Tramping on Life Part 104

She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a far dream to reality.

"Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?" fingering her hair with flexible fingers like a violinist trying his instrument.

"Yes!" I stopped abruptly and flushed.

"Did Jones like you?"

"I think he did."

"Jones is an eccentric ... but nine-tenths of the time he is right in his contentions ... his moral indignations ... it is his spirit of no compromise that defeats him."

With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me....

"Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing to get out of."

I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture.

"Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field taking a walk."

I paused where I was. Mrs. Baxter stood directly in the pathway that led to my tent. And the second act of _Judas_ had begun to burn in my brain, during my vigorous walk back from Jones's shack....

"In the yard of an inn at Capernaum. On the left stands the entrance to the inn. In the extreme background lies the beach, and, beyond, the Sea of Galilee. A fisherboat is seen, drawn up on sh.o.r.e. Three fishermen discovered mending nets, at rise of curtain."

The stage was set for the second act. I must get the play finished in the rough. I owed this much to Mr. Derek, who was faithfully backing me--if not to my own career ... and already I had succeeded in interesting Mitch.e.l.l Kennerley, the new young publisher, in my effort.

After the book was disposed of ... then Europe ... then London ... then Paris, and all the large life of the brilliant world of intellect and literature that awaited me.

But, at the present, one small, dainty, dark woman unconsciously stood in my pathway. I looked into Hildreth Baxter's face with caution, strangely disquieted, but proud to be outwardly self-possessed.

"Let's _us_ take a walk," she suggested.

"No, I must go to my tent and write!"

"Oh, come now ... don't you be like Mubby!... that's the way _he_ talks."

"All right," I a.s.sented, amazed at her directness, "I'll put my work by for the day--though the entire dialogue of the three Galilean fishermen about the miracle of the great draught of fishes is at this very moment burning in my brain."

She laid her hand lightly, but with an electric contact, on the bend of my arm, and off we started, into the inviting fields.

Not far out, we came across a group of romping children. They were shouting and chasing one another about, as happy dogs do when overjoyed with excessive energy.

The example the children set was contagious.... Hildreth and I were soon romping too--when out of the former's sight. We took hands and ran hard down a hill, and half-way up another one opposite, through our own natural impetus.

We changed our mood, strolling slowly and thoughtfully till we came to a small rustic bridge, so pretty it seemed almost like stagecraft, that spanned, at one leap, one of the countryside's innumerable, flas.h.i.+ng brooks. We stood looking over into the foaming, speeding water.

"There's one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and disagreements of the elders, the place is a children's paradise."

"That's only because they have all nature for their backyard--no thanks to their elders," Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a quick smile, "the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go."

"Does that mean that you are unhappy?"

"I suppose I should say 'no.'"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Neither do I, then."

Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth's corner.

We strolled further ... into the fields again ... with linked comradely hands. It seemed that she and I had been born brother and sister in some impossible pastoral idyll.

A change in our spirit again. A fresh desire to romp.

"Let's play just as if we were children, too."

"Tag! You're _it_!" and I touched her arm and ran. She ran after me in that curious loping fas.h.i.+on peculiar to women. I turned and wound like a hare. She stopped, breathless. "That's no fair!" she cried, "you're running too fast."

"Well, then, I'll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!"

She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise. I ducked and swerved and doubled.

"You're quite quick and strong," she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught her by the shoulders.

I stooped over, hunching my back.

"Come on, play leap-frog," I invited. She hesitated, gave a run at me, put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck. We collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.

Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.

"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."

We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.

"--wonder if he saw us?"

"--perhaps--but what matter if he did?"

"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."

We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.

We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness ... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.

"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."