As he turned into a wider street, he became aware that he was following with many who went one way. He kept on with them, intent on nothing. On Pennsylvania Avenue the crowd was going east, and he went east. But of all this he thought little, until he came near the Capitol. There the people swung both east and west, and rounded the building. So he came out in the Square before the east entrance.

The Square was filled with women. There were some men, too, but women were dominant in the throng. He remembered the meeting to which the papers had vaguely referred and because he had nothing to do, he moved on with the rest to the doors.

He noted that the women were saying little. It was almost a silent throng, as if all were immeasurably absorbed in something. Oddly, he thought of Mrs. Folts, and her absorption in food for her family and her guests.

He was in time to find room on the steps and then within the rotunda. He stared about him. This looked different from all other buildings that he had seen—as if great things were due to happen here. He pressed on slowly, as the others pressed. Eventually the elevators received them, and he found himself in an enormous room, the seats of the floor already filled, the galleries fast filling. He stood against the wall and looked. Below and above a throng of women, and only here and there a man. It occurred to him at last that he did not belong here, but now he could not well retreat, for the crowd blocked the doors.

On the platform were a dozen women. He looked at them curiously. He was familiar with but one sort of woman who was willing to show herself before a crowd. There flashed to his mind the memory of the dozen women whom he had seen on the stage of the Mission Saloon in Inch, on what was to have been Bunchy’s wedding night. Dress them like this, he reflected—dark and plain—and they wouldn’t look so different, at this distance.

The silence disturbed him. What on earth made them so still—as if it were a matter of life and death, whatever they were meeting about. He waited in absorbing curiosity to hear what it was they were going to say.

“Somebody says the Senate’s full, too,” he heard a man tell some one. “And they’re going to speak in the rotunda and on the steps.”

The Inger turned to him.

“What’s this room?” he asked.

“This is the House,” the man replied, courteously.

The Inger looked with new eyes. The House ... where his laws were made. He felt a sudden surprised sense of pride in the room.

The silence became a hush, contagious, electric, and he saw that a woman on the platform had risen. She stood hatless, her hair brushed smoothly back, and her hands behind her. Abruptly he liked her. And he wondered what his mother had looked like.

There was no applause, but to his amazement the whole audience rose, and stood for a moment, in absolute silence. This woman spoke simply, and as if she were talking to each one there. It astonished the man. He had heard no one address a meeting save in campaign speeches, and this was not like those.

“The fine moral reaction,” she said, “has at last come. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim all the human life that has been spent. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim the treasure that has been wasted. But it comes too with a sense of joy that all voluntary destruction of human life, all the deliberate wasting of the fruits of labor, will soon have become things of the past. Whatever the future holds for us, it will at least be free from war.”[1]

Of this the Inger understood nothing. What could she be talking about, when the United States was to go to war at once?

“... it is because women understand that this is so, that we have been able so to come together. Not a month ago the word went out. Yet every state in the United States is represented here in Washington to-day by from one to five hundred women. And no one has talked about it. No one has wondered or speculated. We are here because the time has come.”

And now the Inger thought he understood. They were here to help! The time had come—war was here—they had come here to be ready, to collect supplies, to make bandages....

“... seven women from seven of the warring nations of Europe,” the quiet voice went on, “and women of the other states of Europe answered our appeal, and they are here. They will speak to us to-night—and they are to go from state to state, helping all women to understand.”

Women from the warring nations! The Inger looked eagerly. They had been there, they had seen, they had cheered their husbands and sons. Some of them must have lost their men—of course they could tell the American women what to do.

The first woman, however, was not of a warring country. She was a woman of Denmark. And she was of the same quiet manner and conversational speech.

She said: “During the first day of the war an old man said to me, sad and indignant: ‘To me it is quite unintelligible that citizens of the twentieth century consent to be driven like sheep to the shambles.’ And truly, only a fraction of those involved in the war did intend the war. To them and to us it was a surprise that will repeat itself in history as long as war is declared without the consent of the people, as long as war depends on secret notes and treaties.

“Where can we find a way to prevent another happening of these terrors? Can women possibly have any chance of succeeding where men have recently failed so miserably?

“I came from Denmark to say to you that women have better opportunities than anybody else for creating public opinion—the opinion that grows stronger with the coming race. Women give the next generation its first impressions.

