The Plastic Age Percy Marks (read full novel txt) 📖

off with a final, “Goodbye, Hugh, old boy,” sounding behind him.

Hugh settled back into a chair. He had half an hour to wait.

“A sophomore.⁠ ⁠… Gosh!”

XIV

Hugh spent the summer at home, working on the farm, reading a little, and occasionally visiting a lake summer resort a few miles away. Helen had left Merrytown to attend a secretarial school in a neighboring city, and Hugh was genuinely glad to find her gone when he returned from college. Helen was becoming not only a bore but a problem. Besides, he met a girl at Corley Lake, the summer resort, whom he found much more fascinating. For a month or two he thought that he was in love with Janet Harton. Night after night he drove to Corley Lake in his father’s car, sometimes dancing with Janet in the pavilion, sometimes canoeing with her on the lake, sometimes taking her for long rides in the car, but often merely wandering through the pines with her or sitting on the shore of the lake and staring at the rippling water.

Janet was small and delicate; she seemed almost fragile. She did everything daintily⁠—like a little girl playing tea-party. Her hands and feet were exquisitely small, her features childlike and indefinite, except her little coral mouth, which was as clearly outlined with color as a doll’s and as mobile as a fluttering leaf. She had wide blue eyes and hair that was truly golden. Strangely, she had not bobbed it but wore it bound into a shining coil around her head.

Hugh wrote a poem to her. It began thus:

Maiden with the clear blue eyes,
Lady with the golden hair,
Exquisite child, serenely wise,
Sweetly tender, morning fair.

He wasn’t sure that it was a very good poem; there was something reminiscent about the first line, and he was dubious about “morning fair.” He had, however, studied German for a year in high school, and he guessed that if morgenschön was all right in German it was all right in English, too.

They rarely talked. Hugh was content to sit for hours with the delicate child nestling in his arm, her hand lying passive and cool in his. She made him feel very strong and protective. Nights, he dreamed of doing brave deeds for her, of saving her from terrible dangers. At first her vague, fleeting kisses thrilled him, but as the weeks went by and his passion grew, he found them strangely unsatisfying.

When she cuddled her lovely head in the hollow of his shoulder, he would lean forward and whisper: “Kiss me, Janet. Kiss me.” Obediently she would turn her face upward, her little mouth pursed into a coral bud, but if he held her too tightly or prolonged the kiss, she pushed him away or turned her face. Then he felt repelled, chilled. She kissed him much as she kissed her mother every night, and he wanted⁠—well he didn’t quite know what he did want except that he didn’t want to be kissed that way.

Finally he protested. “What’s the matter, Janet?” he asked gently. “Don’t you love me?”

“Of course,” she answered calmly in her small flute-like voice; “of course I love you, but you are so rough. You mustn’t kiss me hard like that; it isn’t nice.”

Nice! Hugh felt as if she had slapped his face. Then he knew that she didn’t understand at all. He tried to excuse her by telling himself that she was just a child⁠—she was within a year of his own age⁠—and that she would love him the way he did her when she grew older; but down in his heart he sensed the fact that she wasn’t capable of love, that she merely wanted to be petted and caressed as a child did. The shadows and the moonlight did not move her as they did him, and she thought that he was silly when he said that he could hear a song in the night breeze. She had said that his poem was very pretty. That was all. Well, maybe it wasn’t a very good poem, but it had⁠—well, it had⁠—it had something in it that wasn’t just pretty.

He began to visit the lake less often and to wish that September and the opening of college would arrive. When the day finally came to return, he was almost as much excited as he had been the year before. Gosh! it would be good to see Carl again. The bum had written only once. Yeah, and Pudge Jamieson, too, and Larry Stillwell, and Bill Freeman, and⁠—yes, by golly! Merton Billings. He’d be glad to see old Fat Billings. He wondered if Merton was as fat as ever and as pure. And all the brothers at the Nu Delta house. He’d been too busy to get really acquainted with them last year; but this year, by gosh, he’d get to know all of them. It certainly would be great to be back and be a sophomore and make the little frosh stand around.

He didn’t carry his suitcase up the hill this time; he checked it and sent a freshman for it later. When he arrived at Surrey 19 Carl was already there⁠—and he was kneeling before a trunk when Hugh walked into the room. Both of them instantly remembered the identical scene of the year before.

Carl jumped to his feet. “Hullo⁠—who are you?” he demanded, his face beaming.

Hugh pretended to be frightened and shy. “I’m Hugh Carver. I⁠—I guess I’m going to room with you.”

“You sure are!” yelled Carl, jumping over the trunk and landing on Hugh. “God! I’m glad to see you. Put it there.” They shook hands and stared at each other with shining eyes.

Then they began to talk, interrupting each other, gesticulating, occasionally slapping each other violently on the back or knee, shouting with laughter as one of them told of a summer experience that struck them as funny. They were both so glad to get back to college, so glad to see each other,