The change in Ramsey was invisible, and yet something must have been seen, for everyone appeared to take it for granted that he was to sit next to Milla at the pastoral meal. She herself understood it, evidently, for she drew in her puckered skirts and without any words make a place for him beside her as he driftingly approached her, affecting to whistle and keeping his eyes on the foliage overhead. He still looked upward, even in the act of sitting down.
“Squirrel or something,” he said, feebly, as if in explanation.
“Where?” Milla asked.
“Up there on a branch.” He accepted a plate from her (she had provided herself with an extra one), but he did not look at it or her. “I'm not just exactly sure it's a squirrel,” he said. “Kind of hard to make out exactly what it is.” He continued to keep his eyes aloft, because he imagined that all of the class were looking at him and Milla, and he felt unable to meet such publicity. It was to him as if the whole United States had been scandalized to attention by this act of his in going to sit beside Milla; he gazed upward so long that his eyeballs became sensitive under the strain. He began to blink. “I can't make out whether it's a squirrel or just some leaves that kind o' got fixed like one,” he said. “I can't make out yet which it is, but I guess when there's a breeze, if it's a squirrel he'll prob'ly hop around some then, if he's alive or anything.”
It had begun to seem that his eyes must remain fixed in that upward stare forever; he wanted to bring them down, but could not face the glare of the world. So the fugitive ostrich is said to bury his head in the sand; he does it, not believing himself thereby hidden but trying to banish from his own cognizance terrible facts which his unsheltered eyes have seemed to reveal. So, too, do nervous children seek to bury their eyes under pillows, and nervous statesmen theirs under oratory. Ramsey's ostrichings can happen to anybody. But finally the brightness of the sky between the leaves settled matters for him; he sneezed, wept, and for a little moment again faced his fellowmen. No one was looking at him; everybody except Milla had other things to do.
Having sneezed involuntarily, he added a spell of coughing for which there was no necessity. “I guess I must be wrong,” he muttered thickly.
“What about, Ramsey?”
“About it bein' a squirrel.” With infinite timidity he turned his head and encountered a gaze so soft, so hallowed, that it disconcerted him, and he dropped a “drumstick” of fried chicken, well dotted with ants, from his plate. Scarlet he picked it up, but did not eat it. For the first time in his life he felt that eating fried chicken held in the fingers was not to be thought of. He replaced the “drumstick” upon his plate and allowed it to remain there untouched, in spite of a great hunger for it.
Having looked down, he now found difficulty in looking up, but gazed steadily at his plate, and into this limited circle of vision came Milla's delicate and rosy fingers, bearing a gift. “There,” she said in a motherly little voice. “It's a tomato mayonnaise sandwich and I made it myself. I want you to eat it, Ramsey.”
His own fingers approached tremulousness as he accepted the thick sandwich from her and conveyed it to his mouth. A moment later his soul filled with horror, for a spurt of mayonnaise dressing had caused a catastrophe the scene of which occupied no inconsiderable area of his right cheek; which was the cheek toward Milla. He groped wretchedly for his handkerchief but could not find it; he had lost it. Sudden death would have been relief; he was sure that after such grotesquerie Milla could never bear to have anything more to do with him; he was ruined.
In his anguish he felt a paper napkin pressed gently into his hand; a soft voice said in his ear, “Wipe it off with this, Ramsey. Nobody's noticing.”
So this incredibly charitable creature was still able to be his friend, even after seeing him mayonnaised! Humbly marvelling, he did as she told him, but avoided all further risks. He ate nothing more.
He sighed his first sigh of inexpressibleness, had a chill or so along the spine, and at intervals his brow was bedewed.
Within his averted eyes there dwelt not the Milla Rust who sat beside him, but an iridescent, fragile creature who had become angelic.
He spent the rest of the day dawdling helplessly about her; wherever she went he was near, as near as possible, but of no deliberate volition of his own. Something seemed to tie him to her, and Milla was nothing loth. He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply. What few remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly all concerned the landscape, which he commended repeatedly in a weak voice, as “kind of pretty,” though once he said he guessed there might be bugs in the bark of a log on which they sat; and he became so immoderately personal as to declare that if the bugs had to get on anybody he'd rather they got on him than on Milla. She said that was “just perfectly lovely” of him, asked where he got his sweet nature, and in other ways encouraged him to continue the revelation, but Ramsey was unable to get forward with it, though he opened and closed his mouth a great many times in the effort to do so.
At five o'clock everybody was summoned again to the rendezvous for a ceremony preliminary to departure: the class found itself in a large circle, standing, and sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” Ordinarily, on such an open-air and out-of-school occasion, Ramsey would have joined the chorus uproariously with the utmost blatancy of which his vocal apparatus was capable; and most of the other boys expressed their humour by drowning out the serious efforts of the girls; but he sang feebly, not much more than humming through his teeth. Standing beside Milla, he was incapable of his former inelegancies and his voice was in a semi-paralyzed condition, like the rest of him.
Opposite him, across the circle, Dora Yocum stood a little in advance of those near her, for of course she led the singing. Her clear and earnest voice was distinguishable from all others, and though she did not glance toward Ramsey he had a queer feeling that she was assuming more superiority than ever, and that she was icily scornful of him and Milla. The old resentment rose—he'd “show” that girl yet, some day!
When the song was over, cheers were given for the class, “the good ole class of Nineteen Fourteen,” the school, the teachers, and for the picnic, thus officially concluded; and then the picnickers, carrying their baskets and faded wild flowers and other souvenirs and burdens, moved toward the big “express wagons” which were to take them back into the town. Ramsey got his guitar case, and turned to Milla.
“Well—” he said.
“Well what, Ramsey?”
“Well—g'bye.”
“Why, no,” said Milla. “Anyways not yet. You can go back in the same wagon with me. It's going to stop at the school and let us out there, and then you could walk home with me if you felt like it. You could come all the way to our gate with me, I expect, unless you'd be late home for your supper.”
“Well—well, I'd be perfectly willing,” Ramsey said. “Only I heard we all had to go back in whatever wagon we came out in, and I didn't come in the same wagon with you, so—”
Milla laughed and leaned toward him a little. “I already 'tended to that,” she said confidentially. “I asked Johnnie Fiske, that came out in my wagon, to go back in yours, so that makes room for you.”
“Well—then I guess I could do it.” He moved toward the wagon with her. “I expect it don't make much difference one way or the other.”
“And you can carry my basket if you want to,” she said, adding solicitously, “Unless it's too heavy when you already got your guitar case to carry, Ramsey.”
This thoughtfulness of hers almost overcame him; she seemed divine. He gulped, and emotion made him even pinker than he had been under the mayonnaise.
“I—I'll be glad to carry the basket, too,” he faltered. “It-it don't weigh anything much.”
“Well, let's hurry, so's we can get places together.”
Then, as she manoeuvred him through the little crowd about the wagon, with a soft push this way and a gentle pull that, and hurried him up the improvised steps and found a place where there was room for them to sit, Ramsey had another breathless sensation heretofore unknown to him. He found himself taken under a dovelike protectorship; a wonderful, inexpressible Being seemed to have become his proprietor.
“Isn't this just perfectly lovely?” she said cozily, close to his ear.
He swallowed, but found no words, for he had no thoughts; he was only an incoherent tumult. This was his first love.
“Isn't it, Ramsey?” she urged. The cozy voice had just the hint of a reproach. “Don't you think it's just perfectly lovely, Ramsey?”
“Yes'm.”
The next morning Ramsey came into his father's room while Mr. Milholland was shaving, an hour before church time, and it became apparent that the son had someting on his mind, though for a while he said nothing.
“Did you want anything, Ramsey?”
“Well—”
“Didn't want to borrow my razors?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Milholland chuckled. “I hardly supposed so, seriously! Shaving is a great nuisance and the longer you keep away from it, the better. And when you do, you let my razors alone, young feller!”
“Yes, sir.” (Mr. Milholland's razors were safe, Ramsey had already achieved one of his own, but he practised the art in secret.) He passed his hand thoughtfully over his cheeks, and traces of white powder were left upon his fingers, whereupon he wiped his hand surreptitiously, and stood irresolutely waiting.
“What is it you really want, Ramsey?”
“I guess I don't want anything.”
“Money?”
“No, sir. You gay' me some Friday.”
Mr. Milholland turned from his mirror and looked over the edge of a towel at his son. In the boy's eyes there was such a dumb agony of interrogation that the father was a little startled.
“Why, what is it, Ramsey? Have you—” He paused, frowning and wondering. “You haven't been getting into some mess you want to tell me about, have you?”
“No, sir.”
His tone was meek, but a mute distress lurked within it, bringing to the father's mind disturbing suspicions, and foreshadowings of indignation and of pity. “See here, Ramsey,” he said, “if there's anything you want to ask me, or to tell me, you'd better out with it and get it over. Now, what is it?”
“Well—it isn't anything.”
“Are yousure?”
Ramsey's eyes fell before the severe and piercing gaze of his father. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Milholland shook his head doubtfully; then, as his son walked slowly out of the room, he turned to complete his toilet in a somewhat uneasy frame of mind. Ramsey had undoubtedly wanted to say something to him and the boy's expression had shown that the matter in question was serious, distressing, and, it might be, even critical.
In fact it was—to Ramsey. Having begun within only the last few hours to regard haberdashery as of vital importance, and believing his father to be possessed of the experience and authority lacking in himself, Ramsey had come to get him to settle a question which had been upsetting him badly, in his own room, since breakfast. What he wanted to know was: Whether it was right to wear an extra handkerchief showing out of the coat breast pocket or not, and, if it was right—ought the handkerchief to have a coloured border or to be plain white? But he had never before brought any such perplexities to his father, and found himself too diffident to set them forth.
However, when he left the house, a few minutes later, he boldly showed an inch of purple border above the pocket; then, as he was himself about to encounter several old lady pedestrians, he blushed and thrust the handkerchief down into deep concealment. Having gone a block farther, he pulled it up again; and so continued to operate this badge of fashion, or unfashion, throughout the morning; and suffered a great deal thereby.
Meantime, his father, rather relieved that Ramsey had not told his secret, whatever it was, dismissed the episode from his mind and joined Mrs. Milholland at the front door, ready for church.
“Where's Ramsey?” he asked.
“He's gone ahead,” she answered, buttoning her gloves as they went along. “I heard the door quite a little while ago. Perhaps he went over to walk down with Charlotte and Vance. Did you notice how neat he looks this morning?”
“Why, no, I didn't; not particularly. Does he?”
“I never saw anything like it before,” said Mrs. Milholland. “He went down in the cellar and polished his own shoes.”
“What!”
“For about an hour, I think,” she said, as one remaining calm before a miracle. “And he only has three neckties, but I saw him several times in each of them. He must have kept changing and changing. I wonder—” She paused.
“I'm glad he's begun to take a little care of his appearance at last. Business men think a good deal about that, these days, when he comes to make his start in the world. I'll have to take a look at him and give him a word of praise. I suppose he'll be in the pew when we get there.”
But Ramsey wasn't in the pew; and Charlotte, his sister, and her husband, who were there, said they hadn't seen anything of him. It was not until the members of the family were on their way home after the services that they caught a glimpse of him.
They were passing a church a little distance from their own; here the congregation was just emerging to the open, and among the sedate throng descending the broad stone steps appeared an accompanied Ramsey—and a red, red Ramsey he was when he beheld his father and mother and sister and brother-in-law staring up at him from the pavement below. They were kind enough not to come to an absolute halt, but passed slowly on, so that he was just able to avoid parading up the street in front of them. The expressions of his father, mother, and sister were of a dumfoundedness painful to bear, while such lurking jocosity as that apparent all over his brother-in-law no dignified man should either exhibit or be called upon to ignore.
In hoarse whispers, Mrs. Milholland chided her husband for an exclamation he had uttered. “John! On Sunday! You ought to be ashamed.”
“I couldn't help it,” he exclaimed. “Who on earth is his clinging vine? Why, she's gotlavendertops on her shoes and—”
“Don't look round!” she warned him sharply. “Don't—”
“Well, what's he doing at a Baptist church? What's he fidgeting at his handkerchief about? Why can't he walk like people? Does he think it's obligatory to walk home from church anchored arm-in-arm like Swedes on a Sunday Out? Whoisthis cow-eyed fat girl that's got him, anyhow?”
“Hush! Don't look round again, John.”
“Never fear!” said her husband, having disobeyed. “They've turned off; they're crossing over to Bullard Street. Who is it?”
“I think her name's Rust,” Mrs. Milholland informed him. “I don't know what her father does. She's one of the girls in his class at school.”
“Well, that's just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take to church!”
“Oh, she's quite pretty—in that way!” said his wife, deprecatingly. “Of course that's the danger with public schools. It would be pleasanter if he'd taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle.”
“'Taken a fancy'!” he echoed, hooting. “Why, he's terrible! He looked like a red-gilled goldfish that's flopped itself out of the bowl. Why, he—”
“IsayI wish if he felt that he had to take girls anywhere,” said Mrs. Milholland, with the primmest air of speaking to the point—“if this sort of thingmustbegin, I wish he might have selected some nice girl among the daughters of our own friends, like Dora Yocum, for instance.”
Upon the spot she began to undergo the mortification of a mother who has expected her son, just out of infancy, to look about him with the eye of a critical matron of forty-five. Moreover, she was indiscreet enough to express her views to Ramsey, a week later, producing thus a scene of useless great fury and no little sound.
“I do think it's inverypoor taste to see so much of any one girl, Ramsey,” she said, and, not heeding his protest that he only walked home from school with Milla, “about every other day,” and that it didn't seem any crime to him just to go to church with her a couple o' times, Mrs. Milholland went on: “But if you think you reallymustbe dangling around somebody quite this much—though what in the world you find totalkabout with this funny little Milla Rust you poor father says he really cannot see—and of course it seems very queer to us that you'd be willing to waste so much time just now when your mind ought to be entirely on your studies, and especially with such an absurdlookinglittle thing—
“No, you must listen, Ramsey, and let me speak now. What I meant was that we shouldn't bequiteso much distressed by your being seen with a girl who dressed in better taste and seemed to have some notion of refinement, though of course it's only natural shewouldn't, with a father who is just a sort of ward politician, I understand, and a mother we don't know, and of course shouldn't care to. But, oh, Ramsey! if youhadto make yourself so conspicuous why couldn't you be a littlebitmore fastidious? Your father wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it had been a self-respecting, intellectual girl. We both say that if youmustbe so ridiculous at your age as to persist in seeing more of one girl than another, why, oh why, don't you go and see some really nice girl like Dora Yocum?”
Ramsey was already dangerously distended, as an effect of the earlier part of her discourse, and the word “fastidious” almost exploded him; but upon the climax, “Dora Yocum,” he blew up with a shattering report and, leaving fragments of incoherence ricocheting behind him, fled shuddering from the house.
