“I don’t know what to do about her,” he said. “She come in about three o’clock with two young fellows—one of them her sweetie. They had a fight and the men went off, and this one’s been here ever since.”
A spasm of distaste passed over Tom—the rules of his generation were outraged and defied. That an American girl should be drunk and deserted in a tough foreign town—that such things happened, might happen to Annie. He looked at his watch, hesitated.
“Has she got a bill?” he asked.
“She owes for five gins. But suppose her boy friends come back?”
“Tell them she’s at the Roosevelt Hotel in El Paso.”
Approaching, he put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up.
“You look like Santa Claus,” she said vaguely. “You couldn’t possibly be Santa Claus, could you?”
“I’m going to take you to El Paso.”
“Well,” she considered, “you look perfectly safe to me.”
She was so young—a drenched little rose. He could have wept for her wretched unconsciousness of the old facts, the old penalties of life, Jousting at nothing in an empty tilt yard with a shaking spear. The taxi moved too slowly through the suddenly poisonous night.
Having explained things to a reluctant night clerk, he went out and found a telegraph office.
“Have given up Mexican trip,” he wired. “Leaving here tonight. Please meet train in the St Paul station at three o’clock and ride with me to Minneapolis, as I can’t spare you for another minute. All my love.”
He could at least keep an eye on her, advise her, see what she did with her life. That silly mother of hers!
On the train, as the baked tropical lands and green fields fell away and the North swept near again with patches of snow, then fields of it, fierce winds in the vestibule and bleak, hibernating farms, he paced the corridors with intolerable restlessness. When they drew into the St Paul station he swung himself off like a young man and searched the platform eagerly, but his eyes failed to find her. He had counted on those few minutes between the cities; they had become a symbol of her fidelity to their friendship, and as the train started again he searched it desperately from smoker to observation car. But he could not find her, and now he knew that he was mad for her; at the thought that she had taken his advice and plunged into affairs with other men, he grew weak with fear.
Drawing into Minneapolis, his hands fumbled so that he must call the porter to fasten his baggage. Then there was an interminable wait in the corridor while the baggage was taken off and he was pressed up against a girl in a squirrel-trimmed coat.
“Tom!”
“Well, I’ll be——”
Her arms went up around his neck. “But, Tom,” she cried, “I’ve been right here in this car since St Paul!”
His cane fell in the corridor, he drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.
III
The new intimacy of their definite engagement brought Tom a feeling of young happiness. He awoke on winter mornings with the sense of undeserved joy hovering in the room; meeting young men, he found himself matching the vigour of his mind and body against theirs. Suddenly his life had a purpose and a background; he felt rounded and complete. On grey March afternoons when she wandered familiarly in his apartment the warm sureties of bis youth flooded back—ecstasy and poignancy, the mortal and the eternal posed in their immemorially tragic juxtaposition and, a little astounded, he found himself relishing the very terminology of young romance. But he was more thoughtful than a younger lover; and to Annie he seemed to “know everything”, to stand holding open the gates for her passage into the truly golden world.
“We’ll go to Europe first,” he said.
“Oh, we’ll go there a lot, won’t we? Let’s spend our winters in Italy and the spring in Paris.”
“But, little Annie, there’s business.”
“Well, we’ll stay away as much as we can anyhow. I hate Minneapolis.”
“Oh, no.” He was a little shocked. “Minneapolis is all right.”
“When you’re here it’s all right.”
Mrs Lorry yielded at length to the inevitable. With ill grace she acknowledged the engagement, asking only that the marriage should not take place until fall.
“Such a long time,” Annie sighed.
“After all, I’m your mother. It’s so little to ask.”
It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March was full of billowy drifts, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands. The people waited; their first energy to resist was spent, and man, like weather, simply hung on. There was less to do now and the general restlessness was expressed by surliness in daily contacts. Then, early in April, with a long sigh the ice cracked, the snow ran into the ground and the green, eager spring broke up through.
One day, riding along a slushy road in a fresh, damp breeze with little starved, smothered grass in it, Annie began to cry. Sometimes she cried for nothing, but this time Tom suddenly stopped the car and put his arm round her.
“Why do you cry like that? Are you unhappy?”
“Oh, no, no!” she protested.
“But you cried yesterday the same way. And you wouldn’t tell me why. You must always tell me.”
“Nothing, except the spring. It smells so good, and it always has so many sad thoughts and memories in it.”
“It’s our spring, my sweetheart,” he said. “Annie, don’t let’s wait. Let’s be married in June.”
“I promised mother, but if you like we can announce our engagement in June.”
The spring came fast now. The sidewalks were damp, then dry, and the children roller-skated on them and boys played baseball in the soft, vacant lots. Tom got up elaborate picnics of Annie’s contemporaries and encouraged her to play golf and tennis with them. Abruptly, with a final, triumphant lurch of nature, it was full summer.
On a lovely May evening Tom came up the Lorry’s walk and sat down beside Annie’s mother on the porch.
“It’s so pleasant,” he said, “I thought Annie and I would walk instead of driving this evening. I want to show her the funny old house I was born in.”
“On Chambers Street, wasn’t it? Annie’ll be home in a few minutes. She went riding with some young people after dinner.”
“Yes, on Chambers Street.”
He looked at his watch presently, hoping Annie would come while it was still light enough to see. Quarter of nine. He frowned. She had kept him waiting the night before, kept him waiting an hour yesterday afternoon.
“If I was twenty-one,” he said to himself, “I’d make scenes and we’d both be miserable.”
He and Mrs Lorry talked; the warmth of the night precipitated the vague evening lassitude of the fifties and softened them both, and for the first time since his attentions to Annie began, there was no unfriendliness between them. By and by long silences fell, broken only by the scratch of a match or the creak of her swinging settee. When Mr Lorry came home
Tom threw away his second cigar in surprise and looked at his watch; it was after ten. “Annie’s late,” Mrs Lorry said.
“I hope there’s nothing wrong,” said Tom anxiously. “Who is she with?” “There were four when they started out. Randy Cambell and another couple—I didn’t notice who. They were only going for a soda.”
“I hope there hasn’t been any trouble. Perhaps—Do you think I ought to go and see?”
“Ten isn’t late nowadays. You’ll find——”
Remembering that Tom Squires was marrying Annie, not adopting her, she kept herself from adding: “You’ll get used to it.”
Her husband excused himself and went up to bed, and the conversation became more forced and desultory. When the church dock over the way struck eleven they both broke off and listened to the beats. Twenty minutes later just as Tom impatiently crushed out his last cigar, an automobile drifted down the street and came to rest in front of the door.
For a minute no one moved on the porch or in the auto. Then Annie, with a hat in her hand, got out and came quickly up the walk. Defying the tranquil night, the car snorted away.
“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m so sorry! What time is it? Am I terribly late?”
Tom didn’t answer. The street lamp threw wine colour upon her face and expressed with a shadow the heightened flush of her cheek. Her dress was crushed, her hair was in brief, expressive disarray. But it was the strange little break in her voice that made him afraid to speak, made him turn his eyes aside.
“What happened?” Mrs Lorry asked casually.
“Oh, a blow-out and something wrong with the engine—and we lost our way. Is it terribly late?”
And then, as she stood before them, her hat still in her hand, her breast rising and falling a little, her eyes wide and bright, Tom realized with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another. Try as he might, he could not separate himself from Mrs Lorry. When she excused herself he suppressed a frantic tendency to say, “But why should you go now? After sitting here all evening?”
They were alone. Annie came up to him and pressed his hand. He had never been so conscious of her beauty; her damp hands were touched with
