The talkers

Never had Gilda known such delight.

Their Eden was guarded by two sign-boards on the wood-road a hundred yards north and south of the log bridge.

The signs were painted and erected by Mr. Hanford. One read: “Keep offn this here privut rode. Ladies presunt.” The other: “Don’t go into them woods; there is ladies loose.”

A cordon of infantry with machine guns might have failed to impress the sauntering timber-cruiser and lowly lumber-jack. But these signs routed them. Only the squirrel and the grouse invaded their leafy solitude.

The weather was perfect. The wonder-days waxed and waned.

Neither dawn nor the wild birds’ choral awoke these two.

But when the sun gold-plated their glazed windows the boy and the girl stirred and awoke, and heard the fire roaring in the sheet-iron stoves behind the closed door of the only other room.

In bathing-dress, blanket-coated, they hailed each other from windows opposite. Gilda came out of her shanty, Stuart emerged from his. Hands touching they picked their way to the edge of the brook where Mike had dammed it.

Here spread a long, green, transparent pool—“ungodly cold,” they agreed—but if it was hell to go into it, it was heaven the next minute.

The thickets of bank ferns trembled under the rain of spray they dashed into the air. Outraged squirrels protested overhead; blue-jays exchanged malicious gossip regarding these shameless intruders; the affrighted trout fled upstream.

The girl’s laughter echoed through the woods; distant wild birds answered. The boy dived and dived like a halcyon.

Then they ran glowing and dripping to their shanties, continuing conversation through open windows while preparing for the day.

When Gilda was ready, Stuart went out and dingled a cow-bell. Mr. Hanford, lurking within earshot, presently rambled into sight, bearing food.

“Mornin’, ma’am. Mornin’, Mr. Sutton. I jess heard some’n a-dribblin’ onto a cow-bell, so, thinks I, I’ll jess run over a spell an’ help cook breakfast—if I’m wanted.”

He always said this; always appeared uncertain that he was needed, always belittled his own culinary efforts, and hinted darkly of metropolitan gastronomic orgies in which, doubtless, they were daily accustomed to indulge.

Thus spake Mr. Hanford while tossing flap-jacks and frying brook-trout.

But he was secretly aghast at their capacity, and never before had two people compelled him to toss flap-jacks so fast.

His summons to breakfast was, “Coffee’s bilin’, ma’am.” And that was the signal for him to toss with all his agility and skill against the rapid inroads on the brown and fragrant stack of cakes.

“My conscience,” he said to Leggett, “I’ve seen feedin’ in Kanuck lumber camps but I hain’t never seen nothin’ like them two.” He added irrelevantly: “Ain’t she pretty, Dan? Say, when she sets curled up on the moss eatin’ onto a hunk o’ fried fish, I never seen nothin’ prettier. She’s cunnin’ as a suckin’ caaf, she is.”

Halcyon days!—ecstatic hours along the stream, struggling to lift fat, heavy, lustily resisting trout from icy, foaming deeps; hours on the broader river with silk lines whistling out across pool and shallow, and the virgin wind blowing, and the fat trout splashing with a glint of rose and silver.

All day, all night the interminable song of the pines filled their ears.

In a depthless blue vault the sun glittered; stars jewelled the dark; and always the endless anthem of the pines.

She accompanied him when he went on tours of inspection. Everything in this utterly new world enchanted her.

She wandered through the seedling nursery, where rows and rows of oblong beds, raised and rounded above the trodden paths, bloomed like delicately tinted mosses. This flower-bed covered with pale blue velvet contained thousands of Coster’s seedling spruces. This blue-green moss was composed of thousands of seedling white pines. Here were panels of silver-grey-green Scotch pines, panels of leafgreen red pines, misty stretches of spruce.

She saw acres of one year, two year, three years’ transplants; acres of three foot, four, five, six foot trees; acres of new forests, ten foot trees, thirty foot trees.

Over the plowed “rides” she plodded, her hand on Stuart’s arm. Once, dizzy, but trusting to him, she climbed a fire-tower, where the stolid look-out sat chewing tobacco and nursing a telescope.

She went afield with him after weevils, and saw the green terminal shoots ominously a-droop, or still upright clotted with white, or rusty and bent.

He peeled for her a terminal shoot and showed her the fat grey-white larvae in the heart of it, packed like cartridges in a rod-magazine.

Everywhere in some plantations men were severing and burning infected shoots. She heard Stuart swearing under his breath.

Another day she went with him on a graver errand.

No “blister” had appeared in the Sutton forests, and Stuart was determined that the leprous curse should never gain a foothold in the domain of his forebears. Yet, across the border, New England festered with it in certain districts.

She saw men in the woods working with grub-hoe, pick, and bush-hook; saw green fires burning.

Stuart showed her a sneaking growth of wild currant—tested the infernal toughness and resistance of the wretched shrub, turned the coarse leaves to search for the deadly rusty spores, and thanked God that he discovered none.

