The Seventh Noon

by Frederick Orin Bartlett

"In there," she faltered, trying to express vague thoughts which yet were most real to her, "everything seems to be normal."

He studied her with increasing interest and a growing sense of comradeship. Her eyes were wonderful as she sat chin in hands, gazing into the fire, lost in some pleasant picture of the past. When he looked into them, they caught him up again as they had done in the café. They swept him to the rhythm of some haunting music back to the days when his blood had run strong—back to the beauty of the hills at twenty when he had not felt big enough by himself to absorb their full marvel. In a dim mystical way he had realized even then that the keenest edge of their meaning was escaping him. The blue sky above the trees had seemed like the laughing eyes of a woman and the rustle of leaves like the whisper of her skirt. He had laughed back boldly then, feeling in the pride of his strength little need of them.

Now the eyes of this girl, and the soft modeling of every line of her, filled him with an infinite tenderness for those forgotten hours. It was as though she cleared away the intervening years and made him face the fragrant Spring again. Without diminishing one whit of his vigorous enjoyment of life, she added an element of refinement to it.

Half in fear of what this might mean, he shook himself free of the mood, and moving a chair to the other side of the fire sat down. Behind her the old clock still ticked as though in malicious appreciation of the situation.

She clung to the subject of the woods as though in it she found relief. She wished to hear more of it from him. It made him appear less a stranger. When he spoke of these things he went back into her own past—into the most beautiful, intimate part of it. He was the only man other than Mr. Arsdale that she could have endured to associate with those days. She felt at ease with him there, and this made her feel that he had more right to be here now. His eager face softened when he spoke of those things. There was in it then none of that fierceness which had for a moment startled her when he spoke of the loneliness he had found here in New York. At that moment he had looked like a man at bay. He had challenged life bitterly. It was not in keeping with the kindly generous strength of his mouth and chin.

"Tell me," she asked him, "of some of your days in the woods."

Yesterday he could not have complied. Those days had seemed dead and buried. Now he was in the mood for it. He found it pleasant, sitting here, to go back.

Each hour stood out as bright with sunshine as a Sorolla. It was as though they had sprung to life at a call from her—had come to bring her ease. He talked at random of brooks that start nowhere and go nowhere, save over white stones and past watercress; of thin ribbed ferns and of scarlet bunchberries. He told her of a stream he knew, where, if you lie very quiet in the moss, you see speckled trout dart over white pebbles into the darker water beneath the lichened rocks. He told her of the shallows, and pools, and falls you find if you keep to its banks for the miles it sings by the grave trees. He told her of mountain tops where he had lain near the stars and watched the noon clouds sweep half a county with their big shadows. He told her of old wood roads he had followed through the young maples and birches and evergreens and pines—roads which lay silent all day long and all night long, month after month, ready for the feet which might tread it once in a year.

So she took him back again to the redolent shadows, back to the silences where dreams are born. Here he came upon other things—the old path gay flowered with illusions which led him toward that future—

A future? What had he to do with a future? Was he rushing headlong thus soon into another pit as bad as that from which he had just escaped? The Future was Now—not one minute, not one second beyond. He was here before an open fire, with this girl in the background, with beautiful rugs and pictures about him, with a great seething, struggling, future-chained horde outside, and the eternal stars overhead. In the midst of it he was free, and this was enough for him to know. Now! Now! The girl was now and her eyes were now and the flush of her velvet cheek was now!