate for which David pined and for which we all long when the evil days come. The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny’s heart. She is to Smith as a Goddess of Liberty in short skirt and sweater, come down from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of comfort. She has become to him not merely the spirit of youth but of life, and his dependence upon her is complete. It was she who saved him from himself when to his tired eyes it seemed that
“All one’s work is vain,
And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
With even the short mirage of morning gone,
No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh