Chapter IV: Part 4

And summed up again the heaven that he could not understand and did not want to, "Search me," he adjured the skies in good Americanese, "if girls aren't the blamedest."

THE V.C.

I had forgotten that I ordered frogs' legs. When mine were placed before me I laughed. I always laugh at the sight of frogs' legs because of the person and the day of which they remind me. Nobody noticed that I laughed or asked the reason why, though it was an audible chuckle, and though I sat at the head of my own dinner-party at the Cosmic Club.

The man for whom the dinner was given, Colonel Robert Thornton, my cousin, a Canadian, who got his leg shot off at Vimy Ridge, was making oration about the German Crown Prince's tactics at Verdun, and that was the reason that ten men were not paying attention to me and that I was not paying attention to Bobby. When the good chap talks human talk, tells what happened to people and what their psychological processes seemed to be, he is entertaining. He has a genuine gift of sympathy and a power to lead others in the path he treads; in short, he tells a good story. But like most people who do one thing particularly well he is always priding himself on the way he does something else. He likes to look at Colonel Thornton as a student of the war, and he has the time of his life when he can get people to listen to what he knows Joffre and Foch and Haig and Hindenberg ought to have done. So at this moment he was enjoying his evening, for the men I had asked to meet him, all strangers to him, ignorant of his real powers, were hanging on his words, partly because no one can help liking him whatever he talks about, and partly because, with that pathetic empty trouser-leg and the crutch hooked over his chair, he was an undoubted hero. So I heard the sentences ambling, and reflected that Hilaire Belloc with maps and a quiet evening would do my tactical education more good than Bobby Thornton's discursions. And about then I chuckled unnoticed, over the silly frogs' legs.

"Tell me, Colonel Thornton, do you consider that the French made a mistake in concentrating so much of their reserve--" It was the Governor himself who was demanding this earnestly of Bobby. And I saw that the Governor and the rest were hypnotized, and did not need me.

So I sat at the head of the table, and waiters brooded over us, and cucumbers and the usual trash happened, and Bobby held forth while the ten who were bidden listened as to one sent from heaven. And, being superfluous, I withdrew mentally to a canoe in a lonely lake and went frogging.

Vicariously. I do not like frogging in person. The creature smiles. Also he appeals because he is ugly and complacent. But for the grace of God I might have looked so. He sits in supreme hideousness frozen to the end of a wet log, with his desirable hind legs spread in view, and smiles his bronze smile of confidence in his own charm and my friendship. It is more than I can do to betray that smile. So, hating to destroy the beast yet liking to eat the leg, about once in my summer vacation in camp I go frogging, and make the guides do it.

It would not be etiquette to send them out alone, for in our club guides are supposed to do no fishing or shooting--no sport. Therefore, I sit in a canoe and pretend to take a frog in a landing-net and miss two or three and shortly hand over the net to Josef. We have decided on landing-nets as our tackle. I once shot the animals with a .22 Flobert rifle, but almost invariably they dropped, like a larger bullet, off the log and into the mud, and that was the end. We never could retrieve them. Also at one time we fished them with a many-pronged hook and a bit of red flannel. But that seemed too bitter a return for the bronze smile, and I disliked the method, besides being bad at it. We took to the landing-net.

To see Josef, enraptured with the delicate sport, approach a net carefully till within an inch of the smile, and then give the old graven image a smart rap on the legs in question to make him leap headlong into the snare--to see that and Josef's black Indian eyes glitter with joy at the chase is amusing. I make him slaughter the game instantly, which appears supererogatory to Josef who would exactly as soon have a collection of slimy ones leaping around the canoe. But I have them dead and done for promptly, and piled under the stern seat. And on we paddle to the next.

The day to which I had retired from my dinner-party and the tactical lecture of my distinguished cousin was a late August day of two years before. The frogging fleet included two canoes, that of young John Dudley who was doing his vacation with me, and my own. In each canoe, as is Hoyle for canoeing in Canada, were two guides and a "m'sieur." The other boat, John's, was somewhere on the opposite shore of Lac des Passes, the Lake of the Passes, crawling along edges of bays and specializing in old logs and submerged rocks, after frogs with a landing-net, the same as us. But John--to my mind coarser--was doing his own frogging. The other boat was nothing to us except for an occasional yell when geography brought us near enough, of "How many?" and envy and malice and all uncharitableness if the count was more, and hoots of triumph if less.

