"You—you must excuse me, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"It's all right, Miss Renie. I take up where we left off. It ain't so easy, Miss Renie, to begin all over again to say it, but—but will you be my—will you be my—"
She was suddenly in his arms, burrowing against the speckled waistcoat a little resting-place for her head.
IN MEMORIAM
Toward the city Mother Earth turns a plate-glass eye and an asphalt bosom. The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets. That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands. The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny.
Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway. The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care.
Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze. Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity. Greeks, first of men, perched their gods up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities.
Because the city is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds. What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of grass sucked in from the tender end of the blade? All progress is like that. How immediately are the yesterdays metamorphosed into memories; and memories, even the stanchest of them, mold and disintegrate.
There were times when Mrs. Simon Meyerburg, who was threescore and ten years removed from the days when her bare feet had run fleet across a plushy meadow, would pause, hand on brow, when a memory, perhaps moving as it crumpled, would pass before her in faded daguerreotype. A gallery of events—so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers. And yet the vivid canvases! A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart tears; a hand-made crib in a dark corner and hardly ever empty of a little new-comer.
Then gaps, except here and there a faded bit. Then again large memories close and full of color: Simon Meyerburg, with the years folded back and youth on him, wooing her beside a stile that led off a South German country road, his peasant cap fallen back off his strong black curls, and even then a seer's light in his strong black eyes. Her own black eyes more diffident now and the black braids looped up and bound in a tight coronet round her head. The voice of the mother calling her homeward through cupped hands and in the Low Dutch of the Lowlands. A moonrise and the sweet, vivid smell of evening, and once more the youth Simon Meyerburg wooing her there beside the roadside stile.