Читать книгу Saturday's Child - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 9

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Two weeks later she and Peter Coleman had their evening at the Chutes, and a wonderful evening it was; then came a theater trip, and a Sunday afternoon that they spent in idly drifting about Golden Gate Park, enjoying the spring sunshine, and the holiday crowd, feeding the animals and eating peanuts. Susan bowed to Thorny and the faithful Wally on this last occasion and was teased by Thorny about Peter Coleman the next day, to her secret pleasure. She liked anything that made her friendship for Peter seem real, a thing noticed and accepted by others, not all the romantic fabric of her own unfounded dreams.

Tangible proof of his affection there was indeed, to display to the eyes of her world. But it was for intangible proof that Susan's heart longed day after day. In spite of comment and of envy from the office, in spite of the flowers and messages and calls upon which Auntie and the girls were placing such flattering significance, Susan was far too honest with life not to realize that she had not even a thread by which to hold Peter Coleman, that he had not given an instant's thought, and did not wish to give an instant's thought to her, or to any woman, as a possible sweetheart and wife.

She surprised him, she amused him, she was the company he liked best, easiest to entertain, most entertaining in turn, this she knew. He liked her raptures over pleasures that would only have bored the other girls he knew, he liked the ready nonsense that inspired answering nonsense in him, the occasional flashes of real wit, the inexhaustible originality of Susan's point-of-view. They had their own vocabulary, phrases remembered from plays, good and bad, that they had seen together, or overheard in the car; they laughed and laughed together at a thousand things that Susan could not remember when she was alone, or, remembering, found no longer amusing. This was all wonderful, but it was not love.

But, perhaps, she consoled herself, courtship, in his class, was not the serious affair she had always known it to be in hers. Rich people took nothing very seriously, yet they married and made good husbands for all that. Susan would blame herself for daring to criticize, even in the tiniest particular, the great gift that the gods laid at her feet.

One June day, when Susan felt rather ill, and was sitting huddled at her desk, with chilled feet and burning cheeks, she was sent for by old Mr. Baxter, and found Miss Emily Saunders in his office. The visitor was chatting with Peter and the old man, and gaily carried Susan off to luncheon, after Peter had regretted his inability to come too. They went to the Palace Hotel, and Susan thought everything, Miss Emily especially, very wonderful and delightful, and, warmed and sustained by a delicious lunch, congratulated herself all during the afternoon that she herself had risen to the demand of the occasion, had really been "funny" and "nice," had really "made good." She knew Emily had been amused and attracted, and suspected that she would hear from that fascinating young person again.

A few weeks later a letter came from Miss Saunders asking Susan to lunch with the family, in their San Rafael home. Susan admired the handsome stationery, the monogram, the bold, dashing hand. Something in Mary Lou's and Georgianna's pleasure in this pleasure for her made her heart ache as she wrote her acceptance. She was far enough from the world of ease and beauty and luxury, but how much further were these sweet, uncomplaining, beauty-starved cousins of hers!

Mary Lou went with her to the ferry, when the Sunday came, just for a ride on the hot day, and the two, being early, roamed happily over the great ferry building, watching German and Italian picnics form and file through the gateways, and late-comers rush madly up to the closing doors. Susan had been to church at seven o'clock, and had since washed her hair, and washed and pressed her best shirtwaist, but she felt fresh and gay.

Presently, with a shout of pleasure that drew some attention to their group, Peter Coleman came up to them. It appeared that he was to be Miss Saunders' guest at luncheon, too, and he took charge of the radiant Susan with evident satisfaction, and much laughter.

"Dear me! I wish I was going, too," said Mary Lou mildly, as they parted. "But I presume a certain young man is very glad I am not," she added, with deep finesse. Peter laughed out, but turned red, and Susan wished impatiently that Mary Lou would not feel these embarrassing inanities to be either welcome or in good taste.

But no small cloud could long shadow the perfect day. The Saunders' home, set in emerald lawns, brightened by gay-striped awnings, fragrant with flowers indoors and out, was quite the most beautiful she had ever seen. Emily's family was all cordiality; the frail, nervous, richly dressed little mother made a visible effort to be gracious to this stranger, and Emily's big sister, Ella, in whom Susan recognized the very fat young woman of the Zinkand party, was won by Susan's irrepressible merriment to abandon her attitude of bored, good-natured silence, and entered into the conversation at luncheon with sudden zest. The party was completed by Mrs. Saunders' trained nurse, Miss Baker, a placid young woman who did not seem, to Susan, to appreciate her advantages in this wonderful place, and the son of the house, Kenneth, a silent, handsome, pale young man, who confined his remarks during luncheon to the single observation, made to Peter, that he was "on the wagon."

The guest wondered what dinner would be, if this were luncheon merely. Everything was beautifully served, smoking hot or icy cold, garnished and seasoned miraculously. Subtle flavors contended with other flavors, whipped cream appeared in most unexpected places--on the bouillon, and in a rosette that topped the salad--of the hot bread and the various chutneys and jellies and spiced fruits and cheeses and olives alone, Susan could have made a most satisfactory meal. She delighted in the sparkling glass, the heavy linen and silver, the exquisite flowers. Together they seemed to form a lulling draught for her senses; Susan felt as if undue cold, undue heat, haste and worry and work, the office with its pencil-dust and ink-stains and her aunt's house, odorous, dreary and dark, were alike a half-forgotten dream.

After luncheon they drove to a bright, wide tennis-court, set in glowing gardens, and here Susan was introduced to a score of noisy, white-clad young people, and established herself comfortably on a bench near the older women, to watch the games. This second social experience was far happier than her first, perhaps because Susan resolutely put her thoughts on something else than herself to-day, watched and laughed, talked when she could, was happily silent when she could not, and battled successfully with the thought of neglect whenever it raised its head. Bitter as her lesson had been she was grateful for it to-day.

Peter, very lithe, very big, gloriously happy, played in one set, and, winning, came to throw himself on the grass at Susan's feet, panting and hot. This made Susan the very nucleus of the gathering group, the girls strolled up under their lazily twirling parasols, the men ranged themselves beside Peter on the lawn. Susan said very little; again she found the conversation a difficult one to enter, but to-day she did not care; it was a curious, and, as she was to learn later, a characteristic conversation, and she analyzed it lazily as she listened.

There was a bright insincerity about everything they said, a languid assumption that nothing in the world was worth an instant's seriousness, whether it was life or death, tragedy or pathos. Susan had seen this before in Peter, she saw him in his element now. He laughed incessantly, as they all did. The conversation called for no particular effort; it consisted of one or two phrases repeated constantly, and with varying inflections, and interspersed by the most trivial and casual of statements. To-day the phrase, "Would a nice girl DO that?" seemed to have caught the general fancy. Susan also heard the verb to love curiously abused.

"Look out, George--your racket!" some girl said vigorously.

"Would a nice girl DO that? I nearly put your eye out, didn't I? I tell you all I'm a dangerous character," her neighbor answered laughingly.

"Oh, I love that!" another girl's voice said, adding presently, "Look at Louise's coat. Don't you love it?"

"I love it," said several voices. Another languidly added, "I'm crazy about it."

"I'm crazy about it," said the wearer modestly, "Aunt Fanny sent it."

"Can a nice girl DO that?" asked Peter, and there was a general shout.

"But I'm crazy about your aunt," some girl asserted, "you know she told Mother that I was a perfect little lady--honestly she did! Don't you love that?"

"Oh, I LOVE that," Emily Saunders said, as freshly as if coining the phrase. "I'm crazy about it!"

"Don't you love it? You've got your aunt's number," they all said. And somebody added thoughtfully, "Can a nice girl DO that?"

How sure of themselves they were, how unembarrassed and how marvelously poised, thought Susan. How casually these fortunate young women could ask what friends they pleased to dinner, could plan for to-day, to-morrow, for all the days that were! Nothing to prevent them from going where they wanted to go, buying what they fancied, doing as they pleased! Susan felt that an impassable barrier stood between their lives and hers.

Late in the afternoon Miss Ella, driving in with a gray-haired young man in a very smart trap, paid a visit to the tennis court, and was rapturously hailed. She was evidently a great favorite.

"See here, Miss Brown," she called out, after a few moments, noticing Susan, "don't you want to come for a little spin with me?"

"Very much," Susan said, a little shyly.

"Get down, Jerry," Miss Saunders said, giving her companion a little shove with her elbow.

"Look here, who you pushing?" demanded the gray-haired young man, without venom.

"I'm pushing you."

"'It's habit. I keep right on loving her!'" quoted Mr. Phillips to the bystanders. But he got lazily down, and Susan got up, and they were presently spinning away into the quiet of the lovely, warm summer afternoon.

Miss Saunders talked rapidly, constantly, and well. Susan was amused and interested, and took pains to show it. In great harmony they spent perhaps an hour in driving, and were homeward bound when they encountered two loaded buckboards, the first of which was driven by Peter Coleman.

Miss Saunders stopped the second, to question her sister, who, held on the laps of a girl and young man on the front seat, was evidently in wild spirits.

"We're only going up to Cameroncourt!" Miss Emily shouted cheerfully. "Keep Miss Brown to dinner! Miss Brown, I'll never speak to you again if you don't stay!" And Susan heard a jovial echo of "Can a nice girl DO that?" as they drove away.

"A noisy, rotten crowd," said Miss Saunders. "Mamma hates Emily to go with them, and what my cousins--the Bridges and the Eastenbys of Maryland are our cousins, I've just been visiting them--would say to a crowd like that I hate to think! That's why I wanted Emily to come out in Washington. You know we really have no connections here, and no old friends. My uncle, General Botheby Hargrove, has a widowed daughter living with him in Baltimore, Mrs. Stephen Kay, she is now,--well, I suppose she's really in the most exclusive little set you could find anywhere--"

Susan listened interestedly. But when they were home again, and Ella was dressing for some dinner party, she very firmly declined the old lady's eager invitation to remain. She was a little more touched by Emily's rudeness than she would admit, a little afraid to trust herself any further to so uncertain a hostess.

She went soberly home, in the summer twilight, soothed in spite of herself by the beauty of the quiet bay, and pondering deeply. Had she deserved this slight in any way? she wondered. Should she have come away directly after luncheon? No, for they had asked her, with great warmth, for dinner! Was it something that she should, in all dignity, resent? Should Peter be treated a little coolly; Emily's next overture declined?

She decided against any display of resentment. It was only the strange way of these people, no claim of courtesy was strong enough to offset the counter-claim of any random desire. They were too used to taking what they wanted, to forgetting what it was not entirely convenient to remember. They would think it absurd, even delightfully amusing in her, to show the least feeling.

Arriving late, she gave her cousins a glowing account of the day, and laughed with Georgie over the account of a call from Loretta's Doctor O'Connor. "Loretta's beau having the nerve to call on me!" Georgie said, with great amusement.

Almost hourly, in these days when she saw him constantly, Susan tried to convince herself that her heart was not quite committed yet to Peter Coleman's keeping. But always without success. The big, sweet-tempered, laughing fellow, with his generosity, his wealth, his position, had become all her world, or rather he had become the reigning personage in that other world at whose doorway Susan stood, longing and enraptured.

A year ago, at the prospect of seeing him so often, of feeling so sure of his admiration and affection, of calling him "Peter," Susan would have felt herself only too fortunate. But these privileges, fully realized now, brought her more pain than joy. A restless unhappiness clouded their gay times together, and when she was alone Susan spent troubled hours in analysis of his tones, his looks, his words. If a chance careless phrase of his seemed to indicate a deepening of the feeling between them, Susan hugged that phrase to her heart. If Peter, on the other hand, eagerly sketched to her plans for a future that had no place for her, Susan drooped, and lay wakeful and heartsick long into the night. She cared for him truly and deeply, although she never said so, even to herself, and she longed with all her ardent young soul for the place in the world that awaited his wife. Susan knew that she could fill it, that he would never be anything but proud of her; she only awaited the word--less than a word!--that should give her the right to enter into her kingdom.

By all the conventions of her world these thoughts should not have come to her until Peter's attitude was absolutely ascertained. But Susan was honest with herself; she must have been curiously lacking in human tenderness, indeed, NOT to have yielded her affection to so joyous and so winning a claimant.

As the weeks went by she understood his ideals and those of his associates more and more clearly, and if Peter lost something of his old quality as a god, by the analysis, Susan loved him all the more for finding him not quite perfect. She knew that he was young, that his head was perhaps a little turned by sudden wealth and popularity, that life was sweet to him just as it was; he was not ready yet for responsibilities and bonds. He thought Miss Susan Brown was the "bulliest" girl he knew, loved to give her good times and resented the mere mention of any other man's admiration for her. Of what could she complain?

Of course--Susan could imagine him as disposing of the thought comfortably--she DIDN'T complain. She took things just as he wanted her to, had a glorious time whenever she was with him, and was just as happy doing other things when he wasn't about. Peter went for a month to Tahoe this summer, and wrote Susan that there wasn't a fellow at the hotel that was half as much fun as she was. He told her that if she didn't immediately answer that she missed him like Hannibal he would jump into the lake.

Susan pondered over the letter. How answer it most effectively? If she admitted that she really did miss him terribly--but Susan was afraid of the statement, in cold black-and-white. Suppose that she hinted at herself as consoled by some newer admirer? The admirer did not exist, but Peter would not know that. She discarded this subterfuge as "cheap."

But how did other girls manage it? The papers were full of engagements, men WERE proposing matrimony, girls WERE announcing themselves as promised, in all happy certainty. Susan decided that, when Peter came home, she would allow their friendship to proceed just a little further and then suddenly discourage every overture, refuse invitations, and generally make herself as unpleasant as possible, on the ground that Auntie "didn't like it." This would do one of two things, either stop their friendship off short,--it wouldn't do that, she was happily confident,--or commence things upon a new and more definite basis.

But when Peter came back he dragged his little aunt all the way up to Mr. Brauer's office especially to ask Miss Brown if she would dine with them informally that very evening. This was definite enough! Susan accepted and planned a flying trip home for a fresh shirtwaist at five o'clock. But at five a troublesome bill delayed her, and Susan, resisting an impulse to shut it into a desk drawer and run away from it, settled down soberly to master it. She was conscious, as she shook hands with her hostess two hours later, of soiled cuffs, but old Mr. Baxter, hearing her apologies, brought her downstairs a beautifully embroidered Turkish robe, in dull pinks and blues, and Susan, feeling that virtue sometimes was rewarded, had the satisfaction of knowing that she looked like a pretty gipsy during the whole evening, and was immensely gratifying her old host as well. To Peter, it was just a quiet, happy evening at home, with the pianola and flashlight photographs, and a rarebit that wouldn't grow creamy in spite of his and Susan's combined efforts. But to Susan it was a glimpse of Paradise.

"Peter loves to have his girl friends dine here," smiled old Mrs. Baxter in parting. "You must come again. He has company two or three times a week." Susan smiled in response, but the little speech was the one blot on a happy evening.

Every happy time seemed to have its one blot. Susan would have her hour, would try to keep the tenderness out of her "When do I see you again, Peter?" to be met by his cheerful "Well, I don't know. I'm going up to the Yellands' for a week, you know. Do you know Clare Yelland? She's the dandiest girl you ever saw--nineteen, and a raving beauty!" Or, wearing one of Peter's roses on her black office-dress, she would have to smile through Thorny's interested speculations as to his friendship for this society girl or that. "The Chronicle said yesterday that he was supposed to be terribly crushed on that Washington girl," Thorny would report. "Of course, no names, but you could tell who they meant!"

Susan began to talk of going away "to work."

"Lord, aren't you working now?" asked William Oliver in healthy scorn.

"Not working as hard as I could!" Susan said. "I can't--can't seem to get interested--" Tears thickened her voice, she stopped short.

The two were sitting on the upper step of the second flight of stairs in the late evening, just outside the door of the room where Alfred Lancaster was tossing and moaning in the grip of a heavy cold and fever. Alfred had lost his position, had been drinking again, and now had come home to his mother for the fiftieth time to be nursed and consoled. Mrs. Lancaster, her good face all mother-love and pity, sat at his side. Mary Lou wept steadily and unobtrusively. Susan and Billy were waiting for the doctor.

"No," the girl resumed thoughtfully, after a pause, "I feel as if I'd gotten all twisted up and I want to go away somewhere and get started fresh. I could work like a slave, Bill, in a great clean institution, or a newspaper office, or as an actress. But I can't seem to straighten things out here. This isn't MY house, I didn't have anything to do with the making of it, and I can't feel interested in it. I'd rather do things wrong, but do them MY way!"

"It seems to me you're getting industrious all of a sudden, Sue."

"No." She hardly understood herself. "But I want to GET somewhere in this life, Bill," she mused. "I don't want to sit back and wait for things to come to me. I want to go to them. I want some alternative. So that--" her voice sank, "so that, if marriage doesn't come, I can say to myself, 'Never mind, I've got my work!'"

"Just as a man would," he submitted thoughtfully.

"Just as a man would," she echoed, eager for his sympathy.

"Well, that's Mrs. Carroll's idea. She says that very often, when a girl thinks she wants to get married, what she really wants is financial independence and pretty clothes and an interest in life."

"I think that's perfectly true," Susan said, struck. "Isn't she wise?" she added.

"Yes, she's a wonder! Wise and strong,--she's doing too much now, though. How long since you've been over there, Sue?"

"Oh, ages! I'm ashamed to say. Months. I write to Anna now and then, but somehow, on Sundays--"

She did not finish, but his thoughts supplied the reason. Susan was always at home on Sundays now, unless she went out with Peter Coleman.

"You ought to take Coleman over there some day, Sue, they used to know him when he was a kid. Let's all go over some Sunday."

"That would be fun!" But he knew she did not mean it. The atmosphere of the Carrolls' home, their poverty, their hard work, their gallant endurance of privation and restriction were not in accord with Susan's present mood. "How are all of them?" she presently asked, after an interval, in which Alfie's moaning and the hoarse deep voice of Mary Lord upstairs had been the only sounds.

"Pretty good. Joe's working now, the little darling!"

"Joe is! What at?"

"She's in an architect's office, Huxley and Huxley. It's a pretty good job, I guess."

"But, Billy, doesn't that seem terrible? Joe's so beautiful, and when you think how rich their grandfather was! And who's home?"

"Well, Anna gets home from the hospital every other week, and Phil comes home with Joe, of course. Jim's still in school, and Betsey helps with housework. Betsey has a little job, too. She teaches an infant class at that little private school over there."

"Billy, don't those people have a hard time! Is Phil behaving?"

"Better than he did. Yes, I guess he's pretty good now. But there are all Jim's typhoid bills to pay. Mrs. Carroll worries a good deal. Anna's an angel about everything, but of course Betts is only a kid, and she gets awfully mad."

"And Josephine," Susan smiled. "How's she?"

"Honestly, Sue," Mr. Oliver's face assumed the engaging expression reserved only for his love affairs, "she is the dearest little darling ever! She followed me out to the porch on Sunday, and said 'Don't catch cold, and die before your time,'--the little cutie!"

"Oh, Bill, you imbecile! There's nothing to THAT," Susan laughed out gaily.

"Aw, well," he began affrontedly, "it was the little way she said it--"

"Sh-sh!" said Mary Lou, white faced, heavy-eyed, at Alfred's door. "He's just dropped off... The doctor just came up the steps, Bill, will you go down and ask him to come right up? Why don't you go to bed, Sue?"

"How long are you going to wait?" asked Susan.

"Oh, just until after the doctor goes, I guess," Mary Lou sighed.

"Well, then I'll wait for you. I'll run up and see Mary Lord a few minutes. You stop in for me when you're ready."

And Susan, blowing her cousin an airy kiss, ran noiselessly up the last flight of stairs, and rapped on the door of the big upper front bedroom.