CHAPTER XV
I BEGIN TO WONDER ABOUT WANZA
SOMETIMES I grew perverse, and went about the tedious common round of my tread-mill existence doggedly, taking umbrage at Mrs. Olds for the many unnecessary, trivial services she exacted. She seemed to delight in keeping my neck under the yoke. There was always a door sagging on its hinges, a knife that needed a new handle, a lamp or two that she or Wanza had forgotten to fill. The mice that I took from the traps each morning were legion. They were Mrs. Olds’ favorite topic of conversation at breakfast time. How one small cabin could harbor so fierce and vast a horde I could scarce conceive. I believe I half suspected Mrs. Olds of emulating the pied piper, and rounding them up from the fields and woods. I was appointed custodian of the wood-rats’ traps, as well. These were taken alive; and one morning I slyly let one escape beneath my tormentor’s chair. Jingles saved the situation by pouncing on the rodent and snapping his teeth together on its neck. I came to have small appetite for breakfast.
I began each day by carrying water from the spring to fill the barrel outside the kitchen door. Mrs. Olds was apt to mount guard over the barrel during this period, to see that no earwigs or bits of leaves went into it from the pail. She was very particular to have the barrel kept sweet and clean, and every second day I scrubbed and rinsed the inside. She required very fine wood for the kitchen stove for quick fires when she desired to heat her patient’s food; and for the fireplace in the front room she asked me to select other wood than cedar, cedar being prone to crackle and snap. I was well nigh staggered with the knowledge of how a woman’s housekeeping differs from a man’s. Joey and I had felt no lack in the good old days. I smiled to see my lad’s eyes open widely at Mrs. Olds’ occasional reference to our “pitiful attempts at housekeeping.”
“Are our housekeeping pitiful?” he invariably asked me later.
But though I swallowed my rising gorge, and managed to work under Mrs. Olds’ coercion, there was ample time left in which to labor at the simple tasks I loved.
Joey and I had discovered that a pair of martins were nesting in a hollow tree near the cabin, and in order to induce other pairs to pass the summer with us I had decided to erect a few bird houses on the premises. I was in the Dingle one evening, therefore, in the act of hoisting a martin house on a cedar pole, when Joey came through the elder bushes with his inquisitive small face in a pucker.
“Mrs. Olds says birds don’t like bird houses,” he hazarded.
“Indeed?” I murmured.
“Do they, Mr. David?”
“I think so, lad.”
“She says she guesses p’haps martins do, mor’n other birds. Why do martins like bird houses ’specially, Mr. David?”
“Why, lad,” I replied, straightening, and taking my pipe from between my lips, “I think it is because the Indians, long ago, before the white man’s time, made snug houses for the martins out of bark and fastened them to their tent poles; and accordingly the martins have grown friendly, and they like us to be hospitable and prepare a home for them.”
“I don’t like to have to coax them,” Joey decided. “You’re awful good to things, Mr. David—sometimes when you coax me, I know I’d ought to get whipped instead.”
It was the purple gloaming of an unusually sultry day; and as Joey finished, I looked at my watch.
“Bed-time, boy,” I announced.
“Hoo—hoo! Hoo—hoo!” he called suddenly, throwing back his head. His eyes went to the windows of the cedar room. Soon a faint answering “Hoo—hoo!” resounded. He sprang up the steps, and grew hesitant before the closed door. But in another moment it swung open and Haidee appeared. She put her arms about the boyish visitant.
“I’ll kiss you on each eyelid,” I heard her say. “That means happy dreams. Go to sleep and dream of ‘Mina, Nainie, and Serena’—oh, I forgot! They are for little girls’ dreams. What shall I tell you to dream of?”
“P’r’aps I’ll dream of ‘Dwainies’ and ‘Winnowelvers’—what lives in Spirkland—an’ all them things you telled me about, shall I?” Joey responded chivalrously.
“I think it would be very lovely if you would,” Haidee’s tender tones replied. And then the kiss was given—a kiss “like the drip of a drop of dew.”
I heard Joey’s abashed, “Good night—good night, Bell Brandon.” Then he beat a hasty crashing retreat through the underbrush, and my wonder woman came down the steps and stood at my side.
“What a glorious sky!” she exclaimed. “Soon there’ll be a trail of star dust across that mauve vastness up yonder. I wish I might go down to the river and see the reflections.”
There was a wistful young note in her voice.
“Nothing easier,” I assured her. “You seem quite at home on your crutches. I think we can manage.”
And so it happened that we watched the sun set together, sitting side by side on the green plush river bank. It was a gorgeous setting, and a more gorgeous afterglow. The meadows across the river were like a wavy robe of pink silk. The stars crept out and floated low like skimming butterflies. The river was amber and gold. Haidee wore the blue robe that I found so distracting. As she talked, from time to time, she turned her head and gazed, pensive-eyed, across the water, and I saw the black loop of her hair, the line of cheek and throat that moved me to such profound rapture. I sat there awkward and tongue-tied while she told me that old Lundquist and a couple of hands from the village had begun repairs at Hidden Lake.
“I have enjoyed your hospitality,” she said earnestly, “but I must go as soon as the cabin is in condition. Wanza will go with me. You are hospitable even to the birds,” she finished smilingly. “I think you must have Finnish ancestry.”
“My people are Southerners,” I answered, scarcely thinking of my words.
“How interesting. Did you live in the South?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! Shall you return some day?”
I shrank from her open look. I answered, “No,” quietly.
Her black-tressed head dipped forward on her chest and her lips grew mute as if my quick denial had silenced them. After a long while she said:
“What grand horizons you have in the West. I grow happier with each sunset that I see. Look at that fleet of pinkish cloudlets—those cloud-chariots of fire racing in those pearly streets.”
“The South cannot compare with the West,” I said. “Could any one describe this valley? Only a poet could do it. The summers here!—crisp, cool nights for sleep, clear bracing days for work—”
“And what for relaxation?”
“What do you think?”
“The twilights for relaxation, surely. The twilights—purple and mysterious. See those weird trees that leap like twisting flames into the sky. Look at the river, lovingly clasped in mountain arms. Listen to the bird-twitterings. Mr. Dale, what is the bird that sings far into the night?”
“The bird that says: ‘Sweet, sweet, please hark to me, won’t you?’”
She laughed. “Something equally plaintive, at any rate.”
“It’s the white-crowned sparrow. You’ll hear it through the darkest nights. Its song has all the sombre quality of the dark hours. It’s our American nightingale.”
“Mr. Audubon. You know tomes of bird lore, don’t you? Joey says you are writing a nature story. I didn’t know the sparrows sang like nightingales before.”
I smiled down into the engaging face, and then I threw back my head and whistled. I began with a rich bell-clear note, this merged into a well defined melody, and terminated in a pealing chanson. “The meadow lark,” I said, “which is not a lark at all, but belongs to the oriole family. It is an incessant singer.”
“Joey said you whistled like the birds. Why, you’re a wonder! A craftsman—a fixing man—and—a bird boy.”
“A bird in the heart is worth more than a hundred in the note book,” I quoted.
The evening ended all too soon.
Two days later Joey brought me the information that Haidee was walking about in the Dingle with the aid of a single crutch.
“An’ she could easily go without that, she says, Mr. David. An’ she says soon she can send them to the children’s hospital in the city.”
“Give Bell Brandon my congratulations,” I bade Joey as I rode away.
I had been to the cabin on Hidden Lake but once since the accident to my wonder woman. I had gone there the following day to fetch Haidee’s mare. Wanza had gone with me and had brought away a few essential articles of clothing for her employer.
On my arrival I found that old Lundquist and the village hands had cleared away the debris, and that the work of restoring the lean-to was well under way.
I made a rough draft of the improvements Haidee and I had planned for the cabin, and drew up some specifications for the men, and then I strolled down to the lake. I was saying to myself that the cabin should be tight and sound for the fall rains, and that if Haidee would allow me I would further embellish it with a back porch and a rustic pergola like the one I had built for Joey at Cedar Dale, when I heard a splash in the water, a sudden swishing sound in the rushes, and saw a movement in the tules. I sprang to the water’s edge. Soon a canoe emerged from the green thickets.
Wanza sat in the canoe, plying the paddle. A triumphant light was on her face, her hands shone bronze in the sun, her red lips smiled mischievously. She called to me:
“I’ve run away! I had to get out on the river, I just had to! Mr. Dale, do you hear the yellow-throat singing ‘witchery—witchery—witchery’?”
I straightened my shoulders with a quick uplift of spirit. Her unexpected presence set my pulses beating a livelier measure. Her cornflower blue eyes rested on me, then wandered to the birch thickets along the shore, and she sat leaning slightly forward, her gaze remote, a charming figure in the sunlight.
“Would you like to hear me recite my little piece about the yellow-throat?”
“While May bedecks the naked trees
With tassels and embroideries,
And many blue-eyed violets beam
Along the edges of the stream,
I hear a voice that seems to say,
Now near at hand, now far away,
‘Witchery—witchery—witchery.’”
Her glance came back to me.
“I wish, Mr. Dale, that we had blue violets in these woods—they all seem to be yellow. Why do you stare at me so?”
“I had no idea you were coming; it is a stare of surprise.”
“But you’re glad to see me, now, aren’t you? I’ll paddle you home. How’s the cabin getting on?”
“It is scarcely habitable yet. But I think the men are getting on as well as could be expected.”
Her face was dappled with light and shadow as she sat there. An exquisite, happy radiance emanated from her. She looked inquiringly into my eyes and swept her paddle.
“You are surprised to see me, you sure are! But now that I am here I want to see the improvements. Give me your hand, David Dale.”
She beached her canoe, stood up, and placed her hand on my shoulder as I bent to her. Very lightly I passed my arm about her. She flashed a laughing side glance at me, and put one foot over the side of the craft. “I don’t need that much help,” she said, grimacing.
The canoe rocked, suddenly. She stumbled. I caught her. She was against my breast. “You see you needed that much help,” I laughed boyishly.
“Let me go, Mr. David Dale.”
She shook herself free and stood apart from me. The sunlight slanted on her face as she stood there, flushing wildly, gilded her white neck, flashed on her bare arms. She held her head down for a moment, and then she raised it and looked at me. Her eyes were soft and wet. “What a goose I was,” she cried softly. “Come on, I’ll race you to the cabin!”
I paddled home in the canoe with Wanza, after directing Lundquist to ride my horse back to Cedar Dale. The river purred to us all the way, the meadow larks and warblers chanted roundelays of joy and love from the thickets, and the birch trees shook their silver, tinkling leaves in elfish music above the sun-kissed water. We were very silent drifting down the river, and my thoughts were strange, strange thoughts. I had begun to wonder about Wanza—Wanza, who understood my rapture at the sight of the new day, who felt the same tightening of the throat at the song of the birds, the same breathlessness beneath the stars. I had begun to ask myself if, after all, she were not as fine as another, even though through long association her rareness for me was impaired.