The Dark Hour

== THE DARK HOUR ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
The returning ship swam swiftly through the dark; the
deep, interior breathing of the engines, the singing of wire stays, the huge
whispering rush of foam streaming the water line, made up a body of silence
upon which the sound of the doctor's footfalls, coming and going restlessly
along the near deck, intruded only a little— a faint and personal disturbance.
Charging slowly through the dark, a dozen paces forward, a dozen paces aft, his
invisible and tormented face bent forward a little over his breast, he said to
himself, "What fools! What blind fools we've been!" 
Sweat stood for an instant on his brow and was gone in
the steady onrush of the wind. 
The man lying on the cot in the shelter of the cabin
companionway made no sound all the while. He might have been asleep or dead, he
remained so quiet; yet he was neither asleep nor dead, for his eyes, large,
wasted, and luminous, gazed out unwinking from the little darkness of his
shelter into the vaster darkness of the night, where a star burned in slow
mutations, now high, now sailing low, over the rail of the ship. 
Once he said in a washed and strengthless voice,
"That's a bright star, Doctor." 
If the other heard, he gave no sign. He continued
charging slowly back and forth, his large dim shoulders hunched over his neck,
his hands locked behind him, his teeth showing faintly gray between the fleshy
lips which hung open a little to his breathing. 
"It's dark!" he said of a sudden, bringing
up before the cot in the companionway. "God, Hallett, how dark it
is!" There was something incoherent and mutilated about it, as if the cry
had torn the tissues of his throat. "I'm not myself tonight," he
added, with a trace of shame. 
Hallett spoke slowly from his pillow. 
"It wouldn't be the subs tonight. You're not that
kind, you know. I've seen you in the zone. And we're well west of them by this,
anyhow; and as you say, it's very dark." 
"It's not that darkness. Not that!" 
Again there was the sense of something tearing. The
doctor rocked for a moment on his thick legs. He began to talk. 
"It's this war " His conscience protested:
"I ought not to 
go on so— it's not right, not right at all— talking so
to the wounded— the dying— I shouldn't go on so to the dying." And all the
while the words continued to tumble out of his mouth. "No, I'm not a
coward —not especially. You know I'm not a coward, Hallett. You know that. But
just now, tonight, somehow, the whole truth of the thing has come out and got
me— jumped out of the dark and got me by the neck, Hallett. Look here; I've
kept a stiff lip. Since the first I've said, 'We'll win this war.' It's been a matter
of course. So far as I know, never a hint of doubt has shadowed my mind, even
when things went bad. 'In the end,' I've said, 'in the end, of course, we're
bound to win.' " 
He broke away again to charge slowly through the dark
with his head down, butting; a large, overheated animal endowed with a mind. 
"But— do we want to win?" 
Hallett's question, very faint across the subdued
breathings and showerings of the ship, fetched the doctor up. He stood for a
moment, rocking on his legs and staring at the face of the questioner, still
and faintly luminous on the invisible cot. Then he laughed briefly, shook
himself, and ignored the preposterous words. He recollected tardily that the
fellow was pretty well gone. 
"No," he went on. "Up to tonight I've
never doubted. No one in the world, in our part of the world, has doubted. The
proposition was absurd to begin with. Prussia, and her fringe of hangers-on, to
stand against the world— to stand against the very drift and destiny of
civilization? Impossible! A man can't do the impossible; that's logic, Hallett,
and that's common sense. They might have their day of it, their little hour,
because they had the jump— but in the end! 
In the end! . . . But look at them, will you! Look at
them! That's what's got me tonight, Hallett. Look at them! There they stand.
They won't play the game, won't abide at all by the rules of logic, of common
sense. Every day, every hour, they perform the impossible. It's like clockwork.
It's like a rehearsed and abominable program — " 
"Yes— a program." 
The wounded man lay quite still and gazed at the
stars. When he spoke, his words carried an odd sense of authenticity, finality.
His mind had got a little away from him, and now it was working with the new,
oracular clarity of the moribund. It bothered the doctor inexplicably— tripped
him up. He had to shake himself. He began to talk louder and make wide,
scarcely visible gestures. 
"We've laughed so long, Hallett. There was
Mitteleuropa! We always laughed at that. A wag's tale. To think of it— a vast,
selfsufficient, brutal empire laid down across the path of the world! Haha!
Why, even if they had wanted it, it would be — " 
"If they wanted it, it would be—
inevitable." 
The doctor held up for a full dozen seconds. A kind of
anger came over him and his face grew red. He couldn't understand. He talked
still louder. 
"But they're doing it! They're doing that same
preposterous thing 
before our eyes, and we can't touch them, and they're
Hallett! 
They'' re damn near done! Behind that line there— you
know the line I mean— who of us doesn't know it? That thin line of smoke and
ashes and black blood. Behind that line they're at work, day by day, month
after month, building the empire we never believed. And Hallett, ifs damn near
done! And we can't stop it. It grows bigger and bigger, darker and darker— it
covers up the sky— like a nightmare " 
"Like a dream!" said Hallett softly. 
The doctor's boot soles drummed with a dull, angry
resonance on the deck. 
"And we can't touch them! They couldn't
conceivably hold that line against us— against the whole world— long enough to
build their incredible empire behind it. And they have! Hallett! How could they
ever have held it?" 
"You mean, how could we ever have held it?" 
Hallett's words flowed on, smooth, clear-formed,
unhurried, and his eyes kept staring at the star. 
"No, it's we have held it, not they. And we that
have got to hold it— longer than they. Theirs is the kind of Mitteleuropa
that's been done before; history is little more than a copybook for such an
empire as they are building. We've got a vaster and more incredible empire to
build than they— a Mitteleuropa, let us say, of the spirit of man. No, no,
Doctor; it's we that are doing the impossible, holding that thin line." 
The doctor failed to contain himself. 
"Oh, pshaw! Pshaw! See here, Hallett! We've had
the men, and there's no use blinking the truth. And we've had the money and the
munitions." 
"But back of all that, behind the last reserve,
the last shell dump, the last treasury, haven't they got something that we've
never had?" 
"And what's that?" 
"A dream." 
"A what?" 
"A dream. We've dreamed no dream. Yes— let me say
it! A little while ago you said 'nightmare,' and I said 'dream.' Germany has dreamed
a dream. Black as the pit of hell— yes, yes— but a dream. They've seen a
vision. A red, bloody, damned vision— yes, yes— but a vision. They've got a
program, even if it's what you called it, a 'rehearsed and abominable program.'
And they know what they want. And we don't know what we want!" 
The doctor's fist came down in the palm of his hand. 
"What we want? I'll tell you what we want,
Hallett. We want to win this war!" 
"Yes?" 
"And by the living God, Hallett, we will win this
war! I can see again. If we fight for half a century to come; if we turn the
world wrong side out for men, young men, boys, babes; if we mine the earth to a
hollow shell for coal and iron; if we wear our women to ghosts to get out the
last grain of wheat from the fields— we'll do it! And we'll wipe this black
thing from the face of the earth forever, root and branch, father and son of
the bloody race of them to the end of time. If you want a dream, Hallett, there's
a — " 
"There's a— nightmare. An overweening muscular
impulse to jump on the thing that's scared us in the dark, to break it with our
hands, grind it into the ground with our heels, tear ourselves away from it
—and wake up." 
He went on again after a moment. 
"Yes, that's it. We've never asked for anything
better; not once have we got down on our naked knees and prayed for anything
more than just to be allowed to wake up— and find it isn't so. How can we
expect, with a desire like that, to stand against a positive and a flaming
desire? No, no! The only thing to beat a dream is a dream more poignant. The
only thing to beat a vision black as midnight is a vision white as the noonday
sun. We've come to the place, Doctor, where half a loaf is worse than no
bread." 
The doctor put his hands in his pockets and took them
out again, shifted away a few steps and back again. He felt inarticulate,
handless, helpless in the face of things, of abstractions, of the mysterious,
unflagging swiftness of the ship bearing him willy-nilly over the blind surface
of the sea. He shook himself. 
"God help us," he said. 
"What God?" 
The doctor lifted a weary hand. 
"Oh, if you're going into that " 
"Why not? Because Prussia, Doctor, has a god.
Prussia has a god as terrible as the God of conquering Israel, a god created in
her own image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this
god. I tell you we're fools. I tell you, Doctor, before we shall stand we shall
have to create a god in our own image, and before we do that we shall have to
have a living and sufficient image." 
"You don't think much of us," the doctor
murmured wearily. 
The other seemed not to hear. After a little while he
said, "We've got to say black or white at last. We've got to answer a question
this time with a whole answer. 
"This war began so long ago," he went on,
staring at the star. "So long before Sarajevo, so long before 'balances of
power' were thought of, so long before the 'provinces' were lost and won,
before Bismarck and the lot of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many,
many years of questions put, and half answers given in return. Questions,
questions: questions of a power loom in the North Countries; questions of a
millhand's lodging in one Manchester or another, of the weight of a head tax in
India, of a widow's Mass for her dead in Spain; questions of a black man in the
Congo, of an eighth-black man in New Orleans, of a Christian in Turkey, an
Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French cripple in the streets of Zabern;
questions of an idiot sitting on a throne; questions of a girl asking her vote
on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a girl asking her price in the dark of a Chicago
doorway— whole questions half answered, hungry questions half fed, mutilated
fag ends of questions piling up and piling up year by year, decade after
decade. Listen! There came a time when it wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all.
There came a time when the son of all those questions stood up in the world,
final, unequivocal, naked, devouring, saying, 'Now you shall answer me. You
shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you shall look at nothing else;
you shall take your hands out of your pockets and your tongues out of your
cheeks, and no matter how long, no matter what the blood and anguish of it, you
shall answer me now with the whole answer— or perish!' " 
"And what's the answer?" 
The doctor leaned down a little, resting his hands on
the foot of the cot. 
The gray patch of Hallett's face moved slightly in the
dark. 
"It will sound funny to you. Because it's a word
that's been worn pretty thin by so much careless handling. It's
'Democracy'!" 
The doctor stood up straight on his thick legs. 
"Why should it sound funny?" he demanded, a
vein of triumph in his tone. "It is the answer. And we've given it. 'Make
the world safe for democracy!' Eh? You remember the quotation?" 
"Yes, yes, that's good. But we've got to do more
than say it, Doctor. Go further. We've got to dream it in a dream; we've got to
see democracy as a wild, consuming vision. If the day ever comes when we shall
pronounce the word 'democracy' with the same fierce faith with which we
conceive them to be pronouncing 'autocracy'— that day, Doctor " 
He raised a transparent hand and moved it slowly over
his eyes. 
"It will be something to do, Doctor, that will.
Like taking hold of lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip
us naked for a moment, leave us newborn and shaken and weak— as weak as Christ
in the manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see,
we'll know what we want." 
The doctor stood for a moment, a large, dark, troubled
body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a hand over
his face. 
"Utopian!" he said. 
"Utopian!" Hallett repeated after him.
"Today we are children of Utopia— or we are nothing. I tell you, Doctor,
today it has come down to this— Hamburg to Bagdad— or Utopia!" 
The other lifted his big arms and his face was red. 
"You're playing with words, Hallett. You do
nothing but twist my words. When I say 'Utopia,' I mean, precisely, impossible.
Absolutely impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream.
I give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years. Forty
years! And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you talk about— so
much harder— so many hundreds of times more incredible— will you have us do
that sort of thing in a day? We're a dozen races, a score of nations. I tell
you it's— it's impossible!" 
"Yes. Impossible." 
The silence came down between them, heavy with all the
dark, impersonal sounds of passage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the
breathing of engines, the muffled staccato of the spark in the wireless room,
the note of the ship's bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail,
running thin in the wind: "Six bells, sir, and— all's well!" 
"All's well!" 
The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling
so in the black interlude, like stage business long rehearsed. 
"All's well!" the doctor echoed with the
mirthless laughter of the damned. 
Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and
stared at the star beyond the rail. 
"Yes, I shouldn't wonder. Just now— tonight—
somehow— I've got a queer feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it's going to be.
Maybe it's going to be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history,
perhaps, has been on us. And maybe it's almost over. Maybe we're going to get
it done in time. I've got a queer sense of something happening—something
getting ready." 
When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little. 
"I wish my father could have lived to see this
day. He's in New York now, and I should like — " 
The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying:
"Lie down, Hallett. You'd better lie down now." 
But the other protested with a gray hand. 
"No, no, you don't understand. When I say— well—
it's just the shell of my father walking around and talking around, these ten
years past. Prison killed his heart. He doesn't even know it, that the immortal
soul of him has gone out. You know him, Doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical— 'the
Destroyer,' they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man, Doctor;
you've got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and as mad. I can
see him now— tonight —sitting in the back room in Eighth Street, him and old Radinov
and Hirsch and O'Reilly and the rest, with all the doors shut and the windows
shut and their eyes and ears and minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war
out. They're old men, Doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to
tomorrow. They mustn't see today. They must ignore today. Today is the tragic
interruption. They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn't so. All
their lives they've been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the Day
of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of revolution. The
barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were almost in sight of the
splendid dawn— the dawn of the Day of Barricades. And then this war, this thing
they call a 'rich man's plot' to confound them, hold them up, turn to ashes all
the fires of their lives. All they can do is sit in a closed room with their
eyes shut and wait till this meaningless brawl is done. And then, tomorrow—
tomorrow— some safely distant tomorrow (for they're old men)— tomorrow, the
barricades! And that's queer. That's queer." 
"Queer?" 
"It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and
months now, there's been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of
the world but the sound of barricades." 
The voice trailed off into nothing. 
To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along
the near deck, his hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his
breast, there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his
own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the ship which held him
up in the dark void between two continents. 
What was it all about? he asked himself over and over.
Each time he passed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head,
painfully, and as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of
the cot and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined,
motionless and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the
steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death. 
But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett's whisper
creeping to him out of the shadow: 
"That's a bright star, Doctor."
Category:Steele
Category:Published