Georgina's Service Stars

CHAPTER III

IN THE SHADOW OF WAR

Last Wednesday I spent the day at Fishburn Court. My visits seem to mean so much to Aunt Elspeth, now that her time is divided between her bed and wheeled chair. I improvised a costume and did the song and dance for her that I am going to give in the French Relief entertainment next week. And I made a blueberry pie for dinner, and set the little kitchen in shining order, and put fresh bows on her cap, and straightened out all the bureau drawers.

When everything you do is appreciated and admired and praised until you are fairly basking in approval, it makes you feel so good inside that you want to keep on that way forever. You just love to be sweet and considerate. But afterwards it's such a comedown to go back home to those who take it as a matter of course that you should be helpful, and who feel it is their duty to improve your character by telling you what your duty is. It rubs you the wrong way, and makes life much harder.

Somehow, going to Fishburn Court is like climbing up into the Pilgrim monument and looking down on the town. Seen from that height, the things that loomed up so big when you were down on their level shrink to nothing. Maybe it is because Uncle Darcy and Aunt Elspeth have lived so very, very long that they can look down on life that way and see it from a great height as God does. I always think of them when I read that verse, "A thousand years in thy sight is but as yesterday." That is why nothing seems to matter to them very much but loving each other and their neighbors as themselves.

I came away from there resolved to turn over a new leaf. I am sorry now that I said what I did the other day in the closet, but I don't feel that I have a right to blot it out of this record. The good and the bad should stand together in one's memoirs. It makes a character seem more human. I never felt that I had anything in common with Washington until I read that he sometimes gave away to violent fits of anger.

I am now resolved to make those Busy Bees the power for good which Barby thinks I can, and quit thinking of my own feelings in the matter, of how disagreeable it is to have them eternally tagging after me. After all, what difference will it make a thousand years from now if they do tag? What difference if one little ant in the universe is happy or unhappy for one atom of time? When you think of yourself that way, as just a tiny ant sitting on the equator of eternity you can put up with almost anything.

A whole week has gone by since I wrote the above sentence, and in that time the most exciting thing has happened, in addition to celebrating my sixteenth birthday. The birthday came first. Barby's gift to me was a darling rowboat, light and graceful as a cockle-shell. Uncle Darcy carved my initials on the oars, and Richard came after dark the night before and dragged it up into the yard, and tied it under the holiday tree. Next morning my presents were all piled in the boat instead of being tied to the branches, for which I was very thankful. It made me feel that I had come to a boundary line which the family recognized, when they discarded the old custom of decorating the holiday-tree. They no longer considered me an infant.

I have been wild for a boat of my own for two years, and was so excited I could scarcely eat my breakfast. I was out in it all day, first with Barby and Richard, and, afterward, with Babe Nolan and Judith Gilfred, who came to lunch. Ordinarily, I would fill pages describing my presents and what we did, but I can't wait to tell the climax.

Late in the afternoon Richard came again and rowed me over to the Lighthouse and back. When we came up the beach on our way home to supper the sun was just setting. It was all so beautiful and I was so happy that I began humming "The End of a Perfect Day." But it wasn't the end, for when we went into the house the exciting thing happened. Who should rise up suddenly in the dusk and put his arms around me but Father, home on unexpected shore leave. I hadn't seen him for a year.

Even Barby didn't know he was coming. It seemed too good to be true that he should be in time for the lighting of my birthday candles. As if it wasn't more than enough just to have him back again, safe and sound, he brought me the most adorable little wrist-watch, and from then on till midnight when my eyes weren't on him they were on it. It's so heavenly to have everybody in the world that you love best and everything you want most all together at the same time.

We had to talk fast and crowd as much as possible into the hours. I felt that I had at last stepped into my field Elysian, when nobody said a word about my running along to bed. I think they would have let me sit up though, even if I hadn't been sixteen, the time was so precious.

Up till this time the war had seemed a faraway, unreal thing, just like the tales we used to shudder over, of the heathen babies thrown to the crocodiles. I had been working for the Red Cross and the Belgian orphans in the same spirit that I've worked for the Missionary Society, wanting to help the cause, but not feeling it a personal matter. But when Father talked about it in his grave, quiet way, I began to understand what war really is. It is like a great wild beast, devouring our next-door neighbors and liable to spring at our throats any minute. It is something everybody should rise up and help to throttle.

