“I meant the birds,” said Olive, dryly.
“Bother the birds! I should love to be a sportsman,” cried Eleanor, exultantly landing her eleventh perch. They trooped like children to the dinner-bell. “I can see how fascinating it must be. To actually feel the struggle for existence; it brings you back to the primitive. You touch reality; you remember you’re an animal.”
“Lunch always reminds me sufficiently of that,” said Olive.
“No,” Eleanor argued. “The napery and the flowers come between us and the facts. How glorious it would be to be primitive!” Between Art and Sport—with that charming impressionability of hers—she had drifted as far from the spiritualities of Dolkovitch as, under the Russian’s influence, from the Socialism of Gerard Brode.
Herbert, whose skill with the rod was not remarkable, diverged into an account of his stay in a Servian fishing-village which was entirely primitive, “so primitive,” he said, laughing, “that the wives do most of the work.” He sketched the place with admirable literary touches. “Sheepskin is their only wear,” he wound up. “In the winter they wear the wool outside. In the summer they take off their skins and—no, not sit in their bones, as Miss Regan is about to remark—but wear the wool inside.”
Matthew was thus led on to relate juvenile sporting experiences on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, and finally his one encounter with a bear in the Cobequid forest, which put the seal on Mrs. Wyndwood’s new-born ardor for sport. This tame picking-up of perch palled; they must go mackerel-fishing, she insisted. And so Matthew Strang arranged with a fisherman to go out to sea in his boat next day. But the sea ran high, and to the undisguised relief of Herbert, who felt himself rather cut out by his cousin in these unliterary expeditions, Primitiva arrived the first thing in the morning with a note from Mrs. Wyndwood, saying she had forgotten the lawn-meet at Colonel Chesham’s to inaugurate the season of the local pack, and she would ride over to that in the hope of catching sight of a bit of the hunt. There was a postscript from Olive, saying: “And, of course, I must go to chaperon her among all those men.” Nevertheless, they went out in the boat late that same afternoon, when the ocean was calm again and quivering in the sun. Their course lay along a track of diamonds which seemed to dance off the water like a million elves of light. By the time they returned, the path of diamonds had changed to one of red gold. Delicious was the ripping sound of the living boat tearing the water, as it dipped gently from side to side, its white sail bellying gracefully. The sunset was strange: one dull red narrow bar crowned by a ball of molten gold radiating four hazy spokes like mill-sails. The ball gradually sank in the sea. In the south the white sickle of the moon grew yellower and yellower; in the east fleecy strips of cloud reflected the dying day. The colors of the cliffs still stood out vivid. The moment was poetic; the air was charged with amorous electricity. The talk drifted into love and marriage.
They played with the subject, skimming it gracefully, touching it with subtle lights, flashed and withdrawn, shooting out audacities with ingenuous impersonality, all four the while tingling with self-consciousness from crown to sole.
Herbert said that to a woman love is a complete romance, to a man a collection of short stories. Olive maintained that the reverse was true. “Oh, if man knew woman!” she cried. “And you who pretend to write comedies!”
Mrs. Wyndwood admitted that Byron was right about love being all in all to a woman. “Nine-tenths of unmarried women,” she said, looking at Herbert, “have never had a proposal.”
“Nine-tenths of married women more likely,” Olive flashed back.