FOR a single horrid moment everybody's heart seemed to lurch off
into space to land only too audibly in a gaspy thud of dismay.
Then Ann Woltor with unprecedented presence of mind jumped up from
the table and ran to the mirror over the fireplace. Only the
twittering throat-muscle reflected in that mirror belied for an
instant the sincerity of either her haste or her astonishment.
"Broken tooth!" she protested incredulously. "Why! Have I got
a--broken tooth?"
People acknowledge their mental panics so divergently. My Husband
acknowledged his by ramming his elbow into his coffee cup. Claude
Kennilworth lit one cigarette after another. The May Girl started
to butter a picture post card that someone had just passed her.
Quite starkly before my very eyes I saw the Sober Stranger,
erstwhile drunken, reach out and slip a silver salt-shaker into his
pocket. Meeting his glance my own nerves exploded in a single hoot
of mirth.
Into the unhappy havoc of the Stranger's face a rather sick but
very determinate little smile shot suddenly.
"Well, I certainly am rattled?" he acknowledged.
His embarrassment was absolutely perfect. Not a whit too much, not
a whit too little, at a moment when the slightest under-emphasis or
over-emphasis of his awkwardness would have stamped him
ineradicably as either boor--or bounder. More indeed by his chair's
volition than by his own he seemed to jerk aside then and there
from any further responsibility for the incident. Turbid as the
storm at the window his eyes racked back to the eyes of his
companions.
"Surely," he besought us, "there must be some place--some
hotel--somewhere in this town where I can crawl into for a day or
two till I can yank myself together again? . . . Taking me in this
way from the streets--or worse the way you-people have--" Along the
stricken pallor of his forehead a glisten of sweat showed faintly.
From my eyes to my Husband's eyes, and back to mine again he turned
with a sharply impulsive gesture of appeal. "How do you-people know
but what I _am_ a burglar?" he demanded.
"Even so," I suggested blithely, "can't you see that we'd
infinitely rather have you visiting here as our friend than
boarding at the hotel as our foe!"
The mirthless smile on the Stranger's face twitched ever so faintly
at one corner.
"You really believe then--" he quickened, "that there is 'honor
among thieves'?"
"All proverbs," intercepted my Husband a bit abruptly, "are best
proved by their antithesis. We do at least know that there is at
times--a considerable streak of dishonor among saints!"
"Eh?--What's that--I didn't quite catch it," beamed the Bridegroom.
But my Husband's entire attention seemed focused rather suddenly on
the Stranger.
"So you'd much better stay right on here where you are!" he adjured
him with some accent of authority. "Where all explanations are
already given and taken! . . . Ourselves quite opportunely short
one guest and long one guest-room, and--No! I won't listen for a
moment to its being called an 'imposition'!" protested my Husband.
"Not for a moment! Only, of course, I must admit," he confided
genially, above the flare of a fresh cigarette, "that it would be a
slight convenience to know your name."
"My name?" flushed the Stranger. "Why, of course! It's Allan John."
"You mean 'John Allan'," corrected the May Girl very softly.
"No," insisted the Stranger. "It's Allan John." Quite logically he
began to rummage through his pockets for the proof. "It's written
on my bill-folder," he frowned. "It's in my check-book. . . . It's
written on no-end of envelopes." With his face the color of half-dead
sedge grass he sank back suddenly into his chair and turned his
empty hands limply outward as though his wrist-bones had been
wrung. "Gone!" he gasped. "Stripped!--Everything!"
"There you have it!" I babbled hysterically. "Now, how do you know
but what _we_ are burglars? . . . This whole house a Den of
Thieves? . . . The impeccable Mr. George Keets there at your
right,--no more, no less, than exactly what he looks,--an almost
perfect replica of a stage 'Raffles'?"
"Eh? What's that?" bridled George Keets.
"Dragging you here to this house the way we did," I floundered
desperately. "Quite helpless as you were. So--so----"
"'Spifflicated,'" prompted the May Girl. The word on her lips was
like the flutter of a rose petal.
With a little gasp of astonishment young Kennilworth rose from his
place, and dragging his chair in one hand, his plate of fruit in
the other, moved round to the May Girl's elbow to finish his
breakfast. Like a palm trying to patronize a pine tree, his crisp
exotic young ego swept down across her young serenity.
"Really, I don't quite make you out," he said. "I think I shall
have to study you!"
"Study--me!" reflected the May Girl. "Make a lesson about me, you
mean! On a holiday?" The vaguely dawning dimple in her smooth cheek
faded suddenly out again.
The Stranger--Allan John--it seemed, was rising from the table.
"If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go to my room," he explained.
"I'm still pretty shaky. I'm----"
But half way to the stairs, as though drawn by some irresistible
impulse, he turned, and fumbling his way back across the dining-room
opened the big glass doors direct into the storm. Tripping ever so
slightly on the threshold he lurched forward in a single wavering
step. In an instant the May Girl was at his side, her steadying
hand held out to his! Recovering his balance almost instantly he
did not however release her hand, but still holding tight to it,
indescribably puzzled, indescribably helpless, stood shoulder to
shoulder with her, staring out into the tempestuous scene. Lashed
by the wind the May Girl's mop of hair blew gold, blew gray, across
his rain-drenched eyes. Blurred in a gusty flutter of white skirts
his whole tragic, sagging figure loomed suddenly like some weird,
symbolic shadow against the girl's bright beauty.
Frankly the picture startled me! "S-s-h!" warned my Husband. "It
won't hurt her any! He doesn't even know whether she's young or
old."
"Or a boy--or a girl," interposed George Keets, a bit drily.
"Or an imp or a saint," grinned young Kennilworth. "Or----"
"Or anything at all," persisted my Husband, "except that she says
'_Kindness_' and nothing else, you notice, except just
'_Kindness_.' No suggestions, you observe? No advice? And at an
acid moment in his life of such unprecedented shock and general
nervous disorganization when his only conceivable chance of 'come-back'
perhaps, hangs on the alkaline wag of a strange dog's tail or the
tune of a street piano proving balm not blister. By to-morrow--I
think--you won't see him holding hands with the May Girl nor with
any other woman. Personally," confided my Husband a bit abruptly,
"I rather like the fellow! Even in the worst of his plight last
night there was a certain fundamental sort of poise and dignity
about him as of one who would say, 'Bad as this is, you chaps must
see that I'd stand ready with my life to do the same for you'!"
"To--do--the same--for you?" gasped the Bride. Very quietly, like
an offended young princess, she rose from the table and stood for
that single protesting moment with her hand on her Bridegroom's
shoulder. Her eager, academic young face was frankly aghast,--her
voice distinctly strained. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I quite fail
to see how the word 'dignity' could possibly be applied to any man
who had so debased himself as to go and get drunk because his wife
and child were dead!"
"You talk," said my Husband, "as though you thought 'getting drunk'
was some sort of jocular sport. It isn't! That is, not inevitably,
you know!"
"No--I didn't--know," murmured the Bride coldly.
"Deplorable as the result proved to be," interposed George Keets's
smooth, carefully modulated voice, "it's hardly probable I suppose
that the poor devil started out with the one deliberate purpose
of--of debasing him self, as Mrs. Brenswick calls it."
"N-o?" questioned the Bride.
"It isn't exactly, you mean, as though he'd leapt from the church
shouting, 'Yo--ho--, and a bottle of rum,'" observed young
Kennilworth with one faintly-twisted eyebrow.
"S-s-h!" admonished everybody.
"Maybe he simply hadn't eaten for days," suggested my Husband.
"Or slept for nights and nights," frowned George Keets.
"And just absolutely was obliged to have a bracer," said my
Husband, "to put the bones back into his knees again so that he
could climb up the steps of his train and fumble some sort of way
to his seat without seeming too conspicuous. Whatever religion may
do, you know, to starch a man's soul or stiffen his upper lip, he's
got to have bones in his knees if he's going to climb up into
railroad trains. . . . And our poor young friend here, it would
seem, merely mis----"
"Mis--calculated," mused Kennilworth, "how many knees he had."
"Paul wouldn't do it!" flared the Bride.
"Do what?" demanded young Kennilworth.
"Hush!" protested everybody.
"Make a beast of himself--if I died--if I died!" persisted the Bride.
"Pray excuse me for contradicting either your noun or your
preposition," apologized my Husband. "But even at its worst I'm
quite willing to wager that the only thing in the world poor Allan
John started out to 'make' was an oblivion--for--himself."
"An oblivion?" scoffed the Bride.
"Yes--even for one night!" persisted my Husband. "Even for one
short little night! . . . Before the horror of 365 nights to the
year and God knows how many years to the life--rang on again! Some
men really like their wives you know,--some men--so no matter how
thin-skinned and weak this desire for oblivion seems to you--"
quickened my Husband, "it is at least a----"
"Paul wouldn't!" frowned the Bride.
In the sudden accentuation of strain everybody turned as quickly as
possible to poor Paul to decide as cheerfully as seemed compatible
with good taste just what that gorgeously wholesome looking
specimen of young manhood would or would not do probably under
suggested circumstances. Nobody certainly wanted to consider the
matter seriously, yet nobody with the Bride's scared eyes still
scorching through his senses would have felt quite justified I
think in mere shrugging the issue aside.
"No, I don't think Paul--would!" rallied my Husband with
commendable quickness. "Not with those eyes! Not with that
particular shade of crisp, controlled hair! . . . Complexions like
his aren't made in one generation of righteous nerves and
digestions! . . . Oh no--! Even in the last ditch the worst thing
Paul would do would be to stalk round putting brand new gutters on
a brand new house!"
"Bridge-building is my job--not gutters," grinned Paul unhappily.
"Stalk round building brand new bridges," corrected my Husband.
"Intoxicated with bridges!" triumphed young Kennilworth. "Doped
with specifications!"
"But perhaps Allan John--doesn't know how to build bridges,"
murmured my Husband. "And perhaps in Allan John's family an
occasional Maiden Aunt _or_ Uncle has strayed just a----"
"With the faintest possible gesture of impatience, but still
smiling, the Bridegroom rose from the table and lifted his Bride's
hand very gently from his shoulder.
"Who started this conversation, anyway?" he quizzed.
"I did!" laughed everybody.
"Well, I end it!" said the Bridegroom.
"Oh, thunder!" protested young Kennilworth. In the hollow of his
hand something that once had been the spongy shapeless center of a
breakfast roll crushed back into sponge again. But in the instant
of its crushing, crude as the modeling was, half jest, half child's
play, I sensed the unmistakable parody of a woman's finger-prints
bruising into the soft crest of a man's shoulder. Even in the
absurdity of its substance the sincerity of the thing was
appalling. Catching my eye alone, young Kennilworth gave an amused
but distinctly worldly-wise little laugh.
"Women do care so much, don't they?" he shrugged.
A trifling commotion in the front hall stayed the retort on my lips.
The commotion was Ann Woltor. Coated and hatted and already
half-gloved she loomed blackly from the shadows, trying very hard
to attract my attention.
