CHAPTER XV
Wilbur Cowen had hesitated in the matter of war. He wanted to be in a battle—had glowed at the thought of fighting—but if the war was going to be stopped in its beginning, what would be the use of starting? And he was assured and more than half believed that it would be stopped. Merle Whipple was his informant —Merle had found himself. The war was to be stopped by the New Dawn, a magazine of which Merle had been associate editor since shortly after his release from college.
Merle, on that afternoon of golf with Wilbur, had accurately forecast his own future. Confessing then that he meant to become a great writer, he was now not only a great writer but a thinker, in the true sense of the word. He had taken up literature—"not muck like poetry, but serious literature"—and Whipple money had lavishly provided a smart little craft in which to embark. The money had not come without some bewildered questioning on the part of those supplying it. As old Sharon said, the Whipple chicken coop had hatched a gosling that wanted to swim in strange waters; but it was eventually decided that goslings were meant to swim and would one way or another find a pond. Indeed, Harvey Whipple was prouder of his son by adoption than he cared to have known, and listened to him with secret respect, covered with perfunctory business hints. He felt that Merle was above and beyond him. The youth, indeed, made him feel that he was a mere country banker.
In the city of New York, after his graduation, Merle had come into his own, forming a staunch alliance with a small circle of intellectuals—intelligentzia, Merle said—consecrated to the cause of American culture. He had brought to Newbern and to the amazed Harvey Whipple the strange news that America had no native culture; that it was raw, spiritually impoverished, without national self-consciousness; with but the faintest traces of art in any true sense of the word. Harvey Whipple would have been less shocked by this disclosure, momentous though it was, had not Merle betrayed a conviction that his life work would now be to uphold the wavering touch of civilization.
This brought the thing home to Harvey D. Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting up lofty ideals, enriching our common life with a new, self-conscious art. Much of this puzzled Harvey D. and his father, old Gideon. It was new talk in their world. But it impressed them. Their boy was earnest, with a fine intelligence; he left them stirred.
Sharon Whipple was a silent, uneasy listener at many of these talks. He declared, later and to others, for Merle was not his son, that the young man was highly languageous and highly crazy; that his talk was the crackling of thorns under a pot; that he was a vain canter—"forever canting," said Sharon—"a buffle-headed fellow, talking, bragging." He was equally intolerant of certain of Merle's little band of forward-looking intellectuals who came to stay week-ends at the Whipple New Place. There was Emmanuel Schilsky, who talked more pithily than Merle and who would be the editor-in-chief of the projected New Dawn. Emmanuel, too, had come from his far-off home to flush America's spiritual darkness with a new light. He had written much about our shortage of genuine spiritual values; about "the continual frustrations and aridities of American life." He was a member of various groups—the Imagist group, the Egoist group, the Sphericists, other groups piquantly named; versed in the new psychology, playing upon the word "pragmatism" as upon a violin.
Sharon Whipple, the Philistine, never quite knew whether pragmatism was approved or condemned by Schilsky, and once he asked the dark-faced young man what it meant. He was told that pragmatism was a method, and felt obliged to pretend that this enlightened him. He felt a reluctant respect for Schilsky, who could make him feel uncomfortable.
And there was the colourful, youngish widow, Mrs. Truesdale, who wrote free verse about the larger intimacies of life, and dressed noticeably. She would be a contributing editor of the New Dawn, having as her special department the release of woman from her age-long slavery to certain restraints that now made her talked unpleasantly about if she dared give her soul free rein. This lady caused Sharon to wonder about the departed Truesdale.
"Was he carried away by sorrowing friends," asked Sharon, "or did he get tired one day and move off under his own power?" No one ever enlightened him.
Others of the younger intelligentzia came under his biased notice. He spoke of them as "a rabble rout," who lived in a mad world—"and God bless us out of it."
But Sharon timed his criticism discreetly, and the New Dawn lit its pure white flame—a magazine to refresh the elect. Placed superbly beyond the need of catering to advertisers, it would adhere to rigorous standards of the true, the beautiful. It would tell the truth as no other magazine founded on gross commercialism would dare to do. It said so in well-arranged words. The commercial magazines full well knew the hideous truth, but stifled it for hire. The New Dawn would be honest.
The sinister truth about America as revealed in the initial number of the brave new venture was that America was crude, blatant, boastful, vulgar, and money-grubbing. We were without ideals beyond the dollar; without desires save those to be glutted by material wealth. It was the high aim of the New Dawn—said the associate editor, Merle Dalton Whipple —to dethrone the dollar, to hasten and to celebrate the passing of American greed.
Not until the second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were to be found in the exploiting class, a sinister combination, all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for his crust of bread. This number unflinchingly indicted the capitalistic ruling class; fearlessly called upon the exploited masses to rise and throw off the yoke put upon them by this nefarious plunderbund. The worker's plight was depicted with no sparing of detail—"the slaves groaning and wailing in the dark the song of mastered men, the sullen, satanic music of lost and despairing humanity."
Succeeding numbers made it plain that the very republic itself had been founded upon this infamy. Our Revolutionary War had marked the triumph of the capitalistic state—the state that made property sovereign. The Revolutionary fathers had first freed themselves from English creditors, then bound down as their own debtors an increasing mass of the American population. The document known as the Constitution of the United States had been cunningly and knowingly contrived to that end, thus thrusting upon us the commercial oligarchy which persisted to this day. It had placed the moneyed classes securely in the saddle, though with fine phrases that seemed not to mean this.
"A conscious minority of wealthy men and lawyers, guided by the genius of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison," had worked their full design upon the small farmer and the nascent proletariat; we had since been "under the cult and control of wealth."
After this ringing indictment it surprised no Whipple to read that we had become intolerant, materialistic, unaesthetic. Nor was it any wonder that we were "in no mood to brook religious or social dissension." With such a Constitution fraudulently foisted upon us by the money-loving fathers of the Revolution, it was presumably not to be expected that we should exhibit the religious tolerance of contemporary Spain or Italy or France.
"Immersed in a life of crass material endeavour," small wonder that the American had remained in spiritual poverty of the most debasing sort until the New Dawn should come to enrich him, to topple in ruins an exploiting social system.
Now the keen eyes of young America, by aid of the magnifying lens supplied by Emmanuel Schilsky, would detect the land of the free to be in fact a land of greedy and unscrupulous tyrants; the home of the brave a home of economic serfs. Young America, which fights for the sanctity of life, solid and alive with virile beauty, would revolt and destroy the walls of the capitalistic state, sweeping away the foul laws that held private property sacred. They would seek a cure for the falsehood of modern life in a return to Nature, a return to the self where truth ever is. They would war with the privilege and ascendancy of the group over the individual conscience. Already the exploiting class, as it neared the term of its depleted life, was but a mass of purulence. Society was rotten, the state a pious criminal, the old truths tawdry lies. Everywhere the impotence of senility—except in young America. We faced the imminence of a vast breaking-up. The subtlest oligarchy of modern times was about to crumble. The revolution was at hand.
A succeeding number of the New Dawn let out the horrid truth about the war, telling it in simple words that even Wilbur Cowan could understand. Having sold munitions to the warring nations, we must go in to save our money. In short, as the New Dawn put it: "The capitalistic ruling classes tricked the people into war." It was to be a war waged for greed. Young America, not yet perusing in large enough numbers the New Dawn, was to be sent to its death that capital might survive—the dollar be still enthroned. But the New Dawn was going to see about that. Young America would be told the truth.
Two of the Whipples were vastly puzzled by these pronouncements, and not a little disquieted. Old Gideon and Harvey D. began to wonder if by any chance their boy, with his fine intellect, had not been misled. Sharon was enraged by the scandalous assertions about George Washington, whom he had always considered a high-minded patriot. He had never suspected and could not now be persuaded that Washington had basely tricked the soldiers of the Revolution into war so that the capitalistic class might prevail in the new states. Nor would he believe that the framers of the Constitution had consciously worded that document with a view to enslaving the common people. He was a stubborn old man, and not aware of his country's darkness. Perhaps it was too much to expect that one of his years and mental habit should be hospitable to these newly found truths.
He was not young America. He had thought too long the other way. Being of a choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—containing the fearless exposure of Washington's chicanery—he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud—if in a troubled way—of the boy's new eminence, he did not distinguish him too pointedly. He pretended to take it all out on Emmanuel, whom he declared to be no fair judge of American history. The other Whipples were beginning to suspect this but were not prepared to admit it either to Sharon or to each other. For the present they would defend Emmanuel against the hot-headed aspersions of the other.
"You said yourself, not a month ago," expostulated Harvey D., "that he was a smart little Jew."
Sharon considered briefly.
"Well," he replied, "I don't know as I'd change that—at least not much. I'd still say the same thing, or words to that effect."
"Just how would you put it now?" demanded Gideon, suavely.
Sharon brightened. He had hoped to be asked that.
"The way I'd put it now—having read a lot more of his new-dawning—I'd say he was a little Jew smarty."
The other Whipples had winced at this. The New Dawn was assuredly not the simple light-bringer to America's spiritual darkness that they had supposed it would be; but they were not yet prepared to believe the worst.
"If only they wouldn't be so extreme!" murmured the troubled Harvey D. "If only they wouldn't say the country has been tricked into war by capital."
"That's a short horse and soon curried," said Sharon. "They can't say it if you quit paying for it."
"There you are!" said Harvey D. "Merle would say that that's an example of capitalism suppressing the truth. Of course I don't know—maybe it is."
"Sure! Anyway, it would be an example of capital suppressing something. Depends on what you call the truth. If you think the truth is that Germany ought to rule the earth you got it right. That's what all these pacifists and anti-militaries are arguing, though they don't let on to that. Me, I don't think Germany ought to rule the earth. I think she ought to be soundly trounced, and my guess is she's goin' to be. Something tells me this New Dawn ain't goin' to save her from her come-uppance. I tell you both plain out, I ain't goin' to have a magazine under my roof that'll talk such stuff about George Washington, the Father of his Country. It's too scandalous."
Thus the New Dawn lost a subscriber, though not losing, it should be said, a reader. For Sharon Whipple, having irately stopped his subscription by a letter in which the editor was told he should be ashamed of himself for calling George Washington a crook that way, thereafter bought the magazine hurriedly at the Cut-Rate Pharmacy and read every word of it in secret places not under his roof.
Wilbur Cowan, though proud of the New Dawn because his brother's name adorned it, had nevertheless failed to profit by its teachings. He was prepared to admit that America groped in spiritual darkness which the New Dawn would flush with its pure white light; he could not have contended with any authority that it was not a land of dollar hunters, basely materialistic, without ideals, artistically impoverished, and devoid of national self-consciousness, whatever that meant. These things were choice words to him, nothing more; and he had no valid authority on which to deny that the country was being tricked into war by the Interests, something heinous that the New Dawn spelled with a capital letter. In a way he believed this, because his brother said so. His brother had been educated. He even felt shame-faced and apologetic about his resolve to enter the fight.
But this resolve was stanch; he wanted to fight, even if he had been tricked by Wall Street into feeling that way. The New Dawn said he had been tricked, and he supposed it was true, even if he couldn't clearly detect how Wall Street had made Germany pursue the course that made him want to fight. So far as his direct mental processes could inform him, the only trickery involved had been employed by Germany and Spike Brennon. Germany's behaviour was more understandable than the New Dawn, and Spike Brennon was much simpler in his words. Spike said it was a dandy chance to get into a real scrap, and all husky lads should be there in a split second at the first call. Perhaps Wall Street had tricked Spike into tricking Wilbur Cowan. Anyway, Spike was determined.
Their decision was made one day after a brisk six rounds of mimic battle. They soaped and bathed and dried their bodies. Then they rested—sitting upon up-ended beer kegs in the storeroom of Pegleg McCarron—and talked a little of life. Spike for a week had been laconic, even for him, and had taken little trouble to pull his punches. To-day he revealed that the Interests had triumphed over his simple mind. He was going and going quick. He recovered a morsel of gum from beneath the room's one chair, put it again into commission, and spoke decisively.
"I'm goin' quick," he said.
"When do we leave?" demanded Wilbur.
"I'm leavin' in two days."
"We're leaving in two days."
They chewed gum for an interval.
