Book: Rilla of Ingleside

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"Di and Nan are home for a couple of weeks. Then they go back to Red
Cross work in the training camp at Kingsport. I envy them. Father says
I'm doing just as good work here, with Jims and my Junior Reds. But it
lacks the romance theirs must have.

"Kut has fallen. It was almost a relief when it did fall, we had been
dreading it so long. It crushed us flat for a day and then we picked up
and put it behind us. Cousin Sophia was as gloomy as usual and came over
and groaned that the British were losing everywhere.

"'They're good losers,' said Susan grimly. 'When they lose a thing they
keep on looking till they find it again! Anyhow, my king and country
need me now to cut potato sets for the back garden, so get you a knife
and help me, Sophia Crawford. It will divert your thoughts and keep you
from worrying over a campaign that you are not called upon to run.'

"Susan is an old brick, and the way she flattens out poor Cousin Sophia
is beautiful to behold.

"As for Verdun, the battle goes on and on, and we see-saw between hope
and fear. But I know that strange dream of Miss Oliver's foretold the
victory of France. 'They shall not pass.'"



CHAPTER XX

NORMAN DOUGLAS SPEAKS OUT IN MEETING

"Where are you wandering, Anne o' mine?" asked the doctor, who even yet,
after twenty-four years of marriage, occasionally addressed his wife
thus when nobody was about. Anne was sitting on the veranda steps,
gazing absently over the wonderful bridal world of spring blossom,
Beyond the white orchard was a copse of dark young firs and creamy wild
cherries, where the robins were whistling madly; for it was evening and
the fire of early stars was burning over the maple grove.

Anne came back with a little sigh.

"I was just taking relief from intolerable realities in a dream, Gilbert
--a dream that all our children were home again--and all small again--
playing in Rainbow Valley. It is always so silent now--but I was
imagining I heard clear voices and gay, childish sounds coming up as I
used to. I could hear Jem's whistle and Walter's yodel, and the twins'
laughter, and for just a few blessed minutes I forgot about the guns on
the Western front, and had a little false, sweet happiness."

The doctor did not answer. Sometimes his work tricked him into
forgetting for a few moments the Western front, but not often. There was
a good deal of grey now in his still thick curls that had not been there
two years ago. Yet he smiled down into the starry eyes he loved--the
eyes that had once been so full of laughter, and now seemed always full
of unshed tears.

Susan wandered by with a hoe in her hand and her second best bonnet on
her head.

"I have just finished reading a piece in the Enterprise which told of a
couple being married in an aeroplane. Do you think it would be legal,
doctor dear?" she inquired anxiously.

"I think so," said the doctor gravely.

"Well," said Susan dubiously, "it seems to me that a wedding is too
solemn for anything so giddy as an aeroplane. But nothing is the same as
it used to be. Well, it is half an hour yet before prayer-meeting time,
so I am going around to the kitchen garden to have a little evening hate
with the weeds. But all the time I am strafing them I will be thinking
about this new worry in the Trentino. I do not like this Austrian caper,
Mrs. Dr. dear."

"Nor I," said Mrs. Blythe ruefully. "All the forenoon I preserved
rhubarb with my hands and waited for the war news with my soul. When it
came I shrivelled. Well, I suppose I must go and get ready for the
prayer-meeting, too."

Every village has its own little unwritten history, handed down from lip
to lip through the generations, of tragic, comic, and dramatic events.
They are told at weddings and festivals, and rehearsed around winter
firesides. And in these oral annals of Glen St. Mary the tale of the
union prayer-meeting held that night in the Methodist Church was
destined to fill an imperishable place.

The union prayer-meeting was Mr. Arnold's idea. The county battalion,
which had been training all winter in Charlottetown, was to leave
shortly for overseas. The Four Winds Harbour boys belonging to it from
the Glen and over-harbour and Harbour Head and Upper Glen were all home
on their last leave, and Mr. Arnold thought, properly enough, that it
would be a fitting thing to hold a union prayer-meeting for them before
they went away. Mr. Meredith having agreed, the meeting was announced to
be held in the Methodist Church. Glen prayer-meetings were not apt to be
too well attended, but on this particular evening the Methodist Church
was crowded. Everybody who could go was there. Even Miss Cornelia came--
and it was the first time in her life that Miss Cornelia had ever set
foot inside a Methodist Church. It took no less than a world conflict to
bring that about.

"I used to hate Methodists," said Miss Cornelia calmly, when her husband
expressed surprise over her going, "but I don't hate them now. There is
no sense in hating Methodists when there is a Kaiser or a Hindenburg in
the world."

