Ramsey Milholland

B >> Booth Tarkington >> Ramsey Milholland


But Ramsey shook his head. "I didn't do it. I wouldn't ever have done
anything just on account of her talkin' that way. She shut the door on
me--it was a good while ago."

"She did! What for?"

"Well, I'm not much of a talker, you know, Fred," said Ramsey, staring
at the pen he played with. "I'm not much of anything, for that matter,
prob'ly, but I--well--I--"

"You what?"

"Well, I had to tell her I didn't feel about things the way she did.
She'd thought I had, all along, I guess. Anyway, it made her hate me
or something, I guess; and she called it all off. I expect there wasn't
much to call off, so far as she was concerned, anyhow." He laughed
feebly. "She told me I better go and enlist."

"Pleasant of her!" Fred muttered. "Especially as we know what she thinks
enlisting means." He raised his voice cheerfully. "Well, that's settled;
and, thank God, old Mr. Bernstorff's on his way to his sweet little
vine-clad cottage home! They're getting guns on the ships, and the big
show's liable to commence any day. We can hold up our heads now, and
we're going to see some great times, old Ramsey boy! It's hard on the
home folks--Gosh! I don't like to think of that! And I guess it's going
to be hard on a lot of boys that haven't understood what it's all about,
and hard on some that their family affairs, and business, and so on,
have got 'em tied up so it's hard to go--and of course there's plenty
that just can't, and some that aren't husky enough--but the rest of
us are going to have the big time in our lives. We got an awful lot to
learn; it scares me to think of what I don't know about being any
sort of a rear-rank private. Why, it's a regular _profession_, like
practising law, or selling for a drug house on the road. Golly! Do you
remember how we talked about that, 'way back in freshman year, what
we were going to do when we got out of college? You were going to
be practising law, for instance, and I--well, f'r instance, remember
Colburn; he was going to be a doctor, and he did go to some medical
school for one year. Now he's in the Red Cross, somewhere in _Persia_.
Golly!"

He paused to digest this impossibility, then chattered briskly on.
"Well, there's _one_ good old boy was with our class for a while, back
in freshman year; I bet we won't see him in any good old army! Old
rough-neck Linski that you put the knob on his nose for. Tommie Hopper
says he saw him last summer in Chicago soapboxin', yellin' his head off
cussin' every government under the sun, but mostly ours and the Allies',
you bet, and going to run the earth by revolution and representatives
of unskilled labour immigrants, nobody that can read or write allowed
to vote, except Linski. Tommie Hopper says he knows all about Linski;
he never did a day's work in his life--too busy trying to get the
workingmen stirred up against the people that exploit 'em! Tommie says
he had a big crowd to hear him, though, and took up quite a little money
for a 'cause' or something. Well, let him holler! I guess we can attend
to him when we get back from over yonder. By George, old Ram, I'm
gettin' kind of floppy in the gills!" He administered a resounding slap
to his comrade's shoulder. "It certainly looks as if our big days were
walking toward us!"


He was right. The portentous days came on apace, and each one brought a
new and greater portent. The faces of men lost a driven look besetting
them in the days of badgered waiting, and instead of that heavy
apprehension one saw the look men's faces must have worn in 1776 and
1861, and the history of the old days grew clearer in the new. The
President went to the Congress, and the true indictment he made there
reached scoffing Potsdam with an unspoken prophecy somewhat chilling even
to Potsdam, one guesses--and then through an April night went almost
quietly the steady work: we were at war with Germany.

The bugles sounded across the continent; drums and fifes played up and
down the city streets and in town and village squares and through the
countrysides. Faintly in all ears there was multitudinous noise like
distant, hoarse cheering... and a sound like that was what Dora Yocum
heard, one night, as she sat lonely in her room. The bugles and fifes
and drums had been heard about the streets of the college town, that
day, and she thought she must die of them, they hurt her so, and now to
be haunted by this imaginary cheering--

She started. Was it imaginary?

She went downstairs and stood upon the steps of the dormitory in the
open air. No; the cheering was real and loud. It came from the direction
of the railway station, and the night air surged and beat with it.

Below her stood the aged janitor of the building, listening. "What's the
cheering for?" she asked, remembering grimly that the janitor was one of
her acquaintances who had not yet stopped "speaking" to her. "What's the
matter?"

