“This is the happiest time—before the child comes,” she said one day, and added, with the observant eye of mothers, “it will be a boy; there is a pink lining to the basket.”
“Yes, it will be a boy,” replied Virginia, wistfully.
“I have had six,” pursued the woman, “six sons, and yet I am alone now. Three are dead, and three are in the army. I am always listening for the summons that means another grave.” She clasped her thin hands and smiled the patient smile that chilled Virginia's blood.
“Couldn't you have kept one back?” asked the girl in a whisper.
The woman shook her head. Much brooding had darkened her mind, but there was a peculiar fervour in her face—an inward light that shone through her faded eyes.
“Not one—not one,” she answered. “When the South called, I sent the first two, and when they fell, I sent the others—only the youngest I kept back at first—he is just seventeen. Then another call came and he begged so hard I let him go. No, I gave them all gladly—I have kept none back.”
She lowered her eyes and sat smiling at her folded hands. Weakened in body and broken by many sorrows as she was, with few years before her and those filled with inevitable suffering, the fire of the South still burned in her veins, and she gave herself as ardently as she gave her sons. The pity of it touched Virginia suddenly, and in the midst of her own enthusiasm she felt the tears upon her lashes. Was not an army invincible, she asked, into which the women sent their dearest with a smile?
Through the warm spring weather she sat beside the long window that gave on the street, or walked slowly up and down among the vegetable rows in the garden. The growing of the crops became an unending interest to her and she watched them, day by day, until she learned to know each separate plant and to look for its unfolding. When the drought came she carried water from the hydrant, and assisted by Mammy Riah sprinkled the young tomatoes until they shot up like weeds. “It is so much better than war,” she would say to Jack when he rode through the city. “Why will men kill one another when they might make things live instead?”
Beside the piazza, there was a high magnolia tree, and under this she made a little rustic bench and a bed of flowers. When the hollyhocks and the sunflowers bloomed it would look like Uplands, she said, laughing.
Under the magnolia there was quiet, but from her front window, while she sat at work, she could see the whole overcrowded city passing through sun and shadow. Sometimes distinguished strangers would go by, men from the far South in black broadcloth and slouch hats; then the President, slim and erect and very grave, riding his favourite horse to one of the encampments near the city; and then a noted beauty from another state, her chin lifted above the ribbons of her bonnet, a smile tucked in the red corners of her lips. Following there would surge by the same eager, staring throng—men too old to fight who had lost their work; women whose husbands fought in the trenches for the money that would hardly buy a sack of flour; soldiers from one of the many camps; noisy little boys with tin whistles; silent little girls waving Confederate flags. Back and forth they passed on the bright May afternoons, filling the street with a ceaseless murmur and the blur of many colours.