Tomorrow About This Time (24 page)

“
Who
was she?”

It was Mother, her rugged face almost white with a kind of social fright, who broke the silence and voiced the wonder of them all.

Pristina whirled back to the window and in a hard little voice answered: “It was her! The fat one! The one
they went to call on!”

“Oh, my
soul!
said Mother, stooping to pick up a pin and unable to find it in her excitement. “Oh, my soul and body! Why, that’s an insult.”

Maria licked her lips with the tip of her tongue with the motion a man used to whet a scythe. “Now I wonder what’ll happen!” she said, a hard glitter in her eyes, as if she rather enjoyed the prospect. Maria was one of those who, having failed in gaining many of the joys of this life, was not content to see others receiving them. Not that she was unkindly when it came right down to actions—only in a little cattish way with her tongue and the expression of her face.

They were watching the Silver house so hard that they failed to notice the minister’s car until it drew up in front of the gate. Mother strained her eyes anxiously.

“Well, anyhow, I’m glad it wasn’t that one. She seems to be real sweet.”

“Now, Mother, you always jump to such hasty conclusions,” said Maria. “I’m sure I don’t see how you can tell whether she’s sweet or not at this distance.”

Pristina said thoughtfully: “She’s sitting in the front seat with the minister!”

“Yes,” said Maria caustically. “Seems to me it’s a little soon to begin that.”

“Maybe he began it,” said Harriet sympathetically.

“Not he!” said Maria. “He wouldn’t have to! It beats me what the girls nowadays have done with their modesty!”

“Well, where did modesty bring us?” laughed Cordelia.

“Cordelia Vandemeeter! I’m surprised!” rebuked Maria.

Then Silver and her father and the minister got out and went up to the house, and the front door closed again. And what had become of the high school girls at tea?

Chapter 18

B
arry Lincoln was helping Sam Fitch to build a fence for his chicken run. The Fitch place stood up and back from the street on a slight elevation among a grove of light maples. The chicken run was higher up the hill to one side and commanded a wide view of the road winding round to the bridge and over into the woods. It was the last house on the street as you went toward Frogtown from the south end of Silver Sands.

Barry had just pounded his thumb trying to straighten a stubborn nail and had thrown down the hammer and stuck the throbbing thumb in his mouth when the flash of a scarlet hat and the flutter of scarlet tulle came into sight down the road. For an instant he stared in astonishment, for such a sight was not native to Silver Sands, and Barry knew everybody that lived there, by sight at least. Then something familiar in the swagger of the plump figure struck him and he drew his brows in a frown and turned a quick look at Sam.

Sam was down on his hands and knees with his back to the street nailing wire to the base. He would not be likely to see her.

Barry stooped and picked up his hammer and began a tremendous pounding on the corner post, straightening another nail, his weather eye to the road, unheeding the blood that was streaming from his bruised thumb.

At just the right instant as Athalie passed behind the group of tall cedars and was for a few seconds lost to view, he threw down his hammer with an exclamation and called to Sam in an imperative voice: “Oh, I say, Sam, run to the house quick and get me a rag to do up this blamed thing. It’s bleedin’ like the deuce!”

Sam, accustomed to obey Barry, his baseball idol, dropped his own hammer instantly and with a sympathetic glance toward his wounded companion steamed toward the house without delay. When he returned with the required rag and a bottle of arnica Athalie was well across the bridge.

A tumult of thoughts was running through Barry’s brain, foremeost among them the telephone conversation he had overheard the day before. Vaguely in the background the sudden flash of coral and silver skirt and little shiny shoes and the tempest of words he had heard in the Silver hall the evening before, with the stormy sobs, lasting long after the music had begun. How much responsibility had he, Barry Lincoln, for their strange specimen of womanhood who wore pants and made appointments over the telephone to meet men from the city, agreeing to stay till all hours of the night? Barry Lincoln’s code was a simple one, but it had an old-fashioned twist to its ideas of womanhood. His mother was a sweet-faced, sad-eyed little widow who wore plain black dresses and did her hair smoothly except for the satiny crinkle of it around the edges of her forehead. She had given him the habit of a clean mind in the midst of a wicked and perverse world, and he somehow patterned his ideas of Girls and what they should be on a picture of his mother taken just before she was married, when the light of joy was in her face and her eyes were like reflections of the kingdom of heaven. Barry knew a whole lot more about the world than his mother had ever told him, but he had kept his clean habit of mind, and any deviation from it on the part of a woman, especially a young woman, gave him always a feeling of nausea. However, this was something no one would ever have guessed. Barry was one who didn’t tell his thoughts among men.

So, now, when he saw this poor little daughter of Eve taking her way toward the path of temptation he was not interested. But the memory of a haunted look in her father’s eyes the night before and the good comradeship he had offered on the evening of the fire, together with the lingering fragrance of cookies, now laid upon Barry’s conscience a duty toward his fellowman. If this girl was really going on an immoral trip that might bring pain and shame to his friend, ought he not in all loyalty to that friend to do something about it?

Out of the tail of his eye he watched the scarlet flash as it followed along the line of the road, crossed the bridge, left the road, and crept up the hill toward the woods. He sat down on the doorstep and kept Sam’s back to the hillside until the scarlet hat and the dark cloak disappeared into the woods and only glimmered unnoticeably among the young leaves as it went farther and farther away from the road. At last his mind was made up.

“Doggone it, Sam, now that hand’s goin’ to be no good today. Wha’d I have to pound that for? Clumsy! Say, Sam, les finish this t’morra. What’dya say we take a day off and go see if we can find Beazley? He ought to be back home from his aunt’s by this time, and it isn’t much of a run over to the Corners. Say, you go get the roadster and run her over to the Pike, an’ I’ll skip across to the creek where I was yesterday morning and see if I can find my knife. I’ll meet you up by the old camp entrance in about fifteen minutes. But if it’s half an hour or longer you stick, for I’ll be there! Beat it now, and don’t talk, Sam. Remember to keep yer mouth shut!”

Sam hurried away with a light of eagerness in his eyes, and Barry rose and took long strides across the fields toward a spot in the landscape a quarter of a mile to the north where Athalie had entered the woods. As he disappeared among the undergrowth he cast a speculative eye to the distant road, but no one was to be seen as yet.

Now the “roadster” above mentioned was as much a part of Barry Lincoln’s existence as his dog or his fishing rod or anything but his mother. It was called the “roadster” by courtesy because it could get over the road so rapidly, but there was nothing about it that would have suggested that name in the modern acceptation of the term. It was ancient and worn and stripped of everything that it could be stripped of and still be. It consisted merely of its throbbing loyal heart, its four wheels, and enough timber and metal to keep them from flying apart when they went catapulting through space. However Barry and whomever he elected to take with him as a companion managed to stick on and always come home alive was a continual wonder in Silver Sands. People told Mrs. Lincoln that they didn’t see how she stood it having her son go off in that awful thing, that it wasn’t safe and it wasn’t Christian, and he always looked as if he were going to destruction and was glad of it, that they should think it would affect his morality, a boy like that to own an infernal machine. He was in daily danger of becoming a murderer!

And besides, how could they
afford
to keep it?

When they twisted on that prying look and said that about affording—it was usually the people for whom she did plain sewing that said it—Barry’s mother always crinkled up her lips into a smile that let little gold lights into her brown eyes and made her look like Barry, and answered always quite pleasantly: “Oh, the old roadster is one of the family. We couldn’t live without that. Barry never has killed anybody yet. I hope he never will.” And she never even reminded them how he had saved a girl’s life once with it, running after an automobile that had got out of her control, nor how he rushed Tad Moffat to the hospital in the city in time to save his hand, the time he got it caught in the reaper.

But if you had asked the boys of the town about the old roadster they would have told you that Barry made it “out of pieces of nothin’ of the junk heap behind the garage” and that its chief characteristic was that it could “go like the devil.”

It was this same go-devil that Sam climbed into, as it stood waiting under its oilcloth lean-to beside the Lincoln cottage, and presently shot out of the yard and around the creek road toward the Pike, a proud lad that Barry had selected him to run his car.

Barry himself had rustled across the creek by a route well known to himself and stolen up to a favorite rendezvous of his own near an old tree under which he often sat by the hour fishing, looking down from his perch on a rock into the limpid stream below or swinging up in the trusty branches above, from limb to limb till he reached a point where all the woods was an open book and himself enveloped in foliage.

It was to this point of vantage that he now hastened, silently, stealthily, as only such as he knew how to go. The tree was the tallest in all the region round about. Looking east from its height he could see the Flats of Frogtown with the gleaming water and Silver Sands shining in the late afternoon sun. Between him and the Flats wound the smooth white ribbon of a road, and far as he could see a black speck sped like a spider down its thread. He watched it an instant and then his eyes scanned the hillside below him, down through the trees. Yes, there was a gleam of scarlet. Her hat. She had thrown it on the ground and was sitting on the log. Her scarlet dress was spread around her radiantly like a splash of vermilion in the spring newness of green. She seemed like some great scarlet tanager waiting for its mate. Yet when she lifted her face to look up at the strangeness of her surroundings, her bare neck and arms, her painted lips and penciled brows, the white, white, whiteness of her face seemed out of place there in the holy quiet of nature’s temple, a parody on a living soul, stark and shameless in a setting of God’s things as they are. Something of this thought perhaps entered the boy’s mind as he saw her first, half startled to realize how near he was to her meeting place, half tempted to slide quietly down and slip away before she discovered him.

Yet her waiting, listening attitude held him. She was evidently expecting someone. If the guy she had phoned up should turn out to be an all-right fellow, why, then he would just make a quiet getaway and join Sam, and no one the wiser. If, on the other hand, he should turn out to be one of these fresh rotters from the city he could let him know where to get off and see that no harm came to that silly little simp down there, just for the sake of her father who was a good old sport.

Presently Barry turned his eyes westward and noted the “roadster” darting along like a small black bug as if it had the speed of a thousand-legger. He watched it to the Pike and knew when it passed behind the old red barn that Sam would be waiting there for him should it be ten minutes or ten hours. Then he glanced to the south and saw the other car, coming at full speed down toward the bridge. Now, if he was right this would be his city man. There were two other cars coming, Eli Ward’s old gray limousine that he bought for two hundred and fifty dollars and fixed up himself, and the grocery delivery truck, speeding recklessly back from the afternoon rounds. But this was a strange car he saw at a glance, and presently it came to a halt just below the group of chestnut trees, and a head came out and looked around. The car jerked on a few feet farther, and the man got out looking around him uncertainly. He measured the distance from the bridge with his eye and began an ascent at random, looking this way and that, furtively. As he came on, there were places where the branches were thin and his face was in full view. Barry studied him curiously. He was tall and thickset, with a heavy jowl and a tiny black moustache over his full red lips. He had taken off his hat and was mopping his face. The climb seemed to be hard on him. As he looked up once, the boy was astonished to see that he was not young and that there were bags under his eyes, puffy places that belonged to a high liver.

He’s old enough to be her grandfather!
thought Barry disgustedly.
What a doggone little fool!

Athalie arose and balanced on the log with outspread arms, and the man cautiously approached, a hungry bestial glint in his eye that the boy in the tree resented.

“He’s rotten!” said the boy to himself. “Gosh! What’ll I do about this? Her father oughta keep her in! Gee!”

The man was upbraiding Athalie for coming in such a noticeable dress. “Are you sure nobody saw you come?” he asked her in a surly tone, smoothing the plumpness of her bare arms with his well-groomed hand as he talked. “It won’t do to have your dad get onto us,” he added. “You’ve got to be careful, you know.”

Athalie pouted, and the man talked to her in a low rumble. Barry could not hear many words. He wished he were well out of that tree and back making a chicken run. He wished he had never gone to that fire in Frogtown nor met the new Silver man, nor taken his old worms to him! What a mess! What did folks want to be fools for?