THE COUNCIL FIRE
"Across the lake in golden glory,
The fairy gleams of sunlight glow.
Another day of joy is ending,
The clouds of twilight gather low."
Another day of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake--or marplot
nickum to spoil it!
"'Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!' That's what _he_ said when
they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I
say it's: 'Varnish right--and puzzle wrong!' All wrong!" snapped Pemrose
to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week
following that first Get Together. "Nobody--nobody has a right to drift
around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him
har-rd--though he did rescue me twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the
Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave."
And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys,
who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls' bungalow in which
a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden
glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft,
ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing
the pearl of their headbands,--and Pem forgot the enigma of that
eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now
and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to
leeward of a vessel in fair sail.
Well! to recall Stud's figure of speech, nobody was "whistling jigs" to
his milestone heart now--or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax
was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its
music fell.
"I watched a log in the fireplace burning."
They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its
transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a
pine-tree pantomime.
A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see,
summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn's
tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening
streaming now across the Bowl--hill-girt lake without--gathered, all
gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a noble tree,
here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish
life, light--inspiration--to a Council Fire.
"I watched a log in the fireplace burning,
Oh! if I, too, could only be
Sure to give back the love and laughter,
That Life so freely gave to me!"
Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one
girl the wish was transmuted into a tear,--into something more tender,
more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all,
and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons
crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes.
"There it goes!" The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame
embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what
Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches
to reflect?
It had been hers--hers--to share the dream of a great inventor, to look
forward with him to the pioneering moment--the beginning of that which
would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together--the moment
when the Thunder Bird should fly.
She never qualified that dream by an _if_, wherever the funds to
equip it might come from--or even if it had to wait a dozen years,
Toandoah's triumph, like that fortune "hung up--" for the great Bird to
make its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no
barrier--when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would
drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite.
But there were steps to be taken in the meantime--exciting steps in the
ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now,
counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless anticipation upon the
first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would
really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the
hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the button and loose the
lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred
miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record
of its flight.
"I--do--believe that my father sleeps with one eye open, thinking of
that golden egg, as he calls it--the little recording apparatus," she
said, when the White Birch Group, as one, asked that the special program
for this ceremonial meeting should be a talk from an inventor's daughter
upon this most daring enterprise of the age. "He says that if
_that_ does not drift back to earth safely with the crow-like
parachute--if anything should happen to it, to the two little wheels,
with the paper winding from one on to the other, all dashed with pencil
marks--the world would call him a fool's mate.... If it did!" Pem's
teeth were clinched. "But, of course, without the record, there would be
nothing to show how high the little rocket had really flown--showing the
bigger one the road," with an excited gasp.
"Yes, I can understand how anxious he must be about the safe return of
the egg--or the log--whichever you choose to call it--the first record
from space, anyway." Tanpa's tone was almost equally excited. "And of
course the wind may play pranks with the parachute--drift it away down
the mountainside!"
"So that we'd lose it in the darkness--oh-h!" Pem shivered upon the
thought. "But we'll all be on the lookout to prevent that, as many of us
as are there--and that won't be more than a picked few, Dad says, to
witness this first experiment.... When--when the real Thunder Bird
flies, though--" she turned those patchwork eyes now, sky-blue,
flame-red, upon her companions--"you'll all--all-ll be there. And, oh!
won't it--won't it be a sight to watch--it--tear?"
Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced assurance, the
slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months
before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped
pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that
gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of
luster--together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby.
Finished now it was, the pearl-woven prophecy--fair record to go down to
posterity!
In faith--such faith as had inspired Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to
weave and unravel her endless web, steadfast in the belief of her
husband's return, so the girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought the
transcendent story to a finish.
To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold pieces, the yellow bonanza,
coming from somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, for its record flight;
to a finish even to the celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash
lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy Moon!
But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak,
not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second
wreck--the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing
will had been read--when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl
poem to her father's workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of
the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young,
young heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the
invention would win out--the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had
ever gone before.
And he had whispered something--something surpassing--about a Wise Woman
who saved a city.
It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of
this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her
nature--the mingling spice in her name.
Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives
woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of
events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the
soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney
played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure--the
quaintly symbolized adventure tale.
But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon
the mounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like
streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through Space,--the
first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies.
The record to go down to posterity!
Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest,
sun and storm, peril and deliverance.
Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a
winsome reflection of Andrew's thistle-burr in her speech. Born "far
awa' in bonnie Scotland", the thistle and America's goldenrod blent
their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized
plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,--and
a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a
shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic
in a sailing vessel.
"We had all to take to the boats, you see," said Jennie McIvor, "for the
ship was leaking so badly that she couldn't keep afloat but a wee bit
longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up."
A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes--the
most primitive form of the boat--tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding
above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of
Ta-te, the tempest.
Somehow, this eye--the spying wind's eye--haunted Pemrose that night,
curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian's which, momentarily,
had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart.
Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom she had
eventually spared! Suppose, on the great night of the first experiment
with Toandoah's little rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small
Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the winds of Earth--out-soar even
the air, their cradle--should meanly seize upon the black, silk
parachute, light as soot, anchored to the golden egg, the little
recording apparatus! Suppose it should whirl both off, away from the
eager hands stretched out to claim them, hide them in a dark recess of
the mountain side, maybe, where they could not be found for
days,--possibly never!
Ta-te _could_ play fast and loose with her father's reputation, she
knew; at least, with the witness to his success as an inventor.
"If the wind should do that," she thought, "then the World, some part of
it--the horrid World--will say that Mr. Hartley Graham's last thoughts
about that mile-long will were wise ones: that it was better--better to
leave all that money 'hung up' awaiting the possible return of that
madcap younger brother--who'll make ducks and drakes of it, most
likely--than--than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird," with a faint
flash of a smile, "in spite, oh! in spite of the fact that daring
volunteers--skilled aviators--are wild to take passage in the far-flying
Bird."
Yes! even that youthful hotspur who used the cream of rough-edged paper,
and was willing to try anything once, though it should be once for all.
The girl's thought reverted to him now as she gazed into the bungalow
fire, seeing in the gusty flicker of every log that menacing
spiral,--the brooding wind's eye.
It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even while her companions of the
White Birch Group were excitedly discussing their picturesque plans for
the morrow; for the celebration of their annual festival in honor of the
birch trees bursting into leaf, for the odes, the songs, the dances, the
planting, each, of a silvery sapling.
It mesmerized her, did Ta-te's eye, with its setting of flame, even to
the exclusion of enthusiasm about the big dance--the joyous Together--in
the evening, of which Una raved in anticipation now and again, and for
which these two friends and rivals in the matter of eyelashes had
brought their prettiest party dresses.
The elders presiding over the destinies of both had given a happy
consent to Tanpa's invitation, and the two were now the guests for a few
days of the mountain Group at their camp on the egg-shaped Bowl.
The sigh of the mountain breeze came soothingly across the lake to lull
their slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by side, in the little
bungalow cots of which a dozen ranged the length of the great water-side
dormitory half-open, half-screened.
Yet Pem fell asleep imploring Ta-Te--and lost the little record
altogether in her dreams!
Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with
Toandoah,--but ever it eluded them!
Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat
up, to see the moonlight flickering--Mammy Moon's own smile--upon the
pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted
by night or day.
Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird,
itself, that was lost,--astray in space, and she with it!
She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a
sudden--all of a sober sudden--those feathers became soft, flopping,
buffeting,--real.
They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even
mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes.
"Hea-vens! W-what is it-t?"
Wildly she sat up--a second time--to see the dawn poking at her with a
pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the
morning in an iridescent oyster-shell of mist.
And, within, a bumping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as
terror--blundering into every sleeper's face, as if testing its warmth,
bowling its way along the line of cots.
"Cluck! Cluck! Flutter! Flutter! Awake! Awake! I'm lost! I'm lost!" it
said.
"What is it? _What is it?_"
Never was such an exciting reveille as girl by girl bounded
up--elastic--fingering a brushed, a tickled cheek.
The answer was a screech that made the morning blush, as if a ghost had
invaded the Tom Tiddler's ground of open day light.
Una shrieked in echo.
Morale was undermined. Cots were vacated. Maiden jostled maiden, all
colliding upon a gaping question that fanned sensation sky-high--until
the bungalow fairly rocked upon a hullabaloo.