The Worn Doorstep

by Margaret Pollock Sherwood

Do you remember that my very first glimpse of you was at the Union? You were debating, very convincingly, on the subject of disarmament, and proved the possibility, the practicability, of peace among nations. I was idly interested in you; Gladys had whispered that you were one of her friends. That night,—but never again,—you were just one of a type to me, with the fine, lean, English look of race, the fine self-control of every nerve and emotion and muscle. I noticed that you were already beginning to have a touch of the scholar stoop, and that you were a shade, just a shade, too slender. It was quite a surprise, and something of a blow to me, to find you English men not, on the whole, so stalwart as the men in America. All our lives we have read of the hale and hearty John Bull, yet our first glimpse of you makes us think that John Bull and Uncle Sam will have to change places in the caricatures if this transformation keeps on.

The hardest thing in the world for me to understand is that the great things of life may hang on mere trifles. If I had not, acting on a moment's impulse, promised to go into lodgings with Gladys in Oxford because she would go there to study Celtic, Icelandic, and Greek, I should never have known you, never have walked with you in glory through an English spring, never have picked crocuses in Iffley meadows and anemones in Bagley wood, never have known that green rippling beauty of Oxford stream and meadow and the piercing joy of life and love that came with you. And now——

The vastness of my loss I can not even grasp; my world is swept away from under my feet, and I am alone, with nothing to stand on, nothing to reach in space. Dying myself could hardly mean such utter letting go; I am aware only of a great blankness. I have not even tried to measure my disaster, to understand. I shall have all the rest of my life to learn to understand; I come of a long-lived race.

That which comes more often than my sense of loss is the sense of my part in letting you go, making you go! You remember that August afternoon when we drifted down the river, for you even forgot to row; the trailing willow branches ruffled our hair and gently took off my hat. It was a lazy, sunshiny, misty afternoon, such a happy afternoon, except for the war-cloud beyond the peace and the exquisite grey and green calm of Oxford. You were wondering, idly enough, about war; how was it to be justified? What right had England, with her love of peaceful enlightenment, to take this swift plunge into the awful horror? And you went, my Lord Hamlet, with that deepening look which showed a soul drawn far within, into a long philosophic discussion as to whether war is ever justifiable; no one could adjust philosophic niceties of thought better than you. Could a man of ethical conviction, without outrage to his better self, go into that barbaric hell? All the time that your intellect was balancing, weighing, and deciding "no!" old impulses were stirring, old heroic fingers were tugging from their graves, old simple-minded forebears were alive and awake, impelling you.

The green, lovely banks grew dim; the shadows lengthened across the rippling water, and sunset flushed the western sky beyond the overhanging branches, while you fought it out. When you turned and asked me squarely, what could I say? It had seemed so piteously, cruelly simple to me from the first, so simple and so great! Of course, I come of the practical American race. Back of me lie generations of ancestors who have had to act and act quickly without exhausting the ultimate possibilities of thought on any subject. I do not mean that they have done unjustifiable things, but that they have had to take life at the quick. When the Indian brandished his tomahawk inside the door at the baby in the cradle, some one had to shoot and shoot instantly, without stopping to ask any authority whether shooting was wrong. That actually happened in my family; it was a little great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of mine. Her Pilgrim father was quite right. Even if his mind told him that it was wrong, which I judge was not the case, there was something in him deeper down and farther back than mere intellect; he did the right thing and did it instinctively, Lord Hamlet. Of course, in reality, his intellectual problem had been settled when he loaded his gun.

All life is transition, and always has been. As I understand it, with one's ancestor one has to load one's gun with one hand, while reaching forward with the other to one's descendant for the pipe of peace. One has to keep collected, centered, ready to do one's utmost in any need; the luxury of the last shade of reasoning is denied us as yet: our task is not to fail at the crisis.

What could I say, when you asked me, except the cruelly hard thing which I did say? Back of me, as back of you, lie the same fighting, plucky ancestors. The same heroic impulses that stirred their dust stir mine, and yours,—alas that it has but feminine dust to stir in me! To me, as to you, there is but one answer in the world to a question like that. There had never been any real doubt in my mind as to what you would do; I think that there had never been any real doubt in your own mind. In the great moments, life seems neither right nor wrong, but something greater; it seems inevitable.

Poor Belgium and the baby in the cradle come back to my mind together, the highly "efficient" tomahawk replaced by the highly "efficient" siege guns. But even apart from the high justice of this issue, England was in trouble, England was fighting. What was there for you to do but help? I said only the one word "go," and even now I can recall the stillness and the wash of the ripples against our boat and through the grasses. The silence of perfect beauty rested on sky and tree and water, and the river no longer seemed a little inland stream flowing softly through grassy meadows with retarding locks, but a flowing passageway to some great sea.

The days that followed I count off on my fingers as one counts a rosary; there were not many, not so many as our prayers. Such little scraps of them, mere fragments, come to me, shining fragments which I treasure and shall always treasure like bits of priceless jewels: in all my mental store there is nothing quite so precious. I was busy every minute, trying to console your mother and your sister, who thought you ought not to go; trying to make them see. It is as if the sun were still illuminating those days, making them forever radiant. It seemed enough to live, to try, to give one's all, not knowing; it was not hard then; nothing could be hard in moments of exaltation like those.

They were full too of homely toil; such queer things we had to do in getting you ready, dear. Of course you were not a trained soldier; how to become a trained soldier in a week of short days is a harder problem than many a one in philosophy. When you decided that you would be a despatch bearer and join the motorcycle brigade, because thus you could go to the front sooner, I am proud that I did not say one word of protest, though I knew that it was the most dangerous task of all. Being a despatch bearer seemed a fitting service for an intellectual leader.