“Off with ‘Gyp,’ as always.” The sister was not concerned.
“‘Gyp’ is mild, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes; stupid.”
“Which way did she go?”
“Her usual--down Cresheim Valley.”
They trotted off toward Chestnut Hill. Blynn broke into a chatty strain
until they had turned into the pike which marks the county line.
“Let’s go up the Wissahickon,” he suggested. “You can turn off here and
go through Cresheim.”
After leaving Main Street they plunged into the Cresheim Valley, which
in the eighteenth century was a thriving industrial center, with
prosperous mills--three or four of them--busy at the manufacture of
hosiery and paper. One has only to recall the conspicuous masculine
leg of that century to know the demand for proper hose, and when one
is reminded that Cresheim Valley produced the paper for the printing
of the Declaration of Independence, the historic setting is made; but
steam, trousers, and a less rebellious time had passed the hand of
oblivion over the once busy vale.
As a result, the old road was ragged and rocky, and the only sign that
broke the effect of forest primeval was the ruins of two of the old
mills, a half-broken dam, and a dangerous looking mill race.
Blynn kept to the safe rôle of talker; but inwardly he chafed and
worried. Somewhere down in those leafy depths an unknown foreigner was
enticing a young girl to come to him....
He scrutinized both sides of the road as he neared the ruined
paper-mill. Tethered among the bushes he knew “Gyp” was peacefully
cropping. He listened and watched, but at no time lost his cue in the
small talk; and was repaid by a slight movement of the bushes and the
sight of a long nose reaching for green branches.
“Sorry” neighed in greeting and stretched his head to look; but “Gyp”
withdrew directly to munch his bunch of leaves.
“Has ‘Gyp’ a white star on his nose?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “Do you see her?”
“No,” he looked the other way. “I just guessed. Most horses do.”
Below the mill he claimed to have dropped a glove, got out, and ran
swiftly back.
Only one dilapidated corner of the ancient paper-mill was still
standing, and that had to be reached via a bridge of logs. Canvas was
fastened over holes in the roof, and odds and ends of boards made a
patch-work flooring, through which the rushing mill race could be
clearly seen. The waters below swirled noisily over rocks and fallen
masonry.
Save for an old stool, some rag rugs and a mass of copper odds and
ends, the mill was quite empty.
IV
“THAT NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE”
Almost as Blynn surveyed the empty mill he knew he had made a mistake
in coming at all, and was instantly eager to get out unobserved. He
knew what a child would think of this sort of spying and how it would
take weeks of building up to get back the lost confidence. Particularly
was it important just now to maintain the genuine intimacy which had
miraculously grown up between them in so short a time. As he stumbled
up the rocky Valley road he was apprehensive of seeing and being seen.
Perhaps Bardek and she had been watching from near-by bushes. That
thought chilled him. Mixed with the fear of losing the child’s faith in
him as trusty pal was the quick antagonism against that other pal, who
was no doubt with her now in this wild spot.
It was a case for slow treatment. Hurry would spoil all. To come near
the rendezvous at all was a grave mistake, he told himself; he had
obeyed an impulse, purely a personal one, too, and it was an impulse
which his mind should have resolutely checked. It shamed him a little
to think how amateurishly he had acted, after all his knowledge of the
mind of children.
Gorgas must take him to Bardek in her own good time. One must play a
waiting game and trust mightily that all would be well.
He regained the carriage, exhibited a glove and took up the dropped
conversation.
“I don’t agree with you about the Duke,” he continued. Miss Levering
had seen “Twelfth Night” recently and had read it over to prepare
herself for a conversation with a university instructor. “The Duke
behaves quite properly, if you will agree with my theory.”
“He was a goose,” commented the lady, “groaning over his countess and
not having the gumption to go up to her and talk it out. And in the
last act he whisks over to Viola just because she puts on dresses.
Shakespeare nodded when he made the Duke; that’s my theory.”
“Let me tell you mine,” said Blynn. “To the Elizabethan, love was an
infection, a kind of pestilence, like the plague, which one caught from
another. Once you have it you are ill. You become moody, put on gay
clothes, wash your face, and demand sad songs. They sold medicines,
love philters to give the disease, and hate potions to cure it. A
chap usually knew when he had caught the pesky thing, but he was not
always sure of the source. Well, the Duke had a bad case. He got it
from the boy Cesario, who was really, as you know, a charming young
lady disguised. Now the very salt of the play is the Duke’s blunders
in guessing who played the trick on him. The Elizabethan audience
understood that joke and enjoyed every one of his false moves toward
the conquest of the Countess. It’s as if a fellow had the influenza
and began to treat himself as if he had sunburn. Every application of
cold cream and every sneeze would be comedy to the onlooker. So in
the end, when the Duke discovers the cause of his trouble he promptly
marries it; as most of us do. Oh, he isn’t a bit inconsistent, if you
understand Elizabethan love.”
“Well, that only proves the play is founded on an error,” she
persisted. “If you must have a lot of historic learning to appreciate a
play, it is not great drama. I insist, Shakespeare nodded.”
“What makes you so certain that love is not a plague?”
“It may be, for all I know,” she parried. “But I should think two
modern young people would know when they--”
“But do they, always? A man may behave exactly like the Duke, have all
the symptoms, and not guess for the longest while what really is the
matter with him. Frequently he blames it on the wrong lady. Sometimes
somebody has to take him aside and speak roundly to him--the girl’s
father, for instance. And there are enough bad marriages to make me
believe that lovers often make a wrong diagnosis. It’s still a mystery
to me. Cupid and his arrows was not a bad theory. He was a wretched
shot, you know; frightfully bad. That would explain a lot of mismating.”
“But the Countess?” she persisted. “She wanted to marry a woman just
because she found her dressed in man’s clothing; and what did she do
later? Promptly switched off to the lady’s brother, Sebastian. There!
I have settled your theory. She had never seen Sebastian before. She
couldn’t get any--any pestilence or plague from a man who wasn’t about.”
Blynn laughed. “I didn’t want to lecture to you; but the theory is
rather complicated and you have hit upon a fine illustration. How
far can love carry? We say, as far as one can see distinctly. The
Elizabethans put no limit--as far as the ends of the earth, to the very
stars and back again.
“Beatrice and Benedict are in love long before they know it. Petruchio
has picked out his Katharine before he sees her. Viola is in love
with the Duke the moment she hears his name. You see, they took their
cue from the carrying power of the mysterious plague. Look the way La
Grippe is ravaging us; and we think it has travelled from the Far East.
Besides, they believed the stars arranged all this sort of thing. We
don’t believe in fate. Therefore we make ourselves too wise. I incline
toward the Elizabethan theory. Do you know Crashaw’s lines ‘To His
Supposed Mistress’?
‘Who’er she be
That not impossible She
That shall command my heart and me;
Wher’er she lie,
Locked up from mortal eye
In shady leaves of destiny.’
“I’m content to believe in ‘the shady leaves of destiny.’”
Miss Levering was busy managing “Sorry,” who seemed restive. His ears
were perked ahead, and he tossed his head nervously.
“Sorry! Sorry! Sorry, boy,” she soothed. “He sees something strange.
There’s a man sitting on the roadside with a lot of pails around him.
Trust ‘Sorry’ for picking out anything unusual.”
Blynn looked forward, but from his side of the carriage could see
nothing.
“It’s a tramp, I suppose,” she conjectured. “They roost in here. Looks
like a travelling tinker. ‘Whoa, Sorry! It’s all right, boy!’ If I talk
to him he calms down. ‘Whoa, Sorry! Keep your head down, boy!’”
The man came into view; he was seated on a log hammering at a copper
disk, a swarthy, stoutish fellow. A huge gold watch-chain stared out
from his waistcoat. He wore no collar. A faded soft hat was decorated
with a long turkey-feather. The costume, plus a large mustachio and
much unshaved stubble, gave him an air of vagabondia.
“Sorry” slowed down and dug into the ground; the man looked up with
smiling face.
“_Bon jour, la compagnie!_” he saluted, flourishing his hammer. Broad
rings flashed from his fat hands.
Blynn searched about for traces of companions. The tall bushes gave no
sign.
“_Bon jour_, Bardek,” returned Miss Levering. “Whoa, Sorry, you fool.
It’s only Bardek. Bardek won’t eat you; whoa, boy!”
“_Mais, oui!_” laughed Bardek. “_Il sait bien qu’ j’en ai souvent
mangé du ch’val!_ The horse-flesh is vairy good.”
Blynn leaned forward to talk to him. Here was a fine chance to get
acquainted.
“Good afternoon,” he greeted. “My French isn’t good enough to expose to
the open air. I’ll have to talk English. Do you under_stand_--”
But “Sorry” had evidently comprehended Bardek’s cannibalistic reference
to the joy of eating horse-flesh, for he jolted Blynn down hard on the
seat. At the syllable “--_stand_” Allen Blynn had abruptly sat. As they
shot briskly up the drive, Blynn looked back to see the round face of
Bardek extended in malevolent laughter.
When they had settled down into a normal pace, Blynn inquired,
“Who is this Bardek? Seems to me I have seen him often hanging about
this region.”
“He’s a Frenchman--at least, I think he is French. Sort of a vagabond
mender of kettles. I don’t know how he gets his living. He seems always
well-fed and contented. He has a wife off there somewhere, and a couple
of babes-in-the-woods. He comes and goes. Sometimes he is away for
weeks on his rounds. We often stop to chat with him, Gorgas and I. Drat
that animal. He ought to know Bardek. I’m ashamed of him. It was that
big vase-like thing that scared him. He’d jump at a new tin-cup.”
They talked of the horses, then, as they emerged from a side-road, of
the beauty of the Wissahickon Valley, a lovely unchronicled spot in
American scenery, Miss Levering steering the conversation by gentle
steps back to “Twelfth Night.”
“I’m almost converted to the Elizabethan view,” she admitted.
“I’ve been going over in my mind a number of girls I know who have
confessed how the man came, saw, and conquered. Girls do gabble, if
it is dark enough, especially just after the marriage. They all talk
like your Elizabethans, claim to have been destined for each other
from the beginning, and so on; yet they all fought the man off at
first; all except one girl--the man tried to get away from her, but
something--your ‘shady destiny’--what was it?--got him at last.... It’s
a horrid thought.”
“Why?”
“Well, it takes all choice away. Heavens! You might be destined to
marry the lamp-lighter! I shouldn’t want to catch anything from
‘Aurora.’”
“Aurora,” the lamp-lighter, was one-armed and weather-beaten and
gnarled like an ancient mariner; his classical name was a Levering
invention.
The winding Wissahickon curled over its rocks far below, and thick
trees covered every hill. An occasional carriage passed, mostly elegant
broughams with liveried footmen and milady taking her afternoon drive;
bicycles whizzed by with much churning of warning bells. Near the
“Hill” Miss Levering cut off into a secluded side-road roofed by old
trees.
Keyser Levering was twenty-two, and had been grown up and more or less
her own master since she was fifteen; yet she felt just a little
self-conscious on two counts. First she was alone in the secluded
woodland with a young man. Of course, a chaperone would have been
absurd; America had adopted the European chaperone for only very
official affairs. In the ’80’s she would not have thought of going to
the theater with him without elderly assistance, but she was permitted
by the code to take him driving up the Wissahickon.
Secondly, she had dared openly to discuss with him the awful topic
of love. To be sure, they had done it in an academic setting. Who
could object to a learned consideration of Elizabethan literature?
Nevertheless, she was not unmindful of the personal modern application
of Elizabethan “theory.”
She did not want to become personally involved. Her instincts would
have fought off any attempt on the young man’s part to bring the topic
up to date; yet she found herself, mothlike, desiring him to do just
that. His Elizabethan theory of maidens disturbed by unknown forces,
holding out willing hands to nameless gentlemen, and hardly sure of
recognizing the rescuer when he appeared--that was not only a startling
idea to her, but it struck surprisingly near a description of her own
state.
For a year or more she had been in a stupor of daydreams over that
“not impossible He” that should command her heart and her. He took no
visible shape in her mind, but remained near and yet disappointingly
aloof and shadowy. Sometimes she had the palpitating feeling that he
was just around the corner, that his nearing foot-falls could be
heard. At other times she was sure she was dancing with him or talking
to him over a dinner table. Many a young man was flattered by her
searching gaze or by the subtle intimacy which she contrived to throw
into a simple personal question.
Once during the previous winter Blynn had been frightened off by one
of these moods of hers, and she knew it and was ashamed. The last
thing she meant to do was to apprise this young man of her quest. He
was being probed and cross-questioned; that was all; but he had not
understood, and had misnamed her, coquette.
This pleasant jog among the leafy bowers of the Wissahickon, charged as
it was by thoughts of Gorgas and her perilous rendezvous with Bardek,
caused the professor to recast his idea of Keyser Levering. They had
talked of love, to be sure, and she had held to the topic deliberately;
yet with her eye and a considerable part of her attention necessarily
on the horses, she had carried on the chat strictly like a graduate
student. Of course, she knew the man. One flashing side-long glance
from her fine, brown eyes would have sent him flying to cover and to
silence.
Along the shaded road they stopped to admire the wonder of the place,
and to allow the horses to drink at a spring. While “Sorry” and “Ned”
cropped the bushes the two humans nibbled sandwiches and talked.
