The Trumpeter Swan | Page 7

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 r��gime, 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