Tramping on Life | Page 9

*
"What shall we do to-day?" asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side
by side, "I say let's go swimming?"
"You and me together?" I demurred.
"In course!"
"And you a girl?"
"Can't I swim jest as well as you can?"
"Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones," called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom
of the stairs.
"All right, Ma!"
"Johnnie, you git up, too!"
"Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!"
"Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there, talking
and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"
I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.
Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as

a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile body
outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off her
flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
naked before me.
* * * * *
It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little calf
wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would say.
I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily, as my
uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise when I
ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly in anything
it generally made me sick to my stomach.
Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was
different in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of
book-English and not the lingua franca that obtained as speech in the
Middle West, my Aunt Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes,
which she made specially for me.
"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.
* * * * *
A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a
swirling pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.
We undressed.
How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.
She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.
We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
the good sun, gasping....
* * * * *
As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.
Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where ...
grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed
particulars....
I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but

at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and rabbits
that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps ...
about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...
The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
had not lifted the analogy up the scale....
A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....
Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
prerogative....
Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
reluctance rose in my breast....
* * * * *
She was astonished, stunned by my negation.
Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish mouth.
"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began to
sob.
Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
power I had never known before.
* * * * *
I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting,
and how she might have made a