“Nom de la manne céleste!” he ejaculated, putting down his hammer. Wide-eyed, he gazed out of the window toward the fast budding maples. It was a French day, sans doute. “Spring!” he exulted aloud in the appropriate language. “How it is ever beautiful, the spring. In France, best of all, but even here in Mount Airy it is good, the spring. In my old trunk the sap goes up, up, and spins my thoughts about. I am full of ideas in the spring, little shoots of thinking and buds and leaves of grand notions. How I can do things in the spring!” But he stood listlessly gazing. “Do? Bah! I can do nothing but dream of what I can never do; ... but it is good.”
Slowly his mind drifted to Gorgas and then back to the starting point of their conversation. His face lighted up, beamed with sympathy.
“So, that is what it is!” he chuckled. “He is a good fellow, Neddie. Nice, clean American fellow. But he is only boy wit’ face like girl. How young is all America! When I was twenty I was man. I had been in army. I had learned my work in life. I had seen the world. Now I am forty and old man. All the little American children of thirty, forty, fifty,—Professor Blynn, Miss Kate, Mrs. Levering, they all come to ask me what to do; me, Bardek! I have the wisdom of old gentleman about to sit down and die. Phoo-ee!” He puffed out a big breath and looked joyfully out of the window. “And I am ten t’ousand years younger than all of them put together.”
The flooding thoughts of spring were too much for Bardek. He doffed his apron, put his tools carefully in their racks and made ready to get out into the open. He hummed like a prowling bumble-bee as he tossed things about.
“Hello, Bardek. Where’s Gorgas?” Morris spoke from the doorway.
“Ah!” Bardek turned jubilantly, came forward in great strides and shook the young man warmly by both hands. “She is here! She is here!” he exulted, looking the astonished Morris over joyfully. “Jus’ you sit yourself. The big easy chair? No!” He dragged forward a cushioned settle. “V’là! It is the best for little tête-à-tête. Oh, you lucky young man! To have Miss Gorgas to talk to all alone. See! I will jus’ pull down this window thing, as— Where is she, that Eve who cannot work this morning—” He looked anxiously out of the door toward the orchard.
“Can’t work?” Morris inquired. “What’s the trouble, Bardek? Ill?”
“Ill?” Bardek exploded. “Oh, yes. She is—ho!—yes, it is a disease, vairy, vairy dangerous. It is good to get it early, like the chicken-poxes and measles. Hey!” looking at him curiously. “You, Neddie; don’t you ever feel like kicking out all the little life-businesses and rushing out into woods away from every one, to weep and laugh and sleep and swear and pray? Look inside. Close your eyes and look inside. Have you not got terrible voice in t’ere what say: Prenez la clef des champs! Faites l’école buissonnière! Take the key of the fields and play truant in the woods!... Day like dese! How can men stay in chicken-houses!”
He slipped out of a workman’s blouse and ruffled his hair excitedly.
“That’s spring fever, Bardek,” Morris explained. “Guess I’ve got a touch of it, too.” He yawned and began to make a cigarette. Then he turned the logs over in the grate.