The Rejoicing Shout of Coming Summer
Still are restless wings now upon the guarded nest. Some flash along the turned furrow, circle near the eaves, dip sharply to the ripple. Willow fronds are startled by the glinting blue of the kingfisher, scarlet of the tanager. Once more the chimneys of old houses know the flickering swallow. The oriole has come to the orchard again, the wren to the grape arbor. Tiny rabbits, beholding for the first time what white clover can be, twitch their noses in content. Tired children, returning from rifled woodlands with too many posies, drop them in the path, like flower girls intrusted to strew the way of summer. It is more comfortable not to grant flowers the capacity for pain, but we demand, nevertheless, that they enjoy giving pleasure to us, so doubtless they areglad to be of service even in this thwarted fashion. Yet May’s store is manifold; her waiting buds can replace the scattered ones.
The face of Nature wears in the shining month a beauty something less than mature, but more than the mischief and troubling intensity of April. The wonder of the hour—the adieu of spring and the rejoicing shout of coming summer—dwells there, a subdued, impassioned note. The crest of the year’s youth merges like all crests into the wave beyond, renewed forever like the waves. To man alone has been given the difficult task of keeping on without a spring. That singular adversity is ours in common with inanimate things: May rose and lilac come back each year to the forsaken house, but to the house May brings no change. About it a world of snow becomes a world of blossoms, as for us, and the sun creates. But the house needs aid of human hands, man of earth’s quickened beauty in luminous May.
Chapter VI
B
Bythe manifold hayfields only, were her wild-rose token banished, a traveler returning from another land to our June, not knowing the time of year, might name the month. In days just before hay harvest the glistening dance of meadow grasses is most splendid, their soft obedience to the winds is readiest. Deep rose plumes of sorrel, the wine-colored red-top, smoky heads of timothy, are forever aripple, and, though overstrewn with flowers, they reveal when bent beneath the step of the southwest breeze a thousand lowlier flowers near theroots. Here the “wild morning-glory,” the tiny fields convolvulus, hides perilously in the mowing; white clover and yellow five-finger are spread; the grassflower holds up its single jewel. The swaying stems are trellises to many a wandering vine; there are fairy arbors where a tired elf might sleep guarded from the sun as well as in a jungle. Here, too, the wild strawberries are ripening, not breathing yet the bouquet of July; but the white wild strawberry, lover of the shades, has already reached its pallid ripeness. Far beneath the moving surface of the grass ocean lies a dim and mysterious world, lined with track and countertrack of the beetle, caverns of the mole, and the unremaining castle of the ant. Here the sleek woodchuck passes imperceptibly, the ingenuous cottontail finds his brief paradise; small moths fold their wings and sleep.
Above are light, motion, and the clearest, strongest colors of the year, untarnished by hot suns, unmixed with the later browns. The dark-eyed yellow daisy, sun worshiper, rises amid the fresh brilliance of that other starry-petaled weed which only sheep will eat. Celestial-blue chicorywanders in from the roadside and will not thereafter be denied. Yarrow with its balsam fragrance and fernlike leaf, the first delicate wild carrot asway, goldfinch yellow of the moth mullein, cloverheads of the Tyrian dye, sunny spray of mustard, lie scattered on the crests of hayfield waves.
In the lowgrounds, on bowldered hillsides, far in the woods, wherever the mowing machine will grant it a summer, spreads the exquisite wild rose, dowered like other flowers of June—the water lily, the wild-grape blossom, the syringa—with a perfume as wistfully sweet as the form and hue of its chalice. That fragrance, unearthly, never fails to bring a catch of the breath, a start of memory, when in whatever place it is encountered again. You seldom find a wild rose withered; they cast their petals down without a struggle, and a throng of ardent pink buds are waiting on the bush. So it is with the water lily—when the hour strikes she draws her green cloak once more about her and retires from the sun.
The meadow rue has shaken out veil upon floating veil in the woodlands. The shaded knolls are sprinkled lavender withwild geraniums, willing to be background for the May windflower or the buttercups of June. Among the rocks, twinkling red and yellow in the sandy, sunny places, the columbine swings her cups of honey impartially for glittering humming bird and blunt-nosed, serious bee. Columbines are delicious—could anyone regard them sensibly, and not as something animate and almost winged. The claret-colored milkweed (a natural paradox) holds flowing nectar, too, but there is a paler milkweed, so softly tinted of pink, yellow, and white as to be no color at all, whereto the little yellow butterflies drift to sip at dusk. The blossomed elder rests like white fog in the hollows, scenting all the country ways and promising elder-blossom wine, the dryad’s draught. In moist and dark retreats—under hemlocks and at the doors of caves—the ghost lamp is lighted. In the brightest spot it can find the small blackberry lily paints against the ledge its speckled orange star.
