"I don't believe that would do. No, I'll do the writing. She'll
understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was
to make war on the largest possible scale at once--that I felt I must
have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn't helped keep it from
coming, and I knew I hadn't; when it came, I had no right to stay out of
it."
Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She
clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips,
"Yes, yes, yes!"
"But if anything should happen, you might go to her, and see what you
could do for her. You know? It's rather far off; she can't leave her
chair--"
"Oh, I'll go, if it's the ends of the earth! But nothing will happen!
Nothing _can_! I--"
She felt herself lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with
his arm still round her, to her father: "Well, we're off at once, Mr.
Balcom. We're to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched
up with the rest somehow; and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the
front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, of course;
we're the first company to report to the Governor. I came to tell
Editha, but I hadn't got round to it."
* * * * *
She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just
before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in
his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his
clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice
satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of
duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping, but she felt a sort of
noble distinction in the abstraction with which they parted. Only at the
last moment he said, "Don't forget my mother. It mayn't be such a
walk-over as I supposed," and he laughed at the notion.
He waved his hand to her, as the train moved off--she knew it among a
score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform of the
car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside
the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But she
felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. What
she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with
the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep
him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should
have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life.
She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm
his father had lost.
There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could
have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she
imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote
to his mother, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect
that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her
for her letter by the hand of some one who called herself "Yrs truly,
Mrs. W.J. Andrews."
Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the
answer had been all she expected. But before it seemed as if she could
have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of
the killed which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was
Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it
might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name, and the company and
the regiment, and the State were too definitely given.
Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she
never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief,
black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him,
with George, George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but
she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last
long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of
George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her
and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid
upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her--she rapidly
recovered.
Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New
York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he
could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to
the little country town where George's mother lived in a little house on
the edge of illimitable corn-fields, under trees pushed to a top of the
rolling prairie. George's father had settled there after the civil war,
as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people,
and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the
front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the
gate of the paling fence.
It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds,
that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her
crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father
standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a
woman rested in a deep armchair, and the woman who had let the strangers
in stood behind the chair.
The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman
behind her chair, "_Who_ did you say?"
Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone
down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, "I am
George's Editha," for answer.
But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman's voice, saying,
"Well, I don't know as I _did_ get the name just right. I guess I'll
have to make a little more light in here," and she went and pushed two
of the shutters ajar.
Then Editha's father said in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks
tone, "My name is Balcom, ma'am; Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom's Works,
New York; my daughter--"
"Oh!" The seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that
always surprised Editha from Gearson's slender frame. "Let me see you!
Stand round where the light can strike on your face," and Editha dumbly
obeyed. "So, you're Editha Balcom," she sighed.
"Yes," Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.
"What did you come for?"
Editha's face quivered, and her knees shook. "I came--because--because
George--" She could go no farther.
"Yes," the mother said, "he told me he had asked you to come if he got
killed. You didn't expect that, I suppose, when you sent him."
"I would rather have died myself than done it!" Editha said with more
truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. "I tried to
leave him free--"
"Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left
him free."
Editha saw now where George's irony came from.
"It was not to be read before--unless--until--I told him so," she
faltered.
"Of course, he wouldn't read a letter of yours, under the circumstances,
till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?" the woman abruptly
demanded.
"Very sick," Editha said, with self-pity.
"Daughter's life," her father interposed, "was almost despaired of, at
one time."
Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. "I suppose you would have been glad to
die, such a brave person as you! I don't believe _he_ was glad to die.
He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many
things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I
suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him, by what
it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through _one_ war before. When
you sent him you didn't expect he would get killed."
The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. "No," she
huskily murmured.
"No, girls don't; women don't, when they give their men up to their
country. They think they'll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as
they went, or if it's an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it's
all the more glory, and they're so much the prouder of them, poor
things."
The tears began to run down Editha's face; she had not wept till then;
but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came.
"No, you didn't expect him to get killed," Mrs. Gearson repeated in a
voice which was startlingly like George's again. "You just expected him
to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren't there
because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there,
poor wretches--conscripts, or whatever they call 'em. You thought it
would be all right for my George, _your_ George, to kill the sons of
those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would
never see the faces of." The woman lifted her powerful voice in a
psalmlike note. "I thank my God he didn't live to do it! I thank my God
they killed him first, and that he ain't livin' with their blood on his
hands!" She dropped her eyes which she had raised with her voice, and
glared at Editha. "What you got that black on for?" She lifted herself
by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp
its full length. "Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your
back!"
* * * * *
The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom's Works was sketching
Editha's beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a
colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow
between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything.
"To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!" the lady said.
She added: "I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But
when you consider how much this war has done for the country! I can't
understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way
out there to console her--got up out of a sick bed! Well!"
"I think," Editha said, magnanimously, "she wasn't quite in her right
mind; and so did papa."
"Yes," the lady said, looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her
lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But
how dreadful of her! How perfectly--excuse me--how _vulgar_!"
A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been
without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had
bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose
from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the
ideal.