Book: The Tin Soldier

T >> Temple Bailey >> The Tin Soldier







CHAPTER XXII

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
Stoelle 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--" . . .




CHAPTER XXIII

THE EMPTY HOUSE

Jean's world was no longer wonderful--not in the sense that it had once
been, with all the glamour of girlish dreams and of youthful visions.

She had never thought of life as a thing like this in the days when she
had danced down to the confectioner's, intent on good times.

But now, with her father away, with Derry away, with the city frozen
and white, and with not enough coal to go around, with many of the
rooms in the house shut that fuel might be conserved, with Margaret and
the children and Nurse installed as guests at the General's until the
weather grew warmer, with Emily transforming her Toy Shop into a
surgical dressings station, and with her father-in-law turning over to
her incredible amounts of money for the Red Cross and Liberty Bonds and
War Stamps, life began to take on new aspects of responsibility and
seriousness.

She could never have kept her balance in the midst of it all, if Derry
had not written every day. Her father wrote every day, also, but there
were long intervals between his letters, and then they were apt to
arrive all at once, a great packet of them, to be read and re-read and
passed around.

But Derry's letters, brought to her room every morning by Bronson,
contained the elixir which sent her to her day's work with shining eyes
and flushed cheeks. Sometimes she read bits of them to Bronson.
Sometimes, indeed, there were only a few lines for herself, for Derry
was being intensively trained in a Southern camp, working like an ant,
with innumerable other ants, all in olive-drab, with different colored
cords around their hats.

Sometimes she read bits of the letters to Margaret at breakfast, and
after breakfast she would go up to the General and read everything to
him except the precious words which Derry had meant for her very own
self.

And then she and the General would tell each other how really
extraordinary Derry was!

It was a never-failing subject, of intense interest to both of them.
For there was always this to remember, that if the world was no longer
a radiant and shining world, if the day's task was hard, and if now and
then in the middle of the night she wept tears of loneliness, if there
were heavy things to bear, and hard things and sad things, one fact
shone brilliantly above all others, Derry was as wonderful as ever!

"There was never such a boy," the General would chant in his deep bass.

"Never," Jean would pipe in her clear treble.

And when they had chorused thus for a while, the General would dictate
a letter to Derry, for his hand was shaky, and Jean would write it out
for him, and then she would write a letter of her own, and after that
the day was blank, and the night until the next morning when another
letter came. So she lived from letter to letter.


"You have never seen Washington like this," she wrote one day in
February, "we keep only a little fire in the furnace, and I am wearing
flannels for the first time in my life. We dine in sweaters, and the
children are round and rosy in the cold. And the food steams in the
icy air of the dining room, and you can't imagine how different it all
is--with the servants bundled up like the rest of us. We keep your
father warm by burning wood in the fireplace of his room, and we have
given half the coal in the cellar to people who haven't any."

"I am helping Cook with the conservation menus, and it is funny to see
how topsy-turvy everything is. It is perfectly patriotic to eat
mushrooms and lobsters and squabs and ducklings, and it is unpatriotic
to serve sausages and wheat cakes. And Cook can't get adjusted to it.
She will insist upon bacon for breakfast, because well-regulated
families since the Flood have eaten bacon--and she feels that in some
way we are sacrificing self-respect or our social status when we
refrain.

"Your father is such an old dear, Derry. He has war bread and milk for
lunch, and I carry it to him myself in the pretty old porcelain bowl
that he likes so much.

"It was one day when I brought the milk that he spoke of Hilda. 'Where
is she?'

"I told him that she was still in town, and that you had given her a
check which would carry her over a year or two, and he said that he was
glad--that he should not like to see her suffer. The porcelain bowl
had reminded him of her. She had asked him once what it cost, and
after she had found out, she had never used it. She evidently stood
quite in awe of anything so expensive.

"Your mother and I are getting to be very good friends, dearest. When
I am dreadfully homesick for you, I go and sit on the stairs, and she
smiles at me. It is terribly cold in the hall, and I wrap myself up in
your fur coat, and it is almost like having your arms around me."


She was surely making the best of things, this little Jean, when she
found comfort in being mothered by a painted lady on the stairs, and in
being embraced by a fur coat which had once been worn by her husband!

She kept Derry's tin soldier, which Drusilla had given him, on her
desk. "You shall have him when you go to France, but until then he is
a good little comrade, and I say; 'Good-morning' to him and
'Good-night.' Yet I sometimes wonder whether he likes it there on the
shelf, and whether he is crying, 'I want to go to the wars--'"

She was very busy every morning in Emily's room, working on the
surgical dressings. She hated it all. She hated the oakum and the
gauze, the cotton and the compresses, the pneumonia jackets and the
split-irrigation pads, the wipes, the triangulars, the many-tailed and
the scultetus. Other women might speak lightly of five-yard rolls as
dressing for stumps, of paper-backs "used in the treatment of large
suppurating wounds." Jean shivered and turned white at these things.
Her vivid imagination went beyond the little work-room with its
white-veiled women to those hospitals back of the battle line where
mutilated men lay waiting for the compresses and the wipes and the
bandages, men in awful agony--.

But the lesson she was learning was that of harnessing her emotions to
the day's work; and if her world was no longer wonderful in a care-free
sense, it was a rather splendid world of unselfishness and
self-sacrifice, although she was not conscious of this, but felt it
vaguely.

She wore now, most of the time, her nun's frock of gray, which had
seemed to foreshadow something of her future on that glorified day when
Derry had first come to her. She had laid away many of her lovely
things, and one morning Teddy remarked on the change.

"You don't dwess up any more."

Nurse stood back of his chair. "Dress--"

"Dur-wess."

"Don't you like this dress, Teddy?"

"I liked the boo one."

"Blue--"

"Ble-yew, an' the pink one, and all the shiny ones you used to wear at
night."

"Blue dresses and pink dresses and shiny dresses cost a lot of money,
Teddy, and I shouldn't have any money left for Thrift Stamps."

Thrift stamps were a language understood by Teddy, as he would not have
understood the larger transactions of Liberty Bonds. He and the
General held long conversations as to the best means of obtaining a
large supply of stamps, and the General having listened to Margaret who
wanted the boy to work for his offering, suggested an entrancing plan.
Teddy was to feed the fishes in the dining-room aquarium, he was to
feed Muffin, and he was to feed Polly Ann.

It sounded simple, but there were difficulties. In the first place he
had to face Cook, and Cook hated to have children in the kitchen.

"But you'd have to face more than that if you were grown up and in the
trenches. And Hodgson is really very kind."

"Well, she doesn't look kind, Mother."

"Why not?"

"Well, she doesn't smile, and her face is wed."

"Red, dear."

"Ur-ed--. And when I ask her for milk for Polly, she says 'Milk for
cats,' and when she gets it out, she slams the 'frigerator door."

"Refrigerator, dear."

"Rif-iggerator."

But in the main Teddy went to his task valiantly. He conserved bones
for Muffin and left-over corn-meal cakes. Polly Ann dined rather
monotonously on fish boiled with war-bread crusts, on the back of
Cook's big range. Hodgson was conscientious and salted it and cooled
it, and kept it in a little covered granite pail, and it was from this
pail that Teddy ladled stew into Polly Ann's blue saucer. "Mother says
it is very good of you, Hodgson, to take so much trouble."

Hodgson, whose face was redder than ever, as she broiled mushrooms for
lunch, grunted, "I'd rather do it than have other people messin'
around."

Teddy surveyed her anxiously. "You don't mind having me here, do you,
Hodgson?"

His cheeks were rosy, his bronze hair bright, his sturdy legs planted a
trifle apart, Polly's dish in one hand, the big spoon in the other.
"No, I don't mind," she admitted, but it was some time before she
acknowledged even to herself how glad she was when that bright figure
appeared.

Feeding the fishes presented few problems, and gradually thrift stamps
filled the little book, and there was a war stamp, and more thrift
stamps and more war stamps, and Muffin and Polly Ann waxed fat and
friendly, and were a very lion and lamb for lying down together.

Then there came a day when Teddy, feeding the fishes in the aquarium,
heard somebody say that Hodgson's son was in the war.

He went at once to the kitchen. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked the
cook, standing in front of her where she sat cutting chives and peppers
and celery on a little board for salad.

"Tell you what?"

"That your boy was in Fwance."

Hodgson's red face grew redder, and to Teddy's consternation, a tear
ran down her cheek.

He stood staring at her, then flew upstairs to his mother. "Cook's
cryin'."

"Teddy--"

"She is. Because her son is in Fwance."

After that when he went down to get things for Muffin and Polly Ann, he
said how s'prised he was and how nice it was now that he knew, and
wasn't she pr-roud? And he fancied that Hodgson was kinder and softer.
She told him the name of her son. It was Charley, and she and Teddy
talked a great deal about Charley, and Teddy sent him some chocolate,
and Hodgson told Margaret. "He's a lovely boy, Mrs. Morgan. May you
never raise him to fight."

"I should want him to be as brave as his father, Hodgson."

"Yes. My boy's brave, but it was hard to let him go." Then, struck by
the look on Margaret's face, she said, "Forgive me, ma'am; if mine is
taken from me, I'd like to feel as you do. You ain't makin' other
people unhappy over it."

"I think it is because my husband still lives for me, Hodgson."

Hodgson cried into her apron. "It ain't all of us that has your faith.
But if I loses him, I'll do my best."

And so the painted lady on the stairs saw all the sinister things that
Hilda had brought into the big house swept out of it. She saw Hodgson
the cook trying to be brave, and bringing up Margaret's tea in the
afternoons for the sake of the moment when she might speak of her boy
to one who would understand; she saw Emily, coming home dead tired
after a hard day's work, but with her face illumined. She saw Margaret
smiling, with tears in her heart, she saw Jean putting aside childish
things to become one of the women that the world needed.

Brave women all of them, women with a vision, women raised to heroic
heights by the need of the hour!

The men, too, were heroic. Indeed, the General, trying to control his
appetite, was almost pathetically heroic. He had given up sugar,
although he hated his coffee without it, and he had a little boy's
appetite for pies and cakes.

"When the war is over," he told Teddy, "we will order a cake that's as
high as a house, and we will eat it together."

Teddy giggled. "With frostin'?"

"Yes. I remember when Derry was a lad that we used to tell him the
story of the people who baked a cake so big that they had to climb
ladders to reach the top. Well, that's the kind of cake we'll have."

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