OUTLAND
BY
MARY AUSTIN
[Illustration]
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
NEW YORK 1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
_Printed in the U. S. A._
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. CONCERNING THE TRAIL AT BROKEN TREE 9
II. I MEET THE OUTLIERS IN THE WOOD AND HERMAN COMES TO FIND ME 24
III. I HEAR OF THE TREASURE AND MEET A FRIEND OF RAVENUTZI 44
IV. THE MEET AT LEAPING WATER 67
V. THE LOVE-LEFT WARD 94
VI. IN WHICH I AM UNHAPPY AND MEET A TALL WOMAN IN THE WOOD 114
VII. HERMAN DEVELOPS HIS IDEA 137
VIII. IN WHICH HERMAN’S IDEA RECEIVES A CHECK 157
IX. HOW THE KING’S DESIRE WAS DUG UP, AND BY WHOM 177
X. THE LEDGE 197
XI. HOW THE OUTLIERS CAME UP WITH THE FAR-FOLK AT A PLACE CALLED
THE SMITHY, AND HERMAN CAME BACK TO RIVER WARD 217
XII. HOW AN OUTLIER SAW A TALL WOMAN FOLLOWING A TRAIL AND MANCHA
MET THE SMITH AGAIN 236
XIII. HOW THEY FOUND THE RUBIES, AND THE SMITH’S ACCOUNT OF
HIMSELF 258
XIV. THE KING’S DESIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF IT 276
XV. HOW HERMAN AND I CAME BACK TO BROKEN TREE 295
OUTLAND
I
CONCERNING THE TRAIL AT BROKEN TREE
The trail begins at the Broken Tree with the hawk’s nest. As often as we
have talked of it since, Herman and I, and that is as often as the
ceanothus blooms untimely for a sign of rains delayed, or there is a low
moon and a following star, or a wind out of the south with the smell of
wild honey in it, we have agreed together that the trail begins at
Broken Tree.
There were some other landmarks I was quite as sure of at the time, but
the creek makes so many turns here I could never find them again, and
the second time of Herman’s going in, he had altogether other things to
think about. So as often as we have occasion to talk of it, we end by
saying that it begins at Broken Tree.
I remember very well how Fairshore looked that day as we stood gazing
back at it from the edge of the plowed lands; the pines sketched blackly
against the smudgy, fawn-colored slope, the sea as blue as lazuli, and
the leaning surf. I had another reason for remembering it, since it was
the last time of Herman’s asking and of my refusing to marry him. I
don’t know why Herman’s being a professor of sociology should have led
him to suppose that our liking the same sort of books and much the same
people, and having between us an income fairly adequate to the
exigencies of comfortable living, should have been reason enough for my
marrying him, but he had spent a great deal of time that summer trying
to convince me that it was. I recall being rather short with him that
afternoon. For, in the first place, if I had meant to marry Herman I
should not have put all I had into a house at Fairshore, and in the next
place, though I had not got to the point of admitting it, the house was
proving rather a failure.
For a long time I had believed that it needed but a little space of
collected quietness for the vague presages of my spirit to burst freely
into power. Somewhere within myself I was aware of a vast, undiscovered
country full of wandering lights and crying voices, from whence the
springs of great undertakings should issue. But now that the house was
accomplished and my position in the English Department definitely
resigned, all that I had got by it was an insuperable dryness of heart
and a great deal of time which hung rather heavily upon my hands. I had
done no work at Fairshore that I was willing to confess to in print. I
know I should not, until I could escape from this inward desertness into
that quarter from whence still, at times, I could feel a wind blowing
that trumpeted up all the lagging forces of my soul. And just when I was
wanting most to know passion and great freedom of feeling, Herman’s
offer of a reasonable marriage, of which the particular recommendation
was that no feeling went to it, took on the complexion of a personal
affront. The more so since there was no very definite way in which I
could make clear to Herman just what offended me.
He was going on that afternoon to explain to me how, in a marriage free
from the disturbances of passion incidental to temperamental matings, I
should be at ease to give myself wholly to the business of book-making.
With all his understanding, Herman was fully possessed of that Academic
notion that literature can be produced by taking pains instead of having
them. He was very patient with me through it all, crediting my
indifference to overwork and to nerves, as a man does with a woman when
he is at a loss to know what is the matter with her. The truth was, if I
was tired of anything, it was of being the very things Herman most
admired in me. I was growing every moment more exasperated. By the time
he had got to the point of wanting to know what more there was that he
could say, I had reached the pitch of replying that there could be
nothing more unless he wished to say the usual thing.
“And that?” He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his
lifted brows.
“Would be merely that you love me and can’t live without me.”
“Oh, if you want me to say what the grocer’s man says to the cook in the
kitchen!”—he flushed—“but you know very well, Mona, that I am not going
to insult your intelligence and mine with the clap-trap of passion.
Certainly I’ve no such cheap sort of feeling for you, and I’m not such
an infernal cad as to suppose you have——Mona?”
It might have been the wind that blew from the country beyond Broken
Tree at that moment, or something in my face, that turned that last
repetition of my name upon the point of interrogation. Though it was my
crying objection to Herman that he could not produce in me those
raptures and alarms and whirlings to and fro, out of which I knew all
creative art to proceed, yet to have him so renounce for us both the
possibility of such a relation filled me with sudden wounding and
affront. And at that, or at some new shadow of wonder in his eyes with
the turning of his voice upon the word, I found myself so little able to
give back look for look, that it was a great relief to me to discover
the hawk’s nest in the Broken Tree. The creek makes a turn here, and the
stepping-stones were so far apart it was necessary for Herman to go
ahead and reach me back his hand. As I swung past him I heard him say my
name again with so new a touch of shamed credulity that I was glad to
put my hand up over my eyes, making believe I had not heard him, and
look very attentively at Broken Tree.
It stands on the upper bank of the creek, snapped off midway by the
wind. Below the break two great sweeping boughs spread either way like
the arms of a guide-post. The nest is in the splintered hollow of the
trunk.
“It is a nest,” I said, as though a doubt I had were the reason for my
not hearing him. Herman was so used to this sort of interruption when we
walked in the woods together that I hoped it had a natural sound. He
answered quite simply that if it was, it should be empty by this time of
the year. Suddenly the hawk, unfurling from the upper branches, pitched
a slow downward spiral above our heads, then beat back into upper air,
uttering sharp cries, and, settling slowly to the left, preened himself
and neglected us. As if being but a watchman, having cried our coming,
he had no other interest in the affair.
Just beyond the pine there was a thicket of wild lilac grown across the
way, and as I put up my hand to defend my face, I saw that a light spray
of it had burst untimely into bloom. Though this was the second week in
October the grass was brittle as new silk and the earth was hard with
drought. I remember holding the branch toward Herman for him to see.
“Look how it calls the rain,” I said, and perhaps something more, though
I do not remember what, about the effort of nature to rise to its own
expectancy. I said that first because it was exactly the sort of thing I
knew Herman, who thought he had entirely rationalized his attitude
toward out of doors, liked least to hear me say. But, perhaps, because
the shadow of the adventure which was to prove him wrong about that and
so many things was already over us, he had no answer but to reach out
across my shoulder and put up his hand over mine to bear back the heavy
branch. This was so little the sort of thing I had learned to expect of
Herman, and we were both so embarrassed by it, that we could never be
quite sure which of us saw it first. When we had pushed aside the
ceanothus there lay the beginning of the trail.
It began directly at the foot of the pine as though there was some
reason for it, and ran shallow and well-defined through the lilac
thicket and up the hill.
Herman said it was a deer trail. To the casual eye it did resemble one
of those woodland tracks made by wild creatures, beginning at no
particular point, and after continuing clear and direct for a little
distance, breaking off for no reason. But there was about this trail a
subtlety, a nuance, slight distinctions in the way the scrub was bent
back from it, in the way it took the slope of the hill, that made it
plainly a man trail. More than that, I felt the slight pricking of the
blood, the quick response of the intelligence to the stimulus of
variations so slight the observation of them lies almost below the plane
of consciousness. Herman, wanting such witness in himself, could not
believe, and was concerned over my mistake. So we went on walking in it,
Herman very well satisfied with his argument, and I saying nothing more
about it. As I frequently have to do when Herman gets talking of the
things which are my province.
It was very quiet in the wood that day, scarcely a bird abroad; now and
then a still, winged insect threaded the green and gold arcades of the
great fern, or a long sigh from the sea, passed up the hill along the
top of the pines.
The trail cleared the scrub and went between young trees, skirting a
hollow planted with lean, sombre boles. The ground beneath was white
with the droppings of shadow-haunting birds. Beyond that there was more
open going among splay-footed oaks, crusted thick with emerald moss, all
a-drip from their outer branches with the filmy lace of lichen. Then a
pleasant grassy space of pines before the close locked redwoods began.
I do not know how long we had been following before we heard the jays,
but we had come into a little open glade where lilies grew, through
which the trail seemed to lead to one of those places where you have
always wished to be. There we heard them crying our approach. Herman
said they were jays, and the first one might have been. I know the high,
strident call they have, which another hears and repeats, and another,
until all the wood is cautious and awake. But one jay calls exactly like
every other, and about this there was a modulation that assured while it
warned; that said: “I have heard; have no concern for me.” And even I
could not have fancied so much as that in the mere squawking of jays.
“Be still,” I said to Herman, who was protesting cheerfully behind me;
“you have waked the wood people and now we shan’t see any of them.”
“What people?”
“The people who walk in the woods and leave the meadows warm and tender,
whom you feel by the pricking between your shoulders when you come upon
the places where they have been. The people who made this trail, whom we
heard calling one to another just now. _The_ people——” And just then we
came upon the faggot.
It lay close beside the trail, little sticks all in order except a last
handful dropped hurriedly on top when the faggot-gatherer had started at
our approach.
“Look!” I said; “that is what they were doing when we came stumbling on
them.”
It _was_ a faggot, I shall always insist that it was a faggot, and I
should have said so if nothing had happened afterward to prove it.
Herman kicked it impatiently with his foot.
“There’s a literary temperament for you,” he protested. “You find a
trail made by wood-choppers, you hear jays squawking and see a heap of
brushwood. Straightway you create a race of people to account for them.”
“You _said_ it was a deer trail a while ago,” I hinted, and Herman
laughed.
It was still and warm in the glade; the needles lay thick and soft and
no grass grew. The scent of the yerba buena stole upon us
intermittently, delicate pungent gusts answering each to each like
speech. All around the sunlight lay, a thing palpable, as if, like the
needles, it had not been lifted for a thousand years, but mellowed there
like wine. Herman stretched himself on the brown thick litter beside me.
“Aha,” he said, “if this belongs to your wood people they know a good
thing. It’s very nice of them to lend it to us for a while. I don’t seem
to feel any pricks between my shoulders, but my heart beats remarkably;
so don’t give me up yet, Mona.”
That was exactly like Herman, to argue with your best beliefs until you
begin to think there is no other way than to subvert your whole scheme
of existence, or to break off all connection with him. And then he
abandons his position with a suddenness that leaves you toppling over
your own defenses.
For a moment I thought he might be going to revert to the matter of my
marrying him, but he lay tossing lightly at the dropped needles, and the
even breathing silence of the wood closed in again. We sat so long that
we were startled on discovering that if Herman got back to the Inn in
time for the stage that was to take him to his train, we would have to
run for it. And that, I suppose, was why we took so little notice of the
landmarks going out, that, though I tried the very next afternoon, I
could not find the trail again.
I wanted to find it too, for if I could once prove to Herman that there
was a reality behind that sense of presence in the woods he credited to
the whimseys of a literary imagination, I should somehow put myself in a
better case for proving—well, I did not know quite what, but I wanted to
find that trail.
I tried that day and the next. Twice I found the glade and the
sun-steeped yerba buena, for the day was warm and the scent of it
carried far, and once I got past Broken Tree, but I could never come
into the trail in any manner.
Then one day when I had almost given up finding it, and had been a long
time in the woods without thinking about it, I found myself walking in
the glade again, and the first thing I noticed was that the faggot was
gone. Although I had been so sure of its being a faggot in the first
place, I was a little startled at missing it, but not in the least
alarmed. The day was full of the warm dry fog that goes before a rain;
it cleared the ground and curled midway of the tall, fluted trees like
altar smoke. I followed along the track, which ran narrowly between the
redwood boles toward an open space, at the back of which was the pool of
a spring. It gleamed under a leaning bay tree, silver tipped with light.
And there beside it was a man who so matched with the color of the
dappled earth that, except for the motions of his singular employment, I
might have missed seeing him altogether. He was of a long clean shape,
dressed as to the upper part of his body in a close-fitting coat of gray
mole-skin. His feet were covered with sandals. Long bands of leather and
of a green cloth, coarse like linen, were laced about, midway of his
thighs. His coat had been loosened at the shoulders, baring his breast
and arms, and as he lay on the bank of the pool, he leaned above it and
studied the reflection of his face. He had leaves of some strange herb
in his hand which he squeezed together, and having dipped it in the
water rubbed upon his face and hair, watching the effect in the pool.
It was his hair that caught my attention most, for it was thick and
waving, and most singularly streaked with white. That was the more
strange because the body of him looked lithe and young. It occurred to
me that he might be remedying an offensive grayness as he dipped and
rubbed and stooped to mirror himself the better in the bright water. But
before I had made up my mind to anything further, he turned and saw me.
The first thing he did was to thrust the hand that held the herb
straight down into the water with a deliberate movement—all the while
holding my gaze with great fixity of purpose, as though he would not so
much as let it question what he did. Presently withdrawing the hand
empty, he stood up.
As he drew erect and clasped the upper part of his tunic, I saw that
around his body was a sort of sash of green cloth wrapped several times,
and stuck through the folds of it, various tools of the cruder sort of
silversmiths. Also, though his figure was young, the skin of his face
was drawn in fine wrinkles. He had a thin, high nose with a slightly
mobile tip that seemed to twitch a little with distrust as he looked at
me. The mouth below it was full and curved, his eyes bluish black,
opaque and velvet-looking; windows out of which came and looked
boldness, cunning and power, and the wistfulness of the wild creature
questioning its kinship with man. All this without so much as altering a
muscle of his face or removing his gaze from mine. Then he stepped back
a pace against the yielding boughs, which seemed to give like doors, and
received him without crackling or sensible displacement into the silence
of the wood.
II
I MEET THE OUTLIERS IN THE WOOD AND HERMAN COMES TO FIND ME
When Herman got my letter concerning the dark man under the bay tree, he
was wholly at loss what to make of it. He was quite habituated to my
method of making believe to be a story before writing it, and was always
willing to play up to his part as soon as he learned what that was, but
in this case I had neglected to tell him. While he was reading the
letter over, it occurred to him the whole thing might be merely a
childish pique because he had scoffed at my wood people in the first
place, and was rather annoyed at it.
But as often as he went back to the letter he found a note of conviction
in it—for I had written it immediately after the adventure—that overrode
both of these interpretations.
After that he was divided between the fear that I really had been
overworking and a period of mild hallucination had set in, or the
possibility that I could have met some sort of wild person in the forest
who might do me an injury. The most disturbing thing in the letter was
the declaration that I meant to go back as soon as I could and find out
all about the woodlander. The result of all this was that after having
written me a separate letter based on each one of these beliefs, and
having destroyed it, Herman left the University Friday morning and came
down to find out, if possible, what really had occurred.
He arrived on the stage that reaches Fairshore at half-past one, and as
he had come directly from his lecture room, he had first to have lunch
and change to his out-of-door clothes. This made it the middle of the
afternoon before he reached the cottage. As soon as he had a glimpse of
it, he experienced a sinking of the heart that warned him that I was not
there. However, he went through the formality of knocking at the front
door before going round to see if I had left the key, as I did for short
absences, or had taken it to the Inn as when I meant to be away several
days. He found the key in the accustomed place, and something more
alarming. Inside the screened porch at the back were the three little
bottles of milk which the milkman had left there each evening that I had
been away. So I had been gone three days!
The first thing was to make sure that I was not at Mira Monte or at
Idlewild, where I went sometimes as the mood demanded. He was very
cautious about making inquiries at the post-office and the Inn, for, of
course, I hadn’t given Herman any right to be interested in my
whereabouts. And, of course, if I really had gone off to hunt for
hypothetical people in the woods, I shouldn’t want it talked about. At
the end of an hour he had learned nothing more definite than that if I
had gone out of town it had not been by the regular stages, and nobody
knew when or where.
He decided then that the occasion justified his going into the house to
find out if I had taken my suit-case, or anything that would give a
clue. By the time he got back to the cottage it was past four o’clock,
and the milkman had been his round. There were now four little bottles
on the ledge. This somehow seemed to Herman so alarming a circumstance,
with its implication of unexpected detention, that with scarcely more
than a glance about the house, he put some crackers and my traveling
flask into his pocket and set out almost running for Broken Tree.
He said that he found the place with very little difficulty, and without
noticing particularly the way he came. I have thought since it might be
one of the conditions of going there, that you must be thinking
altogether of other matters and be concerned in the going for something
more than yourself.
Herman found the trail and followed it as far as the place of the
faggot, and on to the point where I had seen the tall man washing his
hair at the spring. Though he could have had no reasonable expectation
he had unconsciously counted on finding some trace of me in that
neighborhood, and, disappointed in that, was at loss what to do. The
trail, which ran out indistinguishably in the meadow, began again on the
other side. After losing half an hour in picking it up again, he came on
half fearfully, anticipating he knew not what dread evidence at every
turn.
The redwoods grew close here and the space between was filled with
bluish gloom shot with long arrows of the westering sun. The trail ran
crookedly among the clutching roots. Stumbling near-sightedly among
them, he lost it wholly and so came by accident upon what otherwise he
might have missed. Where the forest sheered away from a blank, stony
ledge sticking out of a hill, there was a clear space with some small
ferns and a seeping spring. In the soft earth about it he found prints
of feet he thought to be mine, and beside it, broad and strong, the
heavy feet of men. It was by now nearly dark, and Herman was so
genuinely alarmed and so poor a woodman that he knew no better than to
dash back among the redwoods hunting wildly for the trail and shouting,
“Mona! Mona!” for all the wood to hear.
What had really happened to me was alarming enough to think of, though
in truth I had not been very much alarmed by it at the time. The morning
after my writing to Herman had been one of those pricking days that come
in the turn of the seasons. Such a sparkle on the approaching water,
such a trumpeting from the hills, the high vault full of flying cloud,
that I struck with great confidence into the trail some distance beyond
Broken Tree.
I followed along where it ran in a space wide as a wagon track, and
opened into a meadow full of the airy whiteness of small bloom, floating
above the late yellow lilies and the glinting grass. I sat down at its
farther ledge, leaning against the curled roots of the redwood, and got
as much comfort from it as though I had been propped by a human
shoulder, so full was all the earth of friendly warmth and quietness.
There was neither sun nor shadow nor moving wind. I sat and browsed
along the edge of sleep, slipped in and out, dozed and woke to watch the
lilies: lost myself, and snapped alert to see the eyes of a man, ruddy
and well-looking, fixed upon me from between the shouldering trees. Not
a twig had snapped nor one bough clicked against another, but there he
stood like a stag gazing, uncurious and at ease. When he perceived that
I was aware of him he stepped toward me, throwing up his head, uttering
the high strident cry of jays, followed by one bird-call and another,
which seemed to be answered in kind from within the forest.
He was a man of about forty, burned by the sun with thick, tawny locks
and a pointed, russet beard, wearing a single garment of untanned skin
that came midway of his arms and thighs. There were sandals on his feet
and strips of leather bound about protected him to the knees. He was
belted about the body with a curious implement that might have been a
sling, and from his hand swung a brace or two of quail.
The singular part of this adventure was that while he stood there
communicating in his strange wordless fashion with all the birds in the
woods, I was not afraid. He was standing over me in such a manner that I
could not have escaped him if I would. Really I had no thought of doing
so, but sat looking as he looked at me, and not in the least afraid.
So occupied were we both with this mutual inspection that I did not
quite know how nor from what quarter three men came out from among the
trees and stood beside him. One of them was red and sturdy like the
first, one was old, with a white beard curling back from his face like
the surf from a rock, but exceedingly well built and with great heaps of
gnarly muscles along his breast and arms. The third was the dark man I
had seen washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay.
They all looked at me with amazement and some consternation. Words
passed between them in a strange tongue, though it was plain they
referred to the manner of their finding me, and what was to be done
about it. At length, the old man having said something to the effect
that whatever I might be I did not appear particularly dangerous, they
laughed, all of them, and made a sign that I was to come with them along
the trail.
We moved slowly; my captors, for so I was to regard them, so disposing
themselves as we went that I was scarcely aware of them. We moved
stealthily from bole to bole, mingling so with the tawny and amber
shadows, that time by time I hesitated, thinking myself abandoned. Then
I heard the old man’s throaty chuckle like the movement of slow water
among stones, or caught the bright, regardful eyes of Ravenutzi fixed
upon me from behind the interlacing boughs.
After an hour’s walking we came to a bramble-fenced hollow, ringed with
very tall trees, smelling of the sun. Here there might be a dozen of the
wood folks, with four women among them, lying up like deer through the
bright betraying noon.
Almost the first thing I noticed was that there was no curiosity among
them of a prying sort over my appearance, and no fear. As if they had
never imagined that one of my sort could do them harm. But there was
regretfulness, particularly among the women, that appeared to be
strangely for my sake, and a very grave concern. Moreover, when I
spoke,—for I was moved to speak at once and declare that whatever the
appearance of my coming among them, I meant no harm,—they turned all
toward me, as if merely by attending quietly on this strange tongue they
could make out what was said. I presently discovered that they had made
it out, and by keeping this same considered quietness, without straining
or trying to think what the words were, I was able to know what went on
about me. Although it was several days before I could communicate fully,
and I do not know yet, nor does Herman know, what language the Outliers
spoke among themselves, we were able to get along very well in it.
They drew around me in a circle, which was left open at one side to
admit a man whom I guessed at once by his bearing, as well as the
deference they paid him, to be some sort of chief to them.
He was of a singular and appealing beauty, so that his bodily excellence
was a garment to him, and adorned the simplicity of his dress. There was
that in his way of standing which moved one to go up and lay hand on him
as on the stem of a young cedar. But something stood within him that
protected him more than a weapon from such impersonality. As he waited
to hear the account of me which the red man gave, I felt I had never
such a wish to have a man think well of me, nor been so much at a loss
how to begin it. At the same time he seemed to be hearkening to
something within himself, something that, when he asked a question of
the women (which passed from one to another of them with something of
denial and disclaimer), seemed to speak more loudly. The question
appeared to refer to something which should have settled my business
then and there. The neglect of it devolved upon a woman, comely and
perplexed, as though given to too great a sense of responsibility, and
much overcome at being found at fault.
“No matter,” he said to her excuses, and bending a troubled look on me,
the doubt in him spoke out openly.
“It was of this, I think, _she_ spoke to me.”
At that slight emphasis the dark man who had the smith’s tools on him,
looked at me with so sharp and surprising an interest that it distracted
me from noticing who it was behind me asked with some eagerness:
“Of what did she speak?”
“That there was one walking toward us on the trail, bearing trouble. On
the morning of our leaving, she waked me early to say it. I am thinking
this is the one. If you have forgotten the cup, Evarra, it is an omen.”
The interest of all the wood folk reawakened. They began to regard me
with so much distrust that I was relieved when the chief made a sign to
Noche to take me a little to one side. Thus they talk more freely,
looking at me from time to time, sometimes seeming to blame the woman,
and sometimes to praise her.
Noche was that same old man who had brought me from the neighborhood of
Broken Tree, whose mild blue eyes, set rather shallowly in a broad face,
continued to reassure me.
He sat off a considerate distance, and busied himself with plaiting of
leather thongs. All his features were rugged, the mouth wide, the nose
broad and open at the nostrils, but blunted all as if by some yielding
humor in him which fitted oddly with the knotting of his muscles. Now
and then he turned toward me with chuckling, slow laughter which served
in place of comforting speech.
Whatever conclusion the woodlanders came to about me, it was not to take
immediate effect. They talked or lay quietly in the fern as deer lie.
They slept much, but always with some on guard, dropping off with even
breathing peace, and waking without start or stretching, as if
wakefulness were but a wind that stirred them by times, and sleep the
cessation of the stir.
Toward evening they rose and cooked a meal, of which I had my share—deer
meat, wild honey in the honey-comb, and some strange bread. Two or three
others came in from hunting; they were dressed much the same as the red
man who had found me, and carried slings in their belts or slung upon
their shoulders. The west was red and the pines black against it. There
rose a light ruffle of wind and sighed through the wood. With it passed
through the camp an audible breath of expectation. One of the women
stood up with water in a bowl of bark, holding it high above her head in
the manner of one celebrating a ritual, crooning some words to which the
others made a breathy, soft response. She turned the water out upon the
fire, the ashes of which Noche deftly covered, then, extending the bowl
toward the young leader, she smiled, saying:
“The word is with you, Persilope.”
He took the vessel from her, scattering its few remaining drops
westward.
“To the sea!” he said; “down to the sea!”
“To the sea!” cried the Outliers, and laughed and girt themselves.
Suddenly I found myself caught up into a kind of litter or swing made of
broad bands of skin, in a position of great uneasiness to myself,
between the shoulders of two men. The whole body of woodlanders set off
rapidly, but in their former noiseless fashion, going seaward.
The moon was up and the tide far out when we issued upon the promontory
called Cypress Point. There was little surf, and the glimmer of the tide
ran like silvered serpents all along the rocks. With a shout the
Outliers stripped and cut the molten water with their shining bodies;
laughed and plunged and rose again, laughing and blowing the spray as
long as the moon lasted. They were at it again with the earliest light,
and I should have known they were gathering sea food without what one of
the women told me, of a great occasion going forward at their home which
lay far from here, and a great feast of all the tribe. When the tide
allowed, they gathered fish and abalones, which the women carried to
some secret place among the pines to cure and dry.
When the tide was up the Outliers lay by in the dark rooms of cypress,
bedded on the thick, resistant boughs, or stretched along the ancient
trunks so wried and bent to purposes of concealment. Often in the heat,
when there was cessation of the low whispering tones and light easy
laughter, I would rise up suddenly seeming to myself quite alone only to
discover by the stir of the wind on hair or garment the watchers lying
close, untroubled and observant. While they worked I lay bound lightly
under the wind-depressed cypresses where no light reached, but strange
checkered gleams of it like phosphorescent eyes.
By night I could hear the Outliers shouting strongly in the surf, and
saw by day the Chinese fishing-boats from Pescadera crawl along the
rocks, and the smoke of coasting steamers trailing a shadow like a dark
snake on the sea’s surface, polished by the heat. The men worked with
good-will and laughter, always with watchers out. If one moment they
were hauling at the nets, at a mere squeak of warning there would not be
to the unpracticed eye so much as the glint of the sun on bare skin.
Once a great red car came careering around the point, all the occupants
absorbed in Bridge, just when the sea was at its best, a sapphire
sparkle moving under an enchanted mist and the land luminous with
reflected light.
We could see the casual turning of the owner’s head as some invisible
string from the guard’s stretched, pointed finger seemed to move it like
a mechanical toy. Almost before it rounded the curve, old Noche took
himself out of the seaweed and blew foam at them in derision.
The care and keeping of me fell to Evarra, by whose neglect a proper
dealing with me was kept in abeyance, and to old Noche, with whom I
began to be very well acquainted. Noche had the soul of a craftsman,
though with no very great gift. Whenever the smith was busy at a forge
improvised of two beach stones and a flint, mending fishhooks and
hammering spear-heads from bits of metal picked up along the sand, Noche
would choose to lie puffing his cheeks to blow the fire while Ravenutzi
fitted his movements to the rhythm of the wind as it rose to cover the
light clink of his hammers. Or the old man would sit with his lips a
little apart and in his eyes the bright fixity of a child’s, laying out
iridescent fragments of abalone in curious patterns in which Ravenutzi
took the greatest interest.
It was singular to me that the design the old man struggled with
oftenest, the smith let pass. I had observed this the more because I
became sure that there was no smallest hint of it escaped him, and the
suspicion was fixed in my mind by its revelation of a great singularity
in the character of Ravenutzi himself.
Time and again I had seen Noche laying out his abalone pearls in a
design which, however dearly it was borne within his mind, seemed
reluctant in expression. He would place the salient points of his
pattern, connecting them by tracings in the sand, and when he had taken
the greatest pains with it, startled, would sweep out the whole with his
hand. There were times when its preciousness so grew upon him that he
would not even commit it to the dust, but formed the delicate outline
with his finger in the air.
One of those occasions, when it was full noon, and the tide charged
thunderously along the coast, all the Outliers lying up in the windy
gloom of the cypresses, I knew by the absorbed and breathless look of
him that Noche had accomplished for once the whole of his design. He
bent above it crooning in his beard, so absorbed in the complete and
lonely joy of creation that he neither saw nor sensed the shifting of
the stooped, twisty trunks above him to the form of Ravenutzi.
How he had come there I could not imagine, but there he bent from the
flat-topped foliage, the mouth avid, the eyes burning and curious. As
the shifting of his position brought him into line with my gaze he
passed to a fixed intentness that held me arrested even in the process
of thought. It left me uncertain as to whether it were not I who had
been caught spying instead of Ravenutzi, and merely to meet that look in
me had been, after all, the object of his secret scrutiny.
And this was what separated him from the others more than his dark skin
and his clipped and nasal speech, making me sure, before I had heard a
word of the Far-Folk, of some alien blood in him. Whatever one of the
Outliers did, whether you agreed with him or not, there was at least no
doubt about it.
That was how the days were going with me all the time Herman was writing
me letters and tearing them up again, deciding that I was mad or foolish
or both.
On the evening of the last day, about the time he had entered on the
trail by Broken Tree, we were setting out for I knew not what far home
of the Outliers. I was carried still in my litter, but that was more
kindness than captivity, for though I count myself a good walker, I made
poor work of keeping even with their light, running stride. We were not
many hours out; it was after moonset, and I had lost all track of the
time or the way, being a little sick with the motion, and very tired of
it. I could guess this much, that we were rounding a steep and thick-set
hill by what might have been an abandoned wagon road, for our pace
increased here. Suddenly the company was arrested by sharp resounding
cries and the crackling of underbrush on the slope above us. So does the
night estrange familiar things, that I could get no clue at all to what
the cries might be, except that it was some creature blundering and
crying distressfully, making as if to cross our trail.
The Outliers were themselves alarmed by it, and considered a moment
whether they should halt to let it pass before us or hurry on to leave
it behind. But the check and the beginning of movement had caught the
attention of the lost creature, for it turned directly toward us, and
begun to come on more rapidly, redoubling its cries. Now I thought,
though it seemed so extraordinary, that it said “Mona!” in a wild and
urgent manner. Then it seemed to have slipped or bounded, for the slope
was steep, and fell with a great clatter of stones and snapping of stems
directly in our trail.
Several of the men precipitated themselves upon it. There was a short
struggle, muffled groans, and quiet. One of them struck a light from his
flint and showed a man, scratched and disheveled, lifted in the grip of
Noche, lying limp and faint back from the knotted arms. I turned faint
myself to see that it was Herman.
III
I HEAR OF THE TREASURE AND MEET A FRIEND OF RAVENUTZI
It was the very next day, and before I had learned as much of Herman’s
adventure as I have already set down, that I began to hear of the
Treasure. My hearing became the means of my knowing all that happened
afterwards in Outland on account of it.
It was the middle of the afternoon when I came out of Evarra’s hut and
found Herman, with his head bandaged, lying on a heap of skins with old
Noche on guard, plaiting slings. He had a loop of raw hide about one
foot stretched straight before him to keep it taut as he plaited. Now
and then he turned his face toward us with a wordless reassurance, but
chiefly his attention was taken by the children, who cooed and bobbed
their heads together within the shadow.
Back of them the redwoods stood up thick as organ pipes, and when the
wind stirred, the space above was filled with the click of dropping
needles and the flicker of light displaced. I was going on to inquire of
Herman how he happened to come stumbling on my trail when I thought him
safe at the University, but Noche making a noise of disapproval in his
throat, I left off at once, and began to attend to the talk of the
children. It grew clear as I fixed upon it or lapsed into unmeaning
murmurs as my mind wandered. There were four or five of them busy about
those curious structures that children build with pebbles and potsherds
and mounds of patted dust, set off by a feather or a flower. Noche, it
appeared, was very good at this sort of thing. To their great delight,
he was persuaded to undertake a more imposing mound than they could
manage for themselves; and presently I had made out idly that the
structure in the dust was the pattern of a story he was telling them. It
was all of a king’s treasure. Seventy bracelets of gold, he said, all of
fine work, chased and hammered, and belts of linked gold, and buckles
set with colored stones. He took pebbles from the creek and petals of
flowers to show them how that was, and every child was for making one
for himself, for Noche to approve. Also he said there were collars of
filigree, and necklets set with green stones of the color of the creek
where it turned over the falls at Leaping Water. There were cups of
gold, and one particular goblet of chased work which an old king held
between his knees, around the rim of which a matchless hunter forever
pursued exquisite deer. The stem of it was all of honey-colored agate,
and in the base there were four great stones for the colors of the four
Quarters: blue for the North, green for the South where the wind came
from that made the grass to spring, red for the Dawn side of earth, and
yellow for the West. And for the same king there was a circlet for his
brows, of fire-stones, by which I supposed he meant opals, half a finger
long, set in beaten gold. Also there were lamps, jeweled and chased, on
golden chains that hung a-light above the kings.
When then one of the children, who lay listening with his heels in the
air, wished to know if it were true what his father had said, that there
was evil in the Treasure which came out upon whoever so much as looked
at it, there came a rueful blankness upon the face of old Noche.
“Ay,” said he, “and upon whoever so much as talks of it.” And he shook
his neglected sling at them as though to have left it off for the sake
of a story were a very culpable matter.
But the children would not have it like that at all. They flung
themselves on him in a heap, and got upon his back and about his neck
and rumpled his hair, declaring that he was the best old man that ever
was, and he must tell them about the red necklace: till, growling a
little, but very glad to be beguiled, Noche went on to say there was a
necklace of red stones so splendid that every one of them was a little
more splendid than the next one. Almost before he had begun and before
Herman and I had heard anything louder than the unmeaning forest
murmurs, we saw the children rise to attention, and scatter suddenly,
with gay little splutters of laughter like the noise of water spilled
along the ground. They disappeared down the trails that ran darkling
among the rooted columns of the trees.
There was a certain dismay I thought on Noche’s face as he turned back
to his work, perceiving that I had listened, and not sure how much I had
understood. He began to talk to us at once about his work, as though
that might have been the object of our attention. With his hand he
reached out furtively behind him and destroyed all the patterns in the
dust.
Still I found my mind going back to the story with some insistence. Up
to that time I had seen no metal in the camp but some small pieces of
hammered silver and simple tools of hard iron, and no ornaments but
shells and berries. But there had been a relish in old Noche’s telling
that hinted at reality. I remembered the pattern which he had pondered
so secretly under the cypress trees, and it came into my mind in an
obscure way, without my taking any particular notice of it, that this
might be the pattern of the necklace of red stones. I had not time to
think further then, for the sound to which the children had answered was
the returning hunt and the Outliers coming toward us on the trail.
It was always so that they came together about the time that the blue
haze and the late light rayed out long level bars across the hills. They
would be awake and about at whatever hour pleased them, and take their
nooning in whatever place. Through the days there would scarcely be so
much seen of them as a woman beating fiber between two stones by a
brook, or a man cutting fern on a steep slope. So still they were by
use, and so habituated to the russet earth and the green fern and the
gray stone, that they could melt into it and disappear. Though you heard
close about you low-toned talk and cheerful laughter, you could
scarcely, unless they wished it, come bodily upon them.
On this evening all those in the neighborhood of Deep Fern had come
together, not only because of the news of House-Folk brought to camp,
but because this was the time set for the return of Trastevera from some
errand connected with the great occasion of which I had been told. It
was she who had seen trouble walking with us on the trail from Broken
Tree, and without whose advisement, so Evarra had already explained to
me, nothing would be determined concerning Herman and me.
This Trastevera was also the wife of Persilope, and whatever the
business that called her from Deep Fern that day, she was late
returning. All the Outliers had come in. The light had left the lower
reaches of the forest and began to shine level through the fan-spread
boughs before Persilope came out of the grass walk where he had been
pacing up and down restlessly. Advised by some sound or sense too fine
for me, he lifted up his hand toward that quarter of the thick-set grove
that fenced the far end of the meadow. In the quick attentiveness that
followed on the gesture, he stood in the flush of rising tenderness
until, with some others behind her, she came lightly through the wood.
One perceived first that she was smaller than the others, most
delicately shaped, and next, that the years upon her were like the
enrichment of time on some rare ornament.
I do not know why in our sort of society it should always seem
regrettable, when not a little ridiculous, for a woman to be ten years
older than her husband. Since I have known the exquisite maturity of
Trastevera’s spirit, tempering her husband’s passion to finer
appreciation of her ripened worth, I have not thought it so. As she came
lightly through the thick grass of the uncropped meadow there was, as
often, a glow upon her that might have come from the business she had
been abroad upon. It sustained her a little above the personal
consideration, so that almost before she had recovered from the flush of
her husband’s embrace, she turned toward Prassade—the red man who had
found me in the wood—to say that all was as he would have wished it, and
he had good reason for being pleased. This being apparently a word he
had waited for, he thanked her with a very honest satisfaction. Then,
with her hand still in Persilope’s, he looking down on her more rejoiced
with having her back from her errand than with anything she had to say
about it, she turned a puzzled, inquiring glance about the camp.
“Ravenutzi?” she questioned doubtfully; but the smith smiled and shook
his head, and with one consent, as if she had answered expectation, the
company parted and showed us to her where we stood. Without having any
previous intention about it, I found myself rising to my feet to meet
her, and heard Herman scramble lamely up behind.
She stood so, confronting us without a word for as long as it took
Prassade briefly to explain how they had taken us, and why they had not
done that to us which I already understood had threatened me on the
first day of my captivity. This was long enough for me to discern that
she was darker than the other Outliers, that her hair must have been
about the color of Ravenutzi’s before it turned. Her eyes were gray and
clouded with amber like the morning surf. She moved a step toward me,
nodding her head to what the young chief said, and shaking it slowly to
something in herself. Wonder and perplexity deepened in her. Delicately,
as seeking knowledge of me and not realizing that I could understand her
speech or answer in it, she drew the tips of her fingers across my
breast. There was no more offensiveness in the touch than in the
questioning fingers of the blind. Wonder and perplexity deepening still,
she turned back to Persilope.
“I grow an old woman,” she said, “I have failed you.”
He took the hand which she put out deprecatingly, and held it strongly
against his breast, laughing the full, fatuous man’s laugh of disbelief.
“When have you failed me?”
“I do not know,” she protested; “I cannot tell;” and I understood that
the doubt referred to her failure to get from me by that contact, the
clew she sought.
“Surely these are they whom I feared for you to meet when you set out
for the sea by the cypresses. Not for what they would do to you”—her
look was toward Persilope—“but for what they might bring to all
Outliers. But now I am not sure.”