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

for that face that might indeed provoke
Invasion of old cities; no, nor all
Thy freshness stealing on me like strange sleep.’ ”

Winsor’s hand tightened on Hugh’s arm, and the two boys stood almost rigid listening to the young voice, which was trembling with emotion, rich with passion:

“ ‘Not only for this do I love thee, but
Because Infinity upon thee broods;
And thou are full of whispers and of shadows.
Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say
So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell;
Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,
What the still night suggesteth to the heart.
Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,
Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;
Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where.’ ”

“God,” Winsor whispered, “that’s beautiful.”

“Hush. This is the best part.”

“ ‘It has the strangeness of the luring West,
And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee
I am aware of other times and lands,
Of birth far back, of lives in many stars.
O beauty lone and like a candle clear
In this dark country of the world! Thou art
My woe, my early light, my music dying.’ ”

Hugh and Winsor remained silent while the young voice went on reading Marpessa’s reply, her gentle refusal of the god and her proud acceptance, of the mortal. Finally they heard the last words:

“When she had spoken, Idas with one cry
Held her, and there was silence; while the god
In anger disappeared. Then slowly they,
He looking downward, and she gazing up,
Into the evening green wandered away.”

When the voice paused, the poem done, the two boys walked slowly down the hall, down the steps, and out into the cool night air. Neither said a word until they were halfway across the campus. Then Winsor spoke softly:

“God! Wasn’t that beautiful?”

“Yes⁠—beautiful.” Hugh’s voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Beautiful.⁠ ⁠… It⁠—it⁠—oh, it makes me⁠—kinda ashamed.”

“Me, too. Poker when we can have that! We’re awful fools, Hugh.”

“Yes⁠—awful fools.”

XXII

Prom came early in May, and Hugh looked forward to it joyously, partly because it would be his first Prom and partly because Cynthia was coming. Cynthia! He thought of her constantly, dreamed of her, wrote poems about her and to her. At times his longing for her swelled into an ecstasy of desire that racked and tore him. He was lost in love, his moods sweeping him from lyric happiness to black despair. He wrote to her several times a week, and between letters he took long walks composing dithyrambic epistles that fortunately were never written.

When he received her letter saying that she would come to Prom, he yelled like a lunatic, pounded the astonished Vinton on the back, and raced downstairs to the living-room.

“She’s coming!” he shouted.

There were several men in the room, and they all turned and looked at him, some of them grinning broadly.

“What th’ hell, Hugh?” Leonard Gates asked amiably. “Who’s coming? Who’s she?”

Hugh blushed and shuffled his feet. He knew that he had laid himself open to a “royal razzing,” but he proceeded to bluff himself out of the dilemma.

“She? Oh, yes, she. Well, she is she. Altogether divine, Len.” He was trying hard to be casual and flippant, but his eyes were dancing and his lips trembled with smiles.

Gates grinned at him. “A poor bluff, old man⁠—a darn poor bluff. You’re in love, pauvre enfant, and I’m afraid that you’re in a very bad way. Come on, tell us the lady’s name, her pedigree, and list of charms.”

Hugh grinned back at Gates. “Chase yourself,” he said gaily. “I won’t tell you a blamed thing about her.”

“You’d better,” said Jim Saunders from the depths of a leather chair. “Is she the jane whose picture adorns your desk?”

“Yeah,” Hugh admitted. “How do you like her?”

“Very fair, very fair.” Saunders was magnificently lofty. “I’ve seen better, of course, but I’ve seen worse, too. Not bad⁠—um, not very bad.”

The “razzing” had started, and Hugh lost his nerve.

“Jim, you can go to hell,” he said definitely, prepared to rush upstairs before Saunders could reply. “You don’t know a queen when you see one. Why, Cynthia⁠—”

“Cynthia!” four of the boys shouted. “So her name’s Cynthia. That’s⁠—”

But Hugh was halfway upstairs, embarrassed and delighted.

The girls arrived on Thursday, the train which brought most of them reaching Haydensville early in the afternoon. Hugh paced up and down the station, trying to keep up a pretense of a conversation with two or three others. He gave the wrong reply twice and then decided to say nothing more. He listened with his whole body for the first whistle of the train, and so great was the chatter of the hundreds of waiting youths that he never heard it. Suddenly the engine rounded a curve, and a minute later the train stopped before the station. Immediately the boys began to mill around the platform like cattle about to stampede, standing on their toes to look over the heads of their comrades, shoving, shouting, dancing in their impatience.

Girls began to descend the steps of the cars. The stampede broke. A youth would see “his girl” and start through the crowd for her. Dozens spotted their girls at the same time and tried to run through the crowd. They bumped into one another, laughed joyously, bumped into somebody else, and finally reached the girl.

When Hugh eventually saw Cynthia standing on a car platform near him, he shouted to her and held his hand high in greeting. She saw him and waved back, at the same time starting down the steps.

She had a little scarlet hat pulled down over her curly brown hair, and she wore a simple blue traveling-suit that set off her slender figure perfectly. Her eyes seemed bigger and browner than ever, her nose more impudently tilted, her mouth more supremely irresistible. Her cheeks were daintily rouged, her eyebrows plucked into a thin arch. She was New York from her small pumps to the expensively simple scarlet hat.

Hugh dashed several