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The Adventures of Bobby Orde, a novel by Stewart Edward White |
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Chapter 5. The Little Girl |
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_ CHAPTER V. THE LITTLE GIRL Bobby spent as much time with Celia as he was allowed. On Sunday he took her on his regular excursion to Auntie Kate--and Auntie Kate's cookies. "Aren't you glad there was no Sunday School to-day?" he inquired blithely. "I like Sunday School," stated Celia. Bobby stopped short and looked at her. "Do you like church too?" he demanded. "I love it," she said. "Do you like pollywogs?" "Ugh, No!" "Or stripy snakes?" "They're _horrid!_" "Or forts?" "I don't know." "Or rifles an' revolvers?" "I am afraid of them." "Or dogs?" "I love dogs. I've got one home. His name is Pancho." "What kind is he?" asked Bobby with a vast sigh of relief at finding a common ground. He had been brought to realize yesterday that little girls differ from boys; but for a few dreadful, floundering moments this morning he had feared they might, so to speak, belong to a different race. Afterward he realized that it would not have mattered even if she had not liked dogs. He merely wished to be near her. When he left her he immediately experienced the strongest longing to be again where he could see her, and breathe the deep, intoxicating, delicious, clean influence of her near presence. And yet with her his moments of unalloyed happiness were few and his hours of sheer misery were many. Self-consciousness had never troubled Bobby before; but now in the presence of Gerald's slim elegance and easy, languid manner, he became acutely aware of his own deficiencies. His clothes seemed coarser; his hands and feet were awkward; his body dumpier; his face rounder and more freckled. To him was born a great humility of spirit to match the great longing of it. Nevertheless, as has been said, he and Duke trudged down to the Ottawa every morning, and again every afternoon, or as many of them as Mrs. Orde permitted. He was content to come under the immediate spell of the dancing, sprite-like, sunny little girl. No thought of the especial effort to please, called courtship, entered his young head. He played with the children, and kept as close to Her as possible; that was all. And one evening, trudging home dangerously near six o'clock, he ran slap against the legend chalked in huge letters on a board fence: CELIA CARLETON and BOBBY ORDE He stopped short, his heart jumping wildly. Often had he seen this coupling of names, other names; and he knew that it was considered a little of a shame, and somewhat of a glory. The sight confused him to the depths of his soul; and yet it also pleased him. He rubbed out the letters; but he walked on with new elation. The undesired but authoritative sanction of public recognition had been given his devotion. Gerald was not considered. Somebody had observed; so the affair must be noticeable to others. And with another tremendous leap of the heart Bobby welcomed the daring syllogism that, since the somebody of the impertinent chalk had fathomed his devotion to her, might it not be possible, oh, remotely inconceivably possible, of course, that the unknown had equally marked some slight interest on her part for him? The board fence, the maple-shaded walk, the soft brown street of pulverized shingles, all faded in the rapt glory of this vision. Bobby gasped. Literally it had not occurred to him before. Now all at once he desired it, desired it not merely with every power of his child nature, but with the full strength of the man's soul that waited but the passing of years to spread wide its pinions. The need of her answer to his love shook him to the depths, for it reached forward and back in his world-experience, calling into vague, drowsy, fluttering response things that would later awaken to full life, and reanimating the dim and beautiful instincts that are an heritage of that time when the soul is passing the lethe of earliest childhood and retains still a wavering iridescence of the glory from which it has come. The question rose to his lips ready for the asking. He wanted to turn track on the instant, to call for Celia, to demand of her the response to his love. And then, after the moment of exaltation, came the reaction. He was afraid. The thought of his stubby uninteresting figure came to him; and a deep sense of his unworthiness. What could she, accustomed to brilliant creatures of the wonderful city, of whom Gerald was probably but a mild sample, find in commonplace little Bobby Orde? He walked meekly home; and took a scolding for being late. Nevertheless the idea persisted and grew. It came to the point of rehearsal. Before he fell asleep that very night, Bobby had ready cut and dried a half-dozen different ways in which to ask the question, and twice as many methods of leading up to it. In the darkness, and by himself, he felt very bold and confident. The next morning, however, even after he had succeeded in sequestrating Celia from her companions, he found it impossible to approach the subject. The bare thought of it threw him to the devourings of a panic terror. This new necessity tore him with fresh but delicious pains. He felt the need of finding out whether she cared for him as he had never conceived a need could exist; yet he was totally unable to satisfy it. By comparison the former misery of jealousy seemed nothing. Bobby lived constantly in this high breathless state of delight in Celia; and misery in the condition of his love for her. The Fuller boys and Angus saw him no more; the little library was neglected; the wood-box half the time forgotten; and the arithmetic, always a source of trouble, tangled itself into a hopeless snarl of which Bobby's blurred mental vision could make nothing. All of his spare time he spent at his toy printing press, trying over and over for a perfect result--unblurred, well-registered, well aligned--in the shape of calling cards for "Miss Celia Carleton." As soon as they were done to his satisfaction, he wrapped them in a clumsy package, and set out for the Ottawa, followed, as always, by Duke. He found Celia alone in a rocking chair. "Why didn't you come down this morning?" she asked him at once. Bobby held up the package and looked mysterious. "This," said he. "Oh! what is it?" she cried, jumping up. "I made it," said Bobby. "What is it?" insisted Celia. "Show it to me." But Bobby thrust the package firmly into his pocket. "Up past our house there's a fine sand-hill to slide down," said he, "and we got a fine fort over the hill, and I know where there's a place you can climb up on where you can see 'most to Redding." "Show me what you've got!" pleaded Celia. "I will," Bobby developed his plan, "if you'll come up and play in the fort." "All right," agreed Celia in a breath; "I'll tell mamma I'm going. And I'll hunt up the others." "I don't want the others to go," announced Bobby boldly. She calmed to a great stillness, and looked at him with intent eyes. "All right," she agreed quietly after a moment. They walked up the street together, followed by the solemn black and white dog. The shop windows did not detain them, as ordinarily. At the fire-engine house they turned under the dense shade of the maples. But by the end of the second block said Bobby: "We'll go this way." He was afraid of encountering Angus, or perhaps the Fuller boys. The sand-hill proved toilsome to Celia, but without a single pause she struggled bravely up its sliding, cascading yellow surface to the top. Then she stood still, panting a little, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, the tiniest curls about her forehead wet and matted with perspiration. With a great adoration, Bobby looked upon her slender figure held straight against the blue sky. Almost--almost dared he speak. At least that is what he thought until the words rose to his lips; and then all at once he realized what a wide gulf lay between the imagined and the spoken word. "The fort's over this way," said he gruffly. "Show me the package first," insisted Celia. Bobby drew out the cards, and thrust them into her hands. "They're for you," he said hastily. "I did them on my printing press." Celia was delighted and wanted to say so at length, but Bobby had his sex's aversion to spoken gratitude. "Come on, see the fort," he insisted. He showed her the elaborate works and explained their uses, and pointed out the enemy of stumps charging patiently. Celia caught fire with the idea at once. "I'll make bullets the way they did in the Colonies!" she cried. "Have you 'Old Times in the Colonies,' too?" asked Bobby eagerly. They seated themselves and talked of their books. Celia was just beginning the Alcott series. Bobby had never heard of them, and so they had to be explained. The children had romped and played games together; but they had never exchanged such ideas as their years had developed. For once Bobby forgot the fact of his love, and its delicious pains, and its need for something which he could not place, in the unselfconscious joy of intimate communion. He drew close to Celia in spirit; and his whole being expanded to a glow that warmed him through and through. The westering sun surprised them with the lateness of the hour. At the hotel gate Celia left him. "My, but we had a good time!" said she. With much trepidation Bobby next day suggested in face of the whole group that he and Celia should climb the high hill from which Bobby fondly believed he could see "'most to Redding." To his surprise, and to the surprise of the others, Celia consented at once. They climbed the hill in short stages, resting formally every ten feet. Bobby they called the Guide; while Celia was assigned the duty of announcing the resting-places. There was a wood-road up the hill, but they preferred the steep side. Trees shaded it; and undergrowth veiled it. Little open spaces were guarded mysteriously and jealously by the thickets; little hot pockets held like cups the warmth of the sun. Birds flashed and disappeared; squirrels chattered indignantly; chipmunks scurried away. Occasionally they came to dense shade, and moss, and black shadow, and low sweet shrubs a few inches high, and the tinkle of a tiny streamlet. Once a tangle of raspberries in a little clearing fell across their way. Bobby had never happened on these. They had been well picked over by the squaws, who sold fruit in town by the pailful, but the children managed to find a few berries, and ate them, enjoying their warm, satiny feel. Thus they climbed for a long time. The rests were frequent, the course not of the straightest. For many years their recollection of that hill was as of a mountain. Finally the top sprang at them abruptly, as though in joke. "Come over this way, I'll show you," said Bobby. He led the way to a point where the scant timber had in times past suffered a windfall. Through the opening thus made they looked abroad over the countryside. They could see the snake-fences about the farms, and the white dusty road like a ribbon and the stumps like black dots, and the waving green tops of the "wood lots" and far away the flash of the River. Thus Bobby gained another of his great desires. Celia proved strangely acquiescent to suggestions for these excursions. Gerald's dreaded attractions relaxed their power over Bobby's spirit; and in corresponding degree Bobby regained the lost captaincy of his soul. The self-confidence which he lacked seeped gradually into him; and he began, though very tentatively, to recognize and respect his own value as an individual. These are big words to employ over the small problems of a child; yet in the child alone occur those silent developments, those noiseless changes which touch closest to true abstraction. Later in life our processes are stiffened by the material into forms of greater simplicity. They explored the country about; and what the shortness of their legs denied them in the matter of actual distance, the largeness of their children's imaginations lavished bounteously. Bobby had explored most of it all before--the stump pastures, the wood-lots, the hills, the beach, the piers, the upper shifting downs of sand--but now he saw them for the first time because he was showing them to Celia. One day they made their way under tall beech woods, through a scrub of cedars, and found themselves on the edge of low bluffs overlooking the yellow shore and the blue lake. Long years after he could remember it vividly, and all the little details that belonged to it--the flash of the waters, the dip of gulls, the gentle wash of the quiet wavelets against the shore, the thin strip of dark wet sand that marked the extent of their influences, and, in a long curve to the blue of distance, the uneven waste of the yellow dry sand on which lay and from which projected at all angles countless logs, slabs and timbers cast up derelict by the storms of years. But at the time he was not conscious of noticing these things. In the darkness of his room that night all he remembered was Celia standing bright and fair against the shadow of ancient twisted cedars. _ |
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