Rilla of Ingleside
Susan stalked undauntedly into the kitchen, seized an old storm coat of
the doctor's and after a wild pursuit and several fruitless dashes and
pounces, managed to throw it over the cat and can. Then she proceeded
to saw the can loose with a can-opener, while Rilla held the squirming
animal, rolled in the coat. Anything like Doc's shrieks while the
process was going on was never heard at Ingleside. Susan was in mortal
dread that the Albert Crawfords would hear it and conclude she was
torturing the creature to death. Doc was a wrathful and indignant cat
when he was freed. Evidently he thought the whole thing was a put-up
job to bring him low. He gave Susan a baleful glance by way of
gratitude and rushed out of the kitchen to take sanctuary in the jungle
of the sweet-briar hedge, where he sulked for the rest of the day.
Susan swept up her broken dishes grimly.
"The Huns themselves couldn't have worked more havoc here," she said
bitterly. "But when people will keep a Satanic animal like that, in
spite of all warnings, they cannot complain when their wedding bowls
get broken. Things have come to a pretty pass when an honest woman
cannot leave her kitchen for a few minutes without a fiend of a cat
rampaging through it with his head in a salmon can."
CHAPTER X
THE TROUBLES OF RILLA
October passed out and the dreary days of November and December dragged
by. The world shook with the thunder of contending armies; Antwerp
fell--Turkey declared war--gallant little Serbia gathered herself
together and struck a deadly blow at her oppressor; and in quiet,
hill-girdled Glen St. Mary, thousands of miles away, hearts beat with
hope and fear over the varying dispatches from day to day.
"A few months ago," said Miss Oliver, "we thought and talked in terms
of Glen St. Mary. Now, we think and talk in terms of military tactics
and diplomatic intrigue."
There was just one great event every day--the coming of the mail. Even
Susan admitted that from the time the mail-courier's buggy rumbled over
the little bridge between the station and the village until the papers
were brought home and read, she could not work properly.
"I must take up my knitting then and knit hard till the papers come,
Mrs. Dr. dear. Knitting is something you can do, even when your heart
is going like a trip-hammer and the pit of your stomach feels all gone
and your thoughts are catawampus. Then when I see the headlines, be
they good or be they bad, I calm down and am able to go about my
business again. It is an unfortunate thing that the mail comes in just
when our dinner rush is on, and I think the Government could arrange
things better. But the drive on Calais has failed, as I felt perfectly
sure it would, and the Kaiser will not eat his Christmas dinner in
London this year. Do you know, Mrs. Dr. dear,"--Susan's voice lowered
as a token that she was going to impart a very shocking piece of
information,--"I have been told on good authority--or else you may be
sure I would not be repeating it when it concerns a minster--that the
Rev. Mr. Arnold goes to Charlottetown every week and takes a Turkish
bath for his rheumatism. The idea of him doing that when we are at war
with Turkey? One of his own deacons has always insisted that Mr.
Arnold's theology was not sound and I am beginning to believe that
there is some reason to fear it. Well, I must bestir myself this
afternoon and get little Jem's Christmas cake packed up for him. He
will enjoy it, if the blessed boy is not drowned in mud before that
time."
Jem was in camp on Salisbury Plain and was writing gay, cheery letters
home in spite of the mud. Walter was at Redmond and his letters to
Rilla were anything but cheerful. She never opened one without a dread
tugging at her heart that it would tell her he had enlisted. His
unhappiness made her unhappy. She wanted to put her arm round him and
comfort him, as she had done that day in Rainbow Valley. She hated
everybody who was responsible for Walter's unhappiness.
"He will go yet," she murmured miserably to herself one afternoon, as
she sat alone in Rainbow Valley, reading a letter from him, "he will go
yet--and if he does I just can't bear it."
Walter wrote that some one had sent him an envelope containing a white
feather.
"I deserved it, Rilla. I felt that I ought to put it on and wear
it--proclaiming myself to all Redmond the coward I know I am. The boys
of my year are going--going. Every day two or three of them join up.
Some days I almost make up my mind to do it--and then I see myself
thrusting a bayonet through another man--some woman's husband or
sweetheart or son--perhaps the father of little children--I see myself
lying alone torn and mangled, burning with thirst on a cold, wet field,
surrounded by dead and dying men--and I know I never can. I can't face
even the thought of it. How could I face the reality? There are times
when I wish I had never been born. Life has always seemed such a
beautiful thing to me--and now it is a hideous thing. Rilla-my-Rilla,
if it weren't for your letters--your dear, bright, merry, funny,
comical, believing letters--I think I'd give up. And Una's! Una is
really a little brick, isn't she? There's a wonderful fineness and
firmness under all that shy, wistful girlishness of her. She hasn't
your knack of writing laugh-provoking epistles, but there's something
in her letters--I don't know what--that makes me feel at least while
I'm reading them, that I could even go to the front. Not that she ever
says a word about my going--or hints that I ought to go--she isn't that
kind. It's just the spirit of them--the personality that is in them.
Well, I can't go. You have a brother and Una has a friend who is a
coward."
"Oh, I wish Walter wouldn't write such things," sighed Rilla. "It hurts
me. He isn't a coward--he isn't--he isn't!"
She looked wistfully about her--at the little woodland valley and the
grey, lonely fallows beyond. How everything reminded her of Walter! The
red leaves still clung to the wild sweet-briars that overhung a curve
of the brook; their stems were gemmed with the pearls of the gentle
rain that had fallen a little while before. Walter had once written a
poem describing them. The wind was sighing and rustling among the
frosted brown bracken ferns, then lessening sorrowfully away down the
brook. Walter had said once that he loved the melancholy of the autumn
wind on a November day. The old Tree Lovers still clasped each other in
a faithful embrace, and the White Lady, now a great white-branched
tree, stood out beautifully fine, against the grey velvet sky. Walter
had named them long ago; and last November, when he had walked with her
and Miss Oliver in the Valley, he had said, looking at the leafless
Lady, with a young silver moon hanging over her, "A white birch is a
beautiful Pagan maiden who has never lost the Eden secret of being
naked and unashamed." Miss Oliver had said, "Put that into a poem,
Walter," and he had done so, and read it to them the next day--just a
short thing with goblin imagination in every line of it. Oh, how happy
they had been then!
Well--Rilla scrambled to her feet--time was up. Jims would soon be
awake--his lunch had to be prepared--his little slips had to be
ironed--there was a committee meeting of the Junior Reds that
night--there was her new knitting bag to finish--it would be the
handsomest bag in the Junior Society--handsomer even than Irene
Howard's--she must get home and get to work. She was busy these days
from morning till night. That little monkey of a Jims took so much
time. But he was growing--he was certainly growing. And there were
times when Rilla felt sure that it was not merely a pious hope but an
absolute fact that he was getting decidedly better looking. Sometimes
she felt quite proud of him; and sometimes she yearned to spank him.
But she never kissed him or wanted to kiss him.
"The Germans captured Lodz today," said Miss Oliver, one December
evening, when she, Mrs. Blythe, and Susan were busy sewing or knitting
in the cosy living-room. "This war is at least extending my knowledge
of geography. Schoolma'am though I am, three months ago I didn't know
there was such a place in the world such as Lodz. Had I heard it
mentioned I would have known nothing about it and cared as little. I
know all about it now--its size, its standing, its military
significance. Yesterday the news that the Germans have captured it in
their second rush to Warsaw made my heart sink into my boots. I woke up
in the night and worried over it. I don't wonder babies always cry when
they wake up in the night. Everything presses on my soul then and no
cloud has a silver lining."
"When I wake up in the night and cannot go to sleep again," remarked
Susan, who was knitting and reading at the same time, "I pass the
moments by torturing the Kaiser to death. Last night I fried him in
boiling oil and a great comfort it was to me, remembering those Belgian
babies."
"If the Kaiser were here and had a pain in his shoulder you'd be the
first to run for the liniment bottle to rub him down," laughed Miss
Oliver.
"Would I?" cried outraged Susan. "Would I, Miss Oliver? I would rub him
down with coal oil, Miss Oliver--and leave it to blister. That is what
I would do and that you may tie to. A pain in his shoulder, indeed! He
will have pains all over him before he is through with what he has
started."
"We are told to love our enemies, Susan," said the doctor solemnly.
"Yes, our enemies, but not King George's enemies, doctor dear,"
retorted Susan crushingly. She was so well pleased with herself over
this flattening out of the doctor completely that she even smiled as
she polished her glasses. Susan had never given in to glasses before,
but she had done so at last in order to be able to read the war
news--and not a dispatch got by her. "Can you tell me, Miss Oliver, how
to pronounce M-l-a-w-a and B-z-u-r-a and P-r-z-e-m-y-s-l?"
"That last is a conundrum which nobody seems to have solved yet, Susan.
And I can make only a guess at the others."
"These foreign names are far from being decent, in my opinion," said
disgusted Susan.
"I dare say the Austrians and Russians would think Saskatchewan and
Musquodoboit about as bad, Susan," said Miss Oliver. "The Serbians have
done wonderfully of late. They have captured Belgrade."
"And sent the Austrian creatures packing across the Danube with a flea
in their ear," said Susan with a relish, as she settled down to examine
a map of Eastern Europe, prodding each locality with the knitting
needle to brand it on her memory. "Cousin Sophia said awhile ago that
Serbia was done for, but I told her there was still such a thing as an
over-ruling Providence, doubt it who might. It says here that the
slaughter was terrible. For all they were foreigners it is awful to
think of so many men being killed, Mrs. Dr. dear--for they are scarce
enough as it is."
Rilla was upstairs relieving her over-charged feelings by writing in
her diary.
"Things have all 'gone catawampus,' as Susan says, with me this week.
Part of it was my own fault and part of it wasn't, and I seem to be
equally unhappy over both parts.
"I went to town the other day to buy a new winter hat. It was the first
time nobody insisted on coming with me to help me select it, and I felt
that mother had really given up thinking of me as a child. And I found
the dearest hat--it was simply bewitching. It was a velvet hat, of the
very shade of rich green that was made for me. It just goes with my
hair and complexion beautifully, bringing out the red-brown shades and
what Miss Oliver calls my 'creaminess' so well. Only once before in my
life have I come across that precise shade of green. When I was twelve
I had a little beaver hat of it, and all the girls in school were wild