FLIERS
Laura and Elliott were in the summer kitchen, filling glass jars with
raspberries. As they finished filling each jar, they capped it and
lowered it into a wash-boiler of hot water on the stove.
"It seems odd," remarked Laura, "to put up berries without sugar."
"Isn't it horrid," said Elliott, who had never put up berries at all,
but who was longing for candy and hadn't had courage to suggest buying
any. "I hope the Allies are going to appreciate all we are doing for
them."
"Do you?" Laura looked at her oddly. "I hope we are going to
appreciate all they have done for us."
"Aren't we showing it?" Elliott felt really indignant at her cousin.
"Think of the sacrifices we're making for them."
"Sacrifices?"
How stupid Laura was! "You know as well as I do how many things we are
giving up."
"Sugar, for instance?" queried Laura.
"Sugar is one thing."
"Oh, well," said Laura, "I'd rather a little Belgian had my extra
pounds, poor scrap! Of course, now and then I get hungry for it,
though Mother gives us all the maple we want, but when I do get
hungry, I think about the Belgians and the people of northern France
who have lost their homes, and of all those children over there who
haven't enough to eat to make them want to play; and I think about the
British fleet and what it has kept us from for four years; and about
the thousands of girls who have given their youth and prettiness to
making munitions. I think about things like that and then I say to
myself, 'My goodness, what is a little sugar, more or less!' Why,
Elliott, we don't begin to feel the war over here, not as they feel
it!"
Elliott, who considered that she felt the war a good deal, demurred.
"I have lost my home," she said, feeling a little ashamed of the words
as she said them.
"But it is there," objected Laura. "Your home is all ready to go back
to, isn't it? That's my point."
"And there's Father," said Elliott.
"I know, and my brothers. But I don't feel that _I_ have done anything
in their being in the army. It is doing them lots of good: every
letter shows that. And, anyway, I'd be ashamed if they didn't go."
"Something might happen," said Elliott. "What would you say then?"
"The same, I hope. But what I mean is, the war doesn't really touch us
in the routine of our every-day living. _We_ don't have to darken our
windows at night and take, every now and then, to the cellars. The
machinery of our lives isn't thrown out of gear. We don't live hand in
hand with danger. But lots of us think we're killed if we have to use
our brains a little, if we're asked to substitute for wheat flour, and
can't have thick frosting on our cake and eat meat three times a day.
Oh, I've heard 'em talk! Why, our life over here isn't really
topsyturvy a bit!"
"Isn't it?" There were things, Elliott thought, that Laura, wise as
she was, didn't know.
"We're inconvenienced," said Laura, "but not hurt."
Elliott was silent. She was trying to decide whether or not she was
hurt. Inconvenienced seemed rather a slim verb for what had happened
to her. But she didn't go on to say what she had meant to say about
candy, and she felt in her secret soul the least bit irritated at
Laura.
Then Priscilla whirled in on her tiptoes, her hands behind her back.
"The postman went right straight by, though I hung out the window and
called and called. I guess he didn't hear me, he's awful deaf
sometimes."
"Didn't I get a letter?" Elliott's face fell.
"Mail is slow getting through, these days," said Aunt Jessica, coming
in from the main kitchen. "We always allow an extra day or two on the
road. Wasn't there anything at all from Bob or Sidney or Pete, Pris?
You little witch, you certainly are hiding something behind your
back."
Then Priscilla gave a gay little squeal and jumped up and down till
her black curls bobbed all over her face. When she stopped jumping she
looked straight at Elliott.
"Which hand will you take?" she asked.
"I? Oh, have you a letter for me, after all?"
"You didn't guess it," said the child. "Which hand?"
"The right--no, the left."
Priscilla shook her head. "You aren't a very good guesser, are you?
But I'll give it to you this time. It's not fat, but it looks nice. He
didn't even get out, that postman didn't; he just tucked the letter in
the box as he rode along."
"Certain sure he didn't tuck any other letter in too, Pris?" queried
Laura.
The child held out empty hands.
"That's no proof. Your eyes are too bright." Laura turned her around
gently. "Oh, I thought so! Stuck in your dress. From Bob!"
"Two," squealed Priscilla, with an emphatic little hop. "Here, give
'em to Mother. They're 'dressed to her. Now let's get into 'em, quick.
Shall I ring the bell, Mother, to call in Father and the rest? Two
letters from Bob is a great big emergency; don't you think so?"
The words filtered negligently through Elliott's inattention. All her
conscious thoughts were centered on her father's handwriting. She had
had a cable before, but this was his first letter. It almost made her
cry to see the familiar script and know that she could get nothing but
letters from him for a whole long year. No hugs, no kisses, no
rumpling of her hair or his, no confidential little talks--no anything
that had been her meat and drink for years. How did people endure such
separations? A big lump came up in her throat and the tears pricked
her eyes; but she swallowed very hard and blinked once or twice and
vowed, "I won't cry, I _won't_!"
And then suddenly, through her preoccupation, she became aware of a
hush fallen on the bubbling expectancy of the room. Glancing up from
the page, she saw Henry standing in the doorway. Even to unfamiliar
eyes there was something strangely arresting in the boy's look, a
shocked gravity that cut like a premonition.
"They say Ted Gordon's been killed," he said.
"Ted--Gordon!" cried Laura.
"Practice flight, at camp. Nobody knows any particulars. Cy Jones told
Father." The boy's voice sounded dry and hard.
"Are they certain there is no mistake?" his mother asked quietly.
"I guess it's true. Cy said the Gordons had a telegram."
"I must go over at once." Mrs. Cameron rose, putting the letters into
Laura's hands, and took off her apron.
"I'll bring the car around for you," said Henry.
"Thank you." She smiled at him and turned to the girls. "You know what
we are having for dinner, Laura. Priscilla will help make the
shortcake, I'm sure. I will be back as soon as I can."
Mutely the four watched the little car roll out of the yard and down
the hill.
Then Henry spoke. "Letters?"
"From Bob," said Laura.
"Did she read 'em?"
Laura shook her head.
"Gee!" said the boy.
"Perhaps she thought she couldn't," hesitated Laura, "and go over
there."
A moment of silence held the room. Henry broke it. "Well, we're not
going. Let's hear 'em."
Elliott took a step toward the door.
"Needn't run away unless you want to," he called after her. "We always
read Bob's letters aloud."
So Elliott stayed. Laura's pleasant voice, a bit strained at first,
grew steadier as the reading proceeded. Henry sat whittling a stick
into the coal-hod, his lips pursed as though for a whistle, but
without sound, and still with that odd sober look on his face.
Priscilla, all the jumpiness gone out of her, stood very still in the
middle of the kitchen floor, a kind of hurt bewilderment in the big
dark eyes fixed on Laura's face. Nobody laughed, nobody even chuckled,
and yet it was a jolly letter that they read first, full of spirit and
life and fun. High-hearted adventure rollicked through it, and the
humor that makes light of hardship, and the latest slang of the front
adorned its pages with grotesquely picturesque phrases. The Cameron
boys were obviously getting a good time out of the war. Bob had got
something else, too. The letter had been delayed in transmission and
near the end was a sentence, "Brought down my first Hun to-day--great
fight! I'll tell you about it next time if after due deliberation I
decide the censor will let me."
"Some letter!" commented Henry. "Say, those aviators are living like
princes, aren't they! Mess hall in a big grove with all the fixings.
And eats! More than we get at home. Gee, I wish I was older!"
"So you could come in for the eats?" smiled his sister.
"So I could come in for things generally."
"You couldn't work any harder if you were a man grown," she told him.
"Huh!" said Henry, "a lot I hurt myself!" But he liked the smile and
the praise, wary though he might pretend to be of it. Sis was a good
sort. "You're some worker, yourself. Let's get on to the next one."
The second letter--and it too bore a date disquietingly far from the
present--told of the fight. It thrilled the four in the pleasant New
England kitchen. The peaceful walls opened wide, and they were out in
far spaces, patrolling the windy sky, mounting, diving, dodging
through wisps of cloud, kings of the air, hunting for combat. Their
eyes shone and their breathing quickened, and for a minute they forgot
the boy who was dead.
"Why the Hun didn't bag me, instead of my getting him," wrote Bob, "is
a mystery. Just the luck of beginners, I guess. I did most of the
things I shouldn't have done, and, by chance, one or two of the things
I should--fired when I was too far off, went into a spinning nose-dive
under the mistaken notion it would make me a poor target, etc., etc.,
etc. Oh, I was green, all right! He knew how to manoeuver, that Hun
did. That's what feazes me. How did I manage to top him at last? Well,
I did. And my gun didn't jam. Nuff said."
"Gee!" said Henry between his teeth. "And Ted Gordon had to go and
miss all that! Gee!"
"If he had only got to the front!" sighed Laura.
"Anything from Pete?" asked the boy.
"No."
"Sid?"
She shook her head. "We had a letter from Sid day before yesterday,
you know."
"Sid lays 'em down pretty thick sometimes. Well, I must be getting on.
This isn't weeding cabbages."
The three girls, left alone, reacted each in her own way to the touch
of the dark wings that had so suddenly brushed the rim of their blithe
young lives. Priscilla frankly didn't understand, but her sensitive
spirit felt the chill of the event, and her big eyes gazed with a
tinge of wonder at the blue sky and sunshine of the world outside.
"Seems sort of queer it's so bright," she remarked.
Laura was busy, as were thousands of sisters at that very minute and
every minute all over the land, scotching the fears that are always
lying in wait, ready to lift their ugly heads. Queer the letters had
come through so tardily! Where was Bob, her darling big brother, this
minute? Where was Pete Fearing, hardly less dear than Bob? Pictures
clicked through her brain, pictures built on newspaper prints that she
had seen. But one died twice that way, she reflected, and it did no
good. So she put the letters on the shelf beside the clock and brought
out the potatoes for dinner.
"Ted Gordon was in the Yale Battery last summer," she remarked. "He
came up from camp to get his degree this year. Mrs. Gordon and Harriet
went down. He was Scroll and Key."
In Elliott's brain Laura's words made a swift connection. Before that,
Ted Gordon had meant nothing to her, the name of a boy whom she had
never seen, a country lad, whose death, while sudden and sad, could
not touch her. Now, suddenly, he clicked into place in her own
familiar world. A Scroll-and-Key man? Why, those were the men she
knew--Bones, Scroll and Key, Hasty Pudding--he was one of them!
She felt a swift recoil. So that was what war came to. Not just natty
figures in khaki that girls cried over in saying good-by to, or smiled
at and told how perfectly splendid they were to go; not just high
adventure and martial music and the rhythm of swinging brown
shoulders; not just surgical dressings and socks and sweaters; not
even just homes broken up for a time and fathers sailing overseas. Of
course one understood with one's brain, that made part of the thrill
of their going, but one didn't realize with the feeling part of
one--how could a girl?--when they went away or when one made
dressings. Yet didn't dressings more than anything else point to it?
And Laura had said we didn't feel the war over here!
A sense of something intolerable, not to be borne, overwhelmed
Elliott. She pushed at it with both hands, as though by the physical
gesture she could shove away the sudden darkness that had blotted with
alien shadow the face of her familiar sun. Death! There was an
unbearable unpleasantness about death. She had always felt ill at ease
in its presence, in the very mention of its name; she had avoided
every sign and symbol of it as she would a plague. And now, she
foresaw for an instant of blinding clarity, perhaps it could not be
avoided any longer. Was this young aviator's accident just a symbol of
the way death was going to invade all the happy sheltered places? The
thought turned the girl sick for a minute. How could Laura go on with
her work so unfeelingly? And there was Priscilla getting out
raspberries.
"I don't see," said Elliott, and her voice choked, "I don't see how
you can _bear_ to peel those potatoes!"
"Some one has to peel them," said Laura. "The family must have dinner,
you know. We couldn't work without eating. Besides, I think it helps
to work."
Elliott brushed the last sentence aside. It fell outside her
experience, and she didn't understand it. The only thing she did
understand was the reiteration of work, work, and the pall of
blackness that overshadowed her hitherto bright world. She wished
again with all her heart that she had never come to Vermont. She
didn't belong here; why couldn't she have stayed where she did belong,
where people understood her, and she them?
A great wave of homesickness swept over the girl, homesickness for the
world as she had always known it, her world as it had been before the
war warped and twisted and spoiled things. And yet, oddly enough,
there was no sense in the Cameron house of anything being spoiled.
They talked of Ted Gordon in the same unbated tone of voice in which
they spoke of her cousin Bob or of his friend Pete Fearing, and they
actually laughed when they told stories about him. Laura baked and
brewed, and the results disappeared down the road in the direction
Mother Jess had taken. Aunt Jessica herself returned, a trifle pale
and tired-looking, but smiling as usual.
"Lucinda and Harriet are just as brave as you would expect them to
be," Elliott heard her tell Father Bob. "No one knows yet how it
happened. They hope to learn more from Ted's friends. Two of the
aviators are coming up. Harriet told me they rather look for them
to-morrow night."
Hastily Elliott betook herself out of hearing. She wanted to get
beyond sight and sound of any reference to what had happened. It was
the only way known to her to escape the disagreeable--to turn her back
on it and run away. What she didn't see and think about, so far as she
was concerned, wasn't there. Hitherto the method had worked very well.
What disquieted her now was a dull, persistent fear that it wasn't
going to work much longer.
So when Bruce remarked the next day, "I'm going to take part of the
afternoon off and go for ferns; want to come?" she answered promptly,
"Yes, indeed," though privately she thought him crazy. Ferns, on a
perfectly good working-day? But when they were fairly started, she
found she hadn't escaped, after all. Instead, she had run right into
the thing, so to speak.
"We want to make the church look pretty," Bruce said, as they tramped
along. "And I happen to know where some beauties grow, maidenhair and
the rarer sorts. It isn't everybody I'd dare to take along."
"Is that so?" queried the girl. She wondered why.
"Things have a way of disappearing in the woods, unless they're treated
right. Took a fellow with me once when I went for pink-and-white
lady's-slippers, the big ones--they're beauties. He was crazy to go, and
he promised to keep the place to himself. You could have picked bushels
there then. Now they're all cleaned out."
"But why? Did people dig them up?"
"Picked'em too close. Some things won't stand being cleaned up the way
most people clean up flowers in the woods. They're free, and nobody's
responsible."
In spite of her thoughts Elliott dimpled. "I think it is quite safe to
take me."
He grinned. "Maybe that's why I do it."
It was very pleasant, tramping along with Bruce in the bright day;
pleasant, too, leaving the sunshine for the spicy coolness of the
woods, and climbing up, up, among great tree-trunks and mossy rocks
and trickling mountain brooks. Or it would have been pleasant, if
one could only have forgotten the reason that underlay their
journey. But when they had reached Bruce's secret spot and were
cutting the wiry brown stems, and packing together carefully the
spreading, many-fingered fronds so as not to break the delicate
ferns, that undercurrent of numb consternation reasserted itself. Like
Priscilla, Elliott felt a little shocked at the brightness of the
sunshine, the blueness of the sky, and the beauty of the fern-filled
glade.
"It was dreadful for him to be killed before he had done anything!" At
last the words so long burning in her heart reached the tip of her
tongue.
"Yes." Bruce's voice was sober. "It sure was hard."
[Illustration: Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.]
"I should think his people would feel as though they couldn't _stand_
it!" Elliott declared. "If he had got to France--but now it is just a
hideous, hideous waste!"
Bruce hesitated. "I suppose that is one way of looking at it."
"Why, what other way could there be?" She stared at him in surprise.
"He was just learning to fly. He hadn't done anything, had he?"
"No, he hadn't done anything. But what he died for is just the same as
though he had got across, isn't it, and had downed forty Huns?"
She continued to stare fixedly at the boy for a full minute. "Why,
yes," she said at last, very slowly; "yes, I suppose it is." Curiously
enough, the whole thing looked better from that angle.
For a long time she was silent, cutting and tying up ferns.
"How did you happen to think of that?"
"To think of what?" Bruce was tying his own ferns.
"What you said about--about _what_ this Ted Gordon died for."
It was Bruce's turn to look surprised. "I didn't think of anything.
It's just a fact, isn't it?"
Then he began to load himself with ferns. Elliott wouldn't have
supposed any one could carry as many as Bruce shouldered; he had great
bunches in his hands, too.
"You look like a walking fernery," she said.
"Birnam Wood," he quoted and for a minute she couldn't think what he
meant. "Better let me take some of those on the ground," he said.
"No, indeed! I am going to do my share."
Quietly he possessed himself of two of her bunches. "That's your
share. It will be heavy enough before we get home."
It was heavy, though not for worlds would Elliott have mentioned the
fact. She helped Bruce put the ferns in water, and she went out at
night and sprinkled them to keep them fresh; but she had an excuse
ready when Laura asked if she would like to go over to the little
white-spired church on the hill and help arrange them.
Nothing would have induced her to attend the services, either, though
afterward she wished that she had. There seemed to have been something
so high and fine and--yes--so cheerful about them, so martial and
exalted, that she wished she had seen for herself what they were like.
In Elliott's mind gloom had always been inseparably linked with a
funeral, gloom and black clothes. Whereas Laura and her mother and
Gertrude and Priscilla wore white. A good many things at the Cameron
farm were very odd.
It was after every one had gone to bed and the lights were out that
Elliott lay awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and worried and
worried about Father, three thousand miles away. He wasn't an aviator,
it was true, but in France wasn't the land almost as unsafe as the
air? She had imagined so many things that might perfectly easily
happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by
herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was
homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first
night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things--about the new
kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do
when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and
wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's fingers, but in
the end she spoke out the thing that was uppermost in her mind.
"Mother Jess," she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; "Mother
Jess, I don't like death."
She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because she felt very strongly
and she wasn't used to talking about such things. But she had to say
it. Though if the room hadn't been dark, I doubt if she could have got
it out at all.
"No, dear," said Aunt Jessica, quietly. "Most of us don't like death.
I wonder if your feeling isn't due to the fact that you think of it as
an end?"
"What is it," asked Elliott, "but an end?" She was so astonished that
her words sounded almost brusque.
"I like to think of it as a coming alive," said Aunt Jessica, "a
coming alive more vigorously than ever. The world is beginning to
think of it so, too."
Elliott lay still after Aunt Jessica had gone out of the room and
tried to think about what she had said. It was quite the oddest thing
that anybody had said yet. But all she really succeeded in thinking
about was the quiet certainty in Aunt Jessica's voice, the comforting
clasp of Aunt Jessica's arms, and the kiss still warm on her lips.