"Way it is," said Spike at length, "I'm nothing but about a fourth-rater in my game. I wasn't never a first-rater. I used to kid myself I was, but handier guys took it out of me. Never was better than a third-rater, I guess. But maybe in this other game I could git to be a first-rater. You can't tell. I still got the use of myself, ain't I? And I wouldn't be so much afraid as a guy who never fought no fights at all. It looks good to me. Of course I don't know much about this here talk you read—makin' the world safe for Democrats, and so forth, but they's certain parts of it had ought to be made unsafe for Germans. I got that much straight."
"Where do we go from here?" demanded Wilbur Cowan.
"N'York," said Spike. "Enlist there. I got a friend in Tamm'ny will see we git treated right."
"Treated right—how?"
"Sent over quick—not kept here. This guy is high up; he can get us sent."
"Good!"
"Only thing worries me," said Spike—"sleepin' out of doors. It ain't healthy. They tell me you sleep any old place—on the ground or in a chicken coop—makes no matter. I never did sleep out of doors, and I hate to begin now; but I s'pose I got to. Mebbe, time we git there, they'll have decent beds. I admit I'm afraid of sleepin' out on the ground. It ain't no way to keep your health."
He ruminated busily with the gum.
"Another thing, kid, you got to remember. In the box-fightin' game sometimes even second money is good. I pulled down a few nice purses in my time. But this here gun-fightin' stuff, it's winner take all every time. In a gun fight second money is mud. Remember that. And we ain't got the education to be officers. We got to do plain fightin'."
"Plain fighting!" echoed Wilbur. "And I'll tell you another thing. From what I hear they might put me to driving a car, but you bet I ain't going to take that long trip and get seasick, probably, just to fool round with automobiles. I'm going to be out where you are—plain fighting. So remember this—I don't know a thing about cars or motors. Never saw one till I come into the Army."
"You're on!" said Spike. "Now let's eat while we can. They tell me over in the war your meals is often late."
They ate at T-bone Tommy's, consuming a vast quantity of red meat with but a minor accompaniment of vegetables. They were already soldiers. They fought during the meal several sharp engagements, from which they emerged without a scratch.
"We'll be takin' a lot of long chances, kid," cautioned Spike. "First thing we know—they might be saying it to us with flowers."
"Let 'em talk!" said the buoyant Wilbur. "Of course we'll get into trouble sooner or later."
"Sure!" agreed Spike. "Way I look at it, I got about one good fight left in me. All I hope is, it'll be a humdinger."
Later they wandered along River Street, surveying the little town with new eyes. They were far off---"over where the war was taking place," as Spike neatly put it—surveying at that long range the well-remembered scene; revisiting it from some remote spot where perhaps it had been said to them with flowers.
"We'd ought to tell Herman Vielhaber," said Spike. "Herman's a Heinie, but he's a good scout at that."
"Sure!" agreed Wilbur.
They found Herman alone at one of his tables staring morosely at an untouched glass of beer. The Vielhaber establishment was already suffering under the stigma of pro-Germanism put upon it by certain of the watchful towns-people. Judge Penniman, that hale old invalid, had even declared that Herman was a spy, and signalled each night to other spies by flapping a curtain of his lighted room above the saloon. The judge had found believers, though it was difficult to explain just what information Herman would be signalling and why he didn't go out and tell it to his evil confederates by word of mouth. Herman often found trade dull of an evening now, since many of his old clients would patronize his rival, Pegleg McCarron; for Pegleg was a fervent patriot who declared that all Germans ought to be in hell. Herman greeted the newcomers with troubled cordiality.
"Sed down, you boys. What you have? Sasspriller? All right! Mamma, two sassprillers for these young men."
Minna Vielhaber brought the drink from the bar. Minna had red eyes, and performed her service in silence, after which she went moodily back to her post.
They drank to Herman's health and to Minna's, and told of their decision.
"Right!" said Herman. "I give you right." He stared long at his beer. "I tell you, boys," he said at last, "mamma and me we got in a hard place, yes. Me? I'm good American—true blue. I got my last papers twenty-two years ago. I been good American since before that. Mamma, too. Both good. Then war comes, and I remember the Fatherland—we don't never furgit that, mind you, even so we are good Americans. But I guess mebbe I talk a lot of foolishness about Germany whipping everybody she fight with. I guess I was too proud of that country that used to be mine. You know how it is, you boys; you remember your home and your people kind of nice, mebbe."
"Sure!" said Spike. "Me? I was raised down back of the tracks in Buffalo—one swell place fur a kid to grow up—but honest, sometimes I git waked up in the night, and find m'self homesick fur that rotten dump. Sure, I know how you feel, Herman."
Herman, cheered by this sympathy, drank of his beer. Putting down the glass, he listened intently. Minna, at the bar, was heard to be weeping.
"Mamma," he called, gruffly, "you keep still once. None of that!"
Minna audibly achieved the commanded silence. Herman listened until satisfied of this, then resumed:
"Well, so fur, so good. Then Germany don't act right, so my own country got to fight her. She's got to fight her! I'd get me another country if she didn't. But now people don't understand how I feel so. They say: 'Yes, he praise Germany to the sky; now I guess he talk the other side of his mouth purty good.' They don't understand me. I want Germany should be punished good, and my country she's goin' to do it good. That is big in my heart. But shall I go out on the street and holler, 'To hell with Germany?' Not! Because people would know I lied, and I would know. I want Germany should be well whipped till all them sheep's heads is out of high places, but I can't hate Germans. I could punish someone good and not hate 'em. I'm a German in my blood, but you bet I ain't a pro-German.
"Mamma, again I tell you keep still once—and now you boys goin' to fight. That's good! Me, I would go if I was not too old; not a better German fighter would they have than me. I kill 'em all what come till I fall over myself. You boys remember and fight hard, so we make the world nice again. I bet you fight good—strong, husky boys like you. And I hope you come back strong and hearty and live a long time in a world you helped to put it right. I hope some day you have children will be proud because you was good Americans, like mine would be if we had a little one. I hope you teach 'em to fight quick for their own good country. Now—prosit!"
They drank, and in the stillness Minna Vielhaber was again heard to be lamenting. Herman addressed her harshly:
"Mamma, now again I beg you shall keep still once."
Minna appeared from back of the bar and became coherent.
"I wassn't cryin' no tears for Germans—wass cryin' fur them!" She waved a damp towel at Herman's guests. Herman soothed her.