“And the mother must give her children another idea than the armed warrior. Let her show them how unworthy it is of the citizen of the twentieth century to be used, body and blood, without will or resistance, as food for cannon....”[2]

The Inger listened, stupefied. What was this woman saying? It sounded to him like treason for which they should fall on her and drive her from the hall.

Then he heard the country of the next woman who came forward. Germany! Now they would hear the truth. Here was a woman from a nation of soldiers. She would understand, and she would make the rest know in what lay a country’s glory. Moreover, she was a strong woman—a woman to whom that race of mothers and of soldiers might have looked as the mother of them all.

“Women of the World, when will your call ring out?

“Women of all the belligerent states, with head high and courageous heart, gave their husbands to protect the fatherland. Mothers and maidens unfalteringly saw their sons and sweethearts go forth to death and destruction.”

This was it! The Inger drew his breath deep. She knew—she knew.... She wanted American women to feel the same.

“Millions of men have been left on the battlefield. They will never see home again. Others have returned, broken and sick in body and soul. Towns of the highest civilization, homes of simple human happiness, are destroyed. Europe’s soil reeks of human blood. The flesh and blood of men will fertilize the soil of the corn fields of the future on German, French, Belgian and Russian ground.

“Millions of women’s hearts blaze up in anguish. No human speech is rich enough to express such depths of suffering. Shall this war of extermination go on? Shall we sit and wait dumbly for other wars to come upon us?

“Women of the world, where is your voice?

“Are you only great in patience and suffering?

“The earth soaked in blood, millions of wrecked bodies of husbands, sweethearts, sons—outrages inflicted on your sex. Can these things not rouse you to blazing protest?

“Women of the world, where is your voice, that should be sowing seeds of peace? Do not let yourselves be deterred by those who accuse you of weakness because you wish for peace, who say you cannot hold back the bloody march of history by your protest.

“Protest with all your might ... make preparation for peace ... perform your duty as wives and mothers, as protectors of true civilization and humanity!”[3]

Still in that silence, she ceased—but now once more all over the hall, the women rose, and stood there for a moment, looking into the eyes of the woman of Germany. There was no handclapping, there was no word, there was only that single sign—as if in that room there were but one Person, and that Person answered like this to what she said.

The Inger stared about him. What did this mean? Were these a few traitors who had come here to teach American women to play traitor too—

The German woman was speaking again.

“A letter,” she said, “a letter from German and Austrian women, ‘to the women of England—and of the world.’”

She read: “Women, creators and guardians of life, must loathe war, which destroys life. Through the smoke of battle and thunder of cannon of hostile peoples, through death, terror, destruction and unending pain and anxiety, there glows like the dawn of a coming better day the deep community of feeling of many women of all nations.”[4]

“This is signed,” she said, “by one hundred and fifty German and Austrian women. Thousands more are with us in name and spirit. Do not doubt—doubt!”

Another woman rose, and then another:

A letter from the women of England—

“... Is it not our mission to preserve life? Do not humanity and common sense alike prompt us to join hands with the women of neutral countries, and urge the stay of further bloodshed—forever?... There is but one way to do this ... by Wisdom and Reason. Can they begin too soon?... Already we seem to hear

‘A hundred nations swear that there shall be
Pity and Peace and Love among the good and free.’”[5]

Then a letter from the women of Belgium, from the women of Switzerland, from the women of Italy—five hundred, two thousand names to each.

At length the Inger understood. These women who were here to protest against war were speaking for thousands upon thousands of women all over the world. And here were thousands listening, in the nation’s capitol.

A little French woman spoke, each sentence translated by another woman.

“The humblest cry can sometimes be heard joined to many others.... It is very well for gentlemen banqueting at Guildhall to rejoice at being able to assemble so comfortably during the greatest war in history, thanks to the valor of the British army which defends the coast; but they should think of those who are exposing their lives....

“My two sons are in the trenches since the end of September, and have never slept in a bed since. It would be nothing if the cold had not set in so dreadfully....”[6]

Something—no one could have told whether it was a breath, or a look from one to one, went over the hall. More than in a long account of horror, this French mother, who spoke no other tongue, had made them feel what she was feeling.

There was a Polish woman of the country about Cracow who told the story of what had happened to her village. She spoke slowly, through an interpreter, and almost without emotion.

“We had just three little streets,” she said, “so it was not much to take. But they took them....” And she told how, and how a hundred children in the village had died. “I should be less than a woman in courage if I did not say that I, for one, shall not be silent even one day until my death. Every day I shall be crying, ‘Women of the World. This can not happen again, if we are women of flesh and not of stone.’”

There was a woman of Servia, and she was a peasant woman. Her clothes were those which her neighbors had found for her. Even then, so great was the haste at the last, she had crossed the ocean in a skirt and a shawl, but with no waist beneath the shawl.

“I had to come,” she said, through her interpreter. “There is only one hell worse than the hell that we have been through: and that is not to cry to the last breath that it shall be stopped. That it shall not come again to other women like us....”

There was a woman of Belgium, who belonged to a family high in position in Louvain. She wore garments which had been given to her from the American boxes. It was strange to hear that soft voice, in its broken English, speak of a thousand horrors with no passion. But when she spoke of To-morrow, and of what it must bring, her voice throbbed and strove with the spirit which poured through her.

“Do not think of Louvain,” she said. “Do not think of Belgium. Say, if you like, that this was only a part of what happens in war. Think, then, only of war. Think that war must not be ever again in this our world. While women have voices to raise to other women, we must make them understand that peace is our contribution to the earth. Women of the world, what are we waiting for?”

Then there came a woman, young, erect, burning—a woman of Hungary.

“Listen,” she said. “A Hungarian girl who went to care for the Galician refugees tells me in a recent letter the story of a poor woman who said: ‘I wanted to protect my children. I ran with the other inhabitants of the village. I took my baby in a shawl on my back. The two others hung on to my skirts. I ran fast, as fast as I could. When I got to the station, I had the two children hanging on my skirts, I had the shawl on my back, but I had no baby and I don’t know where I dropped him.’”

The Hungarian woman went on:

“They don’t want us to find out that there is no glory, no big patriotism, no love for anything noble, nothing but butchery and slaughter and rape. War means that. You know the story of the War-brides. You know how agents of the different churches compete with military rulers in glorifying this kind of prostitution. But do you know of the concentration camps with the compulsory service of women? You may have seen the full reports of the atrocities committed on Belgian women—but you didn’t get the other reports about the same kind of atrocities committed by all armies on female human beings between the ages of five and eighty-nine in all the countries where the game of war is being played. Women of the world, what are we waiting for?”[7]

And beside her, as she finished, stood an Irish woman, taking up the thread of the Hungarian’s woman’s cry:

“If we women, to whom even a partial knowledge of these happenings has come, remain silent now, then we are blood guilty. We are more than blood guilty, for we must be numbered with those who will even dare the murder of a soul.

“Let us not blind ourselves with talk of the glories and heroisms of war. We dare not ignore the moral and spiritual wreckage that remains unchronicled. We have to think of men brutalized and driven to hideous deeds by their experiences; of men with reason destroyed; of men disgraced for lack of the cold courage that can face such horrors; of men with a slain faith in good, their outlook on life eternally embittered. What of the women for whom the French government has had to devise legislation to deter them from infanticide? What of the children begotten under such conditions? Women of the world, where is your voice, that should be sowing the seeds of peace?”[8]

Almost as her own voice, went on the voice of another woman, the brief poignant entreaty of an English woman:

“We ask nothing strange! Only that which Christianity, civilization and motherhood dictate.

“The well-being of children touches all. On that common ground the opposing nations could meet and crown their courage by laying aside their arms at the call of a higher humanity.

“Can mother hearts turn from this cry? Will not womanhood join in resolve, though in divers tongues, yet with but one Voice—the Voice of pure human love and pity....”[9]

The Inger stood against the wall, and listened. A place had opened into which he had never looked, whose existence he had never guessed. He stood frowning, staring—at first trying to understand, then understanding and passionately doubting. The appeals of the first speakers did not touch him. What did women know of these things?

Then the Polish woman had spoken. Then the Servian woman. Then the Belgium woman. These undeniably knew what they were talking about! But not until that woman of Hungary had stood there, did the thought come which had pierced him: What if all that she said was true—and was true of Lory? What if it had been her child whom Lory had lost from her shawl as she ran....

He breathed hard, and looked about him. They were all, men and women alike, sitting as tense as he. And he saw that all these believed. No one, no one could doubt these women.

“This is what we have to do—” it was another German woman who was speaking and the interpreter was giving her words. “This is what we have to do: our cry must ring forth irresistibly from millions of voices: ‘Enough of slaughter, enough of devastation. Peace, lasting peace! Make room for peaceful work. Leave the way free for the fraternity of the peoples and for their coÖperation in bringing to flower the culture of international civilization!’

“If men kill, it is for women to fight for the preservation of life. If men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices on behalf of our ideals.”[10]

The Inger stood where the wall curved, so he was looking at the rows of faces from near the front of the room. And he was looking on a sign, a hint no greater in emphasis than a shadow, of what war is to women. He understood it, momentarily he even felt it. And for a flash he saw them all as he had seen the women in the Chicago employment agency—as if he were those women and could suffer what they suffered.

He remembered Lory, and her face lifted to his in the Chicago meeting.

“They’re voting to kill folks,” she had said. “Oh, my God.”

This was what she had meant. She had understood, and he had not understood. How had she understood? He thought about her. Out of Inch, out of scenes of killing, and of misery put upon life, Jem Moor’s girl had come, and she knew how to feel the way these women felt. All that he had been feeling for her became something which beat upon his heart like light.

A note had been sent to the chairman, and with her announcement, a movement of wonder went over the audience, and this wonder was touched with dread. A famous army man was present, and he would speak.

He came forward firmly, and it was by the merest chance that he stood there before them erect, strong, compact, alive, for he had seen service. The Inger looked at him, quickening. Immediately, at the sight of his uniform, the Inger had felt a restoration of confidence in what had always been. Then the man faced them, and he spoke as quietly as the women themselves:

“I ask only to tell you,” he said, “that I have been for twenty-five years in the service—a part of the time in active service. I have believed in armies and in armament. I still believe them to have been an obvious necessity—while our world was being whipped into shape. Now I am in the last years of my service—I do not take very readily to new ideas—even when I know that these point to the next step on the way. I tell you frankly, that if there were a call to arms, I should be there in my old place—I should serve as I have always served, I should kill whom they told me to kill, as long as they would have me there. But—” he hesitated, and lifted his face, and in it was a light that has shone on a face in no battlefield, “if that time comes, I shall thank God for every woman who protests against it, as you here are protesting. And, if that time comes, from my soul I shall honor the men who will have the courage to be shot, rather than to go out to shoot their fellows. These men will not be lacking: I have read the signs and I have heard men talk. Your new way of warfare is not in vain. You will win. You are the voice of To-morrow. I have wanted you to know that I feel this—and that to you and to your effort I say God bless you, and prosper what you do.”

For the first time that night the silence of the audience was broken. A thunder of hands and voices spoke to him. And, as he turned to leave the platform, they did that by which they paid the highest honor that they knew—and rose and remained standing until he had reached his seat.

“Jove,” said the man near the Inger. “Old Battle-axe! Now watch the men catch up. It only needed one full-blooded man to say it....”

“Rot,” said the man beyond him. “No matter what they say, you know and I know that trade will never get out of the way of peace. There’ll be no peace while we have trade—and that’ll be for some time to come!”

At this the first man laughed.

“Trade,” he said, “was a thought before it was trade. Peace is a thought—yet.”

On the stage some one was quoting Washington: “My first wish is—to see the whole world in peace and the inhabitants of it as one band of brothers, striving who should contribute most to the happiness of mankind.”

And Victor Hugo: “A day will come when a cannon ball will be exhibited in public museums, just as an instrument of torture is now; and people will be amazed that such a thing could ever have been.”

Methodically, and as if it had become their business, the women fell to discussing what they must do. In each country more groups must be organized—for School, Home, States, Municipalities—“for the lifting of the programme of pacifism into the realm of serious commercial and educational and home and political consideration.” The psychology of war must give place to the psychology of peace.

From unfair trade legislation by one country against another, down to the sale of toy weapons and soldiers; and from competing expenditures for national defence down to military drill in schools and colleges, the temptations to militarism must pass from the earth.

“We know,” an American woman said, “that war depends on economic conditions beyond our control. But we know, too, that there is something potent to change even these, and it is this potency which we dream to liberate.”

And, beside the Inger, the man said again:

“Peace is only a thought,—yet. But even economic conditions were only thought, once!”

Gradually in the voice of one and another, the word took shape—so simply that the enormity of the import was pathetically lacking: That representatives of the women of the world, united in a demand for international righteousness, shall petition the men and women of the world to turn to the new knowledge that war is an outworn way to settle difficulties; that with one voice we shall all refuse any longer to let the traditions of a past age be put upon us; that the old phrases and catch-words shall not stand for one moment before the naked question of the race: “Is this the best that life can do with life?” That we shall learn from one another that there is no such thing as preparing against war, but that to prepare for war breeds war—twin-born are the slayer and the slain; that we shall teach one another that “Thou shalt not kill” is not only moral law, but sound economic policy, for always these two are one. And that from the constructive plans devised in anguish and in hope by men and women of to-day, there be selected and inaugurated a world programme for permanent peace without armistice and a council of the nations looking toward the federation of the world.

“We have talked long enough of treaties and of arbitration,” they said. “Let us have done with such play. Let us speak the phrase quite simply: The federation of the world.”

And the message concluded:

“For we, the women of the world, have banded ourselves together to demand that war be abolished.”

Last, he remembered a Voice. Afterward, he could not have told what woman spoke, or of what nation they said that she had come. But what she said was like the weaving of what the others had spun.

“Remember,” said her Voice, “that all this is nothing. It is only the body, made for the spirit. And the spirit is that new dominant mind which shall be born in the world—the mind of love.

“You’ll not get this by going to governments. You’ll not get this by the meeting of groups of representative people. You’ll not get this by International Police. These things must be—will be, as a matter of course. But they will not be the mind of love.

“Something will come into the world—and it will know nothing of arbitration, it will know nothing of armistice, it will know nothing of treaties; nor will it know anything of those other ways of secret warfare by which great nations seem to keep clean hands: the ways of ‘high’ finance through ‘peaceful penetration.’

“Something will come into the world, and it will know nothing of nations.

“The little loyalties will go. National pride, national ‘honor,’ patriotism—all the little scaffolds will fall away. And within will be the light that we lack.

“It is the mind of love. I am not afraid to say that beside it, governments are nothing. It is the mind of love. It may be in the simplest cottage of a peasant who goes to the war for a false ideal. But of this as yet the nations do not know.

“What is it that we must know?

“That the nations are nothing—the people are everything. That the people are bound together by ties which the nations must cease to break. That the people are heart’s kindred, met here together for their world-work, and that the nations must cease to interrupt.”

Even then the Cabinet meeting was already concluded, and the newsboys were on the streets with the Extras; and on the bulletin boards of the world the word was being flashed:

“NO ACTION TO BE TAKEN
BY U. S.”

And in the newspapers was the text of that letter, simple, human, of almost religious import, which was to make the United States, years hence, stand out as the first great headland upon new shores.

The people were coming out at the doors of the Capitol. Among them were the women who had spoken—the Polish woman, the Servian peasant, the lady of Louvain. The other women in the crowd put out their hands and took the hands of these women. Those stretching, pressing hands of silent women marked a giant fellowship which disregarded oceans, strange tongues, countless varying experiences, and took account of only one thing.

The Inger was looking up at the white dome against the black sky, and about him at the march of the people. Through his thought ran the flood of this that he had heard. In his absorption he lurched heavily against a man who was trying to pass him and who jostled him. For the first time in his life, the Inger felt no surge of anger at such a happening. He looked in the man’s face.

“Gosh,” the Inger said. “That was too alfired bad!”

The man smiled and nodded. Momentarily, the Inger felt on his arm the touch of the man’s hand.

“All right, brother,” the man said, and was gone.

The Inger felt a sudden lightness of heart. And about him the people went along so quietly. Abruptly the tumult of his thinking gave way to something nearer than these things. He looked in their faces. None of them knew that his father had died! It occurred to him now that there was hardly one of them who, on being told, would not say something to him—perhaps even shake his hand. He thought that many of these people must have seen their fathers die. He wondered which ones these would be, and he wished that he knew which ones they were. Something in him went along with the people, because they must have had fathers who had died. He looked at them in a new way. Their fathers must have died....

Oh, if only, he thought, Lory might have been there to-night with those women who felt as she felt....

He was aware of a hand on his arm. He turned, feeling an obscure pleasure that perhaps some one had something to say to him. It was Lory, alone.