Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

well and was stopping on with Paula for a day or two.

"He's taken over my job," she concluded mischievously, "maid, chauffeur and chaperon. Paula doesn't mind now that she's made such an enormous hit and she doesn't sing again until Thursday. Pete will take you in the big car to Durham."

"Well, that's Heaven's mercy," exclaimed Miss Wollaston. "I don't like to drive with Sylvia in any car and I don't like riding in a Ford no matter who drives. But Sylvia driving a Ford--her own car's broken down somehow--is simply frightful."

"She's waiting for me now," said Mary, "to take me out to the hay field. I must run before she grows any more impatient."

And run was precisely what she did, down the slope to where Sylvia awaited her, a lighter-hearted creature altogether than she had supposed this morning that it was possible for her to be.

She got an explanation of the piano from Sylvia. She had gone with Rush and Mr. March to an auction sale late Saturday afternoon at a farm three or four miles away. Just for a lark. They hadn't meant seriously to buy anything. But this old piano, Mr. March having sworn that he would make it play despite the fact that half the keys wouldn't go down at all and the rest when they did made only the most awful noises, they had bought for eleven dollars, and had fetched home in the truck on Sunday.

"I think he's terribly nice," Sylvia confided. "You know him, don't you? He's quite old, of course.--Well, over thirty he says; but he's awfully--don't you know--well preserved. There are a whole lot of things he can do."

Mary laughed. "That is remarkable. How old are you, you nice young thing? Going on six? Lookout! You'll smash the lemonade!"

"We're going to surprise them," Sylvia announced when they had arrived, miraculously without disaster, at the northeast eighty. They had careened through the wagon gate and halted under an oak tree at the edge of the field. "I'll go and tell them I've brought the lemonade, but I won't say anything about you. You keep out of sight behind the tree. Then Graham won't want to go and brush his hair."

It startled Mary to realize that she had forgotten all about Graham. Not even the sight of his sister had recalled the--highly special nature of the state of things between them nor suggested the need for preparing an attitude to greet him with. At all events she wouldn't follow Sylvia's suggestion and pop out at him from behind a tree.

He was, it happened, the first person the child encountered in her flight across the field; the others, indistinguishable at that distance, were in a group a little farther away. Mary walked out to meet him when she saw him coming toward her and competently gave the encounter its tone by beginning to talk to him--about how hot it was and how nice the hay smelled and how good it seemed to be back here at Hickory Hill--while they were still a good twenty paces apart. You couldn't strike any sort of sentimental note very well when you had to begin at a shout. Then she led him back to the lemonade, gave him a cigarette and answered at length and with a good deal of spontaneous vivacity his obligatory questions about Paula and the opening of the Ravinia season.

She was in the full tide of this--and was, since she had sat down upon a small boulder Graham had insisted she take possession of, screened by the trunk of the tree--when Sylvia hailed her brother from, not very far away with the statement that Rush wouldn't stop for anything or anybody until once more around the field. It was March, then, who was audibly coming along with her. Mary rose, broke off about Paula, and moved the single step it needed to give her sight of him.

She saw nothing else but him. She saw his head go back as from the actual impact of the sight of her. She saw the look, unmistakable as a blast from a trumpet, that flamed into his face. And then her world swam. Paula wasn't singing now, "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" Nor could Paula come upon him now, from anywhere, and take him by the shoulders and kiss his cheek and lead him away with her. This moment was not Paula's--whatever the other had been.

And the rest, standing there looking on, hadn't seen the bolt fall! They were talking as idly and easily as if this were nothing but a hot summer afternoon in the hay field.

"I told him," she heard Sylvia saying, "that there was another nice old person he knew here with the lemonade, who thought I was only about six.--Were you surprised when you saw who she was?--I'm going to take him back to the apple house with us, now that Mary's come, so that he can have the piano ready to dance by to-night." This last, apparently, to Graham.

She even heard herself join in,--the voice was hers anyhow--when Graham, commenting upon the view across the field, remarked that it was so intensely farm-like that it had almost the look of a stage setting.

"It is like something," she said then. "It's like the first act of _Le Chemineau_. We ought to have a keg of cider instead of two jugs of lemonade and we should have brought it in a wheelbarrow instead of in the Ford."

"Well, we couldn't take Mr. March back in a wheelbarrow," Sylvia said, "so I'm glad it isn't the first act of whatever-you-call-it. Because he's simply got to fix the piano well enough for jazz."

Mary couldn't remember that he spoke a word, but he got into the back seat of the Ford with her when Sylvia slid under the wheel.

"If you'll promise," Sylvia said to March at the end of the breathless mile back to the apple house, "if you'll promise to go straight to work at it and never stop until it'll play the _Livery Stable Blues_, then I'll go back to the hay field and see that Rush gets some of the lemonade before those laborers drink it all up. You'll see to him, won't you, Mary? Stand right over him and be severe, so that we can dance to-night. You aren't as excited about it as you ought to be. I think I'll come in and start him."

And this she did while the Ford executed a little jazz rhythm of its own outside. She didn't stay more than a minute or two though. When she saw him fairly occupied, tools in hand, over his task, she darted away again with a last injunction to severity upon Mary.

She had seen nothing. The two were left alone.

Mary sat where she could watch his fine skilled hands at work. The negligent precision with which they accomplished their varied tasks occupied her, made it possible to continue for a while the silence she needed until her world should have stopped swimming; until the blindness of that revelation should have passed.

She had been wrong about him again. He was not an Olympian. (But, of course, Olympians themselves weren't, if it came to that; not always.) He could never, she had been telling herself since that day when they had had their one talk together, belong to any one. He did not--save himself up for special people. He was just there, the same for everybody, like, she had half humorously observed to her father, a public drinking fountain.

If that was the rule, she, Mary Wollaston, was the exception to it. Not Paula with her opulent armory, but she who had listened with him, clinging to him, while Paula sang; she, who had talked to him while Paula fought for her husband's life; she, whom he had come upon in the shade of the oak tree at the edge of the hay field; she who sat near him, silent now. This was the meager total that outweighed those uncounted hours of Paula's. Somehow she had acquired a special significance for him.

Was she trying to evade saying that he had fallen in love with her. What was the good--except that it sounded sweet--of using a phrase which could be packed like a hand-bag with anything you chose to put into it? Graham was in love with her. That boy in New York, whom she had found in a panic of lonely terror lest he should prove a coward in the great ordeal he was facing overseas had been for a few hours in love with her. What would be the content of the phrase for a man like this?

Was she in love with him? Her thoughts up to now had been deep, submerged, almost formless, but this question came to the surface and touched her lips with a smile. Well, and what did the phrase mean to her?

All she could think of as she sat so still watching him, was those fine hands of his, working as skillfully and swiftly as her father's ever worked but at this humble task. She kept her eyes away for just a little longer from his face. She wanted those hands. She wanted them with an intensity that made it impossible at last to let the silence endure any longer.

"Paula..." she said, and stopped in sheer surprise that her voice had come at all; then began again, "Paula wanted you to tune her piano. At Ravinia. I was angry, at that, until she reminded me that you wouldn't be."

His hand laid down the small, odd shaped tool it held, but the next moment picked it up again.

"I shouldn't have minded tuning her piano," he told her.

"I know," she said. "I knew as soon as I had had a minute in which to--gather you up. And when I had done that, I helped her try to find you. I had a special reason, a different one from Paula's, for hoping that we could. And for my reason," she went on, trembling a little and finding it harder to make her words come steadily, "it isn't--yet, too late.

"You see if you were there with her where she could see you every day--there'd be a lot of pianos there she said; enough to keep you going--she'd remember you again. She is like that. Lots of people are, I suppose. When she doesn't see you, she forgets. But if she remembered how much she liked you and how good your opera was,--the real one, the one you wrote for yourself--she might do something about it.--To get it played--so that you could hear it. Now that she's had a great success, she could do almost anything quite easily, I think. Infinitely more than I. I've been trying, but I haven't got very far."

He laid down the tool once more and locked his hands together. "You have been trying?" he repeated. The tension, like the grip of his hands, was drawing up almost unbearably.

"There's a French baritone there, Fournier, who could play your officer's part. As you meant it to be played, I think. But he doesn't sing in English. I thought it might be possible, if you didn't mind its being sung in French, to translate it. That's one of the things I've been--trying to do."

And then with a gasp and a sob, "Oh, don't,--don't hurt them like that!" she reached out and took the hands she wanted.

He responded to the caress, as before, so quickly that one could hardly have known where it began; only Mary did know. She looked