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CHAPTER XVII
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.

CHAPTER XVIII
A WAR WEDDING

Talk about a clap of thunder out of a clear sky – that's nothing to the surprise Babe gave us the very next night. About nine o'clock she called me by telephone to say:

"Listen, Georgina. Is Richard still there? Is it too late for you to come down for a few minutes? Watson and I are to be married tomorrow afternoon. We've just decided. Everything's in a dreadful tangle. We want you to help straighten us out."

I was so surprised I could hardly speak. Tippy thought someone must be dead from the horrified way I gasped out, "Oh, you don't mean it!" The suddenness of it did horrify me in a way. It seems so dreadful to be snatched through the most beautiful and sacred occasion of one's life so fast that there's no chance to do any of the time-honored things that make it beautiful and impressive. For all Babe seems so matter of fact she's full of sentiment, and has always looked forward to doing those romantic things that brides do, such as filling a "hope chest" with

 
Stitches set in long white seams
To the silent music of tender dreams.
 

Hurrying up a wedding in one day in such a combination family as the Nolan-Dorseys would be like scrambling eggs. Of course, we went right down.

We had had an awfully nice day together, exploring the town to see how much it had changed, and calling on Uncle Darcy and dropping into the studios where we have been welcomed on Mr. Moreland's account since the first summer he joined the Artist's colony. We'd been in every store on Commercial street to speak to the clerks, and out to the end of Railroad Wharf to see how many of our old fishermen friends we could find. Down on the beach an art class pitched their easels and went on painting their favorite model, a Portuguese girl under a green parasol, quite as usual, and we sat on the sand in the shadow of a boathouse and watched them lazily, as if there weren't any Huns and their horrors in the universe.

It had been a peaceful day up to the time we reached Babe's house. The tangle she spoke of was the usual kind in her family. Her stepfather, Mr. Dorsey, is a traveling man. He couldn't get home in time to give her away, and Babe's mother thought they ought to wait for him. It wasn't showing him proper respect not to; besides Jim wasn't old enough to do it. Jim didn't want to do it, but he objected to being thought too young, and Watson couldn't wait because he'd received his orders. That's why they were hurrying things up.

He wants to be married in the Church of the Pilgrims because his people are the kind that'd feel better if it was done there. Circumstances were such that none of them could be present, so he wanted to do that much to please them. And Babe couldn't be married at the church unless Viola would loan her her new white dress that Miss Doan had just sent home after keeping her waiting three weeks for it. Her own white ones were out of commission and she wouldn't feel like a bride if she were married in anything but white. But Viola wanted to wear her own dress her own self, and be a bridesmaid. She always gets her own way when she cries, so she was beginning to sob on her mother's shoulder when we went in. And Mrs. Dorsey was saying she didn't see why they couldn't be married right there in the parlor, either in the bay window or under the chandelier with a wedding bell hung from it. Babe's shirt-waist suit that she graduated in was good enough for a home affair and could be laundered in a hurry.

Babe wouldn't hear to that because Watson had expressed his preference for the church and had such a good reason, and Watson was provoked because Viola wouldn't give in to Babe. It was her wedding, he said, and ought to be run to suit her.

Poor old Babe. Among them they worked her up into such a nervous, excited state that she was half crying, and when her mother said in an exasperated tone – "Oh, these war weddings! Why don't you wait till it's all over and he comes back in peace times?" Babe threw herself down on the library couch and wept.

"How do I know he'll ever come back?" she wailed. "It's you who are making a war wedding out of it with all your disagreeing and arguing."

Then Mrs. Dorsey explained all over again to me the way she thought things ought to be settled, and Viola explained her way and Babe sobbed out hers, and Jim made a few remarks till it made me think of the old nursery tale: "Fire won't burn stick, stick won't beat pig, pig won't get over the stile, and I sha'n't get home tonight."

It was awfully embarrassing for Watson and uncomfortable for Richard. Presently they disappeared – went out on the front steps for a smoke. When I suggested the different dressmakers who might be persuaded to rush something through, there was a reason why each one on the list was unavailable. Miss Doan and the two next best had left town on a vacation.

Then I happened to think of that evening dress Babe ruined up on Mrs. Waldon's roof, leaning against the rusty railing. It had a white silk under-dress, and in a flash an inspiration came to me. With that silk slip for a foundation I would attempt to make that wedding gown myself, although there was less than a day in which to do it. I'd seen a lovely piece of tulle that morning, when we stopped in the Emporium.