It is the time of perfect ferns, uncurled quickly from the brown balls, and making our Northern woods tropical with the sumptuous brake and temperate imitationsof the tree fern. They fill the glades and scale the cliffs. They mingle enchantingly along creeks and at the edge of the pond with the regal hosts of the blue flag—the lavishly sown iris of the meadows. They are matted close in the swamps, plumy on the hilltops. From mosses on old logs spring ferns almost as faery as the fronds of the moss itself.
The Swooping Bat Darts Noiselessly
Into the whispering twilight of June come many creatures to play strange games and sing such songs as even the many-stringed orchestra of the sunlit hayfield does not know. The swooping bat darts from thick-hung woodbine and noiselessly crosses the garden, brushes the hollyhocks, and speeds toward the moon. Moths, white and pallid green, wander like spirits among the peonies. Sometimes the humming bird shakes the trumpet vine in the dark, queerly restless, though he is Apollo’s acolyte. The fireflies are lambently awing. The cricket’s pleading, interrupted song is half silenced by the steady, hot throb of the locust’s. The tree toad’s eerie note comes faint and sweet, but from what cranny of the bark he only knows. The mother bird, guardian even in sleep,speaks drowsily to her children. From the brooding timber the owl sends his call of despair across acres of friendly fields placid in the dew. June nights are wakeful. Then enchantment deepens, for there comes no pause in darkness for the joy of earth.
Chapter VII
F
Fromvalley after valley dies away the drowsy croon of the mowing machine, leaving to the grasshoppers the fragrant drying hay. Now comes July in many hues of yellow, spreading her gold beside dark, backwaters and along the sun-warmed stubble, whose various, singing life is loudest through these shimmering afternoons. Tawny beauties are abroad in woodways and sea marshes. Where the hot air shines and quivers over shallow pools yellow water lilies float sleepily beneathcurved canopies, while the lucent pallors of the white water lily one by one are dimmed. Moving serenely toward its climax, the season drinks the sun and takes the color of its slanting light.
The flame lily lifts a burnt-orange cup straight toward the sky. The yellow meadow lily bends down over the damp mold it seeks. But both love deep woods, and, blazing suddenly above a fern bed, the rich flowers startle, like a butterfly of the Andes adrift in Canadian forests. They are princesses of the tropics, incongruously banished to Northern swamps, but scornfully at ease. The false Solomon’s-seal in proud assemblies wears with an oddly holiday air its freckled coral beads, always a lure to the errant cow; and jack-in-the-pulpit, having been invested with some churchly rank which demands the red robe, is ready to cast off his cassock of lustrous striped green for one of scarlet. The pendent-flowered jewelweed, plant with temperament and therefore called, too, touch-me-not, droops its dew-lined leaves along the traveled lanes, for it is making ready small surprise packages of seed that snap ferociously openat a touch; and thus intriguing every passer-by into sowing its crop, it earns the name unfairly borne by the innocent yellow toadflax—snapdragon, which snaps only at bumblebees.
Gayly in possession of the fields, black-eyed Susan, known to the farmer as “that confounded yellow bull’s-eye,” is holding her own, prepared to resist to the utmost the onslaught of the goldenrod, which presumes to unfurl in summer the banners of fall. The clear yellow evening primrose, scion of one of our very best old English families, associates democratically with a peasant mullein stalk, canary-flecked, since they both fancy sun and sand. Magnificent sometimes upon the sand banks rises a clump of that copper-in-the-sunshine flower, the butterfly weed, soon to become as fugitive as our fair, lost trailing arbutus, the cardinal, and the fringed gentian, if its lovers do not woo it less selfishly. All beauty refuses captivity. In upland meadows the orange hawkweed is afoot, waving its delirious-colored “paint brush” wantonly amid the pasture grass in the light hours, but folding it at sunset, no sipper of the dews. Brooksunflowers have come to the edge of the stream, but not to look into the waters; their sunward-gazing petals are delicately scented, surpassing their sisters of the fenced garden. The half-tamed tiger lily, haunter of deserted dooryards and faithful even to abandoned mountain farms long since given over to the wildcat and the owl, wanderer by dusty roadsides, offers each morning new buds, and by twilight they have bloomed and withered. Like the May rose, this is an elegiac flower, clinging to lost gardens when all the rest have vanished, though patches of tansy, herb of witchlore, will show pungent golden buttons for long years untended, let the forgotten gardener but plant it once. How many a little cabin, built in eagerness and hope, is remembered at last only by the tiger lily, May rose, and chimney swift! Yellow sweet clover, catching a roothold anywhere, declaring the gravel bed a garden, makes it happiness to breathe the entranced air. The yellow butterflies, like leaves of autumn, tremble and flurry where the sun-steeped field meets the sweet dark wood. Among the rocks gleam ebony seeds of the blackberry lily, whosestar of orange and umber is about to set.
