“Dick!”
“Well, now! It’ll teach you to go careful how you start a man on them tricks. Lynnette’s a worthy child, but I’d never have thought of kissing her. Yet it wasn’t so bad. Rather subtle.” He licked his lips tentatively.
“Dicky! Vulgar, vulgar boy!”
“You know, I believe she did like it,” confided Dick.
Then very soon, in the middle of the sunshiny, warm morning he went. In the hall, where they had raced and played games long ago, she told him good-by, doing a difficult best to give him cheer and courage to remember, not heart-break. Something helped her unexpectedly, reaction, maybe, of a chord overstrained; likely the good Lord ordered it; His hand reaches into queer brain-twists. She said small, silly things that made the boy laugh, till at last the towering figure was upon her and she was crushed into khaki, with his expert rifleman’s badge digging into her forehead. She was glad of the hurt. The small defenses had gone down and she knew that only high Heaven could get her through the next five seconds with a proper record as a brave man’s mother. In five seconds he turned and fled, and with a leap was through the door. Gone! She tossed out her arms as if shot, and fled after him. Already he was across the lawn, by the tulip-bed, and suddenly he wheeled at the patch of color and his visored cap was off, and he was kissing his hand with the deep glow in his eyes she had seen often lately. It was as if the soul of him came close to the windows and looked out at her. His blond hair in the sunlight was almost as yellow as on that other day long ago when—What was this? Up from the clover in the ditch, filling all the air with fluttering gold, stormed again a flight of yellow butterflies, the Cloudless Sulphur on their spring migration. The boy as he stood looking back at her shouted young laughter and the winged things glittered about him, and with that two lighted on his head.
“Good luck! It’s for good luck, mother,” he called.
She watched, smiling determinedly, dwelling on details, the uniform, the folds of brown wool puttees, the bronze shine on his shoes, the gold spots of light flickering about his head. He wheeled, stumbling a bit, and then the light feet sprang away; there was no Dick there now, only a glimmering, moving cloud of yellow—meaningless. The tulip-bed—sunshine—butterflies—silence. The world was empty. She clutched at her chest as if this sudden, sick, dropping away of life were physical. His triumphant last word came back to her, “It’s for good luck, mother”; then other words followed, words which she had spoken years ago.
“And for immortality.”
Immortality! She beat her hands against the wall. Not Dick—not her boy—her one thing. Not immortality for him, yet. Not for years and years—fifty—sixty. He had a right to long, sweet mortal life before that terrible immortality. She wanted him mortal, close, the flesh and blood which she knew. It was not to be borne, this sending him away to—Oh, God! The thousands on thousands of strong young things like Dick who had already passed to that horrible, unknown immortality. The word meant to her then only death, only a frantic terror; the subtle, underlying, enormous hope of it missed her in the black hour.
A letter came next day from camp, and the next, and every day for a week, and she pulled herself together and went about her busy hours minute by minute cheerfully, as one must. She disregarded the fact that inside of her an odd mental-moral-spiritual-physical arrangement which is called a heart lay quite defenseless, and that shortly a dagger was going to be struck into it. So when the dagger came, folded in a yellow Western Union envelope, it was exactly as bad as if there had been no preparation at all. Dick had sailed. She spun about and caught at a table. And then went on quietly with the five hundred little cheese-cloth “sponges” which she had promised to have at the Red Cross rooms to-morrow. Ghastly little things. So the boy went, one of two million to go, but yet, as most of the others were, the only one. And two weeks later, it might be, came another telegram; a queerly worded thing from the war office: