Stranded in Arcady Part 8

"Are you calling it disaster now? Only yesterday you said you were enjoying it. Have you changed your mind?"

"I have, and I haven't. From a purely selfish point of view, I'm having the finest kind of a vacation, and enjoying every blessed minute of it.

More than that, the raggeder I grow the better I feel. It's perfectly barbarous, I know; but it is the truth. My compunctions are all vicarious. I shouldn't have had half so much fun if I had gone motoring through New England."

The young woman smiled again. "You needn't waste any of the vicarious compunctions on me. Honestly, Donald, I--I'm having the time of my life.

It is the call of the wild, I suppose. I shall go back home, if I ever reach home, a perfect savage, no doubt, but the life of the humdrum will never be able to lay hold of me again, in the sense that it will possess me, as it used to."

Prime's grin was an expression of the purely primitive.

"It is a reversion to type," he a.s.serted, getting up to arrange Lucetta's sleeping-tent. "It makes one wonder if all humanity isn't built that way; if it wouldn't go back at a gallop if it were given half a chance."

"I don't call it going back," was the quiet reply. "I feel as if I had merely dropped a large number of utterly useless hamperings. Life has never seemed so free and completely desirable before, and yet, when we have been running some of the most terrifying rapids, I have felt that I could give it up without a murmur if I shouldn't prove big enough to keep it in spite of the hazards. At such times I have felt that I could go out with only one big regret--the thought that I wasn't going to live long enough to find out _why_ I had to be drowned in the heart of a Canadian forest."

VIII

CRACKING VENEERS

AT the foot of the long portage which had closed the week for them the two voyagers found the course of their river changing again to the southeastward, and were encouraged accordingly. In addition to the changing course the stream was taking on greater volume, and, while the rapids were not so numerous, they were more dangerous, or at least they looked so.

By this time they were acquiring considerable skill with the paddles, together with a fine, woodcrafty indifference to the hardships. In the quick water they were never dry, and they came presently to disregard the wettings, or rather to take them as a part of the day's work. As the comradeship ripened, their att.i.tude toward each other grew more and more intolerant of the civilized reservations.

Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing artificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of the veneers.

"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that, given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our civilized clothes are doing right now."

The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out of a fish-bone.

"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the deerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad if they were done in leather."

"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilization prescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indians have the best of us in this, as in many other things."

"The realities?" she queried.

"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as we shall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much too complex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it is good for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learning in these weeks, Lucetta."

"I have been learning, too," she admitted.

"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"

"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it is going to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the need arises."

"I shall never get back to where I was before," Prime a.s.serted with cheerful dogmatism. Then, in a fresh burst of confidence: "Lucetta, I'm coming to suspect that I have always been the merest surface-skimmer. I thought I knew life a little, and was even brash enough to attempt to write about it. I thought I could visualize humanity and its possibilities, but what I saw was only the outer skin--of people and of things. But my greatest impertinence has been in my handling of women."

"Injustice?" she inquired.

"Not intentional; just cra.s.s ignorance. I know now that I was merely imitative, choosing for models the character-drawings of men who knew even less about women than I did. Vapid sentimentality was about as far as I could get. It revolts me to think of it now."

Her laugh was as unrestrained as that of a child. "You amuse me, Donald.

Most women are hopelessly sentimental. Don't you know that?"

"You are not," he retorted soberly.

"How do you know?"

"Heavens and earth! if I haven't had an opportunity to find out----"

"You haven't," she returned quietly; "not the least little morsel of an opportunity. A few days ago we were thrown together--a man and a woman who were total strangers, to live or die as the chance might fall. I defy any one to be sentimental in such circ.u.mstances. Sentiment thrives only in the artificialities; they are the very breath of its life. If men and women could know each other as they really are, there would be fewer marriages, by far."

"And the few would be far happier," Prime put in.

"Do you think so? I doubt it very much."

"Why?"

"Because, in the most admirable marriage there must be some preservation of the reticences. It is possible for people to know each other too well."

"I don't think so, if the qualities are of the kind that will stand the test."

"Who has such qualities?" she asked quickly.

"You have, for one. I didn't believe there was a human woman on earth who could go through what you have and still keep sweet. Setting aside the hardships, I fancy most other women would have gone stark, staring mad puzzling over the mystery."

"Ah, yes; the mystery. Shall we ever be able to explain it?"

"Not if we decide to throw Grider overboard, I'm afraid."

"Doesn't the Mr. Grider solution seem less and less possible to you as time goes on?" she asked. "It does to me. The motive--a mere practical joke--isn't strong enough. Whoever abducted us was trying for something larger than a laugh at our expense."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Big risks were incurred, and the expense must have been considerable, too. Still, as I have said before, if we leave Grider out of it we abandon the one only remotely tenable explanation. I grant you that the joke motive is weak, but aside from that there is no motive at all. n.o.body in this world could have any possible object in getting rid of me, and I am sure that the a.s.sumption applies with equal force to you. You see where it leaves us."

"I know," was the ready rejoinder. "If the mystery had stopped with our discovery of the aeroplane-tracks, it would have been different. But it didn't stop there. It continued with our finding of the ownerless canoe stocked for a long journey. Was the canoe left for us to find?"

Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trust her with the grewsome truth.

"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with our kidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn't care to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. We reasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the two rifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn up while we were waiting for them?"

"No."

"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."

"You knew it at the time?" she asked.

"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at the river-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and I thought it best not to tell you--it seemed only the decent thing not to tell you."