A Sappho of Green Springs. Bret Harte
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you read it?” asked Mr. Hamlin.
“Yes.”
“Then you don’t want to see it any more, or even remember you ever saw it,” said Mr. Hamlin, carefully tearing the note into small pieces and letting them drift from the windows like blown blossoms.
“But, I say, Jack! look here; I don’t understand! You say you have already seen this woman, and yet”—
“I HAVEN’T seen her,” said Jack, composedly, turning from the window.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you and I, Fred, are going to drop this fooling right here and leave this place for Frisco by first stage to-morrow, and—that I owe you that dinner.”
CHAPTER IV
When the stage for San Francisco rolled away the next morning with Mr. Hamlin and the editor, the latter might have recognized in the occupant of a dust-covered buggy that was coming leisurely towards them the tall figure, long beard, and straight duster of his late visitor, Mr. James Bowers. For Mr. Bowers was on the same quest that the others had just abandoned. Like Mr. Hamlin, he had been left to his own resources, but Mr. Bowers’s resources were a life-long experience and technical skill; he too had noted the topographical indications of the poem, and his knowledge of the sylva of Upper California pointed as unerringly as Mr. Hamlin’s luck to the cryptogamous haunts of the Summit. Such abnormal growths were indicative of certain localities only, but, as they were not remunerative from a pecuniary point of view, were to be avoided by the sagacious woodman. It was clear, therefore, that Mr. Bowers’s visit to Green Springs was not professional, and that he did not even figuratively accept the omen.
He baited and rested his horse at the hotel, where his bucolic exterior, however, did not elicit that attention which had been accorded to Mr. Hamlin’s charming insolence or the editor’s cultivated manner. But he glanced over a township map on the walls of the reading-room, and took note of the names of the owners of different lots, farms, and ranches, passing that of Delatour with the others. Then he drove leisurely in the direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but familiar woodman’s step.
It is not the purpose of this brief chronicle to follow Mr. Bowers in his professional diagnosis of the locality. He recognized Nature in one of her moods of wasteful extravagance,—a waste that his experienced eye could tell was also sapping the vitality of those outwardly robust shafts that rose around him. He knew, without testing them, that half of these fair-seeming columns were hollow and rotten at the core; he could detect the chill odor of decay through the hot balsamic spices stirred by the wind that streamed through their long aisles,—like incense mingling with the exhalations of a crypt. He stopped now and then to part the heavy fronds down to their roots in the dank moss, seeing again, as he had told the editor, the weird SECOND twilight through their miniature stems, and the microcosm of life that filled it. But, even while paying this tribute to the accuracy of the unknown poetess, he was, like his predecessor, haunted more strongly by the atmosphere and melody of her verse. Its spell was upon him, too. Unlike Mr. Hamlin, he did not sing. He only halted once or twice, silently combing his straight narrow beard with his three fingers, until the action seemed to draw down the lines of his face into limitless dejection, and an inscrutable melancholy filled his small gray eyes. The few birds which had hailed Mr. Hamlin as their successful rival fled away before the grotesque and angular half-length of Mr. Bowers, as if the wind had blown in a scarecrow from the distant farms.
Suddenly he observed the figure of a woman, with her back towards him, leaning motionless against a tree, and apparently gazing intently in the direction of Green Springs. He had approached so near to her that it was singular she had not heard him. Mr. Bowers was a bashful man in the presence of the other sex. He felt exceedingly embarrassed; if he could have gone away without attracting her attention he would have done so. Neither could he remain silent, a tacit spy of her meditation. He had recourse to a polite but singularly artificial cough.
To his surprise, she gave a faint cry, turned quickly towards him, and then shrank back and lapsed quite helpless against the tree. Her evident distress overcame his bashfulness. He ran towards her.
“I’m sorry I frighted ye, ma’am, but I was afraid I might skeer ye more if I lay low, and said nothin’.”
Even then, if she had been some fair young country girl, he would have relapsed after this speech into his former bashfulness. But the face and figure she turned towards him were neither young nor fair: a woman past forty, with gray threads and splashes in her brushed-back hair, which was turned over her ears in two curls like frayed strands of rope. Her forehead was rather high than broad, her nose large but well-shaped, and her eyes full but so singularly light in color as to seem almost sightless. The short upper lip of her large mouth displayed her teeth in an habitual smile, which was in turn so flatly contradicted by every other line of her careworn face that it seemed gratuitously artificial. Her figure was hidden by a shapeless garment that partook equally of the shawl, cloak, and wrapper.
“I am very foolish,” she began, in a voice and accent that at once asserted a cultivated woman, “but I so seldom meet anybody here that a voice quite startled me. That, and the heat,” she went on, wiping her face, into which the color was returning violently—“for I seldom go out as early as this—I suppose affected me.”
Mr. Bowers had that innate Far-Western reverence for womanhood which I fancy challenges the most polished politeness. He remained patient, undemonstrative, self-effacing, and respectful before her, his angular arm slightly but not obtrusively advanced, the offer of protection being in the act rather than in any spoken word, and requiring no response.
“Like as not, ma’am,” he said, cheerfully looking everywhere but in her burning face. “The sun IS pow’ful hot at this time o’ day; I felt it myself comin’ yer, and, though the damp of this timber kinder sets it back, it’s likely to come out ag’in. Ye can’t check it no more than the sap in that choked limb thar”—he pointed ostentatiously where a fallen pine had been caught in the bent and twisted arm of another, but which still put out a few green tassels beyond the point of impact. “Do you live far from here, ma’am?” he added.
“Only as far as the first turning below the hill.”
“I’ve got my buggy here, and I’m goin’ that way, and I can jist set ye down thar cool and comfortable. Ef,” he continued, in the same assuring tone, without waiting for a reply, “ye’ll jist take a good grip of my arm thar,” curving his wrist and hand behind him like a shepherd’s crook, “I’ll go first, and break away the brush for ye.”
She obeyed mechanically, and they fared on through the thick ferns in this fashion for some moments, he looking ahead, occasionally dropping a word of caution or encouragement, but never glancing at her face. When they reached the buggy he lifted her into it carefully,—and perpendicularly, it struck her afterwards, very much as if she had been a transplanted sapling with bared and sensitive roots,—and then gravely took his place beside her.
“Bein’ in the timber trade myself, ma’am,” he said, gathering up the reins, “I chanced to sight these woods, and took a look around. My name is Bowers, of Mendocino; I reckon there ain’t much that grows in the way o’ standin’ timber on the Pacific Slope that I don’t know and can’t locate, though I DO say it. I’ve got ez big a mill, and ez big a run in my district, ez there is anywhere. Ef you’re ever up my way, you ask for Bowers—Jim Bowers—and that’s ME.”
There is probably nothing more conducive to conversation between strangers than a wholesome and early recognition of each other’s foibles. Mr. Bowers, believing his chance acquaintance a superior woman, naively spoke of himself in a way that he hoped would reassure her that she was not compromising herself in accepting his civility, and so satisfy what must be her inevitable pride. On the other hand, the woman regained her self-possession by this exhibition of Mr. Bowers’s vanity, and, revived by the refreshing breeze caused by the rapid motion of the buggy along the road, thanked him graciously.
“I suppose there are many strangers at the Green Springs Hotel,” she said, after a pause.
“I