It didn't occur to me at first what a daring thing I was offering to do, or what a mess I'd make of everything if I failed. I was sure of the needlework part, for Tippy began my sewing-lessons so far back I can't remember the first one, and what passed muster with her was good enough for any bride or anybody. And I'd made simple wash dresses under Barby's direction.

Babe accepted my offer with the sublime confidence and joy that Cinderella showed in her godmother's ability to get a ball gown out of a pumpkin, and then I began to have an awful panic. But there was no chance to back out. She rapturously called Watson in to tell him that everybody could be happy now, for I'd found the end of the string that would untangle the whole skein.

From then on "stick began to beat pig, pig began to get over the stile, and the little old woman got home that night." During the next ten minutes two people were routed out of bed by telephone, but neither one minded it when they found it was for something as romantic as a war wedding. Miss Clara, chief clerk at the Emporium, promised to get the store keys early in the morning, cut off the goods with her own hands, and have it delivered to me by seven o'clock.

The other was Mrs. Doan, mother of the dressmaker who had just left town. "Yes, indeed, we could have Sallie's dress form," she said cordially. "Send Jim right over for it."

The dress form was collapsible, so Jim brought it over in a box, but it was a very startling and human-like figure that Richard had to carry up the street for me over his shoulder. There being no time for Babe to stand for fittings herself, we blew up the dummy like a balloon, till it was adjusted to fit the silk slip. Richard kept calling it Sallie Jane, and making such ridiculous remarks to it, that we were nearly hysterical from laughing when we finally started home with it. It was bright moonlight, but so late that we passed only a few people on the street. These few stared in open-mouthed wonder at the stiff lady in white thrown over Richard's shoulder, and one man turned and followed us half a block to satisfy his curiosity.

Tippy would have helped next morning, but she had to bring Belle's children up to spend the day. Aunt Elspeth was very much worse. I took the downstairs guest chamber for my workshop. By five minutes past seven the tulle was spread out on the big four poster, and my scissors were slashing into it. From then on until noon I worked in nightmarish haste. Of course I couldn't have finished it if it had been satin goods or something like that, but the tulle was easy to handle, and I pinned and patted it into shape on patient Sallie Jane till it began to look like the picture I had in mind.

Richard came up about the middle of the morning. I heard him go striding through the hall. Then his laugh rang out from the kitchen where Tippy was letting the children help her make oatmeal cookies.

Then I heard him coming back, and looked up to see him in the doorway. He only saluted and did not venture in, as I was down on my knees before Sallie Jane, making the bridal skirts hang evenly. He could see it was a critical moment. He said he merely dropped in to report that everything was going smoothly at the Nolan-Dorseys. The license and the ring were ready, the auto engaged to take the happy couple to Chatham. They would proceed from there to Boston by rail next day. Judith was at the house now, helping the family keep their head between their ears, and the only trouble was the telephoning. The list of people who would be slighted if not notified was so long that Jim suggested sending out the town crier, and being done with it.

"Poor Uncle Darcy," I said. "He won't be able to see the wedding. Aunt Elspeth is so much worse. He's always been mixed up in the important happenings of my life, and he would have taken such pride in seeing us march up the aisle, you as best man and me as maid of honor – "

Then I broke off short and whirled Sallie Jane around on her pivot as if I had found something the matter which absorbed my attention. But in reality I had just remembered that it was my eighteenth birthday, and came very near reminding him of the fact. To think of having forgotten it myself till the morning was half gone! I had come to my "Field Elysian," and it was a lonely place, for nobody else remembered. The surest sign that I had reached it was that I did not frankly proclaim the fact, frankly expectant of birthday offerings. I didn't want anything if people had to be reminded of the date. I took the corner of a paper of pins between my teeth and stood up to pin the sleeves in place.

Richard looked on approvingly. "That really begins to look like something," he said. "Looks like a white cloud. Even on old Sallie Jane you'd know it was a bridal outfit. You're a trump, Georgina, for rushing things through this way. Babe ought to be everlastingly grateful. But while it's 'Very nice for Mary Ann, it's rather hard on Abraham.' Do you realize I've only four more days left to spend in this old town? This wedding is knocking a whole quarter of it out of my calculations."

Something made me glance up. He was looking down at me so intently it flustered me. I found myself trying to pin the left sleeve into the right arm.

