The Rising of the Tide

wing hardness and indifference toward the war to splinters. That sudden fierce flood, breaking at a point in the long line of which she had never heard, threatening

en, for the attack revealed to Sabinsport that she had a chosen side,

. There was no fear in Sabinsport's heart of anything that she made up her mind she must do, but there was a strong feeling that she ought not to have to go into this war, that it was not her business, that there ought to be a way out. It was clinging to this reluctance through a growing

d left the schools throughout the county, stenographers had left their desks, clerks had left the counters, and the farmers' daughters for miles around had flocked into the factory. This meant business for Sabinsport. Months before her housing capacity had outrun the demand. The onrush of strange men and women had raised a score of difficult and delicate problems; but it all meant money. Never had the shops of Sabinsport made so much, never had they charged so much. And this prosperity had made a new class in Sabinsport, a new kind of rich-the munition rich they called them. They succeeded the class whose fortunes had been made in the factories, a

crust, and that was the conviction that Germany was bound to win; and all they wanted, since this was so,

rror and destruction in the air and under the water. She stood surrounded by enemies, but enemies divided by seas, divided in command, untrained and unfurnished; sure, and daily more brutal and fearful because so sure. Sabinsport di

in? Of course there were those who said, "It will be our turn next

nt with any hopes of speedy victory. It would be long, long, long years-and what years! Young men, boys, old men, steadily marching to death, and always behind them others coming to fill their places-the earth ravaged of its manhood. High hearts, great loves, beautiful talents, beneficent powers, destroyed until the earth had been stripped of its best. Women, steadfast and brave, giving lovers, sons, friends-all that made life fruitful and lovely-giving them with no waver in their heroic souls,

of the struggle. Sabinsport would see its men march off to death and mutilation, would see its women silently growing old, its works of

what was going on in Gallipoli. The truth was the field of the war had become too wide, too complicated, for Sabinsport to follow. The war for her was the

ets and the winding of rivers, the look of shop fronts, the town square, its fountains and statues, the town promenade, the costumes of men and women, the cattle they prized, the horses they drove, the dogs at their heels-he saw them all. It had be

f the best friends of his Oxford days were there, and one by one he learned they would never return. The sandy, burning, treeless, waterless tongue of land, with its scanty footholds for the English and its sheltered pits for the enemy that from over their heads in the heights poured fire and death on them, to him seemed like some hideous dragon-a dragon fifty-seven miles long, carrying on back and in belly every weapon of destructi

ollowed as it was by much looking at fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends and the officers who piloted them-had given Patsy a keen sense of what Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnabilit

that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had seen-could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the highest tower of

constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium's relief, and tha

lty. It came at the very start of the diversion by the English, the diversion on the Somme, which gave the first real hope of

writhing on live wires, no hours of hideous, hopeless pain in the mire, uncared for, no slow dying-

tten back, "If anything should happen to me, Mr. Dick, I've fixed it so they'd tell you first, and I know you'll

age which came to him at daybreak and tried to frame words

ade him a wonderful soldier. He had been advanced, he was Lieutenant Flaherty by the spring of 1916, and Katie had a picture of him in her pocket, familiar, indeed, to most of Sabinsport because Ralph had printed it in the Argus. It had been copied in a city Sunday supplement, much to the joy of K

cause, to be sure, but would Mikey have found his way to France without him? he wondered now, as he sat miserably looking at the yellow sheet in his hand. Katie had long ago worked it out that it was the martia

oke of eight. He had only begun his dressing when he heard the distant click of her door. He could hear her singing when, later,

ing pan high over the stove. "Is it Mikey you've news of?" The dread anguish

ntle hand on her shoulder-"my

urt! He

dead,

s that fought him. It don't say how many he killed?" Then, dropping frying pan and bacon, and thro

the use of it all? Wha

strong and uplifting thing in it-the woman's brave effo

ind him, to let him wait on himself-she wouldn't hear of it, but went through the round. Never for an instant, Dick knew, did she have

orced to tell her that even that poor comfort was denied. Then again the apron went over her head, and

punishment could more than momentarily check. For originality and unexpectedness, no mischief known to Sabinsport's School Board and school teachers had ever touched Mikey's. It had a mirth-provoking quality, too, which made it hard to be dealt with adequately. He did "the last thing you'd think of"-the kind of thing which was passed from mouth to m

nd fighter," Katie often said, when townspeople congratulated her on the part he had taken with the Canadians. There was no doubt but that Sabinsport followed more carefully the famous fights of the English because Mikey Flaherty was with them. The Boys' Club, the War Board, the Argus, Katie's friends, Patsy at the High School and in the Women's Clubs-all watched for the rep

never, as long as she lived, cease to cultivate hatred of Germany and her kind of war. And then for days there would be coldness between them. Patsy would cry herself to sleep, and Ralph would

every now and then literally lift a member from some apparently somnolent family. 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 i

ntry. You have no right to go. Y

thing but its own wish moves, "I'm going. This is the biggest scra

y-one," she urged. "You must fini

Mother, why a fellow wants to get into the big things? And then, darn it, Mother, haven't you

er world-her own private affair. What right had the war to touch it? What could ail him that he should do t

hen a husband had delighted to serve. She had no weapons for fighting, she realized, because she had never needed them. To ask had been all she had ever done, and here was their lad, her son, failing her, defying her, unhear

bitter in her heart, and for the first time in her life did not find full satisfaction in her busy days of planning and buying for herself

, and your by never did the likes o' that. He told you square and you could say good-by and get his picture and go to the train and see him off. What'd you done if you'd got up in the mornin' and found him gone and nothin' but a letter left? God help me, Mrs. Sabins, it was the first time since he was laid in me arms the hour after he was born, that I hadn't waked him-and sometimes bate him to get him up to breakfast. To call him, and call him and get no answer, to go scoldin' in to shake him and find he'd niver been in the bed at all, and

phoned her, and she had hurried to the rectory where in Katie's kitchen the two women cried on each other's shoulders, entirely unconscious of the difference in s

morning soon after the first revolutionary outbreak in Greece. His face was ablaze with joy. "It's come," he said. "It's come-no more kings for Greece-we'll have our Repu

eparted twenty-four hours later, leaving a fruit store on Dick's hands-a fruit store with a primitive set of accounts in

ght," said Ralph when Dick told him of his new care. "

Argus-to join the Canadians-the English, the Foreign Legion. They were of many nations-and months later-long after their going had been forgotten save by a few, word sometimes came from them by more or less accident to their friends-"Lost a leg at Vimy"; "Decorated at Verd

at not even the coming of a war of her own detached her interest. Indeed, it was a little difficult for her to take the trouble with Mexico very seriously, not being able to stretch her imagination to the point where Mexico could be anything more serious to the United States than a nuisance. Yet it did make a difference in thi

ted when they repeated the incident to him. "That was what returning Americans never ceased to marvel at in French and Belgian women-their quiet answer to every hardship, every sorrow-'C'est la guerre.'" That was what had amazed Patsy

like sickness and death, storms and pests? Did all natural people take war this way, neither revolting nor lamenting? Could it be that Americans, trained to despise and hate war as a lower form of energy, an appeal only for those p

Sabinsport took the successive steps of the Mexican difficulty, he gathered more and more hope. She watched every day's events, discussed, criticized, condemned, approved. She knew as much of the essentials as the metropolis, though, as he realized, the m

Coast that felt that all loyalty and understanding was centered in itself. She had her losses. The little grocer never came back-shot in a riot. Two farmers' boys d

abinsport whether we went into the war-not on the Administration, not on Congress, not on the angry, indignant voices that hurled cries o