So Miss Cornelia went. Norman Douglas and his wife went too. And
Whiskers-on-the-moon strutted up the aisle to a front pew, as if he
fully realized what a distinction he conferred upon the building. People
were somewhat surprised that he should be there, since he usually
avoided all assemblages connected in any way with the war. But Mr.
Meredith had said that he hoped his session would be well represented,
and Mr. Pryor had evidently taken the request to heart. He wore his best
black suit and white tie, his thick, tight, iron-grey curls were neatly
arranged, and his broad, red round face looked, as Susan most
uncharitably thought, more "sanctimonious" than ever.

"The minute I saw that man coming into the Church, looking like that, I
felt that mischief was brewing, Mrs. Dr. dear," she said afterwards.
"What form it would take I could not tell, but I knew from face of him
that he had come there for no good."

The prayer-meeting opened conventionally and continued quietly. Mr.
Meredith spoke first with his usual eloquence and feeling. Mr. Arnold
followed with an address which even Miss Cornelia had to confess was
irreproachable in taste and subject-matter.

And then Mr. Arnold asked Mr. Pryor to lead in prayer.

Miss Cornelia had always averred that Mr. Arnold had no gumption. Miss
Cornelia was not apt to err on the side of charity in her judgment of
Methodist ministers, but in this case she did not greatly overshoot the
mark. The Rev. Mr. Arnold certainly did not have much of that desirable,
indefinable quality known as gumption, or he would never have asked
Whiskers-on-the-moon to lead in prayer at a khaki prayer-meeting. He
thought he was returning the compliment to Mr. Meredith, who, at the
conclusion of his address, had asked a Methodist deacon to lead.

Some people expected Mr. Pryor to refuse grumpily--and that would have
made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet,
unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous
voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr. Pryor
poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his prayer
before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact that they
were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr. Pryor had
at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, as people
afterwards said, he thought he was safe in a church and that it was an
excellent chance to air certain opinions he dared not voice elsewhere,
for fear of being mobbed. He prayed that the unholy war might cease--
that the deluded armies being driven to slaughter on the Western front
might have their eyes opened to their iniquity and repent while yet
there was time--that the poor young men present in khaki, who had been
hounded into a path of murder and militarism, should yet be rescued--

Mr. Pryor had got this far without let or hindrance; and so paralysed
were his hearers, and so deeply imbued with their born-and-bred
conviction that no disturbance must ever be made in a church, no matter
what the provocation, that it seemed likely that he would continue
unchecked to the end. But one man at least in that audience was not
hampered by inherited or acquired reverence for the sacred edifice.
Norman Douglas was, as Susan had often vowed crisply, nothing more or
less than a "pagan." But he was a rampantly patriotic pagan, and when
the significance of what Mr. Pryor was saying fully dawned on him,
Norman Douglas suddenly went berserk. With a positive roar he bounded to
his feet in his side pew, facing the audience, and shouted in tones of
thunder:

"Stop--stop--STOP that abominable prayer! What an abominable prayer!"

Every head in the church flew up. A boy in khaki at the back gave a
faint cheer. Mr. Meredith raised a deprecating hand, but Norman was past
caring for anything like that. Eluding his wife's restraining grasp, he
gave one mad spring over the front of the pew and caught the unfortunate
Whiskers-on-the-moon by his coat collar. Mr. Pryor had not "stopped"
when so bidden, but he stopped now, perforce, for Norman, his long red
beard literally bristling with fury, was shaking him until his bones
fairly rattled, and punctuating his shakes with a lurid assortment of
abusive epithets.

"You blatant beast!"--shake--"You malignant carrion"--shake--"You
pig-headed varmint!"--shake--"you putrid pup"--shake--"you
pestilential parasite"--shake--"you--Hunnish scum"--shake--"you
indecent reptile--you--you--" Norman choked for a moment. Everybody
believed that the next thing he would say, church or no church, would be
something that would have to be spelt with asterisks; but at that moment
Norman encountered his wife's eye and he fell back with a thud on Holy
Writ. "You whited sepulchre!" he bellowed, with a final shake, and cast
Whiskers-on-the-moon from him with a vigour which impelled that unhappy
pacifist to the very verge of the choir entrance door. Mr. Pryor's once
ruddy face was ashen. But he turned at bay. "I'll have the law on you
for this," he gasped.

"Do--do," roared Norman, making another rush. But Mr. Pryor was gone.
He had no desire to fall a second time into the hands of an avenging
militarist. Norman turned to the platform for one graceless, triumphant
moment.

