Earth\'s Enigmas

C >> Charles G. D. Roberts >> Earth\'s Enigmas

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Thus year followed year noiselessly, till Reuben was seventeen and Celia
fifteen. For all the expectancy, the sense of eventfulness even, of
these years, little had really happened save the common inexplicable
happenings of life and growth. The little that might be counted an
exception may be told in a few words.

The customs of angling for catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap,
had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to
wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the
books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library of the old
schoolmaster.

As the girl reached up mentally, or perhaps, rather, emotionally, toward
the imaginative stature of her companion, her hold upon him
strengthened. Of old, his perceptions had been keenest when alone, but
now they were in every way quickened by her presence. And now it
happened that the great blue heron came more frequently to visit the
Perdu. While the children were sitting amid the birches, they heard the
_hush! hush!_ of the bird's wings fanning the pallid water. The bird,
did I say? But it seemed to them a spirit in the guise of a bird. It had
gradually forgotten its seclusiveness, and now dropped its long legs at
a point right over the middle of the Perdu, alighted apparently on the
liquid surface, and stood suddenly transformed into a moveless statue of
a bird, gazing upon the playmates with bright, significant eyes. The
look made Celia tremble.

The Perdu, as might have been expected when so many mysteries were
credited to it, was commonly held to be bottomless. It is a very poor
neighborhood indeed, that cannot show a pool with this distinction.
Reuben, of course, knew the interpretation of the myth. He knew the
Perdu was very deep. Except at either end, or close to the banks, no
bottom could be found with such fathom-lines as he could command. To
him, and hence to Celia, this idea of vast depths was thrillingly
suggestive, and yet entirely believable. The palpably impossible had
small appeal for them. But when first they saw the great blue bird
alight where they knew the water was fathoms deep, they came near being
surprised. At least, they felt the pleasurable sensation of wonder. How
was the heron supported on the water? From their green nest the children
gazed and gazed; and the great blue bird held them with the gem-like
radiance of its unwinking eye. At length to Reuben came a vision of the
top of an ancient tree-trunk just beneath the bird's feet, just beneath
the water's surface. Down, slanting far down through the opaline
opaqueness, he saw the huge trunk extend itself, to an immemorial
root-hold in the clayey, perpendicular walls of the Perdu. He unfolded
the vision to Celia, who understood. "And it's just as wonderful," said
the girl, "for how did the trunk get there?"

"That's so," answered Reuben, with his eyes fixed on the bird,--"but
then it's quite possible!"

And at the low sound of their voices the bird winnowed softly away.

At another time, when the children were dreaming by the Perdu, a far-off
dinner-horn sounded, hoarsely but sweetly, its summons to the workers in
the fields. It was the voice of noon. As the children, rising to go,
glanced together across the Perdu, they clasped each other with a start
of mild surprise. "Did you see that?" whispered Celia.

"What did you see?" asked the boy.

"It looked like pale green hand, that waved for a moment over the water,
and then sank," said Celia.

"Yes," said Reuben, "that's just what it looked like. But I don't
believe it really was a hand! You see those thin lily-leaves all about
the spot? Their stems are long, wonderfully long and slender. If one of
those queer, whitish catfish, like we used to catch, were to take hold
of a lily-stem and pull hard, the edges of the leaf might rise up and
wave just the way _that_ did! You can't tell what the catfish won't do
down there!"

"Perhaps that's all it was," said Celia.

"Though we can't be sure," added Reuben.

And thereafter, whensoever that green hand seemed to wave to them across
the pale water, they were content to leave the vision but half
explained.

It also came to pass, as unexpectedly as anything could come to pass by
the banks of the Perdu, that one dusky evening, as the boy and girl came
slowly over the meadows, they saw a radiant point of light that wavered
fitfully above the water. They watched it in silence. As it came to a
pause, the girl said in her quiet voice,--

"It has stopped right over the place where the heron stands!"

"Yes," replied Reuben, "it is evidently a will-o'-the-wisp. The queer
gas, which makes it, comes perhaps from the end of that dead tree-trunk,
just under the surface."

