by Zane Grey
Lenore covered her face with her hands. “Oh — horrible! … Is there nothing — no hope — only…?” She faltered and broke down.
“Lenore, because there’s hate does not prove there’s nothing left.… Listen. The last fight I had was with a boy. I didn’t know it when we met. I was rushing, head down, bayonet low. I saw only his body, his blade that clashed with mine. To me his weapon felt like a toy in the hands of a child. I swept it aside — and lunged. He screamed ‘Kamarad!’ before the blade reached him. Too late! I ran him through. Then I looked. A boy of nineteen! He never ought to have been forced to meet me. It was murder. I saw him die on my bayonet. I saw him slide off it and stretch out.… I did not hate him then. I’d have given my life for his. I hated what he represented.… That moment was the end of me as a soldier. If I had not been in range of the exploding shell that downed me I would have dropped my rifle and have stood strengthless before the next Hun.… So you see, though I killed them, and though I hate now, there’s something — something strange and inexplicable.”
“That something is the divine in you. It is God!… Oh, believe it, my husband!” cried Lenore.
Dorn somberly shook his head. “God! I did not find God out there. I cannot see God’s hand in this infernal war.”
“But I can. What called you so resistlessly? What made you go?”
“You know. The debt I thought I ought to pay. And duty to my country.”
“Then when the debt was paid, the duty fulfilled — when you stood stricken at sight of that poor boy dying on your bayonet — what happened in your soul?”
“I don’t know. But I saw the wrong of war. The wrong to him — the wrong to me! I thought of no one else. Certainly not of God!”
“If you had stayed your bayonet — if you had spared that boy, as you would have done had you seen or heard him in time — what would that have been?”
“Pity, maybe, or scorn to slay a weaker foe.”
“No, no, no — I can’t accept that,” replied Lenore, passionately. “Can you see beyond the physical?”
“I see only that men will fight and that war will come again. Out there I learned the nature of men.”
“If there’s divinity in you there’s divinity in every man. That will oppose war — end it eventually. Men are not taught right. Education and religion will bring peace on earth, good-will to man.”
“No, they will not. They never have done so. We have educated men and religious men. Yet war comes despite them. The truth is that life is a fight. Civilization is only skin-deep. Underneath man is still a savage. He is a savage still because he wants the same he had to have when he lived in primitive state. War isn’t necessary to show how every man fights for food, clothing, shelter. To-day it’s called competition in business. Look at your father. He has fought and beaten men like Neuman. Look at the wheat farmers in my country. Look at the I.W.W. They all fight. Look at the children. They fight even at their games. Their play is a make-believe battle or escaping or funeral or capture. It must be then that some kind of strife was implanted in the first humans and that it is necessary to life.”
“Survival of the fittest!” exclaimed Lenore, in earnest bitterness. “Kurt, we have changed. You are facing realities and I am facing the infinite. You represent the physical, and I the spiritual. We must grow into harmony with each other. We can’t ever hope to learn the unattainable truth of life. There is something beyond us — something infinite which I believe is God. My soul finds it in you.… The first effects of the war upon you have been trouble, sacrifice, pain, and horror. You have come out of it impaired physically and with mind still clouded. These will pass, and therefore I beg of you don’t grow fixed in absolute acceptance of the facts of evolution and materialism. They cannot be denied, I grant. I see that they are realities. But also I see beyond them. There is some great purpose running through the ages. In our day the Germans have risen, and in the eyes of most of the world their brutal force tends to halt civilization and kill idealism. But that’s only apparent — only temporary. We shall come out of this dark time better, finer, wiser. The history of the world is a proof of a slow growth and perfection. It will never be attained. But is not the growth a beautiful and divine thing? Does it now oppose a hopeless prospect?… Life is inscrutable. When I think — only think without faith — all seems so futile. The poet says we are here as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.… Trust me, my husband! There is something in woman — the instinct of creation — the mother — that feels what cannot be expressed. It is the hope of the world.”
“The mother!” burst out Dorn. “I think of that — in you.… Suppose I have a son, and war comes in his day. Suppose he is killed, as I killed that poor boy!… How, then, could I reconcile that with this, this something you feel so beautifully? This strange sense of God! This faith in a great purpose of the ages!”
Lenore trembled in the exquisite pain of the faith which she prayed was beginning to illumine Dorn’s dark and tragic soul.
“If we are blessed with a son — and if he must go to war — to kill and be killed — you will reconcile that with God because our son shall have been taught what you should have been taught — what must be taught to all the sons of the future.”
“What will — that be?” queried Dorn.
“The meaning of life — the truth of immortality,” replied Lenore. “We live on — we improve. That is enough for faith.”
