THE October days had come, gray at dawn, etching the leaves with hoarfrost, lifting the clouds of mist, opening to the blue and gold above, windless and still and solemn, wearing through the long smoky hot afternoons to the gorgeous effulgence in the sky, and on to dusk, steeped in the melancholy of solitude.
Keven and Beryl climbed the trail back of the cabins, she leading the way, silent and pensive, with the spring of the deerstalker in her stride, he following, rifle in hand, with vigor in his step and glowing tan in cheeks no longer hollow.
The trail took the course of the brook, as it tumbled down, sometimes amber-gleaming in the sunlight and again dark and cool, streaming with mellow murmur under the shade. They reached the waterfall, where the brook leaped out of a gray notch to a wide flat ledge, over which it poured in a white sheet, lacy and snowy at the curve, to thin out into a downward-darkening smoke as it disappeared in the glen.
Above the fall stood the firs, great brown-barked trees, branchless far up, rising to lofty height, to spread a mingling canopy overhead. They stood far apart on the slanting slope, blackened at the trunks, where forest fire had scorched but failed to burn.
A hawk sailed in zigzag flight among the treetops, vanishing like a. fading gleam, emphasizing the apparent lifelessness of the forest. The trail climbed to a level bench where the firs thickened and the ferns began to encroach upon the brown-carpeted earth. It swung over to the brow of the ravine, deepening here to a wide timber-choked canyon, up from which floated the music of stone-retarded running water. Far under the grand, dark evergreens flamed the maples, gold-leafed and scarlet and yellow-green, here subdued in shade and there blazing in the rays of sunlight.
Beryl paused to gaze, and Keven, with eyes roving everywhere, halted to catch his breath. The forest seemed a vast cathedral, a colorful green-roofed hall of the wilderness, giving strange sense of protection, of age-old watchfulness. The ravine sent up its cool fragrance to mingle with the pungent piny odor of the firs.
A crash in the brush startled Keven. He wheeled. Beryl was pointing at a gray-blue bounding object that vanished as if by magic. The crack of hoof on dry branch was the last they heard.
“Buck,” said Beryl. “I’m glad you didn’t shoot.”
“Gosh, I forgot I had the rifle,” he whispered.
They climbed on, and the forest grew denser, wilder, blacker, and the underbrush closed above their heads. A gloomy silence prevailed in this primeval forest, where a snapped twig caused a start, and a voice would have been sacrilege. On they walked, and wound through the woods, up and up to a changing region. The firs no longer lorded it over all, though, as if in defiance of their lessening hold, they spread impenetrable thickets of their offspring on the north slopes of ravines. Pines began to appear, and gnarled oaks, and here and there the wondrous smooth-barked red-and-copper madroña, with its wide-spreading branches and its shiny foliage.
Higher still they entered the zone of the oaks, an open forest, patched with sunlit glades of golden grass, upon which the bronze leaves were rustling down. The ground was dry as tinder and reflected the strong heat of the sun. Manzanita with its yellow berries and myrtle with its faded flowers clustered in favored nooks. Under the trees an intoxicating fragrance floated warm on the still air.
Keven and Beryl wandered on with lingering, ever-slowing steps, at last to halt upon an open brow of ground, where a monarch oak, noble and old, bleached at the top, invited rest. They sat down, backs to the wide trunk. Far below shone the river, winding along the bottom of the valley, which from this elevation appeared so deep and vast. Its roar soared up, voice of the wilderness, low and continuous.
There was life in this oak forest. Frost had kissed the acorns. Wild pigeons fluttered among the leaves; robins, halting to rest on their way southward, gave forth plaintive notes, as melancholy as the autumn. Squirrels revealed their cautious movements to keen eyes; jays squalled and crows cawed. And far down through the aisles between the oaks listening deer, sleek and gray, passed with graceful step.
Long Keven reclined there against the tree trunk, feeling Beryl beside him, watching with wide all-absorbing eyes, and again listening blindly, and still again narrowing his lids down to make the forest kingdom resemble what it might have been at the dawn of man upon the earth.
The forest spoke, the river called, the clouds sailed across the blue above. The smell of the hot dry earth, the sweet myrtle, the faint pungency of the piny mountain slope below and intangible drifting odors filtered into Keven’s blood.
