# One of Ours/Book 3

BOOK THREE: SUNRISE ON THE PRAIRIE
Claude was to continue farming with his father, and after he returned from his wedding journey, he fell at once to work. The harvest was almost as abundant as that of the summer before, and he was busy in the fields six days a week.
One afternoon in August he came home with his team, watered and fed the horses in a leisurely way, and then entered his house by the back door. Enid, he knew, would not be there. She had gone to Frankfort to a meeting of the Anti-Saloon League. The Prohibition party was bestirring itself in Nebraska that summer, confident of voting the State dry the following year, which purpose it triumphantly accomplished.
Enid’s kitchen, full of the afternoon sun, glittered with new paint, spotless linoleum, and blue-and-white cooking vessels. In the dining-room the cloth was laid, and the table was neatly set for one. Claude opened the icebox, where his supper was arranged for him; a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter. He placed these things on the table, cut some bread, and after carelessly washing his face and hands, sat down to eat in his working shirt. He propped the newspaper against a red glass water pitcher and read the war news while he had his supper. He was annoyed when he heard heavy footsteps coming around the house. Leonard Dawson stuck his head in at the kitchen door, and Claude rose quickly and reached for his hat; but Leonard came in, uninvited, and sat ​down. His brown shirt was wet where his suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with dust.
“Go ahead and finish your supper,” he cried. “Having a wife with an electric is next thing to having no wife at all. How they do like to roll around! I’ve been mighty blamed careful to see that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how soon do you figure you’ll be able to let me have the thrasher? My wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you guess your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?”
“I’m afraid not. Mother wouldn’t like it. We never have done that, even when we were crowded.”
“Well, I think I’ll go over and have a talk with your mother. If she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her it’s pretty near a case of your neighbour’s ox falling into a pit on the Sabbath day.”
“That’s a good idea. She’s always reasonable.”
Leonard rose. “What’s the news?”
“The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic; coming this way, too.”
“That’s all right,” Leonard declared. “Maybe Americans will stay at home now, and mind their own business. I don’t care how they chew each other up over there, not a bit! I’d as soon one got wiped off the map as another.”
“Your grandparents were English people, weren’t they?”
“That’s a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn’t mind if the baby turned out to have my grandmother’s skin. She had the finest complexion I ever saw.”
​As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens with red combs ran squawking toward them. It was the hour at which the poultry was usually fed. Leonard stopped to admire them. “You’ve got a fine lot of hens. I always did like white leghorns. Where are all your roosters?”
“We’ve only got one. He’s shut up in the coop. The brood hens are setting. Enid is going to try raising winter frys.”
“Only one rooster? And may I ask what these hens do?”
Claude laughed. “They lay eggs, just the same,—better. It’s the fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather.”
This information seemed to make Leonard angry. “I never heard of such damned nonsense,” he blustered. “I raise chickens on a natural basis, or I don’t raise ’em at all.” He jumped into his car for fear he would say more.
When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle. Dirty and sweaty as he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its neck. The little girl was beside herself with delight.
“Go and wash up for supper, Len,” Susie called from the stove. He put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking with his eyes shut.
“Susie, I’m in an awful temper. I can’t stand that damned wife of Claude’s!”
She was spearing roasting ears out of a big iron pot and looked up through the steam. “Why, have you seen her? I was listening on the telephone this morning and heard her tell Bayliss she would be in town until late.”
​“Oh, yes! She went to town all right, and he’s over there eating a cold supper by himself. That woman’s a fanatic. She ain’t content with practising prohibition on humankind; she’s begun now on the hens.” While he placed the chairs and wheeled the baby up to the table, he explained Enid’s method of raising poultry to his wife. She said she really didn’t see any harm in it.
“Now be honest, Susie; did you ever know hens would keep on laying without a rooster?”
“No, I didn’t, but I was brought up the old-fashioned way. Enid has poultry books and garden books, and all such things. I don’t doubt she gets good ideas from them. But anyhow, you be careful. She’s our nearest neighbour, and I don’t want to have trouble with her.”
“I’ll have to keep out of her way, then. If she tries to do any missionary work among my chickens, I’ll tell her a few home truths her husband’s too bashful to tell her. It’s my opinion she’s got that boy cowed already.”
“Now, Len, you know she won’t bother your chickens. You keep quiet. But Claude does seem to sort of avoid people,” Susie admitted, filling her husband’s plate again. “Mrs. Joe Havel says Ernest don’t go to Claude’s any more. It seems Enid went over there and wanted Ernest to paste some Prohibition posters about fifteen million drunkards on their barn, for an example to the Bohemians. Ernest wouldn’t do it, and told her he was going to vote for saloons, and Enid was quite spiteful, Mrs. Havel said. It’s too bad, when those boys were such chums. I used to like to see them together.” Susie spoke so kindly that her husband shot her a quick glance of shy affection.
“Do you suppose Claude relished having that preacher ​visiting them, when they hadn’t been married two months? Sitting on the front porch in a white necktie every day, while Claude was out cutting wheat?”
“Well, anyhow, I guess Claude had more to eat when Brother Weldon was staying there. Preachers won’t be fed on calories, or whatever it is Enid calls ’em,” said Susie, who was given to looking on the bright side of things. “Claude’s wife keeps a wonderful kitchen; but so could I, if I never cooked any more than she does.”
Leonard gave her a meaning look. “I don’t believe you would live with the sort of man you could feed out of a tin can.”
“No, I don’t believe I would.” She pushed the buggy toward him. “Take her up, Daddy. She wants to play with you.”
Leonard sat the baby on his shoulder and carried her off to show her the pigs. Susie kept laughing to herself as she cleared the table and washed the dishes; she was much amused by what her husband had told her.
Late that evening, when Leonard was starting for the barn to see that all was well before he went to bed, he observed a discreet black object rolling along the highroad in the moonlight, a red spark winking in the rear. He called Susie to the door.
“See, there she goes; going home to report the success of the meeting to Claude. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to have your wife coming in?”
“Now, Leonard, if Claude likes it—”
“Likes it?” Big Leonard drew himself up. “What can he do, poor kid? He’s stung!”
AFTER Leonard left him, Claude cleared away the remains of his supper and watered the gourd vine before he went to milk. It was not really a gourd vine at all, but a summer-squash, of the crook-necked, warty, orange-coloured variety, and it was now full of ripe squashes, hanging by strong stems among the rough green leaves and prickly tendrils. Claude had watched its rapid growth and the opening of its splotchy yellow blossoms, feeling grateful to a thing that did so lustily what it was put there to do. He had the same feeling for his little Jersey cow, which came home every night with full udders and gave down her milk willingly, keeping her tail out of his face, as only a well-disposed cow will do.
His milking done, he sat down on the front porch and lit a cigar. While he smoked, he did not think about anything but the quiet and the slow cooling of the atmosphere, and how good it was to sit still. The moon swam up over the bare wheat fields, big and magical, like a great flower. Presently he got some bath towels, went across the yard to the windmill, took off his clothes, and stepped into the tin horse tank. The water had been warmed by the sun all afternoon, and was not much cooler than his body. He stretched himself out in it, and resting his head on the metal rim, lay on his back, looking up at the moon. The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current. One expected to see its great petals open.
​For some reason, Claude began to think about the far-off times and countries it had shone upon. He never thought of the sun as coming from distant lands, or as having taken part in human life in other ages. To him, the sun rotated about the wheatfields. But the moon, somehow, came out of the historic past, and made him think of Egypt and the Pharaohs, Babylon and the hanging gardens. She seemed particularly to have looked down upon the follies and disappointments of men; into the slaves’ quarters of old times, into prison windows, and into fortresses where captives languished.
Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives dwelling in darkness,—never seen from birth to death. Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all. Perhaps even in people like Mrs. Royce and his brother Bayliss there was something of this sort—but that was a shuddery thought. He dismissed it with a quick movement of his hand through the water, which, disturbed, caught the light and played black and gold, like something alive, over his chest. In his own mother the imprisoned spirit was almost more present to people than her corporeal self. He had so often felt it when he sat with her on summer nights like this. Mahailey, too, had one, though the walls of her prison were so thick—and Gladys Farmer. Oh, yes, how much Gladys must have to tell this perfect confidant! The people whose hearts were set high needed such intercourse—whose wish was so beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy it. And these children of the moon, ​with their unappeased longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children of the sun. This conception flooded the boy’s heart like a second moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay deathly still for fear of losing it.
