Chapter III: Part 3

In the circumstances, there was nothing that she could well say against this. She nodded. The Inger consulted his timetable, found a train toward morning, and the thing was done. He left the place like a boy.

“Let’s see some of this Mouth o’ the Pit this afternoon,” he said, “being we’re here. And then we’ll head for that war meeting. It’s grand we got here for it,” he added.

Lory looked up at him in a kind of fear. On the mountain that night she had not once really feared him. But here, she now understood, was a man with whom, in their days together, she had after all never yet come face to face.

VI

THEY sat where they could see the great audience gather. The people came by thousands. They poured in the aisles, advanced, separated, sifted into the rows of seats, climbed to the boxes, the galleries, ranged along those sloping floors like puppets. The stage filled. There were men and women, young, old, clothed in a mass of black shot through with color. Here were more people than ever in their lives Lory or the Inger had seen. The stage alone was a vast audience hall.

The people talked. A dull roar came from them, fed by voices, by shuffling feet, by the moving of garments and papers and bodies. They all moved. No one was still. The human mass, spread so thinly in the hollow shell of the hall, moved like maggots.

The Inger leaned forward, watching. His eyes were lit and his breath quickened. His huge frame obscured the outlook of a little white-faced youth who sat beside him, continually stroking and twisting at a high and small moustache.

“Sit back, sir, can’t you?” this exasperated youth finally demanded.

The Inger, his hand spread massively as he leaned on his leg, tossed him a glance, over shoulder, and with lifted brows.

“Why, you little lizard,” he observed, only, and did not change his posture.

A group of men and women in evening clothes sat beside Lory, who frankly stared at them. One of the women, elderly, pallidly powdered, delicately worn down by long, scrupulous care of her person, sat with one blue and boned hand in evidence, heavily clad with rings.

“Look at the white bird’s claw,” the Inger said suddenly. “I’d like to snap it off its bloomin’ stem.”

And as the people ceased to come in, and now were merely sitting there, breathing, and incredibly alive, he suddenly spoke aloud:

“If hundreds of ’em fell dead and was dragged out,” he said, “we’d never know the difference, would we?”

Lory’s look was the speculative look which always embarrassed him.

“If two of ’em was us, we would,” she said.

The Inger laughed boisterously.

“You bet,—then!” he agreed. “Lord, ain’t it grand that the rest of ’em could go, for all we care!”

She pondered it.

“What if they was a big fire,” she said, “like the Hess House?”

The Hess House, an unsavory place of Inch, had burned the year before, and with it five nameless women.

“Oh gosh,” said the Inger, “you could hand ’em out like fish off the coals, and save ’em, alive and kicking, and cord ’em up somewheres, and rip back for more.”

“Why?” asked Lory. “Why would you do that—if it didn’t make any difference?”

“Because you’d be a dub if you didn’t,” he replied simply.

He was silent for a minute, played at picking her up in his arms, holding her, hewing through the crowd, trampling them out of the way, and as he went, kissing her when he pleased. To him the hall dimmed and went out.... Then he heard the chairman speaking.

The chairman was a man of thick body and bent head, with watching eyes, and a mouth that shut as a fist shuts. His voice went over the hall like a horn.

The meeting had been called because something must be done—something must be done. The war had dragged on until the world was sucked. Men, women, children, money, arms, cities, nations, were heaped on the wreck. The wreck _was_ the world. Something must be done—something must be done. In all the earth stood only one great nation, untouched of carnage, fat, peopled—and peopled with sons of the warring world. This meeting had been called because something must be done. There were those who had come to tell what to do.

To those who comprehended, the weight of the moment lay in the chaos of applause which took the house. The air of the place, languid, silent, casual, for all that one observed, abruptly solidified and snapped, and flew asunder. In its place leaped something electric, which played from the people to the speaker who came first to his place, and from him back to the people.

This man began to speak slowly. He was slow-moving, slow of eyelid and of glance, and his words came half sleepily. It was so that he told them about themselves: Children of those who had come to America for escape, for retreat, for a place of self-expression. Who had sought liberty, free schools, manhood suffrage, womanhood suffrage, religious freedom, and had found some of these and were seeking more. Picture by picture he showed them a country which, save for its enduring era of industrial babyhood, and its political and judicial error, gave them richly of what they had sought, developed them, fed them, comforted them. A place of plenty, a happy paradise, a walled world, he pictured theirs.

In the same sleepy, casual fashion, he went on: Why should they set about all this talk of “something must be done”? This was none of our quarrel. Perfectly, by this time, we recognized its causes as capitalistic issues. If they chose to murder one another, should we add terror unto terror by slaying more, and ourselves? Why ourselves and our sons? Why not stay soft in the nest we had made, while men of the soil which had nourished our fathers called to us vainly, the death rattle in their throats? Sigh delicately for this rattle of death in millions of throats and fill our own with the fat of the land whose prosperity must not be imperilled. Read of a people decimated, and answer by filing a protest. Pray for peace incessantly, beside our comfortable beds. Read of atrocities and shudder in our warm libraries. Hear of dead men who fought and dead men who rotted, and talk it over on our safe, sunlit streets. Meet insult on the high seas, and merely hold mass meetings. And speculate, speculate, speculate, at our laden dinner tables, on the probable outcome.

“The part of men is being played by us all,” the slow voice went on, “of men and of descendants of men of Europe. It was so that they acted in ’76—the men of Europe, was it not? And we are the sons of those who, before ’76, made Europe as they made America—and us. The destruction of one of our vessels—what is that to us? Let’s turn the other cheek. And let’s meet here often, friends, what do you say? Here it is warm and light—you come from good dinners—you come in good clothes—in automobiles. Let us meet to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow! Let us have music—Where is the music to-night? ‘Tipperary’—‘Marseillaise’—‘Wacht Am Rhein’—‘God Save the King’—why are we not being stirred by these to sign a protest, to take a collection which shall keep them fighting on? ‘Something must be done!’ So we meet—and meet—and meet again. And we play a part that in the history of the next century will make the very schoolboys say: ‘Thank God, America locked her door and kept her safety and let them die!’ Next week—let us meet here again next week, pleasantly and together. ‘Something must be done!’ In the name of all the bleeding nations, let us keep on meeting, in this large and lighted hall.”

Before the silence in which he turned away had been rent by the applause that followed on the surprise of it, another man sprang from his seat on the stage and strode to the front. In a gesture curiously awkward and involuntary, he signed them to let him speak, and his voice burst out before they could hear him.

“... he is right—he is right—and I burn in flesh and soul and blood and bone of these peoples of Europe who made me. Their flesh cries to my flesh and it answers with a tongue that has been dumb too long. Men of America! Men who have lately been sons of the warring nations and have crept off here just in time—by a decade or by a century—to stand with whole skins and unbroken bones—let’s have done with it! Do we face our insults as men—or do we stand silent and bid for more? And are we another kind of creature? Do we understand what those men suffer? Are their cries of agony to us in another tongue? Have blood and misery and madness a language of their own, and are we deaf to it—or do we know with every fibre in us what it is they are going through, what it is they ask of us, what it is that if we are men we must give them—and give them now! For now their provocation is our provocation. I ask you what it shall be—the safe way of intervention? Or the hands of human beings, to succor the naked hands of the desperate and the dying of our own kin—our own kin! And to revenge our wrong!”

In an instant the hall was shattered by a thousand cries. Men leaped to their feet. Some sat still. Some wept. But the cries which came from no one knew whom of them, rose and roared distinguishably!

“To war ... war ... war!”

The Inger had risen and stood stooping forward, his hands on the rail, his eyes sweeping the crowd. His look seemed to lick up something that it had long wanted, and to burn it in his face. He was smiling with his teeth slightly showing.

“Ah-h-h,” he said within his breath, and said it again, and stood rocking a little and breathing hard.

The demonstration lasted on as if a pent presence had lapped them to itself and possessed them. A man, and another tried to speak, but no one listened. A few in the front rows left the hall, and, ominous, and barely audible, a hissing began in the galleries and ran down the great bank of heads, and scourged the few as they gained the door.

What at last silenced them was the dignity and status of a man who took the stage. He made no effort to speak. He merely waited. Presently they were quiet, though not all reseated themselves.

He was a man of more than middle years, with a face worn and tortured—but it was as if the torture had been long ago.

“My neighbors,” he said, “will some one tell me why you want to kill your neighbors across the water?”

“To vindicate our honor! To _help_ our neighbors and our kin!” shouted the lean man who had spoken last.

The older man regarded him quietly:

“You want to kill your neighbors,” he repeated. “You want to go over there with arms and be at war. You want to _kill_ your neighbors. I am asking you why?”

From the upper gallery came a cry that was like a signal. Up there a hundred throats took up a national hymn. Instantly from the balconies below, from pit, from stage, a thousand were on their feet and a thousand throats took up the air. Not an instant later, something cut the current of the tune, wavered, broke, swelled—and another nation’s hymn, by another thousand, rose and bore upon the first, and the two shook the place with discord. A third nation’s air—a fourth—the hall was a warfare of jarring voices—and out of the horror of sound came the old exquisite phrases, struggling for dominance: “God Save the Queen”—”Watch on the Rhine,” “The Marseillaise,” “The Italian Hymn,” and rollicking over all, the sickening wistfulness and hopelessness and sweetness of “Tipperary.”

The Inger raised his great form and stretched up his arms and shook them above his head, and swung out his right arm as if it flung a rope.

“Yi—eih—ai—la—o-o-o-oh—!” he shouted, like the cry of all the galloping cow-punchers of the West, galloping, and galloping, to a thing on which, with sovereign intensity, they were bent. He silenced those about him, and they looked and laughed, and gave themselves back to their shouting. The woman with the blue-boned hand looked over to Lory, and smiled with a liquid brightness in her eyes, and her pink spangled fan tapped her hand in tune with the nearest of the songs about her. This woman looked like a woman of the revolution, who believed that good has always come out of war, and that from war good will always come. She smiled. Tears rolled on her face. She sank back weakly, but she waved her pink spangled fan.

As his hand came down, Lory caught at the Inger’s sleeve.

“Can’t we go?” she begged. “Can’t we?”

He pulled his sleeve from her hand, hardly knowing that it was there, and kept at his shouting.

The only man to whom they would listen was, at last, the man who had so roused them. When, after a hurried conference with the chairman, and others, this man rose again, they listened—in the vague expectation that something would now be said which would excite them further.

“Don’t be senseless fools!” he shouted. “This is no better than a neat, printed protest. ‘Something must be _done_!’ Say what it is that you are going to do, or you may as well go home.”

He turned pointedly toward a dark-bearded man who was evidently expected to follow him. This man rose and shook out a paper. He shouted shrilly and wagged his head in his effort to make himself heard, and his long hair swung at the sides.

“At this moment,” he rehearsed, “eighteen meetings such as this are being held in eighteen towns—New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake, Denver, Omaha, Portland, Spokane, St. Louis, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Milwaukee—these and the others are holding meetings like this. You know how each meeting is to take action and transmit that action to-night to each of the other meeting places. I ask you: what is it that this meeting is going to do? And Mr. Chairman, I make you a motion.”

The hall was so silent that it seemed drained of breathing: so electric with listening that it seemed drained of thought.

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, ay, and Ladies, for I deem you fully worthy to have a share in these deliberations,” said he, with a magnificent bow. “I move you, that, Whereas our government in its wisdom has seen fit to withhold itself from the great drama of the world’s business for a length of time not to be tolerated by a great mass of its citizens: and, Whereas, since the destruction of the steamship _Fowler_, a merchant vessel, belonging to the United States and sailing neutral waters, three days have elapsed without action on the part of the government thus outraged past all precedent in conduct toward neutral nations—save only one nation!—That now, therefore, we here assembled, citizens of the United States, do voice our protest and demand of our government that if within the week no adequate explanation or apology shall be forthcoming from the offending power, we do proceed without further delay to declare war against that power.

“And I further move you that it be the sense of this meeting that we hereby petition for immediate mobilization of our army.

“And I further move you that, on the carrying of this motion, a copy of it be telegraphed to the President of the United States, and to the Chairmen of the eighteen similar meetings held in the United States this night, in the common name of liberty and humanity.”

