A window of birds took his fancy. The poor things, trying to sleep in the night light, were tucked uncomfortably about their cages, while their soft breasts and wings attracted to the feather shop possible buyers. The Inger looked at them, thinking. He turned excitedly.
“I get you about that red bird,” he cried, “when you said not kill it! Well, there wasn’t any reason for killin’ the red bird – not any real reason. I don’t blame you for rowin’ at it. But can’t you see that killin’ men in war is differ’nt?”
She looked upon him with sudden attention. While he was being directed to their street, she stood thinking about what he had said.
“Is that the way you felt about it when you first said you was going to the war?” she asked when he joined her.
“Gosh, no,” he replied almost reverently. “All I been wantin’ to go to war for was to raise hell – legitimate. Don’t you see no differ’nce?” he repeated.
It was then that she began to understand what a mighty thing had happened to him. Her insistence that war was merely killing, was merely murder, had done violence to his new idealism. And without the skill to correlate her impressions of this, she divined that here was something which was showing her, once more, the measure of this man. And she saw, too, that now she should not fail him.
She could say nothing, but as they crossed the street to the station, she suddenly slipped her hand within his great swinging arm.
He caught at her hand with a passion that amazed her. As his own closed over hers, she drew breathlessly away again.
“Oh,” she said. “Maybe it’s late. We didn’t hurry…”
He made no comment. At the station they claimed their packs and sat down to wait. Two hours or more later, as they stood by the gate, a man with many bundles jostled Lory and stood beside her, unseeing, with a long parcel jabbing at her neck. The Inger laid his great hand on him.
“Say, Snickerfritz,” he said, in perfect good humor, “lamp the lady there.”
And when the man apologized, the Inger smiled his slow smile, and waved his huge hand at him.
As he looked at this man and at the tired woman beside the man, it occurred to the Inger that these people must all have homes. This was a thing that he had never thought about before. Always he had seen people, as it were, in the one dimension of their personal presence, taking no account of them otherwise – neither of that second dimension of their inner beings, nor of the third dimension of their relationships.
“I bet they all got some little old hole they crawl into,” he said, aloud. And as the gate opened, and the two filed down the platform behind the man with the parcels and the tired woman, the Inger added: “That gink and his dame – they looked spliced. Doggone it, I bet they got a dug-out somewheres!”
“Why, yes,” said Lory, in surprise. “Sure they have. What of it?”
“Oh well, I donno,” he mumbled. “Nothin’ much.”
In the day coach, he turned over a seat, and in the forward one, he deposited the two packs.
“I don’t need two seats,” she objected.
“No,” he assented. “You sit down there.”
She sat by the window, and he beside her. On the way across the desert, she had sat alone at night, with her pack for a pillow, and he in a seat near by. She said nothing now, and when the train began to move, they still sat in silence, watching the lights wheel and march, run to the windows, and vanish with no chance to explain themselves, and an edge of dawn streaking the sky. When he saw her eyes droop, he put his arm about her, and drew her head down until it lay upon his shoulder.
“I want you should go to sleep there,” he said.
For a moment he held her so, not the less tenderly that his great arms would not let her move. But this obedience was, after all, not what he wanted. “Do you want to?” he demanded, and half loosed his clasp.
“I don’t know,” she answered sleepily – but she did not move away.
In a little while she fell asleep, and he sat so and held her. Her weight became a delicious discomfort. He was not thinking either of that night on the trail, or of what might be. He was hardly thinking at all. He was swept by the sweetness of the hour and by the sense of an exalted living, such as he had never dreamed; an exalted warfare, in which men killed for great reasons. And once his feeling was shot through with the recognition that every one in the car would be believing that she was his wife; that every one in the car would be thinking that they had a home somewhere.
He put his lips on her hair, and then rested his cheek there. So, sleeping, they sped through that new world.
VII
At Harrisburg, he bought a New York paper. There have been huge mass meetings in New York to which only an inch of space was given, on a back page; but this meeting had the second column next to the war news. Two overflow meetings had been held and in all three, the enthusiasm, the newspaper said, had been tremendous, the sentiment overwhelming. The editorial boldly supported the headlines:
“… enough of this policy of negation. If national pride has not been sufficient to prompt the United States to activity, to its rôle as a leader among the powers, surely the goad of a violated neutrality and an utter disregard of international law should be sufficient to open the eyes of its people…
“The refusal to exercise intervention was natural. The refusal to make the first move in calling a congress of all nations including the belligerents, was hardly less so. We should in no wise assume to dictate to the powers of Europe. The refusal to mobilize the army or to begin to provide anything like adequate coast defences a people has borne patiently and far too long. But the tacit refusal to permit the citizens to bear arms in defence of this their land … etc.”
