Louise Imogen Guiney

								

ice in the boat for adventurous but uncatalogued uses, and the delays
and mishaps of the voyage, and all the long, insect-thridded night
spent in the boat, the two inventive young heads on the ice which
was their diminishing pillow. There was the tramp across fields from
Auburndale (the Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey Roche, in a
gallant paraphrase, to “loveliest village of the prepossessing”) into
an iris-blue swamp, this after earnest debate whether it is a more
delirious fun to dash in “accoutred as you are,” to the ruination
of shoes and stockings or make the assault barefooted with skirts
kilted away from the blessed unction of black mud. To the everlasting
richness of memory, it was barefooted the two hoydens made their
plunge, and sank, with every sucking step, from sun-warmed mud above
to icy cool below. Wild with the bliss of it they waded furiously, and
the day was of so ineffable a light and texture as to lull them into
forgetfulness of the iris itself for which they had adventured, and it
was left behind, piles of withering beauty, entrancing, like fabrics
and translucent gems. Only that night were they remembered, and she who
was Lou Guiney wrote in magnificent surety:



    “You shall have them in Paradise.”
There was the adventure of the field, in company with her dog, he “so
big and so unsophisticated,” and the imminence of a heifer with an
inherited prejudice against dogs of all degrees.
“She’ll chase him,” said Lou Guiney, from her liberality to varying
events. “We shall have to run for it.”
There was no conceivable need of crossing the field, and equally there
was nothing, to her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric
in wilfully creating a situation you might have to use your wits
to abandon; and so infectious was her unthinking bravery that, as
occasion and she determined, you fought or ran. As it was prophesied,
so it was. The incursion was made, the heifer attacked in good form,
the trio fled in close formation, and the safe side of the fence was
vaultingly attained with no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon
of a memory. All manner of robust childish adventures were natural in
her company. Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to be forded, and
rivers followed until you found they beat your endurance and were going
to make their harbor of the sea and you’d have to leave them to that
blest consummation and go home to supper. She was Atalanta at a race
in the days when a heart, as yet untired, backed her to the limit.
In her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket,
when my gentleman had adroitly abstracted her purse and she almost
ran him down, she celebrates, with some just pride, “my legs (retired
race-horses, but still great at a spurt).” And her fearlessness, the
robust handmaid of reckless action, may have been an unthinking bravado
of youth; equally it may have been the result of a rapid fire of prayer