Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

“ And Ann Woltor wasn't quite sure even yet, I could see, whether I knew or not. The return home the night before had been so late the commotion over Allan John's whistle so immediate—the breakfast hour itself such a chaos of nonsense and foolery. Certainly there was no object in prolonging her uncertainty. I liked her infinitely too much to worry her. Very fortunately also she had a ready eye, the one big compensating gift that Fate bestows on all people who have ever been caught off their guard even once by a real trouble. ”

“ Ann Woltor certainly was no prankish child. Neither was it to be supposed that any particular problem of perspective had flecked her mind into the slightest uneasiness. Ann Woltor knew that the bungalow was there! Had spent at least nine hours in it on the previous day! Lunched in it! Supped in it! Proved its inherent prosiness! Yet even I was puzzled as she crept out from the shelter of her big boulder to the very edge of the cliff, and leaned away out still staring, always at that wave-tormented ledge.
From the hyacinth-scented shadows just behind me I heard a sudden little laugh. ”

“ It's a bear! It's a bear!" chanted Kennilworth in exultant falsetto. "Speaking of classics!"
"Hush!" said George Keets. . . . George Keets really wanted very much to play, I think, but he didn't know exactly how to, so he tried to talk highbrow instead. "This village of yours," he frowned, "I—I hope it's going to have good government?"
"Well, it isn't!" snapped young Kennilworth. "It's going to be a terror! But at least it shall be pretty!"
Under young Kennilworth's crafty hand the little village certainly had bloomed from a child's pretty toy into the very real beauty of an artist's ideal. ”

“ In a moment so awful, it seemed almost incredible that any human face could have summoned so much EGO into it. From those gay, pleasure- roaming feet, it must have come hurtling suddenly—that expression! From those facile self-assured finger tips that were already coaxing the secrets of line and form from the Creator!—From that lusty, hot-blooded young heart that was even now accumulating its "Pasts!"—From the arrogant, brilliant young brain that knew only too well that it had a "FUTURE!"—And even as I watched, young Kennilworth stripped the white flannels from his body. ”

“ Ann Woltor stepped down first. As vague as the shadows she merged from her black-garbed figure faded un-outlined into the shadow of the porch. For an instant only the uplifted lantern flashed across her strange stark face—and then went crashing down into a shiver of glass on the gravelly path at my Husband's feet. "Ann—Stoltor!" I heard him gasp. My Husband is not usually a fumbler either with hand or tongue. In the brightening flare of the flash-light that some one thrust into his hands his face showed frankly rattled. "Ann Woltor!" ”

“ By pulling the huge wolf-skin rug away from the hearth, the May Girl and young Kennilworth achieved for their village a plane of smoothness and light that gleamed as fair and sweet as a real village common at high noon. Curled up in a fluff of white the May Girl sat cross-legged in the middle of it superintending operations through a maze of sunny hair. ”

“ Our little Bride was a dream again in a very straight, very severe gray velvet frock that sheathed her young suppleness like the suppleness of a younger Crusader. Her regenerated beauty was an object-lesson to all young husbands' pocket- books for all time to come that beauty like love is infinitely more susceptible to bad weather than is either homeliness or hate, and as such must be cherished by a man's brain as well as by his brawn. Paul Brenswick, goodness knows, would never need to choose his Bride's clothes for her. ”

“ Why I should have been cataloging shells!"
"There you have it!" cried Kennilworth. "Either you've got to sew all day long with Miss Davies—or else she'll have to catalog shells with you!"
"Sew?" hooted Rollins.
"Oh, I'd just love to catalog shells!" cried the May Girl. In that single instant the somewhat indeterminate quiver of her lips had bloomed into a real smile. By a dexterous movement, released from Rollins's arm, she turned and fled for the door. "Up-stairs, you mean, don't you?" she cried. The smile had reached her eyes now. ”

“ IN the changes and chances of our New England climate it is not so much what a Guest can endure outdoors as what he can originate indoors that endears him most to a weather-worried Host.
Take Rollins, for instance, a small man, dour, insignificant— a prude in the moonlight, a duffer at sailing, a fool at tennis—yet once given a rain-patter and a smoky fireplace, of an audacity so impertinent, so altogether absurd, that even yawns must of necessity turn to laughter—or curses. ”

“ My husband and my lover were both cool-blooded men. My lover was a Quaker who had never yet lifted his hand against any man. The two men started arguing. I came of a hot-blooded family. I had never seen men arguing only about a woman before. More than that I was vain. I was foolish. The biggest portrait painter of the hour had chosen me for what he considered would be his masterpiece. I taunted my lover and my husband with the fact that neither of them loved me. John Stoltor struck my husband. It was the first blow. My husband made a furious attack on him. ”

“ Whether Life would ever succeed or not in breaking down his unaccountable intention never-to- mate, that intention,—physical, mental, moral, psychic, call it whatever you choose,—was stamped indelibly and for all time on the curiously incongruous granite-like finish of his originally delicate features. Life had at least done interesting historical things to George Keets's face.
"Oh, George!" cried my Husband, "I thought you were in Egypt digging mummies." ”

“ By talking archaeology in an undertone with a faintly amorous inflection to the longest and least intelligible words, George Keets really believed I think that he was giving a rather clever imitation of an engaged man. What the May Girl thought no one could possibly have guessed. The May Girl's face was a study, but it was at least turning up to his! Whether she understood a single thing he said, or was only resting, whether she was truly amused or merely deferring as long as possible her unhappy fate with Rollins, she sat as one entranced. ”

“ With a little gasp of astonishment young Kennilworth rose from his place, and dragging his chair in one hand, his plate of fruit in the other, moved round to the May Girl's elbow to finish his breakfast. Like a palm trying to patronize a pine tree, his crisp exotic young ego swept down across her young serenity. ”

“ Things common as time itself, repetitive as sand! Yet irresistibly covetable! How do you explain it?
Who in the world, for instance, would expect to find a cunningly contrived toy-boat on Rollins's bureau with two star-fish listed as the only passengers! Or Paul Brenswick's candle thrust into a copperas-tinted knot of water-logged cedar? In the snug confines of a small cigar box on a lovely dank bed of maroon and gray sea-weed Victoria Brenswick had nested her treasure-trove. Certainly the quaint garnet necklace could hardly have found a more romantic and ship- wrecky sort of a setting. ”

“ In the hollow of his hand something that once had been the spongy shapeless center of a breakfast roll crushed back into sponge again. But in the instant of its crushing, crude as the modeling was, half jest, half child's play, I sensed the unmistakable parody of a woman's finger-prints bruising into the soft crest of a man's shoulder. Even in the absurdity of its substance the sincerity of the thing was appalling. Catching my eye alone, young Kennilworth gave an amused but distinctly worldly-wise little laugh.
"Women do care so much, don't they?" ”

“ Paul Brenswick was a real Bridegroom. I am not, I believe, a particularly envious person, and have never as far as I know begrudged another woman her youth or her beauty or her talent or her wealth. But if it ever came to a chance of swapping facial expressions, just once in my life, some very rainy morning, I wish I could look like a Bridegroom!
But the expression on the Bride's face was distinctly worried. Joy worried! Any woman who had ever been a bride could have read the expression like an open book. Victoria Brenswick had not counted on rain. ”

“ It brought Rollins down- stairs just as everybody was leaving the table in what had up to that moment been considered perfectly reestablished and invulnerable glee. Everybody, of course, except poor Allan John. No one naturally would expect any kind of glee from Allan John.
In the soft pussy-footed flop of his felt slippers none of us heard Rollins coming. But I—I saw him! And such a Rollins! Stripped of the single significant facial expression of his life which I had surprised so unexpectedly in his eyes the night before, Rollins would certainly never be anything but just Rollins! ”

“ Ordinarily speaking my Husband would not be described I think as having a beaming expression.
With a chug like the chug of a motor-boat the little closed car came splashing laboriously round the driveway. Its glassy face was streaked with tears. Depressant as black life- preservers its two extra tires gleamed and dripped in their jetty enamel-cloth casings. A jangle as of dungeon chains clanked heavily from each fresh revolution of its progress. ”

“ I hope my smile was as quick. "What is the matter with everybody?" I said.
With extravagant exuberance my Husband jumped to help the rest of our guests alight. "Hi, there, Everybody!" he greeted each new face in turn as it emerged somewhat hump-shouldered and vague through the door of the bus into the flare of his lantern light.
Poor Rollins, of course, tumbled out.
Fastidiously, George Keets illustrated how a perfect exit from a bus should be made,—suitcase, hat-box, English ulster, everything a model of its kind. Even the constraint of his face, absolutely perfect. ”

“ Barring nothing no one is ever warned that the week will be rainy. It is astonishing how a guest's personality strips itself right down to the bare sincerities when he is forced unexpectedly to doff his extra-selected, super-fitting, ultra-becoming visiting clothes for a frankly nondescript costume chosen only for its becomingness to a—situation! ”

“ Mountains evidently do not recover for us that particular kind of lost rapture. Nor even green pine woods revive the innocent lusts of the little. But in a sea-shore guest-room, every fresh morning of the world, as long as time lasts, you will find on bureau-top desk or table, mixed up with chiffons and rouges, crowding the tennis rackets or base balls, blurring the open sophisticate page of the latest French novel, that dear, absurd, ever-increasing little hoard of childish treasures! ”

“ Truly it wasn't right that anyone who had been so hateful all day long should be able to look so perfectly glorious in the evening.
"Where did you get the suit?" said Rollins. "Is it your own?"
"And the permanent wave?" questioned the Bride. "I think you and the ocean must patronize the same hair dresser."
"Dark men always do look so fine in white flannels," whispered Ann Woltor to my Husband.
"Personally," beamed Paul Brenswick, "you look to me like a person who had imported his own Turkish bath."
"Turkish?" scoffed George Keets. ”

“ A very tall "little girl" she was, and very young, not a day more than eighteen surely. And even in the encompassing bulk of her big coon-skin coat with its broad arms hugging the brown rabbits to her breast she gave an impression of extraordinary slimness and delicacy, an impression accentuated perhaps by a slender silk-stockinged ankle, the frilly cuff of a white sleeve, and the aura of pale gold hair that radiated in every direction from the brim of her coon- skin hat. ”

“ You yourself wouldn't have wanted to spring Rollins on any one quite so early in the day. And with my best breakfast tray, my second best china, and sherry in the grape fruit, there was no reason certainly why Rollins in any way should feel discriminated against. Surely, as far as Rollins knew, every guest was breakfasting in bed. ”

“ In the nearest shadow of all it was almost as though one heard an ego bristle.
"I beg your pardon, but the Pomeranian is mine," affirmed Claude Kennilworth's un-mistakable voice with what seemed like quite unnecessary hauteur.
"What the deuce is the matter with everybody?" whispered my Husband.
With a jerk and a bump the bus grazed a big boulder and landed us wheezily at our own front door. ”

“ To be all alone and bored on a rainy day is no more than anyone would expect. . . . But to be with one's Lover and have the day prove dull? . . . If God in the terrible uncertainty of Him should force even one dull day into the miracle of their life together——?
Ann Woltor, dragging down to breakfast just a few moments late, had not noticed especially, it seemed, that the day was rainy. She met my Husband's eyes as she met the eyes of her fellow-guests, calmly, indifferently, and with perfect sophistication. ”

“ In the inevitable mood of uneasiness and dismay that overwhelms most house party guests when first thrust into each other's unfamiliar faces, the initial gravitations that ensue are rather more than usually significant. To be perfectly explicit, for instance, people who start off five abreast on that first rainy walk never come home five abreast!
In the immediate case at hand, nobody came home at all until long after Allan John and I had finished our luncheon, and in the manner of that coming, George Keets had gravitated to leadership with the Bride and Bridegroom. ”

“ Flavored by moonlight, rattling with tropical palms, green as Arctic ice, wild as a loon's hoot, science and lies slipped alike from Rollins's lips with a facility that even I would scarcely have suspected him of! Lands he had never visited— adventures he had never dreamed of cannibals not yet born— babble—babble—babble—babble! ”

“ Even if you had never heard Ann Woltor speak you could have presaged perfectly from her face just what her voice would be like, gravely contralto, curiously sonorous, absolutely without either accent or emphasis, yet carrying in some strange, inex-plainable way a rather goose-fleshy sense of stubbornness and finality. "One can't exactly in a Christian land," droned Ann Woltor, "go round looking like the sole survivor of a massacre." ”

“ In a sudden gusty flutter of white the May Girl came round the corner into the full buffet of the wind. It hadn't occurred to me before just exactly how tired she looked. "Why, hello, everybody—" she began, faltered an instant— crumpled up at the waist-line—and slipped down in a white heap of unconsciousness to the floor.
It was George Keets who reached her first, and gathering her into his long, strong arms, bore her into the house. It was the first time in his life I think that George Keets had ever held a woman in his arms. ”

“ Boys do not usually like simplicity. It takes a mature man to appreciate simplicity."
"Yes, but the discovery?" I fretted. "Your own discovery?— Just when?"
"In the train of course, coming down that first night!" cried Ann Woltor. "I thought I should go mad. I thought at every station I would jump off. And then Rollins's bungling remark the next day about my tooth gave me the chance, as I supposed, to get away. Except for that awkward accident to my watch I should have gotten away. Your husband implored me for my own sake, for everyone's sake, to stop and consider. ”