Yellow Butterflies — Part 2
A letter came next day from camp, and the next, and every day for a week, and she pulled herself together and went about her busy hours minute by minute cheerfully, as one must.
She disregarded the fact that inside of her an odd mental-moral-spiritual-physical arrangement which is called a heart lay quite defenseless, and that shortly a dagger was going to be struck into it.
So when the dagger came, folded in a yellow Western Union envelope, it was exactly as bad as if there had been no preparation at all.
Dick had sailed.
She spun about and caught at a table.
And then went on quietly with the five hundred little cheese-cloth “sponges” which she had promised to have at the Red Cross rooms to-morrow.
Ghastly little things.
So the boy went, one of two million to go, but yet, as most of the others were, the only one.
And two weeks later, it might be, came another telegram; a queerly worded thing from the war office: “The ship on which I sailed has arrived safely in port.
” What ship?
What port?
After what adventures?
But the great fact remained; he was, at least, overseas, beyond the first great peril.
She flung herself into war work and wrote every day a letter with its vague military address ending in A. E.
F.
And got back many letters full of enthusiasm, of adventure, of old friends and new, of dear French people who had been good to him--but everybody was good to this boy.
Of hard training, too, and a word of praise from high quarters once or twice, passed on secretly, proudly to the one person to whom a fellow could repeat such things.
It was a life crowded with happiness and hardship and comradeship and worth-while work.
And then, soon, with danger.
Through all sordidness and horror it was a life vitalized by enormous incentive, a life whose memory few of those who lived it would give up for everything else that any career might offer.
The power of these gay, commonplace, consecrated boys’ lives reached across oceans and swung nations into consecration.
Dick’s mother moved gladly in the huge orbit, for war work meant to her Dick.
The days went.
He was in action at times now, and wrote that his life was a charmed one, and that he walked safe through dangers; wrote also the pitiful bit of statistics which boys all told to their mothers, about the small percentage of killed and wounded; wrote as well the heroic sweet thoughts which came from depths of young souls which had never before known these depths.
“If I’m killed, darling child, honey, after all it’s not much different.
It wouldn’t be really long before we’d be playing together again.
And I’ve had the joy and the usefulness of fifty years of living in these last months.
What more could you ask?
The best thing to do with a life is to give it away--you taught me that--and this certainly is the best way to give it, for our America.
And don’t worry about my suffering if I’m wounded; there’s not much to that.
Things hurt and you stand it--that happens in every life--and we wiggle and get through.
It hurt like the dickens when I had pneumonia, don’t you remember?
So, behold the straight dope of the wise man Dick, and follow thereby.
Nothing can happen that’s unbearable; keep it in your mind, precious.
Live on the surface--don’t go feeling any more than you can help.
” Thousands of others found the sense of that sentence a way out of impossibility, as this woman did.
She slept nights and worked days and wrote letters and rejoiced in getting them, and shunned like poison thoughts that thronged below the threshold, thoughts she dared not meet.
Weeks wore on, months; the Germans were being pushed back; with a shivering joy she heard people say that the war could not last long; he might--he might come home safe.
She knew as that shaft of golden hope winged across her brain, from the reeling rapture of it she knew how little hope she had ever had.
But she whispered Dick’s wise sentence once in a while, “Nothing can happen that’s unbearable,” and she held her head high for Dick.
Then the one thing which had never entered her mind happened.
Dick was reported among the missing.
Missing.
Let any mother of a boy consider what that means.
Anything.
Everything.
“Nothing can happen that’s unbearable,” said Dick.
But this was.
A
woman can’t stay sane and face that word “missing”--can she?
This woman gasped that question of herself.
Yet she must stay sane, for Dick might come back.
Oh, he might even come back safe and sound.
They did come through prison camps--sometimes--and get back to health.
Prison camps.
She fell to remembering about nights when she had crept into his room to see that he was covered up.
Mines.
But that thought she could not think.
And the difficult days crawled on, and no news came and no more gay letters, with their little half-sentences of love-making, shining like jewels out of the pages, pages each one more valuable than heaps of gold.
No letters; no news; swiftly and steadily her fair hair was going gray.
The Armistice arrived, and then, after a while, troops were coming home.
Because Dick would have wanted it, because she herself must honor these glorious lads who were, each one, somehow partly Dick, she threw herself into the greetings, and many a boy was made happy and welcome by the slim, tall, still-young woman with the startling white hair, who knew so well what to say to a chap.
Outwardly all her ways stayed the same.
No one of her friends noticed a difference except that sometimes one would say: “I wonder what keeps her going?
Does she hope yet that Dick may come back?
” Surely she hoped it.
She would not wear black.
Till certainty came she must hope.
Still, little by little, as drop by drop her heart’s blood leaked, she was coming to believe him dead; coming nearly to hope it.
At the same time in the tortured, unresting brain, the brain that held so large an area of mysticism from Irish forbears, in that cave of weaving thoughts there was still hope of a miracle.
The child next door, Lynnette, not realizing to what a dangerous borderland of sanity she was urging desperate footsteps, helped her frame her vague theory of comfort.
“Nothing is sure yet.
They don’t begin to know about all the missing,” argued Lynnette, dark eyes shining.
“Dick may have been carried to the ends of the earth; he may not know even now that the war is over.
He’s so strong, nothing could--could hurt him,” stammered Lynnette, and went scarlet with a stab of knowledge of things, things that even Dick’s splendid body could not weather.
“Miracles do happen.
Do you know, Lynnette, it’s as if somebody whispered that to me over and over.
‘Miracles do happen--miracles do happen.
’ My brain aches with that sentence.
” She was still a moment.
“I saw what you were thinking.
Of the--otherwise.
I can’t face the--otherwise.
” Her voice thinned to a whisper.
“It’s worse than death, any possible otherwise, now.
When all the prisoners are freed and all the soldiers are coming--home.
Lynnette--I hope he’s dead.
” The girl tossed up a hand.
“Yes, child.
But suffering--I can’t have him suffering--long pain.
It can’t be.
Oh, God, don’t let it be that!
” Lynnette’s brown head dropped on the woman’s two hands and she kissed them with passion.
“I’ve got another thought, honey-child, and I’ll try to tell you, but it’s complicated.
” She was silent again, reviewing the waves of the ocean of her theory.
The aching, unending thoughts had been busy with this theory.
Harmlessly, unnoticed, the mind overwrought had been developing a mania.
Peace.
Had her boy, had all the boys, died for nothing?
They went, the marching hundreds of thousands, with an ideal; no one who talked to any number of soldiers of our armies could fail to know that latent in practically all was an unashamed idealism.
The roughest specimen would look you in the eye and--spitting first likely--make amazing statements about saving the world, about showing ’em if Americans would fight for their flag, about paying our debt to France, and, yes--in a quiet, matter-of-fact way--about dying for his country.
“To every man a different meaning, yet Faith to the thing that set him at his best, Something above the blood and dirt and sweat, Something apart.
May God forget the rest.
” The woman, appealing and winning, had seen this side of the enlisted man more than most; she had brooded over it, and over what was due to four millions of boys giving themselves to save the peace of the world.
Shouldn’t peace, after such sacrifice, be assured?
Should the great burnt offering fail?
Should the war-to-end-war lead to other wars?
God forbid.
By infinite little links she came to tie her boy’s coming home to the coming of world peace.
What more typical of America could there be than Dick?
An enlisted man--she rejoiced in that now; of the educated classes, but representing the rank and file as well as the brains and gentle blood of this land; not too poor, yet not rich; in his youth and strength and forthgoing power the visible spirit of a young, strong, eager country.
She put all this into halting yet clear enough words to the girl.
“I see,” Lynnette picked up the thread.
“Dick is America.
He’s a symbol.
Nobody else could combine so many elements as Dick.
” “I think you understand.
It’s wonderful to be able to tell it to some one who understands.
It has eaten my soul.
” She breathed fast.
“Listen--this is what, somehow, I believe, and nothing could change my belief.
Dick is going to bring peace to his country and to the world.
God has chosen _him_--Dick.
Alive or dead his coming will mean--peace.
Peace!
” The visions of many generations of mystic Gaels were in her eyes as they lifted and gazed out at the branches which swayed slowly, hypnotically across a pale sky.
The girl’s twisting hands holding hers, she went on to unroll the fabric which had woven itself on the unresting loom of her brain, a fabric which was, judged by a medical standard, madness.
The chain of crooked logic was after this fashion: America was the nation to bring at the last peace; Dick was the typical American; with his home-coming peace would come home to the country, and so to the world.
Till Dick came home there could be no surety, no rest for the flag which he served.
Other women died or went mad; this one alone, perhaps, fashioned her sorrow into a vigil for the salvation of her land.
Then one day Lynnette flew across the lawn and stood before her.
“You’ve seen the paper?
