"Well, I guess pretty soon I"ll be going," said Wilbur.
Winona gazed at him with strangely shining eyes.
"You wouldn"t be any good if you didn"t!" she said, suddenly.
It was perhaps the least ornate sentence she had ever spoken.
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur again. "You"ve changed!"
"Something came over me," said Winona.
CHAPTER XV
Wilbur Cowen had hesitated in the matter of war. He wanted to be in a battle--had glowed at the thought of fighting--but if the war was going to be stopped in its beginning, what would be the use of starting? And he was a.s.sured and more than half believed that it would be stopped.
Merle Whipple was his informant--Merle had found himself. The war was to be stopped by the _New Dawn_, a magazine of which Merle had been a.s.sociate editor since shortly after his release from college.
Merle, on that afternoon of golf with Wilbur, had accurately forecast his own future. Confessing then that he meant to become a great writer, he was now not only a great writer but a thinker, in the true sense of the word. He had taken up literature--"not muck like poetry, but serious literature"--and Whipple money had lavishly provided a smart little craft in which to embark. The money had not come without some bewildered questioning on the part of those supplying it. As old Sharon said, the Whipple chicken coop had hatched a gosling that wanted to swim in strange waters; but it was eventually decided that goslings were meant to swim and would one way or another find a pond. Indeed, Harvey Whipple was prouder of his son by adoption than he cared to have known, and listened to him with secret respect, covered with perfunctory business hints. He felt that Merle was above and beyond him. The youth, indeed, made him feel that he was a mere country banker.
In the city of New York, after his graduation, Merle had come into his own, forming a staunch alliance with a small circle of intellectuals--intelligentzia, Merle said--consecrated to the cause of American culture. He had brought to Newbern and to the amazed Harvey Whipple the strange news that America had no native culture; that it was raw, spiritually impoverished, without national self-consciousness; with but the faintest traces of art in any true sense of the word. Harvey Whipple would have been less shocked by this disclosure, momentous though it was, had not Merle betrayed a conviction that his life work would now be to uphold the wavering touch of civilization.
This brought the thing home to Harvey D. Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America"s spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would subst.i.tute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations.
America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting up lofty ideals, enriching our common life with a new, self-conscious art. Much of this puzzled Harvey D. and his father, old Gideon. It was new talk in their world. But it impressed them. Their boy was earnest, with a fine intelligence; he left them stirred.
Sharon Whipple was a silent, uneasy listener at many of these talks. He declared, later and to others, for Merle was not his son, that the young man was highly languageous and highly crazy; that his talk was the crackling of thorns under a pot; that he was a vain canter--"forever canting," said Sharon--"a buffle-headed fellow, talking, bragging." He was equally intolerant of certain of Merle"s little band of forward-looking intellectuals who came to stay week-ends at the Whipple New Place. There was Emmanuel Schilsky, who talked more pithily than Merle and who would be the editor-in-chief of the projected _New Dawn_.
Emmanuel, too, had come from his far-off home to flush America"s spiritual darkness with a new light. He had written much about our shortage of genuine spiritual values; about "the continual frustrations and aridities of American life." He was a member of various groups--the Imagist group, the Egoist group, the Sphericists, other groups piquantly named; versed in the new psychology, playing upon the word "pragmatism"
as upon a violin.
Sharon Whipple, the Philistine, never quite knew whether pragmatism was approved or condemned by Schilsky, and once he asked the dark-faced young man what it meant. He was told that pragmatism was a method, and felt obliged to pretend that this enlightened him. He felt a reluctant respect for Schilsky, who could make him feel uncomfortable.
And there was the colourful, youngish widow, Mrs. Truesdale, who wrote free verse about the larger intimacies of life, and dressed noticeably.
She would be a contributing editor of the _New Dawn_, having as her special department the release of woman from her age-long slavery to certain restraints that now made her talked unpleasantly about if she dared give her soul free rein. This lady caused Sharon to wonder about the departed Truesdale.
"Was he carried away by sorrowing friends," asked Sharon, "or did he get tired one day and move off under his own power?" No one ever enlightened him.
Others of the younger intelligentzia came under his biased notice. He spoke of them as "a rabble rout," who lived in a mad world--"and G.o.d bless us out of it."
