Rilla of Ingleside
have rushed off to Rainbow Valley and brought her an armful of
mayflowers, but I knew that wasn't what she wanted. And after Walter
got home last night he slipped away to the valley and brought mother
home all the mayflowers he could find. Nobody had said a word to him
about it--he just remembered himself that Jem used to bring mother the
first mayflowers and so he brought them in Jem's place. It shows how
tender and thoughtful he is. And yet there are people who send him
cruel letters!
"It seems strange that we can go in with ordinary life just as if
nothing were happening overseas that concerned us, just as if any day
might not bring us awful news. But we can and do. Susan is putting in
the garden, and mother and she are housecleaning, and we Junior Reds
are getting up a concert in aid of the Belgians. We have been
practising for a month and having no end of trouble and bother with
cranky people. Miranda Pryor promised to help with a dialogue and when
she had her part all learnt her father put his foot down and refused to
allow her to help at all. I am not blaming Miranda exactly, but I do
think she might have a little more spunk sometimes. If she put her foot
down once in a while she might bring her father to terms, for she is
all the housekeeper he has and what would he do if she 'struck'? If I
were in Miranda's shoes I'd find some way of managing
Whiskers-on-the-moon. I would horse-whip him, or bite him, if nothing
else would serve. But Miranda is a meek and obedient daughter whose
days should be long in the land.
"I couldn't get anyone else to take the part, because nobody liked it,
so finally I had to take it myself. Olive Kirk is on the concert
committee and goes against me in every single thing. But I got my way
in asking Mrs. Channing to come out from town and sing for us, anyhow.
She is a beautiful singer and will draw such a crowd that we will make
more than we will have to pay her. Olive Kirk thought our local talent
good enough and Minnie Clow won't sing at all now in the choruses
because she would be so nervous before Mrs. Channing. And Minnie is the
only good alto we have! There are times when I am so exasperated that I
feel tempted to wash my hands of the whole affair; but after I dance
round my room a few times in sheer rage I cool down and have another
whack at it. Just at present I am racked with worry for fear the Isaac
Reeses are taking whooping-cough. They have all got a dreadful cold and
there are five of them who have important parts in the programme and if
they go and develop whooping-cough what shall I do? Dick Reese's violin
solo is to be one of our titbits and Kit Reese is in every tableau and
the three small girls have the cutest flag-drill. I've been toiling for
weeks to train them in it, and now it seems likely that all my trouble
will go for nothing.
"Jims cut his first tooth today. I am very glad, for he is nearly nine
months old and Mary Vance has been insinuating that he is awfully
backward about cutting his teeth. He has begun to creep but doesn't
crawl as most babies do. He trots about on all fours and carries things
in his mouth like a little dog. Nobody can say he isn't up to schedule
time in the matter of creeping anyway--away ahead of it indeed, since
ten months is Morgan's average for creeping. He is so cute, it will be
a shame if his dad never sees him. His hair is coming on nicely too,
and I am not without hope that it will be curly.
"Just for a few minutes, while I've been writing of Jims and the
concert, I've forgotten Ypres and the poison gas and the casualty
lists. Now it all rushes back, worse than ever. Oh, if we could just
know that Jem is all right! I used to be so furious with Jem when he
called me Spider. And now, if he would just come whistling through the
hall and call out, 'Hello, Spider,' as he used to do, I would think it
the loveliest name in the world."
Rilla put away her diary and went out to the garden. The spring evening
was very lovely. The long, green, seaward-looking glen was filled with
dusk, and beyond it were meadows of sunset. The harbour was radiant,
purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere. The maple grove was beginning
to be misty green. Rilla looked about her with wistful eyes. Who said
that spring was the joy of the year? It was the heart-break of the
year. And the pale-purply mornings and the daffodil stars and the wind
in the old pine were so many separate pangs of the heart-break. Would
life ever be free from dread again?
"It's good to see P.E.I. twilight once more," said Walter, joining her.
"I didn't really remember that the sea was so blue and the roads so red
and the wood nooks so wild and fairy haunted. Yes, the fairies still
abide here. I vow I could find scores of them under the violets in
Rainbow Valley."
Rilla was momentarily happy. This sounded like the Walter of yore. She
hoped he was forgetting certain things that had troubled him.
"And isn't the sky blue over Rainbow Valley?" she said, responding to
his mood. "Blue--blue--you'd have to say 'blue' a hundred times before
you could express how blue it is."
Susan wandered by, her head tied up with a shawl, her hands full of
garden implements. Doc, stealthy and wild-eyed, was shadowing her steps
among the spirea bushes.
"The sky may be blue," said Susan, "but that cat has been Hyde all day
so we will likely have rain tonight and by the same token I have
rheumatism in my shoulder."
"It may rain--but don't think rheumatism, Susan--think violets," said
Walter gaily--rather too gaily, Rilla thought.
Susan considered him unsympathetic.
"Indeed, Walter dear, I do not know what you mean by thinking violets,"
she responded stiffly, "and rheumatism is not a thing to be joked
about, as you may some day realize for yourself. I hope I am not of the
kind that is always complaining of their aches and pains, especially
now when the news is so terrible. Rheumatism is bad enough but I
realize, and none better, that it is not to be compared to being gassed
by the Huns."
"Oh, my God, no!" exclaimed Walter passionately. He turned and went
back to the house.
Susan shook her head. She disapproved entirely of such ejaculations. "I
hope he will not let his mother hear him talking like that," she
thought as she stacked the hoes and rake away.
Rilla was standing among the budding daffodils with tear-filled eyes.
Her evening was spoiled; she detested Susan, who had somehow hurt
Walter; and Jem--had Jem been gassed? Had he died in torture?
"I can't endure this suspense any longer," said Rilla desperately.
But she endured it as the others did for another week. Then a letter
came from Jem. He was all right.
"I've come through without a scratch, dad. Don't know how I or any of
us did it. You'll have seen all about it in the papers--I can't write
of it. But the Huns haven't got through--they won't get through. Jerry
was knocked stiff by a shell one time, but it was only the shock. He
was all right in a few days. Grant is safe, too."
Nan had a letter from Jerry Meredith. "I came back to consciousness at
dawn," he wrote. "Couldn't tell what had happened to me but thought
that I was done for. I was all alone and afraid--terribly afraid. Dead
men were all around me, lying on the horrible grey, slimy fields. I was
woefully thirsty--and I thought of David and the Bethlehem water--and
of the old spring in Rainbow Valley under the maples. I seemed to see
it just before me--and you standing laughing on the other side of
it--and I thought it was all over with me. And I didn't care. Honestly,
I didn't care. I just felt a dreadful childish fear of loneliness and
of those dead men around me, and a sort of wonder how this could have
happened to me. Then they found me and carted me off and before long I
discovered that there wasn't really anything wrong with me. I'm going
back to the trenches tomorrow. Every man is needed there that can be
got."
"Laughter is gone out of the world," said Faith Meredith, who had come
over to report on her letters. "I remember telling old Mrs. Taylor long
ago that the world was a world of laughter. But it isn't so any longer."
"It's a shriek of anguish," said Gertrude Oliver.
"We must keep a little laughter, girls," said Mrs. Blythe. "A good
laugh is as good as a prayer sometimes--only sometimes," she added
under her breath. She had found it very hard to laugh during the three
weeks she had just lived through--she, Anne Blythe, to whom laughter
had always come so easily and freshly. And what hurt most was that
Rilla's laughter had grown so rare--Rilla whom she used to think
laughed over-much. Was all the child's girlhood to be so clouded? Yet
how strong and clever and womanly she was growing! How patiently she
knitted and sewed and manipulated those uncertain Junior Reds! And how
wonderful she was with Jims.
"She really could not do better for that child than if she had raised a
baker's dozen, Mrs. Dr. dear," Susan had avowed solemnly. "Little did I
ever expect it of her on the day she landed here with that soup tureen."
CHAPTER XIII
A SLICE OF HUMBLE PIE
"I am very much afraid, Mrs. Dr. dear," said Susan, who had been on a
pilgrimage to the station with some choice bones for Dog Monday, "that
something terrible has happened. Whiskers-on-the-moon came off the
train from Charlottetown and he was looking pleased. I do not remember
that I ever saw him with a smile on in public before. Of course he may
have just been getting the better of somebody in a cattle deal but I
have an awful presentiment that the Huns have broken through somewhere."
Perhaps Susan was unjust in connecting Mr. Pryor's smile with the
sinking of the Lusitania, news of which circulated an hour later when
the mail was distributed. But the Glen boys turned out that night in a
body and broke all his windows in a fine frenzy of indignation over the
Kaiser's doings.
"I do not say they did right and I do not say they did wrong," said
Susan, when she heard of it. "But I will say that I wouldn't have
minded throwing a few stones myself. One thing is
certain--Whiskers-on-the-moon said in the post office the day the news
came, in the presence of witnesses, that folks who could not stay home
after they had been warned deserved no better fate. Norman Douglas is
fairly foaming at the mouth over it all. 'If the devil doesn't get
those men who sunk the Lusitania then there is no use in there being a
devil,' he was shouting in Carter's store last night. Norman Douglas
always has believed that anybody who opposed him was on the side of the
devil, but a man like that is bound to be right once in a while. Bruce
Meredith is worrying over the babies who were drowned. And it seems he
prayed for something very special last Friday night and didn't get it,
and was feeling quite disgruntled over it. But when he heard about the
Lusitania he told his mother that he understood now why God didn't
answer his prayer--He was too busy attending to the souls of all the
people who went down on the Lusitania. That child's brain is a hundred
years older than his body, Mrs. Dr. dear. As for the Lusitania, it is
an awful occurrence, whatever way you look at it. But Woodrow Wilson is
going to write a note about it, so why worry? A pretty president!" and
Susan banged her pots about wrathfully. President Wilson was rapidly
becoming anathema in Susan's kitchen.
Mary Vance dropped in one evening to tell the Ingleside folks that she
had withdrawn all opposition to Miller Douglas's enlisting.
"This Lusitania business was too much for me," said Mary brusquely.
"When the Kaiser takes to drowning innocent babies it's high time
somebody told him where he gets off at. This thing must be fought to a
finish. It's been soaking into my mind slow but I'm on now. So I up and