CHAPTER XVII
BACK WITH THE OLD CROWD
RICHARD couldn't stay a minute, he said. It wasn't treating his CousinJames decently to throw his bag in at the door and rush off up herebefore he'd barely spoken to him. But he never felt that he'd reallyreached home till he'd been up here, and he couldn't wait to tell Barbyabout his good luck.
He was dreadfully disappointed to find that she wasn't at home. Hewouldn't sit down at first, just perched on the edge of the table,regardless of what the spattered blueberry juice might do to his newuniform, and hastily outlined his plans. He was so happy over theprospect of getting into active service that will count for a lot, thathe couldn't talk fast enough. We both had so much to say, not havingseen each other for two years, that first thing we knew the telephonerang, and it was his Cousin James saying that dinner was ready, andwould he please come on. And here we'd been talking an hour and tenminutes by the clock, when all the time he "didn't have a minute tostay," and was in such a rush to be off that he couldn't sit down excepton the edge of the table. He couldn't help laughing at himself, it wasso absurd.
Thinking about it after he'd gone, I was sure from the keen way he keptglancing at me that he did find me changed, after all. His recollectionof me didn't fit the real me, any more than my last season's dresses do.He had to keep letting out seams and making allowance for my mentalgrowth, as I had to for his. That's why neither of us noticed how timeflew. We were so busy sort of exploring each other. That's why I foundmyself looking forward with such interest to his coming back aftersupper. It's like going back to a house you've known all your life,whose every nook and corner is familiar, and finding it done over andenlarged. You enjoy exploring it, to find what's left unchanged andwhat's been added.
Miss Susan and I had a cold lunch together. Then it took me half theafternoon to put the kitchen back into its original order and get theblueberry stains off my fingernails. Tippy was pleased with the way shefound things when she came back, though she wouldn't have complimentedmy achievement for worlds. But I know her silences now, which ones areapproving and which displeased. I know I went up several pegs in herrespect. I heard her intimating as much to Miss Susan.
I wasn't out on the front porch with them when Richard came back aftersupper. A few minutes before he came I suddenly decided to change mydress--to put on a new one that Barby bought me the last day I was inWashington. It's a little love of a gown, white and rose-color. I'dnever worn it before, so it took some time to locate all the hooks andsnappers and get them fastened properly. Richard came before I was halfthrough. I could hear quite plainly what he was saying to Tippy and MissSusan, down on the front porch.
After I was all ready to go down, I went to the mirror for one morelook. There was no doubt about it. It was the most becoming dress I everowned, so pretty and unusual, in fact, that I dreaded to face Tippy init. She'd wonder why I put it on just to sit at home all evening, whenthe one I changed from was perfectly fresh. Too often she does herwondering aloud, and it's embarrassing. I was thankful they were sittingout on the porch. The rose vines darkened it, although the world outsidewas flooded with brilliant moonlight. She wouldn't be so apt to noticeout there.
Just as I put out the lamp and started towards the stairs, I heard Tippysay something about moving into the house because the night air was badfor her rheumatism. I didn't want to meet her in the full glare of thehall chandelier, so I waited on the upper landing long enough to givethem time to go in. But Richard was slow about following them, and whenI was half way down the stair he was only as far as the newel post.Glancing up, he saw me and stopped. I knew without his saying a wordthat he liked my dress. His eyes said it. He has wonderfully expressiveeyes.
It was nice to feel that I was making what theatrical people call aneffective stage entrance. Quoting from a play we had been in together along time ago, I held my head high in the haughty-princess manner andsaid airily, "Hath waited long, my lord?"
He remembered the spirit of the reply if not the right words, and madeup an answer that would have done credit to Sir Walter Raleigh forcourtliness. We swept into the room, carrying on in a ridiculous stageyfashion for a moment or two, not giving Tippy a chance to comment on mydress. I saw her looking at it hard, but before she could get in a wordedgeways, Richard asked me to go over to the Gilfreds' with him. He metJudith on the way up here and she asked him to bring me over. She saidsome others of the old crowd would be there.
George Woodson was already there, sitting in the hammock as usual, butwith Judith's guitar on his knees, instead of the ukelele that he usedto tinkle. We could hear him tuning it as we went up the path. After wehad been there a few minutes Babe and Watson strolled in. Evidently theyhad had some sort of a quarrel. The effect was to make Watsonunmistakably grouchy and Babe sarcastic. It was so noticeable thatGeorge said to me in an aside, "Babe is singing in sharps to-night, andWatty's gone completely off the key."
We'd been away so long that naturally our first wish was to find outwhere everybody was and what they were doing. The conversation was suchfor awhile that Watson was decidedly out of it. He doesn't know manyProvincetown people, having been here only a few times on visits to theNelsons, and now they're gone he is staying at the Gifford House, whereeverybody's strange. So he sat in one end of the porch swing, smoking.Sat in the kind of a silence that makes itself felt for the radius ofhalf a mile.
Nearly everybody brought up for discussion was away at some trainingcamp or flying school, or getting ready for naval service. Naturallythat cast a gloom on George's spirits, as he is always cursing his lotwhenever he sees any one in khaki, because he feels left out of thegame. I was feeling a bit gloomy myself because of the damper they cast,when in the midst of the questions about other people, Richard suddenlyturned to Judith to ask about Esther.
"By the way, Judith, where is that fascinating little flirt of a cousinof yours?"
It was the first time I had heard him speak her name since she left, twoyears ago. For him to be able to refer to her as naturally as that, justas he would to any other human being, certainly took a load off my mind.Whenever I thought of these two in connection with each other, I've beenafraid that the jolt she gave him had shaken his faith in some things.But evidently the old wound had healed without a scar. There was nothingbut plain, ordinary curiosity in the questions he asked, when Judithanswered that Esther was married last winter. She married ClaudeMillins, the man she's been engaged to off and on ever since she was akid.
Judith went down to the wedding. She said it was a brilliant affair.They started out with a rosy future ahead of them, but it was like thatold missionary hymn, "Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."They've been having a perfectly heathenish time ever since the warthrew a bomb into their domestic relations. Claude is crazy aboutEsther, but he isn't crazy about enlisting. He is a pacifist. She hadforty-one relatives in the Civil War on the Confederate side. Over halfof them were killed in the battle of Chicamaugua, and she's ashamed ofhaving a husband who's a slacker. She wants him to be a hero. He saidwasn't it "better to be a live dog than a dead lion?" and she said inthat honey-sweet way of hers, "a yellow dog?"
"Gee!" said Watson suddenly, for the first time breaking into theconversation. "Did they quarrel that way _before_ they were married?"
Judith said, "Evidently. She always spoke of it as an off and onengagement."
"Well," said Richard reminiscently, "she certainly had _me_ going some,but after all, I don't know which she hit the hardest, old George here,or myself."
"Or John Wynne," spoke up Babe, who was in the other end of the swing."What's become of that good-looking doctor?"
Richard was the only one who could answer that question. By the queerestcoincidence they had met in a hotel lobby in Boston, and had lunchedtogether afterward. The doctor will soon be in France. He's to take theplace of a Harvard classmate of his, who was killed recently when theAmbulance Corps he was serving with was nearly wiped out.
Babe said she wondered that he hadn't
gone over long before. Sheexpected him to right after Esther broke up his life the way she did.She imagined he'd be like Francesco, in the story ofGinevra--"Francesco, weary of his life, flew to Venice, and embarking,threw it away in battle with the Turks."
"He isn't that kind of a man, Babe," said Richard. "You haven't got hisright measure. He's too big and too fine to fling his life away for alittle personal grievance. It's not morbid sentiment but a matter ofprinciple that's taking him over. He asked for the place he's getting,because he thinks it's unattached men like himself who ought to fillthem. Neither he nor I have any next of kin left now, who are nearenough to worry over us or to mourn very long if we don't get back."
It did me a world of good to hear Richard speak of that affair as "alittle personal grievance." Evidently it didn't hurt him in the least torecall Esther and the incidents of that summer. Under cover of someanecdote that George began telling, Richard said in an aside to me, "Youremember that story Miss Crewes told us about him, Georgina--his doingthe deed for the deed's sake. He's just like that all the way through,keeping himself so modestly in the background that he never gets theappreciation that is his rightful due."
It seems so nice to have a little secret like that Sir Gareth story withRichard. I can't explain just what it is, but I love the way he turns tome when he puts an intimate little parenthesis like that into thegeneral conversation, just for me.
Presently Judith mentioned Miss Crewes, and then Richard remembered totell us what Doctor Wynne told him about her. He had news of her deathrecently. Two years of nursing at the front was too much for her. Shedied from exposure and overwork, and it was no wonder she went to piecesas she did, witnessing so much German frightfulness. She was in one ofthe hospitals that they bombed.
Judith shivered and put her hands over her ears an instant. "Somehow wekeep getting back to those awful subjects no matter what we talk about,"she said. "And George has been strumming nothing but minors on thatguitar ever since he picked it up. For goodness' sake, strike upsomething to make us forget such horrors--something more befitting sucha glorious night."
It was a glorious night. The Gilfred place runs right down to the water.By this time the moon was high overhead, flooding the porch steps withsuch a bright light one could almost see to read by it.
We did read by it presently, when Lowry Gilfred came spinning up on hisbicycle. He always goes downtown the minute he hears the night trainwhistling for the bridge, and brings up the Boston and New York papers.He held one up. The headlines were so big and black we could read themeasily several feet away.
"More atrocities by the Huns. Inhuman U-boat commander fires onlife-boats escaping from torpedoed vessel."
"Well, Moreland," said Watson, "that's what we'll be coming up againstin a week or two." His face was turned towards Richard as he spoke, butI saw him glance at Babe out of the corner of his eye to see how shetook his remark.
Richard answered cheerfully that he looked on the prospect the same waythat old "Horatius at the bridge" did. "To every man upon this earth,death cometh soon or late," and as long as he had to die some time, he'drather go in a good cause than linger to a doddering old age, or bekilled inch at a time by the germs that get you even when you do watchout.
He was sitting on the porch railing with his back against one of thewhite pillars, and the moon shone full on his upturned face. Remarkingsomething about the way he used to spout Horatius on Friday afternoons,when he was a kid at school, he went on repeating from it. Theexpression on his face must have been the one Barby spoke of when shesaid he reminded her of his father in his inspired moments. He said itin a low, intense voice, as if he were speaking to himself, and thrilledwith the deep meaning of it:
"_And how can men die better than facing fearful odds For the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods?_"
Babe said afterwards it made the cold chills go down her back to hearhim say it in such an impressive way, as if he'd really count it joy todie, "facing fearful odds." She was afraid maybe it was a sign he wasgoing to. And she said that his saying what he did, _as_ he did,suddenly made her see things in a different light, herself. That's whyshe got up soon after, and said that they must be going. She wanted achance to tell Watson she'd changed her mind, and that he was right inwhatever matter it was they'd been arguing about.
But before they went, George Woodson started a new song that's latelycome to town. They say all the soldiers are singing it. It has a catchysort of tune you can't resist, and in a few minutes we were all chimingin with him. It sounded awfully sweet, for George sings a lovely tenorand Richard a good bass, so we had a full quartette. It was just likeold times.
"There's a long, long trail a-winding Into the land of my dreams, Where the nightingales are singing And a white moon beams. There's a long, long night of waiting Until my dreams all come true, Till the day--when I'll be--going down That long, long trail with you."
We sang it over till we had learned the words, and then we couldn't getrid of it. It has such a haunting sweetness that Richard and I hummedscraps of it all the way home. After we said good night and I went up tomy room, I could hear him whistling it. I leaned out of my window tolisten. He whistled it all the way down the street, until he reached theGreen Stairs. It sounded so happy. I wished Babe hadn't said what shedid about his facing fearful odds.