After the meal he wanted to lie down in the grasses and watch the
clouds sail by, but she would have none of it. She haled him away to
the brookside. There she showed him how to wash dishes by filling them
half full of water in which fine gravel has been mixed, and then
whirling the whole rapidly until the tin is rubbed quite clean. Never
was prosaic task more delightful. They knelt side by side on the bank,
under the dense leaves, and dabbled in the water happily. The ferns
were fresh and cool. Once a redbird shot confidently down from above on
half-closed wing, caught sight of these intruders, brought up with a
swish of feathers, and eyed them gravely for some time from a
neighbouring treelet. Apparently he was satisfied with his inspection,
for after a few minutes he paid no further attention to them, but went
about his business quietly. When the dishes had been washed, Mary
stood over Bennington while he packed them in the bundle and strapped
them on the saddle.
"Now," said she at last, "we have nothing more to think of until we go
home."
She was like a child, playing with exhaustless spirits at the most
trivial games. Not for a moment would she listen to anything of a
serious nature. Bennington, with the heavier pertinacity of men when
they have struck a congenial vein, tried to repeat to some extent the
experience of the last afternoon at the rock. Mary laughed his
sentiment to ridicule and his poetics to scorn. Everything he said she
twisted into something funny or ridiculous. He wanted to sit down and
enjoy the calm peace of the little ravine in which they had pitched
their temporary camp, but she made a quiet life miserable to him. At
last in sheer desperation he arose to pursue, whereupon she vanished
lightly into the underbrush. A moment later he heard her clear laugh
mocking him from some elder thickets a hundred yards away. Bennington
pursued with ardour. It was as though a slow-turning ocean liner were
to try to run down a lively little yacht.
Bennington had always considered girls as weak creatures, incapable of
swift motion, and needing assistance whenever the country departed from
the artificial level of macadam. He had also thought himself fairly
active. He revised these ideas. This girl could travel through the thin
brush of the creek bottom two feet to his one, because she ran more
lightly and surely, and her endurance was not a matter for discussion.
The question of second wind did not concern her any more than it does a
child, whose ordinary mode of progression is heartbreaking. Bennington
found that he was engaged in the most delightful play of his life. He
shouted aloud with the fun of it. He had the feeling that he was
grasping at a sunbeam, or a mist-shape that always eluded him.