Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

That was enough for Tippy. In her opinion any man in khaki is entitled to all the "sugar and spice and everything nice" the world can give. When she found that he has no home ties now, she adopted him on the spot. He didn't know he was being adopted, but I did, just from the positive tone of her voice. She told him her claim on him was about as old as Susan's. She'd known him when he was a bald-headed baby—held him in her arms in this very house, and sat under his father's preaching many a time in Wellfleet. And indeed he'd stay to supper. He needn't think she'd let a son of Sister Wynne's leave the house without breaking bread with her, especially when he was starting off to a far country where he was liable to get nothing but husks.

If what Tippy wanted was to give him a little slice of home to pack up and take away in his "old kit bag," she certainly succeeded. It will be many a moon before he can forget the table she spread for him, the advice she gave him and the sock she hurried to "toe off" in order that there might be a full half dozen in the package she thrust upon him at parting. An own aunt could not have been more solicitous for his comfort, and she did all but call him Johnny.

It's the first time I ever had any conversation with him more than a sentence or two. Now as he "reminisced" with Tippy, and told experiences of his boyhood on a Western farm and of his medical student days, I saw that the real John Wynne was not the person I imagined him to be.

What a sentimental little goose I must have been at sixteen; truly "green in judgment" to have woven such a fabric of dreams around him. Miss Crewes' story started it, putting him on a sort of pedestal, and the affair with Esther added to it, till I imagined him a romantic and knightly figure, "wrapped in the solitude" of a sad and patient melancholy. The real John Wynne is a busy, matter-of-fact physician, absorbingly interested in the war and keen to be into it, also ready to talk about anything from "cabbages to kings." Yet I suppose if anyone had told me then that I was mistaken in that early estimate of him I would have resented it. I wanted him to fit the role I assigned him. It made him more interesting to my callow mind to imagine him like that king in the poem when,—"The barque which held the prince went down he never smiled again."

He was so warmly interested in my account of finding his picture at that auction and keeping it all these years, that I took him across the hall to look at it. The thought came to me that maybe he'd like to have it, but when I offered it to him he said no, he had a more recent one of his mother, one more like her as he remembered her. He stood looking at it a long while and finally said it seemed so much at home there on the wall that he hoped I'd keep it there. It would sort of anchor him to the old Cape to look back and know that it was hanging in the very room where they had once been together. Then he added almost wistfully:

"If she were here to wish me Godspeed, I could go away better equipped, perhaps, for what lies ahead."

Some sudden impulse prompted me to open the table drawer and take out the little service flag with the one star which I had thrust in there when I put up the new one. As I hung it under the picture I was surprised to hear myself saying, "See! She does wish you Godspeed."

It was exactly as if someone else put the words into my mouth, for I had never thought of them before, and I'm sure I never quoted Scripture that way before, outside of Sunday school. It gave me the queerest sensation to be doing it as if some force outside of myself were impelling me to speak.

"Don't you suppose," I said slowly, "that if God so loved the world that He could give His only son to die for it, that he must know how human fathers and mothers feel when they do the same thing? Don't you believe that He'd let a mother, even up in heaven, have some way to comfort and help a son who was offering his life to save the world? The men in the trenches can't see the stars we hang out for them here at home, but they feel our spirit of helpfulness flowing out to them. How do we know that the windows of heaven are not hung with stars that mean the same thing? How do we know but what those who watch and wait for us up there are not aiding us in ways greater than we dream possible? Helping us as Israel was helped, by the invisible hosts and chariots of fire, in the mountain round about Elisha?"