Meanwhile, unaware of this discussion and of this decision,
Charles-Norton, inflated with fancied freedom, captain of his soul and
master of his Fate, was having a beautiful time.
Tableau:
A meadow by a lake, on the western slope of a high Sierra.
Below, and far to the west, lies a great plain, liquid with distance as
though it were a sea of gold. From its nearer edge, the land comes
leaping up in wide smooth waves of serried pines, to the meadow. There
the pines stop abruptly, in the leaning immobility of a man who has
almost trodden upon a flower. From their feet the meadow spreads, fresh
and lush, susurrant with the hidden flow of a brook, and jeweled here and
there with flowers that are like butterflies. It stops, in its turn,
before a chute of smooth granite in the form of a bowl. In the curve of
the bowl lies a lake--a silvery lake in the depths of which dark blue
hues pulse, and over the face of which light zephyrs pass, like painted
shivers.
On the other side of the lake, to the east, the land continues to rise,
in accelerated assault, first in long lustrous leaps of glacier-polished
granite, then in a chaos of dome and spire, and finally breaks up against
the sky in a serrated edge like the top-crest of a great wind-flagellated
wave which, attacking Heaven, should have been suddenly petrified by a
Word.
On the border of the pine-forest, its one door upon the meadow and facing
the lake, is a log-cabin.
It is early morning, and the air is crisp and cold. To the left of the
cabin, in the dusk of the trees, a fuzzy little donkey stands immobile as
if still frozen by the night.
The sun, still behind the high crest to the east, aureoles it with rose;
its light passes in a broad sheet athwart the sky, leaving the meadow in
a lower darkish plane, as if in the still half-light of a profound sea;
it strikes here and there, among the pinnacles, a glacier that
scintillates frigidly. To the west, above the plain, which is as yet but
an opalescent gray shift, the last star hangs humidly, like a tear at the
end of a lash.
The rose halo deepens along the mountain top; the dark-blue dome of the
sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over
the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still
upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier
thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten
gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and
Charles-Norton Sims appears at the door.
Immediately, the little donkey, rousing to life, comes braying to him
across the green. Charles-Norton gives him a handful of salt, and with a
slap sends him off again.
And then he stands in the door-way with arms folded, facing the sun. He
is nude--except for the abbreviated swimming-trunks which were his last
buy in New York--and to the light his skin, polished like ivory, takes on
a warm and subtle glow. From his shoulders there hangs behind him, to his
heels, something that might be a cloak, except that it does not cloak
him. It does not envelop him; rather does it stand behind him in
ornamental background, with a certain sculptural effect. And it is white,
a wondrous gleaming white, against which the whiteness of his skin seems
rosy. Starting from his shoulders, it goes out and up in gentle
undulation to either side, and then descends in two swift slight curves
that meet in a gothic tip at his heels. It is in shape like a Greek urn,
but has with it a flowing quality--and the whiteness. It is like a Greek
urn of pure alabaster that would have turned liquid, and would be pouring
down behind him in lustrous cascade.
Charles-Norton steps forward--and suddenly this background, this mantle,
this singular ornament, parts in two glistening sections which rise
horizontally to either side of him. By Jove, they are wings! The wings of
Charles-Norton. They have been growing, since that _coup-de-tete_ of his.
He raises them horizontally, and with a dry rustling sound they open out
like fans. He waves them gently, up and down; his chest fills, his head
goes back; and from his open mouth, as from a clarion, there goes out a
great clear cry which, striking the mountain, rebounds along from rock
to rock in golden echoes. He rises into the air.
He goes up slowly, in wide, negligent circles, with slow, strong flap of
wings, his body, with pointed feet close together, hanging lithe, a warm
ivory white between the colder and more radiant whiteness of the wings.
He turns and floats above the lake, then, folding his wings, like a white
arrow shoots down into the water. A fountain of foaming drops springs
toward the sky. Charles-Norton Sims is having his morning bath.
He swims with smooth breast-stroke, his feet and hands below the water,
but his wings raised above. Their roots, at his shoulders, cleave the
glazed surface like a prow, leaving, behind, a slender wake; they follow
above, swinging a bit from side to side, like glorious becalmed sails.
And thus, like a large Nautilus, he drifts to the shore. He emerges,
glistening, upon a little beach which curves there like a little moon
dropped by a careless Creator; he takes a hop, a skip, and a jump, and
lands headlong upon the yellow sand.
He stretches himself taut, his hands, straight above him, clutching the
sand, his toes digging into it, and spreads his wings in fans at his
sides. The earth is there beneath him, in his embrace; he feels her
strength flowing into his veins. The sun is up there, above him; he feels
pouring upon him, penetratingly, its hot life. Content croons in his
heart.
But after a while, an uneasiness stirs him. He moves vaguely several
times, he finally rises to his knees. Oh yes, of course, it is his
stomach--the old tyranny. He walks to the cabin, kicks into incandescence
the heap of coals in front of the door, and throws a handful of dry brush
upon them. He seizes a long pole which is leaning against the facade of
the cabin, goes back to the lake, climbs a large bowlder, and sitting
himself comfortably in a hollow of it, extends the pole, and drops into
the crystalline waters at his feet a bit of red flannel. Immediately
there is a small convulsion and he whisks out of the lake a vibrant
little object that looks like a fragment of rainbow. He whisks out
another, another--twelve in succession. He goes back to the fire with his
rainbows.
There, he--fries them; and--eats them.
Upon which he squats contentedly upon the grass, and fills and lights his
pipe. He sits there very quietly, his feet drawn up, his wings behind him
like a resplendent mantle; he smokes gravely his little black pipe. His
eyes are half-closed, watching the hazy blue puffs of the bowl rise
toward the turquoise-blue dome of the sky. Far above him, a hawk is
circling; to the sight, after a while, a vague melancholy enters his
heart, a subtle and inexplicable yearning. He rises slowly to it, his
pipe dropping from his loosened lips. He tucks the pipe into his trunks
(that is why he wears the trunks); his wings spread out to both sides. He
gives a little spring--and is up in the air.
He hovers above the meadow a while, a bit aimlessly, as though waiting
for an inspiration, rising, falling, rising with slow strong flap of
wing--then suddenly he is off, like a streak, in a whirring diagonal for
the high crests. He dwindles, higher and higher, farther and farther,
smaller and smaller, till finally he is among the tip-top pinnacles, a
mere white palpitation, a snow-flake in the whirl of a capricious wind,
a little glistening moth flitting from glacier to glacier as from lily to
lily.
Down in the deserted meadow, the little donkey opens his mouth
creakingly, and throws forth a lonesome bray.