"Now, now—them boys take care of themselves. Likely they have a little trouble here and there or some place, but they come back sound—I tell you that. Now you dry up—you make some other people feel that way. Hear me?" Minna subsided.
"You bet," resumed Herman, "we're Americans good. Mebbe I can't tell people so now, like they believe me; it's hard to believe I want Germans whipped good if I don't hate 'em, but it's true—and lots others besides me. They come in my place, Dagoes, Wops, Hunnyacks, Swedes, Jews, every breed, and what you think—they keep talkin' about what us Americans had ought to do to lick Germany. It's funny, yes? To hear 'em say us Americans, but when you know them foreigners mean it so hard—well, it ain't funny! It's good!
"And me? Say, I tell you something. If any one say I ain't good American I tell you this: I stand by America like I was born here. I stand by her if she fight Germany just as if she fight France. I stand by her in war, and I do more than that. You listen! Now comes it they say the country's goin' to be dry and put me out of business. What you think of that, hey? So they will shut booze joints like that feller McCarron runs, and even a nice place like this. So you can't buy a glass beer or a schoppen Rhine wine. What you think? Mebbe it's all talk, mebbe not. But listen! This is my country, no matter what she does; I stand by her if she fights Germany to death; and by God, I stand by her if she goes dry! Could I say more? Prosit!"
CHAPTER XVI
The next day Wilbur Cowan sought Sharon Whipple with the news that he meant to do a bit of plain fighting overseas. He found the old man in the stable, in troubled controversy with a rebellious car. He sat stonily at the wheel and at intervals pressed a determined heel upon a self-starter that would whir but an impotent protest. He glared up at Wilbur as the latter came to rest beside the car.
"Well, what now?" He spoke impatiently.
"I'm going to enlist; I thought I would tell you."
Sharon pointed the heavy brows at him with a thumb and uttered a disparaging "Humph!" Then he appeared to forget the announcement, and pressed again on the self-starter, listening above its shrill song for the deeper rumble of the engine. This did not ensue, and he shifted his heel, turning a plaintive eye upon the young man.
"She don't seem to excite," he said. "I've tried and tried, and I can't excite her."
It was an old, old story to Wilbur Cowan.
"Press her again," he directed. Sharon pressed and the other raptly listened. "Ignition," he said.
He lifted the hood on one side and with a pair of pliers manipulated what Sharon was never to know as anything but her gizzard, though the surgeon, as he delicately wrought, murmured something about platinum points.
"Try her!" Sharon tried her.
"Now she excites!" he exploded, gleefully, as the hum of the motor took up the shrill whir of the self-starter. He stopped the thing and bent a reproachful gaze upon Wilbur.
"Every one else leaving me—even that Elihu Titus. I never thought you would, after the way we've stood together in this town. I had a right to expect something better from you. I'd like to know how I'm goin' to get along without you. You show a lot of gratitude, I must say."
"Well, I thought—"
"Oh, I knew you'd go—I expected that!"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"You wouldn't been any good if you hadn't. Even that Elihu Titus went."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. He had been waiting to ask Sharon's opinion about the only troubling element in his decision. This seemed the moment. "You don't suppose—you don't think perhaps the war will be stopped or anything, just as I get over there?"
Sharon laboured with a choice bit of sarcasm.
"No, I guess it'll take more'n you to stop it, even with that Elihu Titus going along. Of course, some spy may get the news to 'em that you've started, and they may say, 'Why keep up the struggle if this Cowan boy's goin' in against us?' But my guess is they'll brazen it out for a month or so longer. Of course they'll be scared stiff."
Wilbur grinned at him, then spoke gravely.
"You know what I mean—Merle. He says the plain people will never allow this war to go on, because they've been tricked into it by Wall Street or something. I read it in his magazine. They're working against the war night and day, he says. Well, all I mean, I'd hate to go over there and be seasick and everything and then find they had stopped it."
Intently, grimly, Sharon climbed from his car. His short, fat leg went back and he accurately kicked an empty sprinkling can across the floor. It was a satisfying object to kick; it made a good noise and came to a clattering rest on its dented side. It was so satisfying that with another kick he sent the can bounding through an open door.
"Gave it the second barrel, didn't you?" said Wilbur. Sharon grinned now.
"Just a letter to your brother," he explained. Then he became profanely impassioned. "Fudge! Fudge and double fudge! Scissors and white aprons! Prunes and apricots! No! That war won't be stopped by any magazine! Go on—fight your fool head off! Don't let any magazine keep you back!"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"They can't stop the war, because there are too many boys like you all over this land. Trick or no trick, that's what they're up against. You'll all fight—while they're writing their magazines. Your reactions are different. That's a word I got from the dirty thing—and from that brother of yours. He gets a lot of use out of that word—always talking about his reactions. Just yesterday I said to him: 'Take care of your actions and your reactions will take care of themselves.' He don't cotton to me. I guess I never buttered him up with praise any too much. His languageousness gets on me. He's got Gideon and Harvey D. on a hot griddle, too, though they ain't lettin' on. Here the Whipples have always gone to war for their country—Revolutionary War and 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American—Harvey D. was in that. Didn't do much fighting, but he was belligerent enough. And now this son of his sets back and talks about his reactions! What I say—he's a Whipple in name only."
"He's educated," protested Wilbur, quick to defend this brother, even should he cheat him out of the good plain fighting he meant to do.
"Educated!" Sharon imitated a porpoise without knowing it. "Educated out of books! All any of that rabble rout of his knows is what they read secondhand. They don't know people. Don't know capitalists. Don't even know these wage slaves they write about. That's why they can't stop the war. They may be educated, but you're enlightened. They know more books, but you know more life in a minute than they'll ever know—you got a better idea of the what-for in this world. Let 'em write! You fight! If it rests on that hairy bunch to stop the war you'll get a bellyful of fighting. They're just a noisy fringe of buzzers round the real folks of this country."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. "I thought I'd ask."
"Well, now you know. Shove off!"
"Yes, sir." Sharon's tone changed to petulance.
"That's right, and leave me here to farm twenty-five hundred acres all by myself, just when I was going to put in tractors. That's the kind you are—just a fool country-town boy, with a head full of grand notions. Well, somebody's got to raise food for the world. She's goin' short pretty soon or I miss my guess. Somebody's got to raise bread and meat. All right, leave me here to do the dirty work while you flourish round over there seein' the world and havin' a good time. I'm sick of the sight of you and your airs. Get out!"
