"No, of course not." There was a short self-conscious pause and then Roger said:
"Does His Highness get that 'daddy' any better than he did? I don't suppose so, just because I feel I've been away a year."
"Oh, yes, he does. He says it quite distinctly. And he makes a weird noise that papa insists is 'grandpa'."
They both smiled. For an instant they had met in Rogie. Once more Roger tried to reach to Anne.
"I often wished that you could have come with me. It was a wonderful experience."
"It must have been. Did you have a good trip?"
"Yes. We swung the convention. But the rest of it—Anne, it's terrible. They're so thwarted and driven! Millions of human beings with never a real rest, never all they need to eat, and worse than all—no hope, not even understanding, so many of them. Down in the social mud they're crawling, thousands upon thousands, like lower forms of life, not undeveloped, but being pushed back, down the scale of humanity. Human beings—going backward!"
But no thrill of anger gripped Anne. What did it matter whether one went forward or backward, since, in the end all dropped in death. Roger and Black Tom spoke as if this life were the purpose of creation; the personal comfort of the individual the apex of creation's effort; while all the time, behind this violence of adjustment, Death stood indifferent to their misunderstanding. Across the confusion of living, Death's shadow lay, penetrating to consciousness in moments of illness; in the stillness of dawn; in moments of physical exhaustion, when the weary body for an interval ceased its demands and something within yearned toward its own without; in rare moments like the massed silence that had swept Anne into peace. Death was the Great Silence, the everlasting Peace.
"I know," she said absently.
"You don't know," Roger broke out passionately. "We have no conception of it out here. The land itself is too rich, the mountains and the sun and sea are too emotional. We're all drugged with the beauty of the land. We have no slums, no poverty as they have it in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. We have graft, oppression, rotten politics, indifference, all the symptoms of the disease, but the ghastly, running sore itself we do not see. Broiling heat in summer, freezing cold in winter, twice every year adjusting the mere physical machinery of life to climate—a scramble for coal in the winter; for ice and air in summer; thousands of people herded in a single block, hundreds of families, packed like sardines in a can; layer on layer of life in one rotting building! Two men for every job. Millions of bewildered insects crawling over each other to find a little morsel to pick from the carcass."