Chapter Twenty-five

The following afternoon, at the Igrotte house, where Claire had enticed an inert Stevey for a five-mile walk through the somnolence of a Sunday, Claire remarked to Dave, who came up on the back porch looking sweaty from having rubbed down a mare:

“Did you know Dora Tarkington has her lunches at our house now, Dave? She’s in her second year at Tallahassee High.”

“No,” said David, breathing very softly as if by that device he could restrain the fact that, at Claire’s remark, every pore in his body seemed to leap to attention.

“Yes. Ought to see her. Right young-ladyfied. Gets herself escorted to the very door by Kenneth Chipman, if you please, and is going to take the kindergarten course when she finishes Tallahassee.”

“Yeh,” said Davey. He was sitting on the railing of the back porch, Claire on the topmost step, hulling a pan of peas for Mathilda. They made little tin-dripping sounds, as they clattered from under her fingers. To Davey, sitting there, swinging one bare foot, and trying to watch them casually, his eyes felt as if they were smeared across his face.

Claire felt rather than saw them, and with the blurting lack of tact, worthy of sweet Emma’s sweet daughter, shot out an eager, friendly arm.

“You’re twice the fellow Kenneth is, Davey, if you pull yourself together and get yourself started.”

“Aw!”

“Dora’s smitten with Kenneth because he’s sort of what you would call an up-and-comer. Naturally, he’s so much older than you, but she’d throw him over like that, for you, if you’d give her half a chance, Dave, by sort of striking out and making your start in life.”

A rush of words, of remonstrances, of shame, clogged into Davey’s throat, so that he turned toward her a flaming face, which finally decided to save itself from tears by a flare of anger.

“What’s Dora Tarkington and Kenneth Chipman got to do with me?” he shot out. “I’d like to know that! I would! What’s anything about—anything got to do with me. Pumph! as if I care!”

“Oh, then, Dave, you do!”

“Pumph!” When David was just turned fifteen, his face was still almost the child’s face of square, unset-looking contour, and bangs that he was just beginning to train backward, but which still persisted in drooping square-cut over his brow. A lean, childish-looking face, with eyes that seemed all out of proportion, because the cheeks needed filling in. Straight, friendly, brown eyes, level as Bek’s, and square white teeth against tan. It was a young face, even for the lean, gangling, childish body. A body of the most astonishing sinuosity. Tough as fibre.[42]

At seventeen, his arms, knobby at the wrists, seemed endless, and his legs, knobby at the ankles, seemed longer than they were to appear in his full maturity.

The farm had put its print on David. Drawn him out long and lean and brown, so that store-clothes struck him mid-arm-and-leg. Even overalls hit him too high at the waist, and petered out considerably above his ankles.

Straddling the porch-rail, swinging bare heels into the side of the house, there was something wounded and cloudy about him and something of absurd adolescence.

“Pumph! Good gosh! Dora and Kenneth. ’Sthat to me! Good gosh, can’t a girl and a fellow walk from Tallahassee High to lunch? Good gosh! Good gosh!”

Poor Claire, on the thought that she was about as subtle as spinach, Steve could sometimes kiss the lobe of her ear, a little ashamed that it endeared her. So now:

“I just thought, Davey,” she said to the ring of the quick peas dancing down into the pan,—“I just kinda thought—you and Dora—growing up together—maybe you—maybe she—it’s nice to see girls and boys that grow up together sort of go on together—that is, if—of course, only, that is, only if——”

“Well, ’tain’t,” said Dave, and jumped down off the frail rail, and walked with a casual whistling toward the barn, and crawled as high into the hayloft as he could, burrowing in and in and in, like something wounded that wanted to lie hurt and alone.

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