I understand now why Richard is so crazy on the subject. It isn't just thirst for adventure, as his cousin James says, although "Dare-devil Dick" is a good name for him. He sees the danger as Father sees it, and wants to do his part to rid the world of it. He talked a long time with Father, begging him to use his influence to get him into some kind of service over there. But Father says the same thing that Mr. Moreland did. That he's too young, and the only thing for him to do is to go back to school in the fall and fit himself for bigger service when his country has greater need of him. Richard went off whistling, but I knew he was horribly disappointed from the way his hat was pulled down over his eyes.

The next morning when I went down to breakfast I felt as if the wild beast had already sprung as far as our door-step, if not actually at our throats, for Barby sat pale and anxious-eyed behind the coffee urn, and her lips were trembly when I kissed her good-morning. Father had received his orders to report in Washington in forty-eight hours, and we had hoped to keep him with us at least two weeks. He is called to a consultation about some extensive preparations to be made for marine hospital work. He had already been notified that he was to be put at the head of it, and he may have to go abroad to study conditions, almost immediately.

I knew from the dumb misery in Barby's eyes she was thinking of the same things I was – submarines and sunken mines, etc., but neither of us mentioned them, of course. Instead, we tried to be as jolly as possible, and began to plan the nicest way we could think of to spend our one day together. Suddenly Father said he'd settle it. He'd spend it all with me, any way I chose, while Barby packed her trunk and got ready to go back to Washington with him. He'd probably be there a week or ten days and he wasn't going one step without her.

Then I realized how grown-up one really is at sixteen. A year ago I would have teased to be taken along, and maybe would have gone off in a corner and cried, and felt dreadfully left out over such an arrangement. But I saw the glance that passed between them when he said it, and I understood perfectly. Barby's face was radiant. You may adore your only child, but the love of your life comes first. And it should. I was glad they wanted to go off that way on a sort of second honeymoon trip. It would be dreadfully sad to have one's parents cease to be all in all to each other. Babe Nolan's mother and stepfather seem that way, bored to death with each other.

Two things stand out so vividly in that last day that I never can forget them. One is our walk down through the town, when I almost burst with pride, going along beside Father, so tall and distinguished looking in his uniform, and seeing the royal welcome people gave him at every step. They came out of the stores and the houses to shake hands with him, the people who'd known him as a little boy and gone to school with him, and they seemed so really fond of him and so glad to have him back, that I fairly loved them for it, even people I hadn't liked especially before.

The second thing was the talk we had up here in the garret in the gable window-seat, when he came up to look for some things he had packed away in one of the chests, twenty years ago.

We did lots of other things, of course; went rowing in the new boat to a place on the beach where he used to picnic when he was a boy. We took our lunch along and ate it there. Afterwards we tramped back into the dunes a little way, just to let him feel the Cape Cod sand in his shoes once more, he said. It was high tide when we got back to the boat-house, so we got our bathing suits and went in. He was so surprised and pleased at some of my diving stunts, and taught me a new one. He is a magnificent swimmer himself.

His hair is iron gray at the temples, and I've always been halfway afraid of him before – that is, afraid to say right out whatever I happened to think or feel. But it was different this time. I felt that he understood me better than anybody else in the world, even as well as Barby used to, when I was younger. As we went back home he said the nicest thing. He said it seemed to him that we must have been boys together at some time in our lives. That I was such a jolly good chum.

I can't think about that last evening or the going away yesterday morning without the tears starting. But I'm thankful I didn't break down at the station. I couldn't have kept from it if it hadn't been for Captain Kidd, who frisked along with us. Just at the hardest moment he stood up on his hind legs and saluted. I'd never seen him do it before. It's a trick Richard taught him lately. It was so cunning everybody laughed, and I managed to pull myself together till the train started.

But I made up for it when I got back home and came up here to the gable window-seat where Father and I had that last precious talk together, with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder. I nearly bawled my eyes out as I recalled each dear thing he said about my being old enough now to understand business matters, and what he wanted me to do in case the United States went to war; how I was to look after Barby if anything happened to him; and what I was to do for Uncle Darcy and Dan's children. That he relied on me just as if I were a son, because I was a true Huntingdon, and no Huntingdon woman had ever flinched from a duty or failed to measure up to what was expected of her.

I keep thinking, what if he should never come back to talk to me again in that near, dear way. But.. I'll have to stop before any more splashes blot up this page.

