Kitabı oku: «Georgina's Service Stars», sayfa 5

CHAPTER IX
SEVEN MONTHS LATER

One might think, seeing that I am keeping two diaries now, that I am leading a double life. But such is not the case. When it was decided that I was to go to Washington this year, to the same school that Barby attended when she was my age, she suggested that I keep a journal, as she did while here. She called hers "Chronicles of Harrington Hall." So I am calling mine "The Second Book of Chronicles." Next vacation we are to read them together.

Naturally I want to make mine as interesting as possible, so I've spent considerable time describing life here at school as I see it, and making character sketches of the different girls, teachers, etc. It would have been more satisfactory if I could have put all that in my Memoirs, thus making one continuous story, but it's too great a task to write it all out twice. So I have put a footnote in my Memoirs for the benefit of whoever my biographer may be, saying, "For what happened at Harrington Hall, see my Book of Chronicles."

All during the first term I did not make a single entry in this old blank book, now open before me. It lay out of sight and out of mind in the back of my desk. But this morning I came across it while looking for something, and tonight I have just finished reading it from start to finish. I realize I have left quite a gap in the story by failing to record several things which happened after Esther went home.

As I sit and re-read these last pages, how far away I seem now from that unhappy August afternoon when I came home from the Gilfreds', feeling that I could never take anyone on trust again. It was days before I got over the misery of that experience, and I really believe it was on account of the way I went moping around the house that Barby decided to send me away to school. Father had been urging it for some time, but she wanted to keep me at home with her one more year.

It wasn't the excitement of getting ready to go away and trying on all my new clothes that restored me to my former cheerfulness, although Barby thinks so. It was just two little words that Richard said the last day he was with us, before going back to school. I wouldn't have believed that a mere exclamation could have brought about such an amazing change in my feelings, and I still wonder how it did. Next year I'm going to study psychology just to find out about such queer happenings in our brains.

We were out in the boat, he and Captain Kidd and I, taking a farewell row. He hadn't mentioned Esther's name since the day she left, but Judith told me he never went back to the house after he found out the double game she had been playing. Remembering how infatuated he'd been I knew he must have felt almost as broken up as Babe says John Wynne was. I kept hoping he'd bring up the subject. I thought it would make it easier for him if he would confide in one who had known the same adoration and disappointment. Besides I brooded over it all the time. It was all I thought about.

So on the way back I sat in pensive silence, trailing my hand languidly over the side of the boat through the water. Richard talked now and then, but of trivial things that could not possibly interest one communing with a secret sorrow, so I said nothing in reply. When we were almost at the pier he rested on the oars and let the boat drift, while we sat and listened to the waves tumbling up against the breakwater.

As we paused thus in the gathering dusk, a verse came to me that seemed a fitting expression of the sad twilight time as well as both my mood and his. For his face looked sad as he sat there gazing out to sea, sad and almost stern. So I repeated it softly and so feelingly that the tears sprang to my eyes, and there was a little catch in my voice at the last line:

 
"Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
 

I had expected some sort of sympathetic response, at least an eloquent silence, for he knew I meant Esther, and it was like a dash of cold water to hear him exclaim in an exasperated sort of way, "Oh rats!"

Captain Kidd took the exclamation to himself, and barked till he nearly fell out of the boat. And Richard laughed and rolled him over on the seat and asked him what he meant by making such a fuss about nothing. That was no way for a good sport to do. Then he began pulling for the landing with all his might.

Considering that I had just bared to him one of the most sacred emotions of my heart, his answer seemed as unfeeling as it was rude and inappropriate, something I could never forgive nor forget. He couldn't help seeing that I was hurt and indignant, for I ran up the beach ahead of him and only answered in monosyllables when he called after me, pretending nothing had happened.

But later when I was upstairs brushing my hair, I heard him down in the dining-room, teasing Tippy and telling her what he wanted for his farewell supper, in that jolly, audacious way of his that makes a joke of everything. I knew perfectly well that he felt blue about going back to school and that he was all broken up over the affair with Esther, but he was too good a sport to show it.

And that's what he meant by saying "Oh rats," in such an exasperated way! He had expected me to measure up to his idea of a good sport and I hadn't done it! My brooding over "a day that is dead" till it spoiled our enjoyment of the present one, seemed silly and sentimental to him. As he told the dog, "that was no way to do." From away back in our pirate-playing days the thought that Richard expected a thing of me, always spurred me on to do it, from walking the ridgepole to swinging down the well rope. He expected me to be as game and cheerful a chum as he is, and here I had spoiled our last boat-ride together by relapsing into that moody silence.

It was as if those two words held a mirror before my eyes, in which I saw myself as I looked to him. "But I'll show him I can be game," I declared between my teeth, and as soon as I had tied the ribbon on my hair I ran downstairs, determined to make that last evening the jolliest one we had ever had.

I am so thankful that we did have such a gay time, for now that things can never be the same again, he will have it to look back on and remember happily. He went away next morning, but I did not leave until nearly two weeks later. It was the day before I started to Washington that I heard the news which changed things.

I was down in the post-office, sending a money order, when Mr. Bart, the famous portrait painter, came in. Some other artist-looking man followed him in, and I heard him say as he caught up with him:

"Bart, have you heard the news about Moreland? He's reported killed in action. No particulars yet, but, it goes without saying that when he went, he went bravely."

Mr. Bart started as if he had been hit, and said something I didn't quite catch about dear old Dick, the most lovable man he ever knew. All the time the clerk was filling my money-order blank they stood there at the same window, talking about him and the winters they had spent together in Paris, their studios all in the same building, and how they'd never want to go back there now with so many of the old crowd gone. They said all sorts of nice things about Mr. Moreland. But not till one of them asked, "Where's the boy now?" did I realize the awfulness of what I had just heard. It was Richard's father they were talking about, and he was dead.

But I couldn't really believe that it was true until I got home and found Barby at the telephone. Mr. Milford had just called her up to tell her about it. And she was saying yes, she thought he ought to go to Richard at once by all means. He would feel so utterly desolate and alone in the world, for his father had been everything to him. Now that his Aunt Letty was dead he had no relatives left except Mr. Milford. She'd go herself if she thought she could be any comfort to the dear boy.

Mr. Milford said he'd catch the Dorothy Bradford within an hour, and he'd convey her messages. And that's the last I heard for ever so long. I wanted to write to Richard, but I just couldn't. There wasn't any way of telling him how sorry I was. But that night I scribbled a postscript at the end of Barby's letter to him, and signed it, "Your loving sister, Georgina." I wanted him to feel that he still had somebody who thought of him as their really own, and as belonging to the family.

I had been here at school over two weeks before any news came about him. Then Barby wrote that Mr. Milford was back, and had told her that they had a trying interview. Richard was more determined than ever to get into the war. He kept saying, "I've got to go, Cousin James. There's a double reason now, don't you see, with Dad to be avenged? I'm not asking you to advance any of my money. All I want is your consent as my guardian. They won't let me in without that."

Richard can't get the money his Aunt Letty left him till he is twenty-one. It's in trust. But he'll have a lot then, and there ought to be considerable when his father's affairs are settled. But because Mr. Moreland had said that Richard was too young to go now and must keep on in school, Mr. Milford feels it is his duty to be firm and carry out his cousin's wishes. But he told Barby he came away feeling that with the boy in that frantic frame of mind, school would do him no more good than it would a young lion. A caged and wounded one at that.

The next news of him was that he had disappeared from the school and his Cousin James couldn't find a trace of him. About that time the expressman left a big flat box for Barby with a note inside that said, "Take care of this for me, please. If I shouldn't come back I'd like for you and Georgina to have it. Dad thought it was the best thing he ever did."

In the box was the portrait that Mr. Moreland painted of Richard the first summer he came to Provincetown, called, "The thoughts of Youth are long, long thoughts." It has been given first place in every art exhibition in which it has been hung, and, besides being a wonderful piece of painting, is the darlingest portrait of Richard as he was at the age of ten that one could imagine.

