IN THE TRAIN
Sahwah the Sunfish came tripping blithely down the Pullman aisle to
rejoin the Winnebagos after a sojourn on the platform with the brakeman,
whom she left exhausted with answering questions. When Sahwah traveled
she traveled with all her might and there was nothing visible to the
naked eye that she did not notice, inquire about, and store up for
future reference. She observed down to the last nail wherein a Pullman
differed from a day coach; she found out why the man ran along beside
the train at the stations and hit the wheels with a hammer; why the cars
had double windows; what the semaphore signals indicated; why the
east-bound freight trains were so much more heavily loaded than the
west-bound; she noticed that there were no large steamboats running on
the Susquehanna, although it looked like a very large river; she counted
the number of times they crossed the river on the run through the
Alleghenies; she noticed the different varieties of trees that grew
along the mountain sides; she scrutinized every passenger in the car
and tried to guess who they were, what their business was and where they
were going. Sahwah's mind was like a photographic plate; everything she
looked at became imprinted there as upon a negative, accurate in every
detail. Like the Elephant's Child, Sahwah was full of 'satiable
curiosity, and her inquisitive trunk was always stretched out in a
quivering search for information.
The brakeman, an amiable personage, was interested in her thirst for
knowledge of railway affairs, and answered her innumerable questions in
patient detail until his head began to buzz and he began to feel as
though he were attached to a suction pump.
"Goodness gracious, child, what do you think I am, an encyclopedia?" he
exploded at last, and sought refuge in the impenetrable regions at the
forward end of the long train.
Sahwah, deprived of her source of information, turned to join her
traveling companions, Gladys and Hinpoha and Migwan, up in the other end
of the car. She stood for a moment at the water cooler, looking down the
car at the people facing her and indulging in her favorite pastime of
trying to read their faces. The car was crowded with all kinds of
people, from the stately, judicial-looking man who sat in front of the
Winnebagos to a negro couple on their honeymoon. There was a plentiful
sprinkling of soldiers throughout the car and one or two sailors.
Sahwah looked at them with eager interest and classified their different
branches of service by the color of the cord on their hats. One
Artillery, three Infantry, one Ambulance Corps and one Lieutenant of
Aviation, she checked off, after a long and careful scrutiny of the last
one, whose insignia puzzled her at first.
A porter brushed by her as she stood there with a glass of milk in his
hand. Sahwah watched the progress of the milk idly, and the porter
stopped beside the Lieutenant of Aviation with it. The lieutenant seemed
to be asleep, for the porter had to shake him before he became aware of
his existence. Just then Hinpoha caught Sahwah's eye and motioned her to
come back to her seat, and Sahwah went tripping down the aisle to join
her friends. She glanced casually at the young lieutenant as she passed
him; he was staring fixedly at her and she dropped her eyes quickly. A
little electric shock tingled through her as she met his eyes; he seemed
to be about to speak to her. "Probably mistook me for someone else and
thought he knew me," Sahwah thought to herself, and dismissed him from
her mind.
"Where have you been all this while?" asked Hinpoha with a perspiring
sigh, laboriously "knitting backward" across the length of the needle in
vicious pursuit of a stitch that should have been eliminated in the
process of decreasing for the heel turn.
"Pursuing knowledge," replied Sahwah merrily, settling herself in the
seat beside Hinpoha, facing Migwan and Gladys.
The four girls were on their way to spend the summer vacation with their
beloved Guardian, Nyoda, at her home in Oakwood, the little town in the
hills of eastern Pennsylvania where she had lived since her marriage to
Andrew Sheridan--"Sherry"--the summer before. Sherry was in France now
with the Engineers, and Nyoda, lonesome in the huge old house to which
she had fallen heir at the death of her last relative, old Uncle Jasper
Carver, had invited the Winnebagos to come and spend the summer with
her.
Vacation had begun inauspiciously for the Winnebagos. To their great
disappointment Katherine wrote that she was not coming east after all;
she was going to remain in Chicago with Miss Fairlee and help her with
her settlement work there. They had rejoiced so at the first news of her
coming and had so impatiently awaited the time of her arrival that the
disappointment when it came was much harder to bear than if they had
never looked forward to her coming. As Sahwah remarked, she had her
appetite all fixed for Katherine, and nothing else would satisfy her.
The news about Katherine had only been one of a series of
disappointments.
Hinpoha had been called home the week before college closed officially,
to attend the funeral of Dr. Hoffman, Aunt Phoebe's husband, whose
strenuous work for his "boys" in the military camp during the past year
had been too much for his already failing strength, and Aunt Phoebe,
worn out with the strain of the last months, had announced her intention
of closing the house and going to spend the summer with a girlhood
friend on the Maine coast. Hinpoha had the choice of going with her or
spending the summer with Aunt Grace, who had a fractured knee and was
confined to an invalid's chair.
Migwan had come home from college with over-strained eyes and a weak
chest and had been peremptorily forbidden to spend the vacation
devouring volumes of Indian history as she had planned, and had a lost,
aimless feeling in consequence.
Sahwah, thanks to the unceasing patriotic activities of Mrs. Osgood
Harper during the previous winter, found herself unexpectedly in
possession of a two months' vacation while her energetic employer
recuperated from her season's labors in a famous sanatorium. As Sahwah
had not expected a vacation and had made no plans, she found herself, as
she expressed it, "all dressed up and no place to go."
For Gladys's father, head over heels in the manufacture of munitions,
there would be no such glorious camping trip as there was the summer
before, and Mrs. Evans refused to go away and leave him, so Gladys had
the prospect of a summer in town, the first that she could recollect.
"I can't decide which I shall do," sighed Hinpoha plaintively to the
other three, who had foregathered in the library of the Bradford home
one afternoon at the beginning of the summer. "I know Aunt Phoebe would
rather be alone with Miss Shirley, because her cottage is small, and it
would be dreadfully dull for me besides; but Aunt Grace will be laid up
all summer and she has a fright of a parrot that squawks from morning
until night. Oh, dear, why can't things be as they were last year?"
Then had come Nyoda's letter:
DEAREST WINNEBAGOS:
Can't you take pity on me and relieve my loneliness? Here I am, in a
house that would make the ordinary hotel look like a bandbox, and since
Sherry has gone to France with the Engineers it's simply ghastly. For
various reasons I do not wish to leave the house, but I shall surely go
into a decline if I have to stay here alone. Can't you come and spend
your vacations with me, as many of you as have vacations? Please come
and amuse your lonesome old Guardian, whose house is bare and dark and
cold.
Sahwah tumbled out of her chair with a shout that startled poor Mr. Bob
from his slumbers at her feet and set him barking wildly with
excitement; Migwan and Gladys fell on each other's necks in silent
rapture, and Hinpoha began packing immediately. Just one week later they
boarded the train and started on their journey to Oakwood.
Sahwah sat and looked at the soldiers in the car with unconcealed envy.
Her ever-smouldering resentment against the fact that she was not a boy
had since the war kindled into red rage at the unkindness of fate. She
chafed under the restrictions with which her niche in the world hedged
her in.
"I wish I were a man!" she exclaimed impatiently. "Then I could go to
war and fight for my country and--and go over the top. The boys have all
the glory and excitement of war and the girls have nothing but the
stupid, commonplace things to do. It isn't fair!"
"But women _are_ doing glorious things in the war," Migwan interrupted
quickly. "They're going as nurses in the hospitals right at the front;
they're working in the canteens and doing lots of other things right in
the thick of the excitement."
"Oh, yes, _women_ are," replied Sahwah, "but _girls_ aren't. Long ago,
in the days before the war, I used to think if there ever _would_ be a
war the Camp Fire Girls would surely do something great and glorious,
but here we are, and the only thing we can do is knit, knit, knit, and
fold bandages, and the babies in the kindergarten are doing _that_.
We're too _young_ to do anything big and splendid. We're just
schoolgirls, and no one takes us seriously. We can't go as nurses
without three years' training--we can't do _anything_. There might as
well not _be_ any war, for all I'm doing to help it. Boys seventeen
years old can enlist, even sixteen-year-old ones, and go right to the
front, but a girl sixteen years old isn't any better off than if she
were sixteen months. I'm nearly nineteen, and I wanted to go as a
stenographer, but they wouldn't consider me for a minute. Said I was too
young." Sahwah threw out her hands in a tragic gesture and her brow
darkened.
"It's a shame," Hinpoha agreed sympathetically. "In books young girls
have no end of adventures in war time, girls no older than we; they
catch spies and outwit the enemy and save their lovers' lives and carry
important messages, but nothing like that will ever happen to us. All
we'll ever do is just stay at home peacefully and knit."
Hinpoha gave an impatient jerk and the knitting fell into her lap with a
protesting tinkle of needles, while the stitch which she was in the act
of transferring slipped off and darted merrily away on an excursion up
the length of the sock. Hinpoha threw up her hands in exasperation.
"That's the third time that's happened in an hour!" she exclaimed in a
vexed tone. "I hope the soldiers appreciate how much trouble it is to
keep their feet covered. I'd rather fight any day than knit," she
finished emphatically.
"Here, let me pick up the dropped stitches for you," said Migwan
soothingly, reaching over for the tangled mess of yarn. "You're getting
all tired and hot," she continued, skilfully pursuing the agile and
elusive dropped stitches down the grey woolen wake of the sock and
bringing them triumphantly up to resume their place in the sun.
"It takes me an age to get a pair of socks done for the Red Cross,"
Hinpoha grumbled on, "and they're as cross as two sticks if you drop a
single stitch! That woman down at headquarters made the biggest fuss
about the last pair I brought in, just because I'd slipped a stitch in
the wrong place--it hardly showed a bit--and because one sock was an
inch longer than the other. War isn't a bit like I thought it would
be," she sighed plaintively, with a vengeful poke at the knitting, which
Migwan had just restored to her.
Poor romantic Hinpoha, trying to sail her ship of rosy fancies on a sea
of stern reality, and finding it pretty hard sailing! Leaning back
against the green plush of the train seat, which set off like an
artist's background the burnished glory of her red curls, and dreaming
regretfully of the vanished days when chivalry rode on fiery steeds and
ladies fair led much more eventful lives than their emancipated
great-granddaughters, it never occurred to her--nor to the rest of the
Winnebagos either, for that matter--that romance might have become up to
date along with science and the fashions, and that in these modern days
of speed and efficiency High Adventure might purchase a ticket at the
station window and go faring forth in a Pullman car. So Hinpoha dreamed
dreams of the way she would like things to happen and built airy castles
around the Winnebagos as heroines; but little did she suspect that
another architect was also at work on those same castles, an architect
whose lines are drawn with an indelible pencil, and whose finished work
no man may reject.
Hinpoha did not resume her knitting again. She opened her hand bag and
drew forth her mirror, and propping it up against her knee, proceeded to
arrange the curls that had escaped from their imprisoning pins and were
riding around her ears. Then she put the mirror back and drew out a
bottle of hand lotion and examined the stopper. She slipped it in and
out several times and then idly dropped a few violet petals from the
bunch at her belt into the bottle, shaking it about to make them whirl,
and then holding it still to watch them settle.
"It looks as though you were telling fortunes," remarked Sahwah,
watching the petals alternately whirl and sink, "like tea leaves, you
know."
Hinpoha brightened at once and animation came back into her face. Better
than anything else under the sun, Hinpoha loved to tell fortunes.
"Do you want me to tell yours, Sahwah?" she asked eagerly.
Sahwah agreed amiably; she did not care two straws about
fortune-telling herself, but she knew Hinpoha's hobby and willingly
submitted to countless "readings" of her future, in various ways, by the
ardent amateur seeress.
Hinpoha shook the bottle energetically, and then watched intently as the
petals gradually ceased whirling and came to rest at the bottom of the
bottle.
"There is a stranger coming into your life," she began impressively,
"awfully thin, and light."
"Like the syrup we had on our pancakes in the station this morning,"
murmured Migwan.
Sahwah and Gladys giggled; Hinpoha frowned. "All right, if you're going
to laugh at me," she began.
"Go on, we'll be good," said Migwan hastily.
"Tell us some more about the light-haired stranger. Please tell us when
he is coming into her life, so we can be there to see."
"He has already come," announced Hinpoha, after thoughtfully squinting
into the bottle.
"News to me," laughed Sahwah, amused at the seriousness with which
Hinpoha delivered her revelations. "Oh, I know who it is," she
continued, giggling. "It's the brakeman. He was a Swede, with the
yellowest hair you ever saw. He was awfully skinny, too. He was very
polite, and told me everything he knew, and then went away to find out
some more."
Migwan and Gladys shouted; Hinpoha pouted and snatched up the bottle,
shaking it with offended vigor, setting the petals whirling madly and
breaking up the "cast" of Sahwah's fortune.
"There was another man, too," she announced, with a
don't-you-wish-you'd-waited air, "but I won't tell you about him now. He
was awfully queer, too; he was there twice, and once he was dark and
once he was light!"
"How do you know it was the same one?" inquired Gladys curiously.
"Because it _was_," replied Hinpoha knowingly.
"Maybe he faded," suggested Sahwah, giggling again.
"No, he didn't," replied Hinpoha mysteriously, "because he was light
_first_ and dark _afterward_!"
Hinpoha's voice rang out like an oracle, and the judicial-looking man in
the seat ahead of them turned around and surveyed the four with a smile
of amusement on his face.
"That man's laughing at us," said Sahwah, feeling terribly foolish.
"Quit telling fortunes, Hinpoha. It's all nonsense, anyhow."
"Maybe _you_ think it's nonsense," returned Hinpoha in an offended tone,
"but they do come true, lots of times. Do you remember, Gladys, the time
I told you you were going to get a letter from a distance, and you got
one from France the very next day?"
"Yes," replied Gladys, "and do you remember the time you predicted I
was going to flunk math at midyears and I took the prize?"
"And do you remember the light man that came into _your_ life, Hinpoha?"
said Sahwah slily.
Hinpoha turned fiery red at this reference to Professor Knoblock and
looked out of the window in confused silence. Sahwah realized that she
was figure-skating on thin ice when she mentioned that subject and
forebore to make any further remarks. A strained silence fell upon the
four. Migwan cast about in her mind for a topic of conversation that
would relieve the tension.
"Has anyone heard from Veronica lately?" she asked.
"I haven't heard from her for several months," replied Sahwah, "but I
suppose she's still in New York. She must be doing great things with her
music. She's given a concert already."
"It's queer about Veronica," continued Sahwah musingly. "Although she
wasn't with us so much I seem to miss her more and more as time goes on.
I often dream I hear her playing her violin." Sahwah's admiration for
Veronica had never waned, although Veronica had never had what Sahwah
described as a "real emotional case" on her.
"Veronica's an alien enemy now," said Gladys in an awed tone.
"Do you think she'll be _interred_?" asked Hinpoha anxiously.
Sahwah gave a little scream of laughter. "_In-terned,_ not _interred_,"
she corrected. "I hope Veronica isn't ready to be buried yet."
"Well, _interned_, then," answered Hinpoha, a little piqued at Sahwah's
raillery. "You don't need to call the attention of the whole car to the
fact that I made a little mistake. Did you see that officer over there
turn around and look when you laughed? He's looking yet, and he probably
heard what you said, and is laughing at me in his mind."
Sahwah involuntarily turned around and her eyes met those of the slim,
fair-haired youth in the uniform of a lieutenant of aviation, sitting
several seats beyond them on the other side of the car. For some
unaccountable reason she again felt suddenly shy and dropped her eyes,
while a little feeling of wonder stole over her at her own
embarrassment. Up until that moment, unexplained feelings had been
totally unknown in Sahwah's wholesome and vigorous young life. There had
been nothing bold or offensive about the stranger's glance, yet there
was a certain curious intentness about it that filled Sahwah with a
strange confusion, a vague stirring within her of something unfamiliar,
something unknown. Outwardly there was nothing remarkable about him,
nothing to distinguish him from the thousands of other lads in khaki
that were to be seen everywhere one went, erect, trim, lovably
conceited. Why, then, should the heart of Sahwah the Sunfish suddenly
flutter at this casual meeting of the eyes with the man across the way,
and why did she turn sharply around and look out of the window?
Then a curious thing happened. The sunlight, which was so bright it was
making the others squint and draw the curtains, suddenly seemed to
Sahwah to be darkened, while a nameless fear stole into her heart and
oppressed her with a sense of lurking danger, of hovering calamity. Only
for a minute it lasted, and then she was herself again and the sunshine
struck into her eyes with intolerable splendor.
She shook herself slightly and turned her attention to Hinpoha, who was
speaking.
"Wouldn't it be dreadful if Veronica were to be interned?" Hinpoha was
saying.
"Veronica won't be interned," said Sahwah with an air of authority.
"It's only the Germans who are being watched so carefully, and have to
register with the police, and all that. Veronica isn't a German citizen,
she's a Hungarian. She will be perfectly safe. Her uncle is an American
citizen and is very patriotic; he was on the last Liberty Loan
committee."
"I wonder how she feels about things?" said Gladys musingly. "Her father
was in the Austrian army, you remember, and died fighting, and her
mother died when their town was taken by the Russians, and Veronica just
barely escaped with her own life. Their home was burned and they lost
everything they had. Veronica would be very wealthy if it hadn't been
for the war. It would be only natural for her to feel bitter toward the
side that had brought suffering to her family."
"But that was in the early days of the war, before so many things had
happened," said Sahwah, "and before Veronica had ever seen America.
She's crazy about America. She certainly wouldn't feel bitter toward the
Americans because the Russians burned their town and killed her father,
would she?"
"Poor Veronica," said Gladys softly. "She's in a hard position and I
don't envy her. I love her dearly, even if her country _is_ our enemy."
"Shucks!" exclaimed Sahwah. "Veronica isn't to blame because her country
is at war. _She_ isn't our enemy. Anyway," she added, "I don't believe
that the Hungarians are as bad as the Germans. They aren't spies like
the Germans are. Why, lots of Hungarians are fighting right in our own
army! Probably if Veronica's father had come to America years ago he
would be doing the same thing now. Anyway, Veronica's here now, and
she's glad she _is_ here, and I don't think it's right to treat her
coldly just because she's an 'alien enemy.'"
"Maybe she's still loyal to her own country, though," said Hinpoha,
"and if the chance ever came to help Hungary's cause she'd feel in duty,
bound to do it. She has such intense feelings about things, you know.
She'd be quite willing to die for any cause she believed in."
"Shucks!" said Sahwah again. "Your romantic notions make me tired
sometimes, Hinpoha. Veronica's not going to die for Hungary's cause, and
she isn't likely to die for any other cause either, any more than we
are."
"But we'd be _willing_ to die for America's cause, wouldn't we?"
demanded Hinpoha, with rising excitement.
"We certainly would!" replied Sahwah, with a fine flash from her brown
eyes.
"Well, if we'd be perfectly willing to die for _our_ country's cause,
why wouldn't Veronica be willing to die for _hers_?" demanded Hinpoha
triumphantly.
"What I meant mostly," said Sahwah, skillfully diverting a discussion
that was becoming decidedly heated, "was that none of us are likely to
get a chance to die for our country, and neither is Veronica going to
get a chance to die for hers, or do anything else for it, even if she
were willing to. She's just a schoolgirl like ourselves and nobody would
think of asking her to do anything."
"That's the trouble," sighed Hinpoha discontentedly. "We're just girls,
and the only thing we'll ever get to do is just knit, knit, knit, and
there's no glory in that. That's the only 'bit' we'll ever be able to
do."
The other three echoed her sigh and reflected sadly upon their
circumscribed sphere, and Sahwah's dream of being another Joan of Arc
flickered out into darkness. Then she brightened again as her thoughts
took a new turn.
"Well, there's one thing we have to be thankful for," she said
feelingly. "If we can't help to make history, we won't have to learn it,
either. We're past the history part of school. But just think what the
pupils will have to learn in the years to come--and the names of all
those battles that are being fought every day now, and the
unpronounceable names of all those cities in Europe, and all the
different generals. It was hard enough to keep the Civil War generals
straight, and there were only _two_ sets of them--think of having to
remember all the American and English and French and Italian and Russian
ones, to say nothing of the German! Why, it will be such a chore to
study history that the pupils won't have time to study anything else!
People always look at little babies and say how fortunate they are; when
they grow up the war will be over and everything lovely again, but I
always think, 'Poor things, wait until they have to study history!' How
lucky we are to be living through it instead of having to learn it out
of books!"
