THE GREEN CROSS
The next minute she knew.
The splashing cries which came from the feathered edges of the
bathing-pool rushed toward her like a great water-wave tipped with
foreign foam, about which there was nothing articulate until, presently,
the spray of one clear shriek was tossed up: “’Becca! Rebecca!”
The Morning-Glory’s face was a very white flower now, all crumpled by
fear, as was the flattened parcel she hugged, the parcel that was to
have worked a metamorphosis.
“’Becca she—she go down, stay down, under de water. She haf eat de green
apple—she sick—she down under de water—she not come up—eugh!” So the
spray-like shriek spread itself out into a cloud of words as a little
French girl of six or seven in a bathing-suit came flying, wild-eyed,
toward the one tall figure she saw, the girl with shiny blue glass
buttons on her blouse, who frantically hugged a small parcel.
“Where? Where? _Show me where!_” The figure dropped the parcel with a
scream and seized the hand of the newsbearer. “Show me where!”
Down into the feathery ripples—the tiny ripples that broke so gently
upon their earthy rim as if protesting that their shallow innocence
couldn’t do any harm—they went together, barelegged child and skirted
girl who didn’t even wait to toss off a shoe.
“’Becca she canno’ speak—no’ cry, like me—jus’ ketch her ‘tummy’ an’
fall—no’ come up!” The raving child vivaciously illustrated her meaning
by pounding with a wet left fist upon her own little rounded stomach,
rather full of unripe apples, too.
“Where? Where?” was all the girl could say. “Drowning! She must be
_drowning_ in two or three feet of water—lying on the bottom of the
bathing-pool!” raged her thought, storming like a thunderclap in her
ears.
The sheet-like pool was wide and wan, covering half an acre, no depth of
color anywhere, except where the brilliant afternoon sun created an
island sunburst in the water around the fountain and where near the
pool’s edge it showed topsy-turvy, moving pictures, pink and yellow, of
children standing or promenading on their heads, as if in fear.
Jessica’s agonized promenade was short and splashing. Now the water rose
above her knees as she dragged herself and her clothing through it!
“Where? _Where?_” was still all her seemingly water-logged tongue could
say.
“I’ll t’ink some dere—dere she’ll go down,—’Becca!” answered, at last,
the pluckily wading, little French child, who clung to her right hand,
pointing to a rainbow-shaft from the fountain leveled downward, too,
like an exploring finger.
And there the rainbow and Jessica found her—at the burnished point to
which she in her dumb play had waded forth through two feet and a half
of water to catch that rainbow—lying all dressed in the old grey frock
and broken footwear beneath the island sunburst of the fountain.
Here the girl, looking down, saw a dark spot, a hair-fringed mound upon
the pool’s bottom, barely covered by a glassy inch or two of
ripples—_head submerged_!
With a choking cry she stooped and dragged it up, lifted it. She was
strong and athletic for her seventeen years, but her whole girlish
framework rocked and shuddered, almost collapsed, as she did so, bowed
by an unexpected gust of weight.
The dumb child was eight years old, stout and chunky; now, unconscious,
clogged by the leaden weight of water in her little clothing, swamped by
green fruit, she would have made a taxing burden for a man.
“Father—Father in Heaven, give me strength—help me—strength to carry her
out of the pool! Strength, Father—_strength_!”
Half-aloud, irrepressibly, the cry that ever comes first in dire need
rocked between the young girl’s parted, gasping lips—she rocking with
it, to the roots, like a sapling in flood.
The childish mound of weight and water sank again until it touched the
glassy ripples, seeming as if it dragged her very flesh with it, while
the French child, submerged to her wallowing armpits, moaned beside her.
Then the round, strained arm that flashed with the silver of the Fire
Maker’s bracelet, aided by its fellow, managed, somehow, to gather up
that leaden weight again, to hold it above the thin sheet of water, to
start with it, staggering toward the earthen bank.
“Is she drowned—dead? How long did she lie there? How far can I carry
her?” The questions spun like a water-worked wheel in Jessica’s brain,
grinding out each staggering step. “Oh! isn’t it horrible? And we were
going to dress her up! The frock I made her! Green apples! _Cramp!..._
Oh, I’m letting her down! It’s too much. I—c-can’t!”
The girl’s dizzy gaze swam before her to the bank. She saw the catalpa
tree—a hundred miles off! She saw strange, steely shapes of playground
apparatus on another continent, as it were. Dimly she beheld the forms
of other girls, her companions, who had come with her, wading through
the light, crisp feathers of water to her help.
Then she saw something else. She heard a shout. Down the playground
slope to the innocent looking pool’s edge, like an arrow launched from
nowhere, tore a brown figure, coming at the rate of a hundred yards to a
dozen seconds.
It was a knightly figure, tall, slimly erect, with green and red
stripes, together with many rich, quivering points of color flashing in
an embroidered jumble upon its right sleeve, the highest color-point
_green_ that gleamed like an emerald eye against a blood-red background
as the flying water hit it.
And where she wore the silver of rank upon her braceleted arm, tortured
in a half-fainting effort to struggle onward with her dripping burden,
it showed a kindred gleam of silver in the eagle drooping from a red,
white, and blue ribbon on its left breast.
“Hang on, just a second! Hold up—I’ll take her!” It seemed to be the
American Eagle, dangling from the tricolored ribbon, that screamed the
encouragement.
Another second, and the arm that wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet, typical
of the fire at the heart that waters could not quench, had yielded its
unconscious burden—swamping cargo of green apples and all—to that
stronger right arm with the dancing specks of color upon the sleeve.
“Do you know how long she’s been under water? One of the children just
told me what was going on here!” panted the newcomer with the silver
eagle on his breast as he laid poor little Rebecca, silent forever, as
it seemed, face downward, upon the nearest patch of playground grass
where the sunbeams mocked her wet, weed-like hair and the broken old
shoes, as full of water, now, as she was herself.
“I don’t know how long she lay there—on the bottom of the pool.”
Involuntarily Jessica pressed her left hand to her heart which was doing
strange “stunts,” while with her right she helped the tired French child
to the bank.
“And I don’t know whether there’s life in her still or not!” The lad in
khaki had breathlessly flung his broad, olive-green hat upon the grass
and was stretching Rebecca’s limp arms out on either side of her head,
not a quiver of which gave token that the torch of her dumb existence
was still alight in some covert corner of her dripping body. He looked
up at the other four girls, Jessica’s companions, who, wet about the
ankles, were hovering, pale-faced, near. “One or two of you had better
run to the nearest pay-station and telephone for a doctor,” he gasped,
“if there isn’t a doctor’s office near. _We_ may not be able to bring
her to! It may take the pulmotor—I could use that if we had it. Turn her
face a little to one side, so that she can get the air!” This to his
fellow-worker, Jessica, who obeyed, her breath hissing between her teeth
in long, shivering, yearning gasps.
“Who’d ever have thought of any child drowning in that toy pool—two feet
an’ a half of water at deepest?” groaned the lad as he knelt astride of
the prostrate little figure, now looking haggard and horrified.
“Two feet and a half of water—and green apples!” Jessica corrected him.
His hands were quickly finding the spaces between the rigid little
limbs. Alternately he pressed with all the weight of his strong young
shoulders upon them, then relaxed, setting up a bellows-like motion to
expel the playground pool—as much of it as ’Becca had swallowed—from her
air-passages and draw in fresh air.
“Could you get at my watch in my vest pocket and time this?”
Jessica obeyed.
“Two of the girls have gone to find a doctor,” she said, glancing at the
disappearing forms of Sally and Betty. “Keep away; we mustn’t get too
near”—this to the other two—“we mustn’t take the air from her.”
“_You_ know something about first aid then; are you timing this work? It
ought to be about a dozen strokes to a minute.” The bestriding lad
directed his question to the first rescuer—the girl-rescuer—by the
motion of an eyelid, the while his strong hands, tanned to the color of
his khaki uniform, rose and fell rhythmically upon the framework of
’Becca’s dumb little heart, he trying so hard to breathe for her through
those brown hands, to force artificial respiration.
The silver swooping eagle above his heaving heart shook and palpitated
with his efforts.
A redness grew under his eyes, as under Jessica’s, where horror and
anxiety laid their congesting fingers.
But the many rich points of color upon his khaki sleeve, yellow, green,
red, white, each of them a little embroidered design in silk, mingled
their merits with the sunbeams which wove of them a rich arabesque that
flashed and played beneath the most noticeable of the badges, the
emerald eye against a blood-red background which shone, green as hope,
when he took the little victim of the bathing-pool from Jessica’s arms.
No peering eye, indeed, this merit badge, but the green cross of the
first aid, awarded for proficiency in succor, hopeful still upon its red
ground, enclosed in a green circle.
Suddenly that verdant hope of which it spoke blossomed! It thrilled and
rioted through Jessica.
“Oh! perhaps we sha’n’t need a doctor—or the pulmotor. I saw her eyelids
quiver. She may not have been three minutes under water.” The timing
watch in the girl’s hand shook. “Keep off the other children,
Olive—Arline—don’t let them get near, to draw the oxygen from her!”
Yes, slowly the breath of life was wavering back into its dumb
tabernacle: through ’Becca’s blue, swollen lips came a slow, uncertain
shiver, drawn from the hands working upon her, a quivering gasp.
“Oh! can’t I rub her a little now, toward the heart—to start it up—I
know just how; I have a Red Cross diploma for first aid—I’m a Camp Fire
Girl!” The sobbing, gurgling exclamation burst from Jessica; on the
heels of the sob came a little whistling, thrush-like note like the
beginning of a song, a song of succor.
“Yes, I think you might—now—while I ‘piece in’ her breathing.”
“Here, Olive, you hold the watch; it isn’t so important to time the
pressures any more; she’s coming round—coming round all right!”
With the timepiece upon her palm ticking little Rebecca’s life back,
measuring the intervals between her reviving gasps, Olive stood and
watched.
Golden lad! Dripping girl, a year his junior! Camp Fire Girl! Eagle
Scout! Together they worked and rubbed. And life, kindly life, so
reluctant to quit even a dumb tabernacle, answered their call, stealing
upon slow wings of returning circulation through the silent child’s
body.
Suddenly the timepiece trembled in the hand that held it. That of which
Olive had spoken in the library as swelling up so big in her at times;
the nameless tide of a young girl’s ideals, of her rapture at beauty,
her adoration of the Father’s Presence she saw in it, her dim drawings
toward service and hero-worship; that impulsive tide rose so high in her
now that it had to find a temporary outlet in the tears of agitation and
relief stealing down her cheeks.
Only a temporary one! Olive had groped girlishly to find a channel of
self-expression for that tide; she had tried to let it ooze out of her
in rhyming, to work it off in painting—or attempts thereat.
But here she was quivering from head to foot with the sudden discovery
that in the living picture before her, the prostrate child and those two
kneeling figures upon the playground grass, there was something nobler
than pen or paint-brush could depict, the highest form of
self-expression.
And her heart surging up within her vaguely named that picture,
“Succor.”
Succor was in the healing warmth of the sunlight that, now again, made
its brightness felt.
Succor seemed waving its wings among the branches of the near-by
willow-tree that brooded over the scene—not one helpless wing, but two:
the Will to help and the trained Ability to do it.
* * * * *
Three hours later two girls sat one on each side of a cot in the
children’s ward of a city hospital. Things had happened in the meantime.
A doctor had arrived in an automobile and after some gentle soundings
and poundings of ’Becca’s anatomy to locate the undigested fruit that
swamped her, had carried her off to the hospital, declaring that her
after treatment was important.
The after treatment she was receiving now was in the shape of a big
waxen queen doll from Olive, a creature that could mechanically call
upon its royal parents by the titles of “Papa” and “Mamma,” as its
little human owner couldn’t.
“It seemed too bad that she shouldn’t have some present, seeing that we
couldn’t dress her up to-day—or for many days to come,” remarked Olive
Deering, looking across at Jessica who was holding the dumb child’s
stubby little fingers. “I wish we knew the name of the Boy Scout who
helped you to save her!”
“’Twas _I_ who helped _him_; he worked over her until he brought her to.
He was an Eagle Scout, too, the highest rank among the Scouts.”
“Think of it!”
“All those little colored designs embroidered on his sleeve were his
twenty-one merit badges.”
Silence for a few minutes while ’Becca’s right hand fondled the doll.
“Glory!” In a low and thrilling voice Olive broke the stillness of the
ward where most of the children slept, calling the other girl by the pet
name of her childhood. “Glory! the ladder has dipped once for all toward
the Sugarloaf; no, I don’t mean that; I mean that the Sugarloaf and Camp
Morning-Glory and camping out with the girls of the Morning-Glory Camp
Fire are all on top for me—and for Sybil, too, if I can make her; the
hotel is nowhere!”
“Do you really mean it, that you want to become a Camp Fire Girl at
last?”
“I want to do something worth while!” Olive’s lip quivered; she spoke
passionately. “I want to do something with—with spice in it! I felt
that, to-day, when I saw you working to bring ’Becca round—you and that
boy.... I want to dance the Leaf Dance and, maybe, to inflict my rhymes
on other girls without their laughing at me,” emotion dwindling down to
laughter.
“But perhaps your father will wish you to go to that hotel, Sybil and
you, with Cousin Anne.”
“Father, no! He approves of the Camp Fire movement; I’ve heard him say
so. He thinks with Captain Andy”—laughingly—“that it’s a pretty good
incubator for the growth of new wing-feathers—unusual power to do
things.”
“Or power to do unusual things, eh?”
“Either will answer! I’m sure Cousin Anne would be delighted to get off
on her own hook this summer, without any of us girls. And ’twill be lots
better for Sybil than going to an hotel and lording it over half-a-dozen
boys, whose parents are staying there, and who wait on her all the
time—fight over her, maybe, as two of them did, last year—because they
think she’s fairy-like and pretty.” There was a look of her beautiful
mother in Olive’s eyes now.
“As for me, I’ve quite made up my mind; I’m not going to lose my hoot
through not using it, like that poor old straw-eyed owl,” wound up the
Camp Fire recruit. “I don’t care”—rising to a dramatic outburst—“if
there should be a dozen tingling Penelopes and half-a-dozen _witchetty_
nieces of Captain Andy’s, each with a pig for a pupil, in the camp,
I’ll—what is it you say—I’ll ‘cleave to my Camp Fire Sisters whenever,
wherever I find them!’”
Half laughing, half crying, she stretched her hand across the cot.
Jessica grasped it. The pledge of sisterhood was made and ratified upon
the heart of a dumb child.