Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 15

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At the church supper that evening Peter had a revelation. Maxine Larabee brushed against him in the coatroom, and he knew as though he had seen it in the paper that he was in love.

Not that Maxine had even noticed his presence. Why should she with every boy in Brailsford Junction running after her? She had simply swept by in her smart tailored suit and velvet hat exhaling the very faint odor of violets. It was not quite nice to use violet perfume in Brailsford Junction in 1913. It gave Maxine an air of sin and secrecy. Peter felt a trifle heady watching her disappear into the forbidden realm marked WOMEN from whence came the concerted giggles, shrieks, and titterings of a dozen high-school girls.

Peter yanked viciously at his two-inch starched collar, polished the bright yellow toes of his bulldog oxfords with his handkerchief, kicked and stamped to straighten the legs of his peg trousers which had an embarrassing manner of working up the calves of his legs exposing a vast expanse of green polka-dot socks to say nothing of the clips of his garters. He hummed through the tenor part to "When It's Apple-Blossom Time in Normandy," corrected a few minor errors in his harmony, then with the determination of a martyr entering the arena left the comparative safety of the coatroom and strode manfully into the bedlam of the church basement where whole flocks of chickens were being devoured by the famished Methodists.

Maxine Larabee! So that was what had been troubling him! But a fine chance he had with any girl as swell as Maxine. Particularly now that he had quit school. Why, even the college guys serenaded her; so did rich Bud Spillman the football hero and bully. She had more picture postcards and sofa pillows and fraternity pennants than any girl in Rock County. She had about twelve different dresses and six or seven hats, and a hat-pin which was supposed to have a real ruby set in the head of it. A fine chance he had with Maxine!

Peter was so absorbed in this new and disastrous turn of events that he failed to answer the greetings and friendly gibes with which he was met as he elbowed his way to the ticket table, purchased for thirty-five cents a frayed rectangle of cardboard, and finding a vacant seat, set to like the good young trencherman he was. He scarcely noticed when Mrs. Fulton whisked away his empty plate and returned plump, red, and beaming with a second helping, and he was half way through his pumpkin pie loaded with whipped cream before he noticed that something cataclysmic and world-shaking was about to occur. Maxine Larabee was taking the chair beside him.

"Gee, you're a regular swell tonight," the blond vision of loveliness crowned with a coronet braid murmured sotto voce to the embarrassed boy beside her. She looked approvingly at the green polka-dot tie which matched the socks, the black curls slicked down on either side of the central part. "Why don't you take me down to the ice-cream parlor and buy me a lover's delight sometime?"

"Me?" Peter asked, astonished. "Me take you right down to the ice-cream parlor and buy you an ice-cream sundae?"

"Why not?" the girl wanted to know. "There isn't any law against it." She had a low, husky voice and a thrilling little laugh which made the goose-flesh stand up on Peter's arms and electric chills run up and down his spine.

"Why don't you take me for a ride on the handlebars of your new motorcycle sometime?"

"Aw, you'd get hurt," Peter said with a tinge of his boyhood contempt for mere girls springing up from some remote corner of his still adolescent mind. "You'd get your skirts caught in the spokes and we'd both go in the ditch."

"Oh, I would!" said the girl, raising her eyebrows. "Oh, I would, would I! Well, I didn't the night Bud Spillman took me for a spin on his motorcycle."

"I can go faster than Bud Spillman," Peter said irrelevantly. "I ran him ragged the day we raced home from Janesville. I can go a mile a minute on my machine."

"Give me a ride sometime and let's see you do it."

"But gee whiz, Maxine...."

"Gee whiz, nothing!" the girl said. "Either you give me a ride on your motorcycle or I won't let you take me down to the ice-cream parlor."

"I'll give you a ride," Peter promised, glowering at the bit of pie-crust he was pushing about with his fork, "I'll give you a ride that'll blow all the hair pins out of your hair."

The girl tittered quietly. "You are a dear," she murmured. "But here comes mother. I'll see you at eight down by the post office."

Peter got up hurriedly as Mrs. Larabee, a buxom blonde of forty with exaggerated Gibson Girl figure nosed her way like a lake freighter through the lesser craft between her and her pampered daughter.

"Won't you have my chair?" said the boy with a mixture of guilt and gallantry. "No, Mrs. Larabee, I'm absolutely all through with supper."

He disappeared like an eel into the milling crowd.

Outside it had started to rain lightly. He walked without hat or coat through the misty spring dusk, his brain a tumult of conflicting emotions. Oh, she was a beautiful girl. Such big, clear blue eyes, such shining blond hair ... like, like a regular gold crown on her head. Her skin was as soft as ... as the petal of a flower, and she had the littlest feet.

He wasn't worthy of her. He wasn't even worthy to touch the hem of her garments. He, a big awkward farm boy without any manners. He wished he could give himself a good poke in the jaw for not saying right away, "Why, of course, Maxine. I would be delighted to give you a ride on my motorcycle."

He thought he must be going crazy to have argued with her like that when she had just decided to notice him for the first time in their lives.

"You big country boob," he said abusively, "I'll bet a town fellow would have known what to say."

His eyes and throat felt so funny that he thought maybe he was going to cry, but he choked back the tears angrily and hurried on through the spring evening watching the nighthawks skimming low over the houses, and the strange, soft flight of the bats. The wind sighed in the newly feathered elms and the arc-lights sputtered menacingly.

He felt incredibly alone, infinitely removed from the rest of the world. No other boy in history had been so suddenly and deeply in love, so troubled and filled with foreboding. He had never known such a hurt as he now felt in his breast, such an unbelievable longing, although for what he could not say.

Long before eight he was standing at the post office corner, and there he stood in the mist until long after nine. Maxine did not come.