VIII
The Inger stepped in front of Lory, and, before the others turned, wheeled to face her.
“Go get your aunt here,” he said, under his voice, and, as she retreated, closed the passage door upon her. Then he turned to the room.
“Well, Dad!” he cried. “Well, Bunchy! Better have another stick or two on the fire, hadn’t we?” he offered.
While the Inger followed his own suggestion, Bunchy watched him, lowering. But the Inger’s father began to talk.
“Bunchy was comin’ along here – he was comin’ along,” he explained, “so I thought I’d come along too. I thought I better come along too – ”
His son glanced at him keenly, wondering at his uncertain manner. As the stove door closed, the Inger inquired with perfect interest:
“How’d you find the place – go to Chicago?”
“Yes, damn you,” said Bunchy, suddenly, and rose, and without warning threw himself upon the Inger.
It took longer than one would have thought, for though the Inger was physically fit and Bunchy was flabby and overfed, he had the strength of blind anger. It cost a distinct effort for the Inger to throw him. He went down with his head on the zinc, and the Inger, with his knee on his chest and his hand on his throat, took breath and regarded him. Bunchy’s little eyes looked up at him like the eyes of a trapped wolf. His thick, raw lips were working.
A profound, ungoverned sense of hatred and loathing filled the Inger. Here was a creature, vile and sordid, to whom Lory Moor was to have been given over, and who was come now seeking his prey. He seemed unspeakable, he seemed, by all the decencies, a thing of which to rid the earth. The Inger shrank from his contact with him, from his hand on that smooth, puffy throat. He felt for him all the “just” horror of which he was capable, and, superadded, an intense physical abomination. All this swept him and possessed him and emptied him of every other feeling.
Then the Inger became conscious that above the sound of their shuffling and breathing, another sound had been growing which now filled the room. It was a dreadful, guttural breathing, unlike that of a man in strife, but rather like that of an animal at its feeding.
The Inger threw up his head and looked. Close by his shoulder, as he knelt there beside the cooking-range, the madman was leaning, watching. Only now, instead of the immovable eyes, his were eyes which blazed and gleamed with a look unimaginable. And the sound that filled the room was the old man’s guttural breath, and with every breath, words, half articulate, were mingled:
“Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im,” he was saying. That was all – the words did not vary, nor the ghastly tone, nor the dreadful breathing. “Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im.”
His long, freckled hands were outspread and trembling. His back was crooked and his head thrust forward. His hair fell about his face. He stepped here and there, as he could, his leg chain clanking. And he said over his fearful chant, like an invocation to some devil.
And the Inger, who was feeling the same rage, looked in the old madman’s eyes, and the two understood each other.
All the horror which the sane man had felt at the beast in the other, stared from the Inger’s eyes, as he looked. And abruptly he was wrenched with horror of the beast in himself. With a sense of weakness, as at the going out of something which seemed to drain his veins, to abandon his body like a great breath from his pores, he took his eyes away from that face.
He relaxed his hold on Bunchy and rose.
“Get up,” he said to him, and looked away from him.
Bunchy scrambled to his feet, amazed, blinking, pulling at his collar, casting sidewise glances of vehement suspicion. The Inger merely stood there, not looking at him.
“Listen here,” said the Inger, in a moment. “The girl is here with her folks. If ever the time comes when she’ll marry me, God knows I want her. But for now, I’m out of your way. You can deal with her and her folks, for all of me. Understand?”
Considering the Inger’s obvious advantage, Bunchy by no means understood. His look said so. Neither was the Inger’s father at all comprehending. In his father’s face the genial kindness and the settled sadness had given place to a contagion of rage and passion. The Inger had never seen his father like this. Even in that moment, this look on the kind, careless face filled the son with sick surprise. The old man by the settle, who had stood staring at this strange turn of things, broke into a plaintive whimper.
“Kill ’im – kill ’im – kill ’im …” he besought, like a disappointed, teasing child.
When Bunchy would have spoken, spluttering, he was arrested by a sound at the door. It was Lory and her aunt, whom she had found in talk with women at a neighbor’s; and it was Hiram Folts, whom, returning, they had met at the street door. The Inger greeted them gravely.
“You meet my father,” he said, and named them. “And you meet,” he said, “Mr. Bunchy Haight.”
Mrs. Folts stared. Not one of all her gifts was a gift for diplomacy.
“Why, ain’t that the man – ain’t that the name – ” she recalled it, and met the Inger’s nod, and saw the look on Lory’s face, and instantly reacted in her own way. “My gracious,” she said, “have you had your suppers?”
Bunchy, replying with labored elegance, fain to be his gallant best to Lory’s aunt, fain to look beseechingly and reproachfully at Lory, and fain to glower heartily at his enemy, became a writhing Bunchy, demeaning himself with ample absurdity.
The Inger was merely silent. In a moment, he took his leave and, as he went, he turned to Lory.
“If you want me,” he said, “send for me. I’ll be waitin’ there in the room I got.”
She made no answer. She had been like some one stricken since first she had seen who was in the room.
“You’ll do it?” he persisted, grateful for Hiram Folt’s nervous fire of questions at his new guest.
She met his eyes and, for an instant, it seemed to him that she gave him her eyes, as she had done that morning on the desert.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
The last sound that he heard as he went down the passage with his father was the fretful whining of the madman:
“Kill ’im – kill ’im – kill ’im…”
Out on the street the Inger looked at the stretch of asphalt pavement, the even fronts of the houses, the lights set a certain space apart, and he looked in the faces of men and women walking home with parcels. All these were so methodical and quiet that they made it seem impossible that he had just wanted to kill a man. All this scene was arranged and ordered, and what he had done had been – disorderly. He thought of the word as he had often seen it in the Inch Weekly: “arrested for being disorderly.” That was it, of course; and here the buildings were as they had been appointed, and the lights were set a certain space apart… But he had not killed the man! And he was doing the way all the others were doing. He and his father were walking here, like all the others. This seemed wonderful. He looked at the lights and at the buildings as if he understood them.
He noticed that his father was trembling. At a crosswalk he caught gropingly at his son’s arm.
“We’ll have some victuals,” said the Inger, and led him to a little restaurant. His father followed obediently; but the food they set before him remained untouched. He sat there weakly, drank cold water, and assented eagerly when the Inger suggested that he go to bed.
In the Inger’s little room he sank on the edge of the single bed, and the Inger was unspeakably shocked to see him cry.
“What, Dad?” he could only say over uncomfortably. “What?”
“I wish’t I could ’a’ settled with him,” his father said. “I wish’t I could ’a’ settled one varmint before I die.”
“What’d you want to muss with him for?” he inquired impatiently.
“Because I ain’t never done much of anything that was much of anything,” the old man said. He straightened himself. “An’ I could of did this!” he added with abrupt energy.
The Inger studied him intently. The great rugged bones of the older man and the big, thick, ineffectual hands suddenly spoke to him, out of the deep of this undirected life. They had wanted to act – those bones and those hands!
“He wasn’t worth the powder,” the Inger said, but he was not thinking of what he said. He was staring at the tears rolling down the old man’s face. “Get to bed – get to bed, Dad,” he kept insisting.
But first his father would tell him, in fragments, disjointed, pieced together by the Inger’s guesses, how his presence there had come about.
Before daylight on the night of the Inger’s departure, his father had been roused by Bunchy and two of his friends arriving at the hut. Questioned, the old man had had nothing to tell them. His son had gone to the wedding, that was all he knew. Still, his son was unmistakably missing now, and the absence was the clue on which Bunchy had worked all that day. On the morning of the second day, the messenger had come riding over from the ticket agent beyond Whiteface, and had spread in the bars of Inch the tale of the manner of the Inger’s purchase of two tickets to Chicago. As soon as he heard, the old man, having done his son’s bidding at the bank in Inch, had sought out Bunchy, found him leaving on the Limited, and abruptly resolved to travel with him – “So’s to keep my eye on the bugger,” he said. Here he began to retell it all, and to fit, in wrong places, some account of Bunchy’s doings on the journey and of their half day in Chicago. “He’s a bugger – a bad bugger,” the old man repeated fretfully, “only he’s worse’n that, if I could think…”
By all this and by the nerveless movements and the obvious weakness of his father, a fact gradually returned to the Inger:
“Dad!” he cried. “You said you was sick the night you come to the hut. Ain’t that over?”
It appeared that it was by no means “over” – the sickness of which the older man had complained. To the Inger, sickness meant so little in experience that he was unable to take it seriously in any one else. In all these days, he had not once recalled his father’s mention that he was ailing. He was swept by his compunction. Against the old man’s protest, he called a doctor. And the doctor, after his examination, left what he could, and, when the Inger emphatically refused to have a nurse sent, unexpectedly announced that he would look in again toward morning.
When, almost at once, his father had fallen asleep in the little single bed, the Inger turned out the light, drew the shade to the top of the window, and stood staring across the roofs. Against the sky rose the dome of the Capitol, pricked with a thousand lights.
He breathed deep, and abruptly he understood that here in the darkness, alone, he was feeling an elation which was to him unaccountable. Something tremendous seemed to have happened to him. What was it? He did not know. His father was ill – Bunchy was here – Lory Moor was in trouble – he was haunted by the image of that mad old man. And yet his whole being was pervaded by a sense of lightness, of gratification, of sheer energy such as he never had known. For an hour he stood there, and he could not have told what he had been thinking. Only something unspeakable seemed to have occurred, which kept him from sleep.
He did sleep at last, rolled in his blanket and lying on the floor. But he was awake, and had ministered to his father, and below, on the doorstep, stood stretching prodigiously, when in the crisp morning, the doctor came back. As the doctor left, he drew the Inger down the stairs again. They spoke together in the little passage, in the light that came through the orange glass over the door. His father had, by a miracle, lived to reach him. Any hour of that day might be his last hour.
The Inger went back upstairs, and stared at his father. Impossible. He had been living for so long. There was so much that he himself remembered having been told of this man’s youth and young manhood. It was incredible that now he should die, and no one would remember these things any more… There had been one story about his buying an eagle somewhere, and setting it free. The Inger had always liked to hear that story. Now it would close over, and no one else would know. This alone seemed intolerable.
He went downstairs, and out on the street. At the next house a blind man lived. This man took his little walk every day. The walk consisted of six paces from the house to the street, and six paces back again. On the street he dared not go. Here in the yard he could encounter nothing. To guide his course he dragged his stick on the edge of the bricks. In this way he could walk very briskly, almost as a man might walk on a street. The Inger watched him. Something in himself seemed to go out of him and to make its way to that blind man.
“Sometime,” he thought, “I’ll go and take him for a walk – afterward.”
That day all Washington, and with it all the country, stood on its doorstep, awaiting the newspapers. But when the boys first came crying the headlines, the Inger let them go by. He had a vague sense of wishing not to be interrupted. Toward noon, however, a phrase caught from a street call lured him down. One of the newspapers which batten on bad news, playing it up, making it worse, contradicting it for another price, came to his hand. This paper announced that the United States would that day positively declare war on the offending nation. Even then the newspaper’s presses were methodically at work on a denial, but this the Inger did not know. He sat staring at what he read. So, then, it had come. So, then, he was really to go to war… There was something, too, about a great meeting of women in the Capitol. To this, save the headlines and the snapshots of women which covered an inside page, he did not attend. “Sob Session Probable,” he read, and wondered what it meant.
His father still slept, and, watching by his bed, he himself grew drowsy. He lay down on his blanket on the floor. This was a strange thing, to lie down to sleep in the day time. He looked up at the high walls of his tiny room. The side walls were larger than the floor – as the walls of a grave would be – he thought. His father stirred and whimpered.
“Oh my God – my God – my God…” he said, but he did not wake. This he said over many times.
At last the Inger dozed, with a preliminary sense of sinking, and of struggling not to let himself go. In his dream he went with his father on an immense empty field. There they were looking for the others, and they could see no one. They walked for a long way, looking for the others. Then these others were all about them, and they were marching, and it seemed very natural that there should be war. At any moment now, there would be war. So they marched and stood face to face with those whom they were sent to fight. And a sense of sickening horror shook him in his dream – for those whom they faced were women. The women were coming, and they had only their bare hands. Tossed by a tide of ancestral fear, he understood that among those women was Lory Moor. He shouted to her to go away – but instead they all came on, steadily, all those women – and he could not tell where she walked, and every one said that the orders were to fire. Caught and wrenched by the fear that never lives, any more, among waking men, he lived the dead passion of fear in his sleep, and woke, wasted by his horror.
He struggled up and looked at his father.
“Oh my God … my God … my God,” his weak voice was going on.
And from the floor beside him the black headlines of the lying paper stared:
“U. S. To Declare War To-Day.”
The Inger slept again, and this time the clamor and crashing of the thing were upon him. This now was war – but not as he had imagined it. He was in no excitement, no enthusiasm, even no horror. He was merely looking for a chance to kill – keenly, methodically, looking for a chance to kill. In the ranks beside him was that old madman from the kitchen – but there was no time even to think of this. They were all very busy. Then it grew dark, and the field went swimming out in stars, and many voices came calling and these met where he was:
“God – God – they’ve killed God…” the voices cried.
Again the nameless terror shook him. What if he had been the one to kill God? He sought wildly among piles of the dead to find God, and he was not found. Then many came and touched him and stared in his face, and he understood them. God had not been killed at all. He himself was God and he had been killing men…
At this the terror that was on him was like nothing that he had ever known. It took him and tore him, and he writhed under a nameless sense of the irreparable, which ate at him, living. When he awoke, he lay weakly grateful that the thing was not true. Something swam through his head, and he tried to capture it – was it true? Was he God? He struggled up and sat with his head in his hands. There were things that he wanted to think, if he had known how to think then.
It was late in the afternoon when the end came to his father, quietly, and with no pain. His father knew him, smiled at him, and with perfect gentleness and without shyness, put out his hand. Save in a handshake, he had never taken his hand before since he was a little boy. But now they took each other’s hands naturally, as if a veil had gone. Afterward, the Inger wondered why he had not kissed him. He had not thought of that.
Before he called any one, the Inger stood still, looking at his father, and looking out the window to the City. So much had happened. A great deal of what had happened he understood, but there was much more that seemed to be pressing on him to be made clear. He had a strong sense of being some one else, of standing outside and watching. What great change was this that had come to his father and to him?
By dark they had taken his father away. The Inger went with him and did what he could. His father lay in an undertaker’s chapel. From the street the Inger stared at the chapel. It looked so strangely like the other buildings.
He took back to his room some poor belongings of his father’s, and when he saw the little room, and the empty unmade bed, he was shaken by a draining sense of loneliness – the first loneliness that he had ever known. Then he let his thought go where all day it had longed to go. He wanted Lory Moor.
He let himself go round by the little house of the Folts’s. It was quite dark, save for that watching light in the kitchen window. He waited on the other side of the street for a long time. No one came. There seemed to be no one in the neighborhood. A little dog came by, looked up at him, and stood wagging a ragged tail. The Inger stooped, then squatted beside the dog, and patted his head.
“I must get a dog,” he thought. “I’d ought to have a dog.”
At last he went away, down toward the town. And as he went, darkness seemed to close in and press about him. His hands were empty. His life was something other than that which he had believed it to be. Where was all this that he had had…
IX
As he turned into a wider street, he became aware that he was following with many who went one way. He kept on with them, intent on nothing. On Pennsylvania Avenue the crowd was going east, and he went east. But of all this he thought little, until he came near the Capitol. There the people swung both east and west, and rounded the building. So he came out in the Square before the east entrance.
The Square was filled with women. There were some men, too, but women were dominant in the throng. He remembered the meeting to which the papers had vaguely referred and because he had nothing to do, he moved on with the rest to the doors.
He noted that the women were saying little. It was almost a silent throng, as if all were immeasurably absorbed in something. Oddly, he thought of Mrs. Folts, and her absorption in food for her family and her guests.
He was in time to find room on the steps and then within the rotunda. He stared about him. This looked different from all other buildings that he had seen – as if great things were due to happen here. He pressed on slowly, as the others pressed. Eventually the elevators received them, and he found himself in an enormous room, the seats of the floor already filled, the galleries fast filling. He stood against the wall and looked. Below and above a throng of women, and only here and there a man. It occurred to him at last that he did not belong here, but now he could not well retreat, for the crowd blocked the doors.
On the platform were a dozen women. He looked at them curiously. He was familiar with but one sort of woman who was willing to show herself before a crowd. There flashed to his mind the memory of the dozen women whom he had seen on the stage of the Mission Saloon in Inch, on what was to have been Bunchy’s wedding night. Dress them like this, he reflected – dark and plain – and they wouldn’t look so different, at this distance.
The silence disturbed him. What on earth made them so still – as if it were a matter of life and death, whatever they were meeting about. He waited in absorbing curiosity to hear what it was they were going to say.
“Somebody says the Senate’s full, too,” he heard a man tell some one. “And they’re going to speak in the rotunda and on the steps.”
The Inger turned to him.
“What’s this room?” he asked.
“This is the House,” the man replied, courteously.
The Inger looked with new eyes. The House … where his laws were made. He felt a sudden surprised sense of pride in the room.
The silence became a hush, contagious, electric, and he saw that a woman on the platform had risen. She stood hatless, her hair brushed smoothly back, and her hands behind her. Abruptly he liked her. And he wondered what his mother had looked like.
There was no applause, but to his amazement the whole audience rose, and stood for a moment, in absolute silence. This woman spoke simply, and as if she were talking to each one there. It astonished the man. He had heard no one address a meeting save in campaign speeches, and this was not like those.
“The fine moral reaction,” she said, “has at last come. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim all the human life that has been spent. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim the treasure that has been wasted. But it comes too with a sense of joy that all voluntary destruction of human life, all the deliberate wasting of the fruits of labor, will soon have become things of the past. Whatever the future holds for us, it will at least be free from war.”1
Of this the Inger understood nothing. What could she be talking about, when the United States was to go to war at once?
“… it is because women understand that this is so, that we have been able so to come together. Not a month ago the word went out. Yet every state in the United States is represented here in Washington to-day by from one to five hundred women. And no one has talked about it. No one has wondered or speculated. We are here because the time has come.”
And now the Inger thought he understood. They were here to help! The time had come – war was here – they had come here to be ready, to collect supplies, to make bandages…
“… seven women from seven of the warring nations of Europe,” the quiet voice went on, “and women of the other states of Europe answered our appeal, and they are here. They will speak to us to-night – and they are to go from state to state, helping all women to understand.”
Women from the warring nations! The Inger looked eagerly. They had been there, they had seen, they had cheered their husbands and sons. Some of them must have lost their men – of course they could tell the American women what to do.
The first woman, however, was not of a warring country. She was a woman of Denmark. And she was of the same quiet manner and conversational speech.
She said: “During the first day of the war an old man said to me, sad and indignant: ‘To me it is quite unintelligible that citizens of the twentieth century consent to be driven like sheep to the shambles.’ And truly, only a fraction of those involved in the war did intend the war. To them and to us it was a surprise that will repeat itself in history as long as war is declared without the consent of the people, as long as war depends on secret notes and treaties.
“Where can we find a way to prevent another happening of these terrors? Can women possibly have any chance of succeeding where men have recently failed so miserably?
“I came from Denmark to say to you that women have better opportunities than anybody else for creating public opinion – the opinion that grows stronger with the coming race. Women give the next generation its first impressions.
“And the mother must give her children another idea than the armed warrior. Let her show them how unworthy it is of the citizen of the twentieth century to be used, body and blood, without will or resistance, as food for cannon…”2
The Inger listened, stupefied. What was this woman saying? It sounded to him like treason for which they should fall on her and drive her from the hall.
Then he heard the country of the next woman who came forward. Germany! Now they would hear the truth. Here was a woman from a nation of soldiers. She would understand, and she would make the rest know in what lay a country’s glory. Moreover, she was a strong woman – a woman to whom that race of mothers and of soldiers might have looked as the mother of them all.
