"Oh, I know that! Nothing could hurt him, but I"ll miss the skeesicks."
He ruminated, then said pridefully: "That boy is what my son would have been if I"d had one. You can"t tell me any son of my get and raising would have talked about his reactions when this time come!"
Winona winced ever so slightly at this way of putting it, but smiled valiantly.
"Publishing magazines full of slander about George Washington, and this new kind of stubby-ended poetry!"
"It is very different from Tennyson," said Winona.
"The other one"s a man," went on Sharon. "You remember when you was worried because he wouldn"t settle down to anything? Well, you watch him from now on! He hasn"t got the book knowledge, but he"s got a fine outdoors education, and that"s the kind we need most. Don"t you see that fine look in his eye--afraid of nothing, knowing how to do most anything? His is the kind makes us a great country--outdoor boys from the little towns and farms. They"re the real folks. I"m awful proud of him, though I ain"t wanting that to get out on me. I been watching him since he was in short pants. He"s dependable--knows how. Say, I"m glad he took to the outdoors and didn"t want to dress up every day and be a clerk in a store or a bank or some place like that. Wasn"t it good?"
"Wasn"t it?" said Winona, bravely.
"We need this kind in war, and we"ll need it even more when the war is over--when he comes back."
"When he comes back," echoed Winona. And then with an irrelevance she could not control: "I"m going to a dance with him to-night." Her own eyes were dancing strangely as she declared it.
"Good thing!" said Sharon. He looked her over shrewdly. "Seems to me you"re looking younger than you ought to," he said.
Winona pouted consciously for the first time in her hitherto honest life.
"You"re looking almighty girlish," added Sharon with almost a leer, and Winona suffered a fearful apprehension that her ribs were menaced by his alert thumb. She positively could not be nudged in public. She must draw the line somewhere, even if she had led him on by pouting. She stepped quickly to the door of the Elite Bootery.
"He"ll come back all right," said Sharon. "Say, did I ever tell you how he got me to shootin" a good round of golf? I tried it first with the wooden bludgeons, and couldn"t ever make the little round lawns under seven or eight--parties snickering their fool heads off at me. So I says I can never make the bludgeons. .h.i.t right. I don"t seem to do more"n hara.s.s the ball into "em, so he says try an iron all the way. So I tried the iron utensils, and now I get on the lawn every time in good shape, I can tell you. Parties soon begun to snicker sour all at once, I want you to know. It ain"t anything for me to make that course in ninety-eight or"--Sharon"s conscience called aloud--"or a hundred and ten or fifteen or thereabouts, in round numbers."
"I"m so glad," said Winona.
"I give him all the credit. And"--he turned after starting on--"he"ll come back--he"ll come back to us!"
Winona drew a fortifying breath and plunged into the Elite Bootery. She was perhaps more tight-lipped than usual, but to the not-too-acute observer this would have betokened mere businesslike determination instead of the panic it was. She walked grimly to a long bench, seated herself, and placed her right foot firmly upon a pedestal, full in the gaze of a clerk who was far too young, she instantly perceived, for negotiations of this delicacy.
"I wish to purchase," she began through slightly relaxed lips, "a pair of satin dancing slippers like those in your window--high-heeled, one strap, and possibly with those jewelled buckles." She here paused for another breath, then continued tremendously: "Something in a shade to go with--with these!"
With dainty brazenness the small hand at her knee obeyed an amazing command from her disordered brain and raised the neat brown skirt of Winona a full two inches, to reveal a slim ankle between which and an ogling world there gleamed but the thinnest veneer of tan silk.
Winona waited breathless. She had tortured herself with the possible consequences of this adventure. She had even conceived a clerk of forbidding aspect who would now austerely reply: "Woman, how dare you come in here and talk that way? You who have never worn anything but black cotton stockings, or lisle at the worst, and whose most daring footwear has been a neat Oxford tie with low heels, such as respectable women wear? Full well you know that a love for the sort of finery you now describe--and reveal--is why girls go wrong. And yet you come shamelessly in here--no, it is too much! You forget yourself! Leave the place at once!"
Sometimes this improvisation had concluded with a homily in kinder words, in which she would be entreated to go forth and try to be a better woman. And sometimes, but not often, she had decided that a shoe clerk, no matter his age, would take her request as a mere incident in the day"s trade. Other women wore such things, and perforce must buy them in a public manner. She had steeled her nerve to the ordeal, and now she flushed with a fine new confidence, for the clerk merely said, "Certainly, madam"--in the later shops of Newbern they briefly called you madam--and with a kind of weary, professional politeness fell to the work of equipping her. A joyous relief succeeded her panic. She not only declared a moment later that her instep was far too high, but fitted at last in a slipper of suitable shade she raised her skirt again as she posed before a mirror that reached the floor. Winona was coming on. Had come!
Late that afternoon, while a last bit of chiffon was being tacked to a dancing frock which her mother had been told to make as fancy as she pleased, Winona hastily scribbled in her journal: "Am I of a gay disposition? Too gay, too volatile? No matter! It is an agreeable defect where one retains discretion sufficient for its regulation. This very night I am one of a party avowedly formed for pleasure, something my reflective mind would once have viewed with disapprobation. But again no matter. Perhaps I have been too a.n.a.lytical, too introspective. Perhaps the war has confused my sense of spiritual values. War is such a mistake!"
It was a flushed and sparkling Winona who later fluttered down the dull old stairs of the respectable Penniman home at the call of the waiting Wilbur Cowan. Her dark hair was still plainly, though rather effectively, drawn about her small head--she had definitely rebuffed the suggestion of her mother that it be marcelled--but her wisp of a frock of bronze gossamer was revolutionary in the extreme. Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising _aplomb_, bore the scrutiny of the family while she pulled long white gloves along her bare arms. A feathered fan dangled from one of them.
"Now, I guess you believe me," said Mrs. Penniman. "Haven"t I always said what a few little touches would do for you?" Proudly she adjusted a filmy flounce to a better line. "And such lovely, lovely slippers!"
The slippers were indeed to be observed by one and all. The short dancing frock was in that year.
Wilbur Cowan was appreciative.
"Some kid!" he cried; "an eyeful!"
Winona pouted for the second time that day, instead of rebuking him for these low phrases of the street. Only Judge Penniman caviled.
"Well, I"d like to know what we"re coming to," he grumbled. "The idee of a mere chit like her goin" out to a place that"s no better than a saloon, even if you do guzzle your drinks at a table--and in a dug-out dress!"
Winona, instead of feeling rebuked, was gratified to be called a mere chit. She pouted at the invalid.
"Poor father!" she loftily murmured, and stood while her mother threw the evening cloak about her acceptable shoulders.
It was true that at the La Boheme alcoholic stimulant would be served to those who desired it, but this was not compulsory, and the place was in no sense a common saloon. Her father was old-fashioned, as he had shown himself to be about the lawless new dance steps that Wilbur had been teaching her. He had declared that if people performed such antics in public without music they"d mighty soon find themselves in the lockup, and Winona had not even shuddered. Now, as he continued to grumble at this degeneracy, she gracefully tapped his arm with her fan. She had read of this device being effectively employed by certain conquerors of men, and coolly she tried it upon her father. She performed the trifle gracefully, and it seemed of value audacious and yet nothing to be misunderstood by a really clean-minded man. She tapped the judge again as they left, with a minor variation of the technic. The judge little knew that he but served as a dummy at target practice.
The car in which Wilbur conveyed his guest to the scene of revelry was not of an elegance commensurate with Winona"s. It was a mongrel of many makes, small, battered, and of a complaining habit. He had acquired it as a gift from one who considered that he bestowed trash, and had transformed it into a thing of noisy life, knowing, as a mother knows of her infant, what each of its squeaks and rattles implied. It was distressing, in truth, to look upon, but it went. Indeed, the proud owner had won a race with it from a too-outspoken critic who drove a much superior car. It was Wilbur Cowan who first in Newbern discovered that you could speed up a car by dropping a few moth b.a.l.l.s into the gasoline tank. He called his car the Can, but, unreasonably, was not too cordial to others using the name.
The Can bore the pair to a fretful halt under the newest electric lights on River Street. "The La Boheme" read the dazzling sign. And Winona pa.s.sed into her new life. She was feeling strangely young as she relinquished her cloak to a uniformed maid. She stood amid exotic splendour, and was no longer herself but some regal creature in the Sunday supplement of a great city paper. She had always wanted to be a girl, but had not known how--and now at thirty-five how easy it seemed!
She preceded Wilbur to a table for two, impressive with crystal and damask, and was seated by an obsequious foreigner who brought to the act a manner that had never before in Newbern distinguished this service--when it had been performed at all.
Other tables about them were already filled with Newbern"s elect, thrilled as was Winona, concealing it as ably as she, with the town"s new distinction. Hardly had food been ordered when a hidden orchestra blared and the oblong polished s.p.a.ce of which their own table formed part of the border was thronged with dancing couples. Winona glowingly surrendered to the evil spell. Wilbur merely looked an invitation and she was dancing as one who had always danced. She tapped him with her fan as he led her back to the table where their first course had arrived. She trifled daintily with strange food, composing a sentence for her journal: "The whole scene was of a gayety hitherto unparalleled in the annals of our little town."
There was more food, interspersed with more dancing. Later Winona, after many sidewise perkings of her brown head, discovered Merle and Patricia Whipple at a neighbouring table. She nodded and smiled effusively to them. Patricia returned her greeting gayly; Merle removed a shining cigarette holder of remarkable length and bowed, but did not smile. He seemed to be aloof and gloomy.
"He"s got a lot on his mind," said Wilbur, studying his brother respectfully.
Merle"s plenteous hair, like his cigarette holder, was longer than is commonly worn by his s.e.x, and marked by a certain not infelicitous disorder. He had trouble with a luxuriant lock of it that persistently fell across his pale brow. With a weary, world-worn gesture he absently brushed this back into place from moment to moment. His thick eyegla.s.ses were suspended by a narrow ribbon of black satin. His collar was low and his loosely tied cravat was flowing of line.
"Out of condition," said Wilbur, expertly. "Looks pasty."
"But very, very distinguished," supplemented Winona.
Patricia Whipple now came to their table with something like a dance step, though the music was stilled. She had been away from Newbern for two years.
"Europe and Washington," she hurriedly explained as Wilbur held a chair for her, "and glad to get back--but I"m off again. Nurse! Begin the course next week in New York--learning how to soothe the bed of pain. I know I"m a rattlepate, but that"s what I"m going to do. All of us mad about the war."
Wilbur studied her as he had studied Merle. She was in better condition, he thought. She came only to his shoulder as he stood to seat her, but she was no longer bony. Her bones were neatly submerged. Her hair was still rusty, the stain being deeper than he remembered, and the freckles were but piquant memories. Here and there one shone faintly, like the few faint stars showing widely apart through cloud crevices on a murky night. Her nose, though no longer precisely trivial, would never be the Whipple nose. Its lines were now irrevocably set in a design far less n.o.ble. Her gown was shining, of an elusive shade that made Wilbur think of ripe fruits--chiefly apricots, he decided. She was unquestionably what she had confessed herself to be--a rattlepate. She rattled now, with a little waiting, half-tremulous smile to mark her pauses, as if she knew people would weigh and find her wanting, but hoped for judgments tempered with mercy.
"Mad about the war? I should think so! Grandpa Gideon mad, and Harvey D.--that dear thing"s going to do something at Washington for a dollar a year. You"d think it was the only honest money he"d ever earned if you heard Merle talk about bankers sucking the life blood of the people.
Juliana taking charge of something and Mother Ella mad about knitting--always tangled in yarn. She"ll be found strangled in her own work some day. And Uncle Sharon mad about the war, and fifty times madder about Merle.
"D"you see Merle"s picture in that New York paper yesterday?--all hair and eyegla.s.ses, and leaning one temple on the two first fingers of the right hand--and guess what it said--"Young millionaire socialist who denounces country"s entrance into war!" Watch him--he"s trying to look like the picture now! Uncle Sharon read the "millionaire socialist," and barked like a mad dog. He says: "Yes, he"d be a millionaire socialist if he was going to be any kind, and if he was going to be a burglar he"d have to be one of these dress-suit burglars you always read about."
"Of course he"s awfully severe on Merle for not going to fight, but how could he with his bad eyes? He couldn"t see to shoot at people, poor thing; and besides, he"s too clever to be wasted like a common soldier.
He starts people to thinking--worth-while people. He says so himself.
Mixed up with all sorts of clever things with the most wonderful names--garment workers and poet radicals and vorticists and new-arters and everything like that, who are working to lift us up so n.o.body will own anything and everybody can have what he wants. Of course I don"t understand everything they say, but it sounds good, so sympathetic, don"t you think?"
She had paused often with the little smile that implored pity for her rattlepatedness. Now it prolonged itself as the orchestra became wildly alive.
Winona had but half listened to Patricia"s chatter. She had been staring instead at the girl"s hair--staring and wondering lawlessly. She had seen advertis.e.m.e.nts. Might her own hair be like that--"like tarnished gold," she put it? Of course you had to keep putting the stuff on at the roots as it grew out. But would her colour blend with that shade?
Patricia"s skin had the warm fairness of new milk, but Winona was dusky. Perhaps a deeper tint of auburn----