*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30479 ***
How good bacon tasted when you broiled it yourself on a forked stick
THE CAMERONS
OF HIGHBORO
BY
BETH B. GILCHRIST
Author of “CINDERELLA’S GRANDDAUGHTER,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
PHILLIPPS WARD
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Published, September, 1919
CONTENTS
I |
Elliott Plans and Fate Disposes |
1 |
II |
The End of a Journey |
23 |
III |
Cameron Farm |
37 |
IV |
In Untrodden Fields |
63 |
V |
A Slacker Unperceived |
91 |
VI |
Fliers |
120 |
VII |
Picnicking |
146 |
VIII |
A Bee Sting |
171 |
IX |
Elliott Acts on an Idea |
197 |
X |
What’s in a Dress? |
223 |
XI |
Missing |
244 |
XII |
Home-Loving Hearts |
265 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
How good bacon tasted when you broiled it yourself on a forked stick |
Frontispiece |
Laura took the new cousin up to her room |
26 |
Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade. |
140 |
“I’m getting dinner all by myself” |
199 |
THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO
THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO
CHAPTER I
ELLIOTT PLANS AND FATE DISPOSES
Now and then the accustomed world
turns a somersault; one day it faces
you with familiar features, the next it
wears a quite unrecognizable countenance.
The experience is, of course, nothing new,
though it is to be doubted whether it was
ever staged so dramatically and on so vast
a scale as during the past four years.
And no one to whom it happens is ever the
same afterward.
Elliott Cameron was not a refugee.
She did not trudge Flemish roads with the
pitiful salvage of her fortunes on her
back, nor was she turned out of a cottage
2
in Poland with only a sackful of her household
treasures. Nevertheless, American
girl though she was, she had to be evacuated
from her house of life, the house she
had been building through sixteen petted,
autocratic years. This is the story of that
evacuation.
It was made, for all the world, like any
Pole’s or Serbian’s or Belgian’s; material
valuables she let pass with glorious carelessness,
as they left the silver spoons in
order to salvage some sentimental trifle
like a baby-shoe or old love-letters. Elliott
took the closing of her home as she
had taken the disposal of the big car,
cheerfully enough, but she could not leave
behind some absurd little tricks of thought
that she had always indulged in. She was
as strange to the road as any Picardy peasant
and as bewildered, with—shall I say
it?—considerably less pluck and spirit than
some of them, when the landmarks she had
lived by were swept away. But they, you
3
see, had a dim notion of what was happening
to them. Elliott had none. She
didn’t even know that she was being evacuated.
She knew only that ways which
had always worked before had mysteriously
ceased working, that prejudices and
preoccupations and habits of mind and action,
which she had spent her life in accumulating,
she must now say good-by to,
and that the war, instead of being across
the sea, a thing one’s friends and cousins
sailed away to, had unaccountably got
right into America itself and was interfering
to an unreasonable extent in affairs
that were none of its business.
Father came home one night from a
week’s absence and said, as he unfolded
his napkin, “Well, chicken, I’m going to
France.”
They were alone at dinner. Miss Reynolds,
the housekeeper, was dining out
with friends, as she sometimes did; nights
that, though they both liked Miss Reynolds,
4
father and daughter checked with a
red mark.
“To France?” A little thrill pricked
the girl’s spine as she questioned. “Is it
Red Cross?”
“Not this time. An investigation for
the government. It may, probably will,
take months. The government wants a
thorough job done. Uncle Samuel thinks
your ancient parent competent to hold up
one end of the thing.”
“Stop!” Elliott’s soft order commandeered
all her dimples.
“I won’t have you maligning my father,
you naughty man! Ancient parent,
indeed! That’s splendid, isn’t it?”
“I rather like it. I was hoping it would
strike you the same way.”
“When do you go?”
“As soon as I can get my affairs in
shape—I could leave to-morrow, if I had
to. Probably I shall be off in a week or
ten days.”
“I suppose the government didn’t say
anything about my investigating something,
too?”
“Now you mention it, I do not recollect
that the subject came up.”
She shook her head reprovingly, “That
was an omission! However, I think I’ll
go as your secretary.”
Mr. Cameron smiled across the table.
How pretty she was, how daintily arch
in her sweetness! “That arrangement
would be entirely satisfactory to me, my
dear, but I am not taking a secretary. I
shall get one over there, when I need one.”
“But what can I go as?” pursued the
girl. “I’d like to go as something.”
Heavens! she looked as though she
meant it! “I’m afraid you can’t go, Lot,
this time.”
She lifted cajoling eyes. “But I want
to. Oh, I know! I can go to school in
Paris.”
Her little air of having settled the matter
6
left him smiling but serious. “France
has mouths enough to feed without one extra
school-girl’s, chicken.”
“I don’t eat much. Are you afraid of
submarines?”
“For you, yes.”
“I’m not. Daddies dear, mayn’t I go?
I’d love to be near you.”
“Positively, my love, you may not.”
She drew down the corners of her mouth
and went through a bewitching imitation
of wiping tears out of her eyes. But she
wasn’t really disappointed. She had been
fairly certain in advance of what the verdict
would be. There had been a bare
chance, of something different—that was
all, and it didn’t pay to let chances, even
the barest, go by default. So she crumbled
her warbread and remarked thoughtfully,
“I suppose I can stay at home, but it
won’t be very exciting.”
Her father seemed to find his next words
hard to say. “I had a notion we might
7
close the house. It is rather expensive to
keep up; not much point in doing so just
for one, is there? In going to France I
shall give my services.”
“Of course. But the house—” The
delicate brows lifted. “What were you
thinking of doing with me?”
“Dumping you on the corner. What
else?” The two laughed together as at a
good joke. But there was a tightening in
the man’s throat. He wondered how
soon, after next week, he would again be
sitting at table opposite that vivacious
young face.
“Seriously, Lot, I met Bob in Washington.
He was there on conservation business.
When he heard what I was contemplating,
he asked you up to Highboro.
Said Jessica and he would be delighted to
have you visit them for a year. They’re
generous souls. It struck me as a good
plan. Your uncle is a fine man, and I have
always admired his wife. I’ve never seen
8
as much of her as I’d have liked. What
do you say to the idea?”
“Um-m-m.” Elliott did not commit
herself. “Uncle Bob and Aunt Jessica are
very nice, but I don’t know them.”
“House full of boys and girls. You
won’t be lonely.”
The piquant nose wrinkled mischievously.
“That would never do. I like my
own way too well.”
He laughed. “And you generally manage
to get it by hook or by crook!”
“I? You malign me. You give it to
me because you like me.”
How adorably pretty she looked!
He laughed again. “You’ve got your
old dad there, all right. Yes, yes, you’ve
got him there!”
“Didn’t I tell you just now that you
mustn’t call my father old?”
“So you did! So you did! Well, well,
the truth will out now and then, you know.
Could you inveigle Jane into giving us
9
more butter?—By the way, here’s a letter
from Jessica. I found it in the stack
on my desk to-night. Better read it before
you say no.”
“Oh, I will,” Elliott received the letter
without enthusiasm. “Very good of her,
I’m sure. I’ll write and thank her to-morrow;
but I think I’ll go to Aunt
Nell’s.”
“Just as you say. You know Elinor
better. But I rather incline to Bob and
Jess. There is something to be said for
variety, Lot.”
“Yes, but a year is so long. Why, Father
Cameron, a year is three hundred and
sixty-five whole days long and I don’t know
how many hours and minutes and—and
seconds. The seconds are awful! Daddles
darling, I never could support life
away from you in a perfectly strange
family for all those interminable seconds!”
“Your own cousins, chicken; and they
10
wouldn’t seem strange long. I’ve a notion
they’d help make time hustle. Better
read the letter. It’s a good letter.”
“I will—when I don’t have you to talk
to. What’s the matter?”
“Bless me, I forgot to tell Miss Reynolds!
Nell’s coming to-night. Wired
half an hour ago.”
“Aunt Nell? Oh, jolly!” The slender
hands clapped in joyful pantomime. “But
don’t worry about Miss Reynolds. I will
tell Anna to make a room ready. Now we
can settle things talking. It’s so much
more satisfactory than writing.”
The man laughed. “Can’t say no, so
easily, eh, chicken?”
She joined in his laugh. “There is
something in that, of course, but it isn’t
very polite of you to insinuate that any
one would wish to say no to me.”
“I stand corrected of an error in tact.
No, I can’t quite see Elinor turning you
down.”
That was the joy of these two; they were
such boon companions, like brother and sister
together instead of father and daughter.
But now Elliott, too, remembered something.
“Oh, Father! Quincy has scarlet
fever!”
“Scarlet fever? When did he come
down?”
“Just to-day. They suspected it yesterday,
and Stannard came over to Phil
Tracy’s. To-day the doctor made sure.
So Maude and Grace are going right on
from the wedding to that Western ranch
where they were invited. All their outfits
are in the house here, but they will get new
ones in New York.”
“Where’s James?”
“Uncle James went to the hotel, and
Aunt Margaret, of course, is quarantined.
Quincy isn’t very sick. They’ve postponed
all their house-parties for two
months.”
“H’m. Where do they think the boy
caught it?”
“Not an idea. He came home from
school Thursday.”
“Well, Cedarville will be minus Camerons
for a while, won’t it?”
“It certainly will. Both houses closed—or
Uncle James’s virtually so. Do you
know what Aunt Nell is coming for?”
“Not the ghost of a notion. Perhaps
she is going to adopt a dozen young Belgians
and wants me to draw up the papers.”
“Mercy! I hope not a whole dozen, if
I am to stay at Clover Hill with her. Half
a dozen would be enough.”
“Want you at Clover Hill?” said Aunt
Elinor, when the first greetings were over
and she had heard the news. “Why, you
dear child, of course I do! Or rather I
should, if I were to be there myself. But
I’m going to France, too.”
“To France!”
“Red Cross,” with an enthusiastic nod
of the perfectly dressed head. “Lou Emery
and I are going over. That’s what
I stopped off to tell you people. Ran down
to New York to see about my papers. It’s
all settled. We sail next week. Now
I’m hurrying back to shut up Clover Hill.
Then for something worth while! Do you
know,” the fine eyes turned from contemplation
of a great mass of pink roses on
the table, “I feel as though I were on the
point of beginning to live at last. All my
days I have spent dashing about madly in
search of a good time. Now—well, now
I shall go where I’m sent, live for weeks,
maybe, without a bath, sleep in my clothes
in any old place, when I sleep at all; but
I’m crazy, simply crazy to get over there
and begin.”
It was then that Elliott began dimly to
sense a predicament. Even then she
didn’t recognize it for an impasse. Such
things didn’t happen to Elliott Cameron.
14
But she did wish that Quincy had selected
another time for isolating her Uncle
James’s house. Not that she particularly
desired to spend a year, or a fraction of a
year, with the James Camerons, but they
were preferable to her Uncle Robert’s
family, on the principle that ills you know
and understand make a safer venture than
a jump in the dark. Nothing radical was
wrong with the Robert Camerons except
that they were dark horses. They lived
farther away than the other Camerons,
which wouldn’t have mattered—geography
seldom bothered a Cameron—if
they hadn’t chosen to let it. On second
thoughts, perhaps that, however, was exactly
what did matter. Elliott understood
that the Robert Camerons were poor.
More than once she had heard her father
say he feared “Bob was hard up.” But
Bob was as proud as he was hard up; Elliott
knew that Father had never succeeded
in lending him any money.
She let these things pass through her
mind as she reviewed the situation. Proud
and independent and poor—those were
worthy qualities, but they did not make
any family interesting. They were more
apt, Elliott thought, to make it uninteresting.
No, the Robert Camerons were out
of the question, kindly though they might
be. If she must spend a year outside her
own home, away from her father-comrade,
she preferred to spend it with her own sort.
There is this to be said for Elliott Cameron;
she had no mother, had had no
mother since she could remember. The
mother Elliott could not remember had
been a very lovely person, and as broad-minded
as she was charming. Elliott had
her mother’s charm, a personal magnetism
that twined people around her little finger,
but she was essentially narrow-minded.
With Elliott it was a matter of upbringing,
of coming-up rather, since within somewhat
wide limits her upbringing had, after
16
all, been largely in her own hands. Henry
Cameron had had neither the heart nor the
will to thwart his only child.
Before she went to bed, Elliott, curled
up on her window-seat, read Aunt Jessica’s
letter. It was a good letter, a delightful
letter, and more than that. If she had
been older, she might, just from reading it,
have seen why her father wanted her to
go to Highboro. As it was, something
tugged at her heartstrings for a moment,
but only for a moment. Then she swung
her foot over the edge of the window-seat
and disposed of the situation, as she had always
disposed of situations, to her liking.
She had no notion that the Fates this time
were against her.
The next day her cousin Stannard Cameron
came over. Stannard was a long,
lazy youth, with a notion that what he did
or didn’t do was a matter of some importance
to the universe. All the Camerons
were inclined to that supposition, all but
17
the Robert Camerons; and we don’t know
about them yet.
“So they’re going to ship me up into the
wilds of Vermont to Uncle Bob’s,” he
ended his tale of woe. “They’ll be long
on the soil, and all that rot. Have a farm,
haven’t they?”
“I was invited up there, too,” said Elliott.
“You!” An instant change became visible
in the melancholy countenance. “Going?”
“No, I think not.”
“Oh, come on! Be a sport. We’d
have fun together.”
“I’ll be a sport, but not that kind.”
“Guess again, Elliott. You and I could
paint the place red, whatever kind of a
shack it is they’ve got.”
“Stannard,” said the girl, “you’re terribly
young. If you think I’d go anywhere
with you and put up any kind of a
game on our cousins—cousins, Stan—”
“There are cousins and cousins.”
She shook her head. “No wilds in
mine. When do you start?”
“To-morrow, worse luck! What are
you going to do?”
She smiled tantalizingly. “I have made
plans.” True, she had made plans. The
fact that the second party to the transaction
was not yet aware of their existence
did not alter the fact that she had made
them. Then she devoted herself to the despondent
Stannard, and sent him away
cheered almost to the point of thinking,
when he left the house, that Vermont was
not quite off the map.
Not so Elizabeth Royce. Bess knew
precisely what was on the map, and had
Vermont been there, she would have noticed
it. There was not much, Miss Royce
secretly flattered herself, that escaped her.
She had heard of Mr. Robert Cameron;
but whether he resided in Kamchatka or
Timbuctoo she could not have told you.
19
Mr. Robert Cameron, she had adduced
with an acumen beyond her years, was
the unsuccessful member of a highly successful
family. And now Elliott, adorable
Elliott, was to be marooned in this uncharted
district for a whole year. It was
unthinkable!
“But, Elliott darling, you’d die in Vermont!”
“Oh, no!” said Elliott; “I don’t think
I should find it pleasant, but I shouldn’t
die.”
“Pleasant!” sniffed Miss Royce. “I
should say not.”
“It is rather far away from everybody.
Think of not seeing you for a year, Bess!”
“I don’t want to think of it. What’s
the matter with your Uncle James’s house
when the quarantine’s lifted?”
“Nothing. But it has only just been put
on.”
“And the tournament next week. You
can’t miss that! Oh, Elliott!”
“I think,” remarked Elliott pensively,
“there ought to be a home opened for girls
whose fathers are in France.”
“Why,” asked Bess, gripped by a great
idea, “why shouldn’t you come to us while
your uncle’s house is quarantined?”
Why not, indeed? Elliott thought Bess
a little slow in arriving at so obvious and
satisfactory a solution of the whole difficulty,
but she was properly reluctant about
accepting in haste. “Wouldn’t that be
too much trouble? Of course, it would be
perfectly lovely for me, but what would
your mother say?”
“Mother will love to have you!” Miss
Royce spoke with conviction.
They spent the rest of the afternoon
making plans and Elizabeth went home
walking on air.
But Mother, alas! proved a stumbling-block.
“That would be very nice,” she
said, “very nice indeed; but Elliott Cameron
has plenty of relatives. They will
21
make some arrangement among them. I
should hardly feel at liberty to interfere
with their plans.”
“But her Aunt Elinor is going to
France, and you know the James Camerons’
house is in quarantine. That leaves
only the Vermont Camerons—”
“Oh, yes. I remember, now, there was
a third brother. They have their plans,
probably.”
And that was absolutely all Bess could
get her mother to say.
“But, Mother,” she almost sobbed at
last, “I—I asked her!”
“Then I am afraid you will have to un-ask
her,” said Mrs. Royce. “We really
can’t get another person into the house this
summer, with your Aunt Grace and her
family coming in July.”
Then it was that Elliott discovered the
impasse. Try as she would, she could find
no way out, and she lost a good deal of
sleep in the attempt. To have to do something
22
that she didn’t wish to do was intolerable.
You may think this very silly; if
you do, it shows that you have not always
had your own way. Elliott had never had
anything but her own way. That it had
been in the main a sweet and likable way
did not change the fact. And how Stannard
would gloat over her! He had had to
do the thing himself, but secretly she had
looked down on him for it, just as she had
always despised girls who lamented their
obligation to go to places where they did
not wish to go. There was always, she
had held, a way out, if you used your
brains. Altogether, it was a disconcerted,
bewildered, and thoroughly put-out young
lady who, a week later, found herself taking
the train for Highboro. The world—her
familiar, complacent, agreeable
world—had lost its equilibrium.
23
CHAPTER II
THE END OF A JOURNEY
Hours later, from a red-plush, Pullmanless
train, Elliott Cameron
stepped down to three people—a tall, dark,
surprisingly pretty girl a little older than
herself, a chunky girl of twelve, and a
middle-sized, freckle-faced boy. The boy
took her bag and asked for her trunk-checks
quite as well as any of her other
cousins could have done and the tall girl
kissed her and said how glad they were to
have the chance to know her.
“I am Laura,” she said, “and here is
Gertrude; and Henry will bring up your
trunks to-morrow, unless you need them
to-night. Mother sent you her love. Oh,
we’re so glad to have you come!”
Then it is to be feared that Elliott perjured
herself. Her all-day journey had
not in the least reconciled her to the situation;
if anything, she was feeling more
bewildered and put out than when she
started. But surprise and dismay had not
routed her desire to please. She smiled
prettily as her glance swept the welcoming
faces, and kissed the girls and handed the
boy two bits of pasteboard, and said—Oh,
Elliott!—how delighted she was to see
them at last. You would never have
dreamed from Elliott’s lips that she was
not overjoyed at the chance to come to
Highboro and become acquainted with
cousins that she had never known.
But Laura, who was wiser than she
looked, noticed that the new-comer’s eyes
were not half so happy as her tongue.
Poor dear, thought Laura, how pretty she
was and how daintily patrician and charming!
But her father was on his way to
France! And though he went in civilian
25
capacity and wasn’t in the least likely to
get hurt, when they were seated in the car
Laura leaned over and kissed her new
cousin again, with the recollection warm
on her lips of empty, anxious days when
she too had waited for the release of
the cards announcing safe arrivals overseas.
Elliott, who was every minute realizing
more fully the inexorableness of the fact
that she was where she was and not where
she wasn’t, kissed back without much
thought. It was her nature to kiss back,
however she might feel underneath, and
the surprising suddenness of the whole affair
had left her numb. She really hadn’t
much curiosity about the life into which
she was going. What did it matter, since
she didn’t intend to stay in it? Just as
soon as the quarantine was lifted from
Uncle James’s house she meant to go back
to Cedarville. But she did notice that the
little car was not new, that on their way
26
through the town every one they met
bowed and smiled, that Henry had amazingly
good manners for a country boy, that
Laura looked very strong, that Gertrude
was all hands and elbows and feet and
eyes, and that the car was continually
either climbing up or sliding down hills.
It slid out of the village down a hill, and
it was climbing a hill when it met squarely
in the road a long, low, white house,
canopied by four big elms set at the four
corners, and gave up the ascent altogether
with a despairing honk-honk of its
horn.
A lady rose from the wide veranda of
the white house, laid something gray on a
table, and came smilingly down the steps.
A little girl of eight followed her, two dogs
dashed out, and a kitten. The road ran
into the yard and stopped; but behind the
house the hill kept on going up. Elliott
understood that she had arrived at the
Robert Camerons’.
Laura took the new cousin up to her room
The lady, who was tall and dark-haired,
like Laura, but with lines of gray threading
the black, put her arms around the girl
and kissed her. Even in her preoccupation,
Elliott was dimly aware that the quality
of this embrace was subtly different
from any that she had ever received before,
though the lady’s words were not
unlike Laura’s. “Dear child,” she said,
“we are so glad to know you.” And the
big dark eyes smiled into Elliott’s with a
look that was quite new to that young person’s
experience. She didn’t know why
she felt a queer thrill run up her spine, but
the thrill was there, just for a minute.
Then it was gone and the girl only thought
that Aunt Jessica had the most fascinating
eyes that she had ever seen; whenever she
chose, it seemed that she could turn on a
great steady light to shine through their
velvety blackness.
Laura took the new cousin up to her
room. The house through which they
28
passed seemed rather a barren affair, but
somehow pleasant in spite of its dark
painted floors and rag rugs and unmistakably
shabby furniture. Flowers were
everywhere, doors stood open, and breezes
blew in at the windows, billowing the
straight scrim curtains. The guest’s room
was small and slant-ceilinged. One picture,
an unframed photograph of a big
tree leaning over a brook, was tacked to
the wall; a braided rug lay on the floor;
on a small table were flowers and a book;
over the queer old chest of drawers hung a
small mirror; there was no pier-glass at
all. Very spotless and neat, but bare—hopelessly
bare, unless one liked that sort
of thing.
There was one bit of civilization, however,
that these people appreciated—one’s
need of warm water. As Elliott bathed
and dressed, her spirits lightened a little.
It did rather freshen a person’s outlook,
on a hot day, to get clean. She even
29
opened the book to discover its name.
“Lorna Doone.” Was that the kind of
thing they read at the farm? She had always
meant to read “Lorna Doone,” when
she had time enough. It looked so interminably
long. But there wouldn’t be
much else to do up here, she reflected.
Then she surveyed what she could of herself
in the dim little mirror—probably
Laura would wish to copy her style of
hair-dressing—and descended, very slender
and chic, to supper.
It was a big circle which sat down at
that supper-table. There was Uncle
Robert, short and jolly and full of jokes,
who wished to hear all about everybody
and plied Elliott with questions. There
was another new cousin, a wiry boy called
Tom, and a boy older than Henry, who
certainly wasn’t a cousin, but who seemed
very much one of the family and who was
introduced as Bruce Fearing. And there
was Stannard. Stannard had returned in
30
high feather from Upton and intercourse
with a classmate whom he would doubtless
have termed his kind. Stannard was inclined
for a minute or two to indulge in
code talk with Elliott. She did not encourage
him and it amused her to observe
how speedily the conversation became general
again, though in quite what way it
was accomplished she could not detect.
But if these new cousins’ manners were
above reproach, their supper-table was far
from sophisticated. No maid appeared,
and Gertrude and Tom and eight-year-old
Priscilla changed the plates. Laura and
Aunt Jessica, Elliott noticed, had entered
from the kitchen. It was no secret that
all the girls had been berrying in the forenoon.
Henry seemed to have had a hand
in making the ice-cream, judging by the
compliments he received. So that was the
way they lived, thought the new guest!
It was, however, a surprisingly good supper.
Elliott was astonished at herself for
31
eating so much salad, so many berries and
muffins, and for passing her plate twice for
ice-cream.
After supper every one seemed to feel
it the natural thing to set to work and “do”
the dishes, or something else equally pressing;
at least every one for a short time
grew amazingly busy. Even Elliott asked
for an apron—it was Elliott’s code when
in Rome to do as the Romans do—though
she was relieved when her uncle tucked
her arm in his and said she must come and
talk to him on the porch. As they left
the kitchen, the boy Bruce was skilfully
whirling a string mop in a pan full of hot
suds.
Under cover of animated chatter with
her uncle Elliott viewed the prospect dolefully.
Dish-washing came three times a
day, didn’t it? The thing was evidently
a family rite in this household. The girl
understood her respite could be only temporary;
self-respect would see to that.
32
But didn’t she catch a glimpse of Stannard
nonchalantly sauntering around a
corner of the house with the air of one who
hopes his back will not be noticed?
Presently she discovered another household
custom—to go up to the top of the
hill to watch the sunset. Up between
flowering borders and through a grassy
orchard the path climbed, thence to wind
through thickets of sweet fern and scramble
around boulders over a wild, fragrant
pasture slope. It was beautiful up there
on the hilltop, with its few big sheltering
trees, its welter of green crests on every
side, and its line of far blue peaks behind
which the sun went down—beautiful but
depressing. Depressing because every
one, except Stannard, seemed to enjoy it
so. Elliott couldn’t help seeing that they
were having a thoroughly good time.
There was something engaging about
these cousins that Elliott had never seen
among her cousins at home, a good-fellowship
33
that gave one in their presence a
sense of being closely knit together; of
something solid, dependable and secure,
for all its lightness and variety. But, oh,
dear! she knew that she wasn’t going to
care for the things that they cared for, or
enjoy doing the things that they did! And
there must be at least six weeks of this—dish-washing
and climbing hills, with
good frocks on. Six weeks, not a day
longer. But she exclaimed in pretty enthusiasm
over Laura’s disclosure of a bed
of maidenhair fern, tasted approvingly
Tom’s spring water, recited perfectly,
after only one hearing, Henry’s tale of the
peaks in view, and let Bruce Fearing give
her a geography lesson from the southernmost
point of the hilltop.
It was only when at last she was in bed
in the slant-ceilinged room, with her candle
blown out and a big moon looking in at
the window, that Elliott quite realized how
forlorn she felt and how very, very far
34
three thousand miles from Father was actually
going to seem.
The world up here in Vermont was so
very still. There were no lights except
the stars, and for a person accustomed to
an electrically illuminated street only a
few rods from her window, stars and a
moon merely added to the strangeness.
Soft noises came from the other rooms,
sounds of people moving about, but not a
sound from outside, nothing except at intervals
the cry of a mournful bird. After
a while the noises inside ceased. Elliott
lay quiet, staring at the moonlit room, and
feeling more utterly miserable than she
had ever felt before in her life. Homesick?
It must be that this was homesickness.
And she had been wont to laugh,
actually laugh, at girls who said they were
homesick! She hadn’t known that it felt
like this! She hadn’t known that anything
in all the world could feel as hideous
as this. She knew that in a minute
35
she was going to cry—she couldn’t help
herself; actually, Elliott Cameron was going
to cry.
A gentle tap came at the door. “Are
you asleep?” whispered a voice. “May I
come in?”
Laura entered, a tall white shape that
looked even taller in the moonlight.
“Are you sleepy?” she whispered.
“Not in the least,” said Elliott.
Laura settled softly on the foot of the
bed. “I hoped you weren’t. Let’s talk.
Doesn’t it seem a shame to waste time
sleeping on a night like this?”
Elliott tossed her a pillow. It was comforting
to have Laura there, to hear a
voice saying something, no matter what it
was talking about. And Laura’s voice
was very pleasant and what she said was
pleasant, too.
Soon another shape appeared at the
door Laura had left half-open. “It is too
fine a night to sleep, isn’t it, girls?” Aunt
36
Jessica crossed the strip of moonlight and
dropped down beside Laura.
“Are you all in here?” presently inquired
a third voice. “I could hear you
talking and, anyway, I couldn’t sleep.”
“Come in,” said Elliott.
Gertrude burrowed comfortably down
on the other side of her mother.
Elliott, watching the three on the foot
of her bed, thought they looked very
happy. Her aunt’s hair hung in two
thick braids, like a girl’s, over her shoulders,
and her face, seen in the moonlight,
made Elliott feel things that she couldn’t
fit words to. She didn’t know what it
was she felt, exactly, but the forlornness
inside her began to grow less and less, until
at last, when her aunt bent down and
kissed her and a braid touched the pillow
on each side of Elliott’s face, it was quite
gone.
“Good night, little girl,” said Aunt Jessica,
“and happy dreams.”
37
CHAPTER III
CAMERON FARM
Elliot opened her eyes to bright
sunshine. For a minute she
couldn’t think where she was. Then the
strangeness came back with a stab, not so
poignant as on the night before but none
the less actual.
“Oh,” said a small, eager voice, “do you
think you’re going to stay waked up
now?”
Elliott’s eyes opened again, opened to
see Priscilla’s round, apple-cheeked face
at the door.
“It isn’t nice to peek, I know, but I’m
going to get your breakfast, and how could
I tell when to start it unless I watched to
see when you waked up?”
“You are going to get my breakfast?”
Elliott rose on one elbow in astonishment.
“All alone?”
“Oh, yes!” said Priscilla. “Mother and
Laura are making jelly, and shelling peas
in between—to put up, you know—and
Trudy is pitching hay, so they can’t. Will
you have one egg or two? And do you
like ’em hard-boiled or soft; or would you
rather have ’em dropped on toast? And
how long does it take you to dress?”
“One—soft-boiled, please. I’ll be
down in half an hour.”
“Half an hour will give me lots of
time.” The small face disappeared and
the door closed softly.
Elliott rose breathlessly and looked at
her watch. Half an hour! She must
hurry. Priscilla would expect her. Priscilla
had the look of expecting people to
do what they said they would. And hereafter,
of course, she must get up to breakfast.
She wondered how Priscilla’s breakfast
39
would taste. Heavens, how these
people worked!
As a matter of fact, Priscilla’s breakfast
tasted delicious. The toast was done
to a turn; the egg was of just the right
softness; a saucer of fresh raspberries
waited beside a pot of cream, and the whole
was served on a little table in a corner of
the veranda.
“Laura said you’d like it out here,”
Priscilla announced anxiously. “Do
you?”
“Very much indeed.”
“That’s all right, then. I’m going to
have some berries and milk right opposite
you. I always get hungry about this time
in the forenoon.”
“When do you have breakfast, regular
breakfast, I mean?”
“At six o’clock in summer, when there’s
so much to do.”
Six o’clock! Elliott turned her gasp of
astonishment into a cough.
“I sometimes choke,” said Priscilla,
“when I’m awfully hungry.”
“Does Stannard eat breakfast at six?”
Elliott felt she must get to the bed-rock of
facts.
“Oh, yes!”
“What is he doing now?”
Priscilla wrinkled her small brow.
“Father and Bruce and Henry are haying,
and Tom’s hoeing carrots. I think Stan’s
hoeing carrots, too. One day last week he
hoed up two whole rows of beets; he
thought they were weeds. Oh!” A small
hand was clapped over the round red
mouth. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.
Mother said I mustn’t ever speak of it,
’cause he’d feel bad. Don’t you think
you could forget it, quick?”
“I’ve forgotten it now.”
“That’s all right, then. After breakfast
I’m going to show you my chickens
and my calf. Did you know, I’ve a whole
calf all to myself?—a black-and-whitey
41
one. There are some cunning pigs, too.
Maybe you’d like to see them. And then
I ’spect you’ll want to go out to the hay-field,
or maybe make jelly.”
“Oh, yes,” said Elliott, “I can’t see any
of it too soon.” But she was ashamed of
her double meaning, with those round,
eager eyes upon her. And her heart went
down quite into her boots.
But the chickens, she had to confess,
were rather amusing. Priscilla had them
all named and was quite sure some of
them, at least, answered to their names
and not merely to the sound of her voice.
She appealed to Elliott for corroboration
on this point and Elliott grew almost interested
trying to decide whether or not
Chanticleer knew he was “Chanticleer”
and not “Sunflower.” There were also
“Fluff” and “Scratch” and “Lady Gay”
and “Ruby Crown” and “Marshal Haig”
and “General Pétain” and many more, besides
“Brevity,” so named because, as Priscilla
42
solicitously explained, she never
seemed to grow. They all, with the exception
of Brevity, looked as like as peas to
Elliott, but Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty
in distinguishing them.
Priscilla’s enthusiasm was contagious;
or, to be more exact, it was so big and
warm and generous that it covered any
deficiency of enthusiasm in another. Elliott
found herself trailing Priscilla
through the barns and even out to see the
pigs, meeting Ferdinand Foch, the very
new colt, and Kitchener of Khartoum, who
had been a new colt three years before,
and almost holding hands with the “black-and-whitey”
calf, which Priscilla had very
nearly decided to call General Pershing.
And didn’t Elliott think that would be a
nice name, with “J.J.” for short? Elliott
had barely delivered herself of a somewhat
amused affirmative (though the
amusement she knew enough to conceal),
when the small tongue tripped into the
43
pigs’ roster. Every animal on the farm
seemed to have a name and a personality.
Priscilla detailed characteristics quite as
though their possessors were human.
It was an enlightened but somewhat
surfeited cousin whom Priscilla blissfully
escorted into the summer kitchen, a big
latticed space filled with the pleasant odors
of currant jelly. On the broad table stood
trays of ruby-filled glasses.
“We’ve seen all the creatures,” Priscilla
announced jubilantly “and she loves ’em.
Oh, the jelly’s done, isn’t it? Mumsie,
may we scrape the kettle?”
Aunt Jessica laughed. “Elliott may not
care to scrape kettles.”
Priscilla opened her eyes wide at the absurdity
of the suggestion. “You do, don’t
you? You must! Everybody does. Just
wait a minute till I get spoons.”
“I don’t think I quite know how to do
it,” said Elliott.
The next minute a teaspoon was thrust
44
into her hand. “Didn’t you ever?”
Priscilla’s voice was both aghast and pitying.
“It wastes a lot, not scraping kettles.
Good as candy, too. Here, you begin.”
She pushed a preserving-kettle forward
hospitably.
Elliott hesitated.
“I’ll show you.” The small hand shot
in, scraped vigorously for a minute, and
withdrew, the spoon heaped with ruddy
jelly. “There! Mother didn’t leave as
much as usual, though. I ’spect it’s
’cause sugar’s so scarce. She thought she
must put it all into the glasses. But
there’s always something you can scrape
up.”
“It is delicious,” said Elliott, graciously;
“and what a lovely color!”
Priscilla beamed. “You may have two
scrapes to my one, because you have so
much time to make up.”
“You generous little soul! I couldn’t
45
think of doing that. We will take our
‘scrapes’ together.”
Priscilla teetered a little on her toes. “I
like you,” she said. “I like you a whole
lot. I’d hug you if my hands weren’t
sticky. Scraping kettles makes you awful
sticky. You make me think of a
princess, too. You’re so bee-yeautiful to
look at. Maybe that isn’t polite to say.
Mother says it isn’t always nice to speak
right out all you think.”
The dimples twinkled in Elliott’s cheeks.
“When you think things like that, it is polite
enough.” In the direct rays of Priscilla’s
shining admiration she began to feel
like her normal, petted self once more.
Complacently she followed the little girl
into the main kitchen. It was a long, low,
sunny room with a group of three windows
at each end, through which the morning
breeze pushed coolly. Between the windows
opened many doors. At one side
46
stood a range, all shining nickel and cleanly
black. Opposite the range, at a gleaming
white sink, Aunt Jessica was busying herself
with many pans. At an immaculately
scoured table Laura was pouring peas into
glass jars. On the walls was a blue-and-white
paper; even the woodwork was
white.
“I didn’t know a kitchen,” Elliott spoke
impulsively, “could be so pretty.”
“This is our work-room,” said her aunt.
“We think the place where we work ought
to be the prettiest room in the house.
White paint requires more frequent scrubbing
than colored paint; but the girls say
they don’t mind, since it keeps our spirits
smiling. Would you like to help dry these
pans? You will find towels on that line
behind the stove.”
Elliott brought the dish-towels, and
proceeded to forget her own surprise at
the request in the interest of Aunt Jessica’s
talk. Mrs. Cameron had a lovely
47
voice; the girl did not remember ever having
heard a more beautiful voice, and it
was used with a cultured ease that suddenly
reminded Elliott of an almost forgotten
remark once made in her hearing by
Stannard’s mother. “It is a sin and
shame,” Aunt Margaret had said, “to bury
a woman like Jessica Cameron on a farm.
What possessed her to let Robert take her
there in the first place is beyond my comprehension.
Granting that first mistake,
why she has let him stay all these years is
another enigma. Robert is all very well,
but Jessica! I would defy any one to produce
the situation anywhere that Jessica
wouldn’t be equal to.”
That had been a good deal for Aunt
Margaret to say. Elliott had realized it
at the time and wondered a little; now she
understood the words, or thought she did.
Why, even drying milk-pans took on a certain
distinction when it was done in Aunt
Jessica’s presence!
Then Aunt Jessica said something that
really did surprise her young guest. She
had been watching the girl closely, quite
without Elliott’s knowledge.
“Perhaps you would like this for your
own special part of the work,” she said
pleasantly. “We each have our little
chores, you know. I couldn’t let every
girl attempt the milk things, but you are
so careful and thorough that I haven’t the
least hesitation about giving them to you.
Now I am going to wash the separator.
Watch me, and then you will know just
what to do.”
The words left Elliott gasping. Wash
the separator, all by herself, every day—or
was it twice a day?—for as long as she
stayed here! And pans—all these pans?
What was a separator, anyway? She
wished flatly to refuse, but the words stuck
in her throat. There was something about
Aunt Jessica that you couldn’t say no to.
Aunt Jessica so palpably expected you to
49
be delighted. She was discriminating,
too. She had recognized at once that Elliott
was not an ordinary girl. But—but—
It was all so disconcerting that self-possessed
Elliott stammered. She stammered
from pure surprise and chagrin and a confusing
mixture of emotions, but what she
stammered was in answer to Aunt Jessica’s
tone and extracted from her by the force
of Aunt Jessica’s personality. The words
came out in spite of herself.
“Oh—oh, thank you,” she said, a bit
blankly. Then she blushed with confusion.
How awkward she had been.
Oughtn’t Aunt Jessica to have thanked
her?
If Aunt Jessica noticed either the confusion
or the blankness, she gave no sign.
“That will be fine!” she said heartily.
“I saw by the way you handled those pans
that I could depend on you.”
Insensibly Elliott’s chin lifted. She regarded
50
the pans with new interest. “Of
course,” she assented, “one has to be particular.”
“Very particular,” said Aunt Jessica,
and her dark eyes smiled on the girl.
The words, as she spoke them, sounded
like a compliment. It mightn’t be so bad,
Elliott reflected, to wash milk-pans every
morning. And in Rome you do as the Romans
do. She watched closely while Aunt
Jessica washed the separator. She could
easily do that, she was sure. It did not
seem to require any unusual skill or
strength or brain-power.
“It is not hard work,” said Aunt Jessica,
pleasantly. “But so many girls aren’t dependable.
I couldn’t count on them to
make everything clean. Sometimes I
think just plain dependableness is the most
delightful trait in the world. It’s so rare,
you know.”
Elliott opened her eyes wide. She had
been accustomed to hear charm and wit
51
and vivacity spoken of in those terms, but
dependableness? It had always seemed
such a homely, commonplace thing, not
worth mentioning. And here was Aunt
Jessica talking of it as of a crown jewel!
Right down in her heart at that minute Elliott
vowed that the separator should always
be clean.
The separator, however, must not commit
her indiscriminately, she saw that
clearly. Perhaps in fact, it would save
her. Hadn’t Aunt Jessica said each had
her own tasks? Ergo, you let others
alone. But she had an uncomfortable
feeling that this reasoning might prove
false in practice; in this household a good
many tasks seemed to be pooled. How
about them?
And then Laura looked up from her jars
and said the oddest thing yet in all this
morning of odd sayings: “Oh, Mother,
mayn’t we take our dinner out? It is such
a perfectly beautiful day!” As though a
52
beautiful day had anything to do with
where you ate your dinner!
But Aunt Jessica, without the least surprise
in her voice, responded promptly:
“Why, yes! We have three hours free
now, and it seems a crime to stay in the
house.”
What in the world did they mean?
Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in
understanding. She jumped up and down
and cried: “Oh, goody! goody! We’re
going to take our dinner out! We’re going
to take our dinner out! Isn’t it
jolly?”
She was standing in front of Elliott as
she spoke, and the girl felt that some reply
was expected of her. “Why, can we?
Where do we go?” she asked, exactly as
though she expected to see a hotel spring
up out of the ground before her eyes.
“Lots of days we do,” said Priscilla.
“We’ll find a nice place. Oh, I’m glad it
takes peas three whole hours to can themselves.
53
I think they’re kind of slow,
though, don’t you?”
Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott’s
face. “Priscilla means that we are
going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while
the peas cook in the hot-water bath,” she
explained. “Don’t you want to pack up
the cookies? You will find them in that
stone crock on the first shelf in the pantry,
right behind the door. There’s a pasteboard
box in there, too, that will do to put
them in.”
“How many shall I put up?” questioned
Elliott.
“Oh, as many as you think we’ll eat.
And I warn you we have good appetites.”
Those were the vaguest directions, Elliott
thought, that she had ever heard; but
she found the box and the stone pot of
cookies and stood a minute, counting the
people who were to eat them. Four right
here in the kitchen and five—no, six—out-of-doors.
Would two dozen cookies be
54
enough for ten people? She put her head
into the kitchen to ask, but there was no
one in sight, so she had to decide the point
by herself. After nibbling a crumb she
thought not, and added another dozen.
And then there was still so much room left
that she just filled up the box, regardless.
Afterward she was very glad of it. She
wouldn’t have supposed it possible for ten
people to eat as many cookies as those ten
people ate after all the other things they had
eaten.
By the time she had finished her calculations
with the cookies, Aunt Jessica and
Laura and Priscilla were ready. When
Elliott emerged from the pantry, the little
car was at the kitchen door, with a hamper
and two pails of water in it, and on the
back seat a long, queer-looking box that
Laura told Elliott was a fireless cooker.
“Home-made,” said Laura, “you’d
know that to look at it, but it works just
as well. It’s the grandest thing, especially
55
when we want to eat out-of-doors.
Saves lots of trouble.”
Elliott gasped. “You mean you carry
it along to cook the dinner in?”
“Why, the dinner’s cooking in it now!
Hop on, everybody. Mother, you take the
wheel. Elliott and I will ride on the
steps.”
Away they sped, bumpity-bump, to the
hay-field, picking up the carrot-hoers as
they went. It is astonishing how many
people can cling to one little car, when
those people are neither very wide nor,
some of them, very tall. From the hay-field
they nosed their way into a little dell,
all ferns and cool white birches, and far
above, a canopy of leaf-traceried blue
sky. In the next few minutes it became
very plain to the new cousin that the Camerons
were used to doing this kind of
thing. Every one seemed to know exactly
what to do. The pails of water were
swung to one side; the fireless cooker took
56
up its position on a flat gray rock. The
hamper yielded loaves of bread—light and
dark, that one cut for oneself on a smooth
white board—and a basket stocked with
plates and cups and knives and forks and
spoons. Potted meat and potatoes and
two kinds of vegetables, as they were
wanted, came from the fireless cooker, all
deliciously tender and piping hot. It was
like a cafeteria in the open, thought Elliott,
except that one had no tray.
And every one laughed and joked and
had a good time. Even Elliott had a
fairly good time, though she thought it was
thoroughly queer. You see, it had never
occurred to her that people could pick up
their dinner and run out-of-doors into any
lovely spot that they came to, to eat it.
She wasn’t at all sure she cared for that
way of doing things. But she liked the
beauty of the little dell, the ferny smell of
it, and the sunshine and cheerfulness.
The occasional darning-needles, and small
57
green worms, and black or other colored
bugs, she enjoyed less. She hadn’t been
accustomed to associate such things with
her dinner. But nobody else seemed to
mind; perhaps the others were used to taking
bugs and worms with their meals. If
one appeared, they threw him away and
went on eating as though nothing had happened.
And of course it was rather clever of
them, the girl reflected, to take a picnic
when they could get it. If they hadn’t
done so, she didn’t quite see, judging by
the portion of a day she had so far observed,
how they could have got any picnics
at all. The method utilized scraps of
time, left-overs and between-times, that
were good for little else. It was a rather
arresting discovery, to find out that people
could divert themselves without giving up
their whole time to it. But, after all, it
wasn’t a method for her. She was positive
on that point. It seemed the least little
58
bit common, too—such whole-hearted
absorption as the Camerons showed in pursuits
that were just plain work.
“Stan,” she demanded, late that afternoon,
“is there any tennis here?”
“Not so you’d notice it. What are you
thinking of, in war-time, Elliott? Uncle
Samuel expects every farmer to do his
duty. All the men and older boys around
here have either volunteered or been
drafted. So we’re all farmers, especially
the girls. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Savvy?”
“Any luncheons?”
“Meals, Lot, plain meals.”
“Parties?”
Stannard threw up his hands. “Never
heard of ’em!”
“Canoeing?”
“No water big enough.”
“I suppose nobody here thinks of motoring
for pleasure.”
“Never. Too busy.”
“Or gets an invitation for a spin?”
“You’re behind the times.”
“So I see.”
“Harry told me that this summer is
extra strenuous,” Stannard explained;
“but they’ve always rather gone in for the
useful, I take it. Had to, most likely.
They’d be all right, too, if they didn’t live
so. They’re a good sort, an awfully good
sort. But, ginger, how a fellow’d have
to hump to keep up with ’em! I don’t try.
I do a little, and then sit back and call it
done.”
If Elliott hadn’t been so miserable, she
would have laughed. Stannard had hit
himself off very well, she thought. He
had his good points, too. Not once had
he reminded her that she hadn’t intended
to spend her summer on a farm. But she
was too unhappy to tease him as she might
have done at another time. She was still
bewildered and inclined to resent the trick
life had played her. The prospect didn’t
60
look any better on close inspection than it
had at first; rather worse, if anything.
Imagine her, Elliott Cameron pitching
hay! Not that any one had asked her to.
But how could a person live for six weeks
with these people and not do what they
did? Such was Elliott’s code. Delightful
people, too. But she didn’t wish to
pitch hay and she loathed washing dishes.
There was something so messy about dish-washing,
ordinary dish-washing; milk-pans
were different.
Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a
strange thing. By this time she had
shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself
and her disgust to the edge of the
woods. She was so very miserable that
she didn’t know herself and she knew herself
less than ever in this next act. Alone
in the woods, as she thought, with only
moss underfoot and high green boughs
overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately
and with vehemence stamped it.
61
“I don’t like things!” she whispered, a little
shocked at her own words. “I don’t
like things!”
Then she looked up and met the amused
eyes of Bruce Fearing.
For a minute the hot color flooded the
girl’s face. But she seized the bull by the
horns. “I am cross,” she said, “frightfully
cross!” And she looked so engagingly
pretty as she said it that Bruce
thought he had never seen so attractive a
girl.
“Anything in particular gone wrong
with the universe?”
“Everything, with my part of it.”
What possessed her, she wondered afterward,
to say what she said next? “I
never wanted to come here.”
“That so? We’ve been thinking it
rather nice.”
In spite of herself, she was mollified.
“It isn’t quite that, either,” she explained.
“I’ve only just discovered the real trouble,
62
myself. What makes me so mad isn’t
altogether the fact that I didn’t want to
come up here. It’s that I hadn’t any
choice. I had to come.”
The boy’s eyes twinkled. “So that’s
what’s bothering you, is it? Cheer up!
You had the choice of how you’d come,
didn’t you?”
“How?”
“Yes. Sometimes I think that’s all the
choice they give us in this world. It’s all
I’ve had, anyway—how I’d do a thing.”
“You mean, gracefully or—”
“I mean—”
“Hello!” said Stannard’s voice. “What
are you two chinning about before the
cows come home?”
63
CHAPTER IV
IN UNTRODDEN FIELDS
“You don’t want to have much to do
with that fellow,” said Stannard,
when Bruce Fearing had gone on about
whatever business he had in hand.
“Why not?” Elliott’s tone was short.
She had wanted to hear what Bruce was
going to say.
“Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but
nobody knows where he came from. He
and that Pete brother of his are no relations
of ours, or of Aunt Jessica’s either.”
“How does he happen to be living here,
then?”
“Search me. Some kind of a pick-up,
I gathered. Nobody talks much about it.
They take him as a matter of course. All
64
right enough for them, if they want to,
but they really ought to warn strangers.
A fellow would think he was—er—all
right, you know.”
Stannard’s words made Elliott very uncomfortable.
She thought the reason they
disquieted her was that she had rather
liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him
turn out a person whom she couldn’t be as
friendly with as she wished was disconcerting.
It was only another point in her
indictment of life on the Cameron farm;
one couldn’t tell whom one was knowing.
But she determined to sound Laura, which
would be easy enough, and Stannard’s
charge might prove unfounded.
But sounding Laura was not easy,
chiefly for the reason Stannard had
shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons
took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite
as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves.
Laura even failed to discover that
she was being sounded.
“Who is this ‘Pete’ you’re always talking
about?” Elliott asked.
“Bruce’s older brother—I almost said
ours.” The two girls were skimming currants,
Laura with the swift skill of accustomed
fingers, Elliott more slowly. “He
is perfectly fine. I wish you could know
him.”
“I gathered he was Bruce’s brother.”
“He’s not a bit like Bruce. Pete is
short and dark and as quick as a flash.
You’d know he would make a splendid
aviator. There was a letter in the ‘Upton
News’ last night from an Upton doctor
who is over there, attached now to our
boys’ camp; did you see it? He says Bob
and Pete are ‘the acknowledged aces’ of
their squadron. That shows we must
have missed some of their letters. The
last one from Bob was written just after
he had finished his training.”
“This—Pete went from here?”
“He and Bob were in Tech together,
66
juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and
they’ve kept pretty close tabs on each
other ever since. They had their training
over here in the same camps. In France,
Pete got into spirals first, ‘by a fluke,’ as
he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings.
But, some way or other, Bob seems
to have beaten him to the actual fighting.
Now they’re in it together.” And Laura
smiled and then sighed, and the nimble
fingers stopped work for a minute, only
to speed faster than ever.
“I haven’t read you any of their letters,
have I? Or Sid’s either? (Sidney
is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.)
But I will. If anything, Pete’s are funnier
than Bob’s. Both the boys have an
eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes
you wouldn’t think there was anything
to flying but a huge lark, by the way
they write. But there was one letter of
Pete’s (it was to Mother), written from
their first training-camp in France after
67
one of the boys’ best friends had been
killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober,
but oh, so different from the way any one
would have felt about such a thing before
the war began! There was plenty of fun
in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete
told about this Jim Stone’s death, and he
said: ‘It has made us all pretty serious,
but nobody’s blue. Jim was a splendid
fellow, and a chap can’t think he has
stopped as quick as all that. Mother
Jess, do you remember my talking to you
one Sunday after church, freshman vacation,
about the things I didn’t believe in?
Why didn’t you tell me I was a fool? You
knew it then, and I know it now.’ That’s
Pete all over. It made Mother and me
very happy.”
Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue
her probing. “Have they always lived
with you,” she asked, “the Fearings?”
“Oh, yes, ever since I can remember.
Isn’t Bruce splendid? I don’t know how
68
we could have got on at all this summer
without Bruce.”
Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed,
either Laura didn’t know of it, or
she had forgotten it, or else she considered
it too negligible to mention.
The girl found that for some reason she
did not care to ask Stannard the source
of his information. Would Bruce himself
prove communicative? There could be no
harm in finding out. Besides, it would
tease Stannard to see her talking with
“that fellow,” and Elliott rather enjoyed
teasing Stannard. And didn’t she owe
him something for a dictatorial interruption?
The thing would require manœuvering.
You couldn’t talk to Bruce Fearing, or to
any one else up here, whenever you felt
like it; he was far too busy. But on
the hill at sunset Elliott found her
chance.
“I think Aunt Jessica,” she remarked,
69
“is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever
seen.”
A glow lit up Bruce’s quiet gray eyes.
“Mother Jess,” he said, “is a miracle.”
“She is so terrifically busy, and yet she
never seems to hurry; and she always has
time to talk to you and she never acts
tired.”
“She is, though.”
“I suppose she must be, sometimes. I
like that name for her, ‘Mother Jess.’
Your—aunt, is she?”
“Oh, no,” said Bruce, simply. “I’ve no
Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any
other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles
are unregistered. She and Father Bob
took Pete and me in when I was a baby
and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born
in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I
boring you?”
“No, indeed!” Elliott had the grace
to blush at the ease with which she was
carrying on her investigation.
He wondered why she flushed, but went
on quietly. “Our own mother died there
in the hotel when I was a week old and we
didn’t seem to have any kin. At least,
they never showed up. Mother was evidently
a widow; Mother Jess got that from
her belongings. She stopped overnight at
Highboro, and I was born there. She
hadn’t told any one in the hotel where she
was going. Registered from Boston, but
nobody could be found in Boston who knew
of her. The authorities were going to
send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized
Home, when Mother Jess stepped
in. She hadn’t enough boys, so she said.
Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck.
Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce
was the one that died; he’d just
slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling
lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us
two; said she thought we’d be better off
on the farm than in a Home and she
needed us—bless her! Do you wonder
71
Pete and I swear by the Camerons?”
“No,” said Elliott. “Indeed I don’t.”
She had what she had been angling for, in
good measure, but she rather wished she
hadn’t got it, after all. “Haven’t you
had any clue in all these years as to who
your people were?”
“Not the slightest. I’m willing to let
things rest as they are.”
“Yes, of course,” thought Elliott,
“but—” She let it go at “but.” Oughtn’t
somebody, as Stannard said, to have
warned her? These boys’ people might
have been very common persons, not at all
like Camerons. The fact that no relatives
appeared proved that, didn’t it? Every
one who was any one at all had a family.
Bruce did not look common: his gray eyes
and his broad forehead and his keen, thin
face were almost distinguished, and his
manners were above criticism. But one
never could tell. And hadn’t he been
brought up by Camerons? The very
72
openness with which he had told his story
had something fine about it. He, like
Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal.
Well, was there? Elliott could quite
clearly imagine what Aunt Margaret,
Stannard’s mother, would say to that
question. She had never especially cared
for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at
Bruce Fearing, one of the pillars of her
familiar world began to totter. Actually,
she could think of no particularly good
reason why, when she had heard his story,
she should proceed to shun him. His history
simply didn’t seem to matter, except
to make her sorry for him; and yet she
couldn’t be really sorry for a boy who had
been brought up by Aunt Jessica.
Perhaps the Cameron Farm atmosphere
was already beginning to work.
“I think you and your brother had luck,”
she said.
“I know we did,” answered Bruce.
Elliott turned the conversation. “I
wish you could tell me what you were going
to say, when we were interrupted yesterday,
about a person’s having no choice
except how he will do things—you having
had only that kind of choice.”
“I remember,” said Bruce. “Well, for
one thing, I suppose I could get grouchy,
if I chose, over not knowing who my people
were.”
“They may have been very splendid,”
said Elliott.
Bruce smiled. “It’s not likely.”
“In that case,” she countered, “you have
the satisfaction of not knowing who they
were.”
“Exactly. But that’s rather a crawl,
isn’t it? Of course, a fellow would like
to know.”
The boy bent forward, and, with painstaking
care, selected a blade from a tuft of
grass growing between his feet. He nibbled
a minute before he spoke again.
“See here, I’m going to tell you something
I haven’t told a soul. I’m crazy to
go to the war. Sometimes it seems as
though I couldn’t stay home. When
Pete’s letters come I have to go away somewhere
quick and chop wood! Anything to
get busy for a while.”
“Aren’t you too young? Would they
take you?”
“Take me? You bet they’d take me!
I’m eighteen. Don’t I look twenty?”
The girl’s eye ran critically over the
strong young body, with its long, supple,
sinewy lines. “Yes,” she nodded. “I
think you do.”
“They’d take me in a minute, in aviation
or anything else.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Who’d help Father Bob through the
farm stunts? Young Bob’s gone, and
Pete and Sidney. They were always here
for the summer work. Henry’s a fine lad,
75
but a boy still. Tom’s nothing but a boy,
though he does his bit. As for the Women’s
Land Army, it’s got up into these
parts, but not in force. Father Bob can’t
hire help: it’s not to be had. That’s why
Mother Jess and the girls are going in so
for farm work. They never did it before
this year, except in sport. We have
more land under cultivation this summer
than ever before, and fewer hands to
harvest it with. But Mother and the girls
sha’n’t have to work harder than they’re
doing now, if I can help it. Could I go
off and leave them, after all they’ve done
for me? But that’s not it, either—gratitude.
They’re mine, Father Bob and
Mother Jess are, and the rest; they’re my
folks. You’re not exactly grateful to
your own folks, you know. They belong
to you. And you don’t leave what belongs
to you in the lurch.”
“No,” said Elliott. With awakened
76
eyes she was watching Bruce. No boy
had ever talked of such things to her before.
“So you’re not going?”
“Not of my own will. Of course, if the
war lasts and I’m drafted, or the help
problem lightens up, it will be different.
Pete’s gone. It was Pete’s right to go.
He’s the elder.”
“But you are choosing,” Elliott cried
earnestly. “Don’t you see? You’re
choosing to stay at home and—” words
came swiftly into her memory—“‘fight it
out on these lines all summer.’”
Bruce’s smile showed that he recognized
her quotation, but he shook his head.
“Choosing? I haven’t any choice—except
being decent about it. Don’t you see
I can’t go? I can only try to keep from
thinking about not going.”
“You being you,” said the girl, and she
spoke as simply and soberly as Bruce himself,
though her own warmth surprised
her, “I see you can’t go. But was that all
77
you meant”—her voice grew ludicrously
disappointed—“by a person’s having a
choice only of how he will do a thing?
There’s nothing to that but making the
best of things!”
Bruce Fearing threw back his head and
laughed heartily.
“You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever
seen.”
“Then you can’t have seen many. But
is there?”
“Perhaps not. Stupid, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “I’m afraid it is.
And frightfully old. I was hoping you
were going to tell me something new and
exciting.”
The boy chuckled again. “Nothing so
good as that. Besides, I’ve a hunch the
exciting things aren’t very new, after all.”
Elliott went to sleep that night, if not
any happier, at least more interested. She
had looked deep into the heart of a boy,
different, it appeared, from any boy that
78
she had ever known; and something loyal
and sturdy and tender she had seen there
had stirred her. It was odd how well acquainted
she felt with him; odd, too, how
curious she was to know him better, even
though he hadn’t the least idea who his
grandfather had been. “Bother his
grandfather!” Elliott chuckled to realize
how such a sentiment would horrify Aunt
Margaret. Grandfathers were very important
to Aunt Margaret and Aunt Margaret’s
children. Grandfathers had always
seemed fairly important to Elliott
herself until now. Was it their relative
unimportance in the Robert Camerons’ estimation,
or a pair of steady gray eyes,
that had altered her valuation? The girl
didn’t know and she was keen enough to
know that she didn’t; keen enough, too,
to perceive that the change in her estimation
of grandfathers applied to a single
case only and might be merely temporary.
However that might be, she was not
79
ready yet to do anything so inherently distasteful
as make the best of what she
didn’t like, especially when nobody but
herself and two boys would know it.
When one makes the best of things, one
likes to do it to crowded galleries, that perceive
what is going on and applaud. The
Robert Camerons, Elliott was quite sure,
wouldn’t applaud. They would take it as
a matter of course, just as they took her
as a matter of course. They were quite
charming about it, as delightful hosts as
one could wish—if only they lived differently!—but
Elliott wasn’t used to being
taken for granted. She might have been
these new cousins’ own sort, for any difference
she could detect in their actions.
They didn’t seem to begin to understand
her importance. Perhaps she wasn’t so
important, after all. The doubt had never
before entered her mind.
The fact was, of course, that among
these busy, efficient people she was feeling
80
quite useless; and she didn’t like to
appear incompetent when she knew herself
to be, in her own line, a thoroughly
able person. But it irked her to think
that she had been forced into a position
where in self-defense she must either acquire
a kind of efficiency she didn’t want
or do without. At the same time it troubled
her lest this reluctance become apparent.
For they were all loves and she
wouldn’t hurt their feelings for worlds.
And she did wish them to admire her.
But she had a feeling that they didn’t altogether,
not even Priscilla and Bruce.
Nevertheless, the next day when Laura
asked whether she would take her book out
to the hay-field or stay where she was on
the porch, Elliott looked up from “Lorna
Doone” and said, with the prettiest little
coaxing air, “If I go, will you let me pitch
hay?” And Laura answered as lightly,
“Certainly.” “I don’t believe you,” said
81
Elliott. “You may ride on the hay-load,”
smiled Laura. “That won’t do at all,”
Elliott shook her head. “If I can’t pitch
hay, I’ll stay here.” Laura laughed and
said: “You certainly will be more comfortable
here. I can’t quite see you pitching
hay.” And Elliott retorted: “You
don’t know what I could do, if I tried.
But since you won’t let me try—”
It was all smiling and gay, but it was a
crawl, and Elliott knew it and knew that
Laura knew it, and she felt ashamed.
Wasn’t Stannard’s frank shirking better
than her camouflaged variety? But
hadn’t she picked berries all the morning
in a stuffy sunbonnet under a broiling sun,
until she felt as red as a berry and much
less fresh and sweet?
“It’s a shame,” said Laura, “that this
is just our busy season; but you know you
have to make hay while the sun shines.
Father thinks we can finish the lower
82
meadows to-day. Then to-morrow we
begin cutting on the hill. It’s really fun
to ride the hay-rake. I mostly drive the
rake, though now and then I pitch for
variety.”
She looked so strong and brown and
merry, as she talked, that Elliott, comfortably
established with “Lorna Doone,” felt
almost like flinging her book into the next
chair, slipping her arm through Laura’s,
and crying, “Lead on!” But she remembered
just in time that, as she hadn’t
wished to come to the Cameron Farm, it
would ill become her to have a good time
there. Which may seem like a childish
way of looking at the thing, but isn’t really
confined to children at all.
So the hay-makers tramped away down
the road, their laughter floating cheerfully
back over their shoulders; and Elliott sat
on the big shady veranda and read her
book.
She might have enjoyed it less had she
83
heard Henry’s frank summary at the turn
of the lane, when his father inquired the
whereabouts of Stannard.
“Beau Brummell hiked over to Upton
half an hour ago. I offered him the other
Henry, but he doesn’t seem to care to
drive anything short of a Pierce-Arrow.
Twins, aren’t they?” and Henry nodded
in the direction of the veranda.
“Sh-h!” reproved Laura. “They’re
our guests.”
“Guests is just it. Yes, they’re guests,
all right.”
“Mother says they don’t know how to
work,” Priscilla observed.
“That’s another true word, too.”
Mother turned gaily in the road ahead.
“Who is talking about me?” she called.
Priscilla frisked on to join her, and
Henry fell back to a confidential exchange
with Laura. “Beau wouldn’t be so bad if
he could forget for a minute that he owned
the earth and had a mortgage on the solar
84
system. But when he tries to snub Bruce—gee,
that gets me!”
“Aren’t you twanging the G string
rather often lately, Hal?—Stannard can’t
snub Bruce. Bruce isn’t the kind of fellow
to be snubbed.”
“Just the same, it makes me sick to think
anybody’s a cousin to me that would try
it.”
Laura switched back to the main subject.
“We didn’t ask them up here as extra
farm hands, you know.”
“Bull’s-eye,” said Henry, and grinned.
What she did not know failed to trouble
Elliott. She read on in lonely peace
through the afternoon. At a most exciting
point the telephone rang. Four, that
was the Cameron call. Elliott went into
the house and took down the receiver.
“Mr. Robert Cameron’s,” she said pleasantly.
“S-say!” stuttered a high, sharp voice,
“my little b-b-boys have let your c-c-cows
85
out o’ the p-p-pasture. I’ll g-give ’em a
t-t-trouncin’, but ’t won’t git your c-c-cows
back. They let ’em out the G-G-Garrett
Road, and your medder gate’s open. Jim
B-B-Blake saw it this mornin’! Why the
man didn’t shut it, I d-d-dunno. You’ll
have to hurry to save your medder.”
“But,” gasped Elliott, “I don’t understand!
You say the cows—”
“Are comin’ down G-Garrett Road,”
snapped the stuttering voice, “the whole
kit an’ b-b-bilin’ of ’em. They’ll be inter
your upper m-medder in five m-m-minutes.”
Over the wire came the click of a receiver
snapping back on its hook. Elliott
hung up and started toward the door. The
cows had been let out. Just why this incident
was so disastrous she did not quite
comprehend, but she must go and tell her
uncle. Before her feet touched the veranda,
however, she stopped. Five minutes?
Why, there wouldn’t be time to
86
go to the lower meadow, to say nothing of
any one’s doing anything about the situation.
And then, with breath-taking suddenness,
the thing burst on her. She was
alone in the house; even Aunt Jessica and
Priscilla had gone to the hay-field. The
situation, whatever it was, was up to her.
For a minute the girl leaned weakly
against the wall. Cows—there were
thirty in the herd—and she loathed cows!
She was afraid of cows. She knew nothing
about cows. She was never in the
slightest degree sure of what the creatures
might take it into their heads to do.
For a minute she stood irresolute. Then
something stirred in the girl, something
self-reliant and strong. Never in her life
had Elliott Cameron had to do alone anything
that she didn’t already know how to
do. Now for the first time she faced an
emergency on none but her own resources,
87
an emergency that was quite out of her
line.
Her brain worked swiftly as her feet
moved to the door. In reality, she had
wavered only a second. When Tom went
for the cows, didn’t he take old Prince?
There was just a chance that Prince
wasn’t in the hay-field. She ran down
the steps calling, “Prince! Prince!” The
old dog rose deliberately from his place
on the shady side of the barn and trotted
toward her, wagging his tail. “Come,
Prince!” cried Elliott, and ran out of the
yard.
Luckily, berrying had that very morning
taken her by a short cut to the vicinity
of the upper meadow. She knew the
way. But what was likely to happen?
Town-bred girl that she was, she had no
idea. A recollection of the smooth, upstanding
expanse of the upper meadow
gave her a clue. If the cows got into that
88
even erectness— She began to run,
Prince bounding beside her, his brown tail
a waving plume.
She could see the meadow now, a smooth
green sea ruffled by nothing heavier than
the light feet of the summer breeze. She
could see the great gate invitingly open to
the road and oh!—her heart stopped beating,
then pounded on at a suffocating pace—she
could see the cows! There they
came, down the hill, quite filling the narrow
roadway with their horrid bulk, making
it look like a moving river of broad
backs and tossing heads. What could she
do, the girl wondered; what could she do
against so many? She tried to run faster.
Somehow she must reach the gate first.
There was nothing even then, so far as she
knew, to prevent their trampling her down
and rushing over her into the waving
greenness, unless she could slam the gate
in their faces. You can see that she really
did not know much about cows.
But Prince knew them. Prince understood
now why his master’s guest had
summoned him to this hot run in the sunshine.
The prospect did not daunt Prince.
He ran barking to the meadow side of
the road. The foremost cow which, grazing
the dusty grass, had strayed toward
the gate, turned back into the ruts again.
Elliott pulled the gate shut, in her haste
leaving herself outside. There, too spent
to climb over, she flattened her slender
form against the gray boards, while,
driven by Prince, the whole herd, horns
tossing, tails switching, flanks heaving,
thudded its way past.
And there, three minutes later, Bruce,
dashing over the hill in response to a message
relayed by telephone and boy to the
lower meadow, found her.
“The cows have gone down,” Elliott told
him. “Prince has them. He will take
them home, won’t he?”
“Prince? Good enough! He’ll get the
90
cows home all right. But what are you
doing in this mix-up?”
“A woman telephoned the house,” said
Elliott. “I was afraid I couldn’t reach
any of you in time, so I came over myself.”
“You like cows?” The question shot
at her like a bullet.
The piquant nose wrinkled entrancingly.
“Scared to death of ’em.”
“I guessed as much.” The boy nodded.
“Gee whiz, but you’ve got good stuff in
you!”
And though her shoes were dusty and
her hair tousled, and though her knees
hadn’t stopped shaking even yet, Elliott
Cameron felt a sudden sense of satisfaction
and pride. She turned and looked
over the fence at the meadow. In its unmarred
beauty it seemed to belong to her.
91
CHAPTER V
A SLACKER UNPERCEIVED
“I think,” remarked Elliott, the next
morning, “that I will walk up and
watch the haying for a while.”
She had finished washing the separator
and the milk-pans. It had taken a full
hour the first morning; growing expertness
had already reduced the hour to three-quarters,
and she had hopes of further
reductions. She still held firmly to the
opinion that the process was uninteresting,
but an innate sense of fairness told her
that the milk-pans were no more than her
share. Of course, she couldn’t spend
six weeks in a household whose component
members were as busy as were this household’s
members, and do nothing at all.
92
That was the disadvantage in coming to
the place. She was bound to dissemble
her feelings and wash milk-pans. But if
she had to wash them, she might as well
do it well. There was no question about
that. If the actual process still bored the
girl, the results did not. Elliott was
proud of her pans, with a pride in which
there was no atom of indifference. She
scoured them until they shone, not because,
as she told herself, she liked to scour, but
because she liked to see the pans shine.
Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too.
She paused on her way through the
kitchen. “What beautiful pans! I can
see my face in every one of them.”
A glow of elation struck through Elliott.
Aunt Jessica was loving and sweet, but
she did not lavish commendation in quarters
where it was not due. Elliott knew
her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica’s
praise made them doubly so.
It was then, as she hung up her towels,
93
that she made the remark about walking
up to the hill meadow. She had a notion
she would like to see the knives put
into that unbroken expanse of tall grass
for which she continued to feel a curious
responsibility. A mere appearance at the
field could not commit her to anything.
“If you are going up,” said Aunt Jessica,
“perhaps you will take some of these
cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has
made lemonade.”
That was one of the delightful things
about Aunt Jessica, Elliott thought: she
never probed beneath the surface of one’s
words, she never even looked curiosity,
and she gave one immediately a reason for
doing what one wished to do. Lemonade
and cookies made an appearance in the
hay-field the most natural thing in the
world.
The upper meadow proved a surprise.
Not its business—Elliott had expected
business, but its odd mingling of jollity
94
with activity. They all seemed to be having
such a good time about their work.
And yet the jollity did not in the least interfere
with the business, which appeared
to be going forward in a systematic and
efficient way that even an untrained girl
could not fail to notice. Elliott’s advent
would have occasioned little disturbance,
she suspected, had it not been for the cookies.
She was used by now to having no
fuss made over her. Laura waved a hand
from her seat behind the horses; the boys
swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to
display a ground-sparrow’s nest that the
scythes had disclosed.
It was Priscilla who discovered the
cookies and sent a squeal of delight across
the meadow. But even then the workers
did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out
across the mown grass and squeal again
and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a
cup in the other, and add a shrill little
yelp, “Come on! Come on, peoples! You
95
don’t know what we’ve got here,” before
they straggled over to what Henry called
“the refreshment booth.”
Then they were ready enough to notice
Elliott. Uncle Robert and the boys
cracked jokes, the girls chattered and
laughed, and every one called on her to
applaud the amount of work they had already
accomplished, exactly as though she
understood about such things.
And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her
words with a whole battery of dimples, all
the while privately resolving that no contagion
of enthusiasm should inoculate her
with the haymaking germ. There were
factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand;
the sky was so blue, the breeze was
so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious,
and the mountain air had such zest
in it. But, on the other hand, the sun was
hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla’s
tip-tilted little nose was already liberally
besprinkled. If Laura hadn’t such
96
a wonderful skin, she would have been a
sight long ago, despite the wide brim of
her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and
Laura looked like a mere husky farm girl,
as she guided her horses skilfully around
the field. How strong her arms must be!
But how could a girl with Laura’s intelligence
and high spirit and charm enjoy
putting all this time into haying? With
Priscilla, of course, matters stood differently.
Children never discriminate.
“No, I sha’n’t do that kind of thing,”
said Elliott, firmly. But she would investigate
the haymaking game, investigate it
coolly and dispassionately, to find out exactly
what it amounted to—aside, of
course, from an accumulation of dried
grass in barns. To this end, she invaded
the upper meadow a good many times, during
the next few days, took a turn on the
hay-rake, now and then helped load and
unload, riding down to the barn on a
mound of high-piled fragrance, and came
97
to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking
wasn’t to be compared with knocking
a ball back and forth across a net. To
try one’s hand at it might do well enough,
now and then, to spice an otherwise luxurious
life, but as a steady diet the thing was
too unrelenting. One was driven by wind
and sun; even the clouds took a hand in
cudgeling one on. A person must keep at
it whether she cared to or not—in actual
practice this point never troubled Elliott,
who always stopped when she wished to—there
were no spectators, and, heaviest demerit
of all, it was undeniably hard work.
But she was curious to discover what
Laura found in it, and you know Elliott
Cameron well enough by this time to understand
that she was not a girl who hesitated
to ask for information.
The last load had dashed into the big
red barn two minutes before a thunder-shower,
and Laura, freshly tubbed and
laundered, was winding her long black
98
braids around her shapely little head.
Elliott sat on the bed and watched her.
“Aren’t you glad it’s done?” she asked.
“The haying? Oh, yes, I’m always glad
when we have it safely in. But I love it.”
“Really? It isn’t work for girls.”
“No? Then once a year I’ll take a vacation
from being a girl. But that doesn’t
hold now, you know. Everything is work
for girls that girls can do, to help win this
war.”
“To help win the war?” echoed Elliott,
and blankly and suddenly shut her mouth.
Why, she supposed it did help, after all!
But it was their work, the kind of thing
they had always done, up here at the Cameron
Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her,
the girls hadn’t done much of it. Was
that what Bruce had meant, too?
“Why did you suppose we put so much
more land under cultivation this year than
we ever had before, with less help in
sight?” Laura questioned. “Just for fun,
99
or for the money we could get out of it?”
“I hadn’t thought much about it,” said
Elliott. She was thinking now. Had she
been a bit of a slacker? She loathed
slackers.
“I never thought of it as war work,” she
said. “Stupid, wasn’t I?”
Laura put the last hair-pin in place.
“Just thought of it as our job, did you?
So it is, of course. But when your job
happens to be war work too—well, you
just buckle down to it extra hard. I’ve
never been so thankful as this year and
last that we have the farm. It gives every
one of us such a splendid chance to feel
we’re really counting in this fight—the
boys over there and in camp, the rest of
us here.” Laura’s dark eyes were beginning
to shine. “Oh, I wouldn’t be anywhere
but on a farm for anything in the
wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in
France!”
She stopped suddenly, put down the
100
hand-mirror with which she was surveying
her back hair, and blushed. “There!”
she said, “I forgot all about the fact that
you weren’t born on a farm, too. But
then, you can share ours for a year, so I’m
not going to apologize for a word I’ve
said, even if I have been bragging because
I’m so lucky.”
Bragging because she was lucky! And
Laura meant it. There was not the ghost
of a pose in her frank, downright young
pride. Her cousin felt like a person who
has been walking down-stairs and tries to
step off a tread that isn’t there. Elliott’s
own cheeks reddened as she thought of the
patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily,
Laura hadn’t seemed to notice it. And
Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott
realized, with a little stab of chagrin,
that Laura wouldn’t understand why her
cousin had pitied her, even if some one
should be at pains to explain the fact to
her.
But Elliott couldn’t let herself pass as
an intentional slacker.
“We girls did canteening at home; surgical
dressings and knitting, too, of course,
but canteening was the most fun.”
“That must have been fine.” Laura
was interested at once.
Elliott’s spirit revived. After all,
Laura was a country girl. “Do you have
a canteen here?”
“Oh, no, Highboro isn’t big enough.
No trains stop here for more than a minute.
We’re not on the direct line to any
of the camps, either.”
“Ours was a regular canteen,” said Elliott.
“They would telephone us when soldiers
were going through, and we would
go down, with Mrs. Royce or Aunt Margaret
or some other chaperon, and distribute
post-cards and cigarettes and
sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if
the weather was hot. It was such fun to
talk to the men!”
“Ice-cream and cigarettes!” laughed
Laura. “I should think they’d have liked
something nourishing.”
“Oh, they got the nourishing things, if it
was time. The Government had an arrangement
with a restaurant just around
the corner to serve soldiers’ meals. We
didn’t have to do that.”
“You supplied the frills.”
“Yes.” Somehow Elliott did not quite
like the words.
Laura was quick to notice her discomfiture.
“I imagine they needed the frills
and the jollying, poor lonesome boys!
They’re so young, many of them, and not
used to being away from home; and the
life is strange, however well they may
like it.”
“Yes,” said Elliott. “More than one
bunch told us they hadn’t seen anything
to equal what we did for them this side of
New York. Our uniforms were so becoming,
too; even a plain girl looked cute
103
in those caps. Why, Laura, you might
have a uniform, mightn’t you, if it’s war
work?”
“What should I want of a uniform?”
“People who saw you would know what
you’re doing.”
“They know now, if they open their
eyes.”
“They’d know why, I mean—that it’s
war work.”
“Mercy! Nobody around here needs to
be told why a person hoes potatoes these
days. They’re all doing it.”
“Do you hoe potatoes?” Elliott had no
notion how comically her consternation sat
on her pretty features.
Laura laughed at the amazed face of her
cousin. “Of course I do, when potatoes
need hoeing.”
“But do you like it?”
“Oh, yes, in a way. Hoeing potatoes
isn’t half bad.”
Elliott opened her lips to say that it
104
wasn’t girls’ work, remembered that she
had made that remark once before, and
changed to, “It is hard work, and it isn’t
a bit interesting.”
Then Laura asked two questions that
left Elliott gasping. “Don’t you like to do
anything except what is easy? Though I
don’t know that it is any harder to hoe potatoes
for an hour than to play tennis that
length of time. And anything is interesting,
don’t you think, that has to be done?”
“Goodness, no!” ejaculated Elliott, when
she found her voice. “I don’t think that
at all! Do you, really?”
“Why, yes!” Laura laughed a trifle
deprecatingly. “I’m not bluffing. I
never thought I’d care to spray potatoes,
but one day it had to be done, and Father
and the boys were needed for something
else. It wasn’t any harder to do than
churning, and I found it rather fun to
watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated,
too, how many Belgians the potatoes
105
in those hills would feed, either directly or
by setting wheat free, you know. I forget
now how many I made it. I know I
felt quite exhilarated when I was through.
Trudy helped.”
“Goodness!” murmured Elliott faintly.
For a minute she could find no other words.
Then she managed to remark: “Of
course every one gardens at home. They
have lots at the country club, and raise
potatoes and things, and you hear them
talking everywhere about bugs and blight
and cold pack. I never paid much attention.
It didn’t seem to be meant for girls.
The men and boys raise the things and the
wives and mothers can them. That’s the
way we do at home.”
“Traditional,” nodded Laura. “We divide
on those lines here to a certain extent,
too; but we’re rather Jacks of all trades
on this farm. The boys know how to can
and we girls to make hay.”
“The boys can?”
“Tom put up all our string-beans
last summer quite by himself. What does
it matter who does a thing, so it’s
done?”
Laura was dressed now, from the crown
of her smooth black head to the tip of her
white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory
operation she had made of it. Elliott dismissed
Laura’s last remark, which had not
sounded very sensible to her—of course it
mattered who did things; why, that sometimes
was all that did matter!—and reflected
that, country bred though she was,
her cousin Laura had an air that many a
town girl might have envied. An ability
to find hard manual work interesting did
not seem to preclude the knowledge of how
to put on one’s clothes.
But Laura’s hands were not all that
hands should be, by Elliott’s standard;
they were well cared for, and as white as
soap and water could make them, but there
are some things that soap and water cannot
107
do when it is pitted against sun and
wind and contact with soil and berries and
fruits. Elliott hadn’t meant to look so
fixedly at Laura’s hands as to make her
thought visible, and the color rose in her
cheeks when Laura said, exactly as though
she were a mind-reader, “If you prefer
lily-white fingers to stirring around doing
things, why, you have to sit in a corner
and keep them lily-white. I like to stick
mine into too many pies ever to have them
look well.”
“They’re a lovely shape,” said Elliott,
seriously.
And then, to her amazement, Laura
laughed and leaned over and hugged her.
“And you’re a dear thing, even if you do
think my hands are no lady’s!”
Of course Elliott protested; but as that
was just what she did think, her protestations
were not very convincing.
“You can’t have everything,” said
Laura, quite as though she didn’t mind in
108
the least what her hands looked like. The
strangest part of it all was that Elliott believed
Laura actually didn’t mind.
But she didn’t know how to answer her,
Laura’s words had raised the dust on all
those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott
had had sitting about in her mind for so
long that she supposed they were her very
own opinions. Until the dust settled she
couldn’t tell what she thought, whether
they belonged to her or had simply been
dumped on her by other people. She
couldn’t remember ever having been in
such a position before.
Yes, Elliott found a good deal to think
of. One had to draw the line somewhere;
she had told herself comfortably; but lines
seemed to be very queerly jumbled up in
this war. If a person couldn’t canteen
or help at a hostess house or do surgical
dressings or any of the other things that
had always stood in her mind for girl’s
war work, she had to do what she could,
109
hadn’t she? And if it wasn’t necessary
to be tagged, why, it wasn’t. Laura in
blouse and short skirt, or even in overalls,
seemed to accomplish as much as any possible
Laura in a pantaloon suit or puttees
or any other land uniform. There really
didn’t seem any way out, now that Elliott
understood the matter. Perhaps she had
been rather dense not to understand it before.
“What would you like me to do this
morning, Uncle?” she asked the next day
at the breakfast-table. “I think it is time
I went to work.”
“Going to join the farmerettes?”
“Thinking of it.” She could feel, without
seeing, Stannard’s stare of astonishment.
No one else gave signs of surprise.
Stannard, thought the girl, really hadn’t
as good manners as his cousins.
Uncle Bob surveyed the trim figure, arrayed
in its dark smock and the shortest of
all Elliott’s short skirts. If he felt other
110
than wholly serious he concealed the fact
well.
“The corn needs hoeing, both field-corn
and garden-corn. How about joining that
squad?”
“It suits me.”
Corn—didn’t Hoover urge people to eat
corn? In helping the corn crop, she too
might feel herself feeding the Belgians.
Gertrude linked her arm in her slender
cousin’s as they left the table. “I’ll show
you where the tools are,” she said.
“Harry runs the cultivator in the field, but
we use hand-hoes in the garden.”
“You will have to show me more than
that,” said Elliott. “What does hoeing do
to corn, anyhow?”
“Keeps down the weeds that eat up the
nourishment in the soil,” recited Gertrude
glibly, “and by stirring up the ground
keeps in the moisture. You like to know
the reason for things, too, don’t you? I’m
glad. I always do.”
It wasn’t half bad, with a hoe over her
shoulder, in company with other boys and
girls, to swing through the dewy morning
to the garden. Priscilla had joined the
squad when she heard Elliott was to be in
it, and with Stannard and Tom the three
girls made a little procession. It proved
a simple enough matter to wield a hoe.
Elliott watched the others for a few minutes,
and if her hills did not take on as
workmanlike an appearance as Tom’s and
Gertrude’s, or even as Priscilla’s, they all
assured her practice would mend the fault.
“You’ll do it all right,” Priscilla encouraged
her.
“Sure thing!” said Tom. “We might
have a race and see who gets his row done
first.”
“No races for me, yet,” said Elliott.
“It would be altogether too tame. I’d
qualify for the booby prize without trying.
But the rest of you may race, if you want
to.”
“Just wait!” prophesied Stannard
darkly. “Wait an hour or two and see
how you like hoeing.”
Elliott laughed. In the cool morning,
with the hoe fresh in her hand, she thought
of fatigue as something very far away.
Stan was always a little inclined to croak.
The thing was easy enough.
“Run along, little boy, to your row,” she
admonished him. “Can’t you see that I’m
busy?”
Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly,
and painstakingly removed every weed.
The freshly stirred earth looked dark and
pleasant; the odor of it was good, too.
She compared what she had done with
what she hadn’t, and the contrast moved
her to new activity. But after a time—it
was not such a long time, either, though it
seemed hours—she thought it would be
pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe
was monotonous. She straightened up
and leaned on the handle and surveyed her
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fellow-workers. Their backs looked very
industrious as they bent at varying distances
across the garden. Even Stannard
had left her behind.
Gertrude abandoned her row and came
and inspected Elliott’s. “That looks fine,”
she said, “for a beginner. You must stop
and rest whenever you’re tired. Mother
always tells us to begin a thing easy, not to
tire ourselves too much at first. She won’t
let us girls work when the sun’s too hot,
either.”
Elliott forced a smile. If she had done
what she wished to, she would have thrown
down her hoe and walked off the field.
But for the first time in her life she didn’t
feel quite like letting herself do what she
wished to.
What would these new cousins think of
her if she abandoned a task as abruptly as
that? But what good did her hoeing do?—a
few scratches on the border of this big
garden-patch. It couldn’t matter to the
114
Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or
anybody else whether she hoed or didn’t
hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that, even
of garden-patches—but not every one
would say it. Some people knew how
to hoe. Presumably some people liked
hoeing. Goodness, how long this row
was! Would she ever, ever reach the
end?
Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed
Priscilla. “That looks nice. You haven’t
got very far yet, have you? Never mind.
Things go a lot faster after you’ve done
’em a while. Why, when I first tried to
play the piano, my fingers went so slow,
they just made me ache. Now they skip
along real quick.”
Elliott leaned on her hoe. “Do you play
the piano?”
“Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by.
I must get back to my row.”
“Do you like hoeing?” Elliott called
after her.
“I like to get it done.” The small figure
skipped nimbly away.
“‘Get it done!’” Elliott addressed the
next clump of waving green blades, pessimism
in her voice. “After one row, isn’t
there another, and another, and another,
forever?” She slashed into a mat of
chickweed with venom.
“I knew you’d get tired,” said Stannard,
at her elbow. “Come on over to
those trees and rest a bit. Sun’s getting
hot here.”
Elliott looked at the clump of trees on
the edge of the field. Their shade invited
like a beckoning hand. Little beads of
perspiration stood on her forehead. A
warm lassitude spread through her body,
turning her muscles slack. Hadn’t Gertrude
said Aunt Jessica didn’t let them
work in too hot a sun?
“You’re tired; quit it!” urged Stannard.
“Not just yet,” said Elliott, and her hoe
bit at the ground again.
Tired? She should think she was tired!
And she had fully intended to go with
Stan. Then why hadn’t she gone? The
question puzzled the girl. Quit when you
like and make it up with cajolery was a
motto that Elliott had found very useful.
She was good at cajolery. What made
her hesitate to try it now?
She swung around, half minded to call
Stannard back, when a sentence flashed
into her mind, not a whole sentence, just
a fragment salvaged from a book some one
had once been reading in her hearing:
“This war will be won by tired men
who—” She couldn’t quite get the rest.
An impression persisted of keeping everlastingly
at it, but the words escaped her.
She swung back, her hail unsent. Well,
she was tired, dead tired, and her back
was broken and her hands were blistered,
or going to be, but nobody would think of
saying that that had anything to do with
winning the war. Stay; wouldn’t they?
117
It seemed absurd; but, still, what made
people harp so on food if there weren’t
something in it? If all they said was true,
why—and Elliott’s tired back straightened—why,
she was helping a little bit; or she
would be if she didn’t quit.
It may seem absurd that it had taken a
backache to make Elliott visualize what
her cousins were really doing on their
farm. She ought, of course, to have been
able to see it quite clearly while she sat
on the veranda, but that isn’t always the
way things work. Now she seemed to see
the farm as part of a great fourth line of
defense, a trench that was feeding all the
other trenches and all the armies in the
open and all the people behind the armies,
a line whose success was indispensable to
victory, whose defeat would spell failure
everywhere. It was only for a minute
that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind
of illuminated insight that made her backache
well worth while. Then the minute
118
passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again
she was aware only of a suspicion that
possibly when one was having the most
fun was not always when one was being
the most useful.
“Well,” said a pleasant voice, “how does
the hoeing go?”
And there stood Laura with a pitcher in
her hand, and on her face a look—was it
of mingled surprise and respect?
“You mustn’t work too long the first
day,” she told Elliott. “You’re not hardened
to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now
and try it again later on. I have your
book under my arm.”
When, that noon, they all trooped up to
the house, hot and hungry, Elliott went
with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody
thanked her for anything, and she didn’t
even notice the lack. Farming wasn’t like
canteening, where one expected thanks.
As she scrubbed her hands she noticed that
her nails were hopeless, but her attention
119
failed to concentrate on their demoralized
state. Hadn’t she finished her row?
“Stuck it out, did you?” said Bruce, as
they sat down at dinner. “I bet you
would.”
“I shouldn’t have dared look any of you
in the face again, if I hadn’t,” smiled Elliott.
But his words rang warm in her
ears.
Laura and Elliott were in the summer
kitchen, filling glass jars with
raspberries. As they finished filling each
jar, they capped it and lowered it into a
wash-boiler of hot water on the stove.
“It seems odd,” remarked Laura, “to
put up berries without sugar.”
“Isn’t it horrid,” said Elliott, who had
never put up berries at all, but who was
longing for candy and hadn’t had courage
to suggest buying any. “I hope the Allies
are going to appreciate all we are doing
for them.”
“Do you?” Laura looked at her oddly.
“I hope we are going to appreciate all they
have done for us.”
“Aren’t we showing it?” Elliott felt
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really indignant at her cousin. “Think of
the sacrifices we’re making for them.”
“Sacrifices?”
How stupid Laura was! “You know as
well as I do how many things we are giving
up.”
“Sugar, for instance?” queried Laura.
“Sugar is one thing.”
“Oh, well,” said Laura, “I’d rather a
little Belgian had my extra pounds, poor
scrap! Of course, now and then I get
hungry for it, though Mother gives us all
the maple we want, but when I do get
hungry, I think about the Belgians and
the people of northern France who have
lost their homes, and of all those children
over there who haven’t enough to eat to
make them want to play; and I think about
the British fleet and what it has kept us
from for four years; and about the thousands
of girls who have given their youth
and prettiness to making munitions. I
think about things like that and then I say
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to myself, ‘My goodness, what is a little
sugar, more or less!’ Why, Elliott, we
don’t begin to feel the war over here, not
as they feel it!”
Elliott, who considered that she felt the
war a good deal, demurred. “I have lost
my home,” she said, feeling a little
ashamed of the words as she said them.
“But it is there,” objected Laura.
“Your home is all ready to go back to,
isn’t it? That’s my point.”
“And there’s Father,” said Elliott.
“I know, and my brothers. But I don’t
feel that I have done anything in their
being in the army. It is doing them lots
of good: every letter shows that. And,
anyway, I’d be ashamed if they didn’t
go.”
“Something might happen,” said Elliott.
“What would you say then?”
“The same, I hope. But what I mean
is, the war doesn’t really touch us in the
routine of our every-day living. We don’t
123
have to darken our windows at night and
take, every now and then, to the cellars.
The machinery of our lives isn’t thrown
out of gear. We don’t live hand in hand
with danger. But lots of us think we’re
killed if we have to use our brains a little,
if we’re asked to substitute for wheat
flour, and can’t have thick frosting on our
cake and eat meat three times a day. Oh,
I’ve heard ’em talk! Why, our life over
here isn’t really topsyturvy a bit!”
“Isn’t it?” There were things, Elliott
thought, that Laura, wise as she was,
didn’t know.
“We’re inconvenienced,” said Laura,
“but not hurt.”
Elliott was silent. She was trying to
decide whether or not she was hurt. Inconvenienced
seemed rather a slim verb
for what had happened to her. But she
didn’t go on to say what she had meant to
say about candy, and she felt in her secret
soul the least bit irritated at Laura.
Then Priscilla whirled in on her tiptoes,
her hands behind her back. “The postman
went right straight by, though I hung
out the window and called and called. I
guess he didn’t hear me, he’s awful deaf
sometimes.”
“Didn’t I get a letter?” Elliott’s face
fell.
“Mail is slow getting through, these
days,” said Aunt Jessica, coming in from
the main kitchen. “We always allow an
extra day or two on the road. Wasn’t
there anything at all from Bob or Sidney
or Pete, Pris? You little witch, you certainly
are hiding something behind your
back.”
Then Priscilla gave a gay little squeal
and jumped up and down till her black
curls bobbed all over her face. When she
stopped jumping she looked straight at
Elliott.
“Which hand will you take?” she
asked.
“I? Oh, have you a letter for me, after
all?”
“You didn’t guess it,” said the child.
“Which hand?”
“The right—no, the left.”
Priscilla shook her head. “You aren’t
a very good guesser, are you? But I’ll
give it to you this time. It’s not fat, but
it looks nice. He didn’t even get out, that
postman didn’t; he just tucked the letter in
the box as he rode along.”
“Certain sure he didn’t tuck any other
letter in too, Pris?” queried Laura.
The child held out empty hands.
“That’s no proof. Your eyes are too
bright.” Laura turned her around gently.
“Oh, I thought so! Stuck in your dress.
From Bob!”
“Two,” squealed Priscilla, with an emphatic
little hop. “Here, give ’em to
Mother. They’re ’dressed to her. Now
let’s get into ’em, quick. Shall I ring the
bell, Mother, to call in Father and the rest?
126
Two letters from Bob is a great big emergency;
don’t you think so?”
The words filtered negligently through
Elliott’s inattention. All her conscious
thoughts were centered on her father’s
handwriting. She had had a cable before,
but this was his first letter. It almost made
her cry to see the familiar script and know
that she could get nothing but letters from
him for a whole long year. No hugs, no
kisses, no rumpling of her hair or his, no
confidential little talks—no anything that
had been her meat and drink for years.
How did people endure such separations?
A big lump came up in her throat and the
tears pricked her eyes; but she swallowed
very hard and blinked once or twice and
vowed, “I won’t cry, I won’t!”
And then suddenly, through her preoccupation,
she became aware of a hush
fallen on the bubbling expectancy of the
room. Glancing up from the page, she
saw Henry standing in the doorway.
127
Even to unfamiliar eyes there was something
strangely arresting in the boy’s look,
a shocked gravity that cut like a premonition.
“They say Ted Gordon’s been killed,”
he said.
“Ted—Gordon!” cried Laura.
“Practice flight, at camp. Nobody
knows any particulars. Cy Jones told
Father.” The boy’s voice sounded dry
and hard.
“Are they certain there is no mistake?”
his mother asked quietly.
“I guess it’s true. Cy said the Gordons
had a telegram.”
“I must go over at once.” Mrs. Cameron
rose, putting the letters into Laura’s
hands, and took off her apron.
“I’ll bring the car around for you,” said
Henry.
“Thank you.” She smiled at him and
turned to the girls. “You know what we
are having for dinner, Laura. Priscilla
128
will help make the shortcake, I’m sure.
I will be back as soon as I can.”
Mutely the four watched the little car
roll out of the yard and down the hill.
Then Henry spoke. “Letters?”
“From Bob,” said Laura.
“Did she read ’em?”
Laura shook her head.
“Gee!” said the boy.
“Perhaps she thought she couldn’t,”
hesitated Laura, “and go over there.”
A moment of silence held the room.
Henry broke it. “Well, we’re not going.
Let’s hear ’em.”
Elliott took a step toward the door.
“Needn’t run away unless you want to,”
he called after her. “We always read
Bob’s letters aloud.”
So Elliott stayed. Laura’s pleasant
voice, a bit strained at first, grew steadier
as the reading proceeded. Henry sat
whittling a stick into the coal-hod, his lips
pursed as though for a whistle, but without
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sound, and still with that odd sober
look on his face. Priscilla, all the jumpiness
gone out of her, stood very still in the
middle of the kitchen floor, a kind of hurt
bewilderment in the big dark eyes fixed on
Laura’s face. Nobody laughed, nobody
even chuckled, and yet it was a jolly letter
that they read first, full of spirit and
life and fun. High-hearted adventure
rollicked through it, and the humor that
makes light of hardship, and the latest
slang of the front adorned its pages with
grotesquely picturesque phrases. The
Cameron boys were obviously getting a
good time out of the war. Bob had got
something else, too. The letter had been
delayed in transmission and near the end
was a sentence, “Brought down my first
Hun to-day—great fight! I’ll tell you
about it next time if after due deliberation
I decide the censor will let me.”
“Some letter!” commented Henry.
“Say, those aviators are living like princes,
130
aren’t they! Mess hall in a big grove
with all the fixings. And eats! More
than we get at home. Gee, I wish I was
older!”
“So you could come in for the eats?”
smiled his sister.
“So I could come in for things generally.”
“You couldn’t work any harder if you
were a man grown,” she told him.
“Huh!” said Henry, “a lot I hurt myself!”
But he liked the smile and the
praise, wary though he might pretend to
be of it. Sis was a good sort. “You’re
some worker, yourself. Let’s get on to
the next one.”
The second letter—and it too bore a date
disquietingly far from the present—told
of the fight. It thrilled the four in the
pleasant New England kitchen. The
peaceful walls opened wide, and they were
out in far spaces, patrolling the windy sky,
mounting, diving, dodging through wisps
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of cloud, kings of the air, hunting for
combat. Their eyes shone and their
breathing quickened, and for a minute
they forgot the boy who was dead.
“Why the Hun didn’t bag me, instead
of my getting him,” wrote Bob, “is a mystery.
Just the luck of beginners, I guess.
I did most of the things I shouldn’t have
done, and, by chance, one or two of the
things I should—fired when I was too far
off, went into a spinning nose-dive under
the mistaken notion it would make me a
poor target, etc., etc., etc. Oh, I was
green, all right! He knew how to manœuver,
that Hun did. That’s what feazes
me. How did I manage to top him at last?
Well, I did. And my gun didn’t jam.
Nuff said.”
“Gee!” said Henry between his teeth.
“And Ted Gordon had to go and miss all
that! Gee!”
“If he had only got to the front!” sighed
Laura.
“Anything from Pete?” asked the boy.
“No.”
“Sid?”
She shook her head. “We had a letter
from Sid day before yesterday, you know.”
“Sid lays ’em down pretty thick sometimes.
Well, I must be getting on. This
isn’t weeding cabbages.”
The three girls, left alone, reacted each
in her own way to the touch of the dark
wings that had so suddenly brushed the
rim of their blithe young lives. Priscilla
frankly didn’t understand, but her sensitive
spirit felt the chill of the event, and
her big eyes gazed with a tinge of wonder
at the blue sky and sunshine of the world
outside.
“Seems sort of queer it’s so bright,” she
remarked.
Laura was busy, as were thousands of
sisters at that very minute and every minute
all over the land, scotching the fears
that are always lying in wait, ready to lift
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their ugly heads. Queer the letters had
come through so tardily! Where was
Bob, her darling big brother, this minute?
Where was Pete Fearing, hardly less dear
than Bob? Pictures clicked through her
brain, pictures built on newspaper prints
that she had seen. But one died twice
that way, she reflected, and it did no good.
So she put the letters on the shelf beside
the clock and brought out the potatoes for
dinner.
“Ted Gordon was in the Yale Battery
last summer,” she remarked. “He came
up from camp to get his degree this year.
Mrs. Gordon and Harriet went down. He
was Scroll and Key.”
In Elliott’s brain Laura’s words made a
swift connection. Before that, Ted Gordon
had meant nothing to her, the name of
a boy whom she had never seen, a country
lad, whose death, while sudden and sad,
could not touch her. Now, suddenly, he
clicked into place in her own familiar
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world. A Scroll-and-Key man? Why,
those were the men she knew—Bones,
Scroll and Key, Hasty Pudding—he was
one of them!
She felt a swift recoil. So that was
what war came to. Not just natty figures
in khaki that girls cried over in saying
good-by to, or smiled at and told how perfectly
splendid they were to go; not just
high adventure and martial music and the
rhythm of swinging brown shoulders; not
just surgical dressings and socks and
sweaters; not even just homes broken up
for a time and fathers sailing overseas.
Of course one understood with one’s
brain, that made part of the thrill of their
going, but one didn’t realize with the feeling
part of one—how could a girl?—when
they went away or when one made dressings.
Yet didn’t dressings more than
anything else point to it? And Laura
had said we didn’t feel the war over
here!
A sense of something intolerable, not
to be borne, overwhelmed Elliott. She
pushed at it with both hands, as though by
the physical gesture she could shove away
the sudden darkness that had blotted with
alien shadow the face of her familiar sun.
Death! There was an unbearable unpleasantness
about death. She had always
felt ill at ease in its presence, in the
very mention of its name; she had avoided
every sign and symbol of it as she
would a plague. And now, she foresaw
for an instant of blinding clarity, perhaps
it could not be avoided any longer.
Was this young aviator’s accident
just a symbol of the way death was going
to invade all the happy sheltered
places? The thought turned the girl
sick for a minute. How could Laura
go on with her work so unfeelingly?
And there was Priscilla getting out
raspberries.
“I don’t see,” said Elliott, and her voice
136
choked, “I don’t see how you can bear to
peel those potatoes!”
“Some one has to peel them,” said
Laura. “The family must have dinner,
you know. We couldn’t work without
eating. Besides, I think it helps to work.”
Elliott brushed the last sentence aside.
It fell outside her experience, and she
didn’t understand it. The only thing she
did understand was the reiteration of
work, work, and the pall of blackness that
overshadowed her hitherto bright world.
She wished again with all her heart that
she had never come to Vermont. She
didn’t belong here; why couldn’t she have
stayed where she did belong, where people
understood her, and she them?
A great wave of homesickness swept
over the girl, homesickness for the world
as she had always known it, her world as
it had been before the war warped and
twisted and spoiled things. And yet,
oddly enough, there was no sense in the
137
Cameron house of anything being spoiled.
They talked of Ted Gordon in the same
unbated tone of voice in which they spoke
of her cousin Bob or of his friend Pete
Fearing, and they actually laughed when
they told stories about him. Laura baked
and brewed, and the results disappeared
down the road in the direction Mother Jess
had taken. Aunt Jessica herself returned,
a trifle pale and tired-looking, but smiling
as usual.
“Lucinda and Harriet are just as brave
as you would expect them to be,” Elliott
heard her tell Father Bob. “No one knows
yet how it happened. They hope to learn
more from Ted’s friends. Two of the
aviators are coming up. Harriet told me
they rather look for them to-morrow
night.”
Hastily Elliott betook herself out of
hearing. She wanted to get beyond sight
and sound of any reference to what had
happened. It was the only way known to
138
her to escape the disagreeable—to turn her
back on it and run away. What she
didn’t see and think about, so far as she
was concerned, wasn’t there. Hitherto
the method had worked very well. What
disquieted her now was a dull, persistent
fear that it wasn’t going to work much
longer.
So when Bruce remarked the next day,
“I’m going to take part of the afternoon
off and go for ferns; want to come?” she
answered promptly, “Yes, indeed,” though
privately she thought him crazy. Ferns,
on a perfectly good working-day? But
when they were fairly started, she found
she hadn’t escaped, after all. Instead, she
had run right into the thing, so to speak.
“We want to make the church look
pretty,” Bruce said, as they tramped
along. “And I happen to know where
some beauties grow, maidenhair and the
rarer sorts. It isn’t everybody I’d dare
to take along.”
“Is that so?” queried the girl. She
wondered why.
“Things have a way of disappearing in
the woods, unless they’re treated right.
Took a fellow with me once when I went
for pink-and-white lady’s-slippers, the big
ones—they’re beauties. He was crazy to
go, and he promised to keep the place to
himself. You could have picked bushels
there then. Now they’re all cleaned out.”
“But why? Did people dig them up?”
“Picked’em too close. Some things
won’t stand being cleaned up the way most
people clean up flowers in the woods.
They’re free, and nobody’s responsible.”
In spite of her thoughts Elliott dimpled.
“I think it is quite safe to take me.”
He grinned. “Maybe that’s why I do
it.”
It was very pleasant, tramping along
with Bruce in the bright day; pleasant, too,
leaving the sunshine for the spicy coolness
of the woods, and climbing up, up, among
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great tree-trunks and mossy rocks and
trickling mountain brooks. Or it would
have been pleasant, if one could only have
forgotten the reason that underlay their
journey. But when they had reached
Bruce’s secret spot and were cutting the
wiry brown stems, and packing together
carefully the spreading, many-fingered
fronds so as not to break the delicate
ferns, that undercurrent of numb consternation
reasserted itself. Like Priscilla,
Elliott felt a little shocked at the brightness
of the sunshine, the blueness of the sky,
and the beauty of the fern-filled glade.
“It was dreadful for him to be killed
before he had done anything!” At last
the words so long burning in her heart
reached the tip of her tongue.
“Yes.” Bruce’s voice was sober. “It
sure was hard.”
Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.
“I should think his people would feel as
though they couldn’t stand it!” Elliott
declared. “If he had got to France—but
now it is just a hideous, hideous waste!”
Bruce hesitated. “I suppose that is one
way of looking at it.”
“Why, what other way could there be?”
She stared at him in surprise. “He was
just learning to fly. He hadn’t done anything,
had he?”
“No, he hadn’t done anything. But
what he died for is just the same as though
he had got across, isn’t it, and had downed
forty Huns?”
She continued to stare fixedly at the boy
for a full minute. “Why, yes,” she said
at last, very slowly; “yes, I suppose it is.”
Curiously enough, the whole thing looked
better from that angle.
For a long time she was silent, cutting
and tying up ferns.
“How did you happen to think of that?”
“To think of what?” Bruce was tying
his own ferns.
“What you said about—about what this
Ted Gordon died for.”
It was Bruce’s turn to look surprised.
“I didn’t think of anything. It’s just a
fact, isn’t it?”
Then he began to load himself with
ferns. Elliott wouldn’t have supposed
any one could carry as many as Bruce
shouldered; he had great bunches in his
hands, too.
“You look like a walking fernery,” she
said.
“Birnam Wood,” he quoted and for a
minute she couldn’t think what he meant.
“Better let me take some of those on the
ground,” he said.
“No, indeed! I am going to do my
share.”
Quietly he possessed himself of two of
her bunches. “That’s your share. It
will be heavy enough before we get home.”
It was heavy, though not for worlds
would Elliott have mentioned the fact.
She helped Bruce put the ferns in water,
and she went out at night and sprinkled
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them to keep them fresh; but she had an
excuse ready when Laura asked if she
would like to go over to the little white-spired
church on the hill and help arrange
them.
Nothing would have induced her to attend
the services, either, though afterward
she wished that she had. There seemed to
have been something so high and fine and—yes—so
cheerful about them, so martial
and exalted, that she wished she had seen
for herself what they were like. In Elliott’s
mind gloom had always been inseparably
linked with a funeral, gloom and
black clothes. Whereas Laura and her
mother and Gertrude and Priscilla wore
white. A good many things at the Cameron
farm were very odd.
It was after every one had gone to bed
and the lights were out that Elliott lay
awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and
worried and worried about Father, three
thousand miles away. He wasn’t an aviator,
144
it was true, but in France wasn’t the
land almost as unsafe as the air? She
had imagined so many things that might
perfectly easily happen to him that she was
on the point of having a little weep all by
herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did
she know that Elliott was homesick?
Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she
had sat that first night, and talked about
comforting, commonplace things—about
the new kittens, and how soon the corn
might be ripe, and what she used to do
when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott
got hold of her hand and wound her
own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica’s
fingers, but in the end she spoke out
the thing that was uppermost in her mind.
“Mother Jess,” she said, using unconsciously
the Cameron term; “Mother Jess,
I don’t like death.”
She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because
she felt very strongly and she wasn’t
used to talking about such things. But
145
she had to say it. Though if the room
hadn’t been dark, I doubt if she could have
got it out at all.
“No, dear,” said Aunt Jessica, quietly.
“Most of us don’t like death. I wonder if
your feeling isn’t due to the fact that you
think of it as an end?”
“What is it,” asked Elliott, “but an
end?” She was so astonished that her
words sounded almost brusque.
“I like to think of it as a coming alive,”
said Aunt Jessica, “a coming alive more
vigorously than ever. The world is beginning
to think of it so, too.”
Elliott lay still after Aunt Jessica had
gone out of the room and tried to think
about what she had said. It was quite the
oddest thing that anybody had said yet.
But all she really succeeded in thinking
about was the quiet certainty in Aunt Jessica’s
voice, the comforting clasp of Aunt
Jessica’s arms, and the kiss still warm on
her lips.
146
CHAPTER VII
PICNICKING
“I feel like a picnic,” said Mother Jess,
“a genuine all-day-in-the-woods picnic.”
It was rather queer for a grown-up to
say such a thing right out like a girl, Elliott
thought, but she liked it. And Aunt
Jessica was sitting back on her heels, just
like a girl too, looking up from the border
where she was working. Elliott had
caught sight of her blue chambray skirt
under a haze of blue larkspurs and had
come over to see what she was doing. It
proved to be weeding with a clawlike thing
that, wielded by Aunt Jessica’s right hand,
grubbed out weeds as fast as she could toss
them into a basket with her left. Elliott
was surprised. Weeding a flower-bed
147
when, as she happened to know, the garden
beets weren’t finished did not square with
her notions of what was what on the Cameron
farm. She was so surprised that she
answered absently, “That sounds fine. I
think I feel so, too,” and kept on wondering
about Aunt Jessica.
“We usually have a picnic at this time of
year when the haying is done,” said that
lady, and fell again to her weeding. “It
is astonishing how fast a weed can grow.
Look at that!” and she held up a spreading
mat of green chickweed. “I have had to
neglect the borders shamefully this summer.”
Elliott squatted down beside her and
twined her fingers in a tuft of grass.
“May I help?” She gave a little tug to
the grass.
“Delighted to have you. Look out!
That’s a Johnny-jump-up.”
“Is it? Goodness! I thought it was a
weed!”
“Here is one in blossom. Spare
Johnny. He is a faithful friend till the
winter snows.”
“Johnny-jump-up.” Elliott’s laughter
gurgled over the name. “But he does
rather jump up, doesn’t he? Funny little
pansy thing! Funny name, too.”
“Not so odd as a few others I know.
Kiss-me-in-the-buttery, for instance.”
“Not really!”
“Honest Injun, as Priscilla says.”
“These borders are sweet.” The girl
let her gaze wander up and down the curving
lines of color splashed across the gentle
slope of the hill. “But flowers don’t stand
much chance in a war year, do they? I
know people at home who have plowed
theirs up and planted potatoes.”
“A mistake,” said Aunt Jessica, shaking
the dirt vigorously from a fistful of sorrel.
“A mistake, unless it is a question of life
and death. We have too much land in this
country to plow up our flowers, yet a while.
149
And a war year is just the time when we
need them most. No, I never feel I am
wasting my time when I work among
flowers.”
“But they’re not necessary, are they?”
questioned Elliott. “Of course, they’re
beautiful; but I thought luxuries had to go,
just now.”
“Flowers a luxury? Oh, my dear little
girl, put that notion out of your head
quickly! American-beauty roses may be a
luxury, and white lilacs in the dead of winter,
but garden flowers, never! Wait till
you see the daffodils dancing under those
apple trees next spring!” And she nodded
up the grassy slope at the apple trees
as though she and they shared a delightful
secret that Elliott did not yet know.
Privately the girl held a different opinion
about next spring, but she wondered
why Aunt Jessica should talk of daffodils.
They seemed rather lugged into a conversation
in July.
Mother Jess reached with her clawlike
weeder far into the border. Her voice
came back over her shoulder in little gusts
of words as she worked. “Did you ever
hear that saying of the Prophet?—‘He
that hath two loaves let him sell one and
buy a flower of the narcissus; for bread is
food for the body, but narcissus is food
for the soul.’ That’s the way I feel about
flowers. They are the least expensive
way of getting beauty and we can’t live
without beauty, now less than ever, since
they have destroyed so much of it in
France. There! now I must stop for to-day.
Don’t you want to take this culling-basket
and pick it full of the prettiest
things you can find for Mrs. Gordon?
Perhaps you would like to take it over to
her, too. It isn’t a very long walk.”
“But I’ve never met her.”
“That won’t matter. Just tell her who
you are and that you belong to us. Mrs.
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Gordon loves flowers, though she hasn’t
much time to tend them.”
“I shouldn’t think any one could have
less time than you.”
Aunt Jessica laughed. “Oh, I make
time!”
Elliott picked up the flat green basket,
lifted the shears she found lying in it, and
went hesitatingly up and down the borders.
“What shall I pick?”
“Anything. Suit yourself. Make the
basket as pretty as you can. If you pick
here and there, the borders won’t show
where you cut from them.”
Mother Jess gathered up gloves and
tools, and went away, tugging her basket
of weeds. Elliott, left behind, surveyed
the borders critically. To cut without letting
it appear that she had cut was evidently
what Aunt Jessica wanted. She
reached in and snipped off a spire of larkspur
from the very back of the border,
then stood back to see what had happened.
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No, if one hadn’t known the stalk had been
there, one wouldn’t now know it was gone.
The thing could be done, then. Cautiously
she selected a head of white phlox.
The result of that operation also was satisfactory.
Up and down the flowery path she went,
snipping busily. On the stalks of larkspur
and phlox she laid a mass of pink snapdragons
and white candytuft, tucking in
here and there sprays of just-opening
baby’s-breath to give a misty look to the
basket. A bunch of English daisies came
next; they blossomed so fast one didn’t
have to pick and choose among them; one
could just cut and cut. And oughtn’t
there to be pansies? “Pansies—that’s for
thoughts.” Those wonderful purple ones
with a sprinkling of the yellow—no, yellow
would spoil the color scheme of the basket.
These white beauties were just the thing.
How lovely it all looked, blue and white
and pink and purple!
But there wasn’t much fragrance.
Eye and nose searched hopefully. Heliotrope!—just
a spray or two. There, now
it was perfect. Anybody would be glad to
see a basket like that coming. Only, she
did wish some one else were to carry it, or
else that she knew the people. It might
not be so bad if she knew the people.
Why shouldn’t Laura or Trudy take it?
Elliott walked very slowly up to the house,
debating the question. A week ago she
wouldn’t have debated; she would have
said, “Oh, I can’t possibly.” Or so she
thought.
“How beautiful!” said Aunt Jessica’s
voice from the kitchen window. “You
have made an exquisite thing, dear.”
Elliott rested the basket on the window
ledge and surveyed it proudly. “Isn’t it
lovely? And I don’t think cutting this has
hurt the borders a bit.”
“I am sure not.” Aunt Jessica’s busy
hands went back to her yellow mixing-bowl.
154
“You know where the Gordons
live, don’t you?—in the big brick house at
the cross-roads.”
“Yes,” said Elliott, and her feet carried
her out of the yard, stopping only long
enough to let her get her pink parasol from
the hall, and down the hill toward the
cross-roads. It was odd about Elliott’s
feet, when she hadn’t quite made up her
mind whether or not she would go. Her
feet seemed to have no doubt of it.
The pink parasol threw a becoming light
on her face, as she knew it would, and the
odor of heliotrope rose pleasantly in her
nostrils as she walked along. But the basket
grew heavy, astonishingly heavy. She
wouldn’t have believed a culling-basket
with a few flowers in it could weigh so
much. The farther Elliott walked, the
heavier it grew. And she hadn’t gone a
quarter of the way, either.
A horse’s feet coming up rapidly behind
155
her turned the girl’s steps to the side of
the road. The horse drew abreast and
stopped, prancing. “Want a lift?” asked
the man in the wagon. He was a big grizzled
farmer, a friend of her uncle’s.
Elliott nodded, smiling. “Oh, thank
you!”
“Purty flowers you’ve got there.”
“Aren’t they lovely! Aunt Jessica is
sending them to Mrs. Gordon.”
“That’s right! That’s right! Say,
just look at them pansies, now! Flowers,
they don’t do nothin’ but grow for that
aunt of yours. She don’t have to much
more ’n look at ’em.”
Elliott laughed. “She weeds them, I
happen to know. I helped her this afternoon.”
“Did you, now! But there’s a difference
in folks. Take my wife: she plants
’em and plants ’em, but she can’t keep none.
They up and die on her, sure thing.”
Elliott selected a purple pansy. “This
looks to me as though it would like to get
into your buttonhole, Mr. Blair.”
“Sho, now!” He flushed with pleasure,
driving slowly as the girl fitted the pansy
in place, a bit of heliotrope nestling beside
it. “Smells good, don’t it? Mother always
had heliotrope in her garden. Takes
me back to when I was a little shaver.”
Elliott’s deft fingers were busy with the
English daisies.
“Now don’t you go and spoil your basket.”
“No, indeed! see what a lot there are
left. Here is a little nosegay for your
wife. And thank you so much for the
lift.”
He cranked the wheel and she jumped
out, waving her hand as he drove on.
Queer a man like that should love flowers!
It was only when she was walking up
the graveled path to the door of the brick
house that she remembered to compose her
157
face into a proper gravity. She felt nervous
and ill at ease. But she needn’t go
in, she reminded herself, just leave the
flowers at the door. If only there were a
maid, which there probably wasn’t! One
couldn’t count for certain on getting right
away from these places where the people
themselves met one at the door.
“How do you do?” said a voice, advancing
from the right. “What a lovely basket!”
Elliott jumped. She was ready to jump
at anything and she had been looking
straight ahead without a single glance
aside from a non-committal brick front.
Now she saw a hammock swung between
two trees, a hammock still swaying from
the impact of the girl who had just left it.
She was the biggest girl Elliott had ever
seen, tall and fat and shapeless and very
plain. She was all in white, which made
her look bigger, and her skirt was at least
three years old. There was a faint trickle
158
of brown spots down the front of it, too,
of which the girl seemed utterly unaware.
“You don’t have to tell me where those
flowers come from,” she said. “You are
Laura Cameron’s cousin, aren’t you?
Glad to know you.”
“Yes,” said Elliott, “I am Elliott Cameron.
Aunt Jessica sent these to your
mother.”
The girl’s fingers felt cool and firm as
they touched Elliott’s, the only pleasant impression
she had yet gathered.
“They look just like Mrs. Cameron.
Sit down while I call Mother. Oh, she’s
not doing anything special. Mother!”
Elliott, conducted through the house to
a wide veranda, sank into a chair, conscious
in every nerve of her own slender
waistline. What must it feel like to be so
big? A minute later she seemed to herself
to be engulfed between two mountains
of flesh. A woman—more unwieldy,
more shapeless, more oppressive even than
159
the girl—waddled across the veranda
floor. What she said Elliott really didn’t
know; afterward phrases of pleasure came
back to her vaguely. She distinctly remembered
the creaking of the rocking-chair
when the woman sat down and her
own frightened feeling lest some vital part
should give way under the strain.
After a time, to her consciousness, mild
blue eyes emerged from the mass of human
bulk that fronted her; gray hair
crinkled away from a broad white forehead.
Then she perceived that Mrs. Gordon
was not a very tall woman, not so
tall as was her daughter. If anything,
that made it worse, thought Elliott. Why,
if she fell down, no one could tell which
side up she ought to go—except, of course,
head side on top. The idea gave her a
hysterical desire to giggle. The fact that
it would be so dreadful to laugh in this
house made the desire almost uncontrollable.
And then the big girl did laugh about
something or other, laughed simply and
naturally and really pleasantly. Elliott
almost jumped again, she was so startled.
To her, there was something repulsive in
the sight of so much human flesh. At the
same time it discouraged her. In the presence
of these two she felt insignificant,
even while she pitied them. She wished to
get away, but instinctive breeding held her
in her chair, chatting. She hoped what
she said wasn’t too inane; she didn’t know
quite what she did say.
Just then suddenly Harriet Gordon
asked a question: “Has your aunt said
anything yet about a picnic this summer?”
“I heard her say this afternoon that she
felt just like one,” said Elliott.
Mother and daughter looked at each
other triumphantly. “What did I tell
you!” said one. “I thought it was about
time,” said the other.
“Jessica Cameron always feels like a
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picnic in midsummer,” Mrs. Gordon explained.
“After the haying ’s done. You
tell her my little niece will want to go.
Alma has been here three weeks and we
haven’t been able to do much for her.
Do you think you will go, too, Harriet?”
“I’d rather not this time, Mother.”
“The Bliss girls will probably go, and
Alma knows them pretty well. She won’t
be lonesome.”
“Oh, no,” said Elliott, “we will see that
she isn’t lonely.”
“Must you go? Tell Mrs. Cameron we
will send our limousine whenever she says
the word.” On the way back through the
house Harriet Gordon paused before the
picture of a young man in aviator’s uniform.
“My brother,” she said simply,
and there was infinite pride in her voice.
Elliott stumbled down the path to the
road. She quite forgot to put up the pink
parasol. She carried it closed all the way
home. Were they limousine people?
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You would never have guessed it to look
at them. Why, she knew about picnics
of that kind!—motor-car, luncheon-kit
picnics! But what a shame to be so big!
Couldn’t they do something about it?
Good as gold, of course, and in such terrible
sorrow! They weren’t unfeeling.
The girl’s voice when she said, “My
brother,” proved that. It seemed as
though knowing about them ought to make
them attractive, but somehow it didn’t.
If they only understood how to dress, it
would help matters. Queer, how nice
boys could have such frumpy people!
And Ted Gordon had been a perfectly nice
boy. The picture proved that. But Aunt
Jessica had been right about the flowers.
The big woman and the farmer proved
that. Altogether Elliott’s mind was a
queer jumble.
“She said she’d send back the basket
to-morrow, Aunt Jessica,” she reported.
“Said she wanted to sit and look at it for a
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while just as it was. And Miss Gordon
asked me to tell you that whenever you
were ready for the picnic you must let her
know and she would send around their
limousine.”
“If that isn’t just like Harriet Gordon!”
laughed Laura. “She is the wittiest girl!
Didn’t you like her, Elliott?”
Elliott’s eyes opened wide. “What is
there witty in saying she would send their
limousine?”
Tom snorted. “Wait till you see it!”
“Why, she meant their hay-wagon!
We always use the Gordon hay-wagon for
this midsummer picnic. That’s a custom,
too.”
Everybody laughed at the expression on
Elliott’s face.
“Not up on the vernacular, Lot?” gibed
Stannard.
“When is the picnic to be, Mother?”
asked Laura.
“How about to-morrow?”
“Better make it the day after,” Father
Bob suggested, and they all fell to discussing
whom to ask.
So far as Elliott could see they asked
everybody except townspeople. The telephone
was kept busy that night and the
next morning in the intervals of Mother
Jess’s and the girls’ baking. Elliott
helped pack up dozens of turnovers and
cookies and sandwiches and bottled quarts
of lemonade.
“The lemonade is for the children,” said
Laura. “The rest of us have coffee.
Don’t you love the taste of coffee that you
make over a fire that you build yourself in
the woods?”
“On picnics I have always had my
coffee out of a thermos bottle,” said
Elliott.
“Oh, you poor thing! Why, you
haven’t had any good times at all, have
you?”
Laura looked so shocked that for a minute
165
Elliott actually wondered whether she
ever really had had any good times. Privately
she wasn’t at all sure that she was
going to have a good time now, but she
kept still about that doubt.
“Aren’t you afraid it may rain to-morrow?”
she asked.
“No, indeed! It never rains on things
Mother plans.”
And it didn’t. The morning of the picnic
dawned clear and dewy and sparkling,
as perfect a summer day as though it had
been made to the Camerons’ order. By
nine o’clock the big hay-wagon had appeared,
driven by Mr. Gordon himself,
who said he was going to turn over the
reins to Mr. Cameron when they reached
the Gordon farm. Two more horses were
hitched on and all the Camerons piled in,
with enough boxes and baskets and bags
of potatoes, one would think, to feed a
small town, and away the hay-wagon went
down the hill, stopping at house after
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house to take in smiling people, with more
boxes and baskets and bags.
It was all very care-free and gay, and
Elliott smiled and chattered away with
the rest; but in her heart of hearts she
knew that there wasn’t one of these boys
and girls who squeezed into the capacious
hay-wagon to whom she would have given
a second glance, before coming up here
to Vermont. Now she wondered whether
they were all as negligible as they looked.
And pretty soon she forgot that she had
ever thought they looked negligible. It
was the jolliest crowd she had ever been
in. One or two were a bit quiet when
they arrived, but soon even the shyest were
talking, or at least laughing, in the midst
of the happy hubbub. It seemed as
though one couldn’t have anything but a
good time when the Camerons set out to
be jolly. Alma Gordon and the little
Bliss girls were the last to squeeze in and
they rode away waving their hands violently
167
to a short, fat woman and a tall, fat
girl, who waved briskly from the brick
house’s front door.
Then Mr. Cameron turned the horses
into a mountain road and they began to
climb. Up and up the wagon went with
its merry load, through towering woods
and open pastures and along hillsides
where the woods had been cut and a tangle
of underbrush was beginning to spring up
among the stumps. And the higher the
horses climbed the higher rose the jollity
of the hay-wagon’s company. The sun
was hot overhead when they stopped.
There were gray rocks and a tumbling
mountain brook and a brown-carpeted pine
wood. Everybody jumped out helter-skelter
and began unloading the wagon or
gathering fire-wood or dipping up water,
or simply scampering around for joy of
stretching cramped legs.
It was surprising how soon a fire was
burning on the gray stones and coffee bubbling
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in the big pail Mother Jess had
brought; surprising, too, how good bacon
tasted when you broiled it yourself on a
forked stick and potatoes that you
smooched your face on by eating them in
their skins, black from the hot ashes that
the boys poked them out of with green
poles. Elliott knew now that she had
never really picnicked before in her life
and that she liked it. She liked it so much
that she ate and ate and ate until she
couldn’t eat another mouthful.
Perhaps she ate too much, but I doubt
it. It is much more likely to have been
the climb that she took in the hot sunshine
directly after that dinner, and the climb
wouldn’t have hurt her, if she had ended
the dinner without that last potato and the
extra turnover and two cookies; or if she
had rested a little before the climb. But
perhaps, it wasn’t either the dinner or
the climb; it may have been the pink ice-cream
of the evening before; or that time
169
in the celery patch, the previous morning,
when she had forgotten her hat and
wouldn’t go back to the house for it because
Henry hadn’t a hat on, and why
should a girl need a hat more than a boy?
Or it may have been all those things put together.
She certainly had had a slight
headache when she went to bed.
Whatever caused it, the fact was that on
the ride home Elliott began to feel very
sick. The longer she rode the sicker she
felt and the more appalled and ashamed
and frightened she grew. What could be
going to happen to her? And what awful
exhibition was she about to make of herself
before all these people to whom she
had felt so superior?
Before long people noticed how white
she was and by the time the wagon reached
the brick house at the cross-roads poor
Elliott hardly cared if they did see it. Her
pride was crushed by her misery. Mrs.
Gordon and Harriet came out to welcome
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Alma home and they hesitated not a minute.
“Have them bring her right in here,
Jessica. No, no, not a mite of trouble!
We’ll keep her all night. You go right
along home, you and Laura. Mercy me,
if we can’t do a little thing like this for you
folks! She’ll be all right in the morning.”
The words meant nothing to Elliott.
She was quite beyond caring where she
went, so that it was to a bed, flat and still
and unmoving. But even in her distress
she was conscious that, whatever came of
it, she had had a good time.
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CHAPTER VIII
A BEE STING
Elliott was wretchedly, miserably
ill. She despised herself for it
and then she lost even the sensation of
self contempt in utter misery. She didn’t
care about anything—who helped her undress
or where the undressing was done
or what happened to her. Mercifully nobody
talked; it would have killed her, she
thought, to have to try to talk. They
didn’t even ask her how she felt. They
only moved about quietly and did things.
They put her to bed and gave her something
to drink, after which for a time she
didn’t care if she did die; in fact, she
rather hoped she would; and then the disgusting
things happened and she felt worse
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and worse and then—oh wonder!—she began
to feel better. Actually, it was sheer
bliss just to lie quiet and feel how comfortable
she was.
“I am so sorry!” she murmured apologetically
to a presence beside the bed. “I
have made you a horrid lot of trouble.”
“Not a bit,” said the presence, quietly.
“So don’t you begin worrying about that.”
And she didn’t worry. It seemed impossible
to worry about anything just
then.
“I feel lots better,” she remarked, after
a while.
“That’s right. I thought you would.
Now I’m going to telephone your Aunt
Jessica that you feel better, and you just
lie quiet and go to sleep. Then you will
feel better still. I’ll put the bell right here
beside the bed. If you want anything,
tap it.”
The presence waddled away—the girl
could feel its going in the tremor of the bed
173
beneath her—and Elliott out of half-shut
eyes looked into the room. The shades
were partially drawn and the light was
dim. A little breeze fluttered the white
scrim curtain. The girl’s lazy gaze traveled
slowly over what she could see without
moving her head. To move her head
would have been too much trouble. What
she saw was spotless and clean and countrified,
the kind of room she would have
scorned this morning; now she thought it
the most peaceful place in the world. But
she didn’t intend to go to sleep in it. She
meant merely to lie wrapped in that delicious
mantle of well-being and continue
to feel how utterly content she was. It
seemed a pity to go to sleep and lose consciousness
of a thing like that.
But the first thing she knew she was
waking up and the room was quite dark
and she felt comfortable, but just the least
bit queer. It couldn’t be that she was
hungry!
She lay and debated the point drowsily
until a streak of light fell across the bed.
The light came from a kerosene lamp in
the hands of an immense woman whose
mild blue eyes beamed on Elliott.
“There, you’ve waked up, haven’t you?
I guess you’ll like a glass of milk now.
You can bring it right up, Harriet. She’s
awake.”
The woman set down her lamp on a little
table and lumbered about the room,
adjusting the shades at the windows, while
the lamp threw grotesque exaggerations on
the wall. Elliott watched the shadows, a
warm little smile at her heart. They
were funny, but she found herself tender
toward them. When the woman padded
back to the bed the girl smiled, her cheek
pillowed on her hand. She liked her
there beside the bed, her big shapeless
form totally obscuring the straight-backed
chair. She didn’t think of waist lines or
clothes at all, only of how comfortable
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and cushiony and pleasant the large face
looked. Mothery—might not that be the
word for it? Somehow like Aunt Jessica,
yet without the slightest resemblance except
in expression, a kind of radiating
lovingness that warmed one through and
through, and made everything right, no
matter how wrong it might have seemed.
“I telephoned your Aunt Jessica,” said
the big woman. “She was just going to
call us, and they all sent their love to you.
Here’s Harriet with the milk. Do you
feel a mite hungry?”
“I think that must be what was the matter
with me. I was trying to decide when
you came in.”
The fat form shook all over with silent
laughter. It was fascinating to watch
laughter that produced such a cataclysm
but made no sound. Elliott forgot to
drink in her absorption.
“Mother,” said Harriet Gordon, “Elliott
thinks you’re a three-ringed circus.
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You mustn’t be so exciting till she has finished
her milk.”
Elliott protested, startled. “I think you
are the kindest people in the world, both
of you!”
“Mercy, child, anybody would have done
the same! Don’t you go to setting us up
on pedestals for a little thing like that.”
The fat girl was smiling. “Make it
singular, mother. I have no quarrel with
a pedestal for you, though it might be a
little awkward to move about on.”
Mrs. Gordon shook again with that
fascinating laughter. “Mercy me! I’d
tip off first thing and then where would we
all be?”
Elliott’s eyes sought Harriet Gordon’s.
If she had observed closely she would
have seen spots on the white dress, but
to-night she was not looking at clothes.
She only thought what a kind face the big
girl had and how extraordinarily pleasant
her voice was and what good friends she
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and her mother were, just like Laura and
Aunt Jessica, only different.
“There!” said Mrs. Gordon. “You
drank up every drop, didn’t you? You
must have been hungry. Now you go
right to sleep again and I’ll miss my guess
if you don’t feel real good in the morning.”
“Good night,” said Harriet from the
door. “Did you give Blink her good-night
mouthful, Mother?”
“No, I didn’t. How I do forget that
cat!” said Mrs. Gordon. She turned
down the sheet under Elliott’s chin, patted
it a little, and asked, “Don’t you want your
pillow turned over?” Then quite naturally
she stooped down and kissed the
girl. “I guess you’re all right now.
Good night.” And Elliott put both arms
around her neck and hugged her, big as
she was. “Good night,” she said softly.
The next time Elliott woke up it was
broad daylight. Her eyes opened on a
178
framed motto, “God is Love,” and she had
to lie still and think a full minute before
she could remember where she was and
why she was there at all. Then she smiled
at the motto—it wasn’t the kind of thing
she liked on walls, but to see it there did
not make her feel in the least superior this
morning—and jumped out of bed. As
Mrs. Gordon had prophesied, she felt well,
only the least bit wabbly. Probably that
was because it was before breakfast—her
breakfast. She had a disconcerting fear
that it might be long long after other people’s
breakfasts and for the first time in
her life she was distressed at making trouble.
Hitherto it had seemed right and
normal for people to put themselves out
for her.
She dressed as quickly as she could and
went down-stairs. Harriet was shelling
peas on the big veranda that looked off
across the valley to the mountains. There
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must have been rain in the night, for the
world was bathed clean and shining.
“Mother said to let you sleep as long as
you would.” Harriet stopped the current
of apology on Elliott’s lips. “Did you
have a good night?”
“Splendid! I didn’t know a thing from
the time your mother went out of the room
until half an hour ago.”
“Didn’t know anything about the thunder-shower?”
“Was there a thunder-shower?”
“A big one. It put our telephone out of
commission.”
“I didn’t hear it,” said Elliott.
“It almost pays to be sick, to find out
how good it feels to be well, doesn’t it?
Here’s a glass of milk. Drink that while
I get your breakfast.”
“Can’t I do it? I hate to make you
more trouble.”
“Trouble? Forget that word! We
180
like to have you here. It is good for
Mother. Gives her something to think
about. Can’t you spend the day?”
Now, Elliott wanted to get home at
once; she had been longing ever since she
woke up to see Mother Jess and Laura and
Father Bob and Henry and Bruce and
everybody else on the Cameron farm, not
omitting Prince and the chickens and the
“black and whitey” calf; but she thought
rapidly: if it really made things any easier
for the Gordons to have her here—
“Why, yes, I can stay if you want me
to.” It cost her something to say those
words, but she said them with a smile.
“Good! I’ll telephone Mrs. Cameron
that we will bring you home this afternoon.
I’ll go over to the Blisses’ to do it, though
maybe their telephone’s knocked out, too.
The one at our hired man’s house isn’t
working. Here comes Mother with an
egg the hen has just laid for your breakfast.”
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“Just a-purpose,” said Mrs. Gordon.
“It’s warm yet and marked ‘Elliott Cameron’
plain as daylight. Is my hair full of
straw, Harriet?”
“It is, straw and cobwebs. Where have
you been, Mother? You know you
haven’t any business in the haymow or
crawling under the old carryall. Why
don’t you let Alma bring in the eggs?
She’s little and spry.”
“Pooh!” said Mrs. Gordon, with one of
her silent laughs. “Pooh, pooh! Alma
isn’t any match for old Whitefoot yet.
You’d think that hen laid awake nights
thinking up outlandish places to lay her
eggs in. Wait till you get to be sixty,
Harriet. Then you’ll know you can’t let
folks wait on you. Before that it’s all
right, but after sixty you’ve got to do for
yourself, if you don’t want to grow old.—Two,
dearie? I’m going to make you a
drop-egg on toast for your breakfast.”
“Oh, no, one!” cried Elliott. “I never
182
eat two. And can’t I help? I hate to
have you get my breakfast.”
“Why, yes, you can dish up your oatmeal,”
calmly cracking a second egg.
“’T won’t do a mite of harm to have two.
Maybe you’re hungrier than you think.
Now Harriet, the water, and we’re all
ready. I’ll help you finish those peas
while she eats.”
The woman and the girl shelled peas,
their fat fingers fairly flying through the
pods, while Elliott devoured both eggs and
a bowl of oatmeal and a pitcher of cream
and a dish of blueberries and wondered
how they could make their fingers move so
fast.
“Practice,” said Mrs. Gordon in answer
to the girl’s query. “You do a thing over
and over enough times and you get so
you can’t help doing it fast, if you’ve got
any gumption at all. The quarts of peas
I’ve shelled in my life time would feed an
army, I guess.”
“Don’t you ever get tired?”
“Tired of shelling peas? Land no, I
like it! I can sit in here and look at you,
or out on the back piazza and watch the
mountains, or on the front step and see
folks drive by, and I’ve always got my
thoughts.” A shadow crossed the placid
face. “My thoughts work better when
my fingers are busy. I’d hate to just sit
and hold my hands. Ted dared me once
to try it for an hour. That was the longest
hour I ever spent.”
Mrs. Gordon had risen to peer through
the window after a rapidly receding
wagon.
“There!” she said. “There goes that
woman from Bayfield I want to sell some
of my bees to. She’s going down to
Blisses’ and I’d better walk right over
and talk to her, as the telephone won’t
work. I ’most think one hive is going to
swarm this morning, but I guess I’ll have
time to get back before they come out.
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Hello, Johnny, how do you do to-day?”
“All right,” lisped the small solemn-eyed
urchin who had strayed in from the
kitchen and now stood in the door hitching
at a diminutive pair of trousers and
eying Elliott absorbedly. “Gone!” he announced
suddenly; coming out of his scrutiny.
“What, your button?” Harriet pulled
him up to her. “I’ll sew it on in a jiffy.
Don’t worry about the bees, Mother. I
can manage them, if they decide to swarm
before you get back, and while you’re at
the Blisses’ just telephone central our
phone’s out of order—and oh, please tell
Mrs. Cameron we’re keeping Elliott till
afternoon.”
Mrs. Gordon departed and Harriet
sewed on the button. “There, Johnny, now
you’re all right. You can run out and
play.”
But Johnny became suddenly galvanized
into action. He dived into a small pocket
185
and produced a note, crumpled and soiled,
but still legible.
“If that isn’t provoking!” said Harriet,
when she had read it. “Why didn’t you
give me this the first thing, Johnny? Then
Mother could have done this telephoning,
too, at the Blisses’.”
“What is it?” asked Elliott.
“A message Johnny’s mother wants
sent. She’s our hired man’s wife and I
must say at times she shows about as much
brains as a chicken. You’d think she’d
know our ’phone wouldn’t be likely to
work, if hers didn’t. Now I shall have to
go over to the Blisses’ myself, I suppose.
The message seems fairly important.
Where has your mother gone, Johnny?”
But Johnny didn’t know; beyond a
vague “she wided away” he was non-committal.
“She might have stopped somewhere
and telephoned for herself, I should
think,” grumbled Harriet. “I’ll be back
186
in a few minutes. Or will you come, too?
If I can’t ’phone from the Blisses’ I may
have to go farther.”
“I’ll stay here, I think, and wash up
my dishes. And after that I’ll finish the
peas.”
“Mercy me, I shan’t be gone that long!
We’re shelling these to put up, you know.
Don’t bother about washing your dishes,
either. They’ll keep.”
“Who’s saying bother, now?” Elliott’s
dimples twinkled mischievously.
Harriet laughed. “You and Johnny
can mind the place. The men and Alma
are all off at the lower farm and here goes
the last woman. Good-by.”
Elliott went briskly about her program.
She found soap and a pan and rinsed her
dishes under the hot-water faucet. Then
she sat down to the peas. Johnny, who
had followed her about for a while, deserted
her for pressing affairs of his own
out-of-doors. Elliott pinched the pods as
187
scientifically as she knew how and wondered
whether, if she should shell peas all
her life, her slender fingers would ever
acquire the lightning nimbleness of the
Gordons’ fat ones. How long Harriet
was gone!
She was thinking about this when she
heard something that made her first stop
her work to listen and then jump up hurriedly,
spilling the peas out of her lap.
The wailing of a terrified child was coming
nearer and nearer. Elliott set down
the peas that were left and ran out on the
veranda. There was Johnny stumbling
up the path, crying at the top of his lungs.
“Why, Johnny!” She ran toward him.
“Why, Johnny, what is the matter?”
Johnny precipitated himself into her
arms in a torrent of tears. Not a word
was distinguishable, but his wails pierced
the girl’s ear-drums.
“Johnny! Johnny, stop it! Tell me
where you’re hurt.”
But Johnny only sobbed the harder.
He couldn’t be in danger of death—could
he?—when he screamed so. That
showed his lungs were all right, and his
legs worked, too, and his arms. They
were digging into her now, with a force
that almost upset her equilibrium. Could
something be wrong inside of him?
“What’s the matter, Johnny? Stop
crying and tell me.”
Johnny’s yells slackened for want of
breath. He held up one brown little hand.
She inspected it. Dirty, of course, unspeakably,
but otherwise—Oh, there was a
bunch on one knuckle, a bunch that was
swelling. “Is that where it hurts you,
Johnny?”
Johnny nodded, gulping.
“Did something sting you?”
“Bee stung Johnny. Naughty bee!”
The girl stared at the small grimy hand
in consternation. A bee sting! What
did you do for a bee sting or any kind of
189
a sting for that matter? Mosquitoes—hamamelis.
And where did the Gordons
keep their hamamelis bottle?
Johnny’s screams, abated in expectation
of relief, began to rise once more. He
was angry. Why didn’t she do something?
This delay was unendurable.
His voice mounted in a long, piercing wail.
“Don’t cry,” the girl said nervously.
“Don’t cry. Let’s go into the house and
find something.”
Up-stairs and down she trailed the
shrieking child. At the Cameron farm
there were two hamamelis bottles, one in
the bath-room, the other on a shelf in the
kitchen. But nothing rewarded her
search here. If only some one were at
home! If only the telephone weren’t out
of order! Desperately she took down the
receiver, to be greeted by a faint, continuous
buzzing. There was nothing for it;
she must leave Johnny and run to a neighbor’s.
But Johnny refused to be left. He
190
clung to her and kicked and screamed for
pain and the terror of finding his secure
baby world falling to pieces about his
ears.
“It’s a shame, Johnny. I ought to
know what to do, but I don’t. You come
too, then.”
But Johnny refused to budge. He
threw himself on his back on the veranda
and beat the floor with his heels and wailed
long heart-piercing wails that trembled
into sobbing silence, only to begin all over
with fresh vigor. Elliott was at her wits’
end. She didn’t dare go away and leave
him; she was afraid he might kill himself
crying. But mightn’t he do so if she
stayed? He pushed her away when she
tried to comfort him. There was only one
thing that he wanted; he would have none
of her, if she didn’t give it to him.
Never in her life had Elliott Cameron
felt so insignificant, so helpless and futile,
as she did at that minute. “Oh, you
191
poor baby!” she cried, and hated herself
for her ignorance. Laura would have
known what to do; Harriet Gordon would
have known. Would nobody ever come?
“What’s the matter with him?” The
question barked out, brusque and sharp,
but never had a voice sounded more welcome
in Elliott Cameron’s ears. She
turned around in joyful relief to encounter
a pair of gimlet-like black eyes in the face
of an old woman. She was an ugly little
old woman in a battered straw hat and a
shabby old jacket, though the day was
warm, and a faded print skirt that was
draggled with mud at the hem. Her hair
strayed untidily about her face and unfathomable
scorn looked out of her snapping
black eyes.
“It’s a—a bee sting,” stammered the
girl, shrinking under the scorn.
“Hee-hee-hee!” The old woman’s
laughter was cracked and high. “What
kind of a lummux are you? Don’t know
192
what to do for a bee sting! Hee-hee!
Mud, you gawk you, mud!”
She bent down and slapped up a handful
of wet soil from the edge of the fern
bed below the veranda. “Put that on
him,” she said and went away giggling a
girl’s shrill giggle and muttering between
her giggles: “Don’t know what to do for
a bee sting. Hee-hee!”
For a whole minute after the queer old
woman had gone Elliott stood there, staring
down at the spatter of mud on the
steps, dismay and wrath in her heart.
Then, because she didn’t know anything
else to do and because Johnny’s screams
had redoubled, she stooped, and with
gingerly care picked up the lump of black
mud and went over to the boy. Mud
couldn’t hurt him, she thought, put on outside;
it certainly couldn’t hurt him, but
could it help?
She sat down on the floor and lifted
the little swollen fist and held the cool mud
193
on it, neither noticing nor caring that some
trickled down on her own skirt. She sat
there a long time, or so it seemed, while
Johnny’s yells sank to long-drawn sobs
and then ceased altogether as he snuggled
forgivingly against her arm. And in her
heart was a great shame and an aching
feeling of inadequacy and failure. Elliott
Cameron had never known so bitter a five
minutes. All her pride and self-sufficiency
were gone. What was she good for
in a practical emergency? Just nothing
at all. She didn’t know even the commonest
things, not the commonest.
“It must have been Witless Sue,” said
Aunt Jessica, late that afternoon, when Elliott
told her the story. “She is a half-witted
old soul who wanders about digging
herbs in summer and lives on the
town farm in winter. There’s no harm in
her.”
“Half-witted!” said Elliott. “She knew
more than I did.”
“You have not had the opportunity to
learn.”
“That didn’t make it any better for
Johnny. Laura knows all those things,
doesn’t she? And Trudy, too?”
“I think they know what to do in the
simpler emergencies of life.”
“I wish I did. I took a first-aid course,
but it didn’t have stings in it, not as far as
we’d gone when I came away. We were
taught bandaging and using splints and
things like that.”
“Very useful knowledge.”
“But Johnny got stung,” said Elliott, as
though nothing mattered beyond that
fact. “Do you think you could teach me
things, now and then, Aunt Jessica? the
things Laura and Trudy know?”
“Surely,” said Aunt Jessica, “and very
gladly. There are things that you could
teach Laura and Trudy, too. Don’t forget
that entirely.”
“Could I? Useful things?” She asked
the question with humility.
“Very useful things in certain kinds of
emergency. What did Mrs. Gordon do
for Johnny when she got home?”
“Oh, she washed his hand and soaked
it in strong soda and water, baking-soda,
and then she bound some soda right on, for
good measure, she said.”
“There!” said Aunt Jessica. “Now
you know two things to do for a bee sting.”
Elliott opened her eyes wide. “Why, so
I do, don’t I? I truly do.”
“That’s the way people learn,” said
Mother Jess, “by emergencies. It is the
only way they are sure to remember.
Laura is helping Henry milk. Suppose
you make us some biscuit for supper, Elliott.”
Elliott started to say, “I’ve never made
biscuit,” but shut her lips tight before the
words slipped out.
“I will tell you the rule. You’d better
double it for our family. Everything is
plainly marked in the pantry. Perhaps
the fire needs another stick before you begin.”
Carefully the girl selected a stick from
the wood-box. “Just let me get my apron,
Aunt Jessica,” she said.
197
CHAPTER IX
ELLIOTT ACTS ON AN IDEA
Six weeks later a girl was busy in the
sunny white kitchen of the Cameron
farm. The girl wore a big blue apron
that covered her gown completely from
neck to hem, and she hummed a little song
as she moved from sink to range and
range to table. There was about her a
delicate air of importance, almost of elation.
You know as well as I where Elliott
Cameron ought to have been by this
time. Six weeks plus how many other
weeks was it since she left home? The
quarantine must have been lifted from her
Uncle James’s house for at least a month.
But the girl in the kitchen looked surprisingly
like Elliott Cameron. If it wasn’t
198
she, it must have been her twin, and I
have never heard that Elliott had a twin.
Though she was all alone in the kitchen—washing
potatoes, too—she didn’t appear
in the least unhappy. She went over
to the stove, lifted a lid, glanced in, and
added two or three sticks of wood to the
fire. Then she brought out a pan of
apples and went down cellar after a roll
of pie crust. Some one else may have
made that pie crust. Elliott took it into
the pantry, turned the board on the
flour barrel, shook flour evenly over
it from the sifter, and, cutting off
one end of the pie crust, began to roll
it out thin on the board. She arranged
the lower crust on three pie-plates, and,
going into the kitchen again, began to peel
the apples and cut them up into the pies.
Perhaps she wasn’t so quick about it as
Laura might have been, but she did very
well. The skin fell from her knife in
long, thin, curly strips. After that she
finished the pies off in the pantry and
tucked all three into the oven. Squatting
on her feet in front of the door, she studied
the dial intently for a moment and hesitatingly
pushed the draft just a crack
open. If it hadn’t been for that momentary
indecision, you might have
thought that she had been baking pies all
her life. Then she began to peel the
potatoes.
199
“I’m getting dinner all by myself”
So it was that Stannard found her.
“Hello!” he said, with a grin. “Busy?”
“Indeed, I am! I’m getting dinner all
by myself.”
He went through a pantomime of dodging
a blow. “Whew-ee! Guess I’ll take
to the woods.”
“Better not. If you do, you will miss a
good dinner. Mother Jess said I might
try it. Boiled potatoes and baked fish—she
showed me how to fix that—and corn
and things. There’s one other dish
on my menu that I’m not going to tell
201
you.” And all her dimples came into
play.
“H’m!” said Stannard, “we feel pretty
smart, don’t we? Well, maybe I’ll stay
and see how it pans out. A fellow can
always tighten his belt, you know.”
“Aren’t you horrid!” She made up a
face at him, a captivating little grimace
that wrinkled her nose and set imps of
mischief dancing in her eyes.
Stannard watched her as with firm motions
she stripped the husks from the
corn, picking off the clinging strands of
silk daintily.
“Gee, Elliott!” he exclaimed. “Do you
know, you’re prettier than ever!”
She dropped him a courtesy. “I must
be, with a smooch of flour on my nose and
my hair every which way.”
He grinned. “That’s a story. Your
hair looks as though Madame What-’s-her-name,
that you and Mater and the
girls go to so much, had just got through
202
with you. I’ve never seen you when you
didn’t look as though you had come out
of a bandbox.”
“Haven’t you? Think again, Stan,
think again! What about your Cousin
Elliott in a corn-field?”
Stannard slapped his thigh. “That’s
so, too! I forgot that. But your hair’s
all to the good, even then.”
“Stan,” warned Elliott, “you’d better
be careful. You will get in too deep to
wade out, if you don’t watch your step.
What are you getting at, anyway? Why
all these compliments?”
“Compliments! A fellow doesn’t have
to praise up his cousin, does he? It just
struck me, all of a sudden, that you look
pretty fit.”
“Thanks. I’m feeling as fit as I look.
Out with it, Stan; what do you want?”
“Why, nothing,” said Stannard, “nothing
at all. Shall I take out those husks,
Lot?”
“Delighted. The pigs eat ’em.” Her
eyes held a quizzical light. “If you’re
trying to rattle me so I shall forget something
and spoil my dinner, you can’t do
it.”
“What do you take me for?” He departed
with the husks, deeply indignant.
In five minutes he was back. “When
are you going home?”
“I don’t know. Not just yet. Your
mother has too many house parties.”
“That won’t make any difference.”
“Oh, yes, it does! Her house is full all
the time.”
“Shucks! Have you asked her if
there’s a room ready for you?”
“Indeed I haven’t! I wouldn’t think
of imposing on a busy hostess.”
“I might say something about it,” he
suggested slyly.
“You will do nothing of the kind.”
“Oh, I don’t know! I’m going home
myself day after to-morrow.”
Hastily Elliott set down the kettle she
had lifted. “Are you? That’s nice. I
mean, we shall miss you, but of course you
have to go some time, I suppose.”
“It won’t be any trouble at all to speak
to Mother.”
“Stannard,” and the color burned in her
cheeks, “will you please stop fiddling
around this kitchen? It makes me nervous
to see you. I nearly burned myself
in the steam of that kettle and I’m liable
to drop something on you any time.”
“Oh, all right! I’ll get out. Fiddling
is a new verb with you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I picked it up. Very expressive,
I think.”
“Sounds like the natives.”
“Sounds pretty well, then. Did I
hear you say you had an errand somewhere?”
“No, you didn’t. You merely heard
me say that finding myself de trop in my
fair cousin’s company, I’d get out of
205
range of her big guns. Never expected
to rattle you, Lot.”
“I’m not rattled.”
“No? Pretty good imitation, then.
Oh, I’m going! Mother’s ready for you
all right, though; says so in this letter.
Here, I’ll stick it in your apron pocket.
Better come along with me, day after to-morrow.
What say?”
“I’ll see,” said Elliott, briefly.
He grinned teasingly, “Ta-ta,” and
went off, leaving turmoil behind him.
The minute Stannard was out of the
door Elliott did a strange thing. Reaching
with wet pink thumb and forefinger
into the depths of the blue apron pocket,
she extracted the letter and hurled it
across the kitchen into a corner.
“There!” she cried disdainfully, “you
go over there and stay a while, horrid old
letter! I’m not going to let you spoil my
perfectly good time getting dinner.”
But it was spoiled: no mere words
206
could alter the fact. Try as she would to
put the letter out of her mind and think
only of how to do a dozen things at once
one quarter as quickly and skilfully as
Laura and Aunt Jessica did them, which
is what the apparently simple process of
dishing up a dinner means, the fine thrill
of the enterprise was gone. Laura came
in to help her and Elliott’s tongue tripped
briskly through a deal of chatter, but all
the while underneath there was a little
undercurrent of uneasiness and anxiety.
Wouldn’t you have thought it would
delight her to have the opportunity of
doing what she had so much wished to
do?
“What’s this?” Laura asked, spying
the white envelop on the floor; “a letter?”
“Oh, yes,” said Elliott, “one I dropped,”
and she tucked it into the pocket of the
white skirt that had been all the time
under the blue apron, giving it a vindictive
little slap as she did so. Which, of
207
course, was quite uncalled for, as if any
one was responsible for what was in the
letter, that person was Elliott Cameron.
The fact that she knew this very well only
added a little extra vigor to the slap.
And all through dinner she sat and
laughed and chattered away, exactly as
though she weren’t conscious in every
nerve of the letter in her pocket, despite
the fact that she didn’t know a word it
said. But she didn’t eat much: the taste
of food seemed to choke her. Her gaze
wandered from Mother Jess to Father
Bob and back, around the circle of eager,
happy, alert faces. And she felt—poor
Elliott!—as though her first discontent
were a boomerang now returned to stab
her.
“This is Elliott’s dinner, I would have
you all know,” announced Laura when the
pie was served. “She did it all herself.”
“Not every bit,” said Elliott, honestly;
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but her disclaimer was lost in the chorus
of praise.
Father Bob laid down his fork, looking
pleased. “Did you, indeed? Now, this
is what I call a well-cooked dinner.”
“I’ll give you a recommend for a cook,”
drawled Stannard, “and eat my words
about tightening my belt, too.”
“Some dinner!” Bruce commented.
“Please, I’d like another piece,” said
Priscilla.
“Me, too,” chimed in Tom. “It’s corking.”
Laura clapped her hands. “Listen,
Elliott, listen! Could praise go further?”
But Mother Jess, when they rose from
the table, slipped an arm through Elliott’s
and drew her toward the veranda. “Did
the cook lose her appetite getting dinner,
little girl?”
“Oh, no, indeed, Aunt Jessica! Getting
dinner didn’t tire me a bit. I just
209
loved it. I—I didn’t seem to feel hungry
this noon, that was all.”
Mother Jess patted her arm. “Well,
run away now, dear. You are not to give
a thought to the dishes. We will see to
them.”
At that minute Elliott almost told her
about the letter in her pocket, that lay like
a lump of lead on her heart. But Henry
appeared just then in the doorway and the
moment passed.
“Run away, dear,” repeated Aunt
Jessica, and gave the girl a little push and
another little pat. “Run away and get
rested.”
Slowly Elliott went down the steps and
along the path that led to the flower borders
and the apple trees. She wasn’t
really conscious of the way she was going;
her feet took charge of her and carried
her body along while her mind was busy.
When she came out among a few big trees
210
with a welter of piled-up crests on every
side, she was really astonished.
“Why!” she cried; “why, here I am on
the top of the hill!”
A low, flat rock invited her and she sat
down. It was queer how different everything
seemed up here. What looked large
from below had dwindled amazingly. It
took, she decided, a pretty big thing to
look big on a hilltop.
She drew Aunt Margaret’s letter out of
her pocket and read it. It was very nice,
but somehow had no tug to it. Phrases
from a similar letter of Aunt Jessica’s returned
to the girl’s mind. How stupid
she had been not to appreciate that letter!—stupid
and incredibly silly.
But hadn’t she felt something else in
her pocket just now? Conscience pricked
when she saw Elizabeth Royce’s handwriting.
The seal had not been broken,
though the letter had come yesterday.
211
She remembered now. They were putting
up corn and she had tucked it into
her pocket for later reading and then had
forgotten it completely. Luckily, Bess
need never know that. But what would
Bess have said to see her friend Elliott,
corn to the right of her, corn to the left
of her, cobs piled high in the summer
kitchen?
Bess’s staccato sentences furnished a
sufficiently emphatic clue. “You poor,
abused dear! Whenever are you coming
home? If I had an aëroplane I’d fly up
and carry you off. You must be nearly
crazy! Those letters you wrote were the
most TRAGIC things! I shouldn’t have
been a bit surprised any time to hear you
were sick. Are you sick? Perhaps
that’s why you don’t write or come home.
Wire me the minute you get this. Oh,
Elliott darling, when I think of you
marooned in that awful place—”
There was more of it. As Elliott read,
212
she did a strange thing. She began to
laugh. But even while she laughed she
blushed, too. Had she sounded as desperate
as all that? How far away such
tragedies seemed now! Suppose she
should write, “Dear Bess, I like it up here
and I am going to stay my year out.”
Bess would think her crazy; so would all
the girls, and Aunt Margaret, too.
And then suddenly an arresting idea
came into her head. What difference
would it make if they did think her crazy?
Elliott Cameron had never had such an
idea before; all her life she had in a perfectly
nice way thought a great deal about
what people thought of her. This idea
was so strange it set her gasping. “But
how they would talk about me!” she said.
And then her brain clicked back, exactly
like another person speaking, “What if
they did? That wouldn’t really make
you crazy, would it?” “Why, no, I suppose
it wouldn’t,” she thought. “And
213
most likely they’d be all talked out by the
time I got back, too. But even if they
weren’t, any one would be crazy to think
it was crazy to want to stay up here at
Uncle Bob’s and Aunt Jessica’s. Even
Stannard has stayed weeks longer than he
needed to!”
When she thought of that she opened
her eyes wide for a minute. “Oho!” she
said to herself; “I guess Stan did get a
rise out of me! You were easy game that
time, Elliott Cameron.”
She sat on her mossy stone a long time.
There wasn’t anything in the world, was
there, to stand in the way of her staying
her year out, the year she had been invited
for, except her own silly pride? What a
little goose she had been! She sat and
smiled at the mountains and felt very
happy and fresh and clean-minded, as
though her brain had finished a kind of
house-cleaning and were now put to rights
again, airy and sweet and ready for use.
The postman’s wagon flashed by on the
road below. She could see the faded gray
of the man’s coat. He had been to the
house and was townward bound now.
How late he was! Nothing to hurry
down for. There would be a letter, perhaps,
but not one from Father. His had
come yesterday. She rose after a while
and drifted down through the still September
warmth, as quiet and lazy and contented
as a leaf.
Priscilla’s small excited face met her at
the door.
“Sidney’s sick; we just got the letter.
Mother’s going to camp to-morrow.”
“Sidney sick! Who wrote? What’s
the matter?”
“He did. He’s not much sick, but he
doesn’t feel just right. He’s in the hospital.
I guess he can’t be much sick, if he
wrote, himself. Mother wasn’t to come,
he said, but she’s going.”
“Of course.” Nervous fear clutched
215
Elliott’s throat, like an icy hand. Oh,
poor Aunt Jessica! Poor Laura!
“Where are they?” she asked.
“In Mumsie’s room,” said Priscilla.
“We’re all helping.”
Elliott mounted the stairs. She had to
force her feet along, for they wished,
more than anything else, to run away.
What should she say? She tried to think
of words. As it turned out, she didn’t
have to say anything.
Laura was the only person in Aunt
Jessica’s room when they reached it. She
sat in a low chair by a window, mending a
gray blouse.
“Elliott’s come to help, too,” announced
Priscilla.
“That’s good,” said Laura. “You can
put a fresh collar and cuffs in this gray
waist of Mother’s, Elliott—I’ll have it
done in a minute—while I go set the
crab-apple jelly to drip. And perhaps
you can mend this little tear in her skirt.
216
Then I’ll press the suit. There isn’t
anything very tremendous to do.”
It was all so matter-of-fact and quiet
and natural that Elliott didn’t know what
to make of it. She managed to gasp, “I
hope Sidney isn’t very sick.”
“He thinks not,” said Laura, “but of
course Mother wants to see for herself.
She is telephoning Mrs. Blair now about
the Ladies’ Aid. They were to have met
here this week. Mother thinks perhaps
she can arrange an exchange of dates,
though I tell her if Sid’s as he says he is,
they might just as well come.”
Elliott, who had been all ready to put
her arms around Laura’s neck and kiss
and comfort her, felt the least little bit
taken aback. It seemed that no comfort
was needed. But it was a relief, too.
Laura couldn’t sit there, so cool and calm
and natural-looking, sewing and talking
about crab-apple juice and Ladies’ Aid, if
there were anything radically wrong.
Then Aunt Jessica came into the room
and said that Mrs. Blair would like the
Ladies’ Aid, herself, that week; she had
been wishing she could have them; and
didn’t Elliott feel the need of something
to eat to supplement her scanty dinner?
That put to rout the girl’s last fears.
She smiled quite naturally and said without
any stricture in her throat: “Honestly,
I’m not hungry. And I am going to put
a clean collar in your blouse.”
“What should I do without my girls!”
smiled Mother Jess.
It was after supper that the telegram
came, but even then there was no panic.
These Camerons didn’t do any of the
things Elliott had once or twice seen
people do in her Aunt Margaret’s household.
No one ran around futilely, doing
nothing; no one had hysterics; no one even
cried.
Mother Jess’s face went very white
when Father Bob came back from the telephone
218
and said, “Sidney isn’t so well.”
“Have they sent for us?”
He nodded. “You’d better take the
sleeper. The eighty-thirty from Upton
will make it.”
“Can you—?”
“Not with things the way they are
here.”
Then they all scattered, to do the things
that had to be done. Elliott was helping
Laura pack the suit-case when she had
her idea. It really was a wonderful idea
for a girl who had never in her life put
herself out for any one else. Like a flash
the first part of it came to her, without
thought of a sequel; and the words were
out of her mouth almost before she was
aware she had thought them.
“You ought to go, Laura!” she cried.
“Sidney is your twin.”
“I’d like to go.” Something in the
guarded tone, something deep and intense
and controlled, struck Elliott to consternation.
219
If Laura felt that way about it!
“Why don’t you, Laura? Can’t you
possibly?”
The other shook her head. “Mother is
the one to go. If we both went, who
would keep house here?”
For a fraction of a second Elliott hesitated.
“I would.”
The words once spoken, fairly swept
her out of herself. All her little prudences
and selfishnesses and self-distrusts
went overboard together. Her cheeks
flamed. She dropped the brush and comb
she was packing and dashed out of the
room.
A group of people stood in the kitchen.
Without stopping to think, Elliott ran up
to them.
“Can’t Laura go?” she cried eagerly.
“It will be so much more comfortable to
be two than one. And she is Sidney’s
twin. I don’t know a great deal, but
people will help me, and I got dinner this
220
noon. Oh, she must go! Don’t you see
that she must go?”
Father Bob looked at the girl for a
minute in silence. Then he spoke:
“Well, I guess you’re right. I will look
after the chickens.”
“I’ll mix their feed,” said Gertrude; “I
know just how Laura does it—and I’ll do
the dishes.”
“I’ll get breakfasts,” said Bruce.
“I’ll make the butter,” said Tom.
“I’ve watched Mother times enough. And
helped her, too.”
“I’ll see to Prince and the kitty,”
chimed in Priscilla, “and do, oh, lots of
things!”
“I’ll be responsible for the milk,” said
Henry.
“I’ll keep house,” said Elliott, “if you
leave me anything to do.”
“And I’ll help you,” said Harriet
Gordon.
It was really settled in that minute,
221
though Father Bob and Mother Jess talked
it over again by themselves.
“Are you sure, dear, you want to do
this?” Mother Jess asked Elliott.
“Perfectly sure,” the girl answered.
She felt excited and confident, as though
she could do anything.
“It won’t be easy.”
“I know that. But please let me try.”
“And there are the Gordons,” said
Mother Jess, half to herself.
“Yes,” echoed Elliott, “there are the
Gordons.”
When the little car ran up to the door
to take the two over to Upton and Mother
Jess and Laura were saying good-by,
Laura strained Elliott tight. “I’ll love
you forever for this,” she whispered.
Then they were off and with them
seemed to have gone something indispensable
to the well-being of the people who
lived in the white house at the end of the
road. Elliott, watching the car vanish
222
around a turn in the road, hugged Laura’s
words tight to her heart. It was the only
way to keep her knees from wabbling at
the thought of what was before her.
223
CHAPTER X
WHAT’S IN A DRESS?
Of course Elliott never could have
done it without the Gordons.
Elliott and Harriet made the crab-apple
juice into jelly, Mrs. Gordon sent in bread
and cookies, and both mother and daughter
stood behind the girl with their skill and
experience, ready to be called on at a
moment’s notice.
“Just send for us any time you get into
trouble or want help about something,”
said Mrs. Gordon over the telephone.
“One of us will come right up. Most
likely it will be Harriet. I’m so cumbersome,
I can’t get about as I’d like to.
Large bodies move slowly, you know.”
Other people besides the Gordons sent
224
in things to eat. Elliott thought she had
never known such a stream of generosity
as set toward the white house at the end
of the road—intelligent generosity, too.
There seemed a definite plan and some
consultation behind it. Mr. Blair brought
a roast of beef already cooked, from Mrs.
Blair, and hoped for both of them that
there would soon be good news of the boy.
The Blisses sent in pies enough for two
days and asked Elliott to let them know
when she was ready for more. People
she knew and people she didn’t know
brought rolls and cookies and doughnuts
and gelatines and even roast chickens, and
asked, with real anxiety in their voices, for
the latest news from Camp Devens.
They didn’t bring their offerings all at
once; they brought them continuously and
steadily and with truly remarkable appropriateness.
Just when Elliott was thinking
that she must begin to cook, something
was sure to rattle up to the door in a
225
wagon, or roll up in an automobile, or
travel on foot in a basket. It was the extreme
timeliness of the gifts that proved
the guiding intelligence behind them.
“They couldn’t all happen so,” was
Henry’s conclusion. “Now, could they?
Gee! and I’ve thought some of those folks
were pokes!”
“So have I,” said Elliott, feeling very
much ashamed of her hasty judgments.
“You never know till you get into
trouble how good people are,” was Father
Bob’s verdict.
Gertrude fingered a doughnut ruefully.
“I want it, but I’m almost ashamed to eat
it. I’ve thought such horrid things of that
old Mrs. Gadsby that made ’em.”
“They’re good,” said Tom. “Mrs.
Gadsby knows how to make doughnuts, if
she has got a tongue in her head! Say,
but I’d as soon have thought old Allen
would send us doughnuts as the Gadsby.”
“Mr. Allen brought us a tongue this
226
morning,” Elliott remarked; “said his
housekeeper boiled it; hoped it wasn’t too
tough to eat. You couldn’t ‘git nothin’
good, these days!’”
“Enoch Allen?” demanded Henry;
“the old fellow that lives at the foot of the
hill? Go tell that to the marines!”
“I don’t know where he lives,” said
Elliott, “but he certainly said his name
was Enoch Allen.”
Bruce chuckled. “Mother Jess’s chickens
have come home to roost, all right.”
“What did she ever do for Enoch
Allen?” asked Tom.
“Oh, don’t you remember,” cried Gertrude,
“the time his old dog died?
Mother found the dog one day, dying in
the woods. I was along and she sent me
to call Mr. Allen, while she stayed with
the dog. I was just a little girl and kind
of scared, but Mother said Mr. Allen
wasn’t anybody to be afraid of; he was
just a lonely old man. I heard him tell
227
her it wasn’t every woman would have
stayed with his dog. It was dead when
he got there.”
But even with competent advisers
within call and all the aids that came in
the shape of “Mother Jess’s chickens,”
and with the best family in the world all
eagerness to be helpful and to “carry on”
during Laura and Mother Jess’s absence,
Elliott found that housekeeping wasn’t
half so simple as it looked.
Life still had its moments and she was
in the midst of one of the worst of them
now. If you have ever stood in a kitchen
where little gray kittens of dust rollicked
under the chairs and all the dinner kettles
and pans were piled on the table, unscraped
and unwashed, and you saw ahead of you
more things that you had planned to do
than you could possibly get through before
supper, and one girl was crying in the attic
and another was crying in the china-closet,
and your own heart was in your
228
boots, you know how Elliott Cameron felt
at this minute. Everything had gone
wrong, since the time she got up half an
hour late in the morning; but the most
wrong thing of all was the letter from
Laura.
It had come just as they were finishing
dinner, for the postman was late. Father
Bob had cut it open, while every one looked
eager and hopeful. Mother Jess had
written the day before that the doctors
thought Sidney was better; there had been
a telegram to that effect, too. Father
Bob read Laura’s letter quite through before
he opened his lips. It wasn’t a long
letter. Then he said: “The boy’s not so
well, to-day.—Bruce, we must finish the
ensilage. Come out as soon as you’re
through, boys. Tom, I want you to get
in the tomatoes before night. We’re due
for a freeze, unless signs fail.” Not another
word about Sidney. And he went
right out of the room.
“What does she say?” whispered Gertrude,
dropping her fork so that it rattled
against her plate. Gertrude was always
dropping things, but this time she didn’t
flush, as she usually did, at her own
awkwardness.
Elliott picked up the letter Father Bob
had left beside her plate. She dreaded to
unfold the single sheet, but what else could
she do, with all those pairs of anxious eyes
fixed on her? She steadied her voice and
read slowly and without a trace of expression:
“Sidney had a bad time in the night, but is
resting more easily this morning. Mother never
leaves him. Every one is so good to us here.
His officers seem to think a lot of Sid. So do
the men of his company, as far as we have seen
them. I don’t know what to write you, Father.
The doctor says, ‘While there’s life there’s
hope, and that our coming is the only thing that
has saved Sid so far. He says that he has seen
the sickest of boys pull through with their
mothers here. We will telegraph when there is
any change. Love to all of you, dear ones, and
230
tell Elliott I shall never forget what she has done
for me.
“Laura”
The room was very still for a minute.
Elliott kept her eyes on the letter, to hide
the tears that filled them. Sidney was going
to die; she knew it.
Slowly, silently, one after another, they
all got up from the table. The boys filed
out into the kitchen, washed their hands
at the sink, and still without a word went
about their work. Gertrude and Priscilla
began mechanically to clear the table. A
plate crashed to the floor from Gertrude’s
hands and shattered to fragments. She
stared at the pieces stupidly, as though
wondering how they had come there, took
a step in the direction of the dust-pan, and,
suddenly bursting into tears, turned and
ran out of the room. Elliott could hear
her feet pounding up-stairs, on, on, till
they reached the attic. A door slammed
and all was quiet.
Down in the kitchen Elliott and Priscilla
faced each other. Great round drops
were running down Priscilla’s cheeks, but
she looked up at Elliott trustfully. And
then Elliott failed her. She knew herself
that she was failing. But it seemed as
though she just couldn’t keep from crying.
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “Oh, dear, isn’t
everything just awful!” Then she did
cry.
And over Priscilla’s sober little face—Elliott
wasn’t so blinded by her tears that
she failed to see it—came the queerest expression
of stupefaction and woe and utter
forlornness. It was after that that
Elliott heard Priscilla sobbing in the china-closet.
Her first impulse was to go to the closet
and pull the child out. Her second was
to let her stay. “She may as well have
her cry out,” thought the girl, unhappily.
“I couldn’t do anything to comfort her!”—which
232
shows how very, very, very
miserable Elliott was, herself.
The world was topsyturvy and would
never get right again.
Instead of going for Priscilla she went
for a dust-pan and brush and collected the
fragments of broken china. Then she
began to pile up the dishes, but, after a
few futile movements, sat down in a chair
and cried again. It didn’t seem worth
while to do anything else. So now there
were three girls crying all at once in that
house and every one of them in a different
place. When at last Elliott did look in
the closet Priscilla wasn’t there.
The appearance of that usually spotless
kitchen had a queer effect on Elliott. She
saw so many things needing to be done at
once that she didn’t do any of them. She
simply stood and stared hopelessly at the
wreck of comfort and cleanliness and good
cheer.
“Hello!” said Bruce at the door.
“Want an extra hand for an hour?”
“I thought you were cutting ensilage,”
said Elliott. It was good to see Bruce;
the courage in his voice lifted her spirits
in spite of her.
“I’ve left a substitute.” The boy
glanced into the stove and started for the
wood-box.
“Oh, dear! I forgot that fire. Has it
gone out?”
“Not quite. I’ll have it going again
in a jiff.”
He came back with a broom in his
hands.
“Let me do that,” said the girl.
“Oh, all right.” He relinquished the
broom and brought out the dish-pan.
“Hi-yi, Stan, lend a hand here!”
The boy in the doorway gave one glance
at Elliott’s tear-stained face and came
quietly into the room. “Sure,” he said,
234
picking up a dish-cloth and gingerly
reaching for a tumbler. “Which end do
you take ’em by, top or bottom?”
Stannard wiping dishes, and with
Bruce Fearing! The sight was so strange
that Elliott’s broom stopped moving.
The two boys at the dish-pan chaffed each
other good-naturedly; their jokes might
have seemed a little forced, had you
examined them carefully, but the effect
was normal and cheering. Now and then
they threw a word to the girl and the pile
of clean dishes grew under their hands.
Elliott’s broom began to move again.
Something warm stirred at her heart.
She felt sober and humble and ashamed
and—yes, happy—all at once. How nice
boys were when they were nice!
Then she remembered something.
“Oh, Stan, wasn’t it to-day you were
going home?”
“Nix,” Stannard replied. “Guess I’ll
235
stay on a bit. School hasn’t begun. I
want to go nutting before I hit the trail
for home.”
It was a different-looking kitchen the
boys left half an hour later and a different-looking
girl.
Bruce lingered a minute behind Stannard.
“We haven’t had any telegram,”
he said. “Remember that. And as for
things in here, I wouldn’t let ’em bother
me, if I were you! You can’t do everything,
you know. Keep cool, feed us the
stuff folks send in, and let some things
slide.”
“Mother Jess doesn’t let things slide.”
“Mother Jess has been at it a good many
years, but I’ll bet she would now and then
if things got too thick and she couldn’t
keep both ends up. There’s more to
Mother Jess’s job than what they call
housekeeping.”
“Oh, yes,” sighed Elliott, “I know that.
236
But just what do you mean, Bruce, that I
could do?”
He hesitated a minute. “Well, call it
morale. That suggests the thing.”
Elliott thought hard for a minute after
the door closed on Bruce. Perhaps, after
all, seeing that the family had three meals
a day and lived in a decently clean house
and slept warm at night, necessary as such
oversight was, wasn’t the most imperative
business in hand. Somehow or other
those things weren’t at all what came into
her mind when she thought of Aunt
Jessica—no, indeed, though Aunt Jessica
made such perfectly delicious things to
eat. What came into her mind was far
different—like the way Aunt Jessica had
sat on Elliott’s bed and kissed her, that
homesick first night; Aunt Jessica’s face
at meal-time, with Uncle Bob across the
table and all her boys and girls filling the
space between; Aunt Jessica comforting
237
Priscilla when the child had met with some
mishap. Priscilla seldom cried when she
hurt herself; “Mother kisses the place
and makes it well.” The words linked
themselves with Bruce’s in Elliott’s
thought. Was that what he had meant
by morale? She couldn’t have put into
words what she understood just then.
For a minute a door in her brain seemed
to swing open and she saw straight into
the heart of things. Then it clicked together
and left her saying, “I guess I fell
down on that part of my job, Mother
Jess.”
Elliott hung up her apron and mounted
the stairs. She didn’t stop with the
second floor and her own little room, but
kept right on to the attic. There was a
door at the head of the attic stairs.
Elliott pushed it open. On a broken-backed
horsehair sofa Gertrude lay, face
down, her nose buried in a faded pillow.
In a wabbly rocker, at imminent risk of a
238
breakdown, Priscilla jerked back and
forth. Gertrude’s hair was tousled and
Priscilla’s face was tear-stained and
swollen.
“Don’t you think,” Elliott suggested,
“it is time we girls washed our faces and
made ourselves pretty?”
“I left you all the dishes to do.” Gertrude’s
voice was muffled by the pillow.
“I—I just couldn’t help it.”
“That’s all right. They’re done now.
I didn’t do them, either. Let’s go down-stairs
and wash up.”
“I don’t want to be pretty,” Priscilla
objected, continuing to rock. Gertrude
neither moved nor spoke again.
What should Elliott do? She remembered
Bruce.
“We haven’t had any telegram, you
know,” she said. Nobody spoke. “Well,
then, we were three little geese, weren’t
we? Not having had a telegram means a
lot just now.” Priscilla stopped rocking.
“I’m going to believe Sidney will get
well,” Elliott continued. It was hard
work to talk to such unresponsive ears, but
she kept right on. “And now I am going
down-stairs to put on one of my prettiest
dresses, so as to look cheerful for supper.
You may try whether you can get into that
blue dress of mine you like so much,
Trudy. I’m going to let Priscilla wear
my coral beads.”
“The pink ones?” asked Priscilla.
“The pink ones. They will be just a
match for your pink dress.”
“I don’t feel like dressing up,” said
Gertrude.
Elliott felt like clapping her hands.
She had roused Trudy to speech.
“Then wear something of your own,”
she said stanchly. “It doesn’t matter
what we wear, so long as we look nice.”
Mercurial Priscilla was already feeling
the new note in the air. Elliott wouldn’t
talk so, would she, if Sidney really were
240
not going to get well? And yet there was
Gertrude, who didn’t seem to feel cheered
up a bit. Pris’s little heart was torn.
Elliott tried one last argument. “I
think Mother Jess would like to have us do
it for Father Bob and the boys’ sake—to
help keep up their courage.”
Priscilla bounced out of the rocker.
“Will it help keep up their courage for us
to wear our pretty clothes?”
“I had a notion it might.”
“Let’s do it, Trudy. I—I think I feel
better already.”
Gertrude sat up on the horsehair sofa.
“Maybe Mother would like us to.”
“I’m sure she’d like us to keep on
hoping,” said Elliott earnestly. “And it
doesn’t matter what we do, so long as we
do something to show that’s the way
we’ve made up our minds to feel. If you
can think of any better way to show it than
by dressing up, Trudy—”
“No,” said Gertrude. “But I think I’ll
241
wear my own clothes to-day, Elliott.
Thank you, just the same. Some day, if
Sid—I mean some day I’ll love to try on
your blue dress, if you will let me.”
Three girls, as pretty and chic and trim
as nature and the contents of their closets
could make them, sat down to supper that
night. It was not a jolly meal, but the
girls set the pace, and every one did his
best to be cheerful and brave.
Half-way through supper Stannard laid
down his fork to ask a question.
“What’s happened to your hair, Trudy?”
“Elliott did it for me. Do you like it?”
Stannard nodded. “Good work!”
Father Bob, his attention aroused, inspected
the three with new interest in his
sober eyes. He said nothing then, but
after supper his hand fell on Elliott’s
shoulder approvingly.
“Well done, little girl! That’s the
right way. Face the music with your
chin up.”
Elliott felt exactly as though some one
had stiffened her spine. The least little
doubt had been creeping into her mind lest
what she had done had been heartless.
Father Bob’s words put that qualm at rest.
And, of course, good news would come
from Sidney in the morning.
But courage has a way of ebbing in
spite of one. It was dark and very cold
when a forlorn little figure appeared beside
Elliott’s bed.
“I can’t go to sleep. Trudy’s asleep.
I can hear her. I think I am going to
cry again.”
Elliott sat up. What should she do?
What would Aunt Jessica do?
“Come in here and cry on me.”
Priscilla climbed in between the sheets
and Elliott put both arms around the little
girl. Priscilla snuggled close.
“I tried to think—the way you said, but
I can’t. Is Sidney—” sniffle—“going to
die—” sniffle—“like Ted Gordon?”
