The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
“We're to look for puffballs this morning, Sybil and I!” was John Herrin Macraven's first tangible thought as he contentedly opened his eyes, early the next day.
“Sybil and I!” he repeated aloud, with even greater content, for he could hear her singing, somewhere down in the garden, stopping now and then to call, in her clear, high soprano, to the dogs.
He flung open the old-fashioned wooden shutters, and blinked out at a tranquil and odorous world steeped in light.
The winelike air of the early summer morning seemed to bring a light and unlooked-for warmth into his blood. He was going to walk in the fields with Sybil, for Terence, the gardener, had reported that already the warm June rains had brought out an early crop of puffballs, down in the old sheep pasture. And Sybil was waiting for him, singing in the garden below. He wondered, before the old-fashioned cheval mirror of the Shotwell guest chamber, how he had ever fallen into the habit of wearing nothing but solemn black.
“Oh, don't bother about hats!” cried Sybil, as he emerged with his sober-hued wide-awake discreetly covering that spot at the top of his head where the hair was already a trifle thin. “Sunlight's good for it,” she explained, noticing him run his fingers dubiously through his thin locks.
One glance at her own rippling wealth of yellow put an end to his indecision. He dropped the sober wide-awake on the veranda steps and turned his high white brow after Sybil and the romping dogs.
“Oh, I know what we must do!” cried Sybil, at the end of the first meadow, as she caught her wondering companion by the arm and led him into a little sumac grove.
“And what is that?” he asked, looking about.
“Stand still!” commanded Sybil.
“But why?”
“Because, sir, you are about to be initiated into the Sacred Order of the Children of the Morning Sun, and duly and fitly anointed!”
She reached out a quick hand, as she spoke, and gave the sumac branches above his head a vigorous shake. The result was a heavy and a totally unexpected shower of dewdrops. The professor found that it had left his hair quite damp, but, for Sybil's sake, he refrained from taking out his pocket handkerchief and mopping his head.
“Isn't it lovely?” cried the girl, as she shook the glistening drops down on her upturned face. The little beads of liquid spattered on her eyelids, glistened across her cheek, lost themselves in her glimmering hair. “Shake some on me.”
He did as she asked, watching her upturned profile cut out against the gloom of the thicket, her golden hair, caught up so loosely from her brow, glinting and shimmering in the subdued half light, her lips parted in a smile that made him think of a young devotee of Aphrodite in some old Adonian festival. And through it all she was so unconscious, so free from pose and restraint, so frank and untrammeled a creature of the fields, that when, a few minutes later, they came to the meadow rail fence, he unconsciously stopped to help her. This he did by reaching out his arms, without either hesitation or embarrassment, and catching her as she stood poised on the top rail.
Now, when a taciturn young scholar helps a young woman over a snake fence, sobriety shudders on her throne; for as he caught her, and felt the clasp of her girlish arms and the warm and fragrant weight of her light body, he so far sent the eternal proprieties to kennel as to wonder just how many similar obstacles might lie in their path that morning.
“Isn't it fun?” cried Sybil, with her childish and innocent bubble of delight. She shook herself free, and tossed back her hair. The young professor suddenly joined in her laughter with great vigor. It was glorious, this emancipated and careless life in the country, he decided. It was the very thing he needed!
So side by side they loitered on through the short-grassed sheep pasture, glistening with the morning dew, fresh and green and virginal.
Suddenly she screamed and darted away from him. He thought, at first, that it was because of some infuriated farm animal. But it was merely that she had caught sight of the first puffball, the first young devil's snuffbox, gleaming like a little ball of ivory against the intense green of the pasture.
He took it from her and glanced over it with critical eyes. There had been a time, when he had first taken up his exhaustive study of mildew and food mold, when he had somewhat prided himself on his knowledge of fungi.
“Ah, yes! We used to call these smokeballs, when I was a boy. But I never understood that they were edible.”
“Edible!” cried Sybil. “Why, when they're sliced and fried in butter, the way Hannah does them, they're better than French omelet! They're delicious!”
She blew a kiss from her puckered lips, with the tips of her fingers, in gustatory appreciation of that imagined dish, and the professor made a hurried mental note of the movement, believing that he detected, in that Latin gesture, so exotic to the Anglo-Saxon, a point of the keenest ethnological interest. Then he gave his attention once more to the puffball, breaking open the peridium and holding the crushed gleba close to his squinting eyes.
“Why—how dare you?” cried Sybil.
“I beg pardon?” said the scientist, still squinting at his specimen.
“How dare you?” repeated Sybil.
The young scholar looked into her half-angry eyes with astonishment.
“Do you know what you've done?” she demanded, with uplifted eyebrows.
“Why, nothing very bad, I hope!” protested the offender.
“That thing you've smashed up is good to eat! I wanted that for breakfast! We may not get another one that size, in the whole field!' She was glowering up at him from under angry brows.
“Oh, I say, we'll surely find more!” he protested.
“Oh, yes, we may find more! But it makes me angry to see a man spoiling a thing just to find out how it's made! And I firmly believe that any one who would do that with his own breakfast would do it with—with his own baby! I hate that scientific way of probing into everything—and spoiling it!”
He was looking at the crushed and discolored delicacy, penitently.
“Did you ever know,” he ventured, “that puffballs, when dried, are used for the stanching of blood?”
Yes, that was one of the few things she did know; it was the only use ignorant country people had for them.
“Well, supposing I find you a hatful of fresh ones—won't that be enough to stanch this—er—this flow of indignation?”
She found it hard to resist his conciliating and almost boyish smile.
“I was mean-tempered, wasn't I?” she conceded meditatively.
“Frightful!”
And they laughed together.
That wave of laughter carried away with it the last of her resentment. But she looked at him, from time to time, with a studious and impersonal glance that might have spelled danger to a mind of more suspicious bent. All he saw, however, was a guileless and repentant young woman in a pink frock, scanning the undulating pasture field for signs of edible fungi. When, a few minutes later, they stumbled upon a colony of puffballs, the volatile Sybil joyously held up her skirt and filled it with the delicate little grayish-white globes.
In such fashion they made their way from one end- of the pasture to the other, laughing, loitering, chattering, oblivious of time and space. From the sheep pasture they crossed into the cool and shadowy old apple orchard. As he helped the laughing girl down from the fence top, the young professor again tingled with that embarrassing and indescribable thrill, at the clasp of her warm hand in his.
Something in his contemplative and uncompromising solemnity of mien, as they started on their way once more, prompted the girl to a sudden challenge. The morning had grown hot and quiet, but under the shadowy trees the dew was still cool and thick on the short grass.
“Let's go barefoot!” she cried audaciously,
Her companion drew back, a little doubting his own ears.
“Let's go barefoot!” repeated Sybil.
“Oh, I say!” It was the professor's customary phrase of protest. “” “Just feel this grass—how soft and cool it is!” pleaded the beguiler. “It's such fun—I always do, anyway!”
She was actually on an apple-tree stump, unlacing her low shoes.
“But, my dear young lady, won't you take your death of cold?”
“I know J shan't,” said the girl, with just the slightest tinge of scorn in her tones. “I do it always, mornings like this.”
“It's well enough for children, I grant,” began the professor temporizingly.
“Of course old folks have to be careful,” admitted Sybil blandly, tucking her stockings into the toes of her empty shoes.
He looked at her, looked at his wide-toed boots, looked at the orchard grass, and with a very melancholy sigh sat down on the turf and, with his back to her, deliberately and defiantly removed his shoes.
Once on his feet again, he turned and faced the laughing Sybil, a little indignantly, a little shamefacedly.
“Isn't it good?”
She had tied the laces of her tiny shoes together and slipped them over her head, so that they hung free at her waist.
“Now try running,” she advised. “It toughens 'em.”
John Herrin Macraven stood and gazed at the twinkle of her white feet as they sped over the dew-drenched grass. Then he surrendered himself to her mood of carefree abandon and ran after her.
It was not so delicious, perhaps, as he had apprehended. He assumed the trouble to lie in the fact that the soles of his feet were still exceptionally ten- der. But he betrayed no sign of what that flight was costing him. Only the initiated might haye judged, from the deliberate and judicious way in which each foot came in contact with the short stubble, that he was still a slave of civilization and its pampering shoe leather. But now that the plunge had been made, he was determined to go on to the bitter end.
Far ahead, through the shadowy trees, he could hear Sybil's lightly re-echoed cry. It was like the call of a dryad through dim Sicilian groves, he told himself. He caught sight of her, flushed and panting, leaning against the lane fence, waiting for him. His feet were getting used to the stubble; the rapid motion sent the blood coursing through his veins. There was, after all, something magically rejuvenating in such free-and-easy outdoor exercise. So he called out gayly, as he approached her:
“Why, you are Diana herself!'
“Fine!” cried the laughing girl.
“And I am Endymion, and this apple orchard is the Ephesian forest,” he went on exultantly.
The answer that greeted his ears was an unexpected one:
“But I'm extremely hungry and it's twenty minutes past nine! Hannah, I might add, has been keeping breakfast waiting for an hour and a quarter!”
It was the guttural and indignant voice of Sybil's father.
The professor of anthropology came to a standstill. The feeling of abandoned hilarity ebbed out of his hot body; the carefree smile withered from his startled face. He looked down at his feet as one might look, on awakening from a dream, at some familiar and homely object of household furniture, linking consciousness with its placid and everyday existence. Then he swallowed hard, once or twice, and looked up at his old-time colleague of the gray walls of Amboro.
The eyes of the two men met, across that narrow country lane, but no words passed between them. The look of each was enough.