Winterbound

  But that explanation didn’t satisfy Kay, haunted by visions of a changed and preoccupied Penny, too busy with her own thoughts and affairs to be interested in other people’s. Nothing about their own eagerness to have her home again, but just pleasant little references to the weather and sitting in the sun. If that was what a winter in New Mexico did to one . . .

  Meantime she stitched away at the curtains she was making for Penny’s room, pale green glazed chintz with a piping of dull rose to go with the new wall paper. Martin had given up the best part of one precious holiday to scraping and waxing the old painted bureau that had always looked so shabby, while Caroline hung about disconsolately until Garry had a bright idea.

  “I tell you what. You make her a dish garden. You can use that flat blue bowl on the top pantry shelf. Fix it with moss and Quaker ladies and it’ll look lovely on her window ledge.”

  “But they’ll die before Penny gets here,” objected Caroline, who had been counting the days off one by one on the grocery calendar in the kitchen, seeing in her mind’s eye the long space yet to cover before the little black crosses reached to the end of the month.

  “If they do you can always get fresh ones. Don’t be such a misery, but go and start it right now. Take a basket and you can have my trowel to dig them up with; it’s out there by the cold-frame.”

  The arranging and rearranging of that dish garden took most of Caroline’s attention for days to come. She planted it over at least a dozen times, and whenever she was needed to set the table or dry the silver it always happened that she was busy “fixing Penny’s garden,” but at least it gave her something to think about during the days of waiting. For there was still no news of the exact date of Penny’s arrival, and still those brief pleasant letters arrived at intervals of a few days each, regular as clockwork.

  “Suppose she never did come home,” said Garry one morning. “Suppose we just keep getting these queer letters day by day, and nothing else ever happens. Suppose . . .”

  But at this gruesome suggestion Caroline began to snivel, and Kay said sharply: “Don’t tease the child like that! You’re getting her all worked up.”

  “I was only fooling. Don’t be silly, Caroline.”

  “Well, when you’re fooling you sound like you weren’t fooling, and I don’t like it!”

  “Ambrose Bierce just disappeared and nobody ever found him,” said Martin, who kept curious and unexpected bits of information stored in his mind, to produce usually at inopportune moments. “And Neal said there was a man once lived over on Seven Hill and one day he just walked out of his front door and nobody ever saw him again.”

  “Which is exactly,” said Garry, “what I would like to do myself, one of these days.”

  She wandered out into the spring sunshine where Emily was playing ball with Arabella. Hands clasped round her knees, she sat watching the tiny racing figure, so like a skein of orange wool blown to and fro by the wind, until Emily said abruptly: “That’ll do,” put the ball in her pocket and turned, while Arabella dropped panting on the grass.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Spring,” said Garry, digging her fingers viciously into the soft earth beside her. “Doesn’t it ever get you that way? I’m cross and disagreeable and restless. I want to do something and I don’t know what I want to do. I’d like to walk out on everything and go some place where I’d never been before—and stay there!”

  “Heavens!” said Emily, looking at her with interest.

  “I mean it.”

  “I’m sure you do. Everyone gets like that once in a while. Usually it’s the result of too much family. I know all the symptoms. It gets you all of a sudden, like measles.” She spoke jokingly but her sharp eyes lingered on Garry’s face, for she had been well aware of those symptoms for some time. It had been a long winter, and most of its responsibilities had fallen on Garry’s shoulders, sturdy, but not sturdy enough to go on forever without rebellion. “Did you ever sit down and think,” she went on cheerfully, “just what you would do if you suddenly came into a fortune? Not a big fortune, but a nice comfortable-sized one, that you could do what you liked with.”

  “I know exactly what I’d do,” said Garry, falling promptly into the game. “I’d send Kay to Europe for two years, first of all. I’d have Martin prepared for college. Then I’d see that Penny and Caroline were settled somewhere comfortably—or they could go on a trip if they wanted to.”

  “In fact, everyone nicely placed.” Emily nodded, thoroughly enjoying this little insight. “You make me think of a hen with a bunch of chickens. And then what?”

  Garry grinned suddenly.

  “Then I’d take what money I might need for emergencies myself, and put it in a bank some place. And I’d start out and work my way all around the country, taking different jobs just as they happened and trying any darn thing I fancied that would support me for as long as I was interested in it. It may sound crazy,” she went on, ruffling Arabella’s orange mane as she spoke, “but I’ve often wondered whether a person couldn’t do that if they really set their mind to it, and I’d like to try it out. Maybe I’d get clear across the continent and maybe I wouldn’t get any further than the next township, but I’d have a swell time trying.”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “Anything. I don’t mean swanky jobs. Any old thing that would pay my way as I went along. There’s nearly always something that somebody wants done, if you look around you.”

  “True,” said Emily.

  “I’d like to know what it feels like to wait on table or work in a store or pick fruit, or . . . oh, just the sort of things anyone could do.”

  “You might advertise,” said Emily meanly.

  “If I did,” Garry retorted, “I bet I’d write an ad that would get me the kind I want, anyway. Hello, there’s the mailman.”

  She jumped up and strolled down to the gateway where the dusty creaking car had just come to a pause on its way downhill. A queer sort of castle in the air, Emily Humbold thought, watching the straight swing of her shoulders, but there was one thing about Garry; she never wove schemes about things that she couldn’t do.

  “All for you, as usual. There’s a card about some auction; we’ll keep that for Penny. Oh, and a letter for Kay.”

  Kay was indoors, turning the last hem on Penny’s curtains. She looked at the envelope heading.

  “Another refusal. Well, they’ve taken a little longer about it, this time.”

  “Open it and see. Heavens, Kay, don’t be such a poke! What did I tell you?”

  For Kay’s face had changed as she read the closely typewritten page.

  “They like it. It’s some woman writing and she wants me to come there and talk it over with her. She doesn’t say for certain, but it sounds as if they were interested.” The color had rushed into Kay’s cheeks. “Look, Garry, do you suppose that really does mean anything?”

  “Of course it does. Do you imagine she’d drag you all the way up to town to talk it over if it didn’t.”

  “She only says ‘if I’m likely to be in town any time soon.’”

  “You’re likely to be in town tomorrow morning. You’ll make that eight-o’clock train if I have to push you on it.” Garry had taken prompt command of the situation. “You’ll have time to see these people and settle everything, and get the afternoon train back again. Edna will take you down.”

  There was no need for Edna or the train journey either, for as soon as Charles heard the news he offered to drive Kay into the city and back. He had business in town himself that could just as well be done tomorrow as any other day. It was to be an early start, with breakfast along the road, and as Kay swallowed a hasty cup of coffee next morning she gave a last anxious look at the plain tailored suit, carefully pressed the night before from its winter creases, the town shoes that Garry had finally located after long search in one of the attic trunks, and Cousin Carrie’s Christmas silk stockings, useful now for the first time.

  “Do I look a
ll right?”

  “Fine. Stop at the first decent store you come to and buy gloves, and you can leave that old pair in the car. And remember—act big and don’t let them talk you down. And don’t you sign any contract till Emily has looked it over for you. Good-bye and good luck!” Garry waved vigorously as the roadster sped down the hill, feeling that she had done her best, anyway, towards launching Kay on the high road to success.

  With the children off to school ten minutes earlier than usual there was a long and tranquil day ahead. Garry basked in the feeling of freedom and leisure that comes over any member of a family, no matter how united, when all the other members are comfortably off and out of the way. She tidied the house, baked a chocolate cake for supper, feeling unusually energetic, and set it to cool while she wandered over to the Rowes’, to find Mary busy over her washtub in the kitchen while Tommy amused himself with a saucepan, a strainer, and a pail of soapsuds, making soup with the gravel outside the back door. It was long since she had had a good gossip with Mary, and the time flew until Neal’s overalled figure, suddenly blocking the doorway, reminded her of lunch and a hungry Emily waiting across the road.

