But Ernest Barbour was dead. His nephews owned and controlled what he had built. They were a great company, which manufactured many things, which invented many things, besides armaments. War was dead. It would never happen again. Bouchards or no Bouchards. The conspirators had been silenced. An enlightened world would never again go to war, would never again be the victim of a Barbour or a Bouchard, a Robsons-Strong, a Kronk, a Bedor’s, a Sazarofi—
The whispers became a shout in Charles’ mind. The shout was all in this room, full of madness and plots and greed. It was full of the smoke of newly active armaments companies, all over the world. It was full of the subdued talk of many men together, in quiet rooms, Germans, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Roumanians, Russians, Serbs—
Charles cried: “Jimmy, it isn’t impossible!”
He couldn’t drink his milk. He stood up, leaned against the table. His head began to spin. “Jimmy, there ought to be a way to stop it, before it gets started. Governments should stop it, in spite of politicians and liars and thieves—”
Jimmy was staring at him, aghast. “What are you talking about, Dad? I don’t understand.”
Charles put the back of his hand against his forehead. “They’ll make it so plausible, when they’re ready. There’ll be nothing else for us to do but fight. There’ll be no way out.” He stammered: “We’d have to fight, after they’d arranged it. Or die. But what would that matter to them? They’re all in it, together. They’re an empire, all of them, everywhere, and they hate the rest of us.”
Oh, God, what am I saying? thought Charles, distracted. He was so tired. He heard Colonel Grayson’s voice: “There are times when it is expedient to make war—When the people want it.” Charles said, incoherently: “People shouldn’t want war. America should never want war. That’s what I mean, Jimmy. America should halt wars before they begin. America should understand—”
“What?” asked Jimmy, when Charles stopped speaking.
“—that wars are plotted, deliberately. Behind closed doors. By men who will ostensibly become enemies, when a war occurs. By men who know that the people love war, and cater to that love.”
He was actually panting. “Jimmy,” he said. “No group of men, anywhere, can make a war, no matter how they try, and no matter how they want a profit out of a war. Only peoples, at the end, make wars.”
Jimmy considered his father’s words with alarmed seriousness. “Well, Americans would never want any war. They’d just laugh at anyone who would suggest it.”
“Unless, Jimmy, they’d be deceived into believing that war was necessary.”
Jimmy was puzzled. “But Dad, there’ve been good wars, too, you know. For freedom.”
Charles did not know why he was so desperate. He shook his head. “Look, Jimmy. Good causes don’t need wars. They might take a little extra time, they might demand more understanding, but they don’t need mass-murder. We can stop the causes of war. We can stop the arming of potentially dangerous nations, who, in their turn, are being deceived and incited. Deliberately. By evil men.”
Jimmy drew an invisible pattern on the table oilcloth with his forefinger. “Dad, what about the Civil War? Don’t you think that was necessary?”
“No, Jimmy. Slavery was becoming untenable in the South. The South knew that. It was only a matter of time until it would have been abolished everywhere. One by one, the Southern States would have abolished it. But the North kept harassing the South. Someone, some men, were harassing the Southern States. Then it became all confused. The South was indignant; it seemed to them that they must withdraw from the Union, in order to preserve their dignity and self-respect. And that war was eventually not fought to free the slaves but to preserve the Union. Even Lincoln admitted that.”
The clock boomed twelve. They could hear its notes, shaking the house ever so slightly, a faint vibration.
Jimmy looked at his father in an intense silence. Finally, he said, with uncertainty: “Dad, you don’t think there’s going to be a war, do you? With anyone?”
The boy was greatly disturbed.
“No! No!” Charles exclaimed. “Jimmy, I’m sorry. I—I’m all confused, these days. I have the strangest thoughts. I don’t know what to think, Jimmy. I suppose I’m just tired.” He added: “Wars aren’t simple, Jimmy. It—it gets all complicated.”
He went out of the kitchen, abruptly, with lame and heavy legs. Jimmy turned off the lights. They stood at the foot of the stairs. Again, Charles put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Forget what I said, won’t you, Jimmy? I don’t know anything. Not a thing. Not a thing,” he repeated, with loud emphasis.
They climbed the stairs together, arm in arm. They parted upstairs. Charles said: “Go to sleep, Jimmy. I’m afraid I’m not myself, these days.”
Then he was alone in his bed, his empty bed, and he was ill with a terrible illness. He was only a little man. He could do nothing. He lay there, hour after hour, looking at the darkness. Finally, he saw the gray light of morning at the windows. He said to himself: Only a little man. I can’t do much, but what I can do I’ll do, so help me God. My son, my son.
CHAPTER XII
Charles did not sleep. He, usually so calm, so derisive of hysteria and excitement, so “balanced” and goodtempered, could not sleep at all. He remembered so many things he had forgotten, words from school-books, from newspapers. “There can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet,” Lincoln had said. And in the end, the bullets had been stronger. Had not Bismarck shouted: “Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches. The great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority votes, but by blood and iron.” And Martin Luther: “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.” And Jefferson: “War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”
A little man. I am only a little man. What can men like me do? thought Charles, as the first sun began to shine through his windows. Millions of men like me, all over the world, and we can do nothing. The workingman has his unions; the great corporations have their advisers; the criminals have their lawyers; the churches have their priests and their ministers; the nations have their ambassadors. But who can speak for men like me, men who abhor war, men who detest murder? How can we ignore our Governments, and speak to each other, and say to each other, as Benjamin Franklin said: “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Let our politicians curse each other, but let us laugh together, and say: You are my brother. I have no quarrel with you. Do not let your son kill my son, for we have nothing but our children.
To fathers, war was not an “adventure,” as Colonel Grayson had said. It was the death of life. The young men, the very young men, should be ignored, as the statesmen should be ignored. Let the young man find his adventure in living, and not in murder; let the statesman find his glory in just legislation, and not among slogans. No man, thought Charles, should be permitted to vote before he is thirty, or until he is the father of sons. Some way, sometime, there might come a day when men like himself, Charles, would outlaw war, when they would band together in every nation to destroy the haters of men who would have men killed for profit or because they wished personal power.
Charles began to detest himself because he had deliberately lived so circumscribed, so well-ordered, so selfish, a life. He wished he knew more. Somewhere, he had read about the Quakers. They would take part in no wars. They calmly refused to be embroiled in wars. So, there was a beginning. One had only to join with the Quakers. There were Quakers in Pennsylvania, in Andersburg. He knew no one else who had any honest religious principles, except, perhaps, the pastor of his church, Mr. Joseph Haas.
Charles was President of the Board of his church, and influential among its members. Mr. Haas was his personal friend. Charles had serenely taken it for granted that decent men went to church; he had never asked himself if anyone ever believed, fully and with all his heart, in what Mr. Haas had t
o say in his pulpit. He had never asked this of himself. Now he understood that he had always approved of churches because he had had a vague idea that they were “necessary,” though why they were “necessary” he had not wondered. He had not liked men who belonged to no church. They had lacked “stability,” for him. But “stability” was not faith; it was not even security. It could be shaken and destroyed, and it could end in a roaring chaos, and God could be lost in the smoke of guns.
He looked at his alarm clock. In a moment it would ring. He shut it off. The churches. Why didn’t the churches stop war? Or were they as helpless as himself, when the peoples wanted war, and gloried and delighted in it, and screamed idiotic slogans, and demanded that men like the Bouchards provide them with the weapons of murder?
So many things to think about, and so many things in ambush.
But it was a lovely morning, as golden and fresh as a new apple, as sweet as honey. Charles stood by his window. He saw the dark green trees, and green lawns, the children already at play in the cool shadows, the brisk housewives already sweeping their verandahs. It was so peaceful. The night with its terrors lay behind him, in this room.
