Rilla of Ingleside
Walter came wandering through the valley as Rilla sat there, with his
head bent and his hands clasped behind him. When he saw Rilla he turned
abruptly away; then as abruptly he turned and came back to her.
"Rilla-my-Rilla, what are you thinking of?"
"Everything is so changed, Walter," said Rilla wistfully. "Even
you--you're changed. A week ago we were all so happy--and--and--now I
just can't find myself at all. I'm lost."
Walter sat down on a neighbouring stone and took Rilla's little
appealing hand.
"I'm afraid our old world has come to an end, Rilla. We've got to face
that fact."
"It's so terrible to think of Jem," pleaded Rilla. "Sometimes I forget
for a little while what it really means and feel excited and proud--and
then it comes over me again like a cold wind."
"I envy Jem!" said Walter moodily.
"Envy Jem! Oh, Walter you--you don't want to go too."
"No," said Walter, gazing straight before him down the emerald vistas
of the valley, "no, I don't want to go. That's just the trouble. Rilla,
I'm afraid to go. I'm a coward."
"You're not!" Rilla burst out angrily. "Why, anybody would be afraid to
go. You might be--why, you might be killed."
"I wouldn't mind that if it didn't hurt," muttered Walter. "I don't
think I'm afraid of death itself--it's of the pain that might come
before death--it wouldn't be so bad to die and have it over--but to
keep on dying! Rilla, I've always been afraid of pain--you know that. I
can't help it--I shudder when I think of the possibility of being
mangled or--or blinded. Rilla, I cannot face that thought. To be
blind--never to see the beauty of the world again--moonlight on Four
Winds--the stars twinkling through the fir-trees--mist on the gulf. I
ought to go--I ought to want to go--but I don't--I hate the thought of
it--I'm ashamed--ashamed."
"But, Walter, you couldn't go anyhow," said Rilla piteously. She was
sick with a new terror that Walter would go after all. "You're not
strong enough."
"I am. I've felt as fit as ever I did this last month. I'd pass any
examination--I know it. Everybody thinks I'm not strong yet--and I'm
skulking behind that belief. I--I should have been a girl," Walter
concluded in a burst of passionate bitterness.
"Even if you were strong enough, you oughtn't to go," sobbed Rilla.
"What would mother do? She's breaking her heart over Jem. It would kill
her to see you both go."
"Oh, I'm not going--don't worry. I tell you I'm afraid to go--afraid. I
don't mince the matter to myself. It's a relief to own up even to you,
Rilla. I wouldn't confess it to anybody else--Nan and Di would despise
me. But I hate the whole thing--the horror, the pain, the ugliness. War
isn't a khaki uniform or a drill parade--everything I've read in old
histories haunts me. I lie awake at night and see things that have
happened--see the blood and filth and misery of it all. And a bayonet
charge! If I could face the other things I could never face that. It
turns me sick to think of it--sicker even to think of giving it than
receiving it--to think of thrusting a bayonet through another man."
Walter writhed and shuddered. "I think of these things all the
time--and it doesn't seem to me that Jem and Jerry ever think of them.
They laugh and talk about 'potting Huns'! But it maddens me to see them
in the khaki. And they think I'm grumpy because I'm not fit to go."
Walter laughed bitterly. "It is not a nice thing to feel yourself a
coward." But Rilla got her arms about him and cuddled her head on his
shoulder. She was so glad he didn't want to go--for just one minute she
had been horribly frightened. And it was so nice to have Walter
confiding his troubles to her--to her, not Di. She didn't feel so
lonely and superfluous any longer.
"Don't you despise me, Rilla-my-Rilla?" asked Walter wistfully.
Somehow, it hurt him to think Rilla might despise him--hurt him as much
as if it had been Di. He realized suddenly how very fond he was of this
adoring kid sister with her appealing eyes and troubled, girlish face.
"No, I don't. Why, Walter, hundreds of people feel just as you do. You
know what that verse of Shakespeare in the old Fifth Reader says--'the
brave man is not he who feels no fear.'"
"No--but it is 'he whose noble soul its fear subdues.' I don't do that.
We can't gloss it over, Rilla. I'm a coward."
"You're not. Think of how you fought Dan Reese long ago."
"One spurt of courage isn't enough for a lifetime."
"Walter, one time I heard father say that the trouble with you was a
sensitive nature and a vivid imagination. You feel things before they
really come--feel them all alone when there isn't anything to help you
bear them--to take away from them. It isn't anything to be ashamed of.
When you and Jem got your hands burned when the grass was fired on the
sand-hills two years ago Jem made twice the fuss over the pain that you
did. As for this horrid old war, there'll be plenty to go without you.
It won't last long."
"I wish I could believe it. Well, it's supper-time, Rilla. You'd better
run. I don't want anything."
"Neither do I. I couldn't eat a mouthful. Let me stay here with you,
Walter. It's such a comfort to talk things over with someone. The rest
all think that I'm too much of a baby to understand."
So they two sat there in the old valley until the evening star shone
through a pale-grey, gauzy cloud over the maple grove, and a fragrant
dewy darkness filled their little sylvan dell. It was one of the
evenings Rilla was to treasure in remembrance all her life--the first
one on which Walter had ever talked to her as if she were a woman and
not a child. They comforted and strengthened each other. Walter felt,
for the time being at least, that it was not such a despicable thing
after all to dread the horror of war; and Rilla was glad to be made the
confidante of his struggles--to sympathize with and encourage him. She
was of importance to somebody.
When they went back to Ingleside they found callers sitting on the
veranda. Mr. and Mrs. Meredith had come over from the manse, and Mr.
and Mrs. Norman Douglas had come up from the farm. Cousin Sophia was
there also, sitting with Susan in the shadowy background. Mrs. Blythe
and Nan and Di were away, but Dr. Blythe was home and so was Dr.
Jekyll, sitting in golden majesty on the top step. And of course they
were all talking of the war, except Dr. Jekyll who kept his own counsel
and looked contempt as only a cat can. When two people foregathered in
those days they talked of the war; and old Highland Sandy of the
Harbour Head talked of it when he was alone and hurled anathemas at the
Kaiser across all the acres of his farm. Walter slipped away, not
caring to see or be seen, but Rilla sat down on the steps, where the
garden mint was dewy and pungent. It was a very calm evening with a
dim, golden afterlight irradiating the glen. She felt happier than at
any time in the dreadful week that had passed. She was no longer
haunted by the fear that Walter would go.
"I'd go myself if I was twenty years younger," Norman Douglas was
shouting. Norman always shouted when he was excited. "I'd show the
Kaiser a thing or two! Did I ever say there wasn't a hell? Of course
there's a hell--dozens of hells--hundreds of hells--where the Kaiser
and all his brood are bound for."
"I knew this war was coming," said Mrs. Norman triumphantly. "I saw it
coming right along. I could have told all those stupid Englishmen what
was ahead of them. I told you, John Meredith, years ago what the Kaiser
was up to but you wouldn't believe it. You said he would never plunge
the world in war. Who was right about the Kaiser, John? You--or I? Tell
me that."
"You were, I admit," said Mr. Meredith.
"It's too late to admit it now," said Mrs. Norman, shaking her head, as
if to intimate that if John Meredith had admitted it sooner there might
have been no war.
"Thank God, England's navy is ready," said the doctor.
"Amen to that," nodded Mrs. Norman. "Bat-blind as most of them were
somebody had foresight enough to see to that."
"Maybe England'll manage not to get into trouble over it," said Cousin
Sophia plaintively. "I dunno. But I'm much afraid."
"One would suppose that England was in trouble over it already, up to
her neck, Sophia Crawford," said Susan. "But your ways of thinking are
beyond me and always were. It is my opinion that the British Navy will
settle Germany in a jiffy and that we are all getting worked up over
nothing."
Susan spat out the words as if she wanted to convince herself more than
anybody else. She had her little store of homely philosophies to guide
her through life, but she had nothing to buckler her against the
thunderbolts of the week that had just passed. What had an honest,
hard-working, Presbyterian old maid of Glen St. Mary to do with a war
thousands of miles away? Susan felt that it was indecent that she
should have to be disturbed by it.
"The British army will settle Germany," shouted Norman. "Just wait till
it gets into line and the Kaiser will find that real war is a different
thing from parading round Berlin with your moustaches cocked up."
"Britain hasn't got an army," said Mrs. Norman emphatically. "You
needn't glare at me, Norman. Glaring won't make soldiers out of timothy
stalks. A hundred thousand men will just be a mouthful for Germany's
millions."
"There'll be some tough chewing in the mouthful, I reckon," persisted
Norman valiantly. "Germany'll break her teeth on it. Don't you tell me
one Britisher isn't a match for ten foreigners. I could polish off a
dozen of 'em myself with both hands tied behind my back!"
"I am told," said Susan, "that old Mr. Pryor does not believe in this
war. I am told that he says England went into it just because she was
jealous of Germany and that she did not really care in the least what
happened to Belgium."
"I believe he's been talking some such rot," said Norman. "I haven't
heard him. When I do, Whiskers-on-the-moon won't know what happened to
him. That precious relative of mine, Kitty Alec, holds forth to the
same effect, I understand. Not before me, though--somehow, folks don't
indulge in that kind of conversation in my presence. Lord love you,
they've a kind of presentiment, so to speak, that it wouldn't be
healthy for their complaint."
"I am much afraid that this war has been sent as a punishment for our
sins," said Cousin Sophia, unclasping her pale hands from her lap and
reclasping them solemnly over her stomach. "'The world is very
evil--the times are waxing late.'"
"Parson here's got something of the same idea," chuckled Norman.
"Haven't you, Parson? That's why you preached t'other night on the text
'Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.' I didn't
agree with you--wanted to get up in the pew and shout out that there
wasn't a word of sense in what you were saying, but Ellen, here, she
held me down. I never have any fun sassing parsons since I got married."
"Without shedding of blood there is no anything," said Mr. Meredith, in
the gentle dreamy way which had an unexpected trick of convincing his
hearers. "Everything, it seems to me, has to be purchased by
self-sacrifice. Our race has marked every step of its painful ascent
with blood. And now torrents of it must flow again. No, Mrs. Crawford,
I don't think the war has been sent as a punishment for sin. I think it
is the price humanity must pay for some blessing--some advance great
enough to be worth the price--which we may not live to see but which
our children's children will inherit."
"If Jerry is killed will you feel so fine about it?" demanded Norman,
who had been saying things like that all his life and never could be
made to see any reason why he shouldn't. "Now, never mind kicking me in