Читать книгу Cristina and I - Stringer Arthur - Страница 3

Table of Contents

“Is it bad news?” I asked, observing both the frown that furrowed my wife’s brow and the smoke that curled up from the electric toaster.

But Margaret, instead of answering that question, asked one of her own.

“What’s a hoosgow?”

“It’s a vulgarism, I believe, for the county jail. And I hope no friend of ours is in one.”

“It’s Cristina,” said the abstracted-eyed Margaret as she put an orchid-tinted note down beside the toast-rack. “She’s coming to stay with us.”

I sat speechless, digesting both buttered toast and a sense of shock.

“Isn’t that rather like letting a puma loose in a lamb’s pen?” I finally inquired.

“She’s been having trouble at home,” averred Margaret as she quietly refilled my coffee-cup.

“But why bring her troubles to us?” was my natural enough query.

“Mother’s worried,” proclaimed Margaret, “about the way Cristina’s been carrying on since she broke off with Roddie Jones. And she won’t go abroad. And she won’t do what she’s told. And father says that if she wants to keep out of the hoosgow she’d better run her traffic-cops down in another county.”

This also had to be digested.

“Cristina’s a bright girl,” I conceded. “But I can’t see how one of those self-opinionated Amazons who smash up their underslung cars and other people’s over-strung nerves is going to add much to the peace of this once happy household.”

“I thought you liked Cristina?”

“I do. I also like shower-baths. But I don’t care to be under one all the time.”

“Cristina,” ventured her more sober-minded sister, “needn’t interfere with you in work-hours.”

“But she will. She always did. Why the devil can’t she take a studio in the Village and go Russian?”

“She may broaden us,” suggested my soliloquizing better half.

“The tinkling Cristina,” I scoffed, “in the rôle of a missionary steam-roller!”

“She might be steadied by contact with a strong character,” asserted her quiet-eyed sister.

“Does that mean me?” I demanded, trying in vain to ignore the writing on the wall.

“Of course,” answered Margaret as she turned off the toaster. “And she’ll come anyway. She always seems to do about what she wants to.”

“That,” I protested, “is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. She’ll argue with me, and be a bad example to the children, and smoke cigarettes at the breakfast-table, and——”

“You seem to forget, darling,” interrupted my wife, “that Cristina is a woman of twenty-five.”

“But still trying to act like twenty,” I amended.

“You used to say that you liked talking with Cristina,” Margaret reminded me. “You said you found her stimulating.”

“But I’ve a book to finish up before the first of October. And I’d much prefer that she stayed home and stimulated her own family.”

“Isn’t that a bit ungracious?” asked Margaret as she passed me the marmalade. “And it would be better, of course, if she doesn’t see Roddie for a while.”

“But you said she’d broken with Roddie,” I interposed.

“She has, for the time being. But Roddie’s the right sort, and Cristina knows it.”

“And she intends to marry him?”

“Of course.”

“Has she told you that?”

“She hasn’t needed to,” was the quiet-toned answer.

Women, I had to admit, were a trifle beyond me. They seemed as elliptical in their mental processes as a leaping frog. Even Margaret’s mind, I’d found, was amazingly like the Grand Central Station: it had two levels for its different trains of thought. She might not be as loquacious as Cristina, but she had a way of reaching her own ends that was no discredit to the matriarchs of other days.

“And if you’ll meet Cristina on the ten twenty-five,” suggested Margaret as she gathered up her mail, “it’ll give me a chance to get the Blue Room ready. And tell Williams, of course, she must have a place somewhere in the garage for her car.”

I looked after my spouse, wondering why women were so erroneously known as the fair sex. Then I went off in search of Williams, who was busy with the dahlia-beds and in no mood for dredging and buoying any second channel through the silt of discarded furniture that so menacingly flowed into my stuccoed garage and made the mere housing of an automobile a matter of high adventure. So, rather than lose a good man in a poor cause, I took off my coat and set to work clearing a space for Cristina’s car. Then, having been twice warned from an upper window that my time was short, I washed off the dust, donned my coat, backed out Margaret’s asthmatic sedan and went to meet Cristina.

She looked very lovely as she emerged from her chair-car and stood in the flat sunlight of our open suburban platform. She stood surrounded by a disturbing number of bags and boxes, over which I cast a needlessly harried eye, dreading as I did the discovery of a dog-crate in the cortège. But the only animal there was Cristina herself. And she seemed very much alive, even if the little squeal of happiness with which she greeted me was an empty and factitious affair. She flung herself into my arms with a nestling movement, however, that seemed new to her. And before I could decide on just how avuncular should be my response to that embrace, she lifted up her face and shook me a little.

“Well, aren’t you going to?” she demanded.

“Going to what?” I countered, remembering how barbaric it was for modern young women to surround their persons with aphrodisiac odors obviously distilled from different exotic flower-essences.

“Kiss me,” answered the cool-eyed Cristina.

We were, after all, about the same as sister and brother. And I’d already been warned about a lack of graciousness in my make-up. And the poor girl, I remembered, had been having rather a hard time of it. I’d even expected to find her unexpectedly meek and quiet, a trifle like a blue-ribbon setter with its spirit broken by a long trip in an express-car.

Yet Cristina’s spirit wasn’t as crushed as it might have been. For when she kissed me, or, to be more chivalric, when I kissed her, she held me down with a hungry little gesture that made me wonder if she wasn’t more alone in the world than she pretended. The fact that my old friend Smithers, the station-agent, and Slim, the express-man, and Patrolman Peter Sprung, were impartial yet interested witnesses of that encounter did not add to my happiness.

“You’re a darling!” murmured Cristina, hugging my arm. “And you’ll have to be awfully careful with that wicker box for it’s got three bottles of dad’s old stuff in it. And those rose dishes that mother’s always been going to give to Margaret.”

It wasn’t until the laborious task of storing Cristina’s hand-luggage in the sedan-back had been completed that my starry-eyed sister-in-law again directed her attention to me.

“Your collar’s soiled, old dear,” she said as she essayed to brush unseen maculations from my apparel. Her hand on my arm even made it a little harder to drive. But I fought down the pagan impulse to inform her that any dirt on my collar came there through cleaning up a garage-end for her own private and personal use. One has to tread lightly, after all, where the sensibilities of starry-eyed women are concerned.

“Are you glad to see me?” Cristina asked out of the silence that had fallen between us.

“Of course,” I answered as I threaded a devious way through the mid-town traffic.

“And I’m going to make you gladder,” murmured my seat-mate as she leaned contentedly against me. In the next thirty yards, however, I had succeeded in straightening out the car again.

“How?” I belatedly demanded.

“I’m coming to help you with your work,” was Cristina’s unexpected announcement.

“How’ll you do that?” I somewhat dazedly inquired.

“You’re getting brackish, darling,” explained Cristina. “You need stirring up a bit.”

“And how’ll you stir me up?” I demanded in a natural enough tone of resentment.

Cristina studied me with a disapproving eye.

“I hate to see you getting old-fogyish,” she had the effrontery to proclaim.

“And how’ll you stop it?” I inquired.

I could see the two little laughter-lines, the drawn-bow lines that parenthesized Cristina’s red and softly curved lips, deepen into a smile.

“I think I’ll make you fall in love with me,” she quietly announced.

“Cristina,” I slowly and solemnly asserted, “all you stand for to me is a shooting pain.”

She turned, at that, and studied me from under thoughtful brows.

“Wait until I get through with you,” she said with an enigmatic little laugh.

“You’ll never even begin,” I promptly assured her. And then I added, apropos of nothing in particular: “Trader Horn says all African cannibals, outside their appetite for long pig, are both moral and chaste.”