Kitabı oku: «Molly Brown of Kentucky», sayfa 5

CHAPTER IX.
THE AMERICAN MAIL

Judy had, clasped in her arms, a package of mail, unopened except for the letter on top, which was the one that poor, brave Mrs. Brown had written her. She had kept throughout the letter the same gallant spirit of belief in her son’s safety, but Judy could not take that view.

“Gone! Gone! and all because of poor miserable, no-account me!” her heart cried out in its anguish, but she shed no tear and made no sound. Her face, glowing with health and spirits only a few minutes ago, was now as pale as a ghost and her eyes had lost their sparkle.

Père Tricot hastened towards her as she came slowly down the street.

“My dear little girl, what is it?”

“He is drowned and all for me – just my stubbornness!”

“Who? Your father?”

“No!”

“Your brother, then?”

“I have no brother.”

“Ah, then, your sweetheart? Your fiancé?”

“I – I – sometime he might – that is, we were not fiancéd, not exactly.”

The old man drew her down on the bench beside him:

“Now tell me all about it, ma pauvre petite.”

And Judy told him of her friends in Kentucky. Of Molly Brown and her brother Kent; of her own stubbornness in not leaving France when the war broke out; and then she translated Mrs. Brown’s letter for him.

“Ah, but the good lady does not think he is drowned!”

“Yes, but she is so wonderful, so brave.”

“Well, are you not wonderful and brave, too? You must go on with your courage. If a mother can write as she has done and have faith in le bon Dieu, then you must try, too – that will make you worthy of such a belle mère. Does she not say that two passengers were seen to be saved by the enemy?”

“Oh, Père Tricot, you are good, good! I will try – if Kent’s own mother can be so brave, why surely I must be calm, too, I, who am nothing to him.”

“Nothing? Ah, my dear Mam’selle, one who is nothing does not have young men take trips across the ocean for her. But look at the spinach wilting in the sun! We must hasten to get the cooking done.”

Poor Judy! All zest had gone out of the morning for her. She put her package of mail in the cart, not at all caring if it got at the fishy end, and wearily began to push. Père Tricot, well knowing that work was a panacea for sorrow, let her take her share of the burden, and together the old peasant in his stiff blue blouse and the sad young American girl trundled the provisions down the boulevard.

“You have more letters, my daughter?”

“Yes, I have not read them yet. I was afraid of more bad news.”

“Perhaps there is something from the mother and father.”

“No, the big one is from Molly and the others are just from various friends.”

When they reached the shop, of course Mère Tricot started in with her usual badinage directed against her life partner, but he soon tipped her a wink to give her to understand that Judy was in distress, and the kind old grenadier ceased her vituperation and went quietly to work washing spinach and making ready the fowls for the spit.

Judy took her letters to a green bench in the diminutive court behind the apartment which passed for garden, with its one oleander tree and pots of geraniums. Her heart seemed to be up in her throat; at least, there was a strange pulsation there that must be heart. So this was sorrow! Strange to have lived as long as she had and never to have known what sorrow was before! The nearest she had ever come to sorrow was telling her mother and father good-by when they started on some perilous trip – but they had always come back, and she was used to parting with them.

But Kent – maybe he would never come back! It was all very well for Mrs. Brown to refuse to believe in his being gone forever, but why should he be the one to be saved, after all? No doubt the passengers who were lost had mothers and – and what? Sweethearts – there she would say it! She was his sweetheart even though they were not really engaged. She knew it now for a certainty. Kent did not have to tell her what he felt for her, and now that it was too late, she knew what she felt for him. She knew now why she had been so lonesome. It was not merely the fact that war was going on and her friends were out of Paris – it was that she was longing for Kent. She understood now why she felt so homeless just at this time. She was no more homeless than she had always been, but now she wanted a home and she wanted it to be Kent’s home, too. Fool! fool that she had been! Why hadn’t she gone home like all the sensible Americans when war was declared? The Browns would never forgive her and she would never forgive herself. She read again Mrs. Brown’s letter. How good she was to have been willing to have Kent turn right around and go back to Paris for that worthless Julia Kean. And now he was gone, and it was all her fault! Ah, me! Well, life must be lived, if all the color had gone out of it.

She wearily opened the letter addressed in Molly’s handwriting. It was from her father, and in it another from her mother, forwarded by Molly. At last she had heard from them. They, too, hoped she had gone back to America. Had taken for granted she had, since they had sent the letters to Molly. She read them over and over. The love they had for her was to be seen in every word. Never again would she part from them. How she longed for them! They would understand about Kent, even though she was not engaged to him. And now she knew what Bobby would advise her to do were he there in Paris: “Work! Work until you drop from it, but work!”

