Athalie. Robert W. Chambers
blunt, merciless curiosity of other children soon taught Athalie to be on her guard. She learned that embarrassed reserve which tended toward secretiveness and untruth before she was eleven.
And in school she learned to lie, learned to deny accusations of being different, pretended that what her sisters accused her of had been merely "stories" made up to amuse them.
So, in school, she made school-life endurable for herself. Yet, always, there seemed to be something between her and other children that made intimacies impossible.
At the same time she was conscious of the admiration of the boys, of something about herself that they liked outside of her athletic abilities.
She had a great many friends among the boys; she could out-run, out-jump, out-swim any of them in the big country school. She was supple and trim, golden-haired and dark-eyed, and ready for anything that required enterprise and activity of mind or body. Her ragged skirts were still short at eleven—short enough not to impede her. And she led the chase for pleasure all over that part of Long Island, running wild with the pack from hill to tide-water until every farmer in the district knew "the Greensleeve girl."
There was, of course, some deviltry among cherry trees and apple orchards—some lawlessness born of sheer exuberance and superb health—some malicious trespassing, some harrying of unpopular neighbours. But not very much, considering.
Her home life was colourless, calm, comfortable, and uneventful as she regarded it. Business at the Hotel Greensleeve had fallen off and in reality the children had very little. But children at that age who live all day in the open, require little except sympathetic intelligence for their million daily questions.
This the Greensleeve children found wanting except when their mother did her best to stimulate her own latent intelligence for their sakes.
But it rested on the foundation of an old-fashioned and limited education. Only the polite, simpler, and more maidenly arts had been taught her in the little New Jersey school her father had kept. And her education ceased when she married Greensleeve, the ex-"professor" of penmanship, a kind, gentle, unimaginative man, unusually dull even for a teacher. And he was a failure even at that.
They began married life by buying the house they were now living in; and when Greensleeve also failed as a farmer, they opened the place as a public tavern, and took in Ledlie to finance it.
So it was to her mother that Athalie went for any information that her ardent and growing intellect required. And her mother, intuitively surmising the mind-hunger of youth, and its vigorous needs, did her limited best to satisfy it in her children. And that is really all the education they had; for what they got in the country school amounted to—well it amounted to what anybody ever gets in school.
Her most enduring, most vivid memories of her mother clustered around those summer days of her twelfth year, brief lamp-lit scenes between long, sunlit hours of healthy, youthful madness—quiet moments when she came in flushed and panting from the headlong chase after pleasure, tired, physically satisfied, to sit on the faded carpet at her mother's feet and clasp her hands over her mother's knees.
Then "what?" and "why?" and "when?" and "how?" were the burden of the child's eager speech. Nothing seemed to have escaped her quick ears or eyes, no natural phenomena of the open; life, birth, movement, growth, the flow, and ebb of tides, thunder pealing from high-piled clouds, the sun shining through fragrant falling rain, mists that grew over swamp and meadow.
And, "Why?" she always asked.
Nothing escaped her;—swallows skimming and sheering Spring Pond, trout that jumped at sunset, the quick furry shapes of mink and muskrat, the rattling flash of a blue-winged kingfisher, a tall heron wading, a gull mewing.
Nothing escaped her; the casual caress of mating birds, procreation in farm-yard and barn-yard, fledgelings crying from a robin's nest of mud and messy refuse, blind kittens tugging at their blinking mother.
Death, too, she saw,—a dusty heap of feathers here, a little mound of fur, there, which the idle breezes stirred under the high sky,—and once a dead dog, battered, filthy and bloody, shot by the roadside; and once some pigs being killed on a farm, all screaming.
Then, in that school as in every school, there was the sinister minority, always huddling in corners, full of mean silences and furtive leering. And their half-heard words, half-understood phrases,—a gesture, a look that silenced and perplexed her—these the child brought also to her mother, sitting at her feet, face against her knees.
For a month or two her mother had not been very well, and the doctor who had brought Athalie into the world stopped in once or twice a week. When he was with her mother the children were forbidden the room.
One evening in particular Athalie remembered. She had been running her legs off playing hounds-and-hares across country from the salt-hay stacks to the chestnut ridge, and she had come in after sunset to find her mother sewing in her own bedroom, her brother and sisters studying their lessons in the sitting-room where her father also sat reading the local evening paper.
Supper was over, but Athalie went to the kitchen and presently returned to her mother's room carrying a bowl of bread and milk and half a pie.
Here on the faded carpet at her mother's feet, full in the lamplight she sat her down and ate in hungry silence while her mother sewed.
Athalie seldom studied. A glance at her books seemed to be enough for her. And she passed examinations without effort under circumstances where plodders would have courted disaster.
Rare questions from her mother, brief replies marked the meal. When she had satisfied her hunger she jumped up, ran downstairs with the empty dishes, and came slowly back again,—a slender, supple figure with tangled hair curling below her shoulders, dirty shirt-waist, soiled features and hands, and the ragged blue skirt of a sailor suit hanging to her knees.
"Your other sailor suit is washed and mended," said her mother, smiling at her child in tatters.
Athalie, her gaze remote, nodded absently. After a moment she lifted her steady dark blue eyes:
"A boy kissed me, mamma," she remarked, dropping cross-legged at her mother's feet.
"Don't kiss strange boys," said her mother quietly.
"I didn't. But why not?"
"It is not considered proper."
"Why?"
Her mother said: "Kissing is a common and vulgar practice except in the intimacy of one's own family."
"I thought so," nodded Athalie; "I soaked him for doing it."
"Who was he?"
"Oh, it was that fresh Harry Eldon. I told him if he ever tried to get fresh with me again I'd kill him.... Mamma?"
"Yes?"
"All that about poor old Mr. Manners isn't true, is it?"
Her mother smiled. The children had been taught to leave a morsel on their plates "for manners"; and to impress it upon them their mother had invented a story about a poor old man named Manners who depended upon what they left, and who crept in to eat it after they had retired from table.
So leaving something "for Manners" had been thoroughly and successfully inculcated, until the habit was formed. And now Athalie was the last of the children to discover the gentle fraud practised upon her.
"I'm glad, anyway," concluded the child. "I never thought we left him enough to eat."
Her mother said: "I shall tell you only truths after this. You are old enough to understand reason, now, and to reason a little yourself."
"I do.... But I am not yet perfectly sure where babies come from. You said you would tell me that some day. I'd really like to know, mamma."
Her mother continued to sew for a while, then, passing the needle through the hem she looked down at her daughter.
"Have