VII
Soon after the train restarted, Santa rested her hand on his arm. “You think better of me now. I'm so tired, I should cry if you spoke to me. Let me sleep on your couch. I'm afraid to be alone.”
He covered her with his rug and did his best to make her comfortable. She was utterly exhausted. In a few minutes her eyes closed and she was breathing gently.
Several hours elapsed. She was still sleeping. He was glad not to have to talk. His mind was filled with a tremendous picture: “There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate full of sores.”
He saw the world that he was leaving, self-satisfied, callous, well-nourished. He saw the world to which he was going, out of which he had planned to make a profit—a world picked clean by the crime of war and peopled by living skeletons. When its pain had passed beyond endurance, the outcast world would attack the world which was comfortable. It would come crawling like a beggar to a rich man's door. When it found the door barred, it would go mad. It had nothing to lose by violence. With its bare hands it would storm the dwelling.
How would the comfortable world defend itself? The Captain said with cannon. From a safe distance it would blow the empty bellies into nothingness. But bread was cheaper than high explosives. Why not fill the empty bellies instead of shattering them?
He recalled the fields round Amiens, starred with miniature forests of stiff, protesting crosses. Why had those crosses been planted if it had not been to teach the living world to share?
A barricade of bread could prevent further bloodshed. It always could have prevented it. The gray tide of wolf-men could be halted by a barricade of bread. Strange that no one had ever thought of it! There had never been a war that a barricade of bread could not have halted. Back and forth across the Atlantic his food-ships were plying. In Holland his warehouses were bulging—
He glanced at the sleeping face of Santa—sweet and sad as an avenging angel's. Her solution of injustice was simple: to slay the wrong-doer before he could do his wrong. It was her own suffering that had taught her this cruel mercy. If she, a half-caste, disinherited at birth, could so risk her soul's salvation for humanity—
He drew himself up sharply. He was turning visionary. At this rate he would end as a second Varensky. All his plans for capturing power would be thwarted. He had seen nothing as yet that would corroborate the Captain's disastrous prophecies.