CHAPTER IIIN CAMPGrand’mère de Grojean was talking about camping out, with many an “est-ce possible!” and “Grand Dieu!” and Mademoiselle Yvonne was looking at the dust in the distance, while Miss Rowrer and grandma were already inspecting their camping-ground.“How well off we shall be here, Ethel!” grandma said. “What a capital idea! We shall breathe freely and, in spite of being in an old country, we shall have new experiences. I like new things!”It was in full July. For several weeks Miss Rowrer had had the intention of quitting Paris. First of all, it was hot, and there was nothing to see, now that the Grand Prix race had been run. Besides, the national holiday of the Fourteenth of July was drawing near, and then the sovereign people dance and eat and drink in the street, which is really too common!“Let us hurry away!” Miss Rowrer said. “Let us not take back to America a bad opinion of France. We must not judge it by Paris. Let us go and see France at home—away from dust and dances and noise, away frompunch d’indignation. The countess has invited us topass the summer in her château; with her leave, we’ll pass it in her park. Let me arrange it.”Miss Rowrer had chosen a hill from which you could see the whole country-side. Then she sent for a house-furnisher, told him her plans, saying: “I want this—and this—and this.” The tradesman remonstrated: “But, mademoiselle, that is never done!” She finished by making him understand, all the same, by dint of repeating, “I wish this! and this! and this!” At last, without any one knowing it except M. Riçois, who paid the bills, the camp was set up.Several square tents, with a flooring of boards, had been raised amid the trees. When the door-flaps were drawn back, Japanese mats were to be seen, and, behind dainty screens, little brass bedsteads and rocking-chairs and toilet furniture.The tent for Will and Phil had its beds concealed under Algerian rugs, which made lounges for the daytime. It served as a smoking-room for the dining-tent, which was set up alongside very simply, with an abundance of flowers in rustic vases. Farther back, hidden in the shrubbery, were the kitchen and offices. Near by there was an immense water-butt, ingeniously made to furnish each tent with an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. There was also a tent for the auto and for the saddle-horses, when needed.“It is perfect, Ethel!” grandma said, looking around.“I am well pleased with it, my dear grandma,” Ethel acknowledged. “It is not as good as Tent City, on Coronado Beach at San Diego,” she added, laughing, “but we shall be more at home here and the view issuperb. How do you find it, Phil? Will, are you pleased?” And she waved her hand to the horizon.From their hilltop, across the river which wound below, they saw an immense plain. Its calm beauty impressed Ethel, fresh from noisy Paris. France had never seemed so large to her. Among the trees there were bell-towers rising above red roofs, and here and there high factory-chimneys crested with smoke. It was “the province,” wide and active and silent.In the distance, fields stretched away to the horizon. It was like an immense sea, with waves forever motionless. Wagons moved across it and boats glided along the waters of the river, and on the roads and in the fields members of the human ant-hill were stirring everywhere.“It is beautiful,” Phil said, “and I am grateful to you for having invited me. Here I shall paint from nature, and you, Miss Rowrer, ought to do delightful water-colors.”“What do you think of my landscape, Will?” Ethel asked her brother, who was examining the auto.“It’s all right—there’s something wrong with my carbureter,” answered Will. “I’ll have to see to it at once. I’ll look at the landscape later.”“That’s just like Will!” Ethel remarked. “You talk landscape to him and he answers with carbureters and floaters and all the rest. If you only listened to him you’d think him the most earth-bound of mechanicians. And in his heart he is a poet—yes, a poet! He has a little blue flower in his heart; perhaps it’s a forget-me-not!”“The dinner-bell is ringing,” observed Will.“Well, let’s to table!” Ethel said. “There’s nothing like forty miles an hour to give one an appetite.”The dinner was delicious. There were the country dishes—soupe blanchie, artichokes and beans, an eel in bouillon, stewed chicken and a salad, an ice and the fritters of the province. The middle of the table was decorated with a magnificent bouquet of roses, while all around were wild flowers of the fields. The cook hired by Mme. Riçois had done things well,—too well, indeed. Over and above the flowers, the table was furnished with as many bottles as in an inn.“Take away those bottles of wine that litter up the table,” Ethel said to the valet.“But, mademoiselle, what are you going to drink?” asked the cook, who was standing near.“We shall drink water—with ice in it.”“Water—with ice!”“At every meal,” Miss Rowrer added.“But after your ice-cream—to warm up the stomach?”“Ice-water!” said Ethel.Over the cook’s face there crept an expression of terror and pity. To console her, Ethel complimented her cookery, but the smile had vanished from the good woman’s lips until they asked her recipe for the fritters.“I’ll take it back to Chicago with me,” said grandma. “We’ll give a german, and we’ll have pastry just like that on the sideboard. It will be a novelty.”Ethel, after the meal, pretended to light a cigarette, to put the men at their ease. Will picked out a cigar, and Phil, who patterned himself after Miss Rowrer, tooka whiff at a cigarette and threw it away. Then he picked up his banjo.“Play us the ‘Arkansaw Traveler’!” grandma asked. “The very turn of the tune makes me wish to dance.”Ethel spoke up: “What if we should map out our time for the two months we are to spend here? We have, first, the invitation from the countess and her friends—there are arallye-paperand achasse à courre.”“The hunt is much later—a few days before we leave for Morgania,” observed Will.“The good duke!” said Ethel; “it seems things are not going at all well in his country. Who knows? By the time we get to Morgania there may be neither duke nor duchy!”“I’d rather be a trapper in the far West than a duke in such a country,” said grandma.“As for me,” said Phil, stopping short the “Arkansaw Traveler,” which he had been strumming lightly, “my picture is already there and I must put it up and retouch it on the spot. I shall go, whatever happens.”“Bravo!” Ethel answered. “‘Whatever happens’! That’s talking! One ought to know what one has to do, and then do it, whatever happens! But that has nothing to do with our camp,” she went on, as she poured out a lemon squash. We must see the Grojeans. I do hope dear Yvonne will come and sketch with me; and we must visit the country fair,—they tell me it is very curious. And then there will be our excursions, and photographs for our albums; and I must take a good deal of exercise. There are so many things to see that we shall have no time to bore ourselves.”The next day they completed the setting up of the camp. Ethel christened it “Camp Rosemont,” looked over it with the eye of the master, and arranged everything for the meals. She had a flag-pole planted for the Stars and Stripes. The rumor ran through the country that circus people had come and were camping under a tent in the open. Curious villagers came and looked on from a distance, stretching out their necks.“Let the children come!” Ethel said. She stuffed them with sweetmeats, spreading bread and butter with jelly for them with her own hands. The little girls amused her most, with their braided hair and simple gowns and little wooden shoes. She met an inborn politeness in them—the refinement of ancient days; they curtsied to her.“You’d say they were fresh from the company of princesses,” was Ethel’s appreciation. True enough, their games, thevolant, thegrâces, the dancing in a round, and the songs, in which they spoke of ladies and princes and knights, all told of the olden time of joust and tournament.“How nice you all are,” Ethel said to them. “Will you come often? You are not afraid of me?”“Oh, no, mademoiselle!”“Bring your little playmates. I shall always have cakes for you.”“Oh, no, mademoiselle!”“What! You do not wish to eat my cakes?”“Oh, not every day! Our parents would scold us! But you can tell us nice stories, and then you might giveus tickets for the circus. You must look pretty when you go riding horseback.”“So you think I’m a circus-rider?”“That’s what people say.”“Well, they are mistaken. I am,—I am”—Ethel did not find it easy to say just what she was. She could not say, “I am a painter,” or, “I am a musician.” So she contented herself with saying, “I am an American!”“America—that is a country. Is it farther than Paris?”“Oh, yes!”“My papa has a machine to mow hay which comes from Chicago. Is that a city? Is it as big as the city yonder?”“It is as big as all that!” Ethel said, opening her arms to the boundless horizon. “And three times as high as the tallest tree.”“My papa has been in Buenos Aires. Perhaps you saw him there?”“Never.”“You were never bitten by serpents?”“Never.”“Does everybody in your country sleep under tents as you do?”“No; but in big, big houses.”“That must be fine.”“I’ll show you pictures, children, and tell you stories of my country and pretty stories of yours, too. Do you love your country very much?”“France? Oh, yes!”Ethel and the Little Peasant Girls“You are right, darlings, and I love it also. It is a beautiful country, which we all love in America. But we sha’n’t be friends any longer if you won’t eat my cakes.”“Oh, yes, mademoiselle!”Ringing laughter followed, and they ate the cakes, and there were games, and dances in which there was something of the majestic minuet and something of the light gavotte.“It does me good to see how happy they are,” Ethel said to herself. “Oh, how I should like to have all the world happy forever!”They were to visit the Grojeans later, when everything should be finished at the camp. The countess had not yet arrived at her château, and Ethel profited by this to explore the country round about. Phil and Will, and even Caracal, who was living at the hotel, from time to time accompanied them. They made sketches and water-colors and talked over their impressions. In her walks Ethel wore a gray serge skirt adorned with large plaits, a bolero of the same stuff edged with white, silk shirt-waist, and a white straw hat; and with that she went up hill and down dale with the readiness of a college boy.They saw France at home. The endless parceling out of properties and labor astonished them. Every one was half peasant and half workman, and had his own house and fields and vineyards. Thanks to the spirit of saving, want was unknown; and the variety of work made anything like a dead season impossible. When the workshop closed its doors, the workman took up his spade and cultivated his garden.“I had no idea of anything like this,” Will said, with deep interest. What a rest for him, who had just left Chicago and the business strife, to find himself in the open country, where everything smiled around him!Sometimes they met a wedding-party on the way—the bride in white, the groom in black, the old men in their blouses. A fiddler, the village barber, marched at the head, scraping out airs of the good old time.They talked with housewives who were twirling their spindles on the threshold. They were asked to enter, and saw the great chimney with its fire-dogs, on which the soup was heating, and the dresser with its colored crockery shining in the shadow. Chickens pecked at their feet. When Phil and Will sat down at the old oaken table to taste thepiquette(light wine) a familiar magpie perched on their shoulders and asked its share.Issuing forth, they met the “priest-eater” of the village offering a pinch of snuff to Monsieur le Curé. Boys were coming back from school, shouting and rattling military marches on imaginary drums. For the girls were dancing and the boys playing their soldier-games, just as in the days of yore, when only the brave deserved the fair.On the village signs, names and trades bore witness to the antiquity of the race and the power of its traditions.“What dignity there is in this people!” Ethel said to Will. “See the old goodman there, with his spade on his shoulder, how he saluted us as he passed by. Our people would think it servility, but it is far from that; it is like the refined greeting of a marquis who does the honors of his land.”Will thought long over this. All these villages were the same now as they had been in other days. They had always been the refuge of simple ideas, and brave hearts had been born and had died in them, content to consider the smoke of the horizon only from afar. These lowly lives had passed between the old church and the little cemetery on the hill, with its cypresses among the tombs.“Yes, here we breathe to the full filial piety and the reverence of forefathers,” Ethel said. “There is something good in all that, you know. You are right, M. Caracal, to prepare a romance on this country life. It’s a beautiful subject and full of striking pictures. Look at that village before us, with its gardens cut by a network of hedges and walls, and at the roofs pressed one against the other as if they were afraid of the horizon, and the smoke mounting straight up to the sky.”“But all that smells of the stable,” Caracal murmured, “the country—pouah!”“It doesn’t smell so strong as your Montmartre cafés,” Phil whispered in his ear.For his part, Phil was living strange days. The valley and hill and the woods he looked at mechanically, thinking of Miss Rowrer the while. The deep charm of the young woman possessed him more and more; he no longer tried to resist it. She had taken possession of him without knowing it. Her mind was large, cosmopolitan, human. All Phil’s happiness was now in being at her disposition, in living near her, and seeing and hearing her. He felt that he grew morally in her presence, and he was more in love with her soul than with her beauty. When he walked through the country with her, he fanciedthat Columbia herself was at his side, explaining France to him.The feeling of his littleness in her presence gave him pain. He could not imagine himself letting her know what he felt, either by word or gesture—he would never dare. She was too immensely rich. Ah! if he only could, he would give all the riches of the world that she might be poor!It was especially when evening came, with its melancholy, that such thoughts arose in him. One night, after dinner, Phil, to please grandma, took his banjo and played the “Arkansaw Traveler.” The perfume of roses filled the tent, which was lighted dimly. The raised canvas showed a cloudless sky; the stars were rising and the crystal notes of the banjo were lost in the great silence.“What a beautiful night!” said Ethel, “and how calm! It is like the infinite.”“But what are we in it all?” said Phil. “In a hundred years nothing of all this will remain; a new mankind will take the place of our own. We count no more than the flower or the drop of water.”