I
Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into green.
Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the dazzling lawn.
Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's
leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than
butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen;
the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake
and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the
blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any
neighbor. Every twig in the old garden bore its new load of buds that
were soft as kittens' paws; and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees
young ivy leaves chased each other like school-boys.
Spring had come again, and its eternal spirit spread the message of
new-born hope, stirred the sap of awakening life, warmed the bosom of a
wintry earth and put into the hearts of birds the old desire to mate.
But the lonely girl turned a deaf ear to the call, and rounded her
shoulders over the elderly desk with tears blistering her letter.
"I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be
anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble
because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very
moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to do? I
feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the traffic on
the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down with a broken
wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's sleeping-place. You'll
laugh when you read this, and say that I'm dramatizing my feelings and
writing for effect; but if you've got any heart at all, you'd cry if
you saw me (me of all girls!) buried alive out here without a single
soul to speak to who's as young as I am--hushed if I laugh by mistake,
scowled at if I let myself move quickly, catching old age every hour I
stay here."
"Why, Alice, just think of it! There's not a person or a thing in and
out of this house that's not old. I don't mean old as we thought of it
at school, thirty and thirty-five, but really and awfully old. The
house is the oldest for miles round. My grandfather is seventy-two, and
my grandmother's seventy. The servants are old, the trees are old, the
horses are old; and even the dogs lie about with dim eyes waiting for
death."
"When Mother was here, it was bearable. We escaped as often as we
could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw
the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose
that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this house
of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past, I'm
frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel that I
ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled with a
girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm forgetting how
to laugh. I'm beginning not to care about clothes or whether I look
nice."
"One day is exactly like another. I wander about aimlessly with nothing
to do, nowhere to go, no one to speak to. I've even begun to give up
reading novels, because they make me so jealous. It's all wrong, Alice.
It's bad and unhealthy. It puts mutinous thoughts into my head.
Honestly, the only way in which I can get the sort of thrill that I
ought to have now, if ever I am to thrill at all, is in making wild
plans of escape, so wild and so naughty that I don't think I'd better
write about them, even to you, dear."
"Mother's on her honeymoon. She went away a week ago in a state of
self-conscious happiness that left Grandfather and Grandmother snappy
and disagreeable. She will be away four months, and every weekly letter
that comes from her will make this place more and more unbearable and
me more restless and dangerous. I could get myself invited away. Enid
would have me and give me a wonderful time. She has four brothers.
Fanny has begged me to stay with her in Boston for the whole of the
spring and see and do everything, which would be absolutely heaven. And
you know everybody in New York and could make life worth living."
"But Grandfather won't let me go. He likes to see me about the house,
he says, and I read the papers to him morning and evening. It does me
good, he considers, to 'make a sacrifice and pay deference to those
whose time is almost up.' So here I am, tied to the shadows, a prisoner
till Mother comes back--a woman of eighteen forced to behave like a
good little girl treated as if I were still content to amuse myself
with dolls and picture books! But the fire is smolderin Alice, and one
fine day it will burst into flame."
A shaft of sunlight found its way through the branches of a chestnut
tree and danced suddenly upon the envelope into which Joan had sealed
up this little portion of her overcharged vitality. Through the open
windows of her more than ample room with its Colonial four-post bed,
dignified tallboys, stiff chairs and anemic engravings of
early-Victorianism, all the stir and murmur of the year's youth came to
Joan.
If her eyes had not been turned inward and her ears had not been tuned
only to catch her own natural complaints, this chatter of young things
would have called her out to laugh and tingle and dance in the haunted
wood and cry out little incoherent welcomes to the children of the
earth. Something of the joy and emotion of that mother-month must have
stirred her imagination and set her blood racing through her young
body. She felt the call of youth and the urge to play. She sensed the
magnetic pull of the voice of spring, but when, with her long brown
lashes wet with impatient tears, she went to the window and looked out
at the green spread of lawn and the yellow-headed daffodils, it seemed
more than ever to her that she was peering through iron bars into the
playground of a school to which she didn't belong. She was
Joan-all-alone, she told herself, and added, with that touch of
picturesque phrasing inherited from her well-read mother, that she was
more like a racing motorboat tied to a crumbling wharf in a deserted
harbor than anything else in the world.
There was a knock on her door and the sound of a bronchial cough. "Come
in," she said and darted an anxious look at the blond fat face of the
clock on the mantelshelf. She had forgotten all about the time.
It was Gleave who opened the door, Gleave the bald-headed manservant
who had grown old along with his master with the same
resentfulness--the ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer
who had thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when
both were in the full flush of middle age. His limp, the result of an
epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by
severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by his
shortness of breath.