“Tell ’em you’d rather walk than sail!” Dick pleaded. “Tell them you know the views so well that it is just as if they were there for you behind the fog! Tell them that fog’s darned restful and just what you need. You see, they are really well-informed people, and you can bet they know all about who you are. You’ll have to work hard, right at the beginning, to put them at their ease, or they’ll be so chagrined they’ll follow us around apologizing all the time. They will be like parents who keep saying when the rector calls that their children never acted up like this before and they simply can’t understand it. You’d think they had created Mount Desert and lived only to display it to me and my guests.”
“I understand.” Lewis laughed. “I’ve noticed that most Mount Desert folk are like that, other years. The first time I came down here, do you know, I couldn’t see any farther than my hand could reach, practically, for two solid weeks. That was in August too. I wouldn’t have known there were any mountains if they hadn’t told me. But you can imagine how they told me! We were just puffing away in the old Morse, when the wind changed and it all came out diamond clear. It was like the never-never land. I thought then that it was the finest scenery in the world. Norway itself can’t beat it. I’ll tell the Langleys that. I’ll tell them how I know it by heart. We’ll see, between us, that they don’t suffer beyond endurance!”
So they drove in at the wide stone entrance gates, laughing.
It was pretty disappointing, all the same. The sky, the sea, the mountains were all there, like the next page in a book—but a page that has annoyingly stuck. Dick took it harder than Lewis, however. He had counted on the sharp clear outlines of this Mount Desert environment to make self-expression easy. He had got Lewis down here, really, for the sole purpose of clearing his own mental and emotional decks of clutter. And the fog, somehow, seemed now an externalization of that inward confusion. Having it here, visibly and sensibly pressing in around him, turned him inarticulate. It was Clare who had planned this expedition, really. She it was who had suggested that Dick “clear his emotional decks by talking things all out with Doctor Pryne.” But it wasn’t going to be so easy.—Besides, Lewis wasn’t acting like himself, Dick thought. You couldn’t call him morose exactly, but neither was he particularly exuding sympathy. He was abstracted: as if he had his own thoughts—even possibly his own worries.
At breakfast the next morning they decided against golf. Lewis wanted exercise, he said, and how about climbing a few mountains? Even without the view, he felt like climbing—strenuously. So Dick, putting aside his own silent preference for a morning of golf, started off as cheerfully as he could manage on a foggy all-day walking and climbing jaunt with this somehow new and strange Lewis. The plan was that they should begin gradually—Asticou Hill, Cedar-Swamp Mountain, and then with second wind acquired, traverse the mile-long ledge to Sargent’s top, swim in the pond below Jordan, and descend the bluffs to Jordan Pond, and a taxi home in time for dinner.
They left Lewis’ car at the foot of Asticou Hill, and started up, thick bars of chocolate in their pockets and thick Alpine sticks in their hands. Lewis was ahead on the faint thread of trail, straining his eyes for the cairns which marked the way. Gray gnomes, these cairns seemed to him, each as it pierced the fog, toppling forward or sidewise, beckoning him back from the pathlessness of foot-high forests of blueberry scrub to the faint footworn windings of the climb.
“I planned a house one summer to stand right here,” Dick said, when they came to a giant gray boulder and automatically halted, leaning their backs against its inviting side, looking down into the sea of fog that shut them onto the hill. “It was my first completely visualized house, really. I was twelve, about. I saw the house as a sort of a growth out of the hill. The skies came down, the sea came up, and the doorsill was solid sunlight. Sometimes I really can’t believe it isn’t here, it was so real to me then. But I went farther than architecture in that first venture. I peopled that house, created a family to live in it. You needn’t believe me, Lewis. I don’t expect you will. But the mother of that family was quite extraordinarily like Clare Farwell. Looked like her, I mean. When I first saw Clare, years after, I recognized her as the woman of my early imagination—the mother in that first house of mine. By the way, we are standing by one of the windows in the bedroom I gave her. The bedrooms were on the ground floor, you see. The whole top story was living room—one huge, spacious apartment, practically all windows. But wasn’t it—eerie—about Clare! Imagining her like that when I was just a kid! I’d never seen anybody like her then. Of course, I couldn’t have. There isn’t anybody like her.... Is there?”
“No, I suppose not,” but Lewis’ response had an absent-minded tonelessness. Yet in another minute he asked, his psychological interests stirring, “What were you yourself in that picture, Dick? Or weren’t you in it?”
“I was the middle son of a large family. I remember you that summer, Lewis. You were down here at Doctor Montague’s with Cynthia. She and Harry got themselves engaged at Jordan Pond. The second time they’d seen each other! I remember my tutor saying to somebody or other that it was a whirlwind affair and he wondered how it would turn out. The word ‘whirlwind’ was what made the grown-up gossip exciting to me and why I remember it now. An exciting word! But speaking of Clare, don’t you think it is rather thrilling the way she has managed to express herself in Green Doors? The firm would be surprised if they knew how little, really, I put myself into it. But that’s good architecting, as I see it. Something like portraiture. If you see what I mean.”
Lewis’ mind was busy with a picture of Dick, a neglected only child, spending long summers on Mount Desert with servants and callow young college-boy tutors while his mother globe-trotted and his father made money,—a child stealing off up here to this lonely, wild hill to plan the ideal house and people it with a mother of his dreaming and a large family of which he was the middle member. “Do you see what I mean? About Green Doors? That it’s portraiture? Portraiture of Clare? And that’s why it’s so perfectly what it should be?”—Would Lewis please come out of his abstraction and pay attention. That’s what Dick’s tone said.