Читать книгу Girl Alone - Anne Austin - Страница 5

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A little later, when Sally was seated primly beside Clem Carson, jolting rapidly down the road that led past the orphanage toward the business district of the city, the farmer nudged her in the ribs and chuckled:

“You’re quite a kissing-bug, ain’t you, Sally? How about a little kiss for your new boss?”

Sally had shrunk as far away from Clem Carson as the seat of the “flivver” permitted, phrases from Mrs. Stone’s embarrassed, vague, terrifying warnings boiling and churning in her mind: “Keep your body pure”—“mustn’t let men take any liberties with you”—“you’re a big girl now, things you ought to know”—“if you’re led astray, it will be due to evils in your own nature”—

She suddenly loathed herself, her budding, curving young body that she had taken such innocent delight in as she bathed for her journey. She wanted to shrink and shrink and shrink, until she was a little girl again, too young to know “the facts of life,” as Mrs. Stone, blushing and embarrassed, had called the half-truths she had told Sally. She wanted to climb over the door of the car, drop into the hot dust of the road, and run like a dog-chased rabbit back into the safety of the Home. There were no men there—no queer, different male beings who would want to “take liberties”—

“My land! Scared of me?” Clem Carson chuckled. “You poor little chicken! Don’t mind me, Sally. I don’t mean no harm, teasing you for a kiss. Land alive! I got a girl of my own, ain’t I? Darned proud of her, too, and I’d cut the heart outa any man that tried to take advantage of her. Ain’t got no call to be scared of me, Sally.”

She smiled waveringly, shyness making her lips stiff, but she relaxed a little, though she kept as far away from the man as ever. In spite of her dread of the future and her bitter disappointment over Miss Pond’s disclosures as to her mother, she was finding the trip to the farm an adventure. In the twelve years of her life in the State Orphans’ Asylum she had never before left the orphanage unaccompanied by droves of other sheep-like, timid little girls, and unchaperoned by sharp-voiced, eagle-eyed matrons.

She felt queer, detached, incomplete, like an arm or a leg dissevered from a giant body; she even had the panicky feeling that, like such a dismembered limb, she would wither and die away from that big body of which she had been a part for so long. But it was pleasant to bump swiftly along the hot, dusty white road, fringed with odorous, flowering weeds. Houses became less and less frequent; few children ran barefoot along the road, scurrying out of the path of the automobile. Occasionally a woman, with a baby sprawling on her hip, appeared in the doorway of a roadside shack and shaded her eyes with her hand as she squinted at the car.

As the miles sped away Carson seemed to feel the need of impressing upon her the fact that her summer was not to be one of unalloyed pleasure. He sketched the life of the farm, her own work upon it, as if to prepare her for the worst. “My wife’s got the reputation of being a hard woman,” he told her confidentially. “But she’s a good woman, good clean through. She works her fingers to the bone, and she can’t abide a lazy, trifling girl around the place. You work hard, Sally, and speak nice and respectful-like, and you two’ll get on, I warrant.”

“Yes, sir,” Sally stammered.

“Well, Sally,” he told her at last, “here’s your new home. This lane leads past the orchards—I got ten acres in fruit trees, all of ’em bearing—and the gardens, then right up to the house. Pretty fine place, if I do say so myself. I got two hundred acres in all, quite a sizeable farm for the middle west. Don’t them orchards look pretty?”

Sally came out of her frightened reverie, forced her eyes to focus on the beautiful picture spread out on a giant canvas before her. Then she gave an involuntary exclamation of pleasure. Row after row of fruit trees, evenly spaced and trimmed to perfection, stretched before her on the right. The child in her wanted to spring from the seat of the car, run ecstatically from tree to tree, to snatch sun-ripened fruit.

“You have a good fruit crop,” she said primly.

“There’s the house.” The farmer pointed to the left. “Six rooms and a garret. My daughter, Pearl, dogged the life out of me until I had electric lights put in, and a fancy bathtub. She even made me get a radio, but it comes in right handy in the evenings, specially in winter. My daughter, Pearl, can think of more ways for me to spend money than I can to earn it,” he added with a chuckle, so that Sally knew he was proud of Pearl, proud of her urban tastes.

