CHAPTER X
THAT night Reba dreamed about the swarthy-skinned Italian whom she had stolen down the hill so many winter nights to watch, as he stood before the little mirror in the basement of the mills at home and brushed his hair. It disturbed Reba to dream about the Italian. Sitting in one of the city's big churches the next day, she did not try to follow the sermon of the preacher in the pulpit. She tried to convince herself that there was nothing wrong in her new friendship. The Italian and her partner of last night had nothing to do with each other. Her dream was just a circumstance. She acknowledged that she had allowed her imagination to take liberties indeed with the Italian,—harmless little liberties, after all, did she but know—but not with her new acquaintance. No! Besides, she had never been to a "movie"; she had never been taken anywhere by a young man. Of course he wasn't a summer-hotel kind of young man, and Lollie Terrence had discarded him at a glance. But beggars couldn't be choosers, could they? She must go now. She had promised. It would be unkind—it would hurt him if she failed him now. Imagine—just imagine—she was desired by him!
She dressed her carefullest on Monday night, put on a fresh white waist and white kid gloves, and wore her bracelet and gold watch and chain. Of course he ought to have called for her. She knew that; but, after all, there was something exciting about stealing out this way to meet him—nobody knowing—nobody in all the world knowing!
Her feet made a merry little clap-clap on the asphalt pavement as she tripped along. She wasn't going to stand in a dark corner, and just watch the Italian. He was actually going to speak to her—greet her to-night—take her with him! She was a little tremulous by the time she saw the bright red and yellow electric lights of the Garden Theater bobbing at her a block away. She had not been out on the city streets at night before. She hoped she wouldn't have long to wait under the glaring lights. She hoped he would come soon. Was it the Garden Theater, he said, after all? What if (he had spoken so hastily, mentioned the meeting-place just once) what if she had misunderstood? And just where should she stand to wait for him? There were crowds of people! Reba stationed herself by one of the iron posts that held up the portico. Oh, she hoped she had not done wrong to come.
"Hello," suddenly a voice said at her side. She glanced up. It was he! Relief surged through her.
"Good evening," she replied.
"Good evening," he echoed.
"I didn't know whether you'd be here or not," she went on nervously.
"Be here! I've been here since seven. I was afraid I wouldn't know you without the ruffles. But say," triumphantly, "I knew you the first minute. I've gotten tickets," he told her.
He had bought tickets for her—with his money! The color mounted to her cheeks.
"Then shall we go in?"
"I'd like to—if you would," he replied humbly.
It was darkish inside. The lights had already been lowered. It was a long, narrow, little theater-space, with red-and-gold walls. Reba felt, rather than saw, that already it was packed with people. She followed the tall shadow of her escort, gropingly along the dim, gradually-descending aisle, and finally felt herself crowding by half a dozen or so human beings who were standing and pressing back to let her by them. Reba and her companion sat down finally in two narrow little seats, side by side, tucked up against the wall.
They sat there for two hours and a half, with scarcely a word to each other. The music, the close, smothery atmosphere, the proximity of so many vague breathing bodies about her, the ever-shifting, ever-changing conglomeration of events upon the screen before Reba, the oft-recurring stab of consciousness of the big piece of masculinity beside her, filled the girl with queer, new sensations of excitement and curiosity.
When finally the screen before her announced a huge "good night," and the audience began to stir and stand up, Reba felt as if she had been sitting there for weeks, with her sleeve slightly grazing the rough, burlapish material of the sailor's coat beside her. She seemed to wake from the dream only when the cool night air struck her forehead, and the familiar street-noises—trolley-cars and passing automobiles—made her realize that she had simply been to an evening moving-picture show, as Mamie did every week of her life.
Still she couldn't begin to talk immediately, nor the sailor either, evidently. For they were inarticulate for at least ten minutes after his single inquiry at the end of the performance if he might see her to her door.
It was Reba at last who spoke.
"I've had a very pleasant evening," she said, in her little old-school way.
"You wouldn't go again with me, would you?" he broke out earnestly. "It wouldn't be just the thing, would it? Of course you wouldn't go again with me?"
The pleading tone of his voice could not be lost on one of even so little experience as Reba. It did not displease her. It was rare music to Reba Jerome.
"I might," she heard herself replying.
"Oh, would you? Thursday? There are new pictures twice a week. You don't know quite what it means to a fellow like me, I guess." His voice almost broke.
