I
"AS IF THE SPRING WERE ALL YOUR OWN"
The local weather-prophets--the cape-coated Mennonites and the
bearded Amishmen, who came into the town to market--had said, with
choral unanimity, that the spring would be brief and sudden, and the
summer parching and intense.
Already, though April had but dawned, the pink arbutus had bloomed
and withered, and the pale first violets were peeping, purple and
fragrant, among the lush grass of the front yards on Second Street.
The annual oriole was a full fortnight ahead of his time in opening
his summer-house in the hickory-tree on the Southwarks' lawn; and up
in the droning study-room of the high-school, where all the windows
were wide to the lazy sunlight, Miss England had begun, this week, to
direct the thoughts of her dwindling senior-class toward the subjects
of their graduation essays.
Swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal,
Mary Denbigh, the morning-session ended, turned from the graveled
walk before the school-grounds into the little town's chief
thoroughfare.
Nobody had ever called her pretty, but her light serge skirt had that
day been lengthened to her ankles, and Mary was wholly conscious of
the new tokens of her growth. Lithe, strong-limbed and firm-bodied,
of peasant stock and peasant vigor, youth and health and the open
country air were not factors sufficiently unfamiliar to combine in a
charm that would attract admiration in her own community. Only a
jaded city-gaze--and a well-trained city-gaze at that--would have
seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks,
and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,--could
have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on
this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was,
perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play
upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the
coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human
summer parching and intense.
The usual group of idle residents and idling commercial drummers were
sitting at the plate-glass window of the hotel as she went by, but
the girl did not see them. Passing among objects of long
familiarity, she saw, in fact, nothing until, in a side-street, she
heard a rapid step behind her, was covered by an approaching shadow
and, half-turning, found someone, a stranger, at her side.
"How d'y'do, liddle girl?"
Mary looked up; but she was quite too startled to observe anything
save that the speaker--she could not have told whether he were man or
boy--was at once dark and rosy, smiling and serious, hat in hand,
and, beyond all speculation, no citizen of her own borough.
"I don't know you," she said.
She flushed quickly, and strode forward. It was, she knew, no
uncommon thing for the girls of her acquaintance to be "picked up,"
as they called the process, by some fellow-townsman that had never
been formally presented to them; but the process was, as she also
knew, one that lost its propriety when extended to aliens.
The present alien was, nevertheless, not easily to be dismissed. He
fell into her gait, and walked facilely beside her.
"I beg your _par_don," he said in the humblest and most
unobjectionable tones. "I don't mean to be _rude_ to you, honest, I
don't. I'm a traveling-man, you see----"
Mary was striding rapidly ahead, her full mouth now drawn firm, her
blue eyes fixed on the vanishing-point.
"I don't care what you are," she answered.
"All righd," he pleaded. "All I vant now is a chanc't to _exblain_.
I've chust started out traveling for my fader, who's a big distiller
in N'York. I've got to stay in this hole for a vhile, un' I'm not
used to the _bees_ness, un' I'm lonesome, un' I only vondered if you
vouldn't go vith me to a moving-picture show, or something, this
evening."
The best way to deal with such a situation is a way that is easiest
for the inexperienced and the unpolished. Mary was both. For the
first time since he had begun to walk beside her, she now, coming to
a defiant stop, faced her annoyer.
"I don't know you," she repeated. "I've told you that onc't, and
you'd better not make me tell you any more still. I live the second
door round the coming corner, and my pop is a puddler an' weighs two
hundred and ten pounds!"
Again she wheeled and again resumed her homeward march; and this time
she walked alone. If she heard, dimly, behind her a confused murmur
of response, she did not hesitate to learn whether the words were
expressions of further apology or new-born dismay, and when she ran,
flushed and panting, up the three wooden steps to the two-story brick
house that was her home, though she could not then deny herself one
backward glance, that glance revealed to her only an empty corner.
The pursuit had ended.
She flung open the light door that was never locked by day, walked
down the short, darkened hall, past the curtain of the equally
darkened parlor, through the dining-room with its pine table covered
by a red cotton cloth, and so into the small, crowded kitchen, where
her mother fretted and clattered above the highly polished range.
Mrs. Denbigh was a little Pennsylvania-German woman, whom a stern
religion and a long life of hard work had not intellectually
enlarged. In spite of the fact that she had borne eight children, of
whom Mary was the seventh, her sympathies had failed to broaden, and
her equally religious and equally hard-working Welsh husband used
often to remark to her, during his one-monthly evening of
intoxication, that he was glad indeed she was to have no more
progeny, since, somehow or other, she "seemed to git wuss tempered
with every innocent youngling as koom to 'un." Whether this
criticism was or was not precise, it is at least true that much
drudgery had not improved the weary woman's temper; that the long
years before her husband rose to his present wages--years during
which his wife had not only kept a house and reared a family, but had
also added to the communal income by night-work as a dress-maker--had
left her gray and stooped and hatchet-faced; and that, though of a
race in which the maternal instinct runs almost to a passion, her
patience with her remaining pair of home-biding children was
frequently fragile and short.
Just now she looked up, a spoon in one hand and a pan in the other,
her forehead damp, as always, with sweat, and her harassed eyes
momentarily bright with anger.
"Where on earth have you been, anyways?" she shrilly inquired of Mary.
The girl's face instantly hardened from the excitement of her recent
adventure to the sullenness behind which she always took refuge in
these more usual domestic crises. What she might have confessed had
she come home to a less overworked mother, it is, obviously, vain to
conjecture; what she actually did was to lock within her breast the
story that had been trembling on her red lips, and what she replied
to Mrs. Denbigh's question was an ungracious:
"Been at school. Where d'you think?"
The mother straightened up as far as her long-stooped shoulders would
permit.
"Think?" she echoed. "I guess I can guess still where you was.
'Less you was kep' in, you had ought t' been home five minutes ago,
an' nobody's kep' in only five minutes. You've been flirtin' with
some idiot of a boy on the street-corner yet--that's about what
you've been doin'!"
It was a random shot, and one fired from no previous knowledge, but
the girl at once realized that, had any neighbor chanced to see what
had actually occurred, this parental construction would appear to
have some foundation in fact. The thought was enough to seal the
locked gate in her breast.
"That ain't so!" she said, with childish fury. "I come straight
home, like I always do. If you want me to help more with the work
than I do help, why don't you let me quit school? I don't want to go
any more, anyhow."
There are some families in which the passing of the lie is no such
uncommon or serious offense, and the Denbigh _ménage_ was one of
them. It was, therefore, upon the latter portion of Mary's speech
that her mother, at this time, seized.
"You'll go to school as long as your pop and me say you must!" she
retorted.
"You let our Etta quit when she was in the grammar school,"
expostulated Mary, with an appeal to the precedent of the
successfully married sister, who was now a next-door neighbor. "You
let her quit then, and now I'm in the high."
Had Mrs. Denbigh's rejoinder been in accordance with the facts, she
would have said that all she wanted to do was to give her daughter as
much of an education as was compatible with the proper conduct of the
Denbigh domestic economy. But tired women are no more apt to indulge
in analytical exposition than are tired men, and so it chanced that
her next speech, accompanied by a gesture that raised the
cooking-spoon aloft, was a torrent of words unexpectedly interrupted.
"In the high?" she repeated. "Well, I know where you'll be in one
minute, still, if you don't right away----"
She brought the spoon forward with a mighty swoop, but its parabola,
in crossing the stove, sent it into violent contact with the pot that
held the stew destined for the noon dinner. The pot was balanced on
the edge of an aperture in the stove whence the lid had been removed.
The vessel fell, and its contents belched upon the burning coals.
Mrs. Denbigh gave one look at the steaming ruin, and then seized the
already retreating Mary. The girl's struggles, her cries, the
dignity of the newly lengthened skirt, avail nothing. A dozen times
the mother's arm descended in stinging castigation, and then she
hurried her daughter into the hall.
"You git right back to school!" she ordered. "I don't care if you're
a half-hour early--you're mostly late enough. You've spoiled your
own dinner and mine and little Sallie's, so you don't git nothin' to
eat still till evening. You'll go to school, and you'll keep on
goin' till your pop an' me tells you to quit!"
Mary looked at the woman without a word, and then, still without a
word, passed through the front door and banged it behind her.
But she did not walk in the direction of the school; she was not
going to school. The rebel-spirit of youth choked her, and turned
her feet, almost without will of her own, toward the river.
She crossed the railroad tracks, came to the disused towpath and
followed it for a mile beyond the town. Far westward she went,
"walking," as she would have said, "her madness down," and, hungry
though she now was, she did not rest until at last, as late as three
o'clock in the afternoon, she sat on a rock at the point where the
Susquehanna curves between the sheer precipice of Chicques on the
Lancaster County side and the hooded nose of the high hill they call
the Point, upon the other.
The flood of rebellion had ceased, but a steady and enduring stream
of resolution remained.
Across the sweep of eddies she saw the nearer hills already shedding
the browns and blacks of winter's bared limbs and pine branches for
the tenderer green of a gentler season. The cultivated portions of
the summits were already rich with coming life. Behind her rolled
the Donegal Valley, where the crops were even then germinating.
Birds were mating in the sap-wet trees beside the water, and from the
flowering seeds there came the subtle, poignant scent of a warm April.
Something--something new and nameless and wonderful--rose in her
throat and left her heart hammering an answer to the new world around
her. She was glad--glad in spite of all her anger and her hunger;
glad that she had not told her mother of the boy--for he must have
been a boy--whom she had, after all, so needlessly reprimanded; but
glad, above everything else, for some reason, for some intoxication
that she might neither then nor ever after completely understand.
Her cheeks glowed a deeper pink; her blue eyes glistened; she opened
her red mouth to the seductive sun and, with a sweep of her firm
hands, flung loose her russet hair to the breeze. Looking out at the
distant fields, she sprang to her feet again and walked, swaying with
the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal.
The fields reminded her of the rural prophets. It was evident, she
thought, that they were right: this year's was to be a spring brief
and sudden, a summer parching and intense.