“To vindicate our honor! To help our neighbors and our kin!” shouted the lean man who had spoken last.
The older man regarded him quietly:
“You want to kill your neighbors,” he repeated. “You want to go over there with arms and be at war. You want to kill your neighbors. I am asking you why?”
From the upper gallery came a cry that was like a signal. Up there a hundred throats took up a national hymn. Instantly from the balconies below, from pit, from stage, a thousand were on their feet and a thousand throats took up the air. Not an instant later, something cut the current of the tune, wavered, broke, swelled—and another nation’s hymn, by another thousand, rose and bore upon the first, and the two shook the place with discord. A third nation’s air—a fourth—the hall was a warfare of jarring voices—and out of the horror of sound came the old exquisite phrases, struggling for dominance: “God Save the Queen”—”Watch on the Rhine,” “The Marseillaise,” “The Italian Hymn,” and rollicking over all, the sickening wistfulness and hopelessness and sweetness of “Tipperary.”
The Inger raised his great form and stretched up his arms and shook them above his head, and swung out his right arm as if it flung a rope.
“Yi—eih—ai—la—o-o-o-oh—!” he shouted, like the cry of all the galloping cow-punchers of the West, galloping, and galloping, to a thing on which, with sovereign intensity, they were bent. He silenced those about him, and they looked and laughed, and gave themselves back to their shouting. The woman with the blue-boned hand looked over to Lory, and smiled with a liquid brightness in her eyes, and her pink spangled fan tapped her hand in tune with the nearest of the songs about her. This woman looked like a woman of the revolution, who believed that good has always come out of war, and that from war good will always come. She smiled. Tears rolled on her face. She sank back weakly, but she waved her pink spangled fan.
As his hand came down, Lory caught at the Inger’s sleeve.
“Can’t we go?” she begged. “Can’t we?”