"Yes, sir."
"When you leaving?"
"To-morrow night—six-fifty-eight."
"Sooner the better!"
"Yes, sir."
Sharon turned back to the car, grumbling incoherent phrases. He affected to busy himself with the mechanism that had just been readjusted, looking at it wisely, thumbing a valve, though with a care to leave things precisely as they were.
That afternoon as Sharon made an absorbed progress along River Street he jostled Winona Penniman, who with even a surpassing absorption had been staring into the window of one of those smart shops marking Newbern's later growth. Whereas boots and shoes had been purchased from an establishment advertising simple Boots and Shoes, they were now sought by people of the right sort from this new shop which was labelled the Élite Bootery.
Winona had halted with assumed carelessness before its attractively dressed window displaying a colourful array of satin dancing slippers with high heels and bejewelled toes. Winona's assumption of carelessness had been meant to deceive passers-by into believing that she looked upon these gauds with a censorious eye, and not as one meaning flagrantly to purchase of them. Her actual dire intention was nothing to flaunt in the public gaze. Nor did she mean to voice her wishes before a shopful of people who might consider them ambiguous.
Four times she had passed the door of the shop, waiting for a dull moment in its traffic. Now but two women were left, and they seemed to be waiting only for change. Her resolution did not falter; she was merely practising a trained discretion. She was going to buy a pair of satin dancing slippers though the whole world should look upon her as lost. Too long, she felt, had she dwelt among the untrodden ways. As she had confided to her journal, the placid serenity of her life had become a sea of mad unrest. Old moorings had been wrenched loose; she floated with strange tides. And Wilbur Cowan, who was going to war, had invited her to be present that evening at the opening of Newbern's new and gorgeous restaurant, where the diners, between courses and until late after dinner, would dance to the strains of exotic and jerky music, precisely as they did in the awful city.
Winona had not even debated a refusal. The boy should be gratified. Nor did she try to convince herself that her motive was wholly altruistic. She had suddenly wished to mingle in what she was persuaded would be a scene of mad revelry. She had definitely abandoned the untrodden ways. She thought that reading about war might have unsettled her ideals. Anyway, they were unsettled. She was going to this place of the gay night life—and she was going right!
It was while she still waited, perturbed but outwardly cool, that the absorbed Sharon Whipple brushed her shoulder. She wondered if her secret purpose had been divined. But Sharon apparently was engrossed by other matters than the descent into frivolity of one who had long been austere.
"Well," he said, beaming on her, "our boy is going over."
Winona was relieved.
"Yes, he's off, but he'll come back safe."
"Oh, I know that! Nothing could hurt him, but I'll miss the skeesicks." He ruminated, then said pridefully: "That boy is what my son would have been if I'd had one. You can't tell me any son of my get and raising would have talked about his reactions when this time come!"
Winona winced ever so slightly at this way of putting it, but smiled valiantly.
"Publishing magazines full of slander about George Washington, and this new kind of stubby-ended poetry!"
"It is very different from Tennyson," said Winona.
"The other one's a man," went on Sharon. "You remember when you was worried because he wouldn't settle down to anything? Well, you watch him from now on! He hasn't got the book knowledge, but he's got a fine outdoors education, and that's the kind we need most. Don't you see that fine look in his eye—afraid of nothing, knowing how to do most anything? His is the kind makes us a great country—outdoor boys from the little towns and farms. They're the real folks. I'm awful proud of him, though I ain't wanting that to get out on me. I been watching him since he was in short pants. He's dependable—knows how. Say, I'm glad he took to the outdoors and didn't want to dress up every day and be a clerk in a store or a bank or some place like that. Wasn't it good?"
"Wasn't it?" said Winona, bravely.
"We need this kind in war, and we'll need it even more when the war is over—when he comes back."
"When he comes back," echoed Winona. And then with an irrelevance she could not control: "I'm going to a dance with him to-night." Her own eyes were dancing strangely as she declared it.
"Good thing!" said Sharon. He looked her over shrewdly. "Seems to me you're looking younger than you ought to," he said.
Winona pouted consciously for the first time in her hitherto honest life.
"You're looking almighty girlish," added Sharon with almost a leer, and Winona suffered a fearful apprehension that her ribs were menaced by his alert thumb. She positively could not be nudged in public. She must draw the line somewhere, even if she had led him on by pouting. She stepped quickly to the door of the Elite Bootery.
"He'll come back all right," said Sharon. "Say, did I ever tell you how he got me to shootin' a good round of golf? I tried it first with the wooden bludgeons, and couldn't ever make the little round lawns under seven or eight—parties snickering their fool heads off at me. So I says I can never make the bludgeons hit right. I don't seem to do more'n harass the ball into 'em, so he says try an iron all the way. So I tried the iron utensils, and now I get on the lawn every time in good shape, I can tell you. Parties soon begun to snicker sour all at once, I want you to know. It ain't anything for me to make that course in ninety-eight or"—Sharon's conscience called aloud—"or a hundred and ten or fifteen or thereabouts, in round numbers."
"I'm so glad," said Winona.
"I give him all the credit. And"—he turned after starting on—"he'll come back—he'll come back to us!"
Winona drew a fortifying breath and plunged into the Elite Bootery. She was perhaps more tight-lipped than usual, but to the not-too-acute observer this would have betokened mere businesslike determination instead of the panic it was. She walked grimly to a long bench, seated herself, and placed her right foot firmly upon a pedestal, full in the gaze of a clerk who was far too young, she instantly perceived, for negotiations of this delicacy.
"I wish to purchase," she began through slightly relaxed lips, "a pair of satin dancing slippers like those in your window—high-heeled, one strap, and possibly with those jewelled buckles." She here paused for another breath. then continued tremendously: "Something in a shade to go with—with these!"
With dainty brazenness the small hand at her knee obeyed an amazing command from her disordered brain and raised the neat brown skirt of Winona a full two inches, to reveal a slim ankle between which and an ogling world there gleamed but the thinnest veneer of tan silk.
