Читать книгу Red of the Redfields - Grace S. Richmond - Страница 5

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Back at the house Red and Ellen Burns had left, Marcia Redfield finished the doing of several things their call had interrupted. Then, when she had read aloud for an hour to her husband, she put on her hat and coat and let herself out into the October evening. Down the road toward the village she went, with a quick, light step like a girl's, her head up, her lungs drawing in deep breaths.

Halfway to the village she met a tall figure which stopped before her. A soft hat came off and remained off, and a crisp, pleasant voice said, "Well met, Mrs. Redfield, if you say so, too. May I turn around and walk with you? I was just coming out to the house."

"I'm delighted to see you, Andy Carter, as you know well enough. But why not go on to the house and talk with my two men till I get back?"

"Because I want to be with you—you can't turn me off like that." He had wheeled and was gently forcing her to keep on walking, with a hand on her arm which he withdrew when he had accomplished his purpose. "I haven't seen you for a dog's age, and I want to tell you again how I like your 'Arrow Tips,' for my Arrow. I find people are reading them with a gusto, even more eagerly than they read Rusty's occasional column from college, though they like that a lot, too. But you get something into yours that makes 'em tingle. I wish I knew how you do it. I can edit a small-town paper, and I think I know how to make it popular, but there's a gentle snap to your paragraphs—if I may try a paradox—that makes people eat up those tips like fresh asparagus in the spring after a winter of canned beets."

She laughed. "You're a flatterer. It's difficult to make much out of the little village happenings without degenerating into actual gossip."

"I know, but you do it. I haven't yet got over one 'Tip' last week. I can say it by heart:

"The Thursday Reading Club is now concentrating its efforts upon a study and understanding of the trees native to this region. We thought we knew a maple when we saw one, but it turns out we knew only the one in our own dooryard. At our latest meeting an animated discussion, at times conducted by all the members of the Club at once in varying tones and pitches, brought out merely the fact of our intense ignorance. No promoter of any particular variety of maple was able to keep the ascendency over the remainder of the Club for more than a minute at a time. One thing only was definitely determined upon—to wit: that he who cuts down a maple tree planted by his father or his grandfather, for any reason whatsoever but one vital to the health or happiness of the entire community, commits a depredation, and he shall be dealt with by a jury composed of all the most enthusiastic and bloodthirsty members of the Club.

"You know, Mrs. Redfield," the speaker concluded, his voice full of satisfaction, "that sort of thing simply isn't done, in the reports of the meetings of a reading club or any other kind of club—not in the local village paper. The reports of such meetings make the most deadly serious reading in the world, and nobody but the members of that particular club ever reads 'em. But your skits! My word, who would think of skipping them? Somebody always gets hit off, yet there's never cause for offense."

"Are you quite sure of that?"

"Absolutely. Except with me. How dared you say in that column that the editor needs a new hat? I do, of course. But for you to observe that you thought its present condition due partly to the heated functioning of my brain in the late discussion over the School Board, and partly from its having been thrown so often into the ring—why, do you know what impertinence that was, Madam? The edition was exhausted before it was fairly off the press, so many delighted subscribers came in to buy an extra copy. 'Who writes that Arrow Tips column?' asked they, and when I gave them three guesses they hit on everybody but you. They seemed to think none but an Irish male could have perpetrated that hit at the hat!"

"By the way, Andy," said the columnist, "is that the hat which you have in your hand? Put it back on your head—this breeze is chilly."

"Yes, Mother," said the daring Andy. He had grown up in the town with the Redfields, but had been away many years. He had come back only two years before to put all he had saved and all he had learned into the old weekly newspaper which had faithfully recorded all his comings and goings from his earliest college days. Motherless from boyhood, he had adored Marcia Redfield all his life of twenty-seven years; Rusty and Nick and Jerry had been his sister and younger brothers, and little Jinny he had carried on his shoulder.

The two walked on, Carter's hat still in his hand, and his thick sandy hair ruffled by the keen October wind.

"It's great to have a talk with you all to myself like this," the young man said, as they neared the centre of the village of Eastville, after the two-mile walk from the outskirts where the Redfields lived. "Let's see—we've mentioned Nick and Jerry and the paper, the new linotype machine, the cost of gasoline for the press engine, the local elections, the situation in English politics, the campaigns for devastated France, the advisability of my getting a new suit in spite of the fact that the cost of printing paper has gone up, and—well, I think—everything except Rusty. She skipped me with a line o' type this week—something about a Senior Play in which she had practically all the lines and so could give me none. I suppose you've heard."

His tone was casual, but his hearer understood that this omitted subject was to him by far the most important of all. Her sympathies were with him, for she knew her elder daughter put most of her spare time into the long weekly letters home, intended to keep her family amused and informed of all her life away from them.

"This week's letter was full of the Play, too," Rusty's mother told him. "If R. R. R., as she loves to sign herself, weren't such a quick study she never could get up her part and keep her school work up at the same time. But she seems to be glorying in this part, which fits her pretty well. Wouldn't you think she'd make a convincing small boy—'Mickey,' by name? You know she always wants to play male parts, but seldom can because she hasn't the height, though she can assume a magnificent bass voice upon occasion."

"I'll say she can," Carter murmured, chuckling at a recollection of one of Rusty's girlhood pranks when she had—at midnight—deceived an investigating neighbour into thinking she was her own father, at an upper window.

"The only thing that bothers her seems to be the management of that crop of red curls. She threatens to bob her hair——"

An alarmed masculine protest interrupted: "Great guns! You won't let her do that!"

"My dear Andy, if she decided to do it the scissors would be cutting into it even as we talk. But it seems that the thought of what I—and possibly you—would say, has held her hand."

"Me? Did she mention me?" The question was shot at her explosively.

"Not at all. I merely recall that you and she have held certain arguments upon the subject in the past."

"I hope she doesn't recall 'em. If she thought I was against it she most certainly would do it," declared the young man.

"Not necessarily. You have more influence over her than most people. Do you imagine Rusty would contribute to any newspaper but yours, in her busy Senior year?"

"Don't you think she would?"

"I do not.—But I'm stopping here, Andy, and I'll say good-night. It's good to have met you. You're always next to Nick and Jerry, you know, as my adopted son."

She had paused in front of a small house, where, as Carter knew, lived an elderly couple house-bound by infirmity the year round. He understood that they would be the lighter of heart for her visit, but he was loath to let her go.

"Yes, I know—bless you," he said, warmly. "It means everything to me. If I'm not a son in earnest some day it won't be my fault, you know. Tell me one more thing that was in Rusty's letter," he added, persuasively, with a hand on her tweed coat-sleeve.

"Oh, yes—I have a message for you from her," Rusty's mother admitted, as if it were an after-thought.

"You have—and would have let me go without it, you teasing person. No, you wouldn't—you're too good to me for that."

"Very well, then. Here it is. 'Tell Andy Carter,' wrote my child, 'that his latest editorial on the School Board was a peach, but that the long one before it on the water question was absolutely bum.' She added: 'You're not responsible for the language, Mother, so report it verbatim, as becomes the columnist of the Arrow, a paper whose motto seems to be We shoot to hit!'"

Carter was laughing, both ruefully and delightedly. "That sounds like Rusty," he declared, "so it's most welcome, though it does 'shoot to hit.' I'll be even with her for that in next week's issue. Must you go in? Well—good-night, good-night!"

His tall, lanky figure stood motionless till she had gone in and closed the door. Then he went striding away down the road.

"Now why can't all women—and mothers—be as interesting as that?" he was thinking. "No wonder Rusty's what she is. Who wouldn't want a mixture of that blood in the veins of his children? Red, red blood it is, yet somehow as blue as there is in the country. Red and blue make purple—the purple of royalty, by George!"

The fancy pleased him, and from this point to his own door—not far away at the foot of a narrow stairway which led up the side of a ramshackle old building to his rooms above the office and pressroom of the Arrow—the editor was whistling gaily.

"'Absolutely bum,' was it, Miss Ruth Rust Redfield?" he questioned a distant young person. "All right—we'll see what we can say in our next to make you take that back!"