“So for all my shudders,” he went on, flinging his words out into the audience, “I was long ago positive that we must enter this inescapable war. At first, when it was just starting in Europe, many of us, most real socialists, condemned it out of hand. It is our tradition—it was always our tradition—to be against wars, all wars between ententes and alliances, wars which always ended by making new power blocs, new fortunes, and new exploitation of the working class.
“The only exception, the only, mind you, were wars of revolt against kings and emperors and czars—the French Revolution, our own Revolutionary War in America to throw off England, the Civil War to end slavery—these were the only wars a socialist could ever call—if not a good war, then a necessary war, an inescapable war.”
He paused, and the crowd waited for the “But” that was to come. They knew what it would be; their papers and many of the papers in English, that they could read a little or which their children read to them, all had said it—since the news came from Russia a month ago: BUT now, defeat for the Allies would also be a deathblow for the young revolution, the return of the Romanoffs for another hundred years.
“But,” Ivarin went on, “there is another inescapable war—and that also has to be won. This war too will have many battlefronts—The Espionage Act they call it, and it’s before Congress now. Every word you or I say can be a target on these battlefronts, every opinion, each meeting, every newspaper or magazine. Already they are rounding up the work of the labor press, the socialist press, calling everything ‘anarchist’—that damnable convenient label.
“While we’re getting rid of Prussians in Germany and the secret police in Russia, are we to grow their brothers over here?”
From the side of the platform, a young man began to tiptoe out to the center of the stage. Ivarin stopped short at this unheard-of intrusion, but the young man whispered, “Important,” as he came on. Behind him murmurs sprang up in the crowd and there was a sweep of new interest.
“The manager of the hall,” the young man whispered, “made me come. There are four policemen in the audience, with a translator, to take down everything. Please don’t be excited.”
“I thought I saw them,” Stefan said. “I wasn’t sure.”
“And outside, on the sidewalk, there are perhaps eight, ten, with high-powered rifles. But our permit is in order. Nothing overlooked.”
“Are we sending somebody to the police?”
“They’re on the way.”
“So they want me to keep the audience calm. I’ll try.”
Throughout this colloquy, Ivarin’s hand had been raised to the audience, in a signal to them to be patient, to wait just a moment. Now he nodded farewell pleasantly to the young man on the platform and then addressed his listeners in an easy voice, as if he had an amusing anecdote to share with them. “As if by a special favor to me,” he said, “arranged by some helpful friend in the Mayor’s or the Police Commissioner’s office, we have been given a beautiful illustration of what I mean.
“Every good teacher—and I was a teacher long before I became a lecturer—wants the perfect illustration for his pupils, to make a point, to drum it into their heads. Now this is a point you need not be alarmed about—we have the legal papers to meet here, as we have met a hundred times before.
“But the fact is that the police seem interested in listening to every word I say. I did not know I was so fascinating as all that. There are also a few policemen outside in the street—but we have all learned from strikes and picket lines that never, never must we give these gentlemen what looks like any reason for getting rough, so not one of us will begin to shout or shove. Not here, nor later out there. Agreed? Your word?”
There was a roar of “Sure … Yes … You bet,” but Ivarin’s hand was up for silence through it all.
“These policemen were sent here tonight, just in case. In case what? Just in case. They know that socialists hired the hall; they know I am a socialist. And we are workingmen, after all. I do not think any policemen have been sent to any meeting that J. P. Morgan may be holding tonight, or John D. Rockefeller.
“But we are poor men, and we belong to unions. We will soon be making something like a million khaki uniforms for the new army, and a million or so overcoats, and another million hats, and a million khaki shirts. Up in Lawrence Mass, the workers will be weaving the cloth for these millions of pieces, and somewhere else, other workers will be making two million pairs of shoes, and digging a million tons of coal for the million ships to carry the fifty million shells and rifles and grenades, to win this war that must be won.
“Perhaps that is why the police are so fascinated with us. We are important. We are valuable. We must be protected and cherished.
“BUT—some of us are also cranks about a phrase we know by heart. We heard it in Europe before we bought our tickets in the steerage. We said it here a thousand times before we got our first papers. ‘It’s a free country’ and we want to keep it free. Not only in peacetime. Even now, in war, with the necessary taboos on military information—even so, we want to go on saying ‘It’s a free country’ and we will fight every inch to keep it free. Won’t we?”
This time when the roar came, Ivarin held up no hand to stop it.
In some unlooked-for way, the actuality of being at war made Garry think more often of Letty. All you think of is war, war, war. Her furious phrases took to sounding again in his mind. All you think of is what you want, what you believe, what you’ll do.”
She was wrong. She was unjust and she was wrong. She had been wrong then, and she would be wrong now. At that time he had thought of their life, their needs and plans, the baby they both wanted, the children. And now, too, he thought of a thousand things apart from the war and his beliefs about it; he was absorbed in his sheet-synthetic experiments at the lab, mesmerized by their problems and quirks, on a deeper level than he had ever reached on any research of any sort. He still enjoyed people and easily made friends; at Synthex, there was nobody like Otto Ohrmann, but a chemist named Plevette was intelligent and likable, and they were soon sharing many free evenings. Plevette was devoted to the theater, and once a week or so they went to Broadway for dinner at a steak house and then a show. Plevette liked to dance, too, and several times lured Garry along for an evening, talking about a pretty girl he wanted him to meet. These evenings always held a special invitation in them, but the expectations were usually greater than the outcome. Plevette once told him he was growing monkish and virtuous, but Garry knew better, knew it with the wretched authority of his private misery.
It’s a damn stupid way to live, he thought often. “A lonely way to live” was a phrase that offended him, and one night only was it formed by his treacherous mind before he could halt it. That was the night war was declared.
One evening a month later, he had a sudden impulse to take a walk past Letty’s shop. He had no reason to find himself in that neighborhood and never had laid eyes on it since they had parted. The idea came to him at the theater and he told Plevette he had a late engagement. While Plevette gave him a knowing grin of farewell, he set off at a stroll for Madison and Seventieth.
It was nearly half past eleven as he approached the shop. From a distance he could see a mild square glow from one of the show windows; Letty still kept her display lighted until midnight, and the outside switch that would be turned off by the night watchman at twelve was still part of her life. The small unimportant fact took on a sudden poignancy.
He slowed down. He had chosen the opposite side of the avenue; if she were staying late at the shop, or were showing it to some friend, he did not want to come upon her, discomfiting them both. They had exchanged a brief letter or two on impersonal things like bills and charges, but they had not seen each other or talked by telephone. Neither had set forth these conditions; they seemed inevitable to each of them. It was more than three months since he had gone to the Brevoort. A quarter of a year.
Even from where he stood, Garry could see the g
ilt legend, “Mrs. Garrett Paige, Antiques,” and again a small poignancy stabbed him. By now it was clear that the shop was deserted, and he crossed the street and stood, like any casual window shopper, gazing in past the gleam of its double plate-glass windows.
The display was beautiful. For a moment he tried to remember what he had learned from Letty, to be able to name the long slender settee or sofa facing out at him; the long flirtings, the reed-like legs, but he gave up. It could be Chippendale or Sheraton or Hepplewhite; in some complex, convoluted way he was glad he did not know. The release he had felt in his ugly three-room flat was mysteriously heightened by his nearness now to this glassed-in perfection.
Letty’s sense of release must be heightened too. Now, with the war, her long disapproval of him must have grown worse. Just about everybody else’s had.
