Читать книгу And Now Tomorrow - Rachel Field - Страница 9

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How can I tell of that summer except to say that I shall never meet its like again? There may be others more fair, others more busy and full of contentment, but never one so charged with the warm swift current of love when first it takes over an untried heart. The response in me was unpredictable. Sometimes I was restless as the dragonflies that hovered over our lily pool, their wings a shimmer of impatience. On others I was wary and withdrawn as one of our garden moles guarding his secret ways. But whatever the mood I no longer slept or woke or went about my business with the old self-sufficiency. It was Harry Collins this, and Harry Collins that, day in and day out. Nothing made sense without him, and I didn't care who knew it.

To love and be wise, they say, is impossible. They say, too, that if you love you are the slave, and if you are loved you are the master. It was like that with Harry Collins and me from the first night of my return. He had only to beckon and up I sprang, one leap ahead of myself. Foolish--of course it was, but past my power to have it otherwise. Maggie Flynn used to shake her head when she saw me hurrying downstairs to meet him, or dressing for the country-club dances as if my very life depended on being ready an hour before it was time to start.

"Come now, Miss Emily, have patience," she would say. "There's all the time in the world and some left over." And when her words failed to halt me she would add slyly, "Ah, well, the feet go to the place where the heart is."

I was always making some excuse to drive by the mills, hoping for a glimpse of Harry's head bent over a desk, or his familiar figure striding across the mill yard. Even when I stayed on our side of the river I would look over a dozen times an hour wondering if he were thinking of me at that precise moment. I was in love, no doubt of that.

There is an old sketchbook of mine in the ell storeroom that always brings back that summer, especially a certain water color which I pass over quickly. Some time perhaps I shall be able to look impersonally at the painted shape of a tilted thorn tree in a field with the outline of a low hill beyond. I shall look and not feel memory stirring too sharp for me to bear. For though the sketch is only half finished it still keeps something of the magic of an afternoon in midsummer. There in the corner the brush strokes end abruptly because I looked up and caught Harry's eyes, and after that--no more reaching for paint and brushes, nothing to do or say but to be aware each of the other.

On summer Saturdays the mills closed at noon, and often Harry and I would drive with a picnic basket over to a place on the outskirts of town. It has changed since then. Only the river is the way it used to be, tranquil and broad after its plunge over Peace-Pipe dam. It flowed there quiet and free of barriers and factory grime, between marshy meadows that spread out below Blairstown. Those marshes are drained now of their cattails and their shallow pools that used to make sunsets more fiery in the irregular small patches they reflected. Gone are the thorn trees and alder thickets, cleared to make room for a parkway and real estate development. Cheap bungalows like rows of painted boxes multiply where field larks used to rise singing from sunburnt grass that was just the color of Harry Collins' hair.

But I, too, am changed. For I have been drained of a certain bright assurance that love can stay secure; cleared of old hopes and confidences by the ruthlessness of experience. But on one July Saturday not a doubt clouded my mind or heart.

I was waiting in the car for Harry by the mill gates when the noon whistle blew. It was sweet to my ears that day, for all its shrillness, and I heard it as wives and sweethearts of mill hands must have heard it, knowing it meant a man's step at the door and a precious half-day to be shared in sunshine and warmth together. He climbed in beside me, so good to see in the heather mixture sweater that was my favorite because it duplicated the little flecks of brown and green in his hazel eyes. We drove for a few miles on the main turnpike and then turned the car into a dusty, unfrequented road that narrowed to a pair of overgrown wheel ruts that ended by clumps of fireweed and the cellar of a burned-out house. Here on the flat, sunny doorstep we sat and ate the sandwiches and cookies I had brought, and drank some sour, red wine that Harry had wheedled one of the Italian mill hands into selling him.

"It's supposed to be Chianti," Harry explained. "Pretty poor imitation, but beggars can't be choosers in Prohibition times. Roselli didn't want to let me have this for fear it would get out he was making it in his woodshed. It's a farce, this Eighteenth Amendment."

"I know," I agreed, trying not to pucker my lips over the wine. "Last winter in Boston all the men carried hip flasks to dances, and some of the girls brought bottles, too."

"Women don't understand about drinking." Harry leaned back and lit a cigarette. "Oh, not this mild sort of thing." He waved at the wine disguised in a catsup bottle, and went on, "Not that I've been drunk often, but just enough to know."

"How does it make you feel?"

"Oh, sort of equal to anything. It's as if nothing were hard or impossible any more. Kind of like a god until you pass out."

"I've only had enough to feel like giggling a lot," I told him. "And once, in the middle of a party last winter, I wanted to cry and cry about nothing in particular."

Harry laughed.

"You're funny, Emmy," he said, and I loved the way that nickname sounded on his lips. "Funny, but I like you."

"You're funny, too," I told him, "and I like you."

"I can read you like a book," he went on. "You're really a very pleasant and easy book to read, though no girl likes to be told that for some strange reason." He yawned and put out his cigarette. "And now, with your permission, I'll take my after-luncheon nap and you can paint a picture, but not of me."

He turned over on the grass, his face buried in his folded arms to keep the flies away.

I set out my water colors and opened my sketchbook to a fresh page, and my fingers began marking out the scene before me, the tilted thorn tree and the tawny patch of field, the familiar hump of hill beyond. My hands worked surely with pencil and brushes and paints, yet my eyes would keep turning to where Harry lay stretched, long-legged and strong of body, in the sun. So still and relaxed he lay, yet so full of vigor and life, that I could almost mark the swift stir of blood in the veins of his freckled hands and arms where the fine hairs were yellower than on his sandy head. Under the white cotton material of his shirt his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, with unbroken regularity. I paused in my painting, and my cheeks began to burn with something far more potent than that homebrewed wine.

"What are you thinking about, Emily?"

He turned over suddenly on his back and studied me through sleep-narrowed eyes.

"Oh, nothing," I hedged, and tried not to give myself away. Then as he still stared and smiled through the slanting sunshine I broke down and confessed. "Well, us, then--if you must know."

"Of course I must--"

He spoke casually, but he broke off and the look in his eyes turned me suddenly shy and confused, though it was what I had hoped I might see in them some time. Day after day I had searched them for that look. Now there was no doubt, and the age-old instinct to flee was upon me. I sprang up, scattering my book and paints and brushes in every direction. I might have been Daphne in flight, my feet suddenly taking root, hair turning into laurel leaves before the onrush of the pursuer.

"Hey, wait." There was nothing of ancient Greece in his words, but I would not have exchanged them for all the sonnets in creation. "You know--it's funny, I was thinking about us, too--especially you."

His arms were strong and hard and warm about me. His breath was warm, too, on my cheek, and the smell of sunburnt grass was all about him and will always overwhelm me with the memory of that moment.

I had been kissed before. What girl of my age hasn't? But this was different. Whatever I can think of him now--and I have thought plenty, both good and bad, since that day--I can never forget the strength and sweetness of his lips.

He held me close--how long, I shall never know, for time was our friend that day and there was no mill whistle to sound and only a kindly, gradual setting in of twilight after the pink went out of the sky and the marshy pools lost their reflected fire.

"Harry," I remember I faltered at last, "does it mean that you and I--that we--"

He nodded and held me closer.

"And we can tell them--tonight?"

"If you want to. But I'd just as soon we kept it to ourselves a little longer."

"They'll know, whether we say a word or not. They'll see it on my face. Oh, Harry, I didn't know, I wasn't sure--about you, I mean. I was always sure about me."