17. Jug's Bottom
Never, felt Calvin Parker, had he painted with such power; certainly never with more speed. All afternoon he had been hard at it, working in an ecstasy of eagerness and strength. Now, In the good-night beams of the sun, he placed his easel where the hght might reach it best and backed off to study the new picture with emotional, almost worshipful, gaze.
For the sake of perspective, he had pushed the deal table to one side with Its litter of color tubes, brushes and bottles of oil. Also upon Its cover of checked oilcloth stood the brown, gallon jug of his morning's compromise.
His gratitude on finding It full and the mountain girl as good as her word had rehabilitated his pledge to himself of temperance. Only through his nostrils had he drunk of It along the way, a scant two fingers of It had he poured to his first toast of the afternoon.
"For medicinal purposes only!"
The mild, crushed-flower aroma of the liquid, its clear-as-crystal color. Its thinness, as of the pure spring water It resembled, made Vernaluska's warning seem a boast. But with the sear of unripened liquor through his mouth and throat he knew that the Metcalf distillation was not weak.
"And Old Tom disgusts bad liquor," he made comment aloud to Boomer and his mate who, according to custom, had dropped in to lunch. "Up to date, this popskull is the only thing I've met in the Blue Ridge that's short on time - time to get mellow. Yet maybe it's only the first drink that burns." He turned to the jug. "Wonder how many of those temperance two-fingers are in you?"
Dipping the handle of a paint brush into its small neck, he tested its wet capacity, indicating the height thereof with a circle upon the brown outside.
His after-luncheon, clock-timed cultivation of the enemy whom he had sworn to make his friend somehow brought him loneliness, rather than companionship.
Why had he traded in that promise to give up what he had set himself to achieve - the location of the Metcalf still? With a little dickering, he might have saved himself that diversion and also the whisky. He had sold out too cheap. A single gallon was no price at all for his word of honor to stay on his side of Roaring Fork until the girl of the hills gave her permission that he cross.
He wished he could see her at once. If she had not been inclined to believe in him, to like him, despite her manner, why had she acted as she had done?
There had been amusement behind her return promise that she would seek him out; was this at his expense ? Would she ever seek him ?
The eyes of Sylvia's photograph peered mildly down from the mantel through the smoke, as if asking why he should feel alone, with her in his memory. A surge of loyalty caused him to pour a draft, generous as his feeling of apology, and throw it off at a gulp.
"So small, so vaguely sweet, so frail - yet the great reward of victory," he toasted her.
But the response of a photograph was necessarily limited. Parker's sense of loneliness increased when the Boomers, having feasted to repletion on the guests' share of his lunch, began long absences of carrying tidbits to the kiddies in the armored pine.
For the first time he tried to catch them. He wanted to pet them, to show them his affection. Each time he lunged after them, however, they barked squeakily, as with terror, and eluded his open hands. Finally they scampered over the sill, not to reappear.
"Why does Vernaluska - you - everybody run away from me?"
From the checkered oilcloth, the mouth of the jug grinned in derisive reproach.
"That's so; there's you left, friend jug. Beg your pardon." He bov/ed humbly and allowed himself to sip from its good cheer.
Before many more such sips inspiration came, took charge of a lagging afternoon. An attractive idea came to him, grew in appeal, finally controlled both hands and mind.
Why need he ever be alone, Calvin Parker, who was said by the critics to possess the ability to create personalities from tubes, brushes, oils? This everfleeing mountain girl - he would catch her on canvas and make her stay. From first glimpse he had intended to paint her, to attempt combining that marvelous softness and brilliancy of her hair.
What was it which the look of her, the spirit of her, the name of her had suggested all along?
In her was combined delicacy with force, hope built on fear, life that was young, alluring, colorful - hfe that sprang from what? Why was she like the rhododendron flower that lifted its face straight to the sun from a bank of the winter's dead leaves?
Ah, he had It at last!
She was Spring. That was why she was so elusive, yet so strong. That was why her smiles suggested tears shed. Her very life meant past death. She was Spring. To him she was not Vernaluska, not "Verney," but V erne.
His rapid sketch was reminiscent of her unexpected appearance that morning from the roadside thicket - reminiscent, yet far from literal. No lavender gingham clothed her form, no country shoes her feet. As the painter stood now at eventide, surveying his work, a frenzy of gratitude possessed him for the license allowed to art.
