Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

“ The next year it was in September that the Morgans asked me to their camp. Air like cooled wine [Pg 205] breathed life into me as my canoe flew down Lac Lumière to the double paddle-beat of Godin and Josef, who had been sent to the club to fetch me. Sunshine lay over the lake and laughed back at us from the hills, where flecks of gold through green tree-tops told that the birches had caught the frost. One peculiarity of the woods is that at whatever time you go to them they persuade you at once, with a wordless, answerless logic, that it is their best season. ”

“ Peace and silence and the tranquil pool—only the steady swish of the line as you cast.
Suddenly a wild lashing and splashing and spraying; the bubble, bubble, bubble of broken water; a white and scarlet flashing that comes and goes where the black hand-fly holds taut to the water; a thrill and tug on your wrist that brings your heart to your mouth. You have struck automatically; he is on; you are playing your first fish of the season.
“Pas trop fort,” Godin remarks calmly from the stern; “not too hard, m’sieur. It is a big one.” ”

“ Zoëtique stood upright in the stern of the canoe, poling it through the shallows. His athletic figure swung with a sure balance; the wind swayed the grasses and floated the ends of the bandanna about his throat. I held my hat on my head as the breeze caught it, and he smiled broadly to see me. The spire of a tall spruce in the distance cut into the sky. It was one of those lucky amateur photographs which wing the spirit and the drawing combined. It takes perhaps a thousand films to produce one, but no professional work comes near the effect when such a one succeeds. ”

“ The outcome is always a doubtful one—it is a fair fight—that is where the thrill comes in. The long runs when you must give line with a swiftness beyond thinking; the lightning rushes toward the boat when your reel must work faster than your brain or you lose him; the lifting, the lowering of the rod that must be done by a sense acquired in many such battles, a sense come to be instinct more than reason; the whisper in the muscles that tells you not to pull him when he sulks ”

“ Luxury, it is said, is a matter of contrast; this man’s scale of such things possibly began at a different point in New York; here in Canada, after a day’s heavy labor in portage and canoe, after coming back grimy and sweating and black-fly-bitten and footsore—after those things, a plunge in the lake and dry flannel clothes and a gray blanket [Pg 23] and a stump realized luxury. So he sighed contentedly and shifted his leg to feel how comfortably the muscles ached in repose, as he drew his crowning happiness out of his pocket, that long brown happiness called a cigar. ”

“ Montreal, and one morning he had driven up the mountain, Mount Royal, the park for which nature has done more, perhaps, than for any other in the world. It was bright weather, and as the carriage climbed the hanging road he had met many people on horseback. Around a turn, where the green mist of leaves arched over a level stretch, a horse and rider cantered toward him through the speckled sunlight—a splendid brown horse carrying a big young man, bare-headed, fair-haired. As pleasant a sight, the bishop thought, as one might see on earth. ”

“ As to brutality, I don’t take that seriously—sentiment has nothing to do with business. What reason, as reasons are known in affairs, is against our absorbing the Southwestern?” As the chilly tones fell, the men who listened saw no reason. Trefethen sighed as if he were tired.
“Of course,” he said. “I meant it; but I was mistaken. It’s my first affair of the sort, as Carroll said, and I’m not used to it. But it’s got to be done. The American Beauty rose at its finest is only obtained by nipping off buds. Well, we’ll make the Imperial an American Beauty, and nip off the Southwestern to begin.” ”

“ I answered from a soul immune to vaudeville sensations, and I did not glance at the programme.
A boy came into the box swinging a tray of glasses of ice-water. I took one and held it in my hand as I spoke. At that moment No. 5 began. With a whirl of my chair which made the man next me frown with astonishment, I had twisted toward the stage, the glass crashed to the floor; the water splashed on a velvet gown and I did not see it; I saw only a figure which stood there, alone, by the footlights.
Strong, sweet, the song of the loggers on the River Gatineau rang flute-like through the theatre. ”

“ You feel Godin’s sense of the importance of the situation by the way he handles the boat. With light manœuvres of the paddle, not to disturb the pool too much, he works you, towing the fish, to a place where the water is clear and you can play his rushing lordship without fear of getting him tangled about lily-roots, and so pulling loose from the fly.
The fight is well on—it is the contest of a man’s brain, working with the awkward tools of a man’s muscles, in an unaccustomed situation, against a wonderful expert and gymnast in his own element. ”

“ The boy, crouching with the landing-net at the water’s edge, followed the infinitely quick scintillations with his eyes; the man, lifting, lowering his rod, keeping the line not too tight, not too loose, followed them, as mere human muscles might, with his playing wrist; with that the long, shining body, brown and gold and silver and pink and scarlet and spotted, stopped struggling, floated limply half out of water, and the large m’sieur, flushed, anxious, drew him slowly inshore. ”

“ The bishop laughed and his mouth twisted whimsically.
“Nonsense, Jim. You mustn’t be upset. You and I know better. It is a crisis, of course, but there is nothing final about it—you know all I can say. Old age and death are just a sort of measles in the cosmic childhood of us eternal people. We’ll sit in gardens and talk together thousands of times again—better gardens than this, maybe, though I can’t imagine it.” He looked about him wistfully. “To my mind it’s like the hill of Zion here—‘a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth’—‘the whole earth’—that’s me.” ”

“ THE SCARLET IBIS The boy stopped sharply in the portage, and swung about and glanced inquiringly at Josef. Light as the sound was, quickly as the boy had heard it, Josef had heard first. He stood rooted in the path, a line of lean strength, in vague-colored clothes, his black locks tumbling from under his battered felt hat, a scarlet bandanna in the belt at his slim waist pricking the dim light with an explosion of color. His extraordinary eyes, very light blue, very large, with pupils dilated over the irises, as animals’ eyes dilate, snapped electrically ”

“ In the tunnel of Phelps’s archway Jim Donnelly, Yale policeman, friend of every Yale boy for uncounted years, opposed his authority to trespassers, let pass the rightful lords of the campus. He honored the late-comers, as they forced their way through the crowd, with a short nod.
“Better hurry up; the Thirties are at it,” he admonished them.
Over the wall of the buildings one heard not a sound in College Street; even in the archway one did not hear. As the belated men stepped into the campus the noise burst on them like a clap of thunder. ”

“ The canoe had worked up the lake; far away beyond the bridge was a stir as if those there could see the first crews of the first race coming; dozens of boats, gay with boys and girls and talk and laughter, lay below, beyond them, but at the turn where the canoe floated it was quiet. There was deep silence.
“It’s all his work. He’s a thieving, cold-blooded monopolist,” the boy went on angrily. “He doesn’t care how much flesh and blood he chops into hash to feed to his great fortune. He doesn’t care that Carl’s father’s railroad stands for forty years’ solid, honest work. ”

“ We’d been travelling all day, paddling in canoes and tramping on portages, and we’d gone through two or three lakes and were now working up a little river full of rapids, but with long “eaux morts” between them. We were getting to the end of such a dead-water, and Shacky’s canoe was in front, with a guide in bow and stern, and him in the middle, with a rifle. We were behind, but neither of Shacky’s guides, Blanc or Zoëtique, saw the caribou till Josef gave a blood-curdling whisper that waked them up:
“C—caribou! C—caribou!” ”

“ That was all he had seen as she talked to Wipes, but he knew the details, the laughing face, the brilliant white, small teeth almost always showing, and the mischievous eyes with tawny lashes. A fascinating face, full of charm; and the drowsy voice, with a reedy note, like a child’s voice just awakened, the quick wit, and innocently naughty ways—he remembered all that, too.
In and out through the strenuous mazes of cavalry-drill went the glint of red hair and the shine of white teeth, and the echo of her laugh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was character and shading back of this ordinary-looking block of humanity. He wore blackened bottes sauvages of caribou leather, laced with thongs of hide through huge brass eyelets; his trousers looked as if they might have been somebody’s dinner clothes five years before—somebody not particularly his shape; his coarse red and blue striped sweater was belted with a broad band of black leather around a waist as trim as a girl’s. He pulled a nondescript felt hat from a shock head of dark hair as he entered, and his blue eyes gazed about half startled and half friendly. ”

“ Without warning he gave an enormous pull and rose to the top and shook himself, and broke water, and beat with his tail, and tossed, and jerked, and rolled, and raised the most dangerous Cain ever, and Walter’s wrist followed the ins and outs of it faster than any mind could possibly think. If your subliminal consciousness doesn’t understand fishing you might as well give up when a trout gets to that act, for no up-stairs thinking-machine ever could follow. However, Walter’s sub-qualities saw him through, and the whale went down again, visibly tired from the struggle. ”

“ The scenery is an orgy of light and shadow; the music is a whirlpool of bands and voices of men. The townspeople are barred, but around Phelps’s archway they gather by hundreds to watch the classes march through. For all over New Haven that night are class dinners, and from the dinners, which are early, the classes in costume march in procession and, carrying torches, pass into the campus. ”

“ Miss Duncan responded firmly. “He doesn’t look strong. But it was very good of you to have him up, and I’m sure I hope he won’t die or anything.”
Dancing eyes and white teeth joined in the smile that softened this ominous last speech, and Fitzhugh swung away down the shaded country street with a cold dislike of the innocent little Marcus in the bottom of his heart, but a very warm feeling for the innocent-seeming Miss Duncan filling all other space.
Neither Miss Duncan nor Wipes could persuade the cadet to see his charge. There he drew the line. ”

“ To give all that up—graduation with honors—the great race—it’s enough to break a boy’s courage. It would break my heart to have him. He has been promised a trip abroad with his best friend, a boy like himself, and after that he is to have a special course in Germany. He is full of ambition and vitality. He could do anything—be anything. He’ll have to give it all up—if you ruin the Southwestern. You see what it means to me—my husband’s life, my boy’s future.”
Marcus Trefethen was uncomfortable and annoyed as the low, eager words stopped suddenly. ”

“ THE REWARD OF VIRTUE This is a story about my guide, Josef Vezina. He’s a corking guide and a wonder at hunting, and all sorts of a good fellow besides, but he’s a French-Canadian habitant, and that means that he’s blind as a bat to some ideas perfectly evident to us. So he did a stunt last autumn one day, all out of kindness of heart, which came near getting me into a nasty hole, and would, if my friend Arthur Shackleton, my roommate at college last year, hadn’t been the best ever, and too square himself to think un-squareness of another fellow. ”

“ Nobody gives a hang, except to regret it for you, if you’ve pulled off success or not. That’s your damned self-consciousness, don’t you know. And look here, Johnny, it’s nothing new to say, but the world is full of friends if you’ll hold out your hand and take ’em. Most people are kindly; they’re only hesitating for fear you’ll snub them, just the way you’re hesitating. ”

“ The large m’sieur, casting, with his whole heart in his forearm, suddenly was aware of a small tentative resistance somewhere on the leader threading [Pg 30] a shimmering way across the pool. Like an electric connection his wrist thrilled in response and the delicate mechanism answered again with a light jerk.
“Steady,” spoke Jack’s deep, authoritative voice. “Something’s after it—don’t jerk. It’s a big one. Recover—don’t get flustered—slow. That’s a peach. Draw the fly slowly—it’s dark yet—let the tail-fly go under a little—not too quick—he’s after it—let him take hold. Strike!” ”

“ In Broadway a man in rapid motion is lost in a sea of men in rapid motion; in the woods a man lifts a slow finger and is so conspicuous that the mountains seem to shout a startled “Look!” The man at the edge of Profanity Pool leaned forward and lunged at his flies hanging [Pg 10] tangled around his rod; he said “Damn!” The two boys, whom his movement had brought to a standstill, unseen, motionless in the shade of the narrow portage, shook with silent laughter.
With that Jack stepped forward, breaking a twig purposely, and came out on the rocks. ”

“ Is it that a woman loves a man when she says words to him that hurt as if one had cut with a knife? Is it that she loves him when she will not listen when he tries to make all right again? Is it that a woman loves a man when”—his light eyes blazed—“when she plays with other men—lets others be to her what only one should be—does that show love? Is it that a woman loves a man when these things are the truth?”
“Sometimes,” I said, and Zoëtique stared at me in dumb anger. ”