"It's a good matter," the old man answered. "I guess there must be a
big crowd of 'em down there. One of our students enlisted to-day, and
they're givin' him a send-off. Listen to 'em, how they _do_ cheer. He's
the first one to go."

She went back to her room, shivering, and spent the next day in bed with
an aching head. She rose in the evening, however--a handbill had been
slid under her door at five o'clock, calling a "Mass Meeting" of the
university at eight, and she felt it her duty to go; but when she got to
the great hall she found a seat in the dimmest corner, farthest from the
rostrum.

The president of the university addressed the tumultuous many hundreds
before him, for tumultuous they were until he quieted them. He talked to
them soberly of patriotism, and called upon them for "deliberation and
a little patience." There was danger of a stampede, he said, and he and
the rest of the faculty were in a measure responsible to their fathers
and mothers for them.

"You must keep your heads," he said. "God knows, I do not seek to judge
your duty in this gravest moment of your lives, nor assume to tell you
what you must or must not do. But by hurrying into service now, without
careful thought or consideration, you may impair the extent of your
possible usefulness to the very cause you are so anxious to serve.
Hundreds of you are taking technical courses which should be
completed--at least to the end of the term in June. Instructors from the
United States Army are already on the way here, and military training
will be begun at once for all who are physically eligible and of
acceptable age. A special course will be given in preparation for
flying, and those who wish to become aviators may enroll themselves for
the course at once.

"I speak to you in a crisis of the university's life, as well as that of
the nation, and the warning I utter has been made necessary by what took
place yesterday and to-day. Yesterday morning, a student in the junior
class enlisted as a private in the United States Regular Army. Far be it
from me to deplore his course in so doing; he spoke to me about it, and
in such a way that I felt I had no right to dissuade him. I told him
that it would be preferable for college men to wait until they could
go as officers, and, aside from the fact of a greater prestige, I urged
that men of education could perhaps be more useful in that capacity. He
replied that if he were useful enough as a private a commission might in
time come his way, and, as I say, I did not feel at liberty to attempt
dissuasion. He left to join a regiment to which he had been assigned,
and many of you were at the station to bid him farewell.

"But enthusiasm may be too contagious; even a great and inspiring motive
may work for harm, and the university must not become a desert. In the
twenty-four hours since that young man went to join the army last night,
one hundred and eleven of our young men students have left our walls;
eighty-four of them went off together at three o'clock to catch an
east-bound train at the junction and enlist for the Navy at Newport. We
are, I say, in danger of a stampede."

He spoke on, but Dora was not listening; she had become obsessed by the
idea which seemed to be carrying her to the border of tragedy. When the
crowd poured forth from the building she went with it mechanically, and
paused in the dark outside. She spoke to a girl whom she did not know.

"I beg your pardon--"

"Yes?"

"I wanted to ask: Do you know who was the student Doctor Corvis spoke
of? I mean the one that was the first to enlist, and that they were
cheering last night when he went away to be a private in the United
States Army. Did you happen to hear his name?"

"Yes, he was a junior."

"Who was it?"

"Ramsey Milholland."





Chapter XX

Fred Mitchell, crossing the campus one morning, ten days later, saw Dora
standing near the entrance of her dormitory, where he would pass her
unless he altered his course; and as he drew nearer her and the details
of her face grew into distinctness, he was indignant with himself
for feeling less and less indignation toward her in proportion to the
closeness of his approach. The pity that came over him was mingled with
an unruly admiration, causing him to wonder what unpatriotic stuff
he could be made of. She was marked, but not whipped; she still held
herself straight under all the hammering and cutting which, to his
knowledge, she had been getting.

She stopped him, "for only a moment," she said, adding with a wan
profoundness: "That is, if you're not one of those who feel that I
shouldn't be 'spoken to'?"

"No," said Fred, stiffly. "I may share their point of view, perhaps, but
I don't feel called upon to obtrude it on you in that manner."

"I see," she said, nodding. "I've wanted to speak with you about
Ramsey."

"All right."

She bit her lip, then asked, abruptly: "What made him do it?"

"Enlist as a private with the regulars?"

"No. What made him enlist at all?"

"Only because he's that sort," Fred returned briskly. "He may be
inexplicable to people who believe that his going out to fight for his
country is the same thing as going out to commit a mur--"

She lifted her hand. "Couldn't you--"

"I beg your pardon," Fred said at once. "I'm sorry, but I don't know
just how to explain him to you."

"Why?"

He laughed, apologetically. "Well, you see, as I understand it, you
don't think it's possible for a person to have something within him that
makes him care so much about his country that he--"

"Wait!" she cried. "Don't you think I'm willing to suffer a little
rather than to see my country in the wrong? Don't you think I'm doing
it?"

"Well, I don't want to be rude; but, of course, it seems to me that
you're suffering because you think you know more about what's right and
wrong than anybody else does."

"Oh, no. But I--"

"We wouldn't get anywhere, probably, by arguing it," Fred said. "You
asked me."

"I asked you to tell my why he enlisted."

"The trouble is, I don't think I _can_ tell that to anybody who needs
an answer. He just went, of course. There isn't any question about it. I
always thought he'd be the first to go."

"Oh, no!" she said.

"Yes, I always thought so."

"I think you were mistaken," she said, decidedly. "It was a special
reason--to make him act so cruelly."

"Cruelly!" Fred cried.

"It _was!_"

"Cruel to whom?"

"Oh, to his mother--to his family. To have him go off that way, without
a word--"

"Oh, no' he'd been home," Fred corrected her. "He went home the Saturday
before he enlisted, and settled it with them. They're all broken up, of
course; but when the saw he'd made up his mind, they quit opposing him,
and I think they're proud of him about it, maybe, in spite of feeling
anxious. You see, his father was an artilleryman in the war with
Spain, and his grandfather was a Colonel at the end of the War of the
Rebellion, though he went into it as a private, like Ramsey. He died
when Ramsey was about twelve; but Ramsey remembers him; he was talking
of him a little the night before he enlisted."

Dora made a gesture of despairing protest. "You don't understand!"

"What is it I don't understand?"

"Ramsey! _I_ know why he went--and it's just killing me!"

Fred looked at her gravely. "I don't think you need worry about it," he
said. "There's nothing about his going that you are responsible for."

She repeated her despairing gesture. "You don't understand. But it's no
use. It doesn't help any to try to talk of it, though I thought maybe
it would, somehow." She went a little nearer the dormitory entrance,
leaving him where he was, then turned. "I suppose you won't see him?"

"I don't know. Most probably not till we meet-if we should--in France.
I don't know where he's stationed; and I'm going with the aviation--if
it's ever ready! And he's with the regulars; he'll probably be among the
first to go over."

"I see." She turned sharply away, calling back over her shoulder in a
choked voice. "Thank you. Good-bye!"

But Fred's heart had melted; gazing after her, he saw that her
proud young head had lowered now, and that her shoulders were moving
convulsively; he ran after her and caught her as she began slowly to
ascend the dormitory steps.

"See here," he cried. "Don't--"

She lifted a wet face. "No, no! He went in bitterness because I told him
to, in my own bitterness! I've killed him! Long ago, when he wasn't much
more than a child, I heard he'd said that some day he'd 'show' me, and
now he's done it!"

Fred whistled low and long when she had disappeared. "Girls!" he
murmured to himself. "Some girls, anyhow--they will be girls! You can't
tell 'em what's what, and you can't change 'em, either!"

Then, as more urgent matters again occupied his attention, he went on at
an ardent and lively gait to attend his class in map-making.





Chapter XXI

That thunder in the soil, at first too deep within it to be audible, had
come to the surface now and gradually became heard as the thunder of
a million feet upon the training grounds. The bugles rang sharper; the
drums and fifes of town and village and countryside were the drums and
fifes of a war that came closer and closer to every hearth between the
two oceans.

All the old symbols became symbols bright and new, as if no one had ever
seen them before. "America" was like a new word, and the song "America"
was like a new song. All the dusty blatancies of orating candidates,
seeking to rouse bored auditors with "the old flag"; all the mechanical
patriotics of school and church and club; all these time-worn flaccid
things leaped suddenly into living colour. The flag became brilliant and
strange to see--strange with a meaning that seemed new, a meaning long
known, yet never known till now.

And so hearts that thought they knew themselves came upon ambushes of
emotion and hidden indwellings of spirit not guessed before. Dora Yocum,
listening to the "Star Spangled Banner," sung by children of immigrants
to an out-of-tune old piano in a mission clubroom, in Chicago, found
herself crying with a soul-shaking heartiness in a way different from
other ways that she had cried. Among the many things she thought of then
was this: That the banner the children were singing about was in danger.
The great country, almost a continent, had always seemed so untouchable,
so safe and sure; she had never been able to conceive of a hostile
power mighty enough to shake or even jar it. And since so great and
fundamental a thing could not be injured, a war for its defence had
appeared to be, in her eyes, not only wicked but ridiculous. At last,
less and less vaguely, she had come to comprehend something of the
colossal German threat, and the shadow that touched this bright banner
of which the immigrants' children piped so briskly in the mission
club-room.

She had begun to understand, though she could not have told just why,
or how, or at what moment understanding reached her. She began to
understand that her country, threatened to the life, had flung its line
those thousands of miles across the sea to stand and hold Hindenburg and
Ludendorff and all their Kaisers, Kings, Dukes, and Crown Princes, their
Krupp and Skoda monstrous engines, and their monstrous other engines of
men made into armies. Through the long haze of misted sea-miles and the
smoke of land-miles she perceived that brown line of ours, and knew it
stood there that Freedom, and the Nation itself, might not perish from
the earth.

And so, a week later, she went home, and came nervously to Ramsey's
mother and found how to direct the letter she wanted to write. He was in
France.

As the old phrase went, she poured out her heart. It seems to apply to
her letter.

She wrote:

Don't misunderstand me. I felt that my bitter speech to you had driven
you to take the step you did. I felt that I had sent you to be killed,
and that I ought to be killed for doing it, but I knew that you had
other motives, too. I knew, of course, that you thought of the country
more than you did of me, or of any mad thing I would say--but I thought
that what I said might have been the prompting thing, the word that
threw you into it so hastily and before you were ready, perhaps. I
dreaded to bear that terrible responsibility. I hope you understand.

My great mistake has been--I thought I sas so "logical"--it's been in
my starting everything with a thought I'd never proven; that war is the
worst thing, and all other evils were lesser. I was wrong. I was wrong,
because war isn't the worst evil. Slavery is the worse evil, and now
I want to tell you I have come to see that you are making war on those
that make slavery. Yes, you are fighting those that make both war and
slavery, and you are right, and I humbly reverence and honour all of
you who are in this right war. I have come home to work in the Red Cross
here; I work there all day, and all day I keep saying to myself--but I
really mean to _you_--it's what I pray, and oh, how I pray it: "God be
with you and grant you the victory!" For you must win and you will win.

Forgive me, oh, please--and if you will, could you write to me? I know
you have things to do more important than "girls"--but oh, couldn't you,
please?

This letter, which she had taken care not to dampen, as she wrote, went
in slow course to the "American Expeditionary Forces in France," and
finally found him whom it patiently sought. He delayed not long to
answer, and in time she held in a shaking hand the pencilled missive he
had sent her.

You forget all that comic talk about me enlisting because of your
telling me to. I'd written my father I was going at the first chance a
month and a half before that day when you said it. My mind was made up
at the first time there was any talk of war, and you had about as much
responsibility for my going as some little sparrow or something. Of
course I don't mean I didn't pay any attention to the different things
you said, because I always did, and I used to worry over it because I
was afraid some day it would get you in trouble, and I'm mighty glad
you've cut it out. That's right; you be a regular girl now. You always
were one, and I knew it all right. I'm not as scared to write to you as
I was to talk to you, so I guess you know I was mighty tickled to get
your letter. It sounded blue, but I was glad to get it. You _bet_ I'll
write to you! I don't suppose you could have any idea how glad I was to
get your letter. I could sit here and write to you all day if they'd let
me, but I'm a corporal now. When you answer this, I wish you'd say how
the old town looks and if the grass in the front yards is as green as it
usually is, and everything. And tell me some more about everything you
think of when you are working down at the Red Cross like you said.
I guess I've read your letter five million times, and that part ten
million. I mean where you underlined that "_you_" and what you said
to yourself at the Red Cross. Oh, murder, but I was glad to read that!
Don't forget about writing anything else you think of like that.

Well, I was interrupted then and this is the next day. Of course, I
can't tell you where we are, because that darned censor will read this
letter, but I guess he will let this much by. Who do you think I ran
across in a village yesterday? Two boys from the old school days, and
we certainly did shake hands a few times! It was the old foolish Dutch
Krusemeyer and Albert Paxton, both of them lieutenants. I heard Fred
Mitchell is still training in the States and about crazy because they
won't send him over yet.

