XIII
It was the second week of their stay at Camp Mills. Robert’s father had returned to Corinth on the third day after the return of the troops. He had come with the idea of bringing Robert home with him, having forgotten in his enthusiasm that the troops would first have to be discharged. Father and son had spent an evening in New York, dining together at the hotel, strolling leisurely down Fifth Avenue, visiting several cafés, principally talking. There were a thousand questions to ask and a thousand answers to make.
Hamilton was packing things into a wooden box, when McCall came running into the room.
“What’re you doing?” asked McCall. “Want a hand? Oh, I see, packing away the relics of the World War to show your children and your children’s children.”
“That’s right,” said Hamilton, wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Hand me that gas mask! That’s it. Now for the books. Some I had with me. The rest I picked up in Paris.”
“What’s the idea of packing now? You don’t expect to get out so soon, do you?”
“Oh, I might as well do it now. Get it over with. All right, now give me that hammer.”
“Have you seen the new order?” asked McCall. “What do you think of applying for appointment to the regular army?”
“Do I look crazy?” He savagely hammered the last nail into position and arose. “Now, that’s over.”
“But there are some fellows who have applied.” McCall stretched himself on the bunk and hunched up his knees comfortably. “There’s McMasters and Dowling. And I’ve been undecided about it.”
“What? I thought you were going to write a novel or something. Going to get down to work.”
“Now that it’s so near I’m getting cold feet. I don’t know if I can work. That is, do civilian work. Write any more. You know how blamed thick competition is on a newspaper anyway. I don’t know if I could hold a job.Oh, I suppose I could, but in the army there’s no uncertainty. As long as the government lasts you draw your pay check.”
“Of all the idiots, McCall, you’re the biggest. You’ve been working too hard on your service records. What do you say to breaking away tonight? We can catch the five o’clock train and get to New York in time to look up Levin. I’ve got his address you know, and the old bird will be glad to see us.”
“All right. All right. We’ve got almost an hour yet. I’ll get dressed and call for you and we can check out together.”
McCall lit a cigarette, puffed silently for a few minutes and left.
When a voice over the telephone announced that it was General Pershing talking and wanting to know why the devil he hadn’t turned in all his Hinkle pills and iodine, and wanting to know where the devil all the spiritus frumenti had disappeared to, Dr. Levin immediately recognized that it was McCall.
“All right, general,” he said, “as soon as I get through prescribing some pills for Marshall Foch. Where are you? In the lobby? Hamilton with you? Fine. Come right up, general.”
Hamilton and McCall burst into the room two minutes later and found a changedLevin—a Levin in civilian clothes, surprisingly dignified and taller than they had remembered.
“Don’t stare,” said Levin genially. “It’s just my clothes. I never could wear a uniform. How in the world have you been?”
They shook hands warmly, exchanged greetings and then found seats on the bed. There was a cheerful exchange of cigarettes and questions and exclamations of how glad they were to be back.
“I wish you’d examine McCall’s cranium,” said Hamilton, blowing a smoke wreath toward the ceiling, as he lay back on the bed. “He’s talking about entering the regular army, pardon me, the regular establishment.”
“Oh, I was just thinking about it. Nothing certain,” said McCall.
“One would think,” remarked Dr. Levin, rubbing a thoughtful hand over his chin. “One would think that your experiences in the World War would be a sufficient antidote. But—”
His brows wrinkled. “How can you? I mean physically. You couldn’t pass the examination.”
“I thought they’d let me in because I’d been wounded in the war. Give me a staff job or something. I’ve got a pretty good record, you know. Got the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross.But—oh, well, I didn’t really intend to apply for a commission in the regular army. Just putting off making a decision as to what I’m going to do when I get out. If you apply, they keep you in longer.”
Dr. Levin chucked a pillow at McCall, and Hamilton, following the cue, rumpled his hair.
“What are we going to do with this gloom?” Dr. Levin appealed. “Let’s take him out and show him the city.”
McCall laughed. “I’m not gloomy. Just thirsty. Let’s go!”
“Just a minute,” laughed Dr. Levin. “I do things methodically. Let’s draw up an itinerary. Where are we going?”
“What’s the difference where we go?” suggested McCall. “The main thing is to go. We’ll charter a taxi and make the rounds.”
“I think,” said Levin aside to Hamilton, as they were pulling on their coats, “that something’s worrying McCall. Has he a sweetheart in Paris?”
“Nonsense,” said Hamilton. “Wouldn’t he have told me?”
“Oh, of course, they always do, don’t they? Whenever a man falls in love he runs around announcing the news. Most of the time the man hasn’t any idea that he is in love.”
McCall, after flicking his shoes with a towel, joined them and they started off together.
They began with the Little Club and champagne and ended with Reisenwebers and gin fizzes.
With the first drink, McCall seemed to recover his spirits.
“On his third glass he usually begins to quote Walt Whitman,” said Hamilton.
“Well, I’ve seen many worse effects of drink,” Dr. Levin’s eyes twinkled.