“How will that prevent war?”
“It will prevent it — in the years to come. Mothers will take good care that children from babyhood shall learn the consequences of fight — of war. Boys will learn that if the meaning of war to them is the wonder of charge and thunder of cannon and medals of distinction, to their mothers the meaning is loss and agony. They will learn the terrible difference between your fury and eagerness to lunge with bayonet and your horror of achievement when the disemboweled victims lie before you. The glory of a statue to the great general means countless and nameless graves of forgotten soldiers. The joy of the conquering army contrasts terribly with the pain and poverty and unquenchable hate of the conquered.”
“I see what you mean,” rejoined Dorn. “Such teaching of children would change the men of the future. It would mean peace for the generations to come. But as for my boy — it would make him a poor soldier. He would not be a fighter. He would fall easy victim to the son of the father who had not taught this beautiful meaning of life and terror of war. I’d want my son to be a man.”
“That teaching — would make him — all the more a man,” said Lenore, beginning to feel faint.
“But not in the sense of muscle, strength, courage, endurance. I’d rather there never was peace than have my son inferior to another man’s.”
“My hope for the future is that all men will come to teach their sons the wrong of violence.”
“Lenore, never will that day come,” replied Dorn.
She saw in him the inevitableness of the masculine attitude; the difference between man and woman; the preponderance of blood and energy over the higher motives. She felt a weak little woman arrayed against the whole of mankind. But she could not despair. Unquenchable as the sun was this fire within her.
“But it might come?” she insisted, gently, but with inflexible spirit.
“Yes, it might — if men change!”
“You have changed.”
“Yes. I don’t know myself.”
“If we do have a boy, will you let me teach him what I think is right?” Lenore went on, softly.
“Lenore! As if I would not!” he exclaimed. “I try to see your way, but just because I can’t I’ll never oppose you. Teach me if you can!”
She kissed him and knelt beside his bed, grieved to see shadow return to his face, yet thrilling that the way seemed open for her to inspire. But she must never again choose to talk of war, of materialism, of anything calculated to make him look into darkness of his soul,
to ponder over the impairment of his mind. She remembered the great specialist speaking of lesions of the organic system, of a loss of brain cells. Her inspiration must be love, charm, care — a healing and building process. She would give herself in all the unutterableness and immeasurableness of her woman’s heart. She would order her life so that it would be a fulfilment of his education, of a heritage from his fathers, a passion born in him, a noble work through which surely he could be saved — the cultivation of wheat.
“Do you love me?” she whispered.
“Do I!… Nothing could ever change my love for you.”
“I am your wife, you know.”
The shadow left his face.
“Are you? Really? Lenore Anderson…”
“Lenore Dorn. It is a beautiful name now.”
“It does sound sweet. But you — my wife? Never will I believe!”
“You will have to — very soon.”
“Why?” A light, warm and glad and marveling, shone in his eyes. Indeed, Lenore felt then a break in the strange aloofness of him — in his impersonal, gentle acceptance of her relation to him.
“To-morrow I’m going to take you home to your wheat-hills.”
CHAPTER XXXII
LENORE TOLD HER conception of the history and the romance of wheat to Dorn at this critical time when it was necessary to give a trenchant call to hope and future.
In the beginning man’s struggle was for life and the mainstay of life was food. Perhaps the original discoverer of wheat was a meat-eating savage who, in roaming the forests and fields, forced by starvation to eat bark and plant and berry, came upon a stalk of grain that chewed with strange satisfaction. Perhaps through that accident he became a sower of wheat.
Who actually were the first sowers of wheat would never be known. They were older than any history, and must have been among the earliest of the human race.
The development of grain produced wheat, and wheat was ground into flour, and flour was baked into bread, and bread had for untold centuries been the sustenance and the staff of life.
Centuries ago an old Chaldean priest tried to ascertain if wheat had ever grown wild. That question never was settled. It was universally believed, however, that wheat had to have the cultivation of man. Nevertheless, the origin of the plant must have been analogous to that of other plants. Wheat-growers must necessarily have been people who stayed long in one place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. In the days of the Pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean of wheat waved and shone under the hot Egyptian sun. The Arabs, on their weird beasts of burden, rode from the desert wastes down to the land of waters and of plenty. Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden grain toward the mysterious east. Moses, when he stood in the night, watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on the desert wind a scent of wheat. The Bible said, “He maketh peace in thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat.”
Black-bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner, dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine; when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out, “Bread or blood!”
But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization; and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of man. Wheat-fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous farmers; fruitful toil of happy peoples; the miller and his humming mill!
When wheat crossed the ocean to America it came to strange and wonderful fulfilment of its destiny. America, fresh, vast, and free, with its sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward; with the advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable wheat-sowers; with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each succeeding year; with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested by machines that were mechanical wonders; with enormous floor-mills, humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour, pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and sweet, the whitest and finest in the world!
America, the new county, became in 1918 the salvation of starving Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France! Wheat for the world! Wheat — that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns! America to succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of war! It was an exalted destiny for a people. Its truth was a blazing affront in the face of age-old autocracy. Fields and toil and grains of wheat, first and last, the salvation of mankind, the freedom and the food of the world!
Far up the slow-rising bulge of valley slope above the gleaming river two cars climbed leisurely and rolled on over the height into what seemed a bare and lonely land of green.
It was a day in June, filled with a rich, thick, amber light, with a fragrant warm wind blowing out of the west.
At a certain point on this road, where Anderson always felt compelled to halt, he stopped the car this day and awaited the other that contained Lenore and Dorn.
Lenore’s joy in the ride was reflected in her face. Dorn rested comfortably beside her, upon an improvised couch. As he lay half propped up by pillows he could see out across the treeless land that he knew. His eyes held a look of the returned soldier who had never expected to see his native land again. Lenore, sensitive to every phase of his feeling, watched him with her heart mounting high.
Anderson got out of his car, followed by Kathleen, who looked glad and mischievous and pretty as a wild rose.
“I just never can get by this place,” explained the rancher, as he came and stood so that he could put a hand on Dorn’s knee. “Look, son — an’ Lenore, don’t you miss this.”
“Never fear, dad,” replied Lenore, “it was I who first told you to look here.”
“Terrible big and bare, but grand!” exclaimed Kathleen.
Lenore looked first at Dorn’s face as he gazed away across the length and breadth of land. Could that land mean as much to him as it did before he went to war? Infinitely more, she saw, and rejoiced. Her faith was coming home to her in verities. Then she thrilled at the wide prospect before her.
It was a scene that she knew could not be duplicated in the world. Low, slow-sloping, billowy green hills, bare and smooth with square brown patches, stretched away to what seemed infinite distance. Valleys and hills, with less fallow ground than ever before, significant and striking: lost the meager details of clumps of trees and dots of houses in a green immensity. A million shadows out of the west came waving over the wheat. They were ripples of an ocean of grain. No dust-clouds, no bleached roads, no yellow hills to-day! June, and the desert found its analogy only in the sweep and reach! A thousand hills billowing away toward that blue haze of mountain range where rolled the Oregon. Acreage and mileage seemed insignificant. All was green — green, the fresh and hopeful color, strangely serene and sweet and endless under the azure sky. Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long lines of roads running everywhither, overwhelmingly pregnant with meaning — wheat — wheat — wheat — nothing but wheat, a staggering visual manifestation of vital need, of noble promise.
“That — that!” rolled out Anderson, waving his big hand, as if words were useless. “Only a corner of the great old U.S.!… What would the Germans say if they could look ou
t over this?… What do you say, Lenore?”
“Beautiful!” she replied, softly. “Like the rainbow in the sky — God’s promise of life!”
“An’, Kathie, what do you say?” went on Anderson.
“Some wheat-fields!” replied Kathleen, with an air of woman’s wisdom. “Fetch on your young wheat-sowers, dad, and I’ll pick out a husband.”
“An’ you, son?” finished Anderson, as if wistfully, yet heartily playing his last card. He was remembering Jim — the wild but beloved son — the dead soldier. He was fearful for the crowning hope of his years.
“As ye sow — so shall ye reap!” was Dorn’s reply, strong and thrilling. And Lenore felt her father’s strange, heart-satisfying content.
Twilight crept down around the old home on the hill.
Dorn was alone, leaning at the window. He had just strength to lean there, with uplifted head. Lenore had left him alone, divining his wish. As she left him there came a sudden familiar happening in his brain, like a snap-back, and the contending tide of gray forms — the Huns — rushed upon him. He leaned there at the window, but just the same he awaited the shock on the ramparts of the trench. A ferocious and terrible storm of brain, that used to have its reaction in outward violence, now worked inside him, like a hot wind that drove his blood. During the spell he fought out his great fight — again for the thousandth time he rekilled his foes. That storm passed through him without an outward quiver.
His Huns — charged again — bayoneted again — and he felt acute pain in the left arm that was gone. He felt the closing of the hand which was not there. His Huns lay in the shadow, stark and shapeless, with white faces upward — a line of dead foes, remorseless and abhorrent to him, forever damned by his ruthless spirit. He saw the boy slide off his bayonet, beyond recall, murdered by some evil of which Dorn had been the motion. Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn’s brain.