Part 2

The car sped along miles of city, through streets which Honor had never known existed, and came to the Black-Lewis Factory, and turned into a large bare yard between buildings. Around the walls stood hundreds of men, marshalled compactly. The men in the car got out and shook hands with two or three who seemed to be in charge.

Then, “Ready, kid,” Eric said to her. “Stand up in the car.” Honor caught her breath; she was frightened a little, unexpectedly. She was not used to audiences; but she stood in the tonneau of the car as Eric directed, tall and slim like a flower, and looked gravely, with a sudden shy dignity, at the observing faces of five hundred working men.

“Now, Honor--‘America.’”

The girl’s eyes lifted from all those eyes regarding her, lifted high to avoid that trying many-barrelled regard, and with that she caught a flash, from a building, of a flag tossing bright colors against the sky. To her astonishment a thrill caught her. “Isn’t it in you to consider your flag?” Eric had asked. There it was, the flag that had guarded her waking and sleeping all her life; it was in danger; enemies were waiting to dishonor it, to tear it down; suddenly her whole vigorous, fresh being rose to it in warmth and in loyalty. The flag! America! Into the dusty air, upward, the full notes poured:

“My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!”

The girl sang, and the grimy, tired men, listening, felt, each one, something that had been hard softening inside of him, something catch in his throat, a contraction around the eyes. Eric watched, well pleased.

“Will you all join in the second verse?” he spoke.

Again the girl lifted the strong and sweet tones, and into them were gathered, following, not obscuring the volume of her voice, half a thousand voices of men, rolling sweet thunder through the buildings where only the hum of machinery, on other days, filled the air.

“It’s good dope. It works to a charm,” Eric commented silently, as the big music ended and the ranks of men stood touched, open-souled, ready for an impression.

He lifted himself to the running-board of the car and the one halting step laid a claim on every man there before he said a word. This chap could not fight; fate had tied him with lameness, but he was doing the best he could for his country. One read his speeches every day in the papers. His sister looked at him, proud of his height and beauty and finished accent, and the straight, strong English which came from his lips, proudest of all of an intangible something which she felt, and which all these men felt, the secret of the charm of young Eric Mannering. It was an unphrased assertion that he and they were brothers in a cause so large that all differences of caste were straws on an ocean. Eric Mannering, the sixth, grandson of an ambassador, great-grandson of a governor, with his air of race, his speech of breeding, cared most to be what all these workmen were--American. He talked as an American to Americans, and he talked from an absolute sincerity, and the trained brain and speech which were vehicles for his words were good, to him, because they might serve the cause of America. By some force of reaction both the Mannering children were democrats, and as the brother spoke the sister approved. Yet she did not listen intelligently at first. Eric was saying things about a good investment, four per cent only, but safe as the granite hills. A good investment. It did not interest her. She was not going to buy bonds. She was going to New York to learn to sing, to make a fortune with her voice. But listen--Eric was talking about--the flag. Still shaken with the thrill of leading those five hundred deep voices, shaken with the tremendous meaning of the words she had sung, still startled with that unexpected wind which had swept her upward into the colors against the sky, as Eric spoke she caught her breath and listened. And behold his words were a bugle-call. This was what the papers meant by Eric’s power of stirring audiences. Rebellious, half angry, she realized that he was stirring her. The papers had been full of the patriotic duty of buying Liberty Bonds; she knew that public men were urging the people, rich and poor, to put their savings into the loan, to help the country raise money to use for the war. The campaign left her cold. She had saved fifteen hundred dollars in two strenuous years for a purpose. She meant to use it for that purpose. She had no intention of side-tracking any of it in Liberty Bonds. She was clear about that. But, listen. Eric in that appealing voice of his, whose unconscious power came, she thought always, from the long suffering of his lameness, was talking about the country--our country--America. The land about which she and the five hundred men had been singing, America needed their money, Eric was saying, for her very life. The girl listened. _She_ was going to New York; that was settled; she hoped Eric would influence these men to put their savings into Liberty Bonds; it was good; it was public-spirited; people ought to do it, probably, but not she. She had a fixed purpose, and it would be silly to let it go. The girl was tenacious. Not for one speech of Eric’s would she change her two years’ decision. Yet a seed of discomfort was springing in her mind. Eric’s voice, with its sincerity, its throb of old pain, flowed on.

