“‘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—”
“I say I 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 thing must begin, 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 in very poor 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 really must be dangling around somebody quite this much — though what in the world you find to talk about 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 absurd looking little thing —
“No, you must listen, Ramsey, and let me speak now. What I meant was that we shouldn’t be quite so 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 she wouldn’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 you had to make yourself so conspicuous why couldn’t you be a little bit more fastidious? Your father wouldn’t have minded nearly so much if it had been a self-respecting, intellectual girl. We both say that if you must be 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.
Chapter VIII
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’d quit, sometimes, about the ‘Ole Flag’?”
“I dunno,” said Milla. “I wasn’t listening any at all. I hate speeches.”
“Well, I could stand ’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 dawdle
d, 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.”
Chapter IX
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 the real sweet 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 to stop waitin’!”
At this, Ramsey moaned, without affectation. “I don’t expect I can, 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 I will come 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.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 264