Part 35 (1/2)

So much for the war. But the French officer--a general now, perhaps with one arm off--came to Newbern to claim his bride. He had been one of the impetuous sort that simply would not take no for an answer. The wedding was in the Methodist church, and was a glittering public function. The groom was not only splendidly handsome in a French way, but wore a s.h.i.+ning uniform, and upon his breast sparkled a profusion of medals. A vast crowd outside the church waited to cheer the happy couple, and slinking at the rear of this was a drab Lyman Teaford--without medals, without uniform, dull, prosaic, enduring at this moment pangs of the keenest remorse for his hasty act of a year before. He, too, would never be the same man again.

In truth, the beginning Teaford menage lay under the most unfavourable portents. Things looked dark for it.

Yet despite the forebodings of Wilbur and Winona, it began to be suspected, even by them, that the war would wear itself out, as old Doctor Purdy said, by first intention. And in spite of affecting individual dramas they began to feel that it must wear itself out with no help from them. It seemed to have settled into a quarrel among foreign nations with which we could rightfully have no concern. Winona learned, too, that her picture of the nurse on a battlefield administering cordial to wounded combatants from the small keg at her waist was based upon an ancient and doubtless always fanciful print.

Wilbur, too, gathered from the newspapers that, though he might die upon a battlefield, there was little chance that a French general would be commissioned to repeat his last words to Mrs. Lyman Teaford of Newbern Center. He almost decided that he would not become a soldier. Some years before, it is true, he had been drawn to the life by a government poster, designed by one who must himself have been a capable dramatist.

”Join the Army and See the World,” urged the large-lettered legend above the picture.

The latter revealed an entrancing tropical scene with graceful palms adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the background two officers consulted with a private above an important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking old colonel seemed to be entreating a couple of spruce young privates to drop round for tea that afternoon and meet the ladies.

Had Wilbur happened upon this poster in conjunction with the resolve of Miss Pearl King to be sensible, it is possible his history might have been different. But its promise had faded from his memory ere his life was wrecked. He felt now merely that he ought to settle down to something. Even Sharon Whipple plainly told him so. He said it was all right to knock about from one thing to another while you were still in the gristle. Up to twenty a boy's years were kind of yeasty and uncertain, and if he was any way self-headed he ought to be left to run.

But after twenty he lost his pinfeathers and should begin to think about things.

So Wilbur began to think about things. He continued to do everything that old Porter Howgill was asked to do, to repair cars for the Mansion garage, and to be a s.h.i.+eld and buckler to Sam Pickering in time of need.

The _Advance_ office became freshly attractive at this time, because Sam had installed a wonderful new power press to print the paper daily; for the _Advance_, as Sam put it, could be found ever in the van of progress.

The new press had innermost secrets of structure that were presently best known to Wilbur Cowan. No smeared small boy was required to ink its forms and no surmounting bronze eagle was reported to scream for beer when the last paper was run off. Even Dave Cowan, drifting in from out of the nowhere--in shoes properly describable as only memories of shoes--said she was a snappy little machine, and applauded his son's easy mastery of it.

So the days of Wilbur were busy days, even if he had not settled far enough down to suit either Sam Pickering, Porter Howgill--who did everything, if asked--or the First-Cla.s.s Garage. And the blight put upon him by a creature as false as she was beautiful proved not to be enduring. He was able, indeed, to behold her without a tremor, save of sympathy for one compelled to endure the daily proximity of Lyman Teaford.

But the war prolonged itself as only he and Winona had felt it would, and presently it began to be hinted that a great nation, apparently unconcerned with its beginning, might eventually be compelled to a livelier interest in it. Herman Vielhaber was a publicly exposed barometer of this sentiment. At the beginning he beamed upon the world and predicted the Fatherland's speedy triumph over all the treacherous foes. When the triumph was unaccountably delayed he appeared mysterious, but not less confident. The Prussian system might involve delay, but Prussian might was none the less invincible. Herman would explain the Prussian system freely to all who cared to listen--and many did attentively--from high diplomacy to actual fighting. He left many of his hearers with a grateful relief that neutrality had been officially enjoined upon them.

Later Herman beamed less brightly as he recounted tales of German prowess. He came to exhibit a sort of indignant pity for the Fatherland, into whose way so many obstacles were being inopportunely thrown. He compared Germany to a wounded deer that ravenous dogs were seeking to bring down, but his predictions of her ultimate victory were not less confident. Minna Vielhaber wept back of the bar at Herman's affecting picture of the stricken deer with the arrow in her flank, and would be comforted only when he brought the war to a proper close.

It was at this time that Winona wrote in her journal: ”General Sherman said that war is the bad place. He knew.”

It was also at this time that a certain phrase from a high source briefly engaged the notice of Sharon Whipple.

”Guinea pigs,” said he, ”are also too proud to fight, but they ain't ever won the public respect on that account. They get treated accordingly.”

It was after this that Sharon was heard ominously to wish that he were thirty or forty years younger. And it was after this that Winona became active as a promoter of bazaars for ravaged Belgium and a pacifist whose watchword was ”Resist not evil!” She wrote again in her journal: ”If only someone would reason calmly with them!” She presently became radiant with hope, for a whole boatload of earnest souls went over to reason calmly with the combatants.

But the light she had seen proved deceiving. The earnest souls went forward, but for some cause, never fully revealed to Winona, they had been unable to reason calmly with those whose mad behaviour they had meant to correct. It was said that they had been unable to reason calmly even among themselves. It was merely a mark of Winona's earnestness that she felt things might have gone differently had the personnel of this valiant emba.s.sy been enlarged to include herself. Meantime, war was becoming more and more the bad place, just as General Sherman had said.

She had little thought now for silk stockings or other abominations of the frivolous, for her own country seemed on the very verge of committing a frightful error.

Some time had elapsed since Wilbur Cowan definitely knew that he would never go to war because of the mother of Lyman Teaford's infant son. He began to believe, however, that he would relish a bit of fighting for its own sake. Winona reasoned with him as she would have reasoned with certain high personages on the other side of the water, and perhaps with as little success. He replied cryptically that he was an out-and-out phagocyte, and getting more so every time he read a newspaper. Winona winced at the term--it seemed to carry sinister implications. Where did the boy hear such words?

This one he had heard on a late Sunday afternoon when he sat, contrary to a munic.i.p.al ordinance of Newbern, in the back room of Herman Vielhaber, with certain officials sworn to uphold that ordinance, who drank beer and talked largely about what we should do; for it had then become shockingly apparent that the phrase about our being too proud to fight had been, in its essential meaning, misleading. Dave Cowan, citizen of the world and student of its structure, physical and social, had proved that war, however regrettable, was perhaps never to be avoided; that in any event one of the best means to avoid it was to be known for your fighting ways. Anyway, war was but an incident in human progress.

Dave's hair had thinned in the years of his wandering to see a man at Seattle or New Orleans, and he now wore spectacles, without which he could no longer have enlarged his comprehension of cosmic values, for his latest Library of Universal Knowledge was printed in very small type. Dave said that since the chemicals had got together to form life everything had lived on something else, and the best livers had always been the best killers. He did not pretend to justify the plan, but there it was; and it worked the same whether it was one microscopic organism preying on another or a bird devouring a beetle or Germany trying to swallow the world. Rapp, Senior, said that was all very well, but these pacifists would keep us out of war yet. Doctor Purdy, with whom he had finished a game of pinochle--Herman Vielhaber had lately been unable to keep his mind on the game--set down his beer stein in an authoritative manner, having exploded with rage even while he swallowed some of the last decent beer to come to Newbern Center. He wiped froth from his waistcoat.

”Pacifists!” he stormed. ”Why don't they ever look into their own bodies? They couldn't live a day on non-resistance to evil. Every one of their bodies is thronged with fighting soldiers. Every pacifist is a living lie. Phagocytes, that's what they are--white corpuscles--and it's all they're there for. They believe in preparedness hard enough. See 'em march up to fight when there's an invasion! And how they do fight! These pacifists belie their own construction. They're built on a fight from the cradle and before that.

”I wish more of their own phagocytes would begin to preach non-resistance and try to teach great moral lessons to invading germs.

We wouldn't have to listen to so many of 'em. But phagocytes don't act that way. They keep in training. They don't say, like that poor old maunderer I read this morning, that there's no use preparing--that a million phagocytes will spring to arms overnight if their country's invaded. They keep in trim. They fight quick. If they didn't we wouldn't be here.”

”These phagocytes--is infantry, yes?” demanded Herman Vielhaber. ”I never hear 'em named before like that.”