Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 21
ОглавлениеI
April brought a break in the stolid serenity of Elm Street. The big house across from the Trench property began to manifest signs of awakening life. For almost a year it had stood vacant, with only a caretaker to guard it against the depredations of Springdale’s budding youth. Paint and pruning shears had scarcely achieved the miracle of external transformation when a consignment of furniture arrived, via the Oriental express and San Francisco. This much Theodora discovered as she risked her fragile bones among the packing cases in the reception hall. She had contrived to make out four letters, N-I-M-S, in great smears of glossy black ink on several of the boxes. That hardly sounded like a name.
“Mamma says it will be time enough to find out about them when they move in,” she complained to Mrs. Ascott. “I heard her ask the agent—and she was mad as hops when he refused to tell her.”
“Delightfully mysterious, Theo. Perhaps some European monarch has grown tired of his crown, and is coming to live across the street from us.”
“Maybe it’s the Emperor of China. I saw the loveliest great red dragon—where one of the cases had broken open and the burlap was torn off. Oh—” in sudden fright, “don’t let Lary know I pried.”
She had perceived her brother’s approach, by some subtle sense that bound them. He and Eileen were crossing the lawn with noiseless steps and Theodora’s back was turned. When they reached the front gate, Mrs. Ascott gave greeting:
“What does one do in Springdale, these glorious spring evenings?”
“One goes to the show, if one has an amiable brother.” To Eileen’s suggestion, Larimore added: “Won’t you come along, Mrs. Ascott? Vaudeville and pictures—not much of an attraction; but it might amuse you. My mother is entertaining the ladies of the missionary society this evening, and she doesn’t want us around.”
“Yes,” Theodora added, “and Mrs. Stevens is coming. She and Eileen don’t speak, since the ‘ossified episode.’ You know, Lady Judith, that’s all that saved you from being invited to join the Self Culture Club. Mamma belongs. She was one of the charter members—reads the magazine, like it was the Bible—and she meant it for a compliment to offer your name for membership. But Mrs. Stevens was so furious at Eileen that she tabled all the names mamma submitted.”
“You wouldn’t have gone in for that rubbish anyway,” Eileen defended herself. “Mrs. Stevens makes me tired. She hasn’t a thing in her library but reference works. And mamma holds her up to Theo and me as a bright example. Tells us that we can’t expect to get culture unless we look things up. Ina Stevens does that, and she has facts hanging all over her. She’s as prissy as her mother.”
“But what was the ‘ossified episode’?” Judith asked, recognizing one of Larimore Trench’s expressions, wherewith Theodora’s speech was frequently adorned.
“Humph, I got caught on the word, in rhetoric class. Thought it meant something about kissing, and the whole class hooted at me. Ina was at home, sick, that day, and Theo and I went over in the evening to take her credit card. Her marks were loads better’n mine, and Mrs. Stevens swelled up so about it that I couldn’t help telling her that my grandfather was expected to die, because all his bones had ossified. And, Mrs. Ascott, both of them—Ina and her mother—fell for it. Mrs. Stevens said it was a dreadful disease, but she had known one old lady who lived three years in that condition. I looked blank as a grindstone; but Theo had to go and snigger. And after we went home, Mrs. Stevens looked it up—and ’phoned mamma that I had to apologize, or she wouldn’t let Ina chum with me any more. I don’t care. I like Kitten Henderson best, any way.”
She turned to look anxiously up the street, as if she were more than half expecting some one, while Judith went into the house to get her hat.
II
The performance had been going on for an hour when the four entered the theatre, groping their way down the dark aisle to a row of unoccupied seats at the left side. The stage was being set for a troupe of Japanese tumblers, and the interval was bridged by news films and an animated cartoon. To Judith this form of entertainment was new. Raoul could tolerate nothing but the sprightliest comedy. With the Ramsays and Herbert Faulkner she had tried to find surcease in grand opera and the symphony. Once in London she and her mother had taken refuge from the rain in a cinema theatre where, on a wide screen, a company of fat French women chased a terrified little man—who had loved not wisely but too often—through the familiar streets of the Latin Quarter, overturning flower stands and vegetable carts, falling in scrambled heaps that writhed with a brave showing of lingerie, untangling themselves and scampering to fresh disaster, when they discovered that the object of their jealous rage had somehow slipped unhurt from the mass. Mrs. Denslow was disgusted. Judith was only bored.
But this bit of screen craft was different. On an expanse of dazzling white a single black dot appeared, paused a breathless moment and went tripping about in a zigzag dance, spilling smaller dots as it went. These resolved themselves into figures that stalked about with the jerky motion of automata. A ghostly hand passed over the picture, and it stood revealed a plenum of regularly arranged dots. With another wave of the wraithlike hand, the dots began to move slowly to and fro, advancing and retreating until they assumed the outlines of a great picture, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Other pictures were produced by means of those same dots. But Mrs. Ascott, who had never before watched the vibrant changes of an animated cartoon, found it necessary to close her eyes to relieve the strain. And then ... some one was leaning over her shoulder, heavy with the odour of a spent cigar, and a full, authoritative voice was saying:
“Come on, Eileen. The whole bunch is down in front. Ina and Jimmy are there, and Kitten and Dan.”
“Hal Marksley, if you can’t come to the house for me—” the girl said petulantly, but she stepped to the seat of her chair and vaulted nimbly over the back. Theodora moved to the vacant place beside her. Lady Judith and the play went on.
III
At the gate, Lary kissed his little sister and sent her home, going into the house with Mrs. Ascott. There was no need of so much as a nod to assure him that the evening was not yet finished. She wanted to ask him about Dr. Schubert—the tragedy that had mellowed and sweetened him. But the revelation would come in due time. Instead, she demanded to know the significance of Indian Summer. Only that morning the old physician had remarked—when she told him of Dutton’s warning—“We hop from snow to sweat, out here in Illinois,”—that one could endure the heat if one kept constantly in mind that after frost there would be Indian Summer.
Indian Summer. She had read a sentimental essay, years ago.... April—the arrogant, reckless abundance of Youth. August—the passionate heat of Love. October—the killing frost of Sorrow. And after that, the golden peace of Indian Summer. In her part of the world there was no such division of seasons. Yet the figures had attached themselves to the walls of her memory by tenacious tentacles. For her there had been neither sorrow nor peace ... just the bald monotony of a life that had been regulated by the artificial standards of her mother or her husband. She was so deadly tired of it all. And her work at the laboratory had not proved absorbing. It was too easy ... the copying of formulæ and an occasional hand at an experiment that might be dangerous. But she knew that none of them would be dangerous. Dr. Schubert was too cautious to permit her even that zest. Sydney Schubert, the son, who specialized in diseases of children, she hardly knew. An epidemic of scarlet fever was raging in the mining towns of Sutton and Olive Hill, and he was away from home most of the time.
“In order to appreciate Syd, you must know the tragedy of his boyhood,” Lary began. “It was more terrible for his parents, of course. But to a sensitive boy who had an instinctive love of beauty—quite aside from his natural devotion to his mother.... Mrs. Schubert was without doubt the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen. Not the type my mother admires. And it may not have been the kind that would last. She was too fair and exquisite.”
“And she died, while the bloom was still fresh?” Judith asked.
“No, she lived eight years. We never knew how the thing happened ... a breeze that ruffled her clothing too close to the grate, or it may have been that her veil caught fire from an exposed gas flame. She was dressed to go out, and was waiting for the doctor in the great hall of their house, when she discovered that her clothing was ablaze. She wrapped herself in a carriage robe that happened to be lying on the settle; but she was horribly burned. One side of her face was disfigured beyond recognition. Fortunately the eyes were saved. It was after her recovery that Dr. Schubert had the pipe organ installed in the hall, to occupy her time, for she never went out, and at home she always covered her scars with a veil of white chiffon. Syd and Bob and I took turns at pumping the organ for her, before the days of electric motors, and she taught all of us music. One afternoon, three years ago, they found her at the organ ... her head resting on the upper manual. They thought at first she was asleep.”
“I’m glad she went that way,” Judith said, her throat tight with emotion.
Lary might have resumed, but he was arrested by boisterous laughter, out on the street. Eileen and her friends were going by, and young Marksley was saying, with a good-natured sneer: “Cornell—nix on Cornell for mine. The kid and I have this college business all doped out. She’s going to cut this little Presbyterian joint, next fall, and we’re both going to Valparaiso University. Greatest college on earth! Place where they teach you to dissolve the insoluble, to transmute the immutable and unscrew the inscrutable. I’m going to take commercial law, and Eileen can go on with her music....” The voices died away, as the group turned the corner beyond Vine Cottage.
“I wish my sister wouldn’t—” Lary checked himself, colouring.
“I shouldn’t take it too seriously. Such school boy and girl affairs seldom come to anything. Eileen’s a stubborn child. I wouldn’t oppose her ... openly.”
IV
It proved a mistake, letting Eileen go away with Hal and the others. At midnight she tried to let herself in noiselessly at the side door, found it unaccountably locked, and was forced to ring the bell. There was a scene at the breakfast table, reported to Mrs. Ascott by Theodora, with dramatic touches. Scenes were not uncommon, but this one was different. It developed along unexpected lines. No one had taken into account the possibility of Mrs. Trench as a bulwark of defence for Eileen. But that wary ally was not wont to fight in the open. She was so accustomed to storming the postern gate, that she was likely to creep around to the rear of her objective, when the front portal stood open, undefended. This morning she had for subterfuge the highly practical business advantage of cultivating Hal Marksley’s friendship. Hal’s father, as the whole town knew, was preparing to build a palatial mansion in the parklike addition he had recently laid out, at the western limit of Springdale’s residential section. Six architects had been invited to compete for the plans. It was important that Larimore Trench be the victor. This would place the contract for construction automatically in David’s hands. But David and Lary wanted to eliminate themselves from the competition, and admonish Hal that it would be advisable for him to take his affection elsewhere. At this, Lavinia forgot her prudence—delivered a direct assault on her husband, which might have been but an echo of the thing she had been saying to him at regular intervals for twenty-eight years:
“Yes, and you’d insult Hal—spoil Eileen’s chance, the way my father spoiled mine—just because a young man has money and knows how to show a girl a good time! I don’t intend to go through another such experience as I had with Sylvia.”
The reference to Sylvia was beside the mark. She had not intended to betray her eagerness for an early marriage for her second daughter.
