



Produced by Al Haines









[Illustration: Cover art]





[Frontispiece: "We're All That's Left of the Charles Darlington Post."
See page 19.]





COMRADES


BY

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS



ILLUSTRATED BY

HOWARD E. SMITH




HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

M. C. M. X. I




COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HARPER & BROTHERS


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1911




ILLUSTRATIONS


"We're All That's Left of the Charles Darlington
  Post"...... Frontispiece

"Folks Don't Amount to Anything.  It's You, Peter"

She Thought of the Slow News of the Slaughtering Battles




COMRADES


In the late May evening the soul of summer had gone suddenly incarnate,
but the old man, indifferent and petulant, thrashed upon his bed.  He
was not used to being ill, and found no consolations in weather.
Flowers regarded him observantly--one might have said critically--from
the tables, the bureau, the window-sills: tulips, fleurs-de-lis,
<DW29>s, peonies, and late lilacs, for he had a garden-loving wife who
made the most of "the dull season," after crocuses and daffodils, and
before roses.  But he manifested no interest in flowers; less than
usual, it must be owned, in Patience, his wife.  This was a marked
incident.  They had lived together fifty years, and she had acquired
her share of the lessons of marriage, but not that ruder one given
chiefly to women to learn--she had never found herself a negligible
quantity in her husband's life.  She had the profound maternal instinct
which is so large an element in the love of every experienced and
tender wife; and when Reuben thrashed profanely upon his pillows,
staring out of the window above the vase of jonquils, without looking
at her, clearly without thinking of her, she swallowed her surprise as
if it had been a blue-pill, and tolerantly thought:

"Poor boy!  To be a veteran and can't go!"

Her poor boy, being one-and-eighty, and having always had health and
her, took his disappointment like a boy.  He felt more outraged that he
could not march with the other boys to decorate the graves to-morrow
than he had been, or had felt that he was, by some of the important
troubles of his long and, on the whole, comfortable life.  He took it
unreasonably; she could not deny that.  But she went on saying "Poor
boy!" as she usually did when he was unreasonable.  When he stopped
thrashing and swore no more she smiled at him brilliantly.  He had not
said anything worse than damn!  But he was a good Baptist, and the
lapse was memorable.

"Peter?" he said.  "Just h'ist the curtain a mite, won't you?  I want
to see across over to the shop.  Has young Jabez locked up everything?
Somebody's got to make sure."

Behind the carpenter's shop the lush tobacco-fields of the Connecticut
valley were springing healthily.  "There ain't as good a crop as there
gener'lly is," the old man fretted.

"Don't you think so?" replied Patience.  "Everybody say it's better.
But you ought to know."

In the youth and vigor of her no woman was ever more misnamed.  Patient
she was not, nor gentle, nor adaptable to the teeth in the saw of life.
Like wincing wood, her nature had resented it, the whole biting thing.
All her gentleness was acquired, and acquired hard.  She had fought
like a man to endure like a woman, to accept, not to writhe and rebel.
She had not learned easily how to count herself out.  Something in the
sentimentality or even the piety of her name had always seemed to her
ridiculous; they both used to have their fun at its expense; for some
years he called her Impatience, degenerating into Imp if he felt like
it.  When Reuben took to calling her Peter, she found it rather a
relief.

"You'll have to go without me," he said, crossly.

"I'd rather stay with you," she urged.  "I'm not a veteran."

"Who'd decorate Tommy, then?" demanded the old man.  "You wouldn't give
Tommy the go-by, would you?"

"I never did--did I?" returned the wife, slowly.

"I don't know's you did," replied Reuben Oak, after some difficult
reflection.

Patience did not talk about Tommy.  But she had lived Tommy, so she
felt, all her married life, ever since she took him, the year-old baby
of a year-dead first wife who had made Reuben artistically miserable;
not that Patience thought in this adjective; it was