Mrs. Ward nodded. The cries of the newsboys had died down in the distance. Mr. Ward had picked up his papers. The game of egg football seemed much nearer than war.
II
“It’s only a question of days, now,” said Mr. Ward. “There can be only one outcome.”
“We’re awfully unready,” said Robin.
“Roosevelt was right,” said Stephen. “He’s been right all along. We ought to have been preparing. We ought to have been preparing for years.”
“He’s done wonders with the Navy Department,” said Mr. Ward. “He’s got Dewey in Hong Kong. He’s had his eye on Manila from the start.”
“He should never have left his desk,” said Mr. Bert Lancaster. “His place is in Washington. This stunt of rushing down to San Antonio to get up a regiment of cowboys is all nonsense. You can’t make a soldier out of a cowpuncher in ten minutes.”
“You can make a campaign out of him,” said Freddy Waters very wisely. “There’s more than one kind of campaign. Teddy Roosevelt keeps his eye on the ball. He never passes up a chance to play to the grandstand.”
“Teddy Roosevelt,” said Mr. Ward slowly, “is all right.”
Jane sat in solemn silence. So did all the other women. That February evening seemed very long ago, when the newsboys were crying extras on the Maine and the game of egg football had seemed nearer than war.
It was mid-April, now. They were all sitting out on the Wards’ front steps, enjoying the early twilight of the first warm evening. The Wards had sat out on their front steps on spring and summer evenings ever since Jane could remember. Minnie always carried out the small hall rug and an armchair for her mother, immediately after dinner. The neighbours drifted in, by twos and threes, dropped down on the rug and talked and laughed and watched the night creep over Pine Street. Sometimes they sang, after darkness fell. The Wards’ front steps were quite an institution.
Pine Street looked just the same, reflected Jane, as it always had, on April evenings. The budding elm boughs met over the cedar block pavement. The arc light on the corner contended in vain with lingering daylight. The empty lawns looked very tranquil and, in the clear grey atmosphere of gathering dusk, poignantly green. Bicycles passed in groups of two and three. Other front steps, further down the block, were adorned with rugs and dotted with chattering people. Nothing was changed.
Nothing was changed on Pine Street. But in Washington, Jane knew, garrulous Congressmen were discussing ultimatums, friendly ambassadors were shaking their heads over declined overtures of intervention, weary statesmen were drawing up documents, and President McKinley was sitting with poised pen. In Chickamauga troops were concentrating. The regular army was in motion. Regiments were entrained for New Orleans and Mobile and Tampa. Twenty thousand men were moving over the rails. Down in San Antonio, Leonard Wood was organizing the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and Roosevelt himself was cutting through the red tape of the Navy Department to join the plainsmen and adventurers and young soldiers of fortune from the Eastern colleges who had answered his first call, across the wide Pacific seas Dewey was lingering, with his tiny fleet, in neutral waters. Off Key West the North Atlantic Squadron was riding at anchor. Jane could fairly see them across the tranquil green lawns of Pine Street, battleships and monitors and cruisers, talking with Captain Sampson’s flagship in flashing points of fire. All waiting for the stroke of the President’s pen.
They were waiting for it on Pine Street, too. Horribly waiting. Jane’s father had been waiting for it for weeks, and Robin had been waiting, and Bert Lancaster and Freddy Waters, too, for all their scoffing. Stephen had been waiting. Jane knew that. Stephen had been waiting in a queer inarticulate suspense that held for Jane a note of tacit doom. Jane had never been able to phrase the question that would terminate it. It had trembled, countless times, on her lips, during the last two months. But it had never been asked. Jane didn’t want to know, beyond the possibility of doubt, just what it would do to her to face the startling realization that Stephen was going to go to war.
Last week he had shown her a clipping, cut from the morning Tribune. A copy of Alger’s letter to the State Governors.
The President desires to raise volunteers in your territory to form part of a regiment of mounted riflemen to be commanded by Leonard Wood, Colonel; Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant-Colonel. He desires that the men selected should be young, sound, good shots and good riders, and that you expedite, by all means in your power, the enrollment of these men.
Jane had made no comment. “It would be fun,” said Stephen, “to go.”
“Fun!” thought Jane.
“I’m pretty bored with the bank, you know,” said Stephen. “I’ve nothing else to do here, unless—”
The sentence was left unfinished. Jane had tried to look very noncommittal. In the perplexities surrounding her Jane clung firmly to one assuaging certainty. She wasn’t going to be railroaded into marrying Stephen to keep him from going to war.
But—if he went, thought Jane in the gathering dusk of Pine Street? If the dreadful moment came, when, like a girl in a book, she had to dismiss him to follow the flag to death or glory—
The notes of the first hurdy-gurdy of the season tuned up on the corner. Jane could see the little street organ, dimly, in the light of the arc lamp. A tiny object that must be the monkey was crawling around the musician’s feet. Jane loved hurdy-gurdies. They meant the coming of spring on Pine Street. They meant it much more than the first robin. Jane had loved to dance to them when she was little. To follow the monkey and slip her allowance in pennies into its cold, damp little claw. She always laughed, still, at
