HER white house is the same, with a difference. It was always a house fitted to the person like a garment, a friendly house with peace in the corners, a house warm with sun or firelight; yet I think we always used the house merely as a starting-place for picnics, for running away into the out-of-doors with a well-stocked basket. We are at best only reformed dryads, my friend and I, and I am not even reformed. I think perhaps that it was in like manner that we used our two selves, merely as a starting-point for picnics, for the leap into the infinite, the challenging of space and time, the tossing of stars like play-balls from one to the other, always with the joy of the word shaping on the tongue to the gleam in a friend’s eye. We are lovers of words, I and she. True we also had talk in the library, dusked with books, dead men’s spirits packed shoulder to shoulder on the shelves. There was brave firelight in the library, and quiet candles, and there was also Xerxes. The great gray Persian curled on onecorner of the big desk. Even asleep he dominated the home in his sole masculinity. Yet to me he was sexless and sphinxlike except when he forsook his Oriental calm for strange gambols in the white moonlight, a bounding gray shape of a tiger grace. Sometimes Xerxes rose and stretched as if our conversation bored him, sometimes his great purring drowned out the Occidental flippancy of our chat. He was more king than cat, and he always made me a little uncomfortable, that Xerxes. To-day he is not dead but deposed. His place on the desk is usurped by a sturdy box of cigars.
However happily we might talk in the library we always knew we were better without a roof, for in the blood of the born picnicker there is something that must always be running, dancing, flying. Out-of-doors, there were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk delved too deep, and the pine-tops to fill all pauses with quiet music. We were the better picnickers because we lived for the most part in life’s schoolroom. We counted our picnic days and sorted them into due order of excellence, some better, some not quite so merry, yet all very good. But lately I had begun to wonder about the picnics, for the difference in the white, hill-girdled house is ahusband. When our friends marry we always wonder about the picnics, for sorrow is always a third comrade to hold two friends’ hands the tighter, and to keep their feet more closely in step; it is happiness that may sever and un-self people.
This, our first married picnic, dawned as brisk and bright as any. The master is not with us. He departs each morning for a mysterious place called “The Works.” That is something I have always noticed in husbands, that tendency to go forth to “The Works.” Somehow no matter how hard women may toil for their daily bread, they never seem to belong to “The Works” of the world. The white house bustles with picnic preparations. It has to bustle when Jennie is in it. Jennie? Well, Jennie might be called the steam-engine at the middle of the merry-go-round. Some day I think the world will grow wise enough to stop talking about the servant question, and begin to study the philosophy that is still often to be found going about wrapped in a maid’s cap and apron. Jennie, a little person quick of foot, bounces up and down like a merry ball, and cries to the blue May morning while she butters sandwiches, “Picnic time has come again! Picnic time has come again!” Yet I never heard of Jennie’s goingon a picnic; do people ever know, I wonder, how much of other people’s unselfishness must go to the making of anybody’s Eden?
The hall rocks to the bouncings and barkings of Mac, for he, too, feels picnic in the air. Mac is a newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare, ready tied beneath a tree to carry us over the hills and far away. When Adam came to this Eden, he brought his animals with him, a method much better than the Scriptural one, for it must have been a strain on any honeymoon, that influx of indiscriminate elephant and dinosaur, cormorant and anteater, and what not. The animals here were carefully chosen, Mac, the shaggy, clumsy, warm-hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a lady of the old South, having all such a lady’s charm and grace and fundamental loyalty touched with just the dash of deviltry considered meet to spice the masculine palate. It is with the clatter of Mac’s ecstatic barking as he plunges before Peggy’s light hoofs that we go driving forth toward the blue, hill-swept horizon.
There is a tentative venturesomeness about my friend’s driving, for horsemanship with her is a recent accomplishment, and a proud one, to the zest of which Peggy contributes with a pricking of ears and a graceful dip tothe side of the road before every motor-car. Mac trots briskly in front or behind, or to the side. His path through life is one of friendly detours. He will never accomplish any great deeds in dogdom. He is one of the simple souls unconscious of their magnetism. There is not an animal by the roadside that doesn’t come ambling up to his genial little nose. Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily across the pasture to chat with him at the bars, and no dog, big or little, fails to wish Mac good-morning.
It is the kind of morning for good wishes both for dogs and men. Knotted old farmers, seeing our picnic faces and picnic basket, grin and twinkle, sharing the May sunshine. The hills are a dim blue against a sky still softer. Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than green, are starred with bluets. Far off there, below a shaggy stretch of pines, is a field so golden with dandelions that it quivers as if held by midsummer heat.
We don’t know where we are going; that is always the charm of our picnics, to follow the will of the road. It carries us past a sawmill in the wood. Its stridency and the tang of fresh sawdust strike sharp across the air fragrant with fern. Then the road is off again across the open, cleaving farms with their broadgreening fields. The meadowlarks ring out their calls to us. The bobolinks dart and dive and sing. I turn to my companion in sudden question: “Now that you are married to a woodsman, do you know anything more about birds?”
“Oh, no,” she answers easily, “we know only the nice birds”; thus reassuring me that in her company I need fear, no more than of old, to meet any but the best bird society, robins and blackbirds and orioles and the other long-established families, and reassuring me also as to my fear that the one left behind at “The Works” might prove to be one of these bugaboo birdmen, of all beings the most subtly superior. In fact, it is very difficult to extract good conversation from any kind of human encyclopedia, ornithological or other.
Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are snowed over with white, but the apple blossoms are unopened, turning to a deep rose amid the pale-green leaves. The orchards are nearly human in their individuality, whether they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy and gnarled and steadfast, or a band of little budding baby trees toddling up a hill. There are no great waters in this countryside, but many little glinting brooks, patteringdownhill beside our wheels, then meandering through meadows beneath their bushy willows. We are minded to follow a brook and let it lead us to perfect picnic. It leads us, of course, up a hill and up, away from all farms, all valleys, into a deep woods road, hushed and strange, and at last beckons us aside from the road itself, with a twinkle of white birch stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and amber.
It takes a long time to tie and blanket Peggy while I sit dreaming in the dappled shade beside the musical rush of water, haunted by my friend’s own song that once set all this woodland madness to elfin rhythms. But my mood is interrupted by the thumping down of the stout picnic basket. She is smilingly tolerant of my dryad whimseys, but for herself, nowadays, she wishes to unpack that basket and get settled. It is for me also, perhaps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other dryad turned domestic; for me, brook water still has power to turn me dizzy and to make my heart stop beating.
It is the same basket we used to carry, but, like the house, it has a difference. There is a great object concealed in ebony leather, and it is called the “wap-eradicator.” The term is profoundly masculine, for a “wap” is someevil-eyed foreigner who might disturb our picnic privacy, and his eradicator is a pistol. There is also a marvelous jackknife which I pause in unpacking to examine. It again is no lady’s toy, seeing that it has not only all the blades a lady might require, but in addition a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a tack-puller and a can-opener. There is stout enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we always used to carry china, feminine and fragile. Food, much of that,—but then we always did take food, for I have noticed that poets need a deal of victualing. In fact, roast beef is about the best thing you can do for anybody’s imagination. One packet I myself put in for old sake’s sake, despite her laughter, a yellow envelope packed with her typed poetry. “We’ll never look at it,” she said, and she generally knows. She pulls forth now some scribbled tablets, skeleton stories of my own, “Your little deedles,” she designates them in genial contempt, and plants the cream jar upon them.
Presently she is off to gather fagots for the fire, admonishing my absent-mindedness, “Don’t let Mac eat the food before we do.” I note how much handier she has grown in all wood-lore. To-day the fire needs no coaxing, also it’s a much smaller fire than we used tobuild. We used to have a scorching splutter for a wee bit of coffee. This fire goes briskly and to the point, showering us now and then with cinders, yet on the whole well-behaved. In other days we toasted our bacon on forked sticks, but there’s a fine frying-pan now, with rings to thrust a rod into, tightening it with twigs. Bacon and eggs sizzle merrily, and the coffee-kettle boils its cover off. We sit smut-cheeked and zestful, and exhibit a great capacity for sandwiches. There is much complacency in our manners. Her coffee, she remarks, “has seven kinds of sticks in it, but is perfectly potable.” The fire, that low, leaping ruddiness against a gray boulder, is the best fire she “ever personally conducted.” As for me, there is plenty of chuckle in me, too, but I am thinking, when shall we begin to talk, for was that not what we always went to the woods for? Somehow, what with building fires, and brewing and frying, with eating and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to eat and drink, there has not been time for talking. That will come later, when we have packed away the sandwiches we could not eat, and given Mac his drink from our emptied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps of sugar. Then surely at last we shall talk, about poems and stories, and all things writable,and all things livable. Sometimes I think she guesses what I am waiting for and regards me with a twinkle, while she moves about light-footed, setting away our clutter.
But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched in flickering shadow on the brown pine needles; and I, the picnic place has caught me again into its spell. Nowhere does spring come stepping so delicately as in New England. In other places there is more riot and revelry in the carnival of bursting blossoms and leaf. In New England spring has the face of a girl nun. There are white violets in our woods and white birch stems. The very light has a quality soft and rare. The sky is the Quaker ladies’ own color. Across the swirling water that leaps down the rock path, the face of a hill rises high into the sky. It is all gray boulder and brown, with a film of pale green over all, touched here and there by the dreamy white of the shadbush. Nearer by, great boulders at the waterside below us are moss-covered, and across them the dappled shade of little leaves goes flickering. The beautiful tree shapes are unhidden, gray stems twining with brown. There is a satin sheen in the rod of light that lines each trunk-shaft turned to the sun. Just now, sailing from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray ofthe hill opposite, there fluttered a white butterfly.
After a long time I touch the envelope packed with poetry, and move it tentatively toward my friend’s hand. She shoves it quietly aside. Drowsy though she is, she has an eye open to watch Peggy’s glossy brown head tossing down there in an amber-lit wood space, and to see that Mac does not wake from his nap, where he lies only half visible against the russet leaves he has chosen to match his coat. Nowadays any soaring talk may be interrupted by a hearty “Whoa, Peggy!” or a “Down, Mac!” It is no poor punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for people whose feet have often ached from treading the tree-tops.
She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to my stories. I am eager to tell her about all the new people in my brain. She brushes the cobwebs from their heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing, in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that I need to write, while I, I know, too, that she need not. If we did not, each of us, understand, could there be any more picnics? But the pauses grow longer, filled with the voices of the water and the wood. The air is warm and drowsy, and at last she isfast asleep, held close to the brown earth, and I, the other one, sit straight, my back to a stout pine, while my thoughts go wandering, gazing in at Eden, at all Edens. Everybody’s path skirts so many Edens, of the women friends married, and the men friends married. Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections. Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine needles, I know, as every woman must know, that she will never again need me in the old way, and, as every woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry. The question for each of us, man or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he, will she, still come out sometimes into life’s great open and picnic with me? That all depends, does it not? on the newcomer. If he, if she, is a petty person, there are no more picnics. If a man, moving in to possess all sky, all sea, every crack and cranny of the universe, still holds most sacred there that path of a woman’s past which she walked, alone, to come to him, he will leave untouched all the little sunny picnic places, for any man big enough to deserve all a woman’s past would be far too big to desire it; is not just that the secret of how to have picnics though married?
And still my thoughts go wandering, passing now from the “wap-eradicator” to allthat lies back of it, of our need for it. How fundamentally different the way in which we must both regard that great black pistol lying between us! To her it is a new toy, something she has recently learned to shoot, and deeper, truer, it is the symbol of a husband’s protection, while I see beyond it that great fevered army of the unemployed, those who work and want, whose presence makes a weapon necessary. In some way I cannot analyze, I know that I am vaguely glad that I am on their side of the fence; in both my work and play too far away from them, perhaps, and too forgetful, still on their side of the ramparts of Eden, in that strange great world where no one ever is satisfied.
That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to which no new poem has been added for many a month,—will she ever write again, and shall I be glad or sorry, I who know myself how a woman’s writing is made? Yet hers is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she remembered,—if she could set to music the purring of herkettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,—how the sunny words might twinkle on harder, stranger paths! But if happy people remembered, could they then be happy? Oh, dear me, why must I be always asking questions? The wind is blowing, and against that big frowning boulder a buttercup is bobbing in the sun: how many times a day one is glad one does not have to be God, but only has to know Him there, behind this sun-and-shadow curtain we name Life!
But my friend is awake, measuring the time of the master’s home-going and ours. She is up, and running down to the waterside. I see her there, slender and tall, light-poised on a stone. Beyond her the opposite hillside looms high, green and gray. Above her ruddy head a shadbush bends itself, russet and white like her own woods-dress. As I look she tosses the water from her cup, and it falls in a great arc of sun-spray against the dusk of the woods.
The home-going is as glad as the going forth, but quieter, with long shadows across the grass. We pass pools where tall trees stand with their feet in the water in the gold light of late afternoon, and all the motionless brown water is bordered bright with marsh-marigolds. We stop at a watering-trough, and I must get out to undo Peggy’s check-rein, and to keep a hand on Mac’s collar so that he will not tumble head foremost over the high rail. I hand up a cup to the driver seated, and we drink thirstily, all four of us.
One farm has been happy with a spring paint-brush since our morning passing. Every flower-pot, box, tripod, and that curiously frequent flower-receptacle, the iron boiler, cut in lengthwise section, has been coated with dashing vermilion. Spring had got into their bones on that farm.
Mac lags from time to time, and we have to stop to lug and heave him into the wagon, where he lies across our feet, a panting, restless lap-robe of warm Airedale. Now a curious social phenomenon occurs. The very dogs, which in the morning had nosed Mac in friendliest fashion, come forth and bark and howl at him in his present eminence. It is the old, old story of the proletariat protesting against the plutocrat.
The green spring country is seamed by old stone walls. I do not know why an old stone wall has power to touch my pulses strangely, to set stirring dreams long prisoned. It is some forgotten child association, I suppose, the feeling that an old stone wall gives me, exactly akin, by the way, to that of an old covered bridge, with its magic of mystery-shod hoofs at midnight.
Peggy’s hoofs are swift, going home, and the road, although the same, seems twice as short as before. At one point we vary it, cutting across country through a wood of pines. Beneath the pines the earth is all brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is clear amber, except that at the far edge of the grove there are bright gold gleams through the distant tree stems. Above our heads the color is not brown; it is that strange deep gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart of a pine tree where the branches meet the trunk. We have not talked very much to-day, she and I, but here no one could speak any words. These seem the stillest woods in all the world. We draw rein. Suddenly from out uttermost silence there rings the chime of a thrush.
But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is panting. Were the animals urgent just like this, I wonder, when Adam and Eve longed to listen to some archangel’s voice?
It is Peggy’s will that we get home. The master is there before us, and at the barn. That is another thing I have noticed about husbands, when they are not at “The Works,” they are likely to be at the barn, if there is one. Jennie is flying about, singing to her feet to keep them lively while she makes us a dinner. Even when that meal comes I findI am still dreaming, for I was not ready to come home. Afterward in the clear May twilight we move forth to doorstep and lawn. It is Peggy’s hour for evening cropping. The master leads her about. Every turn of her head, every lift of her foot, is a movement of grace. In the gathering twilight, soft and misty, Peggy seems some beautiful horse stepping delicately out of elfland. Mac is tugging at the other end of her tether rope, and the master is somehow strung between them.
The level meadows flow away before us. The deepening blue of the sky softly puts out the sunset. Suddenly, as at some signal, the frogs begin to pipe from the meadow pool. My friend crosses the dusky lawn to join those others. She moves at Peggy’s head in her dim white dress. One star comes out.
Across their heads I see, hardly discernible, the spires of the city, and its red earth-lights, and somehow, although I know all its fever, all its pain, I hear the far crying of its spirit to my spirit, cry of innermost comradeship, the call of Home. I rise now from my seat on the doorstep, signal of good-night. She comes flying to my side; of all the words she might say, she chooses that best one, “It was our very nicest picnic.”
THERE are in my summer neighborhood three gentlemen farmers who are women. There is an implied distinction in the implied definition. The three I have under observation are quite different from those women farmers who have shouldered their husbands’ acres when forced to do so by widowhood or other marital disability. This difference, among others that readily occur, is primarily the same as that between all actual and amateur farming, the difference between those who grow up out of the soil and know its tricks, and those who come to the soil from another plane, and don’t suspect it of having any tricks. At any rate, the lady farmers of our neighborhood farm because they want to, not because they have to; otherwise, perhaps, they would not be in our neighborhood at all, although it is one of the loveliest in all the land.
Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of the South and the beautiful austerity of New England lies Pennsylvania. This countrysideis rich in mellow old farms, far retired from railways. There are low, rolling hills and woodsy back roads. Houses are set far up grassy lanes, lined with trees. Doorways back and front are deep in shade. Barns are big and white, and spread broad wings over plentiful harvesting. Houses are white, too, of stucco or of stone, old, kindly, solidly built. To these shady bricked porches, where the roses clamber against gray-white walls, Washington’s colonials might have come clattering up. Small wonder that women desiring farms should desire just this deep-verdured beauty, and no less wonder that the farms, many good miles from market, should be so abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to surround herself with fields and fowls, may readily choose her own particular frame and setting.
The three have chosen, each according to her heart’s requirements. Lady One is the lady of the flowers, and she is the youngest. Her throat is round and white, nor beneath the droop of her great garden hat is it too much exposed to the sun. She wears gloves, white ones and unique among garden gloves because they fit. Her shoes, her kerchief, are always freshly white, and her muslin dress of soft shade, lavender or blue, or sprigged andflounced. She might have stepped forth from fancy’s gallery where we all keep pictures hanging of gardens and of grandmothers. She herself may be dreaming of just such a portrait-picture. But don’t think that she is a drone because she is perhaps a dreamer. There are no such flowers in thirty miles, and flowers mean tireless toil; they take more good soil-sweat than a whole field of potatoes.
She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly seedy, but she retouched all its fading picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame, low, and white. Small grilled windows wink with garret mysteries above the high porch roof, and all is deep in shade and set far back beyond low terraces with mossy flower urns and steps of cracked flags. There are trim green globes of box trees before the front door, and to the left is her garden of flowers set within a labyrinthine box hedge. Everywhere are roses, roses,—starry little yellow blossoms, red, pink, white, roses whose very names are fragrant: Flower of Fairfield, Perle de Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d’Or, Crimson Globe, Killarney.
This lady’s eyes are brown and too deep to fathom because she is still too young to be fearless. Her voice, her words, are sweet and friendly, but her eyes do not see you, they seeonly roses, and in roses, perhaps, those deeper mysteries all women see in all growing things; her gloved hand can touch a rose as if it were a little live face.
Quite different, Lady Two and her farm. Here all is bustle and clack. Chickens, pigs, turkeys, kittens, ducks, puppies, calves occur so frequently that every day is a birthday. You could not associate Lady One with the farmyard; you could not associate Lady Two with anything else. True, her house has a front doorway every whit as picturesque as Lady One’s,—a square porch where the lilies-of-the-valley push up through ancient bricks, and a great pine bears fruit of stars every evening,—but Lady Two is not there to see, for she is putting her chickens to bed. It is out on the great back porch with its pump and its grapevine lattice, on this porch and on the slope to the big barns below, that things happen. There is no rose garden. Lady Two has flowers, it is true, in hearty democratic confusion and profusion; she loves them, too, but without subtlety, watering them and her tomato plants alike with the same splashing hand. Her vegetable-garden is the garden of her heart. She is a woman radiant with a hoe.
Lady Two is tall and spare, tanned andcheery. Somewhere she has a family, comfortable and conventional, but somehow she has managed to slip off to a farm, away from them and all social claims, and thus at forty she remains a hearty, rosy boy, with quick hands, quick feet, and brown eyes full of zest. The farm keeps her a little breathless; she is on the jump all day, from the first imperative call of hungry chicks to the small-hour barkings of Gyp. It is nothing to hurry forth from slumber with lantern and comforting words to still her dog. If she should find that Gyp had been barking at some prowling evil-doer, she would not think first of her own nerves, but of Gyp’s.
Lady Two cares not for costume, choosing merely the nearest and the handiest before she hurries forth to her farm. Her hands are marked by sun and serviceability; could you succor a sick horse in gloves! In mud-streaked denim, hatted and booted like a man, she stalks the boggy pasture to recapture the black turkey-hen, an errant lady, who, in some atavistic dream, prefers to brood on an empty nest in the swamp, exhibiting a truly feminine propensity to combine a pleasing wildness with a perilous wetness.
To Lady Two her farm means primarily fowls. Down the slope below the kitchenporch they are housed with all modern improvements, in brooders and colony house, and all manner of coops. Ducks waddle, geese strut, guinea fowl go trip-trip on feet too tiny. At feeding-time Lady Two is the center of a feathered mass, cackling, peeping, gobbling, quacking, creaking like rusty hinges as guinea fowl do. She might be a mother with a great group of happy, boisterous youngsters. Sometimes she stoops to pick up and inspect some tiny hurt chick. She croons to it with brooding tenderness. Babies, she calls the tiny things, and babies they are to her, all the little newly-borns of her farm, whether a pinky piglet, a calf that gambols awkwardly, a little turkey that must not get its feet wet, a colt unsteady on stilt-legs, a beady-eyed yellow duckling, a plunging puppy lost among its own four legs,—babies all.
Not for roses, not for chicks, that grow, both, beneath a fostering hand, did Lady Three choose her farm. Roses and chicks she has both in plenty, and tends them with her own hands, adequately and happily, but without absorption. She has outlived the need for absorption, so that the twinkle in her gray eyes is imperishable. She has also outlived the need for varied costume. Hers has the detachment and independence ofuniform, always straight-cut, gray serge with a straight-cut linen collar, and small crimson tie. Her dress has all a man’s superiority to his exterior, but her choice of a farm reveals nothing masculine in her spirit. Her great farmhouse is built of brown stones set irregularly in clear-seamed white. There are big twin chimneys at right and left. There is a white tablet beneath the eaves bearing a date of Penn’s time, but only the shell of the house is old, within all is remade to a mistress’s liking. If in all women the root of all impulse is to be always making something that shall tangibly shape to the impress of each woman’s separate self, then Lady Three chose neither flowers nor fowls, she chose to create for herself a home. Much-traveled herself, she found her farm far from beaten paths, lost down a grassy lane where a brown brook clatters and chuckles from out a hushed woodland. A business woman, so-called, executive, successful, as any man, she chose, ten years ago, at fifty, her far-off farm. Her lawns are clear of litter as was her desk in her counting-room. Her house is heated, watered, furnished in neatest and completest comfort. Many electrical devices, and her own ruddy health make her quite independent of kitchen itinerants not like the mistressinured to loneliness. Having read much, seen much, done much, known much, in her fifty years, she chose to spend the rest with herself, in her home, a home where every chair, book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some quick quaint taste, some humorous little philosophy. It is a house warm with welcome, but genially self-sufficient. Of the three, this lady, wise and gray, is the only one who really sees you, and listens; the other two see only farm. Lady Three is not afraid to live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or alone indoors with her hearth fire. You can’t be afraid of the lonely wind when you have long ago ceased to be afraid of yourself.
Thus my three lady farmers; and now that question, Does their farming pay? All lady farming depends entirely on the quality of its male assistance. You cannot farm without a man; it has been tried. Help is an ever-present trouble, but the Lady of the Roses has not found this out, because she is still too young and too pretty. Whenever she steps far from her roses, it is to look at her sky rather than her soil. Unwitting she has power to turn that brute species, Hired Man, into a very knight of chivalry, jealous to guard every blade of wheat that springs for her. Busily binding, cutting, watering her roses,she never even sees her servitors; but they see her, in all those frail fripperies of hers, while in the summer evening they linger, blue-overalled and bounden, just beyond her low hedge, to hear the sound of her voice in its sweet, absent responses. Her men know she does not see them, but perhaps they think some day she will perceive what tall corn she has, what sleek cattle. Does her farming, therefore, pay? Yes, a little, which is as much as can be said for most farming.
Quite different is the case with Lady Two. She has her hired men and her hired boys, big and little, and they all keep very busy, watching her, and they keep still busier demanding that she watch them. She is a cheery, desirable comrade for any toil, their “Miss Katie,” diminutive, both affectionate and superior, showing small awe for their tall boy mistress, in whose brisk capability they have, however, pride. They constantly call her to see them do it, whatever it is she desires. “Miss Katie,” “Miss Katie,” resounds from garden and furrow and hencoop. They cannot detach a setting hen, or churn the butter without her oversight, loudly bellowed for. They are children demanding that their mother shall watch their prowess at play. She wonders why her farm does notpay; it is because of that expensive little name of hers, because of her “Miss Katie.”
Lady Three,—does her farm give her dollar for dollar? Precisely that, and that is all she asks of it. Her oversight is brief, adequate. Men have always worked well for her, they always will. She has the quiet mistress-mastery that every man recognizes; moreover, she has a bank account that every man respects.
No, on the whole, lady farming does not pay, if you reckon success not by desires, but by dollars. From that point of view, only those women farm successfully who have at least once or twice in their lives possessed a husband and assimilated his manner of dealing with crops and with animals. Farmingquafarming, that is essentially man’s work, but farmingquajoy, that’s a woman’s discovery. A man farmer is never fused with his farm, because a man is not built to share earth’s parturition. In some way or other a woman must be always creating, always bringing forth. If she is not a house-mother, then she must be slipping, sliding, something of herself into her roses, her baby chicks, her home. To be joyous, she must be putting forth shoots, blossoms, must be pushing down her roots. To be glad, she must feelherself part of this great springing, growing universe. That woman who has chosen herself a farm has done so that she may feel her head warmed by the life-giving sun and her feet firm in the fertile earth.
If success lies in having what you want, then my three farmer friends have attained it. But sometimes I look at them and wonder, Is it what once they wanted? The Lady of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I am not sure she will not some day have another; surely there are things her hands might touch fairer even than roses. Lady Two has no story, and is too hearty and happy to note the fact, but when I see her lift in a strong brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember there are heads even more golden and downy. Lady Three, cozily ensconced in her snug old farmhouse, looks back into her homeless past, forward into her unhoused future, fearless in the knowledge that whithersoever she goes she carries with her a serene personality that will always be shaping its whereabouts to fit it, but her eyes are bright with philosophies that might have sent forth sons and daughters to splendid living. Like my three friends who have found quiet in the morning call of the sun, in the coming of the rain on a thirsting flower-bed, on all the big littleconcerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on the good green peace of the universe—a universe which must have some stout principle of growth spiritual beneath its seeming waste of mortal energies, in order that I may not question why it is that the farm feminine is not, as it might have been, the farm masculine, the farm infantine.
