Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

“ Out at Arlington the sunlight played gaily on the headstones among the trees, dancing about the solemn things as if to say that, after all, life is only a moment; that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, and that these light-hearted dead should be kept in bright memory. Till it came to the snow of the Amphitheatre and the white tomb on the terrace, and there the sunlight seemed to pour itself out in full-hearted golden tide. Dreamily, mystically, smilingly it wrapped in its arms the grave of America’s boy. ”

“ Spring comes easily in the South. It is much as if the lover you doubted turned all at once his face toward you lighted with the fire unmistakable, and you wondered in the warm flood of happiness if ever you did doubt. So in the turn of a hand in that God’s country there are vivid colors of tulips and jonquils and hyacinths—gold and purple and pink—and the hedges are dim with mists of juicy color, and the lawns have sprung to emerald, and the sunlight stipples the ground with gold laughter through the lace of boughs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lynnette picked up the thread. “Dick is America. He’s a symbol. Nobody else could combine so many elements as Dick.”
“I think you understand. It’s wonderful to be able to tell it to some one who understands. It has eaten my soul.” She breathed fast. “Listen—this is what, somehow, I believe, and nothing could change my belief. Dick is going to bring peace to his country and to the world. God has chosen him—Dick. Alive or dead his coming will mean—peace. Peace!” ”

“ The woman, appealing and winning, had seen this side of the enlisted man more than most; she had brooded over it, and over what was due to four millions of boys giving themselves to save the peace of the world. Shouldn’t peace, after such sacrifice, be assured? Should the great burnt offering fail? Should the war-to-end-war lead to other wars? God forbid. By infinite little links she came to tie her boy’s coming home to the coming of world peace. What more typical of America could there be than Dick? ”

“ 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. ”

“ America was the nation to bring at the last peace; Dick was the typical American; with his home-coming peace would come home to the country, and so to the world. Till Dick came home there could be no surety, no rest for the flag which he served. Other women died or went mad; this one alone, perhaps, fashioned her sorrow into a vigil for the salvation of her land.
Then one day Lynnette flew across the lawn and stood before her. ”

“ Life adjusted itself as life must, and the child grew, as that other Child twenty centuries back, in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. There might have been more boys in America as upstanding in body and character, as loving and clever and strong and merry, as beautiful within and without as her boy, the woman considered, but she had never seen one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Because Dick would have wanted it, because she herself must honor these glorious lads who were, each one, somehow partly Dick, she threw herself into the greetings, and many a boy was made happy and welcome by the slim, tall, still-young woman with the startling white hair, who knew so well what to say to a chap. Outwardly all her ways stayed the same. No one of her friends noticed a difference except that sometimes one would say: “I wonder what keeps her going? Does she hope yet that Dick may come back?” Surely she hoped it. She would not wear black. Till certainty came she must hope. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lynnette answered slowly, “nothing definite. Sometimes I fancy that the identity wasn’t lost to everybody, over in France. That maybe the soldiers who—who brought the four boys from the cemeteries found something to mark them, or one of them, and just said nothing about it. Maybe one of those soldiers might come to you. Why,” exploded Lynnette, “two or three times when I’ve seen a young, military-looking chap coming down this street my heart has been in my mouth. I’ve said: ‘He’s the sign.’”
“You have?” cried the woman. And then, with her arms reaching: “You little Lynnette! You loved Dick.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Things hurt and you stand it—that happens in every life—and we wiggle and get through. It hurt like the dickens when I had pneumonia, don’t you remember? So, behold the straight dope of the wise man Dick, and follow thereby. Nothing can happen that’s unbearable; keep it in your mind, precious. Live on the surface—don’t go feeling any more than you can help.”
Thousands of others found the sense of that sentence a way out of impossibility, as this woman did. ”

“ Through all sordidness and horror it was a life vitalized by enormous incentive, a life whose memory few of those who lived it would give up for everything else that any career might offer. The power of these gay, commonplace, consecrated boys’ lives reached across oceans and swung nations into consecration. Dick’s mother moved gladly in the huge orbit, for war work meant to her Dick. ”

“ There’s no logic anywhere. But she’d go raving mad. And I love her.” Little, aggressive Lynnette flushed all by herself. “Dick left me, in a sort of way, to his mother. He said: ‘Be sweet to her, Lynnette.’ Well,” Lynnette ended defiantly, “I reckon I can lie a good while longer, if it helps her.”
It is queer, considering what a small accident and what a second of time may end a life, that so many lives weather appalling shocks and years of heart-break. ”

“ Radiant, he tumbled in at home a week later, such a joyful lad that he sputtered ecstasy and slang. Tremendous he looked in his uniform, fresh colored from cold barracks and constant exercise and in an undreamed pink of condition.
“I never considered you a delicate person,” the woman spoke up to the six feet two of him, “but now you’re overpowering, you’re beefy.”
“Couldn’t kill me with an axe,” assented Dick cheerfully, and back in her brain a hideous, unformed thought stirred, of things that were not axes, that could kill easily even this magnificent young strength. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ An enlisted man—she rejoiced in that now; of the educated classes, but representing the rank and file as well as the brains and gentle blood of this land; not too poor, yet not rich; in his youth and strength and forthgoing power the visible spirit of a young, strong, eager country. ”

“ The roughest specimen would look you in the eye and—spitting first likely—make amazing statements about saving the world, about showing ’em if Americans would fight for their flag, about paying our debt to France, and, yes—in a quiet, matter-of-fact way—about dying for his country. ”

“ With that he was back, grinning.
“I did it,” stated Dick. “It’s not often a chap’s commanding officer sends him out with orders for a kissing attack, so I put my elbows into it and made a good job. She’s kissed to pieces.”
“Dick!”
“Well, now! It’ll teach you to go careful how you start a man on them tricks. Lynnette’s a worthy child, but I’d never have thought of kissing her. ”

“ Peace and Dick’s immortality and the sign. Be merciful; give it to me.”
A week later in Kentucky blunt little Lynnette was reasoning with her. “You can’t expect to set a date with the Almighty,” reasoned Lynnette. “I think it will come—I do think so, though I don’t know why I think it. Only that such a longing as yours focussed on one thing must be a psychological force. And, whatever God is, He does answer prayer somehow.”
“Yes, He does,” said the woman. “Wasn’t Hughes’ word sent straight as lightning from heaven? It came the day after the funeral—Dick’s funeral. It came out of Dick’s tomb. ”

“ 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. ”