The Desert of Wheat Part 59

"Many Waters" shone white and green under the bright May sunshine. Seen from the height of slope, the winding brooks looked like silver bands across a vast belt of rainy green and purple that bordered the broad river in the bottom-lands. A summer haze filled the air, and hints of gold on the waving wheat slopes presaged an early and bountiful harvest.

It was warm up there on the slope where Lenore Anderson watched and brooded. The breeze brought fragrant smell of fresh-cut alfalfa and the rustling song of the wheat. The stately house gleamed white down on the terraced green knoll; horses and cattle grazed in the pasture; workmen moved like snails in the brown gardens; a motor-car crept along the road far below, with its trail of rising dust.

Two miles of soft green wheat-slope lay between Lenore and her home. She had needed the loneliness and silence and memory of a place she had not visited for many months. Winter had pa.s.sed. Summer had come with its birds and flowers. The wheat-fields were again waving, beautiful, luxuriant. But life was not as it had been for Lenore Anderson.

Kurt Dorn, private, mortally wounded!--So had read the brief and terrible line in a Spokane newspaper, publishing an a.s.sociated Press despatch of Pershing's casualty-list. No more! That had been the only news of Kurt Dorn for a long time. A month had dragged by, of doubt, of hope, of slow despairing.

Up to the time of that fatal announcement Lenore had scarcely noted the fleeting of the days. With all her spirit and energy she had thrown herself into the organizing of the women of the valley to work for the interests of the war. She had made herself a leader who spared no effort, no sacrifice, no expense in what she considered her duty.

Conservation of food, intensive farm production, knitting for soldiers, Liberty Loans and Red Cross--these she had studied and mastered, to the end that the women of the great valley had accomplished work which won national honor. It had been excitement, joy, and a strange fulfilment for her. But after the shock caused by the fatal news about Dorn she had lost interest, though she had worked on harder than ever.

Just a night ago her father had gazed at her and then told her to come to his office. She did so. And there he said: "You're workin' too hard.

You've got to quit."

"Oh no, dad. I'm only tired to-night," she had replied. "Let me go on.

I've planned so--"

"No!" he said, banging his desk. "You'll run yourself down."

"But, father, these are war-times. Could I do less--could I think of--"

"You've done wonders. You've been the life of this work. Some one else can carry it on now. You'd kill yourself. An' this war has cost the Andersons enough."

"Should we count the cost?" she asked.

Anderson had sworn. "No, we shouldn't. But I'm not goin' to lose my girl. Do you get that hunch?... I've bought bonds by the bushel. I've given thousands to your relief societies. I gave up my son Jim--an' that cost us mother.... I'm raisin' a million bushels of wheat this year that the government can have. An' I'm starvin' to death because I don't get what I used to eat.... Then this last blow--Dorn!--that fine young wheat-man, the best--Aw! Lenore..."

"But, dad, is--isn't there any--any hope?"

Anderson was silent.

"Dad," she had pleaded, "if he were really dead--buried--oh! wouldn't I feel it?"

"You've overworked yourself. Now you've got to rest," her father had replied, huskily.

"But, dad ..."

"I said no.... I've a heap of pride in what you've done. An' I sure think you're the best Anderson of the lot. That's all. Now kiss me an'

go to bed."

That explained how Lenore came to be alone, high up' on the vast wheat-slope, watching and feeling, with no more work to do. The slow climb there had proved to her how much she needed rest. But work even under strain or pain would have been preferable to endless hours to think, to remember, to fight despair.

Mortally wounded! She whispered the tragic phrase. When? Where? How had her lover been mortally wounded? That meant death. But no other word had come and no spiritual realization of death abided in her soul. It seemed impossible for Lenore to accept things as her father and friends did.

Nevertheless, equally impossible was it not to be influenced by their practical minds. Because of her nervousness, of her overstrain, she had lost a good deal of her mental poise; and she divined that the only help for that was certainty of Dorn's fate. She could bear the shock if only she could know positively. And leaning her face in her hands, with the warm wind blowing her hair and bringing the rustle of the wheat, she prayed for divination.

No answer! Absolutely no mystic consciousness of death--of an end to her love here on earth! Instead of that breathed a strong physical presence of life all about her, in the swelling, waving slopes of wheat, in the beautiful b.u.t.terflies, in the singing birds low down and the soaring eagles high above--life beating and surging in her heart, her veins, unquenchable and indomitable. It gave the lie to her morbidness. But it seemed only a physical state. How could she find any tangible hold on realities?

She lifted her face to the lonely sky, and her hands pressed to her breast where the deep ache throbbed heavily.

"It's not that I can't give him up," she whispered, as if impelled to speak. "I _can_. I _have_ given him up. It's this torture of suspense.

Oh, not to _know!_... But if that newspaper had claimed him one of the killed, I'd not believe."

So Lenore trusted more to the mystic whisper of her woman's soul than to all the unproven outward things. Still trust as she might, the voice of the world dinned in her ears, and between the two she was on the rack.

Loss of Jim--loss of her mother--what unfilled gulfs in her heart! She was one who loved only few, but these deeply. To-day when they were gone was different from yesterday when they were here--different because memory recalled actual words, deeds, kisses of loved ones whose life was ended. Utterly futile was it for Lenore to try to think of Dorn in that way. She saw his stalwart form down through the summer haze, coming with his springy stride through the wheat. Yet--the words--mortally wounded!

They had burned into her thought so that when she closed her eyes she saw them, darkly red, against the blindness of sight. Pain was a sluggish stream with source high in her breast, and it moved with her unquickened blood. If Dorn were really dead, what would become of her?

Selfish question for a girl whose lover had died for his country! She would work, she would be worthy of him, she would never pine, she would live to remember. But, ah! the difference to her! Never for her who had so loved the open, the silken rustle of the wheat and the waving shadows, the green-and-gold slopes, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, the voice of child and the sweetness of life--never again would these be the same to her, if Dorn were gone forever.

That ache in her heart had communicated itself to all her being. It filled her mind and her body. Tears stung her eyes, and again they were dry when tears would have soothed. Just as any other girl she wept, and then she burned with fever. A longing she had only faintly known, a physical thing which she had resisted, had become real, insistent, beating. Through love and loss she was to be denied a heritage common to all women. A weariness dragged at her. n.o.ble spirit was not a natural thing. It must be intelligence seeing the higher. But to be human was to love life, to hate death, to faint under loss, to throb and pant with heavy sighs, to lie sleepless in the long dark night, to shrink with unutterable sadness at the wan light of dawn, to follow duty with a laggard sense, to feel the slow ebb of vitality and not to care, to suffer with a breaking heart.

Sunset hour reminded Lenore that she must not linger there on the slope.

So, following the gra.s.s-grown lane between the sections of wheat, she wended a reluctant way homeward. Twilight was falling when she reached the yard. The cooling air was full of a fragrance of flowers freshly watered. Kathleen appeared on the path, evidently waiting for her. The girl was growing tall. Lenore remembered with a pang that her full mind had left little time for her to be a mother to this sister. Kathleen came running, excited and wide-eyed.

"Lenore, I thought you'd never come," she said. "I know something. Only dad told me not to tell you."

"Then don't," replied Lenore, with a little start.

"But I'd never keep it," burst out Kathleen, breathlessly. "Dad's going to New York."

Lenore's heart contracted. She did not know how she felt. Somehow it was momentous news.

"New York! What for?" she asked.

"He says it's about wheat. But he can't fool me. He told me not to mention it to you."

The girl was keen. She wanted to prepare Lenore, yet did not mean to confide her own suppositions. Lenore checked a rush of curiosity. They went into the house. Lenore hurried to change her outing clothes and boots and then went down to supper. Rose sat at table, but her father had not yet come in. Lenore called him. He answered, and presently came tramping into the dining-room, bl.u.s.tering and cheerful. Not for many months had Lenore given her father such close scrutiny as she did then.

He was not natural, and he baffled her. A fleeting, vague hope that she had denied lodgment in her mind seemed to have indeed been wild and unfounded. But the very fact that her father was for once unfathomable made this situation remarkable. All through the meal Lenore trembled, and she had to force herself to eat.

"Lenore, I'd like to see you," said her father, at last, as he laid down his napkin and rose. Almost he convinced her then that nothing was amiss or different, and he would have done so if he had not been too clever, too natural. She rose to follow, catching Kathleen's whisper:

"Don't let him put it over on you, now!"

Anderson lighted a big cigar, as always after supper, but to Lenore's delicate sensitiveness he seemed to be too long about it.

"Lenore, I'm takin' a run to New York--leave to-night at eight--an' I want you to sort of manage while I'm gone. Here's some jobs I want the men to do--all noted down here--an' you'll answer letters, 'phone calls, an' all that. Not much work, you know, but you'll have to hang around.

Somethin' important might turn up."

"Yes, dad. I'll be glad to," she replied. "Why--why this sudden trip?"

Anderson turned away a little and ran his hand over the papers on his desk. Did she only imagine that his hand shook a little?

"Wheat deals, I reckon--mostly," he said. "An' mebbe I'll run over to Washington."

He turned then, puffing at his cigar, and calmly met her direct gaze. If there were really more than he claimed in his going, he certainly did not intend to tell her. Lenore tried to still her mounting emotion.

These days she seemed all imagination. Then she turned away her face.

"Will you try to find out if Kurt Dorn died of his wound--and all about him?" she asked, steadily, but very low.