CHAPTER III THE CAMP AT TWILIGHT

“‘When you come to the end of a perfect day,
And you sit alone....’

“Well! we’re not sitting alone, so that’s more sentimental than suitable.” Sara Davenport broke off short in the low song which she had started, looking away over the yellow cantonments of broad Camp Evens, turned to fine gold by the sun’s last flaming ray.

“And I’m sure it’s been anything but a perfect day! What about the poor blighter, and his matches?” struck in her officer-brother, who, seated edgeways upon the railing of the lofty balcony surrounding the camp Hostess House, half-faced the four girls who had been his guests at the illuminated “smoke party” in Gas Valley.

At a little distance, absorbed in the sunset effects upon the burnished rows of elevated barracks brooding like gilded dove-cots, were Olive’s father, Colonel Deering, and a much-loved spinster-cousin, who, during the morning, had been calling upon an old friend, an officer attached to Headquarters Troop.

“The Blighter! Oh! he’s not outmatched yet,” laughed Olive. “Didn’t--didn’t the last word from the base hospital proclaim that he was getting better?”

“Anyhow, we could forgive him,” murmured Arline half under her breath, in quivering rainbowed speech, “because here we’ve been, for the past year or two, trying to live up to the hardy Minute-Girl program, hiking so many hours a week, sleeping out, though at first we ‘caved’ before a cow-bell,”--a double rainbow, this, shedding a reflection of laughter--“and now--now this morning proves that one of our number, at least, could be truly an Emergency Girl!”

She cast a moved look at Olive.

“Ah, yes!” Sesooā shot an amused glance through her half-closed lashes--pretty eyelashes they were, which began by being dark and, shading to amber, now stole gold tips from the sunset--a peculiarity rather typical of Sara herself, and of her speech at the moment, which showed that she was determined that any allusion to the morning should be tipped off with lightness. “Ah, yes! battling with gas is one thing, but--for Olive--battling with grass and grubs in a war-garden may be quite another! Wait till it comes to fighting weeds an’ witch-grass. How much--how much of the dauntless Emergency Girl will be on deck then, I wonder, in our oasis by the seashore?”

“Oh! she’ll be there--a hundred per cent of her!” protested the Torch Bearer, her courage rising to a treble trill.

“Humph! Your voice sounds as if you had just eaten a canary-bird, my dear--and it was only squab that we had for dinner!” merrily mocked the Flame. “But will--will the note be as sweet when, on some broiling hot morning in July or August, the bugle sounds Fatigue on the edge of those white sand-dunes, where we’re going to camp? And it’s ‘Fall in for work in the field!’ amid the potato-rows on the one semi-green hill that would grow a ‘tater’ within a mile of us! A case of ‘Joan of Arc, they are calling you! Lead your comrades to the field!’ ... Oh! you should have seen Olive in silver-scaled armor, as the Maid of France, with her holy lance uplifted, in some tableaux that we gave for the benefit of the Red Cross. She did make a hit!”

Sara’s eyelashes twinkled in the direction of her brother. He shifted his edgy position a little on the railing. His color rose slightly as he glanced towards the modern Joan, a girl like a white orchid, whose dark eyes and hair, with the capacity for spiritual fervor in her face, offered rare material for such an impersonation. But he did not answer.

Perhaps, when he did go over, this keen-eyed young officer of the fiery mettle, nicknamed in camp O Pips, or Observation Post, from the unerring alertness in him which made him come down hard upon a blunder--he whose temper exploded like a whiz-bang--the picture on which he would dwell oftenest, of the oldest girl in this group, would, he felt, outshine every other.

It would show her kneeling by a gassed soldier, with the flame and smoke of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon her hat seeming especially designed to fight that other hateful yellow smoke and flame rolling away from her to leeward--the one the type of ideality that would finally win out over the baleful reality of the other, and leave none but the flame of brotherhood, with its sacred smoke of service, burning in the soul of man.

It was the ideal for which the soldier himself was going over to fight--going “shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace”--though humanly rough-shod!

He pulled himself together.

“And so you’re going to sport a war-garden on this jumping-off spot that you’re bound for next summer, to camp out during July and August on the edge of those white sand-dunes. I thought nothing could flourish there but sand-snails an’ seals, with--with, perhaps, this summer, an occasional submarine thrown in,” he laughingly remarked. “Aren’t you afraid that if you’re out on the water at all, a sub may come to the surface and fire a tin fish at you?”

“Oh! catch her wasting a torpedo on us when she’d have nothing to hit but my little blunt-nosed dory that you gave me, Iver; or Little Owl’s Indian canoe, which she mends with rosin when it sucks in water like a thirsty cow!” Sara, the lieutenant’s sister, burst into a laugh, looking sidewise at Ko-ko-ko--the Camp Fire Owlet--otherwise Lilia Kemp.

