HOME-COMINGS
I MIGHT as well have traveled alone, for all the company Babe and Watson
proved to be. They were so absorbed in their conversation with each
other that they never once glanced out of the window, even when we were
going along the Cape where one is apt to see a familiar face every time
the train stops.
I was so glad to get back to familiar scenes like cranberry bogs and
dunes and marshes, with the pools of water shining in them like mirrors,
that I kept exclaiming, "Oh, look!" I said it several times before I
realized that the landscape had no attractions for them. Neither had the
stuffy car any discomforts, although the hot July sunshine streamed in
across the red velvet upholstery.
With their chairs swung facing each other, they sat and talked like two
Robinson Crusoes who had just found each other after aeons of solitude
on separate islands. For a while I watched them over the top of my
magazine; Watson mopping his shiny red face with his handkerchief, and
Babe with her hat tilted crooked over one eye and a little wisp of hair
straggling over her neck, and her collar all rumpled up behind. I kept
wondering what on earth was the attraction that each had for the other.
One can understand it when the heroine is beautiful and the hero
fascinating, but how two such plain, average people as Babe Nolan and
Watson Tucker can inspire the grand passion is a puzzle.
I couldn't help smiling to myself when I looked back on the time when I
had once imagined Watson to be the most congenial man I ever met. I was
heartily glad that our acquaintance had been interrupted at that point,
until I grew older and wiser. Suppose I had gone on looking at him
through the prism of my ideals until I actually believed that the halo
which my imagination put around him was a real one! What a little fool a
girl of fifteen can be! It seems to me I have aged more in this last
year at school, than in all the years that went before it put together.
Only a few more days until I can count myself actually grown up--till I
have reached that magic milestone, my eighteenth birthday!
Growing up is like the dawning of Spring. For a long time there are just
a few twitters, a hint of buds in the hedgerows. Then, suddenly as an
April shower, a mist of green drops down over the bare branches like a
delicate veil, and one awakens to a world of bloom and birdsong and
romance.
(That's a good paragraph to start a story with. I'll put an asterisk on
the margin to mark it.)
I had expected to awaken to my Springtime and romance this very
summer--to find it perhaps, in Kentucky. Barby and I have planned for
years that my eighteenth birthday should be spent there. The very word,
Kentucky, suggests romance to me. But now that the war has upset
everyone's plans, I'll have to give it up. And Romance is not likely to
come riding by to such a gray old fishing port as Provincetown.
This is what I told myself as we went along between the cranberry bogs
and the dunes. But suddenly we made a turn that showed us the entire end
of the Cape. There, with the sunset light upon it, was the town, curving
around the harbor like a golden dream city, rising above a "sea of glass
mingled with fire." Spires and towers and chimney tops, with the great
shaft of the Pilgrims high above them all, stood transfigured in that
wonderful shining. I took it as an omen--a good omen of all sorts of
delightful and unexpected happenings that might come to me.
When we reached the station, I had two completely separate and distinct
impulses, which made me afraid that I still lack considerable of being
grown up. The first fishy smell of the harbor which greeted me, with its
tang of brine and tar, gave me the impulse to send my suitcase up to the
house by the baggage man, and run all the way home. I wanted to go
skipping along the streets as I used to when my skirts were knee high
and my curls bobbing over my shoulders. I wanted to speak to everyone I
met and have everyone call back at me, "Hello, Georgina," in friendly
village fashion. I wanted to smell what was cooking for supper in every
house I passed, and maybe if the baker's cart came along with its
inviting step in the rear, "hang on behind" for a block or two.
The second impulse was to powder my nose a trifle, put on a little face
veil and a pair of perfectly fitting gloves, and then when the panel
mirror between the car windows showed a modish and tailor-made young
lady, correct in every detail, step into the bus and drive home to make
an impression on Tippy.
The latter impulse dominated, and I am glad it did, for Judith and
George Woodson and several others of the old crowd were at the station
to meet us. Babe hadn't even set her hat straight, but she didn't know
it. Neither did Watson. They just went along, smiling vacuously (I guess
that's as good a word as any, though I'm not exactly sure of it) on
everything and everybody.
It seemed so strange to come home to a house with no Barby in it, but it
was such a satisfaction to feel that my arrival put Tippy into her
little company flutter. It was the face veil which did it, I am sure,
and the urban air which I acquired in Washington. I am taller than she,
now, and I had to stoop a little to kiss her. Instead of her saying, as
I expected, for me to run along and take my things off, because supper
was getting cold, she led the way upstairs to my room, just as if I'd
been the visiting missionary's wife, or relatives from out of the state.
And she went around setting things straighter, which were already
straight, and asking if there was anything I'd have to make me
comfortable, till I hardly knew myself, her making such company out of
me.
Miss Susan Triplett has been here ever since Barby went to Washington,
but she's going home soon, now that I have come back. Between them I got
all the news of the town during supper. Aunt Elspeth is very, very ill.
They're afraid she can't last long at this rate. They have a trained
nurse for her and Belle has to spend so much of her time over there that
Tippy has been taking care of little Elspeth and Judson in the daytime.
Titcomb Carver and Sammy III have both enlisted, and the two Fayal boys,
Manuel and Joseph, are in the Navy. Nearly everyone I asked about was in
some kind of government service. Tippy says the Portuguese boys have
responded splendidly, and she keeps tab on the whole town. But she said
it is a tragedy about George Woodson. He's tried four times to enlist,
but he can't pass the physical examination. His sight is imperfect and
the old trouble with his knee that he got from a football accident in
his Junior year bars him out. Tippy never liked George. He was impudent
to her one time, years ago. Ran his tongue out at her when she told him
to quit doing something that she thought he had no business to do, and
she never forgave him. But now she respects him so much for the
desperate way he has tried to get into the service, and is so sorry for
his disappointment, that she can't say nice enough things about him.
It was late when the expressman brought my trunk. Miss Susan had already
gone upstairs and was putting up her front hair in crimping pins. But
Tippy never made any objections when I started to unpack. I simply can't
get used to being treated with so much deference. It's worth growing up
just to have her listen so respectfully to my opinions and to know that
she feels that my advice is worth asking for.
I only unpacked the top tray to get some things Barby and I had bought
for her in the Washington shops, and to take out something she was even
more interested in than her gifts. It was a little silk service flag to
hang up in honor of Father. She took it in her hands as if it were
sacred. I never saw her so moved to admiration over anything, as she was
over that little blue star in its field of white with the red border
around it.
Her voice didn't sound natural, because there was a queer sort of choke
in it when she said: "I never before wanted to be a man. But I do now,
just for the chance to be what that star stands for."
I had intended to wait till morning before hanging it in the front
window, but she had a hammer and a push-pin out of a box in the hall
closet before I knew what she was looking for, and carried the lamp
ahead of me down the stairs. "Liberty enlightening the World," I called
it, as she stood holding the lamp up for me to see, while I drove the
push-pin into the window sash.
But she didn't laugh with me. It was a solemn thing to her, this placing
of the symbol which showed the world that a patriot had gone out from
the house in defence of his country. Although she's a thin, gaunt figure
with her hair twisted into a hard little knot on the back of her head,
and there's nothing statuesque about a black silk dress gathered full at
the waist, and a ruffled white apron, her waiting attitude seemed to
dignify the occasion and make a ceremony of it. I started to say
something, jokingly, about firing a salute with our ancestral musket, or
singing "America," but the expression on her face stopped me. The spirit
of some old Revolutionary forbear seemed shining in her eyes. I hadn't
dreamed that Patriotism meant _that_ to Tippy; something exalted enough
to transform her homely old features with a kind of inner shining.
Something wakened me very early next morning, soon after daybreak.
Sitting up to look out of the window nearest my bed, I saw somebody
hoeing in the garden. A Portuguese woman I supposed, who was taking the
place of the regular gardener. Ever since old Jeremy Clapp reached his
nineties, we've had his nephew, young Jeremy. But they told me the night
before, that he's gone to be a surfman in the U. S. Coast patrol. It was
especially hard to give him up as the war garden he had just put in was
twice the size we usually have.
Then I recognized the flapping old sport hat which the woman wore. It
was one which I discarded last year. Underneath it, her skirts tucked up
to her shoe-tops to avoid the heavy dew, was Tippy, hoeing weeds as if
she were making a personal attack on the Hindenburg line and intended
demolishing it before breakfast.
Funny as she looked in her scare-crow working outfit, there was
something in the sight that made me want to stand and salute. It gave me
the kind of thrill one has when the troops march by, and everyone cheers
as the colors pass. I can't put it into words, but it was the feeling
that brusque, rheumatic old Tippy with her hoe, stood for as fine a kind
of patriotism as there is in the world. She's just as eager to do some
splendid, big, thrilling thing for her country as any man in khaki, yet
all she can do is to whack weeds. I wish I were artist enough to make a
companion piece for the poster I brought home in my trunk--a goddess of
liberty unfurling a star-spangled banner across the world. I'd make a
homely work-roughened old woman in her kitchen apron, her face shining
like Tippy's did last night, when she looked at the star and wished she
could be the hero it stood for.
I made up my mind to say something like that to her, something to show
her how fine I think it is for a woman of her age to put in such
valiant licks in a vegetable garden when greater things are denied her.
But when I went downstairs and found she had changed from her garden
clothes into her immaculate gingham house dress, and was stepping around
in the brisk, capable way that used to make me afraid of taking any
liberties with her, I couldn't have made such a speech to her any more
than I could have made it to the refrigerator. My first glance showed me
she had lost her company flutter. I saw she would soon have me back in
my old place of doing as I was bid and not questioning her authority, if
I did not assert myself at once.
The chance came while we were at breakfast. A man came with a great lot
of blueberries that she had ordered last week. Not expecting them so
soon she had promised Belle to spend most of the day in Fishburn Court,
because the nurse wanted to get off for a while. She was dreadfully put
out about the berries, afraid they wouldn't keep. She was starting to
carry them down cellar when I rose and took the pails away from her, and
announced that _I'd_ can the whole lot of them, myself.
Goodness knows I didn't want to. I was simply aching to get down to the
beach and go for a long row, and look in on the neighbors long enough to
say howdy to everybody. But having once said I'd do it and been flatly
refused, I simply had to carry my point. I grabbed her by the elbows in
a laughing sort of scuffle and sat her down hard in a chair, and told
her to stay put. To my astonishment, she gave right up, but for a reason
that completely took the wind out of my sails.
"Well," she said thoughtfully, "I suppose you do want to do your bit for
Uncle Sam. It's about all a young thing like you _can_ do, so I oughtn't
to stand in your way if you feel that way about it."
Then I found out she has been canning and preserving everything she can
get her hands on, as a patriotic measure, and she supposed that was my
motive. It gave me a jolt to think that while I was saying: "Poor old
thing, there's so little she can do," she was feeling the same pity for
my youth and inefficiency.
Many a time I've helped put up fruit, but this was the first time I'd
ever been allowed the whole responsibility. The minute she took herself
off I began. Miss Susan was upstairs, starting to pack her trunk, so I
had the kitchen all to myself. It is an attractive old kitchen, every
tin silver-bright, and all in such perfect order that I could go to any
nail or shelf in the dark, absolutely sure of finding on it the utensil
it is expected to hold.
Just outside the screen door, on the back step, Captain Kidd lay with
his head on his paws, watching every movement through his shaggy bangs.
I think he is happy to have me at home again, but the house has been so
quiet during my long absence, that my singing disconcerts him. He sleeps
a lot now that he is such an old dog, and he couldn't take his usual nap
while I was canning those berries. At Harrington Hall I never could let
my voice out as I wanted to for fear of disturbing the public peace. Now
with the whole downstairs to myself, I sang and sang, all the time I
stirred and sweetened and weighed and screwed the tops on the long rows
of waiting glass jars.
I was pretty hot by the time I came to the last kettleful. My hands were
stained, and I had burned my wrist and spilled juice all down the front
of my bungalow apron. But the end was in sight, and I swung into the
tune of "Tipperary" as the soldiers sometimes do on the last lap of a
long march. All of a sudden, Captain Kidd, who had been drowsing for
awhile, lifted his head with such an alert air that I stopped singing to
listen, too. He seldom shows excitement now. Then with an eager little
yelp that was half bark, half whine, he bounded off the step and tore
around the house like a crazy thing.
That cry meant but one thing. It had never meant anything else since he
was a puppy. _Richard was coming._
He always heralded him that way. If I had had any doubt of that first
little cry of announcement there could be none about the fury of barking
which followed. That ecstasy of greeting was reserved for one person
alone. It couldn't be any one but Richard.
A figure in khaki strode past the window, the dog leaping up on him and
almost turning somersaults in his efforts to lick his face. Then splash
went the ladle into the kettle (I had been holding it suspended in my
surprise), and the juice splashed all over the stove. The next instant
Richard was in the kitchen, both hands outstretched to grasp mine, and
we were looking questioningly into each others eyes. It was a long gaze,
for we were each frankly curious to see if the other had changed.
Barby was right. The two years had, made a man of him. He was larger in
every way, and in his lieutenant's uniform looked every inch a soldier.
He spoke first, smiling broadly.
"The same old girl, only taller than Barby now!"
"The same old Dare-devil Dick!" I retorted, "only----" I started to add
"so tremendously good-looking in that uniform," but instead just
laughed, as I drew my hands away.
"Only what?" he persisted in his old teasing fashion. But I wouldn't
tell, and there we were, right back again on our old squabbling grounds,
just where we left off two years ago.
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