I
Bernie Gridley soon acquired a girl chum, a boy-baiting little blond with a profile like the face on an old-style quarter-dollar. Her name was Elinore Carver.
As I was Nathan Forge’s squire, Elinore became my Heart’s Desire. Which may read like “peanut” poetry but which really did possess so much poetry at the time that I am allowing the euphony to remain.
Thus did our quartette facilitate the course of true love, conspire to make it run smoothly and hoodwink our parents considered as being meddlesome outsiders on general principle. Family catechisms in the evening as to our associations during the day probed in vain for any milk-and-water assignations so long as the parties on all sides could swear truthfully that they had traveled during the shining hours with those of their own sex and any propinquity came about in pairs and purely by accident.
Although Bernie’s mother did her worst to keep her offspring an exasperating little prig, still in her heart the Dresden Doll was a daughter of Eve. And ere long it was accepted in school that she and Nathan had been called and by one another chosen.
Peter Taro, the school’s bad boy, had individualistic ideas about it, however. Peter was too crude, too far down in the social scale, to acquire a sweetheart. Therefore he had a propensity to make light of the tenderest sentiments of others. He would walk on the opposite side of any Lover’s Lane—meaning any village street whereon boy and maid could woo without the horrible possibility of being met by parents or those who would carry tales to parents—and make of himself a general nuisance. On picket fences with a stick he would beat a tom-tom. Or he would carry on loud-voiced conversation with the Romeo in the case on subjects of which the Juliet was ignorant. Being snubbed or rebuked, he sought vengeance in rhyme. His lines apropos of Nathan’s affair ran:
“Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley;
—Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!”
This sort of thing he shouted at the top of his lungs to the perplexity of the neighborhood and the edification of the grown-up world in general. Bernice affected to be furious. So ultimately Nathan had to fight the Taro boy. Which he did—adequately.
It was the first fight of Nathan’s career—a “kid-fight” perchance—but no less virile or significant on that account. For like many quiet, peaceable men, when aroused the boy became a fury. Lithe as a cat, nimble as a bantam-weight, he pounded Peter Taro until the blood-smeared youngster fled.
Those were days of bliss and nights of heartburn. Vividly the hours come back that we spent before kitchen mirrors, steam-misty with boiling cabbage or wash-water of our homes, tying and retying our “cravats”, plastering down our hair with pilfered bay rum. If we had the front of our hair parted and well pasted down, and the toes of our shoes reasonably shined, we were groomed satisfactorily for hymeneal campaigning.
That each of us possessed a hat-lifting cowlick in the rear like the business paraphernalia of a small porcupine and that our heels were eternally yellow with mud were among the happy paradoxes of boyhood. We were as we were when we looked in our mirrors—when we posed for phrenological inventory and profile analysis. And besides, a good soldier in either war or love never looks behind anyhow.