Читать книгу The High Way - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 6

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“You know I approved of you, Mary, the moment I first set eyes on you.”

“How flattering!”

“You needn’t be especially flattered. Really, I think the chief reason was because you chose not to come to our church.”

“Nancy! what an extremely odd thing to say,—even for you.” Mary Minot flushed a little as she looked serious demur at her friend, Nancy Chance, only child of the pastor of the Church of All Souls. These two were sitting in an intimate up-stairs bay-window in Dr. Chance’s home. The month was December, the time mid-afternoon.

“Not odd at all. Just think a minute and you will see what I mean. You came to Peterboro and the Peyton School from Annisdale with a note of introduction to Grandmother. You belonged to a church of our faith and order. It was the natural and expected thing that you should come to our church. It took some social or moral or other kind of courage, I’m not sure what, not to.”

Mary Minot shook her head but Nancy pursued her setting-forth.

“So courage was one thing! The other was that you wanted a religious church. You would. But few do, coming new to Peterboro. They want to belong to the correct thing socially, and that is what we are. Our church is not a bit more religious than you thought it was, Mary, when you fixed your choice on that dreary hen-coop of a mission chapel in Webster Street. You with your seeing eyes!”

“Nancy, you use the word ‘religious’ so recklessly! You make me sound like a self-righteous Pharisee, and I believe I am not that.”

“No, you are not, love. Calm yourself. I quite believe that you may not be conscious of precisely what was at work when you made your decision. But the fact is, you made it, not being a Pharisee even remotely, but being deep down, out of sight, religiously minded. Our church people used to be like that, after a fashion, anyway. Now our religion is chiefly sociology. Also ritual. The more ecclesiastical observances we use, the less religious we seem to grow. For instance,—we never introduced recital of the Apostles’ Creed into our plain, Puritan service until, to my certain knowledge, Mary, we had ceased to believe in the truth of what the Creed declares. We look upon it now simply as an effective ‘historic ornament’ to the service.”

Mary Minot shook her head gravely, her “seeing eyes,” as her friend called them, dark with troubled question.

“You are saying what you have no right to say, Nancy, not to me, not even to yourself.”

Nancy lifted her chin and smiled across at her friend a slow, beguiling smile.

“I am so much older than you, Mary. Life has been all of one piece for you. I have had to look on at such a frightful lot of changes. It does make one hard. All I really try to say now is that the inward experience of religion, as you have it, is something that we of All Souls’ Church parted with some time ago, when once we were properly educated according to the ‘Modern Gospel.’ You know what I mean,—what Peterboro Seminary stands for. We all know so much better than the Bible now, you see. Even me!” (The last three syllables sung in tune with mocking cadence.) “It is so interesting, correcting its mistakes, I find, that its teachings are easily lost sight of,” she added pensively.

“Nancy, I don’t know anything about the truth of what you are saying,” rejoined Mary, “and I have an idea you don’t know much more yourself.”

Nancy Chance shrugged her shoulders. She was a slender girl of vigorous frame, swiftly expressive in speech and movement, her face subject to a like swiftness of change in expression.

“All the same you know now why I have liked you from that Sunday morning—let’s see, when was it? Last winter, I guess. You remember I met you after church and one of our deadliest dowagers introduced you as a ‘charming new follower of your dear father, Nancy’”—this was given with irresistible mimicry and Mary Minot laughed in spite of her underlying disapproval.

“Whereupon, with that inexorable conscience of yours, you gently but firmly, my Mary, informed me that you had decided to attend the Webster Street Church regularly while you remained in Peterboro. It was so modestly phrased, as looking then for speedy discharge from Miss Peyton’s, never dreaming of the hit you were to make!”

“Oh, Nancy,” interjected Mary, her forehead knit now with remonstrance.

“On my honour as a gentleman,” cried Nancy remorselessly, “I believe that it was only then and there that you made that momentous decision——”

“If you please, Miss Chance.”

A maid stood within the open door waiting to announce that tea was served in the drawing-room and that Mrs. Chance sent word to Miss Chance that the gentleman, who was to become her father’s assistant, was calling, and would she come down.

The maid disappearing, Nancy dragged her friend with her as she proceeded to obey the summons.

“You’ve simply got to stay and have tea. At last we are to behold Dad’s conquering hero! I’m crazy to see him myself, but he never accepts our bids to dinner, and, anyway, Dad seems to keep him thus far out of sight purposely. He is just a Seminary student, name Shannon, Hardy for first. Who knows what that name may signify?” Then under breath, as the two girls ran noiselessly down the softly carpeted stairs:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if this Hardy Shannon should be pious too? Sometimes they are in Junior year, you know. Before the Major Prophet gets them. You know who the Major Prophet is——?”

The last words were spoken as they crossed the hall to enter the drawing-room. Mary Minot could not have answered the question even if she had cared to, which she did not.

The drawing-room which they entered was very costly in its appointments and very formal in its effect. The same was true of the elderly woman who rose to meet them. She was stately and stiff in a gown of black satin with transparent white bands at throat and wrists; a tiny widow’s cap topped smooth gray hair, many jewelled rings were on her fingers. She advanced a step to greet Mary Minot. This done she presented to the girls, with ceremonious gravity, the young gentleman beside her, friend of Nancy’s father, Mr. Shannon of Melrose.

Turning to the waiting tea-table Madame Chance was about to seat herself but was interrupted by Mary Minot at her elbow, excusing herself from remaining for tea on the plea of an immediate engagement, so, without fuss or flutter, departing.

Hardy Shannon, thus far scarcely differentiating the two girls, was conscious then, as he held the door open for Mary Minot, that something of delicate grace and charm had escaped him and vanished. Then, returning to the drawing-room, he found something vivid and challenging which remained to meet him in direct encounter with Nancy Chance.

But Dr. Chance’s daughter, versed in the formalities of his house, left wholly to Dr. Chance’s mother the introductory conversation. This harked back to the family history and contacts of the Chances and Shannons, slight and early though these might be. Demurely and, in the main, silently attentive to their caller’s requirements in the matter of tea and cakes, Nancy for fifteen minutes played the part of submissive, devoted daughter of the parsonage household to perfection. But she was taking in every detail of Hardy Shannon’s personality the while and deciding that it was very good.

She liked a man to have his height and firm, athletic build. She liked the boyish way his hair had of not staying smooth, asserting itself in a curt wave across the forehead. She liked gray eyes like his,—they called up a line she had read in a small blue and gold volume of poetry in her grandmother’s room,—“with an eye that takes the breath.” Especially she liked the easy preference and deference which he showed her grandmother, she herself being quietly counted the lesser light. The matter-of-course fashion in which her own pose of self-effacement was accepted slightly nettled her, but attracted her, for it was sincere, not a pose. Nancy Chance had a flair for reality. Also she expected her inning later.

It came when her grandmother, excusing herself on account of lameness, asked her to show Mr. Shannon a portrait of Dr. Chance, painted by a famous artist, and only just hung above the dining-room mantel. The portrait was customarily pronounced a masterpiece, and it was Madame Chance’s pride. Having led Shannon across the hall to the dining-room, Nancy stood aside in silence as he regarded the portrait, that of a handsome man in the youth of age wearing with distinction his ecclesiastical gown with the touch of colour in its divinity doctor’s hood; wearing also an expression of benevolent ecclesiastical authority, which would well have suited a bishop.

Nancy approved the young man’s comments, they being confined to the technique of the painting rather than to characteristics of the subject, led him then across the room to windows whence a prospect of Peterboro of wide range was obtained. A wooded hill, facing the height on which her father’s house stood, attracted Shannon’s attention. It was Falconer’s Heights, Nancy told him; you could get a glorious view from there. She was surprised that he had not climbed that steep long since. Shannon expressed penitence for his delinquency and the wish to make it good with all possible speed. Nancy’s quick ear had caught the sound of voices in the drawing-room. Luckily other visitors had come in; Madame Chance would be occupied.

“Would you like to try it now?” she asked flashing the first smile Shannon had seen cross her face. He noticed how it changed the ensemble of it to unsuspected beauty.

“I should be perfectly delighted, if you will go as guide,” he answered eagerly.

“Very good. It would be wrong for your Peterboro education to be neglected another day,” Nancy responded. “Go you then to my grandmother, do your devoir on the portrait,—you can’t overdo it, and make your adieux. I will meet you at the front door ‘saddled and bridled and ready for flight’ in just five minutes.”

Turning, Nancy touched a bell, then instructed the maid who presented herself to do all that was required in assisting Madame Chance in further serving of tea in the drawing-room. This done she was up the staircase and out of sight by the time Shannon reached the threshold of the drawing-room.

She rejoined him in the prescribed five minutes at the house door, and very handsome in her furs and feathers he thought her. Dr. Chance’s daughter possessed limitless ease and self-confidence, that he had already realized; and now he had a vague sense that she wore her clothes even with the same indefinable accent of originality which belonged to all that she said and did, and which allured if it did not charm.

Side by side they walked down the quiet street, the keen December air bringing its quickening of pulse and energy, each excessively curious about the other and each, secretly, filled with young exultation in escaping from the conventionalities of Madame Chance’s tea-table. A breathless climb brought them to the crest of Falconer’s Heights but not before the early dusk had begun to encompass the city, the vague outlines of surrounding plains and the horizon line of the sea.

“It is a little too late. We shall have to come again, Miss Chance,” Hardy Shannon declared, surprised a little at his own boldness. She, not in the least surprised, assented casually but said, consulting her watch:

“Now if you’re good for a dash down, running all the way, we can get the next car—they start only on the half hour—and be back in Market Square in time for me to take you for a few minutes to our club rooms. I’ll tell you about the club when we are in the car. Are you game?”

“Ready. One, two, three,—start,” was the laughing answer.

In the car, struggling to regain her breath, her eyes shining with glee, Nancy gasped out:

“Well, you sure are a prize runner ... I am half dead myself ... but you breathe as softly as ...”

“Well, as what, please?” he urged.

“As an infant Samuel at prayer,” she replied and leaned back closing her eyes in a long breath of relief and relaxing.

“I see,” Shannon said quietly. “Please rest now. Don’t even be clever if you can help it.”

“I like that,” she murmured. For a time there was silence, then, all her forces replenished, Nancy embarked upon a recital, half drolling, half serious, of the aims and achievements of the club, her pet and protégé, to whose quarters in a “stuffy old block” they were now bound.

“First of all, it is not a church affair,—not in the least. We stumbled into creating it, three or four of us who were trying to do something worth while,—I mean something worth while on various lines. We were stumbling along, each trying to express himself or herself, you know, in music or art or literary work or something, and with no help or advice or audience even outside the perfectly worthless circles of personal friends and family. They never dare do anything but admire. So we got together principally to tear each other’s things to tatters. First we met at each other’s houses, but as we have grown larger and really rather important for Peterboro I assure you, Mr. Shannon, we have found headquarters necessary. So we rented quite decent rooms and we each contributed a few derelicts in the way of tables and chairs from our fathers’ attics, and books, the kind nobody wants to read, you know, and old magazines strewn around to make it look literary,—all that rubbish. But a really good piano and a few good pictures I can say we have.”

“How often do you meet?”

“Once a week officially and on Wednesday. This is Friday. But the rooms are open every afternoon and almost always somebody drops in. We have a tiny kitchen—and a perfectly good outfit for serving tea and coffee and doing chafing-dish stunts, so it is a fairly fair haven when you want to get away”—from home she started to say but dropped it there.

“How very jolly it sounds! What does your club call itself? Have you a name?”

“Oh, yes. A brand new one. We could never hit upon one which suited everybody until just this last October. Mary Minot, one of our best, came back from her vacation having evolved precisely the name for us. It was adopted with ardour. Because none of us ever expects to be or could be immortal—meaning of course on our especial lines—don’t, for mercy’s sake scent a heresy, Mr. Shannon!—we call ourselves ‘the Mortals.’ Accurate and adequate, don’t you think?”

“Distinctly so. Is the author of this brilliant creation,—Mary Minot I think you called her,—the young lady whom I met for a moment at your house this afternoon?” Shannon asked.

“Yes. Why, of course! You did meet her just as she was leaving, didn’t you? Isn’t she dear?”

“Well, really, I am hardly qualified to judge. I have no doubt that she may be very dear to those who know her.”

“Please don’t quibble. You struck me as sincere at first and that is what I like. ‘Dear,’ as we girls use it, sums up a whole column of adjectives and saves argument. If I should say that Mary Minot was beautiful somebody would be sure to say her nose was too short or her chin too long or her skin too pale or some such idiotic thing. But nobody ever could or ever did say she wasn’t dear. And she is beautiful, too.”

At this point the two alighted in the Market Square, the city’s main centre of activity, a sharply illuminated congeries of business buildings low and high, new and old, of kiosks and statues, of street-cars, motor-cars, trucks of merchandise, in ceaseless motion and commotion.

Guided by Nancy through the labyrinth of crossings, Shannon made his way to a far corner where, dashing into an office-building of no especial attraction, she touched an elevator call-bell with a certain air of proprietorship. Ushered presently into the rendezvous of the Mortals, four stories up, the young man recognized the accuracy of the description Nancy had given him of its accessories. What he had by no means looked for was that, negligible and incongruous as were the various contributing factors, they had someway been combined into an artistic and inviting whole. Decidedly here was a fireside to which a man might often and gladly flee, with its curious mingling of the liberty of the impersonal and the privacy or near-privacy of home surroundings.

Silently Shannon took the armchair to which Nancy Chance beckoned him beside a deeply glowing wood-fire. The room was half lighted by shaded lamps and the air bore a spicy waft of resinous pine boughs burning.

Chilled with the long car ride preceded by the stiff race up hill and down, more tired than he would have admitted, Shannon yielded himself to the atmosphere of letting-go which belonged to the place. An unconscious craving for surcease of fresh impressions had hold of him.

Then he found himself vaguely perceiving the strange and rapid convolutions of two slender, supple figures silhouetted against a distant window. He accepted them without himself registering the faintest impression. They might be marionettes, they might be monkeys for all he cared. They let him alone. Then from some dim region behind him came the sound of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude softly played. To this he consciously listened, for it did not break the spell which was upon him, but rather gave it voice, a voice potent and precious to Shannon.

The music ceased. The marionettes had disappeared. By and by he was aware of a pair of dark eyes regarding him with ironical concern, and Nancy Chance setting a small tray on a small table by his side dropped down on a cushion before the fire.

“I certainly led you a race, didn’t I?” she commented casually. “I am tired to death myself. They have made us some coffee. Here is yours,” and she filled a cup from a quaint silver jug, then called his attention to a plate of sandwiches which suddenly made him conscious that he was ravenously hungry.

Quite as a matter of course Shannon accepted Nancy’s service, consuming her refreshment without apology or praise. Which pleased her.

“You must come here often,” she said as he rose to go.

“I am a mortal man,” he answered. “Do you think I could qualify? By the way was that you who played the Prelude—Rachmaninoff’s?”

“Yes. Do you like it?”

“I like it particularly. My mother plays his music. I think it took me all the way back to Melrose for a bit. And what were those imps or goblins who were twisting themselves and each other into double knots down there?” and he pointed to the far window. “They are not there now.”

Nancy bit her lip for a second then exclaimed:

“Oh, yes, those were the Gregg twins, Dame and Pyth, everybody calls them,—short for Damon and Pythias—being extra devoted to each other. Their sponsors in baptism named them Walter and Dorothy. At least there is such a legend. They were teaching each other one of the new dances, probably. I made them stop and get to work making your coffee.”

“I see you rule the roost here. Why is their name Gregg?”

“Quite definitely because your great Professor Gregg is their paternal grandfather.... You look puzzled. They will probably go in for theology later. They have not begun it yet.... Then you are going?” Shannon had risen and now developed designs on hat and overcoat.

“Yes, and my thanks for your goodness. You have given me a jolly new kind of afternoon. And now you will surely give me the pleasure of restoring you to your father’s house?”

“Thanks, no. I shall telephone up to the house that I am here for the evening. I often do. You look surprised. Don’t they know in Melrose that women are emancipated?”

Shannon bowed with a touch of the formality with which they had dispensed during the last hour or two, then took his leave, consulting his watch as he crossed to the elevator. It was eight o’clock, time already to report to Dr. Gregg for the night’s work. As he stood waiting a moment a fashionably dressed woman, just released from the elevator on its upward journey, passed him and opened without knocking the door of the club rooms. This, as it happened, she left half open. Shannon heard her voice, high but musical, exclaim:

“Are my lambs here? Of course they are! I always know if they stray ...” upon this the door was closed. Shannon decided not to wait for the elevator’s return and took the four flights of stairs to the street with a series of flying leaps.

Later he became familiar with the fact that Mrs. Hugh Gregg carried on, on her own account, and for her own pleasure and profit, the work of an Interior Decorator on exclusive and artistic lines. Also, that for purposes of this business she rented and occasionally could be found in an atelier in this same building.