Once to Every Man

As long as she could she stood there at the window, doggedly fighting the rising terror that was bleaching her face; fighting the dread which was never quite asleep within her brain–the dread of that old stone demijohn standing in the corner of the kitchen, which for all her broken pleading Young Denny Bolton had refused with a strange, unexplained stubbornness to remove–until that rising terror drove her away from the pane.

One wide-flung arm swept the stack of neatly folded patterns in a rustling storm to the floor as she pushed her way out from the narrow space between table edge and sill. The girl did not heed them or the lamp, that rocked drunkenly with the tottering table. She had forgotten everything–the thick white square of cardboard, even the stooped old man in the small back room–in the face of the overwhelming fear that reason could not fight down. Only the peculiarly absolute silence that came with the sudden cessation of his droning monotone checked the panic haste of her first rush. With one hand clutching the knob of the outer door she turned back.

John Anderson was sitting twisted about on his high stool, gazing after her in infantile, perplexed reproach, his long fingers clasped loosely about the almost finished figure over which he had been toiling. As the girl turned back toward him his eyes wandered down to it and he began to shake his head slowly, vacantly, hopelessly. A low moaning whimper stirred her lips; then the hand tight-clenched over the knob slackened. She ran swiftly across to him.

“What is it, dear?” Her voice broke, husky with fright and pity. “Tell me–what is the matter? Won’t it come right tonight?”

With shaking hands she leaned over him, smoothing the shining hair. At the touch of her fingers he looked up, staring with pleading uncertainty into her quivering face before he shook his head.

“It–it don’t smile,” he complained querulously. His fingers groped lightly over the small face of clay. “I–I can’t make it smile–like the rest.”

Sudden terror contorted the thin features, a sheer ecstacy of terror as white-lipped as that which marred the face of the girl who bent above him.

“Maybe I’ve forgotten how she smiled!” he whispered fearfully. “Maybe I’ll never be able to–”

Dryad’s eyes flitted desperately around the room, along the shelves laden with those countless figures–all white and finely slender, all upturned of face. Again a little impotent gasp choked her; then, eyes filling hotly at that poignantly wistful smile which edged the lips of each, she stooped and patted reassuringly the trembling hands before she stepped a pace away from him.

“You’ve not forgotten, dear. Why, you mustn’t be frightened like that! We know, you and I, don’t we, that you never could forget? You’re just tired. Now, that’s better–that’s brave! And now–look! Isn’t this the way–isn’t this the way it ought to be?”

Face uptilted, bloodless lips falling apart in the faintest of pallid smiles, she swayed forward, both arms outstretched toward him. And as she stood the wide eyes and straight nose and delicately pointed chin of her colorless face took line for line the lines of all those, chalky white, against the wall.

For a moment John Anderson’s eyes clung to her–clung vacant with hopeless doubt; then they glowed again with dawning recollection. He, too, was smiling once more as his fingers fluttered in nervous haste above the lips of the clay face on the bench before him, and almost before the girl had stepped back beside him he had forgotten that she was there.

“Marie!” she heard him murmur. “Marie, why, you mustn’t be afraid! We’ll never forget–you and I–we never could forget!”

Even while she waited another instant those plastic earthen lips began to curl–they began to curve with hungry longing like all the rest. He was talking steadily now, mumbling broken fragments of sentences which it was hard to understand. Her hand hovered a moment longer over his bowed head; once at the door she paused and looked back at him.

“It’s only for a little while,” she promised unsteadily. “I–I have to go–but it’s only for a little while. I’ll be back soon–so soon! And you’ll be safe until I come!”

He gave no sign that he had heard, not even so much as a lifted glance. But as she drew the door shut behind her she heard him pick up the words, caressingly, after her.

“You’ll be safe, Marie,” he whispered. “It’ll be only for a little while, now. You’ll be safe till I come.” An ineffably peaceful smile flickered across his face. “We couldn’t forget–why, of course, we couldn’t forget–you and I!”

With the short black skirt lifted even higher above her ankles that she might make still more speed, Dryad turned into the dark path that twisted crookedly through the brush to the open clearing beside the brook and from there on to the black house on the hill.

She ran swiftly, madly, through the darkness, with the wild, panic-stricken, headlong abandon of a hunted thing, finding the narrow trail ahead of her by instinct alone. Only once she overran it, but that once a low hanging branch, face high, caught her full across the forehead and sent her crashing back in the underbrush. Just once she put one narrow foot in its loosely flapping shoe into the deep crevice between two rocks and gasped aloud with the pain of the fall that racked her knees. When she groped out and steadied herself erect she was talking–stammering half incoherent words that came bursting jerkily from her lips as she tore on.

“Help me … in time … God,” she panted, “Just this once … get to him … in time. Lord, forgive … own vanity. Oh, God, please in time!”

Small feet drumming the harder ground, she flashed up the last rise and across the yard to the door of that unlighted kitchen. Her hands felt for the latch and failed to find it; then she realized that it was already open–the door–but her knees, all the strength suddenly drained from them at the black quiet in that room, refused to carry her over the threshold. She rocked forward, reaching out with one hand for the frame to steady herself, and in that same instant the man who lay a huddled motionless heap across the table top, moved a little and began to speak aloud.

“They didn’t want me,” he muttered, and the words came with muffled thickness. “Not even for the strength of my shoulders.”

She took one faltering step forward–the girl who stood there swaying in the doorway–and stopped again. And the man lifted his head and laughed softly, a short, ugly rasping laugh.

“Not even for the work I could do,” he finished.

And then she understood. She tried to call out to him, and the words caught in her throat and choked her. She tried again and this time her voice rang clear through the room.

“Denny,” she cried, “Denny, I’ve come to you! Strike a light! I’m here, Denny, and–oh, I’m afraid–afraid of the dark!”

Before he could rise, almost before his big-shouldered body whirled in the chair toward her, her swift rush carried her across to him. She knelt at his knees, her thin arms clutching him with desperate strength. Denny Bolton felt her body shudder violently as he leaned over, dumb with bewilderment, and put his hands on her bowed head.

“Thank God,” he heard her whispering, “thank God–thank God!”

But far more swiftly than his half numbed brain could follow she was on her feet the next instant, tense and straight and lancelike in the gloom.

“Damn ’em,” she hissed. “Damn ’em–damn ’em–damn ’em!”

His fingers felt for and found a match and struck it. Her face was working convulsively, twisted with hate, both small fists lifted toward the huge house that crowned the opposite hill. It made him remember that first day when he had looked up, with the rabbit struggling in his arms, and found her standing there in the thicket before him, only now the fury that blazed in her eyes was not for him. There was a rough red welt across her forehead only half hidden by the tumbled hair that cascaded to her waist, torn loose from its scant fastenings by the whipping brush. And as he stood with the flame of the flickering match scorching his fingers, Denny Bolton remembered all the rest–he remembered the light that still burned unanswered in the window across the valley. He bowed his head.

“I–I forgot,” he faltered at last. “I did not know it was so late. I must have been–pretty tired.”

Slowly the girl’s clenched hands came away from her throat while she stared up into his face, brown and lean and very hard and bitter. The ashen terror upon her own cheeks disappeared with a greater, growing comprehension of all that lay behind that dully colorless statement. For just a moment her fingers hovered over the opening at the neck of her too small blouse and felt the thick white card that lay hidden within, before she lifted both arms to him in impulsive compassion, trying to smile in spite of the wearily childish droop at the corners of her lips.

“I know, Denny,” she quavered. “I–I understand.” Her arms slipped up around his neck. “Hold me tight–oh, hold me tighter! For they forgot me, too, Denny; they forgot me, too!”

As his arms closed about her slim body she buried her bright head against the vividly checkered coat and sobbed silently–great noiseless gasps that shook her small shoulders terribly. Once, after a long time, when she held his face away to peer up at him through brimming eyes, she saw that all the numb bitterness was gone from it–that he had forgotten all else save her own hurt.