But the fact that the point of light was thus explicable, made it no
less interesting and little less mysterious to the dwellers about the
Perdu. As it came to be an almost nightly feature of the place, the
people supplemented its local habitation with a name, calling it "Reuben
Waugh's Lantern." Celia's father, treating the Perdu and all that
pertained to it with a reverent familiarity befitting his right of
proprietorship, was wont to say to Reuben,--

"Who gave you leave, Reuben, to hoist your lantern on my property? If
you don't take it away pretty soon, I'll be having the thing put in
pound."

It may be permitted me to cite yet one more incident to illustrate more
completely the kind of events which seemed of grave importance in the
neighborhood of the Perdu. It was an accepted belief that, even in the
severest frosts, the Perdu could not be securely frozen over. Winter
after winter, to be sure, it lay concealed beneath such a covering of
snow as only firm ice could be expected to support. Yet this fact was
not admitted in evidence. Folks said the ice and snow were but a film,
waiting to yield upon the slightest pressure. Furthermore, it was held
that neither bird nor beast was ever known to tread the deceptive
expanse. No squirrel track, no slim, sharp foot-mark of partridge,
traversed the immaculate level. One winter, after a light snowfall in
the night, as Reuben strayed into the low-ceilinged kitchen of the
Hansen farm-house, Mr. Hansen remarked in his quaint, dreamy drawl,--

"What for have you been walking on the Perdu, Reuben? This morning, on
the new snow, I saw foot-marks of a human running right across it. It
must have been you, Reuben. There's nobody else round here 'd do it!"

"No," said Reuben, "I haven't been nigh the Perdu these three days past.
And then I didn't try walking on it, any way."

"Well," continued Celia's father, "I suppose folks would call it queer!
Those foot-marks just began at one side of the Perdu, and ended right up
sharp at the other. There wasn't another sign of a foot, on the meadow
or in the grove!"

"Yes," assented Reuben, "it looks queer in a way. But then, it's easy
for the snow to drift over the other tracks; while the Perdu lies low
out of the wind."

The latter days of Reuben's stay beside the banks of the Perdu were
filled up by a few events like these, by the dreams which these evoked,
and above all by the growing realization of his love for Celia. At
length the boy and girl slipped unawares into mutual self-revelations;
and for a day or two life seemed so materially and tangibly joyous that
vision and dream eluded them. Then came the girl's naive account of how
her confidences had been received at home. She told of her mother's
objections, soon overruled by her father's obstinate plea that "Reuben
Waugh, when he got to be a man grown, would be good enough for any girl
alive."

Celia had dwelt with pride on her father's championship of their cause.
Her mother's opposition she had been familiar with for as long as she
could remember. But it was the mother's opposition that loomed large in
Reuben's eyes.

First it startled him with a vague sense of disquiet. Then it filled his
soul with humiliation as its full significance grew upon him. Then he
formed a sudden resolve; and neither the mother's relenting cordiality,
nor the father's practical persuasions, nor Celia's tears, could turn
him from his purpose. He said that he would go away, after the
time-honored fashion, and seek his fortune in the world. He vowed that
in three or four years, when they would be of a fit age to marry, he
would come back with a full purse and claim Celia on even terms. This
did not suit the unworldly old farmer, who had inherited, not in vain,
the spiritualities and finer influences of his possession, the Perdu. He
desired, first of all, his girl's happiness. He rebuked Reuben's pride
with a sternness unusual for him. But Reuben went.

He went down the great river. Not many miles from the quiet region of
the Perdu there was a little riverside landing, where Reuben took the
steamer and passed at once into another atmosphere, another world. The
change was a spiritual shock to him, making him gasp as if he had fallen
into a tumultuous sea. There was the same chill, there was a like
difficulty in getting his balance. But this was not for long. His innate
self-reliance steadied him rapidly. His long-established habit of
superiority helped him to avoid betraying his first sense of ignorance
and unfitness. His receptiveness led him to assimilate swiftly the
innumerable and novel facts of life with which he came all at once in
contact; and he soon realized that the stirring, capable crowd, whose
ready handling of affairs had at first overawed him, was really inferior
in true insight to the peculiar people whom he had left about the Perdu.
He found that presently he himself could handle the facts of life with
the light dexterity which had so amazed him; but through it all he
preserved (as he could see that those about him did not) his sense of
the relativity of things. He perceived, always, the dependence of the
facts of life upon the ideas underlying them, and thrusting them forward
as manifestations or utterances. With his undissipated energy, his
curious frugality in the matter of self-revelation, and his instinctive
knowledge of men, he made his way from the first, and the roaring port
at the mouth of the great river yielded him of its treasures for the
asking. This was in a quiet enough way, indeed, but a way that more than
fulfilled his expectations; and in the height of the blossoming time of
his fifth summer in the world he found himself rich enough to go back to
the Perdu and claim Celia. He resolved that he would buy property near
the Perdu and settle there. He had no wish to live in the world; but to
the world he would return often, for the sake of the beneficence of its
friction,--as a needle, he thought, is the keener for being thrust often
amid the grinding particles of the emery-bag. He resigned his situation
and went aboard an up-river boat,--a small boat that would stop at every
petty landing, if only to put ashore an old woman or a bag of meal, if
only to take in a barrel of potatoes or an Indian with baskets and
bead-work.

About mid-morning of the second day, at a landing not a score of miles
below the one whereat Reuben would disembark, an Indian did come aboard
with baskets and bead-work. At sight of him the old atmosphere of
expectant mystery came over Reuben as subtly as comes the desire of
sleep. He had seen this same Indian--he recognized the unchanging
face--on the banks of the Perdu one morning years before, brooding
motionless over the motionless water. Reuben began unconsciously to
divest himself of his lately gathered worldliness; his mouth softened,
his eyes grew wider and more passive, his figure fell into looser and
freer lines, his dress seemed to forget its civil trimness. When at
length he had disembarked at the old wharf under the willows, had struck
across through the hilly sheep-pastures, and had reached a slope
overlooking the amber-bright country of the Perdu, he was once more the
silently eager boy, the quaintly reasoning visionary, his spirit waiting
alert at his eyes and at his ears.

Reuben had little concern for the highways. Therefore he struck straight
across the meadows, through the pale green vetch-tangle, between the
intense orange lilies, amid the wavering blue butterflies and the warm,
indolent perfumes of the wild-parsnip. As he drew near the Perdu there
appeared the giant blue heron, dropping to his perch in mid-water. In
almost breathless expectancy Reuben stepped past a clump of red willows,
banked thick with clematis. His heart was beating quickly, and he could
hear the whisper of the blood in his veins, as he came once more in view
of the still, white water.

His gaze swept the expanse once and again, then paused, arrested by the
unwavering, significant eye of the blue heron. The next moment he was
vaguely conscious of a hand, that seemed to wave once above the water,
far over among the lilies. He smiled as he said to himself that nothing
had changed. But at this moment the blue heron, as if disturbed, rose
and winnowed reluctantly away; and Reuben's eyes, thus liberated, turned
at once to the spot where he had felt, rather than seen, the vision. As
he looked the vision came again,--a hand, and part of an arm, thrown out
sharply as if striving to grasp support, then dropping back and bearing
down the lily leaves. For an instant Reuben's form seemed to shrink and
cower with horror,--and the next he was cleaving with mighty strokes the
startled surface of the Perdu. That hand--it was not pale green, like
the waving hand of the old, childish vision. It was white and the arm
was white, and white the drenched lawn sleeve clinging to it. He had
recognized it, he knew not how, for Celia's.

Reaching the edge of the lily patch, Reuben dived again and again,
groping desperately among the long, serpent-like stems. The Perdu at
this point--and even in his horror he noted it with surprise--was
comparatively shallow. He easily got the bottom and searched it
minutely. The edge of the dark abyss, into which he strove in vain to
penetrate, was many feet distant from the spot where the vision had
appeared. Suddenly, as he rested, breathless and trembling, on the
grassy brink of the Perdu, he realized that this, too, was but a vision.
It was but one of the old mysteries of the Perdu; and it had taken for
him that poignant form, because his heart and brain were so full of
Celia. With a sigh of exquisite relief he thought how amused she would
be at his plight, but how tender when she learned the cause of it. He
laughed softly; and just then the blue heron came back to the Perdu.