IAM always sorry for children who have never known what it is to have a grandmother and a grandfather and an old mountain farm to visit, far away from everywhere. A little girl I once knew had all three. Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever seen. She was tall and stout, with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands, as they stroked the little girl’s head on her shoulder, were smooth and soft. The grandmother’s eyes were blue and full of mischief and fun and love. When she laughed she shook all over so that nobody looking at her could help laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally serious. The grandmother’s cheeks were a soft pink, and her hair was black, faintly silvered. She wore it parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was crimped. On Sundays, too, she wore her black grenadine, but on other days her dress was blue gingham with a long white apron.
The grandmother lived on a farm so steepthat it seemed always to be sliding down the mountain into the valley below. At the back of the house were a few acres of cleared space, and then beyond this the stretches of mountain woods. From these woods you could hear the call of the whip-poor-wills in the evenings, and there were wildcats and bears there, too, perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely. The farm had been a wild sort of place until the grandmother took hold of it and tamed it. She had them build a line of white fence palings between the house and the grass-grown mountain road. She would have the porch trimmed with clematis, and they had to build her a grape arbor, too, and swing a hammock under it. Above the whitewashed fence a row of sunflowers nodded, and within was a line of sweet-peas. In front of the house were two long flower-beds, bordered with mignonette. In one was heliotrope, in the other flowering red geraniums. There were other flower-beds, too, wherever the grandmother could find a place for them, and in one was a tall plant of lemon verbena. The grandmother was always plucking a leaf of this and crushing it, and then clapping her fragrant hand over the little girl’s nose. Such fun they had with the flowers, snipping and weeding and watering, their two gossipysunbonnets close together! Whatever the grandmother was doing, the little girl was always at her heels, except when she was tagging after her grandfather.
All through her childhood the little girl used to make long visits at the farm. She was a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grandmother said she was “high-strung,” but her mother and the little girl herself called it just plain “naughty.” At any rate, she was always losing her temper, and then crying for hours over the sin of it. She worried over everything that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything that might happen by night, and was always flying from her bed in terror of the dark. At last, when the little girl’s cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits’ end what to do with her, she would say to the father: “We must send Margie down to mother.”
Now the little girl’s father, who was a minister, had very little money, and the grandmother had less, but somehow they would do without things and do without things until they got the little girl safely off to the old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly that her mother hardly knew her.
The first of these visits was when Margiewas so little that she would have been a baby if there hadn’t been another baby at home. She remembers only one happening of that visit—riding high on the hay wagon, she and her grandmother, while her grandfather drove the mules. Margie thinks now that perhaps her grandmother did not enjoy that ride, for hay is hot and prickly, but whatever the little girl wanted to do, that the grandmother did. Another incident of that first visit her grandmother used to tell the little girl afterwards. The little girl always wanted to help her grandfather in all his work, and often she was much in the way. Sometimes when there was hoeing that must be done, the grandfather would try to slip away unnoticed; then that tease of a grandmother would point out to the little girl how the grandfather’s overalls were just disappearing around the corner of the house, and the little girl would snatch up her sunbonnet and her fire shovel, and run after, crying: “Wait for me, grandpa!” Then she would stand in the furrow right in front of him and pound away with her shovel, so hot and earnest that the grandfather had nothing to do but stand and laugh at her, and down in the doorway the grandmother, watching them, laughed, too, because she was teasing the grandfather and pleasing the little girl.
Another visit came the summer when Margie was seven. Her father was going to Convocation, and so could take her with him and drop her off at the grandmother’s station. Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new sailor suit. She was so excited all the way that she did not talk at all, and would not touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the window, she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather holding the reins and her grandmother waiting on the platform. Her grandmother lifted her up in her arms, doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to be lifted and carried. Seated between her grandparents, while her grandmother held her hat and the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk bumped along at the back, all Margie’s worries fell away from her—she forgot she was a sinful child, she ceased to think that the babies were doomed to drown in the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread disease and die, that her father would be run over in crossing the railroad track; and as for springing from her bed in fear, that night and all the rest she slept so soundly that she never woke at all.
Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmotherwould open Margie’s trunk and take out all the little garments and think them the prettiest ever seen, because the little girl’s mother had made them every stitch. From the little dresses the grandmother would select the very oldest, and then lock all the others away again. Down at the village store she would buy some coarse brown and white stockings, costing ten cents a pair. From a corner behind the sewing-machine she would bring out the sunbonnet she had stitched for Margie in the winter. It was blue check and had pasteboard slats that came out when it was washed. Thus equipped, the little girl might run free of the farm. She helped to feed the calves and the chickens and the pigs; she wiped the dishes for Minnie, the little Dutch maid, in order that Minnie might be sooner ready to play in the haymow with her in the long sultry afternoons through which the locusts shrilled; she went huckleberrying with her grandfather, pushing far into the mountain woods, always treading warily because of the rattlers, and coming home with a face smirched with purple under the sunbonnet; she took long drives with her grandfather along strange, still mountain roads. With him, too, she tried milking: the cow-bells tinkled through the dusk of the long shed, and the air was fragrant withthe hay and the steaming milk-pails, and the little girl tried with all her might, but usually she only succeeded in sending a fine stream into her grandfather’s eye. On indoor days Margie would draw her little red rocker up beside her grandmother’s knee and listen to stories. The stories were all about mysterious and unknown relatives, Cousin Letty This and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah Something Else. Much of it the little girl did not understand at all, yet somehow she liked listening to stories, snuggled against her grandmother’s knee, better than anything else in the long, blithe days, and the little girl felt sleepy very early here on the farm—she that was such a sleepless midget at home.
After supper, while the light was still clear, her grandmother would undress her and put on her nightgown: then, when her hair was combed and her teeth brushed and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl in the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big rocking-chair on the front porch. There the grandmother would croon old songs while the little girl’s head drowsed against her shoulder, and the summer twilight stole upon them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will would sound out from the woods, or the roosting turkeys in the apple trees across theroad would rustle and flap their wings, and sometimes the white moon would come gliding up the sky, seen dreamily through the clematis bloom.
As the little girl grew older she could not go to the farm so often, partly because she took a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her mother needed her at home; but always, when she did go, she and her grandmother had the same old good times together, and Margie was still happier there on the old mountain farm than anywhere else in the world. She seemed to love her grandmother better now that she was old enough to think about her more. The grandmother had some funny ways. For one thing she would never sit in a straight chair at table, but always in a rocker. She would eat a little, and then sit back and rock a little, and sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and chatty, she would fall asleep while she rocked, but she would never admit that she had napped a minute, not she. Try as you might, you could never get the grandmother a present that she would keep. She loved dainty things, but the prettier the gift, the more she would fall to thinking how much it would please some one else, and so presently away it went. If the giver chanced to find her out, she would hang herhead and look much ashamed of herself, but all the time her eyes would be roguish. All the family teased her and she teased them. She would have walked miles for the sake of a good joke on any one of them, but her fun was always tender. One dearly loved joke she played every year. In October, when the mountains were wonderful in the blue autumn weather and the tang of burning leaves was in the air, a little family of Margie’s cousins used to come out from their town house to the old farm for chestnuts. For days before they came the grandmother and Minnie would gather every chestnut and put away the treasure in a big bag. On the morning of the children’s coming, the grandmother was always to be found scattering the hoarded chestnuts in great handfuls everywhere. Later in the day, when the children were shouting over the windfall, she would shake a threatening finger at the grandfather and Minnie if they dared to chuckle.
After a while the little girl was quite grown up and had gone to college, where she had acquired a bad habit of studying herself sick. Once again her mother in desperation sent her to her grandmother. At the station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting with a cot bed; they laid the little girl on it andwalked alongside up the mountain. That morning the grandmother and Minnie had been over all that mile of mountain road and had picked off every stone, so that the little girl might feel no jarring. Margie thought that the back of her head would never stop aching, but her grandmother nursed her and fed her and rubbed her, and wrapped her up warm and put her out in the sunshine; she told her that she must forget what the doctors had said, and that the mountain air would cure her, and so after a while it did.
But there came a last visit. They found that for two years the grandmother had been ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it a secret as long as she could. They sent her little girl to her for the last time. The grandmother would always stop moaning when Margie came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself enough to sit up and tell her stories. She liked to lie in the hammock and have Margie swing her gently, and she would often send her down to the ferny spring for a fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost always as she handed this back to Margie she would say, “Have you ever tasted such good water as this?” and always she was pleased when Margie answered, “No.”
One day Margie had to go away to her teaching. Her grandmother got up from her couch and walked to the front door to bid her good-bye. They said very little, and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked back from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and the valley and the circling mountains, at all the place she loved best in all the world, she knew that she should never wish to see it again.
So the little girl’s visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the first time, one may read a book over again. The little girl has been grown up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and worried and frightened she turns back the pages of her memory. She is sitting on her grandmother’s lap on the porch in the summer twilight. Her grandmother is singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the clematis.
JUST when, for the first time, I was fearing lest some day the wizard-light might fade from my hilltops, because I had climbed them so often; lest some day people’s eyelids might cease to be doors flashing upon mystery, because I had seen so many secrets; and lest, sadder still, I might wake up some morning and find that my comrade-soul had forgotten to pipe me on to the new adventure of the new morning,—just when I was fearing these things, I bought a pair of rubber boots!
They are real boots, real as all masculine things are real. They have straps, a new thing to me in footgear. They are deep and cavernous, so that I sink to the knee, and in them I am armored like a man, but yet a woman. Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my new-bought rubber boots, of adjustment to a man’s free-hearted adventuring. If I am to tramp alone, let me be valiantly shod like a man, though a woman at heart, for is not all the world mine for the walking it? Who knows what new fun may be abroad for me now, inmy rubber boots? I was made for life’s out-of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all weathers, and indeed I have walked it in many, plucking by my homely hillpaths thoughts that are wayside flowers along a subtler way.
I have gazed at my circling hills in many changing lights. I have seen them on a moon-flooded summer evening lie shoulder to shoulder asleep about the broad valley pastures, while the tree-shadows wavered black against white farmhouses, asleep, too; and nothing made any noise except the brook beneath my wayside bridge, and that, a merry brown human brook by day, went singing in the moon an elfin chant it had forgotten that it knew. I have seen my hills deepest blue at the skyline, and below all ablaze, beneath the racing white clouds of October, when more than at any other time the winding roads bewitch my feet, and every blackberry thicket and slope and fence-row is flaunting its banners in my eyes; yet I cannot stop to gaze, for the air is of so keen a blueness; I must walk, run, fly, because of the urgency of October in my toes.
But in the spring one’s step slackens, and one stops to loiter and look at the green willows that twist with the wavering course ofthe swift muddy river; at the rosy mist on the maple-boughs, at sunny blue wings that flash against bare branches. In the spring the most insistent walker must pause by an arbutus bank. Last year’s leaves upon it are still rimmed with frost and snow, and one’s fingers grow red, poking beneath for treasure. But what largess of arbutus our humblest wayside banks hereabouts can yield, arbutus great-petaled, deep-pink, setting free what prisoned fragrance!
I have tramped my climbing roads in winter-time, too, on those days of winter when the mercury sinks to the zero point, when the snow crunches loud beneath my heels, and the sun hangs high and cold, and the spangle glistens on crusted fields. But heretofore there have been days of winter when I have felt myself held within doors, days of slush and ooze, when the sky broods low, and the air is blind with great wet flakes; yet these were the very days when the gypsy wind came rattling the window-sash and piping of new wonders of grayness and of whiteness out there upon the hills.
I who have packed my wanderer’s wallet with the gentle secrets of summer nights, of springtime hillsides, and wintry sunshine, I who have always tramped to the call of alonely road, should I turn craven stay-at-home when life’s wild weather draws my feet hillward through grim slush and sleet? Are there not new secrets waiting on the stormy hills? I am not afraid! I have put on rubber boots.
In all this countryside I am the only woman who walks. Highroads and by-paths and woodways are mine alone, for here solitude is safe and cheery for the woman who goes uncompanioned. I pass by unmolested, but not unhailed. Happily, I have reached the age when men greet me with level comrade eyes, and pass me merrily the time of day; at least the genial old codgers of our region do. The men of my home hamlet of Littleville are a bit proud of my pedestrian prowess, and if they meet me wandering far will draw rein to twinkle down and rally me: “Guess you’re lost this time sure, ain’t you?”
The strangers I meet rarely pass me in churlish silence. I have had a man, never before seen, bend down from his high seat, his face all one pucker of concern, while he shouted to me in a high windy voice, “Hi, there, you’re losing a hat-pin!” His over-spread relief as I adjusted it was but one instance of the intimacy ruling within the sweeping circle of hills that rim Littleville like acup. We are no strangers here, we comrades of the road.
Yet in my walking I must often pay the penalty of being unique, of being an anomaly in country conventions. They are kind, our rural men-folk, but I think the kindest, passing me, make a swift comparison between me and their kitchen-keeping women. In this inarticulate comparison there is a boyish flash of sympathy that I should find the out-of-doors the same jolly thing men do; but more, there is distrust of one who obviously enjoys the zest of her own feet as much as their wives enjoy jogging through life beside a comfortable husband behind a comfortable horse. Possibly the thoughts of rural men-folk are not so different from the thoughts of all other men-folk when they pass the woman who walks.
Whatever the mental comment attached to the gaze, the eyes that meet mine are quite as often astounded as amused. If this is evident even when I trudge in flooding sunshine, astonishment becomes irrepressible when I am seen abroad in snow and sleet. “By gosh! pretty hard walking you got, ain’t you?”
