BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS
For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with
ferns and rank grass, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings
on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to
Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between
them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to
give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber
lassitude and spoke of Molly's miraculous competence in dealing with
the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn't made all that
up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every
summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic
a child as Molly hadn't assimilated the Vermont formula for fighting
fire. "They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,"
he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: "All the
same, the incident shows what I've always maintained about Molly:
that she is, like 'most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly's spirit
oughtn't to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental
blond shell, condemned after a fashionable girl's education to
pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn't fit
for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful
man's body, and for occupation the running of a big factory." He
seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond
a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment.
She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he
was one of the "forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins," and had
cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with
the supposititious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his
intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the
conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible
facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls.
They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing
on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at
it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod
from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the
road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind they make
birch beer of. You nip off the bark with your teeth. You'll like it."
Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now
fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very
unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous,
dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild,
pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste
she knew. "Good, isn't it?" said her companion simply.
She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual
who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans. What an
odd circumstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide
of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville's cousin
and worked a Vermont farm--and had certainly the dirtiest face she had
ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stokers in the
power-house of the University. He spoke again, as though in answer
to what might naturally be in her mind: "At the top of the road it
crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible. I've a bit
of soap in my pocket that'll help--though it takes quite a lot of
scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime." He looked pointedly down at
her as he talked.
Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of
carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark
simplicity of childhood. "Why--is _my_ face dirty?" she cried out.
The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and
the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him. He burst
into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward
as a pretext, "The picture of my _own_ grime that I get from your
accent is tremendous!" But it was evidently not at his own joke that
he was laughing.
For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance.
Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd
disadvantage. But at once the mental picture of herself, making
inaudible carping strictures on her companion's sootiness and, all
unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as
his own--the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly! Sore
heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh,
and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally,
like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this
unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness
around her heart.
Her companion laughed with her. The still, sultry summer woods echoed
with the sound. "How human, how lusciously _human_!" he exclaimed.
"Neither of us thought that _he_ might be the blackened one!"
"Oh, mine _can't_ be as bad as yours!" gasped out Sylvia, but when
she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh
peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.
"Don't, for Heaven's sake, waste that handkerchief," cautioned her
companion. "It's the only towel between us. Mine's impossible!" He
showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they
reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood
beside the brook.
He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his
shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and
knelt down. "I choose this for _my_ wash-basin," he said, indicating a
limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.
Sylvia answered in the same note of play, "This'll be mine." It lay
at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into
transparent shallows. She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid
down and read its title, "A History of the Institution of Property,"
and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a
familiar-looking cover. She had dusted books with that sort of cover
all her life.
Molly's cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow
kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and
presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia. "Now, go to it," he
exhorted her; "I bet I get a better wash than you."
Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous
ablutions. She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated
many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and
her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional
feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having
unconsciously been subjected to an indignity. She was determined that
no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin.
She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was
indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which
she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap
till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of
moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her
cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp
waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the
icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the
day was. She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the
soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though
there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running
water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still
lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this
severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.
She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his
heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned,
high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and
lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived
no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up
at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected
back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost
actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph,
kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a
cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves.
Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar
with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last
blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once
came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at
her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there
to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed. She stood
up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up
her hat.
"Oh, why don't you leave it off?" said the man across the brook.
"You'd be so much more comfortable!" She knew that he meant her hair
was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. "All right,
I'll carry it," she assented indifferently.
He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out,
from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had
really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd
ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing
individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips.
Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April
day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess
to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst
out on her, "Who _are_ you, anyhow?"
She remembered with a start. "Why, that's so, Molly didn't mention my
name--isn't that like Molly! Why, I'm Sylvia Marshall,"
"You may be _named_ Sylvia Marshall!" he said, leaving an inference in
the air like incense.
"Well, yes, to be sure," rejoined Sylvia; "I heard somebody only the
other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques,
since people's names are the most--"
He applied a label with precision. "Oh, you know Morrison?"
She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly
filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing.
Her companion appeared not to notice this. He was attempting the
difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his sleeve,
and said in the intervals of effort: "Well, you know _my_ name. Molly
didn't forget that."
"But _I_ did," Sylvia confessed. "I was so excited by the fire I never
noticed at all. I've been racking my brains to remember, all the way
up here."
For some reason the man seemed quite struck with this statement and
eyed her with keenness as he said: "Oh--really? Well, my name is
Austin Page." At the candid blankness of her face he showed a boyish
flash of white teeth in a tanned face. "Do you mean to say you've
never heard of me?"
"_Should_ I?" said Sylvia, with a graceful pretense of alarm. "Do you
write, or something? Lay it to my ignorance. It's immense."
He shook his head. He smiled down on her. She noticed now that his
eyes were very kind as well as clear and keen. "No, I don't write, or
anything. There's no reason why you should ever have heard of me. I
only thought--I thought possibly Molly or Uncle George might have
happened to mention me."
"I'm only on from the West for a visit," explained Sylvia. "I never
was in Lydford before. I don't know the people there."
"Well then, to avoid Morrison's strictures on introductions I'll add
to my name the information that I am thirty-two years old; a graduate
of Columbia University; that I have some property in Colorado which
gives me a great deal of trouble; and a farm with a wood lot in
Vermont which is the joy of my heart. I cannot endure politics; I
play the flute, like my eggs boiled three minutes, and admire George
Meredith."
His manoeuvers with his sleeve were so preposterous that Sylvia now
cried to him: "Oh, don't twist around that way. You'll give yourself
a crick in the neck. Here's my handkerchief. We were going to share
that, anyhow."
"And you," he went on gravely, wiping his face with the bit of
cambric, "are Sylvia Marshall, presumably Miss; you can laugh at a
joke on yourself; are not afraid to wash your face with kitchen soap;
and apparently are the only girl in the twentieth century who has not
a mirror and a powder-puff concealed about her person."
All approbation was sweet to Sylvia. She basked in this. "Oh, I'm
a Hottentot, a savage from the West, as I told you," she said
complacently.
"You've been in Lydford long enough to hear Morrison hold forth on the
idiocies of social convention, the while he neatly manipulates them to
his own advantage."
Sylvia had dreaded having to speak of Morrison, but she was now
greatly encouraged by the entire success of her casual tone, as she
explained, "Oh, he's an old friend of my aunt's, and he's been at the
house a good deal." She ventured to try herself further, and inquired
with a bright look of interest, "What do you think of his engagement
to your cousin Molly?"
He was petrified with astonishment. "_Molly_ engaged to _Morrison_!"
he cried. "We can't be talking about the same people. I mean _Felix_
Morrison the critic."
She felt vindicated by his stupefaction and liked him for it. "Why,
yes; hadn't you heard?" she asked, with an assumption of herself
seeing nothing surprising in the news.
"No, I hadn't, and I can't believe it now!" he said, blinking his
eyes. "I never heard such an insane combination of names in my life."
He went on, "What under the _sun_ does Molly want of Morrison!"
Sylvia was vexed with him for this unexpected view. He was not so
discerning as she had thought. She turned away and picked up her hat.
"We ought to be going on," she said, and as they walked she answered,
"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of Mr. Morrison."
He protested with energy. "Oh yes, I have. Quite the contrary, I think
him one of the most remarkable men I know, and one of the finest. I
admire him immensely. I'd trust his taste sooner than I would my own."
To this handsome tribute Sylvia returned, smiling, "The inference is
that you don't think much of Molly."
"I _know_ Molly!" he said simply. "I've known her and loved her ever
since she was a hot-tempered, imperious little girl--which is all she
is now. Engaged ... and engaged to Morrison! It's a plain case of
schoolgirl infatuation!" He was lost in wonder, uneasy wonder it
seemed, for after a period of musing he brought out: "They'll cut each
other's throats inside six months. Or Molly'll cut her own. What under
the sun was her grandfather thinking of?"
Sylvia said gravely, "Girls' grandfathers have such an influence in
their marriages."
He smiled a rueful recognition of the justice of her thrust and then
fell into silence.
The road did not climb up now, but led along the side of the mountain.
Through the dense woods the sky-line, first guessed at, then clearly
seen between the thick-standing tree-trunks, sank lower and lower.
"We are approaching," said Page, motioning in front of them, "the
jumping-off place." They passed from the tempered green light of the
wood and emerged upon a great windy plateau, carpeted thickly with
deep green moss, flanked right and left with two mountain peaks and
roofed over with an expanse of brilliant summer sky. Before them the
plateau stretched a mile or more, wind-swept, sun-drenched, with an
indescribable bold look of great altitude; but close to them at one
side ran a parapet-like line of tumbled rock and beyond this a sheer
descent. The eye leaped down abrupt slopes of forest to the valley
they had left, now a thousand feet below them, jewel-like with mystic
blues and greens, tremulous with heat. On the noble height where they
stood, the wind blew cool from the sea of mist-blue peaks beyond the
valley.
Sylvia was greatly moved. "Oh, what a wonderful spot!" she said under
her breath. "I never dreamed that anything could be--" She burst out
suddenly, scarcely knowing what she said, "Oh, I wish my _mother_
could be here!" She had not thought of her mother for days, and now
hardly knew that she had spoken her name. Standing there, poised above
the dark richness of the valley, her heart responding to those vast
airy spaces by an upward-soaring sweep, the quick tears of ecstasy
were in her eyes. She had entirely forgotten herself and her
companion. He did not speak. His eyes were on her face.
She moved to the parapet of rock and leaned against it. The action
brought her to herself and she flashed around on Page a grateful
smile. "It's a very beautiful spot you've brought me to," she said.
He came up beside her now. "It's a favorite of mine," he said quietly.
"If I come straight through the woods it's not more than a mile from
my farm. I come up here for the sunsets sometimes--or for dawn."
Sylvia found the idea almost too much for her. "_Oh!_" she
cried--"dawn here!"
"Yes," said the man, smiling faintly. "It's all of that!"
In her life of plains and prairies Sylvia had never been upon a great
height, had never looked down and away upon such reaches of far
valley, such glorious masses of sunlit mountain; and beyond them,
giving wings to the imagination, were mountains, more mountains,
distant, incalculably distant, with unseen hollow valleys between; and
finally, mountains again, half cloud, melting indistinguishably into
the vaporous haze of the sky. Above her, sheer and vast, lay Hemlock
Mountain, all its huge bulk a sleeping, passionless calm. Beyond was
the solemnity of Windward Mountain's concave shell, full to the
brim with brooding blue shadows, a well of mystery in that day of
wind-blown sunshine. Beneath her, above her, before her, seemingly the
element in which she was poised, was space, illimitable space. She had
never been conscious of such vastness, she was abashed by it, she was
exalted by it, she knew a moment of acute shame for the pettiness of
her personal grievances. For a time her spirit was disembarrassed
of the sorry burden of egotism, and she drank deep from the cup of
healing which Nature holds up in such instants of beatitude. Her eyes
were shining pools of peace....
They went on in a profound silence across the plateau, the deep, soft
moss bearing them up with a tough elasticity, the sun hot and lusty
on their heads, the sweet, strong summer wind swift and loud in their
ears, the only sound in all that enchanted upland spot. Often Sylvia
lifted her face to the sky, so close above her, to the clouds moving
with a soundless rhythm across the sky; once or twice she turned her
head suddenly from one side to the other, to take in all the beauty at
one glance, and smiled on it all, a vague, sunny, tender smile. But
she did not speak.
As she trod on the thick moss upspringing under her long, light step,
her advance seemed as buoyant as though she stepped from cloud to
cloud....
When they reached the other side, and were about to begin the descent
into Lydford valley, she lingered still. She looked down into the
valley before her, across to the mountains, and, smiling, with
half-shut eyes of supreme satisfaction, she said under her breath:
"It's Beethoven--just the blessedness of Beethoven! The valley is
a legato passage, quiet and flowing; those far, up-pricking hills,
staccato; and the mountains here, the solemn chords."
Her companion did not answer. She looked up at him, inquiringly,
thinking that he had not heard her, and found him evidently too deeply
moved to speak. She was startled, almost frightened, almost shocked by
the profundity of his gaze upon her. Her heart stood still and gave
a great leap. Chiefly she was aware of an immense astonishment and
incredulity. An hour before he had never seen her, had never heard of
her--and during that hour she had been barely aware of him, absorbed
in herself, indifferent. How could he in that hour have ...
He looked away and said steadily, "--and the river is the melody that
binds it all together."
Sylvia drew a great breath of relief. She had been the victim of some
extraordinary hallucination: "--with the little brooks for variations
on the theme," she added hastily.
He held aside an encroaching briar, stretching its thorny arm across
the path. "Here's the beginning of the trail down to Lydford," he
said. "We will be there in twenty minutes. It's almost a straight drop
down."