THE LEADER
"Let your spirit guide us through,
Joan of Arc, they are calling you!"
Over the white sands of the Ipswich Beach, looking towards the long
sand-bar, with about three-quarters of a mile of sapphire water
sparkling between, the sportive cry rang, with a gay note of challenge
under its playfulness:
"Come with the flame in your glance!"
And she came with the flame in her glance--no spirit Maid of Orleans
returning to lead the gallant sons of the fleur-de-lys on bleeding
fields--as who knows but she may have come to her France in its hardest
hour! Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her
dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver
of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down
her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue
overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the
Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of
old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil!
"Come with the flame in your glance,
With a garden-rake for a holy lance!"
chanted Sara again, feeling that camouflage was not her only
inspiration.
"Can't you hear the bugle sounding?
Can't you feel our pulses bounding?
Lead your comrades to the field!"
she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and
looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of
fire--of fervor--in them.
"I confess I wish 'twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had
any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a
converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass,
rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and
again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!"
craved she, her chant sinking to a dirge-like sing-song, to which she
matched her march to the war-garden on Squawk Hill, that discordant
paradise of night-herons, so lately reclaimed from the barren dunes.
"What!... What! _Sara_, you're not weakening?" The Maid brandished her
rake. "I wish I had a little more 'pep' in me, myself, this morning,"
she acknowledged, a moment later, sinking her voice to a silky whisper,
with a backward glance over her blue-overalled shoulder at the younger
girls, fifteen of them--a bright-eyed, laughing brigade--who were
following her to take the hill for the fiftieth time from an invading
horde of weeds, ranker, stronger at the seashore than anywhere
else--with a giant's grip upon the sandy soil, from control of which
they had been so lately ousted.
"Well! you didn't expect to be captain of the forces again this morning,
did you, as you have been for three days past?" Sara looked up at her
friend, the oldest girl of the Morning-Glory Group, now encamped upon
the white beach behind them, who had kept incognito a secret that shone
in the dark; who was determined, upon her return to the city, to go to
work, at anything, to release a man--a man for the front. "You thought
our Guardian--Gheezies--would be able to lead us out to capture the
hill, herself, to-day."
"I hoped she would," said Olive Deering. "But I could see that she still
isn't feeling very well after that little sick attack of the past week.
So I persuaded her to save her strength for the Council Fire
to-night--the ceremonial meeting on the sands--at which our little Green
Leaf, Flamina, is really to be initiated as a Wood-Gatherer, and receive
her fagot-ring; hitherto she has been only a novice."
"Won't her voice enrich our Wohelo chant?" murmured Sara. "Sometimes
when she's by herself, skipping along by the sea, it seems to me as if I
never, really, heard a girl sing before; it just fondles the
air--sweetens everything about her. Listen to her now; that's what she
calls a 'funny one!'"
The Green Leaf was dancing forward to the field now, her hands on her
hips, setting the other younger girls saucily swaying with her, to a
dialect lilt of:
"In capo del monte,
In capo del monte,
Si fà l'amore
Fiorentina! Fiorentina!
E cip i tè ciop!
E cip i tè ciop!"
"E chippety chop! Chippety chop!" Olive laughingly echoed the last two
lines as the little singer pronounced them. "I know what that song
means," she cried; "it's about a lover going up a mountain to see his
lady-love whose name is 'Fiorentina'--Florence--and the 'Chippety chop!'
is their airy chatter. Oh! I'm so glad"--she waved her garden
rake--"that the suggestion came from Headquarters that each Camp Fire
Group should adopt a foreign-born sister. Listening to Flamina, nobody
can think that the benefit will be all on her side; we're getting some
magic from her that breathes in that wonderful voice of hers, which, as
you say, would soften a----"
"A corky carrot, eh?" sniffed Sesooā, her spirits dropping with a squawk
from airy realms of love and song, to the skirts of the war-garden on
Night-Heron Hill. "Well! Here's such a _passé_ vegetable row, a
left-over from the crop which the farmer--Captain Andy's enterprising
nephew--planted himself early in the spring. Our late carrot-crop that
we put in towards the end of June doesn't need any sorcery of
Flamina's--or anybody else's"--laughingly; "it's a winner," looking
along green, feathery rows stirred by the sea-breeze, with here and
there a terra-cotta rim just peeping above ground.
