CHAPTER XI
MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE
Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said.
A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers!
If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert!
Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried awayby a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside herown atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance.
"Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il!"
preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail andruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.
And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, camefrom some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the WhiteBirch Group.
"Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed PemroseLorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn'taltogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's thewhistle--the bird-caller's whistle?"
"Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufouslights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking theiris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her smallface, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm.
In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magicwhistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-centpiece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distancebetween them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of afourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melodyin the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermithimself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly,a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.
"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little featheredRomeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast!Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Julietanswering from her balcony, this mound!"
"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer himwith!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he'ssaying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'"merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'"
"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It'swon-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!"
And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes ofspeckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength whichanswered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:
"the song complete, With such a wealth of melody sweet, As never the organ pipe could blow And never musician think or know!"
Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--heactually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight,when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!
By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo lengthfrom a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embersa boiling kettle.
"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explainedapologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur,used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, inmany respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of theLake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyedloch.
"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" hemurmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. "Fine it minded me,ma'am, o' the time when I was a boy, huntin' like a nickum for the nestso' mavis an' merle--blackbird an' thrush--when I'd rise 'wi' lark an'light!' Fegs!" Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, "yon was a thingto make a sober body young again; a while agone I don't know but I wasfeelin' like the last o' pea-time; an'--an', noo, I'm a green peaagain,... or I would be but for the one sair memory," added Andrew, thetrue-penny, under his breath.
"Yes--yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, andfrightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!" complained Una,aggrieved. "Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?" shecried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practicallyengaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.
"My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud--Studley--Studart theynickname him in camp--I don't know why," was the fluttering response.
"A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!" supplied the Guardian, nowbusily frying flapjacks. "Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband's troop,he's the lion-heart," laughingly. "So I understand!"
"Yes, oh! yes, but he's so-o nice, with it," cooed the merle'sbrown-eyed "mate." "He has never--oh! never--squeezed me out ofanything, just because I was a girl; always said that two--two--couldhunt together and make good headway!" softly.
"And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest questof all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side byside! Girls! Dear--girls!" The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablazenow with more than the firelight's glow, as she tossed her browned cakeson to a platter. "_Dear_ girls! In the new, the wider future beforeus--soon to confront all of you--let us bring to it our Camp Firehall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle's breath,the 'pep' of the outdoor dawn--tenderness of the twilight, when we feelthat God is near!... And now--and now! let us sing our grace, not forthis food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us--theglorious manna of opportunity."
"If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but ifunmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!"
On wings of faith the moved chant floated forth, led by the girl-thrushin a sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous roll of the Pinnacleorgan, the murmuring pine trees; and the voices of the slender treechoir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft--aloft toHeaven.
"So you're not only gifted as a 'merle', you sing as a girl, too!" saidPemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in hergreen breast-pocket. "You must love birds very much in order to imitatea thrush-song like that."
"Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brownbird of the woods; so I thought it was 'up to me' to learn to conversewith my kind!" was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. "My brother Stud andI have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have justarrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp."
"Here--here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp forboys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded shores of TheBowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills," put in Tanpa, anair-drawn picture in her glowing tones. "There are two big bungalows, acouple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Ofcourse, we can't occupy them all the time, at present, not until schoolis closed, but we constantly go out there over night--to watch thesummer coming--and for week-ends."
"Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at anyother season of the year," put in one of the older girls, anAssistant-Guardian. "And we can always keep warm, you know, even ifthere is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us."
"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches--thestocking, I mean--when the holes are just haggles!" The eyebrows of afair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes ofmerriment. "But we do--do have such fun at our Get Togethers--ourpicnics and parties," went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi theButterfly of the mountain group.
"Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soonnow--one the day after to-morrow--Saturday--a picnic at Snowbird Cave,to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of theriver, the blue Housatonic."
This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouthstogether.
"Oh! the Housatonic--blue--Hous-a-tonic!" Pemrose bent demurely over herflapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her viewof it from the Dev
il's Chair. "And what about the second GetTogether--when is that to be?" she asked.
"A week from Saturday: _Jubilate!_ It's our anniversary day as aWhite Birch Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon inhonor--in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf." Aponifluttered like green tree-hair, herself. "And that's to befollowed--whoopee!--by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in theevening--to which all the boys are invited. And--and, maybe, some girlsnot of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings,too," slily. "But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts."
"I guess, if they knew there were two strange girls in camp--suchgirls--they'd scuttle to 'come across' with an invitation, too!" laughedthe one slangy member inseparable from every group, whose talk is thelong stitch in the thread of conversation.
"Do you think they would? Oh! I don't know about that. Boys aresuch--such griffins, sometimes."
Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, pointing the accusation, a new andgloomy pessimism born of the Devil's Chair and Jack at a Pinch.
"_Ours_ aren't!" It was the voice of the little girl-thrush liftedin blue-jay belligerence now. "Our boys aren't queer fish--not a bit!"rising to hot defense of Stud, the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth,was of opinion that Life in every phase was a game for two--in whichtwo, of differing sexes, could hunt together and make good headway.
"To be sure, they do love to get off jokes on each other--andoccasionally on us," went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in maidenform. "They have a society of older boys in their camp called the HenkylHunters' Brigade. My brother Stud--he's a patrol leader--belongs to it.And they go on the war-path occasionally--and publish a bulletin abouttheir doings."
"What's a henkyl?" Una's mouth was wide open; upon its gusty breath rodehorned toads and plated lizards, in imaginary solution.
"A henkyl! Oh! if you ask _them_, they say it's a freak of ananimal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp,or--or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!" Jessie's eyessparkled. "Stud says a whole 'henkyl' is hard to capture; it's so sureto shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it."
Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn togetherover eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah'slaboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air.
"Oh! I know. I know!" she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in thefirelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. "A henkyl! Why-y!it's a joke. A joke that they're forever chasing up and down, trying toget a laugh against somebody,--that absurd brigade!"
"Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits," smiled theGuardian. "A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull offwhole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! wemustn't give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air theirwit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently--thesignaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?"
"No, indeed!" A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy,mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she tookher Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. "We're going to flash a messageright across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, darkmountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is allfaded out," she explained.
"Oh, ho! That's what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing ussomething--a display--with red fire, eh?" gasped Pemrose. "How are yougoing to signal--with what code?"
"Morse code--and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!"smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. "How--how about sendingover this message: 'Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them'?"
"Lovely! That will hit the mark!" came the appreciative chorus, to thesong of logs. "Then--then you'll see old Round-top wake up, quick's awink and 'come across' with an invitation--an invitation to that bannerpicnic the day after to-morrow!"
Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Page 12