The car swept up to the front of the house; Clem Carson’s hand on the horn summoned his women folks.

The house, which seemed small to Sally, accustomed to the big buildings of the orphanage, was further dwarfed by the huge red barns that towered at the rear. The house itself was white, not so recently painted as the lordly barns, but it was pleasant and homelike, the sort of house which Sally’s chums at the orphanage had pictured as an ideal home, when they had let their imaginations run away with them.

Sally herself, born with a different picture of home in her mind, had romanced about a house which would have made this one look like servants’ quarters, but now that it was before her she felt a thrill of pleasure. At least it was a home, not an institution.

A woman, big, heavy-bosomed, sternly corseted beneath her snugly fitting, starched blue chambray house dress, appeared upon the front porch and stood shading her eyes against the western sun, which revealed the thinness of her iron-gray hair and the deep wrinkles in her tanned face.

“Why didn’t you drive around to the back?” she called harshly. “This young-up ain’t company, to be traipsin’ through my front room. Did you bring them rubber rings for my fruit jars?”

“You betcha!” Clem Carson refused to be daunted in Sally’s presence. “How’s Pearl, Ma? Cold any better? I brought her some salve for her throat and some candy.”

“She’s all right,” Mrs. Carson shouted, as if the car were a hundred yards away. “And why you want to be throwin’ your money away on patent medicine salves is more’n I can see! I can make a better salve any day outa kerosene and lard and turpentine. Reckon you didn’t get any car’mels for me! Pearl’s all you think of.”

“Got you half a pound of car’mels,” Carson shouted, laughing. “I’ll drive the new girl around back.

“Ma’s got a sharp tongue, but she don’t mean no harm,” Carson chuckled, as he swung the car around the house.

When it shivered to a stop between the barns and the house, the farmer lifted out a few bundles which had crowded Sally’s feet, then threw up the cover of the hatch in the rear of the car, revealing more bundles. Carson was loading her arms with parcels when he saw a miracle wrought on her pale, timid face.

“Lord! You look pretty enough to eat!” Clem Carson ejaculated, but he saw then that she was not even aware that he was speaking to her.

In one of the few books allowed for Sunday reading in the orphanage—a beautiful, thick book with color-plate illustrations, its name, “Stories from the Bible,” lettered in glittering gold on a back of heavenly blue—Sally had found and secretly worshiped the portrait of her ideal hero. It was a vividly colored picture of David, forever fixed in strong, beautiful grace, as he was about to hurl the stone from his slingshot to slay the giant, Goliath. She had dreamed away many hours of her adolescence and early young girlhood, the big book open on her knee at the portrait of the Biblical hero, and it had not seemed like sacrilege to adopt that sun-drenched, strong-limbed but slender boy as the personification of her hopes for romance.

And now he was striding toward her—the very David of “Stories from the Bible.” True, the sheepskin raiment of the picture was exchanged for a blue shirt, open at the throat, and for a pair of cheap, earth-soiled “jeans” trousers; but the boy-man was the same, the same! As he strode lightly, with the ease of an athlete or the light-footedness of a god, the sun flamed in his curling, golden-brown hair. He was tall, but not so tall as Clem Carson, and there were power and ease and youth in every motion of his beautiful body.

“Did you get the plowshare sharpened, Mr. Carson? I’ve been waiting for it, but in the meantime I’ve been tinkering with that little hand cider press. We ought to do a good business with it if we set up a cider stand on the state road, at the foot of the lane.”

Joy deepened the sapphire of Sally’s eyes, quivered along the curves of her soft little mouth. For his voice was as she had dreamed it would be—vibrant, clear, strong, with a thrill of music in it.

“Sure I got it sharpened, Dave,” Carson answered curtly. “You oughta get in another good hour with the cultivator before dark. You run along in the back door there, Sally. Mrs. Carson will be needing you to help her with supper.”

The change in Carson’s voice startled her, made her wince. Why was he angry with her—and with David, whose gold-flecked hazel eyes were smiling at her, shyly, as if he were a little ashamed of Carson for not having introduced them? But, oh, his name was David! David! It had had to be David.

