The Annals of Ann Part 12

Hasn't anything happened worth writing about until to-day, but it has been happening so thick ever since morning that my backbone is fairly aching with thrills. And I'm _tired_! Oh, mercy! But I'm going to stay awake to-night until I get it all written out even if I have to souse my head in cold water, or rouse up Waterloo.

Right after breakfast this morning Mr. Gayle happened to see Cousin Eunice go into the parlor by herself to crochet some extra hard st.i.tches, and so he went in after her and said he would like to have a little talk with her if she didn't mind. Dilsey had left the window up when she finished dusting, which I was very glad to see, for I was in my old place on the porch. He told her he supposed he was the confoundedest a.s.s on earth, but she said oh no, she was sure he wasn't so bad as that! Then he plunged right into the subject and said he was madly in love and didn't know how to tell it. Would she please help him out?

"Oh, don't mind that," she answered kindly. "All earnest lovers are awkward. The Byronic ones are liars!"

He said he knew she would understand and help him with her valued advice!---- But, just _what_ was he to say? And _when_ was he to say it?

She told him she thought it would be a psychological moment to-night, the last night of the year, and they would all be going their different ways on the morrow. It would be very romantic to propose then, say on the stroke of twelve, or just whenever he could get himself keyed up to it. He said oh, she was the kindest woman in the world. She had taken such a load off his heart! He thought it would be a fine idea to propose just on the stroke of midnight--somehow he imagined the clock striking would give him courage! Oh, he felt so much better for having told somebody!

I felt that it would be a weight off my heart if I could tell somebody too, and just then I spied Rufe holding Waterloo up to see the turkeys down by the big chicken coop. I didn't waste a second.

"Oh, Rufe, you'll be surprised!" I said, all out of breath, and he turned around and looked thrilled. "Mr. Gayle is _red-bloodier_ than you think!" Then I told him all about it. "Now aren't you sorry you called him a d---- fool?" I wasn't really minding about the cuss word, for Rufe isn't the kind of a man that says things when he's mad. He's as apt to say 'd.a.m.n' when he's eating ice-cream as at any other time.

Rufe was delighted to hear that it was going to happen while they were still here to see it; and we went right back to the house and planned to sit up with Cousin Eunice and see them after they came out of the parlor on the glad New Year. Julius and Marcella were coming over to sit up with us anyhow to watch it in, so it wouldn't be hard to do.

Well, mother put enough fruit cake and what goes with it out on the dining-table to keep us busy as long as we could eat, but along toward ten o'clock we got _so_ sleepy (being just married people and me) that Julius said let's run the clock up two hours. Marcella said no, that would cause too much striking at the same time, but she said if _something_ didn't happen to hurry them up and put us out of our misery we would all be under the table in another five minutes. We were all so sleepy that everything we said sounded silly, so when a bright idea struck me it took some time to get it into their heads.

"Rufe's typewriter!" I said, jumping up and down in my joy, so it waked them up some just to look at me. "The bell on it can go exactly like a clock if you slide the top thing backwards and forwards right fast. I've done it a million times to amuse Waterloo!"

They said they knew I'd make a mess of it if I tried such a thing, but I told them if they took that view of what a person could do they never would be encouraged to try to do things. I knew I _could_ do it!

Marcella said then for Rufe to place the typewriter close up to the parlor door, and they would all go out on the front porch to keep the lovers from hearing them laugh. So out they all filed.

Well, it was an exciting moment of my life when I was sliding that thing backwards and forwards and thinking all sorts of heroic thoughts, but I gritted my teeth and didn't look up until I had got the twelve strokes struck. Then I went out on the front porch right easy and sat down by the others. Julius tucked his big coat around me and we all sat there a little while, laughing and shivering and shaking until I felt that I'd never had such a good time in my life!

Then somebody whispered let's go in--and _then_ the unexpected happened.

We heard a sound in the parlor close back of us and the _first_ thing we knew there was Mr. Gayle raising the window that opens on to the porch, and he and Miss Claxton came over and looked out into the night. They couldn't see us if we sat still, close up against the wall; and it seemed that none of us could budge to save our lives!

It was a lovely moonlight night, clear and cold, that always reminds me of the night Washington Irving reached Bracebridge Hall (I just love it), and so he put his arm around her, Mr. Gayle I mean, not Washington Irving, and his voice was so clear and firm and happy that we all knew he had been accepted.

"Bid good morrow to the New Year, my love," he said and kissed her on the lips a long, _long_ time. "There has been created for me this night not only a new year, but a new _Heaven_ and----"

"And a new _earth_," she finished up softly, and they closed the window down.

"I hope she won't take her little hammer and knock on her new earth to see if it has petrified wiggle tails in it," Rufe said, after we had filed back into the house and moved the typewriter away from the door. But his voice was solemn when he said it, and we all felt like _puppy dogs_ for being out there. And n.o.body said another word about staying up to see how they looked when they came out of the parlor.

The next day everybody made like they were very much surprised at the way it had turned out except Mammy Lou. She looked as happy when Miss Claxton told us the news as if she had got herself engaged again.

"You were right after all, mammy," Cousin Eunice told her. "In spite of all Miss Claxton's scientific knowledge she has preferred a _man_ to a career!"

"An' shows her good sense, too," mammy answered, her old brown face running over with smiles, like mola.s.ses in the sunshine. "A man's a man, I can tell you; and a career's _a mighty pore thing to warm your feet against_ on a cold night!"

CHAPTER XII

April is here! Jean and April together! No wonder I haven't any sense!

"And the rain it raineth every day," but for just a little while at a time, and the mud smells so good afterward that you don't care. The warm air comes blowing through my window so early every morning and puts such sad, happy thoughts into my head that I have to get up and wake Jean. Then we dress and go out into the side yard, where I try to find a calecanthus in bloom that is really sweet enough to go in front of Lord Byron's picture. And I try to make Jean listen while I tell her all my sad, happy thoughts, that's what I invited her down here for, but she hardly ever listens.

"Isn't everything lovely?" I asked her this morning, after we had tiptoed through the house and out to the side porch. "And doesn't April just remind you of a right young girl, about seventeen years old, with hair made out of sunshine, and cheeks made of peach-blossoms; and eyes made out of that patch of blue sky over Mrs.

West's big barn?"

That patch of sky over Mrs. West's barn takes up a heap of my time on summer afternoons when I lie close to the windows and read. It is so deep and far-off looking that I get to dreaming about Italy, and I call it the place where "Ta.s.so's spirit soars and sings." I learned this long ago out of the Fifth Reader, and I don't know what else Ta.s.so did besides soaring and singing.

But Jean wasn't listening to me. She had reached out and gathered a bunch of s...o...b..a.l.l.s and was shaking the night before's rain off them.

"Oh, Ann," she said, "don't they remind you of willow plumes? And don't you wish we were old enough to wear _them_ on our hats instead of sissy bows? You can get engaged in a minute if you have a willow plume on your hat!"

This seemed to remind her of something, for she spoke again the next minute.

"Say, I've never told you about Ca.s.sius, have I?"

I told her no, although I knew a little about him myself, even if he wasn't in that easy Shakespeare that Lamb wrote for kids. And she seemed to be lost in thought, so I got lost too. It never is hard for me to. I thought: "Mercy, how I have grown!" When I first commenced keeping this diary I just despised poetry, and never cared about keeping my hair tied out of my eyes, nor my hands clean. You know that age! But I soon got over that, for when you get a little bigger being in love causes you to admire poetry and also to beautify yourself.

Jean and I tried very sour b.u.t.termilk (the sourer the better) to make our complexion lovely, with tansy mixed in, until it got so sour that mother said, "Whew! There must be a rat dead in the walls!" So we had to pour it out.

In looking over my past life it seems to me that I've been in love with somebody or other ever since that night so long ago, when Mammy Lou washed me and dressed me up in my tiny hemst.i.tched clothes. And with such lovely heroes, too! When I was awfully little I used to be crazy about the prince that the mermaid rescued while Hans Christian Andersen stood on the beach and watched them. Then I loved Ben Hur from his pictures when I was ten, John Halifax when I was eleven, Lord Byron when I was twelve--I loved him then, do now, and ever shall, world without end, Amen! It is so much easier to love _good-looking_ people than good ones! And, oh, every handsome young Moor, who ever dwelt in "the moonlit halls of the Alhambra!" Washington Irving will have a heap to answer for in the making of me. And I used to dream about "Bonny Prince Charlie," although Miss Wilburn never _could_ hammer it into my head which one of the Stuarts he was. And _actors_!

Well, I would try to make a list and write it on the fly-pages, only it might be a bad example to my grandchildren; then, too, there are so very few fly-pages.

But I started out to tell how much I've changed since I began this book, for now I not only adore poetry, I write it! Fully a quart jar full I've written since I found the first b.u.t.tercup this spring. An ode to Venus, an ode to Venice, and a world of just plain odes. Mammy Lou washed out a preserves jar and put it on my desk for me to stick them in. It saves trouble for her.

Jean soon woke up out of her brown study and commenced telling about Ca.s.sius.

"I used to meet him on sunshiny mornings going to school," she said.

"He was about nineteen and so pale and thin and sad-looking that I named him 'Ca.s.sius.' He walked with a crutch. One morning when the wind blew his hat off I saw that his head was very scholarly looking, so from that hour I began thinking of him every second of the time.

That is one of the worst features about being in love, you can't get your mind off of the person, and if you _do_ it's on to somebody else.

Now, just last week I burnt up a great batch of Turkish candy I was trying to make on account of a person's eyes. They look at you like they're kissing you!" And she fell again into a study, not a brown one this time, just a sort of light tan.

"Whose? Ca.s.sius's?" I interrupted, shaking her to bring her to.

"Pshaw! No! I had almost forgotten about Ca.s.sius! I've never seen anything on earth to equal this other person's eyes! But, anyway, going back to finish up with Ca.s.sius, I thought _of course_, from his walking with a crutch, that he must have had a bad spinal trouble when he was a child and used to have to sit still and be a scholar, instead of chasing cats and breaking out people's window-panes like healthy boys. I pictured out how lonely he must feel and how he must long for a companion whose mind was equal to his; and it certainly made a changed girl of me! I burnt out gallons and gallons of electricity every night studying deep things to discuss with him when I should get to know him well."

"How did you know what kind of things he admired?" I asked, for some men like mathematics and some d.i.c.kens and you can't tell the difference by pa.s.sing them on the street.

"Well, it did make a heap of extra trouble to me," she answered, sighing as tiredly as if she had been trying on coat suits all day.

"As I didn't know which was his favorite subject I had to study the encyclopedia so as to be sure to hit it."

"Gee whiz!" I couldn't help saying.

"Oh, that ain't all! I wrote down a list of strange words to say to him so that he could tell at a glance that I was brilliant. They were terrific words too, from aortic and actinic in the a's to genuflections in the g's. That's as far as I got."

Mammy Lou called us to breakfast just then, but I could eat only four soft-boiled guinea eggs, wondering what on earth Ca.s.sius had said in reply when Jean said genuflections to him.

"Pshaw! The rest isn't worth telling," she said with a weary look, as I pulled her down on the steps right after breakfast and begged her to go on about Ca.s.sius. "It ended with a disappointment--like everything else that has a man connected with it! You're a lucky girl to be in love with Lord Byron so long, for dead men break no hearts!"

"Well, tell it!" I begged.

"Oh, it's too disgusting for words, and was a real blow to a person of my nature! The idiot didn't have spinal trouble at all, I learned it from a lady who knew his mother. He had only sprained his knee, just a plain, every-day knee, with playing basket-ball at school, which was all the good school ever did him, the lady said. My life has certainly been full of disillusions!"