Читать книгу The Perennial Bachelor - Anne Parrish - Страница 9

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Gently the Campions slipped from being rich to being “well-to-do,” from being “well-to-do” to being “comfortable,” and from being “comfortable” to “having to be just a little careful.” Mamma didn’t understand it, but remained placid and bought sealskin sacques and muffs for herself and her daughters, for certainly they had to be kept warm somehow; and, not until after the fur coats were bought, did it occur to her that she might have knitted them all hug-me-tights to wear under their cloaks.

There was a continual trickle of new trifles for herself, a coral colored peplum, fringed with jet, a fanchon bonnet like a velvet dish of currants, a few new braids and puffs, or a straw embroidered white tulle veil. And, for the children, there were Roman sashes, worked petticoats, red and white flannel sailor-suits, embroidered with anchors. These things didn’t count, and as for the larger purchases, the walking costumes and carriage costumes (both used for the same purpose by Mamma), the wine-colored curtains for the dining-room, and Prince, the new pony for Victor, she bought those only because something (not rappings or tipping tables) seemed to tell her that her husband would have wished her to have them.

Besides, she saved—ever so much. All the horses but Stella and old Charlie were sold. The wine bills were nothing compared to what they had been when Papa was alive; as for ball-gowns, she hadn’t been to a ball since she became a widow; and, although she had been unable to resist one confection of arsenic green satin and gold wheat, it billowed alone of its kind in her wardrobe.

Cousin Lizzie Blow thought it was outrageously extravagant of Mamma to have a pair of ear-rings painted with Trusty’s head. Of course, everyone was having ear-rings with dogs, but only the very rich were having their own pets, and most people were quite content with fancy dogs. She was herself. But Mamma said Mercy! she would have felt too funny with strange dogs in her ears. And Cousin Lizzie had such queer ideas, anyway—she had given up bonnets entirely, and taken to wearing a hat like a muffin with a wing stuck on one side just as if she were an unmarried young lady. Cousin Lizzie said to everybody that Margaret Campion was so extravagant and self-indulgent she would certainly end in the Poor House, and Mamma, all aglow, said how sad it made her to see Lizzie making herself so fast-looking and conspicuous; so the two were about even.

Willie and Priscilla had also slipped from wealth to “enough to get on with perfectly nicely.” After serious talks from Willie and frantic endeavors to count up, that looked as if she were doing five-finger exercises, Mamma, in panic, would do something drastic, have crumb-pudding three days running, or cut up her best mantle to make a suit for Victor.

Now and then, with pain in her heart, she sold a bit of land. Willie had sold a lot of his. Slowly the tide of the outside world began to creep in around the islands of The Maples and Riverview.

The Blows had prospered. Sam always had a reputation for being “smart and sharp.” But what good was his money, when he and Lizzie were so unhappy? He shut himself up in his room almost every evening now; but, if anyone called, he would come out, walking carefully and talk a great deal, very distinctly, asking questions that had just been fully answered, and telling anecdotes to the people who had just told them to him. And Cousin Lizzie would sit looking at him, looking and looking, with eyes as bright as if red lamps were burning behind them, and never say a word.

One way that Mamma had saved was by teaching her daughters herself. Sitting around the dining-room table, they read, “spoke pieces” whose pathos reduced Lily to pleasurable tears, and did sums with a doubtfulness and wildness shared by their teacher. But these lessons would never do for Victor. He was to go to the Rectory, where Mr. Page had a school for little boys, and presently to the Academy in town—a trip in the steam-cars every day! He could hardly wait! And finally to Harvard, like Papa.

He stood in the hall of The Maples on the hot September morning of his first day of school, while his women circled around him and Caesar, with Stella hitched into the dearborn, waited at the front door. He had all new clothes for school. Loose trousers coming below his knees were buttoned with big china buttons to his full-sleeved white shirt, and over white stockings he wore heavy laced boots. He had to stick out a foot every now and then and have a good look. He was terribly proud of his boots, the soles were so thick.

One hand held a round straw hat with a blue ribbon; the other his new satchel, containing a slate, and two of Chloe’s molasses cookies to eat at the eleven o’clock recess. He felt grown-up, important, and a little confused.

“May, pet, will you just run up to Mamma’s room and get the little black fan from the table by her bed?” said Mamma, dropping on to the horsehair-covered sofa, and fanning herself with her lace pocket-handkerchief. She was going to take Victor to school, this very first morning. “Oh, Lily, his pencil! In the red glass pitcher on the sideboard—well, then, in the bowl where the nutcrackers are. Mercy, child, you’d be a good person to send looking for trouble! Maggie, you might just slip down cellar, and see if you can’t find a nice pear for him to take.”

That was Mamma’s way—to make things sound easy by saying “just.” “You might just make an angel cake, Chloe,” she would suggest; or, to one of the children, “Will you just slip over to Aunt Priscilla’s with this pat of butter?”

Downright Maggie resented it, resented, too, Mamma’s honey-sweet voice asking, “Don’t you want to help Martha dust the parlor? Don’t you want to pick strawberries this morning?” Maggie would do as she was told, but she resented having to say that she wanted to.

“I don’t want you to do it at all unless you do it willingly,” Mamma would say, her blue eyes wet. But what she really meant, though not in words, hardly with conscious feeling, was, “You must do as I wish, and say you want to, no matter whether you do or not, and then everyone—I—will be happy and comfortable.”

It wasn’t fair.

The clock on the stairs struck nine, which meant that it was half past eight. When it was nine it would whirr and strangle; and at half past nine it would strike ten. Once you got used to it, it was quite easy to follow.

The sisters ran up and down stairs, their rust-brown skirts whisked through the doorways on last scampering errands; and Mamma and Victor got into the carriage. Her claret-colored draperies rose, billowed, spread, engulfed him like the waves of the Red Sea engulfing a very small Egyptian. Caesar gathered up the reins, and they rolled off, while Maggie, May, and Lily, admiring and envious, waved as if the carriage and Stella were a ship and the turnpike was the broad blue sea.

Old Mr. Page was tying up his dahlias that the wind had blown over in the night, when the carriage drew up at the Rectory. He was a dreamy old man with long, silky silver hair, who was supposed to be a splendid teacher because he preached sermons full of Greek and Latin, and wrote beautiful poems about “Friendship” and “Nature,” signed “Rusticus,” that sometimes appeared in the “Poets’ Corner” of the Wilmington newspaper. He tried hard to be a good teacher whenever he remembered that he had a school; but sometimes when the boys were studying he would step out of the open French window for a refreshing glance at his garden, and lose himself for the rest of the morning in pruning his grapevines, smelling his roses, or standing still, lost in his thoughts, far, far away from seven little boys.

He came towards Mamma and Victor across the fallen leaves, taking off his hat, in which he had stuck flowers in the Tyrolean fashion, which he much admired. The seven little boys stopped throwing horsechestnuts at each other in order to have a good look at the new pupil.

“Here is Victor,” said Mamma, looking as if she were going to cry. “He is going to try to be good and study very hard, Mr. Page.”

“So you’re going to try hard, are you?” asked Mr. Page, looking through him mildly and vaguely.

Victor’s hand tightened on Mamma’s, and he looked up for directions.

“Yes, Mr. Page,” she prompted.

“Yes, Mr. Page.”

“Well spoken, Young Meritorious,” said Mr. Page, patting his head. “Come and see my tea-roses, ma’am—they’ve never been more beautiful:

“‘And thou, most lovely Rose,

Of tint most delicate,

Fair consort of the morn;

Delighted to imbibe

The genial dew of heaven,

Rich vegetation’s vermeil-tinctured gem——’”

And his hand beat time gently on the little boy’s silky head.

But if Mr. Page didn’t know it was time she went and school began, Mamma did. She turned to say goodbye to Victor.

What had happened to him? What had he done to make himself look so tiny? She felt as if she were looking at him through the wrong end of her opera-glasses. How could she leave him alone, so little and young? She bent to kiss him, and drove away weeping.

The other little boys were scandalized. To be sure, their mothers had brought them to school once, long ago, but that was when they were young, last year. Behind their geographies they made loud smacking noises and whispered to each other, “Goodbye, Mamma’s darling, sweet little baby girl!” Victor pretended not to notice them, but the ears that Cousin Lizzie Blow complained of, turned scarlet, and presently one tear trickled down his cheek. But he whisked it off with a finger when no one was looking, and a tortoise-shell butterfly floating in at the window cheered him up a little.

When recess came, he followed the other boys out onto the lawn. He felt too shy to take the pear and the molasses cookies out of his satchel. He didn’t quite know what to do. Mamma, or Maggie, or May, or Lily, had always been there to tell him before.

The little boys became terribly busy. They tore out of the open window shouting, “Not it! Not it!” at the top of their lungs. They began a clamorous and confusing game. Victor stood and watched them, his blue eyes wide, his face solemn and excited. Presently he gave a little prancing jump. He was like a lid that lifts on a boiling pot.

“Can you catch?” one boy shouted at him.

“Yes,” said Victor, used to Lily’s mildly tossed bean-bags.

The boy threw the ball, which bounced off from Victor’s middle and rolled into a mint bed.

The little boys laughed and laughed. They went on laughing long after they were comfortably through, leaning over and letting their arms hang limp, reeling in circles. They shouted to each other, “Can you catch?” and replied, “Oh, yes, perfectly wonderfully grandly!” and flung the ball and did catch it, generally. They didn’t throw it again to Victor. He might as well have been a boy made of air, dressed in an air shirt and air pantaloons, for all that they seemed to see him. But they had never shouted so loudly, thrown their ball so nonchalantly, fallen down so often, or panted so hard. They were putting him through childhood’s cruel initiation; but also they were showing off to him for all they were worth.

He had never played with children before, except with his worshipping sisters and the colored children he could order about. He felt something heavy swelling in his breast, and his eyes and nose began to prickle.

He thought of home, and the thought was too much for him. He was like the small seaweed-colored fish that will swim back desperately to their seaweed, no matter how often they are taken away from it. There only they are safe. There the seaweed, and the crabs, and the mollusks, and themselves, are all alike, mottled and streaked with the same olives and pale ambers. The clear water is a place of terror, of swooping seagulls and hungry bigger fish—but, oh, the peace, the safety of the seaweed!

The bell rang, and, as the boys crowded back through the window, Victor slipped under the hedge like a raindrop soaking into the earth, and began to run towards home.

He ran faster than ever before in his life. His heart pounded, his breath came sobbingly, his fair hair stuck on his forehead in dark wet points, and water ran down his face. One stocking kept coming down, and he clutched at it as he ran, and pulled it up. Then in a minute down it would slip, and he would clutch and pull, and down it would slip——

He heard a pounding—thud, thud, thud! He knew it was Mr. Page running after him—Mr. Page grown gigantic, Mr. Page with his black hat as high as a mountain above the floating white clouds of his hair, and the flowers stuck in his hat as tall as mountain pine trees——

But, when at last he couldn’t run another step, there was no one there. The road was empty; the fields of grass and wildflowers were still except for the song of the grasshoppers; the river flowed blue and peaceful in the sunshine.

He didn’t dare stop very long. He began to run again, clutching at his stocking, kicking up the dust with his nice new shoes.

Martha was churning in the kitchen shed. Slap, slap! The butter was coming beautifully, in little yellow lumps. Albert came in to get a pail of water at the pump and said something polite to which she responded with a yell of light-hearted laughter. Then she gave another yell, a different one.

Victor panted up the steps, still clutching at his stocking. His breath came in loud, hiccuping sobs; his face was streaked and furrowed with dust and sweat.

“Wh-where’s Mamma, M-martha? Where’s Mamma?”

“Mah gooness, honey! Pump him a drink, yo’ Albert—let Martha wipe off yo’ face, po’ lamb—an’ den run find his Mamma and tell huh he’s done come home.”

Mamma was in the grape-house with Caesar. The leaves and the heavy bunches of grapes made a broad cool pattern against the sky’s blue dazzle, and there were shadow leaves on her wide straw hat and on her arms, creamy and smooth between her flowing sleeves and her loose gardening gloves.

The air was moist and warm and fragrant. Caesar stood on the old broken chair and cut a heavy bunch of grapes, Mamma lifted up the leaf-lined basket and he laid the bunch in, so gently, as if he were laying a sleeping baby in its cradle. But she let the basket drop and came running, when Albert told her Victor had come home by himself.

He sat on Mamma’s lap, her tender arms around him. He looked at them all with round eyes over the top of the tumbler, silver with coolness. He drank and drank and drank. And they were all there, around him, Mamma and the girls, old Chloe in the doorway still holding the bowl she had been mixing corn bread in, Martha, and Albert, and Caesar with his scissors, and Trusty thumping his tail on the floor. Home drew around him, welcoming him. The little fish was safe in his seaweed again.