Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 11

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Everything in the last ten minutes had passed as in a stiff, dazzling dream. Jo wondered if her clothing were still steaming from the heat of the great kitchen range in front of which she had stood obediently drying out until Dorothy had come. The woman in the white glossy apron was somebody by the name of Hedvig, and from the way Dorothy spoke to her she must have been the hired girl.

Dorothy had a luscious look, her skin was very rosy and rich, her gleaming curls dark and arranged with a fine care alien to the mean stringiness that went with poverty. Jo was trembling, hot and cold darts shooting up and down all over her.

“Your eyes are funny, aren’t they?” Dorothy observed bluntly. “I mean—their color. My father has a ring almost that color. It’s a moss agate. I hate brown eyes like mine. Royce and Ash have blue eyes. How old are you?”

Jo gazed at her with unrelaxed suspicion, but soon the lure of exchanging ages became too strong. “I’m fourteen,” she said briefly.

“Why, I’m fifteen, and you’re bigger than I am! When’s your birthday?”

“February seventeenth.”

“You’re a winter baby. Milledge says winter babies never have cold feet. She means they’re never scared of anything. All of us are summer babies.”

“What are you scared of?” Jo asked with reluctant curiosity.

“We don’t know yet. Milledge says time will tell.”

“Who’s Milledge?” Jo demanded stiffly.

“She was our nurse when we were small. Now she’s my governess when I’m home from school. She teaches me music—and so forth.”

Governess! The only governess Jo had ever heard of was Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.

Voices of Dorothy’s young guests came from another part of the house, but Dorothy showed no concern. “If you’re dry now, we’ll go up and see Grandpa before we go to the living room. He told me to be sure to bring you to see him when you came. He remembers you. We’ll go through the parlor and up the back stairway.”

Dorothy opened a door, and Jo gazed into a space opaque and mellow with late day sunlight after rain. There was here the loneliness of the unused—blinds half drawn, the level rays of the sun paneling dusty bright across heavy knobbed mahogany furniture.

Dorothy closed the door behind them. She walked casually out upon a carpet the like of which Jo had only seen pictured in the mail order catalog.

Forgetting for an instant her dislike of the imperious Dorothy, Jo said breathlessly, “This is the loveliest house I ever saw!”

“Lovely?” Dorothy halted and stared incredulously. “Royce says it’s a—an atrocity! He knows about architecture, and so forth. He says the tower and everything is just too horrible! It was Grandpa’s idea when he built it, but Mamma says it’s a fright because it isn’t any period at all.” Jo was now feeling bewilderment and pain. “But you can come over here and look into the china closet,” Dorothy added, and then with a glance at Jo’s feet, “—only don’t step on the roses.”

Jo looked fearfully down at the carpet. There was a profusion of cream-colored, mammoth blooms on a background that was the shade of purplish petunias just before dusk. Jo tiptoed gingerly across to where Dorothy was standing, but because of her anxiety about the roses she was never to remember what she saw in the china closet.

After that they climbed a back stairway to a room that smelled of camphor and tobacco, the two odors violently embattled. In the purged golden light from the west windows Jo saw the clutter of furnishings rise as if to assault her, and then all at once the sharp beak of a very old man emerged from one of the high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace.

“Grandpa,” said Dorothy, “this is Jo Porte. You asked me to bring her up to see you.”

“I did!” At the resonance in the voice of the old man Jo felt oddly reassured. It was the voice she remembered, although the form had withered terribly. He peered out at her and still she did not waver. “You’ve grown since I saw you last, young woman. You remember? You used to be all legs and arms and neck in those days. But you’ve filled out to a fine young filly. You’ll be looking for a husband one of these days, eh?”

“Oh, Grandpa!” Dorothy exclaimed. “She’s only fourteen and—”

“What of it!” old Ashbrooke thundered. Jo saw with alarm that beneath the white wisp of his hair a vein rose out on his forehead, and his eyes were sharp as she thought sapphires might be. His long, thin hands beat upon the arms of his chair. “What of it! What are women made for, eh? Your great-grandmother married at fourteen in Connecticut and came a pioneer bride to Iowa while it was still part of the territory of Wisconsin. Women weren’t soft in those days—and they didn’t raise soft young ones. I remember the sod house we lived in till I was twelve—and the feather bed my mother brought with her all the way from the farm in Connecticut in a covered wagon behind an ox team. All nine of us—brothers and sisters—were born in that bed!”

Dorothy blushed with embarrassment while the old man glared defiantly out from beneath white porcupine quills of eyebrows.

“Shall I bring you up some cake and ice cream, Grandpa?” she asked tactfully.

“Sit down beside the hearth, young woman,” the old man invited with a nod toward Jo. His lean, knotted finger indicated a bench that stood to one side of the fireplace. Jo looked apprehensively toward it. The birch flames were snapping like dogs’ teeth in the chimney.

“We mustn’t stay, Grandpa,” Dorothy said.

“Remember when I used to tell you about the massacre on Spirit Lake back in 1857?”

He was addressing his words confidentially to Jo, it seemed. She felt flattered and impressed. “I used to ask you to tell me about it,” she reminded him.

“You did. And I told you, eh? Life and courage went hand in hand in that time. I told you that, too. We had reason for fighting in those days. No politics in that fight, eh? Do you remember what we fought for?”

Jo, forgetting Dorothy, laughed outright. “You used to say, ‘Land, land, and more land!’ ”

“Right! And why did we fight for it? Because we loved it. We loved it—we fought for it—we won it—and we went to work on it. There was some sense in that fight, eh? But will you tell me now what they were fighting for over there in Europe? Can you tell me that, eh?”

Jo hesitated. “I—”

“How could you know? The men that did the fighting didn’t know. It wasn’t a war to tame the wilderness. I’ll tell you what it was, young woman. Politics—power—greed—suspicion, that’s what it was! And what did they get out of it, eh? Waste and desolation, that’s what they got out of it. Waste and desolation. We don’t know it yet. But we will know it. I won’t live to see it, but you’ll live to see it. When our women have squandered all the profits of war on fripperies and gimcracks and folderol, we’ll wake up and see ruin around us. Yes, and famine, like as not. Mark my words, young woman! And they’ll have to take to the land again to build for the future. To the land, do you hear? Your generation—and maybe another on top of it—two generations building from the ground up—two generations making up for the waste of four years!”

“If you shout so Mamma’ll think you’re going to have another stroke, Grandpa!” Dorothy pleaded and touched his knee placatingly with her white hand.

“Eh?” He squinted at her, but Jo saw that he had not heard her and did not wish to hear. When he spoke again, however, his voice was lower and his manner more calm. It was almost as if he were talking to himself. “We grew rich down there on the Niobrara. That’s down in Nebraska. But it was a bald country—too much moonlight when there was a moon. I wanted lakes and forests. And I got ’em, by thunder! Ten sections—right here in the north. That was greed, eh? I’ll not argue the point. But I brought in settlers, didn’t I? Men and women who knew what to do with land when they had it—earth users, that’s what I called ’em.” He leaned toward Jo, searching her face from beneath his bristling brows. “And you’re one of ’em, young woman. It’s in your face. It’s in your eyes. You’re a—you’re an earth user, by God!”

“Grandpa!” Dorothy whimpered, tears widening her eyes.

But old Ashbrooke Hilyard’s eyes were fixed upon Jo. He bent toward her again. “When you come to marry, young woman, don’t marry beneath you. Never marry a Hilyard, do you hear! The breed’s gone wrong. I used to think—”

Suddenly he lapsed into silence and his long chin poked abruptly down into the clean white of his shirt front, in between the plaid, flannel folds of the robe he wore. Jo noted all these things. She was to think of them at a time when she knew she would never see him again.

“Let’s go,” Dorothy whispered. “He’s asleep. That’s the way he’s been ever since he had his stroke. He talks a lot and then he goes to sleep. Mamma says it’s best for him. He’ll be eighty pretty soon.”

She drew Jo through the doorway and into the hall. Together they went to the head of the main stairway that was a cascade of white and black that fell into the glossy pool below. Jo’s feet were reluctant to make the descent—away from the dusky, firelit room in the tower and the booming voice of old Ashbrooke Hilyard. As she followed Dorothy it seemed that she was slipping noiselessly down a hurrying waterfall whose course knew no control.