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CHAPTER II

MOTHER AND SON

To have been captain of the foot-ball team, which some student of sociology has called the highest office in the free gift of the American people, might seem glory enough for one life; but Richard Percival was of such stuff that all past triumphs became dust and ashes. He was greedy of the future. Now that the doors of college were fairly closed, that career became to him but as a half-dreaming condition, before one wakes.

On this summer evening, however, it was easy to prolong the dream, since the hour was one for quiet of body and for wandering visions. The room was large and suffused with that restfulness which comes to homes where serene and thoughtful lives have been lived. There were long straight lines; there was a scarcity of knickknacks; there were pictures gathered because they were loved and not to fill a bare space on the wall; there were books and books and books, many of them with the worn covers of old friends. Here, clasped in the arms of another old friend of a chair, half-sat, half-lay his mother, and near her lounged Ellery Norris, the friend whose delicate mingling of love and admiration was as fragrant wine to Dick, who believed in himself because others had always believed in him. The dying twilight, laden with rose-spiciness and with the first shrill notes of the warm night, came in through high narrow windows. Everywhere was the sweet repose that comes after sweet activity, and the center of it was the fragile woman who lay back in her chair, caressing with light hand the head of the young man who sat upon the rug and leaned against her knee.

Norris was looking at Mrs. Percival with a kind of wondering admiration which the son saw with a touch of pity. Poor old Norris! It must have been tough to grow up without a home. As for this fragrant type of femininity, young Percival took it for granted—at least in the women that belong to a man; and the other women hardly count.

Everything made Dick feel very tender toward his past, very well satisfied with his present, very secure about his future. All would be good. That was the natural order of the universe. He had always found it easy to do things and to be a good deal of a personage.

He stared up silently at the space above the mantel where hung a portrait that gazed back at him, with features pale in the fading light. Singularly alike were the boyish face that looked up and the boyish face that looked down, though the painted Percival, a little idealistic about the eyes, wholly firm about the mouth, appeared the more determined of the two. Perhaps this came from the shoulder-straps, the blue uniform, and the military squareness of the shoulders.

“Yes, you are like him, Dick.” Mrs. Percival spoke to his thoughts. The boy looked up startled.

“Am I?” he asked. “I wish I might be. I wish I might be half so much of a man.”

“And I hope you will be more—no, not that. He was my all. I can hardly wish you to be more, but I hope you will do more. At least you don’t have a drag on you from the beginning, as he had. Has Dick told you the story, Ellery?” She turned with a gentle smile toward the other man. “You see I can’t help calling you Ellery. Dick’s letters have made you partly mine already. We are not strangers at all.”

Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.

“You don’t know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine,” he said. “I never knew my mother.”

“You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg, though few of them lived to tell of their own bravery? It makes the lump come up in my throat even to remember it, just as it did when I first heard the news and knew that my boy-lover was there.”

There was silence a moment.

“Ah, Dick, you have a young body to match your heart,” Mrs. Percival went on, “but Dad, before he was twenty, carried a bullet in his side. He had to conquer pain before he could spend strength on other things.”

Dick rubbed his cheek with the mother’s trembling hand.

“Yes,” he said soberly, “it must have been harder to endure the sufferings that clung to him and killed him at last than it would have been to give everything in one swift sacrifice. Endurance,—that’s a word I don’t know, do I, mother?”

“No, dear, that’s the word you know least; but you’ll have to learn it.”

“Ellery, I guess that’s where you have the advantage of me.” Dick looked up with a smile.

“If I have, it’s been a dour lesson,” Norris answered with a wry face.

“Well, if Dad gave his life to his country by dying, I mean to give mine by living,” Dick went on. “There must be things that need doing.”

“More than there are men to do them,” said his mother softly. “You have his spirit and his genius. You have health, too. Don’t put a bullet in your young manhood.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“There are a thousand wounds besides those from a gun. I’m counting on you to live his life as he would have liked to live it—to be his son, Dick.”

“You mustn’t expect the sun and the moon to stand still before me.”

“Oh, well, I dare say I’m as foolish as other mothers.” Mrs. Percival laughed as though she must do that or cry. “But you were certainly born to something, Dick. You’ve shown it ever since you organized your first militia company and whipped the five-year-olds in the next street.”

“And he’s kept right on bossing his particular gang ever since. Richard Dux,” smiled Ellery.

The boy grinned up at them, and his mind traveled to those later days when that leadership of his was so easily acknowledged as to be axiomatic. He saw in panorama the stormy joys of college life with the victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd which toils at the drudgery of progress but does not taste its glory. So many oblivions go to make one reputation.

Dick knew that power was in him. To others it showed in his unconscious self-confidence of carriage, in his eyes that glowed, in the electric something that compelled attraction.

But now college visions were fading into “the light of common day”. The boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora, but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods. Hods are uninspiring objects.

Dick stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the rhythmic strokes of his mother’s hand upon his well-thatched head as she watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow classmen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward. Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and then more cities and