It was winter in Green River.
The town, attracting Colonel Everard to it sixteen years before, newly
prosperous, outgrowing its old lumbering days, with the ship-building
industry already a thing of the past, with the power in the little river
awaiting development, money in the small but thriving bank, and a new
spirit everywhere, beyond the control of old leaders, too progressive
for a provincial magnate's direction, had been in the interesting and
dangerous condition of a woman ready for her next love affair; if the
right man comes, she may live happy ever after, but even if the wrong
man comes, a flirtation is due. Like a woman again, the town showed the
strength of his hold on her in his absence; in winter, when the big,
unfriendly house was shuttered and closed, the ladies of the inner
circle wore out their summer evening gowns at mild winter gayeties,
church socials, Village Improvement Society bridge parties, and the
old-fashioned supper parties which the Nashes and Larribees and Saxons
still ventured to give.
Humble festivities which he would not have honoured with his presence
lacked allurement because he was not in town and staying away from them.
Great matters and small hung fire to await his deciding vote, from the
list of books to be bought for the library to the chairmanship of the
school board. Marking time and waiting for the Colonel to come home;
that was what winter meant to most of Green River, but not to Judith
Randall. Winter was a charmed time to her; the time when her mother did
not care what she did. Freedom was always sweet, but this winter it was
sweeter than ever before to Judith.
She was never lonely now. Whispering groups in the dingy corridor of the
old schoolhouse, or in that sacred spot, the senior's corner, a cluster
of seats in the northwest corner of the assembly-room devoted by
tradition to secret conclaves, though not distinguishable from the rest
of the seats in the room to uninitiated eyes, drew her in without
question, slipping intimate arms round her waist.
Attempts at informal gatherings in the Randall drawing-room were
failures, chilled by brief but devastating invasions of Mrs. Randall
with a too polite manner and disapproving eyes. But wherever the crowd
drifted after school hours, Judith drifted, too, or was summoned by
telephone, by imperative messages, vague, and of infinite
possibilities:
"Judy, this is Ed. There'll be something doing to-night at our house.
Bring your new dance records." Or, as the outer fringe of the younger
set, jealously on the watch for snobbishness, but disarmed at last,
claimed her diffidently but eagerly, new names at which her mother
raised her eyebrows appeared on her dance orders: Joe Garland, whose
father kept the fish market, and Abie Stern, Junior, the tailor's son.
"Is this Judith Randall? Well, Judith, this is Joe; Joe Garland. I'm
getting up a crowd to go skating to-night, and have a rarebit afterward.
Would you care to come?"
She was one of the crowd. Natalie, little, sparkling-eyed, and
black-haired, with the freshest and readiest of laughs, was more
popular, filling her dance orders first and playing the lead in
theatricals, and Rena Drew was more prominent, president of the class
and the debating society, and the proud owner of the strongest voice in
the school quartette, a fine big contralto which wrapped itself round
Judith's small, clear soprano at public appearances and nearly
extinguished it. Willard, the most eligible of the boys, was Judith's
unquestioned property, otherwise nothing distinguished her. She was one
of the crowd, and accepted the fact demurely, as if it were a matter of
course, not a dream come true. Just as discreetly she conducted her
affair with Neil Donovan, captain-elect of the team, literary editor of
the school paper, star debater, and in his way a creditable conquest, if
she had cared to claim him openly.
"Neil danced three dances with me," confided Natalie, in the hushed
whisper appropriate to the confidences that were part of the ceremony of
spending the night together after a party, though Natalie's room, with
the old-fashioned feather bed, where the two were cuddling together, was
on the third story of the rambling white house, and safe out of hearing.
"Neil?"
"Judy, it's too bad to call him Murph and make fun of him. The day he
came into the store to solicit ads for the _Record_ father said that boy
would go far, if he had half a chance, but no boy had a chance in this
town, the way it is run, and no Irish boy ever did have a chance. Well,
an Irish boy is just as good as anybody, if they only thought so."
"But they don't."
"Judy, you are horrid about Neil. You always are about any boy I get
crushed on. Neil has perfectly beautiful eyes, and he is so sensitive.
He kept looking at you all through that last schottische as if you had
hurt his feelings. He must have gone home soon after that. I didn't see
him again. You didn't dance with him once."
"No."
"Poor boy. And he's up there in the schoolhouse with you, hour after
hour, practising quartette stuff, and Willard so crazy about you he
can't see, and Rena crazy about Willard----"
"Rena can have Willard."
