Georgina's Service Stars Part 18

I COULDN'T tell Tippy. The way we did I just handed her Barby's night letter without a word and Richard gave her his. She read them with no more change of expression than if they'd been weather reports. Then she said that she'd known it all along. A wooden Indian couldn't have been less demonstrative, but later I found that nothing could have pleased her more.

Richard says she can't help being born a Plymouth Rock. She's like an ice-bound brook that can't show the depth and force underlying the surface coldness. But her tenderness leaked out for us both afterwards, in all sorts of ways, and I began to understand her for the first time in my life.

She watched me take down the service flag in the window and replace it with one bearing two stars, and I'm sure she read my thoughts. She's always had an uncanny way of doing that. I was thinking how much harder it was to put up that second star than the first one, because I hadn't really given Father to the service. He was in it before I was born. But the second star was the symbol of a real sacrifice that I was laying on the altar of my country. There was no laughing this time, or joking suggestion to make a ceremony of it. I felt to the bottom of my heart what I was doing, and did it in reverent silence.

Soon after she followed me to my room and laid a couple of books on the table, open at the places marked for me to read. I smiled after she went out when I saw that one was an antiquated volume of poems. All my life she has tried to teach me morals and manners by the aid of such verse as "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "Fie! What a naughty child to pout." So I picked up the books wondering what lesson she thought I needed now. The poem she marked was "The Maid who binds her Warrior's sash." As I read I understood. Dear old Tippy! It was _courage_ she would teach me.

Richard was right. She couldn't say these things to me, so she brought me the words of another to help me, knowing the lesson would soon be sorely needed. The other book was a new one she had just drawn from the library, the adventures of a young gunner in the Navy. He had won the Croix de Guerre for distinguished service and escaped the horrors of a German prison camp, so he knew what he was talking about when he wrote the words she left for me to read.

"When you say goodbye to your son or your husband or your sweetheart, take it from me that what he will like to remember the best of all is your face _with a smile on it_. It will be hard work; you will feel more like crying and so will he, maybe. That smile is your bit. I will back a smile against the weeps in a race to Berlin any time. So I am telling you, and I can't make it strong enough--_send him away with a smile_."

This is the verse:

"The maid, who binds her warrior's sash With smile, which well the pain dissembles, The while, beneath the drooping lash, One starry tear-drop hangs and trembles, Though heaven alone record the tear And fame shall never know her story, Her heart has shed a drop as dear As ever dewed the field of glory."

I didn't realize then how hard it was going to be to live up to those quotations, but Tippy, with so much of her life behind her full of its hard lessons--Tippy knew and took this mute way of warning me.

The storm did us a good turn in more ways than unearthing our buried treasure. It brought such cold weather in its wake that when we came in glowing from a tramp along sh.o.r.e just before supper, we found a jolly big fire waiting for us in the living-room. Such a one, Richard said, as would warm him many a time, thinking of it, nights when he was miles up in the air, numb as the North Pole.

We had such a long cosy evening afterward, there in the firelight.

"We'll have it just like this in our own little home when I get back,"

Richard kept saying. We planned the dearest house. We decided to make his Cousin James sell us his bungalow studio, not only because the Green Stairs running up the cliff to it is the place where we first saw each other when we were infants, but because it's such an artistic place, and has such a wonderful view of the sea. It's a place far too delightful to be wasted on a single person, even such a nice old bachelor as his Cousin James.

We even planned what we'd have for our first breakfast when we started to housekeeping, with Aunt Georgina's coffee urn shining at one end of the table and an old beaten-silver chop dish, that is one of Richard's memories of their studio days in Paris, at the other.

"If I could only see that picture in reality before I go!" Richard exclaimed--"if I could only sit down at that table once with you across from me, and know that it was my home and my little wife----"

Then he confessed that he wanted to take back everything he'd said about Watson and war weddings. He believed in 'em now and _couldn't_ I, _wouldn't_ I----? But without waiting to finish the question he hurried on to answer it himself. No, he mustn't ask it. He wouldn't. It wouldn't be fair to me, young as I was, with Barby gone, nor to her. But if he could only feel that I really belonged to him----

I told him I didn't see how rushing through a whirlwind ceremony as Babe did could make us feel we belonged to each other any more than we already did, and I _couldn't_ do it without Barby, but we could say the betrothal part to each other, and that would make him feel that we were almost married. So we hunted it up in the prayer book and each repeated the part that says, "I take thee ... from this day forward ... to love and to cherish ... and thereto I plight thee my troth."