But Sharon timed his criticism discreetly, and the _New Dawn_ lit its pure white flame--a magazine to refresh the elect. Placed superbly beyond the need of catering to advertisers, it would adhere to rigorous standards of the true, the beautiful. It would tell the truth as no other magazine founded on gross commercialism would dare to do. It said so in well-arranged words. The commercial magazines full well knew the hideous truth, but stifled it for hire. The _New Dawn_ would be honest.
The sinister truth about America as revealed in the initial number of the brave new venture was that America was crude, blatant, boastful, vulgar, and money-grubbing. We were without ideals beyond the dollar; without desires save those to be glutted by material wealth. It was the high aim of the _New Dawn_--said the a.s.sociate editor, Merle Dalton Whipple--to dethrone the dollar, to hasten and to celebrate the pa.s.sing of American greed.
Not until the second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were to be found in the exploiting cla.s.s, a sinister combination, all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for his crust of bread. This number unflinchingly indicted the capitalistic ruling cla.s.s; fearlessly called upon the exploited ma.s.ses to rise and throw off the yoke put upon them by this nefarious plunderbund. The worker"s plight was depicted with no sparing of detail--"the slaves groaning and wailing in the dark the song of mastered men, the sullen, satanic music of lost and despairing humanity."
Succeeding numbers made it plain that the very republic itself had been founded upon this infamy. Our Revolutionary War had marked the triumph of the capitalistic state--the state that made property sovereign. The Revolutionary fathers had first freed themselves from English creditors, then bound down as their own debtors an increasing ma.s.s of the American population. The doc.u.ment known as the Const.i.tution of the United States had been cunningly and knowingly contrived to that end, thus thrusting upon us the commercial oligarchy which persisted to this day. It had placed the moneyed cla.s.ses securely in the saddle, though with fine phrases that seemed not to mean this.
"A conscious minority of wealthy men and lawyers, guided by the genius of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison," had worked their full design upon the small farmer and the nascent proletariat; we had since been "under the cult and control of wealth."
After this ringing indictment it surprised no Whipple to read that we had become intolerant, materialistic, unaesthetic. Nor was it any wonder that we were "in no mood to brook religious or social dissension." With such a Const.i.tution fraudulently foisted upon us by the money-loving fathers of the Revolution, it was presumably not to be expected that we should exhibit the religious tolerance of contemporary Spain or Italy or France.
"Immersed in a life of cra.s.s material endeavour," small wonder that the American had remained in spiritual poverty of the most debasing sort until the _New Dawn_ should come to enrich him, to topple in ruins an exploiting social system.
Now the keen eyes of young America, by aid of the magnifying lens supplied by Emmanuel Schilsky, would detect the land of the free to be in fact a land of greedy and unscrupulous tyrants; the home of the brave a home of economic serfs. Young America, which fights for the sanct.i.ty of life, solid and alive with virile beauty, would revolt and destroy the walls of the capitalistic state, sweeping away the foul laws that held private property sacred. They would seek a cure for the falsehood of modern life in a return to Nature, a return to the self where truth ever is. They would war with the privilege and ascendancy of the group over the individual conscience. Already the exploiting cla.s.s, as it neared the term of its depleted life, was but a ma.s.s of purulence.
Society was rotten, the state a pious criminal, the old truths tawdry lies. Everywhere the impotence of senility--except in young America. We faced the imminence of a vast breaking-up. The subtlest oligarchy of modern times was about to crumble. The revolution was at hand.
A succeeding number of the _New Dawn_ let out the horrid truth about the war, telling it in simple words that even Wilbur Cowan could understand.
Having sold munitions to the warring nations, we must go in to save our money. In short, as the _New Dawn_ put it: "The capitalistic ruling cla.s.ses tricked the people into war." It was to be a war waged for greed. Young America, not yet perusing in large enough numbers the _New Dawn_, was to be sent to its death that capital might survive--the dollar be still enthroned. But the _New Dawn_ was going to see about that. Young America would be told the truth.
Two of the Whipples were vastly puzzled by these p.r.o.nouncements, and not a little disquieted. Old Gideon and Harvey D. began to wonder if by any chance their boy, with his fine intellect, had not been misled.
Sharon was enraged by the scandalous a.s.sertions about George Washington, whom he had always considered a high-minded patriot. He had never suspected and could not now be persuaded that Washington had basely tricked the soldiers of the Revolution into war so that the capitalistic cla.s.s might prevail in the new states. Nor would he believe that the framers of the Const.i.tution had consciously worded that doc.u.ment with a view to enslaving the common people. He was a stubborn old man, and not aware of his country"s darkness. Perhaps it was too much to expect that one of his years and mental habit should be hospitable to these newly found truths.
He was not young America. He had thought too long the other way. Being of a choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine--containing the fearless exposure of Washington"s chicanery--he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud--if in a troubled way--of the boy"s new eminence, he did not distinguish him too pointedly. He pretended to take it all out on Emmanuel, whom he declared to be no fair judge of American history. The other Whipples were beginning to suspect this but were not prepared to admit it either to Sharon or to each other. For the present they would defend Emmanuel against the hot-headed aspersions of the other.
"You said yourself, not a month ago," expostulated Harvey D., "that he was a smart little Jew."
Sharon considered briefly.
"Well," he replied, "I don"t know as I"d change that--at least not much.
I"d still say the same thing, or words to that effect."
"Just how would you put it now?" demanded Gideon, suavely.
Sharon brightened. He had hoped to be asked that.
"The way I"d put it now--having read a lot more of his new-dawning--I"d say he was a little Jew smarty."
The other Whipples had winced at this. The _New Dawn_ was a.s.suredly not the simple light-bringer to America"s spiritual darkness that they had supposed it would be; but they were not yet prepared to believe the worst.
"If only they wouldn"t be so extreme!" murmured the troubled Harvey D.
"If only they wouldn"t say the country has been tricked into war by capital."
"That"s a short horse and soon curried," said Sharon. "They can"t say it if you quit paying for it."
"There you are!" said Harvey D. "Merle would say that that"s an example of capitalism suppressing the truth. Of course I don"t know--maybe it is."
"Sure! Anyway, it would be an example of capital suppressing something.
Depends on what you call the truth. If you think the truth is that Germany ought to rule the earth you got it right. That"s what all these pacifists and anti-militaries are arguing, though they don"t let on to that. Me, I don"t think Germany ought to rule the earth. I think she ought to be soundly trounced, and my guess is she"s goin" to be.
Something tells me this _New Dawn_ ain"t goin" to save her from her come-uppance. I tell you both plain out, I ain"t goin" to have a magazine under my roof that"ll talk such stuff about George Washington, the Father of his Country. It"s too scandalous."
Thus the _New Dawn_ lost a subscriber, though not losing, it should be said, a reader. For Sharon Whipple, having irately stopped his subscription by a letter in which the editor was told he should be ashamed of himself for calling George Washington a crook that way, thereafter bought the magazine hurriedly at the Cut-Rate Pharmacy and read every word of it in secret places not under his roof.
Wilbur Cowan, though proud of the _New Dawn_ because his brother"s name adorned it, had nevertheless failed to profit by its teachings. He was prepared to admit that America groped in spiritual darkness which the _New Dawn_ would flush with its pure white light; he could not have contended with any authority that it was not a land of dollar hunters, basely materialistic, without ideals, artistically impoverished, and devoid of national self-consciousness, whatever that meant. These things were choice words to him, nothing more; and he had no valid authority on which to deny that the country was being tricked into war by the Interests, something heinous that the _New Dawn_ spelled with a capital letter. In a way he believed this, because his brother said so. His brother had been educated. He even felt shame-faced and apologetic about his resolve to enter the fight.
But this resolve was stanch; he wanted to fight, even if he had been tricked by Wall Street into feeling that way. The _New Dawn_ said he had been tricked, and he supposed it was true, even if he couldn"t clearly detect how Wall Street had made Germany pursue the course that made him want to fight. So far as his direct mental processes could inform him, the only trickery involved had been employed by Germany and Spike Brennon. Germany"s behaviour was more understandable than the _New Dawn_, and Spike Brennon was much simpler in his words. Spike said it was a dandy chance to get into a real sc.r.a.p, and all husky lads should be there in a split second at the first call. Perhaps Wall Street had tricked Spike into tricking Wilbur Cowan. Anyway, Spike was determined.