CHAPTER XX CHRISTMAS OF 1918

The moving note which merged into melody at the first Peace Celebration, when War was, forever, as men hoped, a thing of the past, turned to mirth in the second one--the Christmas Ceremonial.

It was more than mirth in one girlish heart--one, at least. It was mounting thanksgiving which often sang itself into a sobbing prayer of joy, like the sun-curl upon the swelling wave when tumultuously it breaks.

For He had come back.

Lieutenant Iver Davenport--without as much hair as Peace Europa, because of the burning effects of mustard gas--slowly recovering from shrapnel-wounds, was back at Camp Evens, where once, in premature passion, he had rashly “bawled out” a sergeant, now, by the fortunes of war, a lieutenant like himself.

His mother and sister had been up to see him. They had sat by his cot in the base hospital, and Sara, knowing the sort of news for which he was thirsting, had told him all the story of their camping summer, making it center chiefly around one leading figure--that of the Torch Bearer, Olive Deering.

She described the waning fires of resolution upon the hill of the night-heron, when grit had gone glimmering, and how Olive had gloriously rekindled the flame from the glow in her own breast--and by the thought of what Soldier Brothers were enduring over there.

“It was from a letter about her cousin Clay--Clayton Forrest--that she read. He apparently did ‘his all’ over there, but came through, as--as did that other cousin of Olive’s, the rich banker’s son, who put in his time working in a shipyard on this side. Atlas, we nicknamed him because when we first saw him he was apparently holding up--supporting--with his back and shoulders a horribly heavy, raw, yellow ship’s rib--and the World with it.... That’s just how he felt; I know he did.... Never mind; I like him awfully well now--ever since I let him take my freak of a dory! Ha! that’s another story.”

So Sara’s tongue ran on, a moved, at times a merry, flame, into the returned soldier’s ear.

“But,”--her voice retreated into the softest twilight of conjecturing speech--“but I don’t believe Atlas--or any one of her cousins--holds up Olive’s world. Perhaps I ought not to say it....”

She broke off, mistily, as her eyes met her brother’s, with the homing hunger in them; her brother who had temporarily lost his hair--but not his smile!

“Do you mean--mean to say”--he began, in the old headstrong way. “Ah, well! nothing matters, girlie, except that I’m at home--at home, alive, and can soon see--everybody--for myself. Although I don’t know whether they’ll let me out of here before Christmas, or not. If they do--if I should be discharged from the hospital, and sent to the Casualty Detachment--why, I might get back to you sooner--sooner than I hope for, now.”

“Quite--unexpectedly--perhaps?”

The sister’s heart gave a flying leap.

“Possibly. But don’t look for it! As I say, what does--anything--matter, except that I will be back with you--sooner or later?”

The Flame suddenly bowed her wet cheek on the narrow cot next his; the ring in the last words, the whole world of relief, gave her for the first time an inkling into the soldier’s lot over there; no letter of his had done so.

“While the fight was on, all was Advance--and a heart full of cheers!”

“I--I was always Iver’s best chum--he said so--but I suppose I’ll have to resign myself now to the fact that when he went over the top at Chateau-Thierry and St. Mihiel--four times he led his men over the top, once into that Belleau wheat-field, yellow in the morning, red at night, and again into the meadow where he remembers thinking, before he was shot down, that the clover was sweet, even if he couldn’t smell it for the gas--his real thoughts, when he had any, were more of another girl than of me. Well! I can’t be jealous about that, as I was over the things he left with me! Oh! if he only could be discharged before Christmas--and spend it with us!”

Such was the tenor of the sisterly thoughts as the train bore her back to the home city of Clevedon, now daily witnessing the return of officers and men who wore upon their right sleeve the gold stripes telling of service in France--supplemented often and nobly by the added gold which spoke of wounds.

“Dear me! I wish they--the doctors up there at Camp Evens--would pronounce him better, turn him over to the Casualty Department; then he’d probably get his discharge right away, and arrive home unexpectedly--perhaps! Oh-h!”

The bliss of the latter possibility was the spirit in Sara Davenport’s feet which kept them moving elastically from room to room of her father’s suburban bungalow on the day before Christmas Eve. It was a red-hearted wreath here, a garland there, typifying the matchless thanksgiving of this Christmas in many a heart, to be green while life should last--and the heart have a reminiscent throb!

It was creaming, frothing, whipping, mixing, and cutting into diamond shapes which borrowed luster from the diamond mine of contingent expectancy within such as had never transfigured cookies before.

For if Iver should possibly arrive, not even the type of fare set before aviators on a moonlit beach and jollified by the airy slang of space, was meet for the returning You!

