“And that?” He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his lifted brows.
“Would be merely that you love me and can’t live without me.”
“Oh, if you want me to say what the grocer’s man says to the cook in the kitchen!”—he flushed—“but you know very well, Mona, that I am not going to insult your intelligence and mine with the clap-trap of passion. Certainly I’ve no such cheap sort of feeling for you, and I’m not such an infernal cad as to suppose you have——Mona?”
It might have been the wind that blew from the country beyond Broken Tree at that moment, or something in my face, that turned that last repetition of my name upon the point of interrogation. Though it was my crying objection to Herman that he could not produce in me those raptures and alarms and whirlings to and fro, out of which I knew all creative art to proceed, yet to have him so renounce for us both the possibility of such a relation filled me with sudden wounding and affront. And at that, or at some new shadow of wonder in his eyes with the turning of his voice upon the word, I found myself so little able to give back look for look, that it was a great relief to me to discover the hawk’s nest in the Broken Tree. The creek makes a turn here, and the stepping-stones were so far apart it was necessary for Herman to go ahead and reach me back his hand. As I swung past him I heard him say my name again with so new a touch of shamed credulity that I was glad to put my hand up over my eyes, making believe I had not heard him, and look very attentively at Broken Tree.
It stands on the upper bank of the creek, snapped off midway by the wind. Below the break two great sweeping boughs spread either way like the arms of a guide-post. The nest is in the splintered hollow of the trunk.
“It is a nest,” I said, as though a doubt I had were the reason for my not hearing him. Herman was so used to this sort of interruption when we walked in the woods together that I hoped it had a natural sound. He answered quite simply that if it was, it should be empty by this time of the year. Suddenly the hawk, unfurling from the upper branches, pitched a slow downward spiral above our heads, then beat back into upper air, uttering sharp cries, and, settling slowly to the left, preened himself and neglected us. As if being but a watchman, having cried our coming, he had no other interest in the affair.
Just beyond the pine there was a thicket of wild lilac grown across the way, and as I put up my hand to defend my face, I saw that a light spray of it had burst untimely into bloom. Though this was the second week in October the grass was brittle as new silk and the earth was hard with drought. I remember holding the branch toward Herman for him to see.
“Look how it calls the rain,” I said, and perhaps something more, though I do not remember what, about the effort of nature to rise to its own expectancy. I said that first because it was exactly the sort of thing I knew Herman, who thought he had entirely rationalized his attitude toward out of doors, liked least to hear me say. But, perhaps, because the shadow of the adventure which was to prove him wrong about that and so many things was already over us, he had no answer but to reach out across my shoulder and put up his hand over mine to bear back the heavy branch. This was so little the sort of thing I had learned to expect of Herman, and we were both so embarrassed by it, that we could never be quite sure which of us saw it first. When we had pushed aside the ceanothus there lay the beginning of the trail.
It began directly at the foot of the pine as though there was some reason for it, and ran shallow and well-defined through the lilac thicket and up the hill.
Herman said it was a deer trail. To the casual eye it did resemble one of those woodland tracks made by wild creatures, beginning at no particular point, and after continuing clear and direct for a little distance, breaking off for no reason. But there was about this trail a subtlety, a nuance, slight distinctions in the way the scrub was bent back from it, in the way it took the slope of the hill, that made it plainly a man trail. More than that, I felt the slight pricking of the blood, the quick response of the intelligence to the stimulus of variations so slight the observation of them lies almost below the plane of consciousness. Herman, wanting such witness in himself, could not believe, and was concerned over my mistake. So we went on walking in it, Herman very well satisfied with his argument, and I saying nothing more about it. As I frequently have to do when Herman gets talking of the things which are my province.