Buch lesen: «Once to Every Man», Seite 3

CHAPTER IV

At her first swift coming when she had cried out to him there in the dark and run across to kneel at his knees, a dull, shamed flush had stained his lean cheeks with the realization that, in his own great bitterness he had failed even to wonder whether she had been forgotten, too.

Now as his big hand hovered over the tumbled brightness of her hair, loose upon his sleeve, that hot shame in turn disappeared. After the quivering gasps were all but stilled, he twice opened his lips as if to speak, and each time closed them again without a word. He was smiling a faint, gravely gentle smile that barely lifted the corners of his lips when she turned in his arms and lifted her face once more to him.

“We don’t mind very much,” she repeated in a half whisper. “Do we–either of us–now?”

Slowly he shook his head. With effortless ease he stooped and swung her up on one arm, seating her upon the bare table before the window. Another match flared between his fingers and the whole room sprang into brightness as he touched the point of flame to the wick of the lamp bracketed to the wall beside him.

She sat, leaning forward a little, both elbows resting upon her slim knees, both feet swinging pendulum-like high above the floor, watching with a small frown of curiosity growing upon her forehead, while he stooped without a word of explanation and dragged a bulky package from the table and placed it beside her. Then she sighed aloud, an audible sigh of sheer surprise after he had broken the string and drawn aside the paper wrapper.

Just as they had seemed in the picture they lay there under her amazed eyes–the pointed, satiny black slippers of the dancing girl, with their absurdly slender heels and brilliant buckles, and filmy stockings to match. And underneath lay two folded squares of shimmering stuff, dull black and burnished scarlet, scarce thicker than the silk of the stockings themselves.

The faint, vaguely self-conscious smile went from Denny Bolton’s lips while he stood and watched her bend and touch each article, one by one–the barest ghost of contact. Damp eyes glowing, lips curled half open, she lifted her head at last and gazed at him, as he stood with hands balanced on his hips before her.

A moment she sat immobile, her breath coming and going in soft, fluttering gasps, and looked into his sober, questioning face; then she turned again and picked up one web-like stocking and held it against her cheek, as hotly tinted now beneath its smooth whiteness as the shining scarlet cloth beside her.

He heard her murmur to herself little, broken, incoherent phrases that he could not catch.

“Denny,” he heard her whisper, “Denny–Denny!”

And then, with the tiny slippers huddled in her lap, her hands flashed out and caught his face and drew it down against the too-small white blouse, open at the throat.

“Man–man,” she said, and he felt her breast rise and fall, rise and fall, against his cheek. “Man, you didn’t understand! It–it wasn’t the clothes, Denny, but–but I’m all the gladder, I think, because you’re so much of a man that you couldn’t, not even if I tried a hundred years to explain.”

He drew the chair at the side of the table around in front of her and dropped into it. With a care akin to reverence he lifted one slipper and held it outstretched at arm’s length upon his broad palm.

“I–I hadn’t exactly forgotten, tonight,” he told her. “I’d watched for the light, and I meant to bring them–when I came.” His steady eyes dropped to her slim, swinging feet. “They’re the smallest they had in any shop at the county-seat,” he went on, and the slow smile came creeping back across his face. “I crossed over through the timber late last night, after we had broken camp, and I–I had to guess the size. Shall we–try them on?”

She reached out and snatched the small thing of satin and leather away from him with mock jealous impetuosity, a little reckless gurgle of utter delight breaking from her lips.

“Over these,” she demanded, lifting one foot and pointing at the thickly patched old stocking above the dingy, string-tied shoe. “You–you are trying to shame me, Denny–you want to make me confess they are too small!”

Then, almost in the same breath, all the facetious accusation left her face. Even the warm glow of wonder which had lighted her wet eyes gave way to a new seriousness.

“No one has ever told me,” she stated slowly, “but I know it is so, just the same. Somehow, because it was to be the first party I had ever attended–or–or had a chance to attend, I thought it must be all right, just once, for you to buy me these. There was no one else to buy them, Denny, and maybe I wanted to go so very much I made myself believe that it was all right. But there isn’t any party now–for us. And–and men don’t buy clothes for women, Denny–not until they’re married!”

Her face was tensely earnest while she waited for the big man before her to answer. And Young Denny turned his head, staring silently out of the opposite window down toward the village, dark now, in the valley below. He cleared his throat uncertainly.

“Do they?” She was leaning forward until her hair brushed his own. “Do they, Denny?” A rising inflection left the words hanging in midair.

“I don’t know just what the difference is,” he began finally, his voice very deliberate. “I’ve often tried to figure it out, and never been quite able to get it straight”–he nodded his head again toward the sleeping village–“but we–we’ve never been like the rest, anyhow. And–and anyway,” he reached out one hand and laid it upon her knees, “we’re to be married, too–when–when–”

With swift, caressing haste she lifted the slippers that lay cradled in her lap and set them back inside the open package. Lightly she swung herself down and stood before him, both hands balanced upon his shoulders. For just the fraction of a moment her eyes lifted over his head, flickering toward the stone demijohn that stood in the far, shadowy corner near the door. Her voice was trembling a little when she went on.

“Then let me come soon, Denny,” she begged. “Can’t it be soon? Oh, I’m going to keep them!” One hand searched behind her to fall lightly upon the package upon the table. “They’re–they’re so beautiful that I don’t believe I could ever give them back. But do we have to wait any longer–do we? I can take care of him, too.”

Vehemently she tilted her head toward the little drab cottage across under the opposite hill.

“He hardly ever notices when I come or go. I–I want to come, Denny. I’m lonesome, and–and–” her eyes darkened and swam with fear as she stared beyond him into the dusky corner near the door, “why can’t I come now, before some time–when it might be–too late?”

He reached up and took her hands from his shoulders and held them in front of him, absently contemplating their rounded smoothness. She bent closer, trying to read his eyes, and found them inscrutable. Then his fingers tightened.

“And be like them?” he demanded, and the words leaped out so abruptly that they were almost harsh. “And be like all the rest,” he reiterated, jerking his head backward, “old and thin, and bent and worn-out at thirty?” A hard, self-scathing note crept into the words. “Why, it–it took me almost a month–even to buy these!”

He in turn reached out and laid a hand upon the bundle behind her. But she only laughed straight back into his face–a short, unsteady laugh of utter derision.

“Old?” she echoed. “Work! But I–I’d have you, Denny, wouldn’t I?” Again she laughed in soft disdain. “Clothes!” she scoffed. And then, more serious even than before: “Denny, is–is that the only reason, now?”

The gleam that always smoldered in Denny Bolton’s eyes whenever he remembered the tales they told around the Tavern stove of Old Denny’s last bad night began to kindle. His lips were thin and straight and as colorless as his suddenly weary face as he stood and looked back at her. She lifted her hands and put them back upon his shoulders.

“I’m not afraid–any more–to chance it,” she told him, her lips trembling in spite of all she could do to hold them steady. “I’m never afraid, when I’m with you. It–it’s only when I’m alone that it grows to be more than I can bear, sometimes. I’m not afraid. Does it–does it have to stay there any longer, in the corner, Denny? Aren’t we sure enough now–you and I–aren’t we?”

He stopped back a pace–his big body huge above her slenderness–stepped away from the very nearness of her. But as she lifted her arms to him he began to shake his head–the old stubborn refusal that had answered her a countless number of times before.

“Aren’t we?” she said again, but her voice sounded very small and bodiless and forlorn in the half dark room.

He swung one arm in a stiff gesture that embraced the entire valley.

“They’re all sure, too,” his voice grated hoarsely, “They’re all sure, too–just as sure as we could ever be–and there’s a whole town of them!”

She was bending silently over the table, retying the bundle, when he crossed back to her side, a lighted lantern dangling in one hand.

“I don’t know why myself,” he tried to explain. “I only know I’ve got to wait. And I don’t even know what I’m waiting for–but I know it’s got to come!”

She would not lift her head when he slipped his free arm about her shoulders and drew her against him. When he reached out to take the package from her she held it away from him, but her voice, half muffled against his checkered coat, was anything but hard.

“Let you carry them?” she murmured. “Why–I wouldn’t trust them to any other hands in the world but my own. You can’t even see them again–not until I’ve finished them, and I wear them–for you.”

With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her whimsically provocating smile.

“Tell me–why don’t you tell me, Denny,” she commanded imperiously, “that I’m prettier than all the others–even if I haven’t the pretty clothes!”

When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun, Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley to John Anderson’s once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the room.

“– requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson’s company,” he repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never before heard pass his lips:

“And she could have gone–she could have, and she didn’t–just because–”

His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and buttoned the whole within his coat.

CHAPTER V

As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.

And yet it was still a good two hours before sundown; only a few minutes before he had driven his heavy steaming team in from the fields and turned toward the ladder that mounted to the hayloft, when the familiar shrill complaint of ungreased axles drifted up to him from the valley.

With a foot upon the first rung Young Denny paused, scowling in mild perplexity. He had crossed the next moment to the open double doors, as the sound floated up to him in a steadily increasing volume, and was standing, his big body huge in its flannel shirt, open at the throat, and high boots laced to the knees, leaning loosely at ease against the door frame, when the dingy rig with its curtains flapping crazily in the wind lurched around the bend in the road and came bouncing wildly up the rutty grade.

The boy straightened and stiffened, his head going forward a little, for the fat old mare was pounding along at a lumbering gallop–a pace which, in all the time he had watched for it, he had never before beheld. Old Jerry was driving with a magnificent abandon, his hands far outstretched over the dash, and more than that, for even from where he stood Denny could hear him shouting at her in his thin, cracked falsetto–shouting for still more speed.

A rare, amused smile tugged at the corners of Young Denny’s lips as he crossed the open yard to the crest of the hill. But when the groaning buggy came to a standstill and Old Jerry flung the reins across the mare’s wide back, to dive and burrow in frantic haste under the seat for the customary roll of advertisements, without so much as a glance for the boy who strode slowly up to the wheel, that shadow of a smile which had touched his face faded into concerned gravity. He hesitated a moment, as if not quite certain of what he should do.

“Is there–there isn’t any one sick, is there?” he asked at last, half diffidently.

The little, white-haired old man in the buggy jerked erect with startling, automatonlike swiftness at that slow question. For a moment he stood absolutely motionless, his back toward the speaker, his head perked far over to one side as though he refused to believe he had heard correctly. Then, little by little, he wheeled until his strangely brilliant, birdlike eyes were staring straight down into Denny’s upturned, anxious face. And as he stared Old Jerry’s countenance grew blankly incredulous.

“Sick!” he echoed the boy’s words scornfully. “Sick!”

His grotesquely thin body seemed to swell as he straightened himself, and his shrill squeak of a voice took on a new note of pompous importance.

“I guess,” he stated impressively, “I reckon, Denny, you ain’t heard the news, hev you?” He chuckled pityingly, half contemptuously. “I reckon you couldn’t’ve,” he concluded with utter finality.

The old, sullenly bewildered light crept back into Young Denny’s gray eyes. He shifted his feet uneasily, shaking his head.

“I–I just got back down from the timber, three days ago,” he explained, and somehow, entirely unintentionally, as he spoke the slow statement seemed almost an apology for his lack of information. “I guess I haven’t heard much of anything lately–up here. Is it–is it something big?”

Old Jerry hesitated. He felt suddenly the hopeless, overwhelming dearth of words against which he labored in the attempt to carry the tidings worthily.

“Big!” He repeated the other’s question. “Big! Why, Godfrey ’Lisha, boy, it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to this town. It–it’s terrific! We’ll be famous–that’s what we’ll be! In a week or two Boltonwood’ll be as famous as–as–why, we’ll be as famous as the Chicago Fair!”

He broke off with a gasp for breath and started fluttering madly through the paper which he had wrenched from Young Denny’s bundle of closely wrapped mail, until he found the page he sought.

“There ’tis,” he cried, and pointed out a lurid headline that ran half across the head of the sporting section. “There ’tis–or leastwise that’s a part on it. But they’s more a-comin’–more that that won’t be a patch to! But you just take a look at that!”

Young Denny took the paper from his hand with a sort of sober patience, and there across the first three column heads, following the direction of Old Jerry’s quivering forefinger, he found his first inkling of the astounding news.

“Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round,” ran the red-inked caption.

Word by word he read it through, and a second time his grave eyes went through it, even more painstakingly, as though he had not caught at a single reading all its sensational significance. Then he looked up into the seamed old face above him, a-gleam and a-quiver with excitement.

“Jed The Red,” the boy said in his steady voice. “Jed The Red!” And then, levelly: “Who’s he?”

Old Jerry stared at him a moment before he shook his head hopelessly and collapsed with a thud upon the torn seat behind him, in an excess of disgust for the boy’s stupidity which he made no effort to conceal.

“Jed who?” he mimicked, his voice shrill with sarcasm. “Now what in time Jed would it be, if ’twa’n’t Jeddy Conway–our own Jeddy Conway from this very village? What other Jed is there? Ain’t you got no memory at all, when you ought to be proud to be able to say that you went to school with him yourself, right in this town?”

Again Young Denny nodded a silent agreement, but Old Jerry’s feverish enthusiasm had carried him far beyond mere anger at his audience’s apparent lack of appreciation.

“And that ain’t all,” he rushed on breathlessly, “not by a lot, it ain’t! That ain’t nothin’ to compare with what’s to come. Why, right this minute there’s a newspaper writer down to the village–he’s from New York and he’s been stayin’ to the Tavern ever since he come in this morning and asked for a room with a bath–and he’s goin’ to write up the town. Yes sir-e-e–the whole dad-blamed town! Pictures of the main street and the old place where Jeddy went to school, like as not, and–and”–he hesitated for an instant to recall the exact phrasing–“and interviews with the older citizens who recognized his ability and gave him a few pointers in the game when he was only a little tad. That’s what’s to follow, and it’s comin’ out in the New York papers, too–Sunday supplement, colors, maybe, and–and–”

Sudden recollection checked him in the middle of the tumbled flow of information. Leaning far out over the dash, he put all his slight weight against the reins and turned the fat white mare back into the road with astonishing celerity.

“Godfrey, but that makes me think,” he gasped. “I ain’t got no time to fritter away here! I got to git down to the Tavern in a hurry. He’ll be waitin’ to hear what I kin tell him.”

The thin, wrinkled old face twisted into a hopeful, wheedling smile.

“You know that, don’t you, Denny? You could tell him that there wa’n’t nobody in the hills knew little Jeddy Conway better’n I did, couldn’t you? It–it’s the last chance I’ll ever git, too, more’n likely.

“Twice I missed out–once when they found Mary Hubbard’s husband a-hangin’ to his hay mow–a-hangin by the very new clothes-line Mary’d just bought the day before and ain’t ever been able to use since on account of her feelin’ somehow queer about it–and me laid up to home sick all the time! Everybody else got their names mentioned in the article, and Judge Maynard had his picture printed because it was the Judge cut him down. ’Twa’n’t fair, didn’t seem to me, and me older’n any of ’em.

“And ’twas just the same when they found Mrs. Higgins’s Johnny, who had to go and git through the ice into the crick just the one week in all the winter when I was laid up with a bad foot from splittin’ kindling. I begun to think I wasn’t ever goin’ to git my chance–but it’s come. It’s come at last–and I got to cut along and be there!”

Once more he leaned over the dash and slapped the old mare’s back with the slack of the lines.

“Git there, you,” he urged, and the complaining buggy went lurching down the rough road at the same unheard of pace at which it had ascended. Halfway down the hill, after he had lifted the mare from her shuffling fox-trot to a lumbering gallop, Old Jerry turned back for a last shouted word.

“He’ll be anxious to git all I can tell him, don’t you think?” the shrill falsetto drifted back to the boy who had not stirred in his tracks. “No article would be complete without that, would it? And they’s to be pictures–Sunday paper–and–maybe–in colors!”

There was an odd light burning in Denny Bolton’s eyes as he stood and watched the crazy conveyance disappear from view. The half hungry, half sullen bewilderment seemed to have given place to a new confusion, as though all the questions which had always been baffling him had become, all in one breath, an astounding enigma which clamored for instant solution. Not until the shrill scream of the ungreased axles had died out altogether and his eyes fell once more to the vivid streak of red that ran across the top of the sheet still clutched in his hand did Young Denny realize that Jerry had even failed to leave him the rest of his mail–the bulky package of circulars.

He was smiling again as he turned and went slowly toward the back door of the house, but somehow, as he went, the stoop of his big shoulders seemed to have even more than the usual vague hint of weariness in their heavy droop. He even forgot that the hungry team which he had stabled just a few minutes before was still unfed, as he dropped upon the top step and spread the paper out across his knees.

“Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round,” he read again and again.

And then, with a slow forefinger blazing the way, he went on through the detailed account of the latest big heavyweight match, from the first paragraph, which stated that “Jed Conway, having disposed of The Texan at the Arena last night, by the knockout route in the fourteenth round, seems to loom up as the logical claimant of the white heavyweight title,” to the last one of all, which pithily advised the public that “the winner’s share of the receipts amounted to twelve thousand dollars.”

It was all couched in the choicest vocabulary of the ringside, and more than once Young Denny, whose literature had been confined chiefly to harvesters and sulky plows, had to stop and decipher phrases which he only half understood at first reading. But that last paragraph he did not fail to grasp.

It grew too dark for him to make out the small type any longer and the boy folded the paper and laid it back across his knees. With his chin resting upon one big palm he sat motionless, staring out beyond his sprawling, unpainted sheds toward the dim bulk of his hilly acres, with their jagged outcroppings of rock.

“Twelve thousand dollars!” He muttered the words aloud, under his breath. Eight hundred in three years had seemed to him an almost miraculous amount for him to have torn from that thin soil with nothing but the strength of his two hands. Now, with a bitterness that had been months in accumulating, it beat in upon his brain with sledgelike blows that he had paid too great a price–too great a price in aching shoulders and numbed thighs.

Methodically, mechanically, his mind went back over the days when he had gone to school with Jed Conway–the same Jed The Red whom the whole town was now welcoming as “our own Jeddy,” and the longer he pondered the greater the problem became.

It was hard to understand. From his point of view comprehension was impossible, at that instant. For in those earlier days, when anybody had ever mentioned Jed Conway at all, it had been only to describe him as “good for nothing,” or something profanely worse. Young Denny remembered him vividly as a big, freckle-faced, bow-legged boy with red bristly hair–the biggest boy in the school–who never played but what he cheated, and always seemed able to lie himself out of his thievery.

But most vividly of all, he recalled that day when Jed Conway had disappeared from the village between sundown and dawn and failed to return. That was the same day they discovered the shortage in the old wooden till at Benson’s corner store. And now Jed Conway had come home, or at least his fame had found its way back, and even Old Jerry, whipping madly toward the village to share in his reflected glory, had, for all the perfection of his “system,” failed to leave the very bundle of mail which he had come to deliver.

For a long time Young Denny sat and tried to straighten it out in his brain–and failed entirely. It had grown very dark–too dark for him to make out the words upon it–when he reached into the pocket of his gray flannel shirt and drew out the card which he had found lying upon the kitchen floor that previous Saturday night, after he had lighted Dryad Anderson on her way home through the thickets. But he did not need, or even attempt, to read it.

“And it took me a month,” he said aloud to the empty air before him, “almost a month to save fifteen dollars.”

He rose at the words, stiffly, for the chill air had tightened his muscles, and stood a moment indecisively contemplating the lights which were beginning to glimmer through the dusk in the hollow, before he, too, took the long road to the village down which Old Jerry had rattled a scant hour or two before.