Between the Dark and the Daylight (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907). The story was first published in
Harper’s Monthly 110 (Jan. 1905).
The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst. Editha
sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with
her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the
question whether she could let him go. She had
decided that she could not let him stay, when she
saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue,
making slowly up towards the house, with his head
down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out
on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and
imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her
will before she called him aloud to him: “George!”
He had quickened his pace in mystical response to
her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her;
now he looked up and answered, “Well?”
“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she
swooped down the steps to him, “What is it?” she
cried.
“It’s war,” he said. and he pulled her up to him and
kissed her.
She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to
their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat.
“How glorious!”
“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her
sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at
first. She never knew what to think of him; that made
his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,
which was contemporaneous with the growth of the
war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of
seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even
more than he abhorred it. She could have understood
his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have
been a survival of his old life when he thought he
would be a minister, and before he changed and took
up the law. But making light of a cause so high and
noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the
core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to
cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make
his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps
the miracle was already wrought in him. In the
presence of the tremendous fact that he announced,
all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she
began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and
wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she
poured out upon him her question of the origin and
authenticity of his news.
All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was
aware that now at the very beginning she must put a
guard upon herself against urging him, by any word
or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him
to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He
was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be
allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and
he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.
Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature
pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his
manhood, without her knowing the means she was
using to the end she was willing. She had always
supposed that the man who won her would have
done something to win her; she did not know what,
but something. George Gearson had simply asked
her for her love, on the way home from a concert,
and she gave her love to him, without, as it were,
thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do
something worthy to have won her–be a hero, her hero–it would be even better than if he had done it
before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she
had believed in the war from the beginning.
“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it
wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the
order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that
is for the liberation of people who have been
struggling for years against the cruelest oppression.
Don’t you think so, too?”
“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it
glorious to break the peace of the world?”
“That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that
crime and shame at our very gates.” She was
conscious of parroting the current phrases of the
newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose
her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high
ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid
2
argument she ended with the climax: “But now it
doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the war
has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any
more. There is nothing now but our country.”
He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back
against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague
smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country–right or
wrong.”
“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. “I’ll go
and get you some lemonade.” She rose rustling, and
whisked away; when she came back with two tall
glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice
clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and
she said, as if there had been no interruption: “But
there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a
sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever
there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do,
yet.”
He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he
answered as he set the glass down: “I know you
always have the highest ideal. When I differ from
you I ought to doubt myself.”
A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the
humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was
willing to put himself below her.
Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was
never so near slipping through her fingers as when
he took that meek way.
“You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be
right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and
poured her soul from her eyes into his. “Don’t you
think so?” she entreated him.
He released his hand and drank the rest of his
lemonade, and she added, “Have mine, too,” but he
shook his head in answering, “I’ve no business to
think so, unless I act so, too.”
Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with
leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that
strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to
do what they believed, and not think a thing was
finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew
what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she
said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then faltered.
He went on as if to himself, without apparently
heeding her: “There’s only one way of proving one’s
faith in a thing like this.”
She could not say that she understood, but she did
understand.
He went on again. “If I believed–if I felt as you do
about this war– Do you wish me to feel as you do?”
Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I
don’t know what you mean.”
He seemed to muse away from her as before. “There
is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the
bottom of his heart every man would like at times to
have his courage tested, to see how he would act.”
“How can you talk in that ghastly way?”
“It is rather morbid. Still, that’s what it comes to, unless you’re swept away by ambition or driven by
conviction. I haven’t the conviction or the ambition,
and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I
ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I
couldn’t have asked it of myself, as I must, now I’m a
lawyer. And you believe it’s a holy war, Editha?” he
suddenly addressed her. “Oh, I know you do! But
you wish me to believe so, too?”
She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in
the ironical way he always had with her plainer
mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken with
him.
“George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is
true, at any and every cost. If I’ve tried to talk you
into anything, I take it all back.”
“Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are,
and how– I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I’ll
think it over; I’d like to believe as you do. But I don’t,
now; I don’t, indeed. It isn’t this war alone; though
this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s
every war–so stupid; it makes me sick. Why
shouldn’t this thing have been settled reasonably?”
3
“Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God meant
it to be war.”
“You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what
people wi11 say.”
“Do you suppose it would have been war if God
hadn’t meant it?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put
this world into men’s keeping to work it as they
pleased.”
“Now, George, that is blasphemy.”
“Well, I won’t blaspheme. I’ll try to believe in your
pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go.
“Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at Balcom’s
Works was at one o’clock.
“I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me. Perhaps I
shall bring you a convert.”
“Well, you may come back, on that condition.”
“All right. If I don’t come, you’ll understand.”
He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a
suspension of their engagement. It all interested her
intensely; she was undergoing a tre
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