Molly Brown of Kentucky.

by Nell Speed.

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 a.s.serts 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 ba.s.s. 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 sa.s.sy. 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 canva.s.ses. 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 pa.s.s 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 t.i.t 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 Mere 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.