BLINDFOLD

BLINDFOLD

By ORRICK JOHNS

NEW YORK LIEBER & LEWIS 1923

Copyright, 1923 By Lieber & Lewis

Printed in the U.S.A.

TO MY FATHER George S. Johns, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF UNFAILING SYMPATHY

BLINDFOLD

BLINDFOLD

I

Ellen Sydney’s first garden in the Meadowburn’s new American home had made a fair beginning. She was at work one afternoon bending over the bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby tendrils to the wire mesh of the frame, with an occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath—the earth which Bennet, the youngest of the family, had brought by the basketful from a distance, to enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property.

School was just out and as she worked Bennet banged into the hall, threw down his books and rushed forth again with a shout to join his comrades up the street. They were building a “switch-back railway” from the second story rear window of a neighbour’s house. She could just glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it through the small leaves of the alley poplars.

Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire, Ellen heard Mrs. Osprey’s shrill voice calling from quite half a block away to one of the Osprey boys. She could not restrain a smile at the familiar summons.

[2]“Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry her.” But she would no more have thought of pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry for Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many years in Canada had taught her to believe next to the angels themselves.

As she turned from the garden she heard a still more familiar voice and Potter Osprey came through the gate.

“Hello, Ellen, mind my coming over?”

“Oh, no! I’ve got to go in, though. Come in the kitchen, I’m not very busy.” She had in fact three easy hours before her, with dinner practically prepared and a little ironing to do before she put the dishes in the stove. Ironing was quite pleasant if you had some one to talk to while you did it.

“Vacation’s only six weeks off now,” Potter said as they walked up to the house. “Ain’t that great! I hate school anyway.”

“Ah, Potter, when you are doing so well at it! Milly told me about the debates. She said you were fine in them.”

The monthly school debates were a point of pride with him, and he betrayed a momentary embarrassment. He had quite lost himself in the vainglory of winning two of them in succession, or of being on the winning side both times. He had regretted that while they were in progress, especially while he was on his feet, everybody he knew[3] had not been in the audience. So many people were not. The thing that he feared in talking about them to Ellen was that he would reveal his satisfaction. So Milly had been gossiping about them outside? That pleased him. Milly was in the class below him, which sat in the same room.

He recovered his composure and spoke as though of an ordinary matter.

“Pshaw, the debates ain’t really school. They’re different.... But look, Ellen, all the lots around here are almost forests of weeds in the summer. It’s great! You can hide in them, and everything. They get over six feet high. And there’s woods only a mile out west there, to swim and camp in. If you have time we can walk there some day.”

Ellen’s face brightened at the prospect.

“But it gets hot here in the summer,” he went on, “awful hot—not like Winnipeg. You won’t like that.”

“Oh, I’ve lived in N’Orleans. It’s lots hotter there.”

“Yes, that’s so. That’s way down south, ain’t it? I always think of you coming from Winnipeg. Bennet talks about it all the time. He’s a Britisher all right.”

Ellen replied warmly.

“Well, he shouldn’t be, even if they were born in Canada. His father says he’s going to stand[4] by this country now, because it gives them a good living and always has. He’s going to make them all citizens.”

Potter laughed. He was sitting perched up on the kitchen table, his small feet dangling beneath it and his cap in his hand.

“I told Bennet we licked England twice and he got hot under the collar. He’s funny. Did you like it better up north?”

“Yes, I guess I did. We used to have good times in Winnipeg. The fellows always in the house, my! It’ll be the same here after a while. Those two girls get a crowd coming pretty quick. Only we’ll never have snow like in Winnipeg. I did love the snow, such sledding and skating!”

“That’s the ticket!” agreed Potter, and added with some disgust, “We hardly had one good skate last winter—soon as it’d freeze it’d thaw! But you should have seen the first winter we were here. Almost two months of ice! This house wasn’t here then—hardly any in this row were, and gee, the way the wind used to blow! It changes around here fast. Kirk broke his arm falling through these joistses.”

Potter swung down from the table and stood in front of the ironing board, smiling up at the tall woman, his hands in his pockets.

“Say, Ellen, got something to eat? Just anything, you know—I’ll tell you why I want it.”

Ellen put down her iron on the metal guard[5] and went into the pantry. She returned with three powdered doughnuts on a plate.

“Here,” she said laughing. “You’re always eating, Potter Osprey. Your mother told me I was spoiling your appetite for meals.”

“Thanks,” he said and went on between mouthfuls. “I’ve been smoking. I thought something to eat would take my breath away.”

“Well, if that’s what you came here for you can go right back home. You oughtn’t smoke—so there!”

Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time there was no sound except the thumping of Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She was thumping harder than need be, because she was angry. She was often angry with him. Yet his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or on the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to her. The family already teased her, calling young Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom Meadowburn reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet. Remember Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an uproar. Wolly Judson had been a Winnipegian of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt, who had brought the current gossip regularly to Ellen’s door.

Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his talks with her he betrayed a small opinion of the Meadowburns, all except his friend Bennet, with whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly[6] that she worked too hard, she was spoiling the whole family. Why didn’t the others do more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe any such thing. It was her lot to work, and keep at it until things were done.

Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a member of the Meadowburn household. She lived there, a fixture; and the principal advantages did accrue to the family. They obtained a willing, strong and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing enough to be treated as a distant relative (and consequently not paid except when chance generosity dictated). She had been with the Meadowburns since she was twelve, learning by heart their various needs so that she could have administered to them in her sleep. She was now twenty-seven, a gaunt figure, black-eyed and above the middle height. The face would have been attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had acquired, and the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the absence of jaw teeth.

