Читать книгу Daisy Herself - Will E. Ingersoll - Страница 5

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The summer dawn came with a warm melting of the dark and a running out over the sky-floor of spilled light from under the edge of the world. Daisy, her nerves thrilling like the nerves of one drunken with wine, leaned untired on the varnished window-sill; looking, with all her young vitality gathered into shine of eyes and beat of heart, for her first view of the city.

The shadow of the express, as the early sun came up, coursed like a hound along the barrow-pits of the right-of-way, and quivered, as it were, in noiseless impact against the stolid cedar fence-posts that stood still and were whipped by in the guise of staring bumpkins as the smart, swift train hummed on its way.

Daisy saw these effects at the edge of her travel-picture out of the corner of her eye merely. Her attention was concentrated forward—forward, to watch for the first white trimming of roof-tops on the dewy green fabric of the prairie-rim. Hateful to her were the square fields by the track, where phlegmatic men and teams moved up and down the black fallow; hateful the whitewashed houses, the homely poplar-clumps, the stacks of straw. Appurtenances, all, of the life with which she had been surfeited (she thought): reminding her of cows to be milked, of barnyard drudgery, of gawky, red-visaged, wholly unpiquant boys, of men content to smoke and drawl away their rare hours of ease.

Hateful! The term is too mild to express the immense energy of the girl's distaste for the life she had, with youth's dash, pushed behind her in one reckless thrust.

She was done with it. For good or for ill, she was done with it all, or thought so, in these kinetic and dancing moments, as new leagues of her unexplored earth uprolled along the endless ribbon of this two-railed track of dreams. New leagues, yes—but, so far, no new scenery. The stations she had passed, and continued to pass, were nothing but an endless chain of Toddburns; the intervening reaches of farm land, no more than linked replicas without number or variation, of the Nixon farm. In spite of the "flyer" and its obvious achievement over distance, Daisy Nixon at moments had the odd sensation that the track was revolving beneath the car-wheels, treadmill-style, and the train merely standing maddeningly still amid the old locale.

But there—there! A quick hypodermic needle of joy pricked her throat, and Daisy caught her breath as the strong keen drug of excitement tingled out to all her nerve-ends. A white kite-tail of houses seemed to drop down and flicker, half in the air, at the point where the uprolling earth revolved against the broad-open casement of the morning sky. Appearing for a moment as a fantasy, it soon settled into a lengthening white saw-blade of joined buildings, low in the distance, dividing the solid green world from the dreamy firmament of a June dawn. Straight toward it rushed the cleaving bullet of the train.

Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great urban station in the heart of all.

"Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?"

"Fine, Freddie," Daisy replied, blithely. The comment was plain and simple enough; but her eyes and cheeks told the rest, without need of words.

Beatty stuck on his hat, tilting it a little.

"It ain't so bad, either," he conceded, grinning to himself, as he picked up his smart leather suitcase and Daisy's battered telescope grip, "not so bad, at that, kiddo."

With a hollow, drumlike roar, the train drew to a halt beneath a dome of glass and iron; and Daisy and her companion, inching along behind the file of passengers, at length emerged upon a cement walk, walled in on either side by the bulk of varnished railway coaches. Passing along this, descending a stair with an iron balustrade, and proceeding through a great, busy, and echoing rotunda with a ceiling almost as far away as a sky, Daisy and her companion emerged upon a stretch of granolithic pavement.

Beyond the curb, a bevy of bus-drivers from city hotels crowed like a flock of roosters—the surmounting voice in this bedlam being that of a sandy-mustached old-timer, whose vehicle was labelled "Imperial Hotel." By his hind-wheel he stood, moving nothing but the hinges of his jaws; and to see his mouth open to its red limit was to be filled with consternation.

"Imm-Peary-ail Hoat'l!" he sang, his eyes looking nonchalantly up and away, with something of the expression he used to wear when scouting the sky for signs of rain, in the old farming days before he became poet laureate of the city's pioneer hotel.

"Why—look who's here, will you!" The exclamation was Beatty's, as he stopped alongside the scratched old bus. "This is him, Mrs. Beatty—old Jim-Jam Hogle. Can you take a passenger, J. J.?"

Mr. Hogle, without ceasing his vocal offices for so much as the fraction of a moment, let his eyes flicker down over Beatty with no sign of recognition, returned his gaze again to its former direction above the depot roof, and jerked his thumb casually toward the interior of his craft. Beatty handed the girl in, climbed in after her, and set down the suitcase and grip. No others entered; and presently Mr. Hogle, turning from his post by the wheel-rim and glancing inscrutably in at Daisy as he passed the glass panel behind where his two passengers sat, unsnapped and threw in his iron hitching-weight, climbed to his high seat, and rattled away.

Daisy Nixon had never before seen such crowds nor such coachmanship. With the horses trotting at a good speed, the old teamster wound in and out by motor-trucks, autos, street-cars, horse-drays, and thronging pedestrians, as smoothly, swiftly and carelessly as though he had the whole street to himself. The traffic grew less dense as they passed out of the vicinity of the depot, crossed a corner where the car-tracks met at right angles, and, after bowling for a block or two down the city's main thoroughfare, turned down a side street and drew up at the door of a hoary frame hotel, its white-painted two-tier piazza weathered to a dingy gray.

Beatty and Daisy descended; and the old bus-driver, after first hitching the team to the weight, followed with the grips.

"You wait in the hall here, while I go an' dicker with the clerk, dear," said Beatty, ostentatiously, "I'll be right back."

Daisy, looking about her curiously, encountered suddenly the eye of Mr. Hogle, standing up the hall, out of sight of the hotel office. The eye had been trying for some moments to catch hers; and, now that it had succeeded, Mr. Hogle raised a huge forefinger, stained indelibly with harness-oil, and beckoned. Daisy went over briskly.

"Missis Beatty, hey?" said Mr. Hogle, toning his great voice to a low interrogative rumble.

Daisy nodded a careless affirmative. It was none of his business. She felt able to take care of this point herself, when the time should arrive.

"Like hell you are," said the unmincing Mr. Hogle, "ner wun't be. Break away from him as soon's as you can—that's if it ain't too late already. I know him."

Daisy dimpled; raising her chin challengingly, after a manner she had. But she did not answer.

"I guess you're all right yet," said Mr. Hogle, after a shrewd fatherly glance, "an' I see you're one of them confident kind. Them's the ones that gets ketched easiest. Now you'll mind what I told you—won't you, Missie?"

Daisy, regarding her adviser with dancing eyes, bobbed her chin up and down in mock docility; and Mr. Hogle, shaking his head pessimistically, went out to put away his team.

"What was that old geezer saying?" said Beatty, coming out of the office as the old man went outside.

"I—I'm sure I don't know," said Daisy, gravely, "I think he was trying to make love to me, Freddie."

"Wants to get his can beat off, eh?" remarked Beatty, carelessly; "well, what-oh-what does my little girlie want worst, right now?"

"Breakfast," replied Daisy, plumply; ducking roguishly to avoid the caress her questioner, imagining that was the thing she "wanted worst," sought to bestow.

"A-all right," said Beatty, swallowing his pique; "we'll go and see if they can scare us up some poached-two-on, right now. Then 'm going to take my baby out an' show her the best time she ever had, in all her young life—eh?"

"M'h'm," murmured Daisy, smiling to herself, as she followed her companion into the dining-room.

Breakfast that morning was a notable affair, a milestone in Daisy Nixon's days. Not because there was anything novel or striking about the garniture of the Imperial Hotel dining-room, which was a plain homely place, differing little from the eating-room of the Jubilee House in Toddburn—but because there hummed, and called, and clanged, and whistled through the open windows the multitudinous sounds of this new urban life into which she had, as it were, plunged headlong. Daisy listened absently to Beatty's chatter, conceding him an occasional dimple or smile; but otherwise almost forgot him until, as the meal ended, he laid his hand, hot and moist, over hers, and said:

"Well, how does my little-one feel about it now?"

Daisy glanced down at his white-pored hand, with its cigarette-yellowed finger-tips and outstanding blue veins. Then she looked up at him, and leaned one pretty cheek coaxingly close.

"You's baby feels ashamed in this old waist and skirt and hat," she said, softly; "ain't you going to get her some nice things to be married in?"

Beatty's hand squeezed hers.

"Your Freddie sure will do that for you," he said. "Let's go upstairs now, and figure out what we'll need."

Daisy suffered him to pull her out of her chair by the hand he held. Still retaining it, he led her out of the dining-room, along the hall, and up the stairway. At the top, she halted—fetching her companion, who had kept right on going, to a standstill with a jerk.

"Come on, come on," he said, making his tone matter-of-course, "the room is No. 19."

"What's the number of my room?" said Daisy, regarding him pleasantly but with a kind of odd under-gleam in her eyes.

"Y—your room!" Even Beatty, the inured, was embarrassed by that searching, direct look. "Why, I—I—darned if I remember the number."

Daisy continued to look at him a moment; then the shine in her eyes was succeeded by a twinkle, and this by a promising, coaxing side-glance.

"Well, then, let's go into the women's sitting-room, Freddie—this time."

Beatty knew when to yield a point—so he flattered himself.

"All right, Sweetest," he said, "you're the doctor—always."

They passed into the "ladies' parlor," which was empty, except for a few articles of faded furniture, among which a new red settee in one corner glowed with a preternatural brilliance. Beatty sat on the red settee and drew the girl down beside him.

"Somebody got a kiss for her Freddie?" he said, his lips loosely apart and wrinkles springing into view at the sides of his nostrils.

"Oh, I—do' know," Daisy dropped her head a little; "let's just talk. It's nice to sit together an' talk, when we love each other so, isn't it?"

Beatty's answer to this was to thrust his arm about her waist, push his palm beneath her chin, and pull up her face toward his. The girl resisted at first; then, with a motion of yielding, laid her head back on his shoulder and raised her lips. Beatty kissed her, not reverently but roughly; then kissed her again; then again and again: burying his mouth into hers. A little hand came up and caressed his neck; then slipped down within his coat and rested as it were, upon his heart—moving softly, as though feeling for its beats.

Then hand and girl and all tore suddenly and strongly away—and Daisy Nixon was upon her feet, her cheeks glowing like fire, laughing as she held up the leather purse she had taken from his pocket.

"It was the only way!" she cried, breathlessly and sparklingly, as he sat agape; "the only way to get out of you what you owe to me, for the things I have let you think about me, Mr. Fred Beatty. You thought I didn't know all about you—what you did to poor Pearlie Brodie, making her the talk of Toddburn, with worse to come yet—a poor motherless girl, who was given up by a decent fellow that would have married her, if it hadn't been for you. You thought I didn't know. Yes: you thought I 'fell for you', as you'd call it. But I'll tell you what I did, an' you can put it in your pipe an' smoke it, and I hope it'll do you good. I needed you. I needed to get away from that place where I was wasting my life, and I had no money—so I used you. I've met ginks like you before. I could see through you from the first like a pane of glass—you poor, miserable imitation of a man!

"Now, I'm going to take this money and use it, to keep me till I get a job somewhere. Then I'm going to pay it back. But not to you—don't you ever think it. I'm going to send it to Pearlie Brodie. She'll need it badly enough, in a few months from now. She'd never have got it from you straight—never in this world—so she'll get it through me. Now, you get out of here! I've wasted too much breath talking to you. And keep this in your memory-box: I don't know you! So don't speak to me, if I ever have the bad luck to meet you again!"

The girl had barely finished speaking, when Beatty leaped at her, grabbing for the purse which she held. But she stepped quickly back—and, as he pressed in, gave him, with all the strength of her virile young body, a push that sent him sprawling.

"You give me that money," Beatty said, his face pasty and mean with fury, as he climbed to his feet and stood, slowly dusting off his clothes; "that's all I want out o' you. Hand it over, or I'll go down and phone for a constable, and have you taken to the police station.

"Yes—you will!" Daisy challenged. "I suppose you think no person around Toddburn ever reads the city papers and notices what the law does to a fellow that brings a girl sixteen years old to a hotel. Go down and phone for the police, if you feel like it! I know who they'll take back with them when they come, and it won't be me. And I'll tell you something more, Mr. Smart Man: If you're not out of here in the next three minutes or less, I'll phone for the constable. It makes me sick to look at you. I want to go and wash my mouth, too. It'll take a good many washings to make it feel as clean as it did before you touched it. Get away from here!"

"Well," Beatty growled, after a moment, as a distant step down the hall portended the coming of one of the hotel staff, probably attracted by the sound of the raised voices and scuffling, "keep the money, then, you blamed nickel's worth o' nothing. I'll get the worth of it out o' you some other way, yet—you watch me! There's goin' to come a time when you'll need me, an' you'd better fasten onto this," he took a card from his pocket and tossed it down on the settee. "Till then, I'll bid you 'good-day'."

Therewith—in his intense self-reverence, half-expecting to be called back before he reached the street-door—Mr. Frederick S. Beatty turned on his heel and stalked out.

But Daisy did not call him back. Neither, be it said, did she hasten to wash her mouth. As the slam of the door downstairs gave ostentatious notice of Beatty's exit, she moved to the window, watching him up the sidewalk with an odd, half-maternal look.

"That call-down may do you some good, Mr. Naughty man," she murmured; "you've had too easy a time with girls—that's what ails you, principally."