Stella Dallas (1923, Houghton Mifflin)/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
1
Laurel sat on the end of the pier with her feet swinging over the edge. A girl about her own age sat on each side of her. Their arms were thrown lightly around her shoulders, and hers lightly around theirs. All three of the girls were in white, except for their Boutet de Monvel colored sweaters—pale pink, pale yellow, and faintest lavender. The three girls made as pretty a display against the gray-blue of the lake as a fragment of rainbow. Beneath their swinging feet floated a flotilla of canoes, their bright red and green sides flashing in the sun. On the pier behind the girls was a collection of boxes, leather-encased thermos-bottles and jars, and several tea-baskets.
The three girls were waiting for "the crowd" to assemble. "The crowd" was going on a picnic to Stag Island to-day. Laurel was one of "the crowd."
Laurel was seventeen years old now, and this was the first time in all her life she had ever been one of a crowd. The thrilling experience had lasted for ten days. It would be three weeks the day after to-morrow since Laurel and her mother had arrived at this unexpected Paradise.
Laurel was keenly conscious of the careless arms about her shoulders, but she didn't show it. Laurel could conceal joy and pride, she discovered, quite as successfully as disappointment and chagrin. She was keenly conscious, too, of the girl she had always been before on occasions of this sort, as she had strolled by just such intimate little groups as she now miraculously found herself one of, she and her mother taking in what details of exciting preparations as they could, in a glance or two, or covert backward look. Laurel felt sorrier for that girl on this happy morning, she thought, than she ever had before.
Now, down the long pier that stretched out into the lake from the lawn in front of the hotel drifted other fragments of rainbow, other groups of two-and-three girls with arms linked; and among them occasionally a boy or two—tanned, lean, loose-knit, tough-muscled, dressed in light trousers and soft shirts—typical American college boys. There was a whole rollicking bunch of them behind the last trio of girls. By the time "the crowd" had all collected, the pier was as noisy as an ivy-covered wall full of sparrows on the first sunny day of spring.
Laurel and the two girls beside her jumped up and joined the general chatter. Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Grosvenor, the two chaperons for the day's festivities, leisurely approaching the bevy could catch bits and snatches of characteristic conversation.
"Gorgeous day! Good-looking sweater, my dear! One exactly like it in henna. Last one in the dining-room—perfectly stunning! Absolutely! Crazy about that color."
Laurel didn't contribute much to the staccatoed exclamations, but her eyes shone, and her cheeks were bright.
"Did you ever see any one quite as lovely as Laurel Dallas this morning?" remarked Mrs. Adams to Mrs. Grosvenor.
"She's perfectly exquisite."
"How is your mother, this morning, Laurel, my dear?" Mrs. Adams inquired a moment later.
"Oh, better, thank you, Mrs. Adams," Laurel replied, turning her flushed, pleased face toward the older woman. "The sweet-peas you sent up to her were lovely. She told me to thank you ever and ever so much."
"I left another book at the desk, to be sent up to her later," remarked Mrs. Grosvenor.
"Oh, mother will be so pleased!"
"I hope she likes Wells, and hasn't read his latest."
"I'm sure she hasn't. You're awfully kind, Mrs. Grosvenor."
"Not a bit. I've been ill in a hotel-room myself, Laurel, dear. I know what it is like."
"Oh, Miss Dallas!" suddenly somebody exclaimed, close beside Laurel's other shoulder.
Laurel turned and looked up into the eyes of Mrs. Grosvenor's son Richard—her older son. She had two. Richard was a senior in college. He was one of the oldest boys who played with the "crowd." All the girls were "simply crazy" about Richard Grosvenor.
"But he can't see anybody but you, Laurel Dallas," one of the girls who had been sitting on the edge of the pier with Laurel had just told her.
"You're going with me, in my canoe, aren't you?" he now said to Laurel, smiling.
Any of the other girls would have known how to respond in the bluff, hearty, good-comradeship style of the day. "Thanks, Dick," or, "Crazy to," or, "Sure I am," but Laurel hadn't acquired all the ways yet. "Am I?" she replied, in the same pleased surprised manner with which she met all attentions shown her.
"Yes, you are," he assured her quietly. He turned away.
"There! What did I say, Laurel Dallas?"
"I'll bet he picks a single canoe."
"He was here all last summer and never as much as looked at any of us younger girls."
All the boys were now busy among the canoes, loading them, rearranging the cushions and seat-backs, shoving the dainty little crafts up against the pier, ready for the girls to step into.
"All ready, Miss Dallas."
Laurel turned. Yes, Deborah was right! He had selected a single canoe! He stood up in it now as Laurel approached him. He reached up both hands toward her, the canoe drifting away a little from the wharf as he did so, Laurel placed her hands in his, and he swung her across the widening gap between them into the center of the luxurious nest of cushions he had arranged for her in the bottom of the canoe. She alighted in the frail little boat like a bird on a tender twig. There was something of the same birdlike adroitness in every motion that Laurel made.
Laurel had lost none of the peculiar woodsy quality of her charm in the last four years. Her freckles had disappeared, however. (Stella always maintained it was white vinegar and salt.) Her long curls had disappeared, too. Laurel did her hair up now. Rolled it into a simple knot behind. But the gray eyes with their changing moods from dark to light—like a lake beneath varying skies—were still the same. So was her grave listening manner—like trees on a windless night. She was still slight and sleek in body, too—as un-undulating as a low bas-relief when you draw your hand across its surface, but as possessed of lovely curves, too, and as suggestive of softness and warmth.
"Won't you sit down?" Richard Grosvenor asked her, still holding her hands, though he knew she did not require steadying now. Richard had arranged the pillows so that Laurel would be facing him all the way up to Stag Island.
"Couldn't I paddle, too?"
"Do you want to?"
"I'd like to."
"Oh, all right."
2
They were off ten minutes before the others. Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Grosvenor watched the pretty skiff, with Laurel in the bow and Richard in the stern, disappear like a lazy bird around a clump of trees.
"Richard seems quite taken by her," remarked Mrs. Adams.
Mrs. Grosvenor smiled indulgently. "I can't deny it."
"Well, he certainly shows excellent taste. I think she is a lovely girl."
"Yes, Richard has always been very discerning. I've often told him he's really almost too particular—too fastidious about girls. This is his first serious affair since he has been in college as far as I know."
"It really is, then, serious?"
"Oh, I couldn't say that. It is obvious, that's all. Laurel is only seventeen, you know—a mere child, though Richard, absurd boy, says she's more like twenty in many ways than most girls he knows of twenty-two. It's serious enough, you see, for him to want to talk about her to me. He confided to me yesterday he intends inviting her to the game in November and to Class Day next June. She was motoring with us yesterday afternoon and we discovered some mutual friends. It seems she visits at Mrs. Cornelius Morrison's, you know, of New York and Long Island. I am on two charitable boards with Mrs. Morrison. She is a charming woman. Bob, my other son, is at St. Lee's, with Mrs. Morrison's oldest boy, Cornelius. They're delightful people."
3
It was about an hour's paddle to Stag Island, as the bird flies, but Richard guided the canoe along the irregular coastline, gliding through the dappled shadows of the beech and birch, of dogwood, and wild hydrangea, and occasional denser stretches of close-growing spruce and hemlock.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes Laurel didn't say a word. Not a single word! She sat in her perch in the bow, and steadily, rhythmically dipped her paddle into the water, drew it back, raised it, reached forward, dipped it into the water again. Richard, a few feet behind her, followed her slow revolutions. The effect upon him was almost hypnotic. It was awkward to be silent with most girls. He seldom was. Most girls avoided any such lapses as this. But Laurel Dallas would drift into silence as naturally, as unconsciously, as a canary, whose song is interrupted by some simple cause, and out of it in the same unexpected spontaneous fashion.
The crowd had been left far behind—they couldn't even be heard—when Laurel and Richard slipped into a little sequestered cove, almost a cave, with a leaf-covered roof—a lovely spot. Instinctively both the paddles dug deep into the water and held the canoe stationary. Laurel lifted her paddle very gently, and laid it noiselessly across her knees. The only sound in the sylvan sanctuary was the drip—drip—drip of a few drops of water from her paddle's broad end.
Finally Richard said softly from his seat behind Laurel, "Are you there?"
She broke into a low pleased laugh at that. "Every bit of me is here!"
"I wondered. You've been so noisy."
She leaned her head back and gazed up at the blue sky through the low-hanging branches. She drew in her breath deep. "Oh, isn't it too beautiful to be true!"
Richard, gazing only at her, thought it was! He didn't say so, simply smiled and remarked, "You like the woods, don't you?"
"I love them!" Laurel exclaimed.
But it wasn't the woods she was loving so much just then. It was life. Life had never seemed so kind and generous, so good and beautiful to her as now! She sighed, then suddenly lifted her paddle, plunged it into the dark water at her side, and slipped out of the little cave-spot, into the sunshine again. Slipped out into silence again, too.
"You aren't talking to me very much this morning," later Richard informed her.
She made no reply.
"You're a funny girl. I never knew a girl in my life who had silence for a line."
"Do you want me to talk?"
"No."
"When I'm in a canoe, near the shore, like this, I love sneaking around the corners on the birds and animals when they're not expecting you, and see what they're up to."
Some five, ten, fifteen minutes later, the canoe, pushing its nose around a bit of wooded peninsula, came abruptly upon a deer standing upon the shore. Laurel made no exclamation at sight of him, nor did she stop paddling or vary her stroke. She simply gazed in silent admiration for a second or two, then abruptly turned and looked back over her shoulder, to find out if her companion saw the beautiful creature too. Richard thought he had never seen anything so lovely, so blinding as Laurel's eyes as they met his! He smiled, nodded. She turned back satisfied. Not a word was spoken, but sharing the deer that way was—well—"Look here," said Richard a moment later, "haven't you paddled enough? Come, won't you please sit down here on the cushions and talk?"
She did finally.
"You're different from any girl I ever knew."
Most girls liked being told they were different. It seemed to distress Laurel.
"I try hard not to be."
"Don't try."
Laurel had never been talked to by any boy like this before. She was at a loss to know how to banter back.
"Are you already booked for the game in November?" asked Richard.
"The game?"
"The big game, I mean. It's in Cambridge this year."
"Oh, no, no, I'm not," Laurel's heart fluttered. He meant the big Harvard-Yale game! Oh, how happy her mother would be!
"I want you to go with me."
"Why, but I—do you think your mother—I mean—we—"
"I know," he interrupted, "that we've known each other only a week, and all the rest of that silly conventional stuff. But I'm not a perfect stranger to you. You can tell your mother that my kid brother knows Con Morrison. He visited him once. Con has been at our house. Anyhow, when your mother is able to come downstairs, she'll know us herself. It will be all right then. I simply had to get my word in now for fear you might get booked with somebody else. I want you to go to the game with me, if you go with anybody. Will you?"
"Yes, I will," said Laurel, looking off toward the shore, her eyes again suddenly dark and luminous.
Richard looked toward the shore, too. Had she seen another deer?
When they landed at Stag Island half an hour later, "Don't forget you're going to paddle back with me, too," Richard whispered.
4
All day long one happy moment followed another as uninterruptedly as one telegraph-pole another flashing by the window of a railroad train. It had been like that ever since the morning Mrs. Adams had fallen into conversation with Laurel on the hotel veranda. That was ten days ago, yet Laurel was only just beginning to become sufficiently used to the steady succession of kindnesses as to take them for granted, as to forget for an hour or so, occasionally, the phenomenon of their unfailing repetition.
Mrs. Adams had noticed Laurel the first morning she had appeared alone in the hotel dining-room. So, too, had others noticed her. The head-waiter had shown Laurel to a table by a far window. After she had sat there alone during breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Mrs. Adams made inquiries of the clerk. It seemed the new girl's mother was ill upstairs. Tonsillitis. The hotel doctor was taking care of her. Mrs. Adams spoke to Laurel that morning, asked her if there was anything she could do to help, and introduced her to two girls standing, near by, with tennis racquets.
"Do you play?" asked one of the girls.
"Will you play?" asked the other.
It was as easy as that. That very morning Laurel played tennis with three girls of "the crowd"; that very afternoon played golf with three others; that very evening met the boys and danced until the music stopped, running upstairs between numbers to see if her mother was comfortable, and to let her share what she knew would make her happier than anything else in the world.
"Well, I guess we've struck the right place at last, Lollie," Stella exclaimed from her pillow, with a glint of triumph in her eyes. "Don't think of me. Don't come up again, dearie. I'm all right. I'm bound to be. I just knew we'd happen on to gold some day."
It had all been pure luck. Stella had chosen this particular hotel from a circular, on the strength of the fact of its high rates. The start had been anything but propitious. Either she or Laurel had been ill from the first moment of their arrival. Laurel was confined to the bedroom the first twenty-four hours, and Stella had been obliged to wander about the unexplored regions downstairs companionless. Then the moment the fever left Laurel, didn't it go and settle itself upon Stella—settle and stay, too! At the end of two weeks Stella was only just beginning to sit up in a chair by her bed.
5
After lunch under the tall pines on Stag Island, the boys went off to explore the coast; and the girls (after the tea-baskets were repacked and the pine-needle bank made as neat and clean as the inside of a pine chest) grouped themselves in colorful bunches on the soft brown background, and producing gay work-bags, began plying various tools—knitting-needles, crochet-hooks, and tatting-bobbins; conversing the while lazily, meanderingly, breaking into shrill peals of laughter, now and then, or fragment of popular song.
Laurel lay back, flat on the ground, idle, her hands folded under her head, and gazed up at the murmuring tops of the trees. She wished her mother might be hiding up there among the needles, gazing down at her through the gaps, seeing, hearing.
Deborah, seated beside Laurel, was tickling her nose with a spear of field grass, Laurel attempting to catch it in her mouth by occasional puppy-like snaps. Frances on the other side was amusing herself by weaving pine needles through the meshes of Laurel's sweater. "I'll pay you back, somehow," purred Laurel contentedly.
Now they were telling her about the theatricals they gave every year in August, discussing what sort of a rôle would be best suited to her; now describing the delights of the night she would spend on the top of Spear Mountain before the season was over; now commanding her to make herself useful and sit up and help wind some yarn.
Oh, was it all true? Did they like her a little? Were they her friends? It seemed to Laurel that afternoon, as the shadows grew longer on the western margin of the lake and the hour for the homeward paddle with Richard Grosvenor through those shadows, approached, that her cup of happiness was full to the brim.
6
At the end of the homeward paddle it seemed to her that that cup was overflowing. Richard had asked her to be his partner in the tennis tournament on Saturday; he had asked her to go to lunch at a neighboring hotel with his mother and himself to-morrow noon; he had asked her to come out alone with him, in the canoe, to-night after dinner, when the moon rose; he had asked if he might write to her after he returned to town. He was going back in four days. He had taken a job in his father's office for the rest of the summer.
As they had drawn near to the pier in front of the hotel, he had said to Laurel, interrupting his paddling as he did so, leaning forward, "It doesn't seem possible that I met you only a week ago" (Oh, it was the beginning of the old, old story). "You seem to me like somebody I've known a long while" (told in the old, old way).
Laurel closed her eyes a moment—he didn't see her—then opened them wide. She had a feeling she might wake any moment and find it all a dream.
As she jumped out of the canoe on to the pier beside him, a look passed between them that was like the look when they had shared the deer silently together. For the third or fourth time that day Laurel's heart fluttered and seemed almost to turn over.
Several of "the crowd" were on the pier when Laurel and Richard arrived. Deborah called out brightly to them, "Come along, walk up with us."
She linked a free arm familiarly through Laurel's as she approached, and Richard fell into step on Laurel's other side. Frances and two boys were also with the group. They all moved up the pier together. The girls began singing a popular song. Then suddenly in the midst of the chorus, Deborah stopped singing, stopped walking, too. So did the others.
"Oh, girls! Look!" she exclaimed. "There is that woman!"
Laurel glanced up. Coming down across the lawn in front of the hotel approaching the pier, she saw her mother.
7
Stella was several hundred yards away, but Laurel was familiar with the black-and-white striped foulard which she now wore. Stella had remodeled her foulard this spring. She had given it a lot of fresh "pep," with generous dashes of Kelly green. Deborah seemed familiar with the foulard, too.
"What woman?" Frances inquired.
"Why, my dear, look, look for yourself, and see. Don't you remember that dreadful dress? Of course you do! You were with us. You saw her about two weeks ago. She was around the hotel all one day."
"Good gracious! Of course I do! We wondered how such a person ever got in here, and then decided she must have come, just for the day, from that unspeakable place on the other side of the lake."
"Notice her, Laurel," laughed Deborah, giving Laurel a little squeeze. "I believe she is coming down toward the pier. Take her in. She's a perfect scream. Paint about an inch thick, and plucked eyebrows, and dyed hair, and not a day under forty. Oh, she's a mess. You remember her, Richard, don't you?"
"Yes, I remember her. Awful dame! Horrible creature!"
Behind Laurel lay only water. On either side of her lay only water. She could not turn and run. She watched her mother choose the gravel path that led to the pier. ("She is! She's coming this way, girls!" delightedly ejaculated Deborah.) Then suddenly Laurel exclaimed, "I've lost something."
"Lost something?"
"My watch!" She held up an empty wrist. "It must have dropped off in the canoe."
She turned back immediately. Richard turned back, too.
"Shan't we all come and look?" Deborah offered.
"No, please," Laurel called back.
"You all go along," Richard ordered. "We'll find it."
"I think it must be among the cushions somewhere," said Laurel.
All during the torturing ten or fifteen minutes when she and Richard shook the cushions and pillows, each separate one, and then ran their hands into every possible corner and crevice of the canoe where a watch might lodge, and even searched between the loosely fitted boards of the pier, Laurel kept a constant watch of the shore. She saw her mother walk slowly down the path toward the lake, arrive at the water's edge, hesitate, and then sit down on one of the rustic seats built on either side of the pier, where it joined the bank. She saw the group which she had just left approach the rustic seats, draw nearer to her mother, pass her mother! Thank kind heaven above, they didn't stop! Her mother didn't introduce herself to them after all! Laurel breathed freer. But only for a short time. It soon became evident that her mother was going to wait for her at the rustic seats until her errand at the end of the pier, whatever it was, was finished.
Laurel couldn't keep up the silly search among a half-dozen sofa-pillows and one canoe indefinitely. She must go back along the pier and pass between the rustic seats with Richard Grosvenor beside her, in a minute or two. Would she tell him now—immediately, that the "awful dame" was her mother?
"Well, I guess my watch isn't here, after all," she said with a catch in her voice, with almost a sob. It was over—all over. And so unbeautifully, so hideously.
"If the watch isn't here, it's probably up at Stag Island. If we both paddle hard, we can be there before dark. Jump in, we'll find it."
Laurel gave Richard a look that was like that of a dog to the god who releases his foot from the jaws of a steel trap. "Oh, you are good!" And she jumped into her place in the front of the canoe, he jumped in behind, and they were off, out of sight, out of sound, in three minutes.
They didn't find the watch. They hunted until it was dark on Stag Island and paddled back by the light of a slowly rising July moon. They hardly talked at all. Richard was aware of a high current of feeling that seemed to be coursing through this mysterious girl ever since the first moment that she had noticed that her wrist was bare. It awed and silenced him.
It wasn't until they were returning from Stag Island that he remarked, "You must think a lot of that watch."
She replied, "I'll never forget you're coming to help me find it."
"But we haven't been successful."
"That doesn't matter. I'll never forget it. Never, never, never, never."
A similar high current of feeling coursed through Richard, too, at the sound of her low voice, earnestly repeating the single word to him.
8
It was after nine o'clock when Laurel and Richard reached the pier for the second time that evening. It was deserted. So, too, Laurel observed, with a fresh wave of gratitude for the boy who had saved her, and her mother also, were the rustic seats.
"I'm going in by a side door," Laurel said to Richard, as they walked toward the lighted hotel. "You go in the other way. You see the crowd. I want to go right up to my mother as quickly as I can."
"But you'll be down again?"
"Not to-night."
"You haven't had any dinner."
"I'll have some sent up."
"But—"
"Please."
"Shan't I see you again to-night?"
"Not to-night."
"When shall I see you again?"
(In ten—in five minutes, when "the crowd" told him, he wouldn't want to see her ever again.)
"To-morrow," she managed to smile.
"Yes. Don't forget. We're going to have lunch together to-morrow."
"I won't."
"I've only four days left," he went on eagerly, "give me the morning before lunch, too, will you? Please. We've so much to talk about, and I've only four days left. We'll go somewhere alone."
They had reached the rear door now, Laurel had one hand on the knob.
"Will you? Please answer. Will you?"
Laurel turned and looked up at him, and nodded.
"Right after breakfast?"
She nodded again.
"Promise?"
For the third time she nodded, then suddenly reached out her free hand and touched Richard Grosvenor on his arm, drew her hand back quickly, and whispered, "Good-night."
Her eyes were as black as the lake beneath the moon.
"Laurel!" Richard moved toward her, but she had turned, she had gone. The big door with its heavy spring closed softly upon him.