Heart's Kindred

And as the people ceased to come in, and now were merely sitting there, breathing, and incredibly alive, he suddenly spoke aloud:

“If hundreds of ’em fell dead and was dragged out,” he said, “we’d never know the difference, would we?”

Lory’s look was the speculative look which always embarrassed him.

“If two of ’em was us, we would,” she said.

The Inger laughed boisterously.

“You bet, – then!” he agreed. “Lord, ain’t it grand that the rest of ’em could go, for all we care!”

She pondered it.

“What if they was a big fire,” she said, “like the Hess House?”

The Hess House, an unsavory place of Inch, had burned the year before, and with it five nameless women.

“Oh gosh,” said the Inger, “you could hand ’em out like fish off the coals, and save ’em, alive and kicking, and cord ’em up somewheres, and rip back for more.”

“Why?” asked Lory. “Why would you do that – if it didn’t make any difference?”

“Because you’d be a dub if you didn’t,” he replied simply.

He was silent for a minute, played at picking her up in his arms, holding her, hewing through the crowd, trampling them out of the way, and as he went, kissing her when he pleased. To him the hall dimmed and went out… Then he heard the chairman speaking.

The chairman was a man of thick body and bent head, with watching eyes, and a mouth that shut as a fist shuts. His voice went over the hall like a horn.

The meeting had been called because something must be done – something must be done. The war had dragged on until the world was sucked. Men, women, children, money, arms, cities, nations, were heaped on the wreck. The wreck was the world. Something must be done – something must be done. In all the earth stood only one great nation, untouched of carnage, fat, peopled – and peopled with sons of the warring world. This meeting had been called because something must be done. There were those who had come to tell what to do.

To those who comprehended, the weight of the moment lay in the chaos of applause which took the house. The air of the place, languid, silent, casual, for all that one observed, abruptly solidified and snapped, and flew asunder. In its place leaped something electric, which played from the people to the speaker who came first to his place, and from him back to the people.

This man began to speak slowly. He was slow-moving, slow of eyelid and of glance, and his words came half sleepily. It was so that he told them about themselves: Children of those who had come to America for escape, for retreat, for a place of self-expression. Who had sought liberty, free schools, manhood suffrage, womanhood suffrage, religious freedom, and had found some of these and were seeking more. Picture by picture he showed them a country which, save for its enduring era of industrial babyhood, and its political and judicial error, gave them richly of what they had sought, developed them, fed them, comforted them. A place of plenty, a happy paradise, a walled world, he pictured theirs.

In the same sleepy, casual fashion, he went on: Why should they set about all this talk of “something must be done”? This was none of our quarrel. Perfectly, by this time, we recognized its causes as capitalistic issues. If they chose to murder one another, should we add terror unto terror by slaying more, and ourselves? Why ourselves and our sons? Why not stay soft in the nest we had made, while men of the soil which had nourished our fathers called to us vainly, the death rattle in their throats? Sigh delicately for this rattle of death in millions of throats and fill our own with the fat of the land whose prosperity must not be imperilled. Read of a people decimated, and answer by filing a protest. Pray for peace incessantly, beside our comfortable beds. Read of atrocities and shudder in our warm libraries. Hear of dead men who fought and dead men who rotted, and talk it over on our safe, sunlit streets. Meet insult on the high seas, and merely hold mass meetings. And speculate, speculate, speculate, at our laden dinner tables, on the probable outcome.

