Who Cares? A Story of Adolescence Read online

  II

  Joan was thankful when lunch was over, and murmured "Amen" to gracewith a fervor that would have surprised an unimaginative andunobservant person. Like all the meals in that pompous dining-room, itwas a form of torture to a young thing bubbling with health and highspirits, who was not supposed to speak unless directly addressed andwas obliged to hold herself in check while her grandparents progressedslowly and deliberately through a menu of medically thought-out dishes.Both the old people were on a rigid diet, and mostly the conversationbetween them consisted of grumbles at having to dally with baby-foodand reminiscences of the admirable dinners of the past. An aged butlerand a footman in the sere and yellow only added to the general Rip vanWinklism, and the presence of two very old dogs, one the grandfather'sAiredale and the other Mrs. Ludlow's Irish terrier, with a white noseand rusty gray coat, did nothing to dispel the depression. The sixfull-length portraits in oils that hung on the walls represented menand women whose years, if added together, would have made a staggeringgrand total. Even the furniture was Colonial.

  But when Joan had put on her hat, sweater and a pair of thick-soledcountry boots, and having taken care to see that no one was about, sliddown the banisters into the hall on her way out for her usual lonelywalk, she slipped into the garden with a queer sense of excitement, anodd and unaccountable premonition that something was going to happen.This queer thing had come to her in the middle of lunch and had madeher heart suddenly begin to race. If she had been given to selfanalysis, which she was not, she might have told herself that she hadreceived a wireless message from some one as lonely as herself, who hadsent out the S.O.S. call in the hope of its being picked up andanswered. As it was, it stirred her blood and made her restless andintensely eager to get into the open, to feel the sun and smell thesweetness in the air and listen to the cheery note of the birds.

  It was with something of the excited interest which must have stirredRobinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of what he hadconceived to be a desert island that she ran up the hill, through theawakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves was alight with thegreen heads of young ferns, and out to the clearing from which she hadso often gazed wist fully in the direction of the great city away inthe distance.

  She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterlydisappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the rabbitsand the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in theexpectation of peanuts. She had no sort of concrete idea of what shehad expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the waveof sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had been sentover an electric wire. All she knew was that she was out of breath forno apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at seeing no one there tomeet her. Once before, on her sixth birth day, the same call had beensent to her when she was playing alone with her dolls in thesemitropical garden of a hired house in Florida, and she had started upand toddled round to the front and found a large-eyed little girlpeering through the gate. It was the beginning of a close and blessedfriendship.

  This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonelysoul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the widevalley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she hadever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life. Fromsomewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to herleft the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and sheturned eagerly.

  "Oh, hello," said the boy.

  "Oh, hello," she said.

  He was not the hero of her dreams, by a long way. His hair didn't curl;his nose was not particularly straight; nor were his eyes large andmagnetic. He was not something over six feet two; nor was he dressed inwonderful clothes into which he might have been poured in liquid form.He was a cheery, square-shouldered, good-natured looking fellow withlaughter in his gray eyes and a little quizzical smile playing round agood firm mouth. He looked like a man who ought to have been in thenavy and who, instead, gave the impression of having been born amonghorses. His small, dark head was bare; his skin had already caught thesun, and as he stood in his brown sweater with his hands thrust intothe pockets of his riding breeches, he seemed to her to be just exactlylike the brother that she ought to have had if she had had any luck atall, and she held out a friendly hand with a comfortable feeling ofabsolute security.

  With some self-consciousness he took it and bowed with a nice touch ofdeference. He tried to hide the catch in his breath and the admirationin his eyes. "I'm glad it's spring," he said, not knowing quite what hewas saying.

  "So am I," said Joan. "Just look at those violets and the way theleaves are bursting."

  "I know. Great, isn't it? Are you going anywhere?"

  "No. I've nowhere to go."

  "Same here. Let's go together."

  And they both laughed, and the squirrel that had come to meet Joandarted off with a sour look. He had anticipated a fat meal of peanuts.He was out of it now, he saw, and muttered whatever was the squirrelequivalent for a swear-word.

  The boy and girl took the path that ran round the outskirts of thewood, swung into step and chimed into the cantata of spring with talkand laughter.

  There had been rather a long silence.

  Joan was sitting with her back against the trunk of a fallen tree, withher hands clasped round her knees. She had tossed her hat aside, andthe sunlight made her thick brown hair gleam like copper. They had comeout at another aerie on the hill, from which a great stretch of opencountry could be seen. Her eyes were turned as usual in the directionof New York, but there was an expression of contentment in them thatwould have startled all the old people and things at home.

  Martin Gray was lying full stretch on the turf with his elbows up andhis chin on his left fist. He had eyes for nothing but the vivid girlwhom he had found so unexpectedly and who was the most alive thing thathe had ever seen.

  During this walk their chatter had been of everything under the sunexcept themselves. Both were so frankly and unaffectedly glad to beable to talk at all that they broke into each other's laughing andchildish comments on obvious things and forgot themselves in thepleasure of meeting. But now the time had come for mutual confidences,and both, in the inevitable young way, felt the desire to paint thepicture of their own particular grievance against life which shouldmake them out to be the two genuine martyrs of the century. It was nowa question of which of them got the first look-in. The silence wasdeliberate and came out of the fine sense of sportsmanship thatbelonged to each. Although bursting to pour out her troubles, Joanwanted to be fair and give Martin the first turn, and Martin, equallykeen to prove himself the champion of badly treated men, held himselfin, in order that Joan, being a woman, should step into the limelight.It was, of course, the male member of the duet who began. A man's egois naturally more aggressive than a woman's.

  "Do you know," said Martin, arranging himself in a more comfortableattitude, "that it's over two months since I spoke to any one of aboutmy own age?"

  Joan settled herself to listen. With the uncanny intuition that makeswomen so disconcerting, she realized that she had missed her chance andmust let the boy have his head.

  Not until he had unburdened his soul would she be able, she knew, tofocus his complete attention upon herself.

  "Tell me about it," she said.

  He gave her a grateful look. "You know the house with the kennels overthere--the hounds don't let you miss it. I've been wandering about theplace without seeing anybody since Father died."

  "Oh, then, you're Martin Gray!"

  "Yes."

  "I was awfully sorry about your father."

  "Thanks." The boy's mouth trembled a little, and he worked his thumbinto the soft earth. "He was one of the very best, and it was notright. He was too young and too much missed. I don't understand it. Hehad twenty-five years to his credit, and I wanted to show him what Iwas going to do. It's all a puzzle to me. There's something frightfullywrong about it all, and it's been worrying me awfully."<
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  Joan couldn't find anything to say. Years before, when she was fouryears old, Death had come to her house and taken her own father away,and she had a dim remembrance of dark rooms and of her mother crying asthough she had been very badly hurt. It was a vague figure now, and theboy's queer way of talking about it so personally made the conventionalexpressions that she had heard seem out of place. It was the littleshake in his voice that touched her.

  "He had just bought a couple of new hunters and was going to run thehunt this fall. I wanted him to live forever. He died in New York, andI came here to try and get used to being without him. I thought Ishould stay all alone for the rest of my life, but--this morning when Iwas moping about, everything looked so young and busy that I got a sortof longing to be young and busy again myself. I don't know how toexplain it, but everything shouted at me to get up and shake myselftogether, and on the almanac in Father's room I read a thing thatseemed to be a sort of message from him."

  "Did you? What was it?"

  "'We count it death to falter, not to die.' It was under to-day's date,and it was the first thing I saw when I went to the desk where Fatherused to sit, and it was his voice that read it to me. It was verywonderful and queer. It sort of made me ashamed of the way I was takingit, and I went out to begin again,--that's how it seemed to me,--and Iwoke everybody up and set things going and saw that the horses were allright, and then I climbed over the wall, and as I walked away, outagain for the first time after all those bad weeks, I wanted to findsome one young to talk to. I don't know how it was, but I went straightup the hill and wasn't a bit surprised when I saw you standing there."

  "That's funny," said Joan.

  "Funny--how?"

  "I don't know. But if you hadn't found me after the feeling that cameto me at lunch--"

  "Well?"

  "Well, I'm sure I should have turned bitter and never believed any morein fairies and all that. I don't think I mean fairies, and I can'texplain what 'all that' stands for, but I know I should have beenwarped if I hadn't turned round and seen you."

  And she laughed and set him laughing, and the reason of their havingmet was waved aside. The fact remained that there they were--youth withyouth, and that was good enough.