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.
“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.