“All’s well!” the doctor echoed with the mirthless laughter of the damned.
Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and stared at the star beyond the rail.
“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder. Just now—to-night—somehow—I’ve got a queer feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it’s going to be.—Maybe it’s going to be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history, perhaps, has been on us. And maybe it’s almost over. Maybe we’re going to do the impossible, after all, doctor. And maybe we’re going to get it done in time. I’ve got a queer sense of something happening—something getting ready.”
When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little.
“I wish my father could have lived to see this day. He’s in New York now, and I should like—”
The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying: “Lie down, Hallett. You’d better lie down now.”
But the other protested with a gray hand.
“No, no, you don’t understand. When I say—well—it’s just the shell of my father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison killed his heart. He doesn’t even know it, that the immortal soul of him has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical—‘the Destroyer,’ they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man, doctor; you’ve got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and as mad. I can see him now,—to-night,—sitting in the back room in Eighth Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O’Reilly and the rest, with all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They’re old men, doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn’t see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption. They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn’t so. All their lives they’ve been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were almost in sight of the splendid dawn—the dawn of the Day of Barricades. And then this war, this thing they call a ‘rich man’s plot’ to confound them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow—to-morrow—some safely distant to-morrow (for they’re old men),—to-morrow, the barricades! And that’s queer. That’s queer.”
“Queer?”
“It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there’s been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but the sound of barricades.”