“Potatoes. Big, baked potatoes, split open, you know, with butter and salt and paprika.”
“Or sweet potatoes swimming in butter.”
“And salad––lettuce and tomatoes and oil and vinegar.”
“And then pie. Think of blackberry pie!”
“And jam. I do love jam spread on toast.”
“I’ll tell you something,” said Haig recklessly. “I could even eat sauerkraut!”
Their worst craving was for salt. Marion could fairly taste the spray of the Atlantic on the bathing beaches. She dreamt of salt,––barrels of salt and oceans of salt and caves she had read of in which salt hung in glittering stalactites. And Haig too. He 306 described a desert where salt had risen to the surface and gleamed in crystals in the sand. And once he had lived a long time on salt pork, which he had thought the most insufferable food. But now! The taste of it came back to him, and went tingling through every nerve.
To free their minds from such tormenting memories, Haig went deep into his adventures, his wanderings, his search for excitements. He told her of strange lands and peoples, of the beautiful spots of the world, of battles and perils and escapes,––everything he had been through, with one exception. That––the story of Paris––was still a closed book to her. And similarly, there was one chapter of her life that she did not open to him. A certain delicacy, rendered more vital by their very situation, in which few delicacies could be maintained, restrained them from the uttermost self-revelation. The one subject that was not touched upon in the most intimate of their conversations was that dearest to Marion’s heart and most incomprehensible to Haig’s reason. Partly this avoidance was intuitive, and partly deliberate; where there was so much suffering that could not be escaped, they were scrupulous to inflict upon each other no unnecessary pain or embarrassment. Between a more common man and a less fastidious woman, placed in such propinquity, there would almost inevitably have been concessions and compromises but between these two there remained a barrier that might have been passed by Marion’s unquestioning love, but never by Haig’s inclinations, curbed as they had been through many years, and still reined in by his distrust.
The day came when it seemed safe for Haig to stand and to move a little about the cave. He had fashioned slowly a pair of rude crutches, if they could be so called,––two pine limbs trimmed down with his pocketknife, with their natural forks left to fit under his arms. Marion protested that he was attempting this feat much too soon, but she was compelled to watch him in an agony of suspense lest he should fall on the hard floor of the cave, or rest his weight on the injured leg, and so undo all that had cost them so much of care and labor. But caution restrained him; for he was aware of the danger, though he was also half-mad with impatience to be a man once more. Venturing only a few tentative steps at first, he steadily accustomed himself to movement with the aid of the awkward crutches, and in a few days was able to take up some of the work of their wretched habitation. Marion saw that this pleased him immensely, almost as if he had been a boy entrusted with a man’s responsibility; and once, too, she saw him stand a long time before the row of notches on the wall, and thought his figure straightened, and a flush came into his pale cheek.