A quick glance up the street showed Elaine still stooping over the tulip bed, her stiff little skirts sticking out straight behind her.
The grotesqueness was somehow reassuring. Margaret smiled, half at the absurd little figure, half at her own absurdly tragic fancy.
On the other porch Frank was taking his leave--a process of some duration. First he stood on the lower steps talking at length with Jean who stood on the top step. Then he raised his cap and started away, only to remember something before he reached the corner and to run back across the lawn. There he stood talking while Jean sat on the porch railing, suggesting a faint Romeo and Juliet effect. The next time, Jean called him back. They met halfway down the cement walk and conversed earnestly and lengthily.
With an exquisite sympathy Margaret watched these maneuvers from under discreet eyelids. She was glad for them both, with a clear-souled, generous joy. And yet she felt a sensitive pleasure that walked on the edge of pain. In the young man especially she took a quick delight--in his supple length of limb, the spread of his shoulders, his close-cropped black hair, his new clothes, the way he thrust his hands deep in his trousers' pockets while he swung on the balls of his feet, the attentive bend of his head toward Jean; she reveled in all his elastic, masculine youth which she knew for the garb of a straight, strong, kindly, honorable soul. But out of the revel grew a trouble, as if some strange spirit prisoned in her own struggled to tear itself free, to fling itself, wailing, in the dust.
"Egotism!" said Margaret to herself, curling her lip, sewing very fast.
The fluttering spirit lay tombed and still.
When Frank was finally gone, Jean sauntered across the street to Margaret's porch. She perched on the rail and pulled at the leafless vine-stems beside her, talking idly and desultorily of things she was not interested in.
She was an attractive girl, more wholesome than beautiful. Her bronze-brown hair coiled stylishly about her head, gleamed in the late sun. There were some tiny freckles across her nose. She wore a pale blue summer-dress with short sleeves out of which her young arms emerged, fresh and tender from their winter seclusion.
The two maidens circled warily about the topic they were both longing to talk of. Margaret noted in Jean a new aloofness. Every time she threw Frank's name temptingly into the open Jean purposely let it lie.
At last, with a little gasp of laughter, looking straight before her, Jean exclaimed: "I guess I'm sort of scared!"
"What I like about Frank," said Margaret, "is that he's so true and reliable. He's a fellow you can trust!"
"Yes," assented Jean. "Don't you think he looks--nice in that new suit?"
"Splendid! Frank's a handsome boy."
"Isn't he?" sighed Jean.
"He'll always be constant to anyone he cares for. And, I think--he does care for someone."
"What makes _you_ think so?" demanded Jean, her blue eyes suddenly intent on Margaret.
"What makes you think so?" Margaret parried.
Jean sat up instantly very straight and stiff.
"Who said I thought anything?"
"Oh, no, no!" Margaret disclaimed hastily. "I didn't mean that. I meant anyone would think so!"
Jean lapsed into a placated limpness, resting her lithe young figure in its summer blue against the dingy house-wall.
"Isn't it funny," she mused, "how you can resolve you won't think, and keep yourself from thinking, and really not think, because you've made up your mind you wouldn't--and all the time you _know_!"
Margaret was searching in her mind for some tenderest phrase of warning when Jean anticipated her.
"Well, it's a good thing I don't care!--I thought at first I didn't like his hair that way, but I do now--better than the other way. He was telling about college."
"He finishes this year, doesn't he?"
"Yes. He's going in with his father next year--unless he makes up his mind to go to Yale. But he doesn't think he will. His father wants him here; and he's about decided that's best."
"Marg'ret," called a thin, querulous, broken voice from within the house; "ain't it time you was gettin' supper?"
Margaret opened the door to call back in a loud, clear voice: "Not yet, Mother."
Jean slipped off the railing. "I must go."
"It really isn't time yet. Mother gets nervous, sitting all day. And she doesn't care to read any more. Stay a little longer."
These snatches of Jean's confidence were delicious to her.
"Oh, I've got to go."
Jean suddenly put both arms around Margaret's waist and clasped her in a swift embrace.
"I wish," she said, "some awfully nice old widower or bachelor would come along and marry you!"
As Jean crossed the street with the lowering sun making a nimbus in her chestnut-golden hair, she began to sing. The words sprang joyous and clear as a bobolink's note--
"What's this dull town to me?
Robin's not here!"
But a sudden waft of consciousness smote them to a vague humming that passed swiftly into--
"My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream; Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream."
In the scented dark of the spring evening, Margaret came to the porch again. A little curved moon sailed the sky--less a light-giver than a shining ornament on the breast of night. A while before children's laughter and skurrying footfalls had echoed down the sidewalks. Boys had played ball in the middle of the street, with running and violent contortions, and shouts and calls rejoicing in the release of their animal energies. But these sounds had ceded to silence as the soft darkness fell. Then young strollers, two and two, had passed; but these also were gone. A gentle wind rustled very softly in the dead vine-stalks. The world was alone with the fragrant wind and the dreaming dusk and the little silver scimitar of moon.
The house opposite was all dark, except for a line of lamplight beside the drawn blind of a side window. Earlier, Jean had turned on the porch lights and sat under them in the most graceful of the wicker chairs, reading, or affecting to read, and Frank, coming down the street, had seen her in all that glow. Then they had turned off the lights and gone away together, and the house had sunk into shadowy repose. Vague lines of wanness betrayed the place of the cement walks. The fruit-trees were dim, withdrawn, half-hinted shapes of whiteness, but their perfume, grown bolder in darkness, wandered the winds with poignant, sweet desire.
Margaret leaned against the weather-worn corner-post of the porch; her hand passed over its cracked, paint-blistered surface with, a soft, absent touch. She felt to her finger-tips the wooing lure of the night.
In the spring of her pulses she was aware of Frank and Jean somewhere together in the dusky, fragrant, crescent-clasped folds of it. She seemed to draw in with her breath and gather subtly through the pores of her flesh all the shy, sweet, youthful yearning of the world--and, behind that, wordlessly she knew the driven sap, the life-call, the procreant urge. She sighed and stirred restlessly. The strand of pain that runs in the pleasure of such moods began to ache gently like an old wound touched with foreknowledge of evil weather. She shared the pang that lies at the heart of spring.
Words of poetry pressed into her mind, voices of the great interpreters. She was not a cultivated woman, hardly to be called educated; her horizon, even of books, was chance-formed and narrow; but what circumstance had given her she remembered well. The groping, vain longing that stirred in her fell on speech, and moved among the haunted echoes of the world.
"Bloomy the world, yet a blank all the same-- Framework that waits for a picture to frame."
And then, sudden as a cry:
"Never the time and the place, And the loved one all together!"
She drew a long, shivering sigh, and deliberately thrust the lines out of her mind. Best not to remember them--on such a night! Their edges cut like young grass drawn through careless fingers.
The little new moon was rising higher in the deep, soft blue-darkness of the sky. Margaret looked up at its gleaming curve, and other words of poetry came to her, words she had read once in an old magazine--translated from the Persian:
"Quaffing Hadji-Kivam's wine-cup, there I saw by grace of him, On the green sea of the night, the new moon's silver shallop swim!"
They swung on, like a familiar, wistful, passionate tune:
"Oh, my heart is like a tulip, closing up in time of cold!