Once to Every Man

“Please let him go,” she wheedled softly. “Please let him go–for me!”

Young Denny backed away a step from her upturned face and outstretched hands, grinning a little as he slowly shook his head. It bewildered him–puzzled him–this swift change to supplication.

“Can’t,” he refused laconically. “I–I got to have him to eat.”

His voice was calmly final and for no other reason than to learn what she would do next, because already the boy knew that the soft creature throbbing against him was to have its freedom again. No one, at least since he could remember, had ever before smiled and asked Denny Bolton to “do it–for me.” For one flashing instant he saw her eyes flare at his candid refusal; then they cleared again with that same miraculous swiftness. Once more the corners of her lips lifted pleadingly, arched with guileful, provocative sweetness.

“Please,” she begged, even more softly, “please–because I ask you to!”

Once more Young Denny shook his head.

Standing there before his dark house, still smiling vaguely at the light across the valley his fingers tentatively caressed his lean cheeks where her fingernails had bit deep through the skin that day. He never remembered how it had happened–it all came too swiftly for recollection–but even before he had finished shaking his head the tempting smile had been wiped from her lips, her little face working convulsively with rage, before she sprang at him–sprang with lithe, lightning, tigerlike ferocity that sent him staggering back before her.

Her hands found his face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat as she struggled for breath.

“There–there!” she gasped at him voicelessly. “There,” she whispered through her white lips, “now will you let him go?”

And Denny Bolton had stood that afternoon in wondering silence, gazing back into her twitching, distorted face without a word while the blood oozed from the deep cuts in his cheeks and dripped noisily upon the dry leaves. Once he turned and followed with his eyes the mad flight of the rabbit through the underbrush; and then turned slowly back to her.

“Why, he’s gone already,” he stated with a gentle gravity that was almost ponderous. And with a deliberation which he meant more to comfort than to conciliate: “I–I aimed to let him go, myself, right from the first time you asked me–after a while!”

She cried over him that afternoon–cried not as he had known other girls to cry, but with long noiseless gasps that shook her thin shoulders terribly. Her eyes swam with great drops that hung from her lashes and went rolling silently down her small face while she washed out the cuts with one sleeve ruthlessly wrenched from her blouse and soaked in the brook nearby.

But in almost the same breath while she crooned pityingly over him she bade him–commanded him with a swift, fierce passionate vehemence–to tell her that it did not hurt–did not hurt very much! And before she would let him go that day she made him promise to come back–she promised herself to set a light in the front window of the shabby little cottage to tell him that she had found the plaster–that there was enough left to close the cuts.

There had never been any spoken agreement between them, but since that night, three years ago, Denny Bolton had learned to watch each week end, just at dusk, for the signal to appear. From the first their very loneliness had drawn them together–a childish, starved desire for companionship; and as time passed they only clung the closer, each to the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other utterly, desolately alone.

Winter and summer Denny Bolton went every Saturday night, close to nightfall, and waited for her to come, except that now, in the last few weeks since the first rumor of the Judge’s big barn-raising and masquerade had gone forth, no matter how early he started or how much haste he made, he always found Dryad Anderson there before him. For weeks no other topic had passed the girl’s lips, and with each recurring visit to the small clearing hidden back in the thicket near the brook the boy’s wonder grew.

Almost from the first day she had decided upon the costume which she would wear. Night after night she sat and made plans in a tumultuous, bubbling flood of anticipation which he could scarcely follow, for it was only after long argument that he had sheepishly surrendered and agreed to “dress up” at all; she sat with a picture torn from an old magazine across her knees–a color-plate of a dancing girl which she meant to copy for herself–poring over it with shining eyes, her breath coming and going softly between childishly curved lips as she devoured every detail of its construction.

It was a thing of brilliantly contrasting colors–the picture which she planned to copy–a sleeveless waist of dullest crimson and a much bespangled skirt of clinging, shimmering black. And that skirt hung clear to the ankles, swinging just high enough to disclose the gleam of silken stockings and satiny, pointed slippers, with heels of absurdly small girth.

The boy only half understood the feverish hunger which glowed in Dryad Anderson’s face, piquantly, wistfully earnest in the dull yellow lantern light as she leaned forward, ticking off each item and its probable cost upon her fingers, and waited doubtfully for him to mock at the expense; and yet, at that, he understood far better than any one else could ever have hoped to comprehend, for Young Denny knew too what it was to wait–to wait for something that was drearily slow in the coming.

One other thing marked Judge Maynard’s proffered hospitality as totally different from all the other half-similar affairs which Boltonwood had ever known. There were to be invitations–written, mailed invitations–instead of the usual placards tacked up in the village post-office as they always were whenever any public entertainment was imminent, or the haphazard invitations which were passed along by word of mouth and which somehow they always forgot to pass on to the boy who lived alone in the dark house on the hill. There were to be formal, mailed invitations, and Young Denny found it hard waiting that night for Old Jerry, who had never been so late before.

The cool red of the horizon behind him faded to a dusky gray and the dusk thickened from twilight to dark while he stood there waiting, leaning heavily upon the pike-pole, shifting more and more uneasily from one tired foot to the other. He had turned at last to go and set a light in answer to the one which was calling insistently to him from the blackness before the Judge’s place when the shrill squeal of complaining axles drifted up to him from far down the long hill road.

Old Jerry came with exasperating slowness that night. The plodding ascent of the fat white mare and creaking buggy was nerve-rackingly deliberate. Young Denny shifted the shaft of his pike-pole to the other hand to wipe his damp palm against the checkered coat as the rig loomed up ahead of him in the darkness. Old Jerry was complaining to himself bitterly in a whining, cracked falsetto.

“’Tain’t reg’lar,” the boy heard him whimpering. “’Tain’t accordin’ to law–not the way I figger it, it ain’t. The Gov’mint don’t expect nobody to work ’til this hour!”

The buggy came to a standstill, with the little, weazened old man leaning far out from the torn leather seat, shading his eyes with one unsteady hand while he peered into the shadows searching for the big-shouldered figure that stepped hesitatingly nearer the wheel. There was something birdlike in the brilliancy of the beady little eyes; something of sparrowlike pertness in the tilt of the old man’s head, perked far over to one side.

“Still a-waitin’, be ye?” he exclaimed peevishly. “Well, it’s lucky you ain’t been kept a-standin’ there a whole sight longer–half the night, mebby! You would a-been, only for my havin’ an orig’nal system for peddlin’ them letters that’s all my own. It’s system does it–but it ain’t right, just the same. The Gov’mint don’t expect nobody to work more’n eight hours to a stretch, and look at me, two hours late and I ain’t home yet! I’d complain, too–I’d complain to the authorities at Washington, only–only”–his thin, high-pitched voice dropped suddenly to a furtively conciliating whisper–“only a-course I don’t want to make no trouble for the Judge.”

Denny Bolton cleared his throat and shuffled his feet uneasily, but this hint for haste was utterly wasted upon Old Jerry. The latter failed completely to note the strained intensity of the face that was upturned before him and went on grumbling as he leaned over to fumble in the box beneath the seat. And the tirade continued in an unbroken, half-muffled stream until he straightened laboriously again, the boy’s usual weekly packet of papers and catalogues in one hand.

“No,” he emphasized deliberately, “I wouldn’t really go so fur’s that–I ain’t figgerin’ on makin’ no complaint–not this time. I got too much regard for the Judge to try to get him into any hot water. But there wa’n’t no real use nor reason in his postin’ all them invitations to once. He could a-begun back a stretch and kinda run ’em in easy, a little to a time, instead of lumpin’ ’em this way, and that would a-give me–”

Young Denny reached out and took the bundle from the extended, unsteady old hand. His own hands were shaking a little as he broke the string and fluttered swiftly through the half dozen papers and pamphlets. Old Jerry never skipped a breath at the interruption.

“But that finishes up the day–that’s about the last of it.” The thin voice became heavily tinged with pride. “There ain’t nobody in the township but what’s got his card to that barn-raising by now–delivered right on the nail! That’s my system.” And then, judiciously: “I guess it’s a-goin’ to be a real fancy affair, too, at that. Must be it’ll cost him more’n a little mite before he gits done feedin’ ’em. They was a powerful lot of them invitations.”

Slowly Denny Bolton’s head lifted. He stood and stared into Old Jerry’s peaked, wrinkled face as if he had only half heard the rambling complaint, a strange, bewildered light growing in his eyes. Then his gaze dropped once more, and a second time, far more slowly, his fingers went through the packet of advertisements. Old Jerry was leaning over to unwind the reins from the whipstock when the boy’s hand reached out and stopped him.

“Ain’t there–wasn’t there anything more for me–tonight?” Young Denny inquired gravely.

Jerry paused impatiently. No other question ever caused him quite such keen irritation, for he felt that it was a slur at his reliability.

“More!” he petulantly echoed the question. “More? Why, you got your paper, ain’t you? Was you expectin’ sunthin’ else? Wasn’t looking for a letter, now was you?”

Denny backed slowly away from the wheel. Dumbly he stood and licked his lips. He cleared his throat again and swallowed hard before he answered.

“No,” he faltered at last, with the same level gravity. “No, I wasn’t exactly expectin’ a letter. But I kind of thought–I–I was just hopin’–”

His grave voice trailed heavily off into silence. Eyes still numbly bewildered he turned, leaning forward a little, to gaze out across the valley at the great square silhouette of Judge Maynard’s house on the opposite ridge, while Old Jerry wheeled the protesting buggy and started deliberately down the hill. Just once more the latter paused; he drew the fat gray mare to a standstill and leaned a last time far out from the seat.

“A-course I didn’t mean nothin’ when I spoke about complainin’ against the Judge,” he called back. “You know that, don’t you, Denny? You know I was just jokin’, don’t you?” A vaguely worried, appealing strain crept into the cracked accents. “An’ a-course you wouldn’t say nothin’ about my speakin’ like that. I think a whole heap too much of the Judge to even try to git him into trouble–and–and then the Judge–he might–you understand that I was only jokin’, don’t you, Denny?”

Young Denny nodded his head silently in reply. Long after the shrill falsetto grumbling had ceased to drift back up the hill to him he stood there motionless. After a while the fingers that still clutched the bundle of circulars opened loosely and when he did finally wheel to cross slowly to the kitchen door the papers and catalogues lay unheeded, scattered on the ground where they had fallen.

He stopped once at the threshold to prop his pike-pole against the house corner before he passed aimlessly inside, leaving the door wide open behind him. And he stood a long time in the middle of the dark room, staring dully at the cold, fireless stove. Never before had he given it more than a passing thought–he had accepted it silently as he accepted all other conditions over which he had no control–but now as he stood and stared, it came over him, bit by bit, that he was tired–so utterly weary that the task of cooking his own supper that night had suddenly become a task greater than he could even attempt. The very thought of the half-cooked food sickened him–nauseated him. Motionless there in the dark he dragged one big hand across his dry lips and slowly shook his head.

“They didn’t want me,” he muttered hoarsely. “It wasn’t because they forgot me before; they didn’t want me–not even for the strength of my shoulders.”

With heavy, shuffling steps he crossed and dropped loosely into a chair beside the bare board table that stood in front of one dingy window. A long time he sat silent, his lean chin propped in his rough palms, eyes burning straight ahead of him into vacancy. Then, little by little, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to sag–they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top.

Once more he spoke aloud, hours later.

“They didn’t want me,” he repeated dully. “Not even for the work I could do!”

CHAPTER III

It was very quiet in the front room of the little cottage that squatted in the black shadow below Judge Maynard’s huge house on the hill. No sound broke the heavy silence save the staccato clip-clip of the long shears in the fingers of the girl who was leaning almost breathlessly over the work spread out on the table beneath the feeble glow of the single oil-lamp, unless the faint, monotonous murmur which came in an endless sing-song from the lips of the stooped, white-haired old figure in the small back room beyond the door could be named anything so definite.

John Anderson’s lips always moved when he worked. His fingers, strong and clean-jointed and almost womanishly smooth–the only part of the man not pitifully seared with age–flew with a bewildering nimbleness one moment, only to dwell the next with a lingering caress upon the shaping features before him; and for each caress of his finger tips there was an accompanying, vacantly gentle smile or an uncertainly emphatic nod of the silvered head which gave the one-sided conversation a touch of uncanny reality.

And yet, at regularly recurring intervals, even his busy fingers faltered, while he sat head bent far over to one side as though he were listening for something, waiting for some reply. At every such pause the vacant smile left his face and failed to return immediately. The monotonously inflectionless conversation was still, too, for the time, and he merely sat and stared perplexedly about him, around the small workshop, bare except for the single high-stool that held him and the littered bench on which he leaned.

There was a foot-wide shelf against each wall of that room, fastened waist high from the floor, and upon it stood countless small white statues, all slim and frail of limb, all upturned and smiling of lip. They were miraculously alike, these delicate white figures, each with a throat-tightening heartache in its wistful face–so alike in form and expression that they might have been cast in a single mold. Wherever his eyes might fall, whenever he turned in one of those endlessly repeated fits of faltering uncertainty, that tiny face was always before him, uplifted of lip, smiling back into John Anderson’s vacant eyes until his own lips began to curve again and he turned once more, nodding his head and murmuring contentedly, to the clay upon his bench.

Out in the larger front room, as she hovered over the work spread out before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson’s mumbling lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged with incredulous wonder.

The yellow glow of the single lamp, pushed far across the table from her, where the most of its radiance was swallowed up by the gloom of the uncurtained window, flickered unsteadily across her shining, tumbled hair, coloring the faintly blue, thinly penciled lines beneath her tip-tilted eyes with a hint of weariness totally at variance with the firm little sloping shoulders and full lips, pursed in a childish pout over a mouthful of pins.

The hours had passed swiftly that day for Dryad Anderson; and the last one of all–the one since she had lighted the single small lamp in the room and set it in the window, so far across the table from her that she had to strain more and more closely over her swift flashing scissors in the thickening dusk–had flown on winged feet, even faster than she knew.