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<h1 class="break-before">YELLOW BUTTERFLIES<br/></h1>
<p class="center p140"><b>BY</b><br/>
Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews</p>
<hr class="full"/>
<h2 id="NOTE">NOTE</h2>
<p>Throughout this story there are sentences
and paragraphs quoted, taken
bodily from a press account of the coming
of the American Unknown Soldier.
If other sentences or phrases occur for
which proper credit has not been given,
it is because the story-teller’s mind was
so saturated with the beauty of this account
that its wording seemed the inevitable
form.</p>
<p>For such borrowed grace the writer
offers grateful acknowledgment to the
young reporter who, given what is surely
the most thrilling episode in all history
to write about, has made what has
been well-called “the finest bit of newspaper
work ever done.” Acknowledgment
and thanks to Mr. Kirk Simpson.</p>
<p><span class="smcap"> Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews.</span></p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2 id="YELLOW_BUTTERFLIES">YELLOW BUTTERFLIES</h2>
<p>Out from the door of the house
burst the laughing, shouting
little lad. He raced across the
grass and halted by the tulip-bed;
there, with yet more shouts of full-throated
baby laughter, he turned to
look back at his young mother, racing
after him, standing now in the
doorway. His head was yellow as a
flower, almost as yellow as the tulips,
and the spun-silk, glittering hair of
five years old curled tight in a manner
of aureole. As the girl gazed at
him, glorying in him, suddenly the
sun came brilliantly from under a
cloud, and, as if at a signal, out of the
clover-patch at the edge of the lawn
stormed a myriad of butterflies and
floated about the golden head.</p>
<p>“Oh, the butterflies take you for a
flower, Dicky,” cried the girl.</p>
<p>The little chap stood quite still,
smiling and blinking through the
winged sunshine, and then, behold,
three or four of the lovely things
fluttered down on his head. The
young woman flashed out and caught
him and hugged him till he squealed
lustily.</p>
<p>“Don’t, muvver,” remonstrated
Dicky. “You’ll scare my ’ittle birds.
They ’ike us, muvver.”</p>
<p>“It’s good luck to have a butterfly
light on you,” she informed him, and
then, in a flash of some unplaced
memory, with the quick mysticism of
her Irish blood: “A butterfly is the
symbol of immortality.”</p>
<p>“’Esh,” agreed Dicky gravely.
“’Esh a ’sympum—” and there he
lost himself, and threw back his head
and roared rich laughter at the droll
long word.</p>
<p>“It must have looked pretty,” the
boy’s father agreed that night. “I
wonder what sort they were. I used
to collect them. There’s a book—”
He went to the shelves and searched.
“This is it.” There were pages here
and there of colored pictures. “No.
2,” he read, and pointed to a list.
“The Cloudless Sulphur. Were they
solid yellow?” He turned a page.
“‘The Cloudless Sulphur,’” he began
reading aloud. “‘Large, two and
a half inches. Wings uniform bright
canary color. Likely to light on yellow
flowers; social; it flies in masses
and congregates on flowers. Habit of
migrating in flocks from Southeast
to Northwest in the spring and from
Northwest to Southeast in the autumn.
Food, cassia, etc. Family,
Pieridæ.’ That’s the fellow,” decided
the boy’s father, learned in butterflies.
“A Pierid. ‘Many butterflies
hide under clover,’” he read along,
“‘and down in grasses—pass the
nights there. Some sorts only come
out freely in sunshine.’ Didn’t you
say the sun came?”</p>
<p>“All at once. They flew up then
as if at a command.” She nodded.
“That’s exactly the creature. And
where it says about lighting on flowers
of the same color—they did take
Dicky’s head for a flower, didn’t
they, Tom?”</p>
<p>“It certainly seems as if they did.”
The man smiled. “Kentucky is likely
on the line of their spring migration
Northwesterly. I reckon Dicky’s
friends are the Cloudless Sulphur.”</p>
<p>Dicky’s father died when the boy
was eleven. The years ran on. Life
adjusted itself as life must, and the
child grew, as that other Child twenty
centuries back, in wisdom and stature
and in favor with God and man.
There might have been more boys in
America as upstanding in body and
character, as loving and clever and
strong and merry, as beautiful within
and without as her boy, the woman
considered, but she had never seen
one. His very faults were dear human
qualities which made him more
adorable. With his tenderness and
his roughness, his teachableness and
his stubbornness, his terror of sentiment
and his gusts of heavenly sweet
love-making, the boy satisfied her to
the end of her soul. Buoyancy found
her again, and youth, and the joy of
an uphill road with this gay, strong
comrade keeping step along it. Then
the war came. All his life she had
missed no chance to make her citizen
first of all things an American. And
now that carefully fed flame of patriotism
flamed to cover all America.</p>
<p>“We must go in, mother. Gosh!
it’s only decent. We could bring
peace. We must go in,” he raged. He
was too young to go across and he
raged more at his youth. His mother
gloried in and shivered at his rage.
At last America was in, and the boy,
who had trained in his university,
could not fling himself fast enough
into the service. The woman, as hundreds
of thousands of other American
women, was no slacker. There was a
jingle in the papers:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse outdent">“America, he is my only one,</div>
<div class="verse">My hope, my pride, and joy;</div>
<div class="verse">But if I had another</div>
<div class="verse">He should march beside his brother,</div>
<div class="verse">America, here’s my boy!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>The jingle hit straight at armies of
women in those days.</p>
<p>No officers’ training-camp for Dick;
he would go as an enlisted man with
the rank and file of American men.</p>
<p>“But you’re officer material,” complained
his mother. “Aren’t you
wasting power that the country may
need?”</p>
<p>“If I can win shoulder-bars, honey,
hooray!” said Dick. “Otherwise, me
for a dough-boy.”</p>
<p>So as a dough-boy he went to Camp
Meade, but in three months wore the
stripes of a sergeant. Radiant, he
tumbled in at home a week later,
such a joyful lad that he sputtered
ecstasy and slang. Tremendous he
looked in his uniform, fresh colored
from cold barracks and constant exercise
and in an undreamed pink of
condition.</p>
<p>“I never considered you a delicate
person,” the woman spoke up to the
six feet two of him, “but now you’re
overpowering, you’re beefy.”</p>
<p>“Couldn’t kill me with an axe,”
assented Dick cheerfully, and back
in her brain a hideous, unformed
thought stirred, of things that were
not axes, that could kill easily even
this magnificent young strength.</p>
<p>They were as gay together as if all
the training and the uniform and the
stir and panoply of war were merely
a new and rather thrilling game. She
saw to it that there were theatres and
dances and girls doing, and the lad
threw himself into everything with,
however, a delicious grumble after
each party:</p>
<p>“I don’t get a chance to see you at
all.” That was music.</p>
<p>And then the short, gay leave was
done and Dick back at Meade again.
The winter months went, with letters
thickly coming and going. And late
in May he wrote that he had leave
once more for two days, and instantly
he was there. There was no word
as to what the sudden leave meant,
but they knew. When it was possible
our soldiers due to sail were given
this short flying visit to their homes.
Transports were going all the time
now; great ship followed great ship
till it seemed as if the Atlantic must
be brown with khaki. And not the
nearest of any must know when his
time was, for this was one bit of the
national patriotism, to guard the
knowledge of sailing ships from the
enemy. So the boy told nothing, but
his eyes embraced her with a burning
word unspoken. And her eyes
met them with certain knowledge.</p>
<p>“Let’s cut out the girls and balls
this time,” he said. And one day,
apropos of nothing: “You’re a
peach.”</p>
<p>She smiled back cheerfully as women
were smiling at boys all over the
United States at that date. “I couldn’t
bear it if you weren’t in the service,”
she said.</p>
<p>In a few minutes—it appeared—the
two days were over. “Run across for
one second and say good-by to Lynnette,”
she suggested, when the racing
hours were within three of their
end. Lynnette was the girl next door
who had grown up in the shadow of
Dick’s bigness, a little thing two
years younger, shy and blunt and not
just a pretty girl, but with luminous
eyes and a heart of gold. Dick had to
be prodded a bit to be nice to Lynnette.</p>
<p>“I don’t want to miss one second of
you, honey,” he objected.</p>
<p>“Don’t you dare stay over a second.
But a glimpse would mean a
lot to her, and she’s a darling to
me.”</p>
<p>“Oh, all right,” agreed Dick. “Because
she’s a darling to you—” and
he swung off.</p>
<p>“Dick—” as he sprang from the
gallery. He turned. “Kiss her good-by,
Dick.”</p>
<p>“What sort of a mother——!”</p>
<p>“She’ll object, but she’ll like it.”</p>
<p>“You little devil,” Dick chuckled,
“can’t you let a fellow handle his
own kissing?” And started again,
easy, elastic, made of sliding muscles.</p>
<p>“Oh, Dick!” called his mother once
more, and once more the brown figure
halted. “Now, then, woman?”</p>
<p>“Don’t peck, Dick; kiss her a thorough
one.”</p>
<p>Dick’s laughter rang across the little
place. The echo of that big laughter
in the woman was not a quickened
pulse of gladness as it had been
all his days; a sick aching answered
the beloved sound, and the stab of a
thought—would ever Dick laugh
across the garden again? With that
he was back, grinning.</p>
<p>“I did it,” stated Dick. “It’s not
often a chap’s commanding officer
sends him out with orders for a kissing
attack, so I put my elbows into
it and made a good job. She’s
kissed to pieces.”</p>
<p>“Dick!”</p>
<p>“Well, now! It’ll teach you to go
careful how you start a man on them
tricks. Lynnette’s a worthy child,
but I’d never have thought of kissing
her. Yet it wasn’t so bad. Rather
subtle.” He licked his lips tentatively.</p>
<p>“Dicky! Vulgar, vulgar boy!”</p>
<p>“You know, I believe she did like
it,” confided Dick.</p>
<p>Then very soon, in the middle of the
sunshiny, warm morning he went.
In the hall, where they had raced and
played games long ago, she told him
good-by, doing a difficult best to give
him cheer and courage to remember,
not heart-break. Something helped
her unexpectedly, reaction, maybe, of
a chord overstrained; likely the good
Lord ordered it; His hand reaches
into queer brain-twists. She said
small, silly things that made the boy
laugh, till at last the towering figure
was upon her and she was crushed
into khaki, with his expert rifleman’s
badge digging into her forehead. She
was glad of the hurt. The small defenses
had gone down and she knew
that only high Heaven could get her
through the next five seconds with
a proper record as a brave man’s
mother. In five seconds he turned and
fled, and with a leap was through the
door. Gone! She tossed out her arms
as if shot, and fled after him. Already
he was across the lawn, by the
tulip-bed, and suddenly he wheeled
at the patch of color and his visored
cap was off, and he was kissing his
hand with the deep glow in his eyes
she had seen often lately. It was as if
the soul of him came close to the
windows and looked out at her. His
blond hair in the sunlight was almost
as yellow as on that other day
long ago when—What was this? Up
from the clover in the ditch, filling
all the air with fluttering gold,
stormed again a flight of yellow butterflies,
the Cloudless Sulphur on
their spring migration. The boy as he
stood looking back at her shouted
young laughter and the winged things
glittered about him, and with that
two lighted on his head.</p>
<p>“Good luck! It’s for good luck,
mother,” he called.</p>
<p>She watched, smiling determinedly,
dwelling on details, the uniform, the
folds of brown wool puttees, the
bronze shine on his shoes, the gold
spots of light flickering about his
head. He wheeled, stumbling a bit,
and then the light feet sprang away;
there was no Dick there now, only a
glimmering, moving cloud of yellow—meaningless.
The tulip-bed—sunshine—butterflies—silence.
The
world was empty. She clutched at her
chest as if this sudden, sick, dropping
away of life were physical. His
triumphant last word came back to
her, “It’s for good luck, mother”;
then other words followed, words
which she had spoken years ago.</p>
<p>“And for immortality.”</p>
<p>Immortality! She beat her hands
against the wall. Not Dick—not her
boy—her one thing. Not immortality
for him, yet. Not for years and
years—fifty—sixty. He had a right
to long, sweet mortal life before that
terrible immortality. She wanted him
mortal, close, the flesh and blood
which she knew. It was not to be
borne, this sending him away to—Oh,
God! The thousands on thousands
of strong young things like
Dick who had already passed to that
horrible, unknown immortality. The
word meant to her then only death,
only a frantic terror; the subtle, underlying,
enormous hope of it missed
her in the black hour.</p>
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