Part 8

“I do not comprehend—me, M’sieur,” Blanc went on, “but M’sieur Bob instructed me to say to M’sieur that M’sieur should say to the new messieurs—” He glanced about the circle mildly, including them, and drew his brow together with an unhappy expression. But he spoke with a pretty distinctness. “That M’sieur should say to the new messieurs that he—M’sieur Bob—had unfortunately returned to Lac Lumière by another route. M’sieur is to say that M’sieur Bob did not know of the arrival of the three new messieurs. M’sieur is by no means to let the new messieurs learn that he—M’sieur Bob—is at present up the river, one-half mile of distance from here on the portage.”

Between Bob’s extreme duplicity and Blanc’s extreme frankness even Walter and I could not make out the plot for a moment. There is no other route to Lac Lumière, but it simultaneously came to us that Bob meant to make a forced march and pass us back in the woods, so reaching the lake before us. There he would probably shout till the guides left in camp heard him and paddled over for him, and once landed at the base of reserves he could await his friends clothed properly. It was a well-planned flank movement—Bob seemed a young Napoleon, but Blanc as his _aide-de-camp_ was a complete Waterloo.

With that Blanc veered about and melted, the way he had come, into the forest. I looked at Walter, and saw that even a lawyer did not know any hole out of this corner, and then suddenly the end came in a way not expected.

The hero Buck has, like many heroes, an eye for the fair sex. While he waited for the riddle to be solved, taking it for granted easily that Bob would turn up some time and that “the guide chap was loony”—so he told me later—the memory of another mystery came back to him, the mystery of an unknown lady.

“Do you have lady guides in these parts?” he fired at me. “Who was the tall girl that fled off the rocks as we came around the bend?”

I looked at Walter appealingly, and over the face of Buck came illumination. There burst from him instinctively a yell which Bob could not have bettered, but he instantly choked his feelings to decorum.

“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Morgan.” The boy’s theory of good manners was stretched on top of a volcano of curiosity. “I beg your pardon,” he went on eagerly. “But—but—it wasn’t—wasn’t it Bob—that queer thing?”

I looked at Walter helplessly, and the bright-eyed lads looked at both of us, and something about us answered the question.

“B-Bobby disguised as a f-female, what for?” stammered, inquiringly, one of them—Donnie, I knew later.

And then, whether they crowed in chorus like young roosters, or whether the jubilance of excited chickens was merely expressed in their silence, I do not know. I only know that sound was the symbol of that moment. In another instant, with permission asked—for whatever he may be underneath, the typical Yale boy is Lord Chesterfield on top—with permission impetuously asked and helplessly given, they were off like hounds on a scent, up the portage, after the fated Bob.

The next chapter in the drama I did not witness, but it was told to Walter and me by the actors with such spirit that I could not regret the real play.

As the boys disappeared we once more regarded each other.

“He’s lost,” said Walter. “‘The execution will be private, and may Heaven have mercy on his soul!’ Those young lunatics will raise Cain. All we can do is to await the remains.”

He settled himself against a _pacqueton_ and lighted his pipe, and I stepped across the rocks and picked up Bob’s rod and began to play his unhappy trout, still going through the motions of a fight about the pool. I pulled him in. Then I hooked another, and another, till half a dozen spotted lines of saffron and silver-gilt lay at my feet on the moss. Walter meanwhile gave advice—one of the things he does best.

“Look out for your recover. That last cast was almost on the alders.” Three puffs. “Don’t draw your flies so fast; you don’t give them a chance to rise. Your flies are in the air more than on the water.” Two puffs. “I wouldn’t let out more line—I’d reel in. Nobody can handle a long line in a cut-up little place like this.”

The worm turned. “Walter, do I know how to fish or don’t I? And haven’t I been pulling in trout every minute? Look—seven! Why don’t you come and take them off for me, instead of sitting there and smoking?”

With that, down the road of the woods came a sound—an unwoods-like sound. Growing and clearing, it resolved itself into Lohengrin’s “Wedding March,” sung in a powerful bass:

Here comes the bride! Get on to her stride!

The melody floated through the spruces, and across it cut mirth and plaintive squeals.

“Let me go! Ouch!” And a crash. “It’s no joke, I tell you, to step through a jagged stump when you’ve got bare legs on!” And with that Lohengrin stopped for a second, and heroic laughter filled the forest. Then

Here comes the bride! Get on to her stride!

the orchestra repeated.

“Let me alone! Oh, you beast! These portages aren’t made to go double, Buck. I _can’t_ walk up a tree. Oh, I say!”

A ripping of timber, and from the woods filed a procession. Bob’s maiden garb dripped water, and he was conducted, reluctant, by Buck, who led him along firmly, chanting “Lohengrin.” The others followed, lending a hand. Then the tale was told. The two stranger lads lost strangeness in the telling; and in language of whose color I can give but an echo, they painted the picture of a Homeric battle.

“Bob heard us coming,” Buck began, “and he lit out.”

Hal Harriman was a mighty, square-built, black-headed lad, whose name I had come to reverence. Bob’s accounts of him drew an intellectual giant, eating up the toughest mathematical course in Yale, taking honors in it, asking for more. An inventor Hal Harriman was, who sat at his desk and made machines play about the room. I had come to think of him as the mediæval world thought of Erasmus. I felt a little dizzy, then, when Hal Harriman burst into the conversation on the heels of Buck, like an excited and slangy boy, not like Erasmus.

“The old nut lit out over the river, kicking his legs hidjous,” exploded the genius.

Then something told him he had been slangy; he remembered suddenly that he had never seen me before, and he apologized with blushes in a general way for everything. Nobody noticed, for Donnie’s stammering tongue was jerking out a sentence spaced like telegraphy.

“M-Mrs. M-Morgan, he fell in and sp-p-plashed like a—like a careless wh-whale,” he blew out with difficulty, and at the picture the words recalled, the three youngsters laid hold on each other, and sagged together in laughter. I thought the tale was ended.

“You’re all crazy in the head,” Bob remarked tersely. “But take your time and enjoy yourselves.”

“Me for brevity,” Buck then proclaimed, with dignity. “You see, it was this way, Mrs. Morgan. Bob broke for cover when he heard his friends coming—his _friends_, you see, I regret to state, whom he’d urged to visit him and—”

“Instead of which he puts on ladies’ clothes and runs,” Hal Harriman broke out. “We don’t know yet why he wears ladies’ clothes. Does he prefer them?”

“Bobby, wh-why?” Donnie breathed at him. “We d-didn’t have t-time to ask him up there, M-Mrs. M-Morgan.”

“Time! Gosh! I _beg_ your pardon, Mrs. Morgan!”

“I don’t mind slang a bit,” I reassured the genius. “But I do want to know what happened.”

The genius had the floor. “You see, Mrs. Morgan, when we came out of the portage he was right there; he had only just heard us because of the noise of the rapids.” So far Mr. Harriman’s speech was of irreproachable formality, but with that the rush of the tale caught him. “So there the sad old goat was lepping from rock to rock in his kilties, like a Sabine maiden escaping from her lovers. But such lepps no maiden ever put up, Sabine or otherwise; he looked like he had a hundred legs and all of ’em—excuse me, Mrs. Morgan, _beg_ pardon—I should say that when we emerged from the woods and when Bob became aware of us—Oh, holy cats!” The English as she is wrote left the boy again. “Oh, gee! He lepp one too many and slid on a rock and rolled down clawing and scraping. Did you scrape, Bobby?”

“Did I?” murmured Bob, and patted his anatomy.

“He went into the p-pool with a waterspout, and I’m afr-fr-fraid he got wet,” Donnie put in. “Then he l-landed.”

“He didn’t; you’ve skipped the best,” Buck interrupted. “He _tried_ to land and to rise like Venus from the waves—sort of, don’t you know, Mrs. Morgan. And we, being naturally irritated, chastised him with rocks. Not many, Mrs. Morgan; just a few soft little ones to remind him that he ought to be glad to see us. Remember we threw rocks at you, Bobby?”

“Rocks! Gosh! Look at my shins!” responded Bob mournfully.

“Anyway,” Buck went on, “then he landed, us pelting him with mud, at that time—gobboons of mud. Where he landed there was a pile of sticks and stuff—”

“Old _chaussée de castor_, beaver dam,” Bob hastened to explain learnedly.

“All right—have it that way. It was the moth-eatenest rat-trap I ever met. Bob turned a handspring and crouched behind it, and grabbed a long, varnished pole out of the mess.”

“Varnished!” snapped Bob scornfully. “That was a beaver pole and they’d chewed the bark off.”

“My son, that’s not the point—ain’t it?” reasoned Buck with dignity. “You grabbed the pole and we charged you over the rocks—pointed, slippery rocks, Mrs. Morgan. And as we got near enough our host—our _host_!” with telling emphasis—“poked us off those rocks with that pole. It takes only a small poke, Mrs. Morgan, to knock a man at a crucial moment off a little rock that’s slippery. We got some of our feet wet that way,” he reflected, glancing down. “Donnie fixed him,” he went on. “Didn’t you, Donnie, you idiot?” And he patted the stammerer affectionately.

“I d-did,” Donnie acknowledged, modest but firm.

The account went on.

“You wouldn’t notice it, Mrs. Morgan, but Donnie’s got a brain, and sometimes he works it. He did this time. He withdrew and nobody missed him, being such as he is, and he ran down the portage and found another crossing and got over and doubled up the river. He came behind Bob and Bob didn’t notice because of the battle, but we saw him coming and we kept Bobby in play till he got close, and then—”

“And th-then I th-threw my arms around him and c-clasped him to my heart b-backward,” Donnie cut in. “F-fellows, d-didn’t he yell when he f-felt me?”

Again the three rolled on each other, while Bob threw sand at them, and grinned.

The tale proceeded.

“They went over together, cracking that old dam effect—if that’s what it calls itself—into a million stars.”

“I s-saw the s-stars,” Donnie indorsed.

“And Bobby was taken at last and had to shake hands with his guests.”

“Had to?” objected Bob politely. “Delighted to see you.”

At that there was a roar in the big, deep, fresh young voices, and at the end Donnie’s slow tones, which were yet never ignored, put in.

“We thought it was so g-good of B-Bobby to ask us all up here to have a nice time in a q-quiet way. He said it would be q-quiet, but he could promise us a hearty w-welcome. He s-said he wanted to see us so m-much.”

“So he jabs us into the river with a pole!”

“Frostiest reception I ever got.”

And other comments.

* * * * *

We had a week with the lads. Buck killed a caribou, and Hal Harriman missed one, and Donnie took a five-and-a-half-pound trout. Some of them got ducks and partridges; and all had general good fishing; there were long, rough tramps to remember, and trips to unknown lakes; there was much swimming, but always with care for the clothes to be worn later. The great god Pan did not again pose as a half-done Venus. I could not tell which boy I liked best, but in Walter’s case there was an intimacy with Donnie. It began over photography, when Walter took the youngster into his room one day to show him films and prints made in the woods. We heard sounds of laughter and Donnie’s slow tones urging something, but while we were in camp the secret of the interview was not divulged. It came out a month later in a letter from New Haven.

* * * * *

“DEAR MARGARET: I’ll get even with Walter some time if it takes a leg. What do you suppose he let me in for? Listen to this, if you please, and learn what a beast you’ve carelessly married. You know that day he and Donnie were chuckling and whispering in camp and wouldn’t let us in, and had the films out? Well, I know now what they were up to—do I know? Gosh!

“The running for the fraternities began yesterday. You see, before a fellow is taken into a society he has to spend a week running around and doing exactly what the upper classmen of that society tell him, no matter how crazy it is. Buck and Donnie, for instance, had to go into Huyler’s, dressed in weird clothes, and propose simultaneously to the candy girl, and both had to burst into tears when she refused them. That’s just a sample.

“Well, two days ago I got a hint that I’d better appear in Billy Brent’s room—Donnie’s older brother, you know, a junior. So up I went, grinning but shivering. There was a bunch of juniors there, and I saw by their joyful faces that I was going to get mine strong.

