SEVERAL MONTHS LATER
FRIEDA read a letter she had just received and laughed.
Laughter was not frequent at Kent House those days, so that Jack and
Olive looked up from the work they were doing. Olive was rolling
bandages and Jack was writing notes at her desk. The three of them were
in Jack's private sitting room where, only a few moments before, the
afternoon mail bag had been brought in.
"What is it, Frieda?" Jack asked, turning her head to glance over her
shoulder in some surprise at her sister. She wondered if Frieda realized
that she was fully aware of the way in which she had been watching the
mail for these past few months. For Frieda had watched in vain for the
particular letter which certainly she seemed to expect; even if she did
not greatly desire it.
"Oh, I have just received a note from a young soldier to whom I sent
the first pair of socks I ever made," she returned. "He may not have
originated the poem, but it is almost worth the trouble and the time
I took on the socks. Do listen:"
"Thanks, dear lady, for the socks you knit;
Some socks, some fit.
I used one for a hammock and the other for a mitt.
I hope I meet you when I've done my bit,
But where in the h... did you learn to knit?"
Then Frieda dropped the letter to wave another long grey sock, shot
through with shining knitting needles. It was somewhat narrow in the
ankle and bulged strangely at the heel.
"I wonder if I am improving?" she inquired anxiously. The utilitarian
nature of Frieda's occupation contrasted curiously with the general
fluffiness of her appearance. For no amount of inward anguish could ever
keep Frieda from the desire to wear pretty clothes and to make herself
as attractive as possible. However, no one had any right to say she was
unhappy, except as every one else was, through sympathy with the added
troubles which the war had lately brought upon the world.
Like most of the other women in the larger part of Europe and also in
the United States, Jack and Olive were devoting all their energies to
the work of the war. They had both taken short courses in Red Cross
nursing and had organized clubs and classes in the neighborhood for
every kind of relief work, while Frank had turned over several of his
houses to the Belgian refugees.
Therefore, only Frieda remained more or less on the outside of things.
She had undertaken to learn to knit for the soldiers, but insisted that
since her name meant peace and was a German name as well, she would do
nothing more. The truth was she seemed not to wish to go out or mix with
society a great deal, which was odd, as one of the reasons she had given
for her unhappiness in her own home was that her husband wished to spend
too much time there, so that she had become bored.
However, Frieda had agreed to visit the poor people on the estate and in
the neighboring village, in order to relieve Jack from this one of her
many duties.
Moreover, she enjoyed the odd types of old men and women, so unlike any
other people whom she had ever before known, and she became a great
favorite with them. Instead of giving her money for war purposes Frieda
preferred bestowing it on these same queer old persons and the children
who had been left behind.
This afternoon, after she had finished reading the second of her two
letters, the latter from Jean in Wyoming, Frieda got up from her chair.
"Jimmie and I are going to drive down to the village to see old Dame
Quick," she announced, "I promised to read to her this afternoon." 'Dame
Quick' was the title Frieda had borrowed to give to the oldest woman in
Granchester, because she was so extraordinarily lively.
"What will you do with Jimmie while you read? He will never keep still,"
Jack called, as Frieda moved toward the door.
Frieda paused. "Oh, he and nurse will return back in the governess cart.
I want to walk home. Don't worry if I am a little late," and before
Olive or Jack would speak, she had disappeared.
"I hope Frieda won't be too long. She does not know this country as I
do," Jack murmured afterwards, but not thinking of the matter seriously.
Frieda and Jimmie had a way of jogging in the little governess cart on
many afternoons, sometimes taking the nurse with them and more often
not. Jimmie was rather a troublesome small boy of an age when he was
into every kind of mischief, and Frieda was not fond of children.
Therefore, her family had wondered why she appeared to desire so much of
Jimmie's companionship. Frieda might have answered that he asked so many
questions that she did not have time to think of other things; however,
she had never said this, even to herself.
The governess cart was a little wicker carriage swung low on two wheels,
with an ancient, shaggy pony, who never moved out of a slow trot.
That afternoon, like all the great ladies in the English novels, Frieda
stored away under the seat of her cart as much jelly and jam as her
sister's housekeeper would allow her. At the nearest grocery shop she
bought a package of tea, some tins of biscuits and a half pound of
tobacco. For the truth was that Frieda's old woman liked a quiet smoke.
This habit was not common among the villagers, but Dame Quick whose real
name was "Huggins" was so very old that she allowed herself certain
privileges.
It was a dismal late fall afternoon, but English people and
particularly English children do not stay indoors because of bad
weather.
Frieda wore a blue rain proof coat and a soft hat which she pulled down
over her yellow hair, to keep the soft mist out of her eyes as well as
she could. Jimmie and his nurse were also enveloped in mackintoshes.
But the rain was not actually falling. There was only a November haze
and a pervading dampness, making Jimmie's cheeks redder than ever and
bringing more color than was usual to Frieda's face.
On the way to the village Jimmie and his aunt, whom he regarded as of
his own age, sang "America" in not a particularly musical fashion, but
with a great deal of earnest effort, since Frieda was trying to teach
the British Jimmie to be more of an American.
Jimmie, of course, wished to go into Mrs. Huggins' cottage with his
aunt, but on that point Frieda was resolute. She had a fancy for seeing
her old friend alone this afternoon. Actually she had a reason which had
been developing in her mind for the past twenty-four hours, although
Frieda herself considered her reason nonsensical.
In answer to her knock the old woman came to the door. She looked like
one of the pictures one remembers in the Mother Goose books, and also
like one of them, "she lived alone, all in her little house of stone."
Dame Quick's cottage of two rooms was set in the middle of a long row of
little stone houses, in one of the half a dozen streets in Granchester.
Frieda always felt a shiver as she went inside, since the floor was of
stone and there was a dampness about the little house as if it had never
been thoroughly warmed inside by the sun.
Yet Mrs. Huggins had managed to live there in contentment for about
seventy years. She had come there as a bride before she was twenty and
was now "ninety or thereabouts," as she described herself.
When Frieda entered she bobbed up and down as quickly as an old brown
cork on a running stream.
"Sure, I've been waitin' and longin' for the sight of you these two
hours," she said, taking Frieda's packages, or as many as she could get
hold of, as if she thought them too burdensome for the young woman to
carry.
Frieda laughed and slipped out of her rain coat, which she hung
carefully on a small wooden chair. Then she also laid her hat on the
chair and, as a matter of habit, fluffed up her pretty hair which the
rain and her hat had flattened, and then followed her old hostess.
"You know you have had half a dozen visitors during the two hours you
say you have been waiting, Mrs. Huggins," Frieda returned. For it was
true that the tiny house and the old woman were the center of all the
gossip in the village. "I expect you to tell me a lot of news."
The old woman nodded.
"It is true these are news days in England and elsewhere. Times were,
when the days might be dull without a birth or a death, or a mating. But
now one wakes up to something stirrin' every day--a lad goin' off to the
war, or maybe one gettin' killed; and the girls coomin' in to tell me
their troubles; some of them just married, and some of them not married
at all yet. But all of them worryin' their hearts out. Sure, and if war
is goin' on forever--and it looks like it is--I'm for the women goin'
into battle along with their men."
While she was talking Frieda had followed her hostess back into her
kitchen--the room in which she really lived and had her being. It was
also of stone, but the floor had a number of bright rag rugs as covering
and the walls were lined with pictures cut from papers and magazines,
and with picture postcards. One could have gotten a pretty fair
knowledge of English history at the moment by studying Mrs. Huggins'
picture gallery. She had on her walls a photograph of nearly every
British officer then in command of the army or navy. She had replicas of
innumerable battleships and also of statesmen. But in the place of honor
over a shelf that held her Bible and a tiny daguerreotype of the late,
lamented Mr. Huggins, hung a picture of England's big little man--Lloyd
George. The aged woman received the old age pension which Lloyd George
had given to the poor of England a few years before the outbreak of the
present war.
Frieda sat down on a little chair which lovers of antiques would have
given much to possess. There was a small fire burning in the tiny stove,
and its red coals looked more cheerful than the great log fire at Kent
House.
Frieda knew that Dame Quick would wish to prepare the tea herself.
She had rather a happy feeling as she watched Mrs. Huggins, as if she
had been a little girl who had gone out one day and grown suddenly tired
and forlorn, and then been unexpectedly invited into the very
gingerbread house itself. But a gingerbread house presided over by a
good spirit, not an evil one.
Her own little Dame Quick looked like a child's idea of an ancient good
fairy. She may not have been so small to begin with, but at ninety she
was bent over until she seemed very tiny indeed. Her face was brown and
wrinkled and her eyes shone forth as black as elderberries in the late
gathering time.
