CHAPTER XTHE SEX
In the summer of 1904, the Methodist Sunday school held a picnic six miles up the river. It was a popular place for picnics,—a glen sloping down to a bathing beach, roofed with tall hemlocks and cut off from the road by a level meadow that made an excellent ball field.
Nathan’s father had no grudge against picnics, at least Sunday-school picnics. But he did resent the dangerous mingling and flagrant propinquity of the sexes which such affairs occasioned. So Johnathan, not being able to attend the picnic himself and “keep an eye” on the boy, prohibited him the outing altogether. Girls—slathers of girls—would attend and lead Nat’s feet into paths of wickedness and byways that were vile. Johnathan had to go to Williams Falls and “see about a position” which had been “offered” him at more money than he was making in the cobbler shop. But Nathan’s mother, half in pique at John and half in distressed mother-love at the bitterness of her boy’s disappointment, told him to go ahead and enjoy the picnic and if his father said anything on his return, she would pay the piper.
Bernie Gridley’s father cared nothing about picnics, even though he was a deacon in the church. The Duchess expected to attend merely to chaperone Bernice. But at the last moment the 8:10 train pulled into the Paris station with Gridley relatives. So the Duchess had to consign Bernice-Theresa to the watchful care of a much harassed and overworked Sunday-school teacher who later had a beau herself. Nathan and the little Gridley girl became babes in the wood. They needed no encouragement to make the most of their opportunity.
It was one of those perfect August days of which young men write sonnets and older men compose symphonies. Thesky gave no suggestion of the thunderstorm which was to come at three o’clock, interrupt the ball game, send the picnickers scurrying to cover and leave the world washed afterward in moist and golden glory.
There is small space here for a detailed account of that day’s program, the sports or the luncheon or the minor mishaps or the shower or the return homeward afterward by moonlight. Only a brief record of a tryst which Nathan and I kept with two little girls off in leafy woods.
A path led from the grove over the hill to the northward. Knee-high with vagrant grass, bordered by white birches, poplars and brambles, it wound into the thickest, quietest part of that forest which once stretched from the Paris town line to Center Wickford. We had not been in the grove an hour before Nathan came dodging excitedly through the crowd. He caught my arm and drew me aside.
“I’ve seen Bernie and Elinore!” he cried feverishly, Bernie being about all the picnic meant for him, anyhow. “Her Ma couldn’t come and she’s all alone. She says let’s go way off up the woods and eat our dinners together, just us four! Oh, gee, Billy, what a chance—what a chance!”
“Chance for what?” I demanded.
My friend was crestfallen.
“Why—why—to just be with ’em all day—and perhaps we can kiss ’em——!” He added this last in a whisper.
“Oh, hake! I got sumpin’ on my mind besides always kissin’ girls. I wanner see the sports and try for a prize!” But he persuaded me.
Nathan carried his luncheon under his arm in a paper. Already it was misshapen and greasy with handling. Some boys had pushed it from his grasp and used it as a football. It consisted of three very fatty doughnuts and some thick slices of soggy, indigestible oatmeal bread with equally indigestible chunks of hard cheese between them. This he proposed to open in front of Bernie. It made me nervous.
Shortly before twelve o’clock, therefore, we slipped away from the prosaic rabble and followed two bareheaded, beribboned coquettes up the woods road. And by processes and maneuvers which would only be recognizable by boys, Nathan ultimately found himself carrying Bernie’s daintylunch basket and I had become the personal knight and escort of the Carver girl.
Elinore and I loitered behind, of course with deliberation and premeditation, and Bernie and Nathan disappeared over the top of the hill. And we saw not one another again until the day was far spent and we were forced by sunset to come forth from Avalon.
The Gridley girl affected to be “mad” a goodly portion of that setting-out and had to be coddled and entreated and coaxed persistently to tell the cause of her distemper. By the time it had been negotiated, restraint and bashfulness had disappeared. Thereupon the Gridley girl exercised the prerogatives of Eve’s daughters since the flood, called upon the Forge boy to fetch and carry, to suffer her idiosyncrasies and foibles, to become deliriously happy or excruciatingly miserable as she persisted in references to a future in which the Forge boy did or did not have a part. And so in due course they came to a far woodland brook that trickled musically over mossy stones. The pines grew silent and lofty here. The banks were strewn with needles. A trout pool milled with the sluggishness of deep water a few yards beyond an overhanging bowlder. The Gridley girl at once commented upon its excellence as a place in which to lunch. “It’s so awful private” was the way she put it. So they sat down. And the water babbled past them into eternity.
