There was nothing surprising or exciting to behold when the door flew
open, and the two entered.
"Oh, I've met you before," said Marjorie politely to the man who had
opened it. She had danced with him the night before, and it was
pleasant to find that she had not to deal entirely with strangers. He
was a tired-looking, middle-aged Englishman, with a tanned, plump face
that had something whimsical and what Marjorie characterized to herself
as motherly about it. And the fact that he was clad in a flannel shirt
and very disreputable overalls did not make him the less distinctively
gentle-bred. He greeted her courteously, and took out his pipe--a pipe
that was even more disreputable than his clothes.
"Mrs. Ellison wanted to come over to-night and see what she had to do,"
Francis explained.
"You mean that you were in earnest about her volunteering to take
Pierre's place?" demanded the Englishman, looking at the little smiling
figure in pink organdy.
"I know I look useless," interposed Marjorie for herself. "But Mr.
Ellison will tell you that I really can work hard. If somebody will
only show me a little about the routine I'll be all right."
"I've taken over Pierre's job for the moment," he replied. "Assuredly
I'll show you all I can. But it's rough work for a girl."
Marjorie smiled on.
"Very well, show me, please," she demanded, as she would if the
question had been one of walking over red-hot plowshares.
She stood and looked about her as he answered her, so intent that she
did not hear what he replied.
The place had rows of bunks in various stages of untidiness. It was
lighted by two very smoky kerosene lamps, and had in its middle a table
with cards on it. Three men sat about the table, as if they did not
quite know whether to come forward and be included in the conversation
or not. At the further end Marjorie could see the door that led to the
cooking-place, and eyed it with interest.
"These are all of the men who are here," Francis explained. "There is
another camp some miles further in the forest."
"Am I to cook for them as well?" demanded Marjorie coolly.
"Oh, no," the Englishman answered. He seemed deeply shocked at the
idea. "They have a cook. By the way, Mrs. Ellison, it is only poetic
justice that you should have taken over this job; for do you know that
the reason Pierre gave for his sudden flight in the direction of
marriage was that you and Mr. Ellison looked so happy he got lonesome
for a wife!"
"Good gracious!" gasped Marjorie before she remembered herself. . . .
"That is--I didn't know our happiness showed as far off as that."
She did not dare to look at Francis, whom she divined to be standing
rigidly behind her. "And now could you show me the place where I have
to cook, and the things to cook with?"
Mr. Pennington--Harmsworth-Pennington was his veritable name, as she
learned later--took the hint and swept her immediately off to the
lean-to. The _tout-ensemble_ was not terrifying. It consisted of a
kerosene stove of two burners, another one near it for emergencies, a
wooden cupboard full of heavy white dishes, and a lower part to it
where the stores were.
"The hardest thing for you will be getting up early," he said
sympathetically. "The men have to have breakfast and be out of here by
seven o'clock. And they take dinner-pails with them. Then there's
nothing to get till the evening meal."
"Of course there'd be tidying to do," suggested Marjorie avidly, for
she hated disorder, and saw a good deal about her.
"If you had the strength for it," said Pennington doubtfully.
"Francis thinks I have," she answered with a touch of wickedness.
Francis, behind her, continued to say nothing at all.
She spent five minutes more in the lean-to with the opportune
Pennington, and gathered from him, finally, that next morning there
would have to be a big pot of oatmeal cooked, and bacon enough fried
for five hungry men. Griddle cakes, flapjacks, or breadstuff of some
kind had to be produced also; coffee in a pot that looked big enough
for a hotel, with condensed milk, and a meal apiece for their
dinner-hour.
"I just give 'em anything cold that's left over," said Pennington
unsympathetically. "There has to be lots of it, that's all."
Marjorie cried out in horror.
"Oh, they mustn't have those cold! But--do they have to have all that
every morning?"
"Great Scott, no!" exclaimed the scandalized Pennington. "Some days
they just have flapjacks, and some days just bacon and eggs and bread.
