I told it as simply as I could, while working in a fair share of the
strong color which I hoped would arrest their attention.
It did. In all my experience of men coming back into life from the state
which is so expressively known as dead drunk it was the first time I ever
saw them listen with avidity to any voice but that of the inner man.
What is there about war which speaks with this authority? Where did it
get its power to go to the hidden man of the heart, that subliminal
self with which modern speculation has been so busy, and shift him from
off his age-long base? It is commonly said that, whatever our personal
vicissitudes, human nature remains the same; but though that may be
true of the past, I doubt if it will be true of the future. War on the
scale on which we are waging it has already changed human nature. It has
changed it as the years change a baby to a boy and a boy to a man. It
has lifted human nature up, drawn out of it what we never supposed to
be there, freed it from its slavery to time. It has to a large degree
reversed the processes of time as it has reversed the usages of sex. We
have seen youth doing the work of maturity, maturity that of youth, women
that of men, men that of women. We have seen cowards transformed into
heroes, rotters into saints, stupid, idiotic ne’er-do-wells into saviors
of mankind.
We shall never go back again to the helpless conviction that youth must
grow slowly into age, only to have age decay into ugliness and senility.
This kind of foolish, useless progress may still go on for an indefinite
time to come, but we shall work against it as against something contrary
to the highest possibilities of nature. Since we have thrown off our
mental shackles in great moments, we shall see that we can do the same
in small, and, having emerged on a higher plane, we shall stay there.
Staying there, we shall doubtless go on in time to a higher plane
still—a plane on which the mighty works that are now wrought in war
will become feasible in peace. We are not on that plane yet; but if the
advance of the human race means anything we shall get there. It may take
a thousand years; it may take more; it may take less; but in the mean
time we must seize our blessings as we may.
So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were
sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of
stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but
as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that
they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men
in their condition they were astonishing.
That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the
old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever
kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?”
As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to
restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out
there was always an inclination.
I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules
sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield,
Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?”
He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal.
My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made
a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of
Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of
America was being shaken out of its materialism, its provincialism, and
its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see
that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of
drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that
we ought to be in it was expressed.
“We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when
we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men
one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying
to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors.
We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that
the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their
own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His
way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of
course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.”
I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw
that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding
back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed
in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his
life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously
broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of
purposes.
But he spoke so calmly!
“We shall go into this thing the more thoroughly when our people as a
whole are convinced of its necessity. And for a hundred millions of
people to be convinced is a matter that takes time. But even there you
can see how a great purpose is changing them almost against their own
will. It isn’t many months ago that they elected a President on the
slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ Had it not been for that slogan it’s
doubtful whether or not he would have been elected. All politics apart,
we can say that, had he not been elected, it’s doubtful whether any other
candidate could carry with him a united Congress when we come to the
moment of decision. Were the President not to have a united Congress,
behind him, there would be no united people. As it is we’re all forging
forward together, President, Congress, and people, as surely as winter
forges forward into spring; and when the minute arrives—”
He broke off with a smile I can only call exalted. With a hasty pressure
of my hand he was off to some other fellow with some other needful word.
_CHAPTER XXX_
My purpose in telling you all this is to show you why I reacted so
slightly to Regina’s charge of the indirect method. Though my curiosity
as to what she meant was keen enough, the pressure of other interests
allowed it no time to work. This is to say, as soon as I got back
into the current of great events personal concerns became relatively
unimportant. They had to wait. One developed the capacity to keep them
waiting.
But toward the middle of March I met her one day in Fifth Avenue.
Even from a distance I could see that her step was vigor and her look
animation. The haunting sadness had fled from her eyes, while the
generous smile, spontaneous and flashing, had returned to her scarlet
lips. It was a new Regina because it was the old one.
To me her first exclamation was: “How well you look! You’re almost as you
were before the war.”
Though I was conscious of a pang at seeing her so far from pining away, I
endeavored to play up.
“Mayn’t I say the same of you? What’s done it?”
She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. Work, I suppose—and the knowledge that
things are marching.”
“I hear you’re very busy.”
“I hear you’re busy, too.”
“People do seem to want to be told things at first hand.”
“I find the same.”
“And so one has to be on the job.”
“There’s nothing like it, is there? It”—she flung me one of her old,
quick, daring glances—“it fills all the needs. Nothing else becomes
urgent.”
“You mean that one’s personal affairs—”
“Oh, one has no personal affairs. I remember a man who was in the San
Francisco earthquake telling me that for forty-eight hours he hardly
needed to eat or sleep.”
“I’ve seen that doubled and trebled.”
“Of course you have. It simply means that when we get out of ourselves we
can make supermen of the commonest material.”