CHAPTER VI.
AT THE TRICOTS’.
It took one month and three days for Judy to get the above letter, but her mind was set somewhat at rest long before that time by the Ambassador himself, who had learned through his confrère in Berlin that Mr. and Mrs. Kean were safe and at large, although not allowed to leave Berlin.
The daughter was so accustomed to her parents being in dangerous places that she did not feel so concerned about them as an ordinary girl would have felt for ordinary parents. Ever since she could remember, they had been camping in out-of-the-way places and making hair-breadth escapes from mountain wild cats and native uprisings and what not. She could not believe the Germans, whom she had always thought of as rather bovine, could turn into raging lions so completely.
“Bobby will light on his feet!” she kept saying to herself until it became almost like a prayer. “No one could hurt Mamma. She will be protected just as children will be!” And then came terrible, exaggerated accounts of the murder in cold blood of little children, and then the grim truth of the destruction of Louvain and Rheims, and anything seemed possible.
“A nation that could glory in the destruction of such beautiful things as these cathedrals will stop at nothing.” But still she kept on saying: “Bobby will light on his feet! Bobby will light on his feet!” She no longer trusted the Germans, but she had infinite faith in the sagacity and cleverness of her father. He always had got himself out of difficult and tight places and he always would.
In the meantime, money was getting very low. Try as she would to economize, excitement made her hungry and she must eat and eat three times a day.
“If I only had Molly Brown’s skill and could cook for myself!” she would groan as she tried to choke down the muddy concoction that she had just succeeded in brewing and was endeavoring to persuade herself tasted a little like coffee. She remembered with swimming eyes the beautiful little repasts they had had in the Bents’ studio during that memorable winter.
“Judy Kean, you big boob! I believe my soul you are going to bawl about a small matter of food. If the destruction of Louvain did not make you weep, surely muddy coffee ought not to bring tears to your eyes, unless maybe they are tears of shame.”
The truth of the matter was, Judy was lonesome and idle. She could not make up her mind to paint. Things were moving too fast and there was too much reality in the air. Art seemed unreal and unnecessary, somehow. “Great things will be painted after the war but not now,” she would say. She carried her camera with her wherever she went and snapped up groups of women and children, soldiers kissing their old fathers, great ladies stopping to converse with the gamin of the street; anything and everything went into her camera. She spent more money on films than on food, in spite of her healthy hunger.