Chapter 7

In such a place you must surrender yourself to its influences, profoundly yet vaguely melancholy, or you must resist them with whatever gaiety is in you, or may be conjured out of others. It was conceded that Mavering was the life of the party, as the phrase goes. His light-heartedness, as kindly and sympathetic as it was inexhaustible, served to carry them over the worst places in the road of itself. He jumped down and ran back, when he had passed a bad bit, to see if the others were getting through safely; the least interesting of the party had some proof of his impartial friendliness; he promised an early and triumphant emergence from all difficulties; he started singing, and sacrificed himself in several tunes, for he could not sing well; his laugh seemed to be always coming back to Alice, where she rode late in the little procession; several times, with the deference which he delicately qualified for her, he came himself to see if he could not do something for her.

“Miss Pasmer,” croaked her friend Miss Anderson, who always began in that ceremonious way with her, and got to calling her Alice further along in the conversation, “if you don't drop something for that poor fellow to run back two or three miles and get, pretty soon, I'll do it myself. It's peyfectly disheaytening to see his disappointment when you tell him theye's nothing to be done.”

“He seems to get over it,” said Alice evasively. She smiled with pleasure in Miss Anderson's impeachment, however.

“Oh, he keeps coming, if that's what you mean. But do drop an umbrella, or a rubber, or something, next time, just to show a proper appreciation.”

But Mavering did not come any more. Just before they got to the cove, Miss Anderson leaned over again to whisper in Alice's ear, “I told you he was huyt. Now you must be very good to him the rest of the time.”

Upon theory a girl of Alice Pasmer's reserve ought to have resented this intervention, but it is not probable she did. She flushed a little, but not with offence, apparently; and she was kinder to Mavering, and let him do everything for her that he could invent in transferring the things from the wagons to the rocks.

The party gave a gaiety to the wild place which accented its proper charm, as they scattered themselves over the ledges on the bright shawls spread upon the level spaces. On either hand craggy bluffs hemmed the cove in, but below the ledge it had a pebbly beach strewn with drift-wood, and the Bay of Fundy gloomed before it with small fishing craft tipping and tilting on the swell in the foreground, and dim sail melting into the dun fog bank at the horizon's edge.

The elder ladies of the party stood up, or stretched themselves on the shawls, as they found this or that posture more restful after their long drive; one, who was skilled in making coffee, had taken possession of the pot, and was demanding fire and water for it. The men scattered themselves over the beach, and brought her drift enough to roast an ox; two of them fetched water from the spring at the back of the ledge, whither they then carried the bottles of ale to cool in its thrilling pool. Each after his or her fashion symbolised a return to nature by some act or word of self-abandon.

“You ought to have brought heavier shoes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a serious glance at her daughter's feet. “Well, never mind,” she added. “It doesn't matter if you do spoil them.”

“Really,” cried Mrs Brinkley, casting her sandals from her, “I will not be enslaved to rubbers in such a sylvan scene as this, at any rate.”

“Look at Mrs. Stamwell!” said Miss Cotton. “She's actually taken her hat off.”

Mrs. Stamwell had not only gone to this extreme, but had tied a lightly fluttering handkerchief round her hair. She said she should certainly not put on that heavy thing again till she got in sight of civilisation.

At these words Miss Cotton boldly drew off her gloves, and put them in her pocket.

The young girls, slim in their blues flannel skirts and their broad white canvas belts, went and came over the rocks. There were some children in the party, who were allowed to scream uninterruptedly in the games which they began to play as soon as they found their feet after getting out of the wagons.

Some of the gentlemen drove a stake into the beach, and threw stones at it, to see which could knock off the pebble balanced on its top. Several of the ladies joined them in the sport, and shrieked and laughed when they made wild shots with the missiles the men politely gathered for them.

Alice had remained with Mavering to help the hostess of the picnic lay the tables, but her mother had followed those who went down to the beach. At first Mrs. Pasmer looked on at the practice of the stone-throwers with disapproval; but suddenly she let herself go in this, as she did in other matters that her judgment condemned, and began to throw stones herself; she became excited, and made the wildest shots of any, accepting missiles right and left, and making herself dangerous to everybody within a wide circle. A gentleman who had fallen a victim to her skill said, “Just wait, Mrs. Pasmer, till I get in front of the stake.”