Who knows, besides the birds, that embroidered on the moss new scarlet partridge berries are ripe, hung from the vagrant vine of pale-veined leaf that does not fear the snow? Only a month ago in this fairy greenery lay the furry white partridge blossom, almost invisible, but with a fragrance like that of just-opened water lilies, and now the green fruit colors to the Christmas hue. There are no flowers like these. The wood fairies wear them with their gowns of spangled cobweb trimmed with moonlight.
Bough apples, with a sweetness like that of flowers distilled by the intense sun, show the first brown seeds. From the high-piled loads of hay journeying slowly to the mow fall the dried buttercups and daisies that danced in the mowing grass. Ceaseless are locusts; heavy is the air above the garden, where phlox and strawberry shrub tinge it Persian-sweet. Clustered blueberries are drooped upon the mountains, and in the swamps, sometimes over quicksands, shows the darkling sheen of the high-bush huckleberry. The odor ofthe balsam fir is drawn out and spread far by the heat. Now the pursued brambles become the blackberry patch. The waste lands shine yellow with the blooms of the marching hardhack. It is the triumph of the sun, and his priest, the white day lily of the cloistral leaf, worships in fragrance.
Chapter VIII
T
Thewild cherries are no longer garnet; they have darkened to their harvest and hang in somber ripeness from the twig. Drowsy lie the grain fields and slowly purpling vineyards. The robin in the apple orchard is hardly to be seen among the red-fruited boughs from which the first Astrakhans are dropping. Days of uncertain suns and exultant growing are over. A languorous pause has come to the year. Even the crows, flapping away across the windy blue, caw in a sleepy fashion, not yet hoarse with anxiety because the huskers are hurrying the cornto cover with that penurious vigilance which a crow finds so objectionable. The rabbits, scampering and wary in the new clover time, sit out in the hot sun a good deal now, like convalescent patients; they will keep this up until the faint noons of November, storing the warmth that lets them sleep, come winter, through many a hunting party overhead. The woodpecker knocks with less ferocity. Stately on his favorite dead branch at the lake’s edge the blue-armored kingfisher sits to watch the ripple. Only the grasshopper persists with tragical intensity in his futile rehearsal for the role of humming bird. A satirical Italian compares man to the grasshopper, but no man is capable of such devotion to baffled aspirations. Practice in grace makes him more and more imperfect. Young wood duck, with portentous dignity, follow their mother down the topaz creek in single file, an attentive field class, observing the demented lucky bugs, the red-lined lily pads of the coves, the turtles sound asleep on the warm stones. For the wood’s feathered children this is no month of play and slumber; it will soon be autumn, and they must attempt the long flight.
The aspect of the buckwheat fields is August’s signet. From their goldenrod borders reaches a world of happy whiteness, against sky the color of the pickerelweed flower, waving softly, shadowed only by the plumy clouds. The corn is out in topgallant, and if you look from a mountain path into the planted valley, the écru tassels have hidden the lustrous ribbon leaves. Cornfields are never silent. Always there is a low swish, like that of little summer waves on a lake shore.
Lavender and purple thistles, brimmed with nectar, are besought by imperious bees and the great blue-black butterfly, but already their pale-lit ships drift, unreturning, under sealed orders, to some far harbor in the port of spring. More silvery still, the milkweed is adrift. Fleets of white butterflies rise and fall with the sunset breeze, and slow, twilight moths come from under the brakes at the hour of dew. White-flowered, the clematis and wild cucumber, the creamy honeysuckle of the amorous fragrance, cover fence rail and stone wall, give petals to the barren underbrush, twine fearlessly around barbed wire, and festoon deserted barns. Healing herbsof long ago that once were hung every fall from attic rafters—the “wild isep,” or mountain mint, and the gray-blooming boneset—stand profuse but unregarded in the lowgrounds. We buy our magic potions now. Once they were brewed above the back log, as occasion came. In ferny shadows glimmers the ivory Indian pipe. The wild carrot, with delicate insistence, takes the field.
Ironweed of royal purple, maroon-shot, mingles in illogical harmony with the blue vervain and magenta trumpet-weeds. The note makers name over for us a score of flowers that Shakespeare meant by “long purples”; but surely he foresaw our Northern swamps in August, on fire with those exuberant, torchlike weeds that rise tall above the bogs and earn, by their arresting splendor against a crimson sky, the need of immortality in song. They bloom before the katydids begin and survive the first frost. A few violets—a seed crop, not intended for men’s gaze, and hidden cautiously beneath the leaves, are timidly aflower. They will not go unwed, but would crave to die obscure.
The last of the new-tasting bough appleslie in the orchard grass. The later apple trees, like the sunning rabbit and the thought-worn crow, wait for the harvest moon. Already the unresting twigs are preparing their winter mail of cork and gum, which will not be unfastened by the fiercest assaults of the sleet. Short-stemmed flowers have arisen to clothe the sharp wheat stubble. Along the mountain road grow vagabond peach trees, to whose fruit cling eager blue wasps, whose aromatic gum traps many a climbing robber. Other wanderers from the tended orchard—cruelly sour plums and rouge-cheeked pears—growing among the cornel bushes, drop down for the field mouse and woodchuck their harvest of the wilderness. Some of them, companioned by the faithful phlox and sunflower, once grew in dooryards now desolate. The surpassing rose mallow like sunrise lights the marshes.
