Jerry Freelands felt that the day was not suitably ended if, after
tidying up the kitchen and practicing "The Harp That Once" and "Oft in
the Stilly Night" on his fiddle, he did not go across the fields to
Marietta Martin's and compare the moment's mood with her, either in the
porch or at her fireside, according to the season. They lived, each
alone, in a stretch of meadow land just off the main road, and nobody
knew how many of their evenings they spent together, or, at this middle
stage in their lives, would have drawn romantic conclusions if the tale
of them had been told.
In his youth Jerry had been a solitary, given to wandering "by the
river's brim," as he liked to say, thinking of poetry and his fiddle.
Marietta, even at that time, had been learning tailoring to support her
mother, and she looked upon Jerry with unstinted admiration as too
distinctly set apart by high attainments ever to be considered a common
earthly swain. But Jerry did all his duties as if he were not gifted. He
carried on the small farm, and, after his sister married and went away,
nursed his mother until her death--"as handy as a woman," so the
neighbors said. Yet he knew that all this tribute to the lower life was
only something mysteriously decreed, perhaps to ballast the soul lest it
soar too high. The real things were fiddle-playing and writing verse,
sometimes inspired by nature and again by love or death, and publishing
it in the county paper. Jerry had one consolation, one delight, besides
and above Marietta. This was the poetess, Ruth Bellair, and it was of
her he was thinking as he crossed the field, this darkening twilight, to
Marietta's house. There was a warm spring wind, and frogs were peeping.
Jerry knew, although it was too dark to see, that down by the brook the
procession of willows walked in a mist of green. It was a broken sky,
with here and there a star between soft wafts of cloud, and the newness
and beauty of the time smote upon him as he hurried on, and made him
young again. He walked faster than usual, a tall, lightly moving figure,
his head under his soft felt hat thrown forward and his loose hair blown
back by the swiftness of his going. Time seemed to have fallen away from
him at the call of some new anticipation. He was not a man nearing fifty
as the morning's sun had found him, but a youth with the mountain-top
splendidly near and the rising sun to light his steps.
Marietta lived in a little, low-browed, gambrel-roofed house, with a
vegetable garden in the back, a flower garden in front, and an orchard
at the west side. She had sold the adjoining meadows and also the
woodland, because she said it was better to lessen care as you grew
older, and she was a poor hand to keep up a farm. Marietta was of those
who are perhaps not calm by inheritance, but who have attained serenity
because life proves it to be desirable. To-night she saw Jerry coming
and met him at the door, a plump, fresh-colored woman with sweet brows,
thick white hair, and blue eyes full of a wistful sympathy. She was
younger than he, yet her acquired calmness had given her a matronly air
and made her the one to assume protection and a gentle way of giving. As
she stood there in the doorway, lamp in hand, she looked like a
benignant mother waiting to greet a returning child.
"Well, Marietta," said Jerry.
He stopped a moment before her on the doorstone and drew the quick
breath of the haste of his coming. Then he took off his hat, stayed for
one look at the night behind him, and followed her in. Marietta put the
lamp on the high mantel, and moved his chair slightly nearer the hearth.
There was no fire, but the act seemed to make him more intimately
welcome. Then she seated herself on the sofa between the two side
windows and folded her hands for an evening's intercourse. Jerry took
out his pipe, held it absently for a moment, and laid it down on the
table. Marietta hardly liked that. He must be moved indeed, she knew, if
he meant to forego his evening smoke. Jerry sat forward a little in his
chair and let his long hands, loosely clasped, hang between his knees.
He gazed straight out through the dark window as if he could see the
lovely night pulsating there, and his bright gray eyes seemed to hold
gleams of an extreme anticipation. Then he remembered the world where he
found himself, this clean exquisite room with its homely furnishings,
where he had become as familiar as if it were a secondary shell that
fitted him so completely he hardly noticed it, and turned to her with an
effect of winking his eyes open after a dream.
"Marietta," said he, "who do you suppose has come?"
She shook her head in an attentive interest.
He kept his gaze on her as if it were all incredible.
"Ruth Bellair," he said solemnly.
Now she did start, and her lips parted in the surprise of it.
"Not here?" she insisted. "You don't mean she's come here?"
He shook his head.
"No. She's at Poplar Bridge. The paper said so to-night."
"What's she there for?"
"She's come to board. The paper said so. 'The well-known poetess, Ruth
Bellair, has arrived to spend the summer at the commodious boarding
establishment of L. H. Moody.'"
He looked at her in a pale triumph, and she stared back at him with all
the emotion he could have wished.
"I can't hardly believe it," she said faintly.
"That's it," he nodded at her. "Nobody could believe it. Why, Marietta,
do you suppose there's been a night I've sat here that I haven't either
read some of her pieces to you, or told you something I'd seen about her
in the papers?"
"No," said Marietta, rather wearily, yet with a careful interest, "you
haven't talked about anything else scarcely."
He was looking at her out of the same solemn assurance that it had been
commendable in him to preserve that romantic loyalty.
"She begun to write about the time I did," he said, tasting the flavor
of reminiscence. "I used to see her name in the papers when I never so
much as thought I should write a line myself. She's been a great
influence in my life, Marietta."
"Yes, course she has," Marietta responded, rising to the height of his
emotion. "I guess she's influenced a good many folks."
"Well, I've got my chance. She's here within ten miles of us, and come
what may, I'm bound to see her."
Marietta started.
"See her?" she repeated. "How under the sun you going to do that? You
don't know her, nor any of her folks. Seems if she'd think 'twas
terrible queer."
"She's used to it," said Jerry raptly. "She must be. People with gifts
like that--why, of course folks go to see 'em."
He was removed and silent after this, and had scarcely a word for
Marietta's late-blooming calla that had held her in suspense through the
winter when she had wanted it, to unroll its austere deliciousness now
in the spring. She brought him the heavy pot almost timidly, and Jerry
put out his hand and touched the snowy texture of the bloom. But he did
it absently, and she understood that his mind was not with her, and that
there was little likelihood of his inditing a set of verses to the lily,
as she had hoped. He got up and carried it to the stand for her, and
there he paused for a moment beside it, coming awake, she thought. But
after that period of musing he took up his hat from the little table
between the windows and stood there holding it.
"Marietta," said he, with a simple and moved directness, "what if I
should carry her one of these?"
"One of my lilies?"
"Yes."
She brushed a bit of dust from a smooth green leaf, and the color rose
to her face. She seemed to conquer something.
"When you going?" she asked, in a subdued tone.
"I thought I'd go to-morrow."
"Well, you can have the lily, all three of 'em if you want--have 'em and
welcome."
He was at the door now, his hand on the latch. Marietta, watching him
still with that flush on her cheeks and a suffused look of the calm blue
eyes, noted how he stood gazing down, as if already he were planning his
trip, and as if the anticipation were affecting to him.
He straightened suddenly and met her glance.
"You're real good, Marietta," he said warmly. "I'll call in the morning
and get 'em."
"What time you going?"
"'Long about ten, I guess. Good-night."
When she heard the clang of the gate behind him she went slowly in and
stood by her lily for a moment, looking down at it, and not so much
thinking in any definite channel as feeling the queerness of things.
Marietta often had longings which she did not classify, for what seemed
such foolish matters that, unless she kept them under cover, folks might
laugh. The lily was not only a lily to her: it suggested a train of
bright imaginings. It was like snow, she thought, like a pale lovely
princess, like the sweet-smelling field flower that twisted round a
stalk in a beautiful swirl. It seemed quite appropriate to her that
Jerry should cut the flowers and carry them to Ruth Bellair. He would
know, and the poetess also, what wonderful thing to say about anything
so lovely, all in measured lines rhyming to perfection. She sighed once
or twice when her head was on the pillow. It seemed amazing to her to be
gifted as Jerry and his poetess were, and very stupid to be as dull as
she.
Jerry, that night, hardly slept at all. He sat by his hearth, fiddle in
hand, sometimes caressingly under his chin, sometimes lying across his
knees; but he was not playing. He had opened both windows, so that,
although the spring air was cool, he could get the feeling of the night
and hurry the beating of his excited heart. Jerry was in no habit of
remembering how old he was, and to-night age seemed infinitely removed.
He was thinking of poetry and of Ruth Bellair. She had always been what
he called his guiding star. Once he wrote a set of verses by that title,
and put under it, with a hand trembling at its own audacity, "To R. B."
That had never been published, but he had read it to Marietta, and she
had said it was beautiful. Ruth Bellair had always seemed very far above
him, for although he wrote poetry the county paper accepted in
prodigious quantities, she did verse of a sort that appeared in loftier
journals. She had written "The Hole in the Baby's Shoe," which mothers
had cut out and pinned on the window curtain, and children had spoken on
Last Day, to the accompaniment of tears from assembled parents. Then
there was her sonnet, "Shall I Meet Thee There?" which Jerry had always
supposed to have been inspired by a departed lover, and many, many
others that touched the heart and were easy to remember, they ran so
steadily, with such a constant beat. Jerry knew exactly how she would
look. She would have golden hair and blue eyes, and what she had called
in one of her poems the "tender gift of tears." He had always, in fancy,
seen her dressed in blue, because that was his favorite color, though he
reflected that he might as easily find her clad in white.
It was only toward morning that he slept, his fiddle on the table now,
but very near, as if they had shared a solemn vigil and it still knew
how he might feel in dreams.
It was about ten o'clock when he stopped at Marietta's gate with the
light wagon and sober white horse he had borrowed from Lote Purington,
"down the road." Marietta was ready at the door, a long white box in her
hand.
"I been watching for you," she said. "I went up attic, where I could see
you turn the corner. Then I snipped 'em off, and here they are."
Jerry took the box with a grave decorum, as if it represented something
precious to him, and disposed it in the back of the wagon under the
light robe.
"I'm obliged to you, Marietta," he said. "This'll mean a good deal to
me." He stepped into the wagon again and took up the reins. Then the
calm and beneficence of the spring day struck him as it had not before,
in his hurried preparations, and he looked down at Marietta. They had
always had a good deal to say to each other about the weather, and he
knew she would understand. "It's spring, Marietta," he said, with a
simplicity he had never thought it desirable to put into his verse.
"Yes," she answered, as quietly, yet with a thrill in her voice. "I
don't hardly think I ever saw a prettier day."
There was such a mist of green that the earth seemed to be breathing it
out in swirls and billows. It was impossible to say whether there were
more riot and surge in the budding ground, or in the heavens, where
clouds flew swiftly. The birds were singing, all kinds together, in a
tumultuous harmony. Jerry felt light-headed with the wonder of it; but
Marietta had an ache at her heart, she did not know why, though she was
used to that kind of thing when the outside world struck her as being
full of tremulous appeals without any answers.
Though Jerry had the reins in his hands, he did not go. Instead, he
continued looking at her standing there in her freshness of good health
and the candor of her gaze that seemed to him, next to his mother's
face, the kindest thing he had ever known. The blue of her eyes and the
blue of her dress matched each other in a lovely way. He felt that he
had something to say to her, but he could not remember what it was.
Suddenly a robin on the fence burst into adjurations of a robust sort,
and Marietta, without meaning to, spoke. She had always said since her
childhood that a robin bewitched her--he was so happy and so pert.
"Jerry," said she, "what if I should get my hat and ride with you as far
as Ferny Woods?"
"So do," said Jerry, with a perfect cordiality. "So do."
"It's a pretty day," Marietta asserted again; but he cut her short,
advising her to get ready, and she ran in, a flush on her cheeks and
lightness in her step. When she came out she had made no conventional
preparations for a drive. She had only pinned on her broad black hat and
taken off her apron. She carried a little oblong basket with a cover,
and this she set carefully in the back of the wagon, with the lilies.
Jerry alighted gallantly to help her in, and when he had started up the
horse it was Marietta who began speaking. Usually she was rather silent,
following Jerry's lead, but to-day the warmth and beauty and song had
liberated something in her spirit, and she had to talk back to the
talking earth.
"You know Ferny Woods are much as a mile this side of the Moodys'," she
was saying. "You can just leave me there, and then you can go along and
make your call."
"It seems pretty mean not to take you with me," Jerry offered haltingly.
Yet he knew, as she did, that he had no desire to take her. This was his
own sacred pilgrimage.
"Oh, I wouldn't go for anything," she answered eagerly. "You've looked
forward to it so long--well, not exactly that, for you didn't know she
was coming. But it means a good deal to you. And I don't care a mite. I
truly don't, not a mite."
Jerry flicked at the horse's ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy
anticipation.
"Seems if I should know her the minute I put eyes on her."
"Well, I guess you will," she encouraged him. "Maybe she's the only
boarder they've got, so far."
"No, no, I don't mean that. Seems if I knew exactly how she ought to
look."
"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his
fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she
always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think
anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in
the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his
interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and
satisfactions.
"Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade
of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?"
"Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell."
"I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced
bluntness, as if he wronged the absent goddess through such crudities.
"You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the
way she's got of putting 'em--you can't see 'em very big-framed or
heavy, can you? I can't, anyways."
"No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her
knee--"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought
this little rise was about the prettiest view there is betwixt us and
the Rocky Mountains."
They were on the top of Blossom Hill again, and Jerry drew the horse to
a halt before winding down. All the kingdoms of the earth seemed, in
Marietta's eyes, to be spread out before them. There was the rolling
land of farms and villages, and beyond it the line of haze that meant,
they knew, the sea. Tears filled her eyes. Then her gaze came home to an
apple-tree by the side of the road.
"You see that tree, Jerry?" she asked. "Well, I've always called that
Mother's Tree. Once, the last o' May, we borrowed Lote's team and
climbed up here, and here was that tree in full bloom. Mother had a kind
of a pretty way of putting things, and she said 'twas like a bride.
'Some trees are all over pink,' she says, 'but this is white as the
drifted snow.' And the winter mother died, I rode up over this hill
again, to get her some things to be buried in, and I stopped and looked
at that tree. It snowed the night before, and 'twas all over white, and
sparkling in the sun. I spoke right out loud. 'Mother's Tree,' I says."
"Sho!" said Jerry. "You never mentioned that before. Anybody could
almost write something out o' that."
"Could you?" asked Marietta, brightening. "I wish you would. I should
admire to have you."
Jerry's excitement of the night before had waned a little. Suddenly he
felt tired and chill, and, although the purpose of his journey had not
been accomplished, as if the zest of things had gone.
"Marietta," said he, starting on the horse, "do you think much about
growing old?"
"I guess I don't," said Marietta brightly, and at once. "That's a
terrible foolish thing to do. Least, so it seems to me."
"But you don't feel as you did fifteen years ago, do you, Marietta?" He
asked it wistfully.
She was ready with her prompt assurance.
"I don't know 's I do. Don't seem as if 'twould be natural if I did.
Take a tree, take that apple-tree back there--I don't know 's you could
say it had the same feelings it did when it sprouted up out o' the
seeds. We're in a kind of a procession, seems if, marching along
towards--well, I don't know what all. But wherever we're going, it's
all right, I say. It's all right."
They were silent then for a time, each scanning the roadsides and the
vista before them framed in drooping branches and enriched by springing
sward.
"You seem to have a good deal of faith, Marietta," said he suddenly.
"But you ain't much of a hand to talk about it."
"Course I got faith," she answered. "It ain't any use for anybody to
tell me there ain't a good time coming. I don't have to conjure up some
kind of a hope. I know."
"How do you know?" asked Jerry.
She gave a sudden irrepressible laugh.
"I guess it's because the sky is so pretty," she said. "Maybe the robins
have got something to do with it. Days like this I feel as if I was
right inside the pearly gates. I truly do."
They were entering the shade of evergreens that bordered the ravine
road, where there were striated cliffs, and little runnels came
trickling down to join the stream below.
"I guess there ain't a spot round here that means more to folks in our
neighborhood than this," said Marietta. "Remember the time somebody
wanted to name it 'Picnic Road'? There were seventeen picnics that
summer, if I recollect, all in our set."
"Yes," said Jerry. He remembered his poem about the "awesome
amphitheatre nature wrought," and wondered if Marietta also recalled it
and would quote some of it. But she only said:--
"That kind of a round where we used to eat our suppers is about the
prettiest spot I ever see. That's where I'm going to set up my tent
whilst you're making your call. When you come back you can poke right on
in there and 'coot,' and I'll answer."
Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had
given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some
four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring
and the next winter robed for burial. He could hear the cadence of them
now, beating through his head in premonitory measures. Then there was
the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had
read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers,
and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange.
The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they
were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search
of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, in
all their memories.
"Here we are," said Jerry. He drew up at the bars that led into old
Blaisdell's sugar-camp, and Marietta, not waiting for him, sprang out
over the wheel. "You're as light as a feather," said he admiringly, but
with no sense of wonder. They were still in that childhood land where
everybody is agile for one long, bright day.
"Light as a bun," returned Marietta flippantly. "Here, you wait a minute
till I get me out my basket. When you come back you be sure to coot."
Jerry drove on a step or two, and then drew in the horse. Just as she
had set her basket over the bars and was prepared to follow, he called
to her:--
"Marietta, I believe I'll leave the team."
Marietta understood. She came back readily.
"Well," she said, "I think 'twould look better, myself."
"I can hitch to the bars, same as we used to," Jerry continued.
"Remember how Underhill's old Buckskin used to crib the fence? Here's
the very piece of zinc Blaisdell nailed on that summer we were here so
much."
He had turned and driven back, and while he tied the horse, Marietta
took out the box of lilies.
"I guess you better hold these loose in your hand," she said
tentatively. "Seems to me 'twould look more appropriate."
Jerry nodded. They both had a vision of the poet going on foot to the
lady of his dreams, his lilies in his hand. Marietta lifted the cover of
the box and unrolled them deftly. She looked about her for an instant,
and then, finding feasible standing-ground, went to one of the runnels
dripping down the cliff and paused there, holding the lily stems in the
cool laving of the fall. Jerry, the horse tied, stood watching her and
waiting. The bright blue of her dress shone softly against the wet brown
and black of the cliff wall, and the pink of her cheeks glowed above it
like a rosy light. Marietta had thought her dress far too gay when she
bought it, but the dusk of the ravine road had toned it down to a tint
the picture needed for full harmony. Jerry, though the familiar spot and
her presence in it soothed and pleased him, was running ahead with his
eager mind to the farm where Ruth Bellair stood waiting at the gate. Of
course she was not really waiting for him, because she did not know he
was coming, nor even that he lived at all. When he had mailed her the
package of autumn leaves Marietta had pressed, he had not sent his name
with them. Yet it seemed to him appropriate that she should be standing,
a girlish figure, by the Moodys' gate, to let him in. After that they
would walk up the path together, she carrying the lilies; and perhaps in
the orchard, where the trees were in bloom, they would pace back and
forth together and talk and talk. Jerry knew it was too early for
apple-trees to be blossoming, even in this weather, but the orchard
where Ruth Bellair walked would be white and pink. So he took his lilies
in his hand and strode away, and Marietta watched him. At the turn of
the road he stopped and waved his hand to her.
"Good-by!" called Marietta. "Good luck! Good-by!" Then a little sob
choked her, and she stamped her foot. "What a fool!" said Marietta,
addressing herself, and she walked to the bars with great determination,
let down one, "scooched" to go through, and, picking up her basket, went
on to the amphitheatre. Jerry need not have wondered whether she
remembered his ornate poem. She did, every word of it, and as she walked
she said it to herself in a murmuring tone. When she was within the
beloved inclosure she paused a moment before setting down her basket,
and looked about her. The place was not so grand as her childish eyes
had found it, only a great semicircle of ground brown with pine needles
and surrounded by ancient trees; but it was beautiful enough. Strangely,
she had not visited it for years. Her own mates no longer came, because
they were doing quiet things at home, farming and household tasks, and
Marietta would have had no mind, if she had been invited, to make one of
a serious middle-aged rout taking its annual pleasure with a difference.
"I'd rather by half be alone," she said aloud, as she looked about her,
"or maybe with one other that feels as I do."
Then she put down her basket and went, by a path she knew, to the spring
cleaned of fallen leaves by the first picnickers of every season. There
it was, the little kind pool with its bottom of sand and its fringing
grasses, the cress she had planted once with her own hands and now
beginning to show brightly green. Marietta knelt and drank from her
hollowed palm. The cup was in the basket. When Jerry came back he should
have it to slake his thirst; and presently she returned to the
amphitheatre and lay down on the pine-needles, to look up through the
boughs at glints of sky, and think and think. Perhaps it was not
thought, after all. It followed no road, but stayed an instant on a pine
bough, as a bird alights and then flies out through the upper branches
to the sky itself.
Marietta could not help feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She
had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and
her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her
own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some
singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bidding her take
hope. She was not expectant of definite delights; she only cherished an
irresponsible certainty. When the door opened to let in spring, it
seemed to show her heaven also, and she gave herself up to the gladness
of it. If Marietta had been able to scrutinize her inner being, she
would probably have owned that she found Jerry Freelands' influence upon
her a great and guiding one. It was, she knew, a precious privilege to
know a poet, and to see the natural and spiritual worlds through his
discerning eyes. It would have seemed to her wonderful to be a poet
herself. Ruth Bellair, waiting in unconscious sovereignty for Jerry to
seek her out and lay lilies at her feet, was, she knew, the happiest
woman in the spring world. Yet the soft air moved the pines to wavelike
murmurings, and Marietta too was happy.
It was nearly three o'clock when Jerry came back, and before that
Marietta had roused herself to open her basket and spread a napkin on
the big flat stone that made the picnic-table. She had laid a pile of
fine white bread and butter on the cloth, a paper twist of pickles,
because picnickers, according to tradition, are the better for
consuming pickles, and some of her own superior sugar gingerbread. The
cup was there waiting for Jerry to take it to the spring. Then she
listened for him. He did not give the expected coot, but came through
the forest glade silently and with a halting step. When Marietta saw him
her heart ran forward, before her feet. Jerry looked an older man; his
years were so apparent to her that it seemed for a foolish instant as if
his father were advancing toward her out of the past where she and Jerry
had been young together. She hurried forward.
"What is it?" she besought. "What's happened?"
His dull eyes turned upon her absently. He took off his hat and dropped
it at his feet.
"Why," said he, "nothing's happened that I know of."
The part of prudence was to halt, but anxiety hurried her on as if it
might have been to the rescue of a child in pain.
"Didn't you see her?" she asked breathlessly.
"Yes, I saw her."
He passed a hand over his forehead and smoothed his hair in a way he
had, ending the gesture at the back of his neck.
"How'd she look, Jerry? What was she doing?"
"Why," said Jerry, narrowing his eyes, as if he recalled a picture he
had found incredible, "she was playing croquet out in the front yard."
"But how'd she look?"
"Why, she's a kind of a dark-complexioned woman. She wears spe'tacles.
She's"--he paused there an instant and caught his breath--"she's pretty
fleshy."
"Was she nice to you?"
"Yes, she was nice. She meant to be real nice and kind. She made me"--a
spasm twitched his face, and he concluded--"she made me play croquet."
They stood there in the wood loneliness, dapples of sunlight flickering
on them through the leaves. Marietta felt a strange wave of something
rushing over her. It might have been mirth, or indignation that somebody
had destroyed her old friend's paradise; but it threatened to sweep her
from her basis of control.
"You sit down, Jerry," she said soberly. "I'm going to the spring to get
you a cup of water, and then we'll have our luncheon."
When she returned, bearing the full cup delicately, he lay like a
disconsolate boy, face down upon the ground; so she touched him on the
shoulder and said, in a tone of the brisk housewife:--
"Luncheon's ready."
Then Jerry sat up, and ate when she put food into his hand and drank
from the cup she gave him. Marietta ate only a crumb here and there from
her one bit of bread, for, seeing how hungry he was, she suspected that,
in his poet's rapture, he had had no breakfast. She tried to rouse him
to the things he loved.
"Only look through there," she said, pointing to a vista where a group
of birches were shimmering in green. "I don't know 's I ever see a
fountain such as they tell about, but this time in the year, before the
leaves have fairly come, seems if the green was like a fountain
springing up and never falling back. Maybe, though, it's the word I
like, the sound of it. I don't know."
Jerry turned his eyes on her in a quick, keen glance.
"Marietta," he said, "you have real pretty thoughts."
"Do I?" asked Marietta, laughing, without consciousness. She was only
glad to have beguiled him from the trouble of his mind. "Well, if I do,
I guess you put 'em into my head in the first place." The feast was
over, and she folded the napkin and swept away the crumbs. "Want some
more water?" she asked, pausing as she repacked the basket.
Jerry shook his head.
"Marietta," said he, "seems if it wa'n't a day since you and I used to
be here picnicking."
She laughed again whimsically.
"Well," she said, "when I travel back over the seams I've sewed, looks
like a good long day. I guess there's miles enough of 'em to stretch
from here to State o' Maine."
Jerry seemed to be speaking from a dream.
"And the others have married and got children growing up," he mused.
"Seems if we'd missed the best of it."
They had risen and stood facing each other, Marietta with the basket in
her hand. Jerry took it gently from her and set it on the ground.
"Marietta," he said, "I guess I'm kind of waked up."
Her face quivered. He thought he had never seen her look exactly that
way before.
"I'd work terrible hard," said he. "I guess I could make you have an
easier time."
Then his appealing eyes met hers, and Marietta, because she had no wish
to deny him anything, gave him her hands, and they kissed soberly.
When they walked back to the road, Jerry drew her aside to the birches
on the sunny knoll.
"You mustn't lay it up against me," he said brokenly.
"Lay what up?"
Her lips were full and lovely, and her eyes shone with the one look of
happiness.
"It's spring with these." He pointed to the birches. "It ain't with us."
"I don't know." Marietta laughed willfully. "Ain't you ever seen an
apple-tree blooming in the fall? or a late rose? Well, I have. So,
there!"
To Jerry, looking at her, she seemed like a beautiful stranger, met in
the way, and he kissed her again.
When they were driving home in their sober intimacy that had yet an
undercurrent of that rushing river of life, Marietta turned suddenly to
him.
"Jerry," she said, "when you played croquet, who beat?"
His eyes, meeting hers, took the merry challenge of them and answered
it. They both began to laugh, ecstatically, like children.
"She did," said he.