The men became seriously interested, and worked themselves red and hot; the ladies soon gave it up, and sat down on the sand and began to talk. They all owned themselves hungry, and from time to time they looked up anxiously at the preparations for lunch on the ledge, where white napkins were spread, with bottles at the four corners to keep them from blowing away. This use of the bottles was considered very amusing; the ladies tried to make jokes about it, and the desire to be funny spread to certain of the men who had quietly left off throwing at the stake because they had wrenched their shoulders; they succeeded in being merry. They said they thought that coffee took a long time to boil.

A lull of expectation fell upon all; even Mavering sat down on the rocks near the fire, and was at rest a few minutes, by order of Miss Anderson, who said that the sight of his activity tired her to death.

“I wonder why always boiled ham at a picnic!” said the lady who took a final plate of it from a basket. “Under the ordinary conditions, few of us can be persuaded to touch it.”

“It seems to be dear to nature, and to nature's children,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “Perhaps because their digestions are strong.”

“Don't you wish that something could be substituted for it?” asked Miss. Cotton.

“There have been efforts to replace it with chicken and tongue in sandwiches;” said Mrs. Brinkley; “but I think they've only measurably succeeded--about as temperance drinks have in place of the real strong waters.”

“On the boat coming up,” said Mavering, “we had a troupe of genuine darky minstrels. One of them sang a song about ham that rather took me--

“'Ham, good old ham! Ham is de best ob meat; It's always good and sweet; You can bake it, you can boil it, You can fry it, you can broil it--Ham, good old ham!'”

“Oh, how good!” sighed Mrs. Brinkley. “How sincere! How native! Go on, Mr. Mavering, for ever.”

“I haven't the materials,” said Mavering, with his laugh. “The rest was da capo. But there was another song, about a coloured lady--”

“'Six foot high and eight foot round, Holler ob her foot made a hole in de ground.'”

“Ah, that's an old friend,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I remember hearing of that coloured lady when I was a girl. But it's a fine flight of the imagination. What else did they sing?”

“I can't remember. But there was something they danced--to show how a rheumatic old coloured uncle dances.”

He jumped nimbly up, and sketched the stiff and limping figure he had seen. It was over in a flash. He dropped down again, laughing.

“Oh, how wonderfully good!” cried Mrs. Brinkley, with frank joy. “Do it again.”

“Encore! Oh, encore!” came from the people on the beach.

Mavering jumped to his feet, and burlesqued the profuse bows of an actor who refuses to repeat; he was about to drop down again amidst their wails of protest.

“No, don't sit down, Mr. Mavering,” said the lady who had introduced the subject of ham. “Get some of the young ladies, and go and gather some blueberries for the dessert. There are all the necessaries of life here, but none of the luxuries.”

“I'm at the service of the young ladies as an escort,” said Mavering gallantly, with an infusion of joke. “Will you come and pick blueberries under my watchful eyes, Miss Pasmer?”

“They've gone to pick blueberries,” called the lady through her tubed hand to the people on the beach, and the younger among them scrambled up the rocks for cups and bowls to follow them.

Mrs. Pasmer had an impulse to call her daughter back, and to make some excuse to keep her from going. She was in an access of decorum, naturally following upon her late outbreak, and it seemed a very pronounced thing for Alice to be going off into the woods with the young man; but it would have been a pronounced thing to prevent her, and so Mrs. Pasmer submitted.

“Isn't it delightful,” asked Mrs. Brinkley, following them with her eyes, “to see the charm that gay young fellow has for that serious girl? She looked at him while he was dancing as if she couldn't take her eyes off him, and she followed him as if he drew her by an invisible spell. Not that spells are ever visible,” she added, saving herself. “Though this one seems to be,” she added further, again saving herself.

“Do you really think so?” pleaded Miss Cotton.

“Well, I say so, whatever I think. And I'm not going to be caught up on the tenter-hooks of conscience as to all my meanings, Miss Cotton. I don't know them all. But I'm not one of the Aliceolaters, you know.”

“No; of course not. But shouldn't you--Don't you think it would be a great pity--She's so superior, so very uncommon in every way, that it hardly seems--Ah, I should so like to see some one really fine--not a coarse fibre in him, don't you know. Not that Mr. Mavering's coarse. But beside her he does seem so light!”

“Perhaps that's the reason she likes him.”

“No, no! I can't believe that. She must see more in him than we can.”

“I dare say she thinks she does. At any rate, it's a perfectly evident case on both sides; and the frank way he's followed her up here, and devoted himself to her, as if--well, not as if she were the only girl in the world, but incomparably the best--is certainly not common.”

“No,” sighed Miss Cotton, glad to admit it; “that's beautiful.”

XV.

In the edge of the woods and the open spaces among the trees the blueberries grew larger and sweeter in the late Northern summer than a more southern sun seems to make them. They hung dense upon the low bushes, and gave them their tint through the soft grey bloom that veiled their blue. Sweet-fern in patches broke their mass here and there, and exhaled its wild perfume to the foot or skirt brushing through it.

“I don't think there's anything much prettier than these clusters; do you, Miss Pasmer?” asked Mavering, as he lifted a bunch pendent from the little tree before he stripped it into the bowl he carried. “And see! it spoils the bloom to gather them.” He held out a handful, and then tossed them away. “It ought to be managed more aesthetically for an occasion like this. I'll tell you what, Miss Pasmer: are you used to blueberrying?”

“No,” she said; “I don't know that I ever went blueberrying before. Why?” she asked.

“Because, if you haven't, you wouldn't be very efficient perhaps, and so you might resign yourself to sitting on that log and holding the berries in your lap, while I pick them.”

“But what about the bowls, then?”

“Oh, never mind them. I've got an idea. See here!” He clipped off a bunch with his knife, and held it up before her, tilting it this way and that. “Could anything be more graceful! My idea is to serve the blueberry on its native stem at this picnic. What do you think? Sugar would profane it, and of course they've only got milk enough for the coffee.”

“Delightful!” Alice arranged herself on the log, and made a lap for the bunch. He would not allow that the arrangement was perfect till he had cushioned the seat and carpeted the ground for her feet with sweet-fern.

“Now you're something like a wood-nymph,” he laughed. “Only, wouldn't a real wood-nymph have an apron?” he asked, looking down at her dress.

“Oh, it won't hurt the dress. You must begin now, or they'll be calling us.”

He was standing and gazing at her with a distracted enjoyment of her pose. “Oh yes, yes,” he answered, coming to himself, and he set about his work.

He might have got on faster if he had not come to her with nearly every bunch he cut at first, and when he began to deny himself this pleasure he stopped to admire an idea of hers.

“Well, that's charming--making them into bouquets.”

“Yes, isn't it?” she cried delightedly, holding a bunch of the berries up at arm's-length to get the effect.

“Ah, but you must have some of this fern and this tall grass to go with it. Why, it's sweet-grass--the sweet-grass of the Indian baskets!”

“Is it?” She looked up at him. “And do you think that the mixture would be better than the modest simplicity of the berries, with a few leaves of the same?”

“No; you're right; it wouldn't,” he said, throwing away his ferns. “But you'll want something to tie the stems with; you must use the grass.” He left that with her, and went back to his bushes. He added, from beyond a little thicket, as if what he said were part of the subject, “I was afraid you wouldn't like my skipping about there on the rocks, doing the coloured uncle.”

“Like it?”

“I mean--I--you thought it undignified--trivial--”

She said, after a moment: “It was very funny; and people do all sorts of things at picnics. That's the pleasure of it, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is; but I know you don't always like that kind of thing.”

“Do I seem so very severe?” she asked.

“Oh no, not severe. I should be afraid of you if you were. I shouldn't have dared to come to Campobello.”

He looked at her across the blueberry bushes. His gay speech meant everything or nothing. She could parry it with a jest, and then it would mean nothing. She let her head droop over her work, and made no answer.

“I wish you could have seen those fellows on the boat,” said Mavering.

“Hello, Mavering!” called the voice of John Munt, from another part of the woods.

