Part 8 (1/2)

Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now forgotten, had taken her out to see ”the white Mr. Longfellow.” It was one of the dream-days of her life--the large, s.p.a.cious, square Colonial house where once Was.h.i.+ngton had lived; the poet's square room with its round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple, white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke so winningly and simply. He even gave her a sc.r.a.p of paper on which were written some of his anti-slavery lines.

Those were great days--days when America, the world's experiment in democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify. The great test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice. The young, beautiful, clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give up all and go to the front. It was like tearing her own heart in two, and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself. On that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they pa.s.sionately embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then at last when the young man said: ”I'll go! It's little enough to do in this crisis!” she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.

And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible years set in--years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had seen:

”I saw askant the armies, I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw them, And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and b.l.o.o.d.y, And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence), And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought.

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not, The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd, And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.”

Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing,

”Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing.”

Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated and sick man. Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long widowhood....

Had she not a right to speak to him?

”Understand?” she ended. ”I think, Joe, I ought to understand.... I sent your father into the war....”

Depth beneath depth he was discovering her. He was amazed and awed. He asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so blind. He felt very young then. It was she who actually knew what the word social and the word patriotism meant.

He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper:

”And ... would you send me off, too? The new war?”

She could scarcely speak.

”Whereto?”

”I ... oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere--the slums....”

”Well, then,” she said, quietly, ”I'll go with you.”

”But you--” he exclaimed, almost adding, ”an old woman”--”it's impossible, mother.”

She answered him with the same quietness.

”You forget the shanty.”

And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She _would_ go with him; more than that, she _should_. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in its miraculousness.

But he only said, in a strained voice,

”All right, mother!”

And she laughed, and mused, and murmured: