The Wild Olive. Basil King

forest-banked and little frequented. Pastures and fields of ripening grain on the most distant slopes of Vermont gave the nearest token of life. All about him there was solitude and stillness—with the glorious, bracing beauty of the newly risen day.

      Landing with stiffened limbs, he drew up the canoe on a bit of sandy beach, over which sturdy old bushes, elder and birch, battered by the north winds, leaned in friendly, concealing protection. He himself would be able to lie down here, among the tall ferns and the stunted blueberry-scrub, as secluded and secure as ever he had been in prison.

      Being hungry and thirsty, he ate and drank, consulting his map the while and fixing approximately his whereabouts. He looked at his little watch and wound it up, and fingered the pages of the railway guide he found beside it.

      The acts brought up the image of the girl who had furnished him with these useful accessories to flight. For lack of another name he called her the Wild Olive—remembering her yearning, not wholly unlike his own, to be grafted back into the good olive-tree of Organized Society. With some shame he perceived that he had scarcely thought of her through the night. It was astounding to recollect that not twelve hours ago she had kissed him and sent him on his journey. To him the gulf between then and now was so wide and blank that it might have been twelve weeks, or twelve months, or twelve years. It had been the night of the birth of a new creature, of the transmigration of a soul; it had no measurement in time, and threw all that preceded it into the mists of prenatal ages.

      These thoughts passed through his mind as he made a pillow for himself with his white flannel jacket, and twisted the ferns above it into a shelter from the flies. Having done this, he stood still and pondered.

      "Have I really become a new creature?" he asked himself.

      There was much in the outward conditions to encourage the fancy, while his inner consciousness found it easy to be credulous. Nothing was left of Norrie Ford but the mere flesh and bones—the least stable part of personality. Norrie Ford was gone—not dead, but gone—blasted, annihilated stamped out of existence, by the act of Organized Society. In its place the night of transition had called up some one else.

      "But who? … Who am I? … What am I?"

      Above all, a name seemed required to give him entity. It was a repetition of his feeling about the Wild Olive—the girl in the cabin in the woods. Suddenly he remembered that, if he had found a name for her, she had also found one for him—and that it was written on the steamer ticket in his pocket. He drew it out, and read:

      "Herbert Strange."

      He repeated it at first in dull surprise, and then with disapproval. It was not the kind of name he would have chosen. It was odd, noticeable—a name people would remember He would have preferred something commonplace such as might be found for a column or two in any city directory. She had probably got it from a novel—or made it up. Girls did such things. It was a pity, but there was no help for it now. As Herbert Strange he must go on board the steamer, and so he should be called until—

      But he was too tired to fix a date for the resumption of his own name or the taking of another. Flinging himself on his couch of moss and trailing ground-spruce, with the ferns closing over him, and the pines over them, he was soon asleep.

      Part II

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Strange

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