Isabel Hornibrook

“ 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. ”

“ Olive burst into a low laugh.
“Oh-h! We know that no ghost fazes you, not even the ghost of chlorine gas. You don’t knuckle under to it!”
The kneeling artist slapped her brush suddenly against her dory’s side, drew it vehemently across the bow in a great white, dazzling smear, then turned impulsively and gazed along the still more dazzling beach upon which the stranger had passed, her gold-tipped eyelashes twinkling, her brown eyebrows drawn together hard, as if thought were dipping a paint-brush into some camouflaging pot of memory and trying to produce a picture--trying with all its might. ”

“ But, ah! there are times for all when a hundred per cent on the best of our soul-stock seems exorbitant interest to pay for success in a struggle.
At the end of an hour’s work weeding and thinning out, fighting the enemy, grappling with prickly barb-weed, that nettled the ungloved fingers which boldly grasped it, routing out stubborn beach-grass, wild vetch, wild pea, on this sea-girt hill which seemed to have unregenerate leanings towards being a squawky desert still, even the Maid herself--Olive--began to feel resolution wavering. ”

“ Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.
“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. ”

“ Along a red lane of firelight she glanced at Olive, beautiful in the ruby glow which brought out the wings of a heron woven into her shimmering head-band and the Torch Bearer’s emblem, stenciled on cloth--as the clawing Witch was stenciled upon the fuselage of the aëroplane--crossed logs, flame-tongue, pearl-white smoke, upon the front of her khaki dress, which, with its manifold, meaningful embroideries, was fast becoming a rare, fair tapestry of achievement. ”

“ The dory’s blunt, unromantic nose was bewitched into radiating light in the darkness, too. Down it shone a narrow streak, bright as a Milky Way!
“What is it? Who--who could have done it? Could--could it be the phosphorescent trail of some creature thrown up by the tide?”
But the high tide sobbed, “Not guilty!” as the girl--her flesh beginning to creep upon her bones--turned towards it with the question on her lips.
“No! It doesn’t look like any ordinary phosphorescent trail of a slimy thing!” So her chilling lips answered half aloud the question put by her quailing heart. ”

“ If a spirit has got into my dory, it’s a mighty short-sighted one.... ’Twould be easy to dodge it!”
She broke into a low chuckle, sharpened by rising anger.
“It--it’s the work of somebody! That--that seal-hunter! Could he be the--Blighter?”
Strange how, out of the stirred waves of her subconscious self, the epithet used by her soldier-brother, when the gas, catching a disobedient “doughboy,” had temporarily withered a fiery officer’s holiday, sprang--a kindred flame now--to her parted, stiffening lips, as she turned to the night-breeze for an answer! ”

“ Within the radiant ring of the powerful flash-light belting the sands, a boy and girl--Atlas and the Flame who had defied him--looked into each other’s feverish eyes with comradeship, not challenge now--comradeship that might well grow to something more charming, as the years went on--when the white flag of Peace should float once more over a progressive world. ”

“ If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”
The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.
And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart. ”

“ Sara waved a pensive brush towards a distant snow-white, humpy line, just rising like wavy limbs of sea-nymphs from green breakers, the merriest mob of breakers that combed and foamed and shrank as the tide ebbed. “Everything--everything is so wild an’ happy-go-lucky all around us--that----”
“That it makes one feel irresponsible,” sighed Olive; “puts the war a long way off, except--except when one turns the silver heel of a stocking--bah! another stitch down--or gets a letter from over there.”
“Oh! I know how you hate grubbing in the muck, raising vegetables. ”

“ Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil! ”

“ It would show her kneeling by a gassed soldier, with the flame and smoke of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon her hat seeming especially designed to fight that other hateful yellow smoke and flame rolling away from her to leeward--the one the type of ideality that would finally win out over the baleful reality of the other, and leave none but the flame of brotherhood, with its sacred smoke of service, burning in the soul of man. ”

“ For, as the temperate gust argued, what possible object could a grown-up man have in giving a harmless little merry-andrew of a dory a luminous figurehead, visible, with the naked eye, only for a few yards--even if his present place of sojourn had not, according to Captain Andy, been miles away, at a little town far up a tidal river, which rang with the noise of shipbuilders’ mallets--or launching axes--where Olive Deering’s rich boy-cousin was working as a draftee of labor, to replace the gaps made in shipping by raiding submarines, and apparently not in love with his chosen job. ”

“ There must be no breaking of faith. The life of every American boy and girl alive on that fair November, the eleventh, when the sun shone as if knowing that it marked a New Epoch, mocking the brown leaves upon the ground--while Peace Europa cooed in her blanket--must be nobler for all time--a fair and loving monument to those who would not come back. ”

“ Sara laughed. “Terra-cotta babies, so tender an’ pink! Makes one feel like an ogre to devour them before they ever get a chance to mature.”
“Survival of the fittest, Sally!” Olive sprang lightly to her feet. “I don’t feel as if I could survive another minute without something to eat! Thank goodness! There goes the dear bugle, sounding mess-call--dinner--as if we were military maids. Nothing militant about us, is there, except--except our skirmishes with the big seals, to drive them off the bar. ’Twill be low tide in another hour or so. ”

“ Our castles in the clouds are always bare--and often cold. We’re so glad you’ve made us free of yours!”
The younger aviator--Big Boy--drew a long breath; perhaps sometimes, in the vast empty spaces of those air-castles, occasionally dreary--he might, like Lieutenant Iver over-seas--recall the warm imagery of the Council Fire, its magic of sisterhood, when he missed the things that make life hum.
“Now! it’s your turn. You sing us a song!” pleaded Lilla, a fluttering Owlet, as the brown-clad maidens, light as wafted leaves, settled again into a sitting circle upon the sands. ”

“ See their hands go diving into their breast-satchels, snatching out their masks--adjusting them!”
“Iver had his on the soonest of any,” gloated Iver’s sister. “He--he’s just as quick’s a flash about everything--from temper to task!” the last words half under her breath, in a low chuckle of intense excitement, as she leaned forth over the pale, lumpy sand-bags, on which soldiers rested their weapons in rifle-practice, gazing along the narrow brown traverse beneath.
Over floated breezily the red-necked puffs--a few into one rounded trench-bay, a few into another. ”

“ Three years of Camp Fire life at the most impressionable period, of feelings quickened by a romantic ritual, of heart knit to other girl-heart by the entwining flame of the outdoor Council Fire--of coming, as Olive had said, very near to the Father Heart in which lay their unity--this, and more, had brought one to kneeling, undaunted, by a gassed soldier, the other to embroidering an elm leaf--symbolic American elm--upon the dress of a little immigrant of not two years’ standing. ”

“ And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.
“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. ”

“ Sesooā shot an amused glance through her half-closed lashes--pretty eyelashes they were, which began by being dark and, shading to amber, now stole gold tips from the sunset--a peculiarity rather typical of Sara herself, and of her speech at the moment, which showed that she was determined that any allusion to the morning should be tipped off with lightness. “Ah, yes! battling with gas is one thing, but--for Olive--battling with grass and grubs in a war-garden may be quite another! Wait till it comes to fighting weeds an’ witch-grass. ”

“ Atlas who had been met with flame turned to ice--or next door to it--with as much frigidity as politeness would allow, tempered by a perfunctory little speech of thanks, rehearsed a dozen times beforehand and eked out by the Guardian, for his heroic presence of mind in that swift leap which prevented the extinguishing in herself of the vital spark by a heavy ship’s rib! ”

“ She kicks! She crawls!... She goes!”
It was an hour later. The girls, nineteen of them, with their Guardian, were standing upon the skirts of the adjoining shipyard, watching, with a thrill only a shade less keen than that which had heralded the landing of a war-plane by their Council Fire, the shooting-off of a new vessel on to the water--the curling, laughing high tide which rose crowing to meet her, its bride.
Atlas was with them. Until the end of the War--or as long as he was a shipyard worker--he would be Atlas now, for the foreman had caught the merry deification from Olive’s lips. ”

“ Why don’t we adopt her forthwith, as a Group, directly she’s out of the hospital, make her clothes for her, bring her toys, and when she’s a year old, or so, take her to camp with us in the summer? Fancy her building sand-castles--little Peace Europa--among the cranberries on that white beach from which you put off in your radio-smeared dory, to signal the Coast Guards! ”

“ For the beautiful ship’s hull just darting off the greased launching-ways on to the river, sleek and glossy in her fresh garment of paint--the embryo fishing schooner--would not alone have to face the perils which were the daily bread of Captain Bob and his kind, when big seas would pound her like an earthquake, but even on her maiden trip a submarine might sink her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ SEEKING THE SPARK Alas! for vindication. Alas! for the invisible practical joker which seems sometimes to dog our steps in life and steal our trick when we least expect it.
A maiden knelt upon the white sands out at the wild heart of the sand-dunes, here purple with the shading blossoms of pea-vines, lace-trimmed with everlastings, or raggedly plumed with rank beach-grass and prickly barb-weed. ”

“ For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once said, “in cotton-wool,”--in padded luxury--who, occasionally, rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her time. ”

“ He was covering his halo with his hair; it was a rainbowed halo, too, a bump the size of a hen’s egg, of all colors, upon his right temple, sending a red streak down to his cheek-bone.
In feeling, he was more Atlas than ever, for now it seemed as if he had a lightning-shot globe upon his head, in the shape of that heroic bump, which at times spun so hard through space that it threatened to spin him round with it. But he managed to keep his feet, and the delirious throbs of pain only added to his excitement--and to the thrill of the foreman’s words in his swelling ear: “It was a good line. ”

“ One defied him. One still derided him with that firefly challenge which silently said, “Dear me! how important we are!”
“Back!” waved Atlas again, flourishing a half-numbed arm. But the Flame was still defiant. He knew it for a Flame now: a flame of mischief, sunlit mockery, obstinacy, perhaps--temper, upon occasion--and all manner of deeper fires.
He did not know that it was named by the Council Fire for what it was--and what it aspired to be of kindling warmth--Sesooā, the Flame; otherwise, Sara Davenport, embodiment of “pep” in a Camp Fire Group. ”