“Save her!”
Several girls afterward admitted having used this expression, and little Miss Floy Williams, the youngest and smallest member of the class, was unable to deny that she had said, “Oh, God!” Nothing could have been more natural, and the matter need not have been brought before her with such insistence and frequency, during the two remaining years of her undergraduate career.
Ramsey was one of those who heard this exclamation, later so famous, and perhaps it was what roused him to heroism. He dived from the bank, headlong, and the strange thought in his mind was “I guess this’ll show Dora Yocum!” He should have been thinking of Milla, of course, at such a time, particularly after the little enchantment just laid upon him by Milla’s touch and Milla’s curls; and he knew well enough that Miss Yocum was not among the spectators. She was half a mile away, as it happened, gathering “botanical specimens” with one of the teachers — which was her idea of what to do at a picnic!
Ramsey struck the water hard, and in the same instant struck something harder. Wesley Bender’s bundle of books had given him no such shock as he received now, and if the creek bottom had not been of mud, just there, the top of his young head might have declined the strain. Half stunned, choking, spluttering he somehow floundered to his feet; and when he could get his eyes a little cleared of water he found himself wavering face to face with a blurred vision of Milla Rust. She had risen up out of the pond and stood knee deep, like a lovely drenched figure in a fountain.
Upon the bank above them, Willis Parker was jumping up and down, gesticulating and shouting fiercely. “Now I guess you’re satisfied our fishin’ is spoilt! Whyn’t you listen me? I told you it wasn’t more’n three feet deep! I and Heinie waded all over this creek gettin’ our bait. You’re a pretty sight!”
Of Milla he spoke unwittingly the literal truth. Even with her hair thus wild and sodden, Milla rose from immersion blushing and prettier than ever; and she was prettiest of all when she stretched out her hand helplessly to Ramsey and he led her up out of the waters. They had plenty of assistance to scramble to the top of the bank, and there Milla was surrounded and borne away with a great clacketing and tumult. Ramsey gave his coat into the hands of friends, who twisted the water out of it for him, while he sat upon the grass in the sun, rubbed his head, and experimented with his neck to see if it would “work.” The sunshine was strong and hot; in half an hour he and his clothes were dry — or at least “dry enough,” as he said, and except for some soreness of head and neck, and the general crumpledness of his apparel, he seemed to be in all ways much as usual when shouts and whistlings summoned all the party to luncheon at the rendezvous. The change that made him different was invisible.
Chapter VI
THE CHANGE IN Ramsey was invisible, and yet something must have been seen, for everyone appeared to take it for granted that he was to sit next to Milla at the pastoral meal. She herself understood it, evidently, for she drew in her puckered skirts and without any words make a place for him beside her as he driftingly approached her, affecting to whistle and keeping his eyes on the foliage overhead. He still looked upward, even in the act of sitting down.
“Squirrel or something,” he said, feebly, as if in explanation.
“Where?” Milla asked.
“Up there on a branch.” He accepted a plate from her (she had provided herself with an extra one), but he did not look at it or her. “I’m not just exactly sure it’s a squirrel,” he said. “Kind of hard to make out exactly what it is.” He continued to keep his eyes aloft, because he imagined that all of the class were looking at him and Milla, and he felt unable to meet such publicity. It was to him as if the whole United States had been scandalized to attention by this act of his in going to sit beside Milla; he gazed upward so long that his eyeballs became sensitive under the strain. He began to blink. “I can’t make out whether it’s a squirrel or just some leaves that kind o’ got fixed like one,” he said. “I can’t make out yet which it is, but I guess when there’s a breeze, if it’s a squirrel he’ll prob’ly hop around some then, if he’s alive or anything.”
It had begun to seem that his eyes must remain fixed in that upward stare forever; he wanted to bring them down, but could not face the glare of the world. So the fugitive ostrich is said to bury his head in the sand; he does it, not believing himself thereby hidden but trying to banish from his own cognizance terrible facts which his unsheltered eyes have seemed to reveal. So, too, do nervous children seek to bury their eyes under pillows, and nervous statesmen theirs under oratory. Ramsey’s ostrichings can happen to anybody. But finally the brightness of the sky between the leaves settled matters for him; he sneezed, wept, and for a little moment again faced his fellowmen. No one was looking at him; everybody except Milla had other things to do.
Having sneezed involuntarily, he added a spell of coughing for which there was no necessity. “I guess I must be wrong,” he muttered thickly.
“What about, Ramsey?”
“About it bein’ a squirrel.” With infinite timidity he turned his head and encountered a gaze so soft, so hallowed, that it disconcerted him, and he dropped a “drumstick” of fried chicken, well dotted with ants, from his plate. Scarlet he picked it up, but did not eat it. For the first time in his life he felt that eating fried chicken held in the fingers was not to be thought of. He replaced the “drumstick” upon his plate and allowed it to remain there untouched, in spite of a great hunger for it.
Having looked down, he now found difficulty in looking up, but gazed steadily at his plate, and into this limited circle of vision came Milla’s delicate and rosy fingers, bearing a gift. “There,” she said in a motherly little voice. “It’s a tomato mayonnaise sandwich and I made it myself. I want you to eat it, Ramsey.”
His own fingers approached tremulousness as he accepted the thick sandwich from her and conveyed it to his mouth. A moment later his soul filled with horror, for a spurt of mayonnaise dressing had caused a catastrophe the scene of which occupied no inconsiderable area of his right cheek; which was the cheek toward Milla. He groped wretchedly for his handkerchief but could not find it; he had lost it. Sudden death would have been relief; he was sure that after such grotesquerie Milla could never bear to have anything more to do with him; he was ruined.
In his anguish he felt a paper napkin pressed gently into his hand; a soft voice said in his ear, “Wipe it off with this, Ramsey. Nobody’s noticing.”
So this incredibly charitable creature was still able to be his friend, even after seeing him mayonnaised! Humbly marvelling, he did as she told him, but avoided all further risks. He ate nothing more.
He sighed his first sigh of inexpressibleness, had a chill or so along the spine, and at intervals his brow was bedewed.
Within his averted eyes there dwelt not the Milla Rust who sat beside him, but an iridescent, fragile creature who had become angelic.
He spent the rest of the day dawdling helplessly about her; wherever she went he was near, as near as possible, but of no deliberate volition of his own. Something seemed to tie him to her, and Milla was nothing loth. He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply. What few remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly all concerned the landscape, which he commended repeatedly in a weak voice, as “kind of pretty,” though once he said he guessed there might be bugs in the bark of a log on which they sat; and he became so immoderately personal as to declare that if the bugs had to get on anybody he’d rather they got on him than on Milla. She said that was “just perfectly lovely” of him, asked where he got his sweet nature, and in other ways encouraged him to continue the revelation, but Ramsey was unable to get forward with it, though he opened and closed his mouth a great many times in the effort to do so.
At five o’clock everybody was summoned again to the rendezvous for a ceremony preliminary to departure: the class found itself in a large circle, standing, and sang “The Star Spangled Banne
r.” Ordinarily, on such an open-air and out-of-school occasion, Ramsey would have joined the chorus uproariously with the utmost blatancy of which his vocal apparatus was capable; and most of the other boys expressed their humour by drowning out the serious efforts of the girls; but he sang feebly, not much more than humming through his teeth. Standing beside Milla, he was incapable of his former inelegancies and his voice was in a semi-paralyzed condition, like the rest of him.
Opposite him, across the circle, Dora Yocum stood a little in advance of those near her, for of course she led the singing. Her clear and earnest voice was distinguishable from all others, and though she did not glance toward Ramsey he had a queer feeling that she was assuming more superiority than ever, and that she was icily scornful of him and Milla. The old resentment rose — he’d “show” that girl yet, some day!
When the song was over, cheers were given for the class, “the good ole class of Nineteen Fourteen,” the school, the teachers, and for the picnic, thus officially concluded; and then the picnickers, carrying their baskets and faded wild flowers and other souvenirs and burdens, moved toward the big “express wagons” which were to take them back into the town. Ramsey got his guitar case, and turned to Milla.
“Well—” he said.
“Well what, Ramsey?”
“Well — g’bye.”
“Why, no,” said Milla. “Anyways not yet. You can go back in the same wagon with me. It’s going to stop at the school and let us out there, and then you could walk home with me if you felt like it. You could come all the way to our gate with me, I expect, unless you’d be late home for your supper.”
“Well — well, I’d be perfectly willing,” Ramsey said. “Only I heard we all had to go back in whatever wagon we came out in, and I didn’t come in the same wagon with you, so—”
Milla laughed and leaned toward him a little. “I already ‘tended to that,” she said confidentially. “I asked Johnnie Fiske, that came out in my wagon, to go back in yours, so that makes room for you.”
“Well — then I guess I could do it.” He moved toward the wagon with her. “I expect it don’t make much difference one way or the other.”
“And you can carry my basket if you want to,” she said, adding solicitously, “Unless it’s too heavy when you already got your guitar case to carry, Ramsey.”
This thoughtfulness of hers almost overcame him; she seemed divine. He gulped, and emotion made him even pinker than he had been under the mayonnaise.
“I — I’ll be glad to carry the basket, too,” he faltered. “It-it don’t weigh anything much.”
“Well, let’s hurry, so’s we can get places together.”
Then, as she manoeuvred him through the little crowd about the wagon, with a soft push this way and a gentle pull that, and hurried him up the improvised steps and found a place where there was room for them to sit, Ramsey had another breathless sensation heretofore unknown to him. He found himself taken under a dovelike protectorship; a wonderful, inexpressible Being seemed to have become his proprietor.
“Isn’t this just perfectly lovely?” she said cozily, close to his ear.
He swallowed, but found no words, for he had no thoughts; he was only an incoherent tumult. This was his first love.
“Isn’t it, Ramsey?” she urged. The cozy voice had just the hint of a reproach. “Don’t you think it’s just perfectly lovely, Ramsey?”
“Yes’m.”
Chapter VII
THE NEXT MORNING Ramsey came into his father’s room while Mr. Milholland was shaving, an hour before church time, and it became apparent that the son had someting on his mind, though for a while he said nothing.
“Did you want anything, Ramsey?”
“Well—”
“Didn’t want to borrow my razors?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Milholland chuckled. “I hardly supposed so, seriously! Shaving is a great nuisance and the longer you keep away from it, the better. And when you do, you let my razors alone, young feller!”
“Yes, sir.” (Mr. Milholland’s razors were safe, Ramsey had already achieved one of his own, but he practised the art in secret.) He passed his hand thoughtfully over his cheeks, and traces of white powder were left upon his fingers, whereupon he wiped his hand surreptitiously, and stood irresolutely waiting.
“What is it you really want, Ramsey?”
“I guess I don’t want anything.”
“Money?”
“No, sir. You gay’ me some Friday.”
Mr. Milholland turned from his mirror and looked over the edge of a towel at his son. In the boy’s eyes there was such a dumb agony of interrogation that the father was a little startled.
“Why, what is it, Ramsey? Have you—” He paused, frowning and wondering. “You haven’t been getting into some mess you want to tell me about, have you?”
“No, sir.”
His tone was meek, but a mute distress lurked within it, bringing to the father’s mind disturbing suspicions, and foreshadowings of indignation and of pity. “See here, Ramsey,” he said, “if there’s anything you want to ask me, or to tell me, you’d better out with it and get it over. Now, what is it?”
“Well — it isn’t anything.”
“Are you sure?”
