Two things stand out so vividly in that last day that I never can forget them. One is our walk down through the town, when I almost burst with pride, going along beside Father, so tall and distinguished looking in his uniform, and seeing the royal welcome people gave him at every step. They came out of the stores and the houses to shake hands with him, the people who'd known him as a little boy and gone to school with him, and they seemed so really fond of him and so glad to have him back, that I fairly loved them for it, even people I hadn't liked especially before.
The second thing was the talk we had up here in the garret in the gable window-seat, when he came up to look for some things he had packed away in one of the chests, twenty years ago.
We did lots of other things, of course; went rowing in the new boat to a place on the beach where he used to picnic when he was a boy. We took our lunch along and ate it there. Afterwards we tramped back into the dunes a little way, just to let him feel the Cape Cod sand in his shoes once more, he said. It was high tide when we got back to the boat-house, so we got our bathing suits and went in. He was so surprised and pleased at some of my diving stunts, and taught me a new one. He is a magnificent swimmer himself.
His hair is iron gray at the temples, and I've always been halfway afraid of him before – that is, afraid to say right out whatever I happened to think or feel. But it was different this time. I felt that he understood me better than anybody else in the world, even as well as Barby used to, when I was younger. As we went back home he said the nicest thing. He said it seemed to him that we must have been boys together at some time in our lives. That I was such a jolly good chum.
I can't think about that last evening or the going away yesterday morning without the tears starting. But I'm thankful I didn't break down at the station. I couldn't have kept from it if it hadn't been for Captain Kidd, who frisked along with us. Just at the hardest moment he stood up on his hind legs and saluted. I'd never seen him do it before. It's a trick Richard taught him lately. It was so cunning everybody laughed, and I managed to pull myself together till the train started.
But I made up for it when I got back home and came up here to the gable window-seat where Father and I had that last precious talk together, with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder. I nearly bawled my eyes out as I recalled each dear thing he said about my being old enough now to understand business matters, and what he wanted me to do in case the United States went to war; how I was to look after Barby if anything happened to him; and what I was to do for Uncle Darcy and Dan's children. That he relied on me just as if I were a son, because I was a true Huntingdon, and no Huntingdon woman had ever flinched from a duty or failed to measure up to what was expected of her.
I keep thinking, what if he should never come back to talk to me again in that near, dear way. But.. I'll have to stop before any more splashes blot up this page.
CHAPTER IV
HER IDEAL GIRL STEPS IN
All the time Barby was gone I didn't write a line in this record. I couldn't. Things seemed too trivial. Besides, the house had that strange, hushed air that you feel at a funeral when you're waiting for it to begin. I couldn't bear to touch the piano. It didn't seem right to be playing gay tunes while there was such awful sorrow in the world, and in all probability Father and Barby were spending their last days together.
I declined the invitation to Laura Nelson's dance on that account, and after Tippy had gone to bed I put on Barby's only black dress, a chiffon dinner gown that she had left behind in her closet, and sat by the window in the moonlight, listening to the music of piano and drum floating up from the Nelson cottage. I had turned the silver trimming in so as not to show, and looking down on the clinging black folds that trailed around me, I pictured to myself so vividly the way an orphan or a young widow must feel, that the tears splashed down into my lap till I was afraid it would make the chiffon all crinkly. The dance music sounded perfectly heartless to me. I could understand how bitter it might make one feel who was really in mourning.
When Barby came home and I told her about it, she said that I should have gone to the dance; that our first duty to ourselves and the world is to keep ourselves normal. After I'd spent the morning helping her unpack and hearing everything she had to tell about her week with Father and his departure to some unknown port, she told me she wanted me to stay out of doors all the rest of the day. I must go on the Quest of Cheerful Things, and she hoped that I'd be able to report at least two adventures.
The two things which happened are that I went to a furniture auction and met my ideal girl. While they're not particularly cheerful things, they're important enough to be recorded here.
It began by Babe Nolan bumping into me as I turned a corner, after I'd been out nearly half the afternoon. Babe is a far cry from anybody's ideal girl, that is, as far as looks and manners are concerned, but she has her good points. For one thing she is absolutely sincere, and it's always interesting to hear what new trouble she's been in.
She had her bathing suit bundled carelessly under her arm, and said she couldn't stay because she'd promised to be up at the West End beach by four o'clock, and it was almost that time then. But she'd heard that there was a furniture auction going on in front of the old Holloway house, which has been vacant for years, and she just had to go by and see if there was a white bedstead in the lot, with hollow brass balls on the posts. She was sure that there couldn't be, because she'd been told that the furniture had been brought up from Truro or Wellfleet, or some place down the Cape. It belonged to relatives of the Holloway family. Still she felt possessed to look, and she supposed she'd go through life like the Wandering Jew, looking for that bedstead and never finding it.
Then she told me why. Babe is very unfortunate in her family life, having a stepfather which complicates matters. All her brothers and sisters are either steps or halves. She has no whole ones. And they are all socialists in a way, believing in a community of interests, such as wearing each other's clothes without asking, and using each other's things. Right while Babe was talking to me she had on one of her half-brother Jim's outing shirts, turned in V at the neck instead of her own middy blouse, because Viola had walked off with her last clean one.
With everybody free to root through her bureau drawers, and with no locks in the house that work, of course she has absolutely no privacy, and she had several letters that she wouldn't have the family read for worlds. They were too sacred, and she couldn't bear to destroy them, for they breathed devotion in every line, and were her first of the kind. She thought of burying them under the garden hedge, but that would have necessitated digging them up every time she wanted to re-read them, and there was danger of the puppy trailing her and unearthing them if she went too often to that hallowed spot.
One night just before she and Viola went to Yarmouth for a visit, she found, quite by accident, that the brass balls on her bedposts were screwed on and were hollow. So she folded the letters up small and stuffed them into one, with a dried rose and a broken cuff-link that had associations, and screwed it back tight.
What was her horror when she came home two weeks later to find that her mother had had the room done over in their absence as a surprise for her and Viola. She had bought twin beds of bird's-eye maple and given one old bed to a Salvation Army man who was going through town collecting junk, and sent the other to a camp up in the White Mountains where her mother's people go every year. She didn't know which went where.
Now there's no telling how, when or where those letters will next see the light of day. It was bad enough to lose the letters, but Babe says she'll simply die if they fall into her Aunt Mattie's hands. She's the prim, cold kind who makes you feel that anything sentimental should never be mentioned. It's something to be ashamed of. Tippy's that kind.
I have written all this out not because it's important in itself, but because it's a link in a chain. If I hadn't happened to meet Babe and go with her to hunt for that bedstead, I wouldn't have been at the auction