"Since you passed 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 unembarrassed 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 nobody 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 circumstance 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 snigger 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 snigger; 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 clusters. 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.
"And of course," suggested Charlie Gower, "in such good company you weren't in a hurry about looking for the rest of us." I remembered the asparagus bed and was glad I had slapped him.
"No," my companion looked him over very coolly, "now that I've seen some of the rest of you I'm glad I didn't hurry." Plainly it wasn't going to do to try to take it out of Helmeth Garrett.
As we began by common consent to move back to the spring, Forester drew me by the arm behind the hazel. He was divided between a brotherly disgust at my lapse, and delight to have caught the prim Olivia tripping.
"Well," he exclaimed, "you have done it!" Considering what I knew of Forester's affairs this was unbearable.
"Oh! it isn't for you to talk – "
"What I want to know is, whether I am to thrash him or not?"
"Thrash him?" I wondered.
"For getting you talked about … off there in the woods all afternoon!"
"We weren't – " I began, but suddenly I saw the white bolls of the sycamores redden with the westering sun; we must have been three hours covering what was at most a half hour's walk. "Don't be vulgar, Forester," I went on, with my chin in the air.
"Oh, well," was my brother's parting shot, "I don't know as I ought to make any objection, seeing you didn't."
That, I felt, was the weakness of my position; I not only hadn't made any objection, I hadn't felt any shame; the annoyance, the hurt of outraged maidenliness, whatever was the traditional attitude, hadn't come. Inwardly I burned with the woods afire, the red west, the white star like a torch that came out above it. On the way home Helmeth Garrett rode with us as far as the main road and was particularly attentive to Pauline and Flora Haines. I remember it came to me dimly that there was something designedly protective in this; there was more or less veiled innuendo flying about which failed to get through to me. Pauline put it quite plainly for me when she came to talk things over the day after the picnic. She was sympathetic.
"Oh, my dear, it must be dreadful for you," she cooed; "a perfect stranger, and getting you talked about that way!"
"So I am talked about?"
"My dear, what could you expect? And in plain sight of us. If you had only pushed him away, or something."
"I couldn't," I said, "I was so … astonished." In the night I had found myself explaining to Pauline how this affair of Helmeth Garrett had differed importantly from all similar instances; now I saw its shining surfaces dimmed with comment like unwiped glass.
"That's just what I said!" Pauline was pleased with herself. "I told Belle Endsleigh you weren't used to that sort of thing … you were completely overcome. But of course he wasn't really a gentleman or he wouldn't have done it." I do not know why at this moment it occurred to me that probably Henry Mills hadn't proposed to Pauline after all, but before I could frame a discreet question she was off in another direction.
"What will Tommy Bettersworth say?"
"Why, what has he got to do with it?"
"O-liv-ia! After the way you've encouraged him…"
"You mean because I went to the picnic with him? Well, what can he do about it?" Pauline gave me up with a gesture.
"Tommy is the soul of chivalry," she said, "and anybody can see he is crazy about you, simply crazy." What I really wanted was that she should go on talking about Helmeth Garrett. I wanted ground for putting to her that since all we had been sedulously taught about kissing and all "that sort of thing" – that it was horrid, cheapening, insufferable – had failed to establish itself, had in fact come as a sword, divining mystery, it couldn't be dealt with on the accepted Taylorville basis. I felt the quality of achievement in Helmeth Garrett's right to kiss me, a right which I was sure he lacked only the occasion to establish. But when the occasion came it went all awry.
It