“I didn’t make any mistake. I was handed two packages and told that they were photographs, and I was to go from room to room and peddle them earnestly for five cents apiece. I was to say to each fellow that they were pictures of Yale’s favorite son in his two favorite costumes, and I was to plead and insist importunately and use every effort of every sort to make the fellows buy one at least, and five if possible, without consideration of personal pride. I supposed they were of the president, don’t you know, or some big bug, and I thought I was getting off rather easy. I grabbed the packages—there were about two hundred in the two—and then Billy Brent said:

“‘You’d better look at your wares, Morgan, so you can sell ’em with more enthusiasm.’

“I looked. They were me, both of ’em—me as the great god Pan—you’ve seen it—a sylvan life study—in the earliest known costume, gleaming by glimpses through sheltering foliage—and thank the cats for the foliage! With that whittled tootling machine in a pose at my mouth—a hundred of that! Also me as a Sabine maiden in your darned gray corduroy petticoat, fishing. I didn’t ever know that had been taken. It seems Walter snapped it up the river, at the very moment the fellows came around the bend, and just before I took to the woods. Likely you’ve seen it.

“Walter gave both the films to Donnie and he passed them on to Billy with the suggestion.

“So I started on my weary way, and knocked at door after door of the ‘Hutch,’ and all around the street, and was treated first as a white man, and then as I went on begging and insisting importunately, as was my duty, to get twenty-five cents out of each fellow—why, of course, they turned on me and kicked me out in time. Everybody bought one—that was easy fruit, but it was harder than the dickens to squeeze out the other twenty cents—I couldn’t do it but a few times. Al Nelson took a dozen for dinner cards and that helped—though humiliating. But I’ve still got seventy-five on my hands, and after I go over to Commons in a few minutes from now, and feed my face, I’ve got to start out and beg and insist importunately some more. It’s a cruel and unusual punishment, and you watch me get even with Walter when I get home. You might as well mention to him that if I live and keep my health I’ve got a hunch he’d better cheer up, for the worst is yet to come.

With love to yourself, BOB.”

THE WHISTLING OF ZOËTIQUE

THE WHISTLING OF ZOËTIQUE

As when a child shakes a kaleidoscope the bits of colored glass shift from one distinct pattern into another, so when I think of the events which came of Zoëtique Vézina’s gift of whistling, the little story falls into two or three sharply defined pictures, so different from each other, so linked, so filled with life, that, simple as it is, the tale appears to me dramatic enough to tell exactly as it happened.

It is a far cry from the moonlit stillness of an August night on a Canadian lake—a dark amphitheatre of hills guarding the sky-line, a road of light across the water, canoes floating black on silver—from that to the crowded glare of a New York theatre. Yet the span of life reaches easily across such distances, and the stage-settings of the play I am to tell were such. It was the last night of a fortnight’s visit to the Morgans’ camp, and they, as well as I, were going back to civilization next day. There was a ceremony to be celebrated which had become a custom of last nights, they explained to me—the guides gave a concert. It was always clear and always moonlight on a last night in camp—by law, young Bob Morgan gave me to understand. In any case, it was invariable, and here was this cloudless, bright evening to back up his assertion. There were two methods of giving the concert: either the _messieurs_, which included Mrs. Morgan, stayed in camp and the men paddled about at a picturesque distance, and serenaded them from boats; or else the messieurs went out in the canoes and the guides “howled from the underbrush,” as Bob put it. To-night, the air was so warm and the wet moonlight lay in such thick splashes over the water that no one wanted to stay on land. It gave a man a greedy feeling that he must get “_au large_” and loot jewelry and broken gold out of the night. So the canvas canoes slid from the quay with musical wooden and liquid noises, and off we drifted, two and two, into the perspective of a dream.

There were six of us, with the two strangers. Fishing down a deep bay of Lac Lumière that afternoon, Walter Morgan and I had dropped suddenly, around a corner, on a camp—two tents, two _messieurs_, four guides.

“The devil!” said Morgan, and I, though it was not my business to do the swearing, repeated the words.