In my craft sailed, besides Josef and myself, as bow paddler, The Tin Lizzie. We called him that except when he could hear us, and I think it would have done small harm to call him so then, as he had the brain of a jack-rabbit and managed not to know any English, even when soaked in it daily. John Dudley had named him because of the plebeian and reliable way in which he plugged along Canadian trails. He set forth the queerest walk I have ever seen--a human Ford, John said. He was also quite mad about John. There had been a week in which Dudley, much of a doctor, had treated, with cheerful patience and skill, an infected and painful hand of the guide's, and this had won for him the love eternal of our Tin Lizzie. Little John Dudley thought, as he made jokes to distract the boy, and worked over his big throbbing fist, the fist which meant daily bread--little John thought where the plant of love springing from that seed of gratitude would at last blossom. Little he thought as the two sat on the gallery of the camp, and the placid lake broke in silver on pebbles below, through what hell of fire and smoke and danger the kindliness he gave to the stupid young guide would be given back to him. Which is getting ahead of the story.

I suggested that the Lizzie might like a turn at frogging, and Josef, with Indian wordlessness, handed the net to him. Whereupon, with his flabby mouth wide and his large gray eyes gleaming, he proceeded to miss four easy ones in succession. And with that Josef, in a gibberish which is French-Canadian patois of the inner circles, addressed the Tin Lizzie and took away the net from him, asking no orders from me. The Lizzie, pipe in mouth as always, smiled just as pleasantly under this punishment as in the hour of his opportunities. He would have been a very handsome boy, with his huge eyes and brilliant brown and red color and his splendid shoulders and slim waist of an athlete if only he had possessed a ray of sense. Yet he was a good enough guide to fill in, for he was strong and willing and took orders amiably from anybody and did his routine of work, such as chopping wood and filling lamps and bringing water and carrying boats, with entire efficiency. That he had no initiative at all and by no chance did anything he was not told to, even when most obvious, that he was lacking in any characteristic of interest, that he was moreover a supreme coward, afraid to be left alone in the woods--these things were after all immaterial, for, as John pointed out, we didn't really need to love our guides.

John also pointed out that the Lizzie--his name was, incidentally, Aristophe--had one nice quality. Of course, it was a quality which appealed most to the beneficiary, yet it seemed well to me also to have my guests surrounded with mercy and loving kindness. John had but to suggest building a fire or greasing his boots or carrying a canoe over any portage to any lake, and the Lizzie at once leaped with a bright smile as who should say that this was indeed a pleasure. "C'est bien, M'sieur," was his formula. He would gaze at John for sections of an hour, with his flabby mouth open in speechless surprise as if at the unbelievable glory and magnificence of M'sieur. A nice lad, John Dudley was, but no subtle enchanter; a stocky and well-set-up young man with a whole-souled, garrulous and breezy way, and a gift of slang and a brilliant grin. What called forth hero-worship towards him I never understood; but no more had I understood why Mildred Thornton, Colonel Thornton's young sister, my very beautiful cousin, should have selected him, from a large assortment of suitors, to marry. Indeed I did not entirely understand why I liked having John in camp better than anyone else; probably it was essentially the same charm which impelled Mildred to want to live with him, and the Tin Lizzie to fall down and worship. In any case the Lizzie worshipped with a primitive and unashamed and enduring adoration, which stood even the test of fear. That was the supreme test for the Tin Lizzie, who was a coward of cowards. Rather cruelly I bet John on a day that his satellite did not love him enough to go out to the club-house alone for him, and the next day John was in sore need of tobacco, not to be got nearer than the club.

"Aristophe will go out and get it for me," he announced as Aristophe--the Lizzie--trotted about the table at lunch-time purveying us flapjacks.

The Tin Lizzie stood rooted a second, petrified at the revolutionary scheme of his going to the club, companions unmentioned. There one saw as if through glass an idea seeking a road through his smooth gray matter. One had always gone to the club with Josef, or Maxime or Pierre--certainly M'sieur meant that; one would of course be glad to go--with Josef or Maxime or Pierre--to get tobacco for M'sieur John. Of course, the idea slid through the old road in the almost unwrinkled gray matter, and came safely to headquarters.

"C'est bien, M'sieur," answered the Lizzie smiling brightly.

And with that I knocked the silly little smile into a cocked hat. "You may start early tomorrow, Aristophe," I said, "and get back by dark, going light, I can't spare any other men to go with you. But you will certainly not mind going alone--to get tobacco for M'sieur John."

The poor Tin Lizzie turned red and then white, and his weak mouth fell open and his eyebrows lifted till the whites of his eyes showed above the gray irises. And one saw again, through the crystal of his unexercised brain, the operation of a painful and new thought. M'sieur John--a day alone in the woods--love, versus fear--which would win. John and I watched the struggle a bit mercilessly. A grown man gets small sympathy for being a coward. And yet few forms of suffering are keener. We watched; and the Tin Lizzie stood and gasped in the play of his emotions. Nobody had ever given this son of the soil ideals to hold to through sudden danger; no sense of inherited honor to be guarded came to help the Lizzie; he had been taught to work hard and save his skin--little else. The great adoration for John which had swept him off his commonplace feet--was it going to make good against life-long selfish caution? We wondered. It was curious to watch the new big feeling fight the long-established petty one. And it was with a glow of triumph quite out of drawing that we saw the generous instinct win the battle.

