XISHORT TWILIGHTS AND DRIFTING PETALS
IT was just five years after Mary Wescott’s wedding that, following unprecedented events in Europe, blood did begin to flow in Erzerum, as in Mary Christmas’ dream beneath the sumachs. But it was not avenging blood; and in those awestruck days when the world was rudely shaken from its serenity, the horror of it was lessened in minds already jaded by atrocities. In the mind of Mary Christmas, however, it eclipsed all other catastrophes. The compelling hideousness of it drove sleep from her tired eyes and within them lighted that red gleam which so many years ago had frightened the Wescotts at their quiet table. She was tormented day and night by the intensity of the fire within her. Seeking blindly the comfort that lies in common suffering, she pushed the papers with their ghastly, burdened words between the elbowsof Raphael as he leaned upon his cigar case and pondered his stock; but he, after an impatient glance, turned to the quotations on the tobacco market. Little Mary, it is true, wept with her mother for a few secret moments, but her eyes never left the door through which her husband might at any minute come to stare at her and to shrug his big shoulders.
The next two years, driven by a restlessness that dislodged even the sacredness of custom, Mary Christmas began her country traveling early and continued it late. The very exercise of walking long miles over bad roads, muddy in the spring, frozen and rutty in late autumn, loosened the tension under which she was living. Moreover, in the outlying villages and farming districts there were those who, in the light of present events, listened more eagerly to her stories of ancient wrong and cruel aggression, and gave her not only the sympathy for which she had craved, but the more welcome support of their own righteous indignation.
Finally, as the months dragged themselves wearily into years, she found in Father Wescottan outlet for all her pent-up hostility and for her growing resentment toward those governmental heads who were willing to watch and wait while ships were sunk, and disaster, confusion, and death stalked from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf. He not only shared the resentment of Mary Christmas; he fed it with his own indignant protests. Ifhisparty were in Washington, he told her, things would be different! Mary Christmas knew nothing of parties, but her worshipful gaze, which the years had not dimmed, told him as plainly as words that in her opinion the country had made one incomprehensible error in judgment when it had overlooked him as leader of its destinies. And although Father Wescott’s native modesty did not allow him for a moment to share her opinion, he did echo the sputterings of his automobile as he told his town and county what he thought of the Administration!
But Father Wescott and Mary Christmas waited yet more months before the country righted itself in their estimation—months during which Father Wescott forgot that his business was law and Mary Christmasthat hers was trade, during which Roger and John, the one in the Law School at Cambridge, the other at the foot of the ladder in a Boston firm, studied reluctantly, all the while conscious that in spite of themselves they were marking time.
In the early spring of 1917, impelled by the certainty that watchful waiting was at last at an end and by the bitter, awful knowledge, which she until now had been unwilling to admit to herself, that no avenging spirit would ever quicken her son, Mary Christmas escaped to the country while the frost was still in the roads and before the first arbutus, blooming in the cold moss of some woodland rock, touched the misty air with its perfect fragrance. The last three years had left indelible marks upon her in the thinness of her face and in the lines now irretrievably set about her mouth, in the haunting depths of her eyes and the sagging of her shoulders. They had marked her spirit, too, though that flickered on, choked and smothered, it is true, but wanting only draught and fuel to flame again.
Both were supplied, miraculously it seemedto her, in mid-April. For three weeks she had plodded tirelessly on through days of intermittent mist and rain along the most remote of her routes, her thoughts inextricably entangled in a web in which relief over the declaration of war struggled with bitterness over the indifference which this new country had so mysteriously engendered in her children. And while she pushed her red cart over the roads, depending for hospitality upon the kindness of those to whom for years she had ministered in a way she little understood, two young men in uniform decided to stay for an afternoon in Portland on their way home to say good-bye to their father and mother. What happened that afternoon in the cigar store of Raphael Christmas only one of the three to-day could tell you; but there must have been something persuasive about the square shoulders of the older visitor and the straight brown eyes of the younger, for, the next day but one, a big Scandinavian sold tobacco to whoever wanted it, and told anybody who asked that the proprietor had gone to war.
Stopping in a small village to get the papersof three days past, Mary Christmas saw on the front page of one of them a picture and a story which set the muscles of her arms and legs into such tremor that she could with difficulty push her cart through the gate of the adjoining churchyard and up to the steps of the white church. Here she gratefully sat down in a warm ray of sunshine and tried to sense it all. And as she saw Raphael’s dark face gazing into her own and read the words that told of the Erzerum tragedy of more than twenty years ago and that spoke of Raphael as a hero, ready to avenge, she felt care slip from her shoulders just as years before she had felt quick relief upon the setting down of her great bundle on some friendly doorstep. She felt, too, as she sat there in the sunlight, the rekindling of her spirit, which, now smothered no longer, burst again into ready flame. If John Wescott could have seen her then, leaning back against the paneled door of the old church, her red silk handkerchief on her shoulders, the sun catching alike the light from the gold coins in her ears and from the tears that rolled down hertired face, he would have felt convinced that the impulsive extra hour which he took to interview the city editor of a Portland paper and which cost him six hours at home was well worth the price.