The hall became a medley of sound with but one meaning. Men leaped to the seats, to the rails of balconies, shouting. The thing they had wanted to have said had been said. The fire that had been smouldering since early in the war, that had occasionally blazed in public meetings, in the press, in private denunciation, had at last eaten through the long silence to burn now with a devouring flame, and the people gave it fuel.

A dozen men and women there were who fought their way forward, and stood on the platform, appealing for silence. One by one these tried to speak. To each the hall listened until it had determined the temper of the speaker: then, if it was, as it was from several, a passionate denunciation of the policy, groans and hisses drowned the speaker’s voice. And if it was a ringing cry of “Patriots of the world, show your patriotism in the cause of the stricken world and of this offended nation!”—the fury of applauding hands and stamping feet silenced speech no less.

“Question! Question! Question!” they called—not here and there and otherwhere, but in a great wave of hoarse shouting, like a pulse.

The Chairman rose to put the motion, and as silence fell for him to speak, a youth of twenty, lithe, dark, with a face of the fineness of some race more like to all peoples than peoples now are like to one another, hurled himself before him, and shouted into the quiet:

“Comrades! Comrades! In the name of God—of the hope of the International....”

A yell went up from the hall. A dozen hands drew the youth away. He waved his arms toward the hall. From above and below, came voices—some of men, some of women, hoarse or clear or passionate:

“Comrades! Comrades!...”

But in that moment’s breath of another meaning, the speaker who first had fired them stood beside the chairman, and held up a telegram. They let him read:

“Resolution almost unanimously passed by Metropolitan mass meeting and by two overflow meetings....”

If there was more to the telegram, no one but the reader knew. The clamor was like a stretching of hands across the miles to New York, to clasp those other hands in their brother-lust. The youth of twenty flung himself free of those who had held him, and dropped to the floor, and sat hugging his knees and staring out over the hall as if death sat there, infinitely repeated, and naked.

The Chairman lifted his hand. “You have heard the motion. Does any one desire to hear it re-read?”

Again that amazing, pulsing, unanimity of the cry:

“Question! Question! Question!”

“All those in favor—” the Chairman’s bent head was raised so that he peered at them from under his lids—“will make it manifest by saying ‘ay.’”

Out of the depth of their experience and practice at meetings for charity, for philanthropy, for church, for state, for home, they voted, so that it was like One Great Thing with a voice of its own.

“Ay!”

In this “ay” the Inger’s voice boomed out so that some remembered and wondered, and even in that moment, a few turned to see him.

“Those opposed will make it manifest by saying ‘no.’”

The boy sprang to his feet, and with the clear call of a few hundred no’s, his own voice rang out in agony:

“Oh my God,” he said, “No! No! No!”

There must have been a thousand who laughed at him and called him a name. But the others were gone wild again. And with them the Inger was shouting his wildest, so that for a moment he did not hear Lory. Then he realized that she was standing beside him crying with the few hundred their ‘No!’”

He took her by the shoulder and shook her roughly.

“What do you want to do that for?” he said. “Are you a white feather?”

It smote him with dull surprise that she was so calm.

She answered him as she might have spoken on the mountain trail:

“If that means that I ain’t like them,” she said, “then I am a white feather, I guess.”

“But look here,” he burst out, “you’re no mollycoddle. You’re the West! You know how things go—”

She broke in then, with her face turned toward the hall again.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how things go. They’re voting to kill folks—Oh my God!”

The Inger blazed up in a flame.

“It ain’t any such thing!” he burst out. “They don’t care a hang about killing folks—not for the fun o’ killing!”

He hurled his new fact at her, passionately anxious that she should understand.

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “It’s for somethin’—it’s _for_ somethin’! That’s all the difference. It’s grand! It’s—it’s grand—” He shook with his effort to make her know.

“It’s killing ’em just as dead!” she said, and she wept.

Here the Inger received an unexpected ally. The woman with the blue-boned hand beside Lory leaned forward, and touched the girl’s arm with her pink, spangled fan:

“My child,” she said, “try to understand: killing is so small a part of it all!”

Lory faced her, and her eyes blazed into the faded eyes of her.

“Did you ever see your father kill a sheriff?” she asked. “Well, mine did—and I watched him. And I tell you, no matter how murderin’ is done, it’s hell. If you don’t know that, take it from me!”

About them, the crowd, waiting for no adjournment, was rising, streaming out, falling back as it got to the doors. The Inger, marshalling Lory before him, made his way with the rest. He looked across Lory’s head and above most of the others. He was noticing the people.

There was a fine stalwart lad, he thought—good for the army, and looking ready to shoulder his gun. That chap with the shoulders—what a seat he’d have in the cavalry—or on a broncho, for the matter of that. That fellow there was too old, but he was in excited talk with some one, and both were as eager as boys. Some were still shouting to one another, flushed with immediate purpose. Others were quiet and moved out soberly, as when the lights come back after the great climax. But every one was thrilled and fired by a powerful emotion, and it lived in their faces. The Inger read it there, because he felt it in his own. He warmed to them all.

A man about town, fashionably dressed, and in absorbed talk, came down on the Inger’s foot with shocking vigor.

“I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed in a hurrying falsetto, pitching down three notes of the scale.

“Don’t you give a damn,” said the Inger unexpectedly.

At the door, in the bewilderment of lights and carriage calls and traffic, the Inger stood in complete uncertainty.

“Can you tell me—” “Say, could you tell me—” “Say, which way—” he addressed one or two, but in the inner turmoil of them and in the clamor without, they did not heed him.

The Inger faced the next man, a fat being, with two nieces—one knew that they were nieces; and demanded of him to be told the way to his station.

“Lord bless me,” said the man. “Get on any car going that way!”

“Thank you to hell,” said the Inger heartily. “Hope we’re on the same side,” he warmed to it. “Hope we’re in the same regiment!” he mounted with it.

As the two swung out on the sidewalk, he was silent with the vague mulling of this.

“Could we walk?” Lory suggested. “Is there time?”

He welcomed it. They went up Wabash Avenue with the slow-moving crowd.

It had been raining, and the asphalt between the rails, and the rails themselves, were wet and shining. The black cobblestones were covered thinly with glossy mud. Even the sidewalks palely mirrored the amazing flame of the lights.

It was another Chicago from the city which they had entered with the dawn. Here was a gracious place of warm-looking ways, and a time of leisure, and the people meant other than the people of the morning. The Inger moved among them, swam with them, looked on them all with something new stirring him.

Lory went silently. She had slipped her handkerchief cap away, and her hair was bright and uncovered in the lamplight. But she seemed not to be looking anywhere.

“You did get on to it there to-night, didn’t you?” he asked, wistfully.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Why—the new part,” he told her. “Didn’t you notice? Every last one of ’em was goin’ on about country and folks. _That’s why they want to go._”

She was silent, and he was afraid that she did not understand.

“I never thought of it till to-night, either,” he excused her. “Don’t you see? Fellows don’t want to go to war just to smash around for a fight. It’s for somethin’ else.”

He stopped, vaguely uncomfortable in his exaltation.

“It’s killin’,” she said, “an’ killin’ ’s killin’.”

He stood still on the walk, regardless of the passers, and shook her arm.

“Good heavens,” he said, “women had ought to see that. Women are better’n men, and they’d ought to see it! Can’t you get past the killin’? Can’t you understand they might have a thunderin’ reason?”

“_No_ reason don’t matter,” she said. “It’s killin’. And it ain’t anything else.”

He walked on, his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She knew that he was disappointed in her—but she was too much shaken to think about that. She remembered how her mother had watched her brother go out to fight after some mean uprising of drunken whites against the Indians. Nobody knew now what it had been about, but six men had been shot. That stayed.

Presently the Inger raised his head, and walked with it thrown back again. Women, he supposed, _wouldn’t_ understand. They were afraid—they hated a gun—they hated a scratch. There was the woman with the blue-boned hand and wrist and the pink spangled fan—_she_ understood, it seemed. But somehow that proved nothing, and he freed his thought of her.

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.

VIII

THE Inger stepped in front of Lory, and, before the others turned, wheeled to face her.