In the big kitchen, dominated by an immense coal-and-wood cook stove, Sally found Mrs. Carson busy with supper preparations. Her daughter, Pearl, drifted about the kitchen, coughing at intervals to remind her mother that she was ill.

Pearl Carson, in that first moment after Sally had bumped into her at the door, had seemed to the orphaned girl to be much older than she, for her plump body was voluptuously developed and overdecked with finery. The farmer’s daughter wore her light red hair deeply marcelled. The natural color in her broad, plump cheeks was heightened by rouge, applied lavishly over a heavy coating of white powder.

Her lavender silk crepe dress was made very full and short of skirt, so that her thick-ankled legs were displayed almost to the knee. It was before the day of knee dresses for women and Sally, standing there awkwardly with her own bundle and the parcels which Carson had thrust into her arms, blushed for the extravagant display of unlovely flesh.

But Pearl Carson, if not exactly pretty, was not homely, Sally was forced to admit to herself. She looked more like one of her father’s healthy, sorrel-colored heifers than anything else, except that the heifer’s eyes would have been mild and kind and slightly melancholy, while Pearl Carson’s china-blue eyes were wide and cold, in an insolent, contemptuous stare.

“I suppose you’re the new girl from the Orphans’ Home,” she said at last. “What’s your name?”

“Sa-Sally Ford,” Sally stammered, institutional shyness blotting out her radiance, leaving her pale and meek.

“Pearl, you take Sally up to her room and show her where to put her things. Did you bring a work dress?” Mrs. Carson turned from inspecting a great iron kettle of cooking food on the stove.

“Yes’m,” Sally gulped. “But I only brought two dresses—my every-day dress and this one. Mrs. Stone said you’d—you’d give me some of P-Pearl’s.”

She flushed painfully, in humiliation at having to accept charity and in doubt as to whether she was to address the daughter of the house by her Christian name, without a “handle.”

Pearl, switching her short, lavender silk skirts insolently, led the way up a steep flight of narrow stairs leading directly off the kitchen to the garret. The roof, shaped to fit the gables of the house, was so low that Sally’s head bumped itself twice on their passage of the dusty, dark corridor to the room she was to be allowed to call her own.

“No, not that door!” Pearl halted her sharply. “That’s where David Nash, one of the hired men, sleeps.”

Sally wanted to stop and lay her hand softly against the door which his hand had touched, but she did not dare. “I—I saw him,” she faltered.

“Oh, you did, did you?” Pearl demanded sharply. “Well, let me tell you, young lady, you let David Nash alone. He’s mine—see? He’s not just an ordinary hired hand. He’s working his way through State A. & M. He’s a star, on the football team and everything. But don’t you go trying any funny business on David, or I’ll make you wish you hadn’t!”

“I—I didn’t even speak to him,” Sally hastened to reassure Pearl, then hated herself for her humbleness.

“Here’s your room. It’s small, and it gets pretty hot in here in the summer, but I guess it’s better’n you’re used to, at that,” Pearl Carson, a little mollified, swung open a flimsy pine door.

Sally looked about her timidly, her eyes taking in the low, sagging cot bed, the upturned pine box that served as washstand, the broken rocking chair, the rusty nails intended to take the place of a clothes closet; the faded, dirty rag rug on the warped boards of the floor; the tiny window, whose single sash swung inward and was fastened by a hook on the wall.

“I’ll bring you some of my old dresses,” Pearl told her. “But you’d better hurry and change into your orphanage dress, so’s you can help Mama with the supper. She’s been putting up raspberries all day and she’s dead tired. I guess Papa told you you’d have to hustle this summer. This ain’t a summer vacation—for you. It is for me. I go to school in the city in the winter. I’m second year high, and I’m only sixteen,” she added proudly. “What are you?”

Sally, who had been nervously untying her brown paper parcel, bent her head lower so that she should not see the flare of hate in those pale blue eyes which she knew would follow upon her own answer. “I’m—I’m third year high.” She did not have the courage to explain that she had just finished her third year, that she would graduate from the orphanage’s high school next year.

“Third year?” Pearl was incredulous. “Oh, of course, the orphanage school! My school is at least two years higher than yours. We prepare for college.”

