CHAPTER XII
April is here! Jean and April together! No wonder I haven't any sense! "And the rain it raineth every day," but for just a little while at a time, and the mud smells so good afterward that you don't care. The warm air comes blowing through my window so early every morning and puts such sad, happy thoughts into my head that I have to get up and wake Jean. Then we dress and go out into the side yard, where I try to find a calecanthus in bloom that is really sweet enough to go in front of Lord Byron's picture. And I try to make Jean listen while I tell her all my sad, happy thoughts, that's what I invited her down here for, but she hardly ever listens.
"Isn't everything lovely?" I asked her this morning, after we had tiptoed through the house and out to the side porch. "And doesn't April just remind you of a right young girl, about seventeen years old, with hair made out of sunshine, and cheeks made of peach-blossoms; and eyes made out of that patch of blue sky over Mrs. West's big barn?"
That patch of sky over Mrs. West's barn takes up a heap of my time on summer afternoons when I lie close to the windows and read. It is so deep and far-off looking that I get to dreaming about Italy, and I call it the place where "Tasso's spirit soars and sings." I learned this long ago out of the Fifth Reader, and I don't know what else Tasso did besides soaring and singing.
But Jean wasn't listening to me. She had reached out and gathered a bunch of snowballs and was shaking the night before's rain off them.
"Oh, Ann," she said, "don't they remind you of willow plumes? And don't you wish we were old enough to wear them on our hats instead of sissy bows? You can get engaged in a minute if you have a willow plume on your hat!"
This seemed to remind her of something, for she spoke again the next minute.
"Say, I've never told you about Cassius, have I?"
I told her no, although I knew a little about him myself, even if he wasn't in that easy Shakespeare that Lamb wrote for kids. And she seemed to be lost in thought, so I got lost too. It never is hard for me to. I thought: "Mercy, how I have grown!" When I first commenced keeping this diary I just despised poetry, and never cared about keeping my hair tied out of my eyes, nor my hands clean. You know that age! But I soon got over that, for when you get a little bigger being in love causes you to admire poetry and also to beautify yourself. Jean and I tried very sour buttermilk (the sourer the better) to make our complexion lovely, with tansy mixed in, until it got so sour that mother said, "Whew! There must be a rat dead in the walls!" So we had to pour it out.
In looking over my past life it seems to me that I've been in love with somebody or other ever since that night so long ago, when Mammy Lou washed me and dressed me up in my tiny hemstitched clothes. And with such lovely heroes, too! When I was awfully little I used to be crazy about the prince that the mermaid rescued while Hans Christian Andersen stood on the beach and watched them. Then I loved Ben Hur from his pictures when I was ten, John Halifax when I was eleven, Lord Byron when I was twelve—I loved him then, do now, and ever shall, world without end, Amen! It is so much easier to love good-looking people than good ones! And, oh, every handsome young Moor, who ever dwelt in "the moonlit halls of the Alhambra!" Washington Irving will have a heap to answer for in the making of me. And I used to dream about "Bonny Prince Charlie," although Miss Wilburn never could hammer it into my head which one of the Stuarts he was. And actors! Well, I would try to make a list and write it on the fly-pages, only it might be a bad example to my grandchildren; then, too, there are so very few fly-pages.
But I started out to tell how much I've changed since I began this book, for now I not only adore poetry, I write it! Fully a quart jar full I've written since I found the first buttercup this spring. An ode to Venus, an ode to Venice, and a world of just plain odes. Mammy Lou washed out a preserves jar and put it on my desk for me to stick them in. It saves trouble for her.
Jean soon woke up out of her brown study and commenced telling about Cassius.
"I used to meet him on sunshiny mornings going to school," she said. "He was about nineteen and so pale and thin and sad-looking that I named him 'Cassius.' He walked with a crutch. One morning when the wind blew his hat off I saw that his head was very scholarly looking, so from that hour I began thinking of him every second of the time. That is one of the worst features about being in love, you can't get your mind off of the person, and if you do it's on to somebody else. Now, just last week I burnt up a great batch of Turkish candy I was trying to make on account of a person's eyes. They look at you like they're kissing you!" And she fell again into a study, not a brown one this time, just a sort of light tan.
"Whose? Cassius's?" I interrupted, shaking her to bring her to.
"Pshaw! No! I had almost forgotten about Cassius! I've never seen anything on earth to equal this other person's eyes! But, anyway, going back to finish up with Cassius, I thought of course, from his walking with a crutch, that he must have had a bad spinal trouble when he was a child and used to have to sit still and be a scholar, instead of chasing cats and breaking out people's window-panes like healthy boys. I pictured out how lonely he must feel and how he must long for a companion whose mind was equal to his; and it certainly made a changed girl of me! I burnt out gallons and gallons of electricity every night studying deep things to discuss with him when I should get to know him well."
"How did you know what kind of things he admired?" I asked, for some men like mathematics and some Dickens and you can't tell the difference by passing them on the street.
"Well, it did make a heap of extra trouble to me," she answered, sighing as tiredly as if she had been trying on coat suits all day. "As I didn't know which was his favorite subject I had to study the encyclopedia so as to be sure to hit it."
"Gee whiz!" I couldn't help saying.
"Oh, that ain't all! I wrote down a list of strange words to say to him so that he could tell at a glance that I was brilliant. They were terrific words too, from aortic and actinic in the a's to genuflections in the g's. That's as far as I got."
Mammy Lou called us to breakfast just then, but I could eat only four soft-boiled guinea eggs, wondering what on earth Cassius had said in reply when Jean said genuflections to him.
"Pshaw! The rest isn't worth telling," she said with a weary look, as I pulled her down on the steps right after breakfast and begged her to go on about Cassius. "It ended with a disappointment—like everything else that has a man connected with it! You're a lucky girl to be in love with Lord Byron so long, for dead men break no hearts!"
"Well, tell it!" I begged.
"Oh, it's too disgusting for words, and was a real blow to a person of my nature! The idiot didn't have spinal trouble at all, I learned it from a lady who knew his mother. He had only sprained his knee, just a plain, every-day knee, with playing basket-ball at school, which was all the good school ever did him, the lady said. My life has certainly been full of disillusions!"
"But, you've learned what genuflections means," I reminded her, for I think people ought to be thankful for everything they learn by experience, whether it's from an automobile or an auction house.
Pretty soon after this we heard the sound of horses' feet (when I saw who it was riding them I just couldn't say hoofs), so Jean and I ran to the front door. We were very glad when we saw who it was, for if it hadn't been for this couple we should have had little to talk about down here in the country except telling each other our dreams and what's good to take off freckles.
It was Miss Irene Campbell riding past our house, with Mr. Gerald Fairfax, her twin flame, in swell tan leggins that come to his knee. Miss Irene comes down here sometimes to spend the summer with her grandmother, Mrs. West. She used to know Mr. Fairfax so well when they were little that there were always several planks off of the fence so they could visit together without going all the way around to the gate. But he grew up and went one direction and she went another and they didn't see each other again until late last summer; but they saw each other then, oh, so often! And they found that they must be twin flames from the way their "temperaments accord."
I had heard Doctor Gordon say that I was of a nervous temperament and was wondering whether or not this was the kind you could have a twin flame with; but father says the temperament that Mr. Fairfax and Miss Irene have is what makes affinities throw skillets at each other after they've been married two weeks. But these two are not going to marry, for their friendship is of the spirit. They talk about incarnations and "Karma," which sounds like the name of a salve to me. Sometimes he seems to like her looks as much as her soul, and says she's a typical maid of Andalusia. I learned about Andalusia out of Washington Irving too, so I know he thinks she's pretty. She has some splendid traits of character, mother says, which means I reckon that she doesn't fix her hair idiotically just because other women do, nor use enough violet sachet to out-smell an automobile.
Miss Irene is very sad, both on account of her liver and her lover. Mrs. West says the books she reads are enough to give anybody liver complaint, but she has had a disappointment lately that is enough to give her appendicitis.
His name is Doctor Bynum and he's as handsome as Apollo and a bacteriologist, which is worse than a prohibitionist, for while the last-named won't let you drink whisky in peace, the other won't let you drink water in peace. Still, Miss Irene says he has the most honest brown eyes and the warmest, most comfortable-feeling hands she ever saw and she was beginning to love him in spite of their souls being on different planes.
"He doesn't care for one line in literature," she told mother, who is very fond of her and would like to see her settled in life. "I've tried him on everything from Marcus Aurelius to Gray's Elegy. When I got to this last he said, 'Good Lord! Eliminate it! It's my business to keep folks out of the churchyard instead of droning ditties after they're in it!' Now, do you call that anything short of savage?"
"I call it sensible," mother told her.
"But I hate sensible people—with no nonsense."
"Oh, nonsense is necessary to the digestion," mother answered quickly, "we all know that. But a little sense, now and then, it takes to pay the market men."
"Which, being interpreted, means that you're like grandmother. You hope I'll marry Doctor Bynum, but you greatly fear that it will be Gerald Fairfax!"
"All I have to say is that 'The Raven' is not a good fowl to roast for dinner," mother answered, with a twinkle in her eye, for Jean had come home from Mrs. West's the day before and said that Mr. Fairfax had been reading The Raven so real you were afraid it would fly down and peck your eyes out.
"Oh, Gerald and I don't believe in flesh foods!" she said loftily, then added quickly, "but I'm not going to marry him. Neither am I going to marry a man who calls my reincarnation theory 'bug-house talk.' I came away down here the very day after he said that, without telling him good-by or anything. And I'm just disappointed to death that he has not followed me long ago. I thought sure he would!"
"You don't deserve that he should ever think of you again," mother told her, looking as severe as she does when she tells me I'll never get married on earth unless I learn to be more tidy.
"I confess the 'conflicting doubts and opinions' do give me indigestion. Doctor Bynum has the most good-looking face I ever saw. And he's just lovely when he isn't perfectly hateful, and—mercy me! I think I'll get Mammy Lou to give me a spoonful of soda in a glass of warm water. I have an awful heaviness around my heart!"
This talk took place two or three days ago and we hadn't seen her again until this morning when she came riding past our house. They waved at us as they got even with our gate and turned off the main road to the little path that leads to the prettiest part of the woods.
"Jean, what would you do if Mr. Fairfax looked at you the way he looks at her?" I asked, as we sat down and fixed ourselves to watch them out of sight.
"I'd marry him quicker than you could hiccough!" she answered, gazing after them with a yearning look. "What would you do?"
"I don't know," I told her, and I don't. "Some people seem to be happy even after they're married, but I think it would be nice to be like Dante and Beatrice, with no gas bills nor in-laws to bother you."
"Shoo! Well, I bet she marries him in spite of all that talk about the spirit. A spirit is all right to marry if he smells like good cigars and is on the spot!"
"Yes, I'm afraid Doctor Bynum has lost his chance; for a girl will love the nearest man—when the lilies-of-the-valley are in bloom."
"But I heard Mrs. West say the other day that Mr. Fairfax would make a mighty bad husband, in spite of the good looks and deep voice. He'd always forget when the oatmeal was out."
"Yes," I answered, "I heard her tell mother the other day that she would leave all she had to somebody else if she did marry him, for she believed in every married couple there ought to be at least one that had sense enough to keep the fences mended up."
"Why, that old lady's mind is as narrow as a ready-made nightgown," Jean exclaimed in surprise. "Why, affinities marry in every page of the pink Sunday papers!"
"But really who does make the living?" I asked, for I had heard mother say that that kind of folks never worked.
"The lawyer that divo'ces 'em makes the livin'," Mammy Lou said then, popping her black head out through mother's white curtains. "An' them two, if they marries, will fu'nish him with sev'al square meals! I've knowed 'em both sence they secon' summer," she said, a brown finger pointing in the direction they had gone, and a smile coming over her face, for second summers are to old women what war times are to old men, only more so. "I said it then and I say it now, he's too pore! Across the chist! He thinks too much, which ain't no 'count. It leads to devilment! Folks ain't got no business thinkin'—they ought to go to sleep when they're through work!"
"But his sympathy——" I started, for that's what Miss Irene is always talking about, but mammy interrupted me.
"Sympathy nothin'! How much sympathy do you reckon he'd have on a freezin' mornin' with wet kin'lin' and the stovepipe done fell down? She better look out for a easy-goin' man that ain't carin' 'bout nothin' 'cept how to keep the barn full o' corn and good shoes for seven or eight chil'en!"
Mammy Lou mostly knows what's she talking about, but somehow I hate to think of Miss Irene with seven children. She reminds me so much of a flower. When I stop to think of it, all the girls I've written about remind me of flowers. Cousin Eunice is like a lovely iris, and Ann Lisbeth is like a Marechal Niel rose. Miss Cis Reeves used to look like a bright, happy little pansy, but that was before the twins were born. Now her collar to her shirtwaist always hikes up in the back and shows the skin underneath and her hat (whenever she gets a chance to put on a hat) is over one ear, and lots of times she looks like she wishes nobody in her family ever had been born, especially the twin that cries the loudest.
When I told Miss Irene that she reminded me of a flower, she said well, it must be the jasmine flower, or something else like a funeral, for she was as desolate as everybody was in Ben Bolt. (I always wondered why they didn't bury "Sweet Alice" with the rest of her family instead of in a corner obscure and alone.) I told her then just to pacify her that maybe she would feel better after she got married one way or another and stopped reading books named The Call of——all sorts of things, and thinking that she had to answer all the calls. Cousin Eunice says her only troubles in matrimony were stomach and eye teeth and frozen water-pipes. She never gets disgusted with life except on nights when Rufe goes to the lodge to see the third degree administered. She can even write a few articles now if she gives Waterloo a pan of water and a wash-rag to play with, but she says many of her brightest thoughts never were fountain-penned because he happened to squall in the midst of them.
For the last few days Mr. Fairfax has been riding around the country looking for a little cabin where he can be by himself and fish and read Schopenhauer. I imagine from what they've read before me that he must be the man who wrote the post-cards you send to newly engaged couples saying, "Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!"
Mr. Fairfax says the blue smoke will curl up from his cabin chimney at sunset and form a "symphony in color" against the green tree-tops; and he can lead the "untrammeled life." He is begging Miss Irene to go and lead it with him, I'm sure; and she's half a mind to do it, but can't bear the thoughts of it when she remembers Doctor Bynum's eyes and hands. Altogether the poor girl looks as uncertain as if she was walking on a pavement covered with banana peelings.
I think the blue-smoke-cabin idea is very romantic, but when I mentioned it to Mammy Lou she got mad and jerked the skillet off the stove so suddenly that the grease popped out and burnt her finger.
"Blue smoke! Blue blazes!" she said, walloping her dish-rag around and around in it. "I hope that pretty critter ain't goin' to be took in by no such talk as that! Blue smoke curlin'! Well, she'll be the one to make the fire that curls it!"
It's a good thing that father gave me a fountain pen on my last birthday, for I should hate to write what happened last night with a dull pencil.
Mrs. West had invited Jean and me to spend the night at her house, for Miss Irene was feeling worse and worse and needed something light to cheer her up. Well, it was just long enough after supper for us to be wishing that we hadn't eaten so many strawberries when Mr. Fairfax came up the walk looking as grand and gloomy as Edgar Allan Poe, right after he had written a poem to his mother-in-law. He said let's take a walk in the moonlight for the air was madding. I always thought before it was maddening, and should be applied only to nuisances, like your next-door neighbor's children, or the piano in the flat above you; but I saw from the dictionary and the way he acted later on that he was right, both about the word and the way he applied it.
Not far down the road from Mrs. West's front gate is a very old-timey school-house, so dilapidated that Jean says she knows it's the one where the little girl said to the little boy, forty years ago:
"I'm sorry that I spelt the word,
I hate to go above you;
Because," the brown eyes lower fell;
"Because, you see, I love you!"
Jean didn't mean a bit of harm when she quoted it, but the sound of that last line made them look as shivery as if they had malaria. We soon found a nice place and sat down on a log that looked less like snakes than the others, and when we saw that there wasn't quite room enough for us all Jean and I had the politeness to go away out of hearing and find another log, over closer to the road. Even then we could hear, for the night was so still and we were so busy with our thoughts.
I began thinking: What if I should have such a hard time to find a lover that is sympathetic and systematic at the same time? Suppose Sir Reginald de Beverley isn't sympathetic about Lord Byron! Suppose he likes his parliamentary speeches better than his poetry, like one husband of a lady that I know does!
But my mind was diverted just then by hearing words coming from the direction of Miss Irene and Mr. Fairfax so much like the little girl said to the little boy forty years ago that I was astonished. I had been told that a girl could always keep a man from proposing when she wanted to! But he was saying that she should come with him and lead the untrammeled life, and she was looking pleased and frightened and was telling him to hush, but was letting him go on; and they were both standing up and holding hands in the moonlight.
"I'm not at all sure it's the untrammeled life I'm looking for," she said in little catchy breaths; "but I'm so wretched! And you're the only one who cares! I suppose I may as well—oh, I wish I had somebody here to keep me from acting an idiot!"
Now, if Shakespeare or "The Duchess" had written this story they would have pretended that Doctor Bynum came around the curve in the road at that very minute and taking off his hat said: "Nay, you shall be my wife!"
But it was only Mrs. West coming down the road, carrying a heavy crocheted shawl to keep Miss Irene from catching her death of cold! But listen! The minute we got back to the house the telephone bell rang and it was a long-distance call for Miss Irene. She knew in a second from the city it was from that Doctor Bynum was at the other end of the line. She looked at that telephone like a person in the fourth story of a house afire looks at the hook-and-ladder man.
Mr. Fairfax said well, he must be going; and we all got out on the porch while she and Doctor Bynum made up their quarrel at the rate of two dollars for the first three minutes and seventy-five cents a minute extra. (I know because father sometimes talks to that city about cotton.) And he's coming down Sunday. And Jean and I are holding our breath.
We're having the very last fire of the season to-night! A big, booming, beautiful one that makes you think winter wasn't such a bad time after all! A cold spell has come, and oh, it is so cold! It makes you wonder how it had the heart to come now and cause the flowers to feel so out of place. But it has also caused us to have another fire and I love a fire. I even like to make them, and lots of times I tell Dilsey to let me build the fire in my room myself. I sit down on the hearth and sit and sit, building that fire. Then I get to looking into it and thinking. Thinking is a mighty bad habit, like Mammy Lou says.
I can't do this any more though—for to-night we're having the last fire of the season. To-morrow spring cleaning will be gone through with and the chimneys all newspapered up. No matter how cold it gets after that you can't expect to have a fire after you've sprung cleaned! I never am going to spring clean at my house. The dust and soapsuds are not the worst part of house cleaning, though they are bad enough, goodness knows! What I hate worst to see is the battered old bureaus and shabby old quilts that you've kept a secret from the public for years pulled out from their corners by the hair of their heads and knocked around in the back yard without any pity for their poor old bones! I never see a moving van going through the city streets loaded with pitiful old furniture without thinking "That used to be somebody's Lares and Penates!"
By-the-way, Mammy Lou is crazy for Dovie to have some more twins so she can name them "Scylla and Chrybdis." She hasn't much hopes though, for she says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place. Father says it wouldn't be lightning, it would be thunder to have two more little pickaninnies always standing around under his feet and have to explain to everybody that came along how they got their curious names.
Mammy Lou heard Miss Irene say "Scylla and Chrybdis;" Miss Irene doesn't say it any more though. Doctor Bynum didn't wait for the train to bring him down here that Sunday, but whizzed through the country in his automobile Saturday night. Then he "venied, vidied, vicied" in such a hurry that everybody in town knew it before nap time Sunday afternoon. Mr. Fairfax has gone away on a long trip. Jean said if he had had any sense he would have seen that Miss Irene Campbell wasn't the only girl in the world, but he didn't see it and he's gone.
Next week Jean is going home and when I think of how lonesome I'll be something nearly pops inside of me. They have been writing and writing for me to go home with Jean and stay until Rufe and Cousin Eunice and Waterloo get ready to come down this summer, but mother says I may not go unless Jean and I both promise to reform. We're not to eat any more stuffed olives nor write any more poetry—and, think of it! I'm to stop writing in my diary! Mother says I'll never have any practical sense if I don't begin now to learn things. I tell her, "Am I to blame if I love a fountain pen better than a darning needle?" The Lord made me so. And I hate sewing. It's as hard for me to sew as it is to keep from writing.
Yet if I go home with Jean I must quit writing. Must give up my diary. Must not write one line of poetry, no matter how much my head is buzzing with it! Why, if poets couldn't write their poetry they'd burst a blood vessel! I can't even take you with me to Jean's house and read over what I have written in happier days, you poor little forsaken diary!