Ramsey’s eyes fell before the severe and piercing gaze of his father. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Milholland shook his head doubtfully; then, as his son walked slowly out of the room, he turned to complete his toilet in a somewhat uneasy frame of mind. Ramsey had undoubtedly wanted to say something to him and the boy’s expression had shown that the matter in question was serious, distressing, and, it might be, even critical.
In fact it was — to Ramsey. Having begun within only the last few hours to regard haberdashery as of vital importance, and believing his father to be possessed of the experience and authority lacking in himself, Ramsey had come to get him to settle a question which had been upsetting him badly, in his own room, since breakfast. What he wanted to know was: Whether it was right to wear an extra handkerchief showing out of the coat breast pocket or not, and, if it was right — ought the handkerchief to have a coloured border or to be plain white? But he had never before brought any such perplexities to his father, and found himself too diffident to set them forth.
However, when he left the house, a few minutes later, he boldly showed an inch of purple border above the pocket; then, as he was himself about to encounter several old lady pedestrians, he blushed and thrust the handkerchief down into deep concealment. Having gone a block farther, he pulled it up again; and so continued to operate this badge of fashion, or unfashion, throughout the morning; and suffered a great deal thereby.
Meantime, his father, rather relieved that Ramsey had not told his secret, whatever it was, dismissed the episode from his mind and joined Mrs. Milholland at the front door, ready for church.
“Where’s Ramsey?” he asked.
“He’s gone ahead,” she answered, buttoning her gloves as they went along. “I heard the door quite a little while ago. Perhaps he went over to walk down with Charlotte and Vance. Did you notice how neat he looks this morning?”
“Why, no, I didn’t; not particularly. Does he?”
“I never saw anything like it before,” said Mrs. Milholland. “He went down in the cellar and polished his own shoes.”
“What!”
“For about an hour, I think,” she said, as one remaining calm before a miracle. “And he only has three neckties, but I saw him several times in each of them. He must have kept changing and changing. I wonder—” She paused.
“I’m glad he’s begun to take a little care of his appearance at last. Business men think a good deal about that, these days, when he comes to make his start in the world. I’ll have to take a look at him and give him a word of praise. I suppose he’ll be in the pew when we get there.”
But Ramsey wasn’t in the pew; and Charlotte, his sister, and her husband, who were there, said they hadn’t seen anythi
ng of him. It was not until the members of the family were on their way home after the services that they caught a glimpse of him.
They were passing a church a little distance from their own; here the congregation was just emerging to the open, and among the sedate throng descending the broad stone steps appeared an accompanied Ramsey — and a red, red Ramsey he was when he beheld his father and mother and sister and brother-in-law staring up at him from the pavement below. They were kind enough not to come to an absolute halt, but passed slowly on, so that he was just able to avoid parading up the street in front of them. The expressions of his father, mother, and sister were of a dumfoundedness painful to bear, while such lurking jocosity as that apparent all over his brother-in-law no dignified man should either exhibit or be called upon to ignore.
In hoarse whispers, Mrs. Milholland chided her husband for an exclamation he had uttered. “John! On Sunday! You ought to be ashamed.”
“I couldn’t help it,” he exclaimed. “Who on earth is his clinging vine? Why, she’s got lavender tops on her shoes and—”
“Don’t look round!” she warned him sharply. “Don’t—”
“Well, what’s he doing at a Baptist church? What’s he fidgeting at his handkerchief about? Why can’t he walk like people? Does he think it’s obligatory to walk home from church anchored arm-in-arm like Swedes on a Sunday Out? Who is this cow-eyed fat girl that’s got him, anyhow?”
“Hush! Don’t look round again, John.”
“Never fear!” said her husband, having disobeyed. “They’ve turned off; they’re crossing over to Bullard Street. Who is it?”
“I think her name’s Rust,” Mrs. Milholland informed him. “I don’t know what her father does. She’s one of the girls in his class at school.”
“Well, that’s just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take to church!”
“Oh, she’s quite pretty — in that way!” said his wife, deprecatingly. “Of course that’s the danger with public schools. It would be pleasanter if he’d taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 263
