After her grandfather had gone to bed, she put her roses back into the ice box and, going to the center table, took up Don’s picture. His proud moody face looked out at her. Emily looked back with painful intentness. He was the most wonderful person she knew. And when, now, would she see him again?
She went out to the lawn. The warm dark was full of fireflies. Down in the slough frogs and crickets were singing in melancholy rhythm.
“I’m through high school. I’m finished with something, but I’m not beginning anything. That’s wrong. When you finish something, you ought always to begin something new. But I’m just going to go on doing housework, looking after Grandpa.”
She felt depression closing in upon her, but she pushed it away. She forced her thoughts back over the day—the delicious fun of the morning, the wonderful unexpected present, the moment of illumination about her mother, the pageantry and beauty of the evening.
She walked slowly up and down, and across the slough the lights of Deep Valley were just a little larger than the fireflies.
6
Under the Locust Free
THROUGH THE SUMMER she wasn’t lonely. She was used to having solitude arrive with the thickening green, the spreading warmth, the long golden days of vacation. When the girls were in town she saw them on picnics or “come and bring your sewing” parties. But those were only occasional ripples in a tranquil sea.
Contentedly she weeded her flower beds, helped her grandfather with the vegetable garden, and enjoyed the big sprawling lawn. From the front gate at the north and the slough on the east it rose in a tree-lined slope. Nearer the house was a tall honey locust around which, long ago, her grandfather had built a bench. Emily liked this bench with its view of the shore where sandpipers were running and calling, and marsh hens were nesting, not too privately, among the reeds.
She was sewing there one afternoon when she saw two little boys approaching from the slough. Both were bare-legged, wearing tattered straw hats, and the taller one, who strode boldly in the lead, had a basket on his arm. Six feet away, he lifted his hat and swept a bow which Otis Skinner, Emily thought, could not have bettered.
“Hello, ma’am!” he said, coming upright again. He inspected her with round liquid eyes full of joy and curiosity.
He was a Syrian, and a handsome one. His black hair was thick, clean and curly. His black brows were strongly marked, and his olive skin had a rosy bloom.
“Hello,” answered Emily, smiling.
He smiled, showing teeth as white as Don’s. “Want to buy some frogs’ legs, ma’am?”
“Frogs’ legs! I’ve never eaten any.”
He turned to his companion with a gesture of astonishment. “The lady has never eaten frogs’ legs! But they’s dandy,” he continued, returning to Emily. “They’s deelicious. Um-m-m!” He lifted his head and made the rapturous sound of one tasting Elysian delicacies.
Emily laughed. “Did you catch them yourself?”
“Yusef and I catched them. Yusef and I catch big, big frogs. Great big beautiful frogs. This big!” He put down his basket and indicated a creature of extravagant size.
Emily looked toward the other little boy, a chunky, square-faced child who stared wordlessly.
“He is Yusef?”
“Yes, ma’am. Yusef Tabbit.”
“And what is your name?”
“Kalil, ma’am. Kalil Mohanna.” He pulled off his hat in another magnificent bow.
“How old are you?”
“My age is ten year. One year in America. Excuse the English, please.”
“I’ll try your frogs’ legs,” Emily said, rising.
He extended the basket grandly. “I give you all here for a quarter,” he announced, and Emily, smiling, took the basket to the kitchen, emptied the strange-looking mess into a pan and found her purse.
Kalil bowed again over the quarter.
“We are thankful, ma’am. We are full of thanks to you. Good-by ma’am.” He ran off lightly, followed by Yusef who, even in flight, turned his head to stare.
Still smiling, Emily went into the house and told her grandfather that they were going to have frogs’ legs for supper. She expected him to be surprised but he wasn’t.
“They’re good,” he said. “Your mother used to fix them.”
“My mother.”
“Yes. She learned how back east.”
“How did she fix them?”
“It must be written down somewhere,” he answered, which sent Emily on a search through old cook books, unfolding yellowed papers on which recipes had been written at long-gone thimble bees, tea parties and Ladies’ Aid meetings. At last she found the one she sought, written in a graceful Spencerian hand.
“Frogs’ legs, Sauté Meunière.”
“Wash the frogs’ legs carefully and lay on a clean towel. Season with salt and pepper. Dip in flour and fry in hot butter until golden brown…”
A few days later Kalil came back, still accompanied by Yusef. He smiled at her grandfather. They had often talked at the marsh’s edge, it seemed.
“Hello, sir. Hello, ma’am. You liked our frogs’ legs?” Kalil’s eyes were brightly expectant.
“Yes, we did, very much,” Emily replied. “You may bring them again.”
He smiled, showing all his white teeth. “Bully!” he cried.
It was a word Teddy Roosevelt had popularized, and it came so oddly from the little Syrian that Emily began to laugh. Her grandfather chuckled, and even Yusef smiled—not understanding the joke but delighted with Kalil’s success.
“Bully! Bully!” repeated Kalil, delighted, too.
Roosevelt’s name was in the air, for the Republican Convention had just been held in Chicago. Some time before the exuberant ex-president had announced that his “hat was in the ring.” He had come to Chicago feeling, he said, “like a Bull Moose,” and when, in spite of his popularity, the convention renominated Taft, and Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party, it became at once the Bull Moose Party, and his followers, Bull Moosers.
In Deep Valley, as everywhere, the Roosevelt-Taft feud was tearing friends and families apart. Emily favored Roosevelt, believing, as Jane Addams did, that he spoke for the cause of social justice. The Deep Valley Sun was delivered to the house, but Emily was so eager for news that she bought the Twin City papers, too, when she went downtown to the library or the grocer’s or butcher’s.
She found herself, to her annoyance, always looking for Don. She never went where he might be expected to be. She was contemptuous of girls who wandered in and out of stores or hung around the ice cream parlors looking for boys on whom they had crushes. Yet, in spite of herself, she kept watching for an erect, square-shouldered figure.
She didn’t see him in town. But one Sunday in late June he appeared at her home.
She and her grandfather had gone to church, of course. Every Sunday they attended the white stone Presbyterian Church. They had had dinner, and Emily had gone out to the locust tree which was in flower, pouring fragrance into the surrounding air. She was reading the poems of Sidney Lanier when she heard steps and looked up to see Don.
She concealed her emotion behind dignity as usual. “Hello,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Hello.” He pulled off his hat and gave her the wide white-toothed smile that so transformed his face. “The darned auto stopped right in front of your house, puffing like a steam engine. It knows your kind heart, I suppose. And maybe it knows you have a well.”
Emily was quite unable to return his nonsense in kind. “It needs water?” she asked diffidently.
“You’ve put your finger on it. It needs water, and so do I, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. I’ll get a pail and a glass.”
She was glad to hurry away, for the glory of his coming almost choked her. She could hardly believe that she was hearing his deep voice, that he was standing in her yard, suave, sophisticated, in a light summer suit with a straw hat.
She stole a look at the kit
chen mirror. She had changed after church to an old dress, a faded blue linen. But it was clean, at least, and her hair was neat. She went out to the pump and filled a glass, glad that the water from their well was so marvelously fresh and cold.
Don was looking at her book but he put it down. “What, no cookies?”
“Why should there be cookies?”
“I’m used to having cookies brought out at my approach.”
Still she could not respond to his joking, although she responded when her grandfather joked. She knew how to be merry with the girls.
“I’ll get you some,” she said, turning, and returned with a plate full of sugar cookies she had baked the day before.
He picked up her book again. “Like it?”
“Yes.” She began to speak freely when the subject turned to books. “I like the one about the Marshes of Glynn,” she said, turning the pages, and Don read aloud:
“Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!”
Emily listened, sitting with her head bent, her eyes grave in their thickets of lashes.
“It makes me think of my slough,” she said, when he paused.
“Of the slough! ‘The wide sea marshes of Glynn’?” He sounded contemptuous but she defended her statement.
“It has the feeling of our slough.”
Don rolled a cigarette. He had beautiful hands, dark, with long sensitive fingers.
“It’s an interesting rhyme scheme,” he observed and launched into a dissertation on Lanier. He was enjoying himself, she could see. The boys would say it was because he was showing off, but Emily knew that he really liked intellectual discussions.
“Of course, he’s more the musician than the poet.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He writes for the ear.”
“Not always,” Emily insisted. “Sometimes he has something to say.” And now it was her turn to read aloud:
“As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies…”
It was just the way they had talked and read and argued off on the debating trips.
He went to the well and refilled his glass, but he seemed in no hurry to draw water for the car. He asked what she thought of the news from Chicago. When he found how ardently she favored Roosevelt he teased her with the familiar insults—that Teddy was crazy—that he wanted to make himself king.
“See here,” he said suddenly. His gray-green eyes looked into hers. “I don’t know another girl with whom I could talk like this. I think I’ll have to come again.”
Emily didn’t say that she would like to have him. She bent her head and looked away, but she knew that he knew she was glad he had come.
When he was gone she went up to her room. His picture looked out at her from the top of a chest where it stood with the other class pictures. She had put it in front; that was the only concession she had made to her special feeling for him. She looked at it now with an almost pleading gaze.
She felt sure he had no intention of coming again. Only chance had brought him, and it wouldn’t operate a second time.
“He won’t come again,” she said aloud, firmly. But he did. He came several times in the month of July.
It was very hot that year. There were nights through which it was too hot to sleep and days in which it seemed too hot to live. Almost everyone else was out of town; Annette was in the Twin Cities, shopping. Emily was humbly aware that this was why he favored her. But she realized, too, that he felt a certain comfort and ease in the little house.
He was scornful of it, though, as she had known he would be. She felt an agony of embarrassment the first time he went into the parlor. He strolled about with a superior smile, inspecting the wax flowers.
“It’s incredible! Incredible!” he said, half under his breath.
“It’s the way Grandpa likes it,” Emily answered, flushing. That was as near an apology as she would come.
He sat down at the piano and played “Chop Sticks,” and presently her grandfather came in, his skull cap slightly awry from the nap Don’s call had interrupted.
They shook hands.
“I used to hear you talk when you came to the school on Decoration Day, Mr. Webster,” Don said. “You fought at Bull Run, didn’t you?”
“Bull Run!” exclaimed Grandpa Webster. “It was Gettysburg, young man!”
“Of course! Of course! Gettysburg!”
But Grandpa Webster didn’t respond to the charm of the flashing smile.
“That young man thinks he’s cock of the walk,” the old man grumbled later. After that he usually stayed in his room when Don appeared.
Don did, indeed, have an air of lordly condescension on his visits. Yet he plainly enjoyed them. He enjoyed the pitchers of cold lemonade she made for him, the sugar cookies and molasses cookies which alternated in the jar. He liked the small, clean kitchen and the bench under the honey locust, from which they looked out now at tiger lilies around the house and hollyhocks along the fence and marsh hens down in the slough, noisily busy with their young.
He never suggested taking Emily riding, although the touring car waited in front. He didn’t ask her to go to the movies. Coming to see her was favor enough, his manner said. But she was content to sit and listen while he talked, rolling and smoking cigarettes with man-of-the-world nonchalance.
He talked about his plans, and she recognized that he was close to boasting. But that was all right. He knew how interested she was. He liked to talk about himself. Once he asked her to tell him his worst fault.
“How should I know your faults?”
“Well, you do, don’t you? Come on, tell me!”
“There’s no reason why I should.”
“You admit that you know?”
“I don’t know what your worst one is.”
He began to list them, bitterly, dramatically. He was self-centered, he said, selfish, rude.
He was sometimes, Emily admitted to herself. But he was also wonderful—more wonderful than anyone else she knew.
Oftenest they talked about books.
“Emily,” he asked one day, “have you read any Browning?”
“I can’t make head or tail of him.”
“That’s nonsense. He comes clear if you study him. He just likes to leave out connectives and relatives. I’ll bring him along next time I come.”
A reference to his coming again never failed to thrill her. But when this promised visit came, on a hot August day, she was canning peaches, neck to ankle in an apron, her hair pinned away from a burning face. She answered a knock at the kitchen door and there was Don, looking cool and attractive in a white linen suit.
“Why—I thought you were working!” she cried. He had never come on a week day before.
“I’ve quit. College coming up. The family thinks I need a rest.” He held out a book. “I brought you the Browning.”
She forgot her chagrin in her pleasure.
“Oh, I’m so glad! Sit down outside, won’t you? I’ll finish as quickly as I can.”
He strolled out to the bench and she filled the jars rapidly, took off her apron and tidied her hair. She didn’t take time to change her dress.
“Here I am,” she called, running out. “Will you read it to me now? Try to get it through my head?”
“I’m not going to let you off with the ballads,” he answered, brightening. He opened the book, but before they began they were interrupted.
“Hello!” called a light voice. Annette in a long white dress with a green and white parasol tilted over her shoulder was coming up the lawn. Don and Emily went to meet her. “I thought that was your auto out in front!” she said to Don, and kissed Emily warmly.
“When did you get back?” asked Emily.
“Just this morning.”
“I came out to ask Em whether she had any news of you,” said Don.
Had he? Emily wondered. What about the Browning then? She felt a painful wrench at her heart.
It evidently didn’t occur to Annette that he might have come for any other purpose. She sat down, smiling radiantly. Her dark hair was dressed in curls and puffs with a fillet of green ribbons. Her black eyes sparkled, and perfume drifted out with every flutter of her dress.
Don sat down beside her although Emily was still standing. He began to joke with her, his dark face glowing. Emily felt cast off.
“I think I’ll go fix some lemonade,” she said.
Back in the kitchen she looked in the mirror as she had on his first visit. Her face was shiny and embarrassed, and that turned-up braid and ribbon were too young. But what did it matter? So far as Don was concerned, the earth might have swallowed her up.
When she took out the lemonade Don and Annette were standing.
“We were just leaving!” Annette cried penitently. “I forgot you said you were going to make lemonade. But we’ll stop to drink some; won’t we, Don? And, Em, can you come over soon? I want to show you all we bought in the Cities. I’m certainly going to be the well-dressed college girl.”
After they were gone, the Browning lay on the bench. Slowly Emily picked it up. It was a small brown and gold volume, Select Poems of Robert Browning. It was new, it was unmistakably new.
Holding it tightly, she went into the house. Up in her room, she sat down and began to leaf it through. But she stopped, abruptly, and laid her cheek against it.
It was a present. He had bought it for her!
7
They All Go Away
MISS MIX WAS BACK AGAIN in the big front bedroom at Aunt Sophie’s. Annette had bought her tailor-made suit in the Cities—her new hats, too. But Miss Mix was making everything else—school waists and dress-up waists, school dresses and dark silks for dinner, and filmy evening gowns.
Emily of Deep Valley Page 6