Already the great range, that stretched the entire length of the tiny tiled kitchen, was filled with copper vessels, and appetizing odors were permeating the living room and the little shop beyond.

“Let me help,” said Judy bravely. “Must I mind the shop or do you need me here? I can’t cook, but I can wash spinach and peel potatoes.”

“Marie can look after the shop this morning, my dear child, so you go rest yourself,” said the good wife.

“I don’t want to rest! I want to work!”

“Let her work, Mother! Let her work! It is best so,” and Judy’s old partner got the blue bowl, sacred to mayonnaise, and Judy sat on the bench in the court and stirred and stirred as she dropped the oil into the beaten egg. Her arm ached as the great smooth yellow mass grew thicker and thicker, but the more her arm ached, the less her heart ached. When the bowl was quite full, she started in on a great basket of potatoes that must be peeled, some for Saratoga chips and some for potato salad. Onions must be peeled, too, and then the spinach cleaned and chopped in a colander until it was a purée.

The Tricots worked with a precision and ease that delighted Judy. She never tired of watching the grenadier turn out the wonderful little tarts. On that morning a double quantity was to be made as Marie was to carry a basket of them to “the regiment”; that, of course, meant Jean Tricot’s regiment. They had not yet been ordered to the front, but were ready to go at any moment.

The old woman put batch after batch in the great oven. They came out all done to a turn and all exactly alike, as though made by machinery. Then they were put in the show cases in the shop; and more were rolled out, filled and baked.

“Sometime may I try to do some?”

The old woman smiled indulgently at Judy’s pale face.

“You may try right now.”

Judy made a rather deformed batch but Mère Tricot declared the children would not know the difference, and they could be sold to them. “The soldats must have the prettiest and another time you can make them well enough for them.”

So far, Judy had not shed a tear. Her eyes felt dry and feverish and her heart was still beating in her throat in some mysterious way. Suddenly without a bit of warning the tears came. Splash! Splash! they dropped right on the tarts.

“Never mind the tarts!” exclaimed the kindly grenadier. “Those must go to Jean’s regiment. They will understand.”

“I could not help it,” sobbed poor Judy. “I was thinking how proud Kent would be of me when he knew I could make tarts and wondering how many he could eat, when all of a sudden it came to me that he never would know – and – and – Oh, Mother Tricot!” and she buried her face on the bosom of the good old woman, who patted her with one hand and held her close while she adroitly whisked a pan of tarts from the oven with the other.

“Tarts must not burn, no matter if hearts are broken!”

CHAPTER X.
THE ZEPPELIN RAID

Judy’s cry did her good, although it left her in such a swollen state she was not fit to keep shop, which was what she had planned to do for the afternoon.

“I think I’ll go round to the studio in Rue Brea for a little while. I want to get some things.”

What she really wanted was to get a bath and to be alone for a few hours. Her kind hosts thought it would be wise to let her do whatever she wanted, so they gave her God-speed but begged her not to be out late.

Judy now longed for solitude with the same eagerness she had before longed for companionship. She knew it would be unwise for her to give up to this desire to any extent and determined to get back to her kind friends before dark, but be alone she must for a while. She got the key from the concierge and entered the studio. All was as she had left it. Windows and doors opened wide soon dispelled the close odor. A cold bath in the very attractive white porcelain tub, the pride of the Bents, made poor Judy feel better in spite of herself.

“I don’t want to feel better. I’ve been brave and noble all morning and now I want to be weak and miserable. I don’t care whether school keeps or not. I am a poor, forlorn, broken-hearted girl, without any friends in all the world except some Normandy peasants. The Browns will all hate me, and my mother and father I may never see again. Oh, Kent! Kent! Why didn’t you just pick me up and make me go with you? If you had been very, very firm, I’d have gone.”

Judy remembered with a grim smile how in old days at college she had longed to wear mourning and how absurd she had made herself by dyeing her hair and draping herself in black. “I’m going into mourning now. It is about all I can do for Kent. It won’t cost much and somehow I’d feel better.” Judy, ever visualizing, pictured herself in black with organdy collar and cuffs and a mournful, patient look. “I’ll just go on selling tarts. It will help the Tricots and give me my board.” She counted out her money, dwindled somewhat, but now that she was working she felt she might indulge her grief to the extent of a black waist and some white collars and cuffs. “I’ve got a black skirt and I’ll get my blue suit dyed to-morrow. I’ll line my black sport hat with white crêpe. That will make it do.” In pity for herself, she wept again.

She slipped out of the studio and made her few purchases at a little shop around the corner. Madame, the proprietaire, was all sympathy. She had laid in an especial stock of cheap mourning, she told Judy, as there was much demand for it now.

It took nimble fingers to turn the jaunty sport hat into a sad little mourning bonnet, but Judy was ever clever at hat making, and when she finished just before the sun set, she viewed her handiwork with pardonable pride. She slipped into her cheap black silk waist and pinned on the collar and cuffs. The hat was very becoming, so much so that Judy had another burst of tears.

“I can’t bear for it to be becoming. I want to look as ugly and forlorn as possible.”

She determined to leave her serge suit in the studio and come on the following day to take it to a dye shop. As she was to do this, she decided not to leave the key with the concierge but take it with her.

Her kind friends looked sadly at the mourning. They realized when they saw it that Judy had given up all hope of her friend.

“Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it!” exclaimed the old grenadier.

Marie, whose apple-like countenance was not very expressive of anything but health, looked as sympathetic as the shape of her face would allow. Round rosy cheeks, round black eyes, and a round red mouth are not easy to mold into tragic lines, but Judy knew that Marie was feeling deeply for her. She was thinking of her Jean and the possibility of turning her bridal finery into mourning. There was so much mourning now and according to the Temps, the war was hardly begun.

“I’ll have my serge suit dyed to-morrow,” Judy confided to her.

“Ah, no! Do not have it dyed! Mère Tricot and I can do it here and do it beautifully. The butcher’s wife over the way is dyeing to-morrow and she will give us some of her mixture. It is her little brother who fell only yesterday.”

That night there was great excitement in the Montparnasse quarter. A fleet of air ships circled over the city, dropping bombs as they flew. The explosions were terrific. The people cowered in their homes at first and then came rushing out on the streets as the noise subsided.

Père Tricot came back with the news that no great harm had been done, but it was his opinion that the Prussians had been after the Luxembourg.

“They know full well that our art treasures are much to us, and they would take great pleasure in destroying them. The beasts!”

“Where did the bombs strike?” asked Judy from her couch in the living room. She had wept until her pillow had to be turned over and then had at last sunk into a sleep of exhaustion only to be awakened by the ear-splitting explosions.

“I don’t know exactly, but it was somewhere over towards the Gardens of the Luxembourg. I thank the good God you were here with us, my child.”

CHAPTER XI.
“L’HIRONDELLE DE MER.”

Kent Brown, when he reached New York on his return trip to Paris in quest of the rather wilful, very irritating, and wholly fascinating Judy, got his money changed into gold, which he placed in a belt worn under his shirt.

“There is no telling what may happen,” he said to the young Kentuckian, Jim Castleman, with whom he had struck up an acquaintance on the train. “Gold won’t melt in the water if we do get torpedoed, and if I have it next me, whoever wants it will have to do some tearing off of clothes to get it. And what will I be doing while they are tearing off my clothes?”

“Good idea! I reckon I’ll do the same – not that I have enough to weigh myself down with.” Castleman was on his way to France to fight.

“I don’t give a hang whether I fight with the English, French, Serbs or Russians, just so I get in a few licks on the Prussians.” He was a strapping youth of six feet three with no more idea of what he was going up against than a baby. War was to him a huge football game and he simply meant to get into the game.

The Hirondelle was a slow boat but sailing immediately, so Kent and his new friend determined to take it, since its destination, Havre, suited them.

“I like the name, too,” declared Kent, who shared with his mother and Molly a certain poetic sentiment in spite of his disclaimer of any such foolishness.

There were very few passengers, the boat being a merchantman. Kent and Jim were thrown more and more together and soon were as confidential as two school girls. Kent had been rather noncommittal in his replies at first to Jim’s questions as to what his business was in the war zone at such a time if it were not fighting. As their friendship grew and deepened, as a friendship can on shipboard in an astonishingly short time, Kent was glad enough to talk about Judy and his mission in Paris.

“She sounds like a corker! When is it to be?”

“I don’t know that it is to be, at all,” blushed Kent. “You see, we are not what you might call engaged.”

“Your fault or hers?”

“Why, we have just drifted along. Somehow I didn’t like to tie her down until I could make good – and she – well, I believe she felt the same way; but of course I can’t say. She knows perfectly well that I have never looked at another girl since I saw her at Wellington when she and my sister graduated there. She has – well, – browsed a little, but I don’t think she ever meant anything by it. We get along like a house afire, – like the same things, – think the same way, – we have never talked out yet.”

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think you were an ass not to settle the matter long before this.”

“Do you think so? Do you think it would have been fair? Why, man, I owed some money to my mother for my education in Paris and did not even have a job in sight!”

“Pshaw! What difference does that make? Don’t you reckon girls have as much spunk about such things as men have? If I ever see the girl I want bad enough to go all the way to Paris to get her, I’ll tell her so and have an answer if I haven’t a coat to my back.”

“Perhaps you are right. I just didn’t want to be selfish.”

“Selfish! Why, they like us selfish.”

Kent laughed at the wisdom of the young Hercules. No doubt they (whoever “they” might be) did like Castleman selfish or any other way. He looked like a young god as he sprawled on deck, his great muscular white arm thrown over his head to keep the warm rays of the sun out of his eyes. His features were large and well cut, his hair yellow and curly in spite of the vigorous efforts he made to brush it straight. His eyes were blue and childlike with long dark lashes, the kind of eyes girls always resent having been portioned out to men. There was no great mentality expressed in his countenance but absolute honesty and good nature. One felt he was to be trusted.

“Doesn’t it seem strange to be loafing around here on this deck with no thought of war and of the turmoil we shall soon be in?” said Jim one evening at sunset when they were nearing their port. “We have only a day, or two days at most, before we will be in Paris, and still it is so quiet and peaceful out here that I can hardly believe there is any other life.”

“Me, too! I feel as though I had been born and bred on this boat. All the other things that have happened to me are like a dream and this life here on the good old Hirondelle de Mer is the only real thing. I wonder if all the passengers feel this way.”

There were no women on board but the other passengers were Frenchmen, mostly waiters from New York, going home to fight for la France. The cargo was pork and beef, destined to feed the army of France.

“What’s that thing sticking up in the water out yonder?” exclaimed Kent. “It looks like the top of a mast just disappearing.”

“A wreck, I reckon!” exclaimed Jim.

Kent smiled at his countryman’s “reckon.” Having been away from the South for many months, it sounded sweet to his ears. The “guess” of the Northerner and “fancy” of the Englishman did not mean the same to him.

The lookout saw the mast-like object at the same time they noted it, and suddenly there was a hurrying and scurrying over the whole ship.

“Look, it’s sunk entirely out of sight! Jim Castleman, that’s a German submarine!”

The shock that followed only a moment afterwards was indescribable. It threw both of the Kentuckians down. They had hastened to the side of the vessel, the better to view the strange “thing sticking up out of the water.”

The boats were lowered very rapidly and filled by the crazed passengers and crew. The poor waiters had not expected to serve their country by drowning like rats. As for the crew, – they were noncombatants and not employed to serve any country in any way. They were of various nationality, many of them being Portuguese with a sprinkling of Scandinavians.

“Here’s a life preserver, Brown! Better put it on. This ain’t the Ohio.”

“Good! I’ll take my chances in the water any day rather than in one of those boats. Can you swim?”

“Sure! I can do three miles without knowing it. And you?”

“Hump! Brought up within a mile of the Ohio River and been going over to Indiana and back without landing ever since I was in pants.”

“Well, let’s dive now and get clear of the sinking boat. If anything happens to me and you get clear, you write my sister in Lexington – she’s all I have left.”

“All right, Jim! Let’s shake. If I give out and you get through, please go get Judy and take her back to my mother.”

“That’s a go! But see here, there is nothing going to happen to us if endurance will count for anything. Have you got on your money belt?”

“Yes; and you?” said Kent, feeling for the gold he carried around his waist.

“I’m all ready then.”

The boats, loaded to their guards, were putting off. Our young men felt it was much safer to trust to themselves than to the crazy manning of the already overloaded boats. They were singularly calm in their preparations as they strapped on the life preservers.

“Jim, throw away the papers you have, recommending you to that French general. We may get picked up by the submarine, and as plain, pleasure-seeking Americans we have a much better chance of being treated properly than if one of us was going to join the Allies.” Kent had inherited from his mother the faculty of keeping his head in time of peril.

“Good eye, old man! They are in my grip and can just stay there. I reckon I’m a – a – book agent. That won’t compromise me any.”

“All right, stick to it! And here goes! We must stay together.”

The Kentuckians dived as well as the bulky life preservers would permit and then they swam quietly along side by side. The ship was rapidly settling. The last boat was off, so full that every little wave splashed over its panic-stricken passengers.