The Desert of Wheat Part 54

Then Lenore sustained a strange shock. The beloved handwriting faded, the thick sheets of paper fell; and all about her seemed dark and whirling, as the sudden joy and excitement stirred by the letter changed to sickening pain.

"_France!_ He's in France?" she whispered. "Oh, Kurt!" A storm of love and terror burst over her. It had the onset and the advantage of a bewildering surprise. It laid low, for the moment, her fortifications of sacrifice, strength, and resolve. She had been forced into womanhood, and her fear, her agony, were all the keener for the intelligence and spirit that had repudiated selfish love. Kurt Dorn was in France in the land of the trenches! Strife possessed her and had a moment of raw, bitter triumph. She bit her lips and clenched her fists, to restrain the impulse to rush madly around the room, to scream out her fear and hate.

With forcing her thought, with hard return to old well-learned arguments, there came back the n.o.bler emotions. But when she took up the letter again, with trembling hands, her heart fluttered high and sick, and she saw the words through blurred eyes.

...I'll give the letter to an ensign, who has promised to mail it the moment he gets back to New York.

Lenore, your letter telling me about Jim was held up in the mail.

But thank goodness, I got it in time. I'd already been transferred, and expected orders any day to go on board the transport, where I am writing now. I'd have written you, or at least telegraphed you, yesterday, after seeing Jim, if I had not expected to see him again to-day. But this morning we were marched on board and I cannot even get this letter off to you.

Lenore, your brother is a very sick boy. I lost some hours finding him. They did not want to let me see him. But I implored--said that I was engaged to his sister--and finally I got in. The nurse was very sympathetic. But I didn't care for the doctors in charge. They seemed hard, hurried, brusque. But they have their troubles. The hospital was a long barracks, and it was full of cripples.

The nurse took me into a small, bare room, too damp and cold for a sick man, and I said so. She just looked at me.

Jim looks like you more than any other of the Andersons. I recognized that at the same moment I saw how very sick he was. They had told me outside that he had a bad case of pneumonia. He was awake, perfectly conscious, and he stared at me with eyes that set my heart going.

"h.e.l.lo, Jim!" I said, and offered my hand, as I sat down on the bed.

He was too weak to shake hands.

"Who're you?" he asked. He couldn't speak very well. When I told him my name and that I was his sister's fiance his face changed so he did not look like the same person. It was beautiful. Oh, it showed how homesick he was! Then I talked a blue streak about you, about the girls, about "Many Waters"--how I lost my wheat, and everything.

He was intensely interested, and when I got through he whispered that he guessed Lenore had picked a "winner." What do you think of that? He was curious about me, and asked me questions till the nurse made him stop. I was never so glad about anything as I was about the happiness it evidently gave him to meet me and hear from home. I promised to come next day if we did not sail. Then he showed what I must call despair. He must have been pa.s.sionately eager to get to France. The nurse dragged me out. Jim called weakly after me: "Good-by, Kurt. Stick some Germans for me!" I'll never forget his tone nor his look.... Lenore, he doesn't expect to get over to France.

I questioned the nurse, and she shook her head doubtfully. She looked sad. She said Jim had been the lion of his regiment. I questioned a doctor, and he was annoyed. He put me off with a sharp statement that Jim was not in danger. But I think he is. I hope and pray he recovers.

_Thursday_.

We sailed yesterday. It was a wonderful experience, leaving Hoboken.

Our transport and the dock looked as if they had a huge swarm of yellow bees hanging over everything. The bees were soldiers. The most profound emotion I ever had--except the one when you told me you loved me--came over me as the big boat swung free of the dock--of the good old U.S., of home. I wanted to jump off and swim through the eddying green water to the piles and hide in them till the boat had gone. As we backed out, pulled up tugs, and got started down the river, my thrills increased, until we pa.s.sed the Statue of Liberty--and then I couldn't tell how I felt. One thing, I could not see very well.... I gazed beyond the colossal statue that France gave to the U.S.--'way across the water and the s.h.i.+ps and the docks toward the West that I was leaving. Feeling like mine then only comes once to a man in his life. First I seemed to see all the vast s.p.a.ce, the farms, valleys, woods, deserts, rivers, and mountains between me and my golden wheat-hills. Then I saw my home, and it was as if I had a magnificent photograph before my very eyes. A sudden rush of tears blinded me. Such a storm of sweetness, regret, memory!

Then at last you--_you_ as you stood before me last, the very loveliest girl in all the world. My heart almost burst, and in the wild, sick pain of the moment I had a strange, comforting flash of thought that a man who could leave you must be impelled by something great in store for him. I feel that. I told you once. To laugh at death! That is what I shall do. But perhaps that is not the great experience which will come to me.

