Deep Summer Read Online Free Page B

“We’ll have to get along if we want to reach Baton Rouge tomorrow.”
    It was not until they were under way that Judith remembered she had left two good cooking-pots by the pool. Her mother scolded her for being so careless, but Mark said, “Don’t be too stern with her, Catherine. She’s more biddable than most girls her age.”
    Judith walked away and sat down on deck, watching Philip’s boat rounding the curves a long way ahead. Evidently her father was not going to say any more to her about Philip. He was taking it for granted that she would obey him now as she had done all her life. A pirogue from Illinois came alongside, the traders singing a lusty French song as they pushed ahead. Behind it came a canoe piled with beads and blankets, paddled by Indians who took the swirls with silent ex-pertness. After awhile she heard her father responding to greetings from another flatboat belonging to a family named St. Clair from Pennsylvania. She caught sight of Philip’s boat again, further ahead now. He was keeping his word and leaving her as fast as he could.
    Judith clasped her hands around her knee and leaned back against the cabin wall. No matter what her father said or did, Philip would find her. And what was she going to say to him?
    She wanted him so! Knowing he would not be there when the boat tied up tonight gave her a sense of dreadful vacancy. She wanted him there, talking to her of pirate fights or duels or anything he felt like talking about, telling her again that he loved her and holding her in an embrace that would not have to be interrupted. She was aware of a new, unconfessable need of him that was no less real for being beyond her own comprehension. Judith began to wonder again what it was men wanted of women. It was something beautiful or terrible or perhaps both—strange that though she knew so little about it she could be sure it was something beautiful now that she knew Philip Lame wanted it of her.
    She felt a vague urge to cry. Idling like this was wrong. One should be always doing something useful—or was that only another of the New England rules that had no meaning under the river sun?
    She went into the cabin and got out a kerchief she was hemming. How mousy her clothes were by Philip’s blue and claret satins. And if she obeyed her father how mousy her whole life would be. Until they built a house of their own they were going to be guests of Walter Purcell, son of her father’s oldest friend. Walter Purcell was an industrious young man with all the virtues. Judith puckered her mouth distastefully as she sewed. No doubt his house would be crisp and staid, where she would be expected to be a sober young person in a cap and kerchief sitting at her spinning-wheel until another sober young person in a fustian coat and nankeen breeches came to woo her into a sober marriage. Oh, she didn’t want any of that! Why should God create this delirious landscape but for frivolity and laughter and men like Philip Larne?
    At last they came to the Dalroy bluff.
    Below Baton Rouge the river banks had been low and soft, but suddenly the east bank went up in a hump and a bluff hung like a shelf over the water. At the lower end was the wharf, so wild with flatboats and keels and pirogues that the Sheramys thought their boatmen would never land at all. But by what looked like a creation of space they tied up the boat. Judith scrambled ashore after her father.
    They stood together on the swarming wharf while the men shoved their boxes ashore. Judith was suddenly frightened to think that this wild place was where she was going to live. This confusion of shouting flatboatmen, Negroes rolling hogsheads down the planks, Indians singing to the incoming boats and catching the melons and coins their hearers flung to them, this muddle of wagons and wheelbarrows and fruit-crates—this was the town of Dalroy in the province of West Florida in the country of Louisiana. This was home. Philip would like it. Philip would