Later they wandered along River Street, surveying the little town with new eyes. They were far off—-"over where the war was taking place," as Spike neatly put it—surveying at that long range the well-remembered scene; revisiting it from some remote spot where perhaps it had been said to them with flowers.

"We'd ought to tell Herman Vielhaber," said Spike. "Herman's a Heinie, but he's a good scout at that."

"Sure!" agreed Wilbur.

They found Herman alone at one of his tables staring morosely at an untouched glass of beer. The Vielhaber establishment was already suffering under the stigma of pro-Germanism put upon it by certain of the watchful towns-people. Judge Penniman, that hale old invalid, had even declared that Herman was a spy, and signalled each night to other spies by flapping a curtain of his lighted room above the saloon. The judge had found believers, though it was difficult to explain just what information Herman would be signalling and why he didn't go out and tell it to his evil confederates by word of mouth. Herman often found trade dull of an evening now, since many of his old clients would patronize his rival, Pegleg McCarron; for Pegleg was a fervent patriot who declared that all Germans ought to be in hell. Herman greeted the newcomers with troubled cordiality.

"Sed down, you boys. What you have? Sasspriller? All right! Mamma, two sassprillers for these young men."

Minna Vielhaber brought the drink from the bar. Minna had red eyes, and performed her service in silence, after which she went moodily back to her post.

They drank to Herman's health and to Minna's, and told of their decision.

"Right!" said Herman. "I give you right." He stared long at his beer. "I tell you, boys," he said at last, "mamma and me we got in a hard place, yes. Me? I'm good American—true blue. I got my last papers twenty-two years ago. I been good American since before that. Mamma, too. Both good. Then war comes, and I remember the Fatherland—we don't never furgit that, mind you, even so we are good Americans. But I guess mebbe I talk a lot of foolishness about Germany whipping everybody she fight with. I guess I was too proud of that country that used to be mine. You know how it is, you boys; you remember your home and your people kind of nice, mebbe."

"Sure!" said Spike. "Me? I was raised down back of the tracks in Buffalo—one swell place fur a kid to grow up—but honest, sometimes I git waked up in the night, and find m'self homesick fur that rotten dump. Sure, I know how you feel, Herman."

Herman, cheered by this sympathy, drank of his beer. Putting down the glass, he listened intently. Minna, at the bar, was heard to be weeping.

"Mamma," he called, gruffly, "you keep still once. None of that!"

Minna audibly achieved the commanded silence. Herman listened until satisfied of this, then resumed:

"Well, so fur, so good. Then Germany don't act right, so my own country got to fight her. She's got to fight her! I'd get me another country if she didn't. But now people don't understand how I feel so. They say: 'Yes, he praise Germany to the sky; now I guess he talk the other side of his mouth purty good.' They don't understand me. I want Germany should be punished good, and my country she's goin' to do it good. That is big in my heart. But shall I go out on the street and holler, 'To hell with Germany?' Not! Because people would know I lied, and I would know. I want Germany should be well whipped till all them sheep's heads is out of high places, but I can't hate Germans. I could punish someone good and not hate 'em. I'm a German in my blood, but you bet I ain't a pro-German.

"Mamma, again I tell you keep still once—and now you boys goin' to fight. That's good! Me, I would go if I was not too old; not a better German fighter would they have than me. I kill 'em all what come till I fall over myself. You boys remember and fight hard, so we make the world nice again. I bet you fight good—strong, husky boys like you. And I hope you come back strong and hearty and live a long time in a world you helped to put it right. I hope some day you have children will be proud because you was good Americans, like mine would be if we had a little one. I hope you teach 'em to fight quick for their own good country. Now—prosit!"

They drank, and in the stillness Minna Vielhaber was again heard to be lamenting. Herman addressed her harshly:

"Mamma, now again I beg you shall keep still once."

Minna appeared from back of the bar and became coherent.

"I wassn't cryin' no tears for Germans—wass cryin' fur them!" She waved a damp towel at Herman's guests. Herman soothed her.

"Now, now—them boys take care of themselves. Likely they have a little trouble here and there or some place, but they come back sound—I tell you that. Now you dry up—you make some other people feel that way. Hear me?" Minna subsided.

"You bet," resumed Herman, "we're Americans good. Mebbe I can't tell people so now, like they believe me; it's hard to believe I want Germans whipped good if I don't hate 'em, but it's true—and lots others besides me. They come in my place, Dagoes, Wops, Hunnyacks, Swedes, Jews, every breed, and what you think—they keep talkin' about what us Americans had ought to do to lick Germany. It's funny, yes? To hear 'em say us Americans, but when you know them foreigners mean it so hard—well, it ain't funny! It's good!

"And me? Say, I tell you something. If any one say I ain't good American I tell you this: I stand by America like I was born here. I stand by her if she fight Germany just as if she fight France. I stand by her in war, and I do more than that. You listen! Now comes it they say the country's goin' to be dry and put me out of business. What you think of that, hey? So they will shut booze joints like that feller McCarron runs, and even a nice place like this. So you can't buy a glass beer or a schoppen Rhine wine. What you think? Mebbe it's all talk, mebbe not. But listen! This is my country, no matter what she does; I stand by her if she fights Germany to death; and by God, I stand by her if she goes dry! Could I say more? Prosit!"



CHAPTER XVI

The next day Wilbur Cowan sought Sharon Whipple with the news that he meant to do a bit of plain fighting overseas. He found the old man in the stable, in troubled controversy with a rebellious car. He sat stonily at the wheel and at intervals pressed a determined heel upon a self-starter that would whir but an impotent protest. He glared up at Wilbur as the latter came to rest beside the car.

"Well, what now?" He spoke impatiently.

"I'm going to enlist; I thought I would tell you."

Sharon pointed the heavy brows at him with a thumb and uttered a disparaging "Humph!" Then he appeared to forget the announcement, and pressed again on the self-starter, listening above its shrill song for the deeper rumble of the engine. This did not ensue, and he shifted his heel, turning a plaintive eye upon the young man.

"She don't seem to excite," he said. "I've tried and tried, and I can't excite her."

It was an old, old story to Wilbur Cowan.

"Press her again," he directed. Sharon pressed and the other raptly listened. "Ignition," he said.

He lifted the hood on one side and with a pair of pliers manipulated what Sharon was never to know as anything but her gizzard, though the surgeon, as he delicately wrought, murmured something about platinum points.

"Try her!" Sharon tried her.

"Now she excites!" he exploded, gleefully, as the hum of the motor took up the shrill whir of the self-starter. He stopped the thing and bent a reproachful gaze upon Wilbur.

"Every one else leaving me—even that Elihu Titus. I never thought you would, after the way we've stood together in this town. I had a right to expect something better from you. I'd like to know how I'm goin' to get along without you. You show a lot of gratitude, I must say."

"Well, I thought—"

"Oh, I knew you'd go—I expected that!"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"You wouldn't been any good if you hadn't. Even that Elihu Titus went."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. He had been waiting to ask Sharon's opinion about the only troubling element in his decision. This seemed the moment. "You don't suppose—you don't think perhaps the war will be stopped or anything, just as I get over there?"

Sharon laboured with a choice bit of sarcasm.

"No, I guess it'll take more'n you to stop it, even with that Elihu Titus going along. Of course, some spy may get the news to 'em that you've started, and they may say, 'Why keep up the struggle if this Cowan boy's goin' in against us?' But my guess is they'll brazen it out for a month or so longer. Of course they'll be scared stiff."

Wilbur grinned at him, then spoke gravely.

"You know what I mean—Merle. He says the plain people will never allow this war to go on, because they've been tricked into it by Wall Street or something. I read it in his magazine. They're working against the war night and day, he says. Well, all I mean, I'd hate to go over there and be seasick and everything and then find they had stopped it."

Intently, grimly, Sharon climbed from his car. His short, fat leg went back and he accurately kicked an empty sprinkling can across the floor. It was a satisfying object to kick; it made a good noise and came to a clattering rest on its dented side. It was so satisfying that with another kick he sent the can bounding through an open door.

"Gave it the second barrel, didn't you?" said Wilbur. Sharon grinned now.

"Just a letter to your brother," he explained. Then he became profanely impassioned. "Fudge! Fudge and double fudge! Scissors and white aprons! Prunes and apricots! No! That war won't be stopped by any magazine! Go on—fight your fool head off! Don't let any magazine keep you back!"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"They can't stop the war, because there are too many boys like you all over this land. Trick or no trick, that's what they're up against. You'll all fight—while they're writing their magazines. Your reactions are different. That's a word I got from the dirty thing—and from that brother of yours. He gets a lot of use out of that word—always talking about his reactions. Just yesterday I said to him: 'Take care of your actions and your reactions will take care of themselves.' He don't cotton to me. I guess I never buttered him up with praise any too much. His languageousness gets on me. He's got Gideon and Harvey D. on a hot griddle, too, though they ain't lettin' on. Here the Whipples have always gone to war for their country—Revolutionary War and 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American—Harvey D. was in that. Didn't do much fighting, but he was belligerent enough. And now this son of his sets back and talks about his reactions! What I say—he's a Whipple in name only."

"He's educated," protested Wilbur, quick to defend this brother, even should he cheat him out of the good plain fighting he meant to do.

"Educated!" Sharon imitated a porpoise without knowing it. "Educated out of books! All any of that rabble rout of his knows is what they read secondhand. They don't know people. Don't know capitalists. Don't even know these wage slaves they write about. That's why they can't stop the war. They may be educated, but you're enlightened. They know more books, but you know more life in a minute than they'll ever know—you got a better idea of the what-for in this world. Let 'em write! You fight! If it rests on that hairy bunch to stop the war you'll get a bellyful of fighting. They're just a noisy fringe of buzzers round the real folks of this country."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. "I thought I'd ask."

"Well, now you know. Shove off!"

"Yes, sir." Sharon's tone changed to petulance.

"That's right, and leave me here to farm twenty-five hundred acres all by myself, just when I was going to put in tractors. That's the kind you are—just a fool country-town boy, with a head full of grand notions. Well, somebody's got to raise food for the world. She's goin' short pretty soon or I miss my guess. Somebody's got to raise bread and meat. All right, leave me here to do the dirty work while you flourish round over there seein' the world and havin' a good time. I'm sick of the sight of you and your airs. Get out!"

"Yes, sir."

"When you leaving?"

"To-morrow night—six-fifty-eight."

"Sooner the better!"

"Yes, sir."

Sharon turned back to the car, grumbling incoherent phrases. He affected to busy himself with the mechanism that had just been readjusted, looking at it wisely, thumbing a valve, though with a care to leave things precisely as they were.

* * * * *

That afternoon as Sharon made an absorbed progress along River Street he jostled Winona Penniman, who with even a surpassing absorption had been staring into the window of one of those smart shops marking Newbern's later growth. Whereas boots and shoes had been purchased from an establishment advertising simple Boots and Shoes, they were now sought by people of the right sort from this new shop which was labelled the Elite Bootery.

Winona had halted with assumed carelessness before its attractively dressed window displaying a colourful array of satin dancing slippers with high heels and bejewelled toes. Winona's assumption of carelessness had been meant to deceive passers-by into believing that she looked upon these gauds with a censorious eye, and not as one meaning flagrantly to purchase of them. Her actual dire intention was nothing to flaunt in the public gaze. Nor did she mean to voice her wishes before a shopful of people who might consider them ambiguous.

Four times she had passed the door of the shop, waiting for a dull moment in its traffic. Now but two women were left, and they seemed to be waiting only for change. Her resolution did not falter; she was merely practising a trained discretion. She was going to buy a pair of satin dancing slippers though the whole world should look upon her as lost. Too long, she felt, had she dwelt among the untrodden ways. As she had confided to her journal, the placid serenity of her life had become a sea of mad unrest. Old moorings had been wrenched loose; she floated with strange tides. And Wilbur Cowan, who was going to war, had invited her to be present that evening at the opening of Newbern's new and gorgeous restaurant, where the diners, between courses and until late after dinner, would dance to the strains of exotic and jerky music, precisely as they did in the awful city.

Winona had not even debated a refusal. The boy should be gratified. Nor did she try to convince herself that her motive was wholly altruistic. She had suddenly wished to mingle in what she was persuaded would be a scene of mad revelry. She had definitely abandoned the untrodden ways. She thought that reading about war might have unsettled her ideals. Anyway, they were unsettled. She was going to this place of the gay night life—and she was going right!

It was while she still waited, perturbed but outwardly cool, that the absorbed Sharon Whipple brushed her shoulder. She wondered if her secret purpose had been divined. But Sharon apparently was engrossed by other matters than the descent into frivolity of one who had long been austere.

"Well," he said, beaming on her, "our boy is going over."

Winona was relieved.

"Yes, he's off, but he'll come back safe."

"Oh, I know that! Nothing could hurt him, but I'll miss the skeesicks." He ruminated, then said pridefully: "That boy is what my son would have been if I'd had one. You can't tell me any son of my get and raising would have talked about his reactions when this time come!"

Winona winced ever so slightly at this way of putting it, but smiled valiantly.

"Publishing magazines full of slander about George Washington, and this new kind of stubby-ended poetry!"

"It is very different from Tennyson," said Winona.

"The other one's a man," went on Sharon. "You remember when you was worried because he wouldn't settle down to anything? Well, you watch him from now on! He hasn't got the book knowledge, but he's got a fine outdoors education, and that's the kind we need most. Don't you see that fine look in his eye—afraid of nothing, knowing how to do most anything? His is the kind makes us a great country—outdoor boys from the little towns and farms. They're the real folks. I'm awful proud of him, though I ain't wanting that to get out on me. I been watching him since he was in short pants. He's dependable—knows how. Say, I'm glad he took to the outdoors and didn't want to dress up every day and be a clerk in a store or a bank or some place like that. Wasn't it good?"

"Wasn't it?" said Winona, bravely.

"We need this kind in war, and we'll need it even more when the war is over—when he comes back."

"When he comes back," echoed Winona. And then with an irrelevance she could not control: "I'm going to a dance with him to-night." Her own eyes were dancing strangely as she declared it.

"Good thing!" said Sharon. He looked her over shrewdly. "Seems to me you're looking younger than you ought to," he said.

Winona pouted consciously for the first time in her hitherto honest life.

"You're looking almighty girlish," added Sharon with almost a leer, and Winona suffered a fearful apprehension that her ribs were menaced by his alert thumb. She positively could not be nudged in public. She must draw the line somewhere, even if she had led him on by pouting. She stepped quickly to the door of the Elite Bootery.

"He'll come back all right," said Sharon. "Say, did I ever tell you how he got me to shootin' a good round of golf? I tried it first with the wooden bludgeons, and couldn't ever make the little round lawns under seven or eight—parties snickering their fool heads off at me. So I says I can never make the bludgeons hit right. I don't seem to do more'n harass the ball into 'em, so he says try an iron all the way. So I tried the iron utensils, and now I get on the lawn every time in good shape, I can tell you. Parties soon begun to snicker sour all at once, I want you to know. It ain't anything for me to make that course in ninety-eight or"—Sharon's conscience called aloud—"or a hundred and ten or fifteen or thereabouts, in round numbers."

"I'm so glad," said Winona.

"I give him all the credit. And"—he turned after starting on—"he'll come back—he'll come back to us!"

Winona drew a fortifying breath and plunged into the Elite Bootery. She was perhaps more tight-lipped than usual, but to the not-too-acute observer this would have betokened mere businesslike determination instead of the panic it was. She walked grimly to a long bench, seated herself, and placed her right foot firmly upon a pedestal, full in the gaze of a clerk who was far too young, she instantly perceived, for negotiations of this delicacy.

"I wish to purchase," she began through slightly relaxed lips, "a pair of satin dancing slippers like those in your window—high-heeled, one strap, and possibly with those jewelled buckles." She here paused for another breath, then continued tremendously: "Something in a shade to go with—with these!"

With dainty brazenness the small hand at her knee obeyed an amazing command from her disordered brain and raised the neat brown skirt of Winona a full two inches, to reveal a slim ankle between which and an ogling world there gleamed but the thinnest veneer of tan silk.

Winona waited breathless. She had tortured herself with the possible consequences of this adventure. She had even conceived a clerk of forbidding aspect who would now austerely reply: "Woman, how dare you come in here and talk that way? You who have never worn anything but black cotton stockings, or lisle at the worst, and whose most daring footwear has been a neat Oxford tie with low heels, such as respectable women wear? Full well you know that a love for the sort of finery you now describe—and reveal—is why girls go wrong. And yet you come shamelessly in here—no, it is too much! You forget yourself! Leave the place at once!"

Sometimes this improvisation had concluded with a homily in kinder words, in which she would be entreated to go forth and try to be a better woman. And sometimes, but not often, she had decided that a shoe clerk, no matter his age, would take her request as a mere incident in the day's trade. Other women wore such things, and perforce must buy them in a public manner. She had steeled her nerve to the ordeal, and now she flushed with a fine new confidence, for the clerk merely said, "Certainly, madam"—in the later shops of Newbern they briefly called you madam—and with a kind of weary, professional politeness fell to the work of equipping her. A joyous relief succeeded her panic. She not only declared a moment later that her instep was far too high, but fitted at last in a slipper of suitable shade she raised her skirt again as she posed before a mirror that reached the floor. Winona was coming on. Had come!

* * * * *

Late that afternoon, while a last bit of chiffon was being tacked to a dancing frock which her mother had been told to make as fancy as she pleased, Winona hastily scribbled in her journal: "Am I of a gay disposition? Too gay, too volatile? No matter! It is an agreeable defect where one retains discretion sufficient for its regulation. This very night I am one of a party avowedly formed for pleasure, something my reflective mind would once have viewed with disapprobation. But again no matter. Perhaps I have been too analytical, too introspective. Perhaps the war has confused my sense of spiritual values. War is such a mistake!"

It was a flushed and sparkling Winona who later fluttered down the dull old stairs of the respectable Penniman home at the call of the waiting Wilbur Cowan. Her dark hair was still plainly, though rather effectively, drawn about her small head—she had definitely rebuffed the suggestion of her mother that it be marcelled—but her wisp of a frock of bronze gossamer was revolutionary in the extreme. Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising aplomb, bore the scrutiny of the family while she pulled long white gloves along her bare arms. A feathered fan dangled from one of them.

"Now, I guess you believe me," said Mrs. Penniman. "Haven't I always said what a few little touches would do for you?" Proudly she adjusted a filmy flounce to a better line. "And such lovely, lovely slippers!"

