Temple Bailey - The Trumpeter Swan

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"I'm glad you like it," said Mrs. Paine, "and now if you don't mind,
I'll run along and kill the fatted calf----"

She kissed her son, and under a huge umbrella made her way through the
poppies that starred the grass----

"_On Flanders field--where poppies blow_"--the Major drew a sudden quick
breath---- He wished there were no poppies at King's Crest.

"I hate this hero stuff," Randy was saying, "don't you?"

"I am not so sure that I do. Down deep we'd resent it if we were not
applauded, shouldn't we?"

Randy laughed. "I believe we should."

"I fancy that when we've been home for a time, we may feel somewhat
bitter if we find that our pedestals are knocked from under us. Our
people don't worship long. They have too much to think of. They'll put
up some arches, and a few statues and build tribute houses in a lot of
towns, and then they'll go on about their business, and we who have
fought will feel a bit blank."

Randy laughed, "You haven't any illusions about it, have you?"

"No, but you and I know that it's all right however it goes."

Randy, standing very straight, looked out over the valley where the
river showed through the rain like a silver thread. "Well, we didn't do
it for praise, did we?"

"No, thank God."

Their eyes were seeing other things than these quiet hills. Things they
wanted to forget. But they did not want to forget the high exaltation
which had sent them over, or the quiet conviction of right which had
helped them to carry on. What the people at home might do or think did
not matter. What mattered was their own adjustment to the things which
were to follow.

Randy went up-stairs, took off his uniform, bathed and came down in the
garments of peace.

"Glad to get out of your uniform?" the Major asked.

"I believe I am. Perhaps if I'd been an officer, I shouldn't."

"Everybody couldn't be. I've no doubt you deserved it."

"I could have pulled wires, of course, before I went over, but I
wouldn't."

From somewhere within the big house came the reverberation of a Japanese
gong.

Randy rose. "I'm going over to lunch. I'd rather face guns, but Mother
will like it. You can have yours here."

"Not if I know it," the Major rose, "I'm going to share the fatted
calf."

VI

It was late that night when the Major went to bed. The feast in Randy's
honor had lasted until ten. There had been the shine of candles, and the
laughter of the women, the old Judge's genial humor. Through the windows
had come the fragrance of honeysuckle and of late roses. Becky had sung
for them, standing between two straight white candles.

"In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With the glory in his bosom which transfigures you and me.
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
While God is marching on----"

The last time the Major had heard a woman sing that song had been in a
little French town just after the United States had gone into the war.
She was of his own country, red-haired and in uniform. She had stood on
the steps of a stone house and weary men had clustered about
her--French, English, Scotch, a few Americans. Tired and spent, they had
gazed up at her as if they drank her in. To them she was more than a
singing woman. She was the daughter of a nation of dreamers, _the
daughter of a nation which made its dreams come true_! Behind her stood
a steadfast people, and--God was marching on----!

He had had his leg then, and after that there had been dreadful
fighting, and sometimes in the midst of it the voice of the singing
woman had come back to him, stiffening him to his task.

And here, miles away from that war-swept land, another woman sang. And
there was honeysuckle outside, and late roses--and poppies, and there
was Peace. And the world which had not fought would forget. But the men
who had fought would remember.

He heard Randy's voice, sharp with nerves. "Sing something else, Becky.
We've had enough of war----"

The Major leaned across the table. "When did you last hear that song,
Paine?"

"On the other side, a red-haired woman--whose lover had been killed. I
never want to hear it again----"

"Nor I----"

It was as if they were alone at the table, seeing the things which they
had left behind. What did these people know who had stayed at home? The
words were sacred--not to be sung; to be whispered--over the graves
of--France.

CHAPTER II

STUFFED BIRDS

I

The Country Club was, as Judge Bannister had been the first to declare,
"an excrescence."

Under the old regime, there had been no need for country clubs. The
houses on the great estates had been thrown open for the county families
and their friends. There had been meat and drink for man and beast.

The servant problem had, however, in these latter days, put a curb on
generous impulse. There were no more niggers underfoot, and hospitality
was necessarily curtailed. The people who at the time of the August
Horse Show had once packed great hampers with delicious foods, and who
had feasted under the trees amid all the loveliness of mellow-tinted
hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and
motored down to eat it. After that, they looked at the horses, and with
the feeling upon them of the futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due
season, they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo, and as
mythical as the Centaur.

The Judge argued hotly for the things which had been. Love of the horse
was bred in the bone of Old Dominion men. He swore by all the gods that
when he had to part with his bays and ride behind gasoline, he would be
ready to die.

Becky agreed with her grandfather. She adored the old traditions, and
she adored the Judge. She spent two months of every year with him in his
square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable acres. The
remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's father,
Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting
ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick house, but it had no
acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket town, with a Captain's
walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its middle.

The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.

Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew nothing
of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open
sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.

"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."

He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when his
father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the Judge's
household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy sat up
half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at dawn, and
dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and
helped his wife with the mayonnaise.

When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been sold
by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch----! Old
times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the air of one who
accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood staunchly by the
Administration. If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head, he
would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.

So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.

Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia was a widow
and wore black. She was small and slight, and the black was made smart
by touches of white crepe. Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had
been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman with a firm
conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified standards of
living. She was in no sense a snob. But she held that women of birth and
breeding must preserve the fastidiousness of their ideals, lest there be
social chaos.

"There would be no ladies left in the world," she often told Becky, "if
we older women went at the modern pace."

Becky, in contrast to Aunt Claudia's smartness, showed up rather
ingloriously. She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not too fresh cotton
frock of pale yellow, and a brown straw sailor.

"You might at least have stopped to change your shoes," Aunt Claudia
told her, as they left the house behind.

"I was out with Randy and the dogs. It was heavenly, Aunt Claudia."

"My dear, if a walk with Randy is heavenly, what will you call Heaven
when you get to it?"

They drove through the first gate, and Calvin climbed down to open it.
Beyond the gate the road descended gradually through an open pasture,
where sheep grazed on the hillside or lay at rest in the shade. The
bells of the leaders tinkled faintly, the ewes and the lambs were
calling. Beyond the big gate, the highroad was washed with the recent
rains. From the gate to the club was a matter of five miles, and the
bays ate up the distance easily.

The people on the porch of the Country Club were very gay and gorgeous,
so that Becky in her careless frock and shabby shoes would have been a
pitiful contrast if she had cared in the least what the people on the
porch thought of her. But she did not care. She nodded and smiled to a
friend or two as the Judge stopped for a moment in the crush of motors.

George Dalton was on the porch. When he saw Becky he leaned forward for
a good look at her.

"Some girl," he said to Waterman, as the surrey moved on, "the one in
the sailor hat. Who is she?"

Oscar Waterman was a newcomer in Albemarle. He had bought a thousand
acres, with an idea of grafting on to Southern environment his own
ideas of luxurious living. The county families had not called, but he
was not yet aware of his social isolation. He was rich, and most of the
county families were poor--from his point of view the odds were in his
favor--and it was never hard to get guests. He could always motor up to
Washington and New York, and bring a crowd back with him. His cellars
were well stocked, and his hospitality undiscriminating.

"I don't know the girl," he told Dalton, "but the old man is Judge
Bannister. He's one of the natives--no money and oodles of pride."

In calling Judge Bannister a "native," Oscar showed a lack of
proportion. A native, in the sense that he used the word, is a South Sea
Islander, indigenous but negligible. Oscar was fooled, you see, by the
Judge's old-fashioned clothes, and the high surrey, and the horses with
the flowing tails. His ideas of life had to do with motor cars and
mansions, and with everybody very much dressed up. He felt that the only
thing in the world that really counted was money. If you had enough of
it the world was yours!

II

Year after year the Bannisters of Huntersfield had eaten their Horse
Show luncheon under a clump of old oaks beneath which the horses now
stopped. The big trees were dropping golden leaves in the dryness. From
the rise of the hill one looked down on the grandstand and the crowd as
from the seats of an amphitheater.

Judge Bannister remembered when the women of the crowd had worn hoops
and waterfalls. Aunt Claudia's memory went back to bustles and bonnets.
There were deeper memories, too, than of clothes--of old friends and
young faces--there was always a moment of pensive retrospect when the
Bannisters stopped under the old oak on the hill.

Randolph Paine, his mother and Major Prime were to join them at
luncheon. Separate plans had been made by the boarders who had packed
themselves into various cars and carriages, and had their own boxes and
baskets.

"Caroline Paine is always late," the Judge said with some impatience;
"if we don't eat on time, we shall have to hurry. I have never hurried
in my life and I don't want to begin now."

Claudia Beaufort was accustomed to impatience in men, and she was
inflexible as a hostess. "Well, of course, we couldn't begin without
them, could we?" she asked. "There they come now, Father. William, you'd
better help Major Prime."

Randy was driving the fat mare, Rosalind. Nellie Custis, Randolph's wiry
hound, loped along with flapping ears in the rear of the low-seated
carriage. Major Prime was on the back seat with Mrs. Paine.

"My dear Judge," he said, as the old gentleman came to the side of the
carriage, "I can't tell you how honored I am to be included in your
party. This is about the best thing that has happened to me in a long
time."

"I wanted you to get the old atmosphere. You can't get it at the Country
Club. We Bannisters have lunched up here for sixty years--older than you
are, eh?"

"Twenty years----"

"We used to call it the races, but now they tack on the Horse Show. It
was different, of course, when all the old places were owned by the old
families. But they can't change the oaks and the sweep of the hills, and
the mettle of the horses, thank God."

"I am sorry I was late," said Caroline Paine, as they settled themselves
under the trees, "but I went to town to have my hair waved."

"I wish you wouldn't, Caroline," Mrs. Beaufort told her, "your hair is
nice enough without it."

Caroline Paine took off her hat, "I couldn't get it up to look like
this, could I?"

The Judge surveyed the undulations critically. "Caroline," he said, "you
are too pretty to need it."

"I want to keep young for Randolph's sake," Mrs. Paine told him, "then
he'll like me better than any other girl."

"You needn't think you have to get your hair curled to make me love
you," said her tall son; "you are ducky enough as you are."

Major Prime, delighting in their lack of self-consciousness, made a
diplomatic contribution. "Why quarrel with such a charming coiffure?"

Mrs. Paine smiled at him, comfortably. "I feel much better," she said;
"they are always trying to hold me back."

She was a woman of ample proportions and of leisurely habit. Life had of
late hurried her a bit, but she still gave the effect of restful calm.
She was of the same generation as Aunt Claudia, and a widow. But she
wore her widowhood with a difference. She had on to-day a purple hat.
Her hair was white, her dress was white, and her shoes. She was prettier
than Aunt Claudia but she lacked her distinction of manner and of
carriage.

"They always want to hold me back when I try to be up-to-date," she
repeated.

Randy threw an acorn at her. "Nobody can hold you back, Mother," he
said, "when you get your mind on a thing. Aunt Claudia, what do you
hear from Truxton?"

"A letter came this morning," said Mrs. Beaufort, lighting up with the
thought of it. "I hadn't heard for days before that. And I was worried."

"Truxton hasn't killed himself writing letters since he went over," the
Judge asserted. "Claudia, can't we have lunch?"

"William is unpacking the hamper now, Father. And I think Truxton has
done very well. It isn't easy for the boys to find time."

"Randy wrote to me every week."

"Now, Mother----"

"Well, you did."

"But I'm that kind. I have to get things off my mind. Truxton isn't. And
I'll bet when Aunt Claudia does get his letters that they are worth
reading."

Mrs. Beaufort nodded. "They are lovely letters. I have the last one with
me; would you like to hear it?"

"Not before lunch, Claudia," the Judge urged.

"I will read it while the rest of you eat." There were red spots in Mrs.
Beaufort's cheeks. She adored her son. She could not understand her
father's critical attitude. Had she searched for motives, however, she
might have found them in the Judge's jealousy.

It was while she was reading Truxton's letter that the Flippins came
by--Mr. Flippin and his wife, Mary, and little Fidelity. A slender
mulatto woman followed with a basket.

The Flippins were one of the "second families." Between them and the
Paines of King's Crest and the Bannisters of Huntersfield stretched a
deep chasm of social prejudice. Three generations of Flippins had been
small farmers on rented lands. They had no coats-of-arms or family
trees. They were never asked to dine with the Paines or Bannisters, but
there had been always an interchange of small hospitalities, and much
neighborliness, and as children Mary Flippin, Randy and Becky and
Truxton had played together and had been great friends.

So it was now as they stopped to speak to the Judge's party that Mrs.
Beaufort said graciously, "I am reading a letter from Truxton. Would you
like to hear it?"

Mary, speaking with a sort of tense eagerness, said, "Yes."

So the Flippins sat down, and Mrs. Beaufort read in her pleasant voice
the letter from France.

Randy, lying on his back under the old oak, listened. Truxton gave a
joyous diary of the days--little details of the towns through which he
passed, of the houses where he was billeted, jokes of the men, of the
food they ate, of his hope of coming home.

"He seems very happy," said Mrs. Beaufort, as she finished.

"He is and he isn't----"

"You might make yourself a little clearer, Randolph," said the Judge.

"He is happy because France in summer is a pleasant sort of
Paradise--with the cabbages stuck up on the brown hillsides like
rosettes--and the minnows flashing in the little brooks and the old
mills turning--and he isn't happy--because he is homesick."

Randy raised himself on his elbow and smiled at his listening
audience--and as he smiled he was aware of a change in Mary Flippin. The
brooding look was gone. She was leaning forward, lips parted--"Then you
think that he is--homesick?"

"I don't _think_. I know. Why, over there, my bones actually ached for
Virginia."

The Judge raised his coffee cup. "Virginia, God bless her," he murmured,
and drank it down!

The Flippins moved on presently--the slender mulatto trailing after
them.

"If the Flippins don't send that Daisy back to Washington," Mrs. Paine
remarked, "she'll spoil all the negroes on the place."

Mrs. Beaufort agreed, "I don't know what we are coming to. Did you see
her high heels and tight skirt?"

"Once upon a time," the Judge declaimed, "black wenches like that wore
red handkerchiefs on their heads and went barefoot. But the world moves,
and some day when we have white servants wished on us, we'll pray to God
to send our black ones back."

Calvin was passing things expertly. Randy smiled at Becky as he filled
her plate.

"Hungry?"

"Ravenous."

"You don't look it."

"Don't I?"

"No. You're not a bread and butter sort of person."

"What kind am I?"

"Sugar and spice and everything nice."

"Did you learn to say such things in France?"

"Haven't I always said them?"

"Not in quite the same way. You've grown up, Randy. You seem _years_
older."

"Do you like me--older?"

"Of course." There was warmth in her voice but no coquetry. "What a
silly thing to ask, Randy."

Calvin, having served the lunch, ate his own particular feast of chicken
backs and necks under the surrey from a pasteboard box cover. Having
thus separated himself as it were from those he served, he was at his
ease. He knew his place and was happy in it.

Mary Flippin also knew her place. But she was not happy. She sat higher
up on the hill with her child asleep in her arms, and looked down on the
Judge's party. Except for an accident of birth, she might be sitting now
among them. Would she ever sit among them? Would her little daughter,
Fidelity?

III

"We are the only one of the old families who are eating lunch out of a
basket," said Caroline Paine; "next year we shall have to go to the
Country Club with the rest of them."

"I shall never go to the Country Club," said Judge Bannister, "as long
as there is a nigger to fry chicken for me."

"We may have to swim with the tide."

"Don't tell me that you'd rather be up there than here, Caroline."

"I'd like it for some things," Mrs. Paine admitted frankly; "you should
see the clothes that those Waterman women are wearing."

"What do you care what they wear. You don't want to be like them, do
you?"

"I may not care to be like them, but I want to look like them. I got the
pattern of this sweater I am knitting from one of my boarders. Do you
want it, Claudia?"

Mrs. Beaufort winced at the word "boarders." She hated to think that
Caroline must---- "I never wear sweaters, Caroline. They are not my
style. But I am knitting one for Becky."

"Is it blue?" Randy asked. "Becky ought always to wear blue, except when
she wears pale yellow. That was a heavenly thing you had on at dinner
the night we arrived, wasn't it, Major?"

"Everything was heavenly. I felt like one who expecting a barren plain
sees--Paradise."

It was not flattery and they knew it. They were hospitable souls, and in
a week he had become, as it were, one of them.

Randy, returning to the subject in hand, asked, "Will you wear the blue
if I come up to-night, Becky?"

"I will not." Becky was making herself a chaplet of yellow leaves, and
her bronze hair caught the light. "I will not. I shall probably put on
my old white if I dress for dinner."

"Of course you'll dress," said Mrs. Beaufort; "there are certain things
which we must always demand of ourselves----"

Caroline Paine agreed. "That's what I tell Randy when he says he
doesn't want to finish his law course. His father was a lawyer and his
grandfather. He owes it to them to live up to their standards."

Randy was again flat on his back with his hands under his head. "If I
stay at the University, it means no money for either of us except what
you earn, Mother."

The war had taken its toll of Caroline Paine. Things had not been easy
since her son had left her. They would not be easy now. "I know," she
said, "but you wouldn't want your father to be ashamed of you."

Randy sat up. "It isn't that--but I ought to make some money----"

The word was a challenge to the Judge. "Don't run with the mob, my boy.
The world is money-mad."

"I'm not money-mad," said Randy; "I know what I should like to do if my
life was my own. But it isn't. And I'm not going to have Mother twist
and turn as she has twisted and turned for the last fifteen years in
order to get me educated up to the family standard."

"If you don't mind I shouldn't." Caroline Paine was setting her feet to
a rocky path, but she did not falter. "You shouldn't mind if I don't."

Becky laid down the chaplet of leaves. She knew some of the things
Caroline Paine had sacrificed and she was thrilled by them. "Randy," she
admonished, with youthful severity, "it would be a shame to disappoint
your mother."

Randolph flushed beneath his dark skin. The Paines had an Indian strain
in them--Pocahontas was responsible for it, or some of the other
princesses who had mixed red blood with blue in the days when Virginia
belonged to the King. Randy showed signs of it in his square-set jaw,
the high lift of his head, his long easy stride, the straightness of his
black hair. He showed it, too, in a certain stoical impassiveness which
might have been taken for indifference. His world was, for the moment,
against him; he would attempt no argument.

"I am afraid this doesn't interest Major Prime," he said.

"It interests me very much," said the Major. "It is only another case of
the fighting man's adjustment to life after his return. We all have to
face it in one way or another." His eyes went out over the hills. They
were gray eyes, deep set, and, at this moment, kindly. They could blaze,
however, in stress of fighting, like bits of steel. "We all have to face
it in one way or another. And the future of America depends largely on
our seeing things straight."

"Well, there's only one way for Randy to face it," said Caroline Paine,
firmly, "and that is to do as his fathers did before him."

"If I do," Randy flared, "it will be three years before I can make a
living, and I'll be twenty-five."

Becky put on the chaplet of leaves. It fitted like a cap. She might have
been a dryad, escaped for a moment from the old oak. "Three years isn't
long."

"Suppose I should want to marry----"

"Oh, you--Randy----"

"But why shouldn't I?"

"I don't want you to get married," she told him; "when I come down we
couldn't have our nice times together. You'd always be thinking about
your wife."

IV

From the porch of the Country Club, George Dalton had seen the Judge's
party at luncheon. According to George's lexicon no one who could afford
to go to the club would eat out of a basket. He rather blushed for Becky
that she must sit there in the sight of everybody and share a feast with
a shabby old Judge, a lean and lank stripling with straight hair, a lame
duck of an officer, and two middle-aged women, who made spots of black
and purple on the landscape. Like Oscar, George's ideas of life had to
do largely with motor cars and yachts, and estates on Long Island,
palaces at Newport and Len ox and Palm Beach. During the war he had
served rather comfortably in a becoming uniform in the Quartermaster's
Department in Washington. Now that the war was over, he regretted the
becomings of the uniform. He felt to-day, however, that there were
compensations in his hunting pink. He was slightly bronzed and had blue
eyes. He was extremely popular with the women of the Waterman set, but
was held to be the especial property of Madge MacVeigh.

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