CHAPTER IV

HER IDEAL GIRL STEPS IN

All the time Barby was gone I didn't write a line in this record. I couldn't. Things seemed too trivial. Besides, the house had that strange, hushed air that you feel at a funeral when you're waiting for it to begin. I couldn't bear to touch the piano. It didn't seem right to be playing gay tunes while there was such awful sorrow in the world, and in all probability Father and Barby were spending their last days together.

I declined the invitation to Laura Nelson's dance on that account, and after Tippy had gone to bed I put on Barby's only black dress, a chiffon dinner gown that she had left behind in her closet, and sat by the window in the moonlight, listening to the music of piano and drum floating up from the Nelson cottage. I had turned the silver trimming in so as not to show, and looking down on the clinging black folds that trailed around me, I pictured to myself so vividly the way an orphan or a young widow must feel, that the tears splashed down into my lap till I was afraid it would make the chiffon all crinkly. The dance music sounded perfectly heartless to me. I could understand how bitter it might make one feel who was really in mourning.

When Barby came home and I told her about it, she said that I should have gone to the dance; that our first duty to ourselves and the world is to keep ourselves normal. After I'd spent the morning helping her unpack and hearing everything she had to tell about her week with Father and his departure to some unknown port, she told me she wanted me to stay out of doors all the rest of the day. I must go on the Quest of Cheerful Things, and she hoped that I'd be able to report at least two adventures.

The two things which happened are that I went to a furniture auction and met my ideal girl. While they're not particularly cheerful things, they're important enough to be recorded here.

It began by Babe Nolan bumping into me as I turned a corner, after I'd been out nearly half the afternoon. Babe is a far cry from anybody's ideal girl, that is, as far as looks and manners are concerned, but she has her good points. For one thing she is absolutely sincere, and it's always interesting to hear what new trouble she's been in.

She had her bathing suit bundled carelessly under her arm, and said she couldn't stay because she'd promised to be up at the West End beach by four o'clock, and it was almost that time then. But she'd heard that there was a furniture auction going on in front of the old Holloway house, which has been vacant for years, and she just had to go by and see if there was a white bedstead in the lot, with hollow brass balls on the posts. She was sure that there couldn't be, because she'd been told that the furniture had been brought up from Truro or Wellfleet, or some place down the Cape. It belonged to relatives of the Holloway family. Still she felt possessed to look, and she supposed she'd go through life like the Wandering Jew, looking for that bedstead and never finding it.

Then she told me why. Babe is very unfortunate in her family life, having a stepfather which complicates matters. All her brothers and sisters are either steps or halves. She has no whole ones. And they are all socialists in a way, believing in a community of interests, such as wearing each other's clothes without asking, and using each other's things. Right while Babe was talking to me she had on one of her half-brother Jim's outing shirts, turned in V at the neck instead of her own middy blouse, because Viola had walked off with her last clean one.

With everybody free to root through her bureau drawers, and with no locks in the house that work, of course she has absolutely no privacy, and she had several letters that she wouldn't have the family read for worlds. They were too sacred, and she couldn't bear to destroy them, for they breathed devotion in every line, and were her first of the kind. She thought of burying them under the garden hedge, but that would have necessitated digging them up every time she wanted to re-read them, and there was danger of the puppy trailing her and unearthing them if she went too often to that hallowed spot.

One night just before she and Viola went to Yarmouth for a visit, she found, quite by accident, that the brass balls on her bedposts were screwed on and were hollow. So she folded the letters up small and stuffed them into one, with a dried rose and a broken cuff-link that had associations, and screwed it back tight.

What was her horror when she came home two weeks later to find that her mother had had the room done over in their absence as a surprise for her and Viola. She had bought twin beds of bird's-eye maple and given one old bed to a Salvation Army man who was going through town collecting junk, and sent the other to a camp up in the White Mountains where her mother's people go every year. She didn't know which went where.

Now there's no telling how, when or where those letters will next see the light of day. It was bad enough to lose the letters, but Babe says she'll simply die if they fall into her Aunt Mattie's hands. She's the prim, cold kind who makes you feel that anything sentimental should never be mentioned. It's something to be ashamed of. Tippy's that kind.

