A Woman of Genius Part 5

We had reached the age when matrons no longer avoided references to its most conspicuous phases in our presence, before we found words for mentioning it to one another. There was a young aunt of Pauline's lent something to that.

She was a sister of Mr. Allingham, come to stay with them while her husband was absent somewhere in the West. Pauline told me about it one of the week-ends she spent at home from Montecito; this was Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and she had found the aunt in the house on her return the evening before.

"Do you know," she said, "it is very queer the way I feel about Aunt Alice--the way she is, you know. Mamma hadn't told me, and when I came into the sitting room and saw her, I thought I was going to cry; and it wasn't that I was sorry either ... I'm awfully fond of her. I just felt it."

"Yes, I know," I admitted.

"Aunt Alice is so sensible," Pauline explained a few weeks later, "she talks to me a great deal; she's only a few years older than I am. She has shown me all her things for the baby. Mamma didn't think she ought ... you know how mothers are. They're in the bureau drawer in the best room. I'll show them to you some time; Alice won't mind."

Alice didn't mind, it appeared, so it must have been shyness that led us to select the afternoon when the married women were away, and though I cannot forgive the conditions which led us so surrept.i.tiously to touch the fringe of the great experience, I own still to some tenderness for the two girls with their heads together that bright hot afternoon, over the bureau drawer in Mrs. Allingham's best room. Pauline showed me a little sacque which she had crocheted.

"Mother thought I was too young, but Alice said I might."

"You must have liked to, awfully," I envied.

"That's one of the nice things about having children, I should think"--Pauline fingered a hemst.i.tched slip--"you can make things for them."

"Which would you rather have, girls or boys?" I hazarded.

"Oh, girls; you can always dress them so prettily."

"But boys ... they can do so many things when they grow up." I felt rather strongly on that point.

"Alice says"--Pauline folded the little frock--"that she's so glad to have it she doesn't care which it is." Something, perhaps an echo of my mother's experience, p.r.i.c.ked in me.

"They aren't always as glad as that."

"I suppose not. Alice is having this one because she wants it."

We looked at one another. We would have liked to have spoken further, to have defined ourselves, despoiled ourselves of tenderness, n.o.bilities, but around the whole subject lay the blank expanse of our ignorance. We locked the drawer again and went out and played croquet. And that was how we stood toward our normal destiny that summer when Pauline was wondering if Henry Mills meant to propose to her, and I was wondering how much longer I could keep Tommy Bettersworth from proposing to me.

I managed to stave it off until the end of September. On the twenty-second of that month there was a picnic at Willesden Lake. There were ten couples of us, and Flora Haines, who was wanted to count even with a young man who was to join us at the lake, a stranger to most of us, nephew to one of the wealthiest farmers in the township. We had always wished there might have been young people at the Garrett farm, and there was some talk of this nephew, who was to come on a visit, being adopted.

Some of our brothers had made his acquaintance, and Pauline, who had met him at Montecito, had warranted him as "interesting." I believe Flora Haines was invited to pair with him because every girl felt that Flora would be eminently safe to trust her own young man to in the event of Helmeth Garrett proving more worth while.

Henry Mills, who was reading law at the county seat of the adjoining county, had come over for the picnic and was expected to bring matters to a crisis with Pauline, and Forester had a day off to take Belle Endsleigh, who was at the point of pitying him because, though he had such an affectionate disposition, so long as his mother depended on him he couldn't think of marrying. We had no chaperone of course; several of the couples were engaged, and there were brothers; we wouldn't have to put up with the implication that we were not able to manage by ourselves.

It was the sort of day ... soft Indian summer, painted woodlands, gossamer glinting high in the windless air ... on which Forester found it necessary to hope brotherly that I should be able to get through it without being silly. By that he meant that the submerged Olivia, however interestingly she might read in a book, was highly incomprehensible and nearly always ridiculous to her contemporaries.

Willesden Lake was properly a drainage pond of four or five acres in extent, drawn like a bow about the contour of two hills; water-lilies grew at the head where a stream came in, and muskrats built at the lower end. The picnic ground was in the hollow between the two hills, by a spring, where the gra.s.s grew smooth like a lawn to the roots of oaks burning blood red from leaf to leaf. As it turned out, though we put off lunch for him for an hour, young Mr. Garrett did not come, and as the party sat about on the mossy hummocks in the quiet of repletion, I thought nothing could be so much worth while as to leave Tommy in care of Flora Haines and get away into the woods by myself. The soul of the weather had got into my soul and I felt I should discredit myself with Forester if I stayed. There was a little footpath that led down by a rill to the lake, and as I took it, there was scarcely a sound louder than the soft down-rustle of the painted leaves. There were two or three old boats, half water-logged, tied at the head of the lake, and one of these I found and paddled across to the opposite bank. I had not known there was a path there opening from the dewberry bushes that dipped along the border, but the spirit in my feet answered to its invitation.

I followed it up the hill through the leaf drift that heaped whispering in the smoky wood. I spread out my arms as I went and began to move to the rhythm of chanted verse. Where the red and gold and russet banners brushed me I was touched delicately as with flame. I had on a very pretty dress that day, I remember, a thin organdy with a leaf pattern, made up over yellow sateen, and the consciousness of suitability worked happily on my mind. At the top of the hill I struck into an old wood road where it pa.s.sed through a grove of young hickory, blazing yellow like a host. Here I went slowly and dropped the chanting to the measure of cla.s.sic English verse; it was the only means of expression Taylorville had provided me. Scene after scene I went through happy and oblivious. I had been at it half an hour perhaps, moving forward with the natural impetus of the play, in the faint old wagon tracks, and had got as far as

--Flowers that affrighted she let fall From Dis's wagon!--

when I was startled by the clapping of hands, and looked up to see a young man sitting on the top of a rail fence that ran straight across the way, as though he might have stopped there to rest in the act of climbing over.

"I knew you would see me the next minute," he said, "and I wanted to be discovered in the act of appreciation." He sprang down from the fence and came toward me, taking off his hat. "I suppose you are from the picnic; I expected to find you somewhere about. I am Helmeth Garrett."

"They're at the spring--we waited lunch for you. I am Miss Lattimore; Olivia May," I supplemented. I was a little doubtful about that point, for at Taylorville we called one another by our first names. I was pleased with the swiftness with which he struck upon a permissible compromise.

"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 shirt, 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 vanishing 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 thrashing 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.