"Don't look so flabbergasted, parsons," he boomed. "You couldn't do it--
nobody would expect it of the cloth--but somebody had to do it. You
know you're glad I threw him out--he couldn't be let go on yammering
and yodelling and yawping sedition and treason. Sedition and treason--
somebody had to deal with it. I was born for this hour--I've had my
innings in church at last. I can sit quiet for another sixty years now!
Go ahead with your meeting, parsons. I reckon you won't be troubled with
any more pacifist prayers."

But the spirit of devotion and reverence had fled. Both ministers
realized it and realized that the only thing to do was to close the
meeting quietly and let the excited people go. Mr. Meredith addressed a
few earnest words to the boys in khaki--which probably saved Mr.
Pryor's windows from a second onslaught--and Mr. Arnold pronounced an
incongruous benediction, at least he felt it was incongruous, for he
could not at once banish from his memory the sight of gigantic Norman
Douglas shaking the fat, pompous little Whiskers-on-the-moon as a huge
mastiff might shake an overgrown puppy. And he knew that the same
picture was in everybody's mind. Altogether the union prayer-meeting
could hardly be called an unqualified success. But it was remembered in
Glen St. Mary when scores of orthodox and undisturbed assemblies were
totally forgotten.

"You will never, no, never, Mrs. Dr. dear, hear me call Norman Douglas a
pagan again," said Susan when she reached home. "If Ellen Douglas is not
a proud woman this night she should be."

"Norman Douglas did a wholly indefensible thing," said the doctor.
"Pryor should have been let severely alone until the meeting was over.
Then later on, his own minister and session should deal with him. That
would have been the proper procedure. Norman's performance was utterly
improper and scandalous and outrageous; but, by George,"--the doctor
threw back his head and chuckled, "by George, Anne-girl, it was
satisfying."



CHAPTER XXI

"LOVE AFFAIRS ARE HORRIBLE"

Ingleside
20th June 1916
"We have been so busy, and day after day has brought such exciting news,
good and bad, that I haven't had time and composure to write in my diary
for weeks. I like to keep it up regularly, for father says a diary of
the years of the war should be a very interesting thing to hand down to
one's children. The trouble is, I like to write a few personal things in
this blessed old book that might not be exactly what I'd want my
children to read. I feel that I shall be a far greater stickler for
propriety in regard to them than I am for myself!

"The first week in June was another dreadful one. The Austrians seemed
just on the point of overrunning Italy: and then came the first awful
news of the Battle of Jutland, which the Germans claimed as a great
victory. Susan was the only one who carried on. 'You need never tell me
that the Kaiser has defeated the British Navy,' she said, with a
contemptuous sniff. 'It is all a German lie and that you may tie to.'
And when a couple of days later we found out that she was right and that
it had been a British victory instead of a British defeat, we had to put
up with a great many 'I told you so's,' but we endured them very
comfortably.

"It took Kitchener's death to finish Susan. For the first time I saw her
down and out. We all felt the shock of it but Susan plumbed the depths
of despair. The news came at night by 'phone but Susan wouldn't believe
it until she saw the Enterprise headline the next day. She did not cry
or faint or go into hysterics; but she forgot to put salt in the soup,
and that is something Susan never did in my recollection. Mother and
Miss Oliver and I cried but Susan looked at us in stony sarcasm and
said, 'The Kaiser and his six sons are all alive and thriving. So the
world is not left wholly desolate. Why cry, Mrs. Dr. dear?' Susan
continued in this stony, hopeless condition for twenty-four hours, and
then Cousin Sophia appeared and began to condole with her.

"'This is terrible news, ain't it, Susan? We might as well prepare for
the worst for it is bound to come. You said once--and well do I
remember the words, Susan Baker--that you had complete confidence in
God and Kitchener. Ah well, Susan Baker, there is only God left now.'

"Whereat Cousin Sophia put her handkerchief to her eyes pathetically as
if the world were indeed in terrible straits. As for Susan, Cousin
Sophia was the salvation of her. She came to life with a jerk.

"'Sophia Crawford, hold your peace!' she said sternly. 'You may be an
idiot but you need not be an irreverent idiot. It is no more than decent
to be weeping and wailing because the Almighty is the sole stay of the
Allies now. As for Kitchener, his death is a great loss and I do not
dispute it. But the outcome of this war does not depend on one man's
life and now that the Russians are coming on again you will soon see a
change for the better.'

"Susan said this so energetically that she convinced herself and cheered
up immediately. But Cousin Sophia shook her head.

"'Albert's wife wants to call the baby after Brusiloff,' she said, 'but
I told her to wait and see what becomes of him first. Them Russians has
such a habit of petering out.'

