A candle in a bottle standing on a box gave out the only
light. But the eyes of the boys were smiling as Bok came in and sat down
on the box on which the nurse had been sitting. He talked with the boys,
got as much of their stories from them as he could, and told them such
home news as he thought might interest them.
After half an hour he arose to leave, when the nurse said: "There is no
one here, Mr. Bok, to say the last words to these boys. Will you do it?"
Bok stood transfixed. In sending men over in the service of the Y. M. C.
A. he had several times told them to be ready for any act that they
might be asked to render, even the most sacred one. And here he stood
himself before that duty. He felt as if he stood stripped before his
Maker. Through the glassless window the sky lit up constantly with the
flashes of the guns, and then followed the booming of a shell as it
landed.
"Yes, won't you, sir?" asked the boy on the right cot as he held out his
hand. Bok took it, and then the hand of the other boy reached out.
What to say, he did not know. Then, to his surprise, he heard himself
repeating extract after extract from a book by Lyman Abbott called The
Other Room, a message to the bereaved declaring the non-existence of
death, but that we merely move from this earth to another: from one room
to another, as it were. Bok had not read the book for years, but here
was the subconscious self supplying the material for him in his moment
of greatest need.
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