Gaslight Sonatas Part 14

"I--I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but--but--oh, hang!--when a fellow's a senior it--it's all he can do to get home once in a while and--and--what's the use talking about a thing anyway before it breaks right, and--well, everybody knows it's up to us college fellows--college men--to lead the others and show our country what we're made of now that she needs us--eh, little dressed-up mother?"

She looked up at him with the tremulous smile still trying to break through.

"My boy can mix with the best of 'em."

"That's not what I mean, mother."

"You got to be twice to me what you been, darling--twice to me. Listen, darling. I--Oh, my G.o.d!"

She was beating softly against his hand held in hers, her voice rising again, and her tears.

"Listen, darling--"

"Now, mother, don't go into a spell. The war is going to help you out on these lonesome fits, mother. Like Slawson put it to-day in Integral Calculus Four, war reduces the personal equation to its lowest terms--it's a matter of--."

"I need you now, Edwin--O G.o.d! how I need you! There never was a minute in all these months since you've grown to understand how--it is between your father and me that I needed you so much--"

"Mother, you mustn't make it harder for me to--tell you what I--"

"I think maybe something has happened to me, Edwin. I can feel myself breathe all over--it's like I'm outside of myself somewhere--"

"It's nervousness, mother. You ought to get out more. I'm going to get you some war-work to do, mother, that 'll make you forget yourself. Service is what counts these days!"

"Edwin, it's come--he's leaving me--it--"

"Speaking of service, I--I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but--but--when war was declared the other day, a--a bunch of us fellows volunteered for--for the university unit to France, and--well, I'm accepted, mother--to go. The lists went up to-night. I'm one of the twenty picked fellows."

"France?"

"We sail for Bordeaux for ambulance service the twentieth, mother. I was the fourth accepted with my qualifications--driving my own car and--and physical fitness. I'm going to France, mother, among the first to do my bit. I know a fellow got over there before we were in the war and worked himself into the air-fleet. That's what I want, mother, air service!

They're giving us fellows credit for our senior year just the same. Bob Vandaventer and Clarence Unger and some of the fellows like that are in the crowd. Are you a dead-game sport, little mother, and not going to make a fuss--"

"I--don't know. What--is--it--I--"

"Your son at the front, mother, helping to make the world a safer place for democracy. Does a little mother with something like that to bank on have time to be miserable over family rows? You're going to knit while I'm gone.

The busiest little mother a fellow ever had, doing her bit for her country!

There's signs up all over the girls' campus: 'A million soldiers "out there" are needing wool jackets and chest-protectors. How many will you take care of?' You're going to be the busiest little mother a fellow ever had. You're going to stop making a fuss over me and begin to make a fuss over your country. We're going into service, mother!"

"Don't leave me, Edwin! Baby darling, don't leave me! I'm alone! I'm afraid."

"There, there, little mother," he said, patting at her and blinking, "I--Why--why, there's men come back from every war, and plenty of them.

Good Lord! just because a fellow goes to the front, he--"

"I got nothing left. Everything I've worked for has slipped through my life like sand through a sieve. My hands are empty. I've lost your father on the success I slaved for. I'm losing my boy on the fine ideas and college education I've slaved for. I--Don't leave me, Edwin. I'm afraid--Don't--"

"Mother--I--Don't be cut up about it. I--"

"Why should I give to this war? I ain't a fine woman with the fine ideas you learn at college. I ask so little of life--just some one who needs me, some one to do for. I 'ain't got any fine ideas about a son at war. Why should I give to what they're fighting for on the other side of the ocean?

Don't ask me to give up my boy to what they're fighting for in a country I've never seen--my little boy I raised--my all I've got--my life! No! No!"

"It's the women like you, mother--with guts--with grit--that send their sons to war."

"I 'ain't got grit!"

"You're going to have your hands so full, little mother, taking care of the Army and Navy, keeping their feet dry and their chests warm, that before you know it you'll be down at the pier some fine day watching us fellows come home from victory."

"No--no--no!"

"You're going to coddle the whole fighting front, making 'em sweaters and aviation sets out of a whole ton of wool I'm going to lay in the house for you. Time's going to fly for my little mother."

"I'll kill myself first!"

"You wouldn't have me a quitter, little mother. You wouldn't have the other fellows in my crowd at college go out and do what I haven't got the guts to do. You want me to hold up my head with the best of 'em."

"I don't want nothing but my boy! I--"

"Us college men got to be the first to show that the fighting backbone of the country is where it belongs. If us fellows with education don't set the example, what can we expect from the other fellows? Don't ask me to be a quitter, mother. I couldn't! I wouldn't! My country needs us, mother--you and me--"

"Edwin! Edwin!"

"Attention, little mother--stand!"

She lay back her head, laughing, crying, sobbing, choking.

"O G.o.d--take him and bring him back--to me!"

On a day when sky and water were so identically blue that they met in perfect horizon, the S. S. _Rowena_, sleek-flanked, mounted fore and aft with a pair of black guns that lifted snouts slightly to the impeccable blue, slipped quietly, and without even a newspaper sailing-announcement into a frivolous midstream that kicked up little lace edged wavelets, undulating flounces of them. A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward, her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that s.h.i.+p receding in majesty, long after it had curved from view.

The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city.

Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, turned back reluctantly.

Now only Mrs. Ross. An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail, holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping forward in the breeze. The sun struck off points from the water, animating it with a jewel-dance. It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.

"My boy--my little boy!"

A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment. Conscious of that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled street. Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant, the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the steering-wheel. She pa.s.sed him with unnecessary stealth, her heels occasionally wedging between the cobbles and jerking her up. Two hours she walked thus, invariably next to the water's edge or in the first street running parallel to it. Truck-drivers gazed at and sang after her. Deck- and dock-hands, stretched out in the first sun of spring, opened their eyes to her pa.s.sing, often staring after her under lazy lids. Behind a drawn veil her lips were moving, but inaudibly now. Motor-trucks, blocks of them, painted the gray of war, stood waiting s.h.i.+pment, engines ready to throb into no telling what mire. Once a van of knitted stuffs, always the gray, corded and bound into bales, rumbled by, close enough to graze and send her stumbling back. She stood for a moment watching it lumber up alongside a dock.

It was dusk when she emerged from the rather sinister end of West Street into Battery Park, receding in a gracious new-green curve from the water.

Tier after tier of lights had begun to p.r.i.c.k out in the back-drop of skysc.r.a.ping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches. The back-drop of office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of man's accomplishment.

Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs. Ross, his measured tread behind hers, his night-stick rapping out every so often.

She found out a bench then, and never out of his view, sat looking out across the infinitude of blackness to where the bay so casually meets the sea. Night dampness had sent her s.h.i.+vering, the plumage of her hat, the ferny feathers of the bird-of-paradise, drooping almost grotesquely over the brim.

A small detachment of Boy Scouts, st.u.r.dy with an enormous sense of uniform and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained, small-footed, regimental precision--small boys with clean, lifted faces. A fife and drum came up the road.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

High over the water a light had come out--Liberty's high-flung torch.