Potter Waite stood a moment at the curb beside his car, looking at the
heart of this great new city. At his right, Cadillac Square stretched
broadly away to the County Building's square tower. Within his memory this
handsome space had been a public market, unsightly, evil of odor, reeking
with decaying vegetables and the refuse of the meat-stalls. To-day it was
overcrowded with parked automobiles. At his left opened the Campus
Martius, bisected by the magnificent width of Woodward Avenue. There, on
its little irregular plot, squatted the City Hall, shabby, slatternly,
forbidding. It seemed, against the background, the palisade, of upreaching
sky-scrapers of terra-cotta and brick, to typify that thing we tolerate as
municipal government. As was the shabby building to its clean, its
magnificent, neighbors, so was the thing it contained--the government of a
great city--to the governments of private enterprises which had made that
city a place to excite the envious admiration of her sister
municipalities.
Potter frowned at the thought. The huge machine of government was made up
of such parts, of common councils, of mayors, of state legislatures, of
national legislatures, differing only in degree, but wrought of kindred
materials. It was this machine with which the country would make war.
"It won't work," Potter said to himself. "It hasn't the stroke or the
bore...."
He stood still looking at the teeming Campus, following its currents and
cross-currents and eddies with eyes darkened by thought. It was a current
worthy to pass between magnificent banks. The sidewalks eddied with
never-motionless men and women; with human beings whose errands hurried
them on. Potter studied them with interest. Their faces were mobile,
alert, intelligent, forceful. There was a capability about each
individual; there was something distinct about each atom in the crowd....
Here, after all, was the great machine of government. Here was that from
which government derived; here was that which would make war, which would
_fight_ the war. Walking down that street was a potential army, and the
mothers of a potential army.
It was these who had made possible, who had created, the terra-cotta
sky-scrapers; it was these who had made possible that marvelous procession
of automobiles which taxed the width of Woodward Avenue; it was these who
had made possible the building up of that miracle of industrial life that
stretched around the town like fortifications around some European
city--but fortifications holding the city safe, not from a foreign
invader, but from an economic invader. Factory-fortresses preserving the
prosperity of the town.
He continued to eye the crowd, and his eyes became less deep and dark. He
raised his head without knowing that he raised it. A feeling of pride was
upon him.
"Here's the thing--the real thing," he said within himself. "This is the
machine; the stroke is there and the bore is there ... if they can be made
to see and to understand."
Potter stepped into his car and drove out Woodward Avenue, and thence down
a side-street to that mammoth, unbelievable mass of buildings which all
the world, through advertisements, would recognize as the plant of the
Waite Motor Car Company. Since the day the first brick was laid, a dozen
years before, building had never ceased. The plant had never caught up
with itself, had never been able to produce the number of automobiles
required of it by the public. As far as the eye reached were clean,
splendid structures; the ragged outline at the end, dimly seen, was caused
by steel not yet covered by brick, by brick walls rising to wall in new
space in which to manufacture yet more thousands of the Waite motor-car.
To all this, to this concrete, visible, tangible fortune, Potter Waite was
sole heir. It was not like wealth in stocks, bonds, securities. It was not
in promises to pay, in paper standing for something more substantial. It
was _there_. It could be beheld in the mass. Perhaps a hundred millions of
dollars actually reared themselves in brick and steel, in splendid,
efficient machinery. Potter had grown up with it, was accustomed to it.
Unlike the casual passer-by, he was not awed by it.
He leaped from his car and ran up the broad flight of stairs leading to
the offices on the second floor.
"Dad in?" he flung at the man who sat behind the information-desk.
"Yes, but he's occupied, Mr. Waite. I shouldn't go in."
Potter strode past. The man rose as though to call him back, and then sat
down with a shrug. Potter flung open the door of his father's office,
flung himself through it.
"Dad, have you heard?" he said, abruptly.
Fabius Waite looked up, frowned. "I'm busy. Weren't you told?" he said.
Potter glanced at the other occupants of the room; recognized Senator
Marvel, did not recognize the other. He nodded to the Senator.