Reuben shook himself, pressed some of the water from his dripping
clothes, and climbed the steep upper bank of the Perdu. As he reached
the top he paused among the birch trees to look back upon the water. How
like a floor of opal it lay in the sun; then his heart leaped into his
throat suffocatingly, for again rose the hand and arm, and waved, and
dropped back among the lilies! He grasped the nearest tree, that he
might not, in spite of himself, plunge back into the pale mystery of the
Perdu. He rubbed his eyes sharply, drew a few long breaths to steady his
heart, turned his back doggedly on the shining terror, and set forward
swiftly for the farm-house, now in full view not three hundred yards
away.

For all the windless down-streaming summer sunshine, there was that in
Reuben's drenched clothes which chilled him to the heart. As he reached
the wide-eaved cluster of the farmstead, a horn in the distance blew
musically for noon. It was answered by another and another. But no such
summons came from the kitchen door to which his feet now turned. The
quiet of the Seventh Day seemed to possess the wide, bright farm-yard. A
flock of white ducks lay drowsing on a grassy spot. A few hens dusted
themselves with silent diligence in the ash-heap in front of the shed;
and they stopped to watch with bright eyes the stranger's approach. From
under the apple-trees the horses whinnied to him lonesomely. It was very
peaceful; but the peacefulness of it bore down upon Reuben's soul like
lead. It seemed as if the end of things had come. He feared to lift the
latch of the well-known door.

As he hesitated, trembling, he observed that the white blinds were down
at the sitting-room windows. The window nearest him was open, and the
blind stirred almost imperceptibly. Behind it, now, his intent ear
caught a sound of weary sobbing. At once he seemed to see all that was
in the shadowed room. The moveless, shrouded figure, the unresponding
lips, the bowed heads of the mourners, all came before him as clearly as
if he were standing in their midst. He leaned against the door-post, and
at this moment the door opened. Celia's father stood before him.

The old man's face was drawn with his grief. Something of bitterness
came into his eyes as he looked on Reuben.

"You've heard, then!" he said harshly.

"I know!" shaped itself inaudibly on Reuben's lips.

At the sight of his anguish the old man's bitterness broke. "You've come
in time for the funeral," he exclaimed piteously. "Oh, Reube, if you'd
stayed it might have been different!"

"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him."

It was just before dawn, and a grayness was beginning to trouble the
dark about the top of the mountain.

Even at that cold height there was no wind. The veil of cloud that hid
the stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit. To eastward
the peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleys
and the lower hills. Just under the brow, on a splintered and creviced
ledge, was the nest of the eagles.

As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a receding tide, and the
grayness reached the ragged heap of branches forming the nest, the young
eagles stirred uneasily under the loose droop of the mother's wings. She
raised her head and peered about her, slightly lifting her wings as she
did so; and the nestlings, complaining at the chill air that came in
upon their unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm feathers
of her thighs. The male bird, perched on a jutting fragment beside the
nest, did not move. But he was awake. His white, narrow, flat-crowned
head was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its straight,
fierce lid, watched the pale streak that was growing along the distant
eastern sea-line.

The great birds were racked with hunger. Even the nestlings, to meet the
petitions of whose gaping beaks they stinted themselves without mercy,
felt meagre and uncomforted. Day after day the parent birds had fished
almost in vain; day after day their wide and tireless hunting had
brought them scant reward. The schools of alewives, mackerel, and
herring seemed to shun their shores that spring. The rabbits seemed to
have fled from all the coverts about their mountain.

The mother eagle, larger and of mightier wing than her mate, looked as
if she had met with misadventure. Her plumage was disordered. Her eyes,
fiercely and restlessly anxious, at moments grew dull as if with
exhaustion. On the day before, while circling at her viewless height
above a lake far inland, she had marked a huge lake-trout, basking near
the surface of the water. Dropping upon it with half-closed, hissing
wings, she had fixed her talons in its back. But the fish had proved too
powerful for her. Again and again it had dragged her under water, and
she had been almost drowned before she could unloose the terrible grip
of her claws. Hardly, and late, had she beaten her way back to the
mountain-top.

And now the pale streak in the east grew ruddy. Rust-red stains and
purple, crawling fissures began to show on the rocky face of the peak. A
piece of scarlet cloth, woven among the fagots of the nest, glowed like
new blood in the increasing light. And presently a wave of rose appeared
to break and wash down over the summit, as the rim of the sun came above
the horizon.

