Читать книгу Impatient Virgin - Donald Henderson Clarke - Страница 8

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“The trouble with Ben Robbins is, he is crazy,” Emma Putney said, fumbling with the tongue for her false uppers, and making them click.

“All the Robbins always were more or less cracked,” Hetty Brown agreed. “What has he gone and done now?”

“Nothing any different from usual—which is what makes him crazy,” Emma replied. “Keeping that young one in a fashionable school, and him and his sister Katherine without a cent in the world!”

Hetty bent over the sewing machine at which she was working in her sitting room window, pried a bit of thread loose from the needle, moistened it between her lips, and slid it into proper position.

“They’ve always had mortgages—the Robbins have. And they’ve always had educations, too.”

Hetty tossed her head contemptuously as she steered a bit of material under the bobbing needle.

“Ben—he went to Yale; and Katherine—she went to Mount Holyoke. And if signs mean anything, they’re both going to wind up in the poorhouse.”

“I hear they haven’t paid any of their bills, since the Lord knows when,” Emma said. “But they read Latin and Greek to each other after supper every night.”

Hetty pulled the material from the machine and looked carefully at her work. She was a plump, comely woman of forty, but her motions were as sprightly as those of a girl. Her husband was superintendent of the Flora Silk Company’s mill, and Deacon in the First Church. Her son, Myron, was in his second year in Harvard, and her daughter, Sally, fifteen, was in Southington High School. She nodded her head on which red brown hair was brought smoothly back, but didn’t reply.

“Look at you and Deacon Brown,” Emmy continued. “You haven’t any mortgage, and you got money in the bank, and the Southington High School is good enough for your daughter. Heaven knows you can afford to send Myron to college.”

“We have to be mighty careful,” Hetty said, shaking her head and frowning. “But it isn’t because of the expense we have Sally go to the high school.”

“Oh, everybody knows that,” Emmy exclaimed, making her teeth click, and shaking her head.

Emmy was dressed in black, as usual, and her gray eyes, behind steel-bowed spectacles, looked red and tired from peering. She wore a black bonnet atop her scanty, straw-white hair; her nose, slightly red at the tip, was the most prominent member of her angular face, covered with parchment-like skin. She was eternally taking a peppermint drop, either red or white, from her reticule, as she termed her little leather handbag, and putting it between her lips. She smelled something like a musty peppermint, herself.

“Her father didn’t think it would do any good to put high-falutin’ ideas in Sally’s head,” Hetty explained. “What’s the good of having a daughter getting a lot of airs when what you hope she’ll do is marry some good dependable young man, and settle down to making a home and having babies?”

“I never saw anything come of this finishing-school and college-for-women business, myself,” Emmy asserted. “They say Ruth knows how to carry on a conversation in French, but I figure she’ll have to talk with herself if she wants to try any of it in Southington.”

Hetty nodded comfortably.

“Ruth will have to talk a whole pile of French to talk the mortgage off the Robbins place and the debts off Ben Robbins’ back.”

“I had a sort of idea once that Ruth was setting her cap for Myron,” Emmy suggested, with an extra push of the tongue against her loose upper plate. “If she got Myron, the Robbins wouldn’t have to worry much.”

“Myron went around with Ruth before she went away to that school three years ago,” Hetty admitted. “But it was only one of those boy-and-girl affairs. At first, the Deacon and I were kind of worried. But after a spell they sort of got out of the habit of writing to each other. We figure he’s forgotten all about Ruth now.”

“I never did understand for the life of me what men could see in blondes,” Emmy asserted. “I never saw a blonde yet that you could trust. One of the Cooley boys—Ed, it was—said he saw Myron with a blonde at a football game in Boston last Saturday. And I thought it might be Ruth.”

Hetty looked at the little gold watch, which she wore pinned to her waist over a well-developed left breast.

“Law’s sakes!” she exclaimed, pushing aside her sewing and rising. “It’s past five o’clock; it’s Bridget’s night out, and I’ve got to get the supper.”

Emmy stood up, somewhat slowly, favoring her knees, and grunting just a trifle.

“I didn’t know it was so late myself,” she said. “I’ll be getting along.”

Hetty started towards the front hall.

“Don’t you come with me, Hetty,” Emmy said. “You get right about your chores.”

Hetty accompanied Emmy to the front door.

“Good night, Emmy,” she said.

After that, she went back to the sitting room and plumped herself down heavily on a sofa. She sat limply for a minute, then sighed, got up and went into the kitchen.

“Corned beef hash and biscuits,” said Deacon Brown, entering the golden oak dining room, with its hand-painted punch bowl on the buffet and hand-painted china in the china closet with sliding glass doors. He rubbed his hands and sat down. A moment later his wife and his daughter sat down too.

Deacon Brown was two inches more than six feet tall and weighed less than one hundred and forty pounds. He had a high sloping forehead, thick black eyebrows, hazel eyes set in a maze of wrinkles, a scraggly brown mustache, and an Adam’s apple which bobbed whenever he swallowed. He ate mountains of food: everything on a table seemed to be magnetized by him. He was smacking his lips over his third huge dish of corned beef and buttering his tenth hot biscuit, when his wife said:

“Emmy Putney was in this afternoon.”

“Now you know all the gossip,” the Deacon replied, a sudden upthrust of air from his stuffed stomach causing him to pronounce “gossip” as if it were spelled “gos-sipf.”

Sally, who was eating silently and daintily, glanced at her father scornfully.

“Do you want the baking soda?” Hetty asked.

Deacon Brown shook his head from side to side. Disappearance of the freshly buttered biscuit, violent agitation of the Adam’s apple, and added redness of the cheeks, indicated that he might have a reason for not answering vocally.

“Why will you swallow your food whole?” Hetty inquired.

Deacon Brown suddenly looked relieved.

“What did Emmy have to say?”

“Oh, dear,” Hetty replied. “She was fishing about Myron and Ruth Robbins.”

The Deacon scowled, and put back on the tablecloth a cup of tea he had been raising towards an already dripping mustache.

“She worked around to it the way Emmy does,” Hetty continued. “She said she once thought Ruth was setting her cap for Myron, and that if she got him the Robbins wouldn’t have to worry about money troubles any more.”

“Why didn’t you tell the old fuss-budget to mind her own business?”

“You know I couldn’t do that, Deacon. I don’t think she knows anything. I said I guessed it was only a boy-and-girl affair, and Myron had forgotten about Ruth long ago.”

“I don’t know what ails that boy,” her husband exclaimed. “Here we are working ourselves to skin and bone, and depriving ourselves to give him an education so’s he can be a doctor, and he has to go chasing around after that yellow-haired Ruth Robbins.”

“Do you think the Robbins have an idea how much you’re worth, Deacon?” his wife asked suddenly, her eyes fixed curiously on him.

The Deacon’s face seemed to grow smaller as he looked at her.

“If they know,” he replied, “they know I ain’t got much, and if Myron don’t stop spending money he’ll have to leave college and go to work to keep you and me out of the poorhouse. He’ll have to quit anyhow, if he don’t stop this fool business with that fool girl.”

“Well, I guess he won’t stop it unless she makes him,” Hetty exclaimed. “Emmy said Ed Cooley saw Myron and a blonde girl at a football game in Boston last Saturday, and she thought it might be Ruth.”

A big blue vein on the Deacon’s right forehead swelled and throbbed.

“Emmy got all she wanted out of me,” Hetty said bitterly. “She knows we would give anything to have Myron leave Ruth Robbins alone, and she knows as well as you do it was Ruth that Myron was with at the football game. After two years, it had to come out.”

The Deacon thumped the table with his fist so hard the dishes jumped.

“By thunder!” he exclaimed. “I’d rather be dead than think my money was going to be thrown around by one of those crazy Robbins. And by thunder! I’m going to stop it.”

“What are you going to do, Deacon?”

“You know,” Sally interjected, “Ruth says she wouldn’t marry any man unless she lived with him first?”

Hetty’s lower jaw sagged away from the upper, and her eyes popped wide. She looked at her daughter, and then at her husband.

“For heaven’s sake!” Hetty breathed.

“Young woman, you go up to your room,” the Deacon said in a trembly voice, glaring at Sally.

“What did I do, Pa?” Sally asked. “Huh! What did I do?”

“Go on! Get up to your room this instant, young lady, and don’t ever let me hear of you talking to Ruth Robbins again. I’m sick of hearing her name.”

Sally looked at her father, and then at her mother.

“I don’t know what you’ve done,” her father exclaimed. “I’ll talk with you later. Get out of here now.”

Tears started in Sally’s eyes as she mechanically folded her napkin. Her cheeks were crimson as she stalked from the room. She turned at the dining room door.

“I didn’t do anything,” she exclaimed, and vanished.

“Now lookit here, Hetty,” the Deacon said. “You’ll have to have a long talk with Sally. I can’t be around looking after my children and taking care of my business at the same time. I’d say they both was being contaminated, and I’d say that the proper influence might have prevented it.”

Hetty was weeping.

“But, Deacon I ...” she began.

“Don’t Deacon me,” her husband cried. “You better have the Parson talk with Sally. Free love being preached to your daughter right under your nose. If it was a man instead of a girl he’d be tarred and feathered out of town, or I’d know the reason why.”

“I’m sure Sally is a good girl,” Hetty said. “She was just repeating what Ruth Robbins told her.”

“She listened, didn’t she?”

Hetty’s lips were trembling.

“Oh, Deacon,” she sobbed. “I’m so worried.”

“I should think you would be,” her husband snapped. “I should think you would be.”

“I can’t help thinking,” Hetty exclaimed, in an uncertain tremolo, and with a rising inflection, “what Ruth Robbins may be teaching Myron.”