II
Thenext Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy, but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.
The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark intoround fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.
These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days. The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority (and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally, between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling overtones and melancholy quavers—all these sensations produced a mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath of goodness.
The church itself was charming to look at, built in the late ’eighties of shingles now coloured a warm brown by many rains, and properly vine-hung. The little building with its limited open meadow and well-grown trees drew him at times when he had no particular business there. It wasa favourite place to read. Often he would arrive an hour or more before the service and sit huddled up in one of the corners of the deep verandah, intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step of the rector sounded on the boards below; and if Dr. Minor happened to espy him he would be conducted cheerily into the study, while the lanky priest put on his vestments and asked him questions about his work at school and the health of his “dear mother,” who, much to the clergyman’s disappointment, came almost never to the services.
These innocent confidences sometimes went so far as a mild spiritual examination which had more significance than its casualness indicated. Minor regarded young Osprey as promising material for the ministry.
“The type for scholarship and consecration,” he told his wife. “A sensitive boy, thoughtful and retiring—Oh, manly, manly enough! A little conviction would turn that into spiritual leadership. His family could do nothing better than give him a seminary training. And a part of our duty, my dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new recruits to bring under His banner.”
Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his reflections upon the mission of the Church. His early gods had been the deeply pious heroes of the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee took rank with him very little below the Apostles.
There was one other who shared this secret ambition for Potter—Ellen Sydney—until a recent incident in which he had figured shook her faith.
This affair produced something of a scandal in the Osprey family. Searching one day through the shelves of an old closet for one of his brother Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now his turn to use, the boy had come across a half dozen large, handsomely bound portfolios. He had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated on the instant. The sheets were of lovely texture, beautifully printed, and the covers of a flexible, warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense of incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.
The contents were no less absorbing. Between the pages of French text were reproductions of paintings hung in the Paris salons of the mid-’nineties, the majority of them nudes of that languishing and silken type beloved by the French school of that day, the studio renderings of a flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his search for the school books, Potter took the volumes to an attic room where he consulted them many times in the following weeks, and a collection of nude sketches came from his pencil, copied sometimes from the originals and sometimes attempted from memory.
The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as he was finishing aparticularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.
Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant, half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul, and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over Potter’s head.
He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn steps without even a good-night.
As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and his actual appearance was a little laughable—yet the notion of his interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not,as she reasoned, naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than she could grasp.
For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness.
To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event....
In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning a serpentine creek that drained the valley.
The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden charm—the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring windows—made it a fairy road, a retreat in which Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener memories in the north.She could never walk there too often; it was as near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her starved imagination could picture.
Ordinarily they sat upon the steep terraced slope at the end of the lane, whence one could look down its leaf-fretted vista, or peer over one’s shoulder into the sombre depths of the rarely-visited Florissant place, but to-night he was more venturesome. He led her through the path behind the wall of Annunciation’s big enclosure, until they came to the end of the terrace. Beyond was an open field, once the pasture of the Florissants, and still a part of the property, empty and unused. In its centre through the dusk loomed a dark little hillock clustered with poplars and fir-trees.
It was not hard to believe oneself continents away from the noise of any familiar street or the lights of Creve Cœur houses. Directly fronting them lay the dim mass of Annunciation, its half dozen French turrets and many spires floating out of the treetops into crystalline starlight. Potter had often sat in that very spot and pondered on the mystery of this religious stillness, on the utter distance which separated its life from any he had known, its community of young and vital beauty sternly and perhaps rebelliously subordinated to withered holiness. By a paradox of thelaw of boyhood, the girls in the convent—boarders from comfortable families everywhere in the states—were the subject of vulgar joking among the youngsters thereabouts.
To Ellen the convent was not benign; it was a little terrifying and monstrous. All her life she had been awestruck by anything that suggested the gigantic and august power of Rome, and her head was full of legends concerning that religion and its devotees. Superstition had required of her that she regard them—not as individuals but in the mass—as a sinister species apart from ordinary people.
Potter remarked that when there was bright moonlight the steep slate pitches of the convent roof looked as though they were sheeted in snow.
“There’s lots more of those places in Canada than here,” said she. “They’re not all that they should be, either. Think of sending young girls there!”
“Why not?” he asked.
She now regretted her outburst and was annoyed at his question. She answered primly:
“Why, I wouldn’t tell you, of course.”
He laughed, unconcerned and superior.
“Pshaw, I know what you mean. I’ve heard those stories too—about nuns being in love with priests. But I don’t believe them.”
“Oh, you don’t?” inquired Ellen sarcastically.It was not that she did not think it admirable of him to dislike believing evil of people, but one need not go so far as to defend Catholics....
“No,” he said. “You know why?”
“Well, why, smarty?”
“Because even people outside of such places, convents and the like, even people who are grown up and free to do as they please—well, they never do anything they want to do. I mean things that just pop into their heads to do.”
“Ah, don’t they?” asked Ellen, by this time amused, “And how are you so sure they don’t?”
“I just know. They’re too dog-goned cowardly.”
“Well!” she exclaimed, “that’s a fine thing to be calling people who behave themselves!”
“Then they don’t think of anything bad that they want to do,” he persisted. “You wouldn’t call that being good, would you, Ellen? Pshaw, what’s the credit in that?”
“It’s well for them they don’t think of such things,” she declared. “To hear you, a person would believe you wanted to be tempted.”
“No, I hate it, honestly,” he replied, and she felt that he was trying to speak truly of himself. “I used to say that part of the Lord’s prayer, about ‘lead us not into temptation,’ over twice. I did, for a long time. Because, you see, I’m really tempted—always, every minute.”
He paused after this announcement, which, inspite of his sincerity, had a note of pride, and Ellen broke in, thinking that the moment had come to speak of what was most in her mind.
“Potter, you haven’t been making any more of those pictures, have you?”
She felt him shift quickly to the defensive.
“Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve finished two more.”
“Well, I’m ashamed of you.”
“Why do you mind them so much, Ellen?”
“You don’t have to ask me why.”
“But I do, because my father didn’t think they were bad. He only lectured me for show!” He chuckled at the recollection.
“Ah, Potter, your father is a grown man! Men do lots of things that you shouldn’t think about. You’re just a child. Those pictures! What’s the good of them anyway? Nice people wouldn’t have them around.”
“Some people would!” he declared stoutly. “They’re beautiful, or my father wouldn’t have kept them ... and the one I’ve just finished is the best, oh, lots the best I’ve done!”
She sensed a strain of profound unhappiness in his voice, and all her instincts flew to soothe the hurt.
“I don’t mean to be hard on you, Potter,” she said. “You worry me, that’s all. I can’t see why you bother about these things that other people never think of.”
“Aw,” he said, “never mind, Ellen. I guess I don’t know what I want. It’s no fun being a boy when you’d like to be a man.”
They both fell silent, listening to the trees chattering overhead like live things. The breeze that stirred them was growing chill, and Potter, responding to the kindlier tone of his companion, moved closer to her. His last words and this unconscious movement of affection touched her. She put a rough, friendly hand on his arm, and they sat there in silence for a time. It was he who broke it....
Suddenly a strange plea came pouring from his lips in a torrent of eager words, a plea that she all at once realized she had many times before dreaded—and laughed at herself for dreading.... She sat, scarcely breathing, with averted face. He ended abruptly, frightened at the sound of his own voice. She said nothing. Surely she understood him. What was she thinking?
She turned toward him at last, and he found himself looking into her black eyes that glowed like coals despite the mantle of dusk. Her parted lips closed in a tight line.
“Well,” she said, with slow emphasis, “if that’s what you mean, I’ll tell you this. I will never do such a thing.”
She was on her feet in an instant, her tall body like a statue of rebuke crushing him in its shadow.
“Come,” she said coldly.
“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, Ellen.”
At that moment, as they started homeward from Florissant’s field with the darkness between them, her swishing, angry stride filling him with a new knowledge of mystery and awe, there was no doubt that they both meant what they said. But in Ellen a certain helplessness and fear were born. Struggle as she might from now on his very presence would be a menace, and his presence was more than ever a necessity. For the cry that he was uttering was one that her own heart understood.
So it happened that a few months later when the Osprey family were at a country hotel for the summer, he and Ellen met in the empty house and walked hand in hand through the rooms—her sworn promise whirling in his brain. She was stiff and awkward, but he was in high spirits, perhaps a little hysterical, fondly imagining he was entering upon a new paradise of experience....