The Red Cross Girl | Page 5

and that he and I became
dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and
complicated. And he who had given so much friendship to so many
people needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed
for a time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other,
and where there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."

Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first days of
the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't draw all the time, but we
pretended that it did, and with much pretense came faith. From the
fireplace that smoked to the serious things of life we extended our
pretendings, until real troubles went down before them--down and out.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever
lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spireas
were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet
violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep
pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were
in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the
middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning
we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the woods. And
every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke because of
pretending) and talked until the next morning.
He was one of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest pleasure
not in looking backward or forward, but in what is going on at the
moment. Weeks did not have to pass before it was forced upon his
knowledge that Tuesday, the fourteenth (let us say), had been a good
Tuesday. He knew it the moment he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived
the Tuesday sunshine making patterns of bright light upon the floor.
The sunshine rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before
breakfast there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life. That day
began with attentions to his physical well-being. There were exercises
conducted with great vigor and rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian
cold, and a loud and joyous singing of ballads.
At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in
marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood six
feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head carried
by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He
weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the
weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so
tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days that
he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands flat upon the floor.

The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door
you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at
work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a
stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had
written and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and
admire in that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and
pleasure to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would
send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had
drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a
half column of unsigned print, R. H. D. would find you out, and find
time to praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from
his room at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and
hungry, and whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of
excessive energy, and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and
letters and telegrams.
Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen,
dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced
in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or
ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest.
Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of
statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.
Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work
(else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with