WHEN YOUTH MEETS YOUTH
Three quarters of an hour later Ted
was seated on a log, near a small rustic bridge, beneath
which flowed a limpid, gurgling stream. On a log
beside him sat a girl of perhaps eighteen years, exceedingly
handsome with the flaming kind of beauty like a poppy’s,
striking to the eye, shallow-petaled. She was
vividly effective against the background of deep green
spruces and white birch in her bright pink dress and
large drooping black hat. Her coloring was brilliant,
her lips full, scarlet, ripely sensuous. Beneath
her straight black brows her sparkling, black eyes
gleamed with restless eagerness. An ugly, jagged,
still fresh wound showed beneath a carefully curled
fringe of hair on her forehead.
“I don’t like meeting
you this way,” Ted was saying. “Are
you sure your grandfather would have cut up rough
if I had come to the house and called properly?”
“You betcher,” said his
companion promptly. “You don’t know
grandpa. He’s death on young men.
He won’t let one come within a mile of me if
he can help it. He’d throw a fit if he
knew I was here with you now. We should worry.
What he don’t know won’t hurt him,”
she concluded with a toss of her head. Then,
as Ted looked dubious, she added, “You just leave
grandpa to me. If you had had your way you would
have spilled the beans by telephoning me this morning
at the wrong time. See how much better I fixed
it. I told him a piece of wood flew up and hit
me when I was chopping kindling before breakfast and
that my head ached so I didn’t feel like going
to church. Then the minute he was out of the yard
I ran to the ’phone and got you at the hotel.
It was perfectly simple that way slick
as grease. Easiest thing in the world to make
a date. We couldn’t have gotten away with
it otherwise.”
Ted still looked dubious. The
phrase “gotten away with it” jarred.
At the moment he was not particularly proud of their
mutual success in “getting away with it.”
The girl wasn’t his kind. He realized that,
now he saw her for the first time in daylight.
She had looked all right to him on
the train night before last. Indeed he had been
distinctly fascinated by her flashing, gypsy beauty,
ready laughter and quick, keen, half “fresh”
repartee when he had started a casual conversation
with her when they chanced to be seat mates from Holyoke
on.
Casual conversations were apt to turn
into casual flirtations with Ted Holiday. Afterward
he wasn’t sure whether she had dared him or he
had dared her to plan the midnight joy ride which
had so narrowly missed ending in a tragedy. Anyway
it had seemed a jolly lark at the time a
test of the mettle and mother wit of both of them to
“get away with it.”
And she had looked good to him last
night when he met her at the appointed trysting place
after “As You Like It.” She had come
out of the shadows of the trees behind which she had
been lurking, wearing a scarlet tam-o’-shanter
and a long dark cloak, her eyes shining like January
stars. He had liked her nerve in coming out like
that to meet him alone at midnight. He had liked
the way she “sassed” him back and put him
in his place, when he had tried impudently enough
to kiss her. He had liked the way she laughed
when he asked her if she was afraid to speed, on the
home stretch. It was her laugh that had spurred
him on, intoxicated him, made him send the car leaping
faster and still faster, obeying his reckless will.
Then the crash had come. It was
indeed a miracle that they had not both been killed.
No thanks to the rash young driver that they had not
been. It would be many a day before Ted Holiday
would forget that nightmare of dread and remorse which
took possession of him as he pulled himself to his
feet and went over to where the girl’s motionless
form lay on the grass, her face dead white, the blood
flowing from her forehead.
Never had he been so thankful for
anything in his life as he was when he saw her bright
eyes snap open, and heard her unsteady little giggle
as she murmured, “My, but I thought I was dead,
didn’t you?”
Game to her fingertips she had been.
Ted acknowledged that, even now that the glamour had
worn off. Never once had she whimpered over her
injuries, never hurled a single word of blame at him
for the misadventure that had come within a hair’s
breadth of being the last for them both.
“It wasn’t a bit more
your fault than mine,” she had waived aside his
apologies. “And it was great while it lasted.
I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, though
I’m glad I’m not dead before I’ve
had a chance to really live. All I ask is that
you won’t tell a soul I was out with you.
Grandpa would think I was headed straight for purgatory
if he knew.”
“I won’t,” Ted had
promised glibly enough, and had kept his promise even
at the cost of lying to his uncle, a memory which hurt
like the toothache even now.
But looking at the girl now in her
tawdry, inappropriate garb he suffered a revulsion
of feeling. What he had admired in her as good
sport quality seemed cheap now, his own conduct even
cheaper. His reaction against himself was fully
as poignant as his reaction against her. He was
suddenly ashamed of his joy ride, ashamed that he had
ever wished or tried to kiss her, ashamed that he
had fallen in with her suggestion for a clandestine
meeting this afternoon.
Possibly Madeline sensed that he was
cold to her charms at the moment. She flashed
a shrewd glance at him.
“You don’t like me as
well to-day as you did last night,” she challenged.
Caught, Ted tried half-heartedly to
make denial, but the effort was scarcely a success.
He had yet to learn the art of lying gracefully to
a lady.
“You don’t,” she
repeated. “You needn’t try to pretend
you do. You can’t fool me. You’re
getting cold feet already. You’re remembering
I’m just just a pick-up.”
Ted winced again at that. He
did not like the word “pick-up” either,
though to his shame he hadn’t been above the
thing itself.
“Don’t talk like that,
Madeline. You know I like you. You were immense
last night. Any other girl I know, except my sister
Tony, would have had hysterics and fainting fits and
lord knows what else with half the excuse you had.
And you never made a bit of fuss about your head, though
it must have hurt like the deuce. I say, you
don’t think it is going to leave a scar, do
you?”
He leaned forward with genuine concern
to examine the red wound.
“I think it is more than likely.
Lot you’ll care, Ted Holiday. You’ll
never come back to see whether it leaves a scar or
not. See that bee over there nosing around that
elderberry. Think he’ll come back next week?
Not much. I know your kind,” scornfully.
That bit into the lad’s complacency.
“Of course, I care and of course,
I’ll come back,” he protested, though a
moment before he had had not the slightest wish or
purpose to see her again, rather to the contrary.
“To see whether there is a scar?”
“To see you,” he played up gallantly.
Her hard young face softened.
“Will you, honest, Ted Holiday? Will you
come back?”
She put out her hand and touched his.
Her eyes were suddenly wistful, gentle, beseeching.
“Sure I’ll come back.
Why wouldn’t I?” The touch of her hand,
the new softness, almost pathos of her mood touched
him, appealed to the chivalry always latent in a Holiday.
He heard her breath come quickly,
saw her full bosom heave, felt the warm pressure of
her hand. He wanted to put his arm around her
but he did not follow the impulse. The code of
Holiday “noblesse oblige” was operating.
“I wish I could believe that,”
Madeline sighed, looking down into the water which
whirled and eddied in white foam and splash over the
rocks. “I’d like to think you really
wanted to come really cared about seeing
me again. I know I’m not your kind.”
He started involuntarily at her voicing
unexpectedly his own recent thought.
“Oh, you needn’t be surprised,”
she threw at him half angrily. “Don’t
you suppose I know that better than you do. Don’t
you suppose I know what the girls you are used to
look like? Well, I do. I’ve watched
’em, on the street, on the campus, in church,
everywhere. I’ve even seen your sister
and watched her, too. Somebody pointed her out
to me once when she had made a hit in a play and I’ve
seen her at Glee Club concerts and at vespers in the
choir. She is lovely lovely the way
I’d like to be. It isn’t that she’s
any prettier. She isn’t. It’s
just that she’s different acts different looks
different dresses different from me.
I can’t make myself like her and the rest, no
matter how I try. And I do try. You don’t
know how hard I try. I got this dress because
I saw your sister Tony wearing a pink dress once.
I thought maybe it would make me look more like her.
But it doesn’t. It makes me look more not
like her than ever, doesn’t it?” she appealed
rather disconcertingly. “It’s horrid.
I hate it.”
“I don’t know much about
girls’ dresses,” said Ted. “But,
now you speak of it, maybe it would be prettier if
it were a little ” he paused for a
word “quieter,” he decided on.
“Do you ever wear white? Tony wears it a
lot and I think she looks nice in it.”
“I’ve got a white dress.
I thought about putting it on to-day. But somehow
it didn’t look quite nice enough. I thought well,
I thought I looked handsomer in the pink. I wanted
to look pretty for you.” The
last was very low scarcely audible.
“You look good to me all right,”
said the boy heartily and he meant it. He thought
she looked prettier at the moment than she had looked
at any time since he had made her acquaintance.
Perhaps he was right. She had
laid aside for once her mask of hard boldness and
was just a simple, humble, rather pathetic little girl,
voicing secret aspirations toward a fineness life had
denied her.
“I say, Madeline,” Ted
went on. “You don’t meet
other chaps the way you met me to-day, do you?”
Set the blind to lead the blind! If there was
anything absurd in scapegrace Ted’s turning mentor
he was unconscious of the absurdity, was exceedingly
in earnest.
“What’s that to you?”
She snapped the mask back into place.
“Nothing that is I wouldn’t that’s
all.”
She laughed shrilly.
“You’re a pretty one to talk,” she
scoffed.
Ted flushed.
“I know I am. See here,
Madeline. You’re dead right. I ought
not to have taken you out last night. I ought
not to have let you meet me here to-day.”
“I made you I made you do both those
things.”
Ted shook his head at that.
“A man’s to blame always,” he asserted.
“No, he isn’t,” denied Madeline.
“A girl’s to blame always.”
They stared at each other a moment
while the brook tinkled through the silence.
Then they both laughed at the solemnity of their contradictions.
“But there isn’t a bit
of harm done,” went on Madeline. “You
see, I knew that first night on the train that you
were a gentleman.”
“Some gentlemen are rotters,”
said Ted Holiday, with a wisdom beyond his twenty
years.
“But you are not.”
“No, I’m not; but some
other chap might be. That is why I wish you would
promise not to go in for this sort of thing.”
“With anybody but you,” she stipulated.
“Not with anybody at all,”
corrected Ted soberly, remembering his own recent
restrained impulse to put his arm around her.
“Well, I don’t want to at
least not with anybody but you. I never did it
before with anybody. Honest, Ted, I never did.”
“That’s good. I felt sure that you
hadn’t.”
“Why?”
He grinned sheepishly and stooped
to break off a dry twig from a nearby bush.
“By the way you didn’t
let me kiss you,” he admitted. “A
fellow likes that in a girl. Did you know it?”
He tossed away the twig and looked back at the girl
as he asked the question.
“I thought they liked the other thing.”
“They do and they don’t,”
said Ted, his paradox again betraying a scarcely to
be expected wisdom. “But that is neither
here nor there. What I started out to say was
that I’m glad you don’t make a practice
of this pick-up business. It it’s
no good,” he summed up.
“I know.” Madeline
nodded understanding of the import of his warning.
She was far too handsome and too prematurely developed
physically to be devoid of experience of the ways
of the opposite sex. Like Ophelia she knew there
were tricks in the world and she liked frank Ted Holiday
the better for reminding her of them. “I
won’t do it,” she promised. “That
is, unless you don’t ever come back yourself.
I don’t know what I’ll do then something
awful, maybe.”
“I’ll come fast enough.
I’ll come to-morrow.” he added obeying
a sudden impulse, Ted fashion.
“Will you?” The girl’s face flushed
with delight. “When?”
“To-morrow afternoon. I
can’t dodge the ivy stuff in the morning.
Will four o’clock do all right?”
“Yes. Come here to this same place.”
“I say, Madeline, can’t I come to the
house? I hate doing it like this.”
“No, you can’t. If
you want to see me you’ll have to do it this
way. It’s lots nicer here than in the house,
anyway.”
