“Red! Him? Humph!” Sharon here named an equally well-known primary colour–not red. Wilbur protested.
“You don’t get him,” persisted the old man. “Listen, now! He cast off the family like your father said he would. Couldn’t accept another cent of Whipple money. Going to work with his bare hands. Dressed up for it like a hunter in one of these powder advertisements. All he needed was a shotgun and a setter dog with his tail up. And everybody in the house worried he’d starve to death. Of course no one thought he’d work–that was one of his threats they didn’t take seriously. But they promised to sit tight, each and all, and bring him to time the sooner.
“Well, he didn’t come to time. We learned he was getting money from some place. He still had it. So I begun to get my suspicions up. Last night I got the bunch together, Gid and Harvey D. and Ella and Juliana, and I taxed ’em with duplicity, and every last one of ’em was guilty as paint–every goshed last one! Every one sending him fat checks unbeknownst to the others. Even Juliana! I never did suspect her. ‘I did it because it’s all a romance to him,’ says she. ‘I wanted him to go his way, whatever it was, and find it bright.’
“Wha’d you think of that from a girl of forty-eight or so that can tinker a mowing machine as good as you can? I ask you! Of course I’d suspected the rest. A set of mushheads. Maybe they didn’t look shamed when I exposed ’em! Each one had pictured the poor boy down there alone, undergoing hardship with his toiling workers or whatever you call ’em, and, of course, I thought so myself.”
“How much did you send him?” demanded Wilbur, suddenly.
“Not half as much as the others,” returned Sharon in indignant triumph. “If they’d just set tight like they promised and let me do the little I done—-“
“You were going to sit tight, too, weren’t you?”
“Well, of course, that was different. Of course I was willing to shell out a few dollars now and then if he was going to be up against it for a square meal. After all, he was Whipple by name. Of course he ain’t got Whipple stuff in him. That young man’s talk always did have kind of a nutty flavour. You come right down to it, he ain’t a Whipple in hide nor hair. Why, say, he ain’t even two and seventy-five-hundredths per cent. Whipple!”
Sharon had cunningly gone away from his own failure to sit tight. He was proving flexible-minded here, as on the links.
They were silent, looking out over the spread of Home Farm. The red house still shimmered in the heat waves. The tall trees about it hung motionless. The click of the reaper in the south forty sounded like a distant locust.
“Put the fear of God into him,” said Sharon at last. “Let him know them checks have gosh all truly stopped.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.
“Now drive on and we’ll look the house over. The last tenant let it run down. But I’ll fix it right for you. Why, like as not you’ll be having a missis and young ones of your own there some day.”
“I might; you can’t tell.”
“Well, I wish they was going to be Whipple stock. Ours is running down. I don’t look for any prize-winners from your brother; he’ll likely marry that widow, or something, that wants to save America like Russia has been. And Juliana, I guess she wasn’t ever frivolous enough for marriage. And that Pat–she’ll pick out one of them boys with a head like a seal, that knows all the new dances and what fork to use. Trust her! Not that she didn’t show Whipple stuff over there. But she’s a rattlepate in peacetime.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.
He left a train at the Grand Central Station in New York early the following evening. He had the address of Merle’s apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, and made his way there on foot through streets crowded with the war’s backwash. Men in uniform were plentiful, and he was many times hailed by them. Though out of uniform himself, they seemed to identify him with ease. Something in his walk, the slant of his shoulders, and the lean, browned, watchful face–the eyes set for wider horizons than a mere street–served to mark him as one of them.
The apartment of Merle proved to be in the first block above Washington Square. While he scanned doors for the number he was seized and turned about by a playful creature in uniform.
“Well, Buck Cowan, you old son of a gun!”
“Gee, gosh, Stevie! How’s the boy?”
They shook hands, moving to the curb where they could talk.
“What’s the idea?” demanded ex-Private Cowan. “Why this dead part of town for so many of the boys?”
Service men were constantly sauntering by them or chatting in little groups at the curb.
“She’s dead, right now,” Steve told him, “but she’ll wake up pronto. Listen, Buck, we got the tip! A lot of them fur-faced boys that hurl the merry bombs are goin’ to pull off a red-flag sashay up the Avenoo. Get it? Goin’ to set America free!”
“I get it!” said Wilbur.
“Dirty work at the crossroads,” added Steve.
“Say, Steve, hold it for twenty minutes, can’t you? I got to see a man down here. Be good; don’t hurt any one till I get back.”
“Do my best,” said Steve, “but they’re down there in the Square now stackin’ up drive impedimenta and such, red banners, and so forth, tuning up to warble the hymn to free Russia. Hurry if you want to join out with us!”
“I’ll do that little thing, Steve. See you again.” He passed on, making a way through the jostling throng of soldiers and civilians. “Just my luck,” he muttered. “I hope the kid isn’t in.” Never before had he thought of his brother as “the kid.”
He passed presently through swinging glass doors, and in a hallway was told by a profusely buttoned youth in spectacles that Mr. Whipple was out. It was not known when he would be in. His movements were uncertain.
“He might be in or he might be out,” said the boy.
He was back in the street, edging through the crowd, his head up, searching for the eager face of Steve Kennedy, late his sergeant. Halfway up the next block he found him pausing to roll a cigarette. Steve was a scant five feet, and he was telling a private who was a scant six feet that there would be dirty work at the crossroads–when the fur-faces started.
“We’re too far away,” suggested Wilbur. “If they start from the Square they’ll be mussed up before they get here. You can’t expect people farther down to save ’em just for you. Where’s your tactics, Steve?”
They worked slowly back down the Avenue. It was nine o’clock now, and the street was fairly free of vehicles. The night was clear and the street lights brought alert, lean profiles into sharp relief, faces of men in uniform sauntering carelessly or chatting in little groups at the curb. A few unseeing policemen, also sauntering carelessly, were to be observed.
“Heard a fur-face speak last night,” said Steve. “It’s a long story, mates, but it seems this is one rotten Government and everybody knows it but a few cops. If someone would only call off the cops and let the fur-faces run it we might have a regular country.”
From the Square singing was now heard.
“Oh, boy!” murmured the tall private, dreamily; “am I glad I’m here?” Stretching a long neck to peer toward the Square, he called in warm, urgent tones: “Oh, come on, you reds–come on, red!”
They came on. Out from the Square issued a valiant double line of marchers, men and women, their voices raised in the Internationale. At their head, bearing aloft a scarlet banner of protest, strode a commanding figure in corduroys, head up, his feet stepping a martial pace.
“I choose that general,” said the tall private, and licked his lips.
“Not if I get him first,” shouted Steve, and sprang from the walk into the roadway.
But ex-Private Cowan was ahead of them both. He had not waited for speech. A crowd from each side of the Avenue had surged into the roadway to greet the procession. The banner bearer was seen to hesitate, to lose step, but was urged from the rear by other banner bearers. He came on again. Once more he stepped martially. The Internationale swelled in volume. The crowd, instead of opening a way, condensed more solidly about the advance. There were jeers and shoving. The head of the line again wavered. Wilbur Cowan had jostled a way toward this leader. He lost no time in going into action. But the pushing crowd impaired his aim, and it was only a glancing blow that met the jaw of the corduroyed standard bearer.
The standard toppled forward from his grasp, and its late bearer turned quickly aside. As he turned Wilbur Cowan reached forward to close a hand about the corduroy collar. Then he pulled. The standard bearer came back easily to a sitting posture on the asphalt. The crowd was close in, noisily depriving other bearers of their standards. The Internationale had become blurred and discordant, like a bad phonograph record. The parade still came to break and flow about the obstruction.
