I
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. The sky 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 dainty lunch 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.