“If I’m not happy I’m—I’m content—content to be doing something—the least
little bit—to urge things forward.”
“And I can say the same. If I look well, as you put it, that’s the
reason. And so long as that’s the reason other things can—wait.” She
added, quickly: “I must go now or I shall be late. I’m speaking to the
women at the Mary Chilton Club, and I’m overdue.”
She had actually passed on when I stopped her to say, “What do you mean
by the indirect method?”
She called back over her shoulder, “Ask Stephen.”
And I asked him that night. Having heard him come into his room between
eight and nine o’clock, I marched in boldly, bearding him without beating
about the bush.
“I say, old Stephen, what have you been saying to Regina about me?”
His hat had been thrown on the table; his arms were outstretched in the
act of taking off his overcoat.
He repeated my question as if he didn’t understand it.
“What have I been saying to Regina about you? Why, nothing—much.”
“Nothing much; that means something. What the deuce do you mean by the
indirect method?”
“I haven’t spoken of an indirect method.”
“No; but she has!”
“Oh, I see.”
“Then if you see, tell me what it is.”
He finished the arrested act of taking off his coat, after which he
hung it up in a closet, doing the same with his hat. The minute’s delay
allowed time for the storm-clouds to gather on his face, and all the
passions of a gloomy-hearted nature to concentrate in a hot, thundery
silence.
“Is this a bit of bluff, Frank?”
“Bluff be hanged! I’m ready to speak out frankly.”
The storm-clouds were torn with a flash like a streak of lightning.
“Then why didn’t you come to me like a man instead of sending that
sneaking old beast—”
“Hold on, Stephen. What sneaking old beast have I sent?”
“He wouldn’t have come unless you had set him on me. You needn’t tell me
that.”
“What the deuce are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. There hasn’t been a day since you
came back that I haven’t had a hint.” He was not a man to whom anger
came easily; he began to choke, to strangle with the effort to get
his indignation out. “I’d have given him the toe of my boot long ago
if—if—if—if”—the words positively shivered on his lips—“if—if—if I hadn’t
wanted to see how far you’d go; and, by God! I’ve—I’ve had enough of it!”
“Enough of what, Stephen?” I endeavored to ask, quietly.
He knocked his knuckles on the table with a force that almost made them
bleed.
“My name is Cantyre—do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. But tell me, what is it you’ve had enough of?”
“I’ve had enough of your damned diplomatic slyness in setting that old
reptile on me!”
I am not quick tempered. The tolerance born of a too painful knowledge of
my own shortcomings obliges me to be slow to wrath. But when anger does
get hold of me it works a change like that of a powerful chemical agent
suddenly infused into the blood.
I turned and strode out. A few times in the trenches I had been the
victim of this rage to kill—and I had killed. How many I killed at one
time or another I now couldn’t tell you. I saw too red to keep the count.
All I know is that I have stuck my bayonet into heart after heart, and
have dashed out brains with the butt end of my rifle. It is all red
before me still—a great splash of blood on the memory.
But I had got the habit. In a rage like this to kill some one had become
an instinct. I could not have believed that the impulse would have
pursued me into civil life; but there it was.
Having flung open the door of my apartment, I marched straight for the
“kitchingette.” Lovey was seated on a stool beside the tiny gas-range,
polishing one of my boots. The boot was like a boxing-glove on his left
hand, while he held the brush suspended in his right, looking up at me
with the piteous appeal of a rabbit pleading for its life.
His weakness held me back from striking him, but it didn’t stem my words.
“Who the devil, you old snake, gave you the right to interfere in my
affairs?”
He simply looked up at me, the boot on one hand, the brush suspended in
the other. His lower lip trembled—his arms began to tremble—but he made
no attempt to defend himself.
“What have you been saying?” I demanded. “Speak, can’t you?”
But he couldn’t. I caught him by the collar and dragged him to his feet.
He had just the strength to stand on them, though his limp hands
continued to hold the boot and the brush.
“Now are you going to speak? Or shall I kick you out?”
“You’d kick me out, Slim?”
The mildness of his voice maddened me.
“By God, I would!”
The brush and the boot fell with a dull clatter to the floor.
“Then I’d better go.”
He looked about him helplessly till his eyes fell on the old felt hat
hanging on a peg. I watched him as he took it down and crammed it on his
head. There was another helpless searching as if he didn’t know what he
was looking for before he spied an old gnarled stick in a corner. Taking
that in his hand, he fumbled his way into the living-room.
By the time I had followed him I was beginning to relent. I had not
really meant to have him go, but I was not ready as yet to call him back.
What Cantyre must have thought of me, what Regina must have thought of
me, in egging so poor a creature on to say what I wouldn’t say myself,
roused me as to a more intense degree I used to be roused on hearing of
Belgian women treated with the last indignities, and Canadian soldiers
crucified. Had I stopped to consider I would have seen that Regina didn’t
believe it, and that Cantyre believed it only as far as it gave an outlet
to his complicated inward sufferings; but I didn’t stop to consider.
Perhaps I, too, was seeking an outlet for something repressed. At any
rate, I let the poor old fellow go.
“What about your things?” I asked, before he had reached the door.
He turned with a certain dignity. “I sha’n’t want no things.” He added,
however, “Ye do mean me to get out, Slim?”
I didn’t—but I didn’t want to tell him so. Fury had cooled down without
leaving me ready to retract what I had said. I meant to go after him—when
he had got as far as the lift—but I meant, too, that he should take those
few bleeding steps of anguish.
He took them—not to the lift, but out into the vestibule. Then I heard a
faint moan; then a sound as if something broke; and then a soft tumbling
to the floor.
When I got out he was lying all in a little huddled, senseless heap, with
a cut on his forehead where he had struck the key or the door-knob as he
fell.
It was more than an hour before Cantyre got him back to consciousness;
but it was early morning before he spoke. We had stayed with him through
the night, as he had shown all the signs of passing out. His recovery of
speech somewhere about dawn came as a surprise to us.
To Cantyre I had given but the slightest explanation of the accident,
being sure, however, that he guessed at what I didn’t say.
“Told him to get to the dickens out of this, and he was taking me at my
word. Never meant to let him get farther than the lift. Just wanted to
scare him. Sorry now.”
But Lovey’s account was different.
About seven in the morning there came a streak of wan light down the
shaft into which the window of his room looked out. Cantyre murmured
something about going back to his own place for a bath.
“All right,” I agreed, “and you’d better get your breakfast. When you
come back I can do the same. You will come back, won’t you?”
“Oh, of course! I sha’n’t be gone more than an hour. When he wakes again
give him another teaspoonful of this; but don’t worry him unless he
wakes.”
And just then Lovey woke. He woke with a dim smile, as a young child
wakes. He smiled at Cantyre first, and then, rolling his soft blue eyes
to the other side of the bed, he smiled at me.
“What’s up, Slim?” he asked, feebly. “I ain’t sick, am I?”
“No, Lovey, old son, you’re not sick; you’ve only had a bit of a fall.”
And then it came back to him.
“Oh yes. I know. Served me right, didn’t it?” Rolling his eyes now toward
Cantyre, he continued: “I was just a-frightenin’ of Slim, like. Kind o’
foolish, I was. Said I was goin’ to leave him. Didn’t mean to go no
farther nor the lift.”
“I didn’t mean to let you go, Lovey,” I groaned, humbly.
“Of course you didn’t! ’Ow ’uld ye get along without me, I’d like to
know? Didn’t I keep ye straight all them weeks at the Down and Out?”
“You did, Lovey.”
“And ’aven’t I saved ye lots o’ times since?”
“You have, old man.”
“I wouldn’t leave ye, not for nothink, Slim. We’re buddies as long as we
live, ain’t we? Didn’t ye say that to me yerself?”
“I did, and I’ll say it again.”
“Well then, what’s the use o’ talkin’? You mustn’t mind me, sonny. I may
get into a bad temper and speak ’arsh to you; but I don’t mean nothink by
it. I wouldn’t leave ye, not for—”
The voice trailed away, and presently he was asleep or unconscious again,
I couldn’t be sure which.
Neither could I be sure whether he believed this version of the tale or
whether he concocted it to comfort me. At any rate, it served its purpose
in that it eased the situation outwardly, enabling Cantyre and me to face
each other without too much self-consciousness.
As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us
through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do.
The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had
run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching
the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our
personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to
realities. We were back on the old terms; we called each other Stephen
and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to
do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual
between us.
That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he
thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling.
Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the
threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance
of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that
began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as
for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and
did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things;
and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the
small.
And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place,
some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of
years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up
vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the
soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took
his bath.
Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had
recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the
big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without
connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the
moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the
scale of the big.
There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward
on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the
soles of the huge boots on which he would never walk again. Coming
nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into
the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see
if he was still alive he said, almost roughly:
“Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”
I left him alone because there was nothing I could do for him, but when
I went to Jephson he was lying on his back, his knees drawn up, and
his face twisted into the strangest, most agonized, most heavenly and
ecstatic smile you can imagine on a human face.
Then there was a young fellow running at the head of his platoon, a slim
young fellow with flaxen hair and a face like a bright angel’s, who had
been a crack sprinter at McGill. He was long after my time, of course;
but I had known his family, and since being in the neighborhood of Ypres
I had seen him from time to time. He was not made for a soldier, but a
brave young soldier he had become, surmounting fear, repulsion, and all
that was hideous to a sensitive soul like his, and establishing those
relations with his men that are dearer in many ways than ties of blood.
The picture I retain, and which came back to me now, is of his running
while his men followed him. It was so common a sight that I would hardly
have watched it if it had been any one but him. And then, for no reason
evident to me, just as if it was part of the order of the day, he threw
up his arms, tottered on a few steps, and went tumbling in the mud, face
downward.
With the rapidity of a cinema the scene changed to something else I had
witnessed. It was the day I got my dose of shrapnel in the foot. Lying
near me was a colonel named Blenkins. Farther off there lay a sergeant
in his regiment named Day. Day had for Blenkins the kind of admiration
that often exists between man and officer for which there is no other
name than worship. Slowly, painfully, dying, the non-com. dragged himself
over the scarred ground and laid his head on the dying colonel’s heart.
Painfully, slowly, the dying colonel’s hand stole across the dying
non-com.’s breast; and in this embrace they slept.
Other memories of the same sort came back to me, disconnected, having no
reference to Lovey, or Cantyre, or Regina, or the present, beyond the
fact that they came out of the great life of which comradeship was a
token and the watchwords rang with generosity.
It was the world of the moment. Such things as I had been recalling had
happened that very night; they had happened that very morning; they would
happen through that day, and through the next day and the next—till their
purpose was accomplished. What that purpose was to be—But that I was to
learn a little later.
That is to say, a little later I got a light on the outlook which has
been sufficient for me to walk by; but of it I will tell you when the
time comes.
For in the mean time the tide was rising. As Lovey lay smiling himself
into heaven the national spirit was mounting and mounting, quietly,
tensely, with excitement held in leash till the day of the Lord was very
near at hand.
All through March events had developed rapidly. On the first day of that
month the government had revealed Germany’s attempt to stir up Mexico
and Japan against the United States. A few days later Germany herself
had admitted the instigation. A few days later still Austria had given
her approval to unlimited submarine warfare. A few days later still
Nicholas was deposed in Petrograd. The country was marching; the world
was marching; the heart was marching. It was difficult for the mind to
keep up with the immensity of such happenings or to appraise them at
their value. I do not assert that I so appraised them; I only beg you to
understand that what I wanted and Cantyre wanted and Regina wanted, each
of us for himself and herself, became curiously insignificant.
Not that we were working with the same ends in view. By no means!
Cantyre was still opposed to war as war, and bitterly opposed to war if
it involved the United States. That he was kicking against the pricks,
as Regina asserted, I couldn’t see; but that he was feeling the whole
situation intensely was quite evident.
The result, however, was the same when it came to balancing personal
interests against the public weal. The public weal might mean one thing
to him and another thing to me, but to us both it overrode private
resentment. There was a moratorium of resentment. We might revive it
again; but for the moment it vanished out of sight.
_CHAPTER XXXI_
So we came to that determining moment when we held our famous patriotic
meeting at the Down and Out.
I call it famous because it was a new point of departure. In all the
club’s history there had never been a meeting for any other purpose
than to screw the courage up to the cutting out of drink. Other
subjects had been suggested from time to time; but we had stuck to our
last as specialists. We had not been turned aside for philanthropy,
for education, for financial benefit, or even for religion in the
commonly accepted meaning of that word; and the results had been our
justification. But now the flame at the heart of the earth had caught us,
and we were all afire.
I mean that we were afire with interest, though the interest was against
war as well as for it. But for it or against it, it was the one theme of
our discussion; and with cause.
The tide was rising higher, and the spirit of the nation floating on the
top. On one of the first days of April the President had asked Congress
to declare a state of war with the German Empire. Two days later the
Senate voted that declaration. A few nights after that we got together to
talk things over at the Down and Out.
It was a crowded meeting, but as you looked round you in advance you
would have prophesised a dull one. Our fellows came from all over New
York and the suburbs, washed up, brushed up, and in their Sunday clothes.
A few were men of education, but mostly we were of the type generally
classed as hard-working. In age we ran from the seventies down to the
twenties, with a preponderance of chaps between twenty-five and forty.
What I gathered from remarks before the meeting came to order was a
dogged submission to leadership.
“If you was to put it up to us guys to decide the whole thing by
ourselves,” Beady Lamont said to me as we stood together, “we’d vote
ag’in’ it. Why? Because we’re over here—mindin’ our own business—with
our kids to take care of—and our business to keep up—and we ain’t got
no call to interfere in what’s no concern of ours. Them fellows over in
Europe never could keep still, and they dunno how. But”—he made one of
his oratorical gestures with his big left hand—“but if the President says
the word—well, we’re behind him. He’s the country, and when the country
speaks there’s no Amur’can who ain’t ready to give all.”
Perhaps he had said something similar to Andrew Christian, because it was
that point of being ready to give all which, when he spoke, Christian
took as his text.
I am not giving you an account of the whole meeting; I mean only to
report a little of what Christian said, and its effect upon Cantyre.
Cantyre had come because Regina had insisted; but he sat with the
atmosphere of hot, thundery silence wrapping him round.
“To be ready to give all is what the world is summoned to,” Christian
declared, when he had been asked to say a few words, “and, oh, boys, I
beg you to believe that it’s time! The call hasn’t come a minute too
soon, and we sha’n’t be a minute too soon in getting ready to obey it.”
“Some of us ’ain’t got much to give,” a voice came from the back
sitting-room.
“We’ve all got everything there is, if we only understood it,” Christian
answered, promptly; “but whatever we have, it’s something we hold dear.”
“If we hold it dear,” another voice objected, “why should we be asked to
give it up?”
“Because we haven’t known how to use it. Think of all you’ve had in your
own life, Tom, and what you’ve done with it.”
I didn’t know what Tom had had in his life, but the retort evidently gave
him something to turn over in his mind.
“There never was a time in the history of the world,” Christian went
on, “when the abundance of blessing was more lavishly poured out upon
mankind. In every country in both hemispheres we’ve had the treasures
of the earth, the sea, and the air positively heaped upon us. Food,
clothing, comfort, security, speed—have become the commonplaces of
existence. The children of to-day grow up to a use of trains and motors
and telephones and airplanes that would have seemed miraculous as short a
time ago as when I was a lad. The standard of living has been so quickly
raised that the poor have been living in a luxury unknown to the rich
of two or three generations ago. The Atlantic has got to be so narrow
that we count the time of our crossing it by hours. The globe has become
so small that young people go round it for a honeymoon. People whose
parents found it difficult to keep one house have two or three, and
even more. There is money everywhere—private fortunes that would have
staggered the imagination of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and Augustus
and Charlemagne all combined. Amusements are so numerous that they pall
on us. In lots of the restaurants of New York you can order a meal for
yourself alone, and feel that neither Napoleon nor Queen Victoria nor the
Czar could possibly have sat down to a better one.”
“Some could,” one of our objectors declared, with all sorts of
implications in his tone.
“Oh, I’m not saying there are no inequalities or that there is just
distribution of all this blessing. In fact, my point is that there is
not. All I’m asserting is that the blessing is there, and that the very
windows of heaven have been opened on the world in order to pour it out.”
“I never saw none of it,” a thin, sour fellow put in, laconically.
“But, Juleps, that’s what I’m coming to. The blessing was there, and some
of us wouldn’t try to get what belonged to us, and others of us collared
too much, and we treated it very much as children treat pennies in a
scramble. We did far worse than that. We rifled, we stole, we gobbled,
we guzzled, we strutted, we bragged; the fellow that was up kicked the
fellow that was down to keep him down; the fellow that had plenty sneaked
and twisted and cringed and cadged in order to get more; and we’ve all
worked together to create the world that’s been hardly fit to live in,
that every one of us has known. Now, boys, isn’t that so? Speak out
frankly.”
Since in that crowd there could not be two opinions as to the world being
hardly fit to live in, there was a general murmur of assent.
“Now wealth is a great good thing; and what I mean by wealth is the
general storehouse, free to us all, which we call the earth and the
atmosphere round it. I don’t have to tell you that it’s a storehouse
crammed in every crack and cranny with the things you and I need for
our enjoyment. And it isn’t a storehouse such as you and I would fill,
which has got only what we could put into it; it’s always producing more.
Production is its law. It’s never idle. It’s incessantly working. The
more we take out of it the more it yields. I don’t say that we can’t
exhaust it in spots by taxing it too much; of course we can. Greed will
exhaust anything, just as it’s exhausting, under our very eyes, our
forests, our fisheries, and our farms. But in general there’s nothing
that will respond to good treatment more surely than the earth, nor give
us back a bigger interest on the labor we put into it.”
“That’s so,” came from some one who had perhaps been a farmer.
“And so,” Christian went on, “we’ve had a world that’s given us
everything in even greater abundance than we could use. We’ve had food
to waste; we’ve had clothes for every shade of temperature; we’ve had
coal for our furnaces, and iron for our buildings, and steel for our
ships, and gasolene for our automobiles. We’ve had every invention that
could help us to save time, to save worry, to save labor, to save life.
Childhood has been made more healthy; old age more vigorous. That a race
of young men and young women has been growing up among us of whom we can
say without much exaggeration that humanity is becoming godlike, any one
can see who goes round our schools and colleges.”
He took a step forward, throwing open his palms in a gesture of demand.
“But, fellows, what good has all this prodigious plenty been doing us?
Has it made us any better? Have we become any more thankful that we all
had enough and to spare? Have we been any more eager to see that when
we had too much the next man had a sufficiency? Have we rejoiced in
this plenitude as the common delight of every one? Have we seen it as
the manifestation of the God who expresses Himself in all good things,
and Who has given us, as one of the apostles says, all things richly to
enjoy? Has it brought us any nearer Him? Has it given us any increased
sympathy with Him? Or have we made it minister to our very lowest
qualities, to our appetites, to our insolence, to our extravagance, to
our sheer pride that all this was ours, to wallow in, to waste, and to
despise?
“You know we have done the last. There isn’t a man among us who hasn’t
done it to a greater or less degree. There is hardly a man in New York
who hasn’t lived in the lust of the purely material. You may go through
the world and only find a rarefied creature here and there who hasn’t
reveled and rioted and been silly and vain and arrogant to the fullest
extent that he dared.”
The wee bye Daisy was sitting in the front row, looking up at the speaker
raptly.
“I haven’t, Mr. Christian,” he declared, virtuously.
“Then, Daisy, you’re the rarefied creature I said was an exception.
Most of us have,” he went on when the roar of laughter subsided. “If we
haven’t in one way we have in another. And what has been the result?
Covetousness, hatred, class rivalry, capital and labor bitternesses, war.
And now we’ve come to a place where by a queer and ironical judgment
upon us the struggle for possession is going to take from us all that we
possess.”
He thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and spoke casually,
confidentially.
“For, boys, that’s what I’m coming to. All the good things we have are
going to be taken away from us. Since we don’t know how to use them, and
won’t learn, we’ve got to give them back.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that, Mr. Christian,” a common-sense voice cried out
in a tone of expostulation.
“Peter, you’ll see. You’ll only have to live a few months longer to find
yourself like every one else in America, lacking the simple essentials
you’ve always taken as a matter of course. It isn’t luxuries alone
that you’ll be called on to give up; it will be the common necessaries
of every-day life. The great summons is coming to us, not merely from
our government, not merely from the terrified and stricken nations of
mankind, but from God above—to give everything back to Him. I don’t
say that we shall starve or that we shall freeze; but we may easily be
cold and hungry and driven to a cheese-paring economy we never expected
to practise. The light will be taken from our lamps, the work from our
fingers, the money from our pockets. We shall be searched to the very
soul. There’s nothing we sha’n’t have to surrender. At the very least we
must give tithes of all that we possess, signifying our willingness to
give more.”
“Some of us ’ain’t got nothing.”
It was the bitter cry of the dispossessed.
“Yes, Billy; we’ve all got life; and life, too, we shall have to
offer up. There are some of you chaps sitting here that in all human
probability will be called on to do it.”
“You won’t, Mr. Christian. You’re too old.”
“I’m too old, Spud, but my two boys are not; and they’re getting ready
now. Whether it’s harder or easier to let them go rather than for me to
go myself I leave to any of you guys that have kids.”
“Perhaps it won’t be as bad as what you think.”
“Jimmy, I’m only reasoning from what I see in the world already. When the
human race is being trodden in the wine-press we in America can’t expect
to be spared. If any of you want to know what’s happening to the kind of
world we’ve made for ourselves let him read the eighteenth chapter of the
book of the Revelation. That chapter might be written of Europe as it is
at this minute. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. The kings of the
earth stand off from her, crying, Alas! alas! that great city Babylon,
for in one hour is her judgment come! The merchants of the earth weep and
mourn over her, for no man buyeth their merchandise any more, saying,
Alas! alas! that great city, which was clothed in fine linen and purple
and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, for in
one hour so great riches is come to naught. And every shipmaster, and all
the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, cast dust
on their heads and cry over her, Alas! alas! that great city wherein were
made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for
in one hour she is made desolate.”
“But that ain’t us.”
“No, Headlights, that’s not us. I agree with you that there’s a
difference. America is not in the same boat with Europe—not quite—but
very nearly. Perhaps because our crimes are not so black we’ve been given
the chance to do what we have to do more of our own free act. From Europe
what she had has been taken away violently, whether she would or no. We
have the chance to come before the throne of God and offer it back of
our own free will. You see the difference! And, oh, boys, I want you to
do it—”
“It ain’t for us, Mr. Christian, to decide that.”
“Oh yes, it is, Beady! It’s for each of us to offer willingly in his own
heart. Not just to the government—not just to the country—not just to
France or Belgium or any other nation that’s in a tight place—but to that
blessed and heavenly Father Who’s giving us this wonderful chance to put
everything into His hands again, and get it all back for redistribution.
Don’t you see? That’s it—the redistribution! A better world has to come
out of this—a juster world—a happier world—a cleaner world. And in that
reconstruction we Americans have the chance to take the lead because
we’re doing it of our own accord. Every other country has some ax to
grind; but we have none. We’ve none except just to be in the big movement
of all mankind upward and forward. But the difference between us and
every other country—unless it’s the British Empire—is that we do it man
by man, each stepping out of the ranks in his turn as if he was the only
one and everything depended on his act. It’s up to you, Beady; it’s up to
me; it’s up to each American singly.”
