Chapter IV: Part 4

“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.’”

There was a woman of Servia, and she was a peasant woman. Her clothes were those which her neighbors had found for her. Even then, so great was the haste at the last, she had crossed the ocean in a skirt and a shawl, but with no waist beneath the shawl.

“I had to come,” she said, through her interpreter. “There is only one hell worse than the hell that we have been through: and that is not to cry to the last breath that it shall be stopped. That it shall not come again to other women like us....”

There was a woman of Belgium, who belonged to a family high in position in Louvain. She wore garments which had been given to her from the American boxes. It was strange to hear that soft voice, in its broken English, speak of a thousand horrors with no passion. But when she spoke of To-morrow, and of what it must bring, her voice throbbed and strove with the spirit which poured through her.

“Do not think of Louvain,” she said. “Do not think of Belgium. Say, if you like, that this was only a part of what happens in war. Think, then, only of war. Think that war must not be ever again in this our world. While women have voices to raise to other women, we must make them understand that peace is our contribution to the earth. Women of the world, what are we waiting for?”

Then there came a woman, young, erect, burning—a woman of Hungary.

“Listen,” she said. “A Hungarian girl who went to care for the Galician refugees tells me in a recent letter the story of a poor woman who said: ‘I wanted to protect my children. I ran with the other inhabitants of the village. I took my baby in a shawl on my back. The two others hung on to my skirts. I ran fast, as fast as I could. When I got to the station, I had the two children hanging on my skirts, I had the shawl on my back, but I had no baby and I don’t know where I dropped him.’”

The Hungarian woman went on:

“They don’t want us to find out that there is no glory, no big patriotism, no love for anything noble, nothing but butchery and slaughter and rape. War means that. You know the story of the War-brides. You know how agents of the different churches compete with military rulers in glorifying this kind of prostitution. But do you know of the concentration camps with the compulsory service of women? You may have seen the full reports of the atrocities committed on Belgian women—but you didn’t get the other reports about the same kind of atrocities committed by _all_ armies on female human beings between the ages of five and eighty-nine in all the countries where the game of war is being played. _Women of the world, what are we waiting for?_”[7]

And beside her, as she finished, stood an Irish woman, taking up the thread of the Hungarian’s woman’s cry:

“If we women, to whom even a partial knowledge of these happenings has come, remain silent now, then we are blood guilty. We are more than blood guilty, for we must be numbered with those who will even dare the murder of a soul.

“Let us not blind ourselves with talk of the glories and heroisms of war. We dare not ignore the moral and spiritual wreckage that remains unchronicled. We have to think of men brutalized and driven to hideous deeds by their experiences; of men with reason destroyed; of men disgraced for lack of the cold courage that can face such horrors; of men with a slain faith in good, their outlook on life eternally embittered. What of the women for whom the French government has had to devise legislation to deter them from infanticide? What of the children begotten under such conditions? Women of the world, where is your voice, that should be sowing the seeds of peace?”[8]

Almost as her own voice, went on the voice of another woman, the brief poignant entreaty of an English woman:

“_We ask nothing strange!_ Only that which Christianity, civilization and motherhood dictate.

“The well-being of children touches all. On that common ground the opposing nations could meet and crown their courage by laying aside their arms at the call of a higher humanity.

“Can mother hearts turn from this cry? Will not womanhood join in resolve, though in divers tongues, yet with but one Voice—the Voice of pure human love and pity....”[9]

The Inger stood against the wall, and listened. A place had opened into which he had never looked, whose existence he had never guessed. He stood frowning, staring—at first trying to understand, then understanding and passionately doubting. The appeals of the first speakers did not touch him. What did women know of these things?

Then the Polish woman had spoken. Then the Servian woman. Then the Belgium woman. These undeniably knew what they were talking about! But not until that woman of Hungary had stood there, did the thought come which had pierced him: What if all that she said was true—and was true of Lory? What if it had been her child whom Lory had lost from her shawl as she ran....

He breathed hard, and looked about him. They were all, men and women alike, sitting as tense as he. And he saw that all these believed. No one, no one could doubt these women.

“This is what we have to do—” it was another German woman who was speaking and the interpreter was giving her words. “This is what we have to do: our cry must ring forth irresistibly from millions of voices: ‘Enough of slaughter, enough of devastation. Peace, lasting peace! Make room for peaceful work. Leave the way free for the fraternity of the peoples and for their coöperation in bringing to flower the culture of international civilization!’

“If men kill, it is for women to fight for the preservation of life. If men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices on behalf of our ideals.”[10]

The Inger stood where the wall curved, so he was looking at the rows of faces from near the front of the room. And he was looking on a sign, a hint no greater in emphasis than a shadow, of what war is to women. He understood it, momentarily he even felt it. And for a flash he saw them all as he had seen the women in the Chicago employment agency—as if he were those women and could suffer what they suffered.

He remembered Lory, and her face lifted to his in the Chicago meeting.

