SYLVAN SUITORS
Southward wound the green and white van; southward the hay-camp with
infrequent scurries to inn and barn for shelter; southward, his health
still improving, went the musical nomad, unwinding his musical
hullabaloo for the torture of musical crowds.
Now the world was a-riot with the life and color of midsummer. Sleepy
cows browsed about in fields dotted with orange daisies, horses
switched their tails against the cloudless sky on distant hillsides,
sheep freckled the sunny pastures, and here and there beneath an apple
tree heavy with fruit, lumbered a mother-sow with her litter of pigs.
Sun-bleached dust clouded the highway and the swaying fields of corn
were slim and tall.
The shuttle of Fate clicked and clicked as she wove and crossed and
tangled the threads of these wandering, sun-brown nomads. How
frequently the path of the music machine crossed the path of the van,
no one knew so well perhaps as Philip, but Philip at times was
tantalizing and mysterious and only evidenced his knowledge in peculiar
and singularly aggravating ways.
For the friendship between Diane and the handsome minstrel was steadily
growing. By what subtle hints, by what ingenuous bursts of confidence,
by what bewildering flashes of inherent magnetism he contrived to
cement it, who may say? But surely his romantic resources like his
irresistible charm of speech and manner, were varied. A rare flower,
an original and highly commendable bit of woodland verse, some luxury
of fruit or camping device, in a hundred delicate ways he contrived to
make the girl his debtor, talking much in his grave and courtly way of
the gratitude he owed her. Adroitly then this romantic minstrel spun
his shining, varicolored web, linking them together as sympathetic
nomads of the summer road; adroitly too he banned Philip, who by reason
of a growing and mysterious habit of sleeping by day had gained for
himself a blighting reputation of callous indifference to the charm of
the beautiful rolling country all around them.
"I'm exceedingly sorry," read a scroll of birch bark which Ras drowsily
delivered to Diane one sunset, "but I'll have to ask you to invite me
to supper. Ras bought an unhappy can of something or other behind in
the village and it exploded.
"Philip."
"If I refuse," Diane wrote on the back, "you'll come anyway. You
always do. Why write? Will you contribute enough hay for a cushion?
Johnny's making a new one for Rex."
It was one of the vexing problems of Diane's nomadic life, just how to
treat Mr. Philip Poynter. It was increasingly difficult to ignore or
quarrel with him--for his memory was too alarmingly porous to cherish a
grudge or resentment. When a man has had a bump upon his only head,
held Mr. Poynter, things are apt to slip away from him. Wherefore one
may pardon him if after repeated commands to go home, and certain
frost-bitten truths about officious young men, he somehow forgot and
reappeared in the camp of the enemy in radiant good humor.
Philip presently arrived with a generous layer of hay under his arm and
a flour bag of tomatoes.
"Hello," he called warmly. "Isn't the sunset bully! It even woke old
Ras up and he's blinking and grumbling like fury." Mr. Poynter fell to
chatting pleasantly, meanwhile removing from his clothing certain wisps
of hay.
"You're always getting into hay or getting out of it!" accused Diane.
Philip admitted with regret that this might be so and Diane stared
hopelessly at his immaculate linen. Heaven alone knew by what
ingenuity Mr. Poynter, handicapped by the peculiar limitations of a
hay-camp, contrived to manage his wardrobe. What mysterious toilet
paraphernalia lay beneath the hay, what occasional laundry chores Ras
did by brook and river, what purchases Mr. Poynter made in every
village, and finally what an endless trail of shirts and cuffs and
collars lay behind him, doomed, like the cheese and buns, as he
feelingly put it, to one-night stands, only Ras and Philip knew; but
certainly the hay-nomad combined the minimum of effort with the maximum
of efficiency to the marvel of all who beheld him. Ras's problem was
infinitely simpler. He never changed. There was much of the original
load of hay, Philip said, dispersed about his ears and pockets and
fringing the back of his neck.
"Where did you get tomatoes?" inquired Diane at supper.
"Well," said Philip, "I hate to tell you. I strongly suspect Ras of
spearing 'em with a harpoon he made. Made it in his sleep, too. It's
pretty long and he can spear whatever he wants from the wagon seat.
Lord help the rabbits!" He lazily sprinkled salt upon a large tomato
and bit into it with relish. "But why should I worry?" he commented
smiling. "They're mighty good. Johnny, old top, see if you can rustle
up a loaf of bread to lend me for breakfast, will you? I'm willing to
trade three cucumbers for it. And tell Ras when you take his supper
over that there's a herring under the seat for Dick Whittington's
supper. Tell me," he added humorously to Diane, "just how do you
contrive to remember bread and salt?"
"I don't," said Diane, smiling. "Johnny does. Did the storm get you
last night, Philip?"
"It did indeed. It's the third load of hay we've had this week. We're
perpetually furling up the tarpaulin or unfurling it or skinning the
mattress or watching the clouds. I'm a wreck."
"Where have you been all day?"
"Haying!" said Philip promptly.
"Sleeping!" corrected Diane with a critical sniff.
Mr. Poynter fancied they were synonyms.
"Do you know," he added pointedly, "I imagine I'd find ever so much
more romance and adventure about it if I only had some interesting
ailment and a music-mill. I did think I had a bully cough, but it was
only a wisp of hay in my throat."
Philip's powers of intuition were most fearful. Diane colored.
"Just what do you mean?" she inquired cautiously.
"Nothing at all," replied Philip with a charming smile. "I never do.
Why mean anything when words come so easy without? It has occurred to
me," he added innocently, "that it takes an uncommonly thick-skinned
and unromantic dub to tour about covered with hay. Fancy sleeping
through this wild and beautiful country when I might be grinding up
lost chords to annoy the populace."
Diane had heard something of this sort before from quite another
source. Acutely uncomfortable, she changed the subject. There was
something uncanny in Philip's perfect comprehension of the minstrel's
tactics.
A little later Mr. Poynter produced a green bug mounted eccentrically
upon a bit of birch bark.
"I found a bug," he said guilelessly. "He was a very nice little bug.
I thought you'd like him."
Diane frowned. For every flower the minstrel brought, Philip contrived
a ridiculous parallel.
"How many times," she begged hopelessly, "must I tell you that I am not
collecting ridiculous bugs?"
Philip raised expressive eyebrows.
"Dear me!" said he in hurt surprise. "You do surprise me. Why, he's
the greenest bug I ever saw and he matches the van. He's a nomad with
the wild romance of the woodland bounding through him. I did think I'd
score heavily with him."
Diane discreetly ignored the inference. Whistling happily, Mr. Poynter
poured the coffee and leaned back against a tree trunk. Watching him
one might have read in his fine eyes a keener appreciation of nomadic
life--and nomads--than he ever expressed.
There was idyllic peace and quiet in this grove of ancient oaks shot
with the ruddy color of the sunset. Off in the heavier aisles of
golden gloom already there were slightly bluish shadows of the coming
twilight. Hungry robins piped excitedly, woodpeckers bored for worms
and flaming orioles flashed by on golden wings. Black against the sky
the crows were sailing swiftly toward the woodland.
With the twilight and a young moon Philip produced his wildwood pipe
and fell to smoking with a sigh of comfort.
"Philip!" said Diane suddenly.
"Mademoiselle!" said Philip, suspiciously grave and courtly of manner.
The girl glanced at him sharply.
"It annoys me exceedingly," she went on finally, finding his laughing
glance much too bland and friendly to harbor guile, "to have you
trailing after me in a hay-wagon."
"I'll buy me a rumpus machine," said Philip.
"It would bother me to have you trailing after me so persistently in
any guise!" flashed the girl indignantly.
"It must perforce continue to bother you!" regretted Philip.
"Besides," he added absently, "I'm really the Duke of Connecticut in
disguise, touring about for my health, and the therapeutic value of hay
is enormous."
Now why Diane's cheeks should blaze so hotly at this aristocratic claim
of Mr. Poynter's, who may say? But certainly she glanced with swift
suspicion at her tranquil guest, who met her eyes with supreme good
humor, laughed and fell to whistling softly to himself. Despite a
certain significant silence in the camp of his lady, Mr. Poynter smoked
most comfortably, puffing forth ingenious smoke-rings which he lazily
sought to string upon his pipestem and busily engaging himself in a
variety of other conspicuously peaceful occupations. All in all, there
was something so tranquil and soothing in the very sight of him that
Diane unbent in spite of herself.
"If you'd only join a peace tribunal as delegate-at-large," she said,
"you'd eliminate war. I meant to freeze you into going home. I do
wish I could stay indignant!"
"Don't," begged Philip humbly. "I'm so much happier when you're not.
"There _is_ another way of managing me," he said hopefully a little
later. "I meant to mention it before--"
"What is it?" implored Diane.
"Marry me!"
"Philip!" exclaimed the girl with delicate disdain, "the moon is on
your head--"
"Yes," admitted Philip, "it is. It does get me. No denying it.
Doesn't it ever get you?"
"No," said Diane. "Besides, I never bumped my brain--"
"That could be remedied," hinted Philip, "if you think it would alter
matters--"
Diane was quite sure it would not and later Philip departed for the
hay-camp in the best of spirits. In the morning Diane found a
conspicuous placard hung upon a tree. The placard bore a bombastic
ode, most clever in its trenchant satire, entitled--"To a Wild
Mosquito--by One who Knows!"
Since an ill-fated occasion when Mr. Poynter had found a neatly indited
ode to a wild geranium written in a flowing foreign hand, his literary
output had been prodigious. Dirges, odes, sonnets and elegies
frequently appeared in spectacular places about the camp and as Mr.
Poynter's highly sympathetic nature led him to eulogize the lowlier and
less poetic life of the woodland, the result was frequently of striking
originality.
Convinced that Mr. Poynter's eyes were upon her from the hay-camp,
Diane read the ode with absolute gravity and consigned it to the fire.
The minstrel's attitude toward the hay-nomad might be one of subtle
undermining and shrugging ridicule, but surely with his imperturbable
gift of satire, Mr. Poynter held the cards!
Still another morning Diane found a book at the edge of her camp.
"I am dropping this accidentally as I leave," read the fly leaf in
Philip's scrawl. "I don't want you to suspect my classic tastes, but
what can I do if you find the book!"
It was a volume of Herodotus in the original Greek!