|
Book 2Eleven
Lucy found the walking bad enough. The roads had been rutted during the thaw, and afterwards the deep cuts made by the wagon- wheels had frozen hard. Yesterday`s snowfall had packed into them. Her foot kept catching in the walls of the ruts. On either side of the wheel-tracks the mud had frozen in jagged ridges, rough and sharp like mushroom coral. Since yesterday few countrymen had been abroad, and the horses` hoofs had not yet broken down these frozen incrustations. Lucy couldn`t remember that her feet had ever got so cold when she was walking; but this was not walking, really, it was plodding, and breaking through.
She was going west, directly against the wind, and she had often to turn and stand still to catch her breath. After she was a mile out of town, not a single sleigh or wagon passed her. It was still too early for the farmers who had gone to town in the morning to be driving homeward. The country looked very dreary, certainly. If only the sun would break through! But it made a mere glassy white spot in the low grey sky. In that cold light even the fresh snow looked grey, and the frozen weeds sticking up through it. In the draws, between the low hills, thickets of wild plum bushes were black against the drifts; they should have been thatched with yesterday`s snow, but today`s sharp wind had stripped them bare.
After the first mile Lucy began to feel very tired. The wind seemed to blow harder out here in the open country; it brought the tears to her eyes, and she had to keep wiping them away to see the road clearly. At last she determined to beg a ride from anyone who came by, even if he were going toward town. It was almost too cold to skate; and there would be the long walk home.
She had got over another mile when she heard the sound of sleigh- bells behind her. She turned her back to the wind, and listened. Only one man in the country had such bells. It must be Harry Gordon. There was no place to hide; she wouldn`t hide. Perhaps this was the chance she had been hoping for. She stepped behind a telephone post and waited. She felt even colder than before, and her heart beat fast. She was afraid, after all. There he came in his cutter, over the brow of a hill, down into a draw where he was lost to sight, then out on the very hill upon which she was standing. She stepped into the middle of the road, in front of him, and held up her hand. He pulled in his horses and stopped.
"Harry, could you give me a lift as far as Thompson`s pasture? I find it`s pretty rough walking." She was standing with her back to the wind, her skirts blown forward, holding her muff against her cheek. She looked very slight and appealing out there all alone.
Harry`s eyes were watery from the cold; he seemed more than ever to look at her through glasses. He began in that voice of cheery friendliness which meant nothing at all, with the usual shade of surprise in it:
"Well, now, I`m just awfully sorry, but I`m not going out that way at all! I turn north right here at the corner. I have an important appointment with a man up in Harlem. I`m nearly an hour late as it is, and I`ve got to make up time on the road. Wish I weren`t in such a hurry." He touched his fur cap with his glove and drove on.
Lucy sent just one cry after him, angry and imperious, "Harry!" as if she had the right to call him back. His big shoulders never moved. His sharp-shod horses trotted on, the sleigh-bells singing, and turned north at the section corner a hundred yards away. The cutter with the upright seated figure moved along against the grey snow-drifted pasture land until at last it disappeared behind a group of distant straw stacks.
When Lucy next stopped to take breath, she found herself a long way nearer the river bend. For a moment she had leaned against the telephone post back yonder, but only for a moment. Such a storm of pain and anger boiled up in her that she felt strong enough to walk into the next county. Her blood was racing, and she was no longer conscious of the cold. She forgot to look where she put her feet; they took care of themselves.
She couldn`t have imagined such rudeness, such an insult! She was young, she was strong, she would show them they couldn`t crush her. She would get away from these people who were cruel and stupid-- stupid as the frozen mud in the road. If she let herself think, she would cry. She must not give in to it, she must hurry on.
When she reached the river bank she sat down just long enough to take off her walking-shoes, and put on the other pair with skates attached. Her hands trembled so that she could scarcely pull the leather laces taut and tie them. She was angry with herself, too. That she should have given him the chance to leave her in the road, as he had left her in the dining-room that night in Chicago! But how could anyone be armed against such boorishness and spite? Catching up a stick, she got to her feet and took a few long strokes close to the shore. She was not looking about her, she saw nothing--she would get away from this frozen country and these frozen people, go back to light and freedom such as they could never know.
Without looking or thinking she struck toward the centre for smoother ice. A soft, splitting sound brought her to herself in a flash, and she saw dark lines running in the ice about her. She turned sharply, but the cracks ran ahead of her. A sheet of ice broke loose and tipped, and she plunged to her waist into cold water.
Lucy was more stimulated than frightened; she had got herself into a predicament, and she must keep her wits about her. The water couldn`t be very deep. She still had both elbows on the ice; as soon as she touched bottom she could manage. (It never occurred to her that this was the river itself.) She was groping cautiously with her feet when she felt herself gripped from underneath. Her skate had caught in the fork of a submerged tree, half-buried in sand by the spring flood. The ice cake slipped from under her arms and let her down.
At half-past three, when the wind had grown so bitter, Pauline telephoned her father to drive out and pick Lucy up on the west road. Mr. Gayheart went to the livery barn a few doors from his shop and told Gullford, the driver, to put in two horses. Then he asked his friend the tailor to go with him for a sleigh-ride. Mr. Gayheart was not a man to look for trouble. But as they drove on and on and still did not meet his daughter, he grew uneasy.
When they reached the place on the shore from which the young people used to go skating, they found the ice out in the stream cracked and broken. So she couldn`t have tarried here. She must have taken some other road, or gone to pay a call at one of the farms. The driver noticed something, out where the ice was bad; he said it looked like a red scarf.
Mr. Gayheart jumped out of the sleigh. He contradicted Gullford, but begged him to look again, to go out on the ice.
"I`m a little afraid to go out there, Mr. Gayheart; it`s rotten. But don`t get excited. Stay where you are, and I`ll have a look around."
Gullford went slowly along the shore, considering what was to be done. He knew that was a scarf out there. Presently he stopped and bent over. Under a willow bush at the river`s edge he found a pair of shoes and overshoes. He called Schneider, the tailor, and asked him to stay here with Mr. Gayheart while he whipped up his team and went to the neighbouring farms for help.
In less than an hour farm wagons and sleds were coming toward the river, bringing ropes, poles, lanterns, hay-rakes. One wagon brought a heavy row-boat that had been used in times of freshet. It was already dark, and the men who had come together agreed they could do nothing until morning. Mr. Gayheart kept begging them to try, declaring that he would not leave the river bank that night. While the older men talked and hesitated, four young lads dragged the old boat out into the rotten ice and groped below with their poles and hay-rakes. It did not take them a great while. The sunken tree that had caught Lucy`s skate still held her there; she had not been swept on by the current.
When Harry Gordon and his singing sleighbells came over the hills from Harlem that night, he overtook a train of lanterns and wagons crawling along the frozen land. In one of those wagons they were taking Lucy Gayheart home.
|
