The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

“There’s that girl that plays the harp, and a choir-singer, and a couple of actresses. I can understand them more or less, but you ... I really don’t. You’re not a stenographer, nor anything like that, nor an entertainer, nor a nurse, nor an ambulance-driver.”

“Maybe I’ll be a chaperon,” she said, taking refuge in lightness, for she really did not know what she was going to do. She was classified as a canteen worker. Her uniform was that of the Y. M. C. A., and she had remarked with feeling that the hat was already beginning to fade....

“I presume you know as much about it as any of us do.... I wish you could hear dad on the war and on Germany. He reads the papers to the last punctuation mark, but, somehow, he never seems to grasp it. Possibly most folks are that way, but father always says what he thinks, and goes ahead pronouncing the names of French towns, and has opinions about everything. He gets excited and pounds on the table.... Dad’s all right. We’ve always done things together since I was a kid. He’s that kind.”

She was able to see that a very real affection for his father was stated in those phrases. She wondered about the father—if he resembled his son in appearance or character.... He did not. The father was a middle-sized man of no education except what an undirected reading of many books had given him. He was a great reader of novels, especially of historical romances, and his knowledge of the past of the nations came from these.

His idea of France was Athos, Porthos Aramis, and d’Artagnan, with Miladi and a few cardinals and intriguing duchesses thrown in.... He owned a grocery in Detroit which did moderately well. His soul was filled with admiration and love for his son. He had a temper given to sudden, brief flashes ... and he had no bad habits except that he chewed tobacco surreptitiously. People liked him, especially children. He was good personally, but had no vindictive attitude toward evil. Every Sunday he went to church without complaint and without thought of it; though he would have enjoyed himself much more in a boat with a fish-line. When Captain Ware was younger and got into difficulties which his mother magnified into crimes and wept and foresaw disgrace, Mr. Ware would say, “Now don’t you worry, mother; that boy’s coming out all right....”

“Mother’s more worried about my coming to wicked France than about my being shot up,” he said, presently, and smiled.

His mother was the dominant member of the family. She was the last word in orthodoxy and was stubbornly dogmatic. She was religious after the manner of a zealot, but in her life economy took place just before religion. One had to save money and be economical to enter the kingdom of heaven; she could even overlook a few moral lapses in an individual who was frugal and laid by systematically for a rainy day.... All his life Captain Ware had been afraid of pulling down on his head what he privately called his mother’s “tantrums.” These were hysterical outbursts following some escapade of his, or possibly following a mere argument in which economy or religion was mentioned. She could cast stinging darts with her tongue, and when she was opposed, it did not much matter where, she was reckless in dispensing them. Anybody who stood near was likely to be wounded.

But she loved her son savagely and jealously, and lived her life and practised her economies for him. Anything which appertained to the perpetuation of the species was somehow abhorrent to her. Here, as everywhere, she was an extremist. Before her son was ten years old she was already in a state of mind, and embarrassed him so that he exerted himself to avoid being alone with her, by questioning him and by very frank warnings.... At ten she gave him a book to read entitled Plain Facts. She worked as she thought, frantically, without sparing herself or anybody else ... and the result was that she was burning herself out.... She was a remarkable woman, sometimes a lovable and companionable woman, but so intense, so intolerant of any belief which did not agree perfectly with hers, that people always felt the necessity of being on their guard with her so as not to “set her off.”

It was from these parents that Captain Ware inherited, and he was like neither of them.... But traces of both were easy to find in him. When one looks for explanations of his acts, one would do well to study his parents and to see if his acts did not spring from inherited characteristics and tendencies, or were not the result of a revulsion against parental characteristics which had irked him as a boy.

Now, for the first time in his life—and he was twenty-six years old—he was cutting loose from family contacts, and cutting loose in this total and revolutionary manner. His first adventure in freedom was into a new world which would not understand him and which he was not equipped to understand himself.... He had always lived at home, except for his four years in college, and his mother’s figure had been always present, for she had made it her business to keep it ever present.... In a few hours he would set his foot on the soil of France.... With one sudden wrench, war had snatched him from an environment dominated by his mother—and set him down in France.