From a background of brush, with only here and there a sprouting thing to suggest the season, t'le girl fleeted toward him on bare feet, her dazzling body revealed through a fluttering drapery of young green, her hands outstretched, eyes side-glancing with a look of anxiety lest she be outsped, lips curved with a tremulous, promising smile. Like a veil of spun copper from about and above her floated backward her hair. Boldly beneath, Parker had painted his title :
SPRING IS HERE
"And here to stay, you darling, you beauty; here to stay!" he exulted, addressing her aloud, adoring her closer and closer in the waning glow from the west door. "It's time to light the night-lIghts, but you cannot run away. It's time for supper - tonight you'll have to watch me while I eat. You cannot mock me any more, you cannot deny me. For you're Spring-time, and you can't help being as sweet to me as to any other man."
A moment he spared from her In which to be pleased with himself. He lurched about the shack, found and lit the candles. Steadying himself against the mantel-shelf, he surprised more than mild interest in Sylvia's flower eyes. The approval which she would have felt could she have watched him this afternoon beamed on him from the steel print. After she had toasted him, he toasted her. Then, having made his peace with her, he drank once more to Verne. Pulling his camp-stool close and seating himself, that he might look up under the lashes of her timorous eyes, he sipped a wee drop while he talked with her.
He had her at last, tricky jade, he told her. He would not be lonely any more. Let the father and mother shadow-tails desert him for their squirrelettes In the pine; he need not care. She could not leave him night or day. The white fire from her father's jug had thrown a flashlight on her, had revealed her to him as she was. Her occasional Intolerance was her protest against the prick of thorns In the brush from which she came, the hurt of stones along her life-path. Now that he understood her, now that he had caught and could hold the spirit of her, she would learn to like to stay.
"You are here, you are mine - youth, power, sentience," he whispered to her and to himself, tears stumbling down his exalted face, even as the liquor drizzled to the floor from the glass In his shaking hand. "Do you mind, Verne? Sweet, I hope you do not mind."
Next moment, remembrance mixed his metaphorical intensity. He chuckled in reassurance, tipped the glass to his lips, let the overflow of his hurry mix with the salt-drops on his chin.
Had she not been predisposed toward him from first sight? If not, why the exertion to drag him from the mud, to wipe his face, dig out his ears? Why that memorable smile at the post-ofiice, the visit to his cabin, the silent protectorate of him against her father's possible outbreak, her culmlnative presentation of the jug? She was a woman; he must make allowances for that; a woman with probably more than the average woman's contradictory ways. All mere man could do was to fasten his eyes on fact. And each fact, despite her words, her every act, had favored him.
Supper seemed a prosaic thing by contrast with the successive toasts he drank to Verne and himself, so he put it off. Again curiosity keen as anxiety cause him to dip the paint-brush handle into the mouth of the "bust-head" jug. At first he felt somewhat disconcerted to note that it was almost halfempty. Next moment he decided that he might as well drink an even half of the "bumbllngs" before he ate - let them sting him Into a first-class appetite if they could! Another circle of measurement he painted around the brown jug.
Gyrating once toward Sylvia, he anticipated a possible reproach. It was a long, long way to the bottom of the jug, he told her, when a man could paint under its influence as he had done that p.m. And he wanted her clearly to understand that it was from no Interest in the concrete of his subject that he had been inspired to such results. Vernaluska Metcalf was a beautiful girl, truly, and a girl with lure, doubtless, for certain men of the wild; but it was the spirit behind her personality that he had put upon canvas, a conception which her looks merely aided to express.
"'Y'understand, dear? But of course you do!" he apostrophized as glibly as his thickened lips would permit. "To v/omen I am all artist; to you only, the one woman, am I man. We Parkers love well and once."
To entertain his receptive audience became his concern. For them he recited "The Rubric of Rum," a composition of his own, relic of college days when people laughed at the tendency which later they deplored. In this metered effort were consigned to verse the various excuses offered by various mortals for their libations. They drank to warm up in cold v/eather, they drank to cool down In hot. Good fortune deserved a celebration, bad luck a beaker to console. At birth was uncorked sparkling wine for the christening, at death sustaining brandy for the wake. Friendship tipped the lovingcup, enmity the poison-draft of hate. It mattered not, through the vicissitudes of life - Thirst supplied his own glib excuse.
Parker, declaiming such fragments of his literary achievement as came to mind, gesticulated and bowed with animation, if not dramatic effect, first to one, then the other of his audience. His eyes were fervid; his grin sardonic. By way of realism, he tossed off a drink with each metered citation.
What if he did get a bit tipsy reciting his "Rubric of Rum," he once lapsed into prose to argue? Thirst had inspired it - let Thirst then pay the piper I
The brilliance with which his intemperance always had been associated called for more lights. In his larder he found an unopened candle-box. Dripping grease for sockets in half a dozen available places, he proceeded worthily to illuminate the occasion. Although the effect in the rough-boarded shack was not exactly garish, he was pleased. Whole-heartedly, he drank to the general good-cheer.
"Electric-lighted N'York's got nothing on Fallaway - while the candles last. Here's to Spring, who's brought us life!"
Before each of his fair, lip-tight guests he held a potion; then, in response to their gentle suggestions, obliged by the consumption thereof himself. Tacking against the headwind of intoxication, he introduced and explained one to the other.
Who had sent him to the Blue Ridge for his own best good, in quest of the "grip" which he had got? His valley lily of the conservatory, 'his Sylvia.
Who had angered him with her criticism? Who but the rhododendron girl. Who had helped him with her ridicule, had appealed with her very aloofness, had diverted his search for the regional illicit brew, then had set at his feet the fiery draft for devils or gods? None but Vernaluska, fitly named for a mountain in her mystery and uncompromising power, yet wafted over by a spirit as delicious, as balmy, as virile as the winds of early May.
"And you'll stay, Verne; you'll stay, won't you, Verne?" he cried in a recurrence of maudlin entreaty.
Emotion wobbled his knees. He lurched sidewise into a chair beside the table, stretched botE arms across its checkered oilcloth toward the radiant being stepping so daintily, fearsomely, shyly toward him.
"You've brought me life - you'll not take it away?" he sobbed. "You'll stay with me and like me and let me like you? Couldn't you promise me never, never to go?"
His face fell into his clutching hands. The shoulders built for such strength shuddered weakly, then held still. Only a waggle of the dark, attractive head resented a sudden crash that sounded from the puncheon floor.
The gallon container had been knocked over on its side, had rolled to the edge of the table and over. But not a drop of liquid wasted from its derisive little m.outh.
As It chanced, Calvin Parker had reached the bottom of his jug.
Screaming pain awakened his other mind. Ordered by that greater voice, so often raised In the cause of drunkards, his body staggered up; the physical of his eyes stared about him, crazed from suffering. The candles on the table had burned to stubs; one sleeve of his coat was smoldering over seared flesh.
Ordered again, he lunged across the room to the water-pail, uttered a gasping cry as he sizzled his arm Into It, turned and searched the gloom In a halfconscious fear lest Verne also be endangered by flame.
He located her, peering at him from the drawing stand, shy, sweet, reassuring. He started toward her, meaning to clutch one of the outstretched hands and lay it upon his wound in the conviction that such strong, long fingers must have curative power. But at a hostile sound he stopped and glanced behind.
The back door had blown open; wind was leveling the flame of such candles as still stood. Something had rushed in beside the wind - something black, darting, winged. It batted the walls, struck the puncheon of the floor, rose in swift, astonishing spirals.
It was not Parker's subconsciousness that apprehended the nature of the disturbance which was shaking him with fear more hideous than the pain of his arm. The small, awakening fraction of his conscious mind, rather, bade him leap after it in urgent terror - terror not so much for himself as for Verne, who had come to stay.
The thing which had entered was an enemy airplane, the purpose of the demon at the controls to seize and bear away his spirit of Spring. Deviously, to confuse him, it was darting hither and yon, but its objective could not be in doubt. So; he would meet artifice with superior artifice !
Don Quixote had fought windmills - a small issue compared with the tilt in prospect. One aviator would wish he never had quit his airdrome. With a bestial snarl of challenge, Parker crouched low near the canvas. Just let this winged intruder make the attempt - let him swoop nearer if he dared! Crushed fuselage, twisted tail and broken wings - into what a wreck would the machine be twisted! The shock-absorber or stabilizer was not built that could withstand that superman, Cal Parker, under threat of the unspeakable deprivation.
The thing approached, evidently banking for an easy turn. The moment for counter-attack was about to come - had come.
With all the power of his vitriol-fed limbs, Parker shot into the air. He reached, he clutched the outspread wings of the enemy plane. He brought it down. With giant-strong fingers, he crushed and tore it as together they fell. Only when sure that it would never move again, did he collapse, in a deathlike sprawl, upon the floor.