That winter he saw his son very seldom. Perhaps the boy was busy. Once or twice he came to ask his father for money, but there was none to give him, — very little for anybody — and Doris and Catharine required that.
Some little money was taken in at the Hotel Greensleeve; commercial men were rather numerous that winter: so were duck-hunters. Athalie often saw them stamping around in the bar, the lamplight glistening on their oil-skins and gun-barrels, and touching the silken plumage of dead ducks — great strings of them lying on the bar or on the floor.
Once when she came home from school earlier than usual, she went into the kitchen and found a hot peach turnover awaiting her, constructed for her by the slovenly cook, and kept hot by the still more slovenly maid-of-all-work — the only servants at the Hotel Greensleeve.
Sauntering back through the house, eating her turnover, she noticed Mr. Ledlie reading his newspaper in the office and her father apparently asleep on a chair before the stove.
There were half a dozen guests at the inn, duck-hunters from New York, but they were evidently still out with their bay-men.
Nibbling her pastry Athalie loitered along the hall and deposited her strapped books on a chair under the noisy wall-clock. Then, at hazard, she wandered into the bar. It was growing dusky; nobody had lighted the ceiling lamp.
At first she thought the room was empty, and had strolled over toward the stove to warm her snow-wet shoes, when all at once she became aware of a boy.
The boy was lying back on a leather chair, stockinged feet crossed, hands in his pocket, looking at her. He wore the leather shooting clothes of a duck-hunter; on the floor beside him lay his cap, oil-skins, hip-boots, and his gun. A red light from the stove fell across his dark, curly hair and painted one side of his face crimson.
Athalie, surprised, was not, however, in the least disturbed or embarrassed. She looked calmly at the boy, at the woollen stockings on his feet.
“Did you manage to get dry?” she asked in a friendly voice.
Then he seemed to come to himself. He took his hands from his pockets and got up on his stockinged feet.
“Yes, I’m dry now.”
“Did you have any luck?”
“I got fifteen — counting shell-drake, two redheads, a black duck, and some buffle-heads.”
“Where were you shooting?”
“Off Silver Shoal.”
“Who was your bay-man?”
“Bill Nostrand.”
“Why did you stop shooting so early?”
“Fifteen is the local limit this year.”
Athalie nodded and bit into her turnover, reflectively. When she looked up, something in the boy’s eye interested her.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
He looked embarrassed, then laughed: “Yes, I am.”
“Wait; I’ll get you a turnover,” she said.
When she returned from the kitchen with his turnover he was standing. Rather vaguely she comprehended this civility toward herself although nobody had ever before remained standing for her.
Not knowing exactly what to do or say she silently presented the pastry, then drew a chair up into the red firelight. And the boy seated himself.
“I suppose you came with those hunters from New York,” she said.
“Yes. I came with my father and three of his friends.”
“They are out still I suppose.”
“Yes. They went over to Brant Point.”
“I’ve often sailed there,” remarked Athalie. “Can you sail a boat?”
“No.”
“It is easy.... I could teach you if you are going to stay a while.”
“We are going back to New York to-morrow morning.... How did you learn to sail a boat?”
“Why, I don’t know. I’ve always lived here. Mr. Ledlie has a boat. Everybody here knows how to manage a cat-boat.... If you’ll come down this summer I’ll teach you. Will you?”
“I will if I can.”
They were silent for a few minutes. It grew very dark in the bar-room, and the light from the stove glimmered redder and redder.
The boy and girl lay back in their chairs, lingering over their peach pastry, and inspecting each other with all the frank insouciance of childhood.
Athalie still wore the red hood and cloak which had represented her outer winter wardrobe for years. Her dull, thick gold hair curled crisply over the edges of the hood which framed in its oval the lovely features of a child in perfect health.
The boy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, gazed fascinated and unembarrassed at this golden blond visitor hooded and cloaked in scarlet.
“Does your father keep this hotel?” he asked after a pause.
“Yes. I am Athalie Greensleeve. What is your name?”
“C. Bailey, Junior.”
“What is the C for?”
“Clive.”
“Do you go to school?”
“Yes, but I’m back for the holidays.”
“Holidays,” she repeated vaguely. “Oh, that’s so. Christmas will come day after to-morrow.”
He nodded. “I think I’m going to have a new pair of guns, some books, and a horse. What do you expect?”
“Nothing,” said Athalie.
“What? Isn’t there anything you want?” And then, too late, some glimmer of the real state of affairs illuminated his boyish brain. And he grew red with embarrassment.
They had finished their pastry; Athalie wiped her hands on a soiled and ragged and crumpled handkerchief, then scrubbed her scarlet mouth.
“I’d like to come down here for the summer vacation,” said the boy, awkwardly. “I don’t know whether my mother would like it.”
“Why? It is pleasant.”
“‘I’d like to come down here for the summer vacation,’ said the boy, awkwardly.”
He glanced instinctively around him at the dark and shabby bar-room, but offered no reason why his mother might not care for the Hotel Greensleeve. One thing he knew; he meant to urge his mother to come, or to let him come.
A few minutes later the outer door banged open and into the bar came stamping four men and two bay-men, their oil-skins shining with salt-spray, guns glistening. Thud! went the strings of dead ducks on the floor; somebody scratched a match and lighted the ceiling lamp.
“Hello, Junior!” cried one of the men in oil-skins,— “how did you make out on Silver Shoals?”
“All right, father,” he began; but his father had caught sight of Athalie who had risen to retreat.
“Who are you, young lady?” he inquired with a jolly smile,— “are you little Red-Riding Hood or the Princess Far Away, or perhaps the Sleeping Beauty recently awakened?”
“I’m Athalie Greensleeve.”
“Lady Greensleeves! I knew you were somebody quite as distinguished as you are beautiful. Would you mind saying to Mr. Greensleeve that there is much moaning on the bar, and that it will still continue until he arrives to instil the stillness of the still—”
“What?”
“We merely want a drink, my child. Don’t look so seriously and distractingly pretty. I was joking, that’s all. Please tell your father how very thirsty we are.”
As the child turned to obey, C. Bailey, Sr., put one big arm around her shoulders: “I didn’t mean to tease you on such short acquaintance,” he whispered. “Are you offended, little Lady Greensleeves?”
Athalie looked up at him in puzzled silence.
“Smile, just once, so I shall know I am forgiven,” he said. “Will you?”
The child smiled confusedly, caught the boy’s eye, and smiled again, most engagingly, at C. Bailey, Sr.’s, son.
“Oho!” exclaimed the senior Bailey laughingly and looking at his son, “I’m forgiven for your sake, am I?”
“For heaven’s sake, Clive,” protested one of the gunners, “let the little girl go and find her father. If I ever needed a drink it’s now!”
So Athalie went away to summon her father. She found him as she had last noticed h
im, sitting asleep on the big leather office chair. Ledlie, behind the desk, was still reading his soiled newspaper, which he continued to do until Athalie cried out something in a frightened voice. Then he laid aside his paper, blinked at her, got up leisurely and shuffled over to where his partner was sitting dead on his leather chair.
The duck-hunters left that night. One after another the four gentlemen came over to speak to Athalie and to her sisters. There was some confusion and crowding in the hallway, what with the doctor, the undertaker’s assistants, neighbours, and the New York duck-hunters.
Ledlie ventured to overcharge them on the bill. As nobody objected he regretted his moderation. However, the taking off of Greensleeve helped business in the bar where sooner or later everybody drifted.
When the four-seated livery wagon drove up to take the gunning party to the train, the boy lingered behind the others and then hurried back to where Athalie was standing, white-faced, tearless, staring at the closed door of the room where they had taken her father.
Bailey Junior’s touch on her arm made her turn: “I am sorry,” he said. “I hope you will not be very unhappy.... And — here is a Christmas present—”
He took the dazed child’s icy little hand in his, and, fumbling the business rather awkwardly, he finally contrived to snap a strap-watch over the delicate wrist. It was the one he had been wearing.
“Good-bye, Athalie,” he murmured, very red.
The girl gazed at him out of her lovely confused eyes for a moment. But when she tried to speak no sound came.
“Good-bye,” he said again, choking slightly. “I’ll surely, surely come back to see you. Don’t be unhappy. I’ll come.”
But it was many years before he returned to the Hotel Greensleeve.
CHAPTER IV
SHE was fifteen years old before she saw him again. His strap-watch was still on her wrist; his memory, unfaded, still enshrined in her heart of a child, for she was as yet no more than that at fifteen. And the moment she saw him she recognised him.
It was on the Sixth Avenue Elevated Station at Twenty-third Street one sunny day in April; he stood waiting for the downtown train which she stepped out of when it stopped.
He did not notice her, so she went over to him and called him by name; and the tall, good-looking, fashionably dressed young fellow turned to her without recognition.
But the next instant his smooth, youthful face lighted up, and off came his hat with the gay college band adorning it:
“Athalie Greensleeve!” he exclaimed, showing his pleasure unmistakably.
“C. Bailey, Junior,” she rejoined as steadily as she could, for her heart was beating wildly with the excitement of meeting him and her emotions were not under full control.
“You have grown so,” he said with the easy, boyish cordiality of his caste, “I didn’t recognise you for a moment. Tell me, do you still live down — er — down there?”
She said:
“I knew you as soon as I set eyes on you. You are very much taller, too.... No, we went away from Spring Pond the year after my father died.”
“I see,” he said sympathetically. And back into his memory flashed that scene with her by the stove in the dusky bar. And then he remembered her as she stood in her red hood and cloak staring at the closed door of the room where her dead father lay. And he remembered touching her frosty little hand, and the incident of the watch.
“I never went back there,” he mused, half to himself, looking curiously at the girl before him. “I wanted to go — but I never did.”
“No, you never came back,” she said slowly.
“I couldn’t. I was only a kid, you see. My mother wouldn’t let me go there that summer. And father and I joined a club down South so we did not go back for the duck-shooting. That is how it happened.”
She nodded, gravely, but said nothing to him about her faith in his return, how confidently, how patiently she had waited through that long, long summer for the boy who never returned.
“I did think of you often,” he volunteered, smiling at her.
“I thought of you, too. I hoped you would come and let me teach you to sail a boat.”
“That’s so! I remember now. You were going to show me how.”
“Have you learned to sail a boat?”
“No. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Athalie, I’ll come down this summer—”
“But I don’t live there any more.”
“That’s so. Where do you live?”
She hesitated, and his eyes fell for the first time from her youthful and engaging face to the clothes she wore — black clothes that seemed cheap even to a boy who had no knowledge of feminine clothing. She was all in rusty black, hat, gloves, jacket and skirt; and the austere and slightly mean setting made the contrast of her hair and skin the more fresh and vivid.
“I live,” she replied diffidently, “with my two sisters in West Fifty-fourth Street. I am stenographer and typewriter in the offices of a department store.”
“I’d like to come to see you,” he said impulsively. “Shall I — when vacation begins?”
“Are you still at school?”
He laughed: “I’m at Harvard. I’m down for Easter just now. Tell me, Athalie, would you care to have me come to see you when I return?”
“If you would care to come.”
“I surely would!” he said cordially, offering his hand in adieu— “I want to ask you a lot of questions and we can talk over all those jolly old times,” — as though years of comradeship lay behind them instead of an hour or two. Then his glance fell on the slim hand he was shaking, and he saw the strap-watch which he had given her still clasped around her wrist.
“You wear that yet? — that old shooting-watch of mine!” he laughed.
“‘I’m glad I saw you,’ said the girl; ‘I hope you won’t forget me.’”
She smiled.
“I’ll give you a better one than that next Christmas,” he said, taking out a little notebook and pencil. “I’ll write it down— ‘strap-watch for Athalie Greensleeve next Christmas’ — there it is! And — will you give me your address?”
She gave it; he noted it, closed his little Russia-leather book with a snap, and pocketed it.
“I’m glad I saw you,” said the girl; “I hope you won’t forget me. I am late; I must go — I suppose—”
“Indeed I won’t forget you,” he assured her warmly, shaking the slender black-gloved hand again.
He meant it when he said it. Besides she was so pretty and frank and honest with him. Few girls he knew in his own caste were as attractive; none as simple, as direct.
He really meant to call on her some day and talk things over. But days, and weeks, and finally months slipped away. And somehow, in thinking of her and of his promise, there now seemed very little left for them to talk about. After all they had said to each other nearly all there was to be said, there on the Elevated platform that April morning. Besides he had so many, many things to do; so many pleasures promised and accepted, visits to college friends, a fishing trip with his father, — really there seemed to be no hour in the long vacation unengaged.
He always wanted to see her when he thought of her; he really meant to find a moment to do it, too. But there seemed to be no moment suitable.
Even when he was back in Cambridge he thought about her occasionally, and planned, vaguely, a trip to New York so that he might redeem his promise to her.
He took it out in thinking.
At Christmas, however, he sent her a wrist-watch, a dainty French affair of gold and enamel; and a contrite note excusing himself for the summer delinquencies and renewing his promise to call on her.
The Dead Letter Office returned watch and letter.
CHAPTER V
THERE was a suffocating stench of cabbage in hallway and corridor as usual when Athalie came in that evening. She paused to rest a tired foot on the first step of the stairway, for a moment or two, quietly breathing her fatigue, then addressed herself
to the monotonous labour before her, which was to climb five flights of unventilated stairs, let herself into the tiny apartment with her latch-key, and immediately begin her part in preparing the evening meal for three.
Doris, now twenty-one, sprawled on a lounge in her faded wrapper reading an evening paper. Catharine, a year younger, stood by a bureau, some drawers of which had been pulled out, sorting over odds and ends of crumpled finery.
“Well,” remarked Doris to Athalie, as she came in, “what do you know?”
“Nothing,” said Athalie listlessly.
Doris rattled the evening paper: “Gee!” she commented, “it’s getting to be something fierce — all these young girls disappearing! Here’s another — they can’t account for it; her parents say she had no love affair—” And she began to read the account aloud while Catharine continued to sort ribbons and Athalie dropped into a big, shabby chair, legs extended, arms pendant.
When Doris finished reading she tossed the paper over to Athalie who let it slide from her knees to the floor.
“Her picture is there,” said Doris. “She isn’t pretty.”
“Isn’t she?” yawned Athalie.
Catharine jerked open another drawer: “It’s always a man’s doing. You bet they’ll find that some fellow had her on a string. What idiots girls are!”
“I should worry,” remarked Doris. “Any fresh young man who tries to get me jingled will wish he hadn’t.”
“Don’t talk that way,” remonstrated Athalie.
“What way?”
“That slangy way you think is smart. What’s the use of letting down when you know better.”
“What’s the use of keeping up on fifteen per? I could do the Gladys to any Percy on fifty. My talk suits my wages — and it suits me, too.... God! — I suppose it’s fried ham again to-night,” she added, jumping up and walking into the kitchenette. And, pausing to look back at her sisters: “If any Johnny asks me to-night I’ll go! — I’m that hungry for real food.”
“Don’t be a fool,” snapped Catharine.
Athalie glanced at the alarm clock, passed her hands wearily across her eyes, and rose: “It’s after six, Doris. You haven’t time for anything very much.” And she went into the kitchenette.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 776