Tomorrow Is Forever

by Gwen Bristow

  Dick shook his head. “I thought they always wanted schools in this country.”

  “Not for everybody. There were opponents who said compulsory schooling would break up the home by taking children away from their parents and putting them under control of the state. There were others who said it would destroy the ordained order of society by making the working classes dissatisfied with the position in which God had placed them. But the schools came, because they were part of the current toward human equality.”

  “Gee,” said Dick. “You know, you’re encouraging. The place is getting better, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is. Whenever you’re tempted to believe it isn’t, you might remember that it was in 1870, a good deal less than a hundred years ago, that the State of Massachusetts was hailed as an enlightened leader of progress when the legislature passed a law that children under twelve should not be allowed to work in factories more than ten hours per day.”

  “Good Lord,” said Dick. “Is that true, Mr. Kessler?”

  “It’s absolutely true. Some day when you’ve nothing better to do, look up some of the expressions of horror that greeted the notion of universal suffrage, in this country.” He shifted his position to face Dick squarely. “Every proposal leading toward more freedom has been opposed, and defeated again and again. But we have come forward, Dick. It’s been a long hard march and it isn’t over. People who believe in the idea go down. But the idea moves on.”

  Dick nodded slowly. “I’m beginning to see it.” He wrinkled his forehead, and exclaimed, “But right now, I don’t mind telling you, that big idea sure is up against a lot.”

  Kessler nodded too, in agreement. “Suppose I try to tell you why it’s up against so much right now. Shall I?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Well, you see, a few years ago the idea had gone so far that in several of the most powerful nations of the world, people were actually asking one another if any commonwealth was benefited by keeping part of its citizens in compulsory degradation. In cases where they were still doing so—as with the Negroes in this country—they were ashamed of it and made excuses for it. The march toward human freedom seemed to be going along very well. But then, certain persons, more farsighted perhaps than their neighbors, looked ahead and saw what we were headed for. The result was a long, long way ahead, so far ahead that most of us never thought about it, but for those who did visualize it the very suggestion was so dangerous, such a threat to all nations and all established institutions, that something simply had to be done to stop the march, and quick.”

  “Gosh, go on!” exclaimed Dick. “What’s that suggestion you’re talking about?”

  “Can’t you see it? It’s very logical—simply the suggestion that if a country could be improved by releasing the talents of its people, might not the world be improved by releasing the talents of all its peoples? That’s a terrible idea.”

  “Why?” Dick asked with ingenuous defiance.

  “Don’t be so simple-minded, Dick! Why, that contradicts everything we’re used to. It takes away our colonies. It drives us out of places where we’ve invested our hard-earned money. It means that the coolies no longer have any respect for their betters. It makes us acknowledge we are no longer called of God to meddle with the private lives of the heathen. It turns us upside down and flattens us out and leaves us no better than anybody else.”

  Dick considered this, slowly and soberly. At length he said, “I believe I get it.” He turned it over in his mind again, then ventured, “It means—‘all men are created free and equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—’ it means all. Not just us. Everybody.”

  “Exactly,” said Kessler. “You do get it, don’t you? Those are beautiful words, inspiring words, until you stop to consider what they mean. That’s what has happened in the world—some of us have stopped to consider what those words mean. Just when human freedom began to look like a desirable goal, those farsighted persons we were talking about got a glimpse of what that goal would really be. They felt something had to be done to stop the advance right now. So they set out to stop it. They are called fascists.”

  “Whew!” Dick gave a long whistle. Settling his elbows on the chair-back, he looked across at Kessler with a broad comprehending grin. “So that’s what it’s about!”

  “I don’t pretend to any super-knowledge,” said Kessler. “But as I see it, that’s what it’s about.”

  “And you mean they can’t win!”

  “I don’t mean anything of the sort,” Kessler returned sharply. “They can win. They can’t win through the next six thousand years, but they can win in this generation, and this is the only one we have a chance to live in. If they win in this generation they’ll push us back to do it all over again.”

  “If we lost this war, they’d have to fight it all over? People in the future, I mean?”

  “Yes, they would. The conflict is here, you see; the current of human freedom is pushing along the flow of history, and we’d better stay on the side of history if we want peace. Do you remember when Chamberlain came back from Munich with ‘peace in our time’?”

  Dick nodded.

  Kessler got up and started to walk toward a low bookcase on the other side of the room. Dick sprang to his feet.

  “Let me get it, Mr. Kessler.”

  “No, I can manage. I know just where it is.” He sat down in a chair before the bookcase, and his hand being thus freed, he took out a volume and ruffled its pages. “Did you ever read this?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he read aloud. “‘I once felt that kind of anger which a man ought to feel against the mean principles that are held by the Tories. A noted one who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well, give me peace in my day.” A generous parent would have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” ’”

  Dick spoke eagerly. “Who wrote that?”

  “Thomas Paine, during the American Revolution.”

