Molly Brown of Kentucky

Speed Nell

Molly Brown of Kentucky

CHAPTER I.

A LETTER

From Miss Julia Kean to Mrs. Edwin Green.

Giverny, France,

August, 1914.

Dearest old Molly Brown of Kentucky:

You can marry a million Professor Edwin Greens, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.D. (the last stands for lucky dog), and you can also have a million little Green Olive Branches, but you will still be Molly Brown of Kentucky to all of your old friends.

I came up to Giverny last week with the Polly Perkinses. They are great fun and, strange to say, get on rather better than most married folks. Jo is much meeker than we ever thought she could be, now that she has made Polly cut his hair and has let her own grow out. Polly is more manly, too, I think and asserts himself occasionally, much to Jo’s delight. I should not be at all astonished if his falsetto voice turned into a baritone, if not a deep bass. He walks with quite a swagger and talks about my wife this and my wife that in such masculine pride that you would not know him.

Paris was rather excited when we came through last week. I have been at Quimperle all summer and only stopped in Paris long enough to get some paints and canvas. I had actually painted out. Jo had written me to join her in this little housekeeping scheme at Giverny. I wish you could see the house we have taken. It is too wonderful that it is ours! Such peace and quiet! Especially so, after the turmoil in Paris. I have seen so few papers that I hardly know what it is all about; no doubt you in Kentucky with your Courier Journal know more than I do. They talk of war, but of course that is nonsense. Anyhow, if there is a war, I bet I am going to be Johnny on the Spot. But of course there won’t be one.

I miss Kent, – but I need hardly tell you that. I almost gave in and sailed with him, but it was much best for me to wait in France for my mother and father. They are now in Berlin waiting for the powers that be to give some kind of a permit for some kind of a road that Bobby is to build from Constantinople to the interior; that is, he is to build it if he can get the permission of the Imperial Government. What the Germans have to do with Turkey, you can search me, but that is what Bobby writes me. He has done a lot of work on it already in the way of preliminary plans. I am to hang around until I hear from them, so I am going to hang around with the Polly Perkinses.

No doubt Kent is home by this time. I envy him, somehow. It is so wonderful to have a home to go to. Now isn’t that a silly line of talk for Judy Kean to be getting off, I, who have always declared that a Gypsy van was my idea of bliss? I never have had a home and I never have wanted one until lately. I fancy that winter in Paris with your mother in the Rue Brea was my undoing. Of course, if Bobby had been anything but a civil engineer and Mamma had been anything but so much married to Bobby that she had to trot around with him from one end of the earth to the other, why then, I might have had a home. But Bobby is Bobby and he wouldn’t have been himself doing anything but building roads, and I certainly would not have had Mamma let him build them all by his lonesome. The truth of the matter is, I was a mistake. I should either never have been born or I should have been born a boy. Geewhillikins! What a boy I would have been! Somehow, I’m glad I’m not, though.

I am wild to see little Mildred. It seems so wonderful for you to be a mother. I know you will make a great job of being one, too. Are you going to have her be an old-fashioned baby with the foregone conclusion that she must “eat her peck of dirt,” or is she to be one of these infants whose toys must be sterilized before she is allowed to play with them, and who is too easily contaminated to be kissed unless the kisser gargles first with corrosive sublimate? Please let me know about this, because kiss her I must and will, and if I have to be aseptic before I can do it, I fancy I had better begin right now. Here is Polly with the mail and Paris papers. Will finish later.

It has come! Actual war! We feel like fools to have rushed off here to the country without knowing more about the state France was in. I can hardly believe it even now. They are asking Americans to leave Paris, but I can’t leave. How can I, with Mamma and Papa in Berlin? I am going to stay right where I am until things settle themselves a little. The peasants even now do not believe it has come. We are not much more than an hour from Paris, but there are many persons living in this village who have never been to Paris. The old men stand in groups and talk politics, disagreeing on every subject under the sun except the one great subject and that is Germany. Hatred of Germany is the one thing that there are no two minds about. The women look big-eyed and awestruck. There are no young men – all gone to war. They went off singing and joking.

What I long for most is news. We don’t get any news to speak of. I am filled with concern about Bobby and Mamma. It is foolish, as they are able to take care of themselves, but Bobby is so sassy. I am so afraid he might jaw back at the Emperor. He is fully capable of calling him to account for his behavior. Some one should, but I hope it won’t be Bobby.

Polly Perkins is going to drive a Red Cross Ambulance. He is quite determined, so determined that he has actually produced a chin from somewhere (you remember he boasted none to speak of). It is quite becoming to him, this determination and chin, and Jo is beaming with pride. I believe if Polly had wanted to run, it would have killed Jo.

Excuse the jerkiness of this, but I am so excited that I can only jot down a little at a time. Things are moving fast! The artists and near artists at Madame Gaston’s Inn are piling out, making for Paris, some to sail for United States and others to try to get into England. Jo and I had determined to sit tight in our little house with its lovely walled garden that seems a kind of protection to us – not that we are scared, bless you no! We just felt we might as well be here as anywhere else.

This morning Jo came to breakfast looking kind of different and yet kind of familiar – she had cut off her hair!

“I mean to follow Polly,” she remarked simply.

“Follow him where?”

“Wherever he goes.” And do you know, Molly, the redoubtable Jo burst into tears?

I was never more shocked in my life. If your Aunt Sarah Clay had dissolved into tears, I would not have been more at a loss how to conduct myself. I patted her heartily on the back but the poor girl wanted a shoulder to weep on and I lent her one. I tell you when Jo gets started she is some bawler. I fancy she made up for all the many years that crying has been out of her ken.

My neck is stiff from the wetting I got. Nothing short of the plumber could have stopped her. When she finally went dry, she began to talk:

“By I’b glad Bolly didn zee be bake zuch a vool ob byself!”

“Well, you had better look after your p’s and s’s or you’ll be taken up as a German spy.” That made her laugh and then she went on to tell me what she meant to do, the p’s still too much for her but her s’s improving.

“What’s the use of my brofession now? I’d like to know that. Miniature painting will be no good for years to come. This war is going to be something that’ll make everybody baint on big canvasses. Who will want to look at anything little? I tell you, Judy, the day of mastodons is at hand! There’ll be no more lap-dogs, no more pet canaries. The one time lap-dogs will find themselves raging lions; and the pet canaries will grow to great eagles and burst the silly wires of their cages with a snap of their fingers – ”

“Whose fingers?” I demanded.

“Never mind whose! Mixed metaphors are perfectly permissible in war time.” I was glad to see she could say such a word as permissible, which meant that her storm of weeping had subsided.

“Are you going as a Red Cross nurse?” I asked.

“Nurse your grandmother! I’m going to drive an ambulance or maybe fly.”

“But they won’t want a woman in the thick of the fight!”

“Well, who’s to know? When I get a good hair-cut and put on some of Polly’s togs, I bet I’ll make as good a man as Pol – no, I won’t say that. I’ll never be as good a man as he is. I’m going to try the aviation racket first. If they won’t take me, I’ll get with the Red Cross, somehow. I know I could fly like a bird. I have never yet seen the wheels that I could not understand the turning of. I believe it is not so easy to get aviators. It is so hazardous that men don’t go in for it. I am light weight but awfully strong.”

“But, Jo, what are you going to do about your feet?” You remember, Molly, what pretty little feet Jo has.

“Oh, I’ll wear some of Polly’s shoes and stuff out the toes. I bet I’ll walk like Charlie Chaplin, but when one is flying, it doesn’t make much difference about feet.”

Nothing is going to stop her. She is to start to Paris to-morrow, and I will go, too. I know all of you think I should stay here in G – until I can get into communication with Bobby, but Molly Brown, I can’t do it. When history is being made, I simply can’t stand aside and see it. I’ve got to get in it by hook or crook.

Don’t be scared – I am not going to fly! I wish I could, but I promised Kent Brown I would never fly with any man but him, and while it was done in jest, in a way I still feel that a promise must be kept. I wish I were not made that way. I’d like to dress up like Jo Bill Perkins and pass as a man, and I could do it quite as well as Jo, in spite of her having practiced being a boy all her life, but I can’t help thinking what Bobby has always said to me: “Just remember you are a lady and you can’t go far wrong.” Somehow, I am afraid if I cut off my hair and discarded skirts, I might forget I am a lady. It is an awful nuisance being one, anyhow.

I don’t know just what I am going to do, but I certainly can’t cross the Atlantic, with Bobby and poor little Mamma somewhere in Germany, maybe locked up in dungeons or something. I know it won’t help them any for me to be in France, but at least I will be nearer to them geographically.

My letter of credit on the Paris bankers will put me on easy street financially, so as far as money is concerned, Bobby will know I am all right. I can’t think the war will last very long. Surely all the neutral countries will just step in and stop it. The French are looking to United States. It is very amusing to hear the old peasants talk about Lafayette. They seem to think tit for tat: if they helped us out more than a century ago, we will have to help them out now.

I can’t tell what I think just yet. Everything is in too much of a turmoil. I wish I knew what Bobby thinks. He is always so sane in his political opinions. I get more and more uneasy about them, Bobby and Mamma. Such terrible tales of the Germans are coming to us. I don’t believe them, at least not all of them. How could a kindly, rather bovine race suddenly turn into raging tigers? Why should any one want to do anything to Bobby? I comfort myself with that thought and then I remember how hot-headed and impulsive he is, inherited directly from me, his daughter, and I begin to tremble.

Jo and I are settling up our affairs here. Madame Gaston is to take charge of our few belongings. I have a hunch it will be best to lighten our luggage all we can. Jo is not going to turn into a man until we get to Paris. She is too funny in her envy of old Mère Gaspard because of her big moustache. You know how many of the French peasant women have quite mannish beards and moustaches. Mother Gaspard has the largest and most formidable one I have ever seen, although she is a most motherly old soul, not a bit fatherly.

I will write from Paris again. I know Kent is in a state of grouch with himself for sailing when he did. I believe he feels as I do about things happening. I don’t want houses to burn down, but if they do burn, I want to see the fire; I don’t want dogs to fight, but if there is a dog fight going on, I am certainly going to stand on my tiptoes and look over the crowd and see them tear each other up; I certainly don’t want the Nations to go to war, but if they will do it, I am going to have experiences.

Please give my best love to all the family and a thoroughly sterilized kiss to that marvelous infant. I verily believe if it had not been for Kent’s overweening desire to behold that baby, he would have waited over for another steamer and in that way found himself in the thick of the fight. I am glad he went, however. If Polly Perkins developed a chin and rushed off, what might Kent have done with an overdevelopment of chin already there?

Yours always,Judy.

CHAPTER II.

THE ORCHARD HOME

“R. F. D., late as usual,” laughed Molly, as Mr. Bud Woodsmall’s very ramshackle Ford runabout came careening through the lane and up the hill to the yard gate. “I fancy he has had to stop and talk war at every mail box on his route.”

“I think I’ll go meet him,” said Professor Edwin Green, rather reluctantly arising from the chaise longue that seemed to have been built to fit his lack of curves, he declared. He had been sitting on the porch of the bungalow, eyes half closed to shut out everything from his vision but the picture of Molly holding the sleeping baby in her arms.

“You know you want to gossip with him – now ’fess up!”

“Well, I do like to hear his views of the situation in Europe. They are original, at least. He says Yankee capitalists are the cause of it all. Don’t you want me to put Mildred down? She has been asleep for half an hour,” and the young husband and father stood for a moment and looked down on his treasures with what Judy Kean always called his faithful-collie-dog eyes.

“I know I oughtn’t to hold her while she is asleep, but she seems so wonderful I can’t bear to let her go. I think she is growing more like you, Edwin.”

“Like me! Nonsense! That would be a sad thing to have wished on the poor innocent when there are so many handsome folks in the Carmichael and Brown family from whom she could inherit real beauty.”

“But Edwin, you are handsome, I think. You are so noble looking.”

“All right, honey, have it your own way,” and he stooped and kissed her. “I will allow that the baby has inherited my bald head if you like – Hi there!” he called to Mr. Woodsmall, who was preparing to unlock the mail box, “I’ll come get it,” and he sprinted down the walk where the garrulous postman held him enthralled for a good fifteen minutes. A blue envelope with a foreign postmark told him there was a letter from Julia Kean that would be eagerly welcomed by Molly, but there was no stopping the flow of R. F. D.’s eloquence. The causes of the war being thoroughly threshed out, he finally took his reluctant departure.

“A letter from Judy Kean! Now you will have to put the baby down!”

So little Mildred was tenderly placed in her basket on the porch and Molly opened the voluminous epistle from the beloved Judy.

“Oh, Edwin, she is not coming home! I was afraid she would want to do something Judyesque. Only listen!” and Molly read the Giverny letter to her husband.

“What do you think Kent will say to this? I know he is very uneasy about her anyhow since the war broke out, and now – well, I’m glad I’m not in his shoes. She is not very considerate of him, I must say.”

“Oh, you men folks!” laughed Molly. “I can’t see how she could leave France until she knows something about her mother and father, and after all, I don’t believe Kent and Judy are engaged.”

“Not engaged! What do you think Kent has been doing this whole year in Paris if he wasn’t getting engaged?”

“Studying Architecture at the Beaux Arts. Sometimes persons can know one another a long time and be together a lot and not get engaged,” she teased. It was a very well-known fact that Professor Edwin Green had been in love with Molly Brown for at least five years, and maybe longer, before he put the all important question.

“Yes, I know, but then – ”

“Then what? My brother Kent is certainly not able to support a wife yet, and maybe they are opposed to long engagements.”

“Well, all the same I am sorry for Kent. It was bad enough when you went abroad and the ocean was between us and I knew you were being well taken care of by your dear mother, – but just suppose it had been war time and you had been alone! The news from France is very grave. It looks as though the Germans would eat Christmas dinner in Paris as they boast they will.”

“Oh, Edwin, no!” and Molly turned pale.

“Well, look at these head lines in to-day’s paper. It looks very ominous. When did you say you were expecting Kent home?”

“By to-morrow at latest. He wrote Mother he was to stay some time in New York to try to land a job that looked very promising.”

“Here she comes now!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up with joy as it always did when his mother-in-law appeared on the scene.

Mrs. Brown was coming through the orchard from Chatsworth. Her hair had turned a little greyer since Molly’s marriage, but not much; her step was still light and active; her grey eyes as full of life; and in her heart the same eternal youth.

“Well, children! Did you get any mail? How is my precious little granddaughter? I’ve a letter from Kent. It just did beat him home. Paul ’phoned from Louisville that he is in town now, just arrived and will be here with him this afternoon. I am so excited!”

Dear Mrs. Brown’s life was made up of such excitements now: her children always going and returning. Mildred, Mrs. Crittenden Rutledge, had left for Iowa only two days before, having spent two months with her little family at Chatsworth; now Kent was almost home; and in less than a month the Greens would make their annual move to Wellington. Sue, the eldest daughter, married to young Cyrus Clay, lived within a few miles of Chatsworth and seemed the only one who was a fixture. Paul’s newspaper work kept him in Louisville most of the time and John, the doctor, made flying visits to his home but had to make his headquarters in the city for fear of missing patients. Ernest, the eldest son, was threatening to come home and settle at Chatsworth, but that was still an uncertainty.

“I must read you Judy’s letter, Mother. I know you will feel as uneasy as we do about her. Edwin thinks she should come home, but I think she could hardly leave, not knowing something more definite about her mother and father, who may be bottled up in Germany indefinitely.”

“Only think of the sizzle Mr. Kean will make when they finally draw the cork,” laughed Mrs. Brown; but when Molly read the whole of Judy’s letter to her, the laughter left her countenance and she looked very solemn and disturbed.

“Poor Kent!” she sighed.

“I wonder what he will do,” from Molly.

“Do? Why, he will do what the men of his blood should do!” Mrs. Brown held her head very high and her delicate nostrils quivered in the way her family knew meant either anger or high resolve. “He will go to France and either stay and protect Judy or bring her back to his mother.”

“But, Mother, are you going to ask this of him? Maybe he won’t think it is the right thing to do.”

“Of course, I am not going to ask it of him. I just know the ‘mettle of his pasture.’”

“But the expense!”

“Expense! Molly, you don’t sound like yourself. What is expense when your loved ones are in danger?”

“But I can’t think that Judy could be in real danger.”

“I can’t think anything else. You surely have not read the morning paper. The Germans are advancing so rapidly… The atrocities in Belgium! Ugh! I can’t contemplate our Judy being anywhere in their reach.”

“But, Mother, they must be exaggerated! People could not do what they say they have done, not good, kind German soldiers.”

“Molly! Molly! Your goodness will even let you love the Germans. I am not made that way. The Anglo Saxon in me is so uppermost and I feel such a boiling and bubbling in my veins that nothing but my grey hairs keeps me from joining the Red Cross myself and helping the Allies!”

“Well, then you don’t blame Miss Judy Kean,” laughed Professor Green, who never loved his mother-in-law more than when, as old Aunt Mary expressed it, “her nose was a-wuckin’.”

“Blame her! No, indeed! If I were her age, I’d do exactly what she is doing, but I should certainly have expected Molly’s father to come over and protect me while I was being so foolhardy.”

“Judy doesn’t say she is going as a nurse,” said Molly, referring to the letter. “Jo Williams is to fly and Judy seems uncertain what she is going to do, – just see the fight, as far as I can make out. I know Judy so well I just can’t feel uneasy about her. You mustn’t think I am mercenary, Mother, or careless of my friend. Judy always lands on her feet and is as much of an adept in getting out of scrapes as she is in getting in them.”

“My darling, of course I didn’t mean you were mercenary,” cried Mrs. Brown, seeing in Molly’s blue eyes a little hurt look at the vigorous tone she had taken when Molly merely suggested expense. “I just think in your desire to think well of every one, nations as well as individuals, that you are blind to the terrors of this war. If Judy will only go to Sally Bolling, she will be taken care of. I fancy Sally is at La Roche Craie now.”

“Oh, I had forgotten to think of what this must mean to Cousin Sally!” exclaimed Molly. “The truth of the matter is that it is so peaceful here my imagination cannot picture what it is over there. I am growing selfish with contentment. Of course Philippe d’Ochtè will join his regiment and poor Cousin Sally and the Marquis will suffer agonies over him.”

“Yes and over France!” said Edwin solemnly. “I remember so well a conversation I had with the Marquis d’Ochtè on the subject of his country. I believe he really and truly puts his country above even his adored wife and son. That is more patriotism than I could be capable of – ”

“Not a bit of it, my dear Edwin,” broke in Mrs. Brown.

“‘I could not love thee half so wellLoved I not honour more.’

“Molly and your little baby Mildred are but a part of your country, and if the time should come and your country called you, you would answer the call just as I hope my own sons would.”

“Oh, Mother, you are a Spartan! I am not so brave, I am afraid,” said Molly. “Even now at the thought of war, I am thanking God my Mildred baby is a girl.”

Little Mildred, at mention of her name, although it would be many a day before she would know what her name was, awakened and gave an inarticulate gurgle. Mrs. Brown dropped the rôle of Spartan Mother and turned into a doting grandmother in the twinkling of an eye.

“And was um little tootsie wootsies cold? Come to your Granny and let her warm them. Molly, this baby has grown a foot, I do believe, and look what a fine, strong, straight back she has! And does oo want your Granny to rub your back? Only look, her eyes have brown lights in them! I said all the time she would have brown eyes.”

“And not Molly’s blue eyes! Oh, Mother, that is very bad news to me. Why, the baby’s eyes are as blue as the sea now. They could not change,” and Edwin Green peered into his offspring’s face with such intentness that the little thing began to whimper.

The proper indignation being expressed by the females and the baby dangled until smiles came and a crow, Mrs. Brown informed the ignorant father that all young animals have blue eyes and there is no determining the actual colour of a baby’s eyes until it is several months old, but that the minute brown or golden lights begin to appear in blue eyes, you can get ready to declare for a brown-eyed youngster.

“Well, she will surely have Molly’s hair,” he insisted.

“That we can’t tell, either,” said the all-knowing grandmother. “You see, she is almost bald now except for this tiny fringe that is rapidly being worn off in the back. That does seem a little pinkish.”

“Pinkish! Oh, Mother-in-law, what a word to express my Molly’s hair!”

“Can’t you see she is getting even with you for making Mildred almost cry?” laughed Molly. “I know she is going to have my hair because when you slip a little bit of blue under that little lock that is on the side, where it hasn’t rubbed off, the ‘pink’ comes out quite plainly. My Mildred will be a belle. I have always heard it said that a girl with brown eyes and golden hair is born to be a belle. Oh, yes, I will call the baby’s hair golden although I have always called my own red.”