But after we said it I couldn't see that it made the thought of parting any easier. Really it seemed even harder after we'd solemnly promised ourselves to each other that way.

After a while he said there were several things he wanted to speak of before he went away. One was that his Cousin James has all his belongings in charge. Among them is a beautiful old Venetian jewel casket with his mother's rings and necklaces and things in it. His Cousin James understands that everything in it is to be mine and he hoped that I'd wear them sometimes--even if--in any event---- He didn't go on to say even if _what_, but the unfinished sentence filled me with its unspoken dread, more than if he'd really said it.

After a long silence he said lightly that there was some satisfaction in the thought that I'd always be comfortably provided for no matter what happened, and that I could have the bungalow and the motor-boat and all the other things we'd planned. He'd made his will the day before and his Cousin James had promised to see it was carried out in every detail.

At the thought of what his speech implied and the mere idea of me having or doing any of those lovely things without _him_, I couldn't stand it any longer. I simply hid my face in the sofa cushions and let the d.y.k.es wash out to sea. It must have broken him up somewhat himself, to see the way I took it, for his voice was shaky when he tried to comfort me.

But it was so dear and tender, just like Uncle Darcy's that time he kept saying, "There's naught to fear la.s.s, Dan'l's holding you." Every word only made me cry that much harder.

Presently he cleared his throat and asked if I supposed there was any powder left in the old powder horn over the mantel, and did I remember the time we fed some to Captain Kidd to make him game. He'd confess now, after all these years, he ate some himself that day when I wasn't looking, but its effect was about worn off by this time, and if I kept on that way much longer he'd have to have another nip at that old horn or go to pieces himself.

I sat up then and laughed, despite the big, gulpy sobs that nearly choked me. For I had to tell him that I'd eaten some of that powder myself that same time. I licked it out of the palm of my hand when his back was turned. And if the powder had lost its effect on me the horn itself hadn't. The mere mention of it made me stiffen. Hereafter I'd be just as brave as that old Revolutionary grandmother of mine who s.n.a.t.c.hed it from the wall with the musket, and hustled her Minute Man off with the one grim word, "Hurry!" I promised him that hereafter he shouldn't see me shed another drop. And he didn't.

Mr. Milford came up for me early next morning to take me down to the station to see Richard off. Maybe it was because I had had that spell of wild weeps the night before, that I felt like the-morning-after-a-storm, all cleared up and shiney. At any rate I sent him off laughing. He looked so fit and so fine, starting off on his great adventure like some knight of old, that I told him I pined to go along; that under the circ.u.mstances I'd gladly change places with him. I'd much rather be Richard Moreland than G. Huntingdon.

But he said right before his Cousin James that he'd much rather I'd be _Mrs._ Richard Moreland. It was my blushing so furiously at hearing that name applied to me for the first time which made him laugh. Then there was only time to be caught up in a good-bye embrace before the train pulled out. He swung himself up on the rear platform just as it started.

He did look so handsome and so dear and I was so proud of him in his khaki that there was nothing forced in the last smile I gave him. It was the real spangled-bannery kind; such as shines in your eyes when the band plays martial music and the troops march by. Your heart beats awfully fast and you hold your breath, but you have the feeling that in your soul you are one of the color bearers yourself. You are keeping step with your head held high.

Afterwards when Mr. Milford helped me into the machine he said, "Georgina, you're a trump. You wear your service stars in your eyes."

When I looked at him questioningly, wondering what he meant, he said, "Oh, I know they're brown, not blue, but you showed my boy the star of 'true blue' courage in them, and I was horribly afraid for a few minutes there that maybe you wouldn't."

He talked about service flags all the way home, for we kept coming across them in the windows in every street. Over two hundred men have gone out from this little fishing town. When I told him how I felt that way, about "keeping step," he said he wished I could make some other people he knew feel the same way.

"There's poor Mrs. Carver, for instance, crying her eyes out over t.i.tcomb and Sammy III, and talking as if she's the only mother in the world who's sacrificing anything. If you could suggest that those boys would be a bit prouder of her if she could keep step with the rest of the mothers, make her sacrifice with her head up, it would do her a world of good. She mustn't fly service stars in her window unless she can back them on the inside with the same true blue courage they stand for on the outside--the kind that sends the men to the front."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIII

MARKED ON THE CALENDAR

IT'S queer what a way Doctor Wynne has of stepping abruptly into my life and out again. It's been so ever since I found his picture in the barrel. A few days after Richard left he unexpectedly opened the front gate and came up to the porch where Tippy and I sat knitting. I did not recognize him at first in his captain's uniform, and no one could have been further from my thoughts. I supposed he had already sailed for France.

Some business with old Mr. Carver, who is giving an ambulance to the Red Cross, brought him to Provincetown, and, happening to hear that Miss Susan Triplett was at our house, he came up to say goodbye to her before starting to join the unit to which he's been a.s.signed. He was disappointed when he found that Miss Susan had gone back to Wellfleet.

He said she was one of the few people left who had known his family intimately, and who remembered him as a child. It gave him a sense of kinship to have her call him "Johnny" in a world where everyone else said "Doctor."

That was enough for Tippy. In her opinion any man in khaki is ent.i.tled to all the "sugar and spice and everything nice" the world can give.

When she found that he has no home ties now, she adopted him on the spot. He didn't know he was being adopted, but I did, just from the positive tone of her voice. She told him her claim on him was about as old as Susan's. She'd known him when he was a bald-headed baby--held him in her arms in this very house, and sat under his father's preaching many a time in Wellfleet. And indeed he'd stay to supper. He needn't think she'd let a son of Sister Wynne's leave the house without breaking bread with her, especially when he was starting off to a far country where he was liable to get nothing but husks.

If what Tippy wanted was to give him a little slice of home to pack up and take away in his "old kit bag," she certainly succeeded. It will be many a moon before he can forget the table she spread for him, the advice she gave him and the sock she hurried to "toe off" in order that there might be a full half dozen in the package she thrust upon him at parting. An own aunt could not have been more solicitous for his comfort, and she did all but call him Johnny.

It's the first time I ever had any conversation with him more than a sentence or two. Now as he "reminisced" with Tippy, and told experiences of his boyhood on a Western farm and of his medical student days, I saw that the real John Wynne was not the person I imagined him to be.

What a sentimental little goose I must have been at sixteen; truly "green in judgment" to have woven such a fabric of dreams around him.

Miss Crewes' story started it, putting him on a sort of pedestal, and the affair with Esther added to it, till I imagined him a romantic and knightly figure, "wrapped in the solitude" of a sad and patient melancholy. The real John Wynne is a busy, matter-of-fact physician, absorbingly interested in the war and keen to be into it, also ready to talk about anything from "cabbages to kings." Yet I suppose if anyone had told me then that I was mistaken in that early estimate of him I would have resented it. I _wanted_ him to fit the role I a.s.signed him.

It made him more interesting to my callow mind to imagine him like that king in the poem when,--"The barque which held the prince went down he never smiled again."

He was so warmly interested in my account of finding his picture at that auction and keeping it all these years, that I took him across the hall to look at it. The thought came to me that maybe he'd like to have it, but when I offered it to him he said no, he had a more recent one of his mother, one more like her as he remembered her. He stood looking at it a long while and finally said it seemed so much at home there on the wall that he hoped I'd keep it there. It would sort of anchor him to the old Cape to look back and know that it was hanging in the very room where they had once been together. Then he added almost wistfully:

"If _she_ were here to wish me G.o.dspeed, I could go away better equipped, perhaps, for what lies ahead."

Some sudden impulse prompted me to open the table drawer and take out the little service flag with the one star which I had thrust in there when I put up the new one. As I hung it under the picture I was surprised to hear myself saying, "See! She _does_ wish you G.o.dspeed."

It was exactly as if someone else put the words into my mouth, for I had never thought of them before, and I'm sure I never quoted Scripture that way before, outside of Sunday school. It gave me the queerest sensation to be doing it as if some force outside of myself were impelling me to speak.

"Don't you suppose," I said slowly, "that if G.o.d so loved the world that He could give His only son to die for it, that he must know how _human_ fathers and mothers feel when they do the same thing? Don't you believe that He'd let a mother, even up in heaven, have some way to comfort and help a son who was offering _his_ life to save the world? The men in the trenches can't see the stars we hang out for them here at home, but they feel our spirit of helpfulness flowing out to them. How do we know that the windows of heaven are not hung with stars that mean the same thing?

How do we know but what those who watch and wait for us up there are not aiding us in ways greater than we dream possible? Helping us as Israel was helped, by the invisible hosts and chariots of fire, in the mountain round about Elisha?"

The tenderest smile lit up his face. "It's strange you should have hit upon that particular story," he said. "It was one of my mother's favorites. She began telling it to me when I was no bigger than that little chap there, leaning against her shoulder."

Then he turned and held out his hand, saying, "You've given me more than you can ever know, Miss Huntingdon. Thank you for hanging that little service star there. She does say G.o.dspeed, and its help will go with me overseas."