"The naked boughs into green leaves slipped, The longing buds into flowers tripped, The little hills smiled as if they were glad, The little rills ran as if they were mad.
"There was green on the earth and blue in the sky, The chrysalis changed to a b.u.t.terfly, And our lovers, the honey-bees, all a-hum, To hunt for our hearts began to come."
When he came to a village with an electric car clanging through it, he skirted its borders, and struck off through a woodland toward the river. Even the village was too human, too modern, for his early-pagan mood.
In the woods he felt that curious thrill of stealth, that impulse to cautious concealment, which survives in man from the remote days when enemies beset his forest ways. On a southern hillside he found a dogwood-tree with its blossomed firmament of white stars. In low, moist places the violets had sprung through the thatch of leaves and were singing their purple beauties all unheard. Birds were nesting, and squirrels chattered and scolded.
Under these more obvious signs and sounds went the steady undertone of life in root and branch and unfurling leaf--provoking, inciting, making lawless whomsoever it thrilled.
He came out of the wood on to another road that ran not far from the river, and set off again to the north along the beaten track.
In an old-fashioned garden in front of a small house a girl bent over a flower bed, working with a trowel.
He stopped and looked at her over the palings. She was freshly pretty, with yellow hair blown about her face under the pushed back sunbonnet of blue. The look in her blue eyes was the look of one who had heard echoes; who had awakened with the spring to new life and longings, mysterious and unwelcome, but compelling.
She stood up when he spoke; her sleeves were turned prettily back upon her fair round arms.
"Yes, the road turns to the left, a bit ahead."
She was blushing.
"You are planting flower seeds."
"Yes; so many flowers were killed by the cold last winter."
"I see; there must a lot of them have died here, but their souls didn"t go far, did they now?"
She went to digging again in the black moist earth. He lingered. The girl worked on, and her blush deepened. He felt a lawless impulse to vault the palings, and carry her off to be a flower for ever in some wooded glade near by. He dismissed it as impracticable. His intentions would probably be misconstrued.
"I hope your garden will thrive. It has a pretty pattern to follow."
"Thank you!"
He raised his hat and pa.s.sed on, thinking; thinking of all the old dead flowers, and their pretty souls that had gone to bloom in the heaven of the maid"s face.
Before the road turned to the left he found a path leading over to the top of the palisade. There on a little rocky shelf, hundreds of feet above the river, he lay a long time in the spring sun, looking over to the farther sh.o.r.e, where the city crept to the south, and lost its sharp lines in the smoky distance. There he smoked and gave himself up to the moment. He was glad to be out of that rush. He could see matters more clearly now--appraise values more justly. He was glad of everything that had come. Above all, glad to go back and carry on that big work of his father"s--his father who had done so much to redeem the wilderness--and incidentally he would redeem his own manhood.
It will be recalled that the young man frequently expressed himself with regrettable inelegance; that he habitually availed himself, indeed, of a most infelicitous species of metaphor. It must not be supposed that this spring day in the spring places had reformed his manner of delivery. When he chose to word his emotions it was still done in a manner to make the right-spoken grieve. Thus, going back toward the road, after reviewing his great plans for the future, he spoke aloud: "I believe it"s going to be a good game."
When he became hungry he thought with relief that he would not be compelled to seek one of those "hurry-up" lunch places with its clamour and crowd. What was the use of all that noise and crowding and piggish hurry? A remark of the German"s recurred to him:
"It is a happy man who has divined the leisure of eternity, so he feels it, like what you say, "in his bones.""
When he came out on the road again he thought regretfully of the pretty girl and her flower bed. He would have liked to go back and suggest that she sing to the seeds as she put them to sleep in their earth cradle, to make their awakening more beautiful.
But he turned down the road that led away from the girl, and when he came to a "wheelman"s rest," he ate many sandwiches and drank much milk.
The face of the maid that served him had been no heaven for the souls of dead flowers. Still she was a girl; and no girl could be wholly without importance on such a day. So he thought the things he would have said to her if matters had been different.
When he had eaten, he loafed off again down the road. Through the long afternoon he walked and lazed, turning into strange lanes and by-roads, resting on gra.s.sy banks, and looking far up. He followed Doctor von Herzlich"s directions, and, going off into s.p.a.ce, reduced the earth, watching its little continents and oceans roll toward him, and viewing the antics of its queer inhabitants in fancy as he had often in fact viewed a populous little ant-hill, with its busy, serious citizens.
Then he would venture still farther--away out into timeless s.p.a.ce, beyond even the starry refuse of creation, and insolently regard the universe as a tiny cloud of dust.
When the shadows stretched in the dusky languor of the spring evening, he began to take his bearings for the return. He heard the hum and clang of an electric car off through a chestnut grove.
The sound disturbed him, bringing premonitions of the city"s unrest. He determined to stay out for the night. It was restful--his car would not arrive until late the next afternoon--there was no reason why he should not. He found a little wayside hotel whose weather-beaten sign was ancient enough to promise "entertainment for man and beast."
"Just what I want," he declared. "I"m both of them--man and beast."
Together they ate tirelessly of young chickens broiled, and a green salad, and a wonderful pie, with a bottle of claret that had stood back of the dingy little bar so long that it had attained, at least as to its label, a very fair antiquity.
This time the girl was pretty again, and, he at once discovered, not indisposed to light conversation. Yet she was a shallow creature, with little mind for the subtler things of life and the springtime. He decided she was much better to look at than to talk to. With a just appreciation of her own charms she appeared to pose perpetually before an imaginary mirror, regaling him and herself with new postures, tossing her brown head, curving her supple waist, exploiting her thousand coquetries. He was pained to note, moreover, that she was more than conscious of the red-cheeked youth who came in from the carriage shed, whistling.
When the man and the beast had been appeased they sat out under a blossomed apple-tree and smoked together in a fine spirit of amity.
He was not amazed when, in the gloom, he saw the red-cheeked youth with both arms about the girl--nor was he shocked at detecting instantly that her struggles were meant to be futile against her a.s.sailant"s might. The birds were mating, life was forward, and Nature loves to be democratically lavish with her choicest secrets. Why not, then, the blooming, full curved kitchen-maid and the red-cheeked boy-of-all-work?
He smoked and saw the night fall. The dulled bronze jangle of cow-bells came soothingly to him. An owl called a little way off. Swallows flashed by in long graceful flights. A bat circled near, indecisively, as if with a message it hesitated to give. Once he heard the flute-like warble of a skylark.
He was under the clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of the house. That disturbed him to fierce longings--the clear, high measure of a woman"s laugh floating to him in the night. And once she sang--some song common to her cla.s.s. It moved him as her laugh did, making him vibrate to her, as when a practised hand flutters the strings of a harp. He was glad without knowing why when she stopped.
At ten o"clock he went in from under the peering little stars and fell asleep in an ancient four-poster. He dreamed that he had the world, a foot-ball, clasped to his breast, and was running down the field for a gain of a hundred yards. Then, suddenly, in place of the world, it was Avice Milbrey in his grasp, struggling frantically to be free; and instead of behaving like a gentleman he flung both arms around her and kissed her despite her struggles; kissed her time after time, until she ceased to strive against him, and lay panting and helpless in his arms.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX.
An Unusual Plan of Action Is Matured
He was awakened by the unaccustomed silence. As he lay with his eyes open, his first thought was that all things had stopped--the world had come to its end. Then remembrance came, and he stretched in lazy enjoyment of the stillness and the soft feather bed upon which he had slept. Finding himself too wide awake for more sleep, he went over to the little gable window and looked out. The unfermented wine of another spring day came to his eager nostrils. The little ball had made another turn. Its cheek was coming once more into the light. Already the east was flushing with a wondrous vague pink. The little animals in the city over there, he thought, would soon be tumbling out of their beds to begin another of their funny, serious days of trial and failure; to make ready for another night of forgetfulness, when their absurd little ant-hill should turn again away from the big blazing star. He sat a long time at the window, looking out to the east, where the light was showing; meditating on many idle, little matters, but conscious all the time of great power within himself.
He felt ready now for any conflict. The need for some great immediate action pressed upon him. He did not identify it. Something he must do--he must have action--and that at once. He was glad to think how Uncle Peter would begin to rejoice in him--secretly at first, and then to praise him. He was equal to any work. He could not begin it quickly enough. That queer need to do something at once was still pressing, still unidentified.
By five he was down-stairs. The girl, fresh as a dew-sprayed rose in the garden outside, brought him breakfast of fruit, bacon and eggs, coffee and waffles. He ate with relish, delighting meantime in the girl"s florid freshness, and even in the a.s.sertive, triumphant whistle of the youth busy at his tasks outside.
When he set out he meant to reach the car and go back to town at once.
Yet when he came to the road over which he had loitered the day before, he turned off upon it with slower steps. There was a confusing whirl of ideas in his brain, a chaos that required all his energy to feed it, so that the spring went from his step.
Then all at once, a new-born world cohered out of the nebula, and the sight of its measured, orderly whirling dazed him. He had been seized with a wish--almost an intention, so stunning in its audacity that he all but reeled under the shock. It seemed to him that the thing must have been germinated in his mind without his knowledge; it had lain there, gathering force while he rested, now to burst forth and dazzle him with its shine. All that undimmed freshness of longing he had felt the day before-all the unnamed, unidentified, nameless desires--had flooded back upon him, but now no longer aimless. They were acutely definite. He wanted Avice Milbrey,--wanted her with an intensity as unreasoning as it was resistless. This was the new world he had watched swimming out of the chaos in his mind, taking its allotted orbit in a planetary system of possible, rational, matter-of-course proceedings.
And Avice Milbrey was to marry Shepler, the triumphant money-king.
He sat down by the roadside, well-nigh helpless, surrendering all his forces to the want.
Then there came upon him to reinforce this want a burning sense of defeat. He remembered Uncle Peter"s first warnings in the mine about "cupboard love;" the gossip of Higbee: "If you were broke, she"d have about as much use for you--" all the talk he had listened to so long about marriage for money; and, at the last, Shepler"s words to Uncle Peter: "I was uncertain until copper went to 51." Those were three wise old men who had talked, men who knew something of women and much of the world. And they were so irritating in their certainty. What a fine play to fool them all!
The sense of defeat burned into him more deeply. He had been vanquished, cheated, scorned, shamefully flouted. The money was gone--all of Uncle Peter"s complaints and biting sarcasms came back to him with renewed bitterness; but his revenge on Uncle Peter would be in showing him a big man at work, with no nonsense about him. But Shepler, who was now certain, and Higbee, who had always been certain,--especially Shepler, with his easy sense of superiority with a woman over any poor man. That was a different matter. There was a thing to think about. And he wanted Avice Milbrey. He could not, he decided, go back without her.