"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——