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.