Читать книгу The Vanishing Comrade - Ethel Cook Eliot - Страница 3

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Two boys and a girl climbed down out of the bus from Middletown when it made its final stop in front of the summer hotel at the head of Broad Street. The boys, between them, were carrying the girl’s books and a goodly number of their own, for they were returning from the last session of the school year. To-morrow summer holidays would begin. They nodded a friendly good-bye to the driver and started off up the steep little elm-roofed street that sloped directly up to Ashland College, an institution for girls, perched on the highest plateau of this hill town. The boys’ father was a professor in that college and the girl’s mother an instructor. But in spite of their privilege of living in the lap of learning these young people had to take a daily nine-mile bus ride down into the bigger village of Middletown if they themselves were to get college preparation.

The boys were twins. They were tall and spare, even for boys of sixteen, and seemed all angles. They had thick thatches of auburn hair, whimsical faces, and generous, clear-cut mouths. The girl was sturdy, slightly square in build, with brown, straight bobbed hair. The bobbed hair was parted at the side and brushed away in a wing from her forehead, and this gave her a boyish, ready look. Her eyes were hazel and very clear and confident in their level glance, but when she smiled, as she did often, they crinkled up into mere slits of eyes, because they were slightly narrow to begin with, and then she seemed oddly Puckish. Her mouth was wide and her lips rather full, but for all of that, because of its uptilted corners, it was really a very nice mouth. She trudged along now between her two friends, the corners of her mouth more uptilted than usual.

“Oh, I’m so glad it’s vacation! At last!” she was saying. “Mother and I are going to have just the nicest summer. We’re going to take long walks we never took, make a new vegetable garden, and eat almost every one of our meals out-of-doors when it isn’t raining. We may even if it does rain! When will your tennis court be done?”

“We’re going to get right at it to-morrow morning,” Sam Hart, the twin on her left, answered. “It ought to be finished by the middle of July or sooner if they’ll let us borrow the roller from the Hotel. Then if your mother is as patient as usual with us, we may be champions ourselves before the summer’s over.”

“She’s crazy to play,” Kate assured them. “But she says we must remember she hasn’t touched a racket in years and that you have to keep in practice to be any good at tennis. It was seventeen years ago she won that cup at the Oakdale Country Club.”

“She must have begun playing when she was in creepers,” Sam exclaimed. “I thought it was a regular cup, a real and regular tournament affair.”

“It was, of course. And she was nineteen, foolish.”

“She’s thirty-six now then.” Lee did the arithmetic. “It’s funny that, being so old as all that, she has always seemed just one of us. Where did you ever get such a mother, Kate?”

“Oh, I took my time about choosing,” Kate answered, apparently seriously. “I didn’t snatch at the first thing offered. I said ‘better not have any mother at all than one who isn’t magnificent.’ So I kept my head and refused to consider anything commonplace. You know the result, gentlemen.”

The boys did not bother to respond even with a laugh. They were used to Kate’s nonsense.

But now in their climb up the steep elm-shaded street they had reached the college campus on the “Heights” and Professor Hart’s house set into its corner.

“I’ll take my books,” Kate said. “Thanks for carrying ’em. If I do a lot of weeding in the court, perhaps it’ll pay you a little for having been such good pack-horses for me all this year.”

But Sam shook his head at the outstretched hands. “I’m coming on with you,” he declared. “How about you, Lee?”

“Me, too,” Lee responded. “Wait a second till I pitch these things on to the piazza.”

But Kate protested. “No, don’t. It’s almost supper time. The bus was late. We’ll be busy, Mother and I. Come after supper, instead, and help us decide where the new garden is to be. Perhaps mother will play Mah Jong with us.”

There was nothing to do but agree when Kate took a dictatorial tone. The boys meekly gave a pile of books into her arms and turned in at their own walk.

Kate’s mouth kept its uptilted corners as she went on alone, humming to herself and thinking pleasant thoughts. She skirted the forsaken campus a little way and then took a short-cut across its lawns. She knew that the last student had left to-day, and there would be no “grass police” to shoo her back to the paths.

“It’s great having all the girls gone,” she mused. “Now I shall have a little of Mother to myself again.”

