Part 2

"I was the oldest of them all, Peter. And I was sickest, too. They all expected to come an' decorate me to-day." Patience nodded, without a word. She knew when her husband must do all the talking; she had found that out early in their married life. "I wouldn't of believed it, Peter; would you? Old Mr. Succor he had such good health. Who'd thought he'd tumble down the cellar stairs? If Mis' Succor 'd be'n like you, Peter, he wouldn't had the chance to tumble: I never would of _thought_ of David Swing's havin' pneumonia--would you, Peter? Why, in '62 he slept onto the ground in peltin', drenchin' storms an' never sneezed. He was powerful well 'n' tough, David was. And Jabez! Poor old Jabez Trent! I liked him the best of the lot, Peter. Didn't you? He was sorry for me when they come here that day an' I couldn't march along of them.... And now, Peter, I've got to go an' decorate _them_.

"I'm the last livin' survivor of the Charles Darlington Post," added the veteran. "I'm going to apply to the Department Commander to let me keep it up. I guess I can manage someways. _I won't be disbanded_. Let 'em disband me if they can! I'd like to see 'em do it. Peter? _Peter_!"

"I'll help you into your uniform," said Patience. "It's all brushed and nice for you."

She got him to his swaying feet, and dressed him, and the two went to the window that looked upon the flowers. The garden blurred yellow and white and purple--a dash of blood-red among the late tulips. Patience had plucked and picked for Memorial Day, she had gathered and given, and yet she could not strip her garden. She looked at it lovingly. She felt as if she stood in pansy lights and iris air.

"Peter," said the veteran, hoarsely, "they're all gone, my girl. Everybody's gone but you. You're the only comrade I've got left, Peter.... And, Peter, I want to tell you--I seem to understand it this morning. Peter, you're the best comrade of 'em all."

"That's worth it," said Patience, in a strange tone--"that's worth the--high cost of living."

She lifted her head. She had an exalted look. The thoughtful pansies seemed to turn their faces toward her. She felt that they understood her. Did it matter whether Reuben understood her or not? It occurred to her that it was not so important, after all, whether a man understood his wife, if he only loved her. Women fussed too much, she thought; they expected to cry away the everlasting differences between the husband and the wife. If you loved a man you must take him as he was--just man. You couldn't make him over. You must make up your mind to that. Better, oh, better a hundred times to endure, to suffer--if it came to suffering--to take your share (perhaps he had his--who knew?) of the loneliness of living. Better any fate than to battle with the man you love, for what he did not give or could not give. Better anything than to stand in the pansy light, married fifty years, and not have made your husband happy.

"I 'most wisht you could march along of me," muttered Reuben Oak. "But you ain't a veteran."

"I don't know about that," Patience shook her head, smiling, but it was a sober smile.

"Tommy can't march," added Reuben. "He ain't here; nor he ain't in the graveyard either. He's a ghost--Tommy. He must be flying around the Throne. There's only one other person I'd like to have go along of me. That's my old dog--my dog Tramp. That dog thought a sight of me. The United States army couldn't have kep' him away from me. But Tramp's dead. He was a pretty old dog. I can't remember which died first, him or the baby; can you? Lord! I suppose Tramp's a ghost, too, a dog ghost, trottin' after--I don't know when I've thought of Tramp before. Where's he buried, Peter? Oh yes, come to think, he's under the big chestnut. Wonder we never decorated him, Peter."

"I have," confessed Patience. "I've done it quite a number of times. Reuben? Listen! I guess we've got to hurry. Seems to me I hear--"

"You hear drums," interrupted the old soldier. Suddenly he flared like lightwood on a camp-fire, and before his wife could speak again he had blazed out of the house.

The day had a certain unearthly beauty--most of our Memorial Days do have. Sometimes they scorch a little, and the processions wilt and lag. But this one, as we remember, had the climate of a happier world and the temperature of a day created for marching men--old soldiers who had left their youth and strength behind them, and who were feebler than they knew.

The Connecticut valley is not an emotional part of the map, but the town was alight with a suppressed feeling, intense, and hitherto unknown to the citizens. They were graver than they usually were on the national anniversary which had come to mean remembrance for the old and indifference for the young. There was no baseball in the village that day. The boys joined the procession soberly. The crowd was large but thoughtful. It had collected chiefly outside of the Post hall, where four old soldiers had valiantly sustained their dying organization for now two or three astonishing years.

The band was outside, below the steps; it played the "Star-spangled Banner" and "John Brown's Body" while it waited. For some reason there was a delay in the ceremonies. It was rumored that the chaplain had not come. Then it went about that he had been summoned to a funeral, and would meet the procession at the churchyard. The chaplain was the pastor of the Congregational Church. The regimental chaplain, he who used to pray for the dying boys after battle, had joined the vanished veterans long ago. The band struck up "My Country, 'tis of Thee." The crowd began to press toward the steps of the Post hall and to sway to and fro restlessly.

Then slowly there emerged from the hall, and firmly descended the steps, the Charles Darlington Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. People held their breaths, and some sobbed. They were not all women, either.

Erect, with fiery eyes, with haughty head--shrunken in his old uniform, but carrying it proudly--one old man walked out. The crowd parted for him, and he looked neither to the right nor to the left, but fell into the military step and began to march. In his aged arms he carried the flags of the Post. The military band preceded him, softly playing "Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory," while the crowd formed into procession and followed him. From the whole countryside people had assembled, and the throng was considerable.

They came out into the street and turned toward the churchyard--the old soldier marching alone. They had begged him to ride, though the distance was small. But he had obstinately refused.

"This Post has always marched," he had replied.

Except for the military music and the sound of moving feet or wheels, the street was perfectly still. No person spoke to any other. The veteran marched with proud step. His gray head was high. Once he was seen to put the flag of his company to his lips. A little behind him the procession had instinctively fallen back and left a certain space. One could not help the feeling that this was occupied. But they who filled it, if such there had been, were invisible to the eye of the body. And the eyes of the soul are not possessed by all men.

Now, the distance, as we have said, was short, and the old soldier was so exalted that it had not occurred to him that he could be fatigued. It was an astonishing sensation to him when he found himself unexpectedly faint.

Patience Oak, for some reasons of her own hardly clear to herself, did not join the procession. She chose to walk abreast of it, at the side, as near as possible, without offense to the ceremonies, to the solitary figure of her husband. She was pacing through the grass, at the edge of the sidewalk--falling as well as she could into the military step. In her plain, old-fashioned black dress, with the fleck of white at her throat, she had a statuesque, unmodern look. Her fine features were charged with that emotion which any expression would have weakened. Her arms were heaped with flowers--bouquets and baskets and sprays: spiraea, lilacs, flowering almond, peonies, pansies, all the glory of her garden that opening summer returned to her care and tenderness. She was tender with everything--a man, a child, an animal, a flower. Everything blossomed for her, and rested in her, and yearned toward her. The emotion of the day and of the hour seemed incarnate in her. She embodied in her strong and sweet personality all that blundering man has wrought on tormented woman by the savagery of war. She remembered what she had suffered--a young, incredulous creature, on the margin of life, avid of happiness, believing in joy, and drowning in her love for that one man, her husband. She thought of the slow news after slaughtering battles--how she waited for the laggard paper in the country town; she remembered that she dared not read the head-lines when she got them, but dropped, choking and praying God to spare her, before she glanced. Even now she could feel the wet paper against her raining cheek. Then her heart leaped back, and she thought of the day when he marched away--his arms, his lips, his groans. She remembered what the dregs of desolation were, and mortal fear of unknown fate; the rack of the imagination; and inquisition of the nerve--the pangs that no man-soldier of them all could understand. "It comes on women--war," she thought.

Now, as she was stepping aside to avoid crushing some young white clover-blossoms in the grass where she was walking, she looked up and wondered if she were going blind, or if her mind were giving way.

The vacant space behind the solitary veteran trembled and palpitated before her vision, as if it had been peopled. By what? By whom? Patience was no occultist. She had never seen an apparition in her life. She felt that if she had not lacked a mysterious, unknown gift, she should have seen spirits, as men marching, now. But she did not see them. She was aware of a tremulous, nebulous struggle in the empty air, as of figures that did not form, or of sights from which her eyes were holden. Ah--what? She gasped for the wonder of it. Who was it, that followed the veteran, with the dumb, delighted fidelity that one race only knows of all created? For a wild instant this sane and sensible woman could have taken oath that Reuben Oak was accompanied on his march by his old dog, his dead dog, Tramp. If it had been Tommy-- Or if it had been Jabez Trent-- And where were they who had gone into the throat of death with him at Antietam, at Bull Run, at Fair Oaks, at Malvern Hill? But there limped along behind Reuben only an old, forgotten dog.

This quaint delusion (if delusion we must call it) aroused her attention, which had wavered from her husband, and concentrated it upon him afresh. Suddenly she saw him stagger.

A dozen persons started, but the wife sprang and reached him first. As she did this, the ghost dog vanished from before her. Only Reuben was there, marching alone, with the unpeopled space between him and the procession.

