Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 10

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One August day, in the long vacation, when she and Amy had walked back from the bathing beach, where all Cottonwood’s younger crowd had gathered for a dip, and were lunching in the kitchen, Amy told her that Marianne had refused to marry Fox Madison.

Barbara stood perfectly still at the sink. Fox was a joke; no self-respecting girl in her twenties would want to marry this florid, unambitious idler past forty. Yet ...

Yet, without anyone suspecting how he felt, quietly and unostentatiously, on one of these summer days, he had actually asked her. Who else had asked her? Who else was going to ask her?

“How do you know, Amy?”

“He told Ward Duffy, and Ward told me.”

“And she refused him?”

“Oh, of course! She’s waiting for Link. It makes me sick to have her get him,” Amy said carelessly.

“She has lots of attractive points, Amy.”

“Oh, she’s fascinating, of course—she gets them all. Except Ward—except Ward—except Ward!” Amy did not say the last words aloud, she merely sang them in her heart. But their truth was the secret of her indifference to Marianne’s charm.

“I guess she’ll get Link,” Barbara observed, hoping to be contradicted.

“Oh, he’s crazy about her now; anyone can see it,” Amy answered. Barbara told herself that Amy knew nothing about the matter. Link was constantly in Marianne’s company, and that, in Cottonwood, was quite enough to start the rumour.

“We used to have such fun at our old Sunday night suppers,” Barbara mused. Paper napkins, sandwiches, chocolate, and Barbara’s famous ice-box cake, eight or ten guests scattered about the little patio, and afterward a walk if the evening were warm, and games in the kitchen if it were chilly. Delicious, noisy silly games, with the girls’ faces getting flushed and their hair tumbling, weak gasping of laughter, feeble and tearful screams of mirth. “I wish we could have one of those evenings again,” the girl thought wistfully.

Would Marianne think it silly, sandwiches and cocoa and games? Marianne would plunge into the cheapest coffee van, or the dirtiest tamale parlour, and find them great fun. But would she make the Athertons’ kitchen and the paper napkins and the little patio seem ridiculous? Barbara knew she might.

And not for the first time, nor the tenth, Barbara only waited until the heat of the day somewhat lessened, with the coming of the late afternoon, to walk up to the Wilsons’ and find out for herself what they were all doing. She despised herself for going, but she could not keep away.

A tall, slim girl, with her bright hair almost hidden under her small white hat, she strolled slowly toward the aristocratic portion of the town where the Mackenzies and Wilsons lived, and as she went she felt a sort of sickness in her soul.

Anything would have been better, more dignified than this—to hang about where one was not wanted.

But then she was wanted; they always welcomed her most enthusiastically when she came in.

Only this was different from the old feeling, the careless, cheerful impulse to go where one wished to go, and say and do what one wished. Marianne’s coming had seemed to intensify everything—to make them all self-conscious and strange with one another.

Families were driving about through the wide, shady streets, in little motor cars, as families always did on pleasant summer afternoons. Mother and father with the baby on the front seat; Grandma and the older children in the back. Barbara smiled and nodded; many of these youngsters were, or had been, her pupils.

She felt within her a deep, restless discontent with life. Why couldn’t she be happy with a new book; with her father’s always interesting conversation; with the beach and the patio and the sweetness of the August day; with the contemplation of Amy’s quiet affair with Ward Duffy, and with Barry’s unswerving, if fantastic, fidelity to herself? Why didn’t the mere prospect of a free afternoon, of figs for supper, of a swim before breakfast to-morrow, mean anything to her any more?

Nobody was at the Wilsons’ house; the maid thought they were all over at Mr. Mackenzie’s. Barbara walked the long block, under the big trees, and between the old-fashioned gardens where flowers made swimming blots of colour in the afternoon sun.

Inez, Marianne, Link, Margaret, and Harry Poett were in the dark, handsome library, among the musty shadows and the odorous leather bindings; they said it was cooler in here than anywhere out of doors. Barbara protested that it was not so hot, now. She, Amy, and Ward were going to walk down for a swim, before supper.

The library faced north, across the rose garden, where level shafts of sinking light shone like gold gauze, and bees shot to and fro. The flowers stood erect, mesmerized into motionless sleep, enveloped in strange bright luminescence.

Beyond the rose garden was the grape arbour; thick dusty clusters of fragrant Isabella grapes showed between the folds of the cotton leaves, dry tendrils curled about them. And still beyond was the high evergreen hedge that shut off the side road: a hedge so old that it wore barren patches, where the yellowed pattern of the branches was bare, and whose thicker, brownish-green parts were etched with dusty cobwebs, spread to the last delicate filament on the dark background.

To the west, whence streamed the banners of gold and red, lay the dignified wide leisurely stable yards and poultry runs, fences and windmill and pump, paddock and cow barns. There were fruit trees here, peach, pear, and apricot, and spreading high above the new brick garage a towering fig tree, whose green-black fruit strewed the bare ground beneath. Major Mackenzie’s old roan looked mildly over a barred gate, now and then stretching a wrinkled kid nose toward the flowers of the hollyhock hedge, just out of reach, whinnying softly. A faucet, dripping under a heavily leaved and heavily flowered fuchsia bush, had made a pool where wary little brown birds were drinking and pluming themselves. The fuchsia flowers were royal purple, and pale clear pink, fringed and tasselled like court ladies.

Nothing sensational going on in the library, nothing to see in the side garden. Yet Barbara sensed change, sensed import under the smooth-running surface of the commonplace scene.

Marianne, always the centre of every group, was extended comfortably on a chaise longue, her slim legs and crossed ankles in full view, a cigarette in her fingers, her lazy, mischievous glance moving from one face to another in turn. She spoke little, and Barbara noted that Link, sunk into a wicker chair near by, spoke less. Harry was teasing young Margaret, and Inez was making her usual unfortunate effort to lend sprightliness to the conversation.

Link was charming in his own home, and Barbara found herself realizing, as if for the first time, that this splendid place, this big brick mansion, with its shuttered bay windows and big curved central stairway, would be his some day; barns and stables, flowers and arbours, fruit trees and idling horses.

Link’s wife, whoever she might be, would be mistress here. What a rôle for a girl to fill! What a sunny life with this man for a companion, and this friendly town for a background!

Link asked her to help him, when refreshments were in order, and Barbara went with him into the clean, big pantry that smelled of scrubbed wood and cheese and apples, and they got out bottles of ginger ale, glasses, and cheese crackers, together.

The maids were out, it being Thursday afternoon; Barbara saw a supper of cold meat, salad, and cake neatly arranged for Margaret’s convenience in the ice box. Sunshine slanted redly across the orderly, spacious kitchen, checked glass-towels were hanging neatly on hinged poles, two moss roses were in a glass on the spotless sink. Outside the screen door, watching them wistfully, lay Link’s big Airedale.

“Hello, Gob!” Link greeted him. His voice seemed to Barbara oddly quiet and heavy, somehow. The dog’s tail beat an instant response upon the porch floor, and his eyes blinked, but he did not stir otherwise.

“He knows you are not going to let him in, the old darling!” Barbara said affectionately.

“He knows he can’t come into the kitchen,” Link assented absently.

She gave a last glance at the tray, picked a bottle-opener from the hook where bottle-openers always hung waiting, and twirled it on her finger.

“ ’Member one night in this kitchen, years ago, when we were kids, Link, when your Aunt Lily was here, and we had a candy pull?”

“Do I?”

He put the tray down, and Barbara felt herself amazed and a little frightened when she felt his big hands firmly holding her shoulders, and saw the expression on the face so near her own.

“Do you remember the night last spring, when you wouldn’t let me kiss you, Babs?” he asked, in an odd tone, and with a strange smile.

“I remember the night you mean—yes.”

“I wish—” Link said—“I wish you had let me!”

The pain in his voice and in his eyes puzzled Barbara and made her heart ache vaguely.

“Why?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. But I wish you had. Everything was so simple, then.” Link paused. “Marianne says you like Barry du Spain. Is that true, Barbara?” he added suddenly.

“Not—not that way. At least, I don’t think so.” The girl spoke confusedly, breathlessly, in a low tone.

“You don’t think so?” he echoed, smiling bitterly. “My dear, when it’s that—you won’t think anything, you’ll know.” And he jerked his head in the direction of the library. Tone and expression, when he spoke again, were full of significance. “Would you be sorry?” he asked.

It had come. It had come. No more uneasy speculation and vague jealousy and restless analysis now.

The world plunged, for Barbara, resettled on its axis, but never to be the same. The impossible had happened, the unbearable must be borne.

“You are sorry?” Link rather accused her than asked her, reading her look.

“Oh, no—I’m glad, of course!” she faltered bravely.

He dropped his hands from her shoulders and walked to the window, and she followed him there. They stood together, looking out unseeing at the dooryard, and the laden gooseberry and currant bushes, and the rinsed milk bottles, neatly inverted on a vine-wrapped picket fence.

“I’ve got it awfully hard!” Link said presently, with a gruff, embarrassed boyish laugh.

The girl sent him a quick oblique glance, looked out of the window again.

“I know you have!” she said quickly, in a low voice, her face reddening.

“She likes you a lot, Barberry Bush,” the man said awkwardly.

“I’m glad!” Her tone was quite lifeless; she felt oddly numb. What was the secret—why was she out of all this? Why hadn’t he—why hadn’t he made her understand? Why wasn’t it of Barbara Atherton that he was telling some other girl this?

Jealousy caught her in sharp teeth and shook her. It was all for Marianne—all for Marianne! It wasn’t fair.

Gooseberry bushes in the Mackenzie side garden, powdered with some white powder; a green painted trellis behind them, covered as closely and evenly as wall paper with the clean leaves and heavy white rosettes of the Lamarque rose.

“I guess it’s the first time, with me,” Link was saying, in a happily shamed and shaken voice he tried to make laughing. “She’s got me—I love her so! I want her so.”

“Good luck to you, dear,” Barbara said solemnly. And as she raised her innocent, troubled face, and her luminous eyes to his, he stooped quite simply and kissed her.

“Well!” ejaculated Harry Poett from the hall doorway, in joyous appreciation. “Really, Link—really, Barbara——”

“Oh, you shut up and mind your own business!” Barbara could say good-naturedly, instantly armed, and twirling her bottle-opener again, as she preceded the two boys to the library. “Don’t worry about Link and me!”

Marianne, raising a brown slim arm from which the flowered soft sleeve fluttered like a great wing, reached for another cigarette and regarded them with narrowed, brilliant eyes.

“Link, give an account of yourself,” she commanded lazily.

Barbara saw Link’s answering glance, she saw his big hands tremble as he opened and poured the drinks. Marianne’s power over him seemed to radiate from her like a visible aura; she had only to speak and her accents dominated the room; even when she lay still, sipping her ginger ale, and watching them all with her bright, quick eyes, they were all conscious supremely and primarily of her.

When Link crossed the side garden in the summer evenings and went up the Wilsons’ drive, Barbara wondered, when he took Marianne for walks under the big, moon-washed trees and loitered with her by a paddock gate, or when they two murmured and murmured on the side porch, deep into the night, did Marianne let him kiss her?

Barbara had not wanted him to kiss her, just a few months ago. He had told her she was stand-offish and cold. Was Marianne stand-offish and cold?

“People cure themselves of the drink habit and of the drug habit,” Barbara told herself sternly, walking home alone to join Amy and Barry and Ward for a late dip in the sea. “And I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll not think about them—I’ll not care what happens to Marianne, or how much she gets out of life! I have plenty without them—they really matter to me no more than if they were European royalty. I’ll be nice, I’ll be friendly and interested, but I’ll build my life without them. I must, unless I want to suffer frightfully in the next year or two. They’ll have announcement parties, and she’ll have the handsomest trousseau ever seen in Cottonwood, and the biggest wedding, and she’ll be mistress of that place ...

“She’ll be mistress of that place. And I daresay she’ll have a beautiful baby immediately, to show exactly how easy everything is for her....

“I mustn’t think this way, and I mustn’t care. Now! It’s over, and I’m going on my way serenely, to find my own place in the sun. Marianne Scott may be the most fascinating and irresistible woman alive, but she can’t marry more than one person, after all....

“Link. He simply worships her. Trembling and red and shaken like a boy in his first love affair ...

“But I mustn’t think about that. I’m not going there any more, I’m out of it, and it isn’t my fault, that’s just life. Some persons have things, and some persons haven’t, and that’s the end of it.”

It was hard to say; it was almost impossible to attempt. But Barbara had at least cleared the situation in her own mind by facing it heroically, and she armed herself to accept it heroically over and over again.

The commonplaceness—the uninterestingness of life overcame her like a flood. The very muscles of her hands and feet seemed to rebel at the eternal setting of tables, the washing of dishes, the patient, merry directions to the little stumbling children of the kindergarten. Life, for the first time, had mysteriously lost its flavour.

If before this she had analyzed the situation at all, it would have been to think that the pleasant days would go on in the same fashion forever; work, laughter, home duties, sodas at Bartell’s, dances at the Hall, and summer swims on the Casino Beach. And, presently, weddings for everyone.

But already there was a change. Already she was looking back at last winter, at last summer, as strangely happy times—gone forever. Some subtle, intangible agency had altered all the old relationships, had made all the careless, casual meetings between Cottonwood’s girls and boys self-conscious and significant.

Link Mackenzie and Marianne didn’t come to dances any more; there were not many dances, anyway. And somehow the life seemed to be taken out of any event at the Hall, for Barbara at least, when she knew that Link didn’t care about it, preferred to be somewhere else. All the town knew, now, that Link was in love with Marianne Scott and that his father was furious about it.

Amy was absorbed in a quiet yet deep affair with young Ward Duffy. Margaret Mackenzie had been sent East to boarding school. Inez Wilson had gone into professional invalidism and had vague and mysterious disorders, and trained nurses. Inez always looked cheerful and was beautifully dressed, in bed, but she would speak of nothing but blood pressure and aneurisms.

Link’s sister, young Mrs. “Ote” Barnard, appeared abstracted and anxious, when Barbara occasionally encountered her; Barbara was obliged to believe that either they had all been a crazy lot of irresponsible kids, a year ago, unaware of the real seriousness of life, or that this particular gloomy, foggy autumn was really duller and less eventful than any season Cottonwood had ever known.

In November there was rain, and heavy, milky fogs poured in from the ocean, and the smoke from damp leaf fires wrapped the town in pearly winding sheets. The air was still, cool, lifeless; clear yellow leaves still hung on the apple trees, and cosmos floated like little pale discs of pink and white on the bushy, delicate green of their thready, cloudlike foliage. In the shabby gardens of Cottonwood, heavy-headed chrysanthemums, beaded thick with water, hung motionless, and from the red hips of the rose trees spiders stretched great wheels of pale silver, jewelled with cloudy opals.

The sounds of clucking chickens, fish horns, boat whistles out on the coast, came dreamily through the still mornings. Barbara sometimes felt as if she were asleep, wondered vaguely what had metamorphosed her life so suddenly.

When Amy went off with Ward for supper in his mother’s old mansarded boarding house, near State Street, or when Ward took Amy to the movies, Barbara and Barry and Professor Atherton got supper together, and afterward Barry was companionable and amusing. He was quite devoid of social sense; Link Mackenzie and Lucy and Marianne meant no more to him than did any other persons in town; Barry was delighted that Barbara was seeing nothing of them this winter, and quite content with vegetable suppers, and pencil games afterward, in the Atherton house. And Barbara loved him for it.

One night, when Professor Atherton had gone early to bed, and when they were waiting in the pleasant warmth and brightness of the kitchen for Ward to bring Amy home, Barry began idly to discuss the future.

“It’s a definite thing between Ward and Amy, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I think so. She won’t admit it, but Ward’s got a chance in Los Angeles, and Amy keeps talking as if she expected to go south.”

“Your father’ll go with them, won’t he? He says he has to be there anyway, for some lectures.”

“I suppose so. We haven’t talked about it yet.”

“Would you go, Barberry Bush?” He was suddenly rather flushed, and his eyes shone. The girl laughed at her own confusion in not seeing what excited him.

“I don’t think so. I like my job. And Dad would be back in a few weeks. We might rent this place.”

She was sitting opposite him, in the little breakfast ingle, the table between them. They had been exulting over a magazine, just arrived, in which two of Barry’s poems had been given prominent place. It was far more amazing to Barbara than to him that almost everything he wrote was accepted, even though the pay of small magazines for short poems was never more than twenty-five dollars, and often five or ten. Barry took it coolly, but to Barbara it already spelled success.

Now she saw that he was smiling at her, foolishly and happily, and without knowing why, she smiled back. Her beautiful sunburned hand was lying palm upward on the table, and he dropped his own big firm hand upon it.

“Ever think about marrying me?” he asked, grinning, breathless, with a boy’s daring laugh. Barbara laughed, too, jerking her hand away and turning red.

“I haven’t happened to!”

There was a pause.

“Why not?” the man asked, suddenly earnest.

Another silence, although Barbara, with her head dropped on one side, looked at him deprecatingly; opened her mouth to speak, decided not to, and looked at him amusedly and reproachfully instead. She again essayed words, and no words came.

“Joke, huh?” he asked.

“No, Barry darling,” she soothed him hastily, putting her hand back into his, and dropping her tone to one of affectionate protest. “Only—only you sounded so serious!” she said.

“Well, I was!” Barry answered.

Suddenly, as the strange silence again deepened between them, and Barbara continued to regard him with half-amused and half-frightened eyes, he got up and came around the table, and sat down next to her. Holding her chin back like that of an unfriendly child, and laughing a little, she felt herself caught tight against his breast, and as she buried her face in his shoulder, the better to protect it, felt his kisses on her hair.

“I love you, Barberry Bush!” he said. “I love you terribly!”

She could not repulse him; it was so wonderful to be loved, to feel this big firm arm about her, to laugh excitedly into the shining eyes so close to her own.

“Barry, this is crazy!”

“Then let’s be crazy!”

And they both laughed joyously, as if it were a joke.

Perhaps it was, perhaps no sensible girl would have gotten satisfaction out of the passionate devotion of Barry du Spain. But the memory of that happy, silly half-hour in the kitchen, when they had talked all sorts of absurdities, and when his eyes had looked eagerness and joy and devotion into hers, was one of Barbara’s joys in the days that followed.

Amy was busy with her own affair, Professor Atherton was not very well and was glad to spend most of the cold, foggy season in bed. No one was paying any particular attention to Barbara and Barry; for two or three days the thrilling secret was their own, making all the commonplaces of the girl’s quiet life secretly thrilling and significant.

Barry wrote her exquisite poems and little love notes. Barbara would quite shamelessly catch up a volume of Shelley or Browning, and flash along the pages until she found just the right line or phrase with which to impress him, when she pencilled little requests or replies. Whenever they were alone, he put his arms about her and kissed her forehead, or the top of her shining coppery head, or her brown, shapely, slim hands.

It was like a masquerade to both. To Barbara there was great satisfaction and happiness in making him happy, in raising his mood to absolute ecstasy, as she talked of their married-life-to-be on the old ranch, and of the days of fame and fortune to come. It gratified her deeply to see her power over him, his agonies when she was critical, his delight when harmony reigned between them.

This went on for a week, perhaps, and then, on one particularly depressing morning, he found her at home, putting the pantry in order. Her father was not well, and Amy and Ward had decided upon a quiet wedding, early in the year, and would drive south to their new home for their honeymoon. Barbara admitted to herself she was unreasonable, but she could not banish from her heart a sense of being slighted, of being left behind by the current of events. She found herself looking at unmarried women curiously; Miss Porcher at the school, Miss Bates at the Library, both happy and busy and satisfactory human beings. But—but how the years flew by, between twenty and thirty, and how odd it would be some day to know one’s self to be finally grown beyond all the silly irrational planning for honeymoons and bungalows and budgets!

It was in this mood that Barry found her, putting the pantry in order, undecided and troubled about Amy’s plans, her father’s plans, her own plans. The patio was full of fog, the air was chilly in the pantry, and scented with ammonia and wet wood.

They talked for a few minutes, the man eagerly, the girl hesitatingly, her eyes lowered, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. After that, she ran upstairs to take a peep at her sleeping father and hastily change her clothes. She came down with her new blue coat buttoned snugly about her and a blue hat pulled down over her sunny hair. They were both laughing like mischievous children as Barbara, putting her hand in Barry’s, walked beside him to the City Hall. Young Mr. Hutchinson, the new assistant rector at St. Rita’s, married them just as the noon whistles were droning over Cottonwood.

Barbara Atherton watched the clergyman seriously, saw vaguely that there was the photograph of a pretty woman on his desk, and a pen tray of hand-painted china. Beyond his study window was a cold garden, drooping in the fog. The chrysanthemums wore shrivelled leaves of black, close to their white, sharply scented blooms.

Married. Married. They were getting married. The room was warmed upon this damp, inclement morning by a blue enamelled oil stove; it sent a ring of soft light into the air, as well as a column of warmth. Married. She would be Barbara du Spain.

“Anyway, he’s the closest boy friend I ever had,” she thought, glancing at Barry’s serious, handsome face. “Anyway, other girls get married, and it all comes out happily enough. Anyway, if he is a little bit spoiled, I’ll be so good to him, and make him so happy, that he’ll change. Anyway, I won’t be an old maid.”

It was over. “Kiss her,” said the clergyman, smiling, to Barry. The housemaid and Mrs. Pheland, for the Reverend Mr. Hutchinson boarded with Mrs. Pheland, appeared fluttered as they affixed their signatures, but Barbara wrote her new name with great composure. Barbara Atherton du Spain.

Barry, grinning boyishly, kissed her boyishly, too. It was the first time he had kissed her on the mouth.