At last the black cubical object which had caught Leonard Dawson’s wrathful eye, came rolling along the highroad. Claude snatched up his clothes and towels, and without waiting to make use of either, he ran, a white man across a bare white yard. Gaining the shelter of the house, he found his bathrobe, and fled to the upper porch, where he lay down in the hammock. Presently he heard his name called, pronounced as if it were spelled “Clod.” His wife came up the stairs and looked out at him. He lay motionless, with his eyes closed. She went away. When all was quiet again he looked off at the still country, and the moon in the dark indigo sky. His revelation still possessed him, making his whole body sensitive, like a tightly strung bow. In the morning he had forgotten, or was ashamed of what had seemed so true and so entirely his own the night before. He agreed, for the most part, that it was better not to think about such things, and when he could he avoided thinking.
After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard, to take her as far as Claude’s new house. She was glad Enid didn’t keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing machine before he went to work, and by nine o’clock the clothes were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.
Although within a few months Enid’s car travelled more than two thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected her husband depended upon one’s conception of what was his due. When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and make the best of what was ​good in it. If his wife didn’t love him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort. Everything about a man’s embrace was distasteful to Enid; something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,—for Eve’s transgression, perhaps.
This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of any kind, even religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude before she married him than she was now; but she hoped for a readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him again in exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that for the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient with the boy. And she thought she had been lenient. She could not understand his moods of desperate silence, the bitter, biting remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance if she went over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in the deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself, “It’s the end of everything for me.” Other men than he must have been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a lifetime. Claude had been a well-behaved boy because he was an idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that it might be otherwise.
Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright summer morning, it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but broadly laughed at him. He suffered in his pride, ​but even more in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging hospitality. He was wronging something in himself.
In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in him? Was it, after all, his fault?
Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one else, he noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came out from town to spend the evening occasionally. Enid’s vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss. Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to take any part in the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what Bayliss and Enid called “our literature.”
In the farming towns the term “literature” was applied only to a special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature, Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease, there was Hoof-and-Mouth lit​erature. This special application of the word didn’t bother Claude, but his mother, being an old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
Enid did not understand her husband’s indifference to a burning question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest Havel. She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had something to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the lightning had blasted. Further than that he wouldn’t have let anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.
The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife’s blood with horror—and some would have melted his mother’s heart with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with life—that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with compromises.
From her upstairs window Mrs. Wheeler could see Claude moving back and forth in the west field, drilling wheat. She felt lonely for him. He didn’t come home as often as he might. She had begun to wonder whether he was one of those people who are always discontented; but whatever his disappointments were, he kept them locked in his own breast. One had to learn the lessons of life. Nevertheless, it made her a little sad to see him so settled and indifferent at twenty-three.
After watching from the window for a few moments, she turned to the telephone and called up Claude’s house, asking Enid whether she would mind if he came there for dinner. “Mahailey and I get lonesome with Mr. Wheeler away so much,” she added.
“Why, no, Mother Wheeler, of course not.” Enid spoke cheerfully, as she always did. “Have you any one there you can send over to tell him?”
“I thought I would walk over myself, Enid. It’s not far, if I take my time.”
Mrs. Wheeler left the house a little before noon and stopped at the creek to rest before she climbed the long hill. At the edge of the field she sat down against a grassy bank and waited until the horses came tramping up the long rows. Claude saw her and pulled them in.
“Anything wrong, Mother?” he called.
“Oh, no! I’m going to take you home for dinner with me, that’s all. I telephoned Enid.”
​He unhooked his team, and he and his mother started down the hill together, walking behind the horses. Though they had not been alone like this for a long while, she felt it best to talk about impersonal things.
“Don’t let me forget to give you an article about the execution of that English nurse.”
“Edith Cavell? I’ve read about it,” he answered listlessly.
“It’s nothing to be surprised at. If they could sink the Lusitania, they could shoot an English nurse, certainly.”
“Someway I feel as if this were different,” his mother murmured. “It’s like the hanging of John Brown. I wonder they could find soldiers to execute the sentence.”
“Oh, I guess they have plenty of such soldiers!”
Mrs. Wheeler looked up at him. “I don’t see how we can stay out of it much longer, do you? I suppose our army wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket, even if we could get it over. They tell us we can be more useful in our agriculture and manufactories than we could by going into the war. I only hope it isn’t campaign talk. I do distrust the Democrats.”
Claude laughed. “Why, Mother, I guess there’s no party politics in this.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never yet found a public question in which there wasn’t party politics. Well, we can only do our duty as it comes to us, and have faith. This field finishes your fall work?”
“Yes. I’ll have time to do some things about the place, now. I’m going to make a good ice-house and put up my own ice this winter.”
“Were you thinking of going up to Lincoln, for a little?”
“I guess not.”
​Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back on old pleasures and old friends.
“Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in Frankfort?”
“I think so, Mother,” he answered a little impatiently. “I told her she could attend to it when she was in town some day.”
“Of course,” his mother persevered, “some of the programs are not very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of what we have.”
He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that. His horses stopped at the water tank. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be along in a minute.” Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled. “Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool the other.”
She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost disappeared. “I thought I was smart that time!”
It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.
While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her they were all photographs,—she knew no other way of making a picture.
“Mr. Claude,” she asked, “how comes it all them Germans is such ugly lookin’ people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here ain’t ugly lookin’.”
Claude put her off indulgently. “Maybe it’s the ugly ones that are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our neighbours.”
“Then why don’t they make their soldiers stay home, an’ not go breakin’ other people’s things, an’ turnin’ ’em out of ​their houses,” she muttered indignantly. “They say little babies was born out in the snow last winter, an’ no fires for their mudders nor nothin’. ’Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn’t like that in our war; the soldiers didn’t do nothin’ to the women an’ chillun. Many a time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an’ they never so much as broke a piece of my mudder’s chiney.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must have my dinner and get back to work. If we don’t get our wheat in, those people over there won’t have anything to eat, you know.”
The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages, things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry that used to stop to drink at her mother’s cold mountain spring. She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back, “as raw as beef where he’d scratched it.” Five of her brothers were in the Rebel army. When one was wounded in the second battle of Bull’s Run, her mother had borrowed a wagon and horses, gone a three days’ journey to the field hospital, and brought the boy home to the mountain. Mahailey could remember how her older sisters took turns pouring cold spring water on his gangrenous leg all day and all night. There were no doctors left in the neighbourhood, and as nobody could amputate the boy’s leg, he died by inches. Mahailey was the only person in the Wheeler household who had ever seen war with her own eyes, and she felt that this fact gave her a definite superiority.
Claude had been married a year and a half. One December morning he got a telephone message from his father-in-law, asking him to come in to Frankfort at once. He found Mr. Royce sunk in his desk-chair, smoking as usual, with several foreign-looking letters on the table before him. As he took these out of their envelopes and sorted the pages, Claude noticed how unsteady his hands had become.
One letter, from the chief of the medical staff in the mission school where Caroline Royce taught, informed Mr. Royce that his daughter was seriously ill in the mission hospital. She would have to be sent to a more salubrious part of the country for rest and treatment, and would not be strong enough to return to her duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a box of cigars toward him and began to talk despondently about missionaries.
“I could go to her,” he complained, “but what good would that do? I’m not in sympathy with her ideas, and it would only fret her. You can see she’s made her mind up not to come home. I don’t believe in one people trying to force their ways or their religion on another. I’m not that kind of man.” He sat looking at his cigar. After a long pause he ​broke out suddenly, “China has been drummed into my ears . . . It seems like a long way to go to hunt for trouble, don’t it? A man hasn’t got much control over his own life, Claude. If it ain’t poverty or disease that torments him, it’s a name on the map. I could have made out pretty well, if it hadn’t been for China, and some other things. . . . If Carrie’d had to teach for her clothes and help pay off my notes, like old man Harrison’s daughters, like enough she’d have stayed at home. There’s always something. I don’t know what to say about showing these letters to Enid.”
“Oh, she will have to know about it, Mr. Royce. If she feels that she ought to go to Carrie, it wouldn’t be right for me to interfere.”
Mr. Royce shook his head. “I don’t know. It don’t seem fair that China should hang over you, too.”
When Claude got home he remarked as he handed Enid the letters, “Your father has been a good deal upset by this. I never saw him look so old as he did today.”
Enid studied their contents, sitting at her orderly little desk, while Claude pretended to read the paper.
“It seems clear that I am the one to go,” she said when she had finished.
“You think it’s necessary for some one to go? I don’t see it.”
“It would look very strange if none of us went,” Enid replied with spirit.
“How, look strange?”
“Why, it would look to her associates as if her family had no feeling.”
“Oh, if that’s all!” Claude smiled perversely and took up ​his paper again. “I wonder how it will look to people here if you go off and leave your husband?”
“What a mean thing to say, Claude!” She rose sharply, then hesitated, perplexed. “People here know me better than that. It isn’t as if you couldn’t be perfectly comfortable at your mother’s.” As he did not glance up from his paper, she went into the kitchen.
Claude sat still, listening to Enid’s quick movements as she opened up the range to get supper. The light in the room grew greyer. Outside the fields melted into one another as evening came on. The young trees in the yard bent and whipped about under a bitter north wind. He had often thought with pride that winter died at his front doorstep; within, no draughty halls, no chilly corners. This was their second year here. When he was driving home, the thought that he might be free of this house for a long while had stirred a pleasant excitement in him; but now, he didn’t want to leave it. Something grew soft in him. He wondered whether they couldn’t try again, and make things go better. Enid was singing in the kitchen in a subdued, rather lonely voice. He rose and went out for his milking coat and pail. As he passed his wife by the window, he stopped and put his arm about her questioningly.
She looked up. “That’s right. You’re feeling better about it, aren’t you? I thought you would. Gracious, what a smelly coat, Claude! I must find another for you.”
Claude knew that tone. Enid never questioned the rightness of her own decisions. When she made up her mind, there was no turning her. He went down the path to the barn with his hands stuffed in his trousers pockets, his bright pail hanging on his arm. Try again—what was there to try? ​Platitudes, littleness, falseness. . . . His life was choking him, and he hadn’t the courage to break with it. Let her go! Let her go when she would! . . . What a hideous world to be born into! Or was it hideous only for him? Everything he touched went wrong under his hand—always had.
When they sat down at the supper table in the back parlour an hour later, Enid looked worn, as if this time her decision had cost her something. “I should think you might have a restful winter at your mother’s,” she began cheerfully. “You won’t have nearly so much to look after as you do here. We needn’t disturb things in this house. I will take the silver down to Mother, and we can leave everything else just as it is. Would there be room for my car in your father’s garage? You might find it a convenience.”
“Oh, no! I won’t need it. I’ll put it up at the mill house,” he answered with an effort at carelessness.
All the familiar objects that stood about them in the lamplight seemed stiller and more solemn than usual, as if they were holding their breath.
“I suppose you had better take the chickens over to your mother’s,” Enid continued evenly. “But I shouldn’t like them to get mixed with her Plymouth Rocks; there’s not a dark feather among them now. Do ask Mother Wheeler to use all the eggs, and not to let my hens set in the spring.”
“In the spring?” Claude looked up from his plate.
“Of course, Claude. I could hardly get back before next fall, if I’m to be of any help to poor Carrie. I might try to be home for harvest, if that would make it more convenient for you.” She rose to bring in the dessert.
“Oh, don’t hurry on my account!” he muttered, staring after her disappearing figure.
​Enid came back with the hot pudding and the after-dinner coffee things. “This has come on us so suddenly that we must make our plans at once,” she explained. “I should think your mother would be glad to keep Rose for us; she is such a good cow. And then you can have all the cream you want.”
He took the little gold-rimmed cup she held out to him. “If you are going to be gone until next fall, I shall sell Rose,” he announced gruffly.
“But why? You might look a long time before you found another like her.”
“I shall sell her, anyhow. The horses, of course, are Father’s; he paid for them. If you clear out, he may want to rent this place. You may find a tenant in here when you get back from China.” Claude swallowed his coffee, put down the cup, and went into the front parlour, where he lit a cigar. He walked up and down, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who still sat at the table in the circle of light from the hanging lamp. Her head, bent forward a little, showed the neat part of her brown hair. When she was perplexed, her face always looked sharper, her chin longer.
“If you’ve no feeling for the place,” said Claude from the other room, “you can hardly expect me to hang around and take care of it. All the time you were campaigning, I played housekeeper here.”
Enid’s eyes narrowed, but she did not flush. Claude had never seen a wave of colour come over his wife’s pale, smooth cheeks.
“Don’t be childish. You know I care for this place; it’s our home. But no feeling would be right that kept me from doing my duty. You are well, and you have your mother’s house to go to. Carrie is ill and among strangers.”
​She began to gather up the dishes. Claude stepped quickly out into the light and confronted her. “It’s not only your going. You know what’s the matter with me. It’s because you want to go. You are glad of a chance to get away among all those preachers, with their smooth talk and make-believe.”
Enid took up the tray. “If I am glad, it’s because you are not willing to govern our lives by Christian ideals. There is something in you that rebels all the time. So many important questions have come up since our marriage, and you have been indifferent or sarcastic about every one of them. You want to lead a purely selfish life.”
She walked resolutely out of the room and shut the door behind her. Later, when she came back, Claude was not there. His hat and coat were gone from the hatrack; he must have let himself out quietly by the front door. Enid sat up until eleven and then went to bed.
In the morning, on coming out from her bedroom, she found Claude asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on. She had a moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any smell of spirits. She began preparations for breakfast, moving quietly.
Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost no time. She engaged passage and cabled the mission school. She left Frankfort the week before Christmas. Claude and Ralph took her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express. When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother’s, and sold his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson. Except when he went to see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the neighbours. He felt that they were discussing his domestic affairs,—as, ​of course, they were. The Royces and the Wheelers, they said, couldn’t behave like anybody else, and it was no use their trying. If Claude built the best house in the neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn’t live in it. And if he had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!
One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar. Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went away. He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows securely. As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice. All these things that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop of any second-hand dealer.
How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and decaying things in nature. Rubbish . . . junk . . . his mind could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued from day to day. Actions without meaning. . . . As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten. He wondered how he was to go on through the years ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his soul.
​At last he locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and went over to the timber claim to smoke a cigar and say goodbye to the place. There he soberly walked about for more than an hour, under the crooked trees with empty birds’ nests in their forks. Every time he came to a break in the hedge, he could see the little house, giving itself up so meekly to solitude. He did not believe that he would ever live there again. Well, at any rate, the money his father had put into the place would not be lost; he could always get a better tenant for having a comfortable house there. Several of the boys in the neighbourhood were planning to be married within the year. The future of the house was safe. And he? He stopped short in his walk; his feet had made an uncertain, purposeless trail all over the white ground. It vexed him to see his own footsteps. What was it—what was the matter with him? Why, at least, could he not stop feeling things, and hoping? What was there to hope for now?
He heard a sound of distress, and looking back, saw the barn cat, that had been left behind to pick up her living. She was standing inside the hedge, her jet black fur ruffled against the wet flakes, one paw lifted, mewing miserably. Claude went over and picked her up.
“What’s the matter, Blackie? Mice getting scarce in the barn? Mahailey will say you are bad luck. Maybe you are, but you can’t help it, can you?” He slipped her into his overcoat pocket. Later, when he was getting into his car, he tried to dislodge her and put her in a basket, but she clung to her nest in his pocket and dug her claws into the lining. He laughed. “Well, if you are bad luck, I guess you are going to stay right with me!”
She looked up at him with startled yellow eyes and did not even mew.
Mrs. Wheeler was afraid that Claude might not find the old place comfortable, after having had a house of his own. She put her best rocking chair and a reading lamp in his bedroom. He often sat there all evening, shading his eyes with his hand, pretending to read. When he stayed downstairs after supper, his mother and Mahailey were grateful. Besides collecting war pictures, Mahailey now hunted through the old magazines in the attic for pictures of China. She had marked on her big kitchen calendar the day when Enid would arrive in Hong-Kong.
“Mr. Claude,” she would say as she stood at the sink washing the supper dishes, “it’s broad daylight over where Miss Enid is, ain’t it? Cause the world’s round, an’ the old sun, he’s a-shinin’ over there for the yaller people.”
From time to time, when they were working together, Mrs. Wheeler told Mahailey what she knew about the customs of the Chinese. The old woman had never had two impersonal interests at the same time before, and she scarcely knew what to do with them. She would murmur on, half to Claude and half to herself: “They ain’t fightin’ over there where Miss Enid is, is they? An’ she won’t have to wear their kind of clothes, cause she’s a white woman. She won’t let ’em kill their girl babies nor do such awful things like they always have, an’ she won’t let ’em pray to them stone iboles, cause they can’t help ’em none. I ’spect Miss Enid’ll do a heap of good, all the time.”
​Behind her diplomatic monologues, however, Mahailey had her own ideas, and she was greatly scandalized at Enid’s departure. She was afraid people would say that Claude’s wife had “run off an’ lef him,” and in the Virginia mountains, where her social standards had been formed, a husband or wife thus deserted was the object of boisterous ridicule. She once stopped Mrs. Wheeler in a dark corner of the cellar to whisper, “Mr. Claude’s wife ain’t goin’ to stay off there, like her sister, is she?”
