He shook his head, turning to face her.
“No, I can’t, Francey. ’N I can’t tell you why. Gee, I’m sorry. I would’ve liked to see Dan again. You tell him … oh, darn! Never mind. Don’t tell him anything or say you’ve seen me. I’m sorry about the party, too, Francey. I did ask Mother if you could come, ’cause you always used to come to our parties, but this time it’s different, see?”
She nodded; then, still staring at him, lifted the black bottle to her lips.
“You watch me.” Her voice died away as she began to drink. A trickle ran down her chin and she choked, but went on drinking.
“Gee!” shrieked Stebby, hopping with excitement half-way up the slope, while Irene and Lou halted and looked down at Francey with wide, disapproving, yet excited eyes. “That’s rye in that bottle, Bob … she said so! Oh boy … oh boy … will she be sick!”
“She’s crazy.” Bob turned away and resumed the climb.
“There!” yelled Francey, lowering the bottle and staring up at them. “Who said I wouldn’t drink it? Now I’ll fight the whole bunch of you.”
None of the four took any notice, for Francey was always trying to start a fight; she loved fighting. Only Stebby was slowly climbing backwards, never taking his eyes off her. Any minute now she would be sick.
“Comin’ after berries to-morrow afternoon?” shouted Francey, leaning over the rail with swimming eyes and shaken by hiccoughs. (Gee, I won’t be sick till they’ve gone, the lousy bunch, she swore to herself, leaning hard on the rail.)
“Nope.” Bob, the spokesman, did not look round. Now the four were almost at the top of the slope.
“Oh … why not?”
“Can’t.”
“You mad at me, Bob Vorst?”
“Nope. I guess not. You haven’t done anything to me, Francey Carr. But we can’t come. Not any of us. Ever again. Get that?”
He turned round to shout this down to her, and the girls turned with him; Stebby had never ceased to climb backwards and watch her. She saw the four little figures standing against the crimson splendour of the fall woods, the girls in their light dresses with short bright hair, dark Stebby in white shirt and corduroy knickers, fair sturdy Bob in a blue shirt and tweed knickerbockers with one lock falling across his eyes.
“G’d-bye, Francey,” they called, waving. “G’d-bye.” But Francey, leaning hard on the rail, felt too sick to answer and could only wave.
“Now she can’t say we didn’t say good-bye to her ’n start a fight,” explained Bob, as they went into the rustling, cool-smelling woods. “Mother says we aren’t ever to talk to her again, Irene and Lou … and that goes for you too, Stebby Viner, I guess Aunt Carol would say so, anyway. Understand?”
“Sure, if Mother says so,” murmured Irene, a pretty, conventional child of fourteen who was already more interested in styles and smuggled copies of True Story than in kids’ games. “But why, Bob? What’s she done? We’ve always played with Francey ever since we were little.”
“Never you mind. You go read your old Vogue,” and Bob mincingly arranged an imaginary hat. “Francey’s a crazy girl and her folks are bad.”
“Sure. They’re bootleggers,” said the nine-year-old Lou coolly, looking up at her brother with grey eyes like his own and shaking back the same lock of fair hair.
“You shut up. You’re too little to know about bootleggers,” said Bob crushingly. “Who told you, anyway?”
“Myron did. He said Dan got in a fight with the O’Banion gang when he was in Morgan.”
“Gosh, did he?” said Bob. “Gee! Why didn’t he tell me?”
“’Cause you’re too smarty. You don’t think about anything but your old ball game, Myron says. But he told me,” ended Lou proudly. “He always tells me everything.”
“Well, you oughtn’t to listen, Miss Smarty yourself. Girls oughtn’t to know about rats like the O’Banions. Gee, I’d’ve liked to see Dan, though! I wish I hadn’t promised Mother. I haven’t seen him for a year, not since he went to Morgan to get a job. We used to have good times shooting, remember? Oh … I guess it doesn’t matter. Come on.”
He ground his knuckles expertly into the neck of Stebby, who writhed himself free, and all four tore away along the track under the gorgeous canopy of the trees.
