The Sturdy Oak Part 13

Laughing and breathless, they came to the bridge that led from the town to the open fields, and took the count.

"One hundred and two and a half!" shouted Penny and Genevieve triumphantly. George smiled over his wheel.

"Oh, women, women!" he said. "One hundred and sixty-one!" said Betty.

There was a shout of protest.

"Oh, Betty Sheridan! You didn't! Why, we didn't miss _one_!"

"I wasn't counting candy stores," smiled Betty. "Just to be different, I counted cigar stores and saloons. But it doesn't signify much either way, does it, George?"

CHAPTER VI. BY HENRY KITCh.e.l.l WEBSTER

Of the quartette who, an hour later, emerged from the bath-houses and scampered across the satiny beech into a discreetly playful surf, Genevieve was the one real swimmer. She was better even than Penny, and she left Betty and George nowhere.

She had an endless repertory of amphibious stunts which she performed with gusto, and in the intervals she took an equal satisfaction in watching Penny's heroic but generally disastrous attempts to imitate them.

The other two splashed around aimlessly and now and then remonstrated.

Now, it's all very well to talk about two hearts beating as one, and in the accepted poetical sense of the words, of course Genevieve's and George's did. But as a matter of physiological fact, they didn't. At the end of twenty minutes or so George began turning a delicate blue and a clatter as of distant castanets provided an obligato when he spoke, the same being performed by George's teeth.

The person who made these observations was Betty.

"You'd better go out," she said. "You're freezing."

It ought to have been Genevieve who said it, of course, though the fact that she was under water more than half the time might be advanced as her excuse for failing to say it. But who could venture to excuse the downright callous way in which she exclaimed, "Already? Why we've just got in! Come along and dive through that wave. That'll warm you up!"

It was plain to George that she didn't care whether he was cold or not.

And, though the idea wouldn't quite go into words, it was also clear to him that an ideal wife--a really womanly wife--would have turned blue just a little before he began to.

"Thanks," he said, in a cold blue voice that matched the color of his finger nails. "I think I've had enough."

Betty came splashing along beside him.

"I'm going out, too," she said. "We'll leave these porpoises to their innocent play."

This was almost pure amiability, because she wasn't cold, and she'd been having a pretty good time. Her other (practically negligible) motive was that Penny might be reminded, by her withdrawal, of his forgotten promise to teach her to float--and be sorry. Altogether, George would have been showing only a natural and reasonable sense of his obligations if he'd brightened up and flirted with her a little, instead of glooming out to sea the way he did, paying simply no attention to her at all. So at last she p.r.i.c.ked him.

"Isn't it funny," she said, "the really blighting contempt that swimmers feel for people who can't feel at home in the water--people who gasp and shiver and keep their heads dry?"

She could see that, in one way, this remark had done George good. It helped warm him up. Leaning back on her hands, as she did, she could see the red come up the back of his neck and spread into his ears. But it didn't make him conversationally any more exciting. He merely grunted.

So she tried again.

"I suppose," she said dreamily, "that the myth about mermaids must be founded in fact. Or is it sirens I'm thinking about? Perfectly fascinating, irresistible women, who lure men farther and farther out, in the hope of a kiss or something, until they get exhausted and drown.

I'll really be glad when Penny gets back alive."

"And I shall be very glad," said George, trying hard for a tone of condescending indifference appropriate for use with one who has played dolls with one's little sister, "I shall really be very glad when you make up your mind what you are going to do with Penny. He's just about a total loss down at the office as it is, and he's getting a worse idiot from day to day. And the worst of it is, I imagine you know all the while what you're going to do about it--whether you're going to take him or not."

The girl flushed at that. He was being almost too outrageously rude, even for George. But before she said anything to that effect, she thought of something better.

"I shall never marry any man," she said very intensely, "whose heart is not with the Cause. You know what Cause I mean, George--the Suffrage Cause. When I see thoughtless girls handing over their whole lives to men who..."

It sounded like the beginning of an oration.

"Good Lord!" her victim cried. "Isn't there anything else than that to talk about--_ever_?"

"But just think how lucky you are, George," she said, "that at home they all think exactly as you do!"

He jumped up. Evidently this reminder of the purring acquiescences of Cousin Emelene and Mrs. Brewster-Smith laid no balm upon his hara.s.sed spirit.

"You may leave my home alone, if you please."

He was frightfully annoyed, of course, or he wouldn't have said anything as crude as that. In a last attempt to recover his scattered dignity, he caught at his office manner. "By the way," he said, "you forgot to remind me today to write a letter to that Eliot woman about Mrs.

Brewster-Smith's cottages."

With that he stalked away to dress. Genevieve and Penny, now sh.o.r.eward bound, hailed him. But it wasn't quite impossible to pretend he didn't hear, and he did it.

The dinner afterward at the Sea Light Inn was a rather gloomy affair.

George's lonely grandeur was only made the worse, it seemed, by Genevieve's belated concern lest he might have taken cold through not having gone and dressed directly he came out of the water. Genevieve then turned very frosty to Penny, having decided suddenly that it was all his fault.

As for Betty, though she was as amiable a little soul as breathed, she didn't see why she should make any particular effort to console Penny, just because his little flirtation with Genevieve had stopped with a b.u.mp.

Even the ride home in the moonlight didn't help much. Genevieve sat beside George on the front seat, and between them there stretched a tense, tragic silence. In the back seat with Penfield Evans, and in the intervals of frustrating his attempts to hold her hand, Betty considered how frightfully silly young married couples could be over microscopic differences.

But Betty was wrong here and the married pair on the front seat were right.

Just reflect for a minute what Genevieve's George was. He was her knight, her Bayard, her thoroughly Tennysonian King Arthur. The basis of her adoration was that he should remain like that. You can see then what a staggering experience it was to have caught herself, even for a minute, in the act of smiling over him as sulky and absurd.

And think of George's Genevieve! A saint enshrined, that his soul could profitably bow down before whenever it had leisure to escape from the activities of a wicked world. Fancy his horror over the mere suspicion that she could be indifferent to his wishes--his comfort--even his health, because of a mere tomboy flirtation with a man who could swim better than he could! Most women were like that, he knew--vain, shallow, inconstant creatures! But was not his pearl an exception? It was horrible to have to doubt it.

By three o'clock the next morning, after many tears and much grave discourse, they succeeded in getting these doubts to sleep--killing them, they'd have said, beyond the possibility of resurrection. It was the others who had made all the trouble. If only they could have the world to themselves--no Cousin Emelene, no Alys Brewster-Smith, no Penfield Evans and Betty Sheridan, with their frivolity and low ideals, to complicate things! An Arcadian Island in some Aeonian Sea.

"Well," he said hopefully, "our home can be like that. It shall be like that, when we get rid of Alys and her horrible little girl, and Cousin Emelene and her unspeakable cat. It shall be our world; and no troubles or cares or worries shall ever get in there!"

She acquiesced in this prophecy, but even as she did so, cuddling her face against his own, a low-down, unworthy spook, whose existence in her he must never suspect, said audibly in her inner ear, "Much he knows about it!" Betty did not forget to remind George of the letter he was to write to Miss Eliot about taking over the agency of Mrs.

Brewster-Smith's cottages. In the composition of this letter George washed his hands of responsibility with, you might say, antiseptic care.

He had taken pleasure in recommending Miss Eliot, he explained, and Mrs.

Brewster-Smith was acting on his recommendation. Any questions arising out of the management of the property should be taken up directly with her client. Miss Eliot would have no difficulty in understanding that the enormous pressure of work which now beset him precluded him from having anything more to do with the matter.

The letter was typed and inclosed in a big linen envelope, with the mess of papers Alys had dumped upon his desk a few days previously, and it was despatched forthwith by the office boy.

"There," said George on a note of grim satisfaction, "that's done!"

The grimness lasted, but the satisfaction did not. Or only until the return of the office boy, half an hour later, with the identical envelope and a three-line typewritten note from Miss Eliot. She was sorry to say, she wrote, that she did not consider it advisable to undertake the agency for the property in question. Thanking him, nevertheless, for his courtesy, she was his very truly, E. Eliot.