Janet: Her Winter in Quebec/Chapter 8

S a matter of local loyalty, the Leslies had long since become life members of the Historical Society. As a matter of pure convenience and because it gave access to the only English library within reach, the Argyles had lost no time in being proposed for membership. And so it came about that the cozy little library was a familiar haunt to all four of the young people. Rob Argyle, in particular, had been prompt in assuming it as his own.

To Rob's no slight disgust, he had found that the fall of winter was curtailing even his narrow range of liberty to a most surprising extent. At their best, in summer and to active legs, Quebec sidewalks are none too safe. The insecure boarding, striped with wide cracks, the unexpected steps at the corners of the streets: these are gloomily suggestive of sprained ankles to come. Covered with the white frosts of autumn, they become dangerous; overlaid with a thin coating of hard-trodden snow, they are altogether deadly. For a week after the first snowfall, Rob managed to reach the terrace in safety. On the eighth day, emboldened by his success, he attempted to include the post office in his morning walk. The ninth day he spent in bed, preaching prudence to himself and nursing his twisted leg. All in all, the past four weeks had showed a marked gain. He could not afford to lose it all, for the sake of being blown to an intoxicating sort of breathlessness on the wind-swept terrace. Towards night, he fell to casting about in his own mind for a new occupation.

He found it at the library. By the direct path along Sainte Ursule Street, the library was five minutes' walk away. It took fifteen to reach it on the cars which passed both doors. However, time was not valuable to Rob; and, morning after morning, he clambered out of the car, entered the low yellow building and mounted the single flight of stairs. Once inside the wide, warm room and divested of his coat and hat, Rob lost no time in possessing himself of a book and seeking the place he had chosen as his own, in one of the deep casements in the far corner of the room behind the card catalogue. Seated there, his lame foot in a chair before him and his elbows on his knees beside the open book, Rob lost himself to time and place, while he ranged up and down the world by the side of the explorers and adventurers whose stories lined a goodly part of the walls. Reading had been an acquired taste for Rob. By now, however, owing to stress of circumstances, he had acquired it thoroughly. Had the chance offered, he would have stood on the poop deck by the side of Captain Cook. Chance forbidding, he would read of the experiences of the lucky fellow who did.

Without the resource of the library, Rob would have found time hanging heavy on his hands, that winter. Janet and he were firm friends, and, little by little, Day was creeping towards her old place in his life. However, they were girls, and talked about clothes and lacework and the way they did their hair. When he was with the two of them, Rob endured their chatter as best he might; but it palled on him and usually ended by driving him out of the room. Once out of hearing, however, he told himself that some things might be worse. He did not allow himself to be specific; but there still lurked in his mind the memory of one stormy night when Day, coming in all aglow with exercise, had taken pity on his loneliness and, dropping down on the rug at his side, had attempted to talk football to him. Rob's sense of humour had brought him triumphantly through the ordeal. Nevertheless, he saw to it that the experience should never be repeated. As a general thing, Ronald and Rob let each other severely alone. Questioned, neither one of them could have given reason for the mutual avoidance. Both were well-born, well-bred. The three years' difference in their ages counted for little, since Rob was manly and self-reliant to a rare degree. They never clashed; they merely passed each other by on the other side. Ronald was unfeignedly sorry for Rob and showed it. He showed, also, a courteous tolerance for Rob's hobbies of whose charm he himself had no comprehension. He loved exercise; but he hated sports. American football, to his mind, was a thing to be classed with the bull fights of Spain. Rob's injury was one more proof of the theory he had always cherished. He pitied the injury, but he deplored its cause.

Rob, on his side, accepted the pity more because he was unable to help himself than because he was grateful. Judged from his point of view, Ronald was a nice, ladylike young fellow without the ladylike attitude of pretending to care for sports. Had chance not placed them in the same domestic circle, that winter, Rob would never have given a second thought to Ronald Leslie, save in so far as Ronald Leslie monopolized too great a share of Day's time and attention. Forced into a superficial semblance of friendship, he treated Ronald with a tolerance which differed from that which Ronald accorded him in being easy and wholly careless. He totally failed to appreciate the real manliness of the young Canadian, the quiet pluck with which he had set himself to work to make the best of his fallen fortune. Now and then, however, his conscience did smite him a little, as he marked the unfailing kindliness with which Ronald looked out for his physical weakness. Rob hated being looked out for. Nevertheless, he could not fail to be struck by Ronald's constant heed of his comfort.

"And yet, do you know," he said to his mother, one night, at the end of a long discussion of the whole Leslie family; "good as the fellow is—and he is good, too—he gives me the feeling that he is best off, doddering about over a tea tray and holding yarn for people to wind. He's a nice lady and a pretty one; but, after all, it is the old crowd of the fellows that I am pining to see."

And he did pine for them, too. At times, the pining was acute; but it generally happened when he was alone in his room and the door was shut. Rob Argyle was not the boy to let his voice get pitched to a minor key. His mother, watching him sharply, after the fashion of mothers, saw the heavy drag of his foot and thanked Providence for the jolly twinkle in the keen blue eyes. At best, Rob's healing would be slow. It was something that his courage bade fair to outlast it. She rose, crossed the room and, halting by his chair, fondled his yellow head in an unspoken caress which Rob answered promptly and with interest. Their weeks together in the little foreign city were bringing mother and son into closer union than they had ever known until then. Mrs. Argyle was the one living person to whom Rob had ever confessed either pain or dreariness of spirit And she was shrewd enough to know what, from a boy like Rob, such confessional was worth.

The raw wind, sweeping down Saint Louis Street, bit furiously at Rob's ears, one morning in early December, as he stood on the curbstone, waiting for the car to take him to the library. The gray sky, heavy with unfallen snow, seemed resting on the city spires, and the river, as he rounded the curve by the Château, showed itself a sea of chopping, white-capped waves. Even in the moment it took him to transfer from car to car, Rob was chilled to the marrow of his bones. No New England gale would ever have had half the cunning to discover the narrow crack between his neck and his high, close collar. He shrugged his shoulders with a reminiscent shiver, as the door finally closed behind him, and the warm air of the library wrapped itself about him gratefully.

The place, as was usual in the mornings, was quite deserted. The librarian, busy at his desk, tossed him a cordial nod, as the familiar step sounded on the threshold. Rob halted to speak to him, halted again beside the table to choose a couple of new magazines, then crossed the room in search of his corner and of oblivion.

An hour later, he roused himself with a jerk and came back to his surroundings. Janet, powdered with snow from head to heel, had plumped herself down in the window by his side, and the cold drops, falling from her shoulders, were raining down across his sleeve.

"Hullo, Janet! You here?" Rob nodded and yielded her a few inches more of space.

"I came to return a book. What are you reading? Yes, we can talk. The librarian has gone, and there's not a soul here but ourselves. Did you know it was snowing?"

Rob shook a small pool out of a hollow of his sleeve.

"I gathered the fact from your appearance."

"Gathered the water, you'd better say." And Janet brushed him off remorsefully, then shook herself much as a Newfoundland dog might have done. "Look out of the window," she bade him then.

Obediently Rob turned about. Then he gave a sharp exclamation of surprise. According to his wont, he had been too much absorbed in the printed page before him to heed the picture outside the window. Now he found himself staring into a white mist of whirling, eddying flakes which completely shut out from sight the row of buildings just across the narrow court, save when some gust of wind, stronger by far than its fellows, parted the flakes and drove them slantwise, to disclose the gray old walls beyond.

"I say, this looks wintry," Rob made comment, while there deepened upon him the sense of comfort gained from massy walls and a good coal fire. "If this keeps on, I'd best be getting home." However, as he spoke, his figure relaxed once more against the wall at his side. "What have you been about, this morning, Janet?"

Janet laughed a little shortly.

"Fighting," she answered.

"Who now?" Rob queried.

His question was wholly jovial. Nevertheless, Janet read into it an implication that she was prone to disagree, and she answered crisply,—

"Day."

"What is the row with Day?" Rob asked still jovially.

"I think she is stuck up."

Rob closed his book and laid it down in the chair before him. Then he faced Janet with honest, friendly blue eyes.

"Oh, come now, Janet, Day is my sister. I can't let you go on talking like that," he said.

But not even her walk in the wind and snow had cooled Janet's warlike ardour.

"I can't help it, if she is your sister," she said, with a tartness which was rare with her. "If you didn't want the answer, you shouldn't have asked the question."

Silently Rob pondered the logic of her position and silently admitted its force. Then he asked,—

"But what has Day done?"

"Criticized everything."

"Day is critical," Rob acknowledged grudgingly. "I've come in for a share of it, myself, sometimes. What now?"

"Us," Janet made terse answer.

"Meaning?" Rob inquired.

"Us. All of us here."

"Leslies, or here in the library?"

Janet laughed scornfully.

"Day never would criticize you," she said, and there was a slightly invidious accent upon the pronoun.

"Don't be too sure. Why not?"

"You're an American."

"Glory be!" Rob observed piously, but, as it proved, with injudicious fervour.

Janet flounced forward and put her elbows on her knees.

"There you go! You're all just alike," she burst out hotly.

For a moment, Rob eyed her askance. Then he leaned back and clasped his hands at the nape of his neck.

"Feelings ache anywhere, Janet?" he queried composedly.

Up to that hour, Rob Argyle had never seen Janet, when she was really roused; he had no notion how far her irritation would go. Accordingly, he had made no effort to allay her rising wrath; and now he quailed before the sudden fire of anger that blazed up in her brown eyes.

"Yes," she said shortly. "They do. What is more, you are responsible for it, you and Day. I can't see what you should come here for, when you don't like us any better." "Business," Rob murmured, almost too low for Janet's ears.

"Then you've no business to slander us, when you get here," she retorted. "If you take the bread and butter we give you, you've no right to talk against us, after you've eaten it."

Janet's words were wholly figurative. Nevertheless, Rob made the blunder of interpreting them literally, blundered in his very perturbation, for it was beginning to dawn upon him that the storm within was becoming quite as fierce as the storm without.

"But, Janet, nobody could find any fault with the grub," he said hastily. "Both your mother and Marie are capital cooks."

She raised her head and faced him haughtily.

"Who said they were not?" she demanded.

"Nobody. At least—I thought—Day—" he faltered.

"Day!" An echo of scorn was in her voice. "And so she has been complaining of the food, too?"

Rob looked stunned by the accusation in her tone.

"But I thought you said—"

Impatiently she tapped her foot on the carpet. The fact that inadvertently she had blundered into a quarrel with one of her chiefest friends merely increased her fractiousness.

"Let's not talk about it," she said shortly. "We only disagree.

Turning, Rob faced her steadily, a world of trouble in his blue eyes.

"Look here, Janet, what is all this fuss about, anyhow?" he asked directly.

"Oh, nothing. It is probably all my fault."

"That's nonsense. One person alone never kicks up a row like this," Rob said firmly. "If I've done it, I'm sorry. If not, who has?"

For some strange cause which lurked in the depths of her own conscience, his kindly voice, his steady eyes, his willingness to take his own fair share of blame only irritated Janet so much the more. Or was it that the irritation was directed against herself alone, and only wreaked itself upon Rob as upon the nearest victim?

"I told you before who had done it. It's you and Day."

"What have we done?" Rob asked in amazement.

"Criticized us Canadians."

Rob's amazement increased.

"When? How? I haven't."

"You have. You do it, all the time. You say things, and so does Day; and then you look at each other and laugh." Rob felt his own temper going. He caught fast hold of one corner of it.

