Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 7

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“Why is it,” Barbara asked, in affectionate and indulgent reproach, “that you can be so charming on a little picnic like this, and when we have a big one, you can be so unspeakably difficult?”

Barry, sprawled comfortably at her feet, on the warm rocks, wound a fragrant bit of yerba buena about the shabby toe of her sturdy brown shoe. The little leaves stood up boldly and saucily, like a coronet.

“This isn’t a picnic, Barberry Bush!” he protested lazily.

“Well, what do you call it, when you take your lunch out of doors?”

“I call it heaven, Barberry,” Barry answered prettily.

“Yes, and it’s lovely of you to say so. But why would it spoil it to have others—say Amy and Ward Duffy along?”

“I like Amy, and I like Ward Duffy, too—at least he isn’t a gabbling fool like the rest of them,” Barry conceded, “but they don’t belong in my heaven, that’s all!”

“And I do,” Barbara added, unembarrassed. Barry would always pour out this sort of idealized love-making when they were alone together.

She liked it without taking it very seriously. It was only lately that she had been wondering if any real feeling lay back of it.

“You know I do!” he said. “Barberry, did you see that poem in the Letter-Bag?” he asked eagerly.

“No, but I have the magazine, right beside my bed. I’ll read it to-night.”

She was silent, and in the blue, still hour of the spring afternoon the only sounds they could hear were those of the sea and the wood. The sun shone warmly down upon them, and in their retreat under the young willows there was no wind.

A dozen feet from where they were established, the narrow stream known as Mission Creek widened to meet the ocean waters. To the south ran the long, lazy curves of the ocean shore, broken here and there by the roofs of old farmhouses, buried in plantations of eucalyptus and pepper and dismal cypress trees. The northern aspect was cut away by the cliff behind them.

Mission Creek, a coffee-coloured torrent in winter, a thin, pooled thread of silver in summer, emerged from a tangle of mallows, willows, high cat-tailed grasses and tangled undergrowth, just below the bridge, a mile above. From that point it took on an ocean quality; there was white sand on its banks, where gulls swooped and peeped above the bewildered heads of grazing cattle, and the fresh, sparkling waters of the stream were met by a ruffle of gray salt water, surging to and fro with the shallow tides.

On this perfect afternoon, the tide was receding, in a series of wide, leisurely, frothy curves on the sands, and the gulls, enormous flocks of them, were walking with dainty little twisting motions on the wet strand that mirrored their gray and white bodies.

Barbara let her clear, child-like eyes follow the flight of one of them into the bright air. The bird hung motionless, high up in the blue, not a feather or a muscle stirring, yet with perfect balance and unchanged elevation exquisitely preserved.

“Funny how woodeny and clumsy they are on their feet, Barry. Their bodies have no more shape than the little cheap boats in the five-and-ten. Yet once they are on wings——!”

“Woodeny is a nice word,” Barry commented dreamily.

“Do you wonder, Barry, that the old religious writers decided that we are all to have wings in heaven? Can you imagine anything more wonderful than lifting one’s self straight up into the air, and drifting so, for hours at a time? Our wings, you know,” Barbara said, with childish seriousness, “our wings would be at least fifteen feet long, Barry—they’d have to be. Those birds’ wings are three times as long as their stiff little bodies are!”

“Do you s’pose you’ll always believe in God, Babs?”

“I know in God,” the girl corrected it quickly, with a little stress of the second word.

“You say that, my dear, and it’s impressive. But nobody can know.”

“Oh, that’s where I differ with you, Barry! You know, for example, that you like these days with me; nobody has to prove that to you.”

“But I can see you, Barberry, and actually taste your stuffed eggs and chocolate cake!”

“Yes, and a good many people could see me, and even see stuffed eggs and chocolate cake, without considering that that made heaven.”

“You know, some day you’ll stop believing in God, with a bump, and then you’ll see how you’re deceiving yourself!”

Barbara’s bright face clouded.

“Barry, I hate to have you talk that way!”

“But why? My God, Babs, there you go—like all the inquisitionists! I’m not to be allowed even to speak.”

“Why do you say ‘my God’ if you believe there isn’t any?”

“That’s childish. But let’s not quarrel,” Barry pleaded charmingly, rolling over to plant his elbows in the sand under the willows, and resting his square chin on his hands. His face was flushed with the tonic of open air and sunshine; his rich dark hair was tumbled, and upon his beautiful mouth was his own impish, boyish, irresistible smile.

“Well, the fact remains,” Barbara persisted, returning to her first point, “that I think Amy is beginning to resent my coming off with you on Saturdays.”

“Jealous,” grinned Barry, not sorry of it.

“But isn’t it selfish of us?” the girl said. “When I have you this way to myself, you’re perfectly charming, and we are laughing like a couple of kids all day. But the minute anyone else is around, you stiffen; you get sulky and silent and superior.”

“You mean Link Mackenzie,” Barry grumbled, sticking small clean bits of dead willow twig into a little fence, along a smooth strip of sand.

“I mean all of them. Harry, Rita, Inez, Fatto—all of them.”

“A lot they’d add to our picnics!” Barry scoffed. “Their idea of a good time is to put a bottle up on a rock and shy stones at it, and then go over to the Casino and dance.”

“They did that once—when the day turned out to be cold and foggy! It isn’t fair to judge them by that.—That’s cute, Barry!” Barbara interrupted herself to say, in a pleased tone, her interest in his little fence suddenly awakened. She picked two smooth round pieces of wood, perhaps part of some old wheel-spoke, polished and shortened by the sea, from the tidal, dry, clean rubbish about her, and set them on a jutting rock, inside the fence, like microscopic cannon.

“Fortified,” she said simply.

“I adore you!” said Barry, with a flash of real joy in his strangely expressive eyes. “I adore our days together, our silliness—the day we cleaned the whole beach with rakes, and the day we had a select academy for water-dogs! I hate their hot rooms and saxophones and perspiration.”

“But they think we’re weak-minded,” Barbara offered dubiously, biting a long spear of grass.

“Well, we know we’re not. We know we have more real fun in a minute than they have in a year!”

“But you see the expression in Amy’s eyes, when we tell them what we’ve been doing,” the girl argued, somewhat feebly.

“Amy’s a sweet, dear child,” Barry admitted loftily.

“Baby though she may be, she’s exactly seven months younger than you are, mouthpiece of Allah!”

“But you,” he said, “you’re rare. I wish I never had to be with anyone else—ever.”

Barbara dimpled, and flushed with sheer happiness. If this was not quite Link Mackenzie’s manner of wooing, at least it was as close as Barry would ever come to an expression of devotion. He was a faun, a Pan, wandering through the bewildering woods of life, and showing, even at twenty-five, the courage and character to pick out what he wanted, to revel in it, and to throw the rest aside.

Barry liked a woman for the qualities of her soul and mind, Barberry mused, not only for the thrilling touch of her fingers or the surrender of her lips.

Yet he was delightfully human, too, as witness the adventures with stuffed eggs and water-dogs. There was nothing unnatural, nothing transcendental or affected about his hearty pleasure in the childish joys of life.

That was it, really. Barry was a delicious, companionable, imaginative, and most appreciative child. And love-making, according to the new standard, was anything but that!

She felt very close to her companion to-day; very safe and sisterly and happy. It was restful to be with Barry; when they were alone together, he himself was obviously and ecstatically happy and made few demands. That she should play with him, talk to him, and let him pour about her the flood of his admiring devotion, was all that Barry asked.

After last night, with the searing memory of Link Mackenzie’s sudden onslaught still fresh in her troubled and bewildered soul, it was soothing to know that under no possible or imaginable stress of emotion could Barry, or would Barry, similarly offend her.

Barry did not expect girls to kiss and cuddle and squeeze hands. His ideal of womanhood was a good deal higher than that!

Link—what had suddenly possessed sober old Link to scare her so! Link, passionate and critical and dissatisfied—it was funny.

Not so funny, however, but that Barbara’s cheeks flushed at the memory of it. What had happened?

Resting on the dry leaves and shells and gathered seaweeds and grasses, her back braced against a group of young willows through whose April foliage the sinking sun crept in greenish yellows and ethereal golden lights, Barbara reconstructed the whole episode.

They had been dancing, and Ward Duffy had offered her his coat, to step out into Washington Street, and get a breath of cool air. No harm in that, surely? She had done it a thousand times before.

They had strolled into the little Park, Barbara’s bare arms covered with Ward’s warm, loose coat, her head bare, her face flushed and her hair a little disordered from dancing. And Link had suddenly developed his strange, new theories about girls—girls ought to like to be kissed, girls ought to permit familiarities, even if they didn’t quite enjoy them.

Barbara’s face burned again, remembering the suddenness with which this argument had developed; remembering his quick, hard arms about her, his breath against her forehead, his suddenly passionate, unsmiling eyes close to her own.

It had been ridiculous and undignified. If Link Mackenzie wanted response of that sort from the girl he liked, he would have to find some other girl!

“To wait until I’m married, or at least engaged, indeed,” Barbara reasoned, deep within her own soul, recalling all this in the clear, sensible daylight. “I don’t believe I’d put up with it even if I were married! I don’t believe one has to encourage that sort of thing, and pretend to like it!

“Why, my grandmother Atherton,” she said, out of a silence, “lived twenty-seven years with her husband, and she never called him anything but ‘m’sieu’!’ ”

“Didn’t it beat everything,” Barry asked dreamily, “the way they’d have seventeen children by a man, and yet always speak of him—and to him—as ‘Mr. Smith’?”

Barbara’s clear laughter rang out. This was so like Barry. To see the clean side, the funny side, the historically and dramatically interesting side.

“If you married me, Babs, would you always speak respectfully to me as ‘Mr.’—or better yet, as ‘Señor du Spain’?”

“Why, I’d kneel down every time you addressed me and rub my forehead on the floor!”

A silence. Then Barry said:

“Wouldn’t it be the authentic limit if we got married? We could, you know,” he added eagerly, as the girl—yet not without a happy trembling at her heart—laughed carelessly. “We’re of age. And I’m going to get a job, and I have the ranch, of course.”

“Your job is going to be to write a play, little boy!”

“Well—all right.” He considered it, his eyes brightening. “We could live on the ranch; there’s an old house there.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“That’s right, I forgot. You could keep house, and I could write a play!”

“Our eleven little girls and boys meanwhile frolicking along the beach and eating seaweed.”

“Oh, Lord, no, there’s eggs and sheep and milk and fruit! But we wouldn’t have a lot of dirty little wet babies, Barberry, I loathe ’em!” Barry protested jealously.

“It wouldn’t matter how you felt. I’d—” Barbara drew a long breath—“I’d adore them!” she said, with shining eyes on space.

“Honestly, I do hate kids,” Barry assured her seriously.

“Honestly, I know you do, because you are such a bad, jealous, moody little kid yourself. But I’d spank you and put you in the corner with the rest of them,” Barbara answered cheerfully.

“Would you like it, Babs?” the man asked affectionately. “I think I’d be awfully good, if I had you all to myself, all the time,” he added simply. “If Amy and Link and all the rest couldn’t interfere, and you and I were just playing round together by ourselves. I’d be—” his voice thickened a little, and the black lashes misted with tears, like a child’s thick lashes—“I’d be so damn’ happy,” he said, smiling.

“But, Barry—they’d think we were crazy, on no income at all!”

“We’d have an income. I rent the ranch to Portuguese, you know, and that more than pays taxes and insurance—or something like that!” Barry explained, his voice suddenly growing fretted and shrill, as one harassed beyond endurance by business responsibilities. “They pay me four hundred a year, and about two hundred of that’s eaten up with expenses—and the last two years they’ve only paid part——”

“They cheat you. But I’d learn ’em!” Barbara laughed, with her brow faintly lined and her lip bitten, as he paused.

“Well, my grandfather, my mother’s father, made a good living on that place!” the man agreed, looking at her with all a child’s confidence and expectation.

“How big is it, Barry?”

“About two hundred acres. And the cattle’s mine, too—only they get the calves for taking care of the barns. And they’re always killing some poor inoffensive old cow and eating her. They say she’s broken her leg or been drowned in the marsh or something, but I notice it’s never their calves or heifers that get hurt!”

“Would you let me run the place?” Babs asked, her fancy playing with the notion, as her slender, sun-browned fingers played with the dark hair at her knee.

“Let you run it? Why, I’d give it to you—out and out. You’d have to run it. I’d make you out a deed or something?”

“Poet farmers,” Barbara smiled, musing.

“Arcadians,” he substituted.

“Smocks and sunshine and grapes and candlelight...”

Her voice drifted into the dreamy blue silence. The afternoon was ending in soft glory; a golden haze had come up in the west, and the sea was veiled. But the air was still deliciously warm, and the shadows only softened. Quivering daffodil lights played among the young willows. And always their lazy talk had for its undertone the regular, thin crash of the shallow waves.

“Barberry!” Barry said, suddenly on his knees, his face alight. “Do you mean that we might do it? Are we really talking about something?”

His childish eagerness touched her, and she answered, with a new tenderness in her eyes:

“Dearest, there are so many things to think about, first!”

“No, but what—what?” he said. “What would we have to think about?”

“Everything, goose!”

“It would be such fun to give them all the go-by!” he said youthfully. “We’d take walks, and swim, and cook our meals together, and have the most wonderful times! You’d be Mrs. Barry du Spain, and the children would be Eskimos! I’m Irish and Spanish, and you’d bring in England and New England!”

“Crazy talk, Barry!” She was on her feet, the basket caught up, and swinging from her hand. “Come on, it’s after four, and I’ve got to get home!”

Crazy talk. But she liked it, none the less. It made her step joyously light and gay; it made her eyes dance with a strange happiness, as they walked the three miles home. That was the way a man and a woman ought to talk to each other, naturally and affectionately and simply, as children talk. There was nothing but danger and stupidity in all the rest, in this incessant feverish business of dancing and kissing.

Barbara put her limp, sweet, milk-scented buttercups, the first of the year, into the dishpan to soak, and went on into her bedroom, which smelled warm and close in the languid spring afternoon, to bathe and change. Her shoes were thick and stiff from salt water, and from the roadside dust that gathers in California even in mid-April. Her hair was tangled from crawling through trees and brush, and her dress crumpled.

But the hot bath was deliciously refreshing, and after it Barbara tossed and brushed her copper hair vigorously, before slipping into the cool blue cotton that would do for cooking and for the home evening. And when she went into the kitchen, and found the last of the sweet spring daylight lingering there, and the buttercups stiff and varnished and fragrant in a pale-green and pale-gold mass, the joy of the long happy day still was with her.

Wonderful to tramp down to the beach and share lunch with a friend on the warm shingle of shore. Wonderful to come back to an orderly shaded kitchen, with angles of sunset lying in apricot colour on the walls, and buttercups smiling at one from the shining white sink. Wonderful to feel running through her veins the relaxation that follows a gipsy day, to smell sweet soap on her hands, and the delicate scorch of hot irons on the fresh blue cotton.

No girl had ever in this world had a more loyal, devoted, jealous, precocious, boyish, amusing, and ridiculous friend than Barry. Fancy being able to go off with him from noon until four o’clock, for hours of intimate and affectionate conversation, without experiencing one moment of awkwardness or sentimentality or foolishness! Laughter, plans, good stimulating talk about books and social systems and religion; and now home, happily wearied and satisfied, with an armful of buttercups!

Mrs. Barry du Spain. Barbara Atherton du Spain. It had a nice sound.

“But he’ll never ask me to marry him,” Babs decided maternally, setting a fourth place at the supper table in the sure conviction that he would join them. “At least, he’ll never get any nearer to it than he did to-day. I’ll have to tell him what we’re going to do!”

And Barbara smiled contentedly, pleased that it should be that way. She filled a bowl with scarlet and black cherries—the cherries were early this year—and wished that she had taken a somewhat stronger stand with Link last night. She ought to have told him she would never speak to him again, instead of fighting like a silly high school girl, scolding and gasping, and then forgiving him meekly, and submitting to what really amounted to a scolding from him on the score of prudishness. Still, Link was an old, old friend, and one couldn’t be angry with him long. It was foolish to expect him to be as fine and as sensitive as Barry.