He groaned with martyrdom, made out a check for a hundred—it was one-half of his present bank-balance—and sent it to Frank with a note explaining that for years he had yearned to return this money, but he had lost Frank's address. Also, he would certainly call on his dear classmate just as soon as he got time.
"And that'll be about sixteen years after the Day of Judgment," he snorted.
Not all the tenderness, all the serene uprightness, all the mystic visions of Andrew Pengilly, that village saint, had been able to keep Frank Shallard satisfied with the Baptist ministry after his association with the questioning rabbi and the Unitarian minister at Eureka. These liberals proved admirably the assertion of the Baptist fundamentalists that to tamper with biology and ethnology was to lose one's Baptist faith, wherefore State University education should be confined to algebra, agriculture, and Bible study.
Early in 1917, when it was a question as to whether he would leave his Baptist church or be kicked out, Frank was caught by the drama of war—caught, in his wavering, by what seemed strength—and he resigned, for all of Bess' bewildered protests; he sent her and the children back to her father, and enlisted as a private soldier.
Chaplain? No! He wanted, for the first time, to be normal and uninsulated.
Through the war he was kept as a clerk in camp in America. He was industrious, quick, accurate, obedient; he rose to a sergeancy and learned to smoke; he loyally brought his captain home whenever he was drunk; and he read half a hundred volumes of science.
And all the time he hated it.
He hated the indignity of being herded with other men, no longer a person of leisure and dignity and command, whose idiosyncrasies were important to himself and to other people, but a cog, to be hammered brusquely the moment it made any rattle of individuality. He hated the seeming planlessness of the whole establishment. If this was a war to end war, he heard nothing of it from any of his fellow soldiers or his officers.
