"When all the gay scenes of summer are o'erAnd autumn slow enters so silent and sallowAnd millions of warblers that charmed us beforeHave fled in the train of the sun-seeking swallow;The bluebird, forsaken, but true to his homeStill lingers and looks for a milder tomorrowTill forced by the horrors of winter to roam,He sings his adieu in a lone note of sorrow."
"When all the gay scenes of summer are o'erAnd autumn slow enters so silent and sallowAnd millions of warblers that charmed us beforeHave fled in the train of the sun-seeking swallow;The bluebird, forsaken, but true to his homeStill lingers and looks for a milder tomorrowTill forced by the horrors of winter to roam,He sings his adieu in a lone note of sorrow."
Again that long fine strain cast far out upon the air like a silken reel:
Se—u—re? Se—u—u.
Or could it be a woodcock?
He got up by and bye and walked toward the field of yellow grain on one side of the pasture. Before he was halfway he stopped, arrested by a wonderful sound: from the top rail of the fence before him, separating the pasture from the grain, came a loud ringing whistle. It was Bobwhite! Boys at school sometimes whistled "bobwhite." He knew this bird because he had seen him hanging amid snow and ice and holly boughs outside meat shops about Christmas time. Here now was the summer song: in it the green of the woods, the gold of the grain, the far brave clearness of the June sky.
He tipped forward, not because his feet made any noise. Once again, nearer, that marvellous music rang past him, echoing on into the woods. Thenit ceased; and as Webster approached the field fence what he saw was a rabbit watching him over the grass tops until with long soft leaps it escaped through the fence to the safety of the field.
For a while he remained leaning on this fence and looking out across the coming harvest. Twenty yards away a clump of alders was in bloom: some bird was singing out there joyously. It made ache che chesound, also; but its colour was brown.
The idea occurred to Webster that he would recross the pasture to the field on the other side and go on to the turnpike: one ran there, for he heard vehicles passing. He would make inquiry about some piece of forest further from the city. He remembered again what the professor told them:
"Some of you this summer during your vacation may go out to some nearby strip of woods—what little is left of the old forest—in quest of the warbler. Seek the wildest spots you can find. The Kentucky bluegrass landscape is thin and tame now, but there are places of thick undergrowth where the bird still spends his Kentucky summer. Shall I give you my own experience as to where I found him when a boy half a century ago? On my father's farm there was a woodland pasture. The land dipped there into a marshy hollow. In this hollow was a stock pond. Around the edges of the pond grew young cane. It was always low because the cattle browsed it. The highest stalks were scarcely five feet. On the edge of the canebrakea thicket of papaw and blackberry vines added rankness and forest secrecy. It was here I discovered him. The pale green and yellow of his plumage blent with the pale green and yellow of the leaves and stalks. But it was many years before I knew that the bird I had found was the Kentucky warbler. If I had only known it when I was a boy!"
When Webster reached the turnpike and looked up and down, no one was in sight. He sat on the fence and waited. By and bye, coming in from the country, a spring wagon appeared. Curious projections stuck out from the top and sides of boxes in the wagon. When it drew nearer Webster saw poultry being taken to market. Helooked at the driver but let him pass unaccosted: there would be little use in applying for information about warblers at headquarters for broilers.
Next from the direction of the city he saw coming a splendid open carriage drawn by a splendid horse and driven by a very pompous coloured coachman in livery. An aristocratic old lady sat in the carriage, shielding her face from the dazzling sunlight with a rich parasol. She leaned out and looked curiously at Webster.
"Suydam," she called out to her coachman with a voice that had the faded sweetness of faded rose leaves, "did you notice that remarkable boy? He looked as though he would have liked to drive with me out into the country. I wish I had invited him to do so."
A milk cart followed with a great noise of tin cans. With milk carts Webster felt somewhat at home: it was often his business to receive the family milk. As the cart was passing, he motioned for the milkman to stop. Perhaps all milkmen stop at any sign: there may be an order: Webster called out with a good deal of hesitation:
"Do you know of a woods further out full of bushes and thickets?"
The milkman gave a little flap of the rein to his horse:
"What's the matter withyou?" he said with patient forbearance:
Finally Webster saw creeping down the turnpike toward him an empty wagon-bed drawn by a yoke of oxen. A good-natured young negro man sat sideways on the wagon-tongue, smoking.Webster halted him by a gesture and a voice of command:
"Do you know of a bushy woods further out?"
Any negro enjoys being questioned because he enjoys not answering questions. Most of all he enjoys any puzzling exercise of his mother wit.
"A bushy woods?"
"Yes, a bushy woods."
"What do you want with a bushy woods?"
"I want to find where there is one."
The negro hesitated: "there's a bushy woods about four miles out."
"Is it on the pike?"
"On the pike! Did you ever see a bushy woods on the pike? It'sbesidethe pike."
"Right side or left side?"
"Depends which way you're going. Right side if you are going out, left side if you're coming in."
"You say it's four miles out?"
"You pass the three mile post and then you go a little further."
"Are there any birds in it?"
"Birds? There's owls in it. There's coons in it."
"Do you know a young canebrake when you see one?"
"I know an old hempbrake when I see one."
Webster enjoyed his new authority in holding up his negro and questioning him about a forest. And it seemed to him that the moment had come when it was right to use money if you had it, horns or no horns. He pulled out a dime. The negro, too surprised tospeak, came across and received it. He declined to express thanks but felt disposed to show that he had earned the money by repeating a piece of information:
"It's four miles out."
"Is there much of it?"
"Much of it? Much as you want."
"Do you live in it?"
"No, I don't live in it: I live in a house."
He had retaken his seat on the wagon-tongue.
"What kind of pipe stem is that you are using?"
"What kind? It's a cane pipe stem."
"Where did you get the cane?"
"Where did I get it? I got it in the woods."
"Then thereisyoung cane growing in the woods?"
"Who said there wasn't?"
Webster, beginning this morning to use his eyes, took notice of something which greatly interested him as the wagon moved slowly off down the pike: strands of hemp clung to it here and there like a dry hanging moss. The geologist had told them that his own boyhood lay far back in the era of great Kentucky hemp-raising. Much of the hemp was broken in March, the month of high winds. As the hemp-breakers busily shook out their handfuls while separating the fibre from the shard, strands were carried away on the roaring gales, lodging against stubble and stumps and fences of the fields or blown further on into the pastures. Later when it was baled and hauled in, other filaments werecaught on the rafters and shingles of hemp-houses and barns. Thus when in April the northward migration of birds reached Kentucky, this material was everywhere ready and plentiful, and the Baltimore orioles on the bluegrass plateau built their long hanging nests of Kentucky hemp.
Webster, sitting on the fence and thinking of this, meantime laid his plans for the larger adventure of the following day: the clue he sought had unexpectedly been found: he would go out to the place where young cane grew: there he might have a real chance at the warbler.
This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. It had seemed empty of living creatures when he enteredit; soon it had revealed itself as a whole teeming world. The mere green carpet of the woods was one vast birthplace and nursery, concert hall, playground, battlefield, slaughter-pen, cemetery.
"But my ignorance!" he complained. "I have good strong eyes, but all these years they have been required to look at dead maps, dead books, dead pencils and figures, dead everything: not once in all that time have they been trained upon the study of a living object."
His ears were as ignorant as his eyes: he had not been educated to hear and to know what he heard. Innumerable strange sounds high and low beat incessantly on them—wave upon wave of louder and fainter melodies, thesummer music of the intent and earnest earth. And everywhere what fragrances! The tonic woody smells! Each deep breath he drew laved his lungs with sun-clean, leaf-sweet atmosphere. Hour after hour of this until his whole body and being—sight, smell, hearing, mind and spirit—became steeped in the forest joyousness.
Now it was alone in the June woods that long bright afternoon that Webster took final account of the last wonderful things the geologist had told them that memorable morning. He pondered those sayings as best he could, made out of them what he could:
"I am not afraid to trust you, the young, with big ideas which will lift your minds as on strong wings and carry themswiftly and far through time and space. If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought.""The Kentucky warbler for over a hundred years has worn the name of the State and has carried it all over the world—leading the students of bird life to form some image of a far country and to fix their thoughts at least for some brief moment on this same beautiful spot of the world's surface. As long as he remains in the forests of the earth, he will keep the name of Kentucky alive though all else it once meant shall have perished and been forgotten. He is thus, as nearly as anythingin Nature can be, its winged worldwide emblem, ever young as each spring is young, as the green of the woods is young.""Study the warbler while you may: how long he will inhabit the Kentucky forest no one can tell. As civilisation advances upon the forest, the wild species retreat; when the forest falls, the wild species are gone. Every human generation during these centuries has a last look at many things in Nature. No one will ever see them again: Nature can never find what she has once lost: if it is gone, it is gone forever. What Wilson records he saw of bird life in Kentucky a hundred years ago reads to us now as fables of the marvellous, of the incredible. Were he the sole witness, some of us might thinkhim to be a lying witness. Let me tell you that I in my boyhood—half a century later than Wilson's visit to Kentucky—beheld things that you will hardly believe. The vast oak forest of Kentucky was what attracted the passenger pigeon. In the autumn when acorns were ripe but not yet fallen, the pigeons filled the trees at times and places, eating them from the cups. Walking quietly some sunny afternoon through the bluegrass pastures, you might approach an oak and see nothing but the tree itself, thick boughs with the afternoon sunlight sparkling on the leaves along one side. As you drew nearer, all at once, as if some violent explosion had taken place within the tree, a blue smoke-like cloud burst out all around the treetop—the simultaneous explosive flight of the frightened pigeons. Or all nightlong there might be wind and rain and the swishing of boughs and the tapping of loosened leaves against the window panes; and when you stepped out of doors next morning, it had suddenly become clear and cold. Walking out into the open and looking up at the clear sky you might see this: an arch of pigeons breast by breast, wing-tip to wing-tip, high up in the air as the wild geese fly, slowly moving southward. You could not see