CHAPTER II
He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting, long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.
She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.
She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham, whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she could do.
While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their talk came up to her, Mabel's shrill, continuous chatter, her father's occasional monosyllables. She heard without listening, and the sounds ran like an undercurrent of contentment in her thoughts.
When she had pinned her collar and put on her straw sailor she stood for a long time gazing into the eyes that looked back at her from the mirror, lost in a formless reverie.
"My land!" her mother said when she appeared in the kitchen. "What're you all dressed up like that for, this time of day?"
"I'm going driving," she answered, constrained. She had dreaded the moment. Her mother stopped, the oven door half open, a fork poised in her hand.
"Who with?"
"Paul." She tried to say the name casually, making an effort to meet her mother's eyes as usual. It was as if they looked at each other across a wide empty space. Her mother seemed suddenly to see in her a stranger.
"But—good gracious, Helen! You're only a little girl!" The words were cut across by Tommy's derisive chant from the table, where he sat licking a mixing-spoon.
"Helen's got a feller! Helen's got a feller!"
"Shut up!" she cried. "If you don't shut up—!"
But he got away from her and, slamming the screen door, yelled from the safe distance of the woodpile:
"Helen's mad, and I'm glad, an' I know what will please her—!"
She went into the other room, shutting the door with a shaking hand. She felt that she hated the whole world. Yes, even Paul. Her mother called to her that even if she was going out with a beau, that was no reason she shouldn't eat something. Dinner wouldn't be ready till two o'clock, but she ought to drink some milk anyway. She answered that she was not hungry.
Paul would come by one o'clock, she thought. His mother had only a cold lunch on Sundays, because they went to church. He came ten minutes late, and she had forgotten everything else in the strain of waiting.
She met him at the gate, and he got out to help her into the buggy-seat. He was wearing his Sunday clothes, the blue suit, carefully brushed and pressed, and a stiff white collar. He looked strange and formal.
"It isn't much of a rig," he said apologetically, clearing his throat. She recognized the bony sorrel and the rattling buggy, the cheapest in Harner's livery-stable. But even that, she knew, was an extravagance for Paul.
"It's hard to get a rig on Sunday," she said, "Everybody takes them all out in the morning. I think you were awfully lucky to get such a good one. Isn't it a lovely day?"
"It looks like the rains are about over," he replied in a polite voice. After the first radiant glance they had not looked at each other. He chirped to the sorrel, and they drove away together.
Enveloped in the hood of the buggy-top, they saw before them the yellow road, winding on among the trees, disappearing, appearing again like a ribbon looped about the curves of the hills. There was gold in the green of the fields, gold in the poppies beside the road, gold in the ruddiness of young apricot twigs. The clear air itself was filled with vibrant, golden sunshine. They drove in a golden haze. What did they say? It did not matter. They looked at each other.
His arm lay along the back of the buggy-seat. Its being there was like a secret shared between them, a knowledge held in common, to be cherished and to be kept unspoken. When the increasing consciousness of it grew too poignant to be borne any longer in silence they escaped from it in sudden mutual panic, breathless. They left the buggy, tying the patient sorrel in the shade beneath a tree, and clambered up the hillside.
They went, they said, to gather wild flowers. He took her hand to help her up the trail, and she permitted it, stumbling, when unaided she could have climbed more easily, glad to feel that he was the leader, eager that he should think himself the stronger. At the top of the hill they came to a low-spreading live-oak with a patch of young grass beneath it, and here, forgetting the ungathered flowers, they sat down.
They sat there a long time, talking very seriously on grave subjects; life and the meaning of it, the bigness of the universe, and how it makes a fellow feel funny, somehow, when he looks at the stars at night and thinks about things. She understood. She felt that way herself sometimes. It was amazing to learn how many things they had felt in common. Neither of them had ever expected to find any one else who felt them, too.
Then there was the question of what to do with your life. It was a pretty important thing to decide. You didn't want to make mistakes, like so many men did. You had to start right. That was the point, the start. When you get to be eighteen or so, almost twenty, you realize that, and you look back over your life and see how you've wasted a lot of time already. You realize you better begin to do something.
Now here was the idea of learning telegraphy. That looked pretty good. If a fellow really went at that and worked hard, there was no telling what it might lead to. You might get to be a train-dispatcher or even a railroad superintendent. There were lots of big men who didn't have any better start than he had. Look at Edison.
She agreed. She was sure there was nothing he could not do. Somehow, then, they began to talk as if she would be with him. She might be a telegrapher, too. Wouldn't it be fun if she was, so they could be in the same town? He'd help her with the train orders, and if he worked nights she could fix his lunch for him.
They made a sort of play of it, laughing about it. They were only supposing, of course. They carefully refrained from voicing the thought that clamored behind everything they said, that set her heart racing and kept her eyes from meeting his, the thought of that young couple at Rollo.
And at the last, when they could no longer ignore the incredible fact that the afternoon was gone, that only a golden western sky behind the flat, blue mass of the hills remained to tell of the vanished sunlight, they rose reluctantly, hesitant. He had taken her two hands to help her to her feet. In the grayness of the twilight they looked at each other, and she felt the approach of a moment tremendous, irrevocable.
He was drawing her closer. She felt, with the pull of his hands, an urging within herself, a compulsion like a strong current, sweeping her away, merging her with something unknown, vast, beautifully terrible. Suddenly, in a panic, pushing him blindly away, she heard herself saying, "No—no! Please—" The tension of his arms relaxed.
"All right—if you don't want—I didn't mean—" he stammered. Their hands clung for a moment, uncertainly, then dropped apart. They stumbled down the dusky trail and drove home almost in silence.
Spring came capriciously that next year. She smiled unexpectedly upon the hills through long days of golden sunshine, coaxing wild flowers from the damp earth and swelling buds with her warm promise. She retreated again behind cold skies, abandoning eager petals and sap-filled twigs to the chill desolation of rain and the bitterness of frost.
Farmers trudging behind their plows felt her coming in the stir of the scented air, in the responsiveness of the springy soil and, looking up at the sparkling skies, felt a warmth in their own veins even while they shook their heads doubtfully. And rising in the dawns they tramped the orchard rows, bending tips of branches between anxious fingers, pausing to cut open a few buds on their calloused palms.
But to Helen the days were like notes in a melody. Linnet's songs and sunshine streaming through the attic windows or gray panes and rain on the roof were one to her. She woke to either as to a holiday. She slipped from beneath the patchwork quilt into a cold room and dressed with shivering fingers, hardly hearing Mabel's drowsy protests at being waked so early. Life was too good to be wasted in sleep. She seemed made of energy as she ran down the steep stairs to the kitchen. It swelled in her veins as a river frets against its banks in the spring floods.
Every sight and sound struck upon her senses with a new freshness. There was exhilaration in the bite of cold water on her skin when she washed in the tin basin on the bench by the door, and the smell of coffee and frying salt pork was good. She sang while she spread the red table-cloth on the kitchen table and set out the cracked plates.
She sang:
"You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."
"You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."
"You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."
"You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,
And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."
It seemed to her that she was caroling aloud poetry so exquisite that all its meaning escaped the dull ears about her. She walked among them, alone, wrapped in a glory they could not perceive.
Even her mother's tight-lipped anxiety did not quite break through her happy absorption. Her mother worked silently, stepping heavily about the kitchen, now and then glancing through the window toward the barn. When her husband came clumping up the path and stopped at the back steps to scrape the mud from his boots, she went to the door and opened it, saying almost harshly, "Well?"
He said nothing, continuing for a moment to knock a boot heel against the edge of the step. Then he came slowly in, and began to dip water from the water pail into the wash-basin. The slump of his body in the sweat-stained overalls expressed nothing but weariness.
"I guess last night settled it," he said. "We won't get enough of a crop to pay to pick it. Outa twenty buds I cut on the south slope only four of 'em wasn't black."
His wife went back to the stove and turned the salt pork, holding her head back from the spatters. "What're we going to do about the mortgage?" The question filled a long silence. Helen's song was hushed, though the echoes of it still went on in some secret place within her, safe there even from this calamity.
"Same as we've always done, I guess," her father answered at last, lifting a dripping face and reaching for the roller towel. "See if I can get young Mason to renew it."
"Well, he will. Surely he will," Helen said. Her tone of cheerfulness was like a slender shaft splintering against a stone wall. "And there must besomefruit left. If there isn't much of a crop what we do get ought to bring pretty good prices, too."
"You're right it ought to," her father replied bitterly. "A good crop never brings 'em."
"Well, anyway, I'm through school now, and I'll be doing something," Helen said. She had no clear idea what it would be, but suddenly she felt in her youth and happiness a strength that her discouraged father and mother did not have. For the first time they seemed to her old and worn, exhausted by an unequal struggle, and she felt that she could take them up in her arms and carry them triumphantly to comfort and peace.
"Eat your breakfast and don't talk nonsense," her father said.
But her victorious mood revived while she washed the dishes. She felt older, stronger, and more confident than she had ever been. The news of the killing frost, which depressed her mother and quieted even Mabel's usual rebellion at having to help with the kitchen work, was to Helen a call to action. She splashed the dishes through the soapy water so swiftly that Mabel was aggrieved.
"You know I can't keep up," she complained. "It's bad enough to have the frost and never be able to get anything decent, and stick here in this old kitchen all the time, without having you act mean, too."
"Oh, don't start whining!" Helen began. They always quarreled about the dishes. "I'd like to know who did every smitch of work yesterday, while you went chasing off." But looking down at Mabel's sullen little face, she felt a wave of compassion. Poor little Mabel, whose whole heart had been set on a new dress this summer, who didn't have anything else to make her happy! "I don't mean to be mean to you, Mabel," she said. She put an arm around the thin, angular shoulders. "Never mind, everything'll be all right, somehow."
That afternoon when the ironing was finished she dressed in her pink gingham and best shoes. She was going to town for the mail, she explained to her mother, and when her sister said, "Why, you went day before yesterday!" she replied, "Well, I guess I'll just go to town, anyway. I feel like walking somewhere."
Her mother apparently accepted the explanation without further thought. The blindness of other people astonished Helen. It seemed to her that every blade of grass in the fields, every scrap of white cloud in the sky, knew that she was going to see Paul. The roadside cried it aloud to her.
She let her hand rest a moment on the gate as she went through. It was the gate on which they leaned when he brought her home from church on Sunday nights. She could feel his presence there still; she could almost see the dark mass of his shoulders against the starry sky, and the white blur of his face.
The long lane by Peterson's meadow was crowded with memories of him. Here they had stopped to gather poppies; there, just beside the gray stone, he had knelt one day to tie her shoe. On the little bridge shaded by the oak-trees they always stopped to lean on the rail and watch their reflections shot across by ripples of light in the stream below. She was dazzled by the beauty of the world as she went by all these places. The sky was blue. It was a revelation to her. She had never known that skies were blue with that heart-shaking blueness or that hills held golden lights and violet shadows on their green slopes. She had never seen that shadows in the late afternoon were purple as grapes, and that the very air held a faint tinge of orange light. It seemed to her that she had been blind all her life.
She stood some time on the little bridge, looking at all this loveliness, and she said his name to herself, under her breath "Paul." A quiver ran along her nerves at the sound of it.
He would be busy handling baggage at the station when Number Five came in. She thought of his sturdy shoulders in the blue work-shirt, the smooth forehead under his ragged cap, the straight-looking blue eyes and firm lips. She would stand a little apart, by the window where the telegraph-keys were clicking, and he would pass, pushing a hand-truck through the crowd on the platform. Their eyes would meet, and the look would be like a bond subtly uniting them in an intimacy unperceived by the oblivious people who jostled them. Then she would go away, walking slowly through the town, and he would overtake her on his way home to supper. She could tell him, then, about the frost. Her thoughts went no further than that. They stopped with Paul.
But before she reached his house she saw Sammy Harner frolicking in the road, hilarious in the first spring freedom of going barefoot. He skipped from side to side, his wide straw hat flapping; he shied a stone at a bird; he whistled shrilly between his teeth. When he saw her he sobered quickly and came trotting down the road, reaching her, panting.
"I was coming out to your house just 's fast as I could," he said. "I got a note for you." He sought anxiously in his pockets, found it in the crown of his hat. "He gave me a nickel, and said to wait if they's an answer."
She saw that his eyes were fixed curiously on her hands, which shook so with excitement that she could hardly tear the railway company's yellow envelope. She read:
Dear Friend Helen:I have got a new job and I have to go to Ripley to-night where I am going to work. I would like to see you before I go, as I do not know when I can come back, but probably not for a long time. I did not know I was going till this afternoon and I have to go on the Cannonball. Can you meet me about eight o'clock by the bridge? I have to pack yet and I am afraid I cannot get time to come out to your house and I want to see you very much. Please answer by Sammy.Your Friend, Paul.
Dear Friend Helen:
I have got a new job and I have to go to Ripley to-night where I am going to work. I would like to see you before I go, as I do not know when I can come back, but probably not for a long time. I did not know I was going till this afternoon and I have to go on the Cannonball. Can you meet me about eight o'clock by the bridge? I have to pack yet and I am afraid I cannot get time to come out to your house and I want to see you very much. Please answer by Sammy.
Your Friend, Paul.
Sammy's interested gaze had shifted from her hands to her face. It rested on her like an unbearable light. She could not think with those calm observant eyes upon her. She must think. What must she think about? Oh, yes, an answer. A pencil. She did not have a pencil.
"Tell him I didn't have a pencil," she said. "Tell him I said, 'Yes.'" And as Sammy still lingered, watching her with unashamed curiosity, she added sharply, "Hurry! Hurry up now!"
It was a relief to sit down, when at last Sammy had disappeared around the bend in the road. The whirling world seemed to settle somewhat into place then. She had never thought of Paul's going away. She wondered dully if it were a good job, and if he were glad to go.