Wilbur Cowan jerked his prize up and whirled him about. He contemplated further atrocities. But the pallid face of his brother was now revealed to him.
“Look out there!” he warned the crowd, and a way was opened.
He drew back on the corduroy collar, then sent it forward with a mighty shove. His captive shot through the opening, fell again to the pavement, but was up and off before those nearest him could devise further entertainment. Among other accomplishments Merle had been noted in college for his swiftness of foot. He ran well, heading for the north, skillfully avoiding those on the outskirts of the crowd who would have tackled him. Wilbur Cowan watched him out of sight, beyond the area of combat. Then he worked his own way from it and stood to watch the further disintegration of the now leaderless parade.
The tumult died, the crowd melted away. Policemen became officious. From areaways up and down the Avenue forms emerged furtively, walked discreetly to corners and skurried down side streets. Here and there a crimson banner flecked the asphalt. Steve and the tall private issued from the last scrimmage, breathing hard.
“Nothing to it!” said the tall private. “Only I skun my knuckles.”
“I was aimin’ a wallop at that general,” complained Steve, “but something blew him right out of my hand. Come on up to Madison Avenoo. I heard they was goin’ to save America up there, too.”
“Can’t,” said Wilbur. “Got to see a man.”
“Well, so long, Buck!”
He waved to them as they joined the northward moving crowd.
“Gee, gosh!” he said.
* * * * *
“No, sir; Mr. Whipple hasn’t come in yet. He just sent word he wouldn’t be back at all to-night,” said the spectacled hall boy. But his manner was so little ingenuous that once again the hand of Wilbur Cowan closed itself eloquently about the collar of a jacket.
“Get into that elevator and let me out at his floor.”
“You let me alone!” said the hall boy. “I was going to.”
He knocked a third time before he could hear a faint call. He opened the door. Beyond a dim entrance hall the light fell upon his brother seated at a desk, frowning intently at work before him. The visible half of him was no longer in corduroy. It was incased in a smoking jacket of velvet, and his neck was conventionally clad in collar and cravat. The latter had been hastily tied.
“Why, Wilbur, old man!” cried Merle in pleased surprise. He half rose from the desk, revealing that below the waist he was still corduroy or proletarian. Along his left jaw was a contusion as from a glancing blow. He was still breathing harder than most men do who spend quiet evenings at desks.
Wilbur advanced into the room, but paused before reaching the desk. It was an invitingly furnished room of cushioned couches, paintings, tapestries, soft chairs, warmly toned rugs. The desk at which Merle toiled was ornate and shining. Ex-Private Cowan felt a sudden revulsion. He was back, knee-deep in trench bilge, tortured in all his being, looking at death from behind a sandbag. Vividly he recalled why he had endured that torture.
“You’re all out of condition,” he announced in even tones to Merle. “A little sprint like that shouldn’t get your wind.”
Merle’s look of sunny welcome faded to one of chagrin. He fell back in his chair. He was annoyed.
“You saw that disgraceful outbreak, then?”
“I was in luck to-night.”
“Did you see that drunken rowdy strike at me, and then try to get me down where he and those other brutes could kick me?”
Wilbur’s stare was cool. He was feeling the icy muck about his numbed legs.
“I was the one that struck at you. Too many elbows in the way and I flubbed it.” He noted his brother start and stiffen in his chair. “And I didn’t try to get you down. When I saw it was you I got you up and shot you out where you could run–if you wanted to. And I wasn’t drunk, and I’m not a rowdy.”
Merle gazed with horror upon the apparently uncontrite fratricide. Twice he essayed to speak before he found the words.
“Do you think that was a brave thing to do?”
“No–but useful. I’ve been brave a lot of times where it didn’t do as much good as that.”
“Useful!” breathed Merle, scathingly. “Useful to brutalize a lot of brave souls who merely sought–” he broke off with a new sense of outrage. “And not a policeman there to do his duty!” he finished resentfully.
Wilbur Cowan sat in a carven chair near a corner of the beautiful desk, hitching it forward to rest his arms on the desk’s top. He was newly appraising this white-faced brother.
“Whining!” he suddenly snapped. “Get up and boast that you’re outlaws, going to keel the Government off its pins. Then you get the gaff, and the first thing you do is whine for help from that same Government! You say it’s rotten, but you expect it to watch over you while you knock it down. If you’re going to be an outlaw, take an outlaw’s chance. Don’t squeal when you get caught. You say the rules are rotten, then you fall back on them. What kind of sportsmanship is that?”
Wearily but with a tolerant smile Merle pushed back the fallen lock with one white hand.
“What could you understand of all this?” he asked, gently. “We merely claim the right of free speech.”
“And use it to tell other people to upset the Government! That crowd to-night did what you tell your people to do–went against the rules. But you can’t take your own medicine. A fine bunch of spoiled children you are! Been spoiled by too easy a Government at that!” He broke off to study Merle again. “You’re pasty, out of condition,” he repeated, inconsequently.
Again his brother’s intolerant smile.
“You have all the cant of the reactionary,” he retorted, again gently. “It’s the spirit of intolerance one finds everywhere. You can’t expect one of my–” he hesitated, showing a slight impatience. “I’ve been too long where they are thinking,” he said.
“Aren’t you people intolerant? You want to break all the rules, and those same rules have made us a pretty good big country.”
“Ah, yes, a big country–big! We can always boast of our size, can’t we? I dare say you believe its bigness is a sign of our merit.” Merle had recovered his poise. He was at home in satire. “Besides, I’ve broken no rules, as you call them.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you haven’t! You’d be careful not to. I see that much. But you try to get smaller children to. I’d have more patience with you if you’d taken a chance yourself.”
“Patience with me–you?” Merle relished this. His laugh was sincere. “You–would have more patience with–me!” But his irony went for little with a man still at the front.
“Sure! If only you’d smashed a few rules yourself. Take that girl and her partner they arrested the other day. They don’t whine. They’re behind the bars, but still cussing the Government. You’ve got to respect fighters like that Liebknecht the Germans killed, and that Rosa What’s-Her-Name. They were game. But you people, you try to put on all their airs without taking their chances. That’s why you make me so tired–always keeping your martyr’s halo polished and handy where you can slip it out of a pocket when you get just what you’ve been asking for.”
“You’re not too subtle, are you? But then one could hardly expect subtlety–“
Merle was again almost annoyed.
“Subtle be jiggered! Do you think you people are subtle? About as subtle as a ton of bricks. All your talk in that magazine about this being a land of the dollar, no ideals, no spirituality, a land of money-grubbers–all that other stuff! Say, I want to tell you this is the least money-grubbing land there is! You people would know that if you had any subtlety. Maybe you did know it. We went into that scrap for an ideal, and we’re the only country that did. France might have gone for an ideal, but France had to fight, anyway.
“England? Do you think England went in only to save poor little Belgium? She herself was the next dish on the bill of fare. But we went in out of general damfoolishness–for an ideal–this country you said didn’t have any. We don’t care about money–less than any of those people. Watch a Frenchman count his coppers, or an Englishman that carries his in a change purse and talks about pounds but really thinks in shillings. We carry our money loose and throw it away.
“If this country had been what your sniveling little magazine called it we’d never have gone into that fight. You’re not even subtle enough to know that much. We knew it would cost like hell, but we knew it was a great thing to do. Not another nation on earth would have gone in for that reason. That’s the trouble with you poor little shut-ins; you decide the country hasn’t any ideals because someone runs a stockyard out in Chicago or a foundry in Pittsburgh. God help you people if you’d had your way about the war! The Germans would be taking that nonsense out of you by this time. And to think you had me kind of ashamed when I went over! I thought you knew something then.” He concluded on a note almost plaintive.
Merle had grown visibly impatient.
“My dear fellow, really! Your point of view is interesting enough, even if all too common. You are true to type, but so crude a type–so crude!”
“Sure, I’m crude! The country itself is crude, I guess. But it takes a crude country to have ideals–ideals with guts. Your type isn’t crude, I suppose, but it hasn’t any ideals, either.”
“No ideals! No ideals! Ah, but that’s the best thing you’ve said!”
He laughed masterfully, waving aside the monstrous accusation.
“Well, maybe it is the best thing I’ve said. You haven’t any ideals that would get any action out of you. You might tear down a house, but you’d never build one. No two of you could agree on a plan. Every one of you is too conceited about himself. If you had the guts to upset the Government to-morrow you’d be fighting among yourselves before night, and you’d have a chief or a king over you the next day, just as surely as they got one in Russia. It’ll take them a hundred years over there to get back to as good a government as we have right now.
“You folks haven’t any ideals except to show yourselves off. That’s my private opinion. The way you used to tell me I didn’t have any form in golf. You people are all gesture; you can get up on a platform and take perfect practice swings at a government, but you can’t hit the ball. You used to take bully practice swings at golf, but you couldn’t hit the ball because you didn’t have any ideal. You were a good shadow golfer, like a shadow boxer that can hit dandy blows when he’s hitting at nothing. Shadow stuff, shadow ideals, shadow thinkers–that’s what you people are–spoiled children pretending you’re deep thinkers.”
Merle turned wearily to a sheaf of papers at his hand.
“You’ll see one day,” he said, quietly, “and it won’t be a far day. Nothing now, not even the brute force of your type, can retard the sweep of the revolution. The wave is shaping, the crest is formed. Six months from now–a year at most—-“
He gestured with a hand ominously.
Wilbur briefly considered this prophecy.
“Oh, I know things look exciting here, but why wouldn’t they after the turnover they’ve had? And I know there’s grafting and profiteering and high prices and rotten spots in the Government, but why not? That’s another trouble with you people: you seem to think that some form of government will be perfect. You seem to expect a perfect government from imperfect human beings.”
“Ah,” broke in Merle, “I recognize that! That’s some of the dear old Dave Cowan talk.”
“Well, don’t turn it down just on that account. Sometimes he isn’t so crazy. He sees through you people. He knows you would take all you could get in this world just as quick as the rest of us. He knows that much.”
Merle waved it aside.
“Six months from now–a year at the most! A thrill of freedom has run through the people!”
Wilbur had relaxed in his chair. He spoke more lightly, scanning the face of his brother with veiled curiosity.
“By the way, speaking of revolutions, there’s been kind of a one at Newbern; kind of a family revolution. A little one, but plenty of kick in it. They want you to come back and be a good boy. That’s really what I came down here to say for them. Will you come back with me?”
Merle drew himself up–injured.
“Go back! Back to what? When my work is here, my heart, my life? I’ve let you talk because you’re my brother. And you’re so naively honest in your talk about our wonderful country and its idealism and the contemptible defects of a few of us who have the long vision! But I’ve let you talk, and now I must tell you that I am with this cause to the end. I can’t expect your sympathy, or the sympathy of my people back there, but I must go my own way without it, fight my own battle–“
He was interrupted in a tone he did not like.
“Sympathy from the folks back there? Say, what do you mean–sympathy? Did I tell you what this revolution back there was all about? Did I tell you they’ve shut down on you?”
“You didn’t! I still don’t get your meaning.”
“You cast them off, didn’t you?”
“Oh!” A white hand deprecated this. “That’s Sharon Whipple talk–his famous brand of horse humour. Surely, you won’t say he’s too subtle!”
“Well, anyway, you said you couldn’t accept anything more from them when you left; you were going to work with your hands, and so forth. You weren’t going to take any more of their tainted money.”
“I’ve no doubt dear old Sharon would put it as delicately as that.”
“Well, did you work with your hands? Have you had to be a toiler?”
“Oh, naturally I had resources! But might I ask”–Merle said it with chill dignity–“may I inquire just what relation this might have—-“
“You won’t have resources any longer.”
“Eh?” Merle this time did not wave. He stared stonily at his informant.
“That was the revolution. They called each other down and found that every last one of them had been sending you money, each thinking he was the only one and no one wanting you to starve. Even your dear old Sharon Whipple kicked in every month. No wonder I didn’t find you in a tenement.”
“Preposterous!” expostulated Merle.
“Wasn’t it? Anyway, they all got mad at each other, and then they all got mad at you; then they swore an oath or something.” He paused impressively. “No more checks!”
“Preposterous!” Merle again murmured.
“But kind of plausible, wasn’t it? Sharon wasn’t any madder than the others when they found each other out. Mrs. Harvey D. is the only one they think they can’t trust now. They’re going to watch that woman’s funds. Say, anything she gets through the lines to you–won’t keep you from toiling!”
“Poor Mother Ella!” murmured Merle, his gaze remotely upon the woman. “She has always been so fond of me.”
“They’re all fond of you, for that matter, I think they’re fonder of you than if you’d been born there. But still they’re rank Bolsheviks right now. They confiscated your estates.”
“I didn’t need you to tell me they’re fond of me,” retorted Merle with recovered spirit. He sighed. “They must have missed me horribly this last year.” There was contrition in his tone. “I suppose I should have taken time to think of that, but you’ll never know how my work here has engrossed me. I suppose one always does sacrifice to ideals. Still, I owed them something–I should have remembered that.” He closed on a note of regret.
“Well, you better go back with me. They’ll be mighty glad to see you.”
“We can make that eleven-forty-eight if we hurry,” he said. “I’ll have to change a few things.”
He bustled cheerily into a bedroom. As he moved about there he whistled the “Marseillaise.”
Ten minutes later he emerged with bag, hat, and stick. The last item of corduroy had vanished from his apparel. He was quietly dressed, as an exploiter of the masses or a mechanic. He set the bag on the desk, and going to a window peered from behind the curtain into the street.
“Some of those rowdies are still prowling about,” he said, “but there are cabs directly across the street.”
He pulled the soft hat well down over his brow.
Wilbur had sat motionless in his chair while the dressing went on. He got up now.
“Listen!” he said. “If you hear back home of my telling people you’re a dangerous radical, don’t be worried. Even the Cowans have some family pride. And don’t worry about the prowling rowdies out there. I’ll get you across the street to a cab. Give me the bag.”
As they crossed the street, Merle–at his brother’s elbow–somewhat jauntily whistled, with fair accuracy, not the “Marseillaise,” but an innocent popular ballad. Nor did he step aside for a torn strip of red cloth lying in their way.
CHAPTER XXI
The next morning Wilbur found the Penniman household in turmoil. The spirit of an outraged Judge Penniman pervaded it darkly, and his wife wept as she flurried noisily about the kitchen. Neither of them would regard him until he enforced their notice. The judge, indignantly fanning himself in the wicker porch chair, put him off with vague black mutters about Winona. The girl had gone from bad to worse. But his skirts were clean. The mother was the one to blame. He’d talked all he could.
Then Wilbur, in the disordered kitchen, put himself squarely in the way of the teary mother. He commanded details. The distraught woman, hair tumbling from beneath a cap set rakishly to one side, vigorously stirred yellow dough in an earthen mixing dish.
“Stop this nonsense!” he gruffly ordered.
Mrs. Penniman abandoned the long spoon and made a pitiful effort to dry her eyes with an insufficient apron.
“Winona!” she sobbed. “Telegram–coming home tomorrow–nothing cooked up–trying to make chocolate cake–“
“Why take it so hard? You knew the blow had to fall some time.”
Mrs. Penniman broke down again.
“It’s not a joke!” she sobbed. Then with terrific effort–“Mar–married!”
“Winona Penniman married?”
The stricken mother opened swimming eyes at him, nodding hopelessly.
“Why, the little son of a gun!” said Wilbur, admiringly. “I didn’t think she’d be so reckless!”
“I’m so glad!” whimpered the mother.
She seized the spoon and the bowl. Judge Penniman hovered at the open door of the kitchen.
“I told her what would happen!” he stormed. “She’ll listen to me next time! Always the way in this house!”
Mrs. Penniman relapsed.
“We don’t know the party. Don’t know him from Adam. She don’t even sign her right name.”
Wilbur left the house of mourning and went out to the barn, where all that day he worked at the Can, fretting it at last into a decent activity.
Dave Cowan that night became gay and tasteless on hearing the news. He did what he could to fan the judge’s resentment. He said it was probably, knowing Winona’s ways, that she had wed a dissolute French nobleman, impoverished of all but his title. He hoped for the best, but he had always known that the girl was a light-minded baggage. He wondered how she could ever justify her course to Matthew Arnold if the need rose. He said the old house would now be turned into a saloon, or salong, as the French call it. He wished to be told if the right to be addressed as Madame la Marquise could compensate the child for those things of simple but enduring worth she had cast aside. He somewhat cheered Mrs. Penniman, but left the judge puffing with scorn.
* * * * *
Wilbur Cowan met the noon train next day. The Can rattled far too much for its size, but it went. Then from the train issued Winona, bedecked in alien gauds and fur-belows, her keen little face radiant under a Paris trifle of brown velvet, her small feet active–under a skirt whose scant length would once have appalled her–in brown suede pumps and stockings notoriously of silken texture. Her quick eyes darting along the platform to where Wilbur stood, she rushed to embrace him.
“Where’s the other one?” he demanded.
Astoundingly she tripped back to the still emptying car and led forward none other than Edward–Spike–Brennon. He was in the uniform of a private and his eyes were hidden by dark glasses. Wilbur fell upon him. Spike’s left arm went up expertly to guard his face from the rush, but came down when he recognized his assailant. Wilbur turned again to Winona.
“But where’s he?” he asked. “Where’s the main squeeze?”
Winona looked proudly at Spike Brennon.
“I’m him,” said Spike.
“He’s him,” said Winona, and laid an arm protectingly across his shoulder.
“You wild little son of a gun!” He stared incredulously at the bride, then kissed her. “You should say ‘he’s he,’ not ‘he’s him,'” he told her.
“Lay off that stuff!” ordered Winona.
“You come on home to trouble,” directed Wilbur. He guided Spike to the car.
“It’s like one of these dreams,” said Spike above the rattle of the Can. “How a pretty thing like her could look twice at me!”
Winona held up a gloved hand to engage the driver’s eye. Then she winked.
“Say,” said Spike, “this is some car! When I get into one now’days I like to hear it go. I been in some lately you could hardly tell you moved.”
The front of the house was vacant when the Can laboured to the gate, though the curtain of a second-floor front might have been seen to move. Winona led her husband up the gravelled walk.
“It’s lovely,” she told him, “this home of mine and yours. Here you go between borders all in bloom, phlox and peonies, and there are pansies and some early dahlias, and there’s a yellow rosebush out.”
“It smells beautiful,” said Spike. He sniffed the air on each side.
“Sit here,” said Winona, nor in the flush of the moment was she conscious of the enormity of what she did. She put Spike into a chair that had for a score of years been sacred to the person of her invalid father. Then she turned to greet her mother. Mrs. Penniman, arrayed in fancy dress-making, was still damp-eyed but joyous.
“Your son, mother,” said Winona. “Don’t try to get up, Spike.”
Mrs. Penniman bent over to kiss him. Spike’s left went up accurately.
“He’s so nervous,” explained Winona, “ever since that French general sneaked up and kissed him on both cheeks when he pinned that medal on him.”
“Mercy!” exclaimed Mrs. Penniman.
“For distinguished service beyond the line of duty,” added the young wife, casually.
“I was so happy when I got your wire,” sputtered her mother. “Of course, I was flustered just at first–so sudden and all.”
“In the Army we do things suddenly,” said Winona.
Heavy steps sounded within, and the judge paused at the open door. He was arrayed as for the Sabbath, a portentous figure in frock coat and gray trousers. A heavy scent of moth balls had preceded him.
“What’s that new one I get?” asked Spike, sniffing curiously.
Winona pecked at her father’s marbled cheeks, then led him to the chair.
“Father, this is my husband.”
“How do you do, sir?” began the judge, heavily.
Spike’s left forearm shielded his face, while his right hand went to meet the judge’s.
“It’s all right, Spike. No one else is going to kiss you.”
“Spike?” queried the judge, uncertainly.
“It’s a sort of nickname for him,” explained Winona.
She drew her mother through the doorway and they became murmurous in the parlour beyond.
“This here is a peach of a chair,” said Spike.
The judge started painfully. Until this moment he had not detected the outrage.
“Wouldn’t you prefer this nice hammock?” he politely urged.
“No, thanks,” replied Spike, firmly. “This chair kind of fits my frame.”
Wilbur Cowan, standing farther along the porch, winked at Spike before he remembered.
“Say, ain’t you French?” demanded the judge with a sudden qualm.
He had taken no stock in that fool talk of Dave Cowan’s about a French nobleman; still, you never could tell. He had thought it as well to be dressed for it should he be required to meet even impoverished nobility.
“Hell, no!” said Spike. “Irish!” He moved uneasily in the chair. “Excuse me,” he added.
“Oh!” said the judge, regretting the superior comfort of his linen suit. He eyed the chair with covetous glance. “Well, I hope everything’s all for the best,” he said, doubtfully.
“How beautiful it smells!” said Spike, sniffing away from the moth balls toward the rosebush. “Everything’s beautiful, and this peach of a chair and all. What gets me–how a beautiful girl like she is could ever take a second look at me.”
The judge regarded him sharply, with a new attention to the hidden eyes.
“Say, are you blind?” he asked.
“Blind as a bat! Can’t see my hand before my face.”
The horrified judge stalked to the door.
“You hear that?” he called in, but only the parrot heeded him.
“Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!” it screeched.
Winona and her mother came to the door. They had been absent for a brief cry.
“What she could ever see in me,” Spike was repeating–“a pretty girl like that!”
“Pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” screamed the parrot.
Its concluding laugh was evil with irony. Winona sped to the cage, regarding her old pet with dismay. She glanced back at Spike.
“Smart birdie, all right, all right,” called Spike. “He knows her.”
“Pretty girl, pretty girl!” Again came the derisive guffaw.
Never had Polly’s sarcasm been so biting. Winona turned a murderous glance from it and looked uneasily back at her man.
“Dinner’s on,” called Mrs. Penniman.
“I’m having one of my bad days,” groaned the judge. “Don’t feel as if I could eat a mouthful.”
But he was merely insuring that he could be the first to leave the table plausibly. He intended that the apparent misunderstanding about the wicker chair should have been but a thing of the moment, quickly past and forgotten.
“Why, what’s the trouble with you, Father?” asked Winona in the tone of one actually seeking information.
The judge shot her a hurt look. It was no way to address an invalid of his standing.
“Chow, Spike,” said Wilbur, and would have guided him, but Winona was lightly before him.
Dave Cowan followed them from the little house.
“Present me to His Highness,” said he, after kneeling to kiss the hand of Winona.
* * * * *
The mid-afternoon hours beheld Spike Brennon again strangely occupying the wicker porch chair. He even wielded the judge’s very own palm-leaf fan as he sat silent, sniffing at intervals toward the yellow rose. Once he was seen to be moving his hand, with outspread fingers, before his face.
Winona had maneuvered her father from the chair, nor had she the grace to veil her subterfuge after she lured him to the back of the house. She merely again had wished to know what, in plain terms, his ailment was; what, for that matter, had been the trouble with him for twenty years. The judge fell speechless with dismay.
“You eat well and you sleep well, and you’re well nourished” went on the daughter, remorseless all at once.
“Little you know,” began the judge at last.
“But I shall know, Father. Remember, I’ve learned things. I’m going to take you in hand. I may even have to be severe with you but all for your own good.”
She spoke with icy conviction. There was a new, cold gleam in her prying eyes. The judge suffered genuinely.
“I should think you had learned things!” he protested, miserably. “For one thing, miss, that skirt ain’t a respectable garment.”
Winona slid one foot toward him.
“Pooh! Don’t be silly!” Never before had Winona poohed her father.
“Cigarette fiend, too,” accused the judge.
“My husband got me to stop.”
“Strong drink,” added the judge.
“Pooh!” again breathed Winona. “A little nip of something when you’re done up.”
“You talking that way!” admonished the twice-poohed parent. “You that was always so—-“
“I’m not it any longer.” She did a dance step toward the front door, but called back to him: “Spike’s set his heart on that chair. You’ll have to find something else for yourself.”
“‘Twon’t always be so,” retorted the judge, stung beyond reason at the careless finality of her last words. “You wait–wait till the revolution sweeps you high and mighty people out of your places! Wait till the workers take over their rights–you wait!”
But Winona had not waited. She had gone to confer on Wilbur Cowan a few precious drops of that which had caused her father to put upon her the stigma of alcoholic intemperance.
“It’s real genuine dandelion wine,” she told him. “One of the nurses got it for me when we left the boat in Boston. Her own mother made it, and she gave me the recipe, and it isn’t a bit of trouble. I’m going after dandelions to-morrow, Spike and I. Of course we’ll have to be secret about it.”
In the sacred precincts of the Penniman parlour Wilbur Cowan raised the wineglass to his lips and tasted doubtingly. After a second considering sip he announced–“They can’t arrest you for that.”
Winona looked a little relieved, but more than a little disappointed.
“I thought it had a kick,” she mourned.
“Here’s to you and him, anyway! Didn’t I always tell you he was one good little man?”
“He’s all of that,” said Winona, and tossed off her own glass of what she sincerely hoped was not a permitted beverage.
“You’ve come on,” said Wilbur.
“I haven’t started,” said Winona.
* * * * *
Later that afternoon Winona sat in her own room in close consultation with Juliana Whipple. Miss Whipple, driving her own car as no other Whipple could have driven it, had hastened to felicitate the bride. Tall, gaunt, a little stooped now, her weathered face aglow, she had ascended the steps to greet the couple. Spike’s tenancy of the chair had been made doubly secure by Winona on the step at his feet.
Juliana embraced Winona and took one of Spike’s knotted hands to press warmly between both her own. Then Winona had dragged her to privacy, and their talk had now come to a point.
“It’s that–that parrot!” exploded Winona, desperately. “I never used to notice, but you know–that senseless gabble, ‘pretty girl, pretty girl,’ and then the thing laughs like a fiend. It would be all right if he wouldn’t laugh. You might think he meant it. And poor Spike is so sensitive; he gets things you wouldn’t think he’d get. That awful bird might set him to thinking. Now he believes I’m pretty. In spite of everything I’ve said to him, he believes it. Well, I’m not going to have that bird putting any other notion into his mind, not if I have to–“
She broke off, but murder was in her tone.
“I see,” said Miss Whipple. “You’re right, of course–only you are pretty, Winona. I never used to think–think about it, I mean, but you’ve changed. You needn’t be afraid of any parrot.”
Winona patted the hand of Miss Whipple, an able hand suggesting that of Spike in its texture and solidity.
“That’s ever so nice of you, but I know all about myself. Spike’s eyes are gone, but that bird is going, too.”
“Why not let me take the poor old thing?” said Juliana. “It can say ‘pretty girl’ to me and laugh its head off if it wants.” She hung a moment on this, searching Winona’s face with clear eyes. “I have no blind husband,” she finished.
“You’re a dear,” said Winona.
“I’m so glad for you,” said Juliana.
“I must guard him in so many ways,” confided Winona. “He’s happy now–he’s forgotten for the moment. But sometimes it comes back on him terribly–what he is, you know. I’ve seen him over there lose control–want to kill himself. He says he can’t help such times. It will seem to him that someone has shut him in a dark room and he must break down its walls–break out into the light. He would try to break the walls down–like a caged beast. It wasn’t pretty. And I’m his eyes and all his life, and no old bird is ever going to set him thinking I’m not perfectly beautiful. That’s the plain truth. I may lie about it myself to him pretty soon. I might as well. He only thinks I’m being flirty when I deny it. Oh, I know I’ve changed! Sometimes it seems to me now as if I used to be–well, almost prudish.”
“My dear, he knows better than you do, much better, how beautiful you are. But you’re right about the bird. I’ll take him gladly.” She reflected a moment. “There’s a fine place for the cage in my room–on my hope chest.”
“You dear!” said Winona. “Of course I couldn’t have killed it.”
Downstairs ten minutes later Winona, the light of filial devotion in her eyes, was explaining to her father that she was giving the parrot away because she had noticed that it annoyed him.
The judge beamed gratitude.
“Why, it’s right thoughtful of you, Winona. It does annoy me, kind of. That miserable Dave Cowan’s taught it some new rigmarole–no meaning to it, but bothersome when you want to be quiet.”
Even in the days of her white innocence Winona Penniman had not been above doing a thing for one reason while advancing another less personal. She had always been a strange girl.
Juliana took leave of Spike.
“You have a lovely wife,” she told him. “It isn’t going to be too hard for you, this life.”
“Watch us!” said Winona. “I’ll make his life more beautiful than I am.” Her hand fluttered to his shoulder.
“Oh, me? I’ll be all right,” said Spike.
“And thank you for this wonderful bird,” said Juliana.
She lifted the cage from its table and went slowly toward the gate. The parrot divined that dirty work was afoot, but it had led a peaceful life and its repertoire comprised no call of alarm.
“Pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl!” it shrieked. Then followed its harshest laugh of scorn.
Juliana did not quicken her pace to the car; she finished the little journey in all dignity, and placed her burden in the tonneau.
“Pretty girl, pretty girl!” screamed the dismayed bird. The laugh was long and eloquent of derision.
Dave Cowan reached the Penniman gate, pausing a moment to watch the car leave. Juliana shot him one swift glance while the parrot laughed.
“Who was that live-looking old girl?” he demanded as he came up the steps. “Oh!” he said when Winona told him.
He glanced sympathetically after the car. A block away it had slowed to turn a corner. The parrot’s ironic laughter came back to them.
“Yes, I remember her,” said Dave, musingly. He was glad to recall that he had once shown the woman a little attention.
CHAPTER XXII
Of all humans cumbering the earth Dave Cowan thought farmers the most pitiable. To this tireless-winged bird of passage farming was not a loose trade, and the news that his son was pledged to agrarian pursuits shocked him. To be mewed up for life on a few acres of land!
“It was the land tricked us first,” admonished Dave. “There we were, footloose and free, and some fool went and planted a patch of ground. Then he stayed like a fool to see what would happen. Pretty soon he fenced the patch to keep out prehistoric animals. First thing he knew he was fond of it. Of course he had to stay there–he couldn’t take if off with him. That’s how man was tricked. Most he could ever hope after that was to be a small-towner. You may think you can own land and still be free, but you can’t. Before you know it you have that home feeling. Never owned a foot of it! That’s all that saved me.”
Dave frowned at his son hopefully, as one saved might regard one who still might be.
“I’m not owning any land,” suggested his son.
“No; but it’s tricky stuff. You get round it, working at it, nursing it–pretty soon you’ll want to own some, then you’re dished. It’s the first step that counts. After that you may crave to get out and see places, but you can’t; you have to plant the hay and the corn. You to fool round those Whipple farms–I don’t care if it is a big job with big money–it’s playing with fire. Pretty soon you’ll be as tight-fixed to a patch of soil as any yap that ever blew out the gas in a city hotel. You’ll stick there and raise hogs _en masse_ for free people that can take a trip when they happen to feel like it.” Dave had but lately learned _en masse_ and was glad to find a use for it. He spoke with the untroubled detachment of one saved, who could return at will to the glad life of nomady. “You, with the good loose trades you know! Do you want to take root in this hole like a willow branch that someone shoves into the ground? Don’t you ever want to move–on and on and on?”
His son at the time had denied stoutly that he felt this urge. Now, after a week of his new work, he would have been less positive. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he sprawled face down on the farther shaded slope of West Hill, confessing a lively fear that he might take root like the willow. Late in that first week the old cry had begun to ring in his ears–Where do we go from here?–bringing the cold perception that he would not go anywhere from here.
Through all his early years in Newbern he had not once felt the wander-bidding; never, as Dave Cowan put it, had he been itchy-footed for the road. Then, with the war, he had crept up to look over the top of the world, and now, unaccountably, in the midst of work he had looked forward to with real pleasure, his whole body was tingling for new horizons.
It seemed to be so with a dozen of the boys he had come back with. Some of these were writing to him, wanting him to come here, to come there; to go on and on with them to inviting places they knew–and on again from there! Mining in South America, lumbering in the Northwest, ranching in the Southwest; one of his mates would be a sailor, and one would be with a circus. Something within him beyond reason goaded him to be up and off. He felt his hold slipping; his mind floated in an ecstasy of relaxation.
His first days at the Home Farm had been good-enough days. Sharon Whipple had told him a modern farmer must first be a mechanic, and he was already that–and no one had shot at him. But the novelty of approaching good machine-gun cover without apprehension had worn off.
“Ain’t getting cold feet, are you?” asked Sharon one day, observing him hang idly above an abused tractor with the far-off look in his eyes.
“Nothing like that,” he had protested almost too warmly. “No, sir; I’ll slog on right here.”
Now for the first time in all their years of association he saw an immense gulf between himself and Sharon Whipple. Sharon was an old man, turning to look back as he went down a narrow way into a hidden valley. But he–Wilbur Cowan–was climbing a long slope into new light. How could they touch? How could this old man hold him to become another old man on the same soil–when he could be up and off, a happy world romper like his father before him?
“Funny, funny, funny!” he said aloud, and lazily rolled over to stare into blue space.
Probably it was quite as funny out there. The people like himself on those other worlds would be the sport of confusing impulses, in the long run obeying some deeper instinct whose source was in the parent star dust, wandering or taking root in their own strange soils. But why not wander when the object of it all was so obscure, so apparently trivial? Enough others would submit to rule from the hidden source, take root like the willow–mate! That was another chain upon them. Women held them back from wandering. That was how they were tricked into the deadly home feeling his father warned him of.
“Funny, funny, funny!” he said again.
From an inner pocket he drew a sheet of note paper worn almost through at the fold, stained with the ooze of trenches and his own sweat. It had come deviously to him in the front line a month after his meeting with Patricia Whipple. In that time the strange verse had still run in his mind–a crown of stars, and under her feet the moon! The tumult of fighting had seemed to fix it there. He had rested on the memory of her and become fearless of death. But the time had changed so tremendously. He could hardly recall the verse, hardly recall that he had faced death or the strange girl.
“Wilbur, dear,” he read, “I am still holding you. Are you me? What do you guess? Do you guess we were a couple of homesick ninnies, tired and weak and too combustible? Or do you guess it meant something about us finding each other out all in one second, like a flash of something? Do you guess we were frazzled up to the limit and not braced to hold back or anything, the way civilized people do? I mean, will we be the same back home? If we will be, how funny! We shall have to find out, shan’t we? But let’s be sporty, and give the thing a chance to be true if it can. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? What I mean, let’s not shatter its morale by some poky chance meeting with a lot of people round, whom it is none of their business what you and I do or don’t do. That would be fierce, would it not? So much might depend.
“Anyway, here’s what: The first night I am home–your intelligence department must find out the day, because I’m not going to write to you again if I never see you, I feel so unmaidenly–I shall be at our stile leading out to West Hill. You remember it–above the place where those splendid gypsies camped when we were such a funny little boy and girl. The first night as soon as I can sneak out from my proud family. You come there. We’ll know!”
* * * * *
“Funny, funny, funny–the whole game!” he said.
He lost himself in a lazy wonder if it could be true. He didn’t know. Once she had persisted terribly in his eyes; now she had faded. Her figure before the broken church was blurred.
Sharon Whipple found him the next afternoon teaching two new men the use and abuse of a tractor, and plainly bored by his task. Sharon seized the moment to talk pungently about the good old times when a farm hand didn’t have to know how to disable a tractor, or anything much, and would work fourteen hours a day for thirty dollars a month and his keep. He named the wage of the two pupils in a tone of disgruntled awe that piqued them pleasantly but did not otherwise impress. When they had gone their expensive ways he turned to Wilbur.
“Did you get over to that dry-fork place to-day?”
“No; too busy here with these highbinders.”
He spoke wearily, above a ripening suspicion that he would not much longer be annoyed in this manner. A new letter had that morning come from the intending adventurer into South America.
“I’ll bet you’ve had a time with this new help,” said Sharon.
“I’ve put three men at work over on that clearing, though.”
“I’ll get over there myself with you to-morrow; no, not tomorrow–next day after. That girl of ours gets in to-morrow noon. Have to be there, of course.”
“Of course.”
“She trotted a smart mile over there. Everybody says so. Family tickled to death about her. Me, too, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Rattlepate, though.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.
When the old man had gone he looked out over the yellowing fields with a frank distaste for the level immensity. Suddenly there rang in his ears the harsh singing of many men: “Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?” Old Sharon was rooted in the soil; dying there. But he was still free. He could wire Leach Belding he was starting–and start.
* * * * *
About eight o’clock the following night he parked the Can beside the ridge road, and for the first time in his proud career of ownership cursed its infirmities. It was competent, but no car for a tryst one might not wish to advertise. When its clamour had been stilled he waited some moments, feeling that a startled countryside must rush to the spot. Yet no one came, so at last he went furtively through the thinned grove and about clumps of hazel brush, feeling his way, stepping softly, crouching low, until he could make out the stile where it broke the lines of the fence. The night was clear and the stile was cleanly outlined by starlight. Beyond the fence was a shadowed mass, first a clump of trees, the outbuildings of the Whipple New Place, the house itself. There were lights at the back, and once voices came to him, then the thin shatter of glass on stone, followed by laughs from two dissonant throats. He stood under a tall pine, listening, but no other sound came. After a while he sat at the foot of the tree. Crickets chirped and a bat circled through the night. The scent of the pine from its day-long baking was sharp in his nostrils. His back tired against the tree, and he eased himself to the cooled grass, face down, his hands crossed under his chin. He could look up now and see the stile against stars.
He waited. He had expected to wait. The little night sounds that composed the night’s silence, his own stillness, his intent watching, put him back to nights when silence was ominous. Once he found he had stopped breathing to listen to the breathing of the men on each side of him. He was waiting for the word, and felt for a rifle. He had to rise to shake off this oppression. On his feet he laughed softly, being again in Newbern on a fool’s mission. He lay down hands under his chin, but again the silent watching beset him with the old oppression. He must be still and strain his eyes ahead. Presently the word would come, or he would feel the touch of a groping foe. He half dozed at last from the memory of that other endless fatigue. He came to himself with a start and raised his head to scan the stile. The darkness had thickened but the two posts at the ends of the fence were still outlined. He watched and waited.
After a long time the east began to lighten; a deepening glow rimmed West Hill, picking out in silver the trees along its edge. If she meant to come she must come soon, he thought, but the rising moon distinctly showed the bare stile. She had written a long time ago. She was notoriously a rattlepate. Of course she would have forgotten. Then for a moment his straining eyes were puzzled. His gaze had not shifted even for an instant, yet the post at the left of the stile had unaccountably thickened. He considered it a trick of the advancing moonshine, and looked more intently. It was motionless, like the other post, yet it had thickened. Then he saw it was taller, but still it did not move. It could be no one. Mildly curious, he crept forward to make the post seem right in this confusing new glamour. But it broadened as he neared it, and still was taller than its neighbour, its lines not so sharp.
He rose to his feet, with a dry laugh at his own credulity, taking some slow steps forward, expecting each stride to resolve the post to its true dimensions. He was within a dozen feet of it before he saw it could not be a post–anyway, not the same post. His scalp crept into minute wrinkles at the back of his head. He knew the feeling–fear! But, as in other times, he could not make his feet go back. Two other steps and he saw she must be there. She had not stirred, but the rising light caught her wan face and a pale glint of eyes.
All at once his fear was greater–greater than any he had known in battle. His feet dragged protestingly, but he forced them on. He wanted her to speak or move to break that tension of fear. But not until he reached out stiffening fingers to touch her did she stir. Then she gave a little whispered cry and all at once it was no longer moonlight for him, but full day. A girl in nurse’s cap and a faded, much laundered dress of light blue stood before a battered church, beside a timbered breach in its gray stone wall. He was holding her.
The song was coming to him, harsh and full throated from many men: “Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?”
“We don’t go anywhere from here,” he heard himself say in anger. They were the only words he had spoken.
The girl was shaking as she had shaken back at that church; uttering little shapeless cries from a throat that by turns fluttered and tightened. One clenched hand was fiercely thumping his shoulder. They were on strange land, as if they had the crust of the moon itself beneath their feet. They seemed to know it had been true.
* * * * *
They were sitting on a log in shadow. He rose and stepped into the light, facing his watch to the moon, now gone so high it had paled from gold to silver. He went to her again.
“Do you know it’s nearly one?”
“It must be that–I suppose so.”
“Shouldn’t you be going?”
She leaned forward, shoulders drooping, a huddled bit of black in the loose cloak she wore. He waited. At length she drew her shoulders up with a quick intake of breath. She held this a moment, her chin lifted.
“There, now I’ve decided,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m not going back.”
“No?”
“Not going through any more fuss. I’m too tired. It seemed as if I’d never get here, never get out of that dreadful place, never get out of Paris, never get out of Brest, never get off the boat, never get home! I’m too tired for any more never gets. I’m not going to have talking and planning and arguments and tearful relatives forever and a day more. See if I do! I’m here, and I’m not going to break it again. I’m not going back!”
He reached down to pat her hand with a humouring air.
“Where will you go?”
“That’s up to you.”
“But what can I—-“
“I’m going where you go. I tell you I’m too tired to have any talk.”
He sat down beside her.
“Yes, you’re a tired child,” he told her.
She detected the humoring inflection.
“None of that! I’m tired, but I’m stubborn. I’m not going back. I’m supposed to be sleeping soundly in my little bed. In the morning, before I’m supposed to be up, I’ll issue a communique from–any old place; or tell ’em face to face. I won’t mind that a little bit after everything’s over. It’s telling what’s going to be and listening to talk about it that I won’t have. I’m not up to it. Now you talk!”
“You’re tired. Are you too tired to know your own mind?”
“No; just too tired to argue with it, fight it; and I’m free, white, and twenty-one; and I’ve read about the self-determination of small peoples.”
“Say, aren’t you afraid?”
“Don’t be silly! Of course I’m afraid! What is that about perfect love casting out fear?–don’t believe it! I’m scared to death–truly!”
“Go back till to-morrow.”
“I won’t! I’ve gone over all that.”
“All right! Shove off!”
He led her to the ambushed Can, whose blemishes became all too apparent in the merciless light of the moon.
“What a lot of wound chevrons it has!” she exclaimed.
“Well, I didn’t expect anything like this. I could have got—-“
“It looks like a permanent casualty. Will it go?”
“It goes for me. You’re sure you don’t think it’s better to—-“
“On your way!” she gayly ordered, but her voice caught, and she clung to him a moment before entering the car. “No; I’m not weakening–don’t you think it! But let me rest a second.”
She was in the car, again wearily gay. The Can hideously broke the quiet.
“Home, James!” she commanded.
* * * * *
Dawn found the car at rest on the verge of a hill with a wide-sweeping view over and beyond the county seat of Newbern County. Patricia slept within the fold of his arm. At least half of the slow forty miles she had slept against his shoulder in spite of the car’s resounding progress over a country road. Once in the darkness she had wakened long enough to tell him not to go away.
The rising sun lighted the town of Halton below them, and sent level rays across a wide expanse of farmland beyond it, flat meadows and rolling upland. White mist shrouded the winding trail of a creek. It was the kind of landscape he had viewed yesterday with a rising distaste; land that had tricked people from their right to wander; to go places on a train when they would.
He brought his eyes back from the treacherous vista and turned them down to the face of the sleeping girl. A pale scarf was wound about her head, and he could see but little beyond it but the tip of her nose, a few scattered, minute freckles on one cheek. She was limp, one bare hand falling inertly over the edge of the seat between them. He looked out again at the checkerboard of farms. He, too, had been tricked.
“But what a fine trick!” he said aloud. “No wonder it works!”
He dozed himself presently, nodding till his forward-pitching head would waken him. Afterward he heard Spike saying: “So dark you can’t see your hand before your face.” He came awake. His head was on Patricia’s shoulder, her arm supporting him.
“You must have gone to sleep and let the car stop,” she told him. He stared sleepily, believing it. “But I want my breakfast,” she reminded him. He sat up, winking the sleep from his eyes, shaking it from his head.
“Of course,” he said.
He looked again out over the land to which an old device had inveigled him. A breeze had come with the dawn, stirring the grain fields into long ripples. At the roadside was the tossing silver of birch leaves.
“This is one whale of a day for us two, isn’t it?” he demanded.
“You said it!” she told him.
“Breakfast and a license and–“
“You know it!” she declared.
“Still afraid?”
“More than ever! It’s a wonder and a wild desire, but it scares me stiff–you’re so strange.”
“You know, it isn’t too late.”
She began to thump him with a clenched fist up between his shoulders.
“Carry on!” she ordered. “There isn’t a slacker in the whole car!”
* * * * *
A few hours later, in the dining room of the Whipple New Place, Gideon, Harvey D., and Merle Whipple were breakfasting. To them entered Sharon Whipple from his earlier breakfast, ruddy, fresh-shaven, bubbling.
