CHAPTER VIII
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER
FRIEDA read a letter she had just received and laughed.
Laughter was not frequent at Kent House those days, so that Jack and Olive looked up from the work they were doing. Olive was rolling bandages and Jack was writing notes at her desk. The three of them were in Jack's private sitting room where, only a few moments before, the afternoon mail bag had been brought in.
"What is it, Frieda?" Jack asked, turning her head to glance over her shoulder in some surprise at her sister. She wondered if Frieda realized that she was fully aware of the way in which she had been watching the mail for these past few months. For Frieda had watched in vain for the particular letter which certainly she seemed to expect; even if she did not greatly desire it.
"Oh, I have just received a note from a young soldier to whom I sent the first pair of socks I ever made," she returned. "He may not have originated the poem, but it is almost worth the trouble and the time I took on the socks. Do listen:"
"Thanks, dear lady, for the socks you knit;
Some socks, some fit.
I used one for a hammock and the other for a mitt.
I hope I meet you when I've done my bit,
But where in the h... did you learn to knit?"
Then Frieda dropped the letter to wave another long grey sock, shot through with shining knitting needles. It was somewhat narrow in the ankle and bulged strangely at the heel.
"I wonder if I am improving?" she inquired anxiously. The utilitarian nature of Frieda's occupation contrasted curiously with the general fluffiness of her appearance. For no amount of inward anguish could ever keep Frieda from the desire to wear pretty clothes and to make herself as attractive as possible. However, no one had any right to say she was unhappy, except as every one else was, through sympathy with the added troubles which the war had lately brought upon the world.
Like most of the other women in the larger part of Europe and also in the United States, Jack and Olive were devoting all their energies to the work of the war. They had both taken short courses in Red Cross nursing and had organized clubs and classes in the neighborhood for every kind of relief work, while Frank had turned over several of his houses to the Belgian refugees.
Therefore, only Frieda remained more or less on the outside of things. She had undertaken to learn to knit for the soldiers, but insisted that since her name meant peace and was a German name as well, she would do nothing more. The truth was she seemed not to wish to go out or mix with society a great deal, which was odd, as one of the reasons she had given for her unhappiness in her own home was that her husband wished to spend too much time there, so that she had become bored.
However, Frieda had agreed to visit the poor people on the estate and in the neighboring village, in order to relieve Jack from this one of her many duties.
Moreover, she enjoyed the odd types of old men and women, so unlike any other people whom she had ever before known, and she became a great favorite with them. Instead of giving her money for war purposes Frieda preferred bestowing it on these same queer old persons and the children who had been left behind.
This afternoon, after she had finished reading the second of her two letters, the latter from Jean in Wyoming, Frieda got up from her chair.
"Jimmie and I are going to drive down to the village to see old Dame Quick," she announced, "I promised to read to her this afternoon." 'Dame Quick' was the title Frieda had borrowed to give to the oldest woman in Granchester, because she was so extraordinarily lively.
"What will you do with Jimmie while you read? He will never keep still," Jack called, as Frieda moved toward the door.
Frieda paused. "Oh, he and nurse will return back in the governess cart. I want to walk home. Don't worry if I am a little late," and before Olive or Jack would speak, she had disappeared.
"I hope Frieda won't be too long. She does not know this country as I do," Jack murmured afterwards, but not thinking of the matter seriously.
Frieda and Jimmie had a way of jogging in the little governess cart on many afternoons, sometimes taking the nurse with them and more often not. Jimmie was rather a troublesome small boy of an age when he was into every kind of mischief, and Frieda was not fond of children. Therefore, her family had wondered why she appeared to desire so much of Jimmie's companionship. Frieda might have answered that he asked so many questions that she did not have time to think of other things; however, she had never said this, even to herself.
The governess cart was a little wicker carriage swung low on two wheels, with an ancient, shaggy pony, who never moved out of a slow trot.
That afternoon, like all the great ladies in the English novels, Frieda stored away under the seat of her cart as much jelly and jam as her sister's housekeeper would allow her. At the nearest grocery shop she bought a package of tea, some tins of biscuits and a half pound of tobacco. For the truth was that Frieda's old woman liked a quiet smoke. This habit was not common among the villagers, but Dame Quick whose real name was "Huggins" was so very old that she allowed herself certain privileges.
It was a dismal late fall afternoon, but English people and particularly English children do not stay indoors because of bad weather.
Frieda wore a blue rain proof coat and a soft hat which she pulled down over her yellow hair, to keep the soft mist out of her eyes as well as she could. Jimmie and his nurse were also enveloped in mackintoshes.
But the rain was not actually falling. There was only a November haze and a pervading dampness, making Jimmie's cheeks redder than ever and bringing more color than was usual to Frieda's face.
On the way to the village Jimmie and his aunt, whom he regarded as of his own age, sang "America" in not a particularly musical fashion, but with a great deal of earnest effort, since Frieda was trying to teach the British Jimmie to be more of an American.
Jimmie, of course, wished to go into Mrs. Huggins' cottage with his aunt, but on that point Frieda was resolute. She had a fancy for seeing her old friend alone this afternoon. Actually she had a reason which had been developing in her mind for the past twenty-four hours, although Frieda herself considered her reason nonsensical.
In answer to her knock the old woman came to the door. She looked like one of the pictures one remembers in the Mother Goose books, and also like one of them, "she lived alone, all in her little house of stone."
Dame Quick's cottage of two rooms was set in the middle of a long row of little stone houses, in one of the half a dozen streets in Granchester. Frieda always felt a shiver as she went inside, since the floor was of stone and there was a dampness about the little house as if it had never been thoroughly warmed inside by the sun.
Yet Mrs. Huggins had managed to live there in contentment for about seventy years. She had come there as a bride before she was twenty and was now "ninety or thereabouts," as she described herself.
When Frieda entered she bobbed up and down as quickly as an old brown cork on a running stream.
"Sure, I've been waitin' and longin' for the sight of you these two hours," she said, taking Frieda's packages, or as many as she could get hold of, as if she thought them too burdensome for the young woman to carry.
Frieda laughed and slipped out of her rain coat, which she hung carefully on a small wooden chair. Then she also laid her hat on the chair and, as a matter of habit, fluffed up her pretty hair which the rain and her hat had flattened, and then followed her old hostess.
"You know you have had half a dozen visitors during the two hours you say you have been waiting, Mrs. Huggins," Frieda returned. For it was true that the tiny house and the old woman were the center of all the gossip in the village. "I expect you to tell me a lot of news."
The old woman nodded.
"It is true these are news days in England and elsewhere. Times were, when the days might be dull without a birth or a death, or a mating. But now one wakes up to something stirrin' every day—a lad goin' off to the war, or maybe one gettin' killed; and the girls coomin' in to tell me their troubles; some of them just married, and some of them not married at all yet. But all of them worryin' their hearts out. Sure, and if war is goin' on forever—and it looks like it is—I'm for the women goin' into battle along with their men."
While she was talking Frieda had followed her hostess back into her kitchen—the room in which she really lived and had her being. It was also of stone, but the floor had a number of bright rag rugs as covering and the walls were lined with pictures cut from papers and magazines, and with picture postcards. One could have gotten a pretty fair knowledge of English history at the moment by studying Mrs. Huggins' picture gallery. She had on her walls a photograph of nearly every British officer then in command of the army or navy. She had replicas of innumerable battleships and also of statesmen. But in the place of honor over a shelf that held her Bible and a tiny daguerreotype of the late, lamented Mr. Huggins, hung a picture of England's big little man—Lloyd George. The aged woman received the old age pension which Lloyd George had given to the poor of England a few years before the outbreak of the present war.
Frieda sat down on a little chair which lovers of antiques would have given much to possess. There was a small fire burning in the tiny stove, and its red coals looked more cheerful than the great log fire at Kent House.
Frieda knew that Dame Quick would wish to prepare the tea herself.
She had rather a happy feeling as she watched Mrs. Huggins, as if she had been a little girl who had gone out one day and grown suddenly tired and forlorn, and then been unexpectedly invited into the very gingerbread house itself. But a gingerbread house presided over by a good spirit, not an evil one.
Her own little Dame Quick looked like a child's idea of an ancient good fairy. She may not have been so small to begin with, but at ninety she was bent over until she seemed very tiny indeed. Her face was brown and wrinkled and her eyes shone forth as black as elderberries in the late gathering time.
She placed a small wooden table in front of Frieda and not far from the fire and her own chair. Then she got out some heavy plates and two cups and saucers. And whatever the difference in elegance, tea is never so good served in a thin cup as in a thick one. Afterwards she opened the package containing Frieda's biscuits and jam and finally poured boiling water into her own brown stone tea kettle.
Then she and Frieda, sitting on opposite sides of the tea table, talked and talked.
Several times, as she sat there, Frieda thought that if she had been an English girl she would like to have had just such an old nurse or foster mother as Mrs. Huggins. For she might then have been able to confide a number of things to her—matters she could not talk about even to her sister, since she was not clear enough how she felt concerning them herself, and so Jack might get wrong impressions.
"But you have not told me any special news this afternoon," Frieda protested, having lifted her cup for a second helping of tea, and making up her mind that she could not think of herself while visiting, as she usually did at home. "My sister and brother always expect me to know something interesting after a visit to you."
Dame Quick poured the tea carefully.
"I don't care for gossip," she returned, "yet it seems as if they like it as much in big houses as in little." Her eyes snapped, so that Frieda found herself watching them, fascinated.
"Since you came in I've been wonderin' whether certain information should be sent to Lord and Lady Kent. I don't think much of it myself, as there has been such a steady stream of spy talk these months past. But they are tellin' in Granchester that there is a man there who has taken a house a short distance from the village, on the road to Kent House. It seems he keeps to himself too much to please the village. He says he has been ill, and I'm sure has a right to a mite of peace if he wants it. It's only the village that's talking. Those higher up must know things are what they should be, since they don't bother him."
Frieda was scarcely listening. Mrs. Huggins' news was often uninteresting in itself. It was only that she so much enjoyed repeating it.
She had already finished her second cup of tea and was looking down at the collection of tea leaves in the bottom of her cup.
"Suppose you tell my fortune," she suggested rather shyly. For some time past she had been thinking of just this. "Didn't you say you sometimes told the fortunes of the boys and girls in Granchester, and that a great many things you predict come true?"
The old country woman looked at Frieda sharply.
"I tell the fortunes, child, of boys and girls whose grandfathers and grandmothers I once knew. That isn't difficult fortune telling. I know certain tricks in the faces, I remember what their own people thought and did long before their day. Like father, like son; or maybe like mother, like son; and like father, like daughter. But you—" The old woman shook her head. "I know nothing about you, child; or your country, or your people, or what you have made of life for yourself with that pretty face of yours."
Still Frieda held out her tea cup.
"Oh, well; just let the tea leaves show you a little," she pleaded, in the spoiled fashion by which Frieda usually accomplished her purpose.
Still the old peasant continued to look, not at the tea leaves but at her young companion. Perhaps she saw something with her fine, tired old eyes, that were too dim to read print, which even Frieda's own family did not see.
"You have had too many of the things you wish without ever having to work for them, or to wait, little lady," she repeated slowly. Then she glanced down into the extended tea cup. "I think I see that you will have to lose something before you find out that you care for it. I also see a long journey, some clouds and at last a rainbow."
Frieda put down her cup and laughed a little uncertainly.
"Oh, the Rainbow Ranch is the name of my own home. I wonder if I have ever told you that?" she inquired. "But you are mistaken if you think I have had the things I wish." For, of course, Frieda did not believe she had been a fortunate person. So few people ever do believe this of themselves, until misfortune makes them learn through contrast.
Later, she read a chapter in the Bible and the war news from one of the morning papers. Then, before six o'clock, she started to return to Kent House.
Frieda walked quickly as the distance was not short. Moreover, she had never entirely recovered from the fright of her unexpected encounter with her husband several months before. Yet, since then, she had not only never seen him again, but never heard anything about him, except the scant information of his departure to France, which she had acquired through Frank Kent.
Frieda did think—no matter what the difference between them—that her husband might have let her know that he was at least alive and well. Of course she was a selfish, cold-hearted person, as her family and undoubtedly her own husband believed her to be. However, one could be interested in the welfare of even a comparative stranger in war times.
Later, after Frieda left the village, she passed by the little house which her old friend had tried to involve in a mystery in order to supply her with gossip. The house was set in a yard by itself. The lights were lighted and the curtains drawn down, but, as she hurried by, either a woman's or a man's figure made a dark shadow upon the closed blind.