Jewel Weed Part 8

"Well, our height above the sea-level--" d.i.c.k began.

"Oh, rot!" Ellery exclaimed. "It's something more than air--it's atmosphere. You feel here that it's glorious to work."

"You make me proud of you, old boy."

"It's funny how universally you fellows call me 'old boy'. I suppose I was older than the rest of you. I had to take the responsibility for my own life too soon and it took out of me that a.s.surance that most of you had--that complacent confidence that things would somehow manage themselves. But I'm getting even now. I'm appreciating being young, which most men don't."

"Bully for you!" d.i.c.k cried. "If you couldn't be born a Westerner, you are born again one. I am moved to tell you something that gave me a small glow yesterday. I met Lewis--the editor of the _Star_, you know, Madeline--and he insisted on stopping me and congratulating me on having brought Mr. Norris to St. Etienne; said he was irritated at first by having a man forced on him by influence, when there was really no particular place for him, but, he went on, 'Mr. Norris is rapidly making his own place. We think him a real acquisition.'"

"Oh, pooh!" Norris lapsed sulkily into his usual quiet manner. "Of course I can write better than I can talk. My thoughts are just slow enough, I guess, to keep up with a pen."

d.i.c.k laughed softly as though he were pleased at things he did not tell.

Madeline, for the first time, gave her real attention to Mr. Norris, whom she had not hitherto thought worth dwelling on--at least when d.i.c.k was about. Never before had this young man talked about himself.

A silence fell.

"Was that a wood-thrush?" Norris asked, manifestly grasping at a change of subject.

"I don't know, and I don't intend to know," Madeline cried, with such unusual viciousness that the two men stared. "Poor birds!" she said.

"I've nothing against them, but I'm in rebellion against the bird fad.

I'm so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gus.h.i.+ng, 'Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!' and you know they haven't, and they wouldn't care anyway, and their mother may be dying."

Ellery laughed, and d.i.c.k said:

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to invent a fad of my own."

"Let us in on the ground floor."

"If you like. I'm learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm's is as delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut."

"One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way," Ellery said.

Madeline looked at him and he smiled.

"You're getting poetical, old codger," said d.i.c.k. "You must be in love."

Ellery blushed, but d.i.c.k went on, oblivious of byplay. "I move that we celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking basket."

So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Sh.e.l.ley from his pocket and read _The Cloud_, which d.i.c.k followed by a really funny story from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to the young are the chief interests. It takes years "that bring the philosophic mind" to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler, violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the immediate presence of nature.

This was one day. On another d.i.c.k was full of his adventures of the week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that their birth-pangs had been so picturesque?

Or again, d.i.c.k told them of those other mills, which were the chief foundation of St. Etienne's wealth, piles of gray stone, for ever dust-laden and dingy, into which poured a never-ending stream of grain, and out of which poured an equally unceasing stream of bags and barrels laden with flour. Around the wide interiors wandered a few men, gray too, who peeped now and then into caverns where hidden machinery did all the work. Outside, locomotives whistled and puffed and snorted, as they switched the miles of cars to and from the mills. Great vans rolled up with their burdens of fresh empty barrels to be filled and rolled away again.

It was the commonplace of daily toil, but d.i.c.k made it vivid, because it was in him to see all things as the work of men, and whenever you catch them doing real work, men are interesting.

Sometimes d.i.c.k had other stories to tell. In his collegiate days, he had grown familiar with the typical slum and its problems. The cla.s.s in sociology had visited such. So he went to the slums of St. Etienne, and behold, they were not slums at all, for the slum can not be grown, like a mushroom, in a night. It must have a thousand nauseous influences stagnating for a long time undisturbed. But here were meager little wooden huts, flanked by rusting piles of sc.r.a.p-iron, or flats along the river-bottom where the high waters of spring were sure to send the dwellers in these shabby apologies for homes scrambling to the roofs, or drive them to the shelter of the neighboring brewery. Here as the waters swept under the stony arches of the bridges, old women tucked up their petticoats and fished for the richness with which a city befouls its river. Here they made themselves neat woodpiles of the drift of the sawmills, and turned an honest penny by exhibiting on their roofs gaudy advertis.e.m.e.nts of plug-tobacco, that those who pa.s.sed on the bridge above might look down and read and resolve to avoid the brand thus obnoxiously glorified.

Sometimes d.i.c.k had to relate a picturesque interview with a policeman who unfolded to him unknown phases of life, for though he believed in himself, Percival also believed in the other man, and therefore made him a friend. Every one likes a jolly friendly prince, and that was d.i.c.k's type.

