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crouching and gaping at us, both in blue playsuits, blending with the
mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment--and
within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball
among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was
transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a
raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while
staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestone
children.
Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know
that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I
remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order
one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the
worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast's flanks
pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up,
and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car.
Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a
little blue-black beard, un monsieur trõs bien, in silk shirt and
magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist's husband, was gravely
taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was
well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and
a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me
in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.
There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre
once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritable
passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high
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school year). We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don't
know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year,
and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the
newsreels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with
different main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kinds
were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real
singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof
sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned, and where, at the
end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant
father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on
fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic
newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a
robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through
sewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them
less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced,
blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring
Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust
through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing
mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the
timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie
knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the
belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that
would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show
but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero
embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small
airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of
popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger
was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocently
encircled Lo's shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two
harpies behind us started muttering the queerest things--I do not know if I
understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle
hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.
Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we were
traversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty miles earlier I
had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley
was a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense,
whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where
entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and
childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic
which prompted a semblance of explanation from me. Enmeshed in her wild
words (swell chance . . . I'd be a sap if I took your opinion seriously . .
. Stinker . . . You can't boss me . . . I despise you . . . and so forth), I
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