ANNIE LAURIE PACE
Annie Laurie Pace was making ready for church.
Her Sunday frock of dark blue serge lay on the bed; her silk petticoat
rustled as she stepped briskly about the room; and her heavy coat and
gloves, and her hat with the ostrich plumes, were primly awaiting her
need. All was durable about her clothing, and orderly within the room.
A very clean room it was, somewhat bare and bleak, with a ceiling too
high for its size. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls white and without
pictures. No unnecessary thing was in sight—not even a pretty foolish
trinket on the dresser. Through the windows with their dark green shades
Annie Laurie could look out into the dairy yard with its whitewashed
houses. Beyond stretched the pastures in which grazed the fine herd that
was the pride of her father, Simeon Pace.
Usually, Annie Laurie sang as she dressed for church. She had a warm
full voice, with notes in it not unlike the whistle of an oriole. But
this morning no song came from her lips. She had a set, almost stern
look; her chin came out a little farther than was necessary, and there
was battle in her eye.
Her aunts, dressing in the next room, spoke of it.
“Annie Laurie is not herself,” declared Miss Adnah to Miss Zillah. “I
can see that she is terribly put about. I do hope and pray that we
haven’t made a mistake in letting her leave the district school and go in
with Carin Carson and that other girl. It looks to me as if Mrs. Carson
was the only person that wanted her—except, perhaps, the governess, Miss
Parkhurst—and staying where we’re not wanted is not a thing that we could
ever put up with, we Paces.”
“Don’t worry about Annie Laurie, sister,” replied Miss Zillah, setting
her queer lid-like hat on her short gray curls. “She made the change of
her own free will, remember. She’s run up against a stone wall for the
first time in her life, and I’ll be interested to see whether she climbs
over or burrows under it. Those two girls she’s studying with don’t like
her—or at least they don’t like to have her intruding on them. I don’t
know as I blame them very much. There they were, enjoying each other’s
society, and in comes a stranger and thrusts them apart, you may say.
Annie Laurie is as unlike them as she can be—quite of a different class,
indeed.”
Miss Adnah snapped the fasteners of her gloves sharply.
“What do you mean by a different class, sister?” she said reprovingly.
“Is it possible you consider the Paces inferior to anyone in this
community?”
“Now, Adnah dear, I didn’t say anything about inferiority. I spoke of a
difference. What the Paces know, they’ve mostly taught themselves; and
what they have, they’ve honestly earned. They’re proud of it. But
they’re no prouder of being what they are—well-to-do, reliable,
respectable members of the community—than the Carsons are of being highly
cultivated, rich, much-traveled gentle-folk, or the McBirneys of being
industrious, independent mountain people. The truth is, Adnah, if there
were fewer kinds of pride in this community, and less of each kind, it
would be a better thing.”
“The team is up, aunts,” called Annie Laurie in her clear voice.
“Very well, child; we are ready,” came the reply.
Of course they were ready. It was seldom, indeed, that anyone in that
house kept anyone else waiting. Simeon Pace, holding his fine large
grays in check, knew almost to a second how long before the front door
would open and three tall, upright figures emerge. And this morning was
no exception. At the right instant his sisters, in their well-preserved
cloaks, came out together, followed by his daughter. The door was
locked, the key placed in the crotch of the sycamore, the aunts were
helped to their places by Annie Laurie’s strong arms and then she swung
herself into the seat beside her father, and took the reins from his
hands. As she did so, she happened to hit her father’s left arm, which
gave forth a sound like the rattling of an eave trough in the wind.
And truth to tell, it was made of the same material, for where Simeon
Pace’s muscular member of flesh and blood had once swung, there now was
an unjointed tin substitute for it, hollow as a drum. An ill-advised
visit to a sawmill five years before was responsible for this defect,
which indeed, might have been all but concealed had Mr. Pace been willing
to buy one of the excellent modern imitations of an arm. His sisters and
his daughter continually urged him to do this, but Simeon said that his
tin arm had helped him when his trouble was new, and that he refused to
throw it on the trash heap as a reward for faithful service. It was
nothing to him that his gestures startled nervous folk. He remained
loyal to his battered, awkward tin convenience, and seemed to take an
innocent joy in waving it in the air, offering it as a support to old
ladies, and sawing it up and down when he became excited. All the Paces
were independent and Simeon was the most independent of them all.
He led his women folk well up to the front of the church and eyed them
with critical kindness as they filed past him into the pew, confident
that their thoughts would not wander from the preacher’s words during the
service. So it was good for his fatherly satisfaction that he did not
look into his daughter’s mind, for barely a sentence of the sermon did
she hear that day. Her thoughts were slipping back and forth like
shuttles in a loom. The past week in Mrs. Carson’s home has been a
strange—and in some ways, a distressing—one. True, never had she learned
so much in so short a space of time. If she asked a question everyone
tried to answer it. Little as the other two girls had seemed to like
her, when it came to a question of ideas, they paid instant and warm
attention. An idea was an idea with them, and entitled to respect.
If the combined wit of Miss Parkhurst and her pupils failed to supply a
good answer to an inquiry, plenty of books were at hand to consult, and
as a last reference, there were Mr. and Mrs. Carson, who seemed to have
been almost everywhere and to know something about almost everything. As
Annie Laurie had heard them talk, speaking with interest about all
manners of people, her little local standards began to vanish like mist
before the sun. For the first time it was borne in upon her that Lee,
North Carolina, was not the center of civilization. All the world, it
appeared, was full of interest—full of good neighborly folk. All one had
to do was to learn their language to find out how very nice they really
were. It was such a new and brilliant idea to Annie Laurie that it
almost dazzled her.
She had been used to thinking herself a bright girl—a girl who could keep
at the head of her classes—so it was but natural in those first angry
hours when she raged at the cold reception Carin and Azalea had given
her, that she should have thought: “Just wait till we get down to
lessons, and then I’ll show them.”
But to her surprise, she had not been able to “show them.” Carin and
Azalea did not attack their studies so fiercely as she did. They seemed
to make more of a game of them and less of a task. They laughed over
things that puzzled her. But for all that they were clever, and it did
not seem strange to them that Annie Laurie should be clever too. Her
cleverness, as they knew, was Mrs. Carson’s excuse for asking her to join
them. After that first chilly day they had been polite enough. But they
somehow put her in the wrong. She felt awkward and strange. She fatally
said the wrong thing—or the right thing in the wrong place. Even her
clothes had seemed stiff and unlovely beside theirs, though they were of
good material and honestly and thoroughly made. However, as Annie Laurie
had more than once reflected, their clothes were made for them by their
mothers, who asked nothing better than to see them looking their best.
That Mary McBirney was not really Azalea’s mother made no difference—she
loved Azalea almost as much, judging from what Azalea said.
Annie Laurie stole a glance at her two excellent aunts—always so really
kind and just to her—but rather stern, like her father. The Paces seldom
laughed; they almost never kissed each other; they said what they
thought—and they quite lacked that pretty foolishness which Mrs. Carson
sometimes indulged in with Carin.
Annie Laurie could remember that her own mother had been something like
Mrs. Carson. It was she who had given her the name after the sweet old
song. She had laughed and danced and sung, and the aunts had not quite
liked it, although they mourned her deeply when she died, still in her
youth. And they had treasured as keepsakes the things which had been
hers.
But what was the preacher saying all this time? Something about Ananias
and the doom which overtook him because of his lies. It was not a
subject in which she could feel much interest. Sometimes, up at her
house they suffered from too much truth telling—hard, cold truth
telling—but not a soul of them would have been guilty of a lie.
“Plant a lie in the garden of your soul,” said the minister, “and it will
flourish worse than any poisonous weed. And do not think that you can
uproot it when you will, for it will grow and grow, till it is stronger
than you, and not all your prayers and tears can tear it out of your
life.”
