To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one meaning—bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of belief. He asserted beliefs. The elect believed. The damned refused to believe.
Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to his feet and put himself in an attitude of defense.
He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way before he could come back to earth.
In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to its tremendous import—primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.
Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.
CHAPTER XII
On their way to the hall on the Bowery Gerrit Smith and John Brown passed through dimly lighted streets along which were drifting scores of boys and girls, ragged, friendless, homeless, shelterless in the chill night. The strange old man's eyes were fixed on space. He saw nothing, heard nothing of the city's roaring life or the call of its fathomless misery.
He saw nothing even when they passed a house with a red light before which little girls of twelve were selling flowers. Neither of the men, living for a single fixed idea, caught the accent of evil in the child's voice as she stepped squarely in front of them and said:
"What's ye hurry?"
When they turned aside she piped again: