The Next of Kin

Those who Wait and Wonder

By

Nellie L. McClung

Author of "Sowing Seeds in Denny," "The Second Chance,"
"The Black Creek Stopping House," and
"In Times like These"

TORONTO
THOMAS ALLEN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1917

Published November 1917

Contents

"You won't have many at the meeting to-day," said the station agent cheerfully, when I went into the small waiting-room to wait for the President of the Red Cross Society, who wanted to see me before the meeting. "No, you won't have many a day like this, although there are some who will come out, wind or no wind, to hear a woman speak—it's just idle curiosity, that's all it is."

"Oh, come," I said, "be generous; maybe they really think that she may have something to say!"

Then the President of the Red Cross Society came and conducted me to the house quite near the station where I was to be entertained. My hostess, who came to the door herself in answer to our ring, was a sweet-faced, little Southern woman transplanted here in northern Canada, who with true Southern hospitality and thoughtfulness asked me if I would not like to step right upstairs and "handsome up a bit" before I went to the meeting,—"not but what you're looking right peart," she added quickly.

"I heard my mamma and some other ladies talking about you," she said, "and wondering what you would be like; and they said that women like you who go out making speeches never know how to dress themselves, and they said that they bet a cent that you just flung your clothes on,—and do you? Because I think it must be lovely to be able to fling your clothes on—and I wish I could! Don't you tell that I told you, will you?—but that is why I came over. I live over there,"—she pointed to a house across the street,—"and I often come to this house. I brought over a jar of cream this morning. My mamma sent it over to Mrs. Price, because she was having you stay here."

"That was very kind of your mamma," I said, much pleased with this evidence of her mother's good-will.

I assured my small guest that mum was the word, and that I should be delighted to have her for a spectator while I went on with the process of making myself look as nice as nature would allow. But she was plainly disappointed when she found that I was not one bit quicker about dressing than plenty of others, even though she tried to speed me up a little.

Soon the President came for me and took me to the Municipal Hall, where the meeting was to be held.

The things that I said to them do not matter; they merely served as an introduction to what came after, when we sat around the stove and the young girls of the company brought us coffee and sandwiches, and mocha cake and home-made candy, and these women told me some of the things that are near their hearts.

She stopped abruptly, and a silence fell on the group of us. She fumbled for a moment in her large black purse, and then handed me an envelope, worn, battered. It was addressed to a soldier in France and it had not been opened. Across the corner, in red ink, was written the words, "Killed in action."

The woman who sat beside her took up the theme. "We have talked a lot about this at our Red Cross meetings. What do the women of the world think of war? No woman ever wanted war, did she? No woman could bring a child into the world, suffering for it, caring for it, loving it, without learning the value of human life, could she? War comes about because human life is the cheapest thing in the world; it has been taken at man's estimate, and that is entirely too low. Now, we have been wondering what can be done when this war is over to form a league of women to enforce peace. There is enough sentiment in the world in favor of human life if we could bind it up some way."

I gazed at the eager faces before me—in astonishment. Did I ever hear high-browed ladies in distant cities talk of the need of education in the country districts?

"Were you not afraid of making trouble?" I asked.

I told her that I did see, and that I believed that she had expressed the very thought that was in the mind of women everywhere.

"Well, then," she said quickly, "why don't you write it? We will forget this when it is all over and we will go back to our old pursuits and there will be nothing—I mean, no record of how we felt. Anyway, we will die and a new generation will take our places. Why don't you write it while your heart is hot?"

"But," I said, "perhaps what I should write would not truly represent what the women are thinking. They have diverse thoughts, and how can I hope to speak for them?"

And that is how it happened. There in the Municipal Hall in the small town of Ripston, as we sat round the stove that cold November day, with the sleet sifting against the windows, I got my commission from these women, whom I had not seen until that day, to tell what we think and feel, to tell how it looks to us, who are the mothers of soldiers, and to whom even now the letter may be on its way with its curt inscription across the corner. I got my commission there to tell fearlessly and hopefully the story of the Next of Kin.

I thought of these things that night when I was being entertained at the Southern woman's hospitable home.

"Go on," I said; "tell me some more. Remember that you women to-day made me promise to write down how this war is hitting us, and I merely promised to write what I heard and saw. I am not going to make up anything, so you are all under obligation to tell me all you can. I am not to be the author of this book, but only the historian."

It bore on it the word, "Matches," in ornate letters, all made of beads, but I noticed that its empty condition belied the inscription.

