FOOTNOTE:
[9] Copyright, 1913, The Delineator.
THE CABLE[10]
I says to myself: "What shall I do? What shall I do?"
I crushed the magazine down on my knee, and sat there rocking with it between my hands.
It was just a story about a little fellow with a brick. They met him, a little boy six years old, somewhere in Europe, going along up toward one of the milk stations, at sunrise. They wondered why he carried a brick, and they asked him: "Why do you have the brick?" "You see," he says, "it's so wet. I can get up on this." And he stood on his brick in the mud before the milk station for five hours, waiting for his supplies that was a pint of milk to take home to his mother.
Mebbe it was queer that this struck me all of a heap, when the big war I'd got used to. But you can't get used to the things that hurt a child.
And then I kept thinking about Bennie. Supposing it had been Bennie, with the brick? Bennie was the little boy that his young father had gone back to the old country, and Bennie hadn't any mother. So I had him.
Because I had to do something, I went out on the porch and called him. He came running from his swing—his coat was too big for him and his ears stuck out, but he was an awful sweet little boy. The kind you want to have around.
"Bennie," I says, "I know little boys hate it. But could you leave me hug you?"
He kind of saw I was feeling bad—like a child can—and he came right up to me and he says:
"I got one hug left. Here it is!"
And he hugged me grand.
Then he ran back down the path, throwing his legs out sideways, kind of like a little calf, the way he does. And I set down on the side stoop, and I cried.
"Oh, blessed God," I says, "supposing Bennie was running round Europe with a brick, waiting five hours in the mud for milk for his ma, that he ain't got none?"
When I feel like that, I can't sit still. I have to walk. So I opened the side gate and left Bennie run through into Mis' Holcomb's yard, that was ironing on her back porch, and I says to her to please keep an eye on him. And then I headed down the street, towards nothing; and my heart just filled out ready to blow up.
As I went, I heard a bell strike. It was a strange bell, and I wondered. Then I remembered.
"The new Town Hall's new bell," I thought. "It's come and it's up. They're trying it."
And it seemed like the voice of the town, saying something.
In the door of the newspaper office sat the editor, Luke Norris, his red face and black hair buried behind a tore newspaper.
"Hello, Luke," I says, sheer out of wanting human looks and words from somebody.
He laid down his newspaper, and he took his breath quick and he says: "I wish't Europe wasn't so far off. I'd like to go over there—with a basket."
I overtook little Nuzie Cook, going along home,—little thin thing she was, with such high eye-brows that her face looked like its windows were up.
"Nuzie," I says, "how's your ma?" And that was a brighter subject, because Mis' Cook has only got the rheumatism and the shingles.
"Ma's in bed," says Nuzie. "She's worried about her folks in the old country—she ain't heard and she can't sleep."
I went to a house where I knew there was a baby, and I played with that. Then I went to call on Mis' Perkins, that ain't got sense enough to talk about anything that is anything, so she kind of rested me. But into Mis' Hunter's was a little young rabbit, that her husband had plowed into its ma's nest, and he'd brought it in with its leg cut by the plow, and they was trying to decide what best to do. And I begun hurting inside again, and thinking:
"Nothing but a rabbit—a baby rabbit—and over there...."
I didn't say anything. Pretty soon I turned back home. And then I ran into the McVicars—three of them.
The McVicars—three of them—had Spring hats trimmed with cherries and I guess raisins and other edibles; the McVicars—mother and two offspring, sprung quite a while back—are new-come to the village, and stylish. They hadn't been in town in two months when they'd been invited twice to drive to the cemetery in the closed carriages, though they hadn't known either corpse, personally. They impressed people.
"Oh, Mis' Marsh," says Mis' McVicar, "we wanted to see you. We're getting up a relief fund...."
I went down in my pocket for a quarter, automatic. I heard their thanks, and I went on. And it came to me how, all over the country, the whole 100,000,000 of us, more or less, had been met up with to contribute something to relief, and we'd all done it. And it had gone over there to this country and to that. But our hearts had ached, individual and silent, the way mine was aching that day—and there wasn't any means of cabling that ache over to Europe. If there was, if that great ache that was in all of us for the folks over there, could just be gathered up and got over to them in one mass, I thought it would do as much as food and clothes and money to help them.
I stood still by a picket fence I happened to be passing, and I looked down the little street. It had a brick sidewalk and a dirt road and little houses, and the fences hadn't been taken down yet. And all the places looked still and kind of dear.
"They all feel bad," I thought, "just as bad as I do, for folks that's starved. But they can't say so—they can't say so. Only in little dabs of money, sent off separate."
Bennie was swinging on Mis' Holcomb's gate, looking for me. He came running to meet me.
"I found a blue beetle," he says to me. "And that lady's kitty's home, with a bell on. And I got a new nail. An—an—an—"
And I thought: "He ain't no different from them—over there. The little tikes, with no pas and no suppers and nothing to play with, only mebbe a brick to lug."
And there I was, right back to where I started from. And I went out to get supper, with my heart hanging around my neck like a pail of rock.