“The ship on which I sailed has arrived safely in port.”
What ship? What port? After what adventures? But the great fact remained; he was, at least, overseas, beyond the first great peril. She flung herself into war work and wrote every day a letter with its vague military address ending in A. E. F. And got back many letters full of enthusiasm, of adventure, of old friends and new, of dear French people who had been good to him—but everybody was good to this boy. Of hard training, too, and a word of praise from high quarters once or twice, passed on secretly, proudly to the one person to whom a fellow could repeat such things. It was a life crowded with happiness and hardship and comradeship and worth-while work. And then, soon, with danger. Through all sordidness and horror it was a life vitalized by enormous incentive, a life whose memory few of those who lived it would give up for everything else that any career might offer. The power of these gay, commonplace, consecrated boys’ lives reached across oceans and swung nations into consecration. Dick’s mother moved gladly in the huge orbit, for war work meant to her Dick. The days went. He was in action at times now, and wrote that his life was a charmed one, and that he walked safe through dangers; wrote also the pitiful bit of statistics which boys all told to their mothers, about the small percentage of killed and wounded; wrote as well the heroic sweet thoughts which came from depths of young souls which had never before known these depths.
“If I’m killed, darling child, honey, after all it’s not much different. It wouldn’t be really long before we’d be playing together again. And I’ve had the joy and the usefulness of fifty years of living in these last months. What more could you ask? The best thing to do with a life is to give it away—you taught me that—and this certainly is the best way to give it, for our America. And don’t worry about my suffering if I’m wounded; there’s not much to that. Things hurt and you stand it—that happens in every life—and we wiggle and get through. It hurt like the dickens when I had pneumonia, don’t you remember? So, behold the straight dope of the wise man Dick, and follow thereby. Nothing can happen that’s unbearable; keep it in your mind, precious. Live on the surface—don’t go feeling any more than you can help.”
Thousands of others found the sense of that sentence a way out of impossibility, as this woman did. She slept nights and worked days and wrote letters and rejoiced in getting them, and shunned like poison thoughts that thronged below the threshold, thoughts she dared not meet. Weeks wore on, months; the Germans were being pushed back; with a shivering joy she heard people say that the war could not last long; he might—he might come home safe. She knew as that shaft of golden hope winged across her brain, from the reeling rapture of it she knew how little hope she had ever had. But she whispered Dick’s wise sentence once in a while, “Nothing can happen that’s unbearable,” and she held her head high for Dick. Then the one thing which had never entered her mind happened. Dick was reported among the missing.
Missing.
Let any mother of a boy consider what that means. Anything. Everything. “Nothing can happen that’s unbearable,” said Dick. But this was. A woman can’t stay sane and face that word “missing”—can she? This woman gasped that question of herself. Yet she must stay sane, for Dick might come back. Oh, he might even come back safe and sound. They did come through prison camps—sometimes—and get back to health. Prison camps. She fell to remembering about nights when she had crept into his room to see that he was covered up. Mines. But that thought she could not think. And the difficult days crawled on, and no news came and no more gay letters, with their little half-sentences of love-making, shining like jewels out of the pages, pages each one more valuable than heaps of gold. No letters; no news; swiftly and steadily her fair hair was going gray. The Armistice arrived, and then, after a while, troops were coming home. Because Dick would have wanted it, because she herself must honor these glorious lads who were, each one, somehow partly Dick, she threw herself into the greetings, and many a boy was made happy and welcome by the slim, tall, still-young woman with the startling white hair, who knew so well what to say to a chap. Outwardly all her ways stayed the same. No one of her friends noticed a difference except that sometimes one would say: “I wonder what keeps her going? Does she hope yet that Dick may come back?” Surely she hoped it. She would not wear black. Till certainty came she must hope. Still, little by little, as drop by drop her heart’s blood leaked, she was coming to believe him dead; coming nearly to hope it. At the same time in the tortured, unresting brain, the brain that held so large an area of mysticism from Irish forbears, in that cave of weaving thoughts there was still hope of a miracle. The child next door, Lynnette, not realizing to what a dangerous borderland of sanity she was urging desperate footsteps, helped her frame her vague theory of comfort.
“Nothing is sure yet. They don’t begin to know about all the missing,” argued Lynnette, dark eyes shining. “Dick may have been carried to the ends of the earth; he may not know even now that the war is over. He’s so strong, nothing could—could hurt him,” stammered Lynnette, and went scarlet with a stab of knowledge of things, things that even Dick’s splendid body could not weather.
“Miracles do happen. Do you know, Lynnette, it’s as if somebody whispered that to me over and over. ‘Miracles do happen—miracles do happen.’ My brain aches with that sentence.” She was still a moment. “I saw what you were thinking. Of the—otherwise. I can’t face the—otherwise.” Her voice thinned to a whisper. “It’s worse than death, any possible otherwise, now. When all the prisoners are freed and all the soldiers are coming—home. Lynnette—I hope he’s dead.”
The girl tossed up a hand.
“Yes, child. But suffering—I can’t have him suffering—long pain. It can’t be. Oh, God, don’t let it be that!”