63CHAPTER IVIN UNTRODDEN FIELDS
“You don’t want to have much to do with that fellow,” said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.“Why not?” Elliott’s tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.“Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica’s either.”“How does he happen to be living here, then?”“Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All64right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was—er—all right, you know.”Stannard’s words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn’t be as friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn’t tell whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would be easy enough, and Stannard’s charge might prove unfounded.But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves. Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.65“Who is this ‘Pete’ you’re always talking about?” Elliott asked.“Bruce’s older brother—I almost said ours.” The two girls were skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers, Elliott more slowly. “He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know him.”“I gathered he was Bruce’s brother.”“He’s not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a flash. You’d know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter in the ‘Upton News’ last night from an Upton doctor who is over there, attached now to our boys’ camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete are ‘the acknowledged aces’ of their squadron. That shows we must have missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just after he had finished his training.”“This—Pete went from here?”“He and Bob were in Tech together,66juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and they’ve kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into spirals first, ‘by a fluke,’ as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the actual fighting. Now they’re in it together.” And Laura smiled and then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to speed faster than ever.“I haven’t read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid’s either? (Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If anything, Pete’s are funnier than Bob’s. Both the boys have an eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn’t think there was anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there was one letter of Pete’s (it was to Mother), written from their first training-camp in France after67one of the boys’ best friends had been killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete told about this Jim Stone’s death, and he said: ‘It has made us all pretty serious, but nobody’s blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and a chap can’t think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess, do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman vacation, about the things I didn’t believe in? Why didn’t you tell me I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.’ That’s Pete all over. It made Mother and me very happy.”Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. “Have they always lived with you,” she asked, “the Fearings?”“Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn’t Bruce splendid? I don’t know how68we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce.”Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn’t know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with “that fellow,” and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn’t she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?The thing would require manœuvering. You couldn’t talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.“I think Aunt Jessica,” she remarked,69“is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever seen.”A glow lit up Bruce’s quiet gray eyes. “Mother Jess,” he said, “is a miracle.”“She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired.”“She is, though.”“I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, ‘Mother Jess.’ Your—aunt, is she?”“Oh, no,” said Bruce, simply. “I’ve no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I boring you?”“No, indeed!” Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.70He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. “Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn’t seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn’t told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in. She hadn’t enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he’d just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we’d be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us—bless her! Do you wonder71Pete and I swear by the Camerons?”“No,” said Elliott. “Indeed I don’t.” She had what she had been angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn’t got it, after all. “Haven’t you had any clue in all these years as to who your people were?”“Not the slightest. I’m willing to let things rest as they are.”“Yes, of course,” thought Elliott, “but—” She let it go at “but.” Oughtn’t somebody, as Stannard said, to have warned her? These boys’ people might have been very common persons, not at all like Camerons. The fact that no relatives appeared proved that, didn’t it? Every one who was any one at all had a family. Bruce did not look common: his gray eyes and his broad forehead and his keen, thin face were almost distinguished, and his manners were above criticism. But one never could tell. And hadn’t he been brought up by Camerons? The very72openness with which he had told his story had something fine about it. He, like Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal.Well, was there? Elliott could quite clearly imagine what Aunt Margaret, Stannard’s mother, would say to that question. She had never especially cared for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at Bruce Fearing, one of the pillars of her familiar world began to totter. Actually, she could think of no particularly good reason why, when she had heard his story, she should proceed to shun him. His history simply didn’t seem to matter, except to make her sorry for him; and yet she couldn’t be really sorry for a boy who had been brought up by Aunt Jessica.Perhaps the Cameron Farm atmosphere was already beginning to work.“I think you and your brother had luck,” she said.“I know we did,” answered Bruce.73Elliott turned the conversation. “I wish you could tell me what you were going to say, when we were interrupted yesterday, about a person’s having no choice except how he will do things—youhaving had only that kind of choice.”“I remember,” said Bruce. “Well, for one thing, I suppose I could get grouchy, if I chose, over not knowing who my people were.”“They may have been very splendid,” said Elliott.Bruce smiled. “It’s not likely.”“In that case,” she countered, “you have the satisfaction ofnotknowing who they were.”“Exactly. But that’s rather a crawl, isn’t it? Of course, a fellow would like to know.”The boy bent forward, and, with painstaking care, selected a blade from a tuft of grass growing between his feet. He nibbled a minute before he spoke again.74“See here, I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told a soul. I’m crazy to go to the war. Sometimes it seems as though I couldn’t stay home. When Pete’s letters come I have to go away somewhere quick and chop wood! Anything to get busy for a while.”“Aren’t you too young? Would they take you?”“Take me? You bet they’d take me! I’m eighteen. Don’t I look twenty?”The girl’s eye ran critically over the strong young body, with its long, supple, sinewy lines. “Yes,” she nodded. “I think you do.”“They’d take me in a minute, in aviation or anything else.”“Then why don’t you?”“Who’d help Father Bob through the farm stunts? Young Bob’s gone, and Pete and Sidney. They were always here for the summer work. Henry’s a fine lad,75but a boy still. Tom’s nothing but a boy, though he does his bit. As for the Women’s Land Army, it’s got up into these parts, but not in force. Father Bob can’t hire help: it’s not to be had. That’s why Mother Jess and the girls are going in so for farm work. They never did it before this year, except in sport. We have more land under cultivation this summer than ever before, and fewer hands to harvest it with. But Mother and the girls sha’n’t have to work harder than they’re doing now, if I can help it. Could I go off and leave them, after all they’ve done for me? But that’s not it, either—gratitude. They’re mine, Father Bob and Mother Jess are, and the rest; they’re my folks. You’re not exactly grateful to your own folks, you know. They belong to you. And you don’t leave what belongs to you in the lurch.”“No,” said Elliott. With awakened76eyes she was watching Bruce. No boy had ever talked of such things to her before. “So you’re not going?”“Not of my own will. Of course, if the war lasts and I’m drafted, or the help problem lightens up, it will be different. Pete’s gone. It was Pete’s right to go. He’s the elder.”“But youarechoosing,” Elliott cried earnestly. “Don’t you see? You’re choosing to stay at home and—” words came swiftly into her memory—“‘fight it out on these lines all summer.’”Bruce’s smile showed that he recognized her quotation, but he shook his head. “Choosing? I haven’t any choice—except being decent about it. Don’tyousee I can’t go? I can only try to keep from thinking about not going.”“You being you,” said the girl, and she spoke as simply and soberly as Bruce himself, though her own warmth surprised her, “I see you can’t go. But was that all77you meant”—her voice grew ludicrously disappointed—“by a person’s having a choice only of how he will do a thing? There’s nothing to that but making the best of things!”Bruce Fearing threw back his head and laughed heartily.“You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever seen.”“Then you can’t have seen many. Butisthere?”“Perhaps not. Stupid, isn’t it?”“Yes,” she nodded, “I’m afraid it is. And frightfully old. I was hoping you were going to tell me something new and exciting.”The boy chuckled again. “Nothing so good as that. Besides, I’ve a hunch the exciting things aren’t very new, after all.”Elliott went to sleep that night, if not any happier, at least more interested. She had looked deep into the heart of a boy, different, it appeared, from any boy that78she had ever known; and something loyal and sturdy and tender she had seen there had stirred her. It was odd how well acquainted she felt with him; odd, too, how curious she was to know him better, even though he hadn’t the least idea who his grandfather had been. “Bother his grandfather!” Elliott chuckled to realize how such a sentiment would horrify Aunt Margaret. Grandfathers were very important to Aunt Margaret and Aunt Margaret’s children. Grandfathers had always seemed fairly important to Elliott herself until now. Was it their relative unimportance in the Robert Camerons’ estimation, or a pair of steady gray eyes, that had altered her valuation? The girl didn’t know and she was keen enough to know that she didn’t; keen enough, too, to perceive that the change in her estimation of grandfathers applied to a single case only and might be merely temporary.However that might be, she was not79ready yet to do anything so inherently distasteful as make the best of what she didn’t like, especially when nobody but herself and two boys would know it. When one makes the best of things, one likes to do it to crowded galleries, that perceive what is going on and applaud. The Robert Camerons, Elliott was quite sure, wouldn’t applaud. They would take it as a matter of course, just as they took her as a matter of course. They were quite charming about it, as delightful hosts as one could wish—if only they lived differently!—but Elliott wasn’t used to being taken for granted. She might have been these new cousins’ own sort, for any difference she could detect in their actions. They didn’t seem to begin to understand her importance. Perhaps she wasn’t so important, after all. The doubt had never before entered her mind.The fact was, of course, that among these busy, efficient people she was feeling80quite useless; and she didn’t like to appear incompetent when she knew herself to be, in her own line, a thoroughly able person. But it irked her to think that she had been forced into a position where in self-defense she must either acquire a kind of efficiency she didn’t want or do without. At the same time it troubled her lest this reluctance become apparent. For they were all loves and she wouldn’t hurt their feelings for worlds. And she did wish them to admire her. But she had a feeling that they didn’t altogether, not even Priscilla and Bruce.Nevertheless, the next day when Laura asked whether she would take her book out to the hay-field or stay where she was on the porch, Elliott looked up from “Lorna Doone” and said, with the prettiest little coaxing air, “If I go, will you let me pitch hay?” And Laura answered as lightly, “Certainly.” “I don’t believe you,” said81Elliott. “You may ride on the hay-load,” smiled Laura. “That won’t do at all,” Elliott shook her head. “If I can’t pitch hay, I’ll stay here.” Laura laughed and said: “You certainly will be more comfortable here. I can’t quite see you pitching hay.” And Elliott retorted: “You don’t know what I could do, if I tried. But since you won’t let me try—”It was all smiling and gay, but it was a crawl, and Elliott knew it and knew that Laura knew it, and she felt ashamed. Wasn’t Stannard’s frank shirking better than her camouflaged variety? But hadn’t she picked berries all the morning in a stuffy sunbonnet under a broiling sun, until she felt as red as a berry and much less fresh and sweet?“It’s a shame,” said Laura, “that this is just our busy season; but you know you have to make hay while the sun shines. Father thinks we can finish the lower82meadows to-day. Then to-morrow we begin cutting on the hill. It’s really fun to ride the hay-rake. I mostly drive the rake, though now and then I pitch for variety.”She looked so strong and brown and merry, as she talked, that Elliott, comfortably established with “Lorna Doone,” felt almost like flinging her book into the next chair, slipping her arm through Laura’s, and crying, “Lead on!” But she remembered just in time that, as she hadn’t wished to come to the Cameron Farm, it would ill become her to have a good time there. Which may seem like a childish way of looking at the thing, but isn’t really confined to children at all.So the hay-makers tramped away down the road, their laughter floating cheerfully back over their shoulders; and Elliott sat on the big shady veranda and read her book.She might have enjoyed it less had she83heard Henry’s frank summary at the turn of the lane, when his father inquired the whereabouts of Stannard.“Beau Brummell hiked over to Upton half an hour ago. I offered him the other Henry, but he doesn’t seem to care to drive anything short of a Pierce-Arrow. Twins, aren’t they?” and Henry nodded in the direction of the veranda.“Sh-h!” reproved Laura. “They’re our guests.”“Guests is just it. Yes, they’reguests, all right.”“Mother says they don’t know how to work,” Priscilla observed.“That’s another true word, too.”Mother turned gaily in the road ahead. “Who is talking about me?” she called.Priscilla frisked on to join her, and Henry fell back to a confidential exchange with Laura. “Beau wouldn’t be so bad if he could forget for a minute that he owned the earth and had a mortgage on the solar84system. But when he tries to snub Bruce—gee, that gets me!”