“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—someh
ow, 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 the shins, Ellen. I want to see if Parson meant what he said or if it was just a pulpit frill.”
Mr. Meredith’s face quivered. He had had a terrible hour alone in his study on the night Jem and Jerry had gone to town. But he answered quietly.
“Whatever I felt, it could not alter my belief—my assurance that a country whose sons are ready to lay down their lives in her defence will win a new vision because of their sacrifice.”
“You do mean it, Parson. I can always tell when people mean what they say. It’s a gift that was born in me. Makes me a terror to most parsons, that! But I’ve never caught you yet saying anything you didn’t mean. I’m always hoping I will—that’s what reconciles me to going to church. It’d be such a comfort to me—such a weapon to batter Ellen here with when she tries to civilize me. Well, I’m off over the road to see Ab. Crawford a minute. The gods be good to you all.”
“The old pagan!” muttered Susan, as Norman strode away. She did not care if Ellen Douglas did hear her. Susan could never understand why fire did not descend from heaven upon Norman Douglas when he insulted ministers the way he did. But the astonishing thing was Mr. Meredith seemed really to like his brother-in-law.
Rilla wished they would talk of something besides war. She had heard nothing else for a week and she was really a little tired of it. Now that she was relieved from her haunting fear that Walter would want to go it made her quite impatient. But she supposed—with a sigh—that there would be three or four months of it yet.
CHAPTER VI.SUSAN, RILLA, AND DOG MONDAY MAKE A RESOLUTION
The big living-room at Ingleside was snowed over with drifts of white cotton. Word had come from Red Cross headquarters that sheets and bandages would be required. Nan and Di and Rilla were hard at work. Mrs. Blythe and Susan were upstairs in the boys’ room, engaged in a more personal task. With dry, anguished eyes they were packing up Jem’s belongings. He must leave for Valcartier the next morning. They had been expecting the word but it was none the less dreadful when it came.
Rilla was basting the hem of a sheet for the first time in her life. When the word had come that Jem must go she had her cry out among the pines in Rainbow Valley and then she had gone to her mother.
“Mother, I want to do something. I’m only a girl—I can’t do anything to win the war—but I must do something to help at home.”
“The cotton has come up for the sheets,” said Mrs. Blythe. “You can help Nan and Di make them up. And Rilla, don’t you think you could organize a Junior Red Cross among the young girls? I think they would like it better and do better work by themselves than if mixed up with the older people.”
“But, mother—I’ve never done anything like that.”
“We will all have to do a great many things in the months ahead of us that we have never done before, Rilla.”
“Well"—Rilla took the plunge—"I’ll try, mother—if you’ll tell me how to begin. I have been thinking it all over and I have decided that I must be as brave and heroic and unselfish as I can possibly be.”
Mrs. Blythe did not smile at Rilla’s italics. Perhaps she did not feel like smiling or perhaps she detected a real grain of serious purpose behind Rilla’s romantic pose. So here was Rilla hemming sheets and organizing a Junior Red Cross in her thoughts as she hemmed; moreover, she was enjoying it—the organizing that is, not the hemming. It was interesting and Rilla discovered a certain aptitude in herself for it that surprised her. Who would be president? Not she. The older girls would not like that. Irene Howard? No, somehow Irene was not quite as popular as she deserved to be. Marjorie Drew? No, Marjorie hadn’t enough backbone. She was too prone to agree with the last speaker. Betty Mead—calm, capable, tactful Betty—the very one! And Una Meredith for treasurer; and, if they were very insistent, they might make her, Rilla, secretary. As for the various committees, they must be chosen after the Juniors were organized, but Rilla knew just who should be put on which. They would meet around—and there must be no eats—Rilla knew she would have a pitched battle with Olive Kirk over that—and everything should be strictly business-like and constitutional. Her minute book should be covered in white with a Red Cross on the cover—and wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of uniform which they could all wear at the concerts they would have to get up to raise money—something simple but smart?
“You have basted the top hem of that sheet on one side and the bottom hem on the other,” said Di.
Rilla picked out her stitches and reflected that she hated sewing. Running the Junior Reds would be much more interesting.
Mrs. Blythe was saying upstairs, “Susan, do you remember that first day Jem lifted up his little arms to me and called me ‘mo’er’—the very first word he ever tried to say?”
“You could not mention anything about that blessed baby that I do not and will not remember till my dying day,” said Susan drearily.
“Susan, I keep thinking today of once when he cried for me in the night. He was just a few months old. Gilbert didn’t want me to go to him—he said the child was well and warm and that it would be fostering bad habits in him. But I went—and took him up—I can feel that tight clinging of his little arms round my neck yet. Susan, if I hadn’t gone that night, twenty-one years ago, and taken my baby up when he cried for me I couldn’t face tomorrow morning.”
“I do not know how we are going to face it anyhow, Mrs. Dr. dear. But do not tell me that it will be the final farewell. He will be back on leave before he goes overseas, will he not?”
“We hope so but we are not very sure. I am making up my mind that he will not, so that there will be no disappointment to bear. Susan, I am determined that I will send my boy off tomorrow with a smile. He shall not carry away with him the remembrance of a weak mother who had not the courage to send when he had the courage to go. I hope none of us will cry.”
“I am not going to cry, Mrs. Dr. dear, and that you may tie to, but whether I shall manage to smile or not will be as Providence ordains and as the pit of my stomach feels. Have you room there for this fruit-cake? And the shortbread? And the mince-pie? That blessed boy shall not starve, whether they have anything to eat in that Quebec place or not. Everything seems to be changing all at once, does it not? Even the old cat at the manse has passed away. He breathed his last at a quarter to ten last night and Bruce is quite heart-broken, they tell me.”
“I should not have lamented, Mrs. Dr. dear, if that Hyde-beast had died also. He has been Mr. Hyde most of the time since Jem came home in khaki, and that has a meaning I will maintain. I do not know what Monday will do when Jem is gone. The creature just goes about with a human look in his eyes that takes all the good out of me when I see it. Ellen West used to be always railing at the Kaiser and we thought her crazy, but now I see that there was a method in her madness. This tray is packed, Mrs. Dr. dear, and I will go down and put in my best licks preparing supper. I wish I knew when I would cook another supper for Jem but such things are hidden from our eyes.”
Jem Blythe and Jerry Meredith left next morning. It was a dull day, threatening rain, and the clouds lay in heavy grey rolls over the sky; but almost everybody in the Glen and Four Winds and Harbour Head and Upper Glen and over-harbour—except Whiskers-on-the-moon—was there to see them off. The Blythe family and the Meredith family were all smiling. Even Susan, as Providence did ordain, wore a smile, though the effect was somewhat more painful than tears would have been. Faith and Nan were very pale and very gallant. Rilla thought she would get on very well if something in her throat didn’t choke her, and if her lips didn’t take such spells of trembling. Dog Monday was there, too. Jem had tried to say good-bye to him at Ingleside but Monday implored so eloquently that Jem relented and let him go to the station. He kept close to Jem’s legs and watched every movement of his beloved master.
“I can’t bear that dog’s eyes,” said Mrs. Meredith.
“The beast has more sense than most humans,” said Mary Vance. “Well, did we any of us ever think we’d live to see this day? I bawled all night to think of Jem and Jerry going like this. I think they’re plumb deranged. Miller got a maggot in his head about going but I soon talked him out of it—likewise his aunt said a few touching things. For once in our lives Kitty Alec and I agree. It’s a miracle that isn’t likely to happen again. There’s Ken, Rilla.”
The Classic Children's Literature Collection: 39 Classic Novels Page 446