So she learned that the leprosy called “pine blister” begins as a rusty stain on the under side of a currant or gooseberry leaf. It can not originate on the doomed pine itself; it must have its loathsome birth on currant or gooseberry.

Winds or birds carry it to a pine. But the hellish spores must work quickly because ten minutes is their span of life unless they reach a white pine tree.

When they do the tree is as good as dead. Yet the diseased tree can not infect others of its species. Only spores from currant or gooseberry can do that.

Days came when Stuart remained in seemingly incessant consultation with Mr. Leggett. There were maps and deeds to consult, letter files to inspect—a never-ending mass of detail.

Gilda desired to listen, was gratefully encouraged by Stuart, understood as well as anybody could who had not been conversant with the operations of Sutton & Company for the last decade.

But there were intervals when clerical details formed the subject under discussion. And at such times the girl literally took to the tall timber.

The wild flowers of the Northland were a never-ending surprise and delight to her. She picked few, but was on her knees to every one—to the pink moccasin flowers on tall, slender stalks, to the white trilliums, to the violets, blue, white, yellow; to the scented wild lilies-of-the-valley, like patches of snowy foam in the woods.

Everywhere spread carpets of bloom, straw-yellow, purple, green-white.

The dull strawberry red of another trillium clotted the still places with an odour of death and decay—gloomy, unlovely flowers which drew carrion flies.

But the silvery shad-bush was in flower; witch-hopple, viburnum, squaw-berry, moss and fern were gay and lovely in their resurrection.

Into sunny glades flitted the Beauty of Camberwell on cream-edged brown-velvet wings, embroidered with violet-blue. Comma butterflies flashed to a resting spot on treetrunks glowing like dull spots of fire; green-clouded swallowtails in floppy but rapid flight winnowed the dusk through wet woods.

She lay by the stream in grey shirt and knickers, pillowing her head on both arms crossed behind, and looked up through new leaves into a sky as blue as a cat-bird’s egg; and saw squirrels in tiny silhouette, running along highways of tangled branches.

She rolled over on her stomach and looked down into amber water where trout lay stemming the current, their tails all waving like wind-blown banners above the golden bottom-gravel.

Strange little bluish grey birds creeked and cheeped and whined as they crept up and down mossy tree-trunks; chickadees found her and lingered, conversing with her in friendly levity; near by, low in the sky, two hawks mewed querulously, and their broad shadows swept the trees.

But there were not many hours alone, for Gilda Greenway. Her lover was never far away, and he never left her long in solitude—if the forest silence could be called that—for forest solitude is in the soul, not in the still places of the earth—never in wilderness or desert or upon the grey waste of waters until man brings it with him into the silent places.

A week was gone before they realised it had fairly begun.

It worried them both. Gilda was washing out underclothes below the dam. Her full yet slender hands bore scratches where the little Ladies of the Briers had caressed her, and they were tanned to a creamy tint—which seemed to be the limit of sunburn on skins like hers.

They had mentioned the horrifying speed of Time that morning, surprised and disgusted that day and night should have played them so treacherous a trick.

Now, soberly soaping her intimate attire, Gilda felt inclined to mingle a tear or two with the suds as she watched the iridescent bubbles dance away on the amber current.

Never, never had she been so happy and free from care. Never for an instant had the dark change threatened her; never had the shadow of the Other One stirred in sunlight or lamplight or in the witch-light of the stars. Care slept; memory was kind; life an enchanted vision through which days burned like fire and every second was a flaming jewel.

She lived and moved in a sort of passionless ecstasy; the forest, the sunlight, her lover were impersonal miracles; and she herself a blessed, unreal, unfamiliar thing, born of the magic that enveloped all.

She had spread her wet and immaculate attire on bushes in the sun. Then she got up, slim as a boy and graceful as a girl in her shirt and knickers; and was carrying the soap to her cabin when Stuart came across the bridge waving a telegram.

“I’ve got to stay here!” he cried joyously. “They sent in a runner from Fisher-cat Dam. The office wires me that our deal has gone through; we take over the Lamsden tract; the lawyers are to meet at Chazy, and the surveyors are leaving Utica tonight!”

She flung the soap upon the moss and her wet arms around his neck.

“Oh, how divine!” she cried. “I never want to go back!—never, never. Tell me how long we have?”

“Nearly three more weeks. Can your linen stand it?”

“If it doesn’t, I’ll play Eve,” she said, kissing him with abandon. Then she freed her sagging hair of the last pin, flung it wide and flashing, and danced away over the log bridge.

“Good-bye,” she called, waving one hand behind her. “I’m going to dance through the woods until I fall down! Good-bye—good-bye—good-bye!”

He was after her now; she dodged like a squirrel; and off she sped, a glimmering shape among the trees. He caught her at last and tossed her up into his arms, where she lay panting—her face a pink flower in a shower of gold-red hair.

And so he carried her back to Gilda’s Villa, slowly through the wood, his blond head bent, his lips resting on hers.