Miss Levering’s questions showed intelligence; that is, they showed
that she knew how to stir up the lecturer in him. She wanted to
consider him carefully; so she prodded him gently with artful
interrogations; and kept him to his “theory.”
“What brought Petruchio from Verona to Padua?” Blynn asked, as he might
have questioned a student.
“I have forgotten the details of the play,” she replied, “I think he
said he had come to marry a rich wife.”
“Exactly,” Blynn nodded. “He was drawn to Padua as I have seen a
butterfly drawn unerringly to its mate across miles of country. Of
course, Petruchio didn’t know what was sending him forth; any more
than he knew why his diaphragm was pumping air into his lungs, or
why invisible Neptune influences our tides, or why a green weed will
suddenly spring into a gold and white daisy. Life is so crowded with
intelligent mysterious design that it is difficult to believe that
anything happens haphazard.”
“I wonder if my young man has left Verona,” the lady commented with a
comic sigh. “I’m getting on! Twenty-two, you know.” She shook her head
with grotesque sadness. “He’ll have to hurry or--I’ll be travelling out
to meet him.”
“He may be nearer than Verona,” Blynn essayed, still in the seriousness
of his exposition. “He may be right here,” waving his hand.
The outright smile on her face caught his eye and brought him to earth.
“All right,” he assented cheerfully. “I’ll swallow my theory whole--he
may be right here beside you, for all either of us knows. I knew a
chap who lived next door to his future wife and never guessed it until
one summer he went abroad. He used to tell her all about his girls,
too, and get her help and advice. Out on the ocean somewhere it came to
him suddenly. Then he wanted to stop the boat! He came back on the next
steamer. Fact! Fortunately his wire got in ahead of him, which gave
her time to think things over. She was most surprised, but she had to
acknowledge that he was right! They figured out that they had been in
love a dozen years without once being aware of it. Frightful waste, eh?
They’re the happiest couple I know.”
They sat in silence for a moment or two, each thinking a separate train
of thought.
“Petruchio,” she turned to him quietly, “would you be so kind as to get
out, put the check-rein back on ‘Ned’ and ‘Sorry’, and then hop in and
drive with me back to Padua?”
“Ah, Kate!” he cried, springing out of the carriage. “Mad Kate, merry
Kate, the daintiest Kate of all the Kates, and sometimes the curst,
that right merrily I will.”
On the way home he induced her to talk of Gorgas, and as an elder
sister she entered readily into a discussion of her future education.
She told of the child’s fondness for boyish sports. Did he know that
Gorgas had won a huge silver cup in a tennis contest? Yes, indeed; she
had carried it off matched against pretty stout boys. Quite a hoyden,
she was. Of course, she was getting too old for that sort of thing
now. Something had to be done. She agreed that whatever it should be,
it should be done gradually. The child must not be driven. So Blynn
very adroitly filled Miss Keyser’s mind with the right attitude toward
Gorgas. He was sure of having an ally in the work he had before him,
and one that would not in his absence set up wrong family currents.
Twilight was settling when they arrived home. From McAlley, stableman,
errand-boy and gardener, he learned that Gorgas and “Gyp” had not come
back.
“She’ll be ’long soon,” McAlley remarked without concern. “Mebbe ‘Gyp’
is playin’ lame. He’s a scamp, that he is, a scamp.”
Blynn could not share McAlley’s indifference. His heart beat horridly,
and for no good reason that his mind could tell him. The family always
dined late, and the household was run on a do-as-you-please system.
Perhaps this child had been out at dusk many times before. All that he
told himself; yet terrifying apprehension seized him.
In fifteen minutes he was plunging down Cresheim Valley, now quite
shadowy. Up the hill before him came a slow figure walking beside
a horse. He dove into the bushes and watched her pass him. In the
deceptive gloom she seemed to him again a self-possessed little woman.
Far enough back he followed, within him the sickening relief that comes
after sudden fear.
“I’ll never get used to this,” he said to himself, as he lost sight of
her in the dark, when she turned into her own lane. “If that lassie
belonged to me I’d see that she’d come home in daylight. She has no
idea of the risk she’s running.”
He could not discern figures any longer, but he could make out
McAlley’s lantern and could hear the voices.
He was feeling quite peaceful until one-armed “Aurora,” the
lamp-lighter, who always loped along half bent over, gave him a fright
by suddenly bobbing around the corner and scuttling across the road to
a crazy street-lamp.
V
BARDEK
[Illustration: Kuck-uck! Kuck-uck! Ruft aus dem Wald.]
The opportunity of making the acquaintance of Bardek came sooner than
Blynn had planned, and in a very natural manner.
The instruction of the Williams boy was carried on almost entirely in
the open air. That youngster could no more enjoy himself cooped up in
a house than a bear-cub. The moment he entered the shadowy door of the
school-house his spirits congealed and his mind began to slow up. The
rooms of the “Hall” had been planned entirely for adults--so had the
discipline--and rather slow-blooded adults at that. The temperature and
the ventilation were exactly right for elderly ladies and gentlemen.
And they talked to children about draughts! They might just as well
have worried them about sclerosis of the arteries.
In his adroit way Blynn had enticed the boy to play a “sort of game”
with colloquial German. Call it a “game,” and the lad would play until
he dropped; and by letting him shout at the top of his voice he was
easily persuaded that it was not “study.”
In one of the wild paths in the Valley, where the sumac and the young
poplar made a complete screen, Blynn and “Chuck” Williams, loudly
reviewing German phrases, came upon a voice, rich and fine, carolling
_deutsche Lieder_. It was quite near at hand among the tangle of
blackberry vines and elderberry and came booming suddenly at them as if
purposely to startle.
“Kuckuck! Kuckuck! Ruft aus dem Wald,
Lasset uns singen; tanzen und springen,
Frühling! Frühling! wird es nun bald!”
It was the song of the cuckoo, which every German child knows from the
cradle. While it is yet winter the tremulous bird catches premonitions
in the air and sings its eager song of spring. “Let us dance and sing,”
it cries to all the woods; “Come out! Come out, into the blooming
fields and among the budding trees!” Carried away by its own urging
desire it flies from its haunts searching for the Spring.
The great voice softened and grew tenderly pathetic. Ah! brave little
singer, your song is false, your throbbing heart has lied to you.
Winter, stark, chilling winter is around you and within.
“Kuckuck! Kuckuck! Treflicher Held
Was du gesungen ist dir gelungen
Winter! Winter! räumet das Feld.”
At the end of the song the boy and the teacher applauded vigorously.
“Bravo!” called Blynn. “Once more! _Encore!_”
The bushes parted, disclosing the round face of Bardek.
“Grüss Gott!” he greeted jovially. “Have I not now heard the German
speech? Die süsse Sprache meines Vaterlands?”
“Yes,” rejoined the astonished Blynn; “you did hear us talking German,
a sort of German.”
“Och! it was a sort, yes,” the shoulders shrugged cynically; “but it
was German, the speech of my country.”
“But you are not German, are you?” persisted Blynn. “Yesterday you
were--”
“_Ach!_ Must man be ever the same? Yesterday was I French; gut! Heute
bin ich wirklich deutsch. Auch gut! Morgen, vielleicht, bin ich
italienisch! _Hora è sempre!_”
“What does he say?” inquired “Chuck.”
“My good boy,” Bardek explained in clear English. “Yesterday I have
been French. Good! It pleased me so to be. The day was French,”
flourishing his hands about the sky, “quite French. Today it pleases
me to be German. How could anyone be anything but German on a day like
this?” waving again toward the thick, white clouds and indicating
the cool Northern breeze. “_Ein tousand ein hunderd ein und zwanzig!
Was!_... Now at this moment am I North-German; soon,” he squinted at a
gathering darkness in the southwest, “I am becoming _Bayrischer_. It
rains ever in München; _nicht wahr_? _Ach!_ _München_ is a heaven of
earth--rain, rain, rain, warm _himmlischer_ rain on the outside, and
_bier, bier_, cool, _dunkels Löwenbraü_ on the inside!”
His voice was heavy and deep, the bass singing quality always present,
and his intonation noticeably distinct like that of the book-read
foreigner. He struck his consonants hard, as if he enjoyed them,
especially the final t’s and s’s; his l’s trolled along the roof of his
mouth; and he breathed his vowels sonorously.
He laughed as he stepped into the path, and added, still addressing the
boy,
“When the sky is all of blue and pink, so am I Italian. My skin
changes. I am then a new beast. Oh! It is good to change the skin and
the mind. Boy, don’t you get sick to be always the American beast?”
“Not on your tin-type!” “Chuck” spoke up promptly. “I don’t want to be
a Dutchman. Rather be what I am. But it’s fun talking Dutch with Mr.
Blynn.”
“‘Not on your tin-type,’” echoed Bardek, eyes extended in mock
surprise. “_Was für eine Sprache!_ What a language!”