He drew a deep breath of the scented air, pushing aside the curtains in order to do so. Shadows. Whispers. He had been “hysterical” all week. Perhaps it was his liver, after all. That patent. Perhaps Mr. Bouchard had really been sincere in wanting that patent for “experimentation.” Perhaps Colonel Grayson was only a fearful old man. Perhaps all this talk of peace was really honest talk of peace.
He was pale but quiet when he went down to breakfast. Jimmy was waiting for him; he looked at his father anxiously. But Charles smiled. “Hello, Jimmy. Sorry the telephone woke you. It was just your Uncle Joe, who wanted to know if I had concluded some business I had last night. So, you are playing tennis with Gerry, are you, today? Why not ask her to remain for dinner?” Then he remembered that he had accepted Wilhelm’s invitation for tonight, and he was annoyed. He sat down. “I had almost forgotten, but I’m having dinner at your Uncle Willie’s house. Ask Gerry to stay, anyway. Or isn’t that proper, even though Mrs. Meyers will be here?”
Jimmy did not answer for a moment. He gazed at his father soberly. Then he said: “Oh, it’s all right, I suppose. I’ll call up Aunt Isabel, and ask her.” Why didn’t his father speak of that conversation last night? But Charles was looking with approval at a dish of sliced bananas and cream which Mrs. Meyers had placed before him.
“Not cream, Dad,” said Jimmy. “You know what Dr. Metzger said about cream, and your liver.”
Charles laughed. “I’m going to have cream, anyway. Now, Jimmy, you aren’t a doctor yet. Let me enjoy my breakfast. I happen to be hungry.”
Jimmy watched his father. He, himself, was unusually silent. But he was relieved when Charles refused eggs. So, it was Dad’s liver, after all. Jimmy brightened. “It won’t be too hot for tennis today, after I get through my lessons,” he said. Charles ate his hot oatmeal with relish. “No, I think it’ll be just cool enough,” he said. His spoon scraped the plate. He looked down at it, thoughtfully. “Jimmy, why don’t you ever go to the church’s Wednesday nights’ get-togethers?”
Jimmy was surprised. “Why, I don’t know, Dad. They just bored me. Hardly anyone goes any more.”
Charles looked at him. He had a sudden impulse to say: Jimmy, do you believe in God? But that would startle Jimmy, who was so intelligent and humorous. He had never once spoken of God, to Jimmy. He had never said a prayer with Jimmy. All his son’s instructions in religious observances had come from his church. Had Mary ever taught him his bedtime prayers? Charles felt foolish, as if he had been about to say something childish, or undignified.
Why? said a voice in Charles. He put down his spoon. Mrs. Meyers poured his coffee for him. Charles felt Jimmy’s eyes upon him.
“I think,” he said, in an offhand manner, “that you ought to take some part in the church’s activities, son, besides going with me to services on Sunday mornings.”
“Why, Dad?”
Charles shrugged. “Well,” he murmured. “It might look well,” he added, lamely.
“To whom?”
“Well, it would, anyway,” said Charles, irritably.
“I’m not interested in doing things that ‘might look well,’” said Jimmy. He was coloring. “I’m sorry, Dad. You are insulted. I ought to have remembered that you like doing what you think is the ‘right thing.’”
A week ago, Charles would have laughed. But now he did not laugh. “Is that what you think of me, Jimmy, only wanting to do the right thing for the sake of appearances?”
Jimmy’s young jaw set. “You once told me, Dad, that it was very necessary to keep up appearances. That it was the respectable thing to do.”
Yes, I said that, thought Charles. I said that, imbecile that I am.
Jimmy’s dark eyes were very intent. He was resting his chin on his hand and studying Charles. “I’m afraid I didn’t make myself very clear,” said Charles, with uncertainty. “I think I meant that decent men do certain things because they are correct and expected. Setting a good example.”
“To whom?”
“Good God, Jimmy!” exclaimed Charles. “What’s the matter with you? What are churches for? For everybody. And men of responsibility want others to go to churches, too. It—it’s stabilizing.”
