Part 18 (1/2)

”I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany made me want to go there. And the people that sing all those beautiful songs about women and children went into Belgian villages and--”

”Don't, Claude!” his mother put out her hands as if to push his words back. ”Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we must think about now. I can't but believe there is one fort the Germans didn't put down in their book, and that it will stand. We know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many G.o.d-fearing people there, and G.o.d has preserved it all these years. You saw in the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying.”

She leaned forward and smiled at him indulgently. ”And you believe those prayers will accomplish nothing, son?”

Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon certain subjects. ”Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans are praying, too. And I guess they are just naturally more pious than the French.” Taking up the book he began once more: ”In the low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great loop of the Marne,” etc.

Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that river, and with the idea of its strategic importance, before it began to stand out in black headlines a few days later.

The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to put in six hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the other side of the world, they would need bread. He took a third team himself and went into the field every morning to help Dan and Claude. The neighbours said that n.o.body but the Kaiser had ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.

Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile away, to get yesterday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning, indeed, she sat down on a red gra.s.s bank beside the road and read all the war news through before she stirred, while the gra.s.shoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the windmill breathless.

”The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army went out in taxi-cabs.” Claude drew himself up. ”Well, it will decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?”

”I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few of the English are there, and the French are terribly outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers upstairs.”

”They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper.”

In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the sitting-room. ”There is not much news, except that the battle is on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans outnumber them five to three in men, and n.o.body knows how much in artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no farther.” He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his room.

Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were responsible for the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew and for the grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with amus.e.m.e.nt her growing solicitude for Paris.

It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital, not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. The fact that the river had a p.r.o.nounceable name, with a hard Western ”r”

standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's imagination a firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of French ”politeness”--so much more terrifying than German bullets--and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much through all the centuries--but had never meant so much before.

Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star fall.

X

It was Sunday afternoon and Claude had gone down to the mill house, as Enid and her mother had returned from Michigan the day before. Mrs. Wheeler, propped back in a rocking chair, was reading, and Mr. Wheeler, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, his Sunday collar unb.u.t.toned, was sitting at his walnut secretary, amusing himself with columns of figures. Presently he rose and yawned, stretching his arms above his head.

”Claude thinks he wants to begin building right away, up on the quarter next the timber claim. I've been figuring on the lumber.

Building materials are cheap just now, so I suppose I'd better let him go ahead.”

Mrs. Wheeler looked up absently from the page. ”Why, I suppose so.”

Her husband sat down astride a chair, and leaning his arms on the back of it, looked at her. ”What do you think of this match, anyway? I don't know as I've heard you say.”

”Enid is a good, Christian girl...” Mrs. Wheeler began resolutely, but her sentence hung in the air like a question.

He moved impatiently. ”Yes, I know. But what does a husky boy like Claude want to pick out a girl like that for? Why, Evangeline, she'll be the old woman over again!”

Apparently these misgivings were not new to Mrs. Wheeler, for she put out her hand to stop him and whispered in solemn agitation, ”Don't say anything! Don't breathe!”

”Oh, I won't interfere! I never do. I'd rather have her for a daughter-in-law than a wife, by a long shot. Claude's more of a fool than I thought him.” He picked up his hat and strolled down to the barn, but his wife did not recover her composure so easily. She left the chair where she had hopefully settled herself for comfort, took up a feather duster and began moving distractedly about the room, brus.h.i.+ng the surface of the furniture. When the war news was bad, or when she felt troubled about Claude, she set to cleaning house or overhauling the closets, thankful to be able to put some little thing to rights in such a disordered world.

As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work he began digging his cellar. He was building his house on the level stretch beside his father's timber claim because, when he was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most beautiful spot in the world. It was a square of about thirty acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a thick mulberry hedge on the south side. The trees had been neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage to trim them and care for them at odd moments.

Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.

He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and he meant that this one should be deep enough. One day Leonard Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making. Standing on the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating below.