I saw the sun set in the sea, 'way back toward the western horizon, where the thin, dark line that was land disappeared in the red glow.

The wind blows hard. The water is rough, dark gray, and cold. I like the taste of the spray. Our boat rolls heavily and many boys are already sick. I do not imagine the motion will affect me. It is stuffy below-deck. I'll spend what time I can above, where I can see and feel. It was dark just now when I came below. And as I looked out into the windy darkness and strife I was struck by the strangeness of the sea and how it seemed to be like my soul. For a long time I have been looking into my soul, and I find such ceaseless strife, such dark, unlit depths, such chaos. These thoughts and emotions, always with me, keep me from getting close to my comrades. No, not me, but it keeps them away from me. I think they regard me strangely. They all talk of submarines. They are afraid. Some will lose sleep at night. But I never think of a submarine when I gaze out over the tumbling black waters. What I think of, what I am going after, what I need seems far, far away.

Always! I am no closer now than when I was at your home. So it has not to do with distance. And Lenore, maybe it has not to do with trenches or Germans.

_Wednesday_.

It grows harder to get a chance to write and harder for me to express myself. When I could write I have to work or am on duty; when I have a little leisure I am somehow clamped. This old chugging boat beats the waves hour after hour, all day and all night. I can feel the vibration when I'm asleep. Many things happen that would interest you, just the duty and play of the soldiers, for that matter, and the stories I hear going from lip to lip, and the accidents. Oh! so much happens. But all these rush out of my mind the moment I sit down to write. There is something at work in me as vast and heaving as the ocean.

At first I had a fear, a dislike of the ocean. But that is gone. It is indescribable to stand on the open deck at night as we are driving on and on and on--to look up at the grand, silent stars, that know, that understand, yet are somehow merciless--to look out across the starlit, moving sea. Its ceaseless movement at first distressed me; now I feel that it is perpetually moving to try to become still. To seek a level! To find itself! To quiet down to peace! But that will never be. And I think if the ocean is not like the human heart, then what is it like?

This voyage will be good for me. The hard, incessant objective life, the physical life of a soldier, somehow comes to a halt on board s.h.i.+p. And every hour now is immeasurable for me. Whatever the mystery of life, of death, of what drives me, of why I cannot help fight the demon in me, of this thing called war--the certainty is that these dark, strange nights on the sea have given me a hope and faith that the truth is not utterly unattainable.

_Sunday._

We're in the danger zone now, with destroyers around us and a cruiser ahead. I am all eyes and ears. I lose sleep at night from thinking so hard. The s.h.i.+p doctor stopped me the other day--studied my face. Then he said: "You're too intense. You think too hard....

Are you afraid?" And I laughed in his face. "Absolutely no!" I told him. "Then forget--and mix with the boys. Play--cut up--fight--do anything but _think!_" That doctor is a good chap, but he doesn't figure Kurt Dorn if he imagines the Germans can kill me by making me think.

We're nearing France now, and the very air is charged. An aeroplane came out to meet us--welcome us, I guess, and it flew low. The soldiers went wild. I never had such a thrill. That air game would just suit me, if I were fitted for it. But I'm no mechanic. Besides, I'm too big and heavy. My place will be in the front line with a bayonet. Strange how a bayonet fascinates me!

They say we can't write home anything about the war. I'll write you something, whenever I can. Don't be unhappy if you do not hear often--or if my letters cease to come. My heart and my mind are full of you. Whatever comes to me--the training over here--the going to the trenches--the fighting--I shall be safe if only I can remember you.

With love,

Kurt.

Lenore carried that letter in her bosom when she went out to walk in the fields, to go over the old ground she and Kurt had trod hand in hand.

From the stone seat above the brook she watched the sunset. All was still except the murmur of the running water, and somehow she could not long bear that. As the light began to shade on the slopes, she faced them, feeling, as always, a strength come to her from their familiar lines. Twilight found her high above the ranch, and absolutely alone.

She would have this lonely hour, and then, all her mind and energy must go to what she knew was imperative duty. She would work to the limit of her endurance.

It was an autumn twilight, with a cool wind, gray sky, and sad, barren slopes. The fertile valley seemed half obscured in melancholy haze, and over toward the dim hills beyond night had already fallen. No stars, no moon, no afterglow of sunset illumined the grayness that in this hour seemed prophetic of Lenore's future.

"'Safe!' he said. 'I shall be safe if only I can remember you,'" she whispered to herself, wonderingly. "What did he mean?"

