By the time the sun had struck through the window into his large attic room he had mapped out his course. He would have to continue school till vacation—his mother would insist on that; but by that time he would have secured work of some sort. He regretted having sold the “ha’nt” in California and invested his money with his mother’s—by Mr. Smith’s advice—in the City of Green Hills; but it was too late to change that. Yet he would work hard, attend night school, and prepare himself for his real life-business, which was to be Journalism. He spelled it with a capital, for he would be no small truckling reporter, but a faithful, inspiring leader of the people.
Resolutely he put aside the thought of marriage although it lay, coiled and conscious like fate, at the back of all his plans. Other men married young, why not one more? The conventions were ridiculous; a man was a man when he was grown! He drew himself up and measured again before his mirror. Almost six feet!
Yet he must not subject Erminie to ridicule. The world must see that she was marrying a man who could support and protect her. He would not have to wait very long,—he looked twenty-one,—and his mother would consent when she saw he was well prepared, saw how pitiful was Erminie’s situation. Shyly—though there was none to see—he rubbed his rough chin and wondered how he would look with mustache and imperial.
The elation of the night still lifted him. His body was strangely light; he felt as if he could move a mountain. The need for secrecy increased the stimulation, and he looked on forest, lake, and Sound with new vision. The yellow rose of sunrise touched Cascades and Olympics alike with a splendor he had not before recognized, and lighted the vast reaches between ranges with a clear thin radiance not seen in southern lands.
Billy’s heart ached with this new fulness of life. Visions undreamed before opened his eyes to his own manhood; and the impulse came to put this experience into rhythm,—the impulse that touches every normal young creature. Some may not have the wit to fix it on paper, but all sing the song.
Billy sang it,—sang in a lilting, rather difficult metre, beginning ambitiously with an apostrophe to his love,
“Ermine-white soul of my Erminie,”
and leaping immediately to the next rhyme which should be “burn in me”—he was not acquainted with the exactions of prosody. However, his Muse proceeded for a couple of verses; and if she limped at times, it was no more than appears in the work of some real poets when they push the lady too hard.
He read the lines several times, softly whispering the passioned words. They sounded rather good, though not by a tithe were they adequate. What miserable, foolish little things were written words! Still he marvelled that he could write even these. He would copy them on a typewriter and gave them to Erminie. No one could then guess their authorship, not even her father should he chance upon them.
At breakfast he was silent, preoccupied; but his mother, being tired from a night of watching with the baby, who had been fretful, did not notice Billy, nor object when he said he would not be home at noon.