Part 15 (1/2)
”I can't stay very long. They'd miss me.”
”I'll let you go when you want to.”
”I don't want to. I feel so comfortable--all sleepy, but so wide-awake.
I never want to go.”
Judith, remembering this moment until she carried it into her dreams with her, could not have shared it with Natalie. It was a dream already, to be wondered at and forgotten by daylight, as she stared across the schoolroom at Neil, not a romantic figure at all with his ill-fitting suit and his tumbled hair; forgotten until the next moment like it came--next in a lengthening series of dream pictures, of moonlight and candlelight and faintly heard music, a secret too sweet to share, a hidden treasure of dreams.
Certain pictures stood out clearest. In one, she was skating with Neil.
Willard was giving a chowder party at the Hiawatha Club. This imposing name belonged to a rough one-room camp with a kitchen in a lean-to and a row of bunks in the loft above, and a giant chimney, with a crackling blaze of fire to combat the bleakness of the view through the uncurtained windows--Mirror Lake. It was a failure as a mirror that day, veiled with snow, and the white birches fringing it showed bare and cold among the warm green of spruce and pine.
The camp was built and owned and the canoes and iceboats kept in repair in the boathouse, and the cook maintained and replaced when he left from loneliness, all by a syndicate with Judge Saxon as president. Forming it was one of the last independent social activities of the town before the Colonel took charge.
It was bad ice-boating to-day. The wind was fitful, and the boat, a graceful and winged thing in full flight, dragged heavily along, looking the clumsy makes.h.i.+ft box of unpainted boards that it was. It was a day to be towed along on your skates with one hand on the boat. Judith and Neil had tired of this and fallen behind.
Close together, but not taking hands, they swung slowly through the unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of ”Amos Moss,” rendered in the closest of close harmony, could be heard no longer, and a heavy silence hung over the lake. The camp lay far behind them, a vanis.h.i.+ng speck.
”Neil, take me back,” Judith directed suddenly.
”Not yet.”
”Please. I want some pop-corn.... Neil, I don't like you. You won't talk. You're queer to-day.”
He did not answer. They cut through the ice in silence. It was rougher here. They were near the north end of the lake. There was open water there to-day, black water into which a boat might crash and go down; it made the water under them seem nearer to Judith, black water with only the floor of ice between. She s.h.i.+vered, and Neil broke the silence abruptly, his eyes still straight ahead.
”Judith.”
”Oh, you can talk then?”
”Judith--do you love me?”
”Don't be silly.” Judith spoke sharply. Days at the camp were always a trial to her. The crowd, bunched together in a big hay-rack mounted on runners, started out noisy and gay, like a party of children, singing, groping for apples in the straw, and playing children's games. But at night, slipping home under the moon to a tinkle of sleigh-bells, covered with rugs two by two, a change would take place: arms would slip around waists that yielded after perfunctory protest; in the dark of the woods there would be significant whispering and more significant silences; Willard would be unmanageable. Judith saw this with alien eyes because of Neil, and dreaded it. This that was between them was so much more beautiful, not love-making, not real love, only a strange, white dream.
”You don't, then? You don't love me?”
”We're too young.”
He did not argue the point. His silence had made her lonely before, now it frightened her. She slipped a hand into his, warm through its clumsy glove.
”Cross hands. Don't you want to?”
”No.”
”But I want to. I'm tired. How limp your hand feels. Hold my hands tighter. Neil----”
”What?”
”You don't mind--what I said just now?”