“We were just coming.”
They walked toward him in a trance.
“What’s the idea?” Al said hoarsely. “You’ve been up here over two hours.”
At their indifference he felt pain swelling and spreading inside him, constricting his breath.
“Have you met Mr. Frothington?” She laughed shyly at the unfamiliar name.
“Yeah,” said Al rudely. “I don’t see the idea of his keeping you up here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bill. “We didn’t realize.”
“Oh, you didn’t? Well, I did.” His jealousy cut through their absorption. They acknowledged it by an effort to hurry, to be impersonal, to defer to his wishes. Ungraciously he followed and the three of them came in a twinkling upon a scene that had suddenly materialized on the deck below.
Ellsworth Ames, smiling, but a little flushed, was leaning against the rail while Ham Abbot attempted to argue with a distraught young husky who kept trying to brush past him and get at Ames. Near them stood an indignant girl with another girl’s soothing arm around her waist.
“What is it?” demanded Bill quickly.
The distraught young man glared at him. “Just a couple of snobs that come here and try to spoil everybody else’s good time!” he cried wildly.
“He doesn’t like me,” said Ellsworth lightly. “I invited his girl to dance.”
“She didn’t want to dance with you!” shouted the other. “You think you’re so damn smart—ask her if she wanted to dance with you.”
The girl murmured indistinguishable words and disclaimed all responsibility by beginning to cry.
“You’re too fresh, that’s the trouble!” continued her defender. “I know what you said to her when you danced with her before. What do you think these girls are? They’re just as good as anybody, see?”
Al Fitzpatrick moved in closer.
“Let’s put ’em all off the boat,” he suggested, stubborn and ashamed. “They haven’t got any business butting in here.”
A mild protest went up from the crowd, especially from the girls, and Abbot put his hand conciliatingly on the husky’s shoulder. But it was too late.
“You’ll put me off?” Ellsworth was saying coldly. “If you try to lay your hands on me I’ll rearrange your whole face.”
“Shut up, Ellie!” snapped Bill. “No use getting disagreeable. They don’t want us; we’d better go.” He stepped close to Mae, and whispered, “Good night. Don’t forget what I said. I’ll drive over and see you Sunday afternoon.”
As he pressed her hand quickly and turned away he saw the argumentative boy swing suddenly at Ames, who caught the blow with his left arm. In a moment they were slugging and panting, knee to knee in the small space left by the gathering crowd. Simultaneously Bill felt a hand pluck at his sleeve and he turned to face Al Fitzpatrick. Then the deck was in an uproar. Abbot’s attempt to separate Ames and his antagonist was misinterpreted; instantly he was involved in a battle of his own, cannonading against the other pairs, slipping on the smooth deck, bumping against noncombatants and scurrying girls who sent up shrill cries. He saw Al Fitzpatrick slap the deck suddenly with his whole body, not to rise again. He heard calls of “Get Mr. McVitty!” and then his own opponent was dropped by a blow he did not strike, and Bill’s voice said: “Come on to the boat!”
The next few minutes streaked by in wild confusion. Avoiding Bill, whose hammerlike arms had felled their two champions, the high-school boys tried to pull down Ham and Ellie, and the harassed group edged and revolved toward the stern rail.
“Hidden-ball stuff!” Bill panted. “Save it for Haughton. I’m G-Gardner, you’re Bradlee and Mahan—hip!”
Mr. McVitty’s alarmed face appeared above the combat, and his high voice, ineffectual at first, finally pierced the heat of battle.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves! Bob—Cecil—George Roberg! Let go, I say!”
Abruptly the battle was over and the combatants, breathing hard, eyed one another impassively in the moonlight.
Ellie laughed and held out a pack of cigarettes. Bill untied the motor boat and walked forward with the painter to bring it alongside.
“They claim you insulted one of the girls,” said Mr. McVitty uncertainly. “Now that’s no way to behave after we took you aboard.”
“That’s nonsense,” snapped Ellie, between gasps. “I only told her I’d like to bite her neck.”
“Do you think that was a very gentlemanly thing to say?” demanded Mr. McVitty heatedly.
