The Camerons of Highboro Part 8

"Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?" Laura questioned. "Just for fun, or for the money we could get out of it?"

"I hadn't thought much about it," said Elliott. She was thinking now.

Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.

"I never thought of it as war work," she said. "Stupid, wasn't I?"

Laura put the last hair-pin in place. "Just thought of it as our job, did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work too--well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I've never been so thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every one of us such a splendid chance to feel we're really counting in this fight--the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here." Laura's dark eyes were beginning to shine. "Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere but on a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in France!"

She stopped suddenly, put down the hand-mirror with which she was surveying her back hair, and blushed. "There!" she said, "I forgot all about the fact that you weren't born on a farm, too. But then, you can share ours for a year, so I'm not going to apologize for a word I've said, even if I have been bragging because I'm so lucky."

Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a tread that isn't there. Elliott's own cheeks reddened as she thought of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn't seemed to notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized, with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn't understand why her cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain the fact to her.

But Elliott couldn't let herself pa.s.s as an intentional slacker.

"We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting, too, of course, but canteening was the most fun."

"That must have been fine." Laura was interested at once.

Elliott's spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. "Do you have a canteen here?"

"Oh, no, Highboro isn't big enough. No trains stop here for more than a minute. We're not on the direct line to any of the camps, either."

"Ours was a regular canteen," said Elliott. "They would telephone us when soldiers were going through, and we would go down, with Mrs.

Royce or Aunt Margaret or some other chaperon, and distribute post-cards and cigarettes and sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if the weather was hot. It was such fun to talk to the men!"

"Ice-cream and cigarettes!" laughed Laura. "I should think they'd have liked something nourishing."

"Oh, they got the nourishing things, if it was time. The Government had an arrangement with a restaurant just around the corner to serve soldiers' meals. We didn't have to do that."

"You supplied the frills."

"Yes." Somehow Elliott did not quite like the words.

Laura was quick to notice her discomfiture. "I imagine they needed the frills and the jollying, poor lonesome boys! They're so young, many of them, and not used to being away from home; and the life is strange, however well they may like it."

"Yes," said Elliott. "More than one bunch told us they hadn't seen anything to equal what we did for them this side of New York. Our uniforms were so becoming, too; even a plain girl looked cute in those caps. Why, Laura, you might have a uniform, mightn't you, if it's war work?"

"What should I want of a uniform?"

"People who saw you would know what you're doing."

"They know now, if they open their eyes."

"They'd know why, I mean--that it's war work."

"Mercy! n.o.body around here needs to be told why a person hoes potatoes these days. They're all doing it."

"Do you hoe potatoes?" Elliott had no notion how comically her consternation sat on her pretty features.

Laura laughed at the amazed face of her cousin. "Of course I do, when potatoes need hoeing."

"But do you like it?"

"Oh, yes, in a way. Hoeing potatoes isn't half bad."

Elliott opened her lips to say that it wasn't girls' work, remembered that she had made that remark once before, and changed to, "It is hard work, and it isn't a bit interesting."

Then Laura asked two questions that left Elliott gasping. "Don't you like to do anything except what is easy? Though I don't know that it is any harder to hoe potatoes for an hour than to play tennis that length of time. And anything is interesting, don't you think, that has to be done?"

"Goodness, _no_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Elliott, when she found her voice. "I don't think that at all! Do you, really?"

"Why, yes!" Laura laughed a trifle deprecatingly. "I'm not bluffing. I never thought I'd care to spray potatoes, but one day it had to be done, and Father and the boys were needed for something else. It wasn't any harder to do than churning, and I found it rather fun to watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated, too, how many Belgians the potatoes in those hills would feed, either directly or by setting wheat free, you know. I forget now how many I made it. I know I felt quite exhilarated when I was through. Trudy helped."

"Goodness!" murmured Elliott faintly. For a minute she could find no other words. Then she managed to remark: "Of course every one gardens at home. They have lots at the country club, and raise potatoes and things, and you hear them talking everywhere about bugs and blight and cold pack. I never paid much attention. It didn't seem to be meant for girls. The men and boys raise the things and the wives and mothers can them. That's the way we do at home."

"Traditional," nodded Laura. "We divide on those lines here to a certain extent, too; but we're rather Jacks of all trades on this farm. The boys know how to can and we girls to make hay."

"The boys _can_?"

"Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What does it matter who does a thing, so it's done?"

Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura's last remark, which had not sounded very sensible to her--of course it mattered who did things; why, that sometimes was all that did matter!--and reflected that, country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on one's clothes.

But Laura's hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott's standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and berries and fruits. Elliott hadn't meant to look so fixedly at Laura's hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, "If you prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine into too many pies ever to have them look well."

"They're a lovely shape," said Elliott, seriously.

And then, to her amazement, Laura laughed and leaned over and hugged her. "And you're a dear thing, even if you do think my hands are no lady's!"

Of course Elliott protested; but as that was just what she did think, her protestations were not very convincing.

"You can't have everything," said Laura, quite as though she didn't mind in the least what her hands looked like. The strangest part of it all was that Elliott believed Laura actually didn't mind.

But she didn't know how to answer her, Laura's words had raised the dust on all those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott had had sitting about in her mind for so long that she supposed they were her very own opinions. Until the dust settled she couldn't tell what she thought, whether they belonged to her or had simply been dumped on her by other people. She couldn't remember ever having been in such a position before.

Yes, Elliott found a good deal to think of. One had to draw the line somewhere; she had told herself comfortably; but lines seemed to be very queerly jumbled up in this war. If a person couldn't canteen or help at a hostess house or do surgical dressings or any of the other things that had always stood in her mind for girl's war work, she had to do what she could, hadn't she? And if it wasn't necessary to be tagged, why, it wasn't. Laura in blouse and short skirt, or even in overalls, seemed to accomplish as much as any possible Laura in a pantaloon suit or puttees or any other land uniform. There really didn't seem any way out, now that Elliott understood the matter.

Perhaps she had been rather dense not to understand it before.

"What would you like me to do this morning, Uncle?" she asked the next day at the breakfast-table. "I think it is time I went to work."

"Going to join the farmerettes?"

"Thinking of it." She could feel, without seeing, Stannard's stare of astonishment. No one else gave signs of surprise. Stannard, thought the girl, really hadn't as good manners as his cousins.

Uncle Bob surveyed the trim figure, arrayed in its dark smock and the shortest of all Elliott's short skirts. If he felt other than wholly serious he concealed the fact well.

"The corn needs hoeing, both field-corn and garden-corn. How about joining that squad?"

"It suits me."