Short Stories of the New America Part 2

Mr. Pennypacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious, rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and his letter-files. But the eyes were different-anxious, troubled.

"It makes me sick," she repeated, "to see a great big nation picking on a little one that was only keeping its promise."

Her employer cast about for a conceivable reason for the aberration.

"Any of your folks come here from there?" he ventured.

"Gracious, _no!_" cried Ellen, almost as much shocked as Maggie would have been at the idea that there might be "foreigners" in her family.

She added: "But you don't have to be related to a little boy, do you, to get mad at a man that's beating him up, especially if the boy hasn't done anything he oughtn't to?"

Mr. Pennypacker stared. "I don't know that I ever looked at it that way." He added: "I've been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails, to tell the truth, that I haven't read much about the war. There's always _some_ sort of a war going on over there in Europe, seems to me."

He stared for a moment into s.p.a.ce, and came back with a jerk to the letter he was dictating.

That evening, over the supper-table, he repeated to his wife what his stenographer had said. His wife asked, "That little sallow Miss Boardman that never has a word to say for herself?" and upon being told that it was the same, said wonderingly, "Well, what ever started _her_ up, I wonder?" After a time she said: "_Is_ Germany so much bigger than Belgium as all that? Pete, go get your geography." She and her husband and their High School son gazed at the map. "It looks that way," said the father. "Gee! They must have had their nerve with them! Gimme the paper." He read with care the war-news and the editorial which he had skipped in the morning, and as he read he looked very grave, and rather cross. When he laid the paper down he said, impatiently: "Oh, d.a.m.n the war! d.a.m.n Europe, anyhow!" His wife took the paper out of his hand and read in her turn the news of the advance into Northern France.

Just before they fell asleep his wife remarked out of the darkness, "Mr.

Scheidemann, down at the grocery, said to-day the war was because the other nations were jealous of Germany."

"Well, I don't know," said Mr. Pennypacker heavily, "that I'd have any call to take an ax to a man because I thought he was jealous of me."

"That's so," admitted his wife.

During that autumn Ellen read the papers, and from time to time broke her silence and unburdened her mind to the people in the boarding-house.

They considered her unbalanced on the subject. The young reporter on the Marshallton _Herald_ liked to lead her on to "get her going," as he said-but the others dodged whenever the war was mentioned and looked apprehensively in her direction.

The law of a.s.sociation of ideas works, naturally enough, in Marshallton, Kansas, quite as much at its ease as in any psychological laboratory. In fact Marshallton was a psychological laboratory with Ellen Boardman, an undefined element of trans.m.u.tation. Without knowing why, scarcely realizing that the little drab figure had crossed his field of vision, Mr. Pennypacker found the war recurring to his thoughts every time he saw her. He did not at all enjoy this, and each time that it happened he thrust the disagreeable subject out of his mind with impatience. The constant recurrence of the necessity for this effort brought upon his usually alert, good-humored face an occasional clouded expression like that which darkened his stenographer's eyes. When Ellen came into the dining-room of the boarding-house, even though she did not say a word, every one there was aware of an unpleasant interruption to the habitual, pleasant current of their thoughts directed upon their own affairs. In self-defense some of the women took to knitting polo-caps for Belgian children. With those in their hands they could listen, with more rea.s.suring certainty that she was "queer," to Miss Boardman's comments on what she read in the newspaper. Every time Mr. Wentworth, preaching one of his excellent, civic-minded sermons on caring for the babies of the poor, or organizing a playground for the children of the factory workers, or extending the work of the Ladies' Guild to neighborhood visits, caught sight of that plain, very serious face looking up at him searchingly, expectantly, he wondered if he had been right in announcing that he would not speak on the war because it would certainly cause dissension among his congregation.

One day, in the middle of winter, he found Miss Boardman waiting for him in the church vestibule after every one else had gone. She said, with her usual directness: "Mr. Wentworth, do you think the French ought to have just let the Germans walk right in and take Paris? Would you let them walk right in and take Washington?"

The minister was a young man, with a good deal of natural heat in his composition, and he found himself answering this bald question with a simplicity as bald: "No, I wouldn't."

"Well, if they did right, why don't we help them?" Ellen's homely, monosyllabic words had a ring of despairing sincerity.

Mr. Wentworth dodged them hastily. "We _are_ helping them. The charitable effort of the United States in the war is something astounding. The statistics show that we have helped...." He was going on to repeat some statistics of American war-relief just then current, when Mr. Scheidemann, the prosperous German grocer, a most influential member of the First Congregational Church, came back into the vestibule to look for his umbrella, which he had forgotten after the service. By a reflex action beyond his control, the minister stopped talking about the war.

