Heart's Kindred

“For we, the women of the world, have banded ourselves together to demand that war be abolished.”

Last, he remembered a Voice. Afterward, he could not have told what woman spoke, or of what nation they said that she had come. But what she said was like the weaving of what the others had spun.

“Remember,” said her Voice, “that all this is nothing. It is only the body, made for the spirit. And the spirit is that new dominant mind which shall be born in the world – the mind of love.

“You’ll not get this by going to governments. You’ll not get this by the meeting of groups of representative people. You’ll not get this by International Police. These things must be – will be, as a matter of course. But they will not be the mind of love.

“Something will come into the world – and it will know nothing of arbitration, it will know nothing of armistice, it will know nothing of treaties; nor will it know anything of those other ways of secret warfare by which great nations seem to keep clean hands: the ways of ‘high’ finance through ‘peaceful penetration.’

“Something will come into the world, and it will know nothing of nations.

“The little loyalties will go. National pride, national ‘honor,’ patriotism – all the little scaffolds will fall away. And within will be the light that we lack.

“It is the mind of love. I am not afraid to say that beside it, governments are nothing. It is the mind of love. It may be in the simplest cottage of a peasant who goes to the war for a false ideal. But of this as yet the nations do not know.

“What is it that we must know?

“That the nations are nothing – the people are everything. That the people are bound together by ties which the nations must cease to break. That the people are heart’s kindred, met here together for their world-work, and that the nations must cease to interrupt.”

Even then the Cabinet meeting was already concluded, and the newsboys were on the streets with the Extras; and on the bulletin boards of the world the word was being flashed:

“NO ACTION TO BE TAKEN

BY U. S.”

And in the newspapers was the text of that letter, simple, human, of almost religious import, which was to make the United States, years hence, stand out as the first great headland upon new shores.

The people were coming out at the doors of the Capitol. Among them were the women who had spoken – the Polish woman, the Servian peasant, the lady of Louvain. The other women in the crowd put out their hands and took the hands of these women. Those stretching, pressing hands of silent women marked a giant fellowship which disregarded oceans, strange tongues, countless varying experiences, and took account of only one thing.

The Inger was looking up at the white dome against the black sky, and about him at the march of the people. Through his thought ran the flood of this that he had heard. In his absorption he lurched heavily against a man who was trying to pass him and who jostled him. For the first time in his life, the Inger felt no surge of anger at such a happening. He looked in the man’s face.

“Gosh,” the Inger said. “That was too alfired bad!”

The man smiled and nodded. Momentarily, the Inger felt on his arm the touch of the man’s hand.

“All right, brother,” the man said, and was gone.

The Inger felt a sudden lightness of heart. And about him the people went along so quietly. Abruptly the tumult of his thinking gave way to something nearer than these things. He looked in their faces. None of them knew that his father had died! It occurred to him now that there was hardly one of them who, on being told, would not say something to him – perhaps even shake his hand. He thought that many of these people must have seen their fathers die. He wondered which ones these would be, and he wished that he knew which ones they were. Something in him went along with the people, because they must have had fathers who had died. He looked at them in a new way. Their fathers must have died…

Oh, if only, he thought, Lory might have been there to-night with those women who felt as she felt…

He was aware of a hand on his arm. He turned, feeling an obscure pleasure that perhaps some one had something to say to him. It was Lory, alone.

X

Her face in the darkness, and about them the green gloom of the Square, were all that he knew of the time. Not far from them, like murals on the night, went the people, that little lighted stream of people, down the white steps and along the gray drives.

At first he could say nothing to her. He seized at her hand as he had seized upon it that night in Chicago, but then he remembered and let her hand fall; and at last he blurted out a consuming question:

“Where is he?”

“Who?” Lory asked surprisingly, and understood, and still more surprisingly replied:

“Bunchy! He’s gone to New York.”

This city’s name the Inger repeated stupidly, and as if it made no answer to anything.

“Just for a few days,” she explained, “before he goes home.”

“Home!”

To tell the truth she seemed not to be thinking very much about Bunchy.

“I told him I’d never marry him – not in fifty hundred years. And he went home.”

He considered this incredulously.

“Couldn’t you tell him that without comin’ clear to Washington to do it?” he demanded.

“No,” she said. “There was the money. Why didn’t you tell me you’d give Dad that money?”

He tried to answer her, but all the while this miracle was taking him to itself: Bunchy had gone.

“I guess because it sounded like a square deal, when I only done it to devil Bunchy some,” he told her.

“Is that all you done it for?”

He looked at her swiftly. Was that all that he had done it for?

“Is it?” she said.

“I donno,” he answered truthfully. “It was some of it.”

“I wish,” she said, “I wish’t I knew.”

With that he moved a little toward her, and tried to see her face.

“Why?” he asked.

She turned away and said nothing. And when she did that, he caught his breath and stooped to her.

“You tell me why you wish’t you knew,” he bade her.

“Oh well,” she said – and she was breathless too – “if you done it to help me – get away – then I shouldn’t feel so bad about goin’ to the hut.”

“About comin’ to me?”

“About makin’ you do all this for me!” she cried. “I’m sick over it. I don’t know how to tell you…”