“Why?” asked Lory. “Why would you do that—if it didn’t make any difference?”
“Because you’d be a dub if you didn’t,” he replied simply.
He was silent for a minute, played at picking her up in his arms, holding her, hewing through the crowd, trampling them out of the way, and as he went, kissing her when he pleased. To him the hall dimmed and went out.... Then he heard the chairman speaking.
The chairman was a man of thick body and bent head, with watching eyes, and a mouth that shut as a fist shuts. His voice went over the hall like a horn.
The meeting had been called because something must be done—something must be done. The war had dragged on until the world was sucked. Men, women, children, money, arms, cities, nations, were heaped on the wreck. The wreck was the world. Something must be done—something must be done. In all the earth stood only one great nation, untouched of carnage, fat, peopled—and peopled with sons of the warring world. This meeting had been called because something must be done. There were those who had come to tell what to do.
To those who comprehended, the weight of the moment lay in the chaos of applause which took the house. The air of the place, languid, silent, casual, for all that one observed, abruptly solidified and snapped, and flew asunder. In its place leaped something electric, which played from the people to the speaker who came first to his place, and from him back to the people.
This man began to speak slowly. He was slow-moving, slow of eyelid and of glance, and his words came half sleepily. It was so that he told them about themselves: Children of those who had come to America for escape, for retreat, for a place of self-expression. Who had sought liberty, free schools, manhood suffrage, womanhood suffrage, religious freedom, and had found some of these and were seeking more. Picture by picture he showed them a country which, save for its enduring era of industrial babyhood, and its political and judicial error, gave them richly of what they had sought, developed them, fed them, comforted them. A place of plenty, a happy paradise, a walled world, he pictured theirs.
In the same sleepy, casual fashion, he went on: Why should they set about all this talk of “something must be done”? This was none of our quarrel. Perfectly, by this time, we recognized its causes as capitalistic issues. If they chose to murder one another, should we add terror unto terror by slaying more, and ourselves? Why ourselves and our sons? Why not stay soft in the nest we had made, while men of the soil which had nourished our fathers called to us vainly, the death rattle in their throats? Sigh delicately for this rattle of death in millions of throats and fill our own with the fat of the land whose prosperity must not be imperilled. Read of a people decimated, and answer by filing a protest. Pray for peace incessantly, beside our comfortable beds. Read of atrocities and shudder in our warm libraries. Hear of dead men who fought and dead men who rotted, and talk it over on our safe, sunlit streets. Meet insult on the high seas, and merely hold mass meetings. And speculate, speculate, speculate, at our laden dinner tables, on the probable outcome.
“The part of men is being played by us all,” the slow voice went on, “of men and of descendants of men of Europe. It was so that they acted in ’76—the men of Europe, was it not? And we are the sons of those who, before ’76, made Europe as they made America—and us. The destruction of one of our vessels—what is that to us? Let’s turn the other cheek. And let’s meet here often, friends, what do you say? Here it is warm and light—you come from good dinners—you come in good clothes—in automobiles. Let us meet to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow! Let us have music—Where is the music to-night? ‘Tipperary’—‘Marseillaise’—‘Wacht Am Rhein’—‘God Save the King’—why are we not being stirred by these to sign a protest, to take a collection which shall keep them fighting on? ‘Something must be done!’ So we meet—and meet—and meet again. And we play a part that in the history of the next century will make the very schoolboys say: ‘Thank God, America locked her door and kept her safety and let them die!’ Next week—let us meet here again next week, pleasantly and together. ‘Something must be done!’ In the name of all the bleeding nations, let us keep on meeting, in this large and lighted hall.”
Before the silence in which he turned away had been rent by the applause that followed on the surprise of it, another man sprang from his seat on the stage and strode to the front. In a gesture curiously awkward and involuntary, he signed them to let him speak, and his voice burst out before they could hear him.