I call it famous because it was a new point of departure. In all the club’s history there had never been a meeting for any other purpose than to screw the courage up to the cutting out of drink. Other subjects had been suggested from time to time; but we had stuck to our last as specialists. We had not been turned aside for philanthropy, for education, for financial benefit, or even for religion in the commonly accepted meaning of that word; and the results had been our justification. But now the flame at the heart of the earth had caught us, and we were all afire.
I mean that we were afire with interest, though the interest was against war as well as for it. But for it or against it, it was the one theme of our discussion; and with cause.
The tide was rising higher, and the spirit of the nation floating on the top. On one of the first days of April the President had asked Congress to declare a state of war with the German Empire. Two days later the Senate voted that declaration. A few nights after that we got together to talk things over at the Down and Out.
It was a crowded meeting, but as you looked round you in advance you would have prophesised a dull one. Our fellows came from all over New York and the suburbs, washed up, brushed up, and in their Sunday clothes. A few were men of education, but mostly we were of the type generally classed as hard-working. In age we ran from the seventies down to the twenties, with a preponderance of chaps between twenty-five and forty.
What I gathered from remarks before the meeting came to order was a dogged submission to leadership.
“If you was to put it up to us guys to decide the whole thing by ourselves,” Beady Lamont said to me as we stood together, “we’d vote ag’in’ it. Why? Because we’re over here—mindin’ our own business—with our kids to take care of—and our business to keep up—and we ain’t got no call to interfere in what’s no concern of ours. Them fellows over in Europe never could keep still, and they dunno how. But”—he made one of his oratorical gestures with his big left hand—“but if the President says the word—well, we’re behind him. He’s the country, and when the country speaks there’s no Amur’can who ain’t ready to give all.”
Perhaps he had said something similar to Andrew Christian, because it was that point of being ready to give all which, when he spoke, Christian took as his text.
I am not giving you an account of the whole meeting; I mean only to report a little of what Christian said, and its effect upon Cantyre. Cantyre had come because Regina had insisted; but he sat with the atmosphere of hot, thundery silence wrapping him round.
“To be ready to give all is what the world is summoned to,” Christian declared, when he had been asked to say a few words, “and, oh, boys, I beg you to believe that it’s time! The call hasn’t come a minute too soon, and we sha’n’t be a minute too soon in getting ready to obey it.”
“Some of us ’ain’t got much to give,” a voice came from the back sitting-room.