I've Married Marjorie Part 15

If Francis knew that the little ap.r.o.ned 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 cla.s.s 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed the pails down from the shelf, and began feverishly spreading large biscuits with b.u.t.ter 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s and requested sc.r.a.ps 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 quant.i.ty 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 embarra.s.sed. "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.