Sabinsport

“ Getting out the daily issue of the Sabinsport Argus was, as he often said, “Some job.” To be your own editor-in-chief, leader writer, advertising agent and circulation manager for the only daily in a town of 15,000 or more means hard work and a lot of it. Ralph loved it, “ate it up,” they said in the shop. It was only when calm settled over Sabinsport and he felt no violent reaction from his spirited attacks on town iniquities that he was depressed. This was one of these periods. The year before he had fought and won for the Progressive Party of the District a smashing victory. ”

“ Love makes one sensitive—sensitive to fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan, hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its loftiest aims and hopes. ”

“ And Otto didn’t understand, and Sabinsport continued to irritate and humiliate him.
The war coming when he was still in this mood aroused his enthusiasm. Now the world would have a demonstration of what greatness in a nation meant. They would see again on earth a real empire rise. So filled was Otto with this sense of the magnificence of German destiny, he felt no criticism for anything that Germany could do, no doubt of anything she said. If she invaded Belgium it was because France was already about to do so, and she beat her to it. ”

“ Poor little Sabinsport! Born only to know and to desire her own corner of the earth, wishing only that her people should be free to work out their lives in peace—she had a long road to travel before her mind could grasp the mighty problems the Great War had put up to the peoples of the earth, before her heart could feel as her own the passions and aspirations that burned and drove onward the scores of big and little peoples that fate had brought into the struggle.
But there was no problem in Belgium’s case. Germany had sworn to respect her neutrality and she had broken her oath. ”

“ This crust over Sabinsport’s soul had more and more discouraged Dick through the winter. Hard as it was, however, he held on, in face of the town’s settled conviction, to his belief in final victory. He simply could not see either England or France giving up. It wasn’t possible. They weren’t made that way. They would die and die and die but not surrender; and it was this inner conviction that amounted to knowledge that was both his support and his torture, for he did not fool himself for a moment with any hopes of speedy victory. ”

“ It is not what he says, but it’s a very real thing, and everybody gets it, everybody in Sabinsport. When he dropped down there among us at the time of the accident at the ‘Emma,’ it was to him that all those poor souls turned, not to us. Jake Mulligan feels just as I do about it, and so does Tom Sabins, and so does Nikola and so does John Starrett, and even the Rev. Mr. Pepper. He’s a man—a man that seems to touch everybody. I suppose he is what you call human—I don’t know, but I do know that Sabinsport is a vastly better place to live in because of Dick Ingraham. ”

“ Going to Europe was still an adventure. There had been a time when Sabinsport numbered so few people that had been to Europe that she had formed a society, “The Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe.” It had not lasted long, for she had a sense of humor which saved her from keeping alive that which savored of snobbery, and the Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe died a quiet and early death. ”

“ Our fathers were men of thrift and foresight, and the war will hardly disturb us. But there are few in Sabinsport like us. I should say it was as much the duty of Sabinsport business men to concern themselves about orders as it is the business of Paris to put in munitions. No work and you’ll soon have no town.”
“It is a rich town,” challenged Ralph. “There’s lot of money here—they could keep things going if they would.”
“Rich when there are orders to fill, and only then. Don’t be unreasonable. You know this town lives by work.” ”

“ I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind and strength to helping all men and women in this town to understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader ”

“ With all their homesickness and their need of friends and life, we must get ready for them.”
“But how?” said Dick. “What shall we do?”
“Well,” said Nancy, practically, “we women must have our canteen ready for their passing through.”
But all that Nancy could say at the start had no effect upon Sabinsport. Nothing in her experience could give her an inkling of what it would mean to have a camp of 50,000 men twenty-five miles away. The distance was prohibitive. What would they have to do with Sabinsport, with the City within five miles? ”

“ They were the best of friends, this eager, active, confident young editor and this cool, humorous-eyed, thoughtful young parson. Wide apart in birth, in type of education, in their contacts with the world, they were close in a love of decency and justice, in contempt for selfishness and vulgarity. Both were accidents in Sabinsport, and so looked at the town in a more or less detached way. This fact, their instinctive trust and liking for each other, and the clinching force of the great tragedy in which they had first met had made them friends. ”

“ My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid out for myself for this town.
“I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making what he thought would be a perfect world ”

“ He grew sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly, chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure.
Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack on Verdun—and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone now in his anxiety. Everybody cared. ”

“ But that which combined to make life in Sabinsport most barren and flat to Otto was his feeling that there was no greatness, no sense of a magnificent and mysterious future coming to the country. The people were not working toward a definite national thing. Men and women seemed to think of nothing more magnificent than to gather and spend wealth. The idea of subordinating a personal aim for a national aim, the thing which so dignified German earning, saving and spending, was unheard of here. Here you lived for yourself, not for your nation. ”

“ There was Young Tom, as all Sabinsport called the eighteen-year-old son of Tom and Mary Sabins. Young Tom had come home from school in the fall of 1915 and announced that he had volunteered for ambulance service in France, and that if they didn’t do the square thing and let him go, he’d run away. And they knew he would do it. Tom took it squarely and with inward pride, but Mary Sabins’ world toppled on its foundations when she heard his ultimatum and realized that for some reason unknown to herself her husband actually sympathized with the boy.
“But why? Why? It’s not your country. ”

