"THE MAID WHO BINDS HER WARRIOR'S SASH"
I COULDN'T tell Tippy. The way we did I just handed her Barby's night
letter without a word and Richard gave her his. She read them with no
more change of expression than if they'd been weather reports. Then she
said that she'd known it all along. A wooden Indian couldn't have been
less demonstrative, but later I found that nothing could have pleased
her more.
Richard says she can't help being born a Plymouth Rock. She's like an
ice-bound brook that can't show the depth and force underlying the
surface coldness. But her tenderness leaked out for us both afterwards,
in all sorts of ways, and I began to understand her for the first time
in my life.
She watched me take down the service flag in the window and replace it
with one bearing two stars, and I'm sure she read my thoughts. She's
always had an uncanny way of doing that. I was thinking how much harder
it was to put up that second star than the first one, because I hadn't
really given Father to the service. He was in it before I was born. But
the second star was the symbol of a real sacrifice that I was laying on
the altar of my country. There was no laughing this time, or joking
suggestion to make a ceremony of it. I felt to the bottom of my heart
what I was doing, and did it in reverent silence.
Soon after she followed me to my room and laid a couple of books on the
table, open at the places marked for me to read. I smiled after she went
out when I saw that one was an antiquated volume of poems. All my life
she has tried to teach me morals and manners by the aid of such verse as
"The boy stood on the burning deck" and "Fie! What a naughty child to
pout." So I picked up the books wondering what lesson she thought I
needed now. The poem she marked was "The Maid who binds her Warrior's
sash." As I read I understood. Dear old Tippy! It was _courage_ she
would teach me.
Richard was right. She couldn't say these things to me, so she brought
me the words of another to help me, knowing the lesson would soon be
sorely needed. The other book was a new one she had just drawn from the
library, the adventures of a young gunner in the Navy. He had won the
Croix de Guerre for distinguished service and escaped the horrors of a
German prison camp, so he knew what he was talking about when he wrote
the words she left for me to read.
"When you say goodbye to your son or your husband or your sweetheart,
take it from me that what he will like to remember the best of all is
your face _with a smile on it_. It will be hard work; you will feel more
like crying and so will he, maybe. That smile is your bit. I will back a
smile against the weeps in a race to Berlin any time. So I am telling
you, and I can't make it strong enough--_send him away with a smile_."
This is the verse:
"The maid, who binds her warrior's sash
With smile, which well the pain dissembles,
The while, beneath the drooping lash,
One starry tear-drop hangs and trembles,
Though heaven alone record the tear
And fame shall never know her story,
Her heart has shed a drop as dear
As ever dewed the field of glory."
I didn't realize then how hard it was going to be to live up to those
quotations, but Tippy, with so much of her life behind her full of its
hard lessons--Tippy knew and took this mute way of warning me.
The storm did us a good turn in more ways than unearthing our buried
treasure. It brought such cold weather in its wake that when we came in
glowing from a tramp along shore just before supper, we found a jolly
big fire waiting for us in the living-room. Such a one, Richard said, as
would warm him many a time, thinking of it, nights when he was miles up
in the air, numb as the North Pole.
We had such a long cosy evening afterward, there in the firelight.
"We'll have it just like this in our own little home when I get back,"
Richard kept saying. We planned the dearest house. We decided to make
his Cousin James sell us his bungalow studio, not only because the Green
Stairs running up the cliff to it is the place where we first saw each
other when we were infants, but because it's such an artistic place, and
has such a wonderful view of the sea. It's a place far too delightful to
be wasted on a single person, even such a nice old bachelor as his
Cousin James.
We even planned what we'd have for our first breakfast when we started
to housekeeping, with Aunt Georgina's coffee urn shining at one end of
the table and an old beaten-silver chop dish, that is one of Richard's
memories of their studio days in Paris, at the other.
"If I could only see that picture in reality before I go!" Richard
exclaimed--"if I could only sit down at that table once with you across
from me, and know that it was my home and my little wife----"
Then he confessed that he wanted to take back everything he'd said about
Watson and war weddings. He believed in 'em now and _couldn't_ I,
_wouldn't_ I----? But without waiting to finish the question he hurried
on to answer it himself. No, he mustn't ask it. He wouldn't. It wouldn't
be fair to me, young as I was, with Barby gone, nor to her. But if he
could only feel that I really belonged to him----
I told him I didn't see how rushing through a whirlwind ceremony as Babe
did could make us feel we belonged to each other any more than we
already did, and I _couldn't_ do it without Barby, but we could say the
betrothal part to each other, and that would make him feel that we were
almost married. So we hunted it up in the prayer book and each repeated
the part that says, "I take thee ... from this day forward ... to love
and to cherish ... and thereto I plight thee my troth."