It is not a month of growth. Fruit and grain are only expanding—weeks ago the marvel of formation was complete. It is the time of warm, untroubled slumber that ends with the reveille of frost.
Chapter IX
W
Wherethe slow creek is putting out to sea, freighted with seed and wan leaf, cardinal-flowers watch the waters reddened by their image. Old gold and ocher, the ferns beneath move listlessly up and down with the ripple. As spring walks first along the stream, autumn, too, comes early to the waterside, to kindle swamp maples and give the alder colors of onyx. The lustrous indigo of the silky cornel hangs there in profusion. Scented white balls of the river bush have lost their golden haloes, and even the red-grounded purpleof the ironweed is turning umber. The fruited sweetbrier shows rust. Fall’s ancient tapestry, the browns of decay worked over with carmine, olive, maroon, and buff, is being hung, but where the blue lobelia is clustered in the lowground summer pauses. A parting sun catches the clear yellow of curtsying, transfigured birch leaves, and looks back, waiting, to give September’s landscape a hesitant farewell. It seems early to go. Pickerelweed is azure still. Among the green bogs the fragrant lady’s-tresses wear the white timidity of April, and the three petals of the enameled arrowhead flower are dusty with gold. But seeds wrapped up in brown are scattering. Remembrance yields to prophecy.
The harvesters of grain and grass have gone, and the tinted stubble is full of crickets and monotonous cicadas. Now the crumbling furrow is folded back behind the plow and corn knives are swinging close to the solemn pumpkins, for in cornfield, vineyard, and orchard and in the squirrel’s domain the last harvests of all are hastening to ripeness as the sunset chill gives warning of a disaster foretoldsince August by the katydid. The honey-colored pippins, cracked and mellow in the brooding heat, encounter the windfalls of October’s trees—deepening red, soft yellow, and polished green. Great, sheltering leaves are dropping from the burdened vine. Every breath tells of fruits, drying herbs, and the late flowers that in deserted gardens are most pungent in September—marigolds, tansy, and the cinnamon pink. Pennyroyal and mint are betrayed. Thorn apples, not near ripened, are knocked from the twig by south-bound birds.
Still, among wine-colored and vermilion foliage, the acorn is green, though flushed wintergreen berry and red-gemmed partridge vine proclaim autumn along the forest floor. The auburn splendors are upon the sumac and the burning-bush of old-fashioned dooryards, where, too, the smoke tree holds its haze of seeds. Sometimes a gentian stands erect among dead grasses—a slim señora with a fringed mantilla swirled close about her shoulders in the chilly dusk. The closed gentian keeps its darkly impenetrable blue beside the pink-tipped companion stalks of thesnake’s-head. Fair are the sheathed berries of the prickly ash—but daggers to the taste. Often they grow among wild cherries, which, juiceless now, are sweet as dried fruits from Persia. And there are the black nannyberries with their watermelon flavor, and the first spicy wild grapes.
Immortelles are bleached paper white on sandy hills. The nightshade holds berries of three colors, passing from brilliant green to clouded amber and deep crimson lake, and still upon it hangs the mysterious blue blossom, shunned. Dogwood boughs are gorgeous as a sunset, and the thick scarlet clusters droop from the mountain ash. The last humming birds haunt tanned honeysuckles. Languid, but clinging yet to the sun world, the yellow lily dies on weedy streams. If the all-conquering goldenrod hangs the way for summer’s passing with the color of regret, it has made every meadow El Dorado with its plumes, sprays, clumps, and spears. Spray upon delicate spray, the fairy lavender aster has taken possession of the roadsides and fields, and before it, far into the shade, goes the white woodaster, mingling with the flamboyant leaves of dwarf oaks and the glistening red seeds of the wild turnip. To make September’s pageant the scented, pale petals of spring, the drowsy contentedness of summer’s fulfillment and the Tyrian dyes of fall are joined.
The pallid clematis, in flower along rail fences, still hides the blacksnake, chipmunk, and red squirrel—sometimes even the unsylphlike woodchuck—but the marshes and the branches of the lakeside pines have felt for days past the brief touch of many a strange bird’s feet as the vanguard migrants seek regions of longer days. Finely dressed visitors have come to the blue-berried juniper and the monstrous pokeweed of the terra-cotta stem. The heron breaks his profound meditation to engulf a meadow frog, for he will not leave until the wild geese “with mingled sound of horn and bells” press south above the watercourses. Starling and blue jay stay awhile to oblige with their clatter to the dawn. The fur has thickened on the woods creatures.