The slippers were indeed to be observed by one and all. The short dancing frock was in that year.

Wilbur Cowan was appreciative.

"Some kid!" he cried; "an eyeful!"

Winona pouted for the second time that day, instead of rebuking him for these low phrases of the street. Only Judge Penniman caviled.

"Well, I'd like to know what we're coming to," he grumbled. "The idee of a mere chit like her goin' out to a place that's no better than a saloon, even if you do guzzle your drinks at a table—and in a dug-out dress!"

Winona, instead of feeling rebuked, was gratified to be called a mere chit. She pouted at the invalid.

"Poor father!" she loftily murmured, and stood while her mother threw the evening cloak about her acceptable shoulders.

It was true that at the La Boheme alcoholic stimulant would be served to those who desired it, but this was not compulsory, and the place was in no sense a common saloon. Her father was old-fashioned, as he had shown himself to be about the lawless new dance steps that Wilbur had been teaching her. He had declared that if people performed such antics in public without music they'd mighty soon find themselves in the lockup, and Winona had not even shuddered. Now, as he continued to grumble at this degeneracy, she gracefully tapped his arm with her fan. She had read of this device being effectively employed by certain conquerors of men, and coolly she tried it upon her father. She performed the trifle gracefully, and it seemed of value audacious and yet nothing to be misunderstood by a really clean-minded man. She tapped the judge again as they left, with a minor variation of the technic. The judge little knew that he but served as a dummy at target practice.

The car in which Wilbur conveyed his guest to the scene of revelry was not of an elegance commensurate with Winona's. It was a mongrel of many makes, small, battered, and of a complaining habit. He had acquired it as a gift from one who considered that he bestowed trash, and had transformed it into a thing of noisy life, knowing, as a mother knows of her infant, what each of its squeaks and rattles implied. It was distressing, in truth, to look upon, but it went. Indeed, the proud owner had won a race with it from a too-outspoken critic who drove a much superior car. It was Wilbur Cowan who first in Newbern discovered that you could speed up a car by dropping a few moth balls into the gasoline tank. He called his car the Can, but, unreasonably, was not too cordial to others using the name.

The Can bore the pair to a fretful halt under the newest electric lights on River Street. "The La Boheme" read the dazzling sign. And Winona passed into her new life. She was feeling strangely young as she relinquished her cloak to a uniformed maid. She stood amid exotic splendour, and was no longer herself but some regal creature in the Sunday supplement of a great city paper. She had always wanted to be a girl, but had not known how—and now at thirty-five how easy it seemed! She preceded Wilbur to a table for two, impressive with crystal and damask, and was seated by an obsequious foreigner who brought to the act a manner that had never before in Newbern distinguished this service—when it had been performed at all.

Other tables about them were already filled with Newbern's elect, thrilled as was Winona, concealing it as ably as she, with the town's new distinction. Hardly had food been ordered when a hidden orchestra blared and the oblong polished space of which their own table formed part of the border was thronged with dancing couples. Winona glowingly surrendered to the evil spell. Wilbur merely looked an invitation and she was dancing as one who had always danced. She tapped him with her fan as he led her back to the table where their first course had arrived. She trifled daintily with strange food, composing a sentence for her journal: "The whole scene was of a gayety hitherto unparalleled in the annals of our little town."

There was more food, interspersed with more dancing. Later Winona, after many sidewise perkings of her brown head, discovered Merle and Patricia Whipple at a neighbouring table. She nodded and smiled effusively to them. Patricia returned her greeting gayly; Merle removed a shining cigarette holder of remarkable length and bowed, but did not smile. He seemed to be aloof and gloomy.

"He's got a lot on his mind," said Wilbur, studying his brother respectfully.

Merle's plenteous hair, like his cigarette holder, was longer than is commonly worn by his sex, and marked by a certain not infelicitous disorder. He had trouble with a luxuriant lock of it that persistently fell across his pale brow. With a weary, world-worn gesture he absently brushed this back into place from moment to moment. His thick eyeglasses were suspended by a narrow ribbon of black satin. His collar was low and his loosely tied cravat was flowing of line.

"Out of condition," said Wilbur, expertly. "Looks pasty."

"But very, very distinguished," supplemented Winona.

Patricia Whipple now came to their table with something like a dance step, though the music was stilled. She had been away from Newbern for two years.

"Europe and Washington," she hurriedly explained as Wilbur held a chair for her, "and glad to get back—but I'm off again. Nurse! Begin the course next week in New York—learning how to soothe the bed of pain. I know I'm a rattlepate, but that's what I'm going to do. All of us mad about the war."

Wilbur studied her as he had studied Merle. She was in better condition, he thought. She came only to his shoulder as he stood to seat her, but she was no longer bony. Her bones were neatly submerged. Her hair was still rusty, the stain being deeper than he remembered, and the freckles were but piquant memories. Here and there one shone faintly, like the few faint stars showing widely apart through cloud crevices on a murky night. Her nose, though no longer precisely trivial, would never be the Whipple nose. Its lines were now irrevocably set in a design far less noble. Her gown was shining, of an elusive shade that made Wilbur think of ripe fruits—chiefly apricots, he decided. She was unquestionably what she had confessed herself to be—a rattlepate. She rattled now, with a little waiting, half-tremulous smile to mark her pauses, as if she knew people would weigh and find her wanting, but hoped for judgments tempered with mercy.

"Mad about the war? I should think so! Grandpa Gideon mad, and Harvey D.—that dear thing's going to do something at Washington for a dollar a year. You'd think it was the only honest money he'd ever earned if you heard Merle talk about bankers sucking the life blood of the people. Juliana taking charge of something and Mother Ella mad about knitting—always tangled in yarn. She'll be found strangled in her own work some day. And Uncle Sharon mad about the war, and fifty times madder about Merle.

"D'you see Merle's picture in that New York paper yesterday?—all hair and eyeglasses, and leaning one temple on the two first fingers of the right hand—and guess what it said—'Young millionaire socialist who denounces country's entrance into war!' Watch him—he's trying to look like the picture now! Uncle Sharon read the 'millionaire socialist,' and barked like a mad dog. He says: 'Yes, he'd be a millionaire socialist if he was going to be any kind, and if he was going to be a burglar he'd have to be one of these dress-suit burglars you always read about.'

"Of course he's awfully severe on Merle for not going to fight, but how could he with his bad eyes? He couldn't see to shoot at people, poor thing; and besides, he's too clever to be wasted like a common soldier. He starts people to thinking—worth-while people. He says so himself. Mixed up with all sorts of clever things with the most wonderful names—garment workers and poet radicals and vorticists and new-arters and everything like that, who are working to lift us up so nobody will own anything and everybody can have what he wants. Of course I don't understand everything they say, but it sounds good, so sympathetic, don't you think?"

She had paused often with the little smile that implored pity for her rattlepatedness. Now it prolonged itself as the orchestra became wildly alive.

Winona had but half listened to Patricia's chatter. She had been staring instead at the girl's hair—staring and wondering lawlessly. She had seen advertisements. Might her own hair be like that—"like tarnished gold," she put it? Of course you had to keep putting the stuff on at the roots as it grew out. But would her colour blend with that shade? Patricia's skin had the warm fairness of new milk, but Winona was dusky. Perhaps a deeper tint of auburn——

She was recalled from this perilous musing by Rapp, Senior, who came pressing his handkerchief to a brow damp from the last dance. He bowed to Winona.

"May I have this pleasure?" he said. Winona rose like a woman of the world.

"We're on the map at last," said Rapp, Senior, referring to Newbern's newest big-town feature.

"I know I'm on the map at last," said Winona, coyly, and tapped the arm of Rapp, Senior, with her feathered trifle of a fan.

"Dance?" said Wilbur to Patricia.

"Thanks a heap! Merle won't. He says how can he dance when thinking of free Russia? But did you see those stunning Russian dancers? It doesn't keep them from dancing, does it? Poor old Merle is balmy—mice in his wainscoting."

They danced, and Patricia was still the rattlepate.

"You're going over, Uncle Sharon told us. Merle says you're a victim of mob reaction—what does that mean? No matter. Pretty soon he said you'd be only a private. Grandpa Gideon looked as if he had bitten into a lemon. He says, 'I believe privates form a very important arm of the service'—just like that. He's not so keen on Merle, but he won't admit it. With him it's once a Whipple always a Whipple! When he saw Merle's picture, leaning the beautiful head on the two long fingers and the hair kind of scrambly, he just said, 'Ah, you young scamp of a socialist!' as if he were saying, 'Oh, fie on you!' Merle can talk the whole bunch down when he gets to shooting on all six—sounds good, but I've no doubt it's just wise twaddle.

"What a stunning dancer you are! Ask me quick again so I won't have to go back to free Russia. I'll promise to nurse you when you get wounded over there. I'll have learned to do everything by that time. Wouldn't it be funny if you were brought in some day with a lot of wounds and I'd say, 'Why, dear me, that's someone I know! You must let me nurse him back to health,' and of course they would. Anyway, the family's keen about my going. They think I ought to do my bit, especially as Merle can't, because of his eyes. Be sure you ask me again."

He asked her again and yet again. He liked dancing with her. Sometimes when she talked her eyes were like green flames. But she talked of nothing long and the flames would die and her little waiting smile come entreating consideration for her infirmities.

"Now you be sure to come straight to me directly you're wounded," she again cautioned him as they parted.

He shook hands warmly with her. He liked the girl, but he hoped there would be other nurses at hand if this thing occurred; that is, if it proved to be anything serious.

"Anyway, I hope I'll see you," he said. "I guess home faces will be scarce over there."

She looked him over approvingly.

"Be a good soldier," she said.

Again they shook hands. Then she fluttered off under the gloomy charge of Merle, who had remained austerely aloof from the night's gayety. Wilbur had had but a few words with him, for Patricia claimed his time.

"You seem a lot older than I do now," he said, and Merle, brushing back the errant lock, had replied: "Poor chap, you're a victim of the mob reaction. Of course I'm older now. I'm face to face with age-long problems that you've never divined the existence of. It does age one."

"I suppose so," agreed Wilbur.

He felt shamed, apologetic for his course. Still he would have some plain fighting, Wall Street or no Wall Street.

He wrested a chattering Winona from Mrs. Henrietta Plunkett at the door of the ladies' cloakroom. Mrs. Plunkett was Newbern's ablest exponent of the cause of woman, and she had been disquieted this night at observing signs of an unaccustomed frivolity in one of her hitherto stanchest disciples.

"I can't think what has come over you!" she had complained to Winona. "You seem like a different girl!"

"I am a different girl!" boasted Winona.

"You do look different—your gown is wonderfully becoming, and what lovely slippers!" Mrs. Plunkett inspected the aged debutante with kindly eyes. "But remember, my dear, we mustn't let frivolities like this divert our attention from the cause. A bit more of the good fight and we shall have come into our own."

"All this wonderful mad evening I have forgotten the cause," confessed Winona.

"Mercy!" said Mrs. Plunkett. "Forgotten the cause? One hardly does that, does one, without a reason?"

"I have reasons enough," said Winona, thinking of the new dancing slippers and the frock.

"Surely, my dear, you who are so free and independent are not thinking of marriage?"

Winona had not been thinking of marriage. But now she did.

"Well"—she began—"of course, I——"

"Mercy! Not really! Why, Winona Penniman, would you barter your independence for a union that must be demeaning, at least politically, until our cause is won?"

"Well, of course——" Winona again faltered, tapping one minute toe of a dancing slipper on the floor.

"Do you actually wish," continued Henrietta Plunkett, rising to the foothills of her platform manner, "to become a parasite, a man's bond slave, his creature? Do you wish to be his toy, his plaything?"

"I do!" said Winona low and fervently, as if she had spoken the words under far more solemn auspices.

"Mercy me! Winona Penniman!"

And Wilbur Cowan had then come to bear her off to her room, that echoed with strange broken music and light voices and the rhythmic scuffing of feet on a floor—and to the privacy of her journal.

"I seem," she wrote, "to have flung wisdom and prudence to the winds. Though well I know the fading nature of all sublunary enjoyments, yet when I retire shortly it will be but to protract the fierce pleasure of this night by recollection. Full well I know that Morpheus will wave his ebon wand in vain."

Morpheus did just that. Long after Winona had protracted the fierce enjoyment of the night to a vanishing point she lay wakeful, revolving her now fixed determination to take the nursing course that Patricia Whipple would take, and go far overseas, where she could do a woman's work; or, as she phrased it again and again, be a girl of some use in a vexed world.

In the morning she learned for the first time that Wilbur was to go to war in company with a common prize fighter. It chilled her for the moment, but she sought to make the best of it.

"I hope," she told Wilbur, "that war will make a better man of your friend."

"What do you mean—a better man?" he quickly wanted to know. "Let me tell you, Spike's a pretty good man right now for his weight. You ought to see him in action once! Don't let any one fool you about that boy! What do you expect at a hundred and thirty-three—a heavyweight?"

After he had gone, late that afternoon, after she had said a solemn farewell to him in the little room of the little house in the side yard, Winona became reckless. She picked up and scanned with shrewd eyes the photograph of Spike that had been left: "To my friend Kid Cowan from his friend Eddie—Spike—Brennon, 133 lbs. ringside."

She studied without wincing the crouched figure of hostile eye, even though the costume was not such as she would have selected for a young man.

"After all, he's only a boy," she murmured. She studied again the intent face. "And he looks as if he had an abundance of pepper."

She hoped she would be there to nurse them both if anything happened. She had told Wilbur this, but he had not been encouraging. He seemed to believe that nothing would happen to either of them.

"Of course we'll be shot at," he admitted, "but like as not they'll miss us."

Winona sighed and replaced the photograph. Now they would be a couple of heads clustered with other heads at a car window; smiling, small-town boys going lightly out to their ordeal. She must hurry and be over!

* * * * *

Wilbur, with his wicker suitcase, paused last to say goodbye to Frank, the dog. Frank was now a very old dog, having reached a stage of yapping senility, where he found his sole comfort in following the sun about the house and dozing in it, sometimes noisily dreaming of past adventures. These had been exclusively of a sentimental character, for Frank had never been the fighting dog his first owner had promised he would be. He was an arch sentimentalist and had followed a career of determined motherhood, bringing into the world litter after litter of puppies, exhibiting all the strains then current in Newbern. He had surveyed each new family with pride—families revealing tinges of setter, Airedale, Newfoundland, pointer, collie—with the hopeful air of saying that a dog never knew what he could do until he tried. Now he could only dream of past conquests, and merely complained when his master roused him.

"I hope you'll be here when I get back—and I hope I'll be here, too," said his master, and went on, sauntering up to the station a bit later as nonchalantly as ever Dave Cowan himself had gone there to begin a long journey on the six-fifty-eight. Spike Brennon lounged against a baggage truck. Spike's only token of departure was a small bundle covered with that day's Advance. They waited in silence until the dingy way train rattled in. Then Sharon Whipple appeared from the freight room of the station. He affected to be impatient with the railway company because of a delayed shipment which he took no trouble to specify definitely, and he affected to be surprised at the sight of Wilbur and Spike.

"Hello! I thought you two boys went on the noon train," he lied, carelessly. "Well, long as you're here you might as well take these—in case you get short." He pressed a bill into the hand of each. "Good-bye and good luck! I had to come down about that shipment should have been here last Monday—it beats time what these railroads do with stuff nowadays. Five days between here and Buffalo!"

He continued to grumble as the train moved on, even as the two waved to him from a platform.

"A hundred berries!" breathed Spike, examining his bill. "Say, he sheds it easy, don't he?"

They watched him where he stood facing the train. He seemed to have quit grumbling; his face was still.

"Well, kid, here we go! Now it's up to the guy what examines us. You'll breeze through—not a nick in you. Me—well, they're fussy about teeth, I'm told, and, of course, I had to have a swift poke in the mush that dented my beak. They may try to put the smother on me."

"Cheer up! You'll make the grade," said Wilbur.

Through the night he sat cramped and wakeful in the seat of a crowded day coach, while Spike beside him slept noisily, perhaps owing to the dented beak. His head back, he looked out and up to a bow moon that raced madly with the train, and to far, pale stars that were still. He wondered if any one out there noted the big new adventure down here.



CHAPTER XVII

Wilbur Cowan's fear that his brother might untimely stop the war proved baseless. The war went on despite the New Dawn's monthly exposure of its motive and sinister aims; despite its masterly paraphrase of a celebrated document declaring that this Government had been "conceived in chicanery and dedicated to the industrial slavery of the masses." Not even the new social democracy of Russia sufficed to inspire any noticeable resistance. The common people of the United States had refused to follow the example of their brothers of Russia and destroy a tyranny equally hateful, though the New Dawn again and again set forth the advantages to accrue from such action. War prevailed. As the Reverend Mallet said: "It gathered the vine of the earth and cast it into the great wine press of the wrath of God."

But the little cluster of intellectuals on the staff of the New Dawn persevered. Monthly it isolated the causative bacteria of unrest, to set the results before those who could profit would they but read. Merle, the modernist, at the forefront of what was known as all the new movements, tirelessly applied the new psychology to the mind of the common man and proved him a creature of mean submissions. He spoke of "our ranks" and "our brave comrades of Russia," but a selective draft had its way and an army went forward.

In Newbern, which Merle frequented between issues of the magazine, he received perhaps less appreciation than was his due. Sharon Whipple was blindly disparaging. Even Gideon was becoming less attentive when the modernist expounded the new freedom. Gideon was still puzzled. He quoted, as to war: "The sign of a mad world. God bless us out of it!" But he was beginning to wonder if perhaps this newest Whipple had not, with all his education, missed something that other Whipples had learned.

Harvey D. had once or twice spoken with frank impatience of the New Dawn's gospel. And one Kate Brophy, cook at the Whipple New Place, said of its apostle that he was "a sahft piece of furniture." Merle was sensitive to these little winds of captiousness. He was now convinced that Newbern would never be a cultural centre. There was a spirit of intolerance abroad.

Sharon Whipple, becoming less and less restrained as the months went on, spoke of the staff of the New Dawn in Merle's hearing. He called it a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. Merle smiled tolerantly, and called Sharon a besotted reactionary, warning him further that such as he could never stem the tide of revolution now gathering for its full sweep. Sharon retorted that it hadn't swept anything yet.

"Perhaps not yet—on the surface," said Merle. "But now we shall show our teeth."

Sharon fell to a low sort of wit in his retort.

"Better not show your teeth to the Government!" he warned. "If you do you want to have the address of a good dentist handy."

