by Peggy Gaddis
“I don’t like that phrase, Mr. Gayle.”
“Don’t you?” Jonathan was entirely undisturbed. “Well, what would you call it? A little honest grief for a bereavement is understandable. But just to lie down and let it swamp you seems to me a pretty spineless attitude. You mentioned the girl who dated your boy friend Job at the church supper and said she was a young widow. Yet she seems to have made up her mind to go on living, even if her chief reason for wanting to is gone. So why shouldn’t Loyce pick herself up, brush herself off, and face up to the fact that life goes on whether we want it to or not?”
Cherry was listening, wide-eyed, unwilling to be convinced, and yet not quite able to resist his logic.
“Believe me, Cherry, I’m not unsympathetic,” Jonathan told her gently. “I know she has suffered a great heartache. I’m truly sorry for her. But after all, she is not the only woman who has lost a man she loved. Think of the widows with small children; women whose husbands and sweethearts have died in war, in automobile accidents — Loyce seems to set herself in a niche all by herself and to feel that she alone of all the women in the world has suffered a great loss. And that, my girl, is simply self-pity. And a more loathsome disease I can’t think of at the moment.”
Cherry was staring at him. After a moment she said uneasily, “But, Jonny, what should she do? She loved him so terribly.”
“I’m sure she did, Cherry,” said Jonathan quietly. “But what else was mixed up in that love?”
Cherry blinked, puzzled.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she admitted.
“Simply that this locked-in grief, this withdrawal from the whole human race is very bad for her and, Cherry dear, very dangerous,” Jonathan told her.
Startled, Cherry repeated the word, “Dangerous?”
“Mental illness can easily develop, Cherry,” he told her with brutal frankness, and saw shock spread over her vivid face.
“Oh no, Jonny!” she whispered at last.
“Hadn’t you and the Judge ever thought of that, Cherry?” asked Jonathan. “I would have thought that with all his experience in the legal profession, the many times he must have had to rule on mental illnesses, he would have sensed the danger in Loyce’s behavior. But I suppose when it’s someone in your own family, you just don’t notice — or try not to.”
“Oh, Jonny!” Cherry shuddered. “What are we going to do?”
Jonathan felt a swift stab of compunction at his revelation of his thoughts about Loyce.
“Cherry dear, I’m terribly sorry to have frightened you — sorry as the dickens,” he told her. “But I’ve been thinking about this ever since I first came here. I’ve watched her, and because I’m an outsider I can see telltale signs that you and the Judge would never notice. Oh, I’m no expert; but it doesn’t take an expert to see that Loyce is really sick. The only hope is to draw her out of her black mood; find out what it is besides grief that’s got her so locked up inside herself that she’s in a world of her own in which she is hardly aware of those of us outside that world. There is something there, Cherry, that’s intensifying the grief. I think if we could find out what that was and get rid of it, she would get rid of this melancholia that’s threatening her.”
Cherry was still for a long moment and then she asked anxiously, “Do you think it’s because she works so hard? She does, you know.”
“I think she works hard at physical labor, Cherry, because of this black thing that is driving her. Whatever it is, it makes her work until she is ready to drop; probably so that she can sleep. It’s not the physical labor that’s driving her; it’s the darkness inside of her. And finding out what this is, and maybe easing it, is something that only a trained psychiatrist could accomplish.”
“And we’d never get her to go to one,” Cherry admitted huskily.
“No, I suppose not,” Jonathan agreed. “I’d hoped she would go out with me; perhaps a day in town, Atlanta or Rome or even Gainesville. But of course you know what happened with that effort. She wouldn’t even go to dinner with me, so I had no chance to offer her a day of light-hearted gaiety in town.”
