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Page 42
The Red Cross women had gone home. Half an hour before, the large
library had been filled with white-clad, white-veiled figures. Two long
tables full, forty of them today, had been working; three thousand
surgical dressings had been cut and folded and put away in large boxes
on shelves behind glass doors where the most valuable books had held
their stately existence for years. The books were stowed now in trunks
in the attic. These were war days; luxuries such as first editions must
wait their time. The great living-room itself, the center of home for
this family since the two boys were born and ever this family had been,
the dear big room with its dark carved oak, and tapestries, and stained
glass, and books, and memories was given over now to war relief work.
Sometimes, as the mistress walked into the spacious, low-ceilinged,
bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably. Brock
and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football,
or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be
presented to guests. Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful
new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six
years back, the night they came in, a young Hugh, younger than Brock was
now. Her father and mother, long gone over "to the majority," and the
exquisite old ivory beauty of a beautiful grandmother--such ghosts rose
and faced the woman as she stepped into the room where they had moved in
life, the room with its loveliness marred by two long tables covered
with green oilcloth, by four rows of cheap chairs, by rows and rows of
boxes on shelves where soft and bright and dark colors of books had
glowed. She felt often that she should explain matters to the room,
should tell the walls which had sheltered peace and hospitality that she
had consecrated them to yet higher service. Never for one instant,
while her soul ached for the familiar setting, had she regretted its
sacrifice. That her soul did ache made it worth while.
And the women gathered for this branch Red Cross organization, her
neighbors on the edge of the great city, wives and daughters and mothers
of clerks, and delivery-wagon drivers, and icemen, and night-watchmen,
women who had not known how to take their part in the war work in the
city or had found it too far to go, these came to her house gladly and
all found pleasure in her beautiful room. That made it a joy to give it
up to them. She stood in the doorway, feeling an emphasis in the quiet
of the July afternoon because of the forty voices which had lately gone
out of the sunshiny silence, of the forty busy figures in long, white
aprons and white, sweeping veils, the tiny red cross gleaming over the
forehead of each one, each face lovely in the uniform of service, all
oddly equalized and alike under their veils and crosses. She spoke aloud
as she tossed out her hands to the room:
"War will be over some day, and you will be our own again, but forever
holy because of this. You will be a room of history when you go to
Brock--"
Brock! Would Brock ever come home to the room, to this place which he
loved? Brock, in France! She turned sharply and went out through the
long hall and across the terrace, and sat down where the steps dropped
to the garden, on the broad top step, with her head against the pillar
of the balustrade. Above her the smell of box in a stone vase on the
pillar punctured the mild air with its definite, reminiscent fragrance.
Box is a plant of antecedents of sentiment, of memories. The woman
inhaling its delicate sharpness, was caught back into days past. She
considered, in rapid jumps of thought, events, episodes, epochs. The day
Brock was born, on her own twentieth birthday, up-stairs where the rosy
chintz curtains blew now out of the window; the first day she had come
down to the terrace--it was June--and the baby lay in his bassinet by
the balustrade in that spot--she looked at the spot--the baby, her big
Brock, a bundle of flannel and fine, white stuff in lacy frills of the
bassinet. And she loved him; she remembered how she had loved that baby,
how, laughing at herself, she had whispered silly words over the stolid,
pink head; how the girl's heart of her had all but burst with the
astonishing new tide of a feeling which seemed the greatest of which she
was capable. Yet it was a small thing to the way she loved Brock now. A
vision came of little Hugh, three years younger, and the two toddling
about the terrace together, Hugh always Brock's satellite and adorer, as
was fitting; less sturdy, less daring than Brock, yet ready to go
anywhere if only the older baby led. She thought of the day when Hugh,
four years old, had taken fright at a black log among the bushes under
the trees.
"It's a bear!" little Hugh had whispered, shaking, and Brock, brave but
not too certain, had looked at her, inquiring.
"No, love, it's not a bear; it's an old log of wood. Go and put your
hand on it, Hughie."
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