It was not until after Thanksgiving that I heard directly from him myself. Then I had a note from him, written up in Canada. He said, "I know you won't give me away, Georgina, even to Barby. She might feel it was her duty to tell Cousin James where I am. I couldn't enlist, even up here without his consent, but I've found a way that I can do my bit and make every lick count. I'm at the front, by proxy, and more. So I am satisfied. I haven't much time to write but that's no reason I wouldn't appreciate all the home news available. If you have any on hand just pass it along to yours truly who will be duly grateful."

I was wild to know what he was doing, and exactly what he meant by being at the front "by proxy and more." But, although I wrote regularly after that and underscored the question each time, he never paid any attention to that part of my letters. I could see he was purposely ignoring it. I would have ignored his questions, just to get even, if they hadn't showed so plainly how hungry he was for news of us all. Remembering that he is all alone in the world now, since he and his Cousin James are at outs, and that I am the only one of his home folks who knows his whereabouts, I make my letters as entertaining as possible.

Sometimes Babe Nolan, who is at this school, rooming just across the hall, hands over her brother Jim's letters. The spelling is awful and his grammar a disgrace, but he certainly has a nose for news. He tells about everybody in town from the Selectmen to the Portuguese fishermen. Babe never wants the letters back, so I send them on to Richard, also the Provincetown Advocate, which Tippy mails me every week as soon as she is done reading it.

Hardly had I written the above when my roommate, Lillian Locke, came in. Being a Congressman's daughter, she is allowed to spend a lot of her spare time with her family, who are living at a hotel. She had been out all afternoon with them, consequently had not received her pile of letters which came in the last mail. The elevator boy gave them to her as she came up. One of mine had been put in with hers by mistake. That is why I didn't get it earlier. I was surprised to see that it was from Barby, because I had one from her only this morning. Late as it is I'll have to sit up and add a few more lines to this record, for it's all about Richard and fits right in here.

Mr. Milford finally got track of him in some way and followed him to Canada. He has just returned. He found Richard working in what had once been an automobile factory. It is now turning out aeroplanes for the Canadian government.

One of the first persons Richard met when he reached the town was a workman in this factory who was eager to go to the front, but couldn't for two reasons. He was badly needed in the factory, and he had a family dependent on his wages, two little children and a half-blind mother. His wife is dead. When Richard found he couldn't enlist, big and strong as he is, without swearing falsely as to his age, he went to the man and offered to take his place both in the factory and as a breadwinner for his family.

It was the foreman who told Mr. Milford about it. He said there was no resisting a boy like him. He was in such dead earnest and such a likable sort of a lad. He walked into everybody's good graces from the start. They took him on trial and he went to work as if every blow was aimed at a Hun. When the man saw that he actually meant business and wanted it put down in black and white that he would look after the family left behind, the matter was arranged in short order.

And now Richard feels that not only is there a man on the firing line who wouldn't be there but for him, but every day as he fashions some part of the aircraft, he is doing a man's work in helping to win the war. The foreman said, "He's the kind that won't be satisfied till he knows everything about airships there is to know," and Mr. Milford said he didn't feel that he was justified in opposing him any longer. A job like the one he had undertaken would do him more good than all the colleges in the country.

Down at the bottom of the letter Barby said, "I have written all this to Miss Crewes, that she may have another Sir Gareth to add to her list of knightly souls who do their deed and ask no guerdon."

CHAPTER X
AT HARRINGTON HALL

The other day Miss Everett, the English teacher, took a book away from Jessica Archibald. She said it wasn't suitable for a girl in her teens. It was too sentimental and romantic. Jess didn't mind it very much, for she is one of the worshippers at Miss Everett's shrine. When a bunch of girls are so devoted to a person that they'll go to her room and take the hairs out of her comb to put in their lockets or their memory books, that is the limit. I don't see how any novel ever written could beat that for being sentimental.

But Babe Nolan doesn't agree with me. She never does. She said, "Look at the old Romans. Didn't I remember in Anthony over Caesar's dead body:

"Yea, beg a hair of him for memory, and dying, mention it within their wills, bequeathing it as a rich legacy."

But Babe admits that Jessica is disgustingly sentimental. They are room-mates. And Babe says how any grown person can be the blind bat that Jess's mother is, is a mystery to her. Mrs. Archibald told Miss Everett that her little daughter is "an unawakened child as yet, just a shy, budding, white violet," and she wants to keep her so till she's through school. She says Jessica has always been totally indifferent to boys, never gives them a thought, and she doesn't want her to until she is grown and Prince Charming arrives on the scene. She's just fifteen now.

And all the time, Babe says, shy little Jessica is having the worst kind of a case with one of the Military Academy cadets, who started up an acquaintance with her one day on the street-car, behind the chaperone's back. She's slipped off and gone alone to movies several times to meet him, when she was supposed to be taking tea with her aunt. Yet she looks up in such an innocent, wide-eyed way, and seems so shocked when such escapades are mentioned, that you wouldn't suspect her any more than you would a little gray kitten. But it's making her dreadfully deceitful.

Babe came up to our room to talk to Lillian and me about it, for she's really worried over those clandestine meetings. She says the whole trouble is that Jess doesn't know boys as they exist in the flesh. She knows only the demi-gods created by her own imagination. She has been brought up on fairy-tales in which princes often go around disguised as swine-herds, and, not having any brothers which would give her the key to the whole species, she doesn't know a swineherd when she meets him.

Babe told her no real prince would ask anything clandestine, and that this cadet she's mooning around about is only an overgrown schoolboy with a weak chin and a bad complexion, and if she could see him as he really is and as he looks to the rest of us girls, it would cure her of her romantic infatuation. And Babe told her, moreover, that no real prince would pretend to be a poet when he wasn't, and that the verses he sent her were not original as she fondly believed, wearing them around inside her middy blouse. Babe couldn't remember just what poem they were taken from, but said they were as well known to the public as "Casey at the bat." She is so blunt that when she begins handing out plain truths she never stops for anyone's feelings.

Babe says that if she ever marries and is left a widow in poor circumstances, she will support herself by starting a Correspondence School in a branch that will do more good than all the curriculums of all the colleges. It will be a sort of Geography of Life, teaching maps and boundaries of the "United States" and general information to fit one for entering it. She said we shouldn't be left to stumble into it, in blindfold ignorance like Jessica's.

Right there I couldn't resist breaking in to say, "Oh, speaking of a correspondence course, Babe, did you ever find that brass-balled bedstead you were looking for at the auction?"

Of course the question had no significance for Lillian, but it pointedly reminded Babe of the correspondence she had with the One for whom she was once all eyes when he was present, and all memory when he was gone. She's entirely over that foolishness now, but she turned as red as fire, just the same, and to keep Lillian from noticing, she turned to the bureau and began talking about the first thing she looked at.

It happened to be a photograph of Lillian's brother, Duffield, who is an upper classman at Annapolis. Lillian is awfully proud of him, although from his picture you wouldn't call him anything extraordinary. His nose is sort of snub, but he has a nice face as if he really might be the jolly kind of a big brother that Lillian says he is. She's always quoting him. I've heard so much about what "Duff thinks" and "Duff used to say and do" that I feel that I know him as well as if we'd been brought up in the same house.

So when she began singing his praises again, declaring that Duffield wouldn't ask a girl to meet him clandestinely and he wouldn't have any respect for one who wanted to, I withdrew from the conversation. It was time for me to go on copying the theme which Babe's entrance had interrupted.

She must have been responsive enough to have pleased even Lillian, for when next I was conscious of what they were saying, Lillian was including Babe in the invitation she had given me some time ago, to go along with them next time her mother motored down to Annapolis to see Duff. They're going down to a hop in April, which is only a few days off now, and again in June week, and stay at John Carrol Hall. Mrs. Locke has already written to Barby, inviting me, and Barby has given her permission.

Mrs. Locke is from Kentucky, and knows all the Shirleys. She always introduces me as "the granddaughter of our illustrious editor, you know." In that way I've met a lot of Barby's old friends when I've been invited to take dinner at the hotel with Lillian. That accounts also for my being included in their invitation to an informal musicale at the White House where I met the President and his wife. (See Book of Chronicles for six pages describing that grand occasion.)

