Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

“Very,” replied Archie. “Promise me Lucy and I’ll slow up.”

A sudden little shriek of joy and some handclapping from Mayer’s tonneau interrupted what the old lady might have answered. Glancing over, Miss Herron perceived that their rival had drawn ahead a yard or more, that the girls were crying taunts at her. Not far away now there showed a gleam of the river. And then Archie encountered the greatest surprise of his life.

“Saucy things!” remarked his passenger, and fell silent again.

“Come on!” called the prettiest of the three, through her hollowed hands. “Old freight car!”

“Archie!”

“Yes, Miss Herron?”

“Can’t you – Oh!”

“What, ma’am?” From the tail of his eye he was aware that Miss Agatha was wringing her hands.

“Archie, they mustn’t beat us!”

“I guess I’ll crowd him.”

“Oh!”

The time was ripe, he thought. “Give me Lucy,” he repeated, doggedly, “or I’ll foul him.”

He had expected to frighten her. He had told himself what fun it would be to hear her give her agitated assent, with the fear of death on her if she refused. It was to be a fine revenge. But Miss Herron only raised a warning forefinger.

“Archie Fraser,” she said, in trembling tones, “if – if you take the dust from those common young women and that vulgar man, I’ll never forgive you.”

“Great heavens, Miss Herron! I – I – ”

“Beat ’em!” she ordered truculently.

He stuck blindly to his point: “Lucy?”

“Beat ’em! Show me,” she declaimed, in trumpet tones, “that the man who wants to marry a Herron has some courage in him. Now!”

The road narrowed just ahead, where it led through a cut in the hill and then down to the bridge. On either side the banks rose eight or ten feet, and very steep, and beyond was a sharp curve. Archie made his horn speak angrily, as once more he came abreast of his rival, favored by the fact that Mayer had struck a strip of newly repaired and soft roadway some yards long. A second later he was leading.

“Pull up!” he bellowed hoarsely, crouching forward over his tiller still lower. He dropped his hand to the emergency brake. The cut was not six rods off. Once more the girls cried out, but this time in shrill fear. Miss Herron remained calm as the Sphinx.

“Honk!” from Mayer, and the click of levers. His machine slid along in a cloud of dust. “You win!”

It was ten minutes before the victors exchanged a single word. They rattled over the long bridge, steered up the streets of Oldport to the place where the Daughters were in session. Then Archie lay back with a sigh.

“You weren’t scared a bit!” he exclaimed, frankly doleful.

The old lady straightened her hat, lightly brushed off the top layer of dust from the front of her dress, then gave the briefest of queer little laughs. “It is one of the traits of my family,” she said, “never to be surprised at anything. And another,” she added, descending majestically from the automobile, “is to make the best of circumstances which appear to be inevitable.”

The boy blinked. “I don’t understand,” he stammered.

Miss Herron touched him on the arm. “I trust, then, that Lucy will express herself to you more clearly. In case – if you should venture to ask her a question.”

And with that the old lady minced her way up the steps of the house to disappear within doors.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Archie, as the light began to break.

TWO SORROWS

Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears,
Because I had not known her gentle face;
Softly I said: “But when across the years
Her smile illumes the darkness of my place,
All grief from my poor heart she will efface.”

Now Love is mine – she walks with me for aye
Down paths of primrose and blue violet;
But on my heart at every close of day
A grief more keen than my old grief is set, —
I weep for those who have not found Love yet!

    Charles Hanson Towne.

LOVE AND MUSHROOMS

By Frances Wilson

Van Mater, out on the coast for the melancholy purpose of witnessing what he conceived to be Corny Graham’s crowning indiscretion – that is to say, his marriage – found himself lingering for the purpose of basking in California’s smiles. The writing instinct, which in the little old town on Manhattan would keep his hand traveling back and forth across the paper for days at a stretch, here languished and drowsed like some heavy-eyed, faintly smiling lotus eater.

He had, to be sure – in a spurt of energy that subsided almost as quickly as it came – begun a song to that sybaritic state, in which it was represented as a lady around whose neck hung

A chain ablaze with diamond days

All on the seasons strung,

which he thought sounded rather well.

Then, unfortunately, the rains set in and the result was a mental washout that carried the last vestige of his poetical idea out into the vasty deep where individual ideas become world-thought, though there was a moment when he had an inspiration – something about keeping Lent, which should typify the rains. But this, too, drifted off like a chip on an ocean, and the song became mere literary junk.

Probably the law of compensation is responsible for the fact that, while the coast’s dazzling summer is flawed by trade winds, its rainy season is tempered by mushrooms. At least, so thought Van Mater. Connoisseur that he was in the joys of living, he confessed to a new sensation when, for the first time, he found himself plodding over the seared, round-shouldered hills, spongy with the supererogatory wetness of a three days’ downpour. The rain had ceased temporarily, but the sky wore a look of ineffable gloom, and the feathery mist trailed along the earth like an uneasy ghost.

Some swarthy, dark-eyed Portuguese children, met on the road the day before, had proffered him their pail of spoil, and as he examined its contents he understood, for the first time, what a mushroom really ought to be. Their dank odor – the odor of germinating things – seemed to come from down in the earth where the gnomes are supposed to foregather; and Van Mater’s thoughts reverted with withering scorn to certain woodeny, tan objects that had been foisted upon him from time to time as mushrooms – always, he now triumphantly recalled, to his own inward amazement.

Why, when and where mushrooms had won their vogue with epicures, he had often dumbly wondered, though he had remained silent lest he expose a too abysmal ignorance. Now he chuckled hilariously. It was his acceptance of those frauds – those mere shells from which the souls had fled – that displayed ignorance! In future he would know better, and he tossed the children a quarter and went his way, in a pleasant anticipation of the manner in which he would carelessly throw off to certain admiring friends:

“But I never eat mushrooms, save they come straight to the table from the soil, picked within an hour of the time when the rain ceases. Those things? Why, my dear fellow, you might as well eat so much gristle. Talk about the bouquet of wine! Why, the bouquet of the mushroom is as delicate and elusive as – as – ” The simile failed to materialize, but he went on eloquently: “You can no more preserve it than you can the dew upon a plum.” All of which sounded so well that he speculated anxiously upon the probability of any of the said fellows divining how very little he knew about the matter, after all. They were so deuced knowing, some of them; but it seemed a pity to let an idea like that, what had actually leaped from his brain full-fledged, go to waste. Decidedly, it was worth the risk.

His mind again reverted to the subject with pleasant anticipation when, the next afternoon, clad in knickers and a Norfolk, with a cap pulled rakishly over his eyes, he trudged over the hills to which the children had directed him. Soon, however, everything was blotted from his consciousness save a section of brown hill, over which his eyes roved eagerly in search of the small, Japanese-looking fungi.

“Mushroom or toadstool?” was his stern inward query, as the pert little parasols became more and more numerous; and he did not realize that he had spoken aloud until a gush of laughter caused him to raise his eyes hastily.