If you had any idea how glad I was to get your letter, you wouldn't lose
any time answering this one. Anyhow, I'm going to write to you again
every few days if I get the chance, because maybe you'll answer more
than one of 'em.

But see here, cut out that "sent you to be killed" stuff. You've got the
wrong idea altogether. We've got the big job of our lives, we know that,
but we're going to do it. There'll be mistakes and bad times, but we
won't fall down. Now you'll excuse me for saying it this way, Dora, but
I don't know just how to express myself except saying of course we know
everybody isn't going to get back home--but listen, we didn't come
over here to get killed particularly, we came over here to give these
Dutchmen h--l!

Perhaps you can excuse language if I write it with a blank like that,
but before we get back we're going to do what we came for. They may not
all of them be as bad as some of them--it's a good thing you don't know
what we do, because some of it would make you sick. As I say, there may
be quite a lot of good ones among them; but we know what they've done to
this country, and we know what they mean to do to ours. So we're going
to attend to them. Of course that's why I'm here. It wasn't you.

Don't forget to write pretty soon, Dora. You say in your letter--I
certainly was glad to get that letter--well, you say I have things to do
more important than "girls." Dora, I think you probably know without my
saying so that of course while I have got important things to do, just
as every man over here has, and everybody at home, for that matter,
well, the thing that is most important in the world to me, next to
helping win this war, it's reading the next letter from you.

Don't forget how glad I'll be to get it, and don't forget you didn't
have anything to do with my being over here. That was--it was something
else. And you bet, whatever happens I'm glad I came! Don't ever forget
_that_!

Dora knew it was "something else." Her memory went back to her first
recollection of him in school: from that time on he had been just an
ordinary, everyday boy, floundering somehow through his lessons in
school and through his sweethearting with Milla, as the millions of
other boys floundered along with their own lessons and their own
Millas. She saw him swinging his books and romping homeward from the
schoolhouse, or going whistling by her father's front yard, rattling
a stick on the fence as he went, care-free and masterful, but shy as a
deer if strangers looked at him, and always "not much of a talker."

She had always felt so superior to him, she shuddered as she thought of
it. His quiet had been so much better than her talk. His intelligence
was proven now, when it came to the great test, to be of a stronger sort
than hers. He was wise and good and gentle--and a fighting man! "We know
what they've done to this country and what they mean to do to ours. So
we're going to attend to them." She read this over, and she knew that
Ramsey, wise and gentle and good, would fight like an unchained devil,
and that he and his comrades would indeed and indeed do what they "came
for."

"It wasn't you," he said. She nodded gently, agreeing, and knew what it
was that sent him. Yet Ramsey had his own secret there, and did not tell
it. Sometimes there rose, faint in his memory, a whimsical picture, yet
one that had always meant much to him. He would see an old man sitting
with a little boy upon a rustic bench under a walnut tree to watch the
"Decoration Day Parade" go by--and Ramsey would see a shoot of sunshine
that had somehow got through the walnut tree and made a bedazzlement of
glinting fine lines over a spot about the size of a saucer, upon the old
man's thick white hair. And in Ramsey's memory, the little boy, sitting
beside the veteran, would half close his eyes, drowsily, playing that
this sunshine spot was a white bird's-nest, until he had a momentary
dream of a glittering little bird that dwelt there and wore a blue
soldier cap on its head. And Ramsey would bring out of his memory
thoughts that the old man had got into the child's head that day. "We
knew that armies fighting for the Freedom of Man _had_ to win, in the
long run.... We were on the side of God's Plan.... Long ago we began to
see hints of His Plan.... Man has to win his freedom from himself--men
in the light have to fight against men in the dark.... That light is the
answer.... We had the light that made us never doubt."


A long while Dora sat with the letter in her hand before she answered it
and took it upon her heart to wear. That was the place for it, since it
was already within her heart, where he would find it when he came home
again. And she beheld the revelation sent to her. This ordinary life of
Ramsey's was but the outward glinting of a high and splendid spirit, as
high and splendid as earth can show. And yet it was only the life of an
everyday American boy. The streets of the town were full, now, of boys
like Ramsey.