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. The deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists,
held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was no
sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of the
waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the lagoon. The ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible through the
trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage, her sheets
flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the dim blue shapes of
other islands floating in the night, and from all the great spaces about
us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of great woods. The
odours of the wilderness--smells of wind and earth, of trees and water,
clean, vigorous, and mighty--were the true odours of a virgin world
unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly intoxicating than any
other perfume in the whole world. Oh!--and dangerously strong, too, no
doubt, for some natures! "Ahhh!" breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable
gesture of satisfaction and relief. "Here there is freedom, and room for
body and mind to turn in. Here one can work and rest and play. Here one
can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never get
within touching distance in the cities.