第39章 CHAPTER XVIII(3)

All too soon the aunt and Haydee departed.(This is permissible at any stage of a Salvation Army meeting.)I was no longer interested in the meeting,and,after an appropriate interval of a couple of minutes or less,started to leave with Louis.As we passed out,at the back of the hall a woman recognised me with her eyes,arose,and followed me.I shall not describe her.She was of my own kind and friendship of the old time on the water-front.

When Nelson was shot,he had died in her arms,and she knew me as his one comrade.And she must tell me how Nelson had died,and Idid want to know;so I went with her across the width of life from dawning boy's love for a brown-haired girl in a tam-o'-shanter back to the old sad savagery I had known.

And when I had heard the tale,I hurried away to find Louis,fearing that I had lost my first love with the first glimpse of her.But Louis was dependable.Her name was--Haydee.He knew where she lived.Each day she passed the blacksmith's shop where he worked,going to or from the Lafayette School.Further,he had seen her on occasion with Ruth,another schoolgirl,and,still further,Nita,who sold us red-hots at the candy store,was a friend of Ruth.The thing to do was to go around to the candy store and see if we could get Nita to give a note to Ruth to give to Haydee.If this could be arranged,all I had to do was write the note.

And it so happened.And in stolen half-hours of meeting I came to know all the sweet madness of boy's love and girl's love.So far as it goes it is not the biggest love in the world,but I do dare to assert that it is the sweetest.Oh,as I look back on it!

Never did girl have more innocent boy-lover than I who had been so wicked-wise and violent beyond my years.I didn't know the first thing about girls.I,who had been hailed Prince of the Oyster Pirates,who could go anywhere in the world as a man amongst men;who could sail boats,lay aloft in black and storm,or go into the toughest hang-outs in sailor town and play my part in any rough-house that started or call all hands to the bar--I didn't know the first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who was as abysmally ignorant of life as I was,or thought I was,profoundly wise.

I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight.There was fully a foot of space between us.We slightly faced each other,our near elbows on the back of the bench;and once or twice our elbows just touched.And all the time,deliriously happy,talking in the gentlest and most delicate terms that might not offend her sensitive ears,I was cudgelling my brains in an effort to divine what I was expected to do.What did girls expect of boys,sitting on a bench and tentatively striving to find out what love was?

What did she expect me to do?Was I expected to kiss her?Did she expect me to try?And if she did expect me,and I didn't what would she think of me?

Ah,she was wiser than I--I know it now--the little innocent girl-woman in her shoe-top skirt.She had known boys all her life.

She encouraged me in the ways a girl may.Her gloves were off and in one hand,and I remember,lightly and daringly,in mock reproof for something I had said,how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt of those gloves.I was like to swoon with delight.It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me.And I remember yet the faint scent that clung to those gloves and that I breathed in the moment they touched my lips.

Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt.Should I imprison in my hand that little hand with the dangling,scented gloves which had just tapped my lips?Should I dare to kiss her there and then,or slip my arm around her waist?Or dared I even sit closer?

Well,I didn't dare.I did nothing.I merely continued to sit there and love with all my soul.And when we parted that evening I had not kissed her.I do remember the first time I kissed her,on another evening,at parting--a mighty moment,when I took all my heart of courage and dared.We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings,and we kissed perhaps a dozen times--as boys and girls kiss,briefly and innocently,and wonderingly.We never went anywhere--not even to a matinee.We once shared together five cents worth of red-hots.But I have always fondly believed that she loved me.I know I loved her;and I dreamed day-dreams of her for a year and more,and the memory of her is very dear.