IN SHOP AND DINGLE
IT seemed to me during the next few days that Wanza bloomed magically;
as she worked she chirruped, her feet were light, a bird seemed to sing
in her breast. I knew not to what to attribute the change. She was
still the debonair girl, but she was wholly woman; and she was vital as
a spirit, beautiful as a flower. We grew vastly companionable.
We walked together along the flowery riverways in the twilight; at
night we watched the ribbons of clouds tangle into pearly folds across
the moon’s face, and the stars grow bright in the purple urn of heaven.
Mornings we climbed the heights and gathered wild strawberries for
Haidee’s luncheon, and often in the late afternoon Wanza would come to
the shop and I would help her with her studies.
It was pleasant, too, to take the glasses, and penetrate deep into
the heart of the greenwood and sit immovable among the shrubbery,
bird-spying, as Joey called it. It was Wanza’s delight to see me
stand perfectly still in a certain spot near the shop, where a bed of
fragrant old-fashioned pinks frequently absorbed my attention, and wait
for the sparrows and nuthatches that often came to alight on my head.
Inside my shop I was tending a young cedar waxwing that had dropped at
my feet from a cherry tree near the cabin one morning. Joey had given
the bird assiduous attention, and was overjoyed when a few days later
he found it friendly enough to sit on his hand. We named the bird,
Silly Cedar. And I made him a roomy cage of slender cedar sticks. He
seldom inhabited the cage, however, choosing rather to flutter freely
about the workshop.
Wanza’s joy in the birds was a pleasure to witness. I was at my work
bench one morning, when chancing to glance through the open window I
saw a charming picture. The girl stood by the bed of clove pinks, a
veritable pink and white Dresden shepherdess in one of the stiffest,
most immaculate of her cotton frocks, her hair an unbound, pale-flaming
banner about her shoulders. On her head was poised a nuthatch.
It was the expression of her face that captivated me,--smiling, rapt,
almost prayerful, as if invoking the spirit of all aerial things.
Both arms were out as though she were balancing the dainty object
that perched so delicately upon her head. In every fibre she appeared
electrified, as though about to soar with the birds. Again I had that
sensation of glimpsing beneath the girl’s casual self and finding a
transfigured being.
The bird fluttered away as I gazed, Wanza stooped, gathering the
flowers, and I went out to her.
She flirted the pinks beneath her chin as she looked up at me.
“I’ve been up since five,” she laughed. Even her laugh was subdued.
“And what have you been doing since five?” I asked idly.
She opened a box that lay on the grass at her side.
“I’ve been up on Nigger Head after these. I saw them yesterday when I
went to old Lundquist’s to take him a bit of cottage cheese I’d made.
See!”
I looked as she bade me. Within the box were some fine specimens of
ferns and swamp laurel, and a rare white blossom that I had never seen
in western woods. An airy, dainty, frosty-white, tiny star-flower.
“They are for you. I heard you wishing for swamp laurel.”
“You are very, very kind, Wanza,” I replied.
I lifted the laurel, but my eyes were on the white flower, and my heart
was overcharged, and as I looked a blur crossed my vision and I could
not see the waxen petals. But I saw another woods, lush and sweet, hard
by a southern homestead, I heard the darkies singing in the fields
adjoining, and the sound of the river running between red clay banks. I
saw my mother’s smile.
I felt weak at that moment. I needed to grip hard a friendly hand.
“Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, and whoever
walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his
shroud.” Walt Whitman spoke truly. Someway I knew that Wanza’s sympathy
was true and exquisite, that her understanding was profound. I had
never before thought of this, but suddenly I knew that it was so. She
tendered me the little white flower on her open palm, and I reached out
and took it and I took her hand, saying:
“You are a good girl, Wanza Lyttle.”
My tongue was ineffectual to say what I would have said, and so I said
nothing. The white of her face crimsoned as I held her hand. Her blue
eyes said a thousand things I could not sense. But her lips merely
murmured, “What is the swamp laurel for, Mr. Dale?”
“I want to make a design of laurel for a tray I intend to carve. You
see, Wanza, I am beginning already to think of the holiday trade. At
Christmas I shall send some of my work to the city to an art store
there.”
We passed on to the workshop, and presently Joey joined us there.
“It seems to me, Mr. David,” he said as he entered, “that to-day is
yesterday.”
I smiled at him appreciatively. I had come to call Joey my philosopher
in knee breeches. He resumed, puffing out his cheeks in his
characteristic way, “’Cause I been so busy. I guess if a body was busy
enough there wouldn’t be no time.”
“We make our own limitations, Joey,” I said, bending over my cedar
chest that was all but finished. “The Now is the principal thing, boy.”
“Mrs. Olds is the queerest lady,” he went on, “always watching the
clock. An’ she don’t like our ways, Mr. David--she said so! She says
we’re slip-shod. Hit and miss, she says, that’s the way we live. My,
she’s funny! At night she says, ‘Well, I’m glad this day is over,’
an’ in the morning she says, ‘Dear me! I thought it would never come
morning! I’m glad the night is gone.’ I said to her--I said to her--”
Joey paused, having used up his breath, and requiring a fresh supply.
“Go slowly,” I advised. “What did you say, Joey? Get a good breath and
tell Wanza and me.”
“I said: ‘How can you hate both times? It keeps you busy hating, don’t
it?’ An’ if you’re busy hating, Mr. David, what time do you get to feed
the birds, an’ watch the squirrels, an’ make burr baskets and cedar
chests, an’ bow-guns and flutes?”
Joey put his head on one side and looked up at me inquiringly out of
his bright shrewd eyes.
“Not much time, I’m afraid, Joey,” I responded, knowing that he
expected a reply.
“Of course not. Come here, Silly Cedar,” he called softly to the
Waxwing. He gave a musical whistling note, and the bird, that was
perched on the work bench, flew to him and alighted on his outstretched
hand. He made a picture that I was to remember in other sadder days,
standing thus, holding the bird, scarce moving, so great was his
ecstasy.
Very soon after this the chair reached completion. Upholstered in
burlap and stuffed with moss, it stood in the small rustic pergola
outside the cedar room, awaiting Haidee. Joey’s hassock rested beside
it. And at last one day after I had worked myself into a state of fine
frenzy at the delay I was told that she was sitting in state in the new
chair awaiting me. I hurried to the Dingle, parted the underbrush, and
stood gazing at my wonder woman before she was aware of my coming.
She sat leaning back in the big chair. She looked very weary and pale
as she reclined there. The rough silk of her robe was blue--the rare
blue sometimes seen in paintings of old Madonnas. Her lovely throat was
bare. Her creamy hands with their pink-tinted nails lay idly clasped in
her lap; and her feet, resting on Joey’s hassock, were shod in strange
Oriental flat-heeled slippers with big drunken-looking rosettes on the
toes.
“You are quite recovered?” I asked, stepping forward.
“Oh, Mr. Dale!” she cried, and seemed unable to proceed. And I found
myself bending above her with both of her hands in mine, looking down
into her shadowy, mysterious eyes.
I summoned my voice at last, and spoke rather indistinctly: “Joey and I
have been awaiting your convalescence impatiently. Joey has been very
anxious about his Bell Brandon, as he calls you.”
She still sat with her hands in mine, and she looked up at me with a
strangely quiet gaze and replied gravely: “I like Joey’s name for me.
Does he really call me that?”
“Why,” I said, “I have even ventured to call you so in mentioning you
to Joey.”
I released her hands and seated myself on the steps below her. There
was a silence. The sun slipped behind a cloud. The shadows in the
Dingle deepened to invisible green velvet. In the perfume and hush I
could hear my heart beat. It was very still. A cat-bird called from the
thicket, the hum of bees buzzing among the clover in the meadow came to
us with a sabbath sound.
Haidee looked at me and smiled. “It is very restful here. How is your
other patient progressing?”
“Very well, I believe.”
“This is a splendid sanatorium. I had some wonderful dreams in that
cedar room.”
“I should like to hear about them. I am curious to know what dreams
the room induced,” I answered, with rather too much impressment, I’m
afraid.
She leaned her head against the burlapped chair back and lowered her
lashes against her cheek. I studied her face. During her illness she
seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation. There were lines
about her drooping eyes, something cold and almost austere in the
expression of her face that I had not noticed before. She seemed
farther from me than she had yet seemed--immeasurably remote.
“The dreams were very good dreams--restful dreams.”
“Yes,” I said gently.
“They were dreams of homey things--simple, plain things--and yet there
was a zest in them--a repose--a complete forgetfulness.”
“Forgetfulness?”
“Yes. Isn’t forgetfulness the Nirvana of the Hindu? If we remember
we may regret. If we have no thought backward or forward, we are
blissfully quiescent.”
I watched a yellow warbler preening itself on a swinging bough of a
tamarack. “It is easier to have no thought forward--perhaps,” I said
slowly after a pause.
“You think so, too? I am sure of it. The past is an insistent thing--a
ghoulish thing--waving shrouded arms over the present. To forget!--ah,
there’s the rub.”
She spoke precipitately, turning her head restlessly this way and that
on the rough cushion. The line of her throat, the tiny fluffy ringlets
at the roots of her hair, the curve of her lovely cheek, stirred my
blood strangely.
“Tell me something more of yourself,” I blurted out abruptly.
She started. Her eyes grew bleak, worn with memories, it seemed; her
face that had shone warmly pale, changed and stiffened to marble. She
answered in a cold, slight voice: “There is so little to tell.” After
awhile she added: “Perhaps some day you will tell me your story.”
I sat and watched the yellow warbler, reflecting on the strange relief
it would be to recite to sympathetic ears my pent-up dreary tale, my
baleful tale of a scourging past, of present loneliness and hard plain
living. It was the sort of tale that is never told--unless the teller
be a driveller. I laughed cheerlessly, and someway the brightness of
the hour was clouded by the phantom of the past that Haidee’s words
had invoked. And the phantom dared to stand even at the gate of the
future and demand toll, so that neither past, present nor future was a
thing to rejoice in.
My face must have grown grim. I clenched and unclenched my hand on my
knee. Haidee’s voice continued: “But in the meantime you don’t know
me--the real every day me--and I don’t know you--the real you; and it’s
interesting, rather, to speak to each other, like sliding wraith-like
ships that pass to opposite ports. We fling our voices out--then
darkness again--and a silence.”
“I am what I am,” I answered quickly.
She nodded concurrence. “Dear me! Of course. But you were not always
what you are now. That’s the point. And, some day, I shall persuade you
to tell me all.”
I answered pointedly: “In the words of Olivia, ‘you might do much.’”
She laughed oddly, almost amusedly, at my vehemence, and swayed back a
little from me as I held out my hand. “Good-bye,” I said, “for to-day.”
And when she yielded me her hand I pressed it lightly and let it go.
I had never tried, until that moment, to analyze the quality of my
sentiment for Haidee. I had been filled with a vague romantic idealism
where my wonder woman was concerned, but suddenly I was restless, and
dissatisfied with idealising. I wanted to know Judith Batterly--the
real woman. I wanted to pierce the veil of mysticism in which she was
wrapped. I was not content with the artificiality of our discourse. It
seemed to me I failed to strike a note truly sound in any of our talks.
The real woman eluded me. I could not bring Haidee down to my plane
from the dream-world where only she seemed to function. She was ever
remote. And I wanted to understand fully my feeling for her.
When I fell asleep that night, dreams of Haidee and Wanza were
commingled. Once I awoke, dressed completely, and walked outside the
workshop in the clear, balmy air of the night. I lay down on the river
bank and watched a particularly big bright star that hung just over
the crest of Nigger Head. I thought of Wanza--of her new and gentler
ways that were replacing the old crisp brightness of demeanor--and I
smiled. I thought of Haidee--and I sighed. Then my thoughts flew to the
kickshaw case I had given Wanza and her reception of it, and to the
swamp laurel she had risen at daybreak to gather for me, and thinking
of these things I went back to the workshop and crept in beside Joey,
and with my arm about the lad slept dreamlessly till morning.