GI Brides (80 page)

“But really, Blythe, I think you owe it to Dan as an old friend, to listen to what he has to say, the plans he has made. You gain nothing by running away from anything. It is always better to face a matter clearly, politely, and in a way that you won’t regret later when you think it over.”

Blythe looked at her mother thoughtfully an instant, and then said, “All right, Mother dear. When and where do you want me to see him? Was there any special time stipulated?”

“Why no, dear, only that he wants to see you at the first possible moment because he has several plans he is trying to arrange that depend upon your answer. I think just in courtesy you owe him that.”

“Very well, Mother, I’ll go to the telephone and arrange to see him at once. It’s best to get this thing over. Best for us both!” She turned to go out the door.

“Wait a minute, daughter,” said Mrs. Bonniwell.

Blythe paused and looked at her mother inquiringly.

“I want to suggest that you be very sure of yourself before you go into this interview. You should consider just what you would be giving up if you turn this offer down. And you can’t tell just what reaction you may bring about in Dan. He is very impulsive, you know.”

“Yes, Mother, I’ll remember. But I can’t marry a man just to keep him from marrying a chorus girl or jumping in the river. You wouldn’t have me do that, would you, Mother?”

There was a merry twinkle in Blythe’s eyes as she said it, the kind of twinkle that always brought an answering smile from her mother, no matter how much she frustrated her motherly plans, and Mrs. Bonniwell gave the smile, and said, “Why no, of course not, dear,” and Blythe turned with a laughing “thank you,” and went to the telephone.

It was not until she was gone that the mother discovered her husband standing in the shadow out in the hall by the door, and smiled at him.

“What a child she is!” said the mother, half worried, half pleased. “She doesn’t grow up very fast, does she?”

“Well, I’m not sure but she’s more grown up than her parents,” said Mr. Bonniwell, coming in and sitting down. “Personally, I think she has more sense than either of us, in more ways than one. I certainly am glad she is turning that Seavers kid down. I never liked him. He isn’t even intellectually on a par with our girl.”

“Now, John, don’t be too sure of what she is going to do. Dan had some very pleasant plans for their wedding, and you can’t tell what he may persuade her to do when she once gives him a chance to talk it over.”

“I’ll bank on our girl every time,” said her father. “If she lets that ninny wheedle her into marrying him in a hurry to repent at her leisure, I shall be dreadfully disappointed in her. Especially since she has somebody real in her heart.”

“Oh
John
! I think you are foolish to put so much faith in a couple of snapshots and a letter or two. You might not like this old schoolmate of hers any better than you like Dan.”

“Well, we’ll just let it rest at that and see what Blythe does,” said her father.

And then Blythe came back, smiling, as if from an unpleasant duty well done.

“When is he coming?” asked her mother.

“Right away,” said Blythe.

“Well, don’t worry about how long he stays. I’ll have your dinner saved for you if he is very long.”

“He won’t be,” said Blythe cheerfully. “I told him I could spare him only ten minutes and he had to make it snappy.”

“Blythe!” reproached her mother. “Don’t you think that was a bit rude?”

“No, Mother. It’s the language all young people are using today, and I’ve already told him once before today that I didn’t want to talk about this subject anymore.”

“Oh, my dear! But look here. Don’t you think you should get into a fresher dress? You look a bit dreary and shopworn in that dark one. At least you can do Dan the courtesy of looking fresh and neat.”

“No, Mother, I’m not holding this matter up to make myself charming. I want to get it over with. There he is now,” as the bell sounded through the house, and Blythe jumped up and ran down to the door herself instead of waiting for the servant to admit her caller.

The father, sitting in a shadowed corner of the room, smiled to himself at the summary way in which his daughter was handling this matter.

“She’s a great girl!” he said aloud, with satisfaction in his face.

The mother cast a troubled glance at him.

“Yes, but I’m afraid she is acting in haste and will do something that she will regret all her life,” she said, with a deep sigh.

“She won’t!” said her father, with confidence. “You’ll see.”

They sat in silence, listening, as they heard low voices murmuring in the room. Then suddenly they heard the man’s voice rise. They heard his footsteps tramping back and forth in the library, and the mother cast an anxious glance toward her husband, but he sat quietly amused and waiting.

Low voices again, quiet, gentle murmur. That would be Blythe. Then a deep, angry growl, then loud angry words, and suddenly the tramping of an angry young man’s feet as he went out of the house and slammed the door furiously behind him. “There! John! I was afraid she would offend him, and she must have done it. I just knew she ought not to have gone at this thing in such a hurry.”

“Alice, look here, don’t you know enough about that young man yet after all these years to understand that he would be offended at anybody who refused to fall in with his plans? He wants to be
it,
and he won’t stand for anybody who hinders him.”

“It’s very strange, John, that you should so easily be won over to someone you don’t know at all.”

“No, it’s not strange, Alice, Blythe’s Charlie is
real,
and this Dan isn’t. And someday you’ll see it yourself and be glad you had a daughter with a lot of common sense.”

Then they heard Blythe’s light step coming up the stairs, and Blythe’s voice singing softly a hymn she had heard at the meeting.

A soft light came into her father’s eyes as he caught the words.

“She seems to be pretty happy, whatever it is,” he said gently.

“Oh, John, do you think so?” said the mother. “Such gloomy, pathetic words. She’s just the type that can be made into a fanatic so easily. Talking about purging her soul of dross! As if that child ever had a grain of dross in her. You know yourself she’s always been the sweetest, most reasonable child. I almost never had to punish her, even when she was very little. Talk about dross in her, it’s ridiculous! I tell you, that boy she thinks she’s in love with is the wrong type for her. He’ll just lead her into being a whining old woman before her time.”

“Perhaps he won’t,” said the father, with a twinkle in his eyes. “Perhaps he’ll die, as he told her he was likely to. I suppose you’d be glad if he would.”

“Now, John, you know I never was so awful as that I would want anyone to die before his time. But I certainly don’t see that he’s good for Blythe.”

“No,” sighed the father, “you’d rather see her tied to that weak-chinned Dan, who will go on all his life getting drunk whenever he wants to, and going wild over one nightclub dancer or singer and then another after he’s taken his wife safely home and got her to bed out of the way. That’s the way you want it, isn’t it?”

“John! You know Dan isn’t that kind of fellow! You know he’s fine and clean and self-respecting.”

“
Self
-respecting, yes, but I’m afraid not fine nor clean. My dear, you have lived a fairly sheltered life, and you don’t know all I know about the ways of the world today. But I can vouch for it that Dan Seavers is well started on the way to such a life as I just described, and I should never be willing to consent to his marrying my daughter, no, not even if he professed a thousand times to reform.”

Then Blythe came into the room and her father looked up. “Well, you did that in fairly good time. How did you come off?”

“Why, Daddy, I just told him I didn’t want to marry him, now or ever, and that was all. Of course he was pretty haughty and pretty mad, but he went away.”

“But didn’t you let him tell you all his lovely plans for the wedding?”

“Oh yes, Mother, he began before I was fairly seated, and he told everything, even to how the wedding invitations were to be worded and what kind of trousseau he wanted me to have. The next applicant won’t have very much to do to prepare,” and she gave a funny little wry smile. “That’s Dan all over. He always planned out everything for the whole crowd and
made
them do it, whether they wanted to or not. However, he’s good at that sort of thing, and if I had been in for a big show-off, he might have tempted me. But it all seems so vapid and utterly out of keeping with the times to get up a big showy wedding when a lot of the boys, our good friends, are across the seas somewhere, dying for our country. However, when he had finished and asked me if I didn’t think it was a lovely plan I said, yes, it would make a beautiful wedding. But that I did not want to be the bride, that he would always be my old friend and playmate, but marriage on those terms was impossible for me. I wished him well, said I was glad he had his commission and such fine prospects, and I hoped he would soon find the right girl to share it with him. And that made him
very
angry. So he said he had no doubt but that he would, and he made quick work of getting away.”

“Well, that’s good!” said her father. “And now, Blythe, I wish you’d go on and finish telling about that meeting you attended. I was interested to hear just what that Silverthorn speaker said.”

“Oh yes, Dad, I’d love to tell you.”

Then the mother rose.

“I do hope you’ll excuse me,” she said wearily. “This isn’t anything really important, and I feel I must get some rest if I am to go on with those convention plans tomorrow. Good night.”

O
n the high seas, Charlie Montgomery found himself at last, on his way to an enemy-infested land, going on a mission of extreme danger, every step of which was fraught with peril, and knowing that one false move would bring forfeit of his life, or worse.

Charlie himself did not know how his going had been arranged, nor by what various routes he was to travel, save that the final stage of his journey would be by plane. He would receive his last order before he set out for his final goal, and he did not yet know the exact location of that goal. But his real business, when located, would be to discover what was going on among the enemy, what was planned; and to send out alarms by well-planned and efficient means: by underground, by hidden radio in code, by trusted messenger, by any way that could get the information back to Allied lines in time to frustrate what the enemy had planned. Sooner or later, of course, he knew he would likely be discovered, and shot or imprisoned or buried in an internment camp to waste away, or maybe even be beheaded or tortured. But he had come, knowing all this, and ready to lay down his life for the great cause of freedom and righteousness, for putting down the tyrants, and setting oppressed peoples free. And he was going
now
in the strength of the Lord. For he firmly believed that God had called him to this work, and he was ready to sacrifice his life.

Two great joys he carried with him in his heart that gave him strength to go forward, unswerving, that gave him calmness, even peace in the midst of conflict and alien surroundings. One was the love of God and the nearness of Christ, his newfound Savior. The other was the knowledge that the sweet girl whom he had watched and loved from afar had given him her love and trust, and that if he were never able to come back to her in this life, they would surely meet in heaven, and she would understand through it all. On those two facts his soul rested hard and took comfort.

For it was not an easy task he had set himself, to go among men who did not believe as he did, whose sympathies, if they had any at all, were in opposition to all his opinions; yet he must act and be as one of them, in order to accomplish the purpose for which he had come.

Sometimes he stood on deck and looked off to sea, wondering if he would ever sail back again alive, and he thought of the girl he loved and what it would be like if he were free to go back to her and take her on a wonderful trip, seeing strange lands, exploring beautiful and wonderful places that both of them had studied about. Then something would grip his heart with an almost unbearable longing to take her in his arms again and set his lips upon hers.

And at other times he would stand on deck looking up at God’s stars. They were
God’s
stars even if he should happen to be looking at them from the deck of an enemy’s ship, and God was able to care for him there as if he were at home. God did love him. He believed it with all his heart, and he felt he could trust and not be afraid of anything that might come.

He spent much time studying his Bible, the Bible that Silverthorn had been delighted to give him before he left him. Much of it he could remember repeated by his mother’s gentle voice. But it had never meant anything personal to him before. Now, however, it was everything. It seemed to be the very air he breathed that made him live, the hope of life forever.

“What is it you find to read that seems to be so interesting?” asked a uniformed man pausing beside his deck chair as he sat reading one day.

Charlie looked up with a smile.

“Orders!” he said tersely.

“Orders?” asked the surprised officer. “Do you mean Naval Aviation orders? I never saw any bound that way before. May I see them?”

“No,” Charlie said. “Not Naval Aviation orders, Captain. It deals with still higher orders than Naval Aviation. These orders come straight from God.”

“From
God
?” asked the wondering captain, looking down at the small pliable book in his hands, admiring the feel of its binding, and turning the pages perplexedly. “But—isn’t this a Bible? Just where do you get orders from that? What does it order you to do? Do you mean you really find orders here? And are they at variance with Naval Aviation orders?”