Part 15 (2/2)

”Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old Benke is going to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!” A little silence. ”Will you be glad, Tess? Hm?”

Tess felt herself glowing and s.h.i.+vering as the big hand closed more tightly on her arm. ”Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and all.”

But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew.

No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the watchworks, all the fellows in the neighborhood--gone. At first she hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: ”Well, believe me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goon already.”

”All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright and save you wasting bullets.”

There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid him good-by. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in their everyday suits and hats, with their s.h.i.+ny yellow suitcases and their pasteboard boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their young heads sticking out of the car windows in cl.u.s.ters--black, yellow, brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:

”Good-by! Good-by! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a week, for a visit. Good-by! Good----”

They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, shouting.

Well, you wrote letters--fat, bulging letters--and in turn you received equally plump envelopes with a red emblem in one corner.

You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable forms of cake.

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California.

He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in it, too. California! Might as well send a person to the end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a cosmopolitan tone. ”Well,” he wrote, ”I guess the little old town is as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and I've traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make Hatton's place look like a dump.”

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among themselves and a.s.sured one another, with a toss of the head, that they could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around.

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the type known as a stag. ”Some hen party!” they all said. They danced, and sang ”Over There.” They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other's shoulders, still singing.

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch hour and in the washroom, there was a little desultory talk about the stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases such as ”I says to him”--and ”He says to me.” They wasted little conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters on blue-lined paper with the red emblem at the top. Chuck's last letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.

Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed-looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were those Tessie had from Chuck--blue-lined, cheap in quality. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in the East. These letters were not from him.

Ever since her home-coming, Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue shop was the society shop. The East End crowd sewed there, capped, veiled, ap.r.o.ned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny, if you did not belong to the East End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled and folded them was pure cerulean.

Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as ”that stinkin' bunch.” Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting a blouse in an emergency on Sat.u.r.day night and finis.h.i.+ng it in time for a Sunday picnic, b.u.t.tonholes and all. Their help might have been invaluable. It never was asked.

Without warning, Chuck came home on three days' furlough. It meant that he was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care.

”I don't care where you're goin',” she said exultantly, her eyes lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather ill-fitting khaki. ”You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to be home, Chuck? Gee!”

”I'll say,” responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly:

”Sure. It's swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've traveled around, and come back, things look so kind of little to you.

I don't know--kind of----” He floundered about, at a loss for expression. Then tried again: ”Now, take Hatton's place, for example.

I always used to think it was a regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked to in San Francisco and around there.

Why, they was--were--enough to make the Hatton house look like a shack.

Swimmin' pools of white marble, and acres of yard like a park, and the help always bringing you something to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are sc.r.a.ping and bowing to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something. Take Megan's store, too”--he was warming to his subject, so that he failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--”it's a joke compared to New York and San Francisco stores.

Reg'lar hick joint.”

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