_By_ WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From _The Atlantic Monthly_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Atlantic Monthly Co._
_Copyright, 1919, by Wilbur Daniel Steele._
The returning ship swam swiftly through the dark; the deep, interior
breathing of the engines, the singing of wire stays, the huge whispering
rush of foam streaming the water-line made up a body of silence upon
which the sound of the doctor’s footfalls, coming and going restlessly
along the near deck, intruded only a little—a faint and personal
disturbance. Charging slowly through the dark, a dozen paces forward, a
dozen paces aft, his invisible and tormented face bent forward a little
over his breast, he said to himself,—
“What fools! What blind fools we’ve been!”
Sweat stood for an instant on his brow, and was gone in the steady
onrush of the wind.
The man lying on the cot in the shelter of the cabin companionway made
no sound all the while. He might have been asleep or dead, he remained
so quiet; yet he was neither asleep nor dead, for his eyes, large,
wasted, and luminous, gazed out unwinking from the little darkness of
his shelter into the vaster darkness of the night, where a star burned
in slow mutations, now high, now sailing low, over the rail of the ship.
Once he said in a washed and strengthless voice, “That’s a bright star,
doctor.”
If the other heard, he gave no sign. He continued charging slowly back
and forth, his large dim shoulders hunched over his neck, his hands
locked behind him, his teeth showing faintly gray between the fleshy
lips which hung open a little to his breathing.
“It’s dark!” he said of a sudden, bringing up before the cot in the
companionway. “God, Hallett, how dark it is!” There was something
incoherent and mutilated about it, as if the cry had torn the tissues of
his throat. “I’m not myself to-night,” he added, with a trace of shame.
Hallett spoke slowly from his pillow.
“It wouldn’t be the subs to-night? You’re not that kind, you know. I’ve
seen you in the zone. And we’re well west of them by this, anyhow; and
as you say, it’s very dark.”
“It’s not that darkness. Not that!”
Again there was the same sense of something tearing. The doctor rocked
for a moment on his thick legs. He began to talk.
“It’s this _war_—” His conscience protested: “I ought not to go on
so—it’s not right, not right at all—talking so to the wounded—the
dying—I shouldn’t go on so to the dying—” And all the while the words
continued to tumble out of his mouth. “No, I’m not a coward—not
especially. You know I’m not a coward, Hallett. You know that. But just
now, to-night, somehow, the whole black truth of the thing has come out
and got me—jumped out of the dark and got me by the neck, Hallett. Look
here; I’ve kept a stiff lip. Since the first I’ve said, ‘We’ll win this
war.’ It’s been a matter of course. So far as I know, never a hint of
doubt has shadowed my mind, even when things went bad. ‘In the end,’
I’ve said, ‘in the end, of course, we’re bound to win.’”
He broke away again to charge slowly through the dark with his head
down, butting; a large, overheated animal endowed with a mind.
“But—do we want to win?”
Hallett’s question, very faint across the subdued breathings and
showerings of the ship, fetched the doctor up. He stood for a moment,
rocking on his legs and staring at the face of the questioner, still and
faintly luminous on the invisible cot. Then he laughed briefly, shook
himself, and ignored the preposterous words. He recollected tardily that
the fellow was pretty well gone.
“No,” he went on. “Up to to-night I’ve never doubted. No one in the
world, in _our_ part of the world, has doubted. The proposition was
absurd to begin with. Prussia, and her fringe of hangers-on, to stand
against the world—to stand against the very drift and destiny of
civilization? Impossible! A man can’t do the impossible; that’s logic,
Hallett, and that’s common sense. They might have their day of it, their
little hour, because they had the jump—but in the end! _in the end!_—
But look at them, will you! Look at them! That’s what’s got me to-night,
Hallett. Look at them! There they stand. They won’t play the game, won’t
abide at all by the rules of logic, of common sense. Every day, every
hour, they perform the impossible. Not once since the war was a year old
have they been able to hang out another six months. They’d be wiped from
the earth; their people would starve. They’re wiped from the earth, and
they remain. They starve and lay down their skinny bodies on the ground,
and they stand up again with sleek bellies. They make preposterous,
blind boasts. They say, ‘We’ll over-run Roumania in a month.’ Fantastic!
It’s _done_! They say, ‘Russia? New-born Russia? Strong young
boy-Russia? We’ll put him out of it for good and all by Christmas.’ That
was to cheer up the hungry ones in Berlin. Everybody saw through it. The
very stars laughed. _It’s done!_ God, Hallett! It’s like clockwork. It’s
like a rehearsed and abominable programme—”
“Yes—a programme.”
The wounded man lay quite still and gazed at the star. When he spoke,
his words carried an odd sense of authenticity, finality. His mind had
got a little away from him, and now it was working with the new,
oracular clarity of the moribund. It bothered the doctor
inexplicably—tripped him up. He had to shake himself. He began to talk
louder and make wide, scarcely visible gestures.
“We’ve laughed so long, Hallett. There was _Mittel-Europa_! We always
laughed at that. A wag’s tale. To think of it—a vast, self-sufficient,
brutal empire laid down across the path of the world! Ha-ha! Why, even
if they had _wanted_ it, it would be—”
“If they _wanted_ it, it would be—_inevitable_.”
The doctor held up for a full dozen seconds. A kind of anger came over
him and his face grew red. He couldn’t understand. He talked still
louder.
“But they’re _doing_ it! They’re doing that same preposterous thing
before our eyes, and we can’t touch them, and they’re— Hallett! _They’re
damn near done!_ Behind that line there,—you know the line I mean,—who
of us doesn’t know it? That thin line of smoke and ashes and black
blood, like a bent black wire over France! Behind that line they’re at
work, day by day, month after month, building the empire we never
believed. And Hallett, _it’s damn near done_! And we can’t stop it. It
grows bigger and bigger, darker and darker—it covers up the sky—like a
nightmare—”
“Like a dream!” said Hallett softly; “a dream.”
The doctor’s boot-soles drummed with a dull, angry resonance on the
deck.
“And we can’t touch them! They couldn’t conceivably hold that line
against us—against the whole world—long enough to build their incredible
empire behind it. _And they have!_ Hallett! How _could_ they ever have
held it?”
“You mean, how could we ever have held it?”
Hallett’s words flowed on, smooth, clear-formed, unhurried, and his eyes
kept staring at the star.
“No, it’s we have held it, not they. And we that have got to hold
it—longer than they. Theirs is the kind of a _Mittel-Europa_ that’s been
done before; history is little more than a copybook for such an empire
as they are building. We’ve got a vaster and more incredible empire to
build than they—a _Mittel-Europa_, let us say, of the spirit of man. No,
no, doctor; it’s we that are doing the impossible, holding that thin
line.”
The doctor failed to contain himself.
“Oh, pshaw! _pshaw!_ See here, Hallett! We’ve had the men, and there’s
no use blinking the truth. And we’ve had the money and the munitions.”
“But back of all that, behind the last reserve, the last shell-dump, the
last treasury, haven’t they got something that we’ve never had?”
“And what’s that?”
“A dream.”
“A _what_?”
“A dream. We’ve dreamed no dream. Yes—let me say it! A little while ago
you said, ‘nightmare,’ and I said, ‘dream.’ Germany has dreamed a dream.
Black as the pit of hell,—yes, yes,—but a dream. They’ve seen a vision.
A red, bloody, damned vision,—yes, yes,—but a vision. They’ve got a
programme, even if it’s what you called it, a ‘rehearsed and abominable
programme.’ And they know what they want. And we don’t know what we
want!”
The doctor’s fist came down in the palm of his hand.
“What we want? I’ll tell you what we want, Hallett. _We want to win this
war!_”
“Yes?”
“And by the living God, Hallett, we will win this war! I can see again.
If we fight for half a century to come; if we turn the world
wrong-side-out for men, young men, boys, babes; if we mine the earth to
a hollow shell for coal and iron; if we wear our women to ghosts to get
out the last grain of wheat from the fields—we’ll do it! And we’ll wipe
this black thing from the face of the earth forever, root and branch,
father and son of the bloody race of them to the end of time. If you
want a dream, Hallett, there’s a—”
“There’s a—nightmare. An overweening muscular impulse to jump on the
thing that’s scared us in the dark, to break it with our hands, grind it
into the ground with our heels, tear ourselves away from it—and wake
up.”
He went on again after a moment of silence.
“Yes, that’s it, that’s it. We’ve never asked for anything better; not
once since those terrible August days have we got down on our naked
knees and prayed for anything more than just to be allowed to wake
up—and find it isn’t so. How can we expect, with a desire like that, to
stand against a positive and a flaming desire? No, no! The only thing to
beat a dream is a dream more poignant. The only thing to beat a vision
black as midnight is a vision white as the noonday sun. We’ve come to
the place, doctor, where half a loaf is worse than no bread.”
The doctor put his hands in his pockets and took them out again, shifted
away a few steps and back again. He felt inarticulate, handless,
helpless in the face of things, of abstractions, of the mysterious,
unflagging swiftness of the ship, bearing him willy-nilly over the blind
surface of the sea. He shook himself.
“God help us,” he said.
“What God?”
The doctor lifted a weary hand.
“Oh, if you’re going into _that_—”
“Why not? Because Prussia, doctor, has a god. Prussia has a god as
terrible as the God of conquering Israel, a god created in her own
image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this
god. I tell you we’re fools. I tell you, doctor, before we shall stand
we shall have to create a god in _our_ own image, and before we do that
we shall have to have a living and sufficient image.”
“You don’t think much of us,” the doctor murmured wearily.
The other seemed not to hear. After a little while he said:
“We’ve got to say black or white at last. We’ve got to answer a question
this time with a whole answer.”
“This war began so long ago,” he went on, staring at the star. “So long
before Sarajevo, so long before the ‘balances of power’ were thought of,
so long before the ‘provinces’ were lost and won, before Bismarck and
the lot of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, many years of
questions put, and half-answers given in return. Questions, questions:
questions of a power-loom in the North Counties; questions of a
mill-hand’s lodging in one Manchester or another, of the weight of a
headtax in India, of a widow’s mass for her dead in Spain; questions of
a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black man in New Orleans, of a
Christian in Turkey, an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French
cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an idiot sitting on a
throne; questions of a girl asking her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a
girl asking her price in the dark of a Chicago doorway—whole questions
half-answered, hungry questions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of
questions piling up and piling up year by year, decade after decade.—
Listen! There came a time when it wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. There
came a time when the son of all those questions stood up in the world,
final, unequivocal, naked, devouring, saying, ‘Now you shall answer me.
You shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you shall look at
nothing else; you shall take your hands out of your pockets and your
tongues out of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no matter what the
blood and anguish of it, you shall answer me now with a whole answer—or
perish!’”
“And what’s the answer?”
The doctor leaned down a little, resting his hands on the foot of the
cot.
The gray patch of Hallett’s face moved slightly in the dark.
“It will sound funny to you. Because it’s a word that’s been worn pretty
thin by so much careless handling. It’s ‘Democracy’!”
The doctor stood up straight on his thick legs.
“Why should it sound funny?” he demanded, a vein of triumph in his tone.
“It is the answer. And we’ve _given_ it. ‘Make the world safe for
democracy!’ Eh? You remember the quotation?”
“Yes, yes, that’s good. But we’ve got to do more than say it, doctor. Go
further. We’ve got to dream it in a dream; we’ve got to see democracy as
a wild, consuming vision. If the day ever comes when we shall pronounce
the word ‘democracy’ with the same fierce faith with which we conceive
them to be pronouncing ‘autocracy’—that day, doctor—”
He raised a transparent hand and moved it slowly over his eyes.
“It will be something to do, doctor, that will. Like taking hold of
lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip us naked for
a moment, leave us new-born and shaken and weak—as weak as Christ in the
manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see,
we’ll know what we want.”
The doctor stood for a moment as he had been, a large, dark troubled
body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a
hand over his face.
“Utopian!” he said.
“Utopian!” Hallett repeated after him. “To-day we are children of
Utopia—or we are nothing. I tell you, doctor, to-day it has come down to
this—Hamburg to Bagdad—or—Utopia!”
The other lifted his big arms and his face was red.
“You’re playing with words, Hallett. You do nothing but twist my words.
When I say Utopian, I mean, precisely, impossible. Absolutely
impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream. I
give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years.
_Forty years!_ And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you
talk about,—so much harder,—so many hundreds of times more
incredible,—will you have us do that sort of a thing in a _day_? We’re a
dozen races, a score of nations. I tell you it’s—it’s impossible!”
“Yes. Impossible.”
The silence came down between them, heavy with all the dark, impersonal
sounds of passage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the breathing
of engines, the muffled staccato of the spark in the wireless room, the
note of the ship’s bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail,
running thin in the wind: “Six bells, sir, and—_all’s well_!”
“_All’s well!_”
The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling so in the black
interlude, like stage business long rehearsed.
“_All’s well!_” the doctor echoed with the mirthless laughter of the
damned.
Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and stared at the star
beyond the rail.
“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder. Just now—to-night—somehow—I’ve got a queer
feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it’s going to be.—Maybe it’s going to
be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history, perhaps, has
been on us. And maybe it’s almost over. Maybe we’re going to do the
impossible, after all, doctor. And maybe we’re going to get it done in
time. I’ve got a queer sense of something happening—something getting
ready.”
When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little.
“I wish my father could have lived to see this day. He’s in New York
now, and I should like—”
The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying: “Lie down,
Hallett. You’d better lie down now.”
But the other protested with a gray hand.
“No, no, you don’t understand. When I say—well—it’s just the shell of my
father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison
killed his heart. He doesn’t even know it, that the immortal soul of him
has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical—‘the
Destroyer,’ they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man,
doctor; you’ve got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and
as mad. I can see him now,—to-night,—sitting in the back room in Eighth
Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O’Reilly and the rest, with
all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and
minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They’re old men,
doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn’t
see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption.
They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn’t so. All their
lives they’ve been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the
Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of
revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were
almost in sight of the splendid dawn—the dawn of the Day of Barricades.
And then this war, this thing they call a ‘rich man’s plot’ to confound
them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they
can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this
meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow—to-morrow—some safely
distant to-morrow (for they’re old men),—to-morrow, the barricades! And
that’s queer. That’s queer.”
“Queer?”
“It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there’s
been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but
the sound of barricades.”
The voice trailed off into nothing.
To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along the near deck, his
hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his breast,
there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his
own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the ship which
held him up in the dark void between two continents.
What was it all about, he asked himself over and over. Each time he
passed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head, painfully, and
as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of the cot
and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined, motionless
and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the
steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death.
But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett’s whisper creeping to him
out of the shadow:
“That’s a bright star, doctor.”