Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/Chapter 5
V
The "Pass Matriculation and Third Certificate Class," of which Don was a member, had now entered on the Spring term that was to end in the dreaded government examination for admission to the Provincial University; and Don was working like a slave. Even his Saturdays he gave up to study, and took his walks with a text-book in his pocket, and drew the figures of his geometrical "deductions" with a twig in the earth. He went much further afield than he had in the days when Conroy and he had hunted man-eating tigers in the Park. He had found a ravine, to the north of the town, lying wooded between two bald-top hills that had been sheared for farm land; the sides of the ravine had been left uncut; and in the bottom of it, under the shelter of firs and spruces, a little cool stream ran between its shores of brown pine needles and dead leaves. Here, he read and dreamed and studied, in a happy solitude with his dog, under innumerable green pine branches, among the corded roots of clinging firs, beside the crisp tinkle of little bubbled waterfalls.
Conroy knew the place, but he did not often come with Don—except on a Sunday afternoon when there were no football games to play and his home was depressingly Sabbatical. And this was a Saturday, and Don did not expect to be disturbed. He had made himself comfortable on a little knoll of grass, with the stream at his feet and the slim white stem of a silver birch at his back; Dexter had curled himself in a patch of sunlight near by, his nose between his paws, blinking sleepily; some wood sparrows twittered and quarrelled among the evergreens.
Don, with a book of the "Odyssey" on his knees and a "crib" in his hand, fitted the translation to the text and marked with a lead pencil the words he did not know. He was so busy that he did not notice Dexter when the dog pricked up its ears. He was murmuring: "Then answering him—then answering him—the wily Odysseus—the wily Odysseus—said 'King Alcinous.'"—The dog sat up, its nostrils twitching, and watched the trail of brown path down which they had come. "'Truly it is a beautiful thing.'—Quiet, sir." The dog had growled. "What's the matter with you?" He looked up from his study. There was a girl approaching through the trees.
He put his cap on quickly, and fixed his attention on his book in a pretence of absorption which he intended to maintain until she had passed. But, in a moment, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stop; and Dexter, having sniffed at the hem of her skirt—which came almost to her shoe-tops—barked and ran away up the path. She came closer, and stood there. He raised his eyes from her ankles—which were neatly turned—to her belt, in which she carried a bunch of violets—and then to a face that was dimly familiar, brown-eyed, flushed, and greeting him with a friendly smile that waited to be remembered. She stood in the sunlight, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes dark in the shadow of the brim of her hat, her teeth white in the light; and the adorable dimple in either cheek deepened when she saw that he did not recognise her.
She laughed. A blind memory groped and moved in his brain, and a rush of blood flamed over his face. The dog was barking among the trees. She turned and called in that direction: "He doesn't remember me!"
He knew then. It was "Miss Margaret!"
He started to get up, catching at his books as they slipped from his knees, and fumbling for his pocket as he tried to put away his lead pencil. Remember her? The realization that this smiling young woman was his "Miss Margaret" had come on him with such a shock that he did not know what he was about. In a sort of bewildered double-consciousness, he watched his hands trying to pick up the scattered volumes. Miss Margaret! And then he came suddenly into clear possession of his senses, and stood up with a tremulous smile, a book in one hand and his pencil in the other. "Yes, I do," he said huskily. "You're Miss Margaret."
"How did you know?" she cried, beaming on him. "By the photograph? Have I changed?"
The excitement in her eyes was catching. He stammered, with a broken laugh: "N—no. You took it away—the photograph. I haven't any."
"Oh yes!" she recollected. "I thought ... But why did I?" she accused him. "You tried to"
"Well," he dared. "What did you do to mine? You tore it up—and threw it away."
"I didn't! Oh!" She was scarlet. "How did you find out?" The dog came barking and jumping about her, with Conroy stumbling over him. "He didn't remember!" she cried. "How did you know?... He hasn't changed a bit.... Isn't it funny; he called me 'Miss Margaret'!"
They all talked together, raising their voices to drown Dexter's yelping. "It was my plan. I wanted to surprise you." "I told her we'd find you here." "I almost called for Con on my way out, too." "Isn't it fun!" "Quiet, sir!" "Just look at him!" "Down, sir!"
Conroy caught the dog and muzzled it with a hand; they heard the shrill treble of their voices, unsupported by its barking; and they stopped, self-conscious. The excitement ceased as suddenly as it had begun.
Don looked from Conroy to her with a quick change to bashfulness that took him in the middle of a smile and froze it. She was "Miss Margaret"—and she was not. "I didn't know any other name," he apologized. "I"
"Didn't you? Didn't I ever tell you?"
"No. You"
"Richardson."
Miss Richardson. It made her a stranger to him. He felt almost as if they needed an introduction. "You knew mine?"
"Your cousin told me." They both looked at Conroy, and were unable to get their eyes back to each other again. Conroy saw the situation, and busied himself with the dog, snapping his fingers at it, and catching at its ears. They struggled with an abashed silence until Conroy—thinking loyally that they would get along better without him—said: "Well, I promised to be back home right away.... I guess I better be going." And in spite of their confused efforts to keep him, he did succeed, with the aid of Dexter, in getting himself off the scene.
She looked around her. "What a beautiful place!"
He replied lamely: "Yes, isn't it?"
She saw his books. "Were you studying?"
He tried to think of something more to say than the bald affirmative, and ended by faltering "N—no."
She stooped down to the "Odyssey." "Isn't it funny? What is it?"
"Greek."
"Really?" She sat down on the grass. "Is it—is it as interesting as the book you"
He caught the picture that was in her mind—the picture of the two of them with their heads together over the fairy tales, on his aunt's porch steps—and he laughed. "No—not quite!"
"What is it like? What is it all about?"
He came down slowly, on one knee beside her. "It's—I can't read it without a trans—but it's a good deal of a fairy tale too."
"And there aren't any pictures." She turned over the pages, careful not to look at him for fear she should make him shy again. "It's like the first time I saw music—printed music. I wondered how anyone could make .... music out of it. I suppose it's easy enough—when you know how—too—Greek."
Don laughed apologetically as he sat down. "I don't know. I don't know how."
"We don't study it—at Horton. German is bad enough."
"Are you studying German?"
Oh, she was not studying much of anything—except music and singing. And she had worked so hard at those that her health had broken down and her mother had taken her away from the school. They were in town for a month, on their way to the Muskoka lakes, where they were to spend the summer.
She chattered nervously about herself, turning the pages backward and forward. Don watched her fingers. He glanced shyly at the soft profile of her cheek and chin, with the dark eyelash and dimple that came and went with her smile. He breathed a faint, warm odour of violets that overbore the scent of the wood balsam, every now and then, with a sweet suggestion of feminine daintiness and charm. And that perfume stealing in on him, and her white hands touching his old book, and her voice voluble in friendship, and her smile—they dazzled, fascinated him, intoxicated him, so that his eyes burned on her, and he leaned forward beside her, clasping his knees, to see her better under the brim of her hat; and she looked up, half-startled, and caught the boyish gentleness and reverence that shone even through his ardour; and she was not afraid.
She told him of her studies in the boarding-school for girls, in which she was a day scholar; and he described his own class-room life. They talked as eagerly, and listened as hungrily, as if the trivial experiences of their small days were great and moving events. "I often wondered what you were doing," she confessed. "There was a boy at home reminded me of you—a little."
Don was afraid to acknowledge that he had made an imaginary playmate of her; indeed, he remembered it only dimly. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again," he said. "I didn't know where you'd gone." The miracle of her return came strong on him.
"You didn't forget me, though," she said.
"No."
"Your cousin told me—how they teased you—about the photograph."
He laughed with a return of the shame which that teasing had taught him to feel in remembering the incident. "We had an awful fight," he recollected.
"You are good friends now."
"Yes."
"He hurried me right out here, as soon as he knew who I was." She smiled at the thought of Conroy's delighted eagerness to have her meet Don again. Then she leaned back against the birch, and gazed happily at the tangle of sunlit green branches and the bare, brown shadows underneath. It was just such a place as she would have expected to find the little boy whom she remembered. And he was the same boy, though evidently his books had taken the place of his make-believes, and he was more reserved. She liked him, and she knew it. On her way out with Conroy she had been wondering whether she would like him. She was glad that she did.
As for Don, he had no feminine introspection, and his happiness held him in a dazed silence. He was conscious only that a young divinity—for she was already more than a girl to him—had come glowing and beautiful out of dreamland, and sat beside him in an odour of violets, and talked to him with a musical, soft voice.
"The water sounds so pretty," she said.
He replied musingly: "I'd change it for you if it didn't."
"Why? How?"
"It's the stream running over some big stones. You can change the sound—by changing the stones."
"Really?"
"Would you like to?"
"Why, of course!"
The tiny waterfall was just below their knoll, at the end of a bright shallow where three boulders held back the bed of the stream and dropped the current brawling over their shoulders into a dark pool. Don helped her down the steep bank to the water's edge; and with much excitement and more laughter, with little cries of delight from her and a furious barking from Dexter, they loosened stones from the bank and put them where the plangent water would strike and curl about them; and with every stone, sure enough, they got a new note.
Then they followed down the changes of the stream to a green slope where, Don knew, the first violets always budded; and when he found only leaves and no blossoms yet—for, of course, it was too early in the year—she took some of the hot-house flowers from her belt, made holes in the ground with the pin of her brooch, and stuck the stems in playfully. "There!" she said. "Now you pick them."
He took them out again one by one, careful not to break the delicate stalks, and held them out to her, laughing.
"Oh, thank you." She accepted them with a sparkling gravity. "Aren't they sweet! May I have them all? Wouldn't you like to keep some?"
Don stammered: "Ye—e—es."
"Have you a pin? No, I'll put them in your button-hole."
He could not look at her face; he kept his eyes on her frail wrists as she reached to the lapel of his coat and put the violets in the button-hole and patted them into place. When she stood back, a little flushed at her own daring, he raised his eyes to hers; and the look that passed between them was as innocent as affection and as tender as a caress.
Hours later they came loitering down the avenue towards home; and they came so slowly that Dexter—running ahead of them impatiently, waiting, and then running back—covered every foot of the way again and again. They were still talking, but with an easy friendliness now, and with a confident meeting of their glances. The sun, low in the west behind them, slanted its long rays on them in a glory as they came. The early April breeze, soft with its first evening mist, stirred the budding chestnut branches over their heads, with the breath of a sigh. A robin, as fat as a pullet, called to them from a green lawn, as they passed, a throaty promise of spring.