The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 46

"But-do we want to win?"

Hallett's question, very faint across the subdued breathings and showerings of the s.h.i.+p, fetched the doctor up. He stood for a moment, rocking on his legs and staring at the face of the questioner, still and faintly luminous on the invisible cot. Then he laughed briefly, shook himself, and ignored the preposterous words. He recollected tardily that the fellow was pretty well gone.

"No," he went on. "Up to to-night I've never doubted. No one in the world, in _our_ part of the world, has doubted. The proposition was absurd to begin with. Prussia, and her fringe of hangers-on, to stand against the world-to stand against the very drift and destiny of civilization? Impossible! A man can't do the impossible; that's logic, Hallett, and that's common sense. They might have their day of it, their little hour, because they had the jump-but in the end! _in the end!_- But look at them, will you! Look at them! That's what's got me to-night, Hallett. Look at them! There they stand. They won't play the game, won't abide at all by the rules of logic, of common sense. Every day, every hour, they perform the impossible. Not once since the war was a year old have they been able to hang out another six months. They'd be wiped from the earth; their people would starve. They're wiped from the earth, and they remain. They starve and lay down their skinny bodies on the ground, and they stand up again with sleek bellies. They make preposterous, blind boasts. They say, 'We'll over-run Roumania in a month.' Fantastic!

It's _done_! They say, 'Russia? New-born Russia? Strong young boy-Russia? We'll put him out of it for good and all by Christmas.' That was to cheer up the hungry ones in Berlin. Everybody saw through it. The very stars laughed. _It's done!_ G.o.d, Hallett! It's like clockwork. It's like a rehea.r.s.ed and abominable programme-"

"Yes-a programme."

The wounded man lay quite still and gazed at the star. When he spoke, his words carried an odd sense of authenticity, finality. His mind had got a little away from him, and now it was working with the new, oracular clarity of the moribund. It bothered the doctor inexplicably-tripped him up. He had to shake himself. He began to talk louder and make wide, scarcely visible gestures.

"We've laughed so long, Hallett. There was _Mittel-Europa_! We always laughed at that. A wag's tale. To think of it-a vast, self-sufficient, brutal empire laid down across the path of the world! Ha-ha! Why, even if they had _wanted_ it, it would be-"

"If they _wanted_ it, it would be-_inevitable_."

The doctor held up for a full dozen seconds. A kind of anger came over him and his face grew red. He couldn't understand. He talked still louder.

"But they're _doing_ it! They're doing that same preposterous thing before our eyes, and we can't touch them, and they're- Hallett! _They're d.a.m.n near done!_ Behind that line there,-you know the line I mean,-who of us doesn't know it? That thin line of smoke and ashes and black blood, like a bent black wire over France! Behind that line they're at work, day by day, month after month, building the empire we never believed. And Hallett, _it's d.a.m.n near done_! And we can't stop it. It grows bigger and bigger, darker and darker-it covers up the sky-like a nightmare-"

"Like a dream!" said Hallett softly; "a dream."

The doctor's boot-soles drummed with a dull, angry resonance on the deck.

"And we can't touch them! They couldn't conceivably hold that line against us-against the whole world-long enough to build their incredible empire behind it. _And they have!_ Hallett! How _could_ they ever have held it?"

"You mean, how could we ever have held it?"

Hallett's words flowed on, smooth, clear-formed, unhurried, and his eyes kept staring at the star.

"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 sh.e.l.l-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 h.e.l.l,-yes, yes,-but a dream. They've seen a vision.

A red, b.l.o.o.d.y, d.a.m.ned vision,-yes, yes,-but a vision. They've got a programme, even if it's what you called it, a 'rehea.r.s.ed 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 G.o.d, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+p, bearing him w.i.l.l.y-nilly over the blind surface of the sea. He shook himself.

"G.o.d help us," he said.

"What G.o.d?"

The doctor lifted a weary hand.

"Oh, if you're going into _that_-"

"Why not? Because Prussia, doctor, has a G.o.d. Prussia has a G.o.d as terrible as the G.o.d of conquering Israel, a G.o.d created in her own image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this G.o.d. I tell you we're fools. I tell you, doctor, before we shall stand we shall have to create a G.o.d 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 ma.s.s 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 f.a.g-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 peris.h.!.+'"

"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 p.r.o.nounce the word 'democracy' with the same fierce faith with which we conceive them to be p.r.o.nouncing 'autocracy'-that day, doctor-"

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