HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT

From ADMIRAL'S LIGHT

The High Woods

THE road ran high and lonely over the ridges. Their eyes, dazzled with leagues of white glare, blurred with tears in the sweep of a freezing wind, gained power slowly to descry the milder gleam of the channel far beneath, and beyond this, the billowing of the Maine hills, softened by distance and the smoothing magic of the snow. Sometimes, dipping into a smothered hollow among firs, they suffered again a momentary blindness, in the obscurity of dark green and shadowed white; and again, yet once more dazed with wide brilliancy, climbed higher and farther from the river, up an immense and softly convex curve, toward the fugitive sky-line. Black evergreen tops, the distant relics of some grove, dotted the hills like ermine; or singly, and closer to hand, like feathered arrows that a giant might have shot straight downward. Rarely these, however; so free was the north wind, so shelterless and dry the snow, that by turns the sled groaned over frozen mud, and stuck fast in smoking drifts.

As the two men pushed and tugged to aid the horse, or slapped their aching hands, or stamped and kicked the sled, they exchanged few words. The slow jangling of the bells traveled in the void, a stray mote of cheerful sound.

To Miles, looking back down many a long slope, they chimed with vague but happy thoughts. He surveyed, in shining perspective from this eminence, not only his native valley, but the last fortnight of his life there. Ella was wrong, he had not moped; Tony was wrong, he had hardly considered their estrangement; here was the real truth: before that adventure in the fog, he had passed his days in a brown study, and after it, had been whirled into the glowing rout of life. A hundred dim things which had passed him by he now saw, heard, felt, and thrillingly understood.

Two regrets lingered: he had not seen again either the man or the girl of Alward's Cove; and from them he traveled farther at every shake of the bells. Yet all that was but temporary; and meanwhile, to his strange, new vision of the world, the simplest detail in this simple journey was a bit of exultation.

The woods at last received them into vast and crowded silence. The sorrel horse, with steaming haunches, plodded heavily through a dark lane of virgin whiteness, between puffy, undulating banks of buried

underwood. Beyond or through these, in broken glimpses of depth, white and black trunks so lurked and interchanged in reciprocating movement as to create an illusion of presences-many, yet one—who dodged and spied and followed. There seemed no other life in all this stillness. Yet now and then, in sunny clearings, a line of tiny hollows, filled with shadowy blue, marked some late woodland errand; the straight trot of a fox, scored alongside with shallow scoops of his brush; the neat cuneiform written by partridge claws; the bunched all-fours of a leaping rabbit, or the beaten stream where his whole tribe had flowed over log and knoll into some green cavern. When drifts halted the sled, and brought the bells to silence or single notes, an invisible brook chuckled from among willows, its runnels gossiping under ice and snow.

At dusk the two men reached a dark little shanty in second-growth beeches.

"W'oa there, Gyasticus!" cried Hab. "Here y' are. unlo'd dunnage!"

Stand by to

That night they spent in watches, turn about, sleeping and tending fire; and before daylight were out and away to distant groves of birch and maple. A week of happy, vigorous days fled by. Sometimes the two chopped side by side; sometimes they separated for whole mornings, each alone in the snowy wilderness, but for the ringing shock of the other's axe in frosty wood, half a mile away. The novice felled his trees, first with reluctance at such treachery to old friends, but later with a workman's pride. In the beginning they crashed through their neighbors' tops in a violent cloud of snow, dazzling as an explosion of diamond dust; but now they dropped, groaning, with one clean swing into their foreseen places.

At noon Miles met Habakkuk in the lee of a tall granite boulder, blackened with smoke, and crowned with the red spikes of sumac. Here, over a leaping fire, they boiled snow for their coffee, and thawed their frozen food; and here they lounged for a half hour of vernal warmth and drowsiness. Snow, melted by noonday sun above and flame beneath, dropped round them from the branches, in white batons that broke and dispersed in mid-air. A thin arc of pale green grass bordered the melting semicircle where they sat, with steaming moccasins, while Old-Hab growled some slow account of "getting out knees," of swamping, stumpage, the excellence of beech for "water-log work," and all the personal traits of Nasty Ellum, Old Popple, and Master Oak.

From FERN SEED

Chapter I

ONE evening in Santa Maria Novella he (Leonard Corsant) sat as long as he could sit with a dark, hushed, humped little crowd, looking out from mysterious gloom to where the altar floated in a haze of candlelight and of young voices singing. The contrast moved him, touched him within like an allegory of our poor humankind. He would have stayed there; but the mortal chill of the church had crept into his bones, and drove him away. As he went quietly out, through the vast empty rear of the darkness, a man, a shadow leaning on a pillar, turned to look at him. Leonard caught only a passing impression that the movement was quick and stiff. He thought no more of it.

"Well? To bed with the fleas again?" he asked himself, outdoors. "No, by gum. This is bad. A real go of the waggles!"

His body shook, his teeth chattered. Slapping himself like a teamster, he crossed the piazza by starlight, and hurried down a narrow street, to find some refuge, osteria, trattoria, wine-shop or eating-den, whatever might first appear. For some time he found nothing. The way was empty, dark, a rift among mediaeval shadows. When at last a pair of windows gave light, ahead, their panes all steamy with warmth inside, he turned toward them, opened the door between, and entered.

It was a dingy little old restaurant, a narrow room which in those days before the war ran through cat-a-corner from Sword Street to Sun Street. A dingy little old waiter leaned against the wall as though put there and abandoned like a worn-out umbrella. If alive, he was the only living creature to be seen. Leonard had chosen a table nearest the source of heat-a cavern-mouth that breathed out greasy kitchen odors-and had settled himself on a bench, before the old solitary moved or so much as blinked.

"Good evening," said Leonard. "Something hot, if you please."

The waiter slowly detached his back from the wall, and came forward mumbling excuses:

"The cook has gone home in rage, sir. A maledicted cook, who made asseverations . . Then, as he became aware that his guest sat shuddering, his aged eyes grew bright, shrewd, kindly. He stopped his apology, to cry one compassionate word: "Freddo!"

With that he darted into the kitchen, made a great clatter, and quickly burst again from the darkness, running with a tumbler, a black bottle, and a copper kettle that steamed.

"Prompt and intelligent cuss," quoth Leonard. In more polite phrases, he begged the man to get another tumbler and share his toddy.

"Oh, sir, you are too kind," was the reply. "I could not think of doing so."

The poor old chap was both surprised and frightened. Leonard had an easy way with him, however, and soon the pair were hobnobbing over Gorgonzola verde and a good round of loaf of bread. Chills vanished, likewise formality. The talk passed from weather and hard times to politics, then to warfare and memories; for this dried little ancient with his nut-cracker face and beady eyes had tramped as a boy soldier of Garibaldi's, and plainly a good one. With all the shop to themselves, they took their ease, found each other excellent company, and held a humble revel.

"You like that story, sir?"

"I do, I do!" cried Corsant, leaning back and wiping his eyes. "But it hurts to laugh so."

"Then, sir, I will tell you a yet more comical. At Orte were three sisters . .

Just then the Sword Street door quietly opened. A man came in.

The laughing veteran sprang up, drew away, and as though by a trick on the stage, faded shrivelling back into a sad old waiter.

He who caused this transformation paid it no heed, but stepped down into the room and looked about scornfully. He was a lusty blond young man, handsome after a fashion which, thought Leonard, was too professionally male. His English clothes fitted him too well, tighter than need be, and set off a muscular body powerful enough for an athlete's, but not loose enough.

"Good evening to you," he said in English.

Leonard returned the wish.

The stranger paused by Leonard's table. He was smiling, but his eyes remained too pale and cold.

"We always meet in odd places, don't we?" He spoke affably. His bass voice came from the throat and seemed to roughen it. "I shouldn't quite think you'd care for this, though. There are plenty of good beerhalls."

Corsant, when ruffled, had a sleepy way of looking at you. When angry as a friend of his expressed it-his face died. Now he looked no more than sleepy.

"It does well enough, thanks," he said. "I can't recall any other places where we had the pleasure?"

"Oh, just as you like." The stranger laughed. Then, having turned

to see that the servant was beyond ear-shot, he laughed again, and bent across the table. "I do not scrape friendship. But we're off duty, eh? One good turn deserves another, and I thought you might like to know that they are after you."

Leonard had forgotten all plagues of Egypt and all quarantine documents. Now he remembered. This warning seemed freely enough given, and probably true; still he did not like the giver, or the accompanying sneer of condescension.

"Oh. Much obliged," said he. "Let 'em come." The light-colored eyes flashed down at him balefully. "Good. We are even. I leave you to your friend."

Removing his hat stiffly, the man swung round, marched rather than walked past the waiter-whom he ignored as from a height-and so went out by the other door into the darkness of Sun Street.

"Who was he, Gino?"

The waiter thawed, became human again, and flung off a most inimitable farewell with his hands.

"Ah, that brute! Ah, that white-eyed vassal! I never saw him before, sir."

"Nor I," said Leonard.

He was not so sure; that stiff wheel, and turn of the back all in a piece, reminded him how some one had watched him go out of church.

"For all his garments and his altitude," said Gino, grinning, "he behaved as one in a hurry. No repose. Why fluster so grandly? Why should one hurry, sir? The man cannot consume the time, no: the time consumes the man."

Corsant agreed.

"You speak like Horatius Flaccus. Have we any more hot water? If so, the evening is young. Come, sit down, and let us finish that yarn of the Three Sisters."