“On my way to the Home Farm,” he explained, “but I had to drop in for a look at the girl by daylight. She seemed too peaked last night.”
“Pat’s still sleeping,” said her father over his egg cup.
“That’s good! I guess a rest was all she needed. Beats all, girls nowadays seem to be made of wire rope. You take that one–“
A telephone bell rang in the hall beyond, and Merle Whipple went to it.
“Hello, hello! Whipple New Place–Merle Whipple speaking.” He listened, standing in the doorway to turn a puzzled face to the group about the table. “Hello! Who–who?” His bewilderment was apparent. “But it’s Pat talking,” he said, “over long distance.”
“Calling from her room upstairs to fool you,” warned Sharon. “Don’t I know her flummididdles?”
But the look of bewilderment on Merle’s face had become a look of pure fright. He raised a hand sternly to Sharon.
“Once more,” he called, hoarsely, and again listened with widening eyes. He lifted his face to the group, the receiver still at his ear. “She says–good heaven! She says, ‘I’ve gone A.W.O.L., and now I’m safe and married–I’m married to Wilbur Cowan.'” He uttered his brother’s name in the tone of a shocked true Whipple.
“Good heaven!” echoed Harvey D.
“I’m blest!” said Gideon.
“I snum to goodness!” said the dazed Sharon. “The darned skeesicks!”
Merle still listened. Again he raised a now potent hand.
“She says she doesn’t know how she came to do it, except that he put a comether on her.”
He hung up the receiver and fell into a chair before the table that held the telephone.
“Scissors and white aprons!” said Sharon. “Of all things you wouldn’t expect!”
Merle stood before the group with a tragic face.
“It’s hard, Father, but she says it’s done. I suppose–I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it.”
Hereupon Sharon Whipple’s eyes began to blink rapidly, his jaw dropped, and he slid forward in his chair to writhe in a spasm of what might be weirdly silent laughter. His face was purple, convulsed, but no sound came from his moving lips. The others regarded him with alarm.
“Not a stroke?” cried Harvey D., and ran to his side. As he sought to loosen Sharon’s collar the old man waved him off and became happily vocal.
“Oh, oh!” he gasped. “That Merle boy has brightened my whole day!”
Merle frowned.
“Perhaps you may see something to laugh at,” he said, icily.
Sharon controlled his seizure. Pointing his eyebrows severely, he cocked a presumably loaded thumb at Merle.
“Let me tell you, young man, the best this family can make of that marriage will be a darned good best. Could you think of a better best–say, now?” Merle turned impatiently from the mocker.
“Blest if I can–on the spur of the moment!” said Gideon.
Harvey D. looked almost sharply at the exigent Merle.
“Pat’s twenty-five and knows her own mind better than we do,” he said.
“I never knew it at all!” said Gideon.
“It’s almost a distinct relief,” resumed Harvey D. “As I think of it I like it.” He went to straighten the painting of an opened watermelon beside a copper kettle, that hung above the sideboard. “He’s a fine young chap.” He looked again at Merle, fixing knife and fork in a juster alignment on his plate. “I dare say we needed him in the family.”
* * * * *
Late the following afternoon Sharon triumphantly brought his car to a stop before the gateway leading up to the red farmhouse. The front door proving unresponsive, he puffed about to the rear. He found a perturbed Patricia Cowan, in cap and apron, tidying the big kitchen. Her he greeted rapturously.
“This kitchen–” began the new mistress.
“So he put a comether on you!”
“Absolutely–when I wasn’t looking!”
“Put one on me, too,” said Sharon; “years ago.”
“This kitchen,” began Patricia again, “is an unsanitary outrage. It needs a thousand things done to it. We’d never have put up with this in the Army. That sink there”–she pointed it out–“must have something of a carbolic nature straight off.”
“I know, I know!” Sharon was placating. “I’m going to put everything right for you.”
“New paint for all the woodwork–white.”
“Sure thing–as white as you want it.”
“And blue velours curtains for the big room. I always dreamed I’d have a house with blue velours curtains.”
“Sure, sure! Anything you want you order.”
“And that fireplace in the big room–I burned some trash there this morning, and it simply won’t inhale.”
“Never did,” said Sharon. “We’ll run the chimney up higher. Anything else?”
“Oh, lots! I’ve a long list somewhere.”
“I bet you have! But it’s a good old house; don’t build ’em like this any more; not a nail in it; sound as a nut. Say, miss, did you know there was high old times in this house about seventy-three years ago? Fact! They thought I wasn’t going to pull through. I was over two days old before it looked like I’d come round. Say, I learned to walk out in that side yard. That reminds me–” Sharon hesitated in mild embarrassment–“there’s a place between them two wings–make a bully place for a sun room; spoil the architecture, mebbe, but who cares? Sun room–big place to play round in–play room, or anything like that.”
Patricia had been searching among a stack of newspapers, but she had caught “sun room.”
“Stunning!” she said. “We need another big place right now, or when my things get here.”
Sharon coughed.
“Need it more later, I guess.”
But Patricia had found her paper.
“Oh, here’s something I put aside to ask you about! I want you to understand I’m going to be all the help I can here. This advertisement says ‘Raise Belgian hares,’ because meat is so high. Do you know–do people really make millions at it, and could I do the work?”
Sharon was shaking his head.
“You could if you didn’t have something else to do. And I suppose they sell for money, though I never did hear tell of a Belgian-hare millionaire. Heard of all other kinds, but not him. But you look here, young woman, I hope there’ll be other things not sold by the pound that’ll keep you from rabbit raising. This family’s depending a lot on you. Didn’t you hear my speech about that fine sun room?”
“Will you please not bother me at a time like this?” scolded Patricia. “Now out with you–he’s outside somewhere! And can’t you ever in the world for five minutes get mere Whipples out of your mind?” She actively waved him on from the open door.
Sharon passed through a grape arbour, turning beyond it to study the site of the sun room. All in a moment he built and peopled it. How he hoped they would be coming along to play in there; at least three before he was too old to play with them. He saw them now; saw them, moreover, upon the flimsiest of promises, all superbly gifted with the Whipple nose. Then he went hopefully off toward the stables. He came upon Wilbur Cowan inspecting a new reaper under one of the sheds. This time the old man feigned no pounding of the boy’s back–made no pretense that he did not hug him.
“I’m so glad, so glad, so almighty glad!” he said as they stood apart.
He did not speak with his wonted exuberance, saying the words very quietly. But Sharon had not to be noisy to sound sincere.
“Thanks,” said Wilbur. “Of course I couldn’t be sure how her people would—-“
“Stuff!” said Sharon. “All tickled to death but one near-Whipple and he’s only annoyed. But you’ve been my boy–in my fool mind I always had you for my boy, when you was little and when you went to war. You could of known that, and that was enough for you to know. Of course I never did think of you and Pat. That was too gosh-all perfect. Of course I called her a rattlepate, but she was my girl as much as you was my boy.”
The old eyes shone mistily upon Wilbur, then roved to the site of his dream before he continued.
“Me? I’m getting on–and on. Right fast, too. But you–you and that fine girl–why, you two are a new morning in a new world, so fresh and young and proud of each other, the way you are!” He hesitated, his eyes coming back. “Only thing I hope for now–before I get bedfast or something–say, take a look at the space between them south wings–stand over this way a mite.” Sharon now built there, with the warmest implications, a perfect sun room. “That’ll be one grand place,” he affirmed of his work when all was done.
“Yes, it sounds good,” replied Wilbur.
“Oh, a grand place, big as outdoors, getting any sun there is–great for winter, great for rainy days!” Wistfully he searched the other’s face. “You know, Buck, a grand place to–play in, or anything like that.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.
THE END