Pondering the thought, she divined it had to do with Dorn's singular spiritual mood. He had gone to lend his body as so much physical brawn, so much weight, to a concerted movement of men, but his mind was apart from a harmony with that. Lenore felt that whatever had been the sacrifice made by Kurt Dorn, it had been pa.s.sed with his decision to go to war. What she prayed for then was something of his spirit.

Slowly, in the gathering darkness, she descended the long slope. The approaching night seemed sad, with autumn song of insects. All about her breathed faith, from the black hills above, the gray slopes below, from the shadowy void, from the murmuring of insect life in the gra.s.s. The rugged fallow ground under her feet seemed to her to be a symbol of faith--faith that winter would come and pa.s.s--the spring sun and rain would burst the seeds of wheat--and another summer would see the golden fields of waving grain. If she did not live to see them, they would be there just the same; and so life and nature had faith in its promise.

That strange whisper was to Lenore the whisper of G.o.d.

CHAPTER XXVI

Through the pale obscurity of a French night, cool, raw, moist, with a hint of spring in its freshness, a line of soldiers plodded along the lonely, melancholy lanes. Wan starlight showed in the rifts between the clouds. Neither dark nor light, the midnight hour had its unreality in this line of marching men; and its reality in the dim, vague hedges, its spectral posts, its barren fields.

Rain had ceased to fall, but a fine, cold, penetrating mist filled the air. The ground was muddy in places, slippery in others; and here and there it held pools of water ankle-deep. The stride of the marching men appeared short and dragging, without swing or rhythm. It was weary, yet full of the latent power of youth, of unused vitality. Stern, clean-cut, youthful faces were set northward, unchanging in the shadowy, pale gleams of the night. These faces lifted intensely whenever a strange, m.u.f.fled, deep-toned roar rolled out of the murky north. The night looked stormy, but that rumble was not thunder. Fifty miles northward, beyond that black and mysterious horizon, great guns were booming war.

Sometimes, as the breeze failed, the night was silent except for the slow, sloppy tramp of the marching soldiers. Then the low voices were hushed. When the wind freshened again it brought at intervals those deep, significant detonations which, as the hours pa.s.sed, seemed to grow heavier and more thunderous.

At length a faint gray light appeared along the eastern sky, and gradually grew stronger. The dawn of another day was close at hand. It broke as if reluctantly, cold and gray and sunless.

The detachment of United States troops halted for camp outside of the French village of A----.

Kurt Dorn was at mess with his squad.

The months in France had flown away on wings of training and absorbing and waiting. Dorn had changed incalculably. But all he realized of it was that he weighed one hundred and ninety pounds and that he seemed to have lived a hundred swift lives. All that he saw and felt became part of him. His comrades had been won to him as friends by virtue of his ever-ready helping hand, by his devotion to training, by his close-lipped acceptance of all the toils and knocks and pains common to the making of a soldier. The squad lived together as one large family of brothers. Dorn's comrades had at first tormented him with his German name; they had made fun of his abstraction and his letter-writing; they had misunderstood his aloofness. But the ridicule died away, and now, in the presaged nature of events, his comrades, all governed by the physical life of the soldier, took him for a man.

Perhaps it might have been chance, or it might have been true of all the American squads, but the fact was that Dorn's squad was a strangely a.s.sorted set of young men. Perhaps that might have been Dorn's conviction from coming to live long with them. They were a part of the New York Division of the --th, all supposed to be New York men. As a matter of fact, this was not true. Dorn was a native of Was.h.i.+ngton.

Sanborn was a thick-set, st.u.r.dy fellow with the clear brown tan and clear brown eyes of the Californian. Brewer was from South Carolina, a lean, lanky Southerner, with deep-set dark eyes. Dixon hailed from Ma.s.sachusetts, from a fighting family, and from Harvard, where he had been a noted athlete. He was a big, lithe, handsome boy, red-faced and curly-haired. Purcell was a New-Yorker, of rich family, highly connected, and his easy, clean, fine ways, with the elegance of his person, his blond distinction, made him stand out from his khaki-clad comrades, though he was clad identically with them. Rogers claimed the Bronx to be his home and he was proud of it. He was little, almost undersized, but a knot of muscle, a keen-faced youth with Irish blood in him. These particular soldiers of the squad were closest to Dorn.

Corporal Bob Owens came swinging in to throw his sombrero down.

"What's the orders, Bob?" some one inquired.

"We're going to rest here," he replied.

The news was taken impatiently by several and agreeably by the majority.

They were all travel-stained and worn. Dorn did not comment on the news, but the fact was that he hated the French villages. They were so old, so dirty, so obsolete, so different from what he had been accustomed to.

But he loved the pastoral French countryside, so calm and picturesque.