SLEEPING BENEATH GOD'S TENT
That afternoon we built the lean-to. I had had some fair ideas about
building a lean-to, but Doloria was in possession of a practical
knowledge gathered on camping trips that she and Echochee had made--for
these, I judged, constituted one of her chief recreations since
childhood. She knew how to twist ropes of bark for tying the poles, and
how to interlay the palm fronds so they would neither leak nor be lifted
by the wind. She took the keenest pleasure in it, too, and I can safely
say that never in my life have I enjoyed building anything as much as
that lean-to. When it was finished I stepped back and, in a burst of
admiration, cried:
"It's a palace? I can't ever get along without you!"
A wave of color came into her face, as instantaneous as I believe it was
unexpected, though she said in a matter of fact tone:
"There are other little things to be done, but we'll finish them
to-morrow."
"It's already the coziest place in the world," I insisted. "Now I'm
going to cut that path, and then we'll have----" but I checked myself
and looked at her in some concern. She had worked over hard for me--I
had not realized it while we were busy; so now I begged: "Won't you let
me cook the dinner? I'm afraid you're about dead!"
"Oh, really I'm not. But I'm hungry and so are you, and----" a little
curve came into the corners of her mouth that was very tantalizing, "I
think I'd better cook it."
"I was hoping you would," I admitted shamelessly, "even if you are
tired."
"Purely a selfish decision on my part, I assure you," she smiled. "I
haven't forgotten the breakfast you attempted."
"Very well. I'll cut you a nice straight path for a nice big feed!"
"And don't leave anything in it, will you, Chancellor! It would be
dreadful to come running to you in the dark, and stumble and--and bump
my nose!"
"Dreadful!" I cried. "It would be the end of the world!"
"Or the end of you," she laughed. "Now get to work, and then you can
build the kitchen fire. Don't you think we might have dinner a little
earlier to-night?"
With this she left me; but how sweetly confidential and domestic that
had sounded: "Don't you think we might have dinner a little earlier
to-night?"
I found her again, sitting on a fallen log and gazing wistfully across
the prairie toward the east, not back in the direction of Efaw Kotee's
den, and I felt that she was thinking of Azuria--her Azuria. What
visions its existence must have opened to her, whose life had been
always passionate after dreams and utterly bored with realities! Yet
what were her dreams?
She saw me and arose slowly, passing one hand across her eyes as if
brushing away the fancies; then I watched an expression almost of
tenderness as she came up to me.
"It isn't quite fair to interrupt," I said, "when you were having such
a peaceful time of it; but the fire's ready, and our supply of
buttonwood shrinks."
"Was I having such a peaceful time of it?" she asked, wonderingly.
"Perhaps it might have been if I knew Echochee and your man are safe.
Anyway, I'm glad the fire's ready; I've been expecting you to call me."
"I wish I could give you the same assurance about them that I feel
myself. Try to think I'm right, won't you?"
"Yes, really I will, good Chancellor," she smiled.
On the way back we passed my pool, where she kneeled ingenuously to
bathe her hands and arms, as chastely innocent as a mermaid.
"Have you such a thing as a towel?" she laughed. "Mine are in the tent!"
I got it, and walked slowly on. And I realized again, what I had once
before noted, that overly refined proprieties--I do not mean proprieties
of the essential kind--cannot endure between man and maid cast alone in
a wilderness. They become frail, insipid; and mar, rather than perfect,
the harmony of existence. Contraversely, their absence adds a deeper
luster, strikes the tuning-fork that hums with the true note of life.
Sorry the man who does not feel a sympathetic vibration! A woman is not
exactly at her best when bathing her face above a porcelain bowl, and to
be the constant, daily witness of such ablutions would, in my limited
experience, engender a slight unrest among the tuneful Nine. Yet let her
gracefully lean above a woodland pool, roll back her sleeves and open
the collar of her shooting shirt, and she becomes a personification of
glory to him who waits near the fire he has built for their evening
meal. But she must have looked danger in the face with him, slept near
him beneath the stars; knowing, should she be affrighted in the night,
that her call will bring his reassuring answer, but also knowing that
the voice is all that will ever come unbidden to her side. And thus is
the Cave-man in him gloriously aroused to guard her from Nature's wild,
while the poetry of their intercourse guards her from himself. What more
beautiful existence than to live alone in a forest with the girl you
love!
I thought that after dinner it might be well to sit again beside the
fort where we could watch the prairie. There is a comforting sense of
security that comes to one at nightfall when one has looked in all
directions and found all things well. So for a while she left me to the
orgy of washing dishes, but when I had turned the last plate top down
upon our kitchen log to dry, I saw her returning.
She came humming a tune, a catchy tune--I recognized it at once--that
the mandolins had tinkled in the Havana cafe, and from the mischievous
curves about the corners of her mouth I knew that her mood was adorable.
So I caught up the tune, whistling softly, and crossed to her holding
out my hands.
"It's a corking fox-trot," I said, for the moment stopping our
orchestra. "Let's dance it!"
But she drew back, laughing outright.
"I don't know how!"
"Don't dance?" I must have looked my amazement, for she answered:
"I've often danced, all alone, when I just couldn't help it; but there
hasn't been any one to teach me your kind!"
"I will," I cried delightedly. "We'll begin with that fox-trot!"
"We'd look awfully silly," she replied. "Besides, the name of your dance
is atrocious."
I felt rather thankful that I hadn't suggested the shimmy.
"That may get you out of it now," I announced, "but when we reach the
yacht I'm going to teach you ten hours a day. Understand?--ten hours a
day!"
Again came the tantalizing expression, as she daintily caught her skirt
and made me a royal curtsey, saying:
"It's beyond all measure charming of you, Chancellor. But shall I be so
difficult?"
"Don't joke about a wonderful prospect," I answered. "You're difficult
because of your grace, not the lack of it--if that's what you mean!" But
from her indifferent way of dismissing the subject I judged it was not
what she had meant, at all.
The sun must have set while we were encircling my pool. Then we passed
on into a still denser growth, following a crooked path that led to the
fort--entering a mysterious shadow-land that twilights have the trick of
producing when overhead foliage shuts out the afterglow and the serene
forest gloom is painted in tones of gray. The soft earth we trod was
dark, and the water lay phantom-like in its black bowl. Except for the
few times I held aside a swinging wildwood vine for her to pass, we
might have been two drifting spirits--so quietly did we move, and so
unknowingly were we affected by the hour, the place.
At the edge of our forest, where that long ago prairie fire had blighted
a grove of palm trees that subsequently fell upon each other like an
entangled pile of jackstraws, she took my hand to get across and, freed
from the clinging shadows, we ran out beneath the sky--then gasped in
amazement at its splendor.
It was not a sunset, not an afterglow in the usual sense of afterglows,
but a sky of deep, smouldering red equally distributed from horizon to
horizon; as though everywhere below the world a conflagration raged. I
could not at first speak for the grandeur of it, and when I turned to
her words were again checked by the look upon her face. For this dull,
permeating glow--this enchantment from the heavens--touched her brow,
her cheeks, her parted lips, with a light that aroused in me a thousand
devils and a thousand gods; it lingered over her hair as if striving to
concentrate itself into a halo there; and in her eyes that gazed afar
were suggested the awakening of deeper fires, of wilder mysteries.
"God, what a sky," I at last exclaimed, through sheer panic at the
imminence of crying aloud my love for her.
"What a sky, O God," she whispered, delicately turning my profane
outburst to a sigh of thankfulness.
But, better than she, I knew the meaning of that sky. I knew that down
over the western edge of the world blazed a huge funeral pyre on which
my past was being changed to harmless ashes; while in the east flames
were already lighted beneath the on-coming crucible of destiny, from
whose purifying heat a new love arose. Farther into obscurity would sink
the one; up and on would come the other; and so the sky was now roseate
unto its zenith, reflecting the glory of these miracles. I followed the
look of her eyes and saw, high against the red, a lone crane flying
majestically homeward to the seclusion of his swamp; and it typified my
own belated heart that, without questioning the whence or why,
unerringly obeyed a silent voice which called it to another sanctuary.
I wanted to tell her this, but dared not. And so we stood, spellbound,
while the night brought out the blue--and the young moon changed from
red to silver--and the stars came down to take their places. Then slowly
we passed on and sat by the fort, leaning our backs against it; in
meditation looking across the prairie that had become so changed a place
to us.
The night grew sweet with the purity of untouched wilderness as,
shoulder to shoulder, we sat talking in low tones of Smilax and
Echochee. She had wondered about them no few times that day, and now I,
too, felt some concern. Yet the Everglades lay far eastward and, for any
reason giving up Big Cove, I knew he would plunge as deeply into it as
his pursuers dared follow. To-morrow would be time enough to worry, I
assured her, so we talked about Monsieur, the Azurian throne, and--I
could not help it--of another Chancellor who would build her kitchen
fires. But I tried to keep all bitterness from my words. In the vague
light I could see that her face was serious, and very tender. Then for a
time we sat without speaking.
Perhaps it was the place, the charm; perhaps a magic was working
stronger than I knew; but words came to my lips that I stubbornly
refused to speak. I fought against them; they, too, fought with grim
insistence; so as a compromise, looking straight ahead and pretending to
jest even while I accused, I said:
"You've been listening!"
"Listening?" Her eyes opened prettily, alert as they always were to
parry banter with banter.
"Yes, listening--at the keyhole like a common gossip. A nice pastime for
a Princess, surely!"
"At the--keyhole?" She was proceeding warily now; her mind, as in a game
of hide-and-seek, was on tiptoe, in expectation of discovering me at
every step.
"Yes," I repeated. "And you heard my heart admitting that it's
happy--to've found something it was hungry for."
For the briefest instant I thought a tremor ran through her shoulder, as
if a little chilly sensation had rippled her nerves. But it was a silly
idea, because she lightly replied:
"Corn cakes, maybe. It ought to feel quite stuffed after the seven you
had for dinner."
"Six," I corrected.
"Seven," she insisted.
"But I know!"
"So do I," she laughed, "that you stole one from my plate when you
thought I wasn't looking."
"I needed that one."
"I never doubted it," she agreed.
Wild words again sprang to my lips, but this time I ruthlessly strangled
them. Yet I wanted to say: "I took from you because you stole from me!"
And I wanted to ask--O, shades of suffering Dante, how I longed to
ask!--if her dear heart were hungering, too, that she should have needed
my own to feed it!--if that were her excuse for thievery!
But already I had overstepped my resolution, although not feeling
desperately contrite about it after the sleight-of-hand way that a
declaration of love had been changed into the accusation of filching a
corn cake. Yet it had been a narrow escape and I thanked my gods for the
chance of pulling up, of again getting the right perspective.
To tell her anything at all before Echochee came would be the act of an
utterly selfish cad, for if she did not want my love--and there was
little enough reason to suppose that she did--her position would be
intolerable. In such an eventuality never again could we sit beside the
fort on nights like this, no longer would she want a cleared path
leading to her bailiwick. We would be as two estranged creatures doomed
to live near yet apart; each a daily witness of the other's unhappiness;
neither able by word or deed to give relief. Ah, I was glad she did not
even suspect that I cared a whit for her! I lit my pipe and in moody
silence smoked.
A pipe stem is a safe thing for man to grip his teeth upon when silence
is a virtue. Here in our forest I was master, the undisputed superior
force; and I wondered with a fascinating wonder how that ancestor, who
climbed down from his tree at nightfall, would have been greeting her! I
visualized his cunning face, now peering at me through the ages, leering
at me with bared tusks, bidding me take what was my own by right of
might! I felt the savage splendor of it. The wildness of this place, its
solitude, its distance from mankind, supported me. The cry of a night
bird out on the prairie told that it, too, was preying, or being preyed
upon; and, as if being stirred by this, a panther sent his wail across
the night. I listened for a mate to answer, but she did not. A large,
whitish moth flying out of the shadows passed clumsily within a few
inches of my face, its wings swishing as a bird's; and it, too, was
without a mate.
Then, as in the following silence I continued to listen, some far off
words came back to me. They came as the scent of lavender comes when
rain is pattering on the shingles, and some one opens the old trunk
that, ever since you can remember, has stood back under the rafters of
the sloping roof; the hallowed old trunk where a veil of yellowing lace
is stored--a piece of white satin, a blue or gray faded uniform, and
maybe a wee shoe, and a lock of hair. Every one who has leaned above
that trunk--and thank God they are legion!--has also listened to a voice
coming faintly through the past. And so words out of a lesser past now
came to me, as they were meant to be written on a torn wine card: "I am
in danger!"
She had been in danger of a brute, and had offered the safety of her
keeping to me. And the vision of my savage ancestor, though retreating
sullenly, faded into nothing. Then I felt her body press against me
softly and, looking down, I saw that she had fallen asleep, with her
head--precious, trusting thing--resting against my shoulder.
For an hour I sat motionless, fearing to awake her. Finally one of my
legs went to sleep, and soon my other leg. Yet it was a welcome
discomfort because endured for her. And I suppose the numbness must
eventually have crept the length of my body, for, I, too, slept;
awaking, I did not know how much later, to find her gone.
Then I stumbled back to my lean-to, but did not go inside. This was not
the night, nor mine the mood, to shut high heaven from my eyes, my
thoughts, the lambent flame of my love? So I chose the open, and lay on
my back gazing up into the silhouetted palm fronds, catching glimpses of
a star that here or there peeped through at me, steeping my thoughts in
solitude.
For it was that hushed hour of betwixt and between, when crickets,
tree-toads and other little creatures of the darkness have wearied
themselves to rest; yet also before the daylight life has stirred from
its own deep sleep. The silent hour, this is; the one hour in the round
of time when nature seems to be absolutely poised in breathless space;
when the pendulum of night hangs dead, and dawn is still a great way
over the hill. I shared its mysticism, feeling also a rich contentment
that she, too, was lying near me somewhere in this same solitude;
dreaming, with her cheek upon her arm; her hair kissed by the same dew
that cooled my face. I could not, of course, reach out my hand and touch
her, but the path led straight; and along this now my heart went
begging--impoverished rascal! He went on tiptoe, begging; while I
continued to watch for the elusive star, and my soul looked into the
level eyes of God.