Lanny had sent his great-great-uncle the handsomest book he could find in the local store, a “de luxe” copy of Don Quixote with the Dore illustrations. There came now an invitation to spend a week-end with the old gentleman, and to bring Bess along. Esther wasn't entirely pleased by the intimacy between her daughter and her stepson, but Lanny promised to drive very, very carefully on the snow-covered roads, and Bess was so thrilled and Robbie so pleased that the mother couldn't forbid the visit.
Between Lanny and his stepmother lay a temperamental gulf that nothing could ever bridge. Lanny was guided by his love of beauty, whereas Esther had to think carefully about everything she felt or did, and bring it into conformity with rigid standards. A few times in the afternoon she had come in to find her stepson playing the piano in a loud and extravagant manner, completely absorbed in it; Esther had stood and listened, uneasy in her mind. She had never heard such music, at least not in a drawing room, and to her it was disorderly and unwholesome. Impossible to believe that anyone could let himself go like that and not sooner or later misbehave in other ways.
Bess with her excitability had been something of a “problem child” to her mother; and now came this youth from abroad to stimulate that tendency. Bess would listen to his playing with a rapt expression, as if transported to some strange land where her mother had never been. Bess wanted to play like Lanny, she wanted to dance like him — and wear a one-piece bathing suit in a drawing room while doing it! She chattered about the places her romantic half-brother had visited, the people he had met, the sights he had seen, the stories he told her. Books on child training which Esther conscientiously read all agreed that you shouldn't be saying “Don't! Don't” — and so Esther didn't. But uneasiness troubled her heart.
On that lovely winter ride, snugly wrapped in fur robes, Lanny told the child about the wonderful old gentleman she was going to meet. Great-Great-Uncle Eli had once helped slaves to escape; his friend Thoreau had gone to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a slave-catching government, and when the poet Emerson had come and asked: “Henry, what are you doing here?” Henry had answered: “Waldo, what are you doing out of here?” Some of them had gone to live in a colony called Brook Farm, in order to be independent and have more wholesome lives. “What is a colony?” demanded Bess; and then: “Oh, what fun! Are there any colonies now? Could we go and live in one, do you suppose?”
These two reincarnations of New England idealism arrived in the village of Norton in the proper mood to appreciate their venerable relative. The sweet little Quaker wife and the spinster daughter made them at home, and Bess sat for hours at the old man's feet. She couldn't understand all his long words, but she knew that what he said was good. When the two young people drove home again they had this new bond between them, as if some ancient prophet had anointed them with holy oil.
III
The last winter of the war was the darkest and most dreadful. For three years and a half all the ingenuities of man and the resources of science had been devoted to the ends of destruction. Both sides now had many kinds of poison gases: some which penetrated the clothing and tormented the skin, some which destroyed the lungs, some which blinded men, or made them vomit unceasingly. These gases were put into shells, and whole battlefronts were drenched with them. The Germans had flame throwers, which killed the man who used them as well as those in front. The British and French had tanks, “big Willies” and “little Willies,” which advanced in front of the troops, spitting fire and death.
The poet's vision had come to reality, and there rained a ghastly dew from the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue. Squadrons of swift righting craft darted here and there; they swooped from the clouds and machine-gunned the marching troops; they raided behind the lines and dropped bombs upon railroads and ammunition dumps. The Zepps were fought with explosive bullets, and so great was the peril that the crews of two vessels destroyed them at home in order to avoid going out in them.
Everything had become bigger and more deadly than ever before. The Germans constructed enormous siege guns, known as “Big Berthas,” and set them up in a forest behind Laon, and were firing shells into Paris from a distance of seventy-five miles. At first people had refused to believe such a thing possible; but now they were being fired every twenty minutes, and on Good Friday one of their shells struck a church and killed and wounded nearly two hundred persons, many of them women and children.
For the U-boats there were depth bombs, and nets across all the principal harbors and channels. The Americans were furnishing seventy thousand mines, which were being laid in a chain across the northern entrance to the North Sea, from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. That made one for every twenty feet. Also the British had devised the “Q-boats” — old tramp steamers with concealed armor sent out to wander in the danger zones. A submarine would rise and open fire with shells — for they tried to save their torpedoes for bigger craft. Some of the men of the “Q-boat,” the “panic-crew,” would take to the boats; the “sub” would come closer to complete her job — and suddenly portions of the steamer sides would drop down, disclosing six-inch guns which would open deadly fire.