A “Roaring Buckie”
A pure, high note upon the air, a shrill, vibrating beat, as of a bird
or a woodsman faintly calling! Wordlessly calling!
But it was not bird, nor woodsman. Una stood still, near a dark little
pond, fringed with blue iris—May iris. She heard the birds with it.
“Goodness! can it be-e—am I dreaming that I’m Pemrose—Pemrose,
‘listening in’ on something, picking up sounds from the air with a
wonderful ring—radio ring—that her father has made for her?”
The girl looked down at her forefinger; there was no deep ring, no
shining cat-whisker, no shimmering crystal there.
“Or am I—am I going far beyond her, beyond any one, picking up waves,
sounds, without any of these things, aërial—or ‘radio soul’?”
The dark eyes were translucent now in the dimness of the wood, with the
vision that she, least practical, least plodding of girls—except where
her flowers were concerned—should be the elect of heaven for a new
discovery.
And as the elect of heaven cannot pause to consider, on she went,
through the heavy dew silvering the brown pine needles, sparkling upon
tall fiddle-head brake and cinnamon fern, occasionally upon the ebony
stem of a baby maidenhair upon a bank.
The woods were unspeakable at this hour—the slowly lighting May woods.
There was a little, stealing smile in them, a laugh too young, too
subtle to belong to this old world, at all. Or else the world had
suddenly grown very young—so young that anything might happen!
Una, herself, felt more like six than sixteen, within a near run of
sixteen, as she tiptoed over the trail of a sunbeam on the needles,
pausing now and again to lift one foot off the ground, lift it high and
listen—after the manner of the terrier who thinks that he cannot listen
satisfactorily without a paw in the air.
The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And
now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a
hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.
There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation,
swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.
“_Goodness!_ Now—now the wood is a ‘roaring buckie’, as Andrew, our
Scotch chauffeur, would call a big crooning shell that he’d pick up for
me on the seashore. I wish Andrew were here. If only Pemrose was here!”
She had a momentary spasm of faint-heartedness—of being once more the
timid Una, timid to weakness in all but the strength of her imagination.
She turned to flee—to beat a retreat to the garden, to her fanciful
flower clock.
But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring
buckie was too persuasive—appealing to every fancy she had.
She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had
crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.
But she stole on.
“It seems to come from somewhere behind that log-stack,” she told
herself, peering through thick brambles and umbrella-like scrub of the
tenderest fairy green, at a great pile of crossed logs, their ends
gleaming, golden—a shack for the haunting shadows.
But when, taking her curiosity in both hands—if her courage was too
frail to be handled—she reached that shadowy stack, the mysterious
music—if music it could be called—had receded.
She heard it from a recess farther on—and deeper in the wood.
And now again she wanted to turn. But, at that moment, the soul of the
distant thicket, it soared, indescribably sweet, shrill, clear, like the
_vox angelica_, the angel stop upon an organ.
“Oh-h! I m-must be dreaming!” Yet, with hands clasped—carried out of
herself—Una pursued that fleeing organ-note.
It brought her in less than another minute to the pine-wood’s
battleground. Trailing, khaki-colored limbs of dead boughs, dead
soldiers, which had fought bravely with last winter’s record ice storm,
swept the earth, withering.
But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible
youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches,
twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them.
They were one with the living trunk.
In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her
lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her—some part of
her—she began to feel it—was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy,
away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.
Suddenly—elastically—it sprang back into place: “I w-won’t go any
further—after it; I won’t!” she cried aloud—and turned her head to look
around.
It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as
fairy-like—as full of glamour—as the others had been.
Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.
Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek
on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye,
buttercup, dandelion—ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its
pleading.
It was beyond Una to resist flowers at her feet.
She stooped to pick them up. Was there a nettle among them? Something
stung her. Stung sharply!
She was about to rub the prickling fingers across her lips, but with
some thought of the poisonous weeds which, as a Camp Fire Girl she had
come to know, she chafed them against her skirt—her sweater
cuff—instead.
But there seemed to be no poisoner in all the innocent little bunch that
rested its cheek so trustfully against her tan shoe.
Was it the tear in the violet’s eye that warned her? Was it the averted
face of the drowsy dandelion, still, in the woods, half asleep? Was—oh!
was there the faintest whiff about them that was not natural?
Suddenly all the daylight fled out through the tops of the trees, as it
were.
And, spurning for the first time a flower, Una turned and fled with it,
sobbing, tripping, stumbling, out of the wood—the intoning wood.
She reached the low, stone wall, breathless, wild-eyed.
“Preserve us a’! lassie, what’s happened to ye, the morning? Ye look
‘beglammered.’ Ye look scared; ye look sparrow-blastit.”
Never did a human voice fall more comfortingly upon a girl’s ears than
the rough Scotch accents which greeted hers from the other side of that
garden wall.
“Oh! Andrew, I—heard—” began Una, as strong arms lifted her over the
wall.
“I h-heard—” she raved again.
But the words were blown from her lips by another hum; a hum that seemed
heavenly, so loud, so cocksure, so mechanically humdrum it was—the hum
of a skimming aëroplane.
“I heard—” she began for the third time—and lifted her eyes to the sky.
They were blinded by a sheet of flame.