CHAPTER IX THE “CREATURE FAR ABOVE”

“I light the red candle of Health: strength that I draw from the ocean, buoyancy from the breeze, elasticity from the air, the sands, and ‘dash’ from the wild life about me--dashing health that makes it irksome for me to walk if I can run or dance, that sets my heart soaring along sky-ways of thankfulness, makes me strong for all work which my country asks of me: I light the red candle of Health.”

“I light the white candle of Peace: as, in the Christmas story, Atawessu, the Star, the Creature Far Above, guided wise men to the manger where the Prince of Peace was born, so may the star of loving kindness guide all men soon to that ‘fair city of peace’ where children’s cry--like the song of angels, of old--shall come true and it may be ‘Fini,’ forever, la Guerre: good will on earth! I light the white candle of Peace.”

“I light the blue candle of Loyalty--Truth: as the tides of the ocean are stable, returning rhythmically to the shore, governed by some force which men call Solar Attraction, so may I be drawn to the Sun of Ideals, ‘true to the truth that is in me,’ loyal to each pledge I make: I light the blue candle of Truth!”
“Peerless red, white, and blue,
Vitality, love, and truth,
Bright be my hold on you,
In these halcyon days of youth!
“Staunch as the ocean’s tide,
Nor man, nor might may turn,
Steady as beacon-light,
In its patient, steadfast burn!
“True as the fixed star’s beam.
The Creature Far Above,
Unerring as wild bird’s dive
For hidden treasure trove!
“True as the ...”

But the chanting voices--enriched by Flamina’s caressing note--faltered. What “Creature Far Above” was gliding forth from a bank of blood-red cloud, its radiant wings aflame, as if dipped in the fires of another world?

“It’s an a?roplane! A big--a?roplane! A biplane!”

“Nev-er!”

“Yes, it is! I--I thought at first it was a sea-gull; I’ve been watching it--saw it before it entered that red cloud-gate!” Sara Davenport’s leather-fringed sleeves fell back from her bare fore-arms, leaving them free to describe a broken arc of excitement--like chain-lightning ripping the dusk--under the spell of the tricolored candles.

“Mercy! Whoopee-doo!... Zoom, zoom, zoom!... May--may I be feathers, as Captain Andy would say, if ’tisn’t an a?roplane! A big army air-plane! Oh, girls alive, d’you suppose--suppose it’s going to land--come to earth--drop down right here by our Council Fire?”

“Oh! it never will. Where is it? I can’t see it! The dusk’s so thick, anyway!” It was a half-cheated wail from two-thirds of the girls, turning to Sara’s flame, now a perfect pillar of fire, for guidance--direction.

“There! There! See! Just over that tallest sand-peak now--high sand-hill!... And, oh! for goodness sake! there’s the moon coming over the top--coming over the top to stare at it.”

Yes! round-orbed, magnificent, shadow-mapped, the silvery Green Corn Moon was sailing up over the dunes of antique silver--over the dark-tressed crown of a lesser hill, to gaze at the winged wonder--one moment burning up in the last dying flame of day, the next a mammoth gray moth circling and circling in the vast crimson-hung halls of twilight, as if drawn to the home-fires of earth.

To the far-beckoning blaze of the Council Fire upon the pale beach, within thirty yards of the tide’s rippling edge--the fairy, rainbowed blaze, fed by bone-dry driftwood, copper-marked wreck-wood, flinging aloft every hue in the spectrum--before which nineteen Camp Fire Girls and their Guardian had entered upon the candle-lighting ceremony arranged by Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, the Maid who had “carried on” that morning upon the humble field of that depressing hill.

Now the candles, red, white, and blue, symbolic torches, embedded in their silver candlesticks of sand, flickered, guttered, unheeded--went out, two of them--negligible as glow-worms beside some transcendent display of Northern Lights, streaming merry dancers, radiating from the excitement in the girls’ own breasts, which seemed to surround that a?rial visitor from the North, flying lower--lower--directly over the high-floating, pink-shot smoke-reek of the Council Fire.

But....

Was it going to be a visitor?

Forgotten was the charming purpose of the evening, the main feature of the ceremonial meeting, the initiation of Nébis, little Flamina, now fondling the air with vocal thrills that sobbed joyously, like the softer strings of a violin--as that transporting question sailed, moon-faced, over the top!

