CHAPTER III
IN THE SHADOW OF WAR

Last Wednesday I spent the day at Fishburn Court. My visits seem to mean so much to Aunt Elspeth, now that her time is divided between her bed and wheeled chair. I improvised a costume and did the song and dance for her that I am going to give in the French Relief entertainment next week. And I made a blueberry pie for dinner, and set the little kitchen in shining order, and put fresh bows on her cap, and straightened out all the bureau drawers.

When everything you do is appreciated and admired and praised until you are fairly basking in approval, it makes you feel so good inside that you want to keep on that way forever. You just love to be sweet and considerate. But afterwards it's such a comedown to go back home to those who take it as a matter of course that you should be helpful, and who feel it is their duty to improve your character by telling you what your duty is. It rubs you the wrong way, and makes life much harder.

Somehow, going to Fishburn Court is like climbing up into the Pilgrim monument and looking down on the town. Seen from that height, the things that loomed up so big when you were down on their level shrink to nothing. Maybe it is because Uncle Darcy and Aunt Elspeth have lived so very, very long that they can look down on life that way and see it from a great height as God does. I always think of them when I read that verse, "A thousand years in thy sight is but as yesterday." That is why nothing seems to matter to them very much but loving each other and their neighbors as themselves.

I came away from there resolved to turn over a new leaf. I am sorry now that I said what I did the other day in the closet, but I don't feel that I have a right to blot it out of this record. The good and the bad should stand together in one's memoirs. It makes a character seem more human. I never felt that I had anything in common with Washington until I read that he sometimes gave away to violent fits of anger.

I am now resolved to make those Busy Bees the power for good which Barby thinks I can, and quit thinking of my own feelings in the matter, of how disagreeable it is to have them eternally tagging after me. After all, what difference will it make a thousand years from now if they do tag? What difference if one little ant in the universe is happy or unhappy for one atom of time? When you think of yourself that way, as just a tiny ant sitting on the equator of eternity you can put up with almost anything.

A whole week has gone by since I wrote the above sentence, and in that time the most exciting thing has happened, in addition to celebrating my sixteenth birthday. The birthday came first. Barby's gift to me was a darling rowboat, light and graceful as a cockle-shell. Uncle Darcy carved my initials on the oars, and Richard came after dark the night before and dragged it up into the yard, and tied it under the holiday tree. Next morning my presents were all piled in the boat instead of being tied to the branches, for which I was very thankful. It made me feel that I had come to a boundary line which the family recognized, when they discarded the old custom of decorating the holiday-tree. They no longer considered me an infant.

I have been wild for a boat of my own for two years, and was so excited I could scarcely eat my breakfast. I was out in it all day, first with Barby and Richard, and, afterward, with Babe Nolan and Judith Gilfred, who came to lunch. Ordinarily, I would fill pages describing my presents and what we did, but I can't wait to tell the climax.

Late in the afternoon Richard came again and rowed me over to the Lighthouse and back. When we came up the beach on our way home to supper the sun was just setting. It was all so beautiful and I was so happy that I began humming "The End of a Perfect Day." But it wasn't the end, for when we went into the house the exciting thing happened. Who should rise up suddenly in the dusk and put his arms around me but Father, home on unexpected shore leave. I hadn't seen him for a year.

Even Barby didn't know he was coming. It seemed too good to be true that he should be in time for the lighting of my birthday candles. As if it wasn't more than enough just to have him back again, safe and sound, he brought me the most adorable little wrist-watch, and from then on till midnight when my eyes weren't on him they were on it. It's so heavenly to have everybody in the world that you love best and everything you want most all together at the same time.

We had to talk fast and crowd as much as possible into the hours. I felt that I had at last stepped into my field Elysian, when nobody said a word about my running along to bed. I think they would have let me sit up though, even if I hadn't been sixteen, the time was so precious.

Up till this time the war had seemed a faraway, unreal thing, just like the tales we used to shudder over, of the heathen babies thrown to the crocodiles. I had been working for the Red Cross and the Belgian orphans in the same spirit that I've worked for the Missionary Society, wanting to help the cause, but not feeling it a personal matter. But when Father talked about it in his grave, quiet way, I began to understand what war really is. It is like a great wild beast, devouring our next-door neighbors and liable to spring at our throats any minute. It is something everybody should rise up and help to throttle.

