Molly Brown's College Friends

“Of course we are willing!” cried Lilian.

“The ones who live far can take the first part of the summer, and the last, just before college opens, and the ones who are close can fill in during the midsummer,” said Molly, immediately grasping the possibility of the plan.

“Well, I’ll leave it to you young ladies to work up, and when you care to, I’ll take you over the place. There is a good house and well and plenty of fruit, – apples to feed to the hogs – ”

“That suits me!” declared Edwin, who had been quiet while his cousin was unfolding the plan. “I see no reason, seriously, why this idea should not be wonderfully successful, – not only should it bring you back to college and keep you for the same, or even less, money than you have hitherto had to pay, but it will at the same time help materially in the food situation that the country is going to have to face.”

“Will you be one of that committee that must take hold of this thing?” asked Billie.

“If the student body so wishes!”

“Well, we so wish!” came from twenty throats.

“You and Mrs. Green, – she is already one of us. As for you, Major Fern, we hardly know how to thank you for what you have done,” said the president of the juniors.

“Don’t thank me! I have done nothing! Instead of selling a farm at a loss when I can’t get labor to work it, I am going to ask some beautiful young ladies to work it for me.”

“We might drink him down,” whispered a timid girl.

“Of course! Drink him down!”

And without more ado the twenty girls, with Molly chiming in and Edwin holding down a second, sang:

“Here’s to Major Fern! Drink him down!
Here’s to Major Fern! Drink him down!
Here’s to Major Fern! Here’s to Major Fern!
Drink him down! Drink him down! Drink him down!”

“Fine! That beats a wreath of bay,” beamed the dear old gentleman. “And now I’ll take myself off. I forgot to say I’ll have the land turned under for you and give the use of a team whenever you need it.”

He was gone. The girls, who only a few moments before had felt so depressed, were now filled with hope and animation. Degrees were to be had, after all. Of course it meant work, but that would be fun.

“Oh, gee! I’m happy!” cried Mary Culbertson. “But we must get busy in a hurry.”

“First we must see Prexy and get her to coöperate,” suggested Molly.

“Sure! Let’s do it in order, and find out if we do our part if the college authorities will do theirs. I dote on digging potatoes, myself,” said Lilian.

Committees were formed immediately; one to see Prexy; one to go view their estate; another to look into housing conditions; another to canvas the student body and find out who would and who wouldn’t, who preferred to plant and who to reap.

Billie McKym was wild with enthusiasm. “Do you realize, Molly, that I won’t have to spend a summer in Newport, after all? I can put it up to my relations that I am needed in these parts. I mean to ask for a larger allowance, though, as I can help out some on the sly. I am thinking about buying some Close-to-Nature houses and presenting them to the agricultural club. We shall have to have overalls, too, – and farming implements. – I think I’ll make Grandmother and Uncle come across in good shape.”

Prexy, Miss Walker, was not only willing to coöperate but delighted that the students were finding a way out of the difficulty. It was a deep grief to her, this raising of prices, and she knew only too well how many girls would be cut out of their degrees by this necessary step.

Many interviews with Major Fern had to be arranged and many meetings of committees had to be held, but finally everything was under way for the agricultural club’s work on the farm so kindly donated by its delighted owner.

“By Jove, I begin to feel that I’m helping to win the war!” he declared. “I have been hating myself for a useless hulk of a veteran who was too old to fight and too old-fashioned to suggest to others how to fight, but if I can be the means of keeping a lot of girls at college I think I am doing pretty well; especially if by so doing, those girls will grow food enough for themselves. Every potato is equal to a hand grenade and every bean to a bullet.”

CHAPTER XXIV

THE TRENCHES

Molly and Edwin found themselves deeper in this agricultural scheme than they had at first bargained for. If it was to be done at all, it must be well done and quickly. There must be order and system. Suddenly they awoke to the realization that if it was to be well done and quickly done, it was up to them, the Greens, to do it.

“I am afraid, my dear, that you must be the chaperone and I must turn farmer. This is a stupendous undertaking and for the good name of Wellington we must see it through.”

“It will mean work all summer for you, when you so need a holiday, you poor old fellow.”

“I need no more holiday than you do. You haven’t been idle one minute this whole college year. I have a feeling that this summer we have no business with holidays anyhow. The world is too busy, too upset for any of us, who are able, to lay off. I mean to dig and delve here at home and do all the good I can.”

“I think we ought to rent the Orchard Home for the summer, don’t you?” asked Molly, turning her head away so her husband could not see what it cost her to make that suggestion.

“Why, Molly honey, I can’t bear to think of it. It is hard enough on you not to be able to go to Kentucky for vacation, but I don’t think you should have to think of strangers as being among your apple trees.”

“It won’t be bad, not nearly so bad as you think. At least, the little brown bungalow won’t be quite so lonesome as it would be empty all the year, and we might buy tons of seed with the rent money or even take care of some war orphans.”

“I guess you are right, – you usually are. I’ll write to a real estate agent in Louisville immediately and put it on the market for the summer. I hate to do it, though. Not that it will make so much difference to me. Wherever you are is my Orchard Home, honey!”

The Major’s farm was dubbed “The Trenches” by the members of the agricultural club. It was a suitable name, for these girls felt that they were in the war almost as much as the soldier boys themselves.

Early in May Molly moved to the old farmhouse to superintend arrangements for the many girls later to be housed there. It was decided to run the place more or less as a military camp is run, with squads detailed for various duties.

“Only our trench digging will be in the potato fields and our drilling in the bean patch,” Billie declared.

Billie was in a state of ecstasy from the first. She was General Molly’s aide-de-camp, giving time, money, and thought to the undertaking.

“It is so splendid really to be helping! I wanted to do something to help the Government and now I believe I am going to. I should like best to shoulder a gun and take a crack at the Huns, but since that cannot be, I’ll shoulder a pick and take a crack at the soil.”

Billie, whose post-graduate studies at Wellington were not very important, had cut and gone to The Trenches with Molly. They had installed themselves in a corner of the rambling old farmhouse and were as busy as bees getting ready for the thirty girls who were to land on them the last week in May. Katy and the two children were with them, but Kizzie had been left in Wellington to look after the master, who was up to his neck in work for the finals at college.

The students at Wellington had been canvassed from A to Z, and with a deal of clerical work, all of the ones who were to join the agricultural club had been enrolled and their time of service settled on and arranged for. Billie had donated six Close-to-Nature houses which were to be set up on the grassy lawn of the old farm. The cots she had wheedled out or her uncle. Farming implements, such as hoes, rakes, spades, gasoline ploughs and cultivators she had, as she expressed it, “blasted out of Grandmother McKym.”

“They don’t understand me in the least, my uncle and my grandmother, but they love me, I really believe, and I fancy they always hope I’ll come to my senses and marry in ‘the set’ some of these days. They are really dears,” Billie explained to Molly as they helped to unload the wagons that had just arrived laden with the tents and implements.

“I think they are certainly very generous,” declared Molly, pulling out a bundle of rakes.

From the beginning these girls had determined not to be dependent upon the merely masculine to fetch and carry for them, and Molly and Billie had pitched in with a will to do without men if need be.

“Oh, yes, generous enough! They are glad when I let them off with nothing more troublesome than writing checks. I believe Uncle Donald was scared stiff that I might insist on his coming down here to help dig. And as for Grandmother, – she would rather ante up thousands of dollars than have to drag her silk skirts around in the wet grass here at The Trenches. They don’t see for an instant that I am kind of patriotic in helping this way. They think I am just a faddist. Maybe I am, but somehow I feel that I have ideals! Do you think I am just a silly goose to think so?”

“No, indeed! I know you have ideals, – I should hate to think you didn’t, – very high ideals,” said Molly, as together they wheeled the barrow laden with hoes and rakes out to the tool house. “I reckon your uncle and grandmother have them, too, only perhaps they are not so open about them.”

“Oh yes, they have them. Uncle Donald loves to talk about them, but Grandmother isn’t so keen on expressing herself. Sometimes I think his ideals are mostly literary and hers sartorial. He is a great reader of belles lettres and Grandmother has an instinct for clothes that is truly remarkable.”

“You have it, too.”

“Well, I do like ’em, but I like to dress other persons better than I do myself. If I had been poor, I’d have gone into the business. I may do it yet, but now until this war is over it seems to me it doesn’t make a bit of difference how anyone is dressed – anybody but Mother Earth. The soil dressed with a good fertilizer is more important than silk raiment.”