“It’s Dick,” she said.
Later, not remembering very much how she had come, she found herself at Arlington, at the Amphitheatre, with yet more thousands. There were bright colors of foreign dress uniforms and masses of khaki and light and shadow and the snowy gleam of columns against a background of trees. Later there was distant, solemn music through the trees. From the direction of the fort the dim color of troops came nearer and nearer, clearer and clearer; the marine band, half-step to the throb of drums, swung out and circled the colonnade. The caisson rolled up where a white-surpliced choir waited, and men in uniform with medals on their breasts lifted Dick, and the choir sang “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.” They carried him past the troops with rifles at “present,” past the bareheaded people, through the pillared colonnade, with the white choir and the clergy leading them, the great of many lands awaiting him. They placed him on a catafalque, flower-covered, and the great audience, all the thousands, rose and stood as he passed in—Dick—with Pershing still following, Pershing who had trudged seven miles from the Capitol behind his soldier.
The coffin rested on its base as if held up by a mound of blossoms—and suddenly the woman felt stabbed with a knife, a frantic, unbearable feeling. Her boy lay there with no sign of her near him. The nation had heaped him with honor, but Dick would not be satisfied with the nation, missing his mother. In her hand was a bunch of roses; she wondered where she had gotten them, and vaguely recalled a florist’s shop on the way out. She sprang toward a guard, a soldier, and the man stared at her as people did.
“Put these—put these—right close to him,” she begged in sliding Southern speech. “He’s—he’s my boy.” The soldier little guessed how literal the words were to her, but they went direct to his heart. A boy of hers lay in France; this one stood for him; so he understood it. “Yes, ma’am,” he said gently.
He took the flowers and went away with them and in a moment she saw them laid on the coffin, their white heads against a gorgeous wreath of red roses. The President’s red roses—but the woman did not know that. The man came back then and found her a place in one of the first rows of the curving line of seats where were only men and women in black.
The mighty service went on. The woman going through it with the others seemed aware of it through another’s senses, as if she were removed where her consciousness could not make contact with anything earthly. This was Dick’s funeral, but she was not sad. Only fused to a hazy exaltation. Maybe Dick’s light-hearted spirit was there, hovering over all this and lifting her spirit with him. In any case her flowers lay close to him, clinging whitely against that blood-red wreath. They must be, she was guessing, just above where the withered little French roses rested still on Dick’s dear cold heart. To see them there brought a manner of comfort to her. And the service went on. As Bishop Brent’s voice ended, the bells over in Washington were ringing noon, and sharply the clear, high notes of a trumpeter blew attention. She stood up with the thousands, the millions, the nation. For the nation paused during two minutes then to honor—Dick. All over America, in churches, in marketplaces, on railway lines, the rushing life of the country stopped and the populace stood silent with bowed heads for that tremendous moment, honoring the men who had died.
Then it was over; a minute-gun boomed across the river at the base of the Washington Monument; led by the band the stirred multitude swung into “America.”
“My country, ’tis of thee,” the people sang. And the woman sang with them. She could; she was dry-eyed and calm; this was Dick’s funeral, her little boy Dick, her splendid, big son. Yet she seemed to feel nothing. The Lord God was going to give her a sign that it was Dick. She was anxious about that. Certain, yes, of course; but a sign was to come. Nervousness caught her as the President began to speak; she wished the Lord God would hurry; it would do at any time, surely, yet this strain of waiting was difficult. It was hard to listen to the President while one was watching every moment for the sign. And with that his voice had slipped into words as familiar as her own name, words which she had taught to Dick.
“Our Father which art in Heaven——”
There was a soft, many-rustling sound of thousands rising, and all the voices took up the age-old words: