The Hundred, and Other Stories

by Gertrude Hall Brownell

Her conversation took an amusing interest from the peculiarities of her education. She had seen and heard much in her short life in a hard world, where it was no one's affair to keep anything from her young ken—much of dark, and petty, and unpicturesque—preserving through all a sort of hardy innocence; and she had borrowed from a cheap circulating library a vast lot of fiction dealing with the supremely grand. Her preference in literature, however, had remained for fairy tales, a taste formed when it had been one of her duties to read aloud to certain little children of the rich. She knew them by the score. It was to this, perhaps, some of her remarks owed the fanciful touch that redeemed them from the commonness of her general conversation—a genial commonness, condoned to such young lips. She had a childish way of lending a personality to everything, that amused him more than epigram would have done. She ascribed intention to the wind that blew off her hat, and stopped to express her mind to it. She assumed consciousness in the bench they sat on; she wanted to take the same one, lest it should think they slighted it because it was rickety, for which it was not to blame. Every flower was to her a person. "Hush! They are listening!" she said, looking from the corner of her eye at a bank of knowing pansies. She scolded a button for coming off, as if the want of principle shown by it had been a thing to revolt her. She stood in a one-sided relation of good-fellowship with the brown birds hopping among the gravel, and the fishes in the pond; she spared them many crumbs. With homely good-heartedness she took into an amused regard all the family of spring—buds, blades, insects—addressing speech to them as if she had been a giant and they a very little people.

Never can spring return without Fraisier's remembering that spring. It was bright; by it all the springs following have been cast in the shadow.

The long hair was woven through and through his thoughts; but not as a disturbing, upheaving element. The girl made him waste a great deal of time, but nothing else—not the life of his heart. Because of her good-nature, her entire want of coquetry or perverseness, his feeling for her complicated itself in nowise; rather it grew simpler as it insensibly changed. His wonder and fine dread at feminine appurtenances had worn away a little with increased familiarity; he reposed on that fact as if it had been such an one as becoming accustomed to the noise of guns. He felt under delicate obligations to her for having routed his shyness, and not at all tormented him in any of the thousand ways he apprehended a feminine being would have at her command.

As he was less and less in awe of her and that suspected arsenal, though a charming, fearful element went out of his sentiment, his affection perhaps grew more. She made such a good little comrade! Insidiously, she connected herself in his mind with future days—she who cared only for the day and the pleasure thereof. When he spoke of a thing it would be pleasant to do, a place pleasant to visit, he said, always unreflectingly, yet from a sincere heart: "Some day we must go there. Let us do such a thing some time." When he described the hills and ponds of home, he said what they might have done had she been there last summer or the years before, how they might have rowed and rambled. He painted the good time they might have together, in some not impossible, but not specified time, place, and circumstances.

So the green from tender grew brilliant—grew deep—became void of interest to the accustomed eye, and more or less dust settled over it. It was manifest to all that spring was past.

Then began an anxious time. Those lectures, those miserable lectures! Those courses, those wretched courses, which he had neglected! That blessed information he had spared to cull when the time was for it! These things seemed likely to get their revenge. When he awoke to a sense of his danger—very late! only when the bloom was off the year, when lily and early rose had gone where they could divert no mortal more—he could not believe that he should not, by fitting exertion, catch up in time at the appointed goal. He worked rabidly, with a wet cloth around his head. He thought not of girls in those days, I promise you; he recked not of bronze-gold hair!

It was written that he should not be saved. He closed his school term pitiably conditioned.

When the worst was known, at least was time to breathe, however sore the lungs, then his mind reverted to her. He had been man enough to harbor no spite towards her, accuse her of nothing. He sent her a message and waited at the appointed place, wondering a little, while he waited, at his follies of the spring. They seemed so unnecessary, looked back upon now. Why, in a very real, practical world like this one, where a man's failure to pass his exams was sure to call forth from his progenitor letters such as his pocket at this moment contained, conduct one's self as if existing in a world of lambs and purling streams and shepherdesses? He was one with the actual world in looking with astonishment and condemnation upon his own works. The sky above was hard, barren blue; it seemed so easy, looking back, to have stuck to the approved road. What had possessed him?