“Oh, you clever creature! Kiss me, darling! This calls for a celebration!”
“Sure does,” said Fred Markham. “White Lady, Francis?”
“Oh, Fred, are you sure? He doesn’t have cocktails.”
“Then it’s time he started. Here you are, old man.”
The White Lady was delicious, specially the white of egg part. Francis drank, chatted, and felt worldly. Then he went up to his room, dropped on his bed, and burst into tears. Mum! Imagine it, Mum! With Fred Markham, who had a gold inlay in one of his front teeth, and must be forty if he was a day! Mum—she wasn’t a bit better than Queen Guenevere. But that would set Fred Markham up as Sir Launcelot, which was ridiculous. If Fred was anything, he was a base cullion, or perhaps a stinkard churl. Anyway, he was an insurance broker, and who did he think he was, getting fresh with Lady Cornish? But it had looked as if Mum were in on the kiss; she wasn’t resisting, and maybe it wasn’t the first. Mum! God, she must be almost as old as Markham! He had never before thought of his mother as anything but young. Older than he, but not in any exact chronological way.
The door opened and his mother came in. She saw his tears.
“Poor Francis,” she said, “were you very surprised, darling? No need to be. Doesn’t mean a thing, you know. It’s just the way people go on nowadays. You wouldn’t believe how things have changed, since I was your age. For the better, really. All that tiresome formality, and having to be old so soon. Nobody has to be old now, unless they want to. I met a man last year when we were in London who had had the Voronoff operation—monkey glands, you know—and he was simply amazing.”
“Was he like a monkey?”
“Of course not, silly! Now give me a kiss, darling, and don’t worry about anything. You’re almost done with school, and it’s time you grew up in some very important ways. Did you like the White Lady?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, they’re always rather strange at first. You’ll get to like them soon enough. Just don’t like them too much. Now you’d better wash your face and come down and talk to Daddy.”
But Francis did not hurry to talk to Daddy. Poor Father, deceived like King Arthur! What did Shakespeare call it? A cuckold. A wittoly cuckold. Francis was not pleased with the part he had played in the talk with his mother; he should have carried on like Hamlet in his mother’s bedroom. What had Hamlet accused Gertrude of doing? “Mewling and puking over the nasty sty” was it? No, that was somewhere else. She had let her lover pinch wanton on her cheek, and had given him a pair of reechy kisses, and let him paddle in her neck with his damned fingers. God, Shakespeare had a nasty mind! He must look Hamlet up again. It was a year since Mr. Blunt had coursed his special Lit. class through it, and Mr. Blunt had gloated a good deal over Gertrude’s sin. For sin it was. Had she not made marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths? Well—must wash up and talk to Father.
Sir Francis was greatly pleased about the Classics Prize, and opened a bottle of champagne. Poor innocent, he did not know that his house was falling about his ears, and that the lovely woman who sat at the table with him was an adulteress. Francis had two glasses of champagne, and the White Lady was not altogether dead in his untried stomach. So it was that when Bubbler Graham phoned after dinner he was more ready to fall in with her suggestion that they should go to the movies than he would otherwise have been.
He still had to say where he was going at night, and what he was going to do.
“Bubbler Graham wants to go to the movies,” he mumbled.
“And you don’t want to? Oh, Francis, come off it! You don’t have to pretend to Daddy and me. She’s charming.”
“Mum—is it all right for Bubbler to call me? I thought the boy was supposed to do the calling.”
“Darling, where do you get these archaic ideas? Bubbler is probably lonely. Frank, give the prize-winner five dollars. He’s going to have a night out.”
“Ah? What? Oh, of course. Do you want the car?”
“She said she’d bring her car.”
“There, you see? A thoroughly nice girl. She doesn’t want you to carry all the expense. Have a marvellous time, darling.”
Bubbler wanted to see a film with Clara Bow in it, called Dangerous Curves, and that was where they went. Bubbler had taken Clara Bow as her ideal, and in restless energy and lively curls she was a good deal like her idol. During the show she let her hand stray near enough to Francis’s for him to take it. Not that he greatly wanted to, but he was rather in the position of the man upon whom a conjuror forces a card. Afterward they went to an ice-cream parlour, and sat on stools at the counter and consumed very rich, unwholesome messes of ice cream, syrup, and whipped cream, topped with fudge and nuts. Then, as they drove home through one of Toronto’s beautiful ravines—which was certainly not on their direct route—Bubbler stopped the car.
“Anything wrong?” said Francis.
“Out of gas.”
“Oh, come on! The tank registers more than half full.”
Bubbler bubbled merrily. “Don’t you know what that means?”
“Out of gas? Of course I do. No gas.”
“Oh, you mutt!” said Bubbler, and rapidly and expertly threw her arms around Francis’s neck and kissed him, giving a very respectable version of the way Clara Bow did it. But Francis was startled and did not know how to respond.
“Let me show you,” said the practical Bubbler. “Now ease up, Frank; it isn’t going to hurt. Easy, now.” And under her instruction Francis showed himself a quick study.
Half an hour later he was decidedly wiser than he had been. At one point Bubbler unbuttoned his shirt and put her hand over his heart. Tit for tat. Francis opened her blouse, and after some troublesome rucking up of her brassiere, and accidentally breaking a strap on her slip, he put his hand on her heart, and his scrotum (if schoolboy biology were true) sent a message to his brain that was the most thrilling thing that he had ever known, because her heart lay beneath her breast, and although she was a girl of the twenties. Bubbler had a substantial breast, crushed and bamboozled though it was by a tight binder. His kisses were now, he felt, as good as anything in the movies.
“Don’t snort so much,” said the practical Bubbler.
When she dropped him at his house Francis said slowly and intently, “I suppose this means we’re in love?”
Bubbler bubbled more than she had done at any time during a bubbling evening. “Of course not, you poor boob,” she said. “It’s just nice. Isn’t it? Wasn’t it nice, Frank?”—and she gave him another of her Clara Bow kisses.
Just nice? Frank prepared for bed, very much aware that he was “all stewed up” as Victoria Cameron would have put it. Bubbler had stewed him up, and to Bubbler it was just nice. Did girls really do all that—fumbling under the blouse and hot kissing—just because it was nice?
He was, after all, a Classics prize-winner. A line or Virgil rose in his mind—a line that Mr. Mills read with sad insistence:
Varium et mutabile semper Femina
Even in his mind he was careful to get the arrangement of lines correct. Fickle and changeable always is woman.
Stewing, regretting, yearning for more but angry to have been used for somebody else’s pleasure, Francis went to bed, but for a long time he could not sleep.
“Frank, I’d like you to have lunch with me at my club,” said Sir Francis, when he met his son at breakfast.
His club was large, gloomy, untouched by any sort of modern taste, and extraordinarily comfortable. Ladies were not allowed, except on special occasions and under heavy restraints. His father ordered two glasses of sherry—not too dry—and Francis reflected that in his experience this was a weekend of heavy boozing.
“Now, about luncheon—what do you say to a bowl of oxtail, with grilled chops to follow and—Oh, I say, they’ve got tapioca pudding down for today. I always say, it’s the best tapioca pudding I get anywhere. So we’ll have that, and—waiter—a couple of glasses of club claret.