book I

certainly shall put it in.

First--Last evening at sundown several of us--two in a boat--went out on the lake in the hope of seeing the deer come down to drink. The men paddled, making so little noise and movement that the boat seemed gliding by itself through the silences of space. There was a yellow glow in the West--the aftermath of the most magnificent amber sunset; mountains and lakes of molten cloud--but the stars were not out and there was only that light from nowhere through which the vision gropes surely but always with surprise.

Mr. Nugent paddled our boat--he sat in the stern, I in the bow, with my back to him--through the Narrows, then, after drifting about for a few moments pointed toward the shore most distant. I had been warned not to speak, and not a word had been uttered when a low suppressed voice from behind gave me a start. “Look, look!” it said, “do you see? Straight ahead.” I saw! A reddish brown something was walking along the bank and in a moment I saw it toss its horns. But it was not of the deer I thought just then but of the strange sense of intimacy that suppressed voice on the darkening silent lake had aroused in me. In a moment it came again, lower still, for we were nearing the shore. “There is another.” And he steered through the water-lilies.

A mate had joined the buck and they cropped and drank for a few moments, then walked along the shore and into an arbour-like opening of the forest, exactly like people making a stately exit from the back of a stage. Almost immediately two does came bounding out of the forest and waded into the water until only their heads and red backs were visible. We remained motionless, almost breathless, but in a few moments they must have noticed us for they made hotly for the shore. When they reached it they stood for at least five minutes with their heads thrown back staring at us. Then, although we were, apparently, as lifeless as the lily pads, their reasoning faculty must have satisfied them that we were aliens and therefore to be feared, for they suddenly turned their backs and made for the forest as hard as they could go, leaping over one high bush after another, until nothing could be seen but the white lining of their tails. Then the exhibition being over we talked all the way home, and that strange sense of intimacy with a note of mystery in it was dispelled.

It was to be renewed, however, for we had not done with the deer. That night at eleven o’clock, when Mr. Van Worden was sound asleep--he really is very dull--Mrs. Van W. and I, Mr. Nugent and Mr. Latimer stole down to the boat house by the light of a lantern. We were muffled up in the darkest things we possessed and I felt exactly as if we were conspirators, or smugglers, or refugees from justice.

In the boat house the men lit a lamp they had brought and placed it in a wooden case, open in front, which was on the end of a pole about three feet high. (This light is called a Jack.) The pole was set into a hole on the bow of the boat Mr. N. intended to paddle, and it was to serve as a sort of search light, not only to see the deer by, but to fascinate what moth-like instinct they possessed.

All prepared, we pushed silently out into the lake. Can you imagine the scene? The mountains--there are so many of them!--were black. The sky seemed dropping with its weight of stars. The clear glassy lake reflected the largest of them and the black masses of the forest that rose straight from its brink. And just ahead of me--shall I ever forget it?--floated a white mist, rising and falling, writhing into a different semblance every moment, the light making it the more ghostly and terrifying. I could not see a living thing; the other boat was behind us and I was in the bow as before, staring at that ghostly mist, quite forgetting the deer. A line of Tennyson’s haunted me:

“The dead steered by the dumb went upward with the flood,”

and I longed to utter it aloud, but dared not. Once I turned my head to see if Mr. N. were really there. He looked black and graven, as if indeed he were the dumb servitor. The others I could not see at all. And again there was that sense of gliding, unpropelled, through the silences of the upper Universe, only a thousand times intensified. And, surely, never were so many stars gathered together before. It seemed to me that the big ones must drop into the lake, they looked so heavy, and so close, and the little ones were like a million grains of golden sand. I thought of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the princess who carried a robe of stars in a nut-shell.

But more often I watched that white mist, just in front of the prow and me, and nowhere else. Where did it come from? I have no idea. They tell me there was a mist everywhere, and that by the aid of our light we saw it just ahead, but I saw none of it elsewhere, and I saw the stars and the trees in the lake.

We must have floated for a half hour, searching almost every inch of the banks without a glimpse of deer, when Mr. N.’s paddle stopped suddenly. At the same moment I heard a slight trampling in the brush close by, then a louder, as if a great buck had been brought to bay and were pawing up the earth. Then there was a terrific snort--I had no idea anything could snort so loud--then a long warning whistle, then another snort, and another. By this time he had made up his mind to flee the danger, for the snorts were accompanied by a crashing through the brush in the opposite direction. The faster he went the louder he snorted, until distance tempered the sound. It must have been five minutes before the last faint note of his anger came back to us.

“I am afraid he has warned off all the others,” came that low hoarse whisper from behind me, and it was the last touch needed to deepen the mystery of that unreal midnight.

Mr. N. paddled for ten or fifteen minutes longer, then giving it up, made for the boat house. We glided in noiselessly and he helped me out at once and extinguished the light. Then we stood on the narrow pier between the boat and the other slip of enclosed water waiting for Latimer and Mrs. Van W. There was no sign of them on the dark lake for several moments, and we were obliged to stand very close on that strip of wood in the darker boat house. I can assure you it was very weird; but with a man like Mr. N. beside one it was impossible to feel frightened. In the boat he seemed so far away. Of course I imagined that all sorts of things had happened to the others, but presently they came gliding toward us and into the boat house. We all stole home--without a word. It was long before I fell asleep.

HELEN.

Letter VIII

_From the Lady_ HELEN POLE _to the Countess of_ EDGE _and_ ROSS.

