They walked together.
“May I carry your books?” he asked.
“Why, thank you, Bob.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, taking them.
They walked for a few minutes and he did not say a word. She glanced over and slightly down at him and saw how at ease he was and happy he seemed, and she decided to let him break the silence, but he never did. When they reached the edge of the school grounds, he gave the books back to her. “I guess I better leave you here,” he said. “The other kids wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do either, Bob.”
“Why, we’re friends,” he said earnestly.
“Bob—” she began.
“Yes’m?”
“Never mind.” She walked away.
“I’ll be in class,” he said.
And he was in class, and he was there after school every afternoon for the next two weeks, never saying a word, quietly washing the boards and cleaning the erasers and rolling up the maps while she worked at her papers.
Between them there was that clock silence of four o’clock, the silence of the sun going down, the silence with the catlike sound of erasers patted together, the rustle and turn of papers and the scratch of a pen, and perhaps the buzz of a fly banging with a tiny high anger against the tallest window in the room. Sometimes the silence would go on this way until almost five, when Miss Taylor would find Bob Markham in the last seat of the room, sitting and looking at her silently.
“Well, it’s time to go home,” Miss Taylor would say, getting up.
“Yes’m.”
And he would run to fetch her hat and coat. He would also lock the schoolroom door for her unless the janitor was coming in later. Then they would walk out of the school and across the empty yard. They talked of all sorts of things.
“And what are you going to be, Bob, when you grow up?”
“A writer,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a big ambition. It takes a lot of work.”
“I know, but I’m going to try,” he said. “I’ve read a lot.”
“Bob, haven’t you anything to do after school? I mean, I hate to see you indoors so much, washing the boards.”
“I like it,” he said. “I never do what I don’t like.”
“Nevertheless—”
“No. I’ve got to do that,” he said. He thought for a while and said, “Do me a favor, Miss Taylor?”
“It all depends.”
“I walk every Saturday from out around Buetrick Street along the creek to Lake Michigan. There’s a lot of butterflies and crayfish and birds. Maybe you’d like to walk too.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Then you’ll come?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be busy.”
He started to ask doing what, but stopped.
“I take along sandwiches,” he said. “Ham and pickle ones. And orange pop. I get down to the lake about noon and walk back about three. I wish you’d come. Do you collect butterflies? I have a big collection. We could start one for you.”
“Thanks, Bob, but no. Perhaps some other time.”
He looked at her and said, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“You have every right to ask anything you want to,” she said.
A FEW DAYS later she found an old copy of Great Expectations which she didn’t want, and gave it to Bob. He stayed up that night and read it through and talked about it the next morning. Each day now he met her just beyond sight of her boarding-house, and many days she would start to say, “Bob—” and tell him not to come to meet her any more, but she never finished saying it.
She found a butterfly on her desk on Friday morning. She almost waved it away before she found that it was dead and had been placed there while she was out of the room. She glanced at Bob over the heads of her other students, but he was looking at his book—not reading, just looking at it.
It was about this time that she found it impossible to call on Bob to recite in class. Her pencil would hover over his name and then she would call the next person up or down the list. Nor would she look at him while they were walking to or from school. But on several late afternoons as he moved his arm high on the blackboard, sponging away the arithmetic symbols, she found herself glancing over at him for seconds at a time.
And then one Saturday morning when he was standing in the middle of the creek with his overalls rolled up to his knees, he looked up and there on the edge of the running stream was Miss Ann Taylor.
“Well, here I am,” she said, laughing.
“And do you know,” he said, “I’m not surprised.”
“Show me the crayfish and the butterflies,” she said.
They walked down to the lake and sat on the sand with a warm wind blowing softly about them. He sat a few yards back from her while they ate the ham and pickle sandwiches and drank the orange pop solemnly.
“Gee, this is swell,” he said. “This is the swellest time ever in my life.”
“I didn’t think I would ever come on a picnic like this,” she said.
“With some kid,” he said.
“I’m comfortable, however,” she said.
“That’s good news.”
They said little else during the afternoon.
“This is all wrong,” he said later. “And I can’t figure why it should be. Just walking along and catching old butterflies and crayfish and eating sandwiches. But Mom and Dad’d rib the heck out of me if they knew, and the kids would too. And the other teachers, I suppose, would laugh at you, wouldn’t they?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I guess we better not do any more butterfly-catching, then.”
“I don’t exactly understand how I came here at all,” she said.
And the day was over.
THAT WAS about all there was to the meeting of Ann Taylor and Bob Markham. Two or three monarch butterflies, a copy of Dickens, a dozen crayfish, four sandwiches, and two bottles of orange pop. The next Monday, though he waited a long time, Bob did not see Miss Taylor come out to walk to school.
He discovered later she had left earlier and was already there. Also, Monday afternoon she left early and another teacher finished her last class. He walked by her boarding-house and did not see her anywhere, but he was afraid to ring the bell and inquire.
On Tuesday night after school they both were in the silent room again, he sponging the board contentedly as if this time might go on forever, and she seated working on her papers as if she, too, would be in this room and this particular peace and happiness forever, when suddenly the court-house clock struck.
It was a block away and its great bronze boom shuddered one’s body, making you seem older by the minute. Stunned by that clock, you could not but sense the crashing flow of time, and as the clock said five o’clock Miss Taylor looked up at it for a long time. Then she put down her pen.
“Bob,” she said.
He turned, startled. Neither of them had spoken in the peaceful hour before.
“Will you come here?” she asked.
He put down the sponge slowly.
“Yes,” he said.
“Bob, I want you to sit down.”
“Yes’m.”
She looked at him intently for a moment until he looked away. “Bob, I wonder if you know what I’m going to talk to you about? Do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should tell me first.”
“About us.” he said at last.
“How old are you, Bob?”
“Going on fifteen.”
“You’re fourteen years old.”
He winced. “Yes’m.”
“And do you know how old I am?”
“Yes’m. I heard. Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four.”
“I’ll be twenty-four in ten years,” he said.
“But unfortunately you’re not twenty-four now.”
“No, but sometimes I feel twenty-four.”
“Yes, and sometimes you act it.”
“Do I, really?”
“Now sit still there; we’ve a lot to discuss. It’s very important that we understand what is happening, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“FIRST, LET’S admit we are the greatest and best friends in the world. Let’s admit that I have never had a student like you, nor have I had as much affection for any boy I’ve ever known. And let me speak for you, you’ve found me to be the nicest of all the teachers you’ve ever known.”
“Oh, more than that,” he said.
“Perhaps more than that, but there are facts to be faced and an entire way of life to be examined, and a town and its people and you and I to be considered. I’ve thought this over for a good many days, Bob.
Don’t think I’ve been unaware of my own feelings in the matter. Under some circumstances our friendship would be odd indeed. But then you are no ordinary boy. I know myself pretty well, I think, and I know that I’m not sick, either mentally or physically, and that what I feel is a true regard for your character. But that is not what we consider in this world, Bob, except in a man of a certain age. I don’t know if I’m saying this right.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just that if I were ten years older, and about fifteen inches taller it’d make all the difference. And that’s silly, to go by how tall a person is.”
“I know it seems foolish,” she said, “when you feel very grown-up and right and have nothing to be ashamed of. You have nothing at all to be ashamed of, Bob—remember that. You have been very honest and good, and I hope that I have been too.”
“You have,” he said.
“Maybe someday people will judge the oldness of a person’s mind accurately enough to say, ‘This is a man, though his body is only fourteen. By some miracle of circumstance and fortune, this