Or he would dip into a police court where all the stages of wretchedness were pitchforked into one another's evil-smelling company, so that it ranged from the highest circle of purgatory to the lowest depths of h.e.l.l.

"Why do you go to such places, d.i.c.k? It's nauseating," Madeline exclaimed.

"Why?" he demanded. "I suppose that sometime, when I've made over my information into the neat systematic package that you prefer, I shall start a soul-uplifting row. I look forward to that as my career. You ought to get a career, Madeline."

"A career? I know the verb, but not the noun," she retorted saucily.

"I'm afraid mine is nothing but the trivial task, flavored with all the flavors I like best."

Sometimes, when they went home together at night, Percival had stories to unfold to Norris alone--stories he could not tell Madeline, of things found in the mire, upon which the healthy happy world turns its back when every night it goes "up town" to pleasant hearthstones and to normal life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces--of innumerable schemes to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases of his study that d.i.c.k looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination, as more and more he saw how the hands stretched out of that mire smirched the city which he hoped to serve.

Sometimes, and this was when they were with Madeline again, Ellery would have his experience to tell, redolent of printer's ink, and full of the interest of that profession which is never two days the same--stories of how business toils and spins and is not arrayed like Solomon. Norris, too, was beginning to run up against human nature both in gross and in detail, and to know the world, from the fight last night in Fish Alley up to the doings of statesmen and kings. Madeline had little to tell, for she was living quietly at home, taking the housekeeping off her mother's hands and driving her father to the morning train. She had few episodes more exciting than an afternoon call or a moonlight sail. But the young men brought her their lives, and when she had made her gay little bombardment of comment, they felt as though some new light had fallen upon familiar facts. The very simplicity of her thought put things in the right relation and gave the effect of a view from a higher plane.

There were many times when they did not discuss, but gave themselves to the joy of young things. They sailed, and Madeline held the tiller; and, when evening came on, they curled down with cus.h.i.+ons in the bottom of the boat and sang and chattered the twilight out. They played golf and tennis, and the blood leaped in their veins, for whatever they did, they did it with heart and soul. As for their relations with one another, these were taken for granted, and what they meant, not one of the three stopped to question. It was enough that they were sweet and satisfying in silence.

Late in the season there came a Sunday, memorable to Ellery, when d.i.c.k had gone away for some purpose, and, after a little self-questioning, Norris ventured alone for his afternoon with Madeline. She welcomed him with such serene unconsciousness that he wondered why he had hesitated.

"I'm not so good a sailor as d.i.c.k, Miss Elton," he said. "Will you trust yourself with me?"

"Being an independent young woman, I'm willing to depend on you."

"A truly feminine position."

"It means that I am quite capable of seizing the helm myself if you should fail me," she laughed.

"And I am masculine enough to determine that you shall get it only by favor, not by necessity," he retorted.

"That suits me quite well," Madeline answered gravely.

"And you are not apprehensive of storms in the vague far-away?"

"Don't. I'm so contented with things as they are that I do not want to think of far-aways or of anything that means change."

"You are satisfied with to-day?" he persisted.

"Perfectly."

Ellery flushed with traitorous rejoicing that d.i.c.k was absent. It was a day of suns.h.i.+ne--not the ardent blaze of summer, but the crisp glow of October that seems all light with little heat. The lake was so pale as to be hardly blue, and girdled with soft yellow, touched only here and there with the intenser red of the rock maples. Back farther from sh.o.r.e rose the tawny bronze of oaks. The light breeze flung the _Swallow_ along with those caressing wave-slaps that are the sleepiest of sounds.

To sail under that sky, with Madeline leaning on her elbow near at hand, they two separated from the rest of the world by wide waters, was like a brief experience of Paradise. Ellery watched the light tendril of hair that touched her cheek, lifted itself and touched again, near that lovely curve above her ear. The cheek was warm and creamy but untouched by deeper color. He fell into that mood of blessed silence that, as a rule, comes only when one is solitary.

As they rounded at the dock he came back to himself with a sudden wonder if she had missed the t.i.tillation of d.i.c.k's chatter, for she had been as silent as he.

"I'm afraid I have been very dull. I enjoyed myself so much that I forgot to try to amuse you."

"It's been a heavenly sail, exactly to match the day," Madeline answered with a deep contented sigh that filled him with delight. "I was this moment thinking what a comfort it was to know you well enough so that I didn't have to talk. It's a test of comrades.h.i.+p, isn't it?"

As they smiled at each other, his heart leaped with the consciousness of a bond below the surface.