Half Portions Part 18

"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin'

bullets."

There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their young heads sticking out of the car windows in cl.u.s.ters--black, yellow, brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:

"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--"

They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, shouting.

Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable forms of cake.

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make Hatton's place look sick."

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among themselves and a.s.sured one another, with a toss of the head, that they could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around.

Well, I should say not!

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."

Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a pa.s.ser-by they giggled and shrieked and ran.

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.

Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator.

They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in the East. These letters were not from him.

Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, veiled, ap.r.o.ned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled and folded them was pure cerulean.

Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin'

bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Sat.u.r.day night and finishing it in time for a Sunday picnic, b.u.t.tonholes and all. Their help might have been invaluable. It never was asked.

Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care.

"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to be home, Chuck? Gee!"

"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind of--" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again: "Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and acres of yard like a park, and a j.a.p help always bringin' you something to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are sc.r.a.pin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something.

Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming to his subject, so that he failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--"it's a joke compared to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint."

Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything.

You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd probably be tickled to see you."

He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near busted out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in.

And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day--"

"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't a fool." She was perilously near to tears.

"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--a guy's got to--he's got no right to--"

And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army.

It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York!

It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could not have put it into words.

They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression indicative of extreme disgust.

"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully.

"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and iron and so forth."

"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse and drifted down the lovely Fox River.

"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."

"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do it."

Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there!

Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle."

She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that.

I never did before."

Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."

"Have you, Chuck?"

They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are wonders!"

"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about something else?"

He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.

"About--you." Tessie made it a caress.

"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and marchin' and readin' some--Oh, say, what d'you think?"

"What?"

"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the darnedest language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a piece of bread, you say like this: _Donnay ma un morso doo pang_. See?"

"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration.

And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my G.o.d! Oh, my G.o.d! He knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I don't know anything. Oh, G.o.d, what'll I do?"

It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he--he'd be a different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, French, girls, swell folks--

And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box."

"Chocolate cake."

"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this morning."

"Yes, you did!"