Strange Yesterday (24 page)

6

A
FTER
that, there was another day, and, in an effortless manner, another—so that one never looked ahead, but often looked back and wondered whether time had been at all. Summer rounded off into autumn, and after that the short winter, and after that spring again; and suddenly—so suddenly—it was two years.

And knowing it, he said to himself that it could not have been two years, that surely he had been here no more than days, and that if he were taller, and broader, and browner, and she, Inez, was a woman, it was insidious witchery, and nothing that one might rightly know. All of it was very curious.

Unless—he were in the garden, and then he knew that it was two years, and he knew the way of its being so. And it was because of the garden that he set off one morning in late April to the main road, that he might flag an automobile and ride into Charleston. Before noon he arrived in Charleston. Until the sun was overhead he walked about, finding that his footsteps led him always to the docks, where he sat for a while dangling his legs above the water. But by and by he tired of that, and he sought his destination, a shop before which a chocolate-clad soldier stood, bayonet fixed, and before which there was a large, flamboyant poster of a robust woman clad in an outlandish conglomeration of red, blue, and white, having abundant hips and good breasts, and bearing in hand a torch streaming instead of flame the word liberty. There was reading to some length beneath her low skirt, but he scarce gave the details a glance, though he allowed his eyes to shine with genuine admiration for the hips and breasts of liberty. Then he said to the soldier, who was studying him appraisingly:

“Is this where I enlist?”

“How old are you, kid?” the man with the rifle inquired.

“Nineteen.”

“You don't look it. Go inside and talk to the officer at the desk.”

He went in, and, in a bit less than an hour, he came out, brushed back his hair, and started off down the street. Gazing after him, the soldier shook his head.

Almost immediately, he got a lift, returning to the house in time for a late lunch, during which Mary scolded petulantly. But, somehow, he did not mind her scolding, even when she called him the poorest white trash; and, as he ate, he glanced often at Mary, noticing that after all her yellow face was more pleasant than unpleasant. She fitted in well with the kitchen, which had the same scornful air, saying, in the same petulant manner, that there was not another such kitchen, as perhaps there was not.

And, looking about, he knew that he loved the kitchen more than any room in the house. It was warm, the kitchen, in spite of its bare stone walls, laughing often, smiling more. There was a stove, but it was an innovation which the rest of the room regarded with distinct hostility, especially the hearth. The hearth was large, commanding the kitchen. Into the wall it curled, and under the chimney to the receding fireplace. And to the very edge of the fireplace there was a narrow bench, curving in on either side, upon which one could sit while gazing into the flames. There were smoke-blackened iron hooks above the hearth, used rarely now, except when there was an extra large roast to be made, or an extra large pot of apples or peaches to be stewed. And across the very center of the hearth-space swung an old and mighty beam, dry, worm-holed, dusky with the smoke of a thousand fires; when one came in from a rain, wet, cold and tired, one pulled off one's coat and slung it across that beam, and then sat upon the bench underneath it breathing in the pungent steam. And before the hearth, the flagstoned floor was black, a blackness no amount of rubbing could remove.

There were other beams, and they flung themselves from one side of the kitchen to the other, and all sorts of pots and hams and netted pork hung from them.

In the kitchen there were three windows, set as high as one's head, broad, and draped with starched blue curtains. And the door was small and old and weathered as the beams. Altogether, it was a good kitchen, brown and oldish, very much the commoner, and, indeed, the only commoner in the place. Warm in winter, cool in summer, it was a spot to sympathize with a troubled heart or a troubled body. He would be rather more o sorry to leave it than any other part of the house. Perhaps if there were more of this, and the garden were not so sure of itself—

But one does not think of that now.

Finished with his lunch, he had the woodpile. He went out and laid his ax to the logs, feeling a tense satisfaction in the way the chips flew, in the spring of the ash handle, in the sweat that was gathering and running down his brow. As he finished and began to pile the split kindling, Inez appeared, standing by, and regarding him in that half-humorous, knowing manner of hers.

“Don't go way,” he cried to her. “I'll be through in a moment.”

He was staring at Inez, noticing her with new and curious interest, and thinking to himself that her blue eyes were the bluest he had ever seen in a face so dark. For a few weeks she had been north, and, strange to say, he had not missed her or wished for her return. But now that he was looking at her, it occurred to him that she was different, and yet, much the same. Her bosom was fuller, but she was still slim, with the same illusion of translucency about her. On another, her face would have been lean and haggard, for there were slight hollows in the cheeks, and the lips were rounded, but not full. Her color was more of a faint violet than pink, a violet that reflected much of the blue in her eyes. And the massed, unbound hair that fell to her shoulders in a broad circle intensified the narrowness of her countenance. Were it not for her eyes, the slope of her face would have been almost feline.

Small and frail she was; and he thought that there might be much in her of what her grandmother had been.

Through with the wood, he went over to her, a new and rather eager expression upon his face, a self-confidence that he could not always bring to bear in her presence. “Come, let's walk,” he said to her.

“And where?” she asked him.

“Steer's Head.”

A quick, quizzical smile broke over her lips as she turned and looked at him; and she nodded eagerly. “Yes. I haven't been up there for—ever so long.”

Hesitantly he said: “I want to look at the sea—again.”

And as though she understood, she walked by his side without answering. They walked until they came to the stone wall that made a great semicircle with the hedge, and they turned onto it, going alongside of it to, the green height of the hedge. Now they went slowly, their shoulders brushing, turning, as the road upon the other side did, with every movement of the hedge; and, keeping in that direction, they came at last to the hill called Steer's Head. Up the same path they went, climbing without haste, and at last they came out on the smooth top where the oak tree stood in lone splendor. In the cool shade of its branches, they paused, letting the breeze whisper to them. Straight they stood, and taut, listening, and both of them gazing to the faint difference of blue that told of the sea.

Then, without speaking, as by common and known consent, they turned and walked down the hill. Through the grass they went, and through the brush, following the windings of the trail, returning finally to the level ground. With measured lack of haste they crossed back to the house.

When they were opposite the stone wall, they stopped, and with what was almost a burst of laughter at the sameness of their thoughts, they sank to the grass beneath a tree.

“I am tired,” she said.

They were sitting at the brink of the last slope; from where they were, in gentle, scarcely perceptible movement, the ground swept down to the house, and they could just look over the hedge and into the garden. The house itself was cut into a pattern by trees—the trees nearest them, that is, for those puff-balls of blossom at the side of the house seemed upon a level with the ground. And upon the other side was the pasture, dropping to the hedge and the road; and on the side opposite that the strip of brush that hid them from their nearest' neighbor, giving them a sort of isolation.

The sun was sinking. Already it had turned the green sides of Steer's Head to darkness, and in a little while it would swing away to one side and set. As always with the twilight, a breeze had come up, playing over the fields, grass and leaves dancing with it, blossoms falling in a facetious imitation of snow.

And the grass that swept off to the house was burnished. Nothing is quite as lovely as a sweep of burnished grass, the green assuming all sorts of impossible colors, a blending that would shock the heart of the most renegade artist; the trees were burnished, too; the roof of the house quivered with light.

“It is very beautiful,” he mused. “Always it is beautiful, but to-night, somehow, it is more beautiful than ever.”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly.

In a decidedly matter-of-fact way, he said: “I suppose you know and have known that I love you.”

“I knew—for two years now,” she answered—in the same matter-of-fact way.

“Then I suppose it will do just as well not to say all those silly things I had planned.”

“Perhaps you could try,” she smiled, not looking at him.

Abruptly changing the tone of his voice, he said: “I went to Charleston today.”

“I had wondered where you disappeared to.”

“I enlisted in the army. It is curious that I should have chosen to-day, for the detachment leaves for camp to-morrow.”

She did not speak. She turned, and was looking full into his eyes, her lips attempting to form themselves into a smile that would tell him she knew it for a rather forlorn and bitter jest. What little blood there was in her face drained away; and the white leaped from her dark hair. Reaching forth a hand, she caught it in his blouse.

“That is not so,” she declared firmly.

“But it is, Inez. To-morrow I am leaving. That is why I told you to-night that I love you. I love you, Inez, but I would not have said that—ever, perhaps. Now I can. Don't you see, Inez, that this changes everything?”

“What was there to change?” she pleaded.

“Inez, this was the only way to reach for the stars, and I took it.” (Could he tell her of the garden? How could she understand that?) “I enlisted, and now I can say that I love you. Do you love me, Inez?”

“You didn't know?”

“Inez—Inez—Inez, what are you saying?”

“I love you, John Preswick. Will you tell me now that I am a fool, and that you are not going away?”

In silence he stared before him to the slope, to the house, to the garden. The sun was a little lower, and the burnished surface of the grass was losing its sheen; but further east the sky had taken on a gamut of color, and it was burning like a mirror opposite a fire.

“I am going. But I did not think it would be this way; I thought you would—”

“You thought I would be happy. You thought I would cheer you on and tell you to die. I would—but I love you, John Preswick.”

“You do not—cannot—understand.”

“But I do understand! Why have you done it? Why must, you go off and be killed? You are only a boy. You will be killed, while they wave their flags. I know. But there are others. They do not need you.”

“Inez,” he said softly, “I will not be killed. I will come back, and then, perhaps, you will understand why I went. When I come back, Inez, I shall not go again. Then, for the rest of my life, I will be here—and I will be happy. But now I could not be happy, Inez. If you will only try to understand. It is many things, but most of all, it is the spell that hangs in the garden. Don't laugh at me, Inez. It is something real, and that I am afraid of. So I am going to the war, Inez, and who knows what shall happen? But I will not die. I will come back, and then—

“Inez,” he said suddenly, “will you marry me?”

(But how could he ask this madness of her?)

“Inez, I am nobody, but I love you. That is what I had planned to say, Inez, and after all, I am saying it. It is the usual thing to say, but, God, how true it is! Tell me, Inez.”

She said: “Why, yes. Of course I will marry you.”

“Then you'll wait, Inez?”

“Have I not always waited?” she whispered. “Yes, I'll wait, Johnny.” But she had not called him that ever before; always it had been, half mockingly, John Preswick.

“Inez, I'll come back. I swear to you that I will come back, Inez. But I must go, Inez, because it is calling. I cannot always look at the sea. If you were a man, Inez, and you looked at the sea, you would know what I mean. Now, Inez, tell me that you are not sorry.”

“I am not, Johnny.”

“Inez, look at me, and we will take a pledge that while the other lives, we will wait. Is that childish, Inez? But here, take my hand.”

She took his hand; and then, with the quickness of thought, she was in his arms, a small, frightened bit of hair and flesh, and he was kissing her, and stroking her trembling hands, and feeling the soft giving of her breast against his.

7

T
HEN
they did not speak. His back was to the bole of the tree, and, her small body clutched in his arms, she lay against his breast, her hair to his face. There was a perfume to her hair that he drank in, breathing it deep, and sometimes running his hand over the dark surface to stir it to life. Her hair formed a rimmed crown about her face, and, beneath it, he could just see the edge of her features, thinner, more wan than ever. But they lit with a flush that had crept up from her lips, dispelled the violet, and painted her skin with life-color. It was the color of red wine when it runs upon white.

And now the sun had passed to one side of the Steer's Head, dipping and touching the hedge itself, so that all along the green surface a fire danced, a transient fire that faded and disappeared even as they watched it. Through the hedge the sun shone, like fire through a gnome-made lattice, briefly—and then it was gone, and twilight had come, and to the east lingered the soft illusion of a reflected sun. Thin strips of cloud flung themselves east and west, as though a careless painter had daubed with water color long, graceful strokes.