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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ Shadowed Victory _Date of first publication:_ 1943 _Author:_ Arthur Stringer _Date first posted:_ August 16, 2015 _Date last updated:_ August 16, 2015 Faded Page eBook #20150810 This ebook was produced by: Mardi Desjardins, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net Shadowed Victory by ARTHUR STRINGER AUTHOR OF Irish Poems, Out of Erin, The Old Woman Remembers, The King Who Loved Old Clothes, etc. [Illustration] THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY Publishers INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1943, BY ARTHUR STRINGER PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES First Edition THE CORNWALL PRESS, INC., CORNWALL, N. Y. SHADOWED VICTORY I The harvests have been gathered, The plough’s good work is done; Once more the umber furrows Drink in the autumn sun. And dark the earth lies waiting For newer gifts to yield Where sleep now turns to service In every patient field. So even life lies fallow When tired hearts rest again That seeds which sleep with silence May wave as ripened grain— That they who found love fleeting And once too freely gave May know some greener April Beyond the winter’s grave. The prairie faced the foothills, and the hills Flowed westward to the Rockies, crystal white In autumn air so clear it made the far Snow-covered peaks seem neighbourly and close. High in the azure arch of heaven wheeled An eagle, indolently vigilant, While through the lower air lanes drifts of teal And mallard roved the wheatlands for the feed A million heavy sheaves had left behind, And as the day grew older, wavered off And floated like a cloud above far sloughs Where sedge and rush could screen their coming sleep. It seemed a world of opulence at rest, And as Clyde Barlow tooled his tractor back And forth across the dark-loamed prairie floor, Where lonely as a ship on lonely waves The gang-plough keeled the russet stubble-rows And left wide swathes of umber in its wake, He knew a sense of power combined with peace. Though denim-clad and stained with oil, he sat High on his tractor seat as on a throne, With something kinglike in the wolf-lean frame, The lank hard-muscled shoulders that still held The slackened posture of the prairie-born, A careless sinewed strength the sledge of toil Had hammered to the texture of tried steel And fashioned to earth’s anviled fortitude. Yet touched with pride he rode, with patience in The prairie-squint about the mild brown eyes That took the brooding hardness from the face So saddle-brown, so tanned by wind and sun. His brow was tranquil as he made his turn And marked how straight each mile-long furrow lay, How silver-bright each polished mouldboard shone, How wide the darker landsides slowly grew, How eagerly the earth drank in the sun, And, having given much, now asked for rest. The prairie lay so placid that the sound Made by an army truck that rocked along The distant road seemed almost insolent, Proclaiming to lone ploughmen that the peace About them must be earned by bolder hands. The crowded truck stopped at Clyde’s furrow-ends And blithe Hugh Bidwell clambered down to greet His gang-plough friend so grey with floating dust. “We’re off at last!” cried Hugh, and happiness Beamed from him as he stood so spick and span In army cap and creaseless uniform. “Tomorrow we entrain for Halifax, So here’s good-bye, old top, and luck to you— When you’ll be rounding up your bloody steers And I’ll be busy rounding Adolf up!” Hugh laughed and took the other’s earth-stained hand And heard Clyde answer: “Happy landing, Hugh. And come back safe to brighten up our days, And when you come, let’s hope you’re bringing back A brand-new world to cheer sodbusters up!” Clyde watched the truck fade down the dusty road And heard the soldiers singing as they went. He turned back to his work and wondered why The sun had lost a little of its warmth. He should be happy, he contended, with These patient acres that he ploughed and reaped. He viewed that furrowed sea, remembering This was the land he loved, the mother earth That bared her breast to many a hungry mouth, The waiting loam that took the scattered seed And in its time grew big with ripened grain. Its very dust left him of richer dust; Its fibres reached and twined about his heart And held him as a tree is held by roots That creep down through the hidden depths of time. It was the dim and luring Far-Away His father, craving space, had sought and found, The land to which his youthful mother came From Kansas, on slow creaking wagon wheels, Her milch cow at the tailboard as they went Through dust and sun, with wonder in their eyes, Outspanning in the lone cool northern dusk And breaking camp at dawn and going on With all their settlers’ little world made up Of what they carried with them, axe and gun, Side meat and meal sack, pot and frying-pan, Tined fork and spade and pail, a weathered plough Lashed proudly at the prairie schooner’s side, And a hunger to inhale the breath of peace About them as they toiled and built their home, An island home amid a sea of grass, A sod hut roofed with yellow clay, baked hard As the hands that worked between its windswept walls. It was the land where, as a happy boy, Clyde once rode herd, and with a straining team Broke sod, and mowed the hay that fringed the sloughs, And hauled his loads of poplar firewood home, And saw the widening acres tamed and fenced And a lordlier house supplant the hut of sod, And a panting thing of steel and gas displace The creaking harness and the plodding horse. Clyde stopped his engine and sat looking up At a far-off flash of wings that drank the air And showed themselves as not the wings of birds. Above him in the sky, where puffs of cloud Floated like languid swans in liquid blue, An army plane came pulsing from the west, A sheen of floating silver in the sun. It banked and dipped and circled, roaring loud Above his upturned face, came lower still And dropped a shining something on the soil A stone’s throw from the gang-plough where he sat. Clyde, puzzled, clambered from his throne of iron And found half buried in the crumbled soil A can of house paint, with the label “Yellow.” The dark face turned still darker as he read “The tint for slackers,” written on its side. He stood a moment, motionless as stone, Then, breathing deeper, went with laggard steps Back to the waiting tractor grey with dust And slowly mounted to the seat of iron That seemed no more a throne. That taunt, he knew, Had come from Buckshot Frome, who strode about In his new sergeant’s uniform and stripes And scoffed at craven souls who rustled corn When all their world was threatened by the Hun. There had been words beside the flying-field Where Buckshot questioned if Clyde chose to stay A husky with a cream puff for a heart. “You’d best sign up and drop the hayseed rôle; Clodhoppers don’t stack high in times like these.” Clyde knew he was no coward; he could fight As well as any man. That had been proved When with a caught-up bole of oak he faced And drove away the berserk Durham bull That would have killed his father. And again, Last threshing-time, a lank spike-pitcher stood High on his bundle-wagon forking sheaves Down on the feeder where the steel jaws whined; He slipped and fell along the loosened grain The roaring cylinder was eating up. Clyde heard a frantic shout, and quick as thought Flung his full weight against the engine belt And freed it from the wheel and stopped in time The steel-fanged jaws that might have fed on flesh. The impact flung him like a feather through The startled group of watchers, till a voice In the sudden silence brought his senses back: “Takes guts and brains to throw a belt like that!” No, he was not a coward. But this war Was not for him. His was the humbler task, The world of toil where no torn banners waved, The sterner path where no proud bugles shrilled. He felt at times the tug, but not for him The fields of glory crowned with blood and waste. His lonely path lay on the patient land That grew the bread of life. Yet even here He found grim enemies in drought and frost And hail and rust, in weeds and creeping pests That made all crops uncertain, things to fight Hard day by day as bitterly as Huns. His thoughts went to the near-by Nelson Ranch With its last man enlisted and abroad, Its fields grown wild with dock and tumbleweed, Its rusted ploughs and barns with gaping doors, Its homeless cattle scattered on the range And two gaunt women eking out a life Of loneliness made sharp with bitter want. He thought of his own father hobbling round The kitchen range and putting things to right, A crippled gaunt old man with withered eyes Who once had loved his land and mastered it, Yet like an ailing eagle sat alone And woke to peel the spuds and lay the cloth And do the housework his dead wife had done. “I’m needed here,” said Clyde, as grim of brow He turned the rippling furrows where in time A sea of grain would greet the August sun That the hunger of the world might be appeased. He scanned the wide horizon bathed in light That seemed to melt in waves of empty space And a sense of loneliness crept over him. Then of a sudden all those dreary plains Took on a warmer tone. For down the trail That wound between the wheatlands and the sloughs He saw a drifting figure. And he knew That figure was the woman of his dreams. He stopped his tractor at the road-allowance And watched the loping pinto and the girl Who seemed to ride as light as thistledown, As though the woman and the horse were one. He wondered, as he saw her wind-blown hair And caught the budded contour of her lips, If his resolve to cleave to prairie life Depended on her being a part of it. His sad eyes drank her beauty as she swung So lightly from the saddle, smiled at him, And tied her pinto to a willow post. “Oh, Clyde, I had to come!” And happiness Welled through him at her words, then died away. “Tomorrow Hugh must go. He must be off To do his bit, and maybe give his life To make that brave new world he dreams about. This is his last night here, and he has asked For me to drive him to the waiting train And speed him on his way.” “Hugh talked with me,” Said Clyde, “and seemed quite glad, of course, he’d soon Be cannon fodder on the firing line.” “Oh, he’ll come back; I feel it in my bones. But while he’s here we must be good to Hugh, And the most that I can do is motor him Through those last miles from home. You do not care?” They sat together where the sun-bleached grass Was brown and tawny as a lion’s back. Clyde’s musing, at the moment, was on Hugh, Blue-eyed, lighthearted Hugh who laughed his way Through life and with his hilltop diffidence Accepted what was dark and what was sweet, A rolling stone who gathered no remorse And gave no thought to what might lie behind. “I do not care,” Clyde answered. But a stab, A faint phantasmal stab akin to pain, Went through his heart, remembering How Hugh and this rapt woman that he loved Would laugh and talk and be together through The long-houred evening as the stars came out And darkness settled on the prairie trail. “The thing I care about,” he quietly said, “Is that you keep a little love for me.” She smiled at that and let her softened eyes Rest on him for a moment. Then she said: “You work too hard; your face looks tired and thin.” He stared about the furrows in the sun. “Clodhoppers have to keep their taxes paid,” He answered, and his laugh held little mirth. “I wish,” she murmured, “you were free to go.” He hid his wince, but in the brooding eyes, Above his smile, there lurked a bitter light. “We can’t, Lynn, all be heroes, even though You’d love to see me decked with stripes and stars And that dull tractor turned an army tank.” Lynn laughed and said: “I love you as you are, But I feel you’re missing something out of life.” He turned and studied long that treasured face. “The only thing I’d never want to miss Is you,” he answered as he took her hand. Her smile, at that, was smothered in a sigh. “You are so different from footloose Hugh Who eats the fruit and flings away the core. Some men can live, I know, close to the land And stay contented with their crops and cows, But those meek stay-at-homes like me and you Must surely miss a glow the others get. Hugh may be danger-loving, yet I like That strain of boyish wildness in his blood That leaves him free to dare and laugh at death. We must be kind to him. For all too soon He’ll face cold steel and know the bark of guns And give his body up to save the world.” “I hope,” Clyde said, as he observed her eyes Assess the lowering sun, “that Hugh comes back As sound in wind and limb as when he left, With this old world made over and the days Of humbler workers once more dignified.” He watched the rainbow-haloed figure as It loped off down the trail and soon grew small Along the tawny plain and passed away. Then with a touch of grimness on his face He turned back to his tractor and took up His task of ploughing as the slanting light Of sunset gave a glory to the land. Wars came and went and empires passed away, He told himself, as dark the riven loam Rolled wavelike from each mouldboard’s drifting curve, But this endured, this was the timeless thing That never changed, and he was part of it. II 1 “It will freeze tonight,” an aged voice said, “So cut whatever comes into your head: All flowers left facing this first black frost When day breaks cold you can count as lost.” So forth she went at the close of day To save what winter might carry away; And heavy the harvest she gathered in As the air grew sharp and the light grew thin. 2 “Tomorrow,” her true love murmured low, “It’s off to the front we fighting men go, To die, if we must, where our betters have died— And this is our last night side by side.” When she thought of her true love cold in his grave There seemed nothing to question, nothing to save, And knowing the quick give naught to the dead, “You may take what you like,” she quietly said. The Northern Lights showed green and rose along The fading sky line where the far world stopped; The stars were soft above the sleeping earth And clear and winelike was the prairie air With all its autumn keenness softened by A warm chinook that crept down from the peaks So dark against the slowly paling west. It bathed the rolling plainlands in a peace That seemed the breath of Eden. Side by side The rose-lipped woman and the brooding man Rode on in silence, feeling strangely near. Hugh was the first to speak. “Good-bye, old world! This time next month I’ll be in England, Lynn, ‘That precious stone set in a silver sea’— With pea-soup fog and no clear air like this. We’ll live in sheds and tents and curse the rain And march through mud and toughen up on hikes Where English hills are dark with winter gorse, And sweat and grouse and learn to crawl and stab And make our faces black for midnight raids.” She searched his face and saw dour laughter there. “Don’t be too reckless, Hugh. We want you back When all the bloodshed and the sound of bombs Is just a broken dream, and life once more Goes on as calmly as these sleeping homes.” “Perhaps,” said Hugh, “I’ll not be coming back.” He sat a moment silenced by her gasp Of protest touched with pain, then said to her: “But if I stay a little pile of dust Somewhere between the Channel and the Rhine I’ll have the memory of this last night With you. This last brief happiness will be My bright and one remembered precious stone Set in war’s foggy sea of frightfulness.” They stopped to watch the full moon coming up, A disc of gold above the prairie’s rim. “Don’t talk of war,” Lynn said, and took his hand. “There is so little time before you go.” “So little time,” said Hugh, “and people learn How precious is the present when the hand Of Death is at tomorrow’s door. It leaves The living mad to drain the cup of life And throw away the dregs. And here and now I want the memory of your lips on mine To light me through my hours of loneliness. Kiss me,” he said. “We must remember Clyde,” She murmured with a flutter in her voice. “Why think of Clyde? This hour belongs to us, And we are lost here in a sea of stars And all the clocks of all the world have stopped.” He caught the tremor in her troubled throat, The stifled sigh that seemed almost a sob, The little moan of protest, touched with fear, As though some last support were failing her. He took her in his arms and held her close And all their mad world crumbled to a mist. The mild autumnal moon climbed higher in The star-strewn arch, the arch that many a time Looked down on mortals groping through their dreams And reaping sorrow where they reached for joy. And all the stars swung on, with unconcern, It was so old a story, youth and love, Weakness and rapture, man and woman tossed Like rustling leaves along a windy world, And Eden grown a garden of regret. III Lend me a red rose for her lips, A white rose for her breast, And for her smile the saddened light That lures late suns to rest. Lend me the white-throat’s mellow call Across the noonday heat, The wine-glow from too distant peaks, The wind on ripened wheat. Lend me the murmurous peace of pines, The slender grace of firs, And I from these shall know again The beauty that was hers. Lend me the sound of moon-lit waves That fringe some ghostly tide, And she again will walk with me And whisper at my side. For now she fares in other fields, And time forgets, forgives— But oh, how in my empty heart Her vanished beauty lives! Clyde, out at dawn to round his cattle up, Swerved from his course and found the Landsdale ranch Still wrapped in sleep, and knew that Lynn was back. Yet a vague uneasiness crept through his veins And phantom shadows fell across his heart As he scanned the walls that housed her slumbering head, The garden paths her glad feet often pressed, The climbing rose that he had given her Now drooping lifeless in the morning light. He turned away, and as he turned he saw A dust-stained motor rocking hurriedly Along the trail still blurred with early mists. And then his heart stopped and his hardened eyes Grew narrow. For the driver of the car Was Lynn, a white-faced and rebellious Lynn Who stopped the hurrying wheels and silently Confronted the grim man who barred her way. Clyde did not speak at first. His steadying gaze Took in the wearied lines about her lips And on her barricaded face discerned The trampled look that made him think of fields Where wind and storm have beaten down the grain. And still he did not speak. But in his blood A creeping coldness made his eyes like ice. He leaned still closer to her shadowed face And looked deep in her eyes, demanding that Which neither had the heart to put in words. She knew too well just what that question was. And knew, as well, the answer. But no sound Came from her mournful lips, though eloquent As any low reluctant whisper seemed The tears that washed the face she turned away. Clyde shut his teeth and kept the mad cry in, The cry “And so you gave this night to Hugh!” He groped for something stable in a world He scarcely knew; and all the bitterness Of broken faith and hopes that fell apart, Like banded sheaves too roughly thrown aside, Crept slowly through his body, watching her. “Oh, you will hate me after this,” she said. He drew away a wondering step or two, And gazed at her as though a boundless gulf Already lay between her face and his. “Hugh was my friend. And you were more than that,” Was all he said across their widening gulf. “The time for words is past.” Then tight of lip He swung into the saddle and rode back To his own land. And as he slowly crossed Those acres gilded with the morning sun He told himself that this was all he had, The one thing now he could be loyal to, The final thing to hold his broken faith, The land that still could drink his manhood up. IV What knew he of that bosom deep Whereof the hungry have been fed, Where warm the waiting harvests sleep And broken men may turn for bread? What knew he of that sun-bathed land Where soft the golden noondays bask? Or of the quick ungrudging hand With which she gives to them who ask? Knew he those summers long and sweet When on her hills the feeding droves And on her plains the ripened wheat Made her our Lady of the Loaves?— The lakes, the lordly rivers where The laden ships weave back and forth That hungry countries grey with care Might drain the largesse of our North? And if in white she deigns to sleep, Green floats her girdle in the Spring Where warm her bosom is and deep And doubly dear her wakening. When an early freeze made all the prairie soil As hard as stone Clyde teamed his wheat to town. The yield, that year, was heavy. Granaries Were crowded to the brim; field bins were gorged And capped with straw, while sweating workers built Rough-boarded sheds to hold the overflow When cow-barns had been filled and unused shacks Stood crowded to their sills with kernelled gold, And even emptied house rooms were piled high With precious pyramids whose Pharaohs were Uncounted layers of tawny-crusted loaves (While staring waifs amid the hills of Greece Fought tiger-eyed about a mouldy crust). On many a farm, so ample was the flood Of that small nutlike fruit once fathered by Wild grasses in forgotten Syria, Great mounds of naked grain lay on the ground, Exposed to wind and weather, hail and snow, Kept dormant by the cold yet threatened with The coming rains of spring that quickly touched The sleeping slopes of yellow into life And thatched each hillock with a film of green. Clyde on his grain box, with his two great teams Hitched double-tandem, swung along the trail And saw, high up, the wild geese heading south, And saw, in time, the scattered prairie town Of Buckhorn, like so many other towns— The water tank, the threads of polished steel Where high above the humbler huddled homes The tall lone kingly elevators met The morning light and sentineled the sky. He faced the clustered buyers, who knew wheat As casually as farmers come to know Their long-ploughed land. He sat in stoic calm As samples made the rounds, then took his grade, And slowly tooled his laden wagon up The gangway to the scales above the pit Where streams of gold were pumped to gaping bins. And as he watched the fruit of weariness And thought and planning sing into the pit He knew a sense of power. This was his part, This giving from his toil to hungry towers That fed in turn the far-assembled trains Of boxcars rolling to the plunging Lakes. This was his part, this precious gift of wheat That like a river of fresh-minted gold Flowed eastward, ever eastward, to the sea And still moved on, moved on, through fog and mist, And, cannon-watched and convoy-herded, keeled The grey Atlantic to grey English ports, To ravaged Russia, to the war-torn towns Where famished children snatched at fallen crusts, To empty countries where the crawling tanks And belching guns left hunger in their wake. There was scant glory in it. Yet he watched A squad of khakied rookies swinging past, Sun-tanned, quick-stepping, rifle-bearing youths With eager eyes—and he half envied them. Yet someone, he affirmed, must stay behind To keep their armies fed, and not for him The bugles and the drums, but daily toil, Toil that could claim a glory not of guns And bombs and battleships and tattered flags. His rôle would have to be the humbler rôle, The unrecorded life behind the lines Of hate and hunger and bewilderment. When, homeward bound, he passed the Landsdale ranch, The thought of Lynn glowed in the ashes of His solitary days. He felt it strange He now saw nothing of her. And an ache Of deprivation touched with sharper pain Surged through him as he passed the willow gate Where once the two of them had often leaned. His father told him, in the empty house, That seemed more empty as the year grew old, How Neighbour Landsdale had dropped in that day And talked about the war, and, casual-voiced, Explained his daughter Lynn had joined the CWACs And with her class had just been bundled off To take a boat for England and the front. “That girl can drive a truck or tool a cat As deft as any hulk in denim could, And like as not, before the fighting’s through, You’ll hear she’s captain of a ten-ton tank And headed for the castles on the Rhine.” Clyde pushed his plate away and absently Gazed out across the prairie’s opal rim And wondered if Lynn’s journey overseas Was less to take her to the castled Rhine Than to some camp where she’d be close to Hugh. V A land, for all its wounds, where roses blow And lawns are soft with summer rains, A land of languid hours and ivied homes And old men walking older lanes. An ordered land that broods on Yesterday, Of eyes that turn to earlier years, Of haunted dusks and hills that harbour dreams, A country old in time and tears. But oh! my heart goes, homesick, back today, Back to the wide free prairie’s sweep, Back to the pines that brought the sunset near, Back where the great white Rockies sleep! For I am tired of dusk and dream and rose, Of ghosts and glories dead and gone: Give me the open trail, the upward sweep, The New World and the widening dawn! If Hugh kept in his heart some echo of That last mad night amid the prairie gloom, The throb of rapture and the thin regret That threw a mist about brief happiness, He had a hard new life to fill his days And sponge the crowded slate of memory. He even found a solace in long hours Of drill and strenuous training, battle drill And not the dull parade-square show of arms That seemed so endless in his earlier camp. Hugh, posted with the South Saskatchewans, Took pride in being among those prairie-born Tough-fibred lawless wildcats from the West Forever raising Cain in English pubs And grousing at the grub and at the mud And singing “Wagon Wheels” and “Round-up Time” But clamouring loudest to get at the Hun. “There are no muckers in McNaughton’s men And when we make the jump, look out for us!” But the jump was slow in coming. Week by week And month by month they trained and sang and toiled. They toiled with hand grenades and Tommy guns, Sten guns, Bren guns, and belt-held mortar shells. They learned to slink and hide and crawl like snakes And give the quick garrotte and stab and slash With bright long-bladed knives and clamber up A web of landing rope and storm a wall And man and beach a steel-lipped landing barge With salt waves licking at their laughing chins, And cut a path through tangles of barbed wire And plant a mine and swarm across the sand And kill and take ghost prisoners in the gloom, Since these were picked Commandos hardening for Some unknown tourney, when the time was ripe. To Hugh it seemed like football tactics tried And learned in lighter-hearted college days— The huddles as platoon commanders told Just what the play would be, the new surprise Where cunning took the place of open pass And ordered feint and ruse outwitted brawn. Hugh had, at first, no hatred for the Hun. He had known German settlers in the West, Hard-working frugal tillers of the soil With happy sons and music in their homes, And in his youth a blue-eyed German girl Had made a summer rich with love for him. But as he wandered through the blighted streets Of London where the fury of the blitz Had left its record of stark suffering, And when he saw the wounded ferried back From Channel sea fights where the dull guns barked, And later when sleek Messerschmitts Swooped low and swerved to spit their hail of hate Along the sleeping camp, and Hugh could see The telltale flash of orange at the tip Of rattle-throated guns that vomited Hot lead on helpless sleepers, and discerned The flash of red that decked each cannon’s mouth, He wakened to the fact that all his world Had changed and darkened, as a field of wheat Changes when thunderclouds shut out the sun. It had gone back, abruptly, to the age Of claw and fang, and brute opposing brute. So at his target practice, from that hour, The circled disc became a German heart, The swinging sack through which his bayonet stabbed Thereafter, in his fancy, was a Boche. The bitter wine of hatred filled his blood And made him want to kill and hunger for The moment he could meet their steel with steel And have it out with them. But day by day The peaceful Devon town remained their home, The grass between the tents was trodden thin, The weathered tunics showed a trace of wear, The guns were oiled, the knives honed razor-sharp, While grapevine rumours spread and died away And the sun-browned sons of Mars still moodily Drank down their pints of bitter, smoked their fags Through games of poker and chuck-wagon songs And in the dusk walked out with village girls. But still those sons of Mars were hardened up And still the hikes between the camp and coast Continued, and mock battles still were fought And newer plans of camouflage explored And quicker modes for killing men devised, While restless youth all ready to consign Its frail and breathing body to the blast Of sudden lead and sinew-tearing shell Still irked and asked: “When _do_ we go across?” The summer lengthened into autumn and The soft-aired English autumn dark with rain Merged into winter—not the winter Hugh Had known and welcomed in his jocund North Where blizzards threw their blankets of blown snow Across the sleeping world, to die away And leave the razor-keen subarctic air A ghostly wine that made the body glow, But more a winter of mild discontent, Of mist and rain and sodden meadowland To which the dawning spring came tardily And brought the cuckoo and the primrose back— And better weather for the winnowing planes To sweep the coast and reap their sheaves of death. Those blossoming song-haunted days of spring Were darkened by grim news that darker grew As summer kept still green the hills and downs Of England in her soft encircling seas That stood no more a moat against the world. A yellow tidal wave had seethed and swept Across the startled East and tumbled on To lap the outpost shores of India, Bataan had fallen, then Corregidor, El Alamein was lost, Sevastopol Went down before the thundering German guns That seemed to hold the startled world in pawn, The towers of Coventry lay in the dust, And even on the ice-capped Kiska hills The banners of the Rising Sun flew high. But on a sultry August noon the word The South Saskatchewans had waited for Was quietly given, and a thrill of joy Went through the camp, and armed and eager men Sped off in lorries, singing lustily And throwing kisses to the clustered girls Who wondered what their mission, and what lads Their empty arms would ever hold again. VI Intent within the curtained room we wait For echoes from that far-off world of hate Where on the anvil of inexorable And final force men shape their final will. (All day vague whispers and wild rumours came To put our ceremonial calm to shame.) And now across the night that shuts us in There breaks the brusque etheric bulletin As, far afield, a phantom voice relates The news for which a tensioned nation waits. But having gleaned war’s tabulated woe, I leave the garrulous listeners and go Out to the star-strewn silence of the night, Where, in the soft and unimpassioned light Of a mounting golden moon against a sky Of silvered tenderness, I wonder why A world all black with blood and battle smoke Should so forget the words a Herdsman spoke, And, bombed and torn and spent and cannon-shocked, Reel down a road where angels might have walked. Clyde, in a world that seemed at times remote From all that outer world where fury reigned, Was not quite happy on those lonely nights When, with his milking and his stable chores And the household work a woman should have done All finished, he could sit and listen to The war news on his wan-voiced radio. The messages it carried from a world Of pain and tumult and uncertainty Still left him with the feeling that his days Were given up to pale and paltry ends When all that men could fight and perish for Was threatened by the grim and godless Goth. He was not happy in that prairie home Where the kettle simmered on the glowing stove And the winter winds that whined about the eaves Turned four strong walls into a place of peace. Yet in that world of placid joylessness He wrung contentment from his stabled stock, His horses at their mangers munching hay, His milch cows in their stalls, well bedded down, His straw-floored sheds a place of shadowy warmth, And his last labours of the day being done By lantern light. His thoughts at such a time Would wander from his work, and often he Would question why no word came back from Lynn And under what far stars, that night, she fared. He thought of Hugh, the Hugh he could not hate, Yet through his heart a blade of pain would stab And though he did his best to shut the door On memories so tangled up with pain, Still through his sleep the clouded thoughts would crowd And leave him bitter-minded when he woke. But darker days awaited him. Before The winter passed away his father died. The ailing eagle left the earthly cage, Yet struggling with his last breath, whispered low: “Whatever happens, son, cleave to your land.” The pioneer, now bound for happier lands Where new horizons called, was buried in The white-fenced plot beside the poplar grove Where his good wife so long awaited him. And Clyde went back to that too empty house Where silence filled the rooms. But when spring came He had small time to think about how still A house could be, how pained a heart could beat. The greening prairie floor where gophers played, The honk of wild geese in the green-blue sky, Was a call to arms for him. The warmer sun Meant the old round of labour on the soil Impatient for its seed, the ancient race Against that waiting foeman known as Time. This was his battle, yet a battle fought In long and silent hours of loneliness With no reserves of manpower at his call. The war had drained away all helping hands; And when the struggle took a helpless turn His door was darkened by a blonde Brunhild Who said in broken English she could work As well as any man. The startled Clyde Gazed at the calm-eyed goddess in rough clothes, The young wide-shouldered Valkyr with brown hands And brawny arms and eyes of brooding blue, And took her in and from reluctant lips Learned why she stood alone on foreign soil. She had escaped from Norway in a ketch Of kindly fisher folk, and joined her kin Already safe in England, then had sailed With them to seek new life in that New World Where stricken people might once more know peace. But Fate, on her, still dealt a final blow, For in a train-wreck east of Calgary The crowded cars took fire and she alone Of all that tragic family was saved. Her name was Freya Earling, she explained, And she was strong, and if he needed help She’d labour in the fields or in the house And milk and bake and keep things orderly. “There are no women here,” Clyde said to her, “And you are young, and soon the neighbourhood Would talk about a girl alone with me.” The mild eyes measured him. “I do not care,” She answered with a shrug. “I need a home As much as you must need a woman’s help.” He viewed the twisted braids of tawny gold, The milk-white bosom screened by faded blue, The full red lips and placid azure eyes, And told her it was worth the trying out. He led her in, and showed her where to sleep, And knew a surge of pity as he saw The hempen sack that held her worldly goods. Yet from the day she moulded her first loaf In that disordered house, a change took place. The walls of silence seemed to come to life And Clyde’s bald evenings lost their solitude. Out in the open fields she toiled with him And, mounted on a double-seeder, made Him think of some thick-torsoed goddess from Old sagas and Norse songs, of Ceres on A cloud of drifting dust and tumbleweed, A blonde Persephone in cowhide boots. And when the day was over he would sit And study her thick ropes of pallid gold, Her full red lips that phrased their faltering words, Her queenly rustic vigour touched with calm, Her woman’s rounded throat that flowed away Into the richness of the heaving breast, And soon an Indian Summer sort of peace, That in the end was anything but peace, Crept through the troubled autumn of his days. He liked to think of Freya’s opulent Young body fast asleep beneath the roof Where his tired body rested, near and yet So far away. He even wondered at The sense of something missing, something lost, When for two days he went to Calgary To clear the mortgage from the Barlow ranch And found himself in sudden carnival As that blithe city held its big “Stampede” Where dust and tumult and the tossing flags, The music and the marching and the crowds Seemed of another planet to the son Of earth and toil who walked in loneliness. Clyde watched the cowboys from the grass and sage, The prairie schooners of another age, The flags and bunting and the blaring bands, The busy peddlers with their sidewalk stands, The marching rookies with their steady tramp, The young braves from the emptied Sarcee camp, Then stood arrested as that marching throng Grew thinner, and an old Chief rode along The valley of white faces clustered where His tribesmen once had hunted wolf and bear. Grim-lipped and lean and taciturn as stone, He scorned the cheering crowds, and rode alone. The shaggy-flanked cayuse he sat astride Seemed but a frame of sullen bones and hide, Yet kingly was the posture, kingly waved The eagle feathers round a face engraved With more than Time. Majestical in rags, He rode between the flapping alien flags, The urban tumult and the towers of steel And turbined power and hurrying shaft and wheel. And silence like a blanket hung about The face of bronze above the city’s rout That left him thrice alone. Yet who could tell What lurked behind those eyes inscrutable, Where, seamed and gaunt, the old face stared ahead, The dulled mind held communion with its dead, As, spindrift of the past, he blew along The bannered street between the pale-face throng That seemed but ghosts to him? Erect and stern He rode, and saw the sunset glory burn Along the Rockies, and the wine-glow pale Above each far and unforgotten trail Forever closed to him. From each blank wall Of brick and stone he heard no frontier call. He carried in his filmed and faded eye No answer to the gaze of Verendrye. Now all the aquiline old look was gone That met the challenge of swart Radisson. He merely scanned the mountains dark with pine, The tawny plains, the pulsing hyaline, The luring flash of rivers where his glance Was clouded by the fleur-de-lis of France, The covered wagon, and the rails of steel Down which the white man’s thundering engines reel. Silent he rode, the sunset in his eyes, Sadly resplendent in his foolish dyes, Each bauble on his breast, each tawdry plume Of nodding feathers, but a badge of doom; A king in rags, still crowned with dignity, An old wolf caged, yet pining to be free, Grinding his worn fangs on the ghostly bars That kept him from his kinship with the stars, The curling rivers and the woodland camps That through the mists of time went out like lamps, The teepee clusters on the sun-washed range That shrank and altered in a world of change, The bellowing herd, the long sault’s happy roar, The worn portages he would know no more. So out along the tumult and the crowd He passed as slow and silent as a cloud; Remote, aloof, alone, he faltered on To ghostlier trails from which the light had gone. Heedless of crazy drum and citied strife And laughter, he went riding out of life. And Clyde, when that dulled waif of other days Went drifting through the city’s evening haze, Asked in a mood of sombre inner strife If all his labour and his yeoman life, The trivial grain his grinding toil amassed, Was not a relic of man’s simpler past Now that the reaping and the harvesting Seemed peasantlike, and such a little thing. VII Beyond the slough where one lone bittern wades, The green and opal sky line slowly fades, And at the world’s rim, miles and miles away, The afterglow turns down the lamp of day. The stars come out, and cool the breath of night Steal through the prairie dusk, the dying light. And on the meadowed floor of emptiness No hurrying feet of harried mortals press, Where star-lit space and silence lie so deep The world and all it holds seems lost in sleep. And yet I know a city where on nights Like this, its fevered anthills fringed with lights, Its walls so like a gridiron from the sun, The streets stand breathless when the day is done And through them pant the heat-distracted crowds Like throngs of tortured ghosts in flimsy shrouds Who steal half-frenzied from each fetid room And seek their straitened bed of grass and gloom Where men and women floor a crowded park And sleep, a tumbled army in the dark, Sleep side by side, like scattered sheaves of wheat, In August’s panting brotherhood of heat. The night was clear and mild, an August moon Paved all the Channel with a path of gold And on the curtained troopship creeping towards The slowly paling East no lights were shown. But men were there, men busy oiling guns And fusing hand grenades and whetting knives Or smoking under-deck and making jokes To mask their inner tension, chuckling till The bulky life belts round their shoulders shook— Yet abruptly sober when the sound of guns Came to them from the Channel darkness where Commando Number Three was startled by A German convoy creeping through the gloom. A frowning captain watched a telltale flare Light up the drifting line and muttered low: “We’ll not get Fritzie with his pants down now!” If men fell silent as they drifted on And watched the dark hills on the brightening East Where break of day now meant their zero hour, They still were full of banter as they manned The landing craft the davits eased away And headed for the strangely silent shore, And when a raider with a boyish voice Sang out, “We’ll knock von Runstedt for a loop!” A laugh went round the forward-looking ranks. Hugh Bidwell, huddled in his steel-sheathed barge, Watched close across the early morning mist The shadowy coast of France. He knew by now They were to land along that curving shore And after taking Tourville, storm Dieppe, Dieppe, the town of ease, the idling place Of summer crowds who once could laugh and sing Along their wide and sun-lit Esplanade. The raiders were to blast a gateway for The clumsy tanks, and then go edging on Through park and square and hidden pill-box traps, Destroying what they could, and feeling out The German strength behind the wooded hills. If Hugh, with dark-webbed helmet slung askew, Was glad of action after idleness, He reaped a greater joy in seeing that The man beside him was Bateese Courteau, Good old Bateese, who was not old in years, Bateese the cool and eagle-eyed young Cree With whom he often ranged the prairie sloughs Where every gun-bark meant a canvasback, And now the keenest marksman of the Corps, A cougar in worn khaki, set to kill, A lean and stealthy-footed mountain lion Of muscled strength and _métis_ craftiness, Who gave a wolf-howl as the ramp came down And was the first to cross the pebbled beach And snake his way up through the coils of wire And creep along the low-walled Esplanade And crouch and wait and take his casual shot At waiting foes that he alone could see. Hugh followed close behind, unconscious of The chatter of machine guns from the cliffs. For this, he murmured to himself, is life. This is the thing they all had waited for. He faced their bullets with no sense of fear, Dodging from wall to wall and shooting when A moving helmet showed between the leaves, And flattening out beside his half-breed friend When mortar shells made holes too close to him. And still Hugh had no fear. Others might die, But a hidden voice in his exultant heart Kept telling him that he was different, A man apart, a lad who loved this world, Who in some devious way would yet pull through And see again the white-cliffed English shore, The fog-draped Banks, the hills of Canada, And know once more the faces and the friends Who watched to see their heroes marching home. “You tak’ beeg chance,” Bateese called out to him; But Hugh still faced the spitting guns and laughed. “The bullet with my name, Bateese, has not Been made. Their bombs may blow these walls to bits, But they can’t and won’t touch me. That much I know!” And during those hot hours of turbulence His words were true enough. The German tanks Rolled up in force and held the raiders back; The Teuton planes came swarming through the sky And scattered death along the wavering line; And from their inland camps by truck and train Reserves were hurried in and heavier guns Came rumbling through the hills—and hell broke loose. The crouched Commandos, with their lighter arms, Could not withstand that onslaught. Foot by foot They fought their rear-guard action, draped in smoke That misted sea and shore and shell-torn town. The order came to fall back to the boats, But at the gun-swept beach no boats were there. Yet still the raiders fought and frantically Held back the grey-clad hordes surrounding them, And waited for the boats, and gathered up Their wounded, and still waited for the boats. “We’re going to face a second Dunkirk here,” Growled out a colonel with a bandaged thigh, “But give ’em hell, boys, to the bitter end!” If hell was given, hell was still received; The sloping sand was darkened with the dead. Bateese, behind a huddled barricade Of bloodied bodies piled together, sniped At every foolish Hun who showed his face And Hugh beside him answered shot for shot, Until a cheer went up and word went round The boats were seen, the boats were on their way! But still the rain of lead beat back and forth. Bateese, shot through the ankle, was caught up In Hugh’s quick arms and carried to the beach Where with his belt he strapped the broken bones And puffed the cigarette Hugh gave to him. The men swarmed out about the landing craft And clung to drooping ropes or climbed aboard. A group of prisoners were herded close And ushered sullen through the opened ramps. But from the hills still shrilled the flailing shells And Focke-Wulfs swung low above the waves And bombed the harried stragglers in the sea, Until the rising tide was red with blood. Hugh waded out and struggled up the ropes And tumbled panting on the sodden plates Of the barge that moved so slowly out to sea Where ghostlike in a drifting haze of smoke Companion craft surged through the rain of shells That withered with the slow-receding shore And battle-wearied men could breathe again. But as they breathed in that grim nonchalance Of hope foregone and helpless weariness The harrying planes weaved hawklike over them And banked and rose and met the challenge of The Spitfires swarming from the English coast. The upper air became a shifting maze Of engined anger and the tranquil blue Blossomed from time to time with parachutes That wafted down and met the deeper blue Until the homeward riffling waves were buoyed With tossing rubber dinghies, mile by mile, As Kentish youth and comrade Rhenish youth, Made kindred by their too Icarian wings, Looked up at all the azure of the sky And battled for the blessed right to breathe. “There’ll be no glory in this raid,” said Hugh To stony-eyed Bateese, who squatted close Beside him on blood-clotted plates of steel. “We’ve lost three thousand men and only got This bunch of German swine to pay for it!” His laugh was mirthless as he looked at them. “But what I said, Bateese, sure stands the truth: These bastards couldn’t get me!” At those words A grey-faced German captive, quick as thought, Snatched up a pistol from a sergeant’s belt And, gasping with blind hatred, levelled it At Hugh—at Hugh whose laugh was smothered in The louder sound that sent the bullet home And left a wonder in his laughing eyes. He staggered back and clutched his tunic, red With gushing blood, and fell beside Bateese, Who with a grunt whipped out his raider’s knife And plunged it hilt-deep through the faded grey That sheathed an emptying heart; then with a smile Of snakelike Indian indifference Drew out the blade, and wiped away the gore, And as Hugh’s writhing body washed with red Grew motionless and all his world went out, Bateese caught up the grey-clad killer of His boyhood friend, and with a second smile Threw that blind shell of hatred overboard And watched it float away, face downward, on the sea. VIII The green mounds left at the lone portage, The graves by the trekking wain, Were strewn in the wake of their frontier fires Where their dead were sown like grain. And the gloom was starred with glimmering homes, And the wastes with grain turned gold; And it fell in time, as it ever was, That the New became the Old. Its blood was that of the home-born sons, And its hope, and brawn, was theirs, But the Old World turns to its yesterday While the New to the morrow fares. Yet the child must age as the mother aged And in time of her best must give: By her outward-bound shall the old House stand, By her lost shall the old Home live! There were so many wounded carried back, So many mangled bodies under-deck, As sleek destroyers and squat landing craft Crept through the mine fields to the English coast That in the early-wakened harbour-town There was a call for ambulances when The need could not be met. A quiet-voiced girl Swung up with her grey lorry and agreed To take a load of wounded from the wharf And get them safely to the hospital. That promise and that hope were not fulfilled. A Hunnish bomber, hanging on the heels Of the harried ships that dodged and crept away From the blood-stained sands and waters of Dieppe, Swung lightly in above the cliffs of chalk And dropped its egg and vanished in the blue As the swinging ack-ack thundered back its thanks. . . . And two hours later, in a white-walled room, The young Scotch doctor with the ether cap Leaned closer as his senior swung away The magnet from his patient’s sleeping face And looked intently at a bit of steel No bigger than his thumbnail. “It’s too bad,” He muttered as he held the splinter up, Remembering it was the fragment of The shell that struck their startled Channel town And left a young CWAC’s crowded lorry-frame A mass of twisted steel and ruddied flesh, “Too bad a hell-sent little thing like that Should do such mischief.” With a deeper breath He said, “But isn’t that the way with war?” “Is vision gone?” The younger man inquired. The other bent above the sleeper’s face And shook his head. “It will be, son, before We’re through with her. That much I know.” The grave-faced Scot looked at the stricken girl, Observing, “And she had such lovely eyes!” Recalling at the moment that clear night When he and she had talked of Canada Beside the sea wall where the flak-guns stood. “It won’t, perhaps, make such a difference,” Observed the man who saw too much of pain, “Now that our whole mad planet has gone blind. And she, I think, will take it in her stride, For God knows she was brave in other things.” “Yes, she was of our best,” the other said, “And that grave smile of hers will sure be missed By us when she is invalided home.” “But where’s her home?” the busy surgeon asked, His tired eye on his watch. “And what’s her name?” The younger man gazed at the pallid face And answered, “It’s in western Canada. And Lynn, Lynn Landsdale, is her name.” IX They showed us their ivied towers And their tombs so grey with time, Their storied walls where the lichens creep And the stately roses climb. But under their roses lay Lost names that backward led, Where under the sod so soft with rain Reposed their statelier dead. And we of that newer race That never has learned to reap And barter and toil above the graves Where our scattered fathers sleep— We longed for our own far home Where few dead heroes rest And the long road laughs to the high white sun And the glad hills greet the West— And the carefree heart outspans Where the camp-fired coulees wind And the questing son of the open trail Leaves all his dead behind. Clyde liked to watch the greening wheat grow tall And the clean-floored earth between the shading stalks Drink in the summer rain. He liked to watch That sea of russet heads when lazy winds Sent waves of shadow through the deepening gold. But even better, when the grain was cut, He liked to scan the crowded avenues Of yellow mounds that meant a heavy yield. And heavy was his yield, that arduous year Of toil and sweat, with only Freya’s hands To stook the sheaves his binder left behind. But her bright figure made the widest field A garden of contentment as they worked. He loved the music that the binder made, The singing of the drive-chains as the reel Bent so persuasively the serried stems Against the shuttling knives, the pale gold stream That flowed along its slatted riverbed, The banded sheaves that filled the carrier And tumbled out, to lie like shell-torn men Mowed down and moveless on a battlefield— For Clyde could not forget how overseas His brother-men on cannon-blasted hills Were mowing down the ranks of war-doomed men As madly as his own four-horsed machine Was cutting down its destined ranks of grain— And the Four Horses of that darker field Were trampling with apocalyptic hooves The hope and happiness of half the world. But when Clyde’s sombre gaze was fastened on Blonde Freya toiling with the sheaves, less blonde Than her own sun-bleached hair, a sense of peace, And something more than peace, stole through his heart. She was so sure, so strong, so competent, As with quick hands she caught the bundles up, Swung heads together, wider butts apart, And with a downward movement anchored them Firm on the earth in steepled tents of straw Round which the leaning sister-tents were placed And crowned with flattened sheaves to turn the rain, And, slowly curing in the autumn sun, Stand ready for the nomad threshing gang. And Clyde, impatient for a reckoning Of all his season’s work, contrived to have The threshers come as early as they could. The lurching engine and the water tank, The separator and the red caboose Came crawling in before the break of day, To turn the quiet fields into a place Of tumult, while a placid Freya baked And fried and roasted and made ready for The hungry men with hillocks of hot food. The mounting sun looked down on busy groups About the steaming engine gorged with straw, The swaying belt that shimmered as it went, The bundle-teams that loomed like moving towers Across the morning light, and lumbered in Along the stubbled fields and circled close Beside the separator with its jaws Of whirring steel that drank the thick sheaves down And made an arching waterfall of chaff And straw blown from the stacker’s throat Where dust and clamour reigned. But from the dust And roar and rattle of machinery Emerged the final glad reward of toil And thought and struggle with the patient earth, Emerged the ceaseless flow of kernelled gold Into the waiting bins. The outfit boss Caught up a handful of the running wheat And studied it with narrowed expert eyes. “You’ve got a yield of Northern Number One That’ll leave those Buckhorn buyers sitting up!” A swart spike-pitcher from his wagon said: “What’s more, my friend, as I’ve just figured it She’s running over fifty bushels to The acre, or I’ll eat this hat o’ mine!” Those words were wine to Clyde. And later, when The threshing gang moved on to other farms And the star-hung prairie rim was beaconed with The fires of burning straw, Clyde figured up His season’s crop and what it ought to bring, While Freya sat beside him, busy with Her sewing where the lamplight fell across The braided yellow hair that crowned her head. He told her of his yield. And she looked up With her moon-misty placid smile and said: “Someday, I think, you will be what they call The Wheat King of this country.” And he smiled And answered: “Far, my Freya, from a king; But all the waste and carnage overseas And all the blindness in that older world You left behind has sent the price of wheat So high that lank clodhopper oafs like us Can hold our heads above the water now. And if the cards fall as they ought to fall I’d like, next season, to extend my line And swing a section of that Nelson ranch Where everything,” he said, “is going to seed.” He saw how Freya put her sewing down And stared off into space. And when he asked Just what she might be thinking, heard her say: “I wonder where poor Freya will be then?” He saw the sadness in her fading smile, The sadness in the eyes that met his own, Then turned away. And suddenly he cried: “You are my partner, Freya, on this farm That without you would be an empty waste, And we’ll go on as partners to the end.” “We may be partners in the fields,” she said, “But that is all. And even it must end. There is that girl in England has your heart And someday she’ll be coming back for you.” She saw the look that crept into his face, The hardened lines about his mouth, and knew She had in some way probed an open wound. “That girl,” he said, “is nothing in my life, And we’ll not talk of her.” “I’m sorry,” said The cherried lips that quickly lost their smile. And Freya turned and took her sewing up, While Clyde, for clouded reasons all his own, Felt suddenly alone in time and space, Alone in mist and dust and treadmill days With little left to fight and struggle for. When his dour eyes fell on the flaxen hair Of Freya, half in shadow, half in light, It seemed the only softness in his life. And Freya, at his silence, turned and saw The anguish on his face, and quietly crossed To where he sat and placed a pitying hand On his tensed shoulder as her own mild eyes Grew softer with a look of sympathy That seemed quite new to them. And there she groped For words that were beyond her Norse-trained tongue, For all she murmured was: “I think I know.” Clyde felt her rough and hardened hand stroke back His sun-crisped mat of hair, remembering It was the first small sign of tenderness That he had ever known to come from her, While she reminded him, “You have your wheat——” As though a crop was everything in life. “What good are bins of wheat, when better things Are blown away like prairie dust?” he said. “You have your land,” the stubborn lips maintained, “The land that brings the grain that makes the bread That feeds the world.” Her smiling face grew hard. “And we who have gone hungry, day by day, Long month by month, know what mere eating means.” He looked at her in wonder, conscious that This was the first time all the hidden bars Went down between his lonely heart and hers. He long had felt secure behind the thought That she had always been so like a man, So hard and strong and patient in her work; Yet under that grim shell was womanhood, Warm womanhood, abundant and alive And made for loving. Sudden hunger brought His arms about her and he drew her down And held her close, and pressed unhappy lips Upon the lips that were so red and warm And felt the softness of a rounded breast Against his heart—and knew a sense of loss When Freya so abruptly drew away. “No; if you have not love for me we must Not do these things,” she said in quiet reproof. “But we are here together, man and woman, And life still owes us something,” Clyde replied. But Freya moved her head half sorrowfully From side to side and, smiling, answered him: “You do not love me.” Clyde then turned to her And once more caught her in his arms and said: “But that is something I can learn to do, For you are wonderful, and we are lost Here on the lonely frontier of the world And that warm mouth of yours both sets my blood On fire and brings a peace about my heart.” “Then it is best,” the full red lips replied, “That I go off to other farms before We do some foolish thing that is not right.” And she went out into the star-lit night and leaned Against the timbers of the dark corral, And the room without her seemed an empty place. Clyde in the lamp-lit silence paced the floor And tried to picture life with Freya gone. She was not of his race, or of his kind, And the words that passed between them would be few, But that superbness of blonde flesh and bone And bodily magnificence should be Enough for any man. The mounting thought Of empty days and nights without her sent A darker pang of desolation through His love-starved heart. That surge of solitude Was like a wave that swept him through the door, Across the trodden yard, and past the pens, To Freya standing by the dark corral. “You must not leave me, Freya!” he cried out As he took her hand and drew her body close. “I need you here. And if it must be done, We may as well live on as man and wife.” “That means you marry me?” she quietly asked, And in the starlight when he said it did A woman’s smile of triumph played about The full red lips he found and kissed again. “I think someday I’ll maybe make you learn To love me just a little,” Freya said, And held him closer in her ample arms And wondered why no answer came from him. Before the week was over, side by side, They drove to Buckhorn on a load of grain And there were married in the parsonage Beside the wooden church. And as they dined In Buckhorn’s unresplendent eating place The radio above the bar announced: “At Stalingrad the German troops advanced In hand-to-hand encounters in the street. . . . And at Bordeaux one hundred patriots Were executed in reprisal for Their anti-Nazi acts. . . . The Government Regretfully discloses that the troops From Canada that landed at Dieppe, While fighting bravely, suffered heavy loss; Almost four thousand of our stalwart sons Must now be written down as casualties. . . .” Clyde’s face grew shadowed as the voice droned on. “I think,” he said, “we should be trekking home.” And homeward in the paling autumn light They drove in mingled happiness and gloom And milked their wakened cows and fed their stock; And with their devious farm chores finished up Clyde put the lantern out, and wound the clock, And, peering into Freya’s placid eyes, Explained, with quickened pulse beats, how they two Would sleep together in the double bed No one had slept in since his mother died. X For only a day it bloomed, And at dusk lay dead; Through the night that its breath perfumed Its spirit fled. Yet the rock by the rose’s side Through the long years lay, While the rose swung bright and died In a single day. And loved was the withering rose, But the flawless stone, Round which no grave could close, No love had known. The clock that ticked away his crowded hours, His harried days, his overlonely nights That were, at last, to lose their loneliness, Was still in Clyde’s brown hand when suddenly A sound broke through the silence. And the sound Was that of someone knocking at his door. He knew that Freya and her lamp had gone Up to the room that held the double bed, And a thin impatience touched him as he groped His dark way to the door, and opened it— To find Lynn’s mother standing there alone. And when he led her to the lighted room He saw, with sudden coldness in his blood, How tense and trouble-laden was the face Of his late visitor. “I had to come,” She cried out brokenly, confronting him. “I had to come, Clyde, for I know how close You were to Lynn, how you have loved my girl, My poor lost girl!” The sound of that bleak voice Brought a sudden tightness close about his heart. “She is not dead?” he questioned, standing back And staring at the face so touched with pain. “No, no—she is not dead. But all her days My girl will never see again.” Those words Were muffled in the mother’s faltering sob. “She has been blinded by a German shell, And when they send her back she’ll never see Her kith and kin, or how the roses hang About that bush you gave her long ago, Or how the sunlight falls across the wheat Or how the prairie lilies star the sod.” The white-faced woman’s voice took on A note of protest when she spoke again. “That is not all. This war brings bitter news To us who wait at home. . . . Hugh has been killed, Killed in the fighting at the Dieppe Raid. He died, the chaplain of his corps writes back, Confronting frightful odds and fighting on Until his strength was gone, then forth to God He went a hero, a hero to the end.” Clyde crossed the room and at the window sill Stood staring out across the star-lit land That had engrossed his thoughts while other lives Were being mowed down like sheaves, for freedom’s sake. Lynn blind! Lynn blind! And Hugh killed at the front! He heard, as through a mist, the mother’s voice Proclaiming how the Red Cross was to make Inquiries as to where Lynn had been sent And when she could be coming home again. And through the fog that seemed to fill the room He heard the broken mother murmur: “Now I must go back!” He found and took her hand And led her slowly to the waiting car Where all the stumbling words of sympathy He spoke seemed more than wasted on the air. And with a heavy heart he wandered back To his own waiting roof, the waiting bed, And in the midnight silence thought about The past, and how life’s threads were tangled up By Fate, who, being blind, so blindly weaves. XI It stands unwon though proudly wooed, A pale star in the night That through the dusk and solitude Still lures and leads to light. But baffled, bruised, and torn of soul, We learn through time and tears It was the struggle, not the goal, Made rich our emptier years. For as we win, we strangely lose, And as we lose, we win, And white the temple stands for those Who have not entered in. Clyde knew that Lynn was home. Yet day by day He wondered at his strange unwillingness To meet her face to face. When finally She showed herself the braver of the two And sent for him, he crossed the fields on foot And swung the too-familiar willow gate And crossed the garden where the poplars stood In towers of gold, and Lynn sat reading Braille With the slanting autumn sunlight on her hair. She smiled a little when she heard his voice And turned and groped for his toil-hardened hand And held it for a moment, though the words That passed between them seemed quite meaningless To the far from happy Clyde. He saw the cloud That crept across her half-averted face, And knew too well there were so many things That must be left behind the doors of Time, So many graves that overcareless feet Must not be treading on. “I hope,” Lynn said As a leaf of gold fell on her open book, “That you are happy, Clyde.” A silence grew Between them as he groped for tempering words To answer, when the answer was not truth. He could not tell her how his empty heart Still ached for her, accepting in its need The second-best where she had long stood first, How star and moon and all earth’s wonderment Still lay in that soft face where blindness dwelt. “Oh yes, I am quite happy,” he replied With his amending laugh. “As happy as The gods allow in this war-troubled world. And as a man gets on he learns to ask For less than when he walked with April dreams.” She gave some thought to that and quietly said: “But you still have your land, the land you love; And I’ve just heard you’ve got a section more To break and seed and bring you happiness.” She waited, smiling, for some word from him, But his gaze was on the Rockies tinged with rose. A cold wind stirred the poplars where the sun Threw longer shadows on the faded turf. “These autumn days grow chilly,” Lynn observed, “And now I must go in.” And Clyde went back To his own acres sad with autumn light, And from an umber furrow lifted up A handful of dark soil. He stared at it And wondered why the love of woman still Should trouble men who had their land to love And pondered why a world that ached for peace Should stumble down the blood-soaked paths of hate And blindly seek their shadowed victories. L’Envoi Over the farmlands sweet with grain, Where once the shells plunged deep, How blithe the poppies blow again, How well the orchards sleep. Over the gleaners floats and sings The lark to the falling sun, Over the graves of far-off things And old wars lost and won. And over the hills where long ago Now-mouldering warriors met How green the peaceful vineyards grow, How well the fields forget! Finis TRANSCRIBER NOTES Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained. A cover was created for this eBook. [The end of _Shadowed Victory_, by Arthur Stringer.]