"Oui, M'sieur," spoke Aristophe, unconscious of subtleties or watching. "I go tomorrow--alone. _C'est bien, M'sieur_."

It was about the only remark I ever heard him make, that gracious: "_C'est bien, M'sieur_!" But he made it remarkably well. Almost he persuaded me to respect him with that hearty response to the call of duty, that humble and high gift of graciousness. One remembers him as his dolly face lighted at John's order to go and clean trout or carry in logs, and one does not forget the absurd, queer little fast trot at which his powerful young legs would instantaneously swing off to obey the behest. Such was the Tin Lizzie, the guide who paddled bow in my canvas canoe on the day of the celebrated frog hunt.

That the frog hunt was celebrated was owing to the Lizzie. He should have been in John's boat, as one of John's guides, but at the last moment, there was a confusion of tongues and Lizzie was shipped aboard my canoe. In the excitement of the chase Josef, stern man, had faced about to manipulate his landing-net; Aristophe also slewed around and, sitting on the gunwale, became stern paddler. I was in the middle screwed anyhow, watching the frog fishing and enjoying the enjoyment of the men. Poor chaps, it was the only bit of personal play they got out of our month of play. Aristophe, the Tin Lizzie, was quite mad with the excitement even from his very second fiddle standpoint of paddler to Josef's frogging. His enormous gray eyes snapped, his teeth showed white and gold around his pipe--which he nearly bit off--and he even used language.

"_Tiens! Encore un!_" hissed the Lizzie in a blood-curdling whisper as a new pair of pop eyes lifted from the edge of a rotten log.

And Josef, who had always seen the frog first, fired a guttural sentence, full of contempt, full of friendliness, for he sized up the Lizzie, his virtues and his limitations, accurately. And then the boat was pushed and pulled in the shallow water till Josef and the net were within range. With, that came the slow approach of the net to the smile, the swift tap on the eatable legs, and headlong into his finish leaped M. Crapaud. Which is rot his correct name, Josef tells me, in these parts, but M. Guarron. And that, being translated, means Mr. Very-Big-Bull-Frog.

Business had prospered to fourteen or fifteen head of frogs, and we calculated that the other boat might have a dozen when, facing towards Aristophe, I saw his dull, fresh face suddenly change. My pulse missed a beat at that expression. It was adequate to an earthquake or sudden death. How the fatuous doll-like features could have been made to register that stare of a soul in horror I can't guess. But they did. The whites of his eyes showed an eighth of an inch above the irises and his black eyebrows were shot up to the roots of his glossy black hair. In the gleaming white and gold of his teeth the pipe was still gripped. And while I gazed, astonished, his unfitting deep voice issued from that mask of fear:

"_Tiens! Encore un!_" And I screwed about and saw that the Lizzie was running the boat on top of an enormous frog which he had not spied till the last second. With that Josef exploded throaty language and leaning sidewise made a dive at the frog. Aristophe, unbalanced with emotion and Josef's swift movement shot from his poise at the end of the little craft, and landed, in a foot of water, flat on his buck, and the frog seized that second to jump on his stomach.

I never heard an Indian really laugh before that day. The hills resounded with Josef's shouts. We laughed, Josef and I, till we were weak, and for a good minute Aristophe sprawled in the lake, with the frog anchored as if till Kingdom come on his middle, and howled lusty howls while we laughed. Then Josef fished the frog and got him off the Tin Lizzie's lungs. And Aristophe, weeping, scrambled into the boat. And as we went home in the cool forest twilight, up the portage by the rushing, noisy rapids, Josef, walking before us, carrying the landing-net full of frogs' legs, shook with laughter every little while again, as Aristophe, his wet strong young legs, the only section of him showing, toiled ahead up the winding thread of a trail, carrying the inverted canoe on his head.

It was this adventure which came to me and seized me and carried me a thousand miles northward into Canadian forest as I looked at the frogs' legs on my plate at the Cosmic Club, and did not listen to my cousin, the Colonel, talking military tactics.

The mental review took an eighth of the time it has taken me to tell it. But as I shook off my dream of the woods, I realized that, while Thornton still talked, he had got out of his uninteresting rut into his interesting one. Without hearing what he said I knew that from the look of the men's faces. Each man's eyes were bright, through a manner of mistiness, and there was a sudden silence which was perhaps what had recalled me.

"It's a war which is making a new standard of courage," spoke the young Governor in the gentle tone which goes so oddly and so pleasantly with his bull-dog jaw. "It looks as if we were going to be left with a world where heroism is the normal thing," spoke the Governor.

"Heroism--yes," said Bobby, and I knew with satisfaction that he was off on his own line, the line he does not fancy, the line where few can distance him. "Heroism!" repeated Bobby, "It's all around out there. And it crops out--" he begun to smile--"in unsuspected places, from varied impulses."

He was working his way to an anecdote. The men at the table, their chairs twisted towards him, sat very still.

"What I mean to say is," Bobby began, "that this war, horrible as it is, is making over human, nature for the better. It's burning out selfishness and cowardice and a lot of faults from millions of men, and it's holding up the nobility of what some of them do to the entire world. It takes a character, this débâcle, and smashes out the littleness. Another thing is curious. If a small character has one good point on which to hang heroism, the battle-spirit searches out that point and plants on it the heroism. There was a stupid young private in my command who--but I'm afraid I'm telling too many war stories," Bobby appealed, interrupting himself. "I'm full of it, you see, and when people are so good, and listen--" He stopped, in a confusion which is not his least attractive manner.

From down the table came a quick murmur of voices. I saw more than one glance halt at the crutch on the back of the soldier's chair.

"Thank you. I'd really like to tell about this man. It's interesting, psychologically to me," he went on, smiling contentedly. He is a lovable chap, my cousin Robert Thornton. "The lad whom I speak of, a French-Canadian from Quebec Province, was my servant, my batman, as the Indian army called them and as we refer to them often now. He was so brainless that I just missed firing him the first day I had him. But John Dudley, my brother-in-law and lieutenant, wanted me to give him a chance, and also there was something in his manner when I gave him orders which attracted me. He appeared to have a pleasure in serving, and an ideal of duty. Dudley had used him as a guide, and the man had a dog-like devotion to 'the lieutenant' which counted with me. Also he didn't talk. I think he knew only four words. I flung orders at him and there would be first a shock of excitement, then a second of tense anxiety, then a radiant smile and the four words: '_C'est bien, Mon Capitaine_.' I was captain then."

At that point I dropped my knife and fork and stared at my cousin. He went on.

"'_C'est bien, Mon Capitaine_.' That was the slogan. And when the process was accomplished, off he would trot, eager to do my will. He was powerful and well-built, but he had the oddest manner of locomotion ever I saw, a trot like--like a Ford car. I discovered pretty soon that the poor wretch was a born coward. I've seen him start at the distant sound of guns long before we got near the front, and he was nervous at going out alone at night about the camp. The men ragged him, but he was such a friendly rascal and so willing to take over others' work that he got along with a fraction of the persecution most of his sort would have had. I wondered sometimes what would happen to the poor little devil when actual fighting came. Would it be '_C'est bien, Mon Capitaine_,' at the order to go over the top, or would the terrible force of fear be too much for him and land him at last with his back to a wall and a firing squad in front--a deserter? Meantime he improved and I got dependent on his radiant good will. Being John Dudley's brother-in-law sanctified me with him, and nothing was too much trouble if I'd give him a chance sometimes to clean John's boots. I have a man now who shows no ecstacy at being ordered to do my jobs, and I don't like him.

"We were moved up towards the front, and, though Mr. Winston Churchill has made a row about the O.S.--the officers' servants who are removed from the firing line, I know that a large proportion of them do their share in the trenches. I saw to it that mine did.

"One night there was a digging expedition. An advance trench was to be made in No Man's Land about a hundred and fifty yards from the Germans. I was in command of the covering party of thirty-five men; I was a captain. We, of course, went out ahead. Beauramé was in the party. It was his first fighting. We had rifles, with bayonets, and bombs, and a couple of Lewis guns. We came up to the trenches by a road, then went into the zigzag communication trenches up to the front, the fire-trench. Then, very cautiously, over the top into No Man's Land. It was nervous work, for at any second they might discover us and open fire. It suited us all to be as quiet as human men could be, and when once in a while a star-shell, a Very light, was sent up from the German lines we froze in our tracks till the white glare died out.

"The party had been digging for perhaps an hour when hell broke loose. They'd seen us. All about was a storm of machine-gun and rifle bullets, and we dropped on our faces, the diggers in their trench--pretty shallow it was. As for the covering party, we simply took our medicine. And then the shrapnel joined the music. Word was passed to get back to the trenches, and we started promptly. We stooped low as we ran over No Man's Land, but there were plenty of casualties. I got mine in the foot, but not the wound which rung in this--" Thornton nodded his head at the crutches with a smile. "It was from a bit of shrapnel just as I made the trench, and as I fell in I caught at the sand bags and whirled about facing out over No Man's Land; as I whirled I saw, close by, Beauramé's face in a shaft of light. I don't know why I made conversation at that moment--I did. I said:

"When did you get back?"

And his answer came as if clicked on a typewriter. "Me, I stayed, _Mon Capitaine_. It had an air too dangerous, out there."

I stared in a white rage. You'll imagine--one of my men to dare tell me that! And at that second, simultaneously, came the flare of a shell star and a shout of a man struck down, and I knew the voice--John Dudley. He was out there, the tail end of the party, wounded. I saw him as he fell, on the farther side of the new trench. Of course, one's instinct was to dash back and bring him in, and I started. And I found my foot gone--I couldn't walk. Quicker than I can tell it I turned to Beauramé, the coward, who'd been afraid to go over the top, and I said in French, because, though I hadn't time to think it out, I yet realized that it would get to him faster so--I said:

"Get over there, you deserter. Save the lieutenant--Lieutenant Dudley. Go."

For one instant I thought it was no good and I was due to have him shot, if we both lived through the night. And then--I never in my life saw such a face of abject fear as the one he turned first to me and then across that horror of No Man's Land. The whites of his eyes showed, it seemed, an eighth of an inch above the irises; his black eyebrows were half way up his forehead, and his teeth, luxuriously upholstered with fillings, shone white and gold in the unearthly light. It was such a mad terror as I'd never seen before, and never since. And into it I, mad too with the thought of my sister if I let young John Dudley die before my eyes--I bombed again the order to go out and bring in Dudley. I remember the fading and coming expressions on that Frenchman's face like the changes on a moving picture film. I suppose it was half a minute. And here was the coward face gazing into mine, transfigured into the face of a man who cared about another man more than himself--a common man whose one high quality was love.

"_C'est bien, Mon Capitaine_," Beauramé spoke, through still clicking teeth, and with his regulation smile of good will he had sprung over the parapet in one lithe movement, and I saw him crouching, trotting that absurd, powerful fast trot through the lane in our barbed wire, like lightning, to the shallow new trench, to Dudley. I saw him--for the Germans had the stretch lighted--I saw the man pick up my brother-in-law and toss him over his shoulders and start trotting back. Then I saw him fall, both of them fall, and I knew that he'd stopped a bullet. And then, as I groaned, somehow Beauramé was on his feet again. I expected, that he'd bolt for cover, but he didn't. He bent over deliberately as if he had been a fearless hero--and maybe he was--and he picked up Dudley again and started on, laboring, this time in walking. He was hit badly. But he made the trench; he brought in Dudley.

Then such a howl of hurrahs greeted him from the men who watched the rescue as poor little Aristophe Beauramé--"

"Ah!" I interjected, and Bobby turned and stared--"as the poor little scared rat had not dreamed, or had any right to dream would ever greet his conduct on earth. He dropped Dudley at my feet and turned with his flabby mouth open and his great stupid eyes like saucers, towards the men who rushed to shake his hand and throw at him words of admiration that choked them to get out. And then he keeled over. So you see. It was an equal chance at one second, whether a man should be shot for a deserter or--win the Victoria Cross."

"What!" I shouted at my guest. "What! Not the Victoria Cross! Not Aristophe!"

Bobby looked at me in surprise. "You're a great claque for me," he said. "You seem to take an interest in my hero. Yes, he got it. He was badly hurt. One hand nearly gone and a wound in his side. I was lucky enough to be in London on a day three months later, and to be present at the ceremony, when the young French-Canadian, spoiled for a soldier, but splendid stuff now for a hero, stood out in the open before the troops in front of Buckingham Palace and King George pinned the V.C. on his breast. They say that he's back in his village, and the whole show. I hear that he tells over and over the story of his heroism and the rescue of '_Mon Lieutenant_.' to never failing audiences. Of course, John is looking after him, for the hand which John saved was the hand that was shot to pieces in saving John, and the Tin Lizzie can never make his living with that hand again. A deserter, a coward--decorated by the King with the Victoria Cross! Queer things happen in war!" There was a stir, a murmur as of voices, of questions beginning, but Bobby was not quite through.

"War takes the best of the best men, and the best of the cheapest, and transfigures both. War doesn't need heroes for heroism. She pins it on anywhere if there's one spot of greatness in a character. War does strange things with humanity," said Bobby.

And I, gasping, broke out crudely in three words: "Our Tin Lizzie!" I said, and nobody knew in the least what I meant, or with what memories I said it.

HE THAT LOSETH HIS LIFE SHALL FIND IT

The Red Cross women had gone home. Half an hour before, the large library had been filled with white-clad, white-veiled figures. Two long tables full, forty of them today, had been working; three thousand surgical dressings had been cut and folded and put away in large boxes on shelves behind glass doors where the most valuable books had held their stately existence for years. The books were stowed now in trunks in the attic. These were war days; luxuries such as first editions must wait their time. The great living-room itself, the center of home for this family since the two boys were born and ever this family had been, the dear big room with its dark carved oak, and tapestries, and stained glass, and books, and memories was given over now to war relief work.

Sometimes, as the mistress walked into the spacious, low-ceilinged, bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably. Brock and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football, or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be presented to guests. Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six years back, the night they came in, a young Hugh, younger than Brock was now. Her father and mother, long gone over "to the majority," and the exquisite old ivory beauty of a beautiful grandmother--such ghosts rose and faced the woman as she stepped into the room where they had moved in life, the room with its loveliness marred by two long tables covered with green oilcloth, by four rows of cheap chairs, by rows and rows of boxes on shelves where soft and bright and dark colors of books had glowed. She felt often that she should explain matters to the room, should tell the walls which had sheltered peace and hospitality that she had consecrated them to yet higher service. Never for one instant, while her soul ached for the familiar setting, had she regretted its sacrifice. That her soul did ache made it worth while.

And the women gathered for this branch Red Cross organization, her neighbors on the edge of the great city, wives and daughters and mothers of clerks, and delivery-wagon drivers, and icemen, and night-watchmen, women who had not known how to take their part in the war work in the city or had found it too far to go, these came to her house gladly and all found pleasure in her beautiful room. That made it a joy to give it up to them. She stood in the doorway, feeling an emphasis in the quiet of the July afternoon because of the forty voices which had lately gone out of the sunshiny silence, of the forty busy figures in long, white aprons and white, sweeping veils, the tiny red cross gleaming over the forehead of each one, each face lovely in the uniform of service, all oddly equalized and alike under their veils and crosses. She spoke aloud as she tossed out her hands to the room:

"War will be over some day, and you will be our own again, but forever holy because of this. You will be a room of history when you go to Brock--"

Brock! Would Brock ever come home to the room, to this place which he loved? Brock, in France! She turned sharply and went out through the long hall and across the terrace, and sat down where the steps dropped to the garden, on the broad top step, with her head against the pillar of the balustrade. Above her the smell of box in a stone vase on the pillar punctured the mild air with its definite, reminiscent fragrance. Box is a plant of antecedents of sentiment, of memories. The woman inhaling its delicate sharpness, was caught back into days past. She considered, in rapid jumps of thought, events, episodes, epochs. The day Brock was born, on her own twentieth birthday, up-stairs where the rosy chintz curtains blew now out of the window; the first day she had come down to the terrace--it was June--and the baby lay in his bassinet by the balustrade in that spot--she looked at the spot--the baby, her big Brock, a bundle of flannel and fine, white stuff in lacy frills of the bassinet. And she loved him; she remembered how she had loved that baby, how, laughing at herself, she had whispered silly words over the stolid, pink head; how the girl's heart of her had all but burst with the astonishing new tide of a feeling which seemed the greatest of which she was capable. Yet it was a small thing to the way she loved Brock now. A vision came of little Hugh, three years younger, and the two toddling about the terrace together, Hugh always Brock's satellite and adorer, as was fitting; less sturdy, less daring than Brock, yet ready to go anywhere if only the older baby led. She thought of the day when Hugh, four years old, had taken fright at a black log among the bushes under the trees.

"It's a bear!" little Hugh had whispered, shaking, and Brock, brave but not too certain, had looked at her, inquiring.

"No, love, it's not a bear; it's an old log of wood. Go and put your hand on it, Hughie."

Little Hugh had cried out and shrunk back. "I'm afraid!" cried little Hugh.

And Brock, not entirely clear as to the no-bear theory, had yet bluffed manfully. "Come on, Hughie; let's go and bang 'um," said Brock.

Which invitation Hugh accepted reluctantly with a condition, "If you'll hold my hand, B'ocky."

The woman turned her head to see the place where the black log had lain, there in the old high bushes. And behold! Two strong little figures in white marched along--she could all but see them today--and the bigger little figure was dragging the other a bit, holding a hand with masterful grip. She could hear little Hugh's laughter as they arrived at the terrible log and found it truly a log. Even now Hugh's laugh was music.

"Why, it's nuffin but an old log o' wood!" little Hugh had squealed, as brave as a lion.

As she sat seeing visions, old Mavourneen, Brock's Irish wolf-hound, came and laid her muzzle on the woman's shoulder, crying a bit, as was Mavourneen's Irish way, for pleasure at finding the mistress. And with that there was a brown ripple and a patter of many soft feet, and a broken wave of dogs came around the corner, seven little cairn-terriers. Sticky and Sandy and their offspring. The woman let Sticky settle in her lap and drew Sandy under her arm, and the puppies looked up at her from the step below with ten serious, anxious eyes and then fell to chasing quite imaginary game up and down the stone steps. Mavourneen sighed deeply and dropped with a heavy thud, a great paw on the edge of the white dress and her beautiful head resting on her paws, the topaz, watchful eyes gazing over the city. The woman put her free hand back and touched the rough head.

"Dear dog!" she spoke.

Another memory came: how they had bought Mavourneen, she and Hugh and the boys, at the kennels in Ireland, eight years ago; how the huge baby had been sent to them at Liverpool in a hamper; the uproarious drive the four of them--Hugh, the two boys, and herself--and Mavourneen had taken in a taxi across the city. The puppy, astonished and investigating throughout the whole proceeding, had mounted all of them, separately and together, and insisted on lying in big Hugh's lap, crying broken-heartedly at not being allowed. How they had shouted laughter, the four and the boy taxi-driver, all the journey, till they ached! What good times they had always had together, the young father and mother and the two big sons! She reflected how she had not been at all the conventional mother of sons. She had not been satisfied to be gentle and benevolent and look after their clothes and morals. She had lived their lives with them, she had ridden and gone swimming with them, and played tennis and golf, and fished and shot and skated and walked with them, yes, and studied and read with them, all their lives.

"I haven't any respect for my mother," young Hugh told her one day. "I like her like a sister."

She was deeply pleased at this attitude; she did not wish their respect as a visible quality. Vision after vision came of the old times and care-free days while the four, as happy and normal a family as lived in the world, passed their alert, full days together before the war. Memory after memory took form in the brain of the woman, the center of that light-hearted life so lately changed, so entirely now a memory. War had come.

At first, in 1914, there had been excitement, astonishment. Then the horror of Belgium. One refused to believe that at first; it was a lurid slander on the kindly German people; then one believed with the brain; one's spirit could not grasp it. Unspeakable deeds such as the Germans' deeds--it was like a statement made concerning a fourth dimension of space; civilized modern folk were not so organized as to realize the facts of that bestiality.

"Aren't you thankful we're Americans?" the woman had said over and over.

One day her husband, answering usually with a shake of the head, answered in words. "We may be in it yet," he said. "I'm not sure but we ought to be."

Brock, twenty-one then, had flashed at her: "I want to be in it. I may just have to be, mother."

Young Hugh yawned a bit at that, and stretching his long arm, he patted his brother's shoulder. "Good old hero, Brock! I'll beat you a set of tennis. Come on."

That sudden speech of Brock's had startled her, had brought the war, in a jump which was like a stab, close. The war and Lindow--their place--how was it possible that this nightmare in Europe could touch the peace of the garden, the sunlit view of the river, the trees with birds singing in them, the scampering of the dogs down the drive? The distant hint of any connection between the great horror and her own was pain; she put the thought away.

Then the _Lusitania_ was sunk. All America shouted shame through sobs of rage. The President wrote a beautiful and entirely satisfactory note.

"It should be war--war. It should be war today," Hugh had said, her husband. "We only waste time. We'll have to fight sooner or later. The sooner we begin, the sooner we'll finish."

"Fight!" young Hugh threw at him. "What with? We can just about make faces at 'em, father."

The boy's father did not laugh. "We had better get ready to do more than make faces; we've got to get ready." He hammered his hand on the stone balustrade. "I'm going to Plattsburg this summer, Evelyn."

"I'm going with you." Brock's voice was low and his mouth set, and the woman, looking at him, saw suddenly that her boy was a man.

"Well, then, as man power is getting low at Lindow, I'll stay and take care of Mummy. Won't I? We'll do awfully well without them, won't we, Mum? You can drive Dad's Rolls-Royce roadster, and if you leave on the handbrake up-hill, I'll never tell."

Father and son had gone off for the month in camp, and, glad as she was to have the younger boy with her, there was yet an uneasy, an almost subconscious feeling about him, which she indignantly denied each time that it raised its head. It never quite phrased itself, this fear, this wonder if Hugh were altogether as American as his father and brother. Question the courage and patriotism of her own boy? She flung the thought from her as again and yet again it came. People of the same blood were widely different. To Brock and his father it had come easily to do the obvious thing, to go to Plattsburg. It had not so come to young Hugh, but that in good time he would see his duty and do it she would not for an instant doubt. She would not break faith with the lad in thought. With a perfect delicacy she avoided any word that would influence him. He knew. All his life he had breathed loyalty. It was she herself, reading to them night after night through years, who had taught the boys hero worship--above all, worship of American heroes, Washington, Paul Jones, Perry, Farragut, Lee; how Dewey had said, "You may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready"; how Clark had brought the _Oregon_ around the continent; how Scott had gone alone among angry Indians. She had taught them such names, names which will not die while America lives. It was she who had told the little lads, listening wide-eyed, that as these men had held life lightly for the glory of America, so her sons, if need came, must be ready to offer their lives for their country. She remembered how Brock, his round face suddenly scarlet, had stammered out:

"I _am_ ready, Mummy. I'd die this minute for--for America. Wouldn't you, Hughie?"

And young Hugh, a slim, blond angel of a boy, of curly, golden hair and unexpected answers, had ducked beneath the hero, upsetting him into a hedge to his infinite anger. "I wouldn't die right now, Brocky," said Hugh. "There's going to be chocolate cake for lunch."

One could never count on Hugh's ways of doing things, but Brock was a stone wall of reliability. She smiled, thinking of his youth and beauty and entire boyishness, to think yet of the saying from the Bible which always suggested Brock, "Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." It was so with the lad; through the gay heart and eager interest in life pulsed an atmosphere of deep religiousness. He was always "in perfect peace," and his mother, less balanced, had stayed her mind on that quiet and right young mind from its very babyhood. The lad had seen his responsibilities and lifted them all his life. It came to her how, when her own mother, very dear to Brock, had died, she had not let the lads go with her to the house of death for fear of saddening their youth, and how, when she and their father came home from the hard, terrible business of the funeral, they met little Hugh on the drive, rapturous at seeing them again, rather absorbed in his new dog. But Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father's, too large for him, tied under his collar. Of all the memories of her boys, that grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious. It said much. It said: "I also, O, my mother, am of my people. I have a right to their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my place in trouble, I shall do what I can alone, being but a boy. I shall give up play, and I shall wear mourning as I can, not knowing how very well, but pushed by all my being to be with my own in their mourning."

Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself. Brock and Hugh were different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too--undeveloped, that was all. He had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his face. That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from ugliness; these things were young Hugh's limitations, and no ignoble quality.

In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face, in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond the city, the woman reviewed her boys' lives. Boys were not now merely one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation. They stood in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged, orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth. Her boys were but two, yet necessary. She owed them to the country, as other mothers of men.

There was a whistle under the archway, a flying step, and young Hugh shot from beneath the rosiness of Dorothy Perkins vines and took the stone steps in four bounds. All the dogs fell into a community chorus of barks and whines and patterings about, and Hugh's hands were on this one and that as he bent over the woman.

"A _good_ kiss, Mummy; that's cold baked potato," he complained, and she laughed and hugged him.

"Not cold; I was just thinking. Your knee, Hughie? You came up like a bird."

Hugh made a face. "Bad break, that," he grinned, and limped across the terrace and back. "Mummy, it doesn't hurt much now, and I do forget," he explained, and his color deepened. With that: "Tom Arthur is waiting for me in town. We're going to pick up Whitney, the tennis champion, at the Crossroads Club. May I take Dad's roadster?"

"Yes, Hughie. And, Hugh, meet the train, the seven-five. Dad's coming to-night, you know."

The boy took her hand, looked at her uneasily. "Mummy, dear, don't be thinking sinful thoughts about me. And don't let Dad. Hold your fire, Mummy."

She lifted her face, and her eyes were the eyes of faith he had known all his life. "You blessed boy of mine, I will hold my fire." And then Hugh had all but knocked her over with a violent kiss again, and he slammed happily through the screen doors and was leaping up the stairs. Ten minutes later she heard the car purring down the drive.

The dogs settled about her with long dog-sighs again. She looked at her wrist--only five-thirty. She went back with a new unrest to her thoughts. Hugh's knee--it was odd; it had lasted a long time, ever since--she shuddered a bit, so that old Mavourneen lifted her head and objected softly--ever since war was declared. Over a year! To be sure, he had hurt it again badly, slipping on the ice in December, just as it was getting strong. She wished that his father would not be so grim when Hugh's bad knee was mentioned. What did he mean? Did he dare to think her boy--the word was difficult even mentally--a slacker? With that her mind raced back to the days just before Hugh had hurt this knee. It was in February that Germany had proclaimed the oceans closed except along German paths, at German times. "This is war at last," her husband had said, and she knew the inevitable had come.

Night after night she had lain awake facing it, sometimes breaking down utterly and shaking her soul out in sobs, sometimes trying to see ways around the horror, trying to believe that war must end before our troops could get ready, often with higher courage glorying that she might give so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity--nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth--such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful, peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she might, the ocean surged every day nearer.

Daytimes she was as brave as the best. She could say: "If we had done it the day after the _Lusitania_, that would have been right. It would have been all over now." She could say: "My boys? They will do their duty like other women's boys." But nights, when she crept into bed and the things she had read of Belgium, of Serbia, came and stood about her, she knew that hers were the only boys in the world who could not, _could_ not be spared. Brock and Hugh! It seemed as if it would be apparent to the dullest that Brock and Hugh were different from all others. She could suffer; she could have gone over there light-hearted and faced any danger to save _them_. Of course! That was natural! But--Brock and Hugh! The little heads that had lain in the hollow of her arm; the noisy little boys who had muddied their white clothes, and broken furniture, and spilled ink; the tall, beautiful lads who had been her pride and her everlasting joy, her playmates, her lovers--Brock and Hugh! Why, there had never been on earth love and friendship in any family close and unfailing like that of the four.