Outland

by Mary Austin

“You said it was a deer trail a while ago,” I hinted, and Herman laughed.

It was still and warm in the glade; the needles lay thick and soft and no grass grew. The scent of the yerba buena stole upon us intermittently, delicate pungent gusts answering each to each like speech. All around the sunlight lay, a thing palpable, as if, like the needles, it had not been lifted for a thousand years, but mellowed there like wine. Herman stretched himself on the brown thick litter beside me.

“Aha,” he said, “if this belongs to your wood people they know a good thing. It’s very nice of them to lend it to us for a while. I don’t seem to feel any pricks between my shoulders, but my heart beats remarkably; so don’t give me up yet, Mona.”

That was exactly like Herman, to argue with your best beliefs until you begin to think there is no other way than to subvert your whole scheme of existence, or to break off all connection with him. And then he abandons his position with a suddenness that leaves you toppling over your own defenses.

For a moment I thought he might be going to revert to the matter of my marrying him, but he lay tossing lightly at the dropped needles, and the even breathing silence of the wood closed in again. We sat so long that we were startled on discovering that if Herman got back to the Inn in time for the stage that was to take him to his train, we would have to run for it. And that, I suppose, was why we took so little notice of the landmarks going out, that, though I tried the very next afternoon, I could not find the trail again.

I wanted to find it too, for if I could once prove to Herman that there was a reality behind that sense of presence in the woods he credited to the whimseys of a literary imagination, I should somehow put myself in a better case for proving—well, I did not know quite what, but I wanted to find that trail.

I tried that day and the next. Twice I found the glade and the sun-steeped yerba buena, for the day was warm and the scent of it carried far, and once I got past Broken Tree, but I could never come into the trail in any manner.

Then one day when I had almost given up finding it, and had been a long time in the woods without thinking about it, I found myself walking in the glade again, and the first thing I noticed was that the faggot was gone. Although I had been so sure of its being a faggot in the first place, I was a little startled at missing it, but not in the least alarmed. The day was full of the warm dry fog that goes before a rain; it cleared the ground and curled midway of the tall, fluted trees like altar smoke. I followed along the track, which ran narrowly between the redwood boles toward an open space, at the back of which was the pool of a spring. It gleamed under a leaning bay tree, silver tipped with light. And there beside it was a man who so matched with the color of the dappled earth that, except for the motions of his singular employment, I might have missed seeing him altogether. He was of a long clean shape, dressed as to the upper part of his body in a close-fitting coat of gray mole-skin. His feet were covered with sandals. Long bands of leather and of a green cloth, coarse like linen, were laced about, midway of his thighs. His coat had been loosened at the shoulders, baring his breast and arms, and as he lay on the bank of the pool, he leaned above it and studied the reflection of his face. He had leaves of some strange herb in his hand which he squeezed together, and having dipped it in the water rubbed upon his face and hair, watching the effect in the pool.

It was his hair that caught my attention most, for it was thick and waving, and most singularly streaked with white. That was the more strange because the body of him looked lithe and young. It occurred to me that he might be remedying an offensive grayness as he dipped and rubbed and stooped to mirror himself the better in the bright water. But before I had made up my mind to anything further, he turned and saw me.

The first thing he did was to thrust the hand that held the herb straight down into the water with a deliberate movement—all the while holding my gaze with great fixity of purpose, as though he would not so much as let it question what he did. Presently withdrawing the hand empty, he stood up.