One Sunday, Eve, from her window--she was rather a lazy girl that
Sunday--witnessed the following departures from the camp. Sam Langham
and Mary in a guide boat, with fishing-tackle and an immense hamper
which looked like lunch. Herring and Phyllis could be seen hoisting the
sails on the knockabout. Herring had never sailed a boat and was
prepared to master that simple art at once. Lee and Renier were girt for
the mountain. Renier appeared to have a Flobert rifle in semihiding
under his coat, and it was to be feared that if he saw a partridge, he
would open fire on it, close season though it was. He and Lee would
justify this illegal act by cooking the bird for their lunch. Gay
commandeered the _Streak_ and departed at high speed toward Carrytown.
She had in one hand a sheet of blue-striped paper, folded. It resembled
a cablegram. And Eve thought that it must be of a very private nature,
or else Gay would have telephoned it to the Western Union office,
instead of carrying it by hand. The next to depart from the camp was
Arthur. He moved dreamily in a northwesterly direction, accompanied by
Uncas, the chipmunk, and Wow, the dog. Other guests made departures.
All of which Eve, half dressed and looking lazily from her window,
lazily noted, remarking that for her Sunday was a day of rest and that
she thanked Heaven for it. And she did not feel any differently until
Maud and the Carolinians walked out on the float and began to pack a
guide boat for the day.
Then her lazy, complacent feelings departed, and were succeeded by a
sudden, wide-awake surge of self-pity. She felt like Cinderella. Nobody
had asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and nobody had even thought
of doing so. When she was dead they would gather round her coffin and
remember that they hadn't asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and
they would be very sorry and ashamed and they would say what a nice girl
she had been, and how she had always tried to give everybody a good
time.
Between laughter and tears and mortification, Eve finished dressing, set
her lovely jaw, and went out into the delicious, cool calm of the
mountain morning. She could still hear the voices of many of the
departing ones; and the rattling and creaking of the knockabout's
blocks and rigging. She heard Herring say to Phyllis: "I think it would
be better if I could make the boom go out on this side, but I can't."
Phyllis's answer was a cool, contented laugh. It was as if she said:
"Hang the boom! _We're_ here!"
Have you ever had the feeling that you would like to board a swift boat,
head for the open sea, and never come back? Or that you could plunge
into some boundless, trackless forest and keep straight on until you
were lost, and died (beautifully and painlessly), and were covered with
beautiful leaves by little birds?
Eve enjoyed (and suffered from) a hint of this latter feeling. She ate a
light breakfast (it would be better not to begin starving till she was
actually lost in the boundless, trackless forest), selected a light,
spiked climbing-stick with a crooked handle, headed for one of the
northeasterly mountains, and was soon deep in the shade of the pines and
hemlocks.
After a few miles, the trail that she followed split and scattered in
many directions, like the end of an unravelled rope. She followed an old
lumber road for a long way, turned into another that crossed it at an
angle of forty-five degrees, took no account of the sun's position in
the heavens or of the marked sides of trees. If she came to a high
place from which there was a view, she did not look at it. She just kept
going--this way and that, up and down. In short, she made a conscious,
anxious effort to lose herself. The easterly mountain toward which she
had first headed kept bobbing up straight ahead. And always there was
the knowledge in the back of her head of the exact location of The Camp,
and of all the other landmarks, familiar to her since early youth.
"Drag it!" she said, at length, her eyes on the mountain. "I'll climb
the old thing, put melancholy aside, and call this a good, if
unaccompanied, Sunday."
The morning coolness had departed. It was one of those hot, breathless,
mountain forenoons that kill the appetite and are usually followed,
toward the late afternoon, by violent electrical disturbances.
Eve was not as fit as she had supposed, or as she thought. As a matter
of fact, she was setting too fast a pace, considering the weather and
the angle of the mountain slope; and she was as wet as if she had played
several hard sets of tennis with a partner who stood in one corner of
the court and let her do all the running.
As she climbed, reproaching her wind for being so short, she remembered
that the hollow tip of this particular northeastern mountain was filled
with a deep pool of water. Nobody had ever called it a lake. The map
called it a pond; but it wasn't even that--it was a pool. Springs fed it
just fast enough to make up for the evaporation. It had no outlet. It
was shaped like a fat letter O. At one end was a little beach of white
sand. Indeed, the bottom of the pool was all firm, smooth, and clean,
and the whole charming little body of water was surrounded by thick
groves of dwarf mountain trees and bushes. Not content with being a
perfect replica, in miniature, of a full-grown Adirondack lake, this
pool had in its midst an island, a dozen feet in diameter, densely
shrubbed and shaded by one diminutive Japanesque pine.
When Eve came to the pool, hot, tired, and rather bothered at the
thought of the long walk back to camp, she had but the vaguest idea of
just why the Lord had placed such a pool on top of a mountain, impelled
her to climb that mountain, and made the day so piping hot.
Eve stood a little on the sand beach. She felt hotter and hotter, and
the pool looked cooler and cooler. Presently, a heavenly smile of
solution brightened her flushed, warm face, and she withdrew into a
shady clump of bushes. From this there came first the exclamation "Drag
it!" then a sound of some sort of a string being sharply broken in two,
and then there came from the clump of bushes Eve herself, looking for
all the world like a slice of the silver moon.