What mattered it that the Forge boy’s hair curled long and uncut behind his ears; that he wore a suit his father had shined by prior use to waxen smoothness; that his face still retained at least twelve thousand of the original thirty thousand freckles; that his collar was wrinkled and his shoes were dusty? The Poet lay at the feet of his Inspiration and all the world was fair.
What mattered it also that their talk was of silly nothings and what they spoke or did was forgotten almost as soon as said or done? The boy had a girl of topaz eyes off alone in leafy woods and all the clocks of time ran down.
“I’m sorry I tried to kiss you that night in the vestry,” the boy blurted out. He was lying on his chest, pegginghis knife in the needles. “I felt awful when your father came down and caught me——”
The girl turned her face in amazement.
“Kiss me!” she said faintly. “Was that what you were up to?”
“Why, yes! Didn’t you know?”
“I thought you were fooling—that you jumped out to scare me.”
Each colored dully and looked away. The girl’s hat was tossed carelessly at one side. She sat with her chubby arms clasped about her knees.
“Well, I was tryin’,” confessed Nathan nervously.
“But for the land’s sake, why make such an awful job of it? You almost knocked me over.”
“There wasn’t any other way I could do it. My folks never let me go to kissin’ parties or things like that.”
Silence ensued. Then the precocious, oversexed little lady, several years older in worldly wisdom, picked apart a near-by star-flower as she observed coyly:
“You must have wanted to kiss me awful bad to go to all that trouble to do it.”
“I guess I did, Bernie.”
“Then why don’t you make a good job of it—now? There’s no one here to stop you, is there?”
The world reeled. Nathan grew giddy.
“Aw, go on!” he cackled. “You’re only foolin’!”
“You might try and see—if you weren’t so awfully slow. That’s mostly the trouble with you, Nathan—you’re slow!”
“And you won’t be mad——?”
“What if I am? A girl always loves the man who does things he wants, whether she gets mad or not.” Bernie had secured this sort of thing undoubtedly from her mother’s Pansy Series.
The boy’s embarrassment was so great that Bernice reached her hand out to him, a soft, damp hand, though she looked in the opposite direction. He took the hand, timidly at first, and considered it as Adam considered the Apple.
He sat up beside her with a tremendous yawn, as though he had lain too long and would change his position. As for the girl, she was a bit frightened, white-faced. But an atavism in her blood was militant. She was afraid and yet she wasn’t afraid. Any woman might explain it.
“Aw, can I really kiss you, Bernie?”
“I said so, didn’t I? And if you’re goin’ to do it, for pity’s sake, hurry up!”
He leaned over and kissed her on a peach-blown cheek, searing hot and zero cold by turns. And no more chaste kiss was ever given The Sex.
But Bernie responded in a way that Nathan never forgot. She turned her face, her nostrils breathed into his own, she kissed him—once!—twice!—three times!—heavy, impulsive, lumberous kisses, squarely on his mouth.
The Forge boy wanted to flee or wanted to cry; he couldn’t quite decide which. And because he couldn’t decide he stayed where he was and waited for the rocking hysteria of reaction to pass.
“Let’s—let’s—do it again,” the girl suggested, as the boy sat stiffly, vaguely remembering something about the eye of God being upon the sinner even in the wilderness.
They went through that ecstasy again and again. And astounding to record, the boy suddenly leaned over with his face on his arm.
“Natie Forge! What in the world is the matter?” cried the stupefied girl.
“Dunno,” said the lad. “But somehow I feel we oughtn’t.”
“Well, I like that! Why oughtn’t we?”
“Dunno. And besides—it hurts!”
“Hurts? What hurts?”
“Didn’t you never have anything happen to you that felt so good it hurt?”
“Well, you are a queer one!”
“I know. That’s what Pa’s always sayin’! And—and—everybody. I wish I wasn’t!”
“Here I let you kiss me as much as you want and you make me feel as if I was doin’ sumpin’ wicked. Nathan Forge—I’m mad! I never want to speak to you again!”
“Aw, don’t be mad, Bernie. I didn’t mean nothin’! Honest!”
“Mother always said you were a yokel. I don’t know what it means but you are one, all right.”
Under her exasperation the Dresden Doll was furious. She had lowered the lattice of her modesty and knew it perfectly. A crass boy was vaguely sounding a warning.
The quarrel was patched up somehow and they ate theirlunch, at least they ate Bernie’s lunch. For when the Dresden Doll removed the cover from her dainty repast, an awful qualm smote Nathan at the coarseness of his own. With the subtlety of a boy, Nathan managed to push his package off the bank into the brook. When Bernie squealed a warning, the boy fell clumsily in his efforts to recover. So it floated away downstream, out of sight and certainly out of the possibility of humiliating mastication. Thereat Nathan affected to be both regretful and indifferent. He declared he could subsist till supper without luncheon. The Israelites fasted for forty days, didn’t they, and remained alive? But Bernie prevailed upon him that she had enough in her basket for half a dozen boys. So they ate their meal together, eyes averted.
It was early afternoon when the girl suddenly cried:
“Do you know what I’d like to do? For once in my life without Mother to say ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ I’d like to paddle in this brook as if I was common, and like vulgar children.”
“You might fall in and get your clothes wet and have to go home all drenched and slithery.”
“But you could take off your shoes and stockings and let me hold your hand!”
Nathan demurred. He could not have explained just why. But the girl was not to be denied. She laughed at his discomfiture, sat down near the water’s edge, removed her pretty buckled slippers, peeled off her lisle stockings, rolled up her underclothing. Then she waded—timidly at first—out into the brook, squealing with delight. And she pulled her skirts higher and higher. Finally she had them above her dimpled knees.
From his place on the bank, Nathan watched her and yet tried not to watch her. Much of the real Bernice, down underneath her mother’s affectation and snobbery, was revealed that day in the extravagance of her kisses and the bold display of her limbs.
Four short years later Bernice Gridley was a mother. So it was more than a child’s sexless figure displayed to young Nathan that day. The boy’s nerves began cutting strange capers. Across forehead and chest was a queer, constricted feeling.
The girl kicked and shrieked and played in the water.She called upon Nathan to follow. But the perturbed boy, discovering for the first time that his physical being was a thing apart from himself, tried to behave indifferently, interest himself in something else. For him the girl—all girls—changed again with that experience. Bernice was no longer a fellow human, a playmate, even some one to be kissed deliciously.
Bernice laughed when she beheld the perturbation she was causing. Secretly she exulted. It was the first time she had been privileged to thus test her physical charm maliciously.
But more than the disclosure of the Gridley girl’s limbs was in store for Nathan that afternoon. Bernice splashed in the water until she slipped and fell. With a wild scream and a tremendous plunge, she went down and for a sickening moment the water eddied over her.
Nathan was in the brook at once. He clutched at Bernie’s dress before she could be carried out into the greater depth. Unmindful of himself, he got his arms beneath her. With the panic-stricken girl gasping and choking, he lifted her and carried her back to shore.
The water made her lacy clothing sinuous about her body.
“I’m wet—wet—wet to the s-s-skin!” she chattered, as she tried to pull her sloppy skirts about her limbs—velvety limbs, now ruddy with the shock of the water. “Oh, what will I do—whatever will I do?”
“Guess by the looks of the sky, both of us is goin’ to get still wetter before we leave,” Nathan managed. “We’re goin’ to have a nawful shower. Listen!”
In the high northwest the thunderheads had been piled up. A few moments later the storm broke. Boy and girl were immediately soaked to the last inch of their frightened, quivering bodies. That thunderstorm saved Bernice a bad piece of explanation when she finally entered the home of her parents that evening.
The thunder rattled and clacked furiously about the heavens. The great drops of rain pelted the forest foliage and surface of the brook like bullets. And huddled side by side under a tree, Nathan and Bernie drew close together and covered their heads as best they could with Nathan’s coat.
The girl gripped the boy hysterically when the thunder bowled loudest. The boy was badly frightened himself but he strove to comfort her. And through it all he sensed her soft, vibrant, rain-soaked body and the abyss of sex opened wider and wider.
The storm finally ended, the clouds parted, the thunder moved off muttering to the southwest. A radiant sun broke through. Bernice seated herself in its invigorating warmth. She removed the bedraggled ribbons and shook down her straw-colored hair. Barefooted and nude of limb still, she recovered her composure and began to make light of the incident. But Nathan was thoughtful.
“You act as if you were afraid of me,” Bernice cried petulantly.
The boy sat apart, beating a stick intermittently on the leaves.
“Aw, I ain’t afraid,” he laughed nervously, there being few things less pitiful than a boy striving to affect the sophistication he knows he lacks.
“Then what’s the matter with you? Have I done anything ‘specially wicked?”
“No! You ain’t done nothin’ wrong, I guess.”
But they stole forth, back down the woods road as Adam and Eve must have stolen from the Garden.
Just before they emerged into the clearing, Bernice turned. She clutched Nathan’s coat.
“Don’t you ever tell I took off my shoes and stockings!” she commanded. “Promise me! And don’t you dare break your promise!”
The boy agreed readily enough.
“And now, Nathan Forge,” she said, with a subtle glance around, “kiss me! Just once more. For the last time! A good one!”
But when the boy complied, his face burned. In the kiss he sensed no ecstasy.
He went out to the picnic grounds to run directly into the clutches of his father.
“Where have you been?” Johnathan demanded ominously. The whipcords of his neck stood out in anger.
“Nowhere,” whimpered Nathan. “Just over in the woods.”
“I’m told you’ve been missing all day.”
The boy’s face held the story.
“Have you been alone?”
“N-N-No!”
“Who’s been with you?”
“Billy!”
“And who else?”
The boy hesitated. It was hard to lie. But his little sister piped up shrilly:
“Bernie Gridley and Elinore Carver’s been with ’em! I seen ’em go!”
“Is this so?” demanded Johnathan.
“Yes,” confessed the boy boldly.
“You’ve been—off in the woods—with a girl—all day?”
“Yes, sir!”
“In spite of all that I’ve warned you?”
“Yes, sir!”
Johnathan reached out and lifted his terror-paralyzed son in his wrath.
“You march home!” he commanded. “We’ll see about this! What are you doing here at the picnic, anyhow, when I said you couldn’t come?”
“Ma said I could.”
“But what did I say to you?”
“You said—I couldn’t.”
“Then you deliberately disobeyed there, also?”
“But Ma said——”
“Never mind what your mother said. You don’t do what your mother says. You do what I say! March!”
The worst part of that whole picnic-day episode wasn’t the humiliation before all the boys and girls and particularly Bernie, nor the thrashing that followed. It was that his mother had promised immunity, to defend him, to “pay the piper” and did not keep her word.
Johnathan Forge got his boy home, took him out in the woodshed and ordered him to strip to his pelt. Before the flogging began, he prolonged the terror by coddling the weapon of assault—a couple of feet of stiff harness tug—talking to it, explaining to it how he had told his boy tostay away from the picnic and “his boy” had disobeyed; how he had been told to always keep away from girls and had disobeyed there also. Then he laid it on.
Sordid all this to recount? As well delineate Johnathan thrashing his boy around the calendar and be done with it. But it was a matter of principle with Johnathan. He was responsible for his boy’s soul to God. The Bible said so.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
Nathan lay on his bed that night with his arms behind his head and stared up into the dark.
Moment by moment he lived that galaxy of sylvan love over. Branded as with searing iron into his brain was the picture of Bernice Gridley knee-deep in the brook water, or as he had laid her down on the hemlock needles when he had subsequently rescued her.
“I’ve got to marry her! I’ve got to marry her right off,” he told himself. “Grandfather Forge married at sixteen, he said so; and Grandma Forge was only fourteen. That’s only two years older’n me, and what’s two years? I’ll ask her! I’ll ask her to-morrow.”
And the poor young ass did.
It was down along the path through the Haskell meadow,—the “short cut” from Matthews Court to Windsor Street. It was by accident he encountered the girl but he stopped her.
“Marry you! Marry you!” she choked. “I think you’re raving crazy. I’m not old enough to marry anybody. Besides, I’m mad at you, anyhow!”
“What for, Bernie?”
“You broke your promise! You tattled about me going into the water.”
“I did not!”
“You did!”
“You can’t prove it!”
“Well, somebody did and it might as well been you! Besides, last night I dreamed you did—and that settles it.”
“But I can’t help what you dream!”
“Well, I’m mad, anyhow. You haven’t the backbone ofa fish! You let your father jaw you, right there in sight of everybody.”
“Could I help it? He’s bigger’n me. And besides, he’s my father.”
