Part 5 (2/2)

”I owe you all sorts of apologies, Miss Olivia, but the mare I was to ride went lame and uncle couldn't spare me another, so I had an early lunch at the house and walked over.” As he stood looking down at me I saw that he had a crop of unruly dark hair and what there was in his face that Pauline had found interesting. He wore a soft red tie, knotted loosely at the collar of a white flannel s.h.i.+rt, and for the rest of him was dressed very much as other young men. All at once a spark of irrepressible friendliness flashed up in smiles between us.

It seemed the merest chance then that I had come across the wood to meet him. In the light of what has happened since, I see that the guardian of my submerged self was doing what it could for me; but against the embattled social forces of Taylorville what could even the G.o.ds do!

”If you will take me to the others,” he suggested, ”I can make my excuses, and then we can talk.” It was remarkable, I thought, that he should have discovered so early that we would wish to talk. We began to move in the direction of the lake.

”Were you doing a play?” he asked. I nodded.

”How long were you watching me?”

”Since you pa.s.sed the plum brush yonder; it was bully! Are you going on the stage?” I explained about Professor Winter and the elocution lessons.

”They don't approve of the stage in Taylorville,” I finished, touched by the vanis.h.i.+ng trace of a realization that up to this moment the objection would have been stated personally.

”And with all your talent! Oh, I know what I'm saying. I lived in Chicago four years and saw a lot of the theatre.”

He began to talk to me of the stage, probably much of it neither informed nor profitable, but I had never heard it talked of before in unembarra.s.sed relevancy to living, and he had that trick of speech that goes with the achieving propensity, of accelerating his own energy as he talked, so that its backwater fairly floated us into the ease of intimacy. There was no doubt we were tremendously pleased with one another. I was throbbing still with the measure of verse and moved half trippingly to the rhythm of my blood.

”Do you dance too?” What went with that implied something personal and complimentary.

”Oh, no--a few steps I've picked up at school. That's another of the things we don't approve at Taylorville.”

”I say, what a lot of old mossbacks there must be about here anyway.

Take my uncle, now....” He went on to tell me how he had tried to induce his uncle, who could afford it, to advance the money for technical training in engineering. Uncle Garrett was of the opinion that Helmeth would do better to get a job with some good man and ”pick up things ...

always managed to get along by rule of thumb himself,” said the nephew, ”and thinks all the rest of us ought to. I said, 'How would it be with a doctor, now, just to scramble up his medicine?' but you can't get through to my uncle. He thinks a man who can run a thras.h.i.+ng machine is an engineer.”

I remember that we found it necessary to sit down on the slope of the hill toward the pond while he sketched for me his notion of what an engineer's career might be. ”But you've got to have technical training ... got to! Talk about rule of thumb ... it's like going at it with no thumbs at all.” In the midst of this we remembered that we ought to be looking for the rest of the picnickers. Once in the boat, however, there was a muskrat's nest which, as something new to him, had to be poked into, and we stopped to gather lilies, which I could not have done by myself without wetting my dress. When we came at last to the spring, we found the lunch baskets huddled under the oak and n.o.body about.

I think we must have been very far gone by this time in the young rapture of intimacy. The wood was smokily still, and we scuffed great heaps of the leaves together as we walked about pretending to look for the others. I remember it seemed a singular flame-touched circ.u.mstance that the leaves flew up from under our feet and fell lightly on our faces and our hair.

”I suppose we can't help finding them; the wonder is they haven't been spoiling our good talk before now.”

”Oh,” I protested, ”if you hadn't been coming to look for them you wouldn't have met me.”

”And now that we have met, we are going to keep on. I'm coming to see you. May I?”

”If you care so much....” A little spiral of wind rising fountain-wise out of the breathlessness whirled up a smother of brightening leaves; it caught my skirts and whipped them against his knees. It seemed to have blown our hands together too, though I am at a loss to know how that was.

”Care!” he said. ”If I care? Oh, you beauty, you wonder!” All at once he had kissed me.

The electrical moment hung in the air, poised, took flight upward in dizzying splendour. Suddenly from within the wood came a little sn.i.g.g.e.r of laughter.

CHAPTER IX

I do not know how long it took for the certainty that I had been kissed by an utter stranger in the presence of the entire picnic, to work through the singing flames in which that kiss had wrapped me. We must have walked on almost immediately in the direction of the sn.i.g.g.e.r; I remember a kind of clutch of my spirit toward the mere mechanical act of walking, to hold me fast to the time and place from which there was an inward rush to escape. We walked on. They were all sitting together under a bank of hazel and the girls' laps were filled with the brown cl.u.s.ters. Out of my whirling dimness I heard Helmeth Garrett explaining, as I introduced him, how he had come across me in the wood, looking for them.

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