The Red Book Magazine/Volume 7/Number 6/Don't You Remember?

by George Allan England

 

Don’t You Remember?

BY GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND

I

You first fell in love when you were ten years of age; when I say “love,” I mean a blinding, dizzying agony of worship, self-consciousness, fear and infatuation, the like of which there are no words to tell. You were ten, a little spindle-shanked monster with projecting ears and mouse colored hair; you were addicted to marble when the sidewalks began to grow muddy in March; you made tracks, in winter, and slid down them, or delighted in “tiddledy-benders;” you played “scrub” on the old tennis-courts in summer; you pined for miscellaneous deviltry at all seasons. On Saturday you liked to storm Morrison’s barn, or defend it, Ivanhoe-fashion; evenings it was prisoner’s base or hide-an’-seek in Rogers’ yard. Occasionally you varied all this by fighting after school, at the end of Ashford Street, where the houses thinned out and a little sickly brook ran through a raw field. Then you and Eddie Parker or Tommy Nelligan or some other young “champeens” got together with a swarm of backers and hammered away at random till real blood flowed. You also got licked at home for fighting, licked with a black walnut ruler inlaid with stars made out of the original Charter Oak. Why history writers put that odious old tree into books you never could understand; but then, it was only one more piece of grown-up idiocy. The ruler stung shockingly and you danced and hollered. Your hands got as red as fire.

“I won’t, I won’t! Won’t never, never fight again (whack!) Ow! Ow-w-w-w! O-o-o-o-o! Aw, quit, why doncher when I say I won’t never, never (whack!!) Oo-o-o-oo!—”

“Now the other hand!”

It was just barbaric. You figured out all sorts of things you were going to do to get even, when you grew big—and first of all you were going to make ’way with that ruler. Oh, my, it was simply astonishing the things you were going to do to it! Somehow, it is in the family still, stars and all; it lies on your desk this minute. Piece of the real Charter Oak—no, you can’t afford to splinter those with dull hatchets, as you used to plan. Besides, it’s sometimes useful in little sessions you hold with your eldest son. Besides, again, you're rather grateful to it, now, because it kept you from fighting, once on a time, and thereby preserved your nose. Kept you from fighting, that is, until Bulb Cook dared you knock a teeny, weeny little chip off his shoulder, or Ally Arnold gave you what was technically known as a “coward-blow.” At such crises, somehow, the ruler was always forgotten; you rushed on fate again at the end of Ashford Street, and so on, da capo. For you were nothing but a little boy, a young American, one of million, and so you remained until she came.

She—she was nine and her name was Blanche Heath; she had two blonde pigtails and wore a calico dress all figured over with little sprigs of violets; her father ran a drug store in the village. Such, at least, are the salient facts as you perceive them down the rather dim corridors of time. What she seemed to you in those far days you really cannot tell, since any analysis or critical observation would then have keen sheer sacrilege. Memory furnishes items of pinkish cheeks, bluish eyes with slightly reddened lids, waxen locks and brilliant clothing with an occasional flutter of machine-made lace at the knee, stubby boots, and coarse brown stocking you feel it is but just and right she should have dazzled you. When she pegged stodgily into the school-room—and you always went early so that you might watch her enter—the whole world seemed to tremble and then stand still; you wondered that no one else noticed any unusual convulsion of nature. In study hours, even though she sat behind you, you seemed to have gimlet holes bored in the back of your head to peek at her out of. You were as good a pie, a regular little-Willie, till some of the boys began to call you “Teacher’s pet.” Had it not been for her you most certainly would have fought, for only blood can wipe away that epithet. You let it pass, however, for her sake; you stopped your whispering in school and your rude jests at recess; you sat at “attention,” even when teacher’s back was turned.

From the first day that she entered your grade you were a changed boy. Your one-time unwashed hands became chapped and cracked through much scrubbing with kitchen soap; your boots grew shiny; your big red necktie twined in fantastic knot even your hair received surreptitious oilings, a few times, till parental sniffs and investigations put an end to that. The fights stopped, and the marble-playing with subsequent muddy knees; the barn-stormings and the rude, unmannerly games were no more. Instead of rushing out through the subway-like exit of the school, hollering and screaming with the other boys like a crazy demon in a fit, you took unto yourself the habit of marching forth sedately and crossing over to stand in front of Heath’s drug store where you could see Blanche pass or mayhap enter. But the funny part of it was that when she really came, her arms entwined with other (totally-despised) girls, you did not see her at all. No, your attention was wholly occupied with a minute inspection of the big glass bottles of colored water or with greeting loudly some fellow on t’other side of the street. Your words were big and brave, yet somehow Blanche never took the slightest notice of them. Even though you talked openly of important matters, mentioned the fact that you had a horse hair in a bottle of water, which hair was manifestly turning into a worm—even though you got in with the tough boys that lived near the abattoir, swaggered a little like MacLane, who was known to smoke cigarets and who killed rats with a terrier, you never seemed to make any impression on the cruel fair. Possibly other gingham hearts in the sixth grade pined and drooped and faded for you, but you neither knew nor cared, for hers was as ice and of your knightly love she wotted not.

“Wot yer 'fraid of? Ain't we engaged?”

Your greatest comfort was the drug store, for here at least you had something definite and tangible to lay hold on. You never really and truly believed it was a drug store at all, like other stores, though the stout man who claimed to be her father was visibly to be seen within, mixing drugs and rolling pills—claimed to be her father, I say, because you knew he really and truly couldn’t be; that was preposterous on the face of it. Yet everything seemed natural enough, too; the store and the bottles were like any others, and people used to go in and out, perfectly at ease, as if there were nothing in any way remarkable about the affair. So, although you never took much stock in the reality of things, you were thankful for the comfort and support those bottles and that store gave you in your fathomless sea of trembling adoration.

II

So you worshiped, throbbed, palpitated at a distance for an interminable period—as much as five or six weeks—and then finally something happened, something so wondrous and beautiful and ecstatic that you ran home with trembling legs, hid in your room to think it all over and protested that you didn’t want any supper even when brother Paul came up with blandishments and railleries. That night you lay awake with throbbing, burning brain, till long after 8 o’clock, turning the matter carefully in your mind and trying to draw conclusions from it—now torn with fear lest the mirage should suddenly dissipate, leaving only barrens and desert; now raised and floating on the most dizzying waves of hope and joy. And through it all rang and sang and echoed the words that had caused all the inner turmoil—her words, the first that any woman had ever flattered you with, the first praise, the first compliment, the first intoxicating bliss of life. Even now, though you pay taxes, have a wife and certain olive-branches, you remember those words and they are passing sweet. Then, when that nine-year-old goddess uttered them and when you got them at third hand, they were words of diamonds, set on a background of pure gold. For she had told Kitty Nelligan, who had told Tommy Ashley, who had told you, all in the very strictest confidence, that she thought you were “A very pretty boy!” Joy, joy! Raptures to the with! You could write pages about it, even yet, but Peace, heart! Peace, soul! Stir not up again the storm and welter of that old madness! “A very pretty boy!” Elijah never caught more glorified visions from his fiery chariot than did you, that night, until a great weariness o’er came you and sleep stole away the dazzling wonder.

Next day you suffered acutely, and the day after, and many days, but it was sweet suffering which you wouldn’t have foregone for worlds. And oh, the part you played! The chilling indifference, the open scorn—the secret scrubbings, scourings, shinings! Lord knows you would have gladly thrown yourself at those stubby feet and poured forth your love in a rapture of words, carefully culled from the Fifth Reader, but that was utterly impossible. To woo openly was taboo—a rampant violation of the boy-code. The intricate, unwritten law which governs little people held you like a fly in a spider-web; you would as soon have reached for the sun as have approached her now.

Yet your heart was flaming, under your horse-shoe-dotted waist, and you felt that you must act or die. Die! That rather pleased you, on the whole, the idea of a well-carried-out suicide in the wood-shed, but you dismissed it on reflecting that remains are apt to look somewhat untidy and that possibly Blanche might not cry enough to pay you for the bother of a painful end. Other and easier methods recommended themselves. No, your love should not pour itself out in blood, neither should the banalities of pickled limes and chocolates sully it—especially as Blanche had free access to the store supplies and you felt your finances were incapable of competing with Mr. Heath’s liberality. Rather should art and literature convey the message, chastely, and with anonymous dignity. Your way was clear, your course of action plainly to be discerned.

In the dinning-room at home, the Powers had seen fit to hang a crayon picture of three little boys without any bodies, lying over a sort of railing and embellished with woolly clouds all ’round. You heard people call them Cherubs or something of that sort, and say that Raffy L. painted them. There was a fellow named Rafferty at school, but Raffy L. was one too many for you—“some blame Guiney, I betcha!” No matter; the cherubs looked rather spiritual and detached from earthly vanities, not going down any further than the neck. “Huh, I'd like to be that way,” you told yourself, “when ma’s comin’ with that danged old ruler!” Those little pinfeathery wings would be great in winter, too—better than ear caps! But when it was pie-time, well, the advantages of cherub-hood looked rather doubtful. No matter—the cherubs were pure and fair and not of earth, earthy. So you called them in to serve you and to bear your message to Blanche, that creature of light and beauty. And you brought home your school box of crayons, also a five-cent pad, purchased with delicate tact at the Heath drug store. The thought that possibly your very nickel might find its way into her hand was unutterably sweet.

Then you copied the cherubs. It took the better part of a week, with about a million rubbings out and changes, but at last the perfect work greeted your eyes, a trifle staring and woodeny, you admitted, but still recognizable, and all shaded with a rubber, the way teacher said you must not shade. You had made the clouds considerably woolier than the original, which was a very decided improvement. On the whole, you felt that your cherubs were a very close second to Raffy L’s.

Next day she found them in her desk. You never looked ’round, but the gimlet-holes in the back of your head told you all; your projecting ears stretched out further still to catch the gigglings, the whisperings, and the rustlings as your drawing passed back and forth among the girls. That night, standing in front of the store, you waited for her coming with throbs and thrills.

Lo! She is approaching, the adored; she is drawing nigh, convoyed by two little girls. Dante, watching Beatrice escorted by her ladies, never suffered sweeter pain. Now she is very close; now she is here!

Your hair received oilings a few times.

Now she is past. Noses in air, the three sail by. Your heart falls; you even feel a moisture on your forehead which you hope is cold perspiration and which might be were it not very warm, the day being a hot one in May. All hope is lost; she has not spoken! All? Not so! Just as she turns the corner she makes a diabolic face at you, squinting up both eyes and sticking out her tongue. Then she disappears. You stand rooted to the spot (you tell yourself) with terrible joy; suddenly Mark Rogers hails you from across the street, and you, with Indian whoops and bounds, rejoin him and make off to a barn-storming, the first in many weeks. The sun of human happiness rises to no higher zenith than at that glad moment and all the rest of the ineffable day. “Your strength is as the strength of ten;” you run faster than any other boy, yell louder, jump from higher up the cherry-tree and plan more fiendishly elaborate tortures for your captives in war—all because she has made a hideous face at you and stuck out that little red tongue.

Your courtship proceeded admirably, from that moment. On the next morning she spoke to you for the first time, yes, You handed it to her one with real, actual words: “Hello, Philip!” and you choked and answered, “Hello, Blanche!” and felt very hot and red-faced. The following day your conversation expanded into a bit of repartee

“Hello, Phil!” (Phil, mind you, not Philip!)

“Hello, Blanche!”

“You think you’re a great drawer, don’t you?”

“Well, ain’t I?”

“Huh!”

“I can draw a house!”

“Honest Injun!”

“Yep! You want me to?”

“I don’t care!”

With a flirt of her pigtails she was gone. The thrills were less acute, this time, but still poignant. Assuredly, here was something new under the sun, better than kites, marbles, or hunting for wood-chucks in Pratt’s meadows, where wood-chucks had been extinct this many a long year. You felt suddenly that boyhood was dropping away from you; it was with a certain fine scorn that you beheld your friends making off to Babcock’s woods that afternoon to look for chestnuts. Once you would have been in the van of that excursion; now you stayed behind to cultivate the arts and ponder on your thirsty, unquenched, love.

You handed it to her one Friday in the cloak room.

You rummaged out an old book with a pretty house in it, standing amid tall trees, and that, too, you copied, line for line. On the morrow the gift changed hands, and the news spread over the school that “Phil Brown is stuck on Blanche Heath.” Very shortly this information began to crop out in scraggly chalk letters on blank walls and the sides of barns. Initials also appeared, woven with hearts. In Man’s Land such announcements bring pride, joy, congratulations; in Boy’s Land they mean disgrace and shame and bloody noses. Is not this atavism, the boy-code? Do not the primal fighting instincts of our race assert themselves at the age when men and women are only calves and little blue-eyed heifers?

Pshaw! What did you know of instinct or atavism? You knew only that you waited an hour for her at the corner so that you might say “Hello, Blanche!” You knew only that to walk half a block with her more than repaid you for missing an afternoon in the woods or at the swimming-hole; that you were held by the other boys in scorn and contumely; that everything in the universe was upside down and inside out; that you suffered, yet were glad, that love was torment, yet ecstatic bliss.

III

So the days wore on until June came and the earth was very green, the sky as blue robins’-eggs, the whole of Nature beautiful and kind. Then it was that Blanche and you were ceremonially betrothed with a marble, a tin tobacco-box and a solemn writing, as shortly will appear. Truth be, you engineered the ceremony, she being of less imagination, well satisfied with pickles wrapped up in dripping brown-paper and certain candies whereon were rings the color of gold, set with sparkling gems. No matter—your love could overlook such feminine frailties; she condescended to share your ritual, which was enough for you, without analysis. So you took the tin box and the marble—a splendid moss-agate—and a sheet of your best drawing-paper; with her you carried them all to that raw meadow where the sickly brook ran and where you had so often fought and bled. Here, beside a giant boulder of granite your vows were spoken, your everlasting troth was plighted. Beside the boulder you first dug a deep, deep grave, maybe ten or twelve inches deep; then she inscribed her name on the paper in a trembling scrawl and you wrote yours, drawing a big heart around them both; the marble you both kissed, promising to be forever faithful each to each until death or parents or some other equally inevitable calamity should you part.

“Why don’t you kiss it good, Blanche? Aw, that ain’t half a kiss!”

“’Tis too! Besides, your old agate’s all muddy!”

“’Tain’t neither! That’s only a teenty weenty little spot! Here, lemme rub it off on my han’k’chief! Now it’s all right, see?”

“You ’re a nice one, you are.”

“Well, gimme it! There—is that enough? (Peck! Peck!) Now what you want me to do?”

“I’m going to bury it now. Lay it in the box—now put the paper in too. Here, I'll put the cover on!”

Reverently, almost tearfully, you laid the box in the grave and covered it with earth which you “stomped” down. Then you placed a big stone on top of all, to keep the secret inviolate eternally.

“Now—kiss me!” Your voice trembled and your knees shook, but your purpose was firmer than adamant.

“Aw—I’m ’fraid!”

“Wotcher 'fraid of? Ain’t we engaged? Don’t engaged people always kiss each other?”

“Ye-e-es—but! I’m scared folks will find out! You can kiss me if you want to, put I just ain’t goin’ to kiss you, so there!”

You found yourself, in one day, a poet.

In vain you pleaded; if you were adamant she was diamond. Like a true woman she won the argument; you had to content yourself with one kiss on her pinkish cheek—a cold, ceremonial kiss as befitted such an occasion—the first and last, though little you thought it at the time. Hand in hand you retraced your steps through the field to where the houses began; she said nothing, but you hummed the old Sunday-school hymn:

He leadeth me, He leadeth me,
By His own hand He leadeth me;
His faithful follower I would be
For by His hand He leadeth me

IV

Such was the burial of your love-tokens before the love itself was dead. Dead? Did your love die, like every other thing? Aye, that it did, and speedily—a violent, bitter death—a murder if ever there was one! A murder, and with ridicule, guffaws, coarse, brutal witticism. The lynching of a nun would have been less ghoulish than the slaughter of that blameless passion. Heaven and earth shall pass away but the bitterness of that crude killing shall be never quite forgotten.

Poesy was the innocent cause of the killing, poesy, in this wise. After your betrothal, art and conversation seemed suddenly to become inadequate for the expression of your flame, and you burst into song. It was really a burst—almost an explosion—it deluged the fair one with literary gems just as sometimes people are deluged with water when a hose bursts, or a hydrant. Up to that time you had written nothing except copy-book phrases of rare moral tone and excessive dullness, twelve times on a page. But now, Song touched your lips and you found yourself, in one day, a poet! Song touched your lips; straightway with a school-pencil on the most execrable lined paper you traced burning lyrics and impassioned odes. Nearly all these gems have reverted to the primal night; but two or three still linger, jammed away in memory’s pockets, like tourmalines in feldspar. One, which you left in her desk and which she handed around with impartial liberality, asked this throbbing question, uttered this dark threat:

Question to Blanche

Oh, why are you so cruel?
Oh, why are you, I say?
I'll starve myself with gruel
If you don’t let up today!

Another, of Swinburnian type, declared that

Blanche is pretty like a rose,
With red cheeks and a white nose.
I like to mete
Her on the street.
She looks best in her Sunday clothes.

You handed this to her one memorable Friday after school, sliding it timidly into her hand in the cloak-room where the bustle and flurry hid your perturbation. You were a little shaky about the last rhyme, which, in spite of a great deal of effort, wouldn’t seem to come out right. She, however, never seemed to mind, but gave you courteous smiles and gracious thanks. You hoped your works of genius impressed her properly; you felt sure, at least, that she must palpitate with pleasure at such blistering praise as this:

Oh, Blanche, I kno that in the world
Ther is not eny prettyer girl!
Nobudy is so very sweet.
Nobudy has such plump feet!
Nobudy has such blue
Eyes, and nobudy is so true!

After she had received this treasure, hidden between the leaves of a physiology wherein funny-looking men without any skins stood in graceful attitudes to show their pretty white nerves sprangling all over their backs, you felt that your status was assured. You knew that you were arrivé, and you wrote no more verses but settled back to bask in the favor of your goddess and worship there forever and ever—or at least—until school closed in the last week of June.

Woe, woe and weakness of all human calculations!) Alack for the plans of men that do “gang aft agley!” Fate seemed to smile and Love rain roses; but Nemesis willed otherwise, and with a chilling breath frosted all your garden of bliss. One night—a chilly night, you remember even yet—you were awakened from slumber in your little iron bed by sounds of revelry and mirth down-stairs, where stupid elder folk, both of the family and visitors, were wont at most unearthly hours

... to sit and talk and sing
and never play at anything

save chess or whist or some such tedious fol-de-rol. Yes, you heard shrieks and gusts of laughter, foolish, idle laughter, then a low, mumbling voice, then more shrieks. Your father’s voice rose above the others: “That boy will certainly be the death of me yet!” And sister, good kind sister whom you loved and trusted so, what was she saying? “Now if that isn’t precocious, I’d like to know what is?”

Your skin was creepy. “A regular enfant terrible, eh?” It was Mrs. Heath who spoke, and mother answered:

“He’s only eleven, too—would you believe it?”

Then the low voice began again—Mr. Heath’s voice:

“Here, listen to this one—here’s a choice bit!

Oh, why are you so cruel? Oh, why are you, I say? ...”

With one bound you were out on the floor, wide awake and tingling with a terrible fear; your skin was creepy, your hair rose up, and the blood hummed in your ears. You knew perfectly well what it was all about, you understood everything—the agony of the condemned man is trival beside that first annihilating draught of ridicule and shame.

Mr. Heath finished the verse, and new, barbarous laughter rose up hyena-like to blast your ears. The Hindu seeing his clay Buddha crushed under Tommy Atkin’s heel, the good Orthodox confronted with a complete set of Ingersoll is less mangled in all that the soul holds dear and sacred than were you, standing there by the bed-room door in your canton flannel nighty, hearing the choicest outpourings of your love guffawed and haw-hawed over by a parcel of coarse-grained, ghoulish vandals. Sweating with shame and rage you crept back to your bed, crawled ’way down into it and covered your head over with the blankets, but not before Heath’s repulsive voice croaked mockingly:

“Calf-love, Brown, calf-love! It’s got to come out, like measles, and until it does ...!”

Then the bed-clothes swallowed you and you heard no more; the tears came, the blessed tears; you cried and cried and cried. Then, after a long time, you blurred off into sleep and troubled dreams seized you, due to slumbering with your head covered up—dreams that led you far afield through difficult paths till someone thumped you and it was morning and brother Paul was trying to get you up for breakfast.

Breakfast! After that? The very thought was nausea! No, you never want to live through another meal of that sort, a meal garnished with barbed innuendoes, eaten with downcast face and shame burnt cheeks. You bolted everything at random and rushed away to school, but that was even worse, for you fancied every one was looking at you and pointing the finger of scorn, A few people did smile significantly, for news flies fast in villages; but worse was yet to come. Blanche, herself, drew near; her head too, was hanging. Oh infinite agony—through you the best be loved had been brought to shame! Your legs trembled and your tongue felt parched; you couldn’t have spoken to her for worlds, or she to you. Jen Underwood, however, whom once upon a time you had slighted, suffered from no such reticence.

“You’re a nice one, you are!” she hailed, shrilly, pointing a sharp forefinger and grimacing horribly.

“Whatcher mean?”

“Aw, vou know! You’d oughter be ashamed!”

“Ashamed o’ what?”

“‘Oh, why are you so cruel? Oh why are you, I say?’” she chanted mockingly. You remained rooted, with clenched fists. “Oh my, how I wisht she was a boy!” you growled savagely. I’d—I’d—!”

The next was a boy—Eddie Parker, traditional foe.

“Na-na-nananaaaa!” He too pointed, sticking out a slanderous tongue. Freckles and the lack of teeth made Eddy far from beautiful and no one had ever dared to call him good.

You sallied out against him.

“Na-na-naniaa yourself, an’ see how you like it!”

“‘Oh, why are you so cruel, oh—’”

You rushed him—your strength this time was as the strength of twenty, and the fur began to fly. It flew so excessively that teacher had to drag you off the bleeding little monster before murder should be done. That fight, at least, turned out differently from the Ashford Street ones. After school, when you had interviewed the Charter Oak, you were sent to solitary imprisonment in the attic. Next day you were confined to the yard. It proved a grateful incarceration, since, being a parental command, it relieved you of the onus of skulking and at the same time let affairs settle in the outer world. So speedily did they settle that when you regained your liberty the new scandal of Frank Lapham’s having stolen the school drawing-pencils had quite obliterated your disgrace. You found also, to your surprise, that your love had not only died but had got itself decently buried, all in space of two days. The pinkish cheeks, waxen pig-tails, and violet-sprigged dress no longer fascinated you; they caused you, rather, a distinct feeling of ennui and discomfort. Like most calves, your love had been slaughtered in its infancy; and oh, how very very dead it was!

 

She grew up to marry a man named Smith—and this is gospel truth—thereby losing her identity and acquiring a family. You have also acquired certain olive branches, plus taxes, plus rotundity; yet somehow when the spring is stirring and the sky is the color of robins’ eggs, you wonder what of that tin box, what of the screed and marble buried beside the big rock down at the end of Ashford Street. Have the cellar-digging vandals destroyed them all, with the growth of the town, or do they still lie there in darkness, dreaming of that long-dead June and of all the things which might have been, but were not? The box and the paper have probably long since reverted to their elements, but somewhere in this world the agate still bears the kiss of Blanche and you. Calf-love! ... and now you are such very tough old beef! Calf-love, that made her a princess, her father a king, and the old brick drug store a crystal palace, at the very least! Calf-love! Are you quite, quite sure, even to this day, that it was a drug store after all, or that Blanche was only a little pink cheeked school girl in the sixth grade?