Warning Hill (10 page)

“You come back!” shrieked Mal. “I'll be laying for you! I'll knock your slats in when you come back!”

Tommy knew Mal was the boy to do it, but in the strange elation which had seized him, Tommy thought nothing of consequences. Mary was standing on the shore, while Mal sought vainly for another stone. The wind was blowing at her dress, and Mary had raised her arm. Her voice came out to him over the breeze, very shrill and high.

“Good-by, Tom! And don't you be afraid of 'em at Warning Hill!”

And Mary was like Calypso on the shore, as he had read of her in a broken-backed old Odyssey at home. Did Mary Street really know, he sometimes wondered, that he was going on a longer journey?

Tommy Michael trimmed the sail, as the skiff slid from the river to the harbor. Long ago Jim Street, who seemed to have any amount of time, had taught him how to sail a boat. The little waves went slap against the bottom of the skiff. The fresh wind struck him, nearly as moist and cool as spray. As he pushed down the centerboard and plugged it fast, the water made a mysterious sound, like a hundred small soft voices. One of the harbor gulls swooped by him, all gray above and white as a cloud below. A foreign land, all new to him, was dead upon his bow.

Yes, Warning Hill was new to Tommy then. You could not get to it by land any longer, unless you had business there. The road which led to it across the salt marshes had been closed by a gate several years before. If you came too near, a short, red-faced man would emerge from a small house by the gate, dressed in short trousers and gaiters.

“Get out!” he would say. “This ain't for the likes of you!”

Oh, those were the days when gentlemen were gentlemen. You should have seen him touch his cap when the carriages rolled by! On the whole, however, he must have had a harassed time, because the village boys were always at him, as though they had been called to a holy war. To see the gates shutting you out from Warning Hill was enough to raise your ire, and it puzzled Michael's Harbor, where old people lived who could remember when Warning Hill was nothing but a windswept pasture with a heap of rocks on its highest point, piled there by the Dutch, the story went, for a beacon fire on a stormy night. Those days when Tommy was a boy were so remote in manners if not in time, that people still were puzzled by the vagaries of invaders from the city who took the morning train. Before the Harbor was a suburb there were no barriers of class. Inside the barrier itself were people who disliked it. One recalls that Mr. Simeon Danforth said, as he stood watching the masons build the posts out of field stones.

“Damme! If we aren't getting soft!” he said. “We're building a Roman wall around our children, but you wait till the Picts come down on us and the Danes strike us from the water.”

Mr. Danforth might have said a great deal more, for Mr. Danforth knew. The wall and the gates of Warning Hill epitomized a phase of life itself. In the village and on the hill that age-old struggle ran. Every one was building barriers, struggling, pushing to keep their children safe, in some vain hope that walls would make them better.

Time and again the Picts had come to Warning Hill. There were always boys with spirit enough to break away and to attempt to right the world. Tommy had been there once himself. They had sallied upon the gate like Crusaders skirmishing before the Holy City, six of them, barelegged and muddy, with Mal Street in the lead. Mal Street had been great that day, inspiring every one with his cool courage.

“Hold steady till you see the whites of his eyes!” Mal told them, and he had hit the man in gaiters square on the nose with a rotten apple before they broke for cover.

The waves were striking on the bottom of the skiff—slap-slap—as Tommy held his course to Warning Hill. Now and then a gust of wind would take the skiff with a sudden force, and would make the water sing as water must have sang since the beginning of all time.

“Lay aft there!” Tommy called. “And ease the sheets!”

It was not hard to play the game. You could easily think that there was some one also aboard; his footsteps sounded in the slapping of the water. Tommy could see his own house, over astern to port, gaunt and gray with the elms about it. He could see a smashed window in the cupola and broken shutters, and clothes hanging to dry by the old carriage house, and the bushes near the choked old garden by the beach. His house and everything he knew was slipping too far astern for help. The yellow skiff was very near to Warning Hill.

The houses on the hill had grown very large, all of them like castles. On a stretch of green above him was one of brown rough stones that was larger than the others. Its gray slate roof was a mass of pointed towers. There were balconies in front of its windows, and the lawn came down from it in great long steps. Tommy looked hastily at the shore line. Everywhere before him were the rocks and rough water.

