Part 2
“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.
Shortly after daylight next morning the tramp of marching men and clatter of hoofs and grinding of wheels before the Capitol told that the greatest parade of American history was forming, and the khaki tide rolled into ordered ranks. The woman saw this beginning, very early in the morning. She was there before the bugle sounded attention across the plaza and the cavalrymen snapped out their sabres and the infantrymen came to present and the officers to salute and the colors were dipped--and the sun sent a beam to Freedom on the dome and another to a casket moving through the doorway. She saw it carried down the long steps by the bravest of the brave, all decorated men, and placed on the black-draped caisson with its black horses, and its soldiers sat on their scarlet saddle-cloths. She saw that, and she saw the President and “Black Jack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the A. E. F., following as chief mourners--Pershing wearing, of all his decorations, only the Victory Medal to which every American soldier has a right--the caisson where lay--Dick. She saw the crowds dense up Pennsylvania Avenue, the historic road “where the tramping ghosts of Grant’s legions marked a course.” She saw the silent, attentive thousands who packed the sidewalks, standing there to take their part in what was theirs, the glory of the American people. “Out in the broad avenue was a simple soldier, dead for the honor of the flag. In France he had died as Americans have always been ready to die, for the flag and what it meant.” The woman saw the massed, reverent faces, and read this in them.
“It’s Dick,” she said.
Later, not remembering very much how she had come, she found herself at Arlington, at the Amphitheatre, with yet more thousands. There were bright colors of foreign dress uniforms and masses of khaki and light and shadow and the snowy gleam of columns against a background of trees. Later there was distant, solemn music through the trees. From the direction of the fort the dim color of troops came nearer and nearer, clearer and clearer; the marine band, half-step to the throb of drums, swung out and circled the colonnade. The caisson rolled up where a white-surpliced choir waited, and men in uniform with medals on their breasts lifted Dick, and the choir sang “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.” They carried him past the troops with rifles at “present,” past the bareheaded people, through the pillared colonnade, with the white choir and the clergy leading them, the great of many lands awaiting him. They placed him on a catafalque, flower-covered, and the great audience, all the thousands, rose and stood as he passed in--Dick--with Pershing still following, Pershing who had trudged seven miles from the Capitol behind his soldier.
The coffin rested on its base as if held up by a mound of blossoms--and suddenly the woman felt stabbed with a knife, a frantic, unbearable feeling. Her boy lay there with no sign of her near him. The nation had heaped him with honor, but Dick would not be satisfied with the nation, missing his mother. In her hand was a bunch of roses; she wondered where she had gotten them, and vaguely recalled a florist’s shop on the way out. She sprang toward a guard, a soldier, and the man stared at her as people did.
“Put these--put these--right close to him,” she begged in sliding Southern speech. “He’s--he’s my boy.” The soldier little guessed how literal the words were to her, but they went direct to his heart. A boy of hers lay in France; this one stood for him; so he understood it. “Yes, ma’am,” he said gently.
He took the flowers and went away with them and in a moment she saw them laid on the coffin, their white heads against a gorgeous wreath of red roses. The President’s red roses--but the woman did not know that. The man came back then and found her a place in one of the first rows of the curving line of seats where were only men and women in black.
The mighty service went on. The woman going through it with the others seemed aware of it through another’s senses, as if she were removed where her consciousness could not make contact with anything earthly. This was Dick’s funeral, but she was not sad. Only fused to a hazy exaltation. Maybe Dick’s light-hearted spirit was there, hovering over all this and lifting her spirit with him. In any case her flowers lay close to him, clinging whitely against that blood-red wreath. They must be, she was guessing, just above where the withered little French roses rested still on Dick’s dear cold heart. To see them there brought a manner of comfort to her. And the service went on. As Bishop Brent’s voice ended, the bells over in Washington were ringing noon, and sharply the clear, high notes of a trumpeter blew attention. She stood up with the thousands, the millions, the nation. For the nation paused during two minutes then to honor--Dick. All over America, in churches, in marketplaces, on railway lines, the rushing life of the country stopped and the populace stood silent with bowed heads for that tremendous moment, honoring the men who had died.
Then it was over; a minute-gun boomed across the river at the base of the Washington Monument; led by the band the stirred multitude swung into “America.”
“My country, ’tis of thee,” the people sang. And the woman sang with them. She could; she was dry-eyed and calm; this was Dick’s funeral, her little boy Dick, her splendid, big son. Yet she seemed to feel nothing. The Lord God was going to give her a sign that it was Dick. She was anxious about that. Certain, yes, of course; but a sign was to come. Nervousness caught her as the President began to speak; she wished the Lord God would hurry; it would do at any time, surely, yet this strain of waiting was difficult. It was hard to listen to the President while one was watching every moment for the sign. And with that his voice had slipped into words as familiar as her own name, words which she had taught to Dick.
“Our Father which art in Heaven----”
There was a soft, many-rustling sound of thousands rising, and all the voices took up the age-old words:
“Hallowed be Thy Name--Thy will be done.”
Yes, indeed. The Lord God knew that she had bowed to His will, even as to that word “missing.” She supposed it was His will. She had borne it, somehow. But now that Dick was dead, and carried home all these miles, bringing peace in his quiet hands, _now_ the Lord God ought to give her the sign. He ought, really. With that a quartet was singing something about how
“Splendid they passed, the great surrender made Into the light that nevermore shall fade.”
Oh, yes. But one doesn’t care so much about splendor and unfading light--when one misses Dick. The comforting thing was that Dick was to bring peace--peace forever. He would care about that; that would make him glad. And there was going to be a sign that this boy, this Unknown Soldier coming from his grave in France at the very moment of the Peace Conference--that this boy was Dick. How could she be otherwise than restless till the sign came?
