Now, of course, the quality and the seasonability of these winter dreams
varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter several
years later to pass up a business course at the State university--his
father, prospering now, would have paid his way--for the precarious
advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East,
where he was bothered by his scanty funds. But do not get the
impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first
with musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the
boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering
people--he wanted the glittering things themselves. Often he reached out
for the best without knowing why he wanted it--and sometimes he ran up
against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges.
It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole that
this story deals.
He made money. It was rather amazing. After college he went to the city
from which Black Bear Lake draws its wealthy patrons. When he was only
twenty-three and had been there not quite two years, there were already
people who liked to say: "Now _there's_ a boy--" All about him rich
men's sons were peddling bonds precariously, or investing patrimonies
precariously, or plodding through the two dozen volumes of the "George
Washington Commercial Course," but Dexter borrowed a thousand dollars on
his college degree and his confident mouth, and bought a partnership in
a laundry.
It was a small laundry when he went into it but Dexter made a specialty
of learning how the English washed fine woollen golf-stockings without
shrinking them, and within a year he was catering to the trade that wore
knickerbockers. Men were insisting that their Shetland hose and sweaters
go to his laundry just as they had insisted on a caddy who could find
golf-balls. A little later he was doing their wives' lingerie as
well--and running five branches in different parts of the city. Before
he was twenty-seven he owned the largest string of laundries in his
section of the country. It was then that he sold out and went to New
York. But the part of his story that concerns us goes back to the days
when he was making his first big success.
When he was twenty-three Mr. Hart--one of the gray-haired men who like
to say "Now there's a boy"--gave him a guest card to the Sherry Island
Golf Club for a week-end. So he signed his name one day on the register,
and that afternoon played golf in a foursome with Mr. Hart and Mr.
Sandwood and Mr. T. A. Hedrick. He did not consider it necessary to
remark that he had once carried Mr. Hart's bag over this same links, and
that he knew every trap and gully with his eyes shut--but he found
himself glancing at the four caddies who trailed them, trying to catch a
gleam or gesture that would remind him of himself, that would lessen the
gap which lay between his present and his past.
It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar
impressions. One minute he had the sense of being a trespasser--in the
next he was impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward Mr.
T. A. Hedrick, who was a bore and not even a good golfer any more.
Then, because of a ball Mr. Hart lost near the fifteenth green, an
enormous thing happened. While they were searching the stiff grasses of
the rough there was a clear call of "Fore!" from behind a hill in their
rear. And as they all turned abruptly from their search a bright new
ball sliced abruptly over the hill and caught Mr. T. A. Hedrick in the
abdomen.
"By Gad!" cried Mr. T. A. Hedrick, "they ought to put some of these
crazy women off the course. It's getting to be outrageous."
A head and a voice came up together over the hill:
"Do you mind if we go through?"
"You hit me in the stomach!" declared Mr. Hedrick wildly.
"Did I?" The girl approached the group of men. "I'm sorry. I yelled
'Fore!'"
Her glance fell casually on each of the men--then scanned the fairway
for her ball.
"Did I bounce into the rough?"
It was impossible to determine whether this question was ingenuous or
malicious. In a moment, however, she left no doubt, for as her partner
came up over the hill she called cheerfully:
"Here I am! I'd have gone on the green except that I hit something."
As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at her
closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and shoulders
with a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality of
exaggeration, of thinness, which had made her passionate eyes and
down-turning mouth absurd at eleven, was gone now. She was arrestingly
beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centred like the color in a
picture--it was not a "high" color, but a sort of fluctuating and
feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it would recede
and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a continual
impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality--balanced
only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.
She swung her mashie impatiently and without interest, pitching the ball
into a sand-pit on the other side of the green. With a quick, insincere
smile and a careless "Thank you!" she went on after it.
"That Judy Jones!" remarked Mr. Hedrick on the next tee, as they
waited--some moments--for her to play on ahead. "All she needs is to be
turned up and spanked for six months and then to be married off to an
old-fashioned cavalry captain."
"My God, she's good-looking!" said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over
thirty.
"Good-looking!" cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, "she always looks as
if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf in
town!"
It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the maternal
instinct.
"She'd play pretty good golf if she'd try," said Mr. Sandwood.
"She has no form," said Mr. Hedrick solemnly.
"She has a nice figure," said Mr. Sandwood.
"Better thank the Lord she doesn't drive a swifter ball," said Mr. Hart,
winking at Dexter.
Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold
and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of
Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club,
watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver
molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips
and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his
bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched
dripping on the wet canvas of the spring-board.
There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the
lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the
songs of last summer and of summers before that--songs from "Chin-Chin"
and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Chocolate Soldier"--and because
the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful
to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened.
The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new five
years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had played it
at a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of proms, and he had
stood outside the gymnasium and listened. The sound of the tune
precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he
viewed what happened to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation,
a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attune to life and that
everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might
never know again.
A low, pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of the
Island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motor-boat. Two
white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out behind it and
almost immediately the boat was beside him, drowning out the hot tinkle
of the piano in the drone of its spray. Dexter raising himself on his
arms was aware of a figure standing at the wheel, of two dark eyes
regarding him over the lengthening space of water--then the boat had
gone by and was sweeping in an immense and purposeless circle of spray
round and round in the middle of the lake. With equal eccentricity one
of the circles flattened out and headed back toward the raft.
"Who's that?" she called, shutting off her motor. She was so near now
that Dexter could see her bathing-suit, which consisted apparently of
pink rompers.
The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted rakishly
he was precipitated toward her. With different degrees of interest they
recognized each other.
"Aren't you one of those men we played through this afternoon?" she
demanded.
He was.
"Well, do you know how to drive a motor-boat? Because if you do I wish
you'd drive this one so I can ride on the surf-board behind. My name is
Judy Jones"--she favored him with an absurd smirk--rather, what tried to
be a smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it was not grotesque, it
was merely beautiful--"and I live in a house over there on the Island,
and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the
door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal."
There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the
lake were gleaming. Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she explained how
her boat was driven. Then she was in the water, swimming to the floating
surf-board with a sinuous crawl. Watching her was without effort to the
eye, watching a branch waving or a sea-gull flying. Her arms, burned to
butternut, moved sinuously among the dull platinum ripples, elbow
appearing first, casting the forearm back with a cadence of falling
water, then reaching out and down, stabbing a path ahead.
They moved out into the lake; turning, Dexter saw that she was kneeling
on the low rear of the now uptilted surf-board.
"Go faster," she called, "fast as it'll go."
Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at
the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the
rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.
"It's awful cold," she shouted. "What's your name?"
He told her.
"Well, why don't you come to dinner to-morrow night?"
His heart turned over like the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the
second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.