And as you may have seen the silver moon slip slowly into the sea, so
Eve vanished slowly into the pool--all but her shapely little round
head, with its crisp bright-brown hair and its lovely face, happy now,
exhilarated, and eager as are the faces of adventurers.
And Eve thought if one didn't have to eat, if one didn't end by being
cold, if one could make time stand still--she would choose to be always
and forever a slice of the silver moon, lolling in a mountain pool.
She had the kind of hair that wets to perfection. But it was not the
sort of permanent wave which lasts six months or so, costs twenty-five
dollars, and is inculcated by hours of alternate baking and shampooing.
Eve had always had a permanent wave. She feared neither fog nor rain,
nor water in any form of application. And so it was that, now and then,
as she lolled about the pool, she disappeared from one fortunate square
yard of surface and reappeared in another.
Half an hour had passed, when suddenly the mountain stillness was broken
by men's voices.
Eve was at the opposite side of the pool from where she had left her
clothes. Between her and the approaching voices was the little island.
She landed hastily upon this and hid herself among the bushes.
Three gross, fat men and one long, lean man, with a face like leather
and an Adam's apple that bobbed like a fisherman's float, came down to
the beach, sweating terribly, and cast thereon knapsacks, picnic
baskets, hatchets, fishing-tackle, and all the complicated paraphernalia
of amateurs about to cook their own lunch in the woods.
All but one had loud, coarse, carrying voices, and they all appeared to
belong to the ruling class. They appeared, in short, to have neither
education nor refinement nor charm nor anything to commend them as
leaders or examples. Eve wondered how it was possible for them to find
pleasure even in each other's company. They quarrelled, wrangled, found
fault, abused each other, or suddenly forgot their differences,
gathering about the fattest of the fat men and listening, almost
reverently, while he told a story. When he had finished, they would
throw their heads far back and scream with laughter. He must have told
wonderfully funny stories; but his voice was no more than a husky
whisper, so that Eve could not make head or tail of them.
After a while the whispering fat man produced from one of the baskets
four little glasses and a fat dark bottle. And shortly after there was
less wrangling and more laughter.
The thin man with the leathery face and the bobbing Adam's apple put a
fishing-rod together, tied a couple of gaudy flies to his leader, and
began to cast most unskilfully from the shores of the pool, moving along
slowly from time to time.
The fat men, occasionally calling to ask if he had caught anything,
busied themselves with preparations for lunch. One of them made
tremendous chopping sounds in the wood and furnished from time to time
incommensurate supplies of fire-wood. Smoke arose and a kettle was
slung.
Meanwhile Eve, cowering among the bushes, for all the world like her
famous ancestress when the angel came to the garden, did not quite know
what to do. She had only to lift her voice and explain, and the men
would go away for a time. She felt sure of that. She had been brought
up to believe in the exquisite chivalry of the plain American man.
But there was something about the four which repelled her, which stuck
in her throat. She did not wish to be under any sort of obligation to
any of them. And so she kept mousy-quiet, and turned over in her mind an
immense number of worthless stratagems and expedients.
Have you ever tried to lie on the lawn under a tree and read for an hour
or two--incased in all your buffer of clothes? Try it some time--without
the buffers. Try it in the buff. And then imagine how comfortable Eve
was on the island. Imagine how soft it felt to her elbows, for instance.
And imagine to yourself, too, that it was not an uninhabited island--but
one upon which an immense gray spider had made a home and raised a
family.
From time to time the inept caster of flies returned to the camp-fire,
always in answer to a boisterous summons from his friends. And after
each visit, his leathery face became redder and his casting more absurd.
Finally his flies caught in a tree, his rod broke, and he abandoned the
gentle art of angling for that time and place. Meanwhile steam ran from
the kettle and mingled with the smoke of the fire. The sound of voices
was incessant. Ten minutes later the gentlemen were served.
Midway of the meal, some of which was burnt black and some of which was
quite raw, there was produced a thermos bottle as big as the leg of a
rubber boot. And a moment later, icy-cold champagne was frothing and
bubbling in tumblers.
In that high air, upon a thick foundation of raw whiskey, the brilliant
wine of France had soon built a triumphant edifice, so that Eve, cold
now, miserable, and frightened, felt that the time for an appeal to
chivalry was long since past.
Far from their wives and constituents, the four politicians were
obviously not going to stop short of complete drunkenness. Indeed, it
was an opportunity hardly to be missed. For where else in the woods
could nature be more exquisite, dignified, and inspiring?
It got so that Eve could no longer bear to watch them or to listen to
them. Pink with shame, fury, hatred, and fear, she stuffed her fingers
in her ears and hid her face.
Thus lying, there came to her after quite a long interval, dimly, a
shout and a howl of laughter with an entirely new intonation. She looked
up then and saw the thin man, waist-deep in the bushes, just where she
had left her clothes, making faces of beastly mystery at his companions,
beckoning to them and urging them to come look. They went to him,
presently, staggering and evil.
And then they scattered and began to hunt for her.