They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot platform—high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, shouting.
Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable forms of cake.
Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make Hatton's place look sick."
The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. Well, I should say not!
They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."
Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they giggled and shrieked and ran.
But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.
Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in the East. These letters were not from him.
Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped, veiled, aproned—and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled and folded them was pure cerulean.
Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might have been invaluable. It never was asked.