Kitabı oku: «Georgina's Service Stars», sayfa 6

CHAPTER XI
THE MIDSHIPMAN HOP

It is all in my Book of Chronicles, written out for Barby to read, how we motored down to Annapolis in the fresh April sunshine, and what we wore and what we did. But it is only in this "inmost sanctum" of these pages that "my tongue can utter the thoughts that arose in me."

Mrs. Waldon was with us, as enthusiastic as a girl over going back to her old home, and she kept us amused most of the way with her reminiscences of different midshipmen, especially the two who married her daughters. But in between times my thoughts kept wandering forward uneasily to the hop, in spite of the reassuring knowledge of a lovely new coral-pink party dress, stowed away in the suitcase under my feet, and I couldn't help feeling a bit nervous over the coming event.

It would be the first dance I had ever gone to among strangers, and I kept thinking, "Suppose I'd be a wall-flower!" Then, too, I was a trifle agitated over the prospect of seeing Mr. Tucker again, the most congenial man I had ever met. Naturally I wanted to meet him again, but I shrank from doing so, certain that the sight of me would recall to his mind that humiliating affair of the borrowed slippers and my old Mary-Jane pumps. I was wild to know if he still remembered me, or if he had forgotten "both the incident and the little girl" as Barby predicted he would. Besides I wanted him to see how mature I had grown since then – how boarding school broadened and developed my views of life.

I made up several little opening speeches on the way down, but couldn't decide which to use. Whether to assume a rather indifferent air with a tinge of hauteur, or to be frankly and girlishly glad to see him, and ignore the past.

I was still debating the question in my mind when we drove into "little old Crabtown" as Mrs. Waldon calls Annapolis. She asked the chauffeur to drive by the house where she used to live, so she could point out the place where the midshipmen used to swarm in for their favorite "eats" whenever they could get away from the Academy, and where she and her girls and their guests had those funny "guinea-hen teas" that she'd been telling us about.

While we were drawn up by the curb in front of the house, a big, blond boy in midshipman uniform, swinging past at a lively gait, stopped and saluted, the surprise on his face spreading into a vast grin as he recognized Mrs. Waldon. The next instant he was on the running board, shaking hands with her, and they began talking a dialect none of us could understand, about "dragging" and "queens" and "Jimmy-legs." The regular Midshipman "lingo" she explained afterward when she had introduced him to us in ordinary English. He was Mac Gordon, a sort of a cousin of hers from out West.

The conversation that we couldn't understand was nothing but that she was asking him if he intended taking a girl to the dance, and telling him that we would be there, and asking if the same old guards were at the gates, because she intended to take us over the Academy grounds next day and hoped someone she knew would be detailed to escort us. I could see right then and there that Mac was making up his mind to give Lillian a good time, from the way he kept looking at her, sort of bashfully, through his eyelashes.

Well, I needn't have worried about anything. I had "crossed my bridge before I got to it," as Uncle Darcy often says, when I was fearing I'd be a wall flower. I had the first dance with Duffield, and the moment the band struck up I went into it, feeling as I did that night in the Spanish fandango. After that my card filled up so fast that I had to split dances. Mac Gordon was among the first, and Bailey Burrell, who once spent a summer in Provincetown, so long ago that I'd nearly forgotten him. But he remembered lots of things about me; the first time he ever saw me, for instance, dressed up at a bazaar as "A Little Maid of Long Ago." He even told how I was dressed, with a poke bonnet trimmed in rosebuds over my curls, sitting in a little rocking chair on a table. And he remembered about his sister Peggy breaking my prism. She's cured of her lameness now, and is grown up to be a very pretty girl, Bailey said. He promised to bring her picture around to the hotel next day.

He and Duffield were so entertaining, that as I talked and danced with them, suddenly Mr. Tucker and his opinions ceased to interest me any more. When he came hurrying up to speak to me and to ask for a dance, it was the strangest thing – his personality seemed to have changed since last summer. I looked up to him then as being quite intellectual and fascinating, but, seeing him now with Duffield and Bailey and Bob Mayfield, he seemed really rather insignificant. They called him "Watty," and that expresses him exactly.

But Babe seemed to find him very entertaining, and they danced together a lot. Good old Babe, so homely and so plain. Her nose was shiney and her hair straggling and her dress all sagging crooked before she'd been at it an hour. But she was having a beautiful time, and there's not a bit of jealousy in her nature. She came up to me once to ask for a pin and whispered, "Georgina, you're perfectly wonderful tonight – all sparkle and glow."

It made me very happy, for Babe's compliments are few and far between. She is more apt to speak of your bad points than your good ones, and to be moved to say anything like that meant a lot from her. When I took her over to Mrs. Waldon to get some pins out of her "chaperone bag," because I didn't have any and she needed nearly a dozen, I heard Mrs. Waldon and Mrs. Locke saying nice things about me in an undertone, that made me think of that little line in "The Battle of Waterloo," about "cheeks that blushed with praise of their own loveliness."

It seemed to me that if the band would only keep on playing I could float on and on forever to the music. Oh, it's so wonderful to be a-tingle to the very finger-tips with the joy of just being alive —radiantly alive! To have all eyes following you admiringly as if you were a flower swaying on its stem! Oh I know this sounds conceited, written out in black and white in plain daylight, but that night as they played the strains of "Poor Butterfly" again and again, I felt to the fullest the joy of being a social success, such as Esther was. I felt all wings and as if I really were – at least inwardly – "all sparkle and glow." I wished that the night need never, never end, and the music and the heavenly floating motion need never stop. I wonder if a time can ever come when I'll be so old and stiff and feeble like Aunt Elspeth, that the strains of "Poor Butterfly" will not give me wings again. How does one ever become reconciled to being old?

Next morning when we went over to the Naval Academy none of the boys could get off to accompany us, but the "Jimmy-legs" detailed to escort us was an old acquaintance of Mrs. Waldon's, and she has seen the sights so many times that she is as good as a guide-book. Nothing escaped us. I could have spent a week in the building where the trophy flags are, especially in the room that is lined with them, ceiling and all. By the time we had seen them, from Commodore Perry's "Don't give up the ship" down to the Chinese flag captured from the Boxers, we were worked up to such a pitch of patriotic pride that we wanted to go right off and do something ourselves to add a guidon or an ensign to that "long honor roll of heroic victories on the high seas."

We stayed so long looking at the flags that we didn't have time to go through the chapel before lunch, but we did take time to watch the boys a few moments as the signal sounded for formation and they came marching in every direction to form in front of Bancroft Hall. We sat down on some benches under the trees to watch them, and they did look so fine, marching along with their precise military swing that we girls were wildly enthusiastic about them. I couldn't understand why Mrs. Locke's eyes filled with tears, till Mrs. Waldon said reminiscently:

"It seems only yesterday that my girls and I sat here, watching Oliver and Roy in that same line, and now one is on a submarine and the other on a destroyer."

And then I remembered that out from this peaceful spot where the April flowers were springing up everywhere and robins hopping across the green grass, these boys might have to go right off after "June week" into a storm of shot and shell. A storm far worse than any that ever rained around those tattered old flags we had just been looking at, because now there is the added frightfulness of mines and U-boats, and aircraft overhead, dropping death from the very skies. And yet (it's shocking to confess) last night, while we were dancing in the very place where the boys are being made strong and fit for such fighting, I actually forgot that war is going on.

I forgot it again when the boys came over after lunch to take us back to the Academy to finish our sight-seeing. There were five of them, one apiece on the way over. But after we got inside the grounds Mrs. Locke said she was too tired to climb any more stairs, and she'd seen everything several times before, anyhow. So she and Mrs. Waldon found a bench under the trees facing the water, where a boat drill was going on, and took out their knitting. We strolled off in the direction of the boathouse.

Presently I noticed that no matter how we shifted positions as we went up steps or paused to look out of windows, three of the boys always came drifting back to me: Duff and Bob Mayfield and Bailey. And I wasn't doing a single thing to keep them with me, only laughing at their bright remarks and trying to be agreeable in a general way, for naturally I wanted them all to like me.

But all of a sudden I realized that I was having the same effect on them that Esther had on the boys at home. They were falling all over themselves to make me like them. It was the queerest sensation, that feeling of power that came over me. And, although I didn't care for one a bit more than for the others, I was curious to see what would happen if I were to exert that mysterious influence that I seemed to have over each of them. I began to feel that maybe I had not been fair to Esther in judging her so harshly. Maybe she had felt that same way, and drifted into those different affairs without thinking of consequences.

Pretty soon I could see that Duffield was maneuvering to get the other boys out of the way, and finally he succeeded after talking in an aside with his sister a moment. She immediately developed a great interest in an old wooden Indian which sits out on the campus on a pedestal. It was once a figurehead on the prow of a ship, and is supposed to be a likeness of the old war-chief Tecumpseh. The boys count it as their mascot. They decorate it with their colors before a football game and run around it for luck before exams, and all that sort of thing.

Before I realized how it happened, Duff and I were walking off towards the chapel alone, and all the others were going down to watch Babe and Lillian run around old Tecumpseh for luck. It was nearly an hour before they joined us. We strolled around inside the chapel and read the tablets put up in memory of the heroes who had once been merely boyish midshipmen like the one beside me. One had lost his life in some Asiatic expedition among savages. It was awfully interesting to me, seeing it for the first time, but Duffield kept interrupting my thrills to talk about personal matters.

By this time I felt as if I had known him all my life, for Lillian's daily reminiscences of him had done more to make me acquainted with him than years of occasional meetings could have done. So it didn't seem as startling as it would have been otherwise when he suddenly became very personal. We were sitting in one of the seats back under the gallery. The few tourists wandering about were up near the chancel, whispering together and looking up at the memorial windows. We talked almost in whispers, too, of course, being in this shrine of heroes as well as a place of worship, and that in itself gave a more intimate tone to our conversation.

Duffield told me that he liked me better than any girl he ever met in his life. That he felt he had known me for years, for Lillian quoted me so often both in her letters and visits. And he wanted me to promise to correspond with him, and to give him my picture to put in the back of his watch, so's he'll have it with him when he goes off on his long cruise this summer. Of course I wouldn't promise. I told him I didn't know him well enough, but he wouldn't give up, and we kept on arguing about it for a long time, in a half-joking, half-serious way, till I was almost tempted to say I would, just to see what would happen.

Then the others came in, and we all went down in the crypt to see the tomb of John Paul Jones. And even down there in that solemn place where a guard keeps vigil all the time, and the massive bronze wreaths and the flags and the silence make it so impressive, he edged in between Bailey and me and stooped down to whisper laughingly, "I won't give up the ship. You might as well promise."

But just at that moment Bailey called my attention to the ceiling above the tomb. A map of the heavens is painted on it, with all the constellations that the mariners steer their ships by. Looking up at those stars set above the last resting place of the old Admiral, Barby's words came back to me as if she were right at my elbow:

"There are people like that – there are friendships like that – there is love like that —as dependable as the stars." If Esther had been the "Star" I thought her she never would have drifted into those affairs with Richard and John Wynne and all the others. I think if it hadn't been for that I might have let myself drift a bit, for it certainly was a temptation to see how much Duffield might grow to care for me, although I was sure I could never feel any deep and lasting sentiment for him – the real Uncle-Darcy-and-Aunt-Elspeth kind.

While I stood looking up at that map of the heavens, with these thoughts chasing through my mind, Babe came up and nudged me and told me for mercy's sake to quit star-gazing in a cellar. They were all ready and waiting to go. Babe has a lot of curiosity. As we started towards the stairs she gave me a puzzled look which said as plainly as words, "Now what did you do that for?"

I had stopped to lay my hand on a banner bearing the name of the old Admiral's flag-ship. It was a blue one with the name of the ship in white —Bonhomme Richard. I could not have told her why I did it, had she asked in words, instead of with her eyes. Even to myself I could not explain the impulse, save that the name brought a thought of Richard Moreland, and the feeling that what he had done made him, in his boyish way, as worthy of bronze wreaths and blue banners as any of those whose tablets shone in the chapel above. Seeing those tablets and the tomb and that map of stars, made my old dreams come back, my old longing to do something and be something in the world really worth while. I simply couldn't stand it to go through life and not write my name on the world's memory as it was written in the silver of my christening cup. Then I wondered what Richard would think of Duffield.