“But not much worse, eh?” said McCall. “Well, anyway, I wish Whitman could take a look at this,” McCall made a slight gesture with his hand. “I wonder what he’d say about Manhattan and democracy.”
“I suppose we need a Whitman now,” said Dr. Levin. “We’ve just gone through another CivilWar—the Civil War of the white race. It needs a poet, a Whitman to sing the new ideal of democracy.”
“I think the war has brought about a new appreciation of democracy,” said Hamilton.
“You’re right,” added McCall. “The war has put an end to imperialism. The Kaiser is crushed. Germany is a republic. The little countries of middle Europe are independent. But especially to Russia do the real democrats of the world turn their eyes. I think that even Great Britain will have to give Ireland its freedom and relinquish its hold on the oppressed brownraces—the Hindus and the Persians.”
Dr. Levin shook his head. “You ought to be right, but you aren’t. The war has set back democracy. Europe will be split into fifty little states, all wrangling over boundary lines, over seaports, over tariffs, over a hundred and one things. Politically, Europe will be back in the middle ages, while economically it is in the twentieth century.”
The crowning heresy to McCall and Hamilton came when Levin proclaimed Bismarck a greater statesman than Wilson, because he unified Europe, while Wilson divided it.
“At any rate,” said Hamilton at length, “we three are united by a common love of our country and by certain common ideals. We may not agree as to whether the war has brought those ideals any closer to humanity or not, although personally I think it has. But we do know that these ideals areours—America’s.”
“Yes,” said Levin, “and we are a little cross-section ofAmerica—Catholic, Protestant andJew—but an unusual cross-section. Wait until you see the reaction in this country.The Italians are crying for Italia Irredenta and Italy for the Italians. Poland is crying Poland for the Poles. And the hundred per cent Americans have already begun raising the same cry here. Of course, we’ve missed them while we were in France; but the hundred per centers were the men back home that kept the homefires of hatredburning—painting yellow signs on German bakers who didn’t invest a certain quota of their savings in Liberty bonds, boycotting Hungarian restaurants, refusing to eat German fried potatoes or listen toWagner—stupid things like that. But there were more important things, too, deprivation of the right of free speech and assembly, and suppression of newspapers.”
Hamilton remembered some of the letters Margaret had written.
“Well, wasn’t it necessary to protect the country at home from disaffection?”
“In certain cases it was, certainly,” said Levin. “But in manycases—I won’t say ‘most,’ it wasn’t. That sort of thing grows. It becomes a passion, a religion, like Sadism, of inflicting punishment. Psychopathically it has an interesting explanation. Politically it is dangerous. There is no doubt that many persons derive keen pleasure in hurting others. And the war has stirred them up.
“At first this intolerance is fairlyreasonable—it makes powerless the enemies of the government in the prosecution of war. Which is as it should be. Then it becomes ingrown. Instead of imprisoning traitors as they arise, people begin to stir them up so that they may satisfy the pleasure of imprisoning. Men begin to watch their neighbor for slips from the patriotic code. A patriot must do this thing and that and refrain from the other. There may be five hundred different kinds of patriots inactuality—just as we three represent three different points of view and political philosophy. But the hundred per center can understand only onekind—his own.
“He is aRepublican—I am myself, by theway—so when he finds an Anarchist he has him jugged. It makes no difference whether he be a philosophic Anarchist, a followerof Kropotkin, a man who is a vegetarian by principle and has a Brahministic horror of shedding ofblood—he is placed in the same cell with the brute who was caught placing a bomb under the railroad bridge. Socialists, Communists, I. W. W.’s, sympathizers with the present Russiangovernment—all, in some way different from the hundred percenters—are regarded as enemies of America. Even liberals and progressives are viewed with suspicion.
“By January the country’s going dry. The same bigots who have been denying the rights that the Constitution guarantees every citizen in a misguided effort to protect that Constitution, will be denouncing people who prefer to drink cocktails instead of grape juice, as un-American. Next it will be people who don’t belong to their race and then, to their church.”
“No, never!” Hamilton interrupted. “This isn’t Russia. America is too sensible.”
“I’m Russian by parentage, you know,” said Dr. Levin. “The race riots there, the pogroms, were also supposed to be patriotic. It was always the hundred per cent Russians who incited the hooligans to riot. Imagine that! The officials who were living corrupt lives, looting the public treasury, depriving the soldiers and sailors of food and ammunition to swell their own fortunes, those were the ones who always cried Russia for the Russians. In the name of patriotism they not only killed the Jews, but imprisoned, exiled and killed the real patriots, who were working for a republic. You see it always starts with patriotism. And in Russia the idea of religion was mixed in with it. Those who don’t believe as you do are not only enemies of the state, but also of Christ. The victims of the plunderers and murderers become anti-Christs. It’s ironic.”
“I think that’s just a wild dream of yours. But whatever happens”—he raised a glass of champagne—“here’s to our friendship, born of the war to make the world safe for democracy.”
He proposed the toast jocularly, but it symbolized the moment and they drank, almost seriously.