Читать книгу Girl Alone - Anne Austin - Страница 6

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At 11 o’clock that Saturday night Sally Ford blew out the flame in the small kerosene lamp—the electric light wires had not been brought to the garret—and then knelt beside the low cot bed to pray, as she had been taught to do in the orphanage.

After she had raced mechanically through her childish “Now-I-lay-me,” she lifted her small face, that gleamed pearly-white in the faint moonlight, and, clasping her thin little hands tightly, spoke in a low, passionate voice directly to God, whom she imagined bending His majestic head to listen:

“Oh, thank you, God, for making David like me, and for letting me dance with him. And if dancing is a sin, please forgive me, God, for I didn’t mean any harm. And please make Pearl not hate me so much just because David is sweet to me. She has so many friends and a father and mother and a grandmother and a nice home and so many pretty clothes, while I haven’t anything. Make her feel kinder toward me, dear God, and I’ll work so hard and be so good! And please, God, keep my heart and body pure, like Mrs. Stone says.”

Lying in bed, covered only with the scant nightgown she had brought from the orphanage, Sally did not feel the oppressive heat nor the hardness and lumpiness of her cornshuck mattress. For she was reliving the hour she had spent in the Carson living room, sponsored by a stern-faced David who seemed determined to force Pearl and her giggling, chattering friends to accept the timid little orphan as an equal.

She felt again the pain in her heart at their veiled insults, their deliberate snubs, the concentrated fury that gleamed at her from Pearl’s pale blue eyes. But again, as during that hour, the hurt was healed by the blessed fact of David’s championship. She lay very still to recapture the bliss of David’s arm about her waist, as he whirled her lightly in a fox trot, the music for which came so mysteriously from a little box with dials and a horn like a phonograph. She heard again his precious compliment, spoken loudly enough for Pearl to hear: “You’re the best dancer I ever danced with, Sally. I’m going to ask you to the Junior Prom next year.”

Of course he had danced with Pearl, too, and the other girls, who had made eyes at him and angled for compliments on their own dancing. When he danced with Pearl, her husky young body pressed closely against his, her fingertips audaciously brushed the golden crispness of his hair. She had even tried to dance cheek-to-cheek with David, but he had held her back stiffly.

The other boys—Ross Willis and Purdy Bates—had not asked Sally to dance with them, after Pearl had whispered half-audible, fierce commands; but their rudeness had no power to still the little song of thanksgiving that trilled in her heart, for always David came back to her, looking glad and relieved, and it was with her that David sat between dances, talking steadily and entertainingly, to hide her shy silences.

She sighed in memory, a quivering sigh of pure pleasure, when she lived again the minutes in the kitchen when she and David had washed glasses and plates, while the others danced in the parlor. They had not returned, but together had slipped up the back stairs to the garret, David bidding her a cheerful good-night as he turned into his own room to study for an hour before going to bed.

She had learned, during those talks with David, that he was twenty years old, that he had completed two years’ work in the State Agricultural and Mechanical College; that he was working summers on farms as much for the practical experience as for the money earned, for his ambition was to be a scientific farmer, so that he might make the most of the farm which he would some day inherit from his grandfather. His grandfather’s place adjoined the Carson farm, but it was being worked “on shares” by a large family of brothers, who had no need for David’s labor in the summer. She knew, too, from his modest replies to questions asked by Ross Willis and Purdy Bates, that David was a star athlete, that he had already won his letter in football and that he had been boxing champion of the sophomore class.

“But he likes me,” Sally exulted. “He likes me better than Pearl or Bessie Coates or Sue Mullins. I suppose,” she added honestly, “he’s sorry for me because I’m an orphan and Pearl has it ‘in’ for me, but I don’t care why he’s nice to me, just so he is.”

The radio music stopped at half-past eleven. Soon afterward Sally heard the shouted good-nights of Pearl’s guests: “We had a swell time, Pearl!” “Don’t forget, Pearl! Our house tomorrow night!” “See you at Sunday School, Pearl, and bring David with you! Some sheik! Oh, Mama! But watch out for that baby-faced orphan, Pearl! She’s got her cap set for him and she’ll beat your time, if you don’t look out!”

Sally felt her face flame with shame and anger. Why did girls and boys have to be so nasty-minded, she asked herself on a sob. Why couldn’t they let her and David be friends without thinking things like that? Why, David was so—so wonderful! He wouldn’t “look” at a frightened little girl from an orphans’ home! No girl was good enough for David Nash, she told herself fiercely.

The next morning Pearl failed to entice David into going to church and Sunday School with her, and Sally was left alone to prepare the big Sunday dinner—Mrs. Carson having gone to church in spite of her Saturday determination not to. David came smiling into the kitchen, immaculate in a white shirt and well-fitting gray flannel trousers, a book in his hand, a pipe in his mouth.

“Mind if I study out here on the kitchen-porch?” he asked Sally, his hazel eyes brimming with friendliness. “I like company and my garret room’s hot as an inferno.”

“I’d love to have you,” Sally told him shyly. “I’ll try not to make any noise with the cooking utensils.”

“Oh, I don’t mind noise,” he laughed. “Fact is, I wish you’d sing. I’ll bet you can sing like a bird. Your voice sings even when you’re talking. And any woman—” a delicate compliment that—“can work better when she’s singing.”

And so Sally sang. She sang Sunday School songs, because it was Sunday.

It was sweet to be alone in the kitchen, with David so near, his crisp, golden-brown head bent over his book, smoke spiraling lazily from his pipe. The old grandmother, looking very tiny and old-fashioned in rustling black taffeta, had gone to church, too, leading her middle-aged half-wit son by the hand. Benny had strained at his mother’s hand, trying to get loose so that he could kiss Sally and show her his bright red necktie, at which the fingers of his free hand plucked excitedly. As she remembered those vacant, grinning eyes, that slack, grinning mouth, Sally’s song changed to a heart-felt paean of thanksgiving:

“Count your blessings!

Name them one by one.

Count your many blessings—

See what God hath done!”

Oh, she was blessed! She had a good mind; sometimes she was pretty; she could dance and sing; children liked her—and David, David! Poor half-wit Benny, whose only blessings were a dim little old mother and a new red necktie! But wasn’t a mother—even an old, old mother, whose own eyes were vague, such a big blessing that she made up for nearly everything else that God could give?

But she resolutely banished the ache in her heart—an ache that contracted it sharply every time she thought of the mother she had never known—and began to sing again:

“I think when I read that sweet story of old,

When Jesus was here among men,

How He called little children as lambs to His fold—”

The opening and closing of the door startled her. David was there, smiling at her.

“Won’t you sing ‘Always’ for me, Sally? It’s a new song, just out. It goes something like this—” And he began to hum, breaking into words now and then: “I’ll be loving you—always! Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not—”

“So this is why you wouldn’t go to church with me!” a shrill voice, passionate with anger, broke into the singing lesson.

They had not heard her, in their absorption in the song and in each other, but Pearl had come into the house through the front door, and was confronting them now in the doorway between dining room and kitchen.

“I thought you two were up to something!” she cried. “It’s a good thing I came home when I did, or I reckon there wouldn’t be any Sunday dinner. Do you know why I came home, Sally Ford?” she demanded, advancing into the kitchen, her hands on her hips, her fingers digging spasmodically into the flesh that bulged under the silk.

“No,” Sally gasped, retreating until she was halted by the kitchen table. “I’m cooking dinner, Pearl. It’ll be ready on time—”

“Don’t you ‘Pearl’ me!” the infuriated girl screamed. “You mealy-mouthed little hypocrite! I’ll tell you why I came home! I couldn’t find my diamond bar-pin that Papa gave me for a Christmas present last year, and I remembered when I was in Sunday School that I saw you stoop and pick up something in the parlor last night. You little thief! Give it back to me or I’ll phone for the sheriff!”

Sally stared at Pearl, color draining out of her cheeks and out of her sapphire eyes, until she was a pale shadow of the girl who had been glowing and sparkling under the sun of David’s affectionate interest.

“I haven’t seen your diamond bar-pin, Pearl,” she said at last. “Honest, I haven’t!”

“You’re lying! I saw you stoop and pick something up in front of the sofa last night. I was crazy not to think of my bar-pin then, but I remembered all right this morning, when it was gone off this dress, the same dress I was wearing last night. See, David!” she appealed shrilly to the boy, who was looking at her with narrowed eyes. “It was pinned right here! You can see where it was stuck in! Look!”

David said nothing, but a slow, odd smile curled his lips without reaching those level, narrowed eyes of his.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” Pearl screamed. “I won’t have you looking at me like that! Stop it!”

Slowly, his eyes not leaving Pearl’s face for a moment, David thrust his right hand into his pocket. When he withdrew it, something lay on his palm—a narrow bar of filigreed white gold, set with a small, square-cut diamond. Still without speaking, he extended his hand slowly toward Pearl, but she drew back, her eyes popping with surprise and—yes, Sally was sure of it—fear.

“Where did you get that?” she gasped.

“Do you really want me to tell you?” David spoke at last, his voice queer and hard.

“No!” Pearl shuddered. “No! Does she—does she know?”

“No, she was telling the truth when she said that she hadn’t seen the pin,” David answered, flipping the pin contemptuously to the kitchen table. “But next time I think you’d better put it away in your own room. And Pearl, you really must try to overcome this absentmindedness of yours. It may get you into trouble sometime.”

Pearl shivered, seemed to shrink visibly under her fussy pink georgette dress.

“Oh!” she wailed suddenly, her face crumpling up in a spasm of weeping. “You’ll hate me now! And you used to like me, before she came! You—oh, I hate you! Quit looking at me like that!”

“Hadn’t you better go back to church?” David suggested mildly. “Tell your mother you found your pin just where you’d left it,” that contemptuous smile deepening on his lips.

“You won’t tell Papa, will you?” Pearl whimpered, as she turned toward the door. “And you won’t tell her?” She could not bear to utter Sally’s name.

“No, I won’t tell,” David assured her. “But I’m sure you’ll make up to Sally for having been mistaken about the pin.”

“She’s all you think of!” Pearl cried, then, sobbing wildly, she ran out the kitchen door.

“Guess I’d better not bother you any longer, or they’ll be blaming me if dinner is late,” David said casually, but he paused long enough to pat the little hand that was clenching the table.

Sally was so puzzled by the strangeness of the scene she had witnessed, so tormented by brief glimpses of something near the truth, so weak from reaction, so stirred by gratitude to David, that she was making poor headway with dinner when Clem Carson, who had not gone to church, came in from the barns, dressed in overalls in defiance of the day.

“Got a sick yearlin’ out there,” he grumbled. “A blue-ribbon heifer calf that Dave’s grandpa persuaded me to buy. I don’t believe in this blue-ribbon stock. Always delicate—got to be nursed like a baby. I give her a whopping dose of castor oil and she slobbered all over me.”

He took the big black iron teakettle from the stove and filled the granite wash basin half full of the steaming water. As he lathered his hands until festoons of soap bubbles hung from them, he cocked an appraising eye at Sally, who was busily rolling pie crust on a yellow pine board.

“Dave been hanging around the kitchen this morning, ain’t he?”

Sally’s hands tightened on the rolling pin and her eyes fluttered guiltily as she answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Better not encourage him, if you know which side your bread’s buttered on,” the farmer advised laconically. “I reckon you know by this time that Pearl’s picked him out and that things is just about settled between ’em. Fine match, too. He’ll own his granddad’s place some day—next farm to this one, and the young folks will be mighty well fixed. I reckon Dave’s pretty much like any other young whippersnapper—ready to cock an eye at any pretty girl that comes along, before he settles down, but it don’t mean anything. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Sally murmured.

“I reckon any fool could see that Pearl’s mighty near the apple of my eye,” Carson went on, as he dried his hands vigorously on the Sunday-fresh roller towel. “And if she took a notion that maybe some other girl from the orphanage would suit us better, why I don’t know as I could do anything else but take you back. And I’d hate that. You’re a nice, pretty little thing, real handy in the kitchen, but, yes sir, I’d have to tell the matron that you just didn’t suit.... Well, I got to get back to that yearlin’.”

Somehow Sally managed to finish cooking the big Sunday dinner before the family returned from church. Out of deference for the day she decided to change from her faded gingham to her white dress before serving dinner. Surely she had a right to look decent! Clem Carson couldn’t construe her humble “dressing up” as a bid for David’s attention.

In her little garret room she scrubbed her face and hands, pinned the heavy braid of soft black hair about her head, and then reached under her low cot bed for her small bundle of clothes, in which was rolled her only pair of fine-ribbed white lisle stockings. As she drew out the bundle she discovered immediately that other hands than her own had touched it; the stockings had been unrolled and then rerolled clumsily, not at all in her own neat fashion. Then suddenly full comprehension came to her. The pieces of the puzzle settled miraculously into shape. It was here, in this bundle, that David had found the bar-pin. Somehow he had seen Pearl slip into the room that morning, had guessed that her secret visit boded no good for Sally; had spied on her, and then later had retrieved the bar-pin from the bundle in which Pearl had hidden it.

If David had not seen—But she could not go on with the thought. Trembling so that her teeth chattered she dressed herself as decently as her orphanage wardrobe permitted, and then went downstairs to “dish up” the dinner she had prepared.

Immediately after dinner David went across fields to call on his grandfather, a grouchy, sick old man who almost hated the boy because he would soon own the lands which he himself had loved so passionately. He did not return for supper, and at breakfast on Monday there was not time for more than a smile and a cheerful “Good morning,” which Sally, with Clem Carson’s eyes upon her, hardly dared return.

Sally wondered if David had been warned, too, for as the days passed she seldom saw him alone for as much a minute. Perhaps he was being careful for her sake, suspecting Carson’s antagonism, or perhaps, in spite of the shameful trick in which he had caught her, he really cared for Pearl. Evenings he sat for a short time in the living room or on the front porch, Pearl beside him, chattering animatedly; but he was always in his room studying by ten o’clock, a blessed fact which made her own isolation in her little garret room more easy to bear.

On Thursday morning at ten o’clock David appeared at the kitchen door, an axe in his hands.

“Will you turn the grindstone for me while I sharpen this axe blade, Sally?” he asked casually, but his eyes gave her a deep, significant look that made her heart flutter.

Mrs. Carson, standing over her bubbling preserving kettles, grumbled an assent, and Sally flew out of the kitchen to join him.

The grindstone, a huge, heavy stone wheel turned by a pedal arrangement, was set up near the first of the great red barns. While Sally poured water at intervals upon the stone, David held the blade against it, and under cover of the whirring, grating noise he talked to her in a low voice.

“Everything all right, Sally?”

“Fine!” she faltered. “I get awful tired, but there’s lots to eat—such good things to eat—and Pearl’s given me some dresses that are nicer than any I ever had before, except they’re too big for me—”

“Isn’t she fat?” David grinned at her, and she was reminded again how young he was, although he seemed so very grown-up to her. “She wouldn’t be so fat if she worked a tenth as hard as you do.”

“I don’t mind,” Sally protested, her eyes misting with tears at his thoughtfulness for her. “I’ve got to earn my board and keep. Besides, there’s such an awful lot to be done, with the preserving and the canning and the cooking and everything. Mrs. Carson works even harder than I do.”

David’s eyes flashed with indignation and a suspicion of contempt for the meek little girl opposite him. “You’re earning five times as much as your board and room and a few old clothes that Pearl doesn’t want is worth. It makes me so mad—”

“Sal-lee! Ain’t that axe ground yet? Time to start dinner! I can’t leave this piccalilli I’m making,” Mrs. Carson shouted from the kitchen door.

“Wait, Sally,” David commanded. “Wouldn’t you like to take a walk with me after supper tonight? I’ll help you with the dishes. You never get out of the house, except to the garden. You haven’t even seen the fields yet. I’d like to show you around. The moon’s full tonight—”

“Oh, I can’t!” Sally gasped with the pain of refusal. “Pearl—Mr. Carson—”

“I want you to come,” David said steadily, his eyes commanding her.

“All right,” Sally promised recklessly, her cheeks pink with excitement, her eyes soft and velvety, like dark blue pansies.

Sally was eager as a child, when she joined David Nash in that part of the lane that skirted the orchard. Although it was nearly nine o’clock it was not yet dark; the sweet, throbbing peace of a June twilight, disturbed only by a faint breeze that whispered through the leaves of the fruit trees, brooded over the farm.

“I hurried—as fast—as I could!” she gasped. “Grandma Carson ripped up this dress for me this afternoon and while you and I were washing dishes Mrs. Carson stitched up the seams. Wasn’t that sweet of her? Do you like it, David? It was awful dirty and I washed it in gasoline this afternoon, while I was doing Pearl’s things.”

She backed away from him, took the full skirt of the made-over dress between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and made him a curtsey.

“You look like a picture in it,” David told her gravely. “When I saw Pearl busting out of it I had no idea it was such a pretty dress.”

“I couldn’t have kept it on tonight if Pearl hadn’t already left for the party at Willis’s. Was she terribly mad at you because you wouldn’t go?”

David shrugged his broad shoulders, but there was a twinkle in his eyes. “Let’s talk about something pleasant. Want a peach, Sally?”

And Sally ate the peach he gave her, though she had peeled so many for canning those last few days that she had thought she never wanted to see another peach. But this was a special peach, for David had chosen it for her, had touched it with his own hands.

They walked slowly down the fruit-scented lane together, Sally’s shoulder sometimes touching David’s coatsleeve, her short legs striving to keep step with his long ones.

She listened, or appeared to listen, drugged with content, her fatigue and the smarting of her gasoline-reddened hands completely forgotten.

“We got a good stand of winter wheat and oats. There’s the wheat. See how it ripples in the breeze? Look! You can see where it’s turning yellow. Pretty soon its jade-green dress will be as yellow as gold, and along in August I’ll cut it. That’s oats, over there”; and he pointed to a distant field of foot-high grain.

“It’s so pretty—all of it,” Sally sighed blissfully. “You wouldn’t think, just to look at a farm, that it makes people mean and cross and stingy and ugly, would you? Looks like growing things for people to eat ought to make us happy.”

“Farmers don’t see the pretty side; they’re too busy. And too worried,” David told her gravely. “I’m different. I live in the city in the winter and I can hardly wait to get to the farm in the summer. But it’s not my worry if the summer is wet and the wheat rusts. I’ll be happy to own a piece of land some day, though, even if I own all the worries, too. I’m going to be a scientific farmer, you know.”

“I’d love to live on a farm,” Sally agreed, with entire innocence. “But every evening at twilight I’d go out and look at my growing things and see how pretty a picture they made, and try to forget all the back-breaking work I’d put in to make it so pretty.”

They were walking single file now, in the soft, mealy loam of a field, David leading the way. She loved the way his tall, compact body moved—as gracefully and surely as a woman’s. She had the feeling that they were two children, who had slipped away from their elders. She had never known anyone like David, but she felt as if she had known him all her life, as if she could say anything to him and he would understand. Oh, it was delicious to have a friend!

“There’s the cornfield where I’ve been plowing,” David called back to her. “A fine crop. I’ve given it its last plowing this week. It’s what farmers call ‘laid by.’ Nothing to do now but to let nature take her course.”

It was so dark now that the corn looked like glistening black swords, curved by invisible hands for a phantom combat. And the breeze rustled through them, bringing to the beauty-drunk little girl a cargo of mingled odors of earth, ripe fruit and greenness thrusting up from the moist embrace of the ground to the kiss of the sun.

“Let’s sit here on the ground and watch the moon come up,” David suggested, his voice hushed with the wonder of the night and of the beauty that lay about them. “The earth is soft, and dry from the sun. It won’t soil your pretty dress.”

Sally obeyed, locking her slender knees with her hands and resting her chin upon them.

“Tired, Sally? They work you too hard,” David said softly, as he seated himself at a little distance from her. “I suppose you’ll be glad to get back to the—Home in the fall.”

Sally’s dream-filled eyes, barely discernible in the dark, turned toward him, and her voice, hushed but determined, spoke the words that had been throbbing in her brain for four days:

“I’m not going back to the Home—ever. I’m going to run away.”

“Good for you!” David applauded. Then, with sudden seriousness: “But what will you do? A girl alone, like you? And won’t they try to bring you back? Isn’t there a law that will let them hunt you like a criminal?”

“Oh, yes. The state’s my legal guardian until I’m eighteen, and I’m only sixteen. In some states it’s twenty-one,” Sally answered, fright creeping back into her voice. “But I’m going to do it anyway. I’d rather die than go back to the orphanage for two more years. You don’t know what it’s like,” she added with sudden vehemence, and a sob-catch in her throat.

“Tell me, Sally,” David urged gently.

And Sally told him—in short, gasping sentences, roughened sometimes by tears—of the life of orphaned girls.

“We have enough to eat to keep from starving and they give us four new dresses a year,” Sally went on recklessly, her long-dammed-up emotion released by his sympathy and understanding, though he said so little. “And they don’t actually beat us, unless we’ve done something pretty bad; but oh, it’s the knowing that we’re orphans and that the state takes care of us and that nobody cares whether we live or die that makes it so hard to bear! From the time we enter the orphanage we are made to feel that everyone else is better than we are, and it’s not right for children, who will be men and women some day, with their livings to make, to feel that way!”

“Yes, an inferiority complex is a pretty bad handicap,” David interrupted gently.

“I know about inferiority complexes,” Sally took him up eagerly. “I’ve read a lot and studied a lot. We have a branch of the public library in the orphanage, but we’re only allowed to take out one book a week. I’ll graduate from high school next June—if I go back! But I won’t go back!”

“But Sally, Sally, what could you do?” David persisted. “You haven’t any money—”

“No,” Sally acknowledged passionately. “I’ve never had more than a nickel at one time to call my own! Think of it, David! A girl of sixteen, who has never had more than a nickel of her own in her life! And only a nickel given to me by some soft-hearted, sentimental visitor! But I can work, and if I can’t find anything to do, I’d rather starve than go back.”

David’s hand, concealed by the darkness, was upon hers before she knew that it was coming.

“Poor Sally! Brave, high-hearted little Sally!” David said so gently that his words were like a caress. “Charity hasn’t broken your spirit yet, child. Just try to be patient for a while longer. Promise me you won’t do anything without telling me first. I might be able to help you—somehow.”

“I—I can’t promise, David,” she confessed in a strangled voice. “I might have to go away—suddenly—from here—”

“What do you mean, Sally?” David’s hand closed in a hurting grip over hers. “Has Pearl—Mr. Carson—? Tell me what you mean!”

“When I promised to come walking with you tonight I knew that Mr. Carson would try to take me back to the orphanage, if he found out. But—I—I wanted to come. And I’m not sorry.”

“Do you mean that he threatened you?” David asked slowly, amazement dragging at his words. “Because of Pearl—and me?”

“Yes,” she whispered, hanging her head with shame. “I didn’t want you to know, ever, that you’d been in any way responsible. He—he says it’s practically settled between you and—and Pearl, and that—that I—oh, don’t make me say any more!”

David groaned. She could see the muscles spring out like cords along his jaw. “Listen, Sally,” he said at last, very gently, “I want you to believe me when I say that I have never had the slightest intention of marrying Pearl Carson. I have not made love to her. I’m too young to get married. I’ve got two years of college ahead of me yet, but even if I were older and had a farm of my own, I wouldn’t marry Pearl—”