Читать книгу Patience Sparhawk and Her Times - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 13

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On Monday school re-opened, and Patience was late as usual. She loitered through the woods, conning her lessons, having been too much occupied with her poet to give them attention before. As she ascended the steps of the schoolhouse the drone of the Lord’s Prayer came through the open window, and she paused for a moment on the landing, swinging her bag in one hand and her tin lunch-pail in the other.

She was not a picturesque figure. Her sunbonnet was of faded blue calico dotted with white. The meagre braid projecting beneath the cape was tied with a shoe string. The calico frock was faded and mended and much too short, although the hem and tucks had been let out. The copper-toed boots were of a greyish-green hue, and the coarse stockings wrinkled above them. The nails of her pretty brown hands looked as if they had been sawed off. But the eyes under the old sunbonnet were dreamy and happy. The brain behind was full of new sensations. In the sparkling atmosphere was an electric thrill. The day was as still as only the days of Monterey can be. The pines, and the breakers had never intoned more sweetly.

A voluminous A—men! startled Patience from her reverie. She went hastily within, hung her bonnet and pail on a peg, and entered the schoolroom, smiling half deprecatingly half confidently, at Miss Galpin. The young teacher’s stern nod did not discompose her. As she passed Rosita she received a friendly pinch, and Manuela looked up and smiled; but while traversing the width of the room to her desk she became aware of something unfriendly in the atmosphere. As she took her seat she glanced about and met the malevolent eyes of a dozen turned heads. One girl’s lip was curled; another’s brows were raised significantly, as would their owner query: “What could you expect?”

Patience blushed until her face glowed like one of the Castilian roses on the garden wall opposite the window. “They’ve found out about Byron,” she thought. “Horrors, how they’ll tease me!”

School girls have a traditional habit of “willing” each other to “miss” when in aggressive mood. To-day some twenty of the girls appeared to have concerted to will that Patience should forget what little lore she had gathered on her way to school. Patience, always sensitive to impressions, was as taut as the strings of an Æolian harp from her experience of the past week. Such natures are responsive to the core to the psychological power of the environment, and once or twice this morning Patience felt as if she must jump to her feet and scream. But even at that early age she divined that the sweetest revenge is success, and she strove as she had never striven before to acquit herself with credit.

All morning the silent battle went on. Miss Galpin, who was beloved of her pupils because she was pretty and dressed well, was a graduate of the San Francisco High School, and an excellent teacher. Frankly as she liked Patience she had never shown her any partiality in the schoolroom; but to-day, noting the antagonism that was brought to bear on the girl, she exerted all her cleverness to assist her in such subtle fashion that Patience alone should appreciate her effort. In consequence, when the morning session closed, Patience wore the doubtful laurels and the bad blood was black.

As the girls trooped down into the yard Rosita laid her arm about Patience and endeavoured to lead her away. Manuela conferred in a low tone with the foe, voice and gestures remonstrant. But there was blood in the air, and Patience squared her shoulders and awaited the onslaught. Incidentally she inspected her nails and copper toes.

Several of the girls walked rapidly up to her. They were smiling disagreeably.

“Can’t you keep her at home?” asked one of them.

“Think she’ll marry him?” demanded another.

Patience, completely taken aback, glanced helplessly from one to the other.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Come, Patita,” murmured Rosita, on the verge of tears.

Manuela exclaimed: “You are fiends, fiends!” and walked away.

“Mean? Do you mean to say she got off without you knowing it?”

“Knowing what?” A horrible presentiment assailed Patience. Her fingers jerked and her breath came fast.

“Why,” said Panchita McPherson, brutally, “your mother was in here Saturday night with her young man and regularly turned the town upside down. They were thrown out of three saloons. Can’t you keep her at home?”

Patience stared dully at the girls, her dry lips parted. She knew that they had spoken the truth. She had gone to bed early on Saturday night. Shortly afterward she had heard the sound of buggy wheels and Billy’s uncertain gait. Many hours later she had been awakened by the sound of her mother stumbling upstairs; but she had thought nothing of either incident at the time.

Panchita continued relentlessly, memories of many class defeats rushing forward to lash her spleen: “You’ll please understand after this that we don’t care to have you talk to us, for we don’t think you’re respectable.” Whereupon the other girls, nodding sarcastically at Patience, entwined their arms and walked away, led by the haughty Miss McPherson.

For a few moments Patience hardly realised how she felt. She stood impassive; but a cyclone raged within. All the blood in her body seemed to have rushed to her head, to scorch her face and pound in her ears. She wondered why her hands and feet were cold.

“Come, Patita, don’t mind them,” said Rosita, putting her arm round her comrade. “The mean hateful nasty—pigs!” Never before had the indolent little Californian been so vehement; but Patience slipped from her hold, and running through a gate at the back of the yard crouched down on a box. Rosita’s words had broken the spell. She was filled with a volcano of hate. She hated the girls, she hated Monterey, she hated life; but above all she hated her mother.

After a time all the hate in her concentrated on the woman who had made her young life so bitter. She had never liked her, but not until the dreadful moments just past had she realised the full measure of her inheritance. The innuendoes she had not understood, but it was enough to know that her mother had disgraced her publicly and insulted her father’s memory. Her schoolmates she dismissed from her mind with a scornful jerk of the shoulders. She had beaten them too easily and often in the schoolroom not to despise them consummately. They could prick but not stab her.

The bell rang; but she had an account to settle, and bonnetless she started for home.

Mrs. Sparhawk was sitting on the porch reading a novel when Patience walked up to her, snatched the book from her hand, and flung it into a rose-tree. The woman was sober, and quailed as she met her daughter’s eyes. Patience had walked rapidly under a hot sun. Her face was scarlet, and she was trembling.

“I hate you!” she sobbed. “I hate you! It doesn’t do any good to tell you so, but it does me good to say it.”

The girl looked the incarnation of evil passions. She was elemental Hate, a young Cain.

“I wish you were dead,” she continued. “You’ve ruined every bit of my life.”

“Why—what—what—” mumbled the woman. But the colour was coming to her face, and her eyes were beginning to glitter unpleasantly.

“You know well enough what. You were in town drunk on Saturday night, and were in saloons with a farm hand. To make a brute of yourself was bad enough—but to go about with a common man! Are you going to marry him?”

Mrs. Sparhawk laughed. “Well, I guess not.”

Patience drew a quick breath of relief. “Well, that’s what they’re saying—that you’re going to marry him—a man that can’t read nor write. Now look here, I want one thing understood—unless you swear to me you’ll not set foot in that town again I’ll have you put in the Home of the Inebriates—There! I’ll not be disgraced again; I’ll do it.”

Mrs. Sparhawk sprang to her feet, her face blazing with rage. “You will, will you?” she cried. She caught the girl by the shoulders, and shaking her violently, boxed first one ear, then the other, with her strong rough hands. For an instant Patience was stunned, then the blood boiled back to her brain. She screamed harshly, and springing at her mother clutched her about the throat. The lust to kill possessed her. A red curtain blotted even the hated face from sight. Instinctively she tripped her mother and went down on top of her. The crash of the body brought two men to the rescue, and Patience was dragged off and flung aside.

“My land!” exclaimed one of the men, his face white with horror. “Was you going to kill your ma?”

“Yes, that she was,” spluttered Mrs. Sparhawk, sitting up and pulling vaguely at the loose flesh of her throat. “She’d have murdered me in another minute.”

Patience by this time was white and limp. She crawled upstairs to her room and locked the door. She sank on the floor and thought on herself with horror.

“I never knew,” she reiterated, “that I was so bad. Why, I’m fifteen, and I never wanted to kill even a bird before. I wouldn’t learn to shoot. I’d never drown a kitten. When the Chinaman stuck a red-hot poker through the bars of the trap and burnt ridges in the live rat I screamed and screamed. And now I’ve nearly killed my mother, and wanted to. Who, who would have thought it?”

When she was wearied with the futile effort to solve the new problem, she became suddenly conscious that she felt no repentance, no remorse. She was horrified at the sight of the black veins in her soul; but she felt a certain satisfaction at having unbottled the wrath that consumed her, at having given her mother the physical equivalent of her own mental agony. Over this last cognisance of her capacity for sin she sighed and shook her head.

“I may as well give myself up,” she thought with young philosophy. “I am what I am, and I suppose I’ll do what I’m going to do.”

She went downstairs and out of the house. She passed a group of men; they stared at her in horror. Then another little seed from the vast garden of human nature shot up to flower in Patience’s puzzled brain. She lifted her head with an odd feeling of elation: she was the sensation of the hour.

She went out on Point Lobos and listened to the hungry roar of the waves, watched the tossing spray. Nature took her to her heart as ever, and when the day was done she was normal once more. She returned to the house and helped to get supper, although she refused to speak to her equally sullen parent.