VI
Carol and Nathan had reached that stage of intimacy where a private whistle had been evolved in case Nathan elected to call Carol without advising her grandparents.
Nathan approached the Cuttner house now through silent, deserted streets. An arc light on the distant corner of Walnut and Pearl disclosed the length of the Cuttner side piazza ghostily. Nathan dodged into the shadow of a big maple before the house and cautiously gave the whistle.
Twice, three times he repeated it. No signs of life stirred within. Was the girl sleeping too soundly to hear? Or was she too incensed over the father’s conduct to want any more of the son?
As Nat stood waiting, wondering, hoping wistfully, with a sudden thump of his heart he saw the Cuttner front door give way and a figure slip through. This figure in silhouette turned and remained for a moment with face close to the door, latching it slowly and in perfect quiet. Then it tiptoed stealthily across the veranda, down the steps and Carol came into his arms. She had arisen from bed, dressed hastily and by no means completely, thrown up her hair in a quick knot at her neck and made the red cloak cover the exigencies of a hasty toilet. She giggled mawkishly as she met him. She too assayed this tryst on pique, against her grandfather. Old Archibald had declared “she’d got to cut out havin’ fellers traipsin’ into the house every night and twice a day on Sundays, that Forge yelp in particular. He didn’t have any too good a reputation about town on account of writing dirty-minded poetry.” But Carol, having heard Nathan’s side of the story, was inclined to give the lad the benefit of the doubt. Besides, it was spring and “she couldn’t sleep a wink, anyhow.” A walk in the night was very acceptable. Love laughed at locksmiths, didn’t it? And think how romantic it was, just like Romeo and Juliet. Taking care that no neighbors saw them, they went down Pearl Street hill, out along Adams Street, past the Catholic Cemetery and the pumping station, into world-old, moist, spring country.
It was one of those warm, sensuous nights which often visit New England in early April, with the snow almost gone excepting in far corners of sunless woods, with the ground drying and the incense of budding leaves and flowers surfeiting the shrine of Youth in the vast out-of-doors. The stars hung large and mellow and close. In another hour a half-made moon would find its way through the ephemeral stratas of upper haze. It would stay clear and fine until early morning.
It matters not where they walked; all the spring world through which they moved was wrapped into a soft, sweet dream. There were no distances. Distances were blurred, dissolved in fantasies of mauve and purple nothingness. Poor, distorted, twisted, perverted young love had mocked at locksmiths, indeed. But the singing, sighing spring night threw a mantle of sweet solitude over those distortions and perversions. The boy and the girl were alone, off under a starlit sky in the great out-of-doors. And earth was a garden spread in silver and bound around with impalpable walls of Heart’s Desire.
Nathan recounted what had ensued in his home following Carol’s departure. The girl was already acquainted with the sordid injustices done the boy.
“Served him right!” she snapped pertly. “Personally I think your father’s a little bit ‘off’!”
“Let’s forget it,” responded Nathan. “Let’s just talk about ourselves.” And he breathed a happy sigh. Parents and guardians were sleeping, like all the world about them. The night and its hours belonged to themselves.
“Carrie,” said the boy—thickly, softly—as they moved slowly through infinite reaches of happiness, deep-toned, voluptuous with the spell of springtime, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, Natie!”
The boy’s arm was about her warm, yielding, corsetless waist. Instinctively it tightened.
“Carrie—dear! I—love you!!”
He had never said it in plain words before. His heart leaped with the admission. The hour, the vastness of their freedom, acted upon his self-conscious ego as an opiate. He was the eternal lover.
The girl hung her head. She pressed her arm against the hand which held her tightly. Laughing nervously, she returned:
“I love you too, Natie, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No girl would trust herself out with a fellow so, unless she loved him—very much. Isn’t that right?”
“You know you can trust me, dear.”
“I don’t know as I’m thinking very much about it, Natie. There’s a point where a girl doesn’t care, you know, when she loves a fellow very much.”
They covered a quarter mile in silence.
Far out beyond the Cogswell place was an abandoned pile of weather-grayed lumber. It was half hidden under brambles and wild grape. Nat and the girl reached this pile. Behind it the Cogswell wood lot reared like an enchanted forest, Stygian dark, peri haunted. Across the road, a pasture of sumach and blueberry fell away to the lower shores of a choked and stagnant pond. The hour was too late for the frog chorus to pipe down in this bogland. But occasionally up across the pasture came a single plaintive note or the dull, lugubrious “gut-a-chunk” of a philosophic bullfrog. Once very far away they heard a whippoorwill.
They sat down on this pile of lumber, its weather-spiced fiber even more fragrant than the shrubs and sod around them. Darkness hid scarlet faces. Nathan took the girl on his lap. Their lips met.
Carol resigned herself with a happy quiver. She lay in his powerful young arms like a tired child and blinked at him owlishly in the weird moonlight.
“I think, Natie,” she whispered, “I think—I love you more—than I ever dreamed I could love any man—even back in A-higher.”
Her weight began to numb the boy’s limbs. Yet he could not disturb her; she was a wonderful burden.
Hairpins bothered where her head rested against his shoulder. With her left hand she pulled them out. She shook her riotous chestnut tresses free and they fell about her oval face like the bacchanal crown of a Sybarite. The lad bent his head and buried his lips in them.
She was his—his! Such a night would never come again—could never come again—because this was the first. No thrust-and-parry, drooling calf-talk; no bids for sex-interest here.
Youth, nature and night were stripped to their framework. For this were the worlds made and the constellations hung infinitely. For such was a soul given a maid and a man. For this had a cricket sung beneath these old gray boards for a hundred thousand years.
Again the boy’s lips found the girl’s. Her left arm crept up his right shoulder and around his neck. Their lips clung together.
“Oh, Natie!” she whispered. She had no strength.
“Let’s stroll back toward home,” the boy suggested thickly.
The old clock in the tower of the Universalist Church was striking three when they finally reached the Cuttner gate. In another hour the first streaks of warm dawn would bring the summit of Haystack Mountain into sharper silhouette.
“Just once more, dear boy,” the girl whispered as she stood close before him in the hush of somnambulistic morning.
Arms interlocked, once more Nathan kissed her.
She bade him good-by in a whisper. She tiptoed up and on to the veranda. The door yielded. The Cuttner household still slept. She waved him a comradely farewell and slipped noiselessly inside.
Nathan hurried through the deserted town and into Spring Street. There was no white signal in Edith’s window. The Forge house was weirdly quiet.
From the other side the partition he could hear his father’s lumberous snoring, when he gained his bedroom. He undressed and slipped into an unmade bed as a trillion birds were beginning to awaken and hold tuneful conversation in a hundred thousand tree tops.