_ PART TWO
CHAPTER XXX. EYES FOR TWO
"This day smells as though it had been made in the country," Karl said, leaning from the dining room window which Ernestine had thrown wide open as she rose from the breakfast table.
"Yes, and looks that way," she responded, leaning out herself, and taking a long draught of the spring.
"Let's take a walk," he said abruptly.
"Except when you asked me to marry you--you never proposed a more delightful thing," she responded with gayer laugh than he had heard for a long time.
"Suppose we walk down through the park and take a look at the lake," he suggested.
"I call that a genuine inspiration!"--losing no time in getting Karl's things and her own.
Nothing could have pleased her more than this. It seemed beginning the spring right.
"I can fancy we are in Europe," he said, after they had gone a little way, and she laughed understandingly;--this seemed closer to the spirit of the old days than they had come for a long time.
Her guiding hand was on his arm, but more as if she liked to have it there, than as though necessary. "Your little finger could pilot me through Hades" he said, lovingly, gratefully, as a light touch told him of a step to go down, and again she laughed; it was very easy to laugh this morning.
The winter, full of hard things for them both, had gone now, and spring, as is spring's way, held promise. In the laboratory they no longer treated Ernestine with mere courteous interest. That day in December when she went down to Dr. Parkman's operation had marked a change. Since then there had been a light ahead, a light which shed its rays down the path she must go.
What did it matter if she were a little stupid about this or that, if Mr. Beason was unconsciously rude or Mr. Willard consciously polite? For she
knew now--and did anything matter save the final things? With her own feeling of its not mattering their attitude had seemed to change; she became more as one with them--she was quick to get that difference. "You're arriving on the high speed," Dr. Parkman had assured her when he visited the laboratory a few days before.
So she knew why she was happy, for added to all that was it not a glorious and propitious thing that Karl felt like taking a walk? Did it not argue a new interest in life--a new determination not to be shut off from it? And Karl--why did he too seem to feel that the spring held new and better things? Was it just the call of spring, or did Karl sense the good things ahead? Could it be that her soul, unable to contain itself longer, had whispered to his that new days were coming?
"Why, even a fellow on his way to the penitentiary for life would have to get some enjoyment out of this morning," he said, after they had stood still for a minute to listen to the song of a bird, and had caught the sweetness of a flowering tree.
"And oh, Karl," she laughed, joyously, "you're
not on your way to the penitentiary for life."
"No," he said, and he seemed to be speaking to something within himself rather than to her,--"I'm
not!"
They had reached Jackson Park, and sat down for a little rest before they should wend their way on to the lake. "Oh, Ernestine," he said, taking it in in long breaths, feeling the dew upon his face, and hearing the murmur of many living things,--"
tell me about it, dear. I want to see it too!"
"Karl--every tree looks as though it were just as glad as we are! Can't you feel that the trees feel just as we do about things? The leaves haven't all come out yet, some of them are holding themselves within themselves in a coy little way they have--although intending all the time to come out just as fast as ever they can. And it's that glorious, unspoiled green--the kind nature uses to make painters feel foolish. Oh, nature's having much fun with the painters this morning. Right over there,"--pointing with his finger--"is such a beautiful tree. I like it because all of its branches did not go in the way they were expected to go. Several of them were very perverse children, who mother trunk thought at one time were going to ruin her life, but you know lives aren't so easily ruined after all. 'Now you go right up there at an angle of twenty-two degrees,' she said to her eldest child. 'Not at all,' said the firstborn, 'I intend to lean right over here at whatsoever angle will best express my individuality.' And though the mother grieved for a long time she knows now--Karl--how foolish we are! But listen. You hear that bird who is trying to get all of his soul into his throat at once? He's 'way up there on the top branch, higher than everything else, and so pleased and proud that he is, and he's singing to a little blue cloud straight above him, and I tell you I never saw such blue--such blue within blue. Its outside dress is a very filmy blue, but that's made over an under dress of deeper blue, and there's just a little part in it where you can see right into the heart, and that's a blue so deep and rich it makes you want to cry. And oh, Karl--the heart itself has opened a little now, and you can get a suggestion, just a very indefinite suggestion--but then all inner things are indefinite--that inside the heart of the cloud is its soul, and you are permitted one fleeting glimpse to tell you that the soul of the cloud is such a blue as never was dreamed of on land or on sea."
"I can see that cloud," he said,--"and the bird looking up at it, and the tree whose eldest child was so perverse and so--individual."
"And, Karl," she went on, in joyous eagerness, "can't you see how the earth heaved a sigh right here a couple of hundred centuries ago--now
don't tell me the park commissioners made them!--and that when it settled back from its sigh it never was quite the same again? It was a sigh of content--for the little slopes are so gentle. Gentle little hills are sighs of content, and bigger ones are determinations, and mountains--what are mountains, Karl?"
"Mountains are revolutionary instincts," he said, smiling at her fancifulness--Ernestine was always fanciful when she was happy.
"Yes, that's it. Sometimes I like the stormy upheavals which change the whole face of the earth, but this morning it's nice to have just the little sighs of content. And, dear--now turn around and look this way. You can't really see the lake at all--but you can tell by looking down that way that it is there."
"How can you tell, liebchen?" he asked, just to hear her talk.
"Oh, I don't know
how you can. It's not scientific knowledge--it's--the other kind. The trees know that the lake is there."
"Let's walk down to the lake," he said. "I want to feel it on my face. And oh, liebchen--it's good to have you tell about things like this."
As they walked she told him of all she saw: the people they met, and what she was sure the people were thinking about. Once she laughed aloud, and when he asked what she was laughing at, she said, "Oh, that chap we just passed was amusing. His eyes were saying--'My allowance is all gone and I haven't a red sou--but isn't it a bully day?'"
"There's no reason why I should be shut out from the world, Ernestine," he said vigorously, "when you have eyes for two."
"Why, that's just what I think!" she said, quickly, her voice low, and her heart beating fast.
The shadows upon the grass, the nursemaids and the babies, the boys and girls playing tennis, or just strolling around happy to be alive--she could make Karl see them all. And as they came in sight of the lake she began telling him how it looked in the distance, how it seemed at first just a cloud dropped down from the sky, but how, upon coming nearer, it was not the stuff that clouds are made of, but a live thing, a great live thing pulsing with joy in the morning sunshine. She told him how some of it was blue and some of it was green, while some of it was blue wedded to green, and some of it too elusive to have anything to do with the spectrum. "And, dearie--it is flirting with the sunlight--flirting shamefully; I'm almost ashamed for the lake, only it's so happy in its flirtation that perhaps it is not bothered with moral consciousness. But it seems to want the sunlight to catch it, and then it seems to want to get away, and sometimes a sunbeam gets a little wave that stayed too long and kisses it right here in open day--and isn't it awful--but isn't it nice?"
In so many ways she told how the lake seemed to her--how it seemed to her eyes and how it seemed to her heart and how it seemed to her soul, how it looked, what it said, what it meant; what the clouds thought of it, and what the sunlight thought of it, what the wind thought of it, what the dear babies on the shore thought of it, and what it thought of itself. She could not have talked that way to any one else, but it was so easy for her heart to talk to Karl's heart. One pair of eyes could do just as well as two when hearts were tuned like this!
And then, when she did not feel like talking any more, they stood there and learned many things from the voice of the lake itself. "Ernestine," he said, when they turned from it at last, "it seems to me I never saw Lake Michigan quite so well before." _