The Firing Line. Robert W. Chambers
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"No, I don't," he said.
"Oh! You ought to conform to tradition. There's a particularly alluring hammock on the veranda."
"To get rid of me is it necessary to make me take a nap?" he protested.
"So you refuse to go to sleep?"
"I certainly do."
She sighed and tucked the tennis-bat under her left arm. "Come," she said, moving forward, "my father will ask me what I have done to amuse you, and I had better hunt up something to tell him about. You'll want to see the groves of course—"
"Yes, but I'm not going to drag you about with me—"
"Come," she repeated; and as he stood his ground obstinately: "Please?"—with a rising inflection hinting at command.
"Why on earth don't you play tennis and let me sit and watch you?" he asked, joining and keeping step with her.
"Why do you ask a woman for reasons, Mr. Hamil?"
"It's too bad to spoil your morning—"
"I know it; so in revenge I'm going to spoil yours. Our trip is called 'Seeing Florida,' so you must listen to your guide very attentively. This is a pomelo grove—thank you," to the negro who opened the gate—"here you see blossoms and ripe fruit together on the same tree. A few palmettos have been planted here for various agricultural reasons. This is a camphor bush"—touching it with her bat—"the leaves when crushed in the palm exhale a delightful fragr—"
"Calypso!"
She turned toward him with coldest composure. "That never happened, Mr. Hamil."
"No," he said, "it never did."
A slight colour remained in his face; hers was cool enough.
"Did you think it happened?" she asked. He shook his head. "No," he repeated seriously, "I know that it never happened."
She said: "If you are quite sure it never happened, there is no harm in pretending it did. … What was it you called me?"
"I could never remember, Miss Cardross—unless you tell me."
"Then I'll tell you—if you are quite sure you don't remember. You called me 'Calypso.'"
And looking up he surprised the rare laughter in her eyes.
"You are rather nice after all," she said, "or is it only that I have you under such rigid discipline? But it was very bad taste in you to recall so crudely what never occurred—until I gave you the liberty to do it. Don't you think so?"
"Yes, I do," he said. "I've made two exhibitions of myself since I knew you—"
"One, Mr. Hamil. Please recollect that I am scarcely supposed to know how many exhibitions of yourself you may have made before we were formally presented."
She stood still under a tree which drooped like a leaf-tufted umbrella, and she said, swinging her racket: "You will always have me at a disadvantage. Do you know it?"
"That is utterly impossible!"
"Is it? Do you mean it?"
"I do with all my heart—"
"Thank you; but do you mean it with all your logical intelligence, too?"
"Yes, of course I do."
She stood, head partly averted, one hand caressing the smooth, pale-yellow fruit which hung in heavy clusters around her. And all around her, too, the delicate white blossoms poured out fragrance, and the giant swallow-tail butterflies in gold and black fluttered and floated among the blossoms or clung to them as though stupefied by their heavy sweetness.
"I wish we had begun—differently," she mused.
"I don't wish it."
She said, turning on him almost fiercely: "You persisted in talking to me in the boat; you contrived to make yourself interesting without being offensive—I don't know how you managed it! And then—last night—I was not myself. … And then—that happened!"
"Could anything more innocent have happened?"
"Something far more dignified could have happened when I heard you say 'Calypso.'" She shrugged her shoulders. "It's done; we've misbehaved; and you will have to be dreadfully careful. You will, won't you? And yet I shall certainly hate you heartily if you make any difference between me and other women. Oh, dear!—Oh, dear! The whole situation is just unimportant enough to be irritating. Mr. Hamil, I don't think I care for you very much."
And as he looked at her with a troubled smile, she added:
"You must not take that declaration too literally. Can you forget—various things?"
"I don't want to, Miss Cardross. Listen: nobody could be more sweet, more simple, more natural than the girl I spoke to—I dreamed that I talked with—last night. I don't want to forget that night, or that girl. Must I?"
"Are you, in your inmost thoughts, fastidious in thinking of that girl? Is there any reservation, any hesitation?"
He said, meeting her eyes: "She is easily the nicest girl I ever met—the very nicest. Do you think that I might have her for a friend?"
"Do you mean this girl, Calypso?"
"Yes."
"Then I think that she will return to you the exact measure of friendship that you offer her. … Because, Mr. Hamil, she is after all not very old in years, and a little sensitive and impressionable."
He thought to himself: "She is a rather curious mixture of impulse and reason; of shyness and audacity; of composure and timidity; of courage and cowardice and experience. But there is in her no treachery; nothing mentally unwholesome."
They stood silent a moment smiling at each other rather seriously; then her smooth hand slid from his, and she drew a light breath.
"What a relief!" she said.
"What?"
"To know you are the kind of man I knew you were. That sounds rather Irish, doesn't it? … " And under her breath—"perhaps it is. God knows!" Her face grew very grave for a moment, then, as she turned and looked at him, the shadow fell.
"Do you know—it was absurd of course—but I could scarcely sleep last night for sheer dread of your coming to-day. And yet I knew what sort of a man you must be; and this morning"—she shook her head—"I couldn't endure any breakfast, and I usually endure lots; so I took a spin down the lake in my chair. When I saw you just now I was trying to brace up on a guava. Listen to me: I am hungry!"
"You poor little thing—"
"Sympathy satisfies sentiment but appetite prefers oranges. Shall we eat oranges together and become friendly and messy? Are you even that kind of a man? Oh, then if you really are, there's a mixed grove just beyond."
So together, shoulder to shoulder, keeping step, they passed through the new grove with its enormous pendent bunches of grape-fruit, and into a second grove where limes and mandarins hung among clusters of lemons and oranges; where kum-quat bushes stood stiffly, studded with egg-shaped, orange-tinted fruit; where tangerines, grape-fruit, and king-oranges grew upon the same tree, and the deep scarlet of ripe Japanese persimmons and the huge tattered fronds of banana trees formed a riotous background.
"This tree!" she indicated briefly, reaching up; and her hand was white even among the milky orange bloom—he noticed that as he bent down a laden bough for her.
"Pine-oranges," she said, "the most delicious of all. I'll pick and you hold the branch. And please get me a few tangerines—those blood-tangerines up there. … Thank you; and two Japanese persimmons—and two more for yourself. … Have you a knife? Very well; now, break a fan from that saw-palmetto and sweep a place for me on the ground—that way. And now please look very carefully to see if there