Foot-fast in slush, I pipe back, “But I like it. I have on rubber boots!”
Such the accost from vehicles not facing inmy direction; but when a horse that goes my way is drawn up, and I decline the proffered seat; knee-deep in slush, refuse to get in! then the driver’s face expresses such commiseration as I never expected to feel applied to my inoffensive person. Plainly I see that it is not my drabbled skirts he is sorry for, it is my addled wits. Walking country roads in ill weather has taught me exactly how a lunatic must feel. It is said that the crazy have a certain look in the eye; of experience I can affirm that so also have those who gaze upon the crazy.
For the passing instant, as I meet that profound pity in mild, masculine orbs, I do doubt my own sanity, and wonder if perhaps this glorious freedom of the wild, wet weather is quite the sensible thing it seemed when I set out; for it is the look in other people’s eyes that gives us our own spiritual orientation. Lunacy is a purely relative term. There are places where women may walk and hardly be glanced at for so doing, just as, perhaps, within his own cage-walls, the Bedlamite may seem to himself a normal human being. Also, perhaps, the lunatics, like me, have their silent chuckle; knowing, like me, that they have their inward fun, although the numskull sane can’t see it. I hope so, for I would fain thinksome sunny thought of the poor brainsick folk.
It is not given to my friends of the highway, sensible men creatures on wheels, any more than to their wives, snug at home in dry domestic shoes, to know the joy of my walk through the swift, wet snowflakes. On and up I go, never meaning to go home by the same way I have come. What lover of the road ever does that?
The clinging snow has enfolded all things. Every tree stands with white, shrouded branches. The berry thickets are softly furred with white. The dusky gray aisles of the roadside woods die to blackness in the near distance. The little brooks go tinkling beneath a thatch of snow bristling with high grass blades. There is almost no color. Even the bronze of oak leaves is veiled by white mist. The world is all white and gray, and in the distance faintly blue. The fast-falling snow blurs all familiar outlines strangely, so that I hardly believe those dreamy roofs down there belong to humdrum Littleville.
There is strange, muffled silence. I am half afraid of the woods; they have grown unearthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of the snow that drops from the branches. Gray-white, silent mystery,—and I should neverhave known or seen it, had I not laughed at life’s wild weather, and trudged forth to it in rubber boots, all alone.
Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside groves, of busy secret streams and homely fields, always the human aspect of the road engages the woman who tramps with joy at the heart. In summer and winter, as I go, I pass the brown milk-wagons, plodding, monotonous, starting forth from all the circling farms and converging to the milk station. The drivers have always dull or far-away faces, for it is always the same road, the same rattling cans at their backs, the same shaggy, jogging flanks before them.
Almost always, somewhere on my journey, I meet the rural mail-man. The bobbing yellow dome of his narrow wagon is always easily descried in the distance. The mailman knows my tramp-habits well, and the smile from his little blinking pane never fails me. Another familiar vehicle is the school carryall, which nowadays picks up all the human contents of one of our district schools and carries them down to Littleville for instruction. The school wagon is driven by a jovial grandsire, and it is always crowded to overflowing with small, merry people who hail me. I rarely meet any folk on foot,although occasionally a leggined huntsman slips noiselessly across the road from one grove to another, while a hound sniffs to right and left of his path.
The farm-homes for the walker by the way have each the spell of some new story. There beside that wind-rocked cupola is some curious mechanism. For what purpose? To lift water to a roof-tank? To catch the lightning? To send afloat an airship? Crude, clumsy, aspirant, a farm-boy’s dream!
I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road. A door flings open and a man and a woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed me. The woman’s face is set in impotent hate, the man’s mouth is wried with cursing; and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness a mere passing blight. Man and wife! Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went driving gayly back from the parson’s, his arm about her ribboned waist, and posies flaunting in her hat and in her cheeks—once!
It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond the doors to pity often, but to envy rarely. It is in the nature of things that we cannot envy, for those things we might covet are precisely those that come spilling out of door and window to bless us, so that presently we are bowing our heads and saying our bit ofa grace for them, as being also ours. Gentle old world, so constituted that a home can lock its door, if it will, upon its sorrow, but can never hide its joy! I pass another ragged farmhouse, and here the children in their homemade little duds are trooping in from school. Again an open doorway, and in it a mother wiping red hands upon her apron. The closing door shuts off sharply the shrill voices that tell of the day’s events; but I have seen and heard, and therefore I, too, possess.
At still another window-pane there is a bobbing baby-face. Such a crowing, chuckling joy as is a year-old baby! What home could ever hide him under a bushel? Strange mystery, that gives, withholds, inscrutably, the heart’s desire of all of us, and yet ordains for us who trudge a snow-cold path, that there shall be, even until we grow gray of soul and feeble-footed, forever along our way, until the end, always behind the panes we pass, the bobbing baby-faces! Other women’s babies? Does it make so much difference whose they are, so long as they are sweet?
Another happiness it is ordained no woman shall keep unto herself. The peace of a woman’s mouth when a good man loves her, that is another of the things nothing can conceal, for sorrow may be leaden and secret at theheart, but joy will always out and abroad. That is one of the things we know, we wayfaring women.
Walks end with the dipping of the day. The winter dusk steals very early over all the snowy whiteness. I have to peer to see Littleville’s clustered roofs down there in the river-valley. Before I turn to wade back down the drifted hill-road to the ruddy little home that lends me harborage for the night, I stand still to look about me, through the whirling flakes. See all around me hills I have not yet climbed! Think of the untried roads that lead to them! What secret wizardry of new woods, what elfin tinkle of new brooks, what new farmdoors, glimpsing upon human mystery! Hills and the road for me, on and on! Just around the turn what wonders wait, shall ever wait, for my rubber boots and me!
IHAD walked that way a score of times and never seen that road, yet it must have seen me and singled me out, or else it would never have peeped about from its ambush of berry thicket and swamp and said, “Come.” I was sturdily plodding the broad state road, for there is a state road everywhere, white and useful, belonging to everybody,—to the lumbering brown milk-wagons, to the bouncing muddy buckboards, to the motor-cycles with their vibrant chugging, to the skimming automobiles. The state road talks business all the time, incessant talk to blur the hearing; for all good talk is half silence, and the only people who have anything to say are the people who have listened. I was lonely for some one to talk to when the little road beckoned.
The state road always chooses the riverway, always bustles along on the level; how could one ever be friends with a road that never climbed a hill? My feet were trudging the macadam, though growing more gypsyish each moment, when the flash of a red leaf ona dusty bush, the rustle of an unseen bird, and I saw the little road hailing me, and turned. It was waiting for me, half revealed, half hidden, like a shy, would-be friend, and at first, except for certain gypsy gleams along its fence-rows, it was commonplace enough, it might have been anybody’s road.
