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Page 53
Bean became aware that the old lady had grasped his hand, and he divined
that she was also holding a hand of the flapper.
"And my! such excitement you never did see when little Jim came! We
began to save right off to send him to a good seminary. We were going to
make a preacher out of him; and see the way he's turned out! Lord, what
would his father make of this place and our little Jim, if he was to
come back?
"I lost him before he got to see many changes in the world. I remember
we did go to a party in Fredonia one time, where a woman from Buffalo
wore a low-necked gown, and Jim never got over it. He swore to the day
of his death that any woman who'd wear 'a dug-out dress' was a hussy. He
didn't know what the world could be coming to, when they allowed such
goings-on. Poor Jim! I was still young when he went, and of course--but
I couldn't. I'd had my man and I'd had my baby, and somehow I was
through. I wanted to learn more about the world, and little Jim was
growing up and had a nice situation in the store at Fredonia, working
early and late, sleeping under the counter, and saving his fifty dollars
clear every year. I knew he'd always provide for me--Dear me! how I run
on! Where was I?"
Bean's hand was released, and Grandma rose to her feet, turning to look
down upon them.
"I forgot what I started to say, but maybe it was this, that the world
hasn't changed so much as folks often think. I get to watching young
people sometimes--it seems as if they were like the young people in my
day, and I think any young man that's steady and decent and has a good
situation--what I mean is this, that he--well, it depends on the girl,
as it always did."
She turned and walked to the end of the pergola, fifty feet away. There
she threw up a clenched fist and began to emit groans, cries of hoarse
rage and ragged phrases of abuse. She was again rehearsing her lines in
the mob scene of the equal-suffrage play. At the head of her fellow
mobs-women, she hurled harsh epithets at the Prime Minister of the
oldest English-speaking nation on earth. There seemed to be no escape
for the Prime Minister. They had him.
"We've broken windows, we'll break heads!" shouted the Demon, and a
gardener crossing the grounds might have been seen to quicken his pace
after one backward look.
The pair on the bench were inattentive. They had instinctively drawn
together, but they were silent. In Bean's mind was a confusion of many
matters: Breede sleeping under a counter--people in log-cabins getting
married--the best coon-dog in York State--a yoke of nice fat steers--
But beneath this was a sharpened consciousness of the girl breathing at
his side. She seemed curiously to be waiting--waiting! The silence and
their stillness became unbearable. Something must break ... their breaths
were too long drawn. He got to his feet and the flapper was
unaccountably standing beside him. It was too dark to see her face, but
he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was
bent. And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge,
he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing
her with a simple directness that "Napoleon, Man and Lover," could never
have bettered.
There is no record of Napoleon having studied jiu-jitsu.
For one frenzied moment he was out of himself, a mere conquering male,
unthinking, ruthless, exigent. Then the sweet strange touch of her cheek
brought him back to the awful thing he had done. His reason worked with
a lightning quickness. Terrified by his violence she would wrench
herself free and run screaming to the house. And then--it was too
horrible!
He waited, breathless, for retribution. The flapper did not wrench
herself away. Slowly he relaxed the embrace that had made a brute of
him. The flapper had not screamed. She was facing him now, breathless
herself. He put her a little way from him; he wanted her to see it as he
did.
The flapper drew a long and rather catchy breath, then she adjusted a
strand of hair misplaced by his violence.
"I _knew_ it!" she began, in tones surprisingly cool. "I knew it ever so
long ago, from the very first moment!"
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