Those winding coast roads, which led around quiet coves where herons stood in the clear, still water, past stretches of gray, wind-vexed sea and over upland pastures fragrant with bayberry, mitigated in some degree the tragedy in which Mary Christmas as the years went by had found herself an unwilling actor. It was the old, bitter tragedy of Age contending with Youth and going down before it—a tragedy older than that of Lear or of Isaac and his sons, old as life itself, and enhanced a thousandfold in its cruelty when enacted by immigrant children who willingly crush beneath their feet all that their parents have held sacred. Defeated at home, Mary Christmas took to the long familiar roads, in the courses of which during those first years she had lived over again so much of her life. Along that particularly lonely stretch of woodland she had sung of Vartan; under that great pine which afforded such a sweep of tossing blue water she had imagined that she was looking upon the Mediterranean, her homesick eyes dim with tears; in that clump of sumach, red in the September sunshine, she had fallen asleep and dreamed that avenging blood was flowing in the far city of Erzerum; in country lanes, in farmhouse kitchens, and beneath blossoming apple trees she had told to wide-eyed children her tales of saints and heroes, and of holy places.
These landmarks of the woods and coast villages lent a consistency and coherence to her life as she grew older, which not even the complete emancipation of Raphael and little Mary could entirely disturb. Through her repeated visits to them and her eager reception of those sacramental elements of which they were the symbols, she kept close the past with all its beneficence. It was doubtless in an effort to strengthen this coherence of which she felt such need that, the year following Mary Wescott’s marriage and that of her own Mary, she discarded her suit and hat and returned to the gold-laced bodice and the red silk handkerchief. These she never again relinquished, in spite of the pressure at home and the fast changing modes of those complacent years.
She knew the coast of Maine as few natives knew it and was its best chronicler during those early years of the new century. She watched the invasion alike of the summer sojourner and the automobile, and looked upon both with displeasure, although with the advent of the former there was increased wealth for her. The latter she scorned to employ except in the worst of weathers, when she would occasionally allow some friendly passer-by to carry her to her next stopping-place, the red pushcart bumping along over the stones in the rear; for she hated its choking, sputtering voice along the quiet roads and its rude disturbance of her solitude. She watched children who had feared her upon her first visits grow to maturity and marry; she brought gifts to their children. And each year in graveyards above the sea she saw new white stones, stark and ugly in the wind-swept grass. Before these she would pause not infrequently, to cross herself and to say a prayer for the spirits of those who had learned to look upon her with kindliness.
XI
SHORT TWILIGHTS AND DRIFTING PETALS
IT was just five years after Mary Wescott’s wedding that, following unprecedented events in Europe, blood did begin to flow in Erzerum, as in Mary Christmas’ dream beneath the sumachs. But it was not avenging blood; and in those awestruck days when the world was rudely shaken from its serenity, the horror of it was lessened in minds already jaded by atrocities. In the mind of Mary Christmas, however, it eclipsed all other catastrophes. The compelling hideousness of it drove sleep from her tired eyes and within them lighted that red gleam which so many years ago had frightened the Wescotts at their quiet table. She was tormented day and night by the intensity of the fire within her. Seeking blindly the comfort that lies in common suffering, she pushed the papers with their ghastly, burdened words between the elbows of Raphael as he leaned upon his cigar case and pondered his stock; but he, after an impatient glance, turned to the quotations on the tobacco market. Little Mary, it is true, wept with her mother for a few secret moments, but her eyes never left the door through which her husband might at any minute come to stare at her and to shrug his big shoulders.
The next two years, driven by a restlessness that dislodged even the sacredness of custom, Mary Christmas began her country traveling early and continued it late. The very exercise of walking long miles over bad roads, muddy in the spring, frozen and rutty in late autumn, loosened the tension under which she was living. Moreover, in the outlying villages and farming districts there were those who, in the light of present events, listened more eagerly to her stories of ancient wrong and cruel aggression, and gave her not only the sympathy for which she had craved, but the more welcome support of their own righteous indignation.
Finally, as the months dragged themselves wearily into years, she found in Father Wescott an outlet for all her pent-up hostility and for her growing resentment toward those governmental heads who were willing to watch and wait while ships were sunk, and disaster, confusion, and death stalked from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf. He not only shared the resentment of Mary Christmas; he fed it with his own indignant protests. If his party were in Washington, he told her, things would be different! Mary Christmas knew nothing of parties, but her worshipful gaze, which the years had not dimmed, told him as plainly as words that in her opinion the country had made one incomprehensible error in judgment when it had overlooked him as leader of its destinies. And although Father Wescott’s native modesty did not allow him for a moment to share her opinion, he did echo the sputterings of his automobile as he told his town and county what he thought of the Administration!
But Father Wescott and Mary Christmas waited yet more months before the country righted itself in their estimation—months during which Father Wescott forgot that his business was law and Mary Christmas that hers was trade, during which Roger and John, the one in the Law School at Cambridge, the other at the foot of the ladder in a Boston firm, studied reluctantly, all the while conscious that in spite of themselves they were marking time.
In the early spring of 1917, impelled by the certainty that watchful waiting was at last at an end and by the bitter, awful knowledge, which she until now had been unwilling to admit to herself, that no avenging spirit would ever quicken her son, Mary Christmas escaped to the country while the frost was still in the roads and before the first arbutus, blooming in the cold moss of some woodland rock, touched the misty air with its perfect fragrance. The last three years had left indelible marks upon her in the thinness of her face and in the lines now irretrievably set about her mouth, in the haunting depths of her eyes and the sagging of her shoulders. They had marked her spirit, too, though that flickered on, choked and smothered, it is true, but wanting only draught and fuel to flame again.
Both were supplied, miraculously it seemed to her, in mid-April. For three weeks she had plodded tirelessly on through days of intermittent mist and rain along the most remote of her routes, her thoughts inextricably entangled in a web in which relief over the declaration of war struggled with bitterness over the indifference which this new country had so mysteriously engendered in her children. And while she pushed her red cart over the roads, depending for hospitality upon the kindness of those to whom for years she had ministered in a way she little understood, two young men in uniform decided to stay for an afternoon in Portland on their way home to say good-bye to their father and mother. What happened that afternoon in the cigar store of Raphael Christmas only one of the three to-day could tell you; but there must have been something persuasive about the square shoulders of the older visitor and the straight brown eyes of the younger, for, the next day but one, a big Scandinavian sold tobacco to whoever wanted it, and told anybody who asked that the proprietor had gone to war.