by Zane Grey
“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.
“Tomorrow 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.”
Black-bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner, dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine; when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out, “Bread or blood!”
But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization; and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of man. Wheat-fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous farmers; fruitful toil of happy peoples; the miller and his humming mill!
When wheat crossed the ocean to America it came to strange and wonderful fulfilment of its destiny. America, fresh, vast, and free, with its sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward; with the advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable wheat-sowers; with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each succeeding year; with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested by machines that were mechanical wonders; with enormous floor-mills, humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour, pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and sweet, the whitest and finest in the world!
America, the new county, became in 1918 the salvation of starving Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France! Wheat for the world! Wheat—that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns! America to succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of war! It was an exalted destiny for a people. Its truth was a blazing affront in the face of age-old autocracy. Fields and toil and grains of wheat, first and last, the salvation of mankind, the freedom and the food of the world!
* * * *
Far up the slow-rising bulge of valley slope above the gleaming river two cars climbed leisurely and rolled on over the height into what seemed a bare and lonely land of green.
It was a day in June, filled with a rich, thick, amber light, with a fragrant warm wind blowing out of the west.
At a certain point on this road, where Anderson always felt compelled to halt, he stopped the car this day and awaited the other that contained Lenore and Dorn.
Lenore’s joy in the ride was reflected in her face. Dorn rested comfortably beside her, upon an improvised couch. As he lay half propped up by pillows he could see out across the treeless land that he knew. His eyes held a look of the returned soldier who had never expected to see his native land again. Lenore, sensitive to every phase of his feeling, watched him with her heart mounting high.
Anderson got out of his car, followed by Kathleen, who looked glad and mischievous and pretty as a wild rose.
“I just never can get by this place,” ex
plained the rancher, as he came and stood so that he could put a hand on Dorn’s knee. “Look, son—an’ Lenore, don’t you miss this.”
“Never fear, dad,” replied Lenore, “it was I who first told you to look here.”
“Terrible big and bare, but grand!” exclaimed Kathleen.
Lenore looked first at Dorn’s face as he gazed away across the length and breadth of land. Could that land mean as much to him as it did before he went to war? Infinitely more, she saw, and rejoiced. Her faith was coming home to her in verities. Then she thrilled at the wide prospect before her.
It was a scene that she knew could not be duplicated in the world. Low, slow-sloping, billowy green hills, bare and smooth with square brown patches, stretched away to what seemed infinite distance. Valleys and hills, with less fallow ground than ever before, significant and striking: lost the meager details of clumps of trees and dots of houses in a green immensity. A million shadows out of the west came waving over the wheat. They were ripples of an ocean of grain. No dust-clouds, no bleached roads, no yellow hills today! June, and the desert found its analogy only in the sweep and reach! A thousand hills billowing away toward that blue haze of mountain range where rolled the Oregon. Acreage and mileage seemed insignificant. All was green—green, the fresh and hopeful color, strangely serene and sweet and endless under the azure sky. Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long lines of roads running everywhither, overwhelmingly pregnant with meaning—wheat—wheat—wheat—nothing but wheat, a staggering visual manifestation of vital need, of noble promise.
“That—that!” rolled out Anderson, waving his big hand, as if words were useless. “Only a corner of the great old U.S.!… What would the Germans say if they could look out over this?… What do you say, Lenore?”
“Beautiful!” she replied, softly. “Like the rainbow in the sky—God’s promise of life!”
“An’, Kathie, what do you say?” went on Anderson.
“Some wheat-fields!” replied Kathleen, with an air of woman’s wisdom. “Fetch on your young wheat-sowers, dad, and I’ll pick out a husband.”
“An’ you, son?” finished Anderson, as if wistfully, yet heartily playing his last card. He was remembering Jim—the wild but beloved son—the dead soldier. He was fearful for the crowning hope of his years.
“As ye sow—so shall ye reap!” was Dorn’s reply, strong and thrilling. And Lenore felt her father’s strange, heart-satisfying content.
* * * *
Twilight crept down around the old home on the hill.
Dorn was alone, leaning at the window. He had just strength to lean there, with uplifted head. Lenore had left him alone, divining his wish. As she left him there came a sudden familiar happening in his brain, like a snap-back, and the contending tide of gray forms—the Huns—rushed upon him. He leaned there at the window, but just the same he awaited the shock on the ramparts of the trench. A ferocious and terrible storm of brain, that used to have its reaction in outward violence, now worked inside him, like a hot wind that drove his blood. During the spell he fought out his great fight—again for the thousandth time he rekilled his foes. That storm passed through him without an outward quiver.
His Huns—charged again—bayoneted again—and he felt acute pain in the left arm that was gone. He felt the closing of the hand which was not there. His Huns lay in the shadow, stark and shapeless, with white faces upward—a line of dead foes, remorseless and abhorrent to him, forever damned by his ruthless spirit. He saw the boy slide off his bayonet, beyond recall, murdered by some evil of which Dorn had been the motion. Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn’s brain.
“Lenore will never know—how my Huns come back to me,” he whispered.
Night with its trains of stars! Softly the darkness unfolded down over the dim hills, lonely, tranquil, sweet. A night-bird caroled. The song of insects, very faint and low, came to him like a still, sad music of humanity, from over the hills, far away, in the strife-ridden world. The world of men was there and life was incessant, monstrous, and inconceivable. This old home of his—the old house seemed full of well-remembered sounds of mouse and cricket and leaf against the roof and soft night wind at the eaves—sounds that brought his boyhood back, his bare feet on the stairs, his father’s aloofness, his mother’s love.
