From the moment she stepped off the ferry on Wednesday night, Dorothy moved in a mood of recklessness. She had felt it building as she dressed in her room, as she walked quickly along the sidewalk to the corner rendezvous with her coat pulled snugly against the evening’s chill. If she was here, she might as well make the most of it. She might as well be what everyone expected her to be. The glitter of gold lamp-brackets and swirled marble floors went to her head like champagne—she made it go to her head, in the way she imagined champagne would. Wasn’t it funny that she had tasted gin but never champagne? Cruelly funny.
She was talkative and laughed a good deal with her dance partners; she contradicted Kitty Lawrence flatly several times in a way that made Kitty look at her with lips pinched straight in displeasure. And when Sloop Jackson joined the group, she looked at him sidelong in a way which seemed to say that in spite of the episode in the hall last week, she wanted him to know she wasn’t a child and she was going to prove it on her own terms. She was playing with fire and she knew it—but almost her whole life was playing with fire now, so what difference did a few more sparks make?
After dancing, and refreshments, and a good deal of insincere laughter, Dorothy began to feel that she must really be enjoying herself. Why shouldn’t she? Her behavior matched what she had thought odd and artificial about the others before, and maybe that was the secret: you could get along with anybody if you matched them. But under it all was a fierce, teeth-clenched feeling which she strongly suspected would have translated into a desire to cry if she had been alone in her bedroom at home.
“Want to go downstairs?” said Sloop Jackson, and when Kitty and Ida and their escorts all said “Yes, let’s,” Dorothy tossed her head and said nothing, but followed along with them.
They went down the spiral staircase and paused on the tiled landing, because a crowd of people were going through the open chimney-door ahead of them. They moved closer and Jackson produced his card. Dorothy studied for a second the sharp watchful face of the man who checked the credentials for the secret door. How would the management feel, she wondered, if they knew they were admitting the daughter of the alderman who headed the Prohibition committee into the speakeasy under their very noses? She briefly considered the idea that it might be dangerous. But who cared—danger was only an additional spark to toy with now.
She was on the threshold, with the steps leading down into the speakeasy before her, when a sudden murmur broke out on the landing, and then louder noise from upstairs. Dorothy turned her head, and Sloop Jackson also turned quickly and listened. There were bangs like doors being flung open, a chaos of voices raised and piercing shrill whistles.
“Police raid,” said Jackson. He turned and took Dorothy by the arm. “In here. Quick, before it closes!”
“In there? No!—but—”
“They’ll never find the door! All we’ve got to do is sit tight till they’re gone. Come on, Dorothy!”
But Dorothy, all her old terrors resurrected by the sounds above, pulled back in sudden panic. She would not be trapped in that horrible speakeasy! Whether the police broke down the door and found them or whether they were shut into that closed, sunken red dimness of the underground room while the raid passed overhead, she could not stand it. She tore away from Jackson and stumbled up the steps—the chimney-door was closing, and she struggled through at the last moment; it rubbed rough over her shoulder and nearly tore her frock. Blindly she plunged into a corridor leading to the right…a few yards on she found a set of curving granite stairs and saw they were empty, and rushed up them.
She was on the ground-floor level again; the hall she found herself in was empty, but the loud confusion of voices seemed just around a corner to her left. Dorothy turned the other way and fled through the empty halls, the sounds of the raid still behind her; shying away from open doors to other rooms, seeking only some escape to the outside. Ahead of her in the V-shaped juncture of two dim corridors, a French window stood open to the darkness. Dorothy made for it; she went through without stopping and her heart leaped into her mouth as her foot found nothing outside and she shot down into the jungle of a rhododendron bed.
She landed on her hands and knees in damp wood mulch, shaken by the two-foot drop. It was dark here, with only a faint glimmer from the shiny flat leaves of the rhododendrons reflecting what light came from within the French window. Dorothy scrambled to her feet, bits of the wood sticking to her palms and her knees, and pushed through the bushes. The smooth leaves slapped her; the dew-soaked wilted blossoms were cold against her skin like soggy wads of tissue paper, and she nearly turned an ankle when the heel of her shoe caught in the loose bed. She ran across a bit of dark lawn, vaguely aware of huge oak trees looming up overhead, and then her feet crunched on small gravel—it was a path and it ran down the hill away from the House and she swung left and followed it.
She flew down the dim gray gravel, between vague shapes of shrubs and plants whose spicy wet scents told her of the thick garden on either side, down the steep path with a momentum that could only be stopped if she fell—panting, but unable to think of anything but running, running away from everything that was behind her. She did not know where she was going. It was an island—but there must be some way—
Ahead the ghostly lightness of another path sloping down joined hers from the left—Dorothy saw a figure move into the juncture but had no time to check herself or even to gasp. She collided violently with someone, bumped her nose and sprained her wrist so that for a moment it hung stinging and useless. Her feet skidded on the gravel—hands caught her and kept her from falling. Dorothy gave a gasp, of combined fear and breathlessness, and looked up, trying to see in the dark. A man—or a boy—someone taller than her. For only an instant he held onto her as if making a decision, and then said, “Come with me. This way!”
