EDITHA

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm

which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring

afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the

question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could

not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless

avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his

figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of

the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will

before she called aloud to him: "George!"

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence,

before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"

"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she swooped down the

steps to him. "What is it?" she cried.

"It's war," he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion,

and uttered from deep in her throat. "How glorious!"

"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she

did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think

of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,

which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had

been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise

it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his

abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his

old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed

and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble

seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but

that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that

sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the

miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous

fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him;

she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his

forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her

question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the

very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by

any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to

take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect

as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was

peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.

Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his

nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means

she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that

the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not

know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her

love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him,

without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could

do something worthy to _have_ won her--be a hero, _her_ hero--it would

be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be

grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to

this if it hadn't been in the order of Providence? And I call any war

glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling

for years against the cruelest oppression. Don't you think so, too?"

"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it glorious to

break the peace of the world?"

"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame

at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases

of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She

must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a

good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: "But now it

doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is

gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our

country."

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda,

and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, "Our

country--right or wrong."

"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned, fervidly. "I'll go and get you some

lemonade." She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with

two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in

them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had

been no interruption: "But there is no question of wrong in this case.

I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there

was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet."

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass

down: "I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you

I ought to doubt myself."

A generous sob rose in Editha's throat for the humility of a man, so

very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping

through her fingers as when he took that meek way.

"You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right." She

seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into

his. "Don't you think so?" she entreated him.

[Illustration: "'YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!'"]

He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added,

"Have mine, too," but he shook his head in answering, "I've no business

to think so, unless I act so, too."

Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in

her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel

bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when

they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she

pretended not, and she said, "Oh, I am not sure," and then faltered.

He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: "There's

only one way of proving one's faith in a thing like this."

She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.

He went on again. "If I believed--if I felt as you do about this

war--Do you wish me to feel as you do?"

Now she was really not sure; so she said: "George, I don't know what you

mean."

He seemed to muse away from her as before.

"There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of

his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to

see how he would act."

"How can you talk in that ghastly way?"

"It _is_ rather morbid. Still, that's what it comes to, unless you're

swept away by ambition or driven by conviction. I haven't the conviction

or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I

ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I couldn't have asked it

of myself, as I must, now I'm a lawyer. And you believe it's a holy war,

Editha?" he suddenly addressed her. "Oh, I know you do! But you wish me

to believe so, too?"

She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he

always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken

with him.

"George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and

every cost. If I've tried to talk you into anything, I take it all

back."

"Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and how--I wish I

had your undoubting spirit! I'll think it over; I'd like to believe as

you do. But I don't, now; I don't, indeed. It isn't this war alone;

though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it's every war--so

stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn't this thing have been settled

reasonably?"

"Because," she said, very throatily again, "God meant it to be war."

"You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people will say."

"Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn't meant it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into

men's keeping to work it as they pleased."

"Now, George, that is blasphemy."

"Well, I won't blaspheme. I'll try to believe in your pocket

Providence," he said, and then he rose to go.

"Why don't you stay to dinner?" Dinner at Balcom's Works was at one

o'clock.

"I'll come back to supper, if you'll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a

convert."

"Well, you may come back, on that condition."

"All right. If I don't come, you'll understand."

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their

engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a

tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood

looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows

onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.

"Why didn't he stay to dinner?"

"Because--because--war has been declared," Editha pronounced, without

turning.

Her mother said, "Oh, my!" and then said nothing more until she had sat

down in one of the large Shaker chairs and rocked herself for some time.

Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her

mind with the spoken words: "Well, I hope _he_ won't go."

"And _I_ hope he _will_," the girl said, and confronted her mother with

a stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less

unimpressionable than a cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she

arrived at in speech was: "Well, I guess you've done a wicked thing,

Editha Balcom."

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother

had come out by: "I haven't done anything--yet."

* * * * *

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson,

down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with

that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the

packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the

pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly

yet strongly, and wrote:

"GEORGE:--I understood when you left me. But I think we had better

emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in everything we

had better be one in nothing. So I am sending these things for your

keeping till you have made up your mind.

"I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry any one

else. But the man I marry must love his country first of all, and

be able to say to me,

"'I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more.'

"There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour there

is no other honor.

"Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never expected

to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must say the utmost.