“Probably—do you hear me?”
He nodded his head; he was beyond speech.
“Take a long breath and dive! Do you get me? Dive! Dive at your own feet! Grab your feet in your hands and roll under water in a bunch! Roll toward the beach!”'
It was a desperate manouvre, especially for a man who had already been under water so much that morning. But the situation was critical and called for the taking of big chances. It would either succeed—or fail. And death was no surer if it failed than if he waited. Probably Arboreal ceased to think; he yielded up his reasoning powers to the noble and courageous woman on the sand; he dived and grabbed his feet and rolled.
“Again! Again!” she cried. “Another long breath and roll again!”
Her bosom heaved, as if she were actually breathing for him. To Probably Arboreal, now all but drowned, and almost impervious to feeling, it also seemed as if he were breathing with her lungs; and yet he hardly dared to dive and roll again. He struggled in the water and stared at her stupidly.
She sent her unusual and electric personality thrilling into him across the intervening distance; she held him with her eyes, and filled him with her spirit.
“Roll!” she commanded. “Probably! Roll!”
And under the lash of her courage, he rolled again. Three more times he rolled … and then … unconscious, but still breathing, he was in her arms.
As he reached the land half a million oysters sank into the sea in the silence of defeat and despair, while from the beaches rose a mighty shout.
The sun, as if it gestured, flung the mists from its face, and beamed benignly.
“Back! Back! Give him air!” cried Parrot Feathers, as she addressed herself to the task of removing the oyster from his foot.
The giant beast was dying, and its jaws were locked in the rigour of its suffering. There was no way to remove it gently. Parrot Feathers laid her unconscious hero's foot upon one rock, and broke the oyster loose with another.
Incidentally she smashed Probably Arboreal's toe.
He sat up in pained surprise. Unthinkingly, as you or I would put a hurt finger into our mouths, he put his crushed toe into his mouth. At that period of man's history the trick was not difficult. And then——
A beatific smile spread over his face!
Man had tasted the oyster!
In half an hour, mankind was plunging into the waves searching for oysters. The oyster's doom was sealed. His monstrous pretension that he belonged in the van of evolutionary progress was killed forever. He had been tasted, and found food. He would never again battle for supremacy. Meekly he yielded to his fate. He is food to this day.
Parrot Feathers and Probably Arboreal were married after breakfast. On the toes of their first child were ten cunning, diminutive oyster shells. Mankind, up to that time, had had sharp toenails like the claws of birds. But the flat, shell-like toenails, the symbols of man's triumph over, and trampling down of, the oyster were inherited from the children of this happy couple.
They persist to this day.
“IF WE COULD ONLY SEE”
I
Lunch finished, Mr. Ferdinand Wimple, the poet, sullenly removed his coat and sulkily carried the dishes to the kitchen sink. He swore in a melodious murmur, as a cat purrs, as he turned the hot water on to the plates, and he splashed profanely with a wet dishcloth.
“I'm going to do the dishes to-day, Ferd,” announced his wife, pleasantly enough. She was a not unpleasant-looking woman; she gave the impression that she might, indeed, be a distinctly pleasant-looking woman, if she could avoid seeming hurried. She would have been a pretty woman, in fact, if she had been able to give the time to it.
When she said that she would do the dishes herself, Mr. Wimple immediately let the dishcloth drop without another word, profane or otherwise, and began to dry his hands, preparatory to putting on his coat again. But she continued:
“I want you to do the twins' wash.”
“What?” cried Mr. Wimple, outraged. He ran one of his plump hands through his thick tawny hair and stared at his wife with latent hatred in his brown eyes … those eyes of which so many women had remarked: “Aren't Mr. Wimple's eyes wonderful; just simply wonderful! So magnetic, if you get what I mean!” Mr. Wimple's head, by many of his female admirers, was spoken of as “leonine.” His detractors—for who has them not?—dwelt rather upon the physical reminder of Mr.'Wimple, which was more suggestive of the ox.
“I said I wanted you to do the twins' wash for me,” repeated Mrs. Wimple, awed neither by the lion's visage nor the bovine torso. Mrs. Wimple's own hair was red; and in a quietly red-haired sort of way she looked as if she expected her words to be heeded.
“H——!” said the poet, in a round baritone which enriched the ear as if a harpist had plucked the lovely string of G. “H——!” But there was more music than resolution in the sound. It floated somewhat tentatively upon the air. Mr. Wimple was not in revolt. He was wondering if he had the courage to revolt.
Mrs. Wimple lifted the cover of the laundry tub, which stood beside the sink, threw in the babies' “things,” turned on the hot water, and said:
“Better shave some laundry soap and throw it in, Ferd.”
“Heavens!” declared Mr. Wimple. “To expect a man of my temperament to do that!” But still he did not say that he would not do it.
“Someone has to do it,” contributed his wife.
“I never kicked on the dishes, Nell,” said Mr. Wimple. “But this, this is too much!”
“I have been doing it for ten days, ever since the maid left. I'm feeling rotten to-day, and you can take a turn at it, Ferd. My back hurts.” Still Mrs. Wimple was not unpleasant; but she was obviously determined.
“Your back!” sang Mr. Wimple, the minstrel, and shook his mane. “Your back hurts you! My soul hurts me! How could I go direct from that—that damnable occupation—that most repulsive of domestic occupations—that bourgeois occupation—to Mrs. Watson's tea this afternoon and deliver my message?”
A shimmer of heat (perhaps from her hair) suddenly dried up whatever dew of pleasantness remained in Mrs. Wimple's manner. “They're just as much your twins as they are mine,” she began … but just then one of them cried.
A fraction of a second later the other one cried.
Mrs. Wimple hurried from the kitchen and reached the living room in time to prevent mayhem. The twins, aged one year, were painfully entangled with one another on the floor. The twin Ronald had conceived the idea that perhaps the twin Dugald's thumb was edible, and was testing five or six of his newly acquired teeth upon it. Childe Dugald had been inspired by his daemon with the notion that one of Childe Ronald's ears might be detachable, and was endeavouring to detach it. The situation was but too evidently distressing to both of them, but neither seemed capable of the mental initiative necessary to end it. Even when little Ronald opened his mouth to scream, little Dugald did not remove the thumb.
Mrs. Wimple unscrambled them, wiped their noses, gave them rattles, rubber dolls, and goats to wreak themselves upon, and returned to the kitchen thinking (for she did not lack her humorous gleams) that the situation in the living