He had the sensation of sinking through space and the immeasurable past back to the primal day when these things had been inculcated into the flesh and bone that had been father to him. He wavered there on the verge, never quite attaining the savage state that his being yearned for. The instant his unthinking self gained that vague haunting happiness of a bygone age, then his consciousness intervened. He would deny it, and become again a man who reveled in his senses, only to smell and see and hear and feel his way back to realization of his state. Never could he utterly win that bliss for more than a fleeting instant. But as he had dreamily felt it stealing over him these endless transforming weeks, so now he grasped its significance, its truth, its glorious power to uplift and satisfy and save.
“Beryl, what are you thinking of?” he asked at last, no longer able to deny his intelligence, his thinking self.
She gave a little start. From whence had his voice dragged her?
“I wasn’t thinking,” she said dreamily.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
There it was. He had expected that. Keven divined he must approach Beryl differently, if he were ever to get at this aloofness of her. He understood it. He believed she had by nature and training penetrated deep into this strange state of feeling of suspended consciousness that so baffled him.
“Are you happy?” he went on.
“Oh—so happy,” she replied softly.
“You like this? To climb high up the mountain, to look far down, to be under the trees?”
“Love it better than anything except the river—and you. But you are the river, for you came with it.”
“You have an oak leaf in one hand,” continued Keven, “and pine needles in the other. You have been smelling them. I watched you on the way up. I saw you touch the firs with caressing hand. How many times you stopped to look and listen! You turned your ear to the falling water. You see every living creature of the woods before I do. You choose to sit in the sun instead of the shade. You stuck a long golden leaf in your hair, as an Indian might a feather…. A hundred things like these you’ve done. Were you conscious of them?”
“No, Kev, I wasn’t,” she replied. “I’m surprised at you. I’ll have to be careful—if you’re so observant.”
“Dear, I’m terribly serious. I want you to help me to find out something.”
“About me, Kev?”
“Yes, and through that, about myself.”
“I’m an open book for you, Kev.”
“You are not. You are a marvelous mystery. I don’t want you any different. I only want to climb to heaven with you…. Beryl, only a little while ago—well, you know what I was. Then came freedom from that craving for liquor. Then came love! … If I was tortured before, I am tortured more now. I feel health, strength coming back. I sleep, I eat. My nightmares have gone. I can see better out of this half-blind eye…. There, I’ll hold my hand over my good eye…. Beryl, I can see you—and not so dimly. So you and the river and this solitude have done something to my spirit, and through that to my mistreated body. I can’t explain it. I only feel. And I am tortured because it may be only a dream, a delusion.”
“Ah no, Kev. It is life. It comes from my beloved Solitude.”
“But what comes?” he entreated, in perplexity.
“I—I don’t know exactly,” she replied thoughtfully. “But I know how I feel when I’m away. I long for the river and the woods. I don’t want you to think I haven’t learned things and have not enjoyed the time away from home. I have. But out there in what they call civilization I see and I think. Here I see, but don’t think, I guess that’s it. Roseburg and Portland, one a town and the other a city, I enjoy for a while. I liked my work at Roseburg, and especially school. But I saw the haste, the waste, the madness of people. For money! For excitement! For speed! I saw their selfishness and greed, their misery and sorrow, their sacrifice, and oh, the good and courage of a few. Then I would long for the river, and the firs, for my Solitude. And when I got back something stole over me again. All that—that which troubled me faded away. I forgot.”
Keven felt that she had told him much, yet the illusive thing held aloof. He must probe his own heart, perhaps, if he were ever to disclose it. But there was arresting sweetness in this glimpse of Beryl Aard’s soul.
“In a word, then, Beryl, there is peace comes to one here. And after that, this other thing—this illusive spell, which you and I were under till I broke it.”
“Kev, since you make me think, I’ll tell you something nice I just thought. You are a very bright boy! … But let’s go back to our spell. Let’s climb higher, where we can see. This is nothing. Let’s go up, Kev, up to a place I know, and forget.”
“Yes, darling, I’ll be happy to, but just a word more. Please.”
“Well, go on, you dream-killer!”
“Doesn’t this wonderful spell you speak of come from physical things? What thrills you the most?”
“Smells. The smell of the pines and the firs. The smell of burning leaves—of campfire smoke. The smell of sweet myrtle. Dad always sent me some in letters. My heart would leap. Then I was back here at Solitude. Oh, I love to smell everything here at home. Even a skunk! … Isn’t that dreadful? But it’s true.”
Keven laughed at that, but continued: “Now, Beryl, when you look out there and down, what do you feel?”
“Nothing, till you make me think. I just see.”
He was silent awhile, because realization of this girl’s nature and of his extraordinary good fortune inhibited further speech. If Beryl had Indian blood, which indeed she had in some degree, what was it in him that struggled to meet her on her plane, to understand and feel with her, to get under that smooth, golden-tanned, blue-veined skin of hers? And the answer seemed to be the heritage of a primitive day.
“Come on, enchantress,” he said at length, merrily seizing her hand. “Let us climb on up—and back! But beware of making me love you more.”
Midday found them on the heights, and Keven, at least, was spent and fagged. Purposely he had not looked back or down for hours—but always up the changing slopes.
Beryl led him to a ridgetop of the mountain, the last slow rise of which was black with mantle of firs. Up to this border a meadow almost on end had led, grassy, dotted with purple asters waving in the breeze. The air was thin and cool. Keven panted. He saw the heaving of Beryl’s breast. There were dewy drops on her forehead. They flung themselves down on the ground beneath a huge slanting slab of gray-green mossed rock, which marked the edge of the forest.
“Look, Kev, look with my eyes,” cried Beryl. “This is my throne. I’ve climbed here twice a year since I was ten.”
Keven had fortified himself; he had learned how to look. This last ridge of the mountain ran westward, so that when Keven gazed straight he faced the west. He saw only heavy pearl-white clouds, moving almost imperceptibly, closer than he had ever been to clouds, across the deep dark-azure sky. Then he looked down.
The grassy slope rounded its descent for a way, then fell precipitously a thousand feet, to check its headlong flight in an open cape fringed by firs. A troop of deer dotted the meadowlike promontory. And as Keven gazed a golden eagle sailed wide-winged and grand below him, so that he looked down upon its bright-flecked back.
That little halting bench did not prepare Keven for the blue gulf below. It seemed as if he were falling sheer. How far down the firs, now mere needles of green, millions of them forming the thick black slopes of the canyon! But still deeper down a forest as of flaming fire leaped out of the void. A riot of yellow, of scarlet, of orange, of cerise, of purple, seen through smoky veils, blazed the truth of autumn. He swept his gaze farther down, holding his breath in anticipation of the river, but he saw only bits of gleaming brook and dancing white cascades like the wings of a white moth. This canyon, that seemed to penetrate to the bowels of the earth, was only a side canyon.
Up the colored mosaic of slope Keven’s gaze traveled to the black dense belt, on and up to the crags and the bleached firs, grotesque and deformed, and higher still to be riveted on the peaks and domes of the mountains beyond. It was an endless field, with notched horizon as far as the sky, and leagues and leagues of unbroken forested slopes. Here was the mountain kingdom from which the numberless springs and brooks and streams sent their pure waters down to the father river.
Even before Keven sighted the Rogue he heard it, and instinctively he closed his eyes and turned his ear. Low and far away, deep down and faintly clear, its mellow roar! He had not before heard it like this. And he pictured its long green sweeps, its white rapids, its broad still reaches under canyon walls, its majestic curves. But when he forced his eyelids open he saw, far, far down, only a winding broken blue ribbon with knots of white. He rubbed his eyes. Could that be the Rogue? That strip of spotted blue, smiling out of this incredible void!
But gradually he realized that it was his river—that he was gazing from a great height into a valley ten miles wide at the top, and sheering down over endless slopes and shadows of forest, over wooded basins and black canyons, over labyrinthine mazes of gold and red and magenta, of bright spots lost in the green, to the ragged iron cliffs, and to the tiny blue-and-silver thread between.
He watched then and no longer thought about what he saw. Even Beryl’s head, finding his shoulder, seemed a fragrance and a caress of the senses. Her hand sought his, clung and rested there.
The gulf in the green earth yawned beneath; the mighty slopes flowed down; the river wound its way to be lost; the lilac haze spread across the valley. The white clouds sailed to cast their shadows. And the soaring golden eagle black-barred the sky. Low and far away roared the river. Up to the cool heights wafted the woody smells, like enchantment in their power. And the past of man merged in the present, strange and vague to peering eyes, yet strong and attainable in the scents of the earth.