“I’ve—gone and forgot my speech! You say something, Jack. You say it!”
Sam Hod racked his brain for words to save the situation. All Paris
waited. And then—in the silence—came a rich, strong, boyish voice:
“I’ll give a toast—to Forty-five!”
It was Captain Jack. Two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him. He
knew perfectly that two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.
This is the thing that he did:
Deliberately into his dirty coffee-cup he poured the blood-red liquid.
As his grandfather would have done, with the same exaggerated flourish
the boy took from his pocket a snow-white handkerchief. With that napkin
he wiped flawlessly the delicate receptacle which had held the liquor.
Then he leaned over. From a glass pitcher he poured into that cleansed
wine-glass its fill of pure cold sparkling water. In an instant he held
it aloft.
“Fellows!” he cried. “A toast! a toast not with wine—for wine with its
blood-color belongs to the times which are going—which we hope are
passing forever—I’m drinking a toast with crystal water—emblematic of
the clean white civilization which is coming—for which we’re going ‘Over
There’ to fight and die.
“Here’s to every man who ever did a noble thing; volunteering his
strength to help protect the weak! Here’s to every lad who ever fought
out the terrible question in his heart and put the Greater Good above
his life-hopes and ambitions. Here’s to every soul that ever laid in the
dark, thinking of those at home, knowing that in the charge of dawn he
might become to them but a bitter-sweet memory of days when every hour
was a golden moment and time but a thing to pass away. Here’s to the
dead—the illustrious dead—those who fell in battle, those of Forty-five,
the men of Sixty-two, the men of every age and every land who fought the
good fight nobly, to the best that was in them—for the things they
believed to be right—and have gone to take finer and better orders under
a Greater General, the Commander of Commanders, the Prince of—Peace!”
He paused. He drew a long breath. He looked down the table. And he
continued: “But along with our toast for the soldiers of the dead,
boys—while the opportunity is ours—why not give also a toast—another
kind of toast—to the soldiers of the living? Not ourselves, boys—but the
ones—we’re leaving behind. It is little enough we can do for them!”
His gaze wandered up to his glass. In a strange, inspired voice, he
cried softly:
“A toast!—a toast, also, to the truest and best soldiers of all—the
mothers, the wives, and the girls we are leaving behind!
“Here’s to the toil-hardened hands who cared for us when as helpless
little kids, we were unable to care for ourselves. Here’s to the tears
they have shed over our little torn clothes; the pillows that have been
wet in the midnight with anxiety, longing, and heartache that we might
be spared to do our duty as men. Here’s to the anguish they have
suffered, the prayers they have prayed, the sacrifices they have made,
the toil they have borne—all to be laid on the altar of war, all to be
wiped out in a moment, perhaps, by a splinter of shrapnel or the thrust
of a bayonet. Here’s to the nobility of their anguish when they come to
learn we are no more; and the beauty of their faces when the divinity in
their hearts tells the story upon their care-lined foreheads that they
would climb the same weary Golgotha again—go through the same
Gethsemane—bear the same cross—though they knew all along the end which
it meant.
“Here’s to the wives we loved in the days before War came upon us.
Here’s to the promises they made us—to be ours until death came between
us. Here’s to the suffering they have borne for our thoughtlessness; the
hours when they have looked into the future and wondered if the love
that we promised was worth the price they were paying. Here’s to the
hopes and the fears, the joys and the sorrows that have come to
them—that are coming to them now—that are coming to them in the years on
ahead with ever greater portion. Here’s to their courage and noble
endeavor, given so pathetically to us chaps who sometimes—forget. May we
die as faithfully in the cause to which we have pledged ourselves as
they will live in the memory of what-might-have-been in the lean years
when there are forms sitting in fantasy beside them in the firelight and
our voices are heard in the homes we made with them—no more.
“And here’s to the girls we are leaving behind! Here’s to the kisses
they have given us under the stars of many summers—the memory of their
hands and their lips and their eyes! Here’s to the weight in their souls
and the pain that will hallow the memories that will haunt them through
the years. Here’s to the sighs and the shadows, the heart-hopes and the
longing! God grant in His goodness their fidelity is rewarded!
“These are the things to which we drink—the men of yesterday—and the
memory of their heroism which has been—and the women of to-day and whose
heroism is to be. With the great incentive of these two in our hearts,
boys—let us drink and go away to fight like men—to honor the first—to
sanctify the second.”
He clinked his glass against that of speechless Uncle Joe Fodder’s—and
they drank—Uncle Joe drinking his wine with a hand which trembled so
that the liquid stained his withered claw like a scarlet wound.
The hall was strangely silent.
Sam turned to his wife. “That boy never composed that beautiful speech
alone, Mary,” he said—“not impromptu like that!”
Down the hall an old lady whispered to her daughter:
“Alice! Alice!—His grandaddy made just such a speech—almost word for
word—the night John Farrington’s company bade us women-folks good-by.”
As the hall was being cleared for the big farewell dance, Sam came to
the boy.
“Laddie,” he demanded, “where did you learn that speech?”
“What speech?” asked the boy.
“You know _what_ speech—the toast!”
“I don’t know, Mr. Hod. I just looked at the faces—and the
wine—and—and—Betty!—and it just came out.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Sure, it’s the truth. What was it I said that was so awful wonderful?”
“Don’t you remember what you said?”
The boy laughed ashamedly. “—I couldn’t repeat it if it cost me my
life,” he replied. “It—just—came—out!”
Late that night the old editor lay in his bed thinking of many things.
“The things in life are far stranger than the things in story books,” he
said. Then in the velvet dark he whispered: “Strange! Strange!”
――――
Dashing Captain Jack Fuller, true to his blood and his birthright, went
away on the following day at the head of his sturdy volunteers. They
entrained at ten o’clock for Fort Ethan Allen.
Truly the boy did not remember the words of that toast which he gave
that memorable evening. But one thing he does remember. He remembers the
words of the girl he had married as he took her in his arms in those
last few sweet moments following the final breakfast in the little home:
“It was the Nieson in me that didn’t want you to go, Jack,” she choked
brokenly. “Up to last night I didn’t want you to go. But when you
wouldn’t drink the wine—when you had the courage to do what you did in
front of all those people—I was ashamed of my selfishness. Jackie
dear—I’m the proudest, happiest, miserablest woman in all this town!”
He pressed her to him. He kissed her—an embrace that left her weak and
limp.
“And you can count on me, Jack,” she said, “I’ll—do—my—duty—too! Even—if
you should never come back; remember I said—I was sorry for the way I’ve
acted; I’ll—do—my—duty—too!”
“Good-by, Betty!” he choked.
“Good-by—my soldier!” she lisped—bravely—piteously.
But she sent him away—with a smile!
She’s working now at her old place in Amos Wheeler’s box-shop. She
closed down the little home on Pleasant Street partly because she could
not keep up the expense, partly because she could not endure—the
memories. She’s living out in her father’s old place at the far end of
Cedar Street.
Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!
We know from his letters to our local paper, that Jack Fuller has
reached France. The girl is alone, earning five dollars a week in the
box-factory to support herself. The lad is “Over There” in the Whirlpool
and the Nightmare—and where the fighting is thickest, there we believe
Jack Fuller will be found.
But somehow, we feel that Jack Fuller will not fall. We feel there is
coming a great and a glorious day for our little town of Paris up here
in these mountains. In fancy we can see a morning when a great crowd is
going to mill around and through the platforms and the railroad yards of
our station. The hour is coming when a train whistle will sound far down
the Greene River valley. The minutes will pass. The whistle will sound
nearer. Finally in the lower end of the yards we will see a great furl
of seething smoke from an oncoming locomotive. Another and a third
whistle will shriek as a great high-breasted mogul comes bearing down
upon us, seeming to cry out to us from the decreasing distance: “I’ve
got them! I’ve got them! I’m bringing them back! Every mother’s son of
them! They’re in these coaches I’m pulling behind me now!” And the train
will come to a grinding stop, and amid cheer after cheer and the
gyrations of the Paris band seeking to blow itself inside out, down from
that train will come the soldiers of Uncle Sam—the boys who never have
been and never can be whipped—great bronzed men with lean jaws, faces
the hue of copper and muscles as hard as billets of steel. Car after car
will disgorge them—men who met the Great Problem, offered themselves,
ran the risk, fought the fight, gave their last full measure of
devotion, and have come back home to women who cannot trust themselves
to speak—only hold out their arms mutely.
And we feel certain that in that great day, after the Nightmare is over
and the world is a fairer, better world, that one of those great bronzed
heroes will gather up in his war-hardened arms a slender little girl in
the plainest of white shirt-waists and black skirts, with the paste
dried on the poor little workaday clothes and the worn shoes turning her
step over cruelly. He will gather her up while the tears fall clumsily,
for men do not know how to weep. And there will be no more weariness in
her homeward walk in that twilight. After all, not all the boys are
going to die. Many are coming back, hundreds of thousands of them. There
will be other toasts to Forty-five pledged by the living. It must be so,
for God still rules in His heaven and will make all right with the
world.
Yet just now—for Betty Fuller—the way is lonesome and her pillow is wet
with her tears in the midnight. But—
She sent her man away with a smile.
Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!
All over America her name is legion!