Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XXV

Nothing irked Pat more than being awakened too early. Consequently Katie's knock upon her door, at the third discreet repetition, elicited a plaintive growl of protest.

"Oh, go away!"

"Special delivery letter for you, Miss Pat."

"Shove it under the door and don't bother me." She flumped over in bed, burrowing her face among the pillows like an annoyed baby.

Very much did Pat wish to sleep. Until long after midnight she had lain awake, thinking excitedly. To be roused out of the profound oblivion which she had finally achieved, thus untimely, was a little too much. But that letter got between her and her rest. From Cary Scott, of course. She visualised the oblong blue stamp, insistent, intrusive, "immediate." Oh, well! Up she jumped, caught the envelope from the floor, and dived back into bed to read it.

It was mainly repetition of what he had said last night when they parted: nothing but the absolute necessity of going would have taken him away from her at such a time; he would be back in a few days at the latest; she must wait until then; must not let herself worry, must not make herself unhappy, must trust in him. It ended, "I love you, Pat." Through the quiet directness of the wording Pat felt the stress of an overwhelming emotion. It was not so much worry or unhappiness that filled Pat's thoughts as a confused and colourful bewilderment, a sense of unreality. There intervened a reflection from her mis-education [Pg 248]through the media of flash fiction and the conventional false moralizings of the screen. In a variety of presentations they all taught the same lesson, that when girls "went wrong" they invariably "got into trouble." She passed her hands down along her slender, boyish body and experienced a sharp qualm of fear and disgust and anger, a visualisation of gross and sodden changes in those slim contours. It couldn't happen to her. In spite of the movies, other girls "took a chance" and "got away with it." Ada Clare, for instance, according to common gossip; nothing had happened to her. Cissie Parmenter had lightly hinted at "experiences." Pat thought it would be exciting to tell Cissie. But would it be safe? She would like to have Cissie's reassurance that everything would be all right. But why should she need reassurance? She steadied herself with the thought, entertained wholly without idea of blasphemy or irreverence, that God wouldn't let anything like that come about, the God to whom she had paid such assiduous homage by going regularly to church and asking every night for what she specially wanted on the morrow or in the further future. It was her naïve idea of an unwritten pact with the Deity that the performance of her little ritual, be it never so self-seeking, entitled her, of right, to definite rewards and exemptions, claimable as required. This was one of them. Surely He would keep to His part of the bargain. Otherwise, what good would religion be to anyone?

It occurred to her uncomfortably that He had somewhere said, "The wages of sin is death," which she secretly deemed bad grammar even if it was in the Bible. But Pat did not really feel that this was sin; rather it was accident. Technically it might be sin; she admitted so much. But if it were really sin she would, as a sound Christian, feel[Pg 249] remorse. And she did not feel remorse. Therefore it could not in any serious sense be sin. Irrefutable logic! What did she feel? She asked herself. A sense of the fullness of life, of adventure boldly dared. She had met one of the great crises of a woman's life, the crisis, indeed. It must be so, since all the stories and movies and plays agreed on the point. The singular aspect of it was that she was conscious of no inner change. She was the same Pat Fentriss, only a day older than yesterday. Being a "woman," if this was it, was not so different from being a "girl."

And Mr. Scott. According to the conventions, as she had absorbed them through the sensationalised and distorted lens to which her intellectual vision had become habituated, the lover should lose all "respect" for the unfortunate girl, this being the first symptom of the waning of his love. Well, it wasn't working that way with her lover. The few, broken words of parting last night, the still passion of his letter, told a different story. Possibly, reflected Pat, the people who set forth what purported to be life, on screen, stage, and the printed page, didn't know so much about it after all. Or possibly she and Cary Scott were different from other people. She felt convinced that she was.