_Chipmunk Lake_, August 4th

_Dear Polly?_

I have solved the mystery of Mrs. Opp, and it has been the cause of much thought and speculation on my part. Her father was a German noble, high in favour of his Kaiser some fifty years ago. For some reason he fell from grace and was expatriated, his estates confiscated. He came to this country with a large family, drifted to one of the Northern counties of New York State and tried to make a living by farming. Of course he was a failure, poor man, but he was highly respected in the humble community, not only for his worthy character, but because he could read and write in seven languages. It was also known that he corresponded with Bismarck. Some twelve years after his arrival in the New World his youngest child was born--she who now is Mrs. Opp, wife of the keeper of Chipmunk Lake. By that time he was a common farmer and woodsman, working fourteen hours a day with his sons for a bare living, with neither the money nor the time to educate his superfluous children. The little girl grew up in the woods, turning her hand to everything, from milking to making syrup from the maple trees. When her father died and the farm was divided she “hired out,” and supported herself until she married, some ten years ago.

There you have the key to the mystery; the unconscious pride of carriage, the gracious manner, the well-kept teeth and nails, the more than suggestion of breeding in her face. But all this becomes strange only when you realize her absolute unselfconsciousness. I have talked with the woman over and over again and it is as plain as her descent that she has not the slightest appreciation of what she is and has been deprived of, much less cherishes any pride or vanity in it. It is all unconscious, this persistence of inherited instincts through the most unfavourable circumstances, with not an impulse in the brain to guide it. And how short it stops, this heredity! It goes so far and no farther; the brain, most important of all, is choked with the weeds of a bitter fate. Still, she is happy--why should I pity her? She has her handsome woodsman, her placid mountain life, that eternal _youngness_ in her face. Courts could give her nothing more; rather, would they give her too much.

But how it sets one to thinking, Polly. I have tried to imagine myself in similar circumstances: Dad exiled with a large brood, myself born on a mountain farm, “hired out”----The respectable amount of brain I had inherited from a long line of brilliant and useful men would be as surely mine as now--but with nothing put into it, _could_ it have been wholly ignorant and unambitious and unsuspecting? _Could_ I have cooked without protest for Mrs. Van Worden while her distinguished brother addressed me merely to demand more potatoes or the pepper? _Could_ I have been content with finger nails and teeth, and a backbone with a pride the brain had forgotten? Oh, no! I cannot imagine it. I should have demanded schooling, read my father’s correspondence with Bismarck, fed myself with his nightly tales of past splendour, and married an American of the _haute noblesse_--in short, my heredity would have worked itself out along the lines of the conventional novel, that is always so pleasantly prone to give you life as it should be, not as it is. Here I am face to face with a fact I never have met in fiction, and I am grateful for it--even while I feel sad as I speculate upon a fate I happily have escaped. The Fact is Mrs. Opp of noble blood and low degree, jolly, hearty, happy, unwarped by what she knows not of ungrammatical--and ambitious for a hotel on the St. Lawrence river. Surely, there is a motif for a novel of advanced realism.

I have talked it over with Mr. Nugent. He is so interesting and illuminating to talk anything over with. We take long walks and rows every day. He is my constant cavalier, for it would be really unprincipled of me to attempt to cut any of these women out, they have been so sweet to me. A party of us always start off together, but there are so many paths in the forest!

I cannot analyze for you, Polly, the stage at which I have arrived with Mr. Nugent. He has not actually _said_ anything, so far--he is too clever--but he has a faculty of embracing me with an invisible presentment of himself, which is very disturbing. I don’t know what to think--except that I think a great deal about him. It is very sweet--but if only I could be sure. He is so different--everything over here is so different from anything I have ever known. (I don’t idealize him. I wonder if that is fatal?)

5th

We do not play intellectual games here, thank heaven, and there is no idol on a pedestal, nor one person who is more the fashion than another. We are frivolous usually, although I have occasionally heard some solid and instructive conversation, and we all read a good deal. Every house has several shelves of books, and the best literature of all countries except the Great Republic is well represented. Although I no longer take much interest in the subject--and indeed had observed long ago that the Americans of this class cared little for their own bookmakers--I asked Mrs. Van Worden the other day the cause of it. She often answers in sentences so short they sound like epigrams; however, brevity is the soul as well as the substance of most epigrams, as far as I am able to distinguish between the short sentences of the witty novelists and the paragraphs of those who think. For some reason the staccato movement supplies a meaning of which the words reck not.

Mrs. Van W. shrugged her flexible little shoulders when I called her attention to the fact that she had only three American novels in her bookcase.

“Why should I waste my little time on the obvious? I read what I do not know. I want knowledge. Not of a new dialect and pin point on a map, but of life, of the eternal mysteries. I want the wisdom of those who are not afraid to live and tell of what they have felt, thought, done. I am not satiated, not blasée. I am still full of hopes and dreams, and often I am quite happy; but _I_ have lived. Therefore I want to read books by people who have lived more. How could the surface--painted in water-colours by a cautious hand--interest _me_. And the love scenes! Rotten. Conducted through a telephone. I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don’t care a hang for the ‘verbal felicities.’ They’ll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first. Good God! how little true poetry there is in our time; and I often feel the want of it so terribly. I know the old boys by heart. Oh, for a new Voice! What is the matter with the men, anyway? Women make asses of themselves when they try to be passionate and rhyme at the same time, but I can see no reason why a man should become so offensively ladylike the moment he becomes a poet.”

“These are busy times,” I suggested. “Perhaps the virile brains have found something better to do. A poet always has seemed to me a pretty poor apology for a man. Byron was masculine but he was the great exception. And his genius of personality was far greater than his poetical gift, great, creatively, as that was. I could stand a man being a poet incidentally, if he had the power to make me forget he was a poet, but not otherwise.”

And then we all went out on the lake in the dusk and Mr. Nugent quoted Byron to me for an hour. Not to my back. He was rowing this time.

6th

About two miles from here is a lake entirely covered with water-lilies. It is seldom that a boat cuts the surface or a fish line is cast, for the water is too warm for trout, and our fishermen disdain bull heads and sunfish. Consequently the green lily pads have spread over every inch of it, and scattered upon them are the waxen cups with their golden treasure. It is a scene of indescribable beauty and peace, and the low hills above the shore, instead of the usual haughty mountains, are almost as sweet and wildly still.

The keeper carried a boat there yesterday, and Mr. N. rowed me about for an hour. I gathered an armful of the lilies and hung them all over my hat and gown, linking the long soft stems in my belt until they trailed to my knees. I felt so happy in catching at the beautiful things as the boat grinded through their hidden part, and in adorning myself, that I quite forgot Mr. N., who had fallen silent. The silence of one of these Americans, by the way, is quite different from that of our men. They are at so much pains usually to entertain and interest a woman that their silences indicate either a pleasant intimacy, or depression, never a lordly superiority to small matters. Therefore, I suddenly paused with a cluster of lilies half raised and directed my glance to my companion. He looked neither musing nor sad. His eyes were fastened upon me with eager admiration, his whole face, that lean powerful nervous face stamped by unconquerable emotions, was so concentrated, that I felt myself blushing vividly, and I waved the cluster of lilies at arm’s-length.

“Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” I exclaimed gaily. “Is there any flower in the world so artistic as the water-lily?--from its pure cold form to its aloofness from the leaves?--and always alone, never a blossom and its buds, never a group, gathered as if in fragrant gossip. It is the nun among flowers, sexless, childless, angelically pure and cold, asking nothing of this life but to bloom white and unspotted in some mountain convent like this, a convent of perpetual silence, with its wall of hills, its roof of blue, embroidered with gold at night and haunted by day with fleecy clouds that look like wandering angels--Oh, dear! I forgot the thunder-storms and the cries of angry deer, but doubtless the lilies merely close up at such unholy sounds and pray in unruffled serenity.”

“Lady Helen, will you marry me?” asked Nugent.

Polly, I gave such a start that the boat rocked, and I felt like a silly girl who never had been proposed to before. Moreover, I blushed scarlet. But, although I had, over and over, imagined his proposal, none of my conceptions had been anything like this. I had pictured him losing his head suddenly when we were walking alone in the woods, or keeping guard over the fire in the living-room at night. I had--well, there is no use going into details of what did not happen. Suffice it to say that the proposal was delivered in tersest English under a four o’clock sun, while he had an oar in each hand. And as I could not run away, and as he gave me not the slightest excuse to be angry there was nothing to do but to give him some sort of reply.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know,” I said.

“You mean that you are not sure that you love me, but that I may hope,” and his face turned as crimson as mine--no easy feat, for it is about the colour and consistency of leather.

“It is the sort of thing you can put in a good many different ways. And there is so much to be considered. You have the double magnetism of mind and sex, you always interest and never bore me, and you are entirely different from any one I have ever known. I am twenty-six, and like all women, eager to be in love--that I never have been makes my longing for that particular heritage the keener. Moreover, I am on the rebound from two years of cruel anxiety, days and nights of tears and waiting. For the first time I feel that I belong to myself once more, that the world and all its delights are mine--and you happen to be the only man. How it would be if I had met you in England in every-day conditions--that is the problem I cannot solve. These wild mountains, this life full of novelty, the novelty of everything--Oh, I don’t know.”

“Have you any prejudice against marrying an American?”

“No prejudice. That is not the word. It is--well, the very novelty that draws me to you is what I am most afraid of. You see--as I said--I never met any one in the least like you before. The men I have known, whether Englishmen or Europeans, are all men born of the same traditions as myself. Fundamentally they are the same, no matter what their individualities. But you--you are just as different fundamentally as every other way. How do I know but that your great attraction for me is partly the spell of your fascination, more still the novelty which appeals to my somewhat various mind?”

“You certainly have given the matter some thought,” he said, smiling with a sort of joyous sarcasm, but in his usual harsh abrupt tones. “I’ll debate the matter if you like. Your uncertainty of mind is due to the fact that you have gone fancy-free to the age of twenty-six. Unless a woman early acquires the habit of falling in love, it becomes more difficult every year--the disassociating of the mind from the emotions--the surrender of self--you struck me when I first saw you as being so implacably proud in your absolute self-ownership--it was delicious--I knew you never had kissed any man--when will you give me your answer?”

“When? Oh! Well--before--” brightening--“when Bertie is quite well.”

“Your brother is as good as well now. Soulé says there isn’t a microbe in him. The Adirondacks and common sense are all he wants. He has acquired both. Can you assert that you know it would be utterly impossible to love me?”

“Oh, no, I can’t say that.”

“Then take the plunge. I will answer for the rest. You won’t love me before you marry me. I feel sure of that. I am equally sure that you will love me after. And all the differences from your traditional man--they will transpose themselves into commonplaces when they have become the familiar details of daily life.”

“But English women never marry American men,” I exclaimed, grasping wildly at a straw. “It always is the other way.”

“There lies your chance for fame,” he said more lightly than one would expect from his face. “You are already the most delightfully original of women. Don’t do anything so commonplace as to go home, after having all your blood made over by the Adirondack air, and marry a great landlord with a rent-roll and six titles. Fancy the stimulation of watching a determined American throttling a fortune out of his chaotic country, helping him in his ambitious career, rising with him step by step until he is head and shoulders above the seventy struggling millions of the United States of America. Does not the prospect please you? You see I am practical. I hate self-control. I know very little about it. But I dare not be lover-like, not the least bit, till you give me permission.”

“Oh, please don’t! Yes, the life _would_ be interesting. But I adore politics. Would you throw over that Trust and go in heart and soul for reform, with the ultimate intention of being a distinguished statesman?”

“Yes--but it would mean a curtailed income.”

“I have quantities of money--it _would_ be rather an original international match, wouldn’t it?”

“It certainly would. And while you could expend your entire income on dress and jewels if you chose, you would have to make up your mind to live according to _my_ income.”

“Oh!”

“I _should_ be a failure if I settled down to live on a woman’s money at my age--forty-one--; moreover my divorce from the interests of capitalism would be deprived of its point. It would be the sacrifice that would tell most in the beginning. No native of the British Isles would be accused of the disinterestedness of marrying an unwealthy American when protected by a rent-roll. Nobody would suspect your income.”

“That is a nice polite thing to say to me! How would you like the idea of people saying I married you to be supported--with the inference that no one in England would have me?”

“I do not care a red cent what any one says or thinks if I get you. That is the only thing in life that interests me at present.”

“Bertie might oppose it so violently that he would have another hemorrhage.”

“If he were convinced that you loved me and if you wept a few judicious tears, common gratitude would force him to consent without a hemorrhage--and if you postponed the announcement a month he couldn’t have another if he tried. Besides, he loves you devotedly--you know his opposition would soon be exhausted. I have seldom seen a brother and sister so united. He would end by feeling with you and making vivid mental pictures of your great desire for happiness--if I could only create that desire in you.”

“Oh, dear!” I said. “You must give me time. I _can’t_ say anything definite for days and days. _Please_ talk of something else.”

“I have no intention of worrying you. Let us land here. I have another lake to show you. If this is a cloister, rapt and holy, that is a refuge for lost souls, dank and sinister.”

Much interested, and delighted at his ready conformity to my wishes, I stepped ashore and followed him along a “runway” (deer run), for about a mile. It turned and twisted through the wood and sometimes we had to climb over fallen trees, not having the lightsome feet of the deer--who could leap a house, I should think. It was not a dense wood, and the sunlight fairly tumbled in, but so divided that it seemed palpable enough to catch by the apronful. Some of the leaves looked to be made of light, and a sea-gull--they nest in these forests--seemed swimming and drinking in an upper lake of sunshine. But, abruptly, this charming impression was behind us. The wood grew dark and I noticed that the ground was very springy and soft--as our moors are in places.

“We are on a swamp--made of the decay of trees for a hundred years--” he said--“but you are quite safe. It is at least five feet deep.”

This was sufficiently creepy--only five feet of rotted bark and leaves between ourselves and the lake--although I reflected that if it could support trees, our additional weight would not sink it--but in a moment we stood on the brink of the lake.

Polly, I never have seen so desolate a spot. Even the mountains had deserted it. The forest about it grew on land as flat as a plain, and the trees hid the peaks which were only a few miles distant. And so many of the trees were dead. Lightning had blasted them and scarcely a spruce had escaped the blight. All about the shore the lake was choked with rotting trunks, their naked branches projecting starkly above the water--which had no movement. Its tarnished surface, as ripless as a marsh, did not even reflect that deserted wood--they held themselves aloof from each other; and yet they seemed dying together. The lake has no inlet, Mr. N. had told me as we came along; it is fed by springs and the moisture of the forest. I could imagine it dropping lower and lower, as the trees about it died, until--a century hence?--a dry bed choked with rotting trees would be visited as the tomb of one of Nature’s failures. In England such a spot would be the headquarters of a dozen dark and terrible stories, and would have done threadbare duty in fiction. But old as it is it is still too young for that complicated thing called life to have centred about it. It is on one of the New World’s peaks, and not in another generation will she have time to discover it. It is like those unhappy mortals who die and rot before they have guessed that there is aught in the world to live for. Poor stranded ugly duckling. I felt more pity for it than terror and almost resented the calm insolence of its beautiful fellows--two thousand of them, I am told. I wondered if its hidden springs met and gossipped with other springs, who in turn poured their cold freshness into other lakes, and with it their tale of a comrade forgotten by Nature and despised by man. Doubtless they would deepen their amber-brown in scorn, those spoilt beauties of the mountains, worshipped of men and darlings of Nature; not a ripple of pity would agitate them, I would vow.

“Look,” said Mr. N.

He pushed his feet hard against the swamp, putting much spring into his body--and for a hundred yards the shore trembled, the trees moved as if on a seesaw. My nerves are strong, but that was too much. I grasped his arm.

“Come!” I said, “Take me away--please. And do you go ahead. I want to look at a living being till I get out of this wood.”

And we went back to the lake of the water-lilies, that looked pure, and sweet, and happy enough to pray for their lost neighbour.

7th

This morning I sat watching the sunlight play on the wrinkles of the lake where a light breeze blew. The glittering sun-flecks looked exactly like a flock of tiny silver birds caught fast on the surface of the lake and straining their wings even to run away. Everyday I find something new in this lake to interest me, and early this morning, being unable to sleep, I rose and looked out of my front window and saw a great deer, with his antlers against the rosy dawn, standing on one of the points of The Narrows. For a few moments he listened intently, then waded out among the lily pads and had his morning repast.

Perhaps you can imagine why I slept so ill last night. Polly, I wish I knew my own mind. I am afraid of making a mistake and afraid of throwing away what may be my one supreme opportunity to love. If I were only an American or he an Englishman. If only I had the intuitive knowledge of him and all that he will mean. I am beginning to suspect that I have something of the pioneer, of the discoverer in me. After all, why should not one make great experiments in life? Obedience to traditions, to habit, we see every day--and how much happiness?

But I think I’ll be glad to get away from the subject for a time.

I am rather keen for the autumn to come--“the fall of the year”--when all these mountains are a blaze of red and gold and the lakes reflect their glory; when the dew freezes on these forest flames and turns them to jewels that outdazzle the stars; when the hunters with their red caps are in them, not stalking the nimble deer, but sitting beside the runways hour after hour, patiently waiting the passing of the only lords left in these forests, when we have venison three times a day and wonder why we pined for it. There! that was as malicious a drop as any of Heine’s, and I am sorry.

I saw such a laughable sight two days ago. Mr. N. took me to the cow-yard to see it. Know first that the deer flies are a pest in the land and the terror of beasts. The solitary cow the colony boasts was taking her afternoon nap, down on her folded legs. Close to her head and perched along her back were a half dozen hens with their heads alert, watching the circling flies. The moment one lit, the nearest chicken pounced and the fly disappeared, never to torment cow or deer again. I saw ten disposed of in this way, while the cow slumbered peacefully, secure in her guard.

Have I told you that there is a deep ravine on one side of the house? The veranda overhangs it and I often stand and stare down into that wild tangle of fallen trees and rocks and ferns. The sides are broken and steep and under the shade of many trees, straggling up into complete darkness. The torrent is almost dry, but in winter and spring it is broad and noisy and all the ferns are covered and show green and lace-like under the water. It is the outlet of the lake and it goes far down into the valley where it tumbles over a fall into another and wider stream. Up this rocky steep mountain brook, over the cascade, the trout climb in their thirst for the cold springs of the higher lakes. No other fish can make that perilous journey, so Chipmunk is one of the stars of the Adirondacks. The trout have no minnows or other small fish to feed on, and rise to the fly with little coaxing. I am become so learned in mountain lore! But I feel as if I had discovered this wonderful country, and as happy as a poet in the nervous languor of creation.

You remember I wrote you of Mrs. Coward--and, by the way she says she met you at Homburg and in Scotland two years ago--I have concluded that I do not like her quite as well as the others, not because she is insatiable in her desire for admiration and has several times flattered Mr. N. right out of the room and on to the lake--how can men be so weak?--when he is palpably devoted to me and therefore in common decency she should let him alone. Unless she mends her ways I shall turn my batteries on Mr. Carlisle, a dashing young millionaire who distinguished himself in the late war, is a master of hounds, drives a Tally-ho, is a champion at golf, never misses the two deer a season the government permits him to shoot, and is altogether very jolly and charming. I could cut her out if I chose and without flattering the animal either. That is a trick of the mind to cover up the defects of nature.

But what I started to say was that the real reason I dislike her is that I have discovered more of the snob in her than in most of these Americans, aspiring as they are--with the possible exception of Mrs. Laurence. Yesterday morning I “dropped” into Mrs. Grant’s lodge, and while the servant went for Mrs. Coward--Mrs. Grant had a headache--I picked up a framed photograph of a very good-looking young man in the uniform of the United States. I still held it when Mrs. Coward came stepping down the stairs like the duchess in the play, a red poppy in her dark hair, a soft cream-white morning gown clinging to herself and the floor--the morning was chilly. She had a bunch of poppies in her belt and altogether looked rather well.

“Is this your brother?” I asked. “I fancy I see a resemblance.”

“Yes,” she replied, “it is my soldier-brother. He made a brilliant charge at Santiago and I am very proud of him. Sit there, dear Lady Helen, where the light falls full on you. You are so radiant, bathed in sunlight--and you can stand it. I always feel in the presence of poetry--a blue and gold edition of all the poets--when I can sit and look at you like this. Poetry is really elevating, don’t you think so?--I always maintain that, positively. It is like pure air and the rural beauties of the country. But about my brave brother: it is only fondness that makes me proud of him, for there never has been a generation in our family where we have not given at least one soldier to the country. Of course you will appreciate that. Very few American families can say that for _seven generations_ its men have distinguished themselves in the field and added to the honour of the name.”

Her low silken shallow voice paused that I might comment, but I only stared at the portrait--now restored to the table--trying in vain to frame a phrase that would express my awe of the seven generations. Finally, I said desperately:

“He looks--really--as if the entire Spanish army could not terrify him.”

This extravagance served the purpose of diversion. “Nothing could terrify him,” she exclaimed. “He only needs another war to become really famous. I am quite positive our unfortunate acquisitions will let us in for another war before long--the Chinese question--don’t you think so? I think it so delightful that American women are now beginning to take as much interest in politics as English women do. You really have been our superiors in that--as in many other--respects. I heard you discussing the great questions of the day with Mr. Nugent and Mr. Carlisle last night and I quite envied you--I am just beginning, and you seem to have learned politics with your alphabet. I am _so_ glad you have such influence with Mr. Nugent, because I am convinced that he has the making of a statesman in him and that it is his duty to go into high politics. I have always maintained,” she added weightily, “that it is a man’s duty to cultivate his gifts. If he feels an irresistible impulse to write he should do so--or to paint--or to model. Politics are of equal importance to the development of civilisation--the right sort. Do not you agree with me, Lady Helen?”

“I have always maintained that white is white, and that the sun gives light when there are not too many clouds,” I said, firmly. “How wonderfully becoming those poppies are to you. I envy any one who can wear red, it is a colour so full of life, but it does not suit me at all.”

For a second she had looked puzzled, but she is too thorough a woman of the world to hang out her emotions, and she replied with her usual suavity:

“If I could wear pink and dead white, and brilliant blues as you can I should resign red without a struggle. I have _never_ seen anything so beautiful as you are with a pink rose in your hair and another at your throat.”

But I had had as much of this as I could stand and I asked her abruptly if she had visited many of the lakes.

“This is my first visit to the Adirondacks, I am ashamed to say. I was taken abroad every summer when I was a girl and I have gone almost every year since from force of habit and because I really have such a delicious time. It is one’s duty to see all the beauties of the old world, don’t you think so, Lady Helen?”

But I did not want to talk about Europe. “I hear that Spruce Lake is so beautiful,” I said. “Could not we--a party of us--walk over there some day? It is only seven miles, and Mr. Nugent says the trail is very good.”

“Seven miles! _Dear_ Lady Helen. Twice seven are fourteen. Remember--we--alas!--are not English.”

“They might put us up for the night----”

“Oh, quite impossible. We do not know any of them. They are business people from Buffalo and Utica and all those provincial towns.”

“In trade, do you mean?”

“That is the way you would express it. It is the same class--people who keep stores or make things.”

“And they have the same tastes as yourself?” I asked, puzzled at this new American facer. “They are--sportsmen? They lead the same life up here as you do?”

“I really don’t know anything about them. I suppose there are certain national characteristics; several lakes in the Adirondacks are owned by people of that sort. I am told that there was an encampment of commercial travellers just off the borders of this property last year.”

“But I don’t understand. Your lines of caste are very marked, it has seemed to me. Why should the leisure class and the commercial traveller have the same tastes. It is very odd.”

But she refused to take the slightest interest in the subject, and that afternoon as I was walking to the lake of the water-lilies with Mr. N. I asked him for enlightenment.

“Oh, Eastern men are keen sportsmen,” he said. “That is to say, most--wherever there are mountains and woods and lakes. It is an instinct inherited from the old hunters and trappers--from the days when the settlers shot game for food and were as familiar with the wilderness as the farm. These settlers were the ancestors of men who are in all classes of life to-day. And you must remember that there is no ‘Continent’ to run over to for the yearly vacation. You can travel an immense distance here and pay a good deal of money only to hear a change of accent. But the forests of New York and Maine mean rest, reinvigoration, and the complete happiness of the sportsman. These men up here go in the woods every year as naturally as they keep their nose to the grindstone for the remaining ten or eleven months.

“And they are first-class sportsmen.”

“As good as any in England.”

“Men that--that--sell hats?”

“Carlisle is neither keener nor better.”

“Certainly your country is wonderfully interesting and sometimes I feel as if I were groping about in the neighbourhood of the true democracy. Do they also play golf?”

“They do, indeed.”

“The tradesmen? People who keep retail shops.”

“In the small interior towns many of them have achieved sufficient prosperity and leisure, and they are very keen about it. But in the large towns it is usually the wealthier class that goes in for it; the families of business and professional men, successful on a large scale.”

And then I saw the lilies.

I must tell you that Mrs. Van Worden often goes into the kitchen and sits in a rocking chair by the window and talks to Mrs. Opp, and that sometimes, when the men are out, she invites her into the living-room. It appears that unless these people were treated with a certain amount of consideration they would not remain. A city servant is a servant, but in the country they appear to have studied the Declaration of Independence, and doubtless they all know that Abraham Lincoln’s sister “lived out.” Mrs. Opp is quite insensible of her noble blood but she is as proud as Lucifer all the same, and because her untainted Americanism teaches her that she is “as good as anybody.” She is willing to work for hire and envies no one, but the slightest display of “airs,” an unthinking snub, and she would pack her bundle and march over the mountain with a majesty the self-conscious American of high degree never will achieve. It is truly delightful and I love her. I often go out and sit in the rocker and watch her great bulk move lightly about the exquisite kitchen, and listen to her kindly drawl emphasised by little gracious bends of the head. She tells me the gossip of the mountains, and alluded the other day to the cook at Boulder Lake as “a lovely woman.” I told her about Jemima, and she said:

“Poor child. I guess she was right, but she didn’t know how to take it. Of course you folks nat’rally wants ter eat with yourselves, and the hired help as is used to farms and little country towns don’t just see how it is at first. Different people has different ways and all we ask up here is to be treated right, we don’t expect the hull earth. I’ve always knowed that, because I’ve lived so much to hotels, but Jemima, I guess she’s pretty green yet.”

When I told her about Jemima wanting to see “a dook,” she laughed heartily.

“Well, I guess I’d like to see one, myself,” she admitted, “not that I’d expect them to be so different from other folks, but just because I’ve read so much about ’em. That’s it. That’s it. I’m glad he’s gittin’ on so nice. He had orter drink plenty of milk.”

Curiously enough, that evening I received a letter from Bertie saying that another “eminent doctor” had put him on a milk diet and promised him complete health in _one_ year if he would be faithful to it and the Adirondacks for that period.

“Its beastly uninteresting diet, Nell, and required all the will I’ve got to make up my mind to it,” he wrote; “but I want to get back to England and be alive once more, so I’ve plunged in--literally enough. I’ve leased an Inn on one of the big public lakes from October till June, so we’ll have a big old-fashioned house, they tell me, and not a care, for the proprietor will ‘run it.’ Rogers has promised to come up twice a month and I have written to Nugent and asked him to come often and bring all the friends he likes. I fancy from your letters that I should like the men--and women--over there better than these--Rogers excepted. I believe he is in love with you, Nell, and so is Nugent; but you mustn’t marry an American. By the way Roddy Spencer is coming over here--wrote me to expect him any day, and that he’d look me up at once. He has just succeeded--old Landsburghe died last month, and left Roddy all his personal property. That must amount to three or four hundred thousand and with the estates will set up Roddy as well as he could wish--and his debts must have been a pretty penny.”

I shall be rather glad to see Roddy. He was always with Bertie when they were boys, but I have not seen much of him of late years. Didn’t he go to South Africa in the hope that Rhodes would put him in the way of making a fortune--after he had loaded himself too heavily with debts to remain in London. I forget the details. The legacy must have been a pleasant surprise, for the old Marquis was very eccentric and had refused to pay his debts. Well, I shall be glad to see him and suppose he is as good looking as ever.

HELEN.

Letter IX

_From the Lady_ HELEN POLE _to the Countess of_ EDGE _and_ ROSS.

_Chipmunk Lake_, August 11th

_Dearest Polly_:

I am rather put out, and have been so irritable for two days that I hardly know myself. Still, thank heaven, nobody suspects it. I never have been more amiable.