  “Gee, I like it. It’s reasonable, I mean, it comes out even. All you’ve been telling me comes out even.” He said in a low voice, as though to himself, “We’re fighting for the liberation of everybody.”

  Kessler returned to his former seat. He said, “We’re fighting toward recognition of the simple fact that we don’t know where the next genius is going to turn up. Toward finally realizing that good minds and noble characters are not so abundant that we can afford to waste them, no matter where they happen to be. That’s all.”

  “Holy cats,” said Dick. “That’s terrific. That’s big. That’s worth doing, Mr. Kessler! But why can’t they see it?” he demanded. “The fascists, I mean. It’s so simple!”

  “Most of the important facts of life are very simple, once you make up your mind to look for them, but they’re often very hard to accept. Like that business of loving your neighbor as yourself, for instance—it’s very difficult to admit that he’s as much worth loving as yourself. Most of us hate nothing so much as an idea that threatens our good opinion of ourselves. We don’t like owning up to it that if the earth belongs to us, it also belongs to the Chinese coolies.”

  Dick began to laugh suddenly, then he sobered again. “Cherry said once that Mr. Wallace thought this war was being fought for the coolies. We laughed when she said it. It sounded preposterous. But you mean it really is?”

  “Why yes, though not many of us are willing to admit it. But that’s what we mean when we say we’re fighting for human freedom.”

  “That’s terrific,” repeated Dick. “That’s what I’ll be fighting for in the Marines.”

  Kessler hesitated an instant, then shook his head. “No. Not precisely.”

  �
�Then what will I be fighting for?”

  “For your country.”

  “But isn’t it the same thing?”

  “No. I almost didn’t tell you this, but I might as well say it. It’s not the same thing. You see, Dick, one of the great tragedies of the human race is that history moves too fast for us to keep up with it. Our ideals are always somewhat behind the facts. Right now our ideal is that each army shall fight for its own nation. We’ll co-operate just as much as we have to in order to keep safe. Go ahead and fight for your own flag, you’ve got to, because if you don’t crush the fascist nations your country will go down to barbarism with them, but don’t forget—or forget it if you want to—that you’re fighting toward a time when you’ll have no flag to fight for.”

  Dick whistled again. This time his response was uncomfortable. “Gee—I’m not sure I can follow you that far, Mr. Kessler. That takes a lot of getting used to.”

  “You’re a very patriotic fellow, aren’t you, Dick?”

  “You bet I am. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, right now. But that’s why the ideal of individual dignity is so dangerous. It ultimately denies patriotism.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t you? Don’t you see that love for your country implies that your countrymen are somehow more worth loving than foreigners?”

  “Well, from the foreigners I’ve seen, I think they are—oh gosh, excuse me, Mr. Kessler. But you don’t seem like a foreigner.”

  Kessler smiled. “That’s all right, I’d rather have you say what you think than be artificially polite. But this ideal of nationalism grew up when it was so hard to move around in the world that each little political group could keep to itself. They can’t do that any more. Did you read in the paper the other day that a Liberator bomber had crossed the Atlantic in six hours and twenty minutes? You’ve certainly read these airline ads everybody’s been quoting, about no place on earth being more than sixty hours from the airport. The world’s tightening up. We aren’t used to it. Our hearts still cling to our own spadeful of earth, and we don’t realize that the other spadefuls are so close they can fall over our fences any minute.”

  “Holy smoke,” said Dick. “I guess I never thought about that before, not like you say it. I don’t believe most other people have either.”

  “Haven’t you noticed,” said Kessler with a certain grim amusement, “that this country is still somewhat bewildered about the purposes of this war?”

  “You bet I have. I was bewildered too. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “This country is still uncertain,” said Kessler, “because it has gone into the war on the side of history. The people know it’s the right side, they’re fighting valiantly for victory, but they’re frightened at what victory will mean.”

  “It will mean—?” Dick stopped.

  “That Americans will have to go on, marching through more blood and pain toward a goal they are not sure they can bear to reach. You are fighting for the coolies, Dick, not because you give a damn what becomes of the coolies but because you care a great deal about what becomes of yourself. You don’t dare not to fight for them. They’ve come so close to you that what happens to them touches you already, and will touch your children even more. Don’t stop to think of this now if it’s too much. I know it’s terrifying. Go on and fight for your country. That’s what is being asked of you now.”

  “I want to think about it,” said Dick. “But you don’t think I’m a dope because I’m—well, kind of shocked, do you?”

  Kessler laughed a little. “Of course not. It’s the most shocking conception that has shaken the minds of men and women since they were asked to believe that on the other side of the earth people were walking upside down. If you said you weren’t shocked by it, I shouldn’t believe you.”

  Dick rambled among his own thoughts for a moment. At length he inquired, “How did you come to think of all this?”

  “I was pretty badly hurt in the last war,” Kessler answered frankly. “When a man’s life is so violently changed, he has to do a lot of thinking. At first I thought in terms of individuals, each learning to manage his own problems. But when hell broke loose again I had to start thinking all over, not in terms of individuals only but in terms of the human race. That’s all.”

  Again Dick was silent. He thought, contemplating himself, the world, and himself again. Finally he said,

  “Well, I’m going to stick to my own country awhile. I like Americans and you can say what you please but by and large I do think they’re more decent than other people. Of course, we’ll be liberating the Greeks and Poles and Russians and Norwegians and the rest, but especially we’ll be keeping the United States okay. I guess we’ll make it better than it is when we clean up those fascist b—excuse me, when we clean up those palookas. We’ll be that much ahead. We’ll get the Four Freedoms anyway, and that’s something.”

  “Be careful, Dick,” said Kessler. “Don’t expect too much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if you go out with any expectation that when you get this war over anything will be cleaned up for good and all, you’ll run into the same disillusion that licked the generation just ahead of you. It’s not that easy.”

  “I don’t expect it to be easy! I know it’s going to be tough.”

  “It will be tough, you’re right about that. You’ll go through the hardest training ever devised for military men; you’ll be sent into a desert or a jungle or some frozen island; you’ll fight disease and bombs and submarines, because you believe in freedom. Then at last you’ll get it over and come home, to your own free, gallant country. And you’ll walk right up to a summer resort that advertises ‘restricted clientele.’ You’ll meet another man who went through what you did, because he, like you, believed in freedom, and you’ll see him unable to buy a sandwich in a drug store because they don’t serve niggers. You’ll hear comfortable ladies and gentlemen arguing comfortably that there’d be no unemployment if men would only work. You’ll be told that free lunches in poverty-stricken school districts are merely another way of pampering the thriftless. You’ll find that nine men and women out of ten don’t care what happens to anybody anywhere, don’t even notice it unless it interferes with their own personal convenience. And you’ll stand in the midst of all the stupidity and cruelty and senselessness of your own country, saying to yourself, ‘If this is taken for granted in the freest nation in the world, what can the others be like?’—and you’ll remember the bloody horrors behind you and wonder if they were all for nothing.”

  He stopped, almost sorry he had said so much. Dick was looking down at the rug. Kessler had decided to tell him the truth as he saw it, but now he wondered if he had been right to blurt out all the truth. Dick looked up.

  “No I won’t,” he said abruptly.

  He stood up and pushed his chair away, and then, awkwardly, finding that he had nothing to do with his hands he stuck them into his pockets.

  “I swear I won’t, Mr. Kessler! I won’t get to believing it was all for nothing. I’ll feel pretty bad sometimes—I guess nobody can help that, especially not right out of a war—but if we win this one I’ll know it wasn’t all for nothing. I’ll remember what you’ve been telling me.”

  Kessler leaned forward again, supporting himself on his cane. “Will you, Dick?” he asked, his voice tense with eagerness. “Will you promise me to remember?”

  “I do promise you. I will remember. About the long hard march you were telling me about, and how we go ahead through history even when we can’t see it ourselves. I’ll remember about the Babylonian prince, and the pyramids, and the times when it never even occurred to anybody that people were people. I’ll know it’s better, there is more decency than there used to be, and if I can’t see it, it’s just because I can’t see a thousand years at once.”

  “Remembe
r it, Dick. It’s your only salvation.”

  “No it’s not.” Dick started to get red. He looked down at his shoes, and started talking fast to get it over. “I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Kessler, about what I’m going to remember, after the war and during it. I hope you won’t think I’m being sappy or sentimental or anything—but gosh—I mean—I’ll remember you.” He turned redder.

  “Thank you, Dick,” Kessler said quietly. “I’m glad you think I’m worth remembering.”

  “You are,” said Dick. Still looking down, he kicked at a corner of the rug. “I mean—oh I know it’s not polite to make personal remarks but I can’t say it any other way—I mean for a guy that got shot to pieces in one war and then saw what happened in Germany and should have thought it was all for nothing if anybody ever did but can still talk the way you do—anywhere they send me, Alaska or the Pacific islands or anywhere—I’ll remember you.”

  He looked up then, but his embarrassment would permit his eyes to go no farther than the clock. “Gee, it’s late,” he exclaimed before Kessler could answer his last speech and tempt him into any more sentimental outbursts. “They’ll be wondering what’s become of me. I’ve got to go.”

  Kessler did not try to detain him. Dick got out a few words about its having been fine to be here, and hurried to the door. They made a few commonplace remarks to each other, and Dick, still abashed by his confession, ran to his bicycle. Standing in the doorway, Kessler watched him swing across the bicycle and scurry off. He wondered if Dick would come back to remember anything, or if he would come back with his strong young body shattered into such wreckage as his own.

  “He might have been my son,” Kessler was thinking. “Good God, what I’ve sent him into. If he had been my son, I wonder if I should have said all that to him. I’d have had to send him into it just the same. But he believes me. That’s something. He believes me.”