Читать книгу The Moth Decides - Edward Alden Jewell - Страница 4

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When Louise opened her eyes she stared dreamily up at the slight abrasion in the shingle roof through which morning blinked. There were not many of these informal skylights, for the roof was not an old one. But there were a few, as there are likely to be in most summer cottages. When there was a violent downpour one had to hustle around distributing pans and kettles to catch an often ambitious drip. But this morning there was no rain. Louise's pretty face was not in danger of an unsolicited bath. It was a radiant summer dawn.

For a moment she wondered how she had happened to wake so early. The July birds were all chattering in the woods. But why should she waken out of deep slumber unsummoned? Presently, however, the reason for this phenomenon flashed vividly. Downstairs in the cottage living room, on the chimney-piece, stood an old Dutch clock. This clock possessed a kind of wiry, indignant tick, and a voice, when it was time to speak, full of a jerky, twanging spite. Louise could hear the sharp ticking. Then there came a little whirr—like a very wheeze of decrepitude—followed by an angry striking. One, two, three, four. And at the very first stroke she knew why she was awake at so almost grotesque an hour. The remembrance brought its half whimsical shock. In an hour Leslie would be cranking the engine of his little launch, and they would be chugging toward Beulah.

However, even this did not impel the girl to spring out of bed. Indeed, she arose quite deliberately and only after a brief relapse into a dreaminess which was cousin to slumber itself. She allowed her mind to explore, quite fantastically and not a little extravagantly, the probable courses of the day just springing. She knew beyond any question that it was to be a day packed full of importance for her. Yet she proceeded with that air of cool possession which young persons often elect to display when they feel that the reins are snugly in their hands. As she looked up at the tiny point of aurora in the roof, Louise smiled. There was almost no trace left of the old trouble—that well borne but sufficiently poignant wound, which though her own, had added new lines to the Rev. Needham's already pictorial face. Richard? Oh, Richard was almost forgotten at length. This was as it should be. Defiantly, but also a little slyly (because it could hardly be reckoned a good Christian sentiment), Louise wished that Richard might somehow be here now to observe her triumph; above all—for the wound had still a slight sting—to see how finely calm she had learned to be in these matters.

There was a light step outside on the turf of the hillside. One unalert might not have noted it, or might not have known it for a human tread, where there was such a patter of squirrel and chipmunk scampering. But Louise was alert. She might be calm, but she was also alert. And she knew it was no squirrel out there. That was Leslie. He was lingering about under her window, undecided whether he ought to risk pebbles or a judicious whistle by way of making sure she was awake. At the faint sound of his foot she raised her head quickly from the pillow.

"Louise!" he whispered.

You might have thought it some mere passing sibilance of wind. But you could not be expected to know Leslie's voice as she knew it.

The girl slipped softly out of bed. She did not want to rouse her sister. Hilda was sleeping with her. Hilda had given her own room to Aunt Marjie.

When Louise stepped out on to the bare cottage floor, her feet encountered cool little hillocks of sand, the residue of sundry bed-time shoe dumpings. One could not live up here beside Lake Michigan without coming to reckon sand as intimately and legitimately entering into almost every phase of existence. Indeed, she trod on sand more or less all the way across to the single little window; then dropped lightly on to her knees before the window and peered down through the screen.

"I'm awake, Leslie," she whispered.

And the lad who had been eagerly gazing at this very window, vacant till now, smiled faintly, nodded, and made motions signifying that he would wait for her in the little rustic "tea-house." However, his smile was very brief; and his manner, as he went away toward the specified rendezvous, was manifestly dejected.

When Louise turned back from the window, Hilda was stirring. Hilda lifted herself up on to an elbow and welcomed her sister with bright eyes.

"Who's out there?" she asked.

"Sh-h-h! It's Les. Go back to sleep, Hilda."

"Is he going with you?" the younger girl persisted.

"Only part of the way."

"As far as Beulah?"

"Yes."

"Why doesn't he go all the way?"

"Because I would rather go alone," replied the older girl with a quite fascinating fusion of firmness and mystery.

But the manifest dignity of this response was slighted by Hilda, who merely remarked, in an unemotional yet still significant tone: "Oh, I see."

"Well, isn't it natural?"

"Isn't what natural, Lou?"

"Isn't it natural I should want to be alone when I meet Lynndal?"

"Oh, yes! I didn't just stop to think how it would be."

"Not that it would really matter about Les," the other continued, slipping quickly into her clothes. "Les is only a boy, after all."

"Oh, do you think so, Lou?"

"Why, of course. Leslie isn't more than twenty, if he's that," she concluded rather doubtfully, twisting up her dark hair and fixing it loosely in place.

"Oh, he is!" protested Hilda as vigorously as whisper-talk would allow.

"Is what?"

"Les is twenty."

Louise had turned away from the larger mirror in the dresser and was trying to focus the back of her head with the aid of a small hand mirror, as women do who are particularly concerned about appearing at their best. She looked across oddly at her sister, who in turn blushed, lowering her eyes.

"Well, then, as you say. You seem to be pretty sure."

"Les told me he was," cried Hilda, as though vaguely to shift some sort of responsibility.

Louise relinquished the mirrors and sat down on the edge of the bed for the purpose of tying her shoes. "Listen, Hilda," she said; "you ought to go straight back to sleep. It's only four o'clock. Papa would be mad if he heard us."

"Oh, but he can't," replied Hilda, with the air of one who knows very accurately the acoustic properties of the house in which she dwells.

"But Aunt Marjie might," the other suggested.

"Oh, she wouldn't tell. Aunt Marjie's a sport! Besides," she added, as though to place the matter altogether beyond dispute, "listen!"

Both girls did. They gazed in silence toward the three-quarters partition beyond which Aunt Marjie was established. It was quite true. There were unmistakable dulcet sounds from that direction. Aunt Marjie had warned them she was a heavy sleeper. She had not deemed it urgent to be more specific.

"Safe!" admitted Louise, with a sigh of mock-relief, adding, however: "Even so, you ought to go back to sleep."

Hilda dropped on to her pillow, seeming without comment about to comply. But she was right up again with an earnest question: "Where's he now?"

"Who?"

"Les."

"Sh-h-h! He's waiting for me outside."

"Oh, Louise—I wish you'd let me go with you!" The emphasis implied that the petition had been put hitherto—perhaps persistently. "Please do let me go along—only as far as Beulah!"

The person so earnestly addressed was dusting her face and neck with powder, which signified that she was about ready to depart. She flipped open her handkerchief box with a scene from Dresden on its cover and tucked a fresh handkerchief into her blouse. "Now be good and don't tease," she pleaded a little petulantly. Louise took a certain elder-sisterly attitude towards Hilda which had in it something of selfish authority.

Once more Hilda dropped obediently back. But as she lay there, very wide awake indeed, she couldn't help sighing: "Oh, how I should love to go to Beulah!" And there was another sigh to set it off.

Now, it might be supposed, from the fervour of the young girl's tone, that this Beulah, of which both had repeatedly spoken, must be a wonderfully and peculiarly charming place. Yes, it must indeed possess rare attributes to make a girl beg to be allowed to abandon her nice snug nest at dawn for a mere sight of it. And yet, curiously enough, Beulah was hardly charming in any actual sense: just a tiny, poky, dull little hole of a town, a poor speck on a minor railroad. All things considered, Louise's advice sounded very sensible: "You know you're better off here on the Point."

However, Hilda by no means thought so, and she shook her head with stolid vehemence.

"And I thought," her sister continued, paying very little attention to her own words, "I thought there was to be a tennis match this morning."

"Yes, there is," admitted Hilda.

"Well, you know they couldn't possibly play without you."

She forgot her phrases as fast as she uttered them. She was ploughing through her jewellery case for a certain brooch. It was one which Richard had given her, and which had somehow been overlooked when the other gifts had been sent back to him at the Rev. Needham's firm request. She meant, if she could find it, to wear the brooch this morning. It might be Lynndal would show himself too sure of her. She might want to impress upon him the fact that her life had not been loveless. At length she found the ornament and put it on, with a little toss of coquetry. Of course Louise didn't mean really to hold off any regarding their engagement. Ah, no. That was a settled thing, as a glance at the correspondence must amply prove. Nevertheless, she decided on the brooch. Richard, with his faithlessness, had hacked two years right out of her life. But Louise had a new lover! The earlier affair was remote enough to stand a little harmless commercializing now.

Hilda modestly deprecated the enviable light in which her tennis playing had been put by her sister.

"You know that's not true!" she said.

"What isn't true?"

"What you said about them not being able to play the match without me. Besides," she concluded with a leap of thought which gave the words themselves a queer stamp of irrelevance, "he's going to play in it, too."

"Who is?" asked Louise blankly, brushing some strayed powder off her skirt.

"Leslie."

"Leslie? Well, I don't get the connection."

Hilda nodded quite violently. Her sleep-tossed hair lay richly about her shoulders. One shoulder was bare, where the nightgown fell away from it. She was fresh and pretty. Perhaps not so pretty as Louise. But Hilda was only fifteen, just swinging into the earliest bloom of her womanhood.

"Yes," she explained, "Les is going to play in the match. He told me he would have to get back in time for that. So you see, if it's only the tennis you're thinking about, you might just as well let me go along as far as Beulah."

"Oh, he did?" asked her sister, rather sharply, it must be confessed, for one who had been so abstracted a moment before. "He said he'd have to get back?"

"Yes, Lou. Why? What's the matter?"

"Nothing." She thrust a pin into her hat.

Hilda regarded her sister's back a moment in silence—as though a back might somehow reveal, if one but looked hard enough, what new emotion was passing through a heart. But when she spoke it was casually, and without further adherence to the theme.

"My, Lou," she said, "you look grand this morning!"

"Ha! My street suit!"

"I know, but all our city clothes look grand up here in the woods."

"Well, I guess Lynndal wouldn't recognize me in a jumper. Remember, he hasn't seen me since last winter," observed Louise, with an evident seriousness of tone which might almost lead one to suspect she really meant it was necessary to dress up in order to be recognized.

"Yes, but you've written every day," Hilda reminded her, renouncing the subject of clothes and skipping light-heartedly along the way of digression which had thus been opened up.

"It isn't so!" her sister assured her.

"Well, then, three times a week."

"That's a very different matter." Suddenly she thought of Richard, and the fecund diligence, on her side at least, of their correspondence. She scowled. And then she went and bent over the girl in bed. "Can you see any powder on my face?"

Hilda said she thought she could see just a tiny little bit of rouge. So Louise rubbed her face vigorously with a towel, by way of destroying any possible trace of artificiality, and bringing thus a heightened natural bloom.

There really was very little artificiality about the Needham girls. The Rev. Needham was always nervously on the lookout for that. His great horror was such episodes as are dear to the hearts of novelists: episodes in which soul-rending moral issues appear. And he believed, and often quite eloquently gave expression to the belief, that a subtle germ of artificiality lay at the root of all emotional excesses. Louise's unhappy affair with Richard, the Rev. Needham was pleased to lay almost squarely at the door of Eastern Culture. To be perfectly candid, the Rev. Needham did not know a great deal about this so-called Eastern Culture. But he was persuaded—as are perhaps many more good souls in the Middle West—that it was something covertly if not patently inimical to those standards of sane, quiet living to which he almost passionately subscribed. Why had they ever sent her East at all? "It was that fashionable school that did all the harm," he would say, with a sigh in which there was more than a hint of indignation. Louise herself, whatever she might think of the Culture, admitted that half the girls in the school were deep in love affairs, most of which bore every promise of turning out badly. The school was in that paradise of schools, the nation's capital. It was a finishing school, and a judicious indulgence in social activities was admittedly—even a bit arrogantly—one of the features of the curriculum.

Ah, yes. That was just where all the mischief began. If she had stayed home instead and received young men in her mother's own Middle Western parlour, she might have been spared—they might all have been spared—that terrible ordeal of the heart, with its gloomy envelope of humiliation. In plain terms, Richard had simply turned her down. One might argue about it, but one could not, in the end, really deceive oneself. He had turned her down, thrown her over, jilted her, after flirting desperately and wickedly—though in a manner which the Rev. Needham strongly suspected was looked upon as innocent and even rather proper by the decadence of that East he was always harping upon.

Louise, artless and unworldly, as she had been trained to be from the cradle, found herself but poorly equipped to combat such allurements as the dreadful Richard exhibited. It was an old tale, but none the less terrible for all that. She believed everything he said to her, fatally misconstrued his abundant enough ardour, fell madly in love, and wanted to throw herself in the river when she realized at length that her beautiful dream was shattered. Naturally, the Rev. Needham was shocked. He was horrified when his daughter wrote of throwing herself in the river. He did not definitely visualize the Potomac, which he had never seen; it was the convulsing generality that gripped him.

Mrs. Needham's conduct, at that time, had proved much more practical, if less eloquent, than her husband's. She went straight to her daughter, determined to bring her back home; and she left a distracted minister to make what progress he could with the Sunday sermon—agonized, as he was, by fevered visions of his child's body, gowned in an indefinite but poetically clinging garment, her hair tangled picturesquely with seaweed, floating upon the surface of a composite stream in the moonlight. Necessarily in the moonlight. The effect was more ghastly that way. And certain immortal lines of verse would ripple moaningly through his thoughts:

"The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight deepens, the curfew calls;

* * * * * *

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

But the sea in the darkness calls and calls...."

The Rev. Needham was not himself a poet, but there was poetry in the family. A brother had written poetry and gone to the devil. The Rev. Needham didn't even read poetry very often any more (for of course he never thought of looking upon King James's Version as a poem). In fact, the Rev. Needham had almost a kind of sentiment against poetry, since brother Will had disgraced them all. But it was curious to observe that at times of intense inner tumult, appropriate metrical interlinings had a way of insinuating themselves out of the vast anthology of his youth. Thus, while Mrs. Needham was away looking after their broken-hearted daughter, the clergyman, struggling to evolve his sermon, had to combat such tragic dirges as:

"One more unfortunate,

Weary of breath,

Rashly importunate,

Gone to her death!"

And by the time the poor man got to those inhumanly personal stanzas:

"Who was her father?

Who was her mother?

Had she a sister...?"

he would be pacing the floor and not getting on one bit with his sermon. Mrs. Needham had the good sense to wire back that Louise was all right, and that she was bringing her home. The sermon was somehow completed. But its text was "Vanity, vanity!" and there were allusions in it to Culture which his congregation never truly grasped.

"Good-bye!" whispered Louise. She gave one last flying peep into the mirror.

"'Bye, Lou," her sister returned, presenting her lips for a kiss. "I hope he'll come all right," she added, while Louise crossed the sanded floor as noiselessly as she could. "And—I'm just dying to see him!"

The other girl nodded back hurriedly from the door, and was off downstairs.

Hilda lay down again. She even closed her eyes. But she did not sleep any more. A horrid little fear clutched at her heart: What if he should not come?

What if Lynndal Barry should turn out to be another Richard, after all?