EYES FOR TWO
"This day smells as though it had been made in the country," Karl said,
leaning from the dining room window which Ernestine had thrown wide open
as she rose from the breakfast table.
"Yes, and looks that way," she responded, leaning out herself, and taking
a long draught of the spring.
"Let's take a walk," he said abruptly.
"Except when you asked me to marry you--you never proposed a more
delightful thing," she responded with gayer laugh than he had heard for a
long time.
"Suppose we walk down through the park and take a look at the lake," he
suggested.
"I call that a genuine inspiration!"--losing no time in getting Karl's
things and her own.
Nothing could have pleased her more than this. It seemed beginning the
spring right.
"I can fancy we are in Europe," he said, after they had gone a little
way, and she laughed understandingly;--this seemed closer to the spirit
of the old days than they had come for a long time.
Her guiding hand was on his arm, but more as if she liked to have it
there, than as though necessary. "Your little finger could pilot me
through Hades" he said, lovingly, gratefully, as a light touch told him of
a step to go down, and again she laughed; it was very easy to laugh this
morning.
The winter, full of hard things for them both, had gone now, and spring,
as is spring's way, held promise. In the laboratory they no longer
treated Ernestine with mere courteous interest. That day in December when
she went down to Dr. Parkman's operation had marked a change. Since then
there had been a light ahead, a light which shed its rays down the path
she must go.
What did it matter if she were a little stupid about this or that, if Mr.
Beason was unconsciously rude or Mr. Willard consciously polite? For she
_knew_ now--and did anything matter save the final things? With her own
feeling of its not mattering their attitude had seemed to change; she
became more as one with them--she was quick to get that difference.
"You're arriving on the high speed," Dr. Parkman had assured her when he
visited the laboratory a few days before.
So she knew why she was happy, for added to all that was it not a
glorious and propitious thing that Karl felt like taking a walk? Did it
not argue a new interest in life--a new determination not to be shut off
from it? And Karl--why did he too seem to feel that the spring held new
and better things? Was it just the call of spring, or did Karl sense the
good things ahead? Could it be that her soul, unable to contain itself
longer, had whispered to his that new days were coming?
"Why, even a fellow on his way to the penitentiary for life would have to
get some enjoyment out of this morning," he said, after they had stood
still for a minute to listen to the song of a bird, and had caught the
sweetness of a flowering tree.
"And oh, Karl," she laughed, joyously, "you're _not_ on your way to the
penitentiary for life."
"No," he said, and he seemed to be speaking to something within himself
rather than to her,--"I'm _not_!"
They had reached Jackson Park, and sat down for a little rest before they
should wend their way on to the lake. "Oh, Ernestine," he said, taking it
in in long breaths, feeling the dew upon his face, and hearing the murmur
of many living things,--"_tell_ me about it, dear. I want to see it too!"
"Karl--every tree looks as though it were just as glad as we are! Can't
you feel that the trees feel just as we do about things? The leaves
haven't all come out yet, some of them are holding themselves within
themselves in a coy little way they have--although intending all the time
to come out just as fast as ever they can. And it's that glorious,
unspoiled green--the kind nature uses to make painters feel foolish. Oh,
nature's having much fun with the painters this morning. Right over
there,"--pointing with his finger--"is such a beautiful tree. I like it
because all of its branches did not go in the way they were expected to
go. Several of them were very perverse children, who mother trunk thought
at one time were going to ruin her life, but you know lives aren't so
easily ruined after all. 'Now you go right up there at an angle of
twenty-two degrees,' she said to her eldest child. 'Not at all,' said the
firstborn, 'I intend to lean right over here at whatsoever angle will
best express my individuality.' And though the mother grieved for a long
time she knows now--Karl--how foolish we are! But listen. You hear that
bird who is trying to get all of his soul into his throat at once? He's
'way up there on the top branch, higher than everything else, and so
pleased and proud that he is, and he's singing to a little blue cloud
straight above him, and I tell you I never saw such blue--such blue
within blue. Its outside dress is a very filmy blue, but that's made over
an under dress of deeper blue, and there's just a little part in it where
you can see right into the heart, and that's a blue so deep and rich it
makes you want to cry. And oh, Karl--the heart itself has opened a little
now, and you can get a suggestion, just a very indefinite suggestion--but
then all inner things are indefinite--that inside the heart of the cloud
is its soul, and you are permitted one fleeting glimpse to tell you that
the soul of the cloud is such a blue as never was dreamed of on land or
on sea."
"I can see that cloud," he said,--"and the bird looking up at it, and the
tree whose eldest child was so perverse and so--individual."
"And, Karl," she went on, in joyous eagerness, "can't you see how the
earth heaved a sigh right here a couple of hundred centuries ago--now
_don't_ tell me the park commissioners made them!--and that when it
settled back from its sigh it never was quite the same again? It was
a sigh of content--for the little slopes are so gentle. Gentle little
hills are sighs of content, and bigger ones are determinations, and
mountains--what are mountains, Karl?"
"Mountains are revolutionary instincts," he said, smiling at her
fancifulness--Ernestine was always fanciful when she was happy.
"Yes, that's it. Sometimes I like the stormy upheavals which change the
whole face of the earth, but this morning it's nice to have just the
little sighs of content. And, dear--now turn around and look this way.
You can't really see the lake at all--but you can tell by looking down
that way that it is there."
"How can you tell, liebchen?" he asked, just to hear her talk.
"Oh, I don't know _how_ you can. It's not scientific knowledge--it's--the
other kind. The trees know that the lake is there."
"Let's walk down to the lake," he said. "I want to feel it on my face.
And oh, liebchen--it's good to have you tell about things like this."
As they walked she told him of all she saw: the people they met, and what
she was sure the people were thinking about. Once she laughed aloud, and
when he asked what she was laughing at, she said, "Oh, that chap we just
passed was amusing. His eyes were saying--'My allowance is all gone and I
haven't a red sou--but isn't it a bully day?'"
"There's no reason why I should be shut out from the world, Ernestine,"
he said vigorously, "when you have eyes for two."
"Why, that's just what I think!" she said, quickly, her voice low, and
her heart beating fast.
The shadows upon the grass, the nursemaids and the babies, the boys and
girls playing tennis, or just strolling around happy to be alive--she
could make Karl see them all. And as they came in sight of the lake she
began telling him how it looked in the distance, how it seemed at first
just a cloud dropped down from the sky, but how, upon coming nearer, it
was not the stuff that clouds are made of, but a live thing, a great live
thing pulsing with joy in the morning sunshine. She told him how some of
it was blue and some of it was green, while some of it was blue wedded to
green, and some of it too elusive to have anything to do with the
spectrum. "And, dearie--it is flirting with the sunlight--flirting
shamefully; I'm almost ashamed for the lake, only it's so happy in its
flirtation that perhaps it is not bothered with moral consciousness. But
it seems to want the sunlight to catch it, and then it seems to want to
get away, and sometimes a sunbeam gets a little wave that stayed too long
and kisses it right here in open day--and isn't it awful--but isn't it
nice?"
In so many ways she told how the lake seemed to her--how it seemed to her
eyes and how it seemed to her heart and how it seemed to her soul, how it
looked, what it said, what it meant; what the clouds thought of it, and
what the sunlight thought of it, what the wind thought of it, what the
dear babies on the shore thought of it, and what it thought of itself.
She could not have talked that way to any one else, but it was so easy
for her heart to talk to Karl's heart. One pair of eyes could do just as
well as two when hearts were tuned like this!
And then, when she did not feel like talking any more, they stood there
and learned many things from the voice of the lake itself. "Ernestine,"
he said, when they turned from it at last, "it seems to me I never saw
Lake Michigan quite so well before."