Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Pacifism -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States -- Fiction
And as he looked at the people, the thousands, going to their homes,
Love that had come to dwell in him, touched him on the eyes. He saw
them loving, as he and Lory loved. He saw them grieving, as that woman
had grieved for her child. He saw them lonely for their dead, as he was
lonely for his dead. None of them could deceive him. He knew them, now.
They were like Lory and like him.
Out of a heart suddenly full he spoke the utmost that he could:
“What a rotten shame,” he said, “it’d be to kill any of them!”
She looked up, and saw where he was looking, and her heart leaped with
her understanding of him.
He was trying to think it out.
“But they can’t seem to stop to think of things like that,” he said;
“not when big things come up.”
“Big things!” she cried. “What’s big things?”
“Well—rights—and land—and sea-ports,” said he.
She laughed, and caught up an end of her blue knitted shawl and covered
her face, and dropped the shawl with almost a sob.
“Rights—and land—and sea-ports!” she said over.
The three words hung in air, and echoed. And abruptly there came upon
him a dozen things that he had heard that night: “We had just three
little streets, but they took those....” “There is only one hell worse
than we have been through....” “Say, if you like, that Belgium was only
a part of what happens in war....” “We have to think of men brutalized
and driven to hideous deeds....” “Enough of slaughter. Enough of
devastation. Peace—lasting peace!” And then again the words of the
Hungarian woman: “I had the shawl on my back, but I had no baby and I
don’t know where I dropped him.”
“Think of millions of men doing like Dad and that sheriff,” the girl
said suddenly. “I saw ’em there on the woodshed floor,—stark, starin’,
ravin’ mad.”
Sharp on the dark before him was struck the image of that old madman
in the kitchen. There was a beast in him. The Inger had felt the beast
in himself answer. He had felt the shame of a man who is a beast to
another man. _What if it were the same kind of shame for the nations?_
Suddenly, in his arms, Lory was pouring out all that she had longed to
say to him.
“Back there in Inch,” she cried, “I knew there was some other way. I
had to know! It didn’t seem as if everybody could be like Dad and
Bunchy. Then I saw you—and you seemed like you could be some other
way. And you are—and see the folks there. There _is_ some other way to
be besides killin’!”
The lights in the dome went out, and that high white presence dropped
back against the sky. Still the people were going by, their feet
treading the gravel; and now there was a man’s voice, now a woman’s
voice, now the sleepy treble of a child. And they were all in some
exquisite faith of destination.
“I guess there must be some other way,” the Inger said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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