"Think of the hours of labor that some one has put on that," she went on scornfully, "and now it is such an aristocrat that it takes up all its time at that and has no time to be useful. I know now that it never really intended to hold matches, but simply lives to mock the honest seeker who really needs a match. I have been a real sinner myself," she went on after a pause; "I have been a fiddler, all right. I may as well make a clean breast of it,—I made that match-safe and nearly bored my eyes out doing it, and was so nervous and cross that I was not fit to live with."

"I can't believe that," I said.

Over the world to-day roll great billows of hatred and misunderstanding, which have darkened the whole face of the earth. We believe that there is a switch if we could get to it, but the smoke blinds us and we are choked with our tears. Perhaps if we join hands all of us will be able to do what a few of us could never do. This reaching-out of feeble human hands, this new compelling force which is going to bind us all together, this deep desire for cohesion which swells in our hearts and casts out all smallness and all self-seeking—this is what we mean when we speak of the Next of Kin. It is not a physical relationship, but the great spiritual bond which unites all those whose hearts have grown more tender by sorrow, and whose spiritual eyes are not dimmed, but washed clearer by their tears!

Looking back now, we wonder what we had to worry about! There was politics, of course; we had just had a campaign that warmed up our little province, and some of the beachites were not yet speaking to each other; but nobody had been hurt and nobody was in jail.

The congregations were small, particularly on the hot afternoons, for many of our people did not believe in going to church when the weather was not just right. Indeed, there had been a serious discussion in the synod of one of the largest churches on the question of abolishing prayers altogether in the hot weather; and I think that some one gave notice of a motion that would come up to this effect at the annual meeting. No; religion was not a live topic. There were evidently many who had said, as did one little girl who was leaving for her holidays, "Good-bye, God—we are going to the country."

"Big Boss him say cut down tree," the spokesman of the party said over and over again.

The women in plain and simple language expressed their unexpurgated opinion of Big Boss, and demanded that he be brought to them. The stolid Mikes and Peters were utterly at a loss to know what to do!

"Big Boss—no sense," one woman roared at them, hoping to supplement their scanty knowledge of English with volume of sound.

When the news of war came, we did not really believe it! War! That was over! There had been war, of course, but that had been long ago, in the dark ages, before the days of free schools and peace conferences and missionary conventions and labor unions! There might be a little fuss in Ireland once in a while. The Irish are privileged, and nobody should begrudge them a little liberty in this. But a big war—that was quite impossible! Christian nations could not go to war!

"Somebody should be made to pay dear for this," tearfully declared a doctor's wife. "This is very bad for nervous women."

The days that followed were days of anxious questioning. The men brought back stories of the great crowds that surged through the streets blocking the traffic in front of the newspaper offices reading the bulletins, while the bands played patriotic airs; of the misguided German who shouted, "Hoch der Kaiser!" and narrowly escaped the fury of the crowd.

We held a monster meeting one night at "Windwhistle Cottage," and we all made speeches, although none of us knew what to say. The general tone of the speeches was to hold steady,—not to be panicky,—Britannia rules the waves,—it would all be over soon,—Dr. Robertson Nicholl and Kitchener could settle anything!

Every night when the train came in the crowds waited in tense anxiety to get the papers, and when they were handed out, read them in silence, a silence which was ominous. Political news was relegated to the third page and was not read until we got back to the veranda. In these days nothing mattered; the baker came late; the breakfast dishes were not washed sometimes until they were needed for lunch, for the German maids and the English maids discussed the situation out under the trees. Mary, whose last name sounded like a tray of dishes falling, the fine-looking Polish woman who brought us vegetables every morning, arrived late and in tears, for she said, "This would be bad times for Poland—always it was bad times for Poland, and I will never see my mother again."

In less than a week we were collecting for a hospital ship to be the gift of Canadian women. The message was read out in church one afternoon, and volunteer collectors were asked for. So successful were these collectors all over Canada that in a few days word came to us that enough money had been raised, and that all moneys collected then could be given to the Belgian Relief Fund. The money had simply poured in—it was a relief to give!

If it were not for the fatal curse of modesty I would tell how eagerly I grasped the axe and with what ease I hit, not twice, but half a dozen times in the same place—until the stump yielded. This victory was all the sweeter to me because it came right after our sports day when I had entered every available contest, from the nail-driving competition to the fat woman's race, and had never even been mentioned as among those present!

Before the turn in the road hid it from sight we stopped and looked back at the "Kee-am Cottage"—my last recollection of it is of the boarded windows, which gave it the blinded look of a dead thing, and of the ferns which grandma had brought from the big woods beyond the railway track and planted all round it, and which had grown so quickly and so rank that they seemed to fill in all the space under the cottage, and with their pale-green, feathery fringe, to be trying to lift it up into the sunshine above the trees. Instinctively we felt that we had come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling!