IX
Perry's head was close to mine, over my table. The school was studying louder than ever, and our voices could not have gone beyond the platform; but my friend was cautious. The scholars might well have thought that the whispered conference boded them ill; that the new teacher and the old teacher were hatching some conspiracy against them. It must have looked like it. Perry's elbows were on the table, and my elbows were on the table. My chin rested in my hands, but his hands were waving beneath my chin as he unfolded to me the plot he had just discovered against his hopes and his happiness. But the school was good. The second grammar class had been relieved from a recitation by this confab, and somehow Perry had a subduing influence. Even the Biggest Boy opened his desk quietly and never once looked up from his geography except for a cautious glance out of the corner of his left eye.
"There was a pile of 'em that high, Mark," said Perry, waving his hands about a foot above the table. "There was some books of po-ems and novels and such. He'd sent them all to her in one batch—all new, mind ye, too—and it pleased her most to death. Well, it made me feel flat, I tell you—so flat that when she asked me if I didn't think it was lovely of him, I burst right out and said it was really. What I should 'a' done was kind of pass it off as if it didn't amount to much."
"Who is the young woman?" I asked.
"I ain't mentionin' names," Perry replied, "and I ain't givin' the name of the other man; but I have an idee you could guess if you kep' at it."
Our valley does not bloom with beautiful young women. We always have a few, but those few can be counted on one's fingers. Our valley does not number among its men many who can supplement their sentimental attentions with gifts of books. I knew of one. So it did not require much guessing on my part to divine the cause of Perry's heart-sickness; but as long as the other persons in his drama were anonymities, he would speak freely, so I relieved him by declaring solemnly that never in the world could I guess. I had always supposed him a lover of all women, a slave of none.
Perry smiled.
"I have kep' a good deal of company," he said. "On account of my fiddlin', and singin', and recitin' I've always had things pretty much my own way. It's opposition that's ruination. That's what shatters a man's heart and takes all his sperrit. As long as the game's between just a man and a girl there's nothin' very serious. One or the other loses, and you can begin a new game somewheres else. But when two men and one girl get a playin' three handed, then it is serious; then it's desperate. A man has to th'ow his whole heart and mind into it, if he'd whip, and he gets so worked up he thinks his whole happiness to the end of time depends on his drivin' the other fellow to drownin' himself in the mill-dam."
"In other words, if you had not found another laying piles of books and such gifts at the feet of this fair one, whose name I can never guess, you would have fiddled to her and sung to her and recited to her until she said 'I love you.' Then you would have sought new heavens to conquer."