She laughed, and caught up an end of her blue knitted shawl and covered her face, and dropped the shawl with almost a sob.
“Rights—and land—and sea-ports!” she said over.
The three words hung in air, and echoed. And abruptly there came upon him a dozen things that he had heard that night: “We had just three little streets, but they took those....” “There is only one hell worse than we have been through....” “Say, if you like, that Belgium was only a part of what happens in war....” “We have to think of men brutalized and driven to hideous deeds....” “Enough of slaughter. Enough of devastation. Peace—lasting peace!” And then again the words of the Hungarian woman: “I had the shawl on my back, but I had no baby and I don’t know where I dropped him.”
“Think of millions of men doing like Dad and that sheriff,” the girl said suddenly. “I saw ’em there on the woodshed floor,—stark, starin’, ravin’ mad.”
Sharp on the dark before him was struck the image of that old madman in the kitchen. There was a beast in him. The Inger had felt the beast in himself answer. He had felt the shame of a man who is a beast to another man. What if it were the same kind of shame for the nations?
Suddenly, in his arms, Lory was pouring out all that she had longed to say to him.
“Back there in Inch,” she cried, “I knew there was some other way. I had to know! It didn’t seem as if everybody could be like Dad and Bunchy. Then I saw you—and you seemed like you could be some other way. And you are—and see the folks there. There is some other way to be besides killin’!”
The lights in the dome went out, and that high white presence dropped back against the sky. Still the people were going by, their feet treading the gravel; and now there was a man’s voice, now a woman’s voice, now the sleepy treble of a child. And they were all in some exquisite faith of destination.
“I guess there must be some other way,” the Inger said.
To the man and the woman in each other’s arms, there came no glimpse of the future, great with its people, “striving who should contribute most to the happiness of mankind.” But of the man’s love was born his dim knowledge—which had long been the woman’s knowledge—that the people are bound together by ties which the nations must cease to break. That the people are heart’s kindred, met here for their world-work, which the nations must cease to interrupt.