The blind might hear September in the uproarious arguments of the crow, thedespondent cries of katydid, tree toad, and hoot owl. In the air is reluctance, pause. Flaming festoons of woodbine and poison ivy begarland the stone wall. Summer cannot wait. Elegiac purples of the aster beckon, and the butterfly sleeps long upon the thistle, but she would not go now, in the month of the first bittersweet and the last sweet pea.
Chapter X
T
Thewild ducks are streaming south upon their journey of uncounted days. Resting a little after sunset upon the cedar-bordered pond, they are startled into flight again by some hound hunting in the night, and with beating wing and eerie cry go on. The later flying geese rise clamorous from among the cat-tails, and in silent haste the blue heron and the pair of sad old cranes that had roosted in a dead elm alongshore take the chill, invisible trail. When day comes inspreading fire the crows will humorously watch these wander-birds from the forest edges. They feel no southward impulse. Circling the clearing, they comment in uproar upon the most advisable oak for their afternoon symposium, expand their polished feathers, and, seated in a derisive row, caw a farewell to the wader’s long, departing legs. Now the mountaineer’s girl, remembering Old World peasant tales that never have been told her, hurries indoors at nightfall from the hallooing specter of the Wild Huntsman in the clouds, who is but the anxious leader of the flying wedge.
Now the Mountaineer’s Girl Hurries Indoors
Buckwheat stubble in October is such a crimson as no Fiesolan rose garden ever unfurled. Gray hill slopes of the North are festal with its color, insistent even through rains, glowing from rose madder to maroon. Lower stretches out the pale yellow of oats stubble, which breaks into flashing splinters under the noon sun. The wheat fields show ocher, and darker—burnt sienna at the roots—lie the reaped fields of barley. Small rash flowers, fancying that the ground between the grain stalks has been cultivated especially forthem, now that they see the sun freely again, put on the petals of spring amid this fair desolation. Strawberry blossoms, visibly fey, appear; long-stemmed and scanty-flowered fall dandelions; an ill-timed display of April’s buttercups. The blackberry vines go richly dyed—superb red-velvet settings for the jewels of frost.
Down in the valley, through the wood-smoke haze, move the slow apple wagons through the lanes. This is appleland. Northern Spy and Lemon Pippin are ripe to cracking; Baldwins will be mellow by Twelfth-night, the russet at Easter. Gorgeous and ephemeral hangs the Maiden’s Blush. The strawberry apples are like embers on the little trees, rubies of the orchard. Lady Sweets and Dominies are respectfully being urged into the cellar, and for those who will pay to learn the falseness of this world’s shows the freight cars are receiving Ben Davises. Sheep-noses, left often on the boughs, will hold cold nectar after the black frosts have killed the last marigold. They lie, dull red, by the orchard fence in the early snow, their blunt expression revealing no secrets. You have to know about them.Nothing is more inscrutable than a sheep-nose.
Fast above the indigo crests stir the light clouds, harried by the west wind whereon the hawk floats across the valley. In the afternoon October’s lover takes the hill path, mica-gemmed, that leads between birches of the translucent yellow leaf and maples still green but wearing scarlet woodbine like a gypsy’s sash. For here the sunset lingers till the stars, though from the valley’s goblet evening has sipped the waning sunlight like a clear amber wine. But take at morning the path through brown lowgrounds, or close along the wood where frost sleeps late, for here that flower of desire, the fringed gentian, grows. Its blue is less mysterious and deep than the closed gentian’s, and yet how many name it the cup of autumn delight!
In the woods where leafless boughs give them blue sky at last are revealed in quaint perfection the ferneries of the moss: palm trees towering higher than a snail’s house, gallant green plumes with cornelians at the tip, vast tropical forests spreading for long inches, gray trailing riversand orange cliffs of lichen, leagues of delicate jungle lost under a fallen leaf. A beetle clad in shining mail presses through the wilderness. A cobalt dragonfly lights on a shaken palm. Pursuing a rolling hickory nut, the chipmunk brings a hurricane—but these are elastic trees.
That same mischief maker, incurably curious, chases every stranger, shooting along the stone wall and pausing to peer out from the crevices with unregenerate eyes. The handsome but vain woodpecker pounds at the grub-dowered tree he has chosen to persecute. Enormously ingenuous, the wayside cow lumbers reproachfully out of the path, knocking the grains of excellent make-believe coffee from the withered dock. The drumming of a partridge in his solitary transport sounds where reddened dogwood glorifies a clump of firs. Sometimes the kittle pheasant, hardly at home in our woods, ducks her head and vanishes in the briers.
Baldwins Mellow by Twelfth-night
Now the harvest moon, yellower than the hunter’s moon of ending autumn or the strawberry moon that looks upon June’s roses, rises for husking time. It is the last harvest; when the corn is in,winter comes. Piled, tumbling ears, their grain set in many a curious pattern, go by to the sorting floor and crib, with pumpkins, the satraps of New England, perched in rickety fashion on the gleaming load. The mountain ash hangs flamboyant clusters along the road from the field. Obedient to the frost, the acorns are dropping, and the first chestnuts lie, polished mahogany, in the whitened grass at sunrise. The shagbark has scattered its largess, the butternut its dainties in their staining coats. Against the slopes the tinted fern patches show bronze, russet, and pansy brown. Speaking October and our own purple East, the tall asters, darkening from lavender to the ultimate shadowy violet, join the goldenrod. Sumacs are thronging, with their proudly blazoned crests; the haw is hung with Chinese scarlet lanterns; sweetbrier, stem and leaf, is scented of menthol and spices of the Orient. The oaks stand regal in umber and damson. Who that has known October could ever forget? How quiet the nights are after frost!
Chapter XI
B
Bythe time November comes the year is used to the caprices of the sun and no longer frantically brings out flowers for his gaze or hides them in hurt surprise from his indifference. Now the year is resigned, untroubled of hope, far off from impatient April with her craving and effort. Experienced month, November waits ready to face the snows. She wraps up the buds too warmly for sleet to pierce their overcoats, comforts the roots in the woods with mats of wrecked leaves, spreads a little jewelry of frost as a warning before the black frosts come, and for all else lives in the moment. November has been through this before. But sometimes, in a reverie,she delights the blue jays and persistent wild asters by a day of Indian summer.
There has been a great deal of ill feeling about Indian summer, and the kinder way is not to persecute those who have since youth believed and will maintain forever that it comes in October. Victims of this perverted fancy, they will go through life calling the first hot spell after Labor Day Indian summer. Every fall one explains to them that this brief season of perfection may come as late as Thanksgiving, but the very next year they will be heard to murmur, under frostless skies, “Well, we are having our Indian summer.” Let them go their indoors way, or follow the deserting robins down to Paraguay! Indian summer could just as well come when the oaks have turned forlorn if it wanted to. In truth, it comes and goes, by no means exhausted in a solitary burst of flaring sumacs, fringed gentians lighted by frost along the rims, damson-colored alder leaves and old yellow pumpkins, perilously exposed among forgotten furrows, now that the corn is being drawn in. It goes, and comes again, which is its charm—the one time of year that cannot be calendared.
There is in all the world a small, choice coterie of people who like November and March best of the months, and it must be admitted that these are often a bit arrogant about their refined perceptions. They manage to look down upon the many of us who prefer the daisy fields to the time “when hills take on the noble lines of death.” But whims of the worshiper steal no splendor from the god. June has nothing to place beside a moonlit November night, whose shadow dance of multiform boughs is never seen through leaves, while shadows on the snow are hard of outline, unlike the illusive phantoms running over autumn’s brown grass. June has no flowers so quaint, pathetic, and austere as the trembling weeds of November. What does the goldenrod, white with age, care for frost? All winter it will shake out seeds unthriftily upon the snow, standing with a calm brotherhood who have gone beyond dependence on the day. June’s forests do not take a thousand colors under a low sun. June’s gray dews have no magnificence of frost. June’s incorrigible sparrows are not the brave, flitting “snowbirds” whose sins we forgive,once we hear them chirping in a blizzard. June is a lyric, November a hymn.
The squirrels have put away enough nuts to last through the holidays, and after that they come out and get something else—no one ever knows what. They have gone off with most of the acorns, leaving the fairies their usual autumn supply of cupless saucers. No birds worth fighting with are left, for the crows will not notice them, so they go for the chipmunks. Sometimes at the wood’s edge a bird that came only with the blossoms and that should long since have gone sits lost, half grotesque, on a stark twig—spent and beautiful singer, belated by perversity or by untimely faintness of wing! The muskrat’s winter house is ready, but no happy quiet such as his good citizenship deserves is in store for him, because soon the trappers will begin their patrol of the forest, and his skin, called wild Patagonian ox, the exquisite new fur, will bring a good price. Emotional wild geese still pass overhead in the dawns and sunsets—the crows can scarcely conceal their amusement: “What nonsense, to be alwayscoming or going!” The crow does not remain in the pale North simply out of devotion to us. He is above mortal vicissitudes; behind his demoniac eye dwells a critique of humanity which he would not be bothered to utter if he could. The soul of the satirist once abode in a crow.
Forsaken nests and rattling reeds along the stream, pools in the hollows edged with thin ice, ragged leaves clutched at by the winds, desperate buds of hepatica and cowslip where a sloping bank catches warmth at noon, fences stripped of vines and ghostly with dead clematis, a few frozen apples swinging on the top boughs, trampled fields and pelting rain—and with it all a grandeur more serene than melancholy. November’s lovers are not perverse, declaring this. They see half-indicated colors and hear low sounds. They love the mellow light better than the blaze of rich July, and they are loyal to November because she speaks in quiet tones not heard through the eagerness or snow silence of other months. It is the sentimentalist who sees only gloom and the weariness of departure now. November is ruddier than many a day of springand the sharp air forbids languor. Indian summer, her gift and our most fleeting season, is like the autumn ecstasy of the partridge, passionate and irresistible, but not ending in despondency because he knows it will return, and it is like joy in that it cannot be foreseen nor detained. The bacchanal may have dreaded November, not the dryad.
