Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Pacifism -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States -- Fiction
She sat by the window, and he beside her. On the way across the desert,
she had sat alone at night, with her pack for a pillow, and he in a
seat near by. She said nothing now, and when the train began to move,
they still sat in silence, watching the lights wheel and march, run to
the windows, and vanish with no chance to explain themselves, and an
edge of dawn streaking the sky. When he saw her eyes droop, he put his
arm about her, and drew her head down until it lay upon his shoulder.
“I want you should go to sleep there,” he said.
For a moment he held her so, not the less tenderly that his great arms
would not let her move. But this obedience was, after all, not what he
wanted. “Do you want to?” he demanded, and half loosed his clasp.
“I don’t know,” she answered sleepily—but she did not move away.
In a little while she fell asleep, and he sat so and held her. Her
weight became a delicious discomfort. He was not thinking either of
that night on the trail, or of what might be. He was hardly thinking
at all. He was swept by the sweetness of the hour and by the sense of
an exalted living, such as he had never dreamed; an exalted warfare,
in which men killed for great reasons. And once his feeling was shot
through with the recognition that every one in the car would be
believing that she was his wife; that every one in the car would be
thinking that they had a home somewhere.
He put his lips on her hair, and then rested his cheek there. So,
sleeping, they sped through that new world.
VII
AT Harrisburg, he bought a New York paper. There have been huge mass
meetings in New York to which only an inch of space was given, on a
back page; but this meeting had the second column next to the war news.
Two overflow meetings had been held and in all three, the enthusiasm,
the newspaper said, had been tremendous, the sentiment overwhelming.
The editorial boldly supported the headlines:
“... enough of this policy of negation. If national pride has not been
sufficient to prompt the United States to activity, to its rôle as a
leader among the powers, surely the goad of a violated neutrality and
an utter disregard of international law should be sufficient to open
the eyes of its people....
“The refusal to exercise intervention was natural. The refusal to
make the first move in calling a congress of all nations including
the belligerents, was hardly less so. We should in no wise assume to
dictate to the powers of Europe. The refusal to mobilize the army or
to begin to provide anything like adequate coast defences a people has
borne patiently and far too long. But the tacit refusal to permit the
citizens to bear arms in defence of this their land ... etc.”
The Inger slapped the paper and the page slit down its length.
“That’s it,” he said, “they’ve got it. Ain’t it a wonder,” he put it to
the flying Pennsylvania landscape, “that I come just when I come?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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