Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 3

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“The thing is,” said Amy, rubbing the sugar-bowl so firmly that her fingers suddenly bored holes through the polishing cloth, “the thing is that you’re twenty-two, Babs, and I’m twenty-four. Within the next six or seven years we’ll both marry, won’t we?”

“We certainly will,” Babs agreed fervently, from the sink.

She plunged the soap-shaker into a pan of hot water, frothed it to foam, slid into it a pile of scraped plates and saucers.

“Well, then, the question merely remains—whom?” Amy summarized it triumphantly.

“And when, and why, and where, and how,” her sister added.

“Oh, well, those’ll all take care of themselves!” Amy said easily. “The main point is: we’re not going to be old maids!”

“I suppose not,” Babs admitted uncertainly. And for some reason her breast rose and fell suddenly on a sharp sigh.

“But, now—this is what gets me,” Amy, with her air of fresh childish interest, went on animatedly, blowing at a silver spoon to dislodge the packed white powder on its chased handle, “do we know the boys now—the ones we are going to marry, I mean?”

Barbara Atherton laughed, and answered only with a faint shrug. She swept the dish mop gently about the receding tide of hot water in the sink, inverted the dishpan, wrung out the mop and set it on the window sill above the sink to dry. Then, with a fresh checked towel, she began rapidly to wipe the glasses and plates that were pyramided on the clean sink board.

“It seems likely,” she observed doubtfully, in a silence.

Amy, who had gone off into a dream, roused herself.

“What does?”

“I say it seems likely that we’ll both marry men from Cottonwood. Or near here, anyway.”

“Oh, I hope so!” Amy said, awakened, “I love it—’round here.”

“I believe,” Barbara observed thoughtfully, “that you do.”

“Well, you do, too, Barberry Bush!”

There was a second’s hesitation. Babs carried the hot, clean plates to the dresser, and stood there, stretching her young slim arms from shelf to shelf as she put them away.

“Of course I do. Only—I’ve never seen any place to compare Cottonwood to.”

“Barbara Atherton! You’ve seen San José and Santa Cruz millions of times, and San Francisco and Redwood City.”

Babs hung the last blue cup on its brass hook, turned about with a smile.

“That’s true. I forgot them. But we’ve never really lived anywhere but here, you know.”

The kitchen was hot, clean, shaded, orderly on this burning afternoon. To the girls it was an important and romantic spot. Although actually it was a commonplace room, conventionally furnished with a checked blue and brown linoleum, with two of the plain wooden chairs that are known the country over as “kitchen chairs,” and with a white stove, a white table, and a white cabinet. On the wall was a large calendar, embellished with a Corot painting, and lettered “Mackenzie & Co., Hardware, Plumbers’ Supplies and Sporting Goods, Cottonwood, California.”

Amelia Atherton, from her babyhood, had worn the far more appropriate title of Amy. Barbara was usually “Babs” in the family circle, but many years ago her grandmother had given her the special title of “Barberry Bush.” Old Mrs. Bush had been a dignified and beautiful figure in Cottonwood’s history, and her motherless granddaughters had spent much of their time with her, it was she who had given Barbara her stately name, Barbara Bush Atherton, and the nickname had followed as a matter of course. With them all, the name meant a mood of affection and approval, and Barbara secretly loved to hear herself so called.

Since their grandmother’s death, the girls had kept house for their father, incidentally “arting” their little kitchen, as Babs expressed it, and lending to this utilitarian apartment what the younger sister further poetically characterized “the touch of a woman’s foot.”

Whatever the touch was, it was expressed in the cream-painted woodwork, the blue cotton curtains, the speckless order and simplicity of blue plates and white saucepans, the potted lobelia adding one more blue note in the side window, and the little breakfast alcove furnished with a narrow strip of table crossed by a cotton runner from Perugia, and decorated, on its two white walls, with coloured prints.

“We live by the backs of magazines,” Barbara once said. “We gloat on budgets and tables of calories, and for anything headed ‘Discoveries’ we make a simultaneous leap and fight over!”

Much of all this was true. Their father, Professor Arthur Choate Atherton, had been forced by poor health to give up his chair in entomology in a southern university some years earlier, and had come back to Cottonwood, California, where his motherless little girls had spent all their babyhood with their grandmother.

After that they had lived with Grandma in an ugly bay-windowed house in Washington Street, where the shops were beginning to encroach upon the chicken yards and side gardens of an older day. And when Grandma died, they had sold the ugly big house and bought a pretty little one, the very house in whose kitchen the girls were busy now.

The old Professor, who spent his days roaming about searching for California beetles and moths and parasites, and his nights writing articles about them, admired his daughters enormously. He told them that they were practical, as their lovely mother had been, and that it was much wiser and better to be practical, in this cold world, than a dreamer like himself.

But as a matter of fact, Barbara was not really practical by nature. She, like Amy, had had a good deal of responsibility thrust upon her when very young, and she had risen to her burden rather from necessity than choice.

It was only a form of dreaming, her enthusiasm for new ways, for strange meals, and “arty” kitchens, odd frocks and queer books. She visualized them, when she found them in the backs of magazines, and Amy, who was her slave, was the one who actually brought them into being.

Half seriously, half wistfully, Barbara would mention blue bowls or vegetable suppers, the desirability of practice in French, or of hollyhocks outside the kitchen window, and Amy would quite seriously bring home bowls, seeds, books of verbs, and tomatoes and carrots.

Babs would perhaps have forgotten them entirely by the time they appeared, but her enthusiasms were always easily reawakened, and she would display such dashing originality in her manner of employing them that even Amy would immediately forget that she herself had had any hand in the matter.

Amy was clever, staid, sensible, sweet. Barbara was a wild, brilliant creature of varying moods and violent emotions. Amy was talented, as all the town knew. But Babs, which nobody suspected, was already a personality in embryo, and half her vagaries and heartaches came from the fact that she was instinctively and quite unconsciously seeking self-expression, in any way, by any path, through any door.

The younger sister was pretty, with blue eyes, and a soft snug cap of chestnut hair. Amy’s nose was short and straight, her hands and wrists nicely turned, her skin clear and almost colourless, her mouth small and dimpled. But Barbara was always more, or less, than actually pretty.

Sometimes she was merely a tall girl, with splendid bronze curly hair tangled over a low forehead, and hanging in a loose knot on her neck, a girl with blue eyes suspiciously frowning, and wide scarlet mouth bitten in moments of thought or argument by big, square white teeth. Golden freckles were powdered over Barbara’s milk-white skin, and when she was excited apricot colour blazed on her high cheek bones. Her eyes were long, dark-lashed, and strangely sweet and appealing in expression; “sweet eyes,” Barry du Spain called them sometimes; sweet even when Babs was at her homeliest.

But at her prettiest, on those rare occasions when freshly brushed curling bronze hair, skin, eyes, frock, and mood all matched, she could be startlingly handsome. Sometimes a new boy in town would meet her so, at a beach picnic or a dance, a starry-eyed creature all laughter and gipsy beauty, and would come to call upon her a few evenings later, to be pained and amazed at the bored, oddly dulled, plain girl into which an unfortunate mood had metamorphosed her.

She did not care much about her appearance; indeed, from her very teens Barbara had worn an air of abstracted and busy indifference to a great many of the interests of her school group. She was always adventuring, experimenting, reaching beyond the placid limitations of the life in Cottonwood, trying to find something bigger, something more essentially her own. All the other girls imitated certain things about Barbara, but she never imitated anyone.

And behind her, adoring and scolding and bewildered, came Amy, consoling her for her many tumbles, and inserting, beneath her castles in the air, a solid foundation of practical help and common sense.

“If you had to marry one boy in Cottonwood, now, Babs,” Amy pursued, on this particular afternoon, “whom would you marry?”

“One? Amy, I’m ashamed of you! Do you mean that you think of marrying more than one?”

Amy giggled, screwing the powdered box-top firmly over the polishing powder.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I suspect you of meaning a great deal more than you seem to,” Barbara answered shrewdly. She gathered Amy’s new-polished silver into her fine big hands. “You’ve been after something all afternoon,” she added suspiciously.

“I have not! I was just wondering,” Amy answered, flushing and laughing guiltily.

“Well, whom would you?”

“If—I—had—to—marry—a—Cottonwood—boy—” Amy mused, pursing her lips, narrowing her eyes and staring into space—“maybe Joe Dodge,” she offered, temporizing.

“Joe Dodge!” Babs echoed, with a scoffing laugh.

“Well, Fatto Roach,” Amy suggested. “I’ll tell you whom!” she interrupted herself suddenly. “I’d marry Ward Duffy, in a minute! You know—the Duffys who keep boarders on Cherry Street.”

“Amy, you wouldn’t marry a doctor!”

“I think Ward’s a darling,” Amy was ruminating, more and more pleased with the thought. “Next time we go down to the river, let’s ask Ward. We’ve never asked him. I used to love him—let’s ask him.”

“We couldn’t ask him before. He’s been away at Medical College for five years.”

“I know. But let’s ask him! He’s kind of homely,” Amy admitted affectionately, “but I’ll bet he’s smart. I’m going to ask him.”

She stopped, smiling, rose to put her silver polish away, hung her apron behind the closet door, and washed her hands.

“Let’s go down to Washington Street—they’ll all be down there, it’s much cooler,” Barbara suggested, “and we can have some sodas.”

“Yes, but now you, Babs. Whom would you marry, if you had to marry a boy you know right now?”

“Oh, let me see——” The younger girl bit her lip, squinted.

“Barbara Atherton, you are the most affected girl I ever saw!” Amy said. Babs burst out laughing, and her colour rose.

“You think I could get Link Mackenzie away from Inez?” she asked self-consciously. This was sheer nonsense, and Amy laughed. Inez was not popular.

“I think you could get anyone away from Pola Negri!”

“Well, Inez may have Link,” Barbara said seriously. It was without concern, as Amy noted with a sinking heart. “But I like Link,” Barbara added. “We have the same birthday—Christmas Eve. And ever since I was about fourteen Link has always sent me a present!”

“And if Inez did, whom then, Babs?”

“Oh, Fox, I guess. Fox Madison. I’ve always thought he had such an adorable name. Harry Lawrence Fox George Madison.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” said the other girl, hurt.

Barbara glanced at her quickly. A penitent look crossed her laughing face, and she coloured brilliantly.

“You mean you think I’d take Barry?” she said, rather low.

“Well, wouldn’t you?” Amy asked fearfully.

“Not—” Babs cleared her throat—“not if he didn’t ask me, dear.”

It was at moments like this that she seemed, to Amy, so much older than she was. Amy could not have said a thing like that, she was infinitely less simple than Barbara, for all her sense and sweetness. Barbara’s odd, splendid humility sometimes took her sister’s breath away.

“But if he did ask you?”

Babs’s head was hanging, her eyes averted.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Amy came to the screen door beside her, tried to look into her face.

“You wouldn’t marry him!”

No answer.

“Babs, he hasn’t a penny. You’d have to go down the Coast to that awful old deserted ranch of his and raise pigs! All he can do is write poetry—and poets never have any money! And he’s so selfish—and he’s so stuck on himself.”

Barbara laughed briefly, mirthlessly.

“I don’t think he’s really conceited—Barry. It’s just that he—he sees things differently from the rest of us.”

“I’ll say he sees things differently from the rest of us,” Amy muttered rebelliously. “He’ll spoil any party, to get the seat next to you; he’ll read about that darned old Congo, or about going down to Kew in lilac time—wherever it is!—until everyone but you goes to sleep, and you only stay awake out of politeness. He thinks I’m a fussy old maid——”

“I’m not going to marry Barry du Spain, Amy,” Barbara said as the other’s voice failed. She put her hand on Amy’s shoulder, and looked a little sadly, yet whimsically smiling, too, into Amy’s eyes. “In the first place, he isn’t going to ask me,” she went on. “He isn’t the kind of boy who falls in love with anyone.”

“Except himself!” thought Amy. But she had the tact to be still.

“And in the second place,” resumed Barbara, who was perhaps talking as much to herself as her sister, “in the second place, he is too rare—and queer—too much Pan and fairy and gnome—to marry.”

“Your life,” Amy said solemnly, suppressing a desire to ejaculate first: “I’d pan him!”—“your life would be perfectly crazy. You’d never do anything the way other people do, and you’d never know where the next meal was coming from. You’d live like the penguins on Abalone Rock.”

“And I might like that!” Barbara murmured, dimpling, her cheeks roses.

“Your children,” Amy added firmly, “would be freaks.”

“I adore freaks!”

“Barbara,” pleaded Amy, abandoning argument, and appealing only to the emotions, “please don’t marry him!”

“But I’m not even thinking about it, you idiot!”

“Only—you do like him.”

The traitor blood came into Babs’s cheeks; she lowered her eyes again.

“Well, come on! We’re going to get some sodas,” she changed the subject briskly. “Bring out my white hat, and while you’re getting yours, I’ll give this stuff to the chickens.”

She picked up a covered granite-ware pan from the table on the kitchen porch and went down two plastered steps into the backyard.

It was a pretty backyard, one of a friendly neighbourhood of pretty backyards. The Athertons lived in the new development called “Las Haciendas” on the south boundary of the town; theirs was one of fifty charming six-room bungalows, plastered in cream and distempered pink, and roofed with pipe tiles. The gardens were walled high and quaintly, the square windows grilled, and there were arches and patios, flagged paths and fountains, all on a small but perfect scale.

The Athertons had no car in their garage, but it was useful to house their father’s precious Buff Orpingtons, eleven fowls, six chicks, and a rooster, and it also sheltered flower pots, garden tools, watering hose, and some lockers in which their father carried on modest entomological experiments.

Barbara, as the chickens pecked about her feet to-day, was joined casually by a tall, loosely built young man, who stared at her through glasses and smiled sleepily as he said:

“Aren’t you home early, Barberry Bush?”

“Hello, Barry,” the girl smiled, with a quick analytical glance. “Early? No, it’s almost five.”

“Oh, Lord! I thought it was about three.”

“And what have you been doing all day, that you could lose two hours so casually?”

“I went out to the ranch this morning—on Tomas’s milk wagon; twelve miles. And Rita scrambled me some eggs. And then I went out to Abalone Rock for awhile.”

Barbara smiled at him indulgently, scattering the last crumbs. It didn’t matter what Barry said to her, or in what mood he chanced to be. His measure, by that mysterious ruling that is the secret of romantic girlhood, was always the exact measure of her own heart.

He did not suspect it; indeed, she had only recently made the discovery herself; it still astonished and fluttered her, in the secret depths of her soul. It had only been very recently, during the last few months, that she had been able to face it. She loved Barry du Spain. This—this funny shaky feeling, this strange glowing and quivering and thrilling, Barbara told herself innocently, was the great thing itself—was love!

It made her feel oddly like a little girl, sometimes. But more often she felt motherly toward Barry, infinitely older and wiser and more developed than he.

“There is a copper shine on your brown hair,” the man said now, in the unmistakable rhythm of the sonnet, “as if from out your mother earth you drew bright metal strands to make a part of you—a fillet, like her hand in blessing, there! Yet, I, your poet——” He stopped short.

“Barry, you aren’t making that up as you go along!”

“Well—kinder——”

“Well, I think that’s perfectly charming! Why on earth don’t you write them down and make them into a book? Now, come into the kitchen and let me get a pencil, and go on with that poem ‘To Barbara, in a June Sunset.’ ”

“Oh, forget it! Speaking of sunset, look at it, Barberry Bush! And you talk about kitchens and pencils!”

She stood beside him, erect and slender and tall, but not as tall as he, even though his broad shoulders drooped a little toward her, and the characteristic attitude of his head was to be just a hint lowered toward the world. Barry was an enormous person, at twenty-five, lean, loosely built, strong. His bones were big, his shoulders wide, his arms and legs long. His hair was black, worn in loose shining scallops pushed carelessly from a thoughtful forehead, and his pleasant, blinking eyes were very, very blue. He had a husky, drawling voice, a beautiful mouth whose smile showed splendid even teeth, and the rather high cheek bones and slightly underslung jaw that hinted at his Spanish blood.

“By golly, I met the most interesting man I ever saw in my life to-day!” he said now suddenly.

Babs had been dreaming; wondering what it would be like to have this man’s love. She could love him, of course, any woman could. But suppose he loved, some day? Suppose he suddenly began to experience the trembling and the ecstasies; ah, what a titanic and glorious person Barry would be then!

“Barry, were you ever in love?” she wanted to ask him. But because her own feelings toward him were so vital a part of her being, she did not dare. She concentrated her attention resolutely upon what he was saying.

“Cotter, that’s his name. He’s the tall red-headed guy who goes around the Nation House, cleaning things.”

The girl gave a scandalized laugh.

“Not the person who sweeps the sidewalk and washes the windows?”

“That’s the one,” Barry agreed eagerly. “He’s a wonder. It seems—it’s the most interesting thing you ever heard!—it seems——”

“Babs, aren’t we going down to Bartell’s for sodas?” Amy called patiently, at this point, from the house.

Babs, who had been laughing indulgently at Barry, felt a little check. Somehow his enthusiastic friendship for the servant at the Nation House did not seem so amusing when Amy, coldly unsympathetic, was also a listener.

“His father was in a circus,” Barry resumed the story, when they were walking down the street, “and this kid, when he was only about eight, used to have to——”

Amy’s patient glance met her sister’s eye. Barbara found herself wishing that Barry, by some inspiration, might some day suspect that Amy did not like him.