“Why ain’t it up to every European singly?”
“It is. They’re just beginning to understand that it is. The Englishman,
the Frenchman, the Italian, they’re beginning to see that the democracy
we talk so much about isn’t merely a question of the vote—that it isn’t
primarily a question of the vote at all—it’s one of self-government in
the widest and yet the most personal sense. The great summons is not to
mankind in nations; it’s to mankind as individuals. It’s to Tom and Jimmy
and Peter and Headlights and Daisy and every one who has a name. It’s
the individual who makes the country, who forms the army, who becomes the
redemptive element. In proportion as the individual cleanses himself from
the national sin the national sin is wiped out. So it’s by Englishmen and
Englishwomen that England will renew itself—”
I think it was my old friend, the Irish hospital attendant, who called
out, “What’s England’s national sin?”
The question brought the speaker to a halt. He seemed to reflect.
“What’s England’s national sin?” he repeated. “I should say—mind you, I’m
not sitting in judgment on any one or any people—but we’ve all got to
clean our stables, even if it takes the labors of Hercules to accomplish
it—I should say England’s national vice—the vice that’s been eating the
heart out of her body, and the spirit out of her heart—is sensuality.”
“What’s the matter with France?”
“I’m not an international physician with a specialty for diagnosis,”
Christian laughed; “but in my opinion France has been corroded through
and through with sordidness. She’s been too petty, too narrow, too mean,
too selfish—”
“Say, boss, tell us about my country.”
“You mean, Italy, Tony? Haven’t you got to get rid of your superstition,
and all the degrading things superstition brings with it? I want you
to understand that we’re talking of national errors, not of national
virtues.”
“Have we got a national error in the United States?”
“What do you think, Tapley? Isn’t it as plain as the nose on your face?
Isn’t it written all over the country, on every page of every newspaper
you pick up?”
“What? What is it?” came from several voices at once.
“Dishonesty!” he cried, loudly. “We Americans have got our good points,
but of them honesty is the very smallest. If any one called us a nation
of sharpers he wouldn’t be very far wrong. Our notion of competition
is to get the better of the other fellow, by foul means if it can’t be
done by fair. That’s the case in private life, and when it comes to
public—well, did you ever hear of anything that we ever undertook as a
people that didn’t have to be investigated before very long? You can
hardly read a daily paper in which the investigation of some public
trust isn’t going on. Dishonesty is stamped deep, deep into the American
character as it is to-day; and for that very reason, if for no other,
we’ve got to give everything back. If we don’t it will be taken from us
by main force; and we’re not of the type to wait for that.”
He seemed to gather himself together. His face, always benignant, began
to glow with an inward light.
“But, boys, what I want you to understand is that we can make this act of
offering as a great act of faith. Every good gift and every perfect gift
cometh down! We can take our good gifts and our perfect gifts and hand
them up! We can anticipate their being taken from us by giving them. We
can give them as men who know whence they have been received, and where
they will be held in trust for us—not grudgingly nor of necessity, as the
Bible tells us, for God loveth a cheerful giver. Now is the time for us
to test that love—every man for himself. The appeal is to the individual.
Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken
together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom, according
to the measure that ye mete. For this giving isn’t to men, it’s to
God; it isn’t a portion, it’s all; it isn’t limited to material things,
it includes our love and our life. It’s the great summons; it’s the
great surrender. And—boys—my dear old boys who’ve been saved from other
things—we’ve all been saved for this—for something we never expected,
but which isn’t hard to do when you look at it in the right way—to hand
ourselves back, in body, mind, and possessions, to Him from whom we came,
that He may make a new use of us and begin all over again.”
And the first thing I saw when he stopped was Cantyre springing forward
to grasp him by the hand.
_CHAPTER XXXII_
When I got out the streets were already buzzing with a rumor that no
extra had as yet proclaimed. The House of Representatives had followed
the Senate in voting for war, and the President was about to sign the
declaration.
But I forgot this on arriving at the flat, for Lovey was propped up in
bed, with his thin nose in the air, making little sniffs.
“I smell it, Slim,” he smiled, as I entered. “Kind of a coffee smell it
is now, with a dash o’ bacon and heggs.”
“That smell is always round this flat, Lovey,” I said, trying to be
casual. “It’s all the breakfasts you and I have eaten—”
“Oh no, Slim. You can’t be mistook in this; and besides—” He made a sign
to the man nurse who for the past week or two Cantyre had sent in from
one of his hospitals. “You clear out, d’ye ’ear? I want to talk to my
buddy, private-like.”
The man strolled out to the living-room, whispering to me as he passed:
“There’s a change in him. I don’t think he’ll last through the night.”
“Come and sit ’ere, sonny,” Lovey commanded as soon as we were alone.
“I’ve got somethin’ special-like to tell ye. Did ye know,” he went on,
when I was seated beside the bed, “as I’d seen Lizzy—and she ’adn’t her
neck broke at all. She was lovely.”
“Where?” I asked, to humor him.
“Right ’ere—right beside that there chair that you’re a-sittin’ in.”
“When?”
“Oh, on and off—pretty near all the time now.”
“You mean that she comes and goes?”
“No; not just comin’ and goin’. She’s—she’s kind o’ ’ere all the time,
only sometimes I ain’t lookin’.” His face became alight. “There she
is now—and a great long street be’ind ’er. No, it ain’t a street;
it’s just all lovely-like, and Lizzy with ’er neck as straight as a
walkin’-stick—and not a drinkin’-woman no more she don’t look—it’s kind
o’ beautiful like, Slim, only—only I can’t make ye understand.”
Sighing fretfully over his inability to explain, he lapsed into that
state of which I never was sure whether it was sleep or unconsciousness.
The coma lasted for a great part of the night. Sending the nurse to lie
down, I sat and watched, chiefly because I had too much on my mind and
in my heart to want to go to bed. Every two or three hours Cantyre stole
in, in his dressing-gown, finding nothing he could do. Once or twice I
was tempted to ask him what he thought of Christian’s talk, but, fearing
to break the spell it might have wrought in him, I refrained. He himself
didn’t mention it, nor did he seem to know that I had observed his
impulsive, shaking hands.
On one of the occasions when he was with me Lovey opened his eyes
suddenly, beginning to murmur something we couldn’t understand.
“What is it, old chap?” Cantyre questioned, bending over him and
listening.
But Lovey was already articulating brokenly. It took two or three
repetitions, or attempts at repetition, for Cantyre to be in a position
to interpret.
“What’s he trying to say?” I inquired.
Cantyre pretended to arrange the bottles on the table beside the bed so
as not to have to look at me.
“He says, or he’s doing his best to say, ‘I didn’t say nothink but what
was for everybody’s good.’”
It was on my lips to retort, “Perhaps he didn’t.”
I left that, however, for Cantyre, who went back to his rooms without
comment.
He returned in the small hours of the morning, and once more we sat,
one on one side of the bed and the other on the other, in what was
practically silence. All I could say of it was that it had become a
sympathetic silence. Why it was sympathetic I didn’t know: but the
unclassified perceptions told me that it was.
When Lovey opened his eyes again it was with the air of not having been
asleep or otherwise away from us.
“I saved ye, Slim, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Lovey, old man, you did.”
“Kep’ straight so as you would keep straight too?”
“Yes, Lovey.”
“Ye’d never ’a’ done it if it ’adn’t been for me?”
“No, Lovey.”
“And I’d never ’a’ gone away from ye, Slim. I was just a—a-frightenin’ of
you. I didn’t mean no ’arm at all, I didn’t.”
“I know, Lovey.”
He fixed his glazing eyes upon me as he said, “I told ye my name wasn’t
Lovey, didn’t I?”
“No, but that doesn’t matter.”
“No, that doesn’t matter now. We’re fellas together, so what’s the
diff?... I don’t care where we sleeps to-night, so long as you’re there,
sonny.... Greeley’s Slip is good enough for mine, if I can snuggle up to
you, like.... Ye don’t mind, do ye?”