Georgina's Service Stars

I made up my mind to say something like that to her, something to show her how fine I think it is for a woman of her age to put in such valiant licks in a vegetable garden when greater things are denied her. But when I went downstairs and found she had changed from her garden clothes into her immaculate gingham house dress, and was stepping around in the brisk, capable way that used to make me afraid of taking any liberties with her, I couldn't have made such a speech to her any more than I could have made it to the refrigerator. My first glance showed me she had lost her company flutter. I saw she would soon have me back in my old place of doing as I was bid and not questioning her authority, if I did not assert myself at once.

The chance came while we were at breakfast. A man came with a great lot of blueberries that she had ordered last week. Not expecting them so soon she had promised Belle to spend most of the day in Fishburn Court, because the nurse wanted to get off for a while. She was dreadfully put out about the berries, afraid they wouldn't keep. She was starting to carry them down cellar when I rose and took the pails away from her, and announced that I'd can the whole lot of them, myself.

Goodness knows I didn't want to. I was simply aching to get down to the beach and go for a long row, and look in on the neighbors long enough to say howdy to everybody. But having once said I'd do it and been flatly refused, I simply had to carry my point. I grabbed her by the elbows in a laughing sort of scuffle and sat her down hard in a chair, and told her to stay put. To my astonishment, she gave right up, but for a reason that completely took the wind out of my sails.

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "I suppose you do want to do your bit for Uncle Sam. It's about all a young thing like you can do, so I oughtn't to stand in your way if you feel that way about it."

Then I found out she has been canning and preserving everything she can get her hands on, as a patriotic measure, and she supposed that was my motive. It gave me a jolt to think that while I was saying: "Poor old thing, there's so little she can do," she was feeling the same pity for my youth and inefficiency.

Many a time I've helped put up fruit, but this was the first time I'd ever been allowed the whole responsibility. The minute she took herself off I began. Miss Susan was upstairs, starting to pack her trunk, so I had the kitchen all to myself. It is an attractive old kitchen, every tin silver-bright, and all in such perfect order that I could go to any nail or shelf in the dark, absolutely sure of finding on it the utensil it is expected to hold.

Just outside the screen door, on the back step, Captain Kidd lay with his head on his paws, watching every movement through his shaggy bangs. I think he is happy to have me at home again, but the house has been so quiet during my long absence, that my singing disconcerts him. He sleeps a lot now that he is such an old dog, and he couldn't take his usual nap while I was canning those berries. At Harrington Hall I never could let my voice out as I wanted to for fear of disturbing the public peace. Now with the whole downstairs to myself, I sang and sang, all the time I stirred and sweetened and weighed and screwed the tops on the long rows of waiting glass jars.

I was pretty hot by the time I came to the last kettleful. My hands were stained, and I had burned my wrist and spilled juice all down the front of my bungalow apron. But the end was in sight, and I swung into the tune of "Tipperary" as the soldiers sometimes do on the last lap of a long march. All of a sudden, Captain Kidd, who had been drowsing for awhile, lifted his head with such an alert air that I stopped singing to listen, too. He seldom shows excitement now. Then with an eager little yelp that was half bark, half whine, he bounded off the step and tore around the house like a crazy thing.

That cry meant but one thing. It had never meant anything else since he was a puppy. Richard was coming.

He always heralded him that way. If I had had any doubt of that first little cry of announcement there could be none about the fury of barking which followed. That ecstasy of greeting was reserved for one person alone. It couldn't be any one but Richard.

A figure in khaki strode past the window, the dog leaping up on him and almost turning somersaults in his efforts to lick his face. Then splash went the ladle into the kettle (I had been holding it suspended in my surprise), and the juice splashed all over the stove. The next instant Richard was in the kitchen, both hands outstretched to grasp mine, and we were looking questioningly into each others eyes. It was a long gaze, for we were each frankly curious to see if the other had changed.

Barby was right. The two years had, made a man of him. He was larger in every way, and in his lieutenant's uniform looked every inch a soldier. He spoke first, smiling broadly.

"The same old girl, only taller than Barby now!"

"The same old Dare-devil Dick!" I retorted, "only – " I started to add "so tremendously good-looking in that uniform," but instead just laughed, as I drew my hands away.

"Only what?" he persisted in his old teasing fashion. But I wouldn't tell, and there we were, right back again on our old squabbling grounds, just where we left off two years ago.

CHAPTER XVII

BACK WITH THE OLD CROWD

Richard couldn't stay a minute, he said. It wasn't treating his Cousin James decently to throw his bag in at the door and rush off up here before he'd barely spoken to him. But he never felt that he'd really reached home till he'd been up here, and he couldn't wait to tell Barby about his good luck.

He was dreadfully disappointed to find that she wasn't at home. He wouldn't sit down at first, just perched on the edge of the table, regardless of what the spattered blueberry juice might do to his new uniform, and hastily outlined his plans. He was so happy over the prospect of getting into active service that will count for a lot, that he couldn't talk fast enough. We both had so much to say, not having seen each other for two years, that first thing we knew the telephone rang, and it was his Cousin James saying that dinner was ready, and would he please come on. And here we'd been talking an hour and ten minutes by the clock, when all the time he "didn't have a minute to stay," and was in such a rush to be off that he couldn't sit down except on the edge of the table. He couldn't help laughing at himself, it was so absurd.

Thinking about it after he'd gone, I was sure from the keen way he kept glancing at me that he did find me changed, after all. His recollection of me didn't fit the real me, any more than my last season's dresses do. He had to keep letting out seams and making allowance for my mental growth, as I had to for his. That's why neither of us noticed how time flew. We were so busy sort of exploring each other. That's why I found myself looking forward with such interest to his coming back after supper. It's like going back to a house you've known all your life, whose every nook and corner is familiar, and finding it done over and enlarged. You enjoy exploring it, to find what's left unchanged and what's been added.

Miss Susan and I had a cold lunch together. Then it took me half the afternoon to put the kitchen back into its original order and get the blueberry stains off my fingernails. Tippy was pleased with the way she found things when she came back, though she wouldn't have complimented my achievement for worlds. But I know her silences now, which ones are approving and which displeased. I know I went up several pegs in her respect. I heard her intimating as much to Miss Susan.

I wasn't out on the front porch with them when Richard came back after supper. A few minutes before he came I suddenly decided to change my dress – to put on a new one that Barby bought me the last day I was in Washington. It's a little love of a gown, white and rose-color. I'd never worn it before, so it took some time to locate all the hooks and snappers and get them fastened properly. Richard came before I was half through. I could hear quite plainly what he was saying to Tippy and Miss Susan, down on the front porch.

After I was all ready to go down, I went to the mirror for one more look. There was no doubt about it. It was the most becoming dress I ever owned, so pretty and unusual, in fact, that I dreaded to face Tippy in it. She'd wonder why I put it on just to sit at home all evening, when the one I changed from was perfectly fresh. Too often she does her wondering aloud, and it's embarrassing. I was thankful they were sitting out on the porch. The rose vines darkened it, although the world outside was flooded with brilliant moonlight. She wouldn't be so apt to notice out there.

Just as I put out the lamp and started towards the stairs, I heard Tippy say something about moving into the house because the night air was bad for her rheumatism. I didn't want to meet her in the full glare of the hall chandelier, so I waited on the upper landing long enough to give them time to go in. But Richard was slow about following them, and when I was half way down the stair he was only as far as the newel post. Glancing up, he saw me and stopped. I knew without his saying a word that he liked my dress. His eyes said it. He has wonderfully expressive eyes.

It was nice to feel that I was making what theatrical people call an effective stage entrance. Quoting from a play we had been in together a long time ago, I held my head high in the haughty-princess manner and said airily, "Hath waited long, my lord?"

He remembered the spirit of the reply if not the right words, and made up an answer that would have done credit to Sir Walter Raleigh for courtliness. We swept into the room, carrying on in a ridiculous stagey fashion for a moment or two, not giving Tippy a chance to comment on my dress. I saw her looking at it hard, but before she could get in a word edgeways, Richard asked me to go over to the Gilfreds' with him. He met Judith on the way up here and she asked him to bring me over. She said some others of the old crowd would be there.

George Woodson was already there, sitting in the hammock as usual, but with Judith's guitar on his knees, instead of the ukelele that he used to tinkle. We could hear him tuning it as we went up the path. After we had been there a few minutes Babe and Watson strolled in. Evidently they had had some sort of a quarrel. The effect was to make Watson unmistakably grouchy and Babe sarcastic. It was so noticeable that George said to me in an aside, "Babe is singing in sharps to-night, and Watty's gone completely off the key."

We'd been away so long that naturally our first wish was to find out where everybody was and what they were doing. The conversation was such for awhile that Watson was decidedly out of it. He doesn't know many Provincetown people, having been here only a few times on visits to the Nelsons, and now they're gone he is staying at the Gifford House, where everybody's strange. So he sat in one end of the porch swing, smoking. Sat in the kind of a silence that makes itself felt for the radius of half a mile.

Nearly everybody brought up for discussion was away at some training camp or flying school, or getting ready for naval service. Naturally that cast a gloom on George's spirits, as he is always cursing his lot whenever he sees any one in khaki, because he feels left out of the game. I was feeling a bit gloomy myself because of the damper they cast, when in the midst of the questions about other people, Richard suddenly turned to Judith to ask about Esther.

"By the way, Judith, where is that fascinating little flirt of a cousin of yours?"