* * * *
Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat. Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body, higher than the gloom. That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. It was a growing rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured. It seemed to change and grow in volume, in meaning. The night wind bore it, but life—bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a driving and a mighty spirit. Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite and universal. Suddenly Dorn saw that something as the breath and the blood and the spirit of wheat—and of man. Dust and to dust returned they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable moment on earth, springing up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that ever-increasing purpose which ran through the ages.
A soft footfall sounded on the stairs. Lenore came. She leaned over him and the starlight fell upon her face, sweet, luminous, beautiful. In the sense of her compelling presence, in the tender touch of her hands, in the whisper of woman’s love, Dorn felt uplifted high above the dark pale of the present with its war and pain and clouded mind to wheat—to the fertile fields of a golden age to come.
TALES OF FISHES (1919) [Part 1]
“ZANE GREY,” by W. Livingston Larned
Been to Avalon with Grey…been most everywhere;
Chummed with him and fished with him in every Sportsman’s
lair.
Helped him with the white Sea-bass and Barracuda haul,
Shared the Tuna’s sprayful sport and heard his Hunter-call,
Me an’ Grey are fishin’ friends.… Pals of rod and reel,
Whether it’s the sort that fights…or th’ humble eel,
On and on, through Wonderland…winds a-blowin’ free,
Catching all th’ fins that grow…Sportsman Grey an’ Me.
Been to Florida with Zane…scouting down th’ coast;
Whipped the deep for Tarpon, too, that natives love th’ most.
Seen the smiling, Tropic isles that pass, in green review,
Gathered cocoanut and moss where Southern skies were blue.
Seen him laugh that boyish laugh, when things were goin’
right;
Helped him beach our little boat and kindle fires at night.
Comrades of the Open Way, the Treasure-Trove of Sea,
Port Ahoy and who cares where, with Mister Grey an’ Me!
Been to Western lands with Grey…hunted fox and deer.
Seen the Grizzly’s ugly face with danger lurkin’ near.
Slept on needles, near th’ sky, and marked th’ round moon
rise
Over purpling peaks of snow that hurt a fellow’s eyes.
Gone, like Indians, under brush and to some mystic place—
Home of red men, long since gone, to join their dying race.
Yes…we’ve chummed it, onward—outward…mountain,
wood, and Key,
At the quiet readin’-table…Sportsman Grey an’ Me.
CHAPTER I
BYME-BY-TARPON
To capture the fish is not all of the fishing. Yet there are circumstances which make this philosophy hard to accept. I have in mind an incident of angling tribulation which rivals the most poignant instant of my boyhood, when a great trout flopped for one sharp moment on a mossy stone and then was gone like a golden flash into the depths of the pool.
Some years ago I followed Attalano, my guide, down the narrow Mexican street of Tampico to the bank of the b
road Panuco. Under the rosy dawn the river quivered like a restless opal. The air, sweet with the song of blackbird and meadowlark, was full of cheer; the rising sun shone in splendor on the water and the long line of graceful palms lining the opposite bank, and the tropical forest beyond, with its luxuriant foliage festooned by gray moss. Here was a day to warm the heart of any fisherman; here was the beautiful river, celebrated in many a story; here was the famous guide, skilled with oar and gaff, rich in experience. What sport I would have; what treasure of keen sensation would I store; what flavor of life would I taste this day! Hope burns always in the heart of a fisherman.
Attalano was in harmony with the day and the scene. He had a cheering figure, lithe and erect, with a springy stride, bespeaking the Montezuma blood said to flow in his Indian veins. Clad in a colored cotton shirt, blue jeans, and Spanish girdle, and treading the path with brown feet never deformed by shoes, he would have stopped an artist. Soon he bent his muscular shoulders to the oars, and the ripples circling from each stroke hardly disturbed the calm Panuco. Down the stream glided long Indian canoes, hewn from trees and laden with oranges and bananas. In the stern stood a dark native wielding an enormous paddle with ease. Wild-fowl dotted the glassy expanse; white cranes and pink flamingoes graced the reedy bars; red-breasted kingfishers flew over with friendly screech. The salt breeze kissed my cheek; the sun shone with the comfortable warmth Northerners welcome in spring; from over the white sand-dunes far below came the faint boom of the ever-restless Gulf.
We trolled up the river and down, across from one rush-lined lily-padded shore to the other, for miles and miles with never a strike. But I was content, for over me had been cast the dreamy, care-dispelling languor of the South.
When the first long, low swell of the changing tide rolled in, a stronger breeze raised little dimpling waves and chased along the water in dark, quick-moving frowns. All at once the tarpon began to show, to splash, to play, to roll. It was as though they had been awakened by the stir and murmur of the miniature breakers. Broad bars of silver flashed in the sunlight, green backs cleft the little billows, wide tails slapped lazily on the water. Every yard of river seemed to hold a rolling fish. This sport increased until the long stretch of water, which had been as calm as St. Regis Lake at twilight, resembled the quick current of a Canadian stream. It was a fascinating, wonderful sight. But it was also peculiarly exasperating, because when the fish roll in this sportive, lazy way they will not bite. For an hour I trolled through this whirlpool of flying spray and twisting tarpon, with many a salty drop on my face, hearing all around me the whipping crash of breaking water.