In my twinge of anxiety about the May Girl I had quite forgotten
Ann Woltor. And in the somewhat heated discussion of Allan John's
responsibilities and irresponsibilities, the May Girl also, it
would seem, had passed entirely from my mind.
"I'm very sorry," explained Ann Woltor, "but with this unfortunate
accident to my tooth I shall have to hurry, of course, right back
to town." Even if you had never heard Ann Woltor speak you could
have presaged perfectly from her face just what her voice would be
like, gravely contralto, curiously sonorous, absolutely without
either accent or emphasis, yet carrying in some strange,
inex-plainable way a rather goose-fleshy sense of stubbornness and
finality. "One can't exactly in a Christian land," droned Ann Woltor,
"go round looking like the sole survivor of a massacre."
Across the somewhat sapient mutual consciousness that ever since we
had first laid eyes on each other five months ago--and goodness
knows how long before that--she had been going round perfectly
serenely 'looking like the sole survivor of a massacre,' Ann Woltor
and I stared just a bit deeply into each other's eyes. The
expression in Ann's eyes was an expression of peculiar poignancy.
"No, of course not!" I conceded with some abruptness. "But surely
if you can find the right dentist and he's clever at all, you ought
to be able to get back here on the six-thirty train to-night!"
"The six-thirty train? Perhaps," murmured Ann Woltor. Once again
her eyes hung upon mine. And I knew and Ann Woltor knew and Ann
Woltor knew that I knew,--that she hadn't the slightest intention
in the world of returning to us on any train whatsoever. But for
some reason known only to herself and perhaps one other, was only
too glad to escape from our party--anatomically impossible as that
escape sounds--through the loop-hole of a broken tooth. Already
both black gloves were fastened, and her black traveling-bag swayed
lightly in one slim, determinate hand. "Your maid has ordered the
station bus for me," she confided; "and tells me that by changing
cars at the Junction and again at Lees--Truly I'm sorry to make any
trouble," she interrupted herself. "If there had been any possible
way of just slipping out without anybody noticing----!"
"Without anybody noticing?" I cried. "Why, Ann, you dear silly!"
At this, my first use of her Christian name, she flashed back at me
a single veiled glance of astonishment, and started for the door.
But before I could reach her side my Husband stepped forward and
blocked her exit by the seemingly casual accident of plunging both
arms rather wildly into the sleeves of his great city-going
raincoat.
"Why the thing is absurd!" he protested. "You can't possibly make
train connections! And there isn't even a covered shed at the
Junction! If this matter is so important I'll run you up to town
myself in the little closed car!"
Across Ann Woltor's imperturbable face an expression that would
have meant an in-growing scream on any other person's countenance
flared up in a single twitching lip-muscle and was gone again.
Behind the smiling banter in my Husband's eyes she also perhaps had
noted a determination quite as stubborn as her own.
"Why--if you insist," she acquiesced, "but it has always distressed
me more than I can say to inconvenience anybody."
"Inconvenience--nothing!" beamed my Husband. Ordinarily speaking my
Husband would not be described I think as having a beaming
expression.
With a chug like the chug of a motor-boat the little closed car
came splashing laboriously round the driveway. Its glassy face was
streaked with tears. Depressant as black life-preservers its two
extra tires gleamed and dripped in their jetty enamel-cloth
casings. A jangle as of dungeon chains clanked heavily from each
fresh revolution of its progress.
Everybody came rushing helpfully to assist in the embarkation.
My Husband's one remark to me flung back in a whisper from the
steering wheel, though frankly confidential, concerned Allan John
alone.
"Don't let Allan John want for anything to-day," he admonished me.
"Keep his body and mind absolutely glutted with bland things like
cocoa and reading aloud . . . And don't wait supper for us!"
With her gay jonquil-colored oil-skin coat swathing her sombre
figure, Ann Woltor slipped into the seat beside him and slammed the
door behind her. Her face was certainly a study.
"Sixty miles to town if it's an inch! How--cosy," mused young
Kennilworth.
"Good-bye!" shouted everybody.
"Good-bye!" waved Ann Woltor and my Husband.
As for Rollins, he was almost beside himself with pride and
triumph. Shuffling joyously from one foot to the other he crowded
to the very edge of the vestibule and with his small fussy face
turned up ecstatically to the rain, fairly exploded into speech the
instant the car was out of earshot.
"She'll look better!" gloated Rollins.
"Who?--the car?" deprecated young Kennilworth.
Then, because everybody laughed out at nothing, it gave me a very
good chance suddenly to laugh out at "nothing" myself. And most
certainly I had been needing that chance very badly for at least
the last fifteen minutes. Because really when you once stopped to
consider the whole thrilling scheme of this "Rainy Week" Play, and
how you and your Husband for years and years had constituted
yourself a very eager, earnest-minded Audience-of-Two to watch how
the Lord Almighty,--the one unhampered Dramatist of the world,
would work out the scenes and colors--the exits and entrances--the
plots and counter plots of the material at hand--it was just a bit
astonishing to have your Husband jump up from his place in the
audience and leap to the stage to be one of the players instead!
It wasn't at all that the dereliction worried your head or troubled
your heart. But it left your elbow so lonely! Who was there left
for your elbow to nudge? When the morning curtain rose on a flight
of sea gulls slashing like white knives through a sheet of silver
rain, or the Night Scene set itself in a plushy black fog that
fairly crinkled your senses; when the Leading Lady's eyes narrowed
for the first time to the Leading Man's startled stare, and the
song you had introduced so casually at the last moment in the last
act proved to be the reforming point in the Villain's nefarious
career, and the one character you had picked for "Comic Relief"
turned out to be the Tragedienne, who in the world was left for
your elbow to nudge?
Swinging back to the breakfast-room I heard the clock strike
ten--only ten?
It was going to be a nice little Play all right! Starting off
already with several quite unexpected situations! And it wouldn't
be the first time by any means that in an emergency I had been
obliged to "double" as prompter and stage hand or water carrier and
critic. But how to double as elbow-nudger I couldn't quite figure.
"Let's go for a tramp on the beach!" suggested the Bridegroom.
Always on the first rainy morning immediately after breakfast some
restive business man suggests "a tramp on the beach!" Frankly we
have reached a point where we quite depend on it for a cue.
Everybody hailed the proposition with delight except Allan John and
Rollins. A zephyr would have blown Allan John from his footing. And
Rollins had to stay in his room to catalogue shells. . . . Rollins
was paid to stay in his room and catalogue shells!
Of the five adventurers who essayed to sally forth, only one failed
to clamor for oil skins. You couldn't really blame the Bride for
her lack of clamoring. . . . The Bride's trousseau was wonderful as
all trousseaux are bound perforce to be that are made up of equal
parts of taste,--money,--fashion,--and passion. No one who had
"saved up" such a costume as the Bride had for the first rainy day
together, could reasonably be expected to doff it for yellow
oil-skins. Of some priceless foreign composition, half cloth, half
mist, indescribably shimmering, almost indecently feminine, with
the frenchiest sort of a little hat gaily concocted of marshgrass
and white rubber pond-lilies, it gave her lovely, somewhat classic
type, all the sudden audacious effect somehow of a water-proofed
valentine.
Young Kennilworth sensed the inherent contrast at once.
"Beside you," he protested, "we look like Yellow Telegrams! . . .
Your Husband there is some Broker's Stock Quotation--sent
'collect!' . . . Mr. Keets is a rather heavily-worded summons to
address the Alumnae of Something-or-other College! . . . I am a
Lunch Invitation to 'Miss Dancy-Prancy of the Sillies!' . . . And
you, of course, Miss Davies," he quickened delightedly, "are a
Night Letter, because you are so long--and inconsequent--all about
rabbits--and puppies--and kiddie things like checked gingham
pinafores!"
Laughing, teasing, arguing, jeering each other's oil-skins,
praising the Bride's splendor, they swept, a young hurricane of
themselves, out into the bigger hurricane of sea and sky, and still
five abreast, still jostling, still teasing, still arguing, passed
from sight around the storm-swept curve of the beach, while I
stayed behind to read aloud to Allan John.
Not that Allan John listened at all. But merely because every time
I stopped reading he struggled up from the lovely soggy depths of
his big leather chair and began to worry. We read two garden
catalogues and a chapter on insect pests. We read a bit of Walter
Pater, and five exceedingly scurrilous poems from a volume of free
verse. It seemed to be the Latin names in the garden catalogues
that soothed him most. And when we weren't reading, we drank malted
milk. Allan John, it seemed, didn't care for cocoa.
But even if I hadn't had Allan John on my mind I shouldn't have
gone walking on the beach. We have always indeed made it a point
not to walk on the beach with our guests on the first rainy,
restive morning of their arrival. In a geographical environment
where every slushy step of sand, every crisp rug of pebbles, every
wind-tortured cedar root, every salt-gnawed crag is as familiar to
us as the palms of our own hands, it is almost beyond human nature
not to try and steer one's visitors to the preferable places, while
the whole point of this introductory expedition demands that the
visitors shall steer themselves. In the inevitable mood of
uneasiness and dismay that overwhelms most house party guests when
first thrust into each other's unfamiliar faces, the initial
gravitations that ensue are rather more than usually significant.
To be perfectly explicit, for instance, people who start off five
abreast on that first rainy walk never come home five abreast!
In the immediate case at hand, nobody came home at all until long
after Allan John and I had finished our luncheon, and in the manner
of that coming, George Keets had gravitated to leadership with the
Bride and Bridegroom. Very palpably with the Bridegroom's
assistance he seemed to be coaxing and urging the Bride's frankly
jaded footsteps, while young Kennilworth and the May Girl brought
up the rear staggering and lurching excitedly under the weight of a
large and somewhat mysteriously colored wooden box.
The Bridegroom and George Keets and young Kennilworth and the May
Girl were as neat as yellow paint. But the poor Bride was ruined.
Tattered and torn, her diaphanous glory had turned to real mist
before the onslaught of wind and rain. Her hat was swamped, her
face streaked with inharmonious colors. She was drenched to the
skin. Her Bridegroom was distracted with anxiety and astonishment.
Everybody was very much excited! Lured by some will-o-the-wisp that
lurks in waves and beaches they had lost their way it seems between
one dune and another, staggered up sand-hills, fallen down
sand-hills, sheltered themselves at last during the worst gust of
all "in a sort of a cave in a sort of a cliff" and sustained life
very comfortably "thank you" on some cakes of sweet chocolate which
George Keets had discovered most opportunely in his big oil-skin
pockets!
But most exciting of all they had found a wreck! "Yes, a real
wreck! A perfectly lovely--beautiful--and quite sufficiently
gruesome real wreck!" the May Girl reported.
Not exactly a whole wreck it had proved to be . . . Not shattered
spars and masts and crumpled cabins with plush cushions floating
messily about. But at least it was a real trunk from a real wreck!
Mrs. Brenswick had spied it first. Just back of a long brown untidy
line of flotsam and jetsam, the sea-weeds, the dead fish, the old
bales and boxes, that every storm brings to the beach, Mrs.
Brenswick had spied the trunk lurching up half-imbedded in the
sand. It must have come in on the biggest wave of all some time
during the night. It was "awfully wet" and yet "not so awfully
wet." Everybody agreed that is, that it wasn't water-logged, that
it hadn't, in short, been rolling around in the sea for weeks or
months but bespoke a disaster as poignantly recent as last night,
on the edge of this very storm indeed that they themselves were now
frivoling in. For fully half an hour, it appeared before even so
much as touching the trunk, they had raced up and down the beach
hunting half hopefully, half fearfully for some added trace of
wreckage, the hunched body even of a survivor. But even with this
shuddering apprehension once allayed, the original discovery had
not proved an altogether facile adventure.
It had taken indeed at the last all their combined energies and
ingenuities to open the trunk. The Bride had broken two finger
nails. George Keets had lost his temper. Paul Brenswick in a final
flare of desperation had kicked in the whole end with an abandon
that seemed to have been somewhat of an astonishment to everybody.
Even from the first young Kennilworth had contested "that the thing
smelt dead." But this unhappy odor had been proved very fortunately
to be nothing more nor less than the rain-sloughed coloring matter
of the Bride's pond-lily hat.
"And here is what we found in the trunk!" thrilled the Bride. In
the palm of her extended hand lay a garnet necklace,--fifty stones
perhaps, flushing crimson-dark in a silver setting of such unique
beauty and such unmistakable Florentine workmanship as stamped the
whole trinket indisputably "precious," if not the stones themselves.
"And there were women's dresses in it," explained Paul Brenswick.
"Rather queer-looking dresses and----"
"Oh, it was the--the--funniest trunk!" cried the May Girl. "All--"
Her eyes were big with horror.
"Anybody could have Sherlocked at a glance," sniffed young
Kennilworth, "that it had been packed by a crazy person!"
"No, I don't agree to that at all!" protested the Bride, whose own
trunk-packing urgencies and emergencies were only too recent in her
mind. "Anybody's liable to pack a trunk like that when he's moving!
The last trunk of all! Every left-over thing that you thought was
already packed or that you had planned to tuck into your suitcase
and found suddenly that you couldn't."
"Why, there was an old-fashioned copper chafing dish!" sniffed
young Kennilworth. "And the top-drawer of a sewing-table fairly
rattling with spools!"
"And books!" frowned George Keets. "The weirdest little old edition
of 'Pilgrim's Progress'!"
"And toys!" quivered the May Girl. "A perfectly gorgeous brand new
box of 'Toy Village'! As huge as--Oh it was awful!"
"As huge as--that!" kicked young Kennilworth wryfully against the
box at his feet. "I wanted to bring the chafing dish," he scolded,
"but nothing would satisfy this young idiot here except that we lug
the Toy Village.----"
"One couldn't bring--everything all at once," deprecated the May
Girl. "Perhaps to-morrow--if it isn't too far--and we ever could
find it again----"
"But why such haste about the 'Toy Village'?" I questioned. "Why
not the dresses? The----"
Hopelessly, but with her eyes like blue skies, her cheeks like
apple-blossoms, the May Girl tried to justify her mental processes.
"Probably I can't explain exactly," she admitted, "but books and
dishes and dresses being just things wouldn't mind being drowned
but toys, I think, would be frightened." With a frank expression of
shock she stopped suddenly and stared all around her. "It doesn't
quite make sense when you say it out loud, does it?" she reflected.
"But when you just feel it--inside----"
"I brought the little 'Pilgrim's Progress' back with me," confessed
George Keets with the faintest possible smile. "Not exactly perhaps
because I thought it would be 'frightened.' But two nights
shipwreck on a New England coast in this sort of weather didn't
seem absolutely necessary."
"And I brought the dinkiest little pearl-handled pistol,"
brightened Paul Brenswick. "It's a peach! Tucked into the pocket of
an old blue cape it was! Wonder I ever found it!"
From a furious rummaging through her pockets the May Girl suddenly
withdrew her hand.
"Of course, we'll have to watch the shipwreck news," said the May
Girl. "Or even advertise, perhaps. So maybe there won't be any real
treasure-trove after all. But just to show that I thought of you,
Mrs. Delville," she dimpled, "here are four very damp spools of red
sewing-silk for your own work-table drawer! Maybe they came all the
way from China! And here's a--I don't know what it is, for Allan
John--I think it's a whistle! And here's a little not-too-soggy
real Morocco-bound blank book for Mr. Rollins when he comes
down-stairs again! And----"
"And for Mr. Delville?" I teased. "And for Ann Woltor?"
With her hand slapped across her mouth in a gesture of childish
dismay, the May Girl stared round at her companions.
"Oh dear--Oh dear--Oh _dear_!" she stammered. "None of us ever
thought once of poor Mr. Delville and Miss Woltor!"
"It's hot eatments and drinkments that you'd better be thinking of
now!" I warned them all with real concern. "And blanket-wrappers!
And downy quilts! Be off to your rooms and I'll send your lunches
up after you! And don't let one of you dare show his drenched face
down-stairs again until suppertime!"
Then Allan John and I resumed our reading aloud. We read Longfellow
this time, and a page or two of Marcus Aurelius, and half a
detective story. And substituted orange juice very mercifully for
what had grown to be a somewhat monotonous carousal in malted milk.
Allan John seemed very much gratified with the little silver
whistle from the shipwreck, and showed quite plainly by various
pursings of his strained lips that he was fairly yearning to blow
it, but either hadn't the breath, or else wasn't sure that such a
procedure would be considered polite. Really by six o'clock I had
grown quite fond of Allan John. It was his haunted eyes, I think
and the lovely lean line of his cheek. But whether he was
animal--vegetable--mineral--Spirituelle--or Intellectuelle, I,
myself, was not yet prepared to say.
The supper hour passed fortunately without fresh complications.
Everybody came down! Everybody's eyes were like stars! And every
body's complexion lashed into sheer gorgeous-ness by the morning's
mad buffet of wind and wave! Best of all, no one sneezed.
Our little Bride was a dream again in a very straight, very severe
gray velvet frock that sheathed her young suppleness like the
suppleness of a younger Crusader. Her regenerated beauty was an
object-lesson to all young husbands' pocket-books for all time to
come that beauty like love is infinitely more susceptible to bad
weather than is either homeliness or hate, and as such must be
cherished by a man's brain as well as by his brawn. Paul Brenswick,
goodness knows, would never need to choose his Bride's clothes for
her. But lusty young beauty-lover that he was by every right of
clean heart and clean living, it was up to him to see that his
beloved was never financially hampered in her own choosing! A
non-extravagant bride, wrecked as his bride had been by the
morning's tempest, might not so readily have recovered her magic.
The May Girl, as usual, was like a spray of orchard bloom in some
white, frothy, middy blouse sort of effect. With the May Girl's
peculiarly fragrant and insouciant type of youthfulness one never
noted somehow just what she wore, nor rated one day's mood of
loveliness against another. The essential miracle, as of May-time
itself, lay merely in the fact that she was here.
Everybody talked, of course, about the shipwreck.
The Bride did not wear her necklace. "It was too ghostly," she
felt. But she carried it in her hand and brooded over it with the
tender, unshakable conviction that once at least it must have
belonged to "another Bride."
Rollins, I thought, was rather unduly enthusiastic about his share
of the booty. Yet no one who knew Rollins could ever possibly have
questioned the absolute sincerity of him. Note-books, it appeared,
were a special hobby of his! Morocco-bound note-books particularly.
And when it came to faintly soggy Morocco-bound note-books, words
were inadequate it seemed to express his appreciation. Nothing
would do but the May Girl must inscribe it for him. "Aberner
Rollins," she wrote very carefully in her round, childish hand,
with a giggly flourish at the tail-tip of each word. "For Aberner
Rollins from his friend May Davies. Awful Shipwreck Time, May 10th,
1919." Rollins used an inestimable number of note-books it appeared
in the collection of his statistics. "The collection of statistics
was the consuming passion of his life," he confided to everybody.
"The consuming passion!" he reiterated emphatically. "Already," he
affirmed, "he had revised and reaudited the whole fresh-egg-account
of his own family for the last three generations! In a single
slender tome," he bragged, "he held listed the favorite flowers of
all living novelists both of America and England! Another tome
bulged with the evidence that would-be suicides invariably waited
for pleasant weather in which to accomplish their self-destruction!
In regard to the little black Morocco volume," he kindled
ecstatically, "he had already dedicated it to a very interesting
new thought which had just occurred to him that evening, apropos of
a little remark--a most significant little remark that had been
dropped during the breakfast chat. . . . If anyone was really
interested--" he suggested hopefully.
Nobody was the slightest bit interested! Nobody paid the remotest
attention to him! Everybody was still too much excited about the
shipwreck, and planning how best to salvage such loot as remained.
"And maybe by to-morrow there'll be even more things washed up!"
sparkled the May Girl. "A real India shawl perhaps! A set of chess-men
carved from a whale's tooth! Only, of course--if it should rain as
hard--" she drooped as suddenly as she had sparkled.
"It can't!" said young Kennilworth. Even with the fresh crash of
wind and rain at the casement he made the assertion arrogantly. "It
isn't in the mind of God," he said, "to make two days as rainy as
this one." The little black Pomeranian believed him anyway, and
came sniffing out of the shadows to see if the arrogantly
gesticulative young hand held also the gift of lump sugar as well
as of prophecy.
It was immediately after supper that the May Girl decided to
investigate the possibilities and probabilities of her "toy
village."
Somewhat patronizingly at first but with a surprisingly rapid
kindling of enthusiasm, young Kennilworth conceded his assistance.
The storm outside grew wilder and wilder. The scene inside grew
snugger and snugger. The room was warm, the lamps well shaded, the
tables piled with books, the chairs themselves deep as waves. "Loaf
and let loaf" was the motto of the evening.
By pulling the huge wolf-skin rug away from the hearth, the May
Girl and young Kennilworth achieved for their village a plane of
smoothness and light that gleamed as fair and sweet as a real
village common at high noon. Curled up in a fluff of white the May
Girl sat cross-legged in the middle of it superintending operations
through a maze of sunny hair. Stretched out at full-length on the
floor beside her, looking for all the world like some beautiful
exotic-faced little lad, young Kennilworth lay on his elbows,
adjusting, between incongruous puffs of cigarette smoke, the
faintly shattered outline of a miniature church and spire, or
soothing a blister of salt sea tears from the paint-crackled visage
of a tiny villa. Softly the firelight flickered and flamed across
their absorbed young faces. Mysteriously the wisps of cigarette
smoke merged realities with unrealities.
It was an entrancing picture. And one by one everybody in the room
except Rollins and myself became drawn more or less into it.
"If you're going to do it at all," argued Paul Brenswick, "you
might as well do it right! When you start in to lay out a village
you know there are certain general scientific principles that must
be observed. Now that list to the floor there! What about drainage?
Can't you see that you've started the whole thing entirely wrong?"
"But I wanted it to face toward the fire," drooped the May Girl,
"like a village looking on the wonders of Vesuvius."
"Vesuvius nothing!" insisted Paul Brenswick. "It's got to have good
drainage!"
Enchanted by his seriousness, the Bride rushed off up-stairs with
her scissors to rip the foliage off her second-best hat to make a
hedge for the church-yard. Even Allan John came sliding just a
little bit out of his chair when he noted that there was a large,
rather humpy papier-mache mountain in the outfit that seemed likely
to be discarded.
"I would like to have that mountain put--there!" he pointed.
"Against that table shadow . . . And the mountain's name is Blue
Blurr!"
"Oh, very well," acquiesced everybody. "The mountain's name is Blue
Blurr!" It was George Keets who suggested taking the little bronze
Psyche from the mantelpiece to make a monument for the public
square. "Of course there'll be some in your village," he
deprecated, "who'll object to its being a nude. But as a classic
it----"
"It's a bear! It's a bear! It's a bear!" chanted Kennilworth in
exultant falsetto. "Speaking of classics!"
"Hush!" said George Keets. . . . George Keets really wanted very
much to play, I think, but he didn't know exactly how to, so he
tried to talk highbrow instead. "This village of yours," he
frowned, "I--I hope it's going to have good government?"
"Well, it isn't!" snapped young Kennilworth. "It's going to be a
terror! But at least it shall be pretty!"
Under young Kennilworth's crafty hand the little village certainly
had bloomed from a child's pretty toy into the very real beauty of
an artist's ideal. The skill of laying out little streets one way
instead of another, the decision to place the tiny red schoolhouse
here instead of there, the choice of a linden rather than a
pinetree to shade an infinitesimal green-thatched cottage, had all
combined in some curious twinge of charm to make your senses
yearn--not that all that cunning perfection should swell suddenly
to normal real estate dimensions--but that you, reduced by some lovely
miracle to toy-size, might slip across that toy-sized greensward
into one of those toy-sized houses, and live with toy-sized
passions and toy-sized ambitions and toy-sized joys and toy-sized
sorrows, one single hour of a toy-sized life.
Everybody, I guess, experienced the same strange little flutter.
"That house shall be mine!" affirmed George Keets quite abruptly.
"That gray stone one with the big bay-window and the pink rambler
rose. The bay-window room I'm sure would make me a fine study.
And----"
From an excessively delicate readjustment of a loose shutter on a
rambling brown bungalow young Kennilworth looked up with a certain
flicker of exasperation.
"Live anywhere you choose!" he snapped. "Miss Davies and I are
going to live--here!"
"W--What?" stammered the May Girl. "What?"
"Here!" grinned young Kennilworth.
"Oh--no," said the May Girl. Without showing the slightest offense
she seemed suddenly to be quite positive about it. "Oh, no!--If I
live anywhere it's going to be in the gray stone house with Mr.
Keets. It's so infinitely more convenient to the schools."
"To the what?" chuckled Kennilworth. Before the very evident
astonishment and discomfiture in George Keets's face, his own was
convulsed with joy.
"To the schools," dimpled the May Girl.
"You do me a--a very great honor," bowed George Keets. His face was
scarlet.
"Thank you," said the May Girl.
In the second's somewhat panicky pause that ensued Rollins flopped
forward with his note-book. Rollins evidently had been waiting a
long and impatient time for such a pause.
"Now speaking of drinking to drown one's Sorrows--" beamed Rollins.
"But we weren't!" observed George Keets coldly.
"But you were this morning!" triumphed Rollins. From the flapping
white pages of the little black note-book he displayed with pride
the entries that he had already made, a separate name heading each
page--Mrs. Delville--Mr. Delville--Mr. Keets--Miss Davies--the list
began. "Now take the hypothesis," glowed Rollins, "that everybody
has got just two bottles stowed away for all time, the very last
bottles I mean that he will ever own, rum--rye--Benedictine--any
thing you choose--and eliminating the first bottle as the less
significant of the two--what are you saving the last one for!"
demanded Rollins.
From a furtive glance at Allan John's graying face and the May
Girl's somewhat startled stare, young Kennilworth looked up with a
rather peculiarly glinting smile.
"Oh, that's easy," said he, "I'm saving mine to break the head of
some bally fool!"
"And my last bottle," interposed George Keets quickly. "My last
bottle--?" In his fine ascetic face the flush deepened suddenly
again, but with the flush the faintest possible little smile showed
also at the lip-line. "Oh, I suppose if I'm really going to have a
wedding--in that little gray toy house, it's up to me to save mine
for a 'Loving Cup' . . . claret . . . Something very mild and rosy
. . . Yes, mine shall be claret."
With her pretty nose crinkled in what seemed like a particularly
abstruse reflection, the May Girl glanced up.
"Bene--benedictine?" she questioned. "Is that the stuff that smells
the way stars would taste if you ate them raw?"
"I really can't say," mused Kennilworth. "I don't think I ever ate
a perfectly raw star. At the night-lunch carts I think they almost
invariably fry them on both sides."
"Night-lunch carts?" scoffed Keets, with what seemed to me like
rather unnecessary acerbity. "N-o, somehow I don't seem to picture
you in a night-lunch cart when it comes time to share your last
bottle of champagne with--with--'Miss Dancy-Prancy of the Sillies,'
wasn't it?"
"My last bottle isn't champagne!" flared young Kennilworth. "It's
scotch! . . . And there'll be no Miss Anybody in it, thank you!"
His face was really angry, and one twitch of his foot had knocked
half his village into chaos. "Oh, all right, I'll tell you what I'm
going to do with my last bottle!" he frowned. "The next-to-the-last-one,
as you say, is none of your business! But the last one is going to
my Old Man! . . . I come from Kansas," he acknowledged a bit
shamefacedly. "From a shack no bigger than this room . . . And my
Old Man lives there yet . . . And he's always been used to having a
taste of something when he wanted it and I guess he misses it some.
. . . And he'll be eighty years old the 15th of next December. I'm
going home for it. . . . I haven't been home for seven years. . . .
But my Old Man is going to get his scotch! . . . If they yank me
off at every railroad station and shoot me at sunrise each new
day,--my Old Man is going to get his scotch!
"Bully for you," said George Keets.
"All the same," argued the May Girl, "I think benedictine smells
better."
With a little gaspy breath somebody discovered what had happened to
the Village.
"Who did that?" demanded Paul Brenswick.
"You did!" snapped young Kennilworth.
"I didn't, either," protested Brenswick.
"Why of all cheeky things!" cried the Bride.
"Now see here," I admonished them, "you're all very tired and very
irritable. And I suggest that you all pack off to bed."
Helping the May Girl up from her cramped position, George Keets
bent low for a single exaggerated moment over her proffered hand.
"I certainly think you are making a mistake, Miss Davies," bantered
young Kennilworth. "For a long run, of course, Mr. Keets might be
better, but for a short run I am almost sure that you would have
been jollier in the brown bungalow with me."
"Time will tell," dimpled the May Girl.
"Then I really may consider us--formally engaged?" smiled George
Keets, still bending low over her hand. He was really rather
amused, I think--and quite as much embarrassed as he was amused.
"No, not exactly formally," dimpled the May Girl. "But until
breakfast time to-morrow morning."
"Until breakfast time to-morrow morning," hooted young Kennilworth.
"That's the deuce of a funny time-limit to put on an engagement . . .
It's like asking a person to go skating when there isn't any
ice!. . ."
"Is it?" puzzled the May Girl.
"What the deuce do you expect Keets to get out of it?" quizzed
young Kennilworth.
In an instant the May Girl was all smiles again. "He'll get
mentioned in my prayers," she said. "'Please bless Mr. Keets, my
fiancé-till-to-morrow-morning.'"
"That's certainly--something," conceded George Keets.
"It isn't enough,"--protested Kennilworth.
The May Girl stared round appealingly at her interlocutors.
"But the time is so awfully short," she said, "and I did want to
get engaged to as many boys as possible in the week I was here."
"What--what!" I babbled.
"Yes, for very special reasons," said the May Girl, "I _would_ like
to get engaged to as many----"
With a strut like the strut of a young ban tam rooster, Rollins
pushed his way suddenly into the limelight.
"If it will be the slightest accommodation to you," he affirmed,
"you may consider your self engaged to me to-morrow!"
Disconcerted as she was, the May Girl swallowed the bitter,
unexpected dose with infinitely less grimace than one would have
expected. She even smiled a little.
"Very well, Mr. Rollins," she said, "I will be engaged to
you--to-morrow."
Young Kennilworth's dismay exploded in a single exclamation.
"Well--you--certainly are an extraordinary young person!"
"Yes, I know," deprecated the May Girl. "It's because I'm so tall,
I suppose----"
Before the unallayed breathlessness of my expression she wilted
like a worried flower.
"Yes, of course, I know, Mrs. Delville," she acknowledged, "that
mock marriages aren't considered very good taste . . . But a mock
engagement?" she wheedled. "If it's conducted, oh, very--very--very
properly?" Her eyes were wide with pleading.
"Oh, of course," I suggested, "if it's conducted very--_very_--_very_
properly!"
Across the May Girl's lovely pink and white cheeks the dark lashes
fringed down.
"There--will--be--no--kissing, affirmed the May Girl.
"Oh, Shucks!" protested young Kennilworth. "Now you've spoiled
everything."
Out of the corner of one eye I saw Rollins nudge Paul Brenswick. It
was not a facetious nudge, but one quite markedly earnest. The
whole expression indeed on Rollins's face was an expression of
acute determination.
With laughter and song and a flicker of candlelight everybody filed
up-stairs to bed.
Rollins carried his candle with the particularly unctuous pride of
one who leads a torchlight procession. And as he turned on the
upper landing and looked back, I noted that-behind the almost
ribald excitement on his face there lurked a look of poignant
wistfulness.
"I've never been engaged before," he confided grinningly to Paul
Brenswick. "I'd like to make the most of it . . ."
Passing into my own room I flung back the casement windows for a
revivifying slash of wind and rain, before I should collapse
utterly into the white scrumptiousness of my bed. Frankly, I was
very tired.
It must have been almost midnight when I woke to see my Husband's
dark figure silhouetted in the bright square of the door. Through
the depths of my weariness a consuming curiosity struggled.
"Did Ann Woltor come back?" I asked.
"She did!" said my Husband succinctly.
"And how did you get on with Allan John?"
"Oh, I'm crazy about Allan John," I yawned amiably. And then with
one of those perfectly inexplainable nerve-explosions that
astonishes no one as much as it astonishes oneself I struggled up
on my elbow.
"But he's still got my best silver saltshaker in his pocket!" I
cried.
It was then that the scream of a siren whistle tore like some
fear-maddened voice through the whole house. Shriller than knives
it ripped and screeched into the senses! Doors banged! Feet
thudded!
"There's Allan John now!" I gasped. "It's the whistle the May Girl
gave him!"