And after another month—when the magazine of light urged resistance to the draft—it became apparent not only that the New Dawn would not stop the war, but that the war would incredibly stop the New Dawn. The despoilers of America actually plotted to destroy it, to smother its message, to adjust new shackles about the limbs of labour.

Sharon Whipple was the first of the privileged class to say that something had got to be done by the family—unless they wanted to have the police do it. Gideon was the second. These two despoilers of the people summoned Harvey D. from Washington, and the conspiracy against spiritual and industrial liberty ripened late one night in the library of the Whipple New Place. It was agreed that the last number of the New Dawn went pretty far—farther than any Whipple ought to go. But it was not felt that the time had come for extreme measures. It was believed that the newest Whipple should merely be reasoned with. To this end they began to reason among themselves, and were presently wrangling. It developed that Sharon's idea of reasoning lacked subtlety. It developed that Gideon and Harvey D. reasoned themselves into sheer bewilderment in an effort to find reasons that would commend themselves to Merle; so that this first meeting of the conspirators was about to break up fruitlessly, when Sharon Whipple was inspired to a suggestion that repelled yet pricked the other two until they desperately yielded to it. This was that none other than Dave Cowan be called into consultation.

"He'll know more about his own son than we do," urged Sharon.

Harvey D.'s feeling of true fatherhood was irritated by this way of putting it, but in the end he succumbed. He felt that his son was now far removed from the sphere of Dave Cowan, yet the man might retain some influence over the boy that would be of benefit to all concerned.

"He's in town," said Sharon. "He's a world romper, but he's here now. I heard him to-day in the post office telling someone how many stars there are in the sky—or something like that."

The following afternoon Dave Cowan, busy at the typesetting machine of the Newbern Advance, Daily and Weekly, was again begged to meet a few Whipples in the dingy little office of the First National. The office was unchanged; it had kept through the years since Dave had last illumined its gloom an air of subdued, moneyed discretion. Nor had the Whipples changed much. Harvey D. was still neat-faced and careful of attire, still solicitous of many little things. Gideon, gaunt and dour, was still erect. His hair was white now, but the brows shot their questioning glance straight. Sharon was as he had been, round-chested, plump; perhaps a trifle readier to point the ends of the grizzled brows in choleric amaze. The Whipple nose on all three still jutted forward boldly. It was a nose never to compromise with Time.

Dave Cowan, at first glance, was much the same, even after he had concealed beneath the table that half of him which was never quite so scrupulously arrayed as the other. But a second glance revealed that the yellow hair was less abundant. It was now cunningly conserved from ear to ear, above a forehead that had heightened. The face was thinner, and etched with new lines about the orator's mouth, but the eyes shone with the same light as of old and the same willingness to shed its beams through shadowed places such as first national banks. He no longer accepted the cigar, to preserve in the upper left-hand waist coat pocket with the fountain pen, the pencil, and the toothbrush. He craved rather permission to fill and light the calabash pipe. This was a mere bit of form, for he was soon talking so continuously that the pipe was no longer a going concern.

Delay was occasioned at the beginning of the interview. It proved to be difficult to convey to Dave exactly why he had been summoned. It appeared that he did not expect a consultation—rather a lecture by Dave Cowan upon life in its larger aspects. The Whipples, strangely, were all not a little embarrassed in his presence, and the mere mention of his son caused him to be informative for ten minutes before any of them dared to confine the flow of his discourse within narrower banks. He dealt volubly with the doctrines espoused by Merle, whereas they wished to be told how to deal with Merle. As he talked he consulted from time to time a sheaf of clippings brought from a pocket.

"A joke," began Dave, "all this socialistic talk. Get this from their platform: They demand that the country and its wealth be redeemed from the control of private interests and turned over to the people to be administered for the equal benefit of all. See what they mean? Going to have a law that a short man can reach as high as a tall man. Good joke, yes? Here again: 'The Socialist Party desires the workers of America to take the economic and political power from the capitalistic class.' Going to pull themselves off the ground by their boot straps, yes? Have a law to make the weak strong and the strong weak. Reads good, don't it? And here's the prize joke—one big union: Socialist Party does not interfere in the internal affairs of labour unions, but supports them in all their struggles. In order, however, that such struggles might attain the maximum of efficiency the socialists favour the closest organic cooperation of all unions as one organized working body.

"Get that? Lovely, ain't it? And when we're all in one big union, who are we going to strike against? Against ourselves, of course—like we do now. Bricklayers striking against shoemakers and both striking against carpenters, and all of 'em striking against the honest farmer and the farmer striking back, because every one of 'em wants all he can get for his labour and wants to pay as little as he has to for the other fellow's labour. One big union, my eye! Socialists are jokes. You never saw two of 'em yet that could agree on anything for ten minutes—except that they want something for nothing."

The speaker paused impressively. His listeners stirred with relief, but the tide of his speech again washed in upon them.

"They lack," said he, pointing the calabash pipe at Gideon Whipple, sitting patiently across the table from him, "they lack the third eye of wisdom." He paused again, but only as if to await applause. There was no intimation that he had done.

"Dear me!" murmured Gideon, politely. The other Whipples made little sounds of amazement and approval.

"You want to know what the third eye of wisdom is?" continued Dave, as one who had read their secret thought. "Well, it's the simple gift of being able to look at facts as they are instead of twisting 'em about as they ain't. The most of us, savages, uneducated people, simples, and that sort, got this third eye of wisdom without knowing it; we follow the main current without knowing or asking why. But professors and philosophers and preachers and teachers and all holy rollers like socialists ain't got it. They want to reduce the whole blamed cosmos to a system, and she won't reduce. I forget now just how many billion cells in your body"—he pointed the pipe at Sharon Whipple, who stirred uneasily—"but no matter." Sharon looked relieved.

"Anyway, we fought our way up to be a fish with lungs, and then we fought on till we got legs, and here we are. And the only way we got here was by competition—some of us always beating others. Holy rollers like socialists would have us back to one cell and keep us there with equal rewards for all. But she don't work that way. The pot's still a-boiling, and competition is the eternal fire under it.

"Look at all these imaginary Utopias they write about—good stories, too, about a man waking up three thousand years hence and finding everything lovely. But every one of 'em, and I've read all, picture a society that's froze into some certain condition—static. Nothing is! She won't freeze! They can spray the fire of competition with speeches all they like, but they can't put it out. Because why? Well, because this life thing is going on, and competition is the only way it can get on. Call it Nature if you want to. Nature built star dust out of nothing, and built us out of star dust, but she ain't through; she's still building. Old Evolution is still evoluting, and her only tool is competition, the same under the earth and on the earth, the same out in the sky as in these states.

"Of course there's bound to be flaws and injustice in any scheme of government because of this same competition you can't get away from any more than the planets can. There's flaws in evolution itself, only these holy rollers don't see it, because they haven't got the third eye of wisdom; they can't see that the shoemaker is always going to want all he can get for a pair of shoes and always going to pay as little as he can for his suit of clothes, socialism or no socialism.

"What would their one big union be? Take these unions that are striking now all over the country. They think they're striking against something they call capital. Well, they ain't. They're striking against each other. Railroad men striking against bricklayers, shoemakers striking against farmers, machinists striking against cabinetmakers, printers striking against all of 'em—and the fools don't know it; think they're striking against some common enemy, when all the time they're hitting against each other. Oh, she's a grand bit of cunning, this Old Evolution."

"This is all very interesting, Mr. Cowan"—Harvey D. had become uneasy in his chair, and had twice risen to put straight a photograph of the Whipple block that hung on the opposite wall—"but what we would like to get at—"

"I know, I know"—Dave silenced him with a wave of the calabash—"you want to know what it's all about—what it's coming to, what we're here for. Well, I can tell you a little. There used to be a catch in it that bothered me, but I figured her out. Old Evolution is producing an organism that will find the right balance and perpetuate itself eternally. It's trying every way it knows to get these cells of protoplasm into some form that will change without dying. Simple enough, only it takes time. Think how long it took to get us this far out of something you can't see without glasses! But forget about time. Our time don't mean anything out there in the real world. Say we been produced in one second from nothing; well, think what we'll become in another ten seconds. We'll have our balance by that time. This protoplasm does what it's told to do—that's how it made eyes for us to see, and ears to hear, and brains to think with—so by that time we'll be really living; we'll have a form that's plastic, and can change round to meet any change of environment, so we won't have to die if it gets too cold or too hot. We want to live—we all want to live; by that time we'll be able to go on living.

"Of course we won't be looking much like we are now, we're pretty clumsy machines so far. I suppose, for one thing, we'll be getting our nourishment straight from the elements instead of taking it through plants and animals. We'll be as superior to what we are now as he is to a hoptoad." The speaker indicated Sharon Whipple with the calabash. Sharon wriggled self-consciously. "And pretty soon people will forget that any one ever died; they won't believe it when they read it in old books; they won't understand it. This time is coming, as near as I can figure it, in seven hundred and fifty thousand years. That is, in round numbers, it might be an odd hundred thousand years more or less. Of course I can't be precise in such a matter."

"Of course not," murmured Harvey D., sympathetically; "but what we were wanting to get at—"

"Of course," resumed the lecturer, "I know there's still a catch in it. You say, 'What does it mean after that?' Well, I'll be honest with you, I haven't been able to figure it out much farther. We'll go on and on till this earth dries up, and then we'll move to another, or build one—I can't tell which—and all the time we're moving round something, but I don't know what or why. I only know it's been going on forever—this life thing—and we're a little speck in the current, and it will keep going on forever.

