After the meat course, Mrs. Tolley and Min rather languidly removed the
main platters and, by reaching backward, piled the dinner plates on the
shining new oak sideboard. Thus room was made for the salad, which was
always mantled in tepid mayonnaise, whether it was sliced tomatoes, or
potatoes, or asparagus. After the salad there was another partial
clearance, and then every available inch of the table was needed for
peach pies and apple sauce and hot gingerbread and raspberries, or
various similar delicacies, and the coffee and yellow cheese and
soda-crackers with which the meal concluded.
By the time these appeared, on a hot summer evening, the wheezing clock
in the kitchen would have struck six,--dinner was early at
Kirkwood,--and the level rays of the sun would be pouring boldly in at
the uncurtained western windows. The dining, room was bare, and not
entirely free from flies, despite an abundance of new green screening
at the windows. Relays of new stiff oak chairs stood against its walls,
ready for the sudden need of occasional visitors. On the walls hung
framed enlarged photographs of machinery, and factories, and
scaffoldings, and the like. There was one of laborers and bosses
grouped about great generators and water-wheels in transit, and another
of a monster switchboard, with a smiling young operator, in his apron
and overalls, standing beside it.
Mrs. Tolley sat at the head of the table--a big, joyous, vigorous
widow, who had managed the Company House at Kirkwood ever since its
erection two years before, and who had been an employee of the Light
and Power Company, in one capacity or another, for some five years
before that--or ever since, as she put it, "the juice got pore George."
Mrs. Tolley loved every inch of Kirkwood; for her it was the captured
dream.
Min Tolley, sitting next to her mother, loved Kirkwood, too, because
she was going to marry Harry Garvey, who was one of the shift bosses at
the plant. Harry sat next to Min. Then came her brother Roosy, ten
years old; and then the Hopps--Mrs. Lou, and little Lou, spattering
rice and potato all over himself and his chair, and big Lou, silently,
deeply admiring them both. Then there were two empty chairs, for the
Chisholms, the resident manager and superintendent and his sister, at
the end of the table; and then Joe Vorse, the switchboard operator, and
his little wife; and then Monk White, another shift boss; and lastly,
at Mrs. Tolley's left, Paul Forster, newly come from New York to be Mr.
Chisholm's stenographer and assistant.
Paul was the first to leave the table that night. He drank his coffee
in three savage gulps, pushed back his crumpled napkin, and rose. "If
you'll excuse me--" he began.
"You're cert'n'y excusable!" said Mrs. Tolley, elegantly--adding, when
the door had closed behind him: "And leave me tell you right now that
somebody was real fond of children to raise YOU!"
"An' I'm not planning to spend the heyday of my girlhood ironing
napkins for you, Pauly Pet!" said Min, reaching for his discarded
napkin and folding it severely into a wooden ring.
Paul did not hear these remarks, but he heard the laughter that greeted
them, and he scowled as he selected a rocker on the front porch. He put
his feet up on the rail, felt in one pocket for tobacco, in another for
papers, and in a third for his match-case, and set himself to the
congenial task of composing a letter in which he should resign from the
employ of the Light and Power Company. It was a question of a broken
contract, so it must be diplomatically worded. Paul had spent the five
evenings since his arrival at Kirkwood in puzzling over the phrasing of
that letter.
Below the porch, the hillside, covered with scrub-oak and chaparral and
madrono trees, and the stumps where redwoods had been, dropped sharply
to the little river, which came tumbling down from the wooded mountains
to plunge roaring into one end of the big power-house, and which foamed
out at the other side to continue its mad rush down the valley. The
power-house, looming up an immense crude outline in the twilight,
rested on the banks of the stream and stood in a rough clearing. A
great gash in the woods above it showed whence lumber for buildings and
fires came; another ugly gash marked the course of the "pole line" over
the mountain. Near the big building stood lesser ones, two or three
rough little unpainted cottages perched on the hill above it. There was
a "cook-house," and a "bunk-house," and storage sheds, and Mrs.
Tolley's locked provision shed, and the rough shack the builders lived
in while construction was going on, and where the Hopps lived now, rent
free.
Nasturtiums languished here and there, where some of the women had made
an effort to fight the unresponsive red clay. Otherwise, even after two
years, the power-house and its environs looked unfinished, crude, ugly.
On all sides the mountains rose dark and steep, the pointed tops of the
redwoods mounting evenly, tier on tier. Except for the lumber slide and
the pole line, there was no break anywhere, not even a glimpse of the
road that wound somehow out of the canyon--up, up, up, twelve long
miles, to the top of the ridge.
And even at the top, Paul reflected bitterly, there was only an
unpainted farm-house, where the stage stopped three times a week with
mail. From there it was a fifty-mile drive to town--a California
country town, asleep in the curve of two sluggish little rivers. And
from "town" to San Francisco it was almost a day's trip, and from San
Francisco to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street it was
nearly five days more.
Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and began again: "Light and Power
Co.--GENTLEMEN."
Night came swiftly to Kirkwood. For a few wonderful moments the last of
the sunlight lingered, hot and gold, on the upper branches of the
highest trees along the ridge; then suddenly the valley was plunged in
soft twilight, and violet shadows began to tangle themselves about the
great shafts of the redwoods. The heat of the day dropped from the air
like a falling veil. A fine mist spun itself above the river; bats
began to wheel on the edge of the clearing.
With the coming of darkness every window in the place was suddenly
alight. The Company House blazed with it; the great power-house doorway
sent a broad stream of yellow into the deepening shadows of the night;
the "cook-house," where Willy Chow Tong cooked for a score of "hands"
and oilers, showed a thousand golden cracks in its rough walls. The
little cottages on the hill were hidden by the glare from their
dangling porch lights. Light was so plentiful, at this factory of
light, that even the Hopps' barnlike home blazed with a dozen
"thirty-twos."
"Nothing like having a little light on the subject, Mr. Fo'ster," said
Mrs. Tolley, coming out to the porch. The Vorses had small children
that they could not leave very long alone; so, when Min and her mother
had reduced the kitchen to orderly, warm, soap-scented darkness every
night, and wound the clock, and hung up their aprons, they went up to
the Vorses' to play "five hundred."
"Seems's if I never could get enough light, myself," the matron
continued agreeably, descending the porch steps. "Before I come here I
never had nothing in my kitchen but an oil lamp and a reflector. Jest
as sure as I'd be dishing up dinner, hot nights, that lamp would begin
to flicker and suck--well, shucks! I'd look up at it and I'd say,
'Well, why don't you go out? Go ahead!'" Mrs. Tolley laughed joyously.
"Well, one night--George--" she was continuing with relish, when Min
pulled at her sleeve and, with a sort of affectionate impatience, said,
"Oh, f've'vens' sakes ma!"
"Yes, I'm coming," said Mrs. Tolley, recalled. "Wish't you played 'five
hundred,' Mr. Fo'ster," she added politely.
"I don't play either that or old maid," said Paul, distinctly. This
remark was taken in good part by the Tolleys.
"Old maid's a real comical game," Min conceded mildly.
"Well, you won't be s'lunsum next week when the Chisholms get back,"
said Mrs. Tolley, unaffectedly, gathering up the skirt of her starched
gown to avoid contact with the sudden heavy dews. "He's an awful nice
feller, and she--she's twenty-six, but she's as jolly as a girl. I
declare, I just love Patricia Chisholm."
"Twenty-six, is she?" said Paul, disgustedly, to himself, when the
Tolleys had gone. "Only one woman--of any class, that is--in this
forsaken hole, and she twenty-six!" And he had been thinking of this
Patricia with a good deal of interest, he admitted resentfully. Paul
was twenty-four, and liked slender little girls well under twenty.
"Lord, what a place!" he said, for the hundredth time.
He sat brooding in the darkness, discouraged and homesick. So he had
sat for all his nights at Kirkwood.
The men at the cook-house were playing cards, silently, intently. The
cook, serene and cool, was smoking in the doorway of his cabin. Above
the dull roar of the river Paul could hear Min Tolley's cackle of
laughter from the cottages a hundred yards away, and Mrs. Hopps
crooning over her baby.
Presently the night shift went down to the powerhouse, the men taking
great boyish leaps on the steep trail. Some of the lighted windows were
blotted out--the Hopps', the cook-house light. The singing pole line
above Paul's head ceased abruptly, and with a little rising whine the
opposite pole line took up the buzzing currant. That meant that the
copper line had been cut in, and the aluminum one would be "cold" for
the night.
Minutes went by, eventless. Half an hour, an hour--still Paul sat
staring into the velvet dark and wrestling with bitter discouragement
and homesickness.
"Lord, what a PLACE!" he said once or twice under his breath.
Finally, feeling cramped and chilly, he went stiffly indoors, through
the hot, bright halls, that smelled of varnish and matting, to his room.
The next day was exactly like the five preceding days--hot, restless,
aimless; and the next night Paul sat on the porch again, and listened
to the rush of the river, and Min Tolley's laugh at the "five hundred"
table, and the Hopps' baby's lullaby. And again he composed his
resignation, and calculated that it would take three days for it to
reach San Francisco, and another three for him to receive their
acceptance of it--another week at least of Kirkwood!
On the seventh day the Chisholms rode down the trail that followed the
pole line, and arrived in a hospitable uproar. Alan Chisholm, some five
years older than Paul, was a fine-looking, serious, dark youth, a
fellow of not many words, being given rather to silent appreciation of
his sister's chatter than to speech of his own. Miss Chisholm was very
tall, very easy in manner, and powdered just now to her eyelashes with
fine yellow dust. Paul thought her too tall and too large for beauty,
but he liked her voice, and the fashion she had of crinkling up her
eyes when she smiled. He sat on the porch while the Chisholms went
upstairs to brush and change, and thought that the wholesome noise of
their splashing and calling, opening drawers, and banging doors was a
pleasant change from the usual quiet of the house.
Miss Chisholm was the first to reappear. She was followed by Min and
Mrs. Tolley, and was asking questions at a rate that kept both
answering at once. Had her kodak films come? Was Minnie going to have
some little sense and be married in a dress she could get some use out
of? How were the guinea-pigs, the ducks, the vegetables, the caged fox,
the "boys" generally, Roosy's ear, Consuelo Vorse's lame foot? Did Mrs.
Tolley know that she had made a deep impression on the old fellow who
drove the stage? "Oh, look at her blush, Min! Well, really!"
She came, delightfully refreshed by toilet waters and crisp linen, to
take a deep rocker opposite Paul, and leaned luxuriously back, showing
very trim feet shod in white.
"Admit that you've fallen in love with Kirkwood, Mr. Forster," said she.
"I can't admit anything of the sort," said Paul, firmly, but smiling
because she was so very good to look at. He had to admit that he had
never seen handsomer dark eyes, nor a more tender, more expressive and
characterful mouth than the one that smiled so readily and showed so
even a line of big teeth.
"Oh, you will!" she assured him easily. "There's no place like
Kirkwood, is there, Alan?" she said to her brother, as he came out. He
smiled.
"We don't think there is, Forster. My sister's been crazy about the
place since we got here--that's eighteen months ago; and I'm crazy
about it myself now!"
"Wait until you've slept out on the porch for a while," said Miss
Chisholm, "and wait until you've got used to a plunge in the pool
before breakfast every morning. Alan, you must take him down to the
pool to-morrow, and I'll listen for his shrieks. Where are you going
now--the power-house? No, thank you, I won't go. I'm going out to find
something special to cook you for your suppers."
The something special was extremely delicious; Paul had a vague
impression that there was fried chicken in it, and mushrooms, and
cream, and sherry. Miss Chisholm served it from a handsome little
copper blazer, and also brewed them her own particular tea, in a Canton
tea-pot. Paul found it much pleasanter at this end of the table. To his
surprise, no one resented this marked favoritism--Mrs. Tolley observing
contentedly that her days of messing for men were over, and Mrs. Vorse
remarking that she'd "orghter reely git out her chafing-dish and do
some cooking" herself.
Paul found that Miss Chisholm possessed a leisurely gift of fun; she
was droll, whether she quite meant to be or not. Everybody laughed.
Mrs. Tolley became tearful with mirth.
"Now, this is the nicest part of the day," said Patricia, when they
three had carried their coffee out to the porch and were seated. "Did
you ever watch the twilight come, sitting here, Mr. Forster?"
"It seems to me I have never done anything else," said Paul. She gave
him a keen glance over her lifted teaspoon; then she drank her coffee,
set the cup down, and said:
"Well! How is that combination of vaudeville and railway station and
zotrope that is known as New York?"
"Oh, the little old berg is all there," said Paul, lightly. But his
heart gave a sick throb. He hoped she would go on talking about it. But
it was some time before any one spoke, and then it was Alan Chisholm,
who took his pipe out of his mouth to say:
"Patricia hates New York."
"I can't imagine any one doing that," Paul said emphatically.
"Well, there was a time when I thought I couldn't live anywhere else,"
said Alan, good-naturedly; "but there's a lot of the pioneer in any
fellow, if he gives it a chance."
"Oh, I had a nice enough time in New York," said Patricia, lazily, "but
it just WEARS YOU OUT to live there; and what do you get out of it?
Now, HERE--well, one's equal to the situation here!"
"And then some," Paul said; and the brother and sister laughed at his
tone.
"But, honestly," said Miss Chisholm, "you take a little place like
Kirkwood, and you don't need a Socialist party. We all eat the same; we
all dress about the same; and certainly, if any one works hard here,
it's Alan, and not the mere hands. Why, last Christmas there wasn't a
person here who didn't have a present--even Willy Chow Tong! Every one
had all the turkey he could eat; every one a fire, and a warm bed, and
a lighted house. Mrs. Tolley gets only fifty dollars a month, and Monk
White gets fifty--doesn't he, Alan? But money doesn't make much
difference here. You know how the boys adore Monk for his voice; and as
for Mrs. Tolley, she's queen of the place! Now, how much of that's true
of New York!"
"Oh, well, put it that way--" Paul said, in the tone of an offended
child.
"Apropos of Mrs. Tolley's being queen of the place," said Alan to his
sister, "it seems she's rubbing it into poor little Mollie Peavy. Len
brought Mollie and the baby down from the ranch a week ago, and
nobody's been near 'em."
"Who said so?" flashed Miss Chisholm, reddening.
"Why, I saw Len to-night, sort of lurking round the power-house, and he
told me he had 'em in that little cottage, across the creek, where the
lumbermen used to live. Said Mollie was in agony because nobody came
near her."
"Oh, that makes me furious!" said Patricia, passionately. "I'll see
about it to-morrow. Nobody went near her? The poor little thing!"
"Who are they?" said Paul.
"Why, she's a little blonde, sickly-looking thing of sixteen,"
explained Miss Chisholm, "and Len's a lumberman. They have a little
blue-nosed, sickly baby; it was born about six weeks ago, at her
father's ranch, above here. She was--she had no mother, the poor
child--"
"And in fact, my sister escorted the benefit of clergy to them about
two months ago," said Alan, "and the ladies of the Company House are
very haughty about it."
"They won't be long," predicted Miss Chisholm, confidently. "The idea!
I can forgive Mrs. Hopps, because she's only a kid herself; but Mrs.
Tolley ought to have been big enough! However!"
"This place honestly can't spare you for ten minutes, Pat," her brother
said.
"Well, honestly," she was beginning seriously, when she saw he was
laughing at her, and broke off, with a shamefaced, laughing look for
Paul. Then she announced that she was going down to the power-house,
and, packing her thin white skirts about her, she started off, and they
followed.
Paul was not accustomed to seeing a lady in the power-house, and
thought that her enthusiasm was rather nice to watch. She flitted about
the great barnlike structure like a contented child, insisted upon
displaying the trim stock-room to Paul, demanded a demonstration of the
switchboard, spread her pretty hands over the whirling water that
showed under the glass of the water-wheels, and hung, fascinated, over
the governors.
"I never get used to it," said Patricia, above the steady roaring of
the river. "Do you realize that you are in one of the greatest force
factories of the world? Look at it!" She swept with a gesture the
monster machinery that shone and glittered all about them. "Do you
realize that people miles and miles away are reading by lights and
taking street-cars that are moved by this? Don't talk to me about the
subway and the Pennsylvania Terminal!"
"Oh, come, now!" said Paul.
"Well!" she flared. "Do you suppose that anything bigger was ever done
in this world than getting these things--these generators and
water-wheels and the corrugated iron for the roof, and the door-knobs
and tiles and standards and switchboard, and everything else, up to the
top of the ridge from Emville and down this side of the ridge? I see
that never occurred to you! Why, you don't KNOW what it was. Struggle,
struggle, struggle, day after day--ropes breaking, and tackle breaking,
and roads giving way, and rain coming! Suppose one of these had slipped
off the trail--well, it would have stayed where it fell. But
wait--wait!" she said, interrupting herself with her delightful smile.
"You'll love it as we do one of these days!"
"Not," said Paul to himself, as they started back to the house.
After that he saw Miss Chisholm every day, and many times a day; and
she was always busy and always cheerful. She wanted her brother and
Paul to ride with her up to the dam for a swim; she wanted to go to the
woods for ferns for Min's wedding; she was going to make candy and they
could come in. She packed delicious suppers, to be eaten in cool places
by the creek, and to be followed by their smoking and her careless
snatches of songs; she played poker quite as well as they; she played
old opera scores and sang to them; she had jig-saw puzzles for slow
evenings. She could not begin a game of what Mrs. Tolley called
"halmy," with that good lady, without somehow attracting the boys to
the table, where they hung, championing and criticising. Paul was more
amused than surprised to find Mrs. Peavy having tea with the other
ladies on the porch less than a week later. The little mother looked
scared and shamed; but Mrs. Tolley had the baby, and was bidding him
"love his Auntie Gussie," while she kissed his rounding little cheek.
One night, some four weeks after his arrival, Patricia decided that
Paul's room must be made habitable; and she and Alan and Paul spent an
entire busy evening there, discussing photographs and books, and
deciding where to cross the oars, and where to hang the Navajo blanket,
and where to put the college colors. Miss Chisholm, who had the quality
of grace and could double herself up comfortably on the floor like a
child, became thoughtful over the class annual.
"The Dicky, and the Hasty Pudding!" she commented. "Weren't you the
Smarty?"
Paul, who was standing with a well-worn pillow in his hand, turned and
said hungrily:
"Oh, you know Harvard?"
"Why, I'm Radcliffe!" she said simply.
Paul was stupefied.
"Why, but you never SAID so! I thought yours was some Western college
like your brother's!"
"Oh, no; I went to Radcliffe for four years," said she, casually. Then,
tapping a picture thoughtfully, she went on: "There's a boy whose face
looks familiar."
"Well, but--well, but--didn't you love it?" stammered Paul.
"I liked it awfully well," said Patricia. "Alan, you've got that one a
little crooked," she added calmly. Paul decided disgustedly that he
gave her up. His own heart was aching so for old times and old voices
that it was far more pain than pleasure to handle all these reminders:
the photographs, the yacht pennant, the golf-clubs, the rumpled and
torn dominoes, the tumbler with "Cafe Henri" blown in the glass, the
shabby camera, the old Hawaiian banjo. Oh, what fun it had all been,
and what good fellows they were!
"It was lovely, of course," said Patricia, in a businesslike tone; "but
this is real life! Cheer up, Paul," she went on (they had reached
Christian names some weeks before). "I am going to have two darling
girls here for two weeks at Thanksgiving, just from Japan. And think of
the concert next month, with Harry Garvey and Laurette Hopps in a play,
and Mrs. Tolley singing 'What Are the Wild Waves Saying?' Then, if Alan
sends you to Sacramento, you can go to the theatre every night you're
there, and pretend"--her eyes danced mischievously--"that you're going
to step out on Broadway when the curtain goes down, and can look up the
street at electric signs of cocoa and ginger beer and silk petticoats--"
"Oh, don't!" said Paul; and, as if she were a little ashamed of
herself, she began to busy herself with the book-case, and was
particularly sweet for the rest of the evening. But she wouldn't talk
Radcliffe, and Paul wondered if her college days hadn't been happy; she
seemed rather uneasy when he repeatedly brought up the subject.
But a day or two later, when he and she were taking a long ride and
resting their horses by a little stream high up in the hills, she began
to talk of the East; and they let an hour, and then another, go by,
while they compared notes. Paul did most of the talking, and Miss
Chisholm listened, with downcast eyes, flinging little stones from the
crumbling bank into the pool the while.
A lazy leaf or two drifted upon the surface of the water, and where
gold sunlight fell through the thick leafage overhead and touched the
water, brown water-bugs flitted and jerked. Once a great dragon-fly
came through on some mysterious journey, and paused for a palpitating
bright second on a sunny rock. The woods all about were silent in the
tense hush of the summer afternoon; even the horses were motionless,
except for an occasional idle lipping of the underbrush. Now and then a
breath of pine, incredibly sweet, crept from the forest.
Paul watched his companion as he talked. She was, as always, quite
unself-conscious. She sat most becomingly framed by the lofty rise of
oak and redwood and maple trees about her. Her sombrero had slipped
back on her braids, and the honest, untouched beauty of her thoughtful
face struck Paul forcibly. He wondered if she had ever been in
love--what her manner would be to the man she loved.
"What did you come for, Paul?" She was ending some long sentence with
the question.
"Come here?" Paul said. "Oh, Lord, there seemed to be reasons enough,
though I can't remember now why I ever thought I'd stay."
"You came straight from college?"
"No," he said, a little uneasily; "no. I finished three years ago. You
see, my mother married an awfully rich old guy named Steele, the last
year I was at college; and he gave me a desk in his office. He has two
sons, but they're not my kind. Nice fellows, you know, but they work
twenty hours a day, and don't belong to any clubs,--they'll both die
rich, I guess,--and whenever I was late, or forgot something, or beat
it early to catch a boat, they'd go to the old man. And he'd ask mother
to speak to me."
"I see," said Patricia.
"After a while he got me a job with a friend of his in a Philadelphia
iron-works," said the boy; "but that was a ROTTEN job. So I came back
to New York; and I'd written a sketch for an amateur theatrical thing,
and a manager there wanted me to work it up--said he'd produce it. I
tinkered away at that for a while, but there was no money in it, and
Steele sent me out to see how I'd like working in one of the Humboldt
lumber camps. I thought that sounded good. But I got my leg broken the
first week, and had to wire him from the hospital for money. So, when I
got well again, he sent me a night wire about this job, and I went to
see Kahn the next day, and came up here."
"I see," she said again. "And you don't think you'll stay?"
"Honestly, I can't, Patricia. Honest--you don't know what it is! I
could stand Borneo, or Alaska, or any place where the climate and
customs and natives stirred things up once in a while. But this is like
being dead! Why, it just makes me sick to see the word 'New York' on
the covers of magazines--I'm going crazy here."
She nodded seriously.
"Yes, I know. But you've got to do SOMETHING. And since your course was
electrical engineering--! And the next job mayn't be half so easy, you
know--!"
"Well, it'll be a little nearer Broadway, believe me. No, I'm sorry. I
never knew two dandier people than you and your brother, and I like the
work, but--!"
He drew a long breath on the last word, and Miss Chisholm sighed, too.
"I'm sorry," she said, staring at the big seal ring on her finger. "I
tell you frankly that I think you're making a mistake. I don't argue
for Alan's sake or mine, though we both like you thoroughly, and your
being here would make a big difference this winter. But I think you've
made a good start with the company, and it's a good company, and I
think, from what you've said to-day, and other hints you're given me,
that you'd make your mother very happy by writing her that you think
you've struck your groove. However!"
She got up, brushed the leaves from her skirt, and went to her horse.
They rode home through the columned aisles of the forest almost
silently. The rough, straight trunks of the redwoods rose all about
them, catching gold and red on their thick, fibrous bark from the
setting sun. The horses' feet made no sound on the corduroy roadway.
For several days nothing more was said of Paul's going or staying. Miss
Chisholm went her usual busy round. Paul wrote his letter of
resignation and carried it to the dinner-table one night, hoping to
read it later to her, and win her approval of its finely rounded
sentences.
But a heavy mail came down the trail that evening, brought by the
obliging doctor from Emville, who had been summoned to dress the wounds
of one of the line-men who had got too close to the murderous "sixty
thousand" and had been badly burned by "the juice." And after the
letters were read, and the good doctor had made his patient
comfortable, he proved an excellent fourth hand at the game of bridge
for which they were always hungering.
So at one o'clock Paul went upstairs with his letter still unapproved.
He hesitated in the dim upper hallway, wondering if Patricia, who had
left the men to beer and crackers half an hour earlier, had retired, or
was, by happy chance, still gossiping with Mrs. Tolley or Min. While he
loitered in the hall, the door of her room swung slowly open.
Paul had often been in this room, which was merely a kind of adjunct to
the sleeping-porch beyond. He went to the doorway and said, "Patricia!"
The room, wide and charmingly furnished, was quite empty. On the deep
couch letters were scattered in a wide circle, and in their midst was
an indentation as if some one had been kneeling on the floor with her
elbows there. Paul noticed this with a curious feeling of unease, and
then called softly again, "Patricia!"
No answer. He walked hesitatingly to his own room and to the window.
Why he should have looked down at the dark path with the expectation of
seeing her, he did not know; but it was almost without surprise that he
recognized the familiar white ruffles and dark head moving away in the
gloom. Paul unhesitatingly followed.
He followed her down the trail as far as he had seen her go, and was
standing, a little undecidedly, wondering just which way she had
turned, when his heart was suddenly brought into his throat by the
sound of her bitter sobbing.
A moment later he saw her. She was sitting on a smooth fallen trunk,
and had buried her face in her hands. Paul had never heard such sobs;
they seemed to shake her from head to foot. Hardly would they lessen,
bringing him the hope that her grief, whatever it was, was wearing
itself out, when a fresh paroxysm would shake her, and she would
abandon herself to it. This lasted for what seemed a long, long time.
After a while Paul cleared his throat, but she did not hear him. And
again he stood motionless, waiting and waiting. Finally, when she
straightened up and began to mop her eyes, he said, trembling a little:
"Patricia!"
Instantly she stopped crying.
"Who is that?" she said, with an astonishing control of her voice. "Is
that you, Alan? I'm all right, dear. Did I frighten you? Is that you,
Alan?"
"It's Paul," the boy said, coming nearer.
"Oh--Paul!" she said, relieved. "Does Alan know I'm here?"
"No," he reassured her; then, affectionately: "What is it, Pat?"
"Just--just that I happen to be a fool!" she said huskily, but with an
effort at lightness. Paul sat down, beginning to see in the darkness.
"I'm all right now," went on Patricia, hardily. "I just--I suppose I
just had the blues." She put out a smooth hand in the darkness, and
patted Paul's appreciatively. "I'm ashamed of myself!" said she,
catching a little sob, as she spoke, like a child.
"Bad news--in your letters?" he hazarded.
"No, GOOD; that's the trouble!" she said, with her whimsical smile, but
with trembling lips. "You see, all my friends are in the East, and some
of them happened to be at the same house-party at Newport, and
they--they were saying how they missed me," her voice shook a little,
"and--and it seems they toasted me, all standing, and--and--" And
suddenly she gave up the fight for control, and began to cry bitterly
again. "Oh, I'm so HOMESICK!" she sobbed, "and I'm so LONESOME! And I'm
so sick, sick, sick of this place! Oh, I think I'll go crazy if I can't
go home! I bear it and I BEAR it," said Patricia, in a sort of
desperate self-defence, "and then the time comes when I simply CAN'T
bear it!" And again she wept luxuriously, and Paul, in an agony of
sympathy, patted her hand.
"My heart is just breaking!" she burst out again, her tears and words
tumbling over each other. "It--it isn't RIGHT! I want my friends, and I
want my youth--I'll never be twenty-six again! I want to put my things
into a suit-case and go off with the other girls for country
visits--and I want to dance!" She put her head down again, and after a
moment Paul ventured a timid, "Patricia, dear, DON'T."
He thought she had not heard him, but after a moment, he was relieved
to see her resolutely straighten up again, and dry her eyes, and push
up her tumbled hair.
"Well, I really will STOP," she said determinedly. "This will not do!
If Alan even suspected! But, you see, I'm naturally a sociable person,
and I had--well, I don't suppose any girl ever had such a good time in
New York! My aunt did for me just what she did for her own daughters--a
dance at Sherry's, and dinners--! Paul, I'd give a year of my life just
to drive down the Avenue again on a spring afternoon, and bow to every
one, and have tea somewhere, and smell the park--oh, did you ever smell
Central Park in the spring?"
Both were silent. After a long pause Paul said:
"Why DO you stay? You've not got to ask a stepfather for a job."
"Alan," she answered simply. "No, don't say that," she interrupted him
quickly; "I'm nothing of the sort! But my mother--my mother, in a way,
left Alan and me to each other, and I have never done anything for
Alan. I went to the Eastern aunt, and he stayed here; and after a while
he drifted East--and he had too much money, of course! And I wasn't
half affectionate enough; he had his friends and I had mine! Well then
he got ill, and first it was just a cold and then it was,
suddenly--don't you know?--a question of consultations, and a dry
climate, and no dinners or wine or late hours. And Alan
refused--refused flat to go anywhere, until I said I'd LOVE to come!
I'll never forget the night it came over me that I ought to. I am--I
was--engaged, you know?" She paused.
Paul cleared his throat. "No, I didn't know," he said.
"It wasn't announced," said Miss Chisholm. "He's a good deal older than
I. A doctor." There was a long silence. "He said he would wait, and he
will," she said softly, ending it. "It's not FOREVER, you know. Another
year or two, and he'll come for me! Alan's quite a different person
now. Another two years!" She jumped up, with a complete change of
manner. "Well, I'm over my nonsense for another while!" said she. "And
it's getting cold. I can't tell you how I've enjoyed letting off steam
this way, Paul!"
"Whenever we feel this way," he said, giving her a steadying hand in
the dark, "we'll come out for a jaw. But cheer up; we'll have lots of
fun this winter!"
"Oh, lots!" she said contentedly. They entered the dark, open doorway
together.
Patricia went ahead of him up the stairs, and at the top she turned,
and Paul felt her hand for a second on his shoulder, and felt something
brush his forehead that was all fragrance and softness and warmth.
Then she was gone.
Paul went into his room, and stood at the window, staring out into the
dark. Only the door of the power-house glowed smoulderingly, and a
broad band of light fell from Miss Chisholm's window.
He stood there until this last light suddenly vanished. Then he took a
letter from his pocket, and began to tear it methodically to pieces.
While he did so Paul began to compose another letter, this time to his
mother.