Well, why not? He had seen life. And what had it given him? Dust and ashes! A bitter taste! Responsibilities that galled! Hindrances and disappointments! Two daughters whom he did not know! An empty heart and a jaded soul! Ah! Why live?
Into the middle of his bitter thoughts a crimson stain flared into the luminous gray of the evening sky as if it had been spilled by an impish hand, and almost simultaneously out from the old bell tower in the public square there rang a clang that had never in the years gone by failed to bring his entire being to instant attention. The red flared higher, and down behind the tall chimneys beside the silver beach a little siren set up a shriek that almost drowned out the hurried imperious clang of the firebell. Another instant and the cry went up from young throats down the street, where the voices of play had echoed only a second ago, and following the sound came the gong of the fire engine, the pulsing of the engine motor, the shouts of men, the chime of boys’ voices, hurried, excited, dying away in a breath as the hastily formed procession tore away and was lost in the distance, leaving the tree toads to heal over the torn air.
It took Patterson Greeves only an instant to come to life and answer that call that clanged on after the firemen had gone on their way. He stayed not for hat or coat. He flung open the front door, swung wide the white gate, took one step on the road, and vaulted the fence into the meadow. Down through the dear old mysterious meadow he bounded, finding the way as if he were a boy again, his eye on the crimson flare in the sky. Once he struck his foot against a boulder and fell full length, his head swimming, stars vibrating before his eyes, and for an instant he lay still, feeling the cool of the close-cropped grass in his face, the faint mingle of violet and mint wafting gently like an enchantment over him, and an impulse to lie still seized him, to give up the mad race and just stay here quietly. Then the siren screeched out again, and his senses whirled into line. Footsteps were coming thud, thud across the sod. He struggled halfway up and a strong young arm braced against him and set him on his feet:
“C’mon!” breathed the boy tersely. “It’s some fire!”
“Where is it?” puffed the scientist, endeavoring to keep pace with the lithe young bounds.
“Pickle factory!” murmured the youth, taking a little stream with a single leap. “There goes the hook ‘n’ ladder! We’ll beat ‘em to it. Job Trotter cert’nly takes his time. I’ll bet a hat the minister was running the engine. He certainly can make that little old engine go! Here we are! Down this alley an’ turn to yer right—!”
They came suddenly upon the great spectacle of leaping flames ascending to heaven, making the golden markings of the late-departed sun seem dim and far away as if one drew near to the edge of the pit.
The crude framework of the hastily built factory was already writhing in its death throes. The firemen stood out against the brightness like shining black beetles in their wet rubber coats and helmets. The faces of the crowd lit up fearfully with rugged, tense lines and deep shadows. Even the children seemed old and sad in the lurid light. One little toddler fell down and was almost crushed beneath the feet of the crowd as a detachment of firemen turned with their hose to run to another spot farther up the street where fire had just broken out. The air was dense with shouts and curses. Women screamed, and men hurried out of the ramshackle houses bearing bits of furniture. Just a fire. Just an ordinary fire. Thousands of them happening all over the land every day. Nothing in it at all compared to the terror of the war. Yet there was a tang in the air, a stir in the pulses that made Patterson thrill like a boy to the excitement of it. He wondered at himself as he dived to pick up the fallen child and found his young companion had been more agile. The toddler was restored to her mother before her first outcry had fully left her lips.
“Good work, Blink!” commended a fireman with face blackened beyond recognition and a form draped in a dripping coat.
“That’s the minister!” breathed the boy in Patterson Greeves’s ear and darted off to pounce upon a young bully who was struggling with his baby sister for possession of some household treasures.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the fire was gone, the homeless families parceled out among their neighbors, the bits of furniture safely disposed of for the night, and the firemen getting ready to depart.
“Ain’t you goin’ to drive her back?” the boy asked the tall figure standing beside him.
Patterson Greeves warmed to the voice that replied:
“No, son, I’m going back across the fields with you if you don’t mind. I want to get quiet under the stars before I sleep, after all this crash.”
They tramped through the field together, the three, and there was an air of congeniality from the start as of long friendship. The boy was quiet and grave as if bringing his intelligence up to the honored standard of his friend, and the new man was accepted as naturally as the grass they walked upon or a new star in the sky. There was no introduction. They just began. They were talking about the rotten condition of the homes that had just burned and the rottener condition of the men’s minds who were the workers in the industries in Frogtown. The minister said it was the natural outcome of conditions after the war, and it was going to be worse before it was better, but it was going to be better before a fatal climax came, and the scientist put in a word about conditions abroad.
When they had crossed the final fence and stood in the village street once more, Patterson Greeves waved his hand toward the house and said: “You’re coming in for a cup of coffee with me,” and his tone included the boy cordially.
They went in quite as naturally as if they had been doing it often, and the minister as he laid aside his rubber coat and helmet remarked with a genial smile: “I thought it must be you when I first saw you at the Flats. They told me you were coming home. I’m glad I lost no time in making your acquaintance!”
Blink stuffed his old grimy cap in his hip pocket and glowed with pride as he watched the two men shake hands with the real hearty handclasp that denotes liking on both sides.
The old servants joyfully responded to the call for coffee and speedily brought a fine old silver tray with delicate Sèvres cups and rare silver service, plates of hastily made sandwiches—pink with wafer-thin slices of sweetbriar ham—more plates of delicate filled cookies, crumby with nuts and raisins. Blink ate and ate again and gloried in the feast, basking in the geniality of the two men, his special particular “finds” in the way of companions. “Gee! It was great!” He wouldn’t mind a fire every night!
The coffee cups were empty, and the two men were deep in a discussion of industrial conditions in foreign lands when suddenly, with sharp insistence, the telephone rang out and startled into the conversation. With a frown of annoyance Patterson Greeves finished his sentence and turned to take the receiver.
“Western Union. Telegram for Patterson Greeves!” The words cut across his consciousness and jerked him back into his own troubled life. “Yes?” he breathed sharply.
“Too late! Athalie already on her way. She should reach you tomorrow morning.”
Signed “Lilla.”
It seemed to him as he hung up the receiver, a dazed, baffled look upon his face, that he could hear Lilla’s mocking laughter ringing out somewhere in the distance. Again she had outwitted him!
Chapter 3
Having diligently inquired what time the night express from the East reached the nearby city, and finding that it was scheduled to arrive fifteen minutes after the early morning train left for Silver Sands and that there was not another local train that could bring his unwelcome daughter before eleven o’clock, Patterson Greeves ate his carefully prepared breakfast with a degree of comfort and lingered over his morning paper.
He had in a long-distance call for the principal of a well-known and exclusive girls’ school in New England, and he was quite prepared to take the child there at once without even bringing her to the house. He had already secured by telephone the service of an automobile to take them at once back to the city, that she might
be placed on the first train possible for Boston. It only remained to arrange the preliminaries with the principal, who was well known to him. He anticipated no difficulty in entering his daughter even though it was late in the spring, for he knew that it was likely that a personally conducted tour of some sort, or a summer camp, could possibly be arranged through this school. These plans were the result of a night of vigil. So he read his paper at ease with himself and the world. For the moment he had forgotten the possible arrival of his elder daughter.
His breakfast finished, he adjourned to the library to await the long-distance call. The scattered mail on the desk at once recalled Silver and her suggestion that she would like to visit him. He frowned and sat down at the desk, drawing pen and paper toward him. That must be stopped at once. He had no time or the desire to break the strangeness between them at present. In fact his very soul shrank from seeing Alice’s child, the more so since he had become so aware of Lilla’s child’s approach.
He wrote a kind if somewhat brusque note to Silver saying that she had better defer her visit to some indefinite period for the present, as he was suddenly called away on business—his half intention to take Athalie to her school served as excuse for that statement to his dulled conscience—and that he was deeply immersed in important literary work in which he could not be disturbed. It sounded good enough as he read it over, and he felt decidedly pleased with himself for having worded it so tactfully. He resolved to send it by special delivery to make sure that it reached her before she started. And by the way—what was it she said about taking a position? Of course that must not be allowed. He was fully able and willing to support her. And she could not be too old to go to school. He would arrange for that—not in the school where Athalie would be, however! Perhaps she herself would have a preference. He would ask her. He reached his hand for her letter, which lay on the top of the pile where he had dropped it the night before, for both Molly and Anne had been well trained by the former master that the papers on that desk were sacred and never to be touched.
As he drew the letter toward him and his eyes fell again upon those unaccustomed words: “Dear Father,” something sad and sweet like a forgotten thrill of tenderness went through him, and the face of his beautiful young wife came up before his vision as it had not come now in years.
But before he could read further, or even realize that he had not finished reading the letter the day before, the telephone rang out sharply in the prolonged shrill that identifies a long-distance call, and he dropped the paper and reached for the receiver.
It was the distant school, and the principal for whom they had been searching; but she did not fall in with Patterson Greeves’s plans with readiness, as he had expected, although she at once recognized him. Instead, her voice was anxious and distraught, and she vetoed his arrangements emphatically. An epidemic of measles had broken out in the school in the most virulent form. The school was under strict quarantine, and it was even doubtful, as it was now so late in the spring, whether they would open again until fall. They could not possibly accept his daughter under the circumstances.
In the middle of his dismay there came an excited tapping at the door, following certain disturbing sounds of commotion in the hall, which had not yet been fully analyzed in his consciousness, but which rushed in now to his perturbed mind as if they had been penned up while he telephoned and lost none of their annoyance by the fact that they were now memories.
He called “Come in,” and Anne Truesdale in her immaculate morning dress and stiff white apron and cuffs stood before him, a bright spot of color in her already rosy cheeks and a look of indignant excitement in her dignified blue eyes.
“If you please, Master Pat—” she began hurriedly, with a furtive glance over her shoulder, “there’s a strange young woman at the front door—”
“Hello! Daddy Pat!” blared out a hoydenish young voice insolently, and the young woman, who had not remained at the door as ordered, appeared behind the horrified back of the housekeeper.
For Athalie Greeves, never at a loss for a way to carry out her designs and get all the fun there was going, had not waited decorously at the city station for the train that should have brought her to Silver Sands, but had called from his early morning slumbers a onetime lover of her mother whose address she looked up in the telephone book and made him bring her out in his automobile. In his luxurious car he was even now disappearing cityward having an innate conviction that he and her father would not be congenial.
Patterson Greeves swung around sharply, his hand still on the telephone, his mind a startled blank, and stared.
Anne Truesdale stiffened into indignant reproof, her hands clasped tightly at her white-aproned waist, her chin drawn in like a balky horse, her nostrils spread in almost a snort, as the youngest daughter of the house sauntered nonchalantly into the dignified old library and cast a quick, appraising glance around, leveling her gaze on her father with a half-indifferent impudence.
“Bring my luggage right in here, Quinn! Didn’t you say your name was Quinn?” she ordered imperiously. “I want to show Dad some things I’ve brought. Bring them in here, I said! Didn’t you hear me?”
The old servant hovered anxiously nearby, a pallor in his humble, intelligent face, a troubled eye on his master’s form in the dim shadow of the book-lined room. He turned a deprecatory glance on Anne Truesdale, as he entered with two bags, a shiny suitcase, a hat box, a tennis racket, and a bag of golf clubs, looking for an unobtrusive corner in which to deposit them and thereby stop the noisy young tongue that seemed to him to be committing irretrievable indignities to the very atmosphere of the beloved old house.
“Take them out, Joe,” said Anne Truesdale in her quiet voice of command.
“No, you shan’t take them out!” screamed Athalie, stamping her heavy young foot indignantly. “I want them here! Put them right down there! She has nothing to say about it!”
Joe vacillated from the library to the hall and back again uncertainly and looked pitifully toward his master.
“Put the things in the hall, Joe, and then go out and shut the door!” ordered the master with something in his controlled voice that caused his daughter to look at him with surprise. Joe obeyed, Anne Truesdale thankfully disappeared, and Patterson Greeves found himself in the library alone with his child.
Athalie faced him with a storm in her face.
“I think you are a perfectly horrid old thing!” she declared hysterically with a look in her eyes that at once reminded him of her mother. “I said I wanted those things in here, and I’m going to have them! I guess they are my things, aren’t they?” She faced him a second defiantly and then opened the door swiftly, causing a scuttling sound in the back hall near the kitchen entrance. Vehemently she recovered her property, banging each piece down with unnecessary force and slamming the door shut with a comical grimace of triumph toward the departed servants.
“Now, we’re ready to talk!” she declared, with suddenly returning good humor, as she dropped to the edge of a large leather chair and faced her father again.
Patterson Greeves was terribly shaken and furiously angry, yet he realized fully that he had the worst of the argument with this child as he had nearly always had with her mother, and he felt the utter futility of attempting further discipline until he had a better grasp of the situation. As he sat in his uncle’s comfortable leather chair, entrenched as it were in this fine old dignified castle, it seemed absurd that a mere child could overthrow him, could so put his courage to flight and torment his quiet world. He turned his attention upon her as he might have turned it upon some new specimen of viper that had crossed his path and become annoying; and once having looked, he stared and studied her again.
There was no denying that Athalie Greeves was pretty so far as the modern world counts prettiness. Some of the girls in her set called her “simply stunning,” and the young men of her age called her a “winner.” She was fair and fat and fourteen with handsome teeth and large, bold,
dark eyes. But the lips around the teeth were too red and the lashes around the eyes overladen. Her fairness had been accentuated to the point of ghastliness, with a hectic point in each cheek that gave her the appearance of an amateur pastel portrait.
She wore a cloth suit of bright tan, absurdly short and narrow for her size. A dashing little jade-green suede hat beaded in black and white sat jauntily on a bushy head of bobbed and extraordinarily electrified black hair, and whatever kind of eyebrows she had possessed had been effectually plucked and obliterated, their substitutes being so finely penciled and so far up under the overshadowing hat brim as to be practically out of the running. She wore flesh-colored silk stockings and tall, unbuckled, flapping galoshes with astrakhan tops, out of which her plump silken ankles rose sturdily. Her father sat and stared at her for a full minute. No biological specimen had ever so startled or puzzled him. Was this then his child? His and Lilla’s? How unexpected! How impossible! How terrible!
Tomorrow About This Time Page 3