MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE
Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said.
A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers!
If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert!
Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away
by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her
own atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance.
"Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il!"
preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and
ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.
And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came
from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White
Birch Group.
"Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed Pemrose
Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn't
altogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's the
whistle--the bird-caller's whistle?"
"Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous
lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the
iris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her small
face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm.
In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic
whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent
piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance
between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a
fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody
in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit
himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly,
a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.
"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little feathered
Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast!
Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Juliet
answering from her balcony, this mound!"
"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him
with!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he's
saying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'"
merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'"
"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It's
won-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!"
And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of
speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which
answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:
"the song complete,
With such a wealth of melody sweet,
As never the organ pipe could blow
And never musician think or know!"
Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--he
actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight,
when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!
By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length
from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers
a boiling kettle.
"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explained
apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur,
used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, in
many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the
Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed
loch.
"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" he
murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. "Fine it minded me,
ma'am, o' the time when I was a boy, huntin' like a nickum for the nests
o' mavis an' merle--blackbird an' thrush--when I'd rise 'wi' lark an'
light!' Fegs!" Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, "yon was a thing
to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don't know but I was
feelin' like the last o' pea-time; an'--an', noo, I'm a green pea
again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory," added Andrew, the
true-penny, under his breath.
"Yes--yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and
frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!" complained Una,
aggrieved. "Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?" she
cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically
engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.
"My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud--Studley--Studart they
nickname him in camp--I don't know why," was the fluttering response.
"A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!" supplied the Guardian, now
busily frying flapjacks. "Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband's troop,
he's the lion-heart," laughingly. "So I understand!"
"Yes, oh! yes, but he's so-o nice, with it," cooed the merle's
brown-eyed "mate." "He has never--oh! never--squeezed me out of
anything, just because I was a girl; always said that two--two--could
hunt together and make good headway!" softly.
"And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest quest
of all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side by
side! Girls! Dear--girls!" The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze
now with more than the firelight's glow, as she tossed her browned cakes
on to a platter. "_Dear_ girls! In the new, the wider future before
us--soon to confront all of you--let us bring to it our Camp Fire
hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle's breath,
the 'pep' of the outdoor dawn--tenderness of the twilight, when we feel
that God is near!... And now--and now! let us sing our grace, not for
this food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us--the
glorious manna of opportunity."
"If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but if
unmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!"
On wings of faith the moved chant floated forth, led by the girl-thrush
in a sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous roll of the Pinnacle
organ, the murmuring pine trees; and the voices of the slender tree
choir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft--aloft to
Heaven.
"So you're not only gifted as a 'merle', you sing as a girl, too!" said
Pemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in her
green breast-pocket. "You must love birds very much in order to imitate
a thrush-song like that."
"Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brown
bird of the woods; so I thought it was 'up to me' to learn to converse
with my kind!" was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. "My brother Stud and
I have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have just
arrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp."
"Here--here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp for
boys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded shores of The
Bowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills," put in Tanpa, an
air-drawn picture in her glowing tones. "There are two big bungalows, a
couple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Of
course, we can't occupy them all the time, at present, not until school
is closed, but we constantly go out there over night--to watch the
summer coming--and for week-ends."
"Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at any
other season of the year," put in one of the older girls, an
Assistant-Guardian. "And we can always keep warm, you know, even if
there is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us."
"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches--the
stocking, I mean--when the holes are just haggles!" The eyebrows of a
fair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes of
merriment. "But we do--do have such fun at our Get Togethers--our
picnics and parties," went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi the
Butterfly of the mountain group.
"Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soon
now--one the day after to-morrow--Saturday--a picnic at Snowbird Cave,
to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of the
river, the blue Housatonic."
This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouths
together.
"Oh! the Housatonic--blue--Hous-a-tonic!" Pemrose bent demurely over her
flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her view
of it from the Devil's Chair. "And what about the second Get
Together--when is that to be?" she asked.
"A week from Saturday: _Jubilate!_ It's our anniversary day as a
White Birch Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon in
honor--in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf." Aponi
fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. "And that's to be
followed--whoopee!--by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in the
evening--to which all the boys are invited. And--and, maybe, some girls
not of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings,
too," slily. "But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts."
"I guess, if they knew there were two strange girls in camp--such
girls--they'd scuttle to 'come across' with an invitation, too!" laughed
the one slangy member inseparable from every group, whose talk is the
long stitch in the thread of conversation.
"Do you think they would? Oh! I don't know about that. Boys are
such--such griffins, sometimes."
Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, pointing the accusation, a new and
gloomy pessimism born of the Devil's Chair and Jack at a Pinch.
"_Ours_ aren't!" It was the voice of the little girl-thrush lifted
in blue-jay belligerence now. "Our boys aren't queer fish--not a bit!"
rising to hot defense of Stud, the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth,
was of opinion that Life in every phase was a game for two--in which
two, of differing sexes, could hunt together and make good headway.
"To be sure, they do love to get off jokes on each other--and
occasionally on us," went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in maiden
form. "They have a society of older boys in their camp called the Henkyl
Hunters' Brigade. My brother Stud--he's a patrol leader--belongs to it.
And they go on the war-path occasionally--and publish a bulletin about
their doings."
"What's a henkyl?" Una's mouth was wide open; upon its gusty breath rode
horned toads and plated lizards, in imaginary solution.
"A henkyl! Oh! if you ask _them_, they say it's a freak of an
animal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp,
or--or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!" Jessie's eyes
sparkled. "Stud says a whole 'henkyl' is hard to capture; it's so sure
to shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it."
Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together
over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah's
laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air.
"Oh! I know. I know!" she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in the
firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. "A henkyl! Why-y!
it's a joke. A joke that they're forever chasing up and down, trying to
get a laugh against somebody,--that absurd brigade!"
"Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits," smiled the
Guardian. "A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull off
whole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! we
mustn't give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air their
wit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently--the
signaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?"
"No, indeed!" A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy,
mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took
her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. "We're going to flash a message
right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark
mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all
faded out," she explained.
"Oh, ho! That's what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us
something--a display--with red fire, eh?" gasped Pemrose. "How are you
going to signal--with what code?"
"Morse code--and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!"
smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. "How--how about sending
over this message: 'Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them'?"
"Lovely! That will hit the mark!" came the appreciative chorus, to the
song of logs. "Then--then you'll see old Round-top wake up, quick's a
wink and 'come across' with an invitation--an invitation to that banner
picnic the day after to-morrow!"