the end of the arch on one horizon or the other: the whole firmament was spanned by that mighty arch of pigeons flying south from the sudden cold. Not all the forces in Nature can ever restore that morning sunlit arch of pigeons flying south. The distant time may come, or a nearer, when the Kentucky warbler will have vanished like the wild pigeon:then any story of him will be as one of the ancient fables of bird life.""The rocks of the earth are the one flooring on which every thing develops its story, then either disappears upon the stillness of the earth's atmosphere or sinks toward the silence of its rocks. Of the myriad forms of life on the earth the bird has always been the one thing nearest to what we call the higher life of the human species."It is the form and flight of the bird alone that has given man at last the mastery of the atmosphere. Without the bird as a living model we have not the slightest reason to believe that he could have ever learned the mechanism of flight. Now it is the flight of the bird, studied under the American sky, that has given thenations the war engine that will perhaps rule the destiny of the human race henceforth.The form of the bird will fly before our autumn-brown American armies as they cross the sea—leading them as the symbol of their victory. When they lie along the trenches of France as thick as fallen brown autumn leaves in woodland hollows, it will be the flight of bird-like emblems of destruction that will guide them like hurricane-rushing leaves as they sweep toward their evil enemy.""Through all ages the flight of the bird alone has been the interpreter of the human spirit. The living, standing on the earth and seeing the souls of their dead pass beyond their knowledge, have fixed upon the bird as the symbol of their faith.When you are old enough, if not already, to know your Shakespeare, you will find in one line of one of his plays the whole vast human farewell of the living to the dead: they are the words of Horatio to Hamlet, his dying prince: 'the flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'""As far as we geologists know, this is the morning of the planet. Not its dawn but somewhere near its sunrise. The bird music we hear in these human ages are morning songs. Back of that morning stretches the earth's long dawn; and the rocks tell us that thrushes were singing in the green forests of the earth millions of years before man had been moulded of the dust and had awakened and begun to listen to them. Thus bird music which seems to us so fresh is theoldest music of the earth—millions of years older than man's. And yet all this is still but a morning song. The earth is young, the birds are young, man is young—all young together at the morning of the earth's geologic day. What the evening will be we do not know. It is possible that the birds will be singing their evening song to the earth and man already have vanished millions of years before.""Many questions vex us: all others lead to one: when man vanishes, does he pass into the stillness of the earth's atmosphere and sink toward the stillness of its rocks like every other species? He answers with his faith: that his spirit is here he knows not why, but takes flight from it he knows not how or whither. Only, faith discloses to him one picture: the snowypinion folded and at rest in the Final Places."
"I am not afraid to trust you, the young, with big ideas which will lift your minds as on strong wings and carry themswiftly and far through time and space. If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought."
"The Kentucky warbler for over a hundred years has worn the name of the State and has carried it all over the world—leading the students of bird life to form some image of a far country and to fix their thoughts at least for some brief moment on this same beautiful spot of the world's surface. As long as he remains in the forests of the earth, he will keep the name of Kentucky alive though all else it once meant shall have perished and been forgotten. He is thus, as nearly as anythingin Nature can be, its winged worldwide emblem, ever young as each spring is young, as the green of the woods is young."
"Study the warbler while you may: how long he will inhabit the Kentucky forest no one can tell. As civilisation advances upon the forest, the wild species retreat; when the forest falls, the wild species are gone. Every human generation during these centuries has a last look at many things in Nature. No one will ever see them again: Nature can never find what she has once lost: if it is gone, it is gone forever. What Wilson records he saw of bird life in Kentucky a hundred years ago reads to us now as fables of the marvellous, of the incredible. Were he the sole witness, some of us might thinkhim to be a lying witness. Let me tell you that I in my boyhood—half a century later than Wilson's visit to Kentucky—beheld things that you will hardly believe. The vast oak forest of Kentucky was what attracted the passenger pigeon. In the autumn when acorns were ripe but not yet fallen, the pigeons filled the trees at times and places, eating them from the cups. Walking quietly some sunny afternoon through the bluegrass pastures, you might approach an oak and see nothing but the tree itself, thick boughs with the afternoon sunlight sparkling on the leaves along one side. As you drew nearer, all at once, as if some violent explosion had taken place within the tree, a blue smoke-like cloud burst out all around the treetop—the simultaneous explosive flight of the frightened pigeons. Or all nightlong there might be wind and rain and the swishing of boughs and the tapping of loosened leaves against the window panes; and when you stepped out of doors next morning, it had suddenly become clear and cold. Walking out into the open and looking up at the clear sky you might see this: an arch of pigeons breast by breast, wing-tip to wing-tip, high up in the air as the wild geese fly, slowly moving southward. You could not see the end of the arch on one horizon or the other: the whole firmament was spanned by that mighty arch of pigeons flying south from the sudden cold. Not all the forces in Nature can ever restore that morning sunlit arch of pigeons flying south. The distant time may come, or a nearer, when the Kentucky warbler will have vanished like the wild pigeon:then any story of him will be as one of the ancient fables of bird life."