“No,” Miss Rowrer answered; “I am more than a drop of water, and more than a blade of grass. How, Phil, can you speak that way? As for me, there are times when I feel myself the equal of the whole world.”“Miss Rowrer,” said Phil, “the whole world itself is nothing to the infinite.”Phil Listening to Ethel“And I say,” replied the young girl, “that the end and aim of this whole boundless universe is the production and development of the soul, or, if you prefer itthat way, of consciousness in man’s perishable body. How do you know that Alfred Russel Wallace is not right when he supposes the earth to be the center of the universe? The Bible always said so. What if science should prove it?”“Frankly, now,” remarked Will, who was smoking a bad cigar (and yet the brand bore his name—it was enough to disgust one with earthly grandeur) “frankly now, Ethel, can you suppose these little creatures that we are—”“But I will not be a little creature!” cried Ethel. “The telescope seems to show that there is no such thing as an infinity of suns. Limited as they must be in number, they only form what is called a globular agglomeration, concentric with the Milky Way. I read that the other day. Our solar system is in the center of this agglomeration and so in the center of the Milky Way, which we see around us like a circle. And beyond, there is, perhaps, nothing at all. Our solar system is, then, in the center of the material universe; and this earth of ours—that which is nothing to the infinite, according to Phil—on the contrary, occupies so privileged a place near its central sun that here only, it is probable, life can have been developed and man created, and so the whole universe must have its fulfilment in us! What do you think of such a theory? I had rather believe that than be only a flower or a drop of water,” Ethel concluded, as she arose.From his corner in the shadow Phil saw her, in the full light of the lamp, standing out luminous against the dark horizon as if mingled with the stars. He admired hersuperb self-confidence—why should he doubt himself? He vowed that before their departure for Morgania he would let Miss Rowrer know his feelings for her. Perhaps she suspected them a little. No matter, he would tell her! As an extreme limit, so much did he feel the need of binding himself, he fixed the time for his declaration at the stag hunt.
Grand’mère de Grojean was talking about camping out, with many an “est-ce possible!” and “Grand Dieu!” and Mademoiselle Yvonne was looking at the dust in the distance, while Miss Rowrer and grandma were already inspecting their camping-ground.
“How well off we shall be here, Ethel!” grandma said. “What a capital idea! We shall breathe freely and, in spite of being in an old country, we shall have new experiences. I like new things!”
It was in full July. For several weeks Miss Rowrer had had the intention of quitting Paris. First of all, it was hot, and there was nothing to see, now that the Grand Prix race had been run. Besides, the national holiday of the Fourteenth of July was drawing near, and then the sovereign people dance and eat and drink in the street, which is really too common!
“Let us hurry away!” Miss Rowrer said. “Let us not take back to America a bad opinion of France. We must not judge it by Paris. Let us go and see France at home—away from dust and dances and noise, away frompunch d’indignation. The countess has invited us topass the summer in her château; with her leave, we’ll pass it in her park. Let me arrange it.”
Miss Rowrer had chosen a hill from which you could see the whole country-side. Then she sent for a house-furnisher, told him her plans, saying: “I want this—and this—and this.” The tradesman remonstrated: “But, mademoiselle, that is never done!” She finished by making him understand, all the same, by dint of repeating, “I wish this! and this! and this!” At last, without any one knowing it except M. Riçois, who paid the bills, the camp was set up.
Several square tents, with a flooring of boards, had been raised amid the trees. When the door-flaps were drawn back, Japanese mats were to be seen, and, behind dainty screens, little brass bedsteads and rocking-chairs and toilet furniture.
The tent for Will and Phil had its beds concealed under Algerian rugs, which made lounges for the daytime. It served as a smoking-room for the dining-tent, which was set up alongside very simply, with an abundance of flowers in rustic vases. Farther back, hidden in the shrubbery, were the kitchen and offices. Near by there was an immense water-butt, ingeniously made to furnish each tent with an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. There was also a tent for the auto and for the saddle-horses, when needed.
“It is perfect, Ethel!” grandma said, looking around.
“I am well pleased with it, my dear grandma,” Ethel acknowledged. “It is not as good as Tent City, on Coronado Beach at San Diego,” she added, laughing, “but we shall be more at home here and the view issuperb. How do you find it, Phil? Will, are you pleased?” And she waved her hand to the horizon.
From their hilltop, across the river which wound below, they saw an immense plain. Its calm beauty impressed Ethel, fresh from noisy Paris. France had never seemed so large to her. Among the trees there were bell-towers rising above red roofs, and here and there high factory-chimneys crested with smoke. It was “the province,” wide and active and silent.
In the distance, fields stretched away to the horizon. It was like an immense sea, with waves forever motionless. Wagons moved across it and boats glided along the waters of the river, and on the roads and in the fields members of the human ant-hill were stirring everywhere.
“It is beautiful,” Phil said, “and I am grateful to you for having invited me. Here I shall paint from nature, and you, Miss Rowrer, ought to do delightful water-colors.”
“What do you think of my landscape, Will?” Ethel asked her brother, who was examining the auto.
“It’s all right—there’s something wrong with my carbureter,” answered Will. “I’ll have to see to it at once. I’ll look at the landscape later.”
“That’s just like Will!” Ethel remarked. “You talk landscape to him and he answers with carbureters and floaters and all the rest. If you only listened to him you’d think him the most earth-bound of mechanicians. And in his heart he is a poet—yes, a poet! He has a little blue flower in his heart; perhaps it’s a forget-me-not!”
“The dinner-bell is ringing,” observed Will.
“Well, let’s to table!” Ethel said. “There’s nothing like forty miles an hour to give one an appetite.”
The dinner was delicious. There were the country dishes—soupe blanchie, artichokes and beans, an eel in bouillon, stewed chicken and a salad, an ice and the fritters of the province. The middle of the table was decorated with a magnificent bouquet of roses, while all around were wild flowers of the fields. The cook hired by Mme. Riçois had done things well,—too well, indeed. Over and above the flowers, the table was furnished with as many bottles as in an inn.
“Take away those bottles of wine that litter up the table,” Ethel said to the valet.
“But, mademoiselle, what are you going to drink?” asked the cook, who was standing near.
“We shall drink water—with ice in it.”
“Water—with ice!”
“At every meal,” Miss Rowrer added.
“But after your ice-cream—to warm up the stomach?”
“Ice-water!” said Ethel.
Over the cook’s face there crept an expression of terror and pity. To console her, Ethel complimented her cookery, but the smile had vanished from the good woman’s lips until they asked her recipe for the fritters.
“I’ll take it back to Chicago with me,” said grandma. “We’ll give a german, and we’ll have pastry just like that on the sideboard. It will be a novelty.”
Ethel, after the meal, pretended to light a cigarette, to put the men at their ease. Will picked out a cigar, and Phil, who patterned himself after Miss Rowrer, tooka whiff at a cigarette and threw it away. Then he picked up his banjo.
“Play us the ‘Arkansaw Traveler’!” grandma asked. “The very turn of the tune makes me wish to dance.”
Ethel spoke up: “What if we should map out our time for the two months we are to spend here? We have, first, the invitation from the countess and her friends—there are arallye-paperand achasse à courre.”
“The hunt is much later—a few days before we leave for Morgania,” observed Will.
“The good duke!” said Ethel; “it seems things are not going at all well in his country. Who knows? By the time we get to Morgania there may be neither duke nor duchy!”
“I’d rather be a trapper in the far West than a duke in such a country,” said grandma.
“As for me,” said Phil, stopping short the “Arkansaw Traveler,” which he had been strumming lightly, “my picture is already there and I must put it up and retouch it on the spot. I shall go, whatever happens.”
“Bravo!” Ethel answered. “‘Whatever happens’! That’s talking! One ought to know what one has to do, and then do it, whatever happens! But that has nothing to do with our camp,” she went on, as she poured out a lemon squash. We must see the Grojeans. I do hope dear Yvonne will come and sketch with me; and we must visit the country fair,—they tell me it is very curious. And then there will be our excursions, and photographs for our albums; and I must take a good deal of exercise. There are so many things to see that we shall have no time to bore ourselves.”
The next day they completed the setting up of the camp. Ethel christened it “Camp Rosemont,” looked over it with the eye of the master, and arranged everything for the meals. She had a flag-pole planted for the Stars and Stripes. The rumor ran through the country that circus people had come and were camping under a tent in the open. Curious villagers came and looked on from a distance, stretching out their necks.