It was the first time I had heard him speak her name since she left, two years ago. For him to be able to refer to her as naturally as that, just as he would to any other human being, certainly took a load off my mind. Whenever I thought of these two in connection with each other, I've been afraid that the jolt she gave him had shaken his faith in some things. But evidently the old wound had healed without a scar. There was nothing but plain, ordinary curiosity in the questions he asked, when Judith answered that Esther was married last winter. She married Claude Millins, the man she's been engaged to off and on ever since she was a kid.

Judith went down to the wedding. She said it was a brilliant affair. They started out with a rosy future ahead of them, but it was like that old missionary hymn, "Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." They've been having a perfectly heathenish time ever since the war threw a bomb into their domestic relations. Claude is crazy about Esther, but he isn't crazy about enlisting. He is a pacifist. She had forty-one relatives in the Civil War on the Confederate side. Over half of them were killed in the battle of Chicamaugua, and she's ashamed of having a husband who's a slacker. She wants him to be a hero. He said wasn't it "better to be a live dog than a dead lion?" and she said in that honey-sweet way of hers, "a yellow dog?"

"Gee!" said Watson suddenly, for the first time breaking into the conversation. "Did they quarrel that way before they were married?"

Judith said, "Evidently. She always spoke of it as an off and on engagement."

"Well," said Richard reminiscently, "she certainly had me going some, but after all, I don't know which she hit the hardest, old George here, or myself."

"Or John Wynne," spoke up Babe, who was in the other end of the swing. "What's become of that good-looking doctor?"

Richard was the only one who could answer that question. By the queerest coincidence they had met in a hotel lobby in Boston, and had lunched together afterward. The doctor will soon be in France. He's to take the place of a Harvard classmate of his, who was killed recently when the Ambulance Corps he was serving with was nearly wiped out.

Babe said she wondered that he hadn't gone over long before. She expected him to right after Esther broke up his life the way she did. She imagined he'd be like Francesco, in the story of Ginevra – "Francesco, weary of his life, flew to Venice, and embarking, threw it away in battle with the Turks."

"He isn't that kind of a man, Babe," said Richard. "You haven't got his right measure. He's too big and too fine to fling his life away for a little personal grievance. It's not morbid sentiment but a matter of principle that's taking him over. He asked for the place he's getting, because he thinks it's unattached men like himself who ought to fill them. Neither he nor I have any next of kin left now, who are near enough to worry over us or to mourn very long if we don't get back."

It did me a world of good to hear Richard speak of that affair as "a little personal grievance." Evidently it didn't hurt him in the least to recall Esther and the incidents of that summer. Under cover of some anecdote that George began telling, Richard said in an aside to me, "You remember that story Miss Crewes told us about him, Georgina – his doing the deed for the deed's sake. He's just like that all the way through, keeping himself so modestly in the background that he never gets the appreciation that is his rightful due."

It seems so nice to have a little secret like that Sir Gareth story with Richard. I can't explain just what it is, but I love the way he turns to me when he puts an intimate little parenthesis like that into the general conversation, just for me.

Presently Judith mentioned Miss Crewes, and then Richard remembered to tell us what Doctor Wynne told him about her. He had news of her death recently. Two years of nursing at the front was too much for her. She died from exposure and overwork, and it was no wonder she went to pieces as she did, witnessing so much German frightfulness. She was in one of the hospitals that they bombed.

Judith shivered and put her hands over her ears an instant. "Somehow we keep getting back to those awful subjects no matter what we talk about," she said. "And George has been strumming nothing but minors on that guitar ever since he picked it up. For goodness' sake, strike up something to make us forget such horrors – something more befitting such a glorious night."

It was a glorious night. The Gilfred place runs right down to the water. By this time the moon was high overhead, flooding the porch steps with such a bright light one could almost see to read by it.

We did read by it presently, when Lowry Gilfred came spinning up on his bicycle. He always goes downtown the minute he hears the night train whistling for the bridge, and brings up the Boston and New York papers. He held one up. The headlines were so big and black we could read them easily several feet away.

"More atrocities by the Huns. Inhuman U-boat commander fires on life-boats escaping from torpedoed vessel."

"Well, Moreland," said Watson, "that's what we'll be coming up against in a week or two." His face was turned towards Richard as he spoke, but I saw him glance at Babe out of the corner of his eye to see how she took his remark.

Richard answered cheerfully that he looked on the prospect the same way that old "Horatius at the bridge" did. "To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late," and as long as he had to die some time, he'd rather go in a good cause than linger to a doddering old age, or be killed inch at a time by the germs that get you even when you do watch out.

He was sitting on the porch railing with his back against one of the white pillars, and the moon shone full on his upturned face. Remarking something about the way he used to spout Horatius on Friday afternoons, when he was a kid at school, he went on repeating from it. The expression on his face must have been the one Barby spoke of when she said he reminded her of his father in his inspired moments. He said it in a low, intense voice, as if he were speaking to himself, and thrilled with the deep meaning of it:

"And how can men die better than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods?"