That evening the same five boys who had been with us in the afternoon were lucky enough to get off again and come down to the hotel. Duffield and Mrs. Waldon's cousin were allowed to come earlier, in time for dinner. Afterwards we danced in the parlors and had just as an entrancing a time as we had the night before,

 
"Where Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet."
 

Duffield was all that Lillian had bragged he was. The more I saw him the better I liked him. He was so sweet to her and so dear to his mother and so lovely to me, that I began to have a real pang at the thought of him going off on that long cruise and our never meeting again perhaps, as long as we lived.

I found myself liking him so much better as the evening wore on, and discovering so many attractive things about him, that I was halfway frightened. I was afraid that I was doing what Barby said – "putting a rainbow around him." That the charm I saw about him was maybe partly of my own imagining. It worried me dreadfully. How is one to know? As we floated through the last dance together I began to think that if we were thrown together often I might find that he was the one person in the world I would care for above all others. And yet, John Wynne had thought that about Esther and so had Richard. I wished I had some absolutely sure test, some magic charm, by which I could know the gold of real love from the imitation that glitters like it.

I lost the rhinestone buckle off one of my slippers and my coral dress caught on a jagged hoop of one of the tubs that the palms were in, and tore such a long slit in it that I can never wear it again. But it has served its purpose in the world. I've had two perfectly heavenly evenings in it. I've saved a handsbreadth of its pink loveliness to put away and keep in memory of that happy time.

The boys wouldn't go home until Mrs. Locke promised to bring us down again for June week. She promised, but I'm almost sure Barby won't let me go. The last thing Duffield did was to ask me again for that picture. "Please," he said in an undertone when he stooped to pick up my handkerchief. And he said it again in a meaning half-whisper as we shook hands all around in the general chorus of "Goodbye till June week."

CHAPTER XII
"SHOD GOES SURE"

June week has come and gone, but I was not there when the midshipmen went marching by in their white uniforms across the green mall, and the band played and parasols and summer dresses fluttered their gay colors from the Armory to the training ship.

Father wrote that he was coming, and would take me home with him if I didn't mind missing commencement. I did mind, terribly, but it was nothing when weighed in the balance with travelling back to the Cape with him and being with him a whole week.

So Babe and Lillian went without me, but it was some comfort afterward to hear that the boys all seemed disappointed because I wasn't there. They sent ever so many nice messages. Duffield sent me a Lucky Bag, the midshipmen's Annual, full of jokes about each other and some very attractive pictures both of the men and the buildings. There was a splendid one of him, and he drew a little sketch of Commodore Perry's flag on the margin, changing the motto to the words, "Won't give up the ship."

Babe brought back a Lucky Bag, too; Watson gave it to her. She also had a postal card of that old Indian figurehead, Tecumpseh. I believe Babe must have made some wish while running around it which came true, or else Watson gave her the postal. It surely must have some association for her, for she brought it back to Provincetown and has it now, framed in a carved ivory frame, the handsomest one in the house, and wholly unsuitable for an old wooden Indian. She keeps it on her side of the bureau, and Viola simply loathes it.

Father and I had a delightfully cosy visit on the way home. We stayed all night in Boston and came over on the boat. He has been under a frightful strain and shows it; looks so worn and tired and has ever so many more gray hairs than he had a year ago. He came right from the war zone, and twice has been on ships that had to go to the rescue of torpedoed vessels and pick up passengers adrift in life-boats.

I couldn't get him to talk much about such things. He said he was trying to put them out of his mind as much as possible, and was hungry to get back to the sand dunes and just peaceful women folks. His eyes followed Barby's every movement. At times they had a grave, wistful expression which gave me dreadful forebodings.

