JEAN PLAYS PROXY
Christmas morning found the General conscious. He was restless until
Jean was brought to him. He had a feeling that she had saved him from
Hilda. He wanted her where he could see her. "Don't leave me," he
begged.
She slipped away to eat her Christmas dinner with Derry and Emily and
Margaret. It was an early dinner on account of the children. They ate
in the big dining room, and after dinner there was a tree, with Ulrich
Stölle playing Father Christmas. It had come about quite naturally
that he should be asked. It had been unthinkable that Derry could
enter into the spirit of it, so Emily had ventured to suggest Ulrich.
"He will make an ideal Santa Claus."
But it developed that he was not to be Santa Claus at all. He was to
be Father Christmas, with a wreath of mistletoe instead of a red cap.
Teddy was intensely curious about the change. "But why isn't he Santa
Claus?" he asked.
"Well, Santa Claus was--made in Germany."
"Oh!"
"But now he has joined the Allies and changed his name."
"Oh!"
"And he wears mistletoe, because mistletoe is the Christmas bush, and
red caps don't really mean anything, do they?"
"No, but Mother--"
"Yes?"
"If Santa Claus has joined the Allies what will the little German
children do?"
_What indeed_?
Jean had trimmed a little tree for the General, and the children
carried it up to him carefully and sang a carol--having first arranged
on his table, under the lamp, the purple camels, to create an
atmosphere.
"'We three kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse far
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star--'"
"Yonner 'tar," piped Margaret-Mary.
"Yon-der-er ste-yar," trailed Teddy's falsetto.
"'Oh, star of wonder, star of might,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to the perfect light--'"
Twenty-four hours ago Hilda's book had lain where the purple camels now
played their little part in the great Christmas drama. In the soul of
the stricken old man on the bed entered something of the peace of the
holy season.
"Oh, 'tar of wonner--"
"Ste-yar of wonder-er--" chimed the little voices.
When the song was finished, Margaret-Mary made a little curtsey and
Teddy made a manly bow, and then they took their purple camels and left
the tree on the table with its one small candle burning.
The General laid his left hand over Jean's--his right was useless--and
said to Derry: "Your mother's jewels are my Christmas gift to her. No
matter what happens, I want her to have them."
The evening waned, and the General still held Jean's hand. Every bone
in her body ached. Never before had she grown weary in the service of
others. She told herself as she sat there that she had always been a
sort of sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice sort of person. It was
only fair that she should have her share of hardness.
The nurse begged her in a whisper to leave the General. "He won't
know." But when Jean moved, that poor left hand tightened on hers and
she shook her head.
Then Derry came and sat with his arm about her.
"My darling, you must rest."
She laid her head against her husband's shoulder, as he sat beside her.
After a while she slept, and the nurse unlocked the clinging old
fingers, and Derry carried his little wife to bed.
And so Christmas passed, and the other days, wonderful days in spite of
the shadow which hung over the big house. For youth and love laugh at
forebodings and they pushed as far back into their minds as possible,
the thought of the thing which had to be faced.
But at last Derry faced it. "It is my self-respect, Jean."
They were sitting in her room with Muffin, wistful and devoted, on the
rug at Jean's feet. The old dog, having been banished at first by
Bronson, had viewed his master's wife with distrust. Gradually she had
won him over, so that now, when she was not in the room, he hunted up a
shoe or a glove, and sat with it until she came back.
"It is my self-respect, Jean-Joan."
She admitted that. "But--?"
"I can't stay out of the fighting and call myself a man. It has come
to that with me."
She knew that it had come to that. She had thought a great deal about
it. She lay awake at night thinking about it. She thought of it as
she sat by the General's bed, day after day, holding his hand.
The doctor's report had been cautious, but it had amounted to this--the
General might live to a green old age, some men rallied remarkably
after such a shock. He rather thought the General might rally, but
then again he might not, and anyhow he would be tied for months,
perhaps for years, to his chair.
The old man was giving to his daughter-in-law an affection compounded
of that which he had given to his wife and to his son. It was as if in
coming up the stairs in her white gown on her wedding day, Jean had
brought a bit of Edith back to him. For deep in his heart he knew that
without her, Derry would not have come.
So he clung pathetically to that little hand, which seemed the only
anchor in his sea of loneliness. Pathetically his old eyes begged her
to stay. "You won't leave me, Jean?" And she would promise, and sit
day after day and late into the night, holding his hand.
And as she sat with him, there grew up gradually within her a
conviction which strengthened as the days went by. She could tell the
very moment when she had first thought of it. She had left the General
with Bronson while she went to dress for dinner. Derry was waiting for
her, and usually she would have flown to him, glad of the moment when
they might be together. But something halted her at the head of the
stairs. It was as if a hand had been put in front of her, barring the
way.
The painted lady was looking at her with smiling eyes, but back of the
eyes she seemed to discern a wistful appeal--"I want you to stay. No
matter what happens I beg that you will stay."
But Jean didn't want to stay. All the youth in her rebelled against
the thing that she saw ahead of her. She yearned to be free--to live
and love as she pleased, not a prisoner in that shadowed room.
So she pushed it away from her, and so there came one morning a letter
from her father.
"Drusilla went over on the same boat. It was a surprising thing to
find her there. Since I landed, I haven't seen her. But I met Captain
Hewes in Paris, and he was looking for her.
"I had never known how fine she was until those days on the boat. It
was wonderful on the nights when everything was darkened and we were
feeling our way through the danger zone, to have her sing for us. I
believe we should all have gone to the bottom singing with her if a
submarine had sunk us.
"I am finding myself busier than I have ever been before, finding
myself, indeed, facing the most stupendous thing in the world. It
isn't the wounded men or the dead men or the heart-breaking aspect of
the refugees that gets me, it is the sight of the devastated
country--made barren and blackened into hell not by devils, but by
those who have called themselves men. When I think of our own country,
ready soon to bud and bloom with the spring, and of this country where
spring will come and go, oh, many springs, before there will be bud and
bloom, I am overwhelmed by the tragic contrast. How can we laugh over
there when they are crying here? Perhaps more than anything else, the
difference in conditions was brought home to me as I motored the other
day through a country where there was absolutely no sign of life, not a
tree or a bird--except those war birds, the aeroplanes, hovering above
the horizon.
"Well, as we stopped our car for some slight repairs, there rose up
from a deserted trench, a lean cat with a kitten in her mouth. Oh,
such a starved old cat, Jean, gray and war-worn. And her kitten was
little and blind, and when she had laid it at our feet, she went back
and got another. Then she stood over them, mewing, her eyes big and
hungry. But she was not afraid of us, or if she was afraid, she stood
her ground, asking help for those helpless babies.
"Jean, I thought of Polly Ann. Of all the petted Polly Anns in
America, and then of this starved old thing, and they seemed so
typical. You are playing the glad game over there, and it is easy to
play it with enough to eat and plenty to wear, and away from the horror
of it all. But how could that old pussy-cat be glad, how could she be
anything but frightened and hungry and begging my help?
"Well, we took her in. We had some food with us, and we gave her all
she could eat, and then she curled up on a pile of bags in the bottom
of the car, and lay there with her kittens, as happy as if we were not
going lickety-split over the shell-torn spaces.
"And that your tender heart may be at rest, I may as well tell you that
she and the kittens are living in great content in a country house
where one of the officers who was in the car with us is installed. We
have named her Dolores, but it is ceasing to be appropriate. She is no
longer sad, and while she is on somewhat slim fare like the rest of us,
she is a great hunter and catches mice in the barn, so that she is
growing strong and smooth, and she is not, perhaps, to be pitied as
much as Polly Ann on her pink cushion.
"And here I am writing about cats, while the only thing that is really
in my heart is--You.
"Ever since the moment I left you, I have carried with me the vision of
you in your wedding gown--my dear, my dear. Perhaps it is just as well
that I left when I did, for I am most inordinately jealous of Derry,
not only because he has you, but because he has love and life before
him, while I, already, am looking back.
"My work here is, as you would say, 'wonderful.' How I should like to
hear you say it! There are things which in all my years of practice, I
have never met before. How could I meet them? It has taken this
generation of doctors to wrestle with the problem of treating men
tortured by gas, and with nerves shaken by sights and sounds without
parallel in the history of the world.
"But I am not going to tell you of it. I would rather tell you how
much I love you and miss you, and how glad I am that you are not here
to see it all. Yet I would have all Americans think of those who are
here, and I would have you help until it--hurts. You must know, my
Jean, how moved I am by it, when I ask you, whom I have always
shielded, to give help until it hurts--
"I have had a letter from Hilda. She wants to come over. I haven't
answered the letter. But when I do, I shall tell her that there may be
something that she can do, but it will not be with me. I need women
who can see the pathos of such things as that starved cat and kittens
out there among the shell-holes, and Hilda would never have seen it.
She would have left the cat to starve."
Jean found herself crying over the letter. "I am not helping at all,
Derry."
"My dear, you are."
"I am not. I am just sitting on a pink cushion, like Polly Ann---"
It was the first flash he had seen for days of her girlish petulance.
He smiled. "That sounds like the Jean of yesterday."
"Did you like the Jean of yesterday better than the Jean of to-day?"
"There is only one Jean for me--yesterday, today and forever."
* * * * * *
She stood a little away from him. "Derry, I've been thinking and
thinking--"
He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up to him. "What
have you been thinking, Jean-Joan?"
"That you must go--and I will take care of your father."
"You?"
"Yes. Why not, Derry?"
"I won't have you sacrificed."
"But you want me to be brave."
"Yes. But not burdened. I won't have it, my dear."
"But--you promised your mother. I am sure she would be glad to let me
keep your promise."
She was brave now. Braver than he knew.
"I can't see it," he said, fiercely. "I can see myself leaving you
with Emily, in your own house--to live your own life. But not to sit
in Dad's room, day after day, sacrificing your youth as I sacrificed my
childhood and boyhood--my manhood--. I am over thirty, Jean, and I
have always been treated like a boy. It isn't right, Jean; our lives
are our own, not his."
"It is right. Nobody's life seems to be his own in these days. And
you must go--and I can't leave him. He is so old, and helpless, Derry,
like the poor pussy-cat over there in France. His eyes are like
that--hungry, and they beg--. And oh, Derry, I mustn't be like Polly
Ann, on a pink cushion--."
She tried to laugh and broke down. He caught her up in his arms.
Light as thistledown, young and lovely!
She sobbed on his heart, but she held to her high resolve. He must
go--and she would stay. And at last he gave in.
He had loved her dearly, but he had not looked for this, that she would
give herself to hardness for the sake of another. For the first time
he saw in his little wife something of the heroic quality which had
seemed to set his mother apart and above, as it were, all other women.
BOOK THREE
The Bugle Calls
The wooden trumpeters that were carved on the door blew with all their
might, so that their cheeks were much larger than before. Yes, they
blew "Trutter-a-trutt--trutter-a-trutt--" . . .