Bullied as a young man into a lucrative family living, he had in turn
bullied his mind into some semblance of orthodox beliefs, doing the
honours of the little country church with an energy that made one think
of a coal-heaver tending china; and it was only in the past few years
that he had resigned the living and taken instead to cramming young men
for their examinations. This suited him better. It enabled him, too, to
indulge his passion for spells of “wild life,” and to spend the summer
months of most years under canvas in one part of the world or another
where he could take his young men with him and combine “reading” with
open air. His wife usually accompanied him, and there was no doubt she enjoyed
the trips, for she possessed, though in less degree, the same joy of
the wilderness that was his own distinguishing characteristic. The only
difference was that while he regarded it as the real life, she regarded
it as an interlude. While he camped out with his heart and mind, she
played at camping out with her clothes and body. None the less, she
made a splendid companion, and to watch her busy cooking dinner over
the fire we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart
was in the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the
detail. Mrs. Maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world
was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with
bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was
another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin,
and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very
unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with
slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a
knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with
willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he
was as happy to be in camp as any of them. But more than any other member of the party, Joan Maloney, the
daughter, was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the
landscape, who belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees
and the moss and the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to
it. For she was obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature
of the wilds, a gipsy in her own home. To any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less
apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two
years of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her
primitive, utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. To see
her there made it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. I
lost all recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow
evaporated. This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the
grace of the woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing
the fire, or stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly
seemed the only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home;
in London she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll
overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here
she was alive all over. I forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I forget how any
particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the
boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as wild and natural
and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more
than that I cannot say. Pretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and
possessed of great physical strength in the form of endurance. She had,
too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of a man, tempestuous
sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her mother, and puzzling
her easy-going father with her storms of waywardness, while at the same
time she stirred his admiration by her violence. A pagan of the pagans
she was besides, and with some haunting suggestion of old-world pagan
beauty about her dark face and eyes. Altogether an odd and difficult
character, but with a generosity and high courage that made her very
lovable. In town life she always seemed to me to feel cramped, bored, a devil
in a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as though any moment she
dreaded to be caught. But up in these spacious solitudes all this
disappeared. Away from the limitations that plagued and stung her, she
would show at her best, and as I watched her moving about the Camp
I repeatedly found myself thinking of a wild creature that had just
obtained its freedom and was trying its muscles. Peter Sangree, of course, at once went down before her. But she was so
obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well able to take care of
herself, that I think her parents gave the matter but little thought,
and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance, keeping admirable
control of his passion in all respects save one; for at his age the
eyes are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost the devouring,
expression often visible in them was probably there unknown even to
himself. He, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in
love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him
to the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no doubt, was a
secret and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only
I think he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of
vitality was due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied
yearning that poured for ever from his soul and body. Moreover, it
seemed to me, who now saw them for the first time together, that there
was an unnamable something--an elusive quality of some kind--that
marked them as belonging to the same world, and that although the girl
ignored him she was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by
some attribute very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep
in his. This, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two
months’ camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other figures flitted
from time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man,
sometimes another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in
the clergyman’s tent, but they came for short periods only, and they
went without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played
no important part in what subsequently happened. The weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were
up, the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into
lengths, and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the
trees. Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for
the women’s beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their
tents to the central fireplace. All was prepared for bad weather. It
was a cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate
under the stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to
eat we had seen since we left London a week before.