“Do you realize, men, what it means that the country shall have money to carry on this war? Suppose you lived in a street at the end of which was a dangerous river. Suppose you lived two doors from the wall which guarded that river. Suppose the river was high and threatening to break through, and the family next door was tired out building up the wall. Suppose it was certain that if the river broke, all your city would be destroyed. Would you or wouldn’t you drop work and play and turn anything, everything, into material to build up that wall? The river is Germany, the house next door is England and France--the Allies. The wall is mostly England’s fleet. It’s England’s fleet that has protected us from invasion for three years. As sure as we are here to-day, just so surely Germany will invade America if she can starve out England and make her give up that fleet. We are all nestling behind England’s fleet. We’ve got to see that England isn’t starved; we’ve got to help her fight. She deserves it of us if we were in no peril at all, because she has fought our battle for three years--but we’re in deadly peril. This is our cause--America’s. Our government has got to have money to feed England and to care for our soldiers who are going across--now--to fight for us. It is for our own boys, our good American flesh and blood that the government asks you to buy these bonds. So that they will not be cold and hungry, and short of guns and ammunition to do our fighting. Let us--who cannot go----”

Eric’s voice faltered, and the girl felt the shock of sympathy through the audience like a blow. He cleared his throat and smiled boyishly.

“We who cannot go and fight for dear America--for the high mountains and the broad rivers and the cheerful towns, and the big, strong, generous people whom we love as our own heart’s blood--we’ll do our part here with a rush and a good-will like an irresistible flood; we’ll buy this Liberty Loan with a surplus over, that will be like a great shout to Germany that America will take care of her own--that America is going to win!”

The thrilling young voice stopped, and for a second there was silence, and then the audience burst into a storm of clapping and applause, and with that they broke ranks and began crowding about the men who had come in the car with the two Mannerings, the workers.

“I want a bond--I want two--I’ve got to stick in a bond to build that wall,” the men were saying over each other’s shoulders.

Eric, flushed, happy, watched them and shook hands with them, and introduced them to his little sister, and both enjoyed every moment of the scene with the hot, happy, pulsing blood which real living brings.

“Honor, you never sang like that before,” the boy said, and Honor laughed.

“You don’t know yet what your tame prima donna can do,” she answered easily.

“Do you want to go with me to-morrow?” Eric asked.

Day after day Eric spoke, working far into the nights to make time for this work which he offered to his country instead of the body which he might not offer. And it came to be that on most days Mr. Barron’s secretary went with him, Mr. Barron sending her gladly for the cause, to sing patriotic songs. The two were soon a feature of the Liberty Loan campaign, and booked for all their time. Meetings at great factories, meetings in large schools, meetings in country towns where farmers must be aroused to the importance of their savings for Uncle Sam’s safety--many sorts of meetings heard Eric speak and Honor sing, and always the two were a success. Always there was, in their wake, an uncommon sale of Liberty Bonds.

So it happened that on a Saturday the committee sent Eric to speak at the Lynden Knitting Mill. The girl drove with her brother and the three other men, the “workers,” across the city and down into the manufacturing district, and the car slid to a stop before a large square brick building. They went up steps and into a hall-way, and wound through ten-foot piles of boxes to a glassed-in office, where were the “boss” and other unexplained officials, and a girl stenographer or two, lifting their heads to regard this other girl, who sang. She was beginning to be known for her singing, her work with her brother; the papers spoke of her when they reported Eric’s speeches.

Shortly they were taken through mountainous piles of more boxes, and more, through lanes in a dark ware-room, lanes between piled-up boxes, around corners of boxes, into a great place of mysterious machinery, with a large open space. Along the sides of this space and among the machines--which were stopped--stood girls, girls, girls, the factory-hands. Eric and his party, behind the manager, marched between the lines of girls and came to a manner of stage, although in truth it was only a part of the floor, with half a dozen chairs for the visitors. The girl and the “workers”--the men who were to explain and try to sell the bonds, after Eric’s speech--sat down in the chairs, and the manager said a few words to his employees, while Eric stood by, flushed, breathless as always with the excitement of his coming speech. Then the manager stepped back and Eric spoke, with his voice, his glance of a comrade.

“I think before I begin that we might all like to sing a verse of a song which we love,” and he turned to the girl.

She had been staring at these other girls, two hundred of them, and her heart was beating oddly. She understood what she was there to do--to stir up emotion in this young, pathetic company, so that her brother’s speech might have quicker and stronger appeal. For a moment she shrank--how could she help to wring money from these? She had heard the men in the office saying that most of them earned five and six dollars a week. To ask them to save a dollar a week! Then it flashed to her that it was for their good; it was not begging their money--it was giving them a chance to invest it safely. Swiftly she was on her feet, and the lovely, untired voice floated out among the silent engineers and the tired mill-hands.

“My country, ’tis of thee-- Sweet land of liberty--”

The two hundred girls, with their worn young faces, with their pitiful efforts at finery, cheap, light-colored shoes that meant heart’s blood, slimsy dresses, cut in a far-off imitation of millionaires’ daughters’ dresses--they listened to the girl’s voice, hypnotized. Discouraged faces brightened, defiant eyes softened; Eric Mannering was indeed doing a wise thing to send his sister’s voice as a messenger to prepare his way.

Then, coming forward with the one or two halting steps which, unknowingly, did so much to open the way to the hearts of his audiences, he spoke. He caught his listeners at an emotional moment and held them there. He said much the same things always, but always with the instinctive fitting of the phrase to the people, which is the gift of a born speaker. And he ended when it was quite clear that the Liberty Loan was no charity but a great chance for good business, with an appeal to patriotism.

“I know you haven’t much money,” he said. “I know it’s hard to make both ends meet; and you save and pinch already. But everybody here can give up something--that thing you’ve been planning to do and saving to do, the thing you want to do a lot. I ask you to give up that for this country of ours--of our very own--which is in danger--which needs you--needs you--and you. Don’t do it just because it’s a good investment--though it is the best investment in the whole world to-day, to lend your savings to America. But do it also for this--because you love your country and want to help her keep free; do it because the whole land stands in peril of a thing more terrible than can be said, and you’re brave enough to want to lift your hand with your countrymen to ward off this danger. Do it because you want to be able to say to your children, years from now, when the world is safe for freedom: ‘_I_ helped make the world safe. _I_ stood by America when she needed me. _I_ bought a Liberty Bond,’” Eric turned suddenly, shaken by his own strong feeling, and met his sister’s eyes, and it was as if he had said the words to her.

Honor did not sleep much that night. Over and over she whispered in the darkness her brother’s words, “_I_ helped make the world safe. _I_ stood by America when she needed me. _I_ bought a Liberty Bond,” and closer and closer drew the spell which the words threw about her. How would it be when a day came that children of hers gathered around to ask questions of the great time when half the world battled for democracy, for freedom? How would it be when one said:

“And you, mother? You did your bit? You helped the country with all that you were, and all that you had?” How would it be with her that day if her eyes might not meet questioning young eyes?

The girl was tenacious of a purpose; she had promised herself not to be carried away by oratory and the excitement in the air. She knew what she wanted; she had thought out her plan. She had lived for it these two years; it was her work, her affair. The rich could give millions to the Liberty Loan. Why should she sacrifice her hard-earned all when it meant so much to her, and would mean so very little to the country? Only fifteen hundred dollars! Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bonds! How much would that help? Not the firing of a big gun twice! And to her it was her future. If her voice was not trained now it would soon be too late. Let the rich do it--they could buy thousands of bonds and not suffer. Let the rich do it. Daylight was seeping in at the window when she fell asleep with that thought.

But the tide of battle was turned. Possibly most of the fights of humanity are decided two generations or more before one arrives on the field. The powers of inheritance and of tradition are strong and cumulative. The girl had said that she did not belong to her family, yet to-day when the country needed its children, blood asserted itself in her veins as the very blood of an American five generations ago who had fought and died for the thirteen colonies at King’s Mountain; of a woman, a girl, who about the same time had put her two babies behind her and fired steadily on the Indians at Cherry Valley; of two young great-uncles who had fallen, one on each side, for the right as each saw it, at the first Bull Run; of the great-grandfather who had sacrificed his waning strength to be a war governor, and the grandfather who had left this Garden Court which he loved, because the country needed him at a foreign post. Whether she willed it or not patriotism was in the girl’s blood, and while she steeled herself against its upsetting influence, that slow-rolling flood of tradition and inheritance which had shaped her was, subconsciously, shaping her still. Forces of good are strong as well as forces of evil, and the habit of one generation is the inborn tendency of another.

“Eric, are you speaking anywhere in civilization this week?” inquired his father. “If it isn’t too colossal an effort, I’d like to hear you.”

The two tall, handsome men, alike in build and feature, sharply different in expression, sat of another June Sunday morning, in wicker chairs, smoking tranquilly, in the rose-garden. The Dorothy Perkins lattice was a bit more broken, the gravelled walks a bit greener with weeds, the aspect around a bit more neglected than two years ago. About the garden moved as before the tall, thin figure in a white frock, swinging a basket, piling into the basket masses of red and pink. She came and stood before them at the sentence as a bird might halt in its careless flight.

“Do, beautiful one,” she urged. “He makes a dream of a speech, and you’d be proud. You might even buy Liberty Bonds--you might. Everybody loosens up and buys bonds when Eric stands there and turns on his winning way.”

Mannering’s sarcastic, easy smile came before his slow words. “I? Buy bonds? With what? I haven’t money to be patriotic.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl threw at him like a random arrow. “Eric tells ’em that everybody can give up something and get bonds. Now, Cousin Alured sends you a thousand for your vacation in Newport. You could give that to your country for once. Why not?” Mannering’s weak mouth set. His manner of high-bred indifference flushed to what was as near excitement as one often saw him in. “Not by a long shot. Sacrifice my one luxury of the year! You’re a saucy young devil, Honor. My word! What are you giving up, who are so free with suggestions? The bank-account that’s to turn you into a prima donna? Come--we’ll bargain. I’ll buy Liberty Bonds with my check from Alured Mannering, which is due next week, if you’ll draw that fifteen hundred of yours and use it for the same purpose.”

Mannering, startled for once to indignation by the daring hand on his most precious self-indulgence, yet believed himself quite safe. But he had reckoned without the host of past-and-gone influences which made up a part of that complicated mixture, his daughter. He had forgotten the revolutionary soldier and the Indian fighting-woman, and those others who lived in her. The tall girl, standing before the heavy, handsome man lolling in his deep chair, smoking lazily, smiling at her triumphantly through half-closed eyelids, stared at her father. The color as she stared went out of her face and left it pale. Then she spoke one word in a queer, wooden voice.

“Done,” said Honor Mannering, and put out her hand.

The cigar dropped from Mannering’s fingers. “Nonsense!” he said, and did not stoop to pick it up. “Why, it’s a joke, Honor. Don’t be melodramatic.”

“It’s not a joke. You said ‘we’ll bargain.’ You stated your bargain and I agreed. I mean it. If you’re a man you’ll keep your word. It’s a debt of honor.” The hand was still held out.