"And nobody appreciates its _being_ a 'corker'--not corky--any more than
I do, except when one has to go to work to thin it out, as some of us
will have to do this morning.... And to tell the truth," Sara's
gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled, "I never felt less like work than I do
to-day."
"I don't feel very much in the mood for it myself!" Olive, captain of
the farming-forces, bit her lip, surveying the hill which she had to
take, routing out invading weeds and the supernumeraries in the young
ranks of the vegetables.
"My legs are trying to persuade me that it's time for that evening
ceremonial meeting now--wanting to wheel me back in the direction of
camp," whispered Sara whimsically, as the firefly glance of her brown
eyes flitted over the too prolific rows, not of feathery carrots alone,
but of flouncing beets, tomatoes, beans, triumphant but tardy here at
the seashore, likewise calling to be thinned out. "There's no need for
you to say how your cold feet are behaving, Olive; they'd be warm enough
if you were off there, pow-wowing with the birds on the bar, or lying
out on the home-sands, polishing off--poetically--the words of the
candle-lighting ceremony which you have prepared for the Council Fire
to-night. You know that you're no enthusiastic farmerette; you'd a
thousand times rather paint radio-dials for aëroplanes; 'fess up now!"
"Well! when I came here I hardly knew a potato-stalk from a flouncing
beet, but--but I'm pushing my green head above the soil," confessed the
Maid of the rake--the modern Joan--upon this humble field, the reclaimed
desert looking down upon the fawning ocean, which had to be won from the
enemy over and over again.
"The time's past, however, honey"--Olive drew in her beautifully
chiseled lower lip, which had rather a deep indentation under it, a
rose-leaf nest resting upon the rounded ledge of the chin, which the
girls called her shelf--the ivory shelf where she kept her
inspirations--"the time's past when any girl who _is_ a girl wants to do
only the things which she likes, in the way of war-work, leaving those
that pinch slightly for others!... And now for the pinch! It's time to
begin. We're out to make a showing for the U. S. A.--as our soldiers
say--to stand back of them and help win the war. Let's 'tie to that'
with--with a hundred per cent of the best that's in us, eh?"
But, ah! there are times for all when a hundred per cent on the best of
our soul-stock seems exorbitant interest to pay for success in a
struggle.
At the end of an hour's work weeding and thinning out, fighting the
enemy, grappling with prickly barb-weed, that nettled the ungloved
fingers which boldly grasped it, routing out stubborn beach-grass, wild
vetch, wild pea, on this sea-girt hill which seemed to have unregenerate
leanings towards being a squawky desert still, even the Maid
herself--Olive--began to feel resolution wavering.
"O dear! There never _was_ an ancient village-street in France--or
anywhere else--as crooked as my back feels at the present moment," she
murmured twistedly to herself. "There--there seems to be a 'squawk' in
my courage, too! I want to knock off! I feel irresponsible--idle.
Perhaps it was that mad frolic yesterday on the bar--getting to the
heart of the wild life--the upset--ducking--when the big seal played
submarine! It did something to me. Oh-h! to be, really, a heron, gull,
flippered seal, anything--anything that knows nothing about
horrible--'civilized'--war;... about carrying on in the teeth of
not--wanting--to!"
She straightened her long, graceful back, the Maid, and stood for a
minute gazing off across a mile or more of sparkling bay, to that green
bar on which the high tide now held glassy revel, beckoning to jollity
with long, white fingers of foam, after a manner to make her feel more
irresponsible still.
At the end of that minute she became aware that, mystically, her mood
had spread, or perhaps, in that harum-scarum frolic off the dazzling
bar, the great marbled dog-seal had done more than heave the old settler
into the air; he had capsized the morale of this little army of girls.
"Oh-h, goody! My grit's gone glimmering!" deplored Sara suddenly. "I
hate this witch-grass; there's a 'squawky' old witch in every tuft of
it, I'm sure; it's so rank an' stubborn--so hard to rout out."
"Gone glimmering! I haven't _even_ a glimmer left," sighed fair-haired
Sybil, the Maid's sister, gazing down at her round arm, bare from the
elbow, which had twinkled as a galaxy--radio-painted--the night before.
"Too much fun yesterday; it's taken the 'pep' out of me--burnt it all
away. I--I'd rather do anything than thin out these saucy beets, anyway;
they're so red-faced and flouncing, they--they just seem to giggle at
you in the sun, when you're tired and your back aches, and you don't
want to keep on."
"Yes, like horrid--bold--florid-faced girls; to-day I just want to smack
every one that I pull up!" finished Lilia crossly. "_I_ don't mind
grubbing in this sandy war-garden, when it's an hour and a half in the
morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon, but to put in the whole
time, or most of it--_two_ hours and a half, anyway--at a stretch,
because we want to take it easy, later, and make ready for the Council
Fire--why, that's too much. I don't care what anybody says; I'm going to
rest a while!"
It was the same all over the broad semi-cultivated acres of lonely
hillside. Everywhere courage had gone glimmering, or flickered out
altogether.
Of the seventeen girls at work--two of the campers having been left at
home to prepare dinner: Arline, whose symbolic rainbow was never more
needed, and Betty, the evergreen Holly--not one was now carrying on, or,
if at all, very lamely.
A distant trio who had been raking over the earth around the vegetables,
in order to renew the mulch--surface muck--and draw the moisture to that
sandy surface--had, together with other unpaid volunteers whose tedious
task was to fight insect pests with noxious tobacco-water, thrown down
their arms ignominiously, and sat down under a crooked tree, to chat.
"An infant carrot is, sure, a funny-looking thing; this one has a tail
like a wood-mouse, only pink," lazily moralized Sul-sul-sul-i, meaning
Redstart--Little Fire--here, in this work-a-day field, Victoria Glenn.
"I wonder how such a terra-cotta baby tastes--raw? Bah! Horrid!"
[Illustration: "I don't care what anybody says; I'm going to rest a
while."]
She bit into the vegetable baby and threw it from her, repeating the
experiment, in "loafing" fashion, with another, and yet another.
"Why! you mustn't waste them. We can cook those for our own use--save
the winners to sell for the Red Cross--and to feed others. Oh! Oh!
you're not giving out, too, are you--Victory?"
The Maid's voice broke upon the appealing cry. This change rung upon
Victoria had served as a rally-word before, but evidently there was
"little fire" left in the Victory girl now.
And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as
if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to
feed the waning spark.
"If--if I don't 'pucker' up--if I'm not true to my service-pin--the day
is lost." She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her
overalls. "Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We're none of us in the
mood for work; our legs are telling us that it's time to fall in for a
march back to camp, when it isn't. If I can't rally 'the light that's in
me,' pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I
have not been a slacker!"
The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam
before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller
than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the "giggling" beets,
did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.
And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the "Joan" fire, with which she
started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart.
For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but
a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once
said, "in cotton-wool,"--in padded luxury--who, occasionally,
rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its
burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon
the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her
time.
While her feet trod the struggling soil of the war-garden she was aware
of a secret garden within her, beckoning them; a garden of indolence--of
ephemeral do-as-you-please delights--in which, indeed, she had rarely
lingered since she became a Camp Fire Girl.
How was she to avoid its tempting gate now--how carry on at the task
that "pinched"?
And the answer was, as it was to the Maid, Joan, of old, in her sunny
orchard, the whispering voices, bidding her look beyond herself--above!
"Our Father!" breathed Olive Deering softly, with a rush of tears to
her wide dark eyes, which gazed away from her followers, out over land
and sea. "Great Spirit in Whom I live and move and have my
being--invisible--Whom, yet, as it were, I have seen--strengthen me
now; don't let me shamefully weaken; help me to--carry--on!
"Girls!" She turned again to the field, the humble, oft-won field.
"Girls--Minute-Girls--Victory Girls--what on earth are we about,
weakening, thinking of knocking off before the time for which we pledged
ourselves is over, simply because we're not in the humor for work? Bah!
Nice volunteers we are! What would our Soldier Boys think of us? Oh!
I've got a letter here that would shame us--right here in the
breast-pocket of my overalls"--plucking it forth, waving thin checked
sheets, pennon-like. "It--it's to my father from the captain of that
infantry company in which my Cousin Clay is--Clay, who carried the big
basket of household goods for the little old Frenchwoman--helped her to
get settled again----"
"Humph!" interjected Sara; she still disliked to listen to any eloquence
bearing upon the war score of Olive's cousins--even on the ordinary
"innings" of that rich boy who, seen leading a blind horse under a
blazing sun through a country shipyard, not a dozen miles away, was
apparently not reveling in his task any more than they had been in
theirs--the only score on which she would have liked to hear her friend
dilate was Iver's.
"The captain's letter tells of an experience which the Boys had, away
back in January, before they had been on the front lines at all--while
they were still in training--in barracks, somewhere in France." Thus
Olive took up the story. "It was their first day in the
practice-trenches, (nine long miles from those barracks--about the worst
day, for weather, the captain says, that he ever remembers) the men said
'Sonny France' had gone up front and got killed--sleet, snow, rain,
mud--just a too-horrid sample of everything, girls!
"And after their nine-mile march to the trenches, the company put in
long hours of hard work, training--practicing how to repel an attack,
how to go over the top, ploughing round, knee-deep, in mud, with their
gas-masks on--which the captain says is about as comfortable as walking
about town on a day hot as this, with your head in a canvas bag."
"Oh! we--we know a little about those chlorine-foolers--some of
us--about the popping gas-cloud, too!" wetly exploded Sara.
"And then--then came the dreary march back to barracks in that freezing
January weather, with the men tired almost to death.... But were _they_
weakening, our gallant Boys of the Yankee Division?... our deary, cheery
American Boys? No! No! They were singing. And one--one--the captain
says, a mere lad, sang loudest of all--then dropped in his tracks as he
reached the barracks! And shall we----"
"No-o, we--_shan't_! We're not 'squawking'--crying quit! Not giving up!
We're out to make a showing, and we're going to do it--no matter how hot
the sun is, or how 'witchety' the weeds! Carry on's the word; carry on!"
The failing squawk had, indeed, become a shout; it was a general cry,
from one and all of the war-workers, for all had drawn near to listen--a
sprayed cry, too, as if the gust sweeping up from the sea, over which
that letter had traveled, brought a little brine on its wings.
"Just one thing morel" cried Olive, again the Torch-Bearer--the Maid.
"I've read somewhere, though not in this letter, that when soldiers are
marching a long distance, shoulder to shoulder, they can stand it much
better than if one is hiking alone. There's our lesson in team-work,
girls; let's take hold together--pull together, as we never did
before--on the weeds, the superfluous vegetable chicks, the muck, or
whatever it is! And--sing!"
"We don't know how we'll do it, but we're on the way,"
started a voice, moved--half-laughing.
"We're out to make a showing for the U. S. A.
There's going to be a hot time before us this day,
But still we'll make our showing ..."
The protest was triumphantly completed by the fresh breeze booming up
the vegetables.
* * * * *
Two hours later a tired girl, with slight lines of weariness under her
dark eyes, stole into the tent upon the white beach, flanking the
mother-bungalow, which was, at present, hers and Sara's.
She did not turn to her own corner, but to her friend's, where was
pinned to the translucent canvas a framed photograph, with a Service
Star above it.
"Iver!" whispered Olive Deering, tremulously--and again the Maid's look
was on her face--"I'm trying to be worthy of you--of all our Boys--of
our talk on that twilight balcony! I'm 'holding the line!' I'm carrying
on!"