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Page 45
Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself. Brock and Hugh were
different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too--undeveloped, that was all. He
had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud
hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his
face. That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from
ugliness; these things were young Hugh's limitations, and no ignoble
quality.
In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in
comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face,
in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of
roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to
the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond
the city, the woman reviewed her boys' lives. Boys were not now merely
one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation. They stood
in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged,
orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these
millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth. Her boys
were but two, yet necessary. She owed them to the country, as other
mothers of men.
There was a whistle under the archway, a flying step, and young Hugh
shot from beneath the rosiness of Dorothy Perkins vines and took the
stone steps in four bounds. All the dogs fell into a community chorus of
barks and whines and patterings about, and Hugh's hands were on this one
and that as he bent over the woman.
"A _good_ kiss, Mummy; that's cold baked potato," he complained, and she
laughed and hugged him.
"Not cold; I was just thinking. Your knee, Hughie? You came up like a
bird."
Hugh made a face. "Bad break, that," he grinned, and limped across the
terrace and back. "Mummy, it doesn't hurt much now, and I do forget,"
he explained, and his color deepened. With that: "Tom Arthur is waiting
for me in town. We're going to pick up Whitney, the tennis champion, at
the Crossroads Club. May I take Dad's roadster?"
"Yes, Hughie. And, Hugh, meet the train, the seven-five. Dad's coming
to-night, you know."
The boy took her hand, looked at her uneasily. "Mummy, dear, don't be
thinking sinful thoughts about me. And don't let Dad. Hold your fire,
Mummy."
She lifted her face, and her eyes were the eyes of faith he had known
all his life. "You blessed boy of mine, I will hold my fire." And then
Hugh had all but knocked her over with a violent kiss again, and he
slammed happily through the screen doors and was leaping up the stairs.
Ten minutes later she heard the car purring down the drive.
The dogs settled about her with long dog-sighs again. She looked at her
wrist--only five-thirty. She went back with a new unrest to her
thoughts. Hugh's knee--it was odd; it had lasted a long time, ever
since--she shuddered a bit, so that old Mavourneen lifted her head and
objected softly--ever since war was declared. Over a year! To be sure,
he had hurt it again badly, slipping on the ice in December, just as it
was getting strong. She wished that his father would not be so grim when
Hugh's bad knee was mentioned. What did he mean? Did he dare to think
her boy--the word was difficult even mentally--a slacker? With that her
mind raced back to the days just before Hugh had hurt this knee. It was
in February that Germany had proclaimed the oceans closed except along
German paths, at German times. "This is war at last," her husband had
said, and she knew the inevitable had come.
Night after night she had lain awake facing it, sometimes breaking down
utterly and shaking her soul out in sobs, sometimes trying to see ways
around the horror, trying to believe that war must end before our troops
could get ready, often with higher courage glorying that she might give
so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she
had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with
awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous
captivity--nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of
savagery and sent stalking over the earth--such rose and stood before
the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face
in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled
and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible,
it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her
precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful,
peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and
pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she
might, the ocean surged every day nearer.
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