Kate was justified in her pleasure in the girls’ departure, for those older girls did take an unconscionable amount of Katherine Marshall’s time and thought. Of course, Katherine had to teach them, Kate realized—that was how she earned their living. But she did not understand why, outside of classroom hours, they need be always underfoot. Kate was proud of her mother’s popularity, but often exasperated by it, too; for those older girls never by any chance paid any attention to Kate herself. They were polite, of course, but most perfunctorily; it was her mother they came to see and on her least word and motion they hung almost with bated breath. The truth was that these indifferent, superior girls, always present and never of any use to her, turned the college year for Katherine into a loneliness that even her mother scarcely realized.

There were the Hart boys, of course, always. But boys cannot take the place of a girl comrade. Kate’s mother was all the girl comrade she had. That was why she had not let the boys come with her now. For once, she would be sure to find her mother alone, and the hour would take on, for Kate, something of the nature of a reunion.

The house she now approached, across the street from the campus to which it turned its low and vine-hung back, had formerly been a barn. The college had made it over for Kate’s mother into a charming cottage which despite its turned back was still part of the college property. Kate found her mother sitting on the little garden bench at the side of the big double doors that had once been the carriage entrance and now stood open all spring and summer facing the hazy valley. Her cheek was resting on her hand and the expression in her eyes was a very far-away one, a farther away than the valley one. But she became very present when she heard Kate’s step.

“Oh, Kate, I thought you would never come!” she exclaimed. “Read this letter.” She picked it up from the bench beside her and handed it to Kate. “It’s from your Great Aunt Katherine!”

“What! Again?”

Why Kate exclaimed “Again” would be hard to say, for within her memory Great Aunt Katherine had only written her mother once before, and that was all of two years ago! That letter had been to tell of the sudden death of a semi-relative, a woman of whom, until that time, Kate had never heard. Would this have news of another death? It must be something of importance that had wrung a second letter from Great Aunt Katherine.

Flinging her books on the grass, and following them herself to sit at her mother’s feet, Kate opened the smooth, thick, creamy sheet and read:

My dear Katherine:

I am asking you to send your daughter Katherine to spend the month of July with me here in my Oakdale house. Unexpected business in Boston is keeping me from my usual trip abroad this summer. I do not know whether I told you when acquainting you with Gloria’s tragic death that her daughter was left without home or protection of any sort and that I proposed to take her in. But such was the case. Naturally, ever since, the child has been peculiarly lonely here in Oakdale. And now that she no longer has her day school in Boston to occupy her, the situation is a really trying one. It has occurred to me that Elsie and your Katherine are very nearly of an age, both fifteen, and that they might find themselves companionable. So I am asking you to forget old grievances, as I shall, and send your daughter to me for a month’s visit. I shall plan parties and theatres and good times for them, and promise you that it will be every bit as gay as it was when you were a young girl here, and not too independent then to let your aunt give herself pleasure by planning for yours. I have looked up trains and find that by leaving Middletown at one o’clock, Katherine, with only one change, will arrive in the South Station in Boston at six-fifteen. I shall expect her on that train Saturday of this week, and Bertha, Elsie’s maid, will meet her and bring her out here in time for dinner. If for any reason that is not a convenient train for Katherine to take, will you please wire me what time she will arrive? Sincerely, Aunt Katherine.

Kate looked up at her mother, dazed. “Just like that!” she exclaimed. “Does Great Aunt Katherine expect us to obey her just like that?”

Katherine was grave. “Yes, she has always done things like this. That’s been the trouble. And when things don’t go exactly as she has commanded that they should, she is at first unbelieving and then furious.”

“Hm. And who is Elsie?”

“Elsie is Nick’s little girl, and a sort of foster-niece to Aunt Katherine now, I suppose.”

“It was Nick’s wife who was killed in the automobile accident in France, wasn’t it? But why haven’t you told me about her, about this Elsie? I’ve always wanted a cousin so, Mother!”

“Well, she isn’t exactly a cousin, you know. But even so, if Nick and I hadn’t quarrelled, if we had stayed as we were, in the course of things you would have known each other and perhaps have been very dear friends. It would have been natural.”

“Oh, Mother—quarrels! When you are so lovely, how have people quarrelled with you so? It’s a—paradox. Now don’t say I’ve used the wrong word!—But here’s more, more to the letter!”

Kate had turned the letter over and discovered a postscript on the back. Katherine, who had missed it, bent down, and they read it cheek to cheek.

P.S. I will add, for this will perhaps make your acceptance the quicker to come to, that Nicholas’s name is never mentioned here, either by me or the servants, or even Elsie herself. So that end of things need cause you no anxiety. Elsie is a charming, well-mannered child.

That paragraph had not been intended for Kate’s eyes. Katherine understood that at once, but it was all that she did understand about it. She frowned, puzzled.

“Notice how she says ‘Make your acceptance quicker to come to’,” Kate pointed out sharply. “She takes it for granted you’ll come to it, apparently. If there is any question, it’s only one of time. But why isn’t Nick’s name mentioned?”

Katherine shrugged. “I am afraid she must have quarrelled with him, too, just as she did with your father and me. But if that’s so it must be terrible for both of them, since he owes her so much and she counted on him so to make up for Father and me and later you, Kate, and everything! How could he quarrel with her? Why, he should have put up with anything!”

Katherine’s cheek was again on her hand. Her face was all puzzle. “And why should Elsie be lonely in Oakdale?” she went on aloud, but almost to herself now. “Oakdale is quite a gay little place, and I know very well there are plenty of young people there. Some of them are children of friends of mine, friends I haven’t seen since I was married. Why, there are even the Denton children, just next door to Aunt Katherine’s! It’s all very mysterious, Elsie’s being lonely.”

But mystery where Great Aunt Katherine was concerned was no new thing to Kate. Whenever she thought about Aunt Katherine at all it was always to wonder. Why should her mother be estranged so entirely from her only living relative, this aunt for whom she had been named, and who had been a second mother to her after her own mother had died, when she was a very little girl? Kate could never understand that situation. Katherine was so peculiarly gentle and forgiving and lovable! How could any one stay angry with her?

Last year, when Kate was fourteen, Katherine had tried to explain things to her a little. She had said then that Great Aunt Katherine’s money was the cause of the feud. Only it was not the usual trouble that money makes in families. It was not that Aunt Katherine was selfish or proud. It was—oh, absurdity—that she was over-generous! She expected to force her generosity on her family whether they wanted it or not. It had begun with Kate’s Grandfather Frazier. He and Great Aunt Katherine were half-brother and sister. When Katherine was about Kate’s age now, Grandfather Frazier had failed in business and the very same month Great Aunt Katherine had inherited a fortune from an uncle on her mother’s side. Until that turn of fortune’s wheel Aunt Katherine had been a school teacher living with her half-brother and giving her spare time to mothering her namesake niece. When she woke up one morning to find herself a wealthy—a very wealthy—woman, she immediately decreed that her brother should share the good fortune with her just as she had for so long shared his home with him and his child. But Grandfather Frazier’s pride forbade him to acquiesce in that. The uncle was not his uncle, and it was not only his pride but his sense of propriety that influenced him in his firm decision not to accept one cent from Aunt Katherine. All that he would allow her to do to help his financial situation was to buy the house from him in which they were living so that with the money he might pay his debts. Thereafter he insisted that she was his landlady and he made a fetish until the month of his death of being on time with the absurdly small rent.

Aunt Katherine had built herself a large and mansionlike house on part of the land that went with her brother’s little house. And since he distinctly limited her in the things she might do for his daughter, she adopted, suddenly and to every one’s amazement, a poor young boy, with no background whatever, who had been brought up in a “Home,” and who at the time of her discovering him was working in a factory. She prepared him herself for college, sent him to Harvard, and thrust him, almost head first, into the “younger set” in Oakdale. He had married Gloria, a beautiful young Bostonian but with no especial “connections.” That was all that Kate knew of him, except for this late knowledge that he had a daughter.

Kate could understand her grandfather’s pride, dimly. But her mother’s case was not so clear to her, not quite. Her mother had married a rising young diplomat, a man of supposedly some wealth and assuredly fine ancestry. But on his death, not long after Kate’s birth, it was discovered that there was not a cent to which the young widowed mother could lay claim. Katherine had never explained to Kate how this had happened. She hardly knew herself perhaps, because the processes of Wall Street were a maze to her. Almost gleefully, Aunt Katherine had seized upon this opportunity to offer her niece a home with her and a substantial allowance so that she might feel independent in that home. Katherine had refused point blank. And Aunt Katherine, now very sensitive on the subject of rejected generosities, had made a clean break with her namesake, washed her hands, and dropped her out of her life, much as one might drop a thistle that had pricked too unreasonably.

Katherine, determined to earn her own and her little daughter’s way, had obtained an instructorship here at Ashland College, worked hard and happily ever since, and gloried in her independence.

The whole reason for this choice of poverty and hard work Katherine had not told Kate. But she had hinted that there was a very deep reason and one that justified her. Sometime, perhaps, she would disclose it. Meanwhile, Kate gave all this little thought, and was only brooding over it now because of the letter in her hand.

After a minute she said firmly, “If Great Aunt Katherine thinks I’m going to leave you here alone on this deserted hill-top for a whole month of our precious vacation, she has a surprise in store. Shall we write or wire our regrets, Mother?”

“We’d better write,” Katherine answered, getting up suddenly and beginning in an unusually energetic way to pull up weeds from the lily-of-the-valley bed under the window. “I shall write that Saturday is too soon, for there must be some preparation on our part for such a visit. By next Tuesday, though, I should think you could be ready.”

Kate turned her head to follow her mother with amazed eyes. “You don’t mean I’m to go, Mother?”

“Yes, I want you to go. I want you very much to go. Aunt Katherine apparently needs you. I think, though, she must be drawing on her imagination a bit as to the loneliness of Oakdale for Elsie, especially since she herself says there will be parties and good times for you. You can’t have parties without young people! Even so, her saying she needs you makes our acceptance not only dignified but imperative.”

“But to leave you here alone! How could I ever do that? What are you thinking of?”

Katherine laughed at her daughter then. She was extraordinarily pretty when she laughed, startlingly pretty. But when she sobered, as she was bound to do too quickly, she was quite different, still lovely but not startling. Her face, sober, was intensely earnest. She had a rather square and strong chin but with wide, melting gray eyes to offset it. Her dark curly hair, which when undone came just to her shoulders, could be held in place at her neck with only a shell pin or two, it was so amenable in its curly crispness. Her cheeks and little slim hands were tanned, but with healthy colour showing through, making her, Kate often said, exactly the colour of a golden peach. She was slim and very graceful and not tall.

But in spite of all Katherine’s loveliness and feminine charm, the impression one gained from her was one of over-earnestness, a fire of intense purpose steadily, even fiercely burning under the outwardly gay and light manner.

Now she was laughing. “Why shouldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked. “And I won’t be so alone, either. The Harts are staying. The boys will be my protectors and my playfellows both. I’ve been a fortunate woman all these years to have two such boys as well as my girl! And three mornings a week, you know, I shall be busy helping Mr. Hart with his cataloguing.... Now we shall have to collect all our wits and think about suitable clothes for you.”

Kate’s heart began to beat. When she had read the letter she had not let herself even contemplate what going would mean, not for an instant; for she had not dreamed her mother would so fall in with Aunt Katherine’s plan. But since she had fallen in with it, since she wanted her to go—well, it was very exciting! For the first time she might have for a comrade a girl, a girl of her own age, a chum! For if Elsie, that stranger unheard of until a few minutes ago, was lonely, What was she, Kate Marshall? Oh, she would surely be gladder of Elsie than Elsie could possibly be of her!

She went to the border of the lily-of-the-valley bed and began weeding beside her mother.

“I don’t see what we’ll do about clothes,” she said a little tremulously, not yet really believing in this new vista that seemed opening before her, like the valley there, at her very feet. “If I do go, I suppose Aunt Katherine will expect me to dress for breakfast and dinner and supper and in between times in that splendid house of hers.”

“No, not quite so bad as that; but she certainly will want you to have—let’s see—two ordinary gingham dresses, a little dinner frock, a party frock, a white dress for church, a sport coat and hat, a garden hat, a street hat, a street suit, a——”

But Kate interrupted this list with a quick laugh. “She’ll want in vain, then. Let’s get down to business and just discuss the must-be’s, if I am to be a pig and go and leave you here alone for July with a vacation on your hands.”

Katherine straightened up, brushing the soil from her fingers. Her quick ear had caught a joyous lilt in the voice and laugh that to an ordinary ear would have sounded merely dry. Her own heart leapt in sympathy with Kate’s.