Reba heard it.
"I'd be very pleased to come."
They said good-night under the light that shone over the front entrance of the Women's Alliance. Of her own accord, Reba extended her white-gloved hand in farewell. Nathaniel Cawthorne held it in just the same reverent manner he had held her bare hand on Saturday night, and long enough this time to say, looking down upon it,
"Thank you for wearing your pretty white gloves for me, miss."
There was scarcely a Monday or Thursday evening during the half-dozen weeks that followed that Reba didn't put on a fresh waist and spotless white kid gloves, and steal out after supper to keep her strange tryst. She and her sailor friend always went to the same place of amusement, met at the same hour, at the same spot; always spent the same silent two hours and a half, side by side, in the dim intimate atmosphere of the crowded theater.
There was something persuasive, irresistibly luring, to Reba, about those long quiet periods of speechless communion with the big strange man of the sea. Afterward, always as on the first night, she felt as if she had been to a region remote and secluded, a region in which she was groping along a winding path—a beguiling path, too, leading she knew not whither. Whenever he did speak, his voice paid homage; whenever he did look at her, which as time went on was less and less frequent, his eyes worshiped.
She was aware of the crudeness of his exterior. Aunt Augusta would have spurned him at sight, as a creature who belonged to a lower strata of society; if not actually a foreigner, anyhow, alien to one of Reba's bringing up, and no one for her to hold conversation with. The fact was, Reba didn't hold much conversation with him. There seemed to be little opportunity for speech between them—only the short walk of a half-dozen blocks or so after the performance; and words somehow were out of place after the enthralling experience of a speechless two hours and a half side by side.
It was probably this feature of silence that deepened the intimacy between Reba and Nathaniel Cawthorne. The conventionalities of speech would have increased the self-consciousness of both of them, and frightened off all spontaneous impulses. The unsophisticated sailor did nothing to frighten Reba. In spite of his rough clothes, he was possessed of a certain fineness of feeling that knew by instinct how not to shock or offend. Even his occasional use of "miss" and "ma'am" did not jar on Reba. His grammatical errors were not glaring ones, but, if they had been, the rare quality of his infrequent speeches would have more than made up for whatever their handicap in the way of the words that clothed them.
Reba knew very little about him, when it came to actual facts, scarcely more than what he had told her the first night, and he knew even less about her; but neither probed nor questioned. Perhaps they both hesitated to disturb the almost dreamlike reality of their friendship
As time went on and the bi-weekly meetings became more and more fraught with significance, Reba became a little troubled, anxious; and yet she let herself drift. New as she was in affairs of this sort, she was as loath to show her ignorance as an inexperienced traveler who shrinks from asking questions. She preferred to err, take a wrong turn or two, than to appear ridiculous. She told herself that her new acquaintance might be unaware of a deepening significance in their relations. She was so in the habit of feeding her soul on improbabilities that doubtless now she was imagining absurdities about his innocent friendliness.
For instance, she herself was keenly aware that of late his coat more than barely grazed her sleeve. She could feel his warm arm. But perhaps he did not feel hers. She was acutely conscious of the time when their feet first came in contact down there in the dark, underneath the seats. But perhaps he was not conscious of it. Lately, when he crossed his long legs, the touch of the back of his ankle against the front of hers was like a sharp caress to Reba. What was it to him, she wondered? She was careful always to sit very still, almost inert in her place beside him, neither moving toward him, as if to invite, nor drawing away, as if to forbid; half-curious, half-enticed, full of wonderment as to how much she was manufacturing of his pleasure in her nearness, how much, if any, he really felt.
At last, however, there came the red-letter night, when all Reba's doubt as to her companion's awareness of her closeness to him was swept away by the stealthy imprisoning of her bare left hand in his good right one.
Her hand was not lying, as usual, far away from him, in her lap, but innocently on the edge of the seat, in the dark, deep space between them. The first touch of the sailor's fingers had almost choked Reba, and the gradual enveloping of her hand in his had made her heart pound, and sent the blood rushing to her face.
What ought she to do? He had her hand imprisoned closely now! Might it not hurt his feelings if she made a motion of disapproval? He was so sensitive—so fearful always that he would offend. Reba sat very still. How strange—it swooped down upon her how strange a thing it was to feel her hand enclosed like this. She shut her eyes. It hadn't been all vain imagining then. He had been aware! Oh, surely, she admonished herself, she was not doing right to sit motionless like this. All her instincts told her she was tasting forbidden fruit. And yet—and yet—she had hesitated so long, she couldn't snatch her hand away now, could she? It would be crude, awkward. She sat in suspense, unconscious of what was flashing on the screen before her. She sat in exhilarating and torturing suspense for what seemed hours and hours, not daring to quiver as much as a finger of the hand this strange man held. It was not until people were beginning to stand up to go that her hand was free again, released by the stranger's own accord at last.
He would not look at her afterward. He could not speak, it seemed. Walking beside her the dark way back to the Women's Alliance, he hung his head, slunk along. His good-night was nothing but an unintelligible murmur.
Later, Reba in her room held up the hand that had been held close, to the electric light by her chiffonier. It glowed deep pink. She looked it over—back and front—wonderingly.
"I'm glad! I'm glad!" she whispered defiantly.
The next morning brought a letter to Reba. It was written in a neat, careful hand. There were no words misspelled. Its grammar was flawless.
Miss Rebecca Jerome
My dear Miss Rebecca Jerome:
I will come to-morrow night to see you at seven o'clock.
That was all. It was brief, so brief that it breathed its importance. Reba's folk-dancing class met that night, but she must see Mr. Nathaniel Cawthorne, of course. There was no doubt about that. But where—just where could she see him? Surely not in the Alliance's parlors, pleasant as they were, and designed especially for young men callers, with a series of alcoves along one side. The partitions between the alcoves were low, and did not conceal the head and shoulders of those inside the enclosures. Somebody would be sure to see her caller, Reba concluded. Mamie had already caught a glimpse of him once at the "Movies," and had jovially inquired afterward where Reba had picked up that "gink." Miss Park herself might see him—the wonderful Miss Park, for whom every night of late a marvelous young man of the summer-hotel type called in a low gray racing-car, and whisked her away with him to her home in one of the city's exclusive suburbs.
Reba had developed a burning admiration for Miss Park. Miss Katherine Park had become a model to her of all things fine and splendid, and, unexplainable as it was to Reba, the object of her worship went out of her way to be kind to her (or so it seemed), not in a patronizing way—that was the strange part—but just as if Reba were a friend of hers. More than once she had slipped her arm familiarly through Reba's at the lunch hour, and eaten on a tray beside her in the Cafeteria; more than once Miss Park had climbed the two long flights to Reba's room, and sat down with a bit of sewing and talked; and last week they had gone shopping together.
Reba had asked Miss Park, rather shyly at first, where the best place was to go for a new dress or two which she wanted to buy, and Miss Park had personally conducted her. They were going shopping again the day after to-morrow. Reba was very anxious that Miss Katherine Park should think well of her. If she saw the sailor in his queer clumsy clothes, talking with her in one of the alcoves (Miss Park often remained late in the evening) Reba feared she would not stand so high in her idol's estimation. No. She must not see her new friend here.
It was May. Warm. She would take him across to the Public Gardens. She would hover outside the front door of the Alliance, and spare him the embarrassment of asking for her from one of the girls on duty, and then they could go in search of an empty settee.
When she saw him coming a block away, she hastened to meet him. He wasn't expecting her; he was looking steadfastly straight ahead, and he passed by her first, unaware.
She had to turn back and run after him with a tremulous little, "Oh, please, here I am."
He turned at that, and stopped short at sight of her.
"I want to talk with you some place," he said.
"Yes, I know. Couldn't we go over to one of the seats in the Gardens?" she asked.
"That would be all right, I suppose," he replied.
It was a warm night. A dark, velvety shadow, cast by a thick-leafed horse-chestnut tree in full bloom fell across half of the long bench that Reba and her companion selected. There were bright electric lights illuminating a gorgeous bed of tall tulips in front of them; there were people passing, now and then, sounds of voices occasionally, the ripple of a distant fountain; and over a bridge arching across a bit of quiet water, through the leafy branches of intervening trees, could be seen the lights of one of the city's main thoroughfares, with trolley-cars moving up and down upon it. As soon as Reba and the sailor were seated in the dark black shadow of the horse-chestnut tree, he began to talk to her, sitting well away from her, not touching her, taking off his cap, as if out of deference, and speaking with difficulty at first.