“But--but where did you see it first, Sara? Oh! how could you see it, far off--when everything’s getting so dark? I never knew you had--cat’s--eyes!”

Little Owl was blinking like a snake-charmed owlet which could not move its head upon the neck usually so flexible--that slender girlish neck rising from the round setting of the ceremonial dress being bent fixedly backward--the face, white as a moon-flower, shining upward in ultimate expectancy, such as never had been before, never could, felt she, be again, though she live till crack of doom!

“See it! Oh, I don’t know! While--while we were singing--chanting--about the Creature Far Above (oh! wasn’t that funny?) I happened to look off, and saw a speck--dark--against the red! I thought, at first, it was a bird! Then--then it entered that red ripple-cloud ... then.... Oh-h! I believe it is going to land--land on our map--right here on the sands.

“Yes; I can hear the engine buzz--now! Gracious! it looks like a big, dark fish--swimming round in a fog, with a whirligig in its mouth--the revolving propeller, I suppose.”

Olive was stuttering with excitement, too--her hands clasped--staccato excitement that ticked each word off like a dot against the bare, steely possibility that the big biplane, now within a couple of hundred yards of the home-fires, might pass over and on, without descending.

“It may be a naval a?roplane patrolling for submarines, in which case it will probably fly on over the water--on top of the water, maybe!”

Even Gheezies, the Guardian, as she put forth the unwelcome suggestion, was oppressed by a tickling in her throat, a cooing almost babyish, of held-up excitement that did not yet dare to be exultation over the landing of an army battle-plane by their Council Fire--so that maturity dropped from her like a nun’s cloak and her forty years became as the fourteen of the youngest tiptoeing maidens present.

“My! But, mercy! suppose it should be--should be an enemy air-plane? Hostile! Goodness!”

Sybil, pirouetting on her toes upon the sands, subsided to the soles of her moccasins, in momentary apprehension--flat fright--her lips falling apart, a cleft flower, as her gaze fluttered downward, like a shot bird, to the dim dunes, searching them for two other lonely camps about an eighth of a mile distant, one just vacated, the other occupied by the Guardian’s artist-brother, who, at the moment, was far out on the bay, deep-sea fishing.

Other youthful glances strayed this way and that way, too. All tales of coast invasion which the girls had heard, of air-raid and wreck--invasion which, owing to the fleet of their British cousins and to the immortal valor of their own noble army, fighting for them, they were to be spared in the Great War--loomed up in a dark fog-ring encircling them.

“Bah! Enemy! Hostile!... Gammon and spinach!” cried Sara, flapping, fluttering like a brown leaf in a fish-tail breeze. “No such thing! It’s too far off for us to see the insignia--rings on the under side of the wings, but.... Oh, say! it is going to land; it’s doing a nose-dive now--heading straight down. Glory, d’you hear it whistle?”

“Whee-ee-oo-oo!” Blithely, indeed, whistled the splendid air-ship, nosing towards earth, as if it knew the feminine welcome awaiting it, settling into a natural glide, while the fine wires of the “struts” connecting the two planes cut the air with that homing sound.

“Hostile!... Piffle! Why! Why! the rudder is striped--can just make it out--red, white, and blue, the same--the same as our service-buttons.”

Ah! dear insignia. Perhaps, at that culminating moment, as the recognition bubbled forth, under all the merry dance of excitement in girlish breasts, there was a stable under-current of complaisance sweeping them upward bodily, as it were, to meet the a?rial visitor; satisfaction that, nine hours before, on the hill of discordant name, they had not weakened--been untrue to the claim of those ringed colors linking them now in service to the Adventurers of the skies.

“Yes, here they come! Glory hallelujah! Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue! Oh-h!”

A moment of tense silence, of flyaway breath fluttering, winged, through parted lips--of girlish faces transfigured, luminous in the dusk as the head-bands about girlish brows--flashing recognition signals into the gloom! And down it came, that army bi-plane--bump, bump, bump--in the briefest of jolting canters along the dim, dim beach!

“Well!... Well, we didn’t make a pancake landing, anyhow! No!”