The Meadowburn children had grown up under her care, the two eldest girls being little more than babies at the time the orphan asylum in New Orleans yielded her young and frightened body into the hands of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found time for those fretful and ill-tempered midgets, in addition to keeping the house spotless, laundering for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn had been left free to nurse a collection of[7] modern ills, and to dream of her youth as the dark beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days a morose gloom had settled upon her handsome, Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely known her to laugh at all. Even the smile with which she greeted her husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted.

It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked for the fullest appreciation of his comic genius and his masculine importance. Few men were more conscious of both than he, and even in those moments when the comic mask fell away completely, there was something in the solemn air of pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which to any one but his adoring brood would have seemed most funny.

For Tom Meadowburn the world, whether of New Orleans or Winnipeg, or the new city that had lately taken them in, was a place where he and the wife and children were “getting on.” The Meadowburn household was, in his mind, something very much like heaven, himself presiding. For Ellen, as he often said, it was a refuge under his protecting arm, wherein she need never come to harm nor suffer want. And to her credit she believed him and worked all the harder to please him.

Physically Meadowburn was a tall stout man with a heavy, pink, unwhiskered face, the pale eyelashes and tow hair being lighter than his skin, and the small, quick eyes a transparent, hardly[8] perceptible blue. As a humourist he was not one of your torrential and generous laughers. He was sly and dry, a wrinkle, the flicker of a smile, a knowing arch of the eyebrows being his favourite manner of accentuating his point. He was in the habit of twitting Ellen on the subject of marriage.

“Now then, my girl,” he would say, “what are you keeping from us? What have you got up your sleeve? Didn’t I hear you come in a little late last night? Walking, eh—of course, not alone? We wouldn’t permit you to walk alone.”

“Ellen went to the drugstore for some medicine for me, last night, Tom,” interposed his wife.

“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must remember you’re perfectly free. We wouldn’t keep you from marrying when the right man comes along.”

“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you think! You watch out, Mr. Meadowburn!”

The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact that none of the Meadowburns believed there was danger of Ellen marrying, of any one caring to marry her, at least, whose social position would suit her. For she did not have kitchen-maid standards, as they knew. And she believed there was no danger either. She felt very old....

It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely existence that Potter had thrust his genial, boyish appearance, and by some strange affinity of comradeship, they had taken to each other at once.[9] He too, as she was soon to learn, was lonely and cherished his dreams; and it comforted her to have a champion—even so young and small a champion as he. Was he so young and small? There were times when he frightened her with flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always seem quite nice, quite appropriate. For example, one evening when they were talking about perfectly ordinary matters, he burst out:

“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on earth He wouldn’t love Dr. Minor or any of those people in the church. He’d pick you.”

Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer, misspelled, dignified note....

When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a person but as God, and that was the end of it.”

II

The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy, but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.

The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into[11] round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.

These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days. The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority (and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally, between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling overtones and melancholy quavers—all these sensations produced a mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath of goodness.

The church itself was charming to look at, built in the late ’eighties of shingles now coloured a warm brown by many rains, and properly vine-hung. The little building with its limited open meadow and well-grown trees drew him at times when he had no particular business there. It was[12] a favourite place to read. Often he would arrive an hour or more before the service and sit huddled up in one of the corners of the deep verandah, intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step of the rector sounded on the boards below; and if Dr. Minor happened to espy him he would be conducted cheerily into the study, while the lanky priest put on his vestments and asked him questions about his work at school and the health of his “dear mother,” who, much to the clergyman’s disappointment, came almost never to the services.

These innocent confidences sometimes went so far as a mild spiritual examination which had more significance than its casualness indicated. Minor regarded young Osprey as promising material for the ministry.

“The type for scholarship and consecration,” he told his wife. “A sensitive boy, thoughtful and retiring—Oh, manly, manly enough! A little conviction would turn that into spiritual leadership. His family could do nothing better than give him a seminary training. And a part of our duty, my dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new recruits to bring under His banner.”

Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his reflections upon the mission of the Church. His early gods had been the deeply pious heroes of the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee took rank with him very little below the Apostles.

[13]There was one other who shared this secret ambition for Potter—Ellen Sydney—until a recent incident in which he had figured shook her faith.

This affair produced something of a scandal in the Osprey family. Searching one day through the shelves of an old closet for one of his brother Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now his turn to use, the boy had come across a half dozen large, handsomely bound portfolios. He had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated on the instant. The sheets were of lovely texture, beautifully printed, and the covers of a flexible, warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense of incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.

The contents were no less absorbing. Between the pages of French text were reproductions of paintings hung in the Paris salons of the mid-’nineties, the majority of them nudes of that languishing and silken type beloved by the French school of that day, the studio renderings of a flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his search for the school books, Potter took the volumes to an attic room where he consulted them many times in the following weeks, and a collection of nude sketches came from his pencil, copied sometimes from the originals and sometimes attempted from memory.

The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as he was finishing a[14] particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.

Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant, half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul, and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over Potter’s head.

He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn steps without even a good-night.

As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and his actual appearance was a little laughable—yet the notion of his interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not,[15] as she reasoned, naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than she could grasp.

For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness.

To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event....

In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning a serpentine creek that drained the valley.

The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden charm—the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring windows—made it a fairy road, a retreat in which Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener memories in the north.[16] She could never walk there too often; it was as near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her starved imagination could picture.