The case of Hobart Eddy had always interested us,--dear Hobart Eddy
with whom matters stood like this: Heaven had manifestly intended him
to be a Young Husband, and yet he was thirty-five and walked the world
alone.
Pelleas and I were wont to talk of him before our drawing-room fire.
Hobart Eddy, we were agreed, was one of the men who look like a young
husband. By that I cannot in the least explain what I mean, but he
was wont to bend above a book or lean toward a picture exactly as
another man would say: “And how are you to-day, dear?” If he were to
have entered a coach in which I was traveling I think that I should
involuntarily have looked about for some girlish face to be lighting
at his coming. Therefore we two had been wont to amuse ourselves by
picturing, but without much hope, his possible wife; she must be so
many things to him that we found it difficult to select any one in whom
to rest our expectation, faint yet persistent. Though I knew no one
save Pelleas himself who would have been as a lover so adorable, as a
husband so tender, the problem was not quite so simple; for Hobart Eddy
was a king of the social hour and a ruler of many.
“The allegro, quite the allegro of my dinner symphony,” Miss Willie
Lillieblade had once thankfully flattered him. “Ah, you were more.
You were the absolute conductor. You were the salvation of our tempo
during the entrée. The dear Bishop, who thought he was the religious
theme for the trombones, how you quieted his ecclesiastical chantings.
How you modulated the sputterings of that French horn of a count. And
ah, my dear Hobart, how you obeyed my anxious _sforzando_ over my mute
little guest of honour. I’ve no _beaux yeux_ to look you thanks, but I
appreciated every breath of your baton.”
Thus, with his own charm, Hobart Eddy was one whom it was a simple
thing to adore; and as Pelleas said with twinkling cruelty débutantes
are dear, simple things. But among them all season after season Hobart
moved, boyishly interested, urbanely ready as we thought to do the
homage of the devotee and, one might have said, urbanely unable. And
season after season we had failed to plan for him a concrete romance.
For we thought that his wife should be no less than he a social ruler
of many, yet she must have his own detached heart of youth. Moreover,
we wished her to be clever, but not to every one; and wise, though
with a pretty unreason; and girlishly unconscious, or if she was
conscious then just conscious enough; and very willing to be ordered
about a bit, though losing none of her pretty imperiousness--ah well,
no wonder the case of Hobart Eddy baffled us. No wonder that I believed
him hopeless as I had believed Nichola, who loves no one. We should
long ago have laid the matter by if only there had not persisted about
him that Devoted Young Husband look.
It was in the week made memorable both by our Easter day experience and
by the moral of my matinée that our thought momentarily took up the
case of Hobart Eddy in earnest. Indeed, our Easter day and my matinée
did much to shape our Summer. For on a sudden it seemed so easy to make
happiness in the world as well as to look close and read the fine print
of romance that we found ourselves with almost no leisure. And in that
very week Viola unexpectedly came home from school.
Viola is a niece of my dear Madame Sally Chartres and the previous
Spring she had nominally spent a week with Pelleas and me. I say
nominally because in reality she had spent it before the telephone on
our landing.
“Viola, who,” Pelleas had been wont to say, “sounds like a Greek
maiden captive in an Illyrian household and beloved of a Greek youth,
_Telephone_, in four syllables.”
He was a young bank clerk in Broad street and he seemed to have a
theory that whenever any one else had used the telephone Viola was no
longer at the other end, and he was obliged to make sure. “Miss Viola,
the telephone wants to talk to you,” Nichola had announced all day
long. And though Pelleas and I are the first to love a lover, some way
the case failed to impress us to partisanship--just as we lose sympathy
with the influenza of a man who is perpetually shutting the car door.
“If I were a telephone,” Pelleas would say, “intended by Science for
uses of medicine, bonds and the like I should get out of order if they
tried to make me a courtier.”
“Pelleas,” I had justly protested, “you would be the first to be
delighted.”
“Ah, yes,” he admitted, “I dare say I should, but then you see I know
so little about science.”
When that Summer it was decided that Viola should complete her school
in Switzerland, Pelleas and I understood that the Chartres family
sympathized with our own impression about our telephone. But before
the end of the year Viola unexpectedly returned from Lausanne. And the
April day on which we learned of this from Hobart Eddy was further
memorable to us: For it was on that very morning that the first
rose-breasted grosbeaks appeared in the park.
West of the walk leading from the south to the Reservoir Castle in
the park there is a little brick path, steep and uneven and running
crookedly downward like a mere mood of the sober walk itself. The path
is railed in from the crowding green things on either side, but the
rail hardly thwarts a magnificent Forsythia which tosses its sprays to
curve high over the way like the curve of wings in flight. It was a
habit of ours to seek out this path once or twice every Spring and to
stand beneath these branches. Some way when we did that we were _sure_
that it was Spring, for we seemed to catch its high moment; as for
another a bell might strike somewhere with “One, two, three: Now it is
the crest of May. Four, five, six: Now this apple-tree is at the very
height of its bloom. This is _the moment_ of this rose.” We called this
path the path of In-the-Spring. We always went there in the mornings,
for in Spring we think that it seems to be _more_ Spring in the morning
than in the afternoon. And it was here of an April Nine-o’clock that we
saw our first pair of grosbeaks of the year.
They alighted quite close to us as if for them we were not there. They
were on some pleasant business of testing the flavour of buds and the
proud, rose-throated male, vibrating his wings the while, gave us his
note as if he were the key to the whole matter. And I think that he
was .. .--.....⌒⌒.--.--? he imparted, and it was like revelation and
prophecy and belief; so that for a moment we were near knowing what
he meant and what he is and what we and the Forsythia are. But the
information escaped us and the grosbeaks flew away. However, they left
us their blessing. For there was a little glow in our hearts at having
been so near.
“Now,” Pelleas said as we mounted the steep path back to the real walk
(so innocently absorbed the real walk looked and as if it knew nothing
at all about its gay little aberration of a path!). “Now, that must
mean something.”
“Of course it must,” said I contentedly. “What must, Pelleas?”
He answered solemnly: That when a bird or a child or a wood-creature
shows you confidence it always indicates that something pleasant is
about to happen. I detected his mood of improvisation; but who am I to
dissent from an improvisation so satisfying?
We sat on the first bench and Pelleas drew out our March-April record.
In a little town of the West which we know and love there is kept each
Spring on the bulletin board of the public library a list of dates of
the return of the migratory birds with the names of those who first
saw and reported them; and there is the pleasantest rivalry among the
citizens to determine who shall announce the earliest appearances.
From time to time through the Spring this list is printed in the daily
newspaper. Since we knew of this beautiful custom Pelleas and I have
always made a list, for Spring. That day our record read:--
March 9th Robin, Pelleas.
March 10th Bluebird, Etarre.
March 12th Phœbe, Etarre.
Note.--Earliest we have seen in five years.
March 16th Geese (flying), Pelleas.
March 21st Song Sparrow, Pelleas.
March 21st Meadow Lark, Pelleas.
Note.--Not perfectly certain. Nearly so.
April 5th House Wren, Etarre.
Note.--Did not see it. Heard it.
April 12th High Holder, Etarre.
April 14th Sparrow Hawk, Pelleas.
Note.--May have been a pigeon hawk.
April 29th Rose-breasted grosbeaks (pair), Etarre and Pelleas.
“It sounds like a programme of music,” I said.
“All lists are wonderful things,” said Pelleas, folding ours away in
his portmonnaie; “one ought to ‘keep’ a great many.”
I did not at once agree. To be sure I believe passionately in lists of
birds; but in the main I profess for lists a profound indifference. As
for “keeping a diary” I would as soon describe a walk in the woods by
telling the number of steps I had taken.
“One cannot make a list of the glory of a thing,” I ventured at last.
“Well, no,” Pelleas admitted. “If only one could what a talisman it
would be to take out and read, on one’s worst days.”
It would indeed. But I suppose that one’s list of Spring birds would
help one on such a day if one would, so to speak, read deep down into
the page.
“We might make a ‘Bird List: Part Two,’” Pelleas suggested, “for that
kind of thing.”
“But how could one?” I objected; “for example: ‘_April
29th--Rose-breasted grosbeak day. A momentary knowledge that there is
more about a bird and about what he is and about what we are than one
commonly supposes._’ You see, Pelleas, how absurd that would be.”
“Ah, well,” he protested stoutly, “one needn’t try to write it out in
words. One could merely indicate it. Just that would help one to keep
alive the thrill of a thing. Such a device would be very dear to every
one.”
That is true. To keep alive the thrill of a thing, of revelation, of
prophecy, of belief--we all go asking how to do that.
“I dare say though,” Pelleas said, “that one could keep it alive by
merely passing it on. The point is to keep such moments _alive_. Not
necessarily to keep them for one’s own.”
To keep alive the thrill of that moment when we had seen the grosbeaks,
the high moment of a Spring morning; not to know these little ecstasies
briefly, but to abide in their essential peace; is this not as if one
were arbiter of certain modes of immortality?
“Surely that would make one a ‘restorer of paths to dwell in,’” he
added.
“A restorer of the path of In-the-Spring,” I said.
Pelleas turned the glasses on the magnolias. “On my soul,” he
exclaimed, “I thought I saw a tanager!” And when we had stood for a
moment to watch hopefully and had been disappointed (“Why shouldn’t an
early tanager come, to help us to believe?” he wondered), he gave a
vital spark to what I had said about the path:--
“I suppose that that little path really has no ending,” he said; “you
cannot end direction. Yes, the path of In-the-Spring must run right
away to the end of the world.”
We walked on happily, counting the robins, listening to a near phœbe
call to a far phœbe, watching two wrens pull slivers from a post for a
nest they knew. Across the green, but too far away for certainty, we
thought we saw a cherry bough in flower. .. .-- ..... .⌒⌒ .--? we heard
the grosbeak once again from somewhere invisible. The mornings on
which we walk in the park seem to us almost like youth.
* * * * *
The augury that something pleasant was about to happen was further
fulfilled when we came in sight of our house and saw Hobart Eddy’s
great appalling French touring car like an elephant kneeling at our
curb. Hobart was waiting for us in the drawing-room and he stood before
us looking down from his splendid height and getting his own way from
the first.
“Come, Aunt Etarre,” he said, “there is no car like her. I want you
both to run over to Inglese to see Viola. You knew that she has come
home?”
“Viola--has she really?” I cried; and, “Have you seen her?” asked
Pelleas; and, “How does she look?” we demanded together.
“No,” Hobart said, “I’ve not seen her. I had a charming little note
from her, full of nods. Now that I think of it,” he went on leisurely,
“Viola’s charming little letters are always very like a bow from her.
She never even waves her hand in them. She merely bows, in ink. I think
I shall point out to her that if ever she is too busy to write letters
she might send about her handkerchiefs, instead. One would tell quite
as much as the other, and both suggest orris....”
“Hobart Eddy,” I begged impatiently, “where is Viola?”
“She is in Inglese-in-the-valley, with the Chartres,” he told me. “Get
your bonnet, dear, and a tremendous veil and come. I’ll run like a
tortoise-shell and you shall toot the horn.”
I turned tremblingly to Pelleas for I had never been in a motor car.
Lumbering electric hansoms and victorias had borne me, but the kneeling
elephant was another matter. But Pelleas, being a man, is no more in
awe of machinery than I am of chiffons; or than he is of chiffons; and
he assented to Inglese quite simply.
“Very well, Hobart Eddy,” I said, “I will go. You are charming to
want us. But bear in mind that I reserve the right to insist that you
are running too fast, block by block. And if anything goes wrong very
likely I shall catch at the brake.”
“I’ll lead the thing by the bridle if you say so,” he promised
faithfully.
Presently we were free of the avenue, skimming the park, threading our
way among an hundred excitements, _en route_ to Inglese. Hobart Eddy
was driving the machine himself and as I looked at his shoulders I
found to my amazement that I was feeling a certain confidence. Hobart
Eddy was one of the men whose shoulders--ah, well, it is among the
hardships of life that one’s best reasons are never communicable. But
I was feeling a certain confidence. And though a little alarm remained
to prove me conservative I found myself also diverted. I remember
trying when I was a child to determine at night in a thunder-storm
which of me was frightened and which was sleepy and deciding that
some of me was sleepy but all of me was frightened. And now, having
come to a time of life when some terror should be a diversion, all of
me was diverted though some of me was terrified. Hobart was running
very slowly and glancing back at me now and then to nod reassuringly.
The very sun was reassuring. The river and the Long Island ferry were
reassuring. On such a day certainty is as easy as song. And by the time
that we had reached the hills about Inglese I could have found it in my
heart to telephone to Pelleas if he had been a block away: What a day.
I love you.
Instead I sat quietly in the tonneau when, on the outskirts of the
village, Hobart drew the car to the green crest of a little height. I
found that the tonneau was geometrically in the one precise spot from
which through pine- and fir-trees a look of the sea unrolled. Hobart is
a perfect host and is always constructing these little altars to the
inessential. On a journey Pelleas and he would remember to look out
for the “view” as another man would think of trunk checks. But Pelleas
and Hobart would remember trunk checks too and it is this combination
which holds a woman captive.
“And down there,” said Hobart, looking the other way, “will be Viola of
Inglese-in-the-valley. It sounds like an aria.”
“I wonder,” Pelleas observed on this, “whether Viola is still in love
with our telephone. If I thought she was I should certainly take it
out. I have never,” Pelleas added conscientiously, “taken one out. But
I think I could. I’ve often thought I could. And that should do for
him--that young Greek youth _Telephone_.”
“Her little nod of a letter,” said Hobart, “seemed very content. So
content that either she must have forgotten all about your telephone or
else she had him at her elbow. They say there are those two routes to
content.”
Had Hobart himself found that first route, I wondered. For some years
now we had seen him merely sitting out operas, handing tea, leading
cotillons, and returning fans--urbane, complaisant, perfectly the
social automaton. But always we had patiently hoped for him something
gracious. Instead, had he merely found the content of some Forgetting?
And if this was so he was in case still more sad than if he were
unhappy. Either possibility grieved me. I am not unskillful with my
needle and I found myself oddly longing to bring to bear my embroidery
silks and cottons upon Hobart Eddy’s life. If only I might have
embroidered on it a pattern of rosemary or heart’s-ease--ay, or even
the rue.
And suddenly I grasped the real situation. Here was Hobart for whom
we longed to plan a concrete romance. And over there, in Inglese,
was Viola come home again, grown wiser, more beautiful, and I had no
doubt remaining as wholly lovable as before. And did I not know how
willingly Madame Sally Chartres would have trusted the future of her
little grandniece to Hobart Eddy? Was I not, in fact, in the secret of
certain perfectly permissible ideas of Madame Sally’s on the subject?
Not plans, but ideas. Moreover, now that Viola was back in America
there was once more the peril of that young _Telephone_. And if Pelleas
and I had devised the matter we could have thought of no lady lovelier
than Viola. I turned to telegraph to Pelleas and I found him in the
midst of the merest glance at me. It was one of the glances which need
no spelling. And it was in that moment as if between us there had been
spoken our universal and unqualified, _Why not?_
“Hobart,” said I, “you are very brave to go to Inglese. I have always
thought that any man could fall in love with a woman named Viola.”
But as for Hobart he serenely took one of the side paths which he is so
fond of developing.
“I don’t know,” he said reflectively, “Viola begins with a V. I’m a
bit afraid of V. V--‘the viol, the violet, and the vine.’ V sounds,”
he continued, as if he enjoyed it, “such an impractical letter--a kind
of apotheosis of B. Wouldn’t one say that V is a sort of poet to the
alphabet? None of the sturdiness of G--or the tranquillity of M--or the
piquancy of K--or the all-round usefulness of E. I don’t know, really,
whether a woman who begins with V could be taken seriously. I think I
should feel as if I were married to a wreath, or a lyre.”
Any one save Pelleas and me would have been discouraged, but we are
more than seventy years old and we understand the value of the quality
of a man’s indifference. Moreover, we believed that Hobart had a heart
both cold and hot but that the cold side is always turned toward the
sun.
“Ah,” said I, “but Viola Chartres is another matter. She makes one
_wish_ to fall in love with a wreath, or a lyre.”
“A man always ought,” Hobart impersonally continued, “to marry a
woman named Elizabeth Strong Davis or the like. Something that sounds
primal--and finished. A sort of ballast-and-anchor name that one might
say over in exigencies, like a golden text.”
“Ah, well, now, I don’t know,” Pelleas submitted mildly, “‘Etarre’
sounds like Camelot and Astolat and Avalon and so on to any number of
unrealities. But it seems like a golden text to me.”
I wonder that I could pursue my fixed purpose, that was so charming
to hear. Perhaps it is that I have partly learned to keep a purpose
through charming things as well as through difficulties, though this is
twofold as hard to do.
“Women’s names are wonderful things,” Hobart Eddy was going tranquilly
on. “They seem to be alive--to have life on their own account. I can
say over a name--or I think I could say over a name,” he corrected it,
“to myself, and aloud, until it seemed Somebody there with me.”
I looked at him swiftly. Did he mean that there was for him some such
name? Or did he merely mean that he might mean something, other things
being equal?
“That would be a good test,” he added, “for one who couldn’t make up
his mind whether he was in love. And it would be a new and decorative
branch of phonology. Why doesn’t phonology,” he inquired reasonably,
“take up some of these wonderful things instead of harking back to
beginnings?”
“Precisely,” said I tenaciously, “and Viola--”
“‘Who is Viola? What is she
That all our swains commend her?’”
he adapted, smiling.
“I’ve wondered,” said I gravely, “that you haven’t asked that of
yourself before.”
But having now effectually introduced the matter I looked about me
helplessly. What were we to say to Hobart Eddy? To have embroidered a
message with silks and cottons would have been a simple matter; but it
is difficult to speak heart’s-ease and rue. Moreover, it is absurd to
impart one’s theory of life without an invitation. Sometimes even by
invitation it is absurd. If only one might embroider it, now! Or if one
might merely indicate it, as Pelleas had said of the “Bird Book: Part
Two,” for keeping alive the thrill of a thing....
At that our morning was back upon me, with its moment that was like
revelation and prophecy and belief. Yet how to give to Hobart Eddy in
effect: _A momentary knowledge that there is more about a bird and
about what he is and about what we are than one commonly supposes._
How to tell him that some gracious purpose--like winning the love of
Viola--would teach the secret? I longed unspeakably, and so, I know,
did Pelleas, to be to him a “restorer of paths to dwell in”--a restorer
of the path of In-the-Spring which we feared that he had long lost.
Though, indeed, how should one ever lose that path which runs to the
end of the world? I looked at Pelleas and surprised him in the midst
of the merest glance at me. And when he spoke I knew that he understood.
“Hobart,” said he, “the grosbeaks are here. We saw them this morning.”
Hobart Eddy nodded with an air of polite concern. “The Grosbeaks?” he
said over, uncertainly. “Do--do I know them? I am so deuced forgetful.”
“Ah, well, now,” said Pelleas, “I don’t know that they are on your
list. But you are on theirs, if you care to be. I suggest that you make
their acquaintance. They’re birds.”
Hobart looked startled. But Pelleas enjoys as much as any one being
momentarily misunderstood and he smiled back at Hobart as if he were
proud of his idiom.
“I must get you to present me,” Hobart seriously murmured.
“Do,” Pelleas said with enjoyment. “Come over in the park with us any
day now--though May and June are rather better. I never knew them come
up from the South so early. Splendid family and all that,” Pelleas
added; “_Zamelodia Ludoviciana_, you know. Charming connections.”
“O, I say,” said Hobart, “what a jolly idiot I am! I thought you were
in earnest, you know.”
“I never was more in earnest in my life,” Pelleas protested. “You
really must see them. Little brown lady-bird with her gold under
her wings. Male with a glorious rose all over his breast and a
song--Hobart, you should hear his song. It’s a little like a robin’s
song, but all trilled out and tucked in and done in doubles and
triplets and burrs--and a question at the end. You never heard one sing
at night? You never went over in the park or out in the country to hear
them sing at night? Etarre--do show him how it goes.”
I have a fancy for singing the bird notes that we love and Pelleas,
who could as easily hem a thing as to sing it, will in Spring keep me
all hours at this pastime. Once he woke me in the night to reclaim the
song of the orchard oriole--and next morning Nichola sorely discomfited
me by observing that long after midnight she had heard owls in the
chimney. But we persist in the delight and so now I sang for Hobart the
song of the grosbeak:--
[Music]
“it goes,” said I, “but the next one you hear may be quite--quite
different! There is no tune to the song, ever--but exquisite rhythm.
O, and such arch anxiety he is in, Hobart; you cannot think. And when
he is done you’ve got to believe the way he does because of his little
question which is never ‘Do you think?’ but always ‘Don’t you think?’
Fancy your never having heard him.”
“I say, you know,” said Hobart, enthusiastically, “I’d like to hear
him, most awfully.”
“O you would--you would,” I agreed, and could say no more. In Spring my
heart is always aching for the busy and the self-absorbed who do not
seize opera glasses and post away to some place of trees.
Pelleas was fumbling in his portmonnaie.
“Look here,” he said beaming; “this is the list of the birds that we
have seen this Spring. And we have not once stepped outside town,
either.”
Hobart took our list and knitted his brows over it.
“I know robins and bluebirds,” he claimed proudly.
Pelleas nodded. “They are very nearly our dearest,” he said, “like
daisies and buttercups. But we love the others, too--the rose and
orchid and gardenia birds, Hobart. The grosbeaks and orioles and
tanagers. You can’t think what a pleasure it is to see them come back
one after another, as true to their dates as the stars--only now and
then a bit earlier, for spice. The society columns in November are
nothing in comparison--though of course they do very well. Yes, it’s
quite like seeing the stars come back every year. Etarre and I go to
the park after breakfast for the birds and to the roof of the house
after dinner for the stars. March and April are wonderful months for
the constellations.”
“O yes,” said Hobart Eddy, “yes. The Great Dipper and the North star
and the Pleiades. I always know those.”
He was still holding the list, and Pelleas leaned forward and tapped on
it, his face sparkling.
“Hobart,” he said, “give us a day next week. Let us leave home at
six in the morning and get out in the real country and _walk_ in the
fields. We’ll undertake to show you the birds of this entire list! The
hermit thrushes should be here by then--and I don’t know but the wood
pewees and the orioles, the season is so early. And of course no end of
the warbler family. We will all take glasses and Etarre shall give us
the bird songs and I dare say we’ll see some nests. In the middle of
the day we’ll hunt flowers--I could have been certain that I saw violet
columbine a bit back on this road. And by next week we won’t be able
to step for the rue anemone and the hepatica. You wouldn’t mind not
picking them, Hobart?” asked Pelleas, anxiously. “We’re rather extreme
when it comes to that, and we don’t pick them, you know. You wouldn’t
mind that, I dare say?”
Hobart Eddy said: No. That he should not mind that.
“And then after dark we’ll start home,” Pelleas went on, “but long
enough after dark so that we can walk on some open road and see the
stars. Orion will be done for by then,” he recalled frowning. “Orion
and Jupiter are about below the west by dark even now. But Leo is
overhead--and the Dragon and Cassiopeia in the north--and Spica and
Vega and Arcturus in the east. O, we shall have friends enough. It is
now,” said Pelleas, “forty-nine years that Etarre and I have watched
for them every year. We began to study them the Summer that we were
married. Forty-nine years and they have never failed us once. What do
you think of that?”
Hobart folded our list and handed it back.
“Do you know,” he said solemnly, “that I wouldn’t know whether Hepatica
was a bird or a constellation? Jove,” he added, “what a lot of worlds.”
As for me I sat nodding with all my might. Yes, what a lot of worlds.
“Will you give us a day, Hobart?” Pelleas repeated.
“With all my heart,” Hobart Eddy said simply.
“We’ll take Viola with us!” I cried then joyfully. “She knows all these
things better than we.”
“She does?” exclaimed Hobart. “At her age? I believe they have
actually begun to educate people for living,” he observed, “instead
of for earning a living. I dare say lots of people know this kind of
thing--people in cafés and cars and around, whom one never suspects of
knowing,” he added thoughtfully.
Pelleas and I have sometimes said that of the most unpromising people:
Perhaps after all they know the birds and wait for the stars to come
back. Not that this would prove them good citizens. But neither do the
most utilitarian faculties prove them so.
“I could fall in love with any woman who was so accomplished,” said
Pelleas, looking at Hobart and pretending to mean me.
“By Jove, so could I!” said Hobart, looking at me openly.
“Why, then,” said I at this, meeting his eyes fairly, “I think that we
may as well hurry on to Inglese.”
He understood, and smiled at us.
“You dear fairy god-people,” he said.
But I hugged our hope as we rolled away; and so, I know, did Pelleas.
* * * * *
No one was on the veranda at the Chartres villa, and we had seen no
one in the grounds save a man or two working miracles by unwrapping
rose-trees. Madame Sally Chartres, the servant told us, was gone in the
town, and Miss Viola was walking by the lake. We would not have her
summoned and Hobart, Pelleas, and I went down the slope of early green
to the lake walk.
The day was mounting to noon. A Summer day will miss its high-tide
expression because peace falls on it at noon; but the high noon of
Spring is the very keystone of the bow from sun to sun. I remember once
dreaming of music which grew more beautiful and came nearer, until I
knew as I woke that I could bear it no longer and that another moment
would have _freed_ me. And,
“Pelleas and Hobart,” I said now, “if to-day gets any lovelier, I think
that none of us can bear it and that the bubble will burst and we shall
be let _out_.”
For I love to seem a little mad for the sake of the contrast of my own
knowledge that I am sane.
“On a day like this,” said Pelleas, “one hardly knows whether one is
living it or reading it.”
“If we _are_ reading it,” said I, seeming to glance at Hobart Eddy, “I
hope that it will turn out to be a love story.”
And it did--it did. We followed the curve of the walk past some
flowering bushes and came on a bench, the kind of bench that rises
from the ground at the mere footfall of two lovers. And there sat
Viola, quite twice as lovely as when she had spent that week before our
telephone on the landing, and beside her a Boy whose _rôle_ no one who
saw his face could doubt.
She was very lovely as she rose to greet us--indeed, Viola was one of
those who prove the procession of the wild things and the stars to be
an integral part of life. But now for her a new star had risen whose
magnitude was unquestionable.
“Aunt Etarre!” cried Viola. “O, I am so glad to have you and Uncle
Pelleas and Hobart know--_first_.”
And when she had presented her fine young lover and I had taken her in
my arms, “You know,” she murmured, “he is your telephone, dear. Do you
remember Uncle Pelleas calling him _Telephone_?”
Indeed, I do not think that we caught his real name that morning at
all. And as for Pelleas and me, who are the first to love a lover, we
found ourselves instant partisans of that fine young telephone of ours,
so to speak, now that we finally saw him face to face. And I remember
noting with a reminiscent thrill that the flowering shrub beneath which
we were standing was Forsythia; and so did Pelleas, who is delighted
with coincidences and hears in them the _motifs_ of the commonplace.
“I told you this morning, Etarre, that something pleasant was about to
happen,” he said with satisfaction.
“And so it has,” said I happily--and met Hobart Eddy’s eyes, fixed on
mine and quite uncontrollably dancing.
On which I fell guiltily silent, and so did Pelleas. It is one of the
hardships of life that it is impossible to grieve with the loser and
rejoice with the winner of the same cause.
* * * * *
When, some time after we five had lunched alone on the veranda, Viola
and Our Telephone waved our car down the drive, Pelleas and I were not
less disposed to silence. Running slowly through the grounds Hobart
Eddy glanced back at us, and,
“Well?” he asked gravely.
Pelleas and I looked away over the lawns and said nothing.
“You’ve still got me on your hands, fairy god-people,” said Hobart, and
smiled angelically and quite without a shadow in his eyes.
“I know,” muttered Pelleas then; “we seem to be miserable at this kind
of thing.”
And it did seem as if the path of In-the-Spring had eluded us.
Suddenly, with a great wrench, Hobart brought the car to a standstill.
“Look! Look there! By Jove, there it is! Look at it go!” he cried like
a boy. “What is it--O, I say, do you know what it is?”
We, too, had seen it--the joyous rise and curve of the wing of a
scarlet tanager, flashing into flight, skimming a lawn, burning from
the bough of a far sycamore.
“A tanager!” cried Pelleas and I together, and caught a moment of its
song--its open, double-toned, two-note and three-note song, a serene
cradle melody borrowed from May.
“O, Jove!” said Hobart Eddy. “Hear him.”
In the reeds by the lake the song sparrows were singing--we heard these
too. But I think that Pelleas and I heard chiefly another voice which
for the first time Hobart Eddy was hearing.
“What day next week could we go in the country, do you think?” Hobart
asked as he started the car.
“Monday,” suggested Pelleas promptly.