Winona waited breathless. She had tortured herself with the possible consequences of this adventure. She had even conceived a clerk of forbidding aspect who would now austerely reply: "Woman, how dare you come in here and talk that way? You who have never worn anything but black cotton stockings, or lisle at the worst, and whose most daring footwear has been a neat Oxford tie with low heels, such as respectable women wear? Full well you know that a love for the sort of finery you now describe—and reveal—is why girls go wrong. And yet you come shamelessly in here—no, it is too much! You forget yourself! Leave the place at once!"
Sometimes this improvisation had concluded with a homily in kinder words, in which she would be entreated to go forth and try to be a better woman. And sometimes, but not often, she had decided that a shoe clerk, no matter his age, would take her request as a mere incident in the day's trade. Other women wore such things, and perforce must buy them in a public manner. She had steeled her nerve to the ordeal, and now she flushed with a fine new confidence, for the clerk merely said, "Certainly, madam"—in the later shops of Newbern they briefly called you madam—and with a kind of weary, professional politeness fell to the work of equipping her. A joyous relief succeeded her panic. She not only declared a moment later that her instep was far too high, but fitted at last in a slipper of suitable shade she raised her skirt again as she posed before a mirror that reached the floor. Winona was coming on. Had come!
Late that afternoon, while a last bit of chiffon was being tacked to a dancing frock which her mother had been told to make as fancy as she pleased, Winona hastily scribbled in her journal: "Am I of a gay disposition? Too gay, too volatile? No matter! It is an agreeable defect where one retains discretion sufficient for its regulation. This very night I am one of a party avowedly formed for pleasure, something my reflective mind would once have viewed with disapprobation. But again no matter. Perhaps I have been too analytical, too introspective. Perhaps the war has confused my sense of spiritual values. War is such a mistake!"
It was a flushed and sparkling Winona who later fluttered down the dull old stairs of the respectable Penniman home at the call of the waiting Wilbur Cowan. Her dark hair was still plainly, though rather effectively, drawn about her small head—she had definitely rebuffed the suggestion of her mother that it be marcelled—but her wisp of a frock of bronze gossamer was revolutionary in the extreme. Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising aplomb, bore the scrutiny of the family while she pulled long white gloves along her bare arms. A feathered fan dangled from one of them.
"Now, I guess you believe me," said Mrs. Penniman. "Haven't I always said what a few little touches would do for you?" Proudly she adjusted a filmy flounce to a better line. "And such lovely, lovely slippers!"
The slippers were indeed to be observed by one and all. The short dancing frock was in that year.
Wilbur Cowan was appreciative.
"Some kid!" he cried; "an eyeful!"
Winona pouted for the second time that day, instead of rebuking him for these low phrases of the street. Only Judge Penniman caviled.
"Well, I'd like to know what we're coming to," he grumbled. "The idee of a mere chit like her goin' out to a place that's no better than a saloon, even if you do guzzle your drinks at a table—and in a dug-out dress!"
Winona, instead of feeling rebuked, was gratified to be called a mere chit. She pouted at the invalid.
"Poor father!" she loftily murmured, and stood while her mother threw the evening cloak about her acceptable shoulders.
It was true that at the La Bohême alcoholic stimulant would be served to those who desired it, but this was not compulsory, and the place was in no sense a common saloon. Her father was old-fashioned, as he had shown himself to be about the lawless new dance steps that Wilbur had been teaching her. He had declared that if people performed such antics in public without music they'd mighty soon find themselves in the lockup, and Winona had not even shuddered. Now, as he continued to grumble at this degeneracy, she gracefully tapped his arm with her fan. She had read of this device being effectively employed by certain conquerors of men, and coolly she tried it upon her father. She performed the trifle gracefully, and it seemed of value audacious and yet nothing to be misunderstood by a really clean-minded man. She tapped the judge again as they left, with a minor variation of the technic. The judge little knew that he but served as a dummy at target practice.
The car in which Wilbur conveyed his guest to the scene of revelry was not of an elegance commensurate with Winona's. It was a mongrel of many makes, small, battered, and of a complaining habit. He had acquired it as a gift from one who considered that he bestowed trash, and had transformed it into a thing of noisy life, knowing, as a mother knows of her infant, what each of its squeaks and rattles implied. It was distressing, in truth, to look upon, but it went. Indeed, the proud owner had won a race with it from a too-outspoken critic who drove a much superior car. It was Wilbur Cowan who first in Newbern discovered that you could speed up a car by dropping a few moth balls into the gasoline tank. He called his car the Can, but, unreasonably, was not too cordial to others using the name.
The Can bore the pair to a fretful halt under the newest electric lights on River Street. "The La Bohême" read the dazzling sign. And Winona passed into her new life. She was feeling strangely young as she relinquished her cloak to a uniformed maid. She stood amid exotic splendour, and was no longer herself but some regal creature in the Sunday supplement of a great city paper. She had always wanted to be a girl, but had not known how—and now at thirty-five how easy it seemed! She preceded Wilbur to a table for two, impressive with crystal and damask, and was seated by an obsequious foreigner who brought to the act a manner that had never before in Newbern distinguished this service—when it had been performed at all.
Other tables about them were already filled with Newbern's elect, thrilled as was Winona, concealing it as ably as she, with the town's new distinction. Hardly had food been ordered when a hidden orchestra blared and the oblong polished space of which their own table formed part of the border was thronged with dancing couples. Winona glowingly surrendered to the evil spell. Wilbur merely looked an invitation and she was dancing as one who had always danced. She tapped him with her fan as he led her back to the table where their first course had arrived. She trifled daintily with strange food, composing a sentence for her journal: "The whole scene was of a gayety hitherto unparalleled in the annals of our little town."
There was more food, interspersed with more dancing. Later Winona, after many sidewise perkings of her brown head, discovered Merle and Patricia Whipple at a neighbouring table. She nodded and smiled effusively to them. Patricia returned her greeting gayly; Merle removed a shining cigarette holder of remarkable length and bowed, but did not smile. He seemed to be aloof and gloomy.
"He's got a lot on his mind," said Wilbur, studying his brother respectfully.
Merle's plenteous hair, like his cigarette holder, was longer than is commonly worn by his sex, and marked by a certain not infelicitous disorder. He had trouble with a luxuriant lock of it that persistently fell across his pale brow. With a weary, world-worn gesture he absently brushed this back into place from moment to moment. His thick eyeglasses were suspended by a narrow ribbon of black satin. His collar was low and his loosely tied cravat was flowing of line.
"Out of condition," said Wilbur, expertly. "Looks pasty."
"But very, very distinguished," supplemented Winona.
Patricia Whipple now came to their table with something like a dance step, though the music was stilled. She had been away from Newbern for two years.
"Europe and Washington," she hurriedly explained as Wilbur
held a chair for her, "and glad to get back—but I'm off
again. Nurse! Begin the course next week in New
York—learning
how to soothe the bed of pain.
I know I'm a
rattlepate, but that's what I'm going to do. All of us mad about
the war."
Wilbur studied her as he had studied Merle. She was in better condition, he thought. She came only to his shoulder as he stood to seat her, but she was no longer bony. Her bones were neatly submerged. Her hair was still rusty, the stain being deeper than he remembered, and the freckles were but piquant memories. Here and there one shone faintly, like the few faint stars showing widely apart through cloud crevices on a murky night. Her nose, though no longer precisely trivial, would never be the Whipple nose. Its lines were now irrevocably set in a design far less noble. Her gown was shining, of an elusive shade that made Wilbur think of ripe fruits—chiefly apricots, he decided. She was unquestionably what she had confessed herself to be—a rattlepate. She rattled now, with a little waiting, half-tremulous smile to mark her pauses, as if she knew people would weigh and find her wanting, but hoped for judgments tempered with mercy.
"Mad about the war? I should think so! Grandpa Gideon mad, and Harvey D.—that dear thing's going to do something at Washington for a dollar a year. You'd think it was the only honest money he'd ever earned if you heard Merle talk about bankers sucking the life blood of the people. Juliana taking charge of something and Mother Ella mad about knitting—always tangled in yarn. She'll be found strangled in her own work some day. And Uncle Sharon mad about the war, and fifty times madder about Merle.
"D'you see Merle's picture in that New York paper yesterday?—all hair and eyeglasses, and leaning one temple on the two first fingers of the right hand—and guess what it said—'Young millionaire socialist who denounces country's entrance into war!' Watch him—he's trying to look like the picture now! Uncle Sharon read the 'millionaire socialist,' and barked like a mad dog. He says: 'Yes, he'd be a millionaire socialist if he was going to be any kind, and if he was going to be a burglar he'd have to be one of these dress-suit burglars you always read about.'
"Of course he's awfully severe on Merle for not going to fight, but how could he with his bad eyes? He couldn't see to shoot at people, poor thing; and besides, he's too clever to be wasted like a common soldier. He starts people to thinking—worth-while people. He says so himself. Mixed up with all sorts of clever things with the most wonderful names—garment workers and poet radicals and vorticists and new-arters and everything like that, who are working to lift us up so nobody will own anything and everybody can have what he wants. Of course I don't understand everything they say, but it sounds good, so sympathetic, don't you think?"
She had paused often with the little smile that implored pity for her rattlepatedness. Now it prolonged itself as the orchestra became wildly alive.
Winona had but half listened to Patricia's chatter. She had been staring instead at the girl's hair—staring and wondering lawlessly. She had seen advertisements. Might her own hair be like that—"like tarnished gold," she put it? Of course you had to keep putting the stuff on at the roots as it grew out. But would her colour blend with that shade? Patricia's skin had the warm fairness of new milk, but Winona was dusky. Perhaps a deeper tint of auburn——
She was recalled from this perilous musing by Rapp, Senior, who came pressing his handkerchief to a brow damp from the last dance. He bowed to Winona.
"May I have this pleasure?" he said. Winona rose like a woman of the world.
"We're on the map at last," said Rapp, Senior, referring to Newbern's newest big-town feature.
"I know I'm on the map at last," said Winona, coyly, and tapped the arm of Rapp, Senior, with her feathered trifle of a fan.
"Dance?" said Wilbur to Patricia.
"Thanks a heap! Merle won't. He says how can he dance when thinking of free Russia? But did you see those stunning Russian dancers? It doesn't keep them from dancing, does it? Poor old Merle is balmy—mice in his wainscoting."
They danced, and Patricia was still the rattlepate.
"You're going over, Uncle Sharon told us. Merle says you're a victim of mob reaction—what does that mean? No matter. Pretty soon he said you'd be only a private. Grandpa Gideon looked as if he had bitten into a lemon. He says, 'I believe privates form a very important arm of the service'—just like that. He's not so keen on Merle, but he won't admit it. With him it's once a Whipple always a Whipple! When he saw Merle's picture, leaning the beautiful head on the two long fingers and the hair kind of scrambly, he just said, 'Ah, you young scamp of a socialist!' as if he were saying, 'Oh, fie on you!' Merle can talk the whole bunch down when he gets to shooting on all six—sounds good, but I've no doubt it's just wise twaddle.
"What a stunning dancer you are! Ask me quick again so I won't have to go back to free Russia. I'll promise to nurse you when you get wounded over there. I'll have learned to do everything by that time. Wouldn't it be funny if you were brought in some day with a lot of wounds and I'd say, 'Why, dear me, that's someone I know! You must let me nurse him back to health,' and of course they would. Anyway, the family's keen about my going. They think I ought to do my bit, especially as Merle can't, because of his eyes. Be sure you ask me again."
He asked her again and yet again. He liked dancing with her. Sometimes when she talked her eyes were like green flames. But she talked of nothing long and the flames would die and her little waiting smile come entreating consideration for her infirmities.
"Now you be sure to come straight to me directly you're wounded," she again cautioned him as they parted.
He shook hands warmly with her. He liked the girl, but he hoped there would be other nurses at hand if this thing occurred; that is, if it proved to be anything serious.
"Anyway, I hope I'll see you," he said. "I guess home faces will be scarce over there."
She looked him over approvingly.
"Be a good soldier," she said.
Again they shook hands. Then she fluttered off under the gloomy charge of Merle, who had remained austerely aloof from the night's gayety. Wilbur had had but a few words with him, for Patricia claimed his time.
"You seem a lot older than I do now," he said, and Merle, brushing back the errant lock, had replied: "Poor chap, you're a victim of the mob reaction. Of course I'm older now. I'm face to face with age-long problems that you've never divined the existence of. It does age one."
"I suppose so," agreed Wilbur.
