Chapter 11

"He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot," Halson explained. "It wasn't a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn't mean that, and he started on again. The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating himself on his success when he tumbled down in a dead faint."

"Oh, come now!" Minver protested.

"It _is_ like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by accident instead of motive, isn't it?" Halson smiled with radiant recognition.

"Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough," I said.

"Had they got back to the other picnickers?" Rulledge asked, with a tense voice.

"In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn't going to bring him into camp in that state; besides, she couldn't. She got some water out of the trout-brook they'd been fishing--more water than trout in it--and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs just in time to pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal; and as there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn't know how he ever got home alive; but he did, somehow, manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn't; and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to bed as soon as he could."

"I shouldn't have thought he could have stirred in the morning," Rulledge employed Halson's pause to say.

"Well, this beaver _had_ to," Halson said. "He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him."

"What!" Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope's eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.

"She came right towards him. 'Mr. Braybridge,' says she, 'I couldn't let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn't choose to have these people laughing at the notion of _my_ having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn't bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they'd have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don't you see?' Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, 'It _would_ have seemed rather absurd,' and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot."

"It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station," Minver cynically suggested.

"Groom nothing!" Halson returned with spirit. "She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station."

"Jove!" Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.

"She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise--it made Braybridge feel awfully flat--and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and--that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall."

"And when--and when--did he offer himself?" Rulledge entreated, breathlessly. "How--"

"Yes, that's the point, Halson," Minver interposed. "Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out."

Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson's answer even for the sake of righting himself.

"I _have_ heard," Minver went on, "that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself." We others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly towards him with his gay eyes. "Then that wasn't true?"

"How did you hear it?" Halson asked.

"Oh, never mind. Is it true?"

"Well, I know there's that version," Halson said, evasively. "The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer--the when and the how--I don't know that I'm exactly at liberty to say."

"I don't see why," Minver urged. "You might stretch a point for Rulledge's sake."

Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive passage of his eye over Rulledge's intense face. "There was something rather nice happened after--But, really, now!"

"Oh, go on!" Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.

"I haven't the right--Well, I suppose I'm on safe ground here? It won't go any further, of course; and it _was_ so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge--he'd followed her down to the shore of the lake--found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: 'Never mind. I can't return for it now.' Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said 'Yes,' over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said: 'No, no, you mustn't, you mustn't! You can send it to me.' He asked where, and she said: 'In New York--in the fall--at the Walholland.' Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her--she was paddling on again--'May I _bring_ it?' and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough: 'If you can't get any one to bring it for you.' The words barely reached him, but he'd have caught them if they'd been whispered; and he watched her across the lake and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time."

Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said: "Yes, that's rather nice." After a moment he added: "Rulledge thinks she put it there."

"You're too bad, Minver," Halson protested. "The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She isn't capable of the slightest finesse. I've known her from a child, and I know what I say."

"That innocence of girlhood," Wanhope said, "is very interesting. It's astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It's never been scientifically studied--"

"Yes," Minver allowed. "There would be a fortune for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here's Acton always dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it's about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at nothing. But I don't see how all this touches the point that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer."

"Well, hadn't the offer already been made?"

"But how?"

"Oh, in the usual way."

"What is the usual way?"

"I thought everybody knew _that_. Of course, it was _from_ Braybridge finally, but I suppose it's always six of one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn't it? I dare say he couldn't get any one to take her the handkerchief. My dinner?" Halson looked up at the silent waiter, who had stolen upon us and was bowing towards him.

"Look here, Halson," Minver detained him, "how is it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?"

"_I_ don't know where you've been, Minver. Everybody knows the main facts," Halson said, escaping.

Wanhope observed, musingly: "I suppose he's quite right about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There's probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before there's an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must really be tacit."

"Yes," I ventured, "and I don't know why we're so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. It's merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and there's nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than that."

"Maiden bird is good, Acton," Minver approved. "Why don't you institute a class of fiction where the love-making is all done by the maiden birds, as you call them--or the widow birds? It would be tremendously popular with both sexes. It would lift an immense responsibility off the birds who've been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real life."

Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. "Well, it's a charming story. How well he told it!"

The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.

"Yes," he said, as he rose. "What a pity you can't believe a word Halson says."

"Do you mean--" we began simultaneously.

"That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don't speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it."

"Yes, but see here, Minver!" Rulledge said, with a dazed look. "If it's all a fake of his, how came _you_ to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?"

"That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I _knew_ he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn't strike you. It's the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!"

He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: "That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself--how much he believes of his own fiction."

"I don't see," Rulledge said, gloomily, "why they're so long with my dinner." Then he burst out: "I believe every word Halson said! If there's any fake in the thing, it's the fake that Minver owned to."

VII

THE CHICK OF THE EASTER EGG

The old fellow who told that story of dream-transference on a sleeping-car at Christmas-time was again at the club on Easter Eve. Halson had put him up for the winter, under the easy rule we had, and he had taken very naturally to the Turkish room for his after-dinner coffee and cigar. We all rather liked him, though it was Minver's pose to be critical of the simple friendliness with which he made himself at home among us, and to feign a wish that there were fewer trains between Boston and New York, so that old Newton (that was his name) could have a better chance of staying away. But we noticed that Minver was always a willing listener to Newton's talk, and that he sometimes hospitably offered to share his tobacco with the Bostonian. When brought to book for his inconsistency by Rulledge, he said he was merely welcoming the new blood, if not young blood, that Newton was infusing into our body, which had grown anaemic on Wanhope's psychology and Rulledge's romance; or, anyway, it was a change.

Newton now began by saying abruptly, in a fashion he had, "We used to hear a good deal in Boston about your Easter Parade here in New York. Do you still keep it up?"

No one else answering, Minver replied, presently, "I believe it is still going on. I understand that it's composed mostly of milliners out to see one another's new hats, and generous Jewesses who are willing to contribute the 'dark and bright' of the beauty in which they walk to the observance of an alien faith. It's rather astonishing how the synagogue takes to the feasts of the church. If it were not for that, I don't know what would become of Christmas."

"What do you mean by their walking in beauty?" Rulledge asked over his shoulder.

"I shall never have the measure of your ignorance, Rulledge. You don't even know Byron's lines on Hebrew loveliness?

"'She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meets in her aspect and her eyes.'"

"Pretty good," Rulledge assented. "And they _are_ splendid, sometimes. But what has the Easter Parade got to do with it?" he asked Newton.

"Oh, only what everything has with everything else. I was thinking of Easter-time long ago and far away, and naturally I thought of Easter now and here. I saw your Parade once, and it seemed to me one of the great social spectacles. But you can't keep anything in New York, if it's good; if it's bad, you can."

"You come from Boston, I think you said, Mr. Newton," Minver breathed blandly through his smoke.

"Oh, I'm not a _real_ Bostonian," our guest replied. "I'm not abusing you on behalf of a city that I'm a native proprietor of. If I were, I shouldn't perhaps make your decadent Easter Parade my point of attack, though I think it's a pity to let it spoil. I came from a part of the country where we used to make a great deal of Easter, when we were boys, at least so far as eggs went. I don't know whether the grown people observed the day then, and I don't know whether the boys keep it now; I haven't been back at Easter-time for several generations. But when I was a boy it was a serious thing. In that soft Southwestern latitude the grass had pretty well greened up by Easter, even when it came in March, and grass colors eggs a very nice yellow; it used to worry me that it didn't color them green. When the grass hadn't got along far enough, winter wheat would do as well. I don't remember what color onion husks would give; but we used onion husks, too. Some mothers would let the boys get logwood from the drug-store, and that made the eggs a fine, bold purplish black. But the greatest egg of all was a calico egg, that you got by coaxing your grandmother (your mother's mother) or your aunt (your mother's sister) to sew up in a tight cover of brilliant calico. When that was boiled long enough the colors came off in a perfect pattern on the egg. Very few boys could get such eggs; when they did, they put them away in bureau drawers till they ripened and the mothers smelt them, and threw them out of the window as quickly as possible. Always, after breakfast, Easter Morning, we came out on the street and fought eggs. We pitted the little ends of the eggs against one another, and the fellow whose egg cracked the other fellow's egg won it, and he carried it off. I remember grass and wheat colored eggs in such trials of strength, and onion and logwood colored eggs; but never calico eggs; _they_ were too precious to be risked; it would have seemed wicked.

"I don't know," the Boston man went musingly on, "why I should remember these things so relentlessly; I've forgotten all the important things that happened to me then; but perhaps these were the important things. Who knows? I only know I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Easter, not so much because of the calico eggs, perhaps, as because of the grandmothers and the aunts. I suppose the simple life is full of such aunts and grandmothers still; but you don't find them in hotel apartments, or even in flats consisting of seven large, light rooms and bath." We all recognized the language of the advertisements, and laughed in sympathy with our guest, who perhaps laughed out of proportion with a pleasantry of that size.

When he had subdued his mirth, he resumed at a point apparently very remote from that where he had started.

"There was one of those winters in Cambridge, where I lived then, that seemed tougher than any other we could remember, and they were all pretty tough winters there in those times. There were forty snowfalls between Thanksgiving and Fast Day--you don't know what Fast Day is in New York, and we didn't, either, as far as the fasting went--and the cold kept on and on till we couldn't, or said we couldn't, stand it any longer. So, along about the middle of March somewhere, we picked up the children and started south. In those days New York seemed pretty far south to us; and when we got here we found everything on wheels that we had left on runners in Boston. But the next day it began to snow, and we said we must go a little farther to meet the spring. I don't know exactly what it was made us pitch on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; but we had a notion we should find it interesting, and, at any rate, a total change from our old environment. We had been reading something about the Moravians, and we knew that it was the capital of Moravianism, with the largest Moravian congregation in the world; I think it was Longfellow's 'Hymn of the Moravian Nuns' that set us to reading about the sect; and we had somehow heard that the Sun Inn, at Bethlehem, was the finest old-fashioned public house anywhere. At any rate, we had the faith of our youthful years, and we put out for Bethlehem.

"We arrived just at dusk, but not so late that we couldn't see the hospitable figure of a man coming out of the Sun to meet us at the omnibus door and to shake hands with each of us. It was the very pleasantest and sweetest welcome we ever had at a public house; and though we found the Sun a large, modern hotel, we easily accepted the landlord's assurance that the old Inn was built up inside of the hotel, just as it was when Washington stayed in it; and after a mighty good supper we went to our rooms, which were piping warm from two good base-burner stoves. It was not exactly the vernal air we had expected of Bethlehem when we left New York; but you can't have everything in this world, and, with the snowbanks along the streets outside, we were very glad to have the base-burners.

"We went to bed pretty early, and I fell into one of those exemplary sleeps that begin with no margin of waking after your head touches the pillow, or before that, even, and I woke from a dream of heavenly music that translated itself into the earthly notes of bugles. It made me sit up with the instant realization that we had arrived in Bethlehem on Easter Eve, and that this was Easter Morning. We had read of the beautiful observance of the feast by the Moravians, and, while I was hurrying on my clothes beside my faithful base-burner, I kept quite superfluously wondering at myself for not having thought of it, and so made sure of being called. I had waked just in time, though I hadn't deserved to do so, and ought, by right, to have missed it all. I tried to make my wife come with me; but after the family is of a certain size a woman, if she is a real woman, thinks her husband can see things for her, and generally sends him out to reconnoitre and report. Besides, my wife couldn't have left the children without waking them, to tell them she was going, and then all five of them would have wanted to come with us, including the baby; and we should have had no end of a time convincing them of the impossibility. We were a good deal bound up in the children, and we hated to lie to them when we could possibly avoid it. So I went alone.

"I asked the night porter, who was still on duty, the way I wanted to take, but there were so many people in the streets going the same direction that I couldn't have missed it, anyhow; and pretty soon we came to the old Moravian cemetery, which was in the heart of the town; and there we found most of the Moravian congregation drawn up on three sides of the square, waiting and facing the east, which was beginning to redden. Of all the cemeteries I have seen, that was the most beautiful, because it was the simplest and humblest. Generally a cemetery is a dreadful place, with headstones and footstones and shafts and tombs scattered about, and looking like a field full of granite and marble stumps from the clearing of a petrified forest. But here all the memorial tablets lay flat with the earth. None of the dead were assumed to be worthier of remembrance than another; they all rested at regular intervals, with their tablets on their breasts, like shields, in their sleep after the battle of life. I was thinking how right and wise this was, and feeling the purity of the conception like a quality of the keen, clear air of the morning, which seemed to be breathing straight from the sky, when suddenly the sun blazed up from the horizon like a fire, and the instant it appeared the horns of the band began to blow and the people burst into a hymn--a thousand voices, for all I know. It was the sublimest thing I ever heard, and I don't know that there's anything to match it for dignity and solemnity in any religious rite. It made the tears come, for I thought how those people were of a church of missionaries and martyrs from the beginning, and I felt as if I were standing in sight and hearing of the first Christians after Christ. It was as if He were risen there 'in the midst of them.'"

Rulledge looked round on the rest of us, with an air of acquiring merit from the Bostonian's poetry, but Minver's gravity was proof against the chance of mocking Rulledge, and I think we all felt alike. Wanhope seemed especially interested, though he said nothing.

"When I went home I told my wife about it as well as I could, but, though she entered into the spirit of it, she was rather preoccupied. The children had all wakened, as they did sometimes, in a body, and were storming joyfully around the rooms, as if it were Christmas; and she was trying to get them dressed. 'Do tell them what Easter is like; they've never seen it kept before,' she said; and I tried to do so, while I took a hand, as a young father will, and tried to get them into their clothes. I don't think I dwelt much on the religious observance of the day, but I dug up some of my profane associations with it in early life, and told them about coloring eggs, and fighting them, and all that; there in New England, in those days, they had never seen or heard of such a thing as an Easter egg.

"I don't think my reminiscences quieted them much. They were all on fire--the oldest hoy and girl, and the twins, and even the two-year-old that we called the baby--to go out and buy some eggs and get the landlord to let them color them in the hotel kitchen. I had a deal of ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, somehow; and when we had finished--it was a mighty good Pennsylvania breakfast, such as we could eat with impunity in those halcyon days: rich coffee, steak, sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup--we got their out-door togs on them, while they were all stamping and shouting round and had to be caught and overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded simultaneously, and managed to get them into the street together. Ever been in Bethlehem?"

We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, after a moment of silent forgiveness, said: