My country's part

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. "My Grandmother and Myself" ... 1

II. The United States and the World War 40

Chapter I "my Grandmother And Myself"

What can an American boy or an American girl do for our country?

The ways are many. Every man, woman, and child in the United States has the duty of defending the nation. In time of war every American must be in spirit, if he cannot be in actual duty, a soldier. A soldier's part is to guard his nation. An American's part is to guard America. The guarding may be done by saving the food that the government asks its citizens to save, by buying War Thrift Stamps, by buying Liberty Bonds, by working for the Red Cross, or for other patriotic organizations; but it must be done with the idea that our country is our first concern, our first care.

Every American must be watchful for his country's welfare. How may he do this duty.^ By remembering always that he is, first of all.

an American. No matter what country his father or mother, or grandfather or grandmother came from, he is American, with the rights and privileges and obhgations of his citizenship. And he must have no divided allegiance.

The story of what one American boy could do for his country is told in the story that follows. Some people call this a fiction story. But the root of it is truth. For every boy and every girl in the United States can hold to the love of country that John Sutton's grandmother put into his soul through the incidents that make up the tale of

*'My Grandmother and Myself"

My grandmother was at the basement window, peering into the street as if she were watching for some one, when I came home from school. "Is that you, John?" she asked me as I stood in the hall stamping the snow from my boots. "Sure!" I called to her. "Who'd you think I was.^^ A spirit.^"

She laughed a little as I went into the room and flung down my books. My grandmother hasn't seen any one in ten years, though she sits day after day looking out on the street as if a parade were passing; but she knows the thump of my books on the table as well as she knows the turning of my father's key in the lock of the door. "'Tis a lively spirit you'd make, Shauneen," she said, with that chuckle she saves for me. *'No, 'twas your father I thought was coming."

"What'd he be doing home at this time.^^"

*' These are queer days," she said, "and there are queer doings in them."

"There's nothing queer that I can see," I told her.

"I'm an old, blind woman," she said, "but sometimes I see more than do they who have the sight of their two eyes." She said it so solemnly, folding her hands one over the other as she drew herself up in her chair, that I felt a little thrill creeping up my spine. "What do you mean.''" I asked her. "Time'U tell you," she said.

My mother came in from the kitchen then. "Norah forgot to order bacon for the morning," she said. "Will you go to the market, John, before you do anything else.^^"

"Oh, I'm going skating," I protested.

"It won't take you five minutes," said my mother. She seemed tired and worried. The look in her eyes made me feel that there was trouble hanging over the house. My mother isn't like my grandmother. When things go wrong, my grandmother stands up straight, and throws back her shoulders, and fronts ahead as if she were a general giving orders for attack; but my mother wilts like a hurt flower. She was drooping then while she stood in the room, so I said, "All right, I'll go," though I'd promised the fellows to come to the park before four o'clock.

"And look in at the shop as you go by," my grandmother said, "and see if your father's there now."

"Why shouldn't he be?" my mother asked.

There was a queer sound in her voice that urged me around past my father's shop. My father was there in the Httle office, going over blue-prints with Joe Krebs's uncle and Mattie Kleiner's father and a big man I'd never seen before. I told my grandmother when I went home. "I knew it," she said. "I knew it. And I dreamed last night of my cousin Michael who died trying to escape from Van Diemen's Land."

"You knew what.^^" I asked her, for again that strange way of hers sent shivery cold over me.

"Go to your skating," she bade me.

There wasn't much skating at Tompkins Square, though, when I found the crowd. The sun had come out strong in the afternoon and the ice was melting. "Ground-hog must have seen his shadow last week," Bennie Curtis said. All the fellows — Joe Carey and Jim Dean and Frank Belden and Joe Krebs and Mattie Kleiner and Fred Wendell and the rest of them — had taken off their skates and were starting a tug of war in the slush. Mattie Kleiner was the captain on one side and Frank Belden the captain on the other. Mattie had chosen Joe Krebs and Jim Dean and Joe Carey on his side. Just as I came along he shouted that he chose me. Frank Belden yelled that it was his choice and that he'd take me. "He don't want to be on your side!" Mattie cried. "He's with the Germans !"

"Well, I guess not," I said, "any more than I'm with the English. I'm an American."

"You can't be just an American in this battle," Frank Belden said.

"Then I'll stay out of it," I told him.

They all started to yell "Neutral!" and "Fraid cat!" and "Oh, you dove of peace!" at me. I got tired of it after a while, and I went after Mattie hard. When I'd finished with him he bawled at me: "Wait till your father knows, he'll fix you !"

"What for?" I jeered.

"For going against his principles, that's what," Mattie Kleiner roared.

*'I'd like to know what you know about my father's principles." I laughed at him.

"Well, I ought to know," he cried. "I heard him take the oath."

"What oath?" we all demanded, but Mattie went off in surly silence. Joe Krebs and Joe Carey trailed after him. I stayed with the other fellows until it was dark. Then I started for home.

Joe Carey was waiting for me at the corner. "Do you believe him, John.^^" he asked me. "Do you believe Mattie about the oath.^^"

"How's that.^" I parried. I seemed to remember having heard a man who'd been at the house a fortnight before whispering something about an oath, and I knew that I'd heard my mother say to my grandmother: "I pray to God he'll get in no trouble with any oaths or promises." I kept wondering if Mattie Kleiner's father and Joe Krebs's uncle and the big man with the blue-prints who'd been in my father's shop had anything to do with it. "Oh, Mattie's talking in his sleep," I said.

"Well, maybe," said Joe Carey; "but he wasn't sleeping the night they had the meeting in his house. He was on the stairs going up to the top floor, and he kept the door open a little way and he heard everything they said, and nobody at all knew he was there."

Joe Carey's eyes were almost popping out of his head, and so I knew that Mattie had been telling him a long story. "I guess he didn't hear very much," I said.

"You bet he did," Joe declared. "He heard them reading the letters telling people not to go on the ships because they were going to be sunk, and he heard them talking about bombs and munition factories. He says that he heard your father say that he'd gladly lay down his life for the sake of Ireland."

"But Ireland's not in this war!"

"Sure it is! Mattie says the Germans are going to free Ireland if they beat England. That's why the Irish ought to be with the Germans. Mattie says your father'U be awful ashamed that you wouldn't go on his side. Mat tie says your father "

"I don't give a whoop what Mattie says about my father," I told him. "I guess I can take my own part."

"I guess you'll have to," said Joe.

As I went up the street toward our house I had that queer feeling that comes sometimes after I've been away for a while, a fear that something terrible has happened while I've been gone and that I'll be blamed for it. It was dark on the street, for people hadn't lighted the lamps in the basement dining-rooms, and I was hurrying along when suddenly a man's voice came over my shoulder. I hadn't heard his step behind me at all, and I jumped when he spoke. "Where does Mr. John Sutton live ^ " he asked me.

"Right there." I pointed to our house.

"Do you know him.^" he asked. Through the dark I could see that he was a tall man with sharp eyes. I knew that I had never seen him before, and that he didn't look like any of the men who came to my father's machine-shop. "Don't you know Mr. Sutton .f^" he repeated.

"Yes, sir."

"Know him well, sonny.'*"

"Yes, sir."

"How well?"

"He's my father."

He whistled softly, then laughed, turned on his heel, and strode down the street. I watched him to see if he'd take the turn toward the shop, but he turned the other way at the corner. I thought that I'd tell my grandmother about him but my mother was with her in the dark when I went in. They were talking very low, as if some one were dead in the house, but I heard my mother say, "If I only knew how far he's gone in this !" and my grandmother mutter: "Sure, the farther he goes in, the farther back he'll have to come." I stumbled over a chair as I went into the room with them, and they both stopped talking.

I could hear the little hissing whisper my grandmother always makes while she says the rosary, but I could hear no sound from my mother at all until she rose with a sigh and lighted the gas-lamp. She looked at me as if she hadn't known I'd been there. "Have you any home work to do to-night, John.^" she asked me.

"No, ma'am," I said. "It's Friday."

"Then I want you to come to church with me after your dinner," she said.

"Oh, I don't want to go to church," I'd said before my grandmother spoke.

"'Twill be a queer thing to me as long as I live," she said, "that those who have don't want what they have, and that those who haven't keep wanting."

The telephone-bell rang just then up in the room that my father used for an office, and I raced up to answer it. A man's voice, younger than that of the man who'd spoken to me, came over the wire. *'Say, is this John Sutton's residence?" it asked. "And is he home.'^ And, if he isn't, who are you.'*"

"What do you want.^^" I called.

"Information. This is The World. We hear that there's to be a meeting of the clans to-night, and we want to know where it's to be held."

"I don't know," I said.

"Can you find out.'^"

*'No," I lied. "There's nobody home."

"Won't your father be home for dinner?"

Even then I could hear his key turning in the lock, could hear him passing on his way up to his bedroom, but a queer kind of caution was being born in me. "No, sir," I said.

"Who was that?" my grandmother asked me when I went down.

I told her of the call, told her, too, of the man who had stopped me on the street. Her rosary slipped through her fingers. "I feared it," she said. Then the whisper of her praying began again.

At dinner my father was strangely silent. Usually he talks a great deal, all about politics, and the newspapers, and the trouble with the schools, and woman suffrage, and war. But he said nothing at all except to ask me if the skating were good. My mother was just as quiet as he, and I would have been afraid to open my mouth if my grandmother hadn't started in to tell about New York in the days she'd come here, more than sixty-five years ago. She talked and talked about how different everything had been then, with no tall buildings and no big bridges and no subways and no elevateds. "Faith, you can be proud of your native town, John," she said to my father.

"I wish I'd been born in Ireland," he said.

She laughed. "And if I'd stayed in Ireland I'd have starved," she said, "and little chance you'd have had of being born anywhere."

"It might have been just as well," he said bitterly.

"Oh, no," she said; "there's Shauneen."

He rose from the table, flinging down his napkin. "I won't be home till very late," he said to my mother.

She stood up beside him. "Do you have to go, John.f^" she asked him.

"Yes," he said.

"Oh, John," she said, "I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of what may happen you."

"Nothing'll happen me," he said.

I wanted to tell him of the strange man who had halted me on the street, and of the telephone call, but my father's anger was rising and I feared to fan it to flame. My grandmother said nothing until after my father had gone. Then she spoke to my mother.

"Don't you know better," she asked her, "and you eighteen years married to him, than to ask John not to do something you don't want him to do.^^"

My mother began to cry as we heard the banging of the door after my father. "Well, if you can do nothing else," my grandmother said, "you'd better be off to church. Keep your eyes open, Shauneen," she warned me while my mother was getting her hat and coat.

It was a grand night, with the evening star low in the sky, like a lamp, and the big yellow

I "MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 15

i

moon just rising in the east. The wind blew sharp and salt off the water, but there was a promise of spring in the air, saying that it must be almost baseball time. We went over to the Jesuit church, walking slowly all the way. There we knelt in the dark until I was stiff. As we came out my mother stopped at the holywater font. "John," she said, "will you promise me that if you ever marry you'll never set any cause but God's above your wife.''"

"No, ma'am, I won't," I said, vaguely understanding that my father had hurt my mother by his refusal to stay at home, and wondering what cause he had set above her. As we walked toward the car-line I remembered what Joe Carey had told me of Mattie Kleiner's speech about my father. "Do you have to go to Ireland to die for Ireland .f'" I asked her. She clutched my hand. "My grandfather died for Ireland," she said, "and he wasn't the first of his line to die for her. But I pray God that he may have been the last." She said no more till we came into our own house.

16 MY COL^TRY'S PART

My grandmother was still at the window of the dining-room. There was no light, and my mother did not make one. "There was another telephone call," my grandmother said. "Norah answered it. 'Twas the newspaper calling again for John to ask about the meeting. She said she knew nothing about it and that no one was here to answer."

"Do you suppose," I said, "it, was detectives?"

They said nothing, and I could feel a big lump coming up my throat. I thought they might not have heard me until my grandmother said: "Do you know, Kate, where the meeting is.''

"I don't know, and I don't want to know," my mother cried. She turned to me sharply. "Go to bed, John," she said.

"I know where the meetings are," I blurted out, eager enough for any excuse to put off the hateful order. "They're at Mattie Kleiner's house, because he hides on the stairs when they come, and he heard them take the oath."

*'Is that Matthew Kleiner's boy?" my grandmother asked, so quietly that I thought she had not realized the importance of my news.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Go to bed, Shauneen." She repeated my mother's order.

I went up-stairs, leaving the two of them silent in the dark. I whistled while I undressed, but I shivered after I had turned out the light and jumped between the sheets. I was going to lie awake waiting for my father's return, but I must have dozed, for I thought that it was in the middle of the night that something woke me. I knew, as soon as I woke, that some one was in my room. I could feel him groping. I tried to speak, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then I heard a faint whisper. "Shauneen," it said.

So far away it seemed that I thought it might be a ghost until my grandmother spoke again. "Your mother's in bed now," she said. "Put on your clothes as quick as you can."

"What is it?" I whispered.

"We're going to Matthew Kleiner's, you and I," she said. "I'd go alone if I could see."

" What tune is it .?^"

"Between ten and eleven."

I pulled my clothes on as fast as I could. Then stealthily as thieves we crept out from my room and down the stairs. I held my grandmother's hand and wondered at its steadiness. When we had come outside the basement door she halted me. "Look down the street for the tall man," she bade me. There was no one in sight, however, and we walked along sturdily, turning corners until we came to Kleiner's.

It was a red-brick house in a row, not a basement house like ours, but with a cellar below and an attic above its two main floors. There was no light on the first floor, but I thought that I saw a stream behind the drawn curtains up-stairs. I found the bell and pushed on it hard. No one came for a long time. I rang again. I could see shadows back of the shades before Mattie Kleiner's mother came.

*'What is it?" she demanded before she opened the door.

"Tell her that your mother's sick and that you've come for your father," my grandmother ordered me. I repeated what she'd said. Mrs. Kleiner opened the door. "Oh," she cried, "it is Mrs. Sutton and little John. Oh, you did frighten me. Is the mother very sick.^ I shall call the father."

"Let me go to him," my grandmother said. We were inside the hall then, and I put her hand on the railing of the stairway. She had started up before Mrs. Kleiner tried to stop her. "I've a message for him," said my grandmother. Mrs. Kleiner and I followed her. At the top of the stairs I turned her toward the front room, for I could hear the murmur of voices. I passed a door and wondered if Mattie Kleiner were hiding behind it. "Oh, we must not go in," Mrs. Kleiner pleaded. "The men will not want us to go in." She tried to stop us, but my grandmother turned, looking at her as if she could see her. "I've always followed my own conscience, ma'am," she said, "not my husband's, nor my son's, nor any other

5 ?»

man s.

From within the front room came the sound of the voices, growing louder and louder as we stood there, my grandmother alert, Mrs. Kleiner appalled, I myseK athrill. I could hear my father's voice, short, sharp. "It's our great opportunity," he was saying. "We have only to strike the blow at England's empire, and the empire itself will arise to aid us. Twenty thousand men flung into Canada will turn the trick. French Quebec is disaffected. What if soldiers are there "? We can fight them ! We may die, but what if we do? We will have started the avalanche that will destroy Carthage !"

There were cries of "Right !" to him. Then a man began to talk in German. His voice rang out harshly. From the murmurs that came out to us we knew that the men were applauding his words, but we had no idea of what the words were. Mrs. Kleiner stood wringing her hands. "Who's in there ? " my grandmother asked her.

"I do not know," she insisted.

"Joe Krebs's uncle is there," I said. "1 know his cough. And Mr. Winngart who keeps the deHcatessen-shop. And Frank Belden's father; and that's Mr. Carey's voice."

"They just meet for fun," groaned Mrs. Kleiner.

"Sure, I saw that kind of fun before," said my grandmother, "when the Fenians went after the Queen's Own."

My father's voice rose again. "We are ready to fire the torch .^^ We are ready to send out the word to-night for the mobilization of our sympathizers? We are ready to stand together to the bitter end.^"

"We are ready !" came the shout.

Then my grandmother opened the door.

Through the haze of their tobacco smoke they looked up, the dozen men crowded into the Kleiners' front bedroom, to see my grandmother standing before them, a bent old woman in her black dress and shawl, her little jet bonnet nodding valiantly from its perch on her thin white hair. She looked around as if she could see every one of them. My father had sprung forward at her coming, and, as if to hold him off, she put up one hand.

"7^ it yourself, John Sutton, who's talking here of plots, and plans, and war f she said. Her voice went up to a sharp edge. She flung back her head as if she defied them to answer her. All of them, my father and Joe Krebs's uncle and Mattie Kleiner's father and Mr. Carey and Mr. Winngart and the big man who'd had the blue-prints in the shop, and the others, stared at her as if she were a ghost. No one of them moved as she spoke. '"Tis a fine lot you are to be sitting here thinking ways to bring trouble on yourselves, and your wives, and your children, and your country. Who are there here of you.^^ Is it yourself, Benedict Krebs, who's going out to fight for Germany when your own father came to this very street to get away from Prussia ? Is it you, Matthew

Kleiner, who gives roof to them who plot against America, you, who came here to earn a living that you couldn't earn at home? Is it you, Michael Carey, who's helping them hurt the land that's making you a rich man ? Shame on you; shame on you all!"

"Why shouldn't we fight England?" Joe Carey's father said with a growl. "You'd be the last one, Mrs. Sutton, that I'd think'd set yourself against that."

'"Tis not England," said my grandmother, "that you fight with your plots. 'Tis America you strike when you strike here. And, as long as you stay here, be Americans and not traitors !"

They began to murmur at that, and my father said: "You don't know what you're talking about, mother. You'd better take John home. This is no place for either of you."

"No more than it's a place for you," she said. "Will you be coming home with me now.''

"I will not," my father said.

''Faith, and you'll all be wishing you had," she told them, "when the jails'll be holding you in the morning."

"The jails!" The big man who had held the blue-prints came closer to us. "What is it you say of jails .'^ You have told the police, then.?"

"I didn't need to," my grandmother said. "The government men have been watching this long time. 'Twill be at midnight that they'll come here. But 'tis not myself they'll be finding." I saw the men's glances flash around the room through the smoky haze before she called: "Come, Shauneen." I took her hand again and led her out of the room. Just before the door closed after us I saw that my father's face had grown very white, and that Mattie Kleiner's father had dropped his pipe on the floor.

Outside the house I spoke to my grandmother tremblingly. "Do the police really know.f^" I asked her. She gave her dry little chuckle. "If they don't, they should," she answered; "but I was born an O'Brien, and I've never known one of them yet that ever told the poKce anything. No, Shauneen," she laughed, "'twas the high hill I shot at, but I'm thinking that the shot struck. We'll watch."

We crossed the street and waited in the shadow of the house at the corner. For a little while all was quiet at Kleiner's. Then I saw the tall man come out with Joe Krebs's uncle. After a time my father came out with Mr. Winngart and Mr. Carey. They walked to the other corner and stood there a moment before they separated, "Shall we go home now.^^" I asked my grandmother after I had told her what I had seen.

"Not yet," she said. "I've one more errand to do this night." I thought it might have something to do with the tall man who'd spoken to me or with the telephone call, and I wondered when she sighed. "I'm a very old woman," she seemed to be saying to herself. "I'll be ninety-one years come Michaelmas Day. Some of the world I've seen, and much of" life. Out of it all I've brought but a few things. I'd thought to give these to my son. But — " She paused. "How old are you, Shauneen.'^" she asked me.

"Fourteen," I said.

"Old enough," she nodded. She turned her head as if she were looking for something or some one. Then: "Do you know your way to the Battery .f^" she asked me.

"Sure," I told her. "Are you going there .f^"

"We are."

It had been quiet enough in our part of town. It was quieter yet when we came to Bowling Green and walked across to the Battery. Down there, past the high buildings and the warehouses, we seemed to have come into the heart of a hush. To the north of us the sky was afire with the golden glow from the up-town lights. In front of us ran the East River and the North River. Out on Bedloe's Island I could see the shining of the Goddess of Liberty's torch. Every little while a ferryboat, all yellow with lights, would shoot out on the water. A sailing-vessel moved slowly after its puffing tug. The little oyster-boats were coming in from the bay. A steamer glided along past it as I walked with my grandmother out toward the old Castle Garden.

On the Saturday before Joe Carey and I had come down to the piers, prowling all afternoon on the docks, watching the men bringing in the queer crates and boxes and bags while we told each other of the places from where the fruits and spices and coffee and wines had come. There were thousands and thousands of ships out there in the dark, I knew, and I began to tell my grandmother what some of the sailors had told us of how the trade of the world was crowding into New York, with the ships all pressing the docks for room. "If you could only see it!" I said to her. "I can see more than that," she said. Then: "Take me to the edge of the waters," she bade me.

Wondering and a little frightened, I obeyed her, trying to solve the while the mystery of her whim to bring me to the deserted park in the middle of the night. "Is Castle Garden over there?" she pointed. "Then I've my bearings now."

She stood alone, a little way off from me, staring seaward as if she counted the shadowy ships. The wind blew her thin white hair from under her bonnet and raised the folds of her shawl. There in the lateness of the night, alone at the edge of the Battery, she didn't seem to be my grandmother at all, but some stranger. I remembered the story I'd read somewhere of an old woman who'd brought a pile of books to a King of Rome, books that she threw away, one by one, as he refused them, until there was but one book left. When he'd bought that one from her he'd found that it was the book of the future of the empire, and that he'd lost all the rest through his folly. As I looked at my grandmother I thought she must be like the old woman of the story. Even her voice sounded strange and deep when she turned to me.

"It was sixty -five years ago the 7th of

November that I first stood on this soil," she said. '"Tis a long lifetime, and, thank God, a useful one I've had. Burdens I've had, but never did I lack the strength to bear them. Looking back, I'm sorry for many a word and many a deed, but I've never sorrowed that I came here."