Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 5
V
He had been pacing up and down in the cold, for fifteen minutes, kicking his toes into his heels to keep his feet warm, idling at corners, and turning a dozen times in a block to see whether she was coming behind him—trembling with hope at one thought, shivering with cold and the prospect of disappointment at the next—when he saw her between the avenue trees, walking toward him slowly, graceful against the shining background of the snow, her head down with the appearance of knowing that she was doing wrong. And the flush of pleasure with which he had sighted her, faded out in uneasiness as her manner became more reluctant and unjoyful with her approach.
"I'm not going to church," she announced hurriedly. "I can't stay away from mother so long. She is—we're afraid she may be catching pneumonia."
He dropped his hand from his cap. His disappointment was so complete that it left him blank; he had nothing to say.
She turned over the snow with her foot, and patted it down nervously. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I"
"Oh, it's all right," he put in bravely. "Only I'll not have a chance to—I hope it isn't serious?"
"We don't know yet."
"What does the doctor say?"
She shook her head. "We haven't sent for him. We're waiting to see."
"Oh." He watched her working at the snow.
After an awkward silence, she said: "I must hurry right back." And there was a half-heartedness in the way she said it, as if she were assuring herself that she meant to do it, very soon.
He caught the note. "Won't you walk to the corner and back? It's better . . . waiting . . . out here."
A "cutter" passed them with a rousing jingle of bells. The sunlight was etching the shadow of bare branches on the snow. He saw in her face that she felt the contrast between the crisp brilliancy of the morning and the heavy atmosphere of indoors.
"Well," she agreed, as if conditionally.
When they had gone a few steps, he asked: "Have you ever seen the college?"
"No. . . . Is it far?"
Just two streets over—to the grounds."
"Well."
She stepped out more briskly, having made a truce with her conscience, apparently; and when he asked, "Have you left Horton?" she answered, "Oh, yes. I didn't go back this year at all. We didn't know quite what we were going to do."
"About what?"
"About everything! Mother has been having difficulty—with lawyers, you know—about property—I mean 'titles'—in father's will, and now she has won the cases and sold everything and invested the money, and she wants to travel—to Germany or some place where I can study music—or New York."
"Aren't you going to be at the Conservatory?"
She hastened to reassure his dismay. "Yes, yes. For this term. Of course! . . . Mother may leave me here, with Mrs. Kimball, and go down south for the winter. She has been talking of it since September—and this cold may drive her away."
"Oh?" The aching apprehension which her greeting had started in him, had been slowly easing. Now there began to work in its place a bubbling sense of happiness that was as unreasonable as an intoxication. He struggled to repress his smiles. He looked down at the snow on the sidewalk and up at the snow in the crotches of the trees. He fastened the button of his heavy glove, inspecting it narrowly, with the manner of a girl who is in danger of giggling in church. "I hope it won't be as bad as that," he said in a false voice.
"Her cold."
No. . . . I hope not." She glanced around at him, but he pretended to be examining the front of a house across the road. She put up her hand to pat and finger the coil of hair at the back of her head; and when he looked at her again, noticing her silence, he saw that her arm was shaking.
"Wh—what's the matter?"
The irrepressible quiver of laughter in his voice set her off; and with her first convulsive choke, he snickered. They began to laugh in a sort of suppressed hysteria, blundering along through the snow together, unable to look at each other and breaking out into fresh spasms of giggles infectiously like a pair of children.
"I didn't say anything," he protested.
"You're so funny!" she cried. And that started them afresh.
They had gone a block before they recovered control of themselves; and even then their conversation was interspersed with unreasoning smiles and amused silences. But that laughter had broken down the restraint that separated them; it had joined them in an unconscious conspiracy against her mother; and it had brought them nearer to the camaraderie of their Coulton days. No matter what commonplaces they spoke now, there was a sparkling undercurrent, unexpressed and really inexpressible, flowing beneath their words, almost in a secret understanding, like the furtive twinkles of two actors who had been joking together in the wings before they came out on the stage to speak their lines. With Don, the acting was not unconscious; he was well aware that he was not voicing the tumult of his heart. But with her, the inner working of her thought was in the more complicated spirit of a mild flirtation. She knew that she was playing with fire, for the first flame in Don's eyes, that morning, had frightened her; but he had hidden it now, though she knew it was still there; and while, in her words, she refused to recognise it, she fed it with glances, with smiles, with little dimpling blushes, warmed and excited by it, girlishly.
She asked him what he had been doing at college; and he told her what lectures he had been taking and what subjects he preferred. She asked him how he had spent his Christmas; and he replied with report of the friends whom she had left in Coulton and of the small events of the town. They made no reference to that past which included his love-letter and its result. He said nothing of his constant thought of her, nothing of his revolt against the dictation of his father, nothing of his inner life at all. He kept their conversation on the easy plane of friendly chatter; and when she brushed against his shoulder, in a narrowing of the path, he did not speak until the choke of emotion had died down again in his throat.
She liked skating better than tobogganing; he had done very little of either. She recalled with enthusiasm a "bobbing" party which the girls had had at Horton, last winter, on a moonlit night; and he laughed at her description of how she had blown a tin horn in the ear of a teacher whom she disliked. He learned that she was contemptuous of boys who wore "spring skates, you know," instead of the hockey skates which screwed to the sole of the shoe; and he marked the distinction in his memory as if it were a point of correct dress to be observed. And he was so unaffectedly interested in everything she said—in such sympathetic accord with all her likes and dislikes, and so eager to hear every scrap of information that would help him to imagine her in the life which she had led in their separation—that she enjoyed her walk like a princess among courtiers and rewarded him, regally, with her smile.
When they saw the towers of "Varsity" showing in dark grey above the snow-powdered tops of the pines which screened the building from this approach, he was reminded of his cousin, and asked quickly: "Have you seen him—Conroy—yet?"
"Not yet."
"He will be calling to see you as soon as he hears."
"I suppose so. Yes."
"If your mother's not too ill."
"But," she laughed, "I didn't say she was so ill. It was Mrs. Kimball who was afraid she might be getting pneumonia. I just—I didn't like to say I was going to church without her, so I said I was going . . . to take a little walk . . . while the sun was out."
"Oh." When he had readjusted his thoughts to that change in the situation, he went on boldly: "I might call with him, then?"
"I'm sure—yes, of course. Why not?"
He suggested, in as matter-of-fact a tone as possible: "If you wrote to him, telling him where you are, he'll ask me to go with him . . . I think."
The quick glance she gave him, archly, accepted the small deception which the plan implied. "Well," she agreed.
They walked in a guiltily-smiling silence until they came to the side gate of the college grounds. Their agreement required that Conroy should not see them together. Don said: "He's in Residence, you know," and nodded toward the building.
She turned quickly. "I mustn't go any further. I've been away so long already."
"That's so," he said. "Let's go back by the avenue."
It was the longest way round.
As soon as the college was out of sight in the trees, the hush of their small conspiracy lifted again, and they went along with their chatter, stepping out against a wind that was sifting the snow down on them from the branches overhead. He asked her whether she was cold—because the question gave him an excuse for looking at her with a lingering apprehension. She replied that she was not, but tried to turn up her collar to show him a woman's appreciation of his thought of her comfort. And when the collar came up awkwardly, she let him help her with it, and pretended not to notice the reverent timidity with which he did it.
"Aren't you too?" she asked. "Turn yours up,"—repaying him with innocent full eyes that enjoyed the confusion they created.
"Oh, I'm—I'm all right," he stammered, but raised the collar obediently with an expression of face at once so pleased and so blushingly grateful that it appealed to her affection like the clumsy devotion of the awkward age.
She continued their conversation in a more serious tone for the remainder of the way, drawing from him the confession that he did not intend to study law, but did not know what he did intend to study; and when they stopped at the street corner below her house again, she gave him her hand with demure good wishes for his success in whatever "course" he decided to follow; and he carried away with him a memory of her gentle confidence that was at once a benediction and a surety for hope.
He took a long walk, that afternoon, to the elm where he had fancied her sitting with him looking down on the town; and he stood there in the snow, leaning against the tree, his eyes fixed on the distant spire of St. Stephen's that marked the quarter in which she lived. After supper, he locked himself in his room, and having lit his lamp and opened his books, he spent the evening in idleness, trying to draw a picture of her in lead pencil on a page of his note-book, tantalized by the visual memory of her which he could not reproduce—or abandoning himself to it, with closed eyes, resting his head and arms on the table, smiling blindly—until the cold drove him to bed. There, he lay on his back, his hands clasped over his head, staring at the blackness in which he saw sudden retinal images of her that flashed and vanished. And he tried to make his bed rock down through the floor to "Slumberland"—in a return to his childish fancies—holding to the memory of her in the hope that he might compel her to come into his dreams; and he woke, with a start, his arms numb, his shoulders aching, and found the thought of her again, and cuddled down with it under the bedclothes like a child who wakes frightened, and finds its mother's hand there in the dark.