For the rest of the school term he walked home with Milla every afternoon and on Sundays appeared to have become a resolute Baptist. It was supposed (by the interested members of the high-school class) that Ramsey and Milla were “engaged.” Ramsey sometimes rather supposed they were himself, and the dim idea gave him a sensation partly pleasant, but mostly apprehensive: he was afraid.
He was afraid that the day was coming when he ought to kiss her.
Vacation, in spite of increased leisure, may bring inconvenience to people in Ramsey's strange but not uncommon condition. At home his constant air was that of a badgered captive plaintively silent under injustice; and he found it difficult to reply calmly when asked where he was going—an inquiry addressed to him, he asserted, every time he touched his cap, even to hang it up!
The amount of evening walking he did must also have been a trial to his nerves, on account of fatigue, though the ground covered was not vast. Milla's mother and father were friendly people but saw no reason to “move out of house and home,” as Mr. Rust said, when Milla had “callers”; and on account of the intimate plan of their small dwelling a visitor's only alternative to spending the evening with Mr. and Mrs. Rust as well as with Milla, was to invite her to “go out walking.”
Evening after evening they walked and walked and walked, usually in company—at perhaps the distance of half a block—with Albert Paxton and Sadie Clews, though Ramsey now and then felt disgraced by having fallen into this class; for sometimes it was apparent that Albert casually had his arm about Sadie's waist. This allured Ramsey somewhat, but terrified him more. He didn't know how such matters were managed.
Usually the quartet had no destination; they just went “out walking” until ten o'clock, when both girls had to be home—and the boys did, too, but never admitted it. On Friday evenings there was a “public open-air concert” by a brass band in a small park, and the four were always there. A political speechmaker occupied the bandstand one night, and they stood for an hour in the midst of the crowd, listening vaguely.
The orator saddled his politics upon patriotism. “Do you intend to let this glorious country go to wrack and ruin, oh, my good friends,” he demanded, “or do you intend to save her? Look forth upon this country of ours, I bid you, oh, my countrymen, and tell me what you see. You see a fair domain of forest, mountain, plain, and fertile valleys, sweeping from ocean to ocean. Look from the sturdy rocks of old New England, pledged to posterity by the stern religious hardihood of the Pilgrim Fathers, across the corn-bearing midland country, that land of milk and honey, won for us by the pluck and endurance of the indomitable pioneers, to where in sunshine roll the smiling Sierras of golden California, given to our heritage by the unconquerable energy of those brave men and women who braved the tomahawk on the Great Plains, the tempest, of Cape Horn, and the fevers of Panama, to make American soil of El Dorado! America! Oh, my America, how glorious you stand! Country of Washington and Valley Forge, out of what martyrdoms hast thou arisen! Country of Lincoln in his box at Ford's theatre, his lifeblood staining to a brighter, holier red the red, white, and blue of the Old Flag! Always and always I see the Old Flag fluttering the more sacredly encrimsoned in the breeze for the martyrs who have upheld it! Always I see that Old Flag—”
Milla gave Ramsey's arm, within her own, a little tug. “Come on,” she said. “Sade says she don't want to hang around here any longer. It's awful tiresome. Let's go.”
He consented, placidly. The oration meant nothing to him and stirred no one in the audience. The orator was impassioned; he shouted himself into coughing fits, gesticulated, grew purple; he was so hot that his collar caved in and finally swooned upon his neck in soggy exhaustion, prostrate round his thunderings. Meanwhile, the people listened with an air of patience, yawning here and there, and gradually growing fewer. It was the old, old usual thing, made up of phrases that Ramsey had heard dinning away on a thousand such occasions, and other kinds of occasions, until they meant to him no more than so much sound. He was bored, and glad to leave.
“Kind o' funny,” he said, as they sagged along the street at their usual tortoise gait.
“What is it, Ramsey?”
“Seems kind o' funny they never have anything to say any one can take any interest in. Always the same ole whoopety-whoop about George Washington and Pilgrim Fathers and so on. I bet five dollars before long we'd of heard him goin' on about our martyred Presidents, William McKinley and James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison and all so on, and then some more about the ole Red, White, and Blue. Don't you wish they'dquit, sometimes, about the 'Ole Flag'?”
“I dunno,” said Milla. “I wasn't listening any at all. I hate speeches.”
“Well, I couldstand'em,” Ramsey said, more generously, “if they'd ever give anybody a little to think about. What's the use always draggin' in George Warshington and the Ole Flag? And who wants to hear any more ole truck about 'from ole rocky New England to golden California,' and how big and fine the United States is and how it's the land of the Free and all that? Why don't they ever say anything new? That's what I'd like to know.”
Milla laughed, and when he asked why, she told him she'd never heard him talk so much “at one stretch.” “I guess that speech got you kind of wound up,” she said. “Let's talk about something different.”
“I just soon,” he agreed. And so they walked on in silence, which seemed to suit Milla. She hung weightily upon his arm, and they dawdled, drifting from one side of the pavement to the other as they slowly advanced. Albert and Sadie, ahead of them, called “good-night” from a corner, before turning down the side street where Sadie lived; and then, presently, Ramsey and Milla were at the latter's gate. He went in with her, halting at the front steps.
“Well, g'night, Milla,” he said. “Want to go out walking to-morrow night? Albert and Sadie are.”
“I can't to-morrow night,” she told him with obvious regret. “Isn't it the worst luck! I got an aunt comin' to visit from Chicago, and she's crazy about playing 'Five Hundred,' and Mama and Papa said I haf to stay in to make four to play it. She's liable to be here three or four days, and I guess I got to be around home pretty much all the time she's here. It's the worst luck!”
He was doleful, but ventured to be literary. “Well, what can't be helped must be endured. I'll come around when she's gone.”
He moved as if to depart, but she still retained his arm and did not prepare to relinquish it.
“Well—” he said.
“Well what, Ramsey?”
“Well—g'night.”
She glanced up at the dark front of the house. “I guess the family's gone to bed,” she said, absently.
“I s'pose so.”
“Well, good-night, Ramsey.” She said this but still did not release his arm, and suddenly, in a fluster, he felt that the time he dreaded had come. Somehow, without knowing where, except that it was somewhere upon what seemed to be a blurred face too full of obstructing features, he kissed her.
She turned instantly away in the darkness, her hands over her cheeks; and in a panic Ramsey wondered if he hadn't made a dreadful mistake.
“S'cuse me!” he said, stumbling toward the gate. “Well, I guess I got to be gettin' along back home.”
He woke in the morning to a great self-loathing: he had kissed a girl. Mingled with the loathing was a curious pride in the very fact that caused the loathing, but the pride did not last long. He came downstairs morbid to breakfast, and continued this mood afterward. At noon Albert Paxton brought him a note which Milla had asked Sadie to ask Albert to give him.
Dearie: I am just wondering if you thought as much about something so sweet that happened last night as I did you know what. I think it was the sweetest thing. I send you one with this note and I hope you will think it is a sweet one. I would give you a real one if you were here now and I hope you would think it was sweeter still than the one I put in this note. It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours forever kiddo. If you come around about friday eve it will be all right. aunt Jess will be gone back home by then so come early and we will get Sade and Alb and go to the band Concert. Don't forget what I said about my putting something sweet in this note, and I hope you will think it is a sweet one but not as sweet as therealsweet one I would like to—
At this point Ramsey impulsively tore the note into small pieces. He turned cold as his imagination projected a sketch of his mother in the act of reading this missive, and of her expression as she read the sentence: “It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours forever kiddo.” He wished that Milla hadn't written “kiddo.” She called him that, sometimes, but in her warm little voice the word seemed not at all what it did in ink. He wished, too, that she hadn't said she was his forever.
Suddenly he was seized with a horror of her.
Moisture broke out heavily upon him; he felt a definite sickness, and, wishing for death, went forth upon the streets to walk and walk. He cared not whither, so that his feet took him in any direction away from Milla, since they were unable to take him away from himself—of whom he had as great a horror. Her loving face was continually before him, and its sweetness made his flesh creep. Milla had been too sweet.
When he met or passed people, it seemed to him that perhaps they were able to recognize upon him somewhere the marks of his low quality. “Softy! Ole sloppy fool!” he muttered, addressing himself. “Slushy ole mush!...Spooner!” And he added, “Yours forever, kiddo!” Convulsions seemed about to seize him.
Turning a corner with his head down, he almost charged into Dora Yocum. She was homeward bound from a piano lesson, and carried a rolled leather case of sheet music—something he couldn't imagine Milla carrying—and in her young girl's dress, which attempted to be nothing else, she looked as wholesome as cold spring water. Ramsey had always felt that she despised him and now, all at once, he thought that she was justified. Leper that he had become, he was unworthy to be even touching his cap to her! And as she nodded and went briskly on, he would have given anything to turn and walk a little way with her, for it seemed to him that this might fumigate his morals. But he lacked the courage, and, besides, he considered himself unfit to be seen walking with her.
He had a long afternoon of anguishes, these becoming most violent when he tried to face the problem of his future course toward Milla. He did not face it at all, in fact, but merely writhed, and had evolved nothing when Friday evening was upon him and Milla waiting for him to take her to the “band concert” with “Alb and Sade.” In his thoughts, by that time, this harmless young pair shared the contamination of his own crime, and he regarded them with aversion; however, he made shift to seek a short interview with Albert, just before dinner.
“I got a pretty rotten headache, and my stomach's upset, too,” he said, drooping upon the Paxton's fence. “I been gettin' worse every minute. You and Sadie go by Milla's, Albert, and tell her if I'm not there by ha'-pas'-seven, tell her not to wait for me any longer.”
“How do you mean 'wait'?” Albert inquired. “You don't expect her to come pokin' along with Sadie and me, do you? She'll keep on sittin' there at home just the same, because she wouldn't have anything else to do, if you don't come like she expects you to. She hasn't got any way tostopwaitin'!”
At this, Ramsey moaned, without affectation. “I don't expect Ican, Albert,” he said. “I'd like to if I could, but the way it looks now, you tell her I wouldn't be much surprised maybe I was startin' in with typhoid fever or pretty near anything at all. You tell her I'm pretty near as disappointed as she's goin' to be herself, and I'd come if I could—and Iwillcome if I get a good deal better, or anything—but the way it's gettin' to look now, I kind o' feel as if I might be breaking out with something any minute.” He moved away, concluding, feebly: “I guess I better crawl on home, Albert, while I'm still able to walk some. You tell her the way it looks now I'm liable to be right sick.”
And the next morning he woke to the chafings of remorse, picturing a Milla somewhat restored in charm waiting hopefully at the gate, even after half-past seven, and then, as time passed and the sound of the distant horns came faintly through the darkness, going sadly to her room—perhaps weeping there. It was a picture to wring him with shame and pity, but was followed by another which electrified him, for out of school he did not lack imagination. What if Albert had reported his illness too vividly to Milla? Milla was so fond! What if, in her alarm, she should come here to the house to inquire of his mother about him? What if she told Mrs. Milholland they were “engaged”? The next moment Ramsey was projecting a conversation between his mother and Milla in which the latter stated that she and Ramsey were soon to be married; that she regarded him as already virtually her husband, and demanded to nurse him.
In a panic he fled from the house before breakfast, going out by way of a side door, and he crossed back yards and climbed back fences to reach Albert Paxton the more swiftly. This creature, a ladies' man almost professionally, was found exercising with an electric iron and a pair of flannel trousers in a basement laundry, by way of stirring his appetite for the morning meal.
“See here, Albert,” his friend said breathlessly. “I got a favour. I want you to go over to Milla's—”
“I'm goin' to finish pressin' these trousers,” Albert interrupted. “Then I've got my breakfast to eat.”
“Well, you could do this first,” said Ramsey, hurriedly. “It wouldn't hurt you to do me this little favour first. You just slip over and see Milla for me, if she's up yet, and if she isn't, you better wait around there till she is, because I want you to tell her I'm a whole lot better this morning. Tell her I'm pretty near practick'ly all right again, Albert, and I'll prob'ly write her a note or something right soon—or in a week or so, anyhow. You tell her—”
“Well, you act pretty funny!” Albert exclaimed, fumbling in the pockets of his coat. “Why can't you go on over and tell her yourself?”
“I would,” said Ramsey. “I'd be perfectly willing to go only I got to get back home to breakfast.”
Albert stared. “Well, I got to go upstairs and eat my own breakfast in about a minute, haven't I? But just as it happens there wouldn't be any use your goin' over there, or me, either.”
“Why not?”
“Milla ain't there,” said Albert, still searching the pockets of his coat. “When we went by her house last night to tell her about your headache and stomach and all, why, her mother told us Milla'd gone up to Chicago yesterday afternoon with her aunt, and said she left a note for you, and she said if you were sick I better take it and give it to you. I was goin' to bring it over to your house after breakfast.” He found it. “Here!”
Ramsey thanked him feebly, and departed in a state of partial stupefaction, brought on by a glimpse of the instabilities of life. He had also, not relief, but a sense of vacancy and loss; for Milla, out of his reach, once more became mysteriously lovely.
Pausing in an alley, he read her note.
Dearie: Thought I ought to call you up but over the 'phone is just nix for explanations as Mama and Aunt Jess would hear everything and thought I might seem cold to you not saying anything sweet on account of them listening and you would wonder why I was so cold when telling you good-by for a wile maybe weeks. It is this way Uncle Purv wired Aunt Jess he has just taken in a big touring car on a debt and his vacation starts to-morrow so if they were going to take a trip they better start right way so Aunt Jess invited me. It is going to be a big trip up around the lakes and I have always wanted to go touring more than anything in the world stopping at hotels and all and Mama said I ought to it would be so splendid for my health as she thinks I am failing some lately. Now dearie I have to pack and write this in a hurry so you will not be disappointed when you come by for the B. C. to-night. Do not go get some other girl and take her for I would hate her and nothing in this world make me false for one second to my kiddo boy. I do not know just when home again as the folks think I better stay up there for a visit at Aunt Jess and Uncle Purvs home in Chicago after the trip is over. But I will think of you all the time and you must think of me every minute and believe your own dearie she will never no not for one second be false. So tell Sade and Alb good-by for me and do not be false to me any more than I would be to you and it will not be long till nothing more will interrupt our sweet friendship.
As a measure of domestic prudence, Ramsey tore the note into irreparable fragments, but he did this slowly, and without experiencing any of the revulsion created by Milla's former missive.
He was melancholy, aggrieved that she should treat him so.
He never saw her again. She sent him a “picture postal” from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, which his father disengaged from the family mail, one morning at breakfast, and considerately handed to him without audible comment. Upon it was written,“Oh, you Ramsey!”This was the last of Milla.
