PAGE 10
One Hundred Per Cent
by
“Listen, dear, I can’t have you–“
“Too late. Got a pencil? Let’s send fifty words to Jock and Grace. They’ll wire back ‘No!’ but another fifty’ll fetch ’em. After all, it takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to change eight lives. Now let’s have dinner, dear. It’ll be cold, but filling.”
Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude. But Emma was alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the swift-moving times. In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean. But in this time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the readjustment of this little family and business group was so unremarkable as to pass unnoticed. Even the members of the group itself, seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled.
It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma’s awakening that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows suitcase (“Can’t count on trunks these days,” she had said. “I’m not taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist”). Buck, standing in the doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror. At intervals he said: “Can’t I help, dear?” Or, “Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers! I’d like to know what they had on you, Emma.”
And from Emma: “Yeh, ain’t I noble!” Then, after a little pause: “This house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it’ll look like a Home for Decayed Gentlewomen. Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be the only male protector around the place. We’ll make him captain of the home guard.”
“Gertie was in to-day. She says I’m a shrimp in my uniform compared to Charley. You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any woman in the shop except you. She’s down to ninety-eight pounds, poor little girl, but every ounce of it’s pure pluck, and she says she’ll be as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will.”
Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs. “Seventeen–eighteen–When she comes back we’ll have to pay her twice the salary she got when she left. But, then, you have to pay an errand boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands money that an operator used to brag about–nineteen–“
Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes closets.
“All except you, Emma. You’ll be working without a salary–working like a man–like three men–“
“Working for three men, T.A. Three fighting men. I’ve got two service buttons already,” she glanced down at her blouse, “and Charley Fisk said I had the right to wear one for him. I’ll look like a mosaic, but I’m going to put ’em all on.”
* * * * *
The day before Emma’s departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, bundles, and babies. A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the spirit of the times in her eyes.
“Jock!” she repeated, in answer to their questions. “My dears, he doesn’t know I’m alive. I visited him at camp the day before I left. He thinks he’ll be transferred East, as we hoped. Wouldn’t that be glorious! Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss with him, and he didn’t hear what I was saying. He wasn’t even listening. He couldn’t wait until I had finished a sentence so that he could cut in with something about his work. I murmured to him in the moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded. And when I said, ‘Dearest, isn’t this hotel a little like the place we spent our honeymoon in–that porch, and all?’ he said, ‘See this feller coming, Gracie? The big guy with the moustache. Now mash him, Gracie. He’s my Captain. I’m going to introduce you. He was a senior at college when I was a fresh.'”