“And our boys have gone over to fight, so that ‘they may never have it again!’” murmured Olive in a voice that must have been like the old Frenchwoman’s, between a sob and a song. “They’ll pay our debt to France, and carry on! Carry on, until the cry of some poor, pale little children, who crept up out of cellars in another village they entered, comes true.”
“What--was their--cry?” Sara sniffed as wetly as the outgoing tide; she had forgotten that Corporal Clayton Forrest was one of the superfluous cousins, whose feet, turning aside from paths of luxury, had enlisted in the plodding infantry with fifty companions from his father’s big loom-works.
She had seen him leading a cotillion or escorting fair maidens--debonair cavalier-in-chief of his little New England town.
She pictured him laden with the pots and kettles, the turkey-red pillows, all the household belongings of a little old peasant woman, compressed into a great wicker basket--with the handle of a copper saucepan sticking out over the rim, like the tail of a sitting bird; and she sniffed again because knighthood had not ceased to flower.
“Oh! what was their cry? The children’s cry!” Olive moistly caught her breath. “Ah!... Why! they simply burst open, like poor little pinched buds that had been kept in a cellar--the enemy had held that village four years--when they saw the American soldiers! Clay says they caught at their hands and kissed them--danced wildly round them, crying: ‘Fini, la Guerre! C’fini--c’fini--la--Guerre!’”
“But it isn’t--isn’t ‘Fini, la Guerre!’ yet. And we’ve got to carry on, too; not--not at camouflaging nonsense like this,”--Sara painted a dazzling hieroglyphic, a riddle of the future, upon her boat’s side--“but at real, steady war work, that’s no joke, in that big garden of ours, a young farm, I call it, over there on the hill--Squawk Hill--was there ever such a name!--called after a relative of yours, Olive, the noisy night-heron.... And just between you an’ me”--painting furiously--“I’m getting awf’ly--awf’ly tired of weeding, spraying, hoeing, raking right along, day in and day out, for an hour an’ a half in the morning--hour an’ a half at night!”
“Evening, you mean! Three whole hours--nothing to speak of! But they do string out, when you’re ‘carrying on’!” Blue Heron--Olive--straightened her long, graceful young back; this morning’s stunt of carrying on upon the hill of discordant name had made it feel almost as crooked as an ancient village street, tiled and twisted, in the France which they had been discussing.
“Ah, well, if we show any signs of weakening--we older girls--it’s all up with our pledges as a Group to help feed our boys and the hungry women and children on the other side of the water, for the younger girls don’t take much interest in war-gardening; they’d rather spend all their time, especially at low tide, over there on the long sand-bar, pow-wowing with the seals and birds. And I don’t blame them!” Sara waved a pensive brush towards a distant snow-white, humpy line, just rising like wavy limbs of sea-nymphs from green breakers, the merriest mob of breakers that combed and foamed and shrank as the tide ebbed. “Everything--everything is so wild an’ happy-go-lucky all around us--that----”
“That it makes one feel irresponsible,” sighed Olive; “puts the war a long way off, except--except when one turns the silver heel of a stocking--bah! another stitch down--or gets a letter from over there.”
“Oh! I know how you hate grubbing in the muck, raising vegetables. You were never cut out for a farmerette; that’s your Southern ancestry, on your mother’s side, I suppose--proud planters who left all that sort of thing to slaves!” Sara’s eyebrows went up. “And I must confess”--with a comical shrug--“that there are times when I see very little fun in planting potatoes--and all sorts of other things--with--with about forty-eleven million horrid little bugs just sitting on the fence, as old farmers say, and watching you do it, waiting to pounce on the young shoots directly they come above ground--and not one of them will light on a thistle!... But, bah! C’est la Guerre. And conservation would be nowhere--a lame duck--without cultivation! Besides the hours aren’t--very--long.”