"The rocks of the earth are the one flooring on which every thing develops its story, then either disappears upon the stillness of the earth's atmosphere or sinks toward the silence of its rocks. Of the myriad forms of life on the earth the bird has always been the one thing nearest to what we call the higher life of the human species.
"It is the form and flight of the bird alone that has given man at last the mastery of the atmosphere. Without the bird as a living model we have not the slightest reason to believe that he could have ever learned the mechanism of flight. Now it is the flight of the bird, studied under the American sky, that has given thenations the war engine that will perhaps rule the destiny of the human race henceforth.The form of the bird will fly before our autumn-brown American armies as they cross the sea—leading them as the symbol of their victory. When they lie along the trenches of France as thick as fallen brown autumn leaves in woodland hollows, it will be the flight of bird-like emblems of destruction that will guide them like hurricane-rushing leaves as they sweep toward their evil enemy."
"Through all ages the flight of the bird alone has been the interpreter of the human spirit. The living, standing on the earth and seeing the souls of their dead pass beyond their knowledge, have fixed upon the bird as the symbol of their faith.When you are old enough, if not already, to know your Shakespeare, you will find in one line of one of his plays the whole vast human farewell of the living to the dead: they are the words of Horatio to Hamlet, his dying prince: 'the flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'"
"As far as we geologists know, this is the morning of the planet. Not its dawn but somewhere near its sunrise. The bird music we hear in these human ages are morning songs. Back of that morning stretches the earth's long dawn; and the rocks tell us that thrushes were singing in the green forests of the earth millions of years before man had been moulded of the dust and had awakened and begun to listen to them. Thus bird music which seems to us so fresh is theoldest music of the earth—millions of years older than man's. And yet all this is still but a morning song. The earth is young, the birds are young, man is young—all young together at the morning of the earth's geologic day. What the evening will be we do not know. It is possible that the birds will be singing their evening song to the earth and man already have vanished millions of years before."
"Many questions vex us: all others lead to one: when man vanishes, does he pass into the stillness of the earth's atmosphere and sink toward the stillness of its rocks like every other species? He answers with his faith: that his spirit is here he knows not why, but takes flight from it he knows not how or whither. Only, faith discloses to him one picture: the snowypinion folded and at rest in the Final Places."
That long sunny afternoon in the June woods! The shadows of the trees slowly lengthened eastward. The sun sank below the forest boughs and shot its long lances against the tree trunks. It made a straight path of gold, deeper gold, across the yellow grain. The sounds of life died away, the atmosphere grew sweeter with the odours of leaves and grasses and blossoms.
Webster recrossed the woods as he had entered it, waded through the nightshade and climbed the fence under the dark tree.
It was twilight when he entered the City.
As he passed her yard, Jenny bounded across to him joyous, innocent, tender, in a white frock with fresh blue ribbons in her brown hair.
"Did you find him?" she asked, her happiness not depending on his answer.
"It was not the right place. Tomorrow I am going out further into the country to a better place."
"The humming-bird has been here," Jenny announced with an air of saying that she had been more successful as a naturalist.
He made no reply: as the veteran observer of a day, he had somewhat outgrown the trumpet-vine arbour and the ruby-throat.
He lingered close to the fence. Jenny lingered. He moved off, disappointed but devoid of speech.
"Come back!" Jenny whispered, with reproach and vexation.
It was the first invitation. It was the first acceptance of an invitation. There would have been a second acceptance but the invitation was not there to accept.
When Webster turned in at his home gate, everything was just as he had foreseen: his father sat on one side of the porch, smoking the one daily cigar; his mother faced him from the opposite side, slowly rocking. Elinor crouched on the top step between them: he would have to walk around her or over her.
His father laughed heartily as he sauntered up.
"Well, my son, where is your game bag? What have you brought us for breakfast?"
Webster looked crestfallen: he returned empty-handed but not empty-minded: he had had a great rich day; they thought it an idle wasted one.
"Some of the boys have been here for you," said his mother. "They left word you must be certain to meet them, in the morning for the game. Freshen yourself up and I'll give you your supper."
Elinor said nothing—a bad sign with her. She sat with her sharp little chin resting on her palms and with her eyes on him with calculating secrecy. He stepped around her.
His room had never seemed so cramped after those hours in the woods under the open sky. The whole cottage seemed so unnatural, everythingin the City so unnatural, after that day in the forest.
At supper he had not much to say; his mother talked to him:
"I put my berries away to eat with you for company." They ate their berries together.
He felt tired and said he would go to bed. His room was darkened when he returned to it; he felt sure he had left his lamp burning; someone had been in it. He lighted his lamp again.
As he started toward his window to close the shutters, his eye caught sight of an object hanging from the window sash. A paper was pinned around it. The handwriting was Elinor's. It was a bluejay, brought down by a lucky stone from some cottager's hand. Webster read Elinor's message for him:
"Your favourite Kentucky Warbler,From your old friend,Thomas Jefferson."
"Your favourite Kentucky Warbler,
From your old friend,
Thomas Jefferson."
He sat on the side of his bed. The sights and sounds and fragrances of the pasture were all through him; the sunlight warmed his blood still, the young blood of perfect health.
He turned in for the night and sleep drew him away at once from reality. And some time during the night he awoke out of his sleep to the reality of a great dream.
chapter III, end decoration
chapter IV, title decoration
I initialt was in the depths of a wonderful forest, green with summer and hoary with age. He was sitting on the ground in a small open space. No path led to this or away from it, but all around him grew grasses and plants which would be natural coverts for wild creatures. No human tread had ever crushed those plants.
The soft vivid light resting on the woods was not morning-light nor evening-light: it was clear light without thehours. Yet the time must have been near noonday; for as Webster looked straight up toward the unseen sky, barred from his eyes by the forest roof of leaves, slender beams of sunlight filtered perpendicularly down, growing mistier as they descended until they could be traced no longer even as luminous vapour; no palest radiance from them reached the grass.
He could not see far in any direction. At the edge of the open space where he sat, fallen rotten trees lay amid the standing live ones—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents of the rising forest, passing back into the soil of the planet toward the rocks.
Strange as was the spot, stranger was Webster to himself and did not know what had changed him. Itseemed that for the first time in his life his eyes were fully opened; never had he seen with such vision; and his feeling was so deep, so intense. The whole scene was enchantment. It was more than reality.Hewas more than reality. The singing of birds far away—it was so crystal sweet, yet he could see none. A few yards from him a rivulet made its way from somewhere to somewhere. He could trace its course by the growth of plants which crowded its banks and covered it with their leaves.
Expectancy weighed heavily on him. He was there for a purpose but could not say what the purpose was.
All at once as his eyes were fixed on the low, green thicket opposite him, he saw that it was shaken; something wason its way to him. He watched the top of the thicket being parted to the right and to the left. With a great leaping of his heart he waited, motionless where he sat on the grass. What creature could be coming? Then he saw just within the edge of the thicket a curious piece of head-gear—he had no knowledge of any such hat. Then he saw a gun barrel. Then the hand and forearm of a man was thrust forward and it pushed the underbrush aside; and then there stepped forth into the open the figure of a hunter, lean, vigorous, tall, athletic. The hunter stepped out with a bold stride or two and stopped and glanced eagerly around with an air of one in a search; he discovered Webster and with a look of relief stood still and smiled.
There could be no mistake. Webster held imprinted on memory from a picture those features, those all-seeing eyes; it was Wilson—weaver lad of Paisley, wandering peddler youth of the grey Scotch mountains, violinist, flutist, the poet who had burned his poem standing in the public cross, the exile, the school teacher for whom the boy caught the mouse, the failure who sent the drawing to Thomas Jefferson, the bold figure in the skiff drifting down the Ohio—the naturalist plunging into the Kentucky wilderness and walking to Lexington and shivering in White's garret—the great American ornithologist, the immortal man.
There he stood: how could it be? It was reality yet more than reality.
The hunter walked straight towardhim with the light of recognition in his eyes. He came and stood before Webster and looked down at him with a smile:
"Have you found him, Webster?"
Webster strangely heard his own voice:
"I have not found him."
"You have looked long?"
"I have looked everywhere and I cannot find him."
The hunter sat down and laid on the grass beside him his fowling piece, his game bag holding new species of birds, and his portfolio of fresh drawings. Then he turned upon Webster a searching look as if to draw the inmost truth out of him and asked:
"Why do you look for the Kentucky Warbler?"
Webster hesitated long:
"I do not know," he faltered.
"Something in you makes you seek him, but you do not know what that something is?"
"No, I do not know what it is: I know I wish to find him."
"Not him alone but many other things?"
"Yes, many other things."
"The whole wild life of the forest?"
"Yes, all the wild things in the forest—and the wild forest itself."
"You wish to know about these things—you wish to know them?"
"I wish to know them."
The hunter searched Webster's countenance more keenly, more severely:
"Are you sure?"
There was silence. The forest wasbecoming more wonderful. The singing of the unseen birds more silvery sweet. It was beyond all reality. Webster answered:
"I am sure."