“ The loves of men and women bent before the flood. Patsy had been caught in the onrush. She could not escape—would not, though her heart was breaking over Ralph’s contempt for her great, consuming passion. What she did not realize at all, and what Dick could not make her see, was that Ralph himself had in these last years been swept away by a splendid, unselfish ideal akin to her own, that all his efforts in Sabinsport had been to realize his hopes, that the war had stripped him of his cause, and that he had not as yet found his way out of the ruins. ”

“ He began to take the banking business very seriously indeed, to feel that he could carry home something important and serve not only Sabinsport but the country at large, which at that moment was wallowing in a terrible banking muddle over which his German friends held up their hands in shocked amazement.
As time went on, Otto began to take other things more seriously, and gradually there crept over him a sense of something stupendous going on in men’s thoughts and souls. People were not living for the present in Germany as at home ”

“ To his surprise, Ralph said nothing in defense of Otto.
“He isn’t neutral. He is for Germany, just as Patsy and you are for the Allies. Nobody in Sabinsport is really neutral as far as I can make out. This town is almost solidly against Germany, and you know it. The opposition is to our having anything to do with the infernal business. Sabinsport doesn’t believe in war or doesn’t believe in this war for us, and that’s where I am—now. I’m for the people. ”

“ And the Reverend Richard Ingraham’s days were full of trouble.
There was Ralph Gardner—his dearest friend. They were not getting on at all. The war had broken in on Ralph’s schemes for regenerating Sabinsport at a moment when her open indifference to her own salvation was making him furious and obstinate. It had cut off all possible chance for a campaign. It filled the air with new sympathies and feelings. It thrust rudely out of field matters to which men had been giving their lives. ”

“ She was making money. The whole face of Sabinsport had been changed in the year and a half since the war began. The great wire mill had trebled its plant and was running in three shifts, day and night. The old linoleum factory around the Point had never stopped growing. There were 2,000 girls there now, the pick of Sabinsport and all the country round. When you can make twenty to forty dollars a week, for eight hours’ work, as these girls were doing, you can get pretty nearly any wage-earning woman that you want, so Sabinsport had discovered. ”

“ Rupert Littman had been only ten years old when he and his father, a revolutionist of 1848, obliged to fly for his life, had settled in Sabinsport. The history of father and son was as familiar from that day to this as that of the Sabins, and Cowders and Mulligans and McCullons. Otto, however, was not so well known. He had been much away—four years in college, six in Germany studying banking and business methods, only eighteen months at home, and in these eighteen months he had not been able to adjust himself to the town. ”

“ Dick found indignation, however, qualified strongly by the suspicion that the Lusitania was armed. The doubt was a hang-over from her inherited mistrust of English ways and English dealings. “Probably was carrying munitions,” men would say. “Probably did have guns.”
Then, too, Sabinsport found it hard to believe that it was necessary, and therefore right, for Americans to go to Europe during the war, unless they went to enlist or on errands of mercy. You see, Sabinsport’s idea of business was limited, provincial. ”

“ And then suddenly the American army did appear. There was Cantigny, and then, in the very nick of time, the last moment, when the wearied and overwhelmed French were actually in retreat, our boys came—Sabinsport’s boys; and, careless of the long journeys which had brought them to the spot—the sleepless hours, they broke over the foe, beat him down, beat him back, followed, defied, laughed at his boasted formations, his impregnable trenches, his deadly nests of guns. It was true, as the most experienced and hardened French cried, Rien les arreste—Nothing stops them! Nothing stops them! ”

“ Now Patsy was Sabinsport’s pride.
She was an example, so High Town said, of what a girl could make of herself, though as a matter of fact better backing than Patsy had for her achievement it would be hard to find. Her father and mother were of the reliable Scotch stock which had come a hundred years before to the country near Sabinsport. Here Patsy’s grandfather had settled and prospered. Here her father had been born and here he still carried on the original McCullon farm. He had married a “native” like himself, and like himself well-to-do. ”

“ All human thought and feeling he held to be worm-eaten by self-interest, and he spent his leisure, of which he had much, for he was a bachelor with a law practice which he had studiously kept on a leisure basis, in unearthing reasons for mistrusting the undertakings of his fellowmen. The war gave him a wonderful chance. His was the first voice raised in Sabinsport in defense of the invasion of Belgium. His defense of Germany and his contempt for England were Shavian in their skill. ”

“ You know perfectly well how little help either man has had from the old timers. Everything that is modern here has come through those two men. Moreover, they love Sabinsport. Did you ever hear of Jake’s celebration when the water works were finished in the ’90’s? He is never done talking about the water works. His wife used to say he celebrated them every time he turned a tap—water for turning a tap to a man who had carried every gallon in buckets from a spring by the barn for years and years! Pure water to a man who had seen a town he loved swept by typhoid! ”