He stepped quickly toward the window, drew aside the curtain and pointed to a dark mass of headland beyond the twinkling lights.
“You see the Bluff there. Fifty years ago I stood with my father on that Bluff and watched the logs come down the river to the sawmill—his sawmill, into which he had put his total capital, five hundred dollars. I remember well his words, 'My son, if you live out your life you will see on that flat a town where thousands of men and women will find homes and, please God, happiness.' Your mother and I watched that town grow for forty years, and we tried to make people happy—at least, if they were not it was no fault of hers. Of course, other hands have been at the work since then, but her hands and mine more than any other, and more than all others together were in it, and her heart, too, was in it all.”
The boy turned from the window and sat down heavily in a deep armchair, his hands covering his face. His heart was still sick with the ache that had smitten it that day in front of Amiens when the Colonel, his father's friend, had sent for him and read him the wire which had brought the terrible message of his mother's death. The long months of days and nights heavy with watching, toiling, praying, agonising, for her twin sons, and for the many boys who had gone out from the little town wore out her none too robust strength. Then, the sniper's bullet that had pierced the heart of her boy seemed to reach to her heart as well. After that, the home that once had been to its dwellers the most completely heart-satisfying spot in all the world became a place of dread, of haunting ghosts, of acutely poignant memories. They used the house for sleeping in and for eating in, but there was no living in it longer. To them it was a tomb, though neither would acknowledge it and each bore with it for the other's sake.
“Honestly, Dad, I wish I could make it go, for your sake—”
“For my sake, boy? Why, I have all of it I care for. Not for my sake. But what else can we do but stick it?”
“I suppose so—but for Heaven's sake give me something worth a man's doing. If I could tackle a job such as you and”—the boy winced—“you and mother took on I believe I'd try it. But that office! Any fool could sit in my place and carry on. It is like the job they used to give to the crocks or the slackers at the base to do. Give me a man's job.”
The father's keen blue eyes looked his son over.
“A man's job?” he said, with a grim smile, realising as his son did not how much of a man's job it was. “Suppose you learn this one as I did?”
“What do you mean, Dad, exactly? How did you begin?”
“I? At the tail of the saw.”