Heart's Kindred

“Comrades! Comrades! In the name of God – of the hope of the International…”

A yell went up from the hall. A dozen hands drew the youth away. He waved his arms toward the hall. From above and below, came voices – some of men, some of women, hoarse or clear or passionate:

“Comrades! Comrades!..”

But in that moment’s breath of another meaning, the speaker who first had fired them stood beside the chairman, and held up a telegram. They let him read:

“Resolution almost unanimously passed by Metropolitan mass meeting and by two overflow meetings…”

If there was more to the telegram, no one but the reader knew. The clamor was like a stretching of hands across the miles to New York, to clasp those other hands in their brother-lust. The youth of twenty flung himself free of those who had held him, and dropped to the floor, and sat hugging his knees and staring out over the hall as if death sat there, infinitely repeated, and naked.

The Chairman lifted his hand. “You have heard the motion. Does any one desire to hear it re-read?”

Again that amazing, pulsing, unanimity of the cry:

“Question! Question! Question!”

“All those in favor – ” the Chairman’s bent head was raised so that he peered at them from under his lids – “will make it manifest by saying ‘ay.’”

Out of the depth of their experience and practice at meetings for charity, for philanthropy, for church, for state, for home, they voted, so that it was like One Great Thing with a voice of its own.

“Ay!”

In this “ay” the Inger’s voice boomed out so that some remembered and wondered, and even in that moment, a few turned to see him.

“Those opposed will make it manifest by saying ‘no.’”

The boy sprang to his feet, and with the clear call of a few hundred no’s, his own voice rang out in agony:

“Oh my God,” he said, “No! No! No!”

There must have been a thousand who laughed at him and called him a name. But the others were gone wild again. And with them the Inger was shouting his wildest, so that for a moment he did not hear Lory. Then he realized that she was standing beside him crying with the few hundred their ‘No!’”

He took her by the shoulder and shook her roughly.

“What do you want to do that for?” he said. “Are you a white feather?”

It smote him with dull surprise that she was so calm.

She answered him as she might have spoken on the mountain trail:

“If that means that I ain’t like them,” she said, “then I am a white feather, I guess.”

“But look here,” he burst out, “you’re no mollycoddle. You’re the West! You know how things go – ”

She broke in then, with her face turned toward the hall again.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how things go. They’re voting to kill folks – Oh my God!”

The Inger blazed up in a flame.

“It ain’t any such thing!” he burst out. “They don’t care a hang about killing folks – not for the fun o’ killing!”

He hurled his new fact at her, passionately anxious that she should understand.

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “It’s for somethin’ – it’s for somethin’! That’s all the difference. It’s grand! It’s – it’s grand – ” He shook with his effort to make her know.

“It’s killing ’em just as dead!” she said, and she wept.

Here the Inger received an unexpected ally. The woman with the blue-boned hand beside Lory leaned forward, and touched the girl’s arm with her pink, spangled fan:

“My child,” she said, “try to understand: killing is so small a part of it all!”

Lory faced her, and her eyes blazed into the faded eyes of her.

“Did you ever see your father kill a sheriff?” she asked. “Well, mine did – and I watched him. And I tell you, no matter how murderin’ is done, it’s hell. If you don’t know that, take it from me!”

About them, the crowd, waiting for no adjournment, was rising, streaming out, falling back as it got to the doors. The Inger, marshalling Lory before him, made his way with the rest. He looked across Lory’s head and above most of the others. He was noticing the people.

There was a fine stalwart lad, he thought – good for the army, and looking ready to shoulder his gun. That chap with the shoulders – what a seat he’d have in the cavalry – or on a broncho, for the matter of that. That fellow there was too old, but he was in excited talk with some one, and both were as eager as boys. Some were still shouting to one another, flushed with immediate purpose. Others were quiet and moved out soberly, as when the lights come back after the great climax. But every one was thrilled and fired by a powerful emotion, and it lived in their faces. The Inger read it there, because he felt it in his own. He warmed to them all.

A man about town, fashionably dressed, and in absorbed talk, came down on the Inger’s foot with shocking vigor.

“I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed in a hurrying falsetto, pitching down three notes of the scale.

“Don’t you give a damn,” said the Inger unexpectedly.

At the door, in the bewilderment of lights and carriage calls and traffic, the Inger stood in complete uncertainty.

“Can you tell me – ” “Say, could you tell me – ” “Say, which way – ” he addressed one or two, but in the inner turmoil of them and in the clamor without, they did not heed him.

The Inger faced the next man, a fat being, with two nieces – one knew that they were nieces; and demanded of him to be told the way to his station.

“Lord bless me,” said the man. “Get on any car going that way!”

“Thank you to hell,” said the Inger heartily. “Hope we’re on the same side,” he warmed to it. “Hope we’re in the same regiment!” he mounted with it.

As the two swung out on the sidewalk, he was silent with the vague mulling of this.

“Could we walk?” Lory suggested. “Is there time?”

He welcomed it. They went up Wabash Avenue with the slow-moving crowd.

It had been raining, and the asphalt between the rails, and the rails themselves, were wet and shining. The black cobblestones were covered thinly with glossy mud. Even the sidewalks palely mirrored the amazing flame of the lights.

It was another Chicago from the city which they had entered with the dawn. Here was a gracious place of warm-looking ways, and a time of leisure, and the people meant other than the people of the morning. The Inger moved among them, swam with them, looked on them all with something new stirring him.

Lory went silently. She had slipped her handkerchief cap away, and her hair was bright and uncovered in the lamplight. But she seemed not to be looking anywhere.