If one of the Yoeder boys or Susie Dawson happened to be at the Wheelers’ for dinner, Mahailey never failed to refer to Enid in a loud voice. “Mr. Claude’s wife, she cuts her potatoes up raw in the pan an’ fries ’em. She don’t boil ’em first like I do. I know she’s an awful good cook, I know she is.” She felt that easy references to the absent wife made things look better.
Ernest Havel came to see Claude now, but not often. They both felt it would be indelicate to renew their former intimacy. Ernest still felt aggrieved about his beer, as if Enid had snatched the tankard from his lips with her own corrective hand. Like Leonard, he believed that Claude had made a bad bargain in matrimony; but instead of feeling sorry for him, Ernest wanted to see him convinced and punished. When he married Enid, Claude had been false to liberal principles, and it was only right that he should pay for his apostacy. The very first time he came to spend an evening at the Wheelers’ after Claude came home to live, Ernest undertook to explain his objections to Prohibition. Claude shrugged his shoulders.
“Why not drop it? It’s a matter that doesn’t interest me, one way or the other.”
Ernest was offended and did not come back for nearly a ​month—not, indeed, until the announcement that Germany would resume unrestricted submarine warfare made every one look questioningly at his neighbour.
He walked into the Wheelers’ kitchen the night after this news reached the farming country, and found Claude and his mother sitting at the table, reading the papers aloud to each other in snatches. Ernest had scarcely taken a seat when the telephone bell rang. Claude answered the call. “It’s the telegraph operator at Frankfort,” he said, as he hung up the receiver. “He repeated a message from Father, sent from Wray: Will be home day after tomorrow. Read the papers. What does he mean? What does he suppose we are doing?”
“It means he considers our situation very serious. It’s not like him to telegraph except in case of illness.” Mrs. Wheeler rose and walked distractedly to the telephone box, as if it might further disclose her husband’s state of mind.
“But what a queer message! It was addressed to you, too, Mother, not to me.”
“He would know how I feel about it. Some of your father’s people were sea-going men, out of Portsmouth. He knows what it means when our shipping is told where it can go on the ocean, and where it cannot. It isn’t possible that Washington can take such an affront for us. To think that at this time, of all times, we should have a Democratic administration!”
Claude laughed. “Sit down, Mother. Wait a day or two. Give them time.”
“The war will be over before Washington can do anything, Mrs. Wheeler,” Ernest declared gloomily, “England will be starved out, and France will be beaten to a standstill. The ​whole German army will be on the Western front now. What could this country do? How long do you suppose it takes to make an army?”
Mrs. Wheeler stopped short in her restless pacing and met his moody glance. “I don’t know anything, Ernest, but I believe the Bible. I believe that in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed!”
Ernest looked at the floor. He respected faith. As he said, you must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.
Claude sat leaning his elbows on the table. “It always comes back to the same thing, Mother. Even if a raw army could do anything, how would we get it over there? Here’s one naval authority who says the Germans are turning out submarines at the rate of three a day. They probably didn’t spring this on us until they had enough built to keep the ocean clean.”
“I don’t pretend to say what we could accomplish, son. But we must stand somewhere, morally. They have told us all along that we could be more helpful to the Allies out of the war than in it, because we could send munitions and supplies. If we agree to withdraw that aid, where are we? Helping Germany, all the time we are pretending to mind our own business! If our only alternative is to be at the bottom of the sea, we had better be there!”
“Mother, do sit down! We can’t settle it tonight. I never saw you so worked up.”
“Your father is worked up, too, or he would never have sent that telegram.” Mrs. Wheeler reluctantly took up her workbasket, and the boys talked with their old, easy friendliness.
​When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeders’ place with him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him, over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country, as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver, when this war was undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.
Claude and his mother had not long to wait. Three days later they knew that the German ambassador had been dismissed, and the American ambassador recalled from Berlin. To older men these events were subjects to think and converse about; but to boys like Claude they were life and death, predestination.
One stormy morning Claude was driving the big wagon to town to get a load of lumber. The roads were beginning to thaw out, and the country was black and dirty looking. Here and there on the dark mud, grey snow crusts lingered, perforated like honeycomb, with wet weed-stalks sticking up through them. As the wagon creaked over the high ground just above Frankfort, Claude noticed a brilliant new flag flying from the schoolhouse cupola. He had never seen the flag before when it meant anything but the Fourth of July, or a political rally. Today it was as if he saw it for the first time; no bands, no noise, no orators; a spot of restless colour against the sodden March sky.
He turned out of his way in order to pass the High School, drew up his team, and waited a few minutes until the noon bell rang. The older boys and girls came out first, with a flurry of raincoats and umbrellas. Presently he saw Gladys Farmer, in a yellow “slicker” and an oilskin hat, and waved to her. She came up to the wagon.
“I like your decoration,” he said, glancing toward the cupola.
“It’s a silk one the Senior boys bought with their athletic money. I advised them not to run it up in this rain, but the class president told me they bought that flag for storms.”
“Get in, and I’ll take you home.”
She took his extended hand, put her foot on the hub of the wheel, and climbed to the seat beside him. He clucked to his team.
​“So your High School boys are feeling war-like these days?”
“Very. What do you think?”
“I think they’ll have a chance to express their feelings.”
“Do you, Claude? It seems awfully unreal.”
“Nothing else seems very real, either. I’m going to haul out a load of lumber, but I never expect to drive a nail in it. These things don’t matter now. There is only one thing we ought to do, and only one thing that matters; we all know it.”
“You feel it’s coming nearer every day?”
“Every day.”
Gladys made no reply. She only looked at him gravely with her calm, generous brown eyes. They stopped before the low house where the windows were full of flowers. She took his hand and swung herself to the ground, holding it for a moment while she said good-bye. Claude drove back to the lumber yard. In a place like Frankfort, a boy whose wife was in China could hardly go to see Gladys without making talk.
During the bleak month of March Mr. Wheeler went to town in his buckboard almost every day. For the first time in his life he had a secret anxiety. The one member of his family who had never given him the slightest trouble, his son Bayliss, was just now under a cloud.
Bayliss was a Pacifist, and kept telling people that if only the United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the capital of the world. There was a kind of logic in Bayliss’ utterances that shook Nat Wheeler’s imperturbable assumption that one point of view was as good as another. When Bayliss fought the dram and the cigarette, Wheeler only laughed. That a son of his should turn out a Prohibitionist, was a joke he could appreciate. But Bayliss’ attitude in the present crisis disturbed him. Day after day he sat about his son’s place of business, interrupting his arguments with funny stories. Bayliss did not go home at all that month. He said to his father, “No, Mother’s too violent. I’d better not.”
Claude and his mother read the papers in the evening, but they talked so little about what they read that Mahailey inquired anxiously whether they weren’t still fighting over yonder. When she could get Claude alone for a moment, she pulled out Sunday supplement pictures of the devastated countries and asked him to tell her what was to become of this family, photographed among the ruins of their home; of this old woman, who sat by the roadside with her bundles. “Where’s ​she goin’ to, anyways? See, Mr. Claude, she’s got her iron cook-pot, pore old thing, carryin’ it all the way!”
Pictures of soldiers in gas-masks puzzled her; gas was something she hadn’t learned about in the Civil War, so she worked it out for herself that these masks were worn by the army cooks, to protect their eyes when they were cutting up onions! “All them onions they have to cut up, it would put their eyes out if they didn’t wear somethin’,” she argued.
On the morning of the eighth of April Claude came downstairs early and began to clean his boots, which were caked with dry mud. Mahailey was squatting down beside her stove, blowing and purring into it. The fire was always slow to start in heavy weather. Claude got an old knife and a brush, and putting his foot on a chair over by the west window, began to scrape his shoe. He had said good-morning to Mahailey, nothing more. He hadn’t slept well, and was pale.
“Mr. Claude,” Mahailey grumbled, “this stove ain’t never drawed good like my old one Mr. Ralph took away from me. I can’t do nothin’ with it. Maybe you’ll clean it out for me next Sunday.”
“I’ll clean it today, if you say so. I won’t be here next Sunday. I’m going away.”
Something in his tone made Mahailey get up, her eyes still blinking with the smoke, and look at him sharply. “You ain’t goin’ off there where Miss Enid is?” she asked anxiously.
“No, Mahailey.” He had dropped the shoebrush and stood with one foot on the chair, his elbow on his knee, looking out of the window as if he had forgotten himself. “No, I’m not going to China. I’m going over to help fight the Germans.”
He was still staring out at the wet fields. Before he could ​stop her, before he knew what she was doing, she had caught and kissed his unworthy hand.
“I knowed you would,” she sobbed. “I always knowed you would, you nice boy, you! Old Mahail’ knowed!”
Her upturned face was working all over; her mouth, her eyebrows, even the wrinkles on her low forehead were working and twitching. Claude felt a tightening in his throat as he tenderly regarded that face; behind the pale eyes, under the low brow where there was not room for many thoughts, an idea was struggling and tormenting her. The same idea that had been tormenting him.
“You’re all right, Mahailey,” he muttered, patting her back and turning away. “Now hurry breakfast.”
“You ain’t told your mudder yit?” she whispered.
“No, not yet. But she’ll be all right, too.” He caught up his cap and went down to the barn to look after the horses.
When Claude returned, the family were already at the breakfast table. He slipped into his seat and watched his mother while she drank her first cup of coffee. Then he addressed his father.
“Father, I don’t see any use of waiting for the draft. If you can spare me, I’d like to get into a training camp somewhere. I believe I’d stand a chance of getting a commission.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.” Mr. Wheeler poured maple syrup on his pancakes with a liberal hand. “How do you feel about it, Evangeline?”
Mrs. Wheeler had quietly put down her knife and fork. She looked at her husband in vague alarm, while her fingers moved restlessly about over the tablecloth.
“I thought,” Claude went on hastily, “that maybe I would go up to Omaha tomorrow and find out where the training camps ​are to be located, and have a talk with the men in charge of the enlistment station. Of course,” he added lightly, “they may not want me. I haven’t an idea what the requirements are.”
“No, I don’t understand much about it either.” Mr. Wheeler rolled his top pancake and conveyed it to his mouth. After a moment of mastication he said, “You figure on going tomorrow?”
“I’d like to. I won’t bother with baggage—some shirts and underclothes in my suitcase. If the Government wants me, it will clothe me.”
Mr. Wheeler pushed back his plate. “Well, now I guess you’d better come out with me and look at the wheat. I don’t know but I’d best plough up that south quarter and put it in corn. I don’t believe it will make anything much.”
When Claude and his father went out of the door, Dan sprang up with more alacrity than usual and plunged after them. He did not want to be left alone with Mrs. Wheeler. She remained sitting at the foot of the deserted breakfast table. She was not crying. Her eyes were utterly sightless. Her back was so stooped that she seemed to be bending under a burden. Mahailey cleared the dishes away quietly.
Out in the muddy fields Claude finished his talk with his father. He explained that he wanted to slip away without saying good-bye to any one. “I have a way, you know,” he said, flushing, “of beginning things and not getting very far with them. I don’t want anything said about this until I’m sure. I may be rejected for one reason or another.”
Mr. Wheeler smiled. “I guess not. However, I’ll tell Dan to keep his mouth shut. Will you just go over to Leonard Dawson’s and get that wrench he borrowed? It’s about noon, and he’ll likely be at home.”
​Claude found big Leonard watering his team at the windmill. When Leonard asked him what he thought of the President’s message, he blurted out at once that he was going to Omaha to enlist. Leonard reached up and pulled the lever that controlled the almost motionless wheel.
“Better wait a few weeks and I’ll go with you. I’m going to try for the Marines. They take my eye.” Claude, standing on the edge of the tank, almost fell backward. “Why, what—what for?”
Leonard looked him over. “Good Lord, Claude, you ain’t the only fellow around here that wears pants! What for? Well, I’ll tell you what for,” he held up three large red ringers threateningly; “Belgium, the Lusitania, Edith Cavell. That dirt’s got under my skin. I’ll get my corn planted, and then Father’ll look after Susie till I come back.”
Claude took a long breath. “Well, Leonard, you fooled me. I believed all this chaff you’ve been giving me about not caring who chewed up who.”
“And no more do I care,” Leonard protested, “not a damn! But there’s a limit. I’ve been ready to go since the Lusitania. I don’t get any satisfaction out of my place any more. Susie feels the same way.”
Claude looked at his big neighbour. “Well, I’m off tomorrow, Leonard. Don’t mention it to my folks, but if I can’t get into the army, I’m going to enlist in the navy. They’ll always take an able-bodied man. I’m not coming back here.” He held out his hand and Leonard took it with a smack.
“Good luck, Claude. Maybe we’ll meet in foreign parts. Wouldn’t that be a joke! Give my love to Enid when you write. I always did think she was a fine girl, though I dis​agreed with her on Prohibition.” Claude crossed the fields mechanically, without looking where he went. His power of vision was turned inward upon scenes and events wholly imaginary as yet.
One bright June day Mr. Wheeler parked his car in a line of motors before the new pressed-brick Court house in Frankfort. The Court house stood in an open square, surrounded by a grove of cotton-woods. The lawn was freshly cut, and the flower beds were blooming. When Mr. Wheeler entered the courtroom upstairs, it was already half-full of farmers and townspeople, talking in low tones while the summer flies buzzed in and out of the open windows. The Judge, a one-armed man, with white hair and side-whiskers, sat at his desk, writing with his left hand. He was an old settler in Frankfort county, but from his frock-coat and courtly manners you might have thought he had come from Kentucky yesterday instead of thirty years ago. He was to hear this morning a charge of disloyalty brought against two German farmers. One of the accused was August Yoeder, the Wheelers’ nearest neighbour, and the other was Troilus Oberlies, a rich German from the northern part of the county.
Oberlies owned a beautiful farm and lived in a big white house set on a hill, with a fine orchard, rows of beehives, barns, granaries, and poultry yards. He raised turkeys and tumbler-pigeons, and many geese and ducks swam about on his cattle-ponds. He used to boast that he had six sons, “like our German Emperor.” His neighbours were proud of his place, and pointed it out to strangers. They told how Oberlies had come to Frankfort county a poor man, and had made his fortune ​by his industry and intelligence. He had twice crossed the ocean to re-visit his fatherland, and when he returned to his home on the prairies he brought presents for every one; his lawyer, his banker, and the merchants with whom he dealt in Frankfort and Vicount. Each of his neighbours had in his parlour some piece of woodcarving or weaving, or some ingenious mechanical toy that Oberlies had picked up in Germany. He was an older man than Yoeder, wore a short beard that was white and curly, like his hair, and though he was low in stature, his puffy red face and full blue eyes, and a certain swagger about his carriage, gave him a look of importance. He was boastful and quick-tempered, but until the war broke out in Europe nobody had ever had any trouble with him. Since then he had constantly found fault and complained, everything was better in the Old Country.
Mr. Wheeler had come to town prepared to lend Yoeder a hand if he needed one. They had worked adjoining fields for thirty years now. He was surprised that his neighbour had got into trouble. He was not a blusterer, like Oberlies, but a big, quiet man, with a serious, large-featured face, and a stern mouth that seldom opened. His countenance might have been cut out of red sandstone, it was so heavy and fixed. He and Oberlies sat on two wooden chairs outside the railing of the Judge’s desk.
Presently the Judge stopped writing and said he would hear the charges against Troilus Oberlies. Several neighbours took the stand in succession; their complaints were confused and almost humorous. Oberlies had said the United States would be licked, and that would be a good thing; America was a great country, but it was run by fools, and to be governed by Germany was the best thing that could happen to it. The ​witness went on to say that since Oberlies had made his money in this country—
Here the Judge interrupted him. “Please confine yourself to statements which you consider disloyal, made in your presence by the defendant.” While the witness proceeded, the Judge took off his glasses and laid them on the desk and began to polish the lenses with a silk handkerchief, trying them, and rubbing them again, as if he desired to see clearly.
A second witness had heard Oberlies say he hoped the German submarines would sink a few troopships; that would frighten the Americans and teach them to stay at home and mind their own business. A third complained that on Sunday afternoons the old man sat on his front porch and played Die Wacht am Rhein on a slide-trombone, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. Here Nat Wheeler slapped his knee with a loud guffaw, and a titter ran through the courtroom. The defendant’s puffy red cheeks seemed fashioned by his Maker to give voice to that piercing instrument.
When asked if he had anything to say to these charges, the old man rose, threw back his shoulders, and cast a defiant glance at the courtroom. “You may take my property and imprison me, but I explain nothing, and I take back nothing,” he declared in a loud voice.
The Judge regarded his inkwell with a smile. “You mistake the nature of this occasion, Mr. Oberlies. You are not asked to recant. You are merely asked to desist from further disloyal utterances, as much for your own protection and comfort as from consideration for the feelings of your neighbours. I will now hear the charges against Mr. Yoeder.”
Mr. Yoeder, a witness declared, had said he hoped the United States would go to Hell, now that it had been bought ​over by England. When the witness had remarked to him that if the Kaiser were shot it would end the war, Yoeder replied that charity begins at home, and he wished somebody would put a bullet in the President.
When he was called upon, Yoeder rose and stood like a rock before the Judge. “I have nothing to say. The charges are true. I thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind.”
“Yes, a man can speak his mind, but even here he must take the consequences. Sit down, please.” The Judge leaned back in his chair, and looking at the two men in front of him, began with deliberation: “Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and sometimes I think he is trying to take your place.”
After the case was concluded, Mr. Wheeler joined his neighbour at the door and they went downstairs together.
“Well, what do you hear from Claude?” Mr. Yoeder asked.
“He’s still at Fort R———. He expects to get home on leave before he sails. Gus, you’ll have to lend me one of your boys ​to cultivate my corn. The weeds are getting away from me.”
“Yes, you can have any of my boys,—till the draft gets ’em,” said Yoeder sourly.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. A little military training is good for a boy. You fellows know that.” Mr. Wheeler winked, and Yoeder’s grim mouth twitched at one corner.
That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude. Mrs. Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the neighbourhood doings. Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material for them. Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife. But since Claude went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the boy would be interested. As she laconically said in one of her letters: “Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and sometimes I think he is trying to take your place.”
On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast train from Omaha, going home for a week’s leave. The uniform was still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917. The first draft was not yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in training camps far away. Therefore a red-headed young man with long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic, responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a conspicuous figure among the passengers. Little boys and young girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept opening and forgetting to read.
The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book. He was glad to be going through it at harvest,—the season when it is most itself. He noted that there was more corn than usual,—much of the winter wheat had been weather-killed, and the fields were ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize. The pastures were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again after its first cutting. Binders and harvesters were abroad in the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain into wide, subduing arms. When the train slowed down for a trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.
​Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. “When I see those fellows, I feel as if I’d wakened up in the wrong clothes.”
His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. “That the kind of uniform you’re accustomed to?”
“I surely never wore anything else in the month of July,” Claude admitted. “When I find myself riding along in a train, in the middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the world is turned upside down, for a fact!”
The old man pressed a cigar upon him and began to question him. Like the hero of the Odyssey upon his homeward journey, Claude had often to tell what his country was, and who were the parents that begot him. He was constantly interrupted in his perusal of a French phrase-book (made up of sentences chosen for their usefulness to soldiers,—such as; “Non, jamais je ne regarde les femmes”) by the questions of curious strangers. Presently he gathered up his luggage, shook hands with his neighbour, and put on his hat the same old Stetson, with a gold cord and two hard tassels added to its conical severity. “I get off at this station and wait for the freight that goes down to Frankfort; the cotton-tail, we call it.”
The old man wished him a pleasant visit home, and the best of luck in days to come. Every one in the car smiled at him as he stepped down to the platform with his suitcase in one hand and his canvas bag in the other. His old friend, Mrs. Voigt, the German woman, stood out in front of her restaurant, ringing her bell to announce that dinner was ready for travellers. A crowd of young boys stood about her on the sidewalk, laughing and shouting in disagreeable, jeering tones. As Claude approached, one of them snatched the bell from her hand, ran off across the tracks with it, and plunged into a ​cornfield. The other boys followed, and one of them shouted, “Don’t go in there to eat, soldier. She’s a German spy, and she’ll put ground glass in your dinner!”
Claude went into the lunch room and threw his bags on the floor. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Voigt? Can I do anything for you?”
She was sitting on one of her own stools, crying piteously, her false frizzes awry. Looking up, she gave a little screech of recognition. “Oh, I tank Gott it was you, and no more trouble coming! You know I ain’t no spy nor nodding, like what dem boys say. Dem young fellers is dreadful rough mit me. I sell dem candy since dey was babies, an’ now dey turn on me like dis. Hindenburg, dey calls me, und Kaiser Bill!” She began to cry again, twisting her stumpy little fingers as if she would tear them off.
“Give me some dinner, ma’am, and then I’ll go and settle with that gang. I’ve been away for a long time, and it seemed like getting home when I got off the train and saw your squash vines running over the porch like they used to.”
“Ya? You remember dat?” she wiped her eyes. “I got a pot-pie today, und green peas, chust a few, out of my own garden.”
“Bring them along, please. We don’t get anything but canned stuff in camp.”
Some railroad men came in for lunch. Mrs. Voigt beckoned Claude off to the end of the counter, where, after she had served her customers, she sat down and talked to him, in whispers.
“My, you look good in dem clothes,” she said patting his sleeve. “I can remember some wars, too; when we got back dem provinces what Napoleon took away from us, Alsace und ​Lorraine. Dem boys is passed de word to come und put tar on me some night, und I am skeered to go in my bet. I chust wrap in a quilt und sit in my old chair.”
“Don’t pay any attention to them. You don’t have trouble with the business people here, do you?”
“No-o, not troubles, exactly.” She hesitated, then leaned impulsively across the counter and spoke in his ear. “But it ain’t all so bad in de Old Country like what dey say. De poor people ain’t slaves, und dey ain’t ground down like what dey say here. Always de forester let de poor folks come into de wood und carry off de limbs dat fall, und de dead trees. Und if de rich farmer have maybe a liddle more manure dan he need, he let de poor man come und take some for his land. De poor folks don’t git such wages like here, but dey lives chust as comfortable. Und dem wooden shoes, what dey makes such fun of, is cleaner dan what leather is, to go round in de mud und manure. Dey don’t git so wet und dey don’t stink so.”
Claude could see that her heart was bursting with homesickness, full of tender memories of the far-away time and land of her youth. She had never talked to him of these things before, but now she poured out a flood of confidences about the big dairy farm on which she had worked as a girl; how she took care of nine cows, and how the cows, though small, were very strong,—drew a plough all day and yet gave as much milk at night as if they had been browsing in a pasture! The country people never had to spend money for doctors, but cured all diseases with roots and herbs, and when the old folks had the rheumatism they took “one of dem liddle jenny-pigs” to bed with them, and the guinea-pig drew out all the pain.
​Claude would have liked to listen longer, but he wanted to find the old woman’s tormentors before his train came in. Leaving his bags with her, he crossed the railroad tracks, guided by an occasional teasing tinkle of the bell in the cornfield. Presently he came upon the gang, a dozen or more, lying in a shallow draw that ran from the edge of the field out into an open pasture. He stood on the edge of the bank and looked down at them, while he slowly cut off the end of a cigar and lit it. The boys grinned at him, trying to appear indifferent and at ease.
“Looking for any one, soldier?” asked the one with the bell.
“Yes, I am. I’m looking for that bell. You’ll have to take it back where it belongs. You every one of you know there’s no harm in that old woman.”
“She’s a German, and we’re fighting the Germans, ain’t we?”
“I don’t think you’ll ever fight any. You’d last about ten minutes in the American army. You’re not our kind. There’s only one army in the world that wants men who’ll bully old women. You might get a job with them.”
The boys giggled. Claude beckoned impatiently. “Come along with that bell, kid.”
The boy rose slowly and climbed the bank out of the gully. As they tramped back through the cornfield, Claude turned to him abruptly. “See here, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that!” the boy replied airily, tossing the bell up like a ball and catching it.
“Well, you ought to be. I didn’t expect to see anything of this kind until I got to the front. I’ll be back here in a week, and I’ll make it hot for anybody that’s been bothering her.” Claude’s train was pulling in, and he ran for his baggage.
​Once seated in the “cotton-tail,” he began going down into his own country, where he knew every farm he passed,—knew the land even when he did not know the owner, what sort of crops it yielded, and about how much it was worth. He did not recognize these farms with the pleasure he had anticipated, because he was so angry about the indignities Mrs. Voigt had suffered. He was still burning with the first ardour of the enlisted man. He believed that he was going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry.
Most of his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideas. They had come together from farms and shops and mills and mines, boys from college and boys from tough joints in big cities; sheepherders, street car drivers, plumbers’ assistants, billiard markers. Claude had seen hundreds of them when they first came in; “show men” in cheap, loud sport suits, ranch boys in knitted waistcoats, machinists with the grease still on their fingers, farm-hands like Dan, in their one Sunday coat. Some of them carried paper suitcases tied up with rope, some brought all they had in a blue handkerchief. But they all came to give and not to ask, and what they offered was just themselves; their big red hands, their strong backs, the steady, honest, modest look in their eyes. Sometimes, when he had helped the medical examiner, Claude had noticed the anxious expression in the faces of the long lines of waiting men. They seemed to say, “If I’m good enough, take me. I’ll stay by.” He found them like that to work with; serviceable, good-natured, and eager to learn. If they talked about the war, or the enemy they were getting ready to fight, it was usually in a facetious tone; they were going to “can the Kaiser,” or to make the Crown Prince work for a living. Claude ​loved the men he trained with, wouldn’t choose to live in any better company.
The freight train swung into the river valley that meant home,—the place the mind always came back to, after its farthest quest. Rapidly the farms passed; the haystacks, the cornfields, the familiar red barns—then the long coal sheds and the water tank, and the train stopped.
On the platform he saw Ralph and Mr. Royce, waiting to welcome him. Over there, in the automobile, were his father and mother, Mr. Wheeler in the driver’s seat. A line of motors stood along the siding. He was the first soldier who had come home, and some of the townspeople had driven down to see him arrive in his uniform. From one car Susie Dawson waved to him, and from another Gladys Farmer. While he stopped and spoke to them, Ralph took his bags.
“Come along, boys,” Mr. Wheeler called, tooting his horn, and he hurried the soldier away, leaving only a cloud of dust behind.
Mr. Royce went over to old man Dawson’s car and said rather childishly, “It can’t be that Claude’s grown taller? I suppose it’s the way they learn to carry themselves. He always was a manly looking boy.”
“I expect his mother’s a proud woman,” said Susie, very much excited. “It’s too bad Enid can’t be here to see him. She would never have gone away if she’d known all that was to happen.”
Susie did not mean this as a thrust, but it took effect. Mr. Royce turned away and lit a cigar with some difficulty. His hands had grown very unsteady this last year, though he insisted that his general health was as good as ever. As he grew older, he was more depressed by the conviction that his ​women-folk had added little to the warmth and comfort of the world. Women ought to do that, whatever else they did. He felt apologetic toward the Wheelers and toward his old friends. It seemed as if his daughters had no heart.
Camp habits persisted. On his first morning at home Claude came downstairs before even Mahailey was stirring, and went out to have a look at the stock. The red sun came up just as he was going down the hill toward the cattle corral, and he had the pleasant feeling of being at home, on his father’s land. Why was it so gratifying to be able to say “our hill,” and “our creek down yonder”? to feel the crunch of this particular dried mud under his boots?
When he went into the barn to see the horses, the first creatures to meet his eye were the two big mules that had run away with him, standing in the stalls next the door. It flashed upon Claude that these muscular quadrupeds were the actual authors of his fate. If they had not bolted with him and thrown him into the wire fence that morning, Enid would not have felt sorry for him and come to see him every day, and his life might have turned out differently. Perhaps if older people were a little more honest, and a boy were not taught to idealize in women the very qualities which can make him utterly unhappy—But there, he had got away from those regrets. But wasn’t it just like him to be dragged into matrimony by a pair of mules!
He laughed as he looked at them. “You old devils, you’re strong enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come. You’re chock full of meanness!”
One of the animals wagged an ear and cleared his throat ​threateningly. Mules are capable of strong affections, but they hate snobs, are the enemies of caste, and this pair had always seemed to detect in Claude what his father used to call his “false pride.” When he was a young lad they had been a source of humiliation to him, braying and balking in public places, trying to show off at the lumber yard or in front of the postoffice.
At the end manger Claude found old Molly, the grey mare with the stiff leg, who had grown a second hoof on her off forefoot, an achievement not many horses could boast of. He was sure she recognized him; she nosed his hand and arm and turned back her upper lip, showing her worn, yellow teeth.
“Mustn’t do that, Molly,” he said as he stroked her. “A dog can laugh, but it makes a horse look foolish. Seems to me Dan might curry you about once a week!” He took a comb from its niche behind a joist and gave her old coat a rubbing. Her white hair was flecked all over with little rust-coloured dashes, like India ink put on with a fine brush, and her mane and tail had turned a greenish yellow. She must be eighteen years old, Claude reckoned, as he polished off her round, heavy haunches. He and Ralph used to ride her over to the Yoeders’ when they were barefoot youngsters, guiding her with a rope halter, and kicking at the leggy colt that was always running alongside.
When he entered the kitchen and asked Mahailey for warm water to wash his hands, she sniffed him disapprovingly.
“Why, Mr. Claude, you’ve been curryin’ that old mare, and you’ve got white hairs all over your soldier-clothes. You’re jist covered!”
If his uniform stirred feeling in people of sober judgment, ​over Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in detail. Before she got past his puttees, her powers of observation were befogged by excitement, and her wits began to jump about like monkeys in a cage. She had expected his uniform to be blue, like those she remembered, and when he walked into the kitchen last night she scarcely knew what to make of him. After Mrs. Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn’t wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown clothes didn’t show the dust, and that Claude would never look like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother’s spring.
“Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin’ you, ain’t they? I ’spect there’s an awful lot of briars over there, like them long blackberry vines in the fields in Virginia. Your mudder says the soldiers git lice now, like they done in our war. You jist carry a little bottle of coal-oil in your pocket an’ rub it on your head at night. It keeps the nits from hatchin’.”
Over the flour barrel in the corner Mahailey had tacked a Red Cross poster; a charcoal drawing of an old woman poking with a stick in a pile of plaster and twisted timbers that had once been her home. Claude went over to look at it while he dried his hands.
“Where did you get your picture?”
“She’s over there where you’re goin’, Mr. Claude. There she is, huntin’ for somethin’ to cook with; no stove nor no dishes nor nothin’—everything all broke up. I reckon she’ll be mighty glad to see you comin’.”
Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Mahailey whispered hastily, “Don’t forgit about the coal-oil, and don’t you ​be lousy if you can help it, honey.” She considered lice in the same class with smutty jokes,—things to be whispered about.
After breakfast Mr. Wheeler took Claude out to the fields, where Ralph was directing the harvesters. They watched the binder for a while, then went over to look at the haystacks and alfalfa, and walked along the edge of the cornfield, where they examined the young ears. Mr. Wheeler explained and exhibited the farm to Claude as if he were a stranger; the boy had a curious feeling of being now formally introduced to these acres on which he had worked every summer since he was big enough to carry water to the harvesters. His father told him how much land they owned, and how much it was worth, and that it was unencumbered except for a trifling mortgage he had given on one quarter when he took over the Colorado ranch.
“When you come back,” he said, “you and Ralph won’t have to hunt around to get into business. You’ll both be well fixed. Now you’d better go home by old man Dawson’s and drop in to see Susie. Everybody about here was astonished when Leonard went.” He walked with Claude to the corner where the Dawson land met his own. “By the way,” he said as he turned back, “don’t forget to go in to see the Yoeders sometime. Gus is pretty sore since they had him up in court. Ask for the old grandmother. You remember she never learned any English. And now they’ve told her it’s dangerous to talk German, she don’t talk at all and hides away from everybody. If I go by early in the morning, when she’s out weeding the garden, she runs and squats down in the gooseberry bushes till I’m out of sight.”
Claude decided he would go to the Yoeders’ today, and to the Dawsons’ tomorrow. He didn’t like to think there might ​be hard feeling toward him in a house where he had had so many good times, and where he had often found a refuge when things were dull at home. The Yoeder boys had a music-box long before the days of Victrolas, and a magic lantern, and the old grandmother made wonderful shadow-pictures on a sheet, and told stories about them. She used to turn the map of Europe upside down on the kitchen table and showed the children how, in this position, it looked like a Jungfrau; and recited a long German rhyme which told how Spain was the maiden’s head, the Pyrenees her lace ruff, Germany her heart and bosom, England and Italy were two arms, and Russia, though it looked so big, was only a hoopskirt. This rhyme would probably be condemned as dangerous propaganda now!
As he walked on alone, Claude was thinking how this country that had once seemed little and dull to him, now seemed large and rich in variety. During the months in camp he had been wholly absorbed in new work and new friendships, and now his own neighbourhood came to him with the freshness of things that have been forgotten for a long while,—came together before his eyes as a harmonious whole. He was going away, and he would carry the whole countryside in his mind, meaning more to him than it ever had before. There was Lovely Creek, gurgling on down there, where he and Ernest used to sit and lament that the book of History was finished; that the world had come to avaricious old age and noble enterprise was dead for ever. But he was going away. . . .
That afternoon Claude spent with his mother. It was the first time she had had him to herself. Ralph wanted terribly to stay and hear his brother talk, but understanding how his mother felt, he went back to the wheat field. There was no ​detail of Claude’s life in camp so trivial that Mrs. Wheeler did not want to hear about it. She asked about the mess, the cooks, the laundry, as well as about his own duties. She made him describe the bayonet drill and explain the operation of machine guns and automatic rifles.
“I hardly see how we can bear the anxiety when our transports begin to sail,” she said thoughtfully. “If they can once get you all over there, I am not afraid; I believe our boys are as good as any in the world. But with submarines reported off our own coast, I wonder how the Government can get our men across safely. The thought of transports going down with thousands of young men on board is something so terrible—” she put her hands quickly over her eyes.
Claude, sitting opposite his mother, wondered what it was about her hands that made them so different from any others he had ever seen. He had always known they were different, but now he must look closely and see why. They were slender, and always white, even when the nails were stained at preserving time. Her fingers arched back at the joints, as if they were shrinking from contacts. They were restless, and when she talked often brushed her hair or her dress lightly. When she was excited she sometimes put her hand to her throat, or felt about the neck of her gown, as if she were searching for a forgotten brooch. They were sensitive hands, and yet they seemed to have nothing to do with sense, to be almost like the groping ringers of a spirit.
“How do you boys feel about it?”
Claude started. “About what, Mother? Oh, the transportation! We don’t worry about that. It’s the Government’s job to get us across. A soldier mustn’t worry about anything except what he’s directly responsible for. If the ​Germans should sink a few troop ships, it would be unfortunate, certainly,—but it wouldn’t cut any figure in the long run. The British are perfecting an enormous dirigible, built to carry passengers. If our transports are sunk, it will only mean delay. In another year the Yankees will be flying over. They can’t stop us.”
Mrs. Wheeler bent forward. “That must be boys’ talk, Claude. Surely you don’t believe such a thing could be practicable?”
“Absolutely. The British are depending on their aircraft designers to do just that, if everything else fails. Of course, nobody knows yet how effective the submarines will be in our case.”
Mrs. Wheeler again shaded her eyes with her hand. “When I was young, back in Vermont, I used to wish that I had lived in the old times when the world went ahead by leaps and bounds. And now, I feel as if my sight couldn’t bear the glory that beats upon it. It seems as if we would have to be born with new faculties, to comprehend what is going on in the air and under the sea.”
The afternoon sun was pouring in at the back windows of Mrs. Farmer’s long, uneven parlour, making the dusky room look like a cavern with a fire at one end of it. The furniture was all in its cool, figured summer cretonnes. The glass flower vases that stood about on little tables caught the sunlight and twinkled like tiny lamps. Claude had been sitting there for a long while, and he knew he ought to go. Through the window at his elbow he could see rows of double hollyhocks, the flat leaves of the sprawling catalpa, and the spires of the tangled mint bed, all transparent in the gold-powdered light. They had talked about everything but the thing he had come to say. As he looked out into the garden he felt that he would never get it out. There was something in the way the mint bed burned and floated that made one a fatalist,—afraid to meddle. But after he was far away, he would regret; uncertainty would tease him like a splinter in his thumb.
He rose suddenly and said without apology: “Gladys, I wish I could feel sure you’d never marry my brother.”
She did not reply, but sat in her easy chair, looking up at him with a strange kind of calmness.
“I know all the advantages,” he went on hastily, “but they wouldn’t make it up to you. That sort of a—compromise would make you awfully unhappy. I know.”
“I don’t think I shall ever marry Bayliss,” Gladys spoke in her usual low, round voice, but her quick breathing showed he ​had touched something that hurt. “I suppose I have used him. It gives a school-teacher a certain prestige if people think she can marry the rich bachelor of the town whenever she wants to. But I am afraid I won’t marry him,—because you are the member of the family I have always admired.”
Claude turned away to the window. “A fine lot I’ve been to admire,” he muttered.
“Well, it’s true, anyway. It was like that when we went to High School, and it’s kept up. Everything you do always seems exciting to me.”
Claude felt a cold perspiration on his forehead. He wished now that he had never come. “But that’s it, Gladys. What have I ever done, except make one blunder after another?”
She came over to the window and stood beside him. “I don’t know; perhaps it’s by their blunders that one gets to know people,—by what they can’t do. If you’d been like all the rest, you could have got on in their way. That was the one thing I couldn’t have stood.”
Claude was frowning out into the flaming garden. He had not heard a word of her reply. “Why didn’t you keep me from making a fool of myself?” he asked in a low voice.
“I think I tried—once. Anyhow, it’s all turning out better than I thought. You didn’t get stuck here. You’ve found your place. You’re sailing away. You’ve just begun.”
“And what about you?”
She laughed softly. “Oh, I shall teach in the High School!”
Claude took her hands and they stood looking searchingly at each other in the swimming golden light that made everything transparent. He never knew exactly how he found his hat and made his way out of the house. He was only sure ​that Gladys did not accompany him to the door. He glanced back once, and saw her head against the bright window.
She stood there, exactly where he left her, and watched the evening come on, not moving, scarcely breathing. She was thinking how often, when she came downstairs, she would see him standing here by the window, or moving about in the dusky room, looking at last as he ought to look,—like his convictions and the choice he had made. She would never let this house be sold for taxes now. She would save her salary and pay them off. She could never like any other room so well as this. It had always been a refuge from Frankfort; and now there would be this vivid, confident figure, an image as distinct to her as the portrait of her grandfather upon the wall.
Sunday was Claude’s last day at home, and he took a long walk with Ernest and Ralph. Ernest would have preferred to lose Ralph, but when the boy was out of the harvest field he stuck to his brother like a burr. There was something about Claude’s new clothes and new manner that fascinated him, and he went through one of those sudden changes of feeling that often occur in families. Although they had been better friends ever since Claude’s wedding, until now Ralph had always felt a little ashamed of him. Why, he used to ask himself, wouldn’t Claude “spruce up and be somebody?” Now, he was struck by the fact that he was somebody.
On Monday morning Mrs. Wheeler wakened early, with a faintness in her chest. This was the day on which she must acquit herself well. Breakfast would be Claude’s last meal at home. At eleven o’clock his father and Ralph would take him to Frankfort to catch the train. She was longer than usual in dressing. When she got downstairs Claude and Mahailey were already talking. He was shaving in the washroom, and Mahailey stood watching him, a side of bacon in her hand.
“You tell ’em over there I’m awful sorry about them old women, with their dishes an’ their stove all broke up.”
“All right. I will.” Claude scraped away at his chin.
She lingered. “Maybe you can help ’em mend their things, like you do mine fur me,” she suggested hopefully.
“Maybe,” he murmured absently.
​Mrs. Wheeler opened the stair door, and Mahailey dodged back to the stove.
After breakfast Dan went out to the fields with the harvesters. Ralph and Claude and Mr. Wheeler were busy with the car all morning.
Mrs. Wheeler kept throwing her apron over her head and going down the hill to see what they were doing. Whether there was really something the matter with the engine, or whether the men merely made it a pretext for being together and keeping away from the house, she did not know. She felt that her presence was not much desired, and at last she went upstairs and resignedly watched them from the sitting-room window. Presently she heard Ralph run up to the third storey. When he came down with Claude’s bags in his hands, he stuck his head in at the door and shouted cheerfully to his mother:
“No hurry. I’m just taking them down so they’ll be ready.”
Mrs. Wheeler ran after him, calling faintly, “Wait, Ralph! Are you sure he’s got everything in? I didn’t hear him packing.”
“Everything ready. He says he won’t have to go upstairs again. He’ll be along pretty soon. There’s lots of time.” Ralph shot down through the basement.
Mrs. Wheeler sat down in her reading chair. They wanted to keep her away, and it was a little selfish of them. Why couldn’t they spend these last hours quietly in the house, instead of dashing in and out to frighten her. Now she could hear the hot water running in the kitchen; probably Mr. Wheeler had come in to wash his hands. She felt really too weak to get up and go to the west window to see if he were still down at the garage. Waiting was now a matter of seconds, and her breath came short enough as it was.
​She recognized a heavy, hob-nailed boot on the stairs, mounting quickly. When Claude entered, carrying his hat in his hand, she saw by his walk, his shoulders, and the way he held his head, that the moment had come, and that he meant to make it short. She rose, reaching toward him as he came up to her and caught her in his arms. She was smiling her little, curious intimate smile, with half-closed eyes.
“Well, is it good-bye?” she murmured. She passed her hands over his shoulders, down his strong back and the close-fitting sides of his coat, as if she were taking the mould and measure of his mortal frame. Her chin came just to his breast pocket, and she rubbed it against the heavy cloth. Claude stood looking down at her without speaking a word. Suddenly his arms tightened and he almost crushed her.
“Mother!” he whispered as he kissed her. He ran downstairs and out of the house without looking back.
She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to the window; he was vaulting down the hill as fast as he could go. He jumped into the car beside his father. Ralph was already at the wheel, and Claude had scarcely touched the cushions when they were off. They ran down the creek and over the bridge, then up the long hill on the other side. As they neared the crest of the hill, Claude stood up in the car and looked back at the house, waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained her sight, but her tears blurred everything. The brown, upright figure seemed to float out of the car and across the fields, and before he was actually gone, she lost him. She fell back against the windowsill, clutching her temples with both hands, and broke into choking, passionate speech. “Old eyes,” she cried, “why do you betray me? Why do you cheat me of my last sight of my splendid son!”