Читать книгу Wallflowers - Temple Bailey - Страница 6

Table of Contents

When the two girls reached home, they found their mother awake and reading in bed. The bed seemed to Theodora to overflow the room. It was enormous, Brobdingnagian, like the things in “Gulliver’s Travels.”

“Mother,” she said explosively, “suppose some one had come up with us and found you in bed!”

Her mother was calm. “It is nearly two o’clock,” she said. “If anybody had come up, he would have had to go down again.”

“Like the King of France and forty thousand men,” Sandra contributed.

“Oh, you two!” Theodora raged. “You think its funny—and it isn’t. It is tragic to live like—chickens in a coop.”

“You chose this apartment, Doady. We might have had a bigger one in a less stylish street.”

“It was the best we could do.” Theodora was restlessly prowling the limited space about the bed. “It was the best we could do and not be ashamed to invite our friends.”

“Friends,” said Sandra, “will come and see you if you roost in the top of a tree.”

“Not the kind I want!” Theodora was still raging.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Claybourne commanded. “You act like a caged lion, Doady. What happened to make you so upset? Didn’t you have a good time?”

The caged lion stopped in her tracks. “Good time? Well, if you want to know we were—wallflowers.”

Mrs. Claybourne’s dreams crashed. “Wallflowers?”

“Yes. Nobody wanted to dance with us.”

Sandra, still preoccupied with the humor of the situation, supplemented, “We stepped on the men’s feet.” She began to rock with silent laughter. “Mother, it was awful. You should have seen our partners, folding their tents like the Arabs.”

Theodora made a sharp interruption. “Sandra, I wish you wouldn’t quote things. It is so archaic. But you don’t care what people think of us. You don’t care if we act as if we came out of the ark.”

Theodora was getting hysterical. Her mother, recognizing the signs, shifted the subject.

“Well, Stephanie was nice to you, wasn’t she?”

“She was polite enough, but she was sorry she asked us.”

Sandra protested. “You don’t know that, Doady. Her manner was perfect.”

“So were her clothes. Everything is perfect about Stephanie Moore. But just the same she had us on her hands, and she didn’t know what to do with us.”

Mrs. Claybourne surveyed her daughter with speculative eyes. “Doady,” she said, “there’s some lemonade in the refrigerator. You’d better drink it and go to bed.”

“I don’t want to go to bed. I want to stay up and talk things out. Mother, you should have seen the refreshments. Just a teaspoon of salad and a square inch of ice. When I think of the parties we had at Windytop—platters of chicken and freezers of ice-cream. We’d have called this stingy.”

“The Moores were never generous providers,” Mrs. Claybourne remarked. “That’s probably the reason they are rich. We’ve never been a saving family. Perhaps, if we had, we’d have more to show for it.”

“Well, we’re going to have something to show for it. I am going to start out early tomorrow morning and get something to do. Stephanie asked us to come again, but we can’t unless we have some clothes. You can’t imagine how out of place we looked tonight, and awkward. We were dreadful.”

“My dear, you couldn’t be that.”

“But we were! Sandra knows it. But she won’t face facts. She’s like you. I have to fight both of you to make you see anything as it is. You’d stay in a rut forever.”

She was very much in earnest, and very pretty and appealing. Sandra knew these moods of her sister’s. Doady would go on endlessly arguing, asserting, complaining. Mrs. Claybourne had infinite patience. She sympathized, commanded, and comforted. And eventually brought her tense, accusing offspring to reasonableness and relaxation.

Taking no part in the conversation, Sandra had changed her dress for a white cotton kimono and now stood in front of the mirror, brushing her hair. Mrs. Claybourne’s eyes rested on her with satisfaction. There was no difference in the mother’s love for her two children. But she had to admit that Sandra was less difficult. She was more of a child than Doady, but such a wise child, going through everything with an air of irresistible gaiety. Half-turned, with parted lips smiling, her wide gray eyes surveyed the two of them with a sparkling sidelong glance; with the rose and ivory of her skin framed by the richness of her hair, she seemed to shed about her an atmosphere of youth and radiance.

Leaving Theodora still proclaiming her wrongs, Sandra stepped out on the balcony. A late wedge-shaped moon was poking its nose among the clouds. She stretched herself in an old deck chair which occupied most of the space, and gazed up at the silver sky.

In one of the apartments below, John McCormack’s voice poured forth from a phonograph a passionate love-song. Sandra, with her hands under her head, listened and gave herself up to dreams. She had really, she decided, had a very good time at the dance. Set against the humiliation of the moments when she and Doady had been marooned on the gold bench were those other moments with Gale Markham. She liked him immensely. He was sincere and simple. She had a feeling that she had found a real friend.

Gradually the lights went out. The phonograph was silent. The moon hid itself behind a bank of clouds. Sandra sat up. It was time to go to bed. She leaned her chin on the rail and looked down.

Across the court and on the floor below the Claybournes’ apartment straight, dark curtains hung on each side of the long window, outlining an illumined oblong through which could be seen a section of a wide table, a shaded lamp, and a man’s hand writing steadily. Perched on the table, sphinx-like as it watched the pen travel across the paper, was a great white cat. Utterly motionless the cat watched, except when the pen stopped and she bent her head to the long, slender fingers which ruffled her fur.

The man’s hand was all that could be seen of him. He might be old or young, short or tall. But his hand told something of his mental make-up and of his characteristics, for he wrote quickly, as one who knows his subject, and the fingers which ruffled the cat’s fur were kind.

And now Theodora was at the window. “We’re having something to eat,” she said. “I’m half starved.”

Sandra would have preferred to stay outside. The tight little rooms oppressed her. Like her mother she sighed in the hot night for her own boughs at Windytop. But she felt the utter futility of rebellion. Things were as they were, because they had to be. One might as well be cheerful about it. Doady wasted a lot of energy in fighting windmills.

Mrs. Claybourne had made some sandwiches.

Sandra said with some compunction: “Why didn’t you let me do it, mother? Oh, we shouldn’t be keeping you up so late. You’ve got to go to work in the morning.”

“I can go to bed early tomorrow night,” Mrs. Claybourne said.

She was tired. But her daughters were her daughters. She lived for them; felt no task too hard if it contributed to their happiness.

Sandra, eating her sandwiches and drinking her lemonade, was aware that Doady’s tense mood was over. Having shelved for the moment the memory of tonight’s fiasco, she pushed on to plans for the future. She had found an advertisement in the evening paper. She read it aloud: “ ‘Well-known art dealer requires energetic and trustworthy assistant with some knowledge of old china and glass, young, well-spoken, and willing to make himself generally useful. Call at Room 41, Stocks Building, before ten A.M.’ ”

“It’s worth trying for,” she said as she laid the paper down.

“But they want a man,” her sister reminded her. “It says ‘himself.’ ”

“I don’t care what it says. There’s no reason why a woman wouldn’t do as well.”

“And how much do you know about old china and glass?”

“I’ve read a lot, and I can learn.”

“Getting a job,” Mrs. Claybourne interposed, “isn’t as easy as you think.”

“Getting anything,” her daughter said cocksuredly, “is putting your mind to it.”

Sandra, listening, was glad that she wasn’t restless like Doady. She didn’t in the least care about getting a job. She got a lot out of small happenings, so that each day seemed to promise interests of its own, without going forth to seek them. It was perhaps the thing which gave zest to the life of Sandra Claybourne that she could, after those thrilling moments in the moonlight when John McCormack sang, give herself absorbingly to the eating of her sandwiches and the drinking of her lemonade. All was grist that came into her mill—a little walk to the butcher’s, a little chat with the baker, a little cake to make for Doady and her mother, a little dusting and sweeping before she allowed herself the luxury of an hour or two on the balcony with a good book. Yet there was this about it all—the little things satisfied her not because of themselves, but because back of them were the dreams of youth, which leaped forward into the future and visioned splendors which might never come to pass, but which were none the less believed in and expected.

Theodora had no patience with Sandra’s states of mind. She liked a good dinner and ate it with an appetite unlooked for in one so lissome, but she did not want to get the dinner. She did not want to hobnob with the butcher or chat with the baker. She did not want to bake a little cake or sweep a room. The things Theodora wanted had to do with getting on in the world. She did not believe in being content to go to market and to dream on the balcony with a book. Theodora did not care about the splendors of the future. She wanted things here and now. She felt that Sandra and her mother drugged themselves with dreams.

She was too tired, however, for further argument. So she kissed her mother and went to bed. Early in the morning she would go forth to seek the family’s fortune. She had a sense of importance, as one who grasps at opportunities which others miss.

Sandra, too, kissed her mother. “Good-night, precious.”

“Good-night, my darling.”

It was a little ceremony sacred to the two of them. They always waited until Doady was out of the way before they performed it. Sandra had begun it on the night after her father died.

In bed and ready for slumber, Sandra found that her eyes would not close. The room was warm, and at last she again went out on the balcony. Wrapped in her white kimono, she leaned over the rail. About the court all the windows were dark. The moon shone wan and pale. It was almost morning.

Suddenly her eye was caught by a figure on the balcony below. A man stood by the rail, the white cat which she had seen between the parted curtains on his shoulder. His face was upraised, and in the spectral light his features showed plainly. His profile was as thin as a silver dollar; his dark hair was tossed back from his forehead; he was as still as a statue.

The moon touched Sandra, too, with light. As she leaned on the rail, she was possessed by a sense of the romance of the moment. She saw herself as Juliet ... the man as Romeo—“Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” She was no longer little Sandra whose partners had flapped their wings and flown away. She was Beauty in a garden—“Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel!”

Her heart beat to suffocation!

The moon went behind a cloud. Sandra returned to realities, fled through the window, shut it behind her, and stood blushing in the dark. She wondered if the man had seen her leaning on the rail. She felt that he must have heard the beating of her heart. How silly she had been! How silly!