Paris, December
Down on the sad duty of burying my brother, Alan. How strangely life and death are mingled in this swift impulse of war; Ted Seaver—Captain Seaver, now—who informed me of Alan’s last moments, told me too of Molly’s coming motherhood. One generation gone, and another arriving!
*****
We walked back together from the cemetery across Paris, and he opened his heart to me. At first, it was difficult. There is a certain restrictive bar that interposes when there is this intimacy of family connections. It is easier, often, to unburden one’s self to a stranger. Alan’s death had upset him more than it had me, in my acquired fatalism. It was his first contact with the closed mystery and as always, I think, his thoughts had leaped ahead to his own appointed hour. Yet in this supposition I had not entirely done him justice.
“God, how terrible death is!” he broke out nervously, at last.
“It’s not death; it’s life you’re experiencing,” I said solemnly.
“What do you mean?”
“Life, Ted, is just this: readiness to face the end at any moment, our own and those who are dear to us. We aren’t taught these things at home: nothing prepares us. We can’t believe it till it comes, as a shock.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said the boy, pulling at his cuff, for he is only a boy. “I can’t get it out of my mind; I feel jumpy all over.”
“It’s tough, damned tough.”
“Mr. Littledale,” he said abruptly, “do you blame me for marrying Molly as I did?”
“No-o,” I said slowly.
“For, you see, that’s what breaks me up. The thought of her, of what’s coming, of what will be ahead of her,—if anything happens to me.”
“Naturally, you can’t help thinking of such things,” I admitted. “You see, Ted, there is some logic in the military point of view that wants an officer single, isn’t there?”
“Good heavens, yes. I keep thinking of it all the time, and—wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“What I’ll do when I get out there,—out at the front,” he said, drawing a long breath.
We were walking through the crowded section, near the Place de la Bastille. I touched his arm and drew his attention to the crowds.
“See there; do you know what war has meant to them? Do you realize, Ted, that your lot is the general lot, and that the real sacrifice is there,—in those who remain. Are we privileged to choose our way of service to our country? No.Noblesse oblige.Remember that, Ted; it answers everything.”
“You’re right,” he said, straightening up at once. “But it wasn’t myself I was caring about, it—it’s Molly.”
“Molly is no longer my sister or your wife. Molly has gone beyond us; she represents now something bigger and finer, the spiritual heritage of American womanhood.”
“Then you don’t blame us?” he said.
“No, of course not. I shouldn’t have had the courage, perhaps, but you of the younger generation are right. Meet life as it offers itself: it’s a bigger thing than avoiding it.”
“Thank you; that does a lot of good,” he said, drawing a long breath.
*****
He is of another generation, as is Molly, too,—God bless her. And what I said to him I believe. May it be a generation more significant and responsive than my own! I think it will, for it has been blessed with two things, opportunity and the test of suffering.