Strange Yesterday (21 page)

Everything was over—all the world…. He sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands.

People passing turned and stared at him, and he thought that they knew too. He thought that their eyes said: “Murderer … murderer!”

He stood up later and began to walk. In that way, he thought, he might get away from it. But it was no use. Newspapers were everywhere. The words stared him in his face. “I killed her!” he screamed out once, and then he ran with all his might.

In the night he found a bench in a small park and sat there, sobbing and panting. Then it was that the thought came. A life for a life….

He said to himself: “Now, John Preswick, you too are dead.” And the thought of the sacrifice eased his pain. He would never come back. It was over, as Lucille Croyden had said it would be. And she was dead too.

Far off to the east was a place called Steer's Horn….

2

A
LEG
thrown over the stone fence, the boy paused, his head tilted, his nostrils spread and drinking in the air, as though the atmosphere of the field he looked into were newer and cleaner than the one his foot rested upon. Slowly, still staring before him, he drew himself entirely up on the fence and sat there, dangling his legs. For perhaps a hundred yards the field stretched before him, to a hedge—a large, green, weathered hedge, which drifted with the rise and fall of ground until it came to a hill. Up above the rest of the landscape the hill jutted, out of place, curiously shaped, bare except for straggling underbrush and a single great oak on the very top. And away from the hill the hedge danced off—decorously, mind you—to a house. The house was small, and distance made it appear even smaller, but he could make out its shape—in the form of an overbalanced H, it was—and he could make out a garden in front of it. There the hedge took a turn about, before it went on, hemming in the garden. In the garden the trees were blossoming, and from where he was they looked like huge round snowballs.

There were half a dozen large haystacks in the field, and over to one corner of it, there were some cows. Birds skimmed slantwise from the hedge to the stone.

As he sat there, nodding his head in approval and kicking his heels against the stone, a breeze came up, blowing his hair back from his brow. His hair was badly in need of cutting, but, strangely, in him one did not mind the shagginess a great deal. It was as if the mop upon his head fitted in with the rest of him, with the overalls he wore, and the blue shirt, sleeves rolled high, beneath. He slipped to the ground, and you saw that he was slim and tall. Brown as a berry his face and his bare arms were burnt, almost matching the color of his ruddy brown hair. And underneath a pair of even brows, dark eyes lurked, and dark though they were, they caught a twinkle from the sun. His nose was short, turned a bit, and his mouth appeared eager for opportunity to smile. Upon his face, as yet unshaven, there was a blond down.

Hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, he began to saunter lazily across the field, glancing back every so often to the house, moving his head-in a characteristic gesture that was calculated to throw the hair from his eyes. At the-nearest haystack he halted, cocked his head, and then circled it, kicking it now and again with his foot. He found what he wanted, a low hole; nodding, he crawled in. Within, the space was round and dry; with a sigh of tired comfort he curled up.

There was something far and yet close about the dry interior of a haystack. It always had the warm scent of cows mingled with the crisp odor of hay; it was fairly smooth, and there were bits of hay to pluck forth and fumble with. Warm, it was, restful and cool at the same time. Curling up, he pulled himself enough hay for a pillow, propping his head. He closed his eyes, dreamed, and listened to the rustle of the straw.

It was midday, and he had no desire to sleep. Though he was rather hungry, he thought to himself that he would not eat until evening, being quite certain that he could obtain a meal in the house he had seen along the hedge. Now he was content to lie in the hay, shielded from the sun, and to let his thoughts wander back. Curious, it was, that his thoughts always wandered back and never ahead.

He might have been there for fifteen minutes, perhaps for a bit longer, when he heard some one scream. There was another scream, a rush of steps, and the hay above him gave way, precipitating upon him something soft, but starchy, crisp, and excited. He grabbed it, squirming from beneath at the same time, while it gave out several short and uncertain cries. Then he had it firmly in his hands, finding it an indescribable mixture of smooth flesh, of starched cloth and of hair.

“Now what!” he exclaimed.

The thing wriggled and cried: “It's a bull, you ass! And stop. You are hurting me!”

Letting go, he dived through the hole into the sunlight to see directly before him, pawing the ground in majestic rage, a magnificent, brindled bull. Boy and bull stared for an instant into each other's face, each attempting to comprehend the appearance of the other; then the bull lowered his head and the boy took for the stone fence, covering ground like a slim streak. Perhaps a dozen yards before the bull, he gained the fence, and with a single swift bound, he was over it; the bull plowed up short, his head almost touching the stone. On the opposite side of the fence, the boy paused, ready to run; but, after seeing the bull nodding angrily and impotently at the wall, he came closer, until he was right upon one side of the fence, and the bull on the other. Striking an attitude, he reached out a hand to one of the horns, and when the bull flung his head, he laughed. From the field some one cried:

“Go ahead and laugh! I'd laugh too if I were across where you are!”

Something of black hair and pale blue muslin perched atop the haystack, and as he stared, he saw that it was a girl.

Half covered with wisps of hay, she perched there precariously, the hollow stack threatening to give way any moment beneath her.

“Laugh!” she yelled. “Laugh, you—you—”

“Wait there! I'll run along the wall, and then I'll make for the hedge, and when he gets to the other side of the field, you can run to the fence!”

“But you'll be hurt! You can't outrun him! Get Frank!”

“Never you mind! Do as I said!”

He sprang to the top of the wall and dashed along it away from the stack. The bull paused in indecision; but, as the boy leaped to the ground and started to cross the field, it turned and lumbered after him. The girl had slipped down from the stack; now she paused, fascinated, forgetting herself in the race between the boy and the animal. Her mouth was wide, and almost was she too excited to scream; then, suddenly, it occurred to her that the boy was not running with all his speed, that he kept before the bull with assured ease. Laughing, she cried but softly; and, as he plunged into the hedge, she turned, ran to the wall, and scrambled nimbly over it.

“Wait!” she cried to him, attempting to stretch her voice across the field. She set off for the point where the stone wall bent in and touched the hedge, half running, half walking, her breath coming short. Almost there, she met the boy, who was returning. And now her laughter vanished; she stopped, and she stared at him.

And she knew him, and he knew her, which was all as it should have been….

He stared back. His mouth, which all along had been waiting a chance to smile, broke apart, disarming her so completely that she nodded and smiled back at him. And studying her eyes, eying her steadily and frankly, it came to him that she was only a girl, and quite the loveliest girl he had ever seen—as though she could have been anything but that! Conscious of his scrutiny, she began to pluck the bits of hay from her hair and dress.

Dark hair, it was, that curled back from her shoulders in a wide circle. Her face was even browner than his; the eyes that looked out were as bright and merry as the sky. She wore a thing of starched blue, and beneath it, she appeared slim, even frail. Her arms, bare almost to the shoulder, were the color of his.

She said as she smiled: “Thank you.”

For the first time he was aware of his overalls and the shaggy mop of his hair. He brushed it from his eyes. “You shouldn't have been in that field,” he stated, a trifle sullenly, in contrast to the half-smile that still flickered upon his lips. (Now that he knew her, he was rather angry at her predicament.)

“But if one goes around it, it's so much longer,” she protested anxiously. “And besides, it is old Matthew who shouldn't have been there.”

“Who is he?”

“The bull.”

“Oh, I see. But it would pay to look where you are going. What is your name?” (He felt to himself that for some obscure reason he should know.)

“Inez.”

Leading him over to a tree, she sank upon the grass beneath it. “Tell me, what is yours?”

“My name?” But what could it be?—she was such a fool. “John Preswick.”

A puzzled light in her eyes, she stared at him; and then she nodded very slowly. “How old are you?” she asked seriously, as if it were a most proper question.

“I don't know. Seventeen, I suppose.”

Her eyes were still troubled, and she wrinkled her brow, as trying to remember.

“You're not a tramp,” she decided. “You don't speak like one—you don't at all.” In just a moment she would remember; and then her brow cleared, and she knew where she had seen him before. But he had said that his name was John Preswick. That was curious.

“If you are a tramp,” she added, cautiously and facetiously, the corners of her lips turning in and upwards, “I shouldn't be. talking with you, because if Granny knew, I'd probably have to go to bed without my supper—though she'd bring it up to me on a tray after I was abed, and scold me while I ate it. I am sixteen—but I suppose you knew that?”

“How should I know it?” he demanded truculently.

She shrugged. “I just fancied you would. It doesn't matter.”

He stared past her. She was much too assured of herself.

“Your hair is darker,” she stated abstractedly.

“You might have something better to do than to spout such utter nonsense,” he found himself thinking. But he said nothing.

But neither was she looking at him now. As he turned his head to seek out the object of her gaze, he found that she was staring very intently at the curious-shaped hill.

“Yes. Steer's Head,” she remarked, as agreeing with him. Then she said, quietly, but with remarkable frankness: “I like you. Perhaps it is because you helped me from that horrid bull, though I dare say Frank would have come had I shouted hard enough. Anyway, I'm glad you came.” She hesitated, seemed to feel about her for words:

“Do you see that hill over there, the Steer's Head? Would you like to climb it with me? There is a path that goes up and around it, and from the top you can see the ocean.” That was decidedly a finished statement.

“But aren't you afraid?” he asked her.

“Afraid?—of what?” Her blue eyes searched into his; she glanced at his overalls, and then at his dark, tousled head.

“Come,” she smiled, getting to her feet.

She walked at his side, and often he glanced at her and noticed the sharp cut of her face, the manner in which her hair folded about her shoulders. Her profile was clean, almost with a sharpness about it; had her lips not been so ready to smile, he would have thought them too thin. But it came upon him that her whole face was thin, from the point of her chin to her temples, and that the skin clung over the bridge of her nose and over her chin. It was a pleasant face, but more than that a strange face. And he did not know why it was strange, never understanding that he had and had not seen the expression elsewhere. If he had stopped to think of it, it would have occurred to him that she was a person away from him—that she belonged to the house, and that the house was as far from him as the stars were; and that that was all immeasurably wrong. But there was something to him that would not allow the thought. He walked by her side, and he accepted, as naturally as one accepts the sun, the fact that she was different. He did not question it—nor does one question the sun.

He had known a woman—not girls!

But now the wind blew in his face, curling his hair about his brow; the wind sang through the grass and through the trees; the wind took the dress of the girl who walked with him and folded its rumpled front back against her, revealing her slim; the wind took her hair and spread it from her shoulders; he opened his mouth, and the wind danced into it; the wind swam over his eyes and whispered in the air. He went on, never realizing that already his stride had become too long for the girl.

Then he saw that she was running; he stopped, laughed, and shook his head. Almost were they at the foot of the hill.

“From here look up,” she said.

He saw then that it did hold some resemblance to the head of a steer. Upon one side it jutted, making a cliff that was covered with green moss, and beneath the cliff there was a gash, and beneath the gash the hill spread out. If one had a turn for such things, and if one squinted, one could almost see a cow placidly chewing her cud. The “steer” was undoubtedly a flourish. But he agreed with her while her hand traced and explained the outline. They went around it, found the path, and began to ascend it. The path was narrow, underbrush heavy on either side, and it twisted and wound itself back and forth and back again. But she seemed to know every foot of it, and she never hesitated. Walking behind her, he could stare at her in his ease, and he drank in her hair, her straight shoulders, her slim hips. The dress fell to just below her knees. Her socks were short, her legs bare.

As they climbed higher, the underbrush and scrub growth gave way to a smooth slope covered with long grass and held by an occasional shrub. Here the path ended, and they were able to walk side by side again. She led him up over a hillock that was like an old-fashioned loaf of bread, to a great oak that stood alone and handsome. They were at the top; and underneath them the hill flowed away, to the roll of meadow and pasture, to the small house that was built in the form of an overbalanced H. A narrow road came from behind them, darted past the hedge, and slid away with the rise and fall of land. There were other houses, and at some distance he thought he could see another road.