Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

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."