The Vanishing Comrade: A Mystery Story for Girls

by Ethel Cook Eliot

The girls stayed there, sitting on the window seat, for over an hour, watching for Katherine to come from the orchard. It was showering again, sheets of rain silvering the gardens and drawing curtains of silver magic about the orchard, swirling them all about the orchard’s borders. There was plenty of time for the story which Elsie told haphazardly and in broken sentences, led on by Kate’s interest, and her assurances that now she had seen Nick she would never try to interfere with any of their plans again. Kate’s story of the dragony, flowery picture frame had knocked all Elsie’s guards flat, too. Her story, straightened out, was this:

Elsie’s earliest memory was of her father. She had fallen down the house steps and bumped her head. Nick, her father, had appeared as by magic to kiss the hurt away and run back into the house with her in his arms. She remembered him bending over her, washing the bruise with cold water; then came the smell of witch-hazel. And though this was her first conscious memory, still the very memory itself held in it the inevitableness of this comfort from her father; so she was used to his ministrations.

The next memory was convalescence after measles when she was four. She was sitting up in a chair in a window over the street, wrapped in an eiderdown. Her father was reading to her from “The Psalms of David.” The words sang a beautiful song to her, especially when he came to “The Lord is my Shepherd.” And it was very comforting to have her father sitting there so quietly, near her, as though he meant to stay a long time.

“But your mother?” Kate asked her. “Didn’t she read to you after measles, too? Don’t you remember her?”

Yes, Elsie remembered her mother, though she thought it was a later memory, and it was never a memory of mothering. Gloria had hummed in and out of the house like a humming-bird. Later, when Elsie saw a humming-bird for the first time, she felt as she watched it exactly as she had always felt watching her mother; and the pains that she took not to startle the little spirit away were exactly the pains she had always taken not to startle her mother away, when by chance she hummed near. Gloria looked like a humming-bird, as well as acted like one. Humming-birds fascinated Elsie, and her mother had always entranced her with the same fascination, no more.

But sometimes the humming-bird scolded at her father, pecked at him, hummed all about him pecking. Then Elsie would run away, not fascinated any more. The scolding was always about money. Gloria needed money just as a humming-bird needs honey, and often there wasn’t enough.

They lived in New York near Washington Square. Elsie was cared for by nurses—such a fast-marching procession of nurses in the same chic blue uniforms, provided by the humming-bird, that Elsie remembered them as “nurse,” not as individuals. Her father was the constant human factor in her life, the one person to be counted on. Gloria was merely a dash of colour beyond the nursery door somewhere, a shrill sweet voice at the piano, a swish of silk on the stairs.

At eight, Elsie was sent to boarding school. But the school was in New York, and so her father still saw her almost every day, and on Saturdays he gave her and sometimes her friends “treats.” He took them to the theatre or picture galleries, or for beautiful walks in Central Park. Her mother never came to the school, but had her home once a month on Sundays for dinner. This was a grief to Elsie, not because she felt any need of her mother but simply because she would have been proud to show her schoolmates what a magnificent and fashionable mother she had; also she was humiliated by their curious questionings and pretended doubts as to whether she had a real mother at all. But Elsie was sure that her father was better than twenty mothers. She wouldn’t take a mother as a gift except for show purposes.

Kate writhed at Elsie’s harshness. “Oh, you don’t know, Elsie! Don’t talk so! How can you? It is terrible.”

“That’s what Ermina said when I talked to her about my mother. Ermina was my best friend, but she didn’t stay out her first year at school. Her mother died, and she went home for the funeral and never came back. I knew that she loved her mother just as much as I loved my father. I hid away in my room when they told me her mother had died. I pretended I was sick. It was awful. But when I heard her go downstairs, at the very last minute while they were saying ‘good-bye’ to her at the door, I rushed down in my nightgown. I kissed her and hugged her and we cried terribly. Miss Putnam, the principal of the school, never forgave me for having made Ermina cry when she had been brave and not cried at all before, and for having disgraced the school by standing in the door in my nightgown. But I have been glad ever since. I had to say ‘good-bye’ and that I was sorry. And I don’t think crying out loud was any worse than the crying inside that Ermina must have been doing. Do you?”