But after we said it I couldn't see that it made the thought of parting
any easier. Really it seemed even harder after we'd solemnly promised
ourselves to each other that way.
After a while he said there were several things he wanted to speak of
before he went away. One was that his Cousin James has all his
belongings in charge. Among them is a beautiful old Venetian jewel
casket with his mother's rings and necklaces and things in it. His
Cousin James understands that everything in it is to be mine and he
hoped that I'd wear them sometimes--even if--in any event---- He didn't
go on to say even if _what_, but the unfinished sentence filled me with
its unspoken dread, more than if he'd really said it.
After a long silence he said lightly that there was some satisfaction in
the thought that I'd always be comfortably provided for no matter what
happened, and that I could have the bungalow and the motor-boat and all
the other things we'd planned. He'd made his will the day before and his
Cousin James had promised to see it was carried out in every detail.
At the thought of what his speech implied and the mere idea of me having
or doing any of those lovely things without _him_, I couldn't stand it
any longer. I simply hid my face in the sofa cushions and let the dykes
wash out to sea. It must have broken him up somewhat himself, to see
the way I took it, for his voice was shaky when he tried to comfort me.
But it was so dear and tender, just like Uncle Darcy's that time he kept
saying, "There's naught to fear lass, Dan'l's holding you." Every word
only made me cry that much harder.
Presently he cleared his throat and asked if I supposed there was any
powder left in the old powder horn over the mantel, and did I remember
the time we fed some to Captain Kidd to make him game. He'd confess now,
after all these years, he ate some himself that day when I wasn't
looking, but its effect was about worn off by this time, and if I kept
on that way much longer he'd have to have another nip at that old horn
or go to pieces himself.
I sat up then and laughed, despite the big, gulpy sobs that nearly
choked me. For I had to tell him that I'd eaten some of that powder
myself that same time. I licked it out of the palm of my hand when his
back was turned. And if the powder had lost its effect on me the horn
itself hadn't. The mere mention of it made me stiffen. Hereafter I'd be
just as brave as that old Revolutionary grandmother of mine who snatched
it from the wall with the musket, and hustled her Minute Man off with
the one grim word, "Hurry!" I promised him that hereafter he shouldn't
see me shed another drop. And he didn't.
Mr. Milford came up for me early next morning to take me down to the
station to see Richard off. Maybe it was because I had had that spell of
wild weeps the night before, that I felt like the-morning-after-a-storm,
all cleared up and shiney. At any rate I sent him off laughing. He
looked so fit and so fine, starting off on his great adventure like some
knight of old, that I told him I pined to go along; that under the
circumstances I'd gladly change places with him. I'd much rather be
Richard Moreland than G. Huntingdon.
But he said right before his Cousin James that he'd much rather I'd be
_Mrs._ Richard Moreland. It was my blushing so furiously at hearing that
name applied to me for the first time which made him laugh. Then there
was only time to be caught up in a good-bye embrace before the train
pulled out. He swung himself up on the rear platform just as it started.
He did look so handsome and so dear and I was so proud of him in his
khaki that there was nothing forced in the last smile I gave him. It was
the real spangled-bannery kind; such as shines in your eyes when the
band plays martial music and the troops march by. Your heart beats
awfully fast and you hold your breath, but you have the feeling that in
your soul you are one of the color bearers yourself. You are keeping
step with your head held high.
Afterwards when Mr. Milford helped me into the machine he said,
"Georgina, you're a trump. You wear your service stars in your eyes."
When I looked at him questioningly, wondering what he meant, he said,
"Oh, I know they're brown, not blue, but you showed my boy the star of
'true blue' courage in them, and I was horribly afraid for a few minutes
there that maybe you wouldn't."
He talked about service flags all the way home, for we kept coming
across them in the windows in every street. Over two hundred men have
gone out from this little fishing town. When I told him how I felt that
way, about "keeping step," he said he wished I could make some other
people he knew feel the same way.
"There's poor Mrs. Carver, for instance, crying her eyes out over
Titcomb and Sammy III, and talking as if she's the only mother in the
world who's sacrificing anything. If you could suggest that those boys
would be a bit prouder of her if she could keep step with the rest of
the mothers, make her sacrifice with her head up, it would do her a
world of good. She mustn't fly service stars in her window unless she
can back them on the inside with the same true blue courage they stand
for on the outside--the kind that sends the men to the front."
[Illustration]