Part 12

The man caught the young stranger's arm. "You knew another of those He blessed? Tell me, did he have great wealth, palaces, honors? Did he wait long? Did the blessing tarry so long in the fulfilment as with me?"

The young stranger shook his head in deep bewilderment. "I do not understand. No, he had no wealth, no palaces, no honors. He followed the Christ. He was blessed by His spirit. Why, how could one want goods and honors when one had seen His wonderful smile, when His arms--" He broke off, gazing at his host in appalled incomprehension.

Nemuel's dark face grew darker, more bitter. "Then there _is_ no blessing, after all," he said slowly. "I have waited, believing, trusting. I have kept my life clean. I have kept myself holy--away from those He had not touched--" The stranger drew a quick breath and his eyes softened with pity. "I have never forgotten that I was blessed above others. And now there _is_ no blessing." And he covered his face with his hands.

There was a silence and then the young stranger spoke very gently: "The blessing my master taught me, was for all children--for all childlike faith and trust and purity. It was a sanctification of the child spirit."

Nemuel had lifted his head and was listening, his eyes fastened wonderingly on the stranger's face.

"And it was not a blessing to be wrapped up in a napkin. It was not one to bring you good fortune, as if it had been a sorcerer's charm. It was a blessing for you to take and to make--to use it--to give it to others. Through you He blessed _all_ children.... And yet--" the stranger's voice deepened--"yet there _was_ something special too."

"What was it?" Nemuel breathed.

The stranger bent on him a gaze full of yearning. "Have you not remembered His face?" he asked. "His wonderful look--just for you?" There was a pleading note of reproach in his voice as he leaned toward Nemuel, but his face was all love and tenderness.

Nemuel began to shake his head slowly, still fixing the stranger with his gaze.

"No," he confessed. "I haven't been able to remember--not for years. At first I did. Afterward I _knew_ His face was wonderful, but I could not _see_ it. But now--now I begin to remember----"

The young stranger waited for the halting words, his face lighting softly with a holy hope and joy.

"Why, your face--" Nemuel still hesitated, groping, and then suddenly his voice rang out in triumph, and memory dawned clearly in his eyes--"why, _your face_--is--like--_His_! Oh, I do remember!--and--I begin to understand."

Kitchener's Mob

From The Atlantic Monthly

_By James Norman Hall_

Trench-mortaring was more to our liking. That is an infantryman's game, and while extremely hazardous, the men in the trenches have a sporting chance. Everyone forgot breakfast when word was passed down the line that we were going to "mortarfy" Fritzie. Our projectiles were immense balls of hollow steel, filled with high explosive. Eagerly, expectantly, the boys gathered in the first-line trenches to watch the fun. First a dull boom from the reserve trench in rear where the mortar was operated.

"There she is!" "See 'er?" "Goin' true as a die!" All the boys would be shouting at once.

Up it goes, turning over and over, rising to a height of several hundred feet. Then, if well aimed, it reaches the end of its upward journey directly over the enemy's line, and falls straight into his trench. There is a moment of silence, followed by a terrific explosion which throws dirt and débris high in the air. By this time, the Tommies all along the line are standing on the firing benches, head and shoulders above the parapet, forgetting their danger in their excitement, and shouting at the top of their voices:

"'Ow's that one, Fritzie boy?"

"Guten morgen, you Proosian sausage wallopers!"

"Tyke a bit o' that there 'ome to yer missus!"

But Fritzie kept up his end of the game, always. He gave us just as good as we sent, and often he added something for good measure. His surprise packages were sausage-shaped missiles which came wobbling toward us, slowly, almost awkwardly; but they dropped with lightning speed. The explosion was terrible, and alas for any Tommy who misjudged the place of its fall! However, everyone had a chance. Trench-mortar projectiles are so large, and they describe so leisurely an arc before they fall, that men have time to run.

I've always admired Tommy Atkins for his sense of fair play. He loved giving Fritz "a little bit of all right," but he never resented it when Fritz had his own fun at our expense. I used to believe, in the far-off days of peace, that men had lost their old primal love for dangerous sport, their native ignorance of fear. But on those trench-mortaring days, when I watched boys playing with death with right good zest, heard them shouting and laughing as they tumbled over one another in their eagerness to escape being killed, I was convinced that I was wrong. Daily I saw men going through the test of fire triumphantly, and at the last, what a fearful test it was, and how splendidly they met it! During six months, continuously in the firing line, I met less than a dozen natural-born cowards; and my experience was largely among clerks, barbers, plumbers, shopkeepers, men who had no fighting tradition to back them up, to make them heroic in spite of themselves.

The better I knew Tommy, the better I liked him. He hasn't a shred of sentimentality in his make-up. There is plenty of sentiment, sincere feeling, but it is very well concealed. I had been a soldier of the King for many months before I realized that the men with whom I was living, sharing rations and hardships, were anything other than the healthy animals they looked. They seemed to live for their food. They talked of it, anticipated it with the zest of men who were experiencing for the first time the joy of being genuinely hungry. They watched their muscles harden with the satisfaction known to every normal man when he is becoming physically fit for the first time. But they said nothing about patriotism, or the duty of Englishmen in wartime. And if I tried to start a conversation on that line, they walked right over me with their boots on.

This was a great disappointment at first. I would never have known, from anything that was said, that a man of them was stirred at the thought of fighting for old England. England was all right, but, "I ain't a-goin' balmy about the old flag and all that stuff." Many of them insisted that they were in the army for personal and selfish reasons alone. They went out of their way to ridicule any and every indication of sentiment.

There was the matter of talk about mothers, for example. I can't imagine this being the case in a volunteer army of American boys; but never, during sixteen months of British army life, did I hear a discussion of mothers. When the weekly parcels post from England arrived, and the boys were sharing their cake and chocolate and tobacco, one of them would say, "Good old mum. She ain't a bad sort," to be answered with reluctant, mouth-filled grunts, or grudging nods of approval. As for fathers, I often thought to myself, "This is certainly a tremendous army of posthumous sons!" Months before I should have been astonished at this reticence. But I had learned to understand Tommy. His silences were as eloquent as any splendid outbursts or glowing tributes could have been. It was a matter of constant wonder to me that men living in the daily and hourly presence of death could so control and conceal their feelings. Their talk was of anything but home; and yet I knew that they thought of little else.

One of our boys was killed, and there was a letter to be written to his parents. Three Tommies who knew him best were to attempt this. They made innumerable beginnings. Each of them was afraid of blundering, of causing unnecessary pain by an indelicate revelation of the facts. There was a feminine fineness about their concern which was beautiful to see. The final draft of the letter was a masterpiece, not of English, but of insight; such a letter as any one of us would have liked his own parents to receive under similar circumstances. Nothing was forgotten which could make the news in the slightest degree more endurable. Every trifling personal belonging was carefully saved up and packed in a little box to follow the letter. All this was done amid much boisterous jesting; and there was hilarious singing to the wheezing accompaniment of an old mouth-organ. But of reference to home, or mothers, or comradeship, not a word.

Rarely a night passed without its burial parties. "Digging in the garden," Tommy calls the grave-making. The bodies, wrapped in blankets or water-proof ground-sheets, are lifted over the parados and carried back a convenient twenty yards or more. The desolation of that garden was indescribable. It was strewn with wreckage, gaping with shell-holes, billowing with numberless nameless graves, a waste land speechlessly pathetic. The poplars and willow hedges had been blasted and splintered by shell-fire. Tommy calls these "Kaiser Bill's flowers." Coming from England, he feels more deeply than he would care to admit the crimes done to trees in the name of war.

Our chaplain was a devout man, but prudent to a fault. He never visited us in the trenches; therefore our burial parties proceeded without the rites of the church. This arrangement was highly satisfactory to Tommy. He liked to "get the planting done" with the least possible delay or fuss. His whispered conversations, while the graves were being scooped, were, to say the least, quite out of the spirit of the occasion. Once we were burying two boys with whom we had been having a supper a few hours before. There was an artillery duel in progress, the shells whistling high over our heads and bursting in great splotches of white fire, far in rear of the opposing lines of trenches. The grave-making went speedily on while the diggers argued in whispers as to the calibre of the guns. Some said they were six-inch, while others thought nine-inch. Discussion was momentarily suspended when trench-rockets went soaring up from the enemy's line. We crouched motionless until the welcome darkness spread again. And then, in loud whispers--

"'Ere! If they was nine-inch they would 'ave more screech."

And one of different opinion would reply:

"Don't talk so bloomin' silly! Ain't I a-tellin' you you can't always size 'em by the screech?"

Not a prayer. Not a word either of censure or praise for the boys who had gone. Not an expression of opinion as to the meaning of the great change which had come to them and which might come as suddenly to any or all of us. And yet I knew that every man was thinking of these things.

There were days when the front was really quiet. The thin trickle of rifle-fire only accentuated the stillness of an early summer morning. Far down the line many a Tommy could be heard singing to himself as he sat in the door of his dug-out, cleaning his rifle. There would be the pleasant crackle of burning pine sticks, the sizzle of frying bacon, the lazy buzzing of swarms of bluebottle flies. Occasionally, across a pool of noonday silence, we heard the birds singing; for they didn't desert us. When we gave them a hearing, they did their cheery little best to assure us that everything would come right in the end. Once we heard a skylark, an English skylark, and for a while it made the world beautiful again. It was a fine thing to watch the faces of those English lads as they listened. I was deeply touched when one of them said, "Ain't 'e a plucky little chap, singin' right in front of Fritzie's trenches fer us English blokes?"

It was a sincere and beautiful tribute.

The Professor

_By Calista Halsey Patchin_

The professor had been dead two months. He had left the world very quietly, at that precise hour of the early evening when he was accustomed to say that his "spirit friends" came to him. The hospital nurse had noticed that there was always a time at twilight when the patient had a good hour; when pain and restlessness seemed to be charmed away, and he did not mind being left alone, and did not care whether or not there was a light in the room. Then it was that those who had gone came back to him with quiet, friendly ways and loving touch. He said nothing of this to the nurse. It was an old friend who told me that this had been his belief and solace for years.

When the professor had first come to town he had spoken of the wife who would follow him shortly, from the East. He did not display her picture, he did not talk about her enough so that the town, though it made an honest effort, ever really visualized her. She would come--without a doubt she would come--but not just yet. It was only that the East still held her. Gradually, he spoke of her less and less often, with a dignified reserve that brooked no inquiry, and finally not at all.

The town forgot. It was only when his illness became so serious that all felt someone should be written to, that it was discovered there was no one. The professor, when he was appealed to, said so. Then also, the hospital nurse noticed that at the twilight hour, when he talked quietly to his unseen friends, there was always One who stayed longer than the rest.

But he had been dead two months now, and the undertaker was pressing his bill, and there were other expenses which had been cheerfully borne by friends at the time, and indeed if there had been no other reason, it remains that something must become of the personal possessions of a man who leaves neither will nor known heirs. So the professor's effects were appraised, and a brief local appeared in the daily paper until it had made a dent in the memory of the public, apprising them that his personal property would be offered at public auction at two p.m. of a Thursday, in his rooms on the third floor of the Eureka Block.

It was the merest thread of curiosity that drew me to this sale. I did not want to buy anything. It was a sort of posthumous curiosity, and it concerned itself solely with the individuality of the dead man. Not having had the opportunity of knowing him well in life, and never having known until I read his obituary what I had missed, I took this last chance of trying to evolve the man from his belongings. All I did know was that he was a teacher of music of the past generation in a Western town which grew so fast that it made a man seem older than he was. More than this, he was a composer, a music master, who took crude young voices, shrill with the tension of the Western winds and the electric air, and tamed and trained them till they fell in love with harmony. When he heard a voice he knew it. One of his contraltos is singing now in grand opera across the sea. A tenor that he discovered has charmed the world with an "upper note."

All the same, the professor had grown old--a new generation had arisen which knew not Joseph; he failed to advertise, and every young girl who "gave lessons" crowded him closer to the wall. Now and then there would appear in the daily paper--not the next morning, but a few days after the presentation of some opera--a column of musical criticism, keen, delicate, reminiscent--fragrant with the rosemary that is for remembrance. When "Elijah" was given by home talent with soloists imported from Chicago, it was the professor who kindly wrote, beforehand this time, luminous articles full of sympathetic interpretation of the great masters. And at rare intervals there would appear a communication from him on the beauty of the woods and the fields, the suburbs of the town and the country, as though he were some simple prophet of nature who stood by the wayside. And this was no affectation. Long, solitary walks were his recreation.

It was a good deal of a rookery, up the flights of narrow, dirty stairs to the third floor of the Eureka Block. And here the professor had lived and taught. Two rooms were made from one by the sort of partition which does not reach to the ceiling--a ceiling which for some inexplicable reason was higher in some places than in others.

The voice of the auctioneer came down that winding way in professional cadences. There were in the room about as many people as might come to a funeral where only friends of the family are invited. It was very still. The auctioneer took an easy conversational tone. There was a silent, forlorn sort of dignity about the five pianos standing in a row that put professional banter and cheap little jokes out of the question. The pianos went without much trouble--a big one of the best make, an old-fashioned cottage piano, a piano with an iron frame. One of the appraisers, himself a musician, became an assistant auctioneer, and kindly played a little--judiciously very little--on each instrument in turn.

Then came the bric-a-brac of personal effects--all the flotsam and jetsam that had floated into these rooms for years. The walls were pockmarked with pictures, big and little. There was no attempt at high art; the professor had bought a picture as a child might buy one--because he thought it was pretty. It was a curious showing of how one artistic faculty may be dormant while another is cultivated to its highest point. But no matter how cheap the picture, it was always conscientiously framed. And this was a great help to the auctioneer. Indeed, it was difficult to see how he could have cried the pictures at all without the frames.

By this time the rooms were fuller of people. There were ladies who had come in quietly, just to get some little thing for a remembrance of their old friend and teacher. These mostly went directly over to the corner where the music lay and began looking for something of "his." If it were manuscript music so much the better. But there was little of this. It appeared that with the professor, as with most of us, early and middle manhood had been his most productive time, and that was long enough ago for everything to have been duly published in sheet and book form--long enough, indeed, for the books themselves to have gone out of date.

There they were--long, green notebooks, bearing the familiar names of well known publishers, and with such a hydra-head of title as "The Celestina, or New Sacred Minstrel; a Repository of Music adapted to every variety of taste and grade of capacity, from the million to the amateur or professor."

There were four or five of these. There was sheet music by the pile. There was an opera, "Joseph," the production of which had been a musical event.

Presently the auctioneer came that way. He had just sold a large oleograph, framed, one of those gorgeous historical pictures which are an apotheosis of good clothes. He approached an engraving of an old-fashioned lady in voluminous muslin draperies, with her hair looped away from her face in a "Book of Beauty" style.

"_He_ liked that," murmured a lady.

"What do I hear!" cries the auctioneer, softly. "Oh, such a little bid as that--I can't see it at all in this dark corner. Suppose we throw these peaches in--awfully pretty thing for dining room--and this flower piece--shall we group these three?--now, how much for all? Ah, there they go!"

"Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a gold-headed cane which was presented to the deceased by his admiring friends. It is pure gold--you _know_ they would not give him anything else. How much for this? How much? No--his name is _not_ engraved on it--so much the better--what do I hear?"

"Look at this telescope, gentlemen--a good one--you know the professor was quite an astronomer in his way--and this telescope is all right--sound and in good condition"--the auctioneer had officiated at a stock sale the day before. "You can look right into futurity through this tube. Five dollars' worth of futurity? Five--five and a half? Case and all complete."

There was a pocketful of odds and ends; gold pens, lead pencils, some odd pocket knives; these inconsiderable trifles brought more in proportion than articles of greater intrinsic value. Evidently this was an auction of memories, of emotion, of sentiment.

There was a bit of the beam of the barn that was burned down when the cow kicked over the historic lamp that inaugurated the Chicago fire--no less than three persons were ready to testify to their belief in the genuineness of the relic, had anyone been disposed to question it. But no one was. Nearly all the people in the room were the dead music teacher's personal friends; they had heard the story of all these things; they knew who had sent him the stuffed brown prairie chicken that perched like a raven above the door--the little old-fashioned decanter and wine glasses of gilded glass--the artificial begonias--that clever imitation that goes far toward making one forswear begonias forevermore. There were lamps of various shapes and sizes, there was a kit of burglarious looking tools for piano tuning, there was a little globe--"Who wants the earth?" said the auctioneer. "You all want it."

There was a metronome, which, set to go, began to count time in a metallic whisper for some invisible pupil. Over in the corner just beyond the music were the professor's books. Now we shall find him out, for what a man reads he is, or wishes to be. There was a good deal of spiritualistic literature of the better sort. There was a "History of Christianity and Paganism by the Roman Emperor Julian," a copy of "She," a long shelf full of _North American Reviews_, a dozen or so of almanacs, a copy of Bluebeard. There were none of the "popular" magazines, and if there had been newspapers--those vagrants of literature--they had gone their way. There was a manuscript play for parlor presentation, with each part written out in legible script, entitled, "The Winning Card."

All these and many more things which only the patient appraisers can fully know were sold or set aside as unsalable, until all was done. And then those who had known and loved him and those who had not known or cared for him came down the stairs together.

Fate stood on the landing. As always, Fate ran true to form. She was a woman; a little tired, as a woman might well be who had come a thousand miles; a little out of breath from the two flights of stairs. Her old-fashioned draperies clung about her; her hair was looped away from her face in a "Book of Beauty" style. The man who stood aside to let her pass was talking. "Of course," he was saying, "he was a side-tracked man. But I believe he stands the biggest chance of being remembered of any man in Iowa."

Swift protest at his first words clouded her face; sheer gratitude for his last words illumined it. She bent forward a little and went on up the stairs alone.

She faltered in the doorway, her hand fumbling at her throat. One of the men who had been talking below hastened to her side.

"It's all over," he said, then added, at the dumb misery that grayed her face: "--the auction."

"I--I--didn't come for that," the apathy in her voice holding it steady. "I--I am his wife. His last letter--he sent for me." A sob broke her speech. "It came last week--two months too late."

My Baby's Horse

_By Emilie Blackmore Stapp_

My baby's horse is Daddy's knee; When nighttime comes he rides away To Sleepytown by Dreamland Sea; I love to hear their laughter gay.

Ride, baby, ride, the Sandman bold Is following close behind you, dear, But Daddy's arms will you enfold And so for you I have no fear.

Your prancing steed is slowing down; The Sandman's riding very fast. Oh, here you are at Sleepytown; The Sandman's caught you, dear, at last.

He'll tie your steed by Dreamland Sea, And on its shores all night you'll play, Then you'll come riding home to me To make life sweet another day.

The Call of the Race

_By Elizabeth Cooper_