Just before school opened, in the autumn, Sadie Clews made some revelations. “Milla did like you,” said Sadie. “After that time you jumped in the creek to save her she liked you better than any boy in town, and I guess if it wasn't for her cousin Milt up in Chicago she would of liked you the best anywhere. I guess she did, anyway, because she hadn't seen him for about a year then.
“Well, that afternoon she went away I was over there and took in everything that was goin' on, only she made me promise on my word of honour I wouldn't even tell Albert. They didn't get any wire from her uncle about the touring car; it was her cousin Milt that jumped on the train and came down and fixed it all up for Milla to go on the trip, and everything. You see, Ramsey, she was turned back a couple of times in school before she came in our class and I don't exactly know how old she is and she don'tlookold yet, but I'm pretty sure she's at least eighteen, and she might be over. Her mother kept tellin' her all the time you were just a kid, and didn't have anything to support her on, and lots of things like that. I didn't think such a great deal of this Milt's looks, myself, but he's anyway twenty-one years old, and got a good position, and all their family seem to think he's just fine! It wasn't his father that took in the touring car on debt, like she said she was writing to you; it was Milt himself. He started out in business when he was only fifteen years old, and this trip he was gettin' up for his father and mother and Milla was the first vacation he ever took. Well, of course she wouldn't like my tellin' you, but I can't see the harm of it, now everything's all over.”
“All—all over? You mean Milla's going to be—to be married?”
“She already is,” said Sadie. “They got married at her Aunt Jess and Uncle Purv's house, up in Chicago, last Thursday. Yes, sir; that quiet little Milla's a regular old married woman by this time, I expect, Ramsey!”
When he got over the shock, which was not until the next day, one predominating feeling remained: it was a gloomy pride—a pride in his proven maturity. He was old enough, it appeared, to have been the same thing as engaged to a person who was now a Married Woman. His manner thenceforth showed an added trace of seriousness and self-consideration.
Having recovered his equipoise and something more, he entirely forgot that moment of humble admiration he had felt for Dora Yocum on the day of his flattest prostration. When he saw her sitting in the classroom, smiling brightly up at the teacher, the morning of the school's opening in the autumn, all his humility had long since vanished and she appeared to him not otherwise than as the scholar whose complete proficiency had always been so irksome to him.
“Look at her!” he muttered to himself. “Same ole Teacher's Pet!”
Now and then, as the days and seasons passed, and Dora's serene progress continued, never checked or even flawed, there stirred within some lingerings of the old determination to “show” her; and he would conjure up a day-dream of Dora in loud lamentation, while he led the laughter of the spectators. But gradually his feelings about her came to be merely a dull oppression. He was tired of having to look at her (as he stated it) and he thanked the Lord that the time wouldn't be so long now until he'd be out of that ole school, and then all he'd have to do he'd just take care never to walk by her house; it was easy enough to use some other street when he had to go down-town.
“The good ole class of Nineteen-Fourteen is about gone,” he said to Fred Mitchell, who was still his most intimate friend when they reached the senior year. “Yes, sir; it's held together a good many years, Fred, but after June it'll be busted plum up, and I hope nobody starts a move to have any reunions. There's a good many members of the ole class that I can stand and there's some I can't, but there's one I just won't! If we ever did call a reunion, that ole Yocum girl would start in right away and run the whole shebang, and that's where I'd resign! You know, Fred, the thingIthink is the one biggest benefit of graduating from this ole school? It's never seein' Dora Yocum again.”
This was again his theme as he sat by the same friend's side, in the rear row of the class at Commencement, listening to the delivery of the Valedictory. “Thinks she's just sooblime, don't she!” he whispered morosely. “She wouldn't trade with the President of the United States right now. She prob'ly thinks bein' Valedictorian is more important than Captain of the State University Eleven. Never mind!” And here his tone became huskily jubilant. “Never mind! Just about a half-an-hour more and that's the last o'you, ole girl! Yes, sir, Fred; one thing we can feel pretty good over: this is where we get through with Dora Yocum!”
Ramsey and Fred had arranged to room together at Greenfield, the seat of the state university, and they made the short journey in company the following September. They arrived hilarious, anticipating pleasurable excitements in the way of “fraternity” pledgings and initiations, encounters with sophomores, class meetings, and elections; and, also, they were not absolutely without interest in the matter of Girls, for the state university was co-educational, and it was but natural to expect in so broad a field, all new to them, a possible vision of something rather thrilling. They whispered cheerfully of all these things during the process of matriculation, and signed the registrar's book on a fresh page; but when Fred had written his name under Ramsey's, and blotted it, he took the liberty of turning over the leaf to examine some of the autographs of their future classmates, written on the other side. Then he uttered an exclamation, more droll than dolorous, though it affected to be wholly the latter; for the shock to Fred was by no means so painful as it was to his friend.
Ramsey leaned forward and read the name indicated by Fred's forefinger.
Dora Yocum.
...When they got back to their pleasant quarters at Mrs. Meig's, facing the campus, Ramsey was still unable to talk of anything except the lamentable discovery; nor were his companion's burlesquing efforts to console him of great avail, though Fred did become serious enough to point out that a university was different from a high school.
“It's not like havin' to use one big room as a headquarters, you know, Ramsey. Everything's all split up, and she might happen not to be in a single of your classes.”
“You don't know my luck!” the afflicted boy protested. “I wish I'd gone to Harvard, the way my father wanted me to. Why, this is just the worst nuisance I ever struck! You'll see! She'll be in everything there is, just the way she was back home.”
He appeared to be corroborated by the events of the next day, when they attended the first meeting to organize the new class. The masculine element predominated, but Dora Yocum was elected vice-president. “You see?” Ramsey said. “Didn't I tell you? You see what happens?”
But after that she ceased for a time to intrude upon his life, and he admitted that his harassment was less grave than he had anticipated. There were about five hundred students in the freshman class; he seldom saw her, and when he did it was not more than a distant glimpse of her on one of the campus paths, her thoughtful head bent over a book as she hurried to a classroom. This was bearable; and in the flattering agitations of being sought, and even hunted, by several “fraternities” simultaneously desirous of his becoming a sworn Brother, he almost forgot her. After a hazardous month the roommates fell into the arms of the last “frat” to seek them, and having undergone an evening of outrage which concluded with touching rhetoric and an oath taken at midnight, they proudly wore jewelled symbols on their breasts and were free to turn part of their attention to other affairs, especially the affairs of the Eleven.
However, they were instructed by the older brethren of their Order, whose duty it was to assist in the proper manoeuvring of their young careers, that, although support of the 'varsity teams was important, they must neglect neither the spiritual nor the intellectual by-products of undergraduate doings. Therefore they became members of the college Y.M.C.A. and of the “Lumen Society.”
According to the charter which it had granted itself, the “Lumen Society” was an “Organization of male and female students”—so “advanced” was this university—“for the development of the powers of debate and oratory, intellectual and sociological progress, and the discussion of all matters relating to philosophy, metaphysics, literature, art, and current events.” A statement so formidable was not without a hushing effect upon Messrs. Milholland and Mitchell; they went to their first “Lumen” meeting in a state of fear and came away little reassured.
“I couldn't get up there,” Ramsey declared, “I couldn't stand up there before all that crowd and make a speech, or debate in a debate, to save my soul and gizzard! Why, I'd just keel right over and haf to be carried out.”
“Well, the way I understand it,” said Fred, “we can't get out of it. The seniors in the 'frat' said we had to join, and they said we couldn't resign, either, after we had joined. They said we just had to go through it, and after a while we'd get used to it and not mind it much.”
“Iwill!” Ramsey insisted. “I couldn't any more stand up there on my feet and get to spoutin' about sociology and the radical metempsychorus of the metaphysical bazoozum than I could fly a flyin' machine. Why, I—”
“Oh, that wasn't anything,” Fred interrupted. “The only one that talked like that, he was that Blickens; he's a tutor, or something, and really a member of the faculty. Most o' the others just kind of blah-blahhed around, and what any of 'em tried to get off their chests hardly amounted to terribly much.”
“I don't care. I couldn't do it atall!”
“Well, the way it looks to me,” Fred observed, “we simplygotto! From what they tell me, the freshmen got to do more than anybody. Every other Friday night, it's all freshmen and nothin' else. You get a postal card on Monday morning in your mail, and it says 'Assignment' on it, and then it's got written underneath what you haf to do the next Friday night—oration or debate, or maybe just read from some old book or something. I guess we got to stand up there andtry, anyway.”
“All right,” said Ramsey. “If they want me to commit suicide they can send me one o' their ole 'Assignments.' I won't need to commit suicide, though, I guess. All I'll do, I'll just fall over in a fit, and stay in it.”
And, in truth, when he received his first “Assignment,” one Monday morning, a month later, he seemed in a fair way to fulfil his prophecy. The attention of his roommate, who sat at a window of their study, was attracted by sounds of strangulation.
“What on earth's the matter, Ramsey?”
“Look! Look atthis!”
Fred took the card and examined it with an amazement gradually merging into a pleasure altogether too perceptible:
ASSIGNMENT
TWELVE-MINUTE DEBATE, CLASS OF 1918.Subject, Resolved:That Germany is both legally and morally justified in her invasion of Belgium.
(Debaters are notified that each will be held strictly to the following schedule: Affirmative, 4 min., first. Negative, 4 min., first. Affirm, 2 min., second. Neg., 2 min., second.)
Affirmative Negative R. MILHOLLAND, '18 D. YOCUM, '18
Concluding his reading, which was oral, the volatile Mitchell made use of his voice in a manner of heathenish boisterousness, and presently reclined upon a lounge to laugh the better. His stricken comrade, meanwhile, recovered so far as to pace the floor. “I'm goin' to pack up and light out for home!” he declared, over and over. And even oftener he read and reread the card to make sure of the actuality of that fatal coincidence, “D. Yocum, '18.”