Miss Ward was not to be diverted. "Neil's father did keep a saloon, but
he died when Neil was a baby. His uncle that he lives with keeps a store
at the Falls, and that's all right. His aunt took in washing, but his
mother never did. Charles Brady does get drunk, but Maggie drives him to
it. She's getting awfully wild. She's a perfect beauty, though, and I
wish I had her hair. But Charlie's only Neil's second cousin. And Neil
is so quiet and pleasant, not like that Brady boy that was in my sister
Lutie's crowd; just as fascinating, but Neil doesn't take liberties."
"I'm getting sleepy, Nat."
"Judy, the way I feel about Neil, about Irish boys, is this: we can't go
with them afterward, but while they're in school with us, they are just
as good as we are, and we ought to give them just as good a time as we
can. If you know what I mean."
"I don't. I'm sleepy."
"I'm not. I shan't shut my eyes." But Miss Ward did shut them. "Judy."
"Well?"
"Judy, Abraham Lincoln split rails."
"Cheer up. The Warren Worth Comedy Company is going to play at the Hall
next week, and Warren Worth has perfectly beautiful eyes, too."
"Not like Neil's."
"Go to sleep, Nat."
But Judith did not go to sleep until after an hour of staring wide-eyed
into the dark, and she did not confide to Natalie or any one what had
happened in the intermission after the schottische.
"You act restless," Willard complained to her then. "You hardly looked
at me all through the encore."
"I'll look at you now, but get me some water first," she directed, and
having disposed of him, slipped out alone into the dim and draughty
corridor. Odd Fellows' Building, the centre of various business
activities by day, looked deserted and forlorn at night, when the suites
of offices were dark and closed, and the hall where they danced, gayly
lighted and tenanted, was a little island of brightness in the
surrounding dark.
"Neil," Judith called softly, "Neil, where are you? I saw you come out
here. I know you're here." The corridor was empty, but several office
doors opened on it, and on one of them she saw Charlie Brady's name. She
knocked at it. "You're in there. I know you are. Let me in." She tried
the door, found it unlocked, and opened it. The room was dark, faintly
lighted by the street lamps outside the one uncurtained window, where he
sat with his head in his hands, huddled in a discouraged heap over
Charlie Brady's desk. Judith came and perched on it triumphantly.
"Running away?" she said.
"It's all I'm good for."
"Look at me."
"I thought you hadn't any dances free."
"I haven't. This is Willard's."
"Go back to Willard.... What did you come here for?"
"I don't know."
"Don't you?" He looked up now, with magic in his eyes and voice, the
strange magic that came and went, and when it left him Judith could
never believe it would come again. But it was here. With a little sigh
she slipped off the desk and into the arms he held out for her, closing
her eyes.
"I didn't want to dance with you," she whispered; "not with all those
lights, and before those people."
"No, dear."
"I can't stay very long. They'd miss me."
"I'll let you go when you want to."
"I don't want to. I feel so comfortable--all sleepy, but so wide-awake.
I never want to go."
Judith, remembering this moment until she carried it into her dreams
with her, could not have shared it with Natalie. It was a dream already,
to be wondered at and forgotten by daylight, as she stared across the
schoolroom at Neil, not a romantic figure at all with his ill-fitting
suit and his tumbled hair; forgotten until the next moment like it
came--next in a lengthening series of dream pictures, of moonlight and
candlelight and faintly heard music, a secret too sweet to share, a
hidden treasure of dreams.
Certain pictures stood out clearest. In one, she was skating with Neil.
Willard was giving a chowder party at the Hiawatha Club. This imposing
name belonged to a rough one-room camp with a kitchen in a lean-to and a
row of bunks in the loft above, and a giant chimney, with a crackling
blaze of fire to combat the bleakness of the view through the
uncurtained windows--Mirror Lake. It was a failure as a mirror that
day, veiled with snow, and the white birches fringing it showed bare and
cold among the warm green of spruce and pine.
The camp was built and owned and the canoes and iceboats kept in repair
in the boathouse, and the cook maintained and replaced when he left from
loneliness, all by a syndicate with Judge Saxon as president. Forming it
was one of the last independent social activities of the town before the
Colonel took charge.
It was bad ice-boating to-day. The wind was fitful, and the boat, a
graceful and winged thing in full flight, dragged heavily along, looking
the clumsy makeshift box of unpainted boards that it was. It was a day
to be towed along on your skates with one hand on the boat. Judith and
Neil had tired of this and fallen behind.