"The Germans have torpedoed the _Lusitania_," he said. "It was without
warning. More than a hundred Americans drowned--women and children ...
like rats," he finished.
The Senator was on his feet. The news had been a sudden, bewildering blow
to him. "What's that? Are you sure? Where did you get it?"
Potter threw a paper on the desk over which the Senator and the stranger
crouched with manifest excitement. Not so Fabius Waite. He did not glance
at the paper, nor did he seem moved. His broad, clean-shaven, patrician
face showed no emotion except, perhaps, a shade of irritation at the
others' reception of the tidings. Potter said to himself that his father
would sit outwardly unmoved, unruffled, not in the least disarranged
mentally, if word were brought him that the dissolution of the universe
had commenced. It was true. Fabius Waite would study the information and
determine his course of action before he gave a sign that the most
sharp-eyed might read.
"My God!" exclaimed the man whom Potter did not know.
"What'll it mean?... What will it mean?" the Senator asked, in an awed,
frightened voice.
"What can it mean but war?" Potter said.
His father merely glanced at him, not contemptuously, not rebukingly, in
fact, not as if Potter were a human being at all, but as if he were some
piece of the room's furniture to which attention had been called.
"When you men are through scrambling over that paper," he said, quietly,
"I'll look at it myself." He did not stretch out his hand for the paper,
did not seem to suggest that it be given to him, but simply stated a fact.
Potter came near to smiling at the alacrity with which Senator and
business man abandoned the news sheet and pressed it upon his father. The
Senator was a big man in Washington and in Michigan, Potter knew. The
stranger looked like a man of importance, yet Fabius Waite dominated them,
made their personalities colorless by the simple fact of his presence. He
merely sat there--and they were dwarfs beside him.
"The people," said the Senator, "there'll be no holding them back. They'll
sweep us into war--as they did with Spain."
"I heard there were munitions shipped on the _Lusitania_," said the
stranger.
Fabius Waite paid not the minutest attention to them, but read calmly,
appraisingly, from beginning to end what the paper told of the sinking of
the _Lusitania_. When he was done he folded the paper neatly and laid it
on his desk.
"There were munitions," said the Senator, "and people were warned by
advertisements in the paper to keep off that boat."
"What's the difference?" Potter demanded. "Are we going to let them murder
our citizens like this--and put up such an excuse as that?"
"Citizens had no business on the boat," said the stranger. "They brought
it on themselves."
"There's _got_ to be war," said Potter, his eyes traveling uncertainly
from Senator to business man--to his father, where they remained. "There's
no other way. What else can be done about such a thing?"
"For one thing," said Fabius Waite, coolly, "we can stop jabbering and
think about it.... You especially, Potter. If you must wag your tongue, go
back to the Pontchartrain bar and wag it for the benefit of the gang of
loafers you train with.... Senator, what suggests itself to you?"
"I must get to Washington. The Senate doesn't want war, I can vouch for
that.... But the people.... Perhaps the President can hold them."
"I gather from your words that he'll be willing to try?"
"He's the last man in the country to want war.... There'll be no war.
Those German dunder-heads! Do they want to pull the whole world down about
their ears?"
"They're fools," said the stranger.
"We won't argue about their wisdom. Whether they were wise or foolish,
they seem to have sunk the _Lusitania_." Fabius Waite paused. "And when
all's said and done it won't be the Senate nor the President nor business
which determines what we will do about it. It's the people who will make
up their minds. Don't lose sight of that."
"Public opinion can be molded."
"For a while and to an extent.... I believe this thing can be handled so
that nothing will come of it. It will take careful handling. You agree
with me, do you not, Senator, that neither the people nor the business of
the Middle West want war?"
"Certainly I do."
"I have no doubt you will intimate to the President that you have grave
doubts if the Middle West will follow him into war--will back him up in
any belligerent attitude he may have in mind to assume." Fabius Waite's
eyes were on the Senator's face, and none could tell what thoughts stirred
behind them. He did not order, did not direct, did not suggest, but he was
imposing his will on this imposing member of an august body as surely and
as relentlessly as if he held a revolver at the Senator's head.
"I feel it my duty to intimate as much to him," said the Senator.