“Why, you mustn’t feel so badly for me,” she told him then, warmly tremulous of mouth. “I–I don’t mind now, very much. Only”–her voice broke unsteadily–“only I did want to go just once where all the others go; I wanted them to see me just once in a skirt that’s long enough for me–and–and to wear stockings without any patches, and silk, Denny, silk–next to my skin!”

CHAPTER IV

At her first swift coming when she had cried out to him there in the dark and run across to kneel at his knees, a dull, shamed flush had stained his lean cheeks with the realization that, in his own great bitterness he had failed even to wonder whether she had been forgotten, too.

Now as his big hand hovered over the tumbled brightness of her hair, loose upon his sleeve, that hot shame in turn disappeared. After the quivering gasps were all but stilled, he twice opened his lips as if to speak, and each time closed them again without a word. He was smiling a faint, gravely gentle smile that barely lifted the corners of his lips when she turned in his arms and lifted her face once more to him.

“We don’t mind very much,” she repeated in a half whisper. “Do we–either of us–now?”

Slowly he shook his head. With effortless ease he stooped and swung her up on one arm, seating her upon the bare table before the window. Another match flared between his fingers and the whole room sprang into brightness as he touched the point of flame to the wick of the lamp bracketed to the wall beside him.

She sat, leaning forward a little, both elbows resting upon her slim knees, both feet swinging pendulum-like high above the floor, watching with a small frown of curiosity growing upon her forehead, while he stooped without a word of explanation and dragged a bulky package from the table and placed it beside her. Then she sighed aloud, an audible sigh of sheer surprise after he had broken the string and drawn aside the paper wrapper.

Just as they had seemed in the picture they lay there under her amazed eyes–the pointed, satiny black slippers of the dancing girl, with their absurdly slender heels and brilliant buckles, and filmy stockings to match. And underneath lay two folded squares of shimmering stuff, dull black and burnished scarlet, scarce thicker than the silk of the stockings themselves.

The faint, vaguely self-conscious smile went from Denny Bolton’s lips while he stood and watched her bend and touch each article, one by one–the barest ghost of contact. Damp eyes glowing, lips curled half open, she lifted her head at last and gazed at him, as he stood with hands balanced on his hips before her.

A moment she sat immobile, her breath coming and going in soft, fluttering gasps, and looked into his sober, questioning face; then she turned again and picked up one web-like stocking and held it against her cheek, as hotly tinted now beneath its smooth whiteness as the shining scarlet cloth beside her.

He heard her murmur to herself little, broken, incoherent phrases that he could not catch.

“Denny,” he heard her whisper, “Denny–Denny!”

And then, with the tiny slippers huddled in her lap, her hands flashed out and caught his face and drew it down against the too-small white blouse, open at the throat.

“Man–man,” she said, and he felt her breast rise and fall, rise and fall, against his cheek. “Man, you didn’t understand! It–it wasn’t the clothes, Denny, but–but I’m all the gladder, I think, because you’re so much of a man that you couldn’t, not even if I tried a hundred years to explain.”

He drew the chair at the side of the table around in front of her and dropped into it. With a care akin to reverence he lifted one slipper and held it outstretched at arm’s length upon his broad palm.

“I–I hadn’t exactly forgotten, tonight,” he told her. “I’d watched for the light, and I meant to bring them–when I came.” His steady eyes dropped to her slim, swinging feet. “They’re the smallest they had in any shop at the county-seat,” he went on, and the slow smile came creeping back across his face. “I crossed over through the timber late last night, after we had broken camp, and I–I had to guess the size. Shall we–try them on?”

She reached out and snatched the small thing of satin and leather away from him with mock jealous impetuosity, a little reckless gurgle of utter delight breaking from her lips.

“Over these,” she demanded, lifting one foot and pointing at the thickly patched old stocking above the dingy, string-tied shoe. “You–you are trying to shame me, Denny–you want to make me confess they are too small!”

Then, almost in the same breath, all the facetious accusation left her face. Even the warm glow of wonder which had lighted her wet eyes gave way to a new seriousness.

“No one has ever told me,” she stated slowly, “but I know it is so, just the same. Somehow, because it was to be the first party I had ever attended–or–or had a chance to attend, I thought it must be all right, just once, for you to buy me these. There was no one else to buy them, Denny, and maybe I wanted to go so very much I made myself believe that it was all right. But there isn’t any party now–for us. And–and men don’t buy clothes for women, Denny–not until they’re married!”

Her face was tensely earnest while she waited for the big man before her to answer. And Young Denny turned his head, staring silently out of the opposite window down toward the village, dark now, in the valley below. He cleared his throat uncertainly.

“Do they?” She was leaning forward until her hair brushed his own. “Do they, Denny?” A rising inflection left the words hanging in midair.

“I don’t know just what the difference is,” he began finally, his voice very deliberate. “I’ve often tried to figure it out, and never been quite able to get it straight”–he nodded his head again toward the sleeping village–“but we–we’ve never been like the rest, anyhow. And–and anyway,” he reached out one hand and laid it upon her knees, “we’re to be married, too–when–when–”

With swift, caressing haste she lifted the slippers that lay cradled in her lap and set them back inside the open package. Lightly she swung herself down and stood before him, both hands balanced upon his shoulders. For just the fraction of a moment her eyes lifted over his head, flickering toward the stone demijohn that stood in the far, shadowy corner near the door. Her voice was trembling a little when she went on.

“Then let me come soon, Denny,” she begged. “Can’t it be soon? Oh, I’m going to keep them!” One hand searched behind her to fall lightly upon the package upon the table. “They’re–they’re so beautiful that I don’t believe I could ever give them back. But do we have to wait any longer–do we? I can take care of him, too.”

Vehemently she tilted her head toward the little drab cottage across under the opposite hill.

“He hardly ever notices when I come or go. I–I want to come, Denny. I’m lonesome, and–and–” her eyes darkened and swam with fear as she stared beyond him into the dusky corner near the door, “why can’t I come now, before some time–when it might be–too late?”

He reached up and took her hands from his shoulders and held them in front of him, absently contemplating their rounded smoothness. She bent closer, trying to read his eyes, and found them inscrutable. Then his fingers tightened.

“And be like them?” he demanded, and the words leaped out so abruptly that they were almost harsh. “And be like all the rest,” he reiterated, jerking his head backward, “old and thin, and bent and worn-out at thirty?” A hard, self-scathing note crept into the words. “Why, it–it took me almost a month–even to buy these!”

He in turn reached out and laid a hand upon the bundle behind her. But she only laughed straight back into his face–a short, unsteady laugh of utter derision.

“Old?” she echoed. “Work! But I–I’d have you, Denny, wouldn’t I?” Again she laughed in soft disdain. “Clothes!” she scoffed. And then, more serious even than before: “Denny, is–is that the only reason, now?”

The gleam that always smoldered in Denny Bolton’s eyes whenever he remembered the tales they told around the Tavern stove of Old Denny’s last bad night began to kindle. His lips were thin and straight and as colorless as his suddenly weary face as he stood and looked back at her. She lifted her hands and put them back upon his shoulders.

“I’m not afraid–any more–to chance it,” she told him, her lips trembling in spite of all she could do to hold them steady. “I’m never afraid, when I’m with you. It–it’s only when I’m alone that it grows to be more than I can bear, sometimes. I’m not afraid. Does it–does it have to stay there any longer, in the corner, Denny? Aren’t we sure enough now–you and I–aren’t we?”

He stopped back a pace–his big body huge above her slenderness–stepped away from the very nearness of her. But as she lifted her arms to him he began to shake his head–the old stubborn refusal that had answered her a countless number of times before.

“Aren’t we?” she said again, but her voice sounded very small and bodiless and forlorn in the half dark room.

He swung one arm in a stiff gesture that embraced the entire valley.

“They’re all sure, too,” his voice grated hoarsely, “They’re all sure, too–just as sure as we could ever be–and there’s a whole town of them!”

She was bending silently over the table, retying the bundle, when he crossed back to her side, a lighted lantern dangling in one hand.

“I don’t know why myself,” he tried to explain. “I only know I’ve got to wait. And I don’t even know what I’m waiting for–but I know it’s got to come!”

She would not lift her head when he slipped his free arm about her shoulders and drew her against him. When he reached out to take the package from her she held it away from him, but her voice, half muffled against his checkered coat, was anything but hard.

“Let you carry them?” she murmured. “Why–I wouldn’t trust them to any other hands in the world but my own. You can’t even see them again–not until I’ve finished them, and I wear them–for you.”

With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her whimsically provocating smile.

“Tell me–why don’t you tell me, Denny,” she commanded imperiously, “that I’m prettier than all the others–even if I haven’t the pretty clothes!”

When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun, Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley to John Anderson’s once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the room.

“– requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson’s company,” he repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never before heard pass his lips:

“And she could have gone–she could have, and she didn’t–just because–”

His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and buttoned the whole within his coat.

CHAPTER V

As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.

And yet it was still a good two hours before sundown; only a few minutes before he had driven his heavy steaming team in from the fields and turned toward the ladder that mounted to the hayloft, when the familiar shrill complaint of ungreased axles drifted up to him from the valley.

With a foot upon the first rung Young Denny paused, scowling in mild perplexity. He had crossed the next moment to the open double doors, as the sound floated up to him in a steadily increasing volume, and was standing, his big body huge in its flannel shirt, open at the throat, and high boots laced to the knees, leaning loosely at ease against the door frame, when the dingy rig with its curtains flapping crazily in the wind lurched around the bend in the road and came bouncing wildly up the rutty grade.

The boy straightened and stiffened, his head going forward a little, for the fat old mare was pounding along at a lumbering gallop–a pace which, in all the time he had watched for it, he had never before beheld. Old Jerry was driving with a magnificent abandon, his hands far outstretched over the dash, and more than that, for even from where he stood Denny could hear him shouting at her in his thin, cracked falsetto–shouting for still more speed.

A rare, amused smile tugged at the corners of Young Denny’s lips as he crossed the open yard to the crest of the hill. But when the groaning buggy came to a standstill and Old Jerry flung the reins across the mare’s wide back, to dive and burrow in frantic haste under the seat for the customary roll of advertisements, without so much as a glance for the boy who strode slowly up to the wheel, that shadow of a smile which had touched his face faded into concerned gravity. He hesitated a moment, as if not quite certain of what he should do.

“Is there–there isn’t any one sick, is there?” he asked at last, half diffidently.

The little, white-haired old man in the buggy jerked erect with startling, automatonlike swiftness at that slow question. For a moment he stood absolutely motionless, his back toward the speaker, his head perked far over to one side as though he refused to believe he had heard correctly. Then, little by little, he wheeled until his strangely brilliant, birdlike eyes were staring straight down into Denny’s upturned, anxious face. And as he stared Old Jerry’s countenance grew blankly incredulous.

“Sick!” he echoed the boy’s words scornfully. “Sick!”

His grotesquely thin body seemed to swell as he straightened himself, and his shrill squeak of a voice took on a new note of pompous importance.

“I guess,” he stated impressively, “I reckon, Denny, you ain’t heard the news, hev you?” He chuckled pityingly, half contemptuously. “I reckon you couldn’t’ve,” he concluded with utter finality.

The old, sullenly bewildered light crept back into Young Denny’s gray eyes. He shifted his feet uneasily, shaking his head.

“I–I just got back down from the timber, three days ago,” he explained, and somehow, entirely unintentionally, as he spoke the slow statement seemed almost an apology for his lack of information. “I guess I haven’t heard much of anything lately–up here. Is it–is it something big?”

Old Jerry hesitated. He felt suddenly the hopeless, overwhelming dearth of words against which he labored in the attempt to carry the tidings worthily.

“Big!” He repeated the other’s question. “Big! Why, Godfrey ’Lisha, boy, it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to this town. It–it’s terrific! We’ll be famous–that’s what we’ll be! In a week or two Boltonwood’ll be as famous as–as–why, we’ll be as famous as the Chicago Fair!”