In the April of 1920, nearly eighteen months after the signing of
the Armistice, Tom Whitelaw came back to Boston, demobilized. He had
crossed a good part of Europe almost in a straight line--Brest, Paris,
Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Fère-en-Tardennois, Reims, Luxembourg,
Coblenz--and more or less in the same way had come back again. Now, if
he had been able to forget it all, he would gladly have forgotten it.
Since it couldn't be forgotten it inspired him with an aim in life.
More exactly, perhaps, it made definite the aim he had been vaguely
conscious of already. What he felt was not new; it was only more fixed
and clear. He knew what he meant to do, even though he didn't see how
he was to do it. He might never accomplish anything; very likely he
never would; but at least he had a state of mind, and he was not going
to be in a hurry. If for the ills he saw he was to work out a cure,
or help to work out a cure, or even dream of working out a cure, he
must first diagnose the disease; and diagnosis would take a good part
of his lifetime. He was twenty-three, according to his count, but,
again according to his count he had the seriousness of forty. With the
advantage of a varied experience and an early maturity, he had also
that of age.
His achievements in the war had given him the kind of importance
interesting to newspapers. They had begun writing him up from the
days of the action at Belleau Wood. His picture had appeared in their
Sunday editions as on the staff of General Pershing during his visit to
the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. To Tom himself the only satisfaction
in this was the possible diminishing of the distance between him and
Hildred Ansley. It would not have been the first time in history when
war had helped a lover out of his obscurity to put him on the level
of the loved one. To Hildred herself it would make no difference; but
by her father and mother, especially by her mother, a son-in-law who
had worn with some credit his country's uniform might be pardoned his
presumption.
Public approval also brought him one other consideration that meant
much to him. The man who thought he might be his father wrote to him.
He wrote to him often. He wrote to him partly as a friend might write,
partly as a father might write to his son. Between the lines it was not
difficult to read a yearning and sense of comfort. The yearning was
plainly for assurance; just as plainly the sense of comfort lay in the
knowledge that somewhere in the world there was a heart that beat to
the measure of his own. It was as if he had written the words: "My two
acknowledged children are of no help to me; my wife is crushed by her
sorrow; you and I, even if there is no drop of common blood between us,
understand each other. Whether or not we are father and son, we could
work together as if we were."
The letters were full of a fatherly affection strange in view of the
slight degree of their acquaintanceship. The man's heart cleared that
obstacle with a bound. Tom's heart cleared it with an equal ease. To be
needed was the call to which, with his strong infusion of the feminine,
he never failed to answer instantaneously. As readily as the banker
divined him, he divined the banker. If there was no fatherhood or
sonship in fact there was both sonship and fatherhood in essence.
Whitelaw wrote as if he had been writing to his boy for years, with a
matter-of-course solicitude, with offers of money, with scraps of news.
He talked freely of the family, as if Tom would care to hear of them. A
few words in one of his letters showed that he knew more than Tom had
hitherto supposed.
"If Tad and Lily have been uncivil to you it was not because of
personal dislike. In their situation some hostility toward the
outsider, as they would call him, whom they might be forced to
acknowledge as their older brother must be forgiven as not unnatural."
During all the three years of Tom's soldiering this was the only
reference to the question that had been left suspended by the war.
Whether or not it would ever be taken up again Tom had no idea. He
hoped it would not be. For him an undetermined situation was enough.
Though during this period Henry Whitelaw was frequently in London and
Paris they never met. When the one proposed that he should use his
influence to get the other leave, Tom thought it wiser to stay, as he
expressed it, on the job. Only once did he ask permission to run up for
forty-eight hours to Paris, and that was to see Hildred.
She was then helping to nurse Guy, who, while working with the
Y.M.C.A., had come down with typhoid fever. Convalescent by this time,
he would sail for America in a month or two, Hildred going with him.
Tom himself being on the eve of marching into Germany, the moment was
one to be seized.
They dined in a little restaurant near the Madeleine. With the table
between them they scanned each other's faces for the traces left by
nearly two years of separation. Except that she was tired Tom found
little change in her. Always lacking in temporary, girlish prettiness,
her distinction of line and poise was that which the years affect but
slowly, and experience enhances. He could only say of her that she was
less the young girl he had last seen in Boston, and more the woman of
the world who, having seen the things that happen as they happen most
brutally, has grown a little heartsick, and more than a little weary.
"It's all so futile, Tom. It's such waste. It should never have been
asked of the people of the world."
His lips had the dim disillusioned smile which had taken the place of
the radiance of even a year or two earlier.
"What about the war to end war? What about making the world safe for
democracy?"
She put up a hand in protest. "Oh, don't! I hate that clap-trap. The
salt which was good enough to put on birds' tails is sickening when you
see the poor creatures lying with their necks wrung. Oh, Tom, what can
we do about it if we ever get home?"
"Do about what?"
"About the whole thing, about this poor pitiful, pitiable human race
that's got itself into such an awful mess?"
"The human race is a pretty big problem to handle."
"Yes, but you don't think the bigness ought to stop us, do you?"
"Stop us from--?"
"From trying to keep the world from going on with its frightful policy
of destruction. Isn't there anyone to show us that you can't destroy
one without by that much destroying all; that you can't make it easier
for one without by that much making it easier for everyone? Are we
never going to be anything but fools?"
His dim smile came and went again. "We'll talk about that when I get
home. We can't do it now. Even if we could it's no us trying to reason
with a world that's gone insane. We must let it have time to recover. I
want to hear about you."
She threw herself back in her chair, nervously crumbling a bit of
bread. "Oh, I'm all right. Never better, as far as that goes. I've only
grown an awful coward. Now that the fighting's over I seem to be more
afraid than when it was going on. As far as pep goes I'm a rag."
"It'll do you good to get home."
"Oh, I want to get farther away than home. I want to get somewhere--to
a desert island perhaps--where there won't be any people--"
"None?"
"Oh, well, dad and mother and Guy and--"
"And nobody else?"
"Yes, and you. I see you want me to say it, so I might as well. I want
you there--and _then_ nobody else--not a soul--not the shadow of a
soul--except servants, of course--"
He grew daring as he had never been before. "Perhaps before many years
we may find that island--with the servants all the time--but with your
father and mother and Guy as visitors--very frequent visitors--but--"
"Oh, don't talk about it. It's too heavenly for a world like this." She
looked him in the eyes, despairingly. "Do you suppose it _ever_ could
come true?"
"Stranger things have."
"But better things haven't."
He put down his knife and fork to gaze at her. "Hildred, do you really
feel like that?"
"Well, don't you?" Her tone was a little indignant. "If you don't for
pity's sake tell me, so that I shan't go on giving myself away."
"Of course, I feel that way, only it seems to me queer that you should."
"Why queer?"
"Because you're you, and I'm only me."
"You can't reason in that way. You can't really reason about the thing
at all. The most freakish thing in the world is whom people'll fall in
love with."
"It must be," he said humbly.
"Oh, cheer up; it isn't as bad as all that. There's no disgrace in my
being in love with you. If you'll just be in love with me I'll take
care of myself."
They laughed like children. To neither was it strange to have taken
their love for granted, since they had done it for so long. It was
as if it had grown with them, as if it had been born with them. Its
flowers had opened because it was their springtime; there was nothing
else for it to do. It was a stormy springtime, with only the rarest
bursts of sunshine; but for that very reason they must make the most of
such sunshine as there was. They had not met for two years; it might
be two years more before they met again. They could only throw their
hearts wide open.
She talked of her work. In her mood of reaction it seemed to her now
a stupid, foolish work, not because it hadn't done good, but because
it had done good for such useless purposes. A New York woman whom
she knew, whose son had been killed fighting with the British in the
earlier part of the war, had opened a sort of club for the cheering up
of young fellows passing through Paris, or there for a short leave.
"We bucked them up so that they'd be willing to go back again, and be
blown to bits. It was like giving the good breakfast and the cigarette
to the man going out to the electric chair. My God, what a nerve we
had, we girls! We'd laugh and dance with those poor young chaps, who a
few days later would be in their graves, if the shells left anything to
bury. We didn't think much about it then. It's only now that it comes
over me. I feel as if I'd been their executioner."
"You're tired. You need a rest."
"Rest won't reconcile me to belonging to a race of wild beasts. Oh,
Tom, couldn't we make a little life for ourselves away from everyone,
and from all this cheap vindictiveness? I shouldn't care how humble or
obscure it was."
He laughed, quietly. "There are a good many hurdles to take before we
come even to the humble and obscure."
"Hurdles? What kind of hurdles?"
"Your father and mother for one."
She admitted the importance of this. "But you won't find that hurdle
hard to take if you're Harry Whitelaw."
"But if I'm not?"
"I'm sure from what mother writes that you can be."
"And I'm sure from what I feel that I can't."
"Oh, but you haven't tried." She hurried on from this to give him the
gist of her mother's letters on the subject. "She and Mr. Whitelaw have
the most tremendous confabs about you, every time he comes to Boston.
The fact that he can't talk to Mrs. Whitelaw--she's all nerves the
minute you're mentioned--throws him back on mother. That flatters the
dear old lady like anything. She begins to think now she adopted you in
infancy. You were her discovery. She gave you your first leg-up. And
after all, you know, we've got to admit that during the whole of these
seven years she might have been a great deal worse."
He agreed with her gratefully.
"As a matter of fact," she went on, in her judicial tone, "you must
hand it to us Boston people that, while we can be the most awful snobs,
we're not such snobs that we don't know a good thing when we see it.
It's only the second-cut among us, those who don't really _belong_,
who are supercilious. Once you concede that we're as superior as we
think ourselves, we can be pretty generous. If you've got it in you to
climb up we not only won't kick you down, but we'll put out our hands
and pull you. That's Boston; that's dad and mother. When you've made
all the fun of them you like, the poor dears still have that much left
which you can't take away from them."
Something of this Tom was to test by the time he and Hildred met again.
It was not another two years before they did that, but it was a year.
Demobilized in Washington, he traveled straight to Boston. He had made
his plans. Before seeing Hildred again he would see her father. "It's
the only straight thing to do," he told himself. After all the years
in which they had been good to him he couldn't begin again to go in
and out of their house while they were ignorant of what he hoped for.
Hildred might have told them something; he didn't know; but the details
of most importance were those which only he himself could give them.
Having written for a very private appointment, Ansley had told him to
come to his office immediately on his arrival in Boston. He reached
that city by half-past three; he was at the office by a little after
four.
It was a large office, covering most of a floor of an imposing office
building. On a glass door were the names of the partners, that of
Philip Ansley standing first on the list and in bigger letters than
the rest. In the anteroom an impersonal young lady reading a magazine
said, by telephone, "Mr. Whitelaw to see Mr. Ansley."
The business of the day was over. As Tom passed through a corridor from
which most of the private offices opened he saw that they were empty.
The only one still occupied was at the most distant end, and there
he found Philip Ansley. He found also his wife. The purpose of Tom's
visit having been made clear by letter, both of Hildred's parents were
concerned in it.
They welcomed him cordially, making the comments permissible to old
friends on his improved personal appearance. They asked for his news;
they gave their own. Guy was back at Harvard at the Law School; Hildred
was at home, somewhat at loose ends. Like most girls who had worked in
France, she found a life of leisure tedious.
"Eating her head off," Ansley complained. "Can't settle down again."
Mrs. Ansley was more heroic. "We accept it. It's part of what we
offered up to the Great Cause. We gave our all, and though all was not
taken from us we should not have murmured if it had been."
Taking advantage of this turn of the talk, Tom launched into his
appeal. For the last time in his life, as he hoped, he told the story
of his mother. As he had told it to Hildred and to Henry Whitelaw so
now he gave it to Philip and Sunshine Ansley. Hating the task, he was
upheld in carrying it through by the knowledge that everyone who had a
right to know it knew it now.
He finished with the minute at which Guy first spoke to him. From that
point onward they had been able to follow the course of his life for
themselves. They had in a measure entered into it, and helped him to
his opportunities. He thanked them; but before he could accept their
goodwill again he wanted them to know exactly what he had sprung from.
Hildred did know. She had known it for several years. It had made no
difference to her; he hoped so to make good in the future that it would
make no difference to them.
They listened attentively, with no sign of being shocked. Now and
then, at such points as the stealing of the first little book, or the
final arrest, one or the other would murmur a "Dear me!" but sympathy
and pity were plainly their sentiments. They didn't condemn him; they
didn't even blame him. He had been an unfortunate child. There was
nothing to be thought of him but that.
After he had finished there was a silence that seemed long. Ansley sat
at his desk, leaning back in his revolving chair. Mrs. Ansley was near
a window, where she could to some extent shield herself by looking out.
She left to her husband the duty of speaking the first word.
"It all depends, my dear fellow, on your being accepted by Henry
Whitelaw as his son."