"Katie, you have the rich gift of the open mind. I don't believe that, lastingly, there's anything you'll shut out as impossible to consider.

Your eyes say it, Katie--say they'll look at everything, and just as fairly as they can. Oh they're such honest, fearless, just eyes--so wise and so tender. And it was I--I who love them so--brought that awful look of hurt to those wonderful eyes. Katie--I want to spend all of my life keeping that hurt look from those dear eyes!

"You're asked to do a hard thing, dear Katie. It's cruel it should be _you_ so hard a thing is asked of. Asked to look at a thing you see through the feeling of a lifetime as though seeing it for the first time.

To look at all you've got to push aside things you regarded as fixed. I suppose every one has something that to him seems the things unshakable, something he finds it terrifying to think of moving. All your traditions, all your love and loyalty cling round this thing which it seems to you you can't have touched. But Katie, as you read these pages won't you try to think of things, not as you've been told they were, but just as they seem to you from what you read? Think of them, not in the old grooves, but just as it comes in to you as the story of a life?

"You'll try to do that for me, won't you, dear fair-minded, loving-spirited Katie?

"I was a country boy; lived on a farm, got lonesome, thought about things I had nobody to talk to about, read things and wanted more things to read, part the dreamer and part the great husky fellow wanting life, adventure, wanting to see things and know things--most of all, experience things. I want to tell you a lot about it sometime. I can't let go the idea that there is going to be a sometime. Just because there's so much to tell, if nothing else. And, Katie, _isn't_ there something else?

"No way to begin the story of one's life!

"Then I went away from home. To see the world. Try my fortune.

Experience. Adventure. That was the call.

"And the very first thing I fell in with that recruiting officer in the white suit. I can see just how that fellow looked. Get every intonation as he drew the glowing picture of life in the army.

"The army sounded good. The army was experience, adventure, with a vengeance. A life among men. A chance. He told me that an intelligent fellow like me would soon be an officer. Of course I agreed perfectly I was an intelligent fellow, impressed with army intelligence in picking me for one. Why I could see myself as commander-in-chief in no time!

"There's the cruelty of it, Katie. The expectation they rouse to get you--the contemptuous treatment after they've got you. The difference between the army of the 'Men Wanted For the Army' posters and the army those men find after those posters have done their work.

"Remember your telling me about visiting at Fort Riley when you were quite a youngster? The good time you had?--how gay it was? How charming your host was? As nearly as I can figure it out, I was there at the same time, filling the noble office of garbage man. Now, far be it from me, believing in the dignity of all labor, to despise the office of garbage man. I can think of conditions under which I would be quite happy to serve my country in that capacity. But having enlisted because of the noble figure of a soldier carrying a flag, I grew pretty sore at the 'Damn you, we've got you' manner in which I was ordered to carry things--well, not to be too indelicate let us merely say things less attractive than the flag.

"It's not having to peel potatoes and wash dishes; it's seeming to be despised for doing it that stirs in men's hearts the awful soreness that makes them deserters.

"In our regiment men were leaving right along. Our company had a particularly bad record on desertions. Our captain, a decent fellow, was away most of the time and the lieutenant in command was a cur. I'd find a more gentle word for him if I could, but I know none such. Army men talk a great deal about discipline. But there's a difference between discipline and bullying. This fellow couldn't issue an order without making you feel that difference.

"He had a laugh that was a sneer. It wasn't a laugh, just a smile; a smile that sneered. He couldn't pass a crowd of men cutting grass without making their hearts sore.

"I don't say he's the typical army man. I don't doubt that there are men high in the army who, if all were known, would despise him as much as the men in his company did. But I do say that if there were not a good many a good deal like him more than fifty thousand young men of America would not have deserted from the United States army in the past twelve years.

"There was a fellow in our company I had been particularly sorry for. He wasn't a bad sort at all; he was more dazed than anything else; didn't understand the army manner; the army snobbishness. This lieutenant couldn't look at him without making him sullen.

"One day he told him to do a loathsome thing, then stood there with that sneering smile watching him do it. Well, he did it, all right; that's what _gets_ you, that powerlessness under what you know for injustice.

But that night he left.

"I knew he was going. He wanted me to go with him. I don't know why I didn't. I don't blame men for deserting. But for my own part, it would only be two years more; I used to say to myself, 'You got into this.

You'll see it through.'

"They caught him, brought him back the next day. I happened to be there at the time. So did our spick and span lieutenant. The man who had been caught--or boy, rather, for he was but that--was anything but spick and span. His clothes were torn and muddy, his face dirty and bloody--it had been scratched by something. He knew what he was in for. Court martial and imprisonment for desertion. We knew what _that_ meant.

"He was a sorry, unsoldierly sight. Gone to pieces. Unnerved. All in. His chin was quivering. And then the little lieutenant came along, starting out for golf. He stood in front of him and looked him up and down--this boy who had been caught. Boy who would be imprisoned. And as he looked at him he laughed; or smiled rather, that smile that was a sneer.

"He stood there continuing to smile--torturing him with that smile he couldn't do a thing about--this boy who was down; this fellow who was all in. That was when I struck him in the face and knocked him down.

"The penalty for that, as I presume I need not tell an army girl, is death. 'Or such other punishment as a court martial may direct.'

"The thing directed in my case was imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth for five years. Most of the men in that prison would say, 'Give me death.'

"I'd better not say much about it. Something gets hot in my head when I begin to talk about it. If you were with me--your cooling hand, your steadying eyes--I could tell you about it. 'If you were with me'! I find that a very arresting phrase, Katie.

"Those were black years. Cruel years. Years to twist a man's soul. They took something from me that will not be mine again. I remember your telling how Ann said there were things to make perfect happiness forever impossible. She was right. There _are_ hours that stay.

"I went into the army just an adventurous boy. I came from it an embittered man. My experience with it made me suspect all of life. I was more than unhappy. I was sullen. I _hated_--and I wanted to get even. Oh it was a lovely spirit in which I went forth a second time to meet the world.

"I don't know what might not have happened, I think I was right in line to become a criminal, like so many of the rest of them who have served time at Leavenworth--I don't suppose the United States has any finer school anywhere than its academy for criminals at Fort Leavenworth--had it not been for a man I met.

"I got a job in a garage. I had always been pretty good at mechanical things and knew a little about it. And there I met this man--and through him came salvation.

"I don't know, Katie, maybe socialism will not save the world. I don't see how it can miss it--but be that as it may, I know it has saved many a man's soul. I know it saved mine.

"This fellow--an older man with whom I worked--talked to me. He saw the state I was in, won my confidence and got my story. And then he began talking to me and gave me books. He got me to come to his house instead of the places I was going to, saying nothing against the other places, but just making his things so much more attractive. We used to talk and argue and gradually other things fell away just because there was no room for them.

"You know I had loved books--read all I could get--but didn't seem to get the right ones. Well, after I had served time breaking clay I didn't care anything about books--too sore, too dogged, too full of hate. But the love for the books came back, and through the books, and through this friend, came the splendid saving vision.

"Vision of what the world might be--world with the army left out, with all that the army represented to me vanished from the earth. With men not ruling and cursing other men; but working together--the world for all and all for the world. And the thing that saved me was that I saw there was something to work for--something to believe in--look at--think about--when old memories of the guard knocking me down with the butt of his gun would tear into my soul and bring me low with the hate they roused.

"And so I began again, Katie dear, that sense of things as they might be--that vision--taking some of the sting from what I had suffered from things as they were. I stopped hating and cursing; I began thinking and dreaming. There came the desire to _know_. I tore into books like a madman. I couldn't go on hating my fellow-men because I was too busy trying to find out about them. And so it happened that there were things more interesting to think about than the things I had suffered in the army; I was carried out of myself--and saved.

"I wish I could talk to some of those other fellows! Some of those boys who ran away from the army, not because they were criminals and cowards, but just because they didn't know what to make of things. I wish I could talk to some of those men who dug clay with me at Fort Leavenworth--men who went away cursing the government, loathing the flag, hating all men, and who have nothing to take them out of it. I wish I could take them up with me to the hill-top and say--'There! Don't look at the little pit down below! Look out! Look wide!'

"Katie--you aren't going to save men by putting them at back-breaking work under brutalized guards. You aren't going to redeem men by belittling them. You're going to save them by making them _see_. And the crime of our whole system of punishments is that it does all in its power, not to make them see, but to shut them out from seeing...."

In the letters which followed he told her other things, things he had done, the work he hoped to do, what he wanted to do with his life. Told it with the simplicity of sincerity, the fine seriousness untainted with the self-consciousness called modesty.

He believed he could work with men; things he had already done made him believe he could do more, bigger things. He wanted to help fight the battles of the people who worked; not with any soldier of fortune notion, but because he was one of those people, because he had suffered as one of those people, and believed he saw their way more clearly than the mass of them were seeing it.

And he wanted to write about men; had some reason for believing he could.

He was hoping that his play would open the way to many other things; it looked as though it were going to be put on.

He told of his feeling for it. "More than a showing up and a getting even, though there _is_ that. It will be no prancing steed and clanking saber picture of the army. More digging of clay than waving of the flag.

I see significant things arising from that survival of autocracy in a democracy, an interesting study in the bitter things coming out of the relation of the forms and habits of a vanishing order to the aspirations and tendencies of a forming one. And in that bending of spirit to form, the army codes and standards making for the army habit of mind, the army snobbishness and narrowness. The things that shape men, until a given body of men have particular characteristics, particular limitations. You said that if you loved them for nothing else you would love army people for their hospitality. But in the higher sense of that beautiful word they are the least hospitable of people. Their latch string of the spirit is not out. Their minds are tight--fixed. They have not that openness of spirit and flexibility of mind that make for wider visioning.

"And it's not that they haven't, but why they haven't, brings one to the vein.

"Yes, I got the article you sent me, written by your army friend, eloquent over the splendid things war has done for the human race, the great things it has bred in us. Well if the 'war virtues' aren't killed by an armed peace, then I don't think we need worry much about ever losing them. It's the people at war for peace who are going to conserve and utilize for the future the strong and shining things which days of war have left us. Men who must base their great claim on what has been done in the past are not the men to shape the future--or even carry the heritage across the bridge. War is now a faithful servant of capitalism.

Its glorious days are over. It's even a question whether it's longer valuable as a servant. It may lose its job before its master loses his.

In any case, it goes with capitalism; and if the good old war virtues are to be saved out of the wreck it's the wreckers will save them!

"Which is not what I started out to say. This play into which I'm seeking to get the heart of what I've lived and thought and dreamed is not the impersonal thing this harangue might make it sound. I trust it's nothing so bloodless as a study of economic forces or picture of the relationship of old things to new. It's that only as that touches a man's life, means something to that life. It's about the army because this man happens, for a time, to be in the army--it's what the army does to him that's the thing.

"Though it seems to me a pretty dead thing in these days. Life itself is a dead thing with you gone from it."

In the letter she received that night he wrote: "Katie, is it going to spoil it for us? Can it? _Need_ it? We who have come so close? Have so much? Are outlived things to push us apart? That seems _too_ bitter!

"Oh don't think that I don't _see_. The things it would mean giving up.

The wrench. And, for what?--your friends would say. At times I wonder how I _can_--ask it, hope for it. Then there lives for me again your wonderful face as it was when you lifted it to me that first time.

_You_--and I grow bold again.

"I don't say you wouldn't suffer. I don't say there wouldn't be hurts, big hurts brought by the little things arising from lives differently lived. I know there would be times of longing for things gone. For the sunny paths. For it couldn't be all sunny paths with me, Katie. Those years in the dark will always throw their shadow.