The Camerons of Highboro Part 11

"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 s.p.a.ces, 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 n.o.body'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 rea.s.serted 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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?"