“I only moved twice,” he said unhappily. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“He has to have his sleep, you know. We all have to be more considerate when there’s someone sick. Young people don’t always think of that. And he was so unusually well when you came.”
It was Sunday, and they were to go swimming at Holly Morgan’s house, where a crowd always collected on the bright easy beach. Noel called for him, but they arrived before any of his half-humble remarks about the night before had managed to attract her attention. He spoke to those he knew and was introduced to others, made ill at ease again by their cheerful familiarity with one another, by the correct informality of their clothes. He
was sure they noticed that he had worn only one suit during his visit to Culpepper Bay, varying it with white flannel trousers. Both pairs of trousers were out of press now, and after keeping his great-uncle awake he had not felt like bothering Cousin Cora about it at breakfast.
Again he tried to talk to Holly, with the vague idea of making Noel jealous, but Holly was busy and she eluded him. It was ten minutes before he extricated himself from a conversation with the obnoxious Miss Holyoke. At the moment he managed this he perceived to his horror that Noel was gone.
When he last saw her she had been engaged in a light but somehow intent conversation with the tall well-dressed stranger she had met yesterday. Now she wasn’t in sight. Miserable and horribly alone, he strolled up and down the beach, trying to look as if he were having a good time, seeming to watch the bathers, but keeping a sharp eye out for Noel. He felt that his self-conscious perambulations were attracting unbearable attention and sat down unhappily on a sand dune beside Billy Harper. But Billy Harper was neither cordial nor communicative, and after a minute hailed a man across the beach and went to talk to him.
Juan was desperate. When, suddenly, he spied Noel coming down from the house with the tall man, he stood up with a jerk, convinced that his features were working wildly.
She waved at him.
“A buckle came off my shoe,” she called. “I went to have it put on. I thought you’d gone in swimming.”
He stood perfectly still, not trusting his voice to answer. He understood that she was through with him; there was someone else. Immediately he wanted above all things to be away. As they came nearer, the tall man glanced at him negligently and resumed his vivacious, intimate conversation with Noel. A group suddenly closed around them.
Keeping the group in the corner of his eye, Juan began to move carefully and steadily towards the gate that led to the road. He started when the casual voice of a man behind him said, “Going?” and he answered, “Got to” with what purported to be a reluctant nod. Once behind the shelter of the parked cars, he began to run, slowed down as several chauffeurs looked at him curiously. It was a mile and a half to the Chandler house and the day was broiling, but he walked fast lest Noel, leaving the party—“With that man,” he thought bitterly—should overtake him trudging along the road. That would be more than he could bear.
There was the sound of a car behind him. Immediately Juan left the road and sought concealment behind a convenient hedge. It was no one from the party, but thereafter he kept an eye out for available cover, walking fast, or even running, over unpromising open spaces.
He was within sight of his cousin’s house when it happened. Hot and dishevelled, he had scarcely flattened himself against the back of a tree when Noel’s roadster, with the tall man at the wheel, flashed by down the road. Juan stepped out and looked after them. Then, blind with sweat and misery, he continued on towards home.
IV
At luncheon, Cousin Cora looked at him closely.
“What’s the trouble?” she inquired. “Did something go wrong at the beach this morning?”
“Why, no,” he exclaimed in simulated astonishment. “What made you think that?”
“You have such a funny look. I thought perhaps you’d had some trouble with the little Garneau girl.”
He hated her.
“No, not at all.”
“You don’t want to get any idea in your head about her,” said Cousin Cora.
“What do you mean?” He knew with a start what she meant.
“Any ideas about Noel Garneau. You’ve got your own way to make.” Juan’s face burned. He was unable to answer. “I say that in all kindness. You’re not in any position to think anything serious about Noel Garneau.”
Her implications cut deeper than her words. Oh, he had seen well enough that he was not essentially of Noel’s sort, that being nice in Akron wasn’t enough at Culpepper Bay. He had that realization that comes to all boys in his position that for every advantage—that was what his mother called this visit to Cousin Cora’s—he paid a harrowing price in self-esteem. But a world so hard as to admit such an intolerable state of affairs was beyond his comprehension. His mind rejected it all completely, as it had rejected the dictionary name for the three spots on his face. He wanted to let go, to vanish, to be home. He determined to go home tomorrow, but after this heart-rending conversation he decided to put off the announcement until tonight.
That afternoon he took a detective story from the library and retired upstairs to read on his bed. He finished the book by four o’clock and came down to change it for another. Cousin Cora was on the veranda arranging three tables for tea.
“I thought you were at the club,” she exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you’d gone up to the club.”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I thought I’d read.”
“Tired!” she exclaimed. “A boy your age! You ought to be out in the open air playing golf—that’s why you have that spot on your cheek”—Juan winced; his experiments with the black salve had irritated it to a sharp redness—“instead of lying around reading on a day like this.”
“I haven’t any clubs,” said Juan hurriedly.
“Mr Holyoke told you you could use his brother’s clubs. He spoke to the caddie master. Run on now. You’ll find lots of young people up there who want to play. I’ll begin to think you’re not having a good time.”
In agony Juan saw himself dubbing about the course alone—seeing Noel coming under his eye. He never wanted to see Noel again except out in Montana—some bright day, when she would come saying, “Juan, I never knew—never understood what your love was.”
Suddenly he remembered that Noel had gone into Boston for the afternoon. She would not be there. The horror of playing alone suddenly vanished.
The caddie master looked at him disapprovingly as he displayed his guest card, and Juan nervously bought a half-dozen balls at a dollar each in an effort to neutralize the imagined hostility. On the first tee he glanced around. It was after four and there was no one in sight except two old men practising drives from the top of a little hill. As he addressed his ball he heard someone come up on the tee behind him and he breathed easier at the sharp crack that sent his ball a hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.
“Playing alone?”
He looked around. A stout man of fifty, with a huge face, high forehead, long wide upper lip and great undershot jaw, was taking a driver from a bulging bag. “Why—yes.”
“Mind if I go round with you?”
“Not at all.”
Juan greeted the suggestion with a certain gloomy relief. They were evenly matched, the older man’s steady short shots keeping pace with Juan’s occasional brilliancy. Not until the seventh hole did the conversation rise above the fragmentary boasting and formalized praise which forms the small talk of golf.
“Haven’t seen you around before.”
“I’m just visiting here,” Juan explained, “staying with my cousin, Miss Chandler.”
“Oh yes—know Miss Chandler very well. Nice old snob.”
“What?” inquired Juan.
“Nice old snob, I said. No offence… Your honour, I think.” Not for several holes did Juan venture to comment on his partner’s remark.
“What do you mean when you say she’s a nice old snob?” he inquired with interest.
“Oh, it’s an old quarrel between Miss Chandler and me,” answered the older man brusquely. “She’s an old friend of my wife’s. When we were married and came out to Culpepper Bay for the summer, she tried to freeze us out. Said my wife had no business marrying me. I was an outsider.”
“What did you do?”
“We just let her alone. She came round, but naturally I never had much love for her. She even tried to put her oar in before we were married.” He laughed. “Cora Chandler of Boston—how she used to boss the girls around in those days! At twenty-five she had the sharpest tongue in Back Bay. They were old people there, you know—Emerson and Whittier to dinner and all that. My wife belonged to that crowd too. I was from the Middle West… Oh, too bad. I should have stopped talking. That makes me two up again.”
Suddenly Juan wanted to present his case to this man—not quite as it was, but adorned with a dignity and significance it did not so far possess. It began to round out in his mind as the sempiternal struggle of the poor young man against a snobbish, purse-proud world. This new aspect was comforting, and he put out of his mind the less pleasant realization that, superficially at least, money hadn’t entered into