“Look forward!” called Tommy Michael. It was pleasant to feel that some one else was there.

“Ready about!” called Tommy. “Stand by to beach her!”

Though Tommy was pretending, he could manage a small boat. It was pleasant having things both make-believe and real, because you could slip from one to the other as you pleased. Tommy had seen a place to land where the rocks had dropped away to leave a little strip of sandy beach with a stretch of marsh grass behind it. A minute later Mal Street's skiff nosed into the sand with a flapping sail, and Tommy was shoving in the anchor. Tommy was very careful to make no unnecessary noise. He was sharing the feelings of greater men than he. Balboa would have understood, and old De Soto and Champlain, that Tommy was a brother to them all, as he walked through the marsh grass of a country, where fiddler crabs scuttled to their holes before his step.

Tommy walked forward a little way and stopped, but no one was in sight. There was only the lapping of the harbor waves. Now that he was off the water, the sun was very warm.

“Stand by the ship,” said Tommy. “I'm going on ahead.”

Nothing answered. Only the waves were splashing on the shore. Before him was a small building, whose door sagged half open, and whose windows were gaping like sightless eyes. Its empty stillness startled him, and a curious something besides, as if something was there, though nothing was there at all. The house, the beach and the marsh made a solitary lonely country, because a row of poplars cut it off from the mainland, like a wall.

“Stand by the ship!” said Tommy. “I'm going through those trees!”

Of all the sights that Tommy Michael was to see, he could never recall one finer than the one which met his eyes.

IX

Tommy was standing upon a lawn. It was magnificently green without a single weed upon it, with every blade of grass exact in height. A freshness of growing things was in the breeze, the scent of flowers and green. It seemed to him that soft hands were touching his face and his rumpled hair as he drew in his breath. He forgot that he was a slender tow-headed little boy, in a faded shirt, torn trousers and muddy shoes, with eyes wide and mouth half open. Far away on the rising ground was the house of brown stones, which he had seen from the water. All about him on the lawn were so many beds of flowers of so many colors and sizes that they seemed to shift and change everywhere he looked. It was ten, twenty times as large as any lawn and garden in Michael's Harbor. Straight toward the brown-stone house, not far from where he stood, was a broad white path, running straight up steps and terraces among the flowers, and on either side of the path were figures of large green animals. Tommy could see an elephant and a lion and a long-necked bird.

“Golly!” said Tommy right out loud. “Every one of 'em made of bushes!”

As he spoke, a voice from behind him answered, “Of course they're made of bushes!”

The voice was soft and clear, like the running of cool water. Tommy could almost believe it was not a real voice at all, until he remembered, as he turned himself about, that the grass was thick and that the wind was blowing. He saw that a little girl was standing not ten feet away, looking at him with dark and level eyes.

She might have been a painting. She had that mysterious power sometimes possessed by a canvas to etch itself upon the memory. The tilt of her nose, the upward twist of her lips, her white frilly dress, her bare legs and socks and shiny little shoes were all a part of an impression and meant nothing in themselves. What Tommy remembered was an unsubstantial something, a lightness in her little body, a glimmer in the depths of her eyes that made you think, should you turn your head, that she might disappear into the sun and dancing shadows. She did not disappear. She even took a step toward him, a light feathery step, and stopped. Her hair was brushed straight down her back like Alice's in Wonderland. She was smiling faintly and that curious light was dancing in her eyes.

“Of course they're made of bushes,” she said again. “They're like the box trees in Pliny's garden.”

Tommy drew in his breath; he had forgotten about the animals by the path.

“Who—who are you?” Tommy said.

“I'm Marianne,” she said. “Marianne Jellett. Who are you?”

Tommy Michael drew another deeper breath. For a moment Tommy came near to running away, for he knew he was in the enemy's country, once he heard that name. He was vaguely aware of something which was not right, of a disloyalty to memory—and yet he stayed without ever knowing why.

“I guess you don't know me,” he said. “I'm Tommy Michael.”

She put her head a little to one side, as a bird might, Tommy thought.

“Are you?” said Marianne. “I was just hoping something strange might happen, and nothing strange has ever happened until now.
C'est une bonne chance
—that's French. Do you know French?”

“I'm going to study it,” said Tommy, “when I go to high school in the fall.”

“I learn it from Miss Meachey,” said Marianne, “she's my governess, you know—and then I've learned some bad words too, from Cléone. She's mamma's maid, and sometimes when I don't have anything else to do, I say them to Henri. He's our chauffeur, and he's French too. He thinks they're ever so funny when I say them.”

She smiled at Tommy faintly. Her voice was exactly like the rippling of a brook, it seemed to Tommy Michael. He could not understand half of what she said. Yet it was so strangely pleasant that he stood there, not knowing what to answer, and it seemed to him again that soft hands were touching his face.

“You like me, don't you?” Marianne inquired.

Tommy nodded slowly.

“Well, I don't mind,” said Marianne. She smoothed the ruffles of her dress with a thin little nervous hand, and laughed. It was very pleasant to hear her laugh. It was like the singing of the birds, it seemed to Tommy, and the whispering of the wind.

“I knew you did,” said Marianne, “I could tell.”

“How?” asked Tommy.

“I don't know, but I could tell,” said Marianne.

Tommy saw that she was looking at him, at his shoes and trousers, and at his sun-bleached shirt. It was that frank unwavering curiosity of a child, which sees everything without the light of charity or expedience. Tommy realized he was as different from her as a being from a different world. Tommy became aware that his shoes were caked with rich salt mud. His trousers, never very passable, were also muddy. Such things had made little difference where he came from, but on that lawn, beside the impeccable whiteness of Marianne, he felt a proper twinge of awkwardness. His shirt, of a sort known as the Garibaldi blouse, was secured about his middle by a string—a “stomach string,” Tommy called it, which he now noticed had become undone and was twining rakishly about his legs. He found himself blushing with a new shame as he endeavored to push it back.

“This isn't my best clothes,” Tommy explained. “I've got a blue suit I wear to church.”

“Oh,” said Marianne, “I don't mind, but we'd better go and sit under that tree, perhaps. If one of the gardeners came, he might not know what to think.”

“What,” said Tommy, “would he think?”

Yet even then he must have had an inkling of what she meant.

“Oh, nothing,” said Marianne.

She skipped before him, nervously across the grass, now and then looking over her shoulder to see if he would follow, just as Lorna Doone had done in the Valley of the Doones. She stopped beneath a young copper beech with bending branches which nearly touched the grass.

“Sit down,” said Marianne. “It's—it's really cooler here.”

She paused and patted the pleats of her dress and looked at him from the corner of her eye.

“It's funny,” said Marianne, “I know who you are. I've seen you lots of times.”

“You've seen me?” stammered Tommy, and it seemed a most peculiar thing that she should have ever seen him.

“Yes,” said Marianne, “often when I go driving. I've seen you by the gates of that old house with a cupola on top. I've wondered who you were.”

Tommy felt his face grow red.

“It's my house,” he explained. “It may be old, but it's a pretty big house.”

Then he wondered for the first time, if she had invited him beneath that beech so that no one else might see him. It was not a pleasant thought, but it would not go away.

“What do you do?” asked Marianne.

“Do?” echoed Tommy. “I milk the cow and split the wood, and help my mother inside.”

“Do you?” said Marianne. “I've wondered what boys did down there. What else?”

“I work,” said Tommy, “for Mr. Cooper in the bank, running errands, sweeping out in the afternoon, winters, and all day, summers. I've got to help at home.”

“Oh,” said Marianne, and that was all. The decorous smoothness of the lawn, everything, seemed to be laughing at Tommy Michael.

Then in that way in which a mind will flash back sometimes, Tommy remembered who she was. It was on the road to Michael's Harbor long ago. A carriage was coming down that road, with a body of yellow and red panelling upon it, and its wheels made a shining blur. Four bay horses were drawing it. Out of the white dust cloud which eddied about them they lifted their forefeet as though they heard music. A little girl in that carriage was watching him. Her hair was down her back like Alice's in Wonderland. She wore a tiny hat with ruffles on it.