Читать книгу Barberry Bush - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 8

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On Saturday nights, Link usually dined at home with his father and his unmarried sister, Margaret, and wandered around to the Athertons’ at about half-past seven. Sometimes he brought Margaret with him, and perhaps Fatto Roach or Harry Poett, in which case they all played games around the dining-room table, if they felt like it, or went down to the Washington Theatre, if there was a film or a play worth seeing. Films were twenty-five cents, and plays only twice that much, so that it never was a serious matter for anyone to buy seats. The Casino down near the beach, where there was a cover charge and a cabaret, and dancing on Saturday nights, was considered to be a treat for special occasions. Motor parties reserved tables there sometimes by telephone, and the town’s fastest element, a group of divorced or childless married couples, were usually to be seen there once a week.

Barbara vaguely disliked and distrusted the Casino, as introducing an element into the quieter life of Cottonwood that was not characteristic of the town. Cottonwood folk were simple persons, and the parties at the Casino had the reputation of being wild parties, and often lasted until two or three o’clock on Sunday mornings. The Roaches and Poetts and Wilsons and Mackenzies did not often go to the Casino.

Link duly appeared, on this particular Saturday night, but he was almost an hour late. It was nearly nine o’clock when the lights of his roadster began to feel their way like flashing tentacles among the plastered walls and tiled low roofs of Las Haciendas.

The three Athertons, with Barry du Spain, were in the patio, for the April night was unseasonably warm, and there was an early moon. Scarcely had the opalescent glow of sunset faded behind the eucalyptus and poplar trees that stood between them and the west before the great red disk floated up lazily from the eastern horizon, flooding the little square backyards with uncertain silver, and transforming utilitarian garages and gates and chicken-runs into fairyland.

“We’re out here, Link!” Barbara called when the door in the hall clicked; “aren’t you rather late?”

Link sat down on the grass beside Barbara’s chair.

“I can see that your father got on to the topic of free silver and gold, and McKinley and Bryan, at dinner to-night,” the girl suggested whimsically.

“No, I didn’t dine at home! Evening, Professor. Hello, Amy, is that you there in the dark? ’Lo, Barry.”

“You didn’t dine at home Saturday night? Why, Lincoln, are you off the track completely?”

“Well, I took Inez and her cousin—Marianne Scott—out for a drive this afternoon. Say—” said Link, slightly drawling the last word—“that girl is a high-roller, believe me. She’s full of the Old Nick! First she wanted to stop at the Cemetery——”

“The Cemetery!”

“Yep. And we all got into spasms, laughing at the graves. We ought to go up there, sometimes, Barbara, you’ve no idea what crazy things some of those tombstones have on them!”

“I remember copying some once from an old cemetery in New England,” Professor Atherton said, in a silence. Barbara had drawn back a little, in the mellow shadows of the plastered, tile-topped wall. She and Amy did sometimes go out to the little cemetery, where the mother they had never known, and the granny who had been a mother to them, were asleep. Link’s mother lay there, too. He had perhaps forgotten that; and she was grateful, as the conversation wandered amusedly among ridiculous epitaphs, that neither he nor her father had followed her line of thought.

“Then we went on to Soquel,” Link resumed, happily unconscious of any lack of sympathy, “and Marianne—” it was Marianne already, Barbara noted—“Marianne wanted tamales and tortillas—she’d never tasted them. So we went into a little joint there, one of these awful places with a spotty tablecloth and bottles of catsup, and we all had tamales. By that time, it was almost six, so I telephoned my sister I wouldn’t be home, and we all fooled up and down the street, and went to a fortune teller—I never laughed so much in my life!”

There was amused and interested comment from the others in the group, but Barbara was silent. She did not like Link in this mood of hilarity; it did not, somehow, sound quite genuine. However jolly and spontaneous the afternoon’s merry-making had been, it had been the sort of foolishness that belongs strictly to the moment; it could not be preserved or quoted or shared. Only a stupid person could possibly attempt to convey its giddy charm to others, and Barbara irritably felt that Link was stupid in thinking he could do so. Evidently he had had such a merry time that he had lost all his usual quiet good sense.

“How did you happen to start on this mad carouse, Link?”

“Inez telephoned, just before I left the office—three o’clock, I guess—and asked me if I didn’t want to come over for some tennis. But when I got there they didn’t have a fourth, and—I don’t know—somebody suggested that we go around in the car and take a look at the town.”

“And she’s attractive, is she, Miss Scott?”

“Well, she’s lots of fun. She plunges right into everything, doesn’t care what anybody thinks of her or how many are looking on. But, say, Barbara, I came to get you. We’re going down to the Casino.”

“To the Casino? What’s happening to-night?”

“Nothing special. But they always have cabaret there Saturday nights, you know.”

“But, Link, it’s so late now, it’s after nine.”

“Well, that’s all right. They’re going on ahead, Inez and Marianne and Harry Poett, and maybe some other fellow, if they can get one, and you and I are to join them.”

“Oh, but you don’t need me, Link. I’m not dressed——”

Amy and her father instantly joined him in trying to persuade her to go. She’d have a lovely time, and they didn’t have to make it late unless they felt like it, and she could slip into her blue in five minutes. Amy went so far as to extend a slim foot, in the dark, and press it significantly against her sister’s foot. And Barbara perfectly interpreted the message: “Don’t let her think she can have it all her own way with Link Mackenzie!”

Only Barry was ominously and sulkily silent.

“We need another man,” Link remembered suddenly, “come along, why don’t you, Barry?”

“Oh, thank you, Link.” It was Barry’s coldest, ugliest voice. “You’re awfully kind. But I don’t feel like it.”

Barbara added her pleading. Even though Barry would probably spoil the party, where Barry was, Barbara Atherton had a single-eyed, single-minded, single-hearted slave. Let Marianne Scott, who had thought Barry so handsome, who had made unmistakable overtures to him at the dance last night, thoroughly understand that.

But Barry wouldn’t go, and about half an hour later, Barbara, still feeling that this hysterical rushing about so late at night was extremely silly, and still disturbed by Link’s elation and excitement over his experience of the afternoon, duly climbed into the roadster beside him and was duly escorted to the Casino, down on the shore.

The great place, pagoda-shaped, looking almost like some fanciful great junk, moored at the edge of the moonlit sea, was gushing raw light into the soft spring night. Jangling scraps of discordant music drifted out upon the air, and the entrance, like an old-fashioned drawbridge, brilliantly illumined, and lined with cotton palms in pots, was surrounded by the dark, shining oblongs of parked cars.

Inez Wilson had been able to get a desirable table, close to the dancing, of course. Nothing in Cottonwood was ever refused to a Wilson of the Wilson Fruit Bank. She and Harry Poett, Marianne, and Fox Madison had just seated themselves, when Barbara and Link, threading the already well-filled tables, and trying to seem quite unconscious of interested glances from all sides, joined them.

Inez was looking and acting her worst, sallow in the new shade of sickly sea green, noisy, laughing, and flirtatious. But Marianne was the most striking woman in the room.

She was a little older than the other girls, twenty-five or six, with a perfectly colourless ivory skin, black eyes, a thin and sinuous body, and long white hands. To-night she was wrapped, rather than dressed, in a brocade garment of dull red and blue and gold and silver, her sleek black hair, straight and bobbed short, almost concealed by a tightly wound turban of gold gauze and pearls, and her full, rather sensuous mouth brilliant with Japanese rouge.

Fox Madison, a florid, thin, eyeglassed Englishman of perhaps forty years, was laughing at her with that sort of proprietary pride that a man of the world feels in any clever and beautiful woman. Harry Poett, a nice-looking, simple boy, was apparently captivated, too.

“Oh, here’s Miss Atherton—how d’ye do?” Marianne interrupted her giddy rush of chatter to say with a composed upward sweep of her black eyes. “Link didn’t think you’d come—and I knew you would, and I was right, wasn’t I? He said you mightn’t want to interrupt that game of Parchesi.”

Barbara, inclined to be good-humoured, laughed with the rest.

“We didn’t happen to be playing,” she admitted. “We were all out in the backyard.”

“The——? Oh, the backyard. I see,” Marianne repeated it carefully. And suddenly it sounded rusticated, to sit in one’s backyard—even to mention a backyard.

“This is a wild spree for me, Fox,” Barbara said to the man on her left; “after last night, to come to a party again to-night.”

“Last night?” Marianne asked, arching her plucked black brows.

“Last night there was a dance, too, you know. We were all up until after midnight,” Barbara reminded her, smiling at Harry Poett, in greeting.

“After midnight! Oh, excuse me, but that’s delicious!” Marianne repeated, bursting into soft laughter. “Why, when I was in New York, a few weeks ago, we often danced all night,” she told them, “and then stopped in Brumayer’s for coffee—that’s the thing to do this winter—and went to bed in the daylight. Inez, do tell me, must I be tucked up in bed at ten o’clock every night all the while I’m in Cottonwood?” she demanded whimsically.

But dance music, beginning with the squawk of saxophones, interrupted her. The instruments, played by Negroes in white frogged coats, in a sort of balcony in a corner of the room, rose instantly to such brazen clamour that conversation became impossible. Link, with a nod for Marianne, rose to his feet, Harry claimed Inez, and Barbara was left with Fox Madison, who detested dancing.

No use to try to talk seriously, against the noise. Barbara sat with her elbows on the table, her linked hands lying before her, and smiled amiably at Fox, when he shouted an occasional comment. Chicken sandwiches and ginger ale all round, she supposed? Fox nodded, and the waiter wrote the order and vanished.

She knew strangely few of the dancers; they were mostly visitors, casual passers-by, who had stopped their cars for dinner at the Casino. “Sporty-looking,” Barbara characterized them. Women underdressed, with painted cheeks and eyelids and lips and finger nails. Little dangling dresses all beads or sequins, bobbed heads tightly curled and brightly coloured. They talked to their men while they pressed still more scarlet paint upon their lips, between dances.

The evening, as far as Barbara was concerned, was a failure. Link danced with her, Harry danced with her, and both told her that she was a far better dancer than Marianne was. But Marianne was the success of the hour; no use denying it, one might as well face it.

Harry and Fox both had flat silver flasks, and Marianne toned her ginger ale with Scotch, and so did Inez. The latter was either actually affected by the unusual stimulant to become sillier than ever, or pretended she was. Presently a head waiter bent over Link, who was host at the party, and murmured that he would serve some real vintage champagne if Mr. Mackenzie liked.

Mr. Mackenzie, whom Barbara decided she had never seen to so little advantage, gave a flushed and excited assent. He wanted Barbara to drink to Marianne’s happy stay in Cottonwood, with the others; but she declined, and the golden bubbles were spilled by the persistent waiter against her arresting hand.

“It’s all so silly—so utterly and idiotically silly!” she said to herself, trying to smile naturally and indulgently, trying to stay with them, to be a good sport.

The clock on the wall said ten minutes to twelve, the band banged and throbbed like some hammering nerve in one’s head, the air grew thick with dust and cigar and cigarette smoke, and the meaty fumes of food. Women laughed hysterically, made plunging movements across the tables, screaming, reaching for glasses, and were quieted by their embarrassed friends.

All the lights went out, except for a bright pool in the centre of the empty dancing floor. Into this a slim girl with big rings on first and fourth fingers, and an Egyptian headdress and belt, wriggled and squirmed her way. Her body was bare, except that her breasts were covered with plates of brilliants, and a fringed belt was loose on her hips. She worked her rings like the eyes of moving serpents.

“These people would think the Indian corn dance barbaric,” Barbara mused scornfully, watching and applauding with the rest. She thought of the shingle down near the creek, of afternoon light through the young, green-yellow of the willows, of the clean sea water meeting the clear creek water, on the sandy, shell-strewn beach.

One o’clock. She was past scorn now; she was weary and sleepy to the point of agony. The open-air picnic, after the late hours last night, the six-mile walk, and these dragging hours of heat and noise and close air, made her feel utterly broken. Barbara could have laid her copper head upon the littered table and slept where she sat. And still the saxophones blared and throbbed and the Negro boys broke out into hoarse, vocal accompaniment.

Link was paying the check; sixty-two dollars. It was outrageous to tip the waiter, and tip the head-waiter, and pay sixty-two dollars besides for this preposterous, dull evening!

However, one couldn’t say anything about it. Especially she, Barbara, couldn’t. She had probably betrayed her bored and disapproving attitude quite plainly enough, without verbal underscoring.

Cold, delicious sea air rushed at them when they went down to the thinned line of waiting cars. Harry could take two in his car; Barbara and Fox squeezed in beside him. Link took the other girls home, Marianne cuddling up against his shoulder with a little trill of still fresh and untired laughter.

“Do you hear what she said, Barbara?” Link called, laughing, amused and shocked, as the two cars started.

“Who said?” Barbara called back.

“Marianne. She said she was running off with your beau!”

“She’s the limit!” Harry Poett said, with an appreciative chuckle. “Bold as brass.”

“She’s extraordinarily lovely to look at,” Fox added, scratching a match as they swept out into the dark street.

Barbara said nothing.

She felt dreamy, tired, and oddly quiet, all the next day. Outwardly, it was just like all their other Sundays. But inwardly, Barbara felt old and wise.

Link’s sister Margaret telephoned her at about noon. Link wanted to know if Barbara could come over to dinner at one o’clock. Afterward, they were all going somewhere.

Where? Margaret didn’t know. She was quite a little girl, not more than seventeen, and she was evidently being teased as she telephoned.

“Ouch—stop!” she was giggling. She was in such a gale of laughter that she could hardly speak.

“Will you—they’re all making such a racket! Will you, Barbara? Inez and Marianne are here already—they’re going to play tennis.”

“Where are they going afterward, do you know?”

“No-o-o-o! Oh, ouch—Barbara wants to know where we are going afterward—stop that!”

Barbara’s voice had sympathetic, mirthful notes in it, but she felt a little hurt.

“Is Link there?”

“He’s just gone downstairs.”

“Well, I don’t see how I can come, Margaret. We haven’t had dinner yet, and Mrs. Godley hasn’t come. Amy and I were just getting things started, and I can’t very well walk out and leave everything to her!”

Margaret protested only perfunctorily. Was it youthful gaucherie, or had she gathered, from the attitude of the others, that they were not especially anxious for Barbara’s company?

“Oh, go!” Amy urged her regretfully, when she went slowly back to the kitchen.

“I don’t care anything about it,” Barbara assured her, a little heavily. She was experiencing a queer, numb emotion, not at all like anger or jealousy.

Dinner. Let’s see—what were we having? Green peas that had been shelled yesterday, and that rapped like tiny bullets when they were poured into the white saucepan. Barbara put a lump of butter into them, and a wet lettuce leaf over them, and covered them snugly as she lighted the light under them.

Peas, and asparagus salad, and brown muffins, and cherry tart. The girl began to mix her batter easily and comfortably; she had been able to make muffins for Granny before she was twelve. She buttered the little pans with a brush.

“Amy, if you mix what was left of the French dressing with what was left of the Thousand Island, there’ll be enough, and it might be kind of nice and light, with asparagus.”

“For the love of Allah, make enough muffins, Babs,” Barry said. “Six is just silly!”

“When I made six, Barry, I had no idea that you were going to come back from the ranch on the same day you bid us a tearful farewell and said you were going down there to live in holy seclusion until your book was written.”

“All right—all right! That was last week. Why haul it up now?”

“I haul it up?” Barbara repeated, with indignant emphasis on the pronoun. “You started it!”

“I love asparagus,” Amy said childishly, sucking her finger.

“I hope—” said Professor Atherton’s bland voice—“I hope I am duly grateful to my Maker for one such day as this! The sun shining, my two girls laughing together as they prepare a meal, the fat of the land about to be placed upon my simple table——”

“Hire a hall, darling!” Amy suggested, kissing him.

“Do you include me in your thanksgiving?” Barry, sitting flat on the floor before the oven, charged with the browning of the muffins, asked happily. So seated, with his hair tossed as usual, and his loose white shirt, he looked no more than the handsome, impudent, confident child he loved to be.

“Of course I do, Barry, my boy.”

“Barbara wouldn’t go over to the Mackenzies’,” Amy volunteered, “because Mrs. Godley didn’t come to get dinner. They’re going somewhere afterward, too, aren’t they, Babs?”

“They may be.” Barbara slipped a plate to heat for the muffins between the pot of peas and their cover. “But I don’t want to go racing off all over the country in the traffic of Sunday afternoon,” she objected. “It seems to me crazy. A dance Friday night, the Casino last night, and now they all jam into the car and go off again.”

Her own voice sounded convincing, even to her. But the wretched little sense of being excluded, of being hurt, persisted. What were they all doing in the big Mackenzie house, where Norah was serving the fried chicken and Tilly was taking a last glance at the freezer of ice cream? Were they really having fun? Barbara would be welcome enough, of course, if she went, even now. But did they really want her?

The peas, the asparagus salad, the cherry tart seemed suddenly flat. There was a tameness in the usually pleasant process of moving a table into the patio, and propping the fourth leg with the blade of a knife, on the uneven bricks. The breakfast ingle in the kitchen was always too hot at noon, in spring. It faced southwest, and summer lunches and many summer suppers were eaten in the blue eucalyptus shadows under the protection of the plastered, tile-topped wall.

“After lunch let’s make exactly four sandwiches,” said Barry, when the meal was almost over, “no more, now, I loathe those shoe boxes full of mushy stuff that you have to bring home to save! Four sandwiches, and four chocolate bars. Have we any chocolate bars, by the way?”

“We have those Sanito-nervo-tonico-bites,” Amy said, weakening with sudden disrespectful laughter.

“Well, they’re all right, if they are digestible. Have we four?”

“Four? You forget that Dad sent five dollars! We have crates of them. They came yesterday.”

“All right. Four sandwiches, four Sanito-nervo-tonico-bites,” Barry resumed, “and the drinking cup. This is the day we’re going to walk out the old mesa trail, have a drink at the pool above the trough, supper up there, and coast down this side of the mountain home.”

“Oh, say—I feel like doing that to-day!” Amy agreed enthusiastically. “Old shoes, small hats, sweaters——”

“Amy,” Barbara said, suddenly taking part in the conversation, “why don’t you telephone and ask Ward Duffy to go? He’s lonely; he doesn’t have much fun!”

Amy hesitated, her colour changing, her eyes bright.

“Oh, I don’t like to. But I’d love to.”

“Five sandwiches, five Sanito-nervo-tonico-bites,” Barry altered it droningly, as Amy flew to the telephone.

“Cheer up. You’ll have a nice time,” he pleaded rather than stated in an undertone to Barbara.

Carrying the empty salad platter, he was following her into the kitchen with his hands full of plates. The girl gave him a shamed and grateful glance.

“I know I will! I always do.”

“You wouldn’t want to be skidding all over the place in that roadster, Babs?” the man, capably rinsing his plates before piling them neatly in the sink, asked anxiously and simply.

“No-o. I don’t really like that sort of thing.” She fell silent, arresting him with a touch of fingers on his cuff, her troubled eyes averted. “But—if they are going to do it,” she stammered presently, trying to make her thought clear, “if we are to have parties every day, and excitement—if someone is to be popular and in constant demand——”

“I know,” Barry murmured as she paused, distressed eyes on her face. “How long is that Marianne girl—that Scott, going to be here?” he asked.

“Oh, she doesn’t matter!” Barbara said hastily.

“I think she does. I think she despises us all here and that she’s just going to kick holes in us—if she can,” Barry answered with unexpected feeling.

A combination of pride and shame suddenly braced Barbara. The usurper had been only forty-eight hours in town, and here was she, Barbara Atherton, meekly laying down her arms without a struggle.

“I don’t know,” she said briskly and sensibly, pouring heavy cream from a small fat bottle into a small fat pitcher. “But I’m extremely silly to let it make me feel cross. They asked me to go and I said I didn’t want to go—I’d much rather be with my own crowd. They’ll probably make a fuss about Marianne Scott for a few weeks, and then forget her, or at least she’ll settle down like the rest of us. Perhaps she’ll marry Fox.”

“Has she money?” Barry asked, with simplicity.

“Well, some, I imagine.”

“She’ll go after Link,” the boy predicted. And all Barbara’s unworthy fears were set suddenly fluttering again. Would she really? Would Marianne Scott become mistress of the big house under the big trees? Well, what of it, if she did? Barbara surely didn’t want Link Mackenzie—Barbara surely didn’t want Link Mackenzie....

“I’m never with you, Barbara, but what I want to kiss you,” he had said. A pulse hammered in her throat, to-day, remembering clumsy, quiet Link saying that, although she had felt quite composed and cool at the time. And for the first time in her twenty-two years, Barbara Atherton felt a little shaken—a little confused—over the thought of a man.