“Well, if it does leak a little, it’s a ‘slick bit of birch-bark,’ for all that, as Captain Andy says.” Lilia chuckled. “You’re all just envious of my genuine Indian canoe, brought by my father from Oldtown, Maine, and built by an Indian named Nodolinat--canoe-maker. I’m thinking of changing my Camp Fire name to Dolina, which has something to do with a canoe, either making or mending it, see?”

“Marring it, you mean! It’s a funny-looking craft when you have the bottom all plastered over with sticky rosin,” challenged Sara. “Oh, besides dory and birch-shell, I suppose we’ll have our old reliable, the broad, flat-bottomed camp skiff, which Captain Andy calls a ‘tender old wagon,’” laughingly.

“Captain Andy! Are you going to have that old king-pin with you again, shouldering the safety of a dozen girls or more? I don’t envy him.” The soldier smiled.

“Now, you do! You know you do! We can’t have him all the time. War got him back into active service. He’s been ‘skippering’ a coaster carrying lumber from some part of Maine round to the Essex shipyards,” said Arline. “Wasn’t that it, Olive? You had a letter from him.”

“Yes, but lately he had to give it up because of his lameness, and is doing his ‘bit’ in other directions,” replied Blue Heron, her dark eyes gazing off into the last rays of the sunset. “You know those country shipbuilding yards aren’t so very far from where we’re going to camp on the white Ipswich beach. By the bye,”--laughter trickling through her speech like sunlit water through a sieve--“by the bye, do you all know who’s going to work in those shipyards, this coming summer, if they draft him for labor? Why, my cousin, Atty Middleton Atwell!”

“Atwood Atwell, of Atwood and Atwell, city bankers! What! What! That young sprig from Nobility Hill? I beg your pardon!” The soldier, slipping off his perch, smiled apologetically at Olive, whose girlhood had blossomed in the same luxuriant soil of ancestral wealth. “Why! that kid is worth a million or two in his own right. And his great-grandfather--plus a couple more ‘greats’--signed the Declaration, eh?”

“Is--isn’t that the very reason why he should do his part where it’s most needed, as he’s too young to go across?” The oldest girl’s eyes twinkled challengingly. “Take my other cousin, Clayton Forrest; he’s not twenty-one yet! War was no sooner declared than off he went, hotfoot, and enlisted in the local infantry company being raised in his little town--about fifty young men from his father’s big loom-works signing up with him. And Clay--up to this, Clay was never a ‘grind,’” laughingly, “any more than--than Atwood was!”

“Good enough! And you have two more cousins in the navy, haven’t you?”

“Yes, indeed, she has! Why, it was with one of them, Admiral Haven Warde’s son, that Olive went down in a submarine; actually--actually submerged! Think of it!” put in the Rainbow--Arline--again, rosy now with vicarious excitement, as if the wonderful experience for one of their number touched her with an after-glow. “That--that’s what it means to be daughter of a steel king who’s connected with government shipbuilding yards! Ensign Warde is Junior Aide to the Commandant of the Miles River Navy Yard.”

“And--and it was off there that you--dove! Jove! that was an experience. What did it feel like?” The soldier’s eyes flashed curiously.

“Awfully still an’ tense while we were going down--just about half a minute, you know--with the big engines all stopped and only the electric motors going! And the swish of the water against the sub’s side! I closed my eyes and felt like a shell-fish. But when I opened them again on the bottom, oh! it was a fairy palace down there, under the sea--such bright electric lights glittering on wheels and pipes and I don’t know what not; a--a regular miracle-world of machinery,” in awed girlish tones.

“I suppose so, every inch--about--crammed full of mechanical power, except the forward quarters, where the officers slept!” suggested the lieutenant.

“Yes, and made toast and tea on a little electric contrivance attached to the shining switchboard that controlled the dynamos,” supplemented the favored one who had dived to sea-nymph’s regions in a steel shell, internally so radiant, so charged with magical power that it might make Neptune himself feel outclassed. “I--I was a fish again when we came to the surface once more, broke water, and climbed up into the conning-tower, to look through the periscope’s eye! It seemed such a strange dream-world that I saw outside, not one bit familiar; either very clear and shining and remote, or with waves and boats--and trees along the shore--looming unnaturally large and frowning, according as the telescope was adjusted. Oh-h! I’m sure I was a nice little flounder or haddock then,” merrily, “taking a peep at the upper world.”

“You came near ‘floundering’ out--being shot out, rather--through the mouth of the conning-tower into the gray pulpit, or superstructure, where you might have preached a sermon to the fishes on power, if you hadn’t been killed; that was through--gracious!--through one tiny misstep on an automatic lever, like a sleeping tiger. The Junior Aide, who could control the beast, saved you just in time, eh?” prompted Sara, but abruptly swallowed her chaff as she caught her soldier-brother’s eye.

She knew he was envying that Junior Aide, the young naval ensign, with the gold cord drooping from his left shoulder, thinking that no girl as attractive as Olive--as game in an emergency, too--should have quite so many heroic cousins.

What chance, in her memory, could an ordinary peppery lieutenant in an infantry company have against them--a lieutenant who had let his rash temper betray him into prematurely “skinning” a sergeant?

“I guess I was the blighter myself to-day--or as much of a ‘blight’ as that poor ‘doughboy’ with the matches--for letting temper, headlong anger, gas me. That little flame of a sister of mine, Sara, and I, we have the same sort of ‘pull-the-pin-and-see-me-explode’ temper,” he murmured heavily later, this thought rankling, in the ear of the oldest girl, who had looked into dreamland through the rounded eye of a periscope, when her companions had withdrawn to another corner of the lofty balcony for a better view of the sunset.

“Oh! don’t talk of ‘blights!’” she gasped laughingly. “I’m afraid that ‘bothering bugs’ and plant mildew won’t be in it with me for--for a ‘hoodoo’ when it comes to our working steadily three hours a day, weather permitting, in that green oasis of a war-garden amid the sandy desert of the white dunes, when we’re camping out, the coming summer! And yet I--I was the first to volunteer when the president of the Clevedon County Farm Bureau addressed all the Camp Fires of our city a week ago, and called for recruits for just that very thing. If I don’t stick to my pledge the other girls won’t. And we know America has got to be the ‘world’s pantry.’ But, O dear! give me knitting, sewing, painting war-posters, posing, anything else, from morning till night, except weeding an’ hoeing when the sun’s hot and--and one’s back feels as crooked as--as one of those old French streets that the boys write home about!”

Blue Heron straightened her long, girlish spine with humorous apprehension. She was a tall girl, the white parting on the right side of her dark little head being on a level with the soldier’s cheek-bone, if they were both standing.

“Oh! you’ll carry on.” He smiled at her. “It’s a good line; hold it!”

“As you will when you repel an attack, or--or go over the top!... When d’you suppose you’ll be--starting--across?”

“No knowing! At any minute, perhaps! But--but, if you should be around here a week from to-day, you may see me, still on this side, undergoing gas initiation--getting my medicine down in the trenches at the hands of the Gas Defense Division, Chemical Warfare Service. Certainly those young chemists have a witch’s imagination in the horrors they put over on us!” The soldier laughed.

“And they hold their classes every Thursday. I expect to be in the neighborhood, anyway, because father will. And Sara, you know, is staying with me. The other girls go back to the city to-morrow, to be in time for a ceremonial meeting of our Camp Fire Group, at which we’re going to have a novel initiation of our own--initiate, as a novice, that is, a foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, whom we’ve adopted for nine months, little Flamina Miola, born in Italy! I’m teaching her one or two patriotic poems--along with our special ritual--and you should hear her begin on:
“’Merica’s de lan’ we lova.
Oh, granda lan’ so free,
An’ school-a-mate, wherto I go,
Dis is de Flag fora me!”

“Good!”

“I chose her name for her, too: Nébis, A Green Leaf. Isn’t that pretty? She’s going to camp out with us this summer.”

“Green Leaf for Little Italy! It is poetic. I hope you’ll make it a laurel leaf. Well! I guess that sometimes, over there, when a fellow misses some of the things that--that make life hum, you know; when I’m ‘gooing’ up my gas-mask or, maybe, drawing pictures with my ‘toothpick’ (bayonet) in the mud, I’ll think of you Camp Fire Girls. You certainly have a corner on the poetic--fringes, beads, ceremonies--and it only seems to hearten you to meet what’s rough--ugly.”

“That’s our outdoor life,” half whispered Olive. “We get so many new sensations, come so near to--to the heart of things that we----Why! sometimes I,”--she caught her breath in a little low gush of confidence--“I feel as if it were only the fag-end of me that was shut up in--in the five feet eight or nine of flesh and blood--bloomers and blouse--called Olive.” The low girlish voice soared softly upon the last word as to a height from which the girlish soul looked out upon a great Adventure.

“You mean that you get a real glimpse into unseen things--spiritual things!” The soldier’s voice was low too--low and thrilled. “Well, since we are wading into the deep things, I may say to as much of Olive as is left in the fetching jersey suit beside me now, that ours is a rough game, but somehow, as it were, I have come nearer--nearer to God since I volunteered.... I wish it could help me to get the better of a--whiz-bang temper.”

The Torch Bearer’s eyes were wet. So were the soldier’s. The last word had been said. All she could do was to put out a tremulous little hand and touch his understandingly. He wanted very much to stoop and kiss it. But he didn’t. For he remembered that, though he wore his Plattsburg shoulder-bars, yet they were hardly more than Boy and Girl. And up to the threshold of this unifying war-time their lives had not run in parallel channels, as did that of the Junior Aide, who was an admiral’s son, for instance.

So he only covered the girlish hand warmly with his own--held it nested for a moment as that of a comrade with whom one has shared the secret trail, the rainbow trail, that leads into the unseen.

And he hid another, and very special, picture away in his soldier’s heart to brighten those moments when, riding endless miles on a troop train, “hitting the hay” at midnight or vegetating in mud until he felt himself sprouting, he might miss those things which make life hum.