Chapter 12

"SHOD GOES SURE"

June week has come and gone, but I was not there when the midshipmen went marching by in their white uniforms across the green mall, and the band played and parasols and summer dresses fluttered their gay colors from the Armory to the training ship.

Father wrote that he was coming, and would take me home with him if I didn't mind missing commencement. I did mind, terribly, but it was nothing when weighed in the balance with travelling back to the Cape with him and being with him a whole week.

So Babe and Lillian went without me, but it was some comfort afterward to hear that the boys all seemed disappointed because I wasn't there. They sent ever so many nice messages. Duffield sent me a Lucky Bag, the midshipmen's Annual, full of jokes about each other and some very attractive pictures both of the men and the buildings. There was a splendid one of him, and he drew a little sketch of Commodore Perry's flag on the margin, changing the motto to the words, "Won't give up the ship."

Babe brought back a Lucky Bag, too; Watson gave it to her. She also had a postal card of that old Indian figurehead, Tecumpseh. I believe Babe must have made some wish while running around it which came true, or else Watson gave her the postal. It surely must have some association for her, for she brought it back to Provincetown and has it now, framed in a carved ivory frame, the handsomest one in the house, and wholly unsuitable for an old wooden Indian. She keeps it on her side of the bureau, and Viola simply loathes it.

Father and I had a delightfully cosy visit on the way home. We stayed all night in Boston and came over on the boat. He has been under a frightful strain and shows it; looks so worn and tired and has ever so many more gray hairs than he had a year ago. He came right from the war zone, and twice has been on ships that had to go to the rescue of torpedoed vessels and pick up passengers adrift in life-boats.

I couldn't get him to talk much about such things. He said he was trying to put them out of his mind as much as possible, and was hungry to get back to the sand dunes and just peaceful women folks. His eyes followed Barby's every movement. At times they had a grave, wistful expression which gave me dreadful forebodings.

Coming over on the boat he questioned me about the course of study at Harrington Hall—how far I'd gone in mathematics and everything. Then he asked what I thought about learning typewriting this summer, and taking a short practical business course in Mr. Carver's office. I was so astonished I couldn't speak for a moment. All I could think of was Chicken-Little's cry—"The sky's a-failing. I was sitting under a rose-bush and a piece fell on me."

Finally, instead of answering his question, I blurted out the one I was fixing to ask him later on, after I'd paved the way for it and led up to it diplomatically, about my stopping school and taking the training for a Red Cross nurse. The moment it was out I knew I had bungled it by being so abrupt. He simply waved it aside as impossible. He said I didn't understand the conditions at the front at all. They needed women there, not immature girls unfitted both physically and mentally to cope with its horrors. They would be nervous wrecks in a short time. He said he was speaking from a physician's standpoint. He recognized the Joan of Arc spirit in the school-girls who offered themselves. It was one of the most beautiful and touching things the war had called forth, but they needed something more than youthful enthusiasm and a passion for sacrifice. When I was through school if I still wanted to take the training he wouldn't say a word, but now——

The shake of his head and the gesture of his hand as he said that one word dismissed the subject so utterly that I simply couldn't insist. I couldn't offer a single one of the arguments which I had stored up to answer him with in case he objected, as I knew he would.

Then he said he'd always hoped to give me some practical business training, just as if I'd been a boy, and now the war was making it even more necessary that I should have it. If I'd been a boy he would have wanted me to go into the Cold Storage Plant here that we have an interest in, long enough for me to learn how it is carried on and what its success depends upon. Mr. Samuel Carver II is at the head of it, and Titcomb Carver and Sammy III will take it up when they're through college. But they'll be the first to enlist when the call comes. They're that kind. And if they never come back the business will be eventually turned over to strangers. He wants me to know enough about it to safeguard our interests.

I was perfectly aghast at the idea. Me, not seventeen till next month, spending all my vacation shut up in an office, banging on a typewriter, with the whole free sparkling harbor outside calling to me. I'd planned such good times for this summer, a regular "under-the-rose-bush" kind, no lessons, no rules. Now not only was the sky a-falling over my particular bush, it was hitting me hard.

The boat had just rounded the point when Father finished unfolding his plan, and we were leaning over the railing of the upper deck watching for the old town to come in view. For the first time it failed to look beautiful to me. The straight, ugly lines of the huge Storage plant loomed up till it seemed the biggest thing alongshore except the Pilgrim monument. That, of course, stretched up grim and stern above everything else, and looked across at me as if it knew the hard thing Father had just asked me to do. I felt that it heard the rebellious answer I was making to myself.

"I can't."

"You must," it answered back, as it had done all my life. "It's your duty. The idea of a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Minute Men shirking her duty!"

It always gets back at me that way. It knows that the stern and rockbound Huntingdon part of me could make only one answer when Father put the matter to me the way he did. It was a sacrifice, for I had hoped to begin my new novel this summer. But I had a sort of righteous, uplifted feeling after I had consented, such as I think the martyrs must have had, which is the reward of sacrifice. It's queer what a satisfaction one can get out of that martyr feeling at times.

But I was ashamed of it next morning. I was going through the hall to join Barby and Father on the porch when I heard them talking about me.

"No, Judson, she's only a child. I can't bear to have her go out into the rough business world this early. There'll be time enough for that if some actual need should arise."

"But, Barbara, to let her grow up unprepared for what is almost sure to happen, would be like sending her out on a stony road in her little bare feet. 'Shod goes sure,' Uncle Darcy used to say. If she's properly shod she'll be spared much pain and weariness. If you could only realize what lies ahead of us—if you could only see what I have seen——"

I walked out on the porch just then and he put out his hand to draw me to a seat beside him. Then he began to tell us of what he has just seen in France and England, the splendid way the women and girls over there are rising up and shouldering their burdens. Of their work in the munitions factories and on farms and in railroad yards. From peeresses to peasants they stop at nothing which needs doing, from oiling a locomotive to cleaning out a stable. Personal affairs are no longer regarded. Personal comfort no longer counts. Safety doesn't count. Life itself doesn't count. The only thing that does count is winning the war, and they are giving themselves magnificently, body and soul, "as one who does a deed for love nor counts it sacrifice."

It's like listening to one of the old Crusaders when Father talks that way. It's a holy war to him. When I compared the selfish, easy existence I had planned for myself this vacation with what the girls over there are doing, and remembered how noble I had considered myself for giving it up, I felt ashamed of having called it a sacrifice. I made up my mind then and there that I'll make good in the way Father wants me to if it kills me. He shall never have cause to regret my being just a girl. I'm sure he has envied Mr. Carver his sons many a time, but I'll show him I can answer my Country's call when it comes, fully as well as Titcomb or Sammy III. In the meantime, I'll put in my best licks at getting shod for whatever road that lies ahead.

Of course I didn't start till Father's visit was over, but he took me down to the office one morning and made all the arrangements. It is the old Mr. Carver, Grandfather Huntingdon's friend, who is to take me in hand. Sammy Senior, everybody calls him. He doesn't do much now but sign checks and attend to some of the correspondence, so he'll have plenty of time to attend to me, and seems glad to do it.

It was a solemn sort of morning, for we went into Mr. Sammy Senior's office, and Father took his private box out of the safe and looked over the papers in it. He made a lot of changes and told both of us what he told me up in the garret last time he was home, and a lot more besides. There are certain bonds he wants turned over to Uncle Darcy's grandchildren, Elspeth and little Judson, when they are old enough to go to college. Judson is Father's namesake. He explained to Mr. Sammy Senior that their father, Dan Darcy, saved his life once over in China, nursing him, that time he caught the strange disease which was attacking the sailors. Father had gone over there to study it for the government.

Dan married Tippy's niece, Belle Triplett, after he came home and is working now in the wireless station over at Highland Light, but the government wants him for more important work in the Navy, and Father wants to make sure those children are provided for in case anything happens to Dan. Naturally that led to our going over the whole story. How Dan disappeared from town under a cloud years ago, everybody thinking he was the thief, instead of his friend Emmet Potter. (Dan just went away, like a scapegoat into the wilderness to shield him.) And how a year later Emmet was drowned, trying to save some people from a wreck on Peaked Hill bars, and the town put up a monument in his memory. And then a long time after that Richard and I found his confession in an old musket that we were cleaning up to play pirate with.

It was as dramatic as a real play, the finding of that confession, and I enjoyed telling it again to such an appreciative audience. How Richard and I were sitting in the swing in front of Uncle Darcy's door, polishing the brass plate on the stock, when we found it, and I went screaming into the house that Danny was innocent. How Belle, who happened to be there by the strangest coincidence, read the confession over Uncle Darcy's shoulder, and cried out "Emmet a thief! God in heaven, it will kill me!" and how she carried on like a crazy woman till she made Uncle Darcy promise he'd never tell till she gave him permission, although he would have given his life to wipe the stain from Danny's name. She was engaged to Emmett when he died, and had been worshipping him as a hero up to this time. She didn't know till later that one of the reasons that Dan took Emmet's disgrace on himself was to shield her, because he had cared for her all along as much as Emmet did.

Then Father took up the story again, and told how my letter reached him over there in China and led to the discovery that the silent young American who had saved his life was no other than Dan, who didn't know till then that Emmet had confessed and that exile was no longer necessary. "And so," said Father in conclusion, "he came back and married Belle, and, thanks to the little pirates, they lived happily ever after."

"That would make a rattling good movie," Mr. Carver said. "That ship-wreck scene, and finding the confession, and you children burying that pouch of gold-pieces in the sand, for the storm to cover up forever. If the little pirate can write it as well as she can tell it there's the material all right."

All the way home I kept thinking of his suggestion. I had never used material from real life before. I had always made up my characters. But now I began to see some of the familiar town people in a new light. Plain, quiet Dan, doing his deed regardless of the disgrace it brought upon him, was a real Sir Gareth. And dear old Uncle Darcy, vowed to silence so long, what a heroic part he had played!

"I'll try it some day on the typewriter," I resolved. Then I thought Father was right when he said "shod goes sure." Knowing how to use the typewriter will be a help in my literary career. It begins to look as if every road I happen to take leads into the one of my great ambition.