In the crowded, unbeautiful part of the city were two streets forming
as if the two long legs of the A we knew as children, the A with feet
wide apart, that stood for Ape. A third street went from one to the
other, as the little bar does across the A, but crooked, as a child's
hand would draw it. This street was narrow, gloomy, and relatively
quiet. The tide of traffic kept to the larger streets; the small street
knew, beyond the occupants of its own houses and visitors to these, few
but hurried foot-travellers who used it as a short cut, and people of
inferior pretensions coming there to trade. The ground-story of almost
every house was a shop; a person might have spent a life without real
necessity for leaving the street. Here boots were made and mended; in
the next door, clothes were sold (the dim show-windows were full of
decent dresses, very good still for what you paid; you could be fitted
even with a ball-dress, all beads and satin bows), yonder you could
get money on deposit of your watch, or your flute, or your ear-drops;
farther you could have yourself shaved. There was a window full of
tarts and loaves; another window in which a roast fowl set its gold
note, as some would say, between the pink note of half a ham and the
coral note of a lobster.
Across a certain one of the windows in that street for a long time had
hung from a line, as from the belt of a savage, tails of hair--black,
brown, blond. Below these, two featureless wax faces presented their
sallow blankness to the passer, one wreathed with yellow curls, the
other capped with brown waves of a regular pattern. Ordered around the
twin turned-ebony stands were hairpins, sticks of cosmetic wrapped
in silver paper, slabs of chalk laid on pink cotton, china pots with
pictures of flowers or beauties and pleasing inscriptions in French,
fuzzy white balls of down, combs, gilt-brass ornaments, kid-capped
phials containing amber and ruby liquids. On the inside of the heavy
shutter, caught back against the street-wall by day, was pasted a
large print. This told you in what a prodigious way Madame Finibald's
Gold Elixir would make your hair grow, and showed you the picture of a
lady who doubtless had used it--her hair was extraordinary, it nearly
reached to her feet.
Perhaps it had been found that the neighborhood was become hardened to
the sight of the luxuriant pictured hair; perhaps some who had provided
themselves with the small copy of it, to be obtained inside on a bottle
full of brown stuff, had grown inclined to treat of it lightly: "Ah,
Madame Finibald!" perhaps one irritated customer had said to the old
proprietress, coming to have made clear to her why after three bottles
of Gold Elixir her locks were still not thick, still not glossy and
splendid as the announcement promised they should be, "it's easy to
cork up herb tea. It's easy to make hair long in a picture, and it's
easy to make it thick. I don't believe there ever was any such person
as that young woman on the label!" One morning saw a change in Madame
Finibald's window. All the accustomed things were crowded to the sides
to make room for a chair; on this sat a girl with brown-gold hair that
reached in very truth to the floor.
On every morning and every afternoon, through a long winter, first one
end and then the other of the little street was crossed by a youth who
kept to the larger thoroughfares with the stream. He carried books; he
went rapidly, granting small attention to the things he passed. It is
not from that to be supposed that he was profoundly thinking. His face,
agreeable in feature and color, was rather wanting in expression; no
more interesting than it was interested. He passed at precisely the
same hour every morning, and the time of his passing in the afternoon
varied but little. This, from October unto April. But when April set
its gold stamp on the weather, had there been any wise person observing
this well--constructed blond machine, applauding its regularity,
holding it up perhaps as an example to other young frequenters of
schools and lecture-rooms--that wise person would have been troubled,
he would have had misgivings, he would have been at last full of grief.
A change had come over the young man's mood. His eye was acquiring a
roving habit. If his step had before been bent on duty, it was now
less directly bent; if before he had been on time at his appointments,
he must now have been always more or less late. He walked leisurely,
swinging his books by a strap. He loitered before shop-windows, he
turned to look after a face. The sky smiled down between the rows of
buildings on the occasion of the first balmy day; little clouds floated
in it, shimmering like dissolving pearls. He returned the soft sky's
compliment; he looked up at it, the winter sternness melting from his
eyes. At every street corner he was seen to stop, foolishly smiling
upward; and, yes, positively, he was seen there, forgetful of all the
people, to sigh and stretch! On that very day he lost three books out
of his strap, and did not for some time notice it; when he did, he
cared nothing! From a scrawl on the fly-leaf the finder of these books
learned their rightful owner to be of the house of Fraisier.
He had come hundreds of miles from an obscure town to study in this
great city; he had been a serious, mechanical plodder for months,
feeling that he owed it to himself and to his distant family to fill
his head full, full with precious notions. He had formed no friendships
with his fellow-students, fearing that they would divert him, or
perhaps, fearing the young fellows themselves, among whom he felt
singularly green. He lived alone in one little room at the end of the
world, took no holidays, had no fun, went to bed early so as to be
fresh for his book in the morning. And now, suddenly, he had completely
lost the point of view from which it had seemed necessary that he
should get dizzily high marks, that he should conquer field after field
in the realm of learning, and return to his home exuding glory. He
could not persuade himself any more but that it befitted him perfectly
to spend many hours strolling through the streets with his hands in
his pockets, amusing his eyes with sights of every sort. He could find
no argument that satisfied him why he should not lounge on a garden
seat warm with sun, smoking cigarettes half the day, thinking nothing
profitable. The wretched boy had lost all sober sense of the duty of
man.
If he had limited himself to sitting idle in the garden, watching the
year develop in that narrow, charming enclosure, one might have found
an excuse for him, the same as for the scientist who studies a specimen
under a glass; or, one might have said he had been overworking, his new
circumstances on coming to the city had induced in him a false sort
of fervor for work--a reaction was to be expected. But the mood whose
first stage had been simple disinclination for study and a taste for
pointless wanderings, by the time that in the march of the year the
crocuses had gone, took on developments. It was not so often before a
many-colored flower-bed he stopped, as before a window full of hats and
bonnets.
If, again, he had limited himself to staring in at milliners' fronts!
The wares there do somewhat resemble fantastic flowers, and might
explain the interest of a botanist. But he halted in the same way
before shops that offered no excuse for the same attention; windows in
which were only idle feminine frocks displayed, flippant fans, frills
of fluted lace, feathery things for the neck.
One might have imagined from his wonder and interest that all these
things had just been invented, that they were a strange spring-crop;
that new, too, was the race of smiling, chatting, shopping beings
crowding the street on sunny days, new and in fashion only since this
spring, such unaccustomed pleasure spoke in his eye that shyly followed
them in their prettiest representatives. What exquisite sense shown, O
ever-young Creator, in making the lip red, and the neck white, and the
temperate cheek between white and red!
The boy had moments of being drunk in a glorified way even as is the
innocent bee, with nothing but wandering among flowers. Owing to a
confusion in the ideas attendant on that mysterious soft travailing
among the atoms of the heart warmed through by spring, all sorts of
things to him were as flowers! His imagination was so increased in
power, that with nothing but a pair of little shoes in a show-case to
start from he could build up the most astonishing, dreamy stories:
he could set feet in the shoes and rear a palatial flesh-and-blood
structure over them, as easy as sigh; fit the whole with graces,
laces, circumstances and adventures--contrive even to tangle its fate
pleasingly with his own.
Which may make supposed that he was a youth of some boldness. Far from
it. He scarcely knew what a woman's eyes were like, except in profile
or fugitive three-quarters; on the other hand, he was well acquainted
with her back hair. Hair, in which he could pursue long studies
unconfounded, seemed to him the most beautiful thing in all the world.
One day, with a view to lengthening the way by taking a road that
though shorter must from novelty be richer in diversion than his
daily track, he turned into the little street that cut off the
triangle of the A. He paused before the window of the worn watches and
sleeve-links; he took his time over the faded finery of the second-hand
clothes shop; he examined certain yellowed wood-cuts and stained books
he found in a narrow open stall. As he seemed coming to the end of the
street's resources, he looked over the way and thoughtfully felt his
cheek: he could not find there what would have justified a refreshing
station at the barber's. He continued his way slowly, to make it last.
Now, he stopped where several others were likewise stopping--he had
come to Madame Finibald's.
The girl sat amid her hair, either unconscious or disdainful of the
eyes watching her beyond the glass. She looked in a book open on her
lap; now and then she turned over a leaf, sometimes revealing a picture
on the page. Her chair was low, perhaps so that her hair should amply
trail; its lowness made an excuse for the listlessness of her posture;
her feet were outstretched and crossed, the passers might know that
one of her shoes was laced with pink twine. If she moved her eyes from
her book a moment, it was only to sweep them past the faces, unseeing,
and lift them to the strip of sky between the houses--so blue this day,
the little bit there was of it.
Her face one scarcely noticed for the first moment more than any rosy
apple; for oh! her hair!--her hair claimed all the attention a man had
to give, did her shining hair falling stately along her cheeks, all
over her shoulders, below her waist, beyond her garment--richer, of
course, than any possible queen's cloak. The light rippled over it,
changing on it all the time, when nothing else in the window appeared
to live.
Within the shadow of the shop was discerned a watchful, wrinkled old
face, chiefly differing from a parrot's in the slyness of its eyes.
Fraisier catching sight of it thought of a witch on guard over a
princess enchanted and imprisoned in a glass-case.
The little group in front of Madame Finibald's dispersed, formed anew
with other faces many times in the hour; Fraisier remained, his eyes
climbing up, sliding down the golden ropes of hair.
At last, though the girl gave no sign, he was made uncomfortable by
the sense that she must, even without looking, have seen how long he
stood. He inquired timidly of her face. It was informed with a gentle
brazenness, fortified to be stared at all the day. Yet there was a
suggestion of childishness in its abstracted expression; she wore the
sort of look one has seen on the face of a little girl playing at being
somebody else far more splendid than herself. A close observer might
have suspected that she really thought it rather grand to sit there in
the gorgeousness of her hair, and was amused with pretending not to
know that a soul looked on.
Fraisier, because her eyes were lowered, found hardihood to stare his
fill at her face. He surrendered without struggle before the round
cheeks, the short little nose, the good-natured mouth and chin, which,
in truth, took more than their just space in the face. But most--oh,
still most! delighted him the brown-gold hair that tumbled over her
forehead and ears in little curls.
He was realizing from the mutterings of what was left him of a
conscience how late it must be getting--he must be taking himself
off; he was making long the one minute more he allowed himself, when
her pupils slid between the lashes in his direction. He had lost all
presence of mind, he could not withdraw his glance. After a second's
pause upon his, her eyes slid back to her book and were hidden. Then,
without another thought towards duty, he crossed the street to the
barber's, from whose window he could see Madame Finibald's; and,
coming forth with a smoother face than the rose, entered the little
eating-shop next door, from which likewise he could command Madame
Finibald's.
He went through the little street every day. He took many atrocious
meals in the shop, on the table nearest the window.
On such days as brought perfect weather, the girl in Madame Finibald's
would turn very often to the sky a look easily interpreted as longing.
Then would Fraisier look up too and sigh. It seemed such a pity, this
wasted blue weather.
It seemed such a pity, all this wasted sweetness, he thought in
crossing a public garden on his occasional unwilling way to a lecture.
The quince-tree blossomed in red; under the cherry were little drifts
of scented snow; up out of the vigorous, rested earth were flowers
springing in mad, gay multitudes. The air was silver made air in the
morning; and in the afternoon it was gold made air. Birds, busily
building, busily twittered. These things did nothing to him, but the
more they were lovely and penetrated the heart, the more to make him
lonesome.
He took himself away from their radiance without one regret for them,
to spend his time in preference in an ugly little street where one
could scarcely have known what season it was, where there was nothing
to see that was beautiful but certain long, long hair. In thought,
though, let it be said in vindication of spring's power of enthralling,
having done up the hair in braids, and extinguished it with a hat, he
was always, always guiding it to the contemned garden. When once it was
in the garden, May there had become perfect.
He wondered whether it could be she had become aware of his persistent
presence. He feared she had, and as often that she had not. He imagined
sometimes that when he looked her face was quivering with a conquered
desire to smile. That disconcerted him a shade. Sometimes he thought
she looked suspiciously rosy for a girl unconscious of all the world.
Sometimes he looked away, with the idea that if he turned suddenly
he should find her stealing a glance at him. But he dared not look
very quickly, lest the action should be too marked; and turning with
discreet alacrity, he could never feel sure.
One day, at last, having settled in his mind that this tame conduct was
unworthy of a man, refusing himself a second in which to think better
of any matter, he crossed the street and charged the shop. A bell
snapped sharply as he opened the door. It startled him to the point of
gasping. He grew crimson, finding himself opposed in truth, as many
a night before in dream, by Madame Finibald's sly and lowly smile,
breathing the same faintly drug-perfumed air as the princess breathed,
no glass screen between himself and the hair. He could have touched it,
had he been so bold.
He stammered a request for soap--scented soap. He wished himself tens
of ten miles away, or time out of mind dead, when--wonderful! The
maiden in the window looked frankly over her shoulder. Was it that her
eyes brimmed with friendly laughter, or did it seem so to him because
his head had become incapable of a true notion? His heart, so to speak,
found its feet; he made a muddle of every sentence he launched upon,
but his words had a voice behind them. So much he contrived to convey:
he was very hard to please in the matter of soap. He sniffed at a
variety of proffered tablets, whose virtues Madame Finibald, in very
truth like a witch with a philter to sell, assiduously set forth; each
cake he examined seemed to hold in her estimation just a little higher
place than the foregoing. At the end of ten minutes, without positively
losing her good-humor, she declared that he had seen all in the shop,
she was sorry and surprised they could not suit him, they might have a
fresh stock in on the morrow. He was leaving in clumsy embarrassment,
empty handed, with a promise to return, when the princess lightly
jumped from the window-place, and, sweeping the hair off her face,
said: "There is one more sort, ma'am. I saw it up there, high, when I
dusted. Let me get it."
She fetched the steps, and in a moment had climbed and lifted down a
box. She set it on the counter; she opened it herself and held towards
him, with a direct glance, a packet with a red rose printed on the
wrapper.
Madame Finibald, with an exclamation, snatched it from the girl's hand,
and began, as if here had been a little grandchild recovered to her
old age, to speak with tenderness of its merits. The girl stood near,
twining and untwining a lock around her finger, while she unaffectedly
looked at the customer. Her hair came below her knees; every moment
she had to toss it back out of her face.
"Go back to your window, wicked child!" cried the old witch, suddenly,
as if catching at a piece of gold as it was being taken out of her
pocket. "Go back!"
"I am tired of sitting!" said the little princess, twisting her
shoulders in her frock with the prettiest peevishness. "I have sat and
sat and sat! I have finished my story. Let me go out and get a bun. You
know you said I could when it was noon."
She caught at her hair, and, to the infinite wonder of one looking
on, began twisting, twisting, twisting, coiling, coiling, coiling,
driving in great skewers--while he filled his blissful pockets with
rose-scented soap.
The bell snapped in fretful reprehension for her passing out. Less than
a minute after, it exclaimed in annoyed surprise for his.
Now was he no longer made lonesome by every coquettish touch the more
that the year put to her toilet. For the girl of the regal hair
smiled to him, surreptitiously with her lips, but unguardedly with her
eyes, when he came by her glass-case; while he dawdled in the window
opposite, she communicated with him by signs no other eye could have
perceived. Even before their acquaintance had become very old, she
slipped out to walk in the garden, and they sat on the green seats and
had long, foolish, youthful talks--delightful, foolish, youthful times.
Her conversation took an amusing interest from the peculiarities of
her education. She had seen and heard much in her short life in a hard
world, where it was no one's affair to keep anything from her young
ken--much of dark, and petty, and unpicturesque--preserving through
all a sort of hardy innocence; and she had borrowed from a cheap
circulating library a vast lot of fiction dealing with the supremely
grand. Her preference in literature, however, had remained for fairy
tales, a taste formed when it had been one of her duties to read aloud
to certain little children of the rich. She knew them by the score. It
was to this, perhaps, some of her remarks owed the fanciful touch that
redeemed them from the commonness of her general conversation--a genial
commonness, condoned to such young lips. She had a childish way of
lending a personality to everything, that amused him more than epigram
would have done. She ascribed intention to the wind that blew off her
hat, and stopped to express her mind to it. She assumed consciousness
in the bench they sat on; she wanted to take the same one, lest it
should think they slighted it because it was rickety, for which it
was not to blame. Every flower was to her a person. "Hush! They are
listening!" she said, looking from the corner of her eye at a bank of
knowing pansies. She scolded a button for coming off, as if the want
of principle shown by it had been a thing to revolt her. She stood in
a one-sided relation of good-fellowship with the brown birds hopping
among the gravel, and the fishes in the pond; she spared them many
crumbs. With homely good-heartedness she took into an amused regard all
the family of spring--buds, blades, insects--addressing speech to them
as if she had been a giant and they a very little people.
Never can spring return without Fraisier's remembering that spring.
It was bright; by it all the springs following have been cast in the
shadow.
The long hair was woven through and through his thoughts; but not as
a disturbing, upheaving element. The girl made him waste a great deal
of time, but nothing else--not the life of his heart. Because of her
good-nature, her entire want of coquetry or perverseness, his feeling
for her complicated itself in nowise; rather it grew simpler as it
insensibly changed. His wonder and fine dread at feminine appurtenances
had worn away a little with increased familiarity; he reposed on that
fact as if it had been such an one as becoming accustomed to the noise
of guns. He felt under delicate obligations to her for having routed
his shyness, and not at all tormented him in any of the thousand ways
he apprehended a feminine being would have at her command.
As he was less and less in awe of her and that suspected arsenal,
though a charming, fearful element went out of his sentiment, his
affection perhaps grew more. She made such a good little comrade!
Insidiously, she connected herself in his mind with future days--she
who cared only for the day and the pleasure thereof. When he spoke of a
thing it would be pleasant to do, a place pleasant to visit, he said,
always unreflectingly, yet from a sincere heart: "Some day we must go
there. Let us do such a thing some time." When he described the hills
and ponds of home, he said what they might have done had she been
there last summer or the years before, how they might have rowed and
rambled. He painted the good time they might have together, in some not
impossible, but not specified time, place, and circumstances.
So the green from tender grew brilliant--grew deep--became void of
interest to the accustomed eye, and more or less dust settled over it.
It was manifest to all that spring was past.
Then began an anxious time. Those lectures, those miserable lectures!
Those courses, those wretched courses, which he had neglected! That
blessed information he had spared to cull when the time was for it!
These things seemed likely to get their revenge. When he awoke to a
sense of his danger--very late! only when the bloom was off the year,
when lily and early rose had gone where they could divert no mortal
more--he could not believe that he should not, by fitting exertion,
catch up in time at the appointed goal. He worked rabidly, with a wet
cloth around his head. He thought not of girls in those days, I promise
you; he recked not of bronze-gold hair!
It was written that he should not be saved. He closed his school term
pitiably conditioned.
When the worst was known, at least was time to breathe, however sore
the lungs, then his mind reverted to her. He had been man enough to
harbor no spite towards her, accuse her of nothing. He sent her a
message and waited at the appointed place, wondering a little, while
he waited, at his follies of the spring. They seemed so unnecessary,
looked back upon now. Why, in a very real, practical world like
this one, where a man's failure to pass his exams was sure to call
forth from his progenitor letters such as his pocket at this moment
contained, conduct one's self as if existing in a world of lambs and
purling streams and shepherdesses? He was one with the actual world in
looking with astonishment and condemnation upon his own works. The sky
above was hard, barren blue; it seemed so easy, looking back, to have
stuck to the approved road. What had possessed him?
Then she appeared. At sight of her his heart dropped its armor. She
brought back a whiff of the sweetness of a past atmosphere. Was it
possible he had ever been the happy boy he seemed to remember! He
smiled up in her face with cheek-muscles stiffened by disuse, and eyes
ringed with studious shadows. She had on a flimsy frock, printed all
over with little flowers that seemed to him to smell good; her hair,
where the great wad projected beyond the straw brim, was touched with
a warm, peculiar glory. He had meant to keep himself well hardened
against her, tell her the various things necessary in a matter-of-fact
way, and bid her good-bye indefinitely. He felt more like crying with
his disgraced head in her lap.
He conquered his weakness.... A pretty man he made!
He got out with sufficient composure and dignity what he had to say.
He told her all that had happened, the change it made in the coming
months. He was not going home for the holidays; he could not endure to
see the folks. He was going into the country to spend the summer in
hard study, to make sure of "passing" next term. He was going to the
particular place he mentioned because he had a friend there, a fellow
he had taken up with in the last weeks, one that had had the same bad
luck as himself. This man's family lived there; it would not be quite
so dreary as being alone.
She chaffed and consoled him in turns. Now that the world had gone
all wrong with him, her eyes seemed to him sweeter and softer than
he had ever observed. What a good, kind little friend! Lord! what
a good, crazy, light-hearted time they had had, and how pretty she
looked to-day! What wonderful, thrice wonderful hair it was, waving and
ringletting about her glowing summer face, coiling massively on the
back of her head! No woman on earth had such hair!
He did wish for a moment that Green, his new friend, might see her--he
was proud of her. One night, when they had sat grinding together for
mutual assistance, the oil giving out, Green had told him of a cousin
of his. Fraisier had said nothing of any girl. He only wished that
Green might see the hair of this girl whose name he had foreborne to
speak.
Good-bye, Minnie! He should be working like a slave all through the
burning golden days--let her think of him a little. He should be very
lonesome. When he had studied until his eyes smarted and his head
swam, there would be nothing pleasant to do, no one pleasant to talk
with--she might spare a moment to be sorry for him now and then. He
should be back in the fall. Bless the beautiful and beautiful and
beautiful hair! Good-bye, Minnie!
She so little perished from his mind after their parting that
whenever--as Green and he lay under the trees, withdrawn from the world
and devoted to arduous studies, keeping off the insects by smoke--Green
began talking about that cousin of his, Fraisier became half sick with
reminiscence. He could not resist replying by talking--with the finest,
shyest reverence always--of Minnie. There was a dreamy solace in
talking of her to some one. She described so well, too; so unusually.
He had a proud secret assurance that as an incident in a man's life she
altogether eclipsed a cousin in interest.
"How long is your cousin's hair?" he asked, with assumed casualness,
once. Green stared a little, and confessed not having the slightest
idea. Fraisier opened his arms as wide as they could go, and said,
vaguely blushing, "The young lady I spoke of has hair as long as this!"
"Come! I should like to see it!" spoke Green, in such a tone that
Fraisier turned a deep, vexed red.
He said nothing, but on the next day took his books to a different
place, choosing to keep to himself so long as Green did not seek him
with a suitable apology.
The spot selected by the young men as a meeting ground lay at an equal
distance between Green's home and the cottage in which Fraisier had
taken up his summer quarters. It was on the skirts of a wood, and, by
some accident of the land, often cool when other places were hot. The
rolling pasture it commanded was dotted with scrubby evergreens, and
crossed by a small brook the cow's hoofs had in some places trodden
broad and shallow. It was colored in patches with the frequent pink of
clover-heads, surprised here and there with the white of a long-necked,
belated daisy.
Fraisier took himself to a spot just not so far from the usual haunt
but that Green when he came might see him.
It was a fair, soft, simmering morning, promising a scorching day.
He stretched himself under the trees and lighted a pipe--he had taken
to a pipe in place of cigarettes since coming into the wilderness.
He composed himself for a serious forenoon's work, deciding that it
was much more profitable, after all, to study alone--Green was always
digressing.
The spot he had chosen was not so good, it proved, as the one he had
left clear for Green. A path ran through the woods, just within the
trees; there was a frequent patter of bare feet on the dust, children
with pails passed looking for things. He waited to proceed with his
theorem till their high piping, scattered voices had died away. It was
not so cool, either; as a fact, it was hotter than most places. He did
not crave the exertion of seeking a better; this was at least shady. He
turned over on his back and closed his eyes, yielding gracefully to the
force of circumstances.
A light blow in the face, from an acorn, perhaps, roused him.
He thought of Green, and, instantly broad awake, looked for the
development of some practical joke.
It was not Green--he saw it with a sort of disappointment. It was one
of the berry-seeking children that had caught sight of him snoozing,
and followed its natural instinct. A boy's grinning head was seen
bobbing above one of the neighboring bushes. He turned from it in
disgust and felt surlily about the grass for his pipe, about his person
for a match--
Gracious powers! what sort did the young one take him for, with this
free persecution? Another acorn had hit him smartly on the head.
"Look out, there!" he called, making a feint of rising to give chase.
"Come on!" shouted the boy, gayly, from behind the bush. There was a
burst of laughter, a flash and flutter of pink, and the boy, who turned
out to be a girl, came precipitately towards him. She stopped just
short of a collision, and dropped in the grass panting with laughter.
He stared at her blankly. Every time she looked up and caught sight of
his expression she doubled herself and fairly writhed.
"He doesn't know me!--he doesn't know me!" she brought forth amid her
convulsive giggling.
"Minnie! My God! What--what have you done to yourself?" he exclaimed,
and had no breath left.
She moderated her laughter, and presented her smiling face a moment for
him to see well what had happened. She ran her fingers over her cropped
head, ruffling it absurdly, making the short locks stand on end.
"Isn't it funny? Doesn't a person look funny at first? The rest of
it is hanging, like a fairy horse's tail, in the window, across the
picture of the Elixir lady. (Bad old woman! Cheat! She didn't give
me much for it! But, Natty Fraisier, I would have taken even less,
I did want to come so!) You poor, lonesome boy! I can stay a whole
week--perhaps more. I have found a place in the village, just near you.
The first child I met told me all I wanted to know. I thought it would
have been harder. Mercy! isn't it heavenly still and sweet here, with
hills and cows? I was never in the true country before. Mercy! isn't
it good? Look out, you flower there--over there, you, miss! That is
called a bee; he has a terrible stinger--oh, he is an old acquaintance?
Go ahead, then, and give him a nice swing, and honey for his tea. Oh,
Natty, I am so glad! Aren't you glad?"
He choked and cleared his throat. No, without that voice, never in
the world would he have known her. Before him seemed to be a common
little street-boy who had run off in a girl's new pink dress and shiny
shoes--an unknown boy whose features had something painfully familiar.
Strange! He remembered Minnie's face as possessing a certain harmony
in its lines, however childish and trivial they were; this terrible
little impostor, though not ill favored, was broad of jaw and narrow
of forehead; his eyes even were not the same, but smaller and nearer
together, while the mouth was larger--its very proneness to laughter
increased its commonness. And that ridiculous hair--literally chopped
off by an unskilled hand and twisted here and there with unpractised
tongs! It was so thick, it had no more light or lustre than a
hearth-brush.
Her face sobered ever so little as she looked at him. "What is the
matter? Poor dear! you haven't got over those exams. But I won't
bother, you know, and take up all your time; I have learned better.
I won't interfere with any work, I promise, Natty. See me swear? On
this algebra! Only, before you begin and when you have done each day,
we will go for walks and rows. I saw a boat on the pond. We will have
lunch on the grass, and make a fire with sticks we pick up. Look! you
put three long sticks like that and hang the kettle in the middle. We
will do all those things we used to plan when we never much thought
there would be a chance. You poor, lonesome boy, have you been having
a horrid time? We will make up for it now. Natty, you don't care about
the _hair_, do you? You needn't. You know, I had got mortally sick of
sitting in that window. I could not have stood it a day longer. When
a fly buzzed on the pane I wanted to scream. Again and again I have
come near putting my foot through the glass at one of the gaping
faces, then jumping down and catching the old woman while she told lies
about my having used her Elixir faithfully--never touched a drop!--and
dancing her up and down all around the room until she dropped. I
shall go back to taking care of little children now, as I did before
she found me. I do love children! And in that business, I don't mind
telling you, I shall do better without all that hair. No matter how
tight I did it up, some one was always grumbling that it made too
much show. You mustn't care a bit about the hair, Natty; I gave it up
without a twinge. I cut it off with my own hands. You have no idea how
much comfortabler this is in hot weather. My head feels so light! I can
dip it in the water any minute. I do love it like this!"
