CHRISTMAS OF 1918
The moving note which merged into melody at the first Peace Celebration,
when War was, forever, as men hoped, a thing of the past, turned to
mirth in the second one--the Christmas Ceremonial.
It was more than mirth in one girlish heart--one, at least. It was
mounting thanksgiving which often sang itself into a sobbing prayer of
joy, like the sun-curl upon the swelling wave when tumultuously it
breaks.
For He had come back.
Lieutenant Iver Davenport--without as much hair as Peace Europa, because
of the burning effects of mustard gas--slowly recovering from
shrapnel-wounds, was back at Camp Evens, where once, in premature
passion, he had rashly "bawled out" a sergeant, now, by the fortunes of
war, a lieutenant like himself.
His mother and sister had been up to see him. They had sat by his cot in
the base hospital, and Sara, knowing the sort of news for which he was
thirsting, had told him all the story of their camping summer, making it
center chiefly around one leading figure--that of the Torch Bearer,
Olive Deering.
She described the waning fires of resolution upon the hill of the
night-heron, when grit had gone glimmering, and how Olive had gloriously
rekindled the flame from the glow in her own breast--and by the thought
of what Soldier Brothers were enduring over there.
"It was from a letter about her cousin Clay--Clayton Forrest--that she
read. He apparently did 'his all' over there, but came through, as--as
did that other cousin of Olive's, the rich banker's son, who put in his
time working in a shipyard on this side. Atlas, we nicknamed him because
when we first saw him he was apparently holding up--supporting--with his
back and shoulders a horribly heavy, raw, yellow ship's rib--and the
World with it.... That's just how he felt; I know he did.... Never mind;
I like him awfully well now--ever since I let him take my freak of a
dory! Ha! that's another story."
So Sara's tongue ran on, a moved, at times a merry, flame, into the
returned soldier's ear.
"But,"--her voice retreated into the softest twilight of conjecturing
speech--"but I don't believe Atlas--or any one of her cousins--holds up
Olive's world. Perhaps I ought not to say it...."
She broke off, mistily, as her eyes met her brother's, with the homing
hunger in them; her brother who had temporarily lost his hair--but not
his smile!
"Do you mean--mean to say"--he began, in the old headstrong way. "Ah,
well! nothing matters, girlie, except that I'm at home--at home, alive,
and can soon see--everybody--for myself. Although I don't know whether
they'll let me out of here before Christmas, or not. If they do--if I
should be discharged from the hospital, and sent to the Casualty
Detachment--why, I might get back to you sooner--sooner than I hope for,
now."
"Quite--unexpectedly--perhaps?"
The sister's heart gave a flying leap.
"Possibly. But don't look for it! As I say, what does--anything--matter,
except that I _will_ be back with you--sooner or later?"
The Flame suddenly bowed her wet cheek on the narrow cot next his; the
ring in the last words, the whole world of relief, gave her for the
first time an inkling into the soldier's lot over there; no letter of
his had done so.
"While the fight was on, all was Advance--and a heart full of cheers!"
* * * * *
"I--I was always Iver's best chum--he said so--but I suppose I'll have
to resign myself now to the fact that when he went over the top at
Château-Thierry and St. Mihiel--four times he led his men over the top,
once into that Belleau wheat-field, yellow in the morning, red at night,
and again into the meadow where he remembers thinking, before he was
shot down, that the clover was sweet, even if he couldn't smell it for
the gas--his _real_ thoughts, when he had any, were more of another girl
than of me. Well! I can't be jealous about that, as I was over the
things he left with me! Oh! if he only could be discharged before
Christmas--and spend it with us!"
Such was the tenor of the sisterly thoughts as the train bore her back
to the home city of Clevedon, now daily witnessing the return of
officers and men who wore upon their right sleeve the gold stripes
telling of service in France--supplemented often and nobly by the added
gold which spoke of wounds.
"Dear me! I wish they--the doctors up there at Camp Evens--_would_
pronounce him better, turn him over to the Casualty Department; then
he'd probably get his discharge right away, and arrive home
unexpectedly--perhaps! Oh-h!"
The bliss of the latter possibility was the spirit in Sara Davenport's
feet which kept them moving elastically from room to room of her
father's suburban bungalow on the day before Christmas Eve. It was a
red-hearted wreath here, a garland there, typifying the matchless
thanksgiving of this Christmas in many a heart, to be green while life
should last--and the heart have a reminiscent throb!
It was creaming, frothing, whipping, mixing, and cutting into diamond
shapes which borrowed luster from the diamond mine of contingent
expectancy within such as had never transfigured cookies before.
For if Iver should possibly arrive, not even the type of fare set before
aviators on a moonlit beach and jollified by the airy slang of space,
was meet for the returning You!
"Those air-scouts would call these coated chocolate bars creamed
joy-sticks," thought Sara, as she reverted to candy-making and Camp Fire
recipes. "Well! if Iver should be with us, again, on Christmas Day,
every mouthful I eat will be a joy-stick--tasteless except for the joy.
Oh-h! just suppose he should come to-night while I'm out--attending that
Christmas Ceremonial at the Deerings' home."
"Maybe I could send him to fetch you," returned her mother, to whom the
latter remark was made aloud. "But, to my mind, there's hardly a chance
of it!... Here's a box which has just come for you, daughter!"
"Oh, good gracious! it couldn't be--from--_him_?"
No! It was a bunch of pearl-white Christmas roses grown in the
conservatories of Manchester-by-the-Sea.
With it was no accompanying card, but a sheet of creamy, rough-edged,
masculine note-paper, on which were a series of rather clever
pen-sketches: overalled girls wielding rake, hoe, and sprayer upon a
sea-girt hill; on the next page, a youth steering a blind horse between
reefs of lumber, then with his back bent under a ponderous ship's rib--a
girl defying him--lastly, that girl upright in a dory that might have
escaped from some boat-bedlam, signaling to Coast Guards.
"Atlas knew what would appeal to a Camp Fire Girl, with a taste for
primitive picture-writing," murmured the Flame to herself, nursing the
starry roses, the stars in the eyes above them shining through those
gold-tipped lashes, like a rayed nebula. "Well, well! I suppose this is
a sort of silent tribute to the fact that we all--all--came through the
Game with our wings, as an aviator would say; that we weren't grounded
in what we set out to do!"
A thought which made the awarding of honors at that Christmas
Ceremonial, in the dying days of 1918, a rite at once more triumphant
and touching than the bestowal of any honor-beads before!
For each khaki-colored bead strung upon a leather thong testified to the
contributing of an individual bit in the hour of Freedom's main bitt,
when it was the anchoring prop to which the mainsail of progress, the
mainsheet of safety, were made fast.
Yes! and, in a way, the lives over there, too. For many a soldier owed
his rations and his recovery to the tireless zeal of voluntary workers
on this side of the water.
Who knows but Lieutenant Iver did, as, an hour later, when the spirit of
the Ceremonial meeting had turned to Christmas merrymaking, his fingers,
long and thin, wielded the colonial knocker and rang the bell of the
Deering mansion on Nobility Hill--as certain annals of the city were
proud to call it.
"Oh-h! I nev-er could come in, sis.... Such a scarecrow I am--without as
much hair as--as that Peace Babe you were telling me about!"
"She! Why! she has a perfect shock now--little Peace Europa! She--she's
growing, at all points, like her name!" It was his sister's voice,
merry, tender--tearfully moved--as she ran down-stairs to meet him.
"So--so you _were_ discharged sooner than you expected, Iver."
"Yes. Got my marching orders from the Casualty Detachment only a few
hours ago. Didn't even wait to telephone! Come to fetch you
home--sis!... Why-y! Olive."
Somehow, as she watched that meeting between the Torch Bearer and the
gaunt soldier from over-seas, Sara Davenport, regardless of an onlooking
butler, turned aside in the great lighted hall, and hid her wet eyes in
the crook of her arm from which the soft leather fringes fell back--just
as she had done by the bungalow on the wild sea-beach, after the
exciting capture of a spy, when she yearned that Peace might come again.
She was a forked Flame now, as then, cleft by dividing emotions.
For it was evident by the wonderful color on Olive's cheek, by the
joy-brand in her eyes, who--who was the prop that held up her world--her
maidenly castles in the air. And it was not Atlas, nor any one of her
cousins, fine as might be their war-score!
But not even Sister Sara, only the December breeze fluttering about the
brownstone mansion on the hill, heard what passed, yet a little while
later, between a very tall, very thin officer, assiduously cultivating a
baby crop of new hair, and a dark-eyed girl, upon a balcony of the
Deering home, whither maidens in ceremonial dress had flocked to hear
far, sweet echoes of Community singing--after the said soldier had been
beguiled up-stairs on the plea that he might keep his trench-cap on.
And the said breeze actually halted, cornered by the new mischief--the
shy, glad mischief--in Olive's tones which had hitherto been more on the
meditative order.
"I wonder"--murmured the Torch Bearer--"I wonder, now, if I'm the very
first Camp Fire Girl to--to be proposed to--that's what it means,
doesn't it--in head-band and moccasins--ceremonial dress," shyly.
"But, oh--oh, good gracious! Olive, I oughtn't; not--not until after I
had s-spoken to your father! What will he say?"
The youthful lieutenant's courage was more flustered than when he led
his men over the top into that French clover-meadow where a glance told
him that the blossoms were sweet even if he couldn't smell them through
his gas-mask--and for noxious cloud.
"My father! I don't know what he will say. But--but I rather imagine it
will be the same thing he said--when--he saw you hold out your blistered
hand--to a private--after you had been so badly burned by
that--stray--powder-puff."
"And what was that?"
"Onward--Christian--Soldier!"
whispered Olive very softly.
The End
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Keel to Kite
How Oakley Rose Became a Naval Architect
By ISABEL HORNIBROOK
12mo Cloth Illustrated
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Camp and Trail
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HANDICRAFT FOR HANDY GIRLS
By A. NEELY HALL
Author of "The Boy Craftsman," "Handicraft for Handy Boys," "The Handy
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AND DOROTHY PERKINS
Illustrated with photographs and more than 700 diagrams and working
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By EDWARD STRATEMEYER
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THE GUN CLUB BOYS OF LAKEPORT
Or The Island Camp
321 pages Illustrated Price $1.25
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THE BASEBALL BOYS OF LAKEPORT
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOROTHY BROWN
By NINA RHOADES
Illustrated by Elizabeth Withington
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