"Our medicine chest isn"t very extensive. I hope they brought their own.
If they didn"t, some among us will never again see New York."
I stole a furtive glance at the unfortunate women. There was one among them--but let me first enumerate their heavy artillery:
There was the Reverend Dr. Amelia Jones, blond, adipose, and close to the four-score mark. She stepped high in the Equal Franchise ranks. n.o.body had ever had the temerity to answer her back.
There was Miss Sadie Dingleheimer, fifty, emaciated, anemic, and gauntly glittering with thick-lensed eye-gla.s.ses. She was the President of the National Prophylactic Club, whatever that may be.
There was Miss Margaret McFadden, a t.i.tian, profusely toothed, muscular, and President of the Hair Dressers" Union of the United States.
There was Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt, a gra.s.s one--Batt being represented as a vanishing point--President of the National Eugenic and Purity League; tall, gnarled, sinuously powerful, and p.r.o.ne to emotional attacks. The attacks were directed toward others.
These, then, composed the heavy artillery. The artillery of the light brigade consisted only of a single piece. Her name was Angelica White, a delegate from the Trained Nurses" a.s.sociation of America. The nurses had been too busy with their business to attend such picnics, so one had been selected by lot to represent the busy a.s.sociation on this expedition.
Angelica White was a tall, fair, yellow-haired girl of twenty-two or three, with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little when spoken to--but let that pa.s.s. I mean only to be scientifically minute. A pa.s.sion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved me lyrically. It was a short poem, but an earnest one:
Truth is mighty and must prevail, Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale.
I bestowed it upon the New York _Evening Post_, but declined remuneration. My message belonged to the world. I don"t mean the newspaper.
Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue.
Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain her.
"Guide!" said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of hers.
"Ma"am!" said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from the ground as though shot at.
"This cooking," she said, with an ominous stare at us, "is atrocious.
Don"t you know how to cook?"
I said with a smiling attempt at ease:
"There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of mammalia which an all-wise Providence--"
"Do you think you"re cooking for wild-cats?" she demanded.
Our smiles faded.
"It"s my opinion that you"re incompetent," remarked the Reverend Dr.
Jones, slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the cradles of the nation, but had not rocked any.
"We"re not getting our money"s worth," said Miss Dingleheimer, "even if the Government does pay your salaries."
I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden"s eye there was the somber glint of battle. She said:
"If you can guide us no better than you cook, G.o.d save us all this day week!" And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan W.
Pillsbury.
Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose:
"Come," she said; "it is time we started. What is the name of the first lake we may hope to encounter?"
We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman.
"Come on, then!" she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain staff.
Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills.
So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him forward into the unknown.
Where we were going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and turned on us furiously.
I didn"t know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing it as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies.
"We don"t need hardening!" she snarled. "Do you understand that!"
I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped forward in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon which characterizes the flight of an unwelcome dog.
In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the prospects of a pleasant journey.
We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule, led; then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans, shotguns, rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of the ladies; then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing behind her, Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss White--the latter in her trained nurse"s costume and wearing a red cross on her sleeve--an idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods.
Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage, bearing the inscription:
EQUAL RIGHTS!
EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION!
After a while she shouted:
"Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I"m tired."
Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work, particularly as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols and shopping reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of moving department stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur, because we had already stuffed into the panniers of that simple and dignified animal all our collecting boxes, cyanide jars, b.u.t.terfly nets, note-books, reels of piano wire, thermometers, barometers, hydrometers, stereometers, aeronoids, adnoids--everything, in fact, that guides are not supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown to those misguided ones we guided.
And, to make room for our scientific paraphernalia, we had been obliged to do a thing so mean, so inexpressibly low, that I blush to relate it.
But facts are facts; we discarded nearly a ton of feminine impedimenta.
There was fancy work of all sorts in the making or in the raw--materials for knitting, embroidering, tatting, sewing, hemming, st.i.tching, drawn-work, lace-making, crocheting.
Also we disposed of almost half a ton of toilet necessities--powder, perfumery, cosmetics, hot-water bags, slippers, negligees, novels, magazines, bon-bons, chewing-gum, hat-boxes, gloves, stockings, underwear.
We left enough apparel for each lady to change once. They"d have to do some scrubbing now. Science can not be halted by hatpins; cosmos can not be side-tracked by cosmetics.
Toward sunset we came upon a small, crystal clear pond, set between the bases of several lofty mountains. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but I nerved myself, drew a deep, exultant breath, and with one of those fine, sweeping gestures, I cried:
"Lake Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt! Eureka! At last! Excelsior!"
There was a profound silence behind me. I turned, striving to mask my apprehension with a smile. The ladies were regarding the pond in surprise. I admit that it was a pond, not a lake.