Читать книгу One of Ours / Один из наших - Уилла Кэсер - Страница 19

The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything, then a hard freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler’s old double sleigh from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles, most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But the Wheelers always kept everything.

Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a sleigh-ride. Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and Claude were old playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to see Mr. Royce at his town office.

Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks, Pompey and Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger; that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked in the barn.

The mill road, that led off the highway and down to the river, had pleasant associations for Claude. When he was a youngster, every time his father went to mill, he begged to go along. He liked the mill and the miller and the miller’s little girl. He had never liked the miller’s house, however, and he was afraid of Enid’s mother. Even now, as he tied his horses to the long hitch-bar down by the engine room, he resolved that he would not be persuaded to enter that formal parlour, full of new-looking, expensive furniture, where his energy always deserted him and he could never think of anything to talk about. If he moved, his shoes squeaked in the silence, and Mrs. Royce sat and blinked her sharp little eyes at him, and the longer he stayed, the harder it was to go.

Enid herself came to the door.

“Why, it’s Claude!” she exclaimed. “Won’t you come in?”

“No, I want you to go riding. I’ve got the old sleigh out. Come on, it’s a fine night!”

“I thought I heard bells. Won’t you come in and see Mother while I get my things on?”

Claude said he must stay with his horses, and ran back to the hitch-bar. Enid didn’t keep him waiting long; she wasn’t that kind. She came swiftly down the path and through the front gate in the Maine seal motor-coat she wore when she drove her coupe in cold weather.

“Now, which way?” Claude asked as the horses sprang forward and the bells began to jingle.

“Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells, Claude. I haven’t heard sleighbells since you used to bring me and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don’t we stop for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!” Here Enid laughed. “All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they can’t find out whether your brother really gave them to her for Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself, I believe they’d hold a public meeting.”

Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. “Doesn’t it make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?”

“It would, if she minded. But she’s just as serene! They must have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer’s back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the furs.”

Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the town, where only people of modest means lived. “We must stop to see Gladys’ mother, if only for a minute,” Enid said as they drew up before the fence. “She is so fond of company.” Claude tied his team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch, hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.