"But you can bet this: It will always go on by competition. There won't ever be any Utopia, like these holy rollers can lay out for you in five minutes. I been watching union labour long enough to know that. But she's a grand scheme. I'm glad I got this little look at it. I wouldn't change it in any detail, not if you come to me with full power. I couldn't think of any better way than competition, not if I took a life-time to it. It's a sporty proposition."

The speaker beamed modestly upon his hearers. Gideon was quick to clutch the moment's pause.

"What about this boy Merle?" he demanded before Dave could resume.

"Oh, him?" said Dave. "Him and his holy rolling? Is that all you want to know? Why didn't you say so? That's easy! You've raised him to be a house cat. So shut off his cream."

"A house cat!" echoed Harvey D., shocked.

"No education," resumed Dave. "No savvy about the world. Set him down in Spokane with three dollars in his jeans and needing to go to Atlanta. Would he know how? Would he know a simple thing like how to get there and ride all the way in varnished cars?"

"Is it possible?" murmured Harvey D.

The Whipples had been dazed by the cosmic torrent, but here was something specific;—and it was astounding. They regarded the speaker with awe. They wanted to be told how one could perform the feat, but dreaded to incur a too-wordy exposition.

"Not practical enough, I dare say," ventured Harvey D.

"You said it!" replied Dave. "That's why he's took this scarlet rash of socialism and holy rolling that's going the rounds. Of course there are plenty that are holy rollers through and through, but not this boy. It's only a skin disease with him. I know him. Shut off his cream."

"I said the same!" declared Sharon Whipple, feeling firm ground beneath his feet for the first time.

"You said right!" approved Dave. "It would be a shock to him," said Harvey D. "He's bound up in the magazine. What would he say? What would he do?"

"Something pretty," explained Dave. "Something pretty and high-sounding. Like as not he'd cast you off."

"Cast me off!" Harvey D. was startled.

"Tell you you are no longer a father of his. Don't I know that boy? He'll half mean it, too, but only half. The other half will be showing off—showing off to himself and to you people. He likes to be noticed."

Sharon Whipple now spoke.

"I always said he wouldn't be a socialist if he couldn't be a millionaire socialist."

"You got him!" declared Dave.

"I shall hate to adopt extreme measures," protested Harvey D. "He's always been so sensitive. But we must consider his welfare. In a time like this he might be sent to prison for things printed in that magazine."

"Trust him!" said Dave. "He wouldn't like it in prison. He might get close enough to it to be photographed with the cell door back of him—but not in front of him."

"He'll tell us we're suppressing free speech," said Harvey D.

"Well, you will be, won't you?" said Dave. "We ain't so fussy about free speech here as they are in that free Russia that he writes about, but we're beginning to take notice. Naturally it's a poor time for free speech when the Government's got a boil on the back of its neck and is feeling irritable. Besides, no one ever did believe in free speech, and no government on earth ever allowed it. Free speakers have always had to use judgment. Up to now we've let 'em be free-speakinger than any other country has, but now they better watch out until the boat quits rocking. They attack the machinery and try to take it apart, and then cry when they're smacked. Maybe they might get this boy the other side of a cell door. Wouldn't hurt him any."

"Of course," protested Harvey D., "we can hardly expect you to have a father's feeling for him."

"Well, I have!" retorted Dave. "I got just as much father's feeling for him as you have. But you people are small-towners, and I been about in the world. I know the times and I know that boy. I'm telling you what's best for him. No more cream! If it had been that other boy of mine you took, and he was believing what this one thinks he believes, I'd be telling you something different."

"Always said he had the gumption," declared Sharon Whipple.

"He's got the third eye," said Dave Cowan.

"We want to thank you for this talk," interposed Gideon Whipple. "Much of what you have said is very, very interesting. I think my son will now know what course to pursue."

"Don't mention it!" said Dave, graciously. "Always glad to oblige."

The consultation seemed about to end, but even at the door of the little room Dave paused to acquaint them with other interesting facts about life. He informed them that we are all brothers of the earth, being composed of carbon and a few other elements, and grow from it as do the trees; that we are but super-vegetables. He further instructed them as to the constitution of a balanced diet—protein for building, starches or sugar for energy, and fats for heating and also for their vitamine content.

The Whipples, it is to be feared, were now inattentive. They appeared to listen, but they were merely surveying with acute interest the now revealed lower half of Dave Cowan. The trousers were frayed, the shoes were but wraiths of shoes. The speaker, quite unconscious of this scrutiny, concluded by returning briefly to the problems of human association.

"We'll have socialism when every man is like every other man. So far Nature hasn't made even two alike. Anyway, most of us got the third eye of wisdom too wide open to take any stock in it. We may like it when we read it in a book, but we wouldn't submit to it. We're too inquiring. If a god leaned out of a cloud of fire and spoke to us to-day we'd put the spectroscope on his cloud, get a moving picture of him, and take his voice on a phonograph record; and we wouldn't believe him if he talked against experience."

Dave surveyed the obscure small-towners with a last tolerant smile and withdrew.

"My!" said Gideon, which for him was strong speech.

"Talks like an atheist," said Sharon.

"Mustn't judge him harshly," warned Harvey D.

* * * * *

So it came that Merle Dalton Whipple, born Cowan, was rather peremptorily summoned to meet these older Whipples at another conference. It was politely termed a conference by Harvey D., though Sharon warmly urged a simpler description of the meeting, declaring that Merle should be told he was to come home and behave himself. Harvey D. and Gideon, however, agreed upon the more tactful summons. They discussed, indeed, the propriety of admitting Sharon to the conference. Each felt that he might heedlessly offend the young intellectual by putting things with a bluntness for which he had often been conspicuous. Yet they agreed at last that he might be present, for each secretly distrusted his own firmness in the presence of one with so strong an appeal as their boy. They admonished Sharon to be gentle. But each hoped that if the need rose he would cease to be gentle.

Merle obeyed the call, and in the library of the Whipple New Place, where once he had been chosen to bear the name of the house, he listened with shocked amazement while Harvey D., with much worried straightening of pictures, rugs, and chairs, told him why Whipple money could no longer meet the monthly deficit of the New Dawn. The most cogent reason that Harvey D. could advance at first was that there were too many Liberty Bonds to be bought.

Merle, with his world-weary gesture, swept the impeding lock from his pale brow and set pained eyes upon his father by adoption. He was unable to believe this monstrous assertion. He stared his incredulity. Harvey D. winced. He felt that he had struck some defenseless child a cruel blow. Gideon shot the second gun in this unhuman warfare.

"My boy, it won't do. Harvey is glossing it a bit when he says the money is needed for bonds. You deserve the truth—we are not going to finance any longer a magazine that is against all our traditions and all our sincerest beliefs."

"Ah, I see," said Merle. His tone was grim. Then he broke into a dry, bitter laugh. "The interests prevail!"

"Looks like it," said Sharon, and he, too, laughed dryly.

"If you would only try to get our point of view," broke in Harvey D. "We feel—"

He was superbly silenced by Merle, who in his best New Dawn manner exposed the real truth. The dollar trembled on its throne, the fat bourgeoisie—he spared a withering glance for Sharon, who was the only fat Whipple in the world—would resort to brutal force to silence those who saw the truth and were brave enough to speak it out.

"It's the age-old story," he went on, again sweeping the lock of hair from before his flashing glance. "Privilege throttles truth where it can. I should have expected nothing else; I have long known there was no soil here that would nourish our ideals. I couldn't long hope for sympathy from mere exploiters of labour. But the die is cast. God helping me, I must follow the light."

The last was purely rhetorical, for no one on the staff of the New Dawn believed that God helped any one. Indeed, it was rather felt that God was on the side of privilege. But the speaker glowed as he achieved his period.

"If you would only try to get our point of view," again suggested Harvey D., as he straightened the Reading From Homer.

"I cannot turn aside."

"Meaning?" inquired Sharon Whipple.

"Meaning that we cannot accept another dollar of tainted money for our great work," said Merle, crisply.

"Oh," said Sharon, "but that's what your pa just told you! You accepted it till he shut off on you."

"Against my better judgment and with many misgivings," returned the apostle of light. "Now we can go to the bitter end with no false sense of obligation."

"But your magazine will have to stop, I fear," interposed Gideon gently.

Merle smiled wanly, shaking his head the while as one who contradicts from superior knowledge.

"You little know us," he retorted when the full effect of the silent, head-shaking smile had been had. "The people are at last roused. Money will pour in upon us. Money is the last detail we need think of. Our movement is solidly grounded. We have at our back"—he glanced defiantly at each of the three Whipples—"an awakened proletariat."

"My!" said Gideon.

"You are out of the current here," explained Merle, kindly. "You don't suspect how close we are to revolution. Yet that glorious rising of our comrades in Russia might have warned you. But your class, of course, never is warned."

"Dear me!" broke in Harvey D. "You don't mean to say that conditions are as bad here as they were in Russia?"

"Worse—a thousand times worse," replied Merle. "We have here an autocracy more hateful, more hideous in its injustices, than ever the Romanoffs dreamed of. And how much longer do you think these serfs of ours will suffer it? I tell you they are roused this instant! They await only a word!"

"Are you going to speak it?" demanded Sharon.

