FullReads

Rudie was in charge of the garage now. “That part of it’s all right,” Chug confided to the Weld girl. “Only thing that worries me is Ma. She hasn’t peeped, hardly, but I can see she’s pretty glum, all right.”

“I don’t know your mother,” said the Weld girl.

“Thasso,” absent-mindedly, from Chug.

“I’d–like to.”

Chug woke up. “Why, say, that’d be fine! Listen, why don’t you come for Sunday dinner. I’ve got a hunch we’ll shove off next week, and this’ll be my last meal away from camp. They haven’t said so, but I don’t know–maybe you wouldn’t want to, though. Maybe you–we live the other side of the tracks–“

“I’d love to,” said the Weld girl. “If you think your mother would like to have me.”

“Would she! And cook! Say!”

The Widow Weld made a frightful fuss. Said that patriotism was all right, but that there were limits. Betty put on her organdie and went.

It began with cream soup and ended with shortcake. Even Chug realized that his mother had outdone herself. After his second helping of shortcake he leaned back and said, “Death, where is thy sting?” But his mother refused to laugh at that. She couldn’t resist telling Miss Weld that it was plain food but that she hoped she’d enjoyed it.

Elizabeth Weld leaned forward. “Mrs. Scaritt, it’s the best dinner I’ve ever eaten.”

Mrs. Scaritt flushed a little, but protested, politely: “Oh, now! You folks up in the East End–“

“Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We’re sort of crackers-and-tea codfish, really.”

“Oh, now, Miss Weld!” Chug’s mother was aghast at such frankness. But Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly at each other.

An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains (“I used to do ’em up for folks in town,” said Mrs. Scaritt, “so’s Chug could go to high school.” And “I know it. That’s what I call splendid,” from the girl), she went home, escorted by Chug.

Chug’s hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines.

Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the boards. She danced in hospitals, chateaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New York’s East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and once with a general. But never a dance with Chug.

Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor toward her–her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the wheezy breath, should ask her to dance.