A SLACKER UNPERCEIVED
"I think," remarked Elliott, the next morning, "that I will walk up
and watch the haying for a while."
She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had
taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already
reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further
reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process
was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the
milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn't spend
six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as
were this household's members, and do nothing at all. That was the
disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her
feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might
as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the
actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott
was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of
indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she
told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the
pans shine.
Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way
through the kitchen. "What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every
one of them."
A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and
sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was
not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica's
praise made them doubly so.
It was then, as she hung up her towels, that she made the remark about
walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see
the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she
continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the
field could not commit her to anything.
"If you are going up," said Aunt Jessica, "perhaps you will take some
of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade."
That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott
thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one's words, she
never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for
doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance
in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.
The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business--Elliott had
expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity with activity. They
all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the
jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which
appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that
even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott's advent
would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not
been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over
her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys
swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow's
nest that the scythes had disclosed.
It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of
delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause.
Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and
wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill
little yelp, "Come on! Come on, peoples! You don't know what we've got
here," before they straggled over to what Henry called "the
refreshment booth."
Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the
boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one
called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already
accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.
And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her words with a whole battery
of dimples, all the while privately resolving that no contagion of
enthusiasm should inoculate her with the haymaking germ. There were
factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand; the sky was so blue,
the breeze was so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious, and
the mountain air had such zest in it. But, on the other hand, the sun
was hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla's tip-tilted little
nose was already liberally besprinkled. If Laura hadn't such a
wonderful skin, she would have been a sight long ago, despite the
wide brim of her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and Laura looked
like a mere husky farm girl, as she guided her horses skilfully around
the field. How strong her arms must be! But how could a girl with
Laura's intelligence and high spirit and charm enjoy putting all
this time into haying? With Priscilla, of course, matters stood
differently. Children never discriminate.
"No, I sha'n't do that kind of thing," said Elliott, firmly. But she
would investigate the haymaking game, investigate it coolly and
dispassionately, to find out exactly what it amounted to--aside, of
course, from an accumulation of dried grass in barns. To this end, she
invaded the upper meadow a good many times, during the next few days,
took a turn on the hay-rake, now and then helped load and unload,
riding down to the barn on a mound of high-piled fragrance, and came
to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking wasn't to be
compared with knocking a ball back and forth across a net. To try
one's hand at it might do well enough, now and then, to spice an
otherwise luxurious life, but as a steady diet the thing was too
unrelenting. One was driven by wind and sun; even the clouds took a
hand in cudgeling one on. A person must keep at it whether she cared
to or not--in actual practice this point never troubled Elliott, who
always stopped when she wished to--there were no spectators, and,
heaviest demerit of all, it was undeniably hard work.
But she was curious to discover what Laura found in it, and you know
Elliott Cameron well enough by this time to understand that she was
not a girl who hesitated to ask for information.
The last load had dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a
thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding
her long black braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on
the bed and watched her.
"Aren't you glad it's done?" she asked.
"The haying? Oh, yes, I'm always glad when we have it safely in. But I
love it."
"Really? It isn't work for girls."
"No? Then once a year I'll take a vacation from being a girl. But that
doesn't hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls
can do, to help win this war."
"To help win the war?" echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut
her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their
work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron
Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn't done much of
it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?
"Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this
year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?" Laura
questioned. "Just for fun, or for the money we could get out of it?"
"I hadn't thought much about it," said Elliott. She was thinking now.
Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.
"I never thought of it as war work," she said. "Stupid, wasn't I?"
Laura put the last hair-pin in place. "Just thought of it as our job,
did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work
too--well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I've never been so
thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every
one of us such a splendid chance to feel we're really counting in this
fight--the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here." Laura's
dark eyes were beginning to shine. "Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere but on
a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in
France!"
She stopped suddenly, put down the hand-mirror with which she was
surveying her back hair, and blushed. "There!" she said, "I forgot all
about the fact that you weren't born on a farm, too. But then, you can
share ours for a year, so I'm not going to apologize for a word I've
said, even if I have been bragging because I'm so lucky."
Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the
ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt
like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a
tread that isn't there. Elliott's own cheeks reddened as she thought
of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn't seemed to
notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized,
with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn't understand why her
cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain
the fact to her.
But Elliott couldn't let herself pass as an intentional slacker.
"We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting,
too, of course, but canteening was the most fun."
"That must have been fine." Laura was interested at once.
Elliott's spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. "Do you
have a canteen here?"
"Oh, no, Highboro isn't big enough. No trains stop here for more than
a minute. We're not on the direct line to any of the camps, either."
"Ours was a regular canteen," said Elliott. "They would telephone us
when soldiers were going through, and we would go down, with Mrs.
Royce or Aunt Margaret or some other chaperon, and distribute
post-cards and cigarettes and sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if
the weather was hot. It was such fun to talk to the men!"
"Ice-cream and cigarettes!" laughed Laura. "I should think they'd have
liked something nourishing."
"Oh, they got the nourishing things, if it was time. The Government
had an arrangement with a restaurant just around the corner to serve
soldiers' meals. We didn't have to do that."
"You supplied the frills."
"Yes." Somehow Elliott did not quite like the words.
Laura was quick to notice her discomfiture. "I imagine they needed the
frills and the jollying, poor lonesome boys! They're so young, many of
them, and not used to being away from home; and the life is strange,
however well they may like it."
"Yes," said Elliott. "More than one bunch told us they hadn't seen
anything to equal what we did for them this side of New York. Our
uniforms were so becoming, too; even a plain girl looked cute in those
caps. Why, Laura, you might have a uniform, mightn't you, if it's war
work?"
"What should I want of a uniform?"
"People who saw you would know what you're doing."
"They know now, if they open their eyes."
"They'd know why, I mean--that it's war work."
"Mercy! Nobody around here needs to be told why a person hoes potatoes
these days. They're all doing it."
"Do you hoe potatoes?" Elliott had no notion how comically her
consternation sat on her pretty features.
Laura laughed at the amazed face of her cousin. "Of course I do, when
potatoes need hoeing."
"But do you like it?"
"Oh, yes, in a way. Hoeing potatoes isn't half bad."
Elliott opened her lips to say that it wasn't girls' work, remembered
that she had made that remark once before, and changed to, "It is hard
work, and it isn't a bit interesting."
Then Laura asked two questions that left Elliott gasping. "Don't you
like to do anything except what is easy? Though I don't know that it
is any harder to hoe potatoes for an hour than to play tennis that
length of time. And anything is interesting, don't you think, that has
to be done?"
"Goodness, _no_!" ejaculated Elliott, when she found her voice. "I
don't think that at all! Do you, really?"
"Why, yes!" Laura laughed a trifle deprecatingly. "I'm not bluffing. I
never thought I'd care to spray potatoes, but one day it had to be
done, and Father and the boys were needed for something else. It
wasn't any harder to do than churning, and I found it rather fun to
watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated, too, how many Belgians
the potatoes in those hills would feed, either directly or by setting
wheat free, you know. I forget now how many I made it. I know I felt
quite exhilarated when I was through. Trudy helped."
"Goodness!" murmured Elliott faintly. For a minute she could find no
other words. Then she managed to remark: "Of course every one gardens
at home. They have lots at the country club, and raise potatoes and
things, and you hear them talking everywhere about bugs and blight and
cold pack. I never paid much attention. It didn't seem to be meant for
girls. The men and boys raise the things and the wives and mothers can
them. That's the way we do at home."
"Traditional," nodded Laura. "We divide on those lines here to a
certain extent, too; but we're rather Jacks of all trades on this
farm. The boys know how to can and we girls to make hay."
"The boys _can_?"
"Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What
does it matter who does a thing, so it's done?"
Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the
tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she
had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura's last remark, which had not
sounded very sensible to her--of course it mattered who did things;
why, that sometimes was all that did matter!--and reflected that,
country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a
town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work
interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on
one's clothes.
But Laura's hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott's
standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water
could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot
do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and
berries and fruits. Elliott hadn't meant to look so fixedly at Laura's
hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks
when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, "If you
prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you
have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine
into too many pies ever to have them look well."
"They're a lovely shape," said Elliott, seriously.
And then, to her amazement, Laura laughed and leaned over and hugged
her. "And you're a dear thing, even if you do think my hands are no
lady's!"
Of course Elliott protested; but as that was just what she did think,
her protestations were not very convincing.
"You can't have everything," said Laura, quite as though she didn't
mind in the least what her hands looked like. The strangest part of it
all was that Elliott believed Laura actually didn't mind.
But she didn't know how to answer her, Laura's words had raised the
dust on all those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott had had sitting
about in her mind for so long that she supposed they were her very own
opinions. Until the dust settled she couldn't tell what she thought,
whether they belonged to her or had simply been dumped on her by other
people. She couldn't remember ever having been in such a position
before.
Yes, Elliott found a good deal to think of. One had to draw the line
somewhere; she had told herself comfortably; but lines seemed to be
very queerly jumbled up in this war. If a person couldn't canteen or
help at a hostess house or do surgical dressings or any of the other
things that had always stood in her mind for girl's war work, she had
to do what she could, hadn't she? And if it wasn't necessary to be
tagged, why, it wasn't. Laura in blouse and short skirt, or even in
overalls, seemed to accomplish as much as any possible Laura in a
pantaloon suit or puttees or any other land uniform. There really
didn't seem any way out, now that Elliott understood the matter.
Perhaps she had been rather dense not to understand it before.
"What would you like me to do this morning, Uncle?" she asked the next
day at the breakfast-table. "I think it is time I went to work."
"Going to join the farmerettes?"
"Thinking of it." She could feel, without seeing, Stannard's stare of
astonishment. No one else gave signs of surprise. Stannard, thought
the girl, really hadn't as good manners as his cousins.
Uncle Bob surveyed the trim figure, arrayed in its dark smock and the
shortest of all Elliott's short skirts. If he felt other than wholly
serious he concealed the fact well.
"The corn needs hoeing, both field-corn and garden-corn. How about
joining that squad?"
"It suits me."
Corn--didn't Hoover urge people to eat corn? In helping the corn crop,
she too might feel herself feeding the Belgians.
Gertrude linked her arm in her slender cousin's as they left the
table. "I'll show you where the tools are," she said. "Harry runs the
cultivator in the field, but we use hand-hoes in the garden."
"You will have to show me more than that," said Elliott. "What does
hoeing do to corn, anyhow?"
"Keeps down the weeds that eat up the nourishment in the soil,"
recited Gertrude glibly, "and by stirring up the ground keeps in the
moisture. You like to know the reason for things, too, don't you? I'm
glad. I always do."
It wasn't half bad, with a hoe over her shoulder, in company with
other boys and girls, to swing through the dewy morning to the garden.
Priscilla had joined the squad when she heard Elliott was to be in it,
and with Stannard and Tom the three girls made a little procession. It
proved a simple enough matter to wield a hoe. Elliott watched the
others for a few minutes, and if her hills did not take on as
workmanlike an appearance as Tom's and Gertrude's, or even as
Priscilla's, they all assured her practice would mend the fault.
"You'll do it all right," Priscilla encouraged her.
"Sure thing!" said Tom. "We might have a race and see who gets his row
done first."
"No races for me, yet," said Elliott. "It would be altogether too
tame. I'd qualify for the booby prize without trying. But the rest of
you may race, if you want to."
"Just wait!" prophesied Stannard darkly. "Wait an hour or two and see
how you like hoeing."
Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand,
she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a
little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.
"Run along, little boy, to your row," she admonished him. "Can't you
see that I'm busy?"
Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed
every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the
odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she
hadn't, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a
time--it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours--she
thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was
monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed
her fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent
at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her
behind.
Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott's. "That
looks fine," she said, "for a beginner. You must stop and rest
whenever you're tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy,
not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won't let us girls work
when the sun's too hot, either."
Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would
have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first
time in her life she didn't feel quite like letting herself do what
she wished to.
What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task
as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?--a few
scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn't
matter to the Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else
whether she hoed or didn't hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that,
even of garden-patches--but not every one would say it. Some people
knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how
long this row was! Would she ever, _ever_ reach the end?
Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. "That looks nice. You
haven't got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster
after you've done 'em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the
piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip
along real quick."
Elliott leaned on her hoe. "Do you play the piano?"
"Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by. I must get back to my row."
"Do you like hoeing?" Elliott called after her.
"I like to get it done." The small figure skipped nimbly away.
"'Get it done!'" Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green
blades, pessimism in her voice. "After one row, isn't there another,
and another, and _another_, forever?" She slashed into a mat of
chickweed with venom.
"I knew you'd get tired," said Stannard, at her elbow. "Come on over
to those trees and rest a bit. Sun's getting hot here."
Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their
shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration
stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body,
turning her muscles slack. Hadn't Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn't
let them work in too hot a sun?
"You're tired; quit it!" urged Stannard.
"Not just yet," said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.
Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to
go with Stan. Then why hadn't she gone? The question puzzled the girl.
Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that
Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her
hesitate to try it now?
She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence
flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged
from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: "This war
will be won by tired men who--" She couldn't quite get the rest. An
impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words
escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired,
dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or
going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything
to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn't they? It seemed absurd;
but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren't
something in it? If all they said was true, why--and Elliott's tired
back straightened--why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be
if she didn't quit.
It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott
visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought,
of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on
the veranda, but that isn't always the way things work. Now she seemed
to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench
that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open
and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was
indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere.
It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind
of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then
the minute passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again she was aware
only of a suspicion that possibly when one was having the most fun was
not always when one was being the most useful.
"Well," said a pleasant voice, "how does the hoeing go?"
And there stood Laura with a pitcher in her hand, and on her face a
look--was it of mingled surprise and respect?
"You mustn't work too long the first day," she told Elliott. "You're
not hardened to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now and try it again
later on. I have your book under my arm."
When, that noon, they all trooped up to the house, hot and hungry,
Elliott went with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody thanked her for
anything, and she didn't even notice the lack. Farming wasn't like
canteening, where one expected thanks. As she scrubbed her hands she
noticed that her nails were hopeless, but her attention failed to
concentrate on their demoralized state. Hadn't she finished her row?
"Stuck it out, did you?" said Bruce, as they sat down at dinner. "I
bet you would."
"I shouldn't have dared look any of you in the face again, if I
hadn't," smiled Elliott. But his words rang warm in her ears.