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Page 20
David lingered over the name. "Thank you, my cousin Eleanor. It's as you
said, nothing more beautiful and wonderful has been done in wonderful
America than this thing Aunt Basha did. It was as gallant as a soldier
at the front, for she offered what meant possibly her life."
"Her little two hundred," Eleanor spoke gently. "And so cross at the
idea of being paid back! She wanted to _give_ it."
David's face gleamed with a thought as he stared into the firelight,
"You see," he worked out his idea, "by the standards of the angels a
gift must be big not according to its size but according to what's left.
If you have millions and give a few thousand you practically give
nothing, for you have millions left. But Aunt Basha had nothing left.
The angels must have beaten drums and blown trumpets and raised Cain all
over Paradise while you sat in the bank, my cousin Eleanor, for the
glory of that record gift. No plutocrat in the land has touched what
Aunt Basha did for her country."
Eleanor's eyes, sending out not only clear vision but a brown light as
of the light of stars, shone on the boy. She bent forward, and her
slender arms were about her knee. She gazed at David, marveling. How
could it be that a human being might have all that David appeared to her
to have--clear brain, crystal simplicity, manliness, charm of
personality, and such strength and beauty besides!
"Yes," she said, "Aunt Basha gave the most. She has more right than any
of us to say that it's her country." She was silent a moment and then
spoke softly a single word. "America!" said Eleanor reverently.
America! Her sound has gone out into all lands and her words into the
end of the world. America, who in a year took four million of sons
untried, untrained, and made them into a mighty army; who adjusted a
nation of a hundred million souls in a turn of the hand to unknown and
unheard of conditions. America, whose greatest glory yet is not these
things. America, of whom scholars and statesmen and generals and
multi-millionaires say with throbbing pride today: "This is my country,"
but of whom the least in the land, having brought what they may, however
small, to lay on that flaming altar of the world's safety--of whom the
least in the land may say as truly as the greatest, "This is my country,
too."
THE SWALLOW
The Ch�teau Frontenac at Quebec is a turreted pile of masonry wandering
down a cliff over the very cellars of the ancient Castle of St. Louis. A
twentieth-century hotel, it simulates well a medi�val fortress and lifts
against the cold blue northern sky an atmosphere of history. Old voices
whisper about its towers and above the clanging hoofs in its paved
court; deathless names are in the wind which blows from the "fleuve,"
the great St. Lawrence River far below. Jacques Cartier's voice was
heard hereabouts away back in 1539, and after him others, Champlain and
Frontenac, and Father Jogues and Mother Marie of the Conception and
Montcalm--upstanding fighting men and heroic women and hardy discoverers
of New France walked about here once, on the "Rock" of Quebec; there is
romance here if anywhere on earth. Today a new knighthood hails that
past. Uniforms are thick in steep streets; men are wearing them with
empty sleeves, on crutches, or maybe whole of body yet with racked faces
which register a hell lived through. Canada guards heroism of many
vintages, from four hundred years back through the years to Wolfe's
time, and now a new harvest. Centuries from now children will be told,
with the story of Cartier, the tale of Vimy Ridge, and while the Rock
stands the records of Frenchmen in Canada, of Canadians in France will
not die.
Always when I go to the Ch�teau I get a table, if I can, in the smaller
dining-room. There the illusion of antiquity holds through modern
luxury; there they have hung about the walls portraits of the worthies
of old Quebec; there Samuel Champlain himself, made into bronze and
heroic of size, aloft on his pedestal on the terrace outside, lifts his
plumed hat and stares in at the narrow windows, turning his back on
river and lower city. One disregards waiters in evening clothes and
up-to-date table appointments, and one looks at Champlain and the
"fleuve," and the Isle d'Orl�ans lying long and low, and one thinks of
little ships, storm-beaten, creeping up to this grim bigness ignorant
of continental events trailing in their wake.
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