Close together, but not taking hands, they swung slowly through the
unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the
blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The
ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of
"Amos Moss," rendered in the closest of close harmony, could be heard no
longer, and a heavy silence hung over the lake. The camp lay far behind
them, a vanishing speck.
"Neil, take me back," Judith directed suddenly.
"Not yet."
"Please. I want some pop-corn.... Neil, I don't like you. You won't
talk. You're queer to-day."
He did not answer. They cut through the ice in silence. It was rougher
here. They were near the north end of the lake. There was open water
there to-day, black water into which a boat might crash and go down; it
made the water under them seem nearer to Judith, black water with only
the floor of ice between. She shivered, and Neil broke the silence
abruptly, his eyes still straight ahead.
"Judith."
"Oh, you can talk then?"
"Judith--do you love me?"
"Don't be silly." Judith spoke sharply. Days at the camp were always a
trial to her. The crowd, bunched together in a big hay-rack mounted on
runners, started out noisy and gay, like a party of children, singing,
groping for apples in the straw, and playing children's games. But at
night, slipping home under the moon to a tinkle of sleigh-bells, covered
with rugs two by two, a change would take place: arms would slip around
waists that yielded after perfunctory protest; in the dark of the woods
there would be significant whispering and more significant silences;
Willard would be unmanageable. Judith saw this with alien eyes because
of Neil, and dreaded it. This that was between them was so much more
beautiful, not love-making, not real love, only a strange, white dream.
"You don't, then? You don't love me?"
"We're too young."
He did not argue the point. His silence had made her lonely before, now
it frightened her. She slipped a hand into his, warm through its clumsy
glove.
"Cross hands. Don't you want to?"
"No."
"But I want to. I'm tired. How limp your hand feels. Hold my hands
tighter. Neil----"
"What?"
"You don't mind--what I said just now?"
"What did you say?"
"That about not loving you."
"That?" He laughed a bitter, lonely sort of laugh, as if she were
talking about something that happened a long time ago. "You had to say
it. It's true. I knew it well enough. I just thought I'd ask you."
"Do you want me to very much--want me to love you?"
"Don't talk any more about it."
"Neil, suppose I should marry Willard?"
"I suppose you will."
"You won't mind too much?"
"What call would I have to mind? Who am I? What am I?"
He laughed again, the same hard and bitter laugh, and struck out faster,
gripping her hands hard, so that it hurt, but looking away from her
across the dead, even white of the trackless snow. There was a pain not
to be comforted or reached in his beautiful eyes. It had nothing to do
with her.
"Neil, wouldn't you care at all?" she said jealously.
"Care?"
"If I married Willard?"
"Oh, yes."
"Neil, do you love me?"
He did not answer or seem to hear, and now Judith gave up asking
questions. Carried along at his side in silence, she listened to the
muffled creak of the skates on the snow-covered ice, hushed by the
steady and sleepy sound of it, half closing her eyes. His left arm was
behind her shoulders now, to support her, and she could feel it there,
warm and strong. Breathing when he breathed, her heart beating in time
with his, swinging far to right and left, tense with the stroke or
yielding deliciously in the recovery, caught in the rhythm of it as if
some force outside them both were carrying them on like one, and not
two, and would never let them go, Judith yet felt far away from him.
She was alone in the heart of a snow-covered world, but she was growing
content to be alone. She looked up at his white, set face with wide and
fearless eyes, while the lure of unexplored and unseen ice invited them
all around, and the gray and brooding sky shut them in closer and
closer.
"Neil," she said softly, not caring now whether he answered or heard, "I
wish we needn't ever go back. I love to-day."
Not long after this Judith and Neil went snow-shoeing one Saturday
afternoon by special appointment, an epoch-making event for them. Judith
did not often walk with him or take him driving when the sleigh was
entrusted to her. She was not often seen with him. With quartette
practice and committee work for the dramatic club and other official
pretexts for the time they spent together, Willard was not jealous yet,
though the winter was almost over, and the treasury of dreams was
filling fast.
But this time she made an engagement with Neil as openly as if he were
Willard, while Natalie listened jealously. She started with him openly
from the front door, with her mother's disapproving eyes upon them from
the library window, and Neil proudly carrying her snowshoes, all
unconscious of the critical eyes. The afternoon began well, but no
afternoon with Neil could be counted upon to go as it began. Two hours
later, when they emerged from the Everard woods into the Colonel's
snow-covered rose garden, they had quarrelled about half a dozen
unrelated subjects, all equally unimportant in themselves, but suddenly
important to Neil, who now found further matter for debate.
"What did you bring me in here for?"
"Didn't you know I was?"
"How should I know? I'm no friend of Everard's. I don't know my way
through his grounds."
"What makes you call him Everard, without any Colonel or Mr.? It sounds
so--common."
"It's good enough for me. Here, I don't want to go near his house. I
hate the sight of it."
"But you can't go back by the path. It's too broken up." Judith plunged
into the dismantled rose arbour. "Come on, if you don't want to see the
house, take my hand and shut your eyes."
"That's what Green River does," Neil muttered darkly, "shuts its eyes."
But he followed her.
"The Red Etin's castle," Judith announced; "you know, in the fairy tale:
"The Red Etin of Ireland,
He lived in Ballygan.
He stole King Malcolm's daughter,
The pride of fair Scotlan'.
'Tis said there's one predestinate
To be his mortal foe----
Well, you talk as if the Colonel were the Red Etin, poor dear. Oh, Neil,
look!"
Sinister enough, looming turreted and tall against a background of
winter woods, its windows, unshuttered still, since the last of the
Colonel's week-end parties, and curtainless, catching the slanting rays
of the afternoon sun and glaring malignantly, the house confronted them
across the drifted lawn.
In the woods that circled the house, denuded of undergrowth, seeming
always to be edging forlornly closer to the upstanding edifice for
comfort because it was barren and unfriendly, too, the new-fallen snow
lay shadowy and soft, clothing the barrenness with grace. Giant pine and
spruce that had survived his invasion stood up proud and green under the
crown of snow that lay lightly upon them, as it had lain long ago,
before the Colonel came. And between woods and house, erasing all trace
of tortuous landscape gardening, flower-bed and border and path, as if
it had never been, lay a splendid, softly shining sweep of blue-white
snow. The Colonel's unbidden guests forgot their quarrel and plunged
eagerly across the white expanse.
"Catch me," Judith called, but it was Neil, snatching off her toboggan
cap by its impudent tassel, who had to be caught. It was heavy and
breath-taking work on the broad, old-fashioned snowshoes which she
managed with clumsy grace. Judith, short-skirted and trim in fleecy
white sweater, collar rolled high to the tips of small, pink ears, blond
curls blowing in the wind, pursued ardently. Neil evaded her like a lean
and darting shadow, hands deep in the pockets of his old gray sweater,
cap low over his brooding eyes.
Under the unrelenting glare of the Colonel's windows, and across the
deserted grandeur of his lawn, the two small and dishevelled figures
dodged and doubled and retreated, only to grapple and trip each other up
at last at the foot of the veranda steps, and collapse there, breathless
and laughing. But their laughter died quickly, and Judith, pulling the
recovered cap over her wind-tossed curls, watched the brooding gloom
come back into Neil's eyes as he settled into a sulky heap on the step
below her.
Her quarrels with Neil were as strange as her beautiful hours with him,
fed by black undercurrents of feeling that swept and surprised her,
flaming up suddenly like banked fires. She was hotly angry with him now.
"Neil, I heard what you said about Green River shutting its eyes. It was
foolish."
"I'd say it to his face." Neil flashed a black look at the bland and
elegant drawing-room windows, as if he could talk to the Colonel through
them. "I've got worse than that to say to Everard."
"Then say it to me. Don't hint. I'm tired of hearing you. You're as bad
as Norah."
"You wouldn't understand."
That is the irresistible challenge to any woman. Judith's eyes kindled.
Neil slouched lower on the steps, dropping his head in his hands.
"Everard," he threw out presently, "has bought the Hiawatha Club Camp."
"I don't believe it."
"The club was in debt. That's a bad thing for a club or a man to be, if
the Colonel knows it. And it's a worse thing for a woman."
"What do you mean?"
He did not explain or raise his head. "I've got a job for the summer
vacation," he said presently.
"Already? Fine."
"Oh, fine. In the fish market--tend store, drive the cart. And I'm fired
from the _Record_, Judith."
"Fired?"
"They're going to take on one more man, and pay him real money."
"But you've got the Green River Jottings to do for the Wells _Clarion_."
"And I may get two dollars a month out of it."
"Did you see Judge Saxon again?"
"Last week."
"Why didn't you tell me what he said?"
"I told you what he would say."
"Oh, Neil!"
"The Judge hates to say no, that's why he took time to think it over.
He'd be a bigger man if he didn't hate to say no. He was right to say no
to me."
"Then I wouldn't admit it."
"What's it worth to read law in a country law office? The time for
that's past. He's right. And suppose he took me on, what would it do for
me? Look at Charlie. Doing hack work and dirty work to pay the rent of a
place to drink himself to death in. He's got brains enough. He knows law
enough. He's slaved and starved and got ready for his chance, and his
chance don't come. Why? Because he's Charlie Brady. Well I'm Neil
Donovan. I'm Irish, too, what they called me the first time I saw you--a
paddy."
"That's not the Colonel's fault."
"Who do you think gets the _Record_ job?"
Judith shook her blond head, disdaining to answer, a gathering storm in
her eyes.
"Chet Gaynor--Mr. J. Chester Gaynor. Lil Burr's brother. Her prize
brother, the one that's been fired from three prep schools. Everard got
him a scholarship at the last one."
"Why not? He ought to help his friends. He's a kind man and lots of fun.
It's not his fault if you don't get on. It's your own fault. You don't
have to work in a fish market if you don't want to, or sit there and
sneer at a man who doesn't care what you think of him. Abraham Lincoln
split rails----"
Judith stopped, amazed. Quite abruptly Neil had ceased to sit on the
steps and sneer. He was on his feet, hands clenched, thin body tense and
dangerous, face dead white and eyes blazing, as Judith had never seen
him before, or only once before, too angry for words, but not needing
them.
"Neil, do you really hate him? Hate him like that? I never thought you
meant it. But why--what has he done?"
"Care what I think? If I was any one else--your fool of a Willard--any
one in this town but me, I'd make him care."
"He's done nothing wrong. Neil, don't. Your eyes look all queer. You're
frightening me."
"No, he's done nothing wrong, nothing you could get him for. He's too
careful. He plays favourites. He fools women. He locks the door to every
chance to get on in this town and he sells the keys. He's got his hand
on the neck of the town, and he's shutting it tighter and tighter.
That's all he does. That's all Everard does."
"You can't prove it."
"He takes good care I can't."
"You can't prove a word of it."
"Your father could."
"He's kind to father. He's kind to me."
"You talk like a child."
"Well, you talk like my mother's cook.... Oh, Neil, I didn't mean to say
that. Forgive me. Where are you going? I didn't mean to say it."
"Let me go."
"You're hurting me."
"I hate you! You're one of them--one of the Everard crowd. I hate you,
too!"
"What are you going to do?" Her short, panting struggle with him over,
her wrists smarting from the backward twist that had broken her hold on
him, she leaned against the veranda rail breathless and stared with
fascinated eyes. When this quarrel had gone the way of their other
quarrels, atoned for by inarticulate words of infinite meaning,
justified by the keen delight of reconciling kisses, Judith was to keep
one picture from it: Neil as she saw him then, standing over her
white-faced and angry, ragged and splendid, Neil as she had seen him
once before.
"May-night!" she cried. "You look the way you did that May-night. I'm
afraid of you."
"Everard!" He turned from her, and looking at the windows again as if
the Colonel were behind him, swung back his arm, and sent it crashing
through the glass of the nearest one--once and a second time. "Oh, you
don't want me to call him Everard. Colonel Everard!"
"Neil, I'm afraid."
He looked at the fragments of broken glass and at Judith scornfully, but
the angry light was fading out of his eyes already, the magic light;
against her will she was sorry to see it go.
"Are you hurt? Did you hurt your hand?"
"What do you care if I did? Don't be afraid, Judy. He can pay for a pane
of glass or two. He wouldn't care if I burned his house down. Nobody
cares what I do. I'm a paddy."
Awkward, suddenly conscious of his snowshoes, he shuffled across the
matched boards of the Colonel's veranda and down the steps, turning
there for a farewell word:
"I'm going. Don't cry. I'm not worth it. I'm a paddy, from Paddy Lane."
Dream pictures, pleasant or sad, making her cheeks burn in the dark, or
little secret smiles come when Judith recalled them. Some lived in her
heart and some faded. Judith did not choose or reject them deliberately.
They chose or rejected themselves, arranging themselves into an
intricate pattern of growing clearness. She did not watch it grow. It
was only when it was quite complete that she would see it, but it was
growing fast.