“Come on, Ellie!” Bill cried. “Good-by, everybody! Sorry there was such a row!”
They were already shadows of the past as they slipped one by one over the rail. The girls were turning cautiously back to their own men, and not one of them answered, and not one of them waved farewell.
“A bunch of meanies,” remarked Ellie ironically. “I wish all you ladies had one neck so I could bite it all at once. I’m a glutton for ladies’ necks.”
Feeble retorts went up here and there like muffled pistol shots.
“Good night, ladies,” Ham sang, as Bill shoved away from the side:
Good night, ladies,
Good night, ladies,
We’re going to leave you now-ow-ow.
The boat moved up the river through the summer night, while the launch, touched by its swell, rocked to and fro gently in the wide path of the moon.
II
On the following Sunday afternoon Bill Frothington drove over from Truro to the isolated rural slum known as Wheatly Village. He had stolen away from a house full of guests, assembled for his sister’s wedding, to pursue what his mother would have called an “unworthy affair.” But behind him lay an extremely successful career at Harvard and a youth somewhat more austere than the average, and this fall he would disappear for life into the banking house of Read, Hoppe and Company in Boston. He felt that the summer was his own. And had the purity of his intentions toward Mae Purley been questioned he would have defended himself with righteous anger. He had been thinking of her for five days. She attracted him violently, and he was following the attraction with eyes that did not ask to see.
Mae lived in the less offensive quarter of town on the third floor of its only apartment house, an unsuccessful relic of those more prosperous days of New England textile weaving that ended twenty years ago. Her father was a timekeeper who had fallen out of the white-collar class; Mae’s two older brothers were working at the loom, and Bill’s only impression as he entered the dingy flat was one of hopeless decay. The mountainous, soiled mother, at once suspicious and deferential, and the anaemic, beaten Anglo-Saxon asleep on the couch after his Sunday dinner were no more than shadows against the poor walls. But Mae was clean and fresh. No breath of squalor touched her. The pale pure youth of her cheeks, and her thin childish body shining through a new organdie dress, measured up full to the summer day.
“Where you going to take my little girl?” Mrs. Purley asked anxiously.
“I’m going to run away with her,” he said, laughing.
“Not with my little girl.”
“Oh, yes, I am. I don’t see why she hasn’t been run away with before.”
“Not my little girl.”
They held hands going downstairs, but not for an hour did the feeling of being intimate strangers pass. When the first promise of evening blew into the air at five o’clock and the light changed from white to yellow, their eyes met once in a certain way and Bill knew that it was time. They turned up a side road and down a wagon track, and in a moment the spell was around them again—the equal and opposite urge that drew them together. They talked about each other and then their voices grew quiet and they kissed, while chestnut blossoms slid in white diagonals through the air and fell across the car. After a long while an instinct told her that they had stayed long enough. He drove her home.
It went on like that for two months. He would come for her in the late afternoon and they would go for dinner to the shore. Afterward they would drive around until they found the center of the summer night and park there while the enchanted silence spread over them like leaves over the babes in the wood. Some day, naturally, they were going to marry. For the present it was impossible; he must go to work in the fall. Vaguely and with more than a touch of sadness both of them realized that this wasn’t true; that if Mae had been of another class an engagement would have been arranged at once. She knew that he lived in a great country house with a park and a caretaker’s lodge, that there were stables full of cars and horses, and that house parties and dances took place there all summer. Once they had driven past the gate and Mae’s heart was leaden in her breast as she saw that those wide acres would lie between them all her life.
On his part Bill knew that it was impossible to marry Mae Purley. He was an only son and he wore one of those New England names that are carried with one always. Eventually he broached the subject to his mother.
“It isn’t her poverty and ignorance,” his mother said, among other things. “It’s her lack of any standards—common women are common for life. You’d see her impressed by cheap and shallow people, by cheap and shallow things.”
“But, mother, this isn’t 1850. It isn’t as if she were marrying into the royal family.”
“If it were, it wouldn’t matter. But you have a name that for many generations has stood for leadership and self-control. People who have given up less and taken fewer responsibilities have had nothing
