"Don't interrupt," I answered.
But my spirit had come down to earth, and after the first jolt I
realized that, as usual, Jonathan was right.
We plunged out again into the buffeting wind and the starlit darkness,
and I followed blindly as Jonathan led across the marshes, around pools,
over ditches, until we began to see the friendly twinkle of house lights
on the edge of the village. On through the lanes to the highroad,
stumbling now and then on its stiffened ruts and ridges. As houses
thickened the gale grew noisy, singing in telephone wires, whistling
around barn corners, slamming blinds and doors, and rushing in the
tree-tops.
"O for that haymow!" I gasped.
"The open fire will be better." Jonathan flung back comfort across the
wind.
Ten minutes later we had made harbor in the little house by the shore.
The candles were lighted, the fire set ablaze, and as we sat before it
cooking chops and toast I said, "No, Jonathan, the open fire isn't any
better than the haymow."
"But different?" he suggested.
"Yes, quite different."
"And good in its own poor way."
He turned his chop. Chops and toast and a blazing fire give forth odors
of distracting pleasantness under such circumstances.
"I think," I said, "that each gives point to the other."
"Aren't you glad I took you for ducks?" he asked.
I mused, watching my toast. "I suppose," I said, "no one in his senses
would leave a comfortable city house to go and lie out in a marsh at
night, in a forty-mile gale, with the mercury at ten, unless he had some
other motive than the thing itself--ducks, or conspiracy, or something.
And yet it is the thing itself that is the real reward."
"Isn't that true of almost everything?" said Jonathan.