Читать книгу The Wolf Woman - Stringer Arthur - Страница 4

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John Caver, for all his weariness, found his spirits rising as he made ready for supper that night. He detected some shadow of meaning, for the first time, in the name which had been given to that camp of his. It marked the end, he tried to tell himself, of a long trail of unrest. It carried an aspect of retreat, of escape from a more intricate and unmanageable world.

He noticed that, for the first time in a week, he was anxious to eat; he also noticed, as he seated himself in the cedar-beamed dining-room with its smoke-stained stone fireplace and its glowering mounted mooseheads, that his meal was to be an ample one. But it was not served, as he had hoped, by Aurora Mary. His sole attendant was Indian Joe, a wide-faced métis who looked unnaturally swarthy and sheepish in an enveloping white apron of butcher's linen. From the kitchen door covered with buffed buckskin, however, he could hear the girl's booming voice as she rattled range-lids and gave orders and shot oaths over her shoulder at the none too facile Indian Joe.

But Caver, as he dined on white-meated black bass and green peas and hot biscuits and wild strawberries stewed in maple syrup, topped off with clotted cream and surprisingly good coffee, was tempted to condone those flights of profanity. For the girl could cook as efficiently as she could curse. And for the second time that day, as he lighted a cigarette and strolled out to the rough-timbered veranda that overlooked the paling bay-waters and the lengthening shadows of the pine-fringed Point, a semblance of peace descended upon him. He found consolation in the faintly riffling water touched into orange and opal by the lowering sun, in the brooding high sky that bent over the blue-misted valleys, in the quietening call of water-fowl along the reed-fringed shore-lines. That, after all, was Nature's way, so much more ordered and reasonable than man's. And it was good to go into retreat. Even those anchorets of the Middle Ages, who turned their backs on the world, must in their time have caught at that secret. For there was something healing in quietude. And men, in the end, could be enriched by solitude, could forget the fever and tumult of the ant-hill life that left their hearts arid and their emotions worn thin.

But there were doors, he remembered as he noticed the camp cat carrying a limp kitten across the veranda-end, that could never be quite closed. And his mind went back to the scene that he had tried so assiduously to shut out from his thoughts, to that unspeakable family conference of a week ago, that awful hour in the mulberry-curtained library where he had met his defeat as a father and a man of the world.

The memory of that scene was burned in his brain, as indelible as a brand that is burned on a writhing range-steer. It would always be with him, as vivid as a nightmare etched deep with unformulated agonies. Joan herself had not been there, at first. But his own sister Agatha had been there, stunned and all in black, as though it were a funeral. She had sat red-eyed in her high-backed red fauteuil, looking hopelessly Edwardian with her smelling-salts and her bewilderment before a natural enough law of biology. And his married daughter Gail had motored over to Westbrook, white and hard and indignant, with three small daughters to think of and an inexpressibly irritating way of interrupting the talk with faint and throaty groans. And their Uncle Ellis Norcross had been there, scowling and ill at ease and only too anxious to escape to his golf. But he had added to every one's misery, as usual, by repeated and mournful clucks of his tongue against his mouth-roof and by proclaiming that it seemed only yesterday he was thinking of poor Joe as a prim and starchy little girl in a pink sash. And then this had to happen.

"This is what comes," attested Agatha, "of cigarettes and sitting on one's shoulders in speed-roadsters."

"I'd rather she were dead," sobbed Gail over her incongruously opulent pearls.

"There was a time," Agatha Abbott thickly observed, "when situations like this were restricted to the lower orders."

Old Ellis Norcross sniffed aloud.

"It's the whole damned generation that's gone wrong," he proclaimed as he crossed to the sherry decanter. "And now, instead o' being turned out of home in a snowstorm, they blame their forebears for passing a Freud complex on to them."

But Caver's lost pride, at that endless and useless pother, had turned over in its freshly mounded grave.

"All this self-pity isn't getting us anywhere," he had abruptly broken in. "We're not here to feel sorry for ourselves, but to decide on some plan of action. Just what are we going to do?"

"It seems to me," quavered Gail, "that Joan herself ought to decide that. She flatly refuses to go to Europe."

"Naturally," snorted Uncle Ellis Norcross, "in her condition!"

"But surely some one can convince her——"

"It's no use," interposed Gail. "Joe won't even talk about it. She doesn't even look sorry. All she does is blink at me as though she had a secret her own sister couldn't be trusted with." And that sister rose in her tearful indignation and crossed to the mullioned window overlooking the Italian garden. "I could forgive her being a fool, but I don't see why we should all suffer this way because of her selfishness."

"Will somebody," intoned her Aunt Agatha, "kindly make sure there are no servants outside those doors."

"Then," Caver had cried, "we'll make the man marry the girl."

"Joe," reported Gail, "says that stuff went out with crinolines. She says she couldn't morally live with a man she doesn't love."

"You mean she doesn't care for him?"

"No," affirmed Gail, "she doesn't. I think she almost hates him."

"I must say," asserted her Aunt Agatha over a black-bordered handkerchief, "that she chose a particularly peculiar way of demonstrating her hatred."

"She still regards herself," explained Gail, "as engaged to Allan Somer."

"Where is Allan now?"

"Somer's down in Costa Rica," announced Uncle Ellis, "studying the banana-blight. And he might be doing more service to his country if he stayed home and studied the woman-blight."

"But how and why," demanded Caver, "did a thing like this ever happen?"

"She said," explained the tremulous-voiced Gail, "that it was the moonlight."

"Moonlight?"

"Yes—moonlight and a mood."

"They're like that, nowadays," averred her Aunt Agatha, with a melancholy shake of the head. "Going about half naked and doing negro dances and racing round three-quarters of the night in their own cars."

"Cars, my eye!" corrected Uncle Ellis. "They're not satisfied with cars. They get their kick out of dodging thunder-clouds in plane cockpits, the sky-flying fools!"

It was Gail who waived this wearily aside as irrelevant.

"But the Cavers," she was protesting to her father, "were never that kind."

"Well, they seem to be getting up-to-date!" averred the rubicund old man in tweeds.

"Shut up," cried the harried Caver as he pounded the bell to call a servant. And when a maroon-clad footman had appeared in the doorway, that impassive-faced servitor was commanded to find Joan Caver and fetch her to the library.

Joan had refused to come, at first, but she responded, in the end, to her father's repeated and more summary message. She walked slowly into the shadowy and silent room with an empty and long-stemmed cigarette-holder of jade held between her slightly tremulous fingers, and a look of antagonism in her opal-green eyes. The girl's face, Caver had noticed, was white as paper, with blue shadows under her faintly luminous eyes and the Caver lines of sullenness about rebellious lips slightly pinched with worry and perhaps something more than worry. But there was audacity, and something more than audacity, in the cool glance with which she inspected the unhappy family quartet so silently awaiting her.

Caver, even in that untimely moment, had been acutely conscious of her beauty. She impressed him as wordlessly fragile and finished, as complete and self-contained as the softly tinted amphora on his mantel-shelf beyond the dark-wooded reading-table. She reminded him of porcelain, of something smooth and brilliant but quite impenetrable. It was the hardness, he remembered, of the newer generation, the deflecting shell of sophistication that left her inaccessible to even the more intimate hand he was at that very moment longing to reach out to her. For, with all that shadowy wisdom about her eyes, she seemed singularly untried and intense and at war with herself. But what most wrung his heart was her sense of isolation, of standing alone in a world which she was so foolishly trying to flout.

"Well, what is it?" she had asked with her quietly challenging smile. "What're you going to do with me?"

Caver, as he studied her, found his mind going back to its earlier thought of porcelain. She impressed him as a precariously thin crucible, glazed and indurated and seething with acids which would have to fight out their own eternal battle of force. He tried to tell himself that such things might leave her untouched, that her very hardness might save her from the blue flame of tragedy under which less tenacious spirits once snapped. She was at least sustaining her latter-day rôle of indifference, for about her he could detect no shrinking betrayal of wrong-doing, no timorous acknowledgment of shame. Yet his heart none the less ached for her. He wanted to pity her. But he knew only too well she would refuse to accept his pity.

It was Gail who, after getting up and once more walking to the window, swung half angrily about on her younger sister.

"The more important question," she cried, "is what you're going to do with yourself."

"I thought I'd done about enough," was her curtly restless retort. And it brought a cruel enough counter-retort from the indignant Gail, whose breast was heaving under her absurdly opulent pearls.

But Caver, at the moment, wasn't listening to their talk. He was recalling a scene in the same room, several years before, where Joan had been called to account for a telltale cigarette-end which her Aunt Agatha had found on the girl's dressing-room table. That, at the time, had been disturbing enough to them all. But one got used to such things. His daughter smoked now in public and private, in the family limousine and her own car, on horseback and on bathing beaches, in restaurants and theater lobbies. She smoked openly and shamelessly, like all her leggy generation, just as her own father did. But this was something different.

"Somebody ought to shoot the dirty dog!" her Uncle Ellis was muttering, obviously following his own floundering line of thought. And that brought Joan's glacial green eyes about to her uncle's plump and purplish-brown face.

"Applesauce!" she ejaculated with quiet scorn. "That stuff, old dear, went out with ankle-length skirts. His family might as well talk about shooting me."

"You mean you knew what you were doing?"

"Why shouldn't I?" she demanded.

Her Aunt Agatha was crying openly, by this time, and lugubriously protesting through her sobs that the poor thing ought to be taken as far away as possible. And Caver was almost glad when the shrill of the telephone on the dark-wooded table interrupted their foolish and futile bickering.

"Answer that," he said to Gail, who was seated next to the table-end.

Gail, having wiped her eyes, took up the receiver. Her voice, as she spoke into the instrument, was quiet but a trifle thick and her jeweled fingers toyed with a gold-handled paper-knife as she sat with her unfocused gaze fixed on a Clytie in gold clasping a conch ink-well to her rounded shoulder. But Gail's eyes, as she sat there, had widened perceptibly and the color had slowly ebbed from her face. And her hand was shaking as she gropingly restored the receiver to its hook.

"It's—it's too awful!" she gasped as she rose to her feet, one hand resting on the table-edge.

"What's wrong?" demanded Caver, half-way out of his chair.

But his older daughter disregarded that question. She turned slowly about until she faced the moodily impassive Joan.

"It's about Ronny," she said, trying to control her voice.

"What's happened to the dog?" barked out her Uncle Ellis, tugging at his collar.

"Everything—everything's too late now!" she cried in a voice oddly thinned with desperation.

"What are you talking about?" demanded Caver, stopping half-way with his hand out for the phone.

"Ronny's dead," she answered, her eyes, now quite dry, still fixed on the girl with the jade tube in her hand. "He crashed in his plane, between here and Princeton. He—he was burned to a crisp."

Joan Caver put the jade-green tube down.

"I thought something like that would happen," she said with a quietness that brought their startled glances up to her face.

"Do you mean he killed himself?" came in a bellow from the older man in the golf suit.

"I didn't say that," protested the unnaturally cool-eyed girl. "But he was worried and reckless and ready enough to take a chance when he saw it."

Caver was compelled to turn away from her, to turn away with something dangerously close to a shudder.

"How did it happen?" he quaveringly demanded of his older daughter, who had subsided white and weak into a wing-chair.

"Nobody seems to know, except that he went up from the Princeton field right after luncheon," answered Gail, getting better control of herself as she went on. "He was flying alone, Colton said, and intended to make Mitchell Field. But his engine failed, just before he got to Burrowton, and people there said he seemed to be trying to make a forced landing on the golf-course. But he came down in a nose-dive, not twenty yards from the club-house, and—and the fire started before any one could get out to him."

It was Joan's voice that broke the silence.

"So now nobody will need to shoot him," she observed with ice-cold bitterness.

"That's ghastly—to say a thing like that," cried the quiveringly indignant Gail.

"But you've just implied that he did everything at a most inconsiderate time," contended the white-faced Joan. It was then that she turned to her Uncle Ellis, who was pacing back and forth muttering, "Sky-flying fools!" She seemed the one person in the room who was able to keep her head.

"Please stop that patrolling," she protested. "You see, it makes me rather nervous."

"But what in God's name can we do now?" demanded Gail, shaken by a small chill. "How can we keep people from knowing what's happened to us?"

"To us!" scoffed the slender-bodied girl beside the bridge-lamp. Her laugh was still crisp and mirthless as she turned her back on them and confronted her harried father. "I guess, Dad, you'd better get me away from here. For I certainly don't intend to nest much longer in this roundhouse of whiners. There's not much for me to do now but swallow my medicine. So I'd like you to take me up to Trail-End Camp until—until everything's over."

She was able to smile at the surprise that showed on their faces. She even looked about for a chair, and half wearily seated herself, as though a trifle tired of it all.

"Why, you'd die up there," blurted out her Uncle Ellis, "alone in the backwoods!"

"But the Caver name would remain unsullied in the Social Register," proclaimed the pallid-cheeked girl in the over-ornate Italian chair.

"You positively make me hate you," cried Gail, "when you——"

But Caver cut her short.

"And after that?" he asked, achieving a shadow of his own daughter's quietness.

"That, I think, must remain entirely my own affair."

"But there's Allan Somer to remember," he reminded her, recalling a disturbing enough picture of the intensity with which this girl, for all her youth, had attached herself to the one man who had seemed able to save her from herself.

"I haven't forgotten him," was Joan's quietly spoken reply. And Caver, for a moment, was able to catch a recurring wave of intensity in the morose girlish eyes that met his. It impressed him, even as he remembered how it was an instinct for every man to protect and fight for his own flesh and blood, that the ways of Destiny were inscrutably dark and tangled. She was his own daughter, but she had always remained slightly incomprehensible to him. She may have gone her own way, as was the newfangled habit of women, but she had the habit of getting what she wanted.

"You've certainly broken a good man's heart," her Aunt Agatha was inconsequentially sobbing into the inadequate handkerchief with the black border.

"Bunk!" Joan murmured with cool-noted insolence. And her face, even though colorless, was quiet enough as she turned back to her father. "The sooner we can decide on what I'll need and be on our way the better it'll suit me." She spoke with a matter-of-factness that was not without its shadow of fortitude.

"You're willing to go up there?" he asked, startled by this unexpected valor.

"I haven't much choice, have I?"

"But you understand what it means," persisted her father, "five or six hundred miles away from what you have here, from everything you're used to?"

"I wish it were five or six thousand miles away from what I have here," was her listlessly hostile answer.

Caver, as a man of the world, had always favored quick decisions. And he had no intention, in this case, of prolonging the agony.

"All right," he abruptly announced. "We'll get out of here before the week-end. You can wait over a day or two at Duck Landing until I get those camp quarters fitted for a woman. Will you want to take your own maid?"

"Most certainly not."

"Then a trained nurse?"

Her thin and wintry smile did not escape him.

"I'd prefer nobody until they're actually needed."

"It will be a bit lonely up there," he reminded her.

"Like doing time," she rather grimly suggested. Her hard little laugh grated on him. Yet he was sorry for her, with all her selfishness. He remained oppressed by a sense of inadequacy as he sat staring at the embattled small figure in chiffon. He even nursed an impulse to throw all the others out of the room and take her in his arms and comfort her, or try to comfort her. But he knew that she would be averse to any such advances, that she would whip him back with one of her hard little wise-cracking speeches. She was a woman now, and there were reservations that had to be respected, even by a father.

It was only for a moment, when they were alone half an hour later, that the veil was lifted.

"I don't want Allan to know," she had said with altogether unlooked-for intensity.

"Good God, girl, nobody must know!" he had blurted out before he could give much thought to that speech of hers.

Caver moved restlessly in his none too comfortable chair of willow boughs, as though to shake from his shoulders the last of those accumulated memories. He even sighed as he gazed out on the slowly paling pinelands. But his wandering gaze focused itself, a moment later, on a dark figure that moved between him and the opalescent bay-water. This figure, he saw, was Aurora Mary, making her leisured way down to the boat-landing with her black-faced husky at her heels. There she seated herself on a nail-keg, with her back against a neatly piled stack of stove-wood. She was carrying what appeared to be a battered old bellows-accordion, and having settled herself comfortably, she balanced that strange instrument between her parted knees and proceeded to wring music from its reeds.

Caver, as he listened, was prompted to agree with the husky-dog as to the nature of that music. For Pancake, as the blithely solemn chords rolled forth, raised a protesting nose to the evening stars and gave utterance to a series of dismal howls. But there were others, apparently, who liked it, others besides the rapt and rhythmically swaying Aurora Mary. He could see red-sashed Mike Faubert moving irresolutely out toward the water-front, followed by Indian Joe and a stumbling métis stripling, who was followed in turn by a rotund old squaw with a yellow and scarlet blanket over her shoulders. They dispersed themselves about the landing, sitting silent and motionless as the swaying figure on the nail-keg rhapsodically but none too adeptly poured out to them the strains of Sweet Adeline and Old Black Joe and The Bells of St. Mary.

It impressed the man from the city as simple and unschooled to the verge of barbarism. It seemed aboriginal in its crudity. But, in the lonely northern twilight, it took on a wistfulness of its own, a salvaging dignity that could not be altogether laughed down. And the dusky girl on the nail-keg could not be regarded as altogether ridiculous. She seemed to acquire, in that mellowing light, the glamour of far-off things, uncouth and untamed and slightly incomprehensible. And when Caver went to bed in the chintz-hung room so familiarly aromatic with its dried pine-needle pillows, he could still hear the old bellows-accordion sounding through the darkness. It was too foolish and childish to be annoyed at it. But he couldn't help wondering, as he fell asleep, what that young backwoods musician would do with the seldom-awakened pipe-organ in his town house on Fifth Avenue.