"Now, now!" soothed Harvey D. as Merle turned heatedly upon Sharon, who thus escaped blasting.

"I am not here to be baited," protested Merle.

"Of course not, my boy," said the distressed Harvey D.

Merle faced the latter.

"I need not say that this decision of yours—this abrupt withdrawal, of your cooperation—must make a profound difference in our relations. I feel the cause too deeply for it to be otherwise. You understand?"

"He's casting you off," said Sharon, "like the other one said he would."

"Ssh!" It was Gideon.

"I shall stay no longer to listen to mere buffoonery," and for the last time that night Merle swept back the ever-falling lock. He paused at the door. "The old spirit of intolerance," he said. "You are the sort who wouldn't accept truth in France in 1789, or in Russia the other day." And so he left them.

"My!" exclaimed Gideon, forcefully.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Harvey D.

"Shucks!" exclaimed Sharon.

"But the boy is goaded to desperation!" protested Harvey D.

"Listen!" urged Sharon. "Remember what his own father said! He's only half goaded. The other half is showing off—to himself and us. That man knew his own flesh and blood. And listen again! You sit tight if you want to get him back to reason!"

"Brother, I think you're right," said Gideon.

"Dear me!" said Harvey D. He straightened an etched cathedral, and then with a brush from the hearth swept cigar ashes deeper into the rug about the chair of Sharon. "Dear me!" he sighed again.

* * * * *

Early the following morning Merle Whipple halted before the show window of Newbern's chief establishment purveying ready-made clothing for men. He was about to undergo a novel experience and one that would have profoundly shocked his New York tailors. There were suits in the window, fitted to forms with glovelike accuracy. He studied these disapprovingly, then entered the shop.

"I want," he told the salesman, "something in a rough, coarse, common-looking suit—something such as a day labourer might wear."

The salesman was momentarily puzzled, yet seemed to see light.

"Yes, sir—right this way, sir," and he led his customer back between the lines of tables piled high with garments. He halted and spanned the chest of the customer with a tape measure. From halfway down a stack of coats he pulled one of the proper size.

"Here's a snappy thing, sir, fitted in at the back—belted—cuffs on the trousers, neat check——"

But the customer waved it aside impatiently.

"No, no! I want something common—coarse cloth, roughly made, no style; it mustn't fit too well."

The salesman deliberated sympathetically.

"Ah, I see—masquerade, sir?"

The customer again manifested impatience.

"No, no! A suit such as a day labourer might wear—a factory worker, one of the poorer class."

The salesman heightened his manifestation of sympathy.

"Well, sir"—he deliberated, tapping his brow with a pencil, scanning the long line of garments—"I'm afraid we're not stocked with what you wish. Best go to a costumer, sir, and rent one for the night perhaps."

The customer firmly pushed back a pendent lock of hair and became impressive.

"I tell you it is not for a masquerade or any foolishness of that sort. I wish a plain, roughly made, common-looking suit of clothes, not too well fitting—the sort of things working people wear, don't you understand?"

"But certainly, sir; I understand perfectly. This coat here is what the working people are buying; sold a dozen suits myself this week to some of the mill workers—very natty, sir, and only sixty-five dollars. If you'll look closely at the workers about town you'll see the same suits—right dressy, you'll notice. I'm afraid the other sort of thing has gone a little out of style; in fact, I don't believe you'll be able to find a suit such as you describe. They're not being made. Workers are buying this sort of garment." He picked up the snappy belted coat and fondled its nap affectionately. "Of course, for a fancy-dress party——"

"No, no, no! I tell you it isn't a masquerade!"

The salesman seemed at a loss for further suggestions. The customer's eye lighted upon a pile of coats farther down the line.

"What are those?"

"Those? Corduroy, sir. Splendid garments—suitable for the woods, camping, hunting, fishing. We're well stocked with hunting equipment. Will you look at them?"

"I suppose so," said the customer, desperately.

* * * * *

Late that afternoon the three older Whipples, on the piazza of the Whipple New Place, painfully discussed the scene of the previous evening. It was felt by two of them that some tragic event impended. Sharon alone was cheerful. From time to time he admonished the other two to sit tight.

"He'll tell you you ain't any longer a father of his, or a grandfather, either, but sit tight!"

He had said this when Merle appeared before them as a car drew up to the door. There was an immediate sensation from which even Sharon was not immune. For Merle was garbed in corduroy, and the bagging trousers were stuffed into the tops of heavy, high-laced boots. The coat was belted but loose fitting. The exposed shirt was of brown flannel, and the gray felt hat was low-crowned and broad of brim. The hat was firmly set on the wearer's head, and about his neck was a wreath of colour—a knotted handkerchief of flaming scarlet.

The three men stared at him in silent stupefaction. He seemed about to pass them on his way to the waiting car, but then paused and confronted them, his head back. He laughed his bitter laugh.

"Does it seem strange to see me in the dress of a common workingman?" he demanded.

"Dress of a what?" demanded Sharon Whipple. The other ignored this.

"You have consigned me to the ranks," he continued, chiefly to Harvey D. "I must work with my hands for the simple fare that my comrades are able to gain with their own toil. I must dress as one of them. It's absurdly simple."

"My!" exclaimed Gideon.

Harvey D. was suffering profoundly, but all at once his eyes flashed with alarm.

"Haven't those boots nails in them?" he suddenly demanded.

"I dare say they have."

"And you've been going across the hardwood floors?" demanded Harvey D. again.

"This is too absurd!" said Merle, grimly.

Harvey D. hesitated, then smiled, his alarm vanishing.

"Of course I was absurd," he admitted, contritely. "I know you must have kept on the rugs."

"Oh, oh!" Again came the dry, bitter laugh of Merle.

"Say," broke in Sharon, "you want to take a good long look at the next workingman you see."

Merle swept him with a glance of scorn. He stepped into the waiting car.

"I could no longer brook this spirit of intolerance, but I'm taking nothing except the clothes I'm wearing," he reminded Harvey D. "I go to my comrades barehanded." He adjusted the knot of crimson at his white throat. "But they will not be barehanded long, remember that!"

Nathan Marwick started the car along the driveway. Merle was seen to order a halt.

"Of course, for a time, at least, I shall keep the New York apartment. My address will be the same."

The car went on.

"Did that father know his own flesh and blood—I ask you?" demanded Sharon.

"Dear me, dear me!" sighed Harvey D.

"Poor young thing!" said Gideon.

Merle, on his way to the train, thought of his hat. He had not been able to feel confidence in that hat. There was a trimness about it, an assertive glamour, an air of success, that should not stamp one of the oppressed. He had gone to the purchase of it with vague notions that a labouring man, at least while actually labouring, wears a square cap of paper which he has made himself. So he was crowned in all cartoons. But, of course, this paper thing would not do for street wear, and the hat he now wore was the least wealth-suggesting he had been able to find. He now decided that a cap would be better. He seemed to remember that the toiling masses wore a lot of caps.



CHAPTER XVIII

A week later one of the New York evening papers printed an inspiring view of Merle Dalton Whipple in what was said to be the rough garb of the workingman. He stanchly fronted the world in a corduroy suit and high-laced boots, a handkerchief knotted at his throat above a flannel shirt, and a somewhat proletarian cap set upon his well-posed head. The caption ran: "Young Millionaire Socialist Leaves Life of Luxury to be Simple Toiler."

A copy of this enterprising sheet, addressed in an unknown hand, arrived at the Whipple New Place, to further distress the bereft family. Only Sharon Whipple was not distressed. He remarked that the toiler was not so simple as some people might think, and he urged that an inquiry be set on foot to discover the precise nature of the toil now being engaged in by this recruit to the ranks of labour. He added that he himself would be glad to pay ninety dollars a month and board to any toiler worth his salt, because Juliana was now his only reliable helper, and it did seem as if she would never learn to run a tractor, she having no gift for machinery. If Merle Whipple was bent on toil, why should he not come to the Home Farm, where plenty of it could be had for the asking?

Both Harvey D. and Gideon rebuked him for this levity, reminding him that he did not take into account the extreme sensitiveness of Merle.

Sharon merely said: "Mebbe so, mebbe not."

There came another issue of the New Dawn. It was a live issue, and contained a piece by the associate editor entitled, This Unpopular War, in which it was clearly shown that this war was unpopular. It was unpopular with every one the writer had questioned; no one wanted it, every one condemned it, even those actually engaged in it at Washington. The marvel was that an army could continue to go forward with existing public sentiment as the New Dawn revealed it. But a better day was said to be dawning. The time was at hand when an end would be put to organized exploitation and murder, which was all that the world had thus far been able to evolve in the way of a government.

In a foreword to the readers of the New Dawn, however, a faintly ominous note was sounded. It appeared that the interests had heinously conspired to suppress the magazine because of its loyalty to the ideals of free thought and free speech. In short, its life was menaced. Support was withdrawn by those who had suddenly perceived that the New Dawn meant the death of privilege; that "this flowering of mature and seasoned personalities" threatened the supremacy of the old order of industrial slavery. The mature and seasoned personalities had sounded the prelude to the revolution which "here bloodily, there peaceably, and beginning with Russia, would sweep the earth." Capital, affrighted, had drawn back. It was therefore now necessary that the readers of the New Dawn bear their own burden. If they would send in money in such sums as they could spare—and it was felt that these would flow in abundantly upon a hint—the magazine would continue and the revolution be a matter of days. It was better, after all, that the cause should no longer look to capital for favours. Contributors were to sign on the dotted line.

