She had promised to speak to the young people at their meeting on Sunday evening; but when this arrangement became known there was a demand for a wider hearing. She cheerfully consented to speak in the large auditorium of the church on Sunday evening. Her voice was clear, and filled the great room; every person present heard distinctly, although she was almost ninety years of age. Nor did she forget to tease her cousin a little over the fact that she spoke to more people in the evening than he in the morning; though his morning congregation was not a small one.
Between her engagements were frequent opportunities during that week for visits with her. She talked calmly about all her experiences. She reviewed her work on the battle-field during the Civil War, and spoke with deep interest of her experiences in Constantinople where she had been near to the scene of the earlier work of Florence Nightingale. She talked of her religious convictions, and of the faith with which she was facing the future. She spoke in detail about the American Red Cross. It is only just to her memory to record that in all her conversation there was no word of bitterness or resentment, or any approach to jealousy as she saw that organization moving forward under the direction of others.
She was happy, full of fun, gracious, considerate, and interested in all that was going on in the world. When she sat in her chair at the end of a strenuous day’s work, she rarely leaned back to touch the back of the seat; she had a back of her own, she said.
If the author could give to his readers a truthful impression of that visit, it would be the best possible insight into the character of Clara Barton. She combined in the rarest possible degree self-reliance and modesty. She knew that the work which she had done was a great work, but it confused her when any one told her so. She responded to every suggestion of appreciation, but she grew shy whenever she heard herself praised. Throughout the whole visit she manifested the finest quality of the cultured gentlewoman.
One thing she deeply regretted, and that was that her retirement had not yet brought her sufficient leisure to sort her papers and prepare for the writing of her biography. That such a book would be written she fully realized, and she cared much who wrote it. She was perfectly well in body and clear in mind, and what she hoped to do was to go through a vast accumulation of manuscripts and make the task of writing an easier one.
The author urged her to write the book herself, and she hoped to continue the work which she had begun and to write the story of her life in short sections. One such section she wrote and it is quoted in the first volume of this present work. But she found too much to do in helping the lives of others to pay very much attention to the record of her own life.
So the years went by and her life-work was completed and her biography remained unwritten. She was always thinking of another thing that needed to be accomplished, and saying concerning it, “Until that work is done, I cannot go to heaven.”
CHAPTER XX
CLARA BARTON’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION
Clara Barton died young. Even to those who were near her, she never seemed to grow old. At ninety there was no mark of physical infirmity upon her, nor was there any slightest slackening in the interest of the object for which so long she had cared. On her ninetieth birthday she wrote to the Reverend Percy H. Hepler:
Notwithstanding the much and more that has been said of “age” and all the stress laid upon it, I could never see and have never been able to understand how it came to be any business of ours. We have surely no control over its beginning, and, unless criminally, none over its ending. We can neither hasten nor arrest it, and how it is a matter of individual commendation I have never been able to see. I have been able to see painfully that the persistent marking of dates and adding one milestone to every year has a tendency to increase the burden of “age” and encourages a feeling of helplessness and release from activities which might be a pleasure to the possessor. I have given the exact age as recorded, lest I be suspected of trying to conceal it, but I have never, since a child, kept a “birthday” or thought of it only as a reminder by others.