Chapter III

Once more it was May, and early morning. I was out before breakfast, gathering sticks for my hearth-fire. There had been showers in the night, and an inch of new grass trembled over the ground. I tugged at a pile of brush made by my oldest apple-tree, which had fallen in a winter storm. The limbs, and even the million twigs, were all gray and green and slate-blue in their wrappings of moss, and in among them, like a burning heart, sat a cardinal.

“You ought to be singing from a tree-top,” said I.

“But I’m getting my breakfast. This is the _cafeteria_ of Wingland. Are you going to demolish it?”

“Indeed, no!” I answered, picking up some peripheral sticks and leaving his stronghold unshaken.

To thank me, he hopped to the top of the pile, and, right in my face, sang his most shamelessly seductive song. Serena put her head out of the kitchen window to listen. He paused, and deserted me for a tree-top. But sweet was air and earth. Delight summoned an antithesis. I thought of forgotten pains, some monitions of the night before. Suppose I were to die, and never again stand in that dip of the mountain when it was a brimming bowl of springtime? Perhaps there was no other planet where I might gather in my arms such beautiful gray and green and slate-blue fagots. I turned to go in, and met rebuke in the eyes of my Chicago guest.

“I wonder if you are going to tell me that your woman does not know how to pick up brush.”

My woman! If Serena heard that!

“And after last night! Did you take your medicine?”

Verily I had. She was unconvinced.

“The bottle seems full.”

“Oh, I took it from the cardinal’s throat,” said I, surrendering.

She laughed, for there was sweetness in her, and we went in to breakfast. I had prepared it before going out, leaving Serena on guard. She was with me, not so much for the help she gave, as to save the feelings of my guest.

“Do you have much of this soggy weather?” said Chicago, airily tolerant, as we took our seats.

“Why, I’ve never noticed.”

“We shore do,” said Serena, with gloom that was ludicrously alien to her face. “It’s li’ble to rain now fer two weeks steady.”

“But I had decided not to go home to-day,” cried the guest, almost resentfully declining the hot biscuit Serena urged upon her. “Two weeks! Do you mean two weeks?”

“I’ve known it to hang wet fer a month.”

“Why, Serena!”

“Showery like. You know it’s so, Mis’ Dolly.”

“Well, we’re going to have perfect weather now. Tender, bright, with maybe a bit of dew in the air. Stay, and I promise you a miracle among springs.” I held up a glass of strawberry jam. “The kind of a spring that produced this.” And I offered her the food of heaven.

“Thanks, but I’ve cut out sweets.”

I caught my breath, and looked at Serena, in whose eye sparkled a triumph that said plainly: “Now you see!”

My guest did not notice that I sat dumb, bewildered, bereft. She was talking.

“No, I think, my dear, that if you wish to memorialize a passing folk, you will find material more worthy of your pen in the twilight of the bourgeoisie. They have lived in the main line of evolution, and will leave their touch on the race. Faint it may be, but indelible. In art, in literature, perhaps in certain predilections of character and temperament, it will be possible to trace them. These mountain people will not have even a fossilized survival. They live in a _cul-de-sac_, a pocket of society, so to speak. Your mind has an epic cast, and will never fit into its limits.”

There was more; then Serena’s voice glided into the monologue.

“Mis’ Dolly, I don’t like to tell you, seein’ you were ailin’ last night, but Johnny Diller went by here this mornin’, an’ he said Mis’ Ludd’s little Marthy wasn’t expected to keep breath in her till sundown.”

“I must go,” said I, getting up.

“I don’t approve of it,” said my friend.

“I must. You don’t understand----”

“Please don’t tell me that again, my dear.”

“But you don’t!”

“Your hat’s on the porch,” said Serena.

“You can’t leave to-day, Marie, because I haven’t time to tell you good-by now,” I said, and hurried away.

Home again at ten in the evening, I found Serena sitting by a bright kitchen fire humming “Old Time Religion.”

“Is Miss Brooks asleep?” I asked.

“I reckon she is. She said she was goin’ to take a sleeper.”

“She’s gone?”

Serena’s affirming nod did not interrupt her tune.

“Please stop that humming, Serena, and tell me what you did the minute my back was turned.”

“Nothin’ at all. That was the matter, maybe.”

“You didn’t do _anything_ for her?”

“I fixed her a snack to eat on the train.”

“Oh, thank you! It was a nice one, wasn’t it?”

“I give her some pickled beets, an’ turnip-kraut, an’ ’tater salad made with that blackberry vinegar.”

I dizzily recalled a remark of Len’s. “That blackberry vinegar ’ud pickle a horseshoe.”

“Serena,” I began faintly.

She had crossed to a shelf and was looking fondly at a jar of strawberry jam.

My voice died away; I could not reproach her.

Sweets, my friend had called it. And, my God, it was May morning on a mountain-top!

IV

SAM