“It’s respectable,” said Jimmy.
Charles stood up, and Jimmy stood up, also. They looked at each other.
“I thought,” Charles said, “that we understood each other, Jimmy.”
“We do, Dad,” answered the boy, earnestly. “But something’s happened that is bothering you, and you want to talk to me about it, and you don’t know how.” He paused. He put his hand on his father’s arm, and smiled shyly: “Yes, Dad, I do believe in God. That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?”
Charles stared at him speechlessly, his pale face turning red.
“You want me to believe in God, don’t you, Dad? Mother taught me prayers, before she died, and I learned about God in Sunday school. But all that didn’t make me really believe in Him. It—it was just knowing.” He became even more shy. “You see, there’s a difference between ‘believing’ in God, and ‘knowing’ about Him.”
“I—” began Charles. Then he said, very simply: “I’m glad, Jimmy. I really am.” He turned aside. “You see, son, I don’t know. I thought I knew everything it was necessary for a man like me to know, but I’ve found out I know nothing at all.”
He was at his desk at nine o’clock. He sat there and looked at the pile of his mail. But he was hardly aware of it. He was saying again to himself: “I know nothing at all.”
A week ago he had been worried over nothing; he had thought very little of anything, except his son and his work. A good, safe, orderly life. And now it was all gone. Something vague and terrible had entered it. The thought of God had entered it too. It was very unsettling.
He attacked his pile of mail. There was a thin brown paper envelope, with no return address upon it, among his letters. It was marked “Personal,” so Mr. Parker had not opened it. Charles tore it open. A paper fell out: The Menace. There were three slight pamphlets, also: “The Roman Catholic Church’s Plan for World Slavery.” “Dangerous Errors of the Papacy.” “Freedom or Subjugation.” Frowning, Charles returned to The Menace. It was a newspaper of half a dozen pages. He read the headlines: “The Catholic Church Renews its Attacks on American Institutions in Boston.” He ran his eye rapidly over sub-headlines. He read a paragraph here and there. According to the paper, the Roman Catholic Church had secret organizations all over the world, the Jesuits, who were plotting world-wide destruction of “free Protestantism,” and the “return of the bloody Inquisition.” Then Charles noticed that someone had printed something in pencil on top of the paper: “Please read these and remember Tom Murphy.”
Hate. It was here with him, again, in this pleasant sunlit office of his. It was breathing over his shoulder. It was re
flected back to him from his shining window. Hate. The thing which had been silently and darkly let loose in the world had not been his nightmare, and not been conjured up by his “liver.” It was alive. It was everywhere.
He pushed a bell on his desk, and Mr. Parker entered. Charles kept his face expressionless. “Parker, will you go into the shops and tell Tom Murphy I want to see him at once?”
Who had sent him these slimy things? His brother Friederich? No. Someone else in Andersburg had sent him this paper, these pamphlets. Someone who hated, who lurked in shadows, and grimaced, and hated. And he was not alone.
Tom Murphy came in, pulling off his workman’s cap. He was a slender and keen-faced man of thirty-five, with light hair and prominent blue eyes, a blunt nose and a mouth that was always ready for laughter. But he was not smiling now. He was a foreman, and his blue overalls were very clean and starched, for he had a meticulous little wife.
“Good morning, Mr. Wittmann,” he said. “You sent for me?”
His eyes were cold and proud. Charles hesitated.
“Yes, I did, Tom.”
“I see.” Tom spoke quietly. “You want to tell me you’re going to fire me, after all, for breaking Mr. Fred’s windows, even though you helped keep me out of jail?”
Charles held The Menace in his hands. “No,” he said. “Don’t be a damned fool, Tom. I wasn’t even thinking of that.”
“I was drunk. But I was mad, too,” said Tom. He pushed back a lock of his hair. “I had five beers that night. But I was mad, too.”
Charles could not help smiling. “Tom, Mr. Fred doesn’t want you to go, either.”
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