“No,” said Elliott, who a minute ago
had been afraid of the very same thing.
“No, I am perfectly positive he is going to
get well.”
Just saying the words seemed to help,
somehow.
Priscilla snuggled closer. “You’re
awful comforting. A person gets scared
at night.”
“A person does, indeed.”
“Not so much when you’ve got company,”
said Priscilla.
The warmth of the little body in her
arms struck through to Elliott’s own
shivering heart. “Not half so much
when you’ve got company,” she acknowledged.
Sure enough, in the morning came
better news. Father Bob’s face,
when he turned around from the telephone,
told that, even before he opened his
lips.
“Sidney is holding his own,” he said.
You may think that wasn’t much better
news, but it meant a great deal to the
Camerons. “Sidney is holding his own,”
they told every one who inquired, and their
faces were hopeful. If Father Bob had
any fears, he kept them to himself. The
rest of the Camerons were young and it
didn’t seem possible to them that Sidney
could do anything but get well. Last
night had been a bad dream, that was all.
The next morning’s message had the
word “better” in it. “Little” stood before
“better,” but nobody, not even Father
Bob, paid much attention to “little.”
Sidney was better. It was a week before
Mother Jess wrote that the doctors pronounced
him out of danger and that she
and Laura would soon be home. Meanwhile,
many things had happened.
You might have thought that Sidney’s
illness was enough trouble to come to the
Camerons at one time, but as Bruce quoted
with a twist in his smile, “It never rains
but it pours.” This time Bruce himself
got the message which came from the War
Department and read:
You are informed that Lieutenant Peter Fearing
has been reported missing since September
fifteenth. Letter follows.
The Camerons felt as badly as though
Peter Fearing had been their own brother.
“The telegram doesn’t say that he’s
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dead,” Trudy declared, over and over
again.
“Maybe he’s a prisoner,” Tom suggested.
“Perhaps he had to come down in a
wood somewhere,” Henry speculated,
“and will get back to our lines.”
“The government makes mistakes
sometimes,” Stannard said. “There was
a woman in Upton—” He went on with
a long story about a woman whose son
was reported killed in France on the very
day the boy had been in his mother’s house
on furlough from a cantonment. There
were a great many interesting and ingenious
details to the story, but nobody
paid much attention to them. “So you
never can tell,” Stannard wound up.
“No, you never can tell,” Bruce agreed,
but he didn’t look convinced. Something,
he was quite sure, was wrong with
Pete.
“Don’t anybody write Mother Jess,” he
247
said. “She and Laura have enough to
worry about with Sid.”
“What if they see it in the papers?”
Elliott asked.
“They’re busy. Ten to one they won’t
see it, since it isn’t head-lined on the front
page. Wait till we get the letter.”
“How soon do you suppose the letter
will come?” Gertrude wished to know.
“‘Letter follows,’” Henry read from
the yellow slip which the postman delivered
from the telegraph office. “That
means right away, I should say.”
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,”
said Tom and then he had a story to tell.
It didn’t take Tom long, for he was a
boy of fewer words than Stannard.
Morning, noon, and night the Camerons
speculated about that telegram. They
combed its words with a fine-toothed comb,
but they couldn’t make anything out of
them except the bald fact that Pete was
missing.
If you think they let it go at that, you
are very much mistaken. Where the fact
stopped the Cameron imaginations began,
and imaginations never know where to
stop. The less actual information an
imagination has to work on, the busier it
is. The Camerons hadn’t any more
imagination than most people, but what
they had grew very busy. It fairly
amazed them with its activity. If you
think that this was silly and that they
ought to have chained up their imaginations
until the promised letter arrived, it
only shows that you have never received
any such telegram.
After all, the letter, when it came,
didn’t tell them much. The letter said
that Lieutenant Peter Fearing had gone
out with his squadron on a bombing-expedition
well within the enemy lines.
The formation had successfully accomplished
its raid and was returning when
it was taken by surprise and surrounded
249
by a greatly superior force of enemy
planes, which gave the Americans a running
fight of thirty-nine minutes to their
lines. Lieutenant Fearing’s was one of
two planes which failed to return to the
aërodrome. When last seen, his machine
was in combat with four Hun planes over
enemy territory.
“What did I tell you?” interrupted Tom.
“He’s a prisoner.”
An airplane had been reported as falling
in flames near this spot, but whether
it was Lieutenant Fearing’s machine or
another, no data was as yet at hand to
prove. The writer begged to remain, etc.
No, that letter only opened up fresh
fields for Cameron imaginations to torment
Cameron hearts. Nobody had happened
to think before of Pete’s machine
catching fire.
“Gee!” said Henry, “if that plane was
his—”
“There’s no certainty that it was,” said
Bruce, quickly.
All the Camerons, you see, knew perfectly
well what happens to an aviator
whose machine catches fire.
“If that machine was Pete’s,” Father
Bob mused, “Hun aviators may drop word
of him within our lines. They have done
that kind of thing before.”
“Wouldn’t Bob cable, if he knew anything
more than this letter says?” Gertrude
questioned.
“I expect Bob’s waiting to find out
something certain before he cables,” said
Father Bob. “Doubtless he has written.
We shall just have to wait for his letter.”
“Wait! Gee!” whispered Henry.
“Both the boys’ letters were so awfully
late, in the summer!” sighed Gertrude.
“However can we wait for a letter from
Bob?”
Elliott said nothing at all. Her heart
251
was aching with sympathy for Bruce.
When a person could do something, she
thought, it helped tremendously. Mother
Jess and Laura had gone to Sidney and she
had had a chance to make Laura’s going
possible, but there didn’t seem to be anything
she could do for Bruce. And she
wished to do something for Bruce; she
found that she wished to tremendously.
Thinking about Mother Jess and Laura
reminded her to look up and ask, “What
are we going to write them at Camp
Devens?”
Then she discovered that she and Bruce
were alone in the room. He was sitting
at Mother Jess’s desk, in as deep a brown
study as she had been. The girl’s voice
roused him.
“The kind of thing we’ve been writing—home
news. Time enough to tell
them about Pete when they get here.
By that time, perhaps, there will be something
definite to tell.” He hesitated a
252
minute. “Laura is going to feel pretty
well cut up over this.”
Elliott looked up quickly. “Especially
cut up?”
“I think so. Oh, there wasn’t anything
definite between her and Pete—nothing,
at least, that they told the rest
of us. But a fellow who had eyes—” He
left the sentence unfinished and walked
over to Elliott’s chair. “You know, I told
you,” he said, “that I shouldn’t go into
this war unless I was called. Of course
I’m registered now, but whether or not
they call me—if Pete is out of it—and I
can possibly manage it, I’m going in.”
A queer little pain contracted Elliott’s
heart. And then that odd heart of hers
began to swell and swell until she thought
it would burst. She looked at the boy,
with proud eyes. It didn’t occur to her
to wonder what she was proud of. Bruce
Fearing was no kin of hers, you know.
“I knew you would.” Somehow it
253
seemed to the girl that she could always
tell what Bruce Fearing was going to do,
and that there was nothing strange in such
knowledge. How strong he was! how
splendid and understanding and fine!
“Oh,” she cried, “I wish, how I wish I
could help you!”
“You do help me,” he said.
“I?” Her eyes lifted in real surprise.
“How can I?”
“By being you.”
His hand had only to move an inch to
touch hers, but it lay motionless. His
eyes, gray and steady and clear, held the
girl’s. She gave him back look for look.
“I am glad,” she said softly and her
face was like a flower.
Bruce was out of the house before
Elliott thought of the thing she could do
for him.
“Mercy me!” she cried. “You’re the
slowest person I’ve ever seen in my life,
Elliott Cameron!” She ran to the kitchen
254
door, but the boy was nowhere in sight.
“He must be out at the barn,” she said
and took a step in that direction, only to
take it back. “No, I won’t. I’ll just go
by myself and do it.”
Whatever it was, it put her in a great
hurry. As fast as she had dashed to the
kitchen she now ran to the front hall, but
the third step of the stairs halted her.
“Elliott Cameron,” she declared earnestly,
“I do believe you have lost your
mind! Haven’t you any sense at all?
And you a responsible housekeeper!”
Perhaps it wasn’t the first time a whirlwind
had ever struck the Cameron farmhouse.
Elliott hadn’t a notion that she
could work so fast. Her feet fairly flew.
Bed-covers whisked into place; dusting-cloths
raced over furniture; even milk-pans
moved with unwonted celerity. But
she left them clean, clean and shining.
“There!” said the girl, “now we shall
do well enough till dinner-time. I’m going
255
into the village. Anybody want to
come?”
Priscilla jumped up. “I do, unless
Trudy wants to more.”
Gertrude shook her head. “I’m going
to put up tomatoes,” she said, “the rest
of the ripe ones.”
“Don’t you want help?”
“Not a bit. Tomatoes are no work, at
all.”
Elliott dashed up-stairs. In a whirl of
excitement she pinned on her hat and
counted her money. No matter how
much it cost, she meant to say all that she
wanted to.
Her cheeks were pink and her dimples
hard at work playing hide-and-seek with
their own shadows, when she cranked the
little car. Everything would come right
now; it couldn’t fail to come right.
Priscilla hopped into the seat beside her
and they sped away.
“I have cabled Father,” Elliott announced
256
at dinner, with the prettiest
imaginable little air of importance and
confidence, “I have cabled Father to find
out all he can about Pete and to let us
know at once. Perhaps we shall hear
something to-morrow.”
But the next day passed, and the next,
and the day after that, and still no cable
from Father.
It was very bewildering. At first
Elliott jumped every time the telephone
rang, and took down the receiver with
quickened pulses. No matter what her
brain said, her heart told her Father would
send good news. She couldn’t associate
him with thoughts of ill news. Of course,
her brain said there was no logic in that
kind of argument, and that facts were
facts; and in a case like Pete’s, fathers
couldn’t make or mar them. Her heart
kept right on expecting good tidings.
But when long days and longer nights
dragged themselves by and no word at all
257
came from overseas, the girl found out
what a big empty place the world may become,
even while it is chuck-full of people,
and what three thousand miles of water
really means. She thought she had
known before, but she hadn’t. So long
as letters traveled back and forth, irregularly
timed it might be, but continuously,
she still kept the familiar sense of Father—out
of sight, but there, as he had always
been, most dependably there. Now, for
the first time in her life, she had called
to him and he had not answered. There
might be—there probably were, she reminded
herself—reasons why he hadn’t
answered; good, reassuring reasons, if
one only knew them. He might be temporarily
in a region out of touch with
cables; the service might have dropped a
link somewhere. One could imagine possible
explanations. But it was easier to
imagine other things. And the fact remained
that, since he didn’t answer, she
258
couldn’t get away from a horrible,
paralyzing sense that he wasn’t there.
It didn’t do any good to try to run from
that sensation; there was nowhere to run.
It blocked every avenue of thought, a
sinister shape of dread. The only help
was in keeping very, very busy. And
even then one couldn’t stop one’s thoughts
traveling, traveling, traveling along those
fearful paths.
At last Elliott knew how the others felt
about Pete. She had thought she understood
that and felt it, too, but now she
found that she hadn’t. It makes all the
difference in the world, she discovered,
whether one stands inside or outside a
trouble. The heart that had ached so sympathetically
for Bruce knew its first stab
of loss and recoiled. The others recognized
the difference; or was it only that
Elliott herself had eyes to see what she
had been blind to before? No one said
anything. In little unconscious, lovable
259
ways they made it quite clear that now
she was one with them.
“Perhaps we would better send for
them to come home from Camp Devens,”
Father Bob suggested one day. He threw
out his remark at the supper-table, which
would seem to address it to the family at
large, but he looked straight at Elliott.
“Oh, no,” she cried, “don’t send for
them!” But she couldn’t keep a flash of
joy out of her eyes.
“Sure you’re not getting tired?”
“Certain sure!”
It disappointed her the least little bit
that Uncle Bob let the suggestion drop so
readily. And she was disappointed at
her own disappointment. “Can’t you
‘carry on’ at all?” she demanded of herself,
scornfully. “It was all your own doing,
you know.” But how she did long
at times for Aunt Jessica!
Of course, Elliott couldn’t cry, however
much she might wish to, with the family
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all taking their cues from her mood. She
said so fiercely to every lump that rose in
her throat. She couldn’t indulge herself
at all adequately in the luxury of being
miserable; she couldn’t even let herself
feel half as scared as she wished to, because,
if she did, just once, she couldn’t
keep control of herself, and if she lost control
of herself there was no telling where
she might end—certainly in no state that
would be of any use to the family. No,
for their sake, she must sit tight on the
lid of her grief and fear and anxiety.
But there were hours when the cover
lifted a little. No girl, not the bravest,
could avoid such altogether. Elliott
didn’t think herself brave, not a bit. She
knew merely that the thing she had to do
couldn’t be done if there were many such
hours.
One day Bruce heard somebody sobbing
up in the hay-loft. The sound didn’t
carry far; it was controlled, suppressed;
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but Bruce had gone up the ladder for
something or other, I forget just what,
and, thinking Priscilla was in trouble, he
kept on. The girl crying, face down in
the hay, wasn’t Priscilla. Very softly
Bruce started to tiptoe away, but the
rustling of the hay under his feet betrayed
him.
“I didn’t mean—any one to—find me.”
“Shall I go away?”
She shook her head. “I can’t stand it!”
she wailed. “I simply can’t stand it!”
And she sobbed as though her heart would
break.
Bruce sat down beside the girl on the
hay and patted the hand nearest him. He
didn’t know anything else to do. Her
fingers closed on his convulsively.
“I’m an awful old cry-baby,” she
choked at last. “I’ll behave myself, in a
minute.”
“No, cry away,” said Bruce. “A girl
has to cry sometimes.”
After a while the racking sobs spent
themselves. “There!” she said, sitting
up. “I never thought I’d let a boy see
me cry. Now I must go in and help
Trudy get supper.”
She dabbed at her eyes with a wet little
wad of linen. Bruce plucked a clean
handkerchief from his pocket and tucked
it into her fingers.
“Yours doesn’t seem quite big enough
for the job,” he said.
She took it gratefully. She had never
thought of a boy as a very comforting person,
but Bruce was. “Oh, Bruce, you
know!”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s so—so lonely. Dad’s all I’ve
got, of my really own, in the world.”
He nodded. “You’re gritty, all right.”
“Why, Bruce Fearing! how can you say
that after the way I’ve acted?”
“That’s why I say it.”
“But I’m scared all the time. If I did
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what I wanted to, I’d be a perpetual
fountain.”
“And you’re not.”
She stared at him. “Is being scared
and trying to cover it up what you call
grit?”
“The grittiest kind of grit.”
For a sophisticated girl she was
singularly naïve, at times. He watched
her digest the idea, sitting up on the hay,
her chin cupped in her two hands, straws
in her hair. Her eyes were swollen and
her nose red, and his handkerchief was
now almost as wet as her own. “I
thought I was an awful coward,” she said.
A smile curved his firm lips, but the
steady gray eyes were tender. “I
shouldn’t call you a coward.”
She shook herself and stood up.
“Bruce, you’re a darling. Now, will you
please go and see if the coast is clear, so I
can slide up-stairs without being seen? I
must wash up before supper.”
“I’d get supper,” he said, “if I didn’t
have to milk to-night. Promised Henry.”
She shook her head positively. “I’ll let
you do lots of things, Bruce, but I won’t
let you get supper for me—not with all
the other things you have to do.”
“Oh, all right! I dare you to jump off
the hay.”
“Down there? Take you!” she cried,
and with the word sprang into the air.
Beside her the boy leaped, too. They
landed lightly on the fragrant mass in the
bay of the barn.
“Oh,” she cried, “it’s like flying, isn’t
it! Why wasn’t I brought up on a
farm?”
There was a little choke still left in her
voice, and her smile was a trifle unsteady,
but her words were ready enough. In the
doorway she turned and waved to the boy
and then went on, her head held high,
slender and straight and gallant, into the
house.
265
CHAPTER XII
HOME-LOVING HEARTS
Mother Jess and Laura were
coming home. Perhaps Father
Bob had dropped a hint that their presence
was needed in the white house at the end
of the road; perhaps, on the other hand,
they were just ready to come. Elliott
never knew for certain.
Father Bob met the train, while all the
Cameron boys and girls flew around, making
ready at home. The plan had developed
on the tacit understanding that
since they all wished to, it was fairer for
none of them to go to the station.
Priscilla and Prince were out watching.
“They’re coming!” she squealed, skipping
back into the house. “Trudy, Elliott,
266
everybody, they’re coming!” And she
was out again, darting in long swallow-like
swoops down the hill. From every
direction came Camerons, running; from
house, barn, garden, young heads moved
swiftly toward the little car chug-chugging
up the hill.
They swarmed over it, not giving it
time to stop, jumping on the running-board,
riding on the hood, almost embracing
the car itself in the joy of their
welcome. Elliott hung back. The others
had the first right. After their turns—
Without a word Aunt Jessica took the
girl into her arms and held her tight. In
that strong, tender clasp all the stinging
ache went out of Elliott’s hurt. She
wasn’t frightened any longer or bewildered
or bitter; she didn’t know why she
wasn’t, but she wasn’t. She felt just as
if, somehow or other, things were going
to be right.
She had this feeling so strongly that she
267
forgot all about dreading to meet Laura—for
she had dreaded to meet Laura, she
was so sorry for her—and kissed her quite
naturally. Laura kissed Elliott in return
and said, “Wait till I get you up-stairs,”
as though she meant business, and smiled
just as usual. Her face was a trifle pale,
but her eyes were bright, and the clear,
steady glow in them reminded Elliott for
the first time of the light in Aunt Jessica’s
eyes. She hadn’t remembered ever seeing
Laura’s eyes look just like that. How
much did Laura know, Elliott wondered?
She wouldn’t look so, would she, if she
had heard about Pete? But, strangely
enough, Elliott didn’t fear her finding out
or feel nervous lest she might have to tell
her.
And after all, as soon as they got up-stairs,
it came out that Laura did know
about Pete, for she said: “I’m glad, oh,
so glad, that wherever Pete is now, he got
across and had a chance really to do something
268
in this fight. If you had seen what
I have seen this last week, Elliott—”
The shining look in Laura’s face fascinated
Elliott.
All at once she felt her own words come
as simply and easily as Laura’s. “But
will that be enough, Laura—always?”
“No,” said Laura, “not always. But I
shall always be proud and glad, even if I
do have to miss him all my life. And, of
course, I can’t help feeling that we may
hear good news yet. Now—oh, you
blessed, blessed girl!”
And the two clung together in a long
close embrace that said many things to
both of them, but not a word aloud.
How good it seemed to have Mother
Jess and Laura in the house! Every one
went about with a hopeful face, though,
after all, not an inch had the veil of silence
lifted that hung between the Cameron
farm and the world overseas. Every one,
Elliott suspected, shared the feeling she
269
had known, the certainty that all would be
well now Mother Jess was home. It
wasn’t anything in particular that Mother
Jess said or did that contributed to this
impression. Just to see her face in a
room, to touch her hand now and then, to
hear her voice, merely to know she was in
the house, seemed enough to give it.
They all had so much to say to one another.
The returned travelers must tell
of Sidney, and the Camerons who had
stayed at home had tales of how they had
“carried on” in the others’ absence.
Tongues were very busy, but no one forgot
those who weren’t there—not for a
minute. The sense of them lived underneath
all the confidences. There were
confidences en masse, so to speak, and confidences
à deux. Priscilla chattered away
into her mother’s ear without once stopping
to catch breath, and Bruce had his
own quiet report to make. Perhaps Bruce
and Priscilla and the rest said more than
270
Elliott heard, for when Aunt Jessica bade
her good-night she rested a hand lightly
on the girl’s shoulder.
“You dear, brave little woman!” she
said. “All the soldiers aren’t in camp or
over the seas.”
Elliott put the words away in her
memory. They made her feel like a man
who has just been decorated by his general.
She felt so comforted and quiet, so free
from nervousness, that not even the telephone
bell could make her jump. It
tinkled pretty continuously, too. That
was because all the next day the neighbors
who didn’t come in person were calling up
to inquire for the returned travelers.
Elliott quite lost the expectation that
every time the telephone buzzed it meant
a possible message for her.
She had lost it so completely that when,
as they were on the point of sitting down
at supper, Laura said, “There’s the telephone
271
again, and my hands are full,”
Elliott remarked, “I’ll see who it is,” and
took down the receiver without a thought
of a cable.
“This is Elliott Cameron speaking....
Yes—yes. Elliott Cameron. All ready.”
A tremor crept into the girl’s voice. “I
didn’t get that.... Just received my
message? Yes, go on.... Repeat,
please.... Wait a minute till I call
some one.”
She wheeled from the instrument, her
face alight. “Where’s Bruce? Please,
somebody, call—oh, here you are!” She
thrust the receiver into his hands. “Make
them repeat the message to you. It’s
from Father. Pete was a prisoner.
He’s escaped and got back to our lines.”
Then she slipped into Aunt Jessica’s
waiting arms.
Supper? Who cared about supper?
The Camerons forgot it. When they remembered,
the steaming-hot creamed
272
potato was cold and the salad was wilted,
but that made no difference. They were
too excited to know what they were eating.
To make assurance trebly sure there
were more messages. Bob cabled of
Pete’s escape through the Hun lines and
the government wired from Washington.
The Camerons’ happiness spilled over into
blithe exuberance. They laughed and
danced and sang for very joy. Priscilla
jigged all over the house like an excited
brown leaf in a breeze. None of them,
except Father Bob, Mother Jess, and
Laura, could keep still. Laura went about
like a person in a trance, with a strange,
happy quietness in her ordinarily energetic
movements and a brightness in her face
that dazzled. There was no boisterousness
in any one’s rejoicing, only a gentleness
of gaiety that was very wonderful
to see and feel.
As for Elliott, she felt as though she
had come out from underneath a great
273
dark cloud, into a place where she could
never again be anything but good and
happy. She had been coming out ever
since Aunt Jessica reached home, but she
hadn’t come out the same as she went in.
The Elliott Aunt Jessica and Laura had
left in charge when they went to Camp
Devens seemed very, very far away from
the Elliott whose joy was like wings that
fairly lifted her feet off the ground.
Smiles chased one another among her
dimples in ceaseless procession across her
face. She didn’t try to discover why she
felt so different. She didn’t care. The
dimples, of course, were the very same
dimples she had always had, and at the
moment the girl was entirely unconscious
of their existence, though as a matter of
fact those dimples had never been busier
and more bewitching in all Elliott
Cameron’s life.
“I suppose,” Mother Jess said at last,
274
“we shall have to go to bed, if we are to
get Stannard off in the morning.”
Going to bed isn’t a very exciting thing
to do when you are so happy you feel as
though you might burst with joy, but by
that time the Camerons had managed to
work out of the most dangerous stage, and
inasmuch as Stannard’s was an early
train, going to bed was the only sensible
thing to do. So they did it.
What was more remarkable, the last
sleepy Cameron straggled down to the
breakfast-table before the little car ran up
to the door to take Stannard away. They
were really sorry to see him go and he
acted as though he were just as sorry to
go, which would seem to indicate that
Stannard, too, had changed in the course
of the summer. He looked much like the
long, lazy Stannard who had rebelled
against a vacation on a farm, but his carriage
was better and his figure sturdier,
275
and his hands weren’t half so white and
gentlemanlike. Underneath his lazy ease
was a hint of something to depend on in an
emergency. Perhaps even his laziness
wasn’t so ingrained as it used to be.
They all went out on the veranda to say
good-by and waved as long as the car was
in sight.
“Sorry you’re not going, too?” Bruce
asked Elliott.
“Oh, no! I wouldn’t go for anything.”
“For a girl who didn’t want to come up
here at all,” he said softly, “you’re doing
pretty well. Decided to make the best of
us, didn’t you?”
She looked at him indignantly. “Indeed,
I didn’t! I wouldn’t do such a
thing. Why, I just love it here!” Then
she saw the twinkle in his eye. “You
tease!”
“I’m going away, myself, next week,
S. A. T. C. I can’t get any nearer France
than that, it seems, just yet. Father Bob
276
says he can manage all right this winter
and he has a notion of something new that
may turn up next spring. He says, ‘Go,’
and so does Mother Jess. So—I’m going.”
Elliott stole a quick glance at the firm,
clear-cut face, chiseled already in lines of
purpose and power.
“I’m glad,” she said, “but we shall—miss
you.”
“Shall you miss me?”
“Yes.”
“I’d hate to think that you wouldn’t.”
Elliott always remembered the morning,
three days later, when Bruce went away.
How blue the sky was, how clear the sunshine,
how glorious the autumn pageant of
the hills! Beside the gate a young maple
burned like a shaft of flame. True, Bruce
was only going to school now, but there
was France in the background, a beckoning
possibility with all that it meant of
triumph and heroism and pain. That idea
277
of France, and the fiery splendor of the
hills, seemed to invest Bruce’s strong
young figure with a kind of glory that
tightened the girl’s throat as she waved
good-by from the veranda. She was glad
Bruce was going, even if her throat did
ache. Aches like that seemed far less important
than they used to. She waved
with a thrill coursing up her spine and a
shy, eager sense of how big and wonderful
and happy a thing it was to be a girl.
With a last wave to Bruce turning the
curve of the road Mother Jess stepped
back into the house.
“Come, girls,” she said. “I feel like
getting very busy, don’t you?”
Elliott followed her contentedly. Others
might go, but she didn’t wish to, not
while Father was on the other side of the
ocean. It made her laugh to think that
she had ever wished to. That laugh of
pure mirth and happiness proved the completeness
of Elliott Cameron’s evacuation.
“What is the joke?” Laura asked, smiling
at the radiant charm of the dainty figure
enveloping itself in a blue apron.
“Oh,” said Elliott lightly, “I was thinking
that I used to be a queer girl.”
THE END
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30479 ***