“I’m telling the boy about the terrible sin and danger of this young generation. What kind of a world will it be, I ask you, when such boys as that grow up to control things? It will be another Babylon, and I don’t want to live to see it.”
And his wife, getting only a word here and there, would quote some appropriate passage from Isaiah and go back to her work well satisfied that she had done her duty.
“Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel:” And now it seems to me, as I sit here, a gray-haired man of the silent world, that I have seen many of the signs and wonders, though I did not recognize them as they passed by. That “sinful young generation” has grown up, and men of my age may be said to control the nation. It seems to me that it is a good world after all, and I believe that my mischief-making children will grow up into a steadily developing generation which will make it better yet. For here in the silent world we learn to smile at youthful antics, and to have great charity for them.
The earliest incident of my childhood that I can remember is the time my father pretended to give us a whipping. My older brother and I had been sent to bed in disgrace, to wait for father to come home and administer punishment. I can just recall that we were up in a New England attic, in the bed at the head of the stairs, surrounded by a collection of trunks, boxes and old rubbish which a thrifty housewife always puts “upstairs.” She is too economical to throw them away, and too neat to have them in sight downstairs. I think the town bell was faintly ringing, as it always did at six o’clock, and there was a sound like a gentle tapping as the water lapped at the wharf in high tide. I can just dimly remember the sunshine streaming in through the dusty window as we lay there in bed. The dust danced and floated in it like a flock of tiny flies. Since then I have read much of history. There have been many occasions when brave souls have waited for death or an ominous sentence. These scenes haunt the deaf; we cannot talk and laugh them away as others do. We must put down our book and go back in memory, seeking something in our own lives which may even remotely resemble what we have read. That is part of the penalty which must come with the silence. I remember reading a powerful description of Louis XVI on the night before his execution. A well-meaning, easy-going man, he had never been able to realize the serious side of life until it suddenly peered in through his window with the hideous face of Revolution. Then, face to face with death, he rose to that dignity “which doth become a king.” As I read that passage I put my book down, and, ridiculously enough, there flashed into my mind the picture of these two little boys waiting for the coming of father with his stick. We had determined that we would not cry, no matter how hard he hit us. That was our nearest approach to “dignity.”
I think that even then my hearing was a little defective. I heard my father come in below, and mother’s clear voice was certainly intended for our hearing.
“Now, Joseph, you go right up and whip those boys! They would not mind me, and you must do it.”
All through my life I have somehow managed to hear the unpleasant remarks or thorns of life. We deaf usually miss the bouquets. Poor father! The Civil War was raging, and he had volunteered. My young people seem to think that the Civil War was a mere skirmish beside the great World War just ended. Perhaps so, if we count only money and men, yet our part in this recent conflict was but a plaything in intense living, in sentiment, and breaking up of family life, as compared with the war of the sixties. Father was to leave home for the front in less than a week. He was captain of the local company, and should probably have been stronger in family discipline. But his heart was tender. He did not want to whip his boys, and he protested, as many a man has done. I could not hear what he said, but I knew from the expression on my brother’s face that he was protesting. Tonight, after these long and toilsome years have boiled out much of ambition and the desire to know the great things of life, I wish most keenly that I could have heard what my father said.
But mother insisted, as good women do, and finally we heard the big man slowly mounting the stairs. I can see him now as he stood framed in the doorway with the bright splinter of sunshine bathing him in light; a tall man with a strong, kindly face and a thick black beard. It is the only real memory I have of my father, for he did not come back from the war alive. Long, long years after, I sat at a great banquet next to a famous Senator, who had seen much of life. I told him that I have only this memory of my father, but that I had finally found a man who had served in the same regiment with him, slept in the same tent, who had known him intimately as a man.
“Now,” I asked, “shall I hunt up that man and have him tell me in his own way just what kind of a man my father was?”
Quickly the answer came from this hardened old diplomat: