"You'll have to," he said oracularly—"somebody's always hurting somebody—someone is always getting happiness out of someone's else misery." The horn-rimmed eyes looked very mature and bitter.
But several of the group jumped down from the terrace and were now tinkering with the machines in the drive. Jeering cries came from one to another as the engines started up. "Minga goes with me!" "Aw! go on, you animal, she does not; she goes with me; right here, Minga, where there's a looking-glass and rouge and sachet powder and everything—Sard goes with Thorny Croft. Hey, Nonny, Nonny, the two nuts, the two high-brows! Cinny'll catch cold; she hasn't got enough clothes on; Cinny never has enough clothes on. How about the dance the other night? Well—well—well, we saw a good deal of Cinny!" Not delicate, not pretty, not dignified, not inspiring. But it belongs to the age, Messieur et Mesdames; what part have you had in making the age what it is?
CHAPTER X
THE EXPEDITION
Dear Watts:
Pudge wants me to write and thank you for your letter. He was fascinated with the arrow-heads and listened with his accustomed solemnity to your remarks about "minding mother." An hour afterward I found him putting cold cream, which I have expressly forbidden him to touch, all over the kitten. Upon remonstrance he said blandly, "You didn't tell me not to put cold cream on the kitten, Mother, and she didn't say anything." It was all so funny and he was so naughty afterward! It opened up strange thoughts of all the responsibilities I shall have with him. I wondered if when Pudge grows up the first thing he will hear will be all the sad and ugly stories that are told of his father and if he will believe that they cast an irrevocable shadow on his own life. I have known young fellows who went steadily to the bad because their fathers were weak in some way. They thought they were foredoomed!
I don't even know whether to go on letting him have his own name, his father's name, now disgraced and tragic, but how can I stop things? He is his father, he has his mouth, the beautiful, fateful mouth that always made me feel as if I were a ship, wrecked on it, and he has his hair and his voice and his reckless and beseeching ways. Oh, Watts, you saved my husband, all there was to save, brought him back home; though you couldn't save him from himself.
Thanks for the arrow-heads, Watts, and please write me when you like. You seem to think I might not care to hear. I have known why it was always Pudge you wrote to, but I have grown a little stronger, a little less like a wounded animal that wants to bite the hand held out to it. I hope your mountain top still holds the peace you first found there.
It was this letter that Watts Shipman saved until after his dinner, cooked by himself on a camp-fire out under the trees and served deftly and frugally with a sort of hermit cleanliness and economy. His pipe lit, the russet head of Friar Tuck on his knee, the man read and reread the pages. The deep eyes with their curiously grave and faithful look were puzzled, the long hands gripped once or twice on the paper, and the mouth curled down on the pipe-stem with a look of bafflement and grim disappointment.
"Pshaw!" Watts kicked away a twig. He changed his position on the log upon which he sat. Putting the letter safely in an inside pocket, he got out his knife and cut rather restlessly into a long smear of yellow lichen on a tree. "It's rather queer that a woman can talk like that, hold out her signal of distress and then not tell you she needs you—it's a queer thing," said Watts solemnly to his dog. "It's a queer thing, only a good woman can withhold her self; a bad woman can be subtle and elusive, a funny little beast, plotting, dreaming greedy, little clawing dreams and setting out her little poison traps for you, but a good woman merely draws the veil and you—well, Tuck, all you can do is to go home!"
Watts spoke the last words so loudly that Friar Tuck rose once. "Woof, woof," he barked loudly into his master's face. Watts laughed. "Hush, you baby, I know I said 'go home,' but I'm not going home, Tuck, no sir, not to those comfortable, luxurious bachelor apartments, not until I've roughed it a little longer and get the wisdom and rightness of the woods into me. For we can't take another whole summer off like this, boy, for a long time. We've got to make it last, you old blasé clubman."