Georgina's Service Stars Part 12

It is so thrilling to meet them and so interesting to hear intimate bits of their family history afterward. People she hasn't heard of in years are constantly turning up, brought to Washington by the war. Only this morning, a Major whom she thought was out among the "head-hunters"

dropped in and stayed to lunch.

We have spent the greater part of every day sight-seeing. Not the usual places like Mount Vernon and the Smithsonian, etc. We've been doing them for the last two years in school excursions with the teachers. But places that have taken on unusual interest because of these stirring war times. We went over to Fort Meyer in time for "Retreat" one afternoon, and again to see the trench-digging and the dummies being put up for bayonet practice. And we spent hours at the Wadsworth House, a palace of a home which has been turned over to relief work. There is where Barby spends most of her time. I was so thrilled when I found her there at a desk, directing things in her department, and looking so lovely in her uniform, white with a band around her sleeve, and a blue veil floating over her shoulders, bound on the forehead by a white band and a red cross.

Two retired Admirals in their shirt sleeves were filling huge packing boxes in one of the side rooms. They give their services, working like Trojans all day long. Upstairs in the great dismantled ballroom, and the apartments adjoining, were long tables surrounded by the women working on surgical dressings and hospital garments and comfort kits.

Downstairs, near the entrance, was the desk of the Motor Service Corps.

A pretty society girl in a stunning uniform came in while we stood there, saluted her superior officer, received her orders and started out to drive her machine on some Red Cross errand, with all the neatness and dispatch of a regular enlisted soldier. That's what I'd love to do, if I only had a machine of my own. She looked too adorable for words in that uniform.

One afternoon we went out to see the President receive the Sanitary Corps of a thousand men trained to carry litters. A temporary platform gay with bunting and flags was erected on the edge of the green where the President and his guests of honor sat. Barby was one of them in her floating blue veil, on account of the position she holds now. We parked the machine and sat down tailor-fashion on the gra.s.s in the front row of the crowd, which pressed against the rope that barred our entrance to the mall.

After awhile there was a sound of music down the street, and the marine band came marching across the great field towards us, at the head of the litter-bearers. It was a sunny afternoon, and the band played a gay marching tune as they advanced. I was feeling so uplifted over Barby's being on the grandstand among the honor guests, looking her prettiest, that I didn't realize the significance of the scene at first. Then the thought stabbed me like a knife, that on every one of those litters somebody's best beloved might some day be stretched, desperately wounded maybe, dead or dying. I couldn't help thinking "suppose I should see Father brought in that way, or Richard." When I glanced across at Babe the tears were running down her cheeks, so it evidently affected her the same way.

I'd have been willing to wager she was seeing Watson on one of those stretchers. When we got back to our room, which is a large one with twin beds in it, she dived under hers and pulled out the big florist's box and carried it to the bathroom to sprinkle the flowers. It's wonderful how fresh the thing has kept. She's had it nearly a week. She treats it like a mother would an idiot child, keeps it out of sight of the public, but hangs over it when alone with a tenderness that is positively touching.

Babe's the funniest thing! Every time the hall door opens she is out and up the little stairway to the roof, like a cat. It is a nice place to go, for there is a magnificent view of the city from there, and at night it's entrancing, with the Monument illuminated, and the great dome showing up when the searchlights play. But I don't believe it's the view Babe is after. She wants to be alone. Twice when I went up after her to tell her it was time to start somewhere, I found her sitting staring at a rubber plant in front of her, as if she didn't see even that. And once she was leaning against the iron railing which surrounds the roof, oblivious to the fact that that section of it was rusty. It simply ruined her best evening dress, a delicate blue veiling made over white silk. When we got downstairs to the light there were great streaks of iron rust across the whole front, where the bars had pressed against it.

Sat.u.r.day night Mrs. Waldon had a long-distance call from her cousin, Mac Gordon. His ship was in from the long cruise, and the boys were scattering to their homes for a short visit before being sent to join the fleet abroad. He wanted to know if he could stop by next day to see her, on his way home. She told him to come and welcome, and bring any of the other boys who cared to come. That Babe and I were with her.

Well, Sunday afternoon when Mac walked in there was a whole string of boys behind him; Bob Mayfield and Billy Burrell and Watty Tucker. Only four in all by actual count, but added to the six already in the room, the little apartment seemed brim full and running over. Two of her old army cronies were there besides Barby.

I wondered what Mrs. Waldon was going to do about feeding them all, because the cook is always away on Sunday night. But when the time came she simply announced they'd serve supper in the time-honored Crabtown fashion. At that the men all got up and crowded out into the little kitchenette to see what she had on her "emergency shelf" and to announce what part each one would be responsible for on the menu.

When we were ready to sit down to the table we noticed that Babe and Watson were missing, and when I tried to recall when I had seen them last, I was sure they had slipped away during the general exodus to the kitchen. And I am sure that when I ran up the steps to the roof garden with the announcement, "The rarebit is ready," neither one of them was a bit grateful to me.

I was sorry Duffield Locke wasn't with the boys. His family met him in New York and they went on to New York together. Bob Mayfield tried to tease me about him. He said Duff had my picture in the back of his watch. When I hotly denied it, and vowed I had never given him one, except a little snapshot taken with Lillian of just our heads, he said, "Well, Duff had a pair of scissors."

After we went to our room that night, late as it was, Babe re-packed her trunk and deliberately squeezed all her hats into one compartment, thereby ruining two of them for life, to make room in the tray for that florist box. The flowers were badly shriveled up by that time. Seeing from my face that an explanation was necessary, she said she couldn't carry it back on the train as she had intended, because Watson was going up to Provincetown the same time we were, to visit his cousins, the Nelsons, and she didn't want him to see it.

"But the Nelsons aren't in Provincetown this summer," I answered. "And he knows it, because I told him what Laura said in her last letter.

Besides, why shouldn't he see his own floral offering? He'd be complimented to think you cared enough for it to lug it all the way home."

She seemed a bit confused at my answer, but I couldn't tell at which part of it. Then she said that he didn't pick it out. He thinks he sent roses, and he'd have a fit if he knew it was that awful Gates Ajar. He sent his card to some old relative in Georgetown with a check and asked him to order something appropriate for the occasion.

I asked Babe then, why, if the design wasn't Watty's choice, and she thought it was so dreadful, _why_ did she cling to it so fondly, and take it back to the Cape at the risk of all her hats and the sure ruin of two of them. But she paid no attention to my remark, just went on with her packing. I know she's relieved to find out it wasn't Watty's taste. If they are not actually engaged, they have almost reached the gate, and it _is_ ajar.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XVI

HOME-COMINGS

I MIGHT as well have traveled alone, for all the company Babe and Watson proved to be. They were so absorbed in their conversation with each other that they never once glanced out of the window, even when we were going along the Cape where one is apt to see a familiar face every time the train stops.

I was so glad to get back to familiar scenes like cranberry bogs and dunes and marshes, with the pools of water shining in them like mirrors, that I kept exclaiming, "Oh, look!" I said it several times before I realized that the landscape had no attractions for them. Neither had the stuffy car any discomforts, although the hot July sunshine streamed in across the red velvet upholstery.

With their chairs swung facing each other, they sat and talked like two Robinson Crusoes who had just found each other after aeons of solitude on separate islands. For a while I watched them over the top of my magazine; Watson mopping his shiny red face with his handkerchief, and Babe with her hat tilted crooked over one eye and a little wisp of hair straggling over her neck, and her collar all rumpled up behind. I kept wondering what on earth was the attraction that each had for the other.

One can understand it when the heroine is beautiful and the hero fascinating, but how two such plain, average people as Babe Nolan and Watson Tucker can inspire the grand pa.s.sion is a puzzle.