He was trying hard to cheer Cherry as he leaned toward her and said gently, “Honey, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have been so frank. I didn’t mean to be; if you hadn’t come in here tonight, and caught me with my emotions showing, I could easily have kept things to myself. But I’ve been very worried about her. I know I’m sticking my neck out — way out — in being presumptuous enough to think that any attentions I could offer her would be of any help in solving her problem. But at least I am someone she doesn’t know. She’s accustomed to all the others around her. I thought perhaps if I could get her to go out with me, maybe I could cheer her up; get her mind off her grief. I know that sounds presumptuous as the devil. But, honestly, Cherry it was all I had in mind. I swear it.”
Cherry said shakily, “Oh, I know, Jonny. And it was sweet of you. And she was very foolish not to let you. I had fun when you took me out.”
Jonathan smiled down at her and suddenly put out his hand and drew her to her feet.
“You’re a sweetheart, Cherry,” he said, “and I feel like the world’s worst heel to have upset you by talking this way about Loyce. But, honey, she needs help and needs it badly.”
Cherry was suddenly weeping, and Jonathan’s arms drew her comfortingly close as though she had been a grieving child. For a long moment she stood with her face hidden against his shoulder, sobs shaking her body. And then suddenly she felt his arms tighten, his body go rigid.
Startled, she looked up at him and then followed the direction of his eyes to the stairs where Loyce stood, head held high, face white as paper above the shabby dark blue robe that was belted tightly about her slender body.
For a moment that seemed to all three of them endless, the tableau held. And then Loyce, still without a word, turned and went back up the stairs, moving on swift slippered feet that made no sound. Not until the sound of her door closing behind her released them from the grip of silence did Cherry speak.
She turned a ravaged, tear-streaked face toward Jonathan and whispered in horror-stricken tones, “Oh, Jonny, how much did she overhear?”
Jonathan was scowling darkly, trying to remember all that had been said and wondering how much of it Loyce had heard.
“I don’t know, honey,” he said at last, his voice husky. “We were not talking very loudly. But she must have heard more than we wanted her to hear. I know that from the way she was watching us.”
“Oh, but that doesn’t have to be the reason she was looking so stricken,” Cherry stammered, and there was a faint ray of hope in her voice. “It could have been partly because she thought you were making love to me.
A wry grimace touched Jonathan’s face.
“Would that thought distress her so much?” he asked.
Cherry flushed beneath the look in his eyes.
“Well, she was afraid I might fall in love with you and that you might not like me that much.” Her words stumbled awkwardly.
Jonathan eyed her curiously.
“I hope you convinced her there was no danger of such a thing happening,” he drawled.
“Well, I couldn’t,” Cherry replied. “I mean I couldn’t convince her that I might not fall in love with you. I tried, though — truly I did — because I know how crazy it would be for me to think you could care anything about me.”
“You don’t say!” Jonathan murmured, diverted from the problem of Loyce by the incredible attitude of the girl before him. “Matter of fact, youngster, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fall in love with you. Only I’m not going to do it.”
“Aren’t you?” asked Cherry wistfully.
“Of course not, any more than you are going to fall in love with me, you ridiculous child,” Jonathan told her. “So that’s one problem Loyce doesn’t have to worry about, isn’t it?”
Subdued, Chery said huskily, “Well, yes, I suppose it is.”
Jonathan
looked down at her where she stood, a foot or two away from his arms now, leaning against the tall back of the chair in which she had been sitting. His eyes took her in from the top of her tumbled red-gold curls to the tips of her small feet in scuffed brown shoes. Her sweater and skirt were brown-gold like her hair; a dark green scarf was twisted carelessly about her throat.
“Wouldn’t it be ridiculous,” he said very softly, “for us to fall in love with each other? You are so much a part of the mountains that you’d die of homesickness away from here; yet all that I have worked for, the whole of my life is in the city. You’d hate it; you couldn’t endure it, any more than I could endure a life spent here in the mountains. Don’t you see that, honey?”
Cherry set her teeth hard against the impulsive assurance that she could make herself happy anywhere he wanted to live. Instead, when she managed to speak her voice was colorless, without expression, and all she said was, “Yes, of course. Very ridiculous, if you say so.”
She turned away then and without another word went quickly up the stairs and away from him. Jonathan stood for a long moment watching the now empty stairs. And then, scowling, he plunged one clenched fist into the palm of the other hand and swore luridly.
Chapter Seven.
Cherry greeted the morning with relief, knowing that it was Friday, and the Lodge was booked solid for the week-end. There would be no time to worry about personal problems, either her own or Loyce’s, for the guests would begin arriving shortly after lunch and from then until after breakfast on Monday morning the whole place would be jumping. There was much for her to do to assure the comfort and the satisfaction of the guests, so that they would want to return and would send their friends. She caught a glimpse of Loyce vanishing out of the back door shortly after Cherry herself had come downstairs, but she knew it would do no good to follow her or try to talk to her. That would have to wait until Monday after the last guest had left.
She was grateful that Jonathan did not appear for breakfast.
“Oh, he was up and out an hour ago,” the Judge told her when she took her place at the breakfast table. “Left word that there was a certain trout he had had his eye on for some time and he wanted to make one more effort to catch him before somebody else got him.”
Cherry murmured something and did not look up.
The Judge eyed her sharply.
“Headache, honey?” he asked gently.
Cherry looked up as though startled at the question.
“Who, me?” she asked in surprise. “Now when did you ever know me to have a headache?”
“Well, I just thought you didn’t look as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as usual,” the Judge teased her, but the slightly anxious look was still in his eyes. “Something on your mind?”
Cherry made an effort to wipe her mind clean of last night’s memories and said gaily, “Nothing except the problem of fitting eight guests into six guest rooms; and being sure there are plenty of guides available, not only to show the best fishing spots but to rescue and locate those who are so sure they don’t need a guide that they are certain to get lost. And there’s always one guest who forgets to bring his fishing tackle and expects us to furnish it; and then there’s the matter of ‘flies’ that have to be especially tied to suit some finicky Izaak Walton!”
The Judge nodded and managed a smile. “Oh, well, you’ll cope. You always do.”
“Thanks, pal. A vote of confidence is always appreciated,” she told him, and dropped a light kiss on his cheek as he went out to check on the various things that must be in order to maintain the Lodge’s reputation and justify its very high rates.
The week-end passed without too many complications. On Monday morning, when the last guest had departed, Cherry could relax with the feeling that she had done a good job. It would be five days before there would be another invasion of week-end guests, and she could sit down and worry about her own problems.
Suddenly she turned from the verandah where she had been lingering since the last guest departed and went back into the house. At her desk in the den, she lifted the telephone receiver, called the ranger station and a moment later was talking to Job.
“Well, hi, there,” Job greeted her happily. “I’m that touched that you’d pitch me a thought.”
“I’ve just come up for air after a crowded week-end, pal,” Cherry told him with a surface gaiety that was fairly convincing, at least over the telephone, “and I feel a vast need for entertainment. Would you have any ideas in mind?”
“Lots of them,” Job told her. “But they’re not to be discussed over the telephone, especially with so many eavesdroppers on the line. Hear the clicks?”
“Oh, well, people who have nothing better to do than eavesdrop on my conversations with you are welcome to listen.”
“I resent that,” said Job huffily. “How about conversations with other guys? Do you mind if they listen in on those?”
“What other guys?” Cherry asked, and felt her spirits rise slightly. Job, how would you like to take me to the movies tonight?”
“Monday night? Shoot-’em night? I thought you didn’t like the ‘bang-bangs.’”
“I don’t, usually. But tonight I think it might be fun to eat popcorn and help the good guys head the bad guys off at the pass,” Cherry told him. “Could you get somebody to take over for you tonight? I know it isn’t your night off, but, Job — please?”
“Honey, when you say it like that, I’d quit the job and kick the boss in the teeth and set a few fires myself,” said Job softly. “See you at seven, Baby.”
“Thanks, Job.” Her voice shook slightly.
“Hey,” Job’s voice was sharp, “are you crying?”
“Good grief, no! What’s to cry about?”
“Well, that’s better,” said Job, and she could hear the relief in his tone. “See you at seven then.”
“Make it six-thirty and have dinner with us,” she invited.
“I thought you’d never ask me.” He laughed.
She turned away from the telephone, smiling to herself. Job was a dear. He was mountain folks, as she was. She’d have a good life with Job; they understood each other, and life would be pretty wonderful. And wasn’t she the world’s prize idiot to go around with her chin dragging on the ground just because a good-looking city slicker had put his arms about her and then told her he had no intention of falling in love with her!
She made herself get up and go briskly about her business.
She and the Judge were alone for lunch. When Mrs. Mitchell came in with a big platter of vegetables and a bowl of chicken and dumplings, she announced that Jonathan had asked that a lunch be packed and had said he would not be back until dinner time.
“Chicken and dumplings!” The Judge beamed happily. “That looks mighty good after a week-end of trout, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t let the guests ever hear you say that, Judge.” Mrs. Mitchell chuckled. “That’s a mighty fine rule you made that they can’t catch more than they can eat while they’re up here. If you hadn’t, they’d have toted off every trout in the stream years ago. I had to give that fellow from Savannah what-for because he brought one back that was underweight. He swore it weighed just enough, and I made him watch me while I weighed it. And then Eben explained to him that if we let folks catch and keep the little fellers, there wouldn’t be any big ones to catch next year. City folks sure are dumb, ain’t they, Judge?”
“In some ways, Muv, in some ways,” the Judge agreed, a twinkle in his eyes.
“In a heap o’ ways, if you ask me, Judge,” she told him, and marched out.
“I know it’s unkind, but let’s hope that Jonathan doesn’t have too much luck with his fishing. I don’t feel I could possibly face another fish dinner tonight,” he suggested.
“I’ve been doing some thinking, Gran’sir,” said Cherry. “Why don’t we just let the guests eat in here and fix up a family room, maybe part of the kitchen or even a place in the den, where we can eat what we like while
the guests gorge themselves on their catches?”
“It’s a tempting thought,” the Judge agreed. “But I’m afraid our guests would think we were cheating them of the family atmosphere and the hospitality that they feel they’re entitled to at the rates they pay.”
“I suppose they would.” Cherry smiled at him. “Do you ever feel we are gypping them, Gran’sir, with our rates?”
“Certainly not.” The Judge frowned, and she saw that he was genuinely resentful. “Get that silly idea out of your head immediately. They are given the very best facilities: a trout stream stocked with the finest rainbow trout in this part of the country; a place where they have every possible comfort. They are being given everything their rates entitle them to!”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir, begging your pardon, sir, I’m that sorry,” Cherry offered a mock apology. “It’s just that now and then when I present a bill, somebody screams as if his arm were being twisted and yells that we’re overcharging him.”
“I hope,” the Judge frowned austerely, “that you put a black mark against that man’s name and the next time he wants to make a reservation you tell him we’re booked up.”
“Oh, I do, I do.” Cherry chuckled. “It’s just that I’ve always lived up here, and I have no idea what rates at good hotels are. But you’re the boss, lamb. Whatever you say goes.”
Mollified, the Judge returned to his lunch, and Cherry said lightly, “Too bad Jonny missed lunch. But then if he wants chicken and dumplings for dinner, Muv will see he gets them.”
The Judge nodded. “She likes Jonathan,” he agreed.
“Do you, Gran’sir?” asked Cherry.
The Judge’s bushy white brows went up slightly in surprise.
“Of course,” he answered as though puzzled she should ask such a question. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, I like him,” Cherry said hurriedly, and did not quite meet his eyes. “You don’t think there is anything shady in his background?”
The Judge was studying her with surprised amusement.
“Well, quite possibly there may be,” he replied. “I think it’s unlikely that any man would reach the age of twenty-five or so without some shadiness in his background. It’s in the nature of the male animal to do something along the way that he’s ashamed of later on, like maybe getting a speeding ticket or getting into a drunken brawl when he’s had four or five over the limit; maybe even pilfering from the petty cash box to put a fiver on the races.”