It is the theory when one gets into camp that one has discovered an earth without inhabitants, and proof to the contrary is accounted a rudeness. We wished not to know that people lived, and it was immaterial and irrelevant—what Bob Morgan would sum up as “fresh”—of these unknown ones to thrust knowledge upon us. All the same, there were tents, guides, and an unmistakable _monsieur_ in aggressive sporting clothes on the shore, and, within ten feet of our boat’s nose, another boat with a bored-looking Montagnais Indian paddling it, and in the bow a man with a rod whose first cast explained the Indian’s expression. A fisherman does not catalogue when he sees another man cast, but he knows the details, and he knows their summary—a greenhorn or an expert. Morgan was a crack, and I had studied under him, and before his slow “Good-day” greeted the stranger we were both aware that the rod weighed at least nine ounces, that the leader was too light for it, that a Yellow Sally for a hand-fly and a Scarlet Ibis for the tail were flies that, in this light, made a blot on a man’s character; that the man was casting from his neck down, and getting the flies in a mess as might be expected; that the thirty feet of line out was all and more than all that he could handle; and that, last and worst, the person who would fish for trout in that spot, at a little outlet, where the water was shallow and warm, in the month of August, was, as a fisherman, beneath contempt. I could hear Walter Morgan’s opinion of the person in that “Good day” when it came.

But I was to see his manner change. The stranger, his back toward us, at my friend’s voice arrested his line half-way through a convulsive recover, and the three flies fell in a heap about his shoulders—one caught in his brand-new corduroy hat, and the hook of another went into his thumb. He whirled about his brilliant tan-leather clad shoulders with a lurch which missed upsetting the boat, Montagnard and all, but neither episode disturbed him.

“Good day,” he returned cordially, with a smile which at once made a difference about an uninhabited earth. He went on quickly. “Am I in your way? I’m a greenhorn, and I don’t know other people’s rights, but I mean well. I’ve never had such fun in all my life,” he confided in us with a rush, like a small boy having too good a time to keep to himself. “I’ve never fished before, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I caught a trout a while ago. Do I do it all right?” he inquired wistfully. “I wish you’d tell me if anything’s wrong.”

A Roman candle exploded inside of Morgan could not have left him more scattered. The outcome was that we landed in a spirit of eager friendliness and partook of other spirits with this attractive débutant and his partner, who seemed a person of equal ignorance and equal, though quieter, enthusiasm. That this latter was a well-known playwright we made out shortly, and there was at once a free exchange of names among us, but our first acquaintance we did not then place. However, it took no time at all to see that two such whole-hearted babes in the woods had probably never before arrived, as such, at the approximate age of fifty. They were wax in the hands of their guides, and their guides were “doing” them without remorse. Morgan, pleased with the virgin soil, began gardening; he sowed seeds of woodcraft and of fishcraft which took root before his eyes, and, charmed with the business, he invited the two to dinner that night. That we were breaking camp next day, while they were just beginning their trip, was a point of genuine regret on both sides.

We hurried back to our log castle to see that pea soup and partridges and flapjacks and other delicacies were assured in force for the meal to come, and in an hour or two the meal did come, and I cannot recollect a gayer function. As with the San Francisco earthquake, there was not a dull moment from start to finish, and again and again I saw Morgan look at his wife triumphantly with the “Trust-me-to-bring-home-pleasant-people” expression of a man who has sometimes been less fortunate.

The dining-room was a moss-covered point; the water rippled about two sides of it, forest made its other walls, and a roof of birch bark its ceiling. This greenwood hall rang with laughter spontaneous as children’s, till the silver lake gleamed leaden through tree trunks, and purple hills turned black, and a rim of round moon rose into the twilight, big, over the shoulder of the lowest mountain. Then Godin, head guide and butler, lighted his _lumières électriques_—his candles arranged as a chandelier—and by their swinging light we finished a feast of the gods with maple sirup and delicate “mushi frite,” while the French-Canadian guides sat grouped in Rembrandt lights and shadows about the kitchen fire and laughed, too, to hear the peals which, at everything and nothing, rang across the lake to the lonely hills. Certainly in entertaining these strangers we had entertained angels unawares—angels of light-heartedness—for our sides ached when we slid from the board benches that were dining chairs and went down where the canoes lay beached, where guides evolved out of shadow to slip the boats into the water, to hold them steady, to direct our stumbling with deferential French syllables, as we embarked.