At first, too, it went along discreetly, it turned and walked parallel with the state thoroughfare, a little apart, it is true, but steadily patterning on the manners of the highway, so that if a traveler had chanced on it, he would have seen nothing unconventional. The little road went along like that, and waited for its friends, but I had faith to believe it would soon begin to climb, that climbing was what it wanted of me. Imperceptibly at first it swerved from the parallel, imperceptibly it mounted a little, so that presently, near as we still were, we could look down at the village.
Then the little road began to talk, politely, pleasantly, but in no wise pregnantly. Its language was meaningless at first, but with a lure, as comrade eyes light to yours above lip-chat that does not need to mean anything. We could go slowly, having all the morning to get acquainted. Together the road and I looked down at the town through a screen of late September leaves.
The place lay in mist, partly of the late-lingering fog, partly of the fires that belong to these days when all the village rakes and burns, and the youngsters tumble and romp and shriek in piles of leaves. All outlines are blurred by a pearly haze, against which eddies the deeper blue of chimney-smoke. Beyond the town the hills are dull gray against the luminous gray of the sky, and between town and hill the river runs, a shining silver sheet, with broken, deep-toned reflections near the bank. Looking eastward through the flickering leaves, I watch the sun steadily shining through, shredding the mist with fires of opal, in gleams of blue and orange and amethyst. Down at the village they see none of this, they know only that the fog lifts, while stubble-gardens, and lawns, and house-fronts all turn brown and bare and commonplace beneath the relentless sun. It is for me to see the opal fires lick up the mist; such cheery little wonders of the road are all for me.
The road keeps silence, letting me listen to the village sounds, musically fused at this brief distance; the shunting of a freight train and its raucous whistle, the ringing of hammers on new scaffolding, the shrilling of the saw-mill, the barking of dogs. All to herself, like the shy one that she is, the little roadmurmurs her replies, in the twittering of sparrows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in bared branches, in the scratch and scud of dry leaves that race, the soft thudding of a chestnut burr.
The sun is high, and the wind is blowing, and the comrade road is waiting, genially postponing its sure self-revelation, but a-tiptoe to be off now to the woods, where we may share our fun unmolested, unsuspected. The little road is climbing now beyond mistaking. She is stepping through the woods so familiarly that you might miss her trail if you didn’t follow close, for she knows there is no fun in the woods if you can’t get lost, can’t drop the pack of personality from your shoulder, and grow one with brushwood shadow, or arched branch. When the road said this to me, I began to listen to her for every word that she might say. But stealing ever deeper into the woodland, my path is not talking now, she is singing rather, she is dancing. Suddenly in the deeps of the wood she opens up a long green alley of fairy turf, and waits to see if I will share it with her and go scudding it like a squirrel. The white state-way never dreamed that I could fly, but the little friend-road knew. The road plays with me. Near the rut made by a lumber team, she tosses a handfulof wintergreen berries like flecks of coral for me to garner, and lifts a sudden torch of scarlet oak against some wood-recess black and deep as a cave. Every time she hears the sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into still deeper shadow to be alone with me. Looking to right and left you cannot see the open; the only open is above, in the blue.
In the heart of the woods there is elfland. Trusting me, the little road dared to turn mad, she who had been so circumspect down below in the valley. Of the trees, some were still summer green and some were russet gold and some were claret crimson, so that the sifted light was strange, the light of faery. “There is no state road anywhere,” said my mad little path to me, “there is nothing in all the world but wood and sky. You are a tree, a cloud, a leaf,—there is no you! Dance!” In and out through the trees she eddied and whirled, my road, glad as a scudding cloud and mad as the wind, in and out, in and out. Free winds that piped in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced the blue above us, laced branches that swayed to a dance eternal, exhaustless,—round and round we eddied, panting, the road and I, all by ourselves, alone, unguessed, in the heart of the woods. They, too, were drunk with the madness of out-of-doors, Bacchus’s mænads.
Then, “Whisk!” cried the little road, “we can’t long keep up this sort of thing, friend-woman!” She turned sober in an instant, wild laughter dying to bubbling chuckles at itself. The tall trees broke away abruptly on stump-pocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone walls. We had come upon a bustling little farm. My road, the wild and lonely-hearted, was transformed into a chatty neighbor, and turned in cheerily to pass the time of day at the back door. A brisk and friendly farm it was. The orchard jounced us a red apple as we passed, a white-nosed horse thrust head from the barn window and whinnied a welcome. Two shepherd dogs, one a stiffened grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy, barked a dutiful protest, then sniffed and licked genially. There was a baby carriage on the porch, a swing beneath the shaggy dooryard pine, there were geraniums at the window, and gleaming milk-pans on the back porch. Beyond the big house was a whole village of miniature houses, kennels and chicken sheds and corn-cribs, set down cozily anywhere to be handy. The big red barns were chatty with clucking hens. A sunny, sociable, commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on the back steps, to pause and rest there, the road and I. As we chatted, lingering andhappy, of buttermilk and buckwheat and the cut of kitchen aprons, would any one have guessed that this little cozy domestic road, back there beyond the turn, had reeled in bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?
When we were alone again, the road explained, questioning with searching friend-eyes to see if I understood, “Many selves belong to every road that must be always climbing a hill, all alone. Don’t you know,” laughed the little road, “that there was never a dryad but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over her flickering leaf-films and slip into some crofter’s cot in Tempe and slap the wheat-cakes on the warm hearth-stones?
“And I have other moods as I climb,” whispered the little road, as we took hands and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and playing with them, with no one to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out loud in the friendly solitude of little roads like this.
Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too. Maples like great torches of flame studded the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields marched the corn-shocks, a ragged brown battalion. The sky was ever burning bluerabove the hill-crest. Then we left the farm fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pasture, and suddenly the little road said: “Look, a wayside shrine! Let us stop.”
Pine trees such as survive now in only a few scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel. Beneath the trees some one had built a rude stone pile, a picnic fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little wildwood road all things are natural. We stood silent on that pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the arching green, supported on its blue-brown pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far tops there went singing an eternal chant. No one ever listened long to that music, all alone, who did not know that it is a hymn older than any creed, and outliving all doubt. In the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted by eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart of all desire, so that, troubled, I asked, “But it was to pray that we stopped?”
“Oh,” answered the pagan road, “I never pray, for what is the use of learning how to lisp?—I only praise!”
We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but we were deeper friends when we went on, for there is no bond in friendship closer than the sharing of a faith. Our feetwere springing along as up we went. There were no more farms now, only at last above us the hilltop and the sky, clouds that raced across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and the call of high-winging crows.
The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to say to me this intimacy, “Do you not know my gospel,—that gladness is God? That is why I am always climbing hills. That is why I called you this morning, so that for a little while I and you might step into the sky.”