CHAPTER XXIX
The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus.
In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in the end, I was sorry to see this waste.
With one exception I placed them as all under thirty. They were good-looking fellows in the main, who would respond amazingly to drill. After that impetus to the inner self, of which the Down and Out had the secret, plenty of work, a regular life, food, water, and sleep would renew them as the earth is renewed by spring. No missionary ever longed to bring a half-dozen promising pagans into the Christian fold more ardently than I to see these five or six poor wastrels transformed into fighting-men.
For the minute there was no official there but littleSpender, whose bliss in life was in opening the Down and Out door. Having led me across the empty front sitting-room, he said, as I stood in the gap of the folding-doors:
“Say, brothers! This is Slim. Come in here four or five years ago, just as low down as any of you, and look at him now!”
I did feel enormously tall, in spite of the high studding of the room, as well as enormously big in my ample military overcoat. To the six who sat in that woeful outward idleness, of which I knew the inner secret preoccupation, I must have been an astonishing apparition. Only a very commanding presence could summon these men from the desolate land into which their spirits were wandering; but for once in my life I did it. All eyes were fixed on me; every jaw dropped in a kind of awe.
Knowing the habits and needs of such a stupor, I merely threw off my overcoat, entered, and sat down. Any greeting I made was general and offhand. Apart from that I sat and said nothing.
I sat and said nothing because I knew it was what they liked. They liked the companionship, as babies and dogs like companionship, though their aching minds could not have responded to talk. There was no embarrassment in this silence, no expectation. It was a stupefied pleasure to them to stare at the uniform, to speculate inchoately as to the patch on my eye; and that little was enough.
Nobody read; nobody smoked. I neither smoked nor read; I only sat as in a Quaker meeting, waiting for the first movement of the spirit.
It came when a husky voice, that seemed to travel from across a gulf, said, without any particular reason, “I’m Spud.”
I turned to my right, to see a good-looking, brown-eyed fellow, of perhaps twenty-eight, trying to reach me, as it were, with his pathetic, despairing gaze.
I knew what was behind this self-introduction. The lost identity was trying to find itself; the man who was worthy of something was doing his utmost to get out of the abyss by reaching up his hands to the man who had got out.
“All right, Spud,” I said, heartily. “Put it there! We’re going to be friends.”
Silence for another five minutes was broken when a high voice recited in a sort of litany, “I’m Jimmy McKeever, traveler for Grubbe & Oates, gents’ furnishers.”
Sharp-faced, wiry, catlike, agile, tough as wire, I could see this fellow creeping out into the darkness of No Man’s Land, and creeping back with information of the enemy.
I broke in on the litany to say: “Good for you, Jimmy, old boy! Glad to know you. Let’s shake hands.”
He sprang from his seat on the outskirts of the group, but before he could reach me a great, brawny paw was stretched forward by a blue-eyed young Hercules sitting nearer me, which grasped my fingers as if in a vise. There was then a scramble of handshaking, each of the bunch asserting his claim for recognition, like very small children. The older man alone held aloof, sitting by himself, scowling, hard-faced, cross-legged, kicking out a big foot with a rapid, nervous rhythm.
It was he who, when the handshaking was over, snarled out the question, “What’s the matter with your eye?”
I told them the story of how I lost it.
I told it as simply as I could, while working in a fair share of the strong color which I hoped would arrest their attention.
It did. In all my experience of men coming back into life from the state which is so expressively known as dead drunk it was the first time I ever saw them listen with avidity to any voice but that of the inner man.
What is there about war which speaks with this authority? Where did it get its power to go to the hidden man of the heart, that subliminal self with which modern speculation has been so busy, and shift him from off his age-long base? It is commonly said that, whatever our personal vicissitudes, human nature remains the same; but though that may be true of the past, I doubt if it will be true of the future. War on the scale on which we are waging it has already changed human nature. It has changed it as the years change a baby to a boy and a boy to a man. It has lifted human nature up, drawn out of it what we never supposed to be there, freed it from its slavery to time. It has to a large degree reversed the processes of time as it has reversed the usages of sex. We have seen youth doing the work of maturity, maturity that of youth, women that of men, men that of women. We have seen cowards transformed into heroes, rotters into saints, stupid, idiotic ne’er-do-wells into saviors of mankind.
We shall never go back again to the helpless conviction that youth must grow slowly into age, only to have age decay into ugliness and senility. This kind of foolish, useless progress may still go on for an indefinite time to come, but we shall work against it as against something contrary to the highest possibilities of nature. Since we have thrown off our mental shackles in great moments, we shall see that we can do the same in small, and, having emerged on a higher plane, we shall stay there. Staying there, we shall doubtless go on in time to a higherplane still—a plane on which the mighty works that are now wrought in war will become feasible in peace. We are not on that plane yet; but if the advance of the human race means anything we shall get there. It may take a thousand years; it may take more; it may take less; but in the mean time we must seize our blessings as we may.
So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men in their condition they were astonishing.
That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?”
As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out there was always an inclination.
I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield, Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?”
He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal. My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of America was being shaken out of itsmaterialism, its provincialism, and its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that we ought to be in it was expressed.
“We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors. We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.”
I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of purposes.
But he spoke so calmly!
“We shall go into this thing the more thoroughly when our people as a whole are convinced of its necessity. And for a hundred millions of people to be convinced is a matter that takes time. But even there you can see how a great purpose is changing them almost against their own will. It isn’t many months ago that theyelected a President on the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ Had it not been for that slogan it’s doubtful whether or not he would have been elected. All politics apart, we can say that, had he not been elected, it’s doubtful whether any other candidate could carry with him a united Congress when we come to the moment of decision. Were the President not to have a united Congress, behind him, there would be no united people. As it is we’re all forging forward together, President, Congress, and people, as surely as winter forges forward into spring; and when the minute arrives—”
He broke off with a smile I can only call exalted. With a hasty pressure of my hand he was off to some other fellow with some other needful word.