“Aren’t you twanging the G string rather often lately, Hal?—Stannard can’t snub Bruce. Bruce isn’t the kind of fellow to be snubbed.”“Just the same, it makes me sick to think anybody’s a cousin to me that would try it.”Laura switched back to the main subject. “We didn’t ask them up here as extra farm hands, you know.”“Bull’s-eye,” said Henry, and grinned.What she did not know failed to trouble Elliott. She read on in lonely peace through the afternoon. At a most exciting point the telephone rang. Four, that was the Cameron call. Elliott went into the house and took down the receiver.“Mr. Robert Cameron’s,” she said pleasantly.“S-say!” stuttered a high, sharp voice, “my little b-b-boys have let your c-c-cows85out o’ the p-p-pasture. I’ll g-give ’em a t-t-trouncin’, but ’t won’t git your c-c-cows back. They let ’em out the G-G-Garrett Road, and your medder gate’s open. Jim B-B-Blake saw it this mornin’! Why the man didn’t shut it, I d-d-dunno. You’ll have to hurry to save your medder.”“But,” gasped Elliott, “I don’t understand! You say the cows—”“Are comin’ down G-Garrett Road,” snapped the stuttering voice, “the whole kit an’ b-b-bilin’ of ’em. They’ll be inter your upper m-medder in five m-m-minutes.”Over the wire came the click of a receiver snapping back on its hook. Elliott hung up and started toward the door. The cows had been let out. Just why this incident was so disastrous she did not quite comprehend, but she must go and tell her uncle. Before her feet touched the veranda, however, she stopped. Five minutes? Why, there wouldn’t be time to86go to the lower meadow, to say nothing of any one’s doing anything about the situation.And then, with breath-taking suddenness, the thing burst on her. She was alone in the house; even Aunt Jessica and Priscilla had gone to the hay-field. The situation, whatever it was, was up to her.For a minute the girl leaned weakly against the wall. Cows—there were thirty in the herd—and she loathed cows! She was afraid of cows. She knew nothing about cows. She was never in the slightest degree sure of what the creatures might take it into their heads to do. For a minute she stood irresolute. Then something stirred in the girl, something self-reliant and strong. Never in her life had Elliott Cameron had to do alone anything that she didn’t already know how to do. Now for the first time she faced an emergency on none but her own resources,87an emergency that was quite out of her line.Her brain worked swiftly as her feet moved to the door. In reality, she had wavered only a second. When Tom went for the cows, didn’t he take old Prince? There was just a chance that Prince wasn’t in the hay-field. She ran down the steps calling, “Prince! Prince!” The old dog rose deliberately from his place on the shady side of the barn and trotted toward her, wagging his tail. “Come, Prince!” cried Elliott, and ran out of the yard.Luckily, berrying had that very morning taken her by a short cut to the vicinity of the upper meadow. She knew the way. But what was likely to happen? Town-bred girl that she was, she had no idea. A recollection of the smooth, upstanding expanse of the upper meadow gave her a clue. If the cows got into that88even erectness— She began to run, Prince bounding beside her, his brown tail a waving plume.She could see the meadow now, a smooth green sea ruffled by nothing heavier than the light feet of the summer breeze. She could see the great gate invitingly open to the road and oh!—her heart stopped beating, then pounded on at a suffocating pace—she could see the cows! There they came, down the hill, quite filling the narrow roadway with their horrid bulk, making it look like a moving river of broad backs and tossing heads. What could she do, the girl wondered; what could she do against so many? She tried to run faster. Somehow she must reach the gate first. There was nothing even then, so far as she knew, to prevent their trampling her down and rushing over her into the waving greenness, unless she could slam the gate in their faces. You can see that she really did not know much about cows.89But Prince knew them. Prince understood now why his master’s guest had summoned him to this hot run in the sunshine. The prospect did not daunt Prince. He ran barking to the meadow side of the road. The foremost cow which, grazing the dusty grass, had strayed toward the gate, turned back into the ruts again. Elliott pulled the gate shut, in her haste leaving herself outside. There, too spent to climb over, she flattened her slender form against the gray boards, while, driven by Prince, the whole herd, horns tossing, tails switching, flanks heaving, thudded its way past.And there, three minutes later, Bruce, dashing over the hill in response to a message relayed by telephone and boy to the lower meadow, found her.“The cows have gone down,” Elliott told him. “Prince has them. He will take them home, won’t he?”“Prince? Good enough! He’ll get the90cows home all right. But what are you doing in this mix-up?”“A woman telephoned the house,” said Elliott. “I was afraid I couldn’t reach any of you in time, so I came over myself.”“You like cows?” The question shot at her like a bullet.The piquant nose wrinkled entrancingly. “Scared to death of ’em.”“I guessed as much.” The boy nodded. “Gee whiz, but you’ve got good stuff in you!”And though her shoes were dusty and her hair tousled, and though her knees hadn’t stopped shaking even yet, Elliott Cameron felt a sudden sense of satisfaction and pride. She turned and looked over the fence at the meadow. In its unmarred beauty it seemed to belong to her.
“You don’t want to have much to do with that fellow,” said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.
“Why not?” Elliott’s tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.
“Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica’s either.”
“How does he happen to be living here, then?”
“Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All64right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was—er—all right, you know.”
Stannard’s words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn’t be as friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn’t tell whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would be easy enough, and Stannard’s charge might prove unfounded.
But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves. Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.
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“Who is this ‘Pete’ you’re always talking about?” Elliott asked.
“Bruce’s older brother—I almost said ours.” The two girls were skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers, Elliott more slowly. “He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know him.”
“I gathered he was Bruce’s brother.”
“He’s not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a flash. You’d know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter in the ‘Upton News’ last night from an Upton doctor who is over there, attached now to our boys’ camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete are ‘the acknowledged aces’ of their squadron. That shows we must have missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just after he had finished his training.”
“This—Pete went from here?”
“He and Bob were in Tech together,66juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and they’ve kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into spirals first, ‘by a fluke,’ as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the actual fighting. Now they’re in it together.” And Laura smiled and then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to speed faster than ever.
“I haven’t read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid’s either? (Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If anything, Pete’s are funnier than Bob’s. Both the boys have an eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn’t think there was anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there was one letter of Pete’s (it was to Mother), written from their first training-camp in France after67one of the boys’ best friends had been killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete told about this Jim Stone’s death, and he said: ‘It has made us all pretty serious, but nobody’s blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and a chap can’t think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess, do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman vacation, about the things I didn’t believe in? Why didn’t you tell me I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.’ That’s Pete all over. It made Mother and me very happy.”
Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. “Have they always lived with you,” she asked, “the Fearings?”
“Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn’t Bruce splendid? I don’t know how68we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce.”
Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn’t know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.
The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with “that fellow,” and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn’t she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?
The thing would require manœuvering. You couldn’t talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.
“I think Aunt Jessica,” she remarked,69“is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever seen.”
A glow lit up Bruce’s quiet gray eyes. “Mother Jess,” he said, “is a miracle.”
“She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired.”
“She is, though.”
“I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, ‘Mother Jess.’ Your—aunt, is she?”
“Oh, no,” said Bruce, simply. “I’ve no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I boring you?”
“No, indeed!” Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.
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He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. “Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn’t seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn’t told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in. She hadn’t enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he’d just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we’d be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us—bless her! Do you wonder71Pete and I swear by the Camerons?”
“No,” said Elliott. “Indeed I don’t.” She had what she had been angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn’t got it, after all. “Haven’t you had any clue in all these years as to who your people were?”
“Not the slightest. I’m willing to let things rest as they are.”
“Yes, of course,” thought Elliott, “but—” She let it go at “but.” Oughtn’t somebody, as Stannard said, to have warned her? These boys’ people might have been very common persons, not at all like Camerons. The fact that no relatives appeared proved that, didn’t it? Every one who was any one at all had a family. Bruce did not look common: his gray eyes and his broad forehead and his keen, thin face were almost distinguished, and his manners were above criticism. But one never could tell. And hadn’t he been brought up by Camerons? The very72openness with which he had told his story had something fine about it. He, like Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal.
Well, was there? Elliott could quite clearly imagine what Aunt Margaret, Stannard’s mother, would say to that question. She had never especially cared for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at Bruce Fearing, one of the pillars of her familiar world began to totter. Actually, she could think of no particularly good reason why, when she had heard his story, she should proceed to shun him. His history simply didn’t seem to matter, except to make her sorry for him; and yet she couldn’t be really sorry for a boy who had been brought up by Aunt Jessica.
Perhaps the Cameron Farm atmosphere was already beginning to work.
“I think you and your brother had luck,” she said.
“I know we did,” answered Bruce.
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Elliott turned the conversation. “I wish you could tell me what you were going to say, when we were interrupted yesterday, about a person’s having no choice except how he will do things—youhaving had only that kind of choice.”
“I remember,” said Bruce. “Well, for one thing, I suppose I could get grouchy, if I chose, over not knowing who my people were.”
“They may have been very splendid,” said Elliott.
Bruce smiled. “It’s not likely.”
“In that case,” she countered, “you have the satisfaction ofnotknowing who they were.”
“Exactly. But that’s rather a crawl, isn’t it? Of course, a fellow would like to know.”
The boy bent forward, and, with painstaking care, selected a blade from a tuft of grass growing between his feet. He nibbled a minute before he spoke again.
74
“See here, I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told a soul. I’m crazy to go to the war. Sometimes it seems as though I couldn’t stay home. When Pete’s letters come I have to go away somewhere quick and chop wood! Anything to get busy for a while.”
“Aren’t you too young? Would they take you?”
“Take me? You bet they’d take me! I’m eighteen. Don’t I look twenty?”
The girl’s eye ran critically over the strong young body, with its long, supple, sinewy lines. “Yes,” she nodded. “I think you do.”
“They’d take me in a minute, in aviation or anything else.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Who’d help Father Bob through the farm stunts? Young Bob’s gone, and Pete and Sidney. They were always here for the summer work. Henry’s a fine lad,75but a boy still. Tom’s nothing but a boy, though he does his bit. As for the Women’s Land Army, it’s got up into these parts, but not in force. Father Bob can’t hire help: it’s not to be had. That’s why Mother Jess and the girls are going in so for farm work. They never did it before this year, except in sport. We have more land under cultivation this summer than ever before, and fewer hands to harvest it with. But Mother and the girls sha’n’t have to work harder than they’re doing now, if I can help it. Could I go off and leave them, after all they’ve done for me? But that’s not it, either—gratitude. They’re mine, Father Bob and Mother Jess are, and the rest; they’re my folks. You’re not exactly grateful to your own folks, you know. They belong to you. And you don’t leave what belongs to you in the lurch.”
“No,” said Elliott. With awakened76eyes she was watching Bruce. No boy had ever talked of such things to her before. “So you’re not going?”
“Not of my own will. Of course, if the war lasts and I’m drafted, or the help problem lightens up, it will be different. Pete’s gone. It was Pete’s right to go. He’s the elder.”
“But youarechoosing,” Elliott cried earnestly. “Don’t you see? You’re choosing to stay at home and—” words came swiftly into her memory—“‘fight it out on these lines all summer.’”
Bruce’s smile showed that he recognized her quotation, but he shook his head. “Choosing? I haven’t any choice—except being decent about it. Don’tyousee I can’t go? I can only try to keep from thinking about not going.”
“You being you,” said the girl, and she spoke as simply and soberly as Bruce himself, though her own warmth surprised her, “I see you can’t go. But was that all77you meant”—her voice grew ludicrously disappointed—“by a person’s having a choice only of how he will do a thing? There’s nothing to that but making the best of things!”
Bruce Fearing threw back his head and laughed heartily.
“You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Then you can’t have seen many. Butisthere?”
“Perhaps not. Stupid, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “I’m afraid it is. And frightfully old. I was hoping you were going to tell me something new and exciting.”
The boy chuckled again. “Nothing so good as that. Besides, I’ve a hunch the exciting things aren’t very new, after all.”
Elliott went to sleep that night, if not any happier, at least more interested. She had looked deep into the heart of a boy, different, it appeared, from any boy that78she had ever known; and something loyal and sturdy and tender she had seen there had stirred her. It was odd how well acquainted she felt with him; odd, too, how curious she was to know him better, even though he hadn’t the least idea who his grandfather had been. “Bother his grandfather!” Elliott chuckled to realize how such a sentiment would horrify Aunt Margaret. Grandfathers were very important to Aunt Margaret and Aunt Margaret’s children. Grandfathers had always seemed fairly important to Elliott herself until now. Was it their relative unimportance in the Robert Camerons’ estimation, or a pair of steady gray eyes, that had altered her valuation? The girl didn’t know and she was keen enough to know that she didn’t; keen enough, too, to perceive that the change in her estimation of grandfathers applied to a single case only and might be merely temporary.
However that might be, she was not79ready yet to do anything so inherently distasteful as make the best of what she didn’t like, especially when nobody but herself and two boys would know it. When one makes the best of things, one likes to do it to crowded galleries, that perceive what is going on and applaud. The Robert Camerons, Elliott was quite sure, wouldn’t applaud. They would take it as a matter of course, just as they took her as a matter of course. They were quite charming about it, as delightful hosts as one could wish—if only they lived differently!—but Elliott wasn’t used to being taken for granted. She might have been these new cousins’ own sort, for any difference she could detect in their actions. They didn’t seem to begin to understand her importance. Perhaps she wasn’t so important, after all. The doubt had never before entered her mind.
The fact was, of course, that among these busy, efficient people she was feeling80quite useless; and she didn’t like to appear incompetent when she knew herself to be, in her own line, a thoroughly able person. But it irked her to think that she had been forced into a position where in self-defense she must either acquire a kind of efficiency she didn’t want or do without. At the same time it troubled her lest this reluctance become apparent. For they were all loves and she wouldn’t hurt their feelings for worlds. And she did wish them to admire her. But she had a feeling that they didn’t altogether, not even Priscilla and Bruce.
Nevertheless, the next day when Laura asked whether she would take her book out to the hay-field or stay where she was on the porch, Elliott looked up from “Lorna Doone” and said, with the prettiest little coaxing air, “If I go, will you let me pitch hay?” And Laura answered as lightly, “Certainly.” “I don’t believe you,” said81Elliott. “You may ride on the hay-load,” smiled Laura. “That won’t do at all,” Elliott shook her head. “If I can’t pitch hay, I’ll stay here.” Laura laughed and said: “You certainly will be more comfortable here. I can’t quite see you pitching hay.” And Elliott retorted: “You don’t know what I could do, if I tried. But since you won’t let me try—”
It was all smiling and gay, but it was a crawl, and Elliott knew it and knew that Laura knew it, and she felt ashamed. Wasn’t Stannard’s frank shirking better than her camouflaged variety? But hadn’t she picked berries all the morning in a stuffy sunbonnet under a broiling sun, until she felt as red as a berry and much less fresh and sweet?
“It’s a shame,” said Laura, “that this is just our busy season; but you know you have to make hay while the sun shines. Father thinks we can finish the lower82meadows to-day. Then to-morrow we begin cutting on the hill. It’s really fun to ride the hay-rake. I mostly drive the rake, though now and then I pitch for variety.”
She looked so strong and brown and merry, as she talked, that Elliott, comfortably established with “Lorna Doone,” felt almost like flinging her book into the next chair, slipping her arm through Laura’s, and crying, “Lead on!” But she remembered just in time that, as she hadn’t wished to come to the Cameron Farm, it would ill become her to have a good time there. Which may seem like a childish way of looking at the thing, but isn’t really confined to children at all.
So the hay-makers tramped away down the road, their laughter floating cheerfully back over their shoulders; and Elliott sat on the big shady veranda and read her book.
She might have enjoyed it less had she83heard Henry’s frank summary at the turn of the lane, when his father inquired the whereabouts of Stannard.
“Beau Brummell hiked over to Upton half an hour ago. I offered him the other Henry, but he doesn’t seem to care to drive anything short of a Pierce-Arrow. Twins, aren’t they?” and Henry nodded in the direction of the veranda.
“Sh-h!” reproved Laura. “They’re our guests.”
“Guests is just it. Yes, they’reguests, all right.”
“Mother says they don’t know how to work,” Priscilla observed.
“That’s another true word, too.”
Mother turned gaily in the road ahead. “Who is talking about me?” she called.
Priscilla frisked on to join her, and Henry fell back to a confidential exchange with Laura. “Beau wouldn’t be so bad if he could forget for a minute that he owned the earth and had a mortgage on the solar84system. But when he tries to snub Bruce—gee, that gets me!”
“Aren’t you twanging the G string rather often lately, Hal?—Stannard can’t snub Bruce. Bruce isn’t the kind of fellow to be snubbed.”
“Just the same, it makes me sick to think anybody’s a cousin to me that would try it.”
Laura switched back to the main subject. “We didn’t ask them up here as extra farm hands, you know.”
“Bull’s-eye,” said Henry, and grinned.
What she did not know failed to trouble Elliott. She read on in lonely peace through the afternoon. At a most exciting point the telephone rang. Four, that was the Cameron call. Elliott went into the house and took down the receiver.
“Mr. Robert Cameron’s,” she said pleasantly.
“S-say!” stuttered a high, sharp voice, “my little b-b-boys have let your c-c-cows85out o’ the p-p-pasture. I’ll g-give ’em a t-t-trouncin’, but ’t won’t git your c-c-cows back. They let ’em out the G-G-Garrett Road, and your medder gate’s open. Jim B-B-Blake saw it this mornin’! Why the man didn’t shut it, I d-d-dunno. You’ll have to hurry to save your medder.”
“But,” gasped Elliott, “I don’t understand! You say the cows—”
“Are comin’ down G-Garrett Road,” snapped the stuttering voice, “the whole kit an’ b-b-bilin’ of ’em. They’ll be inter your upper m-medder in five m-m-minutes.”
