Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 5

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At half-past ten the elders had gone home, and the dancing had become fast and furious. A fine mist rose from the floor, and, mingling with cigarette smoke, hung like a haze in the room. Through the haze the saxophones whined, and the shuffling of feet and occasional bursts of laughter and voices merged into a sort of steady dull hubbub as predominant as a sustained organ note.

The air was suffocating. Collars wilted, the men’s faces shone, the girls’ dresses looked bedraggled, and crisp bobs that were rapidly losing their curl were pushed carelessly from flushed damp faces.

Barbara, as she danced with Link, discussed the Wilsons’ cousin.

“Do you think she’s so pretty, Link?”

“Well, she looks sort of crazy and Russian—with that black hair and white skin.”

“Barry can’t stand her.”

“Well, I’m not crazy about her. She talks sort of affected. She’s a rotten dancer.”

“She smokes,” said Babs, who did not. “And she let one of the Poetts—Orville, I think it was, put something in her ginger ale—I saw it.”

“Oh, well,” Link said, with unexpected lenience, “they all do that. That wasn’t so bad.”

“Link!” the girl said, surprised. “I thought you hated that sort of thing at dances.”

The man gave her an odd look; there was something almost speculative in it, as if he saw her or some aspect of her for the first time.

“Let’s go outside and get a breath of air,” he suggested.

They went to the main door, where young Dr. Ward Duffy gallantly offered Barbara his coat. Cold outside, he said, interestedly.

Barbara slipped her bare arms into the light, soft, loose garment, and she and Link stepped out into dark, cool Washington Street. The fresh night air, striking her hot face and parched lungs, was delicious as creek water.

The little Park, spattered with blots and streaks of moonshine, was just opposite the Hall. Rows of cars, unlighted, were parked between. The night was so still that except when the trolley spun by, in a whirl of humming noise and harsh light, they could hear the sea, crashing evenly on the shore, a quarter of a mile away.

Link was not as large a man as Barry, but there was something infinitely more impressive about him. His voice, his strong hands, the keen glance of his handsome gray eyes, the male notes in his pleasant voice, and a hundred other things made Link seem more of a man than Barry. His most trivial comment or statement was taken seriously by his group, whereas all Cottonwood—and especially young Cottonwood—had laughed at Barry from kindergarten days.

Link was rich, but even if he had not been of an age and nature that take small cognizance of material things, he would have been far more, at twenty-five, than a rich man’s son. He was temperate, industrious, conscientious—just a shade too much indeed, of all these good things to seem quite human. Link’s wealth seemed a natural appurtenance, rather than an actuating element, in his life.

Barbara had too honest an indifference to money in her own make-up to appreciate this particular quality in him. She never thought of herself as becoming a rich woman, when the other girls teased her about Link as a beau. Wealth, at this particular moment, would have made small difference in her dreams. She did not want many clothes; she would have shuddered at the idea that servants must positively and unavoidably be under her orders.

Books, friends, the beach, her own little waxwork kitchen, her experiments and dreams, were enough. And to these Link could only add companionship, should he prove to be the right companion, and perhaps be the means through which her innocent thoughts might go on to children—she loved children.

Now she glanced toward him, as they strolled slowly between the pepper and palm trees, and saw the glitter of his eyes, in the dark.

“I thought you hated women smoking.”

“Well, I do—in a way. At least, I told you I was kind of glad Lucy and Margaret didn’t. But—but——”

“But what?” asked Barbara, surprised, as he paused.

They were in a dark, deserted part of the Park. Now suddenly he threw his cigarette away, and caught her tightly in his arms.

Silently, terrified, Barbara bent her body back, her hands hard against his shoulders, her face twisting and jerking madly away from his expected kiss.

“I hate this sort of thing!” she said breathlessly.

Link was not moving. And after a few blind seconds of struggle the girl, held close against him, became motionless, too.

“Link, this is so silly!” she panted, trying to laugh. “I tell you I hate it!”

“Exactly,” he said, a little shaken himself, yet with a sort of easy mastery. “I know you do.”

“Please——” Barbara began, making a sudden and ineffectual movement to free herself.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” Link said unsteadily.

“Then—then why hold me this way?”

“But the point is—you’ve told me twice that you hate it. But why do you hate it? Most girls don’t.”

“I don’t know about other girls,” Babs said, warming, “but I know I do.”

“Hate what?” he asked teasingly.

“Mushing,” Barbara answered viciously.

“Oh, is this mushing?”

She jerked violently again—again felt the firm grip of the iron fingers.

“I just would like to know why all the other girls in this town will let boys kiss them, and you won’t,” Link said.

“I do believe”—said Barbara, glancing up insolently at him, with her bright, strange eyes—“you’ve been drinking!”

“Well. If I have?”

She knew him to be abstemious almost to fanaticism, and a new fear shook her. Suppose he had taken enough to make himself entirely irresponsible?

“Other girls,” he was saying, “when they like men—well, they show it. They flirt, they get kissed and kiss back.”

“Well, I don’t!” Barbara whispered, struggling again.

“Keep still. Why don’t you?”

“Because I loathe it!”

“But you shouldn’t. You’re young, you’re pretty, and you cut yourself out of all this like a nun! When I dance with you I feel as if I was dancing with a nun. You hold off—you talk about Coventry Patmore!”

A reluctant laugh, not entirely unlike a sob, broke from her, and somewhat cleared the air.

“Barbara, how many boys have kissed you?”

“How many—— I think you’re very insulting. No boys, of course, except at Hallowe’en parties, and under mistletoe and all that!”

“I thought so,” Link said, with a sort of gloomy triumph.

She had forgotten everything but the argument now, and despite the fact that his fingers still kept her an ignominious prisoner, she spoke with natural interest.

“Well, is it your idea that every boy in town shall kiss the—the girl—shall kiss any of the girls you happen to like?”

Link was silent, but he sighed, on a note of despair. He dropped his hands, and he and Barbara walked back in the darkness, toward the windows that were gushing light from the Hall.

The first relieved feeling of getting safely back to her familiar moorings was presently invaded for Barbara by an odd sense of anticlimax. If he had wanted to kiss her, back there in the Park, why hadn’t he done it? Was there something about her that not only didn’t invite advances, but that actually repelled them?

“You don’t smoke, you don’t drink, you don’t make up, you don’t let boys kiss you,” Link summarized it.

“Oh, I do make up!” She was almost defending the custom. “That is, Amy and I use powder, when we feel like it, and she often says she’d use rouge, only it always shows on her so. I don’t need it—I’d use it in a minute if I did. As for the other things, I don’t do them because I don’t like them.”

“But, Barbara, you ought to want to do them, and give them up because they aren’t—well, quite nice.”

They were close to the Hall now, and her laugh could ring out unafraid. Instantly the murmuring and laughing in more than one car, parked close by in the dark street, stopped as if by magic.

“That sort of thing, I mean!” Link persisted, jerking his head in the direction from which the amorous murmuring had come.

“What on earth,” Barbara asked curiously, “has started you off on this track to-night? Are you so strong for petting parties and hip flasks?”

“You know I’m not. I only feel that—that a girl can carry——”

“Prudishness,” she supplied scornfully, as he groped for a word.

“Well, prudishness, then. Can carry it too far!”

“Link, what nonsense! You know very well that all the mothers and fathers and clergymen in the country have been perfectly aghast at the way young people have been going on, at dances and roadhouses, and the way they’ve been running round in motor cars——”

“I know it. Only—only you’re too young and pretty, Barbara, to side with them.”

Barbara pondered. Link was, after all, an important person in her world, and she was impressed by his stumbling and ineloquent earnestness.

“I have a good time,” she offered presently in self-defence. “I don’t sit around talking to the old ladies at dances.”

“I know you do—or don’t, I mean! But all the fellows know that you won’t stand for the slightest—for the least——”

“Liberty.” She gave him his word again. “Well, is that so bad?” she asked innocently.

“No, of course it’s not bad. But—but things—like kissing, do have their place, Barbara, you have to admit that?”

“When you’re engaged—yes.” The girl answered promptly and dispassionately.

“And how are you ever going to get engaged, if you are so stand-offish?” Link persisted.

They were walking slowly up and down the sidewalk now, between the dark row of the cars, and the darker, massed foliage of the Park. The girl laughed softly.

“My dear Lincoln, when it is the real thing, one—one breaks. One gives all that——”

There was a silence. Then Link threw away his cigarette, and said discontentedly:

“Some women never get it, and never want it, and never miss it. My mother was like that. Cool—loving, but not demonstrative. She’d put up her cheek for us to kiss.”

“I think your mother was one of the finest women in this town,” Barbara countered triumphantly. “I wouldn’t want to be any different!”

“Yes, but Mother belonged to another generation. They didn’t do the things in her day that they do now.”

“Exactly. And I like the old way best!”

“You like to go down to the river with Barry, and have him read his poetry to you,” Link burst out suddenly, resentfully.

“Well, why not? Why wouldn’t marriage be exactly on such lines as that?” the girl demanded. “I think we hear altogether too much of this sex talk. I think the whole nation’s gone crazy on the subject. Companionship—that’s the priceless thing. Marriage, of course, and children, and friends, and all the rest. But companionship first. I could love a person madly, I know I could, without wanting him to grab me in his arms all the time and kiss my face out of shape!”

“That shows how much you know. I’m never with you, Barbara,” Link confessed, a little shamefacedly, a little resentfully, “but what I want to kiss you.”

She was so much restored, after the recent indignation and fright, to her own daring self, that she could raise her laughing face toward him, visible in the moonshine and shadow.

“Go ahead!” she whispered.

Again his iron fingers gripped her shoulders, but he made no attempt to kiss her, and he did not smile.

“No, I’ll be damned if I will,” he growled. “Not while you feel that way about it.”

“But back there in the Park,” she laughed sensibly, “when I made a fuss, then that made you mad, too!”

“We’re talking different languages,” Link said quietly. Barbara, even while she told herself that she must be right and he wrong, had an odd sense of having failed him, as she walked back to the Hall.

Later, she discussed it with Amy. Amy was sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing cold cream into her face. Barbara, already comfortable on her own pillows, on the other side of the room, was reading her Bible. Their grandmother had raised the girls with strong religious principles, and they usually read a “chapter,” every night, still hearing Granny’s cracked, sweet old voice on the familiar words.

It was almost one o’clock. Amy, thinking of entirely unrelated matters, while listening dreamily to the story of the Prodigal Son, yawned undisguisedly and ruffled her chestnut hair.

“Amy, do you think I’m a prude?” Barbara demanded suddenly. “Well, Link does,” she added aggrievedly, as Amy laughed.

“Did he say so?” Amy asked, instantly alert.

“Practically.”

“Oh, Babs, I think he is really crazy about you!” Amy said elatedly. “Imagine. With all the girls in town after him! I knew his never forgetting your birthday meant something!”

“He thinks girls ought to go in for kissing and petting and all the rest of it!” Barbara observed.

“Link Mackenzie! He does not. Maybe,” Amy admitted, “he wanted to kiss you.”

“No, it wasn’t that. But he said that—that side of it was important. The—the animal side. He didn’t use that phrase, but that was what he meant.”

Amy hesitated, looking thoughtfully at her sister.

“Well—and don’t you think so, Babs?”

“Of course I think so—after you’re married.”

“But—but the point is, Babs, that you can’t just decide about it like that. It’s an impulse—an emotion—it’s like getting hungry. It takes possession of you!”

Barbara flushed darkly.

“I think that’s disgusting,” she said briefly, in distaste.

“Well, it can be made disgusting,” Amy admitted, “all those girls going out between dances to sit in cars with boys, and get kissed, and so on—Mrs. Cobb was saying to-night, when they brought us home, that she actually hates to chaperon most girls nowadays, even the daughters of her oldest friends, because she never knows what’s going on. But—but it isn’t all disgusting, Babs.”

“To me it is,” Barbara said decisively. “Oh, I can’t see,” she went on impatiently, “why there has to be so much fuss about it! Everyone talking about uncontrollable passions! I’d be ashamed to have any feeling I couldn’t control.”

Amy was silent for a long minute, and Babs innocently suspected that she had entirely lost interest in the subject when she said suddenly:

“Sis, falling in love is that.”

“Nonsense!” Barbara scoffed, but a little uneasily. “I’ve been having beaus since I was fifteen.”

“That’s just a phrase you use,” Amy interrupted with unusual firmness. “Of course, you’ve had boy friends, and men have loved you. But you’ve never been in love, Babs.”

Barbara, with a sudden quickening of heart beats, decided that this was the time for the revelation.

“Amy, I think I am in love,” she said faintly. And she added, “with Barry du Spain.”

Amy, whose face had lighted it the first admission, laughed scornfully.

“Babs, don’t talk nonsense! Why, Barry isn’t a man. He’s just a dreaming kid, a poet. He idolizes you, the way he would a Madonna painted on a wall.”

“Do you think he does?” Barbara asked eagerly, diverted.

“Of course I think he does—I know he does, because lately he’s been acting so pettish and silly. But Barry doesn’t know anything about real love, any more than you do!”

“Any more than I do!” Barbara echoed, affronted. “Well, I’ll bet I could have Link Mackenzie to-morrow, if I wanted him!”

“I think you could, too, darling. But I see poor Link’s meaning. He wants you to—well, to kiss back, to sit in his lap——” She stopped, laughing ashamedly.

“Ugh, you make me sick!” Barbara ejaculated.

“Well, I know, and I was only fooling, in a way,” Amy hastened to apologize. “But the truth is, Babs, that, for all your smartness, you’re only a little girl in lots of ways. You haven’t waked up. Now, I’m not half as popular with the boys as you are—or as you could be,” Amy altered it thoughtfully. “But I understand all this more. You’ve got to—if you want to get a man and hold a man—you’ve got to let go, in these days.”

“Amelia Atherton, what would Granny say to that?”

“What all the grannies are saying, I suppose,” Amy admitted meekly.

“Companionship, liking the same things, laughing at the same jokes——” Barbara began magnificently.

“My dear Babs, any woman could have all that with any man and not do her husband the slightest wrong,” Amy said sensibly, in the pause. “Don’t talk nonsense! If that were enough, we would never hear of scandals and divorces and the grand passion and all the rest of it.”

“Then,” said Barbara sulkily, “I devoutly trust that I will never experience the grand passion!”

“Well, you will,” Amy predicted. “And meanwhile,” she added, coaxingly and affectionately, “here is Link Mackenzie, the finest match in town, just ready to fall in love with you, if he isn’t already. All you have to do is be gentle—loving——”

“My dear Amy, when we meet Link at Bartell’s, I’m crazy about him. When he gets all hoarse and gentle at dances, and wants to paw me—and mutter things close in my ear—and mash kisses on to me——”

“Babs!” Amy gasped and laughed, scarlet, her hands over her ears.

“I’d much rather be down on the creek, making little water-dog villages with Barry!” Barbara finished.

“Well, I don’t care whether you marry Link or not,” Amy said finally, “but I will say that, if you go on much further with Barry du Spain, making him think he’s a genius, and playing around with him as if you were both eight years old, then I’ll think you’re a fool!”

But, being Amy, she said it so pleadingly, so mildly, so adoringly indeed, that Barbara could not be hurt. It never occurred to her to be hurt at Amy, for beneath everything that Amy said, there ran, sure and strong, the river of her love for her sister.

“Barry’s the handsomest man I ever saw in my life, and Inez’s cousin said so, too,” Barbara said now, subsiding.

“ ’Andsome is as ’andsome does, miss!” said Amy. “She can have him. That’d be a very nice match.”

“He loathes her.”

“Well, you look out, or she’ll get Link. She’s very different from Inez. She’s a siren, that girl.”

“She can have him!” Barbara snapped off her night light, threw her pillow on the floor. The waning moonlight streamed in bars and angles across the room. “Good-night, darling,” she said. And Amy, vaguely fretted, and lying wakeful, only had to wait one minute to hear her sister’s innocent, deep breathing in her first sleep.