She placed a small wooden table in front of Frieda and not far from the
fire and her own chair. Then she got out some heavy plates and two cups
and saucers. And whatever the difference in elegance, tea is never so
good served in a thin cup as in a thick one. Afterwards she opened the
package containing Frieda's biscuits and jam and finally poured boiling
water into her own brown stone tea kettle.
Then she and Frieda, sitting on opposite sides of the tea table, talked
and talked.
Several times, as she sat there, Frieda thought that if she had been an
English girl she would like to have had just such an old nurse or foster
mother as Mrs. Huggins. For she might then have been able to confide a
number of things to her--matters she could not talk about even to her
sister, since she was not clear enough how she felt concerning them
herself, and so Jack might get wrong impressions.
"But you have not told me any special news this afternoon," Frieda
protested, having lifted her cup for a second helping of tea, and making
up her mind that she could not think of herself while visiting, as she
usually did at home. "My sister and brother always expect me to know
something interesting after a visit to you."
Dame Quick poured the tea carefully.
"I don't care for gossip," she returned, "yet it seems as if they like
it as much in big houses as in little." Her eyes snapped, so that Frieda
found herself watching them, fascinated.
"Since you came in I've been wonderin' whether certain information
should be sent to Lord and Lady Kent. I don't think much of it myself,
as there has been such a steady stream of spy talk these months past.
But they are tellin' in Granchester that there is a man there who has
taken a house a short distance from the village, on the road to Kent
House. It seems he keeps to himself too much to please the village. He
says he has been ill, and I'm sure has a right to a mite of peace if he
wants it. It's only the village that's talking. Those higher up must
know things are what they should be, since they don't bother him."
Frieda was scarcely listening. Mrs. Huggins' news was often
uninteresting in itself. It was only that she so much enjoyed repeating
it.
She had already finished her second cup of tea and was looking down at
the collection of tea leaves in the bottom of her cup.
"Suppose you tell my fortune," she suggested rather shyly. For some time
past she had been thinking of just this. "Didn't you say you sometimes
told the fortunes of the boys and girls in Granchester, and that a great
many things you predict come true?"
The old country woman looked at Frieda sharply.
"I tell the fortunes, child, of boys and girls whose grandfathers and
grandmothers I once knew. That isn't difficult fortune telling. I know
certain tricks in the faces, I remember what their own people thought
and did long before their day. Like father, like son; or maybe like
mother, like son; and like father, like daughter. But you--" The old
woman shook her head. "I know nothing about you, child; or your country,
or your people, or what you have made of life for yourself with that
pretty face of yours."
Still Frieda held out her tea cup.
"Oh, well; just let the tea leaves show you a little," she pleaded, in
the spoiled fashion by which Frieda usually accomplished her purpose.
Still the old peasant continued to look, not at the tea leaves but at
her young companion. Perhaps she saw something with her fine, tired old
eyes, that were too dim to read print, which even Frieda's own family
did not see.
"You have had too many of the things you wish without ever having to
work for them, or to wait, little lady," she repeated slowly. Then she
glanced down into the extended tea cup. "I think I see that you will
have to lose something before you find out that you care for it. I also
see a long journey, some clouds and at last a rainbow."
Frieda put down her cup and laughed a little uncertainly.
"Oh, the Rainbow Ranch is the name of my own home. I wonder if I have
ever told you that?" she inquired. "But you are mistaken if you think I
have had the things I wish." For, of course, Frieda did not believe she
had been a fortunate person. So few people ever do believe this of
themselves, until misfortune makes them learn through contrast.
Later, she read a chapter in the Bible and the war news from one of the
morning papers. Then, before six o'clock, she started to return to Kent
House.
Frieda walked quickly as the distance was not short. Moreover, she had
never entirely recovered from the fright of her unexpected encounter
with her husband several months before. Yet, since then, she had not
only never seen him again, but never heard anything about him, except
the scant information of his departure to France, which she had acquired
through Frank Kent.
Frieda did think--no matter what the difference between them--that her
husband might have let her know that he was at least alive and well. Of
course she was a selfish, cold-hearted person, as her family and
undoubtedly her own husband believed her to be. However, one could be
interested in the welfare of even a comparative stranger in war times.
Later, after Frieda left the village, she passed by the little house
which her old friend had tried to involve in a mystery in order to
supply her with gossip. The house was set in a yard by itself. The
lights were lighted and the curtains drawn down, but, as she hurried by,
either a woman's or a man's figure made a dark shadow upon the closed
blind.