“Those air-scouts would call these coated chocolate bars creamed joy-sticks,” thought Sara, as she reverted to candy-making and Camp Fire recipes. “Well! if Iver should be with us, again, on Christmas Day, every mouthful I eat will be a joy-stick--tasteless except for the joy. Oh-h! just suppose he should come to-night while I’m out--attending that Christmas Ceremonial at the Deerings’ home.”

“Maybe I could send him to fetch you,” returned her mother, to whom the latter remark was made aloud. “But, to my mind, there’s hardly a chance of it!... Here’s a box which has just come for you, daughter!”

“Oh, good gracious! it couldn’t be--from--him?”

No! It was a bunch of pearl-white Christmas roses grown in the conservatories of Manchester-by-the-Sea.

With it was no accompanying card, but a sheet of creamy, rough-edged, masculine note-paper, on which were a series of rather clever pen-sketches: overalled girls wielding rake, hoe, and sprayer upon a sea-girt hill; on the next page, a youth steering a blind horse between reefs of lumber, then with his back bent under a ponderous ship’s rib--a girl defying him--lastly, that girl upright in a dory that might have escaped from some boat-bedlam, signaling to Coast Guards.

“Atlas knew what would appeal to a Camp Fire Girl, with a taste for primitive picture-writing,” murmured the Flame to herself, nursing the starry roses, the stars in the eyes above them shining through those gold-tipped lashes, like a rayed nebula. “Well, well! I suppose this is a sort of silent tribute to the fact that we all--all--came through the Game with our wings, as an aviator would say; that we weren’t grounded in what we set out to do!”

A thought which made the awarding of honors at that Christmas Ceremonial, in the dying days of 1918, a rite at once more triumphant and touching than the bestowal of any honor-beads before!

For each khaki-colored bead strung upon a leather thong testified to the contributing of an individual bit in the hour of Freedom’s main bitt, when it was the anchoring prop to which the mainsail of progress, the mainsheet of safety, were made fast.

Yes! and, in a way, the lives over there, too. For many a soldier owed his rations and his recovery to the tireless zeal of voluntary workers on this side of the water.

Who knows but Lieutenant Iver did, as, an hour later, when the spirit of the Ceremonial meeting had turned to Christmas merrymaking, his fingers, long and thin, wielded the colonial knocker and rang the bell of the Deering mansion on Nobility Hill--as certain annals of the city were proud to call it.

“Oh-h! I nev-er could come in, sis.... Such a scarecrow I am--without as much hair as--as that Peace Babe you were telling me about!”

“She! Why! she has a perfect shock now--little Peace Europa! She--she’s growing, at all points, like her name!” It was his sister’s voice, merry, tender--tearfully moved--as she ran down-stairs to meet him. “So--so you were discharged sooner than you expected, Iver.”

“Yes. Got my marching orders from the Casualty Detachment only a few hours ago. Didn’t even wait to telephone! Come to fetch you home--sis!... Why-y! Olive.”

Somehow, as she watched that meeting between the Torch Bearer and the gaunt soldier from over-seas, Sara Davenport, regardless of an onlooking butler, turned aside in the great lighted hall, and hid her wet eyes in the crook of her arm from which the soft leather fringes fell back--just as she had done by the bungalow on the wild sea-beach, after the exciting capture of a spy, when she yearned that Peace might come again.

She was a forked Flame now, as then, cleft by dividing emotions.

For it was evident by the wonderful color on Olive’s cheek, by the joy-brand in her eyes, who--who was the prop that held up her world--her maidenly castles in the air. And it was not Atlas, nor any one of her cousins, fine as might be their war-score!

But not even Sister Sara, only the December breeze fluttering about the brownstone mansion on the hill, heard what passed, yet a little while later, between a very tall, very thin officer, assiduously cultivating a baby crop of new hair, and a dark-eyed girl, upon a balcony of the Deering home, whither maidens in ceremonial dress had flocked to hear far, sweet echoes of Community singing--after the said soldier had been beguiled up-stairs on the plea that he might keep his trench-cap on.

And the said breeze actually halted, cornered by the new mischief--the shy, glad mischief--in Olive’s tones which had hitherto been more on the meditative order.

“I wonder”--murmured the Torch Bearer--“I wonder, now, if I’m the very first Camp Fire Girl to--to be proposed to--that’s what it means, doesn’t it--in head-band and moccasins--ceremonial dress,” shyly.

“But, oh--oh, good gracious! Olive, I oughtn’t; not--not until after I had s-spoken to your father! What will he say?”

The youthful lieutenant’s courage was more flustered than when he led his men over the top into that French clover-meadow where a glance told him that the blossoms were sweet even if he couldn’t smell them through his gas-mask--and for noxious cloud.

“My father! I don’t know what he will say. But--but I rather imagine it will be the same thing he said--when--he saw you hold out your blistered hand--to a private--after you had been so badly burned by that--stray--powder-puff.”

“And what was that?”
“Onward--Christian--Soldier!”

whispered Olive very softly.

The End