It was suddenly apparent that Emily was crying, but she made no sound and said no word. Her eyes looked round and strained and the firelight caught the tears on her lower lashes.
“Is that a bird calling?” asked Lucy mildly. Lucy’s cindery hand was nervously poking the fire with a twig.
Information was generally left for Rhoda to give. “It is not a bird. It is a man whistling.”
The firelight glared suddenly and cast all their shadows outward in a circle. Their shadows were like the petals of a dark flower with a flaming centre.
They listened to the sound of approaching steps across the soft pine needles. Edward listened but he could not hear. A panic seized him because he could not hear. “Probably the forest is full of great sound. They talk of birds and whistling. The world can’t be nearly as still as my world is. My hearing reaches no further than the light of the fire. I have no impersonal hearing at all. Perhaps they can all hear that waterfall across the valley and perhaps owls and the tread of deer. I should be ashamed to tell Emily how little I can hear, although I can always hear her voice. I am defective. Our hero in a tragic mood of self-realisation. Our hero indeed! I am not even my own hero.”
He drew back a little from the dancing light of the fire because he wished to have shadow on his eyes which were filling with tears of self-contempt and self-pity.
“Real men never cry,” he told himself. “What is the matter with me that I have never grown up into a man? Here are two men coming out of the forest. They need a shave. They have big muscles under their skin. Even when they get drunk they probably never cry and surely they never hate themselves. I don’t love Emily—as either of those two men could love her. I love her deafly and drunkenly and neurotically. Is there no happiness at all for poor things?”
The two unshaven strange men he was looking at stood in the outer radius of the firelight. It was amazingly unlikely that they should have found the campers, it seemed. Edward thought that he and Emily and the others were like bees hidden in their flower of flame and shadow. But now they were found.
“Any of you folks got a match?” asked one of the strangers. He added when he had lighted his pipe, “Why, you’re San Francisco folks, aren’t you? I know because I had the pleasure of listening to you, Miss Romero, addressing a meeting of the What is Liberty Association last week. Say, did you know the office of the W. I. L. A. had been raided? Sure it has. I wouldn’t of known it only that I happened to be right there on the stairs when the police hit the place. Took my name and address and showed me the door.”