Wheeled Through Life
“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”
Treffrey Graham, aviator, Polytechnic student, youth of nineteen in whom
East and West met on breezy ground, for most of his life had been spent
on the other side of the continent, lay upon the rocky Balcony half way
up Pocohosette Mountain and indolently kicked pebbles down a sloping
ledge, over a precipice’s brink.
“So—so this is what Pemrose eloquently calls ‘the lip of nothing’,” he
remarked. “That rolling stone struck something,—bedrock—I guess, five
hundred feet below.”
“The Balcony is the brow of nothing; the edge of the ledge is the
‘dod-lip’—pouting lip,” laughed Pemrose, with a little shudder, as her
glance shot down an inclined plane of seamy rock merging into the
precipice forty yards below the moss-draped Balcony on which she sat.
On one side of this natural platform a fireplace had been built, with a
rough windbreak of piled stones, to prevent the flames from wildly
running amuck at the will of the evening breeze sweeping up the
mountain.
This was a device of that inveterate camper, Treff Graham, whose camp
fire, with that of an erratic father, had blazed on far prairie and
mountain peak, in most of the picturesque spots of his native land.
“This is a little bit of all right,” he murmured complacently; “you were
good to let me come in on it—and on the Flower Pageant to-morrow
night—after my ‘dumb stunt’ yesterday—stampeding the outfit.” His
lip-corners twitched.
“We ought not to have done it.” Pemrose stabbed at his brown hand with a
pine needle—they were skulking among some bushes in the corner of the
rocky Balcony farthest from the fire, she sitting—he lying, breast
downward. “I like a boy who has a brown speck on the pupil of one eye,
just one—he has to have a sense of humor,” she murmured to herself.
Treff was airing his humor upon Una—his cousin—just now.
“Say! oughtn’t they to be tried first on the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals?” he suggested, pointing to a rough sheet of tin,
dotted with little creamy mushrooms of batter, which Una, supported by
Naomi, was slipping on to a red-hot iron grating between the stone arms
of the fireplace.
“The biscuits you mean? Seeing Una mixed them!” Pemrose blinked at the
two.
Treff nodded. “The surprise to me is that she’s ‘sticking it’, at all,
as we fellows say,” he muttered, staring critically at his dark-eyed
cousin, a white rose when she started upon this camping trip, a red
carnation now. “The touch of hardship in the first days’ camping, before
you reached here, hiking, sleeping out at night!” he rambled on. “A
girl, like her, brought up in a flower-pot! If it had been a boy, he’d
have kicked the pot to pieces long ago.”
“That’s what she’s doing now—trying to do,” broke in Pemrose. “She still
has her worry-cows,” laughingly, “foolish fears, but she’s ‘sticking it’
at cooking and camp lessons—even at code, telegraphy, that horrid
teaser, to her,” with a little shrug, “just because her father asked it.
And—and she wouldn’t be Una without her little ‘crinkams’,” merrily.
“Her ‘fancy’ curves with a trimming of blue funk!” The boy’s lips were
pursed. “She never could pull herself out of any mess.”
“She pulled Donnie away from Cartoon’s heels.”
“Bah! That was a mere flash, a fluke; it surprised herself more than
anybody else.” He blinked through the bushes at his cousin. “The trouble
with her”—the young aviator whistled shrewdly—“is that she has just been
wheeled through life in a cushioned chair—and she always will be. If
anything happened to the chair, she’d just—drop through,” with a
collapsing shrug.
“But she’s the dearest girl, for all that!” fired up Pemrose. “Think of
this pageant—party—she’s giving for the mountain people to-morrow
night—her birthday, you know! She has been planning it for ages, a
lovely Wild Flower Pageant, to be given in our open-air theatre,”
grandly, “down the mountain, where a grassy bank forms a natural stage,
with trees for a background. And our dresses—if they aren’t fetching!”
“I’ll say so—when I see them,” murmured the lad, with a fervent glance.
“It’s to be a representation, as far as we can, of that blooming
democracy, Una’s flower clock.” The blue eyes winked—but there was dew
on the lashes. “And it’s all because—because, she has heard, her father,
others, talk, of the hard time the mountain farmers, have, clearing
land. And she wants to remind them that where rocks ‘grow’—and
back-aches—flowers grow, too,” quiveringly; “find the beauty around
them, for them—perhaps, in future, they’ll see some of it, when the day
begins, the hard day.” Pem brushed her hand across her eyes now.
