Five Smooth Stones (56 page)

"Hi, Paul! What're you passing out congratulations about?"

"We no longer have a dean named Goodhue. He's quit. Resigned. Gone from us. It happened Thursday night."

David's hands hit the keyboard in a resounding, crashing chord. "You're kidding!"

"Honest to Gawd."

"You've got to be!"

"I'm not. It so happens that my mother and Mrs. Goodhue belong to the same regional chapter of something or other, and Mrs. Cozy called her and told her. They serve champagne here?"

"Sure do. Order it, but I'm splitting the check with you—" When he got to Pengard the next day there wasn't anyone around he knew well. Chuck and Tom weren't back yet, nor was Hunter, and he wasn't going to be bothered with anyone else. Except Sara, and he called her at both the Knudsens' and Rainsford Hall and missed her at each place. He unpacked, then took a pair of heavy boots from the closet and put them on over thick wool socks, tucking trouser legs in, turning the tops of the socks over the boots, then put on the green sweater Sara had knit for him. He might run into her, and he wanted her to know he wasn't just being polite when he said it was a perfect fit. A heavy mack left in his room by Chuck, and Sudsy's green stocking cap ought to keep him warm even if he walked down along the lake. It had been snowing a little, and he wanted to be out in it, to feel the strange calm of it, the peace that seemed to lie hidden under its white covering of the land.

He had not reached the lake when Sara caught up with him. He heard her calling to him while she was still a long way off, and by the time she reached him he had unbuttoned his mack and was holding it open so that she could see that he was wearing the sweater.

"It fits!" She was laughing and patting the sweater, tugging it here and there, critical of her own handiwork. "Sure does, Sara. But you shouldn'ta oughta—"

"I loved doing it, David. I loved every minute of doing it. I drove poor Chuck just about round the bend with fittings.

Button up, idiot, it's not fur. You'll catch cold. Where are you going? Can I go? May I go, I mean. Please?"

"Nowhere." He took her hand and tucked it under his arm, and lost it because it was so small he could not feel it, "You can come if you promise not to skip. I can't skip."

She ignored him, managed to skip anyhow without outstripping him in speed, and said, "David, the news! It's wonderful. Cozy—"

"I know. Paul Cameron told me last night at the Cat"

"Damn you! I wanted to be the first."

"I don't know why or anything. Neither did Paul—"

"I do! I do! I know all about it. David, let's go down to that boathouse, the last one in the row, where they keep the canoes. There's an oil stove there and we can be warm while I tell you. I heard about it late Thursday night. President Vidal called Tom's father, and Tom called me and woke me up and the next day Bull told us all about it. He said we deserved to know." She pulled her hand from under his arm, fumbled in the outsize pockets of her coat. "I've got two sandwiches—and there's always a jar of instant coffee there —come on, David? We never have a chance to really talk—"

He knew that, knew it well, because he'd tried to work it that way. Being alone with Sara in a confined space was something he always avoided. A guy could take so much, and he wasn't any damned marble statue and for a long time he'd known that would spell trouble. Or something.

He tried to pry information out of her as they walked, but she shut her lips tightly and shook her head. "When we get there and my feet get warm. This blasted cold. Why did you pick today for a walk?"

"Nothing else to do. No one here. I called you—hey, the boathouse is locked. There's a padlock—"

"I know. But there's a window, too. Margaret Benjamin and I found it last fall when we got caught in a thunderstorm."

"I'm afraid there's too much of me to get through that window—"

"I can. There's a back door that unlocks from the inside—" She wriggled through the window, trim legs kicking as though she were swimming, and in a minute he was inside with her, lighting the stove and the oil lamp, pouring water into a pan to heat. She unbuckled storm boots and took them off, revealing wool socks over nylons. He unlaced his boots, then took them off, because his ankle was beginning to ache and he wanted the heat from the stove to get to it.

Sara said, "I brought these sandwiches from Aunt Eve's to eat later tonight, and then when I saw you out the window—"

"Saw me?"

She nodded. "Certainly. You don't think I'd be idiot enough to go to walk when I'd just gotten into the hall after vacation unless I had reason? You want a sandwich now or you want to take it back with you? No food on campus till tomorrow."

"I've got a whole chicken and French fries and pie; brought them from Cincinnati. My problem is to get 'em eaten before Chuck and Tom get here. Look, Sara, food's fine, it's wonderful, it's necessary, but for God's sake—why did Goodhue resign? Why has our Cozy left us?"

When she finished he was leaning forward in the canvas chair, elbows on knees, fingers digging at his scalp. "Damned," he said. "I'll be damned. I'll be Goddamned—"

"You certainly will if you keep talking like a profane parrot."

"What's he going to do? You mean he quit Thursday night and—and isn't even around anymore? How'd he do it?"

"I don't know what he's going to do. Drop dead, I hope. And I suppose he knew he was quitting long enough ahead of time to be all packed and everything. Uncle Karl said the moving people were there Friday. And he said he'd heard they were going to Europe."

David shook his head in bewilderment. "The poor bastard," he said. "That poor, stupid bastard. Stupid. Just plain stupid—"

"David, you're not sorry for him!"

"No. I don't suppose so. I'm damned glad he's gone, and I'm glad he got found out. So he's a queer, and that's his business. But he shouldn't have tried to drag other people along with him—only, I'm all over being mad at him. That's all. What's the use of staying mad at a guy who's as far down as he is now?"

"Clevenger—" said Sara.

David looked up quickly. "What about him?"

"Tom and Hunter say they're going to make him work just as hard to counteract that rumor as he did to start it. David,
don't
get all prickly again! You couldn't do it. Not under the circumstances."

"Maybe I could, but I wouldn't. I'm not getting prickly, Sara. If they want to, I can't stop them. I wish they'd let it alone, but I know 'em well enough now to shut up. If Clevenger had sense he'd quit, and I wish he would. I'm not fond of the sight of him—"

"He won't."

"O.K., so we'll try and forget him. It's not going to be easy —squelching that kind of a rumor—"

"No-o-o. But in time, David. Things work out."

He smiled and stood up, and looked down at her where she sat on the edge of the camp cot. "You sound like my grandfather." He walked to the window. "Hey, it's pitch dark out! How long we been here?"

"Hours and hours. Maybe we'll get lost walking back—"

She was standing beside him, and he could see her reflection in the window by the yellow glow of the oil lamp that softened and made mysterious the corners of the room, the cupboards, the canvas chairs, the camp cot, the boating gear —everything beyond the perimeter of its glow. He turned away from the window and found that she had stepped back and was facing him now. He tried to smile, and said: "My ears are getting cold just thinking about it out there. And it could snow, know that? We'd better be moving along—"

He did not draw away when her hands touched his cheeks, crept along them softly, covered his ears like small, warm earmuffs. "Your ears, David. They mustn't be cold. I've always loved your ears. Not just as me but as an artist. They're just right. They're not big like Chuck's or little tiny things like Dunbar's. They're—they're just right—"

"Sara, Smallest, you better let go of my ears—" He couldn't have moved now if his life had depended on it; his muscles were like mush, and there seemed to be no messages going from brain to feet or hands or legs to galvanize them. All the messages were clearly coming from someplace else.

"I love you when you call me 'Smallest'—"

"What—what're you saying?"

"I mean—I meant—I love it when you call me 'Smallest' —that's what I meant to say."

"It's not what you said, Sara; it's not what you said."

Suddenly she dropped her arms to her sides and stood very still, her eyes, looking into his, enormous and dark over cheeks flushed from the warmth of the room.

"David."

"Sara, we have to go—we—"

"David. We're in love."

Now, tossing in bed on the last night he would ever spend at Pengard, it was easy to say that he should have run, have bundled her into her coat and cap and boots, and run, telling her not to be silly. And, after that, stayed away, stayed the hell away. His brain had come alive at the shock of that outright statement, but it hadn't sent the right message.

