He went downstairs, and out on the street. At the next house a blind man lived. This man took his little walk every day. The walk consisted of six paces from the house to the street, and six paces back again. On the street he dared not go. Here in the yard he could encounter nothing. To guide his course he dragged his stick on the edge of the bricks. In this way he could walk very briskly, almost as a man might walk on a street. The Inger watched him. Something in himself seemed to go out of him and to make its way to that blind man.
“Sometime,” he thought, “I’ll go and take him for a walk—afterward.”
That day all Washington, and with it all the country, stood on its doorstep, awaiting the newspapers. But when the boys first came crying the headlines, the Inger let them go by. He had a vague sense of wishing not to be interrupted. Toward noon, however, a phrase caught from a street call lured him down. One of the newspapers which batten on bad news, playing it up, making it worse, contradicting it for another price, came to his hand. This paper announced that the United States would that day positively declare war on the offending nation. Even then the newspaper’s presses were methodically at work on a denial, but this the Inger did not know. He sat staring at what he read. So, then, it had come. So, then, he was really to go to war.... There was something, too, about a great meeting of women in the Capitol. To this, save the headlines and the snapshots of women which covered an inside page, he did not attend. “Sob Session Probable,” he read, and wondered what it meant.
His father still slept, and, watching by his bed, he himself grew drowsy. He lay down on his blanket on the floor. This was a strange thing, to lie down to sleep in the day time. He looked up at the high walls of his tiny room. The side walls were larger than the floor—as the walls of a grave would be—he thought. His father stirred and whimpered.
“Oh my God—my God—my God....” he said, but he did not wake. This he said over many times.
At last the Inger dozed, with a preliminary sense of sinking, and of struggling not to let himself go. In his dream he went with his father on an immense empty field. There they were looking for the others, and they could see no one. They walked for a long way, looking for the others. Then these others were all about them, and they were marching, and it seemed very natural that there should be war. At any moment now, there would be war. So they marched and stood face to face with those whom they were sent to fight. And a sense of sickening horror shook him in his dream—for those whom they faced were women. The women were coming, and they had only their bare hands. Tossed by a tide of ancestral fear, he understood that among those women was Lory Moor. He shouted to her to go away—but instead they all came on, steadily, all those women—and he could not tell where she walked, and every one said that the orders were to fire. Caught and wrenched by the fear that never lives, any more, among waking men, he lived the dead passion of fear in his sleep, and woke, wasted by his horror.
He struggled up and looked at his father.
“Oh my God ... my God ... my God,” his weak voice was going on.
And from the floor beside him the black headlines of the lying paper stared: