The Whistling Mother

by Grace S. Richmond

And we went downstairs carrying my luggage between us, and the worst was over, and the thing I dreaded hadn't happened.

Perhaps you think she ought to have prayed over me, and given me a Bible, and a lot of good motherly advice. Don't you think it! The prayers had been spread over twenty-two years of my life, and the Bible was all marked up with her markings. As for the good advice—well—if she hadn't done her level best, long before that, to teach me to keep clean, and think straight, and "hit the line hard"—it was too late to begin then. But she didn't have to begin then, because the thing was done, as well as any mother on earth could do it. And if you think that little thumb-marked book wasn't in my bag at that minute, you don't think right, that's all.

Dad said a few fatherly things to me before I went, like the all-round trump he is, and I was glad to have him. I could stand that all right. But I couldn't have borne anything from Mother—not then—and she knew it. How did she know? That's what gets me. But she did, the way she's always seemed to know things without being told. She's that sort, you see.

They all went down to the station with me, in the seven-passenger, with Dad driving. We didn't talk much on the way. I tried not to see the familiar old streets. I hadn't told anybody what train I was going on, but some of my old friends found out and came down just the same, and were there in a bunch to send me off. They hurried up to us, and shook hands and jollied me, and everything was lively. When the train came in we all went together to it, and then I saw the boys stand back and look at Mother. I don't know what they expected to see, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't what they did see.

It was evening, but instead of putting on an awfully stunning fur-bordered coat over the things she'd worn to dinner, as she usually does when she goes out in the car at night, Mother'd taken the trouble to go back to the tailored suit and little close hat she wears in the street and for driving. She knows I like her best that way—and I certainly did that night. I can't tell you why, except that the things we've always done together have been mostly in street-and-sports clothes—tramping and motoring and golfing—and so forth. She always seems more like a sort of good chum dressed like that than when she puts on trailers and silky things—though, my word! if you don't think she's a peach in evening dress you never saw her. Her neck and shoulders—but that's neither here nor there just now. The thing I'm telling is that she'd gone back to the clothes that make her look like a jolly girl, and I knew she'd done it so I could remember her that way.

It wasn't so hard then to go. It was all over in a minute. Nobody hung round my neck. Even when it came to Mother, whom of course I always leave till the last, she just gave me one good kiss, with her hands on my shoulders, and then I jumped on board. The train didn't linger long, for which I was mighty glad. When it pulled out, and I looked back at them all standing there—the whole bunch of them—suddenly I couldn't see them awfully well. But I gave a big wink that cleared my eyes, and saw that Mother was smiling, just as she always does, exactly as if I'd been going back to prep-school after my first vacation home. It wasn't a teary smile, either—it was her very best.... I see it now, sometimes, when I'm just dropping off to sleep.

I've thought about that send-off a lot since I got away. I've realized since, more than I did then, that it must have taken just sheer pluck on all their parts to see it through as they did. Of course, my young sisters couldn't understand all it meant, but my kid brother's read a heap, as I easily found out when we talked about it, and I know he had to do a few swallowings of the throat on the side not to show how he felt more than he did. As for Grandfather and Grandmother, they went through the Civil War, and they knew, better than any of us, what might be ahead. Dad—well—Dad has wonderful control of himself always, and I should be surprised if I saw his heart on his sleeve at any time, yet I knew perfectly that he felt the whole thing tremendously. He was banking on doing his bit in the Home Defence League, and the Red Cross, and everywhere else he could get his hand in, and I could tell well enough that he was aching to be in active service.

But after all, it's the mothers, I think, who do the biggest giving when their sons go to war. I suspect it's what they put into their sons that stands for the real stuff in the crisis. I don't think there are many weak mothers, like Hoofy Gilbert's, even among the ones who are invalids. But I wish more of them understood what it is to a fellow to have his mother hold her head up!

[Illustration: musical notation]