CHAPTER VIII THE LEADER

“Let your spirit guide us through,
Joan of Arc, they are calling you!”

Over the white sands of the Ipswich Beach, looking towards the long sand-bar, with about three-quarters of a mile of sapphire water sparkling between, the sportive cry rang, with a gay note of challenge under its playfulness:
“Come with the flame in your glance!”

And she came with the flame in her glance--no spirit Maid of Orleans returning to lead the gallant sons of the fleur-de-lys on bleeding fields--as who knows but she may have come to her France in its hardest hour! Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil!
“Come with the flame in your glance,
With a garden-rake for a holy lance!”

chanted Sara again, feeling that camouflage was not her only inspiration.
“Can’t you hear the bugle sounding?
Can’t you feel our pulses bounding?
Lead your comrades to the field!”

she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of fire--of fervor--in them.

“I confess I wish ’twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass, rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!” craved she, her chant sinking to a dirge-like sing-song, to which she matched her march to the war-garden on Squawk Hill, that discordant paradise of night-herons, so lately reclaimed from the barren dunes.

“What!... What! Sara, you’re not weakening?” The Maid brandished her rake. “I wish I had a little more ‘pep’ in me, myself, this morning,” she acknowledged, a moment later, sinking her voice to a silky whisper, with a backward glance over her blue-overalled shoulder at the younger girls, fifteen of them--a bright-eyed, laughing brigade--who were following her to take the hill for the fiftieth time from an invading horde of weeds, ranker, stronger at the seashore than anywhere else--with a giant’s grip upon the sandy soil, from control of which they had been so lately ousted.

“Well! you didn’t expect to be captain of the forces again this morning, did you, as you have been for three days past?” Sara looked up at her friend, the oldest girl of the Morning-Glory Group, now encamped upon the white beach behind them, who had kept incognito a secret that shone in the dark; who was determined, upon her return to the city, to go to work, at anything, to release a man--a man for the front. “You thought our Guardian--Gheezies--would be able to lead us out to capture the hill, herself, to-day.”

“I hoped she would,” said Olive Deering. “But I could see that she still isn’t feeling very well after that little sick attack of the past week. So I persuaded her to save her strength for the Council Fire to-night--the ceremonial meeting on the sands--at which our little Green Leaf, Flamina, is really to be initiated as a Wood-Gatherer, and receive her fagot-ring; hitherto she has been only a novice.”

“Won’t her voice enrich our Wohelo chant?” murmured Sara. “Sometimes when she’s by herself, skipping along by the sea, it seems to me as if I never, really, heard a girl sing before; it just fondles the air--sweetens everything about her. Listen to her now; that’s what she calls a ‘funny one!’”

The Green Leaf was dancing forward to the field now, her hands on her hips, setting the other younger girls saucily swaying with her, to a dialect lilt of:
“In capo del monte,
In capo del monte,
Si fà l’amore
Fiorentina! Fiorentina!
E cip i tè ciop!
E cip i tè ciop!”

“E chippety chop! Chippety chop!” Olive laughingly echoed the last two lines as the little singer pronounced them. “I know what that song means,” she cried; “it’s about a lover going up a mountain to see his lady-love whose name is ‘Fiorentina’--Florence--and the ‘Chippety chop!’ is their airy chatter. Oh! I’m so glad”--she waved her garden rake--“that the suggestion came from Headquarters that each Camp Fire Group should adopt a foreign-born sister. Listening to Flamina, nobody can think that the benefit will be all on her side; we’re getting some magic from her that breathes in that wonderful voice of hers, which, as you say, would soften a----”

“A corky carrot, eh?” sniffed Sesooā, her spirits dropping with a squawk from airy realms of love and song, to the skirts of the war-garden on Night-Heron Hill. “Well! Here’s such a passé vegetable row, a left-over from the crop which the farmer--Captain Andy’s enterprising nephew--planted himself early in the spring. Our late carrot-crop that we put in towards the end of June doesn’t need any sorcery of Flamina’s--or anybody else’s”--laughingly; “it’s a winner,” looking along green, feathery rows stirred by the sea-breeze, with here and there a terra-cotta rim just peeping above ground.

“And nobody appreciates its being a ‘corker’--not corky--any more than I do, except when one has to go to work to thin it out, as some of us will have to do this morning.... And to tell the truth,” Sara’s gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled, “I never felt less like work than I do to-day.”

“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 a?roplanes; ’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.”

“Gone glimmering! I haven’t even a glimmer left,” sighed fair-haired Sybil, the Maid’s sister, gazing down at her round arm, bare from the elbow, which had twinkled as a galaxy--radio-painted--the night before. “Too much fun yesterday; it’s taken the ‘pep’ out of me--burnt it all away. I--I’d rather do anything than thin out these saucy beets, anyway; they’re so red-faced and flouncing, they--they just seem to giggle at you in the sun, when you’re tired and your back aches, and you don’t want to keep on.”

“Yes, like horrid--bold--florid-faced girls; to-day I just want to smack every one that I pull up!” finished Lilia crossly. “I don’t mind grubbing in this sandy war-garden, when it’s an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon, but to put in the whole time, or most of it--two hours and a half, anyway--at a stretch, because we want to take it easy, later, and make ready for the Council Fire--why, that’s too much. I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while!”

It was the same all over the broad semi-cultivated acres of lonely hillside. Everywhere courage had gone glimmering, or flickered out altogether.

Of the seventeen girls at work--two of the campers having been left at home to prepare dinner: Arline, whose symbolic rainbow was never more needed, and Betty, the evergreen Holly--not one was now carrying on, or, if at all, very lamely.

A distant trio who had been raking over the earth around the vegetables, in order to renew the mulch--surface muck--and draw the moisture to that sandy surface--had, together with other unpaid volunteers whose tedious task was to fight insect pests with noxious tobacco-water, thrown down their arms ignominiously, and sat down under a crooked tree, to chat.

“An infant carrot is, sure, a funny-looking thing; this one has a tail like a wood-mouse, only pink,” lazily moralized Sul-sul-sul-i, meaning Redstart--Little Fire--here, in this work-a-day field, Victoria Glenn. “I wonder how such a terra-cotta baby tastes--raw? Bah! Horrid!”

“I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while.”

She bit into the vegetable baby and threw it from her, repeating the experiment, in “loafing” fashion, with another, and yet another.

“Why! you mustn’t waste them. We can cook those for our own use--save the winners to sell for the Red Cross--and to feed others. Oh! Oh! you’re not giving out, too, are you--Victory?”

The Maid’s voice broke upon the appealing cry. This change rung upon Victoria had served as a rally-word before, but evidently there was “little fire” left in the Victory girl now.

And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.

“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”

The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.

And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart.

For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once said, “in cotton-wool,”--in padded luxury--who, occasionally, rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her time.

While her feet trod the struggling soil of the war-garden she was aware of a secret garden within her, beckoning them; a garden of indolence--of ephemeral do-as-you-please delights--in which, indeed, she had rarely lingered since she became a Camp Fire Girl.

How was she to avoid its tempting gate now--how carry on at the task that “pinched”?

And the answer was, as it was to the Maid, Joan, of old, in her sunny orchard, the whispering voices, bidding her look beyond herself--above!

“Our Father!” breathed Olive Deering softly, with a rush of tears to her wide dark eyes, which gazed away from her followers, out over land and sea. “Great Spirit in Whom I live and move and have my being--invisible--Whom, yet, as it were, I have seen--strengthen me now; don’t let me shamefully weaken; help me to--carry--on!

“Girls!” She turned again to the field, the humble, oft-won field. “Girls--Minute-Girls--Victory Girls--what on earth are we about, weakening, thinking of knocking off before the time for which we pledged ourselves is over, simply because we’re not in the humor for work? Bah! Nice volunteers we are! What would our Soldier Boys think of us? Oh! I’ve got a letter here that would shame us--right here in the breast-pocket of my overalls”--plucking it forth, waving thin checked sheets, pennon-like. “It--it’s to my father from the captain of that infantry company in which my Cousin Clay is--Clay, who carried the big basket of household goods for the little old Frenchwoman--helped her to get settled again----”

“Humph!” interjected Sara; she still disliked to listen to any eloquence bearing upon the war score of Olive’s cousins--even on the ordinary “innings” of that rich boy who, seen leading a blind horse under a blazing sun through a country shipyard, not a dozen miles away, was apparently not reveling in his task any more than they had been in theirs--the only score on which she would have liked to hear her friend dilate was Iver’s.

“The captain’s letter tells of an experience which the Boys had, away back in January, before they had been on the front lines at all--while they were still in training--in barracks, somewhere in France.” Thus Olive took up the story. “It was their first day in the practice-trenches, (nine long miles from those barracks--about the worst day, for weather, the captain says, that he ever remembers) the men said ‘Sonny France’ had gone up front and got killed--sleet, snow, rain, mud--just a too-horrid sample of everything, girls!

“And after their nine-mile march to the trenches, the company put in long hours of hard work, training--practicing how to repel an attack, how to go over the top, ploughing round, knee-deep, in mud, with their gas-masks on--which the captain says is about as comfortable as walking about town on a day hot as this, with your head in a canvas bag.”

“Oh! we--we know a little about those chlorine-foolers--some of us--about the popping gas-cloud, too!” wetly exploded Sara.

“And then--then came the dreary march back to barracks in that freezing January weather, with the men tired almost to death.... But were they weakening, our gallant Boys of the Yankee Division?... our deary, cheery American Boys? No! No! They were singing. And one--one--the captain says, a mere lad, sang loudest of all--then dropped in his tracks as he reached the barracks! And shall we----”

“No-o, we--shan’t! We’re not ‘squawking’--crying quit! Not giving up! We’re out to make a showing, and we’re going to do it--no matter how hot the sun is, or how ‘witchety’ the weeds! Carry on’s the word; carry on!”

The failing squawk had, indeed, become a shout; it was a general cry, from one and all of the war-workers, for all had drawn near to listen--a sprayed cry, too, as if the gust sweeping up from the sea, over which that letter had traveled, brought a little brine on its wings.

“Just one thing morel” cried Olive, again the Torch-Bearer--the Maid. “I’ve read somewhere, though not in this letter, that when soldiers are marching a long distance, shoulder to shoulder, they can stand it much better than if one is hiking alone. There’s our lesson in team-work, girls; let’s take hold together--pull together, as we never did before--on the weeds, the superfluous vegetable chicks, the muck, or whatever it is! And--sing!”
“We don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’re on the way,”

started a voice, moved--half-laughing.
“We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.
There’s going to be a hot time before us this day,
But still we’ll make our showing ...”

The protest was triumphantly completed by the fresh breeze booming up the vegetables.

Two hours later a tired girl, with slight lines of weariness under her dark eyes, stole into the tent upon the white beach, flanking the mother-bungalow, which was, at present, hers and Sara’s.

She did not turn to her own corner, but to her friend’s, where was pinned to the translucent canvas a framed photograph, with a Service Star above it.

“Iver!” whispered Olive Deering, tremulously--and again the Maid’s look was on her face--“I’m trying to be worthy of you--of all our Boys--of our talk on that twilight balcony! I’m ‘holding the line!’ I’m carrying on!”