"What sort of things?"

Janet had risen now, and stood looking down at him, as he still sat in the wide, deep window casement. Even in his vexation, Rob was boy enough to be aware that never had she looked better than now, with the scarlet flush in her cheeks, the angry light blazing in her eyes.

"All sorts," she made vehement answer.

"What?" he demanded no less vehemently. "It's not fair to hint and dodge, Janet. Speak out."

"You said we took ourselves too much in earnest."

"Well, you do."

"You said it was a regular Sleepy Hollow."

"Yes."

"Day criticizes the clothes of the people she meets on the terrace."

"Well?"

"You make fun of our little street cars."

"Yes."

"You told Day, only yesterday, that you couldn't find a this-year necktie in any of the shops."

"I couldn't."

Janet's exasperation boiled over.

"Well, you needn't have told of it at the dinner table. How do you suppose it made us feel?"

Again Rob's temper lost itself in a sea of amazement.

"But you don't keep the shops."

"No; but my people do."

"Oh. Honestly, I beg your pardon," Rob said contritely. "The name and all—how could I tell?

Again he had blundered. He knew it by the sudden lifting of her resolute little chin.

"That will do, Rob Argyle!" she said crisply. "You needn't imply that my family are in trade."

"But you said your people—"

"And I meant my people. I meant us Canadians."

This time, Rob lost his temper utterly.

"Hang it all, Janet, it would puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer to know what it is you really do mean," he said sharply.

She had turned away. At his words and his unexpected tone, she faced about. Even then, in the height of her anger, she felt a queer little tug at her heart, as she saw him stoop for his stick and then rise with the stiffness which still remained from his recent fall. Then she hardened her heart and, with it, her voice.

"You want to know what I mean? Well, I'll tell you, and I hope you'll remember it. We are Canadians here, not Americans. We have our Canadian ways, and we like them. We aren't big and busy and rushing like your New York. We may not be so fashionable; we may wear our clothes a little longer and not have so many of them. We may not have such wide streets, nor such long cars in them. We may not be the least bit like the people you have been used to meeting in New York. We don't care, if we aren't. If we'd been meant to be just like New York, we should probably have grown just as big and busy and fashionable. We aren't. We're not New York, but Canada; and we are proud of being Canadians and of taking ourselves in earnest. If you don't like us, you can stay at home. For my part, I wish you would."

All the pent-up nervous energy brought on by the shock of her father's sudden death, by the need of adjusting her girlish plans to fit their changed conditions, by the daily and hourly wear and tear of work and worry, of petty snubs and open rudenesses: all this was pouring forth upon the tide of her own words. And, under all her excitement, she fully realized whither it was carrying her, realized it and regretted it. Nevertheless, for the moment, she seemed to herself powerless to stem the tide of her own anger.

Rob's next words, however, were somewhat of a check.

"Do you truly mean that, Janet?"

"Yes, I do," she snapped, wholly resolved upon sticking to her guns, now that they really had gone into action.

For a moment, as they stood there face to face, Rob looked at her steadily. His eyes alone showed his trouble. His lips were firm, although a whitish ring around them betrayed the fact that, heretofore, his life had been singularly free from scenes like this.

"I am sorry," he said then.

"Sorry for what? That you don't like us?"

"But I do like you, Janet," he interposed.

"Yes, when I amuse you. That doesn't keep you from making fun of us, behind our backs, though."

And then Rob's anger blazed.

"Janet Leslie, I'll thank you to remember that I'm neither a sneak nor a cad," he said, and never before in his sixteen years of life had Rob Argyle used that tone to girl or woman. Then the training of generations prevailed, and he checked himself. He turned to the window, and bent down to pick up the magazine which had fallen to the floor.

Slight as was the act, he was conscious of performing it stiffly, clumsily, and it was a moment before he was upright once more. As he finally straightened up to face Janet again, the clang of the doorknob told him that Janet had left the library and shut the door behind her.