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قراءة كتاب Rainy Week

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‏اللغة: English
Rainy Week

Rainy Week

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 6

wild bird's.

With the incredibility of their miracle still stamped almost embarrassingly on their faces, our Bride-and-Groom-of-a-Week completed the list. It wasn't just the material physical fact that Love was consummated, that gave them that look. But the spiritual amazement that Love was consummatable! No other "look" in life ever compasses it, ever duplicates it!

It made my Husband quite perceptibly quicken the tempo of his jocosity.

"One—two—three—four—five—six—seven," he enumerated. "All good guests come straight from Heaven! One—two—three— four—five—six—Seven—" he repeated as though to be perfectly sure, "seven? Why—Why, what the——?" he interrupted himself suddenly.

With frank bewilderment I saw him jump back to the rear step of the bus and flash his light into the farthest corner where the huddled form of an eighth person loomed weirdly from the shadows.

It was a man—a young man. And at first glimpse he was quite dead. But on second glimpse, merely drunk. Hopelessly,— helplessly,—sodden drunk, with his hat gone, his collar torn away, his haggard face sagging like some broken thing against his breast.

With a tension suddenly relaxed, a faint sigh seemed to slip from the group outside. In the crowding faces that surrounded us instantly, it must have been something in young Kennilworth's expression, or in the Pomeranian's, that made my Husband speak just exactly as he did. With his arms held under the disheveled, uncouth figure, he turned quite abruptly and scanned the faces of his guests, "And whose little pet—may this be?" he asked trenchantly.

From the shadow of the Porte-cochere somebody laughed. It was rather a vacuous little laugh. Sheer nerves! Rollins, I think.

Framed in the half-shuttered window of the bus the May Girl's face pinked suddenly like a flare of apple blossoms.

"He—came with—me," said the May Girl.

No matter how informally one chooses to run his household there is almost always some one rule I've noticed on which the smoothness of that informality depends.

In our household that rule seems to be that no explanations shall ever be asked either in the darkness or by artificial light. . . . It being the supposition I infer that most things explain themselves by daylight. . . . Perfectly cordially I concede that they usually do. . . . But some nights are a great deal longer to wait through than others.

It wasn't, on this particular night, that anyone refused to explain. But that nobody even had time to think of explaining. The young Stranger was in a bad way. Not delirium tremens nor anything like that, but a fearful alcoholic disorganization of some sort. The men were running up and down stairs half the night. Their voices rang through the halls in short, sharp orders to each other. No one else spoke above a whisper. With silly comforts like talcum powder, and hot water bottles, and sweet chocolate, and new novels, I put the women to bed. Their comments if not explanatory were at least reasonably characteristic.

From a swirl of pink chiffon and my best blankets, with her ear cocked quite frankly toward a step on the stairs, her eyes like stars, her mouth all a-kiss, the Bride reported her own emotions in the matter.

"No,—no one, of course had ever believed for a moment," the Bride assured me, "that the Drunken Man was one of the guests. . . . And yet, when he didn't get off at any of the stops, and this house was so definitely announced as the 'end of the road'—why it did, of course, make one feel just a little bit nervous," flushed the Bride, perfectly irrelevantly, as the creak on the stairs drew nearer.

Ann Woltor registered only a very typical indifference.

"A great many different kinds of things," she affirmed, "were bound to happen in any time as long as a day. . . . One simply had to get used to them, that was all." She was unpacking her sombre black traveling bag as she spoke, and the first thing she took out from it was a man's gay, green- plaided golf cap. It looked strange with the rest of her things. All the rest of her things were black.

I thought I would never succeed in putting the May Girl to bed. With a sweet sort of stubbornness she resisted every effort. The first time I went back she was kneeling at her bedside to say her "forgotten prayers." The second time I went back she had just jumped up to "write a letter to her Grandfather." "Something about the sea," she affirmed, "had made her think of her grandfather." "It was a long time," she acknowledged, since she "had thought of her grandfather." "He was very old," she argued, "and she didn't want to delay any longer about writing." Slim and frank as a boy in her half- adjusted blanket-wrapper dishabille she smiled up at me through the amazing mop of gold hair with the gray streak floating like a cloud across the sunshine of her face. She was very nervous. She must have been nervous. It darkened her eyes to two blue sapphires. It quickened her breath like the breath of a young fawn running. "And would I please tell her—how to spell 'oceanic'?" she implored me. As though answering intuitively the unspoken question on my lips, she shrugged blame from her as some exotic songbird might have shrugged its first snow. "No—she didn't know who the young man was! Truly—as far as she knew—she had never—never seen the young man before!—o-c-e-a-n-i-c—was it?——"

The rain was not actually delivered until one o'clock in the morning. Just before dawn I heard the storm-bales rip. In sheets of silver and points of steel, with rage and roar, and a surf like a picture in a Sunday supplement, the weather broke loose!

Thank heaven the morning was so dark that no one appeared in the breakfast-room an instant before the appointed hour of nine.

George Keets, of course, appeared exactly at nine, very trim, very distingué, in a marvelously tailored gray flannel suit, and absolutely possessed to make his own coffee.

Claude Kennilworth's morning manner was very frankly peevish. "His room had a tin roof and he hardly thought he should be able to stand it. . . . Rain? Did you call this rain? It was a Flood! . . . Were there any Movie Palaces near? . . . And were they open mornings? . . . And he'd like an underdone chop, please, for the Pomeranian. . . . And it wasn't his dog anyway, darn the little fool, but belonged to the girl who had the studio next to his and she was possessed with the idea that a week at the shore would put the pup on its feet again. . . . Women were so blamed temperamental. . . . If there was one thing in the world that he hated it was temperamental people." And all the time he was talking he wasn't making anything with his hands, because he wasn't thinking anything instead, "And how in Creation," he scolded, "did we ever happen to build a house out on the granite edge of Nowhere? . . . How did we stand it? How——? . . . Hi there! . . . Wait a moment! . . . God—what Form! That wave with the tortured top! . . . Hush! . . . Don't speak! . . . Please leave him alone! Breakfast? Not yet! When a fellow could watch a—a thing like that! . . . For heaven's sake, pass him that frothy-edged napkin! . . . Did anybody mind if he tore it? . . . While he watched that other froth tear!"

Dear, honest, ardent, red-blooded Paul Brenswick came down so frankly interested in the special device by which our house gutters took care of such amazing torrents of water that everybody felt perfectly confident all at once that no bride of his would ever suffer from leaky roofs or any other mechanical defect. Paul Brenswick liked the rain just as much as he liked the gutters! And he liked the sea! And he liked the house! And he liked the sky! And he liked everything! Even when a clumsy waitress joggled coffee into his grapefruit he seemed to like that just as much as he liked everything else. Paul Brenswick was a real Bridegroom. I am not, I believe, a particularly envious person, and have never as far as I

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