Volume Iii Part 53 (1/2)

MORE. Is it?

BANNING. Ah! no, but we don't want to part with you, Mr. More.

It's a bitter thing, this, after three elections. Look at the 'uman side of it! To speak ill of your country when there's been a disaster like this terrible business in the Pa.s.s. There's your own wife. I see her brother's regiment's to start this very afternoon.

Come now--how must she feel?

MORE breaks away to the bay window. The DEPUTATION exchange glances.

MORE. [Turning] To try to muzzle me like this--is going too far.

BANNING. We just want to put you out of temptation.

MORE. I've held my seat with you in all weathers for nine years.

You've all been bricks to me. My heart's in my work, Banning; I'm not eager to undergo political eclipse at forty.

SHELDER. Just so--we don't want to see you in that quandary.

BANNING. It'd be no friendliness to give you a wrong impression of the state of feeling. Silence--till the bitterness is overpast; there's naught else for it, Mr. More, while you feel as you do. That tongue of yours! Come! You owe us something. You're a big man; it's the big view you ought to take.

MORE. I am trying to.

HOME. And what precisely is your view--you'll pardon my asking?

MORE. [Turning on him] Mr. Home a great country such as ours--is trustee for the highest sentiments of mankind. Do these few outrages justify us in stealing the freedom of this little people?

BANNING. Steal--their freedom! That's rather running before the hounds.

MORE. Ah, Banning! now we come to it. In your hearts you're none of you for that--neither by force nor fraud. And yet you all know that we've gone in there to stay, as we've gone into other lands--as all we big Powers go into other lands, when they're little and weak. The Prime Minister's words the other night were these: ”If we are forced to spend this blood and money now, we must never again be forced.”

What does that mean but swallowing this country?

SHELDER. Well, and quite frankly, it'd be no bad thing.

HOME. We don't want their wretched country--we're forced.

MORE. We are not forced.

SHELDER. My dear More, what is civilization but the logical, inevitable swallowing up of the lower by the higher types of man?

And what else will it be here?

MORE. We shall not agree there, Shelder; and we might argue it all day. But the point is, not whether you or I are right--the point is: What is a man who holds a faith with all his heart to do? Please tell me.

[There is a silence.]

BANNING. [Simply] I was just thinkin' of those poor fellows in the Pa.s.s.

MORE. I can see them, as well as you, Banning. But, imagine! Up in our own country--the Black Valley--twelve hundred foreign devils dead and dying--the crows busy over them--in our own country, our own valley--ours--ours--violated. Would you care about ”the poor fellows” in that Pa.s.s?--Invading, stealing dogs! Kill them--kill them! You would, and I would, too!

The pa.s.sion of those words touches and grips as no arguments could; and they are silent.

MORE. Well! What's the difference out there? I'm not so inhuman as not to want to see this disaster in the Pa.s.s wiped out. But once that's done, in spite of my affection for you; my ambitions, and they're not few; [Very low] in spite of my own wife's feeling, I must be free to raise my voice against this war.