Over the wire came the click of a receiver snapping back on its hook. Elliott hung up and started toward the door. The cows had been let out. Just why this incident was so disastrous she did not quite comprehend, but she must go and tell her uncle. Before her feet touched the veranda, however, she stopped. Five minutes? Why, there wouldn’t be time to86go to the lower meadow, to say nothing of any one’s doing anything about the situation.
And then, with breath-taking suddenness, the thing burst on her. She was alone in the house; even Aunt Jessica and Priscilla had gone to the hay-field. The situation, whatever it was, was up to her.
For a minute the girl leaned weakly against the wall. Cows—there were thirty in the herd—and she loathed cows! She was afraid of cows. She knew nothing about cows. She was never in the slightest degree sure of what the creatures might take it into their heads to do. For a minute she stood irresolute. Then something stirred in the girl, something self-reliant and strong. Never in her life had Elliott Cameron had to do alone anything that she didn’t already know how to do. Now for the first time she faced an emergency on none but her own resources,87an emergency that was quite out of her line.
Her brain worked swiftly as her feet moved to the door. In reality, she had wavered only a second. When Tom went for the cows, didn’t he take old Prince? There was just a chance that Prince wasn’t in the hay-field. She ran down the steps calling, “Prince! Prince!” The old dog rose deliberately from his place on the shady side of the barn and trotted toward her, wagging his tail. “Come, Prince!” cried Elliott, and ran out of the yard.
Luckily, berrying had that very morning taken her by a short cut to the vicinity of the upper meadow. She knew the way. But what was likely to happen? Town-bred girl that she was, she had no idea. A recollection of the smooth, upstanding expanse of the upper meadow gave her a clue. If the cows got into that88even erectness— She began to run, Prince bounding beside her, his brown tail a waving plume.
She could see the meadow now, a smooth green sea ruffled by nothing heavier than the light feet of the summer breeze. She could see the great gate invitingly open to the road and oh!—her heart stopped beating, then pounded on at a suffocating pace—she could see the cows! There they came, down the hill, quite filling the narrow roadway with their horrid bulk, making it look like a moving river of broad backs and tossing heads. What could she do, the girl wondered; what could she do against so many? She tried to run faster. Somehow she must reach the gate first. There was nothing even then, so far as she knew, to prevent their trampling her down and rushing over her into the waving greenness, unless she could slam the gate in their faces. You can see that she really did not know much about cows.
89
But Prince knew them. Prince understood now why his master’s guest had summoned him to this hot run in the sunshine. The prospect did not daunt Prince. He ran barking to the meadow side of the road. The foremost cow which, grazing the dusty grass, had strayed toward the gate, turned back into the ruts again. Elliott pulled the gate shut, in her haste leaving herself outside. There, too spent to climb over, she flattened her slender form against the gray boards, while, driven by Prince, the whole herd, horns tossing, tails switching, flanks heaving, thudded its way past.
And there, three minutes later, Bruce, dashing over the hill in response to a message relayed by telephone and boy to the lower meadow, found her.
“The cows have gone down,” Elliott told him. “Prince has them. He will take them home, won’t he?”
“Prince? Good enough! He’ll get the90cows home all right. But what are you doing in this mix-up?”
“A woman telephoned the house,” said Elliott. “I was afraid I couldn’t reach any of you in time, so I came over myself.”
“You like cows?” The question shot at her like a bullet.
The piquant nose wrinkled entrancingly. “Scared to death of ’em.”
“I guessed as much.” The boy nodded. “Gee whiz, but you’ve got good stuff in you!”
And though her shoes were dusty and her hair tousled, and though her knees hadn’t stopped shaking even yet, Elliott Cameron felt a sudden sense of satisfaction and pride. She turned and looked over the fence at the meadow. In its unmarred beauty it seemed to belong to her.
91CHAPTER VA SLACKER UNPERCEIVED
“I think,” remarked Elliott, the next morning, “that I will walk up and watch the haying for a while.”She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn’t spend six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as were this household’s members, and do nothing at all.92That was the disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the pans shine.Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way through the kitchen. “What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every one of them.”A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica’s praise made them doubly so.It was then, as she hung up her towels,93that she made the remark about walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the field could not commit her to anything.“If you are going up,” said Aunt Jessica, “perhaps you will take some of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade.”That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one’s words, she never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business—Elliott had expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity94with activity. They all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott’s advent would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow’s nest that the scythes had disclosed.It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill little yelp, “Come on! Come on, peoples! You95don’t know what we’ve got here,” before they straggled over to what Henry called “the refreshment booth.”Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her words with a whole battery of dimples, all the while privately resolving that no contagion of enthusiasm should inoculate her with the haymaking germ. There were factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand; the sky was so blue, the breeze was so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious, and the mountain air had such zest in it. But, on the other hand, the sun was hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla’s tip-tilted little nose was already liberally besprinkled. If Laura hadn’t such96a wonderful skin, she would have been a sight long ago, despite the wide brim of her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and Laura looked like a mere husky farm girl, as she guided her horses skilfully around the field. How strong her arms must be! But how could a girl with Laura’s intelligence and high spirit and charm enjoy putting all this time into haying? With Priscilla, of course, matters stood differently. Children never discriminate.“No, I sha’n’t do that kind of thing,” said Elliott, firmly. But she would investigate the haymaking game, investigate it coolly and dispassionately, to find out exactly what it amounted to—aside, of course, from an accumulation of dried grass in barns. To this end, she invaded the upper meadow a good many times, during the next few days, took a turn on the hay-rake, now and then helped load and unload, riding down to the barn on a mound of high-piled fragrance, and came97to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking wasn’t to be compared with knocking a ball back and forth across a net. To try one’s hand at it might do well enough, now and then, to spice an otherwise luxurious life, but as a steady diet the thing was too unrelenting. One was driven by wind and sun; even the clouds took a hand in cudgeling one on. A person must keep at it whether she cared to or not—in actual practice this point never troubled Elliott, who always stopped when she wished to—there were no spectators, and, heaviest demerit of all, it was undeniably hard work.But she was curious to discover what Laura found in it, and you know Elliott Cameron well enough by this time to understand that she was not a girl who hesitated to ask for information.The last load had dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding her long black98braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on the bed and watched her.“Aren’t you glad it’s done?” she asked.“The haying? Oh, yes, I’m always glad when we have it safely in. But I love it.”“Really? It isn’t work for girls.”“No? Then once a year I’ll take a vacation from being a girl. But that doesn’t hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls can do, to help win this war.”“To help win the war?” echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn’t done much of it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?