Public-domain ebook
Daisy Herself
Language: en473 downloads on Project Gutenberg
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In: Novels·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #49188.
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A TWO HUNDRED MILE DASH.
Daisy had run away from her home on the farm outside Toddburn village with this young store clerk, Beatty, who now sat holding her hand in the moonlight "flyer" of the M. & N. Beatty, who came originally from the city, was a bad young rascal; and Daisy--who, neglected and exposed to temptation since her earliest girlhood, had developed an innate awareness of "fellows"--knew it. None of her several reasons for this escapade had been the usual one--love. It suited her, however, to let Beatty think that she had come prepared to follow him to the world's end--a lengthy journey, upon which the railway ticket Beatty had bought for her was only good for the first two hundred miles.
Daisy was proceeding daringly, easily, without pause or regret, toward whatever lay in store for her along the path she had taken. Her locomotion was that of a thing which is both propelled and drawn. The propulsive force was her hatred of the farm where she had drudged for all the workable years of her seventeen under that plebeian taskmaster, stolid, selfish John Nixon, her stepfather, and that unmaternal mother whose forename, by some perpetuated sarcasm, was Lovina. The drawing force was Daisy's own eager, vigorous, intrepid spirit of adventure--green maidenhood's hunger for the sensational new.
The car in which the two sat was not a "sleeper," but an ordinary red-upholstered day coach. The two had boarded the train at Oak Lake, the first station east of Toddburn (where neither of them were known by the new station agent) at a little after midnight. They were due to reach the city between six and seven o'clock in the morning.
Even if the car had been a berth coach, and there had been opportunity for retirement, Daisy could not have slept. The hour, the situation, the novelty of the rushing, lamplit train (she had never been on a train before), kept every faculty ablaze and awake in a pleasant intoxication of excitement. Elbow on window-sill and chin in palm, the girl sat, glancing now out at the flying moonlit telegraph posts, now about the interior of the dingy branch-line passenger coach. All seemed fairylike to her eyes habituated only to prairie fallow and lea.
Young Beatty, holding her hand and thrilling in a delightful though less spiritual than fleshly way, at the occasional glances with which Daisy baited him, looked out of the corner of his eye at her and felt very much pleased, indeed, with himself. First, she had a glorious color, the like of which one could not buy for money, nor yet for love--a color that resided comely and rich in her cheeks, even at feeling's lowest tide, but which now, in the high tide of her adventure, overflowed down in a bonny estuary toward the milk-warm curve of her chin. Then, there were the features, each with its peculiar likability or lure--lips made and eager for enjoyment, yet with something in their set and pose that was constant and fine--a nose humorous and short, tiltable to every gradation of coquetry--eyes with dancing irises, soft baffling shadows, and brows that trended downward at the outer ends. Lastly, the hair--brown, with a wave that made it comely in any coiffure; coiled carelessly under a hasty pin or two at temple, crown, and white nape of neck where a curl caressed--had a piquancy even in its disarray. Beatty cuddled his head back against the red upholstery of the seat in luxurious contemplation, and again expressively squeezed the fingers he held.
Beatty himself was a slim, white-handed youth whose abundant blond hair and smooth "way" had made the world, for him, a kind of garden of the Hesperides--the fault with this simile being that he was no Hercules, except in his vanity. In this, his strength was as the strength of ten, though not because his heart was pure. If you had taxed him with that characteristic in which Beatty was eminently taxable--his attitude toward girls--he would have regarded you indulgently a moment, and would then have explained that it was not his fault if "Janes fell for him" and "fooled with the band-wagon" to their own undoing. Surely it was a "free country."
In spite, however, of the fact that the country was a free one, the special thing which had sent Beatty out of the city "for his health" was the quest after him by a two-hundred-pound brother of a sister some ninety pounds lighter. The brother, who carried a professional "haymaker in either mitt" for even those of his own gender who could use their fists with fair ability, was as sincere in his desire to interview Beatty as Beatty was considerate in his desire to save the brother the embarrassment of such an interview. A recently-received picture postcard from a friend of Beatty's had, however, intimated that the family of which the brother and sister in question were members had since "gone to the coast," and that Beatty's home city had therefore become again for Beatty a consistent metropolis of a free country, if he wished to return to it.
Beatty did wish to return to it; and, returning with round and pretty Daisy Nixon as a travelling companion--made, Beatty felt assured, wholly and dependently his by the manner of her home-leaving--he felt that the several months of his exile had not been wasted.
"The boys", so Beatty reflected complacently, as he leaned back on the car-cushion, "will cert'n'ee set up an 'take notice w'en they see this w'at I got here. They cert'n'ee will."
The summer dawn came with a warm melting of the dark and a running out over the sky-floor of spilled light from under the edge of the world. Daisy, her nerves thrilling like the nerves of one drunken with wine, leaned untired on the varnished window-sill; looking, with all her young vitality gathered into shine of eyes and beat of heart, for her first view of the city.
The shadow of the express, as the early sun came up, coursed like a hound along the barrow-pits of the right-of-way, and quivered, as it were, in noiseless impact against the stolid cedar fence-posts that stood still and were whipped by in the guise of staring bumpkins as the smart, swift train hummed on its way.
Daisy saw these effects at the edge of her travel-picture out of the corner of her eye merely. Her attention was concentrated forward--forward, to watch for the first white trimming of roof-tops on the dewy green fabric of the prairie-rim. Hateful to her were the square fields by the track, where phlegmatic men and teams moved up and down the black fallow; hateful the whitewashed houses, the homely poplar-clumps, the stacks of straw. Appurtenances, all, of the life with which she had been surfeited (she thought): reminding her of cows to be milked, of barnyard drudgery, of gawky, red-visaged, wholly unpiquant boys, of men content to smoke and drawl away their rare hours of ease.
Hateful! The term is too mild to express the immense energy of the girl's distaste for the life she had, with youth's dash, pushed behind her in one reckless thrust.
She was done with it. For good or for ill, she was done with it all, or thought so, in these kinetic and dancing moments, as new leagues of her unexplored earth uprolled along the endless ribbon of this two-railed track of dreams. New leagues, yes--but, so far, no new scenery. The stations she had passed, and continued to pass, were nothing but an endless chain of Toddburns; the intervening reaches of farm land, no more than linked replicas without number or variation, of the Nixon farm. In spite of the "flyer" and its obvious achievement over distance, Daisy Nixon at moments had the odd sensation that the track was revolving beneath the car-wheels, treadmill-style, and the train merely standing maddeningly still amid the old locale.
But there--there! A quick hypodermic needle of joy pricked her throat, and Daisy caught her breath as the strong keen drug of excitement tingled out to all her nerve-ends. A white kite-tail of houses seemed to drop down and flicker, half in the air, at the point where the uprolling earth revolved against the broad-open casement of the morning sky. Appearing for a moment as a fantasy, it soon settled into a lengthening white saw-blade of joined buildings, low in the distance, dividing the solid green world from the dreamy firmament of a June dawn. Straight toward it rushed the cleaving bullet of the train.
Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great urban station in the heart of all.
"Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?"
"Fine, Freddie," Daisy replied, blithely. The comment was plain and simple enough; but her eyes and cheeks told the rest, without need of words.
Beatty stuck on his hat, tilting it a little.
"It ain't so bad, either," he conceded, grinning to himself, as he picked up his smart leather suitcase and Daisy's battered telescope grip, "not so bad, at that, kiddo."
With a hollow, drumlike roar, the train drew to a halt beneath a dome of glass and iron; and Daisy and her companion, inching along behind the file of passengers, at length emerged upon a cement walk, walled in on either side by the bulk of varnished railway coaches. Passing along this, descending a stair with an iron balustrade, and proceeding through a great, busy, and echoing rotunda with a ceiling almost as far away as a sky, Daisy and her companion emerged upon a stretch of granolithic pavement.
Beyond the curb, a bevy of bus-drivers from city hotels crowed like a flock of roosters--the surmounting voice in this bedlam being that of a sandy-mustached old-timer, whose vehicle was labelled "Imperial Hotel." By his hind-wheel he stood, moving nothing but the hinges of his jaws; and to see his mouth open to its red limit was to be filled with consternation.
"Imm-Peary-ail Hoat'l!" he sang, his eyes looking nonchalantly up and away, with something of the expression he used to wear when scouting the sky for signs of rain, in the old farming days before he became poet laureate of the city's pioneer hotel.
"Why--look who's here, will you!" The exclamation was Beatty's, as he stopped alongside the scratched old bus. "This is him, Mrs. Beatty--old Jim-Jam Hogle. Can you take a passenger, J. J.?"
Mr. Hogle, without ceasing his vocal offices for so much as the fraction of a moment, let his eyes flicker down over Beatty with no sign of recognition, returned his gaze again to its former direction above the depot roof, and jerked his thumb casually toward the interior of his craft. Beatty handed the girl in, climbed in after her, and set down the suitcase and grip. No others entered; and presently Mr. Hogle, turning from his post by the wheel-rim and glancing inscrutably in at Daisy as he passed the glass panel behind where his two passengers sat, unsnapped and threw in his iron hitching-weight, climbed to his high seat, and rattled away.
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