Sally nodded; what use to say that the orphanage school was a regular public school, too, that it also prepared for college? And that Sally herself had dreamed of working her way through college, even as David Nash was doing?

Eight o’clock was the supper hour on the farm in the summertime, when every hour of daylight had to be spent in the orchards and fields. When the long dining table, covered with red-and-brown-checked oilcloth, was finally set, down to the last iron-handled knife, Sally was faint with hunger, for supper was at six at the orphanage.

Sally had peeled a huge dishpan of potatoes, had shredded a giant head of pale green cabbage for coleslaw, had watched the pots of cooking string beans, turnips and carrots; had rolled in flour and then fried great slabs of round steak—all under the critical eye of Mrs. Carson, who had found herself free to pick over the day’s harvest of blackberries for canning.

“I suppose we’ll have to let Sally eat at the table with us,” Pearl grumbled to her mother, heedless of the fact that Sally overheard. “In the city a family wouldn’t dream of sitting down to table with the servants. I’m sick of living on a farm and treating the hired help like members of the family.”

“I thought you liked having David Nash sit at table with us,” Mrs. Carson reminded her.

“Well, David’s different. He’s a university student and a football hero,” Pearl defended herself. “But the other hired men and the Orphans’ Home girl—”

Clem Carson appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Supper ready?”

“Yes, Papa. Thanks for the candy, but I do wish you’d get it in a box, not in a paper sack,” Pearl pouted. “I’ll ring the bell. Hurry up and wash before the others come in.”

While Clem Carson was pumping water into a tin wash basin, just inside the kitchen door, Pearl swung the big copper dinner bell, standing on the narrow back porch, her lavender silk skirt fluttering about her thick legs.

Sally fled to the dining room then, ashamed to have David Nash see her in the betraying uniform of the orphanage.

She had obediently set nine places at the long table, not knowing who all of those nine would be, but she found out before many minutes passed. Clem Carson sat at one end of the table, Mrs. Carson at the other. And before David and the other hired men appeared, a tiny, bent little old lady, with kind, vague brown eyes and trembling hands, came shuffling in from somewhere to seat herself at her farmer son’s right hand. Sally learned later that everyone called her Grandma, and that she was Clem Carson’s widowed mother. Immediately behind the little old lady came a big, hulking, loose-jointed man of middle age, with a slack, grinning mouth, a stubble of gray beard on his receding chin, a vacant, idiotic smile in his pale eyes.

At sight of Sally, shrinking timidly against the chair which was to be hers, the half-wit lunged toward her like a playful, overgrown puppy. One of his clammy hands, pale because they could not be trusted with farm work, reached out and patted her cheek.

“Pur-ty girl, pur-ty sister,” he articulated slowly, a light of pleasure gleaming in the pale vacancy of his eyes.

“Now, now, Benny, be good, or Ma’ll send you to bed without your supper,” the little old lady spoke as if he were a naughty child of three. “You mustn’t mind him, Sally. He won’t hurt you. I hope you’ll like it here on the farm. It’s real pretty in the summertime.”

The two nondescript hired men had taken their places, slipping into their chairs silently and apologetically. David Nash had changed his blue work shirt and “jeans” trousers for a white shirt, dark blue polka-dotted tie, and a well-fitting but inexpensive suit of brown homespun. Sally, squeezed between the vague little old grandmother and the vacant-eyed half-wit, beyond whom the two hired men sat, found herself directly across from David Nash, beside whom Pearl Carson sat, her chair drawn more closely than necessary.

“My, you look grand, Davie!” Pearl confided in a low, artificially sweet voice. “My cold’s lots better. Papa’ll let us drive in to the city to the movies if you ask him real nice.”

It was then that Sally Ford, who had experienced so many new emotions that day, felt a pang that made every other heartache seem mild by comparison. And two girls, one a girl alone in the world, the other pampered and adored by her family, held their breath as they awaited David Nash’s reply.

“Sorry, but I can’t tonight,” David Nash answered Pearl Carson’s invitation courteously but firmly. “It would be ’way after nine when we got to town, and we wouldn’t get back until nearly midnight—no hours for a farm hand to be keeping. Besides, I’ve got to study, long as I can keep awake.”

“You’re always studying when I want you to take me somewhere,” Pearl pouted. “I don’t see why you can’t forget college during your summer vacation. Go get some more hot biscuits, Sally,” she added sharply.

Except for Pearl’s chatter and David’s brief, courteous replies, the meal was eaten in silence, the hungry farmer and his hired men hunching over their food, wolfing it, disposing of such vast quantities of fried steak, vegetables, hot biscuits, home-made pickles, preserves, pie and coffee that Sally was kept running between kitchen and dining room to replenish bowls and plates from the food kept warming on the stove. In spite of her own hunger she ate little, restrained by timidity, but after her twelve years of orphanage diet the meal seemed like a banquet to her.

No one spoke to her, except Mrs. Carson and Pearl, to send her on trips to the kitchen, but it did not occur to her to feel slighted. It was less embarrassing to be ignored than to be plied with questions. Sometimes she raised her fluttering eyelids to steal a quick glance at David Nash, and every glance deepened her joy that he was there, that he sat at the same table with her, ate the same food, some of which she had cooked. His superiority to the others at that table was so strikingly evident that he seemed god-like to her. His pride, his poise, his golden, masculine beauty, his strength, his evident breeding, his ambition, formed such a contrast to the qualities of the orphaned boys she had known that it did not occur to her to hope that he would notice her. But once when her blue eyes stole a fleeting glimpse of his face she was startled to see that his eyes were regarding her soberly, sympathetically.

He smiled—a brief flash of light in his eyes, an upward curl to his well-cut lips. She was so covered with a happy confusion that she did not hear Mrs. Carson’s harsh nasal voice commanding her to bring more butter from the cellar until the farmer’s wife uttered her order a second time.

In spite of the prodigious amount of food eaten, the meal was quickly over. It was not half-past eight when Clem Carson scraped back his chair, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve.

“Now, Sally, I’ll leave you to clear the table and wash up,” Mrs. Carson said briskly. “I’ve got to measure and sugar my blackberries for tomorrow’s jam-making. A farmer’s wife can’t take Sunday off this time o’ year, and have fruit spoil on her hands.”

While Sally was stacking the soiled supper plates on the dining table, the telephone rang three short and one long ring, and Pearl, who had been almost forcibly holding David Nash in conversation, sprang to answer it. The instrument was fastened to the dining room wall. Pearl stood lolling against it, a delighted smile on her face, her fingers picking at the torn wallpaper.

“Un-hunh!... Sure!... Oh, that’ll be swell, Ross! I was just wishing for some excitement!... How many’s coming? Five?... Oh, you hush! Sure, we’ll dance! We got a grand radio, you know—get Chicago and.... All right, hurry up! And, oh, say, Ross, you might pick up another girl. Sadie Pratt, or somebody. I got a sweetie of my own. Un-hunh! David Nash, a junior from A. & M., is staying with us this summer. Didn’t you know?... Am I? I’ll tell the world! You just wait till you see him, and then you’ll want to jump in the river!... Aw, quit your kidding!... Well, hurry! ’Bye!”

Before the one-sided conversation was concluded, David Nash had quietly left the room by way of the kitchen door. When Sally staggered in with her armload of soiled dishes she found David at the big iron sink, pouring hot water from a heavy black teakettle into a granite dishpan.

“Thought I’d help,” he said in a low voice, to keep Pearl from overhearing. “You must be tired and bewildered, and washing up for nine people is no joke. Give me the glasses first,” he added casually as he reached for the wire soap shaker that hung on a nail above the sink.

“Oh, please,” Sally gasped in consternation. “I can do them. It won’t take me any time. Why, at the Home, six of us girls would wash dishes for three hundred. They wouldn’t like it,” she added in a terrified whisper, her eyes fluttering first toward the dining room door, then toward the big pantry where Mrs. Carson was picking over her blackberries.

“I like to wash dishes,” David said firmly, and that settled it, at least so far as he was concerned.

Sally was trotting happily between table and cupboard when Pearl came in, stormy-eyed, sullen-mouthed.

