One of Ours quotes

“All right, Mahailey.” Claude caught up his cap and ran out of doors, down the hillside toward the barn.

The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face;

the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the south section of the big Wheeler ranch.

the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the south section of the big Wheeler ranch.

It was a fine day to go to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort of day that must, somehow, turn out well.

Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield.

His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical composure.

Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak with complete seriousness.

He kept up his easygoing, jocular affability even with his own family.

He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the path up to the house.

She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear mother!

He guessed if she could stand having these men about, could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!

Bayliss swung round in his swivel chair to return a plough catalogue to the shelf. “What would he be in here for? Better look for him in the saloon.”

Nobody could put meaner insinuations into a slow, dry remark than Bayliss.

Claude’s cheeks flamed with anger. As he turned away, he noticed something unusual about his brother’s face, but he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him how he had got a black eye.

“Oh, forget it!” Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of pickles.

He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into a saloon, and his friend knew he was afraid.

After lunch, Claude took out a handful of good cigars he had bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn’t afford cigars, was pleased.

As a result of Brother Weldon’s sojourn at the farm, Claude was sent to the Temple College.

Claude had come to believe that the things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to shape his destiny.

When the second week of September came round, he threw a few clothes and books into his trunk and said goodbye to his mother and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train for Lincoln.

He took care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from Annabelle’s attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him.

He was born with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair.

It was a personal attribute.

The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.

Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else they could do.

They could not make agreeable people, either. In so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.

Ernest was the only person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and foreign.

It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have to!

On the farm you said you would or you wouldn’t; that Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy.

He had Dan and one of August Yoeder’s four sons to help him, and he worked early and late. The new field he ploughed and drilled himself.

He put a great deal of young energy into it, and buried a great deal of discontent in its dark furrows.

Day after day he flung himself upon the land and planted it with what was fermenting in him, glad to be so tired at night that he could not think.

It was strange that in all the centuries the world had been going, the question of property had not been better adjusted.

The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people who didn’t have it were slaves to them.

He sprang down into the gold light to finish his load. Warm silence nestled over the cornfield.

The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were always stirring up trouble.

Evidently, it took more intelligence to spend money than to make it.

When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor’s degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year.

To be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep, was like being assured of a decent burial.

Safety, security; if you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to them.

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs.

He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind the mountains.

Everyone was always saying it was a fine thing to be young; but it was a painful thing, too.

He didn’t believe older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden light, the mass of mountains was splitting up into four distinct ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in perspective, one behind the other.

She was too much with her mother, and with her own thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions—her garden and the great kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too.

Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds.

The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of Paradise Lost was as mythical as the Odyssey; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true.

While Enid was shopping, Claude bought some white shoes and duck trousers. He felt more interest than usual in his summer clothes. They met at the hotel for lunch, both very hungry and both satisfied with their morning’s work.

Seated in the dining room, with Enid opposite him, Claude thought they did not look at all like a country boy and girl come to town, but like experienced people touring in their car.

“Will you make a call with me after dinner?” she asked while they were waiting for their dessert.

“

Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it’s not much account.

”

He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain heartbreaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

The only way that Claude could ever come to share his secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first.

After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered miller’s hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar. “Well, Claude,” he said with determined cheerfulness, “we’ll always be better friends than is common between father and son-in-law.

You’ll find out that pretty nearly everything you believe about life⁠—about marriage, especially⁠—is lies.

I don’t know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they do.”

Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told himself.

He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.

Marriage reduced all women to a common denominator; changed a cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one. It was quite right that Enid should be unconscious now of everything that she was to be when she was his wife.

Mahailey, at the back of the room, in a black hat with green gooseberries on it, was standing, in order to miss nothing. She watched Mr. Snowberry as if she hoped to catch some visible sign of the miracle he was performing.

She always wondered just what it was the preacher did to make the wrongest thing in the world the rightest thing in the world.

When it was over, Enid went upstairs to put on her travelling dress, and Ralph and Gladys began seating the guests for supper. Just twenty minutes later Enid came down and took her place beside Claude at the head of the long table.

When he closed his eyes he could see the light in his mother’s window; and, lower down, the glow of Mahailey’s lamp, where she sat nodding and mending his old shirts.

Human love was a wonderful thing, he told himself, and it was most wonderful where it had least to gain.

By morning the storm of anger, disappointment, and humiliation that was boiling in him when he first sat down in the observation car, had died out. One thing lingered; the peculiarly casual, indifferent, uninterested tone of his wife’s voice when she sent him away.

Day broke with silvery brightness on the summer sage. The sky grew pink, the sand grew gold.

The dawn-wind brought through the windows the acrid smell of the sagebrush: an odour that is peculiarly stimulating in the early morning, when it always seems to promise freedom⁠ ⁠… large spaces, new beginnings, better days.

The train was due in Denver at eight o’clock. Exactly at seven thirty Claude knocked at Enid’s door—this time firmly. She was dressed, and greeted him with a fresh, smiling face, holding her hat in her hand.

Oh, yes, how much Gladys must have to tell this perfect confidant! The people whose hearts were set high needed such intercourse—whose wish was so beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy it.

And these children of the moon, with their unappeased longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children of the sun.

This conception flooded the boy’s heart like a second moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay deathly still for fear of losing it.

He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that. His horses stopped at the water tank. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be along in a minute.” Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled.

“Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool the other.”

She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost disappeared. “I thought I was smart that time!”

Ernest looked at the floor. He respected faith.

As he said, you must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.

Claude sat leaning his elbows on the table. “It always comes back to the same thing, Mother. Even if a raw army could do anything, how would we get it over there?

Perhaps if older people were a little more honest, and a boy were not taught to idealize in women the very qualities which can make him utterly unhappy—But there, he had got away from those regrets.

But wasn’t it just like him to be dragged into matrimony by a pair of mules!

He laughed as he looked at them. “You old devils, you’re strong enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come. You’re chock full of meanness!”

One of the animals wagged an ear and cleared his throat threateningly.

Mules are capable of strong affections, but they hate snobs, are the enemies of caste, and this pair had always seemed to detect in Claude what his father used to call his “false pride.”

When he was a young lad they had been a source of humiliation to him, braying and balking in public places, trying to show off at the lumber yard or in front of the post office.

they sit on suspended planks, lowering and raising themselves with pulleys, like house painters. Only by listening very closely can one hear the tap of their hammers. No orders are shouted, no thud of heavy machinery or scream of iron drills tears the air.

These strange boats seem to be building themselves.

Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks, asking each other how boats could be built off in the grass like this.

When great passions and great aspirations stirred a country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden bottoms.

They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were the “going over,” the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!

…

As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere.

But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase⁠ ⁠… and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.

nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their way!

He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.

Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store up the street, where there seemed to be everything else.

She had a very sad face, he thought; it wasn’t grief, nothing sharp and definite like sorrow.

It was an old, quiet, impersonal sadness⁠—sweet in its expression, like the sadness of music.

As he came out of the house to start back to the barracks, he bowed to her and tried to say, “Au revoir, Madame. Jusq’ au ce soir.”

He wished he could talk to her as Gerhardt did. He admired the way she roused herself and tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such spirit and precision.

It was a language that couldn’t be mumbled; that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.

Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken spirit, he thought.

Her sharp eyes followed his, and she instantly divined his doubt. “The baby?” she said quickly.

“Oh, the baby is not my brother, he is a Boche.”

For a moment Claude did not understand. She repeated her explanation impatiently, something disdainful and sinister in her metallic little voice. A slow blush mounted to his forehead.

It was a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection. Yet everywhere the ground was full of men. Their own trenches, from the other side, must look quite as dead.

Life was a secret, these days.

It was amazing how simply things could be done. His battalion had marched in quietly at midnight, and the line they came to relieve had set out as silently for the rear. It all took place in utter darkness.

He had really liked Victor. There was something about that fellow … a sort of debauched baby, he was, who went seeking his enemy in the clouds. What other age could have produced such a figure?

That was one of the things about this war; it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger, a life like a movie-film⁠—and then a death like the rebel angels.

A man like Gerhardt, for instance, had always lived in a more or less rose-colored world; he belonged over here, really. How could he know what hard moulds and crusts the big guns had broken open on the other side of the sea?

“I should think you’d have had about enough.”

“Oh, a fellow can’t stay out after all his chums have been killed! He’d think about it all the time, you know,”

the boy replied in his clear treble.

The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus had been shot away.

“Le bébé est cassé, mais il a protégé sa mère,”

Marie explained with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. “Il est bon, il est gai, mon soldat,” but he sometimes drank too much alcohol, and that was a bad habit.

she said. “Even the old ones do not often complain about their dear things—their linen, and their china, and their beds. If they have the ground, and hope, all that they can make again.

This war has taught us all how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters.

”

It was distinctly a blond voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness.

Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.

When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the creeping sunlight. “I didn’t know there were any French girls like you,” he said simply, as she sat down.

At the edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the glistening boxwood wall.

He had left something on the hilltop which he would never find again.

The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front. They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and then turning to the left.

The name that stood was La France. How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the Anchises.

It was a pleasant name to say over in one’s mind, where one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never blush.

Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the silence. “Somehow, Lieutenant, ‘mort’ seems deader than ‘dead.’ It has a coffinish sound. And over there they’re all ‘tod,’ and it’s all the same damned silly thing.

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking.

Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young.

They died and took their secret with them—what they were and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France.

He had begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow emotions. That was the way Gerhardt had put it once; and if it was true, there was no cure for it.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured;

unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together. While he was absorbed in his day dream of farming in France, his companion stirred and rolled over on his elbow.

David’s head went back against the boulder, and he threw one of the chestnuts lightly into the air.

“Oh, one violinist more or less doesn’t matter! But who is ever going back to anything? That’s what I want to know!”

Claude felt guilty; as if David must have guessed what apostasy had been going on in his own mind this afternoon. “You don’t believe we are going to get out of this war what we went in for, do you?” he asked suddenly.

He felt that a man might have been made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it; tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied.

If one were born into this world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and upset things, break and destroy, all one’s life.

Gerhardt wrapped the violin up in its cloth. The little boy thanked him and carried it away. Madame Fleury and her daughter wished their guests goodnight.

As long as that was true, and now he knew it was true—he had come all this way to find out—he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did he envy David. He would give his own adventure for no man’s.

On the edge of sleep it seemed to glimmer, like the clear column of the fountain, like the new moon⁠—alluring, half-averted, the bright face of danger.

Claude sat up in his bed and listened. The sound of the guns had from the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of confidence and safety; tonight he knew why.

What they said was, that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had made to keep their dreams.

He knew the future of the world was safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a straitjacket—cunning and prudence would never have it to themselves.

hadn’t even been home on leave since the Germans first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable—and prolonged.

The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam in the garden.

“Did you know, sir,” said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook Claude in the street after parade, “that these lovely girls had to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty pigs to eat?

The girl’s friends forgave her, and when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an affiche on the hedge, forbidding anyone to decorate the grave.

Apparently, nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than poor Marie Louise.

”