THE CREATURE
"I light the red candle of Health: strength that I draw from the ocean,
buoyancy from the breeze, elasticity from the air, the sands, and 'dash'
from the wild life about me--dashing health that makes it irksome for me
to walk if I can run or dance, that sets my heart soaring along sky-ways
of thankfulness, makes me strong for all work which my country asks of
me: I light the red candle of Health."
* * * * *
"I light the white candle of Peace: as, in the Christmas story,
_Atawessu_, the Star, the Creature Far Above, guided wise men to the
manger where the Prince of Peace was born, so may the star of loving
kindness guide all men soon to that 'fair city of peace' where
children's cry--like the song of angels, of old--shall come true and it
may be '_Fini_,' forever, _la Guerre_: good will on earth! I light the
white candle of Peace."
* * * * *
"I light the blue candle of Loyalty--Truth: as the tides of the ocean
are stable, returning rhythmically to the shore, governed by some force
which men call Solar Attraction, so may I be drawn to the Sun of Ideals,
'true to the truth that is in me,' loyal to each pledge I make: I light
the blue candle of Truth!"
"Peerless red, white, and blue,
Vitality, love, and truth,
Bright be my hold on you,
In these halcyon days of youth!
"Staunch as the ocean's tide,
Nor man, nor might may turn,
Steady as beacon-light,
In its patient, steadfast burn!
"True as the fixed star's beam.
The Creature Far Above,
Unerring as wild bird's dive
For hidden treasure trove!
"True as the ..."
But the chanting voices--enriched by Flamina's caressing note--faltered.
What "Creature Far Above" was gliding forth from a bank of blood-red
cloud, its radiant wings aflame, as if dipped in the fires of another
world?
"It's an aëroplane! A big--aëroplane! A biplane!"
"Nev-er!"
"Yes, it is! I--I thought at first it was a sea-gull; I've been watching
it--saw it before it entered that red cloud-gate!" Sara Davenport's
leather-fringed sleeves fell back from her bare fore-arms, leaving them
free to describe a broken arc of excitement--like chain-lightning
ripping the dusk--under the spell of the tricolored candles.
"Mercy! Whoopee-doo!... Zoom, zoom, zoom!... May--may I be feathers, as
Captain Andy would say, if 'tisn't an aëroplane! A big army air-plane!
Oh, girls alive, d'you suppose--suppose it's going to land--come to
earth--drop down right here by our Council Fire?"
"Oh! it never will. Where is it? I can't see it! The dusk's so thick,
anyway!" It was a half-cheated wail from two-thirds of the girls,
turning to Sara's flame, now a perfect pillar of fire, for
guidance--direction.
"There! There! See! Just over that tallest sand-peak now--high
sand-hill!... And, oh! for goodness sake! there's the moon coming over
the top--coming over the top to stare at it."
Yes! round-orbed, magnificent, shadow-mapped, the silvery Green Corn
Moon was sailing up over the dunes of antique silver--over the
dark-tressed crown of a lesser hill, to gaze at the winged wonder--one
moment burning up in the last dying flame of day, the next a mammoth
gray moth circling and circling in the vast crimson-hung halls of
twilight, as if drawn to the home-fires of earth.
To the far-beckoning blaze of the Council Fire upon the pale beach,
within thirty yards of the tide's rippling edge--the fairy, rainbowed
blaze, fed by bone-dry driftwood, copper-marked wreck-wood, flinging
aloft every hue in the spectrum--before which nineteen Camp Fire Girls
and their Guardian had entered upon the candle-lighting ceremony
arranged by Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, the Maid who had "carried on"
that morning upon the humble field of that depressing hill.
Now the candles, red, white, and blue, symbolic torches, embedded in
their silver candlesticks of sand, flickered, guttered, unheeded--went
out, two of them--negligible as glow-worms beside some transcendent
display of Northern Lights, streaming merry dancers, radiating from the
excitement in the girls' own breasts, which seemed to surround that
aërial visitor from the North, flying lower--lower--directly over the
high-floating, pink-shot smoke-reek of the Council Fire.
But....
Was it going to be a _visitor_?
Forgotten was the charming purpose of the evening, the main feature of
the ceremonial meeting, the initiation of Nébis, little Flamina, now
fondling the air with vocal thrills that sobbed joyously, like the
softer strings of a violin--as that transporting question sailed,
moon-faced, over the top!
