the Desert Of Wheat (2001) Read online

  "Begin," said Dorn, with a light of pride and love and wonder in his gaze.

  "Leave that for some other time," interposed Anderson. "Son, would it surprise you if I'd tell you that I've switched a little in my ideas about the I. W. W.?"

  "No," replied Dorn.

  "Well, things happen. What made me think hard was the way that government man got results from the I. W. W. in the lumber country. You see, the government had to have an immense amount of timber for ships, an' spruce for aeroplanes. Had to have it quick. An' all the lumbermen an' loggers were I. W. W.--or most of them. Anyhow, all the strikin' lumbermen last summer belonged to the I. W. W. These fellows believed that under the capitalistic order of labor the workers an' their employers had nothin' in common, an' the government was hand an' glove with capital. Now this government official went up there an' convinced the I. W. W. that the best interest of the two were identical. An' he got the work out of them, an' the government got the lumber. He dealt with them fairly. Those who were on the level he paid high an' considered their wants. Those who were crooked he punished accordin' to their offense.

  An' the innocent didn't have to suffer with the guilty.

  "That deal showed me how many of the I. W. W. could be handled. An' we've got to reckon with the I. W. W. Most all the farm-hands in the country belong to it. This summer I'll give the square harvesters what they want, an' that's a big come-down for me. But I won't stand any monkey-bizness from sore-headed disorganizers. If men want to work they shall have work at big pay. You will follow out this plan up in the Bend country. We'll meet this labor union half-way. After the war there may come trouble between labor an capital. It begins to seem plain to me that men who work hard ought to share somethin' of the profits. If that doesn't settle the trouble, then we'll know we're up against an outfit with socialist an' anarchist leaders. Time enough then to resort to measures I regret we practised last summer."

  "Anderson, you're fine--you're as big as the hills!" burst out Dorn.

  "But you know there was bad blood here last summer. Did you ever get proof that German money backed the I. W. W. to strike and embarrass our government?"

  "No. But I believe so, or else the I. W. W. leaders took advantage of a critical time. I'm bound to say that now thousands of I. W. W. laborers are loyal to the United States, and that made me switch."

  "I'll deal with them the same way," responded Dorn, with fervor.

  Then Lenore interrupted their discussion, and, pleading that Dorn was quite worn out from excitement and exertion, she got her father to leave the room.

  * * * * *

  The following several days Lenore devoted to the happy and busy task of packing what she wanted to take to Dorn's home. She had set the date, but had reserved the pleasure of telling him. Anderson had agreed to her plan and decided to accompany them.

  "I'll take the girls," he said. "It'll be a fine ride for them. We'll stay in the village overnight an' come back home next day.... Lenore, it strikes me sudden-like, your leavin'.... What will become of me?"

  All at once he showed the ravages of pain and loss that the last year had added to his life of struggle. Lenore embraced him and felt her heart full.

  "Dad, I'm not leaving you," she protested. "He'll get well up there--find his balance sooner among those desert wheat-hills. We will divide our time between the two places. Remember, you can run up there any day. Your interests are there now. Dad, don't think of it as separation. Kurt has come into our family--and we're just going to be away some of the time."

  Thus she won back a smile to the worn face.

  "We've all got a weak spot," he said, musingly. "Mine is here--an' it's a fear of growin' old an' bein' left alone. That's selfish. But I've lived, an' I reckon I've no more to ask for."

  Lenore could not help being sad in the midst of her increasing happiness. Joy to some brought to others only gloom! Life was sunshine and storm--youth and age.

  This morning she found Kathleen entertaining Dorn. This was the second time the child had been permitted to see him, and the immense novelty had not yet worn off. Kathleen was a hero-worshiper. If she had been devoted to Dorn before his absence, she now manifested symptoms of complete idolatry. Lenore had forbidden her to question Dorn about anything in regard to the war. Kathleen never broke her promises, but it was plain that Dorn had read the mute, anguished wonder and flame in her eyes when they rested upon his empty sleeve, and evidently had told her things. Kathleen was white, wide-eyed, and beautiful then, with all a child's imagination stirred.

  "I've been telling Kathie how I lost my arm," explained Dorn.

  "I hate Germans! I hate war!" cried Kathleen, passionately.

  "My dear, hate them always," said Dorn.

  When Kathleen had gone Lenore asked Dorn if he thought it was right to tell the child always to hate Germans.

  "Right!" exclaimed Dorn, with a queer laugh. Every day now he showed signs of stronger personality. "Lenore, what I went through has confused my sense of right and wrong. Some day perhaps it will all come clear.

  But, Lenore, all my life, if I live to be ninety, I shall hate Germans."

  "Oh, Kurt, it's too soon for you to--to be less narrow, less passionate," replied Lenore, with hesitation. "I understand. The day will come when you'll not condemn a people because of a form of government--of military class."

  "It will never come," asserted Dorn, positively. "Lenore, people in our country do not understand. They are too far away from realities. But I was six months in France. I've seen the ruined villages, thousands of refugees--and I've met the Huns at the front. I _know_ I've seen the realities. In regard to this war I can only feel. You've got to go over there and see for yourself before you realize. You _can_ understand this--that but for you and your power over me I'd be a worn-out, emotionally _burnt_ out man. But through you I seem to be reborn. Still, I shall hate Germans all my life, and in the after-life, what ever that may be. I could give you a thousand reasons. One ought to suffice.

  You've read, of course, about the regiment of Frenchmen called Blue Devils. I met some of them--got friendly with them. They are great--beyond words to tell! One of them told me that when his regiment drove the Huns out of his own village he had found his mother disemboweled, his wife violated and murdered, his sister left a maimed thing to become the mother of a Hun, his daughter carried off, and his little son crippled for life! ... These are cold facts. As long as I live I will never forget the face of that Frenchman when he told me. Had he cause to hate the Huns? Have I?... I saw all that in the faces of those Huns who would have killed me if they could."

  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."