He felt shamed, apologetic for his course. Still he would have some plain fighting, Wall Street or no Wall Street.
He wrested a chattering Winona from Mrs. Henrietta Plunkett at the door of the ladies' cloakroom. Mrs. Plunkett was Newbern's ablest exponent of the cause of woman, and she had been disquieted this night at observing signs of an unaccustomed frivolity in one of her hitherto stanchest disciples.
"I can't think what has come over you!" she had complained to Winona. "You seem like a different girl!"
"I am a different girl!" boasted Winona.
"You do look different—your gown is wonderfully becoming, and what lovely slippers!" Mrs. Plunkett inspected the aged debutante with kindly eyes. "But remember, my dear, we mustn't let frivolities like this divert our attention from the cause. A bit more of the good fight and we shall have come into our own."
"All this wonderful mad evening I have forgotten the cause," confessed Winona.
"Mercy!" said Mrs. Plunkett. "Forgotten the cause? One hardly does that, does one, without a reason?"
"I have reasons enough," said Winona, thinking of the new dancing slippers and the frock.
"Surely, my dear, you who are so free and independent are not thinking of marriage?"
Winona had not been thinking of marriage. But now she did.
"Well"—she began—"of course, I——"
"Mercy! Not really! Why, Winona Penniman, would you barter your independence for a union that must be demeaning, at least politically, until our cause is won?"
"Well, of course——" Winona again faltered, tapping one minute toe of a dancing slipper on the floor.
"Do you actually wish," continued Henrietta Plunkett, rising to the foothills of her platform manner, "to become a parasite, a man's bond slave, his creature? Do you wish to be his toy, his plaything?"
"I do!" said Winona low and fervently, as if she had spoken the words under far more solemn auspices.
"Mercy me! Winona Penniman!"
And Wilbur Cowan had then come to bear her off to her room, that echoed with strange broken music and light voices and the rhythmic scuffing of feet on a floor—and to the privacy of her journal.
"I seem," she wrote, "to have flung wisdom and prudence to the winds. Though well I know the fading nature of all sublunary enjoyments, yet when I retire shortly it will be but to protract the fierce pleasure of this night by recollection. Full well I know that Morpheus will wave his ebon wand in vain."
Morpheus did just that. Long after Winona had protracted the fierce enjoyment of the night to a vanishing point she lay wakeful, revolving her now fixed determination to take the nursing course that Patricia Whipple would take, and go far overseas, where she could do a woman's work; or, as she phrased it again and again, be a girl of some use in a vexed world.
In the morning she learned for the first time that Wilbur was to go to war in company with a common prize fighter. It chilled her for the moment, but she sought to make the best of it.
"I hope," she told Wilbur, "that war will make a better man of your friend."
"What do you mean—a better man?" he quickly wanted to know. "Let me tell you, Spike's a pretty good man right now for his weight. You ought to see him in action once! Don't let any one fool you about that boy! What do you expect at a hundred and thirty-three—a heavyweight?"
After he had gone, late that afternoon, after she had said a solemn farewell to him in the little room of the little house in the side yard, Winona became reckless. She picked up and scanned with shrewd eyes the photograph of Spike that had been left: "To my friend Kid Cowan from his friend Eddie—Spike—Brennon, 133 lbs. ringside."
She studied without wincing the crouched figure of hostile eye, even though the costume was not such as she would have selected for a young man.
"After all, he's only a boy," she murmured. She studied again the intent face. "And he looks as if he had an abundance of pepper."
She hoped she would be there to nurse them both if anything happened. She had told Wilbur this, but he had not been encouraging. He seemed to believe that nothing would happen to either of them.
"Of course we'll be shot at," he admitted, "but like as not they'll miss us."
Winona sighed and replaced the photograph. Now they would be a couple of heads clustered with other heads at a car window; smiling, small-town boys going lightly out to their ordeal. She must hurry and be over!
Wilbur, with his wicker suitcase, paused last to say goodbye to Frank, the dog. Frank was now a very old dog, having reached a stage of yapping senility, where he found his sole comfort in following the sun about the house and dozing in it, sometimes noisily dreaming of past adventures. These had been exclusively of a sentimental character, for Frank had never been the fighting dog his first owner had promised he would be. He was an arch sentimentalist and had followed a career of determined motherhood, bringing into the world litter after litter of puppies, exhibiting all the strains then current in Newbern. He had surveyed each new family with pride—families revealing tinges of setter, Airedale, Newfoundland, pointer, collie—with the hopeful air of saying that a dog never knew what he could do until he tried. Now he could only dream of past conquests, and merely complained when his master roused him.
"I hope you'll be here when I get back—and I hope I'll be here, too," said his master, and went on, sauntering up to the station a bit later as nonchalantly as ever Dave Cowan himself had gone there to begin a long journey on the six-fifty-eight. Spike Brennon lounged against a baggage truck. Spike's only token of departure was a small bundle covered with that day's Advance. They waited in silence until the dingy way train rattled in. Then Sharon Whipple appeared from the freight room of the station. He affected to be impatient with the railway company because of a delayed shipment which he took no trouble to specify definitely, and he affected to be surprised at the sight of Wilbur and Spike.
"Hello! I thought you two boys went on the noon train," he lied, carelessly. "Well, long as you're here you might as well take these—in case you get short." He pressed a bill into the hand of each. "Good-bye and good luck! I had to come down about that shipment should have been here last Monday—it beats time what these railroads do with stuff nowadays. Five days between here and Buffalo!"
He continued to grumble as the train moved on, even as the two waved to him from a platform.
"A hundred berries!" breathed Spike, examining his bill. "Say, he sheds it easy, don't he?"
They watched him where he stood facing the train. He seemed to have quit grumbling; his face was still.
"Well, kid, here we go! Now it's up to the guy what examines us. You'll breeze through—not a nick in you. Me—well, they're fussy about teeth, I'm told, and, of course, I had to have a swift poke in the mush that dented my beak. They may try to put the smother on me."
"Cheer up! You'll make the grade," said Wilbur.
Through the night he sat cramped and wakeful in the seat of a crowded day coach, while Spike beside him slept noisily, perhaps owing to the dented beak. His head back, he looked out and up to a bow moon that raced madly with the train, and to far, pale stars that were still. He wondered if any one out there noted the big new adventure down here.