XXV
One Sunday, Eve, from her window--she was rather a lazy girl thatSunday--witnessed the following departures from the camp. Sam Langhamand Mary in a guide boat, with fishing-tackle and an immense hamperwhich looked like lunch. Herring and Phyllis could be seen hoisting thesails on the knockabout. Herring had never sailed a boat and wasprepared to master that simple art at once. Lee and Renier were girt forthe mountain. Renier appeared to have a Flobert rifle in semihidingunder his coat, and it was to be feared that if he saw a partridge, hewould open fire on it, close season though it was. He and Lee wouldjustify this illegal act by cooking the bird for their lunch. Gaycommandeered the _Streak_ and departed at high speed toward Carrytown.She had in one hand a sheet of blue-striped paper, folded. It resembleda cablegram. And Eve thought that it must be of a very private nature,or else Gay would have telephoned it to the Western Union office,instead of carrying it by hand. The next to depart from the camp wasArthur. He moved dreamily in a northwesterly direction, accompanied byUncas, the chipmunk, and Wow, the dog. Other guests made departures.
All of which Eve, half dressed and looking lazily from her window,lazily noted, remarking that for her Sunday was a day of rest and thatshe thanked Heaven for it. And she did not feel any differently untilMaud and the Carolinians walked out on the float and began to pack aguide boat for the day.
Then her lazy, complacent feelings departed, and were succeeded by asudden, wide-awake surge of self-pity. She felt like Cinderella. Nobodyhad asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and nobody had even thoughtof doing so. When she was dead they would gather round her coffin andremember that they hadn't asked her to go anywhere or do anything, andthey would be very sorry and ashamed and they would say what a nice girlshe had been, and how she had always tried to give everybody a goodtime.
Between laughter and tears and mortification, Eve finished dressing, sether lovely jaw, and went out into the delicious, cool calm of themountain morning. She could still hear the voices of many of thedeparting ones; and the rattling and creaking of the knockabout'sblocks and rigging. She heard Herring say to Phyllis: "I think it wouldbe better if I could make the boom go out on this side, but I can't."Phyllis's answer was a cool, contented laugh. It was as if she said:"Hang the boom! _We're_ here!"
Have you ever had the feeling that you would like to board a swift boat,head for the open sea, and never come back? Or that you could plungeinto some boundless, trackless forest and keep straight on until youwere lost, and died (beautifully and painlessly), and were covered withbeautiful leaves by little birds?
Eve enjoyed (and suffered from) a hint of this latter feeling. She ate alight breakfast (it would be better not to begin starving till she wasactually lost in the boundless, trackless forest), selected a light,spiked climbing-stick with a crooked handle, headed for one of thenortheasterly mountains, and was soon deep in the shade of the pines andhemlocks.
After a few miles, the trail that she followed split and scattered inmany directions, like the end of an unravelled rope. She followed an oldlumber road for a long way, turned into another that crossed it at anangle of forty-five degrees, took no account of the sun's position inthe heavens or of the marked sides of trees. If she came to a highplace from which there was a view, she did not look at it. She just keptgoing--this way and that, up and down. In short, she made a conscious,anxious effort to lose herself. The easterly mountain toward which shehad first headed kept bobbing up straight ahead. And always there wasthe knowledge in the back of her head of the exact location of The Camp,and of all the other landmarks, familiar to her since early youth.
"Drag it!" she said, at length, her eyes on the mountain. "I'll climbthe old thing, put melancholy aside, and call this a good, ifunaccompanied, Sunday."
The morning coolness had departed. It was one of those hot, breathless,mountain forenoons that kill the appetite and are usually followed,toward the late afternoon, by violent electrical disturbances.
Eve was not as fit as she had supposed, or as she thought. As a matterof fact, she was setting too fast a pace, considering the weather andthe angle of the mountain slope; and she was as wet as if she had playedseveral hard sets of tennis with a partner who stood in one corner ofthe court and let her do all the running.
As she climbed, reproaching her wind for being so short, she rememberedthat the hollow tip of this particular northeastern mountain was filledwith a deep pool of water. Nobody had ever called it a lake. The mapcalled it a pond; but it wasn't even that--it was a pool. Springs fed itjust fast enough to make up for the evaporation. It had no outlet. Itwas shaped like a fat letter O. At one end was a little beach of whitesand. Indeed, the bottom of the pool was all firm, smooth, and clean,and the whole charming little body of water was surrounded by thickgroves of dwarf mountain trees and bushes. Not content with being aperfect replica, in miniature, of a full-grown Adirondack lake, thispool had in its midst an island, a dozen feet in diameter, denselyshrubbed and shaded by one diminutive Japanesque pine.
When Eve came to the pool, hot, tired, and rather bothered at thethought of the long walk back to camp, she had but the vaguest idea ofjust why the Lord had placed such a pool on top of a mountain, impelledher to climb that mountain, and made the day so piping hot.
Eve stood a little on the sand beach. She felt hotter and hotter, andthe pool looked cooler and cooler. Presently, a heavenly smile ofsolution brightened her flushed, warm face, and she withdrew into ashady clump of bushes. From this there came first the exclamation "Dragit!" then a sound of some sort of a string being sharply broken in two,and then there came from the clump of bushes Eve herself, looking forall the world like a slice of the silver moon.
And as you may have seen the silver moon slip slowly into the sea, soEve vanished slowly into the pool--all but her shapely little roundhead, with its crisp bright-brown hair and its lovely face, happy now,exhilarated, and eager as are the faces of adventurers.
And Eve thought if one didn't have to eat, if one didn't end by beingcold, if one could make time stand still--she would choose to be alwaysand forever a slice of the silver moon, lolling in a mountain pool.
She had the kind of hair that wets to perfection. But it was not thesort of permanent wave which lasts six months or so, costs twenty-fivedollars, and is inculcated by hours of alternate baking and shampooing.Eve had always had a permanent wave. She feared neither fog nor rain,nor water in any form of application. And so it was that, now and then,as she lolled about the pool, she disappeared from one fortunate squareyard of surface and reappeared in another.
Half an hour had passed, when suddenly the mountain stillness was brokenby men's voices.
Eve was at the opposite side of the pool from where she had left herclothes. Between her and the approaching voices was the little island.She landed hastily upon this and hid herself among the bushes.
Three gross, fat men and one long, lean man, with a face like leatherand an Adam's apple that bobbed like a fisherman's float, came down tothe beach, sweating terribly, and cast thereon knapsacks, picnicbaskets, hatchets, fishing-tackle, and all the complicated paraphernaliaof amateurs about to cook their own lunch in the woods.
All but one had loud, coarse, carrying voices, and they all appeared tobelong to the ruling class. They appeared, in short, to have neithereducation nor refinement nor charm nor anything to commend them asleaders or examples. Eve wondered how it was possible for them to findpleasure even in each other's company. They quarrelled, wrangled, foundfault, abused each other, or suddenly forgot their differences,gathering about the fattest of the fat men and listening, almostreverently, while he told a story. When he had finished, they wouldthrow their heads far back and scream with laughter. He must have toldwonderfully funny stories; but his voice was no more than a huskywhisper, so that Eve could not make head or tail of them.
After a while the whispering fat man produced from one of the basketsfour little glasses and a fat dark bottle. And shortly after there wasless wrangling and more laughter.
/> The thin man with the leathery face and the bobbing Adam's apple put afishing-rod together, tied a couple of gaudy flies to his leader, andbegan to cast most unskilfully from the shores of the pool, moving alongslowly from time to time.
The fat men, occasionally calling to ask if he had caught anything,busied themselves with preparations for lunch. One of them madetremendous chopping sounds in the wood and furnished from time to timeincommensurate supplies of fire-wood. Smoke arose and a kettle wasslung.
Meanwhile Eve, cowering among the bushes, for all the world like herfamous ancestress when the angel came to the garden, did not quite knowwhat to do. She had only to lift her voice and explain, and the menwould go away for a time. She felt sure of that. She had been broughtup to believe in the exquisite chivalry of the plain American man.
But there was something about the four which repelled her, which stuckin her throat. She did not wish to be under any sort of obligation toany of them. And so she kept mousy-quiet, and turned over in her mind animmense number of worthless stratagems and expedients.
Have you ever tried to lie on the lawn under a tree and read for an houror two--incased in all your buffer of clothes? Try it some time--withoutthe buffers. Try it in the buff. And then imagine how comfortable Evewas on the island. Imagine how soft it felt to her elbows, for instance.And imagine to yourself, too, that it was not an uninhabited island--butone upon which an immense gray spider had made a home and raised afamily.
From time to time the inept caster of flies returned to the camp-fire,always in answer to a boisterous summons from his friends. And aftereach visit, his leathery face became redder and his casting more absurd.
Finally his flies caught in a tree, his rod broke, and he abandoned thegentle art of angling for that time and place. Meanwhile steam ran fromthe kettle and mingled with the smoke of the fire. The sound of voiceswas incessant. Ten minutes later the gentlemen were served.
Midway of the meal, some of which was burnt black and some of which wasquite raw, there was produced a thermos bottle as big as the leg of arubber boot. And a moment later, icy-cold champagne was frothing andbubbling in tumblers.
In that high air, upon a thick foundation of raw whiskey, the brilliantwine of France had soon built a triumphant edifice, so that Eve, coldnow, miserable, and frightened, felt that the time for an appeal tochivalry was long since past.
Far from their wives and constituents, the four politicians wereobviously not going to stop short of complete drunkenness. Indeed, itwas an opportunity hardly to be missed. For where else in the woodscould nature be more exquisite, dignified, and inspiring?
It got so that Eve could no longer bear to watch them or to listen tothem. Pink with shame, fury, hatred, and fear, she stuffed her fingersin her ears and hid her face.
Thus lying, there came to her after quite a long interval, dimly, ashout and a howl of laughter with an entirely new intonation. She lookedup then and saw the thin man, waist-deep in the bushes, just where shehad left her clothes, making faces of beastly mystery at his companions,beckoning to them and urging them to come look. They went to him,presently, staggering and evil.
And then they scattered and began to hunt for her.