Winterbound (21 page)

“I'd rather stay, if it's all right really. For a while
anyway. Charles has a room planned for me up at his house, when he ever gets it done. But I like it better here. There'll be so many comings and goings up at that place and I'm like Arabella—I enjoy quiet. Besides, I'm an incorrigibly untidy person, as you know, and by the time they get the house up there all planned and perfect there won't be any place in it for untidiness.”

Their eyes met and they both smiled, sharing the same ideas about comfort as opposed to perfection.

“Isn't it funny how things turn out!” Garry looked through the window and up the hill to where the new shingles caught the sunlight. “When we first came to live here we used to wonder about that house, and Kay was always saying how she'd love to have a hand in the fixing over of it. Ever since I can remember we've always joked about ‘Kay's ideas' and teased her about wanting everything just so. With us I guess it's been mostly a case of plenty to fix and nothing to fix it with, but now she's really got a chance to show what she can do for once.”

Penny's curtains could wait till tomorrow, she decided as she stacked the lunch dishes. Kay still had to sew the rings on, and Penny couldn't possibly be home for another week, since they had had another of those queer noncommittal letters only the day before yesterday. The garden was another matter; it was too good a day to
spend indoors, and when the kitchen was tidy she took spade and rake and set to work.

It was a pleasant drowsy afternoon. Robins were busy round the apple trees where pale sticky buds were already unfolding, and the click of Emily's typewriter sounded lazily through the open window. Arabella wandered out presently, picking her ladylike way over the fresh-turned earth, with one eye on the coon cat who sat erect and motionless among the pasture weeds, watching a mole-run. Kay wouldn't be back till five at the earliest, but Garry was so impatient to know the result of that journey that she found herself listening every moment for the possible hum of a car down the valley. But the children came back from school, supper was over and cleared away, before at last the roadster drew up at the gate.

It needed only one look at Kay's face to know the news.

“It's all settled—they're going to use it. Oh Garry, you don't know how I feel! Hey, look out!”

For Garry had seized her in a sudden whirl that nearly landed them both on the floor.

“Never mind. I've squashed your hat, but you can buy a new one now. What happened? Sit down and tell me all about it.”

“It'll be published this fall. There's some work I've
got to do on it still; one picture to draw over again, and the end papers. I never thought about those. But that won't take very long. I must have stayed there two hours and she was perfectly grand; showed me some of the other books they are making, and just how things are printed, and the sort of colors one can use—ever so many things I'd never known about and always wanted to. I never knew there was so much went to making just one book! And the best of it is, it's got me started on new ideas now, and I can't wait to begin on them.”

“It's the feeling of having really made a beginning that counts so much,” she said later that evening, after Charles had gone, the last remnants of the chocolate cake were finished, and she and Garry were sitting curled on the sofa watching the flames in the open fireplace—for evenings were still chilly. “When I saw all those other things there today my own stuff began to look pretty awful. I just hated to look at it, spread out there. I could see all the mistakes I'd made and all that I might have put into it and hadn't. But I guess everyone feels that way when you come to measure up, the first time. I haven't got any illusions about it, either. But it did make me feel that the next thing I try I'll be able to do a lot better, and if they do like my stuff at all I'm going to try hard, and I'll turn out something very different. Garry, I'm so glad you made me stick at those drawings, even
if they did seem silly. It's just groping along by oneself that's so awful; I got into a kind of muddle this winter when it didn't seem as if anything was worth trying. Charles gave me a good talking to coming back in the car today. We nearly quarreled over it, but I guess he was right.”

Garry looked sharply up; there was a little flush on Kay's cheeks, but she went on quickly: “Oh, I know what's back of your mind, but you don't have to worry. We're just good friends and he's got work to think about and so have I, but he's the first person I've ever met that I can really talk to about things, and who understands.”

“That's how it always begins,” thought Garry, giving a poke to the smoldering logs.

“I don't mean that you don't. I only mean . . .”

“I know just what you mean,” said Garry, sitting back on her heels. “You mean someone outside the family, someone who hasn't watched you grow up and who doesn't think they know all about you. That's exactly why I like Emily and Mary Rowe. When I want to spill things over I can spill it over to them, and it's all right. They don't get their feelings hurt and they don't immediately think that anything you happen to say has some relation to something or other they happened to say or do ten months back. I know!”

“Well, that's how I do feel. And that's why . . .”

A prolonged and dismal hoot broke suddenly on the stillness.

“Listen!” said Garry. She dropped the poker and moved to the open window. “Sounds like some car in trouble down the hill there.”

Kay joined her. They stood looking out down the road to where on the first twisting rise two headlights blinked uncertainly, while the grating whine of gears sounded, stopped, and began again.

“Stalled on the first turn. Someone who doesn't know the road, or they're out of gas.”

“Maybe it's Neal,” Kay said.

“Neal's back ages ago. It's after eleven now. Besides, that doesn't sound like his car.”

“Well, we don't have to help them out. Garry, I'm going to bed. That drive made me so sleepy!”

But Garry still stood there, peering out. The car had started anew, hung for a moment doubtfully, then lurched forward, taking the zigzag climb with much wobbling and groaning but a dogged determination that brought it at last, with a final burst of power, just abreast of their own gateway, where it stalled again for good. A slim figure got out, and with one amazed look Garry tore the front door open and ran down the path.

“Penny!”

