The Wishing-Ring Man | Page 3

cheerful face. He had rather heavy shoulders and a shock of carefully brushed straight light hair, and looked about one year out of Harvard. They didn't at all belong with the middle-aged roomful. As a matter of fact, her mother knew Mrs. Havenith a little, and so they had dashed in here to save her suit from the rain. They were sitting and smiling at each other against a background of Mark Twain's life-sized head in a broad gilt frame. They faced another life-sized head of Browning, also autographed, but they liked looking at each other better.
Joy, from her hiding-place, could feel the current of their happiness and youth, and it made her very warm in her soul, and comfortable. She listened to them quite unashamedly, as she would have to a nice play.
"She has wonderful hair, hasn't she?" she heard the girl say.
"Not as lovely as my girl's," the man answered softly.
His girl laughed, a little low pleased laugh. "But you can't see mine hanging down that way, like a picture," she fenced.
"I'm glad you don't wear it that way," he insisted. "I like you to look like a real girl, not a movie star or an advertisement."
"Do you suppose she likes it?" asked the girl. "I'd go crazy if I had to be like that--why, she isn't as old as I am! I suppose they write poems about her, though," she added, as if that might be a compensation.
"Oh, if that's all--" began the man, and they both laughed happily, as at a wonderful joke.
Joy, frozen behind her curtains, heard a little rustle, as if he was taking her hand, and her protest--
"Oh, Dicky, don't--they'll see us!"
"Not a bit," said he cheerfully. "They're all looking at dear Grandpapa, the Angora Poet--oldest in captivity to be reading his own sonnets. Bet you it's about the little girl, poor kid--he seems to be looking around for her."
"Sonnets? Oh, let's go; the rain's stopped," whispered the girl. "You were awfully extravagant this afternoon. Now we're going to take a nice, inexpensive walk up home."
She heard him protesting a little at that; then they slid out softly, while poor Joy sat behind her curtains, moveless and aghast.... Oh, was this what she was like ... to real, happy, gay people her own age? And she had liked the girl so, and been so glad she had her lover, and that they loved each other! And Grandfather.... She had never thought whether he wrote poetry about her or not. She had just taken it for granted. People had to write about something, and it was just as apt to be you as a public crisis or a sunset, or anything else useful for the purpose. But they had laughed about it.... Oh, she did hope it wouldn't be a poem about her that he was going to read! She felt she couldn't stand it, if it were. She knew that when she was the subject she was expected to be in sight, as a sort of outward and visible sign.
"I won't go out into the room!" she said defiantly. "He doesn't expect the sunsets and public crises to stand up and be looked at when he reads about them!"
So she stayed just where she was. As she stayed, incongruously, a joke out of an old Punch came into her head--not at all an esthetic one. It was a picture of a furious woman brandishing a broom, while the tips of her husband's boots showed under the bed-foot. The husband was saying: "Ye may poke at me and ye may threaten me, but ye canna break my manly sperrit. I willna come out fra under the bed!"
Joy laughed a little, even in her sad state of mind, at the remembrance. "I willna come out fra under the bed, either," she decided rather shakily, curling her flowing yellow satin closer about her, and making herself quite flat against the window-frame. She tried to stop her ears and not listen, so she wouldn't know whether the poetry was about her or not. But she had fatally sharp ears, and Grandfather always practised on her and Grandmother, adoringly silent at the breakfast table. She would know the poems apart if she only caught a half word.... And it was about her.
Grandfather's beautiful voice carried as well as it ever had. No matter how many fingers you had in how many ears, you heard it just the same. And the poem's name was, "To Joy in Amber Satin."
It was doubtless a very lovely poem, and she'd been as pleased as anybody when it had sold to the Century for fifty dollars last week. But it suddenly came over Joy that she wasn't a crisis, nor yet a sunset, and that people oughtn't to write poetry to their granddaughters,