Coming over on the boat he questioned me about the course of study at Harrington Hall – how far I'd gone in mathematics and everything. Then he asked what I thought about learning typewriting this summer, and taking a short practical business course in Mr. Carver's office. I was so astonished I couldn't speak for a moment. All I could think of was Chicken-Little's cry – "The sky's a-failing. I was sitting under a rose-bush and a piece fell on me."

Finally, instead of answering his question, I blurted out the one I was fixing to ask him later on, after I'd paved the way for it and led up to it diplomatically, about my stopping school and taking the training for a Red Cross nurse. The moment it was out I knew I had bungled it by being so abrupt. He simply waved it aside as impossible. He said I didn't understand the conditions at the front at all. They needed women there, not immature girls unfitted both physically and mentally to cope with its horrors. They would be nervous wrecks in a short time. He said he was speaking from a physician's standpoint. He recognized the Joan of Arc spirit in the school-girls who offered themselves. It was one of the most beautiful and touching things the war had called forth, but they needed something more than youthful enthusiasm and a passion for sacrifice. When I was through school if I still wanted to take the training he wouldn't say a word, but now —

The shake of his head and the gesture of his hand as he said that one word dismissed the subject so utterly that I simply couldn't insist. I couldn't offer a single one of the arguments which I had stored up to answer him with in case he objected, as I knew he would.

Then he said he'd always hoped to give me some practical business training, just as if I'd been a boy, and now the war was making it even more necessary that I should have it. If I'd been a boy he would have wanted me to go into the Cold Storage Plant here that we have an interest in, long enough for me to learn how it is carried on and what its success depends upon. Mr. Samuel Carver II is at the head of it, and Titcomb Carver and Sammy III will take it up when they're through college. But they'll be the first to enlist when the call comes. They're that kind. And if they never come back the business will be eventually turned over to strangers. He wants me to know enough about it to safeguard our interests.

I was perfectly aghast at the idea. Me, not seventeen till next month, spending all my vacation shut up in an office, banging on a typewriter, with the whole free sparkling harbor outside calling to me. I'd planned such good times for this summer, a regular "under-the-rose-bush" kind, no lessons, no rules. Now not only was the sky a-falling over my particular bush, it was hitting me hard.

The boat had just rounded the point when Father finished unfolding his plan, and we were leaning over the railing of the upper deck watching for the old town to come in view. For the first time it failed to look beautiful to me. The straight, ugly lines of the huge Storage plant loomed up till it seemed the biggest thing alongshore except the Pilgrim monument. That, of course, stretched up grim and stern above everything else, and looked across at me as if it knew the hard thing Father had just asked me to do. I felt that it heard the rebellious answer I was making to myself.

"I can't."

"You must," it answered back, as it had done all my life. "It's your duty. The idea of a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Minute Men shirking her duty!"

It always gets back at me that way. It knows that the stern and rockbound Huntingdon part of me could make only one answer when Father put the matter to me the way he did. It was a sacrifice, for I had hoped to begin my new novel this summer. But I had a sort of righteous, uplifted feeling after I had consented, such as I think the martyrs must have had, which is the reward of sacrifice. It's queer what a satisfaction one can get out of that martyr feeling at times.

But I was ashamed of it next morning. I was going through the hall to join Barby and Father on the porch when I heard them talking about me.

"No, Judson, she's only a child. I can't bear to have her go out into the rough business world this early. There'll be time enough for that if some actual need should arise."

"But, Barbara, to let her grow up unprepared for what is almost sure to happen, would be like sending her out on a stony road in her little bare feet. 'Shod goes sure,' Uncle Darcy used to say. If she's properly shod she'll be spared much pain and weariness. If you could only realize what lies ahead of us – if you could only see what I have seen – "

I walked out on the porch just then and he put out his hand to draw me to a seat beside him. Then he began to tell us of what he has just seen in France and England, the splendid way the women and girls over there are rising up and shouldering their burdens. Of their work in the munitions factories and on farms and in railroad yards. From peeresses to peasants they stop at nothing which needs doing, from oiling a locomotive to cleaning out a stable. Personal affairs are no longer regarded. Personal comfort no longer counts. Safety doesn't count. Life itself doesn't count. The only thing that does count is winning the war, and they are giving themselves magnificently, body and soul, "as one who does a deed for love nor counts it sacrifice."

It's like listening to one of the old Crusaders when Father talks that way. It's a holy war to him. When I compared the selfish, easy existence I had planned for myself this vacation with what the girls over there are doing, and remembered how noble I had considered myself for giving it up, I felt ashamed of having called it a sacrifice. I made up my mind then and there that I'll make good in the way Father wants me to if it kills me. He shall never have cause to regret my being just a girl. I'm sure he has envied Mr. Carver his sons many a time, but I'll show him I can answer my Country's call when it comes, fully as well as Titcomb or Sammy III. In the meantime, I'll put in my best licks at getting shod for whatever road that lies ahead.

Of course I didn't start till Father's visit was over, but he took me down to the office one morning and made all the arrangements. It is the old Mr. Carver, Grandfather Huntingdon's friend, who is to take me in hand. Sammy Senior, everybody calls him. He doesn't do much now but sign checks and attend to some of the correspondence, so he'll have plenty of time to attend to me, and seems glad to do it.

It was a solemn sort of morning, for we went into Mr. Sammy Senior's office, and Father took his private box out of the safe and looked over the papers in it. He made a lot of changes and told both of us what he told me up in the garret last time he was home, and a lot more besides. There are certain bonds he wants turned over to Uncle Darcy's grandchildren, Elspeth and little Judson, when they are old enough to go to college. Judson is Father's namesake. He explained to Mr. Sammy Senior that their father, Dan Darcy, saved his life once over in China, nursing him, that time he caught the strange disease which was attacking the sailors. Father had gone over there to study it for the government.

Dan married Tippy's niece, Belle Triplett, after he came home and is working now in the wireless station over at Highland Light, but the government wants him for more important work in the Navy, and Father wants to make sure those children are provided for in case anything happens to Dan. Naturally that led to our going over the whole story. How Dan disappeared from town under a cloud years ago, everybody thinking he was the thief, instead of his friend Emmet Potter. (Dan just went away, like a scapegoat into the wilderness to shield him.) And how a year later Emmet was drowned, trying to save some people from a wreck on Peaked Hill bars, and the town put up a monument in his memory. And then a long time after that Richard and I found his confession in an old musket that we were cleaning up to play pirate with.

It was as dramatic as a real play, the finding of that confession, and I enjoyed telling it again to such an appreciative audience. How Richard and I were sitting in the swing in front of Uncle Darcy's door, polishing the brass plate on the stock, when we found it, and I went screaming into the house that Danny was innocent. How Belle, who happened to be there by the strangest coincidence, read the confession over Uncle Darcy's shoulder, and cried out "Emmet a thief! God in heaven, it will kill me!" and how she carried on like a crazy woman till she made Uncle Darcy promise he'd never tell till she gave him permission, although he would have given his life to wipe the stain from Danny's name. She was engaged to Emmett when he died, and had been worshipping him as a hero up to this time. She didn't know till later that one of the reasons that Dan took Emmet's disgrace on himself was to shield her, because he had cared for her all along as much as Emmet did.

Then Father took up the story again, and told how my letter reached him over there in China and led to the discovery that the silent young American who had saved his life was no other than Dan, who didn't know till then that Emmet had confessed and that exile was no longer necessary. "And so," said Father in conclusion, "he came back and married Belle, and, thanks to the little pirates, they lived happily ever after."

"That would make a rattling good movie," Mr. Carver said. "That ship-wreck scene, and finding the confession, and you children burying that pouch of gold-pieces in the sand, for the storm to cover up forever. If the little pirate can write it as well as she can tell it there's the material all right."

All the way home I kept thinking of his suggestion. I had never used material from real life before. I had always made up my characters. But now I began to see some of the familiar town people in a new light. Plain, quiet Dan, doing his deed regardless of the disgrace it brought upon him, was a real Sir Gareth. And dear old Uncle Darcy, vowed to silence so long, what a heroic part he had played!