“Fortunately there’s my pink organdie. That must do for dinners,” the mother began, counting on her earth-stained fingers.

“Pardon, Mother darling, my pink organdie. It’s been mine for over a year. Why will you go on calling things yours for years and years and years after they have descended? There’s my pink organdie then. It’ll have to do for church and for parties and for summer best just as it would if I were here. Two gingham dresses almost new. The blue flannel—but that will be too warm and scratchy for July, I’m afraid. Oh, Mother, that’s just all. I simply can’t go to Great Aunt Katherine’s, and I’ll never know Elsie!”

“Of course you can. Haven’t we always found a way to do the things we really wanted? Wait a minute. There’s my new white linen. I shall fix that for you. But your gingham dresses will never do, not for Oakdale. Never!”

“You’re not to give your white linen to me. It’s the prettiest thing you’ve got.”

“Hush! It will make a charming street suit. It will need a black silk tie and a patent-leather belt. I can see you in it.”

“You can, but you won’t!” But when Kate saw her mother’s dazed, puzzled little frown that invariably met her rare impertinences, she relented. “Oh, Mother,” she cried, “if I’m to have your very best things added to mine, of course I shall be perfectly fixed. It will be a regular trousseau.”

“I don’t need anything but these old smocks, staying here,” Katherine insisted. “And that’s exactly what I shall do, give you everything of mine that can possibly be of any use. For once in your life you are going to have just an ordinary young girl good time. And if you and Elsie do hit it off, perhaps Aunt Katherine will consent to her coming back with you for the rest of the vacation. Come, let’s spread all our possibilities out on the beds and see what there is!”

“Yes, after we’ve pared the potatoes for supper,” Kate agreed, trying desperately to hold on to her last shreds of casualness and poise. “We had better have supper to-night, I suppose, whether I go to Great Aunt Katherine’s or not. It must be six o’clock now.”

Katherine threw an arm across Kate’s shoulder as they went through the big door. “How fortunate it is,” she said, not for the first time, “that I have such a steady, common-sensible little girl!”

But Kate would not abide her own hypocrisy.

“Oh, Mother, don’t make me feel cheap!” she exclaimed. “You know perfectly well that I’m just bursting with excitement, only I’m ashamed to show it, for it’s you who are going to be left at home doing just the same old things and seeing just the same old people and everything.”

“But I’m happy doing just that,” Katherine hurried to assure her. “Why, you yourself, Kate, have been looking forward to your vacation here and planning it with such pleasure!”

“Ye—es. But that was before this came. Now I don’t see how I could bear the thought of just staying here! Now that I’m going to have pretty clothes and go to parties and meet some boys and girls, and have a girl chum of my own—why, what I was so looking forward to doesn’t seem anything at all. I’ve suddenly waked up, and there’s a big door open right in front of me, bigger than our funny old front door! I’m going through it, right into such fun! Only I’m leaving you behind. That isn’t fair.”

Katherine was quick to understand. Kate’s whole mood was as real to her as though it were her own. She said, “But don’t you see, dear, I had all that fun a thousand times over when I was a girl. Aunt Katherine gave me parties galore and took me to the theatre as often as Father would let her and there was anything worth seeing. And now that you are to have some of that life for a month, I am delighted. I only wish Aunt Katherine had asked you sooner. I have truly always hoped she would. Only, I suppose, she thought I was like Father and wouldn’t accept things for you any more than for myself. And oh, Katie dear, do try to be patient with Aunt Katherine, no matter what she does or says! Perhaps you will make up a little to her for what I have taken away.”

They stood now in the kitchen, facing each other. Suddenly Kate laughed, her nicest laugh that screwed up her eyes into slits and turned her into a Puck. “Let’s put off supper then,” she cried. “Stodgy old suppers we can have any night. Let’s get out all the clothes we’ve got and just plan. I’m not going to let you touch any of your good ones for me. I’m truly not. But there may be some old things we’ve forgotten.”

“Now you’re really common-sensible, my dear,” Katherine affirmed. “Before it was only pretend common-sensibleness.”

And arm-in-arm, without one look at the kitchen clock which now was pointing to all of quarter past six, they went through the funny, merry little barn house toward the bedrooms.