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.