The voice was young, but firm and authoritative. It was at least something sane to grasp at. Dorothy, all her life one to act on impulse, made another breathless instant’s decision and followed him. Anything that would take her further away; anyone who seemed to know where they were going.
He pulled her along with him, and they went further down the path between more shrubberies, half running, and turned left along a high stone wall heavily overgrown with drooping green. Here they stopped; Dorothy’s arm was released and she heard the metallic whisk of keys on a ring as her companion unlocked an arched door in the wall, pushed her quickly through and pulled it closed behind them. Another quick stair-step descent on a narrow path shelved with slabs of slate, and they emerged in the open on what Dorothy realized was the far side of the island. Off to the left was the boathouse, a jumble of posts and roofs in the moonlight, with the twinkling leaves of breeze-stirred poplar trees overhanging it. Nearer at hand a rowboat was drawn up on the pebbled shore of a little cove. Directed by a whispered signal from her companion, Dorothy scrambled down the beach and tried to climb into the rowboat. She leaned too hard on the gunwale and the boat slid a few inches down the pebbles; as it escaped her Dorothy stumbled forward into the shallows, her shoes and stockings filling with chilly water. The boat drifted further off, and the hem of her skirt clung wet above her knees. But her guide’s hand gripped her elbow from behind, helped her over the side, and let go. Dorothy tripped over the first seat and fell into the bottom of the boat, skinning her knee and elbow and bruising her shoulder, and for a second the frustration, pain and humiliation was enough that she only wanted to stay there.
She felt the boat grind off the pebbly bottom, heard the ripple of water close by her ear, and the sound of the boy’s boots on the floorboards as he stepped into the boat. As he set the oars in place Dorothy managed to crawl up onto the other seat, and sat with her hands braced on either side of her, bedraggled and still short of breath. The first shove from shore carried them out far and smoothly, and then, working one oar, he turned the boat around in its own current. Dorothy looked back at the lights of the Lost Lake House through the trees—saw the small stabbing flickers of electric torches come into the grounds behind it.
The boat rocked a little, and she gripped at the side. Down she came, and found a boat…beneath a willow left afloat…
Where did that come from…? The poetry-book that she had spent the last two nights curled up with in her room, trying drearily to forget about her father—her father, and the library, and the committee and the new shoes…only she would never have found her own way off the island; she had been hustled off by a surer hand in the midst of her confusion.
The oars dug deep in the water; there was no sound from the oarlocks. The rowboat moved swiftly, cutting a glittering, washing wake through the light cast on the lake from the windows of the Lake House. And there was a paler light around them now, too, that broke into ripples on the surface of the water—Dorothy realized that it was moonlight.
There was utter silence, except for the washing of the water and an occasional faint shout from the island. Dorothy could hear her own uneven breathing. Her companion seemed wholly concentrated on the task of getting away; he did not even look at her. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, assessing what lay ahead. Dorothy followed the glance. Across the lake, to the left, a long headland ran out from the further shore, cutting off the moonlight and cloaking all the shore inside it in utter blackness. The shadow ran diagonally out across the water to nearly touch the tip of a short promontory off the back of the island, out on their right, and it was for this point that her companion seemed to be making with a swiftness indicating he knew it was the shortest way to cover. But it seemed to take forever. Dorothy looked up at the moon almost with dread—its light had never seemed so bright and revealing before. Under the lights of the Lake House she had never seen it at all.
The island promontory slid past, with maddening slowness—there were only a few yards of open moonlit water ahead. Dorothy could feel the rowboat quicken and pull against the water with every deep stroke of the oars, like a living thing. Then they slipped from light into shadow; the darkness dropped over them like a cloak of invisibility.
Her eyes adjusted slowly, and she could see little, but she knew that her companion held the oars out of the water, resting for a moment while the boat’s momentum carried them forward. Then, after a moment, he began rowing again, steadily and rhythmically, further into the dark and still giving the impression that he knew where he was going. Dorothy stared ahead, trying to find some recognizable shape or form in the silent lake shore. It was still quite a ways away.
After a few minutes, a vague sense of trees, of rushes, of trailing branches began to take shape, as her eyes adjusted to the dark. They seemed very close to shore now; just ahead a thick cluster of rushes whispered in a slight night-breeze, and the chirp of a frog came from among them. But the rowboat glided past, checked and swung to one side a little, and, moving slower now, crept under the tips of hanging willow branches into what she realized was a small deep inlet in the shore.
By the margin, willow-veil’d, slide the heavy barges trail’d…
The trees closed dark around them, only the arched opening showing a glimpse of the moon shining far out on the lake. Here the boat turned gently, almost silently broadside, as the boy raised one oar and let the other trail in the water, half turned to look back over his shoulder in the direction they had come.