What hints of ancient sorrow
And unremembered pain!”
No, not “unremembered.” She would always remember it. She had had Bets for nine wonderful years and nothing could take them from her. Judy had been right as she always was. One would not drink of the cup of forgetfulness if one could.
CHAPTER 32
Exile
When the pass lists came out in August Hilary led and Pat had a very respectable showing. So it was Queen’s in September for both and Pat thought she might like it if she could survive an absence from Silver Bush for two-thirds of the year. She had always had a sneaking sympathy for Lot’s wife. Was she really to be blamed so much for lingering to look back at her home? Pat’s only comfort was that Hilary would be at Queen’s too, and they would be coming home every weekend.
“You wouldn’t think a house could be so nice as Silver Bush is in so many different ways, Judy. And the pieces of furniture in it don’t seem like furniture. They’re persons, Judy. That old chair that was Great-grandfather Nehemiah’s…when I sit in it it just puts its arms around me, Judy. I feel it. And all the chairs just want to be sat in.”
“Sure and iverything in the house has been loved and took care av and used be so minny human beings, Patsy. It stands to rason they do be more than just furniture.”
“I guess I’m hopelessly Victorian, Judy. Norma says I am. I really don’t want to do anything in the world but stay on here at Silver Bush and love it and take care of the things in it and plan for it. If I do really get through the license exams next year and get a school I’m going to shingle the roof with my first quarter’s salary. Those new red and green shingles, Judy. Think how lovely they’d look against the silver birches in winter. And we must have a new rug for the Little Parlor. And oh, Judy, don’t forget to see that the delphiniums are divided in October, will you? They must be this year…and I’m afraid nobody will remember it when I’m not here.”
There was some excitement in getting her outfit ready…and secret sorrow, remembering how much fun it would have been to talk things over with Bets. Pat couldn’t have a great deal…crops had been poor that year. But the necessary things were managed and Uncle Tom gave her a beautiful coat with a huge fluffy fur collar and Aunt Barbara gave her a smart little hat of brown velvet, tipped over one eye, and the aunts at the Bay Shore gave her an evening dress. Judy knit her two lovely pullovers and Aunt Edith would have given her silk undies if it had not been for the pajama question. Silver Bush was rocked to its foundation over that. Aunt Edith, who thought even colored silk nighties immoral, declared pajamas were immodest and brazen faced. Pat was set on pajamas. Even Judy favored them simply because Aunt Edith hated them.
“How,” said Aunt Edith solemnly, “would you like to die in your sleep and go before your Maker in pajamas, Patricia?”
Mother gave the casting vote…as she had a trick of doing—and Pat got her pajamas.
When the last day came Pat went to the Secret Field to say good-bye and on her return lingered long at the top of the hill field. Autumn was here…the air was full of its muted music. The old farm lay before her in the golden light of the mellow September evening. She knew every kink and curve of it. Every field was an intimate friend. The Pool glimmered mysteriously. The round window winked at her. The trees she had grown up with waved to her. The garden was afoam with starry white cosmos backed by the stately phalanx of the Prince’s Feather. Dear Silver Bush! Never had she felt so close to it…so one with it.
Since the Silver Bush treasury was so very lean Pat had to put up with a rather cheap boarding house that always seemed full of stale cooking smells. It was a square, bare house on a treeless lot, on a street that was quiet only for a little while at night…a street where the wind could only creep in a narrow space like a cringing, fettered thing, instead of sweeping grandly over wide fields and great salt wastes of sea. But at least it was not exactly like the other houses on the street. Pat felt that she couldn’t have borne to live on a street where the houses were all exactly alike. And it had a little park next to it, with a few trees.
When Pat stood alone in her room that night, with its mustard colored ingrain carpet and its dreadful maroon walls and the arrogance of its pert alarm clock, loneliness rolled over her like a wave. Judy had sent her off that morning with “gobs av good luck to ye,” but at this moment Pat was sure there was no good luck in the world for her away from Silver Bush.
She ran to the window. Below the street the western train was puffing and chugging. If she could only step on it and go home! Far beyond was cold moonlight on alien hills.
She shut her eyes and imagined she could see Silver Bush. The moon would be shining down on the Secret Field now. The little rabbits would be sitting on the paths among the birches. She heard the gulf wind sighing in the old firs and the maples whispering on the hills of home. She saw the silvery poplar leaves drifting down through the blue “dim.” She thought of the old doorstep listening for her footfall…of her room missing her. She saw Judy in the kitchen knitting, with Gentleman Tom beside her and Bold-and-Bad in her lap…Cuddles perched thoughtfully somewhere about as was her dear habit…as she, Pat, had perched long years ago.
She was overcome with homesickness…submerged in it. She cast herself on her hard little bed and wept.
• • •
Pat lived through the pangs of homesickness. She was finding out how many things can be lived through. Eventually she was homesick only on rainy evenings when she could imagine the rain splashing on the back doorstones and running down the windows of a kitchen crowded with cats defiant of the weather.
She liked Queen’s fairly well. She liked all the professors except the one who always seemed looking with amused tolerance at everyone and everything. She imagined him looking just so at Silver Bush. As for studies she contrived to get along with a good average. The only marked talent she had was for loving things very greatly and that did not help you much with Greek verbs and dates. It helped you a bit socially, though. Pat was popular at Queen’s, in spite of the fact that the other students always felt she was a little detached and aloof…among them but not of them. She was early elected to membership in the Saturday Satellites and by New Year’s she was a star in the Dramatic Club. She was voted “not exactly pretty but charming.” A bit proud…you knew her a street off by the way she carried her head. A bit reserved…she had no chums among the girls. A bit odd…she would rather sit in that shabby little park by her boarding house in the evenings than go to a movie.
Pat liked to sit there in the twilight and watch the lights spring up in the houses along the street and in the valley and over on the other hill. Commonplace-looking houses, most of them, but who knew what might be going on inside of them? Sometimes Hilary sat there with her. Hilary was the only boy in the world with whom she could be at the same time taciturn and comfortable. They knew how to be silent together.
Pat took Hilary for granted and did not think about his looks at all, other than to see that he did not wear weird neckties. But quite a number of Queen’s girls thought Hilary a charming fellow, although everybody knew that he had eyes only for Pat Gardiner who did not care a hoot about him. Hilary was first and foremost a student and cared little for social doings although he had outgrown all his old awkwardness and shyness. The weekend trip home with Pat was all the diversion he sought or desired.
Those weekends were always delightful. They went on the train to Silverbridge and then walked home. First along the road. Up one long, spruce-walled hill…down into a green valley…another hill…another valley…twists and turns…
“I hate a straight road or a flat one,” said Pat. “This is a road I love…all curves and dips. It’s my road. Oh, it may belong nominally to the township but it’s mine. I love it all, even that dark little glen Judy calls Suicide Hollow. She used to tell me the loveliest creepy story about it years ago.”
Then they left th
e road and went straight home over country…past the eerie misty marsh and across the Secret Field and through the woods by little paths that had never been made but just happened. Perhaps there would be northern lights and a hazy new moon; or perhaps just a soft blue darkness. Cool running waters…aeolian harps in the spruces. The very stars were neighbors.
If only Bets could have been with them! Pat never took that walk home without thinking of Bets…Bets whose grave on the hillside was covered with a loose drift of autumn leaves.
And then Silver Bush! It came on you so suddenly and beautifully as you stepped over the crest of the hill field. It welcomed you like a friend with all its windows astar…Judy saw to that. Though once they caught her napping when she was late getting in from the barn and mother had gone to bed with a headache. There wasn’t a light in Silver Bush and Pat thought she almost loved it best in the dark…so brooding and motherly.
The same dear old creak to the gate…and the happiest dog in the world throwing himself at Hilary. McGinty always came as far as Silver Bush to meet Hilary. Never a Friday night did he miss. Then Judy’s kitchen and welcome. Hilary always stayed to supper and Judy invariably had hot pea soup to begin with, just to warm them up a liddle mite after their cold walk. And a juicy bone for McGinty.
The wind snoring round the house…all the news to hear…all the mad, bad, sad deeds Bold-and-Bad had done…three balls of velvet fluff with tiny whiskered faces tumbling about on the floor. Silver Bush was, as Aunt Edith scornfully said, always infested with kittens. As for Bold-and-Bad, he was ceasing to be a cat and was on the way to becoming a family habit.
Judy always gave them a box of eats to take back Monday morning.
“As long as one can get a liddle bite one can kape up,” she would say.
Pat wondered how Queen’s students who got home only once in a blue moon, survived. But then their homes were not Silver Bush!
CHAPTER 33
Fancy’s Fool
Pat met him for the first time at the Dramatic Club’s exclusive dance in the Queen’s auditorium, by which they celebrated the successful presentation of their play Ladies in Waiting. Pat had been one of the ladies and had been voted exceptionally good, although in certain vivid scenes she could never look “passionate” enough to satisfy an exacting director.
“How can anyone look passionate with a cute nose?” she would ask him pathetically. In the end she looked impish and elusive which seemed to take just as well with the audience.
He came up to her and told her that he was going to dance with her. He never asked a girl to dance or drive with him…he simply told her that she was going to do it. That, said the Queen’s girls, was his “line.” It seemed to be a popular one, though the girls he didn’t notice talked contemptuously of cave man stuff.
“I’ve been wondering all the evening who you were,” he told her.
“Couldn’t you have found out?” asked Pat.
“Perhaps. But I wanted to find out from yourself alone. We are going to the sun-porch presently to see if the moon is rising properly and then we can discover who we are.”
Pat discovered that he was Lester Conway and that he was in his third year at Queen’s, but had just come back to college after an absence caused by pneumonia. She also discovered that his home was in Summerside.
“I know you’re thinking just what I’m thinking,” he said gravely. “That we have been living ten miles apart all our lives and have never met till now.”
His tone implied that all their lives had been terribly wasted. But then, everything he said seemed to have some special significance. And he had a way of leaning towards you that shut out all the rest of the world.
“What an escape I’ve had. I was so bored with the whole affair that I was just going to go when…you happened. I saw you coming downstairs and ever since that moment I’ve been afraid to look away for fear you’d disappear.”
“Do you say that to every girl half an hour after you’ve met her?” demanded Pat, hoping that the sound of her voice would keep him from hearing how her heart was thumping.
“I’ve never said it to any girl before and I think you know that. And I think you’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you?”
Pat was of the opinion that she had but she had enough Silver Bush sense to keep her from saying so. A lovely color was staining her cheeks. Her French-English-Scotch-Irish-Quaker blood was running like quicksilver through her veins. Yes, this was love. No nonsense this time about your knees shaking…no emotional thrills. Just a deep, quiet conviction that you had met your fate…someone you could follow to the world’s end…“beyond its utmost purple rim”…“deep into the dying day”…
He told her he was going to drive her home and did, through a night drenched with moonlight. He told her that he was going to see her soon again.
“This wonderful day has come and gone but there will be another tomorrow,” he said, dropping his voice and whispering the final word confidentially as he announced this remarkable fact.
Pat thought she was getting very sensible because she slept quite well that night…after she once got to sleep.
It was speedily an item of college gossip that Lester Conway and Pat Gardiner had a terrible “case” on each other. It was a matter of speculation what particular brand of magic she had used, for Lester Conway had never really fallen for any girl before though he had played around with several.
He was a dark lover…Pat felt that she could never bear a fair man again, remembering Harris Jemuel’s golden locks. He was not especially good-looking but Pat knew she had got far beyond the stage of admiring movie stars. He was distinguished-looking…with that faint, mysterious scowl. Lester thought he looked more interesting when he was scowling…like Lara and those fellows. His psychology was sound. Whenever a girl met him she wondered what he looked like when he smiled…and tried to find out.
He was appallingly clever. There was nothing he couldn’t do. He danced and skated and footballed and hockeyed and tennised and sang and acted and played the ukulele and drew. He had designed the last cover the The Lantern. Very futuristic, that drawing was. And in the February number he had a poem, To a Wild Blue Violet, containing some daring lines in spite of its Victorian title. It was unsigned and speculation was rife as to who had written it and who the wild blue violet was. Pat knew. It speaks volumes for her condition of heart and mind that she didn’t see anything comical in being called a blue violet. If she had been sane she would have known that a brown-and-orange marigold was more in her line. She was, in spite of her infatuation, a bit surprised to find that Lester could write poetry. She had faintly and reluctantly suspected that he wouldn’t know poetry when he saw it. But A Wild Blue Violet was “free verse.” Everything else, Lester told her, was outmoded. The tyranny of rhyme was ended forever. She would never have dared let him know after that that she had bought a second-hand volume called Poems of Passion and underlined half of them. I shall be dust when my heart forgets, she underlined twice.
She was horribly afraid she wasn’t half clever enough for him. He completely flabbergasted her one evening by a casual reference to the Einstein theory…looking at her sidewise to see if she were properly impressed. Pat didn’t know anything about the Einstein theory. She did not suspect that neither did he and spent much of the night writhing over her ignorance. What must he think of her? She went to the public library and tried to read up about it but it made her head ache and she was unhappy until the next evening when Lester told her she was as wonderful as a new-mooned April evening.
“I’d like to know if you said that because it just came into your head or if you made it up last night,” said Pat. Her tongue was always her own, whatever her heart might be. But she was happy again in spite of Einstein. Lester really did not pay many compliments, so one prized it when he did. Not like Harris Hynes whose “line” had evidently been to say something flattering whenever he opened
his mouth. Judy had always said he must have kissed the Blarney stone. How wraith-like Harris seemed now, beside Lester’s scowls and commands. To think she had ever fancied she cared for him! Mere school-girl infatuation…calf love. He had so little appreciation of the beautiful, poor fellow. She recalled pointing out the Hill of the Mist to him one moonlit winter night and he had said admiringly that it looked like a frosted cake. Poor Harris!
And poor Hilary! He had had to retire into his corner again. No more evenings in the park…no more rambles together. Even the weekend walks did not often come his way now. The car roads held and Lester drove her home in his little red roadster. He was the only boy at Queen’s who had his own car. There was no pea soup in Judy’s kitchen for him. And Pat almost prayed that he wouldn’t notice the terrible crack in the dining-room ceiling.
• • •
It worried Pat a little that Judy didn’t have much of a mind to him. Not that she ever said so. It was what she didn’t say. And her tone when Pat told her he was one of the Summerside Conways…Lester B. Conway.
“Oh, oh, it do be a noble name. And is it any secret what the B. do be standing for? Not Bartholomew be inny chance?”
“B. stands for Branchley,” said Pat shortly. “His mother was one of the Homeburn Branchleys.”
“Sure I do be knowing thim all. Conways and Branchleys. His mother used to visit here before ould Conway made his pile. She was rale humble thin. Minny’s the time I’ve wiped yer Lester’s liddle nose for him whin he was knee high to a toad. Howsomiver,” concluded Judy loftily, “it’s likely the matter is too high for me. Money makes the mare go and it’s the cute one ye are, I’m thinking.”
Judy was really impossible. To insinuate that she, Patricia Gardiner, had picked out Lester Conway because he had money.
“She should know me better,” thought Pat indignantly.
But she felt the lack of Judy. If darling Bets were only alive! She would have understood. What a comfort it would have been to talk over her problems with Bets. For there were problems. For instance, Lester had told her she was to marry him right away as soon as college closed. There was no sense in waiting. He was going right into business with his dad.
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