“If my father dared to jaw me like that in front of everybody I’d—I’d—I’d get a gun and I’d shoot him dead! I told you that before.”
“I hate him as much as I love you, Bernie. At the same time, I can’t kill him.”
“Well, you wanted to know why I won’t marry you and I’m telling you. Besides, who’d marry us?”
“We could run away, Bernie. I could tell some minister we’re older than we are. You could get some of your mother’s long dresses perhaps and I’m puttin’ on long pants next week anyhow——”
“And who’d support us?”
“I’ve reached man’s estate. I’m going to work next week, anyhow. If I’ve reached man’s estate and am going to work and earn money, I’ve got a right to have the things a man has—a wife, for instance!”
“Where are you going to work?”
“In—in—your father’s tannery. And if I’ve got a wife, maybe my father will let me have my own money for myself. He’ll have to! The law’d make him——”
“Well of all things! Nathan Forge! And do you think I’d marry a man who worked in a smelly tannery?”
“Your father does!”
“My father owns it. It’s different. Now I know you’re crazy! I bet your father hit you over the head and made you crazy! I’ve heard of such things. And if you don’t get out of my way I’m going to scream!”
“Bernie—don’t go off mad! I ain’t crazy, Bernie——”
“When I get married it’s going to be a millionaire. And he’s not going to dress like a tramp, or go around with freckles, or need a hair-cut, or be so slow when I let him kiss me he makes me feel I was doing something wicked.”
“Bernie—you said in your letters you l-l-loved me! You said——”
“Oh, can’t you take a joke? That was just for fun, and besides, we aren’t grown up so it didn’t mean anything, anyhow!”
“You were only foolin’?”
“Well, I didn’t suppose you’d take it serious—in such a foolish way as this. Why, my father would horsewhip you if he even dreamed you’d asked such a thing.”
“Bernie—you aren’t—you aren’t—playing fair.”
“Well, a girl doesn’t have to play fair—if she doesn’t want. Anyhow, you’re not the boy I’d marry even if we were grown up. You aren’t handsome! You’re nothing but an ordinary little freckle-faced frump.”
“Then why—did you let—me kiss you——”
“Oh, just because I liked it. And even so, you didn’t care enough to come with me into the water and save me from getting all wet. And—and—I hate you and I’m going to Rutland to spend the summer next week and then I’m going to private school down to Mt. Hadley in the fall. My mother said so. She heard about what happened at the picnic. She said I wasn’t going to stay around Paris and get mixed up with the son of any village cobbler. I’m too high-class. Now you get out of my way or I’ll yell for help!”
“You’re goin’ away and I’m never goin’ to see you any more?”
“I am. And I’m tickled to death to forget you!”
When Nathan could see through his misery, the girl had vanished.
The following Sunday, tramping out on the Wickford road, Nathan beheld a two-seated Concord buggy drawn by a well-lathered horse climbing the hill toward him.
The Dresden Doll, never so dainty, or frilled or furbelowed, sat in the front seat beside a fellow whom Nathan had never seen. The Carver girl with another young stranger occupied the back seat.
Stopping aghast, Nathan looked directly into the Gridley girl’s eye.
She did not see him. She looked through and beyond him. There was no recognition.
But after the rig had passed, leaving a leg-weary, dusty-shoed boy standing in his heart-hunger by the fragrant brambles, one of the quartette passed a remark, which he knew in his hot shame referred to himself.
A sneering little laugh drifted back to him. The rig reached the hilltop and passed over out of sight.
That night Nathan took a bundle of big square envelopes tied with a red ribbon, Bernie’s letters, and put them where the sight could no longer hurt him. He hid them on a beam close to the eaves out in the three-foot attic over the Forge ell. Then he crawled back over the studding and buttoned the low door that led to that windowless garret from his bedroom. That button also fastened a door on a chamber in his little heart. He had completed his first thumb-nail cycle with The Sex.
His cynical observations about “girls,” delivered in the family circle, gladdened the heart of his father and made the latter feel that his precepts were at last bearing fruit, that he had a son who might not be quite so incorrigible as he had begun to fear.
That Christmas he gave Nathan five dollars and reminded the boy of his paternal generosity all through the balance of the year.
But the five dollars meant nothing to Nathan. He was compelled to deposit it in the Paris Savings Bank. Johnathan “borrowed” it three years later to help pay a grocery bill.