Chapter XII
T
TheSouthern woods hang their Christmas trimmings high. Laurel and rhododendron, mistletoe and holly, reach up against the walls of tinted bark. Our Northern forests trail greens along the floor, and roped ground pine, pricking through the prone leaves or a gentle snow, appears as a procession of tiny palm trees, come North for the holiday, surprised and lost, but determined to keep together. Under the haw bushes and over spruce roots, wherever shade was thick last summer, partridge vines twine red-berried wreaths and the little plantsof wintergreen flavor and of that wandering name hold their rubies low on the mountain side. After the enduring snows have come, these glimmering fruits will be requisitioned—dug out by the furry owners of such plantations on days when even covered roots seem barren of sap, and nuts should really be saved awhile longer. Clumps of sword fern, beaten down by November rains, are round green mats; other ferns long ago were brown. But seldom save in its sunsets and woodlands has December color. Ponds, fanged with ice, lie sullen or stir resentfully into whitecaps. The sky is stony and often vanishes in brooding fog. Uncloaked, but courageous in their gray armor, the trees wait tensely for the intolerable onslaught of the cold: the blizzard with knives of sleet.
Over the marshes at the hour of dusk when the bronze and topaz are quenched passes the breath of foreboding. December acknowledges an unpitying fate—anything may happen. It is not the fireside month, softly white outdoors and candlelit within. Time of miracles, it stands expectant, and the thronging stars of theChristmas midnight wear a restless look. Rutted paths answer harshly to the step. Delayed snow is a menace in the air, but lands beyond the cities would be grateful should it hasten, bringing safety to the soil and winter peace. Yet snow is a betrayer, a sheet of paper upon which the feet of rabbit, mink, and fox write a guide to their dwellings and to the whole plan of their days.
Snow for Christmas there must be—on the lighted trees indoors, on our far-scattered, similar cards. But save as a convenience to the reindeer and a compliment to their driver, who cannot create his stocking stock unless he is snowbound, and who must feel sadly languid as he tears through Florida heavens, city people would quite willingly manage with alum. Early in school life, however, comes the dangerous knowledge that nothing is so easy to draw as Christmas Eve: a white hillside, a path of one unchanging curve, a steeple or a chimney with smoke, a fir tree or a star. Thus snow eases art for the credulous who think it white. Glittering under starlight, shadowed with purple, lemon, or deep blue as sunset turns toevening, taking on daffodil hues at noon, snow is harder to paint. Fretted with windy tracery and drawn out into streaming lines where the gale races along by a fence, snow is not, on Christmas greetings, permitted to be seen.
December Acknowledges an Unpitying FateDecember Acknowledges an Unpitying Fate
The first snowstorm of the year should be sent from Labrador on Christmas Eve and sprinkled impartially and ornamentally over all the land. Then, the Yule atmosphere once provided, the distribution should be confined to the rural clientele until the next December, for on streets the hoar frost is indeed like ashes. But why, in somber justice, should the far South pretend to holiday snow at all? Why not Christmas cards pranked with live oaks, alligators, lagoons, and other beauties of an Everglade scene—an inspiring escape from tradition and sentiment? For the antlered steeds must prance above hibiscus flowers as well as round the Pole. Yet it must seem dull to hang stockings by a fireplace that needs fire merely as a decoration and never to have loved a sleigh!
Abandoned, but still no downcast company, slanting corn shocks not honoredwith winter shelter stand patient sentinels in the field. Abandoned they may seem, yet could you suddenly tip one over there would be a startled scurrying, for these are the choice snow-time residences of field mice, cottontails, weasels, and meadow moles—not, of course, together in harmony, but in their separate establishments. Let the blizzard come; it only makes warmer a house of cornstalks properly built, which bears, nevertheless, some of the dangers of a gingerbread home—passing cows may feel tempted.
Vermilion heraldry of the wild rose is waved undimmed. Witch-hazel with her yellow blossoms, last flowers of the year, gazes upon the vanquished shrubs about her with a smile. Why, she will not even sow her seed until February! There is plenty of time for hardy petals.
Massed against the stern horizon, the forest stands an unresponsive gray; entered, the twigs are seen sleek brown, dark red, and a fawn soft as the tan orchid. In towns December shows the iron mood. But in the open places, where pools of light and shadow lie, it is a water-color month, made fine with no gorgeous velvetsof autumn, but hung with blending veils of dawn mist and of new snow, so that the subdued day rises in flushed, drifting vapors, like April’s awakening, and when the sun comes, pale, we wonder that there is no summons in his light.
Chapter XIII
T
Thepainter of landscapes seen in dreams must be a memory that knows fantastic woods and faery seas all strange to the waking memory. Or else the artist is only a weariness with the day just past that gives us in sleep sight of the country which, so Mr. Maugham and other story-tellers say, is the real home that men may go their whole lives long without finding, because we are not always born at home, nor even brought up there, and we might for years be homesick for a land unseen. Once beheld, the recognitionis instant, and in the foreign place begins avita nuova—relief and an intensity of living never known before the new and familiar harbor came down to meet us at the shore. So sometimes it is in dreams. Recurrent and vivid, a scene of sheerest unreality will take on an earthly air, or landscapes flamboyantly exotic will hold the peace denied by every country it has been our daily fortune to know.
Dream landscapes come back again and again, as if they waited there forever, substantial, and we were the transient comers. Some, in ether dreams, shrink always from the same green waves, the same black, open mine, and two have now and then been found who saw on sleep journeys places that words repictured curiously alike. The fantasies may be patchwork of poems, plays, and paintings long forgotten, but when they rise in their compelling fusion they owe no debt to the lumber attic of the subconscious. The world they fashion is their own, and they do offer by their ethereal pathway a compensation for the insufficiencies of life.
There is a long, uncurving sea strand whose gray immensity of sands lies smoothfor miles along the upper beach, but is feathered near the water by the stroking of little afterwaves, and draped unendingly with umber bands of kelp. Here as in no place seen the seaweed laces are edged with colors ground in unlighted depths, as if the tide cast carvings of lapis lazuli and feldspar up with the argent pebbles, and all the drifting algæ are incrusted with yellow shells. Shoreward the palms climb up until they make a green horizon, and their unnatural fronds sink down again like green chiffon that veils the entrance to the pensive forest. Vines with scented flowers as intangible as fog creep over root and trunk, and among them now and then with soundless foot and molten eye a leopard winds. Perpetual sunset wanes and glows behind the palms. There is never any wind. The violence of the ocean, the beasts, the tempest, is held in languorous leash while the treader of the sands goes on with unfelt steps toward rocks where the waters break importunate and sink moaning back. They hang black above a cave, and waves come in to prowl and snakes with scales like gems twine back and forth, glittering in the half light,with narcotic and effortless motion, until they with the rocks and all the scene fade.
A tiny stream, a pixy’s river, slips from beneath a bowlder in a wood long known, and leads through thicket, glade, and clearing to a terrifying land, desolated by ancient fires and strewn with blackened stones and charred boughs. The place itself is athirst, and the dreamer kneels to drink. The tiny stream is dark, like a deep water, and bitter cold as if it flowed through ice. A staff thrust down cannot sound its depths. A finger’s span across and bottomless! Nothing could dam its flow. Old embers at its borders are suddenly scattered when a gleaming hand parts the current and waves back toward the way just traced, but the flame-blasted firs have closed behind into a forbidding wall. Other pallid fingers rise from the portal of the abyss in warning gesture, but the narrow gulf opens underfoot.
There is a town where gay people in white dress promenade in a plaza shaded by orange trees, and they are always humming tunes. Little white streets lead to shuttered houses. A glory of buginvillæa overflows trellis and bower in splendid warwith the hibiscus hedges and the dropping yellow fruit. Down the hill and over cobblestones, pursued by music and laughter, ministered to by odors of the lemon blossom, he whom sleep leads here may go toward a lake of fluent amethyst. The way is past the market place where brown women crouch by baskets of brilliant wares and venders of glistening lizards sit drowsily bent, and then at a step the forest dense and brooding is above him and its low boughs sweep the ripple of the lake. Immense leaves hang like curtains, and among them men with unquiet eyes move and hold monotoned speech while they hew sparkling rock into monstrous shapes. They are circling round a pit. They cast in ornaments of opal and dark gold and garlands of venomous forest growths, gray and blood-red, tied with withered vines. Cries come from the pit, but the chant never stops.
Marching from a stronghold far up on a mountain of cedars, men in mail come at dusk with standards flickering crimson, fringed with gold, down to a valley full of blossomed iris where there is a wide pool with torches at its rim. Their flarestreams out toward the circling cliffs. Each marcher dips his silken flag into the quiet waters, and lights rise upon the battlements above as one by one all the black plumes are lost in the meadow’s darkness and the torches burn low and fall into the pool.
A garden planted only with dark-red nasturtiums that lift for the dreamer’s touch a flower’s velvet cheek lies filmed with dew and fragrant as a noon breath from Ceylon spice groves. The miracle of color is spread along a hillside up to a high wall of great gray stones, and inside the gate is a house grown all over with grapevines, some borne down by blue clusters with shadowy bloom, some by clusters of topaz and ripe green. There is a pond among the grasses, where broad, wan lilies float, and purple pansies border all the walks. Very slowly the paneled door opens and the sun floods the central hall. It is hung with silver draperies, and an old woman stands there with a candle, mumbling and peering in a cataract of light.