Extraordinary and unwelcome, a shaft of apprehension drove through him. “Now, with the war”—it was a ghoul calling the changes in a simple dance, a calm and simple dance that had been familiar and dear. Now, with the war. Long ago Letty had said he would change, if ever war did come, and he suddenly twisted with longing to do just that, to change, to be like others and run their risks with them, not a special set of risks of his own, risks that were not even codified, that were vague and unknown. The apprehension deepened and became so sharp it was fear. It held him as he stood there looking in at her beautiful scene made of polished woods and shining crystal and cool yellow draperies flowing untroubled down the outer edges.
Garry turned harshly away. He slept badly that night and next morning telephoned Cindy Stiles, to ask if she and Hank would let him take them out to dinner and the theater soon.
“We’d love it,” she said promptly. “We miss you.”
“It’s nice to hear that,” he said, with a laugh that undid some of his emphasis. “What haven’t you seen? And what night?”
They agreed on Friday of the following week, and then Cindy impulsively added, “It’s been so long, Garry, why don’t you come on over and have supper tonight—we’re stuck with the babies. It’ll just be my cooking.”
“The best kind,” he said, a decided lift in his spirits.
Hank was equally glad to see him, though he said at once, “Bob Grintzer may drop in later. Are you and he all right?”
“I forgot Bob,” Cindy said. “Did you know Betty’s had another baby? She’s still in the hospital and he passes here on his way home.”
Garry hoped Bob would be sidetracked, but said he’d like to see him again. It was quite natural, neither forced nor obvious, to add, “Have you seen Letty? How is she?”
“Fine,” Hank said. “She seems just fine.”
“She had to hire a third woman,” Cindy said, “to shop for fabrics and wallpapers, and write letters and bills and things. That’s five people working for her!” She went on about the new complications Letty had to face, now that the supply problems that had plagued her for the last three years, about imports from England and France, were starting in all over again right at home. “She’s already buying up bolts of absolutely everything in America, you know, of anything good to make curtains or drapes with, or upholster things in.”
There was silence. Garry wished they would volunteer what he knew they were thinking about. Was she in love with Hank’s brother Peter, or with anybody else? Was she happy? Did she go out constantly? Was she ever sad, or troubled?
“Who do you think’s enlisted?” Hank said then. “My brother-in-law, Proff, that’s who. In the Navy, like his father and grandfather.”
“Connie gets me sick,” his wife said, not explaining it.
“They’ll have to come and get me,” Hank said. “If conscription passes, why fine, but—”
“You’ll be exempted if it does pass, Hank,” Cindy said sharply. “Married, and two children? Please!”
From that instant on, right through supper, which they had in the kitchen on the ground floor of the house, there was no break in their talk of the war, and when Bob Grintzer arrived, they were at it still.
But with Bob’s first words, the evening changed. Maybe it’s his name, Garry thought. Is he turning into another of these fool German-name apologists? “I can’t see,” Bob said truculently, “where anybody gets off, attacking conscription any longer. It sure is going to pass and be a key part of the war effort.”
“Until it becomes law,” Garry said flatly, “I can talk for it, against it, at it, under it, over it or any other way I choose.”
“You sure can,” Hank said. “They’re still at it hot and heavy in Congress. Why shouldn’t you?”
“When it comes to that,” Garry added, straight at Grintzer, “after it becomes law! What’s wrong with saying it should be repealed, that it’s unconstitutional? We’ve done that with plenty of other laws that passed.”
“Not in wartime.”
“Come on, Bob,” Hank said. “The idea of it gets my goat, too—I don’t even know why.”
“Sure you know why,” Garry said hotly. “Damn it, Hank, forced conscription goes against the grain in this country, that’s all there is to it. It always has. Start it up now as an emergency measure, good Lord, after a while it gets to be taken for granted. Before long, you’ve got it in peacetime too, and nobody even gets up and argues any more.”
“Sure, sure,” Grintzer said, “go worry about fifty years from now, and lose the war today. The only real question is what you intend to do about conscription now.”
“What I intend to do about it?” Garry now was truculent too.
“Yes, you,” Grintzer said stiffly.
