IT is true that Ellen in life and even Fergus in death did not really know their own mother. They had said that she would not be able to face the truth; yet she had done it, bravely and with a dignity that none of them would have recognized; for they had not seen her on the day she forced Judge Weissman, her enemy, to aid her because her children were the ones at stake.
So the premonition which had troubled her for so long came now to be a reality. With Ellen in Paris, Robert joined up with his own army, and Fergus (her beloved Fergus) dead, there remained only Gramp, cold and aloof and ageless, in his chamber surrounded by books.
It was the grim old man who found her lying in the darkness of the tiny living room of the flat with Ellen's letter crushed in her hand. In his unearthly fashion he had divined the tragedy. He saw that she did not weep; she did not even moan. She lay quite still, unconscious that he stood there in the shadows watching her. It is impossible to imagine what his thoughts could have been. For a time at least the hardness which had protected him for so long must have melted a little; for Fergus had been of all the family his favorite. It was Fergus to whom he lent his precious books. It was Fergus who had seemed at times the very incarnation of his own youth—so remote now, so buried beneath all his intolerant scorn of those who were afraid to live.
For a long time he stood there watching his daughter-in-law, silently and with an intense concentration as if he were obsessed by a desire to study her sorrow with the passion of an anatomist. And then he had gone up to her and quietly taken the damp, crumpled letter with a strange gentleness out of the strong, worn hand. She did not resist; she did not even stir. She lay quite still while he held the letter close to the light and peering at it read it through, though he knew all the time what was in it.
When he had finished he laid it again by her side and said in a low voice, "The boy loved life, Hattie. And for those who die, death is not hard. There are worse things."
In thirty years it was the first time there had passed between the two any speech purified of anger or resentment.
To one of Hattie's nature there is consolation in the possession of the dead. The grim small tasks, the polite and empty phrases of condolence, the coming and going of those who care for the dead . . . all this empty hubbub and commerce serves in a fashion to conceal and break the anguish of loss. But for Hattie there were not even these things. She was left alone with Gramp in a flat which, though it had seemed empty before, now achieved a desolation beyond all belief. She (who had lived only in her children) had no friends about her; the very flat was not in the proper sense a home, such as the house in Sycamore Street had been. It was a barren, inhuman cave occupied before her by a procession of strangers which, when she left, would again close over the brief years of her tenancy. She found herself alone save for that ancient man her father-in-law, in a strange city, without even the body of her son for a bitter consolation.
So this woman, who had lived her life so richly . . . a life florid and overflowing with sentiment, a life that churned and raced along in an overwhelming current of vitality, achieved in the face of tragedy a calm and a dignity which she had never shown before. She understood, in the primitive depths of her nature, that this truth which she must face was the final one, from which there was no appeal. Always before there had been some hope ahead, some chance of turning events by a vast energy and a crude wilfulness to her own ends. There was nothing now . . . nothing save a few old clothes, some books and the Bible she had given him on his tenth birthday. To these she clung with the tenacity of a savage, and they were pitiful remnants to a woman whose love demanded the very bodies of her children.
For Hattie there were none of those shades of grief and joy which are the lot of those more completely civilized. She had no capacity for seeing herself, or, like Ellen, for finding in the death of Fergus an illumination which served in a mysterious fashion to light up the long progression of her life. In her sorrow, Hattie no longer even pitied herself; and this, of course, may have been the secret of her dignity. Hattie, the martyr, who bore her cross and flung herself before her family like the Pope before the Visigoths, no longer existed. In her place there was a strong, almost grim woman, who was silent and did not complain.
Nor had she, like the more civilized, the pleasure of books and of philosophic reflection. Her life since the very beginning had been far too active for such things; and now, when at last there was time, when she had no one to care for save the independent old man, she could not read, she could not reflect. Books were poor pale things by comparison with the ferocious activity of life itself. There were no stockings to darn, no one for whom she might make meringues, no dog to place upon his mat before locking up the house. (To the apartment there was but one door and it locked of itself. It was, properly speaking, no real home at all.) So she came to invent things for herself to do. She lingered over her work and took (though she was rich now) to such pale tasks as embroidery and knitting, only to find that the objects of her labor, having been created for no real purpose, accumulated dismally in the drawers and cupboards.
She had letters both from Ellen and Robert which she kept in the family Bible to read over and over again; and sometimes a shameful, bitter thought crept into the recesses of her active mind. It was a terrible thought, which she thrust hastily aside as impious and touched with blasphemy; but it returned nevertheless again and again to torment her. She thought, "If only it had been Robert instead of Fergus!" (Robert who was so steadfast and reliable, who already was the youngest captain of his division). She was proud of him too, but in a different way. She could not say how. . . .
The awful thought would not die. She would have given Robert to keep Fergus, though in the solitude of the empty flat she sometimes cried out, "It is not true. I could not think such a horrible thing!"
The squabbling with Gramp came quietly to an end, though neither of them ever made any allusion to the change. They lived together for the most part in silence but the old man ceased to torment and worry her. And on her side without ever knowing why, she came to treat him in a new way, almost to cherish and protect him like some brittle piece of glass, as all that remained of the old life. She even made for him little delicacies and had him to eat at the table with her. At such times they sat, awkwardly, and without conversation, each perhaps abashed by the weakness that lay in this strange truce.
In the long empty days there came to Hattie a mysterious sense of having turned a corner, of having stepped from one room into another. The door between had, she knew, closed forever, though she did not understand why. She had come now into the borders of Gramp's country. She was growing old and so she came to understand a little the old man's vast indifference.
Before he sailed, Robert, dressed in his captain's uniform, neat and spotless, every button properly arranged, came to bid farewell. She could feel certain of him. There would be no mad exploits, no wild surges of temperament ending in disaster, no idle heroics undertaken for their own selfish thrill. These things Robert would never understand.
As he sat talking to her (trying bravely in his solid, unspectacular way to take the place of Fergus) he seemed square and massive and eternal as her father, old Jacob Barr, had been. There was reassurance in the snub nose, the solid jaw and the unruly red hair. Where Fergus had not even been able to look out for himself, she knew that this other son would care for his men with a detached and efficient thoroughness. There was nothing in the death of Fergus which could be counted as a material loss, even to herself. It was Robert who had earned money when it was most needed; it was Robert who looked out for her and stood between her and the world. It was upon men like Robert that the whole world rested; he was a foundation, the beginning and end of all order and worth. And yet. . . . And yet. . . . Even while he sat there doing his clumsy best to make up for the loss of his brother, the old wicked thought kept tormenting her. . . . She wanted to tear it out by its roots, to destroy it forever; but there it was, always with her. . . . If only it had been Robert.
"You need not worry over me," he assured her. "I will take no chances. There's nothing romantic about war . . . at least not about this one. It's simply business. The side which is most efficient is bound to win. There won't be any nonsense. I'll look out for myself."
She said to him almost with indifference, "You're all I have left, because I don't see much of Ellen any more. She's too busy."
But she was not thinking of what she said: she was thinking that war was romantic. It must be so else it would not excite men as it excited Fergus. It was the romance that was the bait in the trap . . . romance and the excitement. So long as these things existed, there would be wars, for there would be men like Fergus who did not take their places efficiently but went because (she remembered one of the phrases he had used again and again in the face of her reproaches) "it was too big a show to be missed." It was not men like Robert who made war possible; it was men like Fergus. She saw it all with a vision uncluttered by talk of economics and politics; and so in her own fashion she came far nearer to the truth than this solid, logical son of hers.
But he was sure of himself, Robert. You could fancy him ordering his men about, ably and dispassionately, leading them admirably when it was necessary, as his grandfather Barr, the Citizen, had done before him in the Civil War. He would make a good job of it. You could see that he would quietly and thoroughly win distinction, not as Fergus had done, without once thinking of it, but because he had arranged it so. You could see him being decorated with medals, as his brother had been decorated, again and again; but not for the same reason. He would not wear them as Fergus had done, with a swagger. He would cherish them, in neat leather cases, and bring them out to show his children and his grandchildren, because he could not tell them what the war was like, give them the feel of it, as Fergus could have done . . . Fergus who (if he had lived) would have lost the medals or thrown them away long ago in disgust like his Grandfather Tolliver, who found the Siege of Paris more romantic than Bull Run or Gettysburg. He had, one fancied, already counted his medals. One could see that he was cut out for a good officer.
"I will see Ellen as soon as I have leave," he murmured and thought, "And I will not be walking about the streets during an air raid as if I were at a church sociable."
Yet he was not bitter because Fergus was the better loved; that fact he had come long since to accept. He was scornful only because it seemed to him an idiotic thing to be wandering carelessly into the midst of danger. There could be no reason for it . . . none on earth.
Before he left, Hattie burdened him with a great bundle of sweaters and socks, all admirably made in the hours when she had been distracted by her terror of idleness.
"You must wear them all yourself," she said. "You'll need them in time. They'll wear out and you'll lose them. I'll send you others from time to time. It's all I have to do nowadays."
And on the way past the cell occupied by The Everlasting he must have heard the squeaking of his grandfather's chair as the old man rocked and rocked, lost again in a torrent of memories; but he did not stop.
"Say good-by for me to The Everlasting," he said and then, after kissing her abruptly, he turned and disappeared quickly down the stairs, so that she could not see his tears. For Robert was, unlike the others, sentimental, though he had never once allowed his mother the joy of discovering it. It was a thing which he thought shameful.
Even he had caught a sense of her terrible desolation.
There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those who possess the gift of awareness. Old Gramp in his solitude knew well its workings, and Ellen, in Paris, had become, as the tempo of her own life began to lose its intensity, to understand it dimly. For Hattie, in the fretful ebb and flow of her existence there could never be such knowledge. This rhythm, this beauty, existed outside her, a thing apart, beyond the wall of her consciousness.
Gramp, in his solitude, knew too that there were in each life hills and valleys and, rising above them all, one peak which pierced the clouds. Out of the depths of his uncanny perception he came to understand that Hattie's life had passed its solitary peak. It had begun now to slip down the other side; what remained could be but a gradual falling away, a gentle decline until the end. What he knew from the summit of a monstrous detachment came to Hattie vaguely through her senses; she knew it as she knew the approach of damp weather by its effect upon her rheumatism. It was that sense of having passed from one room into another, with the door behind her closed and bolted forever.
And Ellen. . . . She too stood now on the summit, for ambition had been the beginning and end of her existence. She had accomplished; she had won. There would never be another peak so lofty, so enveloped in heady invigorating air; nor one so lonely. But there remained the things which lie always on the opposite slope of the peak—the things which the wise, like Gramp, place above all the hurry, the scramble, the headlong turmoil of the long ascent. There were the gentle pastures of reflection, of kindliness, of warmth and fine thoughts, all the rewards which succeed the terrible struggle. Ellen, he knew, had crossed the summit; and she was still a young woman.