“The part of men is being played by us all,” the slow voice went on, “of men and of descendants of men of Europe. It was so that they acted in ’76 – the men of Europe, was it not? And we are the sons of those who, before ’76, made Europe as they made America – and us. The destruction of one of our vessels – what is that to us? Let’s turn the other cheek. And let’s meet here often, friends, what do you say? Here it is warm and light – you come from good dinners – you come in good clothes – in automobiles. Let us meet to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow! Let us have music – Where is the music to-night? ‘Tipperary’ – ‘Marseillaise’ – ‘Wacht Am Rhein’ – ‘God Save the King’ – why are we not being stirred by these to sign a protest, to take a collection which shall keep them fighting on? ‘Something must be done!’ So we meet – and meet – and meet again. And we play a part that in the history of the next century will make the very schoolboys say: ‘Thank God, America locked her door and kept her safety and let them die!’ Next week – let us meet here again next week, pleasantly and together. ‘Something must be done!’ In the name of all the bleeding nations, let us keep on meeting, in this large and lighted hall.”

Before the silence in which he turned away had been rent by the applause that followed on the surprise of it, another man sprang from his seat on the stage and strode to the front. In a gesture curiously awkward and involuntary, he signed them to let him speak, and his voice burst out before they could hear him.

“… he is right – he is right – and I burn in flesh and soul and blood and bone of these peoples of Europe who made me. Their flesh cries to my flesh and it answers with a tongue that has been dumb too long. Men of America! Men who have lately been sons of the warring nations and have crept off here just in time – by a decade or by a century – to stand with whole skins and unbroken bones – let’s have done with it! Do we face our insults as men – or do we stand silent and bid for more? And are we another kind of creature? Do we understand what those men suffer? Are their cries of agony to us in another tongue? Have blood and misery and madness a language of their own, and are we deaf to it – or do we know with every fibre in us what it is they are going through, what it is they ask of us, what it is that if we are men we must give them – and give them now! For now their provocation is our provocation. I ask you what it shall be – the safe way of intervention? Or the hands of human beings, to succor the naked hands of the desperate and the dying of our own kin – our own kin! And to revenge our wrong!”

In an instant the hall was shattered by a thousand cries. Men leaped to their feet. Some sat still. Some wept. But the cries which came from no one knew whom of them, rose and roared distinguishably!

“To war … war … war!”

The Inger had risen and stood stooping forward, his hands on the rail, his eyes sweeping the crowd. His look seemed to lick up something that it had long wanted, and to burn it in his face. He was smiling with his teeth slightly showing.

“Ah-h-h,” he said within his breath, and said it again, and stood rocking a little and breathing hard.

The demonstration lasted on as if a pent presence had lapped them to itself and possessed them. A man, and another tried to speak, but no one listened. A few in the front rows left the hall, and, ominous, and barely audible, a hissing began in the galleries and ran down the great bank of heads, and scourged the few as they gained the door.

What at last silenced them was the dignity and status of a man who took the stage. He made no effort to speak. He merely waited. Presently they were quiet, though not all reseated themselves.

He was a man of more than middle years, with a face worn and tortured – but it was as if the torture had been long ago.

“My neighbors,” he said, “will some one tell me why you want to kill your neighbors across the water?”

“To vindicate our honor! To help our neighbors and our kin!” shouted the lean man who had spoken last.

The older man regarded him quietly:

“You want to kill your neighbors,” he repeated. “You want to go over there with arms and be at war. You want to kill your neighbors. I am asking you why?”

From the upper gallery came a cry that was like a signal. Up there a hundred throats took up a national hymn. Instantly from the balconies below, from pit, from stage, a thousand were on their feet and a thousand throats took up the air. Not an instant later, something cut the current of the tune, wavered, broke, swelled – and another nation’s hymn, by another thousand, rose and bore upon the first, and the two shook the place with discord. A third nation’s air – a fourth – the hall was a warfare of jarring voices – and out of the horror of sound came the old exquisite phrases, struggling for dominance: “God Save the Queen” – ”Watch on the Rhine,” “The Marseillaise,” “The Italian Hymn,” and rollicking over all, the sickening wistfulness and hopelessness and sweetness of “Tipperary.”

The Inger raised his great form and stretched up his arms and shook them above his head, and swung out his right arm as if it flung a rope.

“Yi – eih – ai – la – o-o-o-oh – !” he shouted, like the cry of all the galloping cow-punchers of the West, galloping, and galloping, to a thing on which, with sovereign intensity, they were bent. He silenced those about him, and they looked and laughed, and gave themselves back to their shouting. The woman with the blue-boned hand looked over to Lory, and smiled with a liquid brightness in her eyes, and her pink spangled fan tapped her hand in tune with the nearest of the songs about her. This woman looked like a woman of the revolution, who believed that good has always come out of war, and that from war good will always come. She smiled. Tears rolled on her face. She sank back weakly, but she waved her pink spangled fan.

As his hand came down, Lory caught at the Inger’s sleeve.

“Can’t we go?” she begged. “Can’t we?”

He pulled his sleeve from her hand, hardly knowing that it was there, and kept at his shouting.

The only man to whom they would listen was, at last, the man who had so roused them. When, after a hurried conference with the chairman, and others, this man rose again, they listened – in the vague expectation that something would now be said which would excite them further.

“Don’t be senseless fools!” he shouted. “This is no better than a neat, printed protest. ‘Something must be done!’ Say what it is that you are going to do, or you may as well go home.”

He turned pointedly toward a dark-bearded man who was evidently expected to follow him. This man rose and shook out a paper. He shouted shrilly and wagged his head in his effort to make himself heard, and his long hair swung at the sides.

“At this moment,” he rehearsed, “eighteen meetings such as this are being held in eighteen towns – New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake, Denver, Omaha, Portland, Spokane, St. Louis, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Milwaukee – these and the others are holding meetings like this. You know how each meeting is to take action and transmit that action to-night to each of the other meeting places. I ask you: what is it that this meeting is going to do? And Mr. Chairman, I make you a motion.”

The hall was so silent that it seemed drained of breathing: so electric with listening that it seemed drained of thought.

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, ay, and Ladies, for I deem you fully worthy to have a share in these deliberations,” said he, with a magnificent bow. “I move you, that, Whereas our government in its wisdom has seen fit to withhold itself from the great drama of the world’s business for a length of time not to be tolerated by a great mass of its citizens: and, Whereas, since the destruction of the steamship Fowler, a merchant vessel, belonging to the United States and sailing neutral waters, three days have elapsed without action on the part of the government thus outraged past all precedent in conduct toward neutral nations – save only one nation! – That now, therefore, we here assembled, citizens of the United States, do voice our protest and demand of our government that if within the week no adequate explanation or apology shall be forthcoming from the offending power, we do proceed without further delay to declare war against that power.

“And I further move you that it be the sense of this meeting that we hereby petition for immediate mobilization of our army.

“And I further move you that, on the carrying of this motion, a copy of it be telegraphed to the President of the United States, and to the Chairmen of the eighteen similar meetings held in the United States this night, in the common name of liberty and humanity.”

The hall became a medley of sound with but one meaning. Men leaped to the seats, to the rails of balconies, shouting. The thing they had wanted to have said had been said. The fire that had been smouldering since early in the war, that had occasionally blazed in public meetings, in the press, in private denunciation, had at last eaten through the long silence to burn now with a devouring flame, and the people gave it fuel.

A dozen men and women there were who fought their way forward, and stood on the platform, appealing for silence. One by one these tried to speak. To each the hall listened until it had determined the temper of the speaker: then, if it was, as it was from several, a passionate denunciation of the policy, groans and hisses drowned the speaker’s voice. And if it was a ringing cry of “Patriots of the world, show your patriotism in the cause of the stricken world and of this offended nation!” – the fury of applauding hands and stamping feet silenced speech no less.

“Question! Question! Question!” they called – not here and there and otherwhere, but in a great wave of hoarse shouting, like a pulse.

The Chairman rose to put the motion, and as silence fell for him to speak, a youth of twenty, lithe, dark, with a face of the fineness of some race more like to all peoples than peoples now are like to one another, hurled himself before him, and shouted into the quiet: