Part 24

“No, it’s we have held it, not they. And we that have got to hold it—longer than they. Theirs is the kind of a _Mittel-Europa_ that’s been done before; history is little more than a copybook for such an empire as they are building. We’ve got a vaster and more incredible empire to build than they—a _Mittel-Europa_, let us say, of the spirit of man. No, no, doctor; it’s we that are doing the impossible, holding that thin line.”

The doctor failed to contain himself.

“Oh, pshaw! _pshaw!_ See here, Hallett! We’ve had the men, and there’s no use blinking the truth. And we’ve had the money and the munitions.”

“But back of all that, behind the last reserve, the last shell-dump, the last treasury, haven’t they got something that we’ve never had?”

“And what’s that?”

“A dream.”

“A _what_?”

“A dream. We’ve dreamed no dream. Yes—let me say it! A little while ago you said, ‘nightmare,’ and I said, ‘dream.’ Germany has dreamed a dream. Black as the pit of hell,—yes, yes,—but a dream. They’ve seen a vision. A red, bloody, damned vision,—yes, yes,—but a vision. They’ve got a programme, even if it’s what you called it, a ‘rehearsed and abominable programme.’ And they know what they want. And we don’t know what we want!”

The doctor’s fist came down in the palm of his hand.

“What we want? I’ll tell you what we want, Hallett. _We want to win this war!_”

“Yes?”

“And by the living God, Hallett, we will win this war! I can see again. If we fight for half a century to come; if we turn the world wrong-side-out for men, young men, boys, babes; if we mine the earth to a hollow shell for coal and iron; if we wear our women to ghosts to get out the last grain of wheat from the fields—we’ll do it! And we’ll wipe this black thing from the face of the earth forever, root and branch, father and son of the bloody race of them to the end of time. If you want a dream, Hallett, there’s a—”

“There’s a—nightmare. An overweening muscular impulse to jump on the thing that’s scared us in the dark, to break it with our hands, grind it into the ground with our heels, tear ourselves away from it—and wake up.”

He went on again after a moment of silence.

“Yes, that’s it, that’s it. We’ve never asked for anything better; not once since those terrible August days have we got down on our naked knees and prayed for anything more than just to be allowed to wake up—and find it isn’t so. How can we expect, with a desire like that, to stand against a positive and a flaming desire? No, no! The only thing to beat a dream is a dream more poignant. The only thing to beat a vision black as midnight is a vision white as the noonday sun. We’ve come to the place, doctor, where half a loaf is worse than no bread.”

The doctor put his hands in his pockets and took them out again, shifted away a few steps and back again. He felt inarticulate, handless, helpless in the face of things, of abstractions, of the mysterious, unflagging swiftness of the ship, bearing him willy-nilly over the blind surface of the sea. He shook himself.

“God help us,” he said.

“What God?”

The doctor lifted a weary hand.

“Oh, if you’re going into _that_—”

“Why not? Because Prussia, doctor, has a god. Prussia has a god as terrible as the God of conquering Israel, a god created in her own image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this god. I tell you we’re fools. I tell you, doctor, before we shall stand we shall have to create a god in _our_ own image, and before we do that we shall have to have a living and sufficient image.”

“You don’t think much of us,” the doctor murmured wearily.

The other seemed not to hear. After a little while he said:

“We’ve got to say black or white at last. We’ve got to answer a question this time with a whole answer.”

“This war began so long ago,” he went on, staring at the star. “So long before Sarajevo, so long before the ‘balances of power’ were thought of, so long before the ‘provinces’ were lost and won, before Bismarck and the lot of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, many years of questions put, and half-answers given in return. Questions, questions: questions of a power-loom in the North Counties; questions of a mill-hand’s lodging in one Manchester or another, of the weight of a headtax in India, of a widow’s mass for her dead in Spain; questions of a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black man in New Orleans, of a Christian in Turkey, an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an idiot sitting on a throne; questions of a girl asking her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a girl asking her price in the dark of a Chicago doorway—whole questions half-answered, hungry questions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of questions piling up and piling up year by year, decade after decade.— Listen! There came a time when it wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. There came a time when the son of all those questions stood up in the world, final, unequivocal, naked, devouring, saying, ‘Now you shall answer me. You shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you shall look at nothing else; you shall take your hands out of your pockets and your tongues out of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no matter what the blood and anguish of it, you shall answer me now with a whole answer—or perish!’”

“And what’s the answer?”

The doctor leaned down a little, resting his hands on the foot of the cot.

The gray patch of Hallett’s face moved slightly in the dark.

“It will sound funny to you. Because it’s a word that’s been worn pretty thin by so much careless handling. It’s ‘Democracy’!”

The doctor stood up straight on his thick legs.

“Why should it sound funny?” he demanded, a vein of triumph in his tone. “It is the answer. And we’ve _given_ it. ‘Make the world safe for democracy!’ Eh? You remember the quotation?”

“Yes, yes, that’s good. But we’ve got to do more than say it, doctor. Go further. We’ve got to dream it in a dream; we’ve got to see democracy as a wild, consuming vision. If the day ever comes when we shall pronounce the word ‘democracy’ with the same fierce faith with which we conceive them to be pronouncing ‘autocracy’—that day, doctor—”

He raised a transparent hand and moved it slowly over his eyes.

“It will be something to do, doctor, that will. Like taking hold of lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip us naked for a moment, leave us new-born and shaken and weak—as weak as Christ in the manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see, we’ll know what we want.”

The doctor stood for a moment as he had been, a large, dark troubled body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a hand over his face.

“Utopian!” he said.

“Utopian!” Hallett repeated after him. “To-day we are children of Utopia—or we are nothing. I tell you, doctor, to-day it has come down to this—Hamburg to Bagdad—or—Utopia!”

The other lifted his big arms and his face was red.

“You’re playing with words, Hallett. You do nothing but twist my words. When I say Utopian, I mean, precisely, impossible. Absolutely impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream. I give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years. _Forty years!_ And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you talk about,—so much harder,—so many hundreds of times more incredible,—will you have us do that sort of a thing in a _day_? We’re a dozen races, a score of nations. I tell you it’s—it’s impossible!”

“Yes. Impossible.”

The silence came down between them, heavy with all the dark, impersonal sounds of passage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the breathing of engines, the muffled staccato of the spark in the wireless room, the note of the ship’s bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail, running thin in the wind: “Six bells, sir, and—_all’s well_!”

“_All’s well!_”

The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling so in the black interlude, like stage business long rehearsed.

“_All’s well!_” the doctor echoed with the mirthless laughter of the damned.

Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and stared at the star beyond the rail.

“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder. Just now—to-night—somehow—I’ve got a queer feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it’s going to be.—Maybe it’s going to be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history, perhaps, has been on us. And maybe it’s almost over. Maybe we’re going to do the impossible, after all, doctor. And maybe we’re going to get it done in time. I’ve got a queer sense of something happening—something getting ready.”

When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little.

“I wish my father could have lived to see this day. He’s in New York now, and I should like—”

The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying: “Lie down, Hallett. You’d better lie down now.”

But the other protested with a gray hand.

“No, no, you don’t understand. When I say—well—it’s just the shell of my father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison killed his heart. He doesn’t even know it, that the immortal soul of him has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical—‘the Destroyer,’ they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man, doctor; you’ve got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and as mad. I can see him now,—to-night,—sitting in the back room in Eighth Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O’Reilly and the rest, with all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They’re old men, doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn’t see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption. They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn’t so. All their lives they’ve been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were almost in sight of the splendid dawn—the dawn of the Day of Barricades. And then this war, this thing they call a ‘rich man’s plot’ to confound them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow—to-morrow—some safely distant to-morrow (for they’re old men),—to-morrow, the barricades! And that’s queer. That’s queer.”

“Queer?”

“It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there’s been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but the sound of barricades.”

The voice trailed off into nothing.

To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along the near deck, his hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his breast, there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the ship which held him up in the dark void between two continents.

What was it all about, he asked himself over and over. Each time he passed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head, painfully, and as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of the cot and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined, motionless and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death.

But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett’s whisper creeping to him out of the shadow:

“That’s a bright star, doctor.”

THE BIRD OF SERBIA

_By_ JULIAN STREET From _Collier’s Weekly_ _Copyright, 1918, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc._ _Copyright, 1919, by Julian Street._

“Here’s a queer item,” remarked the man at the window end of the long leather-covered seat, looking up from his newspaper and apparently speaking in general to the other occupants of the Pullman smoking compartment. “There’s a dispatch here announcing the death from tuberculosis of that Serbian who shot the Archduke of Austria at Sarajevo. It seems he has been in prison ever since. I thought he had been executed long ago.”

Four of us, strangers to one another, had settled in the smoking compartment at the beginning of the journey from Chicago to New York, and as we had been on our way nearly an hour it seemed time for conversation.

“They didn’t execute him,” replied a man who sat in one of the chairs, “because he was under age. It’s against the law, over there, to execute a person under twenty-one. This boy was only nineteen.”

“The law wouldn’t have cut much figure over here in a case like that,” replied the first speaker.

“Perhaps not,” returned the man in the chair, “but respect for law is one of the few benefits that seem to go with autocratic government. I don’t find that dispatch in my paper. May I borrow yours?”

The other handed over the journal, indicating the item with his finger.

“I had almost forgotten that fellow,” spoke up a third traveler. “The rush and magnitude of the war have carried our thoughts—and for the matter of that, our soldiers too—a pretty long way since the assassination occurred. Yet I suppose historians, digging back into the minute beginnings of the war, will all trace down to the shot fired by that Serbian.”

“That’s what the paper says,” returned the one who had begun to talk. “It speaks of ‘the historic shot fired in Serbia’ as the thing that fired the world.”

“And in doing so,” declared the man who had borrowed the paper, “it falls into a popular error. The shot was _not_ fired in Serbia, but in Austria-Hungary, and the boy who did the shooting was an Austro-Hungarian subject.”

“But that doesn’t seem possible,” interposed the man who had spoken of the historical aspect of the case. “If he was an Austrian subject and did the shooting in Austria, how could Austria make that an excuse for attacking Serbia?”

The other looked from the window for a moment before replying.

“It was one of the poorest excuses imaginable,” he returned. “Autocracies can do those things; that’s why they must be stamped out. As you said, historians will trace back to the assassination. It so happened that I was over there at the time and got a glimpse of what lay back of the assassination—microscopic, unclean forces of which historians will never hear, yet which seem peculiarly suitable in connection with Austria’s crime. But I had better not get to talking about all that.”

As though in indication of his intention to be silent, he closed his mouth firmly. It was a strong mouth and could shut with finality. Everything about him expressed strength and determination mixed, as these qualities often are in the highest type of American business man, with gentleness, good nature, and modesty. I liked his looks. He was the kind of man you would pick out to take care of your watch and pocketbook—or your wife—in case of emergency. I wanted him to go on talking, and said so, and when both the other men backed up my request, he began in a spirit evidently reluctant but obliging:

“For some years before the outbreak of this war,” he said, “I represented a large American oil company in southeastern Europe, where we had a considerable market. My headquarters were at Vienna, but my travels took me through various countries inhabited by people of the Serb race, and I found it advantageous to learn to speak the Serbian tongue, both for business reasons and because I enjoyed making friends among the people. In order to practice the language and form some knowledge of the people, I made it a custom, when traveling, to stop at small hotels used by the Serbs themselves, in preference to the more cosmopolitan establishments; or, where the small hotels were not clean, I would sometimes take a room with some Serbian family.

”In Bosnia there was one very attractive little city to which I was always particularly glad to go. It was a place of thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and lay in a lovely, fertile valley among the hills; and you may judge something of it by the fact that the Serbs coupled the adjective ‘golden’ with the town’s name. Not one American in a thousand—probably not one in a hundred thousand—had ever heard of the place then, yet it was the capital of Bosnia. The Austrian governor of Bosnia had his palace there, and the life of the place was like that of some great capital in miniature. One thing about the town which interested me was the way in which its people and its architecture reflected Bosnian history. In the first place there were many Serbs there, the more prosperous of them dressing like conventional Europeans—except that the fez was worn by almost all of them—and living in low, picturesque Serbian houses, with roofs of tile or flat stone shingle; the rest peasants in the Bosnian costume, who came in from the outlying agricultural regions. But also there were Mohammedans—leftovers from the days of Turkish dominion—and the town had minarets and other architectural signs of the Turk. And last there were the Austrians—the Austrian governor, Austrian soldiers in uniform about the streets, Austrian minor officials everywhere; and in new buildings, parks, and boulevards, Austrian taste. For, after taking Bosnia, under the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878, the Austrians, knowing well that their grabbing policy was criticized, went to some pains to beautify the Bosnian capital, with the object, it is commonly understood, of impressing visitors—and perhaps also the inhabitants themselves—with the ‘benefits’ of Austrian rule—as though palaces, parks, pavements, and prostitutes were sufficient compensation to the Serbs for the racial unity and freedom which have been denied them, first by one nation, then by another.“

“But,” some one broke in, “up to the time of the present war, didn’t the Serbs have Serbia?”

“The present kingdom of Serbia proper was inhabited by Serbs,” returned the other, “but the Serbia we know is only a small part of what was, long ago, the Serbian Empire. Since the fall of the empire, in the fourteenth century, it has been the great ambition of the Serbs to become again a unified nation. Bosnia was a part of the old empire, but was conquered by the Turks, and later taken over by the Austrians. The story I am about to tell shows, however, what an enduring race consciousness the Bosnian Serbs have maintained.

“Our district manager for Bosnia lived in the town of which I have been speaking, and when I first went there he took me to a small but

## particularly clean and attractive hotel, run by an Austrian Serb. As is

usual in small hotels in Europe, the proprietor’s family took part in the work of running the place; and as I used to stay there frequently, sometimes for two or three weeks at a stretch, I soon came to know them all well. As the years passed I became really attached to them, and there were many signs to show that they were fond of me. Michael, the father, exercised general supervision—though he was not above carrying a trunk upstairs; Stana, the mother, kept the accounts and superintended the cooking, which was excellent; the two daughters worked in the kitchen and sometimes helped wait on table. Even the boy, Gavrilo, the youngest member of the family, helped after school with light work, though he studied hard and was not very strong. I often sat with them at their own family table at one end of the dining-room; I called them all by their given names, and addressed them with the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ of familiarity.

“When I first knew Gavrilo he was twelve or thirteen years old. His father, though of pure Serb blood, had acquired, with years and experience in business, a certain resignation to the existing order of things. He had seen several wars and revolutions, and as he grew older had begun to think that peace under Austrian domination was better than continual conflict, whatever the cause.

“The boy Gavrilo was, however, more like Stana, his mother. Stana could grow old, but the flame in her, the poetry, the mysticism, and above all the Serbian racial feeling, never diminished. Gavrilo learned the Serbian folk stories and songs at her knee; also he learned from her Serbian history, which, under Austria, was not taught in the schools; for the Austrians have long desired to crush out Serbian racial feeling.

“Gavrilo and I became great friends. He was hungry for knowledge and never tired of asking me about the United States and our freedom, free speech, and free opportunity—all of which, of course, seemed very wonderful to one growing up in a decadent, bureaucratic empire, made up of various races held together against their will. In return I gathered from Gavrilo a considerable knowledge of Serb history and legend—and you may be sure that in what he told me, neither the Turks nor the Austrians came off very well. Even as a lad he always referred to the Austrians as _shvaba_—a Serbian word meaning something like our term boches—and by the time he was sixteen he had promoted them to be _proclete shvaba_, which may be freely translated as ‘damned boches.’

“For a long time I took his strong anti-Austrian utterances lightly, considering them the result of boyish ebullience of spirit, but as he grew nearer manhood, and the fierceness of his feeling seemed to increase rather than diminish, I became concerned about him; for it is no wiser for an Austrian Serb to call the Austrians _shvaba_ than it would be for an Alsatian to call the Prussians boches.

“As Gavrilo grew up, his passionate racial feeling disturbed me more and more, though, of course, I sympathized with it. I determined to make an opportunity for a serious talk with him on the subject, and to that end suggested that he go with me to the neighboring hills for a couple of days’ gunning; for Bosnia abounds in game.

“Gavrilo proved to be a very good shot. He would shoot wild pigeons, grouse, and woodcock from the hip, and he even brought along a pistol with which he could hit a hare at a considerable distance. These exhibitions of skill were, however, accompanied by remarks which did not make it easier for me to broach the topic upon which I wished to speak to him. When he would hit a pigeon he would exclaim: ‘There goes another member of the Hapsburg family!’ or: ‘That one was a _shvab_ tax collector!’ or, mock-heroically, ‘So much for you, you nobleman of brilliant plumage with a _von_ before your name. No more will the peasants step out of the road and bow down before you!’