"Well, what now?" He spoke impatiently.
"I"m going to enlist; I thought I would tell you."
Sharon pointed the heavy brows at him with a thumb and uttered a disparaging "Humph!" Then he appeared to forget the announcement, and pressed again on the self-starter, listening above its shrill song for the deeper rumble of the engine. This did not ensue, and he shifted his heel, turning a plaintive eye upon the young man.
"She don"t seem to excite," he said. "I"ve tried and tried, and I can"t excite her."
It was an old, old story to Wilbur Cowan.
"Press her again," he directed. Sharon pressed and the other raptly listened. "Ignition," he said.
He lifted the hood on one side and with a pair of pliers manipulated what Sharon was never to know as anything but her gizzard, though the surgeon, as he delicately wrought, murmured something about platinum points.
"Try her!" Sharon tried her.
"Now she excites!" he exploded, gleefully, as the hum of the motor took up the shrill whir of the self-starter. He stopped the thing and bent a reproachful gaze upon Wilbur.
"Every one else leaving me--even that Elihu t.i.tus. I never thought you would, after the way we"ve stood together in this town. I had a right to expect something better from you. I"d like to know how I"m goin" to get along without you. You show a lot of grat.i.tude, I must say."
"Well, I thought--"
"Oh, I knew you"d go--I expected that!"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"You wouldn"t been any good if you hadn"t. Even that Elihu t.i.tus went."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. He had been waiting to ask Sharon"s opinion about the only troubling element in his decision. This seemed the moment. "You don"t suppose--you don"t think perhaps the war will be stopped or anything, just as I get over there?"
Sharon laboured with a choice bit of sarcasm.
"No, I guess it"ll take more"n you to stop it, even with that Elihu t.i.tus going along. Of course, some spy may get the news to "em that you"ve started, and they may say, "Why keep up the struggle if this Cowan boy"s goin" in against us?" But my guess is they"ll brazen it out for a month or so longer. Of course they"ll be scared stiff."
Wilbur grinned at him, then spoke gravely.
"You know what I mean--Merle. He says the plain people will never allow this war to go on, because they"ve been tricked into it by Wall Street or something. I read it in his magazine. They"re working against the war night and day, he says. Well, all I mean, I"d hate to go over there and be seasick and everything and then find they had stopped it."
Intently, grimly, Sharon climbed from his car. His short, fat leg went back and he accurately kicked an empty sprinkling can across the floor.
It was a satisfying object to kick; it made a good noise and came to a clattering rest on its dented side. It was so satisfying that with another kick he sent the can bounding through an open door.
"Gave it the second barrel, didn"t you?" said Wilbur. Sharon grinned now.
"Just a letter to your brother," he explained. Then he became profanely impa.s.sioned. "Fudge! Fudge and double fudge! Scissors and white ap.r.o.ns!
Prunes and apricots! No! That war won"t be stopped by any magazine! Go on--fight your fool head off! Don"t let any magazine keep you back!"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"They can"t stop the war, because there are too many boys like you all over this land. Trick or no trick, that"s what they"re up against.
You"ll all fight--while they"re writing their magazines. Your reactions are different. That"s a word I got from the dirty thing--and from that brother of yours. He gets a lot of use out of that word--always talking about his reactions. Just yesterday I said to him: "Take care of your actions and your reactions will take care of themselves." He don"t cotton to me. I guess I never b.u.t.tered him up with praise any too much.
His languageousness gets on me. He"s got Gideon and Harvey D. on a hot griddle, too, though they ain"t lettin" on. Here the Whipples have always gone to war for their country--Revolutionary War and 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American--Harvey D. was in that. Didn"t do much fighting, but he was belligerent enough. And now this son of his sets back and talks about his reactions! What I say--he"s a Whipple in name only."
"He"s educated," protested Wilbur, quick to defend this brother, even should he cheat him out of the good plain fighting he meant to do.
"Educated!" Sharon imitated a porpoise without knowing it. "Educated out of books! All any of that rabble rout of his knows is what they read secondhand. They don"t know people. Don"t know capitalists. Don"t even know these wage slaves they write about. That"s why they can"t stop the war. They may be educated, but you"re enlightened. They know more books, but you know more life in a minute than they"ll ever know--you got a better idea of the what-for in this world. Let "em write! You fight! If it rests on that hairy bunch to stop the war you"ll get a bellyful of fighting. They"re just a noisy fringe of buzzers round the real folks of this country."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. "I thought I"d ask."
"Well, now you know. Shove off!"
"Yes, sir." Sharon"s tone changed to petulance.
"That"s right, and leave me here to farm twenty-five hundred acres all by myself, just when I was going to put in tractors. That"s the kind you are--just a fool country-town boy, with a head full of grand notions.
Well, somebody"s got to raise food for the world. She"s goin" short pretty soon or I miss my guess. Somebody"s got to raise bread and meat.
All right, leave me here to do the dirty work while you flourish round over there seein" the world and havin" a good time. I"m sick of the sight of you and your airs. Get out!"
"Yes, sir."
"When you leaving?"
"To-morrow night--six-fifty-eight."
"Sooner the better!"
"Yes, sir."
Sharon turned back to the car, grumbling incoherent phrases. He affected to busy himself with the mechanism that had just been readjusted, looking at it wisely, thumbing a valve, though with a care to leave things precisely as they were.
That afternoon as Sharon made an absorbed progress along River Street he jostled Winona Penniman, who with even a surpa.s.sing absorption had been staring into the window of one of those smart shops marking Newbern"s later growth. Whereas boots and shoes had been purchased from an establishment advertising simple Boots and Shoes, they were now sought by people of the right sort from this new shop which was labelled the elite Bootery.
Winona had halted with a.s.sumed carelessness before its attractively dressed window displaying a colourful array of satin dancing slippers with high heels and bejewelled toes. Winona"s a.s.sumption of carelessness had been meant to deceive pa.s.sers-by into believing that she looked upon these gauds with a censorious eye, and not as one meaning flagrantly to purchase of them. Her actual dire intention was nothing to flaunt in the public gaze. Nor did she mean to voice her wishes before a shopful of people who might consider them ambiguous.
Four times she had pa.s.sed the door of the shop, waiting for a dull moment in its traffic. Now but two women were left, and they seemed to be waiting only for change. Her resolution did not falter; she was merely practising a trained discretion. She was going to buy a pair of satin dancing slippers though the whole world should look upon her as lost. Too long, she felt, had she dwelt among the untrodden ways. As she had confided to her journal, the placid serenity of her life had become a sea of mad unrest. Old moorings had been wrenched loose; she floated with strange tides. And Wilbur Cowan, who was going to war, had invited her to be present that evening at the opening of Newbern"s new and gorgeous restaurant, where the diners, between courses and until late after dinner, would dance to the strains of exotic and jerky music, precisely as they did in the awful city.
Winona had not even debated a refusal. The boy should be gratified. Nor did she try to convince herself that her motive was wholly altruistic.
She had suddenly wished to mingle in what she was persuaded would be a scene of mad revelry. She had definitely abandoned the untrodden ways.
She thought that reading about war might have unsettled her ideals.
Anyway, they were unsettled. She was going to this place of the gay night life--and she was going right!
It was while she still waited, perturbed but outwardly cool, that the absorbed Sharon Whipple brushed her shoulder. She wondered if her secret purpose had been divined. But Sharon apparently was engrossed by other matters than the descent into frivolity of one who had long been austere.
"Well," he said, beaming on her, "our boy is going over."
Winona was relieved.
"Yes, he"s off, but he"ll come back safe."