"Leave go of me!" he gasped. Patience quietly grasped him by the arm, and fell into step beside him. In her heart she was terrified. She was something of a reader in her way, and she thought of magazine stories where the veterans died upon Memorial Day.

"I'll march to decorate the Post--and Tommy--if I drop dead for it!" panted Reuben Oak.

"Then I shall march beside you," answered Patience.

"What 'll folks say?" cried the old soldier, in real anguish.

"They'll say I'm where I belong. Reuben! Reuben! _I've earned the right to_."

He contended no more, but yielded to her--in fact, gladly, for he felt too weak to stand alone. Inspiring him, and supporting him, and yet seeming (such was the sweet womanliness of her) to lean on him, Patience marched with him before the people; and these saw her through blurred eyes, and their hearts saluted her. With every step she felt that he strengthened. She was conscious of endowing him with her own vitality, as she sometimes did, in her own way--the love way, the wife way, powerfully and mysteriously.

So the veteran and his wife came on together to the cemetery, with the flags and the flowers. Nor was there a man or a woman in the throng who would have separated these comrades.

In the churchyard it was pleasant and expectant. The morning was cool, and the sun climbed gently. Not a flower had wilted; they looked as if they had been planted and were growing on the graves. When they had come to these, Patience Oak held back. She would not take from the old soldier his precious right. She did not offer to help him "decorate" anybody. His trembling mechanic's fingers clutched at the flowers as if he had been handling shot or nails. His breath came short. She watched him anxiously; she was still thinking of those stories she had read.

"Hadn't you better sit down on some monument and rest?" she whispered. But he paid no attention to her, and crawled from mound to mound. She perceived that it was his will to leave the new-made graves until the others had been remembered. Then he tottered across the cemetery with the flowers that he had saved for David Swing and old Mr. Succor and Jabez Trent, and the cheeks of the Charles Darlington Post were wet. Last of all he "decorated Tommy."

The air ached with the military dirge, and the voice of the chaplain faltered when he prayed. The veteran was aware that some persons in the crowd were sobbing. But his own eyes had now grown dry, and burned deep in their sunken sockets. As his sacred task drew to its end he grew remote, elate, and solemn. It was as if he were transfigured before his neighbors into something strange and holy. A village carpenter? A Connecticut tobacco-planter? Rather, say, the glory of the nation, the guardian of a great trust, proudly carried and honored to its end.

Taps were sounding over the old graves and the new, when the veteran slowly sank to one knee and toppled over. Patience, when she got her arms about him, saw that he had fallen across the mound where he had decorated Tommy with her white lilacs. Beyond lay the baby, small and still. The wife sat down on the little grave and drew the old man's head upon her lap. She thought of those Memorial Day stories with a deadly sinking at her heart. But it was a strong heart, all woman and all love.

"You _shall not_ die!" she said.

She gathered him and poured her powerful being upon him--breath, warmth, will, prayer, who could say what it was? She felt as if she took hold of tremendous, unseen forces and moved them by unknown powers.

"Live!" she whispered. "_Live!_"

Some one called for a doctor, and she assented. But to her own soul she said:

"What's a doctor?"

The flags had fallen from his arms at last; he had clung to them till now. The chaplain reverently lifted them and laid them at his feet.

Once his white lips moved, and the people hushed to hear what outburst of patriotism would issue from them--what tribute to the cause that he had fought for, what final apostrophe to his country or his flag.

"Peter?" he called, feebly. "_Peter!_"

But Patience had said he should not die. And Patience knew. Had not she always known what he should do, or what he could? He lay upon his bed peacefully when, with tears and smiles, in reverence and in wonder, they had brought him home--and the flags of the Post, too. By a gesture he had asked to have these hung upon the foot-board of his bed.

He turned his head upon his pillow and watched his wife with wide, reflecting eyes. It was a long time before she would let him talk; in fact, the May afternoon was slanting to dusk before he tried to cross her tender will about that matter. When he did, it was to say only this:

"Peter? I was goin' to decorate the baby. I meant to when I took that turn."

Patience nodded.

"It's all done, Reuben."

"And, Peter? I've had the queerest notions about my old dog Tramp to-day. I wonder if there's a johnnyquil left to decorate him?"

"I'll go and see," said Patience. But when she had come back he had forgotten Tramp and the johnnyquil.

"Peter," he muttered, "_this has been a great day_." He gazed solemnly at the flags.

Patience regarded him poignantly. With a stricture at the heart she thought:

"He has grown old fast since yesterday." Then joyously the elderly wife cried out upon herself: "But I am young! He shall have all my youth. I've got enough for two--and strength!"

She crept beside him and laid her warm cheek to his.

THE END