They were in the midst of packing and moving when the news came of
Jesse Dick's death. She had no formal warning. No official envelope
prepared her. And yet she received it with a dreadful calm, as though
she had expected it, and had braced herself for it. She and her father
were at breakfast surrounded by wooden packing boxes and burlap rolls.
Charley, in peril of missing the 8:35 I. C. train, contented herself
with the morning's news second-hand. Henry Kemp had the paper.
"What's the daily _schrecklichkeit_, Dad?"
He had not answered. Suddenly the weight of his silence struck her. She
looked up as though he had spoken her name. The open newspaper shielded
his face. Something in the way he held it. You do not hold a paper thus
when you are reading. "Dad!" The paper came down slowly. She saw his
face.
"Dead?"
"Yes."
He stood up. She came around to him. She wanted to see it on paper,
printed.
That morning she actually caught the 8:35 as usual. She sold little
imports all that morning, went out at the lunch hour and never returned
to Shields'. Outwardly she practised the stoicism of her kind. She
cried herself to sleep night after night, indeed; beat on her pillow
with an impotent fist; sat up, feverish and wakeful, to rage at life.
But she was up next morning, as usual, pale and determined.
There was a curious scene with great-aunt Charlotte. At news of Jesse
Dick's death she had summoned Charley; had insisted that she must
see her; had been so mysteriously emphatic that Charley had almost
rebelled, anticipating a garrulous hour of senile sympathy and decayed
advice. Still she went, ascended the stairs to Aunt Charlotte's room
(she came downstairs more and more rarely now) and at Aunt Charlotte's
first words, "I knew he'd never come back, Charley," would have fled
incontinently if something in the grim earnestness of the black-browed
old countenance had not held her. There was no soft sentimentality
in great-aunt Charlotte's word or look. Rather she seemed eager,
vitalised, as though she had an important message to convey. Charley
did groan a little, inwardly, when Aunt Charlotte brought out the
yellow old photograph of the girl in the full-skirted wasp-waisted
riding habit, with the plume and the rose. And she said vaguely, "Oh,
yes," as she took it in her hand, and wished that she had not come. And
then, "Why, Aunt Charlotte! You lovely thing! You never showed me this
picture before! You're the family beauty. Your face is--the look--it
sort of glows----"
"Just for a little while. Jesse Dick brought that look to it."
"How do you mean--Jesse Dick?"
And quietly, masterfully, with the repression of more than fifty years
swept away before the urgence of this other Charlotte's need, she told
her own brief stark story. "I was eighteen, Charley, when the Civil War
began. That's the picture of me, taken at the time----"
Charley listened. Sometimes her eyes dwelt on the withered old
countenance before her; sometimes she looked down, mistily, at the
glowing face of the girl in the picture. But her attention never
wandered. For the first time she was hearing the story of the first
Jesse Dick. For the first time great-aunt Charlotte was telling it.
She was telling it, curiously enough, with the detachment of an
outsider--without reproach, without regret, without bitterness. When
she had finished she sat back and glanced about the bedroom--the neat,
shabby, rather close-smelling bedroom of an old, old woman--and then
she opened her hands on her knees, palms out, as though in exposition.
"And this is I," said the open palms and dim old eyes. "This is I,
Charlotte Thrift."
As though in answer--in defense of her--Charley leaned forward,
impetuously, and pressed her fresh young cheek against the sallow
withered one. "You've been wonderful, Aunt Charlotte. You have! What
would Grandma Payson have done without you!--or Lottie, or mother, for
that matter."
But great-aunt Charlotte shook her head. She seemed to be waiting for
something. And then Charley said, "I'll be all right. I'm the kind that
goes on. You know. I'm too curious about life to want to miss any of
it. I'll keep on trying things and people and I'll probably find the
combination. Not the perfect combination, like Jesse. You don't, twice.
But I suppose I'll marry--sometime."
"That's it. Don't you give in. You're twenty. Don't you give in. I was
scared when you left your work----"
"Oh, that. I couldn't stay. I don't know. Restless."
"That's all right," said Aunt Charlotte, satisfied. "Restless is all
right. Restless is better than resigned."
Of Jesse Dick's poems, two made a little furore. The reviewers all
had a line or two or three about his having been one of the most
promising of the younger poets of the virile school. They said his was
American poetry, full of crude power. One poem--the one called "Chemin
des Dames"--they even learned in the schools, mispronouncing its
title horribly, of course. They took it seriously, solemnly. Charley
alone knew that it had been written in satire and derision. It was
his protest against all the poems about scarlet poppies and Flanders
fields. Taken seriously, it was indeed a lovely lyric thing. Taken as
Charley knew he had meant it, it was scathing, terrible.
People thought the one called "Death" was a little too bitter.
Good--but bitter, don't you think? That part beginning:
"They said you were majestic, Death.
Majestic! You!
I know you for the foolish clown you are;
A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,
A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence.
...."
When Charley read that one, as she often did, she would beat with her
hard young fist on her knee and cry impotent tears of rage at the
uselessness of it all.
They made a book of his poems and brought it out in the autumn, just
before the armistice. A slim book of poems. There had been so few of
them.