Читать книгу And Now Tomorrow - Rachel Field - Страница 11

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New Year's Eve, 1928, slid into 1929 while Harry smiled at me across the living room at Peace-Pipe and the candles made little reddish glints in the sherry glass he held high. I never took my eyes from his face while the clock chimed and the bells outside rang through a cold January drizzle. I needed the reassurance of his eyes. Good as the old year had been to us, I wanted the new one to be even better and more completely our own. Janice, standing between Uncle Wallace and Dr. Weeks in her silver Paris dress that made her look like a bob-haired angel from a Christmas tree, watched us with amused tolerance.

"Those two," she laughed, "you can see they're making plans for 1929 before 1928 has breathed its last, and after the way Emmy's been sentimentalizing all day about what happened to her in this year."

"I'm glad she's a sentimentalist," Harry championed me. "It's an old-fashioned trait, and I love it in her. Go ahead and make pets out of old junk and old years all you want to, darling, only don't neglect me."

"A likely chance of that." Janice laughed.

She had come back in November, prettier than ever and more full of life. I had dreaded her return because I had wanted nothing to change and Janice always brought change and commotion. Yet I found the readjustment less difficult than I had expected. Janice envied me my new status. I could tell that she had not thought me capable of attracting a man like Harry Collins. Then, too, the months of traveling without Maggie to keep order had given her more consideration for other people's possessions. I, for my part, was less irritated by petty pilferings and trivialities. Only what concerned Harry could touch me deeply. Looking back to it now, I wonder how long we might have stayed so if what lay ahead had been longer in coming; if it had not come at all?

The penalty of love, I suppose, must always be the fear of losing it. So old a motif, yet to each of us new with personal significance at one time or another. Love and fear, I was aware of them both that night as I had not been on other New Years.

"There," I heard Janice sigh. "That's over for one year." She turned to Harry when the last toast had been drunk. "I hope Emily warned you about all the family rituals you'll be in for when you marry a Blair."

"She did," he whispered back, "and so far I'm doing all right."

"Well, you wait," she warned, "they have a way of piling up on you."

Our little gathering broke up soon after midnight, for Dr. Weeks had late visits to make and Harry was driving home with him because of the rain.

"Happy New Year again," the Doctor said as he struggled into his overcoat. "But you youngsters listen to me. There's an epidemic going the rounds and it's no respecter of persons. I've got some pretty sick patients over there across the river."

"You mean in the Mill Infirmary?" Aunt Em was anxious.

"In the Infirmary and out of it," he told her. "And it's not all plain flu either. There are a couple of cases of such high temperatures I suspect meningitis."

I didn't bother much about the word then, though now it seems incredible that there could ever have been a time that I did not know it.

"That sounds serious, Will." Aunt Em followed him to the door all concerned and full of questions. "You don't really think--"

"I'll know more by tomorrow, Em; but frankly I don't like the look of things. Keep the girls away from dances and picture shows and make them eat and rest sensibly if you can. Emily'd better stop going down to her art classes in the Recreation Center for a bit. Just for precaution's sake, you understand, though germs don't keep to one side of the river once they get headway."

His predictions were right as it turned out. By mid-January the Mill Infirmary and the town hospital were taxed to capacity. In spite of extra medical help from Boston Dr. Weeks hardly knew what it was to snatch an hour of uninterrupted sleep. For me the only personal hardship of the epidemic was my promise not to drive to the mills to meet Harry when the five o'clock whistle blew.

A sort of gloom hung over Peace-Pipe that January which I resented because I could not always keep my own well-being clear of it.

"You know, Emmy," Harry said one night, "they've had me checking up on last year's orders and the year before that, and there's been a steady decline. I can't understand it with the stock market soaring. Why, with General Electric and Telephone and U.S. Steel going up, the textile and cotton industries ought to be right on top too. If I only had a few thousand dollars to invest I could make a neat little turnover. Sometimes I can't help wishing--"

"Oh, darling"--I wouldn't let him finish the sentence--"don't wish you hadn't come to Peace-Pipe! I get cold all over when I think how it would have been if you hadn't. If you want to leave the mills after we're married you can try something different. But they'll be raising your salary soon, and Uncle Wallace and Mr. Parker are going to make you an assistant manager before long. I know I can talk Aunt Em into a June wedding instead of a fall one, once this epidemic gets over and done with."

"Oh, I suppose I'll stick." Harry shrugged and lit another cigarette. "Lots of the men in my class would envy me the start I've got here, but when I think what I could do with a little money and a rising market--"

"I wish I had some of my own," I told him. "It's a nuisance having it all tied up in the mills, though I never wanted more than my allowance before. Maybe when we're married they'll give me some outright, and then you can do what you want with it. You tell the market not to go any higher till after June."

"All right," he grinned and kissed me, "I'll use my influence with Wall Street, and you use yours on the family. You don't think you could fix it up for April, do you--just a year from the night we met?"

Somehow when Harry said things like that I didn't know how I could bear so much happiness. I never took being wanted for granted, then or now. There should have been something to tell me of the precipice before the earth crumbled under my feet. Why are we humans less forewarned than the wild ducks who heed the summons of frost even though summer sun lies warm upon their feathers?

Janice had set her heart on going to a Valentine dance at the Country Club, and she begged me to persuade Aunt Em and Dr. Weeks to let us go. January had been a long, cold month with little social activity in Blairstown because of the epidemic.

"It's seemed like a whole solid month of day-after-Christmases to me," Janice had sighed. "I'll have to break out some way soon or go mad."

Dr. Weeks did waive his taboos. The club dances were small and select, and the epidemic seemed definitely on the wane. We felt suddenly festive as we set off, and even Maggie fell into the spirit of the evening as she helped me on with my wraps.

"Choose a groom on a horse," she told us, "and a bride at a dance and you can't go wrong."

"Sorry about the horse, Maggie," Harry teased her from the steps. "But I think there's something in what you say."

We did seem to be a part of a special rhythm when we danced together that night. I had wakened in the morning feeling tired and heavy, and my head had ached all day. But suddenly I felt light and elated and charged with an inner current of happiness that tingled in every nerve and fiber. Somehow that night I couldn't make myself believe in death or pain or despair. Other people might know them, but not Harry Collins and Emily Blair moving together in a close-wrapped mantle of well-being.

"Harry," I whispered once when the music stopped and we waited while the rest clapped for an encore. "I'm almost afraid to be so happy. You don't think--"

His arm tightened around me. "It's fatal to think about being happy. You just are, or you're not, that's all there is to that."

But he was wrong. Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it.

It was three by the clock in the Square as we drove back through the deserted town. Rain was falling, and there was no sign of morning in the east.

"Good night, my sweet." Harry kissed me and turned on the doorstep with a laugh that ended in a yawn.

The drip of cold rain in the darkness and those four words he had spoken became one to me as I stood watching him go down the path--fond, casual words that were never meant to be weighted down with the importance I gave them. Yet all those days and weeks and months and years afterward my heart echoed them. If they became distorted and magnified out of all proportion, the fault is mine and mine alone. For I had no right to cling to them as I did because my need of their reassurance was so great. Yet I am not the first, and I shall not be the last, to try to make a bowstring into an anchor chain.