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Flaming Youth

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<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2> "I'm off of men," confidently wrote Pat in her diary. "There's nothing to it for me. From now on I'm going to be so nice and careful and mind-your-steppy that the place won't know me. All the old cats in Dorrisdale will purr when I come around. I think I shall take up slumming. Anyway, no more flutters for little Pat. I've reformed." In proof of which she comported herself with great circumspection for a space of several months, to the surprise of all and the discomfiture of sundry amatory youths of her circle. The word went about that Pat Fentriss was slowing up. While as much fun as ever in a crowd, she was less approachable in a corner. Pat, her peculiar radiance deepening and ripening, was content with the crowd. Her quickening intelligence was impatient of the callowness and shallowness of her contemporaries among the youth of the suburb. To fill her time a new and purely unselfish interest had come into her life; not so showy as the slumming which she had considered, but of far more practical beneficence. At the time of T. Jameson James's accident she had devoted herself with centred enthusiasm to the sufferer and his household. Later as the tragedy became a commonplace to her mind, she drifted wide of it. It was natural to the shallow fervours and shifting interests of her youth that she should unconsciously drop out of mind that silent and shadowed personality in the big house across the town. When she did think of it, temporary self-reproach would send her there two or three times in[Pg 296] a week. But there seemed to be "nothing that she could do"; and she would drop away again. It was an episode of one of these visits that changed her attitude. On her arrival Dee had told her that Jim was probably asleep; she could creep up softly and see; the attendant who pushed the wheeled-chair was out. Tiptoeing to the open door Pat peered in at the crack. T. Jameson James lay very stiff and still on the window divan, apparently sleeping. Pat was just about to turn away with a sense of relief when she noticed the hand nearest her. It was so tightly clenched that the flesh around the nails was white. His head turned quite gradually, bringing the contour of the face into view. She saw that the eyes were closed, but in the corners two drops of water gathered and grew, slowly, slowly, as if wrung from the very core of a soul's repressed agony. The drops broke, darted, trickled down like rain along a windowpane. A slight shudder lifted his breast. Then he was immobile again. Pat crept away until she reached the refuge of the lower floor. She ran into the garden, kept on running to the far extent of the grounds, flung herself down and so lay. She did not collapse; she did not cry. But presently—unpoetic and anti-climactic though it be to record plain facts—the stress of sudden emotion on top of a hearty luncheon had its logical effect. Pat was violently sick. As soon as she recovered breath and poise, she returned to the house with a plan in mind, stamped noisily upstairs and entered the sick room. "Hello, Jimmie-jams!" "Hello, Pat." His face lighted up a little; she was miserably conscious that he had always welcomed her with a smile. [Pg 297] "How are you feeling?" "All right." This was his invariable formula. "Don't lie to me!" She closed the door, lowered the window, and turned upon him. "Jimmie!" "Well?" "Swear!" "All right. I swear. What's the secret?" "Not that kind of swear. Cuss. Rip it out. Blast the ceiling off the roof. Let yourself go." He peered into her face. It was solemn, intent. "I don't know what——" he began. Then he broke off and let himself go. Such virulent, vitriolic, blazing, throbbing profanity Pat had never dreamt of. It comprehended the known universe and covered the history of the cosmos, past, present, and future. When he had finished and lay back exhausted, she enquired: "Feel better, don't you?" "Yes. How did you know?" "I saw you a few minutes ago when your eyes were holding in. But you couldn't help—there was——" She touched her own eyelids. "You're a —— liar, Pat!" exploded the correct and punctilious T. Jameson James. "That's right. Go to it if you haven't got it all out," approved Pat. "No; I'm through. Lord, that did me good!" "Cussing to yourself is no good. You've got to have somebody to listen. Ever let anyone hear you really loosen up before?" "No. I've always been too—too"—he grinned—"hellish dignified." "Well, you send for me when you need an audience." From that time a bond of special sympathy and fellowship was established between the life so disastrously[Pg 298] wrecked and the life so triumphantly burgeoning. Every morning after breakfast Pat called him on the phone and every noon she came over for an hour's chat, until Dee, grateful beyond her self-contained power to express, threatened to sue her sister for alienation of her husband's affections. Nothing, of however much appeal to Pat, was permitted to interfere with this regimen. Through this it was that she had her quarrel with Monty Standish. After three years of hard-working athletic obscurity, Standish had suddenly blossomed out into flaming football prominence. His picture appeared in the sporting pages of the metropolitan dailies; his condition was the subject of commentary in the papers, as serious as that accorded to an ailing king. He was of a gallant and alluring type, a bonny lad, handsome, spirited, good-humoured, well-mannered, sluggish of mind as he was alert of body, but with a magnetism almost as imperative as Pat's own. He had quite withheld his homage from her, ostentatiously refusing to compete in the circle of her adorers, so she was the more surprised and gratified when he asked her to join his sister's party for the big game. It cost her a real pang to decline, but when he hotly resented her refusal and demanded an explanation—he was rather spoiled by all the local adulation and newspaper notoriety which were the guerdon of his prowess—Pat declined to be catechised. There was a scene, angry on his part, scornful on hers, and he departed, darkly indicating that if Princeton lost the game on his side of the line the true responsibility for the catastrophe would rest upon her contemptuous shoulders. How T. Jameson James got wind of the controversy she never knew, but on the day of the game he called her to account. [Pg 299] "Why didn't you go down to Princeton?" "Didn't want to," she said airily. "Monty Standish asked you, didn't he?" "He said something about it." "They say he's the greatest end we've had for ten years." James was a Princeton alumnus. "He's a good-looking youngster, Pat." The girl flushed and her eyes shone. "He's a winner to look at," she agreed. "They tell me you've added him to your collection." "That's all guff," replied the inelegant Pat. "Is it? The point is that you wouldn't go because you felt you had to come here. Isn't that so?" "I didn't want to go, anyway," lied Pat gallantly. "I'm worn with football twice a week." "Well, you've got to stop spoiling me by coming here every day. It's bad for me; the doctor says so. I won't have it." "Are you going to close the house to me?" retorted Pat saucily. "You'll have to hire a guard. Go on, swear, Jimmie." "Oh, you go to the devil!" said the invalid, laughing. "If Princeton loses to-day——" But Princeton won and Pat was saved from the undying remorse which should (but probably would not) have consumed her spirit had Standish "fallen down" and involved his team in defeat. He came back the following week-end, a hero of the first calibre, and undertook to ignore Pat at the Saturday dance at which he was unofficial guest of honour. It would have been a more successful attempt if his eyes had not constantly strayed from whatever partner he was with, to follow Pat's pliant and swaying form in the arms of some happier man. On the morrow his stern resolution,[Pg 300] already weakened, was totally melted by a talk which he had with T. Jameson James, who had sent for him ostensibly to ask about the game. For a front-page newspaper hero he was amazingly humble when he called up Pat to ask if he might come and see her. Pat, her heart swelling with pride and not without a flutter of other emotions, said that he might if he would apologise properly. Mr. Standish did apologise properly and handsomely, and, by the time the apology was concluded, Pat was mildly astonished at finding herself in his arms being fervently kissed and returning the kisses with no less fervour. She was further surprised to find, when he bade her good-night, that she was engaged to him. But the really astounding feature of the whole matter came when she awoke the next morning to a sense of the prevailing luminosity of the world and the conviction that she was thrillingly in love. She had thought that she was through with all that. For a long time, anyway. <hr /> [Pg 301] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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