The hunter hurled questions now with no pity:
"Would you be afraid to stay here all night alone?"
"I would not."
"If, during the night, a storm should pass over the forest with thunder deafening you and lightning flashing close to your eyes and trees falling everywhere, you would fear for your life and that would be natural and wise; but would you come again?"
"I would."
"If it were winter and the forest were bowed deep with ice and snowand you were alone in it, having lost your way, would you cry enough? Would you hunt for a fireside and never return?"
"I would not."
"You can stand cold and hunger and danger and fatigue; can you be patient and can you be persevering?"
"I can."
"Look long and not find what you look for and still not give up?"
"I can."
There was silence for a little while: the mood of the hunter seemed to soften:
"Do you know where you are, Webster?"
"I do not know where I am."
"You did not know then, that this is the wilderness of your forefathers—theKentucky pioneers. You have wandered back to it."
"I did not know."
"Have you read their great story?"
"Not much of it."
"Are you beginning to realise what it means to be sprung from such men and women?"
"I cannot say."
"But you want to do great things?"
"If I loved them."
The hunter stood up and gathered his belongings together. His questions had become more kind as though he were satisfied. He struck Webster on his shoulder.
"Come," he said, as with high trust, "I will show you the Kentucky warbler."
He looked around and his eyes fell upon the forest brook. He walked overto it, to discover in what direction it ran and beckoned.
"We'll follow this stream up: the spring may not be far away." He glanced at the tree-tops: "It is nearly noon: the bird will come to the spring to drink and to bathe."
Webster followed the hunter as he threaded his way through the forest toward the source of the brook.
Not many yards off his guide turned:
"There is the spring," he said, pointing to a green bank out of which bubbled the cool current.
"Let us sit here. Make no movement and make no noise."
How tense the stillness! They waited and listened. Finally the hunter spoke in an undertone:
"Did you hear that?"
Away off in the forest Webster heard the song of a bird. Presently it came nearer. Now it was nearer still. It sounded at last within the thicket just above the spring, clear, sweet, bold, emphatic notes distinctly repeated at short intervals. And then—
There he was—the Kentucky Warbler!
Webster could see every mark of identification. The bird had come out of the dense growth and showed himself on the bough of a sapling about twenty feet from the earth, in his grace and shapeliness and manly character. With a swift, gliding flight downward he lighted on a sweeping limb of a tree still nearer, within a few inches of the ground. Then he dropped to the ground and moved about, turning over dead leaves. He was only severalyards away and Webster could plainly trace the yellow line over his eye, the blackish crown and black sides of the throat, the underparts all of solid yellowish gold, the upper parts of olive green. An instant later the bird was on the wing again, hither, thither, up and down, continually in motion. No white in the wings, none in the tail feathers. Once he stopped and poured out his loud, musical song—unlike any other warbler's. A moment later he was on the ground again, with a manner of self-possession, dignity—as on his namesake soil, Kentucky.
Webster had sat bent over toward him, forgetful of everything else. At last drawing a deep breath, he looked around gratefully, remembering his guide.
No one was near him. Webster saw the hunter on the edge of the thicket yards away; he stood looking back, his figure dim, fading. Webster, forgetful of the bird, cried out with quick pain:
"Are you going away? Am I never to see you again?"
The voice that reached him seemed scarcely a voice; it was more like an echo, close to his ear, of a voice lost forever:
"If you ever wish to see me, enter the forest of your own heart."
"If you ever wish to see me, enter the forest of your own heart."
chapter IV, end decoration
chapter V, title decoration
W initialebster sprang to his feet in the depths of the strange summer-dark forest: that is to say, he awoke with a violent start and found himself sitting on his bed with his feet hanging over one side.
It was late to be getting up. The sun already soared above the roof of the cottage opposite his window and the light slanted in full blaze against his shutters. Shafts penetrated some weather-loosened slats and fell on hishead and shoulders and on the wall behind him. Breakfast must be nearly ready. Fresh cooking odours—coffee odour, meat odour, bread odour—filled the little bathroom-bedroom. Feet were hurrying, scurrying, in the kitchen. Quieter footsteps approached his door along the narrow hall outside and there came a tap:
"Breakfast, Webster!"
It was his mother's voice, indulgent, peaceful, sweet. He suddenly thought that never before had he fully realised how sweet it was, had always been, notwithstanding he disappointed her.
He got up and went across to open his shutters and had taken hold of the catch, when he was arrested in his movement. At night he tilted the shutters, so that the morning sunmight not enter crevices and shine in his face and awaken him. Now looking down through the slats, he discovered something going on in the yard beneath his window. Elinor had come tipping around the corner of the cottage. She held one dark little witch-like finger unconsciously pressed against her tense lips. Her dark eyes were brimming with a secret, mischievous purpose. A ribbon which looked like a huge, crumpled purple morning-glory was knotted into the peak of her ravenish hair. Her fresh little gown, too, suggested the colours of the purple morning-glory and her whole presence, with a freshness as of dew-drops formed amid moonbeams at midnight, somehow symbolised that flower which surprises us at dawn as having maturedits unfolding in the dark: half sinister, half innocent.
With cautious, delicate steps, which could not possibly have made any noise in the grass, she approached the window and stopped and lifted the notched pole which was used to hold up the clothes-line in the back yard. Setting the pole on end and planting herself beside it, she pushed it with all her slight but concentrated strength against the window shutters. It struck violently and fell over to the grass in one direction as Elinor, with the silence of a light wind, fled in the other.
Webster stood looking down at it all: he understood now: that was the crashing sound which had awakened him.
It had been Elinor who had ended his dream.
But his dream was not ended. It would never end. It was in him to stay and it was doing its work. The feeling which had surprised him as to the sweetness of his mother's voice but marked the deeper awakening that had taken place in his sleep, an unfolding, his natural growth. It was this growth that now animated him as he smiled at Elinor's flying figure. Her prank had not irritated him: no intrigue of hers would ever annoy him again. Instead, the idea struck him that Elinor must be thinking of him a great deal, if so much of her life—incessantly active as it was with the other children of the cottages—were devoted to plans to worry him. She must often have him in mind quite to herself, he reflected; and this freshpicture of Elinor's secret brooding about him somehow for the first time touched him tenderly and finely.
He turned back from the window shutters without opening them and sat on the edge of his bed. He could not shake off his dream. How could it possibly be true that there was no such forest as he had wandered into in his dream—that Kentucky wilderness of the old heroic days? Could anything destroy in him the certainty that with wildly beating heart he had seen the living colours and heard the actual notes and watched the characteristic movements of the warbler? Then, though these things were not real, still they were true and would remain true always.
Thus, often and to many of us, betweenclosing the curtains of the eyes upon the outer world at night and drawing them wide in the morning, within that closed theatre a stage has been erected and we have stepped forth and spoken some solitary part or played a rôle in a drama that leaves us changed for the rest of our days. Yesterday an old self, today a new self. We have been shifted completely away from our last foot-prints and our steps move off in another direction, taking a truer course.
Beyond all else a high, solemn sense subdued Webster with the thought, that in his sleep he had come near as to unearthly things. The long-dead hunter, who had appeared to him, spoke as though he lived elsewhere than on the earth and lived more nobly; his accents,the majesty of his countenance, were moulded as by higher wisdom and goodness. Webster was overwhelmed with the feeling that he had been brought near the mystery of life and death and as from an immortal spirit had received his consecration to the forest.
... He got down on his knees at his bedside, after a while, though little used to prayer....
When he walked into the breakfast-room with a fresh step and freshened countenance, probably all were not slow to notice the change. Families whose lives run along the groove of familiar routine quickly observe the slightest departure from the customary, whether in voice or behaviour, of any member. There was response soonafter his entrance to something in him obviously unusual.
"My son," said his father, who had laid down his paper to help him to the slice which had been put aside, "the woods must agree with you"; and he even scraped the dish for a little extra gravy. Ordinarily, when deeply interested in his paper or occasionally when conscious of some disappointment as to his son, he forgot, or was indifferent about, the gravy.
"They do agree with me!" Webster replied, laughing and in fresh tones. He held out his plate hungrily for his slice and he waited for all the gravy that might be coming to him.
"One of the boys has already been here this morning," said his mother, handing him his cup. "They want youto be sure to meet them this afternoon, not to fail. You must have been dead asleep, for I called you at three different times."
"Did you knock three times?"
Webster asked his question with a sinking of the heart; what if his mother's first knock had awakened him? He might never have finished his dream, might never have dreamed at all. How different the morning might have been, how different the world—if his mother had awakened him before his dream!
He received his cup from her and smiled at her:
"I was dreaming," he said, and he smiled also at the safety of his vision.
Elinor, sitting opposite him, had said nothing. She had finished herbreakfast before he had come in and plainly lingered till he should enter. Since his entrance she had sat restless in her chair, toying with her fork or her napkin, and humming significantly to herself. She had this habit. "You must not sing at the table, Elinor," her mother had once said. "I amnotsinging," Elinor had replied, "I am humming to myself, andnoone is supposed to listen." Meantime this morning, her quickly shifting eyes would sweep his face questioningly; she must have been waiting for some sign as to what had been the effect of the Thomas Jefferson bluejay the night before and of the repeated attack on his window shutters.
Often when out of humour with her he had declined to notice her at table;now once, when he caught her searching glance, he smiled. Dubiously, half with disbelief and half with amazement, she looked steadily back at him for an instant; then she slipped confusedly from her seat and was gone. Webster laughed within himself: "what will she be up to next?" he thought.
It was quiet now at the table: his father had gone back to his paper, his mother was eating the last of her breakfast fruit, and perhaps, thinking that out in the country things were getting ripe. After an interval Webster broke the silence: he was white with emotion.
"Father," he said quietly, "I have decided what I'd like to do."
Webster's father dropped his paper: Webster's mother's eyes were on him.The years had waited for this moment, the future depended upon it.
"If you and mother do not need me for anything else just yet, I'd like to work my way through the University. But if there's something different you'd rather I'd do, or if you both want me in any other way, I am here."
"My son," exclaimed his father, rudely with the back of his hand brushing away a tear that rolled down his cheek—a tear perhaps started by something in his son's words that brought back his own hard boyhood, "your father is here to work for you as long as he is alive and able. Your mother and I are glad—!" but he, got no further: his eyes had filled and his voice choked him.
Webster's mother stood beside him,her hand on his head, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.
When he had made his preparations for the glad day's adventure and stepped out on the front porch, his father had gone to the bank, his mother was in the kitchen. Elinor was sitting on the top step. Her back was turned. Her sharp little elbows rested on her knees and her face was propped in her palms. Her figure again suggested a crumpled, purple morning-glory—fragile, not threatened by any human violence but imperilled by nature.
She did not look around as he stepped out or move as he passed down. He felt a new wish to say something pleasant but could not quite so conquer himself. As he laid his hand on the yardgate, he was stopped by these words, reaching his ears from the porch:
"Take me with you!"
He could not believe his ears. Could this be Elinor, his tease, his torment? This wounded appeal, timid pleading—could it proceed from Elinor? He was thrown off his balance and too surprised to act. The words were repeated more beseechingly, wistfully:
"Take me with you, will you, Webster?"
For now that she had given herself away to him, he might as well see everything: that at last she was openly begging that she be admitted to a share in his plans and pleasures, that he no longer disdain to play with her.
He spoke with rough embarrassment over his shoulder:
"You can't go today. Nobody can go today. I'm going miles out into the country to the woods."
"But some day will you take me over into the woods yonder?"
After a while he turned toward her:
"Yes, I will."
"Thank you very much. Thank you very much, indeed, Webster!"
The tide of feeling began to rush toward her:
"There are some wild violets over there, Elinor, wild blue violets and wild white violets—thick beds of them in the shade."
"Oh, how lovely!" She clasped her hands and knotted them tensely under her chin and kept her eyes fixed more hopefully on him.
"There is a flock of the funniest littlefairies dancing under one of the big forest trees, each carrying the queerest little green parasol."
"How perfectly, perfectly lovely!"
"And I found one little cedar tree. If they'll let us, I'll dig it up and bring it home and plant it in the front yard. It will be your own cedar tree, Elinor."
"Oh, Webster! Could anything be more lovely of you?"
"You and I and Jenny will go some day soon—"
"No, no, no!" cried Elinor, stamping her feet fiercely and wringing her hands. "I don't want Jenny to go! I won't have Jenny! Just you and I! Not Jenny! Just you and I!"
"Then just you and I," he said, smiling at her and moving away.
"Wait!"
She darted down the steps and ran to him and drew his face over and laid her cheek against his cheek, clinging to him.
He struggled to get away, laughing with his new happiness: tears welled out of her eyes with hers.
Webster had taken to the turnpike.
The morning was cool, the blue of the sky vast, tender, noble. Rain during the night had left the atmosphere fresh and clear and the pike dustless. Little knobs of the bluish limestone jutted out. The greyish grass and weeds on each side had been washed till they looked green again.
The pike climbed a hill and fromthis hilltop he turned and looked back. He could see the packed outskirts of the city and away over in the heart of it church spires rising here and there. The heart of it had once been the green valley through which a stream of the wilderness ran: there Wilson had seen the water mills and the gallows for hanging Kentuckians and the thousand hitched horses and folks sitting on the public square selling cakes of maple sugar and split squirrels.
Soon he passed the pasture where he had spent yesterday. That had done well enough as a beginning: today he would go further. He remembered many things he had seen in the park-like bluegrass woods. Sweet to his ear sounded the call of bobwhite from the yellow grain. He wondered whetherthe ailing young crows in the tree-tops had at last taken all their medicine. The curious bird which had watched him out of a hole in the tree-trunk—the chap with the black band across his chest and the speckled jacket and the red cap on the back of his head, was he still on the lookout? What had become of the gorgeous little velvet coach that had travelled across the back of his hand on its unknown road? And that mystery of the high leaves—that wandering disembodied voice:Se-u-re? Se-u-u.Did it still haunt the waving boughs?
But miles on ahead in the country, undergrowth, shade, secrecy for wild creatures—his heart leaped forward to these and his feet hastened.
This day with both eyes open, notshut in sleep, he might find the warbler.
Whole-heartedly, with a boy's eagerness, Webster suddenly took off his hat and ran down the middle of the gleaming white turnpike toward the green forest—toward all, whether much or little, that he was ever to be.