Various

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.

She was not three steps away, and from the trim leather leggings, above which her kilted skirt swirled, to the thick sweater and Tam that she wore, she seemed to Van Mater the most dashingly correct damsel he had ever seen. The foggy air had brought a delicious color to her cheeks and brightness to her eye which made her seem a very creature of the out-of-doors, and Van Mater stared, charmed and arrested.

“Evidently you don’t recognize me,” she suggested. “I was the third bridesmaid—the one in pink—the homely one, you know.”

She eyed him with a wicked satisfaction while the color rose to his face. He had a disagreeable recollection, since she identified herself so minutely, that he had rather passed that particular bridesmaid over with scant attention, amazing as it now seemed. Then he recovered himself, and with that gallant movement of the arm which seems the perfect expression of deference, removed his soft cap and bowed low, as he said:

“Of course—I remember you perfectly now, Miss—ah.”

He tried, as he took her extended hand, to mumble something unintelligible enough to pass for her name, looking at her with an admiration purposely open in the hope of distracting her attention, but the ruse was of no avail. She only smiled into his face with impish delight.

“You people from the East are so dreadfully disingenuous,” she complained. “Why not confess frankly that, so far as you are concerned, I belong to the ‘no name’ series?”

Her eyes were dancing, and suddenly Van Mater felt as if he had known her always—eons before he had known himself in his present incarnation.

“To think that I shouldn’t have recognized you in the pink gown,” he murmured, with well-feigned surprise. “And to think that I’m no more surprised than I am to have you suddenly bob up here in the wet, after your wanderings of perhaps a hundred lifetimes! I can’t seem to recall the date and planet upon which we last met,” he continued, apologetically, “but I fancy that we picked mushrooms in those old times—that the earth and air were all sopping, just as they are now.”

“You write books—you know you do!”

“Well—it’s a decent enough occupation!”

“Yes,” uncertainly. “Still, writers aren’t usually very sincere; they don’t mean what they say. They spin copy as a spider does a web!”

“Writers not sincere—don’t mean what they say!” he echoed. “Why, my dear young lady, you’re all wrong. They usually mean so much that they can’t begin to say it—and as for sincerity, they’re the sincerest people in the world!”“That is, while it lasts!” he added to himself, but his listener, who had stooped to the ground and was now holding up a particularly large and luscious mushroom, was all unconscious of his reservation.

“Look out! You’re stepping on them!” she cried, excitedly, and for the next ten minutes they wandered about with eyes bent on the earth in fascinated absorption. Van Mater at last straightened up with such a thrill of satisfaction as he had not experienced since boyhood.

“My pail’s full,” he called, seating himself on one of the projecting bowlders. “So come and show me where to pick the beefsteaks.”

She pointed upward. Where the hill humped itself against the sky the blurred figure of a cow was visible. Van Mater tried again.

“You might come and rest,” he coaxed, pointing to another bowlder that cropped out in friendly nearness to his own. With a last lingering scrutiny of the ground about, she came, seating herself beside him. Then, with her chin resting on her hands, she surveyed him with a sort of boyish sang-froid.

“We’re right cozy for acquaintances of a half hour’s standing,” she remarked, at last. “But, then, I’ve heard about you for so long. You see, Corny told Beth, and she has—well—mentioned you to me.”

“Pooh—that’s nothing! I tell you, I’ve known you for centuries. I remember that when I heard of one of those theosophist fellows marrying a girl he’d known for a thousand years or so, I roared. Now I understand it!” (Very solemnly.)

She did not speak, and he began again with increased seriousness:

“Really, I’m in earnest, you know. I’ve the most curious sense of—well, of companionship with you—as if we’d known each other indefinitely, as if——”

She interrupted rather hastily.

“Honestly?”

Tersely—“Upon my soul.”

She rose somewhat hurriedly. “It’s going to rain!”

“Never mind. I have a conundrum. Why is love like a mushroom?”

She wrinkled her brow. “Because it’s easily crushed, I suppose, and you’re never quite sure of it.”

“Wrong. Because it springs up in a night—that is, in an hour,” he answered, impressively.

The drops began to fall softly, swiftly, easily, as if they would never more be stanched.

“Come,” she said, but her cheeks were more richly colored than before.

“Isn’t this heavenly?” he murmured, as they vanished down the road in a blur of rain. She did not answer, but her eyes were shining.