第157章

I reassured him.He started the car,and I watched it absently as it gathered speed and turned the corner.I began to walk,slowly at first,then more and more rapidly until I had gained a breathless pace;in ten minutes I was in West Street,standing in front of the Templar's Hall where the meeting of the Citizens Union west in progress.Now that I had arrived there,doubt and uncertainty assailed me.I had come as it were in spite of myself,thrust onward by an impulse I did not understand,which did not seem to be mine.What was I going to do?The proceeding suddenly appeared to me as ridiculous,tinged with the weirdness of somnambulism.I revolted,walked away,got as far as the corner and stood beside a lamp post,pretending to be waiting for a car.The street lights were reflected in perpendicular,wavy-yellow ribbons on the wet asphalt,and I stood staring with foolish intentness at this phenomenon,wondering how a painter would get the effect in oils.Again I was walking back towards the hall,combating the acknowledgment to myself that I had a plan,a plan that I did not for a moment believe I would carry out.I was shivering.

I climbed the steps.The wide vestibule was empty except for two men who stopped a low-toned conversation to look at me.I wondered whether they recognized me;that I might be recognized was an alarming possibility which had not occurred to me.

"Who is speaking?"I asked.

"Mr.Krebs,"answered the taller man of the two.

The hum of applause came from behind the swinging doors.I pushed them open cautiously,passing suddenly out of the cold into the reeking,heated atmosphere of a building packed with human beings.The space behind the rear seats was filled with men standing,and those nearest glanced around with annoyance at the interruption of my entrance.I made my way along the wall,finally reaching a side aisle,whence I could get sight of the platform and the speaker.

I heard his words distinctly,but at first lacked the faculty of stringing them together,or rather of extracting their collective sense.

The phrases indeed were set ringing through my mind,I found myself repeating them without any reference to their meaning;I had reached the peculiar pitch of excitement that counterfeits abnormal calm,and all sense of strangeness at being there in that meeting had passed away.Ibegan to wonder how I might warn Krebs,and presently decided to send him a note when he should have finished speaking--but I couldn't make up my mind whether to put my name to the note or not.Of course I needn't have entered the hall at all:I might have sent in my note at the side door.

I must have wished to see Krebs,to hear him speak;to observe,perhaps,the effect on the audience.In spite of my inability to take in what he was saying,I was able to regard him objectively,--objectively,in a restricted sense.I noticed that he had grown even thinner;the flesh had fallen away from under his cheek-bones,and there were sharp,deep,almost perpendicular lines on either side of his mouth.He was emaciated,that was the word.Once in a while he thrust his hand through his dry,ashy hair which was of a tone with the paleness of his face.

Such was his only gesture.

He spoke quietly,leaning with one elbow against the side of his reading stand.The occasional pulsations of applause were almost immediately hushed,as though the people feared to lose even a word that should fall from his dry lips.What was it he was talking about?I tried to concentrate my attention,with only partial success.He was explaining the new theory of city government that did not attempt to evade,but dealt frankly with the human needs of to-day,and sought to meet those needs in a positive way...What had happened to me,though I did not realize it,was that I had gradually come under the influence of a tragic spell not attributable to the words I heard,existing independently of them,pervading the spacious hall,weaving into unity dissentient minds.

And then,with what seemed a retarded rather than sudden awareness,Iknew that he had stopped speaking.Once more he ran his hand through his hair,he was seemingly groping for words that would not come.I was pierced by a strange agony--the amazing source of which,seemed to be a smile on the face of Hermann Krebs,an ineffable smile illuminating the place like a flash of light,in which suffering and tragedy,comradeship and loving kindness--all were mingled.He stood for a moment with that smile on his face--swayed,and would have fallen had it not been for the quickness of a man on the platform behind him,and into whose arms he sank.

In an instant people had risen in their seats,men were hurrying down the aisles,while a peculiar human murmur or wail persisted like an undertone beneath the confusion of noises,striking the very note of my own feelings.Above the heads of those about me I saw Krebs being carried off the platform....The chairman motioned for silence and inquired if there were a physician in the audience,and then all began to talk at once.The man who stood beside me clutched my arm.

"I hope he isn't dead!Say,did you see that smile?My God,I'll never forget it!"The exclamation poignantly voiced the esteem in which Krebs was held.As I was thrust along out of the hall by the ebb of the crowd still other expressions of this esteem came to me in fragments,expressions of sorrow and dismay,of a loyalty I had not imagined.Mingled with these were occasional remarks of skeptics shaken,in human fashion,by the suggestion of the inevitable end that never fails to sober and terrify humanity.

"I guess he was a bigger man than we thought.There was a lot of sense in what he had to say.""There sure was,"the companion of this speaker answered.