Читать книгу A White Bird Flying - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 5

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The Deal clan worked three days before they had finished dismantling their mother's home and getting it ready for occupancy by Herman Rinemiller's hired man.

"I never saw so many things in my life," each one insisted. "Loads and loads of the accumulations of years. Every magazine, every paper, every string and button that ever came into that house Mother had hoarded."

And so the old things, once so precious, each one representing sacrifice for the purchase, were scattered to the four winds,--to children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, church organizations, Salvation Army, the junk pile down by Stove Creek,--like leaves from some sturdy old oak blown hither and yon in the dead of the year. Margaret took the clock with the little brown church painted on the glass, Isabelle the tallow lamp, Mack the thumbed-over Shakespeare,--"Mother used to make me read it when I didn't know what it was all about," he explained,--and John the blue plush album, with Eloise deeply annoyed at his absurd choice. Katherine deigned to admit into the lovely new home of English architecture, the newest looking of the pieced quilts,--of Jacob's Ladder design. Grace, choosing the scrapbook, was surprised beyond measure when Laura, usually quiet and shy as a little brown quail, pounced upon it with an almost tearful ferocity: "Oh, no, Aunt Grace, not the scrapbook. It's mine . . . please. Grandma always read them all to me . . . she said I could have it. . . ."

Eloise was upset beyond measure and was ready to insist upon Laura's turning it over to her Aunt Grace with apologies, but Aunt Margaret intervened, and Laura bore home her two possessions in peace,--the little hairy calf-skin trunk with the nailhead initials on it, and the thick old scrapbook with all the lovely verses.

Eloise did not understand Laura. Mother and daughter, they seemed not even remotely related. Brisk, practical, efficient and humorless, Eloise, by some strange joke of nature had given birth to a child of emotions, of fancies and dreams. And no barnyard hen on the river's brink was ever more worried and exasperated over her swimming duckling than was Eloise over Laura's disinclination to show any characteristics of her own (the Wentworth) side of the house.

Toward the last of that month, when all seemed normal again after Grandma's death,--so soon does Life slip back to its regular routine--in the privacy of her upstairs blue and white room, Laura began writing a long story. It took her several days, and Eloise went many times to the stairway with: "Laura, whatever are you doing? Do get at some work. We all have to work,--people in our circumstances, at least. If we were better off maybe you could sit around that way, but we might as well face facts that we never will be wealthy and able to enjoy life." There are those who would have taken exception to Eloise's statement. But that was Eloise's philosophy: great wealth brought comfort and happiness. And having no great wealth, she resigned herself, perforce, to a state of no great comfort and no deep happiness.

Laura would dutifully get up, stir things around a bit in her room and then settle down to the absorbing story. It was entitled "A Love That Never Came to Pass" or "The Professor's Life Tragedy." It involved the unrequited love of a college professor for a fellow member of the faculty. To be sure, no obstacle seemed to stand in the way of a happy culmination of the affair, excepting the advice against marriage freely given by a villainous unmarried roommate of the wooed-but-not-won lady, the former resembling Aunt Grace so thoroughly in Laura's mind that she felt a little guilty over the accurate description.

On the third day of the composition period, the embryonic author grew so upset over the tragic affair that she cried too copiously to see the pages clearly. It was in this state that her mother found her. Exasperated mother and embarrassed daughter took part in a dialogue which got them nowhere; indeed, which only seemed to push them farther apart in their understanding of each other.

"That child worries me so," Eloise told John that evening.

"Do you suppose anything could be"--Eloise was pale in her earnestness--"wrong with her?"

"Of course not. She's a smart kid."

"But where did she get it . . . that foolish emotion? Not from my side of the house, that's certain."

"Oh, we'll assume responsibility . . . the Deals." John grinned.

"The Wentworths are all so practical. Look at Uncle Harry Wentworth--worth a half million, if a dollar."

"I thought that money originally came from his wife." John could not resist. At which Eloise closed her mouth with the unspoken eloquence she sometimes assumed, and John went silently back to his office.

When Laura had carried the sad life story of the professor to a close which ended in a grave under a weeping-willow tree with the erstwhile juggler of his happiness planting bleeding-heart bushes on the grave, she washed the visible liquid form of her emotion from her eyes, and went down to cousin Katherine's.

Katherine's and Jimmie Buchanan's new home was lovely and modern and smart, just as Katherine herself was lovely and modern and smart. Its lawn was only beginning to emerge, pretty and green, from the recent dirt of the excavation. But the house itself was a finished affair from the beveled glass of the front door to the green and white incinerator.

Laura opened the immaculate white front door and stepped into the hall with a little, "Hoo-hoo!" She reveled in the sight of the lovely rooms with the gay wedding gifts all about, the inner doors with their sparkling glass and filmy lace, the mahogany and white stairway winding to the upper rooms, the long lovely sitting-room with the one end taken up by the fireplace and the open bookcases. No one was in sight, but immediately she heard a door open, and Katherine's head appeared around the corner of the upstairs hall to be followed by the rest of Katherine in an orchid-colored underslip.

"Oh, it's you, Lolly." That was Katherine's pet name for her cousin. Millard, she had long ago dubbed "The Tribulation," shortening it later to Trib, a nickname which half the town called him now.

"Come on in and make yourself homely, Lolly," she called down.

Laura giggled appreciatively. Kathie was always so funny. She wished Kathie liked her better. No, that was not quite the right thing to think. Katherine liked her, but she took no pains to conceal the fact that she thought her odd. "You're the queerest little duck," she would say whenever Laura ventured one of her mature opinions on any subject.

"I'm going out, Lolly." Kathie looked down at her as she dropped a lovely orchid afternoon gown over her head. "Bridge at Mrs. A. R. Brown's,--that's short for Ashes of Rose, I suppose." Laura giggled. "My word, Laura, this little burg has as much going on as Omaha,--that is, providing you count every church supper and every study club and every female tea. Jimmie wants me to toddle to everything . . . good business, he says . . . the old diplomat in international relations . . . so I run around to them all . . . blue blood, red blood, Catholic, Protestant, Republican, Democrat, wet, dry, our bank's customers, t'other bank's customers. . . ."

She was downstairs now, lovely and slim and sparkling. Laura thought she had never seen any one so gay and pretty. And she smelled like the violets at the foot of the old trees by the creek bed. She threw her arms around Laura now and gave her a swift caress. Laura was surprised and embarrassed beyond measure. So seldom did Katherine notice her except to tease. "How old are you, Lolly? Twelve?"

"Thirteen last week."

"Imagine! Bless your little kid heart. Well, all I can ask for you, Laura," she was suddenly sweet and serious, "is that seven or eight years from now, you'll be as gloriously happy as I am."

"If you mean getting married," Laura said, with the crimson creeping under the olive of her skin, "I'm never going to. I'm going to do something else." She loved watching Jimmie and Katherine--they were a handsome couple. She liked the thrill it gave her to look at them together, but she could not imagine herself under the same circumstances. She shrank from the thought of placing herself in the picture--wanted only to look at others.

Katherine laughed, "You're a queer little duck." She threw her arm around Laura again. "Well, I must go, honey. There isn't anybody here. My butler, maid and chef have all gone. They're all one person, you know,--I call her my 'unholy trinity.'"

"Do you care if I stay and read?"

"Of course not. But . . ." Katherine paused in slipping on a white coat. "What makes you read so much, Lolly? Why don't you get out and do more?"

There it was again,--the thing her mother always said. "Oh, I don't know. I guess I like people in books better than the ones outside," she admitted.

There was the sudden sound of tap-tapping on the cement walk running around to the rear of the house, and Katherine looked out to say: "Oh, darn! There's old man Whiskery-Whee-Come-Wheeze. Stay here, Lolly, and don't squeak, or we'll have to march with Sherman to the sea all afternoon."

Katherine slipped out to the back door, accepted with thanks the beets all washed and clean, took them gingerly out of the old bucket with a rope for the handle, kept surreptitiously closing the door a little more while the old man was talking and finally escaped back to Laura.

"It wasn't Sherman. It was eatables. 'Knew some families further out on the prairie had a worse time than us.'" Katherine imitated the old man's high husky voice to perfection. "'Didn't have nothin' to eat . . . no money . . . last resource was to go out on the prairie 'n' gather up the bleached bones o' the buffalo, haul 'em to town and get a dollar a load. Nature is kind under her harsh exterior. . . . Always leaves somethin' around . . . even if only bones bleachin' on the prairie.'"

Laura laughed. Katherine was so droll. But something hurt her, too. It troubled her to think of the old man trying to tell that to Kathie in her orchid-colored chiffon dress and her lovely white coat. It was true about the buffalo bones. Grandma had said so, too.

Then Katherine, gay and lovely, left for the bridge party. When Laura saw the car go out of the drive, she locked the front door and went into the long living-room. But she did not read.

She tiptoed down the length of the room as though even then some one might be listening. In front of the fireplace she stopped and looked up at the huge portrait which filled the entire space above the mantel.

It was the painting of a lovely lady in velvet draperies, her reddish-brown hair curling over her shoulder and a string of pearls at her neck. In her slender tapering hand she held a hat with a long drooping plume.

It was no ordinary painting,--but an heirloom that had come to Katherine on her wedding day,--the picture of lovely Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, Katherine's and Laura's own great-great-grandmother. Standing there alone in the silent house and looking up at the lovely lady, Laura recalled all that her Grandmother had told her about it,--how the lady had been an aristocratic Scotch woman; how her only son, Basil, riding to the hounds, had met and wooed and won a little sixteen-year-old Irish peasant girl on the Scottish moors, married her and taken her home to the great estate near Aberdeen; how this lady of the picture had tried to make a grand dame of the little Maggie O'Conner, but had not succeeded, for the little bride would put on her peasant dress and shawl and run away over the moors to her own folks. Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie died, and the young Basil and his Irish wife had seen all the property slip away and revert to the crown. They had come to America then with their children, and Grandma herself had been born soon after they landed.

It was only because Grandma had told about hearing of this huge painting that used to hang on the landing of the great house in Aberdeen that Kathie knew about it. She had teased her father to find it. Uncle Mack had set agents to work and though it had cost a great deal of money--he never would tell how much--they had found the painting and shipped it to Katherine. That was just like Kathie. Kathie always got everything she wanted. She wondered if Kathie cared very much for the painting, now that she had it.

For a long time Laura stood and looked up at the lovely lady. The lovely lady looked back at Laura. But Laura was the first to speak.

"Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie," she said aloud, and the sound of her voice in the silent lovely room half startled her. "I'm an author."

Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie gazed back from heavy-lidded eyes, her cupid's-bow lips smiling mysteriously as though she possessed the concentrated wisdom of all the ages. One could not conscientiously say that she seemed pleased at the news and approving of it, but neither could one justly contend that she was annoyed and distressed. She merely smiled that puzzling smile as though, sphinx-like, she knew the secret of deep mysteries.

"I live in a little house all by myself," Laura told the lady confidentially, "no one can touch me when I am there. And no one can come in." She was enjoying herself, dramatizing the situation. She could see herself, a member of the fifth generation beyond the lady of the portrait, standing in front of the ancestor and confiding in her. "I hereby take a vow . . ." she went on. All at once it struck her that there should be some special emphasis to such a serious statement, some rite performed which would verge on the sacred. She ought to do it with human blood, but she did not quite relish the thought of puncturing her own anatomy. She wished she had something that would make a good imitation of blood. Perhaps Kathie had beet juice. She tiptoed to the icebox. There were potatoes and head lettuce, pickles and pie and cold meat, but not a single red condiment. In the medicine closet her quest ended. With the cork from a bottle of disinfectant she went back to the scene of her solemn promise. "This is a symbol," she said, touching her forehead with the scarlet-colored drug: "Laura Deal . . . I hereby plight my troth to a career. Nothing shall keep me from it. If love comes by, I shall spurn it."

She liked the sound of that statement so well that she repeated: "If love comes by I shall spurn it . . . him . . ." Of course, love had to be a him. She fell to wondering what he would look like, providing he did come by. In fact, it would be rather disappointing if he did not come by to be spurned. It made the tears come to her eyes to think how terrible he would feel. But she would be obdurate. Obdurate.--that was her new word. She mustn't forget it.

The door bell ringing suddenly and harshly threw the author into something of a panic. She hastily drew a handkerchief from her blouse pocket and wiped from her forehead all pharmaceutical manifestations of the oath of allegiance to a career. Her heart thumping rapidly, she tiptoed to the door and peeped cautiously out through the lace-covered glass. It was no one at all but Allen Rinemiller, dressed in brown corduroys and a blue shirt open at the throat. Allen had graduated that spring from High School and the captaincy of the football team. He was big and blond. There were three distinct waves in his close clipped hair; his eyes were crinkling and jolly looking and his tanned skin was smooth and firm. She opened the door.

"Hello, Allen."

"Hello, Laura. I went to the back door first where all decent tramps and peddlers go, but nobody came. You the hired girl?"

Laura laughed. She didn't know Allen Rinemiller so very well, but she had watched him lots of times at football games and heard the older girls talk about him, and sometimes when she had been at Grandma's he had plowed or used the disc or picked corn close to Grandma's yard, for his father's land joined it.

"Cousin Kathie's gone away," she volunteered. "What did you want?"

"I didn't want anything. She's the one that wanted it. Wood." And Laura noticed for the first time the truck in the driveway. "Dry elm wood for the fireplace. I want to know where to put it, but first I want to try a chunk in the fireplace if I can, to see if the size is right."

Laura told him to come right in and try the chunk and she would phone Kathie at Mrs. A. R. Brown's to see where it was to go.

So Allen Rinemiller, stepping gingerly over Kathie's oriental rugs, brought in a huge chunk, carrying it easily on his stalwart shoulder. And when Laura came back with the message that the wood was to go in the south end of the basement, he had the screen removed and the chunk in place.

"O.K. . . . if this one goes, they all go," he said and stood up, looking curiously about him.

"Gee . . . swell joint." He was evidently appreciating the lovely rooms with their soft rugs and draperies, their attractive furniture, books and pictures and bowls of flowers. "Gosh . . . I'd like a house like this." Without apology, he walked back to the hall and looked out to the diningroom. There were lavender asters on the dark polished table out there and a big bowl of white ones beyond on the bench in the green and white breakfast-nook. He could even catch a glimpse of the white enamel of the kitchen with its dainty green and white curtains over leaded windows. "Gosh," he reiterated ". . . just about perfect."

"I think it's nice, too. I like to come here." Laura was glad Allen Rinemiller liked it so well. She had been in his house with her grandmother and knew that it was scrubbed to a shining neatness but terribly plain, straight wooden chairs, shining oak table and sideboard, coarse lace curtains ruffled and starched.

When he was going back to the fireplace for the chunk, he stopped short. "Who's the dame?"

Laura almost blushed in her fear that the lovely lady in the picture might suddenly open her cupid's-bow mouth and start to tell all she knew.

"That's Kathie's and my great-great-grandmother," she told him. And for the first time she sensed a rather snobbish pride in the aristocratic ancestor. No one could say Allen's ancestors, on his father's side at least, were aristocratic. Old Christine Reinmueller, his grandmother, was "Dutchier than sauerkraut" every one admitted. She had never even learned to talk all English, but would mix her German words atrociously with the American ones. They said Gus, his grandfather, who died a few years before, had wound rags around his feet for socks.

"Her name was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, and she lived on a big estate in Scotland. My Uncle Mack in Omaha had this painting sent over from Scotland this summer when Kathie was married. And those pearls she has around her neck in the picture are the very pearls Grandma Deal gave Kathie for a wedding present."

"Can you beat it?"

"It was painted lots more than a hundred years ago, about a hundred and fifty, I guess, and the agent Uncle Mack hired had an awful hard time finding it." Laura was surprised at her own talkativeness. After all, it wasn't hard to talk to any one who was really interested in the same thing you were. And Allen Rinemiller acted interested.

He asked her another question or two, said "My gosh," and "Can you beat it?" and suddenly came to the present with a cheerful: "Well, this'll never buy the baby a shirt," shouldered his log lightly and started away. At the door he paused. "Did you know I'm going up to the University to school?" It was the pride of the male of the species strutting a little before the other sex, even though the female was a plain brown wren of a girl.

"Why, Allen, I'm glad. Isn't that nice?" Laura was genuinely surprised. Not many of the Reinmuellers had gone away to school. But Laura was forgetting something. Laura was forgetting that it was the Reinmuellers who seldom went away to school. And Allen, of the third generation, was a Rinemiller.

"Is Verna Conden going too?" She asked the question teasingly. It still seemed slightly audacious for her to be talking to the big High School football captain.

Allen grinned. "No, she's looking for a job . . . clerking or something. Say, Laura, I'll appoint you a committee of one to keep an eye on my girl when I'm gone."

Laura laughed at the frank retort.

They talked a few moments more about the University, and then Allen went singing to the truck and the piling of the wood.

For a long time she could hear the chunks whacking against the cement and a gay unmusical voice singing of a lady in a balcony in a little Spanish town.