She ran her hands through her hair again, ruffling it still more
fantastically. Fraisier winced. He was sick beyond calculating the
degree. "Oh, my poor girl!" he contrived at last to say.
She looked at him more closely than before in her overrunning joy,
and her face fell a little. No doubt she had seen herself in mirrors
since her alteration, but not in a real mirror until she saw herself
reflected in his very pale face. She smiled still, but a little
foolishly; then no more, and stopped chatting. It was as if a stone
had been set to seal up a spring--a large stone laid upon her bubbling
heart. There was a silence.
He saw that she must be seeing what he could not keep out of his face.
He could not help it; he could get no control over his feelings, over
his expression. He was not sure he cared to--he did not try. He was at
sea: he did not know what he felt, what he did not feel. The bottom
seemed to have dropped out of his heart, out of the world--out of
something, everything. He knew not! He only knew he was sick--sick, and
incapable of speech, of action, of reflection.
"You can't stay here, child," he heard some one saying, in a
matter-of-fact, superficial voice. "Don't you see, yourself, that you
can't? For your own sake, I mean. It would never do, Minnie. You must
understand that. You don't know what a thing a small country village
like this is, for gossip and slanderous tongues. I couldn't let you
injure yourself so, don't you see?"
"It wouldn't be proper?" she inquired, faintly.
"No, Minnie; no, it wouldn't--at all. Don't you see it?"
She got to her feet, full as pale as he now.
"All right," she said, and after a few mechanical steps, paused a
moment, looking down, biting her finger--lost in thought, or waiting
for something to happen, for him to say something further.
He could not speak--he could not make himself speak.
"All right," she said again, very distinctly, and turned to go without
another word.
"Minnie! Minnie!" he faltered, and had instinctively cast himself
after her. His outstretched hand almost touched her pink draperies.
She turned on him fiercely, whisking herself out of reach. He was
confronted for a second by a little angry street-boy face, but with
the gathered experience and woe of half a race in the eyes. "Let me
alone! Don't dare to touch me! Nathaniel Fraisier, I hate you!"
She began desperately to run. He saw her clutch her poor little ruined
head, and heard her cry out, breaking into sobs: "Oh, my hair! Oh, my
hair!"
He dropped in the grass, face downward, and pressed his hands over his
ears, trembling. It all seemed so strange, so out of proportion.
In the late afternoon of that same hot day the crabbed little bell on
Madame Finibald's door snapped to let in a tired, dusty youth, whose
dejected face was so flushed, one's thought at sight of him turned
at once on sunstroke. He leaned wearily over the counter and asked a
few questions, at which madame's liver seemed so shaken she could not
keep a hold on her good manners. At the height of her voice she began
berating all the world, and one absent person. Fraisier tried to calm
her, with vague, soothing motions of his hands patting down the air.
When she subsided enough for him to be heard, he pointed to a long
tail of shining hair in the window, and spoke again, growing redder,
if possible, than before--so red that his eyes watered, and he had to
shade them a moment, leaning his elbows on the counter. She unhitched
the hair, shaking it brutally. He put out his hands in remonstrance.
She flung it down before him with a forbidding proposition and a deep
snort of malice. Meekly he emptied his purse on the counter, unfolding
the bills, spreading out the silver and lucky pieces to count,
reserving only for himself a crumpled ticket.
She watched him with gleeful, avaricious eyes. After computation, he
rose without breath of argument and went down the street to pawn his
watch and studs and cigarette-case, returning solvent.
He left with a rather unsightly parcel in his hand; the cover was burst
in more than one place. Madame Finibald had not been so particular
as she sometimes was in the selection of her wrapping-paper. He had
no overcoat and no pocket large enough to put his prize in; he was
forced to hold it, conscious how it was heavy and soft and its contents
gleamed through the holes.
He got home at dark, reporting to his landlady with his back to the
light. He wanted nothing to eat: there were lamps and voices in the
dining-room. He could not go to bed, worn out as he was: on the porch
below his window was singing and picking of strings.
He went forth into the fields. At last, beyond all sounds but the
summer's own, he sank on the grass. He did not look up once at the
stars, but lay sprawling with his forehead on his crossed arms, and
let his heart torture itself at its own good leisure. He drank deeper
and deeper of its dark bitterness, forcing himself recklessly to it,
reaching a sort of desperate drunkenness. It seemed to his inexperience
there could be nothing worse at any time in this life to taste.
He woke long hours afterwards, wondering a little at first, feeling
somewhat stiff. The air was warm and still, tremulous with
crickets--thrilled through with the shaken baubles of the summer's
myriad little jesters. In his sleep he had rolled over; his face was
to heaven. The sky was faint with starlight; the Milky Way was a road
of diamond sand; the great constellations had hung themselves with
solemn jewels; down near the rim of the world watched far-spaced large
earnest beacon-lights--but above, the tiniest irresponsible stars
twinkled in and out, like shining ants in ant-hills. He looked, almost
wondering why his eyes felt so queer--sore besides heavy; why his
breast felt so heavy. He rose sitting; he was on a hillock. Like an
opaque reproduction of the transparent, lightsome sky looked the ground
about him, which the scythe had this season respected; it was dark
dotted with daisies. He rubbed his aching head a little, then lay back
again, the grass shooting coolly up along his cheeks. After the sound,
dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion from which he had waked, because he
had drained it to satisfaction, his head was numbed, but, the little
it worked, clear in its working; his heart was sore, but quieted.
Something had changed; all wore another aspect; all seemed farther
removed. Hours had gone by already, a month would go--a year--fifteen
years. This would be lived out of memory. If it is realized that a
thing must cease, has it not begun to die already? At the first one
must be patient, and take suffering as a matter of course. He stretched
his limbs wearily, not entirely deceived by himself, nor unaware of
depths of heartache under this film of philosophy that had scummed them
over in sleep. He drew his hot palms over the grass; his hand came upon
the parcel that he had not dared to leave behind nor to open, that he
never would have the strength to open--and his philosophy was severely
shaken. His heart was near bursting out afresh; he laid his face on the
wretched, soft, dead little bundle, and agonized.
Then he revolted against this suffering that seemed to him undeserved,
disproportionate. He was not a bad fellow; looking into his heart,
he could declare truthfully that it was not in him to willingly harm
anything--give any one pain. Why should he feel so endlessly mean, so
endlessly miserable? He appealed to Minnie, his reasonable Minnie of
old, against this state of things. He defended himself to her; she
defended him to himself. When all was said, he had at no time done
anything to blame, had that day said nothing that was not wise and for
the best, that he would not in like case be forced to say over again.
He had been taken unawares; he had not expressed himself with tact--he
had been fatally slow. The fact remained that the girl could not have
stayed by him, setting the whole country-side agog. But if his heart
still refused to be at peace about this matter, let it be assured he
meant to seek till he found the girl; it must be easy enough to find
her, though he had failed that day. Alas! poor little forlorn head,
shorn of its great gleaming beauty--poor little discrowned head, at
this hour full of what thoughts, God knew! He would make all things
right to her; he was extravagantly ready to pay any price; he was
lavish of his future, free of all the gods gave him to give. At the
same time that he made these protestations to himself and to her, and
he was sincere in making them, he knew that Minnie would never look at
him again--he knew that she had understood how he was changed with the
change in her; it was beyond his governing, but she must be forgiven
for not forgiving it. And looking into his man's heart, he wondered at
the mystery of it.
In that hour of being honest, after revolting at it, reasoning about
it, trying to sophisticate it away, he came back always to a hopeless
contemplation of it as a simple fact, not to be done away with. In
the face of it he might clear himself of all blame, perhaps, but he
remained humiliated and full of a vague pity. As he lay in the grass
so, plucking heedlessly in the dark at the little tufts, emptied of all
pride under the lofty stars, a dreamy mood followed upon what degree
of success he had in suppressing feelings he was determined not to
endure, so did they hurt! His thoughts in search of soothing travelled
back to days before last spring, when he could hardly have conceived
what he had this night been suffering. Peaceful period, but without
great charm, he decided, loyal to his altered taste. He thought of
the past spring, the soft awakening all without and within a man--the
tender, vast burgeoning, fluttering, shimmering, outreaching! He judged
it sadly from a midsummer night. Not all were flowers that put forth in
that mad amenity of nature; no, not all flowers.
And in connection with all that freshness and fragrance and beauty of
spring, he thought unavoidably of what had seemed to his new-quickened
heart its very expression, its chiefest adornment--the gentle order
he loved in so general and devoted a way. His conjuring head filled
with charming phantoms, pathetic to his sense at this juncture; they
passed, exquisite pageant, leaving as if a perfume of themselves
through the halls of his mind, not one little grace, one foolish trick,
one dainty manner of being, lost on his worshipping sensibility:
silver laughter--odors of violets--sunny loose hairs and white
hand tucking them behind the ear--pretty feet tiptoeing across the
street in bad weather--pouted lips cooing to a baby, or quaintly
attempting its own language to a bird--languid attitudes--belts
of a span--caprices--teasing humors--tenderness--pity for small
creatures--long lashes blinking a tear--queenly bearing--rods of
lily held over bowing heads with such assurance of power as never a
sceptre--aye, power greater than any emperor's, founded, dear God--upon
what? at the mercy--of what? And he yearned and grieved over them, poor
youth, as if he had been their maker.