I understand now why Richard is so crazy on the subject. It isn't just thirst for adventure, as his cousin James says, although "Dare-devil Dick" is a good name for him. He sees the danger as Father sees it, and wants to do his part to rid the world of it. He talked a long time with Father, begging him to use his influence to get him into some kind of service over there. But Father says the same thing that Mr. Moreland did. That he's too young, and the only thing for him to do is to go back to school in the fall and fit himself for bigger service when his country has greater need of him. Richard went off whistling, but I knew he was horribly disappointed from the way his hat was pulled down over his eyes.

The next morning when I went down to breakfast I felt as if the wild beast had already sprung as far as our door-step, if not actually at our throats, for Barby sat pale and anxious-eyed behind the coffee urn, and her lips were trembly when I kissed her good-morning. Father had received his orders to report in Washington in forty-eight hours, and we had hoped to keep him with us at least two weeks. He is called to a consultation about some extensive preparations to be made for marine hospital work. He had already been notified that he was to be put at the head of it, and he may have to go abroad to study conditions, almost immediately.

I knew from the dumb misery in Barby's eyes she was thinking of the same things I was – submarines and sunken mines, etc., but neither of us mentioned them, of course. Instead, we tried to be as jolly as possible, and began to plan the nicest way we could think of to spend our one day together. Suddenly Father said he'd settle it. He'd spend it all with me, any way I chose, while Barby packed her trunk and got ready to go back to Washington with him. He'd probably be there a week or ten days and he wasn't going one step without her.

Then I realized how grown-up one really is at sixteen. A year ago I would have teased to be taken along, and maybe would have gone off in a corner and cried, and felt dreadfully left out over such an arrangement. But I saw the glance that passed between them when he said it, and I understood perfectly. Barby's face was radiant. You may adore your only child, but the love of your life comes first. And it should. I was glad they wanted to go off that way on a sort of second honeymoon trip. It would be dreadfully sad to have one's parents cease to be all in all to each other. Babe Nolan's mother and stepfather seem that way, bored to death with each other.

Two things stand out so vividly in that last day that I never can forget them. One is our walk down through the town, when I almost burst with pride, going along beside Father, so tall and distinguished looking in his uniform, and seeing the royal welcome people gave him at every step. They came out of the stores and the houses to shake hands with him, the people who'd known him as a little boy and gone to school with him, and they seemed so really fond of him and so glad to have him back, that I fairly loved them for it, even people I hadn't liked especially before.

The second thing was the talk we had up here in the garret in the gable window-seat, when he came up to look for some things he had packed away in one of the chests, twenty years ago.

We did lots of other things, of course; went rowing in the new boat to a place on the beach where he used to picnic when he was a boy. We took our lunch along and ate it there. Afterwards we tramped back into the dunes a little way, just to let him feel the Cape Cod sand in his shoes once more, he said. It was high tide when we got back to the boat-house, so we got our bathing suits and went in. He was so surprised and pleased at some of my diving stunts, and taught me a new one. He is a magnificent swimmer himself.

His hair is iron gray at the temples, and I've always been halfway afraid of him before – that is, afraid to say right out whatever I happened to think or feel. But it was different this time. I felt that he understood me better than anybody else in the world, even as well as Barby used to, when I was younger. As we went back home he said the nicest thing. He said it seemed to him that we must have been boys together at some time in our lives. That I was such a jolly good chum.

I can't think about that last evening or the going away yesterday morning without the tears starting. But I'm thankful I didn't break down at the station. I couldn't have kept from it if it hadn't been for Captain Kidd, who frisked along with us. Just at the hardest moment he stood up on his hind legs and saluted. I'd never seen him do it before. It's a trick Richard taught him lately. It was so cunning everybody laughed, and I managed to pull myself together till the train started.

But I made up for it when I got back home and came up here to the gable window-seat where Father and I had that last precious talk together, with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder. I nearly bawled my eyes out as I recalled each dear thing he said about my being old enough now to understand business matters, and what he wanted me to do in case the United States went to war; how I was to look after Barby if anything happened to him; and what I was to do for Uncle Darcy and Dan's children. That he relied on me just as if I were a son, because I was a true Huntingdon, and no Huntingdon woman had ever flinched from a duty or failed to measure up to what was expected of her.

I keep thinking, what if he should never come back to talk to me again in that near, dear way. But.. I'll have to stop before any more splashes blot up this page.