And sometimes oatmeal extra. I didn't mean that all these came at
once."
She felt a bit relieved.
"I'll be in to-morrow at six," she assured him, still smiling bravely.
"I think I can manage it alone."
"One of us can always do the lifting for you, and odd chores," he told
her.
After that she met the other men, and went back to the cabin. Francis
was still following her in silence.
"How nice they are, even the grumpy ones!"
she told him radiantly. "Don't forget to knock on my door in time
to-morrow, Francis."
She gave him no time to reply. She simply went to bed. And in spite
of all that had come and gone she was so tired that she fell asleep as
soon as she was there.
She was awakened by Francis's knock at what seemed to her the middle of
the night. Then she remembered that the pines shut off the light so
that it was high daylight outside before it was in here. A vague
feeling of terror came over her before she remembered why; and for a
moment she lay still in the unfamiliar bed, trying to remember. When
she did remember she was so much more afraid that she sprang out
hurriedly, because things, for some reason, are always worse when you
aren't quite awake. Or better. But there was nothing to be better
just now.
She bathed and dressed with a dogged quickness, trying meanwhile to
reassure herself. After all, it was only cooking on a little larger
scale than she was used to. After all, it was only for a few months.
After all, she mightn't be broken down by it. And--this was the only
thing that was any real comfort--it would free her so completely of
Francis, this association with him, and the daily, hourly realization
that he had treated her in a cruel, unjust way, that when she went back
she would be glad to forget that he had ever lived; even the days when
he had been so pleasant and comforting.
If Francis knew that the little aproned figure, with flushed cheeks and
high-held head, was terrified and homesick under the pride, he said
nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond the ordinary courtesies. He offered
to help her on with her cloak. After one indignant look at him she let
him. The indignation would have puzzled him; but Marjorie's feeling
was that a man who would doom you to this sort of a life, put you to
such a test as Francis had, was adding insult to injury in helping you
on and off with wraps. He, of course, couldn't grasp all this, and
felt a little puzzled.
She walked out and over to the door of the lean-to, leaving him to
follow.
Pennington's kind and motherly face was peering anxiously out. It came
to Marjorie that she was going to have a good deal of trouble keeping
him from taking too much work off her shoulders. Some men have the
maternal instinct strongly developed, and of such, she was quite sure,
was Pennington. She wondered what he was doing so far from England,
and what she could do to pay him back for his friendliness--for she
felt instinctively that she had a friend in him.
Sure enough, he had started the big pot of water boiling for the
oatmeal, and was salting it as she entered.
"Oh, let me!" she cried, and before his doubting eyes she began to stir
the oatmeal in.
"I suppose there never was a double boiler big enough," she began
doubtfully. "It would save so much trouble."
"We might make one out of a dishpan, perhaps, swung inside this pot,"
he said.
"And I always thought Englishmen weren't resourceful!" she commented,
smiling at him. "We'll try it to-morrow."
Meanwhile, having stirred in all the oatmeal necessary, she lowered the
burners a little and began on the coffee. Then she saw the point of
the other stove, for she found she needed it for the bacon and
biscuits. The actual work was not so complicated; the thing that
appalled her was Pennington's insistence on the awful amount of food
needed for the six men and herself. But, of course, as she reminded
herself, there _was_ a difference between cooking for Cousin Anna and
herself on the maid's day out, or for Lucille and herself, and cooking
for six hungry men who worked in the open air at reforesting. She did
not quite know how people reforested, but she had a vague image in her
mind of people going along with armfuls of trees which they stuck in
holes.
Presently the breakfast was prepared, and Pennington banged briskly on
a dishpan and howled "Chow!" in a way that was most incongruous. He
really should have been a Rural Dean, by his looks and his gentle,
almost clergymanly genial manners, and every time Marjorie looked at
him in his rough clothes she got a shock because he wasn't one.
There was a long trestled table down the middle of the men's cabin, and
each man, streaming out, picked up a plate and got it filled with food,
and sat himself down in what seemed to be an appointed place. There
were mugs for coffee, and Marjorie, under Pennington's direction, set
them at all the places, and then went up and down filling them. There
was a tin of condensed milk on the table, set there by Pennington's
helpful hand.
She ran up and down, waiting on her charges, and feeling very much as
if she were conducting a Sunday-school class picnic. The men, except
Pennington and the other young Englishman, who never talked to the last
day she knew him, seemed struck into terrified silence by their new
cook.
And then a terrible thought came over her--it was rather a funny one,
though, for the excitement of doing all this new work had stirred her
up, rather than saddened her. She had never prepared any dinner-pails
for them. She fled back into the cook-place precipitately, snatched
the pails down from the shelf, and began feverishly spreading large
biscuits with butter and bacon.
"There's marmalade in the big tin back of you," said Pennington's
softly cultivated Oxford voice from the doorway. "And if you fill the
small buckets with coffee they will take them, together with the rest
of their dinners."
"But is that enough variety, just bacon and marmalade sandwiches?" she
asked.
He nodded.
"There are tinned vegetables that you can give them to-night, if you
wish."
So, he helping her, they got the last dinner-pail filled before the
hungry horde poured out again. Each passed with a sheepish or
courteous word of thanks, took his pail and went on. It did not occur
to Marjorie till she saw Pennington go, eating as he went a large
biscuit, that he must have cut his own meal very short in order to help
her.
"What nice people there are in the world!" she breathed, sinking on the
doorstep a minute to think and take breath.
She sat there longer than she really should, because the air was so
crisp and lovely, and just as she was beginning to rise and go in to
the summoning dishes, a small striped squirrel trotted across the grass
and requested scraps with impudent wavings of his two small front paws.
So she really had to stay and feed him. And after that there was a
bird that actually seemed as if it was going to walk up to her, almost
as the squirrel had done. He flew away just at the most exciting
moment, but Marjorie didn't hold it against him. And then--why, then,
she felt suddenly sleepy and lay down with her cloak swathed around
her, under a tree, for just a minute. And when she looked at her
wrist-watch it was eleven o'clock.
She felt guilty to the last degree. What would they say at the office
to a young woman who took naps in the morning?
And then the blessed memory that there was no reason why she shouldn't
do exactly as she pleased with her time, so long as the dishes were
done after awhile, came to her.
"There's no clock in the forest," she thought, smiling drowsily; and
lay serenely on the pine-needles for another half hour.
When she did go in, the quantity of dishes wasn't so terrific. There
had been no courses. Each man had left behind him an entirely empty
plate and mug and knife and fork; that was all. And Marjorie seemed to
have more energy and delight in running about and doing things than she
had ever known she possessed, in the heavy New York air. She washed
the dishes and swept out the cabin with a gay good will that surprised
herself. She tried to feel like Cinderella or Bluebeard's wife or some
of the oppressed heroines who had loomed large in her past, but it
wasn't to be done. After that she was so hungry--her own breakfast had
been taken in bites, on the run--that she ate up all the remaining
biscuits, after toasting them and making herself bacon sandwiches as
she had for the men; quite forgetting that her own abode lay near,
filled to repletion with stores of a quite superior kind. The bacon
sandwiches and warmed-over coffee tasted better than anything she had
ever eaten in her life.
And then there was a whole long afternoon ahead of her, before she had
to do a solitary thing for the men's supper!
"I must have 'faculty'!" said Marjorie to herself proudly, thinking
more highly of her own talents than she ever had before. The fact that
as a filing-clerk she had not shone had made her rather meek about her
own capacities. She had always taken it impudently for granted that
she was attractive, because the fact had been, so to speak, forced on
her. But there had been a very humble-minded feeling about her
incapacity for a business life. Miss Kaplan, for instance, she of the
exuberant emotions and shaky English, had a record for accuracy and
speed in her particular line which was unsullied by a single lapse.
And Lucille, lazy, luxury-loving Lucille, concealed behind her
fluffinesses an undoubted and remorseless executive ability. Compared
to them Marjorie had always felt herself a most useless person. That
was why she always was meeker in office hours than out of them. And to
find herself swinging this work, even for one meal, without a feeling
of incapacity and unworthiness, made her very cheered indeed. The
truth was, she was doing a thing she had a talent for.
"And I'm not tired!" she marveled. The change of air was responsible
for that, of course.
She went back to her forgotten cabin, singing beneath her breath. It
had a rather tousled air, but in her new enthusiasm she went through it
like a whirlwind. She attacked her own room first, and created
spotless order in it. Then she went at the living-room. Then--it was
with a curious reluctance--she climbed the stairs to Francis's absurd
little curtained balcony.
Francis, evidently, did not sleep so very well, or he had not that
night at all events. The couch was very tossed, one pillow lay on the
ground with a dent in its midst as if an angry hand had thrust it
there, and, most unfairly, hit it after it was down. The covers were
"every which way," as Marjorie said, picking them up and shaking them
out with housewifely care. Francis's pajamas and a shabby brown terry
bath-robe lay about the floor, the bathrobe in a ridiculously lifelike
position with both its sleeves thrown forward over the pillow, as if it
were trying to comfort it for all it had been through.
Everything had aired since morning, so she disguised the couch again in
its slip-cover, put the cretonne covers back on the pillows, and the
couch stood decorous and daytime-like again. She laid her hand on the
pillow for a moment after she was all through, as if she were touching
something she was sorry for.
"Poor Francis!" she said softly, smiling a little. "After all, he
isn't so terribly much older than I am." She felt suddenly motherly
toward him, and like being very kind. That maltreated pillow was so
funny and boylike. "It isn't a bit like the storybooks," she mused.
"In them you get all thrilled because a man is so masterful. Well,"
Marjorie tried to be truthful, even when she was alone with herself and
the couch, "I guess I was thrilled, a little, when he carried me off
that way. I certainly couldn't have gone if I'd known about the
housework business. But now, the only part of him I like is when he
_isn't_ sitting on me. . . . I wonder if I'll ever be the same person,
after all this?"
She never would. But, though she wondered, she did not really think
that she was changing or would change. As a matter of fact, she had
made more decisions, gone through more emotions, and become more of a
woman in the little time since Francis had carried her off than in all
her life before. The Marjorie of a year ago would not have answered
the challenge of her husband to prove herself an honorable woman by
taking over a long, hard, uncongenial task. She would have picked up
her skirts and fled back to New York with Logan.
"I suppose it's the war," said Marjorie uncomfortably. "Dear me, I did
think that when the war was over it would be over. And everything
seems so _real_ yet. I wonder if when I'm an old, old lady talking to
Lucille's grandchildren I shall tell them, 'Ah, yes, my dears, your
Grand-aunt Marjorie was a very different person in the days before the
war! In those days you didn't have to be in earnest about anything.
You didn't even to have any principles that showed. Life wasn't real
and earnest a bit. People just went to tea-dances and talked
flippantly, and some of the men had drinks. And everybody laughed a
great deal, and it was decadent, and the end of an era, and a lot of
shocking things--but it wasn't half as hard as living now, because
there weren't standards, except when they were had by aunts and
employers and such people. Ah, them was the days!' And the
grand-nieces, or whatever relation they'll be to me, will look shocked,
because they'll be children of their time, and it will still be
fashionable to be earnest, and they'll say, 'Dear me, what a terrible
time to have lived in!' And they'll be a little bit envious. And
they'll say, 'And were even you frivolous?' And I'll sigh, and say,
'Yes, indeed, my dears! I married a worthy young man (as young men
went then) in a thoughtless moment, and then when he came back I
wouldn't stay married to him. But by that time the war was over, and
we'd all stopped being flippant and frivolous. So I washed dishes for
him three months before I went and left him.' And they'll commend me
faintly for doing that much, and go away secretly shocked."