"There must, of course, be a protest," said Fabius White. "News that the
President is preparing a note to the German government will hold the
people in check. I incline to believe they will wait for it to see what
the President thinks.... If it should take time to prepare, so much the
better. It would give the country time to cool off."
"The people have seen what war means," said the Senator. "They've seen
Belgium and France.... They've no stomach for a dose like that. Handle
this thing _right_--let them get over the first shock of it--and the
excitement will die down. The people are sheep.... Yes, you're perfectly
right about delay."
Potter had hurried to his father, his soul a flame of emotion. The flame
was being quenched. The boy stood silent, looking from one to the other of
these men, hurt, amazed. Just why he had come or what he had expected his
father to do he did not know. Impulse had brought him. The word patriotism
was not in his vocabulary, as it was not in the vocabularies of millions
of Americans on that seventh day of May. But some spring had been touched,
something had been set in motion by the news of that atrocity which would
be heralded from one end to the other of the Germanic Empire as a splendid
feat of arms. The thing was _wrong_: the evil of it had seared through to
the uneasy soul of the boy and had set afoot within him something which he
did not understand as yet.... He was not able now to say, "_Civis
Americanus sum_."
It was not reason that had brought him. It was no conscious surge of
loyalty to his country. It was something--something he felt to be _right_.
Perhaps there was a tinge of adventure in it; perhaps his youth heard the
rolling of martial drums and saw the unfurling of flags of war.... But he
was right and these men were wrong. That he knew.
He wondered at the men. There had been no word of sympathy for the dead;
there had been no cry of anger wrung from them by this affront to the
honor of the nation; there had been but one thought--dollars. Business
came first. The prosperity of dollars and cents filled their minds to the
exclusion of all other prosperities. Even the Senator, servant and
representative of the people, was not serving and representing the people.
He, too, saw only the effect of this thing on business.
"Does everybody think like this?" Potter wondered. It might be so. His
friends at the table in the Pontchartrain bar had been surprised at the
news, but he considered their actions those of men who had not been
shocked or those of men enraged. Perhaps they, too, were of one mind with
his father.... Perhaps _all_ the people were of that mind. Perhaps that
was the sort of people the American nation had grown to be....
"Dad," he said, "if Mother had been on board--"
"She wasn't," said Fabius Waite. "Senator, this is mighty ticklish, and it
will grow more ticklish. This one act can be smoothed over, but many
recurrences of it cannot be smoothed over. Isn't there some machinery to
set afoot forbidding American citizens to cross the ocean? That would do
it."
"I wouldn't care to introduce such a resolution," said the Senator, "but
probably somebody can be got to do it."
"We've a _right_ to travel," Potter said, hotly. "Didn't we fight a war
about that once? You don't mean to say, Dad, that you actually would have
this country admit that it was afraid to claim its rights.... The world
would laugh at us."
"Let it," said his father. "Another year or two of this war and this
nation will top them all. We'll be the financial rulers of the world.
We're getting there now, and nothing must happen to set us back."
"And the world will despise us," Potter said, bitterly. He was beginning
to see more clearly now. He paused. This attitude of mind he was
witnessing could not be common to all the people. He would not believe it.
"Dad, think _bigger_. You men are wrong. You can't head this off. It means
_war_.... It's got to mean war. And war means armies and cannon and
shell--and aeroplanes. We've got to have them all. Think, Dad, and you'll
realize it.... Take a telegraph blank, Dad, and write the President. You
can help with this plant; every other plant like it can help. Wire the
President that this plant is at the disposal of the country for any use
the country can put it to.... Tell him you're with him. Tell him you can
make guns or shrapnel-cases or motors for him as well as for England or
France or Russia--as you are making them.... And aeroplanes. We'll need
thousands of them.... Give that job to me, Dad. I know aeroplanes--"
"You know mixed drinks and chorus girls and traffic cops," his father
snorted.
"You won't do it?"
"Don't be a fool."
Potter turned and walked out of the room. He stopped at the
information-desk. Here sat a man who worked for wages, a common citizen.
Here sat the sort of man who made up the bulk of that crowd he had watched
on Woodward Avenue.