“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,99or 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 the100hand-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.101But Elliott couldn’t let herself pass 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!”102“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 cute103in 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! Nobody 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 it104wasn’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!” ejaculated 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 potatoes105in 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 boyscan?”106“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 cannot107do 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 in108the 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,109hadn’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 other110than 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.”Corn—didn’t Hoover urge people to eat corn? In helping the corn crop, she too might feel herself feeding the Belgians.Gertrude linked her arm in her slender cousin’s as they left the table. “I’ll show you where the tools are,” she said. “Harry runs the cultivator in the field, but we use hand-hoes in the garden.”“You will have to show me more than that,” said Elliott. “What does hoeing do to corn, anyhow?”“Keeps down the weeds that eat up the nourishment in the soil,” recited Gertrude glibly, “and by stirring up the ground keeps in the moisture. You like to know the reason for things, too, don’t you? I’m glad. I always do.”111It wasn’t half bad, with a hoe over her shoulder, in company with other boys and girls, to swing through the dewy morning to the garden. Priscilla had joined the squad when she heard Elliott was to be in it, and with Stannard and Tom the three girls made a little procession. It proved a simple enough matter to wield a hoe. Elliott watched the others for a few minutes, and if her hills did not take on as workmanlike an appearance as Tom’s and Gertrude’s, or even as Priscilla’s, they all assured her practice would mend the fault.“You’ll do it all right,” Priscilla encouraged her.“Sure thing!” said Tom. “We might have a race and see who gets his row done first.”“No races for me, yet,” said Elliott. “It would be altogether too tame. I’d qualify for the booby prize without trying. But the rest of you may race, if you want to.”112“Just wait!” prophesied Stannard darkly. “Wait an hour or two and see how you like hoeing.”Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand, she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.“Run along, little boy, to your row,” she admonished him. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she hadn’t, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a time—it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours—she thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed her113fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her behind.Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott’s. “That looks fine,” she said, “for a beginner. You must stop and rest whenever you’re tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy, not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won’t let us girls work when the sun’s too hot, either.”Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first time in her life she didn’t feel quite like letting herself do what she wished to.What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?—a few scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn’t matter to the114Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else whether she hoed or didn’t hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that, even of garden-patches—but not every one would say it. Some people knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how long this row was! Would she ever,everreach the end?Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. “That looks nice. You haven’t got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you’ve done ’em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip along real quick.”Elliott leaned on her hoe. “Do you play the piano?”“Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by. I must get back to my row.”“Do you like hoeing?” Elliott called after her.115“I like to get it done.” The small figure skipped nimbly away.“‘Get it done!’” Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green blades, pessimism in her voice. “After one row, isn’t there another, and another, andanother, forever?” She slashed into a mat of chickweed with venom.“I knew you’d get tired,” said Stannard, at her elbow. “Come on over to those trees and rest a bit. Sun’s getting hot here.”Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body, turning her muscles slack. Hadn’t Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn’t let them work in too hot a sun?“You’re tired; quit it!” urged Stannard.“Not just yet,” said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.116Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to go with Stan. Then why hadn’t she gone? The question puzzled the girl. Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her hesitate to try it now?She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: “This war will be won by tired men who—” She couldn’t quite get the rest. An impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired, dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn’t they?117It seemed absurd; but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren’t something in it? If all they said was true, why—and Elliott’s tired back straightened—why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be if she didn’t quit.It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought, of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on the veranda, but that isn’t always the way things work. Now she seemed to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere. It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then the minute118passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again she was aware only of a suspicion that possibly when one was having the most fun was not always when one was being the most useful.“Well,” said a pleasant voice, “how does the hoeing go?”And there stood Laura with a pitcher in her hand, and on her face a look—was it of mingled surprise and respect?“You mustn’t work too long the first day,” she told Elliott. “You’re not hardened to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now and try it again later on. I have your book under my arm.”When, that noon, they all trooped up to the house, hot and hungry, Elliott went with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody thanked her for anything, and she didn’t even notice the lack. Farming wasn’t like canteening, where one expected thanks. As she scrubbed her hands she noticed that her nails were hopeless, but her attention119failed to concentrate on their demoralized state. Hadn’t she finished her row?“Stuck it out, did you?” said Bruce, as they sat down at dinner. “I bet you would.”“I shouldn’t have dared look any of you in the face again, if I hadn’t,” smiled Elliott. But his words rang warm in her ears.
“I think,” remarked Elliott, the next morning, “that I will walk up and watch the haying for a while.”
She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn’t spend six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as were this household’s members, and do nothing at all.92That was the disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the pans shine.
Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way through the kitchen. “What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every one of them.”
A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica’s praise made them doubly so.
It was then, as she hung up her towels,93that she made the remark about walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the field could not commit her to anything.
“If you are going up,” said Aunt Jessica, “perhaps you will take some of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade.”
That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one’s words, she never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.
The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business—Elliott had expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity94with activity. They all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott’s advent would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow’s nest that the scythes had disclosed.
It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill little yelp, “Come on! Come on, peoples! You95don’t know what we’ve got here,” before they straggled over to what Henry called “the refreshment booth.”
Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.
And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her words with a whole battery of dimples, all the while privately resolving that no contagion of enthusiasm should inoculate her with the haymaking germ. There were factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand; the sky was so blue, the breeze was so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious, and the mountain air had such zest in it. But, on the other hand, the sun was hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla’s tip-tilted little nose was already liberally besprinkled. If Laura hadn’t such96a wonderful skin, she would have been a sight long ago, despite the wide brim of her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and Laura looked like a mere husky farm girl, as she guided her horses skilfully around the field. How strong her arms must be! But how could a girl with Laura’s intelligence and high spirit and charm enjoy putting all this time into haying? With Priscilla, of course, matters stood differently. Children never discriminate.
“No, I sha’n’t do that kind of thing,” said Elliott, firmly. But she would investigate the haymaking game, investigate it coolly and dispassionately, to find out exactly what it amounted to—aside, of course, from an accumulation of dried grass in barns. To this end, she invaded the upper meadow a good many times, during the next few days, took a turn on the hay-rake, now and then helped load and unload, riding down to the barn on a mound of high-piled fragrance, and came97to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking wasn’t to be compared with knocking a ball back and forth across a net. To try one’s hand at it might do well enough, now and then, to spice an otherwise luxurious life, but as a steady diet the thing was too unrelenting. One was driven by wind and sun; even the clouds took a hand in cudgeling one on. A person must keep at it whether she cared to or not—in actual practice this point never troubled Elliott, who always stopped when she wished to—there were no spectators, and, heaviest demerit of all, it was undeniably hard work.
But she was curious to discover what Laura found in it, and you know Elliott Cameron well enough by this time to understand that she was not a girl who hesitated to ask for information.
The last load had dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding her long black98braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on the bed and watched her.
“Aren’t you glad it’s done?” she asked.
“The haying? Oh, yes, I’m always glad when we have it safely in. But I love it.”
“Really? It isn’t work for girls.”
“No? Then once a year I’ll take a vacation from being a girl. But that doesn’t hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls can do, to help win this war.”
“To help win the war?” echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn’t done much of it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?
“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,99or 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 the100hand-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.
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But Elliott couldn’t let herself pass 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!”
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“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 cute103in 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! Nobody 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 it104wasn’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!” ejaculated 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 potatoes105in 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 boyscan?”
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“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 cannot107do 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 in108the 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,109hadn’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 other110than 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.”
Corn—didn’t Hoover urge people to eat corn? In helping the corn crop, she too might feel herself feeding the Belgians.
Gertrude linked her arm in her slender cousin’s as they left the table. “I’ll show you where the tools are,” she said. “Harry runs the cultivator in the field, but we use hand-hoes in the garden.”
“You will have to show me more than that,” said Elliott. “What does hoeing do to corn, anyhow?”
“Keeps down the weeds that eat up the nourishment in the soil,” recited Gertrude glibly, “and by stirring up the ground keeps in the moisture. You like to know the reason for things, too, don’t you? I’m glad. I always do.”
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It wasn’t half bad, with a hoe over her shoulder, in company with other boys and girls, to swing through the dewy morning to the garden. Priscilla had joined the squad when she heard Elliott was to be in it, and with Stannard and Tom the three girls made a little procession. It proved a simple enough matter to wield a hoe. Elliott watched the others for a few minutes, and if her hills did not take on as workmanlike an appearance as Tom’s and Gertrude’s, or even as Priscilla’s, they all assured her practice would mend the fault.
“You’ll do it all right,” Priscilla encouraged her.
“Sure thing!” said Tom. “We might have a race and see who gets his row done first.”
“No races for me, yet,” said Elliott. “It would be altogether too tame. I’d qualify for the booby prize without trying. But the rest of you may race, if you want to.”
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“Just wait!” prophesied Stannard darkly. “Wait an hour or two and see how you like hoeing.”
Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand, she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.
“Run along, little boy, to your row,” she admonished him. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she hadn’t, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a time—it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours—she thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed her113fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her behind.
Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott’s. “That looks fine,” she said, “for a beginner. You must stop and rest whenever you’re tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy, not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won’t let us girls work when the sun’s too hot, either.”
Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first time in her life she didn’t feel quite like letting herself do what she wished to.
What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?—a few scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn’t matter to the114Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else whether she hoed or didn’t hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that, even of garden-patches—but not every one would say it. Some people knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how long this row was! Would she ever,everreach the end?
Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. “That looks nice. You haven’t got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you’ve done ’em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip along real quick.”
Elliott leaned on her hoe. “Do you play the piano?”
“Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by. I must get back to my row.”
“Do you like hoeing?” Elliott called after her.
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“I like to get it done.” The small figure skipped nimbly away.
“‘Get it done!’” Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green blades, pessimism in her voice. “After one row, isn’t there another, and another, andanother, forever?” She slashed into a mat of chickweed with venom.
“I knew you’d get tired,” said Stannard, at her elbow. “Come on over to those trees and rest a bit. Sun’s getting hot here.”
Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body, turning her muscles slack. Hadn’t Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn’t let them work in too hot a sun?
“You’re tired; quit it!” urged Stannard.
“Not just yet,” said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.
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Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to go with Stan. Then why hadn’t she gone? The question puzzled the girl. Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her hesitate to try it now?
She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: “This war will be won by tired men who—” She couldn’t quite get the rest. An impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired, dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn’t they?117It seemed absurd; but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren’t something in it? If all they said was true, why—and Elliott’s tired back straightened—why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be if she didn’t quit.
It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought, of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on the veranda, but that isn’t always the way things work. Now she seemed to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere. It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then the minute118passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again she was aware only of a suspicion that possibly when one was having the most fun was not always when one was being the most useful.
“Well,” said a pleasant voice, “how does the hoeing go?”
And there stood Laura with a pitcher in her hand, and on her face a look—was it of mingled surprise and respect?
“You mustn’t work too long the first day,” she told Elliott. “You’re not hardened to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now and try it again later on. I have your book under my arm.”
When, that noon, they all trooped up to the house, hot and hungry, Elliott went with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody thanked her for anything, and she didn’t even notice the lack. Farming wasn’t like canteening, where one expected thanks. As she scrubbed her hands she noticed that her nails were hopeless, but her attention119failed to concentrate on their demoralized state. Hadn’t she finished her row?
“Stuck it out, did you?” said Bruce, as they sat down at dinner. “I bet you would.”
“I shouldn’t have dared look any of you in the face again, if I hadn’t,” smiled Elliott. But his words rang warm in her ears.