Back of the carved, calm face in which the gray Irish eyes glowed such thoughts were seething. Lawyers weighing evidence would hardly have found her argument valid. The desperate brain which made them more than half knew the sophistry. But the brain _was_ desperate. One cannot face the word “missing” for many months and keep coolly logical. This was the last straw to hold her to sanity--that Dick was the Peace Bringer; that this boy was Dick. These things she must believe. Must.
Quietly she gazed as minute by splendid minute passed, each crowded with such things as America has never seen before. She watched an officer in uniform, a “Sam Browne” belt across his breast, step forward. What were they going to do now? The officer shifted the flowers toward the foot, and she gasped as the President’s great red wreath was moved; her roses were next; it was too bad to take her roses away from Dick. But see--they were left. The officer touched them, and left them; the little sheaf was not in the way. But what was going to happen? He rolled back the flag with its heavy gold fringe, and with that the President stood there and was reading something--citations--reverently, in his incisive voice; then he bent and pinned two precious things to the black cloth of the coffin--the Distinguished Service Cross and that which Americans believe the highest decoration in the world, the Congressional Medal of Honor. How pleased Dick would have been!
“Won in mortality to be worn in immortality,” spoke the President.
Was Dick’s gay spirit maybe even now hovering, watching it all, smiling the sweet, half-shy, one-sided smile she knew, laughing at himself a bit for being the centre of this stupendous ceremony? In quick succession one brilliant uniform succeeded another by the narrow box, each fastening to the black cloth an honor which men have died to win. Something contracted her throat with a short sob when General Jacques, the Belgian, unpinned from his own coat the Cross of War which his King had put there and placed it on Dick’s coffin. And was not that Foch who swept off his white-plumed Marshal’s hat before the presence of--Dick? How Dick would have taken in the scarlet baldric, the gold sash, and red trousers! Dick had an enormous enthusiasm for Foch; once he had seen him--a solemn old fellow in a faded horizon-blue uniform and very muddy boots, the letter said. Smoking a pipe.
Medal after medal; such an array as the greatest soldier on earth had never worn. They rolled back the flag over it all till the judgment day, and Sergeant Woodfill and the seven other heroes lifted Dick again and carried him down the marble steps. The band was playing “Our Honored Dead”; she raised her eyes and saw the city across the river; the dome of the Capitol under which Dick had slept last night; where only dead Presidents had ever slept before; nearer was the yellow of ploughed Virginia fields and the green of winter wheat; about them the snowy white of the great Amphitheatre, and directly beneath the boy as they carried him around was “a great splash of black--thousands of Americans with hats held in their hands.” Between these and the Amphitheatre was a white place with a hole in it. Dick’s grave. She moved dreamily toward that place, and people stood back for the black, lonely figure with its gold star. Unconscious of them, she passed till she was close enough to see everything.
“It will be now, I think,” she was saying. “The Lord God will send His sign when they put Dick----”
The rest of the words couldn’t be framed. Of course Dick’s soul wasn’t there; it was somewhere about, above, close--much interested and a good deal amused as well as thrilled; she felt that. This was only Dick’s body they were putting away covered with medals and flowers, laid on that priceless earth brought from France, scattered down for him to rest on. It was only his body. But such a precious, dear body; it had been so warm and strong--Oh, God! She alone out of the thousands knew that it was Dick, and even she--The Lord God certainly was slow about sending His sign.
The beautiful church service was read; Dick’s soul was committed to God and his body to the grave. Some one touched a silver bar and the coffin sank slowly; a man in uniform placed a final wreath--from all the men of all our fighting armies. Then an old Indian in magnificence of chief’s feathers hobbled up and took off his sweeping war-bonnet, whose white feathers trailed to his moccasins, and laid it with a sort of stick across the open tomb. It was the last tribute. The warrior of ancient America saluted America’s warrior of to-day. A salvo of artillery. Another salvo--and another. The woman stared about. Dick would bivouac to-night in great company. All around him were monuments cut with names that were echoes of thunder of guns. There lay Porter and Crook; yonder lay Dewey. The slope carries along innumerable headstones; over the ridge are the grass ramparts of old Fort Myer, graves thick about them; she sensed these things as the guns rang the salvoes.
The guns had stopped; a bugler, standing out, was playing “Taps”--the soldier’s good night. With the final silver note the artillery broke into the roar of the national salute of twenty-one guns. The crowds moved, shifted, thinned. The bright uniforms scattered and disappeared. But the tall, black figure stood there, conscious of the people only as a swimmer in deep water is conscious of the waves. She was in them, of them, but they had no personality for her. Slowly the huge audience spread away through the trees. The pageant was over. The pageant--what matter was that? Dick; Dick was dead and buried, and she stood by the grave of an Unknown Soldier and reproached God. He had sent her no sign that this boy was hers. Down among the new white crosses in the cemetery below moved figures; there are always figures moving among those crosses--but the woman felt herself alone. All the pomp and ceremony being finished, she was alone with her boy. She knelt near the new grave; the black veil blew about her, covering and uncovering the gold star on her sleeve.
“God,” she whispered, “bless the men to-morrow who are trying to bring peace. I don’t know whether they know that it’s Dick who’s bringing it or not. I don’t care. I know, God, and You know. Only let Dick be the Peace Bringer, and let an American speak the master word. I thought the sign would be to-day, but I’ll be patient if it isn’t to be to-day. But, mighty God, don’t fail me in the end. You know how I couldn’t bear that. It means having Dick again--ever--somehow--I can’t say it well, but you’re God and You know how those things are tied together. Peace and Dick’s immortality and the sign. Be merciful; give it to me.”