CHAPTER XIV
PINK PEARLS
People who like to dream geologic dreams of the figures and forms that moved in the long night of ancient Chaos are fond of tracing out some connection between the Hudson River and its neighbor, the woodland winding Hackensack. Not much narrower than the Tiber, and certainly wider than the little trickles that are left of the classic rivers of Greece, it has little personality for the general inhabitants of New York or New Jersey. Only to those who make friends of the hidden and search out the obscure is revealed the romance of the little river. The Hudson, grown conventional and well turned out, like a handsome mother, accustomed to hotel life, has a daughter, always at her side, yet elusive and wayward. These two, separated by mountain walls and palisade doors and lovely stretches of dreaming hills, meadows and road-crossed flats, have some common secret origin that they cannot alter nor disguise.
The nobler river is, however, destined to become the Path of Commerce, the trail of the great white Foot of Civilization, while the little Hackensack, punctuated here and there with history of the Colonials and with midnight escapes and sorties, winding by old sandstone houses with ancient roofs, still keeps reticence, a lovely inaccessibility. Screened by maples, green hemlocks and alders in some haunts, in others she is a broad tranquil sheet of green crystal or a copper sunset path that leads into vine-hung bowers or spreads out into bare flats where the reeds rear tasseled heads.
Here the blue herons keep their silent vigils, the eagles have nests; here the muskrats drag blue mussel shells along the mossy banks and scatter the tiny pink pearls that sometimes reward hunters, who follow the azure iridescence. The cardinal flower and blue gentian blaze their quiet little trails along the sedges and Indian pipe glimmers in the back thicket. Pitcher plant and sundew, a thousand tiny lanterns of multi-colored berries, all the lush tenting and blossomy fragrance of grapes and hazelnut, and a hundred secret water plants—these are the things that go on living, where the birds bathe and the snakes lie languid and the turtles meet for their boggy conferences.
Sard's plan was to make the trip up the Hackensack by themselves. After lunch she stole out to the garage to find Colter, who was washing the depot car.
"Anyone using this this afternoon?" Sard indicated the long black body.
The man paused. He shut off the hose. "I think not. Judge Bogart has gone off with a friend for golf; Mr. Dunce took the roadster." There were invariably long pauses between Colter's sentences. "You wish to use it?"