“Alice!--Miss Pasmer!” came that of Miss Anderson.

He was going to answer, when he looked at Alice. “We'll let them see if they can find us,” he said, and smiled.

Alice said nothing at first; she smiled too. “You know more about the woods than I do. I suppose if they keep looking--”

“Oh yes.” He came toward her with a mass of clusters which he had clipped. “How fast you do them!” he said, standing and looking down at her. “I wish you'd let me come and make up the withes for you when you need them.”

“No, I couldn't allow that on any account,” she answered, twisting some stems of the grass together.

“Well, will you let me hold the bunches while you tie them; or tie them when you hold them?”

“No.”

“This once, then?”

“This once, perhaps.”

“How little you let me do for you!” he sighed.

“That gives you a chance to do more for other people,” she answered; and then she dropped her eyes, as if she had been surprised into that answer. She made haste to add: “That's what makes you so popular with--everybody!”

“Ah, but I'd rather be popular with somebody!”

He laughed, and then they both laughed together consciously; and still nothing or everything had been said. A little silly silence followed, and he said, for escape from it, “I never saw such berries before, even in September, on the top of Ponkwasset.”

“Why, is it a mountain?” she asked. “I thought it was a--falls.”

“It's both,” he said.

“I suppose it's very beautiful, isn't it! All America seems so lovely, so large.”

“It's pretty in the summer. I don't know that I shall like it there in the winter if I conclude to--Did your--did Mrs. Pasmer tell you what my father wants me to do?”

“About going there to--manufacture?”

Mavering nodded. “He's given me three weeks to decide whether I would like to do that or go in for law. That's what I came up here for.”

There was a little pause. She bent her head down over the clusters she was grouping. “Is the light of Campobello particularly good on such questions?” she asked.

“I don't mean that exactly, but I wish you could help me to some conclusion.”

“Yes; why not?”

“It's the first time I've ever had a business question referred to me.”

“Well, then, you can bring a perfectly fresh mind to it.”

“Let me see,” she said, affecting to consider. “It's really a very important matter?”

“It is to me.”

After a moment she looked up at him. “I should think that you wouldn't mind living there if your business was there. I suppose it's being idle in places that makes them dull. I thought it was dull in London. One ought to be glad--oughtn't he?--to live in any place where there's something to do.”

“Well, that isn't the way people usually feel,” said Mavering. “That's the kind of a place most of them fight shy of.”

Alice laughed with an undercurrent of protest, perhaps because she had seen her parents' whole life, so far as she knew it, passed in this sort of struggle. “I mean that I hate my own life because there seems nothing for me to do with it. I like to have people do something.”

“Do you really?” asked Mavering soberly, as if struck by the novelty of the idea.

“Yes!” she said, with exaltation. “If I were a man--”

He burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh no; don't!”

“Why?” she demanded, with provisional indignation.

“Because then there wouldn't be any Miss Pasmer.”

It seemed to Alice that this joking was rather an unwarranted liberty. Again she could not help joining in his light-heartedness; but she checked herself so abruptly, and put on a look so austere, that he was quelled by it.

“I mean,” he began--“that is to say--I mean that I don't understand why ladies are always saying that. I am sure they can do what they like, as it is.”

“Do you mean that everything is open to them now?” she asked, disentangling a cluster of the berries from those in her lap, and beginning a fresh bunch.

“Yes,” said Mavering. “Something like that--yes. They can do anything they like. Lots of them do.”

“Oh yes, I know,” said the girl. “But people don't like them to.”

“Why, what would you like to be?” he asked.

She did not answer, but sorted over the clusters in her lap. “We've got enough now, haven't we?” she said.

“Oh, not half,” he said. “But if you're tired you must let me make up some of the bunches.”

“No, no! I want to do them all myself,” she said, gesturing his offered hands away, with a little nether appeal in her laughing refusal.

“So as to feel that you've been of some use in the world?” he said, dropping contentedly on the ground near her, and watching her industry.

“Do you think that would be very wrong?” she asked. “What made that friend of yours--Mr. Boardman--go into journalism?”

