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.