A Fortnight of Folly. Maurice Thompson
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Название: A Fortnight of Folly
Автор: Maurice Thompson
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066204594
isbn:
By some method known only to herself she had put herself upon a speaking-plane with Dufour, who, as she approached him, was standing in an angle of the wide wooden veranda waiting for the moon to rise over the distant peaks of the eastern mountains.
“I saw Mr. Tolliver to-day while whipping a brook down here,” said he, turning to look her squarely in the face.
“Oh, did you! Isn’t he a virile, villainous, noble, and altogether melodramatic looking man? I wish there was some one here who could sketch him for me. But, say, Mr. Dufour, what do you mean, please, when you speak of whipping a brook?”
She took from her pocket a little red note-book and a pencil as he promptly responded: “Whipping a brook? oh, that’s angler’s nonsense, it means casting the line into the water, you know.”
“That’s funny,” she remarked, making a note.
She was taller than Dufour, and so slender and angular that in comparison with his excessive plumpness she looked gaunt and bony. In speaking her lips made all sorts of wild contortions showing her uneven teeth to great effect, and the extreme rapidity of her utterance gave an explosive emphasis to her voice. Over her forehead, which projected, a fluffy mass of pale yellow hair sprang almost fiercely as if to attack her scared and receding chin.
“You are from Michigan, I believe, Miss Crabb,” remarked Dufour.
“Oh, dear, no!” she answered, growing red in the face, “No, indeed. I am from Indiana, from Ringville, associate editor of the Star.”
“Pardon, I meant Indiana. Of course I knew you were not from Michigan.”
“Thanks,” with a little laugh and a shrug, “I am glad you see the point.”
“I usually do—a little late,” he remarked complacently.
“You are from Boston, then, I infer,” she glibly responded.
“Not precisely,” he said, with an approving laugh, “but I admit that I have some Bostonian qualities.”
At this point in the conversation she was drooping over him, so to say, and he was sturdily looking up into her bright, insistent face.
“What a group!” said Crane to Mrs. Bridges, a New York fashion editor. “I’d give the best farm in Kentucky (so far as my title goes) for a photograph of it! Doesn’t she appear to be just about to peck out his eyes!”
“Your lofty imagination plays you fantastic tricks,” said Mrs. Bridges. “Is she the famous Western lady reporter?”
“The same, of the Ringville Star. I met her at the Cincinnati convention. It was there that Bascom of the Bugle called her a bag of gimlets, because she bored him so.”
“Oh!”
This exclamation was not in response to what Crane had said, but it was an involuntary tribute to the moon-flower just flaring into bloom between twin peaks lying dusky and heavy against the mist of silver and gold that veiled the sweet sky beyond. A semi-circle of pale straw-colored fire gleamed in the lowest angle of the notch and sent up long, wavering lines of light almost to the zenith, paling the strongest stars and intensifying the shadows in the mountain gorges and valleys. Grim as angry gods, the pines stood along the slopes, as if gloomily contemplating some dark scheme of vengeance.
“A real Sapphic,” said Crane, dropping into a poetical tone, as an elocutionist does when he is hungry for an opportunity to recite a favorite sketch.
“Why a Sapphic?” inquired the matter-of-fact fashion-editor.
“Oh, don’t you remember that fragment, that glorious picture Sappho’s divine genius has made for us—”
He quoted some Greek.
“About as divine as Choctaw or Kickapoo,” she said. “I understand the moon-shine better. In fact I have a sincere contempt for all this transparent clap-trap you poets and critics indulge in when you got upon your Greek hobby. Divine Sappho, indeed! A lot of bald bits of jargon made famous by the comments of fogies. Let’s look at the moon, please, and be sincere.”
“Sincere!”
“Yes, you know very well that if you had written the Sapphic fragments the critics would——”
“The critics! What of them? They are a set of disappointed poetasters themselves. Blind with rage at their own failures, they snap right and left without rhyme or reason. Now there’s Peck, a regular——”
“Well, sir, a regular what?” very coolly demanded the critic who had stepped forth from a shadowy angle and now stood facing Crane.
“A regular star-gazer,” said Mrs. Bridges. “Tell us why the planets yonder all look so ghastly through the shimmering moonlight.”
Peck, without reply, turned and walked away.
“Is he offended?” she asked.
“No, he gives offence, but can not take it.”
Mrs. Bridges grew silent.
“We were speaking of Sappho,” observed Crane, again gliding into an elocutionary mood. “I have translated the fragment that I repeated a while ago. Let me give it to you.
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