She had been staring at these other girls, two hundred of them, and her heart was beating oddly. She understood what she was there to do—to stir up emotion in this young, pathetic company, so that her brother’s speech might have quicker and stronger appeal. For a moment she shrank—how could she help to wring money from these? She had heard the men in the office saying that most of them earned five and six dollars a week. To ask them to save a dollar a week! Then it flashed to her that it was for their good; it was not begging their money—it was giving them a chance to invest it safely. Swiftly she was on her feet, and the lovely, untired voice floated out among the silent engineers and the tired mill-hands.
“My country, ’tis of thee—
Sweet land of liberty—”
The two hundred girls, with their worn young faces, with their pitiful efforts at finery, cheap, light-colored shoes that meant heart’s blood, slimsy dresses, cut in a far-off imitation of millionaires’ daughters’ dresses—they listened to the girl’s voice, hypnotized. Discouraged faces brightened, defiant eyes softened; Eric Mannering was indeed doing a wise thing to send his sister’s voice as a messenger to prepare his way.
Then, coming forward with the one or two halting steps which, unknowingly, did so much to open the way to the hearts of his audiences, he spoke. He caught his listeners at an emotional moment and held them there. He said much the same things always, but always with the instinctive fitting of the phrase to the people, which is the gift of a born speaker. And he ended when it was quite clear that the Liberty Loan was no charity but a great chance for good business, with an appeal to patriotism.
“I know you haven’t much money,” he said. “I know it’s hard to make both ends meet; and you save and pinch already. But everybody here can give up something—that thing you’ve been planning to do and saving to do, the thing you want to do a lot. I ask you to give up that for this country of ours—of our very own—which is in danger—which needs you—needs you—and you. Don’t do it just because it’s a good investment—though it is the best investment in the whole world to-day, to lend your savings to America. But do it also for this—because you love your country and want to help her keep free; do it because the whole land stands in peril of a thing more terrible than can be said, and you’re brave enough to want to lift your hand with your countrymen to ward off this danger. Do it because you want to be able to say to your children, years from now, when the world is safe for freedom: ‘I helped make the world safe. I stood by America when she needed me. I bought a Liberty Bond,’” Eric turned suddenly, shaken by his own strong feeling, and met his sister’s eyes, and it was as if he had said the words to her.
Honor did not sleep much that night. Over and over she whispered in the darkness her brother’s words, “I helped make the world safe. I stood by America when she needed me. I bought a Liberty Bond,” and closer and closer drew the spell which the words threw about her. How would it be when a day came that children of hers gathered around to ask questions of the great time when half the world battled for democracy, for freedom? How would it be when one said:
“And you, mother? You did your bit? You helped the country with all that you were, and all that you had?” How would it be with her that day if her eyes might not meet questioning young eyes?
The girl was tenacious of a purpose; she had promised herself not to be carried away by oratory and the excitement in the air. She knew what she wanted; she had thought out her plan. She had lived for it these two years; it was her work, her affair. The rich could give millions to the Liberty Loan. Why should she sacrifice her hard-earned all when it meant so much to her, and would mean so very little to the country? Only fifteen hundred dollars! Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bonds! How much would that help? Not the firing of a big gun twice! And to her it was her future. If her voice was not trained now it would soon be too late. Let the rich do it—they could buy thousands of bonds and not suffer. Let the rich do it. Daylight was seeping in at the window when she fell asleep with that thought.
But the tide of battle was turned. Possibly most of the fights of humanity are decided two generations or more before one arrives on the field. The powers of inheritance and of tradition are strong and cumulative. The girl had said that she did not belong to her family, yet to-day when the country needed its children, blood asserted itself in her veins as the very blood of an American five generations ago who had fought and died for the thirteen colonies at King’s Mountain; of a woman, a girl, who about the same time had put her two babies behind her and fired steadily on the Indians at Cherry Valley; of two young great-uncles who had fallen, one on each side, for the right as each saw it, at the first Bull Run; of the great-grandfather who had sacrificed his waning strength to be a war governor, and the grandfather who had left this Garden Court which he loved, because the country needed him at a foreign post. Whether she willed it or not patriotism was in the girl’s blood, and while she steeled herself against its upsetting influence, that slow-rolling flood of tradition and inheritance which had shaped her was, subconsciously, shaping her still. Forces of good are strong as well as forces of evil, and the habit of one generation is the inborn tendency of another.