"Sara—baby—"

"David, we're in love. We have been. Always. I—I guess I've known since the very first night when you came to Aunt Eve's—"

A man ought to be angry at a woman who took the initiative like that, ought to lose his interest in her. Interest, hell! When it wasn't interest but was your breath and your heartbeat and every hidden cell of your being, there couldn't be any losing of it just because she had been the one to put it into words, half frightened, half defiant, yet all love in the glow of a foul-smelling oil lamp in a dim boathouse with the black of a moonless night crowding in, the faint night sounds of a lake and a forest clear in the silence.

He sat up in bed in his room at Quimby House and snapped on the lamp beside it, and the room sprang into light, but Sara did not go away. If he'd known then what he knew now, been able to see ahead to the heartache that was inevitable— Yet he had known, even then he'd damned well known there were storms ahead, known it,
known
it—he slammed a fist into a pillow—yet he had reached out and put his hands on her waist, almost spanning it with his fingers, and she had put her hands over his, holding them closer; then she had relaxed her pressure. "Not your hands, David. Your arms—"

Their first kiss had been very gentle, like the kiss of two strangers taking part in some solemn ceremony. There had been more greeting than passion in that first kiss, more a drawing together of two people who had been separate for a long time and wanted first to savor slowly the joy of union. The next had been different. It had been David Champlin and Sara Kent, male and female since time began, wanting each other to the ultimate limits of wanting, very young and impatient and wanting what no man or woman ever had, utter possession, finding a storm, a tumult, and then a singing silence of love.

"Sara—little love—"

"David—"

David supposed, in the self-conscious maturity of twenty-one years and a college degree, that if anyone asked him "When did you really grow up?" or if he had asked himself when Gramp's often repeated remark "You a man now, son," became truth he would have begged the question with an outsider, but to himself would have answered that it was on that night in the boathouse. Because if being a man meant feeling whole and complete and fulfilled, he had become one then.

Until that time a girl had been just a girl; she was nice or she wasn't; you could have fun with her or you couldn't, and you could lay her or you couldn't—and he'd always been glad that most of the time he'd known the difference, that he hadn't been like a lot of guys who had the motto "no harm in trying." Maybe they liked being put down; he didn't, and he was always very cagey about testing the ice before he walked on it.

He'd known, of course, for a long time that with Sara it was different. He was in love. He thought she was too, but he tried to make his thinking stop there. It didn't always. And the farther afield his thoughts traveled, the more scared he became that in spite of himself he'd make a wrong move and find out she wasn't in love with him at all. A rebuff from any other girl could be laughed off; from Sara Kent it would be a mortal hurt.

Maybe if she had just said "I'm in love with you," he could have handled it somehow, but that wouldn't have been Sara. Instead, she had said "We're in love." As simply as that—and that had been Sara. Saying what she knew to be true, not letting him run away from it or from her without facing it.

He remembered their quarrels, most of them no more than spats, and how she had grown to know the attitudes and things that made him flare up, although she had never learned them completely because every once in a while she'd forget and say something and they'd be off again. He remembered, too, the time she had insisted, in an excess of honesty, on telling him about a boy she'd known before.

"David, you knew, didn't you—that night—"

"All I knew was that I loved you, baby. I mean, that's
all.
It's all I wanted to—"

"Don't put me off. The—the other time, David, I didn't like it—it wasn't—well, it wasn't what I know it really is now—"

"So now do you feel better? Now will you forget about it? Because I know a lot of things about you I don't think you even know about yourself, and that's why I don't give a damn what happened before I ever saw you. You don't hear me making a big lot of confessions—"

"You better not! David, don't you dare! I can't even stand
thinking
about it—"

He had thrown his head back and laughed then so that a bird skimming the lake a long way off veered and took flight high and fast, and Sara laughed with him, and the echo thai lived in the lake near where they stood bounced their laughter back and forth. After that every time he walked there he thought that he could hear that laughter, still echoing.

That summer Sara went to Europe with her father, and he came down to earth. He came home broker than he dared tell Gramp and headed for the laundry where they usually had a job for him driving a delivery truck, and was taken on immediately. The man who owned the laundry said: "What in hell you want to go way up there for? You're the best driver I ever had, and what's more I can tell you so and you won't get swellheaded. What they got up there you ain't got here? Those books teaching you how to earn a living?"