“That’s my business, wouldn’t you say? I’m not asking you what you’ll do about it, or saying what I think you should or shouldn’t do.”
Bob Grintzer stood up. “That about finishes it,” he said, looking only at Hank. “I’ll run along.”
“Take it easy,” Hank said as he took him to the door. “That new baby must be winding up your nerves.” He looked dubious when he came back. “He’s sure hot under the collar,” he said to Garry. “He’ll get over it.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
The Selective Service Act passed, and as May inched gently into June, Garry called his father’s office and said, “Is there any agreement by now?”
There was, Evan told him with obvious relief, and suggested that he come into town that afternoon or the next, “like a real client.” He added, “It’ll be nice to see you again anyway.”
“Me too, Dad.”
On his last two or three visits to Barnett, his mother had always greeted him with “More meetings,” to explain his father’s absence. It had been just as well. With his mother alone, he could talk in comfortable generalities; when his father was there, the specifics of law came up, and they could be uncomfortable. Since America had got into the war, he sometimes felt, his parents’ classic and pure pacifism had shaded off in the faintest degree. No flip-flop, no flag-bestrewn speeches about patriotism, but an almost imperceptible retreat from the unequivocal position that had for so long been theirs.
If ideas were shifting and changing over at the Ivarins’, he once thought, there’d be nightly boxing bouts, but we’re not so noisy. Maybe that’s too bad.
He didn’t mean it. Day by day, as the details were announced for carrying out the sweeping new law, he felt less noisy, more muted. Apart from the Civil War Draft, with its riots and evasions and bribes, this was something the country had never condoned, had always denounced as peculiarly European, unacceptable to America, yet now one would think that forced conscription had been ordained by all the founding fathers and blessed by God as well.
Ten million men, the papers agreed, would register on the fifth of June. On that single day, from dawn to dusk across the land, one by one, yet thousand after thousand and million after million, those who had already had their twenty-first birthday but not yet their thirty-first, would register. One by one, alone for all the millions, each would go to a designated “local board” in his neighbo
rhood grocery or bakery, schoolhouse or barber shop, fill out a printed draft form and come into possession of a little green card that might prove to be his official license to go forth and kill.
The fifth of June, Garry thought, as he started driving toward the city. Next Tuesday. Five days from now. Where did resistance start, and when? With a technicality, not unlike a census or the filling out of forms for a driver’s license? Even in matters of conscience, of a man’s immortal soul, there could be so practical a question to ponder, such a splitting of hairs. Preposterous. But there it was.
More than the splitting of hairs. The evaluation of the member-parts of the problem; put that way, it gained some dignity. In this hell of re-evaluation and re-defining, his own father had worn himself down over the past months; his relief was obvious, that they had reached agreement on the immediate issue of registration, and he would certainly assign all credit to the new member he was so impressed with, a man who had moved East from St. Louis the week war was declared, and who had almost overnight become a key figure among them all.
“He sees it,” his father had said once, “not only as a theory of civil liberty, but as the war forces us to see it. Baldwin wants a separate bureau for objectors, because he knows we could never sandwich those cases in with the usual ones.”
“I’d like to meet your ‘sage,’ Dad,” he had said, only to have his father laugh and say, “Roger Baldwin is younger than your sage. Thirty-two or three.”
Never sandwich them in, Garry thought now, as he looked for a space in which to park his car. It was getting harder every day to find one; people now talked about traffic problems and crowding of roads, even good ones like Queens Boulevard. A separate bureau for objectors; did they expect much crowding there too?
In his new office, waiting for Garry to arrive, Evander Paige stopped any pretense of work and gazed out on the young green of Central Park. Turner, Paige, Levy and Payson had moved up to West Fifty-ninth Street only recently and the oily smell of paint and varnish was lively still in the warm air. A slight burn within his eyelids, for which Evan blamed the new paint, made him lean back in his leather chair with his eyes closed.
First Papers Page 54
