Chapter IV: Part 4

As I jumped from stone to stone down the bank the voices grew louder. I stepped along. A log lay overturned and I came to the upper beaver dam, a pile of earth and sticks four feet high. Thirty feet below lay the second, and from over the top of it sounded a thanksgiving hymn.

Oh, gee! I’m glad I’m free!
No wedding bells for me!

Bob sang enthusiastically, as if just escaped, and out of the middle of the dam ripped suddenly a big peeled birch branch. With it went a mass of mud and sticks and the river wallowed through the gap.

“Holy Ike!” shouted Bob, invisible below. “It’s no trick at all. Easy as pullin’ teeth. The beggars’ll have to sit up nights to sew that together.”

Out sprang another great armful of white sticks and black dirt and the loosened pool flowed with a swirl. The boy had crawled out on the dam—or swam out—and was pulling to pieces the work of the patient beavers. I called in distress.

“Bob—Bob! Why _are_ you doing that? Don’t! It’s cruel!” And then I caught sight of Walter watching through his spectacles, barefooted, robed in blue, the cap on his nose. “Walter, stop him!” I pleaded. “Don’t let him. It’s useless and it’s brutal. Those poor little beavers worked hard to make that wonderful dam and I think it’s a sin—”

From behind the wonderful dam came incisive tones.

“Take another think. They’ve ruined the river. I’m going to teach ’em manners.” And then, as if hit by a thought, Bob squealed at me: “For cat’s sake, Margaret, go back—this is no place for you, my good woman—I’m coming out.”

And Walter added: “You’d better go—he’s not completely clothed.”

“Well, breakfast’s ready,” I said, and I turned, and fell splashing behind the upper dam, and as I sat there and mourned that the river had got into my boot I heard Walter’s accents, speaking to Bob.

“That’s enough for scientific research. Now get your clothes on, cub,” he said, and with that rose a shriek.

“Oh, gosh! My clothes! Walter—save ’em! Down on the beach—Oh, Holy Ike! The water’s covered ’em—they’re gone!”

There was a dramatic silence. Splashing and crackling of underbrush, and for a minute nothing more. Then came an outcry, a mixture of suffering and laughter. Accustomed as they were to the pandemonium of “M’sieur” and “M’sieur Bob,” it brought the guides—the two light figures raced down the bank past me as I sat. I did not go. I guessed what had happened, and I doubted my welcome.

Bob had taken his clothes with him to dress after his bath—all of his clothes—everything he owned nearer than Lac Lumière. He had rolled them into a wad, on a bit of pebbly beach convenient to dress on, below the dam. Then he had gone up above and opened the sluice-gate. If he had wanted to lose them he could not have planned better. The first rush of freed water must have taken them away, and by the time he remembered them they were gone forever.

I scrambled back to camp and awaited developments. The first was Blanc, who came leaping, catlike, to the tent of “M’sieur.” He threw me one glance and slipped in and emerged in the same breath, with a blanket. I understood—as with our savage ancestors the first point was protection from the elements—from black flies and mosquitoes worse than elements.

A few minutes later a sad little procession filed up the rocks, and I stood inside my tent and tried to keep a right expression of countenance and attitude of mind. Godin came first, ruling his spirit to seriousness, yet with blue eyes gleaming; then Walter, silent but rolling in his gait and with a watery look in his glance; and then came Bob, slim and tall, and wearing a gray blanket with a dignity which was like a poke in the ribs.

I said: “Oh, Bob, I’m so sorry.” I said it without a smile, and then I went quickly into the tent.

Walter came, in a minute.

“I’ve got him put away,” he began, and then we both tried not to make loud noises. When he lifted his face, tears were on it and at his first word he sobbed.

“Margaret, you mustn’t let him hear you laugh,” he gasped. “He’s dignified. I wish he wouldn’t be. When I laughed down there, he was raging. If he’d only—”

“Walter,” cut in a cold, clear young voice. Bob knew well enough how his family were engaged.

“Yes, Bob, I’m coming,” Walter called back hurriedly. “Now, Margaret, about this question of clothes. Let’s see what we can raise.”

I looked at him with concern, for we both knew what we could raise, and that it was nothing. It was all I could do to remember, and not to mention, that I begged them both to bring a change of clothes, and they would not. But we got him, at the end, clothed—as it might be. He wore a coat of Blanc’s which had been his own three years back—it had suffered under the first régime, but Blanc had ground its face since then. It was short in the sleeves and popped open when buttoned; but it was necessary to keep it buttoned. It had burst on the shoulder blades. There was no extra shirt in the party, so this coat must be worn V-necked. I felt a yearning for a black velvet ribbon to tie around Bob’s neck. Walter contributed some offerings, not of surface value, and Bob had his own sneakers and socks—short socks, because the drowned trousers had been long ones.

“Holy Ike!” wailed Bob, from his blanket, in a voice with a squeal in the middle. “What I want is a pair of clothes!”

I trembled a little. “Cub,” I said, as considerately as I knew how, “I’m sorry—it’s the only thing there is—I’m afraid you’ll have to wear my extra skirt.”

Bob whirled. “Me!” he barked. “Not so’s you’d notice it!”

Then we reasoned. It was short—yes—but yet. Of course he was eight inches taller than I—yes, eight inches was a good bit off a skirt—but yet. Oh, yes, it would fasten around the waist—with safety pins. Socks—bare legs—yes, it was too bad—black flies, yes—but yet. The point was, what else could you do about it? Which finally settled things.

When it was on, and anchored around his vague waist-line, he gazed downward like a young pine-tree outraged in its finest feelings. He missed the bony neck, he got a poor view of the strain across his chest; but he saw the gray corduroy swathing his knees—just his knees—and, below, a waste of fly-bitten legs and a little Lord Fauntleroy finish of gray socks and white sneakers. Before that vision his young dignity went in a landslide. Laughter and yelps rose in succession.

“Don’t, cub! You’ll ruin the hunting! Shut up, you long-legged devil! Stop raising Cain! Stop it!” Walter exhorted him.

Bob, with his arms around a tree and his legs prancing in time, thundered on.

We led between us to breakfast a raw-boned and short-haired lady of six feet, wreathed in a shamefaced grin, and wreathed in desperately little else. When the “Messieurs” so presented themselves it seemed likely during the first shock that there would be no breakfast, for our respectful guides were incapacitated.

We could not get used to him all day. All day, as we caught a glimpse of a short skirt skipping high in air, or vaulting logs with unladylike ease, we were seized with new spasms of mirth. But that night the cub lived down his costume. At four he went off with a body-guard of Blanc, prancing down the portage to Lac à la Poêle, the gray corduroy skirt glinting in and out of the forest. At seven there was talking heard from that direction—reckless talking and crackling of branches.

“What in thunder?” Walter inquired of space. “That can’t be Bob—he’d never be such a lunatic. He’ll scare everything in five miles. It sounds like Bob’s voice. What does it mean?”

“If we’d heard a shot I’d think he’d killed something,” I ventured.

“Too early—and we would have heard a shot, anyway.”

With that Bob broke through the woods. “Hear me fire?” he burst forth.

“No—what at? Where? When?” Questions hit him in groups.

“Only a muskrat. Nice easy shot, and I’ve never killed one—I thought I’d try it.”

“What do you mean, Bob?” Walter asked sternly. “You did _not_ fire at small game in caribou season, in a hunting country?”

With that Bob exploded. “Wake up, Walter, and hear the birdies sing. I’ve got a moose, a peach, twelve hundred pounds, Blanc says. You’re a nice lot of Rip Van Winkles not to hear a shot within two miles. I potted him the first thing, almost at the landing, beaned him with one shot; he dropped like a log.”

Whether he wore skirts or wings mattered little to the cub now. Life was a trumpet peal, and he gambolled about the wilderness with his gray curtain flying, callous to criticism. It took most of the next day to _arranger_ the moose _comme il faut_, as the guides delicately put it, for the shot had finished a mighty life.

“We’ll have to sit up nights and eat,” Bob considered, regarding the huge _pacquetons_ of meat done up in a hide, and then his eyes fell on the head and antlers.

It was a fine head and the _panaches_ were forty points.

“Hully gee!” the cub gurgled, and caracoled on all fours, with that mixture of child into the man which sometimes makes an eighteen-year-old boy startling. “Won’t the fellows be stunned when they lay their eyes on that? Won’t that look delicious on the wall of my house in the ‘Hutch’ next winter! I wish those boys were here to help eat.”

And his long legs, still as in early youth the most emotional features of his physique, described ellipses.

“Bob,” Walter remonstrated, “wait till you get your natural clothing before you jump so much. Your legs gleam not wisely but too well.”

And Bob chuckled, but calmed down.

“I guess that’s good dope,” he acknowledged—“dope” being Yaleish for “advice”—and then he went on: “Ginger!” he brought out explosively. “I’m glad those fellows aren’t due for a while yet, till I shed my ball gown. Just picture to yourself if they’d been on this trip.” His head went back and his big laugh rang up through the trees, ending in a projection of a bark and a bleat as if he could not get it all out. Bob’s laugh ranked with his legs as a safety valve for his spirits, and both worked overtime. “Think if those fellows had seen me this way—Buck and Donnie and Hal Harriman—why, I’d never have heard the last of it.”

Three of the cub’s classmates, coming to visit us in camp, were due now in two days.

Walter stared at him fixedly, and Bob’s wide eyes became attentive. He looked alarmed.

“You’re not going to give me away to the fellows, are you?”

Walter pulled his cap over his eyes, stuck his hands in his pockets, and regarded his young brother.

“I can’t say. I’d be glad to say, but I don’t feel that I can.”

“Look here, Walter,” begged Bob, “if you could curb yourself enough not to tell the fellows—maybe it’s asking too much, but Holy Ike, won’t they guy me! It’ll be a crime! It doesn’t seem as if I could have you do that form of torture.”

Walter grinned. “You look out, you young cuss. Be very gentle and thoughtful to your brother, or it’ll be worse for you. I owe you several. You’re doomed anyway, I think, but you’re doomed worse if you’re not careful.”

The next day, with heavy luggage of tents and _pacquetons_ and game we made a slow way down the Poêle River toward the home camp. It was necessary, with so much _butin_, that the men should triple the portages. Walter, Bob, and I waited at the lower end of one for the last charge to be brought over. Around us lay the impedimenta of a hunting trip, mail-bags which were our trunks, tents, heavy bundles wrapped about with rope, and above the heap, towering darkly, low in the forest, where it had been carried with stateliness, was the sombre magnificence of Bob’s moose’s horns. A still-water stretched a shining band below us between walls of forest; in front was a pool, foam-flecked from the white rapids above.

The boy picked up a rod.

“There ought to be trout in that hole even if it is sunny. If I were a trout I’d—”

He sprang, murmuring a sentence, to a rock. Then to a farther one. In the middle of the river he stood in sharp sunshine, and cast into shadows under the bank. Where the brown hackle touched a ripple, there was a break; his hand lifted instantaneously, and a splashing bit of color followed the glint of the leader—a fish was on. I watched, held with the never-failing fascination of the game, as the lad played cleverly the lively half-pounder in the narrow pool, keeping him away from rocks, away from shore, giving him no slack and no pull, for he was lightly hooked.

As I watched I heard a click, as of a camera, and I turned quickly, and with that, before I had time to investigate, I turned back in astonishment. Floating up the stretch of still-water sounded the most unexpected noise on earth—human voices. As I looked, around the bend below paddled two canoes, loaded heavily with men. I stared, dazed. Who were they? What did they want on our particular planet? There were seven, four guides and three messieurs.

At this point there was a bang on the rocks close by and I was blown sideways by a whirlwind. A flash of bare legs and gray corduroy accompanied the phenomenon. Bob had dropped the rod in midstream and left the trout to play himself and had taken to the woods; the forest crashed as his flying feet fled up the portage.

I gathered myself. The canoes were within two hundred yards now, and Walter stood by me glaring a welcome; for it annoys him to be reminded in the woods that the earth is not his private star. Who were these interlopers? A deep, fresh voice called out:

“Good morning, Mrs. Morgan.”

And I knew. It was, of course, Bob’s friends, the boys not expected for two days, Buck and Donnie and Hal Harriman. Buck I had known before; a magnificent youngster of six feet two, he towered between desiccated-looking guides in the middle of the first canoe and sent questions to me in trumpet tones.

“Where’s Bob, Mrs. Morgan? Do you mind our getting here sooner? Isn’t Bob up yet? This forest is a perfect peach. Are we upsetting things, coming ahead? Do you mind? Where’s that beggar Bob?”

The huge young brute was out on the rocks and mangling my hand with a friendly grip, while he introduced the two others, clean-cut, bright-faced lads like himself. Walter had got back his hospitality, and we both talked steadily to give time for the refugee to make arrangements; we wondered what arrangements he might make. It seemed to me a case of exposure or suicide, but the cub would have to decide which. And meantime, of course, the burning question was Bob’s whereabouts.

“The men at the camp told us you were here; our guides knew the way, so we thought we’d come on and meet you,” the boys explained. “But they said Bob was along, too. Isn’t he?”

By then we had told them four times that we were delighted to have them sooner, and had said all that the subject would bear about canoes and paddling. The moment had arrived when Bob had to be mentioned.

“Yes; he’s along,” Walter acknowledged carelessly. “He killed a moose last night, you know.”

The inference was that no gentleman receives company the first day after killing a moose. The boys looked mystified, but were full of polite interest.

“He stayed back then? He didn’t come down with you?” Buck questioned.

I watched Walter, for this was a crisis. He simply had to decide now where Bob was: whether a few rods back or still in camp on Lac à la Poêle; and whichever way he decided Bob was likely to plan otherwise. It was a crucial moment. And with that, out of the forest dashed the long figure of Blanc, his trousers suspended up under his arms, his belt six inches lower, the red stripes of his wool socks giving a flippant expression to his earnest personality. Blanc was not clever, and he looked anxious as he came into the midst of us.

“M’sieur,” he opened fire; “it is from M’sieur Bob.”

“_Oui_, you may tell me what he said,” Walter allowed. I saw him bite his lip as if the strain was great. The three lads listened.

“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.

Two hundred yards down the lake, the “camp of the _messieurs_” stretched its log front of sixty feet. The lamplight shone ruddily through windows red-curtained, the door from the broad gallery stood open, the bare low room, as we entered, had the qualities which make a place attractive—space, brightness, order, and comfort. Many a time in a New York drawing-room I have thought of the charm of that big camp with its silver-brown bark of walls and ceiling, its scarlet cotton curtains, its rough floor, and rustic furniture; I have remembered how it breathed hospitality and the joy of life, and I have wondered what people wanted of more. Into this room we went, the three Morgans and Dr. Davidge and Mr. Esmond and I. Pipes and cigars were going in a moment, and soon young Bob was sent to find out the plans for the concert. He came back kicking his boyish long legs ecstatically. “It’s going to be a peach,” he announced. “Dr. Davidge’s guides sing, all four of them, and Henri, the old fellow, has a mouth-organ, and Zoëtique is going to whistle. It’ll be the pickles all right.”

“I didn’t know Zoëtique whistled,” said Walter Morgan. “I never heard him.”

Nor had I, but Bob hastened to enlighten us. “I have,” he said, “and it’s a wonder. Never heard anything like it. Godin says he’s the best whistler in Saint Raymond, and they always make him do it for parties, as a side show. Wait till you hear him—I’ll bet you’ll like it.”

Mr. Esmond looked up. “Really good whistling is rare,” he said, and then added as if to himself, “but of course this isn’t that sort.”