There were no more New Dawns. The forces of privilege had momentarily prevailed, or the proletariat had been insufficiently roused to its plight. The New Dawn stopped, and in consequence the war went on. For a time, at least, America must continue in that spiritual darkness which the New Dawn had sought to illumine.

Later it became known in Newbern that the staff of the New Dawn would now deliver its message by word of mouth. Specifically, Merle Whipple was said to be addressing throngs of despairing toilers not only in New York, but in places as remote as Chicago. Sharon Whipple now called him a crimson rambler.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, news of the other Cowan twin trickled into Newbern through letters from Winona Penniman, a nurse with the forces overseas. During her months of training in New York the epistolary style of Winona had maintained its old leisurely elegance, but early in the year of 1918 it suffered severely under the strain of active service and became blunt to the point of crudeness. The morale of her nice phrases had been shattered seemingly beyond restoration.

"D—n this war!" began one letter to her mother. "We had influenza aboard coming over and three nurses died and were buried at sea. Also, one of our convoy foundered in a storm; I saw men clinging to the wreck as she went down.

"Can it be that I once lived in that funny little town where they make a fuss about dead people—flowers and a casket and a clergyman and careful burial? With us it's something to get out of the way at once. And life has always been this, and I never knew it, even if we did take the papers at home. Ha, ha! Yes, I can laugh, even in the face of it. 'Life is real, life is earnest'—how that line comes back to me with new force!"

A succeeding letter from a base hospital somewhere in France spelled in full certain words that had never before polluted Winona's pen. Brazenly she abandoned the seemly reticence of dashes.

"Damn all the war!" she wrote; and again: "War is surely more hellish than hell could be!"

"Mercy! Can the child be using such words in actual talk?", demanded Mrs. Penniman of the judge, to whom she read the letter.

"More'n likely," declared the judge. "War makes 'em forget their home training. Wouldn't surprise me if she went from bad to worse. It's just a life of profligacy she's leadin'—you can't tell me."

"Nonsense!" snapped the mother.

"'And whom do you think I had a nice little visit with two days ago? He was on his way up to the front again, and it was our Wilbur. He's been in hot fighting three times already, but so far unscathed. But oh, how old he looks, and so severe and grim and muddy! He says he is the worst-scared man in the whole Army, bar none. He thought at first he would get over his fright, but each time he goes in he hates worse and worse to be shot at, and will positively never come to like it. He says the only way he can get over being frightened is to go on until he becomes very, very angry, and then he can forget it for a time. You can tell by his face that it would be easy to anger him.

"'But do not think he is cowardly, even if habitually frightened, because I also talked with his captain, who is an outspoken man, and he tells me that Wilbur is a regular fighting so-and-so. These were his very words. They are army slang, and mean that he is a brave soldier. A young man, a Mr. Edward Brennon from Newbern, a sort of athlete, came over with him, and they have been constantly together. I did not see this Mr. Brennon, but I hear that he, too, is gallantly great, and also a regular fighting so-and-so, as these rough men put it in their slang.

"'Wilbur spoke of Merle's writing about the war, and about America's being rotten to the core because of capital that people want to keep from the workingman, and he says he now sees that Merle must have been misled; as he puts it in his crude, forceful way, this man's country has come to stay. He says that is what he always says to himself when he has to go over the top, while he is still scared and before he grows angry—"This man's country has come to stay." He says this big American Army would laugh at many of Merle's speeches about America and the war. He says the country is greater than any magazine, even the best. Now my rest hour is over, and I must go in where they are doing terrible things to these poor men. For a week I have been on my feet eighteen hours out of each twenty-four. I have just time for another tiny cigarette before going into that awful smell.'

"Mercy!" cried the amazed mother.

"There you are!" retorted the judge. "Let her go into the Army and she takes up smoking. War leads to dissipation—ask any one."

"I must send her some," declared Mrs. Penniman; "or I wonder if she rolls her own?"

"Yes, and pretty soon we'll have the whole house stenched up worse'n what Dave Cowan's pipe does it," grumbled the judge. "The idee of a girl of her years taking up cigarettes! A good thing the country's going dry. Them that smoke usually drink."

"High time the girl had some fun," returned his wife, placidly.

"Needn't be shameless about it," grumbled the judge. "A good woman has to draw the line somewhere."

The unbending moralist later protested that Winona's letters should not be read to her friends. But Mrs. Penniman proved stubborn. She softened no word of Winona's strong language, and she betrayed something like a guilty pride in revealing that her child was now a hopeless tobacco addict.

A month later Winona further harassed the judge.

"'I think only about life and death,'" read Mrs. Penniman, "'and I'm thinking now that the real plan of things is something greater than either of them. It is not rounded out by our dying in the right faith. Somehow it must go on and on, always in struggle and defeat. I used to think, of course, that our religious faith was the only true one, but now I must tell you I don't know what I am.'"

"My Lord!" groaned the horrified judge. "The girl's an atheist! That's what people are when they don't know what they are. First swearing, then smoking cigarettes, now forsaking her religion. Mark my words, she's coming home an abandoned woman!"

"Stuff!" said Mrs. Penniman, crisply. "She's having a great experience. Listen! 'You should see them die here, in all faiths—Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and very, very many who have never enjoyed the consolation of any religious teachings whatsoever. But they all die alike, and you may think me dreadful for saying it, but I know their reward will be equal. I don't know if I will come out of it myself, but I don't think about that, because it seems unimportant. The scheme—you remember Dave Cowan always talking about the scheme—the scheme is so big, that dying doesn't matter one bit if you die trying for something. I couldn't argue about this, but I know it and these wonderful boys must know it when they go smiling straight into death. They know it without any one ever having told them. Sometimes I get to thinking of my own little set beliefs about a hereafter—those I used to hold—and they seem funny to me!'"

"There!" The judge waved triumphantly. "Now she's makin' fun of the church! That's what comes of gittin' in with that fast Army set."

Mrs. Penniman ignored this.

"'Patricia Whipple feels the same way I do about these matters; more intensely if that were possible. I had a long talk with her yesterday. She has been doing a wonderful work in our section. She is one of us that can stand anything, any sort of horrible operation, and never faint, as some of the nurses have done. She is apparently at such times a thing of steel, a machine, but she feels intensely when it is over and she lets down.

"'You wouldn't know her. Thin and drawn, but can work twenty hours at a stretch and be ready for twenty more next day. She is on her way up to a first-aid station, which I myself would not be equal to. It is terrible enough at this base hospital. For one who has been brought up as she has, gently nurtured, looked after every moment, she is amazing. And, as I say, she feels as I do about life and death and the absurd little compartments into which we used to pack religion. She says she expects never to get back home, because the world is coming to an end. You would not be surprised at her thinking this if you could see what she has to face. She is a different girl. We are both different. We won't ever be the same again.'"

"Wha'd I tell you?" demanded the judge.

"'The war increases in violence—dreadful sights, dreadful smells. I am so glad Merle's eyes kept him out of it. He would have been ill fitted for this turmoil. Wilbur was the one for it. I saw him a few minutes the other day, on his way to some place I mustn't write down. He said: "Do you know what I wish?" I said: "No; what do you wish?" He said: "I wish I was back in the front yard, squirting water on the lawn and flower beds, where no one would be shooting at me, and it was six o'clock and there was going to be fried chicken for supper and one of those deep-dish apple pies without any bottom to it, that you turn upside down and pour maple sirup on. That's what I wish."'"

"Always thinking of his stomach!" muttered the judge.

"'But he has gone on, and I can't feel distressed, even though I know it is probable he will never come back. I know it won't make any difference in the real plan, and that it is only important that he keep on being a fighting so-and-so, as they say in the Army. It is not that I am callous, but I have come to get a larger view of death—mere death. I said good-bye to him for probably the last time with as little feeling as I would have said good-bye to Father on departing for a three-days' trip to the city.'"

"Naturally she'd forget her parents," said the judge. "That's what it leads to."

* * * * *

Late in June of that year the shattered remains of a small town somewhere in France, long peaceful with the peace of death, became noisy with a strange new life. Two opposing and frenzied lines of traffic clashed along the road that led through it and became a noisy jumble in the little square at its centre, a disordered mass of camions, artillery, heavy supply wagons, field kitchens, ambulances, with motorcycles at its edges like excited terriers, lending a staccato vivacity to its uproar.

Artillery and soldiers went forward; supply wagons, empty, and ambulances, not empty, poured back in unending succession; and only the marching men, gaunt shapes in the dust, were silent. They came from a road to the south, an undulating double line of silent men in dust-grayed khaki, bent under a burden of field equipment, stepping swiftly along the narrow, stone-paved street, heads down, unheeding the jagged ruin of small shops and dwellings that flanked the way. Reaching the square, they turned to cross a makeshift bridge—beside one of stone that had spanned the little river but now lay broken in its shallow bed. Beyond this stream they followed a white road that wound gently up a sere hill between rows of blasted poplars. At the top of the rise two shining lines of helmets undulated rhythmically below the view.

At moments the undulations would cease and the lines dissolve. The opposing streams of traffic would merge in a tangle beyond extrication until a halt enabled each to go its way. A sun-shot mist of fine dust softened all lines until from a little distance the figures of men and horses and vehicles were but twisting, yellowish phantoms, strangely troubled, strangely roaring.