BACK WITH THE OLD CROWD
RICHARD couldn't stay a minute, he said. It wasn't treating his Cousin
James decently to throw his bag in at the door and rush off up here
before he'd barely spoken to him. But he never felt that he'd really
reached home till he'd been up here, and he couldn't wait to tell Barby
about his good luck.
He was dreadfully disappointed to find that she wasn't at home. He
wouldn't sit down at first, just perched on the edge of the table,
regardless of what the spattered blueberry juice might do to his new
uniform, and hastily outlined his plans. He was so happy over the
prospect of getting into active service that will count for a lot, that
he couldn't talk fast enough. We both had so much to say, not having
seen each other for two years, that first thing we knew the telephone
rang, and it was his Cousin James saying that dinner was ready, and
would he please come on. And here we'd been talking an hour and ten
minutes by the clock, when all the time he "didn't have a minute to
stay," and was in such a rush to be off that he couldn't sit down except
on the edge of the table. He couldn't help laughing at himself, it was
so absurd.
Thinking about it after he'd gone, I was sure from the keen way he kept
glancing at me that he did find me changed, after all. His recollection
of 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 mental
growth, as I had to for his. That's why neither of us noticed how time
flew. We were so busy sort of exploring each other. That's why I found
myself looking forward with such interest to his coming back after
supper. 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 and
enlarged. You enjoy exploring it, to find what's left unchanged and
what's been added.
Miss Susan and I had a cold lunch together. Then it took me half the
afternoon to put the kitchen back into its original order and get the
blueberry stains off my fingernails. Tippy was pleased with the way she
found things when she came back, though she wouldn't have complimented
my achievement for worlds. But I know her silences now, which ones are
approving and which displeased. I know I went up several pegs in her
respect. I heard her intimating as much to Miss Susan.
I wasn't out on the front porch with them when Richard came back after
supper. A few minutes before he came I suddenly decided to change my
dress--to put on a new one that Barby bought me the last day I was in
Washington. It's a little love of a gown, white and rose-color. I'd
never worn it before, so it took some time to locate all the hooks and
snappers and get them fastened properly. Richard came before I was half
through. I could hear quite plainly what he was saying to Tippy and Miss
Susan, down on the front porch.
After I was all ready to go down, I went to the mirror for one more
look. There was no doubt about it. It was the most becoming dress I ever
owned, so pretty and unusual, in fact, that I dreaded to face Tippy in
it. She'd wonder why I put it on just to sit at home all evening, when
the one I changed from was perfectly fresh. Too often she does her
wondering aloud, and it's embarrassing. I was thankful they were sitting
out on the porch. The rose vines darkened it, although the world outside
was flooded with brilliant moonlight. She wouldn't be so apt to notice
out there.
Just as I put out the lamp and started towards the stairs, I heard Tippy
say something about moving into the house because the night air was bad
for her rheumatism. I didn't want to meet her in the full glare of the
hall chandelier, so I waited on the upper landing long enough to give
them time to go in. But Richard was slow about following them, and when
I 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 word
that he liked my dress. His eyes said it. He has wonderfully expressive
eyes.
It was nice to feel that I was making what theatrical people call an
effective stage entrance. Quoting from a play we had been in together a
long time ago, I held my head high in the haughty-princess manner and
said airily, "Hath waited long, my lord?"
He remembered the spirit of the reply if not the right words, and made
up an answer that would have done credit to Sir Walter Raleigh for
courtliness. We swept into the room, carrying on in a ridiculous stagey
fashion for a moment or two, not giving Tippy a chance to comment on my
dress. I saw her looking at it hard, but before she could get in a word
edgeways, Richard asked me to go over to the Gilfreds' with him. He met
Judith on the way up here and she asked him to bring me over. She said
some others of the old crowd would be there.
George Woodson was already there, sitting in the hammock as usual, but
with Judith's guitar on his knees, instead of the ukelele that he used
to tinkle. We could hear him tuning it as we went up the path. After we
had been there a few minutes Babe and Watson strolled in. Evidently they
had had some sort of a quarrel. The effect was to make Watson
unmistakably grouchy and Babe sarcastic. It was so noticeable that
George said to me in an aside, "Babe is singing in sharps to-night, and
Watty's gone completely off the key."
We'd been away so long that naturally our first wish was to find out
where everybody was and what they were doing. The conversation was such
for awhile that Watson was decidedly out of it. He doesn't know many
Provincetown people, having been here only a few times on visits to the
Nelsons, and now they're gone he is staying at the Gifford House, where
everybody'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 of
half a mile.
Nearly everybody brought up for discussion was away at some training
camp or flying school, or getting ready for naval service. Naturally
that cast a gloom on George's spirits, as he is always cursing his lot
whenever he sees any one in khaki, because he feels left out of the
game. I was feeling a bit gloomy myself because of the damper they cast,
when in the midst of the questions about other people, Richard suddenly
turned to Judith to ask about Esther.
"By the way, Judith, where is that fascinating little flirt of a cousin
of yours?"
It was the first time I had heard him speak her name since she left, two
years ago. For him to be able to refer to her as naturally as that, just
as 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 been
afraid 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 nothing
but plain, ordinary curiosity in the questions he asked, when Judith
answered that Esther was married last winter. She married Claude
Millins, the man she's been engaged to off and on ever since she was a
kid.
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 that
old missionary hymn, "Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."
They've been having a perfectly heathenish time ever since the war
threw a bomb into their domestic relations. Claude is crazy about
Esther, but he isn't crazy about enlisting. He is a pacifist. She had
forty-one relatives in the Civil War on the Confederate side. Over half
of them were killed in the battle of Chicamaugua, and she's ashamed of
having a husband who's a slacker. She wants him to be a hero. He said
wasn't it "better to be a live dog than a dead lion?" and she said in
that honey-sweet way of hers, "a yellow dog?"
"Gee!" said Watson suddenly, for the first time breaking into the
conversation. "Did they quarrel that way _before_ they were married?"
Judith said, "Evidently. She always spoke of it as an off and on
engagement."
"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 queerest
coincidence they had met in a hotel lobby in Boston, and had lunched
together afterward. The doctor will soon be in France. He's to take the
place of a Harvard classmate of his, who was killed recently when the
Ambulance Corps he was serving with was nearly wiped out.
Babe said she wondered that he hadn't gone over long before. She
expected him to right after Esther broke up his life the way she did.
She imagined he'd be like Francesco, in the story of
Ginevra--"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 his
right measure. He's too big and too fine to fling his life away for a
little personal grievance. It's not morbid sentiment but a matter of
principle 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 fill
them. Neither he nor I have any next of kin left now, who are near
enough 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 "a
little personal grievance." Evidently it didn't hurt him in the least to
recall Esther and the incidents of that summer. Under cover of some
anecdote that George began telling, Richard said in an aside to me, "You
remember that story Miss Crewes told us about him, Georgina--his doing
the 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 the
appreciation that is his rightful due."
It seems so nice to have a little secret like that Sir Gareth story with
Richard. I can't explain just what it is, but I love the way he turns to
me when he puts an intimate little parenthesis like that into the
general conversation, just for me.
Presently Judith mentioned Miss Crewes, and then Richard remembered to
tell us what Doctor Wynne told him about her. He had news of her death
recently. Two years of nursing at the front was too much for her. She
died from exposure and overwork, and it was no wonder she went to pieces
as she did, witnessing so much German frightfulness. She was in one of
the hospitals that they bombed.
Judith shivered and put her hands over her ears an instant. "Somehow we
keep getting back to those awful subjects no matter what we talk about,"
she said. "And George has been strumming nothing but minors on that
guitar ever since he picked it up. For goodness' sake, strike up
something to make us forget such horrors--something more befitting such
a 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 with
such a bright light one could almost see to read by it.
We did read by it presently, when Lowry Gilfred came spinning up on his
bicycle. He always goes downtown the minute he hears the night train
whistling 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 them
easily several feet away.
"More atrocities by the Huns. Inhuman U-boat commander fires on
life-boats escaping from torpedoed vessel."
"Well, Moreland," said Watson, "that's what we'll be coming up against
in a week or two." His face was turned towards Richard as he spoke, but
I saw him glance at Babe out of the corner of his eye to see how she
took his remark.
Richard answered cheerfully that he looked on the prospect the same way
that 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'd
rather go in a good cause than linger to a doddering old age, or be
killed inch at a time by the germs that get you even when you do watch
out.
He was sitting on the porch railing with his back against one of the
white pillars, and the moon shone full on his upturned face. Remarking
something about the way he used to spout Horatius on Friday afternoons,
when he was a kid at school, he went on repeating from it. The
expression on his face must have been the one Barby spoke of when she
said he reminded her of his father in his inspired moments. He said it
in a low, intense voice, as if he were speaking to himself, and thrilled
with 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 hear
him say it in such an impressive way, as if he'd really count it joy to
die, "facing fearful odds." She was afraid maybe it was a sign he was
going 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 why
she got up soon after, and said that they must be going. She wanted a
chance to tell Watson she'd changed her mind, and that he was right in
whatever matter it was they'd been arguing about.
But before they went, George Woodson started a new song that's lately
come to town. They say all the soldiers are singing it. It has a catchy
sort of tune you can't resist, and in a few minutes we were all chiming
in with him. It sounded awfully sweet, for George sings a lovely tenor
and Richard a good bass, so we had a full quartette. It was just like
old 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 get
rid of it. It has such a haunting sweetness that Richard and I hummed
scraps of it all the way home. After we said good night and I went up to
my room, I could hear him whistling it. I leaned out of my window to
listen. He whistled it all the way down the street, until he reached the
Green Stairs. It sounded so happy. I wished Babe hadn't said what she
did about his facing fearful odds.