Willy Cameron was fighting like a demon. Long
ago his reserve of ammunition had given out, and he
was fighting with the butt end of his revolver.
Around him had rallied some of the men he knew best,
Pink and Mr. Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, Dan and Joe
Wilkinson, and they stayed together as, street by
street, the revolutionists were driven back.
There were dead and wounded everywhere, injured men
who had crawled into the shelter of doorways and sat
or lay there, nursing their wounds.
Suddenly, to his amazement, Willy saw old Anthony
Cardew. He had somehow achieved an upper window
of the mill office building, and he was showing himself
fearlessly, a rifle in his hands; in his face was
a great anger, but there was more than that.
Willy Cameron, thinking it over later, decided that
it was perplexity. He could not understand.
He never did understand. For other eyes also
had seen old Anthony Cardew. Willy Cameron,
breasting the mob and fighting madly toward the door
of the building, with Pink behind him, heard a cheer
and an angry roar, and, looking up, saw that the old
man had disappeared. They found him there later
on, the rifle beside him, his small and valiant figure
looking, with eyes no longer defiant, toward the Heaven
which puts, for its own strange purpose, both evil
and good into the same heart.
By eleven o’clock the revolution was over.
Sodden groups of men, thoroughly cowed and frightened,
were on their way by back roads to the places they
had left a few hours before. They had no longer
dreams of empire. Behind them they could see,
on the horizon, the city itself, the smoke from its
chimneys, the spires of its churches. Both, homes
and churches, they had meant to destroy, but behind
both there was the indestructible. They had
failed.
They turned, looked back, and went on.
* * *
* *
On the crest of a hill-top overlooking the city a
man was standing, looking down to where the softened
towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river
mist like fairy towers. Below him lay the city,
powerful, significant, important.
The man saw the city only as a vast crucible, into
which he had flung his all, and out of which had come
only defeat and failure. But the city was not
a crucible. The melting pot of a nation is not
a thing of cities, but of the human soul.
The city was not a melting pot. It was a sanctuary.
The man stood silent and morose, his chin dropped
on his chest, and stared down.
Beside and somewhat behind him stood a woman, a somber,
passionate figure, waiting passively. His eyes
traveled from the city to her, and rested on her,
contemptuous, thwarted, cynical.
“You fool,” he said, “I hate you,
and you know it.”
But she only smiled faintly. “We’d
better get away now, Jim,” she said.
He got into the car.