Of all the legacies in the world, nothing is more desirable for children to inherit than old friendships. One day when Mrs. Locke took Lillian and me shopping with her, we met a lady in one of the stores whom she introduced as Mrs. Waldon. No sooner had she been told who I am than she held out both hands to me, saying in the dearest way, "Not Barby Shirley's daughter, and half a head taller than I! Why, my dear, I was at your mother's wedding, and it seems only yesterday. Our families have been neighbors for three generations, so you see we inherited our friendship, and now here you come, walking into the same heritage."

She insisted on taking us home to lunch with her. Mrs. Locke had another engagement, but Lillian and I went. She has the dearest apartment, on the top floor with a stairway running up to a little roof garden. Her husband served in the Civil War and was a general in the Cuban war, and two of her daughters have recently married naval officers. They were living in Annapolis when that happened, so she knows all about the place. Her other daughter, Miss Catherine, has just come back from a visit down there, and she told us so much about the place and the good times she has there that we are simply wild to go. I can hardly wait for the time to come.

We have just come to our rooms from the Current Events class. If it wasn't for Miss Allen's little lecture every Friday afternoon, reviewing the happenings of the week, we'd hardly know what is going on outside of the school premises. We rarely see the papers, and it is as sweet and peaceful as a cloister, here at the Hall, with its high-hedged park around it. We forget, sometimes, the awful suffering and horrors that have been shocking the world for nearly two years. Our lessons and recreations and friendships fill our days to the brim, and crowd the other things out. While we're digging into our mathematics or playing basketball with all our might, if we think of war at all, it's in the back of our heads, like the memory of a bad dream.

But when Miss Allen tells us of some new horror as she did today, of the torpedoing of the Sussex, crowded with passengers and many Americans aboard, then we realize we are living on the edge of a smouldering volcano, which may burst into action any moment. It doesn't seem possible that our country can keep out of it much longer. I know Father thinks so. His letters are few and far between because he's so very busy, but there's always that same note of warning running through them.

"Make the most of this year at school, Georgina. Nobody knows what is coming. So get all you can out of it in the way of preparation to meet the time of testing that lies ahead for all of us."

After one of those letters I go at my lessons harder than ever, and the little school happenings, its games and rivalries and achievements, seem too trivial for words. I keep measuring them by Father and his work, and what Richard is doing so splendidly up there in Canada, and I wish there was something I could do to make them as proud of me as I am of them. If the family would only consent to my going in for a nurse's training! I'm going to talk Barby into letting me stop school this vacation, and beginning this fall to fit myself for Red Cross service.

When Richard found that Mr. Milford had told us about him being the temporary head of a family, he began mentioning his proteges now and then in a joking way. But two snapshots which he sent of them told more than all his brief descriptions. The one labelled "Granny" shows more than just a patient-faced little woman knitting in the doorway. The glimpse of cottage behind her and the neat door-yard in front shows that he has something to go back to every night that has a real touch of home about it. He boards there, so that he can keep an eye on the boys. One is five, the other seven. He said he had to give the older one, Cuthbert, a fatherly spanking one day, but it didn't seem to make any difference in the kid's feeling towards him.

They seem to be very fond of each other, judging from the second snapshot, labelled "Uncle Dick and his acrobats." The two boys were climbing up on his shoulders like little monkeys, all three in overalls and all grinning as if they enjoyed it. It seems too queer for words to think of Richard being dignified and settled down enough for anybody to look up to him as authority. But the sights he sees are enough to make him old and grave beyond his years. He has written several times of going to the station to help with a train-load of soldiers returned from the front. They are constantly coming back, crippled and blinded and maimed in all sorts of ways. He says that sights like that make him desperate to get a whack at the ones who did it. He'll soon be in shape to do something worth while, for he's learning to fly, so he can test the machines they are making.

Lillian looked at the acrobat picture rather sniffily when it came. I think she took him for just an ordinary mechanic in his working clothes. But when I told her what a Sir Gareth deed he is doing her indifference changed almost to hero-worship. She's so temperamental. Not long ago he sent another picture of himself, a large one, in the act of seating himself in the plane, ready for flight. She wanted to know if she had anything I'd be willing to trade with her for it. She'd gladly give me one of Duff in place of it.

It put me in rather an awkward position for I didn't want Duffield's picture, and I most certainly didn't want her to have Richard's.