But she shook her head. "Not this summer--that cat has spent these last two summers with human beings who have treated him as a kind of fetich--just as we do!" As she rubbed his ear she murmured regretfully: "To think of all you"ve heard and seen and done, and you can"t tell us one thing!"
The Yellow Cat"s eyes narrowed to mere slits of black across two amber agates; then he shook his ears free, yawned, and gave himself up to closed lids and dreams. If he could have told it all, just as it happened, not one word of it could those good souls have comprehended--and this was the way of it.
It was near the close of a June day when the cat made his entrance into that hidden life of the summers from which his exits had been as sudden, though less dramatic. In the heart of the hills, where a mountain torrent has fretted its way for miles through a rocky gorge, there is a place where the cleft widens into a miniature valley, and the stream slips along quietly between banks of moss before it plunges again on its riotous path down the mountain. Here the charcoal-burners, half a century ago, had made a clearing, and left their dome-shaped stone kiln to cover itself with the green velvet and lace of lichen and vine. The man who was stooping over the water, cleaning trout for his supper, had found it so and made it his own one time in his wandering quest for solitude. The kiln now boasted a chimney, a door, and one wide window that looked away over the stream"s next plunge, over other mountains and valleys to far horizons of the world of men. This was the hermitage to which he brought his f.a.gged-out nerves from the cormorant city that feeds on the blood and brains of humans. Here through the brief truce of summer he found time to fish and hunt enough for his daily wants, time to read, to write, time to dream and to smoke his evening pipe, to think long thoughts, and more blessed than all--to sleep! When autumn came he would go back with renewed life and a pile of ma.n.u.script to feed to his hungry cormorant. He was chewing the cud of contentment as he bent to his fish cleaning, when, glancing to one side where the fire, between stones, was awaiting his frying-pan, he caught sight among the bushes of two gleaming eyes, and then the sleek back and lashing tail of the Yellow Cat. The man, being a cat lover was versed in their ways, so for a time he paid no attention, then began to talk softly.
"If you"d come out of that," he said, as he sc.r.a.ped the scales, "and not sit there watching me like a Comanche Indian, I"d invite you to supper!"
Whether it was the tone of his voice or the smell of the fish that conquered, the tawny creature was suddenly across the open with a rush and on the stooping shoulders. That was the beginning of the companionship that lasted until fall. The next season brought the animal as unexpectedly, and they took up the old relation where it had left off the previous summer. They trudged together through miles of forest, sometimes the cat on the man"s shoulder, but often making side excursions on his own account and coming back with the proud burden of bird or tiny beast. Together they watched the days decline in red and gold glory from the ledge where the stream drops over the next height, or when it rained, companioned each other by the hearth in the hut.
There was between them that satisfying and intimate communion of inarticulate speech only possible between man and beast.
There came a day when the man sat hour after hour over his writing, letting the hills call in vain. The cat slept himself out, and when paws in the ink and tracks over the paper proved of no avail, he jumped down and marched himself haughtily off through the door and across the clearing to the forest, tail in air. Late that afternoon the man was arrested midway of a thought rounding into phrase by the sudden darkness. There was a fierce rush of wind, as if some giant had sighed and roused himself. The door of the hut slammed shut and the blast from the window scattered the papers about the floor. As he went to pull down the sash the cat sprang in, shaking from his feet the drops of rain already slanting in a white sheet across the little valley. At the same moment there was a "halloo" outside, and a woman burst open the door, turning quickly to shut out behind her the onrush of the shower and the biting cold of the wind. She stood shaking the drops from her hair, and then she looked into the astonished face of the man and laughed.
She was as slim and straight as a young poplar, clad in white shirt-waist and khaki Turkish trousers with gaiters laced to the knee.
Her hair was blown about in a red-gold snarl, and her eyes looked out as unabashed as a boy"s. The two stared at each other for a time in silence, and finally it was the woman who spoke first.
"This isn"t exactly what I call a warm welcome--not just what the cat led me to expect! It was really the cat who brought me--I met him over on Slide Mountain--he fled and I pursued, and now here we are!"
She made a hasty survey of the hut, and then of its owner, putting her head on one side as she looked about her with a quick, bird-like movement, he still staring in stupefaction.
"Of course you detest having me here, but you won"t put me out in the rain, again, will you?"
At once he was his courteous self. With the same motion he dumped the astonished cat from the cushioned chair by the writing table, and drew it forward to the fire. Then he threw on a fresh stick of pine that flared up in a bright blaze, and with deferring gentleness took the sweater that hung from her shoulders and hung it to dry over a section of tree-trunk that served as a chimney seat.
"You are as welcome to my hut as any princess to her palace," he smiled on her, "indeed, it is yours while you choose to stay in it!"
"Don"t you think," she made reply, as he drew another chair up opposite to her, "that under the circ.u.mstances we might dispense with fine speeches? It is hardly, I suppose, what one would call a usual situation, is it?"
He looked at her as she stretched her small feet comfortably to the blaze, her face quite unconcerned.
"No," he acquiesced, "it certainly is not usual--or I should hate it--the "usual" is what I fly from!"
She threw back her head, clasping her hands behind it as she laughed.
She seemed to luxuriate as frankly in the heat and the dryness as the cat between them.
"And I"--she turned the comprehension of her eyes upon him--"I cross the ocean every year in the same flight!"
The storm drove leaves and flying branches against the window, while they sat, for what seemed a long time, in contented silence. He found himself as openly absorbing her charm as if she had been a tree or a mountain sunset, while she was making further tours of inspection with her eyes about the room.
"It is entirely adorable," she smiled at him, "but it piques my curiosity!"
"Ask all the questions you wish--no secrets here."
"Then what, if you please, is the object I see swung aloft there in the dome?"
"My canvas hammock which I lower at night to climb into and go to bed, and pull up in the daytime to clear the decks."
"And the big earthen pot in the fireplace--it has gruesome suggestions of the "Forty Thieves!""
"Only a sort of perpetual hot-water tank. The fire never quite goes out on this domestic hearth, and proves a very acceptable companion at this high alt.i.tude. There is always the kettle on the crane, as you see it there, but limitless hot water is the fine art of housekeeping--but, perhaps you don"t know the joy there is to be found in the fine art of housekeeping?"
"No, I do not," her eyes took on a whimsical expression, "but I"d like to learn--anything in the way of a new joy! In the way of small joys I am already quite a connoisseur, indeed I might call myself a collector in that line--of _bibelot_ editions, you understand, for thus far I seem to have been unable to acquire any of the larger specimens! Would you be willing to take me on as a pupil in housekeeping?"
"It would add to my employment a crowning joy--not a _bibelot_!"
"Pinchbeck fine speeches again," she shrugged. "Do you stop here all the long summer quite alone?"
"All the "short summer,"" he corrected, "save for the society of the cat, who dropped down last year from nowhere. He must have approved of the accommodations, for he has chosen me, you see, a second time for a summer resort."
"Yes--I think he was trying to protest about you being his exclusive find, when I invited myself to follow him down the mountain--leading and eluding are so much alike, one is often mistaken, is it not so?"
She was sitting forward now, chin in hands, elbows on her knees, gazing into the flames where a red banner waved above the back log. When she turned to him again the westering sun had broken through the clouds and was sending a flare of rosy light in at the window. Studying her face more fully, he saw that she was years--fully ten years--older than he had supposed. The boyish grace that sat so lightly was after all the audacious ease of a woman of the world, sure of herself.
"I, too, am living the hermit life for the summer. I am the happy possessor of a throat that demands an annual mountain-cure. Switzerland with its perpetual spectacular note gets on my nerves, so last year we found this region--I and my two faithful old servitors. Do you know the abandoned tannery in the West Branch Clove? That has been fitted up for our use, and there we live the simple life as I am able to attain it--but you have so far outdone me that you have filled my soul with discontent!"
"Alas," said the man, "you have served me the very same trick! I could almost wish--"
"That I had not come!"
"Say, rather, that you would come again!"
She stood up and reached for her sweater, waiting for him to open the door. The round of the little valley was a glittering green bowl filled with pink cloud scuds. They stepped out into a jubilant world washed clean and freshly smiling. She put out her hand in good-bye.
"I almost think I shall come again! If you were a person with whom one could be solitary--who knows!"
When she appeared the next time she found him by the noise of his chopping. They climbed to the top of the moss-covered boulder that hangs poised over the ledge where the stream leaps into the abyss. Below them the hills rolled in an infinite recession of leaf-clad peaks to the sky line, where they melted to a blur of bluish-green mist.
"Oh, these mountains of America!" she cried, "their greenness is a thing of dreams to us who know only bare icy and alps!"
"Far lovelier," he said, "to look down upon than to look up to, I think.
To be a part of the height comes pretty near to being happy, for the moment."
She turned from the view to study her companion. The lines in the corners of his kind, tired eyes, the lean, strong figure, hair graying about the temples. He grew a little impatient under it before she spoke.
"Do you know," she said slowly, "I am going to like you! To like you immensely--and to trust you!"
"Thank you, I shall try to be worthy"--even his derision was gentle--"I seem to remember having been trusted before by members of your s.e.x--even liked a little, though not perhaps "immensely"! At any rate this certainly promises to be an experience quite by itself!"
"Quite by itself," she echoed.
"Wouldn"t it be as well for you to know my name, say, as a beginning?"
"No," she nodded, "that"s just what I don"t want! I only want to know you. Names are extraneous things--tags, labels--let us waive them. If I tell you how I feel about this meeting of ours will you try to understand me?"
The answer was less in words than in the a.s.sent of his honest gray eyes.
"I have been surfeited all my life," she went on, "with love--I want no more of it! The one thing I do want, more than anything else, is a man friend. I have thought a great deal about such a friendship--the give and take on equal terms, the s.e.xless companionship of mind--what it could be like!"
He brushed the twigs from the lichens between them and made no answer.