The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth
birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not
experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant
a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings
after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of
three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for
outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy,
but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.
The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual
importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled
along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the
church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of
delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels
skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage
man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque
shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just
on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into
round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.
These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days.
The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the
coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose
into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and
handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority
(and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine
women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying
the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had
always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked
profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and
black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally,
between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the
feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling
overtones and melancholy quavers--all these sensations produced a
mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath
of goodness.
The church itself was charming to look at, built in the late ’eighties
of shingles now coloured a warm brown by many rains, and properly
vine-hung. The little building with its limited open meadow and
well-grown trees drew him at times when he had no particular business
there. It was a favourite place to read. Often he would arrive an hour
or more before the service and sit huddled up in one of the corners
of the deep verandah, intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step
of the rector sounded on the boards below; and if Dr. Minor happened
to espy him he would be conducted cheerily into the study, while the
lanky priest put on his vestments and asked him questions about his
work at school and the health of his “dear mother,” who, much to the
clergyman’s disappointment, came almost never to the services.
These innocent confidences sometimes went so far as a mild spiritual
examination which had more significance than its casualness indicated.
Minor regarded young Osprey as promising material for the ministry.
“The type for scholarship and consecration,” he told his wife. “A
sensitive boy, thoughtful and retiring--Oh, manly, manly enough! A
little conviction would turn that into spiritual leadership. His family
could do nothing better than give him a seminary training. And a part
of our duty, my dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new
recruits to bring under His banner.”
Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his reflections upon the
mission of the Church. His early gods had been the deeply pious heroes
of the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee took rank with him very
little below the Apostles.
There was one other who shared this secret ambition for Potter--Ellen
Sydney--until a recent incident in which he had figured shook her faith.
This affair produced something of a scandal in the Osprey family.
Searching one day through the shelves of an old closet for one of
his brother Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now his turn
to use, the boy had come across a half dozen large, handsomely bound
portfolios. He had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated on the
instant. The sheets were of lovely texture, beautifully printed, and
the covers of a flexible, warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense
of incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.
The contents were no less absorbing. Between the pages of French
text were reproductions of paintings hung in the Paris salons of the
mid-’nineties, the majority of them nudes of that languishing and
silken type beloved by the French school of that day, the studio
renderings of a flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his search
for the school books, Potter took the volumes to an attic room where he
consulted them many times in the following weeks, and a collection of
nude sketches came from his pencil, copied sometimes from the originals
and sometimes attempted from memory.
The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as
he was finishing a particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from
him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.
Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant,
half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually
facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul,
and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was
on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the
youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good
thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to
the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people
the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over
Potter’s head.
He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm
in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was
inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn
steps without even a good-night.
As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the
feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe
him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers
whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and
his actual appearance was a little laughable--yet the notion of his
interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not, as she reasoned,
naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than
she could grasp.
For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his
eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened
her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter
received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness.
To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event....
In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the
new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal
commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the
south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and
facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying
and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning
a serpentine creek that drained the valley.
The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden
charm--the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight
of neighbouring windows--made it a fairy road, a retreat in which
Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May
when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first
autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener
memories in the north. She could never walk there too often; it was as
near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her
starved imagination could picture.
Ordinarily they sat upon the steep terraced slope at the end of the
lane, whence one could look down its leaf-fretted vista, or peer over
one’s shoulder into the sombre depths of the rarely-visited Florissant
place, but to-night he was more venturesome. He led her through the
path behind the wall of Annunciation’s big enclosure, until they came
to the end of the terrace. Beyond was an open field, once the pasture
of the Florissants, and still a part of the property, empty and unused.
In its centre through the dusk loomed a dark little hillock clustered
with poplars and fir-trees.
It was not hard to believe oneself continents away from the noise
of any familiar street or the lights of Creve Cœur houses. Directly
fronting them lay the dim mass of Annunciation, its half dozen French
turrets and many spires floating out of the treetops into crystalline
starlight. Potter had often sat in that very spot and pondered on
the mystery of this religious stillness, on the utter distance which
separated its life from any he had known, its community of young
and vital beauty sternly and perhaps rebelliously subordinated to
withered holiness. By a paradox of the law of boyhood, the girls
in the convent--boarders from comfortable families everywhere in
the states--were the subject of vulgar joking among the youngsters
thereabouts.
To Ellen the convent was not benign; it was a little terrifying and
monstrous. All her life she had been awestruck by anything that
suggested the gigantic and august power of Rome, and her head was full
of legends concerning that religion and its devotees. Superstition had
required of her that she regard them--not as individuals but in the
mass--as a sinister species apart from ordinary people.
Potter remarked that when there was bright moonlight the steep slate
pitches of the convent roof looked as though they were sheeted in snow.
“There’s lots more of those places in Canada than here,” said she.
“They’re not all that they should be, either. Think of sending young
girls there!”
“Why not?” he asked.
She now regretted her outburst and was annoyed at his question. She
answered primly:
“Why, I wouldn’t tell you, of course.”
He laughed, unconcerned and superior.
“Pshaw, I know what you mean. I’ve heard those stories too--about nuns
being in love with priests. But I don’t believe them.”
“Oh, you don’t?” inquired Ellen sarcastically. It was not that she did
not think it admirable of him to dislike believing evil of people, but
one need not go so far as to defend Catholics....
“No,” he said. “You know why?”
“Well, why, smarty?”
“Because even people outside of such places, convents and the like,
even people who are grown up and free to do as they please--well, they
never do anything they want to do. I mean things that just pop into
their heads to do.”
“Ah, don’t they?” asked Ellen, by this time amused, “And how are you so
sure they don’t?”
“I just know. They’re too dog-goned cowardly.”
“Well!” she exclaimed, “that’s a fine thing to be calling people who
behave themselves!”
“Then they don’t think of anything bad that they want to do,” he
persisted. “You wouldn’t call that being good, would you, Ellen? Pshaw,
what’s the credit in that?”
“It’s well for them they don’t think of such things,” she declared. “To
hear you, a person would believe you wanted to be tempted.”
“No, I hate it, honestly,” he replied, and she felt that he was trying
to speak truly of himself. “I used to say that part of the Lord’s
prayer, about ‘lead us not into temptation,’ over twice. I did, for a
long time. Because, you see, I’m really tempted--always, every minute.”
He paused after this announcement, which, in spite of his sincerity,
had a note of pride, and Ellen broke in, thinking that the moment had
come to speak of what was most in her mind.
“Potter, you haven’t been making any more of those pictures, have you?”
She felt him shift quickly to the defensive.
“Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve finished two more.”
“Well, I’m ashamed of you.”
“Why do you mind them so much, Ellen?”
“You don’t have to ask me why.”
“But I do, because my father didn’t think they were bad. He only
lectured me for show!” He chuckled at the recollection.
“Ah, Potter, your father is a grown man! Men do lots of things that you
shouldn’t think about. You’re just a child. Those pictures! What’s the
good of them anyway? Nice people wouldn’t have them around.”
“Some people would!” he declared stoutly. “They’re beautiful, or my
father wouldn’t have kept them ... and the one I’ve just finished is
the best, oh, lots the best I’ve done!”
She sensed a strain of profound unhappiness in his voice, and all her
instincts flew to soothe the hurt.
“I don’t mean to be hard on you, Potter,” she said. “You worry me,
that’s all. I can’t see why you bother about these things that other
people never think of.”
“Aw,” he said, “never mind, Ellen. I guess I don’t know what I want.
It’s no fun being a boy when you’d like to be a man.”
They both fell silent, listening to the trees chattering overhead
like live things. The breeze that stirred them was growing chill, and
Potter, responding to the kindlier tone of his companion, moved closer
to her. His last words and this unconscious movement of affection
touched her. She put a rough, friendly hand on his arm, and they sat
there in silence for a time. It was he who broke it....
Suddenly a strange plea came pouring from his lips in a torrent of
eager words, a plea that she all at once realized she had many times
before dreaded--and laughed at herself for dreading.... She sat,
scarcely breathing, with averted face. He ended abruptly, frightened
at the sound of his own voice. She said nothing. Surely she understood
him. What was she thinking?
She turned toward him at last, and he found himself looking into her
black eyes that glowed like coals despite the mantle of dusk. Her
parted lips closed in a tight line.
“Well,” she said, with slow emphasis, “if that’s what you mean, I’ll
tell you this. I will never do such a thing.”
She was on her feet in an instant, her tall body like a statue of
rebuke crushing him in its shadow.
“Come,” she said coldly.
“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, Ellen.”
At that moment, as they started homeward from Florissant’s field with
the darkness between them, her swishing, angry stride filling him with
a new knowledge of mystery and awe, there was no doubt that they both
meant what they said. But in Ellen a certain helplessness and fear were
born. Struggle as she might from now on his very presence would be a
menace, and his presence was more than ever a necessity. For the cry
that he was uttering was one that her own heart understood.
* * * * *
So it happened that a few months later when the Osprey family were at
a country hotel for the summer, he and Ellen met in the empty house
and walked hand in hand through the rooms--her sworn promise whirling
in his brain. She was stiff and awkward, but he was in high spirits,
perhaps a little hysterical, fondly imagining he was entering upon a
new paradise of experience....