“Let the children come!” Ethel said. She stuffed them with sweetmeats, spreading bread and butter with jelly for them with her own hands. The little girls amused her most, with their braided hair and simple gowns and little wooden shoes. She met an inborn politeness in them—the refinement of ancient days; they curtsied to her.
“You’d say they were fresh from the company of princesses,” was Ethel’s appreciation. True enough, their games, thevolant, thegrâces, the dancing in a round, and the songs, in which they spoke of ladies and princes and knights, all told of the olden time of joust and tournament.
“How nice you all are,” Ethel said to them. “Will you come often? You are not afraid of me?”
“Oh, no, mademoiselle!”
“Bring your little playmates. I shall always have cakes for you.”
“Oh, no, mademoiselle!”
“What! You do not wish to eat my cakes?”
“Oh, not every day! Our parents would scold us! But you can tell us nice stories, and then you might giveus tickets for the circus. You must look pretty when you go riding horseback.”
“So you think I’m a circus-rider?”
“That’s what people say.”
“Well, they are mistaken. I am,—I am”—Ethel did not find it easy to say just what she was. She could not say, “I am a painter,” or, “I am a musician.” So she contented herself with saying, “I am an American!”
“America—that is a country. Is it farther than Paris?”
“Oh, yes!”
“My papa has a machine to mow hay which comes from Chicago. Is that a city? Is it as big as the city yonder?”
“It is as big as all that!” Ethel said, opening her arms to the boundless horizon. “And three times as high as the tallest tree.”
“My papa has been in Buenos Aires. Perhaps you saw him there?”
“Never.”
“You were never bitten by serpents?”
“Never.”
“Does everybody in your country sleep under tents as you do?”
“No; but in big, big houses.”
“That must be fine.”
“I’ll show you pictures, children, and tell you stories of my country and pretty stories of yours, too. Do you love your country very much?”
“France? Oh, yes!”
Ethel and the Little Peasant Girls
Ethel and the Little Peasant Girls
“You are right, darlings, and I love it also. It is a beautiful country, which we all love in America. But we sha’n’t be friends any longer if you won’t eat my cakes.”
“Oh, yes, mademoiselle!”
Ringing laughter followed, and they ate the cakes, and there were games, and dances in which there was something of the majestic minuet and something of the light gavotte.
“It does me good to see how happy they are,” Ethel said to herself. “Oh, how I should like to have all the world happy forever!”
They were to visit the Grojeans later, when everything should be finished at the camp. The countess had not yet arrived at her château, and Ethel profited by this to explore the country round about. Phil and Will, and even Caracal, who was living at the hotel, from time to time accompanied them. They made sketches and water-colors and talked over their impressions. In her walks Ethel wore a gray serge skirt adorned with large plaits, a bolero of the same stuff edged with white, silk shirt-waist, and a white straw hat; and with that she went up hill and down dale with the readiness of a college boy.
They saw France at home. The endless parceling out of properties and labor astonished them. Every one was half peasant and half workman, and had his own house and fields and vineyards. Thanks to the spirit of saving, want was unknown; and the variety of work made anything like a dead season impossible. When the workshop closed its doors, the workman took up his spade and cultivated his garden.
“I had no idea of anything like this,” Will said, with deep interest. What a rest for him, who had just left Chicago and the business strife, to find himself in the open country, where everything smiled around him!
Sometimes they met a wedding-party on the way—the bride in white, the groom in black, the old men in their blouses. A fiddler, the village barber, marched at the head, scraping out airs of the good old time.
They talked with housewives who were twirling their spindles on the threshold. They were asked to enter, and saw the great chimney with its fire-dogs, on which the soup was heating, and the dresser with its colored crockery shining in the shadow. Chickens pecked at their feet. When Phil and Will sat down at the old oaken table to taste thepiquette(light wine) a familiar magpie perched on their shoulders and asked its share.
Issuing forth, they met the “priest-eater” of the village offering a pinch of snuff to Monsieur le Curé. Boys were coming back from school, shouting and rattling military marches on imaginary drums. For the girls were dancing and the boys playing their soldier-games, just as in the days of yore, when only the brave deserved the fair.
On the village signs, names and trades bore witness to the antiquity of the race and the power of its traditions.
“What dignity there is in this people!” Ethel said to Will. “See the old goodman there, with his spade on his shoulder, how he saluted us as he passed by. Our people would think it servility, but it is far from that; it is like the refined greeting of a marquis who does the honors of his land.”
Will thought long over this. All these villages were the same now as they had been in other days. They had always been the refuge of simple ideas, and brave hearts had been born and had died in them, content to consider the smoke of the horizon only from afar. These lowly lives had passed between the old church and the little cemetery on the hill, with its cypresses among the tombs.
“Yes, here we breathe to the full filial piety and the reverence of forefathers,” Ethel said. “There is something good in all that, you know. You are right, M. Caracal, to prepare a romance on this country life. It’s a beautiful subject and full of striking pictures. Look at that village before us, with its gardens cut by a network of hedges and walls, and at the roofs pressed one against the other as if they were afraid of the horizon, and the smoke mounting straight up to the sky.”
“But all that smells of the stable,” Caracal murmured, “the country—pouah!”
“It doesn’t smell so strong as your Montmartre cafés,” Phil whispered in his ear.
For his part, Phil was living strange days. The valley and hill and the woods he looked at mechanically, thinking of Miss Rowrer the while. The deep charm of the young woman possessed him more and more; he no longer tried to resist it. She had taken possession of him without knowing it. Her mind was large, cosmopolitan, human. All Phil’s happiness was now in being at her disposition, in living near her, and seeing and hearing her. He felt that he grew morally in her presence, and he was more in love with her soul than with her beauty. When he walked through the country with her, he fanciedthat Columbia herself was at his side, explaining France to him.
The feeling of his littleness in her presence gave him pain. He could not imagine himself letting her know what he felt, either by word or gesture—he would never dare. She was too immensely rich. Ah! if he only could, he would give all the riches of the world that she might be poor!
It was especially when evening came, with its melancholy, that such thoughts arose in him. One night, after dinner, Phil, to please grandma, took his banjo and played the “Arkansaw Traveler.” The perfume of roses filled the tent, which was lighted dimly. The raised canvas showed a cloudless sky; the stars were rising and the crystal notes of the banjo were lost in the great silence.
“What a beautiful night!” said Ethel, “and how calm! It is like the infinite.”
“But what are we in it all?” said Phil. “In a hundred years nothing of all this will remain; a new mankind will take the place of our own. We count no more than the flower or the drop of water.”
“No,” Miss Rowrer answered; “I am more than a drop of water, and more than a blade of grass. How, Phil, can you speak that way? As for me, there are times when I feel myself the equal of the whole world.”
“Miss Rowrer,” said Phil, “the whole world itself is nothing to the infinite.”
Phil Listening to Ethel
Phil Listening to Ethel
“And I say,” replied the young girl, “that the end and aim of this whole boundless universe is the production and development of the soul, or, if you prefer itthat way, of consciousness in man’s perishable body. How do you know that Alfred Russel Wallace is not right when he supposes the earth to be the center of the universe? The Bible always said so. What if science should prove it?”
“Frankly, now,” remarked Will, who was smoking a bad cigar (and yet the brand bore his name—it was enough to disgust one with earthly grandeur) “frankly now, Ethel, can you suppose these little creatures that we are—”
“But I will not be a little creature!” cried Ethel. “The telescope seems to show that there is no such thing as an infinity of suns. Limited as they must be in number, they only form what is called a globular agglomeration, concentric with the Milky Way. I read that the other day. Our solar system is in the center of this agglomeration and so in the center of the Milky Way, which we see around us like a circle. And beyond, there is, perhaps, nothing at all. Our solar system is, then, in the center of the material universe; and this earth of ours—that which is nothing to the infinite, according to Phil—on the contrary, occupies so privileged a place near its central sun that here only, it is probable, life can have been developed and man created, and so the whole universe must have its fulfilment in us! What do you think of such a theory? I had rather believe that than be only a flower or a drop of water,” Ethel concluded, as she arose.
From his corner in the shadow Phil saw her, in the full light of the lamp, standing out luminous against the dark horizon as if mingled with the stars. He admired hersuperb self-confidence—why should he doubt himself? He vowed that before their departure for Morgania he would let Miss Rowrer know his feelings for her. Perhaps she suspected them a little. No matter, he would tell her! As an extreme limit, so much did he feel the need of binding himself, he fixed the time for his declaration at the stag hunt.