Forth leaped, on the word, from his tiny cock-pit, his deep pilot’s seat, a young, boyish aviator, helmeted, gauntleted, leather-jacketed!

Forth he leaped, and pushed his goggles back--then stood for a moment, a-blink, a knight of the skies, fresh from his parade ground, the clouds, landing among fairy princesses, filleted and headed, upon a fairy shore, with a rainbowed Council Fire in the background and three tall candles, of the charmed colors which ringed his wings--one still alight, flickering a welcome--in their antique silver candlesticks of sand!

Could romance go further? The Guardian Fairy felt that it could not. She stepped forward and held out her hand.

“It was a very pretty landing, indeed,” she said.

The knight unbuttoned his leather helmet and pulled it off; his long back gauntlet, reaching to the elbow, too!

“Well! she did drag her tail a little,” he answered, glancing deprecatingly at his “ship” with its red, white, and blue rudder; the great crimson fish--fabled fish--with wings in its head and a propeller in its gaping mouth, which the high tide seemed to have thrown up upon the sands.

“My name is Fenn,” he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian’s hand.

“Lieutenant Fenn, I suppose?”

The a?ronaut bowed again, unbuttoning his leather coat, so that there was a gleam of silver bars--those army bars which Iver wore, thought Sara quickly--upon the broad shoulders beneath; of silver wings, too, wrought on black velvet upon the tired breast, heaving boyishly.

“And--and this is my observer, Lieutenant Hayward,” he introduced further, turning to the second air-man, who, also, had vacated the airy nest of his little cock-pit and stood upon the darkening tide-shore.

“Well! Mother Earth is always ready to welcome aviators--or her children are!” The Guardian shook hands with both.

“That is, when they land of their own free will,” put in the boyish pilot, his strong, white teeth flashing from a pale face as he looked breezily beyond her at nineteen maidens whose hovering brown draperies, fluttering fringes, embroideries and long braids “Mammy Moon” now touched with primitive charm, as if they were her favored offspring.

“I admit the correction,” the Guardian Fairy smiled. “At all events, we are glad--su-premely glad”--her voice shook a little with the thrill of the thing--“to welcome you to our Council Fire. We--we have never before entertained Angels unawares--Aviators unexpectedly!” She laughed. “We are the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, encamped in that bungalow by the seashore. I am the Guardian, Darina Dewey, spinster,” still laughingly. “It would take a long time to introduce you all round, and it’s getting too dark to see. At least, let me present you to the elder girls--to our Assistant Guardian, Miss Deering.... Olive--Lieutenant Fenn.”

Sara Davenport, introduced next, was not too thrilled to note the young air-pilot’s start of admiration over the first presentation--note it jealously, for Iver’s sake.

“Bah! I don’t wonder he wilts!” she murmured to herself, half-savagely. “Olive is a dream in ceremonial dress, with those long braids, her dark eyes, and her skin like a moonlit cosmos flower. If--if I were an aviator, I’d want to fly away with her--ten thousand feet high! Then--then, what would Iver do? Oh, yes! Have you made a long flight?” she added aloud.

“Not very, but I had hard work flying my course.” The knight of the clouds, really not much “wilted,” was giving full twilight attention to her now, as to the other older girls to whom he was introduced. “I was heading into the wind, you see, and the very little there is, up there, was against us. We were flying low, ‘winging the midway air,’” smilingly, “when we sighted the smoke from your big fire there, and my Observer ordered me to fly over.”

“Oh, did you think--imagine--it was a spy bonfire, signaling out to sea? I don’t believe we have a single spy round here, with--with the possible exception of the long-legged sand-snipe always spying upon the fish--greedy things!” Sara excitedly caught her breath.

“Well! I wouldn’t be too sure--of anything.” The young air-scout plucked his goggles from his forehead.

“And do you mean to say you were flying over the coast--over the shore--looking out for--for suspicious things--huts in the woods, lonely signal-stations, wireless ... oh-h?” Arline and Betty drew breath simultaneously, tumultuously, speaking together.

“Well, we saw nothing suspicious here,” was the evasive answer, “only suggestive....”

“Suggestive--of what?”

“Oh, that:
“‘Ground-school dinners bring the tears,
We haven’t had a feed--in--years!’”

came the answer with a long--beclouded--sigh.