He and Miss Boardman had, for just long enough so that he realized it, the appearance of people "caught" discussing something they ought not to mention. The instant after, when Ellen had turned away, he felt the liveliest astonishment and annoyance at having done this. He feared that Miss Boardman might have the preposterous notion that he was _afraid_ to talk about the war before a German. This idea nettled him intolerably.

Just before he fell asleep that night he had a most disagreeable moment, half awake, half asleep, when he himself entertained the preposterous idea which he had attributed to Miss Boardman. It woke him up, broad awake, and very much vexed. The little wound he had inflicted on his own vanity smarted. Thereafter at any mention of the war he straightened his back to a conscious stiffness, and raised his voice if a German were within hearing. And every time he saw that plain, dull face of the stenographer, he winced.

On the 8th of May, 1915, when Ellen went down to breakfast, the boarding-house dining-room was excited. Ellen heard the sinking of the _Lusitania_ read out aloud by the young reporter. To every one's surprise, she added nothing to the exclamations of horror with which the others greeted the news. She looked very white and left the room without touching her breakfast. She went directly down to the office and when Mr. Pennypacker came in at nine o'clock she asked him for a leave of absence, "maybe three months, maybe more," depending on how long her money held out. She explained that she had in the savings-bank five hundred dollars, the entire savings of a lifetime, which she intended to use now.

It was the first time in eleven years that she had ever asked for more than her regular yearly fortnight, but Mr. Pennypacker was not surprised. "You've been looking awfully run-down lately. It'll do you good to get a real rest. But it won't cost you all _that!_ Where are you going? To Battle Creek?"

"I'm not going to rest," said Miss Boardman, in a queer voice. "I'm going to work, in France."

The first among the clashing and violent ideas which this announcement aroused in Mr. Pennypacker's mind was the instant certainty that she could not have seen the morning paper. "Great Scotland-not much you're not! This is no time to be taking ocean trips. The submarines have just got one of the big ocean ships, hundreds of women and children drowned."

"I heard about that," she said, looking at him very earnestly, with a dumb emotion struggling in her eyes. "That's why I'm going."

Something about the look in her eyes silenced the business man for a moment. He thought uneasily that she had certainly gone a little dippy over the war. Then he drew a long breath and started in confidently to dissuade her.

At ten o'clock, informed that if she went she need not expect to come back, she went out to the savings-bank, drew out her five hundred dollars, went down to the station and bought a ticket to Washington, one of Mr. Pennypacker's arguments having been the great difficulty of getting a pa.s.sport.

Then she went back to the boarding-house and began to pack two-thirds of her things into her trunk, and put the other third into her satchel, all she intended to take with her.

At noon Maggie came back from her work, found her thus, and burst into shocked and horrified tears. At two o'clock Maggie went to find the young reporter, and, her eyes swollen, her face between anger and alarm, she begged him to come and "talk to Ellen. She's gone off her head."

The reporter asked what form her mania took.

"She's going to France to work for the French and Belgians as long as her money holds out ... all the money she's saved in all her life!"

The first among the clashing ideas which this awakened in the reporter's mind was the most heartfelt and gorgeous amus.e.m.e.nt. The idea of that dumb, backwoods, pie-faced stenographer carrying her valuable services to the war in Europe seemed to him the richest thing that had happened in years! He burst into laughter. "Yes, sure I'll come and talk to her,"

he agreed. He found her lifting a tray into her trunk. "See here, Miss Boardman," he remarked reasonably, "do you know what you need? You need a sense of humor! You take things too much in dead earnest. The sense of humor keeps you from doing ridiculous things, don't you know it does?"

Ellen faced him, seriously considering this. "Do you think all ridiculous things are bad?" she asked him, not as an argument, but as a genuine question.

He evaded this and went on. "Just look at yourself now ... just look at what you're planning to do. Here is the biggest war in the history of the world; all the great nations involved; millions and millions of dollars being poured out; the United States sending hundreds and thousands of packages and hospital supplies by the million; and nurses and doctors and Lord knows how many trained people ... and, look! who comes here?-a stenographer from Walker and Pennypacker's, in Marshallton, Kansas, setting out to the war!"

Ellen looked long at this picture of herself, and while she considered it the young man looked long at her. As he looked, he stopped laughing.

She said finally, very simply, in a declarative sentence devoid of any but its obvious meaning, "No, I can't see that that is so very funny."

At six o'clock that evening she was boarding the train for Washington, her cousin Maggie weeping by her side, Mrs. Wilson herself escorting her, very much excited by the momentousness of the event taking place under her roof, her satchel carried by none other than the young reporter, who, oddly enough, was not laughing at all. He bought her a box of chocolates and a magazine, and shook hands with her vigorously as the train started to pull out of the station. He heard himself saying, "Say, Miss Boardman, if you see anything for me to do over there, you might let me know," and found that he must run to get himself off the train before it carried him away from Marshallton altogether.

A fortnight from that day (pa.s.sports were not so difficult to get in those distant days when war-relief work was the eccentricity of only an occasional individual) she was lying in her second-cla.s.s cabin, as the steamer rolled in the Atlantic swells beyond Sandy Hook. She was horribly seasick, but her plans were all quite clear. Of course she belonged to the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation in Marshallton, so she knew all about it. At Washington she had found shelter at the Y. W.

C. A. quarters. In New York she had done the same thing, and when she arrived in Paris (if she ever did) she could of course go there to stay.

Her roommate, a very sophisticated, much-traveled art student, was immensely amused by the artlessness of this plan. "I've got the _dernier cri_ in greenhorns in my cabin," she told her group on deck. "She's expecting to find a Y. W. C. A. in _Paris!_"

But the wisdom of the simple was justified once more. There was a Y. W.

C. A. in Paris, run by an energetic, well-informed American spinster.

Ellen crawled into the rather hard bed in the very small room (the cheapest offered her) and slept twelve hours at a stretch, utterly worn out with the devastating excitement of her first travels in a foreign land. Then she rose up, comparatively refreshed, and with her foolish, ignorant simplicity inquired where in Paris her services could be of use. The energetic woman managing the Y. W. C. A. looked at her very dubiously.

"Well, there might be something for you over on the rue Pharaon, number 27. I hear there's a bunch of society dames trying to get up a _vestiaire_ for refugees, there."

As Ellen noted down the address she said warningly, her eyes running over Ellen's worn blue serge suit: "They don't pay anything. It's work for volunteers, you know."

Ellen was astonished that any one should think of getting pay for work done in France. "Oh, gracious, no!" she said, turning away.

The directress of the Y. W. C. A. murmured to herself: "Well, you certainly never can tell by _looks!_"

At the rue Pharaon, number 27, Ellen was motioned across a stony gray courtyard littered with wooden packing-cases, into an immense, draughty dark room, that looked as though it might have been originally the coach and harness-room of a big stable. This also was strewed and heaped with packing-cases in indescribable confusion, some opened and disgorging innumerable garments of all colors and materials, others still tightly nailed up. A couple of elderly workmen in blouses were opening one of these. Before others knelt or stood distracted-looking, elegantly dressed women, their arms full of parti-colored bundles, their eyes full of confusion. In one corner, on a bench, sat a row of wretchedly poor women and white-faced, silent children, the latter shod more miserably than the poorest negro child in Marshallton. Against a packing-case near the entrance leaned a beautifully dressed, handsome, middle-aged woman, a hammer in one hand. Before her at ease stood a pretty girl, the fineness of whose tightly drawn silk stockings, the perfection of whose gleaming coiffure, the exquisite hang and fit of whose silken dress filled Ellen Boardman with awe. In an instant her own stout cotton hose hung wrinkled about her ankles, she felt on her neck every stringy wisp of her badly dressed hair, the dip of her skirt at the back was a physical discomfort. The older woman was speaking. Ellen could not help overhearing. She said forcibly: "No, Miss Parton, you will not come in contact with a single heroic poilu here. We have nothing to offer you but hard, uninteresting work for the benefit of ungrateful, uninteresting refugee women, many of whom will try to cheat and get double their share. You will not lay your hand on a single fevered masculine brow...." She broke off, made an effort for self-control and went on with a resolutely reasonable air: "You'd better go out to the hospital at Neuilly. You can wear a uniform there from the first day, and be in contact with the men. I wouldn't have bothered you to come here, except that you wrote from Detroit that you would be willing to do _any_thing, scrub floors or wash dishes."

The other received all this with the indestructible good humor of a girl who knows herself very pretty and as well dressed as any one in the world. "I know I did, Mrs. Putnam," she said, amused at her own absurdity. "But now I'm here I'd be _too_ disappointed to go back if I hadn't been working for the soldiers. All the girls expect me to have stories about the work, you know. And I can't stay very long, only four months, because my coming-out party is in October. I guess I _will_ go to Neuilly. They take you for three months there, you know." She smiled pleasantly, turned with athletic grace and picked her way among the packing-cases back to the door.

Ellen advanced in her turn.

"Well?" said the middle-aged woman, rather grimly. Her intelligent eyes took in relentlessly every detail of Ellen's costume and Ellen felt them at their work.

"I came to see if I couldn't help," said Ellen.

"Don't you want direct contact with the wounded soldiers?" asked the older woman ironically.

"No," said Ellen with her habitual simplicity. "I wouldn't know how to do anything for them. I'm not a nurse."