"Dickson," he said, "the Germans have sunk the _Lusitania_ and killed a
hundred Americans."
"Awful, wasn't it? I just heard."
"What are we going to do about it?"
"Why--we'll make 'em pay for it, that's what. We'll collect damages,
millions of dollars."
"_Money?_" said Potter.
"You bet, Mr. Waite. Money."
"Is that all? Will that satisfy you?"
"Isn't that enough?" asked Dickson, in real surprise. "What more can
anybody ask?"
"You don't want to fight? You don't think it means war?"
"Great heavens, no! War!... We don't want any of that in ours. I guess
this country won't mix in any wars. We've been seeing what war means.
Anyhow, what should we fight for? England and the Allies are going to lick
Germany, aren't they? Well, let them."
Potter turned on his heel. He had his answer.
Once more he got into his car and whirled down-town. Once more he stopped
before the Pontchartrain and entered the bar. His friends were not there,
but he sat down at a table and ordered a drink; he ordered another
drink--and another....
His eyes were dark and brooding; the restless urge to recklessness was
upon him--that smoldering fire which had made him a young man to be looked
upon askance by the respectable. His face was set--and he drank.... Fred
La Mothe came through the revolving door, saw Potter, studied his face and
his attitude for a moment, and then quietly withdrew. He knew the signs,
and had no desire to be in Potter's company from that hour on.
He sat alone at his table, brooding, drinking from time to time. He felt
no hunger, did not arise to eat. The lights came on and still he sat. The
room was thronged with the early-evening crowd, and Potter glowered at
them--and ordered other drinks.
Presently he stirred uneasily; the spirit of unrest, of recklessness was
working within him, urged on by liquor. He pushed himself to his feet, and
stood, not too steadily, and his eyes seemed to flame as he glared over
the crowd. His face seemed to flame, to be kindling from some fire that
surged up from depths inside him. His yellow hair, brushed back from his
brow, added to the flamelike semblance of him.
He struck the table with his fist and a glass danced over the edge to
smash on the floor.
"It's a hell of a country," he said, loudly, "and you're a hell of a lot
of men...."
The room fell silent, and every face was turned toward him. He glared into
the upturned eyes.
"You're a lot of crawling, sneaking, penny-chasing rabbits," he said,
distinctly. "Brag and blow--that's you.... And then somebody kills your
wives and babies and you haven't the guts to kill back again. You're
afraid, the lot of you. You won't fight. If anybody says war you crawl
under the table.... Americans!... I'd rather be an Esquimo.... If anybody
slapped your faces you wouldn't fight.... I'll show you. I'll show you
what kind of cattle you are.... Now, if there's a fight in you, come and
fight...."
He lunged forward and struck a man, upsetting him against a table. The
place was in an uproar. "It's young Waite--look out. He's a bad actor....
Call the cops." Potter swayed forward into the throng at the bar,
striking, striking. In a moment he was the center of a maelstrom of
shouting, scuffling men--and his laugh rang above their shouts. They
struck at him, clutched at him; waiters and bartenders tried to force
their way to him. He was pushed back and back, still keeping his feet,
still lashing out with his fists, his eyes blazing, his yellow hair
rumpled and waving, his reckless laugh dominating the turmoil. His back
was against the wall. Before him now was a clear semicircle which none
ventured to cross, and he laughed in their faces.
"Fifty to one," he jeered, "and you're afraid."
A couple of policemen shouldered their way through, recognized Potter, and
stopped. "Cut it out now, Waite," said one of them. "Cut it out and come
on."
Potter's answer was to step forward and strike the officer with all his
strength. The other officer did not parley. His night stick was out. He
raised it, brought it down on Potter's yellow hair, and the whole room
heard the thud of it.... Potter stood erect the fraction of a second, then
the stiffness went out of his body and he sank to the floor a shapeless
heap....
The morning papers printed Potter's picture and news stories of this his
most reckless escapade. They also printed moral editorials which, with
singular unanimity, pointed out facts concerning young men with too much
money, no regard for their citizenship, and mentioned disgracing an
honorable name.