"I don't suppose life at the Front is just all you would have our fancy paint? In fact, it must be ghastly beyond all words, and how you all stand it I know not. I simply can't bear to be comfortable by the fireside—but that is silly, for I know the only thing that keeps you all going is the thought that we are safe and warm at home. The war has come very near to us these last few days. A boy whom we knew very well—Tommy Elliot—has fallen. They have a place near here. His father was killed in the Boer War and Tommy was his mother's only child. He was nineteen and just got his commission before war broke out. The pride of him! And how Buff and Billy and Thomas lay at his feet! He was the nicest boy imaginable—never thought it beneath his dignity to play with little boys, or be sweet to his mother. I never heard anyone with such a hearty laugh. It made you laugh to hear it. Thank God he found so much to laugh at, and so little reason for tears.
"I went over to see Mrs. Elliot. I hardly dared to go, but I couldn't stay away. She was sitting in the room they call the 'summer parlour.' It is a room I love in summer, full of dark oak and coolness and sweet-smelling flowers, but cold and rather dark in winter. She is a woman of many friends, and the writing-table was heaped with letters and telegrams—very few of them opened. She seemed glad to see me, and was calm and smiling; but the stricken look in her eyes made me behave like an utter idiot. When I could speak I suggested that I had better go away, but she began to speak about him, and I thought it might help her to have a listener who cared too. She told me why she was sitting in the summer parlour. She had used it a great deal for writing, and he had always come in that way, so that he would find her just at once. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I didn't turn my head, for I knew he liked to "pounce"—a relic from the little-boy days when he was a black puma.' Her smile when she said it broke one's heart. 'If I didn't happen to be here, he went from room to room, walking warily with his nailed boots on the polished floors, saying "Mother! Mother!" until he found me.'
"How are the dead raised up? and with what bodies do they come? I suppose that is the most important question in the world to us all, and we seek for the answer as they who dig for hid treasure. But all the sermons preached and all the books written about it help not at all, for the preachers and the writers are as ignorant as everybody else. My own firm belief is that God, who made us with the power of loving, who thought of the spring and gave young things their darling funny ways, will not fail us here. He will know that to Tommy's mother the light of heaven, which is neither of the sun nor the moon but a light most precious, even like a jasper stone clear as crystal, will matter nothing unless it shows her Tommy in his old homespun coat, with his laughing face, ready to 'pounce'; and that she will bid the harpers harping on their harps of gold still their noise while she listens for the sound of boyish footsteps and a voice that says 'Mother! Mother!'....
"We read some of the many letters together. They were all so kind and full of real sympathy, but I noticed that she pushed carelessly aside those that talked of her own feelings and kept those that talked of what a splendid person Tommy was.
"There was one rather smudged-looking envelope without a stamp, and we wondered where it had come from. It was from Buff! He had written it without asking anyone's advice, and had walked the three miles to deliver it. I think that grimy little letter did Mrs. Elliot good. We had read so many letters, all saying the same thing, all saying it more or less beautifully, one had the feeling that one was being sluiced all over with sympathy. Buff's was different. It ran:
"'I am sorry that Tommy is killed for he had a cheery face and I liked him. But it can't be helped. He will be quite comfortable with God and I hope that someone is being kind to old Pepper for he liked him too.—Your aff. friend
David Stuart Seton.
"'P.S.—I'm not allowed to draw riligus pictures now or I would have shown you God being very glad to see Tommy.'
"'Old Pepper' is a mongrel that Tommy rescued and was kind to, and it was so like Buff to think of the feelings of the dumb animal.
"Tommy's mother held the letter in her hand very tenderly, and the only tears I saw her shed dropped on it. Then 'Let us go out and look for old Pepper,' she said, 'for "he liked him too."'
"I came home very heavy-hearted, trying to comfort myself concerning those splendid boys.
"To die for one's country is a great privilege—God knows I don't say that lightly, for any day I may hear that you or Alan have died that death—and to those boys the honour has been given in the very springtime of their days.
"Most of us part from our lives reluctantly: they are taken from us, and we go with shivering, shrinking feet down to the brink of the River, but those sons of the morning throw their lives from them and spring across. I think God will look very kindly at our little boys.
"And smug, middle-aged people say, 'Poor lads!' They dare to pity the rich dead. Oh! the dull people dragging out their span of years without ever finding out what living means!
"But it breaks one's heart, the thought of the buried hopes. I have been thinking of the father, the man in business who was keeping things going until his boy would be through and ready to help him. There are so many of them in Glasgow, and I used to like to listen to them talking to each other in the car coming out from business. They boasted so innocently of their boys, of this one's skill at cricket, that one's prowess in the football field.
"And now this cheery business man has no boy, only a room with a little bed in the corner, a bookshelf full of adventure—stories and battered school-books, a cricket bat and a bag of golf clubs; a wardrobe full of clothes, and a most vivid selection of ties and socks, for the boy who lies in France was very smart in his nice boyish way, and brushed his hair until it shone. Oh! I wonder had anybody time to stroke just once that shining head before it was laid away in the earth? remembering that over the water hearts would break with yearning to see it again.
"It isn't so bad when doleful people get sorrow, they at least have the miserable satisfaction of saying they had always known it would come, but when happy hearts are broken, when blythe people fall silent—the sadness of it haunts one.
"To talk of cheerier subjects. Aunt Alice is a heroine. Who would have thought of her giving up her house for a hospital! Of course we always knew, didn't we? that she was the most golden-hearted person in existence, but it has taken a European war to make her practical. Now she writes me long letters of advice about saving, and food values, and is determined that she at least won't be a drag on her country in winning the war.
"Talk about saving, I asked one of my women the other day if she had ever tried margarine. 'No,' she said earnestly, 'I niver touch it; an' if I'm oot at ma tea an' no' verra sure if it's butter, I juist tak'