TALL THINGS
One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses what colour vibrations are to the eye.
The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the burden of the reading:
"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,—namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care, "'and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition?—a sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more commonly called passional affinity.'—I have a notion that that may mean something or other, Piney?"
"Don't ast me."
The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something differentiating the beloved from all other women,—something corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined,'—an inherited ideal—something differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp, suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal that he was.
"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"
"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence remained unbroken for another long period.
"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,—I couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"
"There ought not to be, Piney, son."