Annie Laurie wondered why he should be talking like that to those
friendly, good neighbors, who seemed to be doing the best they could’
from morning till night. She wished he would talk about something that
would help her through the coming week, for she dreaded going back with
those girls who did not like her. Why couldn’t preachers know what was
going on in the back of one’s mind? She looked up wearily and met the
gaze of “that Disbrow boy,” as her aunts always called Sam Disbrow, the
son of the undertaker. For some reason they did not like him. They “had
no use for the whole kit and b’ilin’ of Disbrows.” Yet, someway, Annie
Laurie, though she had grown up with this sentiment ringing in her ears,
thought Sam Disbrow rather a nice boy. At this moment he seemed to be as
impatient as she was at the way the minister was scolding about liars.
Evidently liars failed to interest Sam, also.
It happened that Annie Laurie and Sam were near together as the people
came out of church, and while the rest stood talking in the bright winter
sunshine, they talked, too.
“How are you liking it at your new school, Annie Laurie?” he inquired.
The girl flushed hotly—it was easy for a person with such white skin as
Annie Laurie’s to blush. Sam knew this and made allowances, but he saw
there was something more than ordinary the matter. He looked at her a
moment, half closing his eyes, and turning his head a little on one side
in a way he had.
“They’ve been snubbing you—those girls!” he declared. “I knew they
would—knew it as well as anything.”
“I don’t see how you could know that,” said Annie Laurie with a sudden
feeling that she ought not say anything against Carin and Azalea.
“They’re the nicest girls I ever knew; the nicest girls anywhere about
here. If I haven’t been able to—to make them understand me, it’s my own
fault, I suppose.”
“Nonsense!” cried Sam. “They’re not nice if they’ve been making you
unhappy. How can you let them do it? No fellow could put it over me,
now, I tell you. If he didn’t treat me fair and square, I’d have it out
with him. We’d soon see who was the best man.”
“Girls don’t do things that way, Sam.”
“I know they don’t. They sit around and mope and sniff and feel mean,
instead of making a good healthy row. I didn’t think you were such a
hypocrite.”
“Hypocrite?” gasped the girl, too surprised to feel angry. “How am I a
hypocrite, Sam?”
“Because you’re pretending to be contented when you aren’t. You probably
act as if you liked those girls. And you don’t—you can’t—if they’re
snubby. I say, stir up a fuss. Have a row. Tell ’em what you think of
’em. That will clear the air.”
“I’m under too many obligations to Mrs. Carson to do a thing like that,
Sam.”
“Obligations!” snorted Sam. “Nobody is under obligations to be a
doormat.”
All the way home the girl kept thinking of what Sam Disbrow had said to
her. She would have liked to talk the whole matter over with her Aunt
Zillah, but something held her back from complaining of the girls. Deep
down within her was the feeling that if only she could manage right, they
would yet be friends, true, “forever and forever” friends. If that
should prove to be so, it wouldn’t do for this one and that one to be
remembering that she had criticised them.
And yet, how they had tormented her with their way of seeing and yet not
seeing her, and answering and yet not answering. And she was
lonely—desperately lonely. She longed to see the gleam come in the
girls’ eyes when they looked at her, which they turned upon each other.
All the long, quiet Sunday afternoon she thought of it, though she tried
to read. She knew Azalea and Carin were together, for she had heard them
planning a horseback ride, while she was alone, and as she told herself
sadly, likely to be alone every Sunday, since she knew no one she really
wished to be with—save those two, of course.
She had an hour of trying to hate them, but she failed miserably. For
all they had made her suffer, she could not get as far as hating them.
She failed to sleep well that night. Her mind whirled like a
merry-go-round, always bringing back the same thoughts and persons.
Azalea and Carin, Carin and Azalea. The bright and charming faces kept
returning, but never once did they seem to bear the smiles of friendship
and understanding.
Naturally she was far from being herself when she went down to breakfast
the next morning, and when her Aunt Adnah said, “You see to it, Ann, that
you’re not put upon there at Mrs. Carson’s,” her patience snapped like a
wind-filled bag.
“Oh, please leave me alone, Aunt Adnah,” she cried hotly. “I’ll take
care of myself all right.”
“My dear, my dear,” murmured Miss Zillah, “ought you to be speaking like
that to your Aunt Adnah?”
Annie Laurie knew very well that she ought not, and she was morally
certain that if Carin and Azalea could have heard her, they would have
cried: “There, see! You call her a nice girl?”
Well, maybe she wasn’t a nice girl, but certainly she was an unhappy one.
She put her head up as high as she could comfortably carry it on her very
slim neck and marched away to school. It was a wonderful winter
morning—the sort that got into the blood of horses and made them prance.
Perhaps it was in Annie Laurie’s blood, too, as she entered the
schoolroom that morning. Miss Parkhurst had not yet come, and Carin and
Azalea sat together laughing over some charts of the South Sea Isles.
Miss Parkhurst had laid out an interesting course for them, all relating
to the Archipelago; and geography, history, biography, poetry and fiction
were to be woven together until the life of the “burning isles” appeared
before them in a series of vivid mental pictures.
If Annie Laurie had been aware of the amount of explosive material in her
brain and heart that morning, perhaps she would have had the discretion
to remain at home. She really was about as dangerous as a keg of
gunpowder, and it chanced that Carin’s first words were as a match to
produce the inevitable explosion.
“I don’t suppose you’d care about reading Stevenson’s ‘Ebb Tide,’ would
you, Annie Laurie? Not, I mean, as a part of the South Sea study?” She
put the question in that cold, detached little voice which she had used
from the first to the “new girl.” “We couldn’t expect a thorough person
like yourself to enjoy such an unbusiness-like way of getting at things.
I said to Miss Parkhurst that probably Azalea and I had better keep that
for reading after hours, and during school we’ll study any old
Smithsonian Institute reports you and she manage to look up.”
There was a little click in Annie Laurie’s throat, but no spoken word.
Carin, looked up, saw the anger blazing in the girl’s eyes, and started
to say that she was only joking; but before she could frame the words
Annie Laurie found her tongue.
“Why wouldn’t I like to read Stevenson as well as you two?” she demanded.
“Why do you make out that I try to do things in the hard and stupid way?
You’ve certainly made them hard and stupid enough for me the past week.
You’re supposed to have such fine manners, and Azalea is thought ‘so
sweet.’ I haven’t seen your fine manner or her sweetness. I imagined it
was going to be lovely here with you two—that my life would grow to be
interesting when we three were friends. Well, perhaps it would—if we
could be friends. But we can’t. First, because you won’t be—and second
because I won’t. I’m through. I shouldn’t have come. I’m disgusted
that I gave you a chance to snub me. I’m going now, and after this when
you poke fun at me you’ll have to do it behind my back.”
“Why—why—Annie Laurie—” gasped Carin, “I didn’t know—”
But Annie Laurie already had left the room and was stalking down the
corridor. Carin sank back in her chair and covered her face with her
hands. As for Azalea, her book crashed to the floor.
“Oh, Carin,” she cried, “what have we done?”
Miss Parkhurst still was absent, but if she had been there, it is
doubtful if the girls would have consulted her. The battle which had
been threatening all week was on, and the victory at present was, oddly
enough, with the fleeing enemy.
She was already out of the front door by the time Azalea had reached the
hall; and once she was in the open, her dignity deserted her and she ran
toward the gate as if fleeing from a lava stream. Azalea, who had
stopped to snatch her cap and reefer, reached the gate only to see her
racing along the road as fast as her long legs would carry her.
Meantime, Hi Kitchell, the boy who had traveled with Azalea in those old,
half-forgotten days, and who was now happily settled with his mother and
“the kids” in the cabin in which the Carsons had placed them, opened his
sharp eyes to see two girls racing along the frozen road, stumbling over
hard ruts, and then plunging on again. He knew them both—liked Annie
Laurie and swore by Azalea. He saw the anger in the first girl’s face
and the anxiety in Azalea’s every gesture. He couldn’t for the life of
him see why, if Annie Laurie felt like that, she didn’t turn around and
“baste” Azalea. But if she did he’d be on Azalea’s side all right
enough.
Goodness, how they were running! He simply couldn’t stand not knowing
what it all was about. He knew it was none of his business, but for all
of that, a second later he was pelting down the road after them. He
could run like a rabbit and it was not long before he overtook them.
But that was just at the moment when Annie Laurie reached her home and,
dashing in, slammed the door behind her; and Azalea, panting on the
doorstep, furiously rang the bell.