It seemed that Hobart had come into the wilderness prepared to prove that he could make it habitable, as he told her. After he had built a shack, found his food and water, lived by himself for weeks at a time to experiment with bark, twigs and logs—learning the call of wood beasties and forgetting the cries of men—he permitted himself a few extravagances in the way of tools and furnishings until Blessed Memory, as he called the small, silvery shingled house set in a sand dune like a great moonstone in palest gold, came to be a reputable habitation where he took refuge each year, “living,” he said, in order that he might “exist the rest of the time.”
Miss Clergy was ill at ease in her nunlike bedroom without ornament and scant of furnishings. But she found thought for reflection in watching Thurley and Bliss as they went off to try for fresh fish. Her queer, bright eyes would blink rapidly as if a succession of unpleasing thoughts had attacked her conscience and she refused to give way to them. When they would return and hallo for her to answer, she would usually take refuge in the plea of eternal neuralgia and leave them to their own ways for the remainder of the day!
The rooms contained old-style braided rugs and a spinning wheel which, to Hobart’s delight, Thurley knew how to use, thanks to Betsey Pilrig, old blue china and pewter, a square piano on which Hobart played jingling tunes while Thurley sang them as gloriously as when she played missionary with Philena. The beds were mahogany, so was the fire settle, and there was an outdoor Dutch oven which her host insisted on using, a pump and a well and a tiny barn where his wheezy little automobile rested when it was not chasing up and down country roads in search of supplies.
He had no real neighbors nor did he wish for them. He had bought enough acres on all sides of Blessed Memory to secure him freedom from molestation. He wanted to feel, so he explained, that even lavender and black velvety butterflies, great, golden bees and humming-birds might come and go at will.
There were no books or even writing materials in the house. “When I have to go in to town for supplies, I get my extremely urgent mail and reply to it while at the post office,” he explained. “But I wish nothing inky about the hermitage.”
Thurley, who had first viewed the little house and the wild surroundings with dismay as to what she would ever do with herself, fell to work within a few days and became a busy Martha engrossed with house and outdoor work, plying the axe while Hobart was away, replanting flower beds, picking berries, climbing trees to sit astride some sturdy limb and dream of nothing, actually to forget language, as it were, entering the realm of delicious thought, rejoicing in merely singing sounds as did the birds, instead of clumsy words needing to be phrased and accented.
“I never knew any one could be so busy in such a wilderness,” she told Hobart one late afternoon when they had tramped clear to the sea-coast and sat resting before they journeyed homeward with the aid of barn lanterns.
“Because you and I and other creatures who live by their wits most of the time and have the tasks of physical existence performed for them, need to remember that one can almost see and feel the truth of eternity ... the eternal seasons, Thurley, the ever-dying, ever-reviving blossoms, the migration of the birds, the continual progress and continual decay of all forms of life—that is what makes us really seem so busy. Because most of the time we are nibbling at a fragment of this supreme truth, boxed up in a steam-heated apartment with a man and a maid and an engagement tablet to be our aids, we sing some silly opera and return to the apartment convinced we are quite indispensable to mankind. We need to come to such a place as this and humbly realize eternity. That is why I named the little house Blessed Memory, because I carry the thought with me when I lock the door for the long, white winter.”
Thurley was silent, the most sympathetic answer she could have made. She was mentally quoting,