“Oh, virtuous poverty. You're not thinking of becoming a newspaper woman, Miss Pasmer!”

“Why not?” She put the final cluster into the bunch in hand, and began to wind a withe of sweet-grass around the stems. He dropped forward on his knees to help her, and together they managed the knot. They were both flushed a little when it was tied, and were serious.

“Why shouldn't one be a newspaper woman, if Harvard graduates are to be journalists?”

“Well, you know, only a certain kind are.”

“What kind?”

“Well, not exactly what you'd call the gentlemanly sort.”

“I thought Mr. Boardman was a great friend of yours?”

“He is. He is one of the best fellows in the world. But you must have seen that he wasn't a swell.”

“I should think he'd be glad he was doing something at once. If I were a--” She stopped, and they laughed together. “I mean that I should hate to be so long getting ready to do something as men are.”

“Then you'd rather begin making wall-paper at once than studying law?”

“Oh, I don't say that. I'm not competent to advise. But I should like to feel that I was doing something. I suppose it's hereditary.” Mavering stared a little. “One of my father's sisters has gone into a sisterhood. She's in England.”

“Is she a--Catholic?” asked Mavering.

“She isn't a Roman Catholic.”

“Oh yes!” He dropped forward on his knees again to help her tie the bunch she had finished. It was not so easy as the first.

“Oh, thank you!” she said, with unnecessary fervour.

“But you shouldn't like to go into a sisterhood, I suppose?” said Mavering, ready to laugh.

“Oh, I don't know. Why not?” She looked at him with a flying glance, and dropped her eyes.

“Oh, no reason, if you have a fancy for that kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing?” repeated Alice severely.

“Oh, I don't mean anything disrespectful to it,” said Mavering, throwing his anxiety off in the laugh he had been holding back. “And I beg your pardon. But I don't suppose you're in earnest.”

“Oh no, I'm not in earnest,” said the girl, letting her wrists fall upon her knees, and the clusters drop from her hands. “I'm not in earnest about anything; that's the truth--that's the shame. Wouldn't you like,” she broke off, “to be a priest, and go round among these people up here on their frozen islands in the winter?”

“No,” shouted Mavering, “I certainly shouldn't. I don't see how anybody stands it. Ponkwasset Falls is bad enough in the winter, and compared to this region Ponkwasset Falls is a metropolis. I believe in getting all the good you can out of the world you were born in--of course without hurting anybody else.” He stretched his legs out on the bed of sweet-fern, where he had thrown himself, and rested his head on his hand lifted on his elbow. “I think this is what this place is fit for--a picnic; and I wish every one well out of it for nine months of the year.”

“I don't,” said the girl, with a passionate regret in her voice. “It would be heavenly here with--But you--no, you're different. You always want to share your happiness.”

“I shouldn't call that happiness. But don't you?” asked Mavering.

“No. I'm selfish.”

“You don't expect me to be believe that, I suppose.”

“Yes,” she went on, “it must be selfishness. You don't believe I'm so, because you can't imagine it. But it's true. If I were to be happy, I should be very greedy about it; I couldn't endure to let any one else have a part in it. So it's best for me to be wretched, don't you see--to give myself up entirely to doing for others, and not expect any one to do anything for me; then I can be of some use in the world. That's why I should like to go into a sisterhood.”

Mavering treated it as the best kind of joke, and he was confirmed in this view of it by her laughing with him, after a first glance of what he thought mock piteousness.

XVI.

The clouds sailed across the irregular space of pale blue Northern sky which the break in the woods opened for them overhead. It was so still that they heard, and smiled to hear, the broken voices of the others, who had gone to get berries in another direction--Miss Anderson's hoarse murmur and Munt's artificial bass. Some words came from the party on the rocks.

“Isn't it perfect?” cried the young fellow in utter content.

“Yes, too perfect,” answered the girl, rousing herself from the reverie in which they had both lost themselves, she did not know how long. “Shall you gather any more?”

“No; I guess there's enough. Let's count them.” He stooped over on his hand's and knees, and made as much of counting the bunches as he could. “There's about one bunch and a half a piece. How shall we carry them? We ought to come into camp as impressively as possible.”