Georgina's Service Stars
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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.
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.