"I don't believe in these war weddings," he said almost fiercely. "Watt hadn't any right to ask her to marry him now and take such chances. Suppose he'd be killed?"

"She'd feel that he was hers, at any rate," I said between my teeth, still holding on to the paper of pins. "She'd have the memory of this wedding, and the few happy days to follow, and she'd have the proud feeling that she was the wife of a man who'd given his life bravely. She'd be giving something to the cause herself, a continuing sacrifice, for it would keep on all the rest of her life."

"But suppose he wasn't killed outright. Suppose he'd come back to her crippled or blinded or frightfully disfigured. He oughtn't to want to tie her for life to just a part of a man."

Then I took up for Babe so emphatically that I dropped the pins. "Then she'd be eyes to him and feet to him and hands to him – and everything else. And she'd glory in it. I would if I loved a man as Babe does Watson Tucker, though I don't see what she sees in him to care for."

"I believe you would," he answered slowly. Then after a long pause he added, "It certainly must make a difference to a man over there to know he's got somebody back home, caring for him like that!"

He left in a few moments, and I had to work harder than ever for I had slowed up a bit while we talked. The wedding was at four. I am sure I was the happiest one in the crowd, for not only was the dress done in time, it was pronounced a real "creation." Babe never looked so well in her life. Judith had worked some sort of miracle on her hair, and in that simple fluff of white tulle she was almost pretty.

Never did a Maid of Honor have less time for her own arraying. I hurriedly slipped into the same dress of rose-color and white that I wore the night of Richard's arrival, and put on the little pearl necklace that had been Barby's. When he came for me in his Cousin James' machine he brought a big armful of roses for me to carry. It made me awfully happy to have him say, "Many happy returns of the day" when he gave them to me, even when he laughingly confessed that he hadn't remembered the date himself. It was Judith who reminded them that the wedding day and my birthday were the same. Even so, it was nice to have the event marked by his lovely roses.

Despite all Judith's precautions we had a wild scramble to get all the little Dorseys corralled for a final dress review. Each one of them came up with some important article missing, which had to be hunted for. Then a sudden calm descended. We found ourselves at the door of the Church of the Pilgrims. We were going slowly, very slowly up the aisle to the solemn organ music, conscious of a white blur of faces on each side. The church was packed.

There had been no time for a rehearsal, but, for once, luck was with the Nolan-Dorseys. Nobody stumbled, nobody dropped anything, nobody responded in the wrong place. As Jim remarked afterward, "We did real well for a bunch of amateurs. We flocked all right though not even birds of a feather; one man in naval uniform, one in aviator's, and one in civilian's."

Jim gave the bride away. I was strung up to such a nervous tension for fear it wouldn't go off all right that I never took a full breath till Jim was through his part, the ring on Babe's finger and her bouquet safely back in her hands again. It was only at the very last when the old minister who was perfectly devoted to Babe began to falter through a prayer, that I realized I hadn't really heard the ceremony. It had gone in one ear and out the other, leaving no impression of its sacred meaning.

But if I missed the impressiveness of it Babe and Watson did not. He was as pale as a ghost, and her hands trembled so they could hardly hold her flowers. It was a solemn time for them. Then it grew solemn for me, as a sentence of the last prayer caught my attention.

"And take now, into Thy especial care and keeping, those who go forth from this altar to defend us, both upon the high seas and in the boundless battle plains of the air."

He was praying for Richard too. I glanced across at him and found that he was looking intently at me. I had never seen such an expression in his eyes before – a sort of goodbye, as if he were looking at me for the last time, and was sorry. It was the dearest look. Our eyes met gravely for an instant, then just the shadow of a smile crept into his, and mine dropped. I couldn't understand why that little half-smile should make me so sort of happy and confused. Then the "Amen!" sounded and the organ pealed out the wedding march, and with my hand on his arm we followed the bridal couple down the aisle, and out through the door to the automobile, waiting to take them to Chatham.

Once out of the door Babe wasn't a bit dignified. In her hurry to get away before the crowd could follow and hold a curbstone reception, she chased down the long board walk leading from the church to the street so fast that Watson could hardly keep up. They didn't pretend to keep step. She had a long coat and a hat waiting for her in the machine. She had kissed her family all around before leaving the house, so she just piled in as she was, and began pulling off her veil while the chauffeur cranked up.