I couldn't help smiling to myself when I looked back on the time when I had once imagined Watson to be the most congenial man I ever met. I was heartily glad that our acquaintance had been interrupted at that point, until I grew older and wiser. Suppose I had gone on looking at him through the prism of my ideals until I actually believed that the halo which my imagination put around him was a real one! What a little fool a girl of fifteen can be! It seems to me I have aged more in this last year at school, than in all the years that went before it put together.

Only a few more days until I can count myself actually grown up--till I have reached that magic milestone, my eighteenth birthday!

Growing up is like the dawning of Spring. For a long time there are just a few twitters, a hint of buds in the hedgerows. Then, suddenly as an April shower, a mist of green drops down over the bare branches like a delicate veil, and one awakens to a world of bloom and birdsong and romance.

(That's a good paragraph to start a story with. I'll put an asterisk on the margin to mark it.)

I had expected to awaken to my Springtime and romance this very summer--to find it perhaps, in Kentucky. Barby and I have planned for years that my eighteenth birthday should be spent there. The very word, Kentucky, suggests romance to me. But now that the war has upset everyone's plans, I'll have to give it up. And Romance is not likely to come riding by to such a gray old fishing port as Provincetown.

This is what I told myself as we went along between the cranberry bogs and the dunes. But suddenly we made a turn that showed us the entire end of the Cape. There, with the sunset light upon it, was the town, curving around the harbor like a golden dream city, rising above a "sea of gla.s.s mingled with fire." Spires and towers and chimney tops, with the great shaft of the Pilgrims high above them all, stood transfigured in that wonderful shining. I took it as an omen--a good omen of all sorts of delightful and unexpected happenings that might come to me.

When we reached the station, I had two completely separate and distinct impulses, which made me afraid that I still lack considerable of being grown up. The first fishy smell of the harbor which greeted me, with its tang of brine and tar, gave me the impulse to send my suitcase up to the house by the baggage man, and run all the way home. I wanted to go skipping along the streets as I used to when my skirts were knee high and my curls bobbing over my shoulders. I wanted to speak to everyone I met and have everyone call back at me, "h.e.l.lo, Georgina," in friendly village fashion. I wanted to smell what was cooking for supper in every house I pa.s.sed, and maybe if the baker's cart came along with its inviting step in the rear, "hang on behind" for a block or two.

The second impulse was to powder my nose a trifle, put on a little face veil and a pair of perfectly fitting gloves, and then when the panel mirror between the car windows showed a modish and tailor-made young lady, correct in every detail, step into the bus and drive home to make an impression on Tippy.

The latter impulse dominated, and I am glad it did, for Judith and George Woodson and several others of the old crowd were at the station to meet us. Babe hadn't even set her hat straight, but she didn't know it. Neither did Watson. They just went along, smiling vacuously (I guess that's as good a word as any, though I'm not exactly sure of it) on everything and everybody.

It seemed so strange to come home to a house with no Barby in it, but it was such a satisfaction to feel that my arrival put Tippy into her little company flutter. It was the face veil which did it, I am sure, and the urban air which I acquired in Washington. I am taller than she, now, and I had to stoop a little to kiss her. Instead of her saying, as I expected, for me to run along and take my things off, because supper was getting cold, she led the way upstairs to my room, just as if I'd been the visiting missionary's wife, or relatives from out of the state.

And she went around setting things straighter, which were already straight, and asking if there was anything I'd have to make me comfortable, till I hardly knew myself, her making such company out of me.

Miss Susan Triplett has been here ever since Barby went to Washington, but she's going home soon, now that I have come back. Between them I got all the news of the town during supper. Aunt Elspeth is very, very ill.

