The Cow Puncher Part 30

"Your country needs you more," she whispered. "It is better that way.

And what a man you are in uniform! I think I see you smas.h.i.+ng heads instead of bottles. Six out of six, Dave! It's awful, but you must do it. Already we know what has happened in Belgium. You will forget your own wrongs in the greater wrongs of others. . . . And I shall join the service as a nurse. My father was a doctor, and I can soon pick it up."

She chatted on, but he had become suddenly grave. "I don't think that is your course, Irene," he said. "This is going to be a bigger job than it looked. The Government will get soldiers and nurses; the popular imagination turns to such things. But it will be neither soldiers nor nurses that will win the war. I feel sure of that now.

It has come to me, perhaps as a kind of presentiment, but I feel absolutely sure. The determining factor will be food. The world's margin is narrow enough in normal times, and now we are plunged into the abnormal. Millions of men will be taken from production and turned to purposes of destruction. They will be taken from offices, where they need little food, and put in the trenches, where they need much food. Countries will be devastated; armies will retreat, destroying all food as they go. s.h.i.+ps will go down with cargoes of wheat; incendiary fires will swallow warehouses of food. I do not regret my decision, I believe my place is in the trenches; but those less fit for the fight than I must, in some form or other, produce food. That includes the women; it includes you."

"Me? But what can I do?"

"Since I left home I've thought a good deal of the old ranch. I despised it in those prosperous days--those days we thought we were prosperous--but the prosperity is gone and the ranch remains. It still lies out there, just as it did when you and your father motored down that afternoon a dozen years ago. I think you'll have to go back there, Reenie. I think you'll have to take the boy Charlie, and what other help you can get, and go back to the old ranch and raise something for the soldiers to eat. You can do it. There are good men to be had; men who can't very well carry a rifle, but can drive a plow.

And believe me, Reenie, it's the plow that's going to win. Go back and put them at it. Think of every furrow as another trench in the defences which shall save your home from the fate of Belgium's homes.

It's not as easy as going to the front; it hasn't got the heroic ring to it, and I suppose there are many who will commercialize it. Let them. We shall need their profits after the war to pay our debts. But it's the thing that must be done. And you'll do it, won't you?"

"I'll do what ever needs to be done, Dave. I'd rather be by your side, or as near as may be, but if you say that my duty lies back on the old ranch I shall go back to the old ranch and raise food for my soldier.

And when it's all over we shall ride those old hillsides again. . . .

Up the canyon, you remember, Dave? The little niche in the wall of the canyon, and all the silence and the sunlight? . . . Forever. . . ."

CHAPTER XXII

Any philosophy which accepts the principle that the great, over-shadowing events of life are subject to an intelligent controlling influence must of necessity grant that the same principle applies to the most commonplace and every-day experiences. It is impossible to believe that the World War, for example, has a definite place in the eternal scheme of the universe without believing the same of the apparently most trivial incident in the life of Kaiser Wilhelm, Lloyd George, or Woodrow Wilson, or, for that matter, of the humblest soldier in the ranks. The course of the greatest stream of events may well be deflected by incidents so commonplace as to quite escape the notice of the casual observer.

Some such thought as this comforted me--or, at least, would have comforted me, had I thought it--when a leaking gasoline tank left me, literally as well as figuratively, high and dry in the foothills. The sun of an August afternoon blazed its glory from a cloudless sky; far across the s.h.i.+mmering hills copper-colored patches of ripening wheat stood out ruddy and glowing like twentieth century armour on the brown breast of the prairie; low in a valley to the left a ribbon of silver-green mountain water threaded its way through fringes of spruce and cottonwood, while on the uplands beyond sleek steers drowsed in the suns.h.i.+ne, and far to the westward the Rockies slept unconcerned in their draperies of afternoon purple. All these scenes the eye took in without enthusiasm, almost without approval; and then fell on the whitewashed ranch buildings almost in the shadow underneath. And in these days a ranch--almost any ranch--means gasoline.

I soon was at the door. The walls had been recently white-washed; there were new s.h.i.+ngles of red cedar on the roof; flowers bloomed by the path that led down to the corrals. My knock attracted a little chap of two-and-a-half or three years; his stout hands shoved the screen back, and I found myself ushered into his company. There evidently was no one else about, so I visited, and we talked on those things which are of importance in the world of three-year-olds.

"Muvver's don to the wiver," he confided. "She tum back pwetty soon."

"And Father?" I asked. "Where is he?"

Into the dark eyes came a deeper look; they suddenly shone with the spirituality of a life only three years removed from the infinite. By what instruction, I afterwards wondered, by what almost divine charm had she been able to instil into his young mind the honour and the glory and the pride of it? For there was pride, and something more than pride; adoration, perhaps, in his words as he straightened up and said in perfect English, "My father was a soldier. He was killed at Courcelette."

I looked in his little, sunburned face; in his dark, proud eyes; and presently a strange mist enveloped the room. How many little faces, how many pairs of eyes! It was just fading away when a step sounded on the walk, and I arose as she reached the door.

"The Man of the House has made me at home," I managed to say. "I am s.h.i.+pwrecked on the hill, for a little gasoline."

"There is plenty out in the field, where the tractor is," she replied.

"You will find it without difficulty. Or if you care to wait here, Charlie may be along presently."

Her voice had sweet, modulated tones, with just that touch of pathos which only the Angel of Suffering knows how to add. And her face was fair, and gentle, and a little sad, and very sweet.

"He has told me," I said. There seemed no reason why I should not say it. She had entered into the sisterhood--that universal sisterhood of suffering which the world has known in these long, lonely years. . . .

And it was between us, for we were all in the family. There was no occasion to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance by slow, conventional thrust and parry.

"Yes," she said, sitting down, and motioning me to a chair. "I was bitter at first. I was dreadfully bitter at first. But gradually I got a different view of it. Gradually I came to feel and know that all we can feel and know here is on the surface; on the outside, as you might say, and we can't know the purpose until we are inside. It is as though life were a riddle, and the key is hidden, and the door behind which the key is hidden is called Death. And I don't believe it's all for nothing; I won't believe it's all for nothing. If I believed it was all for nothing I would quit; we would all quit.

"Then there is the suffering," she continued, after a pause. "I don't know why there should be suffering, but I know if there were no suffering there would be no kindness. It is not until you are hit--hard hit--that you begin to think of other people. Until then all is selfishness. But we women--we women of the war--we have nothing left to be selfish for. But we have the whole world to be unselfish for. It's all different, and it can never go back. We won't let it go back. We've paid too much to let it go back."

It was hard to find a reply. "I think I knew your husband, a little,"

I ventured. "He was a--a man."

"He was all that," she said. She arose and stood for a moment in an att.i.tude of hesitation; her fingers went to her lips as though enjoining caution. Then, with quick decision, she went into an inner room, from which she returned with a letter.

"If you knew him you may care to read this," she said. "It's very personal, and yet, some way, everything is impersonal now, in a sense.

There has been such a common cause, and such a wave of common suffering, that it seems to flood out over the individual and embrace us all. Individualism is gone. It's the community now; the state; mankind, if you like, above everything. I suppose, so far as German kultur stands for that, it has been imposed upon the world. . . . So this is really, in a sense, your letter as well as mine."

I took it and read:

I have had many letters to write since my service began as a nurse in the war, but never have I approached the task with such mixed emotions.

The pain I must give you I would gladly bear myself if I could; but it is not all pain; underneath it, running through it in some way I cannot explain, is a note so much deeper than pain that it must be joy.

You will already have been advised that David Elden was among those who fell at Courcelette. It is trite to say that you have the sympathy of a grateful nation. How grateful the nation really is we shall know by its treatment of the heroes who survive the war, and of the dependents of those who have crossed over. But nothing can rob you of the knowledge that he played a man's part. Nothing can debar you from that universal fellows.h.i.+p of sympathy which is springing up wherever manhood is valued at its worth.

A new Order has been born into the world; the Order of Suffering. Not that it is new, either; it has been with us since the first mother went into the shadow for her first child; but always suffering has been incidental; a matter of the individual; a thing to be escaped if possible. But now it is universal, a thing not to be escaped, but to be accepted, readily, bravely, even gladly. And all who so accept it enter into the new Order, and wear its insignia, which is unselfishness and sympathy and service. And in that Order you shall not be least, measured by either your sacrifice or the spirit in which you accept it.

But you are yearning for his last word; for some voice that will seem to you now almost a voice out of the grave, and I am happy to be able to bring you that word. It was something more than chance that guided me that night, as it is every night.

We were well behind the line of actual fighting, but still in the danger zone of artillery fire. Night had settled in; all was darkness save for occasional distant flares. I had become detached from my party in moving to another station; lost, if you like, yet not lost; never have I gone so directly to so great a destination. While trying to get my location I became aware of a presence; it will sound strange to you, but I became intensely aware of _your_ presence. Of course I knew it could not be you, in the flesh, but you it seemed to be, nevertheless. I moved as though led by an invisible hand, and presently I found a bit of shattered wall. In the gloom I could just discern the form of a man lying in the shelter of the wall--if you could call it shelter--it rose scarce a foot above the ground.

I knelt beside him and turned my torch on to his face. It was pale even through the brown skin; the eyes were closed; the hair was wet and plastered on the forehead; there were smears of blood in it and on his cheeks. As my light fell on his lips they framed a smile.

"Reenie," he said. "It was good of you to come. I knew you would come."

"I am here, Dave," I answered, and I think you will forgive me the impersonation. "Now let me find out where you are hurt, and we'll fix you up, and get you moved presently."

He opened his eyes and looked at me with the strange look of a man whose thread of consciousness is half unravelled. "Oh, it's you, Edith," he said, when he had taken me in. "Funny, I thought it was Irene. I must have been dreaming."

I questioned him again about his wound, and began feeling his hair.

"It's not there," he said. "Guess I got it all over my hands. They got me this time. Shrapnel, in the body. Don't waste time on me.

Some other fellow may have a chance."

I found, with a little examination, that the case was as bad as he supposed. Fortunately, the wound had induced a local paralysis, and he was not suffering to any great degree. I placed my hand in his and felt his grip tighten on it.

"I'm going to stay till it's over, Dave. We'll see it out together."

"That's decent," he answered, and then was still for quite a time.

"I've often wondered what was on the other side," he said at length.

"I shall know presently."

"You are not afraid?" I whispered.

"No. Only sort of--curious. And--reverent. I guess it's reverent. . . You know I haven't been much on religion. Never seemed to get the formula. What is the formula? I mean the key--the thing that gives it all in one word?"

"In one word--sacrifice."

"I walked out of church once because of some doctrine about sacrifice,"