Stories from Everybody's Magazine.

THE LAYING OF THE MONSTER

BY THEODOSIA GARRISON

Dorothea reposed with her shoulders in the shade of the bulkhead and her bare feet burrowing in the sun-warmed sand. Beneath her shoulder blades was a bulky and disheveled volume--a bound year of G.o.dey's Lady Book of the vintage of the early seventies.

Having survived the handling of three generations, this seemed to take naturally to being drenched with rain and warped by sun, or, as at the present moment, serving its owner either as a sand-pillow or as a receptacle for divers scribbled verses on its fly-leaves and margins.

It was with a poem now that Dorothea was wrestling, as she wriggled her toes in the sand and gazed blankly oceanward. Under the scorching August sun, the Atlantic seemed to purr like a huge, amiable lion cub.

It was not the amiabilities of nature, however, in which Dorothea found inspiration. A harp of a single string, she sang as that minstrel might who was implored to make love alone his theme.

Given an imaginative young person of eleven, who, when not abandoning herself utterly to athletics, has secret and continual access to the brand of literature peculiar to the "Seaside Library," and the result is obvious. Dorothea's mother read recipes; her father was addicted to the daily papers. It was only in her grandmother that Dorothea found a literary taste she approved. On that cozy person's bookshelves one could always find what happened to Goldie or what the exquisite Irish heroine said to the earl before she eloped with the captain.

In this knowledge Dorothea's parents had no ambition that their daughter should excel. In fact, an uncompromising edict on the subject had been given forth more than once to a sullen and rebellious sinner. But how should the most suspicious parent, when his daughter sits in his presence apparently engrossed in a book ent.i.tled "The Girlhood of Famous Women," guess that carefully concealed in its interior is a smaller volume bearing the t.i.tle "Muriel's Mistake, or, For Another's Sin?"

Having acquired knowledge, the true student seeks to demonstrate.

Dorothea had promptly and intentionally fallen in love with the son of her next-door neighbor. Amiel--fresh from his first year in college-- was a tall, broad-shouldered youth, with kindly brown eyes and a flash of white teeth when he smiled. In contrast to the small boys and the sober-going fathers of families in which the summer colony abounded, he shone, as Dorothea's favorite novelists would have expressed it, "like a Greek G.o.d."

It was this unsuspecting person whom Dorothea had, at first sight, elected to be the Hero of her Dreams. She trailed him, moreover, with a persistency that would have done credit to a detective. Did he go to the post-office, he was sure to meet Dorothea returning (Lady Ursula, strolling through her estate, comes upon her lover unawares). Dorothea, emulating her heroine's example by vaulting a fence and cutting across lots, could be found also strolling (if slightly breathless) as he approached.

She timed her day, as far as possible, with his. Would he swim, play tennis, or go crabbing--there was Dorothea. Would he repose in the summerhouse hammock and listen to entire pages declaimed from Tennyson and Longfellow, the while being violently swung--his slave was ready. She read no story in which she was not the heroine and Amiel the hero. At the same time, she was perfectly and painfully conscious in the back of her brain that Amiel regarded her only as a sun-browned, crop-headed tomboy, who had an extraordinary facility for remembering all the poetry she had ever read, and who amused and interested him as his own small sister might. Outwardly she kept strictly to this role--a purely natural one--while inwardly she soared dizzily from fantasy to fantasy, even while her physical body was plunging in the waves or leaping on the tennis court.

Could Amiel have had the slightest insight into the fancies seething in his small neighbor's mind, he would have been astounded to the verge of doubting her reason. Little did he know, as he stood now on the bulkhead and looked down at her, that at the moment Dorothea was finishing mentally a poem in which with "wild tears" and "clasping hands," he had bidden her an eternal farewell--by moonlight. She was, moreover, perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove."

Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated the final couplet doubtfully:

" 'Farewell,' he said. 'Ah, love, my love, My heart is breaking for thee, Dove.' "

"Look out!" said a voice above her. "I'm going to jump."

Dorothea sat up delightedly, with her bare, brown legs tucked beneath her, Turk-like, as she welcomed him. ("Ah! Beloved," said Lady Ursula with her hand on her fluttering heart.) "h.e.l.lo," said Dorothea, with a wide grin.

He flung himself down beside her and surveyed her with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Been digging holes with your head?" he asked affably. "Your hair and eyelashes look it. Been here all the afternoon?"

"Yes," she said. "I saw you go riding after lunch. I've been here ever since. I love to be on the beach when there isn't a lot of people bothering around. Then"--she made a wide gesture with her brown hand-- "all of it seems to belong to me, not broken up in little bits for everybody." She shook her cropped head vigorously, and the sand pelted down her shoulders.

"Well," he said, watching this operation, "you came near taking your little bit to the house with you to keep, didn't you? How long have you worn your hair cropped like that, Dorothea? Was it when you decided to be captain of a ball team?"

He drew a box of chocolates from his pocket and tossed it over to her. She caught it neatly on her outstretched palm, as a boy would have done, and nibbled squirrel-like as she talked. She did not resent being teased by Amiel--she liked it, rather, as representing a perfect understanding between them. Also, once removed from the high hills of romance, she was not devoid of humor.

"It was cut in June--before you came. They didn't want me to, but I just begged them. It was such a nuisance bathing and then flopping about drying afterward, and being sent upstairs all day long to make it smooth."

"You funny kid," he said. "You don't care how you look, do you?

You ought to have been a boy. What have you been doing down here all by yourself?"

"Reading--and--listening," said Dorothea vaguely. She folded G.o.dey's Lady Book tightly to her chest. Lady Ursula or no Lady Ursula, she would have died--with black, bitter shame at the thought of any eye but her own falling upon the penciled lines therein. The horror of ridicule is the black shadow that hangs over youth. That strange, inner world of her own Dorothea shared with nothing more substantial than her dreams.

"Listening?" he inquired.

"To the ocean," explained Dorothea. "It was high tide when I came down, and the waves boom-boomed like that, as though it were saying big words down in its chest, you know."

"And what were the wild waves saying?"

"Oh, big words like--" she thought a moment, her small, sunburnt face serious and intent. "Oh, like

"Robert of Sicily, Brother of Pope Urbane And Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine."

she intoned deeply. "You see?"

"Absolutely," he said enjoyingly. "And so you weren't lonesome?"

Dorothea, who had spent her afternoon in a region peopled with interesting and exquisite figures, shook her head.

"You don't get lonesome when you think," she said--"imagine" was the word she meant; she used the other as appealing to his understanding. Suddenly the vague, introspective look left her face; she turned to him with the expression of one imparting pleasing tidings. "My friend is coming to-morrow to stay a week,"

she said. "You remember I told you that mother had asked her.

Well, she's coming down with father to-morrow. She has never been to the seash.o.r.e before. You'll take us crabbing, won't you, Amiel? And if we have a bonfire you'll ask father to let us stay up, won't you?"

"Sure," he said good-naturedly. "What's her name?"

"Her name is Jennie Clark, and she lives next door to us in the city, and we're going to have fun--fun--fun," chanted Dorothea.

"Come on." She sprang lightly to her feet and dug her shoes and stockings out of the sand. "We can have a game of tennis before dinner."

Clutching her book with her shoes and stockings, she raced with him to the steps that led to the bulkhead, and from that eminence--with the air of one performing an accustomed act--she clambered on the fence that separated the green lawns from beach to avenue. This, with a fine disregard for splinters, she proceeded to walk--her property tucked under her arm.

Amiel strode beside her on the lawn. She was as sure-footed as a goat; but when he clutched her elbow as she performed a daring pirouette, she offered no opposition, but proceeded sedately beneath his hold. Why not? She had ceased to be Dorothea on her way to a tennis game ("Lean heavily on me, dearest," whispered Reginald, "the chapel is in sight. Bear up a little longer").

With a weary sigh the Lady Ursula slid finally from the gate-post to the ground and proceeded to put on her stockings.

Jennie Clark arrived duly and was received, if not rapturously, at least hospitably. To be frank, Jennie Clark was not among those first suggested by Dorothea as a prospective visitor. Of her own private and particular friends some five had been rejected by a too censorious parent, mainly, it seemed, because of a lack of personal charm--Dorothea preferring a good sport from the gutter, as it were, to a dull fairy from a dancing school.

Jennie had been near, perilously near, the end of Dorothea's list. Her sole claims to Dorothea's friendship were that, living next door, she was available on rainy days when greater delights failed, and that Dorothea, by a dramatic relation of a ghost story, could hypnotize her into a terrified and wholly fascinated wreck.

Jennie was thirteen, a very young thirteen--pretty and mindless as a Persian kitten--but developing rapidly a coquettish instinct for the value of a red ribbon in her dark curls, and the set of a bracelet on her plump arm. Beside her curves and curls and pretty frilled frocks, Dorothea, in her straight, blue flannel playing suit or stiff afternoon pique', with her cropped blonde head, suggested nothing so much as wire opposed to a sofa cushion.

She was in white pique' this afternoon. To meet one's friend at the station was an event. Dorothea was honestly excited and happy, and she was not at all pained that Jennie Clark's first greeting was a comment on her short hair and her sunburn.

By what might have seemed to the un.o.bserving a happy coincidence, Amiel, strolling from his house to the beach with his after- dinner pipe, was hailed by Dorothea from the summerhouse. She had run the unsuspecting Miss Clark very hard to arrive at the psychological moment. Joining them there, he was duly presented to Jennie Clark, and Dorothea, accepting the courteous fashion in which he acknowledged the introduction as an indirect compliment to herself, was elated. Jennie was certainly very pretty. She tossed back her long curls and talked to Amiel with an occasional droop of her long lashes, and Dorothea, beaming upon them both, had no notion that, hovering above her in the quiet twilight, the green- eyed Monster was even then scenting its victim and preparing to strike.

Presently Dorothea's father and mother and Amiel's stout and amiable parents joined their offspring in the summerhouse. One of the affable, if uninteresting, neighbors came as well and, promptly introducing a banjo as a reason for his being, lured the a.s.sembled company into song.

Dorothea, snuggled into her corner, blissfully conscious of Amiel's careless arm about her shoulder, gave herself up to happiness. The night was soft as velvet, sewn with the gold spangles of stars. The waves whispered secrets to each other as they waited for the moon to rise. Dorothea, rapturously using the atmosphere as a background for Lady Ursula, became suddenly aware that the singing of "Juanita" in six different keys had ceased, and that Jennie, having been discovered to be the possessor of a voice, was singing alone. She had an exquisite little pipe, and she sang the dominating sentimental song of the year with ease if not with temperament. Its close was greeted with instant and enthusiastic applause. Jennie became instantly the center of attraction.

It was Amiel who urged her to sing again, Amiel who seized upon the banjo and accompanied her triumphantly through a college song, turning his back squarely upon Dorothea the while.

Dorothea sat up straight, a sudden, bewildering anger at her heart as she watched them. In the midst of the song she announced casually that the moon was coming up. No one paid the slightest attention to her except the calling neighbor, who said "Hush!"