The next day my husband came to me and said: “Mary, I have asked for a leave of absence. We are going back to the United States. We are going out West to have a visit with your family.”
Two years before I had believed that Tom would not fit into my Northwest. But in twenty-four hours Tom and my father were old pals. He was as much at home with mother and the children as I, and all the neighbors liked him. He was interested in everything on the ranch, and even in the small-town life of the village. He interested father in putting modern equipment on the ranch. He went hunting with the men, played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse, and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters. When mother made a big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy. As I stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother, I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.
Tom was natural. It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to everybody. I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up a dog and beat her for running away. In after years I saw Tom angry with men of his own class; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against public men who had betrayed public trust. Something barbaric in me was satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization farther west.
Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the next scene in my life of which I shall write. Many things of personal and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to do with this message to women. I was in France when the World War began. I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals. I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of living. Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.
Then the world was torn in two. The earth dripped in blood and sorrow. Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.
Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood. They were all too deep in the terrible question of war.
When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire, the little queen said very quietly: “Madam, may not my husband and I occupy this room together? It is very kind of you to arrange two suites for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night—and, anyway, I prefer to be near him.”
The war had done that. Who would expect a queen to think of the problems of housing guests, even a great queen? And the war had made the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.
Many other conventions I saw die by the way as the war progressed. Then America came in.
There is a temptation to talk about America in the war, but, after all, that has no bearing on my story. Soon after the United States entered, American men and women began to arrive in Europe in great numbers. I met them everywhere; sight-seeing, in offices, at universities, at embassies and consulates. I met them and loved them and suffered for them.