” “I went to the Red Cross early.
I haven’t read it.
” Her pulse stopped.
“Lynnette!
Not--Dick?
” “Oh, no--oh, no!
” Lynnette went crimson painfully.
Another girl would have had her arms around the woman, but not this one.
To show feeling was like pulling teeth to Lynnette.
“It’s not that,” she said.
“But--there’s to be a peace conference.
You know.
And they want to bring back for us at that time, Armistice Day, an unknown soldier.
” “The two things.
” Yes--the two things.
What could the two things mean but her vision, her hope for the world.
Dick was coming.
He was to be the unknown soldier.
Dick was coming, carrying peace in his dead hands.
Who else could it be?
People, mere people, could not see how that was fitting and inevitable; but she saw it; she knew it; God would take care of it.
The unknown soldier would be Dick.
He would bring, mystically, certainly, success to the gathering in Washington.
And the Lord God would give her a sign.
Each day she rose hoping the sign might be that day.
Each night she lay down sure of its coming, willing to wait.
“Lynnette, I’ll wear--those clothes, now.
” And when the girl came across the lawn and found her a few days later in new black, with the dramatic gold star on her arm, Lynnette dropped suddenly in a heap.
“Oh,” the woman cried.
“You hadn’t given up hope.
” And then: “Lynnette--you loved Dicky, too.
” With that Lynnette was standing before her, her head high, a trembling smile on her face.
“I always loved him.
And now I may tell you--he loved me.
” The woman stared.
“Yes,” Lynnette said.
“I didn’t dream it till that last morning, when he ran across--and he kissed me.
He’d never kissed me before.
It--it wasn’t just a little kiss to--an old playmate.
” The words came difficultly.
“It--would be impossible to tell it except to you.
But it was--a long kiss.
He--didn’t say anything.
I’ve thought it over and over and I think he--believed he shouldn’t. Somehow.
But that kiss--said it.
For me.
I know Dick--loved me.
” The woman caught the small figure so that the wet eyes could not see her.
“My Lynnette!
” Never on earth should the child know the true story of Dick’s kiss.
Then it was November and she went to Washington.
It meant saving money for months, but there was no question; the journey was as inevitable as death.
Likely the Lord waited in Washington with that sign which she would know when it came.
Many American women are tall and slender, with lines of distinction; this was one of them.
In her sombre dress with sheer white at neck and wrists, with the shadowy veil falling and lifting about her shoulders and accenting her white hair, with her lithe young movement, and with that touch of mysticism, of other-worldness in eyes that shone jewel-gray from a carved face, she was an arresting person.
In great Washington, packed with all human sorts, people turned to look at her.
“The gold star!
The black--the veil!
What a face of tragedy!
” Such things they said; more than once a man’s hand crept to his hat, and he stood bareheaded as she passed, as before the dead.
But she who had lived for three years facing an unthinkable word drifted through the crowd unconscious, uncaring.
A newspaper had printed a composite photograph of twenty-nine young soldiers, one from each of the combat divisions in France, and at breakfast in the hotel a woman whom she had never seen stepped across and laid it, the picture folded out, by her plate.
“It’s your boy, too,” the woman spoke gently, and was gone.
Dick’s mother stared at the vague, lovely face of an uncommonly handsome lad, dreamy, deep-eyed, steady-mouthed, a face rather short from brow to chin, with a wide facial arch between the cheek-bones--such as was Dick’s face.
The sweet extreme of youth was like Dick, but a certain haunting, ethereal quality was not like him;
yet, even so might her boy look at her through the veil of another world.
There was in fact a manner of likeness, and to the woman whose soul was at white heat the likeness was the voice of Heaven saying “Amen” to her possessing thought.
Yet this was not the sign.
She would know that when it came.
This was but an incident, making sure faith surer.
All the steps of his journey home she had watched Dick--the Unknown.
When the papers had told how Sergeant Younger, over there in France at Châlons-sur-Marne, on October 24th, would be sent into a room of the city hall alone, to choose one of four nameless dead boys lying, each so helpless to plead his cause, in four earth-stained coffins, she had known well, even then, which one.
Over Dick’s quiet heart the Sergeant would lay the white roses.
The French town decked with the colors of the Allies; troops about the city hall; an American flag at half-mast;
an unseen band playing on muffled trumpets--all this while the Sergeant walked slowly through the still room where the dead boys waited, and walked slowly back and turned and went to the farthest on the right.
Dick.
He bent and laid down the white French roses--over Dick.
She was sorry about the other boys, yet Dick meant all of them.
It was ordered.
Dick was the Peace Bringer.
She read how the inscription carried the words: “An Unknown American who gave his life in the World War.
” She smiled a little to think how she alone in the world knew the Unknown;
how among more than two thousand unidentified soldiers buried on the battlefields where they fell, chosen by chance so that even the field where he had fallen might never be placed--she smiled to think how through this mist of circumstance she knew Dick.
The woman was mad, it might have been said, had any one known her full thought; who among us, with imagination, but hides a small corner of madness from the world?
Flower-heaped, carrying the cross of the Legion of Honor, moving like the mightiest king through weeping throngs, Dick came to the gray old cruiser _Olympia_, where Dewey had once said: “You may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready.
” And they carried him on board, and a General was his escort home, and a guard of his comrades stood about him day and night as he slept among the flags, his faded French roses above his breast.
The cruiser had steamed out from Havre through dipped flags and firing guns, and all the way across the Atlantic she was saluted by all ships large and small which sailed within vision.
Because she carried Dick.
With that it was November 9th and a raw, foggy, rainy day, but the woman went out from city noises, in the wet, where it was quiet, to listen for something.
After a while she heard it--a far boom of guns--salutes to the _Olympia_ as she came slowly up the Potomac.
The fog hid her, but fort after fort, post after post, took up the tale and thundered its solemn welcome to the nation’s dead boy.
The boy’s mother was at the Navy Yard when the ship swung into dock.
She saw the crew, standing high up, in dark-blue lines, stiff, at attention; astern, under the muzzle of a gun that had rung into history that May morning in Manila Bay, was an awning; beneath it something flag-draped--Dick.
The woman shook in a tearless sob.
Dick.
What was it all--all the glory that the nations, that America could heap on him, when--ah, Dick!
She seemed to see his eyes and the deep look in them as he turned by the tulip-bed and kissed his hands to her--as the Cloudless Sulphurs stormed up from the clover around his blond head.
Dick!
Her little, laughing Dick--her big, loving Dick.
Then she was aware of a gun crashing, a band playing a dirge--the gun crashing again into the music; it was the “minute-guns of sorrow” they were firing.
And then suddenly--a shrill sound and a heart-stirring--as they lifted the coffin to the gangway, the boatswain, in the old ceremony of the sea, “piped his comrade over the side.
” Step by slow step they carried the lad down and the boatswain’s whistle called piercingly again as Dick, high on the shoulders of eight uniformed men, reached shore.
Dick was home.
The coffin wound between the lines of troops and marines, toward the gun-carriage, and the rigid young bluejackets far above watched still at attention, and with that a bugler blew flourishes and the band broke into the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the nation’s hymn.
And still the minute-guns crashed through.
And packed thousands of plain American citizens waited bareheaded for hours in the cold rain to see this beloved boy of America carried by.
Many people remarked the slender, tall woman in her billowy black veil with the gold star on her arm.
Some spoke of her.
“A wonderful face,” they said, and: “Her eyes are burning her up.
” And more than one thought: “Who knows?
It may be her boy.
” After that she stood hour after hour in a shadowy doorway of a large chamber and watched a marvellous procession file past, four abreast.
Hour after hour.
Without ceasing they came; it was as if the country poured itself out in one draft of love.
Sometimes a group halted and there was a short ceremony.
She saw the President place the silver shield with its forty-eight gold stars; she saw the Boy Scouts, fresh-faced, sturdy lads such as Dick had been five or six years ago, form and recite their oath by Dick’s coffin; she saw the embassies of England, of France, and Italy bring wreaths for Dick; she saw the ancient Indian fighters, led by General Miles, and the Belgians with their palm, and the old man of ninety-one who wore his old Victoria Cross, and Pershing, laying down his wreath and stepping back to salute his soldier, and the Chinese and the Japanese with their antique bowing, and the white-turbaned Hindus, and ever and ever the plain Americans in their thousands, “his own people from every nook of the nation, who gave him his reward.
” The short gray day faded and night came and still the crowds poured, and Dick’s mother stood, still, unconscious of fatigue, and saw, as in a dream, the pageant, till the last ones allowed to come in had passed out and the swaying woman in black went also, and the boy was alone with his guard of five comrades, “his head eastward toward France and at his feet the twinkling lights of Washington.
” Far above him on the great dome of the Capitol the brooding figure of Freedom, his comrade also, watched.