The male eagle stretched his head far out over the depth, lifted his
wings and screamed harshly, as if in greeting of the day. He paused a
moment in that position, rolling his eye upon the nest. Then his head
went lower, his wings spread wider, and he launched himself smoothly and
swiftly into the abyss of air as a swimmer glides into the sea. The
female watched him, a faint wraith of a bird darting through the gloom,
till presently, completing his mighty arc, he rose again into the full
light of the morning. Then on level, all but moveless wing, he sailed
away toward the horizon.

As the sun rose higher and higher, the darkness began to melt on the
tops of the lower hills and to diminish on the slopes of the upland
pastures, lingering in the valleys as the snow delays there in spring.
As point by point the landscape uncovered itself to his view, the eagle
shaped his flight into a vast circle, or rather into a series of
stupendous loops. His neck was stretched toward the earth, in the
intensity of his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of his
nestlings and his mate.

Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a low, round hill, or
swelling upland. Bleak and shelterless, whipped by every wind that the
heavens could let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniper
scrub. It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a short grass,
meagre but sweet. There in the chilly gloom, straining her ears to catch
the lightest footfall of approaching peril, but hearing only the hushed
thunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb to which she had
given birth in the night.

Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail came upon her, the
unwonted solitude filled her with apprehension. But as soon as the first
feeble bleating of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was changed.
Her terrors all at once increased tenfold,--but they were for her young,
not for herself; and with them came a strange boldness such as her heart
had never known before. As the little weakling shivered against her
side, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of tenderness. When an
owl hooted in the woods across the valley, she raised her head angrily
and faced the sound, suspecting a menace to her young. When a mouse
scurried past her, with a small, rustling noise amid the withered mosses
of the hillock, she stamped fiercely, and would have charged had the
intruder been a lion.

When the first gray of dawn descended over the pasture, the ewe feasted
her eyes with the sight of the trembling little creature, as it lay on
the wet grass. With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, till
presently it struggled to its feet, and, with its pathetically awkward
legs spread wide apart to preserve its balance, it began to nurse.
Turning her head as far around as she could, the ewe watched its every
motion with soft murmurings of delight.

And now that wave of rose, which had long ago washed the mountain and
waked the eagles spread tenderly across the open pasture. The lamb
stopped nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three steps, tried
to persuade it to follow her. She was anxious that it should as soon as
possible learn to walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock.
She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers.

The lamb seemed afraid to take so many steps. It shook its ears and
bleated piteously. The mother returned to its side, caressed it anew,
pushed it with her nose, and again moved away a few feet, urging it to
go with her. Again the feeble little creature refused, bleating loudly.
At this moment there came a terrible hissing rush out of the sky, and a
great form fell upon the lamb. The ewe wheeled and charged madly; but at
the same instant the eagle, with two mighty buffetings of his wings,
rose beyond her reach and soared away toward the mountain. The lamb hung
limp from his talons; and with piteous cries the ewe ran beneath, gazing
upward, and stumbling over the hillocks and juniper bushes.

In the nest of the eagles there was content. The pain of their hunger
appeased, the nestlings lay dozing in the sun, the neck of one resting
across the back of the other. The triumphant male sat erect upon his
perch, staring out over the splendid world that displayed itself beneath
him. Now and again he half lifted his wings and screamed joyously at the
sun. The mother bird, perched upon a limb on the edge of the nest,
busily rearranged her plumage. At times she stooped her head into the
nest to utter over her sleeping eaglets a soft chuckling noise, which
seemed to come from the bottom of her throat.

But hither and thither over the round bleak hill wandered the ewe,
calling for her lamb, unmindful of the flock, which had been moved to
other pastures.

Within Sound of the Saws.

Lumber had gone up, and the big mill on the Aspohegan was working
overtime.

Through the range of square openings under the eaves the sunlight
streamed in steadily upon the strident tumult, the confusion of sun and
shadow, within the mill. The air was sweet with the smell of fresh
sawdust and clammy with the ooze from great logs just "yanked" up the
dripping slides from the river. One had to pitch his voice with peculiar
care to make it audible amid the chaotic din of the saws.

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