All the while Sahwah was talking, Hinpoha had been watching with
undisguised interest a man who sat in the seat directly across the aisle
from them, who, with an artist's sketching pad on his knee, was drawing
caricatures with a thick black pencil. Hinpoha, clever artist that she
was herself, took a lively interest in anyone else who could draw, and
from the glimpses she could get of the sketches being made across the
aisle, she recognized the peculiar genius of the artist. She attracted
the attention of the other three, and they too watched in wonder and
with ever-growing interest. The artist finally looked up, saw the four
eager pairs of eyes fastened on him, and nodding in a friendly way,
handed his sketch-book across the aisle.
"Would you like to see them?" he asked genially, his eye lingering on
Hinpoha's glory-crowned head with artistic appreciation.
He himself looked like the typical artist one sees in pictures. His hair
was long and wavy and his blond beard was trimmed in Van Dyke fashion.
Hinpoha nearly burst with admiration of him, and when he became aware of
her existence and offered to show his sketches she was in a flutter of
joy.
"Oh, may we?" she exclaimed delightedly, taking the book from his hand.
"Oh, lookee!" she squealed in rapture to the other girls. "Did you ever
see anything so quaint?"
The others looked and also exclaimed in wonder and delight. There were
pictures of trains running along on legs instead of wheels, of houses
and barns whose windows and doors were cunningly arranged to form
features, of buildings that sailed through the air with wings like
birds'; of drawbridges with one end sticking up in the air while an
enormously fat man sat on the other end; of ships walking along on
stilts that reached clear to the bottom of the ocean!
"Oh, aren't they the most fascinating things you ever saw?" cried
Sahwah, enraptured.
Utterly absorbed, she did not see the lieutenant of aviation gather up
his things to leave the train at one of the way stations; was not aware
that he paused on his way out and looked at her for a long, irresolute
minute and then went hastily on.
The last page in the book of sketches had not been reached when the
train came to a stop right out in the hills, between stations.
"What's the matter?" everybody was soon asking.
Heads were popped out of windows and there was a general rush for the
platforms, as the sounds outside indicated excitement of some kind.
"Two freight trains collided on the bridge and broke it down," was the
word that passed from mouth to mouth. "The train will be delayed for
hours."
Dismayed at the long wait in store for them, the Winnebagos sat down in
their seats again, prepared to make the best of it, when the
judicial-looking gentleman who had been sitting in front of them came up
and said, "Pardon me, but I couldn't help overhearing you girls talking
about going to Oakwood. I am going to Oakwood myself--I live there--and
I know how we can get there without waiting hours and hours for this
train to go on. We are only about twenty miles from Oakwood now and
right near an interurban car line. We can go in on the electric car and
not lose much time. I will be glad to assist you in any way possible. My
name is Wing, Mr. Ira B. Wing."
"Not Agony and Oh-Pshaw's father!" exclaimed Hinpoha. "I knew they lived
in Oakwood, but----"
"The same," interrupted Mr. Wing, smiling broadly. "Are you acquainted
with my girls?"
"Are we?" returned Hinpoha. "Ask them who roomed next to them this last
year at Brownell! Do we know the Heavenly Twins! Isn't it perfectly
wonderful that you should turn out to be their father! We were having a
discussion a while ago as to whether you were a lawyer or a professor,
and Sahwah--excuse me, this is Miss Brewster, Mr. Wing, another one of
the Winnebagos, that the Twins don't know--yet--Sahwah insisted that you
were a lawyer and I insisted you were a professor, and now Sahwah was
right after all. You _are_ a lawyer, aren't you? I believe Agony said
you were."
"I am," replied Mr. Wing with a twinkle in his eye, "and I'm more than
delighted to meet you. Come along, and we'll see if we can't get to
Oakwood before dark."
Then the whimsical artist came up and addressed Mr. Wing. "Did I hear
you say you could get to Oakwood on the electric?" he inquired. "I'm
going there too. My name is Prince, Eugene Prince."
"Glad to meet you," replied Mr. Wing heartily. "Come along." He summoned
the porter to carry out the various suitcases.
Before long the little party were aboard the electric car, and reached
Oakwood almost as soon as they would have if the train had not been held
up. The electric car went by the railway station and the Winnebagos got
off, because Nyoda would be waiting for them there. Mr. Wing and the
artist went on to the center of the town.