Walter laughed bitterly. “It is not a nice thing to feel yourself a coward.” But Rilla got her arms about him and cuddled her head on his shoulder. She was so glad he didn’t want to go — for just one minute she had been horribly frightened. And it was so nice to have Walter confiding his troubles to her — to her, not Di. She didn’t feel so lonely and superfluous any longer.
“Don’t you despise me, Rilla-my-Rilla?” asked Walter wistfully. Somehow, it hurt him to think Rilla might despise him — hurt him as much as if it had been Di. He realized suddenly how very fond he was of this adoring kid sister with her appealing eyes and troubled, girlish face.
“No, I don’t. Why, Walter, hundreds of people feel just as you do. You know what that verse of Shakespeare in the old Fifth Reader says—’the brave man is not he who feels no fear.’”
“No — but it is ‘he whose noble soul its fear subdues.’ I don’t do that. We can’t gloss it over, Rilla. I’m a coward.”
“You’re not. Think of how you fought Dan Reese long ago.”
“One spurt of courage isn’t enough for a lifetime.”
“Walter, one time I heard father say that the trouble with you was a sensitive nature and a vivid imagination. You feel things before they really come — feel them all alone when there isn’t anything to help you bear them — to take away from them. It isn’t anything to be ashamed of. When you and Jem got your hands burned when the grass was fired on the sandhills two years ago Jem made twice the fuss over the pain that you did. As for this horrid old war, there’ll be plenty to go without you. It won’t last long.”
“I wish I could believe it. Well, it’s suppertime, Rilla. You’d better run. I don’t want anything.”
“Neither do I. I couldn’t eat a mouthful. Let me stay here with you, Walter. It’s such a comfort to talk things over with someone. The rest all think that I’m too much of a baby to understand.”
So they two sat there in the old valley until the evening star shone through a pale-grey, gauzy cloud over the maple grove, and a fragrant dewy darkness filled their little sylvan dell. It was one of the evenings Rilla was to treasure in remembrance all her life — the first one on which Walter had ever talked to her as if she were a woman and not a child. They comforted and strengthened each other. Walter felt, for the time being at least, that it was not such a despicable thing after all to dread the horror of war; and Rilla was glad to be made the confidante of his struggles — to sympathize with and encourage him. She was of importance to somebody.
When they went back to Ingleside they found callers sitting on the veranda. Mr. and Mrs. Meredith had come over from the manse, and Mr. and Mrs. Norman Douglas had come up from the farm. Cousin Sophia was there also, sitting with Susan in the shadowy background. Mrs. Blythe and Nan and Di were away, but Dr. Blythe was home and so was Dr. Jekyll, sitting in golden majesty on the top step. And of course they were all talking of the war, except Dr. Jekyll who kept his own counsel and looked contempt as only a cat can. When two people foregathered in those days they talked of the war; and old Highland Sandy of the Harbour Head talked of it when he was alone and hurled anathemas at the Kaiser across all the acres of his farm. Walter slipped away, not caring to see or be seen, but Rilla sat down on the steps, where the garden mint was dewy and pungent. It was a very calm evening with a dim, golden afterlight irradiating the glen. She felt happier than at any time in the dreadful week that had passed. She was no longer haunted by the fear that Walter would go.
“I’d go myself if I was twenty years younger,” Norman Douglas was shouting. Norman always shouted when he was excited. “I’d show the Kaiser a thing or two! Did I ever say there wasn’t a hell? Of course there’s a hell — dozens of hells — hundreds of hells — where the Kaiser and all his brood are bound for.”
“I knew this war was coming,” said Mrs. Norman triumphantly. “I saw it coming right along. I could have told all those stupid Englishmen what was ahead of them. I told you, John Meredith, years ago what the Kaiser was up to but you wouldn’t believe it. You said he would never plunge the world in war. Who was right about the Kaiser, John? You — or I? Tell me that.”
“You were, I admit,” said Mr. Meredith.
“It’s too late to admit it now,” said Mrs. Norman, shaking her head, as if to intimate that if John Meredith had admitted it sooner there might have been no war.
“Thank God, England’s navy is ready,” said the doctor.
“Amen to that,” nodded Mrs. Norman. “Bat-blind as most of them were somebody had foresight enough to see to that.”
“Maybe England’ll manage not to get into trouble over it,” said Cousin Sophia plaintively. “I dunno. But I’m much afraid.”
“One would suppose that England was in trouble over it already, up to her neck, Sophia Crawford,” said Susan. “But your ways of thinking are beyond me and always were. It is my opinion that the British Navy will settle Germany in a jiffy and that we are all getting worked up over nothing.”
Susan spat out the words as if she wanted to convince herself more than anybody else. She had her little store of homely philosophies to guide her through life, but she had nothing to buckler her against the thunderbolts of the week that had just passed. What had an honest, hardworking, Presbyterian old maid of Glen St. Mary to do with a war thousands of miles away? Susan felt that it was indecent that she should have to be disturbed by it.
“The British army will settle Germany,” shouted Norman. “Just wait till it gets into line and the Kaiser will find that real war is a different thing from parading round Berlin with your moustaches cocked up.”
“Britain hasn’t got an army,” said Mrs. Norman emphatically. “You needn’t glare at me, Norman. Glaring won’t make soldiers out of timothy stalks. A hundred thousand men will just be a mouthful for Germany’s millions.”
“There’ll be some tough chewing in the mouthful, I reckon,” persisted Norman valiantly. “Germany’ll break her teeth on it. Don’t you tell me one Britisher isn’t a match for ten foreigners. I could polish off a dozen of ‘em myself with both hands tied behind my back!”
“I am told,” said Susan, “that old Mr. Pryor does not believe in this war. I am told that he says England went into it just because she was jealous of Germany and that she did not really care in the least what happened to Belgium.”
“I believe he’s been talking some such rot,” said Norman. “I haven’t heard him. When I do, Whiskers-on-the-moon won’t know what happened to him. That precious relative of mine, Kitty Alec, holds forth to the same effect, I understand. Not before me, though — somehow, folks don’t indulge in that kind of conversation in my presence. Lord love you, they’ve a kind of presentiment, so to speak, that it wouldn’t be healthy for their complaint.”
“I am much afraid that this war has been sent as a punishment for our sins,” said Cousin Sophia, unclasping her pale hands from her lap and reclasping them solemnly over her stomach. “‘The world is very evil — the times are waxing late.’”
“Parson here’s got something of the same idea,” chuckled Norman. “Haven’t you, Parson? That’s why you preached t’other night on the text ‘Without shedding of blood