PAN’S PIPES
At breakfast Tony discoursed readily as ever, smiled as engagingly,
with glances no less frank, provocative, or droll. Twice he forced old
Mr. Bissant to brighten his cloudy morning face, to smite with open
palm his short white curls, and chuckle; once, even, to parry joke with
joke. But Miles sat dazed and unhappy. Their little house, lacking
so many things, had lacked also the presence of a lie; before that
presence, now, he came awkwardly, and as it were with eyes averted. He
heard Tony laugh, saw the white flash of his teeth, the quick, foreign
heave of his burly shoulders, the nameless turns of speech and look
by which friend signals to friend; he knew Tony for the same man of
yesterday, challenging the same admiration; yet between himself and
all this, a single night had stretched a dismal vacuum, a distance
slight, but both intensive and insulating. The sudden change puzzled
him abominably.
“An Italianate Englishman,” his grandfather descanted, “they used to
call a devil incarnate. I leave it to fancy what an Italian who--”
“Aha, but I’m not!” cried Tony warmly. “I have you there. My father was
Italian born, yes. That’s only half. And me, bless you, I sailed out on
an English ship a twelve-year-old. Under the same flag ever since. An
English deck is English soil. Come now, Mr. Bissant, to be honest--”
While their debate ran high, Miles slipped quietly from the room.
Last night’s fog had poured up the channel, overflowed the hills, and
now submerged all but the smoky loom of the hackmatack pillars, as
Miles passed between them. Sea-rime silvered his rough jacket; from
beneath wet eyelashes he peered into motionless, white space; the very
hill underfoot was a declivity felt, not seen. He wandered slowly down
it, hands in pockets, head bent.
To be honest! Tony’s chance phrase recurred ironically; and after it,
his saying on the hill above Kilmarnock, “You’re the sort a man can
trust.” With what? thought Miles bitterly: with lies, calculated,
shaped as confidences. He had not known, before, how utterly the older
man had captured his liking; or how, divorced from belief, liking could
become reproach. A raw simpleton, to lend a stranger his heart!
In this mood he found himself halting, without purpose, on the
Admiral’s quarter-deck. From the rail he saw neither rocks nor river,
but only the globular, spiny tufts of young Norway pines that stepped
down toward the beach. Wind-slanted, rooted in crevices, they lent
their fixity as a gauge to sight: their needles, carding sluggish
vapor, freed the spellbound air; formlessness became texture; and
fleecy filaments dissolving, twining, blending, thick as the smoke
of wet brushwood, set the whole snowy void adrift in level motion.
Somewhere, far below in the bay, a whistle mournfully bellowed. Nearer
home, but deep in the fog, sounded the unsteady bumping of a single oar.
“Hallo-o-o!” The rowing stopped; and a moment later the same high,
clear voice called, “Hallo-o-o!”
Miles trumpeted through his hands an answering hail.
“Oh!” cried the rower, with evident relief. “Hallo again. Are you a
vessel or the shore?”
“I’m the shore,” laughed Miles. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m lost out here.” The voice, floating across the hidden surface,
rang clear as from the throat of a singer. “One oar went overboard,
and the more I pull, the faster this thing goes round and round. And
the tide’s running down--out, I mean--and I’m frightened.” The bumping
noise broke in again, and again ceased. “No use! Hallo! Why, now you’re
clear round on the _other_ side!”
“Stay where you are!” cried Miles eagerly. “Wait. There’s no danger.
I’ll come out and tow you.”
He scrambled down to the beach, and along it to where Tony, for no
apparent use, maintained a small boat moored on an endless rope.
Hauling home till the black bow came cleaving the fog, he ordered
peremptorily,--
“Keep on shouting, there! What’s the matter with you? How can I find--”
“I was just thinking,” replied the voice calmly, from no great
distance. “If you come out, you may get lost, too.”
Miles cast off, and jumped in.
“On this river?” He laughed somewhat breathlessly, half at the warning,
half at a strange excitement which had mastered him. This drifting
voice he had known, from the first hail, to be a girl’s; what girl’s,
he had nearly guessed from the second; and pulling vigorous oars, he
was not surprised to see, after blind exploration and shouting, the
square bow of the magician’s punt focusing from out the heavy smoke.
Bareheaded, half turned on a thwart, and peering anxiously through that
smoke, sat a misty figure, whose light, strong lines of active youth
not even a man’s cardigan jacket could muffle. She gave a little cry of
deliverance.
“It’s fine of you--” Something cut her praise curiously short, just as
gunwale swept gunwale.
“Come aboard,” said Miles. Sheepish, and suddenly flushed, he found
himself out of all measure preoccupied with an unshipped oar. “Careful.
Step in the middle,” he added mechanically. His outstretched hand met a
warm, firm little grasp, in the same delighted instant that two ankles,
quick and slender as the feathered ankles of mythology, whipped over
into the bottom of the boat.
“Make fast your painter,” he ordered, shipping his oar in a dream.
“Make my what?” cried his passenger anxiously. He managed at last to
look up, and saw her darting puzzled glances into the punt. Cold vapors
wavered about her hair thinly, as though conquered and dispersed by
lambent brightness.
“Tie the rope,” he translated.
“Oh, this!” She obeyed, her nimble fingers rosy with the cold, her
shining head bent so zealously over the knot as to show but one brown
cheek transparently aglow with exercise.
Watching this with unbounded pleasure, he gave way. The punt fell
behind, swung dimly into their wake; the rope rose taut and dripping;
and as though satisfied with her knot, the girl suddenly faced him,
brushing from her forehead an obstinate tendril of bright hair.
“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. “I don’t--I don’t know
anything about boats.”
Again a fragment of boyhood restored: he met that look of elfin
gravity, under the wide circumflex of eyebrows, more formidable than
bows bent against him.
“How did you get lost?” he ventured in confusion; and, meaning
kindness, was dismayed to hear the question ring like a rebuke.
“Weir-poles--a whole lot drifted out of our cove,” she answered, with a
flutter of the same confusion. “He had worked so hard--It was a pity
to lose so many. I had to come out after them. He was--isn’t very well.”
“Your father?” asked Miles.
“Yes,” replied the girl uncertainly. Another flush, a deeper color in
her cheeks, allowed him to guess at Abram’s illness. “No; I call him
that, but--he’s all I have; and she was so good to me--his wife. She
sent me to school winters, and wouldn’t let--as long as she lived--”
Her words, lingering unfinished, her look penetrating the hidden
distances of the fog, seemed to dismiss a memory down some long vista.
“Were you afraid?” said Miles, between strokes.
“Of course I was,” she laughed. Her instant change of mood, her glance
swiftly returning to close quarters, but above all the radiant
conflict about lips and eyes, the honest mischief and shy directness,
struck him into a panic joy. No countenance had ever looked so quick
with various meaning, so tremulous with color, so dangerously awake
and alive, as her face now in this floating dawn, this cold, nebulous,
elemental light of the sea mist. It was a discovery in his life,
a mystery, and a power. He could have ferried her to the farthest
continent.
“Afraid?” she said. “What else? I thought I was slipping out into the
big ocean. And the fog all round! It was like--like sitting alone with
a lot of years. I thought of my sins!”
“You can’t have many.” The words sprang from impulse, free admiration;
he could have hammered out no compliments; but she willfully mistook
him, and laughed his honesty aside.
“Ah now, what a tongue you have!” And with a provoking smile, bending
aside her look, she studied the smoky water that drew astern. Under
the gray cardigan jacket, her slight, active body in the blue calico
reminded him oddly of nacre shining in some uncouth shell, or of
hazelnuts when frost has split the rough beard.
A strange motive, as strong as it was new, forced him to say:--
“The first time I saw you--” All conclusion suddenly failed him. “Do
you remember it?”
“Remember?” Again, and more deeply, she watched the slow sweep of the
current; and more deeply her blood tinted the sun-burned, oval face.
She tossed her head with a little shake, more of impatience than of
denial. “No, I--I can’t remember.”
Disappointed, frustrated, he rowed for a space in silence, knowing that
the full career of their speech had swerved awry. In a twinkling she
had withdrawn to a lamentable distance.
“But Jubilee?” persisted Miles. “And Terry, and the dog--what became--”
“All sold,” answered the girl curtly. “When she died. Sold off. Poor
little old Terry!” For a moment she sat alone with her thoughts; then
suddenly lifting her head, listened.
“What’s that?” Her tone was hard as business. “Do you hear it?”
Miles heard, and not without anxiety. A steady, muffled puffing sound
labored doggedly nearer through the fog. Against an ebb-tide that
raced for the bay and open sea, he had rowed indifferently, his
arms working, but his thoughts inclining to let the boat drift. In
the charmed isolation of the fog, it had become, for the instant, a
barge of glory, a shallop of dreams. Awake now, he recognized that
the “back-eddy” which swept the shore toward Alward’s Cove had not
yet seized their keel; that they were still in the channel; that the
channel was none too wide, and the approaching noise none too far
astern. He swung full power on his port oar.
“What is it?” repeated the girl, peering over her shoulder.
“Trim the boat,” he commanded. “Can’t tell. We’re all right.”
But of this he felt by no means sure. The steady “puff-puff” throbbed
more and more distinct, and with it came a wide whisper of rushing
water. The vagueness of all direction told him that to shout, in this
thick obscurity, would only alarm his passenger. He tugged mightily
across the current, hoping for the sudden wrench of the counter-eddy.
It did not grasp them. Instead, the noise fought closer, truculent and
panting; the whisper of rushing surfaces widened and sharpened, more
and more sibilant.
A silent explosion seemed to hoist the laggard stern of the punt,
which instantly, as though stung into live hatred, came crashing along
their port side, crowding and struggling like a horse that fights his
mate in harness. Struck by this trough of whirling suds, an oar shot
into the air. With a stagger, the boat careened as to capsize, slewed
violently on a soft upheaval. Through the mist, a pear-shaped bag of
woven cordage stole past like a phantom, above a low black bulwark;
at interminable intervals, three heavy stakes filed along, almost
overhead,--fenders hanging parallel at the same forward slant. Their
boat, righting dizzily, leaped once, cramped and awkward as a sheep
jumping a wall. And they were left pitching on a foamy wake, smothered
in the smell of steam, wrapped by a warm mist invisible in a cold.
“The oar! The oar!” cried Miles.
Long afterward, he admired her instant foresight. She had already
caught the oar-blade, just as it bobbed past in hissing lather. The tug
steadily puffed farther into the distance, and--now that their need was
over--began again the hoarse bellowing which Miles had heard in the
bay. For some moments, exchanging a queer smile that conveyed more than
utterance, each saw the other’s face touched, through the gleaming
fog, with a light still more pale and northern.
“Bail her out,” said Miles, nodding at the half-filled punt, while he
wrestled with broken thole-pins. When at last they were under way, it
was in silence.
And yet danger had advanced each in the other’s knowledge, by that
shared experience which was more than words, presence, or time--so
savage, so close upon the happy side of life, had flashed the
traitorous. Hidden together on the river, in a privacy of space, they
had heard the pipes of Pan the gracious, and now Pan the terrible had
“stamped his hoof in the night thicket.”
The waves of their enemy’s wake broke widely along the shore, with a
pleasant sound as of the sea, but roving and transitory. The eddy at
last eased the laboring oars. And by some mystery of the air, the fog
began to blur and dissolve, to rise from a clearing circle of water,
from the shaggy, wallowing rocks, the pink granite walls, the sombre
undergrowth, till the fir-tops reared like a parapet in the thick of a
siege, with ragged embrasures and sharp merlons bosomed in the smoke of
cannonades.
“Almost home,” said Miles. And while he spoke, numberless floating
bladders of seaweed brushed beneath, clogged the speed of their boat,
and then let it pass into clear water at Alward’s. The weir, a string
of cedar poles, like the tops of a sunken fence, ran a broken parallel
to their shoreward course.
“Stop a minute,” begged the girl.
Very willingly he backed water, then rested his oars.
“Before we get within hearing.” She eyed him with grave decision. “I’ve
been worried, and I want your--somebody’s advice.” Lowering her voice,
she glanced at the weir: “Could a man make his living by that?”
Miles shook his head gloomily.
“Never in the world. I’m sorry, but--”
“Thanks. I thought so,” she interrupted. “I told him, but he doesn’t
seem to care. What will become--” Her smile was friendly but sad.
“I’m breaking orders: the one thing he won’t let me do is to talk to
strangers.”
“Are we?” said Miles, more gloomily.
“You know we are,” she answered, looking down. “In one way, no. If that
thing had passed over us, out there--” The gray cardigan did not hide
a passing shiver. For a time her bright head remained drooping. “No,
we’re not. I’ll ask you. Do you know a man named Florio?”
“Do I?” he cried. “He lives with us, down there!”
“What is he?” she asked eagerly. “What does he do?”
“Nothing,” answered Miles, with a puzzled scowl. “I--I don’t know.”
“He and my father seem,” she began, then paused. “Has he anything to do
with fish--with herring?”
“Except to eat them!” Laughing at her incongruous picture of Tony,
Miles suddenly felt a new and curious pang. “Do you like him?”
She would not look up.
“I--I hate him!” Her answer trembled with vehemence. “Row, please.
Quick, I must get home!”
He gave way once more, unaccountably glad. The bow, lifting, grated in
sludgy sand. Neither spoke until he had dragged the magician’s punt
well up the beach. Though standing nearly shoulder-high beside him,
she had grown, as if at the touch of land, magically smaller; yet
her presence, her influence, freed from the confines of the boat and
the mist, not only stood more remote but reared more alarming. Their
adventure, which had seemed limitless, now poignantly ended.
“I hope,” he began, “I hope--” He longed vaguely to offer help, but
against what? And why did she still look down, as though afraid or
angry?
“What ye doin’ down there?” growled a thick, slurring voice.
“Good-f’r-nothin’, traipsin’--told ye--”
The bank and upper shore formed a layer of solid reality, below the
brooding unreality of the fog. The little house, gray and raggedly
patched, stood close at hand, against the white shafts of birches. In
the open door stood Abram, swaying blindly.
“Come ’ere!” he grumbled. “Come ’ere to me! I’ll learn ye--”
He brandished an uncertain fist, lurched a step forward, and stumbled.
The rising bank hid his fall.
Without looking back, the girl went slowly up the beach.
[Illustration]