Mannering, his armor of indifference stripped, gazed at her horrified, and knew that he must indeed keep his word. For there were a few things sound yet in Eric Mannering’s flabby code, and the girl’s finger was on one. He stood up, and the gods and his ancestors gave him grace to put out his own hand. “You have me, Miss Mannering,” and he smiled again lazily. “Done.” He gripped the girl’s hand savagely, and turned and walked into the house.

“Honor, what kind of an apple-cart have you upset now?” her brother demanded, stepping to her with his uneven gait.

She smiled at him, white still. “Did you see? Wasn’t he gorgeous? It was hard as death--but he wouldn’t--betray--the Mannering word. Oh, Eric, it _is_ good to feel proud of him,” and she finished under her breath--“for once.”

“It _is_,” Eric agreed soberly. “It will make over his life to help the country, like the others--grandfather and such. I can’t see how you dared dream--” And then he caught her by the shoulder. “But, Honor--you’ve thrown away--your career.” He gripped her so that it hurt. She swayed a bit, standing facing him, looking into his eyes almost on a level.

“Don’t you suppose--I realize?” She gasped the words. “It’s been coming--I’ve been--fighting against it. I--I love--my country.”

With that she slid from his hand and tumbled in a heap, and the pink and red roses splashed about her. “Oh, Eric--Oh, you’re such a donkey--” she sobbed, with her face in her hands. “Listening to you--your speeches--going right to my heart--these weeks! Oh--you idiot, don’t pull my hair down! And me just human. What did you think I was--cold boiled fish? Oh, Eric--I adore you so--and that voice of yours gets right through--everything. Selfishness, and ambition, and--and piggishness--it’s all no use. You’re such a--a horrid saint. I _have_ to--do as you say. And Eric--darling old Eric--it’s mostly on account of my children, anyhow.”

“Your children!” the astounded Eric managed to put in there, and both went off into shrieks of mad laughter.

“You _awful_ stupid,” the girl sobbed through laughing. “You said--they’d ask what we’d done--to make the world safe--to help America. And I won’t have any upstarts of children--taunting me--that I--I didn’t buy Liberty Bonds. So--so I’m going to put in every penny--and then I’ll throw it in their old teeth--and I hope it’ll break ’em.”

“Honor,” spoke young Eric, and caught his breath to speak. “Honor, you’re the sweetest and finest thing in the world, and I’m prouder to be your brother than of anything on earth.” And Honor knew that no voice to come in life would ever sound sweeter in her ears than her brother’s as he said the words.

Later, when the two had taken in hand the new situation, Eric, his arm about his sister’s shoulders, sitting beside her on the grass of the old garden, spoke. “There’s a thing I want to tell you, Honor, but I hate to for fear it may bother you.”

“What?”

“McIvor is coming.”

“Here?--McIvor? _The_ McIvor?”

“Yes, to finish up the Liberty Loan campaign. He’s to sing in St. Margaret’s Square, in the open, the night of the 27th. It’s thought his voice will be worth a hundred thousand of subscriptions.”

Honor began sucking her thumb violently; the boy had seen her do that in moments of stress from baby-hood. Then she suddenly stopped and whistled. “Whew! I hate it like anything--his coming. He said I wouldn’t get anywhere, and I haven’t. It’s two years. And now I won’t ever. Well--likely he won’t remember a word about me. But I want to hear him. Can you get me a place, Eric?”

“You bet I can,” pronounced Eric. “I’m the chairman of the committee on arrangements, and if you don’t have the best seat in the whole blamed show, I’ll eat my hat. Mr. Barron had me made chairman--he’s getting McIvor to come, of course.”

“The old fox,” commented Honor. “And never peeped to me.”

“’Fraid you’d be sore, and it might put you off singing for meetings,” explained Eric.

“Men are silly,” Honor reflected as to that. “McIvor was right and I’m wrong, but does Mr. Barron think I can’t take my medicine, I wonder?”

“You’re a game sport, Honor, besides being a peach of a girl, and I’m certain you’ll be the best singer on earth yet. That’s what,” Eric assured her impressively.