Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old grass faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences the words:
“I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”
And he had seemed to be forming a great heart-filling anthem. It was all on his tongue’s tip, with the answering chorus coming from out of some vast mystery, “Behold, thou 451art fair, my love–behold, thou art fair–thou hast dove’s eyes.” There in the sunshine upon the prairie grass it was as real and vital a part of his soul’s aspiration as though it had been reiterated in some glad symphony. But as he sat in the sunset trying to put into his voice the language that stirred his heart, he could only drum upon a box and look at the girl’s blue eyes and her rosebud of a face and utter the copper coins of language for the golden yearning of his soul. She answered, thrilled by the radiance of his eyes:
“Isn’t the young spring beautiful–don’t you just love it, Kenyon? I do.”
He rose and stood out in the sun on the lawn. The girl got up. She was abashed; and strangely self-conscious without reason, she began to pirouette down the walk and dance back to him, with her blue eyes fastened like a mystic sky-thread to his somber gaze. A thousand mute messages of youth twinkled across that thread. Their eyes smiled. The two stood together, and the youth kicked with his toes in the soft turf.
“Lila,” he asked as he looked at the greening grass of spring, “what do you suppose they mean when they say, ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills’? The line has been wiggling around in my head all morning as I walked over the prairie, that and another that I can’t make much of, about, ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love–behold, thou art fair.’ Say, Lila,” he burst out, “do you sometimes have things just pop into your head all fuzzy with–oh, well, say feeling good and you don’t know why, and you are just too happy to eat? I do.”
He paused and looked into her bright, unformed face with the fleeting cloud of sadness trailing its blind way across her heart.
“And say, Lila–why, this morning when I was out there all alone I just sang at the top of my voice, I felt so bang-up dandy–and–I tell you something–honest, I kept thinking of you all the time–you and the hills and a dove’s eyes. It just tasted good way down in me–you ever feel that way?”
Again the girl danced her answer and sent the words she could not speak through her eyes and his to his innermost consciousness.
452“But honest, Lila–don’t you ever feel that way–kind of creepy with good feeling–tickledy and crawly, as though you’d swallowed a candy caterpillar and was letting it go down slow–slow, slow, to get every bit of it–say, honest, don’t you? I do. It’s just fine–out on the prairie all alone with big bursting thoughts bumping you all the time–gee!”