Ted acquiesced, since he had no choice,
and rose, announcing that it was time to go now.
“We don’t have to go yet.
I told Grandpa I was going to spend the evening with
my friend, Linda Bates. He won’t know.
We can stay as long as we like.”
“I am afraid we can’t,”
said Ted decidedly. “Come on, my lady.”
He held out both hands and Madeline let him draw her
to her feet, though she was pouting a little at his
gainsaying of her wishes.
“You may kiss me now,”
she said suddenly, lifting her face to his.
But Ted backed away. The code
was still on. A girl of his own kind he would
have kissed in a moment at such provocation, or none.
But he had an odd feeling of needing to protect this
girl from herself as well as from himself.
“You had more sense than I did
last night. Let’s follow your lead instead
of mine,” he said. “It’s better.”
“But Ted, you will come to-morrow?”
she pleaded. “You won’t forget or
go back on your promise?”
“Of course, I’ll come,” promised
Ted again readily.
Five minutes later they parted, he
to take his car, and she to stroll in the opposite
direction toward her friend Linda’s house.
“He is a dear,” she thought.
“I’m glad he wouldn’t kiss me, so
there,” she said aloud to a dusty daisy that
peered up at her rather mockingly from the gutter.
An automobile horn honked behind her.
She stepped aside, but the car stopped.
“Well, here is luck. Where
are you going, my pretty maid?” called a gay,
bold voice.
She turned. The speaker was one
Willis Hubbard, an automobile agent by profession,
lady’s man and general Lothario by avocation.
His handsome dark face stood out clearly in the dusk.
She could see the avid shine in his eyes. She
hated him all of a sudden, though hitherto she had
secretly rather admired him, though she had always
steadily refused his invitations.
For Madeline was wary. She knew
how other girls had gone out with Willis in his smart
car and come back to give rather sketchy accounts of
the evening’s pleasure jaunt. Her friend
Linda had tried it once and remarked later that Willis
was some speed and that Madeline had the right hunch
to keep away from him.
But it happened that Madeline Taylor
was the particular peach that Willis Hubbard hankered
after. He didn’t like them too easy, ready
to drop from the bough at the first touch. All
the same, he meant to have his way in the end with
Madeline. He had an excellent opinion of his powers
as a conquering male. He had, alas, plenty of
data to warrant it in his relations with the fair
and sometimes weak sex.
“What’s your hurry, dearie?”
he asked now. “Come on for a spin.
It’s the pink of the evening.”
But she thanked him stiffly and refused,
remembering Ted Holiday’s honest blue eyes.
“What are you so almighty prunes
and prisms for, all of a sudden? It’s the
wrong game to play with a man, I can tell you, if you
want to have a good time in the world. I say,
Maidie, be a good girl and come out with me to-morrow
night. We’ll have dinner somewhere and dance
and make a night of it. Say yes, you beauty.
A girl like you oughtn’t to stay cooped up at
home forever. It’s against nature.”
But again Madeline refused and moved away with dignity.
“Your grandfather will never
know. You can plan to stay with Linda afterward.
I’ll meet you by the sycamore tree just beyond
the Bates’ place at eight sharp give
you the best time you ever had in your life.
Believe me, I’m some little spender when I get
to going.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Hubbard. I tell you
I can’t go.”
He stared at the finality of her manner.
He had no means of knowing that he was being measured
up, to his infinite disadvantage, with a blue eyed
lad who had stirred something in the girl before him
that he himself could never have roused in a thousand
years. But he did know he was being snubbed and
the knowledge disturbed his fond conceit of self.
“Highty tighty with your ‘Mr.
Hubbards’! You will sing another tune by
to-morrow night. I’ll wait at the sycamore
and you’ll be there. See if you won’t.
You’re no fool, Maidie. You want a good
time and you know I’m the boy to give it to
you. So long! See you to-morrow night.”
He started his motor, kissed his hand impudently to
her and was off down the road, leaving Madeline to
follow slowly, in his dust.