Francey hung on to the rail and presently, without being sick, she felt better. She continued to stare up at the woods where the children had vanished with a sullen look on her face. There was a faintly degenerate look about her large pale blue eyes and pale full mouth, and she seemed dirty and uncared-for in a dry, wind-tossed way. The children all thought her ugly and made fun of her dumbness and her limp red hair. All the good that had come to Francey from her original sound American stock was a beautiful body and her courage; she was afraid of nothing but her brother Dan.
Presently, from behind a tattered blind over a corner of the porch, a man’s voice, low and young, called:
“Fran.”
“What?” she said, without moving.
“Come here.”
“Don’t want to,” she said, half-looking round and tightening her clasp on the rail.
He said nothing. Presently, very slowly, she walked across to the porch and stood by the blind, looking down at the ground. All she could thus see of her brother was his foot in a tan shoe and a dark violet silk sock.
“If you drink that stuff again I’ll knock your front teeth in,” he said in the same low voice, rustling the newspaper he held. “If we’re goin’ to do what I said, you got to learn to do without that stuff. Understand?”
“Sure I do, Dan,” she said eagerly. “I don’t really like it. I was only showin’ that lousy bunch—”
“I know … I know … but they ain’t worth showin’. Remember what I said.”
“You used to like Bob.”
“Sure I did. But we were on’y kids then, an’ he’s soft. They’re all soft. You and I gotta be hard, Fran. So you lay off them. Understand?”
“Bob said they aren’t to go with me any more.”
“Well, isn’t that what I’m tellin’ ya? On’y I wished we’d got in first and told the lousy bastards they wasn’t good enough for us before they told us, that’s all. Shut up, will ya. I want to read this.”
The paper rustled again, and he was quiet. Presently she sat down on the porch step at his feet, picked up part of the paper that had slipped to the ground, and became absorbed in the pictures.
Up in the garden of the house most of the older guests were saying good-bye to Sharlie Vorst while the younger people were making plans to drive out to the nearest country club and dine there and dance.
Boone, the eldest Vorst boy, was a little drunk. He came quickly down the portico steps with his arm round Jeanette Waldron, a ripe beauty of nineteen from a nearby town, whose looks had that exotic touch sometimes found in American girls with Middle European emigrant blood and were carefully tended as those of a Manchu princess. Her rosy knees showed between her rolled stockings and yellow skirt.
“But we’ll need to change,” she was protesting.
“We will not. No-one does nowadays. Come on. I need a drink.”
“You’ve had one.”
“Sure I have, but I want another.”
“All right … oh, there’s your father! I must just kiss him good-bye!”
She ran up the steps to Webster Vorst, who stood laughing down at the young people, and stood on tiptoe and flung her arms round his neck.
“G’d-bye, darling!”
“Why … hey … it’s little Jeanette! Not going, are you?” He returned her kiss quickly and held her away from him, looking down with a little embarrassment into her exquisite face.
“Boone wants to drive out somewhere and dance with the crowd.”
“On your way, then. I suppose we can expect you with the milk.”
“Sure!”
She gave him another hug, pressing her body against him, and ran down the steps and into the car.
“Do you
have to do that?” said Boone, his handsome curly head lowered sulkily, when they had driven for a couple of miles in silence.
“Do what, sunshine?”
“Kiss Dad … like that … every time you see him?”
“I like him. He’s got what you haven’t.”
“Thanks. Why bother with me at all, then?”
“Oh, you’re sweet sometimes, when I feel that way. Get going, will you? I’m thirsty.”
She settled back in her seat, arranged her leopard-skin coat, and carefully painted her mouth. She enjoyed kissing Boone’s tall father, whose silver hair looked so distinguished above his hatchet Redskin face, and she enjoyed still more the look on the faces of Miss Cordell and all the other lousy old bluenoses, including that skinny bit of the Old South, Mrs. Vorst, when she did it. It amused her and woke them up.
“Quite sure you’ve finished?” she asked sarcastically, as Boone lowered the flask from which he had been taking a long pull and handed it to her.
“Ah, don’t be like that, Jeanette. Let’s stop here and …”
He parked the car under the tall crimson maples rustling dryly in the evening wind, and they fell into one another’s arms.
