GONE
The steward (or the stew, as Townsend thenceforth called him) did not
attend the party. A preliminary tour of the grounds convinced him that
adventures of his particular kind were not to be found there. Dancing
was not in his line. Music (except the clamorous music of his own
voice) he did not care for. And he did not care to hear what Mrs. Wild
had to say about the Camp-fire movement.
To him the crucial part of the whole party was the eats and he lingered
near them like a faithful sentinel. The artistic quality of these
saved them from devastation. Those pyramids of luscious beauty could
not be defiled by human hands without showing the indubitable signs of
vandalism. Their very splendor saved them.
It is true that he skilfully extracted an olive from the symmetrical
mound of chicken salad and took an almond and a macaroon and other
detached dainties that were not made sacred and secure by their own
architecture. But for the most part Pee-wee was faithful to his trust.
He knew his time would come. And then, oh, then, that proud tower of
interlaced sandwiches would look like Rheims Cathedral.
Thus an hour passed and the merry throng emerged upon the lawn and made
a direct assault upon the dancing platform, lured by strains of
irresistible music. Some strolled about but none out of the radius of
that melodious magnetism, and Pee-wee remained undisturbed on the
romantic isle of eats.
He sat upon the edge of the island, the extreme western coast, fishing
for eels, with a string, a bent pin and a salted almond. It seemed
that the eels did not care for salted almonds, so Pee-wee endeavored to
tempt them with a chocolate bonbon but the bonbon dissolved on the pin,
forming a sort of subterranean chocolate sundae, and the eels ignored
it.
"I bet I know what's the matter," said Pee-wee; "they're afraid to come
near the island on account of the lights." At all events the eels
appeared to shun the neighborhood of the party; they were not in
society.
Just then Pee-wee had an inspiration. In the light of its consequences
it was probably the most momentous inspiration that he ever had. "I
know what I'll do," he said. "I'll use a long, long stick that'll
reach way, way, way out." And he glanced about him in quest of a
"long, long stick" with which to beguile the bashful eels. His
inquiring eye lit upon one of the long clothes-line supporters which
Townsend had driven into the river bottom to help hold the island in
position.
It is necessary to understand the strategical position of this
prospective fishing rod. These two poles had been forced down into the
muddy bottom just south of the island and the southern edge of the
island lay against them and was thus prevented from drifting down with
the ebbing tide. The makeshift gang-plank, gay with bunting, held the
island off shore and the ropes between the island and the bushes
steadied it. This crude engineering was quite sufficient. BUT----
There is a church somewhere in Europe of which it is said that if a
certain brick were removed the whole edifice would fall in ruins.
Pee-wee was not even an amateur engineer. That world-stirring
consequences could flow from an act so casual and trivial as securing a
fishing rod never entered his innocent and pre-occupied mind. He did
not know that in the hasty calculations of Townsend all the component
parts of this system of props and fetters were necessary one to
another. He removed the brick and the cathedral fell and there
followed a catastrophe compared to which the World War is a mere
incident. If he had pulled the north pole out of the earth the sequel
could hardly have been more momentous.
Sublimely innocent of the fact that he was unhinging the universe,
Pee-wee arose, advanced to the outer pole and began tugging on it. It
did not come up easily for the force of the rapidly ebbing tide caused
the island to press against it like a brake. But he succeeded at last
and as he dragged the muddy pole across the grass, the island turned
slowly cornerwise to the shore.
In his preoccupation, Pee-wee did not notice this. He tied his
fishline to the end of the pole, bent another pin and provisioned it
with a stuffed olive, requisitioned from a cutglass dish nearby. How
he intended to support this lengthy pole so that its end might reach
the neighborhood of the coy eels is not a part of this narrative for
Pee-wee's angling enterprise never reached that point.
He was presently startled by a splash and looking around he saw that
the end of the scaffold had slipped off the island. He was now aroused
to the imminent peril of the Isle of Desserts and to the terrible
responsibility which fell to the clothesline and the bushes.
As the island turned slowly outward the clothes-line strained but held
fast. But the rhododendron bushes had not the same heroic quality.
For a few moments they resisted, but the island, now at the mercy of
the ebb, tugged and tugged, and presently a mass of bush gave up the
struggle and came away, rope and all. The earthly paradise with its
luscious store of cake and chicken salad, its commanding pyramid of
sandwiches flanked by icing cakes, its plates of dates and olives and
candy of every variety, its mound of jellied doughnuts, and a mammoth
freezer full of ice cream, floated majestically down the moonlit river,
trailing a huge clump of rhododendron bush after it like the tail of a
comet.