Chapter 26
The entire company turned in startled surprise and Anne and Joe scuttled furtively over to stand by him. They had been plainly frightened by a situation that they knew they could not control.
“Oh, Dad, is that you? I didn’t hear you come in. I’m glad you’ve arrived. It was naughty of you to be late the first night of my house party,” broke forth Athalie nonchalantly. “Come and let me introduce you to my guests.”
Patterson Greeves made no move to go forward. He handed his packages to the attendant Joe, and took off his hat and gloves, still standing where he had first appeared, still looking the company over, person by person, his eyes growing sterner, his mouth more displeased.
“I do not understand,” he said, coming forward inquiringly, giving a searching glance into each impudent face, guest by guest.
“Let me have that bottle, please!” He took the big bottle from the unresisting hand of the once-arrogant youth and lifted it near to his nose.
“Where did you get this liquor, may I ask? I’m afraid somebody has been breaking the laws of the land. I shall have to put you all under arrest until we investigate. Joe, will you kindly call up the chief of police?” The entire company of would-be revelers rose in consternation and looked to right and left for a place of exit, but Anne Truesdale, her cheeks flaming an angry crimson, her eyes like two sword points, barred the way of the pantry, and the angry householder and his ancient servant stood in the wide doorway leading to the hall. They began to steal furtively behind one another and sidle toward the pantry, fancying Anne less formidable than their inhospitable host.
“Why, Dad! I thing you’re horrid!” broke forth Athalie, her lips trembling. “Why, Dad!”
“Be still, Athalie! You may go to your room! You have broken all three of your promises. I have nothing more to say to you at present. You know what the consequence was to be.”
“But, Dad—”
“Leave the room!”
And Athalie actually left it.
The moment was awful. Even Silver felt sorry for them.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, while we are waiting for the officer, let me get your names and addresses,” said Patterson Greeves, his classroom tone upon him as he brought out pencils and notebook. “Your name, sir?” He turned to the first white-faced boy, the one who had held the bottle as he entered.
The boy lifted a face from which the fun had fled and tried to brazen it out.
“Oh cert, my name’s Brett Hanwood. Hamilton Prep pitcher, you know.”
Straight around the table he went writing down carefully the addresses, asking a searching question now and again. When he reached Marcella Mason he eyed her curiously for an instant, felt the sleeve of her coat, a flicker of amusement passing over his otherwise grave face and said: “And this—ah—gentleman?”
Marcella winced.
“This completes the list, I think.”
Patterson Greeves lifted his pencil and counted, “Four ladies and seven—” his eye was on Marcella—”men! The ladies of course we will not hold accountable. And now as it is not convenient for me to entertain guests tonight they will be returned to their homes or their schools as the case may be. The men—” again he glanced at Marcella—”will await the officer’s verdict. Doubtless they will be held till the trial, or possibly let out on bail if they can furnish sufficient evidence. The state is laying stress on this matter of prohibition just now, and—”
“Oh!” gasped Marcella and collapsed in sobs.
“Now,” said Greeves, “if you four young ladies will just go into the library I will call up your school and arrange for your return.”
“Oh—h–h–h!” murmured the girls in a panic.
Just then the officer was brought in by Joe, and Greeves explained to him in a low tone. Then he turned back to his frightened victims. “You four girls may come into the library now.”
The girls huddled in a mass and followed him. The sound of hasty feet scuttling after, and Marcella arrived red and teary.
“I—I—I’m a girl, too!”
“Oh,” said Greeves surveying her through his glasses, “curious specimen, I must say. Man and girl! Well, well! Which school do you attend?”
Marcella bore the sarcasm meekly and tried to hide her borrowed plumage behind the other girls. They made a curious group in their wild young flapper frocks with their plump, bare shoulders shivering in the shadows of the big old room while they waited for Patterson Greeves to get long distance. They glanced mutely into one another’s eyes and thought of the school records already against them.
“Is this Briardale School for Girls? Is this the principal? Let me speak to the principal, please. I have five young ladies here in my house who claim to belong to your school. They have been attempting to have a hooch party during my absence. Can you tell me where they are supposed to be tonight? Shall I return them to you? Their names are—”
He consulted his paper and read off the names. The girls stood and shivered as if he were striking them.
“I beg your pardon. Did you say Miss Mason was at home at the bedside of her sick mother? Yes? And this Violet? Her sister is being married? Oh! I see!” His eyes dwelt mercilessly on the trembling Violet. “Having her eyes examined? I see. And the other one? Oh, she was taken sick and was sent home? I see. Then you would you prefer that I return these young ladies to their various homes—”
“Oh, no, no!” broke in Marcella. “My father would half kill me! I’d rather go back to school.”
“Mine would take my next month’s allowance away, and it’s spent already,” wept Violet then hushed to hear what was being said on the telephone.
“You say this Violet lives in our neighboring city? And Miss Mason in a suburb? Where? Oh, Hazelbrook. Yes, I know it quite well. I’m not sure, but her father is an old friend of mine. Walter Mason? That’s the one. Very well, then. I quite agree with you that these two should go to their homes. I will personally escort them there at once. The other two you would prefer to have return to the school tonight? Just how far is that from the Junction? I see. No, there is no train out of here until ten o’clock. That would miss connection. I think it would be better to get an automobile. Yes, I have a reliable man and his wife, old trusted servants. I can send them in their care.
Oh, that’s all right. I’m only glad to get it all so easily arranged. They will be there tonight. It may be late. I may be delayed in finding a car, but they will arrive, don’t worry. Thank you! Good night!”
The girls were trembling and furious, but looking in his determined face they saw they had no way of escape. Especially did Marcella quail as she looked down at her borrowed garments and thought of her father’s face when he should hear the report of his old friend.
Patterson Greeves hung up the receiver, rang for Anne Truesdale, and said: “Now, young ladies, you will go upstairs in charge of Mrs. Truesdale and find your belongings. We shall be ready to start in twenty minutes.”
He herded them to the stairs and went into the dining room to consult with the chief of police, who had the bottle of liquor in his hand and was asking keen questions with eyes that were used to reading human countenances and penetrating human masks.
After a brief consultation between the two men, the uncomfortable boys were called into the library and subjected to a telephone conversation much like that which the girls had passed through, except that it was decided by the headmaster of the school that the boys should be returned in a body under police escort and that their fathers should be at once summoned from their various homes. The boys looked even more hunted than the girls had done. They perhaps had more reason to fear both parental and scholastic discipline.
The boys were marched out of the house at once with hastily packed suitcases and sober looks on their faces. A grocery truck was requisitioned. The boys piled in, and six men, two of them regular police aides, the other four pressed into service from the firehouse with hastily improvised uniforms, climbed in after the
m, a man to a boy. There was no escape.
The guards hugely enjoyed the occasion. They were getting a night’s excitement and a long ride free. It would be something to talk about at the firehouse for many a day. Uri Weldon had been the first one to volunteer. He had no time even to telephone to Lizette before leaving. But then Lizette was not one to worry about him.
In a quarter of an hour an automobile arrived and two unhappy maidens with handkerchiefs to their eyes stole out and crept into the backseat. Molly, in a flannel petticoat and an extra sweater under her long winter coat, climbed fearfully in between them, and Joe took the front seat beside the driver. They moved off hurriedly through the night, and presently Patterson Greeves and two silent, angry frightened girls emerged from the house and walked down the street to the ten o’clock train for the city.
“Well, they’re all getting away early!” sighed Mother Vandemeeter. “Now we can go to bed in peace. I was afraid they were going to have a dance, and that would have been so out of place in the old Silver house. I just couldn’t have gone to sleep for thinking.”
“I don’t know as they could have gone much later!” said Grandma, getting stiffly up from her padded rocking chair and tottering toward her downstairs bedroom door. “This is the last train, isn’t it?”
Said Pristina up at her top bedroom window: “Now! I wonder which one he is taking to the train!”
Silver and Anne Truesdale busied themselves in putting the house to rights and gathering up the debris of the brief onslaught of the enemy.
“Them old stemmed fruit cups was one of Miss Lavinia’s best prized set,” Anne mourned. “To think one shoulda got broke tonight fer them little fools. I almost just used the old sauce dishes, and then I thought the master might not like it!”
“Never mind, Anne. What difference does a glass or two less make? They’re gone. They might have broken more if they had stayed longer. It looked to me as if they were out to break more than fruit glasses.”
“Yes!” said Anne. “My soul! So that’s that!”
Five hours later, Patterson Greeves, dismissing the car that had brought him back from the city, walked up from the post office corner where he had got out and let himself silently into the house. Anne, released from her vigil, turned over and murmured drowsily to herself again: “So that’s that!”
In the wee small hours of the morning, with the east paling into pink, the only two who had got any enjoyment out of the affair, Molly and Joe on their way home from their long pilgrimage, sitting in the backseat holding hands and never saying a word, were having a second honeymoon. Their first automobile ride! An all-night affair. They were sore and stiff with the long ride, next day. But what did it matter? They had something to remember to their dying day. They might have other rides, doubtless would when Patterson Greeves got time from parenting to buy a car of his own, but never would any be like that first one, where the moonlight lay like thin sheets of silver over the springtime world.
Chapter 27
Sometimes a storm will settle the atmosphere, for a time, and it seemed as though Patterson Greeves’s summary dismissal of the house party had really subdued Athalie and made life bearable and even almost pleasant at times in the Silver house.
There had been a stormy scene the next morning between Athalie and her father, but his brief experience in dealing with the young hoodlums the night before had seemed to give him confidence. He laid down the law in no uncertain manner to the young woman, who went through various stages of rebellion to argument then pleading and finally surrender.
“But I told you about that house party when I first arrived, and you never said a word. You had no right to come in and raise a row afterward,” had been her opening sentence of the interview, spoken with stormy eyes.
She left the library with downcast countenance and a promise to apologize to Silver for her insolence of the night before, a condition of her further remaining in the house.
“Although I hate her just as much as ever and always shall!” she added as she was about to close the door behind her.
Her father thought it as well to let this sentiment go unanswered, and Athalie went up to Silver’s door, walked in without knocking, and announced: “My father sent me to apologize.” Having said it, she slammed the door after her and departed, leaving Silver no opportunity to reply.
Thus matters had settled into a semblance of amity between them. The conversation at the table consisted in animated talk between Silver and her father, and absolute silence on the part of Athalie whenever her sister was present. The two girls walked their separate ways as much as if they were in separate spheres. Silver made one or two unsuccessful attempts to bridge over this chasm between them and finally settled down to forget it and be happy.
Silver was living a rich and beautiful life, entering into the church work of the new community with zest and rare tact, already beloved by everyone, and spoken of often as being like her great-aunt Lavinia.
The minister was a frequent visitor at the house, going often on hikes and fishing trips with Greeves, and spending long hours in discussions on political, scientific, and on rare occasions, religious subjects; and often Silver was a third member of the party on these occasions. But the minister was a busy man and did not make his visits to Silver’s house too noticeable. It was fortunate for him that Aunt Katie’s back fence joined the Silver garden and that the high hedge made passing possible without calling the attention of the neighbors, for Silver Sands was very jealous of their minister and would never let him pay more attention to one family or individual without an equal amount somewhere else. Much of his friendship with Silver and her father was carried on in the evening, or morning when they had taken a trek to the woods and come upon the minister, also sometimes when there was no school, with the addition of Blink and his dog.
Athalie had begun to take a real if rather puzzled interest in high school. At first she had attempted to become a leader, had even offered to furnish cigarettes and teach the girls to smoke, telling them they were far behind the times, but this resulted in an instant aloofness on the part of the girls of the better class, Emily Bragg being the only one who really accepted the offer and attached herself to Athalie like a leech.
This was not part of Athalie’s plan. She retired from the field as leader and studied the situation for a few days. She began slowly to perceive that she would never be accepted nor welcomed as long as she lifted her own standards. She must accept the standards of Silver Sands or count herself as an outsider forever.
Experimentally she made an attack on the boys and found to her amazement that they, too, had standards. They might not be exactly the same as their sisters’, and there were few among them who were ready surreptitiously to meet her halfway and laugh with her, yet on the whole, she was losing rather than gaining in influence. Because for some unaccountable reason even the boys seemed to feel that she was unclassing herself. She sat down to ponder and decided that it was the old-fashioned town and that it was hopeless. Whereupon she brushed her hair a long time one day and began to curl the ends under and teach it to be “put up.” She ceased even the surreptitious application of cosmetics applied on the way to school since her father’s distinct command had put an end to a careful make up before her own mirror. Her eyebrows began to grow in their legitimate place, with a strange likeness to Patterson Greeves’s, and altogether she took on a more wholesome look in every way.
Saturday mornings, at Silver’s suggestion, Patterson Greeves made it a point to be at home and to take Athalie to the country club for a round of golf. Even when she grew closer with her schoolmates and found some of her amusement in their Saturday picnics and little round of simple parties she never failed to accept his invitations for golf with alacrity. At such times there were flashes of something like real affection in her eyes, although he was usually too preoccupied to notice her. Indeed he would often have forgotten the engagement if Silver had not reminded him.
Greeves had sought to ind
uce Athalie to eat more wholesome food. He had hunted out a diet menu and urged it upon her, and in some degree she had acquiesced, though he found her often with surreptitious boxes of candy, or taking more cake at tea than the law allowed. It was not until Barry again wielded his influence that she really got at it and began to show a loss in weight.
It was one Saturday morning that she had at last decided to try her father on the subject of knickers. She came down nonchalantly arrayed in them and announced herself ready for the country club. Her father looked up from a page he was correcting with an annoyed frown upon his brow. He had forgotten that it was Saturday and was exceedingly anxious to finish the theme he was at work upon. He took her in, knickers and all, and laid down his papers with a stern look on his face.
“You’ll have to go by yourself if you’re going to wear those things!” he said sharply. “It’s strange you don’t know what a figure you cut in them. You’re too stout for any such getup!”
Athalie, cut to the heart as she always was when her figure was criticized, turned with a shrug and a flip and an “Oh, very well!” and flung out of the room.
Her father settled back to his writing again, thinking that probably she had gone to change, but as she did not return he became absorbed once more and forgot all about it.
Athalie meantime, had stamped out of the front door, down the street, and was making her way swiftly to the old log in the woods, the only refuge she knew outside the house where she would probably meet no one and would be free to cry her heart out and wonder what had become of Lilla. She had not had word from Lilla since they parted.
She was sitting on the log weeping with long quivering sobs when suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder, and looking up she saw that Barry was sitting beside her.
“What’s the matter, kid? Has anything happened? Anyone been treating you mean?”
She lifted eyes that were brimming with tears, and there was something childish and almost sweet about her helpless young despair.
Tomorrow About This Time Page 27