SHE had settled low in the seat, her mouth and chin hidden in the folds
of the satin wrap; her face seemed as chill as marble, her youth cruel,
disdainful. But her undeniable courage commanded his admiration, the
unwavering gaze of her eyes into the dark. He wondered if, back of her
crisp defenses, she were happy. He knew from observation that she led an
almost isolated existence... she had gathered about her no circle of her
own age, she indulged in none of the rapturous confidences, friendships,
so sustaining to other girls. The peculiar necessities of her father
had accomplished this. Yet he was aware that she cherished a general
contempt for youth at large, for a majority of the grown, for that
matter. Contempt colored her attitude to a large extent: that and
happiness did not seem an orderly pair.
He felt, rather than saw, the influence of the dawn behind him; it was
as though the grey air grew more transparent. Annot twisted about. “Oh!
turn, turn!” she cried; “the day! we are driving away from it.” A sudden
intoxicating freshness streamed like a sparkling birdsong over the
world, and Anthony's dejection vanished with the gloom now at their
backs. Delicate lavender shadows grew visible upon the grass, the color
shifted tremulously, like the shot hues of changeable silks, until the
sun poured its ore into the verdant crucible of the countryside.
“I am most frightfully hungry,” Annot admitted with that entire
frankness which he found so refreshing. “I wonder--” On either hand
fields, far farmhouses, reached unbroken to the horizon; before them the
road rose between banks of soft, brown loam, apparently into the sky.
But, beyond the rise, they came upon a roadside store, its silvery
boards plastered with the garish advertisements of tobaccos, and a
rickety porch, now undergoing a vigorous sweeping at the hands of an
old man with insecure legs, upon whose faded personage was stamped
unmistakably the initials “G. A. R.”
Anthony brought the car to a halt, and returned his brisk and curious
salutation. “Shall I bring out some crackers?” he asked from the road.
But she elected to follow him into the store. The interior presented the
usual confusion of gleaming tin and blue overalls, monumental cheeses
and cards of buttons, a miscellany of ludicrously varied merchandise.
Annot found a seat upon a splintered church pew, now utilized as a
secular resting place, while Anthony foraged through the shelves. He
returned with the crackers, and a gold lump of dates, upon which they
breakfasted hugely. “D'y like some milk?” the aged attendant inquired,
and forthwith dipped it out of a deep, cool and ringing can.
Afterward they sat upon the step and smoked matutinal cigarettes. The
day gathered in a shimmering haze above the vivid com, the emerald of
the shorn fields; the birds had already subsided from the heat among
the leaves. Anthony saw that the lamps of the car were still alight, a
feeble yellow flicker, and turned them out. He tested the engine; and,
finding it still running, turned with an unspoken query to Annot. She
rose slowly.
The wrap slipped from her bare shoulders and her dinner gown with its
high sulphur girdle, the scrap of black lace about her hair, presented
a strange, brilliantly artificial picture against the blistered, gaunt
boards of the store, with, at its back, the open sunny space of pasture,
wood and sky.
“It's barely twenty miles back,” she told him, once more settled at his
side. The old man regarded them from under one gnarled palm, the
other tightly clasped about the broom handle; his jaw was dropped;
incredulity, senile surprise, claimed him for their own.
With Annot, Anthony reflected, he was everlastingly getting into new
situations; she seemed to lift him out of the ordinary course of events
into a perverse world of her own, a front-backward land where the
unexpected, without rule or obligation, continually happened; and, what
was strangest of all, without any of the dark consequences which he
had been taught must inevitably follow such departures. He recalled the
incredulous smiles, the knowing insinuations, that would have greeted
the exact recounting of the past night at Doctor Allhop's drugstore.
He would himself, in the past, have regarded such a tale as a flimsy
fabrication. And suddenly he perceived dimly, in a mind unused to such
abstractions, the veil of ugliness, of degradation, that hung so
blackly about the thoughts of men. He gazed with a new sympathy
and comprehension at the scornful line of Annot's vivid young lips;
something of her superiority, her contempt, was communicated to him.
She became aware of his searching gaze, and smiled in an intimate,
friendly fashion at him. “You are the most comfortable person alive,”
she told him. There was nothing critical in her tones now. “I said that
you were not a good chauffeur, and--” the surroundings grew familiar,
they had nearly reached their destination, and an impalpable reserve
fell upon her, but she continued to smile at him, “and... you are not.”
That was the last word she addressed to him that day.
As, later, he sluiced the automobile with water, he recalled the strange
intimacy of the night, her warm and sympathetic voice; once she had
steadied herself with a clinging hand upon his shoulder. These new
attributes of the person who, shortly, passed him silently and with cold
eyes, stirred his imagination; they were potent, rare, unsettling.