Part 7

The old man ate—the Inger never forgot how. With his eyes immovably fixed on the Inger’s face, he crept cautiously forward to meet the spoon, and when he had the contents safe, drew back like a dog to his corner, with those strange grunting breaths.

“Poor old fellow!” the Inger tried to say, softly—and the grunting mounted to a snarl.

When they had fed him, the Inger drew Lory out into the quiet of the little garden.

“You can’t stand that,” he said. “I won’t have you stand that. You’ve got to get some place an’ get out o’ this.”

She looked down the dusk of the garden, and he was surprised to see that she was smiling a little.

“You don’t know,” she said. “With that—or hard work—or anything else—I’ll always think it’s heaven to what I thought had to happen.”

“You mean Inch?” he comprehended.

“I mean Bunchy,” she said.

She moved down the path, and following her for a step or two, he noted the dress she was wearing, and the tan of her neck, and her arms in their thin sleeves.

“That’s the dress you had on that day in the desert,” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” she answered. “It’s almost the only dress I’ve got,” she added.

He fell to wondering whether it would be possible for her ever to forgive him now, and come to him, and whether it could ever be as it might have been. Sometime, perhaps, when he came back from the war—if he came.... It was on his lips to make her know. But always the memory of the night on the trail swept him. “I didn’t know no woman I could tell—nor no other decent man.” And then....

She stood still, looking back at the house.

“I wanted,” she said, “to get that newspaper. Did you see what it said about women—about who’s here?”

He had not seen, but he would not let her go back to the kitchen, nor would he go himself. They went round the house, and found a newsstand, and sat over a little table in an ice-cream place.

“Many Women Arrive in Capital,” the headlines said. “Large Number of Women Arrivals at Hotels. Conjecture Washington May Become Shopping Centre of the East.”

“We noticed this morning—we said so this morning,” Lory remembered.

“I guess it just happened so,” the Inger said. “You’ve all come buying good clothes, I bet.”

She did not smile, but sat looking across the room. The wife of the soda fountain man and two women from outside leaned there, talking.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Lory said, “if the women all come here the way I come—unexpected?”

He did not hear her. He was reading eagerly down the first column of the page:

“Answer Still Delayed. President Not Yet Ready to Give Out Statement. Mass Meeting Resolutions produce Profound Effect. Foreign Pressure Increasing. All-Night Cabinet Meeting Likely—”

“Lord Heavens,” cried the Inger, “why don’t they light in an’ smash ’em—like _men_?”

She did not hear him. The three women in the corner were looking at her curiously, and she wondered why. As she walked by them toward the door, she thought that she heard one of them whisper:

“She don’t know!”

When she reached the door, she turned back and looked at them.

“Do you live near?” the proprietor’s wife asked her.

“Just since to-day,” the girl said. “I just come—from California.”

“Oh!” the woman comprehended. “Come in again—soon.” And something else she added that sounded like “To-morrow—maybe?”

Lory nodded and they went out.

“The whole place seems to be waitin’ for somethin’,” the Inger was saying. “Why don’t they jump in—why don’t they jump in?”

The girl was not listening. She was looking at the groups of women in the doorways.

The two walked back to the chubby house. It was frowning, for there were no lights in its windows, save a glimmer from the kitchen where the gas jet always burned.

“Not out there,” said the Inger, as they went in the dark passage. “Don’t let’s go where the old man is.”

“I can hear talking,” Lory said only, and threw open the kitchen door.

The supper table was still covered, with its litter of dishes. On the settle the old man was lying, with his head lifted, watching. Beside the stove sat the Inger’s father and Bunchy Haight. No one else was in the room.

VIII

THE Inger stepped in front of Lory, and, before the others turned, wheeled to face her.

“Go get your aunt here,” he said, under his voice, and, as she retreated, closed the passage door upon her. Then he turned to the room.

“Well, Dad!” he cried. “Well, Bunchy! Better have another stick or two on the fire, hadn’t we?” he offered.

While the Inger followed his own suggestion, Bunchy watched him, lowering. But the Inger’s father began to talk.

“Bunchy was comin’ along here—he was comin’ along,” he explained, “so I thought I’d come along too. I thought I better come along too—”

His son glanced at him keenly, wondering at his uncertain manner. As the stove door closed, the Inger inquired with perfect interest:

“How’d you find the place—go to Chicago?”

“Yes, damn you,” said Bunchy, suddenly, and rose, and without warning threw himself upon the Inger.

It took longer than one would have thought, for though the Inger was physically fit and Bunchy was flabby and overfed, he had the strength of blind anger. It cost a distinct effort for the Inger to throw him. He went down with his head on the zinc, and the Inger, with his knee on his chest and his hand on his throat, took breath and regarded him. Bunchy’s little eyes looked up at him like the eyes of a trapped wolf. His thick, raw lips were working.

A profound, ungoverned sense of hatred and loathing filled the Inger. Here was a creature, vile and sordid, to whom Lory Moor was to have been given over, and who was come now seeking his prey. He seemed unspeakable, he seemed, by all the decencies, a thing of which to rid the earth. The Inger shrank from his contact with him, from his hand on that smooth, puffy throat. He felt for him all the “just” horror of which he was capable, and, superadded, an intense physical abomination. All this swept him and possessed him and emptied him of every other feeling.

Then the Inger became conscious that above the sound of their shuffling and breathing, another sound had been growing which now filled the room. It was a dreadful, guttural breathing, unlike that of a man in strife, but rather like that of an animal at its feeding.

The Inger threw up his head and looked. Close by his shoulder, as he knelt there beside the cooking-range, the madman was leaning, watching. Only now, instead of the immovable eyes, his were eyes which blazed and gleamed with a look unimaginable. And the sound that filled the room was the old man’s guttural breath, and with every breath, words, half articulate, were mingled:

“Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im,” he was saying. That was all—the words did not vary, nor the ghastly tone, nor the dreadful breathing. “Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im.”

His long, freckled hands were outspread and trembling. His back was crooked and his head thrust forward. His hair fell about his face. He stepped here and there, as he could, his leg chain clanking. And he said over his fearful chant, like an invocation to some devil.

And the Inger, who was feeling the same rage, looked in the old madman’s eyes, and the two understood each other.

All the horror which the sane man had felt at the beast in the other, stared from the Inger’s eyes, as he looked. And abruptly he was wrenched with horror of the beast in himself. With a sense of weakness, as at the going out of something which seemed to drain his veins, to abandon his body like a great breath from his pores, he took his eyes away from that face.

He relaxed his hold on Bunchy and rose.

“Get up,” he said to him, and looked away from him.

Bunchy scrambled to his feet, amazed, blinking, pulling at his collar, casting sidewise glances of vehement suspicion. The Inger merely stood there, not looking at him.

“Listen here,” said the Inger, in a moment. “The girl is here with her folks. If ever the time comes when she’ll marry me, God knows I want her. But for now, I’m out of your way. You can deal with her and her folks, for all of me. Understand?”

Considering the Inger’s obvious advantage, Bunchy by no means understood. His look said so. Neither was the Inger’s father at all comprehending. In his father’s face the genial kindness and the settled sadness had given place to a contagion of rage and passion. The Inger had never seen his father like this. Even in that moment, this look on the kind, careless face filled the son with sick surprise. The old man by the settle, who had stood staring at this strange turn of things, broke into a plaintive whimper.

“Kill ’im—kill ’im—kill ’im ...,” he besought, like a disappointed, teasing child.

When Bunchy would have spoken, spluttering, he was arrested by a sound at the door. It was Lory and her aunt, whom she had found in talk with women at a neighbor’s; and it was Hiram Folts, whom, returning, they had met at the street door. The Inger greeted them gravely.

“You meet my father,” he said, and named them. “And you meet,” he said, “Mr. Bunchy Haight.”

Mrs. Folts stared. Not one of all her gifts was a gift for diplomacy.

“Why, ain’t that the man—ain’t that the name—” she recalled it, and met the Inger’s nod, and saw the look on Lory’s face, and instantly reacted in her own way. “My gracious,” she said, “_have_ you had your suppers?”

Bunchy, replying with labored elegance, fain to be his gallant best to Lory’s aunt, fain to look beseechingly and reproachfully at Lory, and fain to glower heartily at his enemy, became a writhing Bunchy, demeaning himself with ample absurdity.

The Inger was merely silent. In a moment, he took his leave and, as he went, he turned to Lory.

“If you want me,” he said, “send for me. I’ll be waitin’ there in the room I got.”

She made no answer. She had been like some one stricken since first she had seen who was in the room.

“You’ll do it?” he persisted, grateful for Hiram Folt’s nervous fire of questions at his new guest.

She met his eyes and, for an instant, it seemed to him that she gave him her eyes, as she had done that morning on the desert.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

The last sound that he heard as he went down the passage with his father was the fretful whining of the madman:

“Kill ’im—kill ’im—kill ’im....”

Out on the street the Inger looked at the stretch of asphalt pavement, the even fronts of the houses, the lights set a certain space apart, and he looked in the faces of men and women walking home with parcels. All these were so methodical and quiet that they made it seem impossible that he had just wanted to kill a man. All this scene was arranged and ordered, and what he had done had been—disorderly. He thought of the word as he had often seen it in the Inch _Weekly_: “arrested for being disorderly.” That was it, of course; and here the buildings were as they had been appointed, and the lights were set a certain space apart.... But he had not killed the man! And he was doing the way all the others were doing. He and his father were walking here, like all the others. This seemed wonderful. He looked at the lights and at the buildings as if he understood them.

He noticed that his father was trembling. At a crosswalk he caught gropingly at his son’s arm.

“We’ll have some victuals,” said the Inger, and led him to a little restaurant. His father followed obediently; but the food they set before him remained untouched. He sat there weakly, drank cold water, and assented eagerly when the Inger suggested that he go to bed.

In the Inger’s little room he sank on the edge of the single bed, and the Inger was unspeakably shocked to see him cry.

“What, Dad?” he could only say over uncomfortably. “What?”

“I wish’t I could ’a’ settled with him,” his father said. “I wish’t I could ’a’ settled _one_ varmint before I die.”

“What’d you want to muss with him for?” he inquired impatiently.

“Because I ain’t never done much of anything that was much of anything,” the old man said. He straightened himself. “An’ I could of did this!” he added with abrupt energy.

The Inger studied him intently. The great rugged bones of the older man and the big, thick, ineffectual hands suddenly spoke to him, out of the deep of this undirected life. They had wanted to act—those bones and those hands!

“He wasn’t worth the powder,” the Inger said, but he was not thinking of what he said. He was staring at the tears rolling down the old man’s face. “Get to bed—get to bed, Dad,” he kept insisting.

But first his father would tell him, in fragments, disjointed, pieced together by the Inger’s guesses, how his presence there had come about.

Before daylight on the night of the Inger’s departure, his father had been roused by Bunchy and two of his friends arriving at the hut. Questioned, the old man had had nothing to tell them. His son had gone to the wedding, that was all he knew. Still, his son was unmistakably missing now, and the absence was the clue on which Bunchy had worked all that day. On the morning of the second day, the messenger had come riding over from the ticket agent beyond Whiteface, and had spread in the bars of Inch the tale of the manner of the Inger’s purchase of two tickets to Chicago. As soon as he heard, the old man, having done his son’s bidding at the bank in Inch, had sought out Bunchy, found him leaving on the Limited, and abruptly resolved to travel with him—“So’s to keep my eye on the bugger,” he said. Here he began to retell it all, and to fit, in wrong places, some account of Bunchy’s doings on the journey and of their half day in Chicago. “He’s a bugger—a bad bugger,” the old man repeated fretfully, “only he’s worse’n that, if I could think....”

By all this and by the nerveless movements and the obvious weakness of his father, a fact gradually returned to the Inger:

“Dad!” he cried. “You said you was sick the night you come to the hut. Ain’t that over?”

It appeared that it was by no means “over”—the sickness of which the older man had complained. To the Inger, sickness meant so little in experience that he was unable to take it seriously in any one else. In all these days, he had not once recalled his father’s mention that he was ailing. He was swept by his compunction. Against the old man’s protest, he called a doctor. And the doctor, after his examination, left what he could, and, when the Inger emphatically refused to have a nurse sent, unexpectedly announced that he would look in again toward morning.

When, almost at once, his father had fallen asleep in the little single bed, the Inger turned out the light, drew the shade to the top of the window, and stood staring across the roofs. Against the sky rose the dome of the Capitol, pricked with a thousand lights.

He breathed deep, and abruptly he understood that here in the darkness, alone, he was feeling an elation which was to him unaccountable. Something tremendous seemed to have happened to him. What was it? He did not know. His father was ill—Bunchy was here—Lory Moor was in trouble—he was haunted by the image of that mad old man. And yet his whole being was pervaded by a sense of lightness, of gratification, of sheer energy such as he never had known. For an hour he stood there, and he could not have told what he had been thinking. Only something unspeakable seemed to have occurred, which kept him from sleep.

He did sleep at last, rolled in his blanket and lying on the floor. But he was awake, and had ministered to his father, and below, on the doorstep, stood stretching prodigiously, when in the crisp morning, the doctor came back. As the doctor left, he drew the Inger down the stairs again. They spoke together in the little passage, in the light that came through the orange glass over the door. His father had, by a miracle, lived to reach him. Any hour of that day might be his last hour.

The Inger went back upstairs, and stared at his father. Impossible. He had been living for so long. There was so much that he himself remembered having been told of this man’s youth and young manhood. It was incredible that now he should die, and no one would remember these things any more.... There had been one story about his buying an eagle somewhere, and setting it free. The Inger had always liked to hear that story. Now it would close over, and no one else would know. This alone seemed intolerable.

He went downstairs, and out on the street. At the next house a blind man lived. This man took his little walk every day. The walk consisted of six paces from the house to the street, and six paces back again. On the street he dared not go. Here in the yard he could encounter nothing. To guide his course he dragged his stick on the edge of the bricks. In this way he could walk very briskly, almost as a man might walk on a street. The Inger watched him. Something in himself seemed to go out of him and to make its way to that blind man.

“Sometime,” he thought, “I’ll go and take him for a walk—afterward.”

That day all Washington, and with it all the country, stood on its doorstep, awaiting the newspapers. But when the boys first came crying the headlines, the Inger let them go by. He had a vague sense of wishing not to be interrupted. Toward noon, however, a phrase caught from a street call lured him down. One of the newspapers which batten on bad news, playing it up, making it worse, contradicting it for another price, came to his hand. This paper announced that the United States would that day positively declare war on the offending nation. Even then the newspaper’s presses were methodically at work on a denial, but this the Inger did not know. He sat staring at what he read. So, then, it had come. So, then, he was really to go to war.... There was something, too, about a great meeting of women in the Capitol. To this, save the headlines and the snapshots of women which covered an inside page, he did not attend. “Sob Session Probable,” he read, and wondered what it meant.

His father still slept, and, watching by his bed, he himself grew drowsy. He lay down on his blanket on the floor. This was a strange thing, to lie down to sleep in the day time. He looked up at the high walls of his tiny room. The side walls were larger than the floor—as the walls of a grave would be—he thought. His father stirred and whimpered.

“Oh my God—my God—my God....” he said, but he did not wake. This he said over many times.

At last the Inger dozed, with a preliminary sense of sinking, and of struggling not to let himself go. In his dream he went with his father on an immense empty field. There they were looking for the others, and they could see no one. They walked for a long way, looking for the others. Then these others were all about them, and they were marching, and it seemed very natural that there should be war. At any moment now, there would be war. So they marched and stood face to face with those whom they were sent to fight. And a sense of sickening horror shook him in his dream—for those whom they faced were women. The women were coming, and they had only their bare hands. Tossed by a tide of ancestral fear, he understood that among those women was Lory Moor. He shouted to her to go away—but instead they all came on, steadily, all those women—and he could not tell where she walked, and every one said that the orders were to fire. Caught and wrenched by the fear that never lives, any more, among waking men, he lived the dead passion of fear in his sleep, and woke, wasted by his horror.

He struggled up and looked at his father.

“Oh my God ... my God ... my God,” his weak voice was going on.

And from the floor beside him the black headlines of the lying paper stared:

“U. S. To Declare War To-Day.”

The Inger slept again, and this time the clamor and crashing of the thing were upon him. This now was war—but not as he had imagined it. He was in no excitement, no enthusiasm, even no horror. He was merely looking for a chance to kill—keenly, methodically, looking for a chance to kill. In the ranks beside him was that old madman from the kitchen—but there was no time even to think of this. They were all very busy. Then it grew dark, and the field went swimming out in stars, and many voices came calling and these met where he was:

“God—God—they’ve killed God....” the voices cried.

Again the nameless terror shook him. What if _he_ had been the one to kill God? He sought wildly among piles of the dead to find God, and he was not found. Then many came and touched him and stared in his face, and he understood them. God had not been killed at all. _He himself was God and he had been killing men...._

At this the terror that was on him was like nothing that he had ever known. It took him and tore him, and he writhed under a nameless sense of the irreparable, which ate at him, living. When he awoke, he lay weakly grateful that the thing was not true. Something swam through his head, and he tried to capture it—was it true? Was he God? He struggled up and sat with his head in his hands. There were things that he wanted to think, if he had known how to think then.

It was late in the afternoon when the end came to his father, quietly, and with no pain. His father knew him, smiled at him, and with perfect gentleness and without shyness, put out his hand. Save in a handshake, he had never taken his hand before since he was a little boy. But now they took each other’s hands naturally, as if a veil had gone. Afterward, the Inger wondered why he had not kissed him. He had not thought of that.

Before he called any one, the Inger stood still, looking at his father, and looking out the window to the City. So much had happened. A great deal of what had happened he understood, but there was much more that seemed to be pressing on him to be made clear. He had a strong sense of being some one else, of standing outside and watching. What great change was this that had come to his father and to him?

By dark they had taken his father away. The Inger went with him and did what he could. His father lay in an undertaker’s chapel. From the street the Inger stared at the chapel. It looked so strangely like the other buildings.

He took back to his room some poor belongings of his father’s, and when he saw the little room, and the empty unmade bed, he was shaken by a draining sense of loneliness—the first loneliness that he had ever known. Then he let his thought go where all day it had longed to go. He wanted Lory Moor.

He let himself go round by the little house of the Folts’s. It was quite dark, save for that watching light in the kitchen window. He waited on the other side of the street for a long time. No one came. There seemed to be no one in the neighborhood. A little dog came by, looked up at him, and stood wagging a ragged tail. The Inger stooped, then squatted beside the dog, and patted his head.

“I must get a dog,” he thought. “I’d ought to have a dog.”

At last he went away, down toward the town. And as he went, darkness seemed to close in and press about him. His hands were empty. His life was something other than that which he had believed it to be. Where was all this that he had had....

IX

AS he turned into a wider street, he became aware that he was following with many who went one way. He kept on with them, intent on nothing. On Pennsylvania Avenue the crowd was going east, and he went east. But of all this he thought little, until he came near the Capitol. There the people swung both east and west, and rounded the building. So he came out in the Square before the east entrance.

The Square was filled with women. There were some men, too, but women were dominant in the throng. He remembered the meeting to which the papers had vaguely referred and because he had nothing to do, he moved on with the rest to the doors.

He noted that the women were saying little. It was almost a silent throng, as if all were immeasurably absorbed in something. Oddly, he thought of Mrs. Folts, and her absorption in food for her family and her guests.