Marjorie was so cheered up by her own fervent imaginings by this time
that she stopped to sit down on the arm of a chair, all by herself, and
laugh out loud. And so Francis saw her, as he came in for something,
and looked up, guided by her laugh. He had scarcely heard her laugh
before for some time. She was perched birdlike on the arm of the chair
at the foot of his couch, just to be glimpsed between the draperies of
the balcony. She looked, to his eyes, like something too fragile and
lovely to be real. And she was laughing! That did not seem real,
either. She might have been pleasant, even cheerful, but this sprite,
swinging there and laughing at nothing whatever, almost frightened him.
For an awful moment he wondered if he had driven Marjorie mad. . . .
He had been unkind to her--hard on her, he knew.
Before he could stop himself he had rushed up the stairs to the little
balcony.
"Marjorie--Marjorie! What were you laughing about?" he demanded in
what seemed to her a very surprising way.
"Why, don't you want me to laugh?" she demanded in her turn, very
naturally.
"I--why--yes! But you frightened me, laughing all by yourself that
way."
"Oh, I see!" said Marjorie, looking a little embarrassed. "People
often look surprised when I forget, and do it on the street. I think
about things, and then when they seem funny to me I laugh. Don't you
ever have thoughts all by yourself that you laugh over, when you're
alone?"
Francis shook his head. He had a good mind, and a quick one, but he
did not use it as something to amuse himself with, as Marjorie did with
hers. He used it to work with.
"I beg your pardon for startling you," he said. "But----"
"I know. It looked queer. I was just thinking how different everybody
and everything is since the war. We're all so much more grown up, and
responsible. And I was hearing myself talk to Lucille's grandchildren,
and tell them all about the days before the war, when everybody said
they just didn't care. . . . Aren't things different?"
Francis nodded.
"Yes, they're different. I don't know exactly how, but they are. And
we are."
"Do you think you are?"
Francis sat down on the couch, looked at her, bright-eyed and grave,
and nodded again.
"Yes. All the values are changed. At least they are for me and most
of the men I came across. I don't think the women are so different;
you see, the American women didn't have anything much to change them,
except the ones who went over. We were in such a little while it
didn't have time to go deep."
He meant no disparagement, but Marjorie flared up.
"You mean me--and Lucille--and all the rest!" she accused him. "You're
quite wrong. That was just what I was telling Lucille's grandchildren.
We are different. Why, do you think I would have thought I owed you
anything--owed it to you to stay up here and drudge--before the war? I
never thought about being good, particularly, or honorable, or owing
things to people. Oh, I suppose I did, in a way, because I'd always
been brought up to play fair. But never with the top of my mind. You
know yourself, all anybody wanted was a good time. If anybody had told
me, when I was seventeen--I was seventeen when the war started, wasn't
I?--that I'd care more about standards than about fun, I'd have just
thought they were lying, or they didn't know. And right and wrong have
come to matter in the most curious way."
"I think perhaps," he answered her--they had quite forgotten that they
were enemies by now--"that the war was in the air. Maybe the world
felt that there wouldn't be much chance for good times for it--for our
generation--again, and snatched at it. You know, for a good many years
things won't be the same, even for us in America, who suffered less,
perhaps, than any other nation in the world. Life's harder, and it
will be."
"Oh, always?" demanded Marjorie. "You know, Francis, I always wanted
good times worse than anything in the world, but that isn't saying I
had them. I didn't. Won't I ever have any more? That few weeks when
I raced around with you and Billy and Lucille was really the first time
I'd been free and had fun with people I liked, ever since I'd been
born. And--and I suppose it went to my head a little bit."
She looked up at him like a child who has been naughty and is sorry,
and he looked over at her, his face going tense, as it did when he felt
things.
"I don't think we were exactly free agents," he said musingly.
"Something was pushing us. I'm not sorry . . . except that it was
hardly fair to you----"
She leaned toward him impulsively, holding out her hand. He bent
toward her, flushing. They were nearer than they had been since that
day when his summons to war came. And then Fate--as Mr. Logan might
have said--knocked at the door.