Rilla of Ingleside
not know will never grieve him. I take the whole responsibility, Mrs.
Dr. dear, so do not you vex your conscience."
Susan spoiled Shirley shamelessly that winter. He came home from
Queen's every week-end, and Susan had all his favourite dishes for him,
in so far as she could evade or wheedle the doctor, and waited on him
hand and foot. Though she talked war constantly to everyone else she
never mentioned it to him or before him, but she watched him like a cat
watching a mouse; and when the German retreat from the Bapaume salient
began and continued, Susan's exultation was linked up with something
deeper than anything she expressed. Surely the end was in sight--would
come now before--anyone else--could go.
"Things are coming our way at last. We have got the Germans on the
run," she boasted. "The United States has declared war at last, as I
always believed they would, in spite of Woodrow's gift for letter
writing, and you will see they will go into it with a vim since I
understand that is their habit, when they do start. And we have got the
Germans on the run, too."
"The States mean well," moaned Cousin Sophia, "but all the vim in the
world cannot put them on the fighting line this spring, and the Allies
will be finished before that. The Germans are just luring them on. That
man Simonds says their retreat has put the Allies in a hole."
"That man Simonds has said more than he will ever live to make good,"
retorted Susan. "I do not worry myself about his opinion as long as
Lloyd George is Premier of England. He will not be bamboozled and that
you may tie to. Things look good to me. The U. S. is in the war, and we
have got Kut and Bagdad back--and I would not be surprised to see the
Allies in Berlin by June--and the Russians, too, since they have got
rid of the Czar. That, in my opinion was a good piece of work."
"Time will show if it is," said Cousin Sophia, who would have been very
indignant if anyone had told her that she would rather see Susan put to
shame as a seer, than a successful overthrow of tyranny, or even the
march of the Allies down Unter den Linden. But then the woes of the
Russian people were quite unknown to Cousin Sophia, while this
aggravating, optimistic Susan was an ever-present thorn in her side.
Just at that moment Shirley was sitting on the edge of the table in the
living-room, swinging his legs--a brown, ruddy, wholesome lad, from top
to toe, every inch of him--and saying coolly, "Mother and dad, I was
eighteen last Monday. Don't you think it's about time I joined up?"
The pale mother looked at him.
"Two of my sons have gone and one will never return. Must I give you
too, Shirley?"
The age-old cry--"Joseph is not and Simeon is not; and ye will take
Benjamin away." How the mothers of the Great War echoed the old
Patriarch's moan of so many centuries agone!
"You wouldn't have me a slacker, mother? I can get into the
flying-corps. What say, dad?"
The doctor's hands were not quite steady as he folded up the powders he
was concocting for Abbie Flagg's rheumatism. He had known this moment
was coming, yet he was not altogether prepared for it. He answered
slowly, "I won't try to hold you back from what you believe to be your
duty. But you must not go unless your mother says you may."
Shirley said nothing more. He was not a lad of many words. Anne did not
say anything more just then, either. She was thinking of little Joyce's
grave in the old burying-ground over-harbour--little Joyce who would
have been a woman now, had she lived--of the white cross in France and
the splendid grey eyes of the little boy who had been taught his first
lessons of duty and loyalty at her knee--of Jem in the terrible
trenches--of Nan and Di and Rilla, waiting--waiting--waiting, while the
golden years of youth passed by--and she wondered if she could bear any
more. She thought not; surely she had given enough.
Yet that night she told Shirley that he might go.
They did not tell Susan right away. She did not know it until, a few
days later, Shirley presented himself in her kitchen in his aviation
uniform. Susan didn't make half the fuss she had made when Jem and
Walter had gone. She said stonily, "So they're going to take you, too."
"Take me? No. I'm going, Susan--got to."
Susan sat down by the table, folded her knotted old hands, that had
grown warped and twisted working for the Ingleside children to still
their shaking, and said:
"Yes, you must go. I did not see once why such things must be, but I
can see now."
"You're a brick, Susan," said Shirley. He was relieved that she took it
so coolly--he had been a little afraid, with a boy's horror of "a
scene." He went out whistling gaily; but half an hour later, when pale
Anne Blythe came in, Susan was still sitting there.
"Mrs. Dr. dear," said Susan, making an admission she would once have
died rather than make, "I feel very old. Jem and Walter were yours but
Shirley is mine. And I cannot bear to think of him flying--his machine
crashing down--the life crushed out of his body--the dear little body I
nursed and cuddled when he was a wee baby."
"Susan--don't," cried Anne.
"Oh, Mrs. Dr. dear, I beg your pardon. I ought not to have said
anything like that out loud. I sometimes forget that I resolved to be a
heroine. This--this has shaken me a little. But I will not forget
myself again. Only if things do not go as smoothly in the kitchen for a
few days I hope you will make due allowance for me. At least," said
poor Susan, forcing a grim smile in a desperate effort to recover lost
standing, "at least flying is a clean job. He will not get so dirty and
messed up as he would in the trenches, and that is well, for he has
always been a tidy child."
So Shirley went--not radiantly, as to a high adventure, like Jem, not
in a white flame of sacrifice, like Walter, but in a cool,
business-like mood, as of one doing something, rather dirty and
disagreeable, that had just got to be done. He kissed Susan for the
first time since he was five years old, and said, "Good-bye,
Susan--mother Susan."
"My little brown boy--my little brown boy," said Susan. "I wonder," she
thought bitterly, as she looked at the doctor's sorrowful face, "if you
remember how you spanked him once when he was a baby. I am thankful I
have nothing like that on my conscience now."
The doctor did not remember the old discipline. But before he put on
his hat to go out on his round of calls he stood for a moment in the
great silent living-room that had once been full of children's laughter.
"Our last son--our last son," he said aloud. "A good, sturdy, sensible
lad, too. Always reminded me of my father. I suppose I ought to be
proud that he wanted to go--I was proud when Jem went--even when Walter
went--but 'our house is left us desolate.'"
"I have been thinking, doctor," old Sandy of the Upper Glen said to him
that afternoon, "that your house will be seeming very big the day."
Highland Sandy's quaint phrase struck the doctor as perfectly
expressive. Ingleside did seem very big and empty that night. Yet
Shirley had been away all winter except for week-ends, and had always
been a quiet fellow even when home. Was it because he had been the only
one left that his going seemed to leave such a huge blank--that every
room seemed vacant and deserted--that the very trees on the lawn seemed
to be trying to comfort each other with caresses of freshly-budding
boughs for the loss of the last of the little lads who had romped under
them in childhood?
Susan worked very hard all day and late into the night. When she had
wound the kitchen clock and put Dr. Jekyll out, none too gently, she
stood for a little while on the doorstep, looking down the Glen, which
lay tranced in faint, silvery light from a sinking young moon. But
Susan did not see the familiar hills and harbour. She was looking at
the aviation camp in Kingsport where Shirley was that night.
"He called me 'Mother Susan,'" she was thinking. "Well, all our men
folk have gone now--Jem and Walter and Shirley and Jerry and Carl. And
none of them had to be driven to it. So we have a right to be proud.
But pride--" Susan sighed bitterly--"pride is cold company and that
there is no gainsaying."
The moon sank lower into a black cloud in the west, the Glen went out
in an eclipse of sudden shadow--and thousands of miles away the
Canadian boys in khaki--the living and the dead--were in possession of
Vimy Ridge.
Vimy Ridge is a name written in crimson and gold on the Canadian annals
of the Great War. "The British couldn't take it and the French couldn't
take it," said a German prisoner to his captors, "but you Canadians are
such fools that you don't know when a place can't be taken!"
So the "fools" took it--and paid the price.
Jerry Meredith was seriously wounded at Vimy Ridge--shot in the back,
the telegram said.
"Poor Nan," said Mrs. Blythe, when the news came. She thought of her
own happy girlhood at old Green Gables. There had been no tragedy like
this in it. How the girls of to-day had to suffer! When Nan came home
from Redmond two weeks later her face showed what those weeks had meant
to her. John Meredith, too, seemed to have grown old suddenly in them.
Faith did not come home; she was on her way across the Atlantic as a
V.A.D. Di had tried to wring from her father consent to her going also,
but had been told that for her mother's sake it could not be given. So
Di, after a flying visit home, went back to her Red Cross work in
Kingsport.
The mayflowers bloomed in the secret nooks of Rainbow Valley. Rilla was
watching for them. Jem had once taken his mother the earliest
mayflowers; Walter brought them to her when Jem was gone; last spring
Shirley had sought them out for her; now, Rilla thought she must take
the boys' place in this. But before she had discovered any, Bruce
Meredith came to Ingleside one twilight with his hands full of delicate
pink sprays. He stalked up the steps of the veranda and laid them on
Mrs. Blythe's lap.
"Because Shirley isn't here to bring them," he said in his funny, shy,
blunt way.
"And you thought of this, you darling," said Anne, her lips quivering,
as she looked at the stocky, black-browed little chap, standing before
her, with his hands thrust into his pockets.
"I wrote Jem to-day and told him not to worry 'bout you not getting
your mayflowers," said Bruce seriously, "'cause I'd see to that. And I
told him I would be ten pretty soon now, so it won't be very long
before I'll be eighteen, and then I'll go to help him fight, and maybe
let him come home for a rest while I took his place. I wrote Jerry,
too. Jerry's getting better, you know."
"Is he? Have you had any good news about him?"
"Yes. Mother had a letter to-day, and it said he was out of danger."
"Oh, thank God," murmured Mrs. Blythe, in a half-whisper.
Bruce looked at her curiously.
"That is what father said when mother told him. But when l said it the
other day when I found out Mr. Mead's dog hadn't hurt my kitten--I
thought he had shooken it to death, you know--father looked awful
solemn and said I must never say that again about a kitten. But I
couldn't understand why, Mrs. Blythe. I felt awful thankful, and it
must have been God that saved Stripey, because that Mead dog had
'normous jaws, and oh, how it shook poor Stripey. And so why couldn't I
thank Him? 'Course," added Bruce reminiscently, "maybe I said it too
loud--'cause I was awful glad and excited when I found Stripey was all
right. I 'most shouted it, Mrs. Blythe. Maybe if I'd said it sort of
whispery like you and father it would have been all right. Do you know,
Mrs. Blythe"--Bruce dropped to a "whispery" tone, edging a little
nearer to Anne--"what I would like to do to the Kaiser if I could?"
"What would you like to do, laddie?"