II
“I’m sorry I tried to kiss you that night in the vestry,” the boy blurted out. He was lying on his chest, pegging his knife in the needles. “I felt awful when your father came down and caught me——”
The girl turned her face in amazement.
“Kiss me!” she said faintly. “Was that what you were up to?”
“Why, yes! Didn’t you know?”
“I thought you were fooling—that you jumped out to scare me.”
Each colored dully and looked away. The girl’s hat was tossed carelessly at one side. She sat with her chubby arms clasped about her knees.
“Well, I was tryin’,” confessed Nathan nervously.
“But for the land’s sake, why make such an awful job of it? You almost knocked me over.”
“There wasn’t any other way I could do it. My folks never let me go to kissin’ parties or things like that.”
Silence ensued. Then the precocious, oversexed little lady, several years older in worldly wisdom, picked apart a near-by star-flower as she observed coyly:
“You must have wanted to kiss me awful bad to go to all that trouble to do it.”
“I guess I did, Bernie.”
“Then why don’t you make a good job of it—now? There’s no one here to stop you, is there?”
The world reeled. Nathan grew giddy.
“Aw, go on!” he cackled. “You’re only foolin’!”
“You might try and see—if you weren’t so awfully slow. That’s mostly the trouble with you, Nathan—you’re slow!”
“And you won’t be mad——?”
“What if I am? A girl always loves the man who does things he wants, whether she gets mad or not.” Bernie had secured this sort of thing undoubtedly from her mother’s Pansy Series.
The boy’s embarrassment was so great that Bernice reached her hand out to him, a soft, damp hand, though she looked in the opposite direction. He took the hand, timidly at first, and considered it as Adam considered the Apple.
He sat up beside her with a tremendous yawn, as though he had lain too long and would change his position. As for the girl, she was a bit frightened, white-faced. But an atavism in her blood was militant. She was afraid and yet she wasn’t afraid. Any woman might explain it.
“Aw, can I really kiss you, Bernie?”
“I said so, didn’t I? And if you’re goin’ to do it, for pity’s sake, hurry up!”
He leaned over and kissed her on a peach-blown cheek, searing hot and zero cold by turns. And no more chaste kiss was ever given The Sex.
But Bernie responded in a way that Nathan never forgot. She turned her face, her nostrils breathed into his own, she kissed him—once!—twice!—three times!—heavy, impulsive, lumberous kisses, squarely on his mouth.
The Forge boy wanted to flee or wanted to cry; he couldn’t quite decide which. And because he couldn’t decide he stayed where he was and waited for the rocking hysteria of reaction to pass.
“Let’s—let’s—do it again,” the girl suggested, as the boy sat stiffly, vaguely remembering something about the eye of God being upon the sinner even in the wilderness.
They went through that ecstasy again and again. And astounding to record, the boy suddenly leaned over with his face on his arm.
“Natie Forge! What in the world is the matter?” cried the stupefied girl.
“Dunno,” said the lad. “But somehow I feel we oughtn’t.”
“Well, I like that! Why oughtn’t we?”
“Dunno. And besides—it hurts!”
“Hurts? What hurts?”
“Didn’t you never have anything happen to you that felt so good it hurt?”
“Well, you are a queer one!”
“I know. That’s what Pa’s always sayin’! And—and—everybody. I wish I wasn’t!”
“Here I let you kiss me as much as you want and you make me feel as if I was doin’ sumpin’ wicked. Nathan Forge—I’m mad! I never want to speak to you again!”
“Aw, don’t be mad, Bernie. I didn’t mean nothin’! Honest!”
“Mother always said you were a yokel. I don’t know what it means but you are one, all right.”
Under her exasperation the Dresden Doll was furious. She had lowered the lattice of her modesty and knew it perfectly. A crass boy was vaguely sounding a warning.
The quarrel was patched up somehow and they ate their lunch, at least they ate Bernie’s lunch. For when the Dresden Doll removed the cover from her dainty repast, an awful qualm smote Nathan at the coarseness of his own. With the subtlety of a boy, Nathan managed to push his package off the bank into the brook. When Bernie squealed a warning, the boy fell clumsily in his efforts to recover. So it floated away downstream, out of sight and certainly out of the possibility of humiliating mastication. Thereat Nathan affected to be both regretful and indifferent. He declared he could subsist till supper without luncheon. The Israelites fasted for forty days, didn’t they, and remained alive? But Bernie prevailed upon him that she had enough in her basket for half a dozen boys. So they ate their meal together, eyes averted.
It was early afternoon when the girl suddenly cried:
“Do you know what I’d like to do? For once in my life without Mother to say ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ I’d like to paddle in this brook as if I was common, and like vulgar children.”
“You might fall in and get your clothes wet and have to go home all drenched and slithery.”
“But you could take off your shoes and stockings and let me hold your hand!”
Nathan demurred. He could not have explained just why. But the girl was not to be denied. She laughed at his discomfiture, sat down near the water’s edge, removed her pretty buckled slippers, peeled off her lisle stockings, rolled up her underclothing. Then she waded—timidly at first—out into the brook, squealing with delight. And she pulled her skirts higher and higher. Finally she had them above her dimpled knees.
From his place on the bank, Nathan watched her and yet tried not to watch her. Much of the real Bernice, down underneath her mother’s affectation and snobbery, was revealed that day in the extravagance of her kisses and the bold display of her limbs.
Four short years later Bernice Gridley was a mother. So it was more than a child’s sexless figure displayed to young Nathan that day. The boy’s nerves began cutting strange capers. Across forehead and chest was a queer, constricted feeling.
The girl kicked and shrieked and played in the water. She called upon Nathan to follow. But the perturbed boy, discovering for the first time that his physical being was a thing apart from himself, tried to behave indifferently, interest himself in something else. For him the girl—all girls—changed again with that experience. Bernice was no longer a fellow human, a playmate, even some one to be kissed deliciously.
Bernice laughed when she beheld the perturbation she was causing. Secretly she exulted. It was the first time she had been privileged to thus test her physical charm maliciously.
But more than the disclosure of the Gridley girl’s limbs was in store for Nathan that afternoon. Bernice splashed in the water until she slipped and fell. With a wild scream and a tremendous plunge, she went down and for a sickening moment the water eddied over her.
Nathan was in the brook at once. He clutched at Bernie’s dress before she could be carried out into the greater depth. Unmindful of himself, he got his arms beneath her. With the panic-stricken girl gasping and choking, he lifted her and carried her back to shore.
The water made her lacy clothing sinuous about her body.
“I’m wet—wet—wet to the s-s-skin!” she chattered, as she tried to pull her sloppy skirts about her limbs—velvety limbs, now ruddy with the shock of the water. “Oh, what will I do—whatever will I do?”
“Guess by the looks of the sky, both of us is goin’ to get still wetter before we leave,” Nathan managed. “We’re goin’ to have a nawful shower. Listen!”
In the high northwest the thunderheads had been piled up. A few moments later the storm broke. Boy and girl were immediately soaked to the last inch of their frightened, quivering bodies. That thunderstorm saved Bernice a bad piece of explanation when she finally entered the home of her parents that evening.
The thunder rattled and clacked furiously about the heavens. The great drops of rain pelted the forest foliage and surface of the brook like bullets. And huddled side by side under a tree, Nathan and Bernie drew close together and covered their heads as best they could with Nathan’s coat.
The girl gripped the boy hysterically when the thunder bowled loudest. The boy was badly frightened himself but he strove to comfort her. And through it all he sensed her soft, vibrant, rain-soaked body and the abyss of sex opened wider and wider.