I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; and that flag was the American flag—the flag of Wilson’s country and my country. These men had followed that flag—these five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental, homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union—the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed there was war.
“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the vanished sun.
Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office, and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there floated a little American flag.
“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war. I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day I’ll be for all the world against the world.
“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”
XII
DOÑA QUIXOTE
Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter. “Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!”—I heard them dozens of times a day—and the shy, wilted floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “pauvre Virginie.”
La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles, between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold, gray-blue eyes—inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who had once harried the coasts of Flanders—dancing with delight, and her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point to the jest.