A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 16

"'Out of the mouth of babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can't see the sky."

"Yes," said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother's shoulder. "I always know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking 'straight talk.' I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to hear only straight talk."

"I've got a surprise for you, Elsie," said Mrs. Valentin, a day and a night eastward of the Sierras. They were on the Great Plains, at that stage of an overland journey which suggests, in the words of a clever woman, the advisability of "taking a tuck in the continent."

Elsie's eyebrows seemed to portend that surprises are not always pleasant.

"I've been talking with our Eastern lady, and imagine! her daughter is one of Mrs. Barrington's girls too. This will be her second year. So there is"--

"An offset to Gladys," Elsie interrupted.

"So there is a chance for you to know one girl, at least, of the type I've always been holding up to you, always believed in, though the individuals are so rare."

Elsie's sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer.

Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of trying to realize a mother's ambitions for one's self, when one is only a girl--the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked.

Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed of--pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. She wished to conform to her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too--a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words.

"Well, mother?" she questioned.

"She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course, must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be--you will try to be responsive?"

"I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It's like wrinkling my forehead; it does itself."

Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under certain not unfamiliar conditions.

"'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.' I am leading my Pegasus to the fountain of--what was the fountain?"

Elsie laughed. "Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in vain."

"Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?--if only there were more of it."

They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some shirt-waists; for the heat had "doubled up on them," as a Kansas farmer on the train remarked.

Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.

The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering, was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation's emblems, freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to commercial account,--advertising, in symbols of death and priceless devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by your bootmaker.

Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if the avalanche strike you?

They returned to their hotel, exhausted, yet excited, by the heat; and Mrs.

Valentin admonished herself of what our boys must be suffering in that "unimaginable climate," and she entered into details, forgetting to spare Elsie, till the girl turned a sickly white.

It was then the bishop's card was sent up--their own late bishop, much mourned and deplored because he had been transferred to an Eastern diocese.

There could be no one so invariably welcome, who knew so well, without effort, how to touch the right chord, whether in earnest or in jest that sometimes hid a deeper earnest. His manner at first usually hovered between the two, your own mood determining where the emphasis should rest. He had brought with him the evening paper, but he kept it folded in his hand.

"So you are pilgrims to Mecca," he said, looking from mother to daughter with his gentle, musing smile. "But are you not a little early for the Eastern schools?"

"There are the home visits first, and the clothes," said Mrs. Valentin.

"And where do you stop, and for how long?"

"Boston, for one year, Bishop, and then we go abroad for a year, perhaps."

"Bless me! what has Elsie done that she should be banished from home for two years?"

"She takes her mother with her."

"Yes; that is half of the home. Perhaps that's as much as one girl ought to expect."

"The fathers are so busy, Bishop."

"Yes; the fathers do seem to be busy. So Elsie is going East to be finished? And how old is she now? How does she presume to account for the fact that she is taller than her mother and nearly as tall as her bishop?"

Elsie promptly placed herself at the bishop's side and "measured," glancing over her shoulder at him in the gla.s.s. He turned and gravely placed his hand upon her head.

"I thought of writing to you at one time," said Mrs. Valentin, "but of course you cannot keep us all on your mind. We are a 'back number.'"

"She thought I would have forgotten who these Valentins were," said the bishop, smiling.

"No; but you cannot keep the thread of all our troubles--the sheep of the old flock and the lambs of the new. I have had a thousand minds lately about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were young and sure about things. Don't you think young lives need room, Bishop?

Oughtn't we to seek to widen their mental horizons?"

"The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin--very suddenly sometimes, and beyond our ken." The bishop's voice had struck a deeper note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the girl choked and turned away. "This war is rather a widening business, and California is getting her share. Our boys of the First, for instance,--you see I still call them _our_ boys,--what were they doing a year ago, and what are they doing now? I'll be bound half of them a year ago didn't know how 'Philippines' was spelled."

Mrs. Valentin became restless.

"Is that the evening paper?" she asked.

The bishop glanced at the paper. "And who," said he, "is to open the gates of sunrise for our Elsie? With whom do you intend to place her in Boston?"

"Oh, with Mrs. Barrington."

Mrs. Valentin was watching the bishop, whose eyes still rested upon Elsie.

"She is to be one of the chosen five, is she? The five wise virgins--of the East? But they are all Western virgins this year, I believe."

"If you mean that they are all from the Western States, I think you are mistaken, Bishop."

"Am I? Let us see. There is Elsie, and Gladys Castant, perhaps, and the daughters of my friend Mr. Laws of West Dakota"--

"Bishop!"

"Of West Dakota; that makes four. And then the young lady who was on the train with you, Miss Bigelow, from Los Angeles."

"Bishop! I am certain you are mistaken there. If those people are not Eastern, then I'm from West Dakota myself!"

"We are all from West Dakota virtually, so far as Mecca is concerned.