No battle, it is said, is ever fought, and I dare say no game--worth
counting--is ever played, exactly as previously planned. One of our
company had planned, very secretly, as he thought, a battle; another,
almost openly, was already waging hers; while a third was playing a game--
though probably, I admit, fighting, inwardly, her poor weak battle also;
and none of the three offered an exception to this rule. The first clear
proof of it--which it still gives me a low sort of pleasure to recall--was
my prompt discovery, as we gathered around the tea-board, to eat the
picnic's remains, that our Flora was out of humor with the Baron. It was
plain that the whole day's flood of small experiences had been to her
pretty vanity a Tantalus's cup. She was quick to tell, with an irritation,
which she genuinely tried to conceal, and with scarcely an ounce of words
to a ton of dead-sweet insinuation, what a social failure he had chosen to
be. Evidently he had spent every golden hour of sweet spiritual
opportunity--I speak from her point of view, or, at least, my notion of
it--not in catching and communicating the charm of any scene or incident,
nor in thrilling comparisons of sentiment with anyone, nor in any
impartation of inspiring knowledge, nor in any mirthful exchange of
compliments or gay glances over the salad and sandwiches; but in
constantly poking and plodding through thicket and mire and solitarily
peering and prying on the under sides of leaves and stems and up and down
and all around the bark of every rough-trunked tree.
She made the picture amusing, none the less, and to no one more so than to
the Baron's wife, whose presence among us at the board was as fragrant, so
to speak, as that of a violet among its leaves and sisters. "Ah! Gustaf,"
she said, with a cadenced gravity more taking than mirth, "sat iss a
treat-ment nobody got a right to but me. But tell me, tell se company,
vhat new sings have you found? I know you have not hunt' all se day and
nussing new found."
But the Baron had found nothing new. He told us so with his mouth dripping
and his nose in the trough--his plate I should say. You could hear him
chew across the room. Suddenly, however, he ceased eating and began to
pour forth an account of his day's observation; in response to which M.
Fontenette, to my amused mystification, led us all in the interest with
which we listened. The Baron forgot his food, and when reminded of it,
pushed it away with a grunt and talked on and on, while we almost forgot
our own.
As we rose to return to the veranda, the Creole still offered him an
undivided attention, which the Baron rewarded with his continued
discourse. As I gave Fontenette a light for his cigarette I held his eye
for a moment with a brightness of face into which I put as significant
approval as I dared; for I fancied the same unuttered word was brooding in
both our hearts: "A new vay to remoof old stains."
Then he turned and gave all his attention once more to the entomologist,
as they walked out upon the gallery together behind their wives. And the
German woman courted the pretty New Englander as sweetly as the Creole
courted her husband, and with twice the energy. She was a bubbling spring
of information in the Baron's science; she was a well of sweet philosophy
on life and conduct, and at every turn of their conversation, always
letting Mrs. Fontenette turn it, she showed her own to be the better mind
and the better training.
When Mrs. Fontenette, before any one else, rose to go--maybe my dislike of
her only made it seem so--but I believed she did it out of pure bafflement
and chagrin.
Not so believed her husband. He responded gratefully; yet lingered, still
listening to the entomologist, until she fondlingly chid him for
forgetting that while he had been all day in his swivel-chair, she had
passed the hours in unusual fatigues!
She declined his arm in our garden walk, and positively forbade me to cut
a rose for her--but with a grace almost maidenly. As I let them out, the
heat-lightning gleamed again low in the west. A playfulness came into M.
Fontenette's face and he murmured to me, "See se lightening."
"Yes," I replied, pressing his hand, "but I sink sare vill be no storm if
sare iss no sunder."
Mrs. Fontenette gave a faint gasp of impatience and left us at a run,
tripping fairily across the rough street at the only point visible to
those on the veranda. Fontenette scowled unaware as he started to follow,
and the next moment a short "aha!" escaped him. For, at her gate, to my
unholy joy, she stumbled just enough to make the whole performance
unspeakably ridiculous, and flirted into her cottage----
"In tears!" I offered to bet myself as I turned to rejoin my companions on
the veranda, and wished with all my soul the goggled Baron could have seen
it.