“Women of the World, when will your call ring out?
“Women of all the belligerent states, with head high and courageous heart, gave their husbands to protect the fatherland. Mothers and maidens unfalteringly saw their sons and sweethearts go forth to death and destruction.”
This was it! The Inger drew his breath deep. She knew – she knew… She wanted American women to feel the same.
“Millions of men have been left on the battlefield. They will never see home again. Others have returned, broken and sick in body and soul. Towns of the highest civilization, homes of simple human happiness, are destroyed. Europe’s soil reeks of human blood. The flesh and blood of men will fertilize the soil of the corn fields of the future on German, French, Belgian and Russian ground.
“Millions of women’s hearts blaze up in anguish. No human speech is rich enough to express such depths of suffering. Shall this war of extermination go on? Shall we sit and wait dumbly for other wars to come upon us?
“Women of the world, where is your voice?
“Are you only great in patience and suffering?
“The earth soaked in blood, millions of wrecked bodies of husbands, sweethearts, sons – outrages inflicted on your sex. Can these things not rouse you to blazing protest?
“Women of the world, where is your voice, that should be sowing seeds of peace? Do not let yourselves be deterred by those who accuse you of weakness because you wish for peace, who say you cannot hold back the bloody march of history by your protest.
“Protest with all your might … make preparation for peace … perform your duty as wives and mothers, as protectors of true civilization and humanity!”3
Still in that silence, she ceased – but now once more all over the hall, the women rose, and stood there for a moment, looking into the eyes of the woman of Germany. There was no handclapping, there was no word, there was only that single sign – as if in that room there were but one Person, and that Person answered like this to what she said.
The Inger stared about him. What did this mean? Were these a few traitors who had come here to teach American women to play traitor too —
The German woman was speaking again.
“A letter,” she said, “a letter from German and Austrian women, ‘to the women of England – and of the world.’”
She read: “Women, creators and guardians of life, must loathe war, which destroys life. Through the smoke of battle and thunder of cannon of hostile peoples, through death, terror, destruction and unending pain and anxiety, there glows like the dawn of a coming better day the deep community of feeling of many women of all nations.”4
“This is signed,” she said, “by one hundred and fifty German and Austrian women. Thousands more are with us in name and spirit. Do not doubt – doubt!”
Another woman rose, and then another:
A letter from the women of England —
“… Is it not our mission to preserve life? Do not humanity and common sense alike prompt us to join hands with the women of neutral countries, and urge the stay of further bloodshed – forever?.. There is but one way to do this … by Wisdom and Reason. Can they begin too soon?.. Already we seem to hear
‘A hundred nations swear that there shall be
Pity and Peace and Love among the good and free.’”5
Then a letter from the women of Belgium, from the women of Switzerland, from the women of Italy – five hundred, two thousand names to each.
At length the Inger understood. These women who were here to protest against war were speaking for thousands upon thousands of women all over the world. And here were thousands listening, in the nation’s capitol.
A little French woman spoke, each sentence translated by another woman.
“The humblest cry can sometimes be heard joined to many others… It is very well for gentlemen banqueting at Guildhall to rejoice at being able to assemble so comfortably during the greatest war in history, thanks to the valor of the British army which defends the coast; but they should think of those who are exposing their lives…
“My two sons are in the trenches since the end of September, and have never slept in a bed since. It would be nothing if the cold had not set in so dreadfully…”6
Something – no one could have told whether it was a breath, or a look from one to one, went over the hall. More than in a long account of horror, this French mother, who spoke no other tongue, had made them feel what she was feeling.
There was a Polish woman of the country about Cracow who told the story of what had happened to her village. She spoke slowly, through an interpreter, and almost without emotion.
“We had just three little streets,” she said, “so it was not much to take. But they took them…” And she told how, and how a hundred children in the village had died. “I should be less than a woman in courage if I did not say that I, for one, shall not be silent even one day until my death. Every day I shall be crying, ‘Women of the World. This can not happen again, if we are women of flesh and not of stone.’”