"The Russians are doing splendidly, however, and they have saved Italy.
But even when the daily news of their sweeping advance comes we don't
feel like running up the flag as we used to do. As Gertrude says, Verdun
has slain all exultation. We would all feel more like rejoicing if the
victories were on the western front. 'When will the British strike?'
Gertrude sighed this morning. 'We have waited so long--so long.'

"Our greatest local event in recent weeks was the route march the county
battalion made through the county before it left for overseas. They
marched from Charlottetown to Lowbridge, then round the Harbour Head and
through the Upper Glen and so down to the St. Mary station. Everybody
turned out to see them, except old Aunt Fannie Clow, who is bedridden
and Mr. Pryor, who hadn't been seen out even in church since the night
of the Union Prayer Meeting the previous week.

"It was wonderful and heartbreaking to see that battalion marching past.
There were young men and middle-aged men in it. There was Laurie
McAllister from over-harbour who is only sixteen but swore he was
eighteen, so that he could enlist; and there was Angus Mackenzie, from
the Upper Glen who is fifty-five if he is a day and swore he was
forty-four. There were two South African veterans from Lowbridge, and
the three eighteen-year-old Baxter triplets from Harbour Head. Everybody
cheered as they went by, and they cheered Foster Booth, who is forty,
walking side by side with his son Charley who is twenty. Charley's
mother died when he was born, and when Charley enlisted Foster said he'd
never yet let Charley go anywhere he daren't go himself, and he didn't
mean to begin with the Flanders trenches. At the station Dog Monday
nearly went out of his head. He tore about and sent messages to Jem by
them all. Mr. Meredith read an address and Reta Crawford recited 'The
Piper.' The soldiers cheered her like mad and cried 'We'll follow--
we'll follow--we won't break faith,' and I felt so proud to think that
it was my dear brother who had written such a wonderful, heart-stirring
thing. And then I looked at the khaki ranks and wondered if those tall
fellows in uniform could be the boys I've laughed with and played with
and danced with and teased all my life. Something seems to have touched
them and set them apart. They have heard the Piper's call.

"Fred Arnold was in the battalion and I felt dreadfully about him, for I
realized that it was because of me that he was going away with such a
sorrowful expression. I couldn't help it but I felt as badly as if I
could.

"The last evening of his leave Fred came up to Ingleside and told me he
loved me and asked me if I would promise to marry him some day, if he
ever came back. He was desperately in earnest and I felt more wretched
than I ever did in my life. I couldn't promise him that--why, even if
there was no question of Ken, I don't care for Fred that way and never
could--but it seemed so cruel and heartless to send him away to the
front without any hope of comfort. I cried like a baby; and yet--oh, I
am afraid that there must be something incurably frivolous about me,
because, right in the middle of it all, with me crying and Fred looking
so wild and tragic, the thought popped into my head that it would be an
unendurable thing to see that nose across from me at the breakfast table
every morning of my life. There, that is one of the entries I wouldn't
want my descendants to read in this journal. But it is the humiliating
truth; and perhaps it's just as well that thought did come or I might
have been tricked by pity and remorse into giving him some rash
assurance. If Fred's nose were as handsome as his eyes and mouth some
such thing might have happened. And then what an unthinkable predicament
I should have been in!

"When poor Fred became convinced that I couldn't promise him, he behaved
beautifully--though that rather made things worse. If he had been nasty
about it I wouldn't have felt so heartbroken and remorseful--though why
I should feel remorseful I don't know, for I never encouraged Fred to
think I cared a bit about him. Yet feel remorseful I did--and do. If
Fred Arnold never comes back from overseas, this will haunt me all my
life.

"Then Fred said if he couldn't take my love with him to the trenches at
least he wanted to feel that he had my friendship, and would I kiss him
just once in good-bye before he went--perhaps for ever?

"I don't know how I could ever had imagined that love affairs were
delightful, interesting things. They are horrible. I couldn't even give
poor heartbroken Fred one little kiss, because of my promise to Ken. It
seemed so brutal. I had to tell Fred that of course he would have my
friendship, but that I couldn't kiss him because I had promised somebody
else I wouldn't.

"He said, 'It is--is it--Ken Ford?'

"I nodded. It seemed dreadful to have to tell it--it was such a sacred
little secret just between me and Ken.

"When Fred went away I came up here to my room and cried so long and so
bitterly that mother came up and insisted on knowing what was the
matter. I told her. She listened to my tale with an expression that
clearly said, 'Can it be possible that anyone has been wanting to marry
this baby?' But she was so nice and understanding and sympathetic, oh,
just so race-of-Josephy--that I felt indescribably comforted. Mothers
are the dearest things.

"'But oh, mother,' I sobbed, 'he wanted me to kiss him good-bye--and I
couldn't--and that hurt me worse than all the rest.'

"'Well, why didn't you kiss him?' asked mother coolly. 'Considering the
circumstances, I think you might have.'

"'But I couldn't, mother--I promised Ken when he went away that I
wouldn't kiss anybody else until he came back.'

"This was another high explosive for poor mother. She exclaimed, with
the queerest little catch in her voice, 'Rilla, are you engaged to
Kenneth Ford?'

"'I--don't--know,' I sobbed.

"'You--don't--know?' repeated mother.

"Then I had to tell her the whole story, too; and every time I tell it
it seems sillier and sillier to imagine that Ken meant anything serious.
I felt idiotic and ashamed by the time I got through.

"Mother sat a little while in silence. Then she came over, sat down
beside me, and took me in her arms.

"'Don't cry, dear little Rilla-my-Rilla. You have nothing to reproach
yourself with in regard to Fred; and if Leslie West's son asked you to
keep your lips for him, I think you may consider yourself engaged to
him. But--oh, my baby--my last little baby--I have lost you--the war
has made a woman of you too soon.'

"I shall never be too much of a woman to find comfort in mother's hugs.
Nevertheless, when I saw Fred marching by two days later in the parade,
my heart ached unbearably.

"But I'm glad mother thinks I'm really engaged to Ken!"



CHAPTER XXII

LITTLE DOG MONDAY KNOWS

"It is two years tonight since the dance at the light, when Jack Elliott
brought us news of the war. Do you remember, Miss Oliver?"

Cousin Sophia answered for Miss Oliver. "Oh, indeed, Rilla, I remember
that evening only too well, and you a-prancing down here to show off
your party clothes. Didn't I warn you that we could not tell what was
before us? Little did you think that night what was before you."

"Little did any of us think that," said Susan sharply, "not being gifted
with the power of prophecy. It does not require any great foresight,
Sophia Crawford, to tell a body that she will have some trouble before
her life is over. I could do as much myself."

"We all thought the war would be over in a few months then," said Rilla
wistfully. "When I look back it seems so ridiculous that we ever could
have supposed it."

"And now, two years later, it is no nearer the end than it was then,"
said Miss Oliver gloomily.

Susan clicked her knitting-needles briskly.

"Now, Miss Oliver, dear, you know that is not a reasonable remark. You
know we are just two years nearer the end, whenever the end is appointed
to be."

"Albert read in a Montreal paper today that a war expert gives it as his
opinion that it will last five years more," was Cousin Sophia's cheerful
contribution.

"It can't," cried Rilla; then she added with a sigh, "Two years ago we
would have said 'It can't last two years.' But five more years of this!"

"If Rumania comes in, as I have strong hopes now of her doing, you will
see the end in five months instead of five years," said Susan.

"I've no faith in furriners," sighed Cousin Sophia.

"The French are foreigners," retorted Susan, "and look at Verdun. And
think of all the Somme victories this blessed summer. The Big Push is on
and the Russians are still going well. Why, General Haig says that the
German officers he has captured admit that they have lost the war."

"You can't believe a word the Germans say," protested Cousin Sophia.
"There is no sense in believing a thing just because you'd like to
believe it, Susan Baker. The British have lost millions of men at the
Somme and how far have they got? Look facts in the face, Susan Baker,
look facts in the face."

"They are wearing the Germans out and so long as that happens it does
not matter whether it is done a few miles east or a few miles west. I am
not," admitted Susan in tremendous humility, "I am not a military
expert, Sophia Crawford, but even I can see that, and so could you if
you were not determined to take a gloomy view of everything. The Huns
have not got all the cleverness in the world. Have you not heard the
story of Alistair MacCallum's son Roderick, from the Upper Glen? He is a
prisoner in Germany and his mother got a letter from him last week. He
wrote that he was being very kindly treated and that all the prisoners
had plenty of food and so on, till you would have supposed everything
was lovely. But when he signed his name, right in between Roderick and
MacCallum, he wrote two Gaelic words that meant 'all lies' and the
German censor did not understand Gaelic and thought it was all part of
Roddy's name. So he let it pass, never dreaming how he was diddled.
Well, I am going to leave the war to Haig for the rest of the day and
make a frosting for my chocolate cake. And when it is made I shall put
it on the top shelf. The last one I made I left it on the lower shelf
and little Kitchener sneaked in and clawed all the icing off and ate it.
We had company for tea that night and when I went to get my cake what a
sight did I behold!"

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