“I don’t feel very much in the mood for it myself!” Olive, captain of the farming-forces, bit her lip, surveying the hill which she had to take, routing out invading weeds and the supernumeraries in the young ranks of the vegetables.
“My legs are trying to persuade me that it’s time for that evening ceremonial meeting now--wanting to wheel me back in the direction of camp,” whispered Sara whimsically, as the firefly glance of her brown eyes flitted over the too prolific rows, not of feathery carrots alone, but of flouncing beets, tomatoes, beans, triumphant but tardy here at the seashore, likewise calling to be thinned out. “There’s no need for you to say how your cold feet are behaving, Olive; they’d be warm enough if you were off there, pow-wowing with the birds on the bar, or lying out on the home-sands, polishing off--poetically--the words of the candle-lighting ceremony which you have prepared for the Council Fire to-night. You know that you’re no enthusiastic farmerette; you’d a thousand times rather paint radio-dials for aëroplanes; ’fess up now!”
“Well! when I came here I hardly knew a potato-stalk from a flouncing beet, but--but I’m pushing my green head above the soil,” confessed the Maid of the rake--the modern Joan--upon this humble field, the reclaimed desert looking down upon the fawning ocean, which had to be won from the enemy over and over again.
“The time’s past, however, honey”--Olive drew in her beautifully chiseled lower lip, which had rather a deep indentation under it, a rose-leaf nest resting upon the rounded ledge of the chin, which the girls called her shelf--the ivory shelf where she kept her inspirations--“the time’s past when any girl who is a girl wants to do only the things which she likes, in the way of war-work, leaving those that pinch slightly for others!... And now for the pinch! It’s time to begin. We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.--as our soldiers say--to stand back of them and help win the war. Let’s ‘tie to that’ with--with a hundred per cent of the best that’s in us, eh?”
But, ah! there are times for all when a hundred per cent on the best of our soul-stock seems exorbitant interest to pay for success in a struggle.
At the end of an hour’s work weeding and thinning out, fighting the enemy, grappling with prickly barb-weed, that nettled the ungloved fingers which boldly grasped it, routing out stubborn beach-grass, wild vetch, wild pea, on this sea-girt hill which seemed to have unregenerate leanings towards being a squawky desert still, even the Maid herself--Olive--began to feel resolution wavering.
“O dear! There never was an ancient village-street in France--or anywhere else--as crooked as my back feels at the present moment,” she murmured twistedly to herself. “There--there seems to be a ‘squawk’ in my courage, too! I want to knock off! I feel irresponsible--idle. Perhaps it was that mad frolic yesterday on the bar--getting to the heart of the wild life--the upset--ducking--when the big seal played submarine! It did something to me. Oh-h! to be, really, a heron, gull, flippered seal, anything--anything that knows nothing about horrible--‘civilized’--war;... about carrying on in the teeth of not--wanting--to!”
She straightened her long, graceful back, the Maid, and stood for a minute gazing off across a mile or more of sparkling bay, to that green bar on which the high tide now held glassy revel, beckoning to jollity with long, white fingers of foam, after a manner to make her feel more irresponsible still.
At the end of that minute she became aware that, mystically, her mood had spread, or perhaps, in that harum-scarum frolic off the dazzling bar, the great marbled dog-seal had done more than heave the old settler into the air; he had capsized the morale of this little army of girls.
“Oh-h, goody! My grit’s gone glimmering!” deplored Sara suddenly. “I hate this witch-grass; there’s a ‘squawky’ old witch in every tuft of it, I’m sure; it’s so rank an’ stubborn--so hard to rout out.”