The Blood Red Dawn

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

After that he came every day. He was never empty-handed. He brought flowers, or sweetmeats from the Greek quarter, or delicate morsels that he picked up in the markets. Mrs. Robson grew to watch for his coming. He called her "Little Mother" in the Russian fashion. She would smile warmly as she listened to him linger caressingly over this term of endearment. He seemed to have the greatest respect for Mrs. Robson, but he was brutally indifferent to the poor little seamstress, Miss Proll, whom he ran into once or twice as he was leaving the house.

"These spinsters!" he would say with scorn, as she passed him on the stairs.

He seemed to concede anything to a woman who had fulfilled the obligations of motherhood, but he found nothing to excuse the lack.

His visits quite transformed the atmosphere of the Robson household. It was incredible that ten minutes a day in the thrall of a personality, hearty and masculine, could so change the anemic current of gloom that had encompassed these women. Mrs. Robson began to take a fragmentary interest in life. Indeed, if it had not been for the noncommittal words of the doctor in answer to Claire's inquiries regarding her mother's chance for improvement, she would have been misled into hoping for better days.

It was plain that Danilo's own hearthstone was a tradition, something stretching back into a misty past, and that he was finding a stimulation in crossing the threshold of this far Western home. All his life had been spent in wanderings. There was a touch of the nomad about him. He had starved in Paris, studied relentlessly in Berlin, and walked the streets of New York penniless. He had lived in hospitals, and wretched rooming-houses, and cold, impersonal hotels. The first years of his youth had been surrendered ruthlessly to his profession. There was a shade of cruelty in the pictures which he drew of his relentless ardor for learning, in those soul-thirsty days. One would have thought that all these years of wandering had taken the edge off any national feeling, but he seemed suddenly to have flamed with the old folk-consciousness, as some bare twig bursts into a white heat of bloom with the coming of spring. Now all the fury that moved him to assault the ramparts of learning was being poured out in the prospect of personal sacrifice for his native land. He was caught up in this cloud of fire and transfigured. When he spoke of these things Claire felt awe. She had never yet beheld a man gripped by an emotional enthusiasm.

"You are wondering, no doubt," he would say again and again, "why I have not gone back ... before! But it seemed best ... to wait. My country will need men of my profession, later.... Later, I shall do things. I shall bind up wounds. Ah, it had not been easy to persuade myself to wait. It is never easy. To move with the crowd, that is easy ... even when the crowd moves to certain death. But to sit and wait for your appointed time ... with people sneering beneath their smiles ... no, that is not easy!"

Once she asked him about his parents. His father, it appeared, had been a professor of Greek in the university at Belgrade; his mother from peasant stock, the daughter of a prosperous landed proprietor. He seemed more proud of this peasant stock than of his father's high breeding. Claire was puzzled. To her American ears the very word peasant savored of unequality, of a certain checkmated opportunity.

"My father saw my mother during the season of fruit blossoms. He was traveling through the country after an illness, and my mother was standing in her father's orchard, among the flowering plum-trees. My father was no longer a young man, but it was the spring of the year!" he finished, with an eloquent gesture.

Now his father was dead. His mother ... he did not know. He had received no tidings for months. But it appeared that news of his people had always been infrequent. It was not precisely neglect—Claire was sure that the memory of these kinsfolk was always with him, something almost too real and tangible to call for confirmation in the shape of a formal exchange of greetings.

"Next fall, if she is still alive, I shall see this mother of mine," he finished.