CHAPTER XII
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.