“How are they to arrange, Bob?” asked his sister. “Are they going out on the lake, or shall we?”

“Oh, they said just as the _messieurs_ wished; so I settled it,” Bob answered in a lordly way. “It was such a whooping good night, I thought it would be the stunt to go out ourselves, and bum around in the canoes.”

So it was that in half an hour we drifted down the shore toward the point where the blaze from the guides’ camp shone and disappeared by glimpses, a star of orange fire in the trees above, an orange bar of fire in the water below. The men’s voices in excited conversation, as conversation is always with French Canadians, floated out to us; we caught words which showed the forest road of their thoughts—such words as “_caribou_,” and “_carabine_,” and “_gros poisson de cinq livres_,” and “_un m’sieur qui tire b’en_,” and there would be a hush while one deep voice told a story and then all together would break out in an abandonment of laughter. Suddenly some one, going outside the range of firelight, caught sight of the fleet on the lake, and there was a quick word—“_les messieurs_” and “_les canots_”—and then a silence.

Walter Morgan called from invisibility. “Godin,” he called—Godin was head guide.

“_Oui, M’sieur_,” came back with respectful good-will from among the trees. I listened closely now, for it is a pity to lose any of Morgan’s French.

“_Est-ce que vous êtes mangé_?” he demanded cheerfully, and Bob gave a snort—Bob knows French.

But Godin knew better than that—he knew his _m’sieur_ and what he meant. “_Mais oui, M’sieur, on a fini de dîner_,” he responded promptly, shifting the sentence graciously.

“_Êtes-vous preparry pour nous donner un concert?_” Morgan went on, not bothering particularly to pronounce according to French models—“concert,” especially, being done in honest English.

There was an embarrassed ripple from among the trees—the strange guides believed that _M’sieur_ was making a joke, and that it was civil to encourage him. But Godin understood.

“_Oui, M’sieur_,” his polite tones came back. “One will sing a song or two with pleasure, if the _messieurs_ desire it.”

There was an undertone of talking back and forth, as we waited, and a little self-conscious laughing, a little chaffing evidently, and then a tremendous clearing of throats and trying of keys up and down the scale. A second’s silence and a voice which we of the camp knew for Blanc’s swung out over the water, musical, for all its occasional sharpness. It was one of the old _voyageur_ songs he sang, filled with the sadness which the gay souls seemed to crave in their music.

C’est longtemps que j’ai t’aimé,
Jamais je ne t’oublierais.

The refrain came over and over through so many verses that I wished some one would choke Blanc and let the concert go on. Yet it was far from painful to lie in a canoe, with young Bob wielding a skilful paddle for my benefit, and listen to soft French words sprinkled over a sapphire night—on the whole, let Blanc pursue the subject through ten more stanzas if he must.

He came to an end; there was great hand-clapping from the floating audience; then from the hidden performers more earnest undertones of discussion as to the next number. We waited, smiling to ourselves, and soon the notes of old Henri’s mouth-organ sounded from the grove of spruce trees. I suppose a mouth-organ is not a high form of instrument, but I am glad that I am not too musical to have found it pretty that night. I had a vision, too, in my mind, of the grizzled, labor-worn face, and the knotted hands which held the cheap toy, and a thought came to me of a narrow life which had known little but hard work, to which this common music meant operas and oratorios. It was nice music, too—old Henri had a soul, and he put it heartily into his mouth-organ. We clapped that number and encored it, and the man played the second tune with a vim that showed pleasure. And while arrangements were making for the next event I heard Esmond talking in his canoe to Mrs. Morgan.

“It’s too charming for words,” he said. “I’ve never known anything at all like it. The old-world simplicity—the quaintness—the good-will and earnestness of it. I didn’t know such people existed outside of books. Why, if you could get this atmosphere on a stage—”

With that a preliminary silence and the clearing of a throat warned us that the performance was about to continue. A young voice rang out over the water with manly vigor and pleasant distinctness—one caught every word:

C’était le vingt-cinq de juillet
Lorsque je me suis engagé
Pour monter dans la rivière
Qu’on appelle la rivière enragé.

On a monté dans la rivièr-e
En canot dans la Gatineau;
Plus souvent les pieds à ter-re,
Avec la charge de sur le dos.

The _chanson_ went on to tell in not too artistic rhymes the story of a logger on the River Gatineau. The words were a bit bald in spots, yet they bubbled with picturesqueness—the rhymer had told what he knew, and that had kept the song simple and strong. But the words were beside the question. Far from an accomplished musician, I yet knew in a few bars that the air was out of the common, and probably very old. I knew that many of the songs of the _habitants_ came with their ancestors from France, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and this one had an ancient ring.

The song ended—it was rather long—there was a second’s pause, and then a frank, manly voice, the voice of the singer, spoke from the stage of the spruce grove.

“_Excusez-la_,” said the voice.

It was prettier than I can describe. What was implied was so plain and so graceful—and only a Frenchman could have said it without self-consciousness. “What I have done is poor, but it is all I can do. I hope you will let it please you. It is my best, excuse it,” the two gracious words asked from us.

I looked at Mr. Esmond—he seemed petrified—he could not even clap, as the rest of us did. “I never knew anything like it,” I heard him murmur.

Bob, seldom suppressed for long, came to the front. “Zoëtique, Zoëtique, whistle it—_sifflez-le, sifflez_,” he called, and added an explanatory word to us. “It’s twice as good when he whistles; it’s a decent tune sung, but wait till you hear him whistle—it’s a peach.”

Presently the whistle came.

I think there is not any other whistling like that in the world—certainly I have never heard any, and many people who should know have said the same. The canoes lay motionless, the people in them hardly breathed, and out from the spruces, over the track of the moon, floated to us the sweetest sound I have ever heard made by a human being. Birds on a dewy morning throw out notes as clear and silvery, but bird-notes are weak and are haphazard. These came freighted with the vigor of a man, with the thought of humanity; there was in them the gladness of youth, a rapture of artistic fulfilment; and, beyond what any words can say, there was in them a personality impossible to say—a personality cramped into a narrow life which spread its wings unashamed in these sounds of loveliness. He whistled the air that he had sung, the old French air of unexpected harmonies, and it was as if a magic flute repeated the logger song of the “River Gatineau, which one called the raging river in the springtime.”

He stopped, and out of the dark hill beyond us floated an echo like the ghost of a flute of long ago.

There was deep stillness for a second, and Zoëtique’s unconcerned, clear voice broke it.

“_Excusez-la_” he said.

For a moment we were too stirred to join Bob’s energetic hand clapping. “Don’t you like it?” the youngster demanded. “I think it’s great. For cat’s sake, why don’t you encourage the lad?”

And, so adjured, we broke into as great a storm of applause as six people can manage, and, after, we discussed the sensation of the evening from boat to boat while the performers arranged further their hand-to-mouth programme. The concert went on; there were choruses, charming to listen to, in the ten men’s voices, all sweet with the musical sense of these people; there were separate solos, “_A l’école du Roi_,” “_Au clair de la lune_,” “_Alouette, gentille alouette_,” and others characteristically _voyageur_ and _habitant_; and old Henri was made to play again on his mouth-organ. But the hero of the concert was the whistler, and three times more he was called before the curtain—which is to say that three times more from out of the mysterious darkness of the trees the flute notes flooded full down the moon-path and thrilled the misty air about us. And each time, at the end came Zoëtique’s unconscious, honest little speech of two words:

“_Excusez-là._”

It was only Mr. Esmond, I remarked, who did not discuss the whistling as we paddled back to “the camp of the _messieurs_,” where the lamplight through the scarlet-curtained windows of the long front sent out a comfortable glow to welcome us. It seemed to me that Esmond was strangely silent for a man as talkative as he had shown himself. Even Mrs. Morgan could not make him express enthusiasm as to the hit of the evening.

“I’m afraid you didn’t like our whistling gentleman as much as we did,” she complained at last, as I helped her out of the canoe.