“They’re voting to kill folks,” she had said. “Oh, my God.”

This was what she had meant. She had understood, and he had not understood. How had she understood? He thought about her. Out of Inch, out of scenes of killing, and of misery put upon life, Jem Moor’s girl had come, and she knew how to feel the way these women felt. All that he had been feeling for her became something which beat upon his heart like light.

A note had been sent to the chairman, and with her announcement, a movement of wonder went over the audience, and this wonder was touched with dread. A famous army man was present, and he would speak.

He came forward firmly, and it was by the merest chance that he stood there before them erect, strong, compact, alive, for he had seen service. The Inger looked at him, quickening. Immediately, at the sight of his uniform, the Inger had felt a restoration of confidence in what had always been. Then the man faced them, and he spoke as quietly as the women themselves:

“I ask only to tell you,” he said, “that I have been for twenty-five years in the service—a part of the time in active service. I have believed in armies and in armament. I still believe them to have been an obvious necessity—while our world was being whipped into shape. Now I am in the last years of my service—I do not take very readily to new ideas—even when I know that these point to the next step on the way. I tell you frankly, that if there were a call to arms, I should be there in my old place—I should serve as I have always served, I should kill whom they told me to kill, as long as they would have me there. But—” he hesitated, and lifted his face, and in it was a light that has shone on a face in no battlefield, “if that time comes, I shall thank God for every woman who protests against it, as you here are protesting. And, if that time comes, from my soul I shall honor the men who will have the courage to be shot, rather than to go out to shoot their fellows. These men will not be lacking: I have read the signs and I have heard men talk. Your new way of warfare is not in vain. You will win. You are the voice of To-morrow. I have wanted you to know that I feel this—and that to you and to your effort I say God bless you, and prosper what you do.”

For the first time that night the silence of the audience was broken. A thunder of hands and voices spoke to him. And, as he turned to leave the platform, they did that by which they paid the highest honor that they knew—and rose and remained standing until he had reached his seat.

“Jove,” said the man near the Inger. “Old Battle-axe! Now watch the men catch up. It only needed one full-blooded man to say it....”

“Rot,” said the man beyond him. “No matter what they say, you know and I know that trade will never get out of the way of peace. There’ll be no peace while we have trade—and that’ll be for some time to come!”

At this the first man laughed.

“Trade,” he said, “was a thought before it was trade. Peace is a thought—yet.”

On the stage some one was quoting Washington: “My first wish is—to see the whole world in peace and the inhabitants of it as one band of brothers, striving who should contribute most to the happiness of mankind.”

And Victor Hugo: “A day will come when a cannon ball will be exhibited in public museums, just as an instrument of torture is now; and people will be amazed that such a thing could ever have been.”

Methodically, and as if it had become their business, the women fell to discussing what they must do. In each country more groups must be organized—for School, Home, States, Municipalities—“for the lifting of the programme of pacifism into the realm of serious commercial and educational and home and political consideration.” The psychology of war must give place to the psychology of peace.

From unfair trade legislation by one country against another, down to the sale of toy weapons and soldiers; and from competing expenditures for national defence down to military drill in schools and colleges, the temptations to militarism must pass from the earth.

“We know,” an American woman said, “that war depends on economic conditions beyond our control. But we know, too, that there is something potent to change even these, and it is this potency which we dream to liberate.”

And, beside the Inger, the man said again:

“Peace is only a thought,—yet. But even economic conditions were only thought, once!”

Gradually in the voice of one and another, the word took shape—so simply that the enormity of the import was pathetically lacking: That representatives of the women of the world, united in a demand for international righteousness, shall petition the men and women of the world to turn to the new knowledge that war is an outworn way to settle difficulties; that with one voice we shall all refuse any longer to let the traditions of a past age be put upon us; that the old phrases and catch-words shall not stand for one moment before the naked question of the race: “Is this the best that life can do with life?” That we shall learn from one another that there is no such thing as preparing against war, but that to prepare for war breeds war—twin-born are the slayer and the slain; that we shall teach one another that “Thou shalt not kill” is not only moral law, but sound economic policy, for always these two are one. And that from the constructive plans devised in anguish and in hope by men and women of to-day, there be selected and inaugurated a world programme for permanent peace without armistice and a council of the nations looking toward the federation of the world.

“We have talked long enough of treaties and of arbitration,” they said. “Let us have done with such play. Let us speak the phrase quite simply: The federation of the world.”

And the message concluded:

“For we, the women of the world, have banded ourselves together to demand that war be abolished.”

Last, he remembered a Voice. Afterward, he could not have told what woman spoke, or of what nation they said that she had come. But what she said was like the weaving of what the others had spun.

“_Remember,_” said her Voice, “_that all this is nothing. It is only the body, made for the spirit. And the spirit is that new dominant mind which shall be born in the world—the mind of love._

“_You’ll not get this by going to governments. You’ll not get this by the meeting of groups of representative people. You’ll not get this by International Police. These things must be—will be, as a matter of course. But they will not be the mind of love._

“_Something will come into the world—and it will know nothing of arbitration, it will know nothing of armistice, it will know nothing of treaties; nor will it know anything of those other ways of secret warfare by which great nations seem to keep clean hands: the ways of ‘high’ finance through ‘peaceful penetration.’_

“_Something will come into the world, and it will know nothing of nations._

“_The little loyalties will go. National pride, national ‘honor,’ patriotism—all the little scaffolds will fall away. And within will be the light that we lack._

“_It is the mind of love. I am not afraid to say that beside it, governments are nothing. It is the mind of love. It may be in the simplest cottage of a peasant who goes to the war for a false ideal. But of this as yet the nations do not know._

“_What is it that we must know?_

“_That the nations are nothing—the people are everything. That the people are bound together by ties which the nations must cease to break. That the people are heart’s kindred, met here together for their world-work, and that the nations must cease to interrupt._”

* * * * *

Even then the Cabinet meeting was already concluded, and the newsboys were on the streets with the Extras; and on the bulletin boards of the world the word was being flashed:

“NO ACTION TO BE TAKEN
BY U. S.”

And in the newspapers was the text of that letter, simple, human, of almost religious import, which was to make the United States, years hence, stand out as the first great headland upon new shores.

* * * * *

The people were coming out at the doors of the Capitol. Among them were the women who had spoken—the Polish woman, the Servian peasant, the lady of Louvain. The other women in the crowd put out their hands and took the hands of these women. Those stretching, pressing hands of silent women marked a giant fellowship which disregarded oceans, strange tongues, countless varying experiences, and took account of only one thing.

The Inger was looking up at the white dome against the black sky, and about him at the march of the people. Through his thought ran the flood of this that he had heard. In his absorption he lurched heavily against a man who was trying to pass him and who jostled him. For the first time in his life, the Inger felt no surge of anger at such a happening. He looked in the man’s face.

“Gosh,” the Inger said. “That was too alfired bad!”

The man smiled and nodded. Momentarily, the Inger felt on his arm the touch of the man’s hand.

“All right, brother,” the man said, and was gone.

The Inger felt a sudden lightness of heart. And about him the people went along so quietly. Abruptly the tumult of his thinking gave way to something nearer than these things. He looked in their faces. None of them knew that his father had died! It occurred to him now that there was hardly one of them who, on being told, would not say something to him—perhaps even shake his hand. He thought that many of these people must have seen their fathers die. He wondered which ones these would be, and he wished that he knew which ones they were. Something in him went along with the people, because they must have had fathers who had died. He looked at them in a new way. Their fathers must have died....

Oh, if only, he thought, Lory might have been there to-night with those women who felt as she felt....

He was aware of a hand on his arm. He turned, feeling an obscure pleasure that perhaps some one had something to say to him. It was Lory, alone.

X

HER face in the darkness, and about them the green gloom of the Square, were all that he knew of the time. Not far from them, like murals on the night, went the people, that little lighted stream of people, down the white steps and along the gray drives.

At first he could say nothing to her. He seized at her hand as he had seized upon it that night in Chicago, but then he remembered and let her hand fall; and at last he blurted out a consuming question:

“Where is he?”

“Who?” Lory asked surprisingly, and understood, and still more surprisingly replied:

“Bunchy! He’s gone to New York.”

This city’s name the Inger repeated stupidly, and as if it made no answer to anything.

“Just for a few days,” she explained, “before he goes home.”

“Home!”

To tell the truth she seemed not to be thinking very much about Bunchy.

“I told him I’d never marry him—not in fifty hundred years. And he went home.”

He considered this incredulously.

“Couldn’t you tell him that without comin’ clear to Washington to do it?” he demanded.

“No,” she said. “There was the money. Why didn’t you tell me you’d give Dad that money?”

He tried to answer her, but all the while this miracle was taking him to itself: Bunchy had gone.

“I guess because it sounded like a square deal, when I only done it to devil Bunchy some,” he told her.

“Is that all you done it for?”

He looked at her swiftly. Was that all that he had done it for?

“Is it?” she said.

“I donno,” he answered truthfully. “It was some of it.”

“I wish,” she said, “I wish’t I knew.”

With that he moved a little toward her, and tried to see her face.

“Why?” he asked.

She turned away and said nothing. And when she did that, he caught his breath and stooped to her.

“You tell me why you wish’t you knew,” he bade her.

“Oh well,” she said—and she was breathless too—“if you done it to help me—get away—then I shouldn’t feel so bad about goin’ to the hut.”

“About comin’ to me?”

“About makin’ you do all this for me!” she cried. “I’m sick over it. I don’t know how to tell you....”

He wondered if it was possible that she did not understand.

“I done the only thing I could think to do,” she said. “There wasn’t anybody else....”