CONCERNING CHRIS AND EASTER (1916)
Easter is the only girl, a sort of happy afterthought at the end of a long family of five boys, with six years between her and her next brother.
Chris is the only precious child, born after a good many years of marriage to devoted and adoring parents.
Easter doesn’t think much of boys. They are common as blackberries in her family and she is keenly sensible of her own distinction in having, as she puts it, “chosen to come as a girl.”
Thus it came about that her mental attitude struck Chris with something of a shock; not wholly unpleasant; stimulating; the tingle of resentment tempered by a thrill of amused surprise. It was so odd and new to meet anyone who felt like that.
Besides, till he came to live in Easter’s village he had been rather lonely, and she supplied a felt want. Especially had this been so in the last two bewildering years, for his parents had seemed less absorbed in him than was quite dutiful. And for the last year his father had vanished altogether to that mysterious place that swallowed up so many pleasant and familiar folk; that overshadowing, omnipotent, vastly extending region known as “the front.”
Easter, on her part, welcomed the society of Chris. She, too, was lonely by reason of the very same cause as Chris. Little girls were scarce in that village and Easter’s mother was busy all day long with war work of one sort and another, and owing to the same cause Chris’s governess, Miss Radley, only gave him her society during the bare hours of lessons, which lessons had for some time been shared by Easter.
Now Easter was much better at lessons than Chris; much quicker, in most things far more intelligent and receptive. Only in arithmetic did Chris shine, and in this subject he had soared away from Easter and did abstruse calculations in the end of the book all by himself with Miss Radley.
Easter was born on an Easter Day, and this year she was eight years old. Chris was born on Christmas Day, and last Christmas he was eight. Therefore, in spite of his prowess in arithmetic, he maintains that he is a year older than Easter.
“Weren’t you born in 1908?” he demands sternly.
“Ye-es,” answers Easter, “on an Easter Sunday. They were so pleased.”
“And I,” says Chris, “was born in 1907. Take seven from eight and what remains?”
“One, but it isn’t a real, whole one,” Easter objects.
No one knows this better than Chris, but he stoutly maintains: “A year’s a year, and you’re either born in it or you’re not—so there.”
However, in spite of this and many other differences of opinion, they had decided to get married when they came to what Easter’s nurse calls “a suitable age.”
As a rule Chris follows blindly where Easter leads, giving in to her stronger will and considerably stronger body, though not always without protest.
Easter is tall for her age and very muscular. She has a gentle, early-Victorian, regularly featured, delicately tinted face, with a high forehead, abundant curly, fair hair, and large pathetic blue eyes that are entirely misleading. In fact, her appearance is as unlike her real character as it is possible for such an extremely agreeable exterior to be. She looks all softness and gravity and gentle melancholy. Whereas she is a ruthless and determined young person who cares nothing for “moral suasion” and less for punishments and penalties, provided she gets her own way.
Chris, on the contrary, is soft-hearted and easily ruled through his affections. He would rather not be disobedient and troublesome unless such breakings of the law are expressly commanded by Easter.
But to be called a “muff” is more than he can bear, and rather than Easter should think this of him he will offend his whole dynasty of friends.
Chris and Easter were sitting under a hedge brilliant with scarlet hips and cloudy with “traveler’s joy.” The hedge topped a fairly steep bank, with a ditch full of muddy water at the bottom of the bank.
A heated argument was in progress as to the names of their eight daughters. Easter had already chosen the names, and they ran as follows: Irene, Semolina, Rosalind, Majorca, Minorca, Vinolia, Larola, and Salonica. Chris objected to Semolina and Vinolia.
“I hate semolina,” he observed gloomily, “almost as bad as I hate rice.”
“But it sounds so much nicer.”
“And Vinolia, too—greasy stuff you smear on chapped legs.”
“It’s got a lovely smell,” said Easter.
“And why,” demanded Chris, who was in a bold and captious mood, “should there be eight of ’em? Why can’t there be some boys?”
“I won’t have boys, I tell you,” Easter declared firmly. “Girls are far prettier.”
“Are they?” asked Chris incredulously. “I’ve never seen any pretty ones.”
Instead of asking “Where are your eyes?” Easter said huffily, in life-like imitation of nurse: “That’s as it may be. Anyway they wear far prettier clothes.”
“You don’t,” Chris pointed out.
Easter looked down at her extremely short and faded navy-blue skirt, at her long legs stuck out in front of her, at her muddy boots, at the large hole in the knee of her stocking. Save for the said skirt she was dressed almost exactly like Chris, in muffin cap, reefer and brass buttons.
“Sometimes I do,” she maintained; “but anyway, Irene, Semolina, and Rosalind, and Majorca, and Minorca, and Vinolia, and Larola, and Salonica will all have lovely frocks, silk ninon, with sashes. Chris, they’ll be perfectly sweet, and we’ll make them walk two and two in front of us to church.”
“I tell you,” Chris declared, unmoved by this entrancing vision, “that I don’t want so many daughters. I don’t like them, I don’t want ’em and I won’t have ’em.”
“Then,” Easter ejaculated in breathless tones that should have warned him, “I shan’t marry you.”
“I don’t care,” the callous Chris announced. “The country wants men. I heard my daddy say so the last time he was home. There’s far too many women as it is. They can’t fight.”
“Can’t they?” the indignant Easter exclaimed ironically, and giving Chris a vigorous and wholly unexpected push, rolled him down the steep bank and into the ditch with a mighty splash; and then, adding insult to injury, she dug her heels into the wet grass, and taking off with skill and surety, jumped over his prostrate body on to the road, whereupon she ran away, laughing derisively.
Chris got most uncommonly wet, for the bottom of the ditch was slimy and soft. Even after he had struggled to his feet they slipped about and sank in far over the tops of his boots. And when he did manage to scramble up the bank to the road, he certainly looked a deplorable object, covered with mud and green slime and with water oozing from every bit of him. He stamped his feet and rubbed them on the wet grass that bordered the road without much visible betterment.
There was no going back through the village in such a plight, so he climbed the first five-barred gate he saw and started on a long cross-country journey that was to bring him home by unfrequented ways. He found the unfrequented ways, for he didn’t meet a soul, but he lost his bearings altogether. The wind got up and there followed cold, gusty showers of rain and hail. He felt chilled and miserable and dreadfully tired. Field after field he traversed and yet found no familiar landmarks, till, having toiled uphill over a heavy ploughed field, he reached a road that stood fairly high, and below him on the far horizon he recognized the square tower of his own church. He plodded on and on till at last he trotted wearily up his own drive, and there he saw that not only Miss Radley but the three maids were all gathered on the steps of the front door. The moment Miss Radley saw him she ran toward him, exclaiming:
“Oh, Chris! Where have you been? We were getting so anxious. Do you know it’s half-past five? My dear boy, how wet you are! Come in and get changed at once.”
The maids went back into the house when they saw Chris, and Miss Radley hurried him in and upstairs, not even waiting to make him wipe his feet.
“We’ve been so anxious,” she repeated. “I went to Easter’s, and she said you’d parted ever so long ago. Why did you go off by yourself like that?”
Chris was half in, half out of his sailor blouse by this time, and mumbled something about having got tired of Easter.
Miss Radley didn’t worry him much with questions, nor did she comment severely upon his dirty state. She was extraordinarily kind and got her hands all over mud in helping him to take off his boots; and it was not until he was lying luxuriously in a hot bath that it struck him as odd that his mother didn’t come to him. All the time, too, he had the feeling that Miss Radley wanted to tell him something and yet she couldn’t seem to begin.
“Where’s mummy?” he asked at last. “Isn’t she back yet? I wish she’d come and talk to me.”
Miss Radley looked queerly at him, almost as though she were going to cry. “Chris dear,” she said, and waited for quite a long time, “mummy has had to go away....”
“Away! For the night? Where to? Why?”
“Chris dear”—again Miss Radley seemed to find it difficult to go on—“she had a telegram, just after you went out, from the War Office, asking her to go at once. Your father is in a hospital at Boulogne, very ill ... wounded.”
“Dangerously wounded?” asked Chris, who was familiar with war terms.
Miss Radley nodded, and two tears ran down her cheeks. “That’s what it said.”
“I think,” said Chris, “I’d like to get out of this bath now.”
When he was dressed he didn’t seem to want the long-delayed tea, even though there was a beautiful brown egg and lovely buttered toast. In spite of the hot bath and a bright fire in the schoolroom he felt horrid, cold trickles running down his back all the time. He was extremely tired, too, yet only conscious of one overwhelming want—to be taken on his mother’s knee and comforted. Miss Radley took him on hers and sat with him right in front of the fire. She was very kind and told him how sorry mummy had been to go off in such a hurry without saying good-bye, but there was just one train that would reach London that night if she caught it at the junction; and the squire, Easter’s father, had driven her himself in his motor, and they just managed; and she was crossing to France that night in charge of a brother officer of dad’s—she had her passport long ago.
Every now and then Miss Radley lightly touched his face, which was very hot, and then she would hold his hand, which was very cold. Half-asleep, Chris would murmur from time to time, “dangerously wounded,” but somehow he couldn’t feel about it as he knew he ought to feel. Though he adored his daddy, all he felt was this overpowering ache of longing for his mother.
Easter’s scornful refusal to have any boys in her family had hurt him very much. He felt lonely and pushed out, somehow; and he badly wanted the one person who never failed in her appreciation of little boys, even if they were thin and small and not particularly good looking, and could not run so fast as ... certain little girls. He was conscious of being all these undesirable things, and yet he was convinced it was a great and glorious thing to be a boy, even if Easter didn’t think so. Once, after a long and acrimonious discussion with her on this very subject, he had said to his mother: “I choosed to come as a boy, didn’t I?”
“God chose,” said his mother gravely.
“Me and God settled it together,” Chris announced complacently, and his mother got up suddenly and looked in a cupboard for something she never found.
In Chris’s mind God and Father Christmas were inextricably mixed up. He had no fear of either one or the other. Both were beneficent and considerate and ready to give people their choice both as to presents or other things.
Yet when he was put to bed that night he couldn’t dream of pleasant, soothing things, but was pursued by eight strong daughters in embroidered ninon frocks and pink sashes, who formed themselves into a solid phalanx and drove him to the edge of an awful precipice, and were just pushing him over ... when he would wake to find Miss Radley standing beside his bed, looking anxious and troubled, shading a candle with her hand.
The war had not touched Easter very nearly. Her mother had forbidden nurse to talk about it to her; and her father (judging her sensitiveness wholly from her gentle, Early-Victorian appearance) was careful to keep all frightening or depressing news from her as far as was possible. All her life she had been sheltered and adored and spared and spoiled. Her brothers, being so much older, had “given in” to her from the very first, and although the two eldest were fighting—one in the navy, the other in the army—their doings did not seem to affect her particularly. And of the three still at school she had, of late, seen very little, for in the holidays they were always doing O.T.C. training, or making munitions somewhere.
Yet one thing had impressed her during the last two years. She was always hearing that some of their acquaintances had “lost” a son, a brother, or a husband. They did not talk of “killed” or “missing” to Easter; but they did speak of this continual and mysterious “loss,” and with the queer secretive puzzledom of childhood she never asked people outright what they meant by the phrase.
It worried her, this continual losing. She never heard that these lost ones got found again. Suppose she herself got lost in this irretrievable way? How dreadful it would be. What would her family do? In justice to Easter one must allow that the thought of her people’s consternation quite overshadowed any possibly unpleasant consequences to herself.
She had never discussed the question with Chris, who knew a lot about the war and wanted to talk about it to the exclusion of more interesting topics—such as daughters. But this was easily overruled. Moreover, Easter’s mother had decided that far too much was said about the war in Chris’s hearing, and she had asked Miss Radley to warn him not to talk about it to Easter lest it should upset her.
Miss Radley had her own opinion of Easter’s sensibility. She had not taught the children for six months without discovering which was the more susceptible and imaginative. But she did as she was bid, and Chris had done his best to obey in his turn. Perhaps in a lofty masculine way he was rather proud that he should be allowed to know things closely hidden from the domineering Easter, and was therefore the less anxious to share his knowledge with her.
He whole-heartedly admired Easter. She was so strong, so good at things, so invariably cheerful and well, with a never-failing fund of good spirits and energy. It is very possible that one of her chief attractions for him lay in the fact that she seemed so entirely outside those great and grave anxieties that obsessed everybody else.
Easter was brought up to understand that any “career” that she chose was open to her. She should have an equal chance with any of her brothers; she might be a doctor for a factory inspector, or a police-woman, or go in for any art or craft she fancied. Literature, art, music, even the stage, were to be open to her, should she so wish. But, so far, her sole ambition was centred in the possession of a husband, a meek husband, and eight meek daughters to move and have their being at her decree.
It was the swing of the pendulum with a vengeance.
No one told Easter about Chris’s daddy that afternoon. In the evening she prepared her lessons with her customary energy and intelligence, and giggled cheerfully from time to time at the recollection of Chris’s comical appearance as he lay floundering in the ditch.
“That’ll teach him,” said Easter to herself, “whether it’s to be daughters or not!”
Next morning at breakfast her mother said: “Miss Radley can’t take you to-day, Easter dear, so it’s no use your going over. They had very bad news yesterday, and Mrs. Denver has had to go to France. The major is very ill.”
“Has Chris gone?” Easter asked.
“No, dear; but Miss Radley sent over a note quite early to say he has got a bad, feverish cold (he got so wet yesterday—it’s a pity he didn’t come back with you), and we don’t know what it may turn to. So you must just take a holiday, for I’m due at the hospital supplies at ten, and shall be away all day.”
“What’s the matter with Major Denver?”
“I fear,” said her mother, anxiously watching the earnest, delicately tinted face upturned to hers, “I fear he is very badly wounded.”
“Oh!” said Easter, and she looked very grave.
“Be as happy as you can, my precious,” her mother called to her as she drove away. “I’ll get home as early as possible.”
That was a very long day for Easter.
For one thing, it rained all the morning; for another, her father had to go a long way off on business connected with special constables, and couldn’t take her; and Amelia, the usually cheerful housemaid, went about the house with red eyes and a perpetual sniff, because she had heard that morning she’d lost a cousin in the “big push on the Somme.”
Amelia was distinctly depressing.
Easter knitted a few rows of her scarf—the scarf that was always begun by her and finished by somebody else because she got tired of it. She found she was missing Chris far more poignantly than was at all pleasant.
After all, even if he didn’t always quite give in to her, he was good company; and Easter found herself remembering many kind things he had done. The chocolates he had always shared so generously, the apples so unequally divided always in her favor. Once when she fell off a wall and scratched her hands and tore her frock so badly, he hadn’t laughed, and he was so seldom rough in play, only when unbearably provoked. Easter was too honest not to admit that even at the time.
It cleared up in the afternoon and she ran over to the Denvers’ house to see if Chris was up yet and could play.
Emma, the parlormaid, was firm in her refusal to admit Easter.
“Master Chris is that bad, so feverish it might turn to anything, the doctor says. Miss Radley said no one was to come in, and she haven’t left Master Chris a single minute herself. It’s dreadful, and us all in such trouble about the major, too.”
“You haven’t lost him, have you?” Easter asked.
“Good gracious! no, not yet, so far as we knows. But he’s as bad as bad, and,” she added, “if anything was to happen to Master Chris and his ma away an’ all—but, there! I can’t bear to think of it. You run along home, Miss Easter. I’ll tell Miss Radley you came to ask.”
And the door was shut in Easter’s face.
Next day the news was no better. Even Easter’s mother could not keep from her the universal anxiety as to Major Denver. He had been their doctor for a year before the war, and in that time had managed to endear himself to everybody.
It was said he had taken a country practice because he thought the bracing air would be good for Chris. Every soul in the village felt a special right to know the latest news of the major, and Miss Radley had the telegrams pinned on the front door as soon as she got them.
All day long people came up the drive to read these telegrams, and presently there was a bit of white paper as well, concerning Chris, for the doctor’s little son lay grievously sick at home, while his father, they feared, was dying of his wounds in France. A white-capped hospital nurse had come to help Miss Radley.
Easter was a very lonely little girl. She felt, too, that in some inexplicable fashion she was shut out from things, that more was happening than she was allowed to know; and, worst of all, Chris had so entirely disappeared that she began to fear that he, too, was lost, and they were afraid to tell her.
At the end of nearly a week she felt she could not bear this furtiveness and suspense a minute longer, and she determined to go to Chris’s house and find out for herself just what had happened and was happening. She would not ring the bell. She would go round to the side of the house and see if the schoolroom window was open, and get in and find Miss Radley and force her to tell the truth. If Chris was lost, then she, Easter, must herself set forth to find him without more delay.
All fell out as she had planned.
The schoolroom window, which opened like a door divided down the middle, was open, and Miss Radley, with her back to it, sat at the table, writing.
Easter could move quietly as a cat when it suited her. She came in without making a sound, and stood just behind Miss Radley, who was so absorbed she noticed nothing.
“Have you lost Chris, Miss Radley?” Easter asked loudly.
Miss Radley started violently, and Easter came round to her side, and she noticed that Miss Radley’s usually round, rosy face was pale and much less round than it used to be.
“Oh, Easter dear, how you startled me! Don’t suggest such a dreadful thing! We’re awfully anxious, with his mother away and all this other trouble, but ... we must hope always, always hope—for if anything happened to Chris....”
“What has happened to Chris?” Easter asked, searching the very soul of Miss Radley with her large clear gaze.
“He got so wet after he left you that day last week—I can’t think how—and he got a real bad chill, and now there are all sorts of complications—and his temperature keeps up so.”
“What are complications?” Easter interrupted.
“You wouldn’t understand.... Oh, Easter, child, don’t stare at me like that! Aren’t you sorry?”
“I know how Chris got so wet,” Easter said slowly. “I pushed him into the ditch.”
Miss Radley drew back a little from Easter; then she put out her hand and laid it on the child’s arm.
“I expect it was only in fun ... you couldn’t know....”
“Can’t I play with him a bit? Is it catching?” Easter’s voice was still quite loud and matter-of-fact. “It’s rather dull and lonely for me.”
“For you!” Miss Radley echoed indignantly. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you care, you hard child? But you never did care for anybody but yourself.”
“Does Chris?”
“Yes, indeed he does. He’s always been a dear, kind boy. Easter, you must go home. I can’t stop to talk to you now. Try to think about other people a little....”
Miss Radley did not finish her sentence, for Easter had gone from her as silently as she had come. For a minute the governess sat quite still. Then she sighed and shivered, and went on with her letter.
Easter fled down the Denvers’ drive and out into the road, but she didn’t go home. She ran and ran till she could run no more, and dropping into a walk, turned downhill along a winding lane thickly bordered by trees so high that they almost met overhead, forming an arch. The light in this avenue was curiously lurid, for the trees were beeches, and though rapidly thinning, were still gorgeous in reds and yellows. The avenue led to a church in the next parish (Easter had run such a long way), and she had been there quite lately with Chris to a fruit and flower service in aid of the local hospital. Miss Radley had taken them both, and now Easter remembered there were very large vegetable marrows at the base of one of the pillars, and wondered if they were still there. She and Chris had sat next each other at that service, and during the sermon he had let her hold his knife. It had a corkscrew and a thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs, as well as blades, and all were very difficult to open. Chris was good about lending his things. And he never told of people. What did old Raddles mean when she called her hard? She did care for Chris, but she wasn’t going to say so to Raddles. Yet Raddles looked awfully sad. Supposing they had lost Chris, after all, and were afraid to say? Supposing she, Easter, got lost, now, to-day? This was a long, lonely, unfamiliar road, with such a queer light in it. Supposing it were enchanted and she couldn’t find her way back? Then she would be like all those sons she had heard about lately. Her heart began to beat very fast. Ah! somebody was coming up the road. She would ask her way. It would be dreadful to be lost.
A very tall lady came toward her walking slowly up the hill. She was dressed in black, with a long thin veil turned back from her face. She looked restlessly from side to side, as though trying to find somebody in the shadows. This seemed quite natural to Easter. Timidity or shyness with strangers was unknown to her. She was glad to see somebody, and the tall lady’s face was very gentle.
“Have you lost anybody?” Easter asked as they met.
The tall lady stopped, and though she looked straight down at Easter, the child was uncomfortably conscious that she didn’t really see her.
“I have lost my only son,” said the lady.
“You, too!” cried Easter, and what she could not say to Miss Radley she found it easy to say now to this pale lady who looked at her so strangely. “Oh, I am sorry!”
And she took one of the lady’s hands in both her own.
The lady did not draw her hand away; with her eyes still fixed on Easter’s face with that queer, unseeing look, she said: “Dear child! And you?”
“Not yet,” said Easter. “Not yet—at least, they say so, but I’m dreadfully afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the lady. “Don’t be afraid. That’s what he always said.”
“Everyone,” said Easter, and her hard little voice grew soft, “everyone seems losing sons and people. Won’t you never, never find him again?”
Into that lady’s face there leapt a sudden radiance as when a clearly burning lamp is carried into a dark room. Her eyes were luminous and bright, and Easter felt that she was really seeing her at last.
“We shall all find them again,” she said almost joyously. “Everyone of us.”
“Are you sure?” Easter questioned.
“In sure and certain hope,” said the lady.
“In sure and certain hope,” Easter repeated. “I like that. You are sure?”
“Absolutely. Tell me, dear, who is it you are anxious about?”
Hand in hand they had started slowly to mount the hill.
“It’s Chris,” she said. “He plays with me a lot and we do lessons together ... and they won’t let me see him, and I want to tell him I’m sorry.”
“But why won’t they let you see him?”
“Because they’re afraid they’ll lose him—I heard that, though Raddles denied it when I asked her.”
“Then he’s ill?”
“I suppose so.”
The lady looked curiously at Easter. There was no doubt whatever that she was troubled, and yet ... how oddly the child spoke.
As they walked on, hand in hand, the lady said, more to herself than to Easter: “Does the road wind uphill all the way?”
“No,” said Easter; “when we get to the end of this it’s quite flat.”
When they came to the main road Easter took her hand out of the lady’s. “I know my way now,” she said. “Good-bye.”
The lady stooped and kissed her. “I should write to Chris if I were you,” she said. “He’ll probably like a letter very much when he’s a little better.”
Easter nodded and started to run, with that swift, long-distance, steady running that had so often worn out Chris; that was his admiration and his despair. And as she ran she repeated over and over again: “In sure and certain hope” all the way.
She would write to Chris directly she got in. Her copies were always neater than his.
But she couldn’t do it the minute she got in, for tea was ready, and her mother there to have it with her. Her mother looked pleased, too. Better news had come from France. There was hope that Major Denver might pull through, after all; and she had seen Miss Radley, and Chris’s temperature was nearly down to normal.
It was a lovely tea; and directly after it Easter sat down at her mother’s desk and wrote to Chris. Very large, with beautiful up-and-down strokes:
“Dear Chris,
“I’m sory I pushed you. Sum of them shall be boys. The ones with the names you don’t like. Please don’t get lost.
“Your loving
“Easter.”
She licked the flap of the envelope with copious completeness, and in one corner of the address, very thick and black, in inch-long printed letters was the word “Eargunt.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.