Chapter 7: Conservation and Conversation

Thusis hooked the first trout. It made a prodigious swirl in the pool and rushed to and fro in the shadowy depths—a slim, frantic phantom lacing the crystalline water with flashes of pallid fire.

She drew in the trout splashing and spattering in all its rainbow glory, and I thankfully thumped it into Nirvana and placed it upon a catafalque of wet green moss in my basket. Thusis looked on calmly while I performed the drudgery of the episode, and I heard her singing carelessly to herself:

“The old gods have gone away;

I follow them with feet astray,

But in my heart I’ll faithful be

To Tenedos and Naxos!”

“There seems to be a dryad or two left,” said I, looking up over my shoulder where I squatted by the brookside, scrubbing my hands in the under-water gravel.

“You mean me,” she nodded absently, loosening and freeing her leader and line.

“I sure do, Thusis.”

“You’re so funny,” she said in the same tranquil, detached voice, as though she were some young chatelaine and I her gillie.

We went on to the next pool where the green crystal water gushed in and spread out calmly through the woodland, reflecting every fern and tree.

The silken whistle of her cast made a pretty whispering sound in the mossy silence, and I watched her where she stood slim and straight as a silvery sapling searching the far still reaches of the water with the tiny tuft of tinseled feathers until the surface of the placid pool was shattered into liquid splinters by the splash of a trout, and her line vibrated and hummed like a taut violin string.

Like lightning the convulsive battle was joined there in the woodland depths and the girl, all fire and grace, swayed like a willow under the furious rhythmic rushes of the unseen fish.

Click-click went her reel, and the feathery whirr of the line accented the silence. Then that living opalescent thing sprang quivering out of its element, and fell back, conquered, in a shower of opal rain.

Toward noon we came to a pool into which poured the stream with a golden sound between two boulders mantled thick with moss. And here Thusis seated herself and laid aside her rod.

“I am hungry,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me with the same aloof composure that all the morning had reversed our rôles as master and maid.

But even as she spoke she seemed to realize the actual situation: a delicate color came into her cheeks and then she laughed.

“Isn’t it funny?” she said, springing to her feet. “Such presumption! Pray condescend to unsling the basket and I shall give Don Michael his lunch.”

“Don Michael,” said I, “will continue to do the dirty work on this expedition. Sit down, Thusis.”

“Oh, I couldn’t permit——”

“Oh, yes, you could. You’ve been behaving like a sporting duchess all this morning. Continue in that congenial rôle.”

“What did you say?” she demanded, her gray eyes frosty and intent on me.

“I said you’ve been behaving like a duchess.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s so.”

She sat on her mossy throne, regarding me intently and unsmilingly.

“Don’t say that again, —please,” she said, coldly.

“I was merely jesting.”

“I know. But please don’t say it in that way. Don’t use that expression.”

“Very well,” said I, not relishing the snub. And I laid out the lunch in silence, during which operation I could feel Thusis was watching my sulky features with amusement.

To make sure I looked up at her when I had finished, and caught the little devils laughing at me out of both her eyes.

“Luncheon’s ready,” said I, infuriated by her mockery.

“Monsieur is served,” said Thusis, in a voice so diabolically meek that I burst out laughing; and the girl, as though flinging discretion to the summer breezes, leaped to her feet with a gay little echo of my laughter and dropped down on the moss beside the woodland banquet.

“What do I care after all!” she said. “From the beginning I’ve been at no pains to deceive you. So in the name of the old gods let us break bread together.”

She picked up a bit of bread, sprinkled a pinch of salt on it, broke it, and offered me half with a most adorable air. And we ate together under the inviolate roof of the high blue sky.

“Now,” she said, “you’ll never betray me.”

“You knew that in the beginning.”

“Did I? I don’t know. I’ve been perfectly careless concerning you, Don Michael.”

“Was it from instinctive confidence, Thusis, or out of disdain?”

The girl laughed, not looking up but continuing to poke for olives with a fork too large for the neck of the flask:

“Disdain you, Don Michael? How could I?”

“I sometimes believe you do. You behave very often as though I were a detail of the surrounding landscape and quite as negligible.”

“But it’s an attractive landscape and not negligible,” she insisted, still poking for elusive olives. “Your simile is at fault, Monsieur O’Ryan.”

“Thusis,” said I, gravely consuming a sandwich, “you have made fun of me ever since I laid eyes on you.”

“You began it.”

“How?”

“You made fun of my red hair.”

“It is beautiful hair.”

“Indeed?”

“You know it. You know perfectly well how pretty you are.”

“Señor!”

“In fact,” said I, offering myself another sandwich, “you are unusually ornamental. I concede it. I even admit that you resemble The Laughing Girl.”

“The cherished photograph on Monsieur’s dresser! Oh, that is too much flattery. What would the Admiral think to hear you say such things to your housekeeper! Don Michael, you are young and you are headed for trouble. I beg of you to remember your ancestors.”

“How about yours, Thusis?”

“Mine? Oh, they were poor Venetians. Probably they ran gondolas for the public—the taxis of those days, Don Michael—and lived on the tips they received.”

“Thusis?”

“Monsieur?”

“I’d be grateful for a tip—if you don’t mind.”

“A tip?”

“Yes. Just a little one.”

The girl held out her glass and I filled it with cool Moselle.

“You’re such a nice boy,” she said, and sipped her wine, looking at me all the while. She was so pretty that it hurt.

“A tip,” she repeated musingly. “That is the Anglo-Saxon slang for information. Is it then that you request information?”

“If you are willing.”

“About what, pray?”

“About yourself, Thusis.”

“That is unworthy curiosity.”

“No, it isn’t curiosity.”

She elevated her delicate nose, very slightly. “What, then, do you term it, Don Michael?”

“Sympathy.”

“Oh la! Sympathy? Oh, I know that kind. It is born out of the idleness of speculation and developed with an admixture of sentimental curiosity always latent in men.”

She laughed: “It’s nothing but emotion, Monsieur. Men call it budding friendship. But men really care for no women.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s true. Men seek friendship among men. Men like few or no women, but almost any female. That is the real truth. Why dodge it?”

“How old are you, Thusis?”

“Not old—as you mean it.”

She had finished her luncheon, and now she leaned over and bathed her lips and fingers in the icy stream. There, like some young woodland thing out of the golden age of vanished gods she hovered, playing at the glimmering water’s edge, scooping up handfuls of golden gravel from the bottom and letting them slide back through her dripping fingers.

“I’ll tell you this,” she said, looking at the water: “I don’t like men. I never did. Any I might have been inclined to like I had already been born to hate ... You don’t understand, do you?”

“No.”

She smiled, sat erect, and dried her fingers on her handkerchief.

“Be flattered,” she said. “No other man before you has had even a glimpse of my real self. And I really don’t know why I’ve given you that much. I ask myself. I don’t know ... But,”—and her sweet, reckless laughter flashed—”the very devil seemed to possess me when I first saw you, Don Michael. I was amazingly careless. But you were so funny! I was indiscreet. But you were so solemn and so typically and guilelessly masculine.”

“Was I?” said I, getting redder and redder.

“Oh, yes!” she cried, “and you are still! You are all man—the most comprehensive type of your sex—the most logical, and the most delightfully transparent! Oh, you are funny, Don Michael. You don’t know it; you don’t suspect it; but you are! And that is why I read you to the depths of your nice boyish mind and heart, and felt that I need be at no pains to play my little rôle with you.”