“It's me. I never thought I'd make it. I've had that
wretched hill on my mind ever since I started out. Did I wake the whole countryside up?”

“But Penny—Kay, come here!” Garry shook the small figure to make sure it was real. “You mean you learned to drive and you drove all that way alone!”

“Every inch of it.” Penny waved her hand at the shabby flivver, dust-colored, with dried mud caked to the axles, and one crumpled fender visible in the dim glow from the headlights. “We bought that wreck down there for forty dollars and Peggy said if I wanted to drive it back I could keep it, and there it is. I'd planned to creep up and take you all by surprise, seeing it was after dark, and then I had to stall on the hill! The horn was an accident; I leaned on the button. Well, I've stalled my way half across the country, come to that, but I got here!”

They hugged, held each other at arm's length to stare, and hugged again.

“You're looking grand!”

She was. A grimy and disheveled Penny when they dragged her indoors to the lamplight, almost as dust-smeared as the car, but amazingly sun tanned, firm of muscle under her khaki flannel shirt and with a new light of assurance in her eyes.

“Where are the rest of you?”

But Martin had already stumbled out of bed, roused
by the sound of the car, Caroline came trailing down in her nightgown, only half awake; Emily Humbold loomed in her doorway, stalwart in striped pyjamas, clutching an outraged Arabella who had no opinion at all of midnight strangers falling from the skies like this. A state of happy confusion in which everyone talked at once and nobody listened and news went in at one ear and out at the other, since nothing seemed particularly important except the great fact that Penny was home again, until suddenly she said:

“Father's coming back in June, for a few weeks. I didn't write about it because he didn't want me to tell you until he was quite sure. He'll be busy most of the time but he'll be able to get up here for a little while anyway.”

“He is? Oh, grand! And Kay's sold a book. What do you think of that?”

“You're not fooling? Kay, let me look at you! Tell me about it.”

“I'll tell you tomorrow. There's too much else to think about now. Penny, we have missed you so!”

“If you ask me you've done remarkably well without me!” Penny looked happily round on the familiar room in which her mind had lived for so much of the time that she was away.

“But Penny, those letters!” Garry suddenly remembered. “How on earth . . .”

The old guilty expression came over their mother's face, what they always used to call “Penny's auction look.”

“Well, you see ... I didn't want to tell you what I was doing because I knew you'd be worried. So I wrote all those letters ahead and gave them to Margaret—I told you she is down there with Peggy now?—and I numbered them all and told her to mail one every four days. And I had her forward yours to me along the road so I'd know
you
were all right.”

“Worried! Do you know you had us crazy?” demanded Garry. “We thought you were having a nervous breakdown or something, from those letters, and didn't want to tell us. They were so absolutely unlike you. Some day I'm going to make you read them over, every one, and you'll see!”

“Well, it's awfully hard to make up letters ahead of time that way, but I did think I'd done them pretty well. And then I got to the point where I simply had to write you postcards, but I didn't dare mail them so I had to put them by, and today I dumped the whole lot in the mailbox in some little New York town I came through. You'll get them tomorrow, all in one bunch.
When that postmaster sorts the mail I guess he'll think someone was crazy.”

“He wouldn't be far wrong, either. Now we know where the strain comes from in this family!”

“Sheer guilty conscience,” Penny confessed. “I felt so selfish, having a perfectly good time all by myself without you knowing. It was the first time in years I've ever done exactly as I pleased, with no one to consider. I could stop when I chose and go on when I chose. I slept in any odd tourist camp I took a fancy to. I didn't have to stop and eat unless I felt like it and I didn't have to talk to a single soul unless I chose. I had a perfectly marvelous time.”

Garry nodded. She, more than anyone else, knew exactly how Penny had felt. This growing-up business—perhaps it didn't after all make so much difference as one thought. Or did anyone really grow up at all?

“Well, I guess we'll forgive you. Only next time . . .”

“There won't be a next time,” Penny sighed happily. “I'm going to stay put, now.”

“We were going to have everything fixed up to welcome you, and here we're still at sixes and sevens and your curtains aren't hung and your bed isn't made and all that's ready is Caroline's dish garden,” Kay laughed. “If she hasn't just un-fixed it all over again!”

“I didn't. It's right here. I'm going to get fresh violets tomorrow.”

Caroline looked with self-satisfaction at the little bowl of moss and flowers on the table at Penny's elbow, over which she had labored so persistently.

“Do we have to go to school tomorrow?” Martin asked.

“No, you don't, but you have to go to bed tonight.” Penny jumped up. “Do you realize it's tomorrow now, and I haven't even got my suitcase out of the car!”

“I'll fetch the flashlight.”

They stood in the doorway looking out over the quiet hillside. The night air was damp and mild, filled with the smell of earth and of springtime; from down in the valley came the glad minor chorus of the peepers in the swamp. Across the road the lantern in the Rowes' kitchen gleamed faintly through the tangled apple boughs. There was a light in an upper room too, that only Kay's eyes saw and rested on, before she turned to slip her arm round Penny's waist with a little sigh of contentment.

“It's good to have you back!”

“It's good to be back.”

Garry stretched her arms, waiting for Martin to bring the suitcase. It was more than a gesture; she had a feeling as though something had slipped from her shoulders. It was a little like the feeling she had had that night
when she woke up in the darkness and knew all at once that the cold snap had broken; a sense of something different in the air, a feeling of security and comfort, that everything, now, was going to be all right.

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