You are here

قراءة كتاب Rainy Week

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Rainy Week

Rainy Week

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 5

these smooth-spikey-pink- blue-yellow-or-mottled shells arrive with maddening frequency. And Rollins is a born cataloguer! What easier thing in the world to say than, "Oh, by the way, Rollins, old man, here's an invoice that might interest you from a Florida Key that I've just located. . . . How about the second week in May? Could you come then, do you think? I'm all tied up to be sure with a houseful of guests that week, but they won't bother you any. And, at least, you'll have your evenings for fun. Clothes? Haven't got 'em? Oh, Pshaw! Let me see. It rained last year, didn't it? . . . Well, I guess we can raise the same umbrella that we raised for you then! S'long!"

Everything settled then! Everything ready but the springtime and the scenery! . . . And God Himself at work on that!— Hist! What is it? The flash of a blue-bird?

A bell tinkles! A pulley-rope creaks! And the Curtain Rises!

May always comes so amazingly soon after February! So infinitely much sooner than anyone dares hope that it would! Peering into snow-smeared shop windows some rather particularly bleak morning you notice with a half- contemptuous sort of amusement a precocious display of ginghams and straw hats. And before you can turn round to tell anybody about it, tulips have happened!—And It's May!

More than seeming extravagantly early this year, May dawned also with extravagant lavishness. Through every prismatic color of the world, sunshine sang to the senses!

"What shall we do," fretted my Husband, "if this perfection lasts?" The question indeed was a leading one!

The scenery for Rainy Week did not arrive until the afternoon of the eighth.

From his frowning survey of bright lawns, gleaming surf, radiant sky, I saw my Husband turn suddenly with a little gasping sigh that might have meant anything.

"What is it?" I cried.

"Look!" he said, "it's come."

Silently, shoulder to shoulder, we stood and watched the gigantic storm-bales roll into the sky—packed in fleece, corded with ropes of mist, gorgeous, portentous,—To-morrow's Rain! It is not many hosts and hostesses under like circumstances who turn to each other as we did with a single whoop of joy!

An hour later, hatless and coatless in the lovely warm May twilight, we stood by the larch tree waiting for our guests. We like to have them sup in town at their own discretion or indiscretion, that first night, and all arrive together reasonably sleek and sleepy, and totally unacquainted, on the eight o'clock train. But the larch tree has always been our established point for meeting the Rainy Week people. Conceding cordially the truth of the American aphorism that while charity may perfectly legitimately begin at home, hospitality should begin at the railroad station! We personally have proved beyond all doubt that for our immediate interests at stake dramatic effect begins at the entrance to our driveway.

Yet it is always with mingled feelings of trepidation and anticipation that we first sense the blurry rumble of motor wheels on the highway. If the station bus were only blue or green! But palest oak! And shuttered like a roll-top desk! Spilling out strange personalities at you like other people's ideas brimming from pigeon-holes!

For some unfathomable reason of constraint this night, no one was talking when the bus arrived. Shy, stiff-spined, non- communicative, still questioning, perhaps. Who was who and what was what, these seven guests who by the return ride a week hence might even be mated, such things have happened, or once more not speaking to each other, this also has happened, loomed now like so many dummies in the gloom.

"Why, Hello!" we cried, jumping to the rear step of the bus as it slowed slightly at the curb, and thrusting our faces as genially as possible into the dark, unresponsive doorway.

"Hello!" rallied someone—I think it was Rollins. Whoever it was he seemed to be having a terrible time trying to jerk his suitcase across other people's feet.

"Oh, is this where you live?" questioned George Keets's careful voice from the shadows. The faintest possible tinge of relief seemed to be in the question.

"Here?" brightened somebody else.

A window-fastener clicked, a shutter crashed, an aperture opened, and everybody all at once, scenting the sea, crowded to stare out where the gray dusk merging into gray rocks merged in turn with the gray rocks into a low rambling gray fieldstone house silhouetted with indescribable weirdness at the moment against that delicate, pale gold, French-drawing- room sort of sky cluttered so incongruously with the clump of dark clouds.

"The road—doesn't go any farther?" puzzled someone. "There's no other stopping place you mean—just a little bit farther along? This is the end,—the last house,—the——?"

High from a cliff-top somewhere a sea bird lifted a single eerie cry.

"Oh, how—how dramatic!" gasped somebody.

Reaching out to nudge my Husband's hand I collided instead with a dog's cold nose.

Following apparently the same impulse my Husband's hand met the dog's startling nose at almost the same instant.

Except for a second's loss of balance on the bus-step neither of us resented the incident. But it was my Husband who recovered his conversation as well as his balance first.

"Oh, you Miss Davies!" he called blithely into the bus. "What's your Pom's name? Nose-Gay? Skip-a-bout? Cross-Patch? What?—Lucky for you we knew your propensity for arriving with pets! The kennel's all ready and the cat sent away!"

In the nearest shadow of all it was almost as though one heard an ego bristle.

"I beg your pardon, but the Pomeranian is mine," affirmed Claude Kennilworth's un-mistakable voice with what seemed like quite unnecessary hauteur.

"What the deuce is the matter with everybody?" whispered my Husband.

With a jerk and a bump the bus grazed a big boulder and landed us wheezily at our own front door.

As expeditiously as possible my Husband snatched up the lantern that gleamed from the doorstep and brandishing it on high, challenged the shadowy occupants of the bus to disembark and proclaim themselves.

Ann Woltor stepped down first. As vague as the shadows she merged from her black-garbed figure faded un-outlined into the shadow of the porch. For an instant only the uplifted lantern flashed across her strange stark face—and then went crashing down into a shiver of glass on the gravelly path at my Husband's feet. "Ann—Stoltor!" I heard him gasp. My Husband is not usually a fumbler either with hand or tongue. In the brightening flare of the flash-light that some one thrust into his hands his face showed frankly rattled. "Ann Woltor!" I prompted him hastily. For the infinitesimal fraction of a second our eyes met. I hope my smile was as quick. "What is the matter with everybody?" I said.

With extravagant exuberance my Husband jumped to help the rest of our guests alight. "Hi, there, Everybody!" he greeted each new face in turn as it emerged somewhat hump-shouldered and vague through the door of the bus into the flare of his lantern light.

Poor Rollins, of course, tumbled out.

Fastidiously, George Keets illustrated how a perfect exit from a bus should be made,—suitcase, hat-box, English ulster, everything a model of its kind. Even the constraint of his face, absolutely perfect.

With the Pomeranian clutched rather drastically under one arm, Claude Kennilworth followed Keets. All the time, of course, you knew that it was the Pomeranian who was growling, but from the frowning irritability of young Kennilworth's eyes one might almost have concluded that the boy was a ventriloquist and the Pom a puppet instead of a puppy. "Her name is 'Pet'," he announced somewhat succinctly to my Husband. "And she sleeps in no—kennel!"

A trifle paler than I had expected, but inexpressively young, lovely, palpitant, and altogether adorable, the May Girl sprang into my vision—and my arms. Her heart was beating like a

Pages