The Rising of the Tide

own since the day the news had come of the attack on Verdun. He knew then that he, like Sabinsport,

es for which Europe was struggling. The minds of his readers were there, not in Sabinsport. It was so even in the mills and factories, where the men and women of a dozen nationalities watched the contest and not his efforts to fight what he insisted was their battle. What he did not sense was that these grave laboring people were slowly realizing that their battle was being fought overseas. They

rty was in abusing it. Not that he was any more willing to yield the nation's rights under international law than his Progressive leader, but he believed with all his obstinate, passionate soul that these right

drawer under his big glass in front of his chair, his repository for years for whatever interested him in public affairs. And if anybody questioned or mis-stated either the position of Germany or the United States, Sam would stop, whatever the condition of his client's face, and pull out the d

and then, in the spring of 1916, when the town's heart was still big with anxiety over the fate of Paris, came the sinking of the Sussex, and the cynical declaration of one of

ar. But Dick had felt at the time that Sabinsport, as a whole, would have been much better satisfied if the victory over Germany in the matter of the Sussex had been a victory of guns rather than of notes. Certainly Un

alk one wouldn't dream that you had ever heard of it. Why, Patsy, we're the only nation that has won a victory over Germany since

ecause the English were getting ahead of her. She'll com

forget Belgium? You don't know yet, nor does

ore vehemently, while Ralph the next day published an editorial in the Argu

urse of i

exhibit of its unpopularity, the reception the settlement of our struggle with Germany has met surpasses anything that I remember in our history. We were and had bee

an a century to do away with. Civilization means doing away with it-substituting reason for force, brains for fists, ballots for bullets. Vociferous America subscribes to this ambition. Indeed she says that it is for

ave ever had a victory of diplomacy that compared with it. Englan

rary to the laws of nations by arbitration as we have done, we had forced it by the use of

and we have to fight.' Sure-but compacts settled by war do not always hold. War means more war. Italy could not be held from the present horror. She remembered earlier wars. This war settles nothing. Whe

he earth are firmer because of our victory. But greater still in far-reaching importance is the demonstration of what arbitration can do. It will make all civilized methods easie

don't like civilization. We prefer to fight. We are afraid, too, of what other peoples that do and are fighting will think of us. They will think we a

unpopular with vo

told Dick. "I shall never see Ralph Gardner again. He mig

ver his article. "Emotionalism has made her harsh, cruel, unseeing. It is horrifying that any woma

ne anger towards those that caused the hurt, and she wants to fight them, to hurt them in turn. There are as many women as men in Sabinsport

twentieth century. Women never will support war. I tell you, Patsy is not normal. Her who

. "Jealous of Belgium! Lord, wa

s 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

ion in June again sound the high note it had struck four years before. He went to Chicago with a despairing hope that he would there hear some hearty, strong expression of faith

s military, all that is modern in it is a reminiscence of 1912. Don't deceive yourself. Your party at least is practical e

so great a body had had faith. There he saw shattered his hope of speedily building into party gospel new and kindlier and mo

from Chicago s

t meant come true, in Sabinsport that I've worked. It's all over. I've no leader and no party. I don't know where I am in the world. I'm utterly lost. What's the matter with me? Tell me square, as you se

fection in these long months when the two had been so asunder in aim and in thought. Dick had taken their differences for granted, he had never dispute

question, "What's the matter with

so much mischief in this country. So far you have been unwilling to admit that any other form of evil existed on earth and the only way you were willing to fight this was your own way. You had selected your enemy, you had laid out your weapons. You would not consent to see other enemies or other weapons. You have considered e

at is Germany's use for all her social and industrial machinery. It carries with it no honest effort to appraise the value of the man's contribution and see that he gets it; no determination to give him a free voice and a free vote; no attempt to arouse him to exercise his opinion, get from himself whatever he has in him that may contribute to the whole. It fits him into a scheme; all of who

oble, however beneficent, may not be whisked out of the way like a toy. What is your way or mine to the sweating world? It turns up now one side and now another in its endless war for righteousness-it asks for this method now, and now for that; to-day for war by words, and to-morrow for war with fists. You can't choose either where you'll fight for righteousness or how, Ralph; you can only say you will fight for it-that much is in your power-but where? Insist on your place, and before you know it you are alone without helper or enemy-the fight has chan

y behind. You say they're defeated-lost-that all the betterments you and your friends had dreamed are ripped from the world. Nonsense! What's going on in England and France? The recognition of the necessity of accepting as government practices many a thing you've been turning Sabinsport upside down to get. This war is righteous in aim, and all righteousness will be shoved ahead as it goes on. That's what's happ

the kind that climbs easily

things you've been interested in; forge

"I don't have to do

formula you have laid down. Incantations are useless now, Ralph. You may cry 'Peace! Peace!' until you swoon, but you'll cry it to unhearing ears. You can say your formul? backward and forward and wave your divining rod as you will, but it won't work. There is no magic wand that is goin

as won. I've known it would some day. Don't expect much of

and had been forced by merciless, insistent, continuing facts to admit that war was on the earth. Neither their denials nor their horror turned the Great Invader. He came on as if they were not. T

ow to think of more. Patsy's wrath at being classed with the uncivilized, as she insisted she had been, had not cooled, and Ralph, so long as he was engrossed with his hope of revival of progres

out of Sabinsport's festivities if you do sto

holding a man who was once her friend

over these childish breaks more th

six years before and his first meeting with Patsy McCullon soon after she had taken the position of "Assistant to the Principal" in the high school. He remembered exactly how she looked as she came briskly into Mary Sabins' handsome living-room-a straight, slender figure, brimming with life and curiosity-dark, clear eyes, dark waving hair, a nose with just a suggestion of a tilt, and a mouth all smiles and good humor. He remembered how full she was of her new work-to the p

onal adventures in her school with as lively ones of what was going on in Sabinsport's streets and factories. If she talked school reform, he talked labor reform; if she urged improved laboratorie

pitality and with what entire absence of pretension Patsy had entertained her friends in the ample farm house, giving them all the gay country fall pleasures, quite to the horror of High Town, who would have loved to have opened its really luxurious houses and set out its really lovely china. Patsy had taken Dick and himself as her major-domos in her festivit

enough to support any fight he would make, no matter how costly in advertising and circulation; there had been the perplexity about how and where to attack next the duo of rascals, as he beli

your old reform victory has improved things. Of course the franchises ought to be in the h

g woman. That was the way he felt about her when she went abroad in June of 1914, he told himself, as he idly fin

d every thought of pleasure and profit. It was the weak and broken men and women of that over-run land that filled her heart. And how lovely she had grown under pity and labor for others. He had stepped into a church one night, the first winter of the war, where she was telling the story of Belgium. He had done it in spite of himself, he recalled.

turned to rage that she should be giving her strength to these distant orphans when, as

as all the misery in America to the bottomless well of misery in Europe! And what a difference in trying to do away with misery in a land of peace and in one of war! What was al

is self-centered narrowness. He would tell her why he was so unreasonable, so boorish. He wanted his own way in the world and resented a war that blocked it. He wouldn't see a noble reason for the war because the war interfered wit

d come for him to take a hand in the affairs of the two. "They must find out that they are in love," he said quite decidedly to himself, "and who's to h

re she thought Ralph might be, and as he was doing the same, the two had had no meetings. That must be stopped. Dick called Patsy up. "I'm giving

tuttered Patsy.

, and I don't believe I have a right to tell you. Just

e. I can't bear to have Ral

ng a woman's curiosity and possibly suspicion over the sorrows of a man in whom she was interested, was an effective means of k

him. You know how

e does not. He comes

n I have that he won't fly into a rage and berat

responsible for R

-e-

"if I'm interfering with the work of the

us office casually suggested that he was giving a party and that Ralph wa

I'm coming?" Ralp

, and she

why," refl

vagaries of Patsy's min

entleness itself in her questions and answers to Ralph. The girl was really touched by the change in the looks and the manner of the young man. He was paler than she had ever seen him. It was not unbecoming to the big fellow, but it was a little pathetic-to Patsy. He was quieter, less talkative, not at all assertive. "Something has gone out of him," Patsy told herself. What was it? And it was not st

r if it choked him. But somehow he found himself talking quite freely of things he was interested in and which Patsy herself had led him to. He talked well and reasonably of the munition plants,

in that active little brain something was revolving-something about him. But never in his life would he have figured out that Patsy, as she sat quietly dis

particularly noticeable here, five hundred miles from the sea. It included files of Vorwaerts, of Le Temps, Le Matin, London Times, of political weeklies of many countries, besides scores and scores of pamphlets and books. Again and again in the past two year

saw him pick up book after book-criticize, ask Dick's opinion, borrow, say, "I've finished this"-"I want to read that." Where was the pugnacious, intolerant, scoffing Ralph she had fought with

hadn't found himself. He was so made that as long as his faith in himself wavered, as he had no fighting objective, he could not press his interest in Patsy. She seemed as inaccessible as a

id; more eagerly did they meet, more reluctantly part. Even Mary Sabins, who before the war had harbored an idea that Patsy a

and Ralph are falling in love,

paternal feeling. It was only now and then that a jealous pang seized

so, I am convinced, if there had been in Sabinsport a single girl known to Dick that had the mingling of charm and spirit that was needed to win him. Surely he would have followed her as the needle the pole; but she was not there. The girl that did draw him was a girl overseas, a girl at whose name Sabinsport raised its eyebrows, a girl whose fathe