The Inger slapped the paper and the page slit down its length.
“That’s it,” he said, “they’ve got it. Ain’t it a wonder,” he put it to the flying Pennsylvania landscape, “that I come just when I come?”
The graciousness and quiet of Washington, the spaciousness of the vast white station, the breadth and leisure of the streets, welcomed them like a presence. Here was something such as they had left at home – a sense of the ample.
“Seems like there was room enough for two more here,” said the Inger contentedly, as they turned into the avenue.
They chose to walk to find Lory’s aunt, lured by the large village aspect of the place. And as they walked, there leaped up for them from the roofs the insistent, dominant shaft of the monument.
“Thanks be,” said the Inger. “There’s somethin’ to shin up. It begun to look to me like the East is a place where all the trails laid flat.”
“I kind of like it here, though,” Lory said apologetically.
“Seems like there’s more folks and their stuff, and less of God and his stuff,” the Inger offered after a pause.
Lory shook her head. Her hair was in disorder, and the soot of the train filmed her face, but her look was strangely radiant.
“I donno. I feel like there was lots of God around,” she said.
She had waked the previous morning in the dimness of the coach and had found her head on his shoulder, his cheek on her hair, her hand in his hand. For a moment she lay still, remembering. Then she lifted her face slowly, lest she should waken him. But he was awake and smiled down at her, without moving, save that his clasp a little tightened. She struggled up, her flushed face still near his.
“Your arm,” she said; “ain’t it near dead?”
He sat quietly, and still smiling. “I give you my word,” he said, “I ain’t once thought of myself in connection with that arm’s dyin’.”
“Did you sleep?” she demanded, anxiously.
“I’m afraid,” he said ruefully, “I did – some.”
Having thought of him, she began to think of herself. She sat erect, her hands busy at her hair, her face crimson.
“Tell me something,” he said, and when she looked round at him: “did you care?”
“Did I care – what?” she asked.
He kept her eyes. “Did you?” he repeated.
“I care about bein’ a whole lot of bother to you,” she answered gravely. “An’ I’m goin’ to pay for my own breakfast.”
They breakfasted for the first time in the dining-car – both infinitely ill at ease, Lory confusedly ordering the first things on the card, the Inger indolently demanding flapjacks and bacon. And when they brought the bacon dry, he repudiated it, and asked gently if they thought he didn’t know how it was cooked or what? – ultimately securing, with the interested participation of the steward, a swimming dish of gravy. After that, Lory had slipped in a vacant seat on the other side of the car, and he had gone back to their own seat, and stared miserably out the window. He ought, he reflected, to have been showing her at every step of the way that he despised himself; and here instead he had made her ill at ease with him, afraid of him, eager to be away from him. That night, in the long dragging journey of their slow train, they had sat apart, as they had sat on the Overland.
Here on the avenue in Washington, she was merely disregarding him. For the first time in their days together, she seemed to be almost happy. That, he settled the matter, was because she was so soon to be free of him. There came upon him, for the hundredth time, the memory of her reason for coming to him in her need —
“I didn’t know no woman I could tell – nor no other decent man.”
It was the supreme compliment of his life – it was his justification. And how had he rewarded it…
Suddenly he felt her hand on his arm, and when he turned, she was looking away and before them. He followed her eyes and saw the white dome.
“It’s it,” she said, reverently.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s it, sure enough.”
They walked on, staring at it. All that could be in the heart of a people all the time was in their faces for the meaning of it.
In a little back street, ugly save for its abundant shade, they came to the home of Lory’s aunt. It was a chubby house, with bright eyes, and the possibilities, never developed, of a smile. There were a small, smothered yard, and an over-ripe fence, and the evidences of complete discouragement on the part of the house to distinguish itself from its neighbors, all made in the same mint.
A woman with an absorbed look answered the door; when she saw them, she slightly opened her mouth, but the absorbed look did not leave her eyes.
“For evermore,” she said. “It’s Lory Moor. And I ain’t a thing in the house to eat.”
The girl kissed her, and the woman suffered it, not without interest, but still in that other absorption, and led them into the house.
“How’d you ever come to come?” she said. “I have got some fresh baked bread, if that’ll do you.”
And at Lory’s protest,
“This your husband?” her aunt asked. “Well, I’ll tell you what, we can send him to the bakery.”
With this the Inger took matters in his own hands. There was something epic in his description.
“Miss Moor’s husband that was going to be,” he said, “is Mr. Bunchy Haight, a saloon keeper in Inch. She’s run away from him on her weddin’ night. And I’ve brought her to you. Wasn’t that right?”
“My gracious,” said her aunt.
“It’s just till I get a job,” Lory put in. “Was I right to come, Aunt ’Cretia?”
“Why, of course so, of course so,” said her aunt. “Jem Moor always was a weak fool. Can you make biscuits?”
Lory nodded.
“Then we’ll have biscuits and honey for supper,” she arranged it, and the principal thing settled: “How is Jem?” she said, and then took account of her niece’s presence with “How you have grown!”
In a little while they went out to the kitchen. And there the plump complacence of the little house gave way, and they stood facing its tragedy. As they entered, a chain rattled and drew across the zinc under the cooking-stove. An old man got to his feet, and one of his legs was chained to the leg of the wooden settle. He must have been eighty. His gray beard half covered his face. He stood with his head forward, and watched them immovably.
“It’s Hiram’s father,” said Aunt ’Cretia parenthetically. “We’ve kep’ him chained in the kitchen ’most a year now. His head ain’t right.”
The Inger went over to him, seized by a horror and a pity which shook him, and he stood with this leaping pity in his face. On a sudden impulse he put out his hand to the old man, with a groping sense that here was a language which the maddest could comprehend.
To his amazement, the old man jumped backward, his chain dragging and rattling on the floor. From his throat there came a sound, three times repeated, like a guttural giving forth of breath. Then slowly his lips drew back until they showed his toothless gums, where might have been fangs. He crouched and watched.
They stood so for a moment, looking at each other. Then the Inger wheeled and strode to the door, and went out in the little kitchen garden. Late sunlight slanted here, swallows were wheeling and twittering, and a comfortable cat was delicately walking a fence.
The man stood, feeling a sudden physical nausea. Something not in human happenings had happened. He felt as if he could never go into that room again. He sat down on the clothes reel. He had felt friendliness, and the old man had wanted to spring at him. It was monstrous, incredible. He found himself trying to make in his throat the sound that the old man had made.
He sat there until Lory came to the door to tell him that supper was ready. She was in a clean print gown, from her pack. She stood beside him, smiling, and telling him that the biscuits were hot and that her uncle had come. The gown, her smile, what she was saying, all brought him back, grateful, to the commonplace hour. He followed her, and spoke fearfully.
“Do we eat in the kitchen, do you know?” he asked.
To her negative he made no comment, and went with her through the kitchen, but he could not keep from looking. The old man sat on the settle, his eyes immovably fixed on them. “If I try to touch him, he’ll snarl,” the Inger thought. “He’ll snarl.”
Lory’s uncle, Hiram Folts, a petty clerk in one of the departments, was plainly staggered by this advent into his household, and plied his guests with questions. He was a thick, knotted man, who walked as if his feet hurt, and continually fumbled with blunt finger tips at his shaven jaw.
“I was saying to her yesterday, or Tuesday, – or was it Monday? – that she hadn’t heard from you folks in a long while,” he said.
The talk, the food, the motley dishes, the wall-paper and the colored pictures were the American middle-class home at its dreariest. But there was cheer and there was welcome, and the kindly hearts were potentialities of what might be in human relationship. Through the hour, came the dragging and the rattling of the old man’s chain on the zinc, and once a fretful, tired whining.
“Be good, pa!” Hiram Folts called, gently, and the whining ceased.
By some fortune, he had a meeting which took him early, leaving the household rocking with his hunt for a properly ironed collar. Lory electing to rest, the Inger set forth with his host, and left him as soon as he could, with the promise to be his guest for that night. This little man was one whom, in a saloon in Inch, the Inger would unmercifully have bedevilled. But sitting at his table, he had taken him at another value, and later had insisted hotly on paying his car fare.
Once alone down town in that city, the Inger walked with head erect, his eyes on the façades of buildings, on the lights, on all the aspects of a city street to which the habitués grow accustomed. This was, for the world of a city, the most beautiful world which he had ever walked. He knew not at all what it was that pleased him. But the order and smoothness of the streets, the leisure or pleasant absorption of the passers, the abundant light, the dignity of the stone, all these met him with another contact than that of muddy, roystering Inch, or the shining body of San Francisco, or the sullen, struggling soul of Chicago.
“A fellow must have a nerve to get drunk here,” was the way that he thought all this.
Before the office of The Post he halted and crossed. A lit bulletin board had called a crowd:
“President Receives Telegrams from Eighteen Mass Meetings Demanding War.”
he read.
A rough voice cried out:
“Yes, and if there’d been anybody home in Washington, we’d had a meeting here!”
No one made any comment, and the man disappeared in the crowd.
“Ten Thousand Cut to Pieces in the Stelvio Pass.”
the bulletin went on.
“‘End of the War Not in Sight’ Lord of Admiralty says.
“Two Thousand Women March Sixty Miles in the Snow with Their Children.
“Seven Women Travel Together to Washington from Seven Warring Nations.”
The Inger went on down the street. The bulletin board was like a window opened abruptly upon another world, and closed again. Again the quiet and soft brilliance of Pennsylvania Avenue came to meet him. He turned and looked back at that dim, watchful dome.
“Nothin’ to stir a man up to enlist here,” he thought. “This town looks like the war’d been put to bed.”
He looked in at the door of the New Willard, saw the lobby and the corridor unaccountably filled with women, and retreated. On the street he looked down at himself in slow speculation.
“I donno but what I’d look better in some differ’nt clothes,” he thought, in surprise.
When he returned to the house, Lory had gone to bed, and he felt a vague disappointment. He had wanted to tell her about it. Yet, in the morning, when he tried to tell her, all that he found to say was:
“It’s a nice, neat town. Everybody minds their own business. I tell you, a fellow’d have his nerve to get drunk here.”
Against her aunt’s will, Lory was to begin her search for work that day. There were virtually no advertisements for help. She started early to find an employment agency. The Inger went with her, and when they were alone in the street, she turned to him.
“Don’t you leave me keep you here a minute,” she said earnestly. “You go when you’re ready – you know that.”
“Go where?” he said. “Where’ll I go?”
“Where you want to,” she answered. “I mean – I’ve hung on to you long enough.”
“You want me to go, don’t you?” he said. “Well – I should think you would.”
“I don’t want to drag on you – and spend your money,” she answered. “As soon as I can, I’ll pay you for my ticket – you know that – ”
She stopped, suddenly breathless.
“Oh,” she said, “I ain’t goin’ to try to tell you all you done for me. I guess you know that!”
“You look a-here,” he said, “I’m goin’ to sit by till I see you get some kind of a job – if a job’s what you want. Oh, don’t be afraid I’ll bother you. I’ll get a room somewheres – and keep track. And don’t you be afraid I’ll do much – not much– that I don’t want to do.”
They went to one or two of the agencies, and the Inger waited on the curb till she reappeared – sometimes after an hour of his waiting. And once as they went through a downtown street, he spoke in wonder:
“I never saw so many women in a place in my life,” he said. “Not even in Inch, in race track times. Did you notice?”
Lory sighed. “Yes,” she said, “I did. How do you s’pose they all got so much to see about, and such a lot o’ nice clothes?” she asked.
The day passed fruitlessly for her. The Inger found a room, which he rented without looking at it, and came back to the Folts’s for his things. Mrs. Folts insisted that he stay for supper, and when he had accepted he was aghast to find that, the evening being chilly, and Mr. Folts being kept late at the department that night, they were to sit at supper in the kitchen.
The old man on the settle was very quiet. He sat crouched in a corner, and save for those immovable eyes on them all, his presence would hardly have been noticed. The Inger had brought an evening paper, and occasionally he read from it snatches of the European news, but principally to keep his eyes from the old man.
“Ranks to be thrown open without age limit.”
he read.
“Rumored that young boys and old men will be drafted within a month.”