"But--but where did you see it first, Sara? Oh! how _could_ you see it,
far off--when everything's getting so dark? I never knew you
had--cat's--eyes!"
Little Owl was blinking like a snake-charmed owlet which could not move
its head upon the neck usually so flexible--that slender girlish neck
rising from the round setting of the ceremonial dress being bent fixedly
backward--the face, white as a moon-flower, shining upward in ultimate
expectancy, such as never had been before, never could, felt she, be
again, though she live till crack of doom!
"See it! Oh, I don't know! While--while we were singing--chanting--about
the Creature Far Above (oh! wasn't that funny?) I happened to look off,
and saw a speck--dark--against the red! I thought, at first, it was a
bird! Then--then it entered that red ripple-cloud ... then.... Oh-h! I
believe it _is_ going to land--land on our _map_--right here on the
sands.
"Yes; I can hear the engine buzz--now! Gracious! it looks like a big,
dark fish--swimming round in a fog, with a whirligig in its mouth--the
revolving propeller, I suppose."
Olive was stuttering with excitement, too--her hands clasped--staccato
excitement that ticked each word off like a dot against the bare, steely
possibility that the big biplane, now within a couple of hundred yards
of the home-fires, might pass over and on, without descending.
"It _may_ be a naval aëroplane patrolling for submarines, in which case
it will probably fly on over the water--on top of the water, maybe!"
Even Gheezies, the Guardian, as she put forth the unwelcome suggestion,
was oppressed by a tickling in her throat, a cooing almost babyish, of
held-up excitement that did not yet dare to be exultation over the
landing of an army battle-plane by their Council Fire--so that maturity
dropped from her like a nun's cloak and her forty years became as the
fourteen of the youngest tiptoeing maidens present.
"My! But, mercy! suppose it should be--should be an enemy air-plane?
Hostile! _Goodness!_"
Sybil, pirouetting on her toes upon the sands, subsided to the soles of
her moccasins, in momentary apprehension--flat fright--her lips falling
apart, a cleft flower, as her gaze fluttered downward, like a shot bird,
to the dim dunes, searching them for two other lonely camps about an
eighth of a mile distant, one just vacated, the other occupied by the
Guardian's artist-brother, who, at the moment, was far out on the bay,
deep-sea fishing.
Other youthful glances strayed this way and that way, too. All tales of
coast invasion which the girls had heard, of air-raid and
wreck--invasion which, owing to the fleet of their British cousins and
to the immortal valor of their own noble army, fighting for them, they
were to be spared in the Great War--loomed up in a dark fog-ring
encircling them.
"Bah! Enemy! Hostile!... Gammon and spinach!" cried Sara, flapping,
fluttering like a brown leaf in a fish-tail breeze. "No such thing! It's
too far off for us to see the insignia--rings on the under side of the
wings, but.... Oh, say! it _is_ going to land; it's doing a nose-dive
now--heading straight down. Glory, d'you hear it whistle?"
"Whee-ee-oo-oo!" Blithely, indeed, whistled the splendid air-ship,
nosing towards earth, as if it knew the feminine welcome awaiting it,
settling into a natural glide, while the fine wires of the "struts"
connecting the two planes cut the air with that homing sound.
"Hostile!... Piffle! Why! Why! the rudder is striped--can just make it
out--red, white, and blue, the same--the same as our service-buttons."
Ah! dear insignia. Perhaps, at that culminating moment, as the
recognition bubbled forth, under all the merry dance of excitement in
girlish breasts, there was a stable under-current of complaisance
sweeping them upward bodily, as it were, to meet the aërial visitor;
satisfaction that, nine hours before, on the hill of discordant name,
they had not weakened--been untrue to the claim of those ringed colors
linking them now in service to the Adventurers of the skies.
"Yes, here they come! Glory hallelujah! Three cheers for the Red, White,
and Blue! Oh-h!"
A moment of tense silence, of flyaway breath fluttering, winged, through
parted lips--of girlish faces transfigured, luminous in the dusk as the
head-bands about girlish brows--flashing recognition signals into the
gloom! And down it came, that army bi-plane--bump, bump, bump--in the
briefest of jolting canters along the dim, dim beach!
"Well!... Well, we didn't make a pancake landing, anyhow! No!"
Forth leaped, on the word, from his tiny cock-pit, his deep pilot's
seat, a young, boyish aviator, helmeted, gauntleted, leather-jacketed!
Forth he leaped, and pushed his goggles back--then stood for a moment,
a-blink, a knight of the skies, fresh from his parade ground, the
clouds, landing among fairy princesses, filleted and headed, upon a
fairy shore, with a rainbowed Council Fire in the background and three
tall candles, of the charmed colors which ringed his wings--one still
alight, flickering a welcome--in their antique silver candlesticks of
sand!
Could romance go further? The Guardian Fairy felt that it could not. She
stepped forward and held out her hand.
"It was a very pretty landing, indeed," she said.
The knight unbuttoned his leather helmet and pulled it off; his long
back gauntlet, reaching to the elbow, too!
"Well! she did drag her tail a little," he answered, glancing
deprecatingly at his "ship" with its red, white, and blue rudder; the
great crimson fish--fabled fish--with wings in its head and a propeller
in its gaping mouth, which the high tide seemed to have thrown up upon
the sands.
"My name is Fenn," he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian's hand.
"Lieutenant Fenn, I suppose?"
The aëronaut bowed again, unbuttoning his leather coat, so that there
was a gleam of silver bars--those army bars which Iver wore, thought
Sara quickly--upon the broad shoulders beneath; of silver wings, too,
wrought on black velvet upon the tired breast, heaving boyishly.
"And--and this is my observer, Lieutenant Hayward," he introduced
further, turning to the second air-man, who, also, had vacated the airy
nest of his little cock-pit and stood upon the darkening tide-shore.
"Well! Mother Earth is always ready to welcome aviators--or her children
are!" The Guardian shook hands with both.
"That is, when they land of their own free will," put in the boyish
pilot, his strong, white teeth flashing from a pale face as he looked
breezily beyond her at nineteen maidens whose hovering brown draperies,
fluttering fringes, embroideries and long braids "Mammy Moon" now
touched with primitive charm, as if they were her favored offspring.
"I admit the correction," the Guardian Fairy smiled. "At all events,
_we_ are glad--su-premely glad"--her voice shook a little with the
thrill of the thing--"to welcome you to our Council Fire. We--we have
never before entertained Angels unawares--Aviators unexpectedly!" She
laughed. "We are the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, encamped in
that bungalow by the seashore. I am the Guardian, Darina Dewey,
spinster," still laughingly. "It would take a long time to introduce you
all round, and it's getting too dark to see. At least, let me present
you to the elder girls--to our Assistant Guardian, Miss Deering....
Olive--Lieutenant Fenn."
Sara Davenport, introduced next, was not too thrilled to note the young
air-pilot's start of admiration over the first presentation--note it
jealously, for Iver's sake.
"Bah! I don't wonder he wilts!" she murmured to herself, half-savagely.
"Olive is a dream in ceremonial dress, with those long braids, her dark
eyes, and her skin like a moonlit cosmos flower. If--if I were an
aviator, I'd want to fly away with her--ten thousand feet high!
Then--then, what would Iver do? Oh, yes! Have you made a long flight?"
she added aloud.
"Not very, but I had hard work flying my course." The knight of the
clouds, really not much "wilted," was giving full twilight attention to
her now, as to the other older girls to whom he was introduced. "I was
heading into the wind, you see, and the very little there is, up there,
was against us. We were flying low, 'winging the midway air,'"
smilingly, "when we sighted the smoke from your big fire there, and my
Observer ordered me to fly over."
"Oh, did you think--imagine--it was a spy bonfire, signaling out to sea?
I don't believe we have a single spy round here, with--with the possible
exception of the long-legged sand-snipe always spying upon the
fish--greedy things!" Sara excitedly caught her breath.
"Well! I wouldn't be too sure--of anything." The young air-scout plucked
his goggles from his forehead.
"And do you mean to say you were flying over the coast--over the
shore--looking out for--for suspicious things--huts in the woods, lonely
signal-stations, wireless ... oh-h?" Arline and Betty drew breath
simultaneously, tumultuously, speaking together.
"Well, we saw nothing suspicious here," was the evasive answer, "only
suggestive...."
"Suggestive--of what?"
"Oh, that:
"'Ground-school dinners bring the tears,
We haven't had a feed--in--years!'"
came the answer with a long--beclouded--sigh.