The longer Vassar puzzled over it, the more impenetrable became Waldron’s motive. His leadership in the movement was uncanny. What did it mean?
CHAPTER V
IT was barely seven when they reached Union Square. It was already packed by a dense crowd of good-natured cheering men and women. Seventy-five thousand was a conservative estimate. The air was electric with contagious enthusiasm.
“We’ll hear the apostle of peace first,” Vassar said to Zonia, pushing his way slowly through the crowd toward a platform with three-foot letters covering its four sides:
PEACE! PEACE! PEACE! PEACE!
The Reverend A. Cuthbert Pike, president of the Peace Union of America, was delivering the opening address as the chairman of his meeting. He was a funny-looking little man of slight features, bald and decorated with a set of aggressive side whiskers. His manner was quick and nervous, electric in its nervousness, his voice in striking contrast to the jerky pugnacity of his body. The tones were soft and dreaming, as if he were trying to subdue the tendency of the flesh to fight for what he believed to be right.
He leaned far over the rail of the platform and breathed his words over the crowd:
“Two great powers contend for the mastery of the world, my friends,” he was saying. “The spirit of Christ and the spirit of Napoleon. The one would overcome evil with good. The other would hurl evil against evil. One stands for love, humility, self-sacrifice. The other stands for the hate, pride and avarice of the militarism of today—”
Vassar lost the next sentence. His mind had leaped the seas and stood with brooding wonder over the miracle of self-sacrifice of a thousand blood-drenched trenches and battlefields where millions of stout-hearted men were now laying their lives on the altar of their country—an offering of simple love. They had left the selfish pursuit of pleasure and wealth and individual aggrandizement and merged their souls and bodies into the wider life of humanity—the hopes and aspirations of a race. Was all this hate and pride and avarice? Bah! The little fidgety preacher was surely crazy; the thing called war was too big and terrible and soul-searching for that. Such theories were too small. They could not account for the signs of the times.
The preacher was talking again. He caught the quiver of hate in his utterance of the name of the great German philosopher.