In the Mist of the Mountains Part 1

In the Mist of the Mountains.

by Ethel Turner.

CHAPTER I

SOMEWHAT CONTAGIOUS

It is October and the mountains are waking from their short winter sleep.

It is October, the month of the moving mists.

Come and let us take a walk, not down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson, but up a mountain side with Nature,--nay, with G.o.d Himself. There is nothing to see, absolutely nothing at all. You know that there are trees on either hand of you, and that the undergrowth is bursting into the stars and delicate bells of its springtime bloom. But your knowledge of this is merely one of the services your memory does for you, for the mist has covered it all away from sight.

You look behind you and your world is blotted out.

You look in front of you,--nay, you cannot look in front of you, for the mist lies as a veil, actually on your face.

"I breathed up a whole cloud this morning," Lynn remarked once.

"I eated one--and it was nasty," said Max.

Still you continue to look in front of you as far as may be.

And the next moment the veil lifts,--clean up over your head perhaps, and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges catching in the trees.

And now your gaze leaps and lingers, and lingers and leaps for miles in front of you. You look downward and the ball of the earth has split at your feet and the huge fissure has widened and widened till a limitless valley lies there. You look down hundreds of feet and see like sprouting seedlings the tops of gum trees,--gum trees two hundred feet high.

The far side of the valley shows a rolling mountain chain washed in in tender shades of purple, paling nearer at hand to blue, the tender indescribable mountain blue. Great jagged headlands hang perilously over the deep, and the silver thread of a distant waterfall gleams here and there down the face of the gorges of whose wonderful beauty the tourist has heard and comes thousands of miles to see.

A billowy cloud, soft and dazzling as snow, has fallen from the sky or risen with the mist, you are not sure which, and lies bewilderingly low and lovely on the purple hills. Then there comes that damp, delicate sensation on your face and all is mist again.

It is just as if a lovely girl now playfully hid her exquisite face with the gauzy scarf twined round her head, and now showed it, each fresh glimpse revealing a newer and tenderer beauty.

Lynn, who, though but eight, is given to quaint and delicate turns of thought, calls it all "G.o.d's kaleidoscope."

Nearer to the station cl.u.s.ter the weatherboard business places of the little township of Burunda. The butcher does a trade of perhaps two sheep a week during the winter, but leaps to many a score of them when "the strangers" begin to come up from the moist city at the first touch of November's heat. The bakers--there are two of them--fight bitterly for "the strangers'" custom.

All the winter a few decrepit-looking tarts and buns form the shop window display of each. But when signs of life begin in the cottages the battle starts.

"Seven for sixpence," Benson writes in red letters on a card in the midst of his "drop" cakes.

"Eight for sixpence," Dunks retorts in larger type in the midst of _his_ heap of the popular confectionery.

"Nine for sixpence," is Benson's desperate challenge,--the cakes of course shrinking somewhat in size.

The baker does not live who can afford to give ten for sixpence.

Benson has now to create new signs. "No second-cla.s.s flour used in the cakes of _this_ establishment," is one of his efforts.

Dunks caps it.

"No miserable counting out of currants in cakes baked _here_. Visitors are invited to sample." And on his counter is a very fruity specimen cut across. As a result of this compet.i.tion "the strangers" may count on quite respectable cakes for their tea.

There are two grocers--brothers, oddly enough, though not connected in trade; steady, peaceable old men with whom brotherly love continues despite trade rivalry.

But they possess a live young a.s.sistant each, and it is war to the knife between these lads.

They fall on the startled stranger before he is fairly out of the train and thrust before him the merits of their respective establishments.

Howie, the boy of Septimus Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself right into the midst of your mountain of luggage and children and porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he, Larkin, will bring your letters with him from the post office every morning when he calls for orders.

It is said that the loser invariably fights the winner after these contests unless there falls to his lot another pa.s.senger by the same train. But if it happens that the luck is to neither,--that is, if all are hotel or boarding-house visitors, or (an unforgivable thing in the eyes of both) if the newcomers are people who bring their own groceries from the metropolis, then the two go off almost friends and help each other up with any boxes the train may have brought for them.

The Lomax children took a keen interest in the warfare, and always asked Larkin, when he came for orders in the morning, how many of the new people's custom he had secured.

For it was Larkin's trick of insinuating himself among the portmanteaus and confused servants and children, and then talking rapidly of bacon and letters, that had gained him Mrs. Lomax's custom when the family first came to Burunda. That bewildered lady simply had to consent that he might call to get him out of the knot of seemingly inextricable confusion with which she had to deal.

There are two photographers, two shoe-menders, two house agents, two visiting doctors.

It is conceivable that if a third man of any trade come along the character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have the quiet monotony of the place broken up by a civil war.

Not far from the station stand the hotels and the more modest boarding-houses.

And then begin the cottages and villas--nearly all of them weatherboard--of people who like to have a foothold a few thousand feet in the air when summer's shroud of damp enwraps the Harbour city.

The Lomax children swung disconsolately on the gate of their summer home. All they could see was the road in front of them, now clear, now filled with flying mist, and their senses were wearied of it.

Might they go down the gully?

No, they might not go down the gully. Who had time on a busy day like this, and Miss Bibby writing to New Zealand, to go trapesing down all those rough places with them?

Couldn't they go alone?

No, they could not go alone. A nice thing it would be for the Judge's children to be lost down a gully and sleeping out all night.

Well, might they go down to the waterfall? They couldn't get lost on made paths and with picnickers everywhere.

No, they might not go down to the waterfall. What would the Judge say if he heard his children had been down a dangerous place like that and no one with them!

"Well, let us go up to the shops and the station. We've got twopence between us, and we want to spend it, and besides----" But Pauline broke off, recognizing it was worse than useless to explain to a person like Anna the pleasure they could obtain from watching to see whether Howie or their own Larkin got most of the customers by the excursion train.

But Anna was horrified at the idea.

"In those dusty clothes and with your sandals off! A nice condition for the shopkeepers to see a Judge's children in!"

"Oh, hang a Judge's children," muttered Pauline, but not until Anna had returned to the house.

"Wish daddy was a butcher," said m.u.f.fie.