Heart's Kindred

“You did get on to it there to-night, didn’t you?” he asked, wistfully.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Why – the new part,” he told her. “Didn’t you notice? Every last one of ’em was goin’ on about country and folks. That’s why they want to go.”

She was silent, and he was afraid that she did not understand.

“I never thought of it till to-night, either,” he excused her. “Don’t you see? Fellows don’t want to go to war just to smash around for a fight. It’s for somethin’ else.”

He stopped, vaguely uncomfortable in his exaltation.

“It’s killin’,” she said, “an’ killin’ ’s killin’.”

He stood still on the walk, regardless of the passers, and shook her arm.

“Good heavens,” he said, “women had ought to see that. Women are better’n men, and they’d ought to see it! Can’t you get past the killin’? Can’t you understand they might have a thunderin’ reason?”

“No reason don’t matter,” she said. “It’s killin’. And it ain’t anything else.”

He walked on, his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She knew that he was disappointed in her – but she was too much shaken to think about that. She remembered how her mother had watched her brother go out to fight after some mean uprising of drunken whites against the Indians. Nobody knew now what it had been about, but six men had been shot. That stayed.

Presently the Inger raised his head, and walked with it thrown back again. Women, he supposed, wouldn’t understand. They were afraid – they hated a gun – they hated a scratch. There was the woman with the blue-boned hand and wrist and the pink spangled fan —she understood, it seemed. But somehow that proved nothing, and he freed his thought of her.

A window of birds took his fancy. The poor things, trying to sleep in the night light, were tucked uncomfortably about their cages, while their soft breasts and wings attracted to the feather shop possible buyers. The Inger looked at them, thinking. He turned excitedly.

“I get you about that red bird,” he cried, “when you said not kill it! Well, there wasn’t any reason for killin’ the red bird – not any real reason. I don’t blame you for rowin’ at it. But can’t you see that killin’ men in war is differ’nt?”

She looked upon him with sudden attention. While he was being directed to their street, she stood thinking about what he had said.

“Is that the way you felt about it when you first said you was going to the war?” she asked when he joined her.

“Gosh, no,” he replied almost reverently. “All I been wantin’ to go to war for was to raise hell – legitimate. Don’t you see no differ’nce?” he repeated.

It was then that she began to understand what a mighty thing had happened to him. Her insistence that war was merely killing, was merely murder, had done violence to his new idealism. And without the skill to correlate her impressions of this, she divined that here was something which was showing her, once more, the measure of this man. And she saw, too, that now she should not fail him.

She could say nothing, but as they crossed the street to the station, she suddenly slipped her hand within his great swinging arm.

He caught at her hand with a passion that amazed her. As his own closed over hers, she drew breathlessly away again.

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe it’s late. We didn’t hurry…”

He made no comment. At the station they claimed their packs and sat down to wait. Two hours or more later, as they stood by the gate, a man with many bundles jostled Lory and stood beside her, unseeing, with a long parcel jabbing at her neck. The Inger laid his great hand on him.

“Say, Snickerfritz,” he said, in perfect good humor, “lamp the lady there.”

And when the man apologized, the Inger smiled his slow smile, and waved his huge hand at him.

As he looked at this man and at the tired woman beside the man, it occurred to the Inger that these people must all have homes. This was a thing that he had never thought about before. Always he had seen people, as it were, in the one dimension of their personal presence, taking no account of them otherwise – neither of that second dimension of their inner beings, nor of the third dimension of their relationships.

“I bet they all got some little old hole they crawl into,” he said, aloud. And as the gate opened, and the two filed down the platform behind the man with the parcels and the tired woman, the Inger added: “That gink and his dame – they looked spliced. Doggone it, I bet they got a dug-out somewheres!”

“Why, yes,” said Lory, in surprise. “Sure they have. What of it?”

“Oh well, I donno,” he mumbled. “Nothin’ much.”

In the day coach, he turned over a seat, and in the forward one, he deposited the two packs.

“I don’t need two seats,” she objected.

“No,” he assented. “You sit down there.”

She sat by the window, and he beside her. On the way across the desert, she had sat alone at night, with her pack for a pillow, and he in a seat near by. She said nothing now, and when the train began to move, they still sat in silence, watching the lights wheel and march, run to the windows, and vanish with no chance to explain themselves, and an edge of dawn streaking the sky. When he saw her eyes droop, he put his arm about her, and drew her head down until it lay upon his shoulder.

“I want you should go to sleep there,” he said.

For a moment he held her so, not the less tenderly that his great arms would not let her move. But this obedience was, after all, not what he wanted. “Do you want to?” he demanded, and half loosed his clasp.

“I don’t know,” she answered sleepily – but she did not move away.

In a little while she fell asleep, and he sat so and held her. Her weight became a delicious discomfort. He was not thinking either of that night on the trail, or of what might be. He was hardly thinking at all. He was swept by the sweetness of the hour and by the sense of an exalted living, such as he had never dreamed; an exalted warfare, in which men killed for great reasons. And once his feeling was shot through with the recognition that every one in the car would be believing that she was his wife; that every one in the car would be thinking that they had a home somewhere.

He put his lips on her hair, and then rested his cheek there. So, sleeping, they sped through that new world.

VII

At Harrisburg, he bought a New York paper. There have been huge mass meetings in New York to which only an inch of space was given, on a back page; but this meeting had the second column next to the war news. Two overflow meetings had been held and in all three, the enthusiasm, the newspaper said, had been tremendous, the sentiment overwhelming. The editorial boldly supported the headlines:

“… enough of this policy of negation. If national pride has not been sufficient to prompt the United States to activity, to its rôle as a leader among the powers, surely the goad of a violated neutrality and an utter disregard of international law should be sufficient to open the eyes of its people…

“The refusal to exercise intervention was natural. The refusal to make the first move in calling a congress of all nations including the belligerents, was hardly less so. We should in no wise assume to dictate to the powers of Europe. The refusal to mobilize the army or to begin to provide anything like adequate coast defences a people has borne patiently and far too long. But the tacit refusal to permit the citizens to bear arms in defence of this their land … etc.”

The Inger slapped the paper and the page slit down its length.

“That’s it,” he said, “they’ve got it. Ain’t it a wonder,” he put it to the flying Pennsylvania landscape, “that I come just when I come?”

The graciousness and quiet of Washington, the spaciousness of the vast white station, the breadth and leisure of the streets, welcomed them like a presence. Here was something such as they had left at home – a sense of the ample.

“Seems like there was room enough for two more here,” said the Inger contentedly, as they turned into the avenue.

They chose to walk to find Lory’s aunt, lured by the large village aspect of the place. And as they walked, there leaped up for them from the roofs the insistent, dominant shaft of the monument.

“Thanks be,” said the Inger. “There’s somethin’ to shin up. It begun to look to me like the East is a place where all the trails laid flat.”

“I kind of like it here, though,” Lory said apologetically.

“Seems like there’s more folks and their stuff, and less of God and his stuff,” the Inger offered after a pause.

Lory shook her head. Her hair was in disorder, and the soot of the train filmed her face, but her look was strangely radiant.