National Avenue, Booth Tarkington [8 ebook reader .txt] 📗

Before them the dirt road, grown with long grass between the ruts, had been widened to the dimensions of a city street as it passed between old forest groves of beech and elm, through which other wide rough roads had recently been cut. Beyond the woods were some open fields, where lines of stakes were driven in the ground to outline⁠—apparently in a mood of over-optimistic prophecy⁠—some scores of building lots and various broad avenues. But so far as could be seen from the runabout, felled trees and wooden stakes were all that proved Ornaby to be an Addition and not a farm, though a few negroes were burning the remnants of a rail fence in a field not far from the road. And what made the whole prospect rather desolate was the malicious caprice of the weather;⁠—the very moment when Dan stopped the runabout and waved his hand in a proud semicircle of display, the first of the robust clouds passed over the sun and Ornaby lay threatened in a monstrous shadow.

“Look, Lena!” the exultant proprietor cried. “This is Ornaby!”

“Is it?” she said desolately. “I do wish you’d turned round when I said. It’s going to thunder and lighten horribly, and I know I’m going to be frightened to death.”

Then, as a louder rumble sounded in the sky, she shivered, clutching Dan’s arm. “I know that struck somewhere!”

“It might have struck somewhere in the next county,” he laughed.

“What! Why, look at the sky right over us. I never saw anything so awful.”

Dan laughed again and patted her small, clutching hand soothingly. “It’s just a pleasant little summer thundershower, Lena.”

“Little!” she cried. “Do you call storms like this ‘little’ out here?”

For, in truth, Dan’s reassuring word was not well supported by the aspect of the sky. Above them hung what appeared to be a field of inverted gray haystacks, while from westward ragged, vast draperies advanced through a saffron light that suddenly lay upon all the land. A snort of wind tore at the road, carrying dust high aloft; then there was a curious silence throughout all the great space of the saffron light, and some large raindrops fell in a casual way, then stopped.

“You see?” said the cheery Dan. “That’s all we’ll get, likely enough. I shouldn’t be surprised it’d clear up now.”

“ ‘Clear up!’ ” Lena cried incredulously. “I do believe you’re crazy! Oh, heavens!”

And the heavens she thus adjured appeared heartily inclined to warrant her outcry. Satan fell from the sky in a demoniac swoop of lightning, carrying darkness with him; wind and water struck the runabout together; and Dan was fain to drive into the woods beside the road, while Lena clung to him and wailed. He tied the trembling horse to a tree, and got the bride and her wrecked parasol under the inadequate shelter of the tool house he had mentioned, but found little happiness there. A hinge had broken; the negroes had carried the door away to repair it; the roof leaked everywhere and was sonorous with the hail that fell presently with the heavy rain. At every bedazzlement of the lightning Lena gasped, then shrieked throughout the ensuing uproar, and before long whimpered that she was freezing. In fact, her wet clothes, little more than gauze, appeared to be dissolving upon her, while the air grew cold with the hail.

Dan put his soggy coat about her, petted her, and piled wet sticks together, saying that he would make a fire for her if he could. Whereupon she wept and uttered a pathetic laughter. “Burn up with the heat one minute,” she said, through chattering teeth, “and the next freeze to death if you can’t make a fire! What a place!”

Of course Dan defended his climate, but his argument was of as little avail as were his attempts to build a fire with sodden wood and drenched matches. Lena suffered from the cold as expressively as she had from the heat, and forgetting that these changes in temperature had not been unknown to her in her own native habitat and elsewhere, she convinced herself perfectly that all of her troubles were put upon her by “the West.” Yet in this she was not so unreasonable as might appear;⁠—our sufferings from interior disturbances are adept in disguising themselves as inflictions from outside.

These troubles of hers were not alleviated by two unfortunate remarks made by her young husband in the course of his efforts to hearten her. After one of the numerous electrical outrages, appalling in brilliancy and uproar, he said he was sorry he couldn’t have taken her to the old Ornaby farmhouse for shelter; and when Lena reproached him for not having thought of this sooner, he explained too hastily that the house had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground during a thunderstorm earlier in the summer. After that, as she became almost hysterical, he straightway went on to his second blunder. “But nobody was hurt,” he said. “Nobody at all, Lena. There wasn’t anybody in the house; and anyhow I don’t believe the lightning’s really struck right near us during this whole shower. Why, it’s nothin’ at all; I’ve seen storms a thousand times worse than this. Only last summer I got caught out on a little lake, north of here, in a canoe, and pretty near a real tornado came up, with thunder and lightning that would make this little racket today look like something you’d get from a baby’s toy. We didn’t mind it; we just⁠—”

“ ‘We?’ Who?”

“Martha Shelby was with me,” the incautious Dan replied. “Why, you ought to’ve seen how she behaved, Lena! She didn’t mind it; she just laughed and kept on paddlin’ like a soldier. I honestly think she enjoyed it. Now, why can’t you⁠—”

“You hush!” Lena cried.

“But I only⁠—”

“Haven’t I enough to bear? Be quiet!”

He obeyed, gazing out upon the tumultuous landscape, and wondering sadly what made her so angry with him. Then, all at once, beyond and