Front matter
Reading edition
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,” “FATE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR,” ETC.
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1913 By George H. Doran Company
TO THE MEN OF THE UPPER ROOM
... And this is the story I told you through the several nights: of the man who came up through the dark and the fighting (often in such a ruck of fighting that he couldn’t hear voices); how he was punished by men, broken by self, and healed by a woman; indeed, but for her, he might have chosen the long way of the brute to put on his powers and attain the certain royalty of the human adult in this year of our Lord. She paid the price; she was the man-maker; she saw the World-Man shining ahead.... It is a story of the path at our feet, of the Compassionates who draw near to speak, when we are brave enough to listen, of the women who walk beside us. A tale of the road as we go—many are ahead, many behind—but we do not travel this stretch again.
—W. L. C.
KAO LIANG
No one thought of kao liang.
Morning did not mention it in his great story; even Duke Fallows did not think of it.
Kao liang, the millet of China. Inland seas of it are there, green in the beginning of its flow, dull gold in its high tide.
A ruffianly scouring grain. Rice is its little white sister. Millet is the strength of the beast, the mash of the world’s poor. A hundred millions of acres of Asia are in yield or waiting for kao liang to-day. Remember the poor.
In Manchuria kao liang grows strong and high. Its fox-tails brush the brows of the tall Chinese of the north country. It brushed the caps of the Russian soldiers one certain Fall.
The Censurer came with the planting in that year. Kao liang was like a soft green mould upon the hills and valleys when he came to his battle-fields. He was watching for a browner harvest and a ruddier planting. Fall plowing and red planting—for that, he came to Liaoyang.
His soldiers trampled it, devastated the young grain with their formations, foraged their beasts upon it. Yet the millet grew, hardened and covered the earth—for the poor must be served. Out of flood and gale and burning, it waxed great, filling the hills and the hollows, closing in on the city, climbing thinly to the Passes.
Its protest to the invasion was mute as China’s, but it did not run. Before the Japanese, it closed in. It was ripe when the brown flanker crossed the Taitse. It was ripe when two Slav chiefs took their thousands forth to form the anvil upon which the flanker was to be broken. The Cossacks had been feeding their beasts upon it for many days, and they drank in the deep hollows where the roots of kao liang held the rain. It was ripe for the world’s poor, when the Sentimentalist strode forth at last—the hammer that was to break the spine of the flanker.
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
PAGE
AFIELD 1
BOOK TWO
THE HILL-CABIN 115
BOOK THREE
THE BARE-HEADED MAN 239