Читать книгу Mirthful Haven - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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The boy who had pretended to stumble against her felt his own kind of interest in her, however, and he also watched her until she had turned the corner. He was a swarthy big boy of eighteen, with a heavy figure, thick black hair that seemed never to have been combed, much less washed, and his expression was one of derisive brooding, as though he pondered upon an injustice to himself that he found grossly absurd. He stood waiting, scuffing the gravel of the schoolhouse yard with the sole of his rubber boot and sending furtive glances at the backs of his departing schoolmates until they had passed from sight; then he moved away in the direction taken by Edna Pelter, going slowly at first but walking faster after he had turned the corner. She was a hundred yards or so in advance of him and he let that distance remain between them until the village street had become a country road—Old Road, leading down to the sea over higher and rougher ground than that traversed by River Road, the straight and almost level thoroughfare by the waterside. Old Road winds and dips and rises between lonely stone-walled fields, where ledges of rock come through the thin earth like the bones of a beggar through his tattered garment; there are bordering dark thickets, too, and it was as she approached one of these that the girl heard hurrying footsteps upon the roadway behind her.

She knew whose they were and again did not turn her head, not even when the boy who had followed her, overtaking her, threw clumsy tugging arms about her and pulled her to a halt. She kept her face averted now, however, for a definite reason, and her pensive expression was shaded by a slight, patient annoyance. She scuffled a little; then stood still, enduring with boredom the boy’s heavy embrace. “Oh, go on home, Hugo Wicks,” she murmured, sighing. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Come off!” he said huskily. “You can’t put it over on me! I got as much rights as everybody else! You got to let me—”

But at this, as he strove to bring his lips near hers, she struggled away from him, and, disengaging herself, struck him smartly across the mouth with a hard little hand. “Rights!” she said. “Nobody’s got any rights around me!”

Hugo was enraged by the blow, and faced her furiously. “Oh, haven’t they?” he said. “You think everybody don’t know all ’bout you and Vinnie Munson? Who do you think you are, anyways?”

“I’ll show you,” she said sullenly. “I’ll show you who I am if you don’t quit gettin’ funny around me!”

“Big talk!” Hugo jeered, and became bitterly loquacious in a series of jibes. “Big talk when Pelters try to brag about who they are! Pelters! Whose lobster-pots is your father haulin’ up after dark nowadays? Why don’t you never wear that nice sweater of Nina Grier’s you got out o’ the high school cloakroom and had dyed last Feb’uary? Say, Edna, what happened to your sister, Nettie, her never comin’ home from that trip to Boston she took when that railroad man’s wife was huntin’ around fer her two three year’ ago? Listen, Edna, has Vinnie Munson told you ’bout his mother havin’ him up before the preacher fer goin’ with you? Pelters! I’ll show you how much right Pelters got to talk ’bout who they are!”

With that, before she could move to prevent him, he flung his arms about her again and kissed her. She bore this, as she did his taunts, with apparently more mere dreariness than emotion. “Oh, get through!” she said. “Get through and go on home!”

Hugo released her and rather abruptly seemed to become discouraged. “Go on yourself!” he said, and, turning his back, walked sulkily toward the village. Edna, pensive again, as if there had been no interruption, continued upon her way.

Old Road is so crooked that it seems to have been paralysed while wriggling with indifferent success to avoid the stone ledges; it makes into two miles the one straight mile between the village and the sea, and the second mile is through forest so dense in growth and thorny underbrush that the thicket is like an unkempt hedge bordering the narrow roadway. Nevertheless, a few dim paths struggle through the woodland tangle, and, at the emergence of one of these upon the mere wagon-track that Old Road becomes in the forest, a well-dressed boy of sixteen stood waiting. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with noticeably long dark eyelashes, a sleek dark skin and shapely features; women of any age would have taken note of him anywhere. His desire, as he waited for the approaching high school girl, however, must have been that nobody at all should take note of him, for he did not step out upon the road. Instead, he stood pressed back into the thicket and not even upon the path itself but a few feet away from it.

When her footsteps upon the stiffened mud of the wagon-track became audible he made no sign, and still stood motionless and silent as these sounds ceased abruptly and he knew that she had halted at the mouth of the path. For a moment she stood as silent as he; but each knew that the other was there, and, after a glance over her shoulder, she entered the path, saw him and smiled faintly at him. He took her hand and with precaution drew her a dozen yards deeper into the underbrush; he would have gone farther and was evidently surprised when she stopped.

“Come on,” he urged her in a whisper. “We can’t stay this near the road; somebody might hear us.”

“I don’t care,” she said; but she spoke in a whisper, too. “What if they did?”

“ ‘What if they did?’ ” he repeated, and stared at her. “My goodness, are you crazy, Edna! Come on!”

“I don’t want to,” she said. “Let’s go sit on the rocks at Great Point.”

“ ‘On the rocks’?” he echoed incredulously. “Why, anybody that wanted to could see us on the rocks. There’s a big sea runnin’ after the No’theaster and there’s nearly always two three people on the Point to look at it; they’d see us.”

“Well, what if they did? We wouldn’t be doin’ any harm, would we?”

“My goodness, Edna! You know as well as I do I couldn’t go where anybody’d be liable to see me with you.”

“Couldn’t you?” she asked gravely. “I thought anyways you might do at least that much for me, if I ever wanted you to.”

The boy’s expression had become one of distressed perplexity. “But what for?” he said. “What do you want me to get seen with you for?”

“I don’t know. I just thought——” She hesitated vaguely, then smiled, tossed her head jauntily and spoke as if imparting a confidential but triumphant bit of news. “Some day I’m goin’ to put it all over this old town, Vinnie. I guess I been eatin’ dirt in this old burg pretty near long enough.”

“What’s the matter?” he whispered, greatly astonished. “What’s come over you? What you want to commence talkin’ this way for all of a sudden, Edna?”

“All of a sudden? It’s not so much as you think; I’ve had notions from a good while back that I wasn’t goin’ to stand everything a whole lot longer. I’m not goin’ to have the whole burg callin’ me bad all my life, I guess! I’m gettin’ kind o’ tired bein’ picked on for the only one that’s bad, too. I could tell a few things about some o’ the girls that think they’re so slick, if I wanted to, I guess!”

“Sh!” he warned her, alarmed by a vehemence in her manner, though her voice was still repressed to no more than a murmur. “Don’t get excited, Edna.”

“I’m not. I guess by this time I ought to be used to the way this burg acts towards me because it’s never been any different since I was born! Sometimes lately it just makes me kind o’ tired, though, and I get to thinkin’ I’m too old to let it go on so much longer; that’s all. I’d like to show a few people—”

“Listen!” he interrupted, and pulled at her hand. “We can’t stand around here talkin’ about it; we’re too near the road. Let’s go where we were Wednesday.”

He moved as if to walk deeper into the woods; but she shook her head. “How about your comin’ to sit a while on the rocks with me, Vinnie? I just thought I’d kind o’ like to have ’em see somebody wouldn’t mind, and it looked to me like you ought to come if I wanted you to.”

“Me!” he said, protesting. “Why, it’d be worse for me than anybody on account of my family’s position; and, besides, look at all the trouble I already been in about you!”

“But this wouldn’t get you into any more, Vinnie,” she returned quickly. “They wouldn’t know anything they don’t know already.”

“About me they would,” he said nervously, still whispering. “There hasn’t been anything ever injured my reputation except whoever found out about us and told my mother, and she told old Reverend Beedy when she took me there, of course; but he and my mother both said if I’d promise to save my soul by never havin’ any more to do with you they’d do all they could to keep it from gettin’ around, so—”

“Did they?” Edna interrupted, with a sharply ejected breath of laughter. “Then I guess whoever told your mother must ’a’ been busy lately. It’s all over town.”

“What!”

“Oh, yes,” she said, again with a breathed effect of laughter but not of mirth. “I guess you’re fixed up with a reputation hardly any better than what I got, myself, Vinnie.”

“I don’t believe it! You just say so because you think maybe it’d get me to go out on the Point with you.”

“No; I’m tellin’ you because it’s true and so’s you’ll see it won’t do you any p’tic’lar harm if you come. It really is all over town, Vinnie, because Hugo Wicks knows it. So what difference would it make if anybody just saw us sittin’ there?”

“My goodness!” Vinnie Munson once more exclaimed under his breath. “How do you know Hugo Wicks knows it?”

“Because he just asked me if you’d told me about your mother takin’ you up to Reverend Beedy’s. So won’t you come out on the rocks with me, Vinnie? Please?” she whispered, and wistfully leaned toward him a little. “Won’t you?”

But he looked away from her, and, swallowing, spoke plaintively. “I guess if Hugo Wicks knows it, then you’re right and it is all over town. My mother said she’d try to keep my father from findin’ out I’d been goin’ with you; but I guess now he’ll hear it.”

“Won’t you?”

“Well, my goodness!” he murmured; and, from beneath his softly shadowing eyelashes, there glinted perceptibly something of the repulsion he naturally felt for a girl who entangled him with disastrous circumstance. The tight clutch of his fingers upon hers relaxed and their hands separated. “I expect you got me in trouble enough without my sittin’ around on any old rocks. I guess you must be crazy!”

“All right,” Edna said, somewhat gloomily thoughtful but unresentful and not at all surprised. “I just thought I’d ask you, anyhow. I didn’t expect you’d want to, maybe.” She paused; then murmured unemotionally, “Well, g’bye,” and, turning from him, began to push her way through the underbrush in the direction of the road. Vinnie Munson made no response to her word of farewell, although both of them vaguely understood that this parting was a farewell indeed, and meant the end of more than the short whispered and murmured conversation that it concluded.

Again upon Old Road, and not more pensive than when she had left it for the thicket, Edna walked slowly onward toward the sea. All the way from the village a sound like forest winds had been growing louder in her ears; now it became deeper, more like the rolling of continuous distant thunder heard indoors, and, as she advanced, separate crashings could be distinguished regularly in an endless series. Old Road escapes from the thick enclosure of the woods only to end the next moment at the broader highway over the sea-cliffs; thus, as if she came out of a dark corridor to look forth from a high balcony, she stepped out into the open, and there suddenly was the wide ocean uproarious below her. All the nearer air was filled with its clamors; and yet in the distance the illimitable grey reaches of water seemed to move silently from a misty and dimensionless horizon.

She turned to the right upon the highway but presently crossed it, pressed through a broad tangle of bayberry bushes and juniper, and, having climbed a pile of great boulders and upthrust stratified rock, sat down upon the topmost stone, where only the highest flung mist of spray from the surf below could reach her. Here, a lonely, small figure upon a vast rough pedestal, she was at the crest of Great Point, the rocky jut that forms the juncture tip of two long crescents of coast line; to left and right of her, as far as her eye could reach, the green surf, rolling up ponderously, broke and plunged upon the land. Below her the seas were heaviest of all; hundreds of yards out, one of them would heave itself into an enormous and ominous ridge, gain momentum, speeding landward; then, steepening and rising prodigiously for an unbearable moment, this running precipice would crash in a white collapse that still swept onward and struck so hard upon the brown rocks that bubbles of foam were flicked almost to the feet of the girl upon the crest of Great Point.

She sat with her elbows upon her knees and her face made into a triangle by her supporting hands—a dreamer’s posture appropriate at the moment; for, instead of the breakers up and down the coast, what she saw were the white manes of companies of horses, racing. The horses ran just beneath the surface, with only their flying manes visible, and to-day they were titanic steeds, galloping monstrously. In easier weather and under a sunny sky they were crystalline ponies, racing cheerily, not with the fury of these colossal submarine chargers; and this fancy, transforming the ocean into a hippodrome, was an old one with her, as it is with other watchers of the sea immemorially.

For half an hour her attitude remained almost without any change at all; then her dreamily fascinated gaze shifted to follow a line of coursers that dashed themselves to pieces upon a pebbled beach a quarter of a mile to leftward of her, and suddenly she sighed, shivering a little. Her glance, happening to move slightly inland, had fallen upon the intrusive presence, not of a human being but of a long grey house, all stone and shingle, with a broad lawn framed in a clipped brown hedge. Nothing could have been more familiar to her than this house, built before she was born, and she did not shiver because of the desolate expression of vacancy imparted to it by its heavily boarded windows and doorways; the sight of it, startling her from revery, seemed to remind her of something distasteful and oppressive. Moreover, the power thus to trouble her was not a property of this house only; next to it and nearer her stood another, a long white house upon a high terrace above a lawn where shrubberies were stacked about with straw; and other houses, two score or more, faced the sea from the ridge behind the highway, all of them expressing the same affluent vacancy; and all of them disturbing to Edna Pelter. For, as if made conscious by the first that the others were there behind her upon Great Point, she rose, turned, and looked frowningly up and down the long irregular line of these empty houses, from one end to the other. Her frown was hostile but not defiant; in her eyes was the look of the native who stares up at the walls of a foreign invader too powerful and too well established to be resisted, and, for the moment that she bore this look, she became, in instinct at least, a true part of the community that despised her. Other eyes of Mirthful Haven had that look whenever they glanced, always a little unwillingly, at these houses by the sea.