The other night a half dozen of the party were playing Bridge in a corner of Mrs. Van Worden’s living-room. I detest gambling and was trying to interest myself in a book when I happened to glance out of the window and saw--Mrs. Coward and Mr. N. on their way down to the lake. Now, I don’t pretend to be in love with the man, Polly, but I do feel that while he is pretending devotion to me it is little short of an insult for him to sneak off with another woman--and an arrant coquette--for a row at nine o’clock at night--it is scandalous and I never have heard _any one_ utter so many virtuous platitudes as Mrs. C. If I thought he was trying to make me jealous I should merely dismiss him from my mind with the contempt he would deserve, but he really is incapable of such pettiness, and I happen to know he was only too frightened I’d find it out.

Polly, I cannot pretend to describe to you my sensations when I saw those dark shapes steal through the spruce grove before the house--the branches are cut so high that it is really a grove of slender trunks and you see the lake plainly. For the moment I felt as if my heart were sinking and I involuntarily pushed my hand underneath it, while my breath shortened and my face burned and then went cold. I had an impulse to rush out and see if it really were true and to prevent it. And then I fell into a rage. How I wished Roddy Spencer were here. He is such a splendid looking creature that he could be made to set another man wild with jealousy. Suddenly I bethought myself of Carlisle. He was playing, but the game was nearly over. I made up my mind in an instant; I got up and moved about the room as if I were getting bored and impatient, and in a few moments I caught his eye. I sent him a glance of coquettish appeal, and it had the desired effect. The moment the game was over he was at my side and we ensconced ourselves on the three-cornered divan under the swinging rose-coloured lamp and never moved till twelve o’clock. N. and Mrs. C. returned, looking half-frozen and too silly, for they were obliged to get almost inside the chimney. We never noticed them. I coquetted, Polly, as I never coquetted before, and Mr. Carlisle is a flirt whose accomplished depths it is interesting to explore. For fear he should think I was animated by pique--although he knew nothing of the row--I contrived to intimate that I was rather bored and on the verge of making an excuse to return to Boulder Lake. At the same time I made him feel what a triumph he would achieve if he renewed the fascinations of Chipmunk Lake for me. Nothing would induce me to leave. I shall stay and prove to this self-satisfied American flirt that I can make myself twice as interesting as herself. I’ll employ her own weapon, flattery, and make her platitudes apparent. When I have sufficiently punished N. I’ll take him back and keep Carlisle besides. I am sure she wants to marry N. She has too large a fortune of her own to be tempted by Carlisle’s, and N.’s possibilities appeal to her inordinate ambition and vanity.

This morning, of course, N. tried to be as devoted as usual. But I dismissed him with an absent smile, which became brilliantly personal the moment C. appeared. We went off for a walk in the forest and I never shall forget the expression of N.’s face. I almost relented. But he deserves punishment. I will have all or nothing. In the afternoon Mrs. Coward drifted about majestically for a half hour or so--her face expressing nothing--while Carlisle and I read a novel together on the divan in the corner. She tried to get N. into her pocket but he merely glowered into the fire and took no notice of her. Presently she drifted away, and in the afternoon I saw her fishing with _Mr. Van Worden_! If I were in such desperate straits I would give out that I was writing a book, and keep to my room. I fancy she wove a net of flattery for Mr. Latimer, but he is a faithful soul. Mrs. Van W. often looks sad, by the way, brilliant as her normal spirits are. It must be an unsatisfactory roundabout way of trying to be happy. I am more than ever determined to make no mistake when I do marry, and to consider one thing only. I am convinced there is no other happiness.

13th

I have restored N. to favour but now give him only half my time, that he never may be quite sure of me again. Mr. C. apparently is quite as high in my good graces, and while he is merely stimulated and on the verge of becoming serious, N. shows a curious mixture of alarm, anger and energetic determination--and has taken no more rows or walks with Mrs. C. I have managed to convey to him that I will accept no divided homage, and he is now only too eager to give me the whole of it, and keeps out of Mrs. C.’s way. I must say she is a thoroughbred. She has never betrayed jealousy or pique by the flutter of an eyelash. Perhaps I’ll restore Mr. Carlisle to her presently, for I am rather tired of him. There is none of the quality of the unexpected about him. He is a well-proportioned mass of good points and good fortune--all trained outward; he never has had the necessity--I believe his family has had wealth and position for four generations--nor the inclination to look very far into himself, consequently the crust has deepened and the personality diminished. Mr. N., on the other hand, while as well-born, has had all his faculties sharpened by a struggle with the impinging forces that array themselves against the young man seeking to conquer them without money. But first of all he received a college education and distinguished himself by his talents and hard study. Given the illuminating education first and the struggle of the wits for mastery afterward, and adding to both the advantages and the principles of a gentleman--and the inner life, the soul, of such a clever man could not fail to be developed, complex and interesting. I have had only glimpses of it, but it has excited my curiosity so that I naturally could not watch another woman carry him off with equanimity. But I don’t think there is any danger of another lapse. He has renewed his efforts to interest me, and--it certainly _is_ clever of him--has not so much as addressed me with his eyes again. That is to say there is no appeal in them. But there are other things, Polly, and there is something about the man that fearfully suggests the impossibility of failure. But the weather is so heavenly just now that I wish everybody in the world could have everything he wanted. It is like living in a crystal dome and being bathed by invisible waves of soft stimulating perfumed air; with splendid masses of rich and tender greens, of amber-browns and turquoise blue, and the golden glory of sunsets for the eye, and a vast uplifting silence. It is a sort of voluptuous heaven, virtuously seductive.

The other day several of us walked down the mountain to one of the farms to see the haying. It was a grand valley among the mountain-tops. From the farm we visited we looked over rolling wooded hills, dotted with houses, cattle, and a solitary white church spire, to a great irregular chain of green mountains, encircling the horizon; other peaks, faint and blue and distant, showing beyond their depressions; and the forest, the forest, everywhere beyond the clearings of the farmers.

The hay had been cut and the mechanical rake was gathering it into heaps when we arrived, while men pitched it into a wagon where another man stood with a pitchfork pressing it down. The sweetness of that air! I never shall forget it; I was doubly glad I never had used perfumes. It was drenched with the sweetness of newly mown hay and it almost intoxicated me. I fancy that if Mr. N. had seized the occasion to press his suit--however, I do not know. He did not, and as there were some ten people in the field it would not have been so romantic, in spite of the fragrance. They gave me a hand-rake and I raked quite a good deal of the pretty green stuff that it seems shocking the farm-yard cattle should eat.

I was very much disappointed in the appearance of these mountain farmers. How few things in life resemble the traditions of them--we have been so victimized by poets and romanticists. I expected great brawny muscular fellows, with enormous legs, brown skins, and deep chests. But they are pale and thin and stooping, not one looks as if he would see sixty or as if he got the least pleasure out of life. Mr. N. explained that hard work while they were young and no cessation of it thereafter had broken their constitutions. In winter they work on the roads which they are under contract to keep open, and of course it snows and freezes heavily and frequently. During these same severe months they also go in the woods and help to “draw” the logs the lumbermen have cut during the summer for the pulp mills. These logs have to be piled on sleds and drawn to the creek, to be floated down to the valley after the spring rains. The men rise at three in the morning, working by torches till sunrise, and seldom get to bed before eleven at night! No wonder they are old men at forty. And I don’t pretend to say how many cords of wood they cut a year, or how many stone fences they have built, or how many thousand stones they dug from the ground before they could farm.

When all the hay had been removed the field looked like a great green lawn--brilliantly green under the five o’clock sun. Beyond was a dip, then the thick masses of the dark green woods, touched into richer green by that blaze of sunshine, then the mountains, sombre and faintly blue. It is a beautiful land, Polly, but it depresses me to think that while it means new blood and new life and all cure for the outsider of leisure, it sucks jealously back into its own store of vitality the little store of its struggling children. It is an unnatural and snobbish mother, after all.

Mr. N. calls me “Maud Muller,” since I raked the hay. Did you ever come across that Quaker poet, Whittier? He lived here in America, but I am told he is the poet of the English quakers as well. Mr. N. recited “Maud Muller” to me, as we stood apart in the field--after I had tired of raking. It really is a beautiful and musical poem, but I could not see anything quakerish about it.

When I write “I am told,” Polly, you may assume that my authority is Mr. N. As far as my limited comprehension can perceive he knows everything.

16th

Mr. Carlisle was called suddenly to Newport last night by the illness of his mother. A man rode thirty miles with the telegram, left his horse at a farm house and walked the trail--which is so full of rocks logs and mud-holes that no strange horse could cover it without breaking a leg, and, likely as not, his neck. It was just after dinner and we were all grouped in the little spruce grove before the camps watching the sunset, when the man, looking so hot and tired, came hurrying out of the woods. I am sure every one of us had a fright when we saw the yellow envelope, a telegram is such a rare interloper in the peace of these mountain camps; and when the man said “Mr. Carlisle,” I am equally sure that every one of us wanted to hold Mr. C.’s hand. He went rather pale, but said it was doubtless a false alarm as his mother had been very nervous ever since the war--during which her nerves had been on the rack between apprehension of Cervera’s fleet and his own demise--and hastened away to get his things together. The keeper was sent out to bring a buckboard in and Mr. C. left at three this morning.

I am sorry to say, Polly, that before he left I had rather a painful interview with him. I tried to avoid it, but these American men are very determined, my dear, and he managed to detain me on the veranda after the others had gone in. How I hate men to be serious! It hurts my conscience so that I don’t get over it for weeks. I had not the slightest intention of making him love me, I only wanted to punish that woman for her contemptible conduct in regard to Mr. N. Now I feel quite as bad myself and wish that I had simply contented myself with showing her that I had a string tied to Mr. N. Mr. C. is really a fine manly fellow and I felt like petting him as I would Bertie and telling him not to mind, but of course I couldn’t. He vows he’ll come back the moment he is free, and gently insinuated contempt for a suitor who was ten years too old to win me. How funny these men are! What I am to do with them all I am sure I cannot imagine, but I would rather he went away hoping, and accepted his fate by degrees; for heaven knows I do not wish to add too heavily to his troubles. Not that I gave him any encouragement. Heaven forbid. But they are so determined, these Americans.

The buckboard awoke me at three o’clock, and I got up and peered out of my high window. The woods looked so grey and ghostly, filled with mist that was like a wet cobweb. The keeper was driving and Mr. C. sat on the back seat muffled in a winter great coat. Mr. Latimer went out with him to the end of the trail; and presently they disappeared into the forest and the mist; and the silence was as if the world were dead.

But I have not told you of the new arrival. She has come to spend the last of our camping days here with Mrs. Wilbur Garrison, and she is quite the most imposing, nay, overwhelming person I have met in this extraordinary jumble of democracy and caste, known--infelicitously, I gather--as the United States. She is Mrs. Earle wife of ---- ---- ---- ----,[A] and of course, a personage of vast importance in Washington. But she is no mushroom; she has belonged for heaven knows how many generations--eight, perhaps--to the haute noblesse of the country and was born into an equally imposing number of dollars. But, Oh, Polly! she is so cold, so haughty, so frozen! Her handsome little head is set so far back on her mountainous body, her backbone is so rigid and her upper lip so proudly curled, there is such a touch of icy peremptoriness in her manner, as if it were her daily task to dismiss pushing aspirants for social recognition--that I feel I have looked upon the walking embodiment of the aristocratic idea as it is interpreted by Americans. Heaven knows she has been sweet to me, she has even invited me to spend a month with her in Washington next winter; but I know that after a consecutive month of that chill presence I should return to Bertie a sort of hysterical iceberg, my marrow frozen and my humour on the verge of insanity. And, although not in the least clever, she would be quite an agreeable woman were it not for her tragic self-consciousness, for she must know the world of Washington like a book; and it is a