The Tin Soldier Part 61

"By Jove, Jean-Joan, I never knew before what women meant in the lives of men. Here we are marooned, as it were, on an island of masculinity, yet it isn't what the other fellows think of us that counts, it is what you think who are miles away. Always in the back of our minds is the thought of what you expect of us and demand of us, and added to what we demand and expect of ourselves, it sways us level. We don't talk a great deal about you, but now and then some fellow says, 'My wife,' and we all p.r.i.c.k up our ears and want to hear the rest of it.

"It is a great life, dearest, in spite of the hard work, in spite of the stress and strain. And to me who have known so little of the great human game it is a great revelation.

"In the first place, there has been brought to me the knowledge of the joy of real labor. I shall never again be sorry for the man who toils.

You see, I had never toiled, not in the sense that a man does whose labor counts. I was always a rather anxious and lonely little boy, looking after my father and trying to help my mother, and feeling a bit of a mollycoddle because I had a tutor and did not go to school with the other chaps. In the eyes of the world I was looked upon as a lucky fellow, but I know now what I have missed. In these days I am rubbing elbows with fellows who have had to hustle, and I am discovering that life is a great game, and that I have missed the game. If Dad had been different, he might have pushed me into things, as some men with money push their sons, making them stand on their own feet. But Dad liked an easy life, and he was perhaps ent.i.tled to ease, for he had struggled in his younger years. But I have never struggled. I have always had somebody to brush my clothes and to bring my breakfast, and I think I have had a sort of hazy idea that life was like that for everybody--or if it wasn't, then the people who couldn't be brushed and breakfasted by others were much to be pitied.

"Oh, I've been a Tin Soldier, Jean-Joan, left out not only of the war but of life. I've been on the shelf all these years in our big house, with the wooden trumpets blowing, 'Trutter-a-trutt' while other men have striven.

"When I first came here I had a sort of detached feeling. I had no experiences to match with the experiences of other men. I had never had to rush in the morning to catch a subway, I had never eaten, to put it poetically, by candlelight, so that I might get to the store by eight. I had never sold papers, or plowed fields, or stood behind a counter. I had never sat at a desk, I had never in fact done anything really useful, I had just been rich, and that isn't much of a background as I am beginning to see it here--.

"I find myself having a rather strange feeling of exaltation as the days go by, because for the first time I am a cog in a great machine, for the first time I am toiling and sweating as I rather think it was intended that men should toil and sweat. And the friends that I am making are the sign and seal of the levelling effects of this great war. Not one of the men of what you might call my own cla.s.s interests me half as much as Tommy Tracy, who before he entered the service drove the car of one of Dad's business a.s.sociates. I have often ridden behind Tommy, but he doesn't know it. And I don't intend that he shall. He rather fancies that I am a scholarly chap torn from my books, and he patronizes me on the strength of his knowledge of practical things.

"Tommy likes to eat, and he talks a great deal about his mother's cooking. He says there was always tripe for Sunday mornings, and corned beef and cabbage on Mondays, and Monday was wash-day!

"I wish you could hear him tell what wash-day meant to him. It is a sort of poem, the way he puts it. He doesn't know that it is poetry, though Vach.e.l.l Lindsay would, or Masters, or some of those fellows.

"It seems that he used to help his mother, because he was a strong little fellow, and could turn the wringer, and they would get up very early because he had to go to school, and in the spring and summer they washed out of doors, under a tree in the yard, and his mother's eyes were bright and her cheeks were red and her arms were white, and she was always laughing. There's a memory for a man on the battlefield, dearest, a healthy, hearty memory of the day's work of a boy, and of a bright-eyed mother, and of a good dinner at the end of hours of toil.

"Perhaps with such a mother it isn't surprising that Tommy has made so much of himself. He has aspirations far beyond driving some other man's car, and if he keeps on he'll have a little flivver of his own before he knows it--when the war ends, and he can strike out, with his energy at the boiling point.

"There are a lot of men who have belonged not to the idle rich, but to the idle poor, and the discipline of this life is just the thing for them as it is for me. It rather contradicts the kindergarten idea of play as a preparation for life. These busy men, forced to be busy, are a thousand times more self-respecting than if left to lead the listless lives that were theirs before their country called them. I wonder if, after all, Kipling isn't right, and that the hump and hoof and haunch of it all isn't obedience? Not slavish obedience, but obedience founded on a knowledge of one's place and value in the pack?"

Jean, striving to follow Derry's point of view, found herself floundering.

"I am glad you like it, but I don't see how you can. And you mustn't say that you've always been a Tin Soldier on a shelf. I won't have it.

And you have played the game of life just as bravely as Tommy Tracy, only your problems were different--. And if you can't remember wash days you can remember other days--. But I like to have you tell me about it, because I can see you, listening to Tommy and laughing at him. I adore your laugh, Derry, though I shouldn't be telling you, should I--? I have pasted the picture you sent me of you and Tommy in my memory book and have written under it, 'When you and I were young, Tommy' and I've drawn a cloud of steam above Tommy, with washboilers--and tubs--and cabbages and soap suds, and his mother's face smiling in the midst of it all--. And in your cloud is your mother smiling, too, with her little crown on her head, and gold spoons for a border--and a frosted cake with candles--and a mountain of ice-cream. Perhaps you have other memories, but I had to do the best I could with my poor little rich boy--"

It was about this time that Jean's memory book! became chaotic. Most of the things in it had to do with Derry, a bit of pine from a young plume which Derry had sent her from the south--triangles cut from the letter paper on which he sometimes wrote--post-cards to say "Good-morning," telegrams to say "Good-night"--a service pin with its one sacred star.

There were reminders, too, of the things which were happening across the sea, a cartoon or two, a small reproduction of a terrible Raemaeker print; verse, much of it--

They have taken your bells, O G.o.d, The bells that hung in your towers, That cried your grace in a lovely song, And counted the praying hours!

The little birds flew away!

They will tell the clouds and the wind, Till the uttermost places know The sin that the Hun has sinned!

Jean thought a great deal about the Huns. She always called them that.

She hated to think about them, but she had to. She couldn't pin the pages together, as it were, of her thoughts. And the Huns were worse than the sharks that had frightened her in her little girl days. Oh, they were much worse than sharks, for the shark was only following an instinct when it killed, and the Huns had worked out diabolically their murderous, monstrous plan.

In the days when she had argued with Hilda, she had been told of the power and perfection of Prussian rule. "Everything is at loose ends in America," had been Hilda's accusation.

"Well, what if it is?" Jean had flung back at her hotly. "Having things in place isn't the end and aim of happiness. Just because a house is swept and garnished isn't any sign that it is a blissful habitation. When I was a child I used to visit my two great-aunts in Maryland. I loved to go to Aunt Mary's, but I dreaded Aunt Anne's.

And the reason was this. Everything in Aunt Anne's house went by clock-work, and everything was polished and scrubbed and dusted within an inch of its life. When we arrived, we sc.r.a.ped our shoes before we kissed Aunt Anne, and when we departed, we felt that she literally swept us out--. We had hours for everything, and n.o.body thought of doing as she pleased. It was always as Aunt Anne pleased, and the meals were always on time, and n.o.body was ever expected to be late, and if she was late she was scolded or punished; and n.o.body ever dared throw a newspaper on the floor, or go out to the kitchen and make fudge, or pop corn by the sitting-room fire. Yet Aunt Anne was so efficient that her house-keeping was the admiration of the whole State.

"But we loved Aunt Mary's. She would come smiling down the stone walk to meet us, and she would leave the morning's work undone to wander with us in the fields or woods. And we had some of our meals under the trees, and some of them in the house, and when we made taffy, and it stuck to things, Aunt Mary smiled some more and said it didn't matter.

And we loved the freedom of our life, and we went to Aunt Mary's as often as we could, and stayed away when we could from Aunt Anne's.

"And that's the way with America. It isn't perfect, it isn't efficient, but it is a lovely place to live in, because in a sense we can live as we please.

"Did you ever know a man who wanted to go back to slavery? As a slave he was fed and clothed and kept by his master, with no thought of responsibility--. Yet it was freedom he wanted, even though he had to go hungry now and then for the sake of it--"

"I like law and order," Hilda said. "We don't always have it here."

"I'd rather be a gipsy on the road," had been Jean's pa.s.sionate declaration, "and free, than a princess with a 'verboten' sign at all the palace gates."

There were wisps of gauze, too, in her memory book, a red cross, drawings in which were caricatured some of the women who worked in the surgical dressing rooms.

"Emily," Jean asked, as she showed one of the pictures to her friend, "do such women come because it's fas.h.i.+on or because they really feel--?"

"I fancy their motives are mixed," said Emily, "and you mustn't think because they wear high heels and fluff their hair out over their ears that they haven't any hearts."

"No, I suppose not," Jean admitted, "but I wonder what they think the veils are for when they fluff out their hair.

"And their rings," she went on. "You see, when they all have on white ap.r.o.ns and veils you can't tell whether they are Judy O'Grady or the Colonel's lady--so they load their hands with diamonds. As if the hands wouldn't tell the tale themselves. Why, Emily, if you and Hilda were hidden, all but your hands, the people would know the Colonel's lady from Judy O'Grady."

Emily smiled abstractedly, she was counting compresses. She stopped long enough to ask, "Is Hilda still in town?"

"Yes. I saw her yesterday on the other side of the street. I didn't speak, but some day when I get a good opportunity I am going to tell her what I think of her."

But when the opportunity came she did not say all that she had meant to say!

She went over one morning to her father's house to get some papers which he had left in his desk. The house had been closed for weeks and the hall, as she entered it, was cold with a chill that reached the marrow of her bones--it was dim with the half-gloom of drawn curtains and closed doors. Even the rose-colored drawing-room as she stood on the threshold held no radiance--it had the stiff and frozen look of a soulless body. Yet she remembered how it had throbbed and thrilled on the night that Derry had come to her. The golden air had washed in waves over her.

She s.h.i.+vered and went over to the window. She pulled up a curtain and looked out upon the grayness of the street. The clouds were low, and a strong wind was blowing. Those who pa.s.sed, bent to the wind. She was slightly above the level of the street, and n.o.body looked up at her.

She might have been a ghost in the ghostly house.

Well, she had to get the papers. She turned to face the gloom, and as she turned she heard a sound in the room above her.

It was the rather startling sound of m.u.f.fled steps. She dared not go into the hall. She felt comparatively safe by the window--.

If--anything came, she could open the window and call.

But she did not call, for it was Hilda who came presently on rubber-heels and stood in the door.

"I thought I heard some one," she said, calmly.

"How did you get in?" was Jean's abrupt demand.

"I had my key. I have never given it up."