Sharlie Vorst stood beside her husband on the porch waving goodbye to the last of her guests and thinking how well the party had gone off. But then her parties always went well, and had done so for twenty-five years. It was fun giving parties. She did hope that Webster’s crazy notion about The Sentinel, The Inquirer and The Citizen having to be taken over by that New York syndicate quite soon if their circulations and the advertising did not improve was only a crazy notion. Of course, a lot of the old privately-owned newspapers had gone over into syndicate-control since the European war; and most every week she seemed to meet some writer or cartoonist or reporter who could no longer earn a living from his local paper because the syndicates were supplying all the necessary material from head offices in New York.
It was tough on local newspapermen, but then, everything had speeded up so since that War.
Of course, if the three papers were bought up by a syndicate, Webster would get a good price and his family would still be comfortable. But it was kind of nice, being married to the owner of those three old papers (here she slipped her hand through the owner’s arm and pulled him slowly round so that they could walk back to the house together) and she certainly did hope that when Boone had finished college and went into the newspaper game his father would still be owning The Sentinel, The Inquirer, and The Citizen.
And thinking of Boone she said slowly in her soft drawl:
“Webster, I dislike that Jeanette Waldron. I don’t think she’s a nice little girl. I wish Boone wasn’t so crazy about her.”
Mr. Vorst looked a little embarrassed. For some time he had found it difficult to think of Jeanette as a wild but harmless and charming child, and the last thing he wanted was to discuss her with his wife. The handsome face looked more intelligent than it was: he was a rather stupid but honest man who loved his wife, his family, and his home, and disliked and feared the bold modern girl.
He said uneasily: “Oh … there’s no harm in her. All the boys and girls are wild nowadays; look at Frankwood’s lot … out all night in their car and drinking like little fishes, but it doesn’t seem to harm them. They’re nice kids enough. It’s the same everywhere since the War. It only seems odd to you and me, Sharlie, because we were brought up so differently. …”
“I certainly was. Mamma’d have had the hide off me if I’d as much as asked might I smoke a cigarette.”
“Vine Falls is a long sight better than most places in that way. Our boys and girls are still straight. They like speeding and … and a little petting, but they’re clean, Sharlie.”
“I don’t think Jeanette is. I think she’s a bad girl.”
“Oh, come! There’s no harm in her. She’s only crazy, like the rest. They’ll all marry and settle down in a year or two, you’ll see.”
“I hope Jeanette won’t marry Boone.”
“You think of nothing, Sharlie, but who’ll marry who. You were marrying Bob off to Helen the other day, and him not thirteen.”
Her face grew tender.
“That would be lovely. There’s nothing I’d like better.”
“And for Lou to marry Stebby, I suppose?”
She laughed.
“They’d fight all day; they do now. Now, Webster, will you please go right along this minute and get Blodgett to clear up that disgraceful mess in the closet. I’m going up to take a shower.”
At the foot of the stairs she paused, her eye caught by the view through the open front door and enchanted for an instant by the evening sunlight on the motionless gold branches of the maples, and the glimpses of deep, cool blue sky between the red leaves. Her gaze moved over the five-pointed yellow and rosy ones scattered here and there on the soft green grass, and turned at last to the familiar roofs of the town, the spire of the Catholic church and the gleam of the river in the little valley below. This certainly is a good place to live, she thought contentedly, going up the stairs. It all went off very well this afternoon, and weren’t the children just lovely! Everybody said so. She felt thankful that the three younger ones would not be thinking about petting and speeding and drinking for a year or two.
Singing in a low voice she went into the bathroom. As for the Carrs, hidden in their shabby bungalow down in the woods, she did not think about them at all.
CHAPTER IV
AMY DID NOT find the Anna Bonner School for Girls an appalling place full of nasal little rats. She enjoyed writing and cutting out paper figures more than she enjoyed school, but she liked school, too. She had no best friend, for she was not the kind of child that has a best friend, but there were three or four little girls with whom she usually walked round eating biscuits at Break and had mild little jokes with. They exchanged the gossip of school—so bright within its narrow frame—and said isn’t-it-ghastly to one another about the homework.
Perhaps no other school in London would have made such a satisfactory refuge for a secretive little girl who was grieving passionately for her dead mother, for the Anna Bonner was a good place for dreamers. It was a private school of some ninety girls, founded in the ’eighties by a rich brewer’s daughter who had been a pupil-teacher under the famous Frances Mary Buss, and was housed in a grey stone building in one of the quiet roads of Highbury not ten minutes walk from where Amy lived. It cannot be said that the Anna Bonner worked hard and played hard. Indeed, one ambitious and energetic member of the educational world had been known to refer to it as a nest of lazy hounds. But the Founder was still alive, a very old lady living at St. Leonards-on-Sea, and although it was many years since she had retired from active headmistress-ship, the school was still her chief interest and she dealt very sharply with any attempts to pep it up. Miss Bonner had not been deeply influenced by Miss Buss’s ideals, much as she had respected that pioneer, and she had her own ideas about the education of girls and what a girls’ school should be. “A cool frame for most seedlings, not a forcing house,” she was wont to say to her staff, for she was a devout gardener.
As a result of the Founder’s influence, carried on by one of her great-nieces as headmistress, the Anna Bonner was an old-fashioned, pre-War type of school in which the best of the Victorian virtues were inculcated, and a well-balanced character, with proficiency in needlework and the domestic arts, was regarded as being of more use to the type of girl who attended there than the higher education and proficiency at games. The staff was contented if unambitious, and the girls had a quiet, pleasant place in which they could get through the time while waiting to grow up. No one at the Anna Bonner was earnest. While no one actually said to a girl who had muffed an exam: “Never mind, dear, worse troubles at sea, and tea’s nearly ready,” the words were implied in the slow-paced, unselfconscious atmosphere of the plain little school building. The daughters of prosperous tradesmen and managers of departments in big North London shops who
went there always kept an affection for the old place; and most of them remembered what they had been taught about cooking and sewing and cutting out clothes. Miss Anna Bonner asked for nothing more ambitious.
In this mild little world Amy’s intense grief for her mother was not suspected, and no one cared what her home life was like so long as her fees were paid regularly and she behaved like all the other little girls, which she did. Her work was so faultlessly neat in its presentation that she was rather popular with the staff; otherwise, nothing but her pigtail distinguished her from the other seventy-nine pupils in the school.
Here she came five days out of the seven, moving quietly up and down the long bare corridors where budding branches or sprays of autumn leaves stood in the windows, changing with the season of the year against the white sky of Spring or the yellow sky of winter; or bent daily over her desk while an aeroplane droned above the school, taking no more notice of it than the schoolgirls of the ’eighties at the same desks had taken of the sound made by a passing hansom.
Once every six weeks or so she would ask her form mistress if she might have a new rough note-book.
“But, Amy, you’ve got through the last one very quickly, haven’t you, dear? Let me see it.” (The Anna Bonner was one of the few schools left in London where the teachers called the girls “dear”.)
Amy would silently hold out a note-book and quickly turn over the pages, full of her writing and calculations.
“Yes, it’s quite full, isn’t it! Very well, dear, ask Margery if you can have a new one.”
Then Amy would put away the used note-book in her desk, where it would stay until it came out in another six weeks to deceive her form mistress again; and carry home the new one to begin Volume Four of The Wolf of Leningrad. The school rough note-books were exactly the right size for lavish comfortable scribbling and there was always such a lot to be done with her shilling a week pocket money that she was pleased to get her writing-books for nothing.
This was not the only small deception she had taken to since her mother’s death. Scarcely a day passed on which she did not tell a lie or deceive somebody by keeping silent when most girls would have spoken, but she deceived and lied so naturally that she never felt guilty about these attempts to keep bullies at bay, and idly inquisitive people out of her secret world. Since her mother’s death she had bitterly learned that a child is not even safe if it keeps still, and quiet, and tries not to upset people. Her father and Old Porty, Dora Beeding and Mrs. Beeding, and even Mona, her nearest approach to a best friend, were always picking on her about her accent or teasing her, trying to organize her spare time or worrying her to tell what she did in the evenings with the sitting-room door locked. Against all such intrusions into her secret life she had no weapons except deceit and lies, and naturally she used them. By the time her mother had been dead a year, she was rapidly developing into a sly little girl.