“And it was just then that I saw her face. I give you my word that at that moment it was the most beautiful face I ever saw. There was a calm beauty and dignity, a light of joy upon it which made me forget the flat nose, the narrow forehead and the great mouth. They passed on, and John, the foreman, looked up at me. We were both thinking the same thing, master and man though we were. I couldn’t reach him with my hand, but I did say:
“‘John, she has had her life wish. She has come to look like the Goddess of Liberty. It was a miracle.’
“And John answered in his slow, thoughtful way:
“‘No, not a miracle—always she has had that great spirit in her heart; always that great love in her soul. She has kept that love and spirit pure all through these hard years, and now at the great sacrifice it shone out through her face. Said I not right that my wife would come to be the most beautiful woman on earth?’”
My friend told the story in a matter-of-fact way, and then fell into a silence. I did not ask him how he reconciled this experience with his statement that beauty is rubbed in from the outside. It wasn’t worth while; we both knew better. The face of mature years is a mask. It is the candle behind it that gives it character and beauty.
CAPTAIN RANDALL’S HOUR
Uncle Isaac Randall was the last Grand Army man in our town. All the other old comrades had passed on. As a boy I used to try to imagine what “the last Grand Army man” would be like. Poets and artists have tried to picture him, but when he actually appears you know how far the real must travel to reach the ideal. For poet and artist would have us look upon some calm, dignified man, carried by the wings of great achievement far above the mean and petty things of life which surround us like a thick fog in a narrow valley. For that, I fear, is what most of us find life to be unless the memory of some great sacrifice or some great devotion can lift our heads up into the perpetual sunshine. Those who knew Uncle Isaac saw little of the hero about him. He was just a little, thin, nervous man, very deaf, irritable and disappointed. No one can play the part of a deaf man with any approach to success unless he be a genuine philosopher, and Uncle Isaac was unfitted by nature for that. Sometimes in Summer, when the sun went down, you would see the old man standing in the barn looking off to the crimson West, over the purpling hills where the shadows came creeping up from the valley. A man with some poetry and philosophy would have seen in the darkening notch where the hills gave way, to let the road pass through, an approach to the beautiful gate through which wife and children and old comrades had passed on, to wait for him beyond the hills. But Uncle Isaac was cursed with that curiosity which is the torture of the deaf—he saw the hired man up on the hill talking to the neighbor’s boy, and his burning desire was to know what they were talking about as they stood in the twilight.
The Great War came, and Uncle Isaac’s two grandsons volunteered. Before they shipped overseas they came back to the farm—very trim and natty in their brown uniforms. It irritated the old man to think that these boys—hardly more than babies—hardly to be trusted to milk a kicking cow—should be sent to fight America’s battles. And those little rifles! They were not much better than popguns, compared with his old army musket. The old man took the gun down from the nail where it had hung for years. He had kept it polished, and the lock with its percussion cap was still working. He would show these young sniffs what real warfare meant. So they went out in the pasture—the old soldier carrying his musket, carefully loaded with a round bullet—pushed in with the iron ramrod. In order to show these boy soldiers what real warfare might be, the old man sighted the musket over the fence and aimed at a board about 300 yards away. The bullet went at least five feet wide, while the old musket kicked back so hard that Uncle Isaac winced with the pain. Then one of the boys quietly raised his “popgun” and aimed at a bush at least half a mile away across the valley. In a fraction of a minute he fired half a dozen bullets which tore up the ground all around that bush. Then the boys hung one of their brown uniforms on the fence across the pasture, and put Grandpa’s old blue coat beside it. You could hardly distinguish the brown coat against the background, while the blue coat stood out like a target. It was hard for the old man to realize that both he and his musket belonged to a vanished past. The boys looked at the gun and at Grandpa marching home—trying to throw his old shoulders back into military form—and smiled knowingly at each other as youth has ever done in the pride of its power. They could not see—who of us ever can see?—the spiritual forces of patriotism which walked beside the old man, waiting for the time to show their power.