When Mary Christmas had convinced herself by twelve more readings that what the words said was indeed true, she left the church steps, stopping only to fold the miraculous paper within her gold-laced bodice and to say a prayer of thanksgiving, and wheeled her cart into a neighboring barn. Here she left it while she journeyed by stage to the nearest sizable town, returning the next day with the necessary purchases for the new work which, she decided, had become hers to perform. From her packages she brought forth an American flag with which she covered her cart, and tiny flags of the Allies which she tacked securely in the corners. Thus decorated, and armed with a veritable sword of the spirit, she started forth, choosing the most outlying roads she knew.
That spring and summer, and late into the fall, she forgot her business of selling in this new and self-imposed task of recruitingfor the army. Into the most remote of farming districts she pushed her gay cart; in farmhouse kitchens, at crossroads, and among groups of men at work in the hayfields she gave her stirring message. Nor did she scorn to use any and every means of persuasion. When the story of her own wrong at the hands of the enemy failed to arouse more than an ill-expressed compassion, when the plea for making the world secure against tyranny and the simple urge of natural patriotism were not provocative of determination, her racial shrewdness came to her aid with the suggestion of expediency.
“They will make you go soon,” she would cry to half a dozen young men, impressed in spite of themselves. “Soon they will come and take you whether you want to go or not. You are not such a hero then! Go now—like my son here! Go now and offer yourselves! That is the way!”
Reluctantly she left the roads when the lowering skies foretold snow and when the hurrying November sun set in a horizon of pale green beneath overhanging clouds of purple. That winter she gave up her tradeamong the railroad towns, and, instead of weaving laces, knit rough socks of gray wool, sitting with little Mary in the hot back room of the bakeshop. A peace came to brood over her in those days with their short twilights. It made her oblivious of her toil-racked body, and in some strange, quiet way quenched the flames of her spirit until they glowed in a clear, steady light, a “light that never was on sea or land.” And when another spring with its drifting petals brought her the news that Raphael had given his life in France to avenge his father’s death and to alleviate, if but for a little time, the suffering of the world, she was quite content.
The drifting petals of that spring brought a message to the Wescott village also, a message that made Father Wescott again walk up the street with his collar and tie in their rightful places. He looked old and stooped as he opened the white gate and went up the driveway in the drowsy, contented hum of bees and the sweet odor of apple blossoms in warm sunlight. He did not go back to his office that day or the next, but satwith Mrs. Wescott in the library or helped her with the housework, which must be done as carefully and methodically as though they were not surrounded by some grim, overwhelming presence. And on the third afternoon, as they sat in the library, Mr. Wescott pasting stray leaves in old books and Mrs. Wescott darning some table linen which she had twice thrown away, they heard the grating of the driveway gravel and saw between the porch shutters a quick flash of red and black and gold. Then Mary Christmas burst open the door, and, after throwing herself at Father Wescott’s feet, sat with them quietly until the shadows on the orchard grass grew longer and a little girl drove her cow down the hill.
But after her lunch of sandwiches and milk she did not go until she had entered into every room of the great, empty house. Sitting together in the library, they heard her softened footsteps upstairs, visiting every one—that in which Roger had been born, those where he had played and slept, and in each they heard her high, quavering voice singing a prayer-song for the rest of hisspirit. Downstairs too she knelt and prayed—in the library where he had read his books, in the dining-room where he had eaten, even in the great old stable where so many years ago he had played the part of the priest in the Etchmiadzin church. Then, her sacrifice ended, she went her way up the hill.
An hour later it came to them who still sat in the library that she had looked old and tired as she had said good-bye. They might so easily have taken her on her way! Father Wescott, reproving himself for his thoughtlessness, coaxed his car into reluctant motion, and with Mrs. Wescott beside him choked up the hill to overtake Mary Christmas and to carry her to her next stopping-place or, better still, to bring her back again with them.
They did not go far. By the path that led to the pasture bars and thence to Mary Wescott’s boulder, they saw the familiar red cart, still bedecked with its colors. Halting the car beside it, they hurried up the path, over the hummocks starred with violets, and through the alders to the boulder. There bythe spring, beneath a wild plum-tree, white with bloom, lay Mary Christmas in the evening light, her face relaxed, her busy hands at rest. A song sparrow on the stunted pine tree filled the still air with notes like crystals in sunlight, and a robin called from the wild crab-apple on the hill. But Father and Mother Wescott knew, as they stood there looking upon the quiet face beneath the white blossoms, that Mary Christmas’ restless, shining spirit was heeding none of these. It had gone, they knew, in a quick flash of light across the gray, tossing ocean, to her own land, where for a season it would wander with the winds on treeless plains, look upon the ark which no eye had seen, and leave its healing power in the dim aisles of the church at Etchmiadzin. Then, satisfied and at peace, it would go to dwell in the Everlasting Halls of God!