“There, pa, who says that ain’t your chance?” Mrs. Folts put in.
The old man lifted his head, and listened.
“War may drag on for another year,” the Inger continued, and the old man broke out with that sharp labored outpouring of guttural breath – once, twice, three times.
“War!” he said. “War. War. Who says I can go? Who says…”
He forgot what he had been saying, and searched for it piteously. He sprang up, and paced the four steps each way that his chain allowed him.
“There, there, pa! I’ll come feed you your supper now,” Mrs. Folts soothed him.
But while she fed him, she was called away to the door, and thrust the dish into Lory’s hand, and went. The old man, seeing the dish recede, burst into savage grunting. The Inger took the plate from Lory, and sat beside him on the settle.
The old man ate – the Inger never forgot how. With his eyes immovably fixed on the Inger’s face, he crept cautiously forward to meet the spoon, and when he had the contents safe, drew back like a dog to his corner, with those strange grunting breaths.
“Poor old fellow!” the Inger tried to say, softly – and the grunting mounted to a snarl.
When they had fed him, the Inger drew Lory out into the quiet of the little garden.
“You can’t stand that,” he said. “I won’t have you stand that. You’ve got to get some place an’ get out o’ this.”
She looked down the dusk of the garden, and he was surprised to see that she was smiling a little.
“You don’t know,” she said. “With that – or hard work – or anything else – I’ll always think it’s heaven to what I thought had to happen.”
“You mean Inch?” he comprehended.
“I mean Bunchy,” she said.
She moved down the path, and following her for a step or two, he noted the dress she was wearing, and the tan of her neck, and her arms in their thin sleeves.
“That’s the dress you had on that day in the desert,” he said suddenly.
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s almost the only dress I’ve got,” she added.
He fell to wondering whether it would be possible for her ever to forgive him now, and come to him, and whether it could ever be as it might have been. Sometime, perhaps, when he came back from the war – if he came… It was on his lips to make her know. But always the memory of the night on the trail swept him. “I didn’t know no woman I could tell – nor no other decent man.” And then…
She stood still, looking back at the house.
“I wanted,” she said, “to get that newspaper. Did you see what it said about women – about who’s here?”
He had not seen, but he would not let her go back to the kitchen, nor would he go himself. They went round the house, and found a newsstand, and sat over a little table in an ice-cream place.
“Many Women Arrive in Capital,” the headlines said. “Large Number of Women Arrivals at Hotels. Conjecture Washington May Become Shopping Centre of the East.”
“We noticed this morning – we said so this morning,” Lory remembered.
“I guess it just happened so,” the Inger said. “You’ve all come buying good clothes, I bet.”
She did not smile, but sat looking across the room. The wife of the soda fountain man and two women from outside leaned there, talking.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Lory said, “if the women all come here the way I come – unexpected?”
He did not hear her. He was reading eagerly down the first column of the page:
“Answer Still Delayed. President Not Yet Ready to Give Out Statement. Mass Meeting Resolutions produce Profound Effect. Foreign Pressure Increasing. All-Night Cabinet Meeting Likely – ”
“Lord Heavens,” cried the Inger, “why don’t they light in an’ smash ’em – like men?”
She did not hear him. The three women in the corner were looking at her curiously, and she wondered why. As she walked by them toward the door, she thought that she heard one of them whisper:
“She don’t know!”
When she reached the door, she turned back and looked at them.
“Do you live near?” the proprietor’s wife asked her.
“Just since to-day,” the girl said. “I just come – from California.”
“Oh!” the woman comprehended. “Come in again – soon.” And something else she added that sounded like “To-morrow – maybe?”
Lory nodded and they went out.
“The whole place seems to be waitin’ for somethin’,” the Inger was saying. “Why don’t they jump in – why don’t they jump in?”
The girl was not listening. She was looking at the groups of women in the doorways.
The two walked back to the chubby house. It was frowning, for there were no lights in its windows, save a glimmer from the kitchen where the gas jet always burned.
“Not out there,” said the Inger, as they went in the dark passage. “Don’t let’s go where the old man is.”
“I can hear talking,” Lory said only, and threw open the kitchen door.
The supper table was still covered, with its litter of dishes. On the settle the old man was lying, with his head lifted, watching. Beside the stove sat the Inger’s father and Bunchy Haight. No one else was in the room.