The Next of Kin Part 2

The government of one of the provinces, in the early days of the war, shut down the public works, and, strange to say, left the bars open.

Their impulse was right--but they shut down the wrong thing; it should have been the bars, of course. They knew something should be shut down. We are not blaming them; it was a panicky time. People often, when they hear the honk of an automobile horn, jump back instead of forward. And it all came right in time.

A moratorium was declared at once, which for the time being relieved people of their debts, for there was a strong feeling that the cup of sorrow was so full now that all movable trouble should be set off for another day!

The temperance people then asked, as a corresponding war measure, that the bars be closed. They urged that the hearts of our people were already so burdened that they should be relieved of the trouble and sorrow which the liquor traffic inevitably brings. "Perhaps," they said to the government, "when a happier season comes, we may be able to bear it better; but we have so many worries now, relieve us of this one, over which you have control."

Then the financial side of the liquor traffic began to pinch. Manitoba was spending thirteen million dollars over the bars every year. The whole Dominion's drink bill was one hundred millions. When the people began to rake and save to meet the patriotic needs, and to relieve the stress of unemployment, these great sums of money were thought of longingly--and with the longing which is akin to pain! The problem of unemployment was aggravated by the liquor evil and gave another argument for prohibition.

I heard a woman telling her troubles to a sympathetic friend one day, as we rode in an elevator.

"'E's all right when 'e's in work," she said; "but when 'e's hidle 'e's something fierce: 'e knocks me about crool. 'E guzzles all the time 'e's out of work."

It was easy to believe. Her face matched her story; she was a poor, miserable, bedraggled creature, with teeth out in front. She wore black cotton gloves such as undertakers supply for the pallbearers, and every finger was out. The liquor traffic would have a better chance if there were not so many arguments against it walking round.

About this time, too, the traffic suffered a great bereavement, for the personal liberty argument fell, mortally wounded. The war did that, too.

All down the ages there have been men who believed that personal liberty included the right to do what one wished to do, no matter who was hurt. So, if a man wished to drink, by the sacred rights for which his forefathers had bled and died he was at liberty to do so, and then go home and beat up his own wife and family if he wanted to; for if you can't beat your own wife, whom can you beat, I'd like to know?

Any one who disputed this sacred right was counted a spoil-fun and a joy-killer!

But a change came over the world's thought in the early days of the war. Liberty grew to be a holy word, a sacred thing, when the blood of our brightest and best was being poured out in its defense, and never again will the old, selfish, miserable conception of liberty obtain favor. The Kaiser helped here, too, for he is such a striking example of the one who claims absolute liberty for himself, no matter who is hurt, that somehow we never hear it mentioned now. I believe it is gone, forever!

The first step in the curtailment of the liquor traffic was the closing of the bars at seven o'clock, and the beneficial effect was felt at once. Many a man got home early for the first time in his life, and took his whole family to the "movies."

The economy meetings brought out some quaint speeches. No wonder!

People were taken unawares. We were unprepared for war, and the changes it had brought;--we were as unprepared as the woman who said, in speaking of unexpected callers, "I had not even time to turn my plants." There was much unintentional humor. One lady, whose home was one of the most beautiful in the city, and who entertained lavishly, told us, in her address on "Economy," that at the very outbreak of the war she reduced her cook's wages from thirty to twenty dollars, and gave the difference to the Patriotic Fund; that she had found a cheaper dressmaker who made her dresses now for fifteen dollars, where formerly she had paid twenty-five; and she added artlessly, "They are really nicer, and I do think we should all give in these practical ways; that's the sort of giving that I really enjoy!"

Another woman told of how much she had given up for the Patriotic Fund; that she had determined not to give one Christmas present, and had given up all the societies to which she had belonged, even the Missionary Society, and was giving it all to the Red Cross. "I will not even give a present to the boy who brings the paper," she declared with conviction. Whether or not the boy's present ever reached the Red Cross, I do not know. But ninety-five per cent of the giving was real, honest, hard, sacrificing giving. Elevator-boys, maids, stenographers gave a percentage of their earnings, and gave it joyously. They like to give, but they do not like to have it taken away from them by an employer, who thereby gets the credit of the gift. The Red Cross mite-boxes into which children put their candy money, while not enriching the Red Cross to any large extent, trained the children to take some share in the responsibility; and one enthusiastic young citizen, who had been operated on for appendicitis, proudly exhibited his separated appendix, preserved in alcohol, at so much per look, and presented the proceeds to the Red Cross.

The war came home to the finest of our people first. It has not reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero. Many a cellar can stand a week of this--but look out for the second! Every day it comes to some one.

"I don't see why we are always asked to give," one woman said gloomily, when the collector asked her for a monthly subscription to the Red Cross. "Every letter that goes out of the house has a stamp on it--and we write a queer old lot of letters, and I guess we've done our share."

She is not a dull woman either or hard of heart. It has not got to her yet--that's all! I cannot be hard on her in my judgment, for it did not come to me all at once, either.

When I saw the first troops going away, I wondered how their mothers let them go, and I made up my mind that I would not let my boy go,--I was so glad he was only seventeen,--for hope was strong in our hearts that it might be over before he was of military age. It was the Lusitania that brought me to see the whole truth. Then I saw that we were waging war on the very Princes of Darkness, and I knew that morning when I read the papers, I knew that it would be better--a thousand times better--to be dead than to live under the rule of people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of reasoning is so oxlike--they are so stupidly brutal. I knew then that no man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her!

Soon after that I knew, without a word being said, that my boy wanted to go--I saw the seriousness come into his face, and knew what it meant. It was when the news from the Dardanelles was heavy on our hearts, and the newspapers spoke gravely of the outlook.

One day he looked up quickly and said, "I want to go--I want to help the British Empire--while there is a British Empire!"

And then I realized that my boy, my boy, had suddenly become a man and had put away childish things forever.

I shall always be glad that the call came to him, not in the intoxication of victory, but in the dark hour of apparent defeat.

CHAPTER III

LET'S PRETEND

Let's pretend the skies are blue, Let's pretend the world is new, And the birds of hope are singing All the day!

Short of gladness--learn to fake it!

Long on sadness--go and shake it!

Life is only--what you make it, Anyway!

There is wisdom without end In the game of "Let's pretend!"

We played it to-day. We had to, for the boys went away, and we had to send our boys away with a smile! They will have heartaches and homesickness a-plenty, without going away with their memories charged with a picture of their mothers in tears, for that's what takes the heart out of a boy. They are so young, so brave, we felt that we must not fail them.

With such strong words as these did we admonish each other, when we met the last night, four of us, whose sons were among the boys who were going away. We talked hard and strong on this theme, not having a very good grip on it ourselves, I am afraid. We simply harangued each other on the idleness of tears at stations. Every one of us had something to say; and when we parted, it was with the tacit understanding that there was an Anti-Tear League formed--the boys were leaving on an early train in the morning!

The morning is a dismal time anyway, and teeth will chatter, no matter how brave you feel! It is a squeamish, sickly, choky time,--a winter morning before the sun is up; and you simply cannot eat breakfast when you look round the table and see every chair filled,--even the five-year-old fellow is on hand,--and know that a long, weary time is ahead of the one who sits next you before he comes again to his father's house. Even though the conversation is of the gayest, every one knows what every one else is thinking.

There is no use trying--I cannot write the story of that morning.... I will tell you of other troop-trains I have seen go. I will tell you of another boy who carried off all the good-byes with a high hand and great spirits, and said something to every one of the girls who brought him candy, telling one that he would remember her in his will, promising another that he would marry her when he got to be Admiral of the Swiss Navy, but who, when he came to say good-bye to his father, suddenly grew very white and very limp, and could only say, "Oh, dad!

Good old dad!"

I will tell you of other troop-trains I have seen go out, with other boys waving to other women who strained their eyes and winked hard, hard, hard to keep back the tears, and stood still, quite still until the last car had disappeared around the bend, and the last whistle had torn the morning air into shreds and let loose a whole wild chorus of echoes through the quiet streets!

There was a mist in the air this morning, and a white frost covered the trees with beautiful white crystals that softened their leafless limbs. It made a soft and graceful drapery on the telegraph poles and wires. It carpeted the edges of the platform that had not been walked on, and even covered the black roofs of the station buildings and the flatcars which stood in the yard. It seemed like a beautiful white decoration for the occasion, a beautiful, heavy, elaborate mourning--for those who had gone--and white, of course--all white,--because they were so young!

Then we came home. It was near the opening time of the stores, and the girls were on their way to work, but their footfalls made no sound on the pavement. Even the street-cars seemed to glide quietly by. The city seemed grave and serious and sad, and disposed to go softly....

In the store windows the blinds were still down--ghastly, s.h.i.+rred white things which reminded me uncomfortably of the lining of a coffin! Over the hotel on the corner, the Calgary Beer Man, growing pale in the sickly dawn, still poured--and lifted--and drank--and poured--and lifted--and drank,--insatiable as the G.o.ds of war.

I wandered idly through the house--what a desolate thing a house can be when every corner of it holds a memory!--not a memory either, for that bears the thought of something past,--when every corner of it is full of a boyish presence!... I can hear him rus.h.i.+ng down the stairs in the morning to get the paper, and shouting the headlines to me as he brings it up. I can hear him come in at the front door and thump his books down on the hall seat, and call "Mother!" I sit down and summon them all, for I know they will fade soon enough--the thin, sharp edge of everything wears mercifully blunt in time!

Then I gathered up his schoolbooks, and every dog-eared exercise-book, and his timetable, which I found pinned on his window curtain, and I carried them up to the storeroom in the attic, with his baseball mitt--and then, for the first time, as I made a pile of the books under the beams, I broke my anti-tear pledge. It was not for myself, or for my neighbor across the street whose only son had gone, or for the other mothers who were doing the same things all over the world; it was not for the young soldiers who had gone out that day; it was for the boys who had been cheated of their boyhood, and who had to a.s.sume men's burdens, although in years they were but children. The saddest places of all the world to-day are not the battle fields, or the hospitals, or the cross-marked hillsides where the brave ones are buried; the saddest places are the deserted campus and playgrounds where they should be playing; the empty seats in colleges, where they should be sitting; the s.p.a.ces in the ranks of happy, boisterous schoolboys, from which the brave boys have gone,--these boys whose boyhood has been cut so pitifully short. I thought, too, of the little girls whose laughter will ring out no more in the careless, happy abandonment of girlhood, for the black shadow of anxiety and dread has fallen even on their young hearts; the tiny children, who, young as they are, know that some great sorrow has come to every one; the children of the war countries, with their terror-stricken eyes and pale faces; the unspeakable, unforgivable wrong that has been done to youth the world over.

There, as I sat on the floor of the storeroom, my soul wandered down a long, dark, silent valley, and met the souls of the mothers of all countries, who had come there, like me, to mourn ... and our tears were very hot, and very bitter ... for we knew that it was the Valley of Lost Childhood!