  “Half the day gone,” Garry thought guiltily. “And I was going to get Penny’s curtains up and the rest of the garden dug.”

  “I expect I’ll have to be packing my things before so very long,” Emily remarked casually as they sat over their coffee in the living room.

  “You?” Garry stared at her in sudden dismay. “Indeed you won’t. Why, you’re one of the family. Penny would be furious if you were gone before she got here, after all we’ve written about you. We want you to stay all summer. Unless you don’t like it any more,” she added. “Maybe you’ve got something else to do.”

  “I’d rather stay, if it’s all right really. For a while anyway. Charles has a room planned for me up at his house, when he ever gets it done. But I like it better here. There’ll be so many comings and goings up at that place and I’m like Arabella—I enjoy quiet. Besides, I’m an incorrigibly untidy person, as you know, and by the time they get the house up there all planned and perfect there won’t be any place in it for untidiness.”

  Their eyes met and they both smiled, sharing the same ideas about comfort as opposed to perfection.

  “Isn’t it funny how things turn out!” Garry looked through the window and up the hill to where the new shingles caught the sunlight. “When we first came to live here we used to wonder about that house, and Kay was always saying how she’d love to have a hand in the fixing over of it. Ever since I can remember we’ve always joked about ‘Kay’s ideas’ and teased her about wanting everything just so. With us I guess it’s been mostly a case of plenty to fix and nothing to fix it with, but now she’s really got a chance to show what she can do for once.”

  Penny’s curtains could wait till tomorrow, she decided as she stacked the lunch dishes. Kay still had to sew the rings on, and Penny couldn’t possibly be home for another week, since they had had another of those queer noncommittal letters only the day before yesterday. The garden was another matter; it was too good a day to spend indoors, and when the kitchen was tidy she took spade and rake and set to work.

  It was a pleasant drowsy afternoon. Robins were busy round the apple trees where pale sticky buds were already unfolding, and the click of Emily’s typewriter sounded lazily through the open window. Arabella wandered out presently, picking her ladylike way over the fresh-turned earth, with one eye on the coon cat who sat erect and motionless among the pasture weeds, watching a mole-run. Kay wouldn’t be back till five at the earliest, but Garry was so impatient to know the result of that journey that she found herself listening every moment for the possible hum of a car down the valley. But the children came back from school, supper was over and cleared away, before at last the roadster drew up at the gate.

  It needed only one look at Kay’s face to know the news.

  “It’s all settled—they’re going to use it. Oh Garry, you don’t know how I feel! Hey, look out!”

  For Garry had seized her in a sudden whirl that nearly landed them both on the floor.

  “Never mind. I’ve squashed your hat, but you can buy a new one now. What happened? Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  “It’ll be published this fall. There’s some work I’ve got to do on it still; one picture to draw over again, and the end papers. I never thought about those. But that won’t take very long. I must have stayed there two hours and she was perfectly grand; showed me some of the other books they are making, and just how things are printed, and the sort of colors one can use—ever so many things I’d never known about and always wanted to. I never knew there was so much went to making just one book! And the best of it is, it’s got me started on new ideas now, and I can’t wait to begin on them.”

  “It’s the feeling of having really made a beginning that counts so much,” she said later that evening, after Charles had gone, the last remnants of the chocolate cake were finished, and she and Garry were sitting curled on the sofa watching the flames in the open fireplace—for evenings were still chilly. “When I saw all those other things there today my own stuff began to look pretty awful. I just hated to look at it, spread out there. I could see all the mistakes I’d made and all that I might have put into it and hadn’t. But I guess everyone feels that way when you come to measure up, the first time. I haven’t got any illusions about it, either. But it did make me feel that the next thing I try I’ll be able to do a lot better, and if they do like my stuff at all I’m going to try hard, and I’ll turn out something very different. Garry, I’m so glad you made me stick at those drawings, even if they did seem silly. It’s just groping along by oneself that’s so awful; I got into a kind of muddle this winter when it didn’t seem as if anything was worth trying. Charles gave me a good talking to coming back in the car today. We nearly quarreled over it, but I guess he was right.”

  Garry looked sharply up; there was a little flush on Kay’s cheeks, but she went on quickly: “Oh, I know what’s back of your mind, but you don’t have to worry. We’re just good friends and he’s got work to think about and so have I, but he’s the first person I’ve ever met that I can really talk to about things, and who understands.”

  “That’s how it always begins,” thought Garry, giving a poke to the smoldering logs.

  “I don’t mean that you don’t. I only mean . . .”

  “I know just what you mean,” said Garry, sitting back on her heels. “You mean someone outside the family, someone who hasn’t watched you grow up and who doesn’t think they know all about you. That’s exactly why I like Emily and Mary Rowe. When I want to spill things over I can spill it over to them, and it’s all right. They don’t get their feelings hurt and they don’t immediately think that anything you happen to say has some relation to something or other they happened to say or do ten months back. I know!”

  “Well, that’s how I do feel. And that’s why . . .”

  A prolonged and dismal hoot broke suddenly on the stillness.

  “Listen!” said Garry. She dropped the poker and moved to the open window. “Sounds like some car in trouble down the hill there.”

  Kay joined her. They stood looking out down the road to where on the first twisting rise two headlights blinked uncertainly, while the grating whine of gears sounded, stopped, and began again.

  “Stalled on the first turn. Someone who doesn’t know the road, or they’re out of gas.”

  “Maybe it’s Neal,” Kay said.

  “Neal’s back ages ago. It’s after eleven now. Besides, that doesn’t sound like his car.”

  “Well, we don’t have to help them out. Garry, I’m going to bed. That drive made me so sleepy!”

  But Garry still stood there, peering out. The car had started anew, hung for a moment doubtfully, then lurched forward, taking the zigzag climb with much wobbling and groaning but a dogged determination that brought it at last, with a final burst of power, just abreast of their own gateway, w
here it stalled again for good. A slim figure got out, and with one amazed look Garry tore the front door open and ran down the path.

  “Penny!”

  “It’s me. I never thought I’d make it. I’ve had that wretched hill on my mind ever since I started out. Did I wake the whole countryside up?”

  “But Penny—Kay, come here!” Garry shook the small figure to make sure it was real. “You mean you learned to drive and you drove all that way alone!”

  “Every inch of it.” Penny waved her hand at the shabby flivver, dust-colored, with dried mud caked to the axles, and one crumpled fender visible in the dim glow from the headlights. “We bought that wreck down there for forty dollars and Peggy said if I wanted to drive it back I could keep it, and there it is. I’d planned to creep up and take you all by surprise, seeing it was after dark, and then I had to stall on the hill! The horn was an accident; I leaned on the button. Well, I’ve stalled my way half across the country, come to that, but I got here!”

  They hugged, held each other at arm’s length to stare, and hugged again.

  “You’re looking grand!”

  She was. A grimy and disheveled Penny when they dragged her indoors to the lamplight, almost as dust-smeared as the car, but amazingly sun tanned, firm of muscle under her khaki flannel shirt and with a new light of assurance in her eyes.

  “Where are the rest of you?”

  But Martin had already stumbled out of bed, roused by the sound of the car, Caroline came trailing down in her nightgown, only half awake; Emily Humbold loomed in her doorway, stalwart in striped pyjamas, clutching an outraged Arabella who had no opinion at all of midnight strangers falling from the skies like this. A state of happy confusion in which everyone talked at once and nobody listened and news went in at one ear and out at the other, since nothing seemed particularly important except the great fact that Penny was home again, until suddenly she said: