MOTHER AND SON
To have been captain of the foot-ball team, which some student of
sociology has called the highest office in the free gift of the American
people, might seem glory enough for one life; but Richard Percival was
of such stuff that all past triumphs became dust and ashes. He was
greedy of the future. Now that the doors of college were fairly closed,
that career became to him but as a half-dreaming condition, before one
wakes.
On this summer evening, however, it was easy to prolong the dream, since
the hour was one for quiet of body and for wandering visions. The room
was large and suffused with that restfulness which comes to homes where
serene and thoughtful lives have been lived. There were long straight
lines; there was a scarcity of knickknacks; there were pictures gathered
because they were loved and not to fill a bare space on the wall; there
were books and books and books, many of them with the worn covers of
old friends. Here, clasped in the arms of another old friend of a chair,
half-sat, half-lay his mother, and near her lounged Ellery Norris, the
friend whose delicate mingling of love and admiration was as fragrant
wine to Dick, who believed in himself because others had always believed
in him. The dying twilight, laden with rose-spiciness and with the first
shrill notes of the warm night, came in through high narrow windows.
Everywhere was the sweet repose that comes after sweet activity, and the
center of it was the fragile woman who lay back in her chair, caressing
with light hand the head of the young man who sat upon the rug and
leaned against her knee.
Norris was looking at Mrs. Percival with a kind of wondering admiration
which the son saw with a touch of pity. Poor old Norris! It must have
been tough to grow up without a home. As for this fragrant type of
femininity, young Percival took it for granted--at least in the women
that belong to a man; and the other women hardly count.
Everything made Dick feel very tender toward his past, very well
satisfied with his present, very secure about his future. All would be
good. That was the natural order of the universe. He had always found it
easy to do things and to be a good deal of a personage.
He stared up silently at the space above the mantel where hung a
portrait that gazed back at him, with features pale in the fading light.
Singularly alike were the boyish face that looked up and the boyish face
that looked down, though the painted Percival, a little idealistic about
the eyes, wholly firm about the mouth, appeared the more determined of
the two. Perhaps this came from the shoulder-straps, the blue uniform,
and the military squareness of the shoulders.
"Yes, you are like him, Dick." Mrs. Percival spoke to his thoughts. The
boy looked up startled.
"Am I?" he asked. "I wish I might be. I wish I might be half so much of
a man."
"And I hope you will be more--no, not that. He was my all. I can hardly
wish you to _be_ more, but I hope you will _do_ more. At least you don't
have a drag on you from the beginning, as he had. Has Dick told you the
story, Ellery?" She turned with a gentle smile toward the other man.
"You see I can't help calling you Ellery. Dick's letters have made you
partly mine already. We are not strangers at all."
Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the
slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.
"You don't know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine," he
said. "I never knew my mother."
"You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a
fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know
how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg,
though few of them lived to tell of their own bravery? It makes the lump
come up in my throat even to remember it, just as it did when I first
heard the news and knew that my boy-lover was there."
There was silence a moment.
"Ah, Dick, you have a young body to match your heart," Mrs. Percival
went on, "but Dad, before he was twenty, carried a bullet in his side.
He had to conquer pain before he could spend strength on other things."
Dick rubbed his cheek with the mother's trembling hand.
"Yes," he said soberly, "it must have been harder to endure the
sufferings that clung to him and killed him at last than it would have
been to give everything in one swift sacrifice. Endurance,--that's a
word I don't know, do I, mother?"
"No, dear, that's the word you know least; but you'll have to learn it."
"Ellery, I guess that's where you have the advantage of me." Dick looked
up with a smile.
"If I have, it's been a dour lesson," Norris answered with a wry face.
"Well, if Dad gave his life to his country by dying, I mean to give mine
by living," Dick went on. "There must be things that need doing."
"More than there are men to do them," said his mother softly. "You have
his spirit and his genius. You have health, too. Don't put a bullet in
your young manhood."
"What do you mean, mother?"
"There are a thousand wounds besides those from a gun. I'm counting on
you to live his life as he would have liked to live it--to be his son,
Dick."
"You mustn't expect the sun and the moon to stand still before me."
"Oh, well, I dare say I'm as foolish as other mothers." Mrs. Percival
laughed as though she must do that or cry. "But you were certainly born
to something, Dick. You've shown it ever since you organized your first
militia company and whipped the five-year-olds in the next street."
"And he's kept right on bossing his particular gang ever since. Richard
Dux," smiled Ellery.
The boy grinned up at them, and his mind traveled to those later days
when that leadership of his was so easily acknowledged as to be
axiomatic. He saw in panorama the stormy joys of college life with the
victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young
men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to
the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime
self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the
world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined
to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those
conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd
which toils at the drudgery of progress but does not taste its glory. So
many oblivions go to make one reputation.
Dick knew that power was in him. To others it showed in his unconscious
self-confidence of carriage, in his eyes that glowed, in the electric
something that compelled attraction.
But now college visions were fading into "the light of common day". The
boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora,
but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods.
Hods are uninspiring objects.
Dick stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the
rhythmic strokes of his mother's hand upon his well-thatched head as she
watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow
classmen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped
with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward.
Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies
that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and
then more cities and rivers and hills and lakes, and now the blessed
restfulness of home and twilight. He had seen it all many times
before--two thousand miles of space to be covered between New Haven and
St. Etienne. On this last journey it had taken on a new significance to
his eyes,--a significance which matched his dreams. It was instinct
with meaning of which he was a part.
This was his country, huge, half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was
not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness
of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and
it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty
race who would master those miles of inert earth.
God breathed His spirit into the earth and it became a living man.
Man--His image--must breathe the spirit into the earth and make it a
living civilization.
His father, with a Gettysburg bullet bruising his life, had nevertheless
played the part, and done his share toward turning a frontier village
into a noble city. With a thrill Dick saw himself building the structure
higher on its firm foundations, making it great enough to match the wide
fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that
hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his
own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the
thing seemed done--vague and yet, somehow, concrete.
"Pooh, what is time? A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed Dick
suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight
hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed
time,--just add hot water and it swells to six times its original bulk."
His mother smiled indulgently at her son's vagaries of speech, and he
went on:
"Moreover, I've been away four years,--years of vast importance, it
seems to me. I come back and everything is going on in the same old way.
Every one is interested in the same old things. They don't seem to think
anything exciting has happened, except that the city has doubled in size
and there has been another presidential election. They aren't a bit
stirred up over me. They aren't even deeply moved because Ellery over
there is wielding an inexperienced editorial pen. Everything is
familiar, but I've forgotten it all. It's hard to pick up the threads."
"More than that, boys. The threads are not all done up in a neat bunch
and handed to you as they are in New Haven. St. Etienne's point of view
is not always that of the gentleman and the scholar. Its great men are
not of the campus, but those who control the destinies of others,
sometimes by wealth, oftener by the genius of power. But, after all,
this is the real world."
Dick laughed again.
"And a world after my own heart, mother."
"Yes, I think you will fit in," she said with maternal complacency.
"Both of you," she added with sudden remembrance.
"The fitting-in on my part will have to be a process of swelling, I
guess," Norris said whimsically. "Small and narrow as is the berth I
have at the _Star_ office, I shall have to be bigger than I am before I
fill it."
"Oh, you're all right. You're fundamentally all right, and that means
you'll rise to every opportunity you get." Dick's voice took on some of
the patronage of a leader for his follower. "I'd bank on Ellery Norris
if the rest of the world turned sour."
"Thanks," said Ellery briefly, and their eyes met in that interchange of
assurance which is the masculine American equivalent for embrace and
eternal protestation. Mrs. Percival smiled to herself, amused yet
pleased by the frank boyish affection.
"What kind of a time did you have at Mr. Early's reception?" she asked
abruptly.
"Oh, it was a circus with three rings. In the middle ring there was a
performing hippopotamus of a Hindu. He was really a sunburst. Then in
the farthest ring there were a thousand women with big hats, all talking
at once. But in the nearest there were just Madeline and Mrs. Lenox, and
that was a good show. By Jove! Madeline is prettier than ever, and
hasn't found it out yet. That's the advantage of sending a girl off to a
women's college where there is no man to enlighten her."
"Pretty! That's not the word to describe Miss Elton. She's too simple
and dignified," remonstrated Norris.
"Bowled over already, are you?" Dick jeered.
"Ellery is quite right," Mrs. Percival interrupted. "Madeline has
something Easter-lily-like about her."
"You grow enthusiastic, mother."
"I love her very dearly, Dick."
"Norris and I are going out to see her to-morrow. We'll take the motor, I
guess."
Mrs. Percival beamed down at him and gave his head an affectionate pat,
and the son glanced up with a blandness that might easily have become a
smirk. Yet his mother's complacent satisfaction with the inevitable
irritated him. Madeline Elton might be the most admirable combination
of the virtues and the graces, but he wanted to find it out for himself.
Mrs. Percival rose with the air of one who has heard and said what she
desired.
"Good night, dear boy," she purred as Dick struggled to his long legs.
"How good it is to have you to lean on and trust! These have been lonely
years while you were away. Now I shall leave you two to your quiet
smoke."
Dick kissed her hand and then her lips, as though to show both reverence
and love. Norris, too, stooped and kissed her hand, and the two watched
her as she moved in her slow way up the stairs. As she disappeared,
Norris turned and laid an arm over Dick's shoulder.
"That's the kind of thing, Percival, that you do not wholly appreciate
unless you've gone without it. I grew up without any atmosphere to speak
of, and I've been gasping for breath all my life. I wonder if I shall
ever get a full allowance of air to live in."
As they looked, friendly eye into friendly eye, Ellery seemed to review
his own life in contrast with Dick's. Dick had background; he had to
begin everything for himself. He had earned most of his way through
college; he had earned his standing among the men as he had earned his
standing in scholarship, by dogged persistence instead of by the right
of eminent domain to which Dick was born. He had never envied Percival's
readier brain, wider popularity, more profuse fortune; but something
close to envy crept upon him now for this refinement of home, this
delicate mother-love. This was a loss not to be made good by pluck or
perseverance. Love was the gift of the gods.