Part 42 (1/2)
”My dear,” she wailed, ”aside from the vulgarity of the thing--you know that no one ever admits to a real interest in food--I am so hungry that if there is any more mention of eating I shall go off in a corner and howl. You know how those adorable German Christmas stories always begin: '_Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden.
Durch das Wald kam ein armes Madchen das weinte bitterlich._' The reason why she weinted bitterlich was because her soul was hurt at being kept out of the secret of the beautiful, beautiful food that was hidden in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus.
Let's discuss Nijinsky and the musical a.s.ses till you are ready----”
”All ready now!” he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves, twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He lit a match and kindled a leaf. Fire ran through the ma.s.s and rosy light brightened the darkened snow. ”By the way,” he said, as with cold fingers he pulled at the straps of his pack, ”I'm beginning to be afraid that we'll be a lot later getting home than we expected.”
”Well, I suppose I'll go to sleep on the train, and wake up at every station and wail and make you uncomfortable, and Mason will be grieved and disapproving when I get home late, but just now I don't care. I don't! It's _la belle aventure_! Carl, do you realize that never in my twenty-four (almost twenty-five now!) never in all these years have I been out like this in the wilds, in the dark, not even with Phil? And yet I don't feel afraid--just terribly happy.”
”You do trust me, don't you?”
”You know I do.... Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at all----!”
He had brought out, from the pack, granite-ware plates and cups, a stew-pan and a coffee-pot, a ruddied paper of meat and a can of peas, rolls, Johnny-cake, maple syrup, a screw-top bottle of cream, pasteboard boxes of salt and pepper and sugar. Lamb chops, coiled in the covered stew-pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the peas, heated in their can, were added when the coffee began to foam.
He dragged a large log to the side of the fire, and Ruth, there sitting, gorged shamelessly. Carl himself did not eat reticently.
Light snow was falling now, driven by them on the rising wind. The fire, where hot coals had piled higher and higher, was a refuge in the midst of the darkness. Carl rolled up another log, for protection from the weather, and placed it at right angles to the first.
”You were saying, at Mrs. Needham's, that we ought to have an old farm-house,” he remarked, while she snuggled before the fire, her back against a log, her round knees up under her chin, her arms clasping her legs. ”Let's build one right here.”
Instantly she was living it. In the angle between the logs she laid out an outline of twigs, exclaiming: ”Here is my room, with low ceiling and exposed rafters and a big open fireplace. Not a single touch of pale pink or rosebuds!”
”Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that I can lose myself in.”
”Then here outside my room,” said Ruth, ”I'm going to have a brick terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick wall.”
”I'm sorry, blessed, but you can't have a terrace. Don't you realize that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through this wilderness?”
”I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if necessary.”
”Well, I'll think it over, but----Oh, look here, I'm going to have a porch made out of fresh saplings, outside of my room, and it 'll overlook the hills, and it 'll have outdoor cots with olive-gray army blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the hills in the first sunlight.”
”Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled into it.”
”Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the wilderness?”
”Love it! I'd be perfectly happy there. At least for a while. I wouldn't care if I never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden singing in thirty sharps.”
”Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff--you looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly, not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead--sailing and sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and sit there and look way off----Would you like it?”
”Oh, I can't tell you how much!”
”Have to go there some day.”
”When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too.”
”Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything.” Quietly exultant at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover that thrill, ”Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that.”
”But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited.
I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such stolid dubs.”
”Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course, knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me----Course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything.”