The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 9

It was not a wide and lordly river, but as the silent man and the crooning girl drifted down its narrow and winding course between screening festoons of wild grapevine and Virginia creeper and bittersweet and sentinellike elms and buttonwoods and willows, it seemed the most beautiful stream that ever wound between earthly hills, as tranquilizing and placid as Lethe itself. Macraven, at the oars, had already forgotten his disquieting fears. Sybil, in the stern, trailed her fingers in the limpid amber water. The sun was high and hot; the shadows were dark and cool. Time and the world were no longer remembered.

They had decided to drift down to Anona Island, where the river widened into a broken and shallow lagoon. It was there, Sybil explained, that she usually found her first water lilies. And they could build a little fire on the island, and make tea, and have luncheon, and start out to look for the lilies later in the afternoon, when it was cooler.

They had surrendered to a mood of lazy merriment, and during that Arcadian repast were as light-hearted as children, in the face of the fact that their milk jug had fallen into the river and their lemon pie had been sat on by the unsuspecting professor. Sybil deftly spread her cloth on the sloping stretch of green turf, while Macraven blew on the fire until he was red in the face, and then fanned the embers with his hat until the smudge drove his companion, sneezing, to the upper ground, where she rubbed her eyes and looked down on him with demure dissatisfaction.

“You know exactly as much about building a fire as I know about cooking a meal!” she declared, with a sigh of resignation.

“Why, do you mean to say you've never learned cooking, and all that sort of thing?” he demanded, turning on her suddenly. Then these biscuits, as white and light as snowflakes, on which he had been feasting his eyes, were the flowering of the humble Hannah's art!

“Pooh!” she said, with a little gesture of disgust. “I hate it!”

“But I say, supposing you should have to do that sort of thing some day?” rejoined the practical scientist, wondering why her confession should so depress and disturb him.

“But I never shall!” said Sybil airily, coming back to where the luncheon was spread. She could see by his face that he still nursed old-fashioned prejudices as to the domestic woman and her ways. “But I hate it, just the same!” she added honestly, even as she remembered that Anne was able to make Southern corn puddings about which her father would talk for months afterward.

Macraven gazed out over the water with empty and meditative eyes.

“You think I'm lazy and—and good for nothing” began the girl, throwing pebbles into the river.

“But look at Anne, with all her wealth, with all her opportunities for idling—see how well she can do those things!”

“I'm sick of hearing of Anne” cried the girl. “For ten years, I've had Anne held up to me as a paragon of all the virtues, and I'm tired of it! And when she comes here—and you remember what I'm saying!—I'm going to make her act just as silly and crazy as I do! Wait and see if I don't!” And she flung a pebble with a bang against a near-by pine stump.

When she broke the silence, at last, the change in her tone and the new wistfulness in her face strangely touched her companion's heart.

“You can't remember how poor mother used to shock all Amboro, can you? She was a Southern woman, you know—and Amboro was always so much the other way! I must have taken it from her! I guess I'll just have to go on cakewalking through life, for I hate hard work and sewing and cooking and cleaning up and having to think and plan ahead!”

“A girl who can—can write poetry like yours doesn't need to know all that sort of thing,” the repentant man mollified the egotistic young pagan at his side, just because she was such a sad and beautiful young pagan.

But her lightness of spirit did not come back to her until they had made away with their luncheon and were strolling along the fringes of the little island, looking for pond lilies. As they sauntered on and rested and idled the time away, she cunningly wove a garland of oak leaves. Then, as he sat gazing into a little bay of translucent amber water, she took his black wide-awake from his head, with her girlishly conciliating laugh, and in its place put there the crown of leaves.

“I'm a wood nymph, you see,” she said, as she knelt beside him, “and you are the wood god, Pan, and I'm crowning you with leaves that came from some old Ionian forest.”

“Oh, I say!” he protested.

“No, don't touch it! Don't dare!” she cried imperiously.

“But I prefer”

“It's lovely! It makes you look as young and romantic as a Greek god!”

The man of science became more lenient.

“And will probably give me a bully old sunstroke before the afternoon's out!” he still protested, however, feeling gingerly at his strange headdress.

“Oh, you scientist!” she cried in scorn.

“But even scientists take to hats now and then!”

“Hats! Haven't you any imagination? Can't you keep in the picture for once? And it's much nicer and cooler than that old black thing, if you'd only acknowledge it!”

So, rather than hurt her feelings or disrupt her illusions, he wore the oak leaves meekly, while she wove a second garland for herself, of leaves and flowers intertwined. Then she made a mirror, by polishing the bottom of the pie pan with earth, and viewed herself therein with supreme and undisguised admiration. It was not misplaced, the young professor decided, as he looked at the vital and slender figure, the flushed and nymphlike face, crowned with woodland leaves.

“Now, I'm going to have a wand, like this, and with it conjure to your feet all those water lilies over there that look like white-and-golden stars!”

She tripped out on a fallen pine log that lay along the water's edge and waved her stick toward the tranquil lilies, blinking so sleepily up at the afternoon sky. She leaned out and stretched toward them, but they were beyond her reach.

“Help me, Pan,” she cried.

He followed her out on the log, but even at the end of his own long arm, the wand was too short.

“Oh, I know!” she exclaimed abandonedly. “I'll wade in after them!”

“I—I shouldn't think of that!” warned the other, now older and wiser in past experience.

“Who cares?” demanded the emancipated Sybil.

“But isn't that the public road just over the brow of the hill, there?” he remonstrated.

“Well, it won't kill them!” retorted the paganized one.

“Let me try it first, with this longer pole,” suggested the man of science and discretion.

He did try. He leaned far out and could just sweep the closest lily head.

“There, I've got it!” he exclaimed in triumph.

The lily head broke off short, and the carefully balanced pole swung free again. But with the unexpected swing of that pole, its wielder lost his precarious equilibrium, gyrated with fluttering arms for one undecided moment, and then fell floundering into the amber-tinted water.

It was not Sybil's cry alone that he heard as he struggled and scrambled to get a footing on the muddy bottom. There fell on his ears, as he came to the surface and fought through the tangled lily stalks for safer footing, a second and more distant cry. He paid little attention to it at first, for his mind was taken up with his efforts to reach dry land. His first lucid feeling was one of wonder that his leaf-crowned companion should betray so little concern over his plight, and should be standing there staring across the river, instead of offering to give him a friendly hand up on the pine log.

The water was muddy and made his eyes smart, and it was not until he had drawn himself up and sat on the end of the log, blinking in' the strong sunlight, that he gave his attention to his surroundings.

“Anne!” he heard the startled Sybil cry. “Anne, is that you? Oh, you darling Anne!”

Then he glanced up and saw that it was Anne.

It was not the staid and somber Anne that he had last seen in Amboro, but a new Anne, a figure in raiment quite as gay and summery as his own had been. Above it shimmered a pale rose silk parasol.

“But where's Dickie?” Sybil was demanding.

“He's seeing about the trunks,” answered Anne, coming closer to the river bank. “He can only stay for three days.”

“Pshaw!” ejaculated Sybil.

The professor listened to their voices as to the voices of another world. He felt entombed and forgotten. Even Anne was ignoring him. With a sudden little gasp of indignation, he reached up and tore his ridiculous oak leaf garland from his head and flung it into the river. Then he turned from one woman to the other, angrily. It was Anne who spoke first.

“You'll take your death of cold in those wet things,” she said in her even voice, as she gazed over at him with her sober gray eyes.

He rose to his feet with dignity. Sybil choked back the laugh that was bubbling to her lips.

“It is too bad!” she murmured, and made ineffectual little dabs at his ooze-covered flannels with her tiny mockery of a handkerchief.

He looked down at the scene of the accident in silence. If he had only fallen into deep water, there might have been something to redeem the ridiculousness of it all, something sinister in his fierce battle for life. As it was, even Anne herself could not keep back a momentary smile.

“I—I—hate you worse than—cats!” at last ejaculated the man of science, irascibly, unreasonably, as he turned solemnly back to the boat.

Across that stretch of open water the two women stood looking at each other, silently, pregnantly, thoughtfully, as he rowed away.