'I WANT to tell you--I _must_ tell you all about it.'
With a kind of grave finality, the little woman in the deck chair next
to mine snapped together the collapsible drinking-cup with which she had
been playing, and sat up, laying a small eager hand on my arm. It was as
if her groping thoughts had suddenly pushed open a door into action. I
wondered if she guessed that I had been peeping at her from under
dropped lids. She had the colorless make-up of a small middle-aged
mouse, but her expression was amazing. It startled and arrested one. All
the old lines of the face were set to small ambitions and sordid
desires, but the look which should have accompanied these lines was
clean gone--wiped into something big and still and simple--and her
manner was that of an earnest child.
'I was in Belgium when it commenced,' she began. 'But I guess I better
go back and tell it all right from the beginning,' she broke off.
'Please do,' I begged.
I did my best to speak naturally, but my voice seemed to break some
spell, for her face blurred suddenly to self-consciousness.
'I--I reckon I ought to apologize for speaking to a stranger,' she
stammered primly. And now her words exactly matched all the old small
lines of her face. It was as if her little self, aware of something big
and overwhelming that threatened to sweep her out of her depth, made a
desperate clutch at conventionality.
'But I want to hear,' I protested eagerly. 'Please tell me.'
She must have seen that I was in earnest, for the little conventional
self disappeared at that, and she answered simply, 'And I want to tell
you--it seems like I've just _got_ to tell you.'
It was September, 1914. We homing Americans were churning through an
extraordinarily blue ocean toward New York and peace, while back there,
just over our shoulders, a mad world was running red.
'It was like bein' torn all to pieces and put together again different,'
she said. 'But I'll go back like I said, and start right from the
beginning.'
For a moment she was silent, staring thoughtfully down at the cheap
little metal cup, screwing the rings softly round and round, and
drawing, as it were, inspiration from the sight of it.
'I come from Johnson's Falls,' she began at length. 'You wouldn't know
where that is. It's just a little place down in West Virginia, but it's
right close to the Virginia state line, and we have some mighty nice
people in town. Why,' she exclaimed, 'I reckon we have some of the very
best blood in the South there! But--but that isn't what I set out to
tell you,' she caught herself up.
She fell into such a prolonged silence, turning the little cup, and
looking at it, that at last I ventured a question to start her again.
'And I suppose,' I said, 'you belong to one of the oldest families
there.'