They're afraid she can't last long at this rate. They have a trained nurse for her and Belle has to spend so much of her time over there that Tippy has been taking care of little Elspeth and Judson in the daytime.

t.i.tcomb Carver and Sammy III have both enlisted, and the two Fayal boys, Manuel and Joseph, are in the Navy. Nearly everyone I asked about was in some kind of government service. Tippy says the Portuguese boys have responded splendidly, and she keeps tab on the whole town. But she said it is a tragedy about George Woodson. He's tried four times to enlist, but he can't pa.s.s the physical examination. His sight is imperfect and the old trouble with his knee that he got from a football accident in his Junior year bars him out. Tippy never liked George. He was impudent to her one time, years ago. Ran his tongue out at her when she told him to quit doing something that she thought he had no business to do, and she never forgave him. But now she respects him so much for the desperate way he has tried to get into the service, and is so sorry for his disappointment, that she can't say nice enough things about him.

It was late when the expressman brought my trunk. Miss Susan had already gone upstairs and was putting up her front hair in crimping pins. But Tippy never made any objections when I started to unpack. I simply can't get used to being treated with so much deference. It's worth growing up just to have her listen so respectfully to my opinions and to know that she feels that my advice is worth asking for.

I only unpacked the top tray to get some things Barby and I had bought for her in the Washington shops, and to take out something she was even more interested in than her gifts. It was a little silk service flag to hang up in honor of Father. She took it in her hands as if it were sacred. I never saw her so moved to admiration over anything, as she was over that little blue star in its field of white with the red border around it.

Her voice didn't sound natural, because there was a queer sort of choke in it when she said: "I never before wanted to be a man. But I do now, just for the chance to be what that star stands for."

I had intended to wait till morning before hanging it in the front window, but she had a hammer and a push-pin out of a box in the hall closet before I knew what she was looking for, and carried the lamp ahead of me down the stairs. "Liberty enlightening the World," I called it, as she stood holding the lamp up for me to see, while I drove the push-pin into the window sash.

But she didn't laugh with me. It was a solemn thing to her, this placing of the symbol which showed the world that a patriot had gone out from the house in defence of his country. Although she's a thin, gaunt figure with her hair twisted into a hard little knot on the back of her head, and there's nothing statuesque about a black silk dress gathered full at the waist, and a ruffled white ap.r.o.n, her waiting att.i.tude seemed to dignify the occasion and make a ceremony of it. I started to say something, jokingly, about firing a salute with our ancestral musket, or singing "America," but the expression on her face stopped me. The spirit of some old Revolutionary forbear seemed shining in her eyes. I hadn't dreamed that Patriotism meant _that_ to Tippy; something exalted enough to transform her homely old features with a kind of inner shining.

Something wakened me very early next morning, soon after daybreak.

Sitting up to look out of the window nearest my bed, I saw somebody hoeing in the garden. A Portuguese woman I supposed, who was taking the place of the regular gardener. Ever since old Jeremy Clapp reached his nineties, we've had his nephew, young Jeremy. But they told me the night before, that he's gone to be a surfman in the U. S. Coast patrol. It was especially hard to give him up as the war garden he had just put in was twice the size we usually have.

Then I recognized the flapping old sport hat which the woman wore. It was one which I discarded last year. Underneath it, her skirts tucked up to her shoe-tops to avoid the heavy dew, was Tippy, hoeing weeds as if she were making a personal attack on the Hindenburg line and intended demolishing it before breakfast.

Funny as she looked in her scare-crow working outfit, there was something in the sight that made me want to stand and salute. It gave me the kind of thrill one has when the troops march by, and everyone cheers as the colors pa.s.s. I can't put it into words, but it was the feeling that brusque, rheumatic old Tippy with her hoe, stood for as fine a kind of patriotism as there is in the world. She's just as eager to do some splendid, big, thrilling thing for her country as any man in khaki, yet all she can do is to whack weeds. I wish I were artist enough to make a companion piece for the poster I brought home in my trunk--a G.o.ddess of liberty unfurling a star-spangled banner across the world. I'd make a homely work-roughened old woman in her kitchen ap.r.o.n, her face shining like Tippy's did last night, when she looked at the star and wished she could be the hero it stood for.

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 a.s.sert 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.