“Pretty idea—if any of it sticks,” muttered the boy.
“And Una has coaxed out of the Guardian almost all the money that was
left for her, for her own entertainment, to spend it upon ice cream, oh!
and all sorts of ‘eats’ for them—their wives and little children—who
have so little in their lives—that’s—lovely.”
“Well! with ice cream for a fertilizer—” began young Treff.
“Come! You’d better not sneer. You’re to be scene shifter—general
electrician, properties’ man—”
“Merciful hop-toads! what else?”
“Anything you like—‘Hop’,” laughed the girl.
“Well! there’s one comfort, I shan’t be the only ‘hop-toad’, not if that
old farmer comes who chased you up a ladder—and then let you fall from a
hayloft on to a horse’s back.”
“And who came within a cow’s thumb of shooting us, because his wife gave
his slippers away to.... Oh! cock-a-luraloo!” The girl jumped up.
“There’s supper! And I’m hungry.”
“So am I,” acknowledged Treff. “It’s low tide in me, I confess.”
But it was a high tide while the feast lasted—a sweeping tide race of
fun and laughter, joke and story.
“We might have had a concert up here,” remarked young Treff, when he was
disposing very appreciatively of his last biscuit, the biscuit sneered
at in its doughboy day, “we might have had the ghost of a concert up
here—if only you had brought that—that talisman ring up with you.” He
looked down at Pemrose’s right forefinger, without the insignia of her
father’s genius. “Humph! when it comes to radio, you’re the ‘Nello’.”
“‘Wireless’ for winner, eh?” laughed the girl. “Somehow, I don’t think
you, really, believe that I can get any results with the witch-ring, at
all,” laughingly. “And I can! I can! Up here, we’d be too far from any
strong sending station I’m afraid. A five-mile radius is about my limit,
even for dot an’ dash—for any faint little gleamings of speech or song
it must be nearer—” the black eyebrows went up over the rapt blue
eyes—“and then—then it’s a whisper, seems to come from the other side of
the world, or—or from the farthest little blinking star,” dreamily. “But
Una—Una and I did—the morning we started—pick up something, just the
faintest little ‘queak’,”—half-laughingly—“singing ‘queak’—but we made
words out of it; didn’t we?” She glanced flutteringly at her friend.
“Awfully funny what you do pick up, at times,” said Treff, “from all the
hotchpotch, all the stuff, broadcasted, shot out into the air, sometimes
by amateurs not licensed to broadcast—but who do it, just the same. I
cut in on some ‘queaky’ singing myself, a few nights ago.” He locked his
brown hands at the memory, looking down from the Balcony ledge. “Some
honey-head—radio bug—amateur, I guess, was shooting off something about
‘dewy flowers’—as well as I could get it—and ‘holding’ somebody ‘in a
hand—by the hand.’ Now, what little girl....” The brown speck winked.
“Oh! go on—was there any more?” breathed Pemrose gasping—and she dared
not look at Una.
“Oh! I kept getting snatches of the same ‘blarney’, whenever I could
blank out other sounds.... I’ve rigged up a pretty powerful set at our
camp, you know—wire enough to send a message to Mars.” He kicked a stone
down the ledge.
“Go—on!” There was a queer little tickling in Pemrose’s throat.
“Well! later—later it seemed as if the ‘bug’ was blowing about radio: I
caught the word ‘Air’ distinctly; and something about:
... ‘Waves you cannot see,
Bring you, at last—nearer to me.’
Funny—”
He stopped. Two girls were sitting bolt upright upon the Balcony ledge,
one staring blankly with blue eyes—the other fearfully with black.
“Where’s—Una?” said the Guardian, ten minutes later. “She ought not to
go off like that, alone.”
Under cover of the general clearing up, one girl was missing.
“She has never had the chance before,” said Pemrose. “In camp, we hunt
in couples,” gayly. “But she’s off after harebells, I suppose. Some of
the loveliest—loveliest bluebells you ever saw growing just on the edge
of the precipice—a wing of the precipice, over there near the wood!
Shall I go and look for her?”
“I’ll go, too,” said young Treff, as the Guardian nodded.
“Oh! do let us stop, for a minute, to look at the view.” He caught at
Pemrose’s hand, presently, to steady her upon the shelving rock. “Una’s
all right! There she is!”
“The Guardian is going after her, too,” murmured the girl. “She wouldn’t
be the one to help ‘wheel Una through life’— but she feels her a handful
on her heart, just the same.”
“No wonder, as Uncle Dwight, Una’s Dad, has fitted up that jolly camp
for you. Done it in such high-powered style, too—radio, horses,
everything! But the view!” The young aviator caught his breath.
“Fine—fine as from that Lenox Pinnacle, where I pulled you up out of the
Devil’s Chair!”
“And cut me afterwards—Jack at a pinch!” dimpling mischievously. “But
the Pinnacle—the Pinnacle was nothing to this,” breathed Pemrose.
“Three—three tiers of mountains, rising one behind the other! Oh-h! they
look like three orders of angels; don’t they?”
“In the sunset they are—‘ripping’!”
The faces of both were transfigured as they gazed breathlessly off at
green, spangled foothills grading up into tinseled peaks, which, in
turn, did homage to the mighty, misty Archangel—Mount Mansfield, in the
distance, with wings of pearl.
“He seems to be waving his Big Trump at us,” said Pemrose.
“‘Say it with music’!” gasped the boy, his ear pricked towards the
woods. “What—what’s that. A murmur? Queer murmur! Didn’t you hear it?”
It was, indeed, as if faint music—the vague ghost of murmuring music—was
being wafted to them from that golden trump.
“Merciful hop-toads—green hop-toads!” It was Treff’s characteristic
explosion. “What does it mean? Where does it come from—on the wind—up
the mountain—from the woods?... But the wood doesn’t—own—it.”
“No-o,” gasped the girl. “It isn’t the trees—nor any bird—nor insect.”
“It’s as distinct from them—” the young aviator was breathing
heavily—“as—my soul! as the voice of a song sparrow down by the surf.
What.... The wind’s fetching it up to us—helping it. If—if this isn’t
eerie!”
They stared blankly, boy and girl, each into the other’s face, trying to
tear thence the meaning of it: of that wild, wandering organ note—ghost
of disembodied music—a succession of piping notes stealing upon the
breeze up the mountain—hypnotizing, beguiling.
Now the dim spruce wood below them became, as it seemed, a “roaring
buckie”, a hollow, reverberating sea shell, faintly throbbing with old
ocean’s murmur! Now, from it came a wee, high piping—undulating
piping—as of elfin singing, against which no evening sound in Nature
could hold its own for sweetness.
“Well, I’m ding-wizzled!” Treff blew his bewilderment from eyes, ears
and nose together—blew it upon the roseate air. “At this hour—by George!
it makes one’s heart slip around in one’s body, like—like—”
“Una’s—Una’s is slipping round in hers!” Pemrose caught her lip between
her teeth. “Look—will you? There—she’s off into the wood, to find
it—find out what it means! She so timid!... Una—come back!” she cried
sharply.
At that moment there leaped into the blue eyes something that rather
dazzled young Treff.
It had the flash of a bridge over a torrent—a flinty bridge.
Not for nothing had this girl a father who had bridged even space itself
with his discoveries; it was her nature to build bridges—span the
incredible.
“Una—come back,” she cried again—and sprang down the mountain towards
her friend, in her the same feeling that had possessed her yesterday, as
if her head and shoulders were being jerked backward, the rest of her
going with the horse—with something runaway. “Una—that’s that’s nothing!
I—I believe I know—” in half-mystified tones—“I believe I could—”
As if a spell were broken, Una turned. On the very verge of losing
herself among the thick spruces, thick as hops near the precipice’s
edge, she paused uncertainly.
The lovely harebells she had gathered, growing in such profusion in this
wild spot—a bunch almost as big as her head—stood out, like a fluttering
bluebird, against the green.
Suddenly she tossed them from her. With a frightened cry—an awakening
cry—she began running blindly, climbing recklessly—not up towards
Pemrose—but in the direction of the mothering arms of the Guardian, wide
open to receive her.
But, again, she was “sparrow-blasted”, mystified—quivering to the core
now. And the sunset drew a red muffler across her eyes.
She caught her foot in a moss-seamed crack of the sloping rock that
skirted this right wing of the precipice.
In the effort to dislodge it she set herself rolling.
Before a hand could reach her, before an eye could take in just what had
happened, she was rolling downward—a scapegoat doll—from the brow to the
lip of nothing.