I have written all this out not because it's important in itself, but because it's a link in a chain. If I hadn't happened to meet Babe and go with her to hunt for that bedstead, I wouldn't have been at the auction when my ideal girl came along, or when Richard drove by and I hailed him to borrow a quarter, and he stopped and saw her. What she said and what he said, and what happened afterward was like a game of "Consequences."

All sorts of stuff lay around on the grass – dishes and bed-slats and odd andirons. There was a beaded mat and a glass case of wax flowers, and a motto, "The Lord is my Shepherd," cross-stitched in pink and gray worsted, sitting right out on the grass. Babe said probably it was the work of hands long dead and gone, and didn't it seem sad that they should come to this end? But the tide was in and she'd have to go. She might have known she'd not find that bedstead. Would I walk up to the beach with her?

But I told her no, I'd just rummage around awhile longer to see what else there was for sale. Maybe I could get some "local color" that way. Babe knows about my writing. She is one of the girls I read my novel to, and she respects my talent. So she left me. I did get some local color by staying, and took out my pencil and pad, which I always carry around in my knitting bag, and made a note of it.

An old-fashioned hoop-skirt was thrown across a rose-bush, and a black silk bonnet lay under it, beside a pair of worn shoes. Both the bonnet and the shoes had what Tippy calls a "genteel" air, and made me think they must have belonged to a prim maiden lady with proud nose and slender feet, probably called "Miss Althea." The name came to me like an inspiration, I could almost see her standing by the rose-bush.

Just then some boys, who were wrestling around, bumping into everything, upset a barrel on the grass, and a great pile of framed photographs came rolling out. Some of them were comical enough for a Sunday supplement, women in tight basques and little saucer hats, and men with whiskers – beards or perfectly ridiculous bushy "burnsides." A crowd of summer people began making joking remarks about them to set each other to laughing.

But there was one in an oval walnut frame that I couldn't bear to have them make fun of, the photograph of a lady with a little boy leaning against her shoulder. She had a strong, kind face, with such steadfast eyes looking straight at you, that you just knew everybody went to her with their troubles. The boy was a dear little fellow, serious as a judge, with his hair brushed in a long roll on the top of his head in one of those old-fashioned coxcomb curls.

One of the girls from the hotel picked it up and began declaiming a verse from "Somebody's Darling," that's in one of our school readers.

It came over me in a great wave how I would feel if it were Barby's picture thrown out that way for strangers to ridicule and step on, or the one I've always loved of Father, when he was a little boy, hugging his white rabbit. I felt that I simply must save it from further desecration. The only way was to buy it. The man said I could have any frame in the barrel, picture thrown in free, for twenty-five cents, without waiting for it to be put up at auction. They were in a hurry to get through. I told him I'd take it, then I discovered I hadn't a penny left in my knitting bag. I'd spent my last one on the way down, treating Babe to a soda water.

It was right while I was standing there with the frame in my hands, uncertain whether to go to the bakery and borrow a quarter or ask the man if he'd take my note for it till next day, that Judith Gilfred came into the yard with a girl I'd never seen before. I knew at a glance that it must be the cousin she'd been expecting from the South. She's talked about her for a month, and said such gushing things that I was prepared to see quite a pretty girl, but not the most beautiful one I had ever seen in my life. That's what she is, and also my ideal of all that is gracious and lovely and sweet.

She's a blonde with the most exquisite hair, the color of amber or honey, with little gold crinkles in it. And her eyes – well, they make you think of clear blue sapphires. I loved her from the moment Judith introduced us. Loved her smile, the way it lights up her face, and her voice, soft and slow, blurring her r's the way Barby does. From her little white-slippered feet to the jewelled vanity box on a slender chain around her neck, she looks exactly as I'd choose to look if I could make myself over. Her name is Esther Gilfred.

Judith must have told her as much about me as me about her, for she was so cordial and dear. Judith has been my most intimate friend ever since I started to school. Esther was so interested in the auction. One of her greatest charms I think is her enthusiasm for whatever you happen to be interested in. She made the picture I was carrying around seem doubly desirable, just by saying in that indescribably charming way of hers that antique frames are quite the rage now. There is such a fad for them in her town.

We must have spent more than half an hour poking around among all the queer old things being auctioned off, when I heard the honk of an automobile horn, which I recognized as Richard's. He was signaling me. He had slowed down as he came opposite the place, to see why such a crowd was gathered in there, and, as he did so, caught sight of us.