“Well, I must say, you’re a quick worker—and I don’t mean on dishes!” she snapped at Sally. “So this is the way you have to study, Mr. David Nash! But I suppose she pulled a sob story on you and just roped you in. You’d better find out right now, Miss Sally Ford, that you can’t shirk your work on his farm. That’s not what Papa got you for—”

“I insisted on helping with the dishes, Pearl,” David interrupted the bitter tirade in his firm, quiet way. “Want to get a dish cloth and help dry them?” There was a twinkle in his eyes and he winked ever so slightly at Sally.

“I’ve got to dress. Five or six of the bunch are coming over to dance to the radio music. Did you hear what I said about you?” Pearl answered, her shallow blue eyes coquetting with David.

“About me?” David pretended surprise. “Is that all, Sally? Well, I’ll go on up to my room and study awhile, if I can stay awake.”

“You’re going to dance with me—with us,” Pearl wailed, her flat voice harsh with disappointment. “I told Ross Willis to bring another partner for himself, because I was counting on you—”

“Awfully sorry, but I’ve got to study. I thought I told you at supper that I had to study,” David reminded her mildly, but there was the steel of determination in his casual voice.

Pearl flung out of the room then, her face twisted with the first grimaces of crying.

“We’d better wash out and rinse these dish cloths,” David said imperturbably, but his gold-flecked eyes and his strong, characterful mouth smiled at Sally. “My mother taught me that—and a good many other things.”

A little later, under cover of the swishing of water in the granite dish pan, David spoke in a low voice to the girl who worked so happily at his side:

“Take it as easy as you can. They’ll work you to death if you let them. And—if you need any help, day or night,” he emphasized the words significantly, so that once again a pulse of fear throbbed in Sally’s throat, “just call on me. Remember, I’m an orphan myself. But it’s easier for a boy. The world can be mighty hard on a girl alone.”

“Thank you,” Sally trembled, her voice scarcely a whisper, for Mrs. Carson was moving heavily in the pantry nearby.

Fifteen minutes later, as Sally was sweeping the big kitchen, shouts of laughter and loud, gay words told her that the party of farm girls and boys had arrived. With David gone to his garret room to study, Sally suddenly felt very small and forlorn, very much what he had called her—a girl alone.

The sounds of boisterous gayety penetrated to every corner of the small house, but they echoed most loudly in Sally’s heart. For she was sixteen with all the desires and dreams of any other girl of sixteen. And she loved parties, although she had never been to a small, intimate one in a private home in all her life.

She leaned on her broom, trembling, desire to have a good time fighting with her institution-bred timidity. Then she looked down at her dress—the blue-and-white-checked gingham, faded, dull, that she had worn for months at the orphanage. If they should come into the kitchen—any of those laughing, gay girls and boys—and find her in the uniform of state charity they would despise her, never dream of asking her to come in, to dance—

Her hands suddenly gripped her broom fiercely. Within a minute she had finished her last task of the evening, had brushed the crumbs and dust into the black tin dust pan, emptied it into the kitchen range. Then, breathless with haste, afraid that timidity would overtake her, she ran up the back stairs to the garret.

Her cold little hands trembled with eagerness as she jerked her work dress over her head and arrayed her slight body in the lace-trimmed white lawn “Sunday dress” which she had worn earlier in the day on her trip from the orphanage. Excitedly, she slapped her pale, faintly flushed cheeks to make them more red, then bit her lips hard in lieu of lipstick.

When she tiptoed down the dark hall of the garret she found David Nash’s door ajar, caught a glimpse of the university student-farmhand bent over a pine table crowded with books.

She crept on to the head of the narrow, steep stairs, and there her courage failed her. The dance music, coming in full and strong over the radio, had just begun, and she could hear the shuffle of feet on the bare floor of the living room. How had she thought for one minute that she could brave those alien eyes, intrude, uninvited, upon Pearl’s party? Hadn’t Pearl made it cruelly clear that she despised her, resented her, because of David’s interest in her?

“Want to dance?”

She had been leaning over the narrow pine banister, but she straightened then, a hand going to her heart, for it was David standing near her in the dark, and his voice was very kind.